Body Surfing

  “Where is your dad buried?”

  “In Needham.”

  “Maybe I’ll go there one day.”

  Ben, beside her, pats down the loose shingle.

  Yes, she will go to Mr. Edwards’s grave, and she will bring roses. Not hothouse roses, but real ones from someone’s garden.

  But first she will go to see the painting at the Museum of Fine Arts.

  “Did you love Jeff very much?” Ben asks in a tight voice, as if he has been saving up this one question all afternoon. Sydney can hear, in his tone, how much the answer might mean to him.

  “I did,” Sydney answers honestly. “But when something like that happens, it puts into question everything you once felt. What comes after taints it.” She turns to see if Ben is satisfied with her answer or not, but he is standing, looking at the tide coming in.

  “Christ,” he says.

  Chapter 14

  They swim back to the boat. The tide has risen faster than Ben anticipated. He stays near Sydney, and when the weight of her clothes drags her down and her mouth fills with seawater, he clutches her arm and holds on to her until they reach the Whaler.

  At the boat, Sydney crawls up the stern and tumbles inside. She helps Ben lift the anchor. “I’m really sorry about this,” he says repeatedly, but she waves him away. She tells him she is glad for the sense of adventure, for the time they had on the rooftop. If she had to do it again, even with the risky swim, she would. She hunkers down inside the cockpit. The sweatshirts are of no use now.

  “We’ll be there soon,” he says.

  Sydney shivers, and when she glances up, she can see that Ben, too, is shaking inside his jeans and his soaked sweatshirt. He is running the boat as fast as he dares, the tide blessedly with them this time. As they pass through the gut, he cuts the engine at the dock. “I’ll let you off here,” he says, “and go out to the mooring. I’ll row in in the dinghy. Find someone and ask for a blanket. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Sydney does as she is told and waits for Ben in a small room meant to suggest a yacht club. Sepia photographs of sailing teams hang over the mantel. Elaborate silver trophies sit on wooden shelves. In a corner is a children’s library, a stack of board games on the floor. A young man has given Sydney a green flannel blanket in which she has wrapped herself. Still, she shivers—from the memory of the conversation on the rooftop or the cold, she doesn’t know.

  When Ben comes, she sheds the blanket, folds it, and thanks the young man. She and Ben jog to the car. Once inside, he turns on the heat full throttle. Again, he apologizes.

  “Ben, stop,” Sydney says. “It was fun.”

  “You’re still shivering,” he says.

  “I’m fine,” she insists. “I’m absolutely fine.”

  “You use the guest bathroom,” Ben decides as they step from the Jetta. “I’ll use the one at the end of the hall.” He calls to Julie as Sydney and he enter the house. Julie, emerging from her room, pokes her head over the upstairs railing. Ben takes the steps two at a time, and Sydney follows. “What?” Julie asks, a look of alarm on her face.

  “Sydney’s going to need some warm clothes,” he says.

  “Did you fall in?” Julie asks.

  “Not exactly,” Ben says.

  Sydney thinks it may be the best shower she has ever had. She runs the hot water for as long as it takes to warm her body, which seems to have chilled itself to its core. After a time, her shoulders begin to relax, the nearly scalding water on the back of her neck doing its job. She finds a quarter inch of shampoo in a bottle and washes her hair. Earlier, she heard Julie open the door and lay a pile of clothes on the sink. “They’ll be way too big,” the girl called from the doorway.

  “They’ll be great,” Sydney said.

  “There’s towels here, too.”

  Sydney feels as though she has just completed a long sail, as if she’d been in a race and won. A bowl of hot chowder would be perfect.

  She wraps her hair in a knot, using an elastic band she finds on the shelf of a nearly empty medicine cabinet. She dresses herself in Julie’s clothes—a navy velour running suit at least two sizes too big. Sydney appreciates the roominess and feels as she did as a child after a bath: cleansed all over, wrapped in the warmth of a towel nearly as large as she. She has to wipe the steam off the mirror even to see her face, pink now from the hot water. She wonders briefly if she will be the last person ever to use this shower, if the new owners will feel compelled to renovate the house or, worse, tear it down for new construction. She examines fondly the features of the bathroom she once shared with houseguests and a minister: the toilet with the handle one has to jiggle to get it to flush right; the slightly rusted chrome towel bar; the medicine cabinet with its metal shelves; the two globular lights at either side of the mirror, suggesting lanterns. When she opens the door to the hallway, steam travels with her.

