Boca Raton Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Lauren Groff

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542041379

  Published in coordination with Plympton.

  Cover design by Pete Garceau

  It was very late and Ange couldn’t sleep. She had tried the usual things, had drunk a bottle of wine and watched a glacial Scandinavian film, had stared at her daughter smiling in her dreams, but her mind stayed bright, and there was no fatigue in her bones.

  The insomnia came from the Girl Scout cleanup of the creek that afternoon. Lily had spent the whole time crouched in the water, poking at a turtle with a stick. Ange had let her slack off because there was such a huge amount of trash in this scrap of a place that Ange was afraid it could harm her daughter’s soul to see how awful human beings could be. Out of the mud and from under the foliage, Ange had wrested license plates, condoms, popped balloons, Ping-Pong balls, beer cans—the effluvia of disposable lives. Up and down the creek, all the other mothers and their girls were grimly pulling junk out of the weeds.

  Then Ange bent down and pushed aside a broad leaf, and there she saw the horror: the downy outlines of what used to be chicks, everything once alive wasted away, the last browned bits tracing a halo around the knots of bright plastic that the poor crazed mother bird had fed her babies.

  Something flipped over hard inside Ange. She reached down and felt the clammy bits of the chicks through the gloves as she put them in her garbage bag. Then she threw up and called her daughter urgently, tossed the trash bag into the back of the leader’s pickup truck, and raced home, Lily trotting beside her, far too winded to whine. Ange felt only a little better when she slammed the front door and locked it against the dread that had trailed them back to their house.

  For a minute Ange panted there, and Lily stood in the middle of the room, sucking her finger and glaring at her mother with her dark eyes.

  Everything was off all afternoon, and dinner was impossible—roasted chicken and, oh my God, ravioli like little boiled sacks of flesh. Ange ate nothing, fighting her nausea, but Lily ate well.

  Then there were the empty hours, until at last Ange trailed out to the porch in her mother’s crocheted afghan to sit under the strange warp of the night, alone with the bats that were only fleeting darknesses in the starless sky.

  It was barely visible through the trees, but the street rolled gently downhill from the house for a mile before it met its full stop at the ocean. There, between the end of pavement and the beginning of sand, was a hidden place where people parked their cars so that, surrounded by the dunes, they could feel invisible. Teenagers and squirrelly adulterers went there at night to screw. If the wind was coming off the ocean just right, the music from the car speakers flew up the gentle incline to the little house in its ring of citrus trees. From this distance, it was warped into only a whine and a beat, which somehow more clearly expressed the songs’ yearnings toward love, love found, love of self in love, love lost, love being sweatily made. Ange had listened for hours, though it filled her with a seething discontent.

  But now at this time of early morning, nobody was awake; this part of Boca Raton was all old people clinging to houses they’d bought in the seventies for a whistle and a fistful of peanuts. Ange’s luck in owning her house hinged upon another family’s tragedy: a mother not much older than Ange had waited until her only son drove off to college before going weepily into the house, cooking up three-bean chili with rat poison in it, and shooting herself in the throat after her husband had finally stopped breathing. For three years before that, Ange had passed the house twice a day, walking to and from work at the history library, but mostly she had missed seeing the little white cottage for the overgrown citrus trees circling it. Even in neglect, the orchard had produced so much fruit, there was always a humming, moving carpet of wasps on the ground. The college boy had driven back home before he had even unpacked the car into his dorm room, and Ange had been walking by the moment after he had climbed out of the car and bent over, weeping on the sidewalk. Near him stood his uncle, who looked distressed but for some reason wasn’t hugging the child to comfort him. Ange didn’t yet know the story but put her arms around the boy. For a very long time, the boy had wept on her shoulder, Lily kicking between them. At last, he raised his head, looked at her with haunted eyes, and said, I never, ever want to go in there again.

  The uncle said, We’ll sell it. Don’t worry.

  The boy said in despair, But after this happened, who would ever buy it?

  Me, said Ange, surprising herself. Me. I’ll buy it.

  He looked at her for a minute and said, Ok, yes, and then wept again. Then he said he wouldn’t keep a penny from the sale, that it’d be infected money, and that Ange must pay only what was left on the mortgage. The uncle, who happened to be a lawyer, tried to argue until the boy screamed wordlessly, a sound as terrible and thrilling as a train’s metal shearing when it derails. Then the uncle agreed.

  This was a Friday. On Monday, papers were signed, every penny from Ange’s savings plus two hundred bucks borrowed from her coworker Phyllis, but, really, no money at all.

