Mail-Order Matty
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“Nanny…” Damon dropped Matty’s arm and started forward. “Did you feed her?”
“What is it you t’ink I do, Damon Quinn?” She said his name as if it were one lyrical word. “You t’ink I stand there, bottle in hand, and tease her with it? You t’ink I wave it in her face? That what you t’ink?”
“I think you’ve taken excellent care of her, as usual. I’m just trying to find out exactly what you’ve done.”
“This your woman?”
Damon turned, as if he’d forgotten Matty. “I’m sorry. Nanny, this is Matty.” He reversed the introduction, clipping off his words. “Where is she?”
“She be in the screen porch, Damon Quinn. I rock her in the hammock. She cries I not rock, so I rock an hour. More.” She lifted narrow bony shoulders almost to her earlobes.
“I’ll get her.”
“You do that. She stop you pick her up. She know I be tired of rocking.”
Damon disappeared into the house and left the two women to confront each other. Nanny folded her arms. She wasn’t much more than four and a half feet tall, although she might have been taller in her youth. She had a wiry body that seemed to have folded and compacted with age. Her dark face was furrowed with deep lines, as if life had plowed that field and harvested what it had sown again and again. She wore a faded cotton print dress and a red kerchief tied at the back of her thin gray curls. Right now the curls bounced as she shook her head.
“Somet’ing wrong with you?”
Matty managed a smile. “More than you’ll ever want to hear about. Let’s just say I’m a terrible sailor.”
“No one in my family ever git sick on the water.”
“No one in my family’s ever even been on the water. At least, nobody who lived to tell about it.” Matty started forward.
“You come here, you don’t like the sea, maybe you don’t like Inspiration, either, or people on Inspiration. Maybe you don’t like coming at all.”
Matty had never felt less like passing tests, but her smile only faltered a little. “Right now I don’t. I’m glad you’re so perceptive. It’ll make getting along that much easier.”
Nanny frowned, but she seemed momentarily at a loss for words.
“The thing is,” Matty continued, “I don’t like anything right now because I’m exhausted and my head feels like someone’s inside it playing kettledrums. I wouldn’t even like my own mother right now. So thanks for understanding.”
“You got drums in your head, I got tea.”
“I would kill for a cup of your tea.”
“You sit in my kitchen.” Nanny pivoted and started through the hallway. Matty climbed the stairs to follow her.
Inside, the screaming of an infant was easily audible. Either Damon hadn’t yet rescued his daughter or Heidi hadn’t succumbed to his charms. Either way, Matty wanted to follow the sounds and at least glimpse her new charge, but she knew she’d better do as Nanny had ordered. The old woman wasn’t going to be won over easily.
She found the kitchen at the rear of the house by following the hall and cutting through lighted rooms. She was too tired to register much. The rooms were spacious, with high ceilings and tall windows. The furnishings were sparse but interesting, as if schooners from all over the world had docked here and traded ornately carved chests, cupboards and tables for whatever Inspiration’s owners had offered them.
The kitchen was huge, crisscrossed by rafters hung with dried flowers and herbs. Nanny was dwarfed by an eight-burner range sporting one lonely teakettle. The room was painted the color of good French vanilla ice cream, and the cupboards, trim and counters were a range of soft sherbets. The effect was charming.
Nanny waved Matty to a long pine table. “Tell me ‘bout your head.”
“It’s pounding. I still feel a little dizzy.”
“It buzz?”
Matty wasn’t sure where this was leading, but for the sake of harmony she was willing to play along. And besides, Nanny was right. “Yes, a little.”
“And your insides moving?”
“Like they’re training for the Olympics.”
“I’ll fix.”
“I’d be grateful.” Matty watched as Nanny eased her way around the room. She moved as if she were underwater, fluidly and in slow motion. She removed dried herbs from glass jars lining a counter, adding a pinch of this and a sprig of that to a brown pottery teapot. The water sizzled on the stove and grew louder until Nanny made her last decision and poured the water over the remedies she had selected.
Matty remembered what Damon had said about Nanny’s eyesight and sense of smell. With a sinking heart she wondered how she could call a halt to this now. She had expected traditional black tea, perhaps Earl Grey, or even something as daring as chamomile or peppermint. She had not realized that Nanny would mix her own.