  Ben is waiting downstairs. “Can I get you that beer you wouldn’t let me get you three years ago?” he asks.

  Sydney laughs.

  Sydney and Julie and Ben, bottles in hand, find seats in the rearranged living room. In the kitchen, Mrs. Edwards is making dinner. Sydney can smell pork chops.

  Ben said, earlier in the day, It’s hard to clear the life out of a house. It goes in black trash bags and boxes, Sydney thinks, surveying the room that once was familiar. It goes to the Salvation Army and to the dump. It goes to new walls and to new rooms, perhaps to a condo in Boston or to an apartment in Montreal. Will a painting or a small piece of furniture make the boat trip to the brown-and-yellow cottage on Frederick’s Island? Where will the white couches go? Or the long dining room table around which the family had so many dinners? Will Mrs. Edwards keep her flea-market finds?

  “After dinner, I’ll finish with the windows,” Ben says to Julie, “though I don’t know what good it will do. By Thursday, they’ll be salted up again.”

  “I’m almost done with my room.”

  “I’ll begin the cellar, too,” he adds.

  “Good luck with that,” Julie says. “I hate cellars,” she explains to Sydney. “I almost never go down there.”

  Sydney would like to help, but to offer is to suggest that she might be spending the night. It bothers her to remain idle, however. It seems to her that the time she once spent in the house demands some effort on her part in its dismantling.

  She will do the dishes, she thinks. At the very least.

  Ben has dressed in a black sweater over a white T-shirt. His face is coarse and reddened, his hair finger-combed over his ears. Perhaps he forgot his hairbrush. He is wearing a pair of khaki shorts he might have found in a drawer in the boys’ dorm. Sydney wonders if her old room has been cleared out, if the blue cobalt vase is now gone. Who’d have wanted that? Is it in one of the trash bags marked Goodwill?

  “Sydney’s going to come to Montreal to see my show,” Julie announces to Ben, who has drained his beer and is thinking, Sydney can see, of getting up to get another one. If he offers a second to her, she will accept. It may be hours yet before she has to drive back to Boston. Surviving the swim to the boat has made her reckless.

  “Good,” he says. “That’s when?”

  “January,” Julie says.

  “Well, I’ll come, too,” he says. Sydney notes that Ben assiduously avoids looking in her direction.

  “You will?” Julie asks excitedly. “Hélène says there will be a party.”

  The dinner consists of the pork chops, rice from a box, and a bag of salad with bottled dressing. It’s a meal not unlike the ones Sydney used to have in Troy: simple, rudimentary, tasteless. The chops are so well done Sydney can barely cut through them with a serrated knife. The four eat at the kitchen table, plastic mats under their plates. Sydney cannot escape the odd feeling that they are an ordinary family sitting down to its evening meal after a routine workday. Mother, son, daughter. What would Sydney’s role now be? Old family friend? Distant family friend? Former employee who almost married the second son?
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  Mrs. Edwards chews slowly, as if she has no desire for the meal she has just made. Perhaps all of life to her is now tasteless. Sydney remembers similar sensations after Daniel died and after Jeff left her on her wedding day: the notion that the world had lost its sensory properties, or she had lost the ability to perceive them. She would like to be able to share this thought with the woman but can only imagine Mrs. Edwards’s dismissive look were she to do so. The woman’s skin is red and blotchy. Grief has heightened her color.

  Across from her, Julie seems subdued. This might be the last dinner she will ever have in the house. She has not said yet when she is returning to Montreal. The death of Mr. Edwards would have been hard on Julie, too young to have a father taken from her. And mightn’t Mr. Edwards’s grief have been equally keen? To leave the child he clearly loved most at such a tender age? Would he have felt relief that Julie had Hélène? Did the dying have such thoughts? Or did one become more and more detached, ready to enter a different universe?

