The Highest Tide (20 page)

“Oh, yes.” Florence smiled. In all the hours I’d spent with her I’d never seen half as many forced smiles. “Want to see for yourself?”

She took a breath, pushed down on both chair arms, then fell back into the cushions. She got up on her second try and gingerly steadied herself, feeling for that sweet spot on the balls of her feet that kept her upright.

I started to rise to steady her, then caught myself and recalled the judge telling me how helpless he felt watching little Angie teeter on a balance beam.

Florence forced another smile and took a huge breath at the same time, which made her look bug-eyed crazy. Then she rocked side to side until her right foot lifted enough to slide forward a few inches. She did the same to budge her left, then shuffled forward. There was tons of head and torso action, but her feet never left the floor.

The state lady glanced at me, her expression convincing me that Florence should have stayed in her chair.

The worst part was Florence thought she’d done pretty dang well. When she got to the counter, she clutched it, turned and beamed for real, as if she’d proven something. “I’m a little slow, but I get around.” She leaned against the counter and breathed, reading our faces, disliking what she saw.

This Julie Winslow said all sorts of encouraging crap, but it was easy to see beneath the words that she had a job to do, and that she was very confident in her ability to make decisions about other people’s lives.

“So, what about your perspective, Miles? Has Florence been getting worse, better, or staying the same?”

The question sounded harmless, but tightened everything inside me.

During the prior week, I’d started tapping her pills out almost every morning. Otherwise I found them on the floor. I loosened food lids and tried to leave her at least buttered toast or an apple if I didn’t make her a sandwich. I helped her to the bathroom twice and even pulled her off the toilet once. She’d claimed she was unusually stiff that day and promised she’d never ask me to do that again, but I wondered how long it would be before she couldn’t bring a spoon to her mouth or get up without me. Plus, I didn’t know how to get straight answers about how she truly felt, and didn’t know who else to ask, especially seeing how she’d sworn me to secrecy, without ever saying as much, about almost everything.

“Some days she’s stiffer than others,” I said vaguely. “The good thing is she doesn’t really have to get around that much because she reads most of the time, and even the fastest reader only has to get up so many times to pick out another book.”

We all laughed, but everyone looked sick, and I realized that I hadn’t seen Florence with a book in weeks. Could she even turn the pages anymore?

“Parkinson’s is a cruel affliction,” the lady said after a clumsy silence.

“It’s not actually Parkinson’s,” I offered, before I could stop myself. “It’s cortical basal ganglionic degeneration. And her neurologist isn’t even certain it’s that.”

The state lady looked astonished, glanced at Florence, to see if she’d challenge me, then pulled a pen from nowhere and wrote on a small pink pad.

Florence blinked slowly at me and swung her heavy nose a quarter inch from side to side.

After Julie Winslow finally left, I told Florence it was good that the state lady saw that she wasn’t completely alone. I don’t know if she heard me. She was as distracted as I’d seen her, half-lidded and alone with her thoughts or wherever she’d gone although her body remained a couple feet from mine.

I ran home, made her a tuna sandwich and ran back with it. Then I shook out her pills and left the vials open beside her next to a coffee mug half full of water. (I didn’t give her water glasses anymore. She needed handles.) I told her again that she did pretty well with the state lady, but she wasn’t listening.

Her dentures stuck in the sandwich on her first bite, forcing her to pull the bite out of her mouth and clumsily tap her teeth back into place as my stomach rolled. She looked up, big-eyed, as if something just occurred to her. “I feel so grateful.”

“It’s just tuna,” I said.

She laughed and everything felt normal again, so I told her more about how my conversation with the cult made me feel terrific and phony at the same time.

She listened intensely, and when I was done, said, “I just realized something.”

I waited.

“You were the love of my life,” she said.

It wasn’t just the words that startled me, it was the tense. She talked for a while in that same tense, summing up her life. I let her go on, not out of respect, but because, like I said earlier, I was never any good at pretending. Finally, her eyes focused and she asked me to please finish stacking her books.

