Two If by Sea (6 page)

“You'll want a cup,” said Tura. “What's happened to your wrist?”

“Nothing,” Frank said, unwinding the bandage. “A bruise.” The wrist was fat and blue. “Maybe some ice for this.” The boy had begun to eat the wafers and cheese, taking small bites. Frank sat down and waited for his tea, in the strangely quiet kitchen inside a reconstructed universe.

F
RANK WOKE WITH
a shriek, embarrassed. He had been asleep in the boat when the new man driving it nudged him. The fellow told him to head off to wherever he would sleep the rest of the night. The bright dial on the man's watch indicated that it was four in the morning.

Frank said, “I'm good still.”

“I know. You're fine. But you need to be back later tomorrow. There are people trapped we haven't seen yet.” The man must have been up all night: his skin had that telltale patina of Queensland sweat and dust dried and reapplied. Yet he seemed as alert and relaxed as if they were fishing. The rookie girl had been replaced, although the boy still hung in. The boat made widening circles, heading in the direction of pale faces that swam into the light or shouts at first faint and then urgent. They had spotted more bodies. The pilot steered the boat over to a man so young and robust-looking that he must have been knocked unconscious to have drowned. Leaning out, Frank stuck a numbered pinny on his chest, as they did with two old women and two teenage girls, whose chic shoulder bags still festooned their tanned shoulders. Those bags would have had ID in them, Frank thought, and cursed himself for a fuckwit for not trying to anchor those children before they sank—for if their parents were alive . . . They brought the living, a bedraggled man sobbing for his wife but clinging to his son who clung to their collie dog, as well as an American woman with her sister and the sister's boyfriend. They left behind two grannies, who refused to leave their cats. Frank remembered that people in New Orleans had died after the hurricane because they would not leave behind their pets.

“There's too much to do,” Frank muttered.

“The chief said you lost your wife. You need a rest and a meal at least. She said to call you off.”

Dropped at the makeshift levee near a huge car park that remained above water, Frank got back into his car. He reclined the seat and somehow, his leg awkwardly outstretched in a futile attempt at elevating it, he must have fallen asleep again. When he opened his eyes, it was to a watery sunlight. He turned the key. At the same moment, his phone lighted. Along with another list of phone calls from his mother, the unidentified caller had tried again. Impatient, his leg run through with a soldering iron from sitting cramped in the rescue motorboat and then this tiny car, Frank punched the return dial.

“Frank?” said Brian Donovan. Frank couldn't speak. The voice was indeed his brother-in-law's. Frank had heard it last on Christmas Eve, but dozens of times before he even knew Brian, when Brian read the news on MAT21, the Brisbane iteration of the national public channel. Ten times or more throughout his and Natalie's brief courtship and the year of their marriage, they'd done some small thing with Brian and his wife, although Brian was older, in his fifties, mad for football, everything Frank was not—but still a good and comical man. “Frank Mercy?” It was just past nine on Boxing Day, the day in Australia when people visited relatives they didn't like as much. Frank liked Brian very much.

Now Frank found his voice and said, “Brian! You're alive.”

“Just. I was still down in the bar and we were swept out, the bartender and me, up onto the roof of some broadcast tower. We hung there for hours.”

“Where are you now?”

“My leg is broken and my shoulder. I'm in hospital.”

“Natalie, Brian,” Frank said. “I know what I saw, but you might . . .”

There was a reason Frank Mercy had lived, and saved the boy. It was fair dinkum for Natalie's life.

“No, Frank. The only hope is for my Adair, but her . . . her things were found. Her shoes. And her backpack. And my brother Hugh and his wife, Mairead, have not been found.”

“All the rest?”

“That's right.”

“Brian.”

“They have me doped up. Can you even understand me? I feel like I'm speaking from inside a balloon . . .”

“I understand you just fine,” said Frank.

“All the rest. They were found. My wife and Kelly. And Da. My brothers. I'm on the fourth floor and they've taken me down to identify the bodies. You'll want to see our Natalie. Frank, Jesus God.”

Frank said, “Yes.”

