Chapter 21 - Sweet Haven

LUTH sat, devoid of energy, unable even to rise and turn on the lamp, in the twilight of the living room. It was that time of day that always filled her with melancholy, as cooking smells drifted from the kitchens of the houses on either side of them and young people made their way past the gate, coming back from the sea, their ribbing and laughter jolting her nerves. Sociable little animals, she thought, without a care in the world, like … monkeys. The comparison made her uneasy. It was hers, but it also belonged to Mother Martha, the woman who pronounced herself a missionary.

“Monkeys,” the charlatan spits. The wild blue marbles of her eyes galvanize the girls; they stare at each other in disbelief—Could she really be talking to us? Then someone giggles and they are off—Monkeys, monkeys!—pursuing Naia, shrieking and teasing each other. No one gives a thought as to what might happen when they catch the girl. A wild, exhibitionist spirit possesses Naia. She has no idea where she is headed, but she runs.

In a deserted corridor she comes face-to-face, chest-to-chest, with the boy. He is Brent. She has known him all her life. They have played hide-and-seek and Three Billy Goats Gruff after Sunday school, concealing themselves under foliage and within sections of brightly painted concrete pipe, taking turns napping while they await discovery.

Elated at the prospect of rescue, she lets him take her by the arms. They whirl into the armory as though in a dance.

He locks the door: the keeper of the keys. He is a cadet officer, she a majorette; they belong together; there is no need to struggle. Brent clamps a hand over her mouth anyway, gripping her wrists firmly in the other—moist, trembling, adolescent hands. In the close air, they stand like that for a long time, feeling the heat of each other’s bodies through their clothes. In a little while he lets his hand slip and rest on the neckline of her singlet, and she glances down in astonishment, realizing for the first time that her blouse is lost.

He pulls her about, his sex a hot questing lump against her skirt as she arches to him, his hands on either side of her face. He touches her gently, where Mother Martha gripped her to demonstrate the consuming power of the Lord. Into this sweetness she lets herself fall.

IMAGINATION was Luth’s curse. Her reading habit had fueled it—a thirst for stories that, with the years, had had to be sated with borrowed copies of the Reader’s Digest, and then of Harlequins and Mills and Boones, until at long last she gave up books altogether, blaming her bad eyes and the household chores that used up all her free time.

Her job had never afforded her much leisure. For nearly forty years she had worked from the 6:45 flag-raising ceremony to the five o’clock dismissal bell, and then in the evenings and weekends, checking papers, recycling exams, writing faithfully in her lesson plan book. When she was younger, what a torture it had been not to yield to whimsy, not to record some silliness observed at the school canteen or the sour faces at the PTA meeting. She wished she had, now that the names and events all ran together, but she had been mortally afraid of a random check as the principal paced the corridors of the school. Those forty years of lesson plans now formed the diary of her life, but what a meager record it was, how inert its entries, what an ultimate waste of time.

She thought she remembered Brent, though, or perhaps Adam—could conjure an image of a somber child, very pale, with distinctive light brown hair, standing alone on the blacktop while his darker schoolmates tore about him. A child who looked this way and that, as though lost, or recently deprived of hearing, or unable to comprehend the language of his peers.

There was one other memory—of a knot of boys glimpsed at recess, and the lonely, pale child in the center, shrinking between two of his peers as one of the bigger boys shoved a set of knuckles into his face. She had thought they were beating him, but saw that the large boy wore a ring, the stone made of some greasy green substance, like dried Play-Doh or nose dirt. “Kiss poo-poo, kiss poo-poo,” the big one coaxed, whatever that meant, and at that moment the persecuted child had caught her eye, but for some reason she had not been able to summon the energy to break up the knot. Let nature take its course, she had thought.

By dumb luck, or clever machination, the Holland three had never been among her pupils, not in all the years of their elementary education. She knew only that they had vanished from the school for a couple of years while their father worked on a PhD in some American state, and when they returned they were chubby, short-tempered, irreversibly transformed.

INTO the dusk of the living room, there came some tentative movement, and Luth drew a deep breath and mechanically began to give instructions for dinner.

But it was not the maid. It was Naia.

