The Drowning House (30 page)

My legs gave way and I sank to the floor. What had my life amounted to, after all? Thirty years, a failed marriage, a dead child. What remained? Only photos and what I could remember. Not long ago, I had thought that the pain of recollection was unbearable. Now I understood that it was worse to forget, that the price for forgetting was this gnawing emptiness.

There was a sort of conversation going on in my head.
I’d like to see her with her hair combed. Then tell her yourself. Look what she’s done. So? Where is she? Taking pictures, probably. Doing nothing
. I turned to the window and saw that the sky had darkened. The rain that had been announcing itself all day had arrived. I went to the open door and stood on the threshold.

The wind when it came was like a huge sigh. Then for a moment the silence was absolute. The trees stood motionless, waiting. As if from far off I heard a bicycle bell, footsteps running on the sidewalk.
Then a wedge of sound split the space between the houses, a noise so loud it shook the building and rattled the windows. The sky lit up yellow behind the roofline of the Carraday house, and the real rain came all at once, hard and drenching.

I turned back and closed the door. The interior of the alley house was dark now. Flashes of light like tracers came and went, as if the lightning had followed me inside. My face and hair were wet, I wiped my eyes and blinked, trying to find the outlines of the furniture, but I couldn’t make the room come into focus.

The smell of aged wood and salt—a kind of decay peculiar to the Island—rose from the wet timbers. In the half-light, I saw it all the way it had been—the old chair, the clothes hanging on the wall.

I remembered an evening in the fall, a sudden shower, pushing my way into the alley house. I was six years old. I remembered my knees shaking, my arms and legs dimpled with cold. My hair and clothes soaked.

The room was dark. I collapsed into the big chair. Only when it was too late did I realize I was sitting on some papers. I stood up and looked at them. I switched on the light and confirmed—they were long, ruled pages covered with what had been lines of fine writing, done in ink. My father’s notes, written with his beautiful gold pen. Crushed now, and blurred—as I watched, the words and numbers ran together into black, unreadable smudges. I tried to blot the first page with the tail of my plaid camp shirt. That seemed to help a little, so I took off the shirt and tried again. I was standing, wiping the pages, when he opened the door.

As he came closer, I saw the vein pulsing in his forehead. “Do you know what you’ve done?” he asked. “You’ve destroyed weeks of valuable data.” I tried to explain that I hadn’t meant to. That I’d only meant to sit in the chair. He thought for a moment, and I had time to hope that I might be told to go away. Then he said, “You want to sit. Fine,” and pushed me back onto the chair. Wiry fibers stood up from its upholstered surface.

I began to cry. “Stop that,” he said. My nose was running, tears and mucus ran together into my mouth and I tried to wipe my face with
my shirt. He said, “Put your hands in your lap. Look at me. You’ll sit there until I tell you to move.” He went over to the table and busied himself with something.

I don’t know how long I stayed in the room with him. I had been given a watch on a plastic strap, but I had lost it. That failure came back to me then with added force. Every so often my father would look up from his reading, his features calm, unreadable. Once he said, “Cross your ankles.” A faint smile played around his mouth. After a while, he went to the kitchen and fixed himself something to eat. My legs and shoulders ached. I remember feeling ashamed of my bare childish chest.

The rain had stopped when he closed the door behind him. My shirt was dirty, but I put it on again anyway. Stiffly, I crossed the lawn and made my way to the house. I told myself that my punishment was over. Soon I would be in my bed, the blanket pulled over me. The room I shared with Frankie had never seemed so attractive.

But the back door was locked. I stood on the porch, shivering. I thought about calling out. But Eleanor was away, I didn’t know where. And my father would hear me long before Frankie woke. I went around to the front door and tried that too. I twisted the handle, pulled on it, but it was locked. Finally I went back to the alley. I was afraid to go back into the alley house, afraid my father would return. I made a place for myself on the damp ground and curled up among the cannas. I hoped it wasn’t true, what Faline said, that rats nested there.

PAIN BLOOMED AT THE BACK OF MY HEAD
. I didn’t want to remember anything more. I stumbled out into the yard. Eyes closed, I crouched on the grass, retched and vomited into the flower bed.

The rain washed over me. I could hear it on the roofs and on the packed ground, steady now, predictable. I retched again, but nothing came up. Gradually I became aware of discrete sounds, water gurgling loudly where it ran from the gutter, rain sifting through the moving leaves. The green, soaked smell of the Island rose around me.

I heard footsteps on the porch and someone calling my name. I felt an arm around my waist, raising me, awkwardly at first. I moaned. Will pulled me to my feet, but my legs buckled and I staggered. Then he saw my face. “Jesus Christ,” he said and reached for my knees, and in one easy movement picked me up. “Sweetheart.” Already he was walking toward his house. “What? What is it?” he asked. I turned my face away, buried it in his shoulder. I felt the warmth of his body through my wet clothes, his wet shirt. As he held me, the feeling intensified until it seemed to have passed through my skin and into some other place.

Chapter 27

THE NEXT DAY, I MOVED INTO
Stella’s room. Will helped me carry my things across the yard and through the oleander hedge. Eleanor stood on the steps watching, her hands braced on her hips. She was wearing a yellow sundress with a full skirt that was unexpectedly girlish. Her face was stiff with strain. For the first time I could remember, she looked her age. “I don’t know what this is supposed to accomplish,” she said.

“El, please.” Will turned to look at her, but she was already on her way inside. From the edge of the lawn, I heard the screen door bang shut.

The move didn’t take long, I hadn’t brought much to the Island—just enough clothes to fill a suitcase, my photo gear. Will handled everything carefully, as though my modest belongings were somehow precious.

