Wild Child Read Free

glass each left of the second bottle and the world sprung to life in the fullness of its detail, everything sharpened, in focus, as if he’d needed glasses all these years and just clapped them on. The gull was gone but it had been special, a very special gull, and there were sparrows now, or wrens, hopping along the floor in little streaks of color, snatching up a crumb of this or that and then hurtling away over the rail as if they’d been launched.
    He was thinking he didn’t want any more wine—two bottles was plenty—but maybe something to cap off the afternoon, a cognac maybe, just one.
    She’d been talking about one of the girls who worked for her, a girl he’d seen a couple of times, nineteen, soft-faced and pretty, and how she—her name was Bettina—was living the party life, every night at the clubs, and how thin she was.
    “Cocaine?” he wondered, and she shrugged. “Has it affected her work?”
    “No,” she said, “not yet, anyway.” And then she went on to qualify that with a litany of lateness in the morning, hyper behavior after lunch and doctor’s appointments, too many doctor’s appointments. He waited a moment, watching her mouth and tongue, the beautiful unspooling way the words dropped from her lips, before he reached down and ran a finger over the blemish below her kneecap. “You have a scar,” he said.
    She looked at her knee as if she wasn’t aware it was attached to her, then withdrew her leg momentarily to scrutinize it before giving it back to the sun and the deck and the waiting touch of his hand.
    “Oh, that?” she said. “That’s from when I was a kid.”
    “A burn or what?”
    “Bicycle.” She teased the syllables out, slow and sure.
    His hand was on her knee, the warmth of the contact, and he rubbed the spot a moment before straightening up in the chair and draining his glass. “Looks like a burn,” he said.
    “Nope. Just fell in the street.” She let out that laugh again and he drank it in. “You should’ve seen my training wheels—or the one of them. It was as flat”—flaat—“as if a truck had run me over.”
    Her eyes flickered with the lingering seep of the memory and they both took a moment to picture it, the little girl with the wheel collapsed under her and the scraped knee—or it had to have been worse than that, punctured, shredded—and he didn’t think of Lisette or Angelle, not yet, because he was deep into the drift of the day, so deep there was nothing else but this deck and this slow sweet sun and the gull that was gone now. “You want something else?” he heard himself say. “Maybe a Rémy, just to cap it off? I mean, I’m wined out, but just, I don’t know, a taste of cognac?”
    “Sure,” she said, “why not?” and she didn’t look at her watch and he didn’t look at his either.
    And then the waiter was there with two snifters and a little square of dark chocolate for each of them, compliments of the house. Snifter, he was thinking as he revolved the glass in his hand, what a perfect designation for the thing, a name that spoke to function, and he said it aloud, “Isn’t it great that they have things like snifters, so you can stick your nose in it and sniff? And plus, it’s named for what it is, unlike, say, a napkin or a fork. You don’t nap napkins or fork forks, right?”
    “Yeah,” she said, and the sun had leveled on her hair now, picking out the highlights and illuminating the lobe of one ear, “I guess. But I was telling you about Bettina? Did you know that guy she picked up I told you about—not the boyfriend, but the one-night stand? He got her pregnant.”
    The waiter drifted by then, college kid, hair in his eyes, and asked if there’d be anything else. It was then that he thought to check his watch and the first little pulse of alarm began to make itself felt somewhere deep in the quiet lagoon of his brain: Angelle, the alarm said. Lisette. They had to be picked up at school after soccer practice every