Turtle Moon Part 11

"Great," Lucy says. All he needed was to be switched into a decent school system."

It's a cruel and untrue thing to say, and they all know it.

"I'm sorry," Lucy says. "I'm just exhausted. I have to go lie down,"

she tells Evan.

"Here?" Melissa says.

Lucy plans to rest for only a few minutes, but once she stretches out on the living room couch, which she bought on sale at Bloomingdale's one Labor Day weekend, she falls into a deep sleep.

When she wakes, the living room is dark, and she bolts from the couch, frightened, unsure of where she is. Even when she turns on the light, she's confused. She had not remembered owning so many things: good china and silverware, lithographs and thick wool rugs, woven to last a hundred years. She goes outside, even though it's already dusk, too late to go to Salvuki's. Instead, Lucy walks down Easterbrook Lane, past lawns so deep and green it almost seems like midnight.

When Lucy first came to Great Neck, after her parents' deaths, she was mesmerized by all the greenery; she felt as if she could go to sleep for a very long time, lulled by the mockingbirds and the mourning doves. It's happening to her all over again; it's an effort just to walk half a block. She used to take this route with Keith in his stroller, and now she sees a boy about his age, maybe one of his old friends, she can't tell at this distance, dribbling a basketball as he heads for a neighbor's house, a springer spaniel behind him, lunging for the ball each time it hits the concrete. Lucy can see the boy is wearing the hundred-twenty-dollar Nikes that Keith has begged for, sneakers Lucy wouldn't buy him even if she could afford to. The Nikes are clean and white, and they'll probably stay that way till the boy has outgrown them and been given another pair.

Evan is waiting for her when she gets back to the house. He's brought a pizza, which they wolf down together in silence. They're used to doing this; they spent most of the last year of their marriage avoiding conversation.

"Are you sure you're all right?" Evan asks when Lucy insists she has to go up to bed at a quarter after eight.

"Jet lag," Lucy says, though it's nowhere near the truth.

She keeps thinking about the way Keith looked as she peered through the window of Miss Giles's house. In the early-morning light, his hair seemed blonder, he was leaner than before, all sharp angles. He lookedlike a stranger, a boy found in the woods, covered with bramble scratches, but dressed in clean clothes, and safe in that kitchen where there was cinnamon sugar to sprinkle over the cereal.

When she's not thinking of Keith, when she's not careful, she imagines Julian Cash, and each time she does she feels edgy, and nothing can cure that but sleep. Up in the guest bedroom there is a yellow bedspread Lucy doesn't remember, no doubt chosen by Melissa, since Lucy has always disliked bright colors in bedrooms. Lucy sleeps in her clothes, her arms wrapped around herself. By the time she wakes in the morning, Melissa's car is already idling at the curb.

"She doesn't trust me," Lucy tells Evan down in the kitchen.

Evan lifts the window shade and waves to Melissa. "She has nothing to worry about," he says. "You know what I mean," he adds when he sees the look on Lucy's face.

"I know exactly what you mean," Lucy says.

"Since she's picking you up, can you lend me your car?"

Evan grudgingly hands over his keys, and when Lucy gets dressed and goes out to the garage, she understands why he hesitated. He has a brandnew red Celica convertible. He's always wanted a convertible, and Lucy appreciates that he would trust her with it, especially in the shape she 5 in.

She heads straight to Middle Neck Road, the main shopping district of town, and she's lucky enough to find a parking s.p.a.ce just two blocks up from Salvuki's. When Lucy moved here all the girls wanted Capezio ballet slippers, whether they were dancers or not, and the boys wore loafers and high-topped sneakers or, occasionally, well-polished Frye boots. Her Aunt Naomi bought Lucy her first pair of Capezios, thin pink slippers that didn't make a sound when she walked and made her size-eight feet seem as delicate as one of the roses that will soon open beside Evan's front door. As she locks up the Celica, Lucy realizes that she still has a key to that door in her purse. She just never would have thought of using it. Even when she lived there, especially toward the end, she felt as though she were breaking and entering each time she brought the groceries home.

She has that same feeling walking into Salvuki's, even though there is still a pot of coffee at the front desk, and a tray of flaky croissants. The air here always smells like coconut shampoo, which costs twelve dollars a bottle and never seemed to get your hair truly clean. This is where Lucy had her hair cut off to shoulder length just before her wedding, and then she wept all night long, even though her Aunt Naomi a.s.sured her that a married woman shouldn't have all that hair.

