The Pirate Queen Read online

  “He’s awfully mature,” said Gwennie.

  “We met him at the town beach when Bender made us stop so he could take a walk.”

  Gwennie followed through the front door. Bender had set up an office in the downstairs room he called a library. He pored over a procedure manual.

  Saphora volunteered to take Gwennie’s suitcase and bag to the guest room opposite the study to give Gwennie time with her daddy. But she left the door open and could conveniently hear them.

  “There she is,” Bender said, an old wooden desk chair squeaking as he got out of it. He had always greeted Gwennie differently than the boys. She was his Gwen. There was an elevated intensity all over Bender as if he might break in two at the sight of her. She had not always brought out the best in Bender when she was a teen. But Bender admittedly had not ever been good at relating to young people. Once she had gotten her bachelor’s degree in tow and was well on her way to law school, Bender gained a sudden vocabulary for praise in her presence.

  Saphora picked up the suitcase and then the bag and set them on the bed. She opened the drapes covering the french doors while Gwennie sobbed next door. With the extra light in the room, the fine silt was visible that had coated the table surfaces over the seasons the house had been closed up. She wanted Sherry to come and see to everything after all. She went into the guest bath and pulled a hand towel out of the closet. It took only a couple of minutes to dust the furniture. But as the afternoon sunlight hit the surfaces, she could see her fresh swirls in the wood top. She pulled out a glass full of seashells from the upper closet shelf. She placed them on top of the smudged table surface.

  Eddie shrieked from outside.

  She ran to look through the glass doors. He was only reacting to Tobias, who had beat him to the top ladder rung and was climbing into the tree house.

  Gwennie appeared in the doorway. “You look like you did the night I pulled my first tooth,” said Gwennie, “wincing at the sight of blood.” Crying aged her in a good way.

  “I’ve never seen you so sentimental,” said Saphora. “I like it.” She handed her a box of tissues.

  Gwennie closed the bedroom door. “Daddy looks fine, Mama. I don’t know what I expected.”

  “Surgery and chemo will change how he looks. So enjoy today.” The tabletop did not shine in spite of the steady rubbing she was giving it. How her housekeeper made old tables look new again was beyond her.

  “I’m glad you brought him here. It’ll keep him out of the office so he can properly mend.”

  “I think he didn’t want his colleagues to see him looking like a patient.”

  “Daddy said he wanted Jim overseeing his treatments.” Saphora knew what Bender had told her. But in spite of the distance between them she still knew him better than he knew himself.

  “You probably haven’t been in much of a cooking mood. If you help me, I’ll make pizzas for the boys and something healthy for us,” said Gwennie.

  “I don’t care if it’s healthy.”

  “I’ll make both.”

  The afternoon moved slowly for Saphora. The boys took their pizza up the tree house ladder. Bender joined Saphora and Gwennie for pizzas and salad but seemed relieved that Gwennie was in such a talkative mood. It was like her to rattle along in waves of what had been accomplished, especially in front of her father. She had closed on the condo and paid off her car. Of course, now she was afraid she would have to trade in the car because none of them were built to last. It was a soothing inventory of all things Gwennie.

  “You’ve done something to your hair,” said Bender.

  That surprised Saphora so much that she said, “That’s nice you noticed.”

  “I notice when my daughter’s changed her hair,” said Bender. “That color suits you.”

  Gwennie reddened under his approval.

  “I just meant it’s not the usual thing you talk about,” said Saphora.

  “That’s nonsense. I can make personal observations. What are you implying? I can’t coalesce like you, Saphora? I realize I don’t ramble on like you women are prone to do,” he said. Looking at Gwennie he added, “Present company excluded. But I need the comfort of daily talk just like everyone else.” His voice was growing in volume. “Does that surprise you too, Saphora? That I’m just like everyone else?”

  “Daddy,” said Gwennie.

  “I’m tired.” He said to Saphora, “Forgive me.”

