Page 49 of The Last Book Party

I turned around to see them walking away, relieved we were far enough from the house that no one else had witnessed the scene.

Franny got up and tried to pull Henry toward the house.

“I’m fine,” Henry said, shaking him off. “Don’t trouble about me. I’m absolutely fine.”

I touched his shoulder again. This time he turned toward me, but he looked so disdainful and dismissive, as if he didn’t know why any of this concerned me, that I realized what a mistake it was to think that I might comfort him.

Henry staggered down the hill toward the tennis court and disappeared into the darkness. Franny ran his fingers through his long hair. He stretched out a hand toward Lil, who barely looked at him but let him pull her up. They walked togetherback to the side of the house. Jeremy, still on the ground, looked at me with disgust.

I wanted to bury my face in my hands, wipe away the entire night. Instead, I turned and walked quickly into the house. I pushed my way between the guests, through the kitchen, and into the front hall, where Alva grabbed my arm and asked, “What’s wrong?” Unable to speak, I shook my head and stepped away. I was almost at the door when I heard Malcolm’s West Virginia twang from the living room. “I know who you are, darlin’—I know my Edwardian finery—and my old paperbacks. You, honey pie, are Miss Zuleika Dobson!”

More than a little tipsy, Malcolm was perched on the edge of the living room couch, one arm draped over the shoulder of Eric Baxter, whose shirt was unbuttoned down to his navel, revealing a smooth, tan torso. Without answering Malcolm, I stepped outside and let the screen door slap behind me. Still holding Henry’s novella, I walked quickly down the long driveway, not breaking my stride as I hiked up my dress and stomped on one paper bag light after another, snuffing their candles one by one.

45

I didn’t start crying until I’d put the car in gear. By the time I turned onto Route 6, my vision was blurred. When I saw the turn-off to Longnook Beach, I made a quick right. Gripping the steering wheel so hard my hands cramped, I took the curves in the road too fast, desperate to get to the beach.

As I expected, the parking lot was empty. I left my shoes in the car and walked to the top of the path that went down to the ocean. The moon was nearly full, shining a tunnel of light on the water and illuminating the sand. But instead of descending, I turned and took the path that climbed higher up the dunes, through the beach grass, despite theKEEP OFF THE DUNES: EROSIONsign. Bunching the skirt of my dress in my hands, I followed the sandy path up to one ledge and then another, higher and higher, until my calves were burning and my heart pounding. As I neared the top, I pushed harder and ran, until I was at the crest of the towering dune, more than one hundred feet above the ocean. The cool, moist wind whistled and whipped through my hair, lifting it behind me and in front of my face, brushing damp strands across my cheeks and into my mouth. My face was wet and salty, from tears and from the sea air.

With my back to the whole of Truro, I recalled Franny’s prophecy when he was pretending to read my palm, that I would find myself atop a tall sand dune at night with a handsome stranger. It seemed like a cruel joke. I screamed into the wind, and then felt stupid for doing so. I wanted to rage at everything and everyone—Henry and Tillie, Franny and Jeremy—and myself. I grabbed my dress by the hem and tried to rip it, cursing in frustration when I couldn’t. I bent down and picked up a rock as big as my fist and threw it down the dune, disappointed that I couldn’t throw it far enough to make it drop into the sea.

Standing in my long dress above the ocean, bedraggled, angry, and confused, I was at a loss as to how everything could have changed so suddenly, how I could have been so wrong about everyone. Had I been so consumed with Henry that I’d missed everything else? Jeremy was lying to himself—that much I knew. But was he right about me?

I looked at the slanted wall of sand stretching below to the dark beach. It was vast and steep, but I knew the way down. I had done this as a child every summer. I took a step, and a jump, and another, faster and farther, getting more air with every leap, careening down the dune, my feet landing and lifting off the sand and chunks of clay, flying down and finding myself pitching forward and running on the beach, almost falling, until I got close to the water’s edge and was able to slow myself down.

Breathless, I walked into the surf, letting the waves splash on my shins and thighs. The water soaked my dress and dragged it down behind me like seaweed. I took the dress off and dropped it onto the sand. I walked up the beach in my slip until the moon disappeared behind a cloud and I felt chilled. I climbed up the dune path. At the top, I turned and looked at the ocean, the waves coming in like shadows.

Without wiping the sand from my feet or my hands, I drovehome barefoot, letting my car drift into the center of the empty road. At home, I showered and then sat on my bed, wrapped in a towel, staring into the darkness. I didn’t leave my room when I heard Jeremy come in a few hours later. I slept fitfully. At daylight, I gave up trying. I slipped out of the house before anyone was awake. I didn’t spot a soul on the walk down the dirt road to the bay. It was low tide, and I waded through the shallow water and onto the smooth sandbars that stretched toward Great Hollow Beach. The water sparkled a brilliant blue in the sunlight. The lighthouse at Long Point looked close enough to touch. But the beauty of the morning was not soothing or inspiring. It was offensive. Annoying. I walked back to the dry sand and stretched out on my back, closing my eyes against the bright sun.

I tried to clear my mind, but I kept replaying everything: Henry’s slumped shoulders as he watched Tillie and Lane. Franny calling our night—me—a “hiccup.” The pages of Henry’s novella. The moment when I realized Jeremy had been lying the whole time. The sting of what he said about me.

When I got back to the house, my parents were weeding the garden. Jeremy was gone.

part five

September 1988

46

Every morning when I stepped outside, the rush of hot, muggy air still shocked me. This was Florida in late September, and the heat was relentless. My hair was always frizzy, my inner thighs sticky. No matter what I wore, or how high I cranked the air-conditioning in my Chevy Nova, by the time I walked through the parking lot and into the chilled offices of theCitrus County Chronicle, I was wilted.

