The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  Then, of course, Charlotte and Fiona had come running up the lawn, laughing, dripping, boasting, wearing on every nerve. He’d snarled at them, or at himself, and had stalked off toward the Mermaid while Charlotte made pancakes for Fiona, who fell asleep as soon as she’d eaten her last bite and had to be carried up to bed. It was high tide; the bridge was submerged; Henry would be gone at least another hour. Another woman might have used this hour to pack a little suitcase of essentials, so that she could take her daughter and get out, as soon as the getting was good. Charlotte took the tide as a sign that the getting would never be good, that Henry was Fiona’s father and Fiona would need him no matter what. There was an unbearable poignancy in those martinis, as in the wilted rose he found for her somehow, at three in the morning after Fiona was born. Another woman would have known when to cut her losses, get a divorce, and Charlotte wished she had that woman’s conviction, but she had never been blessed with such certainty. She was porous, soluble; other threads got woven in with her own substance and became a part of her. Divorce was not the thing for Charlotte and Henry. They needed an operation, the kind where seven specialized surgeons worked for hours, teasing apart the nerves inch by inch, disentangling all the veins.

  Natalie, on the phone from New York, put it differently: “Well, you’re not going to give up that house, are you?”

  No, she was not. Day by day, job by job, she had claimed it for herself. The portrait of Vestina over the mantel had been replaced with a painting she’d found in the attic, of Billingsgate Light, around the turn of the century, before it washed away—the square tower of whitewashed brick with the lightkeeper’s house attached, clumps of beach rose at the back door, and then the whitecaps of a pale summer sea. This, and the freshly painted living room, the scrolls of new trim on the porch that exactly matched the old, the morning glories spiraling with berserk genius over the balusters, these things raised a fierce will of love in her, and she was going to stay.

  So, on September first, she was sitting at breakfast just like always, cutting a peach over Fiona’s cereal while Henry replenished his outrage from the bottomless well of possibilities in the Times. Way out on the flats the men were working: She recognized the motions as they angled their bull rakes into the mud, rocking them back and forth, then jerking back hard to wrench up the clams. Tim Cloutier had driven right out to the edge of the water beside his claim. It was the new moon and the tide had ebbed so far it looked as if you could walk all the way across to Try Point, though Charlotte had tried this once and knew that what looked like a few shallow rivulets from here were really as wide as rivers and three feet deep, with a bottom so soft you could sink up to your hip on a wrong step. September was a month with an R in it; Labor Day was coming—prices were good; they’d harvest as much as they could today.

  A red fox stepped around the corner of the house with a live squirrel held lightly between its jaws. It stopped to look in through the window at them, curious and unafraid.

  “Henry, look. . . .”

  Ordinarily he’d have refused to turn his head. Today, though, he knew he had lost his wife’s sympathy, and he had to reclaim it somehow, so he lowered the paper and found himself face-to-face with this fox, who kept still, his ears pricked and foreleg proudly raised. The squirrel hung limp from the fox’s mouth, but its large wet eyes seemed to be looking straight into Charlotte’s.

  “Mama, him’s going to eat that squirrel!” Fiona said, jumping off her chair, breaking the trance, so the fox bounded off up the driveway. “Mama, go after him; don’t let him!”

  Henry flinched and lifted the paper again, protecting himself from the noise.

  “He has to bring some supper home to his family,” Charlotte tried.

  “Him’s could eat his vegetables!” Fiona replied, sounding just like her father.

  “Speaking of which, how about a bite of cereal?”

  Fiona ate, and seemed to forget. The squirrel had been torn to pieces by now. The tide was streaming in—Charlotte could pick out Darryl by the red canoe he used to tow his oysters in. Tim heaved bushel after bushel into his truck bed, until as he turned to grab another load, the truck listed, the back tire sinking into the mud. Tim stepped back, knelt beside the wheel, and started digging with both hands.

  “What’s he doing out there?” Charlotte asked.

  “Who knows?” Henry said, going downstairs to his desk.

