The Drowning House (31 page)

DAYS PASSED, AND THE CALENDAR
on Will’s desk showed June 4. I had been on the Island a little more than two weeks.

It was hard to say what that meant in Galveston. The natural rhythm of the place was such that local people tended to think in terms of years, or even generations. To them, two weeks was nothing. The tourist perspective was different. Two weeks was a leisurely vacation. Like so many visitors to the Island, I found myself wondering where the days had gone. Was that what prompted me to go back for Will’s note?

Almost immediately I’d regretted leaving it in the drawer when I could so easily have taken it. Since that night I had thought about the note many times. I wanted it for myself, for the pleasure of reading his words, also for the darker pleasure of knowing Eleanor couldn’t.

I was in the kitchen. I had just opened the drawer and removed the silverware tray when I heard Eleanor at the front door. I knew she didn’t expect me to be there. As she came into the hall, I heard Will’s voice. Neither of them could see me.

“Consider it,” Will said. “That’s all I’m suggesting.”

“I’ve had years to consider it. I haven’t changed my mind.” I’d never heard Eleanor so agitated.

“I just think we should have the discussion.”

“Will, I know how this goes. We’ll talk about it, and you’ll behave as if you’re listening, and at some point, later, you’ll do what you want. Then afterward you’ll say we talked about it. Just as if I’d agreed! As if what I said made no difference!”

I knew I should do something to alert them to my presence. I reached for the wall phone. Maybe I could say good-bye and hang up noisily. But how would I explain my presence in the house? I held my breath.

Eleanor’s voice was unrecognizable. The woman I’d known, who never asked for anything, was pleading. “I thought you were happy. I thought we were happy.”

“I am happy,” Will said. There was no note of protest. It was a statement of fact. He sounded as though he meant it.

“Then why?”

“Because I think she should know.”

“What difference can it possibly make, after all this time? There’s just no good reason to do this now when everything is settled.”

“I’m not sure she feels it is. Settled.”

I dropped my hand. I slid the note back among the other papers and began to inch the whole pile slowly toward the drawer. I felt the old excitement and the ache that came with being invisible. They were talking about me. I tried to imagine what would happen if Eleanor, this new Eleanor I hardly recognized, found out I had heard them.

Will said, “I’d like to ask her to stay.”

“And do what?”

“Finish the exhibition. Enjoy the Island. Take pictures. Eat! My God, I don’t think she weighs a hundred pounds.”

“And then what?”

“Then … we’ll see.”

“Admit it. This is not really about her. It’s about you. And what you want.”

“What I want is to take care of her. Is that such a bad thing?”

“You’re already taking care of Mary Liz. And Catherine, and Patrick.”

“What about you? What am I doing for you?”

He must have touched her. She sighed, then she made a sound low in her throat that I had never heard. “She’s your child,” Will said. “I would have thought—”

Eleanor cut him off. She had regained her poise, I recognized her voice again. “She’s not a child. She’s almost thirty years old. And she has a husband waiting for her at home.”

“El, that marriage is over.”

“Who is to say when a marriage is over? A lot of people would have said yours was, years ago. But you tell me no. Will, nobody can have everything, not even you. There’s always something else to want. Do
you ever think about what this has been like for me? What I’ve given up? The things I wanted? I sacrificed them for you.”

I put the papers back in the drawer. Carefully, I picked up the silverware tray.

“Come here.”

He must have approached her, caressed her again. The thought of it made me feverish. I could feel the heat in my face and neck. “No, don’t,” she said. “I know you too well. I can see what you’re doing. Complicating things. Making them harder. I wish to God I knew why you must do this. Is your life so easy that—”

“I don’t think my life is easy, however it may appear.” I could hear pain in his voice.

“Don’t talk to me about Catherine. You know that’s not what I meant. There are things no one can change. But our lives could have been different. You could have made them different, but you wouldn’t. You say you want to take care of Clare. Why? Why now? Be honest, Will. You love having people look to you for help and encouragement. You love that role. The more the better. And they do look to you. They don’t know that in the end, that’s all you’ll give them—the blessing of your attention and more hope than anyone should have.”

“Is that all I’ve given you?”

“You said we would go away. That we would be together.”

“And we have. We will again.”

“I don’t want to go to Paris if I have to come back to this. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of fucking in the garage.”

I thought of the space adjoining the tack room, the narrow bed, the table with its bowl of roses. Of Will and Eleanor meeting there. I fought the images that assaulted me—Eleanor on her back, her legs wrapped around Will’s waist. Eleanor on her knees in front of him.

I thought of Will and Eleanor traveling together.

I wondered if she might have been away with Will the night I was locked out of the house. When my father looked up from his ruined pages and saw me, had he been thinking of her?

Will laughed, easily. “You could have fooled me.” Then he said,
“El, I’m not an absolutist. I’m just trying to work things out. To get along. But you. You take no prisoners.”

Eleanor’s voice was hoarse. “Do I amuse you?” she asked.

“Is this really so serious?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is. It was bad enough before. But now you want to bring her into it. I can’t stand this.”

Will’s voice was calm. “Are you suggesting that I choose between the two of you? I hope not.”

“I’ve never said that.”

There was a pause. Then Will said, “You are free to go anywhere you want. You have the means.”

“You say that because you know I won’t.”

“Is that such a bad thing? That we know each other as well as we do?”

There was a silence. Then Eleanor said, “You shouldn’t be so sure of me.”

I thought of Faline.
You can’t say what a person thinking. Or what they might do
. I leaned into the drawer. I hoped that it would close smoothly. Slowly, slowly, I began to slide it shut. In a moment, when they left, I could slip out into the yard.