The girl stopped a couple of meters short of the sofa, as though afraid to draw closer. Luth saw that her face was horribly swollen from weeping. She was clutching something in her hand.

“Have you heard from him?” she whispered.

“Who?” said Luth, taken aback. “Brent?”

“No,” Naia choked. “Have you heard from the lawyer?”

Luth understood then. The girl had built up her hopes, hanging on to that halfhearted promise to get her out of Donostia and to her aunt.

“No, Naia,” she said. “He hasn’t called.”

“Where’s mother?” the girl persisted. “Is she with him? Are they discussing me?”

“I don’t know.”

Abruptly Naia whirled about and headed back to the bedrooms. Luth braced herself for the sound of a door being slammed. When nothing happened, she rose gingerly to her feet and felt her way over to the hall.

The girl was not in her room. She was huddled upon the bed in Antonia’s, sobbing, an object by her limp hand. It was her mobile phone.

“He’s never going to call, Naia,” Luth said gently. “There’s no way they can get you to Antonia. You know that.”

Behind her she heard Daniel’s tread. She cast him a quick glance of warning, but there was no need. Something else had caught his attention—Narita’s laptop, sitting quietly atop the desk beside a recent drift of papers. She saw him brush the top of it, furtively glancing at something lying there.

“We can’t help you unless you tell us how it happened,” Luth said. “You cannot handle this alone, Naia. Tell me.”

The girl’s lips quivered as she struggled to speak through her sobs. Luth told herself that she must wait, that something important was about to be revealed. There was a point, she now knew, at which a human being, young or old, gave way, broke down, came crawling out of itself sobbing for help.

Sounds came from Naia’s mouth. “I did not know.”

“What didn’t you know, child?” Luth said. She noted the edge in her own voice. Her body started to shake with the effort of keeping herself in check, for strangely she felt no pity for the girl, despite her distress. She felt only the same tired exasperation she felt when having to explain a lesson for the umpteenth time to a roomful of stupid children. Only the same dread, rapidly masked with anger, when long ago Narita or Antonia came to her with a lovelorn face and a circuitous confession. And she was grateful to be whole and in control, while everyone around her had reached breaking point and dissolved.

“I didn’t know he would show the videos around,” Naia said, with an effort.

Then Daniel was hovering over them, trying to touch the girl as though solace might travel through skin. His voice was soft and kind in a way Luth’s could never be. “Who are you talking about, child?”

The girl shook his hand off with a cry of rage. Get out! Luth mouthed to him. He was a man. What did men know?

Daniel retreated a couple of steps, over to the desk.

Now, thought Luth. Now was the time to get at the truth.

“So it is really you in that movie,” she began.

“Of course it is,” Naia spat. “What did you think?”

“You lied to us,” Luth started to say, but checked herself. The girl had not lied. She had said nothing. It was she, Luth, and Daniel, who had lied—to themselves. Instead, she said, “How did it happen, Naia? That is all I want to know.”

The girl was crying, infuriatingly, again.

“A to B to C, Naia.” It sounded, appallingly, like a fourth-grade lesson in science, reduced to its key points, to be regurgitated for a periodical test. Luth remained by Naia’s side, loath to touch her, but unable to get up or even shift position. She sat and waited, calling on all her reserves of patience, until the girl’s sobs dwindled once more.

“He said the videos were private,” Naia said.

“Who did?” said Luth. No reply. She could feel herself on the outer reaches of sanity, but when had her instincts ever been wrong? “Was it Rinky Holland?” she shouted. “My God, Naia, it isn’t enough that you give us clues here and there and expect us to come up with our own version to believe. You must tell us the truth. We raised you like parents. You owe it to us to give us the truth, Naia. You owe it to us.”

“You are so sick,” the girl screamed back. “You are filthy. It was Adam, okay? Just Adam. I wanted to tell you, but you weren’t listening. Now shut up, Lola, shut up. Just shut up.”

THE girl lay with her face buried in the spread. Her sobs had gradually diminished until she was silent, asleep maybe, indifferent to the effect of her words. Luth sat, frozen, as though at the bottom of a dark lake, breaking surface only at the feel of something creeping down her cheek. As she shrugged the tear away, her eyes focused on Narita’s laptop, and she wondered what had caught Daniel’s attention so. There was nothing there now, she saw as she rose. Her husband, stumbling out of the room at Naia’s words, had taken whatever it was away with him.

