We’d just gotten in among the cars when she stopped and faced me, her arms pushed in under mine and linked around my waist. “You stink like a camel, but it really is good to have you back all the same.” She kissed me lightly on the lips, her skin cold but soft. “You know what? I don’t want you to go away ever again. I like you right here, where I can see you.”
We stayed wrapped in each other and I fought the urge to tell her the truth. Sanity prevailed. I would find a time and a place to do that, but not now, not yet. She was too happy, I was too happy. I wanted to keep the real world outside.
She let me go. “Magical-mystery-tour time.”
We got to her mother’s Plymouth sedan. Carrie hadn’t gotten around to buying a car since she’d gotten back: she’d been too busy. She’d arranged the transportation of Aaron’s body from Panama to Boston, then the cremation, before returning to Panama to scatter his ashes in the jungle. After that, she’d had to get Luz settled into high school, and herself into her new job. She’d also had to set up house — then change her life around again when a not-too-reliable Brit turned up begging for a spare room.
We split as she went to the driver’s side of the Plymouth, reaching into her bag for the keys and hitting the fob. The car unlocked with a bleep and a flash of the indicators. I pulled open the door, threw my bag into the back, and climbed in, as Carrie closed her door and put on her belt. That frown of hers had reappeared, the one that went along with the raised eyebrow and slight tilt of the head.
The engine turned over and we rolled out of the parking space. She cleared her throat. “I’ve been thinking about a whole bunch of stuff while you were away. There’s something very important I want to say to you.”
I reached across and pulled off her hat before running my fingers slowly through her hair, as she negotiated the Plymouth over the potholed pavement. We hit the main drag and turned left up the north shore for the ten miles to Marblehead.
“Good important or bad important?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. It’ll be easier for me to explain when we get there.”
I nodded slowly. “Okay. Tell me some other stuff, then.”
Luz liked her new school, she said, and had started to make some really nice friends; she was staying over with one of them for the rest of the week to give us time together. She also told me how her mother’s bed-and-breakfast had picked up a little since September. Oh, and that she thought there might be a part-time job for me at the yacht club as a barman. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t need a job serving pints of Sam Adams for weekend water warriors. Come Wednesday, I was going to be a bona fide, flag-waving citizen; the U.S. was my oyster, and all that sort of thing.
Marblehead’s old town was like a film set: brightly painted wooden houses with neat little gardens sitting on winding streets. Cornish fishermen had settled there in the 1600s, maybe because the rocky coastline reminded them of home. The only fishermen there now dangled lines off the backs of their million-dollar boats in the Boston yacht club.
Marblehead today was where old Boston money met new Boston money. Carrie’s mother had been born there, and was blessed with plenty of the old stuff. She’d come back ten or so years ago, after her divorce from George, and took in bed-and-breakfast guests because she enjoyed the company.
Carrie made a couple of turns that took us off the main street and we came to a stop on a small road that ran along the water’s edge. Tucker’s Wharf jutted just a little into the water, with old clapboard buildings on either side, now restaurants and ye olde shoppes. “This is it,” she announced. “We’re here.”
We got out, zipped up against the cold, and Carrie took my arm as she walked me toward a wooden bench. We sat and looked out over the bay at the large houses on the other side.
“Mom used to bring me here when I was a kid,” Carrie said. “She called it Marblehead’s gateway to the world. That sounded pretty magical to a ten-year-old, I can tell you. It made me think my hometown was the center of the universe.”
It sounded pretty magical to me, even now. The place I’d grown up in was the center of a shit-heap.
“She used to tell me all kinds of stories of fishing boats setting off from here to the Grand Banks, and crews gathering to join in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.” She smiled. “You’re not the only history buff around here. I hope you’re impressed.” The smile faded slowly as her thoughts turned elsewhere. She looked into my eyes, then away, across the water. “Nick, I don’t really know where to start with this.”
I gave her hair a stroke. I didn’t know where this was going, but I guessed it had to do with Aaron. I had a sudden flash of him sitting under guard in that storeroom in Panama, smoking. His nose was bloodied and his eyes were swollen, but he was smiling, maybe feeling happy with himself that he’d helped the rest of us escape into the jungle as he enjoyed his last cigarette.
I hadn’t had a clue how I was going to get him out of there. I was unarmed; my options were about nil. Then he had made the decision for me. The door burst open and Aaron launched himself into the night.
As he slithered into the darkness there was a long burst of automatic fire from inside the house. Then the guard got to the door and took aim with a short, sharp burst.
I had heard an anguished gasp, then a chilling, drawn-out scream. Then the sort of silence that told me he was dead.
“I brought him here, you know, soon after we’d met. We came up from Panama one vacation. I knew it would scandalize my parents. Turned out they had a whole lot of other stuff on their minds. George was too busy fighting whoever were the designated bad guys that year to notice I was there. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He couldn’t even remember Mom’s birthday. So back we went to Panama to study while the folks got divorced.” She smiled wistfully. “Jeez, I’d gone to all that trouble to round off my rebellious years by getting laid by my teacher, and my straitlaced parents were too busy messing up their own relationship to pay any attention…. Shit,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Maybe I shouldn’t be encouraging you into college.”
I gave her a squeeze. “I spent my rebellious teenage years stealing cars, and the ones I couldn’t get into I’d just smash up. I think they’re over now.”
Suddenly she pressed herself against me. “I hated you being away, Nick. It scared me. I guess it made me realize how much I’ve gotten used to having you around. After Aaron died I told myself I’d be very careful about laying myself open to that sort of pain again.”
I lifted a hand to her face and brushed a tear from her cheek.
“I was worried about being with you, Nick. Dependability isn’t exactly high on your résumé.”
I gave my résumé, as she called it, a quick glance. This time last year I’d been living in homeless shelter housing in Camden, had no money, had to line up to get free food from a Hare Krishna soup-wagon. All my friends were dead apart from one, and he despised me. Apart from the clothes I stood up in when I arrived in Panama, my only other possessions were in a bag stuck in Left Luggage at a London train station. She had a point.
“And no sooner have we settled down here than you take off again. Not much for a girl to brag to her mother about, is it?” She paused. “Then there’s Kelly. What if we don’t get along? What if she and Luz don’t get along?”
I was Kelly’s guardian: she was the other woman in my life I was busy disappointing. She was thirteen and not nearly as grown-up as she liked to think she was. I’d be seeing her at Christmas down in Maryland. Not on Christmas Day itself, because she was doing the family thing with Josh and his children, her new family, but I’d be seeing her on Christmas Eve. “Carrie, I—”
She placed a finger to my lips. “Sssh…” She turned and looked me straight in the eye. “I was worried, but I’m not worried anymore. I don’t care about the past. You’re a tour guide now, a barman, whatever — I don’t care, as long as you’re good at it. The last few weeks have been good for me. They gave me time to think, and I realized something. I can finally think about what’s ahead. It’s like I was just treading water the last year, my life was on hold.