Another year unspooled.
Sabrina Torres, my editor’s mother and bankroller, evidently decided that, just as my old friend Marcus said, Florida was the new New York. She decided to move the magazine’s base to Florida and to build the purple pavilion in all its glory. She would not be unmoved. So when Ivy was spirited away to become a TVFuchsianista,always her first love, and I was tapped to take her place as editor ofFuchsia, I had mere weeks to decide, to create an expanded editorial plan, and then to organize my move.
I didn’t want to uproot Sam or leave Sam even briefly. I didn’t want to leave the Midwest. I didn’t want to leave my family or my very few real friends—little though I saw them. There was a bid for me to teach writing at Sterling North College, a small liberal arts school in Madison, which I now decided to consider. It was a real job, a tenure-track job, and though I knew it might sometimes be dull, the duties sounded like money for nothing. If that didn’t work out, I could try my hand at respectable PR jobs, finding something through my mother’s vast and clean network.
Then Sabrina made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, a figure more than twice the fictional salary I’d allowed my delighted, deluded parents to believe that I earned—back when I had fully seven hundred dollars in savings and got by only by regularly liberating cheese-and-mustard sandwiches from the office fridge. If I sold my little warehouse digs in Chicago to the subletter who kept pleading for it, I would be sitting “prettypretty,” which had become a family catchphrase after a little girl used it to describe the white tulle overskirt with the forgiving waist that I wore to my courthouse wedding. When I played the Cornelia card, Sabrina stipulated a home office with a nanny stipend and an assistant. So I signed a four-year contract with bonuses that would be fulfilled no matter what the fate of the magazine.
In Florida with my folks that long-ago Christmas break, during the interval when Emil Gardener and Cary Church were murdered, I swore that, despite the fried grouper sandwiches, I would never live in that strange and tropical place, where the weather was extraordinary but also some of the people were extraordinary in a different way, like extraterrestrials, every second woman over the age of fifty with a face so blunted by Botox she looked like a Claymation figure.
Be careful what you don’t wish for.
Now I would live my real life in vacationland, where thick-skinned fruit you knew from only the produce section could be pulled from a tree in your yard, where bugs that looked Jurassic never died but only grew and grew and grew. No more the harsh sun on crisp brown snowy prairie grass, the restless skeletal finger-snapping of black winter branches. I would always long for my Midwestern home, but it was not essential. What was essential would be there.
With reluctance that he took great pains to hide, Sam began looking for a job right away. Not two weeks had passed, however, before Angela Damiano decided that, this being Florida, where you could throw a coin in any parking lot and hit somebody who needed a defense lawyer, Damiano, Chen, and Damiano needed a satellite office there. Two of the firm’s finest elected to join Sam, and he lured a young lawyer from Kelley and Hall who’d interned for him one summer, one Eleanor Bigelow.
Weeks passed, and while I had been terribly conflicted about living in a place I imagined populated only by drug dealers and senescent demagogues, the cartoon sunniness of the so-called Treasure Coast began to beguile me. It seemed to say,You can rest here.You can be safe.
That was the end of that. Or so it seemed. It was only the end of the beforemath.
Fifteen
Brown Pelican
Pelecanus occidentalis.A large, odd seabird, the brown pelican is not quite as devoted a parent as was once believed: Legend (not true) says the pelican pierced a hole in its own breast to feed the blood to its chicks. But pelicans do fill their huge bill pouch with fish to carry to their young. A large bird, three to five feet long and weighing four to eleven pounds, with a wingspan of nearly seven feet, brown pelicans dive from heights as steep as fifty feet to hunt for prey. If a parent bird eats the fish first, it always regurgitates part of the catch for the pelican chicks, which are notoriously voracious. Because of the myth surrounding their blood, pelicans are often associated in spiritual art with a suffering Christ near the sea.
In narrative, coincidence is a juvenile strategy (“What were the odds that the woman he crashed into on that crowded ski slope in Utah would be his ex-wife, whom he hadn’t seen in ten years?”).
In real life, though, stuff happens.
One Sunday, near their new condominium in Cocoa Beach, my parents arranged a long-postponed brunch with one of Dad’s fraternity brothers, an engineer at the Kennedy Space Center. Although they hadn’t yet sold the house where we grew up, they were gradually making the transition full-time to the land ofpalm trees, pools, and pineapple plants. Their backyard was an almost sinisterly unchanging absinthe-colored Eden. Every couple of months, a gigantic storm came along and took out one of their windows, but they were philosophical about it, even my father, who would have blown an aneurysm if this had happened even a couple of years before. Dad had sold a half interest in his business to a partner, who ran things ably in his absences—my mother thought that this was proof of magic in the universe. She had worked entirely remotely for several years.
Which brings me to the homily.
Buckle up, folks—this will be a ride to remember.
Patrick and Miranda decided to meet the old friend at this nutty restaurant called Space Alley, where the servers all wore silver Mylar outfits and the ceiling was a mosaic of spinning saucers and flashing lights. Mom remembered later thinking that, for somebody, it would be a seizure on a cracker.
As they waited for their Big Bang Burgers and Supernova Shakes, Mom spotted a woman eating a modest salad alone in a nearby booth. The woman glanced up, alerted by some psychic signal. My mother blinked, then swiftly snapped a picture with her phone and sent it to me.
At that moment, I was floating in a pool on a big inflatable chair in the shape of a whale, fittingly, as I was pregnant with our twin boys (when I learned of this, I thought of Fay, so long ago, saying “the requisite two boys”). I was wearing a bathing suit that my sister called a BINO, or a Bikini In Name Only, because it really was more the size of something you would attach to the mast of a small sailboat. My phone, in a sturdy zip-sealed plastic bag, was in the cupholder with my plastic bottle of lemonade. So massive was I that it took me five minutes to flounder my way out of the pool and get the bag open to study that photo.
It was Ruth Wild.
Though visibly older in ways that couldn’t necessarily be accounted for by the passage of years, thinner, her hair entirely white, her expression sculpted downward by care, it was clearly Ruth, my old chemistry teacher, Felicity’s mother. Given the location, you will have to forgive the allusion to the wrinkle on the space-time continuum, but it was not all that far-fetched to see her there. As I reminded Miranda when I texted back, Ruth’s father, of whom she’d been enormously proud, had been a rocket scientist. He had worked on the first shuttle after theChallengerdisaster. Ruth and her sisters had been born and raised nearby, and Ruth came north only for college, for a scholarship at Minnesota not very different from the one Felicity got to University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Why had I never considered that Ruth would return here to hide in plain sight? Florida was home to her. The truth was that, after Felicity was convicted, after I wrote the story, I scarcely thought of Ruth at all, except when I imagined the book I would write, which was on hold for the moment, but which would require revisiting old mysteries.
So much had detoured the plans I made.
What do they say? (And again, who are they, anyway?) Nothing comes with a greater guarantee of giving the gods the giggles (I still do like alliteration, a lot of alliteration...) than the huge hopes of humble human beings.
All the things I had wanted to happen, had happened—along with a few more. They had, however, all happened at the same time, which is what probably gave rise to that old aphorism about being careful what you wish for.
That Sunday, Sam was indoors, putting Nelia down for her nap. I yelled for him, and he came running with our naked two-year-old tucked under his arm in a football carry.
“My parents just saw Felicity’s mother in a restaurant,” I toldhim, as Nelia, who did not know fear, clambered onto Sam’s shoulders and then leaped into my arms.
Sam said, “No way. They did not.” I was about to show him the photo when I realized that Sam would not recognize her; he had never seen Ruth Wild. By the time he and Felicity met, Ruth was gone. “Are you going to try to talk to her?”
