“Don’t know how you can drink that in this heat,” Devin mused, watching steam rise from Lamar’s coffee and vanish under the café umbrella. She leaned away, sipping her cold brew, beads of sweat sliding down her neck. It was humid this early in the morning, earlier than she was used to.
“I don’t know,” Lamar’s brow arched. “Guess I got that heat in my veins!”
She snorted.
Their meal at Ed’s felt like ages ago, though in fact today was only Friday of the following week. She’d waited for his text, at first disappointed when it hadn’t come, then relieved. It was hard to put Maybank’s name—and the painting and everything else—out of mind. But she needed room to breathe, and was grateful he had given it.
“Hey, look at this!” He pulled a torn blue envelope from his pocket and tossed it on the table in front of her. She looked it over and blinked.
“Drew & Sasha?” It was too early for guessing games. “Okay…what is this?”
“An invite. Couple of friends from school are getting hitched the end of July. Their photographer flaked on them, so I gave them your name!”
“Oh,” she managed. “Wow. That’s great. Thank you!” She tried on a smile she hoped wasn’t too strained and took another sip.
“Yeah, well, I remembered you saying your business hadn’t taken off. I thought this could help.” He tilted his head. “How’s your foot?”
“Better. Almost good as new.”
“Good. I still get a phantom pain sometimes when I think about that cut. Weird, huh?” He shuddered.
“Yeah…weird.”
A silence spread out between them, one she wasn’t sure how to bridge. The truth was she herself still felt lingering stabs of pain. Her right foot was infected, she felt certain—though it seemed healthy and clean on the surface. Maybe not medically infected, but something was wrong. Another kind of infection. An emotional one? A spiritual one?
She shook her head, dispelling such thoughts. They made no sense, and right now too many things needing sense made of them. She leaned forward, eyes narrowing in the bright sun, and held his gaze, taking his measure before she spoke.
“How do you want to approach this Maybank thing? I think he’s our best shot at figuring out…what happened…in the marsh.”
His face fell. “Uh. Yeah. I mean, I guess. Probably is.”
She blinked. “Isn’t that why you wanted to meet? You said you wanted to show me something. I thought maybe you’d found him.”
“No,” he said. “No, it’s not—I mean, it’s different. Something I thought you’d like.”
She titled her head. “Okay. Give it to me, then.”
He grinned. “Ain’t that easy. I can’t show you unless I take you there. You brought your camera, right?”
“Yeah, I got it. Okay…how far is it?”
“Not far.”
They left the coffee shop and she followed him in her Prius up Bell onto River, then through backroads she’d never driven before. Morning light filtered through thick crowns of oaks, dripping in bright patches on the roads ahead except where tangles of muscadine and wisteria choked it, thick and green and flowerless. They passed an apartment complex, followed the snaking road until a dusty lot and an empty baseball field appeared, tucked away near the river. They parked, climbed out of their cars, and squinted in the beaming sun.
“Down this way,” he beckoned. She trodded after.
He slipped into a copse of elms, sweetgums, and laurel oaks at the field’s far end. They walked beneath the trees on raised ground; not a path, but a former embankment, through forest just as flooded as the rice fields it had once been. Thank God the mosquitoes hadn’t hatched yet, she thought. They waded through brakes of saw palmetto, ducked hanging vines and sidestepped flowers. More light filtered in as elms gave way to live oaks and the space between them grew wider. The way banked right. Devin glimpsed a line of water: the river, she realized. It looked blue under shadows of low-hanging oak boughs hiding the horizon.
The air grew close as the heat thickened. It was gorgeous.
Then the forest fell away. Two boys knelt along the water, a bucket by their side, dropping a weighted twine into the shallows. Lamar led her away from them toward a spit of land barely higher than the waterline, likely drowned when the tide was high. But they walked out amid the high spartina, boots barely sinking in the mud, and crossed over as if walking on water.
Lamar stopped and grinned, spreading both hands to each side. “They call it Hag Island—the few who know about it. Though it’s not really an island. A hammock, I think they call it.”
It felt private here, guarded by thick undergrowth at the hammock’s edge. Hidden from any other eyes. A refuge form the world, kept secret for those whose lives were held in the river’s arm.
“It’s beautiful,” Devin murmured.
They skirted the edge, rounded the single oak that grew in the middle, sheltering the hammock’s secrets. A flattened trail in the marsh grass marked where alligators climbed out of the water and slid back in. They stopped by a short wax myrtle, bony limbs mingling with the fingers of the oak, hung thick with tangles of moss. Blue bottles were strewn on the ground beneath, dusty and dirty and broken.
Lamar picked one up and slipped it onto a branch. “Oystermen and shrimpers brought these here probably years before I was born, when there were still oyster beds here. Did it to keep away ghosts.”