“Heidi don’t like strangers,” Nanny said, without turning to see how her words affected Matty. “Already she know who her family is….”
Matty refused to disagree, although she thought that kind of perception in an infant was unlikely. “Little babies are much more intelligent than we give them credit for.”
“You pick her up, she probably cry.”
“She might very well,” Matty agreed.
“She probably cry a lot.”
“She’s certainly getting some practice right now.” Matty could still hear Heidi screaming somewhere off in the distance.
“She be mad at Damon Quinn, he go off and leave her so long, go off to git you.”
Matty still refused to take the bait. “It’s amazing how good children are at making their feelings known.” And little old Bahamian ladies, too. But Matty didn’t add that.
Nanny selected a cup from one of the cupboards, one that had obviously seen better days, then she poured Matty’s tea, squinting and lifting the cup so that she could survey its contents before she handed it over.
The cup was chipped along the rim in four different places. The handle had been broken off and glued. Matty hoped the glue held long enough for her to finish the tea. “It smells…” Words failed her. It smelled like an overripe compost pile.
“You drink it, it’ll fix you quick.”
Fix her to do what? Matty considered her options. She could refuse outright on the grounds that the tea might really end her suffering once and for all. Or she could say—quite truthfully—that her stomach was rebelling.
Or she could take up the challenge and show Nanny that she trusted and respected her. The first two wouldn’t help Matty settle into life on Inspiration, but the third might—if it didn’t kill her first.
“It smells a little like my favorite herbal blend at home,” Matty said. “Thank you, Nanny.” She lifted the cup to her lips and swallowed her first sip. The taste was vile, a cross between banana peels and some mutant relative of the cabbage family. She waited for her throat to close or her muscles to clench spasmodically. When nothing happened, she cautiously took another. “It’s so…warm.” She smiled at Nanny. “I guess it was cool out on the water.”
The kitchen door flew open, and Kevin stepped through. She saw he had dark hair down to his shoulders and the faint tracing of a mustache, but a more detailed appraisal would have to wait, since he was obviously in a hurry. He carried one of Matty’s suitcases in each hand. And as he strode past the table he left a trail of water behind.
“You be raining on my floor, Kevin Garcia,” Nanny said.
“Suitcase fell in the water,” he mumbled.
Matty closed her eyes and took another sip of the tea, but not before she had seen the glow of triumph on Kevin’s face. She suspected that fell was not the appropriate word, and that when she opened the suitcase in question she might find anything from dead fish to exotic coral formations in among her new Victoria’s Secret bras and panties.
“You leave it in bathtub, you be sure.” Nanny followed behind him, mopping the water trail with a dishtowel. “You t’ink you can spill water my house, you gotta new t’ink coming.”
“Yeah…yeah…” Kevin disappeared through the doorway.
“Kevin Garcia don’t want new faces on cay,” Nanny said.
“I’ve guessed that much,” Matty said pleasantly. “Do you suppose all my suitcases will be properly baptized, or just that one?” She took another swallow of her tea and discovered it was the last. Somewhere between the first and the final she had developed something like a fondness for it. The taste was truly terrible, but it had spread a warm lethargy through her body, weighting her limbs and even her eyelids. Her stomach was no longer an angry tempest, and the steady beat behind her eyes was slowing to lullaby tempo.
Nanny brought the teapot back to the table and refilled Matty’s cup. Matty didn’t even protest.
“Kevin’s not the onliest person on Inspiration likes t’ings the way they always be,” Nanny said.
“Nothing ever stays the same, does it?” Matty sipped her tea and contemplated how the rhythm of her own words had slowed. “But I can tell you, Nanny, that if life does stay too much the same, it’s not good either. In fact, it’s terrible and lonely. New things aren’t necessarily bad…they’re…just… new.”
Nanny was frowning. In fact, there were now two Nannys frowning at her, identical twin Nannys, who were matched wrinkle for wrinkle, curl for curl. Just as Matty was about to comment on this remarkable phenomenon the tranquility of the kitchen was shattered by a foghorn. Matty tried to remember if she had noticed a lighthouse as they had approached, wondering if even now it was signaling a ship about to enter dangerous waters. The possibility was so romantic, so thrilling, that she wanted to ask, but somehow her lips, curved into a wide smile, refused to move.
“This monster child is my daughter, Heidi,” Damon shouted above the din. “And she refuses to stop screaming.”
