Chapter 28
WILLIAM
William and his mother said little as they were driven to the Pruitts’ for an intimate rehearsal dinner.
On the doorstep of Haven House, they were each clearly absorbed in their own thoughts, the silence between them pulsing, as audible as the cicadas, until they heard a scream behind the door.
The cry of a woman. They looked at each other as if each might have some explanation, and then his mother tried the handle, finding it unlocked.
In the foyer, Mrs. Pruitt was pressing both palms against her mouth, others gathering nearby—Shay and Andrew on the stairs, staff members in black vests and white chef’s coats huddling in the hall.
Everyone’s attention was pulled to an open doorway, and William made out the figure of a man standing frighteningly still in the middle of the parlor’s carpet.
His black vest was unbuttoned, his rolled shirtsleeves suggesting some authority.
He was staring at a fixed point, at something William could not see.
“What’s going on?” he asked a waiter.
“They found a snake in there,” the waiter whispered. “A cottonmouth.”
Mr. Pruitt strode through the door to the kitchen.
A young man with shoulder-length hair trailed him, gripping a shovel with pale knuckles.
One of Mrs. Pruitt’s hands fluttered to her husband as he passed, but he brushed by her without so much as a glance.
At the parlor’s entrance, he gestured for the boy to go ahead of him, toward the man who barely seemed to breathe.
The boy hesitated, his fingers loosening and tightening in a flex of fear.
William did not know much about snakes, but by the way the waiter had pronounced cottonmouth, he knew it meant poison.
He imagined a basilisk, fangs the length of a dagger, worrying that the man needed more than a shovel. He needed a sword.
“Go on,” Mr. Pruitt barked.
The boy mumbled a fortifying “Okay, okay,” and darted in. Without turning his head, the man on the carpet held out his hand and took the shovel. The boy scurried back out, folded safely back into the crowd of staff. One of the chefs patted him on the back.
“I can’t,” Mrs. Pruitt said, fleeing down the hallway to lock herself in a bathroom.
William felt an unprecedented pang of sympathy for her, as he did not want to watch either, but no one else paid her any attention, consumed by the man taking three slow steps forward.
He slipped out of the frame of the doorway, and William’s mother drew her hand to her throat.
After a moment, there was a guttural, primal yell, the sharp clang of metal against wood, loud enough to ring throughout the entire house. William felt it in his molars.
“It’s dead,” the man grunted, and the entire hallway exhaled.
They stood in silence as he walked through the entryway, the shovel horizontal in his hands.
In its blade was the flaccid body of the snake, smaller than William had imagined, an animal that could curl beneath an end table or melt into the shadow of an open door, waiting to sink its teeth into your calf.
This was somehow more frightening than the monster he’d envisioned.
It was split in two near its head, its scales patterned with a geometry of browns until the shock of its white, bloody meat.
The young boy skittered in front of him, opening the back door, and William looked at Shay, whose eyes were, for some reason, drawn up the staircase, to the darkened corridor of the second floor.
“Well, nothing else to see here,” Mr. Pruitt said, trying to regain some semblance of control over the house. “Back to the kitchen, everyone. It’s nearly time for dinner.”
At the Pruitts’ table, there were four forks at William’s place setting.
Two to his left, one to his far right, and then another laid horizontal above his plate.
Once, when they’d been invited to an Easter luncheon at the house of Shay’s friend Katherine, his mother had whispered to him to simply work from the outside in, but how did that work when there were utensils on three sides?
A waiter circled the table with a bottle of white wine, which William and Shay both refused.
William was exhausted from the previous evening, from the frenzy of the snake, and the upholstered chairs were painfully uncomfortable.
“Et tu, William?” Mr. Pruitt said. “Had enough last night?”
This dinner was just for their immediate families, and so there was no one to hide behind. Mrs. Pruitt turned her full attention to smoothing her napkin on her lap. Andrew had finally collected her from the bathroom, and the family portrait winked at William from over her shoulder.
“Yes,” William said. “I don’t really drink.”
“I feel like, after the events of this evening, everyone could use a drink,” his mother said. “Is it normal, to find snakes inside like that?”
“We’ve never had one inside the house. They like to stay near water,” Mr. Pruitt said.
“Someone left the library doors to the garden wide open. There are too many people coming in and out this weekend,” Andrew added.
“Is that something young people are doing now? The not drinking?” Mrs. Pruitt asked, clearly trying to change the subject. “Andrew was saying one of your high school friends—Grace, I believe?—doesn’t eat pork.”
“She doesn’t eat any meat,” Shay said quietly. Since the cottonmouth, she’d barely spoken.
“That’s not good for the body, or the brain,” Mr. Pruitt said. “There’s a reason we evolved to eat meat. She’ll have difficulty having children, if she keeps that up.”
“Mort,” his wife chastened him.
“When I was pregnant with Shay, I ate a steak every morning. My body craved it,” William’s mother said, and Mr. Pruitt smiled, toasting his glass in her direction.
Men usually liked their mother, appreciating her lack of sentimentality, and William could tell this pleased her, especially after the years she spent managing their father, his charm at some point rendered ineffectual, even offensive to her.
Though she never appeared to seek approval, she clearly savored it.
Oysters were served. William had never eaten one before, but followed the others, who used the smallest fork to their right to loosen the mollusk from its shell.
Although he hated seafood, he didn’t want to embarrass his family by leaving his plate untouched.
