Strawberries in the Sea (35 page)

“Gone. No change in story. Don't worry. He's got plenty to hide. Not just the beating. He can't brag he made a fool of you without admitting you made a fool of him.”

“Thanks,” she said bitterly. It was hard to shape words with her battered mouth. She wrote, “You sure know how to kill anybody's self-respect. What do you mean, a fool? I found him in the surf, half-frozen and scared senseless. I thought Jamie was dead but by accident, not murder. . . . I was trying to think what to do about him and he kept panicking.” The pen slowed a little; damn Edwin's eyes, watching and assessing. What did he think he was, a lie detector? Bearing down on the pen she wrote, “When Jamie showed up here today I was surprised.
Glad
,” she added. “I thought Quint would be too.”

It was the first time she'd written his name. The shape of the words brought him before her eyes in a constantly changing series of images so that she was temporarily blinded, she didn't know what to write next.

Edwin got up suddenly and began fixing a drink for himself. Freed, she wrote, “Instead, he went off his head. If I was a fool, it was because I dragged him ashore that night. I should've left him there and told somebody else where he was.”

She shoved the pad across to Edwin, and went back to getting supper. She cooked the corn and broiled steak for him and heated up the beef stew for herself. When they'd finished, he suggested going out to the cove and she went eagerly; it seemed months since she'd walked to the shore and tonight there was an almost supernatural beauty to the scene.

She wondered how long it would be before her eyes wouldn't go involuntarily to the place where Quint had been lying that night. She found she didn't want to be here after all, and pretended to slap fiercely at mosquitoes. Finally she told Edwin she was going back to the house, and left him climbing the rocks on the far side of the cove.

She sat on the stairs with her guitar. At least her hands weren't hurt, though she couldn't sing very well with her sore lips and lame jaw. She hummed safe songs that were talismans to return her to innocence. Nothing could do that, of course, but she might thus find a recognizable Rosa.

She went to bed when it was dusk, leaving a lamp lit in the kitchen. Listening to the crickets, she wondered again why Edwin had really come. He was through with the Parnell job. But with Laura Parnell? Whatever drove him, she was glad of it. She couldn't imagine, or didn't want to, what her frame of mind would have been tonight if he hadn't come.

S
he slept hard, and when she woke up it was like arousing from some nearly fatal illness. A crisis had passed, and she could feel only relief. She was very sore and lame, especially where she had been kicked, but she winced more at the debasement of it than at the pain.

The morning was clear, boats were already leaving, and the cry of a gull banking past her window, so close she could hear the soft rush of his wings, was like a summons to her, a message from the boat. She could hardly wait to get out there.

Edwin was already up. He poached eggs for her without consulting her, and served them with soft bread and butter. If he'd come to brood over lost opportunities, he didn't show it. Maybe he thought she was in worse shape than he was, she thought philosophically. Ah well, he didn't know the half of it.

The reflection of her bruised face in the mirror made her recoil.

“I wish I'd brought my paints,” Edwin wrote. “You're sensational.”

God, but it was good to have him there. She could even laugh, tender as her mouth was. “Look at
this!
” she bragged, pulling up her shirt. His eyelids flickered when he saw her ribs, he sucked in one cheek as if he were biting it.

When she was filling her thermos bottle, he wrote, “Fix more. I'm going too. Take that cake.”

She made a face as if he'd suggested a drink before breakfast, but packed the cake carefully in the round cookie tin Jude had sent full of individually wrapped tomatoes.

Like the guitar, like Edwin,
Sea Star
was reality, and maybe all that she was meant to have. If Edwin should marry, or have a valid, absorbing love affair, she'd lose him, but for now he was here, and now was all one could count on.

They lay to for a coffee break in Bull Cove, and Jamie, seeing them from a little distance offshore, came speeding in. When he saw her face he went blank, as if he'd been slugged senseless. For once he was without words.

“I know it,” she said at once. “I'm sensational. Fabulous. Edwin told me.”

“What the hell
happened?
” He kept peering as if trying to discover her among the various purples and sick yellows.