Silently, opening the door to shield him so no one could see, Frank threw up there on the dirty blacktop. Let me cry, he thought, the grief a dry wedge thrust thick end up from his chest. He threw up once more, all the day's food, a disgusting greasy pile, and still he retched, like an old drunk. Tears were at least pure. Tears, he heard from his sister, dissolved the wedge; they had hormones of grief in them that were released by the crying. Brian had actually seen her, seen Natalie. It seemed indecent, that he had seen Frank's own dead wife.

But she had been Brian's sister long before.

Frank wanted the ring he had put on Natalie's hand. It had been his mother's. He wanted to keep that ring close for however long there would be for him. He wanted a lock of Natalie's dark hair.

He wanted his wife and his life.

Brian had been talking the whole time that Frank was cupping the mic of the phone to muffle the sound of his heaving. What a giant of a man Frank had turned out to be, he thought. His self-pity was so huge he could not console a man who had just lost his whole family. “It's the girls, Frank. My wife . . . was a woman, and she'd had a life. But they never had a life. They never rode a motorbike or drove a car. They never slept a night away from home except at girlfriends', or flew in a plane. They'll never know what it is to be in love. They never saw a world outside Brisbane. At least they didn't know what happened. Losing a child, you can't endure it.”

Frank said, “Of course,” and thought, It must be. “I'm so very sorry, Brian.” It occurred to him then. “How did you think to call me?”

“They brought me a newspaper. Your photo was on the front, standing in a boat, holding a little child's body. Didn't you know that? Did the child live? If I hadn't known you, I wouldn't have been sure, your face was half hidden by the fold of that yellow anorak. But it was obvious to me that it was you.”

Frank said, “That child did live. We didn't save his mother or his brother.”

“Our Natalie would be proud, then. Proud you didn't give up. That's what she would have done, gone out to try to help.” Brian asked then, “What will you be wanting for a funeral?”

“I don't know if Natalie would want that,” Frank said.

“She would. She would want to be mourned extravagantly. But I thought, perhaps, all with a single stone. They will all be together.”

“That is fine, Brian. Whatever you want. Whatever it will cost. Rest now. I'll be along soon. Tomorrow, if that's okay.”

Oh Christ, the Irish, Frank thought. Brian was correct, however inconveniently, about what Natalie would think of him. Natalie would have sneered and cursed him for a sissy for even once thinking of driving his own car off the road and so disgracing her. She would have scorned him if he hadn't gone straight back to business. And if he had been the one who had died, Natalie would have grieved him and outlived him because she loved life as a philosophical choice.

Frank drove to the hospital.

He knew that Brian Donovan was there, in his bed and banged up, but that visit could wait. He took the elevator to the morgue and did the thing he had done with hundreds of people—who had sometimes fallen to their knees and screamed and sometimes clutched Frank's arm, but most often looked up at him as though to ask how it could be that they were on the other side of a glass picture window looking at the composed faces of their wives, or husbands or children or brothers. The bright, antiseptic smell meant to mask malodorous death stung his eyes.

Frank looked at Natalie, her broad shoulders covered by a blanket and the light straps of her summer nightgown. Her tussocky short reddish hair had dried and wound its way into the curls she hated and fought to restrain. Her face was only pale, without a mark, her lips still a ruddy brick, her eyes slightly less than closed, as though she might at any moment open them. Frank asked the morgue attendant, “May I go to my wife?”

“No,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“Natalie wasn't sick. She drowned,” Frank said, reflexively showing his volunteer first responder's ID.

“It's not a forensic matter, sir,” said the young woman. “It's a matter of possible contagion.”

“May I have my wife's wedding band?”

“No,” said the woman. “I'm sorry.” Then she glanced around her and said, “Yes. Of course you can. I'm sorry for being such a bitch.” Pulling on gloves and a paper mask, she pressed the button to open the automatic door with her hip. Frank watched as she lifted Natalie's hand, and it was then he caught a glimpse of the livor mortis, the purplish flesh of her arms and back. Humans usually drowned facedown, their legs and arms dangling, their extremities displaying this grotesquerie of gravity, then, as time passed, the swelling came that made them floaters. Natalie had clearly lain on her back, alone, on some surface, for a time after her death. Frank closed his eyes and squeezed his temples as if he could press out the indelible film of Christmas Eve, as though that could be accomplished short of his own senility or death. His mouth was filthy. His emptied stomach writhed for more food. How could his body still want?

