Blue Water (26 page)

“And Mum?”

“Actually,” Mallory said, getting up, “Mum's not doing so great.”

She excused herself, then disappeared into the kitchen, averting her shining eyes. Toby pressed his thumb to a stray grain of rice. I felt that I should do something, say something, but I didn't know what. On the kitchen counter, the last smoky wisp of sandalwood rose like a pale offering, and as I watched, it seemed that my life began to split, like the blossoming of a flower, until it contained not
only the present moment, but others, each growing out of the next, an arrangement of separate petals connected by a single, golden core. I was sitting on a trawler on Hunter's Cay, nursing a deliberate shot of scotch. I was driving down a dark highway, Cindy Ann by my side. I was dressed in green scrubs, smiling, lying down for the night in a brightly lit room. Each of those moments, each of those lives, existed simultaneously. I didn't know which to believe in. I didn't know where I actually stood.

Abruptly, the kitchen clock chimed. A cat launched itself into Cindy Ann's lap. Deep, rolling purrs flooded the room with such force that even Mallory smiled, reappearing with dishes of green tea ice cream.

“What a sound,” she said.

“Because of midnight,” I said, and Toby said, “You're right. I almost forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Cindy Ann said.

“Listen,” I said, and another petal opened to the light. Rousing Evan from his bed that last Christmas—the same way that, once, my mother had roused me. Breathing in his sleep-smell. Feeling the weight of his still-limp body, the damp flush of his skin. Helping him into his snowsuit and boots as, downstairs, Rex waited with the flashlight, the thermos. The three of us hurrying down the road toward the Haldigers' chicken coop, where Evie kept some guinea fowl, a nanny goat, and an ancient piebald pony.

“Is it time?” Evan kept saying. He was awake now, eager, pulling at our hands.

Only the pure of heart could hear the animals speak on Christmas Eve. This was why little children could hear them, while grown-up people could not.
What are they saying?
my mother would ask as I breathed the warm air of the Schultzes' cow barn: manure
and silage, sweet grain and dust. Otto Schultz always came out to meet us, give the cows a little extra feed—
something to talk about,
he'd say. As he moved among the stanchions, I waited for the sounds of all those moving jaws to congeal. Straining to make language out of what I heard. Worrying I wasn't good enough, pure. Because the truth was that I never heard anything. Year after year, as my parents and Toby listened, too serious, I would make something up.

Cup,
I'd said.
Christmas. Hop along. Velvet
.

“They're saying that they want more bread,” Evan told us. “The guinea hens. And they want to keep their babies this time.”

“Babies?” Rex said.

“The goat,” Evan continued somberly, “would like a radio.”

“And what about Poppy?” I asked. Poppy was the pony, gluey-eyed, stiff.

“Poppy's going to heaven soon,” Evan said. “He says he has everything he wants.”

Had Evan really said this? Was it possible Rex and I had laughed? Now, sitting at Mallory's table, the taste of the ice cream soured on my tongue. I got up, circled past the Christmas tree, went into the girls' room—but, no. This was worse. Maybe I should drive back to Milwaukee after all, find another room at another hotel. Or maybe I should try and get to the airport, book a morning flight to Miami, spend the night stretched across a row of plastic chairs. One thing was suddenly clear to me: I couldn't stay. Not here. I stepped back and bumped into Toby. Somehow, I thought it might be Rex. I wanted it to be Rex.

“What—?” Toby began, and I blurted out, “I never heard them, you know. The animals. I just pretended to.”

“Everyone pretends,” Toby said.

“I think that Evan really heard them. I'm pretty sure he did.”

“I wouldn't be surprised.”

“But I'll never get to ask him, later. When he's older.”

“You're tired,” Toby said.

“I mean, think of all the things I'll never know. Big things. Important things. Why should this one even matter?”

“Why don't you try to sleep?” Toby said. “I'll sit with you, if you like.”

“Because I'm
not
tired,” I said, but then my face split into an enormous yawn. For some reason, this made me laugh, and I was laughing still as Toby eased me onto the bed, pulled off my boots, pinched each big toe lightly the way he'd done when I was small. To my relief, the pillow beneath my head didn't smell like anything in particular. Fabric softener. Perhaps the slightest trace of shampoo. Evan's pillow, his sheets, his room in the morning, had always smelled like tapioca. It wasn't just me who thought so; Rex often commented on it, too. You could wash all his bedding, dump him in the tub, and the next morning: sweet tapioca.

“Don't tell me this is Laurel's bed,” I said.

“It's Monica's. It's okay.”

“Laurel said she had a gun in here.”

