The Drowning House (29 page)

I replayed my conversation with Jules. It had lasted a few minutes. But its implications were seismic. Not that Eleanor would care, as long as whatever I was doing took me away from Galveston. I asked myself if it was time to go.

Then I thought of Patrick. Patrick would care, even if he had no idea what it meant. How could I leave Galveston without seeing him? Growing up, I had trusted him completely. One day, soon, he would materialize on the back steps. A pebble would hit my window, and
I’d look down to find him there. It was what he had always done. I heard Eleanor walk toward the bedroom I had shared with Frankie and thought of my younger self there, watching for Patrick’s signal.

It was dark outside when I got up and retrieved the plaid shirt from the wooden stand in the bathroom where I had hidden it behind a stack of embroidered hand towels. I couldn’t explain the feeling it aroused—a persistent aching sadness that belonged only to me. I spread the shirt out on the bed, willing myself to receive the revelation that would make its meaning clear. I paced back and forth until the space became unbearable, then I went out into the hall.

Fog had blown in with the night air. In our old bedroom, there were no lamps, just the single bulb dangling overhead. The corded spreads, the utilitarian furniture—two unmatched dressers and a desk—would not have been out of place at a summer camp. The worn rag rug muffled sound, so that you could walk quietly to and from the window seat. The room was nothing like Bailey’s with its animal cutouts and bright comforter.

I sat on the bed that had been mine and bounced once or twice like a visitor to a motel, testing the springs. I went to the dresser and opened the top drawer. It was empty, except for a faded sheet of wrapping paper that served as a liner. I leaned over and inhaled its smell—aged wood and damp and loneliness. For a moment I thought I heard the susurrus of air moving in and out of another body. I turned, but there was only the humid dark, and the branches of the crape myrtle moving against the window. Outside, the rasping cry of an owl.

I walked to the window and looked out toward the Carradays’. There was no light there. I turned back toward my bed.

I remembered then that someone used to come into our room at night. Someone who stood near me. That I listened for the sound of his breathing, like a hand rubbing against cloth. I slept fitfully—I would doze, then wake suddenly, my senses straining in the dark. Sleep and wake again, alert. When I heard it, when I knew he was there, I went rigid. My shoulder grew stiff with the effort of keeping still. I tried to imagine myself in another place. I tried to imagine
myself invisible. I tried not to think. I’d heard Faline say,
Thinking about it brings it to you
.

Sometimes, in the moonlight, I could see Frankie, through my eyelashes, in the bed next to mine. She lay sprawled, her mouth open, her long legs tangled in the bedclothes. She didn’t move. But I had, obscurely, the feeling that my sister, sleeping there, defended me in a way she would not have done consciously during the day.

I went back to Eleanor’s room. I had never come to her for help, never believed that I deserved it. I leaned against her door, listening, but there was no sound. Was she there? I knocked, softly at first. Then louder. I banged the flat of my hand against the wood until my palm stung. I made a fist and beat on the door. I called her name. There was no response. There never had been. Eleanor’s room was empty.

THE NEXT DAY I WENT TO THE ARCHIVE
as usual, but I was distracted, I hardly saw the photographs I handled. I was aware of other things—the drone of the air-conditioning, smudges on the glass partition. As I sat at the broad table, pictures of the Island spread before me, I thought of Eleanor and Will, thoughts that generated their own heat, so that even in that chilly space, my skin burned.

In the afternoon I gave up and walked the few blocks to Harriet Kinkaid’s house. I might not be able to talk to her about Eleanor, I didn’t know her well enough for that, but I could tell her about the photo I’d found of Stella with her father. I hadn’t discussed it with anyone else. I still held out hope that there might be an explanation. Harriet would know.

Her Peugeot was in the driveway and I rang the bell. I heard it chime, once, twice, but no one came to the door. I tried the handle—hadn’t Harriet said she always left it open? But the door was locked.

“No here,” a voice said.

I turned to find a man with a bamboo rake in one hand standing at the corner of the house.

“I’m looking for Harriet Kinkaid.”

“Miz Kinkaid no here.” He was short, with a heavy dark mustache and a shock of startlingly white hair.

“Do you know where she is?”

Something about his manner suggested that he did, but he remained silent.

“When will she be back?” I asked. I didn’t really want to hear his answer. I was afraid I knew what it would be.

“No here,” he said again. If he understood my question, he wasn’t going to respond. Probably he had learned that there was nothing to be gained by delivering bad news. We stood eyeing each other for a moment. Then I turned away.

I walked toward the library, but I knew there was no point in returning to the archive. Will was at his office, and I didn’t want to run into Eleanor.

On the streets, visitors to the Island chatted and laughed. The air was gauzy, full of salt. It blurred the edges of the houses and softened the colors of everything, so that the view was pretty, tranquil, like a postcard. But the haze was corrosive, eating through paint and wood. The damage was imperceptible—no one would notice until suddenly something gave way. That knowledge, and the willingness to accept it, was also part of being an Islander.

I looked back toward Harriet Kinkaid’s house and saw her yardman still standing there. I wondered who else might be observing me and why.

I remembered then a place I could go that might offer up information, one that had the added advantage of being unoccupied, so I could search at leisure without being seen. The alley house. It was the one place I had yet to investigate. Some reluctance I couldn’t account for had kept me from it.

Chapter 26

GROWING UP, I HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING
how different Galveston was from most other places. I had nothing to compare it to. I had never spent a night off the Island until the winter Will’s plane took me to my grandmother in Ohio.

