The Drowning House (35 page)

“They have real winter in Ohio too. And skiing.”

“Is it any good?”

“I don’t know. I never went. I stayed with my grandmother.”

Patrick nodded. “I guess not too many grandmothers ski. They drink wine in Europe.”

I had nothing to say to that. But it didn’t matter. Our conversations had always had an odd rhythm, lots of starts and stops. “You didn’t come to the party,” I said.

“I hate those things.”

“But you knew I was here,” I persisted. “I know you did. And I went out to the beach to try and find you. Why didn’t you come and see me?”

“I started to, one time. I came by your house.”

“You did?”

“I saw you in the window.”

I remembered my first night on the Island. How I had gone to the window after my bath, looked out into the shadowy space between the houses. “You were outside?”

Patrick grinned. “I was kind of glad it happened. I never did get to see you with your clothes off.”

I thought of the times we had kissed, my inexpert fumbling. Patrick’s hand on my bare stomach. We had come close. “When did you find out?” I asked. “About us? Who told you?”

Patrick shook his head. “No one took me into their confidence or anything. Shit. It was Ernie. At the Liquor Mart. You were back east by then. And it was pretty clear I was done with school. Ernie didn’t exactly tell me. I was in there one time, reaching for my wallet and he said, ‘Where’s your sister?’ I told him, ‘My sister doesn’t live here,’ and he said, ‘No, I mean the other one.’ I must have given him a look, because he handed me my change and went off into the back of the store. There was a curtain, and he ducked behind it.” Patrick’s mouth twisted. “He probably figured I knew. And then he saw I didn’t.”

“Everyone knew,” I said. “Everyone except us.”

“It wouldn’t have changed things. Much.”

“Maybe not for you. But my life could have been different.” The words were out of my mouth before I realized that it was what Eleanor had said.
Our lives could have been different
.

“I don’t know.” Patrick shrugged. “Maybe you were the lucky one.”

“How can you say that?” I felt a surge of anger, then I reminded myself that there was a lot he didn’t know. “You left too,” I said.

“I was only gone for a while. You stayed away. You did real things. All I did was ski. Up, down. Up, down.” His expression didn’t change, but something about the way he said it made me ache for him.

“You could have stayed away,” I said. Patrick leaned his head back and said nothing.

I felt ashamed. What I’d told him sounded like the truth, but only if you didn’t know Patrick. I was sure that other people, who didn’t, had made the same argument many times, equally sure that it was futile. Patrick was living the only life he could. Wasn’t that what the scars on his arms and face meant? That he was someone who would always go back, no matter how terrible the consequences? I had never judged him. There was no reason to start now. Surely it was beside the point.

I turned and took his face in both hands and kissed the scarred skin. “I bet you were a good skier,” I said.

Patrick closed his eyes, and we sat for a moment in silence. Then he said, “Not bad. You know what a mogul is?”

I thought for a moment. “A powerful person?”

Patrick laughed. “You and me. We are definitely a team. Between the two of us, we’ve pretty much got it covered.” He smiled, his knee bounced. “Well. What do you think? You want to go somewhere?”

I didn’t care if we went or stayed. I just wanted to be with him, his body next to mine. He was tapping his foot and I could feel the vibration all along my leg. What we did, our conversations, were not important. They never had been.

“I used to think we might run away together,” I said.

“I did too.”

“I mean really.”

“I mean really, too.”

“Do you ever think about what might have happened?”

“God, yes. I thought about it when I saw you looking out that window.” He pretended to leer and I laughed. I felt the tension surrounding that dark
what if
begin to ease.

“So tell me what you’re doing now.”

“I’m sitting in a funky old carriage with my arm around a beautiful woman who also happens to be my half sister. But, hey.”

“I meant work.”

“The bank.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s not enough? I wear a tie and everything.” He mimed choking, and I didn’t press him. There would be plenty of time to find out. Our shared future, not like anything I had imagined but still essential, lay ahead. We had always taken comfort from each other. For now that would be enough.

“You said you got cold feet.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me. You being a big success and all. I’m not anybody—”

“Stop it,” I said heatedly. “Success isn’t what you think.” I recalled Harriet Kinkaid saying,
You must learn to take the credit too
. I knew she
would disapprove, but I said anyway, “It’s something that happens to you.”

“Well, it hasn’t happened to me.”

That was the kind of remark Frankie would have tendered as proof that Patrick wasn’t trying. I understood it as something else, his way of resisting other people’s expectations. Not just his family’s but the entire Island’s. All his life everyone around him had had an idea about who he was or should be. I knew how it weighed on him. It was the thing I had been spared.

He saw me looking at him and said, “They wanted to do more grafts. But I said the hell with it.”

I had told Eleanor that Patrick had no vanity, and I’d been right. What I’d worried about was that Patrick would be changed by time and living away. Turned into someone I didn’t know. Instead the experience seemed to have driven him deeper into himself. I felt strangely disappointed. Wasn’t that what I’d wanted? To have Patrick back? Himself, unchanged?

Then I had one of those flashes of insight that come only when they are too late to be useful. I understood that my wish had been granted, in the precise and pitiless way that wishes often are. Patrick had not changed, nor had my feelings for him altered. But I had. The girl who had roamed the Island with Patrick getting into trouble was gone, into another life, a dream.

Patrick sighed. His knee jiggled. “What about the beach?” he asked. “You want to go there?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “The beach.”

We drove out toward San Luis Pass and parked. It seemed like the most random stretch of sand imaginable, but we were only alone for a few minutes. Some men were wade fishing in the surf. When they saw us, they waved and greeted Patrick by name and brought over their cooler. Light was seeping over the horizon when we left.

