Two If by Sea (33 page)

When Claudia came inside after her ride, he summoned her up to his room and spread the page out on the desk.

“Frank,” she said, raking her fingers through her sweaty hair. “That's you. I knew you participated in the rescue. But that little child, it looks like Ian.”

“It is Ian.”

“How was he hurt? You never told me.” Already, there was the slight tang of resentment.
There can be no secrets
.

“No.”

“Why is he soaking wet?”

“I found him in a van that was sinking in the second wave. After my wife died. He and this boy, his brother, I know now, were in the van with a woman. I couldn't get either of them out. The other boy or the woman. The van just went end over end, and it was gone, swept away.”

“I don't understand,” Claudia said. “Why was
Ian
in someone else's van?”

“That's how I got Ian, Claudia. He's not the child of a relative of Natalie's. He's not the child of anyone I ever knew. He's a child I found when I was on rescue patrol, the morning after the tsunami, the morning after Natalie died, last Christmas . . .”

“Then how did you adopt him?”

“I didn't.” Claudia sat down hard on the padded bench, lips parted on a sigh. “I just took him. I got a friend to make up dummy papers. I should have given him to the Red Cross workers the first day, but I didn't.” Claudia spread her hands and seemed to study them. “Claudia, I don't know why I did it.”

“I'm sure Ian knows why,” Claudia said. Then, in a moment, she seemed to grow smaller in the chair. Claudia was strong, as physically strong as any woman he had known—stronger than Natalie had been. When she was tired, or angry or sad, though, she folded into herself, like the morning glories Hope planted in summer around the stone pillars at Tenacity, which closed into tiny pale umbrellas at night. Frank lifted her loosely fisted hand and kissed her knuckles.

“I know you'll leave me now. And if you hesitate, I should make you leave me.”

“You can't
make
me do anything, Frank. I hate you for thinking you can just dismiss me when you decide to drop the big bombshell.”

“No one's dismissing you. Now that Colin is coming—”

“Colin is probably going to be afraid of abandonment because he never knew if anyone would ever find him. He probably thought he'd have to go looking for Ian when he was finally eighteen. And Ian? Ian could make one wrong turn and end up actually going to a bank and asking the teller nicely to give him ten thousand dollars . . . All those bad things could happen. That's the worst that could happen. What about the best?”

“You're the best that could happen, Claudia. You and I together with them, that's what's best. But what if I'm putting you in danger just because I don't want to lose you? I don't want to be melodramatic about it, but you know it's entirely possible that people are after Ian. I know that sounds like a bad movie. It's true, though.”

“You can protect him better alone than both of us can?”

Frank got up and laid his hands against the frame of the big window. “No.”

“And you'd protect them better if you lost me? Is this what this little boy Colin deserves? A father mourning again for someone he loved and who left him? Well, maybe I flatter myself.”

“Claudia, you know I love you.”

“You never said the words.”

“I love you, Claudia. If I had a life I could plan, I'd want that life to be with you.”

“But you only have this life. What are you going to do with this life?”

She stood up and kissed him and he tasted the tears and sweat on her mouth. They lay down on his bed, and shrugged and tugged until all their clothes were rolled around their feet like children's beach towels, and then, though they were in a house where other people were wandering around downstairs, they made love without thought of intrusion or conclusion.

“We forgot to use anything,” Frank said suddenly.

“It doesn't matter,” Claudia said. “The chance that I could get pregnant right now is pretty small. I'm a doctor. I know.”

“But it could happen! What if it did?”

