David Cantrell had hugged him once rather formally, then turned and marched across the pavers, past the fountain, and back into his car. Dale showed Joseph to his room, then disappeared.
Joseph, dislocated as a Mandingo slave newly arrived at a Key West dock, had sat stunned in the fancy rattan chair in his new “home.” Ideas streaked and fell across his mind like shooting stars. His heart raced, then slowed, then pounded, then seemed to stop altogether. He needed focus. He needed a purpose. He needed his mother.
He looked out the window now, feeling again the rush of confusion, the pull of too many possibilities. Dale lumbered lightly across the pool area below. What a weird guy, thought Joseph. He went back to the bed and picked up the journal again.
I can’t stop. I don’t want to. On the nights I can’t see him, it feels like my body just might drive over there on its own and wait. I can’t go when Raymond is working the peninsula beat — that would be an insane risk. When I don’t go to David, I take one of Mom’s dinghys out to Sweetheart Deal and write in this book. We meet in his beach house down the peninsula now — safer than the Seabreeze and a lot nicer, too. Sometimes we go aboard his yacht, Lady of the Bay. It was his boat we met on again, and I didn’t realize it for weeks! I get there at eleven, after work, use the garage-door opener he gave me to slide in unseen, then shower upstairs in the big bedroom, put on some fresh clothes — or not — and wait. Sometimes, if I’m late, I’ll change at work in the downstairs rest room and hope nobody sees me between the door and my car. I can see the ocean from the bed, twinkling across the sand. He always comes at eleven-thirty. Then we have until twelve-thirty, when I have to shower again, then dress myself on trembling knees, and go home. One hour. I live for it, and I feel, all this time, your presence inside me, Dear One, so patient and so warm. You, my miracle of all miracles, my secret life!
To my shock, Raymond has begun to seem happier these days than at any time in the last year. There is a minor intimacy in his looks, a gentle, growing lightness when we talk. I see him watching me sometimes when he thinks I’m not noticing. Little bits of that old adoration seem to be coming back to him. It is wonderful to see. And it is so necessary, so absolutely important, to what I want to accomplish.
Dear One, though you will never read this, I must tell you that I know what I will do, already. There was never any doubt about it. In the strangest of ways, you have given me everything that I had ever wanted in my life, and in the strangest of ways, you have given the same thing to Raymond.
I believe I am being watched. I will also be the first to admit I am afraid, vastly afraid of being discovered, but still, when I discount my fear and look at the facts, I have to believe that I am being watched.
First was that time back in February, at work. I was lacing Tyler’s shoestring and I felt eyes on me. When I looked up, there was this kid up the sidewalk, standing still while a gaggle of tourists parted and passed by him, looking straight at me and Tyler. He turned, joined the crowd, and disappeared. I say a kid: He looked about twenty maybe, an average beach kid.
Then a couple of days later, I got the feeling again. When I looked around, I didn’t see anyone, until I noticed one of those little dinghys they rent at the Pavilion, and there was a man sitting in it right offshore, with a camera held up to his face, aimed at me. A big yacht slid by between us, and when I looked again, the dinghy had taken off. The first thing I thought was Raymond. He hired a man to shoot me and expose my unfaithfulness. But why shoot me with the kids? Then I wondered if it was David. No. Why would he want me photographed?
I asked Ray about it, and he said I was probably just making it up. But, he said, the best way to expose a tail was to double back a lot, and keep an eye out for who was still behind you. So I tried that a bunch — walking to work on the nights I wasn’t going to David’s, going back and forth to the preschool, strolling down the bayfront on my Sunday afternoons off. It never worked. Like I said to Ray, it wasn’t that I was being followed, I was being watched.
He said it was the mark of a guilty conscience.
We were up early, Ray getting ready to head up to school for a contracts examination, I bound for the preschool.
But I don’t have a guilty conscience, I said. You can imagine, Dear One, how guilty it truly was.
Maybe you just think you don’t, he said with a smile.
Well then tell me, what is it I feel so guilty about?
