Float (23 page)

“Isn’t that Osbert Marpol, from the Club?” asked Cora.

“Yes. No. It’s Adoniram. When I got washed up in the Duck on Seacrest’s beach last night, he saved me.”

“Adoniram?” She gave Duncan a worried look.

Duncan waved at the boat, and Adoniram waved back with his stick. “Do you have a dry cell phone?” he asked her.

She dug through her pocket and handed him her phone. He dialed Adoniram’s phone number from memory and watched as Adoniram took his cell out of his suit and clicked it on.

“Duncan!” he shouted over the sound of surf. “You and I send diatoms to the sea in a symbolic cleansing gesture, and the ocean regurgitates a giant netball back at us, in our faces where it belongs. It is one of the side effects that the artist cannot imagine.”

“What are you doing out there?”

“The ocean has encountered another world. Look at all that plastic. Look at the nets, how they’ve strangled every living thing they’ve encountered. From my side I see a dead sea turtle.”

“What’s the plan?”

“We’re going to bring it to the attention of our world. Who is it who said that the sea is forever asking questions and writing them aloud on the shore?”

“Churchill?” asked Duncan.

“Why not? We’ll display this creation of death on your parking lot. It will be the first of many installations I’ll create there.”

“Are you coming out as yourself, then?”

“Back to life. And back to work. Talk later.”

Duncan put the phone back in Cora’s pocket and put his arms around her. They watched as Adoniram joined Beaky in the task of uncoiling rope on the deck.

“I thought you and Osbert were enemies,” she said. “I thought you were afraid he was going to kill you.”

“I used to think many things that turned out to be wrong. For one thing, he’s not even Osbert, so how could he kill me? From a false equation you get only a chain of errors.”

“Have you been eating the mulberries?”

He smiled and did not answer. They watched as Beaky handed Adoniram an iron fishing spear attached to a rope, then Adoniram raised the instrument over his head and lunged it at the plastic ball, à la Ahab. After the spear hit its mark, Beaky leaned out from the bow and tossed a grappling hook on the line and pulled it tight, securing the boat to the ball. He gave a tug to test it, then motioned to Adoniram that they were ready to go. Fingers moved from Beaky’s pocket to his shoulder.

The crowd on land applauded when the tugboat slowly edged the plastic ball off the beach, then began to cheer when the ball began to sink below the surface of the water, threatening to pull Adoniram and the boat down with it. But he revved up the tugboat and got enough momentum going to keep the ball floating along behind them as they disappeared into the rising light of day, around the tip of the Cove.

“God help us,” said Cora.

Duncan waved at the tug as it disappeared. “Maybe instead of worrying about bringing my fucked-up genes into the world, I should have been worrying about the fucked-up world.”

“It’s too late to worry now.”

They stood there for a while as the others returned to the cleanup and search efforts. Duncan looked down to inspect the new landscape of the beach, which had expanded as the yard contracted. He saw pieces of their old rickety dock, along with the crumpled hull of
Ariel,
Nod’s catboat. There was no sign of the inflatable—no motor, no seats, no shreds of rubber. He looked down at the steep wall beneath them, which had been sliced off so neatly by the sea that it read like a geological chart. Horizontal layers of dirt were squeezed in between thick strata of compressed sand streaked with rust. Roots, rocks, and odd subterranean life saw light for the first time in millennia. If a mammoth tusk fell out of the wall at that moment, Duncan would not have been surprised.

When he looked back up, Slocum was standing next to them, with his arm wrapped around Gabriella, the figurehead from his mother’s living room.

“I think she’ll clean up pretty good, don’t you?” said Slocum. “The fallen angel.”

“Slocum, any word on your sister?” asked Cora.

Slocum arranged a grim look on his face and shook his head. “No word,” he said. “We’ll just have to keep looking. Judson Drake is gone, too. Heard he might have been on
L’ark
when she came loose. Poor bastard.”

Duncan touched Gabriella’s splintered face. “This isn’t the first time the old girl has had her troubles on the sea. In spite of what my mother said about the U.S. Navy sending it to the family in appreciation of some relative’s valor in the Napoleonic wars—in which, mind you, America was not even involved—Lucius found her right on the beach after a storm in 1882. Where’d she wash up this time?”

