The Wicked Redhead

And just as I’m giving this point the full weight of my concentration, some noise drifts in from the window, the screaming of happy children, and I lift the window sash and stick my head out into the hot afternoon sky. Underneath it, two girls and a boy tear apart the oncoming foam of a most blue ocean, supervised by a tanned, long-limbed, gravid woman wearing a shocking pink bathing costume that does nothing whatsoever to disguise the girth of her expectant belly. One of the girls in the surf is my Patsy, shrieking her head right off as a crestfallen wave swirls about her knees. The damn boy holds her hand solicitously. (As well he might.) The woman, perhaps hearing the slide of the window sash in its casing, cranes her head to meet mine. Waves. Calls out with cupped hand. Motions me down to the white, sunlit beach. Her head’s wrapped up in a matching pink scarf, and she’s so gorgeously happy, so free of every care, I want to fly right out through the window and into her arms, where my own sorrows might dissolve by the heat of her joy.

4

INSTEAD, I take the stairs, which lead downward to a series of bright rooms arranged around some kind of courtyard, smelling of lemon and eucalyptus, and go out through the front door and across the beaten lane to the beach on the other side. The woman awaits me patiently, wearing a calm, beatific smile beneath a pair of strict cheekbones, and a wary tilt to her dark, straight eyebrows. The Florida sun has washed her fair skin in shades of delicate apricot, which become her extremely. Under the cold sky of a New York City winter, she might be nothing more than handsome.

“I hope you slept well, Miss Kelly,” she says, by way of greeting, in a voice that speaks of private schooling and a dignified upbringing. I want to reply, Sure looks that way, don’t it, by the late angle of that afternoon sun, but I can be civil when civility is called for. My own vowels were shaped by a cadre of disciplined nuns, you know, though they do have a tendency to revert to their original form when left unattended.

“Very well, thank you,” I reply, in my best Bryn Mawr accent, though I did attend that fine institution but a single year. “I appreciate your taking us in like that, right in the middle of the night like a pair of thieves. I hope we didn’t scare you.”

She laughs pleasantly. “Well, you gave us a shock, that’s for certain. But Ollie’s an old friend, a dear old friend, and he’s welcome in our house anytime. Even at three o’clock in the morning.”

“I see Patsy’s making herself at home. I hope she hasn’t been any trouble.”

“Oh, not at all! She’s a darling. She’s your sister, Ollie said?”

“My baby sister. Five last year.” I shade my eyes and watch the small fry gambol about, soaking themselves in the kind of abandon we older, wiser ones have long since discarded. We haven’t yet told my baby sister that she is an orphan, that her daddy has joined our mama under the wet soil of River Junction, Maryland, and that the brother she adored—the brother who all but reared her up himself—now basks in the everlasting peace of the Lord Almighty. She imagines, I guess, we’ve taken her on a surprise vacation to a southern paradise, and as I watch her play, I have no desire to disabuse her of this illusion. The sun grows hot on my hair and my shoulders, the milky skin of my redhead’s neck. The salt air fills my chest. The pungent sky makes my heart race in recollection of my dream, and I clench my fist to quell the memory. “She must be over the moon. I don’t know that she’s ever seen the ocean beach before.”

“She’s taking to it wonderfully. Sammy and Evelyn practically grew up in the water. They’ve been looking out for her.”

“So I see. You have beautiful children, Mrs.—” I cut up short and turn to her. “Ah! I apologize. Ollie never did tell me your name, and I was about dead last night by the time—”

“Oh, look at me. Chattering on like this, and I haven’t even introduced myself! Fitzwilliam. Virginia Fitzwilliam.” She holds out her hand. “And my husband, Simon, who’s gone off with your Ollie right now, I’m afraid.”

I clasp her hot, firm hand and tilt my head back to the house. More like a villa, I perceive, the kind of Mediterranean building you see in pictures of Italy or the south of France, an impromptu eruption of yellow walls and red tiles and round arches. I consider the words your Ollie, carelessly uttered, and my stomach grows a pair of energetic hummingbirds. “In there?” I ask.

“No, no. In town. To our offices. I understand they meant to talk business.” Her expression turns a little blank, enough to send an electric signal shimmering across the surface of my brain, which—as you perceive—is something of a suspicious organ to begin with.

