Snapshots (3 page)

“The best. Better than your mom's chicken and noodles.”

“That's saying quite a lot,” Trista offered with a smile. She got up and rinsed her bowl off in the sink. “I believe I'll turn in early,” she said, but he couldn't help wishing she'd stay in the kitchen and talk awhile. He hadn't realized how starved he was for human companionship.

“Hey,” he said. “How about a walk around the block?”

Trista shook her head. “Not tonight,” she replied offhandedly. “Catch you in the morning.” She touched his shoulder briefly before retreating down the hall and closing the guest-room door.

Words sprang unbidden to his mind:
Such a shame that Trista has stayed single so long.
She'd make a fine wife, a good mother. He entertained the fleeting notion that it might be partly his fault that she'd never married, his and Martine's, but he didn't linger on it. There was no point in allowing even more regrets to enter his consciousness; no sense in twisting this situation into something it wasn't.

Still, he minded that Trista couldn't stay for a few more days. On the other hand, if she were here, neither he nor Martine would be likely to initiate a discussion of the intimate details of their marriage. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out if that would be good or bad.

He stared down at the melting ice cream in his dish. For a moment, it seemed like a metaphor for his life at present. Melting away, becoming something he didn't recognize anymore.

In the morning, he expected Trista to show up in the kitchen for breakfast and intended to suggest running together before she headed for the hospital. But she'd already left in Martine's car, so he gulped two cups of high-octane coffee, scribbled a note saying he was sorry he'd missed her and went to work.

He only saw Trista briefly on Sunday morning before she left for the airport. He would have driven her himself, but she'd already summoned a cab before he woke up. She seemed subdued, worried, but this scarcely registered with him. All his thoughts were focused on springing Martine from the hospital.

The night before, Martine had quizzed him thoroughly on the phone about what time he'd be there to pick her up. She'd remained all too quiet on his previous visits, barely replying when he spoke to her, but now he entertained the tentative hope that Martine was willing to give their marriage another chance. Maybe a couple of weeks at Sweetwater Cottage, just the two of them, would smooth things over.

As soon as Trista's taxi disappeared around the corner, Rick started for the hospital. He bought a bouquet of flowers from a roadside vendor, and when he reached Martine's floor at the hospital, he bounded off the elevator, smiling at the nurses and aides at the nurses' station. Martine's room was only a couple of doors down the hall, and he rounded the corner prepared to kiss her hello.

The bed was empty.

A cold hand clenched his heart. Of course he thought the worst. Visions of emergencies straight from TV dramas sprang to mind, all punctuated by doctors running down the hall, their lab coats flying, and someone yelling, “Stat! Hurry, she's coding!”

He rushed back to the nurses' station, losing a couple of daisies in the process. The flowers skidded across the highly polished tile floor as they scattered. Oblivious to his panic, one of the aides, a young girl named Kitty, glanced up from her coffee and doughnut. A scrim of powdered sugar trailed unheeded across her upper lip.

“Where's my wife? Is she all right?”

“Yes, Mr. McCulloch, she checked out about an hour ago.”

This stopped him in his tracks. “She did?” He was incredulous. They'd discussed on the phone last night how he would be there to pick her up as soon as Trista left. He'd told Martine jokingly that he'd drive her directly to Star-bucks for a chai tea latte because she claimed that she was going through withdrawal; she usually treated herself to one every day.

“A man came to get her.” Kitty took another bite of her doughnut.

“A man—?” For one horrifying moment, a new picture of Padrón forcing Martine out of the hospital at gunpoint flashed through his mind. But Padrón was dead.

As this irrational vision faded, one of the nurses sitting behind the counter extended her hand, and in it was a white envelope. His name was scribbled on the front. It was Martine's handwriting, distinctive and easily recognizable by its wide lower loops.

“Mrs. McCulloch left this for you,” she said.

He accepted the envelope, slitted it open and walked slowly to the waiting area in a nearby alcove, where he sank onto one of the chairs to read the message.