Claudia sat up and rummaged in Frank's bureau for one of his ten identical pairs of navy-blue sweatpants. She took these and a tee shirt into the shower and hummed old John Barry movie themes as she rinsed her hair and scrubbed her body. When she came out, turbaned in a towel, wearing the sweatpants and shirt, she next unfurled her quilt, which made Frank a nervous wreck. He was always thinking he'd roll over in bed and put his foot through one of the soft-as-tissue quilts stitched in Italy by Claudia's great-grandmother Campo. Although Claudia believed heartily in using things that were old, she also grieved every popped thread and was always paying extravagant sums to have the Fancy Dance or Rosewood Border reinforced. Once cocooned in it, she said, “What if I did get pregnant? Big deal. I could take care of a child on my own. After all, you do, with only the help of your mother and me, and Patrick, and the whole village.” Claudia wrinkled her nose to take the sting out of her words. “I could get a job in North Carolina, where my father and my sisters live.”

“North Carolina?”

“People raise children there all the time, when they're not eating possum and having sex with close relatives.”

“I mean, you'd leave here? Away from me?”

“Do you want children, Frank?”

“I have children.”

“I mean, children with me?”

“Claudia, this isn't . . .”

“Well, I don't mean tomorrow. It's nine months until the World Cup, and then the Olympic team is chosen. By then I'll be thirty-four. I mean after. If I do have children, I want to have them then.”

“And I'll be forty-five then.”

“So what? You're forty-two now, so this boy, Colin, was born when you were my age. Ian was born when you were thirty-nine. Natalie was forty and pregnant for the first time. That's not extraordinary on the age charts for postmillennial parenting.”

“Aren't you worried about it being too late? Biologically?”

“Weren't you with Natalie?”

“She was a doctor.”

“As am I. Frank. Why do people think that psychiatrists aren't real doctors?”

“A woman's fertility declines . . .”

“Frank, I just said this twice. I'm a
doctor
. I know what the propaganda is. Yeah, women miscarry more as they get closer to forty and a lot of those are early miscarriages because there's something wrong with the fetus, maybe a birth defect. By then, there'll be a simple blood test for chromosomal abnormalities, probably by the second month. Even without that, when you put it all together, if you had a seventy or a seventy-five percent chance that Glory Bee would take a silver medal, would you think those were good or bad odds?”

Frank shrugged. “I'd say those were good odds.”

“Those are about the odds we would have a healthy kid. And I'm an Italian girl, Frank, and I want to have a baby. End of story. End of our story maybe because—”

“Claudia, let me catch up. Let me take one thing at a time. I'm a widower for nine months here!”

“And?”

“And . . .” Frank didn't honestly know
and what
. How had he mourned Natalie? In an hour at the morgue? On his knees next to his mother's sofa, in the barn, stabbing at forkfuls of hay? That was what work was for. Hard work burned the muscles, tired the brain. Work trumped mourning. But the truth was, Ian trumped mourning. Frank had mourned, and he had healed, through Ian, balm of the lost. Now would come Colin, rescued from the flood, carried safe to this place. Who knew what this kid would be like? But to find out, and to help this boy, already certainly so marked by loss, Frank would need . . . Claudia. Not some woman. Not a helpmate. Claudia, herself.

That was the truth.

He looked at Claudia now, her wet hair spiking out in back as she toweled it, her skin rosy from her shower, and saw that his life without Claudia would be a round of days, of the challenges of fatherhood, brotherhood, manhood, farmerhood, without the flavor these past few months had taught him to take for granted. She was a doctor, a curious and learned woman, tough and game. She was his friend, his playmate, his physical equal, and the fun they had in bed still dumbfounded him. Like no other woman ever would, she understood Ian. Only a man as anointed with good luck as with bad could happen across two such remarkable women in one life of not even vaguely trying, and only a fool with shit for brains would release a woman like this woman.

“Did you ever suspect anything?” Frank asked her.

“No,” she said. “And I know when people are lying. Maybe it's because you're not really lying. You don't believe you did anything wrong.” She got up and began to painstakingly separate the strands of her hair. “Frank, when I was a resident, I had to do marriage counseling. Couples in trouble always say, But . . . we've been through so much together. And I told them, That is the worst reason to hang on! Like digging a hole to fill a hole. I would ask them, what if you substituted the phrase ‘because he refused to work' instead of ‘You've gone through so much together'? Would you think that justified holding on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, now I feel like that. You and I have been through so much in a very short time, really since the day we met. Of course I feel as though I have known you forever. Everyone feels that. And while I don't want you to think I condone this . . .”