“Behind the lighthouse, on the rocks.” Slocum turned and pointed over at the stone beacon, which stood twenty feet closer to the water than it had before the storm. “Not too far from where they found your mother.”

“My mother?”

Chandu, dripping and swaying like a surfacing sea god, was hoarse from howling as he stood guard by Duncan’s mother on the war room floor. It was, amazingly, still in one octagonal piece, somewhat lathered in dirty sea foam but perfectly balanced on a chest-high pile of trash at the Boat Club beach. It had been yanked to shore by a boat lift after a commercial charter had towed it to the basin. Emergency workers were now trying to entice his mother to leave the floor and come to the ambulance for treatment, but she pushed them away with her bare feet as she clung to the prow of the old bookstand bolted to the floor. The platform tipped gently back and forth as they struggled, as if it were still at sea. Chandu stopped making his mournful sound when he saw Duncan.

“Duncan!” his mother shouted. “Thank goodness you’re here. Tell these people to leave me alone.”

“Mom, you’re alive.” He pulled himself up onto the floor.

“Of course I am.” She raised the trophy that held his caul. “I grabbed this when the walls started to bow out. Here, help with these knots.”

She and Chandu were lashed by their waists to the bookstand. There was so much rope twisted around them that Duncan didn’t even know where to begin. To make matters worse, a line of swordfish bait was entwined in the mess. The plastic glow-sticks still held light. Chandu licked his face when he knelt down.

“Old man,” said Duncan, rubbing his shaggy head with both hands. “You did it.” Never did an animal smell so thoroughly like the ocean, or smell so good. He was alive. They were both alive. “Were you on this floor during the storm?” he asked his mother. “Out on the water?”

“It was no bed of owl feathers, I can tell you.”

Duncan shook his head. She was one tough bird, he had to give her that. He examined the rope and attempted to pry a line loose from the Gordian knot that held them to their raft. He felt his mother’s hand on his shoulder.

“Duncan, dear, I have bad news.”

The crowd surrounding the floor became quiet and apprehensive. Duncan couldn’t imagine what would constitute “bad news” in the face of all this destruction. He assumed … Nod.

“Gone,” she said, and she ran her hand over the empty bookstand. “One hundred and forty years of work, gone. I held onto it as long as I could, but it dissolved in my arms. Leaf by leaf, it pulled away in the wind and the water, until finally the covers held nothing, and then they, too, fell apart and my hands were empty.”

“It?” asked Duncan.

“The Log,” she said. “Gone.”

The crowd looked at one another in confused silence, and Duncan went back to the knot. The Log. Maybe that would be the end of her obsessive race planning. But of course, if Nod was gone, it was the end of it anyway, wasn’t it? “Well, you saved the caul, Mom. That’s something.”

“No, the caul saved me.” She held the loving cup like a baby. “It kept me from drowning, but it could not keep the Log safe from the ravages of water. ‘Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made …’”

“You’ll get by without the Log,” he said. “It’s going to be harder to get by without a house.” He sat back on his ankles, and his wet boots felt cold against his body. He wanted to add “ … or Nod,” but he could not bring himself to say his brother’s name. “This knot is too tight.” He turned to see Slocum arriving with his arms full of his mother’s things, picked up on the walk over. “Slocum, do you have a knife on you?”

“Are you mad?” his mother said. “That will be the day when a son of mine can’t release a sheepshank. There”—she tucked the loving cup under her arm and pointed at a line—“pull hard on that one, and it will all fall away.”

He did, and it did, and his mother and Chandu stepped out of their restraints.

“Now get off that floor,” shouted a woman standing nearby. She was very short, so that her head barely cleared the edge of the floor, and she had a fiercely determined look to her face. She didn’t seem to be an emergency worker, dressed as she was in a damp but tailored pantsuit.

“Who’s that?” Duncan asked.

“Ignore her,” said his mother.

A young man with an ambulance badge snuck up behind his mother and threw a silver blanket around her shoulders. “Mrs. Leland, you’ve got hypothermia. Come with me, and we’ll get you warmed up in the ambulance.”

“She wouldn’t have hypothermia if she had more fat,” said Slocum as he made a neat pile of rescued objects on the ground. “This storm was just a warning. A new aquatic phase has arrived, and we must adapt with fat!”