  “It’s not important that you’re like everyone else, Daddy. Don’t give it a thought,” said Gwennie. “You’re not like everyone else. You’re you. Mama is, well, Mama.”

  There was a distinction in the way Gwennie alluded to Bender’s uniqueness followed by the sort of tone that asserted that Saphora was exactly like everyone else; it stabbed Saphora even more than Bender’s comment. “Do we have to compare me to anyone?” she asked.

  Bender laughed as he once did right after they were married. It was a laugh he had inherited from his father, who had often gotten Bender to laugh at his mother for some comment he felt proved she was less than intelligent. It was very off-putting.

  “I’m going to leave you two to catch up. I’ll wash dishes,” said Saphora.

  “You and Gwennie stay and talk. I’ve got to finish my reading,” he said, getting up from the table. He turned and looked at Gwennie and said, “I’m sorry. It’s the pressure of tomorrow that brought out the worst in me. Not your mama.” His cell phone vibrated, so he took it out and said, “I’ll be. It’s Sam the Hammer.” He left the table.

  “Who is Sam the Hammer?” asked Gwennie.

  “Minor league pitcher for the Tigers,” said Saphora.

  “Dad knows a baseball player?”

  “They fish and play golf together.” There was a rumor that Sam Hammersley was being scouted for the Cleveland Indians.

  Bender held up his hand as if Saphora and Gwennie were talking too loud. He disappeared into the library.

  Saphora did not want to respond childishly to Bender, so she fell quiet. He had a history for bringing closure to an argument without apologizing. She used to imagine scoring a winning point. But what was the use? She sat silent. “You don’t have to do the dishes,” she said to Gwennie.

  “I want to,” Gwennie said. She went outside to collect the boys’ lunch leftovers.

  Saphora stood over the sink. She battled the strangest array of thoughts. She defined it as a mixture of guilt and anger. It was not a new emotion. It was an old resurrected hybrid of emotions she had come to know during the first ten years of their marriage when she could not for the life of her figure out how to win an argument with Bender. His negotiation skills were nearly at a genius level. Even when he brought the matter to a close, there was a nagging cloud hanging over Saphora that said even though his tone had gentled, he used a codified language that only alluded to his need to get on with the night so he could fall asleep listening to Bread.

  She revisited the conversation to the point where she had set him off. Then she got angry with herself for having said anything at all.

  She looked through the window over the sink and found Tobias hanging upside down out of the tree looking straight at her. He was like a lucky charm for her emotions. She laughed and that set him to clapping his hands as if it had been his intent all along to bring her out of the doldrums.

  He tried to pull himself up, but his tiny abdominal muscles would not respond. Gwennie went up the ladder and helped him slide up into her arms. Then he climbed back down onto the ground.

  By nightfall Tobias had gotten on his bicycle and gone home.

  Eddie said to Saphora, “Tobias told me that his father said he could win the prize for the most pills taken in a day. He had to take more, so that’s why he had to leave.”

  Saphora couldn’t figure out Tobias’s illness.

  Eddie manipulated Gwennie until she gave in and joined him in a violent video game. The goal of the game was to cut off the opponent’s head and then win another pail of green goo that gave the
victor more power over his enemy. Gwennie’s sorceress kept losing her head. That meant she had to use her potions to restore her own head. By the end of the game, Eddie had taken her castle and all of her servants as slaves. Eddie shouted when his monster changed the sorceress into a whining cat. The game was over.

  Saphora stowed the last of the leftover pizza and salad in the fridge, then excused herself. Bender had taken a sleeping pill early on and was snoring quietly in the upstairs bed. Saphora slipped on a pair of white terry slippers she had bought recently and absent-mindedly tucked into her suitcase. She pulled a sweater over her head and walked out onto the balcony. Suction from within and without snapped the door closed behind her.

  Night had fallen over the Neuse River. A lighthouse was blowing light across the ocean beyond the hillocks of marsh grass. Saphora swished leaves off the deck bench seat and found solace sitting quietly with no one to ask anything of her.

