Brooks shut the bathroom door and Maddie said, “Please, can we go? Now? Like right now? Something bad is going to happen. I know it.”
He whispered, “Soon, real soon,” and his warm breath on her cheek made her feel like maybe, just maybe, everything would be okay, when Bitsy pounded on the bathroom door, yelling for them to come quick.
Penny stood on the ballroom balcony, her toes gripping the smooth wood edge.
“Penny,” Maddie said softly, scared she’d startle her.
“Howdy!” Penny called down.
She was holding on to the faded red velvet curtain with one hand and Maddie heard the rings jangling. The fabric was old. It would tear.
“Oh, God, Penny, please come down.”
Penny used her other hand to direct Spencer’s placement of the beanbags for her landing.
“A little more to the left. No, that left.”
“That’s the right,” Spencer yelled back.
“Don’t fucking argue with her,” someone said, a girl, Gabrielle maybe, but Maddie couldn’t take her eyes off Penny, who was acting as if she leapt off a balcony every day. Like she was a freaking acrobat in Ringling Bros. Like it was no big deal.
“Oh shit,” Brooks whispered.
“Okey-dokey, I’m ready to fly.”
Maddie ran forward where she knew she’d be in line with Penny’s fall.
“Maddie,” Brooks said. “Get out of the way.”
“No, I got this.” She stopped him with an open hand. “Penny, I’m sorry. I promise, I swear. Cross my heart and hope to—”
It was too late.
Penny leapt off the balcony with a lively “Geronimo!” but instead of swinging out over the ballroom, her hands slid down the rope as if it was coated in butter. She landed so hard Maddie felt the ballroom shake with a loud crack, like the wood floor had split, but it was Penny who broke, lying there, splayed out, her right leg twisted at an impossible angle.
40.
Jules
He’d been a big fucking dope. It had taken him two months and change to figure out Leslie was scheming. She was that Scheherazade after all. He didn’t know exactly what she was up to, not all of it, but he’d find out soon. He had a feeling he couldn’t ignore—they were about to lose everything.
He was in the garden. He spent all his time there now that the moths were laying eggs. He was almost grateful for the distraction—it was hard work, propping the ladder against each trunk, using the hand spade to scrape away the egg sacks covered in the mother moths’ own buff-colored body hair. Climbing one rung after another. Methodical extermination.
The moon was nearly full. Lighting his way. He felt a thrill spark in his gut each time he happened upon a mother moth mid–egg secretion, the furred sac protruding from between her wings. He smashed the mother and unborn caterpillars with the flat of the spade.
The chestnut received most of his attention. If there was one thing he’d do right on this island, it was protect that tree. His discovery. He thought of Darwin and his long-necked rhea birds.
He scraped and scraped, moved up rung by rung. Repositioned the ladder until he’d completed the circle, the tree’s bark free from white-winged moths and insulated sacs. Bits of gauzy webbing stuck in his hair and on his sweaty arms. He hummed his father’s old spirituals. The same songs of suffering and redemption he’d sung to Leslie. To Brooks. To Eva. But now his father’s bass was there, in the woods with him, singing harmony to Jules’s tenor.
The pieces came together. The clues from those months on the island he hadn’t wanted to see, knowing they’d spoil his family’s new home. His perfect gardens. His chance at a new life.
Leslie at the fair air-kissing look-alike women. Flirting with the ancient uniformed Grudder men. Bringing those kids into the Castle so they infested the ballroom like the caterpillars did the forest. Inviting those greasy-haired headbanger kids into what she swore was home. Leslie huddled on the sofa with Brooks, whispering into their son’s ear. Filling their starry-eyed boy with poisonous tales. The cocktail party. These fucking animals, she’d spat. He should have known, he told himself as he scraped away the eggs. Should’ve, should’ve, should’ve chugging like the engine of a train that was nearing and as it charged closer, so much made sense. Brooks disappearing on his skateboard with that heavy backpack. Filled with cans of spray paint, Jules knew now. And all for what? What was the damn endgame? He wouldn’t be there to find out. It was time to leave. He’d pack up his and Brooks’s and Eva’s things that weekend and leave the island. Leslie could come or stay. He’d drug his son if he had to. Tie him up and strap him in the car. He’d do anything to get Brooks off that island after he’d seen the girl’s father walk off the golf green the other night, out of the fireworks smoke like a ghost out of hell. The man’s face twisted with rage.
“You married one of your mother’s angels,” his father’s voice jolted him so he nearly fell off the ladder.
“Pops, don’t start. I’m tired.”
God, was that ever the truth. He imagined letting his body fall slack, falling to the egg-and-moth-carcass-covered ground below.
“That woman is putting on a play, Julius. Her own private tragedy been brewing right under your nose. Just like those bored rich white ladies dressing up in their parlors. Flowers in their hair and rings on their toes!”
He laughed. He had to. His pops (or was it him, he thought, losing sight of what was real) remembering those pretty white toes that had peeked out from under diaphanous gowns in his mother’s old photographs. He’d studied those toes as he sawed into his fried pork chops and potatoes at the kitchen table so many years ago. Longed to touch them. Kiss them.
Brown male moths in search of mates fluttered around his face, batting his cheek with their soft wings. He remembered the posters—FREE AFRICA. END APARTHEID—Leslie had hung on the walls of their apartment, and the crudely carved statues of African fertility gods she’d placed on the mantel. She bought him his first dashiki made from bright purple and green kente cloth. She marched by his side in New York; Washington, D.C.; and at universities across the South, where they protested the absence of African American Studies departments. She was a believer, and he had witnessed her unquestionable faith. Or was it faith that made it impossible for her to question anything—that made her as monomaniacal as Ahab chasing his great white whale. What was Leslie chasing?
His father’s voice joined the flit-flit-flit of the moths. “You were her open door, Jules. In walked lily-white Leslie, out walked…”
“Stop!” Jules shouted.