The House on Oyster Creek Read online

  Andrea bent over, her fists clenched, and Charlotte felt her own throat close on the same sorrow—if it had been Henry, cold, hard old Henry . . . her heart would have crumbled away just like this. She knew too well that a child was still alive in Henry, a child who needed so many things. She shuddered; she couldn’t bear to think.

  “The projects?” she echoed, stupidly. Of course, look around—that was why everything in the room screamed money the way it did, why even Andrea looked as if she might have been gotten for the highest bid. Money was freedom, safety, beauty, love, and if you’d begun in servitude, danger, ugliness, and need, you’d never be able to put enough layers of it between you and the past. It would just feel better to have another Hummer in the garage, for good measure, and you wouldn’t want any mangy stand of lilacs marking the edge of your property, but a solid and preferably very expensive fence. You’d despise anyone who reminded you of those bad old days, and certainly you wouldn’t want them desecrating your million-dollar view.

  Henry wasn’t so different, really, except that he had started with enough money that he knew it wouldn’t save him. He felt about obscure poets the way Narville felt about high-end brand names.

  “This house, it was supposed to be his dream come true,” Andrea said, weeping so openly and sadly now that Charlotte felt ready to weep herself. “Every day he was going to sail in the bay the way he did that week, forty years ago.”

  “Oh, oh, Andrea.” Charlotte relinquished the coffee cake and reached out to hug her. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Why did everybody hate us so?” Andrea asked. “Jeb, he does—he did his best. Oh, he was the worst yoga student you ever saw!” she said, laughing and crying at once. “He was stiff as a . . . well, he reminded me of a gargoyle. He barely even tried to do the stretches. Then it turned out he took the class because he’d seen me! That’s the way he is; he goes and gets what he wants. He wanted me so much.”

  That made him indispensable. This, Charlotte could understand.

  Jeb had been in a rage since Skip left. Everything had gone wrong, all along the way. He watched Tim set out the racks that morning, clipping the grow-out trays on them, and as soon as the truck was gone, he’d set out to avenge himself, taking the oyster rack by its legs, intending to wrench it out of the mud, pull it up and throw it over the way you’d upend a table in a brawl. He had no way of knowing how sharp a growing oyster could be, nor how the young ones clung to the racks. The oyster shells sliced deep into both of his hands—Andrea heard him cry out, looked out and saw him fall back into the water. She ran to help him but the best she could do was to pull him in toward the beach so he wouldn’t drown as the tide came up. By the time the rescue squad arrived, his pupils had blown out . . . he was gone.

  She grimaced with her whole body. “I guess it was there for years; it was leaking blood into his brain. I guess I should be grateful it happened quick,” she said.

  “That’s a blessing,” Charlotte said, holding her tight. “At least he didn’t suffer.” She racked her mind for more of the phrases commonly used to put a patch on grief.

  “He wanted a Viking funeral,” Andrea said. “You know, in a burning boat?”

  “No . . . I didn’t know.”

  But Jeb had pillaged like a Viking, grown rich and fat like a Viking, and Charlotte supposed he ought to be borne into the next life in a flaming longship.

  “They’re pretty particular about what goes in the bay.” She realized this wasn’t the right thing only after she’d said it. “I mean, you’ll need some kind of town approval. Maybe Skip could help?”

  “Skip just put in a new kitchen with my inheritance,” Andrea said sharply, and blew her nose.

  “So you’re not sorry the suit is over?”

  Andrea looked at her wearily, then glanced around the room, the enormous furniture, the plasma TV screen covering the whole back wall, the bank of French doors, and the crystalline view. Finally she dropped her gaze—resigned, Charlotte thought at first, until she realized Andrea was stretching her leg out to contemplate a diamond ankle bracelet she was wearing.

  “No,” she said. “This just isn’t the place for me.”

  36

  A PERFECT BEACH DAY

  A perfect beach day, a Saturday right in the middle of August, and inland the temperature was forecast to hit ninety-five. The tourists would be happy, and tonight they would arrive in the restaurants sleek from their showers, feeling smart and beautiful and a little richer than they did in the rain, ordering martinis and oysters, oysters, oysters, and after dinner they would stroll among the shops, buying linen ensembles and wide-brimmed hats for the lives they felt they were so very close to leading.

