The Drowning House (32 page)

I opened my mouth to speak and stopped.
Away
was what I wanted to say.
To the mainland
. Instead I said, “The Dairy Freeze?” It was only a matter of blocks away, but it was all I could manage.

“You sure? You’ve got goose bumps.” I nodded. “Okay.” He turned to me. “You wouldn’t rather drive to New Orleans? Drink Sazeracs? Hear some jazz?”

I hesitated. Did he mean it? Had the thought of running away occurred to him too? The fog drifted in front of us like torn sheets.

“Sure,” I said, hoping to sound casual, but the moment had passed. Patrick was reaching down for the paper bag. He unscrewed the top of the bottle and gazed fixedly into the night as if he were studying something I couldn’t see. We backed up, turned, and left the parking lot. One wheel rose unexpectedly and bumped down again as we drove over the curb.

At the Dairy Freeze, strings of colored bulbs hung from the corrugated metal roof. There was music playing and the salt smell of french fries and hot cooking oil mixed with the other salt smell from the ocean.

“You need time to study the extensive menu or do you want the usual?” Patrick asked.

I nodded. Thinking about the two of us in some other place, maybe together in a hotel, had made me suddenly shy. Patrick ordered and paid and passed me a soda. “In New Orleans, they have a drink called a hand grenade,” he said.

“Let’s go.” I thought of posters I had seen, the kind that have a
flower in the foreground and the name of the place printed across the top. I thought of the smudged, black-and-white photos in Faline’s newspapers. The foreign capitals, in my textbooks—Vienna, Buenos Aires.

They were all equally impossible. I couldn’t imagine the two of us—Islanders born and bred specifically for that existence—in any of them, but I spoke quickly, not giving myself time to think about why it could never happen. “Let’s go to New Orleans.”

Someone banged the hood of the dune buggy. “Shit, man, what’s this?” A face appeared—black hair that stood up like a scrub brush, a gap-toothed smile. Tony looked the same, only bigger, broader in the shoulders. Patrick nodded. Other faces appeared, boys mostly, a few girls, one with wings of green above her eyes. They surrounded the car. Tony slapped the windshield. “Your daddy buy you this?” His grin stretched tight. The others pushed against the sides of the dune buggy, first individually, then together. I felt drops falling from my drink onto my bare legs as the car began to rock.

Patrick smiled. “Quit that, we’re eating.” The rocking stopped.

The boy leaned over. “You’re not eating.” It was true, Patrick’s hamburger sat untouched in its wrapper. He saw the hot dog with a bite out of it in my lap. “But she is. That girl likes weenies.” He squinted and licked his lips. I flushed and looked down.

For a moment no one moved. Then another boy said, “Shut up, Tony,” and elbowed him out of the way. “Look at her, she’s a kid.” The tension eased. The girl with the eye shadow smiled and blew cigarette smoke out of her mouth and inhaled it through her nose. She had round, heavy breasts and rounder hips and a little waist marked by a shiny snakeskin belt. I stared at my bony knees, humiliated.

“What do you want to do?” the second boy asked. His name was Lowell.

Patrick shrugged. He could behave worse than any of them, and that gained him respect. But there would never be any real penalty for him, not on the Island. Like his father, Patrick lived above consequences, but because he was less forthcoming, it seemed like an
advantage he chose not to share. My father said Patrick was spoiled. I knew there were others who thought that too.

Someone mentioned the beach. “No, it’s too wet,” a girl said.

“That’s why they call it the beach, genius. All that water.”

“Asshole. I meant the sand.”

“No such thing as too wet,” Tony said. “Right, pal?” He was heavier than Patrick, broader in the shoulders.

“Try to relax, Antonio,” Patrick said.

The breeze had come up and the strings of lights overhead swayed and cast splashes of color on the watching faces. Tony raised both palms and stepped back.

Over the speakers a country singer complained about his life on the road. I knew they weren’t listening. Still, the group began to get restless. The girls dropped their cigarettes, pulled out mirrors and lipstick and gum. The boys swung their arms in halfhearted punches. Then all at once everyone standing around got into one car or another. Two boys climbed into the small backseat of the dune buggy, another perched above them. We left the Dairy Freeze and drove east down Broadway. The neon sign of the new Walgreens burst on us like a flare, but most of the buildings on either side of the street, the old houses, the windowed storefronts, were invisible in the dark.

“Hang on,” Patrick said, and we swung around a corner.

I knew the place. Patrick and I had visited it before. Whispering and shoving, we went around to the alley, where one of the iron rails was gone. Someone had a flashlight. Its beam glanced off the dun-colored brick walls and the foliage that overran the boarded-up windows.

“Shut that thing off until we get inside,” said Patrick. He was already shifting a piece of plywood that covered a window in the raised basement. It was not nailed, but propped artfully against the wall of the house, and it came away easily. Setting it aside, Patrick climbed through and reached back for me.

We were in the laundry room. There was a row of deep, zinc-lined tubs against the wall, and near them a mangle with wooden rollers
and a white enamel basin underneath. A couple of ironing boards stood at careless angles, as though whoever had been using them had left hastily, intending to return. Hard work had been done there, but it was a pleasant space. The smells of soap and starch seemed to have penetrated the walls. I could imagine the smolder and hiss of hot irons, freshly washed linens swaying on the rack overhead.

We moved gingerly through the house. All the ornament had been stripped away. Only the high-ceilinged rooms remained. They echoed as though a hundred years of talk and laughter and the cries of children lingered there and resonated at our passing, the way a set of chimes stirs in the wind.

We trailed through to where double doors opened out into a glass dome. Whatever flooring had once been there was gone, and the room was an indoor forest. Wild plants and weedy, fast-growing saplings had shot up. In front of us stood a porcelain fountain, its base dry and discolored, its circumference littered with cigarette butts.