“I tripped going downstairs. It's a wonder you didn't hear the crash. I was sure it would bring the Percys over, but maybe they thought it was a sonic boom. I did what you could call a bang-up job.”

“Should you be out here?” He glanced accusingly at Edwin, who gave him a benign smile and went on sketching.

“Why not?” asked Rosa. Our motto, she thought. “I'm like a singed cat, a lot better than I look.” She was so glad that neither of them knew about Quint that she felt almost drunk. A sore face was a helpful disguise while Jamie told her about Quint giving himself up.

“So now you aren't the Mafia any more,” she said. “Have some cake.”

“Hey, thanks. . . . No now the line is, ‘Take warning from this, it could really happen the next time,' I know one thing, that bunch won't be back, and nobody else will come that doesn't want a fight. We got the message across. But I was some glad when that little guy showed up. None of us wanted him on our conscience, especially when they began saying he'd be full of buckshot when he surfaced.” He laughed. “Know what? He thought he'd killed
me!
For a minute there I thought he was going to hug and kiss me like one of those French generals.”

She laughed with him. Edwin, putting down his sketchbook to take some cake, didn't know what the joke was, but he looked genial. It was all fine. A happy ending for everybody, Quint gone, the story over. . . . She watched the two men eating the cake she'd baked for Con. No, for Quint. Edwin was showing Jamie the sketch he'd made of him, Jamie was amused and impressed. He was making an honest attempt to consider Edwin an ordinary man, neither fiend nor angel.

“How can I congratulate him for winning that award?” he asked Rosa.

“Say it to his face, or write it.” She took the notepad and pen out of Edwin's shirt pocket and handed it to Jamie, who self-consciously wrote his message and showed it to Edwin. Edwin nodded, and held his knife over the cake, eyebrows questioning.

“Don't mind if I do,” said Jamie, a little loudly, but visibly gratified at being able to communicate. Rosa sat on the engine box delicately sipping coffee through painful lips, her lids downcast so she could watch Jamie past her lashes. What grew between him and her—if she let it grow—would take time, but it would be sound and good. No doubt of that. Jamie wouldn't be coming to her for refuge; he was one of the most self-sufficient men she'd ever met. Jude had mentioned the solid silver dollar. Was that Jamie Sorensen?

It was only an insubstantial idea, almost as ungraspable as fog. She had bruises that nobody could see, and if she was glad that these two men couldn't know about her and Quint, she couldn't wipe out the fact that
she
knew.

The outer bruises should last forever, she thought bitterly. Too bad he couldn't have given me some real scars, to remind me every time I looked in the mirror. That's what I deserve.

Jamie said, “Thanks for the mug-up, friend.” He untied the line that held the boats together. “I'll be up tonight, okay? I've got some nylon for my baitbags.” He didn't wait for an answer, but went away fast, as he always did.

No matter what she did all afternoon, baiting up, washing sheets, going with Edwin to pick blackberries on the back shore, she was as conscious of Jamie as if he were there with her. She carried on long involved conversations with him which never reached any satisfactory conclusions; always there was the wall between. Transparent but unshatterable, not even to be scratched with a diamond, it was so hard.

You should hang on to him, you fool, she harshly addressed herself. You can take your time about it, but for God's sake—no, for your own— don't lose him. There are a thousand Cons, and
con
is right, but only one Jamie Sorensen. So what if there'll never be anything again like what you had with Con at the first of it? There's never another first: first pup, first grade, first boat. So you go on to the second, and that always has something the first didn't have.

But the wall remained, growing thicker as the evening came on. Edwin, though physically with her, was aloof, and she thought, We're not much help to each other. People
are
islands, and sometimes not even within shouting distance.

After supper he saw Jamie coming before she did, and went out. Apparently he too thought she should grapple Jamie to her with hoops of steel the way it said in the Bible about somebody or other.