Clearly, Salvuki can't help her now; she actually cringes when she sees her reflection in the mirror behind the receptionist's desk.

"I'm looking for Salvuki," Lucy says. Actually, she has to say it three times before the receptionist turns her gaze on her.

"Mr. Salvuki is out today. He's doing an entire a wedding party," the receptionist informs her. "And he's not taking any new clients, since he's booked with his regulars.""I am a regular," Lucy informs her right back.

The receptionist studies Lucy's green-tinged hair and doesn't believe her for a second.

"Well, I used to be," Lucy admits. "I moved to Florida."

"G.o.d. What did they do to you there?" the receptionist asks.

"My aunt, Naomi Friedman, is one of his regular customers," Lucy says.

"She's one of his best customers."

"Mrs. Friedman." The receptionist nods. "She was in yesterday."

Lucy reaches into her purse and brings out her neighbor's photograph.

"You haven't ever seen her, have you?"

"Never," the receptionist says, eyeing the photo, then quickly handing it back. "But believe me, she didn't have her hair colored here."

Lucy wanders over to the sinks and shows the photograph to the shampoo girls, but neither of them recognizes the murdered woman; they haven't even been working for Salvuki for more than a few months. Lucy herself doesn't remember the other stylists, but she recalls that no one worked for Salvuki for long; he was, and probably still is, too much of a screamer. There's nothing Lucy can do until tomorrow; the entire day is wasted, and maybe that's why she's so susceptible to the white strapless dress in the window of a shop on Middle Neck Road. The dress is gathered into hundreds of tiny pleats; it's a dry cleaner's nightmare and much too expensive. But it's gorgeous, like a slice of moonlight, and there are silver-colored sandals, which the saleswoman also convinces Lucy to take. She will have to go to the reunion after all, and by the time she's done shopping, Lucy has spent three hundred dollars she can't afford, all because she's back in Great Neck, where the saleswomen don't bother you with anything as trivial as the price until you're already rung up and the credit card is out of your hand.

When she gets back to Easterbrook Lane, Lucy pulls into the garage, then goes into the house through the garage door, which leads to the kitchen. She hangs Evan's car keys on the hook by the telephone, just the way she used to. She has a cup of coffee, thinking, in spite of herself, about Julian Cash, how impressed he I be when she hands over the real name of her neighbor, how willing to keep Keith out of this mess completely. She thinks about the way he looked at her when he told her she should go home. Maybe she should have, because now something's happened.

It was so late at night, and the shadows were so blue, she may not have been seeing straight. Here in Great Neck, so far from that Verity madness that happens every May, she cannot believe the things she did in his bed. She won't even think about that.

Lucy washes out her coffee cup in the sink before carrying her shopping bag upstairs. In the guest room, she shakes out her new dress and hangs it in the closet, and then she finally dares to walk down the hall to Keith's room. She's been avoiding it, and now she knows why.It's like opening the door into another lifetime. Lucy had worked so hard to make his room perfect; she'd special ordered mini-blinds in the hues of the rainbow, she'd had shelves built in that were deep enough for fish tanks and globes of the world.

Keith hasn't been here since school vacation in February, but there is still a pile of comic books he left beside the bed. His yellow rain slicker is hooked over the closet door. From the window it's possible to see the whole backyard: the swimming pool and the climbing structure Evan ordered on Keith's sixth birthday, a green grid of slides and swings and monkey bars. There is the herb garden Lucy so carefully put in, although she left before it could be of use. There is the birdhouse, still in the magnolia tree. A child would have to be crazy not to want to come back here. He'd have to favor man-o'-wars and dust, heat waves and an old single bed bought at the Suns.h.i.+ne flea market.

Lucy closes Keith's door and goes to the guest bathroom. She takes a long shower, and when she's done she lies down on the yellow bedspread, just for a few minutes, but she winds up falling asleep, with her hair still wet, so that all her dreams are cold and blue. Since she's come back, she's amazingly tired, as if she were recovering from a fever, and she sleeps longer than she has in months. She's out for hours and doesn't wake until she hears Evan come home. As soon as she gets off the bed, Lucy knows her hair wffi be a disaster for the reunion. She finds some mousse in the bathroom cabinet, slicks a little over her hair, then slips on the new white dress. She can't wear a bra with it, which makes her self-conscious, and the silver sandals are half a size too small. But when she turns and sees herself in the full-length mirror, she understands why some people are willing to pay so much for clothes. It's a wonderful dress. She doesn't even look like herself.

