The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  “I pictured it more . . . upscale. . . .” Andrea said. That was the way Jeb had described it, but he’d been there only the one time, and the various coves had run together in his mind. He’d looked at three lots in Olde Harbour Estates, where each house was bigger and more important than the last, but the choicest properties there were already gone. The land on Tradescome Point sloped gently south over a bay frothy with whitecaps like a meringue pie. One hundred feet of frontage, electricity already in place—and he could sink a mooring right out in front of the house. The purchase price had seemed ludicrous at the time, but it would have doubled by now. He had a sixth sense where money was concerned. Women, on the other hand . . . He glanced over at Andrea, who was making a little kiss in the mirror to perfect her lipstick. Could she not be satisfied that he’d just built her a million-dollar house?

  Then a reassuring sight: their fence, tall, solid, white, with the carriage lamps spaced along just as they were at home, and the tower rising. The place made its statement. They turned off the broken pavement of Point Road into their cobblestone driveway, followed its curve into the porte cochere. Yes, everything was ready; they were home.

  Charlotte heard the car turn in, the doors open and shut. The sun was red and enormous, settling into the western haze, and this pleased her as if the scene belonged to her and she was generously sharing it with her new neighbors. She imagined Jeb pulling his wife against him, arms around her waist, affected together by the beauty of the place, having a little moment of renewal together in their new home. They would walk through the rooms, feeling all the care Darryl had given that building, the perfect joints, the smooth sills; they’d look out every window; they’d push open the glass doors and see the bay spread before them like a banquet. The tide was well out by now. Tim was hooking a chain under the truck’s hood so they could winch it out of its mire.

  “What the hell?” A great bellow came from the other side of the fence. “What the hell is going on?” And a figure—Jeb Narville, Charlotte realized, squat and ungainly in his khaki shorts, like a gorilla with arms loose at his sides—came running down the lawn to the seawall, brandishing a fist in Tim’s direction.

  “What’s happened, what is it?” Charlotte ran out onto the lawn, thinking he’d found the house full of snakes, or a ceiling collapsed, or . . .

  “What is that?” he asked her. His face, which had been ruddy when she met him at the registry, was so red now it outdid the salmon-colored shirt he was wearing.

  “What . . . what do you mean?”

  “You know what the hell I mean,” he said, hulking closer.

  “You mean the truck?”

  “Bayfront. That’s what I bought. Bays have water in them, Mrs. Tradescome.”

  “Oh! You . . . You . . .” He’d seen the place only the day he bought it. He’d been feasting all this time on the photographs the realtor took—on a perfect summer day, in the golden late-afternoon light, at the exact crest of the high tide.

  “Mr. Narville,” she said, expecting the federal truth-in-advertising board to descend from the clouds and take her away, “the tide’s ebbing, that’s all.”

  “I’ve seen low tide before, Mrs. Tradescome. I’ve seen junkyards too.”

  “It’s different, different places,” she said, going toward him, telling herself he was a civilized man and would not hit her. Also remembering that he had assumed she knew nothing but poetry and lilacs. “We have a pretty dramatic tidal range here—twelve feet. That’s one reason it’s so good for oysters. See, that’s Tim, and Darryl, and Bud; they raise oysters out there. The tide’s still on the way out. . . .”

  He looked at her as if she had, impossibly, given him more bad news, and she hurried on. “You can get a shellfishing license; you can go out and gather your own dinner; it’s wonderful. . . .”

  “I don’t want to gather my own dinner,” he roared, as if this would involve rooting in garbage cans. “This is Cape Cod; you go sailing. I’ve got a hundred-thousand-dollar sailboat here. I paid for waterfront property, not for . . .” He shook his head, as if there were no words awful enough to describe this view.

  Charlotte heard Henry’s dry laugh and turned to see him behind her.

  “You did indeed, sir,” he said, absolutely jovial. “And that’s what you got, waterfront—tidal—property. You’ll have water brimming in about . . .” He squinted out over their heads. The rank scent of exposed seaweed reached them—the tide was near its low, exposing the seaweed, and the oyster racks, and, of course, the mired trucks. “Six hours.”

