Two If by Sea (24 page)

“You said you'd go in the morning.”

“You wouldn't, and neither would I.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

With a modest maidenly crouch, Claudia retrieved and slipped into her robe.

“You can't,” she said. “Your horse could be jumping for a ribbon tomorrow.”

“She is right, Frank,” said Patrick. “Hello, Claudia.”

“You said that, Patrick.”

“It's a four-hour drive. I went to school in Champaign,” Frank said. “Patrick, I'll go over and see to Glory Bee. You get some sleep. Claudia, are you sure you don't want me to come?”

“I'm a very good driver.” Claudia said to Patrick, “You look better than when I saw you last. You're standing up.” Patrick glanced at his black boots. “I'll leave my suitcase with you, Frank, and just take my bag with a couple of things. I don't know for sure how long I'll be gone. It depends on Pro's . . . hopes.” Claudia made a wide loop around Patrick and left.

Desperate for a topic, Frank said then, “Why was she fifth? Glory Bee? Why wasn't she out of it altogether? Or first?”

Fortunately, spirits had loosened Patrick's tongue and he gave what amounted, for him, to a valedictory speech.

“She knocked out a pole. It was a clear round otherwise. I didn't drive her as fast as I could have. I didn't know how much of a chance I could take. I don't like to think of getting hurt either. The water . . . she didn't even notice it. She could have done it again twice, and half again as fast. Horse like that . . . Frank, she could do anything.”

“Don't bitch it,” Frank said, an old sliver of his father's superstition pinning him between the shoulder blades. He didn't know anyone who worked with horses who wasn't deeply superstitious, whatever other belief system or lack of it went on in that person's life.

“Wise,” Patrick said, as if insanity-as-gospel meant perfect sense.

A few minutes after Patrick left, there was another knock. Frank had just struggled into his jeans and shirt. Claudia was back, her face washed clean, wearing jeans and a denim jacket. Frank pulled her to him and kissed her throat, swiftly undoing her jeans and sliding her up onto the edge of the laminate bureau.

“No time,” she said. “I'm sorry.” She hopped down and walked a few steps away.

“I know,” Frank told her. “I have to see to Glory Bee before she's stiff anyhow. I'm sure Pat rubbed her down, but I'm not satisfied it was well enough.”

Claudia said, “Sure. By the look of him at the Steel Pier, I would say you have cause to wonder.”

Frank said, “What were you doing at the Steel Pier?”

“Having a whiskey. Not like Patrick. Prospero was hurt and I couldn't do anything for him, and it got to me. I was shaken.”

“So you went in a bar and ordered a whiskey by yourself?”

“Yes, Frank. Girls do. Would you have said this before tonight?”

Frank told her, “I don't know.”

“I'm not a lady.”

“I think you are.”

“I'm not, though. I'm a jock. I'm a doc. I'm a jock doc.” Claudia crossed back to his side and stood on her toes to kiss him goodbye. Then, in an afterthought, she kicked off her pants, slipped up onto the long console, and, looking up at him from under her eyelids, offered him the condom packet while slowly opening her legs.

“Not being a lady,” she said.

“Not called for at a moment like this.” They did it clothed, standing there.

Later Claudia said, “I didn't mean to start a thing.”

“Serves you right. Whiskey-swilling cowgirl.”

“That's what everybody says.”

Frank watched as Claudia made her way down the hall, wondering all the while why he didn't just walk down with her, as an ordinary person should. He thought that the elevator had probably already come and gone when he called, “Wait! Claudia!”

From a distance, he heard her call, “What?”

“Come back here for a moment if you can?” She did, impatient, wary, her keys whirling on her finger. “Sit down for a moment.”

“Frank, don't get agitated. Don't think I expect you to be my boyfriend now.”

“That's the problem, see.”

“Why?”

“I think I want you to expect that. I want you to hope for the best between us. Do you think that the best between us is only one night?”

“I'm okay if it is,” Claudia said, twirling her keys briskly.

“But I'm not,” Frank said.

Claudia let her keys go still and then said, “Oh.”

“So what do you think the best between us can be?”

