The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  “In fact, you’d studied the past so thoroughly you were able to see into the future. . . .”

  Henry writhed, but the drunken oration continued, Orson rolling each new compliment over his tongue with a nearly obscene pleasure.

  “Vietnam,” Henry said. “That raging energy—you could feel it in the streets, everywhere. Everyone went dancing every night; the women were ablaze with it. . . . My God, they were beautiful.”

  He gave Charlotte a hard glance—she had disappointed him by aging.

  “I used to roar at my father, after he voted to reelect Nixon,” Henry said. “Oh, the house shook. . . .” He laughed. “I can see him shouting up the stairs at me—‘You should see a psychiatrist!’ He thought I was a traitor—you understand.”

  Orson nodded dolefully. “My father forced me take up law,” he said. “He thought it would make a man of me.”

  “Do you still practice law, or have you retired?” Charlotte asked. “What do you think about Jeb Narville’s lawsuit?”

  “Wills and trusts, my dear, wills and trusts . . .”

  “Still, you must have some sense. . . .”

  “I’ve long since despaired of penetrating the popular—or, for that matter, the judicial—mind. It’s not going to be about what’s best for the town, or the people, or what’s most ethical and fair. It will be about the way the judge interprets what’s written as law. A very similar lawsuit shut down the aquaculture in Truro ten years ago, so precedent would seem to be on Narville’s side. Tim Cloutier is not what you’d call a charismatic fellow, and you’ve got twenty people signed on as plaintiffs already. They have the money, so they have the lawyers. We shall see.”

  “Orson, why are we living under the King’s Law all these centuries later?”Charlotte asked.

  Orson leaned back in his chair. “Wealthy people own the beachfront and, coincidentally, the government. They have no incentive to change a law that works to their own benefit.”

  Here was Orson’s cognac, and for Charlotte, a plate piled with calamari.

  “I didn’t order this,” she said to the waiter. “I mean, they erased it off the board; I thought you said you were out?”

  The waiter looked over at Darryl, who was laughing as if he’d pulled off a great joke. Charlotte turned up her palms, mouthing, What? How? and he stood up, stiffly, and came over to explain.

  “They’re running. It’s easier to catch them than not. My cousin works in the kitchen—he ran a line out the upstairs window.”

  Back at his table, Nikki tapped a cigarette out of her pack, smelled it, fitted it back in again. Charlotte couldn’t quite speak.

  “They’re just squid; the sea’s full of ’em,” Darryl insisted, but there was such light in his face, as if the rest of this sentence, unspoken, were . . . And I own the sea, so I got it for you.

  “Oh, of course, squid. Now I see.” She laughed; she felt she would cry. “You . . .”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, going back to Nikki. Maybe that was true. It didn’t feel that way. It felt as if he had blown, gently, on the last ember of an old, old fire, and it had whooshed to life with the force of a blowtorch.

  Orson and Henry, civilized creatures, had been attending to their drinks; Orson was warming his glass in his palm and opining that Columbus was the only mass murderer ever to have a holiday named in his honor.

  “People ask how we can say he discovered America,” Henry was saying. “It’s simple enough . . . he was able, he had that kind of imagination. The Native Americans didn’t guess there was a land beyond this one—or they might have discovered Europe.”

  “It’s so,” Orson said. “It’s so.”

  “Of course,” Henry said, “he was reprehensible. . . .”

  “People who do things always are,” Charlotte said. “They’re trying to get somewhere—to the New World, or to the root of some problem—they focus on that; they forget the other stuff. The rest of us worry about what might go wrong, who we might hurt, and we don’t get anything done.”

  “There’s a grain of truth in that,” Henry said, surprised.

  “Have some calamari,” Charlotte said with her mouth full. “Here, have a tentacle. They’re so good.” The faces, the candlelight, the conversations around them; everything was spinning gorgeously together. “I love this town,” she said.

  “It’s quite a place,” Orson agreed.

  “I think this is the best wedding anniversary we’ve ever had,” she said, giddy.

  “Is this our wedding anniversary?”

  “It is.”

  “How long since we were married?”

  “Forever!”

  Henry smiled at her, crookedly, sweetly. “That sounds about right.”