Florida’s sameness, its unceasing summer weather and endless flat terrain, seemed like penance, as if living someplace where nothing changed, where it was impossible to remember what season it was, let alone what month, was what I deserved for looking in all the wrong places to change myself.

Nearly a year had passed since I’d started as a reporter at theChroniclein Citrus County—a swampy, rural area that hadn’t had a citrus industry since the freeze of 1895 and was now known only for fish camps, manatees, defunct phosphate mines, and a few low-rent retirement communities, including one called Beverly Hills. The western edge of the county was coastal, but there wasn’t a legitimate beach to be found; you had to paddle through the mangroves for more than half a mile into the Gulfof Mexico to get to water that was more than waist deep. Inverness, the county seat, was a sleepy town. Its charm, if it could be said to have any, didn’t come from the brick courthouse in the small central square or the two blocks of basic mom-and-pop shops ringing it, but from the chain of lakes abutting the town and the Withlacoochee River beyond. Inverness couldn’t have been further from Truro in landscape or sensibility, which, for me, made it perfect.

I lived in a two-story town house off US Highway 44 East, about a mile from the office, paying less than a third of my monthly rent in New York. I had a small front porch, large enough to serve as a landing pad for the morning newspaper, a screened back porch, a small kitchen and living room, two full bathrooms, and two bedrooms. The building was new Florida construction, which meant it was moderately attractive but shoddy, with walls thin enough for me to hear the newlyweds next door argue as if they’d been married for years and then have what sounded like pretty satisfying make-up sex, followed by the low murmurs of contented conversation. When I saw them in the parking lot, they seemed happy enough, which was a good reminder that relationships, like most things, can be solid and worthy even if they don’t look perfect.

The apartment complex had a pool, which no one used but me. After work, I would swim laps and then float on my back and gaze up at the thick oak branches and the fuzzy strands of Spanish moss that hung down from them. Even with my ears submerged, I could hear the high hum of the cicadas. It was a relief to live someplace where I had no history, connections, or expectations.

I had found the job through Alva. When I’d shared my plan to make a fresh start and work as a reporter, she’d suggested Citrus County, where her sister, Camilla, worked in advertisingat the local newspaper. Alva, with whom I’d eventually shared everything about the summer, had been one of the few people supportive of my foray into newspaper reporting. “Everyone values the big leap forward,” Alva had told me, “but baby steps can take you just as far.”

The job was at once dull and fascinating. From day one, I had immersed myself in covering county commission and school board meetings, local elections and parades. I had written about the onset of “love bug” season, when mating June bugs hover in the air and coat the fronts of cars with their sticky bodies. I had covered the trial of a man convicted of shooting his wife in the back with a sawed-off shotgun. At his sentencing hearing, he’d had only one character witness, his high school shop teacher, who testified that while he didn’t remember the man doing anything remarkable, nor could he recall him causing any trouble. Deliberating for fewer than ten minutes, the jury recommended the electric chair. Everything was so new to me that I felt as though I was not only learning how to be a newspaper reporter, but was starting life over. I was beginning to understand how the world worked, and how it was both simpler and more complicated than I had imagined.

I liked having daily deadlines and no time to think too long about words beyond their power to say what needed to be said. I’d become quicker at churning out news stories and could practically write a police brief in my sleep. I knew most of the county sheriff’s deputies by name and which of the local gadflies monopolized the microphone at zoning hearings because they didn’t have anything better to do with their time. I’d written a few profiles, including one about the region’s first female alligator trapper, and had been asked to contribute regularly to the feature pages. I’d written a series of front-page stories about a kindergarten girl who’d contracted HIV through a bloodtransfusion and was at the center of a battle between panicked parents, school officials, lawyers, and doctors about whether she would be allowed to attend public school. The series elicited a record number of letters to the editor, as well as a phone call from my mother to tell me how impressed she was with my reporting and writing. I was surprised by how much her praise meant to me.

I didn’t feel like a local, but nor did I feel like a total stranger. I went out for beers a few times a month with theChronicle’s other reporters, who hadn’t given up trying to nose out why I had come from so far away for a low-paying, low-prestige job in Citrus County. Typically, I was more comfortable with Sally, the sixty-something owner of the Floral City Antiques Barn and Book Mart, who had barely looked up from her paperback when I had walked in to inquire about a rocking chair in the window. I’d purchased the rocking chair and had become a regular at the shop, where I found and fell in love with books by Florida writers—Their Eyes Were Watching Godby Zora Neale Hurston,Cross Creekby Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, andTourist Seasonby Carl Hiaasen. Soon I started dropping in just to talk to Sally, who had vowed to read every secondhand book she purchased for resale. Her eclectic reading made for interesting conversation. From one week to the next, she might want to talk about Edna Ferber, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or Sidney Sheldon. What I loved most about Sally was that she found something to love in all of the books, evenJonathan Livingston Seagull, which she said was either profoundly stupid or illogically profound.

On Saturdays, I volunteered to read to the blind at a local nursing home, marveling every week how the chatter would cease as my elderly listeners got swept up in the story. With no movie theaters or bookstores in Citrus County, there was little to do in the evenings, which had helped me stop circling my old Selectrictypewriter and start writing again. At first I managed only a few minutes a day, but eventually I worked up to an hour and sometimes two or three. I still felt queasy when I sat down, but I didn’t let fear stop me. I had finished several short stories, one of which had been accepted for publication in a literary journal in Georgia.

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