The House on Oyster Creek Page 16

  “It must be hard on her,” Betsy said, “having her husband . . .”

  “Up the river,” Charlotte finished darkly, just as Betsy said politely, “. . . away.”

  “Why would anyone marry that guy?” Charlotte asked, though what she wanted to ask was whether Betsy understood that her new BMW had come at Carrie’s expense.

  “I guess love’s always a mystery,” Betsy said, in a sentimental singsong.

  Pam said, “Boy, you can say that again,” and there was a flurry of sighs among the women.

  “Mysterious as quantum mechanics,” Charlotte said, and they gave her that What kind of freak are you? look she remembered from high school.

  “I mean, it works by the most complicated, convoluted laws,” she said, “but they’re laws just the same.”

  Pam stepped away, but Betsy giggled. “Skip and I were one of those love-at-first-sight things; we just couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”

  Charlotte and Henry had been a love-at-first-sight thing too—they’d set off a burst of static in each other, a distracting, unreadable signal that neither of them could escape. With Darryl . . . Charlotte looked up the road, wishing to see him, at least catch a glimpse of his truck in passing. She’d come to think of it as the Very Honorable Truck—its patchwork pieces, its ladder rails built of two-by-fours—there wasn’t much left of it, but it did what it needed to, every day, and when she saw it on the beach, or getting gas at SixMart, or waiting behind the school bus as the first graders tumbled into their mothers’ arms, she felt a little safer, as if the truck itself were proof of a steadfast goodness woven through her life. She attended to Darryl’s movements like a sunflower turning its face upward, east to west all day. From a distance, always. If she saw him getting gas at SixMart, she’d go to the Texaco in town. It was worth a few cents more per gallon to avoid him, out of fear there’d be no spark in his eye.

  Mrs. Carroll’s van came over the rise then, and she pulled into the driveway just as the sky began to redden behind the pines.

  “Sorry, ladies, someone rolled his Jeep on suicide alley. We were detoured through Harwich and half of Orleans.”

  Fiona leaped out into Charlotte’s arms, still talking a blue streak to Crystal, who gazed at her with fond amusement and something like pride. Then Alexis came out, stepping carefully in new shoes, and the others, and last of all the sturdy and pugnacious Timmy Junior, who looked around and said, “Yeah, I told ya my mom wouldn’t be here.”

  “She was here a minute ago, honey,” Charlotte said. “She probably just went to get some cigarettes.”

  “Or some dinner,” Betsy rushed to say, to protect her from defamation.

  “She’s always outta cigarettes,” Tim said.

  “Tim, you come on with me,” Pam said.

  “Nah, I’m gonna walk home,” he said, puffing out his chest. It was about four miles, but of course he was too small to have any idea of that.

  “I’ll take you home, honey,” Charlotte said. They lived in the Driftwood Cabins; if Carrie wasn’t there Charlotte could just keep him until she came home. But Pam and the others closed ranks as if they suspected the worst kind of things about Charlotte.

  “That’s all right; I’ll take care of him,” Pam said, taking him by the arm, but Timmy shook her off.

  “I’m walkin’!” he insisted, setting off up the driveway with manly steps, only to turn and run back in terror.

  Carrie pulled in with a squeal of tires. “I’m here, I’m here,” she said. “Get in the truck. I said I’d be here and I’m right here.”

  “You weren’t here,” Tim said. His face started to crumple, and he made a fist and punched the truck door.

  “Don’t cry,” Carrie said, leaning across to yank him up into the passenger seat by the arm. “Just don’t, or I’m gonna fuckin’ cry too.”

  16

  FOG

  December’s full moon fell on the sixteenth, nearly Christmas, though there wasn’t a proper chill. In spring, the cool wind off the water had kept the temperatures low. Now the water held its summer warmth long after frost had withered the green on the mainland. There were still a few little roses blooming on leafless canes outside the kitchen window: That morning as Charlotte stirred Fiona’s oatmeal on the stove, she looked out to see each bud glazed with a perfect coat of ice, like Persian domes.

