Duma Key

i

What came next was a period of recovery and transition from my other life to the one I lived on Duma Key. Dr. Kamen probably knew that during times like that, most of the big changes are going on inside: civil unrest, revolt, revolution, and finally, mass executions as the heads of the old regime tumble into the basket at the foot of the guillotine. I’m sure the big man had seen such revolutions succeed and seen them fail. Because not everyone makes it into the next life, you know. And those who do don’t always discover heaven’s golden shore.

My new hobby helped in my transition, and Ilse helped, too. I’ll always be grateful for that. But I’m ashamed of going through her purse while she was asleep. All I can say is that at the time I seemed to have no choice.

ii

I woke up the morning after my arrival feeling better than I had since my accident — but not so well I skipped my morning pain cocktail. I took the pills with orange juice, then went outside. It was seven o’clock. In St. Paul the air would have been cold enough to gnaw on the end of my nose, but on Duma it felt like a kiss.

I leaned my crutch where I’d leaned it the night before and walked down to those docile waves again. To my right, any view of the drawbridge and Casey Key beyond was blocked out by my own house. To the left, however —

In that direction the beach seemed to stretch on forever, a dazzling white margin between the blue-gray Gulf and the sea oats. I could see one speck far down, or maybe it was two. Otherwise, that fabulous picture-postcard shore was entirely deserted. None of the other houses were near the beach, and when I faced south, I could only see a single roof: what looked like an acre of orange tile mostly buried in palms. It was the hacienda I had noticed the day before. I could block that out with the palm of my hand and feel like Robinson Crusoe.

I walked that way, partly because as a southpaw, turning left had come naturally to me my whole life. Mostly because that was the direction I could see in. And I didn’t go far, no Great Beach Walk that day, I wanted to make sure I could get back to my crutch, but that was still the first. I remember turning around and marveling at my own footprints in the sand. In the morning light each left one was as firm and bold as something produced by a stamping-press. Most of the right ones were blurry, because I had a tendency to drag that foot, but setting out, even those had been clear. I counted my steps back. The total was thirty-eight. By then my hip was throbbing. I was more than ready to go in, grab a yogurt cup from the fridge, and see if the cable TV worked as well as Jack Cantori claimed.

Turned out it did.

iii

And that became my morning routine: orange juice, walk, yogurt, current events. I became quite chummy with Robin Meade, the young woman who anchors Headline News from six to ten AM. Boring routine, right? But the surface events of a country laboring under a dictatorship can appear boring, too — dictators like boring, dictators love boring — even as great changes are approaching beneath the surface.

A hurt body and mind aren’t just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. That my mind had been as badly hurt as my body was a thing I only came to realize once I was alone and all other voices dropped away. The fact that I had tried to choke my wife of twenty-five years for doing no more than trying to wipe the sweat off my forehead after I told her to leave the room was the very least of it. The fact that we hadn’t made love a single time in the months between the accident and the separation, didn’t even try, wasn’t at the heart of it, either, although I thought it was suggestive of the larger problem. Even the sudden and distressing bursts of anger weren’t at the heart of the matter.

That heart was a kind of pulling-away. I don’t know how else to describe it. My wife had come to seem like someone… other. Most of the people in my life also felt other, and the dismaying thing was that I didn’t much care. In the beginning I had tried to tell myself that the otherness I felt when I thought about my wife and my life was probably natural enough in a man who sometimes couldn’t even remember the name of that thing you pulled up to close your pants — the zoomer, the zimmer, the zippity-doo-dah. I told myself it would pass, and when it didn’t and Pam told me she wanted a divorce, what followed my anger was relief. Because now that other feeling was okay to have, at least toward her. Now she really was other. She’d taken off the Freemantle uniform and quit the team.

During my first weeks on Duma, that sense of otherness allowed me to prevaricate easily and fluently. I answered letters and e-mails from people like Tom Riley, Kathi Green, and William Bozeman III — the immortal Bozie — with short jottings (I’m fine, the weather’s fine, the bones are mending) that bore little resemblance to my actual life. And when their communications first slowed and then stopped, I wasn’t sorry.

Only Ilse still seemed to be on my team. Only Ilse refused to turn in her uniform. I never got that other feeling about her. Ilse was still on my side of the glass window, always reaching out. If I didn’t e-mail her every day, she called. If I didn’t call her once every third day, she called me. And to her I didn’t lie about my plans to fish in the Gulf or check out the Everglades. To Ilse I told the truth, or as much of it as I could without sounding crazy.

I told her, for instance, about my morning walks along the beach, and that I was walking a little farther each day, but not about the Numbers Game, because it sounded too silly… or maybe obsessive-compulsive is the term I actually want.

Just thirty-eight steps from Big Pink on that first morning. On my second one I helped myself to another huge glass of orange juice and then walked south along the beach again. This time I walked forty-five steps, which was a long distance for me to totter crutchless in those days. I managed by telling myself it was really only nine. That sleight-of-mind is the basis of the Numbers Game. You walk one step, then two steps, then three, then four, rolling your mental odometer back to zero each time until you reach nine. And when you add the numbers one through nine together, you come out with forty-five. If that strikes you as nuts, I won’t argue.

The third morning I coaxed myself into walking ten steps from Big Pink sans crutch, which is really fifty-five, or about ninety yards, round-trip. A week later and I was up to seventeen… and when you add all those numbers, you come out with a hundred and fifty-three. I’d get to the end of that distance, look back at my house, and marvel at how far away it looked. I’d also sag a little at the thought of having to walk all the way back again.

You can do it, I’d tell myself. It’s easy. Just seventeen steps, is all.

That’s what I’d tell myself, but I didn’t tell Ilse.

A little farther each day, stamping out footprints behind me. By the time Santa Claus showed up at the Beneva Road Mall, where Jack Cantori sometimes took me shopping, I realized an amazing thing: all my southbound footprints were clear. The right sneaker-print didn’t start to drag and blur until I was on my way back.

Exercise becomes addictive, and rainy days didn’t put a stop to mine. The second floor of Big Pink was one large room. There was an industrial-strength rose-colored carpet on the floor and a huge window facing the Gulf of Mexico. There was nothing else. Jack suggested that I make a list of furniture I wanted up there, and said he’d get it from the same rental place where he’d gotten the downstairs stuff… assuming the downstairs stuff was all right. I assured him it was fine, but said I wouldn’t need much on the second floor. I liked the emptiness of that room. It called to my imagination. What I wanted, I said, was three things: a plain straight-backed chair, an artist’s easel, and a Cybex treadmill. Could Jack provide those things? He could and did. In three days. From then until the end it was the second floor for me when I wanted to draw or paint, and it was the second floor for exercise on days when the weather closed in. The single straight-backed chair was the only real piece of furniture that ever lived up there during my tenure in Big Pink.

In any case, there weren’t that many rainy days — not for nothing is Florida called the Sunshine State. As my southward strolls grew longer, the speck or specks I’d seen on that first morning eventually resolved into two people — at least, on most days it was two. One was in a wheelchair and wearing what I thought was a straw hat. The other pushed her, then sat beside her. They appeared on the beach around seven AM. Sometimes the one who could walk left the one in the wheelchair for a little while, only to come back with something that glittered in the early sun. I suspected a coffee pot, a breakfast tray, or both. I further suspected they came from the huge hacienda with the acre or so of orange tiled roof. That was the last house visible on Duma Key before the road ran into the enthusiastic overgrowth that covered most of the island.

iv

I couldn’t quite get used to the emptiness of the place. “It’s supposed to be very quiet,” Sandy Smith had told me, but I had still pictured the beach filling up by midday: couples sunning on blankets and slathering each other with tanning lotion, college kids playing volleyball with iPods strapped to their biceps, little kids in saggy swimsuits paddling at the edge of the water while Jet-Skis buzzed back and forth forty feet out.

Jack reminded me that it was only December. “When it comes to Florida tourism,” he said, “the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is Morgue City. Not as bad as August, but still pretty dead. Also…” He gestured with his arm. We were standing out by the mailbox with the red 13 on it, me leaning on my crutch, Jack looking sporty in a pair of denim cut-offs and a fashionably tattered Tampa Devil Rays shirt. “It’s not exactly tourist country here. See any trained dolphins? What you got is seven houses, counting that big ’un down there… and the jungle. Where there’s another house falling apart, by the way. That’s according to some of the stories I’ve heard on Casey Key.”

“What’s with Duma, Jack? Nine miles of prime Florida real estate, a great beach, and it’s never been developed? What’s up with that?”

