The Drowning House (3 page)

“He could have found someone here, you know,” Eleanor said. She wiped her mouth deliberately, and I noticed a splotch of color on the napkin. I didn’t recall her wearing lipstick. “He asked for you.”

I picked a chunk of ice out of my glass with my fingers and put it in my mouth, but not before it had dripped down the front of my shirt.

“I gave you a spoon,” Eleanor said.

I swallowed and pushed my chair back. It grated against the floor. “
Will
. Does he expect me to call him that?”

“Of course. You’re an adult now.”

“That’s right. They can’t send me away.”

Eleanor sighed. “Clare, we’ve talked about this. Your leaving the Island was something we agreed on together, both families. It was a serious situation. The girl died.”

“That wasn’t our fault!”

“I’m not blaming you. I’ve never blamed you. But you shouldn’t have been there. And people were upset. Your presence would have been …”

I spoke before she could find the word. “Was that the reason?”

She hesitated for a moment. Just long enough to suggest she’d considered her answer. “Of course.” Eleanor regarded me steadily. “And you came back. Once things had settled down.”

“Patrick didn’t come back. What’s he doing now? What’s he driving these days?”

Patrick was a couple of years older than I was. He had wrecked three cars, spectacularly, before he was seventeen. The last had gone over the seawall and into the Gulf at four in the morning. Patrick survived and was discovered naked, drunk, and laughing on the beach.

“Patrick spent some time in Europe. College was not really an option for him. Then he came back. He has a place of his own. He’s working for his father.”

I tried to hide my astonishment. A host of images assailed me—Patrick fighting with another boy, rolling in the dirt. Patrick at the beach, shirtless, a brown bottle balanced on his head. I couldn’t imagine Patrick in an office, sitting behind a desk.

“He is?”

“There. You see?” Eleanor suppressed a smile, but I could tell she was pleased at my reaction. “In fact, Patrick is doing very well.” She took a slow sip of tea. “I hope you won’t bring all that up with Will. It was a long time ago. Here, on the Island, the whole thing’s been forgotten.” She wiped her mouth again carefully. “Frances is looking forward to seeing you,” she said.

All families have their enduring fictions, repeated so often that they are accepted without question although they have no basis in fact. Ours featured Frankie and me as equals and friends. The truth was that Frankie was my parents’ favorite. We had never been close.

Frankie was always busy. Around her, I felt as though every minute was already full, that all the air in any room that contained us both had already been used up. I kept to myself. When I was small, I hid in the shade under the lattice-covered porch, where the ground was damp and sandy, strewn with bits of broken shell.

When I was older, I retreated across the lawn to the alley house, a two-room cottage at the back corner of our property. I slept a lot. I was accused of doing nothing, of daydreaming. I knew what was meant—a momentary thought often dilated into several minutes of reverie, while I stood motionless. In time I came to understand that I was not like the rest of my family. So I became someone who watched more than she spoke. As Frankie put it, a snoop.

She accused me regularly. “You’ve been in my top drawer. I left it open exactly half an inch and now it’s closed.”

“She did laundry this morning. Have you got clean socks?”

Reluctantly, Frankie looked and saw them, rolled and sorted by color. “I don’t care,” she said, “I know you’ve been in there.” I shrugged. I had been in her drawer, and I knew she was keeping two hundred dollars and several condoms in a Band-Aid box. But she couldn’t prove it.

Eleanor spoke. “Frances and Stephen will be down for the weekend.” My sister and her husband were both doctors with practices in Houston. “They can’t make the party.”

“Party?”

Eleanor regarded the mint in her glass. “Tomorrow. It’s Will’s birthday. We’re celebrating. Of course we hoped you’d be here.”

I wondered who that “we” included. “Is Patrick coming?”

“He’s been invited. More tea?” I shook my head. “And Michael?” Eleanor asked pointedly. “How is he?”

“Michael is fine.” To my surprise, it was true. I knew Michael had suffered. I’d seen him, shoulders hunched, sobbing in the shower. But he had completed his task, delivered his burden to wherever it is old sorrows go. While I had barely started. I was beginning to think that grieving the loss of my child would be my real life’s work. Michael’s ease—one of the traits I’d loved and married him for—was now the principal thing dividing us.

“He called last night. He said he hadn’t heard from you in days.”

I looked down at my hands. They were stained with blackberry juice.

We sat in silence for a moment, each of us aware of things unsaid. “Well. You’ll want your bath.” Eleanor removed our glasses and took them to the sink.

I was in the hall when I heard her call my name. “Clare?” She caught up with me at the foot of the stairs.

She came close and put one hand on the back of my neck and the other on my forehead, as she had done when I was small and she suspected a fever. Her palms were cool, her touch gentle but firm, as though by the pressure of her hands she could subdue my troubled thoughts. I smelled the lemon on her fingers. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked. “You look so tired.”

“I’m fine,” I told her. I had never been able to say anything else.

“You’re on the Island now. Be a little careful.”

I ducked my head and stepped back, away from her.

The runner had been replaced, but the stairs gave and sighed in the old way. Out of habit I turned toward the back bedroom I had shared with Frankie, half expecting to see it divided, as it had been when we occupied it, by a frayed clothesline strung from a hook on the door to her dresser. With our miscellaneous belongings gone, the
space seemed bare, the furniture smaller and oddly disconnected, like the objects in a child’s drawing.

In the room where I would stay, officially recognized as an adult and a guest, was a high bed with a white canopy like a sail. The crisp linens made me aware of the berry stains on my hands. With a feeling of relief, I stripped off my clothes, dropping them on my way to the bathroom.