  Fiona knelt on her bed while Charlotte combed her hair into ponytails. Tim’s truck was marooned on its own little island, the tide cutting around it in two streams. Darryl, Bud, all of them had gathered around it, shoveling, but they seemed only to dig it deeper. Darryl ran up to the Narvilles’ and came back with a sheet of plywood, which he wedged under the back wheels, but as Tim tried to back up on it, the front sank in deeper.

  “It’s stuck,” Fiona said.

  “They must know what to do when something like this happens,” Charlotte said. “They’re out there every day.” She had the wisp of memory, though, of a child’s sense that her parents always knew just what to do. The late-summer air seemed full of gold dust, the bay so still it was hard to believe the tide was rising. But it had closed over the island so the truck looked to be floating. And then it was halfway up the tires. “They’ve been farming out there for years,” she went on calmly, twisting a curl between her fingers.

  “They look all confused,” Fiona said.

  “Well,” Charlotte had to admit, “that’s true.” As she said this the truck lurched to a tilt, and the plywood shot out from under it. The men jumped back and stood shaking their heads, rubbing their beards. A backhoe came chugging around the end of the point and down the beach toward them, stopping at the edge of the water. Tim ran across to it in three splashing jumps, explaining something to the operator, hands out as if to shake him, so that Darryl went over and set a quieting hand on Tim’s back. Tim shook him off, pushed the backhoe guy away, and jumped onto the backhoe himself, starting out through the water toward the truck, and Charlotte and Fiona watched as the treads sank into the mire. There was a terrible grinding sound and the smell of burning rubber and everything stopped.

  Tim jumped off the backhoe and got into the truck as if he meant to go down with the ship. By the time he gave up, he couldn’t open the door against the water. He pushed, and the others pulled, but they were helpless, and as the water reached the door handle, Tim rolled down the window, pulled himself out through it onto the roof, and floundered ashore to watch in silent homage as the water rose, as if watching a coffin lowered.

  “Daddy, Daddy, the oyster truck got stuck!” Fiona raced down to tell Henry, who came up and looked out, though only the roof of the truck’s cab and the yellow bucket of the tipped backhoe were showing. He shook his head—all his predictions had come true; everything was revealed to be just as skewed and dangerous as he had said all along. It felt like a holiday: Misfortune Day, when everyone would take a break from all their constructive, orderly efforts, and stumble drunken into the streets, howling at the moon.

  “Do you suppose that once it’s totally high tide, a boat will come by and the rudder will snag on the backhoe bucket and the boat will capsize?” Charlotte asked.

  “We can hope,” Henry said, with a thin smile. “I wonder what a day submerged in salt water will do for a truck.” He doubled over, laughing and groaning at once.

  “A day underwater?” Charlotte asked. “That truck will be there for the rest of our lives.”

  11

  SALT

  As soon as the last truck—Bud Rivette’s, with Tim in the passenger seat looking straight ahead—turned away up Point Road, Charlotte ran down and squeaked around the end of the fence on the seawall. The bay was brimming. Beneath its little dancing waves was a huge new pickup truck with a V- 8 engine, four-wheel drive, a W’04 sticker, and an eel in the carburetor.

  Stepping over onto the Narvilles’ side of the fence, Charlotte seemed to have stepped into a foreign land. The house, finished in all but
the last details, was as solid as a fortress; even the windows were not only wide and high, but also gleamingly thick, as if made of some special kind of glass. The tower had a copper roof surmounted by a weather vane that depicted a dragon rampant. Mahogany chaise longues were set in a row between the porch columns; she could hear the delicate plash of the fountain in the koi pond, stroke the soft fronds of the high-end bulrushes planted at the edge. Darryl was bending over the kitchen’s central island, polishing the marble countertop. About to knock on the French door, Charlotte hesitated, pierced by a sudden qualm, heard a robin hit the glass above her, and looked up to see it fly off crookedly in the wind.

  Darryl looked up and blinked to see her, pulled off his goggles and came to the door.