  She drank the wine down, hearing the boats bump against the pilings, the foghorn, the name Wolfowitz repeated like a soft wind through the trees. The nation was lurching over a precipice—“A superpower on the skids,” Henry said, and he and Orson shook their heads in grave agreement. . . . Yes, they’d been right all along. Skip had left Ada’s table and gone back to Betsy to give a report. Darryl was explaining something to Nikki—with an intensity that made Charlotte guess he was telling her about rehab. Rehab had saved him, given him hope that he wanted to share with everyone he met, but Nikki looked as if it were an old story she’d heard once too often.

  The two girls who were clearing the tables were the ones Charlotte had seen standing at the side of the road that first day. They were Carrie’s daughters, Desiree and Jelissa. They went to the high school in Eastham; Charlotte would see them getting off the bus at the Driftwood Cottages in the afternoon. They moved smoothly among the tables, proud to be grown-up and working, sashaying a little to show off their hips, wiping each table with one efficient sweep of the rag.

  At home, Henry paid the babysitter and bade Charlotte a formal good-night at the bottom of the stairs; as she fell asleep she heard his footsteps on the shells in the driveway as he set off for the Mermaid.

  15

  THEY

  Charlotte had never been a woman who could assume love was her due. She was pretty sometimes, with the dark hair and the blush coming up in her cheeks, but any lapse of confidence and it all fell apart—she became awkward, anxious, with eyes narrowed, a raw need in her face no one would like to see. That Darryl had seemed . . . well, seemed was the word, wasn’t it? He was a natural: He could hear the qualities of different silences and his eyes reflected every sparkle they saw. It would be easy to mistake his intention. Still, Charlotte felt as if a knot in her chest had hatched and was stretching its shimmering wings.

  She hadn’t guessed what fall would be like here; they’d had a light frost that shriveled the morning glories, but the roses were still blooming. The bay was a dark, bottomless blue; the oak leaves, last to turn, made a tapestry of deep colors like a Persian rug, the marsh grass thick and gold. Every afternoon Charlotte and Fiona scuffed through the woods, imagining how souls must sneak from tree to tree around them, shivering cozily. Fiona, Alexis, and Crystal went trick-or-treating together in the town center, each holding tight to her mom’s hand. Fiona had never been outside after dark before. In every doorway an old woman hovered, offering candy in exchange for a glimpse of the children’s excitement. Alexis and Crystal were Disney princesses, but Fiona went as a witch.

  “You look so beautiful,” Ada Town said, and Fiona stamped her foot and cried,” I don’t! I don’t! I look ugly! Like a witch!”

  “I’m sorry, dear, you’re quite right,” Ada said. “I was wearing the wrong glasses.”

  Along with the mini-Snickers and Tootsie Pops in Fiona’s bag, Charlotte found a “Preserve Our Boat Meadow” pamphlet. The picture on the front showed Oyster Creek at sunset, so still, so beautiful with the pink clouds reflected and the grasses turning red at the tops, that Charlotte felt a pull of homesickness, as if it were a place she’d loved and lost already. Inside was a photo of Bud Rivette’s claim, with Darryl’s truck parked at the side—it reminded her t
hat Jeb Narville had called it a junkyard. There was a bulleted list of the perils of aquaculture: damage to the eelgrass beds; danger to shorebirds, turtles, and horseshoe crabs; the “voluminous waste produced by oysters and the consequent increase of sedimentation,” whatever that was. “For our children’s sake,” it read, “let’s stand together against the desecration of our most precious resource, before it’s too late.”

  Charlotte’s heart might be swelling, but others’ were closing up tight. Winter was coming, the tourists had gone and taken all the money with them, no one would buy oysters until Thanksgiving. Tim being away, Darryl was helping Carrie with her grant as well as working his own. The two of them would be out on the flats by the light of Darryl’s miner’s lamp before the sun was up, the raw wind rattling Charlotte’s windows. Cars were parked at the end of every other driveway, apparently poised to turn, with FOR SALE, RUNS GOOD, $6880 OR B.O. signs in their windows. On the fences, signs advertised firewood for sale, snowplowing, handyman services, brush clearing . . . anything that might inch a family a few days farther through the winter. Dramas that played out crisply in sleek Manhattan living rooms were ragged here, like the wounds of a blunt knife, festering, scarring, slow to heal. At the hardware store, Charlotte’s credit card wouldn’t go through, and the cashier was so kind (“The fourth one today,” he said. “I know mine’s at the limit. Gonna be a lean Christmas”) that she put all her purchases back rather than use another card and let him know she wasn’t in his predicament.