He shrugged. “Some kind of long-running legal dispute is all I know. Want me to see if I can find out?”

I thought about it, then shook my head.

“Do you mind it?” Jack looked honestly curious. “All the quiet? Because it’d get on my nerves a little, to tell you the God’s honest.”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.” And that was the truth. Healing is a kind of revolt, and as I think I’ve said, all successful revolts begin in secret.

“What do you do? If you don’t mind me asking?”

“Exercise in the mornings. Read. Sleep in the afternoons. And I draw. I may eventually try painting, but I’m not ready for that yet.”

“Some of your stuff looks pretty good for an amateur.”

“Thank you, Jack, that’s very kind.”

I didn’t know if kind was all he was being or if he was telling me his version of the truth. Maybe it didn’t matter. When it comes to things like pictures, it’s always just someone’s opinion, isn’t it? I only knew that something was going on for me. Inside me. Sometimes it felt a little scary. Mostly it felt pretty goddam wonderful.

I did most of my drawing upstairs, in the room I’d come to think of as Little Pink. The only view from there was of the Gulf and that flat horizon-line, but I had a digital camera and I took pictures of other things sometimes, printed them out, clipped them to my easel (which Jack and I turned so the strong afternoon light would strike across the paper), and drew that stuff. There was no rhyme or reason to those snapshots, although when I told Kamen this in an e-mail, he responded that the unconscious mind writes poetry if it’s left alone.

Maybe sí, maybe no.

I drew my mailbox. I drew the stuff growing around Big Pink, then had Jack buy me a book — Common Plants of the Florida Coast — so I could put names to my pictures. Naming seemed to help — to add power, somehow. By then I was on my second box of colored pencils… and I had a third waiting in the wings. There was aloe vera; sea lavender with its bursts of tiny yellow flowers (each possessing a tiny heart of deepest violet); inkberry with its long spade-shaped leaves; and my favorite, sophora, which Common Plants of the Florida Coast also identified as necklace-bush, for the tiny podlike necklaces that grow on its branches.

I drew shells, too. Of course I did. There were shells everywhere, an eternity of shells just within my limited walking distance. Duma Key was made of shells, and soon I’d brought back dozens.

And almost every night when the sun went down, I drew the sunset. I knew sunsets were a cliché, and that’s why I did them. It seemed to me that if I could break through that wall of been-there-done-that even once, I might be getting somewhere. So I piled up picture after picture, and none of them looked like much. I tried overlaying Venus Yellow with Venus Orange again, but subsequent efforts didn’t work. The sullen furnace-glow was always missing. Each sunset was only a penciled piece of shit where the colors said I’m trying to tell you the horizon’s on fire. You could undoubtedly have bought forty better ones at any sidewalk art show on a Saturday in Sarasota or Venice Beach. I saved some of those drawings, but I was so disgusted with most of them that I threw them away.

One evening after another bunch of failures, once again watching the top arc of the sun disappear, leaving that flush of Halloween color trailing behind, I thought: It was the ship. That was what gave my first one a little sip of magic. How the sunset seemed to be shining right through it. Maybe, but there was no ship out there now to break the horizon; it was a straight line with darkest blue below and brilliant orange-yellow above, fading to a delicate greenish shade I could see but not duplicate, not out of my meager box of colored pencils.

There were twenty or thirty photo printouts scattered around the feet of my easel. My eye happened on a close-up of a sophora necklace. Looking at it, my phantom right arm began to itch. I clamped my yellow pencil between my teeth, bent over, picked up the sophora photo, and studied it. The light was failing now, but only by degrees — the upper room I called Little Pink held light for a long time — and there was more than enough to admire the details; my digital camera took exquisite close-ups.

Without thinking about what I was doing, I clamped the photo to the edge of the easel and added the sophora bracelet to my sunset. I worked quickly, first sketching — really nothing more than a series of arcs, that’s sophora — and then coloring: brown overlaying black, then a bright dab of yellow, the remains of one flower. I remember my concentration being fined down to a brilliant cone, the way it sometimes was in the early days of my business, when every building (every bid, really) was make or break. I remember clamping a pencil in my mouth once again at some point, so I could scratch at the arm that wasn’t there; I was always forgetting the lost part of me. When distracted and carrying something in my left hand, I sometimes reached out with my right one to open a door. Amputees forget, that’s all. Their minds forget and as they heal, their bodies let them.

What I mostly remember about that evening is the wonderful, blissful sensation of having caught an actual bolt of lightning in a bottle for three or four minutes. By then the room had begun to dim out, the shadows seeming to swim forward over the rose-colored carpet toward the fading rectangle of the picture window. Even with the last light striking across my easel, I couldn’t get a good look at what I’d done. I got up, limped around the treadmill to the switch by the door, and flipped on the overhead. Then I went back, turned the easel, and caught my breath.

The sophora bracelet seemed to rear over the horizon-line like the tentacle of a sea creature big enough to swallow a supertanker. The single yellow blossom could have been an alien eye. More important to me, it had somehow given the sunset back the truth of its ordinary I-do-this-every-night beauty.

That picture I set aside. Then I went downstairs, microwaved a Hungry Man fried chicken dinner, and ate it right down to the bottom of the box.

v

The following night I lined the sunset with bundles of witchgrass, and the brilliant orange shining through the green turned the horizon into a forest fire. The night after that I tried palm trees, but that was no good, that one was another cliché, I could almost see hula-hula girls and hear ukes strumming. Next I put a big old conch shell on the horizon with the sunset firing off around it like a corona, and the result was — to me, at least — almost unbearably creepy. That one I turned to the wall, thinking when I looked at it the next day it would have lost its magic, but it hadn’t. Not for me, anyway.

I snapped a picture of it with my digital camera, and attached it to an e-mail. It prompted the following exchange, which I printed out and stowed in a folder:

Two days later, when Jack came by to ask if I wanted to run errands, I said I wanted to go to a bookstore and buy a book of Salman Dalí’s art.

Jack laughed. “I think you mean Salvador Dalí,” he said. “Unless you’re thinking about the guy who wrote the book that got him in so much hot water. I can’t remember the name of it.”

“The Satanic Verses,” I said at once. The mind’s a funny monkey, isn’t it?

When I got back with my book of prints — it cost a staggering one hundred and nineteen dollars, even with my Barnes & Noble discount card, good thing I’d saved a few million out of the divorce for myself — the MESSAGE WAITING lamp of my answering machine was flashing. It was Ilse, and the message was cryptic only at first listen.

“Mom’s going to phone you,” she said. “I did my best talking, Dad — called in every favor she owed me, added my very best pretty-please and just about begged Lin, so say yes, okay? Say yes. For me.”

I sat down, ate a Table Talk pie I’d been looking forward to but no longer wanted, and leafed through my expensive picture-book, thinking — and I’m sure this wasn’t original — Well hello, Dalí. I wasn’t always impressed. In many cases I thought I was looking at the work of a talented smartass who was doing little more than passing the time. Yet some of the pictures excited me and a few frightened me the way my looming conch shell had. Floating tigers over a reclining nude woman. A floating rose. And one picture, Swans Reflecting Elephants, that was so strange I could barely look at it… yet I kept flipping back to look some more.

And what I was really doing was waiting for my soon-to-be-ex-wife to call and invite me back to St. Paul, for Christmas with the girls. Eventually the phone rang, and when she said I’m extending this invitation against my better judgment I resisted the urge to smash that particular hanging curveball out of the park: And I’m accepting it against mine. What I said was I understand that. What I said was How does Christmas Eve sound? And when she said That’s fine, some of the I’m-covered-up-and-ready-to-fight had gone out of her voice. The argument that might have nipped Christmas with the Family in the bud had been averted. Which did not make this trip back home a good idea.

MINE IT, Kamen had said, and in big capital letters. I suspected that by leaving now I might kill it, instead. I could come back to Duma Key… but that didn’t mean I’d get my groove back. The walks, the pictures. One was feeding the other. I didn’t know exactly how, and I didn’t need to know.

But Illy: Say yes. For me. She knew I would, not because she was my favorite (Lin was the one who knew that, I think), but because she had always been satisfied with so little and so seldom asked for anything. And because when I listened to her message, I remembered how she’d started to cry that day she and Melinda had come out to Lake Phalen, leaning against me and asking why it couldn’t be the way it was. Because things never are, I think I replied, but maybe for a couple of days they could be… or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Ilse was nineteen, probably too old for one last childhood Christmas, but surely not too old to deserve one more with the family she’d grown up with. And that went for Lin, too. Her survival skills were better, but she was flying home from France yet again, and that told me something.