With her hair cut so short, and no jewelry, her neck is as long as a swan's. All those tiny gathered pleats look like feathers, or layers of abalone sh.e.l.l.

Lucy knows the full effect of the dress when she goes downstairs and Evan stares at her the way he did a long time ago, when they'd meet in her Uncle Jack's garden. If Julian could see her now, he'd be lost.

He'd be hers, if that's what she wanted.

"You're really going to the reunion?" Evan says.

"I told you I was," Lucy says.

"I thought you hated the past," Evan says. He's carrying a dry-cleaning bag and inside is a gray suit Lucy doesn't recognize.

"What?" Lucy is annoyed that he presumes to know how she feels about anything.

"That's how it always seemed," Evan says. "You never talked about your parents. I don't think I know one fact about your first sixteen years.

I just a.s.sumed you'd never want to see anyone you went to high school with. Melissa's in the middle of compiling her family history. It'sreally pretty interesting. There's a whole branch of her family that settled in New Orleans."

"Oh, great," Lucy says. "What do you do? Compare her to me, and if she does the opposite she gets an A-plus?"

Evan doesn't answer, but he tightens up, just as he always did when he was hurt. Still, Lucy can't stop herself.

"What do you plan to do?" she asks. "Marry her, then sue for custody because you live better than I do? So what? Most divorced men have three times the income of their ex-wives."

"I'm not like that," Evan says, wounded. "I offered you this house, you didn't want it. You never wanted anything from me."

He turns from her, defeated, but actually, he's right. She never got anything from her marriage, because she didn't want it; sometimes when he brought her presents, earrings he spent too much for, a silver chain he'd ordered weeks in advance, she'd put them in a dresser drawer and never touch them again.

"I want something now," Lucy says. "Take me to the reunion."

"I have two tickets, and I'm taking Melissa," Evan tells her.

Lucy has not come back to New York for her high school reunion, and now she's desperate to go. She has never looked back, Evan's right about that; she has locked up the past, much the way Keith keeps the Indian-head pennies Evan collected for him in a gla.s.s jar. There are times when she could swear she's heard something rustling in her own kitchen, her mother's skirt as she backs up against the linoleum counter so that Scout can wrap his arms around her and kiss her.

"It's not her past," Lucy says. "Is it?"

She goes to wait in the driveway, so Evan can make his decision, and when he comes out, nearly twenty minutes later, showered and wearing the gray suit, she knows that he's called Melissa. He was always generous, and he still is; in spite of everything, they do have a past together. They don't speak on the way to the country club, although they are both thinking of all the other times they drove up this winding gravel road.

Evan waves to the guard at the iron gate; he still comes here on Sundays to play golf with some of the boys they went to school with, and Melissa has suggested they have their wedding reception here.

Twenty years ago, at their prom, Lucy wore a pink chiffon dress and refused to dance with anyone but Evan. She didn't know it then, but he'd already decided to ask her to marry him.

Tonight the golf course is so green it s.h.i.+mmers in the twilight; the hedge of mock orange is still just as lush, emerald leaves sprinkled with stars.

Lucy and Evan look good together as they walk across the parking lot.

They always did. Lucy wanted the exact opposite of her parents'

marriage and that's what she got, and she knows, even now, that she hasn.o.body but herself to blame.

"It's great that you found Melissa," Lucy tells Evan. "Keith will be happy when you tell him about her." Probably he'll adore her; she has everything Lucy does not: youth, patience, no blood tie.

"You think so?" Evan says hopefully.

"As happy as Keith can be," Lucy amends.

She says this as they're entering the club, and Evan touches her elbow lightly. It's the touch of commiseration, and it reminds them both of all the hours they have spent trying to understand Keith's unhappiness.

There is a crush of people filling in name tags, grownups in linen and silk, all unrecognizable to Lucy after twenty years. Several people greet Evan, old buddies and acquaintances, but it's not until they walk into the ballroom that a woman approaches Lucy.

"You look incredible," the woman tells Lucy.

Whatever that means. The woman glances over at Evan. "I thought you two were divorced."

Lucy realizes that this stranger is Mison Reed, whom she used to sit next to in algebra.