“I’m not going anywhere until my floor is safe from the grasping hands of those people. They didn’t come to rescue me—they want this!” And with that, she stomped the floor with her foot. Her toenails were still perfectly trimmed in scarlet.

“Don’t do that!” said a man standing next to the woman. He had keen eyes and gray hair neatly cut. He wore a dark suit that looked as if it had been slept in, and Duncan realized who they were. “Those people” were the two museum representatives that his mother had chased from the house the day before.

His mother stomped again. “I’ll do whatever I want to
my
floor.”

“It’s our floor now,” said the man. He strained his neck forward like a sea turtle. “We found it.”

“I never abandoned it!” shouted his mother. “Go away, you wreckers!”

“Mrs. Leland is right,” said Chief Lovasco, and everyone turned to him for guidance. “She is still in possession of her vessel.”

“We claim salvage rights.” With her short, raptorial arms, the museum woman waved a sheath of papers over her head. “It’s not a boat. It’s a major work of American art. We saved it, so it’s ours. She just happened to be on it.”

“You see, Duncan, dear,” said his mother, whose lips were turning blue. “I can’t go anywhere.”

“You two”—Lovasco motioned to the museum people—“leave her alone until we get her stabilized. Come with us, Mrs. Leland.”

“It’s ours!” they shouted, and they grabbed hold of the splintered edge of the floor.

“How did it even survive in one piece?” asked Cora. Slocum pushed her up onto the floor, then a Red Cross worker handed her a stack of towels.

“The wine saved us,” said his mother.

“The casks,” said Slocum, picking up a metal barrel hoop from the ground. He stuck his head through it and wore it like a necklace.

“From what we can make out,” said Lovasco, “when the walls gave out, the floor launched into the water below and landed on the wine casks floating in the yard.”

“Off we went!” said his mother. Cora wrapped her mother-in-law’s single braid in a towel and wrung it out. “We caught hold of the line of swordfish bait when we passed the porch, and then we sailed out of danger.”

“They lodged in the teeth of the old pier. These folks”—Lovasco gestured at the museum people—“were out on a vessel as the storm was winding down, and they saw the lights in the dark and heard the howling of the dog. They were able to tow her here to the Boat Club.”

“It’s a miracle,” said Slocum.

“It might be a miracle,” said the museum woman, “but it was no accident. When we got the news that the house fell into the ocean, we risked our lives in that charter boat to search for the Dodge floor. We hadn’t intended to find
her,
too. We don’t want
her.
”

“Now here we are, and no one will give way,” said Lovasco.

“I should have left the house earlier,” Duncan’s mother told Cora. “I had some dark thoughts out there in the storm. Some regrets and misgivings.”

Duncan wondered if this was the start of her life without an hallucinogenic crutch.

“It’s hard leaving something you love,” said Cora. “The important thing is that you got out alive.”

“It was a matter of interpretation,” his mother mused. “My actions were based on bad information. All these years I’ve been reading the wrong columns, so I was miscalculating the wind and tide projections.” She shook her head, and her heavy braid swung a bit. “When the first wall went down, I thought some abnormal wind must have turned the tide before its time. But I still thought the house would hold. When the next wall went down, I said, ‘Impossible.’ I grabbed the loving cup anyway and tied myself to the bookstand with Chandu and a flashlight. I went over the numbers again, and that’s when I realized my mistake, but it was too late. Next thing I know, I’m at sea.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation,” said Duncan, “Seacrest’s is still standing.”

“Of course it is. I was using a bad equation.” She squinted as she looked around her. “The worst thing is, now that I know where I went wrong, I no longer have the Log to guide me. Maybe Nod knows what we should do next. He’s always been so good that way. Where is he?”

Duncan and Cora exchanged looks, then Cora put her hand on his mother’s arm. “Annabel, they haven’t found him … yet.”

His mother stared out at the sea, and a pained expression crossed her face. The sun, cleared of the horizon, shone a white brilliant light. It was difficult even to look in that direction.

“Nod might not come back,” his mother said, tightening the silver blanket around her. “But he’ll be okay. Nothing would have stopped him from surviving.”

The Coast Guard cutter motored loudly around the corner, and for a moment, Duncan thought this was it. They had Nod, one way or another. But no. The crew was suiting up and checking tanks, which meant a new batch of divers was preparing to go under. A red-and-white helicopter swept close to the waterline. For a moment, he wished for his mother’s sake that she had her war room back. It was obsessive, but it gave her life meaning and made it seem not so sad. And he felt she was going to be very sad very soon.