  And jewelry.

  “They don’t need me until later. Tina will sit there all day alone,” Betsy said, “but tonight they’ll come in from the beach and they’ll want to buy, buy, buy.” She tilted the beach umbrella a little more toward the west and stretched deliciously, showing off the silver ring on her second toe.

  “You can’t ask for more than this,” Charlotte said. “High tide at two p.m., not a cloud, barely a breeze . . .”

  “Well, maybe one thing,” Betsy said conspiratorially, pulling out a pink thermos. “Cosmopolitans!”

  There were bright umbrellas tilted in the sand already, all around the bay. Everyone on earth would go to the beach today, and in the years and decades ahead, men and women would look back and stretch this and the few other days like it until they came to stand for whole summers of long, perfect days at the shore, days like the one Jeb Narville had hoped to replicate when he built his new house, like the one Charlotte remembered, when her parents had been happy and she’d been a little girl who didn’t know the dangers of life. Someday Fiona might look back and remember this day, the light and freedom, Oreos and lemonade, the bright red beach pail with its yellow shovel.

  “I’m going to feed one to the bordies!” she said, running toward a couple of seagulls that took flight in alarm. “Bordies, come back, bordies!” she cried.

  “They don’t like Oreos,” Alexis said in her spider’s voice, rolling her eyes. “They like clams, and dead meat, and things.”

  The little girls skittered along like sandpipers at the lacy edge of the water, and Betsy shaded her eyes with her hand, looking out to the mouth of the bay. Charlotte sipped. “God, what a day.” There was a moment of blissful silence, marked only by terns crying.

  “Is that a whale spout?”

  “Where?”

  “Over there, but it can’t be; it would have blown away by now.”

  “It looks like smoke.”

  “Is it a boat on fire? Was it last summer, or . . . before you moved here, I guess, that the Muertaros’ boat blew up in the harbor?” Betsy rummaged for her cell phone and dialed 911.

  “It’s what? What? Oh, no, come on . . .”

  She covered her mouth with both hands and looked at Charlotte wide-eyed. “It’s Jeb Narville! His Viking funeral!”

  “Pass the potato chips,” Charlotte said grimly.

  Betsy shook her head. “That poor man.”

  “To Jeb,” Charlotte said, lifting a Cosmo in a plastic glass.

  “To Jeb!”

  “I can’t help but think it might all be the aneurysm; that if he were thinking clearly he never could have gotten so angry.”

  “You haven’t been here long enough,” Betsy said, shaking her head. “People get like this when they buy a place by the water. It’s only natural, really: You invest a million dollars in a house, and it’s supposed to be perfect, a dream house. They built those condos down by the wharf, advertised the view of the fishing boats, sold the places bing, bing, bing; then those people moved in, formed a condo association, and started trying to put the fishery out of business! They said it was ugly and it smelled bad and it was detrimental to their property values!”

  “Life is hilarious.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Betsy said. “I had a little fling with a guy who lived
in those condos,” she confided suddenly, much as she might have admitted to spending too much on a pair of shoes. “They’ve got amazing views, I’ll say that.”

  Right. While Charlotte and Darryl suffered and yearned and steeled themselves against love, Betsy had been meeting some man for champagne and strawberries in his condo over the harbor. Of course.

  “How did you manage it?”

  “Oh, it was summer, and I’d just go over if the store was quiet, you know. It was . . . an interlude . . . that’s all. I wasn’t hung up on him or anything.”

  A sandpiper tiptoed nearly up to Charlotte’s foot to take an Oreo crumb. They could see flames as well as smoke now, as the boat began to blaze.

  “It’s nice to smell woodsmoke,” Charlotte said. “It makes me look forward to fall.”

  “Just think, you’re breathing in a little of Jeb Narville.”

  “Betsy!”

  “Well, it’s true!”

  “I don’t know . . . now that Andrea told me all about him, I can’t hate him anymore. It’s discouraging.”

  “Have a sandwich,” Betsy said kindly. “I’ve got cucumber and scallion cream cheese on whole wheat, or PB and J.”

