Lydia, carrying Evelyn, turns away from me, cooing and soothing, the picture of an affectionate aunt, Madonna and child, and in the diminishing of Evelyn’s cries, above my own desperate whispers, I hear a faint, high drone emerge from the east.
“Someone’s coming!”
“Yes.”
My body goes limp. A wild, frantic hope moves my pulse. I think, I must remain calm. This is a gift from God, my only chance. God above, let them stop. Let them see us and stop the car.
Samuel’s head lowers to my ear. “Don’t try it.”
“Try what?”
“Do something.” Lydia’s voice carries across the air, singsong, from the direction of the tree. “They’re going to think we’ve broken down. They’re going to stop.”
Samuel hesitates an instant, and in that precious speck of time I try to think of something to say, anything to soften him, to change his mind, while the drone of the car deepens and strengthens, focusing into a point up the road we’ve just traveled.
“Samuel—”
He turns me around and locks me in his arms and starts to kiss me. I try to move my hands, to maneuver them between our bodies to push his shoulders, but he’s far too big, his body smashed against mine like a brick wall, his hands simultaneously pulling at my dress and trapping me in place. I lift my knee and he pushes me backward, against the door of the car, his mouth so hard and brutal I can’t move my jaw, I can’t speak, I can’t breathe, my tongue tastes blood. Spots. I’m dizzy, I’m going to faint. The sound of the engine roars near, the brakes shriek.
“Need help, buddy?”
Samuel lifts his head at last. “Does it look like I need help?” he snarls, in a perfect American accent.
I reach deep in my lungs for enough breath to scream, but Samuel grasps the back of my head and his mouth smashes down on mine in a grotesque pantomime of sexual passion. I flail my arms, trying to make some kind of signal, some show of distress, but the engine revs high and the tires squeal softly, and Evelyn’s laughter rings in my ears from some distant point, where Lydia is amusing her. Help, says my throat, says my brain, turning dark at the edges, the engine fainter and fainter, and Samuel lifts his head and lets me go.
I slide down his chest and legs to my knees, coughing and gasping, spitting out saliva and blood, and he takes me by the shoulders. “Sorry. Sorry.”
“Bastard.”
“I’m sorry.” He hauls me back up and digs for a handkerchief or a cigarette, I don’t know which.
“Put her back in the car,” calls Lydia.
“Where are we going?”
“Why, to Maitland,” she says. “Where else?”
Chapter 30
Maitland Plantation, Florida, July 25, 1922
I remember the night we fled Connecticut. Only a few days had passed since my mother died, and we were staying at a hotel of some kind, I don’t remember the name. Just that it was somewhere on the outskirts of town, and there was a small, blue view of Long Island Sound from one window.
Father woke me sometime in the middle of the night, when the sky was nearly black and the moon was absent. He had already packed our things. He shook me gently, and I woke at once and did as he said. I took Sophie from the bed (she slept next to me, curling like a giant doll into the curve of my arm) and wrapped her in a blanket. I remember feeling terribly guilty that we took that blanket without asking. We went down the back stairs and into the automobile waiting outside. The electric motor whirred softly. Though the air was warm, my father kept the top up, and we drove without speaking along the narrow lanes, avoiding the Boston Post Road until we were several miles south into New York state.
What I remember most was the silence. The dense, awful stillness inside that car, like a hole underground, surrounded by earth. Sophie slept on my lap, golden curls catching the rare glow from a streetlamp, while the air pressed intolerably against my skin. Father’s hands clenched the tiller. He didn’t smoke, had never so much as touched a cigarette in his life, and his fingers had nothing else to do. Just held that steering tiller in a dead man’s grip and expressed nothing. Not a word passed his teeth. I had to guess where we were headed, why we were headed there, and it was not until the horizon climbed before us, the unmistakable ragged-edge skyline of Manhattan, that I knew for certain. And even then, I wondered if we were only passing through on our way to somewhere else.
And maybe I still feel that way. Maybe I’m still driving along that midnight road, which spent only an hour or two on the clock and seemed to go on into infinity. No possible end. No place to rest.
The engine of Samuel’s flivver runs louder than our old electric Columbia, and instead of setting her teeth in silence, Lydia keeps up a never-ending patter of conversation. Every so often she stops to ask a question of a purely rhetorical nature—Don’t you think, darling? or Wasn’t it smashing?—to which Samuel replies yes or no, according to her desire. Her mania exhausts me. I wonder if she’s taken a drug of some kind, one of those drawing room powders you hear about, such is the furious, fizzy tempo of her speech, and then I think, no, that’s not it. She doesn’t need fairy dust. It’s the thrill of the chase that’s got her stoned. She’s flying high on her own cleverness, her own capacity for deceit. The sheer joy of whatever evil she’s about to commit.
But Samuel. Samuel hunches over the steering column—his body’s too big for the car, his head submits to the height of the canvas top—and grips the wheel as if it’s going to fly away otherwise—the same way my father’s fingers clenched around the tiller of that runabout. Perspiration glosses his temples. He speaks only to satisfy Lydia, and even then his voice is so brief and guttural, it might as well be a skip in the engine, a cough of the pistons. Not human at all.
Me, I just sit there in the corner of the rear seat, holding Evelyn on my lap. Stroking her soft hair. Gathering my strength. Watching the horizon for the first sign of dawn.
But the earth is still dark when we turn down the drive toward Maitland, I don’t know how much later. Black and quiet, the way the world lies in that hour before dawn, the deepest hour of the night. Though I peer through the windshield, I can’t see the house itself, just the glow of the headlights on the track before us. When Samuel brings the car to a stop and sets the brake, I take the existence of house and gardens and orchards on faith. Or else dread: the recognition that we’ve reached the end of the road, Evelyn and I, and there’s no refuge left to us.
“Out of the motor, now!” Lydia sings. “Chop chop!”
“For the last time,” I say. “You can have everything. All Simon left to me. I don’t care about it. I never want to set foot in Florida again.”