All right, then. I’d go, I’d make nice, and I would be sure to pack Reba, just in case one of my rages swept over me. They were abating, but of course on Duma Key there was really nothing to rage against except for my periodic forgetfulness and shitty limp. I called the charter service I’d used for the last fifteen years and confirmed a Learjet, Sarasota to MSP International, leaving at nine o’clock AM on the twenty-fourth of December. I called Jack, who said he’d be happy to drive me to Dolphin Aviation and pick me up again on the twenty-eighth. And then, just when I had all of my ducks in a row, Pam called to tell me the whole thing was off.

vi

Pam’s father was a retired Marine. He and his wife had relocated to Palm Desert, California, in the last year of the twentieth century, settling in one of those gated communities where there’s one token African-American couple and four token Jewish couples. Children and vegetarians are not allowed. Residents must vote Republican and own small dogs with rhinestone collars, stupid eyes, and names that end in i. Taffi is good, Cassi is better, and something like Rififi is the total shit. Pam’s father had been diagnosed with rectal cancer. It didn’t surprise me. Put a bunch of white assholes together and you’re going to find that going around.

I did not say this to my wife, who started off strong and then broke down in tears. “He’s started the chemo, but Momma says it might already have metas… mesass… oh, whatever that fucking word is, I sound like you!” And then, still sniffing but sounding shocked and humbled: “I’m sorry, Eddie, that was terrible.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “It wasn’t terrible at all. And the word is metastasized.”

“Yes. Thank you. Anyway, they’re doing the surgery to take out the main tumor tonight.” She was starting to cry again. “I can’t believe this is happening to my Dad.”

“Take it easy,” I said. “They do miracles these days. I’m Exhibit A.”

Either she didn’t consider me a miracle or didn’t want to go there. “Anyway, Christmas here is off.”

“Of course.” And the truth? I was glad. Glad as hell.

“I’m flying out to Palm tomorrow. Ilse is coming Friday, Melinda on the twentieth. I’m assuming… considering the fact that you and my father never really saw eye to eye…”

Considering the fact that we had once almost come to blows after my father-in-law had referred to the Democrats as “the Commiecrats,” I thought that was putting it mildly. I said, “If you’re thinking I don’t want to join you and the girls for Christmas in Palm Desert, you’re correct. You’ll be helping financially, and I hope your folks will understand that I had something to do with that—”

“I hardly think this is the time to drag your goddam checkbook into the discussion!”

And the anger was back, just like that. Jack, almost out of his stinking little box. I wanted to say Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you loudmouth bitch. But I didn’t. At least partly because it would have come out loudmouf birch or maybe broadmouth lurch. I somehow knew this.

Still, it was close.

“Eddie?” She sounded truculent, more than ready to get into it if I wanted to.

“I’m not dragging my checkbook into anything,” I said, carefully listening to each word. They came out all right. That was a relief. “I’m just saying that my face at your father’s bedside would not be likely to speed his recovery.” For a moment the anger — the fury — almost added that I hadn’t seen his face at mine, either. Once more I managed to stop the words, but by then I was sweating.

“All right. Point taken.” She paused. “What will you do for Christmas, Eddie?”

Paint the sunset, I thought. Maybe get it right.

“I believe that if I’m a good boy, I may be invited to Christmas dinner with Jack Cantori and his family,” I said, believing no such thing. “Jack’s the young fellow who works for me.”

“You sound better. Stronger. Are you still forgetting things?”

“I don’t know, I can’t remember,” I said.

“That’s very funny.”

“Laughter’s the best medicine. I read it in Reader’s Digest.”

“What about your arm? Are you still having phantom sensations?”

“Nope,” I lied, “that’s pretty well stopped.”

“Good. Great.” A pause. Then: “Eddie?”

“Still here,” I said. And with dark red half-moons in the palms of my hands, from clenching my fists.

There was a long pause. The phone lines no longer hiss and crackle as they did when I was a kid, but I could hear all the miles sighing gently between us. It sounded like the Gulf when the tide is out. Then she said, “I’m sorry things turned out this way.”

“I am, too,” I said, and when she hung up, I picked up one of my bigger shells and came very close to heaving it through the screen of the TV. Instead, I limped across the room, opened the door, and chucked it across the deserted road. I didn’t hate Pam — not really — but I seemed to still hate something. Maybe that other life.

Maybe only myself.

vii

Did I think about it, or only consult the ticking of instinct? I can’t remember. Maybe it was neither. Maybe the only thing that mattered was that I wanted to see her. In any case, I replied almost at once.

Her own reply was just as quick. She must have been waiting.

Don’t hold it against her. It seemed that my If-So-Girl had been saying that about her older sister ever since she could talk. Lin doesn’t want to go on the weenie roast because she doesn’t like hot dogs… but don’t hold it against her. Lin can’t wear that kind of sneakers because none of the kids in her class wear hightops anymore… so don’t hold it against her. Lin wants Ryan’s Dad to take them to the prom… but don’t hold it against her. And you know the bad part? I never did. I could have told Linnie that preferring Ilse was like growing up lefthanded — something over which I had no control — and that would only have made it worse, even though it was the truth. Maybe especially because it was the truth.

viii

Ilse coming to Duma Key, to Big Pink. Yippee, she was excited, and yippee, I was, too. Jack had found me a stout lady named Juanita to clean twice a week, and I had her make up the guest bedroom. I also asked her if she’d bring some fresh flowers the day after Christmas. Smiling, she suggested something that sounded like creamus cackus. My brain, by then quite comfortable with the fine art of cross-connection, was stopped by this for no more than five seconds; I told Juanita I was sure Ilse would love a Christmas cactus.

On Christmas Eve I found myself re-reading Ilse’s original e-mail. The sun was westering, beating a long and brilliant track across the water, but it was still at least two hours to sundown, and I was sitting in the Florida room. The tide was high. Beneath me, the deep drifts of shell shifted and grated, making that sound that was so like breath or hoarse confidential speaking. I ran my thumb over the postscript — I have some special news — and my right arm, the one that was no longer there, began to tingle. The location of that tingle was clearly, almost exquisitely, defined. It began in the fold of the elbow and spiraled to an end on the outside of the wrist. It deepened to an itch I longed to reach over and scratch.

I closed my eyes and snapped the thumb of my right hand against the second finger. There was no sound, but I could feel the snap. I rubbed my arm against my side and could feel the rub. I lowered my right hand, long since burned in the incinerator of a St. Paul hospital, to the arm of my chair and drummed the fingers. No sound, but the sensation was there: skin on wicker. I would have sworn to it in the name of God.

All at once I wanted to draw.

I thought about the big room upstairs, but Little Pink seemed too far to go. I went into the living room and took an Artisan pad off a stack of them sitting on the coffee table. Most of my art supplies were upstairs, but there were a few boxes of colored pencils in one of the drawers of the living room desk, and I took one of those, as well.

Back in the Florida room (which I would always think of as a porch), I sat down and closed my eyes. I listened to the waves do their work beneath me, lifting the shells and turning them into new patterns, each one different from the one before. With my eyes shut, that grating was more than ever like talk: the water giving temporary tongue to the edge of the land. And the land itself was temporary, because if you took the geological view, Duma wouldn’t last long. None of the Keys would; in the end the Gulf would take them all and new ones would rise in new locations. It was probably true of Florida itself. The land was low, and on loan.

Ah, but that sound was restful. Hypnotic.

Without opening my eyes, I felt for Ilse’s e-mail and ran the tips of my fingers over it again. I did this with my right hand. Then I opened my eyes, brushed the e-mail printout aside with the hand that was there, and pulled the Artisan pad onto my lap. I flipped back the cover, shook all twelve of the pre-sharpened Venus pencils onto the table in front of me, and began to draw. I had an idea I meant to draw Ilse — who had I been thinking of, after all? — and thought I’d make a spectacularly bad job of it, because I hadn’t attempted a single human figure since starting to draw again. But it wasn’t Ilse, and it wasn’t bad. Not great, maybe, not Rembrandt (not even Norman Rockwell), but not bad.