  “You came,” he said. “I didn’t expect . . .” He seemed as surprised as if she’d finally tracked him down in Istanbul, where he was living under an assumed name. And as glad as if they’d been lovers separated by a war. The room filled up with light, or it seemed to.

  “Because of the truck . . . that got stuck on the flats . . .” Excuses, as if she had in fact crossed oceans to find him.

  “Tim parked on the soft spot,” he said. “We knew it was there; I sank into it over my knee the other day. Put a chair out to mark it, but the tide must have pulled it up last night. Brand-new truck.”

  “Now what?” she asked, trying to sound sensible, though she was electrified and barely knew what they were saying. He’d missed her.

  “Oh, it’s total,” he said. “Total loss. About the only thing that might help now is if he drove it into a pond.”

  “What?”

  “To rinse the salt out, stop the corrosion. You’d be amazed at the power of salt. When I first started oystering I used to drive through the shallows . . . until the chassis just crumbled out from under the truck. Pieces of steel came right off in my hand.”

  He held out this imaginary hunk of metal, his thick hand gripped around the space so she could see it exactly.

  “Gas tanks are porous; did you know that?” he asked, lighting up. It was a gift he could give her, this scrap of information.

  “I didn’t,”she said, dazzled.

  “It’s a stupid-ass mistake; the thing’s going to leak all day, and that oil’s going to hit someone’s herd,” he went on. He shook his head, disapproving, but then shrugged it off. “It happens on a spring tide,” he said. “It could happen to anyone.”

  A spring tide was the extreme low; it came twice monthly, on the new and full moons. Knowing this pleased Charlotte as if she were back in third grade again and had the right answer. She was coming to know the language of the place. She stretched in the sunlight that flooded through the Narvilles’ window, looking out to see a speck come around the point and up the bay toward them. It was a little old dragger with three guys crowded into the wheelhouse and a black dog sitting up front. It slowed, weaving across and back—of course, it was Tim, returning to the scene. Who could have kept away? Thirty thousand dollars’ worth of truck and a whole continent of pride were submerged there. They cut the engine; they’d found it. Then they circled, agonizingly slowly, over and over it, all of them, even the dog, a quizzical figurehead, peering down over the bow.

  Yes, Charlotte knew it well, the circling, circling, over what’s been lost, so close you can see it, even touch it, though even as you watch it’s being corrupted; time and nature are wearing it away. And all through your own fault, too, your own idiot misreading of the signs. No one but yourself to blame.

  “So, the house is nearly done,” she said.

  “Ready for its close-up. The owners are coming for the weekend. They haven’t been here since we started building.”

  “I hope they like it.”

  Darryl looked around the room. “It’s just what they wanted,” he said with a sigh. “Look at this. . . .” It was the bill for the exotic fish in the koi pond: thirty-five fish, at seventy dollars apiece.

  Charlotte laughed. “I’m surprised they didn’t have you wallpaper it with hundred-dollar bills.”

  “Well, don’t suggest it!” he said. “It’s too bad. With this spot, the simplest thing would be amazing.”

  “I know. Just a shingled cottage with a screen porch so you could sit out late on a summer night . . .”

  “. . . and you’d put the bedroom on the east side, so you’d wake up in the morning sun. . . .”

  “And you’d have the kitchen open, like this, but on the west side, so when you were cooking dinner you’d have the light, and Fiona would be playing on the rug there, and I’d have an herb garden outside the kitchen door so I could just step out and pick some rosemary.”

  “You would, would you? What about me?”

  “You . . .” He’d caught her by the corner of a thought. He was right there, in the scene she had imagined. “You’d be on the flats, just getting the last bags in.”

  He kept it up, daring her. “Are the bluefish running?”

  “Oh, yeah, you’re going to catch a couple for supper. I saw you get the fishing pole, so I went out for the rosemary.”

  “I love bluefish,” he said. Her throat closed suddenly—had he mentioned hunger? She looked down to avoid his eyes.

