Two If by Sea (35 page)

Claudia lowered the boom. Honoring traditions of boyhood hardened in the fire of time, Colin sulked and objected that it was only a word. “And it just means being a dummy.”

“ ‘Drongo' was not the word I meant.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Kids don't use it,” said Claudia. “Even if they know it. And nice adults don't even use it much.”

“Patrick does.”

Glaring at Frank, Claudia said, “He shouldn't, and he's not a kid.”

“They'll say I'm a sissy.”

“Did boys at the convent say that?”

“When I wouldn't fight, yeah.”

“You're not a sissy. Aren't you the fastest runner in your class?”

“Yes.”

“And aren't you better at football, well, at soccer, than anybody?”

“Yes.”

“Colin, I don't have boys of my own . . .” Claudia said, and Frank heard Colin's silent sigh and wondered if she could have put it a little less bluntly. “But I know this much. Only a fool gets in a fight for nothing. Why would you want to mess up that face? You have a face like a movie star. Tell them to shut their mouths and tell them—”

“They look like drongos,” Frank put in.

“Gee, thanks, Frank. Just don't make your mouth dirty. Colin, do you want Ian to say ‘fuck'?”

“Ian's a baby.”

“And are you so grown-up? Are you even ten yet, Colin?”

Colin blushed. Claudia knew perfectly well that Colin was going on nine. “You can have a birthday party in a couple of months, and you can invite nine guys from your soccer team and school, and we can have a hayride, and put Saratoga and Bobbie on the hay wagon, and you can have a fire outside for hotdogs and cake. And . . . Dad Frank even has fireworks he thinks I don't know about . . .”

“You always have fireworks on New Year's in Brisbane, and in Australia, too!” Colin said.

“But if you swear again, I'll call every one of those boys and tell every single one of them that you can't have a party or presents until . . . until you're eleven. Is that fair?”

“Yes,” Colin said, not like a child, but with the air of someone who was used to doing what he agreed to do, however grim.

“Good.” Claudia lifted her chin at Frank and almost preened.

Then Colin said, “It's kind of not fair.”

“What?”

“I never said ‘fuck' in Brisbane and I never got to have a birthday party anyhow.”

Against her will, Claudia laughed. On the superhighway of instant almost-motherhood, she had blown a tire.

Then, one day, she asked Colin to go for a run with her. She'd checked with her doctor, and had gotten clearance. Since her riding accident, so long ago, she'd favored stretching, yoga, dance, low-impact pursuits. She was, however, starting to notice that her pure aerobic fitness was not what she wanted it to be. ”I'm going to be slow as a snail,” she warned Colin.

“It's okay,” he said, proud to be doing something that didn't involve a little kid, like Ian. “If I have to go ahead of you, I'll loop back, okay?”

She later told Frank that they set off across the fields, and when they got to the top of Penny Hill, Claudia said, “I'm going to have a heart attack. Let me sit down for a minute. Oh, hell, am I out of shape.”

Colin said, “The van was all filled with mud and Cora was dead.”

“It's too warm for November,” Claudia answered carefully, because it was best to stay low and oblique. “The air smells like metal. That means it might snow tonight. At least that's what my dad used to say.”

“Where's your dad?”

“Down in the South. In North Carolina. But he grew up in New York. It snows there all the time.”

“She was brave,” Colin said.

“Cora?”

“Yes, she was pretty brave. She was hurting my head to hold my face up where there was air. Then the water covered her up.”

Claudia told Frank that her heart began to slap against her ribs at this matter-of-fact recitation of witness to a heroic death.

“Did you know Cora very long?”

“She was my mum's nanny. Not granny . . . nanny. When my mom was little.”

“When she was little in Australia?”

Colin laughed. “My mum wasn't little in Australia! She was little in Leeds!”

“That's in England,” Claudia said.

“Too right. Except I don't know where it is. They have football there. My dad listened to it on the radio.”