Steve Lifkin, an attorney in the law office where Martine worked as a paralegal, was the guy who had written Martine those love notes. The letters had left no doubt in Rick's mind that Martine and Steve enjoyed an intimate, ongoing relationship of almost a year.

He glanced up when Kitty passed by. “Mr. McCulloch? Are you all right? You're so pale.”

“I'll be fine,” he said tonelessly. He stood, pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, but shoved it back in again. His first instinct was to call Martine and ask her what the hell she was doing. If she was with Steve, though, she wouldn't talk to him anyway. He wondered how she could have gone from joking about chai tea lattes last night to moving in with Steve today. He wondered what he was going to do with himself for the rest of his life, and he wondered why he cared.

In the days that followed, Martine's belongings disappeared mysteriously, piece by piece, from their Kendall home, as well as furniture that she'd brought into the marriage. The grandfather clock that had always stood in the foyer of her family's Columbia house, the engraved crystal wineglasses that were her mother's. Blank spaces on the walls appeared where Martine's beautiful watercolor paintings had been; the stained-glass window that she'd crafted so carefully was missing from where it hung on the screened porch. Every day when he arrived home from work, Rick would amble around the house, glumly taking note of the things that were newly missing, then sit down to a tasteless frozen dinner heated in the microwave.

At first he'd thought that before she left Miami, Trista must have known Martine wasn't going to come home from the hospital with him, but when she called two days after Martine left the hospital, she seemed astonished when he told her that Martine was living at Steve's place.

“Oh, Rick, I'm sorry,” Trista said, her voice low. Other women shrilled when they were upset, but not Trista. If anything, she became more centered.

He greeted this with silence. Though Trista and Martine had grown apart in recent years, he couldn't imagine Martine's embarking on such a course without running it past Trista first.

Trista sighed. “Rick, she told me on Saturday that she was going to file for divorce. She mentioned that you'd had a fight before Padrón forced her into the car, and she said she wanted to leave you. I couldn't talk her out of it. I tried. She never mentioned that another man was involved.”

“She and Steve have been having an affair for almost a year. Maybe she'll fill you in on what's happened,” he said.

“She doesn't talk to me,” Trista replied despairingly. “And I don't understand her or the things she does sometimes.”

“Ditto for me.”

After they hung up, Rick buried his face in his hands. Through his pain, he was furious with Martine for putting them through this and angry with himself because his wife had felt a need to include another man in her life. He was well aware that it was too late to go back and change the way things were, and he didn't much like the way they were going to be, either.

Shortly after this conversation, Rick descended into a depression the likes of which he had never experienced. As always when things got tough, he began to ruminate over his life as it was before things got so complicated. Before he had a job that was becoming increasingly difficult to perform.

Maybe that was because he was drinking too much, staying out later and later at one bar or another and avoiding one-on-one social situations of any kind. Still, he believed that he was performing his job to the best of his ability until his boss called him into his office late one Friday in early March.

“Rick,” Shorty said, walking around his desk and perching on the edge of it as he was wont to do when attempting to establish rapport. “You've been through a lot, and I think you need a break. I hope you don't take this as a put-down, and I have great respect for your ability, but I'm going to put you on an extended leave starting today.”

Rick hadn't seen this coming at all. “Extended leave?”

“Don't worry, we'll welcome you back after a few months. We're giving you time to pull yourself back together, that's all. I'll keep in touch, and—”

“What have I done wrong?” Rick was in a state of bewildered disbelief; how could this be happening? On top of everything else?

Shorty sighed and stared out the window for a long moment. “Son, you're not playing at the top of your game. People complain that you don't call them back, you forgot an important meeting last week, and I suspect that your mind's not focused on your work. I'm doing this for your sake as much as the department's. I don't want you finding yourself in an edgy situation and getting into trouble.”

I'm already in trouble, at looks like.
“My divorce will be final this week. After that—”

“Please don't argue, Rick. What's the name of that place in South Carolina you go to every summer? Where your family has a vacation cottage?”

“Tappany Island,” Rick said in a low tone.