Matty heard Damon’s voice, and she even made some sense of what he said. The foghorn was a baby, Damon’s baby, in fact. She was supposed to turn around, acknowledge the child in his arms, perhaps even offer professional advice on calming her. Some part of Matty—a part growing steadily smaller—wanted to do just that. As for the rest…
Her eyelids gave up the fight and closed, screening out everything except Damon’s next words.
“Nanny! What the hell did you put in that tea?”
CHAPTER THREE
Sun poured over honey-colored walls and made feathery tracings of the palm fronds that were dancing in the Caribbean breeze just off Matty’s balcony. Matty had been watching the shadows for longer than she cared to admit. She wasn’t sure what she hoped for. That their hypnotic sway would put her back to sleep. That if she concentrated hard enough she would find she was asleep in her lonely bed in Minnesota and that yesterday was just a disturbing dream. That someone would come into her room and tell her that she had not disgraced herself again and again on the trip to Inspiration Cay, that she had not blacked out at the kitchen table at the trip’s end.
That someone, and she was afraid to speculate who, hadn’t carried her up to this room last night and undressed her as she’d slept the sleep of the dead.
She tried to remember the events of last evening. She had tried to make friends with Nanny. She had humbled herself to the point of neurosis, drinking a tea that could have done far more than put her to sleep. Damon had come into the room. Thinking about it now, she suspected that he’d had Heidi in his arms. He had been angry at Nanny, then…nothing.
Except that at a deeper level of awareness she thought she remembered arms around her, arms that had laid her gently on this bed, and hands that had smoothed away her clothes. Warm, strong hands that had lingered against her skin. Had she really moved against those hands, arched her back and sighed as they stripped away her sweater?
She was never going to find the courage to leave this room again.
The light seemed to grow brighter and the shadows sharper. At home she could have judged the time easily, but here the light was bright enough to destroy her frame of reference. It might be morning or late afternoon. She could have slept for days or weeks. As the warm honey of the walls lightened to palest gold, she realized that however long she had slept, it was time to get up. She might wish that she could avoid facing the population of Inspiration Cay, but she was trapped here with that tiny and decidedly odd band, and with her own humiliation. If possible, it was time to start putting yesterday behind her.
A soft rapping sounded at her door, then a voice. “Matty?”
She sat up and pulled a sheet over her breasts just as the door swung open. Damon stood in the doorway, a Damon completely transformed since yesterday. Gone was the man in the tropic-weight sportscoat and neatly pressed slacks. This Damon was barefoot, his hair tousled as if he had just dried it with a towel, wearing ragged cutoffs and a faded green T-shirt. This Damon, too, was outrageously gorgeous. “Good,” he said, with no ceremony. “You’re still alive.”
She hadn’t decided what to say today or how to act. She said the first thing that came to mind. “Am I supposed to be?”
“Look, there are just a few rules here. Don’t let Nanny play doctor, and don’t let Kevin scare you.”
She tucked the sheet under her arms. She was still wearing a bra and panties. That was one of the first things she had made sure of this morning before she set about wallowing in her memories and embarrassment. But she felt curiously naked facing Damon this way, her legs drawn up to her chest, her shoulders bare except for flimsy lace straps the color of her skin.
She was a master at sounding as if nothing bothered her. She was unflappable Matty, everyone’s rock of Gibraltar. “Was Nanny trying to kill me?”
“They’re both harmless. But if I were you, I’d watch my back for a while. And don’t worry. I’ve spoken to Kevin about the suitcases.”
With a sinking heart, she registered the plural. “Do I have anything left to wear?”
“Nothing inside them was damaged. Apparently Samuel retrieved them before they sank. Kevin was just making a point.”
“Well, I’ll have to tell Kevin it’s all right to talk to me if he’s upset. The suitcases are old. I don’t know if they can stand much more.”
“He won’t talk about his feelings. He won’t talk to anybody.”
It was time to talk about her own, or at least some small part of them. “About yesterday…”
“I’m sorry, Matty. I should never have asked you to come.”
