The Drowning House (12 page)

It was almost too easy. With Bailey in tow, I’d had to photograph in a new way. I had to manage her things—the diaper bag, the one gluey pacifier she couldn’t do without—as well as a camera and lenses. I made shorter trips and sometimes took the stroller. And I learned to wait for the moment when I became so much a part of my surroundings—just another young mother with messy hair and food stains on her clothes, riding the subway, or sitting on a bench—that I was forgotten while people’s lives unfolded in front of me.

I wondered where the family I’d talked to had gone. Probably to one of the pocket parks, where there would be showers, cold drinks, and other kids to play with. I got back in the car and drove slowly along the beach road. By now they would be staking out their spot together, spreading their towels and angling the umbrella just so. When I came to the first park entrance, I turned in.

The park attendant said, “D.C. plates. You’re a long way from home.”

“Not really. I’m BOI.” I handed him a couple of bills.

“I’m IBC.” He meant Islander by choice. “Moved down here awhile back from Omaha.”

“How do you like it?” I asked.

“I like it fine. The weather. I like it hot. The water. It was supposed to be a vacation, but I never went back. I like the life. Put this on your windshield.” He handed me a numbered square.

I nodded and smiled. The Island was often a point of no return.

The roll of the breakers rose to meet me as I walked down toward the shore, the sound of the Gulf giving up tokens from its store of strange things. The sand was not postcard white but buff-colored, fine and soft as face powder. Everywhere there were children, families. Grandmothers with their hair in rollers sitting next to portable
cots. Fathers in baggy shorts chasing kids in the shallows and tossing them in the surf.

My family had never spent much time at the beach. My father was a redhead and burned easily, so he only went there when there was a special bird to see. The Island schools were more likely to take kids on field trips to places where there were plenty of bathrooms and a gift shop full of items that were safe in every sense of the word. Along the shore you never knew what you were going to find.

As if on cue, something white and crumpled revealed itself ahead of me on the sand. Was it a skeleton or a plastic bag? A fish head or a cast-off T-shirt? Or something awful, something I had yet to imagine?

I didn’t want to find out. When I stopped and turned back, I saw that the sun was already low in the sky. Near the tide line, a gull was worrying a strand of seaweed, and I wondered if that was what my searching had amounted to. The day that had begun so promisingly was more than half over, and I’d achieved nothing.

I recalled my father then, a notebook in his lap, extending his arm and the palm of his hand, so that his gesture seemed to me less like shielding his face than an attempt to block the light. I could hear him saying,
The beach is for idiots, people who have no way to engage their minds
.

At the park entrance, the attendant was gone. Traffic on the beach road had picked up, people were going the other way now, into town for a drink, for dinner. I pulled out too quickly, spraying sand and just missing a black truck that was speeding past. The driver swerved and hit the horn, hard, as the two dogs in the back skidded and bounced against the side of the truck bed. I heard their toenails scraping metal.

Chapter 12

AT THE HOUSE, ELEANOR WAS WAITING
downstairs. She looked up from the mail she was sorting. “Did you visit the archive?” she asked.

“Not yet.” I tried to sound carefree, like a vacationer. “I drove around. Looked at things. Took some photos.”

“Yes?” She gazed at me inquiringly.

“Out past the seawall.” I hadn’t planned to tell her, but I found I wanted to. I wanted to make her understand that I could go where I pleased. “I drove out to Jamaica Beach. And beyond.”

I’d expected her to protest. Instead she asked, “And what did you find?”

It came to me with renewed force that I’d learned nothing. I shrugged. “I met one of Patrick’s friends.”

She nodded. “Don’t forget,” she said, “we have dinner tonight with your sister and Stephen. You’ll want to change, I imagine.” She set the mail down on the hall table, and I saw that she was wearing a bracelet, a heavy gold cuff that looked as if it might be antique. My father had not approved of expensive jewelry.

I went up to my room and stirred the few clothes I’d tossed into the closet, hoping that something would materialize, but the miscellaneous arms and legs hung limp and disobliging. I sat down heavily on the bed.

Some people, like Frankie and my father, are born knowing things. The rest of us have to discover them for ourselves. For me, growing up, that had meant a series of painful experiments carried out in full view of the Island. Frankie had seen and commented on
them all. It was often said that she was like my father. And they were in many ways similar—active, competent, matter-of-fact.

Frankie had done well in school, and she brought home trophies, gold-plated figures on tall mountings that cluttered her bookcase. Their faces were smooth metal with rounded protrusions for noses and hollows where their eyes should have been. I said once, “I think it’s creepy that they all look the same.” She didn’t bother to respond. That summer she had begun wearing sandals with little heels and had perfected a silent gesture of dismissal, a way of flipping her smooth, strawberry blond hair with her hand.

I was intensely curious, but the subjects that drew me were not taught in school, and the questions I wanted to ask were often hard to articulate. How many times had I heard Frankie echo me in her smart-girl, classroom voice for my father’s entertainment? It was a regular occurrence at family meals—my father rolling his eyes above the gold rim of his coffee cup while Frankie choked into her wadded-up napkin.

Eleanor never intervened. She was there, and yet removed, her face in profile like the face on a coin, her inner glow dimmed. I wondered suddenly if that was the price of her composure. Had she been obliged to close down some region of herself permanently in order to preserve it? I thought about the effort that must have required.

I hadn’t cared that Frankie called me a snoop. It was my way of getting answers without risking ridicule. Now, hearing voices, I walked quietly down the hall to the bedroom we had shared. The window seat was still an ideal vantage point—from it I could see everyone who came and went.

