“I am listening.” Jules heard the rising indignation and realized he shouldn’t have pushed. “I’ve been listening all day. But I got to meet Maddie. You’re making me late.”
Maddie. Maddie. Who was this Maddie? Jules guessed she was one of the girls who partied in the ballroom each night. He heard his father’s voice—so loud, it felt as if three generations of Simmons men were standing in the garden surrounded by twitching half-dead caterpillars. Keep away from those white girls, boy. Is it really worth the risk? He heard his father’s honeyed laugh. Plenty of dark girls happy to get you off.
But that wasn’t true on this island, and he wasn’t his father, and he swallowed the impulse to warn his son, and instead asked, “Tell me more about Maddie.” He stooped to look into his son’s face, smiled when he saw Brooks’s mouth twitch.
“Just a girl.”
“Oh no, she ain’t just,” Jules said, and slapped his son on the back.
“Quit it, Dad,” Brooks grumbled but Jules could see him smiling. Finally.
“All right then, you get lost. Go find your Maddie.”
“Dad!” But the boy was tugging off the work gloves and running up the patio steps. With a new bounce in his step, for sure. Jules felt a prick of envy as he tried to remember what it felt like—young love—how it filled you so one touch from that little hottie and you burst like the freaking Hindenburg.
He called after Brooks, whose long legs took the steps two at a time. “Clean up the ballroom first! It smells like a saloon in there.”
Brooks stopped at the top step and turned. Sass returned, hands on hips. “What? No way! Mom said it doesn’t matter. Vinny and Enzo are getting ready to tear the room apart anyway.”
Jesus, Jules thought, he had no idea what plans were multiplying in his wife’s mind. She had those dark-haired boys in the heavy-metal tees busting holes in the walls with sledgehammers, tearing down wallpaper in long, ragged strips. Leslie watching it all with her arms crossed and a smug smile on her face. Reveling in her revenge. He wondered if she heard her father’s voice, her mother’s, as she watched the destruction of their castle, just like he heard his father’s in the garden.
He didn’t want Brooks hanging out with those boys, he thought as he unwrapped the band hugging the scaly trunk of an old sugar maple. Brooks was hardly ever at the cottage, spending all his time in that ballroom, which stank of spilled beer and cigarette smoke. Leslie only laughed Jules’s concerns away. He’s just a boy. He’s just having fun. He’s just making friends. Yeah, Jules thought, not wanting to get into it with Leslie for the hundredth time that month—our boy is just making friends with the enemy. With those meatheads who brawled at the fair. He imagined his son racing through the maze, his fingers grazing the hedged walls, toward the cottage where he’d primp and pick at his hair, make himself handsome for this Maddie. It all stank of danger.
“Brooks!” His voice was his father’s, the booming bass ricocheted off the trees, “You clean that ballroom. And,” he felt the thrum of his pulse in his throat, “you quit talking back.”
His son’s voice was faint, far away. “It’s Mom’s house. And she says I don’t have to.”
“Fuck!” Jules shouted.
He grabbed the spade, lifted it over his head, and brought the flat rusted metal down on the caterpillars stuck to the pile of green bands. Again and again. Still, the mashed pieces squirmed.
He dropped the spade only when his hands began to ache. His fingers were covered in a coarse red rash that itched so badly he wore his winter gloves to sleep so he wouldn’t scratch himself raw, or worse, make the sores ooze.
Leslie had tried to get him to swallow a Valium to help him sleep. Spend his nights in bed, not in the garden. But Jules had important work to do. He wasn’t ready to surrender. Not yet.
25.
Veronica
She had fallen in love with the girl. There were even moments, during their teatime (and Oprah time), where Veronica wondered if she did want to live after all.
“Call me Nicky,” she urged Maddie. “Please.”
When was the last time she’d asked someone to call her that? It must have been Bob when they first met at Pilgrim State Hospital after the accident at the factory had broken his back. Veronica had been a nurse-in-training. Starched white uniform and pantyhose with seams up the backs of her legs.
Maddie had arrived at White Eagle at four on the dot every afternoon since their first tea. Veronica made sure the popcorn was popped and buttered, the TV set programmed to Oprah. Even the day after Bob’s episode at the Castle bell tower, when she’d been up half the night. Her body had felt bruised and she’d found a gash on her foot where a branch had torn through her slipper. But still, she wouldn’t miss her afternoon with Maddie. Not for anything.
It had been like pulling teeth to get Bob out of the TV room and away from the coverage of the presidential election. She set him up in his study with the portable television and a Sara Lee pound cake. His eyes widened like a child’s when she told him he could eat the whole cake if he didn’t leave the room or disturb her special time with Maddie. She knew it was cruel to bribe a confused old man, but it was worth it. The things she learned from Oprah! Who knows, she thought, what different choices she’d have made if she’d tuned in earlier and had Oprah’s affirmations in her life?
What a brave woman. A few days ago, she and Maddie had watched a rerun where Oprah confronted a group of skinheads. Honest-to-goodness neo-Nazis with shaved heads and black boots and swastika tattoos. How could this woman—this black woman—forgive such monsters, especially when, as she and Maddie watched, transfixed (Veronica grateful for the commercial breaks), those scalped boys in their red-suspender-hiked trousers shouted slurs in Oprah’s face, called an audience member a monkey, even used the N word. She had heard the nasty word come out of Bob’s mouth, and the mouths of countless Grudder men. As well as Veronica’s own father. Even the pious saints in Palmyra were not free from hatred. But that Oprah—she was one cool customer—she didn’t so much as flinch. By the end of the episode, she was holding hands with the biggest and meanest boy, and they were crying together, and Maddie was crying too (without shame, Veronica saw, amazed) and she too felt the tears pushing through and wanted to let them loose, she truly did.