“Do you think Mal would let any one of us keep a gun?” Toby covered me with the blankets, a quilt, and then he spread a sleeping bag from the closet over the top. “Sorry it's so cold,” he said.

“I'm sorry for the girls,” I said.

“They usually sleep together,” Toby said. “They're actually good friends when there's no one around to see.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “They've been through a lot. The rest of us, too. You wouldn't believe what Cindy Ann can be like. When she's drinking, I mean.”

“She says things are going to be different.”

Toby made a face. “Do you know how many times we've heard her say the same thing?”

“Maybe this time it will be true.”

“Maybe,” he said, and then he sighed. “I keep remembering what she was like, that summer you two were friends. Whenever she's really angry, abusive, that's the person I try to keep inside my head. The way she was with her brother. The way she looked after her sisters. Working so hard all the time, like she did.”

“I know.”

“I think I was in love with her, a little.”

“Me, too.”

He pulled the covers up to my chin.

I said, “Why did all this have to happen?”

“I don't know.”

“What is the point of it?”

“Try to sleep.”

Something struck the bed, then, as if a piece of the ceiling had fallen. I started. “What was that?”

“Just a cat,” Toby said, and there it was, kneading the mattress beside me. I touched its fur, lightly, and it put its beautiful face close to mine. Blinked, clear-eyed as any god. And, like any god, it did not speak.

t
he day of the wedding dawned bright
and clear, but just before noon, great clouds rolled in, and by the time we stepped aboard the
Michigan Jack
—my parents, Cindy Ann with all three of her girls, Becca with her boy—it was hard to keep our teeth from chattering. My parents stared balefully up at the sky, hands jammed into their pockets, scarves doubled twice around their necks. “This goddamn weather,” my father muttered, and my mother said, “How people
live
this way.” Still, the
Jack
looked beautiful, her sleek lines sparkling with white lights and garlands. And then there was the harbor itself: winter-proofed boats and weathered pilings, curious gulls like whitecapped spectators. Toby's bare hands shook as he worked the surprisingly delicate ring onto Mallory's finger, from nervousness or cold, I could not say.

Afterward, I kissed him, congratulated Mallory, exchanged a few, quiet words with Cindy Ann. “I thought it was going to be
awful out here,” she said, her breath escaping in round, white puffs. “But, really, it was pretty.”

“If you don't mind the frostbite,” Laurel said.

My parents, who were listening, started to laugh. Laurel looked startled, but pleased. Amy, wrapped in her mother's old beauty, turned away from us all. “I'm
hungry,
” she said, and Mallory said, “I bet everybody's hungry, right?” She had her arm around Becca's Harvey; Monica clung to her hips.

Mallory Hauskindler. To everyone's astonishment, she'd taken Toby's name. Her dark head was covered by a blue stocking cap, and when Toby tugged, lightly, on the pom-pom at the end, she smiled up at him, radiant, expecting his proud kiss. How I wanted to feel again, for Rex, what I knew she must be feeling. How willing I was, at that moment, to do whatever it would take. As much as we'd lost, Rex and I, what we had still amounted to more. I would learn to love our life aboard
Chelone,
to call that life my home. Rex would learn to accept my decision to give my brother this blessing.

I'd already excused myself from the wedding lunch, and while the others turned left off the dock, cutting through the marina parking lot, I followed the wooden boardwalk that ran along the edge of the harbor. At the end stood the Shanty restaurant; inside, I spotted Lindsey before she noticed me. She was at the same table where the two of us had sat the last time we'd met. I watched her eating popcorn from the complimentary bowl, gazing out the window at the scruffy-looking mallards picking their way across the yellowed ice. In that gray, puffy jacket and piano keyboard scarf, she looked exactly as she might have looked two years earlier, five years, ten. How grateful I was, how comforted, that Lindsey, at least, hadn't changed! Twenty years from now, she'd be sitting here still, laughing over Bart's latest golfing escapade, tunneling
through the pockets of her purse, looking for her wallet, a pencil, her keys.

She saw me, then. Stood up. Surprised me by taking me into her arms, holding me tighter, tight.

“Hey,” I said, smelling that scarf, a season's worth of residual shampoo, moisturizing lotions, perfume. Suddenly, sharply, I thought of Bernadette, the smell of her sunblock, her warm, freckled skin. Certainly
Rubicon
would have made Miami by now. Perhaps Leon was already scheduled for tests, sitting in a room somewhere, waiting to be seen. Or perhaps he'd already been admitted. Perhaps they'd found something fixable, concrete: an infection, a chemical imbalance, a small, harmless blip of the brain.