He set the battered suitcase gently on a luggage rack and I laid everything else on the bed. “You have your own bathroom,” he said, “as of course you know. What else?” He stepped back into the doorway as if to indicate that the room was now entirely mine. “Do you have everything you need?” He turned his gaze on me, and I noticed again how the effect of his attention was to convert a routine inquiry into something more. At that moment, I felt that I could ask him for anything in the world and he would give it to me.

Mary Liz said, “Someone might as well sleep in that room. It’s not a goddamn shrine. House is full of people anyway.”

Faline said, “I don’t wash the sheets but once a week, so fix your bed in the morning.”

Frankie wasn’t around to comment, and I found, interestingly, that I was no longer sure what she would say.

Eleanor said nothing. She didn’t need to. Her walk, the economy of her gestures, her shoulders, set as though she were preparing to lift something heavy, communicated her thoughts perfectly.

I wondered if Patrick knew. I was certain he had been in the house. I had encountered Faline hastily bundling up a pile of laundry—shorts, boxers, T-shirts—that could only have been his. That glimpse of his clothes called up a stream of familiar feelings. But to my surprise, they were now overtaken by others, larger and more compelling. I still longed for Patrick, but my sense of urgency about finding him was gone. Now when I thought of Patrick, it was mostly in his father’s presence, a private acknowledgment of some similarity of looks or manner that made our exchanges even sweeter.

I told myself that it was a way of being with them both without ever having to take sides, to choose between them.

Will made it easy. He was playful, tender, thoughtful. He made small jokes. His benevolence encompassed the household. He was unfailingly patient with Mary Liz. He flattered and occasionally teased Faline. I saw their faces turn toward him when he came into the room like flowers bending toward the sun.

People said Will was charming, and that judgment was generally accepted. Still, if we’d been asked, I think each of us would have claimed some special understanding that set our relationship with him apart. Certainly, I felt this to be true. I had been waiting for Patrick, believing he would appear and make things right. But it was Will who had found me when I needed him.

Now I really could come and go as I pleased. Which meant that I spent my days at the archive. But every evening, I returned to Stella’s room. I didn’t open the albums or look at my notes. Instead I sat in the armchair by the window and listened for Will’s step. I knew he
expected me to join him and Mary Liz for dinner. The third night, he asked me to come down to his study beforehand.

“I want you to know you’re welcome to any of these,” he said, indicating the books and portfolios I had already investigated. I regretted then that I hadn’t waited for him to offer me his things. Embarrassed, I examined the pattern in the worn Oriental rug. There was a pause. Will must have read my reaction as indifference. “Or they may not interest you,” he said.

“Oh. Yes, they do,” I said quickly. “I mean, I’m sure they will.”

He smiled and took down a faded red volume with a leather spine. I don’t remember what was in it. What I recall is the way he showed it to me, turning the pages slowly, offering the occasional comment, measuring my responses. At first I was afraid to say what I thought, afraid I might offend him. But I discovered that he liked me to have my own opinions and to express them, so that our conversations were less one-sided.

Our nightly visits in his study became a kind of ritual.

Once he found me with a large book open on my lap, one I’d seen him enjoying,
The Gardens of Italy
. “You’re looking at Latham,” he said, delighted. “I’m not surprised. Amazing photos.” He gazed down at the open page. “The Italians did wonderful things with water. Water steps, like these, water organs, fountains. Or, if your host wanted to surprise you, a water jet hidden in a bench or between paving stones. Visitors never knew when they’d be in for a good soaking. I have to admit, the idea appeals to me.”

“Didn’t they mind?”

Will’s eyes widened and he looked amused. “I’m sure some of them did.”

I thought of him with his guests the night of the party. Who would he choose to startle? “Would you like to do that?”

“Why not?” His grin said I didn’t need to worry, he would let me in on the secret. “You haven’t been to Florence, have you?”

“No.”

He nodded. “You will. One day. Your mother tells me you don’t like to fly,” he said. “But it might be worth it to see this.”

He moved his hand across the page, almost as if he were stroking it.

I knew that later, he would leave and go to Eleanor. He didn’t say so, but I knew. I believed Mary Liz knew. Faline and Otis, too.

Will sat down next to me. “So tell me, what do you think of this house?”

I didn’t know how to answer.

“My grandfather built it,” he said, “and I feel a certain responsibility. Toward the house and its contents. I know how it must seem to you. It can’t compare to …” He gestured toward the open volume. “He was a self-made man. But the things Mary Liz said about him. You know, I don’t believe any of that.” He smiled. Clearly he wanted me to agree with him, to say there was nothing to the old rumors. I remember thinking it wasn’t so much to ask. So I nodded.

What strikes me now is the precariousness of those days. The surprise wasn’t that they ended, but that we were able to preserve that frail equilibrium at all. We were like the cast of a play that depends for its success on perfect timing, the actors entering and leaving the stage at just the right moment. I didn’t think about what might happen if someone missed a cue. My only conscious desire was for things to go on as they were.

I didn’t tell Will what had happened in the alley house. He hadn’t asked for an explanation, and I hadn’t offered one beyond the fact that I sometimes had terrible headaches.

“Migraines?”

I nodded. “I don’t remember much afterward,” I told him. It was a lie, but I didn’t trust myself to say more. I didn’t say anything about the photo I’d found either. The image of Stella with her father stayed buried behind some shoes and my camera bag, under the bed I now slept in.

I didn’t think I could answer Will’s questions selectively. I believed that one revelation would inevitably produce the other, that once I began to speak I would have no choice but to give up the whole truth, just as, remembering my disgrace, I had vomited into the plants and dirt.