  Ben finishes his meal quickly. Sydney notes that he is on his third beer and is polishing that one off at a good clip.

  The man has lost his father and his brother, his mother to her mourning. His sister will continue to live in a different country. He pushes his chair back and turns his body so that he is gazing into the living room. He rests an elbow on the kitchen table.

  Sydney once again glances around the table: Mrs. Edwards, still fussing with her pork chop; Julie finishing her bottle of beer; Ben, tired, taking a long swallow. It is, she thinks, as if the family has been caught in a riptide and carried out to sea, each of them swimming sideways, parallel to shore.

  When Sydney has finished washing the last of the pots, she cleans the stove. She wipes down the surface, removes the burners, soaks them in the sink, and digs out the debris stuck in the seams between the stove and the granite countertop. She opens the oven door and briefly ponders tackling that as well. To do so, however, would require asking for oven cleaner, to which Ben or Julie would certainly reply, No, don’t do that; that’s too messy a job. Mrs. Edwards might not reply at all.

  Sydney decides to clean out the refrigerator instead. She wipes down the interior, washes the shelves and the bins in lukewarm water. She throws out food she is absolutely certain no one would want: rotten onions in a net bag; liquefying lettuce; a jar of olive tapenade with a layer of flourishing green plant life. The other items, even the marginal ones, she replaces exactly as she found them. Mrs. Edwards might think the refrigerator is not Sydney’s province, that she has overstepped her bounds.

  The freezer is filled with unidentifiable items in plastic bags, most with a fur of frost on them. Sydney shuts the door.

  When she has done as much as she can with the refrigerator, Sydney begins to clear out the cabinets. Definitely not her province, but she doesn’t feel, despite the impending drive back to Boston, that she can quit working until everyone else does. Perhaps there will be a small celebration at the end of the evening, with slices of the triple-berry pie Sydney spotted earlier in the cake tin.

  She removes every item from the first cabinet: second-string dishes one might use for cereal, aqua bowls that can only have been a house gift, small juice glasses with bright red cherries on them, plastic dishes in the event one didn’t want to use real ones on the porch. Never once, the entire time Sydney lived in the house, did anyone ever use a plastic dish.

  Mrs. Edwards passes through the kitchen without comment. Sydney is mildly surprised that the woman doesn’t even stop to stare. She glides silently through twice more while Sydney is on her knees on the counter, reaching into the back crevices of a cabinet with the sponge. It is as though the woman has forgotten how to talk.

  When Mrs. Edwards enters the room for the fourth time, Sydney hops down from the counter. The woman sighs and climbs the stairs to the second floor. Sydney listens for footsteps overhead. Mrs. Edwards is on her way to her bedroom.

  Sydney can hear Ben in the rough drag of heavy objects against the cellar floor. She thinks Julie may have gone up to bed. She sits at the kitchen table with a glass of water from the tap. Her presence here is superfluous and suspect; it is time she was on her way. She wonders briefly where she put her briefcase with the key she earlier removed from her pocket. Maybe her clothes will be dry. In a minute she will go to fetch them, dress quickly, and then find Ben so that he can drive her to her car at the public parking lot. That accomplished, she will head south.

  But first, she must do one more thing.

  Sydney enters her old room and closes the door. The beds have been stripped, the bureau and the nightstand cleared of all debris. Even the bedside table lamp is gone. Sydney sits on the bare mattress and lets her eyes adjust to the ambient light.

  There is no cobalt vase with a feather on a sill, no red-enameled chair against the wall. She wonders who slept here after she left the room two years ago, and when it was finally emptied in preparation for the closing. She remembers Jeff standing by the window, Sydney thinking he might be crying.

