Two If by Sea (12 page)

Frank had remembered a horse blanket for Glory Bee. The cold. Another surprise fact he forgot that he knew. “I came from a place where the median temperature was in the eighties. If I have a winter coat, it's at the farm.”

Eyeballing sizes, they decided that Marty would go to the big-box store at the first exit north and get coats and gloves for all of them. Marty did, bringing back the same blue down jacket for the two men and a red snowsuit for Ian, who was fascinated. On a plane he might have been . . . Frank had the sense that it hadn't been Ian's first flight, but he might never have experienced cold. Marty also brought back a car seat, surprising them all.

“I'm a physician,” Marty intoned. “It's my responsibility to make sure this child is properly restrained.” Frank's jaw tightened. He'd driven all over Brisbane with Ian in the backseat of the Mini without the first thought of a car seat. Marty said, “He's nowhere near sixty pounds. This one converts into a booster for when he gets bigger. By then, we'll probably need it, huh, Edie?” The knit cap that Marty brought for Frank was a Hello Kitty hat with pink bobbles that Frank happily pulled on over his wiry brown hair. Ian was delighted.

Eden said, “You have a wild look and a two-day beard. With that hat, you could be a child molester.”

Thankfully, they'd brought both the farm truck, with the trailer that Patrick would use to take Glory Bee to the equine disease control center, and the eight-seater Suburban van stenciled with the name of Tenacity Farms. Working quickly, they all filled the van's wayback to bursting with the suitcases and some boxes that held a few things of Natalie's from her office, including an album of their wedding pictures, and Frank's oldest training tools, the tack pieces that had been his father's. There were a few more boxes and a big crate Frank had shipped that would arrive later—or maybe never. There was his life, Frank thought, contained in a four-by-three-foot space, the life he had thought, for a short while, would fill up the world and brim over. He lowered the hatchback.

They all drove around to the loading area outside a metal-pole barn, where animals were kept until they were claimed.

The sedative had worn off, and Frank recognized Glory Bee's angry, high-pitched whickering. She was still tethered to the stanchions that formed the travel stall around her, but pulling back with all her might, her muscles bunching under her gleaming black hide.

Frank heard Eden's sharp intake of breath.

“Oh! She's beautiful,” his sister said. Frank could easily forget that Eden, the computer research whiz, was a horse farmer's daughter. “Make sure that he . . . Ian! Don't go near her now.”

“He'll be fine,” Frank said as Ian stroked Glory Bee's leg, and made that funny little motion with his hands that seemed to be his default in times of stress—right, left, as if his little hands were paintbrushes.

“You're awfully casual about his safety,” Eden reproved Frank.

“He's got a way with animals.”

“No animal is trustworthy, Frank. Jack always taught us that.”

“How is Jack?” Frank asked. Eden compressed her lips and shook her head.

With half a shot of sedative in her, Glory Bee went placidly into the trailer and turned to her bag of grain. They all prepared to set off on their journeys.

“See you in a few days, guv,” Patrick said.

“Do you even know how to get there? Do you even know how to drive on the right side of the road?”

“It's only a frontage road from the airport,” Marty said. “I programmed it in. Patrick can follow us there.”

“I'll practice driving on the odd side while I'm here,” Patrick said. “Should be something a person can do. Tourists do, when they come to Ireland.”

“When was the last time you drove?”

Patrick laughed and used his thumb to flip two Life Savers candies off the roll. “I've a lousy memory for dates. Some months, though.”

Probably twenty or thirty, Frank thought.

“Got my GPS. I ordered it last week,” said Patrick.

“Leave the people in the town some of their brandy,” Frank told him. Pat grinned and left.

The rest of them got back into the van, Eden and Frank first taking turns threading and securing the car seat, which seemed to be built with the complexity of a lunar module. “I'm so glad you're home,” Eden said as they tucked Ian in. The child was already asleep on the backseat, and hardly stirred when Frank snapped on the harness.

“You just don't want to muck out the stalls.”

“Frank, how can you joke?”

“I don't know,” Frank said. “I don't know how not to. For twenty years, it was what you did when the worst got even worse.”