“Business?” I inquire.

“Now, Miss Kelly. I imagine you can tell me far more about all this than I can tell you.”

“But you’re too polite to ask.”

Mrs. Fitzwilliam places her two hands on the underside of her enormous belly, as if the infant has begun to weigh upon her insides and wants support. Turns her head and looks back out to sea, where her children play. “For what it’s worth, Miss Kelly, my husband left the rum-running business some time ago. He wasn’t cut out for it.”

“A rumrunner, was he?”

“We own a shipping company,” she says simply, and I guess she doesn’t need to say more. After all, any fool with a seaworthy boat and a sober pilot can get his start in the rum-running trade off the coast of the eastern United States, and a lucrative trade it is, too. A fellow with the foresight or the luck to own a fleet of such craft? Why, he might clear a fortune, in short order. He ought to clear a fortune, if he’s got a lick of mortal sense. Nothing extraordinary about that.

“I see. And I suppose that shipping company brought you to Anson’s notice?”

“Anson? Do you mean Ollie?”

“I beg your pardon. Anson’s his middle name. He took what I guess you’d call a nom de guerre for a time, which is when I met him. And you know how it is with names.”

She smiles. “They have a way of sticking to people.”

“Yes. But to you he’s Oliver Marshall. Reckon I shall have to get used to that.”

We have both returned our attention to the children splashing in the surf, but when I say these words Mrs. Fitzwilliam glances back at me. “No, don’t do that. Keep him by the name you knew him first. The name you fell in love with.”

“Who says we’re in love?”

She laughs. “Nobody needs to say it, Miss Kelly. My goodness. I have eyes in my head, even at three o’clock in the morning.”

“Then you might consider an appointment with an oculist, Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”

Instead of replying, Mrs. Fitzwilliam calls out to the boy, who—together with his sister—has begun to swing Patsy between them. “Sammy! Put her down, now. She’s not used to the ocean.”

“Oh, she’ll be all right,” I say, but Sammy and his sister obediently lower Patsy back to her feet. Patsy makes an imperious squeal and tugs at their hands, yet they will not be moved by her. I start forward to settle the matter, until Mrs. Fitzwilliam takes my arm.

“No,” she says. “Let them be. Sammy’s got a way with him. He knows how to handle the younger ones.”

“Lucky for you, I guess. With another one on the way.”

“Yes.” She releases my arm and nods to my sling. “Simon tells me you took some bruising.”

“Did he, now?”

“Well, he didn’t need to. For one thing, there’s a nasty swelling right there on your left cheekbone. And Ollie told us a little of your story, while Simon was changing his bandage.”

“Oh? And just what did Ollie tell you?”

“That the two of you had been through a fight. Beaten about by a criminal of some kind.” Her voice is kind, full of sympathy and all that, but not overspilling. I don’t believe Mrs. Fitzwilliam is the overspilling sort of person, which is a trait I prize, and one you rarely find in women. Why, most females about smother you with sympathy for your troubles, and then expect you to smother them in turn, until the two of you can hardly breathe for the wetness of your mutual commiseration. Whereas I prefer the wetness of a nice dry martini, myself.

I tell her: “I guess that’s true. But we survived, I guess. I’ll do just fine, as I’m sure your husband told you.”

“No doubt.” Mrs. Fitzwilliam speaks so soft, the words be swallowed right up by that purring ocean nearby. “But the truth is, Ollie’s worried sick about you. And I don’t know what happened back there, among those bootleggers of yours. I’m not sure I want to know. God knows I’ve seen enough evil to make me grateful for my present peace. But whatever it is, whatever you’ve endured, believe me. That man would rather die than see you come to further hurt.”

I wrap one hand about my stiff elbow and stare at the round, bald spine of a rising wave. The heavy pause as it commences to overturn into the foam. Because what can I say to this woman? Can I tell her how my insides ache like murder from the battering of my stepfather, who did punish me for my betrayal of him? Can I tell her about my arm he nearly broke in two, about my belly into which he drove his meat fist? Can I tell her about the sight of my brother’s neck, broken like a rag doll, or how it feels to witness a man being struck in the jaw with a set of brass knuckles, such that you will never forget the sight, you will witness it evermore you close your eyes?