  Fiona and Alexis were back, with seaweed. Alexis was modeling kelp around her shoulders like a brilliant green shawl, and Fiona had a bubbly, branched one arranged as a wig. Two little boys who’d run along the water’s edge from the public beach stopped and pointed at the funeral boat. A flock of tiny sails flitted out from Try Point, turning abruptly with a shift in the wind.

  Henry came up behind them, standing there on his stork legs, uncomfortable as always when he was away from his desk. He was taking a break from The Torturer’s Horse to write a short biography of Ada Town, and this had lightened his mood.

  “Is there something on fire out there?”

  “It’s Jeb,” Charlotte said.

  Suddenly the fire went out. The boat had broken and sunk out of sight.

  “She’s putting the house on the market,” Betsy said.

  “New neighbors,” Charlotte said. “I hope they’re nice.”

  Henry shook his head sadly. “It’s not that kind of house,” he said.

  37

  THE SOUND OF SNOW

  “Now,” the kindergarten teacher said kindly to Fiona, who was sitting at a tiny desk, alert and at the ready, as if she were about to pilot a space shuttle into the stratosphere. “Can you draw a picture of yourself for me?”

  Fiona had passed the first test—piling four blocks on top of one another—and now she seized the crayon and with lips pursed in fierce concentration drew a face with hands and feet attached, then two larger faces hovering on either side.

  “That’s a very good picture,” the teacher said, giving her a wide, lipsticky smile. “That’s you?”

  “Mama, Dad, me,” Fiona said crisply. Then: “No, wait! I left out the water!” She grabbed the paper back and drew a long blue squiggle across the bottom of the page. “There: me.” She folded her hands in her lap. She was a member of a family, a citizen of this place. That was her.

  She couldn’t wait another minute for school. All through Labor Day weekend she was tensed and ready to spring, and on Monday afternoon Charlotte took her on a last run into Hyannis for more school supplies, just to keep her from jumping out of her skin. They found themselves in something between a traffic jam and a parade—thousands leaving, hundreds standing on the bridges over Route 6, waving good-bye, holding signs that said, THANK YOU, and, COME BACK SOON! Red Cross tents were set up at the rest stops, offering coffee and doughnuts. The radio announced the length of the bridge backup: six miles, eight miles, then eleven. In Kmart they bought a Hello Kitty pencil box and erasers shaped like jungle animals, and headed home, nearly alone on the road.

  As Charlotte tucked her into bed that night, Fiona grabbed her hand and refused to let it go.

  “Mama, I want so much to be . . . what I’m supposed to be.”

  “Oh, my girl . . .” Charlotte sat down beside her. What was to become of a five-year-old who could know such a thing about herself, who already had the words to explain it? Her eyes sparkled so as she sat up against the pillow, clutching her bear tight, scarcely able to contain her excitement as she rushed off to meet life. To look at her was to believe the world must be entirely good, entirely.

  “Fiona, you are so much more than what you’re supposed to be.” It was going to be a big part of Charlotte’s job to make sure Fiona could go beyond what she was supposed to be; that, she knew.

  In the morning they walked up Point Road, Fiona in her red plaid skirt, her hand so tight in her mother’s, and here came the bus: Boat Meadow. In the afternoon Fiona would leap off, barely able to contain all her stories. The maple tree would turn red, the bay its deep fall blue, and later the oak leaves would get their Persian rug colors. By Thanksgiving, the marsh grasses would be as gold as Kansas wheat, and Charlotte would see Desiree pushing her new daughter in a carriage, walking the same route Ada used to take every day. One day there were three of them: the baby’s father, who’d disappeared over the bridge when Desiree got pregnant, had come back and was walking along self-consciously beside her, beside his family. It was that or lose a piece of himself, Charlotte knew. At the new moon in December, she woke up to see headlights sweep over the ceiling as Tim and Bud and Westie headed out to the flats to take the oysters in. Darryl had been able to move his grant out next to Nikki’s, near Egg Island.

  The Narville house was sold to a barrel-chested guy from Quincy. “Great spot! Maximum potential!” he barked the day they met him. He intended to buy up a piece of the harbor for a marina, which pleased Betsy, because yacht people were also jewelry people. Of course he was having the house renovated, from stem to stern. Hot tub, koi pond . . . ridiculous. He was having a paddock put in—he liked the sound of hooves on stone. And he had a live-in cook, so the open-plan kitchen had to go.