“I guess I think it can be . . . I don't know. The very best? Maybe you have nasty habits. Like you pick your teeth.”

“Maybe you do.”

“Maybe you don't,” she said. “Maybe if I did, I'd change.”

“Maybe you don't have to.”

“I can be awful,” Claudia said. “I can be an awful, stuck-up, snobby know-it-all bitch!”

“Is that a warning?”

“No. It's a description. I'm just telling you.”

“Okay. I'm not afraid.”

“And if you ever lie to me about anything, I'll leave you. Even if it seems like a little nothing. Of course, you don't have to tell me everything. But if it affects me, us, there can be no secrets.”

Oh, Frank thought, oh no.

“Well,” he said, making his slow way from one supercharged precipice to the next, even higher, willing himself to keep going and not to look down, aware that he'd never before been the one who did all the talking—that every woman who came before, including Natalie, had done all that, for both of them. “I don't know how this story goes. I'm not saying that we're in love. What I'm saying is, I'm a sentimental guy.”

Claudia came into Frank's arms. He held her, and kissed the top of her head.

W
HEN SHE WAS GONE,
Frank swung into the truck and zipped over to the coliseum barn, where he showed a couple of tiers of security his credentials. Considering the millions of dollars in horseflesh sleeping or rustling back there, he appreciated more than one checkpoint. He was surprised to see a girl who looked to be twelve or thirteen outside Glory Bee's box stall.

“Hey!” he called. “That's my horse.”

Smoothly, the young woman—the closer he got, the more she looked like a young woman and less like a child, although she was no taller than five-feet-nothing at the most—held out her hand.

“I'm Linnet,” she said. “Like the bird? Patrick paid me to sit up with her and let me help rub her down. She's fantastic. I think Patrick was tired when he came back around.”

“I think Patrick was drunk.”

“That, too,” Linnet said smoothly as Frank stroked Glory Bee's neck, marveling at the mostly durable change in her, as though she'd had her brain removed and replaced with the temperament center of another horse.

“So she's had a good rubdown . . .”

“And her dinner. A light dinner.”

“Are you here for juniors?”

“I was, back when I was a kid.”

“What do you do now?” Frank meant, What do you do now at Grand Prix events, but the girl had a different answer.

“I'm in jockey school.”

“You're in jockey school?”

“College.”

“There's a college for being a jockey?”

“Yes, a regular college sports program. There are only a few, but I'm in one.”

“Where?”

“Indiana. The big one is Chris McCarron's school in Kentucky, but this is a good school. Trevor Caven runs it.”

“That's something I never would have believed,” Frank said. “Jockey school. I thought you just did that.”

“Well, I guess you once just did being a doctor. But not very well.”

“Huh. I'll go back and call it a night, then. Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. I'm twenty. I know I don't look it. I can take care of myself. And there are big guys out there with guns. Not that I would need their help.”

“Then you won't mind my saying you should stay away from Patrick.”

“I do mind,” Linnet said. “He's not a bad person. You think the drinking is all there is to it. But my father drinks like that, and he also has no talents.”

“You don't know Patrick.”

“I do. He's been down to our school.”

“Patrick? For what?”

“He did a series of lectures on two weekends a couple of months ago about avoiding common injuries. He knows Trevor.”

“
Patrick
did a series of lectures?”

She might as well have told Frank he'd said Mass.

“He's very thoughtful about it.”

Frank stopped. She was right. Patrick had a good heart and a keen mind; he treated Glory Bee like a duchess and Ian like a little brother. The response to jockeys as lecherous little creatures who drank to avoid eating and tried to skewer every woman past puberty was an easy shot. “I'll apologize, then.”

“I might come to see your farm one day.”

“That would be good. Do better. You let me know if you . . . Do jockey school students need summer jobs?”

The girl beamed. Her skin was parchment white, with freckles, and she was almost plain until she smiled. The smile recalibrated everything. No wonder Patrick was smitten.

She said, “This one does. Do you have full-time help?”

“Well, Professor Patrick lives and works at Tenacity. But early summer is hard. We put up hay and we're going to have my . . . a friend's horse there, healing . . .”

