The House on Oyster Creek Page 10

  “So there’s your example. Good is something you can build with—brick by brick. The rest—the wrongs, the stupidities—they do real damage, but you can transcend them; you’ve got that solid foundation of good to stand on.”

  She sounded so encouraging, inspirational even, as if she actually knew something. She could have kicked herself for acting as if she were better than he, though her own life had been a series of desperate acts too.

  “Maybe,” he said, smiling. “I suppose. God, when I first got back, the work was like an outrage—get up in the freezing dark; the wind was so raw, my boots would leak, and if I went in to get another pair I’d lose the tide. . . . But in summer, you’re out there at dawn. . . . I saw an egret last week; it landed not ten feet away from me. It was so white, it reflected the colors of the sunrise just the way the water does. It feels good to be out there working. And I got out of my mother’s place. I can probably pay her back some of what I owe her. I feel pretty lucky now.”

  A seagull with a clam in its beak was rising on an updraft in front of them, higher and higher, until thirty feet up it dropped the clam, which smashed on Narville’s seawall, the gull floating down to pick out the meat. They stood watching together, hating to break the moment. Through the rippled old windows at her own house, the bay showed infinite moody variations: Sometimes you seemed to have a direct glimpse into history, so a whale ship might round the point at any minute; sometimes the water brimmed up to the tips of the spartina, cool and pure; sometimes the bay was so hard and gray you’d think of the men who had drowned there. Framed by the columns of Narville’s porch, though, the sea was simply a luxury, a bowl of gold.

  “Gotta get back to work,” he said, and she went to clear off the table, put the coffee things away.

  “We’re running out of filters.”

  “I’ll pick some up tonight. Do we need coffee?”

  “Wouldn’t be a bad idea,” she said, taking the pot to the sink to rinse it.

  “Okay, I’ll put it on the list.” He looked over his shoulder at her and smiled. “We sound like an old married couple,” he said.

  “I know.” She tried not to sound too pleased.

  “Mama, Darryl, look!” Fiona ran up the hill with her cup of stew.

  “Looks healthy,” Darryl said with a grimace, taking the cup from her and peering in. “What’s in it?”

  “Clovers,” she said, looking up at him, surprised by his attention, drinking it in. “The rabbits like them.”

  “Are you friends with the rabbits?” He glanced at Charlotte, and back to Fiona, his eyes crinkling warmly at the corners, sympathy and humor playing over his face.

  “The rabbits . . . and the baby bunnies too!” she said, her voice musical, flirtatious, daring him to contradict her.

  “If I was a rabbit I’d want to be friends with you,” he said. “You’re such a good cook.” He lifted the cup and pretended to sip. “Tastes delicious. Though you know what I think it needs? A scallop shell. They have a very delicate flavor. Good with clovers.”

  “I’ll get some,” she said, and skipped off with such confident purpose it was almost painful to see. She wanted so much to be good, and as she was four years old she was sure this was a simple matter.

  “So, would you go back to that other life someday? I mean, not all of it, obviously, but the work—maybe working for a recording company, or . . .”

  “Oh, no. No, it’s the worst place for a . . . drug addict.” He forced himself to say this, though not without an abject, confessional pleasure. Then he squared his shoulders and picked up a bundle of shingles to go back to work.

  “I’m stayin’ here, get my general contractor’s license, grow the oyster business, settle down.” He thought a minute, then spoke harshly. “Life, plain life, that’s what I want. Health insurance. Buy some land, build my own place, start a family . . . go to bed every night feeling like I’ve accomplished a little something. Just a real life, you know, like yours.”

  He started around to the side with the shingles, but turned back. “Yours and Henry’s, I mean,” he said soberly, and in a minute she heard the nail gun firing steadily: Bang. Bang. Bang. She’d been finishing the doors for the upstairs closets, and she opened the polyurethane again and stirred it, watching Fiona out the front window as she started back to work.

  “Clouds so swift the rain’s falling in,” she sang, hardly realizing it until she heard Darryl’s voice, outside, coming in with the next line.

  The stench of rotten fish hit her again, and she turned to see Tim at the back door, with mirrored sunglasses covering the eye patch.

