Alice's Island, page 5
After Chris’s death, his father, Christopher—they had the same name—and his sister, Tricia, had taken charge of the business, to tie up the loose ends, the unfinished jobs, invoices, outstanding payments. They had decided to dismantle the business, even though the accounts were up-to-date and it was solvent. They would push ahead with the contracts that were already signed and even with the deal with Yale—that would be a nice homage to Chris. But then, they would shut it down. It didn’t make sense to keep it going without Chris. He had built it up alone and hadn’t wanted to bring anyone in, taking care of everything on his own, keeping all the bases covered. The ubiquitous Chris. Everyone he contracted was on a per-job basis. He knew that at some point, he’d have to expand, but everything in due time. Step by step. Yale was going to be the turning point, what took him to the next level.
My mother was becoming increasingly concerned about me. Honey, where do you go for so long? You’re not in any condition to be running around like that, you’re about to give birth. And I’d invent activities: childbirth education classes, gynecologist appointments, yoga, music therapy, shopping for baby clothes.
* * *
I discovered that on Cape Cod, Chris had followed Route 28, exiting onto Route 151 East. He’d turned off on Falmouth Road around Mashpee.
That is how I reached the small Barnstable Municipal Airport, close to Hyannis, where a number of streets merge and the Airport Shopping Center is located. Among the businesses situated along US 28 (with their security cameras witnessing the flow of cars) was a garage and parts store called World Tech Auto Center, an aesthetician’s called Salon Centric, a rug and carpet store called Kent’s Carpetland, and a spy store called Night Eyes.
By now I’d become experienced and knew it was pointless to try my luck at the franchises, because they generally had strict security and privacy policies, and any request like mine had to go through the higher-ups. So I went to places where the decisions depended on a single person I could negotiate with directly. My instincts had gotten sharper, or at least that’s what I thought, until every business at the shopping center turned me down and all I had left was the spy shop.
Night Eyes turned out to be a small, rundown shop, despite its sign reading Security and Electronics Superstore, and the speaker outside was playing the theme from The Pink Panther.
The store was empty. Behind the counter was a middle-aged man eating an orange as he watched a small TV of a kind I thought no longer existed.
“Hey, Blondie, how can I help you?” he asked in a foreign accent I couldn’t quite manage to place.
I thought maybe it would be harder to lie to this guy, since his job was selling gadgets that revealed people’s lies. Was it better to tell him the story about my drug-addict brother or get straight to the point? Insecure after my recent defeats, I hesitated.
“You can say whatever problem open. All you say here confidential. Me priest, this confession. Amen.”
“Well, see, my brother . . .”
“Had car accident, right?” he cut me off. “Died behind steering wheel, driving, drug overdose.”
I looked at him, unable to believe it. Had I already gone in there in my madness? I wouldn’t have forgotten his accent or his peculiarly kind way of talking.
“Eddie, from car shop, call me,” he clarified. “He say, look, pregnant crazy trying get security camera footage. He tell all businesses in area. Don’t give nothing. Not legal. Illegal. Don’t give. Watch out pregnant bitch.”
I wanted to run out of there. Alice, it’s over; you’re going to end up in jail.
“That brother story? Very bad,” he stated. “Film was on TV recently. I watch much TV to improve English. Getting better, every time is better. At first when I arrive, I only know say hello and fuck you.”
I turned and started heading for the door.
“Wait. No leave. I make fun of you. Eddie a jerkoff, no like him, he no give discount when I take car to get fixed. Probably he call me and everyone else so you go back to him and he get more money from you.”
“I offered him a lot of money.” Those were my first words since I had come in. “I have money.” How much money you want I pay you? I almost said to him, so he would understand me, accept, and just give me the tapes.
“Why you no come here first? You want information. Confidential. Secret. This spy store. Birds of feather. Clear as water. You disappoint me a little. Why you no trust me? Plus, here no ask question. Here only find answers.”
He reminded me of Yoda from Star Wars. But he wasn’t from a galaxy far, far away, nor was he a Russian ex-KGB agent. It turned out he was Spanish. From Malaga. His name was Antonio, like Antonio Banderas, also from Malaga, as he made clear. The orange he was eating was from Valencia, because according to him the oranges from Florida and California were piece of shit compared to Spanish. The financial crisis in Spain had led him to emigrate in search of the promised land. That and, a week after he got laid off from the security firm he worked for, his wife hooked up with his boss. It took him a long time to figure it out, and he thought: If only someone helped me then the way I helping people now. That was where he got the idea for the spy shop.
I liked Antonio. Maybe it helped that I’d had a Spanish boyfriend. When I was studying at Brown, I studied abroad for six months in Madrid—the first time I left the country. That’s where I met Diego. I was going through a crisis with Chris (yeah, we had crises then) due to the distance between our universities, but also because we’d been together all our lives and had never had other relationships, other experiences. He wanted to experience other things (hook up with other chicks), and I wanted to discover the world (fall in love with other guys). Diego was a sweet parenthesis in my life. A professor in the art department at the Complutense University in Madrid, he was a painter as well as a sculptor and photographer. He was sensitive, fun and a great dancer. I loved his hands and the way he touched me. During those six months I experienced things I never had before and never would again. With him I felt artistic, bohemian, as if I’d gone outside myself, outside my world, and was someone else. Maybe you were that person you’d always wanted to be but never dared. Diego had a sister I adored, whose name was Olivia. I never talked to Chris about Diego. We agreed that what had happened during that time had happened; we didn’t want to give explanations to each other and didn’t feel we owed them either.
