Hummingbirds

in scripty-looking letters above him. Then I threw my black pencil on the floor. I raised my shaking hands and covered my face with them. I called out my daughter’s name, the way you’d call out if you saw someone too close to a steep drop or busy street.

Maybe I was just crazy. Probably I was crazy.

Eventually I became aware that there was — of course — only one hand over my eyes. The phantom ache and itching had departed. The idea that I might be going crazy — hell, that I might have already gone — remained. One thing was beyond doubt: I was hungry. Ravenous.

Ix

Ilse’s plane arrived ten minutes ahead of schedule. She was radiant in faded jeans and a Brown University tee-shirt, and I didn’t see how Jack could keep from falling in love with her right there in Terminal B. She threw herself into my arms, covered my face with kisses, then laughed and grabbed me when I started listing to port on my crutch. I introduced her to Jack and pretended not to see the small diamond (purchased at Zales, I had no doubt) flashing on the third finger of her left hand when they shook.

“You look wonderful, Daddy, ” she said as we stepped out into the balmy December evening. “You’ve got a tan. First time since you built that rec center in Lilydale Park. And you’ve put on weight. At least ten pounds. Don’t you think so, Jack? ”

“You’d be the best judge of that, ” Jack said, smiling. “I’ll go get the car. You okay to stand, boss? This may take awhile.”

“I’m good.”

We waited on the curb with her two carry-ons and her computer. She was smiling into my eyes.

“You saw it, didn’t you? ” she asked. “Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

“If you mean the ring, I saw. Unless you won it in one of those quarter drop-the-claw games, I’d say congratulations are in order. Does Lin know? ”

“Yep.”

“Your mother? ”

“What do you think, Daddy? Best guess.”

“My best guess is… not. Because she’s so concerned about Grampy right now.”

“Grampy wasn’t the only reason I kept the ring in my purse the whole time I was in California — except to show Lin, that is. Mostly I just wanted to tell you first. Is that evil? ”

“No, honey. I’m touched.”

I was, too. But I was also afraid for her, and not just because she wouldn’t be twenty for another three months.

“His name’s Carson Jones, and he’s a divinity student, of all things — do you believe it? I love him, Daddy, I just love him so much.”

“That’s great, honey, ” I said, but I could feel dread climbing my legs. Just don’t love him too much, I was thinking. Not too much. Because —

She was looking at me closely, her smile fading. “What? What’s wrong? ”

I’d forgotten how quick she was, and how well she read me. Love conveys its own psychic powers, doesn’t it?

“Nothing, hon. Well… my hip’s hurting a little.”

“Have you had your pain pills? ”

“Actually… I’m stepping down on those a little more. Plan on getting off them entirely in January. That’s my New Year’s resolution.”

“Daddy, that’s wonderful! ”

“Although New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken.”

“Not you. You do what you say you’re going to do.” Ilse frowned. “That’s one of the things Mom never liked about you. I think it makes her jealous.”

“Hon, the divorce is just something that happened. Don’t go picking sides, okay? ”

“Well, I’ll tell you something else that’s happening, ” Ilse said. Her lips had thinned down. “Since she’s been out in Palm Desert, she’s seeing an awful lot of this guy down the street. She says it’s just coffee and sympathy — because Max lost his father last year, and Max really likes Grampy, and blah-blah-blah — but I see the way she looks at him and I… don’t… care for it! ” Now her lips were almost gone, and I thought she looked eerily like her mother. The thought that came with this was oddly comforting: I think she’ll be all right. I think if this holy Jones boy jilts her, she’ll still be okay.

I could see my rental car, but Jack would be awhile yet. The pickup traffic was stop-and-go. I leaned my crutch against my midsection and hugged my daughter, who had come all the way from California to see me. “Go easy on your mother, okay? ”

“Don’t you even care that—”

“What I mostly care about these days is that you and Melinda are happy.”

There were circles under her eyes and I could see that, young or not, all the traveling had tired her out. I thought she’d sleep late tomorrow, and that was fine. If my feeling about her boyfriend was right — I hoped it wasn’t but thought it was — she had some sleepless nights ahead of her in the year to come.

Jack had made it as far as the Air Florida terminal, which still gave us some time. “Do you have a picture of your guy? Enquiring Dads want to know.”

Ilse brightened. “You bet.” The picture she brought out of her red leather wallet was in one of those see-through plastic envelopes. She teased it out and handed it to me. I guess this time my reaction didn’t show, because her fond (really sort of goofy) smile didn’t change. And me? I felt as though I’d swallowed something that had no business going down a human throat. A piece of lead shot, maybe.

It wasn’t that Carson Jones resembled the man I’d drawn on Christmas Eve. I was prepared for that, had been since I saw the little ring twinkling prettily on Ilse’s finger. What shocked me was that the photo was almost exactly the same. It was as if, instead of clipping a photo of sophora, sea lavender, or inkberry to the side of my easel, I had clipped this very photograph. He was wearing the jeans and the scuffed yellow workboots that I hadn’t been able to get quite right; his darkish blond hair spilled over his ears and his forehead; he was carrying a book I knew was a Bible in one hand. Most telling of all was the Minnesota Twins tee-shirt, with the number 48 on the left breast.

“Who’s number 48, and how did you happen to meet a Twins fan at Brown? I thought that was Red Sox country.”

