The Drowning House (36 page)

“Whoa,” Lowell said, “take it easy.”

Patrick laughed. “You afraid I might break something?” He set Darcie down on one of the duct-taped barstools. “Want a drink?” he asked her. “One of those pink ones?” He slapped the bar to get Russell’s attention and pointed at Darcie.

She grinned. “I may not have time. Did he tell you where we’re going?”

Lowell sighed and stood up and wiped the place where his glass had been with a crumpled napkin.

“Look at his face,” Darcie said. “You can tell he’s excited. Lowell, I got good news.”

“The tent fell down?”

“They’re going to have the princess cat out so you can pet her. In a little tiara.”

Lowell shook his head in disgust.

Darcie laughed. Russell brought her a drink in a tall glass with a
straw. “Okay,” she said, “I guess you’ve suffered enough. You’re off the hook. We’re going tomorrow, Mom too.” She smiled and took a sip through the straw.

“Thank you, Jesus.” Lowell sank onto a chair that was too small for him.

I sat back. Around me, the droning voices from the TV, the muttering of the men in the back of the room, the chink of glasses from the bar resolved into a murmur, as relaxing in its own way as the sound of surf. It filled your ears and quieted your worries.

Darcie leaned against Patrick, and he put one arm around her waist. Her long hair was straight and shiny, sun-streaked, and when she tilted her head to gaze up at him through her bangs, I saw her eyes widen. She squeezed his arm and they both laughed again.

Watching them, I felt suddenly like an outsider.

Darcie said, “You probably think we’re pretty childish.”

I shook my head, but it was what I’d been thinking, unfairly. Darcie was young. She believed the world was a good place, full of happy cats. If she lifted Patrick’s spirits, why should I object? Hadn’t I resolved not to judge him? I made an effort to look pleasant.

Darcie elbowed Patrick. “He brings it out in me. Partly because I’ve known him since I was ten. When I see him, I sort of revert.”

As if to demonstrate what she meant, Patrick pulled at the little tie on the front of her blouse. “Quit that,” Darcie said, pushing his hand away.

I wondered then what I was seeing. If theirs was a sexual relationship, it was easy, offhand, entirely without tension.

“Patrick and I go back a ways too,” I said. Lowell looked away, and I understood that he knew about Patrick and me.

Darcie glanced around hopefully, as if she expected to hear some good stories. She wasn’t jealous. She had no reason to be. I was older, someone from Patrick’s past, important to him for a reason he hadn’t explained, but not a rival.

“We used to pull pranks on Faline. And on her father. That kind of thing,” Patrick said.

“Did you get in trouble?”

“We didn’t get caught. That’s the secret of life as a Carraday.” He looked at me, and I saw that he felt my discomfort.

I was wearing the earrings Will had given me. Patrick reached out and touched one. “Did my dad give you those?”

I nodded and felt the pearls move. I wondered how he knew.

Patrick cleared his throat. “So,” he asked Darcie, “how’s work?”

“I hate it,” she said cheerfully. “I want to get married and stay home. Watch
Days of Our Lives
.”

Lowell said, “You don’t finish school, the days of your life will be waiting in line at the welfare office.”

Patrick said, “There’s Joe over there. You could marry him. It’s only been twenty-seven years since his last wife died. And he really enjoys talking about his hernia.”

Lowell laughed and Darcie made a face. “You are so gross. Both of you.” She took out a compact and dusted her cheeks. “So what are we doing tonight?” she asked.

“We’re going somewhere,” Patrick said. I saw that his knee was jumping. “Come on. You and Lowell follow me.”

“What about my drink?”

Patrick picked up Darcie’s glass, pushed the fruit to the side, and drained it. Then he swept an arm around me and turned for the door.

In the car, Patrick was quiet. He drove fast, swinging around corners and accelerating through yellow lights, the way he always did, but without any of his usual exuberance. Somehow Lowell kept us in sight without breaking any laws.

“So where are we going?” I asked.

Patrick didn’t answer, and I didn’t care enough to persist.

He pulled up in front of a pavilion overlooking the wharf, a steel-and-glass wedge that jutted over the water. Patrick gave his keys to the valet and we waited for Darcie and Lowell near the roped-off entrance. A handful of tourists stood nearby, gazing fixedly at the brightly lit space by the door. Patrick didn’t retreat exactly, but he stepped away from the glare and turned the burned side of his face toward the building.

Darcie had put on more makeup in the car, and her cheeks sparkled. “I’m not sure I’m ready for this,” she said, smoothing her clothes with her hands. I saw, all at once, how scruffy we were, except for Lowell, whose hair was cut short and who had tucked in his shirt.

“Well,” Patrick said, “shall we go in?” His manner was curiously formal. I still had no idea why we were there, but Patrick’s demeanor told me we’d come for a reason.

There was a broad-hipped man at the door with a list, but Patrick nodded at him and we passed through. We were early and the room was only partly filled. Against one wall was a raised, skirted platform with a microphone on a stand. There was no one near it except for a technician, who was taping a cord to the floor. Everyone else was over by the bar.

Darcie’s instinct had been sound—it was a dressy crowd. Women in silk and linen, men in jackets. Patrick steered me closer to the guests.

That was when I saw Will. He was talking to a young woman whose back was toward me. Her hair was short, and her dark red strapless dress showed off her neck and shoulders. At first I didn’t recognize her. But I did know the look on Will’s face—intensely engaged, full of delight. He was using his hands to emphasize a point. I saw her fingers stroking the tanned skin of her upper arm. I heard the technician say through the mike, “Testing, one, two.”

Will looked up then and saw me. Did I imagine it, or did he hesitate for just a moment before he raised his arm and waved us over?