God, I wonder if my color showed. I have to hand it to myself, I’m a pretty good liar. So was Poon.
I don’t know, he said. You’d have to tell me.
He was looking at me with calm interest.
I nodded, glanced at the newspaper spread out on the table before us, and thought before I spoke. “The only thing I feel guilty about is not being able to have your children.”
“Then you’d have felt followed — watched — for fifteen years. Have you?”
No, I told him. Just a couple of weeks.
Ray was quiet for a while, looking down at the paper.
I could arrange surveillance, he said.
I told him not to. God, imagine that.
I’m serious, he said.
For a moment, he looked like a boy, acting serious. There is something so decent, so genuine about Raymond. That something, if I had to name it, is generosity. Even if he thinks I’m making something up, he’s generous enough to suspend his disbelief and put himself in my shoes. Jim — your Uncle Jim — always said Raymond was a good cop because he could anticipate. I think he’s a good cop because he can put himself in the bad guy’s shoes. Sometimes I think that it has broken my heart to betray him. But it hasn’t, because my betrayal has yielded you, Dear One, the great gift to us.
A long pause, Raymond looking at me. I can tell you, as a thirty-nine-year-old woman who isn’t totally dumb, that Raymond Cruz has the most penetrating eyes on earth. They cut in without hurting you, they’re so sharp. I have always found it astonishing how hard Raymond tried to turn them off, how often he just blinks and turns away while his eyes are cutting in, ready to snip off the truth like a cluster of grapes from the vine. Sometimes I think it’s because he’s afraid of what he’ll find. Sometimes I think he’s just being polite. I’m sure he doesn’t offer his suspects such courtesy.
But that morning, he didn’t turn them off me.
Is there something going on, Ann? he asked.
Like what, baby? I don’t understand what you’re asking.
His eyes kept coming in — exploring, finding?
“I’m asking you, Ann.”
“Well... no. I feel good. Everything except that feeling of being watched.”
He waited. Raymond can wait for hours.
But I can escalate.
Maybe you’re right, I said. I’m still willing to talk about adoption.
He looked back to his newspaper, sipped his coffee, shook his head. No.
I have held out for adoption for years. Sometimes I could almost feel that bawling little bundle in my arms. But deep down inside, whenever I imagined that bundle and knew that it was neither mine nor his, all the joy drained out of the scene and I felt only falsehood in it. Even though I’d offered this option to Raymond as unflinchingly as I could, there was never the conviction behind it I would have wanted. Certainly, that Ray would have wanted.
But beyond that, there was the other reason we never adopted, the bigger reason. Hope. We were still both under forty. We were still healthy, even though my uterus was destroyed — damaged, I know now — by infection after Little Warm. Raymond thought the scar and the damage was from an acute appendectomy I had had in France. France is where Poon and Virginia told everyone I was going, as an exchange student. I told Raymond about the operation before we got engaged, when he was sixteen and I was eighteen, and there was never any question from him. When the gynecologists later pronounced me unable to conceive or carry a child, I pretended to be as shocked and disappointed as he was. In so many ways, ways that I’ll never be able to express to Raymond, I truly was. But still, there is that grand, eternal, lifesaving illusion called hope, and Raymond would never let it go. Maybe it was the saints he prayed to, maybe it was his faith in the Virgin Mother, maybe it was the only log floating in the stormy sea around him that he could grasp. Since we first “discovered” I couldn’t bear children, Raymond never once has capitulated. He never once admitted defeat. He used to read to me all the biblical tales of women who were barren, rewarded by God with sons and daughters. He used to pray with me for long hours, begging for a child. Only in the last two years have I thought that Ray really began to doubt, when he enrolled suddenly in law school, when his embraces started to vanish and his words to dry up and his interest in me as a woman seemed finally buried by the thousand burdens that plague this decent, trusting man. And I? Who was I to blame him? I wish I could tell you this, Dear One, that until you came along I had begun to lose hope, too. Hope. Perhaps we will name you that, if you’re a girl.