  The old town, the real town, was disappearing, little by little, day by day. The men gathered at the SixMart counter seemed to know they were becoming picturesque, like the last lions of Africa. One morning Charlotte went in for some coffee and found a photographer from the National Geographic setting up a time to go out on the flats with Bud and Jake. “You get some great light right after sunset,” Jake was explaining. It was true—all the streams of the estuary would reflect the bright sky even after the sun was down.

  The brilliant fall devolved into a warm, rainy winter. “Never should have taken the animals in,” Bud kept saying. “All that work for nothing.” In April the apple trees that had washed in from the wreck of the Franklin started to bloom, and the yellow shutters were off the windows at the Lemon Pie Cottages. Taking Fiona to her piano lesson, Charlotte passed Darryl on the highway—he was turning down Paine Hollow Road, talking on his cell phone, doing his job. As she was doing hers.

  Then she came upon him in the hardware store, looking up the barrel of a socket wrench with a funny grin on his face. He blushed as if she’d caught him at something; then she blushed, and her knees started shaking so she had to press them tight together and talk very seriously about the tides.

  “. . . and for the moment I can keep up with the orders,” he said, looking away. “George always asks after you, by the way.”

  “George?”

  “George McConnell? At the North Wind, in Boston? He had the idea we . . .”

  “Gee, where would he get that kind of idea?”

  Darryl smiled. Everything was right there between them, just like always.

  “Well, give him my regards when you see him,” Charlotte said.

  “I will. But I won’t see him for a while. We’re going away . . . me and Nikki . . . gettin’ married and takin’ her brother out west. There’s a clinic out there, in Colorado—might be able to help him.”

  “That would be terrific,” she said. The phrase getting married was folded so deep into the middle of the sentence, it was hard to get at it. “And congratulations on the wedding!�
�� She surprised herself, chirping this out so brightly. She sounded like the kind of person who probably let days go by without thinking of Darryl Stead.

  “It seems like the right thing,” he said simply, as, when they’d been working together at the Narvilles’, he’d run a board between two ladders for her to stand on while she painted, and had bounced on it lightly to test it. “Seems solid,” he’d said then.

  “I’m just—I’m so happy for you.” The right words, but jealousy twisted them, made them syrupy, as if she were amazed someone would stoop to marry him. And then, trying to make up for that, she let her real feeling show on her face, and his face was crossed by a phantom suddenly, and he dropped the socket wrench back into the bin and said, “The bolt’s in the truck,” and was gone.

  Standing there with her package of vacuum cleaner bags, a piece of screen to cut for patches, and a twenty-pound bag of potting soil, she felt she’d lost her life’s best chance at love. But later, years later, it began to seem that she and Darryl had collaborated to make each other a gift—a memory preserved whole as in a snow globe, safe from the ordinary difficulties, the disappointments and uncertainties that corrode a love over time. They’d dreamed the same dream together; it helped them face their real lives.

  There was the year of the red tide, a plume of toxic algae that streamed down from the Gulf of Maine on a spring nor’easter, hitting Wellfleet just before Memorial Day—the first day of the season, when coffers empty after the winter would have begun to fill. Every oyster and clam was tainted; it took most of the summer for the algae to clear. Then, just as things seemed to be getting back to normal, a crazy storm blew up with no warning and came in at just the right angle to drive a surge of water up the bay, carrying the oysters and their racks with it, smashing them against the seawall. Bud’s whole crop was ruined. “I’m takin’ the hint,” he said, and put his house on the market and drove south to Pensacola to start a charter fishing business. The same storm unearthed the bones of a shipwreck at the back shore, stark as a skeleton in the desert. Skip and Betsy had bought the whole block Betsy’s Fine Jewelry was on, renovated it with brilliant taste, and opened Alexis’s Old Tyme Ice Cream Shoppe, a “country store” selling tin pails and cute aprons, and the Watermen’s Grill, with a raw bar where you could taste oysters from every cove in Wellfleet.