Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (9781101559833) Read online

  10

  During the first few days, kids I’d gone to school with since we’d been five mumbled hellos, and then moved away like they were afraid of catching whatever I had.

  “They don’t know what to say, Florine,” Grand said. “They probably don’t want to hurt your feelings or make you cry.”

  What Grand told me made sense, but it didn’t make things easier until I started finding things in my desk, like three blue marbles, a pinecone painted white, and a tiny baby doll wrapped in a pink piece of felt and tied with string to a stick cross. Little notes were tucked into the desk, too. “I’m sad about your mom going lost,” said one. “I said a prayer for you,” said another. “My dog ran away and I still feel bad about it. If my mother went missing, it would be awful,” someone else wrote.

  While Daddy kept at Parker and Parker kept at the Crow’s Nest Harbor police, the State Police, the Coast Guard, and anyone else on the case, September moved into October, then October 13, which was Carlie’s thirty-first birthday. I woke up with her name on my lips. I sang “Happy Birthday” while I looked at the ceiling, and it sounded more like a prayer than a celebration. Daddy was quiet that day.

  We joined Grand for supper. She made Carlie’s favorite dish, baked scallops, mashed potatoes, and spinach, and she baked a chocolate cake. We stuck thirty-one candles into the cake and sang. The word “Happy” came out like a dying breath.

  October passed its flaming torch to November.

  Our schoolwork was harder, now that we’d hit seventh grade. But I welcomed it, because it kept my mind from caving in on itself. I took to math that year. Numbers had a rhyme and reason to them. I craved answers, and math gave them to me.

  One Friday in early November, our teacher, Mrs. Richmond, asked me to stay for a minute after the rest of the class filed out for the day. She looked up at me with kind brown eyes through her smudged black cat-frame glasses. A flake of red lipstick clung to the curve of her upper lip and chalk dust sprinkled the top of her navy blue suit.

  She said, “Florine, I know you’re going through something very hard. You are being brave about it, but let me know if you need help. Okay?” I was embarrassed, but glad that she was watching out for me. Then she asked me to help Rose Clark with math.

  Rose had come up from kindergarten with us. While we’d grown, she stayed about the size of a fourth grader, with fuzzy yellow hair and pale eyes the color of water on sand. She didn’t mesh with the world we knew, but she was sweet. Besides, Dottie would have killed anyone who dared hurt Rose. Two things about my friend Dottie. She was bone kind and she was strong.

  Learning got harder for Rose as we went up through the grades. Each teacher found help for her, but she’d barely squeaked by sixth grade. This year, if she didn’t make it, word was that she would be riding the retard bus to Long Reach.

  I told Mrs. Richmond that I would help Rose. So, during math period, Rose and I left the classroom and went into a small, empty room with two side-by-side desks and one high window. I showed Rose what to do, then sat back and watched her dirty, chewed-down fingernails trace invisible numbers from the bottom of one column to the top of the next, where she tried to figure out where to go from there.

  “Just like the right column,” I said. “So, one and one and eight make ten, so what goes on the bottom here?” She giggled and guessed, “Nine?” Then she’d say, “Florine. Your name is so pretty. Like a flower.”

  “Your name is a flower for sure,” I said. “But that isn’t going to help you on the next math test. You got to pay attention. Try it again.” Each forty-minute period would end with me drained and Rose still happy and stupid.

  I complained to Dottie. Her being my best friend and me being in the situation I was in would get me some sympathy, I thought. But when I ventured to say that teaching Rose math was a waste of time, Dottie said, “Not everyone gets to have brains in everything. I ain’t that bright, either. I’m just smart enough to get Madeline to help me out every night, else I’d be down the hall with you and Rose.”

  “She picks her nose and she eats it,” I added for a gross-out factor.

  “Maybe she don’t get breakfast at home,” Dottie said, and I finally got the message.