  And beyond, the tide receding over the ridges of the flats, and one truck, Darryl’s, parked at the water’s edge. The men had been out every minute they could be the past few days—they were getting the oysters out of the water before the hard cold. The tides wouldn’t be low enough again for two weeks, and by then the bay could be frozen over. Most of the grants were bare by now, and you’d see the rusted racks piled up against people’s garages beside their stacks of lobster traps, or under the hulls of jacked-up boats. Darryl had helped Carrie clear her grant, but his own oysters were still on the racks.

  Charlotte had put a load of laundry in the dryer when she first came downstairs, but an hour later it was still sopping. She got the stepladder and drove a nail into the soffit over the porch, tying a rope between it and one of the oak branches, feeling magnificently capable, a veritable frontierswoman. There was a bag of clothespins in the kitchen drawer, and the day was clear, though a fog bank loomed like a distant mountain range over the back shore. The laundry was mostly Fiona’s—her overalls printed with teacups, her striped turtle-necks and footie pajamas—and Charlotte had to wring each piece out before she could hang it. She waved when she saw Darryl look up from his work, and when he had a full load and started driving up the beach, she stood her ground, methodically pinning Fiona’s pink socks to the line.

  He drove up and parked directly in front of her.

  “You!” he said, jumping out of the truck as if his pleasure at seeing her were too great to be borne sitting down, coming to stand on the other side of the laundry basket, smiling and smiling.

  “You!” she said, and every tender, furious, disappointed, prayerful atom in her heart was in it, the one syllable. It made him shy.

  “How are you?” she asked, averting her eyes a little. He looked so substantial in orange waders and a thick sweatshirt. The most natural, appropriate thing to do would be to walk right into his arms.

  “Good. Pretty good,” he said, measured. If the gods were looking down, they wouldn’t see anything suspicious, just an ordinary conversation. “Busy, I mean. Really busy. Between my grant and Carrie’s, and trying to get the house on Try Point buttoned up tight before winter.”

  “That’s nice of you,” she said, “to be helping Carrie, I mean.” Really she had no idea what she was saying, but it didn’t matter. If they’d been reading the shellfish regulations aloud the message would still have been clear. “Can I help? I’d be happy to.”

  “Nah, I’m fine.”

  Then he thought again. “But . . . come down if you’d like, just to hang around. I . . .” He took a deep breath. “I’ve missed you.”

  Life became so beautiful at that moment that Charlotte could feel it glowing around her—every bit of it, the black ducks patrolling like old gossips at the water’s edge, the weight of the waterlogged dish towel in her hand.

  “I’ve missed you too,” she managed, so softly she wasn’t sure he could hear.

  “You can wear my extra boots.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  She ran around the house and tapped on the basement window. “I’m going down to help Darryl on the oyster claim.”

  “You are?” Henry asked, looking up from his desk.

  “Yes. So you’ll answer the phone?”

  “Certainly.”

  She hopped into Darryl’s passenger seat, pushing his extra jacket, tide chart, pliers, gloves, and rags aside to make herself a spot.

  “Wait.” Foam stuffing was pushing out through a tear in the seat, and he tore off a length of duct tape to patch it. “There, that’s better. We gotta take this load to Tim’s mom’s house. She has a
root cellar. Then we’ll go down and get the last load in.”

  “I guess this must be what it’s like in heaven,” Charlotte said, leaning back into her seat.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. Or, I guess . . . somehow this feels like driving to the hardware store with my father on a Saturday morning. Or . . . it’s nice to see you.”

  A happy, secret grin flashed over his face and he glanced sideways at her. The truck bounced and squeaked at every little bump. They turned onto the highway, then off into the woods, toward the back shore.

  “Like wild picking,” he said. “We’d go the first day of the season every year. My father knew every nook and cranny of all the little coves. We’d be up at the crack of dawn; he’d make me coffee full of milk and sugar. . . .”

  They’d turned down a sand road, and finally into the driveway of a sagging cape whose shingles were curling up with age. Set into the back hillside, behind a pile of lobster traps overgrown with vines, was a low wooden door such as might lead to a hobbit hole.