  “Truck’s floor rusted through,” someone was saying in the next aisle, as Charlotte tried to fit the weather stripping back into its spot. “Won’t pass inspection, and when I tried to take out a loan for a new one, Joe Silva at the bank said he didn’t want to stick me with a debt I wouldn’t be able to pay if I lost my grant.”

  “If they win, I’m going south,” said another. “Get a little place in Mississippi and raise catfish.”

  “How ya going to do that?”

  “Sell my place!”

  It was Bud Rivette—Charlotte recognized his laugh as it turned into a deep smoker’s cough. Bud’s place looked likely to fall down any day, but no matter—it was on a wooded hillside, less than a mile from the bay, and whoever bought it would tear it down, top some trees, and build an upside-down house with a water view.

  “Meanwhile I gotta build gear, and the mesh is three hundred dollars a roll.”

  “Charge it,” someone said, with a laugh that was more like a groan.

  “I’ve got a buddy in North Carolina, grows geraniums.”

  “Geraniums?”

  “Yeah, geraniums. You plant ’em, you water ’em, they grow. When they’re big enough you sell ’em. Everyone loves geraniums. No one’s ever gotten sick from one. No one ever moves in next to a geranium farm and complains it’s ruining their view.”

  “They . . .” someone began. Charlotte wanted to go around the aisle and make it clear she wasn’t a member of “they,” that she loved this town because you could still touch the earth here; everything hadn’t been buttered over with wealth, crusted with high-end beauty salon/spas, surfaced with the finest Italian marble. . . . The rooms hadn’t gotten bigger and bigger until they looked like hotel lobbies; they were still rooms where people lived and children built block castles on the floor. Up on the back shore there were miles of rough scrub plants grown low and thick under the wind, and the Atlantic Ocean looked as vast and blank as a desert. You looked at life from a different perspective when you saw this and remembered these light-houses had been built to warn ships away, because if they ran aground in a storm, the waves would batter the ships to splinters, and their men to death.

  These thoughts didn’t matter; nor did it matter that she hadn’t joined the lawsuit, that she was repulsed by Jeb Narville and admired Darryl and the others, with their lives of methodical effort and small gain. She hadn’t been born here, gone to school here, been disillusioned by love or crushed by debt here. None of her relations had been lost at sea, or to an overdose, or the kind of car crash that came from gunning an engine in a drunken rage with the momentary illusion that you will escape, because you have that spark of imagination even though no one ever noticed; you’ll get out of this town and make something happen in the world. A boy she knew back in New Hampshire had died like that, a week before their graduation. They’d given him a hero’s funeral, saying that he’d lived every moment to the fullest, lived his life on the edge; he was always a risk taker—it ran in the family. It would have been too sad to say that he had been careless with his life, because it didn’t seem to be worth very much.

  The name Cloutier had proud meaning in town—Tim’s uncle went down on the Sola Mara when it was pulled under by the enormous weight of scallops it was trying to bring back from Georges Bank; his cousin OD’d on a January night and was left by his frightened companions to freeze on the roadside. Tim’s father had worked for the Department of Public Works all his life, pocketing a percentage of the dump fees year after year. When he was discovered, the town manager took the blame for subjecting him to temptation. They gave him a job where he wouldn’t come in contact with money and the matter was closed. The Cloutiers had suffered, had been brought low—they belonged.

  “Our boat meadow?” Charlotte asked Betsy Godwin, as they waited at Mrs. Carroll’s for pickup time. “Who’s ‘our’? Did you get one of these things in Alexis’s Halloween bag?” There was no name, no phone number on the pamphlet, but reading it aloud Charlotte couldn’t help mimicking Preston Withers’s Yankee accent.

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s just meant to get people thinking,” Betsy said. “Bring the issue out into the open, you know.”

