Two If by Sea (8 page)

“No, rather I would like you to do it for Natalie, for Miles. For me.”

“It's a wonderful thought, but that's not how you are.”

“How am I now, Frank? Will you be the one to say that Natalie's life was meaningless because a great bloody monstrous wave knocked her out of the world?”

“Of course not. She is dead, and so is your Miles,” Frank said. He had not meant for it to be so harsh. But it was harsh. What kind of twaddle was this, about doing it for Natalie? “Nothing I do from now on has anything to do with Natalie.”

“Are you so sure?” Cedric asked, a ghost of his customary bluster under the challenge.

“What about this lad?” Tura said. “He's just a child of three. Where will he go?”

“I thought perhaps here, until I could figure out a home for him,” Frank said.

“Authorities and social welfare? It will take years,” Tura said. “This isn't New York, Frank. It's Queensland. Mind that. He's quite the lad, really. He's seen a great deal in these days. And there he was, out chasing the cats.”

“He's a child. They don't understand,” Frank said.

“And we do, then,” Cedric said, turning back from the window, squaring his shoulders and looking around him in a way that got his wife up and scurrying to put the kettle on.

That there's nothing to understand, Frank thought. Only that, at the end of the day, there's nothing at all to understand.

“The child needs a proper life,” Cedric said.

“I'm not responsible—” Frank began.

“Then why didn't you let him drown? Leave off pitying yourself, Frank. It doesn't look good on you.” Cedric was his old self for a moment, frosty and blunt. “The lad chases the cats because it's his choice to present himself alive.” Cedric reached for the Driza-Bone that Miles had left on its customary peg and then threw it, hard, at the door. “Not all this ‘go slow now, easy does.' That's horse bollocks. We're alive for the time we get. I sound like an effing card for the old nutters' home.” Cedric left the room and Tura and Frank could hear him thumping back up the stairs to his study.

“It's the boy putting him in mind of Miles.”

Frank said, “Sure.”

“But it's the boy, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have no idea,” Tura said, mechanically washing up a handful of cress at the sink, selecting some thin bread for toast, and slowly slicing away the crusts. Frank had no idea why all Brits didn't weigh four hundred pounds. They stopped chewing only to sleep. “When I was on the phone just now, I thought of the boy. I thought it would be good to have grandchildren one day. And I don't want to be a grandmother.”

“I thought all women did.”

“It's the end of your time as a woman, Frank,” Tura said. “It's becoming a sort of sofa, not a woman. The end of being all the center of attention. I love Kate, and yet I admit I was happy that I had her in my forties, because it would be longer before I was redundant, if you will.” Tura sliced a cucumber thin and took a carton of salad cream from the fridge. She tapped the knife on the thick butcher-block table. “It was just in that moment that I understood why people are all on about being grandparents, and how natural it would be for them to come here in their time, and how this place wouldn't be such a man's place now, and me its only dame, as Yanks say. It would be the grandparents' house. But it won't be this house. It will be somewhere else.”

Frank could say nothing. Tura was a fine-looking woman late in her sixties, and knew it, and took care to stay fit, sashaying around in high-waisted Katharine Hepburn slacks and soft, man-tailored shirts and boots. She didn't tend toward philosophy, and Cedric treated her like the Queen of the Silver Dollar. Tura set a plate of sandwiches on the table and whisked the cold teapot away before Frank could pour out anything wet. Drama had the same net effect as a stakeout on a summer night. He longed for a pitcher of ice water, a shower, and a long private piss. But Tura wasn't finished. “I was singing to him before. You know, Frank, my name is after the old Irish song ‘Tura Lura Lura.' When I stopped, he tapped me on the arm, sharpish. I know he hears.”

“Maybe he's scared out of it. Now I think of it, his brother said he was special.”

“Special?”

“In America, that means the kid's got problems. Retarded. Something. They call them special.”

This, Frank now remembered, was not what his brother had said at all. He had said the boy was important. The brother was just a good boy. Frank would have been the same if it had been his little sister. Life was not a statement of choice in the fucking good earth or whatever Cedric had said. Life was random as a pair of dice with ten sides.

“He can be here as long as you need, of course, Frank. We're happy to have him. Until you've arranged for your way home.”

“What about Kate?” Frank nodded toward the boy.