“I wanted you to hear it from me,” Lindsey was saying, and I thought that, perhaps, I'd misheard her, though her lips had been pressed to my ear.

“What?”

“Barton and I have separated.”

She'd already seated herself without looking at me, spreading a thin, paper napkin over her knees. Shame kept me silent; I'd never even considered the possibility that something in Lindsey's life might go wrong. A waitress arrived to fill our coffee cups. She was young, heavyset, unsuspectingly pretty. “How are you ladies today?” she asked, as if she really meant it.

“He's in love with someone else,” Lindsey said, after the girl had gone. “Apparently it's been going on for years. Everybody knew.”

I opened a laminated menu. “I didn't.”

“I'd walk right out of here if I thought you did.”

I met her gaze. “I wouldn't blame you.”

The waitress was standing over us again.

“Fish fry,” I said. “With coleslaw.”

“The same,” Lindsey said, and then, to me: “Sorry.” In a swift, nervous gesture, she plucked my menu out of my hand, tucked it back into place behind the condiment stand. “We're putting the house on the market. We're selling everything, dividing what we get. No lawyers. We're trying to keep things civilized. Because it was, you know, a mostly good marriage. I know that sounds strange, considering—”

“It doesn't sound strange,” I said. “Lindsey. It's me. You don't have to explain.”

She had opened another napkin, smoothed over the first. “I'm moving to Arizona. Tucson. My sister loves it out there. Fred Pringle's going to be taking over your account until you can make other arrangements.”

“God, Fred. I haven't thought of him in ages.”

“He's an ass, I know. I'm leaving you in the lurch.”

“No, you're not,” I said, but Lindsey was rooting around in that bottomless purse, lifting flaps, unzipping pockets.

“Speaking of asses,” she said, removing a fat, manila file. “I suppose you've already spoken with Chester?”

“He wants to break the lease,” I said.

“He's broken it.” Lindsey handed me a letter. “He'll be gone, as of New Year's Day. You'll need to find someone to watch the place, especially during this kind of weather. It could be awhile before you find another tenant.”

“My brother can do it,” I began, then stopped. Toby didn't have time to look after his own life, much less mine. “Look, I'll figure something out. I'm sorry, Linds; I'm still in shock. What will you do in Tucson?”

She shrugged. “Work. Maybe put out my own shingle.”

“Or retire?”

Her laugh was short and swift as a slap. “With what? I've got to think about the future.”

“You've got savings,” I said. “Equity. It's not like you'll be starting from scratch.”

“I've got to find a place to live. Buy furniture. A car. Pots and pans, all the rest of that crap. And what if, tomorrow, there's a lump in my breast? What if I break my back?”

“You have your sister. And friends. And—”

“It isn't the same. Think about it, Meg. Think about how it would be if you couldn't depend on Rex.”

For a moment, I was silent. “I know,” I said.

The food came, along with fresh coffee. We moved things around on our plates.

“I think you should talk to a lawyer,” I said. “Not to make things adversarial. But why should you have to worry about money when Bart's the one who—”

“I told you, no lawyers,” she said, interrupting. “I remember how those lawsuits changed you. That's not going to happen to me.”

“What changed me,” I said, deliberately, “was losing a child.”

She bit into a piece of fish. “Losing a child,” she said, “wasn't what you talked about. It was litigation. Getting even.
Justice
. And, believe me, I understand because I'm so upset right now, I'm so angry—” She paused, swallowed, took a deep, visible breath. “I know that if I sat down with an attorney, I'd walk away hell-bent on punishing Barton for every wrong thing he's done since the moment he was born.”

“You have to admit,” I said, “that this particular wrong thing is a bad one.”

“It is.” Her voice was small, and I felt ashamed. She dropped her face into her hands. “What if I can't forgive him for this? Thirty-
two years. All that history between us. What if I end up hating him? And I do hate him, sometimes. I really, truly do.”

The waitress appeared again. “Everything okay?” she asked, then froze, her mouth a plump, pink
O
, when Lindsey lifted her tear-streaked face.

After we'd paid, we walked down to the beach, following the path behind the water treatment plant, the same path that Cindy Ann and I had taken so many years ago. By now, the clouds had passed out over the water. The lake was vibrant with ice and sun. Lindsey unwound her piano scarf, let it hang over her shoulders like a priest's fat stole.

“I've always hated this thing,” she said.

“Why wear it, then?”

She shrugged. “There's nothing wrong with it. It's a perfectly good scarf.”

I peeled it away from her, balled it up, chucked it out onto the ice. “You're starting over with everything else. You might as well buy a scarf.”