“How long are you going to stay?”

“I don't know how long. I don't have plans.”

“For a while, then?”

“Do you guys mind?”

“Of course not. It's a big house . . . there's plenty for all of us. Frank, it's your home, too! I wouldn't mind if Marty and I lived in a trailer.”

“I would,” Marty said.

“Well, I don't mind living at home. I have to figure out what I'm going to do, and I have enough to live on.”

“I hope we'll have our own house soon,” Eden said.

Marty said, “Define soon.”

“Then Mom will be on her own.”

“She'd probably like that,” Frank said.

“I'm not so sure.”

Frank fell asleep for a while, his head pillowed on a clean horse blanket he found in the backseat. Under the surface of his slumber, he could hear Marty and Eden's companionable murmur, the slight rise and fall of their conversation against the blat of the radio. When he awakened, they had crossed the border from Illinois into Wisconsin.

“Wow,” Frank said. “I zonked out.”

Eden said, “You should sleep for weeks. How are you even walking? I mean at all? I couldn't live through losing Marty that way.” As imperceptibly as a child grows an inch, the landscape began to change, the slurry of rubbled parking lots shoved up against apartment sprawls and strip malls giving way to stretches of snowfield, some dotted with a smudge of trees clubbed around a plain house with straight-up walls of red brick or whitewashed clapboard.

“You do, though. There are moments when it's all too bright and loud or beautiful. Then you catch yourself just living, noticing a sunset, happy to be in a soft bed. And you hate yourself . . .”

“I can't imagine it.” Eden sighed. “Marty, do you want to drive for a while?”

He said, “Sure. There's that highway plaza in a couple of miles. Pull off.”

“You can't imagine,” Frank said, after a moment. “I saw her, and I kept thinking I could wake her up.”

“You saw her? Oh, Frank. Of course you would, at the funeral. Or, was it like that?”

“I saw her at the hospital. And before the . . . burial. She wasn't, well, disfigured. She looked like Natalie.”

“Why did you tell us not to come, Frank? My only brother. My only sister-in-law. We should have been there with you. All this would have been easier.”

“It was dangerous there.”

“That doesn't matter,” Eden said.

“What they tell you is true. I thought, there was such chaos, it could have been someone else. Even now, I expect her to turn up. I pick up the phone to call her twice a day.” Frank stopped. “I don't want to talk about Natalie now.” He put his warm arm against the glass, polishing a porthole in the fog on the side window the way he had as a child. “What's going on at home? It's been a long time.”

Eden admitted that it had been hard, working her job at the library, finishing her master's, trying to help their mother with Jack—worse every day mentally and sound as an oak plank physically—and keeping up with the ten horses they boarded.

They pulled off to change seats. Ian slept on, not even flinching when the door slammed.

“What about your man here?” Frank said.

“I'm the Jewish stableman,” Marty answered. But Marty was in medical school. How much time could he realistically spend on a farm that was always a mess at best? At least it was paid for. Frank's mother, Hope, often said that if she had to be widowed, she was glad it happened fast, in a freak explosion at the grain co-op where Francis Mercy worked a few days a week. She was glad because Francis never had to be sick. He never had to face waking up and seeing that death had taken a step closer to the door. The big insurance settlement meant that Hope did not have to sell the farm and move Eden to an apartment in Madison. There was a sum set aside for Frank and for Eden, and Hope didn't have to work, although she acted as though the high school library would be gone in a frenzy of book combustion if she took a sick day.

It was more than twenty years ago, now. Frank had been in his first year of college and Eden in first grade, but to Frank it seemed a lifetime. He could hear his father's voice, but no longer summon up his face.

“You have kids come to help,” he said to Eden.

“One girl,” Eden said. “I tried five boys. It's not like I couldn't pay them. Something, at least. But you can't pay enough. Because they don't really do anything.”

Frank could imagine Patrick preening.

