The Pirate Queen Read online

  Saphora thought it might have been a habit of his while waiting to get adopted; always make them think you’re happy.

  Bender had seemingly forgotten about how weak chemo had made him. “Look into my flashlight,” he said.

  “I’ve seen lots of those,” said Tobias.

  Jamie admitted to Saphora, “We’ve had three scares this year, but he always comes out of it. Tobias is resilient like that.” But she was nervous and paced the whole time Bender asked Tobias about his symptoms.

  Bender felt around the boy’s lymph nodes. Then he asked, “Tobias, have you had an accident? By that, I mean a bathroom accident?”

  Tobias looked away, as if embarrassed to answer.

  Saphora told Eddie, “Wait outside with Sherry.”

  Sherry led Eddie out of earshot and then closed the library door behind them.

  “Dr. Warren, he’s got a doctor he sees on a regular basis,” said Jamie. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I’ve got a bathroom right here where we guys can go and clean up,” said Bender. “Ladies not allowed, right, Tobias?”

  Tobias looked happy to know the women were being thrown out of the room. He allowed Bender to help him off the bed. Then he and Bender disappeared into the large bathroom that serviced the library.

  Jamie was too surprised to protest. Saphora was surprised too. Bender had not had his nose out of his medical books since Jim had told him cancer was a certainty.

  The plumbing in the old house rumbled. The shower was warming up.

  “I’m sorry we’ve disrupted your meal,” said Jamie.

  “No need to apologize,” said Saphora, keeping her voice low and considerate. Jamie had said she was a worrier. Saphora understood worrying and did not want Jamie to feel as if she were a bother. “We know Tobias is sick. He never misses taking his meds. Sherry’s up on his medicine schedule as much as Bender’s.”

  “You’ve got enough on your hands just looking after Dr. Warren,” said Jamie.

  “Tobias would never have let you or me take him into the bathroom for a shower. Bender’s got the doctor’s bedside manner, and he’s a guy. This couldn’t have happened at a better place,” said Saphora.

  “You can see why I could never take Toby out on a boat.”

  “Tobias seems like the kind of boy who wouldn’t take to your treating him like he’s too frail to do anything. You know, he asked me to teach you how to fish today,” said Saphora.

  “He thinks that he never gets to do what other kids do. But we’ve had such bad luck just giving him a little independence.” Jamie was standing outside the bathroom door now, listening.

  “Let’s go up and get some of Eddie’s clothes for Tobias.”

  Jamie hesitantly followed Saphora upstairs. Saphora opened a bureau beside the bed where Eddie slept and pulled out several pairs of shorts. “Look through these. I know Tobias is smaller around the waist, but he’ll be fine for the night. It’ll do him a lot of good allowing him to finish eating that fish he caught and then catching lightning bugs with Eddie.”

  “You’re taking this all in stride,” said Jamie.

  “I wasn’t a perfect mother. But I did learn from my mistakes. Tobias is dying for some normalcy. He wants to be treated the same as Eddie or any other kid without his illness.”

  “He must have told you about his AIDS then?”

  “No, but what does it matter what he’s sick with?” Saphora did not show surprise.

  “Does Dr. Warren know?”

  “He’s a doctor. He’ll figure it out.”

  Jamie took a pair of Eddie’s khaki shorts and a T-shirt. “I’m glad Toby found you and Eddie on the beach that day, Saphora.”

  Now that Jamie had brought it up, Saphora thought how serendipitous it was for Tobias to have picked them out of the other families out walking. “I’m glad too,” she said, equally glad that she and Jamie were becoming friends.

  “It’s like angels guided Toby to Eddie,” said Jamie.

  Lately Saphora had thought the opposite, that fate was playing one mean trick on her after another. She could have used an angel or two driving away that storm. But now that she thought about it, it seemed as if an angel had come upon her that day on Tiny Beach, dressed like a thin, dark-haired boy looking for a friend.