“Take a break—that's all I'm asking.” Shorty paused at the door and appeared to be thinking something over for a moment, before abruptly leaving the room. Rick sensed that the conversation had been almost as hard on his boss as it had been on him.

Numb after this dismissal, still scarcely believing it, Rick cleaned out his desk and set about getting roaring drunk as soon as he got home. When he emerged on the other side of this binge with a nasty hangover, he tossed some things into a suitcase in preparation for leaving.

He'd planned to head for Sweetwater Cottage anyway. He just hadn't expected to be going alone.

1981

C
lick: Class picture of Miss Davison's third grade, Class 3-A, Eugene Field Elementary School, Columbia, South Carolina. Rick, the new boy in class, stands in the back row because he's tall. I'm grinning, Martine is biting her lip, and we're holding hands.

The first picture of Rick, Martine and me was snapped on his second day in Miss Davison's third grade. There he is, standing in the back row with the other big boys, grinning widely and completely at home.

In the picture, Martine and I sit in the front row, two skinny nine-year-old girls missing various front teeth. We were the twins. Our names were always scrunched together—TristanMartine. If you're not a twin, you probably have a hard time imagining how we were never separate identities but a collective noun, not to mention that people could hardly tell us apart, though we are mirror twins. I'm left-handed, Martine is right-handed. I part my hair on the left, and Martine parts hers on the right.

Rick was a transfer student who arrived in the middle of the semester, and we were drawn to him as soon as we spotted him shuffling his feet beside the teacher's desk on that first morning. He had sandy hair shading toward brown and blue eyes tending more toward gray than ours, which were on the violet side. Freckles. A strong, straight nose. High cheekbones that were to become craggy in adolescence and a ready smile that would become his trademark.

I can't explain it, but it was as if the three of us were instantly connected on sight, as if someone somewhere had thrown a master switch and we were three instead of two plus one. Soon we were no longer TristanMartine; we were Trista, Martine and Rick. Three names were more difficult to run together than two.

By Rick's second week in our class, we'd formed a secret club we called the ILTs. This came about when the school cafeteria served tacos and we discovered that we all loved them more than any other lunch food at Field School. For some reason, Rick felt compelled to trade his prized red-and-blue Richard Petty Matchbox car for Goose Fraser's unwanted taco and chivalrously presented it to us. We showed our appreciation by sharing it with him, after which the three of us raced through the wide halls back to the classroom in spite of the No Running rule, screaming, “I love tacos!”

Even today I can almost smell the chalk dust in the air as I remember how, under Miss Davison's stern eye, we laboriously wrote “I will not run in the hall” a hundred times on wrinkled notebook paper with our stubby pencils. In the back of the school bus on the way home, we unanimously agreed that ILT was our shorthand for I Love Tacos. On the reverse side of one of the “I will not run in the hall” papers, the three of us added our first initials to ILT so we'd have names that rhymed. Rick became Rilt, Martine was Milt and I was Tilt. The password to our secret club was “Burrito,” and that was what we also named the club goldfish, which belonged to Rick.

I was the introvert, my nose always stuck in a book. Rick was outgoing, the kind of guy everyone liked. And Martine—well, she was artistic and creative, mercurial, flighty and fun. It wasn't long before we discovered that we worked well together. Never a dull moment, Dad would always say, but it was clear that he doted on Rick, and soon, he considered Rick to be the son he'd always wanted.

By the time summer arrived, the three of us were inseparable and our parents had become good friends. We all lived in a new country-club subdivision grandiosely named Windsor Manor and populated with big two-story brick houses where professional people like my dad, a criminal lawyer, and my mother, a volunteer in local charities, lived and reared their families.

Windsor Manor abounded in vacant lots lushly shaded by tall and fragrant loblolly pines as well as a goodly number of oak trees cloaked in wisteria vine. The three of us claimed these lots for our own. Our tree house, erected in the low fork of an oak in the woods not far from our house, was the neighborhood gathering spot for all the kids.

