Two If by Sea (4 page)

Then, from the corner of his consciousness, Frank glimpsed a solid cloud, a muddy cumulonimbus. He hesitated, despite his custom of reacting, even now, in the moment to anything that looked out of place. He couldn't trust his own eyes. But it was real; it was coming, another river of dread, another flood. Frank hurled himself onto his back in the bottom of the boat, the child pressed against his chest. The boat pilot grunted in pain as he struck his neck on the gunwale, the jaws shoved against his chest like a jackhammer in reverse.

The girl rookie shrieked, “Get them! Get them! No! No way!” Frank and the pilot hauled themselves to their knees.

The inland tsunami pushed the van farther back with a metal moan. Frank threw the little boy to the rookies and lunged toward the open side door, fighting to grab for purchase as the car beneath shifted. “Give me a hand,” he said. “I can't hold this!” The older brother and the mom were clinging to the welded feet of the front seat. Frank let go of the door and dove in, pulling the bigger child loose. Then the van swept from its fragile perch. Frank felt his right wrist wrench. He clung to the older brother with his left hand. The boat pilot scrambled across the bottom of the boat. Then the van spun and hit the bigger kid broadside, ripping him from Frank's grasp. Frank shucked his coat, ready to plunge in and chase the truck. But it gamboled away before Frank could haul his arms out of his mac.

The rescue boat pilot said, “No, Frank. It's no use.”

In the time it took him to speak, the van was borne away, hideously fast and slight in the current. They watched it heel over, the wheels spinning in the air. Then there was nothing at all but the turbid brown surface. Onlookers cried from the top of the hill, the street to the hospital, “Look there!”

“You're the navy,” a woman shrilled. “Go get them!”

“She drove off the edge of the high road up there! That woman in the purple van!” an old man shouted. “She drove right off the road like a suicide. People stopped to look!”

The first woman screamed, “Harry! You're blind as well as daft. She was scared, you fat stupid old bastard! Didn't you see that big black limo that was after her? Bumped right into the back of that caravan of hers. She was pushed off the road, she was. There's no doubt about it. That big black car was giving it a flogging. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Do you need help?” the rookie boy called to the old couple.

“Nah,” the woman called. “My daughter's coming in her boat now. For Harry, my husband here, and me. We're fine until then. But thanks.”

Frank struggled to his feet. The girl handed the little boy to him. The child had not stirred, and if he had not felt the faint surge of his breath, Frank might have shaken him to start respirations. Huge-eyed and slight, his head like a daisy on a stalk, the child looked up. Frank parted the canvas lapels of his jacket and tucked the child inside, as he would have done with a puppy, and the child nestled in. By the time they got to the ER entrance, Frank was certain that they had lost him. With the child against his chest, Frank began to cry, the only occasion since the day his father died that he knew for certain that he had cried, although there must have been other times. He opened his coat and surrendered the small body to a nurse.

The boy had fallen asleep. He looked back at Frank and held out his arms. He struggled until the nurse set him on his feet.

Frank reached out with the hand of the wrist that was not swollen and held the boy's fingers as he followed him down the hall.

T
HE DOCTOR WHO
put tape on Frank's wrist had known Natalie since school days.

“One thing you don't want to do is to give up,” said the man, who'd been born in Hong Kong. “Certainly not on Natalie Donovan.”

“I won't. Although it's hard. I saw it happen.”

She must be dead, Frank thought. He glanced down at the little boy. Had the child spoken?

“I treated a man this morning who had been sitting on one of the lampposts outside the theater since it happened. The police went right past him and assumed he was safe, until this morning. And he is safe. He has some infection, but eventually his legs and feet will heal. I don't know what to say,” the doctor told Frank. “Certainly, I would not give up on Natalie Donovan.”

Finally, Frank said, “I'll try not to.”

The child sat at Frank's feet, quietly winding surgical tape around his right shoe. His shoes were small Converse high-tops, a bright orange through the thick brown mud stains.

“He's fine,” the doctor said. “Isn't he? A bit damp and dirty. You were married before Natalie? He's a lovely kid.”