She’s but a stranger, after all, and my hurts belong only to me.

Mrs. Fitzwilliam touches my shoulder. “I have an idea. Let’s drive into town and meet them, shall we?”

5

TOWN IS Cocoa, a collection of mostly wooden buildings sprawled along the edge of what Mrs. Fitzwilliam calls the Indian River, and is really some kind of inlet from the ocean itself. Maybe a river feeds it, I don’t know. Anyway, you reach this squirt of a town by means of a pair of long, flat bridges directly west from the barrier strip of Cocoa Beach, leapfrogging an island they call Merritt, which I confess I have no recollection of crossing the night before.

“You were likely asleep,” Mrs. Fitzwilliam says. “I’ve never seen such an exhausted pair as the two of you last night. Not since the war, anyway.”

“The war? Did you nurse?”

“No. I drove an ambulance on the Western Front. Well, a number of ambulances. They had a tendency to break down often.”

She tosses this off gaily, like she’s describing some kind of picnic expedition. Shifts the automobile into another gear—it’s a fine blue Packard roadster, immaculate cloth seats, a real nice piece of tin—while the draft loosens her scarf from its moorings to spread out behind us like a white flag of surrender. Air smells of salt and muck and burning oil. I narrow my eyes against the afternoon sun and say, “I guess that explains the way you drive.”

“Oh? Just how do I drive?”

“Like you mean it.”

She laughs and steers us into Cocoa, pulling up outside a large brick building that proclaims itself home of the Phantom Shipping Company.

“Who’s the phantom?” I ask.

She sets the brake and leaps free of the seat with breathtaking agility for a woman with so much baby inside her.

“Me,” she says.

6

THE MEN have gone out for a sail, says a receptionist in a neat navy suit, and if we hurry we might just catch them. I tell Mrs. Fitzwilliam I don’t especially enjoy messing about in boats. She tells me don’t be silly and takes my arm. The Phantom Shipping Company warehouses and dock lie but a pair of blocks away, she explains, and so we stride down the broiling sidewalk so fast as we are able, one of us recently beaten up to blazes and the other one set to whelp any minute, sweating and puffing, and lucky enough the ship is still moored, though a tall, bull-shouldered man stands beside her, unwinding a rope from a bollard.

Now, while I have spent the past three days and nights in Anson’s company, while I have lain in his bed and wept in his lap, while I have woken in the dark to the sound of his breath, have dressed his wounds and whispered to him things I have never before whispered to another living person, while we have eaten together and drunk together and driven together and slept together, still my cheeks burn as I make my way up the dock, and the shape of his brown, clipped head becomes clear against the green edge of mangrove lying along the opposite bank of the river. Mrs. Fitzwilliam calls out. Anson straightens and turns, stiff as some kind of machine, lit by the high, white sun.

Another man appears at the boat’s edge and, spotting us, calls something back, her name I think, crammed with delight, and leaps to the dock. Mrs. Fitzwilliam surges forward, and I envy the quick, eager way she hurries across the boards toward her husband’s open arms. My own feet have turned to sand. Anson spares not the least regard for Mrs. Fitzwilliam, propelling her great belly toward the man presumably responsible for it. Just stands there, tethered to the boat by the coil of rope in his left hand, and watches me approach. He’s not smiling, either. I have the idea that he’s making out the state of my injuries. The degree of strength returned to me by my night’s rest.

As for me, I walk forward measuredly, because I am yet incapable of swift movement. Because I am yet incapable of saying a word. What do you say to this man, when you have lived by his side for three days, and now find everything has changed between you, in the space of a morning’s separation? Now that the horror’s over. Now that you’re safe by the sea in Florida, under a tranquil sun, under the care and protection of a doctor and his wife. Now that you’re in paradise, the two of you, when a moment ago you were trudging through hell. How do you turn yourself into an ordinary, happy couple, like the one embracing next to you?

On the other hand. Here stands Anson, my Anson, wearing a white shirt and an ill-fitting suit of pale linen, too tight about the shoulders, his olive skin soaking up the light and his golden-brown hair bristling unfashionably; his navy eyes as grave as they ever were, his lips as thick; every detail, every bruise and scar so blessedly familiar in this strange new world, this Florida. I find myself smiling.

“Good afternoon,” I say.