“Number 48’s Torii Hunter, ” she said, looking at me as if I was the world’s biggest dummox. “They have a huge TV in the main student lounge, and I went in there one day last July when the Sox and Twins were playing. The place was crammed even though it was summer session, but Carson and I were the only ones with our Twins on — him with his Torii tee-shirt, me with my cap. So of course we sat together, and…” She shrugged, to show the rest was history.

“What flavor is he, religiously speaking? ”

“Baptist.” She looked at me a little defiantly, as though she’d said Cannibal. But as a member in good standing of The First Church of Nothing in Particular, I had no grudge against the Baptists. The only religions I don’t like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God. “We’ve been going to services together three times a week for the last four months.”

Jack pulled up, and she bent to grab the handles of her various bags. “He’s going to take spring semester off to travel with this really wonderful gospel group. It’s an actual tour, with a booker and everything. The group is called The Hummingbirds. You should hear him — he sings like an angel.”

“I’ll bet, ” I said.

She kissed me again, softly, on the cheek. “I’m glad I came, Daddy. Are you glad? ”

“More than you could ever know, ” I said, and found myself wishing she’d fall madly in love with Jack. That would have solved everything… or so it seemed to me then.

X

We had nothing so grand as Christmas dinner, but there was one of Jack’s Astronaut Chickens, plus cranberry dressing, salad-in-a-bag, and rice pudding. Ilse ate two helpings of everything. After we exchanged presents and exclaimed over them — everything was just what we wanted! — I took Ilse upstairs to Little Pink and showed her most of my artistic output. The drawing I’d done of her boyfriend and the picture of the woman (if it was a woman) in red were tucked away on a high shelf in my bedroom closet, and there they would stay until my daughter was gone.

I had clipped about a dozen others — mostly sunsets — to squares of cardboard and leaned them against the walls of the room. She toured them once. Stopped, then toured them again. It was night by then, my big upstairs window full of darkness. The tide was all the way out; the only way you even knew the Gulf was there was by its soft continual sighing as the waves ran up the sand and died.

“You really did these? ” she said at last. She turned and looked at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. It’s the way one person looks at another when a serious re-evaluation is going on.

“I really did, ” I said. “What do you think? ”

“They’re good. Maybe better than good. This one—” She bent and very carefully picked up the one that showed the conch sitting on the horizon-line, with yellow-orange sunset light blazing all around it. “This is so fu… excuse me, so damn creepy.”

“I think so, too, ” I said. “But really, it’s nothing new. All it does is dress up the sunset with a little surrealism.” Then, inanely, I exclaimed: “Hello, Dalí! ”

She put back Sunset with Conch, and picked up Sunset with Sophora.

“Who’s seen these? ”

“Just you and Jack. Oh, and Juanita. She calls them asustador. Something like that. Jack says it means scary. ”

“They’re a little scary, ” she admitted. “But Daddy… this pencil you’re using will smudge. And I think it’ll fade if you don’t do something to the pictures.”

“What? ”

“Dunno. But I think you ought to show these to someone who does know. Someone who can tell you how good they really are.”

I felt flattered but also uncomfortable. Dismayed, almost. “I wouldn’t know who or where to—”

“Ask Jack. Maybe he knows an art gallery that would look at them.”

“Sure, just limp in off the street and say, ‘I live out on Duma Key and I’ve got some pencil sketches — mostly of sunsets, a very unusual subject in coastal Florida — that my housekeeper says are muy asustador. ’”

She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. It was how Pam looked when she had no intention of letting a thing go. When she in fact intended to throw her current argument into four-wheel drive.

“Father—”

“Oh boy, I’m in for it now.”

She paid no mind. “You parlayed two pick-ups, a used Korean War bulldozer, and a twenty-thousand-dollar loan into a million-dollar business. Are you going to stand there and tell me you couldn’t get a few art gallery owners to look at your pictures if you really set your mind to it? ”

She softened.

“I mean, these are good, Daddy. Good. All I’ve got for training is one lousy Art Appreciation course in high school, and I know that.”

I said something, but I’m not sure what. I was thinking about my frenzied quick-sketch of Carson Jones, alias The Baptist Hummingbird. Would she think that one was also good, if she saw it?

But she wasn’t going to. Not that one, and not the one of the person in the red robe. No one was. That was what I thought then.

“Dad, if you had this talent in you all the time, where was it? ”

“I don’t know, ” I said. “And how much talent we’re talking about is still open to question.”

“Then get someone to tell you, okay? Someone who knows.” She picked up my mailbox drawing. “Even this one… it’s nothing special, except it is. Because of…” She touched paper. “The rocking horse. Why’d you put a rocking horse in the picture, Dad? ”

“I don’t know, ” I said. “It just wanted to be there.”

“Did you draw it from memory? ”

“No. I can’t seem to do that. Either because of the accident or because I never had that particular skill in the first place.” Except for sometimes when I did. When it came to young men in Twins tee-shirts, for instance. “I found one on the Internet, then printed—”

“Oh shit, I smudged it! ” she cried. “Oh, shit! ”

“Ilse, it’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s not all right and it does matter! You need to get some fucking paints! ” She replayed what she’d just said and clapped a hand over her mouth.

“You probably won’t believe this, ” I said, “but I’ve heard that word a time or two. Although I have an idea that maybe your boyfriend… might not exactly…”

“You got that right, ” she said. A little glumly. Then she smiled. “But he can let out a pretty good gosh-darn when somebody cuts him off in traffic. Dad, about your pictures—”

“I’m just happy you like them.”

“It’s more than liking. I’m amazed.” She yawned. “I’m also dead on my feet.”

“I think maybe you need a cup of hot cocoa and then bed.”