  “Is there really a shortage of eelgrass?” Charlotte asked. “Is crabgrass endangered too? And do oysters produce voluminous waste? I thought they helped clean the water—filter feeders, you know. . . .”

  “I don’t know!” Betsy laughed. “I’m in retail. How do you like my new wheels?”

  She was driving a brand-new BMW, a bulbous SUV. She’d parked next to Carrie, whose tailgate was tied shut by means of a rope pulled through a rust hole.

  “Spiffy,” Charlotte said.

  “I’ve got room to drive the whole Saturday gymnastics gang now,” Betsy went on; then she smiled at Carrie and added, “Though who needs another monthly payment, huh?”

  Charlotte hardly dared look at Carrie—she was too hungry to know every single thing about her. How could it be that Darryl’s goodness was evident in every move, while his sister had that renegade’s gleam—the tough, pocked face, the eyes flashing with shrewd judgment? Carrie glanced at Betsy and away, as if, due to an unfortunate blind spot, she could not see BMWs.

  Mrs. Carroll had taken the kids on a field trip and they weren’t back yet, so there they all were together, the moms—Lisa Gonsalves of the bait-shop Gonsalveses, Pam Powers the liquor store cashier, Geneva Mulligan of Mulligan Electric and Stell Mulligan of Mulligan Chimney Sweep, Stephie Brown whose husband dove for lobsters and Lolly Soule who was married to the Soule Propane guy. Lisa and Steph and Lolly, who had been in the same class at Wellfleet Elementary and then Provincetown High, stood together, backs to the others. They’d married their high school sweethearts; this had determined their fates. Lolly had a bright, kind face, and it was easy to imagine her winning Matty Soule, a shy, pudgy man who had inherited the gas company from his father, knew everything about gas stoves and bass fishing, and if you brought up any other subject would smile helplessly and cast his eyes to the ground. Lolly’s house was paid off; they owned an enormous boat and a Florida time-share, while Steph and Lisa were just getting by. Pam was twenty; she’d had her older son the night of her junior prom, then Crystal, the girl with the tangled hair whom Fiona had befriended the first day. The others kept a motherly watch over her. They opened their circle to Betsy too—Betsy with her jewelry shop and her husband’s Main Street office had a clear place in town. Charlotte might have been a CIA agent, or witness protection client,
for all anyone knew.

  Pam was so bowed down, her eyes so dull and her voice so weary, it seemed as if she’d carried those children until she began to droop to the ground. The boy was with her now, complaining in a high, thin voice while she repeated, eyes closed: “I don’t care, I don’t care.” Charlotte was glad to see her, though. Pam was the only one who would really talk to her.

  “You look tired.”

  Pam sighed and rolled her eyes. “What Freddy Low expects for ten dollars an hour,” she said. Freddy Low managed the liquor store. “Not that I give a damn. I’m over it, I can tell you.”

  “I wonder why they’re late,” Charlotte said. A stiff wind had come up and the pine trees were shaking their shaggy boughs. Everyone pulled their sweaters tighter. Charlotte realized she still had the “Preserve our Boat Meadow” brochure in her hand, and folded it into her back pocket in hopes no one would see. There was a hoot of laughter from the circle of other moms at some story Betsy was telling.

  Steph and Lisa had sat down together on Mrs. Carroll’s front step, talking about the tides. Both their husbands had oyster grants, though Steph’s was off Egg Island and wasn’t affected by the suit. They glanced over toward Betsy, worried she’d overhear them. “He’s a lawyer,” Lisa said with a shrug. “That’s what they do.”

  Carrie, who’d been sitting in her truck the whole time, gunned her engine suddenly and drove away, tires squealing.

  “Jesus,” Lisa said, “is she using again? She’s out of control.”

  A flurry of looks passed among the moms. They’d jumped at the roaring engine the way seagulls flap up in a scare, and now they settled themselves back into one group. Betsy made sympathetic puppy-dog eyes, shaking her head, and the others looked grim, censorious, and also proprietary.

  “She’s my cousin,” Pam told Charlotte. This was a quiet boast, the way Charlotte might have mentioned that she had a friend who wrote for the Times. “We used to call her the Stump Grinder.”