Frank said, “He's not . . .” and then added, suddenly, “He is my nephew. One of Natalie's brother's boys.” Why did he lie? Frank had no idea. In his time, he'd rescued twenty kids from circumstances fully as dire. He liked children, at least better than he liked adults. They seemed comic, as a group, but he never had a particular feeling for one child. And yet now he couldn't take his eyes off the little boy from the flood—despite his own distress, Frank was fascinated by everything the child did. This was undoubtedly a subconscious reaction to having, in a sense, just lost his own son.

His own son. The only child he would ever have. Now the child he would never have. The floor canted.

“Would you like some tea?” the doctor said. “You look shattered.”

“Sure,” said Frank, for the first time fully grasping the Anglo-Celtic avidity for the solace of any hot beverage. Where most doctors would keep samples of enticing drugs, this one had an electric kettle, mugs, sugars, and a wooden box of teas. He handed Frank a steaming mug.

“Natalie was sort of a legend,” the man said. “She made doctoring like space exploration. We would hear of her exploits in emergency. Fearless. She was fearless.”

Frank set down his cup.

Had she been fearless when she woke in dark water, without Frank beside her, clutching her belly, trying to break the surface? Had it been so fast . . . ? Frank picked up and drank the tea in a single gulp, his eyes smarting at the pain. He could feel little flags of flesh unfurl from the roof of his mouth. The doctor said, “You'll want to let it cool . . . well.”

The doctor pulled a packet of gum from a drawer and handed it to the little boy, who accepted it with an amazing and trustful grin.

“You'll look after Uncle, won't you?” the doctor said.

The boy stood and slid the gum packet into the rucksack, which was very small and also pale orange, with a soccer ball decaled on it in silver. Carefully lifting the doctor's outsized silver pen and a prescription pad from his metal desk, the boy drew a line, along which he carefully drew an intersecting arrow facing up and to the right, then one up and to the left, finally holding out the finished product, which was no more than an inch long, as if this explained everything. What did it mean? Was it some sort of writing?

Had that little woman, the mother, been Japanese?

She had not been Japanese.

And this was not Japanese, or anything else.

When the doctor nodded, the child delicately lifted his two small hands and swung them in a small arc in front of his chest, back, forth, back, describing in the air the same angle as the lines he drew. Frank thought, He's trying to behave. Behave? What? Had the child spoken? Frank said, “He's shy. Now, especially.”

Frank led the little boy down the stairs and out the door. They walked a quarter of a mile down the street to a big makeshift auditorium, a square block of canvas tent with the Red Cross flag on a high pole, visible even to the ships at sea. The line was halfway down the street. Frank took out a couple of the Vicodin given him by the doctor and bit down. He had a prescription for more of it, and just where would he find the nearest operating pharmacy? Some wily entrepreneur was selling lemonade and stuffed pita. Frank bought two of each and he and the boy stood in the line, munching on some sort of fried vegetable stuff with yogurt as a sauce. The child had a good appetite. Gradually, the line of the hopeful, dirty, deranged, sleepless, and damned shortened. In a moment, Frank would be able to present the child to the caretakers, where he belonged. Finally, they came to the front of the line, and a sweating volunteer fixed on them—exhausted but desperately good-natured. And Frank looked down at the child and thought crazy shit he hadn't thought since he was writing poems during night school lectures with the goal of toppling girls into his bed. This child was his pulse . . . he was Frank's. No one else could have him. Nothing could change this. Frank took out his mobile, although it hadn't rung. “Of course!” he said loudly. “Yes. Great. Be right there.” He nodded to the volunteer. “Found his dad! All's well. Thanks anyhow.”

•  •  •

Later, after what seemed many hours, but could not have been, for it was still early afternoon, Frank ended up at the entrance to the place he'd lived and worked until he met Natalie. He glanced up at the scrollwork arch that spelled out
Tura Farms
.