  “ ’Lo,” he said suggestively, as if he’d caught her at something.

  “Hi,” she said. “Darryl’s outside.” But he’d seen Tim come in and was standing behind her at the French doors. Some kind of pride bounced between them at being found together like this.

  “Hey, man,” Darryl said. “Had a good week, I hear.”

  “Sashimi heaven,” Tim said, looking hard at them from behind the sunglasses.

  “You here to work?” Darryl asked. “Because if you are, the whole east side is ready to be shingled.”

  “Tomorrow,” Tim said, turning his head to show, at the base of his neck, a bare patch among his tattoos. “I’m gettin’ a stingray here.” Then he lifted the sunglasses so she could see his eye narrow. “Anyway, looks like you’ve got help for today.”

  “Am I . . . not supposed to be here?” she asked after he left.

  “No, you’ve been terrific,” Darryl said. “I mean, thank you, you’ve done so much. But . . . tomorrow the guys’ll be back; it might be distracting. . . .”

  “But . . .” she began. They couldn’t just stop the conversation.

  “I did one quick favor for you; it’s not like you have to work for me forever now.” He caught her eye with a half-pleading, half-consoling look, but Charlotte, wounded and ashamed of her silliness, shook her head and laughed, saying she had to get Fiona home for her nap anyway.

  9

  FLOATING

  Henry came up from his office in the late afternoon, grimacing in the bright sunlight. Charlotte was keeping Fiona out on the beach so he could get some peace to work—they had built a little village of wet sand and shells.

  “Daddy! We made a whole town!” Fiona cried, running up the lawn toward him. She was wearing a flower-girl dress they’d found at the church thrift shop—white lace with little rosebuds stitched in. Clothing made no sense to her: She only liked to be naked or in costume. Stepping out the door, Henry looked down over the water like a man surveying the battlefield at Guernica, half bent so Charlotte thought he was about to double over with some internal pain. Fiona tried to grab his hand but he let it go limp and slip away. She solved this problem by taking his wrist tight in her two hands and began to pull him down the lawn. He followed so unwillingly it did look as if she were dragging him.

  “Nice,” he said, not seeing it.

  Charlotte wrinkled her nose at him.

  “It’s a few lumps of sand,” he said between his teeth. “I can’t say what I don’t feel.”

  “Yes, that puts it quite truly.”

  “So don’t expect . . .” It was a warning.

  “Believe me, I expect nothing.”

  “Mama!” Fiona jumped up in fear; Henry’s anger was as familiar as a gray sky, but Charlotte’s was a thunderbolt.

  “Never mind, never mind, sweetheart, let’s go in the water,” Charlotte said, and Fiona brightened instantly, running in without a thought for the dress. Charlotte lifted her hand and twirled her around, and the petticoats swirled over the surface.

  “Henry, come in,” she said. She didn’t want to be angry, and she let sympathy fray the edges—she’d known fatherhood wasn’t natural to Henry, she’d married him and had Fiona nevertheless, and she probably did expect too much. If only she could find some route for him, some way toward comfort and happiness. If they could be something like the family Darryl imagined . . .
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  Henry waded in up to his ankles and stood rooted, stiff as if he thought the water might erode him, squinting across the bay. “That’s where Billingsgate Light used to be—out there,” he said.

  “Where is it now?”

  “The sea came up, bit by bit, year by year—there was a settlement out there at one time. They floated the houses in to the mainland when the ocean started rising. Finally it was just the lighthouse, and one winter night in 1915 the waves smashed it up, and that was the end.”

  “The end,” Charlotte echoed. She knelt in the water as if she could wash off Henry’s gloom, leaning back to wet her hair, sucking the salt water from her fingers. Fiona jumped and splashed beside her.

  “Fiona looks like a water lily, with her skirt all spread out, don’t you think?”

  Fiona was looking up at him, intently hopeful, and he looked down at her, intently irritated. Why did Charlotte insist on asking impossible things of him? What could it matter whether the child looked like a water lily?

  “It’s good that you like the water,” he managed.

  “I love the water!” Fiona said, shaking her head so drops flew from her curls.