  Then she was a homeowner, eight months pregnant, Teo, Lily’s father, off jazz drumming somewhere in the Midwest—a bitter little harbinger of the life to come. She rented a dumpster and tossed everything from the house she thought too intimate: sheets, mattresses, clothes, curtains, soaps, spoons that had tasted the insides of the family’s mouths, blankets that had warmed their bodies, the carpet still wet with blood. There was very little left to the house in the end. It was just a bungalow of two bedrooms, five rooms total, an antique cottage with old crazes in the heart pine where the termites had chewed. She painted the walls white, then the furniture a different glossy white—the king-size bed, the kitchen table and chairs, the wooden parts of the couch. She taught herself how to upholster with a bolt of cheap pale velvet and a staple gun. She had wanted no color at all; it was like living in a cloud when the sunlight shone in through the leaves of the citrus trees. She had carefully saved what she thought the boy should have when his grief was less fresh and sharp: papers, photographs, trophies, stuffed animals, the cache of love notes proving that the darkness that had ended the marriage so explosively hadn’t been there all along just biding its time. When she dropped the stuff off in plastic containers at the law office, the uncle crept out, blinking rapidly. His shirt was sweated through, and without asking, he put his hands on her belly. I’m so glad, he stammered. In that house. Where my brother. Not death, but life. She breathed three times slowly, until she felt the frayed end of her patience slip out of her grasp, then gently removed the man’s hands.

  At last, just before dawn, the birds in the orange trees started singing their acid little songs, and Lily came out to the porch, still half dreaming. She climbed into her mother’s lap, and together they watched the sky go pink, then orange, then stretch into its broad daily blue. If a night of sleeplessness could be punctuated with this body slowly awakening on her lap, this smell of pepper and salt water and sleep, Ange thought, maybe insomnia was worth it. Or maybe not—Lily’s breakfast o
f scrambled eggs nauseated Ange, and she had to retch in the bathroom, thinking how she might never be able to eat anything bird-based again.

  If a night of sleeplessness could be punctuated with this body slowly awakening on her lap, this smell of pepper and salt water and sleep, Ange thought, maybe insomnia was worth it.

  Everything took longer after a night without sleep. She was late to drop Lily off at school, late to work, late to reshelve the books, late to sit with the project she had just started. The history library was a hidden treasure in an otherwise bare-bones university, and it hadn’t taken long for the junior faculty to realize that the two librarians could be useful as underpaid research assistants. Phyllis, the other librarian and Ange’s boss, groused about taking on special projects, but Grouse was her native tongue. Ange loved the trickier things the professors asked her to dig up. She had fallen into the job fifteen years ago; she’d vaguely chosen library science because she liked books, particularly history books, because of a single moment in her childhood that was the closest she’d ever come to transcendence. In sixth grade, she had looked up Alexander the Great for a class report and had been reading along happily when, suddenly, the little school library fell away, and in its place rose a jagged mountaintop path where, through the biting wind that drove the snow sideways, she saw the great gray rear of a war elephant. Already huge, it was laden more hugely with wicker baskets, a small man perched atop whose red cloak was barely visible through the blizzard.

  When the mountain withdrew to a small white star and the school restored itself around her—its smell of glue and damp pizza, the boys hucking pink erasers at one another’s heads—Ange felt scoured. Dazzled. She held the vision in a close and deep pocket within herself. She majored in history in college, got a library master’s, a job. She was paid very little, but she had no mortgage and there was money enough, if barely.

  Her newest project, which the best of the professors had just handed her—the most apologetic, the one whose gift card at Christmas was the most generous—was on the Millerites, a nineteenth-century cult who had believed that they would personally witness the end of the world. She’d settled in happily with the white gloves and the brittle diary that was the library’s only primary source on this subject when Phyllis came by. Today, her earrings of peacock feathers flapped behind her and tangled in her white hair. Lunch? she said and lifted her giant Tupperware seductively. Phyllis was lonely in her marriage to a silent grayish man named Phil—Phil and Phyllis, it should have been a clue—but the woman still felt pity for Ange, whom she considered a noble and struggling single mother. Every day she brought enough lunch for two. Ange gave an inward sigh but calculated the money she’d saved on lunch over the years, added today’s ten dollars, and stood.

  They ate the salad outside in the wind, watching the students heave by with their backpacks. The women spoke of nothing, of Zumba and politics and how Phyllis had woken at night to find her husband staring blindly into the refrigerator, eating pickles and a block of cheddar, still asleep.

  Then Phyllis peered at Ange’s face. You ok? she said. You’re quieter today. And you look . . . different.

  Different? Ange said. I must have brushed my hair this morning. Ha.

  No, Phyllis said. I mean you’re really pale. Bloodlessly pale. And there’s something off, I guess, in your face?

  Ah, no, just tired, Ange said. I couldn’t sleep at all last night.

  Then, because Phyllis’s eyes were huge in sympathy, Ange told the story of the creek cleanup, the disintegrated chicks, the little knots of plastic.

  Phyllis made sympathetic noises. She hadn’t believed in climate change until the year before, as if it were an article of faith and not science, as if it weren’t her business as a librarian to seek out and understand facts. But after Ange had gently converted her, she took on the fervency of the true believer. On weekends, she marched with other women her age and wrote letters to corporations.

  Phyllis said, Oh my gosh, I have to send you that article about what Miami will look like when the oceans rise. I swear, it gave me nightmares.

  Oh. Great. Please do, Ange said politely. But she imagined only sun on water and pleasure yachts with women in bikinis dancing on them drifting through the orange stucco buildings of Coral Gables. She smiled to herself as Phyllis talked on.

