Free Suspended Sentences by Brian Garfield Page B

off her ragged sneakers, and dug her toes into the cool sand. The toes weren’t very clean. She was going too long between baths these days. The bathroom in the hotel was at the end of the corridor and she went there as infrequently as possible because she couldn’t be sure who she might encounter and anyhow the tub was filthy and there was no shower.
    Across the channel loomed the craggy mountains of Molokai, infamous island, leper colony, its dark volcanic mass shadowed by perpetual sinister rain clouds, and Brenda lost herself in gruesome speculations about exile, isolation, loneliness and wretched despair, none of which seemed at all foreign to her.
    The sun moved and took the shade with it and she moved round to the other side of the palm tree, tucking the fabric of the cheap dress under her when she sat down. The dress was about gone — frayed, faded, the material ready to disintegrate. She only had two others left. Then it would be jeans and the boatneck. It didn’t matter, really. There was no one to dress up for.
    It wasn’t that she was altogether ugly; she wasn’t ugly; she wasn’t even plain, really; she had studied photographs of herself over the years and she had gazed in the mirror and tried to understand, but it had eluded her. All right, perhaps she was too bony, her shoulders too big, flat in front, not enough flesh on her — but there were men who liked their women bony; that didn’t explain it. She had the proper features in the proper places and, after all, Modigliani hadn’t found that sort of face abominable to behold, had he?
    But ever since puberty there’d been something about her gangly gracelessness that had isolated her. Invitations to go out had been infrequent. At parties no one ever initiated conversations with her. No one, in any case, until Briggs had appeared in her life.
    â€¦She noticed the man again: the well-dressed one with the neatly trimmed beard. A droopy brown Hawaiian youth was picking up litter on the beach and depositing it in a burlap sack he dragged along; the bearded man ambled beside the youth, talking to him. The Hawaiian said something; the bearded man nodded with evident disappointment and turned to leave the beach. His path brought him close by Brenda’s palm tree and Brenda sat up abruptly. “Eric?”
    The bearded man squinted into the shade, trying to recognize her. Brenda removed her sunglasses. She said, “Eric? Eric Morelius?”
    â€œBrenda?” The man came closer and she contrived a wan smile. “Brenda Briggs? What the devil are you doing here? You look like a beachcomber gone to seed.”
    Over a drink at Kimo’s she tried to put on a front. “Well, I thought I’d come out here on a sabbatical and, you know, loaf around the islands, recharge my batteries, take stock.”
    She saw that Eric wasn’t buying it. She tried to smile. “And what about you?”
    â€œWell, I live here, you know. Came out to Hawaii nine years ago on vacation and never went back.” Eric had an easy relaxed attitude of confident assurance. “Come off it, duckie, you look like hell. What’s happened to you?”
    She contrived a shrug of indifference. “The world fell down around my ankles. Happens to most everybody sometimes, I suppose. It doesn’t matter.”
    â€œJust like that? It must have been something terrible. You had more promise than anyone in the department.”
    â€œWell, we were kids then, weren’t we. We were all promising young scholars. But what happens after you’ve broken all the promises?”
    â€œGood Lord. The last I saw of you, you and Briggs were off to revitalize the University of what, New Mexico?”
    â€œArizona.” She tipped her head back with the glass to her mouth; ice clicked against her teeth. “And after that a state college in Minnesota. And then a dinky jerkwater diploma mill in California. The world,”