Recently, when we had discussed what name we should give our baby—I was seven months pregnant at the time—he had said: You chose for the first baby; you wanted something international that could be spelled the same in English, Spanish, Italian, and French. And I was fine with that: Olivia. I liked it. But now it’s my turn. I want a name that sounds like a jewel, because that’s what we’re going to have, a precious jewel: Ruby, he said.
And I said: Sorry, no way. Find another one; Ruby sounds to me like a hooker from a soap opera.
Looking offended, he said: You just tarnished the memory of my great-grandmother Ruby, Alice. He never called me by my full first name except when he was trying to unnerve me. Most of the time he called me Ali, or preferably A. I liked A.
“So, Blondie, what I help you with? Shoot.”
Just then, Eddie from World Tech came in. He was very annoyed. He thought Antonio was negotiating with me to get more money for the recordings. Son of a bitch, you come here and you take away our money and our jobs. Go back to Mexico where you belong!
“I’ll give you what you need for a thousand bucks,” Eddie said.
Before I could say yes or no—I would have said yes—Antonio beat me to the punch.
“Seven hundred, Blondie, and all yours.”
“Five hundred,” Eddie offered.
“Three hundred,” Antonio said, undercutting him.
“Don’t be an asshole!” Eddie said. “She can give us a thousand, and we’ll split it.”
Antonio ignored him. He looked at me and winked.
“A hundred dollars, Blondie.”
“I’ll turn you both in to the cops! This is illegal!” Eddie threatened. But far from shrinking, Antonio counterattacked:
“Of course, Eddie. How you want? Police come. Then you explain them those cars that come in morning and no return from garage. Or return, but in pieces you sell illegally. Explain that to police, cocksucker.”
Suddenly, his English had gotten better. Eddie went pale.
“You think I talk shit? Go put stolen exhaust tube up your asshole.”
Eddie took off, spouting all sorts of threats that Antonio ignored while he slowly finished his orange.
“So, what your name, Blondie?” he asked me when we were alone.
“Grace.” Avenging Angela had officially given up the ghost.
“Well, pleasure, Grace. Like Grace of Monaco. Also blond.”
“I’m not blond; I’m a redhead.”
He ignored the comment.
“You really going to pay Eddie so much money?”
“Yes. And if you want, I’ll pay you more.”
“More, no. Just what’s right. Just thousand dollars, Blondie.” He gave me his hand. “Oh, I’m color blind. You for me always blond.”
I smiled and shook his hand. The aroma of the Valencian orange lingered. A scent that reminded me of Spain and of Diego. You’re a widow, now; you could find him, I thought, and I felt very dirty.
Back in the car, with the recordings on a USB drive, I decided to stop fooling around and go back to offering money, plain and simple. Wasn’t I a millionaire? Didn’t I feel that money was dirty? Well, blow it and don’t look back. To hell with it. That money reminded me all the time of what had happened, and the sooner it disappeared, the sooner I’d resolve Chris’s lie/secret/mystery. In any case, back home, I stopped at my bank branch and opened an account for Olivia. I deposited $300,000, to be split with her sister when she was born. It was one thing to blow my small, dirty fortune and another to leave my daughters unable to go to college.
JUNE 4–12
CHRIS HADN’T CROSSED Route 28 close to the Airport Shopping Center. I checked twice. That meant he’d entered Hyannis. I checked again. I vaguely remembered being there as a girl. Maybe it had been just one of our many outings during those summers in Chatham.
That night I called my father.
“Dad?”
“Yes, honey.”
“When we spent the summer in Chatham, were we ever in Hyannis?”
“Yeah, once or twice. But just passing through.”
“What do you mean, passing through?”
“Hyannis is where you can catch the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Don’t you remember when we went to Martha’s Vineyard? It’s the island where they filmed Jaws.”
“That’s right, now I remember . . .” I recollected with a smile. “And apart from remembering it being a pretty island, why does Nantucket seem so familiar to me?”
“Well, probably because I drove you up the wall telling you over and over how Nantucket was a whaling port, and it was there that Ishmael set off on the Pequod under the orders of Captain Ahab.”
Moby-Dick is my father’s favorite book.
“Ah, right. You used to read me bits of that book when I was a girl.”
Nantucket. Whales. Moby Dick. Was Chris Moby Dick, and was I Captain Ahab? How did Moby-Dick end? Who won? Did he catch the whale? Did Captain Ahab end up half-mad after trying to chase down the impossible? I didn’t remember, but my impression was it turned out badly, terribly badly. That was a sign. Let it go, Alice. It’s not legal to hunt whales anymore.
“Hey, Dad. Do you have a copy of Moby-Dick?”
“Of course. A first edition, 1851.”
“Can I borrow it?”
“What for?”
