“Uh-huh.”

“Well, there’s a part I left out. They jerked off on me while they were sticking the pins in.”

“Jesus. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I didn’t realize what was going on until I was older. I used to think they were peeing. That was bad enough. The point is, I used to think about it during sex. In this very fucked-up way, it used to turn me on.”

“Why didn’t you tell that to the group?”

“I bet they’re some things you didn’t tell the group.”

“So do you still think about it?”

“Sometimes. Does that upset you?”

“No,” I said. “I guess you know what I think about then.”

“Yes.” The way he said it made me realize that not only did it not upset him, he got off on it a little.

“The trouble with us is that we know too much about each other.” I leaned over into the swamp, slid my arm in right up to the elbow. We were in a relatively deep passage and I could feel the variation in temperature, from body to lukewarm to a hint of chill. Mel made a crunching noise but I ignored him. I was remembering that dream I’d had at Willowridge, of the black water that was going to reflect something unspeakable back at me.

It was quiet, too quiet. Mel tapped the bottle of rum and Coke on my back. I knocked back a long swig and felt it almost immediately.

I said: “You know all I can pay attention to in the news are crime stories. Violent crime. The more violent, the better. Is there something wrong with me?”

“No, honey. It’s drama you miss.”

“What do you mean?”

“Willowridge was one big soap opera. You’re going to have to get used to the mundanity of daily life.”

“I’ll show you dramatic.” Without thinking about what I was going to do I began stripping, pulling off my T-shirt—I wasn’t wearing a bra—and then my shorts and underpants. Then I stood up in the prow, the boat jerking abruptly with the movement. Mel watched me, smiling, until I took a breath, and jumped.

Despite its murkiness, the water was surprisingly clean feeling, although as I surfaced I could feel my toes dragging a bit of seaweed. Or was it an alligator? Live body overboard.Let them get me, I thought.

Mel was leaning right above me. “Are you nuts?”

“Yes,” I said, and moved several feet away from the canoe. It was like I couldn’t stop myself. Treading water, I threw back my head and screamed up into the dark gray-green sky fringed with overhanging trees. Screamed once, got the echo, and screamed again. And again.

“Get back in here, Sally.” Mel sounded a million miles away, or maybe it was just the water in my ears. I swam over and he helped me aboard, a precarious and clumsy process which slopped a lot of water into the canoe. “You were afraid of drowning in the Gulf, but you don’t give a shit about being Jaws bait,” he said.

“I don’t know why I did that.”

“Sshhh.” He put his arms around me from behind, and we sat there like that until I stopped shivering.

“Feel better?”

“Guess so.”

“You probably needed to do that, although I wish you hadn’t picked alligator swamp.” He took off his own shirt, patted me dry, helped me get dressed.

I said: “I’m sorry about the other morning.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me.”

“I haven’t slipped up since I left Willowridge. D’ya think there’s a support group for that kind of thing?”

“You mean like Self-Mutilators Anonymous?”

“I guess not. Wouldn’t be a pretty sight, anyway. The meetings, I mean.” I thought of Douglas.

We headed back, neither of us talking, although we kept passing the bottle. I knew I was getting drunk and I didn’t care. I could smell and feel the swamp drying on my skin and hair, that high stagnant odor like the Katzes’ goldfish pond. When we tied up at the dock Mel said we’d better bail out the canoe, so we found a couple of old paint cans and scooped methodically until he laid his hand on my arm.

“Look.”

The sky above the trees where we’d just emerged was alive with silver streaks.

“Meteor shower,” Mel said.

“Wrong time of year.”

“Nonetheless.”

In a minute it was over. The regular stars shimmered demurely in the dense black.

“Did you make a wish?” Mel asked me.

“No. I didn’t have time to think.”

He put his arm around me and we stood there on the dock watching the sky for a while, waiting for something else to happen.

22

The restaurant was dim and for once just the right coolness, not the usual bone-chilling freeze I’d come to expect in Florida. Amber cut-glass tumblers clinked discreetly as ice water was poured into them from a silver pitcher, a relief compared to New York City restaurants, where you felt as if you were at a very loud nerve-racking party with everyone else in the room. Our waitress’s name was Slim, which I thought was a strange name for a woman until my uncle explained that Slim was what you called anyone who was tall. Like Red, for redheads. Down South, nicknames stuck. In my class at RISD there had been a girl from Alabama named Shug Maloney, Shug short for Sugar.

It was my last night in Florida, which also happened to be my birthday. I was wearing the hibiscus print dress Aunty Mabel had bought for me although I had a cardigan on over it because I was self-conscious about my newest scar. My hair was up in a bun like Nai-nai’s. The trick, I’d found, was to do it right after you got out of the shower when your hair was still wet. I could feel the chill of the jade point on my nape.

“I’m a lucky man,” Uncle Richard pronounced. “Out on the town with the two handsomest women in St. Pete.” He was looking the healthiest he had in days and dressed like a real high roller-gleaming black oxfords, gold cuff links, but not, I was relieved to see, the parrot tie. It made me feel less guilty about the mornings I’d missed with him. He squinted at me behind his glasses. “So who you think she looks like?” he asked my aunt.

Aunty Mabel considered. “She used to look like her ba-ba. Now she looks a little like her Aunty Ching-yu.” She explained to me: “My second-to-oldest sister. Serious face, always thinking.” I tried, unsuccessfully, to remember which face that was from Nai-nai’s old albums.

“And what happen to this sister?” My uncle picked up a roll and reached for the butter dish as my aunt deftly slid it away from him.

“She married a merchant’s son. Three children.”

“Merchant’s son,” said my uncle. “That means rich. We gotta find a rich man for Sally, support her be an artist. That Mel, is he rich?”

“Not exactly.”

“He’s a good boy, though.”

My uncle had met Mel only once, when he’d come by to pick me up and Aunty Mabel had persuaded him to come in for lemonade. They’d talked basketball. Everyone was polite. I knew Ma would hear every detail of my bad behavior, how I hadn’t even come home for the last two nights.

That morning I’d watched Mel shaving naked, angling into the bathroom mirror, one foot up on the edge of the bathtub, as classical a stance as any marble Greek warrior. “You could drive back with me, you know,” he said.

“My plane ticket’s nonrefundable.”

“Maybe I’ll just have to make a pit stop then.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, there was this gas station attendant in Savannah.”

“How old is she?”

“You’re jealous,” he said, reaching behind to wrap his arm around me. “I like that.”

On this, our last morning together, we drove into St. Pete to a consignment shop and he bought me a birthday present, the cardigan I was wearing, black with pearl buttons in the 1930s style I liked. Then we got some postcards and sat in a coffee shop to write them.

“Which should we send to Doug?” Mel asked me. “The manatees?”

“How about the alligator wrestling one?”

“Excellent choice.”

“The manatees go to Lillith.”

“You wanna do it?”