The 100 Year Miracle (12 page)

“Seven-to-one no one tries to take her keys when she leaves,” he said.

Tilda didn’t want to talk about the woman. It was too uncomfortable. Instead she said, “How’s the fish?”

“Better than you’d think. You sure you don’t want some?”

Tip and Tilda stayed until all the food on his plate was gone, along with two beers for him and half the cup of coffee for her. Tip had been right. The woman had left, giving hugs to everyone at the bar on the way out, and everyone let her go, including them.

“You want to see my house? The inside of it, I mean,” Tip asked when they got up to pay at the bar.

*   *   *

The wine had run off with more of her inhibitions than Tilda might have guessed. She was taking more liberty than she had any right to, giving herself a tour of the first floor of Tip’s house. She left him to trail behind her, as though he were a Realtor and she were thinking of buying the place. She did everything but open the closets and test the faucets.

There were no planned developments on Olloo’et. Each piece of property had been purchased by an individual, who saw to it that a well could be dug and a septic system installed, and then the family built their own four walls in whatever configuration occurred to them at the time. It was the architectural version of a crazy quilt, which is to say that Tip’s house looked nothing like Harry’s, which looked nothing like any of the others, and some of them looked nothing like anything that should have been built at all.

There was a sliding glass door in the living room that opened onto a deck. With the lights on inside, the glass was a dark mirror revealing little of the outside but reflecting back to her the room, Tip, and her own full-length self. Her fingers itched to fuss with her hair, but Tip was watching her. So instead she cupped her hands around her face and pressed her nose to the glass.

She could see the green light from the Miracle. It was brighter in some places than others, less a continuous ribbon that night than a tie-dyed swirl. She could see the white tents on the beach all lit up and the scientists shrunk to the size of dragonflies by the distance, busying themselves with whatever it was that scientists did.

Tilda flipped down the little latch and pulled the sliding door open.

“Jesus.” She sucked air in through her teeth and crossed her arms over herself. Had it been that cold earlier? She stepped outside to get a clearer look at things, and when she did a young woman crossed right below her, right below the deck she was standing on, walking at an angle toward the yellow caution tape and then under it and toward the commotion. Just then someone else stepped out of the shadows of Tip’s deck, a dark-haired, darker-skinned man.

Tilda recognized the woman from Jake’s, which wasn’t so surprising. By the end of the week, any number of the scientists were bound to start looking familiar. Even if she never learned their names, she might give them nicknames, so she could discuss them with Harry. She would say things like, “That one over there, the one who looks like Ichabod Crane, certainly seems excited about something.” And from then on they would call him Ichabod.

But the thing that was surprising was that the woman’s trajectory made it seem for all the world that she had come from Harry’s deck, just there to Tilda’s left. Tilda felt a smidgeon of protectiveness, whether over Harry or his property she wasn’t sure. Either way, it was her job to take care of things for him.

“Anything interesting going on out there?” Tip stepped outside and stood beside her.

“I think that woman was just at Harry’s,” Tilda said, nodding at her retreating form, already almost another indistinguishable Gor-Tex–clad dragonfly like the others. The man, who had been close on her heels, had peeled off and stopped to talk to someone nearer the water.

“A tryst, perhaps,” Tip said.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Tip shrugged. “You never know. Women are very into the brooding artist type.”

“She’s young enough to be his daughter.”

“Don’t knock it until you try it.” He was smiling and flashing his dimples at her.

Tilda rolled her eyes and went back inside, giving one last good shiver in the relative warmth of the living room. Tip shut the sliding glass door and clicked the little lock shut.

“You haven’t remodeled,” Tilda said. “It looks just like when the Feinsteins lived here.”

“Feingolds,” Tip corrected.

“Feingolds.”

“That’s because they still do,” Tip said, stepping around her.

Tilda followed him to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer, a microbrew that Tilda didn’t recognize, which didn’t mean anything at all. The Pacific Northwest had begun growing breweries like it grew moss. It seemed every man between the ages of twenty-seven and forty-five owned one. He tipped it toward Tilda in offering, and she took it. It was important to support the local economy.

