The Drowning Tree (14 page)

Kyle takes the corkscrew—which I hadn’t even realized I’d pulled out of the bottle—and folds my hand in both of his. “Take it one step at a time, Juno. The police probably won’t release the body for at least another week.”

“Did Detective Falco tell you that when he questioned you this morning?”

Kyle’s hands on mine feel suddenly cool and damp. He gives my hand a final squeeze and lets it go to reach for a knife. “He told you that he talked to me?” he asks, turning back to the cutting board and starting to chop the mushrooms.

“Yes, but it’s not like he said you were a suspect or anything …”

“A suspect!” His voice sounds surprised but he keeps chopping in the same, even rhythm. “A suspect in what? Don’t they think she killed herself?”

“Did Falco tell you that?”

“No, but I remember you told me that she was a little unstable—didn’t you say she had a lousy childhood and a drinking problem? And that she was on antidepressants?”

What he says is perfectly true and no doubt I did tell him, over a few glasses of wine, all about Christine’s awful, near Dickensian, childhood—how the family worked in Briarwood and the only picnics they ever went on were with the patients and how no one understood why she wanted to go to college and study art history. I probably concluded that it was no wonder she ended up with a drinking problem and hadn’t been able to settle into a real relationship for years. I’m sure I told her story with compassion and real regret that
things have been so hard for her
but the thought, now, of dragging Christine’s problems out in front of a man I hardly know leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. It reminds me a little too much of the way Fay talked about Christine the other day in the sauna.

“So what’s the difference between taking antidepressants and smoking pot? At least prescription drugs are legal.” The words are out of my mouth before I even know I thought them. In fact, I’m not sure I do think that prescription drugs are better than pot. Kyle has stopped chopping now, the silver blade poised over the pile of finely minced brown flesh.

“Juno? Do you have a problem with me smoking? I mean, I knew you wanted to keep it hidden from Bea, but I thought you said you wouldn’t mind getting high after she left for her rafting trip.”

Did I? It sounds like something I might have said after a few glasses of wine
.

“I’m not sure that doing anything illegal would be such a good idea with the police around …”

“Exactly what illegal activities did you have in mind?”

I’d only been thinking about the pot, but something in the way Kyle’s avoiding eye contact with me makes me wonder if there’s something else he’s not telling me. “I don’t know, Kyle,” I say, “is there something you want to tell me about?”

Kyle turns to me slowly, the knife still in his hand. “That detective told you about what happened in Colorado, didn’t he?”

“Detective Falco didn’t tell me anything, Kyle.” I look down at the point of the blade trembling in the air between us and he, following my gaze, lays the knife down on the counter. When I look back up at him I see tears standing in his eyes. “What happened in Colorado?”

“It wasn’t my fault. There was an accident on a youth hostel rafting expedition I was leading and when the police came in a couple of the
guides had some pot in their backpacks … it wasn’t like we were getting high with the kids or that had anything to do with the accident …”

“What kind of accident?”

Kyle sighs and runs a hand through his dark, shoulder-length hair. I notice when he pulls the hair back that there are silver strands mixed in with the black. “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew it would freak you out about Bea’s trip. A kid was killed. He capsized and hit a rock. He broke his neck.”

“Shit, Kyle. How could you not tell me a thing like that?”

“Yeah, well, I guess it’s a little like you not mentioning that your husband tried to drown you and Bea.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath to steady myself and instantly I’m on the river that day in the boat with Neil and Bea. We’ve rowed out to the middle of the river where the currents are most dangerous. World’s End, the Dutch called it, because of the confluence of currents that wreaked havoc on ship navigators. Neil loved going there. He said he could feel the spirits of shipwrecked sailors calling to him from the bottom of the river. He’d been up for days trying to finish a series of paintings for his first really big gallery showing. I’d been up, too, nursing eight-month-old Bea through whooping cough—Neil had refused to have her inoculated because he believed the vaccination program was a government plot to compromise our immune systems or control our dreams—I can’t remember which.

He had become obsessed with his dreams. I remember that. Ever since I told him the story of Halcyone and Ceyx he’d been convinced we could visit each other in our dreams.
Try
, he’d whisper in my ear before I fell asleep each night,
to visit me tonight and hold something in your hand—don’t tell me what—and I’ll tell you what you were holding in the morning
. I’d go to sleep imagining that I held a feather, a rock, a blade of grass. A surprising number of times he guessed right in the morning, but the morning he took us out in the boat he said I’d come to him in his dream carrying a knife and that I’d slashed his paintings.
But you didn’t even sleep last night
, I’d pleaded with him.

It’s that you don’t trust me anymore
, he said, ignoring the truth of what I said. He asked me to come out with him in the boat. He said it would prove I trusted him. I pleaded that Bea was still too sick. I suggested
we at least drop her off at my father’s house, but he said he had to know I trusted him with our child’s life. I knew that since Bea was born he’d felt like I had withdrawn from him, that I’d become too protective—too timid. I wasn’t the girl who’d scaled heights with him and rowed across the Hudson in a summer storm. And what about him, I’d wanted to scream, was he the same boy I’d sat next to in Dante class? The gentle artist who’d sketched my face and made me feel more beautiful than I ever imagined myself? The boy who’d recite the cantos to me in Italian while we made love? No, he wasn’t the same boy, but still I didn’t believe he’d hurt us.

