Two If by Sea (47 page)

Frank got up and followed Claudia, who was pacing in the dooryard.

“I'm a knob,” he said.

“There you go, being easy on yourself again.”

“I'm an asshole.”

“It's not just that you don't take my feelings or even my life into consideration. That's bad enough. Why is here any worse than anywhere else? It's probably better. Remember what Julia Madrigal's priest said about a community that would always protect her?”

“Julia doesn't have a past with a network of thugs. A thug didn't come after Julia Madrigal and try to burn down her little house on the wildflower hill. No one was murdered there.”

“I can't take it all in now. We'll talk about it later. You just presented this as if you were saying, Okay, troops, let's mount up and ride!”

That evening, Claudia's bedtime drill was particularly military. “Teeth. Ears. Story. Yes, prayers, Ian. In you go. I'm telling a story tonight. No. Don't complain. It's a good one. It's about a tree that was really a ghost . . .”

Frank stayed below, still sitting at the table, as though he'd been drilled and filled with lead. Around him swirled ordinary people who'd had satisfying and dependable lives until everything they counted on as real was shaken up and dumped out like a jar of marbles—by his choices.

Frank had been given the chance to bring Ian into the huge community center gym and give him over to the genial Red Cross volunteer. Even if he hadn't known what was to come, or where Ian had been before, could he have given him up? Back then?

He could not have.

If Frank had learned nothing else about the essence of parenthood—in the six months that amounted to six minutes of his life—it was that parenthood was not composed of bikes with playing cards in the spokes and tooth fairy pillows, tenpin bowling and extra ketchup, plaster handprint plaques and Nerf footballs, soccer shoes and bike helmets, bedtime books and clapping games. All these bright things guarded its primitive essence. After a certain span of years, a man who has no family of his own becomes if not dangerous, then impervious. The covenants that bound Frank's life now might easily have missed him by a narrow margin. He could have been another man. Except for them.

His life was Ian's now. His death was Ian's. And now Colin's as well. And so was Claudia's.

•  •  •

Frank woke, with an electrical spark of terror along his arms, first uncertain where he was or who was behind him. He jumped up, then slowly reassured himself that he'd only fallen asleep at the kitchen table. Quickly, he glanced at the clock. It was nine, and he'd forgotten all about the horses. He shrugged into his barn coat and boots, but everything was quiet in the stalls. Patrick had seen to all of them. Inside again, Frank went into the boys' room, tucked the comforter around Colin's shoulders, then went back to his own room, sitting down on the padded bench in his room, watching Claudia sleep, trying to anticipate the consequences of dismembering a family, a place, a life, simultaneously admitting that he had no way of dealing with the consequences if he could anticipate them. Earlier, he'd finally decided that the best reason he felt so called to leave was that, if anyone did follow them, it would at least assure that his sister and her family were safe.

But that had not worked with Tura and Cedric.

He had barely fallen asleep when the sound of Claudia stirring awakened him. She pressed her body close to him, hungrily, and exhausted as he was from working his brain like a circular saw, Frank reached eagerly for her, fumbling with the buttons on her nightshirt to free her breasts, handling and suckling them, until he tasted the salty wetness on her neck.

“What's the matter? Claudia. Sweetheart?”

“I don't know if I can do this, Frank,” she said softly.

“We don't have to,” he said.

“I don't mean sex. I mean, I don't know if I can leave.” Frank knew that he should say the right words. He also knew that if there were such words, he didn't know them. “It's not because I don't love you and the boys. You're the reason I'd give up competing. It's not because of my job. I don't mind practicing privately. I'm not in love with teaching.”

“Then why?”

“What if there's never a place to stop?” Claudia wrapped her legs around Frank's and fitted her hips to his. “What if that story on Christmas morning had a different ending?” She pushed away but Frank wouldn't let her go, wanting to pull her clothes off roughly, his selfish body aching and swelling for her. “Frank, no, wait. Why does it have to be only one way—go, and go now? You don't give a good goddamn that I was invited to give a lecture series that is very prestigious, and very lucrative, that people twice my age would kill to do . . .”

“Claudia, I don't even know about this. You didn't tell me.”

“Would it matter if I had?”