She chatted on in an untroubled voice about a dream she’d recently had in which her grandmother was a young woman again riding a red bicycle and waving at her. It was obviously a phony dream she invented to make herself appear distracted, to make me feel comfortable finding and setting aside her tiny Kama Sutra guide while I restacked the others.

After I finished, she sighed and asked me to please help her to the bathroom. Once I got her lined up, I left her to lower her pants and do her thing, but waited around just in case. After a long silence during which I worried she’d fallen asleep, she called for help. I came in, held my breath, braced my feet against the toes of her shoes, pulled her up by her bony wrists, then reached behind her and flushed. She apologized cheerfilly and kidded herself for being way too old to let someone like Julie Winslow rattle her, as if getting on and off the toilet were a matter of confidence.

Before I left, she asked me to bring her one of the blue pills from the closet. “Sleep will give me strength,” she said, but didn’t sound convincing.

Glancing back through her cabin window, I saw her trying to shield her eyes from the late sun, or possibly from me, her hand bouncing lightly, trying to land, as if it were loose at the wrist and about to wobble off.

CHAPTER 23

T
HREE OF US
huddled eagerly above a speakerphone in the tidy den belonging to the parents of Phelps’s obnoxious neighbor Blake “Blister” Cunningham. As soon as this girl named Ruby got on the line, Phelps took over. He introduced himself, told her two of his friends were listening in, then said, “Would you please fake an orgasm?”

Ruby giggled through the speaker, then started panting lightly, as if climbing steps. That was enough to make us blush, although she still sounded pretty phony to me until she started whispering, “Oh yeahhhhhhhh,” before yipping like a puppy and mewing like a hungry kitten. Then came a series of jolting breaths as if she’d touched something hot, followed by long, supersatisfied noises that came from somewhere below her throat, as if she were lowering herself into a hot bath or had just tasted the world’s best soup.

Suddenly there was nothing funny about it at all, and we dodged each other’s eyes until Phelps leaned toward the speakerphone and said, “We give up. Thanks. That was pretty convincing.”

Her laugh sounded almost manly for some reason. Then she told us she hadn’t finished yet.

“We get the idea,” Phelps said. “Great work. Really. Best I’ve heard in a while.”

The phone call, of course, was Phelps’s brainstorm after he heard Blister’s folks had flown to Reno for the weekend. He talked Blister into it by convincing him there was no way the 900 number on the ad—which featured some remarkably limber Asian girl—would stand out on a phone bill. And if in the long shot it did, Blister could say he’d ordered vintage baseball cards like the ones Phelps swore he’d ordered on a similar 900 number earlier in the summer. Once Phelps pointed out again that the call would cost just $2.99, Blister agreed his parents wouldn’t notice.

Blister was a wrestler, not a genius. He loved to ask if you wanted to learn the fireman’s carry. Then he’d grab your right bicep, drop to a knee, swing a forearm under your balls, roll backward and fling you onto your back. It was Phelps who first observed that Blake Cunningham was as annoying as a blister.

After that phony orgasm, Phelps pointed to me, and said, “Ma’am, my good friend Squid Boy here would like to ask you some technique questions.”

“Hello there,” I said timidly.

She giggled. “Why do they call you Squid Boy?”

“Because I have ten arms and two hearts.” That killed Phelps to the point he knocked his hip into the heavy wooden desk and started cussing.

“
Okay
,” Ruby said. “Let’s hear the questions.”

“When we’re kissing,” I asked, “when exactly should we get the tongue involved?”

“For real?” she asked.

Phelps nodded approval of the question.

“Yeah,” I said.

She giggled. “Well, that all depends.”

Phelps looked at me, agitated. “Depends on what?” he asked.

“On how aroused I am and how aggressive your tongue is.”

Phelps looked disappointed.

“What about breasts?” I asked. “When should they be squeezed and how hard?”

Phelps nodded again.

“Depends on the time of the month,” she said. “Sometimes even a light touch is too much.” Her voice turned breathy. “Sometimes you can almost
bite
them.”

“What time of the month can you bite tits?” Blister asked. “The last week of the month or what?”

She laughed herself into a cough.

“’Just so you know,” Phelps said, “the Einstein who asked you that question has just one eyebrow.”

