Two If by Sea (29 page)

“Claudia, I have no idea. Nobody like those guys ever came up this driveway before. Maybe I just overreacted.”

“If you overreacted, why didn't you ever talk about it? You expected it.”

“I don't know. Maybe I don't want to think anything's out of the ordinary. At least not until I have to. Claudia, let me tell you. I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe in predicting the future. I probably don't believe in anything. Whatever I did believe in once, that probably hit the ground with the very first call I went out on, the three-year-old little girl her own father pushed off the fifth-floor balcony one sunny morning right after church. I remember driving up there with my partner Elena and this little girl was just on the grass like a doll, in her little yellow dress. No blood. Just like a little doll. The mom? The mom is upstairs crying with her arms around the dad and telling Elena it's a big misunderstanding, that he really loved his little girl, and that he was possessed, and did we really have to arrest him? If I did believe in the woo-woo, I'd be standing outside the 7-Eleven every Saturday night at ten minutes to twelve to buy my Powerball. Visions, faith healing, God. It's all the fucking Easter Bunny. But what Ian does, I can
see
. It's like the scientific method. Try it, test it, try it again. I'm not the first person who ever saw it.” He told Claudia about the gladiators at McDonald's. “So if I'm not the first person, who else has? When he puts bad guys together with his mother and father, I think, What if somebody's looking for Ian? What if I interrupted certain plans? You think they'd be okay with that?”

“Let's try to be pragmatic. He's never said that anyone used—”

“Fuck pragmatic. I am being pragmatic. You tell me. What if somebody got hold of your Mrs. Madrigal? What if she started brokering peace treaties, like Hope said? Yeah, sure, the hope of the world, huh? But it wouldn't be. Tell me the profit in peace on earth and goodwill toward all men. I think Mrs. Madrigal was smart. If everybody knew about her, somebody would want to make money off her. And after somebody wanted to make money off her, somebody would want to stop her. What if what Ian
wanted
was the wrong thing?”

“That's a fair point. Not that I think Ian would ever want the wrong thing. But I'm surprised at it coming from you.”

“Surprised? Why?”

“These were cousins of your wife. Cousins, right?” In his haste, Frank had tripped over his own lie, knocking over a pole. He bent to retie his boot, rationalizations snapping through his mind like the flip-books you thumbed to make moving images, little books he found in cereal boxes when he was a kid—somehow so much more magical than actual animation.

“Just . . . it was more . . . her brother who knew them. At least knew them well.”

“But still, Ian is probably explaining this symbolically. Bad guys means something to him. The storm, maybe. He's not only a relative by marriage. You love Ian.”

“I didn't know what a father's love really was, Claudia. When I agreed to adopt Ian, I didn't know the extent of how he was.”

“Would it have stopped you?”

“No! But what I do know, from seeing them at their worst, is how people act, Claudia. Even people who would describe themselves as good parents . . . Take something that doesn't even matter. Fucking beauty pageants! Child abuse for a trophy some shill bought for a hundred bucks the gross. Ribbon that went for fifty cents a thousand. Maybe the family gets a check for a hundred bucks, for the five thousand they spent.”

“You could say that about jumping horses. That's what I mean.”

“You could say that, and half the time I do! But at least there's something going on there, some athleticism, some work-to-success ratio, something . . . anyway, that has nothing to do with it. I'm just going to have to talk to Ian about it. About why he thinks his mother was killed by bad guys. And about what he's feeling when he does what he does. And about how it's not a great idea for people to know.”

Claudia said, “Or I will.”

