Two If by Sea (42 page)

“What protects you?” Frank asked, when his boys were gone.

“I used to think about that, being kidnapped by people who wanted to make twenty billion dollar corporate mergers between paranoid corporate leaders. That never happened. No one pays attention to me.”

“Claudia said you helped people. Couples. Others. People who got drunk and hit their wives. Who hit their kids. They stopped doing that.” Julia nodded and Frank went on, “Can you stop them from being drunks? Like with my grandfather, who's dead now. He had dementia. Ian couldn't make my grandfather well, but he made him stop smacking my mother with his cane and throwing his food at the wall. So, what if they go back to drinking—”

“Most of them never stop.”

“What's to keep them from just blabbing in the local bar about what you can do?”

“Nothing. I don't think about it.”

“What, you just have faith? In God or something?”

“Or something.”

Frustrated, Frank got up and shoved his hands into his pockets, sighing as he gazed out the window. “Why don't you get on a plane and go to, well, Brooklyn and ask someone to give you ten thousand dollars, and then fly to Los Angeles and go to a bank and ask someone to give you ten thousand dollars, and then fly to the Emirates and tell someone to be nice and give you a million dollars . . . ?”

“I'm not set up like that. When I was twelve, I did it with mascara, though. My parents weren't unaware of this. They made it clear that there were appropriate and inappropriate uses for all extraordinary things, just as you will do with your boys. Colin could tell other kids the answers to all the tests, if he knew them, right?”

“Yes.”

“Does he?”

“I don't think so.”

“He's not wired to do that.”

“What does the sign mean that says wildflowers?” Frank asked.

“I don't want people tromping up the low side of the hill and wrecking the wildflowers. They aren't really wild. I sowed rue anemone and hepatica and cohosh and dwarf crested iris just how I want. It should say, ‘Beware the owner of the wildflowers.' ”

Julia stood up.

“I would guess you all are thinking now, Why does she sit up there with a kid, waiting for someone who wants to use her badly? The practical reason is, this is my home, and where would I go that anyone couldn't follow? People I help out are grateful. They're resourceful and supportive, and protective. Some of them are in law enforcement. Others pitched in to help build the house. Some are clergy. They don't tell, except maybe others who might need me, too.” She unselfconsciously began to braid her hair, then to loosen it again. “There's also the fact that anyone who came here with . . . well, bad motives would be affected by me, unless they were crazy. Or missing something.”

“What is it that they would be missing?” Frank asked her.

“A human soul, for want of a better term.”

“That is exactly who would come,” Frank said. “I used to be . . . never mind. People don't go out to kill somebody because they think, Hey, there's this lady making the world a little too safe around Durham, unless they're stone thugs. Irredeemable. You have to find a real fine citizen, a piece of meat, to kill a lady and a kid because they're supposed to.”

Claudia was staring at him. She wasn't used to Frank speaking out, especially to strangers. But he couldn't stop himself.

Julia said, “I can't do anything about that . . .”

“Move, or put in a machine-gun turret, or an alarm system. Get a guard dog or a moat. Or something.”

“That person you describe wouldn't be deterred by any of that.”

“Frank,” Claudia said. “You're really worried about them, I know, but what she's saying—”

“Of course I am!”

“We're here to learn from Julia before any of that becomes an issue for us.”

It already was an issue, Frank thought, but he said nothing.

“You know, Frank,” Julia said, in the voice she would use to tell her kindergartners it was time to clean up their paints, “I don't know anyone else like me. So, can I spend some time with Ian?”

She climbed up, and Colin came down, now clearly close to hostility from enforced hanging around.

“My neck hurts,” he said.

“Like a sore throat?” said Claudia.

“No, like . . . something else. I'm just so bored. Can you drive me back to the grandfather's place so I can go fishing and you can stand here and talk all day? I'd rather be back with those girls than be up here.”

“Let's climb up to the roof porch,” Frank suggested.

Colin said, “Fine.”

Frank and Claudia climbed up to the little square porch, where they stood looking out over the ancient furred folds of the mountains. The watery sun and the constant breeze made Claudia sleepy, so they went back down, just as Julia came out onto the landing, beaming.