“That sounds wonderful.”

“Which? ”

She laughed. It was wonderful to hear her laugh. It filled the place up. “Both.”

Xi

We stood on the beach the next morning with coffee cups in hand and our ankles in the surf. The sun had just hoisted itself over the low rise of the Key behind us, and our shadows seemed to stretch out onto the quiet water for miles.

Ilse looked at me solemnly. “Is this the most beautiful place on earth, Dad? ”

“No, but you’re young and I can’t blame you for thinking it might be. It’s number four on the Most Beautiful list, actually, but the top three are places nobody can spell.”

She smiled over the rim of her cup. “Do tell.”

“If you insist. Number one, Machu Picchu. Number two, Marrakech. Number three, Petroglyph National Monument. Then, at number four, Duma Key, just off the west coast of Florida.”

Her smile widened for a second or two. Then it faded and she was giving me the solemn stare again. I remembered her looking at me the same way when she was four, asking me if there was any magic like in fairy tales. I had told her yes, of course, thinking it was a lie. Now I wasn’t so sure. But the air was warm, my bare feet were in the Gulf, and I just didn’t want Ilse to be hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don’t they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog. Except the ones you love can really multiply that hurt and pass it around. Pain is the biggest power of love. That’s what Wireman says.

“See anything green, sweetheart? ” I asked.

“No, I was just thinking again how glad I am that I came. I pictured you rotting away between an old folks’ retirement home and some horrible tiki bar featuring Wet Tee-Shirt Thursdays. I guess I’ve been reading too much Carl Hiaasen.”

“There are plenty of places like that down here, ” I said.

“And are there other places like Duma? ”

“I don’t know. Maybe a few.” But based on what Jack had told me, I guessed that there were not.

“Well, you deserve this one, ” she said. “Time to rest and heal. And if all this” — she waved to the Gulf — “won’t heal you, I don’t know what will. The only thing…”

“Ye-ess? ” I said, and made a picking-out gesture at the air with two fingers. Families have their own interior language, and that includes sign-language. My gesture would have meant nothing to an outsider, but Ilse knew and laughed.

“All right, smarty. The only fly in the ointment is the sound the tide makes when it comes in. I woke up in the middle of the night and almost screamed before I realized it was the shells moving around in the water. I mean, that’s it, right? Please tell me that’s it.”

“That’s it. What did you think it was? ”

She actually shivered. “My first thought… don’t laugh… was skeletons on parade. Hundreds, marching around the house.”

I’d never thought of it that way, but I knew what she meant. “I find it sort of soothing.”

She gave a small and doubtful shrug. “Well… okay, then. To each his own. Are you ready to go back? I could scramble us some eggs. Even throw in some peppers and mushrooms.”

“You’re on.”

“I haven’t seen you off your crutch for so long since the accident.”

“I hope to be walking a quarter-mile south along the beach by the middle of January.”

She whistled. “A quarter of a mile and back? ”

I shook my head. “No, no. Just a quarter of a mile. I plan to glide back.” I extended my arms to demonstrate.

She snorted, started toward the house again, then paused as a point of light heliographed in our direction from the south. Once, then twice. The two specks were down there.

“People, ” Ilse said, shading her eyes.

“My neighbors. My only neighbors, right now. At least, I think so.”

“Have you met them? ”

“Nope. All I know is that it’s a man and a woman in a wheelchair. I think she has her breakfast down by the water most days. I think the tray is the glinty thing.”

“You should get yourself a golf cart. Then you could buzz down and say hi.”

“Eventually I’ll walk down and say hi, ” I said. “No golf cart for the kid. Dr. Kamen said to set goals, and I’m setting em.”

“You didn’t need a shrink to tell you about setting goals, Daddy, ” she said, still peering south. “Which house do they belong to? The big one that looks like a rancho in a western movie? ”

“I’m pretty sure, yes.”

“And no one else lives here? ”

“Not now. Jack says there are folks who rent some of the other houses in January and February, but for now I guess it’s just me and them. The rest of the island is pure botanical pornography. Plants gone wild.”

“My God, why? ”

“Haven’t the slightest idea. I mean to find out — to try, anyway — but for now I’m still trying to get my feet under me. And I mean that literally.”

We were walking back to the house now. Ilse said, “An almost empty island in the sun — there should be a story. There almost has to be a story, don’t you think? ”

“I do, ” I said. “Jack Cantori offered to snoop, but I told him not to bother — thinking I might look on my own.” I snagged my crutch, fitted my arm into its two steel sleeves — always comforting after spending time on the beach without its support — and started thumping up the walk. But Ilse wasn’t with me. I turned and looked back. She was facing south, her hand once more shading her eyes. “Coming, hon? ”

“Yes.” There was one more flash from down the beach — the breakfast tray. Or a coffeepot. “Maybe they know the story, ” Ilse said, catching up.

“Maybe they do.”

She pointed to the road. “What about that? How far does it go? ”

“Don’t know, ” I said.

“Would you like to drive down it this afternoon and see? ”

“Are you willing to pilot a Chevy Malibu from Hertz? ”

“Sure, ” she said. She put her hands on her slim hips, pretended to spit, and affected a Southern drawl. “I’ll drive until yonder road runs out.”

Xii

But we didn’t get even close to the end of Duma Road. Not that day. Our southward exploration began well, ended badly.

