Two if by Sea

  “What you’re describing doesn’t exist, Frank. It would be like faith healing.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that.”

  “That’s what you’re describing.”

  Frank thought back to the odd, boxy, maroon van where he had first seen Ian, trapped. “His brother said to take him first. He said he was important.”

  “He probably said it was important. How could you remember exact words at a moment like that?”

  “Mom! For twenty years, I listened for people to say things like, ‘She wasn’t dead. When I put her in the car, she wasn’t dead.’ People who were out of their minds. I learned to listen no matter how involved I was. That’s what the bigger kid said.”

  A fierce, throaty bellowing issued through the lower hall. “That’s Jack,” his mother said. “I give him some hot milk and something to eat about now.” They headed past the fireplace, into an ell that led to Jack’s rooms.

  “Does he talk to you? Jack?”

  “He doesn’t talk at all. He hasn’t talked for years. Since right before you left. Not a word. Just sounds. Crying or rage.”

  Unaccountably, for Hope said he never did this, Jack had pissed himself. The wood floor next to the tapestry chair gleamed under an amber pool. Together, they urged the old man toward the bathroom, although he could walk under his own steam, balanced and surprisingly strong. Suddenly he shook Frank’s hand off his arm and jabbed him, hard, intentionally, in the ribs, with one knotty fist. “Don’t, Jack. It’s your grandson, it’s Frank.” The ancient old man drew back and struck Frank on the shoulder. Frank rubbed the place. It hurt.

  “Get something to clean that up,” Hope said. “I’ll help him. I’m glad you’re not squeamish.”

  Frank passed Ian without seeing him. Ian was standing in the doorway, probably keyed up, past exhaustion, on some plane of nerves that kept his feet moving when the rest of him was inanimate.

  “Put that down,” Hope said, and Frank looked back. Jack had raised his walking stick.

  Ian darted past Frank and, gathering himself visibly, stood facing Jack with his fists on his hips. Jack sat down heavily, on the pile of towels Hope had slipped into the chair. The shillelagh slid out of his hand and its clublike head struck the floor. Ian’s hands moved—right, left.

  In a voice that sounded of old gears, Jack said, “Who are you, son?”

  Hope clutched the pile of clean towels she’d taken from the closet.

  She said, “Well.”

  EIGHT

  FRANK LEANED AGAINST the tailgate of his mother’s old pickup truck and watched the horses come, smudges in the mist, down the lane from the big barn to the small pasture. His father had stood in this lane, and so had his grandfather. Frank wondered if they had been so tired, and, an hour after the sun came up, so hungry and dirty as he was today. As he had come to expect, the little paint mare, one of the boarders, bit everything she could in her urgency to break into the line. He whistled at her, one sharp blast, and she paid no attention. Finally one of the two thoroughbreds aimed a kick at her hip. The paint was unfazed, and bared her teeth. Frank had to check this behavior, and he would. Not today.

  He pulled on the wrist warmers his mother had knitted for him and lowered his watch cap over the sunglasses he wore even before daybreak. Patrick made fun of the sunglasses, but they were a twenty-year habit. On the job, Frank was naked without something covering his eyes. He wore Jims, the only sunglasses he ever found that could correct his vision, which was sharp but could fool him at dusk, when the earth’s wildings woke, looked around them, and decided without plan to take what they wanted. It was piercingly cold, but the old men at the feed store insisted that the wind was a thaw wind. Frank hoped they were right in this, as in so much else.

  This morning, he would take Ian to the Growing Room, a preschool in the center of town.

  The mayhem of school kids pinged in his belly, where the big bowl of oatmeal he’d eaten an hour ago might as well have been no more than a sip of water.

  Being a child of seven or nine or ten had scared the hell out of Frank.

  He had been strong, and athletic, but he never relaxed among other boys, who had no stops and no funnel on their vicious energy. He played with the little schoolyard thugs, who switched allegiances by the hour, freely pounding away on the one they’d defended as a best friend before lunch. He played sports and excelled, and tried hard every day to make sure he never got on anyone’s bad side because he was certain that the kids he knew would kill him if they could get away with it and sleep tight afterward. He went to their birthday parties and bought them the toy weapons they wanted. None of them was really a bad boy. He didn’t know people who’d turned out to be criminals: if they had, they chiseled loans or cheated on taxes. They were ordinary, voracious kids—boys with blocky heads who came to school on Mondays in Green Bay Packers jerseys, having smudged black streaks under their eyes in anticipation of that night’s game.

