Two if by Sea

  Frank brought the malt vinegar down from the spice cupboard, and Hope thoughtfully cut up and relished her potato for a while. “Sadly, there is no such thing as a bad potato,” she said. “He’s said a couple of things. I didn’t tell you because I thought he was just being a little kid. When you were four or five, you said you saw a spaceship the size of a basketball that glowed green like a glow stick landing in the big pasture.”

  Frank said, “Well, that happens to be true. I did.”

  “Ian said he ran away with Cora in the night.”

  “Cora was the woman in the van, the one we tried to rescue. The woman who looked Filipino or Indonesian. Did he tell you about the castle?”

  “No, he didn’t say anything about a castle.”

  “I hope he doesn’t say anything at school.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that, Frank. He’s so self-possessed, it’s . . . it’s eerie. It seems . . . somehow . . .”

  “Learned, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So where are they?”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever lived in the castle, Mom. Or whatever it was. His mother and father. Or his guardians?” Frank carefully cut his potato into slices. “I read the Brisbane papers every week, cover to cover. I read the updates on people who were reunited and found. I read about the missing. There’s no one, no one at all, who corresponds to Ian, or his older brother, or that woman. Not one person.”

  Claudia came in to announce that she was taking off. She was getting together with some former students in Chicago and would be spending the night there. Before she left, she kissed Frank lightly and gave Hope a light shoulder hug.

  Chummy.

  Hope didn’t even roll her eyes at Frank, but closed them in the pleasure of the gesture.

  Advantage, Claudia.

  But also, good for Claudia. She handled things well, appropriately, neither Victorian nor postmodern, assuming but not presuming.

  On Tuesday night, just before she left for New York, Claudia and Frank and Ian planned to load up the trailer for the horse auction in Baraboo, hoping to come home with Ian’s birthday present in tow. Frank and Ian had spent an hour looking at photographs of horse breeds in his father’s books, and later, on the Internet. Persistently, Ian came back to Arabians, although he didn’t like the light-colored ones. Frank didn’t subscribe to the myth that Arabians were any spookier than other horses; he liked them for their strength and solid carriage, and he didn’t want a forty-pound child mounted on a horse whose shoulder was even with Frank’s head.

  They arrived early, to be close enough to the bottom of the small amphitheater. The auction had begun promptly at seven, on the third Tuesday of every month, for forty years, run without interruption by Cyrus Young, who claimed to be descended from the great pitcher, a Wisconsin-born Chippewa. Many of the first horses were draft horses, sold by and purchased by what seemed to be identical pairs of Amish men. There were several young paint mares, a nice buckskin quarter horse about ten years old, and a pretty paint and Morgan cross that Frank tried to direct Ian toward, but Ian sat patiently, saying nothing for an hour, then an hour and a half.

  “Do you think he’s just not into it?” Frank said to Claudia.

  “I don’t know. Most kids would have wanted every one of them.”

  The dark gray Arabian mare was led by a college girl who could have been the same college girl as the one he remembered from a long time ago—same oversized sweater and undersized jeans—the one who walked away when her horse didn’t sell. But this one had at least the decency to have cried all the way here. You could see it in her swollen face. Some horses had to be sold; he’d sold his own gelding, Pywackit, but to a neighbor, when he’d gone to college, and he still thought about him. Next to him, he felt Ian sit up straight. The horse’s name was Sultana, and she was eight years old, owned by Tracy Hollander of Lansing, Michigan, for the past three years, part of the University of Wisconsin Madison’s precision color guard and the University of Wisconsin Madison’s equestrian team.

  “Now, this is a beautiful horse, a beautiful horse,” Cy said. “And she is gentle as a kitten. Would do anything this little girl here wanted. Now, if she does not find a buyer tonight, she will be donated, by her owner’s family, to Bright Gateway. That’s how easy she goes. Sound as a nut, been vetted regular. But a horse like this, she should belong to one person . . .”

  “Dad!” Ian said urgently.