In the porcelain claw-foot tub, gradually I relaxed. I thought about how I had grown up taking baths, and how different a bath was from a shower. In the shower, you stood with your eyes half closed, hardly regarding yourself. You performed the necessary motions quickly, without looking, and the uprightness of your posture somehow characterized the whole process.

In the bathtub, on the other hand, your body lay before you, inescapable, close enough for critical inspection. You were obliged to face the disconcerting changes that came with adolescence. If someone walked in, you couldn’t turn away quickly. You were exposed, vulnerable.

Anything that grows can be trained, over time, to take on a certain form. A young tree, splayed against a wall, extends its branches only to the sides. If a child regularly assumes a posture of vulnerability, a crouch—in the bathtub, under the house—does that determine the way she grows, the way she thinks of herself? When she marries, does it dictate the kind of man she chooses? Someone who, like Michael, seems unassailable?

Unassailable
. That was the word I used to describe him to myself. I’d believed that from Michael I would learn to move through life confidently, to expect and encounter good things.

I stood and stepped out of the tub. I wiped the mirror, but the fog swam back almost at once.
Don’t look
, it said.
Don’t ask. Snoop
.

A dog barked, and I stepped to the open window. The world outside was fading into dusk. The noise of the cicadas rose and fell.

I stretched out on the bed. As if from far off I heard the sounds of my childhood—the metal vents on the roof spinning and pinging, the
scratch of a crape myrtle against the screen. Later, I knew too when I heard something that didn’t belong, a quick step that wasn’t Eleanor’s. A sound that said someone else, a stranger, was in the house.

I waited, tense and listening, until the footsteps faded. But all I heard was the old house shifting and settling, the breeze moving around outside, and the sound of my own breathing.

Chapter 3

IN THE MORNING, I WOKE TO FIND
my cheeks wet with tears. I wondered if there were a kind of memory that belonged only to the body, that needed no conscious recollection to call up the past.

I hadn’t planned to have a baby, and I was four months pregnant before I knew for certain. Then I found myself overwhelmed by fatigue. It was like standing in warm surf, letting the water move me along, imperceptibly, farther and farther from the place where I’d started. Later there were nights when I woke in a wordless panic, sweating. Hands pressed against the hard roundness of my growing belly, I wondered,
What have I done?
By then I was showing, and our friends knew. Apparently none of them saw my terror.

But once a stranger, an elegantly dressed woman with gray hair and a briefcase, stopped me on the street, patted my shoulder, and said, “It will be all right.”

Jules wasn’t so sure. “You of all people,” he said, “to get sucked into the baby thing. I thought you were serious.”

I slid off the big bed and looked around for my clothes, but they were not on the floor or in the bathroom. I wrapped myself in the towel I’d used the night before, opened the door, and listened. From downstairs came the click and sudden surge of the washer.

Eleanor must have taken my clothes. I would have to borrow something of hers.

THE TWO ROOMS AT THE FRONT
of the house, overlooking the street, were my parents’. They had slept in separate bedrooms for as long as I could remember. In Eleanor’s, the coverlet was taut across the bed, the pillows plumped. On her dressing table stood a glass lamp, and I remembered my mother sitting within its circle of light. It seemed then that she was the source of the soft brightness around her. She produced her own glow, and it was hard to take your eyes off her.

I found the white shirt she had been wearing the day before lying on a wicker hamper in her closet. I picked it up and held it to my face, but it was too much hers for me to put on. Her unworn clothes hung in neat rows. Their order was somehow equally overwhelming.

Then I noticed a group of things—shirts, khaki shorts, and a cotton sweater, all hung together—that I recognized because they had been mine when I was small. There were clothes of Frankie’s too—a sundress, a tank suit that had once been supple as skin and was now stiff and oddly attenuated from its years in the closet.

I took a shirt off its hanger, a plaid camp shirt. I slid a hand into one of the short, square sleeves. How old had I been when I wore it? Five? Six? I’d been smaller than Bailey, whose arms and legs were surprisingly sturdy.

I heard Eleanor’s voice and put the hanger back. I didn’t want her to see me there. It was one thing to appear in her clothes, another for her to find me looking.

I stepped back into the hall. Through the window I saw the Kiehlers’ house and their yard, where a bare-chested brown man was trimming a palm with measured swings of a machete. He wore rope sandals and a wide-brim straw hat. There was nothing to distinguish him from someone doing the same job in front of the same house a century ago.

The street was quiet. A car would have given away the year, made it clear we were approaching the twenty-first century. But there were no cars. Not even parked cars. My station wagon was gone.

I took the steps two at a time.

In the kitchen, Eleanor was standing at the sink. “I heard you get up,” she said. “I could have loaned you a robe.” She placed a bowl
of blackberries on the table. “These were in your car. I thought you might like some for breakfast. What else? Shall I make you some eggs?”

“Where is the station wagon?” I asked.

“Otis has it. He’s working on it.”

“Otis?”

“Faline’s Otis. They’re married. For heaven’s sake, Clare, it’s been more than ten years. Things happen. Will came by and saw the car and offered to clean it up for you. It looked as if you’d been living in it.” She paused. I knew she wanted me to explain. I met her gaze but said nothing.

She sighed. “You can go over there as soon as you’re dressed. You do have a comb?” She handed me a small pile still warm from the dryer. I took the clothes from her without answering and stood to go.

“You haven’t eaten. A little fruit …”

“No, thanks. Maybe later,” I said. I didn’t want to stay and discuss my attachment to the station wagon. I knew it said something about my state of mind that I would rather keep to myself.

In the front hall, I passed Lavinia with her enigmatic, blind stare. She seemed to be leaning forward on her pedestal, listening, trying to compensate for her inability to see. I noticed that the fishing hat was gone.