“To read it.”
“Honey, it’s worth thirty-five thousand dollars. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to handle a thirty-five-thousand-dollar book. I’m leaving it to you in my will. After I’m gone, you can do what you want with it.”
The next day, my father came over with a hardcover copy of Moby-Dick. I was surprised, because he said he was going to buy me the e-book. But he wasn’t much of a fan of digital.
“The feel of the paper will bring you closer to the characters. When you turn the pages, you’ll feel the breeze of the sea as you navigate aboard the ship.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I opened the book and flipped through it. “What did you say it’s about? I don’t mean the plot, but the message.”
“Well . . .” He reflected a few seconds; he didn’t like to talk idly. “It’s about the need to face evil. About creating demons and chasing them to the point of madness, or out of our own madness, basically to keep from examining the ones we have inside us.”
“Got it . . .” I tried to keep him from detecting in my voice the fireball that was blazing in my mind. “But just one thing, Dad. The book ends badly, right?”
“No, honey, it ends the way it has to.”
He gave me a kiss and left. My father never wants to be a bother or interrupt whatever someone is doing. Because he also doesn’t want to be bothered or interrupted in his discreet passage through life. Beyond that, he never asks me how I am, because my mother already takes care of that a thousand times a day. My father reads me; he smells me from a distance. He looks at me and knows, without asking. His love is silent. He’s like that old pilled blanket you bundle up in on the couch at night to watch television. Not because you’re cold, but because it makes you feel cozy, protected, comfortable.
* * *
“Where are we going, Mommy?”
Olivia was sitting in her booster seat in the back of the Cherokee, paging through the maps with the routes marked in red marker. I suddenly realized it was a pigsty back there. Empty water bottles, Styrofoam containers from all the places I had stopped to get food—I always ate in the car, like Karl the banker—containers I hadn’t thrown out, because I wanted to recycle them. Paper cups, markers, notebooks, CDs, and traffic tickets. I’d gotten more than one, and every time the cops stopped me, the first thing I thought was I was busted, they were going to arrest me, and I’d end up in jail, charged with a crime against Chris’s privacy.
It was midafternoon. I could have left Olivia with my mother, but I wasn’t ready to start up her questioning machine yet. So I did the only thing that occurred to me, I took her with me.
“What are we doing, Mommy? Where are we going?”
“Put that down, honey.”
“It looks like a treasure map. Are we looking for treasure?”
“Yes, Oli,” I said, taking the map out of her hands.
“What treasure?”
“I don’t know; we won’t know what it is until we find it.”
“Whose treasure is it? Did Daddy leave it for us?”
“Yeah, more or less.”
“Are we going to find pirates?”
“I hope not.”
“Did a pirate kill Daddy?”
Maybe it would have been better to leave her with my mother.
* * *
The preceding days had been a blur. On June 5, I found out that Chris had entered (or left) Hyannis by way of Barnstable Road. (Courtesy of the Church of the First Born. Donation: one hundred dollars).
* * *
June 6 was a washout.
* * *
On June 7, Chris’s mother, Betty, turned sixty-five. My mother had warned me: We can’t skip, honey; we have to maintain a good relationship with them. They love us very much. And we love them, too; of course, that goes without saying. I know it’s going to be a sad day, but it’s important we’re all together, don’t you think?
Olivia got sick during the celebration, due to the heat—to top it off, she was wearing a princess costume—plus the games, food, excitement, ice cream and candy. She ended up vomiting. And naturally, there was a lot of sadness and yearning, because the scene was normal only on the surface. The absence of Chris consumed almost all the available oxygen.
* * *
June 8. Chris had crossed Main Street to continue up Ocean Street. (Courtesy of the owner of the Yankee Peddler Pawn Shop. Five hundred dollars and a children’s illustrated edition of Treasure Island acted out by mice, which immediately became Olivia’s favorite book).
* * *
June 9. Chris had proceeded down Ocean Street until he reached the port, where the various ferry companies disembarked. (Courtesy of the bartender at the Black Cat Tavern. Four hundred dollars.) And he had turned left on Ocean Street, entering what looked like a parking lot. (Courtesy of the manager of the Hyannis Harbor Hotel. One thousand dollars. I paid that ridiculous sum not because I had the feeling I was getting closer to the end—or to the beginning—and that the information was therefore more valuable, but because I was unusually nervous and incapable of haggling.)
* * *
And now it was June 10. I stopped the car right where Chris turned, where I’d lost sight of him. It was the entrance to the parking lot for the ferry terminal. Tachycardia. The pier for the Robin Island Ferry. Robin Island? I’d never heard of it. I had trouble breathing. From the Weweantic River along US 6 to the Robin Island ferry terminal: 37.5 miles. Would the red-marker route end there? My legs shook when I got out of the SUV. “Stay here a second, babe,” I said to Olivia with a trembling voice. “You never let me get out, Mommy; this is stupid; I want to look for treasure, too,” Olivia complained.
I approached a worker who was directing cars onto the ferry.
“Excuse me, does this ferry go to Robin Island?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s why it’s called the Robin Island Ferry. We’re original around here, as you can see,” he answered, without any trace of malice.