“Ian's not more important than you . . .”

Claudia said, “Yes, he is. I believe that, too.”

Frank sat up and settled himself against the headboard, wrapping his arms around his knees. Why did it have to be go, and go now? Why did it all seem so urgent? He was not an impulsive man. Until Christmas morning, he had been content to wait and to watch. Then he saw Linnet, her face heartbroken at the end, surprised, and the dark stain under her small body spreading on the snow, the stain Frank would always see, even if it were to be washed away by a dozen seasons of rain and sun and wind and snow. But if it were to be him alone, he could live around it. But for Ian, who imbibed every emotion and assimilated it into himself?

“I don't think that Ian can forget and just be a kid here. He made a girl put down her gun to save me. And she shot herself in front of him, Claudia.”

She closed her eyes and rocked, gently back and forth. Finally, she said, “Yes. He can forget. He's outlived other memories, Frank. There will always be the memory of the tsunami for him.”

“That wasn't his home.”

Claudia sat still for a long time. Then she reached up and placed her hands firmly on either side of Frank's face. “But, Frank? Do you feel that somehow nothing will ever happen again? That he'll never see anything again that's horrible, wherever we go?”

“He . . . he'll get older. And when he's older . . .”

“It won't get easier, Frank. You don't think that, do you?”

Frank said, “I hope it. But no, I don't think that.”

Claudia turned to him tenderly. “At least you're not fooling yourself about that.”

T
HEY WERE MARRIED
on New Year's Eve.

Marty and Patrick were Frank's witnesses; and Claudia's were Hope, Eden, and Claudia's sister Miranda, who, as Frank's wedding surprise, met them on the steps of the courthouse, with their dad. The ceremony lasted exactly six minutes. Even Frank found it cursory. But his bride's beauty and demeanor compensated. In a cream-colored 1940s suit she'd found in some antiques store, carrying calla lilies and white roses, Claudia looked like Grace Kelly. When Claudia made the ancient promises, she surprised Frank when her eyes filled. She had glanced around proudly at the small group and put out her hand to Ian and Colin, pulling their hands between hers and Frank's as Frank placed the ring on her finger.

“Pronounce us, please,” Claudia asked prettily. “Husband and wife, and parents and children.”

Not many women would have taken him on, Frank thought, and almost none would have taken all three of them. When people spoke of emotional baggage, they rarely meant a virtual mud wagon of wet rocks and manure. But so she had. With the help of a social worker Claudia knew well, the paperwork for a stepparent adoption was already under way, and the home study and interviews with Colin would begin as soon as January.

As Claudia arched her back to toss her flowers, Frank spoke to Natalie, his own eyes stinging. Wish me well, my sweetheart, my generous girl.

Protect us.

After the wedding and a lunch at Old Anthony's, an Italian place they both loved, they all went back to Tenacity Farms. It was a mild day for the last day of the year, and Claudia changed out of her wedding dress, surely the only bride who celebrated her wedding day by putting her horse through a small exhibition. Her father, the other Dr. Campo, said to Frank, “She's something, isn't she? I didn't know how she'd recover from Pro.”

“Claudia's gifted, and she trusts me, and Glory Bee trusts her. I would have never imagined either one of those things happening.”

“Can she go all the way?”

Frank couldn't imagine tamping down the old man's pride by revealing Claudia's decision. Since there was a hope, slim but real, of another time, Frank played along. “Nothing's certain, but she's already come further than most. I feel good about it.”

“You've made her happy,” Miranda said.

“I don't quite know how all this happened,” Frank said, laughing. “But I'll take it. I'm the one who's lucky. Claudia's too good to be true.”

“Wait until you get a taste of her temper,” said her dad.

“I have and I'm sticking to it. She's too good to be true.”

The following week, Frank began the process of dissolving Tenacity. Tearfully, Eden decided to give Saratoga to her best friend from childhood. Frank obtained passage for Glory Bee, Sultana, and Bobbie Champion. Finally, on a bitter January day, he chose to walk past the lower corrals, around the indoor ring, and up Penny Hill to hand over the lease on Tenacity to the Batchelders. They could exercise the option to buy after two years unless Frank and his family returned.