Her eyes didn’t flicker. She supposed she had anticipated this, that she hadn’t gotten out of bed before this to avoid it. How could Damon possibly want her after everything that had happened? She was a complete failure. Even if Damon had still been willing to give her another chance, Nanny and Kevin weren’t going to. And she had already seen how fiercely and surprisingly loyal he was to them. “It’s all right, Damon. I understand.” She continued to keep her voice light and struggled with a smile.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you swam back to George Town. I’ve been so caught up in my own problems, I just didn’t try hard enough to put myself in your shoes.”
“You couldn’t have.”
“I should have made arrangements for us to stay in George Town last night. Heidi would have managed without me. And you could have rested. The trip here wouldn’t have been so awful. You wouldn’t have had to face Nanny and Kevin when you were sick and exhausted. I won’t blame you if you tell us all to go to hell.”
She managed a feeble joke. “That would be a long way from paradise, wouldn’t it?”
“Will you give us another chance, then?”
Moments passed before she realized what he’d said. There was no particular warmth in his voice, and he wasn’t looking at her directly. Despite his casual clothing, his posture was anything but. He looked like a man who was preparing himself for an assault.
“You mean you’ll let me stay?”
“Let you?”
“I disgraced myself, didn’t I? Why would you want me?”
“I still need you, Matty. The question is whether you’re willing to live here under these circumstances. I doubt if you see any reason to after yesterday.”
She was flooded with relief, swimming in it, surfing in it. She didn’t know what to say. When she could speak, she continued to keep her voice light and make no emotional demands with her tone. “I can think of one very big reason.”
“What?”
“I don’t think I can swim as far as George Town.”
“Thank you,” he said gruffly.
“Just so you know. I almost never get sick. And I never faint. And I don’t usually succumb to a cup of tea.”
“You don’t have to be superhuman. You just have to be here.”
“A warm, maternal female body?”
This time his gaze met hers directly, nearly pinning her to the spot. “The maternal part remains to be seen.”
Heat rose in her cheeks, but before she could say anything, he went on. “Have some breakfast, but I’d advise fixing your own. Then I’ll introduce you to Heidi, and you can see just how maternal you feel.”
He closed the door, and she was left alone to wonder exactly how warm and how female he had found her.
* * *
“All right. For some strange reason she’s willing to give the two of you another chance, and me as well.” Damon glowered at Nanny and Kevin, who was clasping Heidi like a football under one arm, crosswise against his chest. They were standing on the back veranda, screened from view by some wildly fragrant vine that was perfuming the air from its vantage point on the lattice-work. “She’s more forgiving than I would be under the circumstances.”
“Not’ing in that tea they arrest me for.” Nanny was glowering, too, glowering and sucking on a pipe that one of her sons had carved for her. Damon and Arthur had forbidden her to smoke it inside, but she spent hours each day with it clamped unlit between her lips. He had no idea what she burned in it each evening when she went outside to sit on the beach and stare in the general direction of George Town, but she had assured him that whatever it was, it was nothing they could arrest her for, either.
“You knocked her out with that tea,” Damon said. “And you knew you would. No more of that, Nanny. And, Kevin, there’s no point in trying to chase Matty away. You might as well write yourself a ticket back to Miami if you do, because I’ll be moving back there with Heidi to deliver pizza if this custody issue can’t be resolved in my favor here on Inspiration.”
“I can leave anytime.” Kevin’s posture was defiant, one hip thrust forward, his chest puffed out, the hand not holding Heidi thrust deep in the pocket of his jeans. He looked like a young Blackbeard, angry and violent and aching for trouble.
“No, you can’t,” Damon said shortly.
“You can’t stop me.”
Damon wasn’t in the mood to argue. Kevin was partially right. If it ever came to it, Damon couldn’t stop the boy from leaving. But Kevin owed Damon money for his medical care, for room and board, for clothing and incidentals, and Kevin, despite appearances and despite the way they had met, always paid his debts. For his part, Damon made sure that Kevin never came out even in any exchange. That way he knew Kevin would stay on Inspiration, and he could continue to keep an eye on him. He didn’t know how much of this Kevin understood, and he didn’t even care. So far it was working, and that was all that mattered.
“I’m putting Matty’s suitcases on your bill,” Damon said.
“Why? She’s still got ‘em, doesn’t she?”
“We’re going to have to have them cleaned professionally. And it won’t be cheap.”
“You ever heard of child labor laws?”
“You ever heard of juvenile detention centers?”
Kevin sank into a sullen silence.