Tura snorted. “To keep the child? Kate? That stupid sod she's with will never marry her. She's got her bloomers all up over him, now they've ‘gone through' so much together.” Tura made phantom quote marks in the air with her fingers. Tura was a brick. How could she be ironic the day Miles was lost? How could Frank think it? Was this what you did? Trip over your life and have a cucumber sandwich? None of them was making sense. “Our Kate's almost glad they weathered the tsunami in church together. Romantic.” She stopped. “I'm awfully sorry, Frank. I meant no harm in that.”

“No offense taken, Tura,” Frank said. “I'll go have a look at Glory Bee.”

“Wait and have a cup.” Tura got up and began to clear off the dishes, and, as Frank watched in astonishment, began throwing the crockery away rather than scraping the beans into the trash.

“Tura?” he said.

She glanced at him.

“You're throwing your dishes away. Do you want to do that?”

Tura almost laughed. “Look at me!” she said. The little boy, who was now awake, smiled, and did a funny thing with his hands: sweep, sweep. Tura said then, “Frank, I don't want to be on about this. It's a day we need to be ready for mourning in our house. I like to think of the child with you. Perhaps I mean you with him.”

“Tura, you know that if I did that, and I can't do that, it would be kidnapping a child.”

Tura was at her desk by then, her large binder open before her, pen in hand.

“Kidnapping?” she said. “That would only be a legal thing, surely?”

There you go, Frank thought, she's nuts. Perhaps she'd always been nuts. Frank threw down his tea and, in two bites, ate four of Tura's cress-and-cream sandwiches, then walked out toward the stable. Halfway, he thought he might faint. A black band strapped his eyes. He sat down in the dust. What did Glory Bee matter? It was mad that the world had literally gone under and here Frank was on his way to check the swollen ankle of a fractious filly. Glory Bee had banged her hock badly during her murderous ballet on the morning before he left.

As he approached, he thought Glory Bee looked a bit sulky. She was huge, eighteen hands, and muscled like a wrestler. Black as her soul, Cedric said. Nothing wrong with Glory Bee that a mallet to the temple couldn't cure, he said. Glory Bee nickered softly and rolled her eyes. I'm not up to you today, lass, he thought. You'll be staying in that box.

Just outside her stall, Frank sat on a tack chest and tried to think through the angles. If he left in two weeks, could he host . . . host a funeral, do up papers, and find care for the boy? Could he leave in less? A week? This baked land was nothing to him anymore. The airport was already open. Planes were bringing in supplies, medicine, doctors, relief workers, and press, but what would they be taking out? He hadn't even considered an airline. He had to replace his passport, if he had SCUBA gear to dive down to the U.S. embassy, which was underwater on Porter Court, in the neighborhood where he and Natalie lived. His crew chief would expect him back tonight, but that . . . well, there were enough crews out there. Everyone would want to say he or she had been part of the rescue of the Christmas Eve Tsunami.

Kidnapping? Only a legal thing, surely.

Frank thought, then, of Charley Wilder.

Charley could help.

He'd met Charley, a Texan, a few months after his injury. Charley happened to be in Madison with his wife, Annie, who also was a lawyer, at some sort of legal-aid convention. They'd ended up sitting back to back in a Cajun joint where Frank was supposed to meet a buddy who had to beg off at the last minute. Normally, Frank would have cut up and eaten his water glass before tapping a stranger on the back like a life-insurance salesman. But he heard them talking with their friends, or colleagues, about going to Australia, specifically to Brisbane, to help resolve issues of domestic same-gender partnerships in the most freewheeling, and yet sometimes numbingly conservative, nation on earth.

“Funny thing,” Frank said when Charley turned around. “I'm moving to Brisbane.”

“What's over there for you?” Charley asked.

“Horses,” Frank said. “I'm going to work for a guy who trains Grand Prix jumpers.”

Charley had the usual male human reaction. “Why?”

Frank had a prepared rejoinder. “Somebody has to,” he said.

Charley was leaving with his family the following month. They'd rented out their two-hundred-year-old grandly restored home in San Antonio's King William neighborhood and were going full bore, with their two grammar-school-age sons. They'd visited back and forth since he arrived.

Would Charley and Annie take the boy? They had two sons and they were softhearted liberals. It was a good idea. It was a very good idea.

