It was a mild night, clear but with that loamy greenhouse moistness that is always there in southern Florida. A swelling moon obscured the stars around it; the farther constellations burned a winter blue. Some of the palms hung limp and black while others tossed seemingly at random in little disconnected scraps of breeze. Aaron drove and tried to figure out the faint but chafing sense of failure that had come upon him.
He'd managed to find Suki, but the fact that he'd found her had done her no good at all. Her situation was the same as if he'd done nothing whatsoever. He'd tried to get involved, but he couldn't help feeling that he hadn't tried quite hard enough; worse, he couldn't quite deny an abashing and ambivalent relief that his offer had been refused. Maybe at bottom he'd been doing nothing more than trying to trick his conscience, sidestep some inchoate blame.
But blame for what? How much did a person have to do? He had a father who needed watching and an anemic business that required constant care and feeding. He wasn't sleeping with Suki, they had no history together; he'd made her no promises, owed her no allegiance. Why should he adopt this lunatic jeopardy in which she'd placed herself? And yet...
And yet, in some unreasonable and undodgeable way, he felt responsible. Not because of anything he'd done. That was the bitch of it. He was not only blameless but incidental. He'd been cruising along and, like the guy who sees a crawling turtle in the middle of the road, was confronted by a clear and necessary duty. Such duties fell across the paths of decent people all the time. But usually the rescues required were small and quick—ease the tied-up dog tangled in its leash, save the bird being harried by a cat. Luck of the draw that the charge which fell to Aaron involved not a turtle or a sparrow but a human being; and not just any human being, but a woman he happened to find beautiful.
He drove, and he did not remember turning right on White Street.
Once on White, he could have taken Truman to head downtown, but when he got to Truman he didn't turn. His hands and feet realized before his mind did that he was heading back to Suki's.
He didn't know why he was going there, except perhaps to allay, if only for a moment, the shameful feeling that he was letting himself off too easily. He would see again the thick shrubs where he'd been brave enough to wait in ambush, the ratty patch of lawn on which he'd tackled poor Pineapple. He turned right on Newton Street.
From a distance off, he looked at Suki's house, the unlit windows, the dark porch under ginger-breaded eaves.
But then his attention was diverted by something he just barely glimpsed on the opposite side of the street. An elbow. An elbow propped on the window frame of a car parked across from Suki's house. The car was a poor choice for stealth—an electric blue Camaro, some non- production color, with a molded skirt stuck onto the bottom of the frame. It hunkered just outside the main splash of orange brightness from a street lamp.
Aaron took his foot off the accelerator, crept along as slowly as he dared. He didn't have the nerve to turn his head, but as he passed the parked car he saw out of the corner of his eye a dark suspender cinched down on a muscular and shirtless shoulder, a tangle of unruly hair falling on a massive neck.
Praying that his face had not been noticed, hoping that his leg would not slam down on the gas and draw attention, Aaron kept on. Hands damp around the steering wheel, he hung a left on Eisenhower Drive and headed home to the Mangrove Arms, trying not to imagine what might have happened had the strongman from the T-shirt shop staked out Suki's place an hour sooner.
Pineapple waited until he thought Suki was asleep, then quietly started gathering up the edges of his bedroll.
Sitting, he tucked his pillow in among the folds, then tried to stand without shouldering the sauerkraut steamer or stepping on Fred, who was snoring with his head beneath the sink. Stepping barefoot over Suki, who'd been given the choice spot next to the propane fridge, he opened the screen door as gently as he could and escaped down the piled cinder blocks into the uncluttered night, to sleep among the mangrove roots and the animate puddles that survived somehow in every hollow.
When he had gone, Suki let her eyes spring open.
From floor level, she looked at the moonlit rusted legs of the single dinette chair, the dust-caked recesses at the base of the idle appliances. She had a pillow and two blankets and a sleeping pad. She was not uncomfortable but she was getting more disheartened every minute. What was gnawing at her was the gradual understanding that, strangled, half-drowned, and rescued, she was not at the end of her trials but only the beginning.
Terror had come and gone and probably would come again—but terror was a fast emotion, and mercifully impossible to remember fully. What confronted her now was a slower and more grinding dilemma: How did she continue her life in the face of what had happened?