He found he didn’t mind the taste, which was salty and almost metallic, like the smell of pennies, so much as the texture.
It had the feel of something that was still alive, and he thought of the snake’s body.
How as it had been paraded past him in two halves, he swore its tail slithered.
Over a bisque, they talked about Andrew’s work, and it became evident that Mr. Pruitt was close friends with one of the partners at his firm, which made William like Andrew a little bit less.
They spoke about the dangers of New York, where you could live and not live, and the dangers of Chicago, where you could live and not live.
William’s mother spoke as if she were looking down at it all from the same height as the Pruitts at their estate in Connecticut.
“And where do you live, William?” Mrs. Pruitt asked.
“Uptown,” he said.
“And do you like it?” she asked.
“Yeah, I guess. There was a fire in my building last year, so I had to move and thought maybe I’d go someplace else, but the rent is cheap and, I don’t know, people worry about the Latin Kings, but they’ve never really bothered me.”
“It’s very close to the lake,” his mother said after a beat of silence, and William realized his response was not appropriate for this particular table.
“Oh, beautiful,” Mrs. Pruitt said.
As the dinner progressed to a fillet of sole William could barely stomach and limp asparagus, the others loosened and warmed ever so slightly—maybe because they were relieved to all be getting along, or maybe because of the wine.
William began to notice that no one asked Shay any questions.
She hadn’t spoken since the talk of Grace, and when there was a brief lull, a spotlight never shone on her.
William realized they were frightened that if they began to pull at a thread of her life, it would lead to the tangle of Synanon. Perhaps he was as well.
Sometimes, like when Mr. Pruitt droned on about the age of the house’s window glass, William would try to make eye contact with Shay, only to find her consumed by the flame of the table’s tall ivory candles.
Her face empty in a way he’d never seen before this weekend, almost as if she were asleep.
It was the look she’d had during Mr. Pruitt’s speech, the same look she’d had at the rehearsal.
A waiter poured coffee into delicate china cups. There was only one fork left on the table.
“No other incidents in the kitchen this evening?” Mr. Pruitt asked.
“No, sir,” the waiter said.
“Incidents?” William’s mother asked.
“There was a small fire last night,” Mrs. Pruitt said.
“Scorched the back wall by the stove, so it’ll all have to be repainted.
The chef said it wasn’t his fault, that some stray guest must have stumbled in drunk, as if that makes any sense at all, for someone to accidentally set a grease fire.
We’d have tried to find help elsewhere, but it’s a little difficult to do that on the island, as you can imagine. It’s been an eventful past two days.”
“Well, hopefully that’s all behind us now so we can have an uneventful wedding day tomorrow,” their mother said.
Shay’s spoon clattered onto the carpet. The waiter bent down to retrieve it. William thought of the grease fire in his restaurant’s kitchen, its roaring exaltation, but knew his mother wouldn’t want him to say anything about his work washing dishes.
“So,” Mr. Pruitt said, turning to Andrew. “Any pre-wedding jitters?”
“No, no,” Andrew said. “Only excitement.”
“My grandmother made me drink a full glass of sherry before I walked down the aisle. I needed it—I was shaking like a leaf, and she gave it to me like it was medicine,” Mrs. Pruitt said. “It was the first drop of alcohol I ever had.”
“That sounds like something Aunt Eleanor would do,” Shay said.
“Except it would be whiskey,” their mother said.
“I don’t know that I’ve met an Aunt Eleanor—” Mrs. Pruitt began.
“Any jitters for you, Shay?” their mother interrupted, as if she didn’t want to think of Eleanor either. William lifted the coffee cup to his lips, then set it down without taking a sip.
“Only excitement,” Shay echoed.
Everyone smiled, as if the matter had been put to rest. Dessert was served: a tall white cake with strawberries and fresh whipped cream that Mr. Pruitt proclaimed was a family favorite.
When William took a bite, something tasted off, like maybe the cream had turned.
When he looked up, he saw similar frowns of confusion on everyone’s face except Mr. Pruitt’s, but no one said a word.
There was a golf cart idling in the driveway’s half circle, the same one that had taken them there, which made William wonder what the kid behind the wheel had been doing for the past few hours. If he’d just been sitting there, waiting.
“We’ll pick up the tab tonight,” Mr. Pruitt said, patting Andrew on the shoulder as they lingered in the doorway. William had almost forgotten that there were drinks at the island’s bar, Lorraine’s, after this. The weekend was as rigidly scheduled as a day of school.
“Thanks, Dad,” Andrew said.
Mrs. Pruitt and William and Shay’s mother were a few steps behind the rest of them, talking quietly.
At first, William hoped they were speaking of paying for the wedding, but then he heard murmurs about whether Shay still needed someone to do her hair, given the length, and he felt his anger at his mother deepen, that she was avoiding the subject at all costs.
“All aboard,” Mr. Pruitt announced, clearly trying to finish the women’s conversation for them.
“We’re going to walk there,” Shay said. “Me and William.”
“Alone?” Andrew asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
They stared at each other for a moment, and then Andrew turned his attention to William, resigned. “You’ll protect her from all the island youth and miscreants?” he asked.
Shay looked at William expectantly, and he wondered if she knew everything: his suspicions, Aunt Eleanor and the missing check, his visits to churches and temples and synagogues. The prayers he’d attempted alone in his bed.
“With my life,” William said, and Shay threaded her arm through his own.