“What a great kid. What an instrument he has.”

Instrument, thought Frank. Like a cello. Like a scalpel.

“And you, Colin, do you have any questions?” Julia asked. “Other than, when can we leave?” She said to Claudia, “Your teacher, back then, called me an empath. But I'm not an empath. An empath is just someone who feels deeply, sometimes to extremes, and who feels called to nurture and give emotionally. You're probably an empath. Many good therapists are. But Ian is different. Ian is an empath and he also has a tremendous, maybe unprecedented ability to exercise what you would call mind control. I am different in that way, too. He can change things and behaviors. Discord hurts him, physically, and makes him feel sick, like he was telling me about your sister's divorce—”

“My sister isn't divorced.”

“Ian said your sister is divorced.”

“Ian never met my sisters until yesterday. Which sister?”

“He didn't say that, honey,” Julia went on. “If he only just met them, I'm sure he doesn't know. He's four. He wants people to feel better. Of course, he's a kid, so part of the reason he wants people to be happy is so it doesn't bug
him
. Or torment
him
.” Julia turned to Frank. “But he is also very afraid of bad guys. I think maybe you're putting that idea in his head.” Julia Madrigal stood. “I'm sorry to be rude. But now I have to go get Hale. It was so good to meet you all.”

She held out her hand.

Frank shook it, feeling her confidence, wishing he could feel anything like it, knowing that wasn't his portion.

By the time they returned, Albert Campo had fished out the stream. “Look at these trout!” he crowed. “Fresh as if they were still in the stream.”

“I can't eat them,” Ian said. “They look like not dead. Can I just have corn? Just corn. Just corn and bread,” he said.

Claudia said, “Let him have the full-starch option, Dad.”

The rest of the evening passed peacefully, and Frank would later be grateful that the first time he'd spent with Claudia's family, all together, which would also be the last time, was so pleasant for both of them. A year later, Becca's husband, Rad, would be killed by one of his best friends in a hunting accident, and by then, Claudia lived so far away that she couldn't even come home to these mountains to comfort her big sister. As a token, for Frank, that weekend was pure and good, a memory he would keep in his hip pocket like his first wedding, a photograph that never got old. Years later, standing alone on some canted hillside, shivering with sweat as he tried to wedge rocks into a makeshift wall, clouds like dirty sheep crowded overhead, Frank would think of the amber evening light in Dr. Campo's kitchen, and watching Claudia so young and so content with all she did, solicitous of her dad, girl-giggling or gossiping with her sisters, deeply compelled by Julia Madrigal, and so tenderly proud of the sweet dependency of the two young boys so newly in her life.

In a few quiet sentences, late that night, Frank told her what had transpired with Rad Cartwright, making only the slightest allusion to the abuse. Claudia's voice bristled. “I don't know if even Ian or Julia could ever change what a jerk he is, but Rebecca didn't seem to mind that he had to be the big, swaggering jock until . . . he started . . . until . . .”

“Until he slapped her around? That's what made Ian sick the first night. He wanted Becca to be happy.”

Claudia, who seemed to have prepared remarks for every occasion, could only say, “Wow,” followed by “She's getting a divorce? Is that what Ian meant, what he said to Julia? Becca said he hit her once, by accident.”

“She's ashamed,” Frank said. “For every incident of domestic violence reported, the stats say seven more are never reported. I'd bet that's more like ten or twenty.”

“But in my own family.”

Frank considered how rich he would be if he had a nickel for every time he'd heard that particular remark. Claudia might be a psychiatrist, but when the planks were in their own eyes, he guessed, they were probably as vulnerable as any other Joe. Even at four, Ian clearly could not ignore what needed doing. He couldn't go through the world easing every dispute. Frank imagined Ian on a street corner in Chicago, with two business harangues, one hostage situation, four phone spats, a breakdown, and a breakup, all unfurling simultaneously within the range of his hearing.

He said, “I hope he helped Rad and Becca. But Julia's right. Ian has to grow into all this.”

“Julia seems pretty serene.”