"We are," Lucy says. She cannot for the life of her remember ever talking to Mison, not even in cla.s.s. "It's a friendly divorce."

Lucy waves to Evan as he turns to look back at her before making his way to the bar.

"No alimony," Mison says knowingly.

Lucy forces a smile, then excuses herself and heads for an hors d'oeuvres table. There is some sort of vague Hawaiian theme, echoing their prom, with lots of sliced pineapple and a band whose members wear leis over their white dinner jackets. The room is a little too cool and Lucy has the sense that everyone here knows one another, except for her. She felt that way in high school, although now, when she stops at a table piled with tea sandwiches, she instantly recognizes Heidi Kaplan. Heidi's red hair is just as thick and luxuriant as ever, especially when set against her silky black dress. For years, Lucy has been guessing that Heidi would have grown coa.r.s.e and fat, when in fact she's more beautiful than ever.

"Lucy Rosen," Heidi says, coming up to Lucy as she piles a plate with crabmeat sandwiches and pineapple. "Everyone thought you disappeared off the face of the earth."

"No," Lucy says. "Just Florida."

"Year round?" Heidi says, shocked. "We go to Boca in February, but the rest of the time we're in the city, except for the summer, when we're out at the beach."

People here seem to be starving; they circle around the hors d'oeuvres, so that Lucy is pushed uncomfortably close to Heidi."So what do you do with yourself in Florida?"

Heidi asks. "You were always so smart."

Lucy smiles and takes a bite of pineapple. "Not really," she says.

She looks over her shoulder; the lights are dim and she doesn't recognize anyone out on the dance floor.

"Oh, yes you were," Heidi tells her. "I was actually jealous of you."

They both laugh at that, a ridiculous schoolgirl folly. All Lucy has to do is listen politely while Heidi talks about her husband, an oncologist whose practice is on Madison and Seventy-third, and then she manages to get away. When she reaches the bar she can see Evan talking to a group of old friends. The women seem to have aged better than the men, many of whom are balding and paunchy. These men look about the same as their own fathers did, back when the boys were seniors in high school. Lucy's Uncle Jack wasn't much older when she came to live with him. Her parents were just about the age she is now on the night they died. Though she doesn't drink, Lucy orders a margarita. It's a cash bar, and Lucy has to rifle through her purse for some singles. She accidentally pulls out the photograph of her neighbor and while she looks at her neighbor's face she can feel the air-conditioning blowing on her shoulders. She slips the photograph back into her wallet and pays for her drink, and when she turns from the bar she realizes that she's being watched.

Over by the French doors that lead to a stone patio bordered by azaleas is Andrea Friedman, Lucy's cousin. Beneath Andrea's gaze, Lucy feels as if her white dress were shrinking, exposing too much skin. She takes a long sip of her margarita and then, because she has no choice, crosses over to the French doors and stands beside Andrea.

"No one looks the same," Lucy says. "That's for sure.

They have not seen each other for three years, and actually they never saw each other more than once or twice a year after their disastrous tenure in the same household. As it's turned out, Andrea was ambitious. She's a corporate lawyer married to one of her partners, a large, intelligent man who wouldn't be caught dead at a twentieth high school reunion. And the truth is, Andrea does look the same, only she wears contact lenses and her ma.s.s of dark, curly hair is considered exotic rather than a curse.

"I take it my parents don't know you're in town," Andrea says. She's still staring at the bar; she has a gla.s.s of white wine and seltzer.

"Well, no," Lucy admits. "I didn't plan this trip.

It just happened."

Andrea turns and appraises Lucy, staring at her hair. "That took guts," she says.

"Guess what?" Lucy says. "We still have nothing to say to each other."They sip their drinks and watch the dance floor, where Heidi Kaplan is dancing with one of her old boyfriends.

"What a b.i.t.c.h," Andrea says bitterly.

"Heidi?" Lucy says.

"She told everyone you were on the pill," Andrea says. "That's why she was the prom queen and you were only one of the princesses."

Lucy looks closely at her cousin. "Where did she get that piece of information?"

Andrea sips her white wine.

"Thanks so much," Lucy says to her cousin.

"I only come back here to see my parents," Andrea says. "I avoid this town like the plague.

You have no idea what it was like not to be pretty here. You were so wrapped up in yourself, you can't imagine the things I had to do."