Patrick brought Glory Bee out of her stall and began to warm her up, and Claudia, who would be leaving midweek for an event in Saratoga, New York, was drawn away. Frank stood leaning against Prospero's neck, left alone with the vivid snapshot, never fully realized but ineradicable, of the older boy's face when he caught sight of the navy boat arriving, there in the car filling with brackish water. Even conjuring with the idea that Ian had some way of knowing that his brother had survived was, he would have agreed with Claudia, silly—no matter what gifts Ian had. Ian and . . . well, Colin, were not identical twins. The brother was older by at least three years, maybe four. Frank had sat up late scanning the Web for Etry Castle, Aintree Castle, Atterbury Castle, but Australia was short on castles, so Frank expanded his search. He found an Etry Castle, which looked like a glorified mansion on Lake Michigan, in Annet-sur-Marne, in France. There was no online description of the place—who had built it or why, who owned it now, or what function it fulfilled, domestic or ceremonial. Was it a park or a museum? A private home? Was it one of those places owned by some Asian or Eastern European billionaire whose own name was virtually unknown and whose wealth inhabited numbered bank accounts and bullion caches in neutral nations and island hermitages around the globe? Could Ian have been born in France? He had no trace of an accent except his lazy, flat Australian nasality that was beginning to fade. Some moneyed thug. That was the kind of man, or being (why could it not be a woman?) Frank imagined having an interest in Ian. He'd mentioned bad guys. It was paranoid in the extreme—the stuff of airport reading at its sleazy bubbling—to invest in a preschool child's worldview. But something about Ian's reluctance to give up the merest details of his life before the tsunami, as well as how tight-lipped he'd remained about the identity of the woman in the van, how the information seemed to burst forth suddenly from a broken seam, stoked Frank's sense that what Ian said was genuine, so far as Ian understood it. Frank also had the strong sense that Ian had decided to repair that seam of confiding as quickly as it opened, and had not told half of what he knew. And this person was forty-eight months old. Ian's general grace in the world, the more Frank knew of what the boy may have endured, was staggering.

Frank went out to the ring and watched as Patrick reconfigured the jumps. Claudia sidled Glory Bee closer to the fence.

“I want you to concentrate on what you're doing,” he said to Claudia. “You shouldn't even be involved with me when you've set yourself this kind of job.”

“Sue Smith trained a Grand National winner, and her husband was an Olympic show jumper. Don't you think they ever fucked, up there in the Yorkshire moors?” Claudia said. “Do you think it frightened the horses?”

“If Patrick overhears this, I'll end you,” Frank said in a whisper, struggling not to laugh. Were all doctors so bawdy? Natalie was possessed of the same vinegar. Was that the source of Frank's attraction? Was he trying to fill in the outlines left by his dead wife? And what if he was? A man could do a great deal worse. “I meant, don't worry about Ian. I'll handle that. I don't want you involved.”

“You should have told me that before you involved me.”

Frank went into the house and made himself his obligatory grilled cheese. He made another and ate it with leftover potato wedges from the fridge. Because food was something he could take or leave, his mother noticed his indulgence. “Did you forget breakfast? What's with all the comfort food?”

“Comfort.”

She said, “Are you worried about Ian?”

“News travels fast.”

“I could say that you wouldn't be in this state if you hadn't done what you did in the first place.”

“But you wouldn't say that because it reeks of self-righteousness.”

“That's right. But also, I love Ian, and deplore as I may however he got here to us, I'm not sure that wherever he was before wasn't worse.” She paused in her reading and said, “What does Claudia know?”

“Just that I adopted a kid whose parents were killed, a shirttail relative of Claudia's. Like Eden.”

“Except Eden and Marty think he was the son of one of Natalie's brothers. Your nephew by marriage. Although Eden doesn't believe it.”

“Jesus, Mom. What am I supposed to do, host a family meeting and confess all?”

“Yes, that's exactly what you should do.”

“Has he said things to you, Mom?”

Hope sat down. “Give me one of those potatoes,” she said. Frank liberally salted and peppered a thick wedge and handed it to Hope in a paper towel.

“Do you want ketchup?”

“Vinegar.”

Frank brought the malt vinegar down from the spice cupboard, and Hope thoughtfully cut up and relished her potato for a while. “Sadly, there is no such thing as a bad potato,” she said. “He's said a couple of things. I didn't tell you because I thought he was just being a little kid. When you were four or five, you said you saw a spaceship the size of a basketball that glowed green like a glow stick landing in the big pasture.”

Frank said, “Well, that happens to be true. I did.”

“Ian said he ran away with Cora in the night.”

“Cora was the woman in the van, the one we tried to rescue. The woman who looked Filipino or Indonesian. Did he tell you about the castle?”

