T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

For the first few weeks, they went to the beach nearly every day — to “kick back,” as he put it. There was the sun, the sand, there were the surfboards he and Pamela paddled out on the ocean while whoever they could grab hold of watched the little girl so she didn’t drown herself, the days lazy and long and memorialized by the potent aroma of suntan oil and the hiss of cold beer in the can. But Carey wasn’t much of a surfer and the waves were all taken in any case (prioritized, that is, by a clique of locals who resented outsiders and one another too), and by August he and his family were headed north, for the Russian River, where they were going to stay for the remainder of the summer with another couple — friends from high school, from what I could gather. Jim and Francie. Jim was a writer, Francie taught school. And they’d rented a “funky” cabin in the redwoods just three blocks from the river and a place called Ginger’s Rancho, where local bands played six nights a week and on Mondays there were poetry readings.

It was an ongoing party, shared meals, a surfeit of beer and wine and drugs, swimming in the river, dancing in the club at night, yet what Pamela didn’t know — or Jim either — was that Carey was having sex with Francie every chance he could get. They’d make excuses, going out to the market while Jim was writing and Pamela babysitting, taking long walks, swimming, canoeing, berry picking, their eyes complicit and yet no one the wiser. Then came a sultry afternoon in mid-August when they all went down to Ginger’s in their shorts and swimsuits to sit in the bar there, at a table in the corner where the window was thrust open and they could gaze out on the river as it made its swift dense progress to the sea. Francie was wearing her two-piece — a leopard-skin pattern, gold and black like the sun spotting the floor of the jungle — and Carey, in a pair of cut-off jeans, leaned into the table to admire the pattern of moles in the cleft between her breasts. (Orion’s Belt, he liked to call it — privately, of course — and he was writing a song named after one of the three stars of the constellation, Alnilam, though how he expected to find a rhyme for it I couldn’t imagine.) Pamela was in a one-piece and a baggy T-shirt and was trying her best to keep the little girl — Terri — entertained. Jim was Jim, with hair that hung in his eyes, a chain-drinker and chain-smoker who seemed content to let the world roll on by.

An hour passed. They took turns buying rounds for the table. There was music on the jukebox and time slowed in the way it does when simply drawing breath is all that matters. Even Terri seemed content, sprawled on the floor and playing with her Barbies. Then, at a signal, Carey got up to go to the men’s room and a moment later Francie went to the ladies’, making sure the coast was clear before pulling him in with her and locking the door. It was risky, it was mad, but that made it all the more intensely erotic, a hurried bottomless grinding up against the sink while the jukebox thumped through the wall and the shouts of children at play in the shallows ricocheted eerily round them in that echoing space. Francie came back to the table first, after having hastily dabbed at herself with a wad of paper towels, and if her smooth tanned abdomen showed a trace of Carey’s fluids shining there, no one noticed. A moment later Carey sauntered across the room, four fresh gin and tonics cradled against his chest. “What took you so long?” Pamela wanted to know. He set down the drinks, one at a time, shrugged. “There was a line like you wouldn’t believe.”

And where was Terri? She was at the next table over, being entertained by an old woman in a bleached straw hat who must have been a retired elementary school teacher or a grandmother or something of the like because she took right to Terri as if she’d been waiting for her all her life. The two of them were playing word games, playing patty-cake, the woman had her on her lap. Pamela said it was cute. The drinks went down. The conversation jumped and sparked, longtime friends spinning out jokes and routines and gossiping about every soul they knew in common who didn’t happen to be sitting at the table in that moment. And then, at some point, Pamela glanced up and saw that the old woman in the straw hat was gone. Along with Terri. The little girl. Her daughter.

It took a minute for Carey to grasp the situation — and when he did, when he got up dazedly from his chair, the first stirrings of alarm beating in him, he went methodically through the place, jerking out chairs to look under the tables, going down on his hands and knees, startling people, Pamela right behind him and Jim and Francie right behind her. Then it was the restrooms, the kitchen, then out the door to where the river, cold and muscular, framed the shore. He saw a maze of bare limbs, people spread out on mats and blankets, huddled beneath beach umbrellas in bruised puddles of shade, radios going, kids shouting, dogs shaking themselves dry. But he didn’t see Terri. And now it began to build in him, the shock and fear and hate — hate of the old woman, of all these people, these oblivious people, and of Pamela too, for doing this to him, for giving him this daughter he loved in that moment more than anything in the world. He began shouting his daughter’s name, his voice high and tight, as if he were onstage howling into the microphone at the climax of one his concerts, and here were Pamela and Jim and Francie, their faces shrinking away from his like stones dropped down a well. “Terri!” he called. “Terri!”

But wasn’t that the old woman? Wasn’t that her, laid out on her back like a corpse, her flabby legs spread in a V and the straw hat pulled down over her face? He was on her in the next instant, snatching the hat away. “Where is she?” he demanded. “My daughter. What did you do with her?”

The old lady blinked under the harshness of the sun. It was hot. Mid-afternoon. She was glazed in sweat. “Who?”

“My daughter. Terri. The little girl you had in your lap. Terri! ”

Something like recognition slid across the woman’s face, the faintest spark, and he realized she was drunk, no grandmother, no schoolteacher, just a drunken fat old slut he could have choked to death right there on the beach and nobody would have blamed him. And what did he get out of her? Blinking, holding up a hand to shield her eyes, her voice cracked and the fat of her arms shining like grease, she came up on one elbow and gave him a grimace. “I thought she was with you.”

He was making promises to himself as he ran up and down the beach, wading now, calling out his daughter’s name over and over — he’d been wrong, he’d sinned, he’d been selfish, stupid, stupid, stupid, and if they found her, if she was all right, saved, fine, whole, he would change his ways, he swore it. If only—

That was when Pamela let out a cry from the far end of the beach where the trail wound through a scrub of bushes and low trees and he ran toward the sound of it, people jerking their heads around, Jim just behind him and Francie too, the sand burning under his feet and the sun knifing at him. In the next moment, Pamela was stepping out of the shadows as if out of an old photograph, and he saw the smaller figure there beside her, Terri, in her pink playsuit and with her face clownishly smeared with the juice of the huckleberries she’d been picking all by herself.

—

What happened next? I didn’t know. Curiously, there were no entries after that, the year drawn down in a succession of blank white pages. It happened that I had to go back east again on business in any case (not with the first group — I had no patience with them — but for another investment opportunity, which ultimately turned a nice little profit for Chrissie and me), and when I got back I treated her to a week at a resort in Cabo we like to use as a getaway. Time passed. I forgot about the journal, forgot about Carey Fortunoff and his unplumbed life. And then one day Mary Ellen stopped by to pick up Chrissie for their afternoon walk just as I was coming in the door, and it all came back to me.