Chip introduced Isolde and Woody to Peregrine Balfe, Lord Balfe.
“Please call me Perry,” the Englishman said. He nodded, friendly, but didn’t offer to shake hands. Perry said that he hoped Woody didn’t mind that they’d begun putting up the shutters. It seemed the right thing to do.
Woody said he was glad they’d begun.
Isolde, without a word, turned and walked into the house.
“Long flight?” Chip asked, watching Isolde.
“Bumpy landing,” Woody said. Chip glanced at Perry, then wandered into the yard, opened the cell phone, dialed, and began to talk. Perry was immediately at Woody’s side, obliging, cheery, picking up their suitcases with a grunt. Perry looked much too weak to carry both, but he insisted. Woody led the way indoors.
Isolde passed them, saying that she had to get to the supermarket before it closed.
The house, partially shuttered now, was dark and humid. The television muttered in the living room. They paused to check on Hurricane Ernestine. A weatherman pointed at the bright orange circle and said it would intensify and come ashore in the middle of the night. Woody led Perry into the master bedroom, where he put the suitcases down and then, turning away, leaned a hand against the wall for support.
“Those suitcases were monsters,” Woody said, fascinated by the bullet scars on Perry’s back. They were bigger than on the front: like smooth, fleshy flowers, almost.
“Light as a feather.” Straightening up, Perry looked around the bedroom with an expression of unbelief. “Right,” he said. Woody assumed he was speaking to himself.
In the living room, they paused again at the television as a man dressed in yellow foul-weather gear, standing under a torrential downpour, shouted, “It’s raining in the Bahamas!” Woody led Perry out the back door and onto the pool deck.
Perry said, “Chip told me you keep the alligator as a pet.” It was about ten feet long and lay motionless on the bottom of the pool. They stared at it. Perry asked how long it could stay down there. Woody shrugged and said he didn’t know, exactly.
Perry said, “So it isn’t a pet?”
“God, no,” Woody said. “It’s a pest. We think it’s male, because in May and June, mating season, it came and went and upset the neighborhood. Every time the Fish and Game wardens arrived to pick it up, it disappeared. They swore that somebody was tipping it off. It went away for a long while, and we thought, phew. But it came back last week.”
Perry said, “Does it have a name?”
“Mrs. McCracken.”
Perry’s laugh turned into a fit of coughing. Woody stared at him and said, “You know her?” Perry, smiling, said the name had a good, bone-crunching sound to it.
Woody said, “Tell me about your bar in Jamaica.”
Perry said, “In Negril. Perry’s, it was called. Not very original. Maybe I should have called it The Green Parrot.”
Woody said, “Everyone came to Perry’s?”
“That’s it,” Perry said. “Everyone came to Perry’s.”
Woody said, “I wonder if my wife ever went there.”
Perry frowned, thinking hard. He said, “You’re referring to Isolde?”
Woody thought, Who else would I be referring to? He said, “She used to spend winters sailing in the Caribbean. Maybe she came to Perry’s too.”
“Might have,” Perry said. “She very well might have. So many people did.”
Woody said, “My brother says you’re a lord. Is that true?”
Perry said that it was.
Ancestral acres? Woody asked. Marble halls?
Perry said, “Sadly, none of that. My grandfather was given — some say purchased — a peerage. He was a surgeon, rather famous in his day. He pioneered the use of rubber gloves during surgery, and said such memorable things as, ‘Every surgical incision is an adventure in bacteriology.’”
“That’s food for thought,” Woody said.
“I remember it,” Perry said, “every time I cut my thumb.”
Woody said, “You ever been married?”
Perry nodded. “I was, some time ago. Actually, I think I still am, in a way.”
Isolde was in shock from seeing her house wide open and Chip and Perry wandering around. Now, pushing an empty cart into the supermarket, she felt grateful for the cool air that soothed her sweating skin. She saw the coiling checkout lines, the aisles dense with shoppers, and she sensed their fear. Dizzy, thinking, This is all too much for me, she fought down the urge to turn and run. Where could she go? She’d worked so hard to create a new life with Woody. She ordered herself to concentrate on the task at hand.
The supermarket was about to close. The aisles were full, the shelves empty. The ululations of the disappointed rose into the fluorescent light. Isolde saw how fragile and transitory her life was. Her carefully constructed happiness was toppling. She hurried around, crossing unobtainable items off her list: water, Sprite, Coca-Cola, ginger ale, canned soup, canned tuna, sardines, salmon, Spam, baked beans, bread, crackers, Oreo cookies, nuts, potato chips, canned milk, long-life milk, powdered milk, peanut butter, jelly, batteries, toilet paper, paper towels, Chlorox, ice. Her cart was empty. Still, she had the stockpile of water and supplies at home. But with four people that wouldn’t last long.
Then she had an idea. Their stove was fueled from a propane tank. She’d cook pasta and vegetables. That might last until stores reopened. She found lots of pasta. She tossed boxes of it into her cart, then hurried into the fresh produce section. The fruit was gone, but Isolde filled her cart with onions, peppers, garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots, celery, fresh herbs.
Near her, the double doors leading to the back of the supermarket swung open and twelve policemen in riot gear, lace-up black boots, black bulletproof vests, carrying shotguns and batons, filed into the produce section and spread out across the back of the store. They took up positions at the ends of the aisles against the back wall and muttered into microphones on their left shoulders.
A voice blared over the public address system: “Attention all shoppers, this store is shutting down NOW. All shoppers must report to the CASHIERS. I repeat, all shoppers must report to the CASHIERS. This store is shutting down NOW.”
The policemen yelled, “Let’s GO! Let’s MOVE it!”
Isolde froze. The supermarket, she’d often thought, was her last refuge. Now she thought, There’s no place safe for me. The nearest policeman, a giant block of a man with a thick black mustache, swiveled his body toward her, shotgun held ready across his chest. He yelled, “C’mon! MOVE it!” He stepped closer.
Isolde was shaking. Her voice came out in a bleat. “I need food.”
“Whatever’s in your cart,” the policeman said, “that’s it. Take it to the cashier.”
Isolde pushed her shopping cart to the front of the supermarket. She was weeping. The policeman, shotgun at the ready, kept pace behind her. Policemen with guns herded shoppers toward the cashiers. Isolde wept as the startled checkout girl rang up her pasta and vegetables, she wept as an old man pushed her cart of groceries out to the parking lot. He loaded the grocery bags into her car, and Isolde blindly pressed money into his hand and got behind the wheel. Leave, she told herself. Drive north. Outrun the storm.
She knew Perry Balfe’s crooked heart well. She saw how he’d deteriorated, how junk had taken over. And now Woody, the man she loved and wanted to build a life with, to have children with, a man who truly loved her, Woody would learn she’d been married to, had probably loved, Perry Balfe, con man, dope runner, junkie, child murderer.
In her heart, Isolde had known this day would come. She’d always expected Perry to reappear. The deeper her love for Woody, the sunnier her new life, the more certain Isolde became that it couldn’t last. She didn’t deserve it. She’d forfeited the right to happiness. She’d sent up clouds of prayers, and now they were falling like dead letters around her feet. Soon she’d have to explain herself.