“I don't want you to think that I do.”

“Some things are more important . . .”

That's just a legal thing
,
surely
.

Frank said, “Wait, Claudia. Cops use that line of logic all the time, and they call it a higher law, when they want to justify doing something wrong.”

“Do you think Ian is better off with you?”

“Absolutely. I don't think there's anywhere else Ian could be on earth. And if I did the so-called right thing, and took them back . . .”

“You know what would happen. A foster family. And then maybe an adoption, a changed name. They would be unhappy for a long time,” Claudia said. “Missing us.”

“You're right,” Frank said. He stood and let the winter sun gild his arms and hands. The case clock in the hall clucked patiently.

Slowly then, he said, “Claudia, I don't know how it all comes out. We've done everything like an avalanche. We became a family almost before we became a couple. And sure, ‘family' is another word that people use to cover up a multitude of sins. They say, ‘He's family,' like those patients of yours who had been through so much together.” Frank put his hands under Claudia's elbows and pulled her up to face him. “And as for love? We ignore the facts. Like the sun. We know that the sun is just a dying star, Claudia, a ball of gas. We know it for a fact. We know the sun can be dangerous. But we think of the sun as something generous and magical, that lets us have baseball and sweet corn and turns trees after an ice storm into these wizard's wands of pure glass. We feel like it's a privilege just to wake up to the sight of the sun. So maybe that's how it is with love. We ignore what we know. We know everybody feels it. People use the word ‘love' to push people around. Love can make people cruel. Love can make people weak. Love doesn't always stay the same. And sometimes it goes dark, like a star that gets extinguished and just leaves the memory of its light. But how I feel, it's a privilege just to wake up and remember how lucky I am. If you left me right now, the memory of this . . . well, light, I would still be way luckier than I deserve. The facts are, it's too soon, and it's too much of a risk, and it's too complicated, and it could even be dangerous. It's all that. And still, our love makes me alive. Maybe we don't get a long past. Maybe we just get a future. Maybe this isn't the first time in my life I've loved anyone this much. It might be. But I know for sure that it's the last time.” Claudia let one of her hands drift across her eyes, and then looked up at Frank. “So you have to ignore the facts, Claudia. You have to say yes. Will you marry me?”

“How could I say no? That must be the largest number of sentences you've ever said to me.”

“It's the largest number I've ever said, period. So say yes. I want to hear you say yes.”

“Yes, Frank. Yes. I can't wait to marry you.”

•  •  •

They all stood at the Qantas arrivals door, behind the railing, Ian holding the poster that said, in block letters twelve inches high,
COLIN
.

In the end, not only Claudia but Hope had come along to New York. They'd come on the Thursday, with Frank and Claudia spending two days alone at the W, in celebration of their engagement, and Hope wandering happily around the city with Ian, up to the top of the Empire State Building, then to a matinee of
The Lion King
, which Ian loved mightily. The next day, Hope, nearly seventy-four, took Ian on a four-mile forced march through Central Park, stopping for hotdogs and the zoo. Only when he was tired did they go to FAO Schwarz, where they dropped four hundred dollars on toys for Colin, including a game system that Ian knew his brother would love, although, up to this point, the only video game Ian had ever played was something called a MobiGo at Henry, Oliver, and Abe's house. Hope drew Frank's credit card like a gun, despite understanding now that, in the part of her mind that was being steered by a four-year-old, she had no idea of the value of money.

Every few hours, Ian asked Hope, “Is Colin at the airplane yet?”

On the day of the arrival, just before they left for Kennedy, they all moved over to a couple of rooms at the Giraffe, because it was smaller and funny, and Frank wanted Colin to have a chance to put his feet on the ground for a day before they returned to Wisconsin. He needed his own feet on the ground, in honesty.