He stopped, reluctant to drive into what he supposed had been the only other home he'd ever known, except for his own farm in Wisconsin. He didn't count the series of anonymous apartments he'd barely inhabited around Chicago, places where he'd never so much as made a meal. He'd never settled down, never come close to it, despite how much he loved Chicago and his job. He moved every year. In one of his (very brief, very few) therapy sessions after his accident, the police psychiatrist had basically kept her shoe planted on Frank's chest until he admitted that he kept everything temporary on purpose. He had been waiting. It once seemed possible that he might fall enough in love with a woman that she would install him like an appliance in her own life. In anticipation of that unlikely event (made more unlikely by dating women to whom he felt about as attached as he might have felt to a very good TV show), Frank didn't want to become overly fond of a certain neighborhood.

“Or a china pattern?” the psychiatrist asked him.

“Things like that, sure. Fabric or leather for your sofa. Whatever it might be. I just wanted to stay flexible and keep my options open.”

“I would say you accomplished that,” she told him.

Frank hadn't expected to become attached to the farm's owners, Tura and Cedric Bellingham, although he probably should have advised Tura of that before she began setting a place for him each night at their table—just as she did for their adored nephew, Miles. At those dinners, listening to Tura's discourse on her upcoming exams for her volunteer paramedic certification, her views on cheese as a binge food, and her gratitude toward Helen Mirren for making it safe for middle-aged women to be considered babes (“Middle-aged if you're hoping to live to be a hundred and twenty-five,” Cedric commented quietly), and working beside Cedric, watching the man's vast and unassuming skill with animals, Frank tumbled unawares into the kind of affection he had felt for no one except his own mother and his father, dead since Frank was seventeen.

So he sat. When he pressed the button, the gates would swing open and he would have to find out if anyone in Cedric and Tura's family was lost; he would have to divulge Natalie's death, and everything else about this astounding, harrowing day. He sat thinking of the first day he'd come to Tura Farms, hesitating at this same gate, just seven months after he'd spent thirty days in the hospital, two weeks in a rehab facility, and a solid summer in the rack at the house where he'd grown up.

All those months, his leg was suspended, long enough for ivy to have twined around the pulley, and he took handfuls of pills and watched everything from
Masterpiece Theatre
to Swedish porn, his laptop strapped to an aluminum stand and propped on his stomach. Finally, before starting in on a series of documentaries assembled by his mother, a high school librarian, despair at his state of weakness caught him. His thoughts turned mortal, and snaked out toward the future, which he realized, quite suddenly, was his to have or have not as he chose. If he took too many of these pills, not even his mother would know it was by choice. Pills were a messy choice, though, Frank thought, and he would have to wait until he was able-bodied enough to get to his gun, and by then, given that it was only his leg and not his mind that was maimed, he might no longer want to do anything so dramatic. Still, his life would always be neatly sliced into two eras, one before and after a single blunt moment.

On a rainy, cold spring night, when Frank was two days past twenty and a block from his house, he spotted an older guy struggling to change a tire. Frank would have stopped even if he didn't have time, but he had time. He was planning a leisurely hot shower and a fast nap before a late dinner with a woman he was seeing, and had two hours of grace. The old man's car was in a bad spot, invisible until a motorist pulled out of a long downhill curve. Parking his own car safely in front of the guy's, Frank showed him his badge and they set to work. No more than three minutes later, a seventeen-year-old with a brand-new license cut the curve too fast and crushed Frank's right leg with such an impact that surgeons had to extract a quarter that had been in Frank's pocket from the muscle of his thigh. It shouldn't have meant that he was finished as police, but it had. He was unable even to sit for long enough to hold a desk job, unable to stand for the work of a shift, so he got full disability. He also got all sorts of combat dollars and payouts from insurance policies he'd forgotten that he ever had, and a fat check from the family of the kid who'd been driving the car that hit him. Frank kept returning the check, and the family kept sending it back to him, desperate with gratitude because Frank refused to ruin a good kid's life with some foolish charge of aggravated vehicular assault. Finally, Frank kept the money.

Then, there was nothing to do but heal and face a future washed all to shades of dun.