  Darryl lifted each bag of oysters out of the truck bed and handed them to Charlotte, who set them in stacks beside the door. They barely spoke, picking up each other’s rhythms, crouching low as they shifted the bags into the dark earthen room.

  “Won’t they crush each other?”

  “Nah—see, the big ones are in the bottom bags; their shells can stand a ton of pressure. Literally. The little ones have thinner shells; they don’t weigh much at all.”

  “Don’t they need to breathe?”

  “They’re dormant; they don’t need air, or water, or anything. If it gets too cold I’ll run an extension cord out the kitchen window and turn on a lamp with a hundred-watt bulb in there. If it’s too warm I go down to the rink in Orleans and get a load of ice from the Zamboni.”

  They heard a window open, and Tim’s mother called to Darryl from above.

  “Come around the back; I got somethin’ for ya.”

  It took her some time to get to the back door . . . she was very small and old, and she avoided Charlotte’s eyes—in fact, she seemed to avoid seeing Charlotte at all, as if out of some superstition. She opened the door just enough to hand Darryl a package wrapped in newspaper.

  “Cod,” she said. “Bud brought it over; I got it dryin up th’ attic.” This sentence had been constructed to fit within one shallow breath. A cough seized her as soon as she finished, and she bent into it, waving them away. Her hair was all wiry tufts with pink scalp visible.

  “Wanna come take a ride with us out to the flats?” Darryl asked her, and the idea made her laugh until a new coughing fit started.

  “I gotta wash the livin’ room walls this afternoon,” she said, shutting the door again.

  “She never leaves the house,” Darryl said as they drove away, the truck slipping sideways on the sandy hillside. Now they could see the ocean, its blue sameness stretching endlessly. “It happens to women around here; I don’t know why. They’re inside raising their kids and then the kids go off and they don’t want to come out.”

  “They’ve got those walls to wash,” Charlotte said. “If she never leaves that house, then she never sees all this, and it’s a few minutes away.” They were driving along the ridge of a dune: The whole spiral of the cape curved out before them.

  “Yeah, it’s a funny hollow down there.”

  “Everyone misses so much, because they don’t quite dare to look. When I think . . .” She stopped, because what she was thinking was how big and powerful Henry had seemed once, how she’d imagined she could keep safe by marrying him.

  “It’s true,” Darryl said, thoughtful, regretful. “I was married . . . before . . .” he said suddenly.

  “Before what?”

  “Before I got thinking I was going to be great big shot in the entertainment business.” He checked the rearview mirror and veered down Point Road. “A notion fueled by huge amounts of cocaine, and . . . Anyway, I used to be married. Six bleary months, and she still uses my name—Lisette Stead—why?”

  “Maybe because she’s proud of it. Maybe you’re the nicest thing that ever happened to her.”

  “That’s pretty far-fetched.” He laughed, turning onto the sand. But he shot a glance at her to see if she meant the compliment.

  “We should be able to get the last ones in,” he said. “If not it’ll have to wait till tomorrow, and that’s going to be a lousy tide.”

  His old red canoe was tied to the nearest rack—by the time they’d settled the bags into it the tide would have come up and they could float it back to the beach. “Here, you go down the row and take out the pins; I’ll throw ’em in the canoe.”

  It took some strength to work the pins but she was getting the hang of it.

  “We gotta bring the racks in too,” Darryl said. The rebar was crusted over with translucent young oysters clinging tight as limpets. Charlotte bent down to pull the corner of one rack up out of the mud.

  “No, no, no!” he yelled, but it was too late. Charlotte yelped and grabbed her bloody thumb tight in her fist.

  “They’re sharp,” he said. “Those new shells are like razors.”

  “So I see.” She shuddered. She could still feel the oyster’s edge against her flesh, like her knife slicing through a chicken breast in the kitchen.

  “I’ve got Band-Aids in the truck. Stay there.” He ran and leaped to the truck and back. “There, the blood’s a good sign; it’s cleaning the wound, but you’d better wash it—just swish it in the salt water; it’s deeper over there.”