Martine and I were raised Southern, my parents' families both having settled South Carolina before the American Revolution; Barrineaus and Woods fought for the Confederacy in what we were taught to call the War of Northern Aggression. Our grandmother, Claire Dawson Barrineau, signed Martine and me up for the Daughters of the American Revolution the day after we were born, and Rick's father's most prized possession was a copy of the Order of Secession, signed by one of his ancestors. He hung it over his desk at Carolina Gas and Energy, of which he was president.

That summer after Rick arrived was the first year that we three spent time together at Tappany Island, an unspoiled barrier island off the South Carolina coast reachable only by a picturesque side-swinging drawbridge. Rick's mother usually spent the whole summer there with Rick and his elder brother, Hal. Boyd McCulloch, Rick's father, drove down on weekends, and the first time we were invited to the cottage, Martine, our parents and I accompanied him in his big Roadmaster station wagon.

After a wonderful weekend, Mom and Dad departed on Sunday night with Boyd, but Martine and I stayed for the rest of the week. We settled happily into a guest room connected to another by a bath. Our room was decorated with antiques, heirloom quilts and hand-crocheted dresser scarves. We loved the ornate iron bedsteads, delighted in the wispy, drifting curtains that could be looped back to expose the view of the dunes with a slice of blue ocean beyond. Ever after, that was our room when we stayed at the cottage.

I mean to tell you, Sweetwater Cottage was no palace. It was an unpretentious old grande dame of a house, built high off the ground but not spiked up on stilts like the ones they build in flood zones today. The cottage was surrounded by a veranda, which we always called the porch because, Rick's father said,
veranda
sounded much too granda for a blowsy old lady like the cottage.

Rick's grandfather, Harold McCulloch, built the house on several oceanfront lots back in the 1940s when land was cheap, and the cottage sat far away from its neighbors. Over many years, the original three rooms were expanded into the present L-shaped structure with the Lighthouse room on top. The shingles on the outside have been painted many colors and were, in my childhood, a milky blue. Lilah Rose, Rick's mom, who delighted in decorating and redecorating both the cottage and her house in Windsor Manor, had the shingles painted yellow some years back, and she's the one who skirted the space under the house with white lattice.

Spreading oak trees shrouded in wispy curtains of gray moss shaded the house; dried fronds of palmettos at the edge of the dense woods across the road clattered in the breeze. The island abounded in roads of white sand, fine as sifted sugar; glistening salt marshes sheltered all manner of wildlife; tidal creeks wended their pristine, unspoiled way through the island. And best of all, we had the wide majestic ocean with its many moods.

Across the road was the river and the marsh, home to a variety of creatures both large and small. I loved to watch the birds—dapper little crested kingfishers, diving from tree limbs to catch their dinner, ospreys soaring and wheeling against the brilliant blue sky, graceful white ibis stalking the shallows. But we saw lots of animals, too, raccoons and otters and turtles. Even a couple of alligators.

I guess you've figured out that Tappany Island was a kids' paradise. Our primary playmates on the island were the innumerable nieces and nephews of Queen, who cooked and cleaned for Rick's family during the summer. Queen invariably arrived for work accompanied by a gaggle of beautiful brown-skinned children. When these happy denizens of the island weren't available to fish with us or play tag or join us in pestering Queen to whip up a batch of her wonderful featherlight waffles, the three of us, Rick, Martine and I, often rode bikes to Jeter's Market at the crossroads of Bridge Road and Center Street.

The store was fragrant with the smoky scent of the barbecued pork that the Jeters made in the wooden shed out back and with whatever fresh fish local fishermen brought in that day from the nearby public docks. Old toothless Mr. Jeter never minded if we kids read comic books without buying them, perhaps because while reading, we consumed great quantities of boiled peanuts and Gummi Bears, which he charged to the McCullochs' account.

We walked every one of those winding roads. We yanked untold numbers of blue crabs out of the marsh and poked curiously at jellyfish stranded on the wide sandy beach by the tide. So happy were we during our first summer there that we vowed on both spit and blood to meet on Tappany Island every single summer of our lives as long as we lived.