  Jamie took Tobias back to their cottage. Bender sat quietly on the lower deck rubbing mosquito repellent on his arms and legs. Sherry and Eddie had gone into town for ice cream right after dinner. They took down orders and promised to return with some for Bender and Saphora.

  Saphora lit a couple of candles to take outside and then joined Bender. He was holding a cigar to his nose and smelling it, eyes closed.

  “You don’t smoke,” said Saphora.

  “Sometimes I do, Saphora. Occasionally after a golf game my buddies and I would hit a martini bar—one that allowed cigars. This is one I’ve had for a while. I’m just smelling and remembering.”

  “If you smoke it, I won’t tell Jim.”

  “If I won’t clog my arteries with fried fish then there’s no point in ruining my lungs with a cigar.” He dropped it back into his shirt pocket.

  “Tonight, with Tobias, that was incredible how you took over. It could have humiliated him. But you were amazing, actually.”

  “I understand what he’s going through. We guys have to stick together.” He looked out over the dark river. There was nothing to see except the moon behind a cloudy haze. He seemed to disappear into the dark void.

  “Bender, look at me,” said Saphora.

  “I’m looking,” he said, calm, like a man thinking over his life. “You’re still beautiful after all this time.”

  She took in the compliment, considering he said it with such earnestness. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you that what you do is important. You give your patients back their lives after they’ve been through horrible accidents. All those burn victims. You help them find their dignity again.” She was fishing around so much that his countenance changed. He was even more attractive when his eyes softened and a slight smile appeared. He made her smile too.

  “It means a lot to hear you say it. We don’t always say what we should say.”

  She gave his comment some thought. “I think it’s because I feel like a watcher.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I watch you, but I’m standing outside your world.” She didn’t know how to explain it. “I don’t have access to your world.” That didn’t come out right either.

  “I give you everything I’ve got, Saphora.”

  Again, he equated material things with love. “All I’ve ever wanted is to know you love me.”

  “Everyone loves you, Saphora. Why don’t you know that about yourself?” he asked.

  “Is that what you think I’m talking about? Some issue with low self-esteem?” She was careful not to raise her voice. “Everyone loving me isn’t the point. This is about you and me.”

  “You want me to tell you I love you. But there’s no end to telling you. You’re not easily satisfied, Saphora. You’re no picnic.”

  “Should there be an end to telling someone you love them?”

  “I just mean that you seem to need it more than the average person.”

  “Only because there’s such a deficit of hearing it, Bender.”

  “Now I’m cold-hearted?”

  “Bender, I didn’t mean to get us off on the things that upset us.” She wanted to do whatever it took to get him to stop looking disappointed in her since it would only make her mad at him again.

  “I love you. Can you believe that?” he asked.

  “Am I enough?”

  “That is a silly question.”

  The slamming of car doors brought Bender up out of his chair. He picked up one of the candles and blew it out and then the other. “I’m going inside to have one scoop of vanilla ice cream. Nothing on the top, no chocolate or cherries. I’m down to that now, Saphora. Not a good sherry or a vodka and no cigar. God or this
awful existence finally has me cornered in a dark place where I can’t have any of the small luxuries that give me a moment of pleasure. That ought to be punishment enough for the night.”

  “I’m not punishing you.” She could not say anything else to him. She was stuck on the idea of God cornering him.

  He went inside.

  All she had intended to say was how heroic he was to come to Tobias’s rescue. Now here she sat outside, alone and racked with guilt, while Bender joined Eddie for ice cream. She wondered if he was realizing what a treasure he had in Eddie, or his children and daughters-in-law. He still seemed to see them all as an extension of his collections, like trophies. She had failed again at trying to explain the empty ache she had felt for longer than she cared to admit. Cancer had made the ache deeper instead of bringing them back together. If she told this to any of her children or her friends, she would be judged as being petty in the middle of her husband’s trauma, when all she was trying to do was recover some of the lost conversations they had missed over the years.

