Two If by Sea (2 page)

If he hadn't been so physically tired, he'd have made it to the front seat of the serviceable old Mini he'd bought when he moved from Chicago. He'd left the passenger door thrown open. There on the seat were his mobile phone and the wallet he habitually removed from his pocket to stave off the old and scolding pain that fishhooked from lower hip to upper calf. Neither had been touched. The mobile went silent a single second before Frank could grab it.

Fumbling, he depressed the button.

The screen did not light up with the number composed mostly of eights, Natalie's favorite numeral—the number he always saw because he was too lazy to program in her name or photo.

Instead, he saw another familiar number, the origin of seventeen unheard voicemails. He felt crushed, literally stomped. But why should he? How ridiculous to expect Natalie to have a phone, her own phone.

How stupid was he?

His poor family at home. Of course. Eden. Mom. He should listen. He must at least listen.

“Frank!” his sister said. “Call us! Mom is frantic. I am frantic.” He thought of the sweet and subdued Christmas Eve at Tenacity, the horse farm in Wisconsin where Frank's mother still lived with Frank's much-younger sister. Eden would be finished now with all but one semester of graduate school. And his grandfather, old Jack Mercy, at ninety-six slipped away into the muck of dementia, how was Jack holding up? Just before he left for Australia, Frank spent the day with Jack, and remembered comparing the old man's gaze to that of a bear he'd once seen—no cunning, no amusement, no plan, only flooding, baffled hunger. Still powerful and rangy after a life spent wrestling horses and throwing bags and bales, Jack had balled his fist and socked Frank's mother, Hope, so hard that she staggered and nearly fell, then threw his food at Hope, his rages seemingly only for her. It worried Frank, but there was no point bringing it up. Hope was just twenty when she married Frank's father, fourteen years her senior. Jack was the only father that Hope had now, since both her parents died in 1960 in the Park Slope air disaster. Whatever he did, Hope loved Jack still, with a foundling passion.

“Please be okay, Frank,” Eden said. “Please call us back!”

Frank listened to a previous message.

In that one, an hour earlier, Eden didn't even speak directly to him. She addressed their mother: “He isn't answering. Mom, who should we call? Can we call anybody? It's a disaster area.”

The phone chimed yet again. Answer it, Frank thought. Just say a word.

If the situations were reversed, he would have gone mad. All Frank had to do to end their agony, or at least temper it, was to press a button. But he simply could not summon the will. Here, inside this, he had no will to speak to them. At this moment, he was no more than enclosed space, breathing. How to rejoice for his own survival? How even to agree to rejoice for it, for the sake of others?

Go on and call, he thought, and almost pressed the return dial. Then he didn't.

Instead, he thought, he hadn't even told them about the baby. It didn't seem pressing enough to call before Christmas. And Frank was sly. All the Mercy family liked surprises. Perhaps he wouldn't tell them at all and they would show up after the baby's birth, with Natalie already fit again, his mother's first grandchild, a summer babe, just weeks old, in arms. It was a passing thought. Frank had intended, or perhaps intended, to tell them that night—the bow on top of the huge crate of gifts that Natalie had already sent. Every ritual of family was beloved to Natalie, as to all her Donovan tribe, and she reveled so much in her first big run at the hols as an in-law that Frank accused her of having butchered and packaged a wallaby: the box weighed as much as if it had been filled with ore. “But I didn't have the chance last year!” she said. “We'd only just been married. I got them . . . a fruit basket or some daft thing!”

Earlier, Frank had said something about his wife's having spent half the GNP of Australia on Christmas. Natalie's brother Brian, one ale to the good of sense, guffawed.

“No one goes for prezzies more than my sister!” Brian said. “Think of that whenever she says to just give her something simple and ignore it, brother-in-law of mine! You'll have a happy marriage, then. I remember her little, not just counting out what was under the tree but using my mum's sewing tape to measure the parcels to make sure that none of us got bigger than she did!”