  She could nearly see the house next to them through the fog. The tree-lined fence separating the houses blocked much of her view, but she figured that had been the intent of whoever had erected it twenty years ago. It had come with the house and was one of the features Bender liked, the privacy of a fenced backyard barricaded by deep water. No one to bother him.

  Even the night noises were comforting. But then a not-so-distinguishable faint sifting sound began from behind the next-door neighbor’s backyard trees. Sift. Swish. Sift. Swish. She figured it wasn’t any sort of insect rubbing its legs in the night air. Maybe a raccoon. Then she decided not. She sat up to see if there was a light on in the house. A rouge of candle glow seeped through the top of the windows in back of the house. The swishing noise persisted. It might have been something mechanical, but the rhythm was too crisp and uneven, not any kind of noise a machine would make.

  Saphora sat for an hour on the balcony, her curiosity causing her to sit guessing until she decided that it sounded like a shovel cutting into the soft, sandy loam. But the house was not near enough to the beach or the riverbank to pick up the activity of clam diggers or even teenagers building a pit for an illegal bonfire.

  Finally the digging stopped. A door closed. Despite her curiosity about the digging, Saphora was even more curious about the occupant. Whoever had rented out the summer house had taken up a spade to dig by moonlight. Why on earth a neighbor would take to digging after midnight got her so curious she subconsciously got out of her chair to lean over the balcony railing. No hint of a human presence came through the trees. The next morning she would finagle a way to introduce herself.

  The house next door had gone completely dark. There was nothing to watch except the half moon. She sat under it until the cool wind chased her indoors. The door faintly whined at the hinges.

  Bender’s eyes opened, cat’s-eye slits widening under the hairline of moon falling across his face.

  She froze in the doorway. “I’m sorry if I woke you up,” she said.

  “Don’t apologize.” He did not take his eyes off her or look away as had been his custom for many years. “You look pretty standing there like that, the moon on your hair.” His voice was so thin that Saphora realized he had startled awake. Before he dozed off again he said, “But you have always been the prettiest of all the wives.” Then his eyes closed, and he fell directly asleep.

  Bender had once asked Saphora to join him in a pact: only one of them could take a sleep aid in case the house caught fire. He had seen too many burn victims in his operating room. Besides, the kind of sleeping pills Bender brought home from the hospital made him nearly comatose. She watched him sleeping and then took her place beside him as she had done for twenty-seven years.

  She fell asleep as the puzzling sifting sound started up again.

  5

  With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women.

  ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, Gift from the Sea

  Bender lay in the hospital bed with the blinds pulled closed. He looked too big for the bed, awkwardly pulling at the pale green hospital gown. Getting him to wear it took the genius coaxing of a nurse forewarned that he was a bona fide god complex–affected surgeon.

  Jim came in to check on him and talk to him about the side effects of the chemo if indeed the therapy was needed. “It’s good to talk about chemo and prepare for the possibility of it,” he told Bender and Saphora. “Then if you don’t need it, no big deal.” But Jim felt chemo was the viable avenue and made good on his promise to keep Saphora honestly abreast of Bender’s diagnosis. He showed them the gels from the CT scan. The tumor had shown up in his cranium, a small shadow that looked like a tiny moon gliding over earth. Jim left to meet up with the surgeon who would perform Bender’s procedure. He had promised Bender to observe and assist during the surgery.

  After Jim left, two nurses prepped Bender for the procedure.

  Saphora sat beside him, offering ice chips, although he complained of hunger pangs. The wife seated next to the patient in the bed opposite them doted on her Latino husband, whose dark eyes softened each time she smiled and pushed more ice into his mouth.

  Bender stared stiffly at the golf tournament on the overhead television. He kept switching the channels back and forth between the tournament and a tennis match.

  “Ramsey is coming,” said Saphora. Their youngest son, hearing about his daddy’s diagnosis, had bought a ticket into Raleigh-Durham.

  “He doesn’t have to come,” he said, still not taking his eyes off the tournament.

  “Of course he’s coming,” she said. “You’ll dry out. Eat this.”

