the window.
He moved a few feet to the left and saw Laura’s tiny blue rental car. The driver-side door opened and she climbed out, glanced at the ocean and perhaps the young woman romping in the surf, then strode toward the cottage. She was wearing a plain navy blue dress today, and dark high heels. The wind grabbed at her hair and ruffled it, like the hair of the girl down the beach. She touched it lightly with spread fingers and smiled absently, as if luxuriating in the breeze’s caress. Something in Carver moved.
“Thing is,” McGregor said, “you gotta corner that ex-wife of yours and work on her. Tell her any fuckin’ thing, but keep her away from Adam Kave. Will you do that?”
“If I can find her,” Carver said.
As he hung up, she was peering into the dimness through the screen. She knocked on the door. Wanted in.
“I phoned you earlier,” she said, when he’d called for Laura to enter and she stood a few feet inside the door.
“Did you? I just got here, haven’t had time to check my calls.”
“It’s warm in here.”
“It doesn’t have to be. Switch on that air-conditioner.”
She walked to the window unit, studied the controls for a second, then turned it on High. The compressor clunked on and the blower began a wavering, powerful hum. She closed her eyes and sucked in some of the cool, filtered air, then moved away from it. She seemed instantly refreshed, oddly invigorated. Or had she been that way since she’d entered?
Some of the cool air found its way across the room to Carver. “Why’d you call?” he asked.
“We need to talk.”
“About Ann?”
“About what you’re doing. About you. I talked to Lieutenant McGregor in Fort Lauderdale. I don’t like him. Or trust him. Being around him makes my flesh creep.”
“And he thinks he won you over.”
She walked to the water-stained chair Carver usually sat in after swimming and lowered herself onto it, then folded her hands in the lap of the blue dress. As if she were planning on staying awhile.
“What’s Sam Devine think about you coming to Florida?” Carver asked.
Her hands tightened on each other, fingertips whitening around pink-enameled nails. “We argued about it. He tried to talk me out of it. Then he wanted to come with me. I think he would have, but he’s wrapped up in a case with the Highway Department. Something about land acquisition.”
“And you came anyway.”
“I had to. I told you why.”
“I guess you did,” Carver said.
She looked out past the dead plants hanging in the window. The rush of surf was still audible over the hum of the air-conditioner. The place was cooling off fast.
“Edwina Talbot’s more than pretty,” she said. “She’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, she’s that.” Carver thought of Edwina, and, for some reason, of the woman down on the beach.
Laura tilted her head to the side and sighed, then stood up and walked over to stand near him. She moved as if she had no choice in the matter, as if some celestial puppet master were skillfully working her strings. “She can’t give you what you need right now. Sam can’t give me what I need.”
“Maybe not,” Carver said, somehow not surprised by her direct approach. It was all so clear to her, as she must think it was to him. Or would be to him if only he’d open his mind and let the light in. If only he’d read that survey in
He hadn’t wanted this, but then he hadn’t counted on Laura’s candidness, and the effect she’d have on him standing close and looking so honestly, so yearningly, into his eyes. Years hadn’t passed. Acid hadn’t spilled. Fire hadn’t burned. Their son was still alive.
No, he was dead.
Dead forever.
Carver’s throat tightened. He felt his eyes well with tears.
Laura said, “We can give each other what we need. Only you and me. That’s how it is, I’m afraid.”
Carver reached for her before he knew what he was doing and was pressing her to him, feeling her body vibrate as if she were trembling on the edge of an endless drop. Her forehead and cheek were crushed against his chest and her tears saturated his shirt like warm blood. “Oh, Christ!. .” she moaned, and clung to him as if he alone and not Christ could save her. This was shared self-pity, he realized. Maudlin. A staged catharsis. But she was right: they needed it.
On the bed they twisted grief into desperation and desire, and hid from death in the ultimate act of life.
Her sharp cries were still lodged like shards of pain in his mind when Carver rolled exhausted from her, dragging his bad leg across her perspiration-slick thigh. The heated scent of their lovemaking lay over them. He let his eyes slide sideways to study the sweat-gleaming plane of her stomach and the faintly quivering swell of pale breast. Her breathing was shallow and ragged, as if just enough to sustain life. There were distinct dividing lines where her swimming suit had shielded flesh from sun at the Andrew Johnson Motel.
Carver realized he was parched and thirsty. He felt like a man suddenly awakened after sleeping off a long drunk. Hair of the dog, he thought, and said, “There’s a beer in the refrigerator. Want to share it?”
“Sure.” Her voice was slow and drained of feeling. Cold beer time. Cold logic time. The way it had been years ago. He wondered what she was thinking now, lying among the ruins.
He got up and considered leaving the cane and using walls and furniture for support to cross the floor to the kitchen. But his good leg felt rubbery, and he didn’t like the idea of possibly falling in front of Laura. He grabbed the cane, and, barefoot, he padded and thumped across the plank floor.
She was sitting up when he returned behind the folding screen that partitioned off the sleeping area. His bedroom. With Laura in it. Her breasts were bare and seemed larger and more pendulous now as she leaned her back against the oak headboard. She seemed relaxed.
She said, “Don’t worry, I’m up to date on my pills.”
“I should have asked,” Carver said. “Didn’t even think about it.” Or maybe some part of him had thought about it and he hadn’t wanted to ask. But he didn’t want her to be pregnant; God, he didn’t want that!
He took a long swallow of beer, feeling some of it dribble coldly onto his chin, then handed her the can. She tilted back her head and drank deeply. A few drops of beer or condensation from the can rained onto her right breast, and she absently lifted her left hand and rubbed away the glistening dampness without lowering the can. He waited, watching her drink.
Finally she handed the half-empty can back to him.
He placed it on the table by the bed and sat down on the mattress, twisting his body so he could face her. She smiled and said, “So how do you feel?”
“Relieved,” he said. “Not good, though. Not at ease.”
“Why not?”
Carver wasn’t sure he could crystallize the reasons in his mind so he could analyze them and frame an answer for her. Guilt was in there. And Edwina. A part of him felt like a wayward teen who’d cheated on his steady. But it was more than that. It involved so many things, some of them indefinable right now and maybe forever. Uncertainty seemed to be a permanent facet of life. His life, anyway.
He groped in his mind for what he was sure of, found it, and said, “I don’t want you to talk to Adam Kave, Laura.”
She stared at him and something deep in her eyes changed. She seemed to retreat from him without changing position propped against the headboard. As if she were diminishing in the small end of a telescope. Soon she’d be too far away for them to hear each other. “Is that what this was about? An exercise in persuasion?”
It hadn’t occurred to him that she’d think that; he knew it should have. “No! For God’s sake, Laura!” It hurt him physically that she believed that about him, a heavy ache in the pit of his stomach.
She got up, stepped into her shoes, and raised her dress above her head and wriggled into it. Fumbling, she buttoned it up the front, missing half the buttons, and yanked its belt tight. Then she snatched up her underwear and pantyhose from the floor and stood angrily holding them bunched tightly in her right hand, as if they were