  She knew her decision to divorce Andrew was simply a painful choice she had to make. Daniel’s death was evidence of a cruel and capricious universe at work. But Jeff’s actions might always puzzle her. Were they a missive from the dark underbelly of human existence, indicating a fatal narcissism and a stunning lack of empathy? Had he done it for the sport, the kill? Or could he not help himself, caught up in a rivalry that had begun before he’d even realized it? Jeff was selfish, certainly, and perhaps hardwired to be competitive in spite of his own best interests. But did that make him evil? Or merely a flawed and all-too-real human being?

  It was impetuous what I did, she remembers Jeff saying to her in Julie’s bedroom the night the girl went missing. Even careless.

  Sydney stands and glances once more around the room, trying to remember herself before there was a Jeff or a Ben or a Mr. Edwards or a Julie. She can see only the faintest of images, barely substantial: a young woman, twenty-nine, living from day to day, suspended between a life she was trying to recover from and a life she could not then have imagined. The images fade even as Sydney watches. The room falls very dark, and she shuts the door behind her.

  When she turns, she sees Mrs. Edwards standing in the upstairs hallway. The woman has a cardboard carton in her arms. “Are you lost?” she asks.

  Interesting question, Sydney thinks.

  “Mark wanted you to have this,” the woman says. She holds her arms out, indicating Sydney should take the box from her. Sydney is surprised by its weight. On the top of the box, in black marker, are written instructions: This box to Sydney Sklar.

  “I was going to have it shipped to your address,” Mrs. Edwards says, “but since you’re here. . .” She pauses. “Before he died, while he was still able, Mark packed up a few things and made notes as to where they should go. I don’t know what’s in here,” she adds, her tone implying and I don’t want to, either.

  “Thank you,” Sydney says to the woman, who is even now brushing her scant hair off her forehead.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll be here long,” Mrs. Edwards says.

  “No. I was just going.”

  “Well. . .,” Mrs. Edwards says, seemingly at a loss for words. She gives an odd wave of her hand. “Safe trip!” she adds—a woman seeing off an acquaintance about to head to distant lands.

  Sydney carries the box into the dining room, where there is not much light but less likelihood of someone walking in on her. With a breath for courage, she opens the carton.

  There are dozens of upright manila files. Sydney sees the name Beecher on one and knows immediately what the box contains. Mr. Edwards has given her the history of the house.

  She closes the flap of the box, as if protecting it. That the man, knowing he would die soon, put his files into this carton and wrote her name on it is almost more than she can bear. Did he understand that his wife would sell the house? Did he think that someone might come in and tear it down, destroying all that history? Did h
e believe that, of all of them, Sydney would be its most appreciative trustee?

  She cries until it is all out of her: the longing for the family, her grief for Mr. Edwards, her anger at Jeff. She cries until she gets the hiccups, and then a headache.

  Sydney fetches her clothes from the drying rack and puts them on where she is standing. She folds the navy velour sweat suit into a neat package. Through the front windows, she spots Ben sitting on the porch. With the box under her arm, she opens the door.

  “Hey,” he says. “I wondered where you were.”

  “I’m leaving now. Would you mind giving me a ride back to my car?”

  “What’s that?” he asks, pointing to the box.

  “It’s. . .” Sydney opens her mouth, but cannot answer him. Wisely, Ben doesn’t press her. Perhaps he can see that she is in some distress.

  “Sit here a minute,” he says.

  Sydney sets the box on a teak chair and joins Ben on the top step. The air is warm, suggesting a tropical climate. Sydney has to remind herself that it’s mid-September in New Hampshire.

  “Your clothes are dry?” he asks.

  “A little damp.”

  “You want a beer?”

  “I have a two-hour drive.”

  “A cup of coffee?”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  Actually, she would like to lie down. She wishes she had an excuse to sleep in the house tonight, to slip out early tomorrow morning. But she will not do that. “It smells like the sea tonight,” she says.

  “East wind.”

  “It’s nice,” she says. “What will you do now?”

  “I’ll work on the cottage until it gets too cold. There’s a fireplace there, but the house isn’t insulated. Then I’ll return to the city, commute back and forth when there’s a stretch of good days in the forecast. By November, the cottage will be uninhabitable. And then I guess I’ll have to think about the rest of my life.”