  “This is fraud,” Narville insisted.

  “No, no, no,” Henry replied. “A misunderstanding.” She knew what he was thinking. “Unfortunate about the heavy equipment, of course.” He laughed in sympathetic pain. “Believe me, it’s worse for him than it is for you. Meanwhile, welcome, neighbor.” He lifted his glass toward the sun, which seemed to have liquefied and spilled into the western sea. “Come on in and let’s have a short one.”

  This was the Henry she’d fallen in love with, who had pulled her by the hand through the Fulton Fish Market at five a.m. one morning, so she could see the men slinging sea bass to one another across the counters, warming themselves at their trash-can fires . . . living their secret life while the rest of the city was asleep. Henry didn’t get close to people, never identified with anyone (idiotic concept, he’d say), didn’t suffer their troubles or feel obligated or try to understand. And so he went among them with ease, while Charlotte tried to comfort and encourage, got hurt, felt guilty, admired and disparaged, and could hardly bear to walk down the street sometimes for fear of all the crosscurrents she would feel emanating from every other pedestrian.

  Narville gaped at Henry. Andrea, small and taut, with her blond hair pulled into a high ponytail, had come up on soft steps behind him, and smiled with polite incomprehension, as if she’d been offered a glass of motor oil.

  “Who did you say those people are?” Narville asked, turning back from a few steps away, sweeping a hand out toward Darryl and the others.

  “Aquaculturists,” Charlotte croaked. “Oystermen. Like, you know, farmers.”

  Her voice was drowned out by the deep groan as the bulldozer strained up the beach, pulling the truck by a cable looped around the axle. For a long minute the truck didn’t budge, but suddenly the mire disgorged it with a great farting sound, and among the men gathered on the flats an ironic cheer went up. Darryl shook his head and started off toward his grant. Tim hawked and spit over his shoulder.

  “Well,” Narville said, “they’re farming on my land.” He took Andrea’s hand and pulled her away—she gave Charlotte a dazed glance over her shoulder, a church-tea smile twisted between suspicion and apology—and a few minutes later they heard the Hummer start and tear off up the road.

  When they came back, Tim was the only one left on the flats. He’d lost three tides; he had to catch up, taking in three times as many oysters as usual, chiseling them apart, scrubbing the ones that were big enough and taking them up cape to the wholesaler, sorting the rest and getting them back underwater where they could grow. Charlotte, feeding Fiona her pastina in chicken broth at the picnic table on the screened porch, watched him work, a dark shape blending into the dusk. Fiona could not keep her mind on the food—she wanted to tell Charlotte the story of the exciting day over and over. By the time she’d eaten a little, Tim was visible only by the beam from his miner’s lamp, and moths gathered thick on the screen outside.

  They heard the Hummer pull into the driveway and Charlotte shuddered. Her persistent sense of wrongness, the thing that had made her sick after she sold the lot to the Narvilles, was confirmed now—she had put her hand out and tried to change something in the world, and now everything had swung wild and it was all her fault.

  “Maybe they had a good supper and they feel cheered up,” she said, and Fiona, ignoring the spoon Charlotte was trying to sneak into her mouth, held her mother’s hand and said, “They’ll feel better after a good s
upper,” in exactly Charlotte’s comforting tone, so that she laughed and gave up on the pastina.

  A shadow darted down the Narvilles’ front lawn and jumped clumsily from the seawall, heading out along the beach.

  “Fiona,” Charlotte whispered, switching off the light, “let’s go sit on the step and listen to the crickets.” They went out, closing the screen door so carefully you could barely hear the snap. The crickets were pulsing in their slow, end-of-summer rhythm—school was starting soon and on the beach across the way kids were gathered around a bonfire. The shadow floundered with comic effort over a stream that Darryl would have crossed in one unthinking stride, and bent down between Tim Cloutier’s racks, grabbing one of the grow-out trays, trying to tear it away from the rack.

  “Hey! What the hell?” Whether Tim was as immense as he seemed, or that was a trick of perspective, Charlotte wasn’t sure. What was clear was his stance, which reminded her he’d been a marine sergeant some years back.

  “I’m gathering my dinner,” Jeb Narville sneered.