We both felt fine when we left. I’d had an hour off my feet, plus my midday Oxycontin. My daughter had changed to shorts and a halter top, and laughed when I insisted on anointing her nose with zinc oxide. “Bobo the clown, ” she said, looking at herself in the mirror. She was in great spirits, I was happier than I’d been since the accident, so what happened to us that afternoon came as a total surprise. Ilse blamed lunch — maybe bad mayo in the tuna salad — and I let her, but I don’t think it was bad mayo at all. Bad mojo, more like it.

The road was narrow, bumpy, and badly patched. Until we reached the place where it ran into the overgrowth that covered most of the Key, it was also ridged with bone-colored sand dunes that had blown inland from the beach. The rental Chevy thudded gamely over most of these, but when the road curved a little closer to the water — this was just before we reached the hacienda Wireman called Palacio de Asesinos — the drifts grew thicker and the car waddled instead of bumping. Ilse, who had learned to drive in snow country, handled this without complaint or comment.

The houses between Big Pink and El Palacio were all in the style I came to think of as Florida Pastel Ugly. Most were shuttered and the driveways of all but one were gated shut. The driveway of the one exception had been barred with two sawhorses, bearing this faded stenciled warning: MEAN DOGS MEAN DOGS. Beyond the Mean Dog house, the grounds of the hacienda commenced. They were enclosed by a sturdy faux-stucco wall about ten feet high and topped with orange tile. More orange tile — the roof of the mansion inside — rose in slants and angles against the blameless blue sky.

“Jumping jeepers, ” Ilse said — that was one she must have gotten from her Baptist boyfriend. “This place belongs in Beverly Hills.”

The wall ran along the east side of the narrow, buckled road for at least eighty yards. There weren’t any NO TRESPASSING signs; given that wall, the owner’s stance on door-to-door salesmen and proselytizing Mormons seemed perfectly clear. In the center was a two-piece iron gate, standing ajar. And sitting just inside its open halves —

“There she is, ” I murmured. “The lady from down the beach. Holy shit, it’s The Bride of the Godfather.”

“ Daddy! ” Ilse said, laughing and shocked at the same time.

The woman was seriously old, mid-eighties at least. She was in her wheelchair. An enormous pair of blue Converse Hi-Tops were propped up on the chrome footrests. Although the temperature was in the mid-seventies, she wore a gray two-piece sweatsuit. In one gnarled hand a cigarette smoldered. Clapped on her head was the straw hat I’d seen on my walks, but on my walks I hadn’t realized how enormous it was — not just a hat but a battered sombrero. Her resemblance to Marlon Brando at the end of The Godfather — when he’s playing with his grandson in the garden — was unmistakable. There was something in her lap that did not quite look like a pistol.

Ilse and I both waved. For a moment she did nothing. Then she raised one hand, palm out, in an Indian How gesture, and broke into a sunny and nearly toothless grin. What seemed like a thousand wrinkles creased her face, turning her into a benign witch. I never even glimpsed the house behind her; I was still trying to cope with her sudden appearance, her cool blue sneakers, her delta of wrinkles, and her —

“Daddy, was that a gun? ” Ilse was looking into the rear-view mirror, wide-eyed. “Did that old lady have a gun? ”

The car was drifting, and I saw a real possibility of clipping the hacienda’s far corner. I touched the wheel and made a course correction. “I think so. Of a kind. Mind your driving, honey. There ain’t much road in this road.”

She faced front again. We’d been driving in bright sunshine, but that ended with the hacienda’s wall. “What do you mean, of a kind? ”

“It looked like… I don’t know, a crossbow-pistol. Or something. Maybe she shoots snakes with it.”

“Thank God she smiled, ” Ilse said. “And it was a great smile, wasn’t it? ”

I nodded. “It was.”

The hacienda was the last house on Duma Key’s open north end. Beyond it, the road swung inland and the foliage crowded up in a way I found first interesting, then awesome, then claustrophobic. The masses of greenery towered to a height of twelve feet at least, the round leaves streaked a dark vermillion that looked like dried blood.

“What is that stuff, Daddy? ”

“Seagrape. The green stuff with the yellow flowers is called wedelia. It grows everywhere. There’s also rhododendron. The trees are mostly just slash pine, I think, although—”

She slowed to a crawl and pointed to the left, craning to look up through the corner of the windshield to do so. “Those are palms of some kind. And look… right up there…”

The road bent still farther inland, and here the trunks flanking the road looked like knotted masses of gray rope. Their roots had buckled the tar. We’d be able to get over now, I judged, but cars passing this way a few years hence? No way.

“Strangler fig, ” I said.

“Nice name, right out of Alfred Hitchcock. And they just grow wild? ”

“I don’t know, ” I said.

She bumped the Chevy carefully over the tunneling roots and drove on. We were down to no more than five miles an hour. There was more strangler fig growing out of the masses of seagrape and rhododendron. The high growth cast the road into deep shadow. It was impossible to see any distance at all on either side. Except for an occasional wedge of blue or errant sunray, even the sky was gone. And now we began to see sprays of sawgrass and tough, waxy fiddlewood growing right up through cracks in the tar.

My arm began to itch. The one that wasn’t there. I reached to scratch it without thinking and only scratched my still-sore ribs, as I always did. At the same time the left side of my head started to itch. That I could scratch, and did.

“Daddy? ”

“I’m okay. Why are you stopping? ”

“Because… I don’t feel so great myself.”

Nor, I realized, did she look it. Her complexion had gone almost as white as the dab of zinc oxide on her nose. “Ilse? What is it? ”

“My stomach. I’m starting to have serious questions about that tuna salad I made for lunch.” She gave me a sickly coming-down-with-the-flu smile. “I’m also wondering how I’m going to get us out of here.”