  The day I started being mean to Rose, I’d had a scene at home with Daddy. He’d sat up until 2:00 A.M., drinking vodka and making phone calls to Parker. When he stumbled off to his room, I heard him crying. I wanted to go to him, but I knew he’d send me back to bed. Even after his cries turned to snores, I didn’t sleep until about 4:00. Both Daddy and I overslept. I woke up at about 6:30, and I flew out of bed and threw on the same clothes I’d taken off the night before.

  “Daddy,” I shouted at him, “Daddy, get up.” I heard him grunt and swear as I washed my face and brushed my teeth. I grabbed an apple and ran for the bus stop, only to find I’d missed the bus.

  Daddy was upchucking in the bathroom when I got back home. “I missed the bus,” I shouted over his puking.

  “Shit,” I heard him say, and he let loose again. Then the toilet flushed and he walked out of the bathroom, wiping his face with a hand towel Grand had embroidered for him and Carlie. I could see the L and C on the corner closest to me. “Why don’t you stay home?” he said.

  “You said we needed to get on with it.”

  “I ain’t in the mood to hear you tell me what I said, Florine.”

  “You shouldn’t drink and you shouldn’t stay up so late,” I said.

  “Well, if you’re smart enough to tell me what I shouldn’t do, don’t you think you’re smart enough to get yourself up, eat breakfast, make a goddamn sandwich, and catch the bus?”

  “You were crying. You kept me awake.”

  “Well, excuse me for living here.”

  “You don’t have to be mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “No, I’m goddamn not.”

  “Are you giving me a ride or what?”

  “Don’t talk to me that way. Say to me, ‘Please, Daddy, may I have a ride to school?’”

  “PLEASE MAY I HAVE A RIDE TO SCHOOL?”

  “Jesus,” he said. He went back into the bathroom and threw up again as I slammed out of the house and stomped up the driveway.

  Grand came out of her house and said, “You’re late today. You okay, Florine?”

  “No,” I shouted. “No, I’m not. I hate Daddy. He’s an asshole.”

  I walked past her and toward the bus stop; head down, into the sour wind. I picked up the pace as Daddy’s truck squealed out of the driveway, but he caught up.

  “Get in, Florine,” he said. “I ain’t got time to dick around.”

  “No,” I said. “I can walk to school.”

  “It’s three miles up the road. Get in, goddamn it.”

  “No.”

  He put the emergency brake on, and opened the door, and walked after me. I started to run, but he caught up to me, picked me up, and slung me over his shoulder. I beat at his back with my fists and screamed as loud as I could, but he wasn’t having any of it. He opened the passenger side door of the truck and threw me onto the seat. He slammed the door, walked around to his side of the truck, got in, and slammed his door. We both steamed as he drove, and he dropped me off in record time. I climbed out and left the door open so that he’d have to walk around and close it.

  When I walked into the classroom, Mrs. Richmond looked at me, then at the clock, then her face changed and I could almost hear her thinking to herself, “Oh, poor Florine. Her mother’s either run off or dead. I must be patient.” It would have been better if she’d sent me to the principal’s office, but she said, “We just started math. Why don’t you go down the hall with Rose?”

  So off I went, poor Rose toddling behind me. We sat down at our desks, and Rose snuggled
next to me. She smelled like dried pee. I moved my chair away and said, “Let’s get started.”

  “I like your shirt. It’s pretty,” Rose said.

  “Same shirt I wore yesterday,” I snapped. “Let’s go.”

  As usual, she couldn’t do her numbers.

  “I just showed you how to do that, Rose,” I said, a little too loud, a lot too impatient.

  Her smile flickered like a breeze-smacked candle flame. “Forgot,” she said.

  “Well, don’t forget again,” I said. “I’m going to show you one more time, then I’m going to be quiet until you get it right.”

  “All right,” she said. She bent to her task, her little finger moving down, then up, her mouth pursed into a tiny pucker. She took a long time to come up with an answer, but she did, and then she put down her pencil and folded her hands.

  “Let me see,” I said. When I saw it was wrong, I rolled my eyes. “Rose, how do you expect me to help you? Do you want me to tell Mrs. Richmond that you can’t do this?”

  Still a tiny smile, but she shook her head.

  “Well, then you have to learn this stuff.”