The bartender interrupted then, muttering, “More of this bollocks . . .” They all quieted to listen to the curiously electronic voice of the announcer at the Pacific Storm Prediction Centre. Brian was a TV newsman—something of a celebrity in Brisbane—and the barkeep pulled another ale for Brian and asked why everyone got a big stiffie over every tropical depression when they came to nothing.

“It should be called the Watching Tropical Storms Happen Centre,” Brian told the bartender. “Not the Prediction Centre. They've never predicted a single damn storm.” He sipped his ale. “The tide came way in tonight, though, farther than I've ever seen it here.”

“It does that when someone farts in Japan,” said the barkeep, and Frank remembered laughing. Laughing! But then, anyone might have laughed. Whoever really believed that the thing you feared most would come to pass? Last night, the barkeep had been getting ready to close when Frank got up to make his call. As Brian rummaged for some bills in his pocket, the bartender had said, “No, no. These rounds are on us, lads. Drink up. I've managed to miss midnight Mass, so I'm happy, but my bride was already plenty pissed I had to work on Christmas Eve. She said the grandkids were desolate. But I think it's she who's desolate because my daughter and her fiancé, two kids and they've finally got engaged, if you please, they went out pubbing.”

That man must be dead now, floating open-eyed like a figure in an old
Alice in Wonderland
woodcut, white on gray, with lamps and teacups and tables and chairs and spoons swirling around him. It seemed untrue. Families stumbled into the station house all the time—into the hospital, into the morgue—pleading proximity.
He can't be dead. I just saw him tonight at the bowling alley
 . . . and Frank understood the audacity of fate's disregard for logical progression.

Could Brian have lived?

The thatched bar was no more than a couple hundred yards from the little roll of the water's edge. The tsunami would have swallowed that distance. Frank thought of Brian, of his big, affable equine face and mane of sand-white hair, the dark blue Irish Donovan eyes.

Of all of them, only Natalie had brown eyes.

Brian had introduced him to Natalie.

Brian usually hosted a swank event called Everyday Heroes—that year in the ballroom at the Brisbane Riverwalk—and was a friend of Frank's crew chief on the squad of volunteer first responders. Frank had not wanted to go: he was annoyed that he had to buy a sport coat. The tall woman with the thick auburn hair in an unruly pixie cut seemed familiar to him even before the awards were given out, and, as it turned out, she was, at least her face was. At a local high school, Natalie had tripped and disarmed a boy who'd shot two of his classmates, then sat on him while treating one of his victims until teachers took him over. She'd probably saved the life of the girl who was worst hurt, the brachial artery in her shoulder nicked so that she would have bled out in a minute had the Harbor High graduate giving the Career Day speech that day not also been an ER doctor. Since school violence was rare in Australia, and the possession of firearms hardly ubiquitous, the incident was big news for weeks, with many images of a reluctant Natalie, dressed much as she was that night, in the same plain black suit, her only jewelry the fire-opal earrings she loved.

The Natalie he met that night was on her fourth martini and insisted on feeding him three bleu-cheese-stuffed olives soaked in gin. (“I don't like gin,” he protested. “I only like vodka martinis!” Natalie had held up a wavering finger. “
Vodk
a
?
Vodka has nothing to do with a discussion about martinis!” she'd scolded him.) At Natalie's insistence that night, they'd never left the hotel. Two months later, they were married.

One Christmas, and then this one. Two anniversaries, one just past. A long trip and a short one. Hardly even the primary constituents of what could be called a marriage.

Frank knew guys, plenty of guys, who, by his age, had been divorced, at least once, a few twice. That was how his disinclination to marry had hardened into a full-fledged position, though he thought of children in the way people think of a winning lottery ticket. Until they met, he had not understood that this was a position a man could maintain only if he were never awestruck by love. The pleasantness of women was leaven in life, but Frank had not ever been in love. Not even near misses. Did this one love matter more in the universe than the love of two teenagers rutting in a car? It didn't, and yet he could not help but feel as though it must, somehow, have deserved a bye. People eaten alive with terminal illness had survived this storm, but not his only wife? He punched his thigh again.

In his adult life, Frank had forced himself to face facts squarely, the better to get hard things underway. He thought suddenly of sitting with families who regaled him with false hopes at the sites of irretrievably ghastly car wrecks, the kind of wrecks in which it was impossible to tell which victim had originally inhabited which car. When he was young, he privately thought those people were foolish.