In my grandmother’s neighborhood, each lot was visibly rectangular, a box of air, divided from its neighbors by the power lines above, the chain-link fence below. The lawns were edged, the shrubs squared off or rounded into balls. Everything constructed, everything that grew expressed the taut geometry of the place. Because it was pervasive, I thought that it must be the result of some local force, the same one that prompted my grandmother’s interest in quilting. I believed that I felt it working on me, gradually winding up my muscles and tendons, so that every day it was harder to move.

Galveston had always defied that kind of organization. An early plan of the proposed city shows a framework of blocks superimposed on an irregular, tapering sandbar, like the imprint of a waffle iron on batter. The whole thing has an air of unreality. On the bay side, the grid pattern overlaps the coastline and the blocks sit, all or partway, in the water. Bayous meander across the avenues to the south.

Did the surveyor understand instinctively that in Galveston the natural tendency of things is toward disorder? Sidewalks heave and melt, houses lean, shutters and verandas sag. Vines race up fences and smother telephone poles. Order gives way first in the side streets, the alleys, the areas not on public view.

When my parents moved in behind the Carradays, families still
lived in the alley houses. Some of the occupants ran small businesses, unsanctioned by the city, like the woman who sold stuffed crabs from her kitchen window to a line of waiting customers at lunchtime.

The alley house that became ours belonged then to a man I knew only as Greek Pete, who carried a string of worry beads that made a constant, soft clicking sound. Greek Pete kept his door open, and a steady stream of children came and went, clutching the trinkets he gave away—little toys he hadn’t sold to tourists. I remembered standing just inside the threshold, unsure of my welcome despite the music from the radio, the general atmosphere of festivity. I hung back, fists in the pockets of my shorts, enjoying the whir of the oscillating fan. He had to come to me, his big fingers closed around a marble, a whistle. Once Greek Pete lifted my chin and looked at me. “So beautiful and so sad,” he said and pressed something into my palm.

When my parents bought the alley house, the fence between our properties came down. That fall, Eleanor planted the bougainvillea that covered the walls, completing the transformation. Soon it seemed, from the outside anyway, that the alley house had always been ours. Nothing was done to the interior. We rented the space occasionally to medical students like Stephen who wanted a cheap, temporary place near the hospital.

At the far end were a galley kitchen and a small bathroom. Mildew stippled the bottom of the plastic shower curtain and there was a circle of rust around the drain like a sore mouth. The bedroom was opposite, its floor covered with moldy carpet squares. The remainder of the house was haphazardly furnished, and mostly given over to my father’s birding equipment—the Zeiss binoculars, the reflecting telescope and tripod, the stacks of notebooks and guides. Hats for the sun and jackets for cooler weather hung from a rail by the door. I recalled the faintly resinous odor of my father’s rain gear, the oversize saw-tooth treads of his rubber boots.

My father made no effort to oblige our student renters. He believed they were lucky to have found lodging with a doctor. Their few belongings either stayed in the bedroom or got lost among his.

I liked the dilapidated comfort of the alley house—the mushroomy odor of the place and the steady drip of the shower.

I remembered all this, and the recollection seemed straightforward enough. And yet, standing outside the door, I hesitated to go in. The alley itself appeared smaller, as childhood places do to an adult eye, and less colorful. By daylight, the clump of cannas was limp and ragged. No one lived in any of the alley houses now. There was no smell of browning crabs, no music, nothing to interrupt my reverie. I found the key under a flowerpot by the door.

As I stood turning it in my hand, I heard far-off thunder. Heat lightning flashed behind the roofs and chimneys, and I smelled the possibility of rain. A few drops fell and I told myself to do what anyone would with rain coming. Go inside. I unlocked the door and stepped over the threshold.

It had been a guesthouse for years, I knew that. Still, I was unprepared for the extent of the change. The coat rail was gone, the creamy walls freshly painted, the old carpet replaced by sisal matting. Two director’s chairs flanked a wooden chest with brass fittings. Even the light seemed different, more diffuse, as though passing through the crisp blinds had strained it of all intensity. The past was gone—ours, Greek Pete’s, the unknown years before that, all had disappeared completely.

I walked through to the back, but it was the same—clean, unobjectionable. Airless, like a photo in a catalogue. The appliances were new, the bed piled with pillows. I went into the bathroom. With a feeling of foreboding I couldn’t explain, I turned the water on and off. I looked in the medicine cabinet and flushed the toilet. Nothing happened. I stared at the shower wall, closed my eyes, opened them again.

I began to feel oddly detached from the things around me. It was a sensation I remembered from childhood, from our family dinners, from my early years in school, when I felt a part of myself withdraw and leave the dining room, the classroom, while another part stayed behind, slouched at the table, at my desk, preparing
to drop a plate or snap a ruler. Now I watched as that wayward self got up and began to move around the small rooms, pulling out drawers, flinging open cupboards one after another. My hands trembled. The air-conditioning was turned off and the house was warm and stuffy. Sweat prickled along my hairline and ran under my arms. Finally, everything in the kitchen that could be opened stood gaping except the refrigerator. It gave way with a heavy sucking sound. There was nothing inside but bare metal shelves and the smell of synthetic cold.

There was more I had to do. I went into the bedroom and got down on my hands and knees and raised the fitted bedspread, twisting to look up at the lacework of springs. I felt behind the pillows and under the mattress. I pulled everything off the bed—the sheets, the pillows, right down to the mattress with its shiny brocade cover. The urge to do these things was both irresistible and awful. I realized that my eyes stung and my mouth tasted as though I had swallowed blood.

I went to the wooden chest and lifted its lid. It was empty. There was nothing remarkable in that, the house had been cleared and readied for the next set of guests, but somehow this last vacancy, the sum of all the others, was too much to bear.