He thought of Natalie naked beside him on the floor of their living room. She'd told him to pretend that they owned a fireplace, but had pushed open the screen door to invite the sound of the river, because she loved sex outside—on a beach without even a blanket over or under them, on the hood of her car. She called it “home porn.”

“What brings this up?” Frank said. “I married a doctor. I want a linen suit. I want an Odyssey dive watch.” This was an ongoing joke. In reality, they had so little clothing that their closet looked like the “after” picture in a magazine story about organization. Between them, unlike any other man and woman on earth, Natalie and Frank could easily share a closet that was six feet wide and eighteen inches deep. Frank called it a look-in instead of a walk-in. Of the women in his life, including the few he had spent enough time with to see what they wore when they weren't wearing it, he had never known one who had only five pairs of shoes. Frank had five pairs of shoes. Natalie had seven. She joked that they should send to Paris for cheese because they had nothing to spend their money on.

One night, just after she told him about the baby, chiding him for not guessing, for thinking she was simply getting fat, she said, “We once talked about living at your ranch for a while. Don't you want to live there always? You wanted to train your own horses sometime. I would like living with your family.” Frank thought, On the same land. But in our own big house, about a mile away from the rest of them.

He said, “Natalie, it's not a ranch. You're imagining a sheep station in one of those places here that has fourteen syllables and ends in . . . ‘gong.' Or an American TV show. You don't have to take a Rover and camp out in a tent to do the chores. You can walk across Tenacity in thirty minutes. It's a little horse-boarding outfit with a couple of chickens and a cow and a great big white farmhouse like a thousand others, too big for just my mother and my old grandfather and my sister. It's not as far as the eye can see. It's eighty acres, twenty rented to a farmer to plant in alfalfa for the horses.”

“Sounds grand. I've only ever lived on a street.”

“You don't like horses. It's unsanitary and there are flies.”

“I've cleaned maggots out of wounds, Mercy. I've put maggots on necrotic tissue to eat the dead flesh. I treated a baby whose father—”

Frank said, “Okay! You're the queen of tough.”

“Don't forget again,” she said. “Or you'll pay for it.”

She looked anything but tough now. She was tiny and forlorn, a dirty broken doll. He finally began to cry, shocked when it made a noise, snot running down his chin. Eden was wrong. The crying hurt worse than the dry wedge. Frank thought he might suffocate.

The morgue attendant had returned and was standing quietly outside the door. She wiped down her wrists and the ring with hand sanitizer, snapping off her gloves, pulling off her bonnet and mask. She placed the ring inside a plastic glove and knotted the glove. Frank slipped it into his pocket. He wiped his face with the backs of his hands. The woman pulled off several wet wipes and handed them to Frank. She asked him if she could now close the curtain. Frank said yes, she could. She asked, “Will you want Dr. Donovan to be removed to a facility nearby here? I'm afraid the choices are very limited for the next while. We don't know how long.”

“Natalie's brother is alive. His wife and children died. They were all at Murry Sand Castle Inn, as was my wife. The rest of her family died also. He is hospitalized here. His name is Donovan, too . . .”

“Yes, he was here yesterday. Brian, the news guy. I recognized him. But I knew Dr. Donovan. I admired her. We will all feel her loss personally.”

“Thank you. I'll see to it,” said Frank, immediately forgetting what he had promised to see to. He left.

On the road back to Tura Farms, he pulled off at a farm track. He might kick in the side of the car, but his leg would rebel. He couldn't pound the steering wheel: he'd sprained his tiny wrist, after all. And why wreck the car? Yet something must happen. The one hundred and thirty pounds of flesh on the table back there was his own family, his wife, his son. Back out on the road, Frank thought, perhaps Kate Bellingham would mind the child until they could find proper channels for someone nice to adopt him or take him into foster care. Maybe even Cedric and Tura would look after him, fostering the little kid informally, at least for a while. Was Tura up to that? The child couldn't be more than three. Frank parked nearest the house, counting the cars. The truck, Tura's old Volvo station wagon, Kate's newer Audi. No sign of Miles's old superstock Chevy, which the kid, for some reason, adored. It was possible to tear up the road around Tura. No one ever bothered with traffic stops in Queensland, unless you happened to be driving on the wrong side with a bighorn sheep in the passenger seat and then it was only to inquire how the sheep liked the view. It was one of the things Frank had liked best about Australia.