The Mangrove Coast df-6 Page 5

  “It sounds like you’re not a big fan of your stepfather.”

  “He’s not my stepfather anymore. He’s my mother’s ex-husband.” “You don’t like him.”

  “I respect Frank. At times I even find him likable and entertaining. But he never pretended to be my real father. No, with Frank and me, it was… it was more like a business arrangement. I think we both knew we had to accept each other or risk hurting my mother. Even when I was very little I can remember thinking that. It was the only way to keep my mom happy, and we both loved my mother very much.” She paused for a moment, remembering how it was, before she added, “You said my dad, my real dad, had a picture of me. Did he ever show you a picture of my mom?”

  I nodded. He had. Yes, he certainly had.

  Bobby had carried a couple of photos of Gail. One, I couldn’t remember much about… a busty teenage Latina girl in shorts and a T-shirt? Yeah… posed in front of some kind of fast car. A GTO, maybe or a 442. One of the popular muscle cars of the day. Essence of the American male from that period: dream car, dream girl, a bank loan and marital obligations implied.

  But the picture of Gail I remembered best was a glamour shot apparently taken by a professional photographer: haunting eyes, high cheekbones that created their own shadows in tricky lighting, long black hair with auburn overtones brushed as bright and smooth as a candle’s flame. It was the face of a starlet; one of the classic beauties from the forties. Imagine Rita Hayworth, but with Veronica Lake’s sleepy, secretive eyes, and you’d come pretty close to Gail Richardson.

  Bobby had called it his “‘Twelfth of Never’ photograph.” Which made no sense until one night, as I boiled coffee over a can of Sterno, tropic rain drumming down, he explained: “It’s because of the way she looks. Her face, her hair, the way her eyes look right into mine. It reminds me of the song ‘The Twelfth of Never.’ It’s our song, Gail’s and mine.”

  I said, “Huh?”

  “What‘a’ya mean, ‘huh?’”

  “I mean ‘The Twelfth of Never.’ I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  At first, he thought I was kidding. Then he realized that I wasn’t. “Doc, you’re telling me you’ve never heard it? Not even on the radio? The Johnny Mathis song, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Nope. But it’s been a couple of years since I’ve been back to the States. Nearly four years, actually.”

  His expression was pained. “You’d have to live on the frigging moon not to have heard that song.”

  I was boiling the coffee, listening to the rain, looking at the blue flame of my miniature chemical fire: Sterno in the jungle. “The moon,” I said. “For the last few years, yeah. The moon, that pretty nearly describes the places I’ve been.”

  He said, “You’re serious. You’re really serious. Okay… you want to know what the song’s like? Look at my wife. The way her face is, that’s exactly what the song sounds like. Too beautiful even to describe. A thousand years ago, she coulda been an Aztec princess or she could be Miss Latin America today. You know what you can’t tell from that photograph? Her eyes; Gail’s got the most unusual eyes you’ve ever seen. Her right eye’s bright blue. Powder blue like those stones the Navaho Indians wear. Those stones… turquoise, that’s what they call it. But her left eye is green. Really deep green, jungle green. I look at her eyes and I know that there’ll never be anyone else for me but Gail. Like until the twelfth of never, get it? I mean forever.”

  Later, much later, when I finally heard the song, Bobby had been dead for, what, six months? Maybe a year. But listening to it, I’d thought about how right the man was. In his life, there had been only one true love. Gail. One blue eye, one green eye. And probably his toddler daughter, as well. Another girl with unusual eyes.

  Back then, I’d thought of them as Bobby’s girls.

  The only loves he would ever have. Just like he’d said: forever.

  To Amanda, I now said, “I never met your mother, but I remember the photos. She was a very beautiful woman.”

  “She still is. She’s in her forties, but the men-when she walks into a room? — men still stop what they’re doing and stare. She has that

  … I don’t know what you’d call it. That grace or something, it’s almost like an odor. When the two of us go into a restaurant or a lounge, she’s the one who gets the attention. But if I try to joke about it, like, Hey, Mom, they think I’m your younger plain-Jane sister, she gets this really hurt look in her eyes. Because she loves me, understand, and I think she’s always felt bad that she’s so much prettier than I am.”