Tilda twisted off the cap and left it on the counter, which, she noticed, had a circular red stain like someone had overflowed a glass of cherry Kool-Aid.

“Do you rent it from them?” Tilda asked. “The Feingolds, I mean.”

“No,” he said. “I inherited it after my parents died.”

“The Feingolds died?”

He swallowed his pull of beer. “Well, just the two of them.”

“Oh, my God.” The memory came from behind and slapped into the back of Tilda’s knees, threatening to take them out from under her. “I remember you. You were a little boy, and you had a cat.”

“Goldie,” Tip provided. “She got hit by a car.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“Dad had a heart condition. We’d known about it forever, but his going was sudden. He was in Cincinnati when it happened. I had to fly his body back. That was just a year after Mom died. She had cancer.”

“I’m so sorry,” Tilda said, because she was. It was sad to be an orphan no matter how old you were, and he was not old enough to expect it. “They were my age.”

“No.” Tip shook his head. “They were definitely older.”

“Not that much older.”

Tilda decided not to provide a date to prove her point, and Tip didn’t follow up, so they stood in his deceased parents’ kitchen looking at each other. He didn’t need alcohol to make him bold. He had youth and testosterone, which seemed to Tilda like walking around half bombed anyway. She saw that unsteady swagger in her son as he struggled with the powers that had been bestowed upon him.

Tip was older than Juno. Maybe as much as ten years. His swagger was more controlled. He’d had a little more time to get a grip on things but not so much that he was looking down at the slide ahead of him. It was something of a golden moment for him, and Tilda wondered if he appreciated it. Probably he didn’t. No one ever does.

“Would it ruin the mood,” Tip interrupted, “if I made us a bowl of ice cream? I’m still hungry.”

“What mood?” Tilda asked.

“Well, I thought, if I worked at it a little, you might let me kiss you. But then my stomach might start growling, and you would hear it, and that might be awkward. So I’m hoping that if I stop to make a bowl of ice cream, you won’t leave, and you’ll let me keep looking at you a little more because I’m really enjoying that.”

It was more than cold, it turned out, that could make her cross her arms over herself. “That’s rather bold of you,” Tilda said.

“It was, but in my defense, I’ve been doing all of my best stuff. It didn’t seem to be working.”

“That was probably a sign.”

“I surrender,” he said, holding up his hands, “and offer this microwaved fudge sauce as an offering of peace.”

“I’m never eating again. That was, what, twenty, thirty courses?”

“I wanted to impress you.”

Tilda pulled out a kitchen chair, knocked a few stray crumbs off the table in front of the seat, and let herself plop onto the gingham cushion. She was suddenly aware of how tired she was.

“You may have bit off more than you can chew,” Tilda said. She wanted to kick off her shoes but didn’t.

“I’m starting to see that.” His upper half disappeared into the fridge, and he came back out with a jar of maraschino cherries and a can of whipped topping before taking a gallon of vanilla ice cream from the freezer.

Tip opened the lid and waggled the carton at her. “Last chance.”

“Never again,” she reiterated.

Tilda felt like a boa constrictor that had choked down a rabbit and needed to find a dark, warm place to digest for the next week before horking up a pile of bones and fur. It was time to go home. At home, she could take off her shoes.

“Well,” she said. “Thank you very much for the dinner. You’re very talented.”

Tip didn’t stop scooping. “It’s really the only thing I’m good at,” he said.

Someone else, someone not Tilda, might have opened her mouth and revealed that she, too, knew that feeling, the feeling of having one good skill and nothing else to fall back on. But such a person was not in the room.

“I’m sure that’s not true,” she said instead.

She shifted her weight to the edge of the chair, ready to push up to standing, a sort of punctuation on these last few good-night pleasantries.

“Oh, it’s true. Ask anybody. Without the restaurant, I’d be selling ladies’ shoes at some department store on the mainland. I’d be fetching those little flesh-colored footsies for the customers and carrying huge stacks of shoe boxes back and forth to the stockroom.”