  It was because of these boys, not because of any sort of lust for authority, that Frank grew up certain he would be a cop. Only with some kind of order did he see how he could live in such a terrifying world.

  Now he saw Hope watching Ian constantly. Hope knew everything. Frank had believed that as a child, and believed it now. If Hope believed in what they now called “the Ian effect,” then, if it wasn’t real, at least they would share the same hallucination.

  When would Ian break? When would he crack like an egg that spilled hot rage? So far, Ian was only a gentle kid, too curious, and needy as a duckling when it came to Frank’s presence. When he was overtired, Ian balked, went boneless, and made Frank haul him up the stairs. Even while Frank was doing that, though, he could tell that Ian didn’t really disagree with going to bed; it was a ritual protest on behalf of all children. Told sternly to stay in his bed in the small room that adjoined Frank’s room, he cried for ninety minutes straight, until Eden came down the hall from their room, picked him up, and tossed him in Frank’s bed, with an oath about some people needing “to actually work.”

  Once, he deliberately dumped a full bowl of fruit on the floor because Hope put maple syrup on it. Once, he threw one of Frank’s old metal Hot Wheels cars at a light fixture and shattered the bowl, showering milky shards down on the people around the dinner table. He then sat in a closet for ninety minutes and wrote a laborious letter of nonsense whorls and curlicues, signed with the inch-long line and the arrows.

  More often, Ian was never bored, and grateful for everything.

  Where had such a child come from, in this century?

  A few days after they arrived, Hope and Frank went to Target with Ian and let him pick out his kit, a wardrobe from the skin out. Ian selected jeans in every color and plaid shirts with snaps. There were not enough colors to have one of each, so he had doubles of the bright blue and bright orange, still so stiff that when Ian put them on, he looked like he was wearing a box. He changed four or five times a day, and wouldn’t allow Hope to wash them, or even take them out of the little trunk at the foot of the bed that had once held Frank’s toy cars. Periodically, Ian laid all his clothes on the bed and mixed and matched them. His favorite, worn three days running, was the pair of orange jeans with an orange-and-blue shirt. His other cherished item of apparel was a deerstalker hat that belonged to Grandfather Jack and, when he could get it away from him, Jack’s shillelagh.

  Jack didn’t smile, but seemed to regard Ian with more than casual interest when Ian put on the hat, the pants, and a necktie that Hope had found in a big basket of fabric scraps. Frank once saw Ian tap Jack’s knee twice. Jack tapped Ian’s knee twice. Ian tapped Jack’s knee six times. Jack did the same thing. They were, Frank saw, playing.

  “He’s strange about possessions.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have many,” said Hope.

  “But he’s funny. Obsessive.”

  “He eats nicely. He doesn’t count pieces of food or get upset when we change his routine. He cleans up after himself. He’s extraor
dinary with people.” She meant ancient Jack. She further insisted that “the Ian effect” did not pertain to her.

  “He does what I tell him to do.”

  “How do you know?” Frank teased her.

  “There’s no reason for him to try to get his way with me. You may be right about this . . . ability, but it seems to me that he’s just a remarkably charming boy.”

  Then, one day in the dullest stretch of what Wisconsinites fatuously referred to as early spring, Frank saw a huge blue truck making its way up the driveway. He didn’t pay much attention. Hope had been talking about their need for a bigger washing machine and dryer. The truck remained quite a while, forcing Patrick to drive the pickup into the gully to get around it. When he came inside with Patrick to shower before dinner, Frank could see the moony blue glow from the living room, and, once inside, he was aghast. Curved in along one whole wall, as a bay window would have curved out, supported by pillars of stainless steel as incongruous in the big farmhouse living room as a fire escape, was an aquarium that was twelve feet long and four feet tall. Corals nested brightly in corners and Frank recognized from his and Natalie’s diving trips a squadron of military-blue Achilles tang, a spiny red lionfish, clown triggers, a miniature grouper, and translucent sea horses that floated among fronds of delicate green and violet vegetation. He turned to his mother, speechless, more surprised than if she had planted a forest of sequoias behind the house while he was working up at the barn. Hope smiled at him indulgently. On the big boat-shaped oak table was more candy than Frank had seen outside a store—the really evil-colored stuff that looked like individual toxins, ropes of licorice, yards of dots, Pixy Stix taller than Ian, peanut-butter cups as big around as Frank’s palm.