It was a young man in jeans and a Minnesota Twins tee-shirt. The number on the tee was 48, which meant nothing to me; in my old life I used to go to as many T-Wolves games as I could, but I’ve never been a baseball fan. The guy had blond hair which I knew wasn’t quite right; I didn’t have the colors to get the exact darkening-toward-brown shade. He was carrying a book in one hand. He was smiling. I knew who he was. He was Ilse’s special news. That was what the shells were saying as the tide lifted them and turned them and dropped them again. Engaged, engaged. She had a ring, a diamond, he had bought it at —

I had been shading the young man’s jeans with Venus Blue. Now I dropped it, picked up the black, and stroked the word

at the bottom of the sheet. It was information; it was also the name of the picture. Naming lends power.

Then, without a pause, I dropped the black, picked up orange, and added workboots. The orange was too bright, it made the boots look new when they weren’t, but the idea was right.

I scratched at my right arm, scratched through my right arm, and got my ribs instead. I muttered “Fuck” under my breath. Beneath me, the shells seemed to grate a name. Was it Connor? No. And something was wrong here. I didn’t know where that sense of wrongness was coming from, but all at once the phantom itch in my right arm became a cold ache.

I tossed back the top sheet on the pad and sketched again, this time using just the red pencil. Red, red, it was RED! The pencil raced, spilling out a human figure like blood from a cut. It was back-to, dressed in a red robe with a kind of scalloped collar. I colored the hair red, too, because it looked like blood and this person felt like blood. Like danger. Not for me but —

“For Ilse,” I muttered. “Danger for Ilse. Is it the guy? The special-news guy?”

There was something not right about the special-news guy, but I didn’t think that was what was creeping me out. For one thing, the figure in the red robe didn’t look like a guy. It was hard to tell for sure, but yes — I thought… female. So maybe not a robe at all. Maybe a dress? A long red dress?

I flipped back to the first figure and looked at the book the special-news guy was holding. I threw my red pencil on the floor and colored the book black. Then I looked at the guy again, and suddenly printed

in scripty-looking letters above him. Then I threw my black pencil on the floor. I raised my shaking hands and covered my face with them. I called out my daughter’s name, the way you’d call out if you saw someone too close to a steep drop or busy street.

Maybe I was just crazy. Probably I was crazy.

Eventually I became aware that there was — of course — only one hand over my eyes. The phantom ache and itching had departed. The idea that I might be going crazy — hell, that I might have already gone — remained. One thing was beyond doubt: I was hungry. Ravenous.

ix

Ilse’s plane arrived ten minutes ahead of schedule. She was radiant in faded jeans and a Brown University tee-shirt, and I didn’t see how Jack could keep from falling in love with her right there in Terminal B. She threw herself into my arms, covered my face with kisses, then laughed and grabbed me when I started listing to port on my crutch. I introduced her to Jack and pretended not to see the small diamond (purchased at Zales, I had no doubt) flashing on the third finger of her left hand when they shook.

“You look wonderful, Daddy,” she said as we stepped out into the balmy December evening. “You’ve got a tan. First time since you built that rec center in Lilydale Park. And you’ve put on weight. At least ten pounds. Don’t you think so, Jack?”

“You’d be the best judge of that,” Jack said, smiling. “I’ll go get the car. You okay to stand, boss? This may take awhile.”

“I’m good.”

We waited on the curb with her two carry-ons and her computer. She was smiling into my eyes.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” she asked. “Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

“If you mean the ring, I saw. Unless you won it in one of those quarter drop-the-claw games, I’d say congratulations are in order. Does Lin know?”

“Yep.”

“Your mother?”

“What do you think, Daddy? Best guess.”

“My best guess is… not. Because she’s so concerned about Grampy right now.”

“Grampy wasn’t the only reason I kept the ring in my purse the whole time I was in California — except to show Lin, that is. Mostly I just wanted to tell you first. Is that evil?”

“No, honey. I’m touched.”

I was, too. But I was also afraid for her, and not just because she wouldn’t be twenty for another three months.

“His name’s Carson Jones, and he’s a divinity student, of all things — do you believe it? I love him, Daddy, I just love him so much.”

“That’s great, honey,” I said, but I could feel dread climbing my legs. Just don’t love him too much, I was thinking. Not too much. Because —

She was looking at me closely, her smile fading. “What? What’s wrong?”

I’d forgotten how quick she was, and how well she read me. Love conveys its own psychic powers, doesn’t it?

“Nothing, hon. Well… my hip’s hurting a little.”

“Have you had your pain pills?”

“Actually… I’m stepping down on those a little more. Plan on getting off them entirely in January. That’s my New Year’s resolution.”

“Daddy, that’s wonderful!”

“Although New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken.”

“Not you. You do what you say you’re going to do.” Ilse frowned. “That’s one of the things Mom never liked about you. I think it makes her jealous.”

“Hon, the divorce is just something that happened. Don’t go picking sides, okay?”

“Well, I’ll tell you something else that’s happening,” Ilse said. Her lips had thinned down. “Since she’s been out in Palm Desert, she’s seeing an awful lot of this guy down the street. She says it’s just coffee and sympathy — because Max lost his father last year, and Max really likes Grampy, and blah-blah-blah — but I see the way she looks at him and I… don’t… care for it!” Now her lips were almost gone, and I thought she looked eerily like her mother. The thought that came with this was oddly comforting: I think she’ll be all right. I think if this holy Jones boy jilts her, she’ll still be okay.

I could see my rental car, but Jack would be awhile yet. The pickup traffic was stop-and-go. I leaned my crutch against my midsection and hugged my daughter, who had come all the way from California to see me. “Go easy on your mother, okay?”

“Don’t you even care that—”

“What I mostly care about these days is that you and Melinda are happy.”

There were circles under her eyes and I could see that, young or not, all the traveling had tired her out. I thought she’d sleep late tomorrow, and that was fine. If my feeling about her boyfriend was right — I hoped it wasn’t but thought it was — she had some sleepless nights ahead of her in the year to come.

Jack had made it as far as the Air Florida terminal, which still gave us some time. “Do you have a picture of your guy? Enquiring Dads want to know.”

Ilse brightened. “You bet.” The picture she brought out of her red leather wallet was in one of those see-through plastic envelopes. She teased it out and handed it to me. I guess this time my reaction didn’t show, because her fond (really sort of goofy) smile didn’t change. And me? I felt as though I’d swallowed something that had no business going down a human throat. A piece of lead shot, maybe.

It wasn’t that Carson Jones resembled the man I’d drawn on Christmas Eve. I was prepared for that, had been since I saw the little ring twinkling prettily on Ilse’s finger. What shocked me was that the photo was almost exactly the same. It was as if, instead of clipping a photo of sophora, sea lavender, or inkberry to the side of my easel, I had clipped this very photograph. He was wearing the jeans and the scuffed yellow workboots that I hadn’t been able to get quite right; his darkish blond hair spilled over his ears and his forehead; he was carrying a book I knew was a Bible in one hand. Most telling of all was the Minnesota Twins tee-shirt, with the number 48 on the left breast.

“Who’s number 48, and how did you happen to meet a Twins fan at Brown? I thought that was Red Sox country.”

“Number 48’s Torii Hunter,” she said, looking at me as if I was the world’s biggest dummox. “They have a huge TV in the main student lounge, and I went in there one day last July when the Sox and Twins were playing. The place was crammed even though it was summer session, but Carson and I were the only ones with our Twins on — him with his Torii tee-shirt, me with my cap. So of course we sat together, and…” She shrugged, to show the rest was history.

“What flavor is he, religiously speaking?”

“Baptist.” She looked at me a little defiantly, as though she’d said Cannibal. But as a member in good standing of The First Church of Nothing in Particular, I had no grudge against the Baptists. The only religions I don’t like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God. “We’ve been going to services together three times a week for the last four months.”

Jack pulled up, and she bent to grab the handles of her various bags. “He’s going to take spring semester off to travel with this really wonderful gospel group. It’s an actual tour, with a booker and everything. The group is called The Hummingbirds. You should hear him — he sings like an angel.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

She kissed me again, softly, on the cheek. “I’m glad I came, Daddy. Are you glad?”

“More than you could ever know,” I said, and found myself wishing she’d fall madly in love with Jack. That would have solved everything… or so it seemed to me then.

x

We had nothing so grand as Christmas dinner, but there was one of Jack’s Astronaut Chickens, plus cranberry dressing, salad-in-a-bag, and rice pudding. Ilse ate two helpings of everything. After we exchanged presents and exclaimed over them — everything was just what we wanted! — I took Ilse upstairs to Little Pink and showed her most of my artistic output. The drawing I’d done of her boyfriend and the picture of the woman (if it was a woman) in red were tucked away on a high shelf in my bedroom closet, and there they would stay until my daughter was gone.