He would be those people now. A granny.
It's not impossible. Just perhaps. There's always a chance
 . . .

Frank got into the car and drove in what he sensed vaguely was the direction of the horse farm just north of Brisbane where he'd worked . . . worked and lived, until he married. But he did not get far. He could not recall which side of the road to drive on, and he didn't care. He would get himself killed; perhaps that was best. No, that was never best. He stopped, and ended up at the cemetery. After he sat for a while on a stone bench, he stood and filled his lungs, then tried to spool out the exhale in a hiss, as he had learned to do after the accident four years ago that had given him, at thirty-eight, his bad leg and his pension.

At the wedding, Brian toasted Natalie and Frank. “Welcome to the family, Frank Mercy. God have mercy on you, because Natalie won't. But she'll give you the most loyal heart in Australia, in the southern hemisphere, and maybe in galaxies we don't know about yet. My baby sister should be an action figure, to tell the truth. I mean, my brother Hugh here's a florist, and Natalie sews people's guts back into their tums after they try to blow them out with rifles. We, her older brothers, are deeply grateful to Nat for beating up on our enemies all our lives and we hope she'll do the same for you and your own five kids. A thousand welcomes to you with your marriage kerchief. May you grow old with goodness and riches.” Bawling openly, Natalie two-fisted the heavy wedding bouquet that Hugh had made from white roses and camellias and hit Brian square in the chest. Her smile was incandescent; in memory, unbearable.

Frank began to shiver in the watery sunlight. They called it acute stress disorder now, the revving of the heart, the flushing of the skin, and the narrowing of vision. The emotional sequels were various—detachment, denial, anxiety, the persistent urge to avoid the scene of the event. There. In describing it, he was already experiencing it. If he lay down on this stone bench, he might sleep for six months.

Another car pulled up on the cracked shell road to the cemetery, a man and a woman. She was dressed in bits and pieces of things, a fancy ruffled shirt over sweatpants, a bright shawl and rubber boots. Like Frank, she didn't bother to close the passenger door.

“Man, where are you from?” the woman asked. For a moment, Frank thought of the radio evangelist.

“Brisbane. I live at Carson Place.”

“Were you out last night?”

“I was at an inn at Bribie Island. At the beach.”

“Have you seen our son?” she asked. She held out a snapshot of a boy around fifteen, astride a motorbike.

Frank studied the photo carefully for a minute or more and finally said, “I'm sorry but I haven't seen him. Where was he?”

“Selling Magnum Mini Moments at a beach stand,” the father said. “He was coming home tennish.” Moments were gooey little ice cream treats, among them a selection named for the seven deadly sins, Greed, Envy, Lust, Sloth, and, Frank's favorite, Gluttony. “We think he must have stayed for the fireworks.” Fireworks were a staple of Australian Christmas, and also of Australian anything else. Aussies used everything from American Thanksgiving to the International Day of the Child as an excuse to set fire to something, to festoon the sky with twinkly, perishing graffiti. “I know he would have beat the storm out, because that didn't come until what? Long after midnight. One in the morning? He's got himself stuck at some gymnasium. James has got a good head on his shoulders. He'll turn up. You can make a good bit of tips holiday nights.”

“He should not have worked on Christmas Eve,” the mother said. Her eyes roamed corner to corner. “He should have come up to church.”

“Shut up,” said the man. “You shut up and go to hell while you're after it. It's nothing to do with it.”

As the couple made their separate ways to the car, as if alone on parallel moving sidewalks in a terminal that went on forever, Frank pressed the speed dial to the home farm. Eden's answering machine picked up, a minor blessing. Frank would be able to live for a while longer without hearing the reaction to what he had to say. It would be blameless joy. Not that his family didn't care for Natalie. They did. They cared for Natalie, but they adored Frank. If they had to choose who would live and who would die, there would have been no choice.

The message said, “This is Eden Mercy's cell phone, and I'm sorry it's not me in person. How about leaving a message?”