  When she packed up at the end of the day, Ange hesitated, then put the journal she’d been reading in a clean felt cloth and gently placed it in her satchel. She had never borrowed a book illicitly before, and as she walked out the door and into the sunshine, it felt thrilling, like a giant bubble slowly inflating in her chest. She picked up Lily from school and they walked home, buying burritos for dinner on the way. Ange could eat only a few bites, and only when she closed her eyes, because it also looked like a lump of flesh in her hands. Then all the old rhythms of nighttime slowly unrolled: the bath and pajamas and book reading and kiss on the damp forehead and perfect small pink mouth open in sleep. Lily had fallen asleep so early, there was still daylight outside. Ange was weary and yawning, but it was a good weariness; she would sleep well tonight, she knew.

  She decided to hold off on looking at the journal, saving it like a dessert, and sat down with her computer to email Teo his weekly photos. They’d met when she’d taken a spring break trip on her own to Puerto Rico. He’d been playing in the hotel band, and within minutes after the end of the set, they were in the elevator up to Ange’s room. He was warm, funny, shining; even while she was with him, he filled her with an ache that was maybe loneliness, maybe sex. For the first time in so long, though, Ange felt seen. She’d been in her late thirties, running out of time, so when he suggested he come home to Boca Raton with her, she said sure. They were pregnant quickly, and then he was hired as the drummer for a jazz trio about to go on tour and returned home only half a day after Ange had given birth. In those first few hours, she had held her daughter and felt the girl was ferociously and entirely her own; that feeling never quite left, even when Lily’s father arrived with his armfuls of carnations and balloons, weeping. For a while they tried to make a go of it, but babies are deeply unmusical creatures. They scream without much sense of rhythm or timing, and Lily’s father suffered a slow diminishment of self under all the noise. A remarkable sight, the amazing shrinking man. His brown paled, his smile dimmed, and at last he was nearly nothing at all, a ghost of himself. Then there were the arguments, the quick viciousness of his insults, her cold shoulder. To save his soul from the annihilation of being a father, he at last went back to San Juan. His life in the seven years since had been full of rum and jazz and moonlight and the perfume of tourist ladies he reluctantly seduced. Ange sent a weekly email about life in the white cottage; he sent back either nothing, a single emoticon, a video in which he played a song he’d written for his daughter on the guitar that Lily watched over and over again, or long letters in which he said things like “the love of my life” and “the gaping black hole of my soul.”

  But there had been nothing from him, no note at all, for well over a hundred days, since the twin hurricanes had come through Puerto Rico like a left jab and then a knockout hook. He had video-chatted during the worst of the second storm, showing them how the palms outside were pressed flat against the ground, how the plate-glass windows of his apartment seemed to be pulsing under the wind, but the video cut out when the cell service died. Most of the island still had no electricity, even after months, which may have excused Teo in his own mind from sending a note saying he was alive, but it did not, Ange thought. No, it did not excuse him at all. He couldn’t be dead; there was a sort of live nerve he still was pinching somewhere in her. But she did think the pleasure of throwing away an old life and sparking a new one had caught hold of him again, and that he was still in its throes, that eventually he would surface. So every week she sent out the email with the update on Lily and a few pictures to show him what marvels he was missing; in this week’s photo, her daughter was in messy pigtails, with no front teeth, bea
ming over tonight’s burrito as fat as her head. What kind of monster wouldn’t see that girl and want to be close to her, wouldn’t want to know her entirely?

  Ange had worked herself into a rage and finally erased the genial note she’d written and replaced it with: Lily hasn’t heard from you since the hurricanes. If you’re still alive, Teo, I’ll kill you. She hit send.

  For a little while, she had to stand and pace to calm down. The night was cool, and the wind licked through the open windows and the screen door. It was ten and she was still not tired, which worried her. After some time, she sighed and opened a bottle of wine—white, for fear of spills, though any liquid at all was bad, she knew—and sat down with the cloth gloves and unpacked the journal from its wrapper.

  It was a strange document, in the hand and with the terrible spelling of a little girl of a Millerite family in Upstate New York. The girl had begun it in 1843 with her daily concerns: a chicken found roosting in the pump house, a braid caught in a candle and singed to the scalp, a little boy on a neighbor farm trampled by a horse. The entries were labored over in thick pencil, slow going until Ange got a feel for the warp of the girl’s brain and the girl herself grew out of her shyness and into a clearer style. It seemed that in August 1844, a fiery preacher came to the tent revival and, under the pouring heat of day, proclaimed that the Day of Ascension was at hand in October, when Jesus would return to the earth to carry his children to heaven with him. The girl was caught up with the fervor that had infected everyone around her. She prepared as intensely as her parents did and gave her own calf to the little lame neighbor boy; his family wasn’t believers, wouldn’t be carried to heaven. On the chosen day, she took her journal with her to the rooftop and scribbled by candlelight while around her the family wore white robes and sang their hymns in excitement as the stars came out and the moon beamed down as if in benediction.