  “Be still now,” Frank told him. He waited. He saw the Kesselberg brothers a few rows up, Galen and Tommy. They would flip her after she threw a foal or two, but by then, she’d be broody, and not as well disposed to the cooperation of horse and rider.

  “Let’s start the bidding at two hundred,” Cy said. “Which is a crime, really. Okay, Galen. I see three. Up there, three fifty. Welcome. Welcome. Tommy? You’re going to bet against your own brother?”

  “I’m fixing my hat, Cy.”

  “We have three fifty. Who’s going to take this pretty girl home? Four hundred? Galen? Thank you very much. Now, oops! Yes, four fifty. Now, this is more like it. Horse like this, in Chicago, would sell for sixteen hundred dollars, two thousand, five thousand dollars.”

  “We’re in Baraboo tonight, though, Cy!” somebody called out.

  “We have four fifty. Do I hear five hundred? Sir? Galen? Well, four fifty once, four-fifty—”

  “Dad!” Ian cried. “That’s my horse!”

  “Five hundred!” Claudia called out. Frank stared at her. “What!” she said. “Were you going to sit there?”

  “I was just about to say something.”

  “Five fifty? Do I hear five fifty? Five hundred once, five hundred twice . . . sold to the pretty lady in the blue shirt! Please see Erin down there, we offer delivery for a very minimal charge. A very minimal charge.” Cy turned. “These are a matched pair of Morgans, driving horses, shiny as a chestnut. Look at the move.”

  “Dad! Where are they going with my horse?” Rough-handed farmers turned to smile.

  “Come on,” Frank said, hauling Ian up onto his shoulder. As they stepped out into the sawdust surrounding the auction barn, Frank said to Claudia, “I’ll write you a check.”

  “I can afford it,” Claudia said.

  “You already got him a saddle!”

  “Now there’s a horse to go under it.”

  “What am I going to get him?” Frank said. “He’s my son!”

  Claudia said, “A bike.”

  “A bike?” Ian’s face shined.

  Frank gave the college girl time to say her goodbyes. “She’ll be yours?” the girl said to Claudia.

  “I have a horse. It’s for him.”

  “A little boy?” The girl glanced down at Ian. “She’s gentle but she can spook.”

  “Any horse can spook,” Frank said.

  “Dad, lift me up! Dad! Lift me up!” Ian said. Frank bent to pick Ian up.

  “No, don’t!” the girl said. “She’s never been ridden bareback!”

  Ian leaned forward onto Sultana’s neck, as if he were about to fall asleep. The horse whickered softly. Ian said, “Come on. Time to go home.”

  “She spooks when she’s loaded. I have a bandana . . . he’s really little to be so good at this.”

  “He’s good with animals,” Frank said.

  “He’s not afraid. When I was his age, I was afraid of a Welsh pony.”

  “I’d be afraid of a Welsh pony, too,” Frank said. “I’m sorry to take her away from you.”

  “She’s a good girl. I have her sister. But I’m going to law school in Seattle. I tried for months to sell her. No one wanted her.”

  “He really wants her,” Claudia said. “He picked her out in his dreams.”

  They threaded out carefully, around the vans and trailers. Claudia said, “I feel sorry for that girl. She was sweet.” Quietly, alone under one of the lights, the girl who’d owned the horse was scrubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands.

&nbs
p; “Can I get in the back?” said Ian. “The horse is lonely.”

  “If you go to sleep for a while,” Frank told him. “Then you can.” As if Ian could will himself asleep, as he had in the airport, he was out in thirty seconds. Even when they bumped into the driveway, he didn’t wake. Hope came out, and Frank suddenly noticed that every light in the house was on.

  Frank called, “Hey, Mom. Well, Ian got his horse. He knew just the one he wanted. She’s a really nice little Arabian—”

  “Someone came here, Frank. Earlier tonight, just after dark.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. A car came up the driveway, rolling very slowly, and then just parked between the back door and the barn. I walked out there. There were two men in the car. I couldn’t see their faces. I called to them, Can I help you? They didn’t get out, and they didn’t speak to me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went back in the house and locked the door.”