It didn't seem that Colin would want to back off the subject of soccer and his own certainty that he was destined for the big-kid team because of his prowess, although Claudia assured him that he would probably be placed by age rather than greatness.

“I want to be a professional football player,” he said.

“You don't mean American football?”

“No. That's for fat wankers. Real football. Soccer.” He stood up. “I'm still sad Cora died.”

“Are you sure she died?”

“I saw her.”

Claudia and Colin began to run, slowly. Colin said that he woke with his nose filled with mud, his face pressed against the roof of the truck by Cora's dead hands. With his own small hands, he showed Claudia the size of the space, maybe three inches. He had to put his face in the muddy water to push his way out through a window that was stuck halfway down, but it was okay because, one day in the amethyst sea near the Tree Castle—Etry Castle, Claudia thought—Cora had taught both him and Ian to hold their breath and bubble, and then to swim.

Colin swam for a few feet. He floated but the water stank around him, so he swam for a few more feet, until he could grab a piece of a metal roof. Then he climbed over that and swam a little more. At last, there was ground under his feet.

He crawled up toward a road, slipping and falling back into the water so many times he said he would have let go if he didn't make it the last time. When he did make it, he blew the mud out of his nose and wiped it on some leaves. Then he put his backpack under him and slept in the shade of a big rhododendron, and when he woke up, he tried to go back to sleep because he was so thirsty he was afraid he would die of thirst and he didn't want to die while he was awake. Even at eight years old, he knew he could not drink the floodwater. The next time he woke up, he thought he was dead then because he heard buzzing, like a million angry bees. It was a motorbike. A boy and a girl on a motorbike found this little kid covered entirely in mud. They said to the lady they took him to that they couldn't even tell what race he was. The girl held him on her lap, and they took him to a church. The minister was there, and he had a wife. The wife brought Colin to a hospital, where he was treated for what sounded to Claudia like dehydration, a fracture of his neck (Claudia assumed that this was his collarbone), and cuts and bruises.

The minister's wife sat beside him for two days.

Her name was Helen, and once, she was reading the newspaper, a special newspaper about the tsunami; Colin saw the big picture and recognized the fireman and his brother. When Helen was done, Colin didn't know if he should tell her that the boy in the picture was Ian.

“Were you afraid someone would find Ian?” Claudia asked.

“Yes.”

“Didn't you want your mother and father?”

“Already dead,” Colin said. Claudia wished she had a thumb drive for her own memory so that she could recall all this exactly. She told Frank later she had the feeling it would not be something that Colin would recite again—at least in so much detail.

“So, I told Frank, our mummy said it drove her mad, because she could hear when people were thinking. Not like me. Other people can hear me thinking, but only if I want to. My dad said, Mary, Mary, please no more drugs but she said shut up, go see the man with the lightning tattoo on his head, and the Hula man. Go now. She said, go now. But she was a good mummy except for those times.”

“Hula man?”

“He was from Hawaii. He told Cora he could do the hula like a hula bug.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know. But I talked to him when I was in the convent.”

“He came there?”

“No,” Colin said. “I talked to him like I do. I pretended I was crying. I told him that Ian was drowned and he was dead.”

“So they wouldn't look for Ian.”

“Too right.”

Claudia said she wanted to hug him then, but knew that he could be as amiable as an oyster, so she said they had better go home, it was getting cold. The sun was setting, early, the way it did that time of year, and the temperature dropping fast. Claudia was soaked through and clammy with the chill, although Colin didn't seem bothered. She figured they had two miles to run back—she hadn't meant to come so far. “I thought I should call you to pick us up, but I didn't want to stop him talking,” she told Frank later. “I also didn't want him to keep talking.”

And Colin kept on talking, fearful as Claudia was that he'd blow himself out and clam up for good. As they tromped along, he told Claudia, “When I saw that newspaper, I knew it was Ian but he looked like dead.”