“Good afternoon. Sleep well?”

“Had no choice, did I? It was either sleep or die.” I lift my hand and touch the bruise purpling his jaw, and I guess it says something for the both of us that he doesn’t flinch. “You?”

“About the same. Where’s Patsy?”

“She’s having the time of her life playing with the Fitzwilliam fry. Housekeeper’s minding them.” I nod my head toward the boat, which is some kind of sailing vessel, maybe twenty feet long, single mast, pulling eagerly at the rope in Anson’s hand. “Where are you headed?”

“Just for a cruise offshore.”

“For what purpose?”

His eyes slip away to inspect the rigging. “No purpose.”

“Liar. You’re going out to see the rum ships, aren’t you?”

“I guess we might happen to catch sight of a few. You can’t avoid them, after all.”

“Oh, naturally. You weren’t going to pull up alongside some old ship, some rum warehouse anchored just outside United States waters, and maybe flap your gums for a bit? Maybe tease a little knowledge out of somebody?”

He lifts the hand that holds the rope and rubs his chin with one thumb.

“Anson. You look guilty as my brother Johnnie used to look, when he was caught skimming off blueberries that were meant for a pie.”

“There’s no danger, Gin.”

“I thought you were done with this business. I thought we were on the lam. Fugitives. Price on our heads, probably.”

“I wasn’t planning on giving anybody my name.”

“It’ll never work. You’ve got fishy written all over that beaten-up mug of yours, in case you didn’t know. Anyway, what am I supposed to do if something happens to you out there?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me out there.”

“Oh? Good. Then I guess you won’t mind that I come along.” I start for the edge of the dock, and Anson makes a noise of objection and takes my elbow.

“See here. What’s going on with you two?” booms Dr. Fitzwilliam.

“Why, your wife and I are coming with you, that’s all. Aren’t we, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?”

She frowns and puts her hand on her belly. “Oh, I shouldn’t. I stopped sailing months ago. But you go on ahead, Simon.”

Now, this Dr. Fitzwilliam of hers is a handsome fellow, I’ll give him that, though his hair has turned to silver and the skin of his face has toughened under the sun. His eyes are hazel and terribly sincere, and his smile is too cheerful for my taste, exposing a vast amount of perfect dentistry. I guess Mrs. Fitzwilliam likes it well enough. He exchanges this speculative look with Anson, who is scowling fit to thunder, and turns to me. Speaks in a profoundly correct English accent, not softened at all by the Florida climate. “Can you sail, Miss Kelly?” he asks.

“I can learn.”

“In other words, she can’t tell a sheet from a sail,” Anson says, “aside from the fact that her right arm’s almost certainly sprained. Anyway, Gin, you can’t just leave Virginia onshore by herself, in her condition.”

“That’s all true,” says Mrs. Fitzwilliam. “So why don’t Ollie and Miss Kelly take the motor launch by themselves, Simon? You could keep me company onshore.”

“But—”

And Mrs. Fitzwilliam lowers her chin and sends some kind of telegraphic message in her husband’s direction, some kind of Morse marital code I can’t quite comprehend, and I’ll be damned if the good doctor doesn’t just cut his sentence short and lose himself in translation of those blue eyes.

“I think that sounds like an excellent idea,” I say, just to move things along.

Dr. Fitzwilliam runs a hand through his hair and casts a look at Anson that puts me in mind of a hound dog in the act of apologizing.

“I don’t see why not,” he says.

“Now, hold on a minute, Doc. I thought you were supposed to examine her first, before any kind of strenuous—”

“Oh, she seems about as healthy as you do, in my professional judgment,” the doctor says airily, “and in any case, Marshall, I was just thinking you might be better off in a motor launch yourself, in your bruised condition.”

“My condition’s just fine. It’s hers I’m thinking about.”

“Why, then! It’s settled, isn’t it?” Dr. Fitzwilliam takes his wife’s arm. “Come along. The launch is moored directly to the warehouse, there.”

7

SOMETHING I should tell you about, before I step on that motor launch with Anson. Head out to God knows where on the skin of the Atlantic, the two of us together.

On the second day of our journey south from Maryland, we woke at dawn. Or rather, Anson woke at dawn and roused me by the mere act of whispering my name—Ginger—against my ear.