  “I will,” she said.

  She tried again, and she got it wrong.

  I broke.

  “You can’t do this,” I said. “You’re just too stupid.” Rose’s lip quivered and tears spilled out of her eyes.

  “I know I’m stupid,” she said. “You don’t have to be mad at me. I know you’re sad because your mother died.”

  “Don’t you say that! She did not die!” I yelled, and then I melted onto the floor. “You can’t say that,” I sobbed. “No one can say that!”

  I scared the hell out of Rose, and she set to crying as hard as me, and neither of us could stop. We watched the ugly masks of each other’s faces as tears, snot, and drool ran down our cheeks, into our mouths, dripped onto our clothes.

  Why no one heard us, I don’t know. No one came running to see what was going on. By and by, shame and sense slunk back into my brain, and I managed to choke out, “I’m sorry, Rose. Don’t be scared. I’m sorry,” because she was still crying so hard that she shook. I wiped my face with my hands, got up off the floor, and went to her. I said soft words to her, much as Carlie or Grand had to me when I was young and afraid or hurt.

  I finally got her calmed down and cleaned up, but the math lesson was over for the day. We walked side-by-side back to the classroom holding hands, still sniffling a little bit. When Mrs. Richmond saw us, she took us into the hall.

  “What happened?” she asked me.

  Rose said, “Florine didn’t do nothing. I just don’t feel good.”

  I didn’t feel good, either, and I felt worse later that day when Dottie walked up to me on the playground and stood an inch from my face.

  “You tell Rose she was stupid?” she asked.

  I studied the tops of my shoes. The unfairness of it all crouched solid and square in my mind and I said, “She is stupid. No sense pretending she isn’t.”

  Dottie said, “Fuck you, Florine,” and walked away, taking my breath with her.

  11

  That night, Daddy hit an all-time-high drunk with a bottle of vodka. By the time I’d gotten home from school, half a fifth had gone down his gullet and he staggered as he warmed up a can of beans for me and him. Grand called just before supper and he said to her, “Oh, juss fine ma. Juss leave us alone. We’re fine. Juss fine. Beans’re burning. Gotta go.” He hung up and scraped the beans out of the pan and onto our plates. I stared at the scorched beans on my plate and burst into tears. Daddy didn’t say anything to me; he just picked up the bottle of vodka and went into the living room. He sat down heavy in his chair, and it whined with the weight he threw at it. I threw my supper into the garbage and ran over to Grand’s house.

  “Daddy’s drunk,” I said. “He gave me burned beans for supper.”

  Grand pursed her lips. Then she warmed me up some American chop suey and let me eat it in front of the television while she sat and knitted. Her needles flashed faster and faster as we sat there. A rare scowl creased her handsome old face.

  “You mad at Daddy?” I asked.

  “Hard to be mad when he’s so broke up,” she said. “Hard to be patient, too, I guess. Jesus tests us in ways we can’t even imagine.”

  “Daddy’s ignoring Jesus, I think,” I said. “Me and Jesus.”

  “He’s down deep, Florine, down deep,” Grand said. “He’s trying to make sense of what happened, not that I approve of the way he’s doing it, but before he can come back to the light and love of Jesus, he’s got to wrestle with the devil.”

  I’d always pictured the devil as red, with a pitchfork, like the one on the deviled ham can. But maybe, for Daddy at least, the devil was a clear, sharp liquid.

  “What about me?” I asked. “We got to get on with it, he said. Well, I’m trying.”

  “I know,” Grand said. “Jesus is easier on young ones, I guess.”

  I almost spit chop suey onto the coffee table in front of me. I loved Grand, but if she thought what Jesus was putting me through was easy, then Jesus was full of crap.

  Someone opened Grand’s front door, and Daddy shouted, “Ma, you seen Florine?”

  “In here,” Grand called. Daddy leaned against the doorframe to the living room. He looked from Grand to me and back again.

  “Dammit, Ma,” he said to Grand, “stop messing with us. We can manage juss fine.”

