“You wouldn't have gone anyway,” Lila said.
“Who knows,” her mother said.
There was a thought: She could hitchhike West, a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, red bandanna around her neck, always resting in the shade of a big cactus, using the tumbleweeds for a bed. Maybe get a job in one of those gas stations two hundred miles from nowhere. She could walk out into the desert and have her baby in the warm sand.
Lila set her plate near the sink where her mother was rinsing dishes. She walked down the hallway and flopped across the bed. The white furniture still held light in the early dusk. She stared dreamily at the map above her bed, blurred her eyes, then closed them so the shapes of the map were emblazoned on her inner eyelids. There were places where no one would find her, Borneo, Madagascar, Sudan. After it was all over she would come home, her sack of trinkets jingling on her back and her hair shortish like the lady explorers’ she'd seen in books.
Lila heard her father humming on the porch and her mother opening cupboards to put away dishes. Maybe she would stay with her parents and hide it. Always wear big blouses, and eat doughnuts and brownies in front of them. She would only whisper to Birdflower. Then he'd help her carry the frozen beef patty boxes. He'd rub her ankles. She'd go alone to a spot on the point, wedge herself into a crevice, grab onto the big rocks, and push till the baby slid out and plopped into a saltwater pool with grayish-blue starfish cleaving to the bottom. The baby would breathe in water, smiling from under the surface at her, and swirl through the narrow mouth of the pool out to sea.
Her mother and father were whispering about her on the porch. They always had ideas on what she should be doing. Lila remembered when her mother told her to pay attention to the dark McKin boy, to Jacob Whitney, the son of the coast guard captain, and to thin Matt Lumly, because she would have to choose from these. Her mother said to notice their temperaments, how they handled the few dollars their parents gave them. Lila stared. “Do you really think I would marry one of those idiots,” she said. Her mother started to cry. But Lila didn't care. No one would force her to marry a stupid fishy island boy.
Lila hung her head over the edge of the bed. She could still hear her parents on the porch. A tiny beige arm stuck out from under the white ruffle of the bedspread. She smacked the doll under the bed, rolled over on her back, and watched the shifting willow leaves speckle shadows over the room's walls.
Things women did stayed with them. Like having abortions, like losing their virginity, like Eddie's mother: no one on the island forgot the things she did. Even Lila would sometimes look at her on the beach in her bikini and imagine the men she'd been with standing around her.
Lila went to the closet and picked out a blouse to wear, one she had ordered from a catalogue. The blouse had real gold threads running through it that glittered in the darkening room. She put her hands to her waist and stuck out her chest to admire her lean body. She ballooned her stomach, then contorted it all out and arched her back. “That's what you'll look like,” she said out loud into her twinkling blouse. “Like a fat old cow.” Lila made her face look serious. She saluted her image. “Good luck,” she said, then ran out of the house, speeding in a line to her bike leaning against the porch.
“Be back by eleven,” her father yelled after her.
Her hair flew back and she took her fingers from the handlebars. She knew this was like flying and that birds didn't have it any better. She passed the lighthouse, rounded the inlet, sped by the Trolley Stop and the gas station. She turned down Eddie's street and pumped hard on the pedals until her front tire slammed into sand. She got off then and walked her bike.
Daylight was nearly gone and the moon was clouded to a puzzle piece. Faintly, she saw Eddie in a white T-shirt throwing pebbles into the yard. His arm slung sideways. He pitched each stone as if it might skip in and out of the grass. The arcing arm movement let Lila see the scene clearly: herself at the kitchen table and the baby staring at her from a bassinet, watching her face as she took a long swig of a beer. In front of Eddie's house she pushed her kickstand down and watched the metal rod sink into soft sand.
FIFTEEN. TALL BOYS
Ultimately, in relationships,” Neal said as he turned the Dart onto the highway, “everyone is selfish.”
“I don't know,” Eddie said.
“This is how I figure it. A person gets bored with their life in general. Not with their lover, wife, or husband. And the cheapest, easiest thing to do is have an affair.”
“I couldn't tell you any of that stuff,” Eddie said as his hand snaked up and down in the wind out the window.
The cook looked at him. “How many beers do you want for you and your little friend?”
“A six is fine,” Eddie said, reassured that Neal remembered the point of the drive.
“You will drink a few with me first?”
The Dart passed a kid pushing his bike on the soft sand shoulder. Eddie was uncomfortable. “Sure,” he said. “But I gotta meet her at midnight.”
“Great,” Neal said, adjusting the radio. “We'll cruise a little.”
Eddie dropped his cigarette out the window and looked down to see the smattering of sparks. Since she had touched the inside of his wrist — whispered it so close to his ear he had heard each nuance of her breath — all he had thought about was Lila being pregnant. The fact made everything seem too loud: people's voices, the ocean, the dishwashers at work — the volume made him sick to his stomach and he couldn't forget it, not for one second. Though he had promised not to, he wanted to tell, to spread it over as many people as possible so that his solid problem would thin out and begin to disintegrate like an aspirin melting in water.
Eddie saw Neal looking at the crotch of his pants. Earlier, at work, while sorting silverware, he had noticed Neal staring at his rear. His mother had assured him that Neal would never actually touch him. But still. He'd heard from friends about the queer swim team manager who after meets stared through the steam into the shower room. He worried that the guy at the gas station would see him waiting in the car when Neal sashayed in to get beer. All I need is for people to talk. His eyes teared and he kept saying just under his breath: It would be stupid to cry. Neal hummed with the radio. “Do you have dreams about her?” he asked. “Nowadays I only dream about men.”
Eddie thought Neal inched his hand across the front seat, but he didn't want to act as if he'd noticed.
“Can't we get the beer,” Eddie said.
“In a minute,” Neal said, driving toward the docks. “Tell me what it's like.”
Eddie thought his mouth smirked slightly as he made a U-turn in the dock lot. “You know what it's like,” he said.
Neal gave a snort. “I guess I do.”
They rambled back around the inlet. Eddie slumped against the door and thought of getting so drunk his mind would move without his willful force from one thing to another. Neal pulled into the Texaco. “Tall boys?” he burlesqued. Eddie nodded and watched Neal walk in and get beers from the glass case. He didn't want to quit high school and come live here. Those deep lines would form around his eyes from squinting all day against sun and water. Eddie tried to imagine himself as a fisherman, guts smeared on his T-shirt and his beard uneven as a rag. His foot kicked the bottom of the glove compartment. But if he brought her home, his father's face would redden and he'd call him out to the barn, asking intimate and embarrassing questions.
His stepmother would put bushels of peaches in front of Lila and have her peel them and then stir till her fingers were sore from moving the big wooden spoon in the huge pots past dusk and into the dark.