  “What happened?” Frank said.

  “Nothing. The car just sat there. For fifteen minutes, with the lights on. Then the driver turned it around and drove back down the driveway, very slowly.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  Hope said, “I almost called the police. It was as if they were just brazening it out, coming up to my door, showing me they could.”

  Frank said nothing; Ian woke up and began chattering about Sultana. Hope held her arms out to him. Claudia said quietly, “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  With a murderous look at Frank, Hope said, “I couldn’t find my phone. I couldn’t find the house phone either.”

  Frank made no move to get out of the truck. Finally, he said, “I own a farm.”

  “I see that. Congratulations, Farmer Mercy,” said Claudia.

  “Not this farm. Another farm. A farm in England that Tura left to me, that she bequeathed to me, when she died.”

  Claudia didn’t argue with him. “I see what you’re getting at. It wouldn’t be hard to find you here. But would it be hard to find you there either?”

  “Well, here, after three generations? You could ask the first person you met. Sally the border collie could do it. Anyone who could use a telephone or a computer could do it.”

  “Would you take him away from here? To somewhere? To there?” Claudia said.

  Frank hadn’t considered it until tonight. He thought of himself now, the lonely laird, up in all what he imagined from the pictures to be clefted, purple-carpeted vastness, vastness that nevertheless would be a few miles up the track from some smoky, shitty little factory city. And where would the track finally end? He shrugged. Quietly, Claudia kissed him on the cheek and slid out of the cab, got into her own car, and departed.

  SEVENTEEN

  ONE MORNING IN early September, Frank was in his bathroom, shaving naked at the sink, when Ian pounded at the door and finally nearly fell in. Ian asked, “Why’s your penis so big? Why’s it got hair on it? Are you sick?”

  “That happens when you grow up,” Frank said, reaching for his pajama bottoms. He’d obviously never seen a grown man naked. So much for his beloved father. “It’ll happen to you, too.”

  “No. I’m pretty sure I don’t want it to.”

  “Well, it happens anyhow.”

  “Did it happen to Claudia? Is she sick?”

  Sweet Christ. Wasn’t this talk supposed to come later? Like at age fifteen?

  “Women don’t have penises. They have vaginas.”

  “That’s . . . like . . . what?”

  “Like a hole sort of.”

  “Like your butt? Girls have to pee out their butts?”

  “Nope. They have two holes. One for, well, for being their vagina where a baby comes out when they have a baby.”

  “A real baby could come out your butt?”

  “No, honey. It’s different. It’s like . . . stretchy. Anyhow, they grow up and they get a little hair there, too. Under their arms, too. Men and women.”

  “Do you think it happened to Colin?” Ian asked.

  His brother.

  “Not yet. Colin would only be . . . how old was Colin when the flood came?”

  “Eight.”

  Frank would have guessed six, but it had been only moments, pulled taut by anxiety and exhaustion; there had been no time for a good look. How light Ian had felt that morning, in his arms, like a bundle of sticks. Ian must have gained ten pounds since Christmas.

  “So he’d be almost nine now.”

  “Hmm,” Ian said. “Are you pretty old, Dad?”

  The jocular affirmative answer, something about older than mud, sprang to Frank’s lips, but he quelled it. Children with lost parents were extremely serious about death, and he didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him that. The margin between death and their parents concerned them, particularly if they’d experienced loss. “No, I’m not that old. Look at old Grandpa Jack. I could get that old. My father died, when he was my age, but it was in an accident. He got caught in a big accident. I’m pretty good.”

  “I hope you don’t get old like Jack,” Ian said. “Jack is very, very, very sad.”

  “But Grandma’s happy, and she’s old, in a way. She’s not going to die.”

  “Is Claudia pretty old?”

  “Claudia’s only the same age as Eden. She’s not even a little old.”

  “What about Glory Bee?” Ian said. “She could die. I don’t think Sultana would die.”

  “She could die.”

  “Would you be sad?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean about Claudia.”