Then their footsteps came toward the kitchen. I pushed the drawer closed and spun around. As I did my hand brushed the kitchen table and knocked something to the floor, where it shattered.

I looked up. Eleanor stood in the doorway. “This has always been your least attractive trait. If it was unattractive in a child, it’s much worse in someone who ought to be an adult.” Her hands gripped the doorframe.

Will appeared in back of her. “She didn’t know we were here.”

“Oh yes she did.” Eleanor’s arms were shaking. “This is something she does. She sneaks around, listening, she pries.” She followed my gaze to the fragments of green glass on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“She didn’t do it intentionally.” Will smiled briefly at me.

“What makes you think you know anything about her?”

He didn’t answer. He just put his hands on Eleanor’s shoulders. She twisted a little, resisting, then exhaled through flared nostrils and threw her head back. Will lowered his voice but he kept talking, his hands kept moving, as though she might be calmed by the right inflection, the right pressure. “Who knows,” he said. “Maybe this is for the best.”

She swung and would have hit him, but he caught her wrist and held it. Eleanor’s arm was rigid. “Go. Just go.” I stood staring for a moment before I realized she was talking to me.

Will said, “Maybe you’d better leave us for a bit.”

I stepped forward, then hesitated. There was no way out that didn’t bring me closer to them. I tried to pick my way past the shards of green glass, the stems of mint on the floor, turning my face so I didn’t have to see that Will’s arms were around Eleanor. That he was holding her firmly against him.

By the time I reached the Carradays’ back door I was limping. A piece of the broken pitcher had worked its way into the ball of my right foot. When I sat down and pulled it out, I barely saw the cut. I felt nothing. My mind was full of what I had heard.

I crossed the threshold, moving the way you do in dreams—weightlessly, without even the small vibration that marks each step and fixes you in time and space. I passed smoothly through the house to the double drawing room where the tall mirrors set opposite each other amplified the already impressive setting. Their surfaces were mottled with age, so that I seemed to be approaching through a brilliant fog. I thought about what had been passed down through the Carraday family. Not just the house and its contents, the familiar stories, but the real legacy—Ward Carraday’s overriding need, Stella’s love and struggle.

In the gold-flecked glass I saw a young woman with an unruly mass of hair, in wilted, ordinary clothes that made her look out of place. Not tall, like Eleanor. Not blond, like her, with skin that turned an even biscuit color in the sun. Not athletic like Frankie. Not freckled like her or redheaded, like my father. I pressed close, closer until my own image looked back at me. The face of a stranger.

I had always believed that because I observed the world through the lens of my camera, because I looked at things in ways others didn’t, I saw more. Now I understood that I had failed to perceive what other people with no special ability or training had seen at once. I thought back to the night of Will’s birthday party, to Leanne’s comment.
I thought you were part of the family
. I remembered Eleanor’s reaction,
Did she say why?
Her visible relief when I told her I had no idea. I thought of Harriet Kinkaid’s
I would have known you anywhere
. And then I thought all the way back to Aunt Syvvie trying to be kind. To Eleanor saying,
You’ll give her ideas
.

“Clare, you’re hurt!”

At the sound of Will’s voice I turned and saw that I had left a trail of blood, red smudges on the polished floor. “Sit down and let me look at your foot,” he said. I didn’t move, and he took my arm and drew me gently to a nearby chair. The cut throbbed. “This is serious,” he said. “You may need stitches.” Kneeling, he might have been about to show me an especially elegant shoe. Then he looked up and I saw what everyone else had, the chiseled face, the long jaw, and under the brows that had been dark when he was younger, that were dark in all the old photographs, blue eyes very like my own.

“You’re my father,” I said.

His hands closed around my foot as though he didn’t want to let go. “Yes,” he said. I looked again at the crown of his head, at the hair that, if it hadn’t been cut short, would have grown out thick and springy like mine.

Chapter 28

IT WAS DECEMBER, THE YEAR I TURNED FOURTEEN
, when Patrick and I stole the car. All day the winter sky had pressed down on the Island like the lid of an aluminum pan. Later, fog moved in off the water and seeped into the city, muffling sound, blurring lighted windows. It was the kind of night when the Islanders, convinced already of their separateness, believe themselves alone in the world.

No one noticed when I went down to meet Patrick in the alley. Together we walked to the Liquor Mart, where I waited for him, leaning against the damp wall, trying to look unconcerned, while he went inside and flashed his fake ID. Finally the door opened, yellow radiance spilled onto the wet pavement, and Patrick came out smiling. He flung his arm around my shoulders. A piece of hair stuck out over his forehead and I reached to try and smooth it. We walked to the corner, his hip bumping my waist.

The car swam up out of the mist, a dune buggy with high seats and black roll bars, the keys still swinging in the ignition. “Someone’s even more out of it than I am,” Patrick said. He looked back.

“Who was in there?”

He shook his head. “Well, what do you think? Feel like going for a ride?” He dropped his arm and walked around to the passenger door. I felt the chill of the fog along the exposed side of my body, the place where he had been standing. “You’re coming, aren’t you?” he asked.

Patrick and I had been in and out of trouble for years. But the dune buggy was trouble of a different kind, trouble of a new order of magnitude.
I think that was what made it irresistible—the feeling that what we were about to do together would change our lives.

Patrick put the car in gear and we lurched forward. The smiling face of a killer whale, black and enormous, loomed suddenly over the dashboard. I must have gasped. “You thought I was going to hit that wall, didn’t you?” Patrick grinned. “Don’t worry.” He squeezed my thigh. “Everything is fine. Everything will be fine.” He wedged the bottle, still in its paper bag, down between the seats. “Where do you want to go?”