I had clipped about a dozen others — mostly sunsets — to squares of cardboard and leaned them against the walls of the room. She toured them once. Stopped, then toured them again. It was night by then, my big upstairs window full of darkness. The tide was all the way out; the only way you even knew the Gulf was there was by its soft continual sighing as the waves ran up the sand and died.

“You really did these?” she said at last. She turned and looked at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. It’s the way one person looks at another when a serious re-evaluation is going on.

“I really did,” I said. “What do you think?”

“They’re good. Maybe better than good. This one—” She bent and very carefully picked up the one that showed the conch sitting on the horizon-line, with yellow-orange sunset light blazing all around it. “This is so fu… excuse me, so damn creepy.”

“I think so, too,” I said. “But really, it’s nothing new. All it does is dress up the sunset with a little surrealism.” Then, inanely, I exclaimed: “Hello, Dalí!”

She put back Sunset with Conch, and picked up Sunset with Sophora.

“Who’s seen these?”

“Just you and Jack. Oh, and Juanita. She calls them asustador. Something like that. Jack says it means scary.”

“They’re a little scary,” she admitted. “But Daddy… this pencil you’re using will smudge. And I think it’ll fade if you don’t do something to the pictures.”

“What?”

“Dunno. But I think you ought to show these to someone who does know. Someone who can tell you how good they really are.”

I felt flattered but also uncomfortable. Dismayed, almost. “I wouldn’t know who or where to—”

“Ask Jack. Maybe he knows an art gallery that would look at them.”

“Sure, just limp in off the street and say, ‘I live out on Duma Key and I’ve got some pencil sketches — mostly of sunsets, a very unusual subject in coastal Florida — that my housekeeper says are muy asustador.’”

She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. It was how Pam looked when she had no intention of letting a thing go. When she in fact intended to throw her current argument into four-wheel drive.

“Father—”

“Oh boy, I’m in for it now.”

She paid no mind. “You parlayed two pick-ups, a used Korean War bulldozer, and a twenty-thousand-dollar loan into a million-dollar business. Are you going to stand there and tell me you couldn’t get a few art gallery owners to look at your pictures if you really set your mind to it?”

She softened.

“I mean, these are good, Daddy. Good. All I’ve got for training is one lousy Art Appreciation course in high school, and I know that.”

I said something, but I’m not sure what. I was thinking about my frenzied quick-sketch of Carson Jones, alias The Baptist Hummingbird. Would she think that one was also good, if she saw it?

But she wasn’t going to. Not that one, and not the one of the person in the red robe. No one was. That was what I thought then.

“Dad, if you had this talent in you all the time, where was it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “And how much talent we’re talking about is still open to question.”

“Then get someone to tell you, okay? Someone who knows.” She picked up my mailbox drawing. “Even this one… it’s nothing special, except it is. Because of…” She touched paper. “The rocking horse. Why’d you put a rocking horse in the picture, Dad?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It just wanted to be there.”

“Did you draw it from memory?”

“No. I can’t seem to do that. Either because of the accident or because I never had that particular skill in the first place.” Except for sometimes when I did. When it came to young men in Twins tee-shirts, for instance. “I found one on the Internet, then printed—”

“Oh shit, I smudged it!” she cried. “Oh, shit!”

“Ilse, it’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s not all right and it does matter! You need to get some fucking paints!” She replayed what she’d just said and clapped a hand over her mouth.

“You probably won’t believe this,” I said, “but I’ve heard that word a time or two. Although I have an idea that maybe your boyfriend… might not exactly…”

“You got that right,” she said. A little glumly. Then she smiled. “But he can let out a pretty good gosh-darn when somebody cuts him off in traffic. Dad, about your pictures—”

“I’m just happy you like them.”

“It’s more than liking. I’m amazed.” She yawned. “I’m also dead on my feet.”

“I think maybe you need a cup of hot cocoa and then bed.”

“That sounds wonderful.”

“Which?”

She laughed. It was wonderful to hear her laugh. It filled the place up. “Both.”

xi

We stood on the beach the next morning with coffee cups in hand and our ankles in the surf. The sun had just hoisted itself over the low rise of the Key behind us, and our shadows seemed to stretch out onto the quiet water for miles.

Ilse looked at me solemnly. “Is this the most beautiful place on earth, Dad?”

“No, but you’re young and I can’t blame you for thinking it might be. It’s number four on the Most Beautiful list, actually, but the top three are places nobody can spell.”

She smiled over the rim of her cup. “Do tell.”

“If you insist. Number one, Machu Picchu. Number two, Marrakech. Number three, Petroglyph National Monument. Then, at number four, Duma Key, just off the west coast of Florida.”

Her smile widened for a second or two. Then it faded and she was giving me the solemn stare again. I remembered her looking at me the same way when she was four, asking me if there was any magic like in fairy tales. I had told her yes, of course, thinking it was a lie. Now I wasn’t so sure. But the air was warm, my bare feet were in the Gulf, and I just didn’t want Ilse to be hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don’t they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog. Except the ones you love can really multiply that hurt and pass it around. Pain is the biggest power of love. That’s what Wireman says.

“See anything green, sweetheart?” I asked.

“No, I was just thinking again how glad I am that I came. I pictured you rotting away between an old folks’ retirement home and some horrible tiki bar featuring Wet Tee-Shirt Thursdays. I guess I’ve been reading too much Carl Hiaasen.”

“There are plenty of places like that down here,” I said.

“And are there other places like Duma?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a few.” But based on what Jack had told me, I guessed that there were not.

“Well, you deserve this one,” she said. “Time to rest and heal. And if all this” — she waved to the Gulf — “won’t heal you, I don’t know what will. The only thing…”

“Ye-ess?” I said, and made a picking-out gesture at the air with two fingers. Families have their own interior language, and that includes sign-language. My gesture would have meant nothing to an outsider, but Ilse knew and laughed.

“All right, smarty. The only fly in the ointment is the sound the tide makes when it comes in. I woke up in the middle of the night and almost screamed before I realized it was the shells moving around in the water. I mean, that’s it, right? Please tell me that’s it.”

“That’s it. What did you think it was?”

She actually shivered. “My first thought… don’t laugh… was skeletons on parade. Hundreds, marching around the house.”

I’d never thought of it that way, but I knew what she meant. “I find it sort of soothing.”

She gave a small and doubtful shrug. “Well… okay, then. To each his own. Are you ready to go back? I could scramble us some eggs. Even throw in some peppers and mushrooms.”

“You’re on.”

“I haven’t seen you off your crutch for so long since the accident.”

“I hope to be walking a quarter-mile south along the beach by the middle of January.”

She whistled. “A quarter of a mile and back?”

I shook my head. “No, no. Just a quarter of a mile. I plan to glide back.” I extended my arms to demonstrate.

She snorted, started toward the house again, then paused as a point of light heliographed in our direction from the south. Once, then twice. The two specks were down there.

“People,” Ilse said, shading her eyes.

“My neighbors. My only neighbors, right now. At least, I think so.”

“Have you met them?”

“Nope. All I know is that it’s a man and a woman in a wheelchair. I think she has her breakfast down by the water most days. I think the tray is the glinty thing.”

“You should get yourself a golf cart. Then you could buzz down and say hi.”

“Eventually I’ll walk down and say hi,” I said. “No golf cart for the kid. Dr. Kamen said to set goals, and I’m setting em.”

“You didn’t need a shrink to tell you about setting goals, Daddy,” she said, still peering south. “Which house do they belong to? The big one that looks like a rancho in a western movie?”

“I’m pretty sure, yes.”

“And no one else lives here?”

“Not now. Jack says there are folks who rent some of the other houses in January and February, but for now I guess it’s just me and them. The rest of the island is pure botanical pornography. Plants gone wild.”

“My God, why?”

“Haven’t the slightest idea. I mean to find out — to try, anyway — but for now I’m still trying to get my feet under me. And I mean that literally.”

We were walking back to the house now. Ilse said, “An almost empty island in the sun — there should be a story. There almost has to be a story, don’t you think?”

“I do,” I said. “Jack Cantori offered to snoop, but I told him not to bother — thinking I might look on my own.” I snagged my crutch, fitted my arm into its two steel sleeves — always comforting after spending time on the beach without its support — and started thumping up the walk. But Ilse wasn’t with me. I turned and looked back. She was facing south, her hand once more shading her eyes. “Coming, hon?”

“Yes.” There was one more flash from down the beach — the breakfast tray. Or a coffeepot. “Maybe they know the story,” Ilse said, catching up.