  “Are we having a theme party?” Frank finally said. “Or am I at the wrong house?”

  “Oh, you mean the fish tank,” said Hope. “It’s just a fish tank.”

  “If that’s just a fish tank, then the Sears Tower is just an office building.” Frank began to remove the top layers of shirts for the laundry. “Why . . . how did you get something like that? And what did it cost?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Setting it up cost more than the tank. They have whole companies that set up aquariums, can you imagine?”

  “Why, though?”

  “It’s pretty. It livens up the place. It’s very educational. These creatures are native to the ocean where he grew up.”

  “He, being Ian?”

  “Yes. I got a sort of grouping of leather furniture—”

  “A grouping?”

  “So that we could sit around it and read and look at it. And feel the serenity. That’s why they put these in dentists’ offices, you know . . .”

  Frank regarded the candy, some variations of which he hadn’t seen since he was eleven. “And all this must be fish food, Mom . . .” To Ian, who was all but out of sight, matching the bowls and lids of the Tupperware and putting them away in lower cabinets—“his job,” as Hope had told him—Frank said, “So, son, is all this yours?”

  Ian stood up, and, to his credit, gave Frank a blinding smile, as if to say, A bit of all right, huh?

  “You made Grandma do this. You’re not supposed to make Grandma get things you like.”

  “But he didn’t, Frank,” Hope protested.

  “But he did, Mom.” Frank gestured at the room, which now resembled a combination country inn and South Beach nightclub. “Next it will be a litter of puppies and a miniature motorcycle. And now you have to admit it. You went to Madison to look for a nice serviceable large-capacity Maytag and you brought home the Great Barrier Reef. Admit it. You don’t run for the penny candy on your own.”

  Hope poured herself a cup of old coffee, splashed a little milk in it, and added a few ice cubes.

  “Frank,” she said. “I do like that aquarium, and I honestly thought it was my idea.”

  “I’m sure it was . . . at least after a while.”

  Ian needed school. But he couldn’t talk. So Frank was avoiding preschool. Wasn’t it just too soon? On the other hand, didn’t Ian need compatriots (no, Frank’s instincts roared, he was perfect as he was!)? That night, Frank read Ian a book about a little bunny who’d run away from his mother. He turned himself into a mountain, into a fish in a stream, and a crocus in a hidden garden—all to hide from his mother. At the end of the rather sweet story, Ian kept tracing the picture of the mother bunny climbing the mountain to bring down her errant son. Frank knew he was thinking about parents who followed children anywhere—from home to danger and back.

  Frank said, “You know, I can find people. That’s what police do sometimes. If you were lost, I could find you. And I would find you. I would never let you be lost.”

  Ian got up and pulled down his drawing pad. He opened the aluminum box of forty-eight colored pencils he kept sharpened and arranged carefully by gradations of shade. After a few minutes, he showed what he’d drawn to Frank. It was a mature, if primitive, drawing, the face of a boy who might have been Ian a few years older, except he had brown eyes, a mitered chin, and longer, darker blond hair. “It’s your brother.”

  Ian nodded.

  He smiled.

  He waited for Frank to tell him that he would soon climb mountains and cross rivers and search in gardens until he found a boy who’d been dead for months.

  “Honey, I don’t think I can find him. I think his body swallowed too much water. I don’t think his body could get better, just like my wife, Natalie.”

  Then Ian shook his head violently. He lifted one hand like a crocodile puppet, and then snapped the fingers closed, plainly telling Frank to shut his mouth.