In the garden below, Frankie and her husband, Stephen, sat with Eleanor. From above, I could see down the front of my mother’s summer dress, and it dawned on me that this perspective, featuring her breasts, was the one a man—my father or Will Carraday—would have. I could see that Frankie’s hair, which she wore short now, was graying at the roots, and the fact that she had lost the natural advantage of her dramatic coloring made her seem unexpectedly vulnerable.

Frankie had never been beautiful exactly, but as a girl she had
given off a bright, hard shine that to me perfectly expressed the virtues I lacked. At the same time, she had always been scornful of her good looks, as though any consideration of physical appearance was beneath her. This attitude she shared with my father, along with the freckles she had inherited. Hers were browner and fewer, a spray across her nose and cheeks.

I slid my fingers under the curved brass fittings and opened the window a crack, just enough to be able to hear the conversation going on below.

Stephen was describing a difficult patient. Frankie looked at him with barely concealed impatience, one foot swinging. She turned to Eleanor. “Before she comes down, I want to know. Why is she here?”

“I take it you mean your sister? She has a job to do.” Eleanor leaned back slowly and rested her hands on the arms of her chair. She regarded Frankie intently. She seemed to be willing her into repose.

Frankie shook her head. “She’s been away a long time. There must be something else.”

“If you think so, why don’t you ask her?”

Frowning, Frankie began to pleat the edge of her cocktail napkin. “Because she’ll just space out and go silent the way she does when she doesn’t want to deal with something.” She tossed the napkin on the table. “There’s a man involved, of course. The one at the party? Oh, I heard. Nothing new there.”

“For heaven’s sake. Clare is married. She’ll be going back to Michael when she’s finished with the exhibition.”

“Is that what you think?”

Eleanor sat forward. “Frances, listen to me. It’s been hard for them, what happened to Bailey. But they’ll get on with their life together. They’ll make accommodations. People do.” She looked off into the darkening garden. “Relationships grow and change. Sometimes they take on forms you don’t expect.” She rotated the ice in her glass with one finger. Finally she said, “Maybe you two can see each other differently now that you’re adults. Anyway, sometimes it’s better not to know everything.”

I had shared a room with Frankie for twelve years, and I understood
that every fiber of her being strained to reject this thought. And yet she sat silent, her head bent.

Frankie had finished high school a year early. In college she majored in biochemistry and did well enough to be accepted into medical school on her first try. She had always seemed determined to live her life as fast as possible. So it was no surprise, really, that she now looked older than her years.

Stephen treated renal dialysis patients. Frankie was a surgeon. They had met when he rented the alley house behind ours for a semester. Frankie had miscarried twice that I knew of. There was a time when I took pleasure in the fact that there was something she wanted that she couldn’t have as a matter of course. Now that satisfaction was gone. What I felt was not sympathy exactly, we were too far apart. Frankie had not been kind to me. But she had been capable and resolute, and somehow I had counted on that.

I knew Frankie and Stephen were considering adopting. It was surely a last resort, involving what my father called “mystery DNA.” I slid the window closed.

Downstairs, Stephen was in the kitchen refilling drinks. He hugged me and said, “You look well.” It was what he always said, and I suppose he meant it, given that he spent most of his time with people in various stages of kidney failure. He was fair, like Frankie, and his coloring also seemed to have faded over time, so that now he looked like an old Polaroid of the boy he had once been. With his mouth closed, he was still handsome. But when he spoke, you saw that his upper lip was a little too short, his front teeth too much in evidence. He wore his pants belted at the waist. It was easy to imagine what he would look like in another ten years.

“Oh, there you are.” Frankie was in the doorway. She reached for one of the glasses. “I’ll take mine, thanks.” She looked at Stephen. “You can give that to Eleanor.”

He smiled and went outside as directed, and I wondered whether Frankie knew how little attention he actually paid to her bossing.

She turned and leaned back against the counter. “You haven’t changed,” she said. She was wearing black pants, a boxy linen shirt,
and a few pieces of chunky silver jewelry, a look that characterized her as attractive but not frivolous. She had always worn her clothes as though they were the uniform of whatever group she currently belonged to—popular teenage girls, serious medical students. Now she was a busy professional person, not someone who would spend time choosing clothes.

“Who did you dress up for?” she asked. “Not Stephen, I hope. It’s a complete waste of time.”

I began to respond, but she held up one hand. “Do you really not understand how you come across?”

I thought then of the one-sided conversations we’d had during our teens. Frankie liked to display her knowledge and I was a ready audience, so she was the one who talked to me about sex. First, the biological facts. Later, the whole taxonomy of high-school dating. I understood that there was a system of clearly defined rules and entitlements, but I could never recall the specifics. If he does this, you let him do that. What I remembered was her irritation.
Do you really not understand?

My only experience with boys had been with Patrick, and the things we did together—exploring vacant houses and setting fires on the beach—I knew enough not to mention. I remember that I asked Frankie once, “How do you know when you’re on a date?,” a question she found hilarious and duly repeated at the dinner table.

As if she could read my mind, Frankie said, “I was awful to you sometimes.” She looked down at the floor. Twilight was seeping into the kitchen. The moving blades of the ceiling fan cast shadows on the high walls and lifted a few fine hairs at the crown of her head. “I wanted his approval.”

We both knew she was talking about our father. “Not that it’s any excuse. He made it clear which behaviors would be rewarded. I didn’t appreciate then what it took to resist him.”

I was stunned. “You mean me? But I didn’t resist him,” I said. “I just—”

“You stood up to him! You did what you wanted. You had no one to speak up for you, and still … I just went along and went along
until … I don’t know if I even wanted to go to medical school. Or if I wanted to be a doctor. It’s what I am. And it’s fine. Mostly I enjoy my practice. Surgery is better than a lot of things. Most of the time, it feels constructive. But it wasn’t my choice. It was decided for me. It was as if his way of being was not just the best but the only way, and the finest thing I could hope for was to be part of it.”