Not a bad question. All at once the seagrape seemed to be pushing in and the interweaving palms overhead seemed thicker. I realized I could smell the growth around us, a ropy aroma that seemed to come to life halfway down my throat. And why not? It came from live things, after all; they were crowded in on both sides. And above.

“Dad? ”

The itch was worse. It was red, that itch, as red as the stink in my nose and throat was green. That itch you got when you were stuck in the burn, stuck in the char.

“Daddy, I’m sorry but I think I’m going to vomit.”

Not a burn, not a char, it was a car, she opened the door of the car and leaned out, holding onto the wheel with one ham, and then I heard her sowing up.

My right eye came over red and I thought I can do this. I can do this. I just have to get my poor old shit together.

I opened my door, reaching cross-body to do it, and got out. Lurched out, holding the top of the door to keep from sprawling headfirst into a wall of seagrape and the interwoven branches of a half-buried banyan. I itched all over. The bushes and branches were so close to the side of the car that they scraped me as I made my way up to the front. Half my vision

(RED)

seemed to be bleeding scarlet, I felt the tip of a pine-bough scrape across the wrist of — I could have sworn it — my right arm, and I thought I can do this, I MUST do this as I heard Ilse vomit again. I was aware that it was much hotter in that narrow lane than it should have been, even with the greenroof overhead. I had enough mind left in my mind to wonder what we’d been thinking, coming down this road in the first place. But of course it had seemed like nothing but a lark at the time.

Ilse was still leaning out, hanging onto the wheel with her right hand. Sweat stood on her forehead in clear beads. She looked up at me. “Oh boy—”

“Push over, Ilse.”

“Daddy, what are you going to do? ”

As if she couldn’t see. And all at once both the words drive and back were unavailable to me, anyway. All I could have articulated in that moment was us, the most useless word in the English language when it stands by itself. I felt the anger rising in my throat like hot water. Or blood. Yes, more like that. Because the anger was, of course, red.

“Get us out of here. Push over.” Thinking: Don’t you get mad at her. Don’t you start shouting no matter what. Oh for Christ’s sake, please don’t.

“Daddy, you, can’t—”

“Yes. I can do this. Push over.”

The habit of obedience dies hard — especially hard, maybe, between fathers and daughters. And of course she was sick. She pushed over and I got behind the wheel, sitting down in my clumsy stupid backwards fashion and using my hand to lift in my rotten right leg. My whole right side was buzzing, as if undergoing a low-level electric shock.

I closed my eyes tightly and thought: I CAN do this, goddammit, and I don’t need any stuffed rag bitch to see me through, either.

When I looked at the world again, some of that redness — and some of the anger, thank God — had drained out of it. I dropped the transmission into reverse and began to back up slowly. I couldn’t lean out as Ilse had done, because I had no right hand to steer with. I used the rear-view instead. In my head, ghostly, I heard: Meep-meep-meep.

“Please don’t drive us off the road, ” Ilse said. “We can’t walk. I’m too sick and you’re too crippled-up.”

“I won’t, Monica, ” I said, but at that moment she leaned out the window to vomit again and I don’t think she heard me.

Xiii

Slowly, slowly, I backed away from the place where Ilse had stopped, telling myself Easy does it and Slow and steady wins the race. My hip snarled as we thumped back over the strangler fig roots burrowing under the road. On a couple of occasions I heard seagrape branches scree along the side of the car. The Hertz people weren’t going to be happy, but they were the least of my worries that afternoon.

Little by little the light brightened as the foliage cleared out overhead. That was good. My vision was also clearing, that mad itch subsiding. Those things were even better.

“I see the big place with the wall around it, ” Ilse said, looking back over her shoulder.

“Do you feel any better? ”

“Maybe a little, but my stomach’s still sudsing like a Maytag.” She made a gagging noise. “Oh God, I should never have said that.” She leaned out, threw up again, then collapsed back onto the seat, laughing and groaning. Her bangs were sticking to her forehead in clumps. “I just shellacked the side of your car. Please tell me you have a hose.”

“Don’t worry about that. Just sit still and take long, slow breaths.”

She saluted feebly and closed her eyes.

The old woman in the big straw hat was nowhere in evidence, but the two halves of the iron gate were now standing wide open, as if she was expecting company. Or knew we’d need a place to turn around.

I didn’t waste time considering that, just backed the Chevy into the archway. For a moment I saw a courtyard paved with cool blue tiles, a tennis court, and an enormous set of double doors with iron rings set into them. Then I turned for home. We were there five minutes later. My vision was as clear as it had been when I woke up that morning, if not clearer. Except for the low itch up and down my right side, I felt fine.

I also felt a strong desire to draw. I didn’t know what, but I would know, when I was sitting in Little Pink with one of my pads propped on my easel. I was sure of that.

“Let me clean off the side of your car, ” Ilse said.

“You’re going to lie down. You look beat half to death.”

She offered a wan smile. “That’s just the better half. Remember how Mom used to say that? ”

I nodded. “Go on, now. I’ll do the rinsing.” I pointed to where the hose was coiled on the north side of Big Pink. “It’s all hooked up and ready to go.”

“Are you sure you’re all right? ”

“Good to go. I think you ate more of the tuna salad than I did.”

She managed another smile. “I always was partial to my own cooking. You were great to get us back here, Daddy. I’d kiss you, but my breath …”

I kissed her. On the forehead. The skin was cool and damp. “Put your feet up, Miss Cookie — orders from headquarters.”