When he came back, he was freezing, and quickly slipped through the outer and inner doors to take refuge by the fire in one of the leather chairs that wasn't new—an old high-backed oxblood-colored thing that had belonged to his father. How many times had he sat in this very chair, removing his gloves and liners, holding his fingers out to the fire, trying to pick out the bouquets of spices—turmeric or cumin or oregano—that described the dinner to come. He sat back and looked up at the rubbed hardwoods of the wide stairs, the marks on the wall beside the downstairs bath that signaled the incremental growth of Eden Constable Mercy, the great half-moon window at the end of the living room that showed the rise to Penny Hill and, each night, showcased the sunset. How many other Mercys before him had done the same thing?

As they began to pack, and to separate out what they would sell before the move, Hope grew pensive and, on occasion, weepy. She looked at things she certainly would not need—an ancient set of embroidered towels, a nest of cast-iron cake-baking mugs, outdated art unearthed from closets, a thousand hardcover books—and treasured them unreasonably. For the first time Frank could remember, she seemed querulous. One day, as she and Eden prepared tags for the auction to come, she said, “It's not these things. It's what I see as I sort them. I fed my babies in this kitchen. It may be fixed up, but it's still my kitchen. I still see the same trees and fields and hills from my windows. I roasted a hundred turkeys, and sat up late at this table doing the bills after Francis died, waiting for Eden to come home from a date, doing the dishes while a thunderstorm rolled up over those hills. I'm leaving the thousands of mornings I started my day in this room, taking my coffee and my newspaper to that big red leather chair. I leave the sound of Frank calling my name when he came home from overseas with the medal, and the doorway he carried me through when I was a twenty-year-old bride. The phone call telling me that you and Natalie were going to be married, and that my husband was dead. All the sun and shadows of a life.”

Together, for a moment, they listened to Ian, who was murmuring to the fish, something he did often, calling them by name, and lately, encouraging them not to forget him. All of the grownups had explained to Ian that their new house might one day have a place for an aquarium, maybe even an aquarium as big as this one, but they couldn't take these very fish or this very aquarium. Frank warned Ian that if they started feeling pretty sure they wanted to do it even when they knew they couldn't, they would know it was Ian working on their brains and Ian would get a consequence for that: it was hard enough for all of them to move and Ian didn't need to make it harder.

Knowing he sounded like a child, Frank said, “You'll make new memories, Mom.”

“No, I won't. But I'll try to keep these dear. I always imagined that I would be the grandmother in this house and this would be where my grandchildren would come for summer weeks.”

Frank said, “I'm sorry.” He added, “You could get married again. Plenty of people in their seventies get married.”

“Plenty of people in their seventies die, Frank, and a few people in their seventies get married. I've had about five dates since your father died, period.”

Frank had no idea there had been so many.

“But if you went now, and Eden and Marty went, given everything that's happened, it wouldn't be the same. It's as if I'm not leaving home, Frank, it's leaving me.”

I
N THE VILLAGE
of Stead, Jane Eyre might easily have just disappeared around the corner, her arm crooked through the hoop of a shopping basket. In the truck still lettered
Tenacity
, Frank and the boys arrived on a dove-colored afternoon, driving over an arched stone bridge into a half-cobbled village thoroughfare that couldn't decide if it wanted to be in the nineteenth or twentieth century—there being no question of the twenty-first. As they paused, a green April mist that seemed equal parts liquid and vegetal shimmered in the air, and then, for a minute, rain fell in earnest.

“The people live out in the street,” Ian said.

It seemed that way. Houses and stores bumped up against the thoroughfare, with no front yard or parkway except a scrap of tufty grass tucked behind ancient dry stone walls—their slabs stacked like shrunken books. At the back of buildings that clustered together like a toy village, there were small yards, with play structures, tumbles of wild roses and balls of shrub, that rose up to the curved and clefted hills, where old packhorse tracks and winding lanes slipped through a verdant quilt of new green, a burnished brown, and a child's Easter purple. Frank couldn't deny the view's extravagance, but he worried about the austerity of the splendor. Small beings in small places clung to the side of an indifferent landscape. This was not, he thought, a settling place for those who lacked the kind of work that occupied their hands and hearts.