  Tim overtook him in a half second, but as Jeb was a foot shorter and twenty years older than he was, he hesitated. Narville’s chest puffed as if he had the advantage.

  “Get off my claim, little man,” Tim said.

  “This land belongs to me,” Narville said. “I suppose we might work out some kind of rental agreement. Until then, you can get off of my land.”

  “Call the cops,” Tim said, turning back to his work.

  “You listen to me, boy . . .” Narville said. “I’ve just come from my lawyer this last hour, and it’s very clear that I own this land. I suggest you go and consult your own attorney and we can take it from there. Meanwhile . . . I’m hungry.” Narville, who would have guessed that, though Tim might have a public defender, he could never afford an attorney, reached for Tim’s oysters again, and Tim shoved him away. Narville fell back in the low water, struggling like a beetle on its back.

  “Jeb, Jeb!” It was Andrea, calling from the porch.

  “I’m fine,” Narville called back to her, struggling to stand. “Better than I was. That’s assault, by the way,” he said over his shoulder to Tim as he fled back to the house. He tried to lift himself onto the seawall, but couldn’t, and had to go around over Charlotte’s lawn.

  12

  CAPE COD GIRLS

  Fiona started preschool two days after Labor Day. In New York, there would have been hair tearing, and perhaps hair pulling, as Charlotte investigated twenty places, waving Fiona under the admissions directors’ noses to be sniffed like a wine, in hopes she might be considered worthy to finger paint alongside the best and brightest. In Wellfleet, everyone went to Mrs. Carroll’s, a plain square house on Valley Road where the pines seemed to shed a darkness as intense as the sun’s light. Mrs. Carroll’s living room was entirely given over to the school, with dress-up clothes on hooks all around, shelves of books and art supplies, a train set on a low table, a hamster, a parrot, and an aquarium. Then there was the little kitchen with the bathroom off the back, and the Carrolls’ bedroom, and that was all. Mr. Carroll worked for the Department of Public Works, and of course he had an oyster claim, so there was plenty of time for Mrs. Carroll to clean the papier- mâché off the dinner table before he got home.

  Most of the other mothers averted their eyes from Charlotte and Fiona. They’d known one another all their lives and didn’t feel up to bothering with a newcomer. It was a relief to see Betsy Godwin and her daughter, Alexis. Betsy smiled warmly, and Charlotte started toward her, but Alexis, with her hair pulled into four small ponytails fixed with fat round beads, regarded Fiona coldly. Alexis clearly understood that she was the standard by which other little girls must be judged, and felt for those who were about to be found wanting. Fiona headed in the opposite direction and sat down beside a small dark girl with a very large snarl in her hair.

  “Hi, I’m Fiona Tradescome.”

  The girl stared at her as if she had just done something utterly bizarre. Fiona looked up at Charlotte as if to say, I always knew everything you taught me was wrong. But Charlotte smiled back encouragingly and Fiona tried again.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Crystal!” the little girl said, as if Fiona must be an imbecile. “Everybody knows that!” There was a loud tap on the window—a round, hairy man whose T-shirt depicted a slavering hound. She waved to him and turned delightedly back to Fiona. “That’s my dad,” she said. “He picks up garbage on the end of a pole.”

  “Really?” Fiona said, with a baleful glance at her mother—why couldn’t she have married someone interesting?

  The girl nodded. “Once, he got a whole turkey sandwich, still wrapped up.”

  “Really?”

  Charlotte kissed the top of Fiona’s head, and began to tiptoe backward, bumping into Carrie, the clerk from SixMart, as grim as a jailer, her hand tight around the wrist of a little boy whose face was contorted with tears.

  “Do you want to be the only one who has to have his mother here? Is that what you want, for everyone to think you’re a little wuss?” she said. He cried harder, of course, and she had raised her hand, apparently to hit him, when Mrs. Carroll intervened.

  “Is this Tim Junior?” she asked, crouching down to his eye level. “Tim, I’m Mrs. Carroll; I’ve been looking forward to having you in class! Mrs. Cloutier, why don’t you stay for a few minutes?”