Patrick took the flashlight, held it to his chin, and grinned horribly.

People asked afterward,
Why did you go there? What did you do?
—and I didn’t know how to answer. I said what any of us would have said. That I didn’t know why we’d gone there, that we had done nothing, really.

In the days that followed, it seemed to me that the adults, with their questions, were bent on assigning some conscious motive to our activity. Theft. Vandalism. Sex. Drinking. The truth is, few of us ever acted with intent. There was little left to steal—even the doorknobs had been removed. Yes, we were messy, we dropped things and left them there. And, yes, some of the couples tunneled their way into the leafy corners of the room and did the same things they would have done under the bleachers by the football field or in the backseat of a car or at the beach. Patrick had his bottle, of course, and someone else had brought a couple of six-packs of beer. But none of what we did was purposeful.

I do know that the great house in its forlorn state was both sad and thrilling—that it spoke to me of loss and the inevitability of loss,
but also of something else. When I leaned my head back and saw the iron ribs of the walls thrusting upward until they disappeared into the night, I felt a kind of release, as though my heart were rising with them.

What did the house mean to Patrick? Was it just another place that should have been off-limits? Or did it speak to him of something he secretly wished for—the collapse of family pride? The end of everything that came with it?

This is what I remember. The girl with the eye shadow stood close to me, so I could see the black patent-leather liner behind her lashes. She tapped my collarbone with a long, green fingernail and said, “You could be pretty, if you’d do something with yourself.” There was a stump of holiday candle, half consumed, left from a previous visit. We set it on the edge of the dry fountain and Tony lit it with the girl’s disposable lighter. He winked at me when he put the lighter in his shirt pocket.

Lowell asked Patrick about the dune buggy.

“We borrowed it,” he said.

“From who?”

“I don’t know. It was in the parking lot in back of the Liquor Mart.”

Several of the boys were listening now. One of them let out a long whistle. “Holy shit.”

“The keys were in the ignition.”

Tony said, “You stole it?”

Patrick gazed thoughtfully at his shoe, as if it belonged to someone else. “I borrowed it.” That was when Tony stepped away into the dining room. Later Lowell and some others called for him, but he didn’t respond, and they concluded he had left. I remember feeling glad that he was gone.

When I smelled burning, the first thing I thought of was the irons in the laundry room, one of them scorching a pillowcase or a napkin. Then I saw flickers of golden light. It was neither the steady brilliance of electricity nor the wash of a flashlight beam but something else. Curious, I went to investigate. Below the tangle of wires the shredded remains of the dining-room curtains were on fire. Flames were
racing through the old fabric, bits fluttered down onto the dark wood floor, where they continued to burn. It was beautiful. I stood transfixed as liquid flames poured upward onto the ceiling. The air grew thicker.

Patrick appeared beside me. “Shit. We’ve got to get out of here,” he said, but instead of making for the laundry room, he turned and went back. At first, some of them thought it was a joke and refused to move from where they were lying or sitting, and I saw Patrick pulling at one, shaking another, until a girl saw the flames and screamed. Then everything became confused, and there was shouting and arguing. Someone grabbed my arm, hard, propelling me past the fire and toward the door. “Move,” a voice said, “hurry,” but of course we couldn’t in the interior blackness of the hall. The flashlight was gone, and we had to feel our way. Haste made us clumsy. I fell against someone, felt his elbow in my chest and heard him swear. The girl who had screamed was sobbing, and someone else was saying, “Shut up, shut up.” Somehow we reached the open window, climbed out, and lay panting on the grass.

I remember feeling the ground, cool and moist, under me. In a couple of hours it would be morning. Lowell laughed, and others joined in. We struggled to our feet and started toward the cars. Then someone asked, “Where’s Carla?”

Lowell turned to a mousy girl with panels of brown hair framing a narrow face. “Where’s Carla?”

The girl flinched, as though she had been hit. “She forgot her belt.”

I looked around and realized that Carla must be the girl who had spoken to me.

“You let her go back?”

“Don’t be like that. I told her not to.” The girl’s voice rose to a whine.

Flames had overtaken the roof when Patrick started across the lawn, walking fast, then running. I saw the back of his neck, his shirttail, his long quick legs. He was running toward the burning house.

One of the boys made to block his way, but Patrick stepped lightly
around him, and I knew that my anxiety had been misplaced. Ever since we’d met up with Tony at the Dairy Freeze, I had been worried about what might happen between the two of them. The real danger was something I had not anticipated. I had never had any reason to fear a fight.

Chapter 29

A CLOUD PASSES, AND IN THE FIERCE
Island sunlight everything appears different—the tops of the palms flash silver, the asphalt sparkles. Since the discovery that I was Will’s daughter and Patrick’s half sister, I had experienced something similar. My new knowledge lit up my surroundings.

It was, however, a private vision. There was no one for me to share it with. Not Frankie, who already knew and had tried to tell me. Not Faline, who had kept the secret for years. I thought of what Frankie had said—
There are only two sides, the Island side and everything else
—and I knew where Faline’s loyalty would have to be.

Nor was there more to say to Will, who now held my face and kissed me gently when he said good night. Who clearly felt that all was well. How could I explain to him what my life had been like growing up, what his failure to acknowledge me had meant? How could I tell him what had happened to me without accusing him? When I imagined it, I saw his face close, saw him turn away.

So everything changed and nothing. Life in the Carraday house went on as usual.

One morning Faline stopped me at the foot of the stairs. “I got a whole tableful of silver to polish before dinnertime. You want to, you might could carry these over to Miz Kinkaid. She enjoy something sweet.” She held out a plastic container.