  Frank’s head felt cold, the way it had when he was a child and slugged down a second tumbler of lemonade with ginger—cold so intense it was an ache that seemed it would never abate.

  “I would be sad.”

  “Would you shoot a bad guy if he was killing her?”

  “I don’t know. Probably yes.”

  “Would you shoot a bad guy killing your old people?” Frank knew that Ian meant Cedric and Tura. “I know a bad guy killed your old people. I liked them.”

  “I would have. Cedric and Tura were very good. They were very good to me and to you. I wish I had been there.”

  “If you were there, maybe they would still kill them. And you, too.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “They’re very bad,” Ian said. “Those bad guys are really bad. Colin says they are.”

  “Did he know them?”

  Frank slipped his pajama bottoms back on, trying not to make too big a deal of it, as Ian leaned over the sink, studiously squeezing a whorl of toothpaste around the edge of the drain.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes. Colin knew the bad guys,” said Ian. “You’re not Peter Parker.”

  “Who’s Peter Parker?”

  “Uh, Spider-Man?”

  “Sorry. That’s a silly name. Peter Parker. Especially for a superhero.”

  “He wants it to be silly. It’s a secret. Do you want to go bowling tonight? You can bring Claudia.”

  “It’s a school night. I don’t think we can. Now go run. You’re late for school.” Ian dawdled so much over breakfast that he nearly invariably missed the bus, but Hope didn’t mind driving him.

  Frank heard the car’s initial crunch on the gravel die away to the sound of the rain sticks they’d built as children with rice and paper towels. He turned to some papers. The hours melted. It seemed only minutes later, but the sun at the window told him hours, that Patrick yelled up the stairs, “Frank! Gent to see you.” Frank looked down from the bedroom window and saw, instead of the usual pickup truck that had seen better days, a car—nondescript, the kind of car a child would draw if asked to draw a car. It was perfectly clean, as if newly waxed. Acting on a signal from the lizard brain, Frank went into his room, pulled on his clothes, and then, carefully closing the door and turning the old key lock, he walked into the closet. Reaching up to one side, he moved the indistinguishable false pa
nel of breadboard that hid a combination safe set flush in the wall of the shelf. His Glock was clean and loaded, as he kept it always. With it stuck in the waistband of the back of his Levi’s, under his bomber jacket, he jogged down the stairs and stepped behind the open door to glance out at the man Patrick was talking to—a relaxed, slender, healthy-looking man who could have been fifty or sixty, with his hands in the pockets of what Frank could tell was a very costly suede coat. After a minute, Frank made a noise and stepped outside.

  “Hello, Frank,” the man said, extending his hand.

  “Hello. How are you today?”

  “I’m very well, thanks. You look good.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t remember if we’ve met.” Frank was comfortably aware of the weight of the gun at his waist.

  “We haven’t met that you would remember. But I knew your father as a young man, and your grandfather, your mother as well.”

  “She’s off driving my son to school.”

  “You have a son? A fourth generation?”

  He didn’t ask if Frank had a wife. Frank’s fingertips tingled, the way people’s forearms do after they’ve narrowly avoided being creamed in a car smashup. Something about the way the visitor stood was telltale, the way a tennis pro might stand, at the ready to move left or right. An athlete. A soldier.

  A cop.

  “I’m a widower. My wife died nearly a year ago.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss. I am a widower as well.”

  Was this guy police? The phrase was so earnestly spoken, yet seemed to glide so effortlessly from the guy’s lips, without even a shift in posture, that there was history behind it. Frank said, “Are you on the job?”

  “I’m retired. You?”

  “Once upon a time. Long time ago. How can I help you?”

  “I came to see a man about a horse actually. My daughter was at the Mistingay in Chicago in July and she got her heart set on a horse she said you owned. A horse named Glory Bee.”

  “That’s my horse, but the truth is, she’s not for sale,” Frank said.

  “I can offer a very nice price. As a matter of fact, isn’t that the horse?” Claudia was leading Glory Bee down from the arena. Frank wanted to signal her, Go back! Instead, he put himself between the horse and the man’s line of vision. “Were you there?”