Two if by Sea

  Another little door opened.

  Frank had never told Eden and Hope about the baby. The thought of Natalie standing on the table and shouting out their joy made his hands shake. His bad leg ignited.

  Leaning forward, he urged the car ahead. The three hours from the airport seemed far longer than the twenty hours from Brisbane.

  • • •

  Ian splashed languidly in the oversized claw-footed tub that was the centerpiece of the new upstairs bathroom. But when Hope tried to lay him down in bed alone, the boy made it clear that he would not go to sleep until he was assured that Frank would be beside him. Like a small businessman, Ian cast his eyes upward and pointed at the other side of the demulcent queen-sized bed that took up most of the smallest of the five bedrooms in the farmhouse. He pointed to his hand, asking for paper, and drew that funny little thing, the arrows along the horizontal line—right, left.

  “I’ll be up in a moment,” Frank said. “I want to talk to . . . to Grandma.”

  Ian eye-rolled and Frank laughed.

  “He doesn’t believe you.”

  “I really will come,” Frank said.

  In the big living room, paneled with logs from the maples that fell for the gourmet kitchen, Frank told his mother about the storm, the flood, and the rescue. He told her about the hillside at Tura Farms—unused land that Cedric and Brian worked with a local priest to have set aside and summarily consecrated. On the morning after the funeral, although the crowd would have been huge if Frank had allowed it, only a few doctors came from Our Lady Help of Christians, as well as Natalie’s brother and Frank’s crew chief. They stood with Frank and Tura and Cedric under a hastily thrown-up tent, in, impossibly, another swizzle of rain. Natalie’s father Jamie’s favorite song was, of course, “Waltzing Matilda,” and a friend of Natalie’s, a young intern who’d studied violin at conservatory, played that, and then the lullaby “Tura Lura Lura,” like the name of Frank’s employer. The late Mrs. Donovan had sung that song to lay down her babies. With people practically on their knees in tears, Brian ended the short ceremony by repeating a part of the Yeats poem about the entry into heaven of a fiddler from Dooney.

  At this, Hope smiled, got up and took a volume down from her banks of curved bookshelves, and read, “ ‘When we come at the end of time, to Peter sitting in state, he will smile on the three old spirits, but call me first through the gate. For the good are always the merry, save by an evil chance, and the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.’ ”

  “She was merry,” Frank said. “I don’t know how she ended up with me.”

  “Oh, Frank. You were what she wanted. She lit up when she talked about you. She lit up when anyone talked about you. You were the great love to her. It’s unbearable.”

  “Mom,” Frank said. “Natalie was expecting a baby. By the time we came here, we’d have had a son.” Hope gripped his arm. Frank almost resented it then—how much more it hurt Hope than it seemed to have before. Perhaps he only imagined that. Frank kneeled beside the arm of her chair and let his mother put her cool hand on the back of his neck.

  “I know you’re more than grown up, but all this makes me feel terribly protective of you, Frank. This is way, way too much. My poor boy.”

  “You didn’t know how much fun we had. I didn’t want her to go to work. I was like this high school boy. I wanted her to come and watch me train horses so I could show off. Do you know what that’s like?”

  Hope said, “Not that exactly. Your dad was older.”

  “I thought we were just getting started . . .” The dry wedge formed in Frank’s throat. “We had a whole life to know, and then, when we knew everything, to enjoy it together growing old.”

  “That much I do know.”

  “You do. Yes, you do, Mom.”

  “The little boy . . .”

  “Mairead, Hugh’s wife, was married before. Brian Donovan was in no shape to take care of him.”

  “I see. Tell me how it was, Frank. About everything. Work backwards. Nothing ever got worse from talking about it.” It was one of Hope’s axioms, like “many hands make light work,” or “discretion is the greater part of valor,” “lie down with dogs, get up with fleas,” or (Frank’s favorite) “a day without sunshine can be very restful.”