  When I started to speak, Amanda held up her palm, shushing me. “I’m not fishing for compliments here, so you don’t need to offer any. I’m trying to make you see how it was with Frank and my mom. He wanted to possess her, and that’s exactly what he did. He possessed her, treated her like some kind of treasure. Which sounds great until you realize that treasure is nothing more than property with a specific value. There’s a Hindu saying that a woman’s face is shaped by her heart. My mother’s face is soft and kind and caring, but it’s not very strong. She let it happen, which isn’t uncommon for women of her generation. But she’s still the one who allowed herself to become completely dependent on Frank. And that’s why she was so unprepared for what happened last year.”

  What happened, according to Amanda, was a woman named Capricia and then a man named Jackie Merlot.

  4

  In terms of male behavior, the story of the Calloways is so unfortunately commonplace that you have to wonder about the validity of the human male as a lifetime mate. When Frank gave up his psychology practice, his land syndicate business blossomed, then it boomed. He kept his old secretary, a woman named Betty Marsh, and hired a second secretary to handle the growing workload. She was a twenty-seven-year-old former art student by the name of Capricia Worthington, “Cappy” for short, which Frank allowed a nautical interpretation, and so his name of endearment for her became Skipper.

  “I don’t know when the affair started,” Amanda told me. “I didn’t see much of Mom and Frank before the split up because my job keeps me so busy. I’m district manager for Vita Tech, a medical supply company. We’re based outside Pompano Beach, just south of Deerfield, and I’m almost always on the road. That, plus I share a condo with a girlfriend-a pretty nice place north of Lauderdale called Sea Ranch Lakes-so it’s not like I got by their house much.

  “But I remember this one time I was over there for dinner and Frank had this moony, distracted look. Like he had to really force himself to pay attention to what my mom or me said. Something else is, he gave Mom a couple of very pointed, well-disguised cuts about weight she’d gained and something about the way her skin looked, wrinkles, I think. My mom loves to lay out in the sun.

  “He’s very good at stuff like that, making criticism sound like it’s some harmless observation or a joke, but he really means it, and he knows how to make it hurt, too.”

  I asked, “Was it unusual for him to criticize your mother?”

  “About her actual physical appearance, yeah. She’s so beautiful, that’s what he loved about her. In every other way, though, he was a very demanding person. The way she dressed, the way she spoke, the way she hosted a dinner party. Frank was always in control, and he let her know it.

  “He was never loud or vicious, but just sharp enough to make his point stick. Oh yeah-that night, he made some remark about her being too old to do something. Learn to play tennis, I think, but he gave it a sexual connotation, as if to imply she was letting him down in the romance department. I didn’t say anything, but I felt like smacking him. My mom’s so damn sensitive, I knew she’d spend the next couple of weeks eating nothing but lettuce and carrots and fretting about the way she looked. Yeah, she’d gained a little weight. She was forty-four years old, for God’s sake. But Frank didn’t like it, so he had to let her know it and, at the time, I remember thinking, Uh-oh, this marriage is in trouble.”

  It was indeed.

  Fran
k moved out and rented a penthouse beach condo just across from Bahia Mar Marina, Lauderdale. Capricia Worthington moved in.

  “I met Skipper three or four months after the divorce was final. Frank was having a house built for her at Boca Grande. New life, new home, new ocean, that was the thinking, I guess. Frank was being very modern and civilized about it all, so he and his young bride invited me to dinner. I accepted out of curiosity more than anything else. What did this woman have that made Frank act like such a complete dumbass? That’s what I wanted to find out.

