She had given him the gull carved for him by Dupree. He had looked at it for a moment, then had cast it aside. Later, when she went to retrieve it from the floor, it was gone, but she had glimpsed it on the shelf in Danny’s room before they left the house. Her son was a complex little boy.
The car jogged as it hit a dip in the road, the headlights skewing crazily across the trees for a moment. She wondered if she should bring up what had been troubling her since earlier in the evening, or if she should just let it rest until the morning.
She had gone outside to put some water in the car and her attention had been drawn to the little grave that Joe had created for the dead gull. The stone that marked the spot had been moved aside, and the earth was scattered around what was now a shallow hole. The bird was gone, but she had found blood and some feathers nearby. It could have been an animal that had dug up the bird, she supposed, except that Danny had dirt beneath his nails when he’d eaten earlier that evening, and when she’d questioned him about it, he’d simply clammed up. It was only later, when she examined the grave, that she had begun to suspect what had happened.
She decided to leave matters as they were. She hoped to enjoy the night and didn’t want to leave her son after an argument.
“Will Richie be at Bonnie’s?”
“I’m sure he will,” said Marianne. Richie’s mental age wasn’t much more than Danny’s, but he seemed to care a lot about Danny, and Danny liked the fact that Richie deferred to him. That didn’t happen a lot for Danny, who had found it hard to make friends and to settle on the island.
She hung a left into Bonnie’s driveway and killed the engine.
Danny undid his seat belt and waited for her to come around and open the door. Light shone upon them as Bonnie appeared on the steps, her hair loose around her shoulders, a cigarette dangling from the fingers that cupped her elbow. Bonnie Claeson had endured a hard life: a husband who beat her, then ran off with a line-dance teacher; a son who would always be dependent on her; and a succession of men who were at best unsuitable and at worst unstable. Sometimes, Marianne thought, Bonnie Claeson appeared to live her life as if she were being paid by the tear. Then there was the accident, the one in which her nephew Wayne Cady had been killed. Marianne had attended the funeral, along with much of the island’s population, watching as the coffin was lowered into the ground at the small cemetery beside the island’s Baptist church, Bonnie’s sister so distraught with grief that when the time came to drop dirt on the coffin, she had fallen to her knees and buried her face in the damp earth, as if by doing so she might somehow burrow beneath the ground and join the dead boy.
Bonnie had been strong for her sister that day, but then she was strong in so many ways. It wasn’t easy for her raising a disabled son alone, and the state’s overburdened mental health system had been of little help to her during her son’s life. Much of the funding had traditionally gone to placing mentally ill children in psychiatric hospitals or residential programs, but Bonnie had resisted that from the start. For a time the state had provided at-home help to her after her husband left, but cuts in funding and the prohibitive cost of sending someone out to the island on a regular basis meant that the service was withdrawn after less than a year. Marianne was suddenly terribly grateful that Danny would never be so reliant on her, and that at some time in the future she might be able to lean on him for support.
Bonnie had been good to her from the beginning and she had returned that goodwill as much as she could, taking Richie for a night to give Bonnie a break, or bringing him on movie trips with Danny on weekends. She had never discussed her past with Bonnie, but Marianne knew that the older woman suspected more than she ever said. Bonnie had been a victim of enough bad men to recognize a fellow sufferer when she met her.
“Thanks for doing this,” Marianne said as she approached the step, her hand on Danny’s shoulder.
“It’s no problem, hon. How you doing, Danny?”
“Okay,” mumbled Danny.
“Just okay? Well, we’ll see if we can change that. There’s popcorn and soda inside, and Richie has got some new computer game that I’m sure he’s just dying to show you. How does that sound?”
“Okay,” repeated Danny in that same monotone.
Marianne raised her eyes to heaven, and Bonnie gave her an “I know” shrug in return. “If I’m not late, I’ll drop by to pick him up. Otherwise, I’ll be by first thing in the morning.”
“Don’t sweat it, hon. You just have a good time.”
Marianne kissed Danny on the cheek, hugged him, and told him to be good, then went back to her car. She waved good-bye as she drove, but Danny was already heading inside and his thoughts of her, and his anger with her, would soon be forgotten with the promise of new games to play. She picked up speed once she was back on the main road, which became Island Avenue. She parked across the street from Good Eats, the sound of bluegrass music coming to her from inside, and checked her makeup in the mirror. She touched up her lipstick, tugged at her hair, then sighed.
She was thirty-two years old and she was going on her first date in years.
With a giant.
Joe Dupree was waiting for her, a beer in front of him. He was seated at a table in the back of the restaurant, turned slightly sideways so that his legs didn’t hit the underside. Once again, she was struck by how out of place he must often feel.
Nothing ever sits right for him. Things are always too small, too tight, too narrow. He lives his life in a constant state of displacement. Even the island itself doesn’t seem big enough to hold him. He should be out in open spaces, somewhere like Montana, where he would be dwarfed by the scale of the natural world.
He rose as he saw her approach, and the table shuddered as he struck it with his thigh. He reached down to save a water glass from falling, liquid splashing the table and the single red rose in the vase at its center shedding a leaf as his hand made the clumsy catch. The restaurant was half full, mainly with local people, although she saw a young couple stealing curious glances at the big man. Visitors. Funny how, even after only a year here, she resented the presence of outsiders.
“Hi,” he said. “I was starting to worry.”
“Danny was kicking up some. He still doesn’t like it when I head out without him. If he had his way, he’d be sitting here now demanding french fries and soda.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “You want me to go back and get him?”
He lifted his hands in surrender. “No, you’re just fine.”
He reddened, thought briefly about trying to explain what he meant, then decided that it would only get him into further trouble.
In truth, it had been a long time since Joe Dupree had found himself in a social situation with a woman, and he figured that his skills in that area, limited as they were to begin with, were probably pretty rusty by now. Women occasionally came on to him, or they used to when Joe Dupree would take time out from the island to frequent the bars of the Old Port, the island’s little diesel ferry taking him over on its last scheduled run. He would drink in the city’s bars until one or two in the morning, then call Thorson and have him come pick him up. The old ferry captain didn’t usually mind. He didn’t sleep much anyway. On those rare occasions when Thorson couldn’t make it, Dupree would either hire a water taxi or take a small single room at a cheap hotel, where he would remove the mattress from the bed and place it on the floor, using cushions to support his legs where they overhung the end.
And in those bars, particularly the ones off the tourist trail, he would sometimes attract the attentions of women. He would hear them, two or three of them, laughing in that way that women with alcohol on their breath and sex on their minds will sometimes laugh, a hoarse, unlovely thing from deep inside them, their eyelids heavy, their eyes narrowing, their lips slightly pursed. Their comments would crawl across the dusty floor