She went tiredly back to the bed. Absently she put out a hand to smooth Naia’s hair. In a few days she would be bundled off to Manila, her clothes given away or shipped; there would be little left in the house to remind Luth of her pain. It would be possible to heal.

But the prospect of a future minus the girl petrified her. Who would be left to receive her ministrations then? Not Daniel. Oh, she loathed him. She still found excuses to be out of the room when he was around. In this half-light, one hand brushing mosquitoes from her sweating limbs, she felt the monster of resentment rising within her—her dark twin, swollen and black and soft. What might she do, when she and Daniel were alone? He had not had her in years. Thank God, that pounding at her gate, the begging, the humiliation of yielding to him, was long over, by mutual agreement.

But with Naia gone, would his old urges be awakened? And what excuse might she use? Quiet, you fool, you don’t want the maid to hear us. Oh, he would gladly have performed for Cecilia’s benefit, halting and stupid though she was.

What delight she had experienced with him had been minimal, had come mostly at the beginning of their marriage, when he was tall and willowy, with soulful eyes and a baritone voice, and her body had been novel even to her. Somewhere in the piles of test papers and laundry, that flame of awareness had guttered out. In later years, she had consented, once or twice a month, to a brief and itch-inducing encounter in the darkness, which amounted, eventually, to a few minutes of pleasure, for him, she assisting him with her hand. He always embraced her afterward, with a gratitude that rose from the depths of his soul—it made her feel heartless, petty. She would lie numb, listening to his snores, sleep gone.

Whatever else those visits to Rinky Holland had accomplished, they at least had marked the end of her battles. Perhaps Rinky had prescribed celibacy. A veritable hair shirt, to atone for the surge of libido that had—if Daniel’s confessions were accurate and not the product of a fevered imagination and a perverse drive to impress anyone who listened—led to hour-long, straining, weepy encounters with that graduate student. In the back of the family car, at an unnamed hotel on the outskirts of town, and even in the faculty comfort room at the English department, after office hours.

That graduate student. Candidate for a PhD. That by itself meant nothing; there were scores of universities in the country that annually churned out PhDs. Diploma mills, they were called, and Sweethaven, for all its airs, was fast becoming such an institution. Luth shuddered in revulsion. She could not even bear to think of the creature’s name. The woman had been Narita’s age. She imagined an obsequious little voice: “Dannie Pastor, why do you refuse love that is given to you?”

But divorce was not possible under the country’s laws; Luth’s home and her position would forever be secure, as were her children’s inheritance and Naia’s. The little slut had dumped him. She had pulped his heart. Luth felt the same debilitating satisfaction that infused her when she thought of her husband’s literary enterprises. He had not been good enough, not virile enough, not wealthy enough, even for a thirty-ish spinster with a thickening waist. You had best stay with me, old fool, she thought, I know your quirks better than any other human being; we are the same, two old losers who have lost our energy and our sheen, keeping up appearances to maintain our self-respect.

She supposed she would never kiss, let alone sleep with, another man; it was too late. There were honey-haired Florida retirees on television who mated like baboons, but there was no possibility of such behavior in her world. From time to time, if thoughts of beauty and fleshly desires intruded, she satisfied herself by watching the Fashion Channel: slender, belligerent young models advancing down the catwalk, then retreating, always new, never changing.

And of course there had been Naia, and the joy of watching her grow, shooting up to a height never before seen on her side of the family or Daniel’s. Praying anxiously against the first crop of pimples, having her devoutness rewarded by a face that never lost the freshness of babyhood, of features that had grown in all the right directions and at the same even and balanced pace. In a way she had never admitted aloud, Luth had thanked Narita for snaring such a wonderful package of genes while young, before experience and cynicism quenched any aspirations she might have had of having a child. And she had thanked Antonia for staying, albeit for what might have been too long—of growing into the role of the playful, intelligent young mother, unencumbered by marriage and the job of pleasing a husband.