And now, still holding Blanche’s hand, Addie turns and smiles, though her eyes do not participate. For a moment, they take on the oddly mesmerized and mesmerizing quality they’ve had since she was four months old, as she lay nursing with her dah on the sun-drenched beach at Pawleys, when her young parents walked, hand in hand, into a sparkling, calm sea, and did not come back.
“Look, Addie!” Blanche points.
And suddenly here they are. As the Nina rounds the final bend, the captain blows the horn and Addie catches her first glimpse of Wando Passo, her new home. There is the park; there, the six great chimneys rising up above the canopies of the old trees; there, on the rolling greensward that slopes down to the river, a crowd of well-dressed people mills beneath a tent with colored ribbons flying at the poles. Now, thinks Addie…Not tomorrow, not next week, next year, but today, this hour, my true life starts….
And there, surrounded by his friends, stands Harlan on the dock. It’s the first time she’s seen him since the wedding, the first time she’s seen him in his handsome, worrisome gray uniform. There, to his left, is Tom Wagner, his commanding officer at Fort Moultrie. (Just three days, she thinks, three days before he must report.) Both Harlan’s face and Tom’s—all the faces in the crowd, in fact—are turned expectantly one way, as if waiting, yet, oddly, not for her. Odder still, Harlan holds a gun.
FOUR
Eyes still shaded with a hand, Ransom gazed southward toward the river bend, waiting for a boat that never came. He could still make out the birds, though, away there in the distance. Like spindrift from a breaking wave, they hung a moment, a curtain of bright green high in the air, and then they veered and Ransom lost them, too. Through some trick of light, or of perspective, they vanished as though never there.
“Daddy!”
Coming to as from a fugue, he found Hope glaring from the edge of the periwinkle.
“What?” he said.
“What are you looking at? I called you three times!”
“Did you see those birds?”
“What birds?”
“You…” He took a sounding from her face and stopped.
“Mommy said the coals are ready. Everybody’s hungry.”
Some doubt of him had been instilled, he recognized. “All right, then, come on,” he said, deciding it was going to be his project now to banish it. “I’m deputizing you as my assistant.”
“What’s ‘deputizing’?”
He smiled and put his hand on her small shoulder. “It means you’re going to help me cook.”
They were really there, though, weren’t they? As he walked toward the fire with Hope, Ran posed the question to himself, or, rather, a little voice asked him, the familiar one that, in the morning, when you hesitate between the blue shirt and the red, reminds you, Red is better with your coloring. This conversation, for the most part, in most of us, goes on subliminally, yet for Ransom, in the months since Claire had left, when he had no one else to help him choose his clothes, this voice had broken through; he had befriended it, or it, him, and he sometimes answered it aloud. This didn’t seem too worrisome—the voice, after all, was his—yet in the cab and elsewhere, it had occasioned looks, so Ransom, heading south to rehabilitate his life, had decided to forgo further conversations in this line.
“Absolutely,” he muttered now, forgetting that resolve.
“What, Daddy?”
“Nothing, Pete.”
She watched, frowning, as he forked the first steak on the grill. “Is that zebra?”
Ransom laughed. “Zebra? What, does your old man look like a poacher, a horseflesh-eating kind of guy? Nope, Pete, plain old beef.”
With her hands clasped behind her like an Oxford don, scratching one big toe with the painted toenail of the next, Hope contemplated the meat with the oddly mesmerized and mesmerizing stare she’d had since infancy. “Scar eats beef.”
“Who’s Scar?” he asked as he seared one side and flipped.
“He’s the bad brother in The Lion King.” Brushing dirt smudges from her knees, Claire emerged from the garden with Charlie and a shirtfront full of Silver Queen and baby mesclun leaves.
“He isn’t bad,” Hope said. “Scar’s my daddy.”
Surprise made Ransom’s laugh a little sharp. “So who does that make me?”
“Silly, Scar’s my real daddy. Let’s play the Scar game!”
Claire’s look said, Don’t pursue, but Hope dropped to her knees and reached her fingers up to him, curled like claws. “Help me, brother, please!” she said, and her eyes glowed like two small illuminated swimming pools at night.
“No, ma’am.” Claire hauled Hope to her feet. “I need you inside to help me shuck this corn.”
“Mommy, please!”
“Madam, in the house. Right now. March.”
“Mo-om!”
“Move it!”
What’s this? Ran’s look said to Claire, and hers answered, Later.
In the square of mottled, antique yellow light, he watched them stripping tassels and green shuck into the sink, the same home movie he’d screened every night in New York all these months when he turned out the lights. Twice, Claire passed the table without looking, but the third time she glanced at the check, as though to reassure herself that it was really there. She glanced toward the window, seeking him outside in the darkness. Ransom, though—outside in the darkness, looking back—could tell by the vagueness in her face that Claire couldn’t see him through her own reflection in the glass.
“I think I may have diagnosed your problem,” he told her, slightly later, as he poured the wine.
“Do tell.”
“Carpenter ants.”
Claire glanced up, surprised. “You’re kidding.”
“There’s a mongo nest out there in the periwinkle patch.”
“Carpenter ants…They’re not that bad, though, right?”
Ransom