She went. I turned on the faucet and hosed off the side of the Malibu, taking more time than the job really needed, wanting to make sure she was down for the count. And she was. When I peeked in through the half-open door of the second bedroom, I saw her lying on her side, sleeping just as she had as a kid: one hand tucked under her cheek and one knee drawn up almost to her chest. We think we change, but we don’t really — that’s what Wireman says.

Maybe sí, maybe no — that’s what Freemantle says.

Xiv

There was something pulling me — maybe something that had been in me since the accident, but surely something that had come back from Duma Key Road with me. I let it pull. I’m not sure I could have stood against it in any case, but I didn’t even try; I was curious.

My daughter’s purse was on the coffee table in the living room. I opened it, took out her wallet, and flipped through the pictures inside. Doing this made me feel a little like a cad, but only a little. It’s not as if you’re stealing anything, I told myself, but of course there are many ways of stealing, aren’t there?

Here was the photo of Carson Jones she’d shown me at the airport, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t want him by himself. I wanted him with her. I wanted a picture of them as a couple. And I found one. It looked as if it had been taken at a roadside stand; there were baskets of cucumbers and corn behind them. They were smiling and young and beautiful. Their arms were around each other, and one of Carson Jones’s palms appeared to be resting on the swell of my daughter’s blue jeans–clad ass. Oh you crazy Christian. My right arm was still itching, a low, steady skin-crawl like prickly heat. I scratched at it, scratched through it, and got my ribs instead for the ten thousandth time. This picture was also in a protective see-through envelope. I slid it out, glanced over my shoulder — nervous as a burglar on his first job — at the partially open door of the room where Ilse was sleeping, then turned the picture over.

I love you, Punkin!
“Smiley”

Could I trust a suitor who called my daughter Punkin and signed himself Smiley? I didn’t think so. It might not be fair, but no — I didn’t think so. Nevertheless, I had found what I was looking for. Not one, but both. I turned the picture over again, closed my eyes, and pretended I was touching their Kodachrome images with my right hand. Although pretending wasn’t what it felt like; I suppose I don’t have to tell you that by now.

After some passage of time — I don’t know exactly how long — I returned the picture to its plastic sleeve and submerged her wallet beneath the tissues and cosmetics to approximately the same depth at which I had found it. Then I put her purse back on the coffee table and went into my bedroom to get Reba the Anger-Management Doll. I limped upstairs to Little Pink with her clamped between my stump and my side. I think I remember saying “I’m going to make you into Monica Seles” when I set Reba down in front of the window, but it could as easily have been Monica Goldstein; when it comes to memory, we all stack the deck. The gospel according to Wireman.

I’m clearer than I want to be about most of what happened on Duma, but that particular afternoon seems very vague to me. I know that I fell into a frenzy of drawing, and that the maddening itch in my nonexistent right arm disappeared completely while I was working; I do not know but am almost sure that the reddish haze which always hung over my vision in those days, growing thicker when I was tired, disappeared for awhile.

I don’t know how long I was in that state. I think quite awhile. Long enough so I was both exhausted and famished when I was finished.

I went back downstairs and gobbled lunchmeat by the fridge’s frosty glow. I didn’t want to make an actual sandwich, because I didn’t want Ilse to know I’d felt well enough to eat. Let her go on thinking our problems had been caused by bad mayonnaise. That way we wouldn’t have to spend time hunting for other explanations.

None of the other explanations I could think of were rational.

After eating half a package of sliced salami and swilling a pint or so of sweet tea, I went into my bedroom, lay down, and fell into a sodden sleep.

Xv

Sunsets.

Sometimes it seems to me that my clearest memories of Duma Key are of orange evening skies that bleed at the bottom and fade away at the top, green to black. When I woke up that evening, another day was going down in glory. I thudded into the big main room on my crutch, stiff and wincing (the first ten minutes were always the worst). The door to Ilse’s room was standing open and her bed was empty.

“Ilse? ” I called.

For a moment there was no answer. Then she called back from upstairs. “Daddy? Holy crow, did you do this? When did you do this? ”

All thought of aches and pains left me. I got up to Little Pink as fast as I could, trying to remember what I’d drawn. Whatever it was, I hadn’t made any effort to put it out of sight. Suppose it was something really awful? Suppose I’d gotten the bright idea of doing a crucifixion caricature, with The Gospel Hummingbird riding the cross?

Ilse was standing in front of my easel, and I couldn’t see what was there. Her body was blocking it out. Even if she’d been standing to one side, the only light in the room was coming from that bloody sunset; the pad would have been nothing but a black rectangle against the glare.

I flicked on the lights, praying I hadn’t done something to distress the daughter who had come all this way to make sure I was okay. From her voice, I hadn’t been able to tell. “Ilse? ”

She turned to me, her face bemused rather than angry. “When did you do this one? ”

“Well…” I said. “Stand aside a little, would you? ”

“Is your memory playing tricks again? It is, isn’t it? ”

“No, ” I said. “Well, yeah.” It was the beach outside the window, I could tell that much but no more. “As soon as I see it, I’m sure I’ll… step aside, honey, you make a better door than a window.”

“Even though I am a pain, right? ” She laughed. Rarely had the sound of laughter so relieved me. Whatever she’d found on the easel, it hadn’t made her mad, and my stomach dropped back where it belonged. If she wasn’t angry, the risk that I might get angry and spoil what had, on measure, been a pretty damned good visit went down.