“How do you know about flesh-colored footsies?” Tilda asked.

“My mother took me shopping with her when I was a kid. I’d look all over for the little boxes of them. I remember they looked like white Kleenex boxes. I’d try to stretch the footsies over my head, so I could look like a burglar and scare people.”

“They couldn’t possibly fit over your head.”

“They didn’t. I’d end up breaking a few before putting them on my hands instead and pretending my fingers were all fused together. Made my mother furious.”

“I could understand that,” Tilda said and then did stand up.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What would your alternate future be if you weren’t a senator?”

“I’m not a senator, so I guess we’ll find out. But for now it’s time for me to say ‘good night.’”

Tip was putting the glass jar of store-bought fudge sauce into the microwave and setting the timer. “You can’t leave yet.”

“I’m almost certain that I can.”

“Nope.” The microwave dinged. “You can’t leave because we’re not friends yet. You’ve spent more time alone in my restaurant than you have with me, and the point of tonight was to convince you to be my friend.”

“All of this because Harry doesn’t like you?”

“No. I’m not that fragile.” Tip dug a spoon out of the drawer and drizzled on the fudge with a generous hand. “I saw you in the coffee shop, and you looked like someone I would like to spend time with and maybe even someone who would like to spend time with me. Harry was just a good excuse. I guess I felt like I needed one.”

Tip licked a drip of fudge off the side of his hand. “Are you sure you don’t want some? It’s really good.”

He put the fudgy spoon into the bowl and topped everything with a good long squirt of whip and dug a cherry out of the jar with his fingers.

“Bring a second spoon over,” Tilda said. “But I’m just tasting.”

*   *   *

Two hours after they finished the ice cream, Tilda let Tip lead her to the bedroom. He turned the light on, and she took her hands from his shirt buttons to find the switch and turn it back off. He tasted like beer and chocolate, and the scars on his forearms from kitchen burns felt slick and taut under her fingertips. When she pressed her nose to his chest and breathed, she could smell that he had been sweating earlier, probably at work, and she could smell something else, the musk of his excitement, the smell that would be left on the sheets.

15.

Rachel grabbed her cooler marked “food,” doing all she could not to reveal how heavy it was with a dozen of her full containers secreted away inside.

She carried it up to the parking area, loaded the cooler into the campered back, and shut the tailgate. Her heart rate and breathing were labored, and she bent forward with her hands on her knees, giving herself just one moment. Anyone might see her, so she raised herself up, refusing to pant from the effort, and came around to unlock the driver’s door. She put in her key and turned. Something was wrong. The key turned freely in the lock. There was no telltale friction as the mechanism gave way, no click as the old-fashioned plunger popped up on the inside. Rachel opened the truck door and fiddled with the lock. The plunger moved up and down just as easily as the key had turned. She fiddled with the door handle and the key some more, looking for some configuration of maneuvers that would right this wrong, but there was no getting around it. Not only had the door been unlocked, but the lock had been broken.

With the door open, the small dome light cast a dim yellow glow in the cab. She looked all over the floorboards first and then climbed inside. She hadn’t left anything important or incriminating in the truck. She was almost certain she hadn’t, but the longer she sat there the less certain she became. She tried to push down the paranoia. This was ridiculous. Of course, there was nothing for anyone to find in here. What could there be? Everything was back at the cabins.

Jesus, the cabins.

She reached out far to grab hold of the wide-open door and slammed it shut, starting the engine with her other hand before the dome light could even click off. She couldn’t get back to the camp fast enough, not even if she could fly.

*   *   *

It took two hours for Rachel to unhook all of her equipment and load it into the back of the camper. Thirty minutes of that was spent checking everywhere inside and outside for signs of disturbance. The door and window seemed secure, and her clothes were still taped up to block the noise. She tore it all down, shoving it into bags and hauling it out to the truck without even bothering to pull the duct tape off the sweatshirts. She was sweating, and her hair, which had started to fall out of the ponytail, kept getting in her face.