  “So I found out. She has the body, she has the looks, but in an… artificial mall-girl kind of way. Implants and fitness classes, that kind of body. Meet her and you get the feeling that, if stores sold women, she’d be in the front window of Dillards. Something else, she’s totally New Age, but the Junior League variety, the kind that takes money to maintain. She said things like ‘The reason I prefer crystals instead of magnets when there’s a full moon is, I’m an Aries, but with Scorpio rising, so my needs and my sensitivity change just like the tides.’ The details may be off, but that’s the kind of stuff she’d say. Or she’d say, ‘I hope to do a couple of seminars in Sedona, Arizona, over the ski season and learn exactly why I’m lunar-sensitive more than solar-active.’ Buzz phrases. She uses all the newest buzz phrases. A real ditz.”

  “Sedona?” I said. “I have a friend who says Sedona is a major refueling spot for alien spaceships.”

  Amanda mistook the comment for sarcasm. “Seriously, Sedona’s a real place. She wants to go there and take a seminar or take a sweat lodge, one of the two. Frank, he just sat there smiling, accepting it like a complete idiot. He told me that’s what she offered him, a new way of looking at life. She’d awakened a new spirituality in him. Something like that. They’d known each other in a previous karma-Jesus, it was all I could do not to bust out laughing-and that, together, they’d discovered a mystic link to certain elements in the sea. Bottle-nosed dolphins. They are very, very big on dolphins.”

  I liked the way she said that. I liked her hard-nosed rationality; was beginning to see Amanda Richardson more and more as an individual and less and less as the daughter of a long-dead friend.

  She was still talking about the new wife; didn’t like her, but I also got the impression that part of it, maybe a lot of it, was jealousy. “My God, listening to Skipper, it really was a struggle to keep a straight face. But Frank, this guy I’d always known to be damn near cold-blooded when it came to logic or business or anything like that, was sitting there sipping a fine cabernet telling me he and his new squeeze had been talking to Flipper. The way he was behaving, it was like aliens had come down from Mars and taken over his body or something.”

  I said, “When people go through big changes, they sometimes stop thinking rationally.”

  “It sounds like you speak from experience.”

  “I do my share of dumb things. I’ve gone through periods where I seem to specialize in the behavior. But I’m usually rational.”

  “There was a time when I could say the same thing about my stepfather.”

  “Then I don’t understand it.”

  “Yeah, well, you haven’t met Skipper. Frank was thinking with his testicles, trust me.” She paused for a moment; gave me an amused look. “Tell me something, Dr. Ford. You’re a biologist, one of those solid, mild-mannered, UP-front guys. It’s practically stenciled on your forehead. And Frank can’t be more than seven or eight years older than you. So why is it that middle-aged men confuse immaturity with youth? Or is it just that an aging brain starts shrinking before the rest of a man’s body?”

  She gave it a light touch, but there was some anger down in there deep, the same place her thirty-second rule came from.

  Thinking, Me? Mild-mannered? I said, “So your stepfather’s not the only one in the family who knows how to make cutting remarks.”

  “It wasn’t aimed at you, just an overall observation.”

  “Men in general, huh?”

  “They do seem to be fairly predictable. Not all, but most. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “I wasn’t wondering. I was commenting on your attitude.” When I saw her expression condense, I added quickly, “Not criticizing. Just commenting.”

  “You didn’t see how devastated my mom was when Frank left. Like I told you, she was dependent on him. I’d moved out, then he moved out. So there she is, forty-some years old, overweight and a dud in bed according to the husband who abandoned her, living all alone. This beautiful woman, probably the kindest person I’ve ever met, and I’m not saying that just because I’m her daughter. She was hurt, disillusioned, she was depressed and vulnerable as hell. A perfect target for any wandering asshole who wanted to take advantage of her. You expect me to be happy about that?”

  “Are you talking about the guy she disappeared with or someone else?”

  Amanda said, “I’m talking about him, yeah, that’s exactly the guy I’m describing. Jackie Merlot, the one I’m telling you about.”

