Five Tuesdays in Winter(10)

“I know you want this,” he said in my ear, in a voice I didn’t recognize. “I can give you this.”

He started rubbing me hard both on the chest and down below. “You like me. I read all about it. All about it. And I can do this for you.”

He kept rubbing. I knew what he was talking about. I hadn’t done it to myself, but Gina had told me about it. I wanted to wait until I had a boyfriend so that the first time I felt it I would be with someone and not alone in my bedroom and it would be special. I also knew there were times when it was not special. But I didn’t know that it could be not special with someone you liked. This was not special. This felt like Hugh was doing some kitchen chore inside my bathing suit.

Sweat had broken out all over his face. “I can give pleasure, not just receive it.” His head was tilted toward the window, as if there were other people down on the grass he was talking to. “I do care about other people. Other people are real to me. Cara. You are real to me.” One of his fingers inside my bathing suit was poking into me.

It hurt, really hurt. I reached for his hand but he kept rubbing and poking. “It hurts,” I said.

He pressed his mouth to my ear. “It hurts at first and then it feels really, really good,” he said.

But it was burning me. “This is so stupid,” I said in a voice my mother hated. I’d been using it a lot lately. It was probably the reason she’d handed me over to Mrs. Pike. I was embarrassed by the sound of the voice. I tried to yank his hand out of my suit but he clamped me tighter against the table. His shoulder was pushing against my jaw. I shifted my mouth slightly and bit down hard.

He flinched back. “Jesus.”

You become a creature I can’t understand, my mother sometimes said to me.

He pulled away and looked at me then smiled and came for me again. But I had enough space now to put out my arms and shove him off of me. The weird thing was, Hugh’s body fell so willingly. He fell backward over the lip of the tub and his head hit the tiled wall with a perfect clack, like the castanets in “It’s a Small World.” It worried me that he didn’t open his eyes. I picked up the diapers and unlocked the door.

I knew I should tell Thomas or Mary or call 911 from the phone in the little room, but I walked outside toward the pool. I rehearsed not what I was going to say to Mrs. Pike or Kay but what I would write to Gina from jail, how I would explain it to her, the way he went down so easily, like a slinky you just have to nudge at the top of a staircase. I needed to remember to bring my notebook with me to jail.

“Well, the diapers must have been somewhere in California,” Mrs. Pike said.

Kay had either dozed off or was pretending to, with Elsie in a deep sleep on her chest.

I was saying things in my head but nothing was coming out.

“Look, Cara, look! Look at me!” Stevie called from the pool. “I’m doing this all by my lone self!” He swam the whole width of the pool slowly, his arms and legs beneath him moving every which way, his head between the inflated wings on his arms, his mouth in a concentrated frown.

“Good job.”

“What’s wrong with your voice?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ll swim all the way to there”—he pointed to the deep end—“if you come with me. You can be my own pet wolf shark.”

“A wolf shark? That sounds scary.”

“They don’t have to be.”

It would be odd now if I said suddenly that I’d bitten Hugh and also he might be unconscious.

“Look!” Stevie lay on his back then flipped over onto his stomach, put his whole head underwater, then flipped over again onto his back. A week ago he was too scared to be the only one in the pool. Now he was doing tricks.

“Mrs. Pike,” I began, my voice still strange. But behind her something caught my eye. Across the lawn and up at the very top of the mansion, nestled between the peaks of the two turrets, was a small widow’s walk. Hugh was leaning against its railing, looking out to sea. He was still in his bathing suit, a square white bandage on his bare shoulder.

“Did you have something to say, Cara?”

“No. Just— Would you mind passing me the fins?”

She had to bend down to reach them.

“A wolf shark needs her fins,” I said and slid them on.

At the edge of the pool I let out a howl and jumped. I could hear Stevie cheer me on just before I went under. I wasn’t sure if wolf sharks actually existed. At four and a half, Stevie knew far more about the natural world than I did. But I hoped they existed. I hoped there was such a thing.





Five Tuesdays in Winter





Mitchell’s daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them or lead them to very clearly marked sections—if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books?— while they complained that nothing was arranged by title. He would have liked to have a bouncer at the door, a man with a rippled neck who would turn people away or quietly remove them when they revealed too much ignorance.

His daughter loved the customers. She sat behind the counter at the cash drawer every Saturday, writing up receipts in an illegible imitation of his own microscopic hand and chatting like an innkeeper. She was too tall and too sophisticated for a Maine preteen. She made him uneasy. She had recently learned the word “reticent” and used it on him constantly.