She’d seen blue bottle trees in town before, but never one as shabby and forlorn as this. She shivered despite the warmth, eyes drawn toward the river. Marsh grasses soared away far as she could see, while clouds marched over the water.
“Used to come here with my boy Gil all the time. We’d drink beers and fish on the weekends.” Lamar beamed. “Good place to find dolphins, wouldn’t you say?”
Devin bit her lip, smiled. “I would.” It was the wrong time of day for them, and maybe too far up the river for dolphins, but she didn’t want to say so. There was something special about the place in the morning; she could sense that. It was a privilege to be here.
Even so, something felt off. She’d always felt marshes to be places of infinite stillness, peace, serenity. Now she only saw the ranks of spartina grass as cover for terrible, unknown things to lie concealed. Anything could be hidden there, untold ranks of formless things.
“What’s wrong?” Lamar asked, watching her.
Her foot throbbed. She shook her head, swallowed, and tore her eyes away from the marsh. She caught his eye and saw a knowing look. “It’s the shadow, isn’t it?” he asked.
She nodded sadly.
The sky waxed over by degrees, the light growing whiter, more strained. The water shimmered. As if from far away they heard yelps from the boys who had, apparently, caught a crab on their line. Despite everything—the beauty of the place, the blissful quality of the day—Devin couldn’t help but feel her throat tighten, her shoulders clench.
They stood looking out on the water, watching for fins and tails. At last Lamar sighed. “Hey. We can leave if you want. I get it. I really do. I’m sorry I brought you here.”
“No, it’s beautiful. It really is.” She smiled. “Thank you.”
* * *
After getting lunch he brought her to his apartment, south of town near the bridge to the first of the barrier islands. It was surprisingly pristine, every detail in its place, the furniture nothing special but still ordered neatly in each area’s limited space. She followed him to a room in back near the rear door—the one part of the apartment that seemed messy and disordered.
“My studio,” he said, voice shy but full of pride.
She shuffled in, taking in stacks of canvases—some empty, some half-finished—leaning against the walls, the paint supplies scattered wildly across multiple tables. The room was brightly lit, more so than any other part of Lamar’s home. Despite the disarray there was something that felt clear and clean about it.
“This is my project,” he indicated a few of the paintings. “It’s basically what I do. I call them conceptual portraits—not like an exact image of a person, but an expression of how I see them. Kind of a translation of someone’s essence into imagery.”
She looked them over. One was fully abstract, a riot of contrasting pinks, yellows, teals, purples, streaking over and past each other in every direction. Another was two pale colors with a blurred stripe of white splitting the two, like fog hovering over a lake, maybe. A third was more representational: an aerial view of the city, of its red rooftops, blazing white church towers, the verdant trees lining each street.
“That one’s Casey’s,” Lamar said, almost embarrassed.
“Isn’t it…I don’t know, kind of presumptuous? To think you can see someone’s essence?”
“Maybe. But I kind of feel, if you’re going to try for something? Try for the highest and best thing you can do. To me, that’s seeing other people. And showing them who they are, no matter how they worry they’re not good enough or have something to prove. You feel me?”
She met his eyes, regarded him for a while, and nodded.
“Would you…I mean, what do you think about doing one for me?”
He blinked. “Um… actually…no. Not right away at least.”
She reddened but looked away, hiding her disappointment. “Yeah, I mean, whatever. Not that big of a deal anyway.”
“Listen, it’s not that I don’t want to. Okay? It’s just too soon. I don’t have a clear enough sense of you is all. Not yet.”
Not yet. It implied there could be a maybe later, which meant he thought they would spend more time together. She wondered how she felt about that, whether she wanted it or not.
She was suddenly tired. Disappointed, almost, in the way the day had unfolded, though she knew that was wrong. Their dinner at Ed’s last week, how the two had been so connected by that day in the marsh…didn’t he feel the same need to figure out what had happened? The same fear of what they’d seen?
She didn’t understand his lack of interest. How could he move on so easily from something like that? Her hands were shivering, as if she’d been emptied of all energy. She wanted to go home.
Mercifully, her phone chirped. She glanced at the incoming text, smiled, and pocketed the phone again. “Thank you for showing me all of this,” she said. “They’re all beautiful. But I’ve got to take care of some things.”
Lamar nodded. “It’s cool. Go on. I don’t want to keep you. I’m glad you agreed to come with me today.”
“Yeah. I had fun. Listen, I’ll text you soon,” she promised.
It had been fun, she realized, sinking into her car again outside of the apartment. And she would text him. Maybe not for a while. Not till her thoughts were still again, and she was free of that vague sense of wandering in the dark.
When would that be? She wondered. Devin started her car, backed out of the lot, and drifted away down dusty narrow roads.