  If I could have one wish, she thought, it would be to experience a whiff of the joy behind Tobias’s smile. It had to be the fact that he had come from a rootless life, whatever that meant in a foster care system, to now being rooted in his adoptive family. Perhaps he was so grateful to be connected to a family that he could forgive his dependence on medicine that kept him among the living.

  If she could get beyond the empty feeling of marriage to a man who did not know how to love her, she could grab hold of a little of Tobias’s joy. Always the obstacles.

  “Nana, come inside for ice cream.” Eddie stuck his head out the french door, a rim of chocolate mustache outlining his mouth. “Can you have some or will it make you fat?” he asked, having heard her turn down dessert most of his life.

  “I don’t care if it makes me fat, Eddie,” she said. “Give me chocolate and nuts and cherries, all of it.”

  She ate the cup of ice cream, lapping up Eddie’s silly stories and even tolerating Bender’s absorption in a golf game on television. She wouldn’t let Sherry clean up the ice cream mess and instead sent her out of the kitchen to read or whatever she wanted to do.

  Bender fell asleep on the couch. She turned off the television and covered him with a blanket. Eddie kissed his grandfather so hard that Saphora was surprised he did not stir at all.

  “He’s taken his medication, Eddie. He’ll see you in the morning.”

  “I love you, Nana,” said Eddie.

  “I love you too,” she said. But it was his sincerity that broke open some of the emotions she had tamped down. “More than I can even tell you.” She hugged Eddie until he told her she did not have to get so mushy.

  He went upstairs to bed without complaining.

  She was not the least bit sleepy, being overwrought with dark chocolate decadence. The moon drew her back outside as if she were an ocean tide.

  She could not get Tobias out of her head. He left behind a residue of his delicate self wherever he went. At first she thought it was his dependence on the kindness of strangers that caused those around him to pause and be thankful for their good health. Then it came to her that it was his humility.

  Luke was out shoveling again. Of course. There was a full moon.

  9

  Out of the welter of life, a few people are selected for us by the accident of temporary confinement in the same circle.

  ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, Gift from the Sea

  The artists drawn to Oriental’s warm shores had at some point in years past gotten the idea that tourists needed evidence of the existence of the Oriental dragon, a town myth. So in strategic locations around town, brightly colored giant dragon eggs sat perched in nests. The signs placed near the large stones disguised like eggs and painted in all kinds of mural motifs declared the spots were a natural nesting ground for the Oriental dragon.

  In spite of the brilliant marketing ploy, Oriental attracted more sailing and yachting aficionados who had chanced upon its busy harbor than tourists lured by its humble publicity campaign. The town residents liked the fact that Oriental was a best-kept secret. The boat owners making up the sailing community loved its cozy, welcoming harbor and the lazy lull of its downtown streets.

  In front of each shop or café were bike racks full of bicycles for people to ride and then leave at the next shop or café they visited. The town provided the bicycles to encourage the locals and tourists to put more bikers than drivers on the quiet streets. Saphora walked across the street to Ida’s B and B and borrowed a blue bicycle deciding, for the time being, not to occupy her thoughts with Bender. The act of pedaling down South to the marina lessened her worries, swapping them for the lightness of soul she felt through the simple act of carrying food home in a backpack. She could disappear into the simple pace of Oriental and pretend she belonged to these gypsy types who lived part of the year sailing navigational routes down the Atlantic coasts, summers on the Gulf.

  She came upon a farmer’s market under an outdoor tent. A local vendor wearing a straw islander hat manned the rows of folding tables. The tables were ornamented by bins filled with homegrown tomatoes and crookneck squash. He poured a bucket of green beans into a cardboard box. Walking up and down through the aisles, Saphora took in the smallness of the display. It wasn’t masses of vegetables like the bulk produce sold in large supermarkets. It was all that this man had grown from his home-based garden to produce this small, potent, natural bounty. He washed a tomato and handed it to her sliced in half. She thanked him and ate it warm. Its strong tang, superior to bland supermarket tomatoes, made her picture her mother, Daisy, bent over a container garden. “I’ll take six,” she said, and he bagged them.