“Maybe they do.”

She pointed to the road. “What about that? How far does it go?”

“Don’t know,” I said.

“Would you like to drive down it this afternoon and see?”

“Are you willing to pilot a Chevy Malibu from Hertz?”

“Sure,” she said. She put her hands on her slim hips, pretended to spit, and affected a Southern drawl. “I’ll drive until yonder road runs out.”

xii

But we didn’t get even close to the end of Duma Road. Not that day. Our southward exploration began well, ended badly.

We both felt fine when we left. I’d had an hour off my feet, plus my midday Oxycontin. My daughter had changed to shorts and a halter top, and laughed when I insisted on anointing her nose with zinc oxide. “Bobo the clown,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror. She was in great spirits, I was happier than I’d been since the accident, so what happened to us that afternoon came as a total surprise. Ilse blamed lunch — maybe bad mayo in the tuna salad — and I let her, but I don’t think it was bad mayo at all. Bad mojo, more like it.

The road was narrow, bumpy, and badly patched. Until we reached the place where it ran into the overgrowth that covered most of the Key, it was also ridged with bone-colored sand dunes that had blown inland from the beach. The rental Chevy thudded gamely over most of these, but when the road curved a little closer to the water — this was just before we reached the hacienda Wireman called Palacio de Asesinos — the drifts grew thicker and the car waddled instead of bumping. Ilse, who had learned to drive in snow country, handled this without complaint or comment.

The houses between Big Pink and El Palacio were all in the style I came to think of as Florida Pastel Ugly. Most were shuttered and the driveways of all but one were gated shut. The driveway of the one exception had been barred with two sawhorses, bearing this faded stenciled warning: MEAN DOGS MEAN DOGS. Beyond the Mean Dog house, the grounds of the hacienda commenced. They were enclosed by a sturdy faux-stucco wall about ten feet high and topped with orange tile. More orange tile — the roof of the mansion inside — rose in slants and angles against the blameless blue sky.

“Jumping jeepers,” Ilse said — that was one she must have gotten from her Baptist boyfriend. “This place belongs in Beverly Hills.”

The wall ran along the east side of the narrow, buckled road for at least eighty yards. There weren’t any NO TRESPASSING signs; given that wall, the owner’s stance on door-to-door salesmen and proselytizing Mormons seemed perfectly clear. In the center was a two-piece iron gate, standing ajar. And sitting just inside its open halves —

“There she is,” I murmured. “The lady from down the beach. Holy shit, it’s The Bride of the Godfather.”

“Daddy!” Ilse said, laughing and shocked at the same time.

The woman was seriously old, mid-eighties at least. She was in her wheelchair. An enormous pair of blue Converse Hi-Tops were propped up on the chrome footrests. Although the temperature was in the mid-seventies, she wore a gray two-piece sweatsuit. In one gnarled hand a cigarette smoldered. Clapped on her head was the straw hat I’d seen on my walks, but on my walks I hadn’t realized how enormous it was — not just a hat but a battered sombrero. Her resemblance to Marlon Brando at the end of The Godfather — when he’s playing with his grandson in the garden — was unmistakable. There was something in her lap that did not quite look like a pistol.

Ilse and I both waved. For a moment she did nothing. Then she raised one hand, palm out, in an Indian How gesture, and broke into a sunny and nearly toothless grin. What seemed like a thousand wrinkles creased her face, turning her into a benign witch. I never even glimpsed the house behind her; I was still trying to cope with her sudden appearance, her cool blue sneakers, her delta of wrinkles, and her —

“Daddy, was that a gun?” Ilse was looking into the rear-view mirror, wide-eyed. “Did that old lady have a gun?”

The car was drifting, and I saw a real possibility of clipping the hacienda’s far corner. I touched the wheel and made a course correction. “I think so. Of a kind. Mind your driving, honey. There ain’t much road in this road.”

She faced front again. We’d been driving in bright sunshine, but that ended with the hacienda’s wall. “What do you mean, of a kind?”

“It looked like… I don’t know, a crossbow-pistol. Or something. Maybe she shoots snakes with it.”

“Thank God she smiled,” Ilse said. “And it was a great smile, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. “It was.”

The hacienda was the last house on Duma Key’s open north end. Beyond it, the road swung inland and the foliage crowded up in a way I found first interesting, then awesome, then claustrophobic. The masses of greenery towered to a height of twelve feet at least, the round leaves streaked a dark vermillion that looked like dried blood.

“What is that stuff, Daddy?”

“Seagrape. The green stuff with the yellow flowers is called wedelia. It grows everywhere. There’s also rhododendron. The trees are mostly just slash pine, I think, although—”

She slowed to a crawl and pointed to the left, craning to look up through the corner of the windshield to do so. “Those are palms of some kind. And look… right up there…”

The road bent still farther inland, and here the trunks flanking the road looked like knotted masses of gray rope. Their roots had buckled the tar. We’d be able to get over now, I judged, but cars passing this way a few years hence? No way.

“Strangler fig,” I said.

“Nice name, right out of Alfred Hitchcock. And they just grow wild?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She bumped the Chevy carefully over the tunneling roots and drove on. We were down to no more than five miles an hour. There was more strangler fig growing out of the masses of seagrape and rhododendron. The high growth cast the road into deep shadow. It was impossible to see any distance at all on either side. Except for an occasional wedge of blue or errant sunray, even the sky was gone. And now we began to see sprays of sawgrass and tough, waxy fiddlewood growing right up through cracks in the tar.

My arm began to itch. The one that wasn’t there. I reached to scratch it without thinking and only scratched my still-sore ribs, as I always did. At the same time the left side of my head started to itch. That I could scratch, and did.

“Daddy?”

“I’m okay. Why are you stopping?”

“Because… I don’t feel so great myself.”

Nor, I realized, did she look it. Her complexion had gone almost as white as the dab of zinc oxide on her nose. “Ilse? What is it?”

“My stomach. I’m starting to have serious questions about that tuna salad I made for lunch.” She gave me a sickly coming-down-with-the-flu smile. “I’m also wondering how I’m going to get us out of here.”

Not a bad question. All at once the seagrape seemed to be pushing in and the interweaving palms overhead seemed thicker. I realized I could smell the growth around us, a ropy aroma that seemed to come to life halfway down my throat. And why not? It came from live things, after all; they were crowded in on both sides. And above.

“Dad?”

The itch was worse. It was red, that itch, as red as the stink in my nose and throat was green. That itch you got when you were stuck in the burn, stuck in the char.

“Daddy, I’m sorry but I think I’m going to vomit.”

Not a burn, not a char, it was a car, she opened the door of the car and leaned out, holding onto the wheel with one ham, and then I heard her sowing up.

My right eye came over red and I thought I can do this. I can do this. I just have to get my poor old shit together.

I opened my door, reaching cross-body to do it, and got out. Lurched out, holding the top of the door to keep from sprawling headfirst into a wall of seagrape and the interwoven branches of a half-buried banyan. I itched all over. The bushes and branches were so close to the side of the car that they scraped me as I made my way up to the front. Half my vision

(RED)

seemed to be bleeding scarlet, I felt the tip of a pine-bough scrape across the wrist of — I could have sworn it — my right arm, and I thought I can do this, I MUST do this as I heard Ilse vomit again. I was aware that it was much hotter in that narrow lane than it should have been, even with the greenroof overhead. I had enough mind left in my mind to wonder what we’d been thinking, coming down this road in the first place. But of course it had seemed like nothing but a lark at the time.

Ilse was still leaning out, hanging onto the wheel with her right hand. Sweat stood on her forehead in clear beads. She looked up at me. “Oh boy—”

“Push over, Ilse.”

“Daddy, what are you going to do?”

As if she couldn’t see. And all at once both the words drive and back were unavailable to me, anyway. All I could have articulated in that moment was us, the most useless word in the English language when it stands by itself. I felt the anger rising in my throat like hot water. Or blood. Yes, more like that. Because the anger was, of course, red.

“Get us out of here. Push over.” Thinking: Don’t you get mad at her. Don’t you start shouting no matter what. Oh for Christ’s sake, please don’t.

“Daddy, you, can’t—”

“Yes. I can do this. Push over.”

The habit of obedience dies hard — especially hard, maybe, between fathers and daughters. And of course she was sick. She pushed over and I got behind the wheel, sitting down in my clumsy stupid backwards fashion and using my hand to lift in my rotten right leg. My whole right side was buzzing, as if undergoing a low-level electric shock.