“The great tomb of the sailors,” said Slocum, shading his eyes with his hand as he looked out to sea.

“He was a man who knew his bowline from a sheepshank,” said Duncan’s mother.

“It’s a little early to be using past tense,” said Duncan, stinging with what felt like an attack on his knotting ability, while marveling at her ability to accept the worst and move right along. “There’s still hope,” he said. “Plenty of hope. Let’s first get you settled, Mom. You’re shivering.”

“Duncan, dear, this is no time.”

Cora put her arms around her mother-in-law. “Come on, Annabel. You’ve got to warm up. Duncan will guard the floor for you.”

“Cora, how are you doing? I don’t know how Duncan could have walked away from you at a time like this.” She patted Cora’s hand and turned to Duncan. “I’ll go inside if you stay here and maintain the family claim. You’ll have to commit to stay put, for once.”

“Should I tie myself to the mast?” he asked.

She didn’t answer but allowed Cora and a rescue worker to help her to the edge of the floor, where Slocum picked her up and stood her on the ground. She staggered as if still on her life raft, then bent over to pick up a cracked stave of a wine cask.

“Those idiots,” she said, addressing her anger now at the crane operator who lifted the floor to shore. “Don’t know the proper way to beach a vessel. Maybe the other casks have washed up safely elsewhere. We’ve got to go looking for them, Slocum. Let’s hurry before more wreckers arrive.”

A wave, pushed by one behind it, slid so far up the slant of sand and rock that their feet were unexpectedly soaked. A thin coat of petroleum was left on the land as the water retreated, creating rainbows in the dark pools cupped among the descending slabs of shale.

“Dry clothes first,” said Lovasco. “I don’t want any more fatalities than necessary.”

“I wouldn’t have thought any were
necessary,
” said Cora, her arm through her mother-in-law’s, treading carefully through the mess.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Slocum, who was on her other side. “They’re absolutely necessary.”

“Amen,” said Annabel Leland. “If there wasn’t death, how would we know what to do with life?”

Duncan watched as they walked away, led by Chandu, who sniffed out the easiest passage through the chaos for them. The rescue team followed behind in twos like a funeral procession. The sun was heating up the earth now, and the moisture on the black roofs of the boat sheds was beginning to evaporate in wisps. It looked as if the world was dissolving in a slow burn. His mother stopped to look at smashed pieces of casks, but Cora kept pulling her forward. Chief Lovasco directed his officers to continue searching for Nod, and the museum people stood firmly with their hands clasped on the floor. Their charter boat knocked against the Club’s wooden pier as the captain waited for further instruction, and a lobster boat pulled up behind it. Annuncia and Wade. Duncan watched them intently for a moment to see if they knew something about Nod, but they moved slowly as they tied up, too slowly to have any news, and when they saw him they looked at him for an answer. He had none.

He sat down as heavily as a body bag and leaned against the book stand. It seemed strange that Nod was not with him now, Nod who had spent so much of his life here on the Club waterfront. Duncan kept expecting him to pop up from behind an upturned boat and give his slightly manic, breezy laugh, making death seem like a sick joke. His eyes scanned the boatyard, trashed not just with garbage but with yachts stove in on their sides, pleasure boats still attached to their moorings dragged from the sea, and dinghies blown in a pile against the shuttered porch of the old clubhouse. The building was still standing, somewhat, but looked as if it were being held together with string and tar. Enormous mounds of seaweed and weathered planks and lobster pots created a labyrinth around it, and in this mess he saw their float. Nod had never even made it this far to collect it. He must have been lost as soon as he stepped onto the inflatable, swept out of the cove and through the jagged teeth of the sunken pier where he was swallowed by the sea.

Annuncia and Wade appeared by the floor and stared at it and him, as if they were both already museum pieces. “Look. It’s the racing map,” said Wade, using his arm to wipe a strand of seaweed off the floor.

“Keep your hands off,” said the museum woman.

“Coastal Bank & Trust washed into the water,” said Annuncia, ignoring the woman altogether. “We went to have a look. What a crowd. People must think money is going to float to the surface. Feds are there—National Guard, too. Then we heard the news about your mom on the Coast Guard channel.”