  He set out local honey and she took a jar.

  Out front a sidewalk guarded by garden containers paralleled the two-lane downtown road. Beyond that the village harbor serviced fishing boats coming in and out. Captain Bart was greeting customers. Sea gulls serpentined overhead waiting for dropped fish. She asked herself what had taken her so long to come to Oriental.

  In the next tent a half block down, two men wearing expensive blue-and-white windbreakers reclined in lawn chairs behind a table filled with fresh fish. When Saphora approached the table, one sat forward, happy to see her.

  “What’s the fresh catch?” she asked.

  “It’s all fresh,” he said. Grocers back home all claimed the fish was fresh when asked, too. But she trusted the local boys’ claim here along the coast. “How’s the tilapia today?”

  “Almost out of tilapia. We’ve got salmon just off the boat. Some swordfish and tuna steaks.”

  Gwennie was coming in tomorrow, catching an early flight. She would want the tuna steak. Sherry shared her tastes. Saphora picked out two tuna steaks for the women and two swordfish steaks for herself and Bender. Eddie would eat corn dogs.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “My husband, Bender, and I are here for the summer,” she said. “We have a house on South.”

  “The big blue house with the green roof. Is that the one?”

  “Yes. But it’s my first time here.”

  “Glad to meet you. I’m Reed Holt and this is my brother Lane.” Reed wrapped up the fish and bagged it for her to tuck into her backpack.

  “I’ve heard about a fishing tournament Saturday,” she said.

  “Yep, the annual tarpon tournament’s kicked off by a kids’ parade down this street in an hour,” said Lane. “A couple of vendors will be frying fish.”

  She thanked him. She would try and rally Eddie and Tobias. There was time to get the fish home into the refrigerator and pick up the boys. The last thing she needed to get was a couple of onions. The farmer’s market had sold out.

  She rode the bicycle back up South and swapped it for the Lexus. The grocer’s was a little too far for biking on a short schedule. She drove to the grocer’s and spotted the yellow onions. She bagged one up and was just about to meander toward the checkout lane when she heard, “
I think you must be following me.” Pastor John Mims stood grinning and pinching an obviously ripened tomato.

  He startled Saphora, but she kept the surprise from her face as much as possible, attempting a normal-looking smile. No use hiding.

  “I’m glad I saw you. Did Dr. Warren tell you about tonight?” he asked.

  “Not a word,” she said. So far she was not lying to Mims. Bender’s highly realized sense of self-possession had followed him from Davidson. Cancer had not simplified him but made him more complicated than even their first three decades together.

  “The ladies’ quilting group is holding a silent auction and bake sale. Bender didn’t tell you about it?”

  “He wouldn’t, Pastor.” She would be honest with him. “Bender’s not into bake sales and such,” she said. Bender was plying the minister with promises he did not intend to keep.

  “The doctor said you’d be good for a pie. He didn’t tell you?”

  “I haven’t baked since we hired Sherry. And she cooks to suit Bender. He doesn’t eat pie.” She couldn’t tell whether or not Mims was kidding.

  “That’s a shame.”

  “It’s nice to see you, Pastor.”

  Before she could escape, he stopped her again. “Mrs. Warren, you don’t have to bring anything. I was just trying to find a way to invite Dr. Warren out of the house. He says he’s not been out much since starting his chemo.”

  “I doubt he’d come. He’s already got Sherry cooking dinner for tonight.”

  “Sure, but if you can make it, it’s at six o’clock. There’s one silent auction item that’s a vacation to the mountains. They expect it to be a hot ticket. But someone like Dr. Warren could give them a run for their money.”

  “I’ll tell him,” she said, slipping away from the minister to the checkout lane.

  Bernard sat on his stool as he must do for hours on end all day. “Mrs. Warren, I saw you confronting that crooked preacher. Want me to have him arrested?”