She stepped to the left, and I saw what I’d drawn while in my dazed, pre-nap state. Technically, it was probably the best thing I’d done since my first tentative pen-and-inks on Lake Phalen, but I thought it was no wonder she was puzzled. I was puzzled, too.

It was the section of beach I could see through Little Pink’s nearly wall-length window. The casual scribble of light on the water, achieved with a shade the Venus Company called Chrome, marked the time as early morning. A little girl in a tennis dress stood at the center of the picture. Her back was turned, but her red hair was a dead giveaway: she was Reba, my little love, that girlfriend from my other life. The figure was poorly executed, but you somehow knew that was on purpose, that she wasn’t a real little girl at all, only a dream figure in a dream landscape.

All around her feet, lying in the sand, were bright green tennis balls.

Others floated shoreward on the mild waves.

“When did you do it? ” Ilse was still smiling — almost laughing. “And what the heck does it mean? ”

“Do you like it? ” I asked. Because I didn’t like it. The tennis balls were the wrong color because I hadn’t had the right shade of green, but that wasn’t why; I hated it because it felt all wrong. It felt like heartbreak.

“I love it! ” she said, and then did laugh. “C’mon, when did you do it? Give.”

“While you were sleeping. I went to lie down, but I felt queasy again, so I thought I better stay vertical for awhile. I decided to draw a little, see if things would settle. I didn’t realize I had that thing in my hand until I got up here.” I pointed to Reba, sitting propped against the window with her stuffed legs sticking out.

“That’s the doll you’re supposed to yell at when you forget things, right? ”

“Something like that. Anyway, I drew the picture. It took maybe an hour. By the time I was finished, I felt better.” Although I remembered very little about making the drawing, I remembered enough to know this story was a lie. “Then I lay down and took a nap. End of story.”

“Can I have it? ”

I felt a surge of dismay, but couldn’t think of a way to say no that wouldn’t hurt her feelings or sound crazy. “If you really want it. It’s not much, though. Wouldn’t you rather have one of Freemantle’s Famous Sunsets? Or the mailbox with the rocking horse! I could—”

“This is the one I want, ” she said. “It’s funny and sweet and even a little… I don’t know… ominous. You look at her one way and you say, ‘A doll.’ You look another way and say, ‘No, a little girl — after all, isn’t she standing up? ’ It’s amazing how much you’ve learned to do with colored pencils.” She nodded decisively. “This is the one I want. Only you have to name it. Artists have to name their pictures.”

“I agree, but I wouldn’t have any idea—”

“Come on, come on, no weaseling. First thing to pop into your mind.”

I said, “All right — The End of the Game. ”

She clapped her hands. “Perfect. Perfect! And you have to sign it, too. Ain’t I bossy? ”

“You always were, ” I said. “ Trè s bossy. You must be feeling better.”

“I am. Are you? ”

“Yes, ” I said, but I wasn’t. All at once I had a bad case of the mean reds. Venus doesn’t make that color, but there was a new, nicely sharpened Venus Black in the gutter of the easel. I picked it up and signed my name by one of back-to doll’s pink legs. Beyond her, a dozen wrong-green tennis balls floated on a mild wave. I didn’t know what those rogue balls meant, but I didn’t like them. I didn’t like signing my name to this picture, either, but after I had, I jotted The End of the Game up one side. And what I felt was what Pam had taught the girls to say when they were little, and had finished some unpleasant chore.

Over-done with-gone.

Xvi

She stayed two more days, and they were good days. When Jack and I took her back to the airport, she’d gotten some sun on her face and arms and seemed to give off her own benevolent radiation: youth, health, well-being.

Jack had found a travel-tube for her new picture.

“Daddy, promise you’ll take care of yourself and call if you need me, ” she said.

“Roger that, ” I said, smiling.

“And promise me you’ll get someone to give you an opinion on your pictures. Someone who knows about that stuff.”

“Well—”

She lowered her chin and frowned at me. When she did that it was again like looking at Pam when I’d first met her. “You better promise, or else.”

And because she meant it — the vertical line between her eyebrows said so — I promised.

The line smoothed out. “Good, that’s settled. You deserve to get better, you know. Sometimes I wonder if you really believe that.”

“Of course I do, ” I said.

Ilse went on as if she hadn’t heard. “Because what happened wasn’t your fault.”

I felt tears well up at that. I suppose I did know, but it was nice to hear someone else say it out loud. Someone besides Kamen, that is, whose job it was to scrape caked-on grime off those troublesome unwashed pots in the sinks of the subconscious.

She nodded at me. “You are going to get better. I say so, and I’m trè s bossy.”

The loudspeaker honked: Delta flight 559, service to Cincinnati and Cleveland. The first leg of Ilse’s trip home.

“Go on, hon, better let em wand your bod and check your shoes.”

“I have one other thing to say first.”

I threw up the one hand I still had. “What now, precious girl? ”

She smiled at that: it was what I’d called both girls when my patience was finally nearing an end.

“Thank you for not telling me that Carson and I are too young to be engaged.”

“Would it have done any good? ”

“No.”

“No. Besides, your mother will do an adequate job of that for both of us, I think.”

Ilse scrunched her mouth into an ouch shape, then laughed. “So will Linnie… but only cause I got ahead of her for once.”

She gave me one more strong hug. I breathed deep of her hair — that good sweet smell of shampoo and young, healthy woman. She pulled back and looked at my man-of-all-work, standing considerately off to one side. “You better take good care of him, Jack. He’s the goods.”