“No, he didn't say anything about a castle.”

“I hope he doesn't say anything at school.”

“I don't think you have to worry about that, Frank. He's so self-possessed, it's . . . it's eerie. It seems . . . somehow . . .”

“Learned, right?”

“Exactly.”

“So where are they?”

“Who?”

“Whoever lived in the castle, Mom. Or whatever it was. His mother and father. Or his guardians?” Frank carefully cut his potato into slices. “I read the Brisbane papers every week, cover to cover. I read the updates on people who were reunited and found. I read about the missing. There's no one, no one at all, who corresponds to Ian, or his older brother, or that woman. Not one person.”

Claudia came in to announce that she was taking off. She was getting together with some former students in Chicago and would be spending the night there. Before she left, she kissed Frank lightly and gave Hope a light shoulder hug.

Chummy.

Hope didn't even roll her eyes at Frank, but closed them in the pleasure of the gesture.

Advantage, Claudia.

But also, good for Claudia. She handled things well, appropriately, neither Victorian nor postmodern, assuming but not presuming.

On Tuesday night, just before she left for New York, Claudia and Frank and Ian planned to load up the trailer for the horse auction in Baraboo, hoping to come home with Ian's birthday present in tow. Frank and Ian had spent an hour looking at photographs of horse breeds in his father's books, and later, on the Internet. Persistently, Ian came back to Arabians, although he didn't like the light-colored ones. Frank didn't subscribe to the myth that Arabians were any spookier than other horses; he liked them for their strength and solid carriage, and he didn't want a forty-pound child mounted on a horse whose shoulder was even with Frank's head.

They arrived early, to be close enough to the bottom of the small amphitheater. The auction had begun promptly at seven, on the third Tuesday of every month, for forty years, run without interruption by Cyrus Young, who claimed to be descended from the great pitcher, a Wisconsin-born Chippewa. Many of the first horses were draft horses, sold by and purchased by what seemed to be identical pairs of Amish men. There were several young paint mares, a nice buckskin quarter horse about ten years old, and a pretty paint and Morgan cross that Frank tried to direct Ian toward, but Ian sat patiently, saying nothing for an hour, then an hour and a half.

“Do you think he's just not into it?” Frank said to Claudia.

“I don't know. Most kids would have wanted every one of them.”

The dark gray Arabian mare was led by a college girl who could have been the same college girl as the one he remembered from a long time ago—same oversized sweater and undersized jeans—the one who walked away when her horse didn't sell. But this one had at least the decency to have cried all the way here. You could see it in her swollen face. Some horses had to be sold; he'd sold his own gelding, Pywackit, but to a neighbor, when he'd gone to college, and he still thought about him. Next to him, he felt Ian sit up straight. The horse's name was Sultana, and she was eight years old, owned by Tracy Hollander of Lansing, Michigan, for the past three years, part of the University of Wisconsin Madison's precision color guard and the University of Wisconsin Madison's equestrian team.

“Now, this is a beautiful horse, a beautiful horse,” Cy said. “And she is gentle as a kitten. Would do anything this little girl here wanted. Now, if she does not find a buyer tonight, she will be donated, by her owner's family, to Bright Gateway. That's how easy she goes. Sound as a nut, been vetted regular. But a horse like this, she should belong to one person . . .”

“Dad!” Ian said urgently.

“Be still now,” Frank told him. He waited. He saw the Kesselberg brothers a few rows up, Galen and Tommy. They would flip her after she threw a foal or two, but by then, she'd be broody, and not as well disposed to the cooperation of horse and rider.

“Let's start the bidding at two hundred,” Cy said. “Which is a crime, really. Okay, Galen. I see three. Up there, three fifty. Welcome. Welcome. Tommy? You're going to bet against your own brother?”

“I'm fixing my hat, Cy.”

“We have three fifty. Who's going to take this pretty girl home? Four hundred? Galen? Thank you very much. Now, oops! Yes, four fifty. Now, this is more like it. Horse like this, in Chicago, would sell for sixteen hundred dollars, two thousand, five thousand dollars.”