The Last Book Party(54)

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 drove home 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 the Citrus 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 the Chronicle in 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 Gulf of 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 advertising at 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.