The circle around him opened to include us, and I felt his energy. “You know each other, of course,” he said, gesturing toward the woman in the strapless dress. It was the archivist, Gwen. She appeared as polished as ever. She said something, and the conversation went forward.

But I was thinking about other things. About what it must have been like for Patrick to grow up on the Island in Will’s shadow. Never to be able to escape being his father’s son, wherever he went. And I wondered when he had come to understand that whatever Will
showed him of interest and affection was exactly what he offered everyone. Will’s manner, like a fine instrument, could be tuned to any situation. But there was no real difference in what he gave of himself.

I recalled what I’d overheard between Will and Eleanor the night I broke the pitcher. Eleanor’s desperate pleading. I wondered if Will was also taking care of Gwen, and what exactly that might mean.

I turned to face Patrick, but he was gazing out the window. He seemed to be looking for something beyond the gaily lit wharf, beyond the bay. The pale, rippled skin along the side of his face was drawn tight.

I understood then why he had brought me there. I stepped closer to him, until I felt the persistent animating vibration along his side. I slid my arm around his waist. He folded my right hand in his, raised it to his lips, and kissed my fingers. I still lacked the words to describe what we meant to each other. But in one way, at least, we were bound forever. Only he could know exactly how I felt at that moment. Appreciate that particular pain.

Chapter 33

IT SHOULD BE EASY TO TELL THIS STORY
. I know what happened, and when. I should be able to put the events in order, line them up like beads on a string. But I think now that time is not a line but a spiral, bending back on itself, delivering us again and again to the same places.

When I woke around midday on the morning of June 17, the Carraday house was quiet. The door to Mary Liz’s bedroom was closed. I leaned against it and heard her heavy, irregular breathing. She had said she was never alone, but the house seemed to be empty. I went downstairs and looked around, but found no one. Outside the front door, the newspaper lay untouched on the stone veranda.

I took the paper in its plastic wrapping and went back through the house and down the half flight of stairs to the kitchen. The room was in perfect order, the counters cleared. There was no sign of Faline. When I put my hand on the stove, it was cold. I sat and opened the paper.

It was Sunday. That knowledge made the surrounding air feel different and gave the room and the things in it—the basket of fruit, the stacked crockery—an added repose, like the elements in a still life. I closed my eyes and willed the stillness to include me. Instead the thought came irresistibly that something was wrong.

Where was Will? The house was too quiet. I got up and walked around, opened the refrigerator and peered inside. The sight of so much food waiting to be washed, cut, mixed, seasoned, and cooked one way or another was somehow oppressive. Where was Faline?

I stifled the urge to call out for her, and sat down again. Faline was probably with Otis. I looked at my watch and saw that it was past one.

I went back up the stairs to the front hall where the big chandelier hung dim and gray. The crystals shivered when the air-conditioning came on, and I felt a chill down my back. I understood then what it would mean to be alone in the house day after day, like Stella, waiting and hoping for what would never happen.

After a brief search I found the keys to the jeep. I climbed into it and drove without thinking past the rows of parked cars, past the restaurant with the shark, open-mouthed, rearing up from its roof. I turned onto Seawall Boulevard and saw long lines of heavy surf rolling in from the Gulf.

So that explained the change I’d felt in the atmosphere. Weather coming. I looked around and saw awnings and aluminum storm shutters closed, a car pulled up onto the patio of a restaurant so the plastic windscreen could enclose it—a gesture only, one that meant the owner was enjoying his preparations.
There’s a storm in the Gulf
. I wondered why nothing had been done at the Carradays’, why the tall windows hadn’t been covered, the pots brought in from the veranda, but I had no desire to return to the house.

Instead I did what so many Islanders do when a storm threatens. I drove west toward the beach. At the pocket park, the gate was closed, so I pulled onto a nearby access road and bumped down through the dunes onto the sand. From this perspective the waves were larger, dark and heavy as beaten steel. Several other cars already sat in a row along the tide line.

Something had drawn us there while most people were putting up plywood and carrying their lawn furniture inside. Islanders who rode out storms in unlikely places were sometimes accused of thrill-seeking. To me the urge seemed more like a kind of bone-deep weariness, coupled with the hope that the unyielding surface of the everyday world might crack open and reveal something beyond it.
You are waiting for the world to end, and part of you wants to see it happen
. I headed east, digging my heels into the hard-packed sand, pushing myself forward. I tucked my head and kept my eyes down as I walked.

Above me the sky was vast and troubled. Everything else seemed diminished—the houses along the beach were small and indistinct, the park boardwalk a pile of weathered blocks among the dunes. This was where the continent poured itself out—here in this thin strip of sand. The expanse was so flat and open it seemed the wind might carry me away. I stopped and raised my arms and willed it to happen.

Instead, my legs began to shake. I remembered that I hadn’t eaten anything that morning or much the night before. I turned back, but the breeze was against me. By the time I got to the jeep, the windshield was rimed with salt, the windows opaque. I rubbed at them, making long whitish smears. A woman passed me, her eyes wild, her hair a mass that whipped in the wind. She looked a little crazy. She glanced back at me, startled, and I realized I must look the same. Finally I gave up on the windows and climbed into the car.

The road back was two lanes and a narrow, gritty shoulder. I rolled down my window and drove slowly, hoping that the rain would come soon and clear the windshield. I had gone about a mile when I noticed a black pickup behind me, uncomfortably close. Two dogs hung out of the back, their tongues lolling. I took my foot off the accelerator and waited for the driver to pass. Instead he slowed too. I reached out and waved him on. Still the truck loomed through the streaky rear window. I could hear the noise of its engine. Wind buffeted the sides of the jeep.

We came to an intersection where the red overhead light bounced in the breeze. If I stopped, would the truck hit me? Thinking about it, I could feel the shock in my spine and legs. I glanced to the left, held my breath, and shot through.