After giving Otis an affectionate pat, she straightens and smiles when she sees Cyril watching her.
“You want to come in?” he asks.
“I like it out here, with everything in bloom. It smells heavenly.”
“That time of year.”
He steps outside and they settle into rockers.
“My mother’s wisteria blossomed for the first time,” Melody says. “She thinks it’s a sign.”
“That spring is here?”
“That the baby is about to be, but . . .” She sighs, leaning her head back and staring at the porch ceiling. “She’s had that plant forever, and it never flowered. She made it happen through sheer will. She’s a force of nature. You never met a woman like my mother.”
“She sounds a lot like mine. If Marceline LeBlanc sets her mind to something, she doesn’t let anything get in her way, and she doesn’t wait around for someone else to fix things for her. Not many women are like that. She is. You are.”
“Me?”
“You. That’s how I know you’re going to be just fine, no matter what happens.”
She digests that comment. He stares at the horses out on the grass, listening to their chairs creaking back and forth and marsh birds singing in the thicket.
“The only thing that’s going to happen,” she says, “is you and me and our baby and dayclean.”
“Dayclean?”
“A fresh start.”
He smiles. “Well, our money’s adding up, slowly but surely.”
“Will it be enough? Because maybe I can ask my parents if—”
“Melody! You can’t ask your parents—”
“They love me. I keep thinking maybe if they knew, they could—”
“Put that thought right out of your head. If you tell anyone, our lives will be in jeopardy! Our baby’s life!” His tone is hushed, harsh.
He sees her arms go to her stomach, cradling it. He turns to survey the dirt lane leading back out to the road, imagining spies in the verdant shadows at the property’s perimeter. Nothing to see but wild horses grazing beneath wooly swirls of Spanish moss, but rumors of white mainland trespassers persist.
“I know,” she says softly. “It’s just hard.”
He turns back to her, brushing a blond strand out of her eyes. She meets his gaze head-on, and lifts her chin.
No delicate Southern belle, his Melody. Even eight months into her pregnancy, the woman is about as fragile as the ancient live oak throwing shade over half the yard. It’s the reason—one of the reasons—he’d been drawn to her. She isn’t afraid to think deeply about things, or to challenge what she’s always thought, or to feel. She wasn’t afraid of anything.
But right now, she should be.
“Don’t worry, Cyril. I won’t tell a soul and I don’t need help from anyone except you.”
“Not even your mother? Because in your condition you must be—”
“Not even my mother,” she tells him. “I promise.”
Waiting at the intersection outside the school, Gypsy sees purple crocuses poking up in the tiny garden across the street. The old woman is out there with a watering can.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary . . .
Just the other day, Gypsy had mentioned her to Oran, who’d launched a lengthy tirade about metaphorical religious significance in the nursery rhyme.
Psycho lunatic, she’d thought. But then, in the next breath, he was warning her to be careful crossing streets after school because there’d been a fatal hit and run a few blocks away, on Webster Avenue.
“Was it a student?”
“Nah, some old coot.”
“Well, I’m not an old coot,” she’d shot back, and he’d laughed.
He’d laughed, too, on that March Sunday when she’d told him that she’d slept most of the day.
“Guess you ate too many sweets last night.”
“Chocolate wakes you up. It doesn’t put you to sleep.”
“Listen to Miss Smarty-Pants.”
Troubling thoughts stall in her brain as she skirts around ambling pedestrians: strung out flower children wearing Nehru jackets and headbands, chatty young mothers pushing baby buggies, herds of schoolchildren fluttering Crayola drawings.
Last Halloween, she’d heard about unsuspecting trick-or-treaters getting Halloween candy laced with LSD. Had someone done the same to her Valentine’s and Easter chocolate? Where had her father bought it?
At Webster Avenue, she watches traffic zoom past, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, anxiously waiting for a light to change. She needs to get home and tell him what happened, and he has to report it—though the thought of Oran getting involved with “the fuzz” on the right side of the law is laughable.
But acid doesn’t knock you out. It makes you feel groovy and happy.
She thinks of her mother, a strung out, rail-thin beauty with long black hair, glazed blue eyes, and a faraway smile.
She hadn’t known Linda very well, never lived with her, and wasn’t particularly fond of her. She was just someone who’d drifted into their lives from time to time—never on holidays or for Gypsy’s birthday, never to attend parent conferences or tend to her when she was ill.
For years, Linda showed up without warning whenever she needed a place to stay for a couple of days, a week or two at most. And then one day—
Someone jostles her; people push past. The light has changed. She crosses the street and moves on down the next block, no longer in a hurry to get home.
She hears her father calling her Miss Smarty-Pants. She sees his mocking grin, sees him turn away, but not before she’d glimpsed something disconcerting in his gaze.
Why would he have drugged her? She’s heard of hippie parents smoking grass with their teenagers, but this wasn’t like that. This had been sneaky and underhanded, and it had been some kind of powerful knockout drug.
Her mind chases logic down dark alleys as she drags her feet along the sidewalk, trying to make sense of it. You don’t incapacitate someone in that way unless they pose some kind of threat—or maybe if you’re delusional.
Her father has his moments, but even his most feverish rants are a means to a benevolent end where his daughter is concerned. All he wants is to save her soul and lead her to eternal paradise when the world goes up in flames. He truly believes he’s the Messiah.
Does she believe it?
Not as unequivocally as she had when she was younger. She has more questions now. Sometimes he answers them, dispelling her doubts with patience and clarity. Other times, he raves that she’s a disbeliever.
At the Grand Concourse she waits shoulder to shoulder in a crowd of fellow New Yorkers impatient to cross to the subway on the opposite side.
Traffic zips along the busy boulevard, a transit bus speeding past so close it all but grazes the tip of Gypsy’s nose. She remembers her father’s warning about the hit and run and takes a step backward from the curb. Her gaze falls on a corner newsstand. There’s Twiggy on a magazine cover. She shifts her gaze to a stack of newspapers, and a headline engulfs her like a swirling black funnel.
BROOKLYN’S TENSE ANTICIPATION OF BUTCHER’S NEXT STRIKE: FEBRUARY 13, MARCH 23, APRIL . . . ?