  And he burst into tears, so I did too, and this time I did spit my food back into my plate. Grand put down her knitting and said, “In the kitchen. Both of you.”

  “Can’t do this,” Daddy sobbed, sitting down at the table. “I’m goin’ crazy out of my head.”

  “We got to do it, Daddy,” I sobbed. “We got to get on with things. You said so.”

  “Who the hell tol’ you that?” Daddy said. “Some asshole? Can’t stop thinking of what god-awful trouble Carlie might have gotten mixed up into. Can’t think of nothin’ else. Can’t do nothin’ else. Drink, maybe.”

  “You can do more than that,” Grand said. “But you got to put one foot in front of the other.”

  “Got no choice,” Daddy said, wiping his hand over his wet face. “Got no choice.”

  The teakettle shrieked, but before Grand could pour the tea, Daddy’s soggy thoughts veered in another direction and he decided we had to go home, right then, so across the road we went, me half holding him up. I went to bed to cry some more and to talk to Carlie before I went to sleep. Daddy was on the phone at midnight to Parker, yet again.

  Sometime after that, Pastor Billy Krum showed up. I woke to hear him knocking at the door. “This is Billy,” he shouted to Daddy. “Let me in, for chrissake.”

  Pastor Billy ran the white church down the road. Sundays, he was a preacher. Every other day, he hauled lobsters off Spruce Point. He and Daddy had gone to school together. Daddy never went to church, but Billy and he played poker together.

  “I ain’t letting you in,” Daddy shouted, but I ran to the door. I stared at Billy on the other side of the door like he was some night angel.

  He smiled, his blue eyes kind. “You going to let me in, Florine?”

  So I did, and then Billy said, “You’d probably best go back to bed,” and so I lay there and listened as he let Daddy puke up remarks that only a devil would spit out without being embarrassed. He wailed away, saying things like, “What did I do to drive her off? Why did she leave me? I should have treated her better. It’s my fault. God damn the bitch to hell. What was she thinking? I hope she’s dead, because if she isn’t, I’m going to kill her.” Billy’s answers were soft, when he gave them. Mostly, he let Daddy go on and somehow, together, they wrestled the devil back to hell for the night. I fell asleep at about four in the morning.

  A
couple of hours later, Billy woke me for school. This was the second time in two nights that I hadn’t slept much. But I didn’t dare to disagree with God’s messenger. He handed me a lunch that Grand had bagged up for me and delivered to him.

  Before I went out the door, Billy said to me in his voice made of gravel and honey, “Florine, you are one of God’s angels, straight from heaven. And God don’t give his angels anything they can’t handle.”

  I pondered that as I walked to the bus. If I was an angel, why couldn’t I fly somewhere and find my mother? And where the hell was heaven, anyway? Thoughts pinged around my brain like moths looking for a light. I didn’t want to face Dottie, Bud, and Glen. I didn’t want to face Rose. I didn’t want to face anyone. The bus was at the stop when I reached it and I sat in a seat by myself toward the middle. When Rose’s stop came and she got on, she spied me and waved. I sank lower in my seat but she plunked herself down beside me anyway. “Hold out your hand,” she said, “I found this for you.” She put a heart-shaped pink rock into my palm.

  12

  Later that day, as Rose and I struggled through her math lesson, the school principal’s deep voice came over the intercom.

  “Please return to your classrooms,” he ordered.

  “He sounds like God,” Rose said, and we giggled as we walked back to the room.

  It was dead quiet, with all eyes on Mrs. Richmond. She stood in front of her desk, her face as serious as I’d ever seen it. “Sit down, Florine. Rose,” she said, and we did. Then she said to the class, “I have some very bad news. President Kennedy was shot this morning in Dallas, Texas. I’m sorry to tell you he just died.” She took a tissue from the pocket of her Friday suit, lifted her glasses off her nose, and wiped at her eyes.

  At least they know what happened to him, I thought. Then I felt bad for thinking that. Rose turned around in her seat and said to me, “My Poppy said the Russians would kill him and they did. Will they bomb us now he’s dead? Poppy says they hate us.”