Making such a promise exhilarated us, gave the stamp of permanency to our extraordinary friendship, and was the occasion for Lilah Rose to snap a picture. We're nine years old, arms flung around each other, eyes squinting into the bright sunshine and wearing T-shirts with our club names Rilt, Milt and Tilt emblazoned across the front. Martine is sticking out her tongue at the camera, and Rick's fingers are forked behind my head, giving me devil's horns.

That's how it started for Rick and Martine and me. Later, after I read
The Three Musketeers
and we watched the movie video together at my insistence, we adopted “all for one, one for all” as our motto. It was unthinkable that anything would ever come between us.

Unthinkable—but inevitable. What we didn't know is that it would be one of us.

As I said, we were all best friends, but I first felt something special for Rick over and above friendship the day of our class picnic when were in sixth grade.

Our middle school was located across the street from a city park, and at the end of the school year, the room mothers brought fried chicken, potato salad and brownies and spread the food out on the picnic tables there. After we ate lunch, we ran wild, playing Crack the Whip and Red Rover while the mothers chatted with the teacher nearby. The boundaries were impressed upon us: no leaving the picnic area, and a buddy system was strongly enforced.

For some reason I'd worn strappy white sandals instead of my usual Nikes. It was a foolish decision because they weren't the proper shoes for playing such lively games, and eventually one of the straps broke. I retrieved my shoe in dismay as the hubbub swirled around me, limping over to a bench partly screened from the picnic area by a bush. I'd been having a great time whooping and hollering with the rest of the kids, and those sandals were my favorite shoes. I was so disappointed at being sidelined that tears gathered in the corners of my eyes and one slid slowly down my cheek.

I sat there for a while before Rick spotted me and left the others to come over and kneel at my side. “Tris?” he said. “What's wrong?” He tilted his head sideways, and his eyes reflected concern. For the first time, I noticed that the lashes were gold-tipped, bleached by the sun.

Wordlessly, I held out my shoe. “Look at this. My mom's going to be so mad that I wore these today.” I wondered if I could talk her into buying me another pair. I wondered if the store would still have that particular style.

“Oh, that's too bad,” Rick said. He was studying the broken strap.

“Uh-huh.” I wiped the tears from my face with the back of my hand.

“Listen, Tris, give it to me.”

“What?”

He took the shoe from my hands and stood. “Stay there, I'll be right back.” He loped toward the street.

“Rick, wait,” I called after him, though I didn't want to get him in trouble by attracting attention. He disappeared around a magnolia tree, and all I could think of was that he'd better hurry back before we had buddy check, because they'd surely find out he was missing then.

I sat. I waited. The other kids eddied by, and once someone said, “Tris, what's wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said, my unshod foot tucked beneath me on the bench. “Just resting.”

Though it seemed like much longer, it was probably only twenty minutes or so before Rick returned.

“Here,” he said. “Your shoe's fixed.” He tossed it in my direction. Sure enough, the strap was newly attached by means of heavy white stitching.

“But how?” I whispered, turning it over in my hands.

“There's a shoe repair place right up the street. I've been there with my mom before.” The sunshine glinted on the lighter strands of his hair, and he smiled at me.

“Thanks,” I said. “I mean, really. Why, if they found out you left the park, you could get detention until school's out. Or maybe even suspended.”

“It was worth it if you can enjoy the rest of the picnic,” he said gruffly and as if embarrassed by my gratitude. I aimed a sharp glance up at him and noticed something different shimmering in the air between us, a tentative knowing, a recognition of important things left unsaid. Surprised, I blinked, and it was gone, like a burst soap bubble.

“Hey, Rick,” called one of the boys over by the water fountain. “Let's play some ball.”

Rick touched my hand so briefly it might not have really happened, and then he ran away to join the game. I never mentioned Rick's thoughtfulness or daring to Martine, mostly because I wasn't sure what to make of it. The complexity of the look that had passed between us that day became a secret between Rick and me, one of the many that we were to share during our lives.