I closed my eyes tightly and thought: I CAN do this, goddammit, and I don’t need any stuffed rag bitch to see me through, either.

When I looked at the world again, some of that redness — and some of the anger, thank God — had drained out of it. I dropped the transmission into reverse and began to back up slowly. I couldn’t lean out as Ilse had done, because I had no right hand to steer with. I used the rear-view instead. In my head, ghostly, I heard: Meep-meep-meep.

“Please don’t drive us off the road,” Ilse said. “We can’t walk. I’m too sick and you’re too crippled-up.”

“I won’t, Monica,” I said, but at that moment she leaned out the window to vomit again and I don’t think she heard me.

xiii

Slowly, slowly, I backed away from the place where Ilse had stopped, telling myself Easy does it and Slow and steady wins the race. My hip snarled as we thumped back over the strangler fig roots burrowing under the road. On a couple of occasions I heard seagrape branches scree along the side of the car. The Hertz people weren’t going to be happy, but they were the least of my worries that afternoon.

Little by little the light brightened as the foliage cleared out overhead. That was good. My vision was also clearing, that mad itch subsiding. Those things were even better.

“I see the big place with the wall around it,” Ilse said, looking back over her shoulder.

“Do you feel any better?”

“Maybe a little, but my stomach’s still sudsing like a Maytag.” She made a gagging noise. “Oh God, I should never have said that.” She leaned out, threw up again, then collapsed back onto the seat, laughing and groaning. Her bangs were sticking to her forehead in clumps. “I just shellacked the side of your car. Please tell me you have a hose.”

“Don’t worry about that. Just sit still and take long, slow breaths.”

She saluted feebly and closed her eyes.

The old woman in the big straw hat was nowhere in evidence, but the two halves of the iron gate were now standing wide open, as if she was expecting company. Or knew we’d need a place to turn around.

I didn’t waste time considering that, just backed the Chevy into the archway. For a moment I saw a courtyard paved with cool blue tiles, a tennis court, and an enormous set of double doors with iron rings set into them. Then I turned for home. We were there five minutes later. My vision was as clear as it had been when I woke up that morning, if not clearer. Except for the low itch up and down my right side, I felt fine.

I also felt a strong desire to draw. I didn’t know what, but I would know, when I was sitting in Little Pink with one of my pads propped on my easel. I was sure of that.

“Let me clean off the side of your car,” Ilse said.

“You’re going to lie down. You look beat half to death.”

She offered a wan smile. “That’s just the better half. Remember how Mom used to say that?”

I nodded. “Go on, now. I’ll do the rinsing.” I pointed to where the hose was coiled on the north side of Big Pink. “It’s all hooked up and ready to go.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Good to go. I think you ate more of the tuna salad than I did.”

She managed another smile. “I always was partial to my own cooking. You were great to get us back here, Daddy. I’d kiss you, but my breath…”

I kissed her. On the forehead. The skin was cool and damp. “Put your feet up, Miss Cookie — orders from headquarters.”

She went. I turned on the faucet and hosed off the side of the Malibu, taking more time than the job really needed, wanting to make sure she was down for the count. And she was. When I peeked in through the half-open door of the second bedroom, I saw her lying on her side, sleeping just as she had as a kid: one hand tucked under her cheek and one knee drawn up almost to her chest. We think we change, but we don’t really — that’s what Wireman says.

Maybe sí, maybe no — that’s what Freemantle says.

xiv

There was something pulling me — maybe something that had been in me since the accident, but surely something that had come back from Duma Key Road with me. I let it pull. I’m not sure I could have stood against it in any case, but I didn’t even try; I was curious.

My daughter’s purse was on the coffee table in the living room. I opened it, took out her wallet, and flipped through the pictures inside. Doing this made me feel a little like a cad, but only a little. It’s not as if you’re stealing anything, I told myself, but of course there are many ways of stealing, aren’t there?

Here was the photo of Carson Jones she’d shown me at the airport, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t want him by himself. I wanted him with her. I wanted a picture of them as a couple. And I found one. It looked as if it had been taken at a roadside stand; there were baskets of cucumbers and corn behind them. They were smiling and young and beautiful. Their arms were around each other, and one of Carson Jones’s palms appeared to be resting on the swell of my daughter’s blue jeans–clad ass. Oh you crazy Christian. My right arm was still itching, a low, steady skin-crawl like prickly heat. I scratched at it, scratched through it, and got my ribs instead for the ten thousandth time. This picture was also in a protective see-through envelope. I slid it out, glanced over my shoulder — nervous as a burglar on his first job — at the partially open door of the room where Ilse was sleeping, then turned the picture over.

I love you, Punkin!

“Smiley”

Could I trust a suitor who called my daughter Punkin and signed himself Smiley? I didn’t think so. It might not be fair, but no — I didn’t think so. Nevertheless, I had found what I was looking for. Not one, but both. I turned the picture over again, closed my eyes, and pretended I was touching their Kodachrome images with my right hand. Although pretending wasn’t what it felt like; I suppose I don’t have to tell you that by now.

After some passage of time — I don’t know exactly how long — I returned the picture to its plastic sleeve and submerged her wallet beneath the tissues and cosmetics to approximately the same depth at which I had found it. Then I put her purse back on the coffee table and went into my bedroom to get Reba the Anger-Management Doll. I limped upstairs to Little Pink with her clamped between my stump and my side. I think I remember saying “I’m going to make you into Monica Seles” when I set Reba down in front of the window, but it could as easily have been Monica Goldstein; when it comes to memory, we all stack the deck. The gospel according to Wireman.

I’m clearer than I want to be about most of what happened on Duma, but that particular afternoon seems very vague to me. I know that I fell into a frenzy of drawing, and that the maddening itch in my nonexistent right arm disappeared completely while I was working; I do not know but am almost sure that the reddish haze which always hung over my vision in those days, growing thicker when I was tired, disappeared for awhile.

I don’t know how long I was in that state. I think quite awhile. Long enough so I was both exhausted and famished when I was finished.

I went back downstairs and gobbled lunchmeat by the fridge’s frosty glow. I didn’t want to make an actual sandwich, because I didn’t want Ilse to know I’d felt well enough to eat. Let her go on thinking our problems had been caused by bad mayonnaise. That way we wouldn’t have to spend time hunting for other explanations.

None of the other explanations I could think of were rational.

After eating half a package of sliced salami and swilling a pint or so of sweet tea, I went into my bedroom, lay down, and fell into a sodden sleep.

xv

Sunsets.

Sometimes it seems to me that my clearest memories of Duma Key are of orange evening skies that bleed at the bottom and fade away at the top, green to black. When I woke up that evening, another day was going down in glory. I thudded into the big main room on my crutch, stiff and wincing (the first ten minutes were always the worst). The door to Ilse’s room was standing open and her bed was empty.

“Ilse?” I called.

For a moment there was no answer. Then she called back from upstairs. “Daddy? Holy crow, did you do this? When did you do this?”

All thought of aches and pains left me. I got up to Little Pink as fast as I could, trying to remember what I’d drawn. Whatever it was, I hadn’t made any effort to put it out of sight. Suppose it was something really awful? Suppose I’d gotten the bright idea of doing a crucifixion caricature, with The Gospel Hummingbird riding the cross?

Ilse was standing in front of my easel, and I couldn’t see what was there. Her body was blocking it out. Even if she’d been standing to one side, the only light in the room was coming from that bloody sunset; the pad would have been nothing but a black rectangle against the glare.

I flicked on the lights, praying I hadn’t done something to distress the daughter who had come all this way to make sure I was okay. From her voice, I hadn’t been able to tell. “Ilse?”

She turned to me, her face bemused rather than angry. “When did you do this one?”

“Well…” I said. “Stand aside a little, would you?”

“Is your memory playing tricks again? It is, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “Well, yeah.” It was the beach outside the window, I could tell that much but no more. “As soon as I see it, I’m sure I’ll… step aside, honey, you make a better door than a window.”

“Even though I am a pain, right?” She laughed. Rarely had the sound of laughter so relieved me. Whatever she’d found on the easel, it hadn’t made her mad, and my stomach dropped back where it belonged. If she wasn’t angry, the risk that I might get angry and spoil what had, on measure, been a pretty damned good visit went down.

She stepped to the left, and I saw what I’d drawn while in my dazed, pre-nap state. Technically, it was probably the best thing I’d done since my first tentative pen-and-inks on Lake Phalen, but I thought it was no wonder she was puzzled. I was puzzled, too.