  So Frank sat back on the floor and traced patterns in the old Oriental carpet, and told Hope how recovery workers quickly found the bodies of Brian’s wife and daughters, and her brothers and their families. He described the Mass for all of them on December 27, at Brisbane’s Cathedral of St. Stephen. He was lucky to be able to schedule the Mass at all. Funerals were being booked like two-for-one holiday cruises. He pleaded what was by then a rare flirtation with the truth: he had to go back to the United States very soon, and, as his home was destroyed, he had nowhere to live with his little boy. Like everyone else in Brisbane, it seemed, the priest knew both Natalie and Brian. Natalie had been the first doctor to see Father Lawrence Boynton in the ER when he broke his ankle in a fall on the way home from his own brother’s late-in-life ordination; his brother had raised a family and buried a wife before becoming a priest.

  Frank went with Brian and Tura. Cedric stayed home with the little boy. It was the cathedral’s name day, the Feast of St. Stephen, celebrated anciently in Ireland by children carrying a stuffed toy of a wren from door to door to beg for pocket change—supposedly for the poor bird’s funeral. The church was bedecked in purple and red and set about with holly bushes. Clerestory windows laid gold bars of late afternoon sunlight over the grand, horrible carnival of fifteen caskets of Australian camphor laurel, an extravagant waste of a beautiful hardwood that no one could help but forgive, next to the huge framed image of all of them, made by a beach photographer the day before Christmas Eve. Natalie’s family was buried in the same festive, silly clothes they wore in the photo, the guys in identical shirts with great, blue Parramatta flowers on them, Natalie and her mother and the girls in plain blue sundresses. That fact alone loomed surreal: it had been such a short time that Frank could remember how they all smelled—the little girls’ grapefruit shampoo and lemon butter from the shrimp lunch they’d all had in midafternoon. The big family photograph, with smaller copies for everyone made by Brian’s office staff, was the only representation of Hugh and his wife, Mairead, whose bodies still had not been found. Just twelve hours before the funeral, Brian’s daughter Adair was found in the wreckage of the hotel, her badly battered body identified from her dental records. Brian had seemed ready to accept the solace of the Mass with a fragile peace. He’d covered enough “miracles” that he’d still kept a slender thread of one wrapped around his finger for Adair. The discovery demolished him. Frank had to push Brian in a wheelchair—for he would go right back to the hospital—and Brian slumped to one side, as though he’d had a stroke as well as broken his leg. Adair had just had her purple braces put on. The purple cost more, and she’d written her daddy a letter, thanking him. She was almost thirteen.

  Natalie’s obituary was on the front page of the newspaper—the Donovans’ the greatest loss of life in one family from this catastrophe or perhaps any catastrophe. They would all slumber together under one piece of dark gray granite with a rood of Australian copper. Although at the end, Frank felt oppressed rather than uplifted by the great press of the Donovans’ Catholicism, and even Brian stared vacantly at the repeated promises of the world to come. Frank’s comfort came from Cedric and Tura’s offer of that hilltop, Frank told Hope, knowing that a part of Natalie lay under ground he’d walked on and ridden on and loved—even though it was only expedient, because the largest Brisbane Catholic cemetery was flooded.

  “It was selfish, to want her buried there. For I thought, even then, why would I want to live there? Look at it every day? Coming back was what we planned to do, Natalie and I, in time for Edie’s wedding.” His mother nodded. “And then, I decided it would be better for him, here. For Ian.”

  Hope laid the book down and said, “I know.”
r />   “I didn’t even think of what to do with our apartment. Insurance and so forth. Brian said he would find a lawyer to sort it out.”

  “You can deal with it from here.”

  “I just wanted to get home,” Frank said. He paused, then said, “You should know this, though. The little boy isn’t any relation to the Donovans, Mom.”

  “What do you mean?” Hope raised her two hands and pressed her palms together. “What are you telling me, Frank?”