  “Will you watch her for a minute?” Charlotte asked. “So I can take a quick swim?”

  “Certainly, take your time.” That much he could do, give his wife a moment’s respite from the endless duties of mothering.

  Charlotte swam away in bold strokes. She’d forgotten her own strength, and feeling it now as she sliced through the water she suddenly wanted to flee, to swim until she’d escaped from Henry and even Fiona, until she was fifteen again, with those long white arms, and her mother was dead, and she was free. The feeling itself frightened her and she stopped, well out, and looked back to see Henry standing right where he’d been, gazing out toward the mouth of the bay. Alone.

  “Henry!” He didn’t hear her. The distance seemed immense suddenly, she raced back across it, her heart pounding so she thought it would burst.

  Fiona’s skirt billowed under the water; she wasn’t moving. Charlotte grabbed her by the waist; her eyes opened like a doll’s and she took a terrible drowning breath. She coughed. She was alive.

  And in a fury. She had seen her mother swim off and had followed her, assuming she would be able to swim as naturally as she walked. She didn’t know about drowning; she didn’t know about death.

  “I can’t swim!” she cried, fighting her way out of Charlotte’s arms to slap at the water. It had failed her, insulted her. “You can read and I can’t; you can swim and I can’t. . . .”

  Charlotte lifted her up again, holding the tense little body tight against her.

  “I was thinking,” Henry said, defending himself. “I just looked away for a minute. She’s fine; she swallowed a little water. Don’t make it into a big deal.”

  “Don’t make it into a big deal?”

  He turned around and walked back up toward the house. He’d been asking himself some terribly important question, about Cambodia probably—that was the chapter he was on. And Fiona had done what she always did and followed her mother. Charlotte’s heart slammed in her ears. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she murmured into Fiona’s hair.

  “It’s not all right! I want to swim!”

  “I didn’t know how to swim when I was your age, either,” she said to Fiona.

  “You didn’t?” Fiona relaxed entirely, laid her head against her mother’s neck.

  “Of course not, silly. Someone had to teach me. And now I can teach you.”

  “I don’t want you to teach me! I want to know.”

  “I can’t say I blame you,” Charlotte said. “But since I can’t think of any other way . . . let’s try it.” She pulled the dress gently over Fiona’s head. Her little shoulders, her bottom . . . thirty seconds more, another minute, and . . . the world would have turned to ash and blown away.

  “Here, we’ll wade in together; hold my hand.”

  Charlotte knelt in the water and held out her arms. “Lie back; look up at the sky,” she said, serene as a mesmerist. Fiona lay back across her arms.

  “Now take a deep breath. I’m holding you. Do you see that one little cloud moving?” She dropped her arms an inch, then another, and after a few tries she was able to lift her hands out of the water. “See, you’re floating!”

  Fiona lost her composure and sank.

  “Try it again.”

  “No, I can’t do it!”

  “You just did do it.”

  “No! I didn’t float; I sank!”

  Charlotte said nothing, waiting for Fiona to consider this on her own. A yellow kayak issued from between the reeds in the boat meadow, heading toward Try Point along the shore.

  “Go behind me,” Fiona said suddenly.

  “Why?”

  “Because . . . because I’ll be able to bend backward if I can see you there.”

  And suddenly it was second nature. Fiona fell back on the water, arms outstretched, and kicked along in a blissed-out circle, her hair feathered into a wide halo.

  “Do it again,” she said.

  “I’m not doing anything!” Charlotte laughed.

  “No,” Fiona said. “You did. Do it again!” Much as she wanted to be free, she’d rather believe herself buoyed by her mother’s magic. So she leaned back and Charlotte raised her heels in her palms, and Fiona floated away through the sparkles, saying, “Mom, look, look at me!”

  As if Charlotte could have torn her eyes away. It was magic to know just how to let go so the last thing a child feels before the cool rush of freedom is the fit of her heel to her mother’s palm.