  “We’d have a woodstove,” he said. “We’ve got a southern exposure—we wouldn’t need much oil. I’ve been heating with wood since I got back, and I haven’t bought a stick. I go out in the National Seashore forest, early morning, with my chain saw, and cut up the fallen trees.”

  “They allow that?”

  “Well . . . no . . . but my father did it and his father before him—that was way before it was National Seashore. It used to be woodlots, you know, back before oil.”

  “So, I could pick the beach plums and make jelly?” There were hundreds of them, dusky red and purple, on the low, rough-leaved bushes along the Seashore Road.

  “Sure! I mean, I’d bail you out if the park rangers got you.” He laughed so sweetly.

  “And you’d build a swing for Fiona?” Tears sprang up and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, but it was a sign that they’d strayed too far.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’d be lucky to afford a tenth of an acre with a view north over the landfill. I’d better get this finished. I gotta help get that truck out of the sand next tide.”

  “Drink?” Henry had come up next to her while she stood at the window watching the tide recede. It pulled a long iridescent thread behind it—the gas from the truck’s tank, which would have filled with salt water by now, like the glove compartment, the six CD slots, the heated leather seats. The electrical system would have shorted out, setting off the wipers and flashing the headlights until the battery died. Crabs were investigating, barnacles settling in. That was the day’s progress, underwater. She could see the backhoe’s bucket sticking out of the water at a crazy angle, and there was a still spot in the water beside it, the roof of the truck’s cab.

  “Is there any wine? Look, here comes the radio antenna.”

  Henry looked out, his mouth twitching toward a smile.

  “One drives into mires,” he said companionably, and went off on light feet to the kitchen, glad to be of service. Charlotte would relive an argument line by line, trying to pull some true thread out of the tangle, but Henry’s encompassing regret swallowed the particulars. Surely he need not examine his faults one by one? He was infinitely blameworthy and must work to redeem himself; wasn’t that every man’s story? He returned with two glasses, and a sippy cup of orange juice for Fiona.

  “Perfect timing!” Charlotte said. A bulldozer was coming around the point. “A toast! To the power of salt!” Talking to Darryl had cast everything in a golden light, and as Henry handed her the wineglass she saw him sculpted in relief, half man, half stone, reaching out to her, hoping she could free him. She clicked her glass to his, and to Fiona’s, and drank. A fumé blanc—she’d liked a fumé blanc once and he never passed a package store now without looking for a bottle.

  They watched as
Darryl’s truck turned onto the beach and headed out along the wrack line toward the spot where the others stood conferring. Even at this distance you could guess his life from his stance—he was strong, he’d been defeated, and he was carrying on. He waved to the tow truck that was backing along the wet sand, motioning it closer, then splaying both hands: Stop. The tow guy—one of the Mulligans, with blond dreadlocks and a gold earring that caught the sun—put his head out the window and laughed: The flats looked like a sandbox full of some child’s abandoned toys.

  Charlotte was barely aware of the other story that was bumping along the road toward them, in a brand new Hummer. The Narvilles had driven from Alpharetta, stopping in Charleston, Cape May, Old Lyme, and finally Newport, to soak in the seaside ambience . . . “pick up a sense of the decor,” Andrea later explained. She taught yoga at the gym where Jeb Narville had worked out obsessively after the end of his first marriage, and by moving to Wellfleet she meant to flee a dictatorship ruled by Vonda, his first wife, into a land of inspiration and balance where the pull of gravity was felt not as a force to be resisted, but a firm embrace. She had a lifetime subscription to Architectural Digest, and a gold bracelet the spelled out, Luxe, calme, volupté. Near Newport they had picked up their new catboat, a twenty-two-footer with brass rails, mahogany trim, and a forty-horsepower Yanmar engine that would allow for the occasional burst of yeehaw speed. As the tide withdrew, Jeb piloted the Hummer, towing the catboat, down Point Road, past the Mermaid and the Masonic lodge, the vine-choked woods, the Driftwood Cabins sign overgrown by blackberry bushes.