Damon ran his fingers through his hair. “Look, Kevin, you’re very good at making your point. You don’t want her here. We all know that. But give her a chance. Please? She’d like to be friends.”
Kevin made a noise that was every bit as descriptive as the profanity that Damon insisted he eliminate from his vocabulary.
“All right. You don’t have to be friends,” Damon said. “Just don’t make her life miserable. Got it?”
“I’ve got work to do.” Kevin swung Heidi forward, and Damon was left with no choice but to take her. Kevin ambled off, both hands deep in his pockets and his back hunched defiantly.
“He don’t stay, I don’t stay,” Nanny said.
“He’ll stay. And this is not a contest. It’s not you and Kevin versus Matty. For Pete’s sake, Nanny. Give her a chance.”
“Don’t know no Pete. Don’t want to.” She went back into the house and slammed the door behind her.
Heidi wiggled in Damon’s arms, and he noticed for the first time that she was wearing a diaper and nothing else. “You cold, sweetheart?” He lifted her so that she was hanging in front of him. “Is Daddy’s little sweetheart cold?”
She gave a toothless grin, and his heart kicked into overdrive. The day she had learned to smile had been the best day of his life. He clasped her close and wrapped his arms around her, noisily kissing the soft top of her head. She was going to have dark hair like his, despite the fact that Gretchen’s hair was nearly—and naturally—white. Her eyes looked as if they were going to stay blue, but he didn’t know enough about babies to tell anything about the final decision on her coloring. Whatever the details, he knew for certain that she was going to be the most beautiful little girl, teenager and, finally, woman in the entire world. He could tell that much, and the rest didn’t matter one bit.
“Let’s put some more clothes on you,” he said with that peculiar timbre in his voice that he’d developed since their first meeting. He couldn’t seem to talk to Heidi as if she were an adult. She wasn’t, after all. She was so tiny, so fragile, so unbelievably…cuddly. He was certain there was a biological reason why babies evoked baby talk. Something about pitch and decibels and the fragile auditory system of infants. He was certain that he was just playing along with Mother Nature, who couldn’t always be understood, but who always seemed to know exactly what she was doing.
Inside the house he started upstairs to find Heidi more clothes. It wasn’t really cold outside. She was probably perfectly comfortable just as she was, but he had an ulterior motive. She was charming in diapers, charming any way, for that matter. But dressed in one of those ridiculous outfits that grandmothers the world over seemed to favor she was absolutely…perfect. And he wanted Matty to see just how perfect she was.
In Heidi’s room he settled her on the change table and set her mobile of fuzzy yellow ducks spinning so that she could bat her fists in their direction as he chose something else for her to wear. The room was tiny, just large enough for a crib, the table and a rocking chair. The house had eight bedrooms, and he was welcome to make a nursery in any of them that weren’t in use, but he had chosen the old dressing room because he could enter it directly from his bedroom.
He had never allowed Heidi to cry at night and never intended to. Until she was old enough to need more space, he wanted her nearby, where he could hear her when she wriggled or sighed or laughed. He had never realized just how short childhood was, but he was all too aware at the end of each day how swiftly it had passed and how much his daughter had changed.
He was a hopeless sap.
In the bottom drawer of the change table he sorted through sunsuits and dresses, T-shirts and overalls. Gretchen hadn’t wanted custody, but she sent their daughter clothes as if that would somehow make up for her lack of maternal instinct. Arthur Sable, the man who owned Inspiration Cay, seemed to have bought stock in a baby boutique and was taking his dividends in merchandise, and even Nanny and Kevin had pooled their funds to buy Heidi whatever caught their eye among George Town’s meager baby supplies. Damon wondered what Matty would think when she saw how packed these drawers were.
He wondered what Matty would think, period.
The subject of Matty stilled his hands, and for a moment he stared at the heap of baby clothes and tried to imagine what she must be feeling. He couldn’t imagine a worse beginning for them all. He had dragged Matty through hell yesterday. Even he had felt queasy after the boat trip in from George Town, and he was an experienced sailor. He could so easily have made the day easier for her, but he hadn’t thought it through well enough. He wasn’t good at putting himself in anyone else’s shoes. He had always found it easier to concentrate on ideas, on theories, on statistics, rather than on people and what they were feeling. Feelings confounded him, his own included. He suspected that was why he’d never had any serious thoughts about marriage or parenthood.