Patrick would see to Tenacity and its tenants . . . Hollywood might have to wait. Like most jockeys Frank had known, Patrick would have been a gypsy, and like most of them, he seemed adept at other physical things, like acrobatics and tumbling. Maybe Patrick wasn't interested in gawping at movie stars. Maybe he wanted to be a stunt man. He'd probably read about that kind of world, on one of the many nights when Patrick plowed steadily through a book and a bottle. Frank didn't even know if Patrick had a family. He didn't speak of them. Patrick probably would not leave Wisconsin for a while, possibly a long while. That was good; it would help Frank manage the jaw-dropping prospect of slipping back into the life that was never really his, as an adult, in any case. It would be his now, though. Tenacity Farms was at least something he could put out his hand and touch, that would not give way. It was Eden's as well as Frank's, but Eden wouldn't want any part of it after she and Marty were married in the spring.

Married, Frank thought suddenly. Eden? Of course, she was now, what? Thirty? Thirty-one. To Frank, Eden still seemed like a child.

And to their mother, Frank was sure that even he was still a child.

He longed to see his mother more now than at any other time in his life, except for the days Hope spent at the University of Wisconsin Hospital after Eden's complex birth, when Frank was eleven. At the wedding, Natalie said, “You have a crush on your mother.” She said it with the same sweet and sour fusion that tinctured Hope's voice once when she described Frank as emotionally retarded. It was probably true. What cause had he to assume the mantle of a man in full? He played with guns and horses. They said most people truly didn't grow up, until they had a child.

Another little door opened.

Frank had never told Eden and Hope about the baby. The thought of Natalie standing on the table and shouting out their joy made his hands shake. His bad leg ignited.

Leaning forward, he urged the car ahead. The three hours from the airport seemed far longer than the twenty hours from Brisbane.

•  •  •

Ian splashed languidly in the oversized claw-footed tub that was the centerpiece of the new upstairs bathroom. But when Hope tried to lay him down in bed alone, the boy made it clear that he would not go to sleep until he was assured that Frank would be beside him. Like a small businessman, Ian cast his eyes upward and pointed at the other side of the demulcent queen-sized bed that took up most of the smallest of the five bedrooms in the farmhouse. He pointed to his hand, asking for paper, and drew that funny little thing, the arrows along the horizontal line—right, left.

“I'll be up in a moment,” Frank said. “I want to talk to . . . to Grandma.”

Ian eye-rolled and Frank laughed.

“He doesn't believe you.”

“I really will come,” Frank said.

In the big living room, paneled with logs from the maples that fell for the gourmet kitchen, Frank told his mother about the storm, the flood, and the rescue. He told her about the hillside at Tura Farms—unused land that Cedric and Brian worked with a local priest to have set aside and summarily consecrated. On the morning after the funeral, although the crowd would have been huge if Frank had allowed it, only a few doctors came from Our Lady Help of Christians, as well as Natalie's brother and Frank's crew chief. They stood with Frank and Tura and Cedric under a hastily thrown-up tent, in, impossibly, another swizzle of rain. Natalie's father Jamie's favorite song was, of course, “Waltzing Matilda,” and a friend of Natalie's, a young intern who'd studied violin at conservatory, played that, and then the lullaby “Tura Lura Lura,” like the name of Frank's employer. The late Mrs. Donovan had sung that song to lay down her babies. With people practically on their knees in tears, Brian ended the short ceremony by repeating a part of the Yeats poem about the entry into heaven of a fiddler from Dooney.

At this, Hope smiled, got up and took a volume down from her banks of curved bookshelves, and read, “ ‘When we come at the end of time, to Peter sitting in state, he will smile on the three old spirits, but call me first through the gate. For the good are always the merry, save by an evil chance, and the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.' ”

“She was merry,” Frank said. “I don't know how she ended up with me.”

“Oh, Frank. You were what she wanted. She lit up when she talked about you. She lit up when anyone talked about you. You were the great love to her. It's unbearable.”

“Mom,” Frank said. “Natalie was expecting a baby. By the time we came here, we'd have had a son.” Hope gripped his arm. Frank almost resented it then—how much more it hurt Hope than it seemed to have before. Perhaps he only imagined that. Frank kneeled beside the arm of her chair and let his mother put her cool hand on the back of his neck.