  She did, and dried it on her shirt, holding it out so he could put on the Band-Aid, but he hesitated, as if he were afraid even this little touch would be inappropriate, so she took the Band-Aid in her good hand and put it on herself.

  “That’s nothing, believe me,” he said. “Tim cut himself last summer—I guess there’s an artery at the base of your thumb? The blood came out in jets; it was unbelievable.”

  “That guy can’t do anything right.”

  “You wanna know something about Tim?” Darryl said suddenly. “He’s got a copy of Chesapeake on his bedside table—he loves it. He reads it over and over. I don’t think he’s ever read anything else. He’s proud to be working the tides like he does; it means everything to him. I’ve known him most of my life. I’d be him, if . . .”

  “If what?” They were back at work; a breeze had come up from the east, and the foghorn at the end of Try Point started—it sensed the damp even while the sun was still shining.

  “If it weren’t for dumb luck. I played football in high school; everyone looked up to me.” He laughed—derisive. “Because I was good at football. Also I was a stoner and a heavy- metal fanatic, and for a while I made a pretty good living unloading bales of dope up in Bound Brook in the middle of the night. That’s the national seashore; no one’s there to see—all the guys with boats were bringing stuff in from Mexico and Colombia back then. It beat hell out of codfishing.”

  They worked along consistently, though Charlotte’s thumb slowed her down.

  “You certainly do sound like a lucky guy,” she teased.

  “No, I mean . . . I never got caught. My hearing was always really good—I just had a certain awareness, I knew when something wasn’t quite right, I knew when to get out of there. Then it turned out that I could do stuff with sound—I had a knack for it. So I escaped. I mean, not that there’s anything to escape from, but you know what I mean . . .”

  “Darryl Stead, I do not know what you mean! You were talented, ambitious, you listened, you understood things, and you used that talent to get away from a dead-end life. Not . . . not that this is a dead-end life . . . but . . .”

  “No, it’s not; it’s not a dead-end. It’s good, solid work, in the most beautiful place in the world. You’re exhausted at the end of the day, a good exhaustion.”

  “Exactly,” she said stoutly.

  “Except that when you’re shellfishing, you’re kind of running in place. No one gets wealthy; the
y just keep their heads above water, year after year.”

  “I’m seeing that,” she admitted.

  “Or even secure. You never know what’s going to hit you next—red tide, parasites. . . . Have you ever seen a moonsnail?” He kicked over some shells on the seafloor until he found one that looked like someone had used a hole punch on it. “See that? Their tongues are like drills. They bore right through a clam shell and suck out the meat.”

  “So where do New York washashores fit in—are we parasites, or predators?”

  He stood up, hands on hips, arching his back to stretch, and laughed. “It’s not your fault. I know that. Tim is spoiling for a fight, always. The people who’ve signed on to the lawsuit, every one of ’em’s had some kind of a run- in with him. He acts like he owns the town.”

  “What was he in prison for in the first place?”

  “Oh, he bit off a piece of Rob Welch’s ear.” Rob Welch was the deputy police chief.

  “That’s just something a person should never do,” Charlotte said. “Even the worst cop has the right to possess two whole ears.” They laughed happily, naturally, a couple of old collectors admiring an excellent specimen of human folly.

  “In Tim’s defense,” Darryl said, “I should say that Rob Welch was my partner in high school crime. We had a marijuana patch back in among the old woodlots; we did quite a business. When I see him in his uniform I always feel like there must be a real cop tied up in a closet somewhere. When we were kids, there was your house, and Ada’s, and almost everything else was wild. We knew every inch of it; we picked oysters all through the inlet here, and blueberries in the summer. . . . It seemed like it all belonged to us. Then the real estate developers turned up, and one day there was an empty cul-de-sac out in the middle of nowhere, and then there were houses around it . . . and of course they tore up all the blueberry bushes and planted lawns. Tim never got used to it. He’ll still walk right through someone’s yard if he feels like it.”

  The tide had lifted the canoe, and the fog was drifting over them in thick wisps—it felt like you could reach up and pull off a piece. They couldn’t see Try Point anymore, or Ada’s red house at the head of the creek, and they worked along quickly, silently, in a kind of dream.