They hadn’t fallen in love — no breaks there, muchacho — but he gave her a warm smile. “I’ll do my best.”

“And he promised to get an opinion on his pictures. You’re a witness.”

Jack smiled and nodded.

“Good.” She gave me one more kiss, this one on the tip of the nose. “Be good, father. Heal thyself.” Then she went through the doors, festooned with bags but still walking briskly. She looked back just before they closed. “And get some paints! ”

“I will! ” I called back, but I don’t know if she heard me; in Florida, doors whoosh shut in a hurry to save the air conditioning. For a moment or two everything in the world blurred and grew brighter; there was a pounding in my temples and a damp prickle in my nose. I bent my head and worked briskly at my eyes with the thumb and second finger of my hand while Jack once more pretended to see something interesting in the sky. There was a word and it wouldn’t come. I thought borrow, then tomorrow.

Give it time, don’t get mad, tell yourself you can do this, and the words usually come. Sometimes you don’t want them, but they come, anyway. This one was sorrow.

Jack said, “You want to wait for me to bring the car, or—”

“No, I’m good to walk.” I wrapped my fingers around the grip of my crutch. “Just keep an eye on the traffic. I don’t want to get run down crossing the road. Been there, done that.”

Xvii

We stopped at Art & Artifacts of Sarasota on our way back, and while we were in there, I asked Jack if he knew anything about Sarasota art galleries.

“Way ahead of you, boss. My Mom used to work in one called the Scoto. It’s on Palm Avenue.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me? ”

“It’s the hot-shit gallery on the arty side of town, ” he said, then rethought that. “I mean that in a nice way. And the people who run it are nice… at least they always were to my Mom, but… you know…”

“It is a hot-shit gallery.”

“Yeah.”

“Meaning big prices? ”

“It’s where the elite meet.” He spoke solemnly, but when I burst out laughing, he joined me. That was the day, I think, when Jack Cantori became my friend rather than my part-time gofer.

“Then that’s settled, ” I said, “because I am definitely elite. Give it up, son.”

I raised my hand, and Jack gave it a smack.

Xviii

Back at Big Pink, he helped me into the house with my loot — five bags, two boxes, and a stack of nine stretched canvases. Almost a thousand dollars’ worth of stuff. I told him we’d worry about getting it upstairs the next day. Painting was the last thing on earth I wanted to do that night.

I limped across the living room toward the kitchen, meaning to put together a sandwich, when I saw the message light on the answering machine blinking. I thought it must be Ilse, saying her flight had been cancelled due to weather or equipment problems.

It wasn’t. The voice was pleasant but cracked with age, and I knew who it was at once. I could almost see those enormous blue sneakers propped on the bright footplates of her wheelchair.

“Hello, Mr. Freemantle, welcome to Duma Key. It was a pleasure to see you the other day, if only briefly. One assumes the young lady with you was your daughter, given the resemblance. Have you taken her back to the airport? One rather hopes so.”

There was a pause. I could hear her breathing, the loud, not-quiteemphysemic respiration of a person who has probably spent a great deal of her life with a cigarette in one hand. Then she spoke again.

“All things considered, Duma Key has never been a lucky place for daughters.”

I found myself thinking of Reba in a very unlikely tennis dress, surrounded by small fuzzy balls as more came in on the next wave.

“One hopes we will meet, in the course of time. Goodbye, Mr. Freemantle.”

There was a click. Then it was just me and the restless grinding sound of the shells under the house.

The tide was in.

How to Draw a Picture (III)

Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that may play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t. There’s nothing as human as hunger. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art. That little girl I was telling you about? She found hers and used it.

She thinks No more bed all day now. I go Daddy room, Daddy’s study. Sometimes I say study, sometimes I say groody. It has a nice big window. They sit me in the char. I can see down up. Birds and nice. Too nice for me, so it makes me sat. Some clouds have wings. Some have blue eyes. Every sunset I cry from sat. Hurts to see. Hurts the down up in me. I could never say what I see and that makes me sat.

She thinks SAD, that word is SAD. Sat is for how you feel in the char.

She thinks If I could stop the hurt. If I could get it out like weewee. I cry and beg beg beg to say what I mean. Nan can’t hep. When I say “Color! ” she touch her face and smile and say “Always was, always will be.” Big girls don’t help either. I’m so mad at them, why don’t you listen, YOU BIG MEANIES! Then one day the twins come, Tessie and Lo-Lo. They talk special to each other, listen special to me. They don’t understand me at first, but then. Tessie bring me paper. Lo-Lo bring me pencil and I “Ben-cil! ” out my mouth and it makes them claff and lap their hands.

She thinks I CAN ALMOST SAY THE NAME OF PENCIL!

She thinks I can make the world on paper. I can draw what the words mean. I see tree, I make tree. I see bird, I make bird. It’s good, like water from a glass.

This is a little girl with a bandage wound around her head, wearing a little pink housecoat and sitting beside the window in her father’s study. Her doll, Noveen, lies on the floor beside her. She has a board and on the board is a piece of paper. She has just succeeded in drawing a claw that actually does bear a resemblance to the dead loblolly pine outside the window.

She thinks I will have more paper, please.

She thinks I am ELIZABETH.

It must have been like being given back your tongue after you thought it had been stilled forever. And more. Better. It was a gift of herself, of ELIZABETH. Even from those incredibly brave first drawings, she must have understood what was happening. And wanted more.

Her gift was hungry. The best gifts — and the worst — always are.