“Who told you about that?” I ask Kyle, my eyes still closed.

“Bea told me. She said it was the reason you didn’t like to go out on the river.”

I open my eyes and I’m looking down into a bowl filled with fat green slugs, swollen things smelling of brine and drowned bodies. Even when I realize it’s the seaweed, not slugs, I’m already gagging. Kyle snatches the bowl away, slopping poisonous green water on the counter. The dead sea smell rises up like a noxious gas as Kyle pours the bowl into the sink and the bloated seaweed slithers over the lip of the bowl like a live eel. I can feel the bile rising in my throat. It’s how Bea and I both smelled when the Coast Guard fished us out of the river—a brackish odor that lingered in our hair and on our skin for days and lingers still in my dreams.

K
YLE STAYS FOR ANOTHER HOUR OR SO AFTER THE SEAWEED INCIDENT
. W
HILE
I
HEAT
up a can of Campbell’s tomato soup he makes us grilled cheese sandwiches. To his credit, he doesn’t say a word about preservatives or the evils of dairy. In return, I don’t ask him any more about the boy in Colorado, but he tells me anyway. How he knew the instant he saw the raft overturn that the boy had been killed
—I was ten feet behind him and even over the roar of the rapids I heard the crack of his head against the rocks
—but still he risked his own life diving into the water and dragging his body to the shore, where he performed CPR on him until the ambulance came.

“Could the same thing have happened to Christine? Could she have hit her head on the stone wall when she capsized?”

Kyle shakes his head. “I can’t see the impact being hard enough to kill her in a slow-moving creek like the Wicomico. Although I suppose it
might have been hard enough to knock her out. Then—if she were alone—she might drown.”

“Or if the person she went with was ahead of her at the time and didn’t see her capsize he—or she—might not get to her until it was too late.”

Kyle looks up from his mug of soup and smiles. “Sorry, Juno, Falco already tried that trick on me—giving me a chance to confess that I was there. He even told me that they found a pill container in her pocket so I’d feel less guilty if I had been there. But I wasn’t. Besides, if I had been crazy enough to take her out on the river at night I’d have stayed behind and kept an eye on her the whole time. So unless you believe I deliberately killed your friend …”

“I don’t, of course I don’t believe that, Kyle. Falco presented the same scenario to me. I guess he thinks it could have been me in the other kayak.”

“It makes more sense. The other kayak was wider. It’d be the one you’d pick if you were going out on the river at night.”

“Do you see me doing that, Kyle?”

He grins. It’s the first time either of us has smiled since he got here. I try to return the smile but it feels like I’m posing for a picture instead of responding to another human being.

“No, I don’t,” he says, lifting his hand to stroke my cheek. I feel the muscles of my face relax out of the false smile at his touch. It occurs to me that there’s still a chance that Kyle and I could come out of this okay—that the suspicion and mistrust we’re both feeling doesn’t have to be the end of whatever was beginning between us. “Not with your fear of the water—especially now that I know why you’re so afraid of going out on the river.”

Kyle moves closer and pushes his hand through my hair, his callused fingertips kneading into my scalp and then down into the knotted muscles in my neck. I let my head fall forward, easing into the weight of his hands, and my hair falls in front of my face like a curtain between us. He brushes back my hair and tucks it behind my ear. It’s the same gesture Christine made on the train platform when she asked me about Kyle. What had she asked me?
Have you felt that much for anyone since Neil?
Kyle ducks his head to kiss me. I have only to lift my head to meet him halfway,
but instead I’m remembering how I answered Christine.
I’m not sure I ever want to feel that much for anyone again
.

I don’t move away, but I don’t move toward him either. I feel curiously frozen, trapped in the moment like a bubble inside a glass paperweight. I’ve watched Ernesto make those bubbles. You stick the tip of your pincers into the hot glass and then twist. The glass closes over the pocket of air, trapping it forever. When Kyle moves away from me it feels like the space he’s left between us has been sealed over with something harder than cooling glass.

He doesn’t stay long after that. When he leaves, I try to go to sleep but I toss and turn so much that even Paolo and Francesca grow disgusted with me and retreat to Bea’s bed, where they curl up together, nose to rear, like a monotone yin yang. I turn on the light, determined to read myself to sleep, but the books on my night table might as well be in Sanskrit for all the interest they hold for me. Then I remember Eugenie Penrose’s journal pages and get up to retrieve them from my bag.

The second entry is dated June 27, 1892. Five days after the first entry.

Or having her older—and taller—half sister usurp her in a young man’s affections, I think, laying the journal pages down on the bed by my side. Could Eugenie really have been so blind not to see that Clare’s fit (one of her fits, she’d written; how often did she have these fits?) was caused by jealousy over Penrose’s attentions to herself? Perhaps she simply couldn’t imagine anyone preferring her to her prettier, more vivacious (albeit volatile) younger sister. Or was that prim, self-effacing tone a ruse meant to conceal even from herself her own burgeoning interest in Augustus Penrose? Whether genuine or sham, Eugenie’s narrative accomplishes one thing—it’s taken my mind off Christine’s death for the moment. I close my eyes and see not the awful image of Christine below the water but instead two sisters walking home along the path by the river in their long Victorian dresses in white and blue. An image that sees me into a deep—and dreamless—sleep.