“Julia lives on a mountaintop covered with flowers. She's worked at it. She's somehow learned to confine it to when she needs it.” He thought of the last thing Julia had said, as they stood at the foot of her hill before driving off, that as she grew older she knew, instinctively, where she could go, where she could not go. She seemed to suggest that the knowingness went with the gift, and that it grew with the gift, and with the person.

Frank had to remind himself again of Ian the adult. If he really was theirs now, someday he would not be. Between any parent and any child, a series of ruptures happened in a natural way, as a child moved out of the parent's boundaries and tested their new freedoms. And when those ruptures healed, they left their breaches, wider each time, the easier for the child to slip through the next time adventure beckoned. The next misadventure. Although Frank understood all this, simply from having lived, there was no way to take comfort in any of it. Ian was still as light in his arms as one of Julia Madrigal's flat reed baskets, filled with nothing but bright leaves, and this thing that pulled Ian along was big, stronger than Ian, stronger than Frank, too much for this little . . . for his little boy.

When Glory Bee was bothered by flies, her whole body cascaded shuddering muscle. Frank now felt his own flesh in such a waterfall of shivers. In Frank's mind, Ian was perpetually a child. But in a dozen years, he'd be grown. He would go to college and get a job and fall in love. He would want to know about his background, or he wouldn't. As Frank had, he would want to put as much distance as possible between himself and Tenacity Farms . . . or, as Frank had, he would want to come back. Someday, Ian would be . . . what? A divorce lawyer? Nobody would ever get divorced. A judge? (“Please. Be happy . . .”) A diplomat in the highest realms of dominion? Or would he be a mail carrier, a bricklayer, a bus driver, anything to keep anyone from ever noticing the Ian effect?

Someone would, though.

“She's adjusted,” Claudia said. “She hasn't always lived on a hill. She's been around. Ian will do all the things people do, and he'll adjust. He'll learn to do what she does, to confine this to when he needs it. She said she's never met anyone else like her.”

“She said that Ian is more than her.”

“If he is, well . . . he'll still learn. I don't know how to tell him when it's appropriate. I mean, is it ever inappropriate? It sort of came close to crossing that line with my sister and her husband.”

“It turned out okay, though,” said Frank, who remembered Rad's congested face and how close he had come to putting his fist in it.

“When I was a little girl, my parents were really careful to say that no one should ever tell a kid not to tell secrets.”

“That's how you turned out way too mentally healthy,” Frank said, smiling in the darkness.

“But they did tell us that some things were
I-T-H
, and that meant ‘in the house.' Private things that were just for our family. So, do we tell him that this is like that?”

“I guess. At least for now.”

Frank kissed Claudia's outstretched hand, happy again that they had come to these mountains, when he noticed again the unaccustomed ring on her finger. He thought of the lamplight on her father's thick pelt of silver hair, his thick nose and peasant hands, like Claudia's hands, so unlike the hands of the surgeon Albert was. A good old man, happy for his daughter. But even stoking that feeling, he couldn't shake the chill that swept over him: Julia somehow knew that no one was after her. Ian just as clearly knew that someone was.

W
HEN THEY GOT BACK,
the farm, to Frank's consternation, was not even remotely a shambles. If anything, Patrick had done it up so well Frank felt like he'd walked onto a movie set. In honor of the coming season, he'd strung the entire small pasture and the peak of the barn with white lights, and Hope said he'd gone scouting for Christmas trees just the day before. A new bin with a snug hinged and handled lid ran along one wall, and the untidy lower stack of hay bales was surrounded by a slender slatted cage. The horses looked to have been polished. Glory Bee's coat shined like a crow's wing.

The next day, Claudia at work, the boys full of yawns but back in school, Frank called Brian Donovan again. The reverse of a man asking for the daughter's hand, Frank felt it must only be meet and right that he should tell his late wife's brother that he would be married again. A sign of respect. A sign that Frank still considered Brian his kin. It was about four in the afternoon in Brisbane, and the phone rang for so long Frank thought he'd have to leave a message. At last, though, Brian answered, sounding as though he'd been asleep. Frank's worry about Brian spiked anew. “I don't work today,” Brian explained. “I was up late reading, and I fell asleep.”