Colin put the page under the mattress, and then, later, when he was alone, slid it inside the rubber envelope that Cora had given him a long time ago—the one that she stole from the people. In the rubber envelope was another paper envelope, and in that were all “our papers,” Colin explained. He had never learned to read. His parents hadn't taught them to read. From what Colin described, they sounded like a pair of harmless hippie travelers who should never have had children. Colin described staying on “farms not like this farm,” where his father fed animals and did raking and his mother slept and cried and ate pills.

They always left in the night.

Ian got them cars. Their father would take them to car-selling places and Ian would ask the car people to be nice and do that hand thing, or not even have to ask them, and they would give him a car. His father broke the cars a couple of times. They would go to another farm. Once, by a place where there were big boats with tons of people, they met the Hula man and a red-haired girl who said “fuck” all the time.

“Do you talk to her?”

“I don't,” Colin said. “Never.”

They were home by then.

“Are you starving?” Claudia said. “I'm starving.” She added, “I want to hear more but I'm too starving. Aren't you?”

Colin went inside and yelled back, “It's Glory Bee beef stew! They've cut up the horse.” That made Ian cry.

Late into the night, Frank lay awake, scoring his leg with the heel of his hand, imagining the poor addled druggie mother, who must have been so very young. The next night, Claudia and Frank took refuge at her apartment, the only place they now felt even remotely comfortable making love or talking about anything that involved the boys and their past.

“I never thought I was taking Ian from anybody,” Frank told Claudia. “I would never have done that.”

“How could you have known?” Claudia said.

“I should have known because Colin would have talked to me with his mind like he did when he was at the convent.”

“Was your name on that photo in the newspaper?”

Frank thought. “No. But the man at the airport recognized me. And I'm not distinctive-looking.” Claudia didn't disagree, and Frank was stung. Pulling out her computer, Claudia propped it on her naked belly and pulled up the
Brisbane Standard
's special issue of images from the tsunami. “There's no name. It says an American firefighter,” she told him, pointing out the picture. “How did they even know that?”

“Someone could have told them. People on my crew. Or even me. I don't remember. I don't remember whole parts of those days, or whole days, for that matter. All I really remember is calling the guy who was the head of the navy rescue, this was weeks before I left for the United States, and saying I was getting out of Brisbane the next day.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I didn't want them to call me up again. I wanted to be thought of as gone.”

T
HERE WOULD BE
no formal engagement, Claudia said, waxing traditional, until Frank met her father and her sisters. Although he grumbled that they were grownups and he hardly had to ask for her hand, she pointed out righteously that she practically lived with his family. She did not, in fact, want Hope and the others to know that their wedding was impending until after her family was informed.

“We could go for Thanksgiving,” Claudia said.

“I can't just up and leave the farm for days and days,” Frank said.

“You up and left the farm for years and years,” Claudia reminded him. “Patrick will look after it. We'll bring the boys and make a long weekend of it.”

“Fine,” Frank said, admitting to himself that he was a little rueful about showing up—the gimpy farmer and ex-cop and his two little blond jackaroos with their nasal drawls—to marry the doctor's daughter.

“My dad will like you,” Claudia insisted.

“Even if you knew he'd hate me on sight, you'd have to say that, wouldn't you?”

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, Frank noticed a flyer in the Firefly Coffee Shop. It was for youth hockey, classes and leagues forming this week. Standing there in the store, he phoned to see if there were still places left for kids Colin and Ian's age, and there were, although only a couple. Hockey, Frank thought. It was difficult. It was aggressive. It was the kind of sport played by men with hair on their teeth. It would be perfect for Colin. Ian, neither aggressive nor particularly coordinated, could just learn to skate.

That Thursday night, Frank loaded up the approximate metric ton of pads and skates and sticks and helmets (could he return all this stuff if they hated hockey or were hopeless at it?) and found room in the truck for Ian's car seat and the booster the law required Colin to sit in until he hit eighty pounds. With Ian chattering away and Colin in aggrieved silence, they drove to Spring Green Ice Sports, a modest building faced in white brick, the rest of it a tin pole barn.