The sleep had done me no good, I’m afraid. My arm had stiffened in the night, and the rest of me just hurt. We lay as a pair of spoons on our left sides, because of the injuries to our respective rights, attached by the exact same intimacy in which we had fallen asleep six hours before, and for a minute or two, or maybe more, neither of us moved a muscle. Maybe we couldn’t. As bad as Duke had beat me, he had done Anson worse: hung him by his arms inside a wet, frigid building made of mountain stone, while his earlier wounds gaped untended, in such a way as Christ Himself must have suffered upon His holy cross. So I guessed Anson’s limbs ached too, his muscles lay stiff alongside mine, his head drummed an old, fatigued beat. Above our heads, our left hands clasped. I felt the slow thud of his heart passing through his shirt and mine, to enter into my shoulder and spread along my bones like some kind of uncanny medicine. I said, We’re alive, at least, and he said, Yes, thank God. Didn’t ask me how I felt, how I was doing, any of that rote, empty talk. Didn’t mention my brother, who had died for our sakes, nor his brother, who had nearly died for mine alone. Didn’t tell me about love nor lust nor devotion, not pity for my present misery nor awe for our mutual survival. Just lay with me while the sun did creep up the edge of the sky outside our walls, and those words we didn’t utter lay there too, like smoke against our skin, like incense filling our lungs, like a benediction laid upon us.

The air began to take on light, and Patsy stirred in the cot beside us. Anson kissed my hair and ear and cheek and said it was time to go, we had rested enough. Go where? I whispered, because I had plumb forgotten where we were supposed to be headed, and he said, Florida, and I guess I might could then have asked him what waited for us in Florida, what lay at the end of our road, what was the nature of this life to which we were fleeing together.

But I did not. Maybe I was scared to ask, maybe I was too numb to care. I helped him clumsily with his coat and shoes, and he helped me clumsily with mine. We woke Patsy and carried her out through the drizzle to the waiting automobile, and I settled us both inside while Anson returned the key to the motor inn’s office. Started the engine and the automatic wipers and rolled back onto the black highway, and we never did stop for the night again. Just drove on, by sun and by moon, catching food and sleep by the side of the road, until the clouds parted and the air commenced to dry out and warm, and sometime in the middle of the third night we came to rest on a stretch of beach they call Cocoa, for no reason that I can properly tell.

And I don’t recount all this history to you now in order to illuminate some measure of what we endured together, Anson and I, before arriving at this earthly paradise. I don’t hold with wallowing in past afflictions; I like to walk into my future looking square ahead. Just to point out, so delicately as I can, that we have yet no actual future to speak of. No covenants between us, no vows of any kind, no physical sacrament to reunite us in the wake of that horrifying rupture at my step-daddy’s hands. Only a blind trust in that thing—that smoke and incense, that benediction, whatever you care to call it—that has taken form in the darkness around us.

Such that whatever lies upon this road along which we presently hurtle, it is surely made from this unknown substance. We ourselves are built of it. For better or worse.

8

NOW, I have taken to the seas but one other time in my life—if you don’t count the Hudson River ferries, which I don’t—and in that instance, as in this one, Oliver Anson Marshall himself was my pilot.

Then, we traveled in a racing motorboat, and the speed of that craft near enough flattened my chest forever into the fashionable silhouette. And if that boat was your naughty little sister, sleek and fast and amoral, why, this one’s your mama’s lazy uncle. Old and slow and overfed, kind of prone to fits and starts of his engine, if you know what I mean. Still, we’re free, aren’t we, the two of us. Making a white trail toward the ocean, while the sun heats our skin and the draft cools it right back down, and the other craft go about their business, large and small, without paying us any mind. We might be waterbugs on a pond so great as the universe. Free.

As you might expect, Anson’s not best pleased with me for my overturning of his usual neat plans. Gives me a dose of what they call the silent treatment as we head off down the Indian River, disturbing the peaceable green water with all the noise and energy of our sturdy motor. The draft rattles the brim of my hat until at last I remove the damned thing and toss it on a bench, and the sudden freeing of hair is like plunging from a cliff. Exhilarating and messy. “I remember the last time the two of us went on a boat ride together,” I call out, over the noise of the engine. “Was it only last week?”

“Didn’t end so well, as I recall.”