  They came up the lawn to find Henry reading on the porch, Bunbury curled on his lap. Charlotte wrenched herself toward forgiveness. Back in the city, rushing to catch a walk light, she’d pushed the stroller so harshly over the curb that it tipped and Fiona nearly fell into the street. It was the same thing, a moment’s lapse. Henry wouldn’t have imagined Fiona would try to swim after her, that she was connected to Charlotte by a filament as weightless and strong as spiderweb, was drawn through life by it, following her every thought, feeling, and move.

  “We had a swimming lesson,” she said, bending down to scratch Bunbury behind the ears.

  “Daddy,” Fiona called. “I learned to swim!”

  “That’s good, very nice,” he said, barely lifting his eyes from the page.

  “I can swim!” she repeated, jumping up and down to get his attention, so water sprayed over him.

  “Stop it!” he said, shielding the book, taking off his glasses to wipe them.

  Fiona hung her dripping head.

  “It takes time to learn to swim,” he lectured.

  “How’s your swimming, Henry?” Charlotte asked, and he gave her a small, ironic smile, pulling his bad arm in against his side. He had accepted his limitations; maybe one day Charlotte would accept hers.

  “So you see, honey, Daddy doesn’t know much about swimming,” she said lightly. Henry continued reading.

  “He hates me,” Fiona said, provoking no response.

  “No, no, he doesn’t,” Charlotte said. Could Henry even hear them? He gave no sign. She lifted Fiona and carried her inside.

  “He loves you,” Charlotte told Fiona, wrapping her in a towel, rubbing her hair dry so it stuck up all over. “He loves you very, very much, but he has no idea how to show that.”

  Fiona looked more skeptical than a four-year-old ought to be able to manage. It was wrong to ask her to understand so much, but it was the best Charlotte could think to do. She sat on the edge of the bathtub, rocking Fiona on her lap.

  “Listen, you accomplished a lot out there, and you will do better every time you try; do you understand? No one just jumps in the water and swims; everyone learns it bit by bit. Daddy’s arm doesn’t work so well, and it makes swimming hard for him, so he doesn’t really know much about it.” The little head nodded solemnly against her neck.

  “The learning itself ought to be her satisfaction,�
�� Henry said later, defending himself. “You praise her for every little thing. She has no sense of reality.”

  “You never minded it when I treated you that way,” she said. “You don’t notice when she’s drowning, but one drop of water on your goddamned book and you’re in a fury. This has nothing to do with swimming; it has to do with a little girl who wants her father’s love.”

  They were on the porch, with Fiona just inside. Looking in through the window Charlotte saw Fiona had balled up the lint from the dryer screen and was holding it to her chest, petting it softly, whispering to it as if, being so warm and soft, it must be alive. Oh, she was so absolutely, entirely human: noisy, dirty, boastful, grasping, jealous, recklessly curious, full of love and tenderness. . . . Henry was so old and august he had overcome every single one of these qualities.

  “I will try to do better,” he said between his teeth. He had given her those beautiful, grave poems to read: “and the seas of pity lie / locked and frozen in each eye.” He had seemed to know more of the depth of life and feeling than anyone she’d known. She remembered how angry he had been at her when she was new on the job and used a cliché to describe the death of a child. Now she saw that the phrase had mattered more to him than the life.

  “You’re a fraud, Henry.”

  He snarled, like a cornered animal, and reflexively covered his weak hand. He was wrong, though; the hand was nothing to be ashamed of. The pity was his blinded heart, tap-tapping its grim path through the gorgeous world.

  And she had followed along behind him, though she was a seeing woman and ought long since to have found a better path. Well, Fiona was not going to suffer for her idiocy. Charlotte almost felt the little snap in her chest, as the marriage gave way.

  10

  MOTHER NATURE

  Later that evening she opened the freezer door to find two martinis standing together, upright as sentinels, inside. She shut the door immediately; she didn’t want to think how Henry would have come up from the beach in a fury, cursing her and everything that distracted him from his work, then looked back down to see them—his wife, his little girl!—whom he had nearly lost in one careless moment. The anger would have swung around then, struck him straight on, and with it the great sympathy he could feel when he had a little distance from things. Tender, sorry, he had imagined a reconciliation, getting the martini glasses out of the china cabinet as his father would have done, mixing the drinks with the same care he used to take getting Fiona’s hot water bottle just right.