Until then I hadn’t noticed Blister’s left eyebrow was nothing more than a gray smear, the result, I learned, of him getting so excited lighting a joint he’d stolen from his sister that he hadn’t noticed his eyebrow burning until it started to stink.

Phelps waved his hand to silence Blister’s noisy counterattack, then urged me to ask more questions.

“How much moaning should the guy do?’’ I asked.

She laughed her manly laugh. “As much as he wants.”

“What about talking while you’re doing it?” Phelps asked. “Is that expected?”

“You mean like dirty talk or chitchat?”

“Yeah.”

“Which one?”

“Both.”

“Not expected.”

That was a relief to all of us.

I asked more questions, including how best to remove a bra, until Phelps got bored and asked: “Do you ever call the penis a ‘wand of light’? And what can you tell us about your fountain of nectar?”

“What are you even talking about?” She sounded annoyed.

Phelps stopped laughing long enough to say, “Just tell us how important it is that your boyfriend knows his way around your G-spot.”

Ruby sighed, then said, “You guys aren’t eighteen, are ya?”

I was afraid she was about to hang up on us, so I asked, “What’s your favorite Kama Sutra position?”

“Come again?”

I pulled Florence’s little picture book out and flipped through pages. “Do you like the “crab’s position’?”

The boys crowded me, demanding to know where I’d come up with the guide, struggling to glimpse the drawing that showed some bored woman with her feet on her belly and her bored boyfriend inserting himself.

I’d committed almost every position to memory, but it was hard to pick which ones to ask about. To be honest, most of them didn’t look that fun. I mean these people were all dressed up in these silly hats and still looked as bored as seventh-graders during the second hour of social studies, the only difference being they were mostly naked and stuck together like dogs.

When she didn’t answer, I asked, “What about ‘the embrace of thighs’? You like that one?”

Her lips smacked twice and she exhaled, as if she’d lit a cigarette. “You boys know this phone call is two ninety-nine a minute, right?”

Blister flashed as red as a stoplight. “It’s two ninety-nine for the
whole
call,” he said unconvincingly.

“A minute,” she said. “’It’s two ninety-nine a
minute
.”

That was the last we heard of Ruby before Blister hung up and glanced wildly at the loud antique wall clock and slowly figured out we’d been talking for at least fourteen minutes.

Then he shouted at Phelps who shouted right back that he’d read the ad the exact same way. Blister found a tiny solar-powered calculator and twice screwed up punching in numbers with his thick fingers before letting thirteen hcks and shits fly after announcing that the call was gonna cost his parents $41.86!

Phelps shrugged and said, “Ruby didn’t really sound all that Asian, did she?”

“I am in such deep shit!” Blister shouted.

“Personally,” Phelps soothed, “I’d be more worried about explaining how you lost an eyebrow.”

Blister chased him around the couch and outside before tackling him near the gazebo and twisting him into a painful double-arm bar that had Phelps laughing and screaming for help all the way onto his back.

I took the long way home so I could get a look at whatever the highest tide of the week had stranded.

Every week left behind more shells, bones, seaweed and litter. If the weight of the bay’s tidal debris had been charted weekly that summer the line would have sloped relentlessly upward from June through August.

It wasn’t my imagination.

I was accustomed to beach buildups after winter storms dragged bushes and trees into the bay. This was different. There hadn’t been any big blows since April, so most of the tidal slop was broken-down sea life.

I found a four-foot-long tangle of driftwood, barnacles, crab backs and oyster shells lassoed together with mussel threads. And I saw an amazingly intact large sculpin skeleton, as if whatever ate it had vowed to preserve its architecture. I poked a stick into the bulge of seaweed next to it, expecting to find a dead salmon or gull. But it didn’t smell and it was too firm for flesh. I parted the seaweed and picked up yet another barnacled hockey glove.

I studied it quickly to make sure it wasn’t the same one I’d stuck in the garage, then glanced around to see if anyone was messing with me. One strange hockey glove was interesting. Two was a bona fide mystery.

But now that I didn’t feel comfortable calling Professor Kramer about big stuff like oarfish sightings, I definitely couldn’t call him about an invasion of hockey gloves.