  “Saphora, just hand me the cup. I can feed myself ice.”

  The Latino’s wife glanced up at Saphora. She was a white lady who spoke in a quiet voice but laughed uninhibitedly. There was a faint mixture of sympathy and humility in her eyes, eyes that seemed to participate in everything she observed.

  Gwennie came huffing into the room. She had taken the stairs in lieu of the elevator. She had used the exercise ploy as her excuse for avoiding elevators most of her adult life. But Saphora knew her fear of them.

  “Eddie went to stay the afternoon with his new friend, Tobias,” said Gwennie. “I met his parents. The husband looks old enough to be Tobias’s granddad. The mom looks a lot younger than him, but what do I know?” She set a stack of freshly bought magazines on Bender’s tray and kissed her daddy.

  It was the first time he took his eyes off the television. “Hold on to this,” he said, handing her his phone. “If I get any calls, just plug them into the message center on my laptop.”

  Jim reappeared, flanked by two OR nurses. “No phone calls for a few days, Bender,” he said. “Gwennie, shut that thing off.”

  Gwennie froze between the power of two stiff-necked surgeons.

  Finally Saphora took the phone. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Bender was wheeled out of the room. He was about to disappear behind the two automatic doors into the OR center when Saphora was overwhelmed with emotion. He looked helpless lying there, drifting off against his will into the sedation and under the management of a surgery crew not his own. Saphora leaned over the bed rail and kissed him lightly on the forehead that would soon be minus the thick blond forelock that had distinguished Bender from so many of his friends with thinning hair.

  The last emotion to register on his face was indistinguishable to everyone looking at him except Saphora. He had seldom registered fear, but there it was in his eyes just before they closed.

  An hour later she sat outside the surgery center holding a pager until Gwennie coaxed her down the stairs for a late lunch.

  The cafeteria was dressed up like a Fourth of July parade. Red, white, and blue streamers festooned the common areas, linking the various buffet lines like veins. Helium balloons floated cell-like above the cash registers. Saphora had completely forgotten the Fourth and said so to Gwennie.

  “It’s two days away. We can watch the fireworks on the water in Oriental. Turner will
be in town, and Eddie’s never been to the Croaker Festival,” said Gwennie. “We’ll take him, and it’ll help keep our minds off things.”

  “Ramsey is coming too. But Celeste is staying home with the kids. I told him to tell her not to worry.” Celeste tended to feel guilty about everything.

  Gwennie put an apple on her tray next to the pasta dish. “I don’t know that it’s a bad idea. Those three kids of hers are out of control. But then I know nothing about kids. I’m too impatient.” Gwennie wasn’t patient with Celeste either. She said, “Celeste does that counting thing with her kids. ‘Okay, Liam, I’m counting to five and then you’d better do what I say.’ The instant I would get Liam alone, I’d say to him, ‘Listen, kid, do it on one or you’re toast!’”

  “Celeste told me she couldn’t figure out why her kids were scared of Aunt Gwennie.”

  “Fear is akin to respect, Mama. Don’t confuse the meaning.”

  “Now you sound like your daddy.”

  “I realize I don’t need kids of my own,” she said.

  “Gwennie, I can’t wait to see what kind of mother you’ll make. Don’t minimize all children under Celeste’s definition of family. She’s got Ramsey believing that if he so much as even thinks about a career change, he’ll wreck his kids’ college funds.”

  “College! Liam’s what, five?”

  “Liam is seven. Celeste has an exacting sense about saving money.”

  “Celeste has an exacting sense about leading Ramsey around like a poodle,” Gwennie said over her shoulder as she led the way to a table on the farthest side of the cafeteria.

  “He does seem cloistered by Celeste.”

  “I know my brother’s not perfect. But he was the fun brother, the one who always knew what to do on a boring Saturday. Celeste has killed my baby brother and replaced him with a trained circus act.”

  “He did always struggle with discipline,” said Saphora. At first, it had seemed Celeste was good for him.