  According to Amanda, Gail had met Merlot years ago. She pronounced it “MUR-lowe,” similar to the pronunciation of the wine. At about the same time, Gail also started seeing Calloway as her psychologist. “Apparently, Mom knew Merlot back when the two of us still lived alone. I say apparently because I can’t remember ever seeing the guy until about eleven months ago. When I did meet him, just looking at him, something about his face, those eyes, it gave me the creeps. Jesus, talking about him gives me goosebumps right now. See?”

  I looked at the freckled arm extended toward me. When I touched my fingers to her forearm-there were, indeed, goosebumps-she flinched slightly, saying, “Merlot was supposedly one of Frank’s earliest land syndicate investors. I think he and my mom met through Frank at some party or something, got to be friends, but once she started to date Frank, Merlot vanished from the picture.”

  Nearly twenty years later, Merlot had reappeared.

  “I don’t know how he heard about the divorce. Maybe he read it in the paper or something, but only a couple of weeks after the thing was final, Merlot was back on the scene. Mom had been living by herself for more than a year by that time. Frank and his soulmate bimbo were a public item, not even trying to hide the fact they were living together. He’d even gone to the trouble of making a full confession to my mom about his affair. About why he’d outgrown the relationship and why he hoped they’d be friends, but their life as husband and wife were over, because he needed space to grow and he’d met an old spirit probably from another lifetime, meaning Skipper. Can you imagine someone as nice as my mom sitting there listening to this bullshit? Also that he wished her well, but that she had to go on and find a new life. Nice guy, huh?”

  “Kind of surprising behavior for a psychologist.”

  “Yeah, it’s like little Skipper had actually screwed the man’s brains loose. But you know what gets me most of all? Frank really is a pretty nice guy. That’s one of the reasons it hurt my mom so much. She wasn’t just dependent on him, she liked him. He took care of her, he made her laugh. About a month after Frank left, she told me the whole story. The both of us just sat there holding each other and crying.”

  I was sitting at the galley table, drinking iced tea, listening. I could look across the water to the row of guide slips, each with its own ornate wooden sign. Name of captain, name of skiff. At the end of the T-dock was Janet Mueller’s bright blue houseboat moored snugly among the more expensive sailboats, Aquasports, Makos and fiberglass party cruisers. Curled up on the stern deck of Janet’s boat was the marina’s black cat, Crunch amp; Des. His tail was slapping rhythmically in sunlight. He looked as predatory and as bored as some of the big lions I’d seen years ago while working in Mozambique.

  Thinking about Mozambique, the way its jungle rose as a green bluff out of the mud of the Zambezi River, caused me to think about the small Central American nation of Masagua. Similar jungle, similar earth odors, similar rustred rivers. It a
lso caused me to think about Pilar Balserio.

  I said to Amanda, “I’ve read that losing a lover is like having someone die. Someone you care about. When a relationship ends, they say you have to go through a mourning period.”

  “Well… my mom certainly did that. She’s a very sensitive person. If there’s a commercial on television that uses a dog or a baby, she gets teary eyed. It used to drive me nuts, but that’s just the way she is. When I was growing up, all my girlfriends absolutely loved her. Same with the boyfriend I had in high school. The two of them still stay in touch. At least, they stayed in touch before she met Merlot. See, I’m telling you about the kind of person my mother is. She’s very caring and extremely thoughtful. You need to understand that to understand why I’m positive she’s in some kind of trouble.”

  According to Amanda, Merlot began by telephoning her mother regularly, checking on her, then dropping by to bring her books or little presents. Gail Richardson was lonely, depressed, and she welcomed the friendship.

  “This was after they’d spent quite a bit of time getting reacquainted on the Internet.”

  I said, “What?”

  “You know, the Internet, the America Online thing. You don’t have a computer?”

  “No.”

  “I thought everyone had a PC. But you know how it works, right?”

  I nodded. Tomlinson had told me about it.

  “Mom and Merlot did a bunch of E-mailing, visiting the same chat rooms, that sort of stuff. Conversations through cyberspace. Merlot in his house, Mom in our old place, which is why it always seems so safe having on-line friends. I guess the two of them spent a lot of time getting reacquainted, just typing away.