  “I’m late to work already,” she said, with a poison look for her son, and a truly murderous one for Charlotte, who had turned back toward her, because if she was Tim’s wife she must be Darryl’s sister. You’d never know it—he was glowing, expansive, ready to listen to any story, take on any job; this woman’s whole being seemed clenched against the world, her dark hair pulled into a squaw’s braid, her stance pugnacious, and her eyes sharp, as if she never knew where the next blow would come from. “It’s not like I can afford to lose a day’s pay,” she said bitterly, shaking her son’s hand out of hers and stalking out the door.

  The boy’s wailing set off a panic among the other children—Fiona ran weeping to Charlotte, Alexis called “Crybaby, crybaby,” from the door, two boys who had been involved in a quiet game began hitting each other with the toy trucks they’d been maneuvering.

  Mrs. Carroll sat little Tim in her lap and rocked him back and forth while he tried to escape. “The dad’s in prison,” Betsy explained to Charlotte, sotto voce. So that was why she’d been seeing Carrie out on Tim’s claim. Darryl had said Tim was on parole, and the fight with Narville must have tripped the wire that sent him back to jail.

  “You know, Fiona,” Charlotte said, “he misses his mom. Do you think you could help cheer him up?”

  Fiona jumped off her lap and threw her arms around the boy, who said, “Bitch, get your hands off me.”

  By the time Charlotte escaped it was ten o’clock, and she had to be back by noon. At home, she poured a cup of coffee and sat on the porch step in the sunlight, watching a fishing boat cross the mouth of the bay. She could hear Henry typing with one-handed fury below. He had learned on a manual, with his good hand, and though he used a computer now, he still hit every key with a vengeance. And that was all the sound there was: The Narville house was finished; there were no air compressors, no nail guns. Darryl had gone to work on Try Point for two guys who were building a place “in the Provençal style.” The Narvilles had stayed in their house all of four days, then headed back to Georgia before Charlotte could get up the nerve to pay a call.

  There was a soft sound—the first wave folding over on itself as the tide came up the beach. It used to be this quiet while her mother was sleeping off a round of chemo—the hours passing, a plane droning overhead. She’d had to get out of there—with one of the boys. . . . There had always been one or another, a boy whose suffering she felt more keenly than she’d ever felt her own, and she’d keep her arms so tight around him, her cheek against his back, willing him comfort as he gunned the motorcycle engine and they flew along the back road
s. Oh, if only they would get somewhere! But no, there was just the graveyard, the privacy in back of the headstones to pull off each other’s clothes, gently, like bandages. . . . Let me see; let me heal you.

  She called down to Henry that she was taking a walk and set off, looking for Darryl without admitting such a thing to herself, sticking her hands into her jeans pockets, then pulling them out again, not sure what to do with them. Ada was just coming up the road, having walked to the end of the point and turned back, and was talking to herself in a bright, thoughtful voice. . . . “So naturally he would have . . .” Charlotte heard her say, as if she were puzzling out some conundrum she’d been brooding over for years. Seeing Charlotte, she smiled and continued on, but Charlotte put her hand out.

  “Mrs. Town?”

  “Yes, that’s me.” She was older than Charlotte had realized, her face so lined it could have been a sketch, showing the tender resignation of a woman who’d made her peace with life.

  “I’m Charlotte Tradescome. I keep seeing you and I wanted to introduce myself.”

  “Charlotte Tradescome? Oh, my . . . yes, I know Henry has moved back to Wellfleet. It’s nice to see the lights on in the old house. I knew your grandfather, you know.”

  Charlotte tried to imagine this. She had not known either of her grandfathers herself. “On the Pelletier side, or Doyle?”

  Ada gave her a sharp look. “Tradescome, of course,” she said. “Henry Senior. In fact, I was his secretary for many years.”

  “Oh!” Charlotte said. “Oh! You mean Henry’s father. I grew up in New Hampshire.”

  “You—you’re not Henry’s daughter?”

  “No, no, I’m his wife!” Charlotte explained, enjoying her surprise.

  “You married him.” Ada peered at her, puzzled, concerned. The experience of her years shaded her voice with more nuance than Charlotte could absorb.