  Frank told her then, in unsparing detail, about his decision to bring the child home with him, entirely against the laws of any country and good sense, and, strangely, his own will—although nothing would have changed his choice now. Finally, he told her about the hold of the airplane, and all the animals. Hope sat silent for a long while, five minutes.

  “So much has happened to you. You’ve just lost your wife,” his mother said. “And your unborn son. You’re not yourself.”

  “That didn’t make it right! But somehow, I don’t think there’s somebody out there looking for him. He had to have a father of his own. Everyone has a father.”

  Hope nodded, her face composed. “If there was a father who was alive, you might think he’d have seen that picture of you in the paper. Wouldn’t he? It ran everywhere. Germany. Japan. All over the world.”

  “You couldn’t recognize the child from that picture. You could see his orange sneakers. And just a corner of his face.”

  “You would know if it was your child, Frank. Then again, I’m not sure that a month is enough for someone to come forward.”

  “I didn’t want anybody to come forward! I dragged Charley into it, too.” Briefly, he told Hope about how he had gone to Charley in the early days, with Ian by his side.

  “You could tell Charley didn’t like it. But you could tell he didn’t hate it either. He’s a straight-up guy. And he would have taken Ian. But I wouldn’t give him up.”

  Hope went back into the kitchen for more coffee and returned, sitting down in a double-sized chair closer to Frank. She always drank coffee, the high-test kind of coffee, all day and through the evening, like religion, and she slept exactly eight hours each night without getting up at all. She closed her eyes in the dark and opened them in the dark, just before six, and had all her life. Even as a child, Frank was an indifferent sleeper, who envied his friends’ ability to fall into small comas even on the bus home from school. When he asked Hope her secret, she said it was because her soul was just, and Frank, in his reverence for her, never thought of this as ironic. “So, how did your friend Charley manage to come up with a passport?” she asked. “Especially at such a chaotic time.”

  “I think anybody can do it, maybe especially in a chaotic time. It’s shady, of course. Lawyers know people like police know people. They just don’t talk to those people. The birth certificate calls him Ian Smith Donovan, in the name of one of Natalie’s dead brothers. The other papers call him Ian Smith Donovan Mercy. The birth year is right. I didn’t want to know too much. But, Mom, I know enough!”

  “Maybe this man wanted to give you some way to deny it . . .”

  “There’s no way to deny it.”

  “I think I hear him,” Hope said. “Let me go up and check.” She sprinted up the stairs, with more alacrity and bounce than Frank could have done, and Frank sat back, using his hand as a forceps on his temples to ease the tension that perched between his eyes. He still found it difficult to believe that he had done what he had done.

  He recalled the live power lines of tension that whipsawed the air between him and Charley as he sat in his library, looking at Frank, then at Ian, his face first grave, then concerned, then amused, then resigned. Without talking about why they were doing it, the two men took their places at laptops and began searching the databases for missing children. In Brisbane and the surrounding area alone, there were thirty alerts for children under the age of eighteen—one of them Natalie’s niece. None of them was a blond male child about three years old. Frank next moved on to the six provinces, turning up a wild number of missing teenagers, hundreds of them between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. The numbers of missing children under the age of twelve dropped sharply. Excluding the cold cases, there were a few dozen, and not a single one a child of Ian’s age or description. After an hour’s search, with a last look at Ian, Charley told Frank he would call Frank in a few days.

  “Does he cry out in his sleep?” Hope said, returning from the bedrooms upstairs and taking her place in the big chair.

  “He does sometimes.”

  “It scared me. I was going to pick him up, but he never woke.”

  “I want to wake him up and tell him we’re here, and nothing can hurt him. But I don’t want to disturb him either,” said Frank.

  “You were talking about you and Charley.”

  Frank told his mother about the search of the databases for missing children, and how few turned up, none like Ian.

  “How can that be? In a whole country?”

  “That whole country has a population not much larger than the New York metropolitan area, Mom.”

  “Maybe the father or mother was hurt. What if he’s in the hospital? I suppose, in that way, you could think of it as being a foster-care arrangement until you can find the father. You can take him back.”