  Was there, after all, any wonder that Ian was hoping that his brother was alive and Frank could bring him home? Frank lay down next to Ian in the twilight, remembering himself as a child in this very room, huddled under a delicious thickness of quilts that never seemed to be enough, reaching with his toes for the hot water bottle that Hope customarily gave him. The present was so hard that Frank was grateful he couldn’t see the future. He put his arm around Ian and fell asleep.

  • • •

  The next morning, Ian got hurt.

  Since Frank hadn’t decided about school, he still kept Ian with him most of the time while he worked, figuring that a child who’s survived a tsunami should have some credit at the happenstance prevention bank. Any experienced father—farmer, idiot—would have known that a farm is the most dangerous of all workplaces, a minefield of accidents literally waiting to happen, and that having someone there to look after Ian and Jack was only baseline prudent.

  It was a Monday, and though Hope would be ready to look after him in the summer, this last term she was working long hours every day, training a new media specialist—the modern name for librarians, as libraries were now “media centers” and books apparently were “media.” Her pension earned twice over, Hope Mercy was finally retiring from the high school, after forty years.

  Fetes and observances were planned.

  With this and the wedding on the horizon, Frank should have waited for summer to start trying to mend the various messes and malfunctions at Tenacity. He should have attended to urgent things, like putting Ian on his medical insurance and getting Ian a Social Security card. But one dawn rolled as every repair uncovered another set of problems and tasks, and the mind under his mind was able to find a little study in which to think while his muscles were busy. That had always been Frank’s way. There was money to hire someone to do the work, but there wasn’t so much of it that Frank and Patrick couldn’t make do. Activity led to practical considerations, but idleness bred speculative thought like burdock. Frank needed practicality. Concentrating on here and now was a struggle. Then and someday sang like sirens. Whenever he was alone and short of exhausted, his mind began to plow. What if the father came? What if Charley repented of his foolishness? What if Ian remembered everything and produced his family’s phone number? He didn’t want to remember Natalie’s drained, inert face, or Br
ian’s anguished mourning, all those identical Donovan coffins, or the purple minivan tumbling away with Ian’s older brother inside, or anything else.

  At least when he fell into bed these winter nights, he was spent. He’d never worked harder—not at Tura Farms, not on the job. No sooner did he lie down and surrender to the sounds of the house going to sleep around him, the doors snapping shut, lights flicking off, shades pulled with a swoosh, the heat clattering to life, than he went out, and no sooner did he go out than he woke before it was light when Hope snapped on the hall light and walked past his door on the way down to the kitchen.

  That same morning, Hope said, “Do you think he’ll stay with me in summer? Go with me and do the things I do? I don’t think he will. He wants to be out there with you. He wants to be with you every minute.”

  Frank said, “I’ll make sure he does.”

  Then it was too late.

  Frank wasn’t watching. There was so much to be done. Everything in the big barn was falling down, and when the big pasture bloomed in spring, there would be a whole new set of problems because, even under snow, he could tell it was a welter of burdock, mallow, poison ivy, and thistles as big around as broom handles. Weeds didn’t really matter, but Frank hated weeds. The higher pasture would have been better for exercise; it was flatter, bigger, and drained well. But something big had taken out about sixty feet of fence in two places at some point, and neither his sister nor his mother claimed to know what it was, although Frank suspected Marty with a tractor. The family horses were healthy, but not for long. Eden’s quarter horse, Saratoga, was just eight, but had ballooned to the girth of an oil drum from more than adequate food and inadequate exercise. Hope was an accomplished rider, and rode her big Clydesdale mare, Bobbie Champion, to visit neighbors the way other women might drive a car; she sometimes even rode her horse to school, although this created too much of a sensation to be practical. In summer, she harnessed Bobbie to her big-wheeled pony cart and went to and from town and the farmers’ market. But now Bobbie needed the farrier and the door on her big stall hung off its hinges. Bobbie could have walked out anytime she wanted and gotten on the road to Madison although she never moved. Still, anything broken was dangerous. Frank put Glory Bee in the sturdiest of the boxes, but she succeeded in leaning out slats after the first two days. Forty days of work and more before the place was even safe, Frank thought. It was not safe. Ian would have been safer in a housing project on the west side of Chicago.