Frank got up and stumbled over his own feet, on the way over to Glory's stall. As he stood watching the mare snuffle through her manger, he became aware of a small sound, like that sound from the trunk so long ago, like birds singing. He realized then he'd been hearing it the whole time.

What the hell.

Frank stepped into the empty stall next to Glory Bee.

He looked down.

His very skin grew tight, from his hips to his hairline.

The boy was sitting in the straw, literally under the mare. He was rubbing the place her hock was sore. He was singing. He was humming a little song. Frank's breath caught on the exhale. Don't let him move. If Frank so much as touched Glory Bee at this moment, she'd go off like a firecracker. A horse was not a gorilla. A horse would not care that this was a vulnerable young mammal and she should suspend her murderous kicks for the nonce. This kid was dead. There was no way to get him out.

Noticing Frank, the boy stood up. Frank thought his bowels would dissolve. The boy walked over to the side of the stall and held up his arms. Glory Bee gazed at Frank with a look that plainly said, What can you do? Then she put her nose down and nudged the boy. Slowly, like the progress of a glacier, Frank reached in, grabbed one of the boy's arms, and pulled him out. Glory nickered softly and went back to her manger of hay. Frank had sweated through his shirt. Sweat was running down his legs. He had to remind himself to breathe.

“That horse could hurt you very, very badly. You must never go in there again. You must never go near a horse again, ever, unless I am with you. I'll teach you when it's okay.” The little boy nodded, with a replete sigh. “Do you understand? Never again. Horses are very good, but they can hurt boys.” Frank set the boy down. He opened the hasp and gingerly stepped into the stall beside the huge black filly. Quietly chomping, she quivered in pleasure as Frank scratched her neck in long, slow strokes. He stepped out and locked the door.

Frank had picked the child up to carry him back to the house before his head began to shout simultaneous bulletins about what he had just seen happen, in Glory Bee's stall . . . and more importantly, what he had just said to the little boy whose name no one knew.

He sat down on a stone bench, with the boy on his lap, and held him close, and he watched the sun dip until it splashed orange on the horizon and the darkness was like a firm line drawn.

T
HE DOORS OF
the elevator opened, and Natalie put out her hand, favoring Frank with a big, conspiratorial smile as they paused to step in. She was all dressed up in what she called her dancing clothes—short red sheath with sparkling threads and four-inch heels that made her taller than he was. Because of the instruments she used in the ER, she rarely wore her wedding ring, but tonight, the heart's-blood ruby flanked by diamonds sparkled on her hand. She whispered that she wished there weren't other partygoers behind them. “It's twenty-seven floors. We could ride it twice. Do you need more than that? Some men do . . .” Frank stood back to let Natalie pass. She took one step, and then dropped out of sight.

Frank leaped forward, grabbing the doorsills.

Where there was supposed to be a floor was boiling water. The elevator shaft was filled nearly to the level of the floor with boiling water.

His heart banged like a dryer filled with tennis shoes. Frank reached out but the heat shoved him back. He shouted, “Natalie!”

And he woke.

No one had noticed: the airplane cabin was in turmoil, track lights flickering, images on the individual TV screens just so much fractured ice.

“What's going on?” Frank called to the flight attendant scurrying past.

She held up one finger, rolling her eyes toward the cockpit.

In seats in front of Frank, the copilots who were off shift threw down their blankets and sprang to their feet.

Then the microphone came to life with its throaty absence of sound.

“No need for panic, folks,” the pilot drawled. Why did all airline pilots, even this Qantas pilot, seem to draw their accents from a childhood in southern Virginia? “That sound you heard was lightning just barely glancing off one of the wings of this big Airbus A380 aircraft. Now, these airplanes are made to withstand this kind of weather interference, usually with no more than a scorch mark. The lightning engineers protect the electrical system, and metals just conduct that current right through the wing and back into the atmosphere. You heard some homemade thunder there, folks. But, as you see, your entertainment has resumed, and we're just fine, passing over the Hawaiian Islands right at this moment. The last time a plane crashed because of a thunderstorm was way back in the Vietnam War. I'm sorry you were all startled. But settle back now, and enjoy a snack or a beverage on us. In five hours, we'll touch down in Seattle.”