  “Take him back to Brisbane? Maybe. I don’t want to. Say he has a father. If he is out there, he’s looking for his child. But, Mom, I know there’s a different story to this,” Frank said. “I was a cop for twenty years. You have a sense of things.”

  “I don’t want to push you, Frank. But think of what you’re saying. This doesn’t make sense. I know how you did it, but why did you do it?” Hope’s face creased. With a sigh that showed how tired she was—and this terrified Frank—she pincered her own temples, just as Frank had done. He didn’t think of his mother as having an age. As Eden said, Hope had cooked everything, a great kettle of obscenely caloric creamy potato and leek soup, turkey with stuffing, braised beets with bleu cheese, two kinds of pie, and a tart.

  “You and Natalie were expecting a baby boy. Then, here was this little boy.”

  “No, it wasn’t that . . .”

  “It’s not myself I’m thinking about. Having him here. Any culpability I might have. He’s fine. A great little kid. But he had to come from someplace. Even if his mother died, and his brother, that poor little boy, he has other people . . .”

  “He has no other people.”

  “You should talk to somebody, Frank.”

  “You mean a lawyer, here in the States?”

  “I mean a therapist,” Hope said, “I mean a psychiatrist. This isn’t the way you talk. Ian’s fast asleep. I want to do some reading and go to bed myself. This has been quite a day. I have to help Jack get to bed first.”

  “I’ll do it,” Frank said. His grandfather had his own apartment, two rooms and a small bath, at the back of the house. Frank had added them thoughtfully, so that Jack had a big picture window and his own entrance that led directly to the older barn, the one Jack had built himself, where they still boarded several horses. Having him on his own helped his mother, or so Frank believed. In his addled fury, Jack routinely treated Hope like a servant and sometimes went off his nut and smacked her with the old shillelagh he’d bought forty years ago in Ireland. But he could still read fluently, and did, for hours at a time, almost to the exclusion of everything else. He could still shower himself, and even shave, although he’d shrunk to the size of a seventh grader. He hadn’t known Frank at all and seemed wary of Eden and Marty.

  “He won’t let you,” Hope said. “We could pay for nurses. We’ve tried. He’s like your horse.” She stood up.

  “I’ll help you at least,” Frank said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  “Another time. You must be worn out, with all this. He’s not your responsibility,” Hope said.

  “He’s not your father.”

  “He’s Francis’s f
ather. He loved me as a daughter,” Hope said. “I’m used to it.” In one of her weekly letters, Hope said she put up with Jack because there were moments when Jack’s glance betrayed how deeply shamed he was.

  “It’s too hard for you now, Mom.”

  Although Hope put on her lipstick and swooped up her long hair before she ever came downstairs in the morning, Frank never thought she looked artificial, or as though she was trying to cover up her age. Now he thought, She’s seventy-two. He had never asked his mother why she and his dad had married when she was twenty-one, only to wait for ten years to have a child. Perhaps they hadn’t. Perhaps no child had come until Frank, and then so many years between him and Eden. Back then, people didn’t talk about such things.

  “Well, it might have been getting to be too much for me,” said Hope. “Now it won’t be. I have you around. Are you planning on buying a house of your own?”

  Shocked, Frank said, “I wasn’t. Not now. I can, though. I thought we’d stay here, for a while at least.”

  Hope smiled, relieved. “Good. I missed you. You’d better go see to . . . Ian.”

  “What?”

  “What you said about what happened in the airplane, Frank. It could be . . . the strain. It’s really difficult for me . . .”

  “To believe that. I know. But I saw what I saw. Patrick saw it, too. And I saw it before.”

  “I think you’re under a great deal of pressure.”

  “You think I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t think you would ever knowingly do anything that was wrong. I don’t think you’re lying.”

  “He does it all the time, Mom. Do you think I’m saying he’s supernatural or something? Like he has superpowers?”