It was the section of beach I could see through Little Pink’s nearly wall-length window. The casual scribble of light on the water, achieved with a shade the Venus Company called Chrome, marked the time as early morning. A little girl in a tennis dress stood at the center of the picture. Her back was turned, but her red hair was a dead giveaway: she was Reba, my little love, that girlfriend from my other life. The figure was poorly executed, but you somehow knew that was on purpose, that she wasn’t a real little girl at all, only a dream figure in a dream landscape.

All around her feet, lying in the sand, were bright green tennis balls.

Others floated shoreward on the mild waves.

“When did you do it?” Ilse was still smiling — almost laughing. “And what the heck does it mean?”

“Do you like it?” I asked. Because I didn’t like it. The tennis balls were the wrong color because I hadn’t had the right shade of green, but that wasn’t why; I hated it because it felt all wrong. It felt like heartbreak.

“I love it!” she said, and then did laugh. “C’mon, when did you do it? Give.”

“While you were sleeping. I went to lie down, but I felt queasy again, so I thought I better stay vertical for awhile. I decided to draw a little, see if things would settle. I didn’t realize I had that thing in my hand until I got up here.” I pointed to Reba, sitting propped against the window with her stuffed legs sticking out.

“That’s the doll you’re supposed to yell at when you forget things, right?”

“Something like that. Anyway, I drew the picture. It took maybe an hour. By the time I was finished, I felt better.” Although I remembered very little about making the drawing, I remembered enough to know this story was a lie. “Then I lay down and took a nap. End of story.”

“Can I have it?”

I felt a surge of dismay, but couldn’t think of a way to say no that wouldn’t hurt her feelings or sound crazy. “If you really want it. It’s not much, though. Wouldn’t you rather have one of Freemantle’s Famous Sunsets? Or the mailbox with the rocking horse! I could—”

“This is the one I want,” she said. “It’s funny and sweet and even a little… I don’t know… ominous. You look at her one way and you say, ‘A doll.’ You look another way and say, ‘No, a little girl — after all, isn’t she standing up?’ It’s amazing how much you’ve learned to do with colored pencils.” She nodded decisively. “This is the one I want. Only you have to name it. Artists have to name their pictures.”

“I agree, but I wouldn’t have any idea—”

“Come on, come on, no weaseling. First thing to pop into your mind.”

I said, “All right — The End of the Game.”

She clapped her hands. “Perfect. Perfect! And you have to sign it, too. Ain’t I bossy?”

“You always were,” I said. “Très bossy. You must be feeling better.”

“I am. Are you?”

“Yes,” I said, but I wasn’t. All at once I had a bad case of the mean reds. Venus doesn’t make that color, but there was a new, nicely sharpened Venus Black in the gutter of the easel. I picked it up and signed my name by one of back-to doll’s pink legs. Beyond her, a dozen wrong-green tennis balls floated on a mild wave. I didn’t know what those rogue balls meant, but I didn’t like them. I didn’t like signing my name to this picture, either, but after I had, I jotted The End of the Game up one side. And what I felt was what Pam had taught the girls to say when they were little, and had finished some unpleasant chore.

Over-done with-gone.

xvi

She stayed two more days, and they were good days. When Jack and I took her back to the airport, she’d gotten some sun on her face and arms and seemed to give off her own benevolent radiation: youth, health, well-being.

Jack had found a travel-tube for her new picture.

“Daddy, promise you’ll take care of yourself and call if you need me,” she said.

“Roger that,” I said, smiling.

“And promise me you’ll get someone to give you an opinion on your pictures. Someone who knows about that stuff.”

“Well—”

She lowered her chin and frowned at me. When she did that it was again like looking at Pam when I’d first met her. “You better promise, or else.”

And because she meant it — the vertical line between her eyebrows said so — I promised.

The line smoothed out. “Good, that’s settled. You deserve to get better, you know. Sometimes I wonder if you really believe that.”

“Of course I do,” I said.

Ilse went on as if she hadn’t heard. “Because what happened wasn’t your fault.”

I felt tears well up at that. I suppose I did know, but it was nice to hear someone else say it out loud. Someone besides Kamen, that is, whose job it was to scrape caked-on grime off those troublesome unwashed pots in the sinks of the subconscious.

She nodded at me. “You are going to get better. I say so, and I’m très bossy.”

The loudspeaker honked: Delta flight 559, service to Cincinnati and Cleveland. The first leg of Ilse’s trip home.

“Go on, hon, better let em wand your bod and check your shoes.”

“I have one other thing to say first.”

I threw up the one hand I still had. “What now, precious girl?”

She smiled at that: it was what I’d called both girls when my patience was finally nearing an end.

“Thank you for not telling me that Carson and I are too young to be engaged.”

“Would it have done any good?”

“No.”

“No. Besides, your mother will do an adequate job of that for both of us, I think.”

Ilse scrunched her mouth into an ouch shape, then laughed. “So will Linnie… but only cause I got ahead of her for once.”

She gave me one more strong hug. I breathed deep of her hair — that good sweet smell of shampoo and young, healthy woman. She pulled back and looked at my man-of-all-work, standing considerately off to one side. “You better take good care of him, Jack. He’s the goods.”

They hadn’t fallen in love — no breaks there, muchacho — but he gave her a warm smile. “I’ll do my best.”

“And he promised to get an opinion on his pictures. You’re a witness.”

Jack smiled and nodded.

“Good.” She gave me one more kiss, this one on the tip of the nose. “Be good, father. Heal thyself.” Then she went through the doors, festooned with bags but still walking briskly. She looked back just before they closed. “And get some paints!”

“I will!” I called back, but I don’t know if she heard me; in Florida, doors whoosh shut in a hurry to save the air conditioning. For a moment or two everything in the world blurred and grew brighter; there was a pounding in my temples and a damp prickle in my nose. I bent my head and worked briskly at my eyes with the thumb and second finger of my hand while Jack once more pretended to see something interesting in the sky. There was a word and it wouldn’t come. I thought borrow, then tomorrow.

Give it time, don’t get mad, tell yourself you can do this, and the words usually come. Sometimes you don’t want them, but they come, anyway. This one was sorrow.

Jack said, “You want to wait for me to bring the car, or—”

“No, I’m good to walk.” I wrapped my fingers around the grip of my crutch. “Just keep an eye on the traffic. I don’t want to get run down crossing the road. Been there, done that.”

xvii

We stopped at Art & Artifacts of Sarasota on our way back, and while we were in there, I asked Jack if he knew anything about Sarasota art galleries.

“Way ahead of you, boss. My Mom used to work in one called the Scoto. It’s on Palm Avenue.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“It’s the hot-shit gallery on the arty side of town,” he said, then rethought that. “I mean that in a nice way. And the people who run it are nice… at least they always were to my Mom, but… you know…”

“It is a hot-shit gallery.”

“Yeah.”

“Meaning big prices?”

“It’s where the elite meet.” He spoke solemnly, but when I burst out laughing, he joined me. That was the day, I think, when Jack Cantori became my friend rather than my part-time gofer.

“Then that’s settled,” I said, “because I am definitely elite. Give it up, son.”

I raised my hand, and Jack gave it a smack.

xviii

Back at Big Pink, he helped me into the house with my loot — five bags, two boxes, and a stack of nine stretched canvases. Almost a thousand dollars’ worth of stuff. I told him we’d worry about getting it upstairs the next day. Painting was the last thing on earth I wanted to do that night.

I limped across the living room toward the kitchen, meaning to put together a sandwich, when I saw the message light on the answering machine blinking. I thought it must be Ilse, saying her flight had been cancelled due to weather or equipment problems.

It wasn’t. The voice was pleasant but cracked with age, and I knew who it was at once. I could almost see those enormous blue sneakers propped on the bright footplates of her wheelchair.

“Hello, Mr. Freemantle, welcome to Duma Key. It was a pleasure to see you the other day, if only briefly. One assumes the young lady with you was your daughter, given the resemblance. Have you taken her back to the airport? One rather hopes so.”

There was a pause. I could hear her breathing, the loud, not-quiteemphysemic respiration of a person who has probably spent a great deal of her life with a cigarette in one hand. Then she spoke again.

“All things considered, Duma Key has never been a lucky place for daughters.”

I found myself thinking of Reba in a very unlikely tennis dress, surrounded by small fuzzy balls as more came in on the next wave.

“One hopes we will meet, in the course of time. Goodbye, Mr. Freemantle.”

There was a click. Then it was just me and the restless grinding sound of the shells under the house.

The tide was in.