“Prospero. Yes.”

“If he makes it, and we still board a few. Do you like work?”

“I've been working since I was ten.”

“So you must like it.”

“I'd rather have wealthy patrons of racing buy villas and hot cars for me, but yes, for now I do like it.”

Back at the hotel, Frank fell asleep for a few hours to what seemed like one endless
Law & Order
episode, but was probably, in fact, four or five, to wake sweating from a dream he didn't recall until he had finished the cold toast and coffee he'd nearly kicked across the hall—having forgotten he'd ordered them the night before. He brought the tray back in, knocking over Claudia's suitcase that was just inside the door. Suddenly deciding that he and Patrick would drive home tonight no matter when the event finished, he humped all the luggage down to the bell stand. It was while standing there, folding claim tickets into his wallet, that he realized that he'd dreamed again of elevator doors opening, but that this time first Natalie and then Claudia and then Patrick were stepping in, only to reach up to him from boiling water while he held back from all of them, clutching Ian in his arms. His phone pinged with a message. Claudia had written,
Pro is resting on a suspended bed. They pinned a fracture, right hind leg fibula. The doctor says his temperament is on his side because he won't fight confinement as he heals. Transport will bring him home next week. I'll wait and drive back. I thought about you all night. C.C.

CeeCee.

Her initials formed a natural nickname. Someone would have called her that in high school. He wondered what, and who, Claudia had done in high school. It was unseemly even for him to wonder about it. She was not his. He had thought of her, too, last night, nearly torturously replaying their sex to a groaning schoolboy conclusion while Sam Waterston snappishly reminded a mopey ADA of the moral fiats behind his oaths. And then he had slept, and dreamed her into his particular hell.

He texted back,
Me, too. Good for Pro. Patrick will baby him. Try not to worry
.

Frank got into the car. As he pulled out carefully onto the frontage road, he heard someone say plainly,
I want Ian. Can you bring me?
It was a voice, but not a voice, the same crazy head-talk he'd heard just a few days earlier. Ian couldn't do what Frank could only think of as mental telegraphing—although Frank could not be sure of anything anymore, since he'd been sure that Ian could not speak. Perhaps it was Ian, saying in his small child's way that he wanted Frank.

On the way to the coliseum, he called his mother three times, and once he could have sworn that Ian picked up, and then, whether from anger or silliness, left the landline off the hook, hidden someplace Hope wouldn't find it. Frank had to call his mother's cell phone to attempt to reach her and was peeved when her message said,
Hope Mercy here. Please leave us a message and we really will get right back to you.
Who had a name like Hope Mercy? She sounded like a health conglomerate. Frank thought of wireless minutes as costly as uranium rolling up, because his mother, not quite altogether keen on the idea of cell phones, often left hers behind when she was out in the garden or driving around in her pony cart. He thought of Glory Bee possibly—well, impossibly—taking away honors and points from an event that she had no business being in at all. And he thought of Claudia, and what he might now mean to a woman he didn't even know, and what she might now mean to him, and what any of that meant to Ian, and Ian's presumed assumed identity, and of Patrick's comic appraisal of all he could see of Claudia from beneath Frank's shirt, which had been plenty, and why was Patrick to blame; he was a man, even if he had an inseam twenty-six inches long.

Then he heard the voice again.
Do you hear me? I'm not dead. Goddamn dub!

Could Ian do this, too? Was he being haunted? Did he have a brain tumor?

Frank had to pull over to rummage in the glove box for his trusty painkiller (he would end up a junkie, drifting pleadingly from doctor to doctor wearing a false lumbar belt and a quivering smile) when lightning flashes from the corners of his eyes threatened a four-eleven alarm headache. The walk to the open stadium was at least a mile once he parked: Patrick had parked the trailer and van by the stables and cabbed it in luxury. When Frank got out of the air-conditioned truck, he nearly swooned. It was easily a hundred in the shade. That wouldn't bother his cantankerous Aussie girl, but it might kill other horses. And it could easily kill spectators who were elderly, hatless, or simply sane, because, with the earlier and junior classes, these events were longer than bad marriages.