He was up at the seawall almost every night since they had returned. There was a new crack in the foundation and he had commanded her to get on the goddamn horn and call the engineers. Order a ton of boulders to be shipped on a barge. Fortification. She had nodded and said, Yes, Bob, but hadn’t called anyone, and knew she never would. There was no room on her to-do list.
She lit a cigarette and resisted the urge to scratch the phantom itch where her left breast had once been. She tried to imagine what he saw when he looked out over the sea. It was as if he was waiting. For something. Or someone. Gripping the cement with his feet, like he could will the crumbling seawall to remain solid, root it into the earth, brace it against the surge sucking at the foundation. It was just like him, she thought, to pick an unwinnable battle with the sea, the merciless ebb and flow that would remain long after the seawall crumbled, long after he, and she, were dead and gone. Most likely, she thought, he was dreaming of revenge. Like some mad sea captain at the water-whipped helm of his ship.
It would rain soon—dark storm clouds swarmed over the sea. What would happen to the caterpillars, she wondered, realizing they didn’t repulse her as they did the rest of the islanders. Perhaps a plague was just what the island needed.
Common names: Asian gypsy moth (English), erdei gyapjaslepke (Hungarian), gubar (Romanian), gypsy moth (English), lagarta peluda (Spanish), limantria (Italian), l?Vstraesnonne (Danish), maimai-ga (Japanese), mniska vel’kohlava (Slovak), neparnyy shelkopryad (Russian), Schwammspinner (German), spongieuse (French)
—National Biological Information Infrastructure & Invasive Species Specialist Group
18.
Jules
He was in the garden day and night. Watching over his trees. Brushing the bristled beasts off bark with his naked fingers.
He wasn’t bonkers, which was what Leslie had called him that afternoon when he’d refused to come in and take a break. He was obsessed—he admitted it. But as his pops had said to him many times: what was a man without an obsession? Sure, his father’s obsession had been listening to ball games on that valve radio—Dodgers games, even after they’d shattered the old man’s heart, abandoning Brooklyn. Jules came home from school every day to his father twisting knobs, cussing up a storm. He worked construction and was laid off more days than not, and Jules had suspected his father preferred it that way, despite his mother’s housekeeping job barely keeping them afloat. His pops had memorized players and stats like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, and there was no doubt baseball was as close to a life’s passion as he ever got.
His father’s voice in his head grew louder each night Jules spent in the garden. Just as the hum of the caterpillars’ feeding swelled. His father’s visits surprised him every time. That honeyed bass that could fill a room. He’d had the gift of a voice and had sung in the Calvary Baptist Church choir. When he sang “Oh to Be Kept by Jesus,” women wept in the pews. A few had to be propped up by their neighbors to keep from swooning.
At first, Jules had kept his promise to Leslie and wore his heavy-duty work gloves as he plucked one caterpillar after another off the trees, but it was tough to grab those squirming suckers. He’d been doing it glove-free for a few days. So far, so good. No rash. He was beginning to think the stories he’d heard—first from Dom Short for Dominic—about gypsy-moth larvae being poisonous, causing rashes on human skin (and even under the fur of animals) was an island legend, spun to keep little kids from getting lost in the woods.
He’d worked on the trees late that night, long after dusk, long after the forest’s night music began, and was outside the kitchen door soaking his hands in a pail of cold water—maybe they were starting to sting a bit—when he heard Leslie’s voice. He decided to surprise her and opened the screen door slowly, careful not to let it slam shut. He toed off his dirt-caked Carhartt boots and padded toward the ballroom. Brooks had been blasting music all night for his new friends. Jules wasn’t thrilled about a gang of kids partying hard in what he wasn’t even ready to call his home. But Leslie had persuaded him in that way only she could. A nibble at his ear. A silent promise of a fuck in the not-so-distant future. And she was right—Brooks needed to make friends. And the Castle was far enough from other houses that the music wouldn’t carry. “But what if someone gets hurt?” he’d asked, and Leslie had called him a party pooper and he’d chased her, caught her, and their lips were together, their tongues twisting, and, well, that was that.
The music had died down and now there was that whining, pleading stuff the kids called alternative, and he heard girls giggling. Leslie was standing outside the arched entryway of the ballroom, talking to a few kids. Boys. She saw him and he knew something was wrong. Her smile was plastic, put on like a mask, and then one of the boys turned, saw Jules, lifted a hand and said, “Hello, sir.”
It was the boy from the fair. The one Jules had been goddamn sure was wearing a gun. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the silver pistol in a holster slapping against the kid’s black-denim-covered thigh.
“Hi, babe,” Leslie said.
He gripped her arm, the bulky sweatshirt—his old Harvard rag—bunching under his fingers. The three boys, all dark-haired and wearing heavy-metal tees, just like at the fair, backed away, and one—not the gun-toter, another with a mullet and long sideburns, called to Leslie, “Thanks, Mrs. Marshall. We’ll be by tomorrow. At noon.”
“See ya,” said the gun-toter, and there was slime in his voice, mocking.
“What the fuck, Leslie?” Jules was growling. Felt the vibration in his chest.
“Relax, baby,” she began, smoothing the hair on his forearm dusted with dirt.
“Do not tell me to relax. Don’t you know who those kids are? From the fair. The kid with the gun!”
“You are overreacting,” she said. “Again. You wouldn’t let Brooks go out. So I brought the kids to him.”
She was walking away, a hand raised without looking back. A dismissal that made the pulse in his neck throb.
“You know, I’m not going to talk to you when you turn into this … this…”
“What?” He jogged to catch up with her, stepped in front of her as she entered the maze so her chin bumped his chest.
“Beast!” she yelled, droplets of her spittle hitting his cheek.
She skirted around him and was running. He knew he had to keep up or he’d be lost in the maze. Why hadn’t he memorized the turns? He’d tried, but like everything he attempted on this goddamn island, he’d failed, Leslie’s code slipping through his fingers.
“Leslie, stop!”
She whipped around each turn, and the tall maze walls, black against the near-full-moon sky, seemed to throb. The tang of pine stuck in his nose—the scent he had worshipped when they’d first arrived now seemed noxious and he felt his throat close. He was heaving when he reached the cottage lawn. Leslie was gone. The cottage screen door thwacked shut.
He found her in the bedroom. She was crying. Her ice-blue eyes shot with red.