Chapter 32

THE NEXT AFTERNOON
, Patrick came to the archive. We whispered awhile in deference to the space—there were still no other readers. Then I put my work aside, and together we went to a park where a brass band was playing languid oompah music in a raised pavilion. Patrick pulled me through the crowd to the performers. When they saw him, the musicians stood and shook his hand and two foaming mugs appeared. Eventually Patrick said, as if the idea surprised him, “You want to eat?”

We drove to one of the old hotels, conceived in the mission style and meant to evoke the Island’s largely nonexistent Spanish past. The new owner had spent a lot of money. The stucco walls were bright white and the tile roof gleamed. If the result was not “correct,” it was convincing, and the restaurant was full. We were seated right away. The waiter ignored our shorts and T-shirts, shaking out my napkin and placing it in my lap. He produced Patrick’s drink without asking for his order.

Clearly Patrick, like Will, knew people all over the Island, although I doubted somehow that they moved in the same circles. Wherever we went, he was recognized and greeted. I noticed that people wanted to do things for him, too.

Every day that week Patrick came to the archive and claimed me, much as he had when we were growing up. When we left, the man at the desk stared pointedly at the piles of photographs that had accumulated. Gwen hurried by looking anxious. I smiled at them both in a way that I hoped invited no comment.

Together Patrick and I toured the Island. Some places I had been to before, others I hadn’t. His reception was the same everywhere—eager, friendly.

We were never alone. And finally I had to accept that we would never recover the place that had been ours, the private territory of our adolescence. It too was gone.

We did not go to Saint Vincent de Paul, and I didn’t ask about it either.

I had seen and envied Will’s ability to set aside anything troubling. I told myself it was a skill I could develop, and I made an effort to seem unconcerned. I believed that if I could achieve the outward appearance of calm, my state of mind would adjust itself accordingly. But I sometimes felt a burning in my chest as if the thoughts I refused to entertain consciously had taken form and lodged themselves there.

I saw Will only briefly, breezy passing encounters in the halls. Once he said, “You’re going out again?” He looked preoccupied. He held a handful of papers, his reading glasses were pushed back on his head. He seemed pleased though, as if my new social busyness meant I was finding a way to be on the Island that was more than temporary. I could have told him I was meeting Patrick, but I didn’t. He would hear about it from someone soon enough. I said as little as possible and let Will believe I was making new friends. Faline knew better, her face radiated doubt.

I no longer had a plan or felt the need for one. It was a revelation, the way life continued to unfold without my making the smallest effort. The sun rose through the pink mist, burned the unwary tourists, and sank again into the Gulf. The wind blew. The cruise ships came and went. The days rolled by in breathtaking, unbroken swells.

I have said that islands have a way of seizing the imagination. Of taking over. Did I think that because I’d been away for so long, it couldn’t happen to me?

WE OFTEN STARTED OUT
at Lafitte’s. Once I knew some of the regulars, it felt different. There was Russell, the bartender, who lived with his mother in a double-wide trailer out by the mudflats. The woman in the muumuu was Edna, a former seventh-grade teacher. “She’s harmless,” Patrick said. “She’s just used to hearing herself talk.”

From what Frankie had said about Lowell Morgan, I hadn’t expected to like him. But he turned out to be a big, sweet-faced man who had grown up the only brother of six girls. Maybe that explained the careful way he negotiated his surroundings, as if he’d learned early to be cautious of interiors. Lowell would nurse one beer for hours, picking the bottle up and setting it down again precisely on one of Lafitte’s scarred tables. He built carved-wood porches for the owners of the Island’s houses, old and new. They considered themselves lucky to be on his waiting list.

I left my Leica at home. I hadn’t taken a photograph since Patrick and I had met in the tack room. The presence of my camera, whether I used it or not, seemed to remind him of his appearance and make him self-conscious in a way that saddened me.

Most of those nights run together in my mind—the images combine, like multiple exposures. But I do recall one evening—it was shortly after my first encounter with Patrick at the Carradays’.

When we arrived at Lafitte’s, Patrick went straight to the shuffleboard table and skimmed a puck down it. Then he approached the bar. He patted Edna’s plump hand and began flipping the channels on the ancient TV. No one seemed to mind. He adjusted the twisted coat hanger that served as an antenna. When the picture came into focus, he said, “Nolan Ryan. Having a good year.” He sat down with his back mostly to the set.

“I see you’re planning to watch the game,” said Lowell.

The bartender came over with a beer for Patrick and a glass of wine for me. “Russell, my man,” Patrick said. “You think the Rangers have a chance?” Patrick never seemed to pay attention to the games, but somehow he always knew what was happening. He turned to Lowell. “I don’t like to let planning interfere with a good time. I’m keeping my options open.”

Lowell said, “Well, I got to come up with a plan pretty quick. Darcie wants me to take her to the cat circus.”

“The what?”

“It’s only here for a couple of days, and she wants to go. Her car’s in the shop again. She won’t stop talking about it. Cats singing. Cats walking across a wire.” He rubbed his neck as if it hurt.

Lowell’s sister, Darcie, was the girl I’d met at the beach house. She had a summer job in a boutique on the Strand.

“You want to slip away? Go somewhere else?” Patrick asked.

“Sure. But what am I going to tell her?”

“Say you got confused and thought it was another night.”

But it was too late. Darcie had skipped over the crack in the concrete floor and was coming toward us. She was barely five feet tall, and she was too young to drink legally, but I’d never seen Russell ask for ID.

“Hey, Patrick,” she called out. He turned and picked her up in a hug, swinging her around so her sandaled feet flew and her flowered top rode up, exposing several inches of lean, tanned back.