The scarf skittered for a yard or two, then snagged on a rough spot, unfurled like a monochromatic flag. “Barton gave me that scarf.”

“Screw him,” I said. “Look, I admire you for not wanting to be mad at him, but
I
can be mad, all right?”

Lindsey sighed. She said, “You know, I don't even play the piano. What the hell was he thinking?”

We had come to the end of the beach. At the edge of the bluff, the water had frozen into abstract sculptures, some of them nearly as high as the junipers wedged between ridges of granite, pink quartz. I remembered the green smell of those junipers, their dusty blue berries, hard as pearls. How Cindy Ann pointed them out to me as we'd scaled our way down from the upper bluff park,
following trails cut by erosion, until we arrived at the moon-washed beach. Sitting on our slab of sandstone, humming with residual warmth from the sun. Cindy Ann talking about becoming a botanist, a plant geneticist—we'd just finished studying Mendel, his blue-eyed alleles, his wrinkly peas—and I'd envied her, then, because there were so many things she wanted to do, while I myself, imagining the future, saw nothing but white space, a terrible blank page. So I lay down on my back, not speaking, just looking up at the sky. Cindy Ann stretched out beside me. Her shoulder just touched mine. She said, “Have you ever walked on the moon?”

Now I asked Lindsey, “Did I really change so much?”

“I shouldn't have said that.”

“It's okay.”

“No, it isn't.”

“I'd like to know what you think.”

She kicked at a beach pebble trapped beneath a cracked, shining circle of ice. “I think you made the right decision, buying that boat,” she said. “Leaving town.”

“You're avoiding the question.”

“Yes and no. I guess, at the time, I really didn't understand. I thought you should see a therapist, remember?”

“I got mad at you for saying so.”

“It was bad advice. I saw a therapist myself, right after Barton left me.”

“What did he say?”

“She.”

“Sorry.”

“She told me to get an attorney.”

I laughed, and so did Lindsey. It was the first time I felt like I knew
her again, and perhaps she felt the same way about me. On the way back to the car, she suddenly took my hand, swung it as if we were sweethearts. “How was the wedding, by the way? I meant to ask.”

“Sincere.”

“At least Cindy Ann wasn't there. I hear she's in some kind of mental hospital.”

“Actually, she was released.”

“She didn't come to the wedding, though.”

“No, she was there.”

Lindsey stopped walking. “You're taking this awfully well.”

“It's—an acquired state of mind.”

“That's the one thing I can't imagine,” she said. “Finding myself face-to-face with Stanley. Or, worse, running into the two of them somewhere. Not that I'm equating—”

“Stanley?” I said. “Who's Stanley?”

“Bart's golf partner.” She looked at me. “Didn't I tell you that part?”

I shook my head.

“He said he tried for years. To bury that part of himself. He says he still loves me in the best way he can.”

We were walking again, approaching the parking lot. I'd just been thinking I would make it through the day without crying; I reminded myself it wasn't the first time I'd been wrong. Helplessly, hopelessly, I swiped at the cold tears stiffening my cheeks, but Lindsey didn't notice. She'd dropped my hand to dig in her purse, rattling handfuls of change.

“I suppose,” she said as we stepped up onto the asphalt, “I should do the right thing and tell them about your house. They're looking for something together.”

“It's okay,” I said. “Besides, I've got someone else in mind.”

“Ha.”
She'd found her keys. It was a small triumph, but enough to make both of us smile. “I like to think of you out on that sailboat,” she said.

“I like to think of you in the desert.”

She nodded, dreamily. “Dry heat. All that sky.”

“With a big canteen.”

“With a life jacket.”

We laughed, but this time, it was more to please each other than ourselves. As she drove away, I realized that I hadn't asked for her sister's address, for an e-mail address outside of Lakeview, for any contact information whatsoever. But there'd be no point, really, in trying to keep in touch. A year from now, she'd be living in the desert; Rex and I might be anywhere in the world. He'd been right about selling the house, I decided as I got into my mother's car. It was simply too difficult, finding a steady tenant, managing things long-distance. And this would be another concession I could offer when he learned that I hadn't signed the settlement, that I'd actually taken steps toward a relationship—for what else could I call it?—with Cindy Ann Kreisler.

Don't worry,
I told Evan.
Everything's going to work out.
Since arriving in Wisconsin, I'd been catching myself talking to him, explaining things, listening for his answers. Whenever this happened, I felt quieted, as if a dull, steady hunger had been appeased. And yet I understood myself. It wasn't as if I truly believed that he was there.