At least Jamie wasn't asking for firm answers tonight. They talked quite a bit about the baitbags; he liked a good-sized one, and she knit a sample for him. He approved it, and after all this she asked leading questions about the fracas the other night. He was keeping his word about not applying pressure, and she was grateful for that. Her own doom-laden thoughts ran on and on beneath the surface; the house was full of Quint, haunted by him. Jamie couldn't exorcise the presence, he only strengthened it. His very innocence gave it more and more substance.

I will never be free of it, she thought with chilling simplicity.

What kind of woman was she? The kind who would go to bed with any charming scoundrel who could make her feel sorry for him? Who could wheedle and blarney her into thinking she was needed? Or was that only her excuse? . . . Seal Point was right, whether it laughed or pitied. So she'd run away from the deserved result of her own behavior, only to smash her face upon the unyielding and undestructible truth out here.

Jamie thought Con had taken her in. Could he be that charitable about Quint? No. She could never tell him, and she couldn't live with it between them, not as he wanted her to live with him.

The unshatterable wall was the simple fact that she wasn't good enough for him.

“What are you thinking?” he asked all at once. “Or is it the bruises that give you that kind of melancholy look?”

“Like a sad clown,” she said. “No, I'm aching in spots. I guess I'll take some aspirin.”

She got up to go to the sink, eager to get away from his eyes. So this was over too, though he didn't know it yet, and pity made her throat ache. Pity for him or for herself, it didn't matter, it hurt just as much.

“You ought to be in bed,” he said, pushing back his chair. “I'll be going.”

“Looking for herring tonight?” she asked, shaking the tablets into her hand.

“I'll always be looking for herring,” he said with a laugh. “It's not just a business, it's a calling.” He came up behind her and put his hands lightly on her shoulders. She felt his lips on her nape. “Your poor mouth's too sore to kiss,” he said.

When he had gone she stood in the dusky kitchen slowly stroking her throat, trying to drive out the pain. But I won't go away from here, she thought. I won't be driven. Anybody has to stop running sometime. . . .

Edwin came in while she was still standing there, he couldn't have been far away. He lighted a lamp and set it on the table, took down the cribbage board from the wall, went into his room and came out with an unopened bottle of Jim Beam.

The instant he put it on the table, she removed it and pushed it roughly into his hands.

“I don't know what in hell you're trying to forget,” she told him. “But I know about
me
, and I've already rolled in the muck enough without getting drunk. And I'll be damned if I'll watch you doing it. Now if that's what you came out here for, you can just leave on the boat tomorrow.”

He tipped back his chair, put his fingertips together, and nodded meditatively. She wanted to hit him. “And don't be so superior! If it's
love
”—she twisted her mouth on the word, and it hurt—“why don't you fall in love with somebody who'll love
you?
Or do you choose wrong on purpose, because otherwise there's no excitement?”

He shrugged.

“I know all about it,” she said. She plucked the notepad from his pocket. “I slept with that little whoremaster,” she wrote in a slashing hand. “Because he had nightmares, and he begged. He didn't have to beg very hard. I'd have done anything to hold on to him. Smuggled him off in the boat, sell my property to set him up down east somewhere. We talked about it. He had it all planned out and I never said No. I knew the second day that Jamie wasn't dead, but as long as Quint thought so, he needed me.”

She laughed raucously, feeling tears in her eyes, and went on writing. “He beat me up when he found out. Everything else, all he said tome, was forgotten. He didn't even want my money. Now you know what I've got to get drunk about. What's your excuse?”

She shoved the pad at him. His cheekbones were flushed and his eyes in slits as if against too-bright light. He wrote, “Same as yours. I went back.”

She saw everything behind the words. She saw the woman in the garden, with her hands up to her hair and then in the shadowy hall, smiling at Edwin with hungry uncertainty, her hand on his arm. Superimposed on this, clear in itself yet not draining vigor from the under-images, there was Con at the wheel of his boat, glancing around as if he'd heard his name, his eyes twinkling like the spots on the sea where wind and sun hit together; and there was Quint in her arms, and his husky whisper in her ear.

She looked again at the brief black words on the pad. “But that's not all,” she said aloud. She went on with an effort, and the words fell desolately into the deep well of silence. “It's not the disgust that makes you ache. It's the b—”