Two if by Sea

  “Keep you? Of course we’ll keep you. There was never any thought that we wouldn’t keep you. You’re our kid.”

  “I’m pretty bad. My mum—”

  “Your mum said that? You were bad? You’re not bad. You just have a wild streak. That’s all. Like Glory Bee.”

  “She didn’t say I was bad. But she took drugs.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “It does kind of.”

  “No,” said Frank. “It never does. It never has anything to do with your kid.”

  They walked on, a few more steps, Colin’s crying quieting enough so that he could catch breaths. Frank said, “I know you love Ian. I love Ian. I can help you take care of him. We’ll take care of both of you. Claudia and me. Grandma and Eden and Marty. Patrick even. We don’t just love Ian. We want to love you, too.”

  “My dad said take care of Ian, when my dad was sick.”

  “He meant take care of him in the big brother way, like, make sure other boys don’t beat him up.”

  Colin said, “No, he didn’t. He meant the other.”

  Frank could see Claudia approaching by then, bent over under the weight of the two big hockey bags, holding Ian’s hand. He thought he would shout from love of her. Who had they sent—if Billy believed it was Patrick? Who was little like that? Who walked in bold enough . . . The kids didn’t think it was Patrick?

  “Did Patrick pick you up?” he asked Colin quickly.

  Colin began to cry again, going heavy in Frank’s arms, shuddering like a hooked fish. “No, no. He said it was Patrick.”

  “Who did?”

  “The man, the coach said go ahead, it’s okay. Patrick went back out to move the truck and it looked like the truck for a minute and I don’t know the names of trucks from America, like Ford, and it was dark where he put it. Then a guy come down the walk and says, hi, Patrick, like a cobber, and Patrick had on this big long anorak. He picks up Ian and puts him in the middle of the front seat and then puts me on the side by the door and I knew Patrick wouldn’t do that. He says sit there, all pommy. He jumps in the other side and pulled off the cap. I saw her hair and it was her.”

  “It was her?”

  “That girl, the girl with the red hair. She said Don’t you fucking move. I didn’t mean to swear.”

  “It’s okay,” Claudia said.

  That was exactly what Billy had said, describing Patrick. Surely, Billy was not to blame; Billy may have seen Patrick twice in his life, probably in the sour murk of Raise the Bar, the tavern where the better cut of his townspeople watered—the others driving just north to the Country Scholar, a curiously decorous name for a bar fight with four walls around it. Patrick’s hair was thick, dark brown, like Frank’s own.

  Frank said, “Then what?” Colin cried harder, so hard that he began to choke, and leaned out of Frank’s arms to throw up an evil jet of soda pop.

  “I think that’s enough for him now,” Claudia said. “He needs to go home and have a rest. Nothing will change by talking about this right now.”

  “Should we . . . should we take them to a hotel or something? The house will stink of fire, and . . .” He did not say it, but Claudia would know he meant that this, on top of Jack’s death and everything else, would be too much for the stunned family back at Tenacity. Even more, he was sure that Claudia didn’t yet know that Prospero was dead.

  She said, “I think home is best, no matter how it smells or looks. The house wasn’t damaged. Just that old porch on the back of the old barn. And your grandfather. I’m so sorry, Frank.”

  “What?” said Ian. “Why are we being sorry?”

  “There was a fire at the farm. At Tenacity. That’s why I left the skating rink, but I will never leave the skating rink again. Ever. And old Grandpa Jack died in the fire. He was very old, and he couldn’t get away and no one could save him.”

  “Oh,” said Ian. “That’s sad. Is Grandma okay? Is Sally okay? Is Glory Bee okay? Is Sultana okay? Is Edie okay?”

  “They’re okay. Let’s go home,” Frank said. “Let me get a blanket out of the truck.”

  Claudia and the boys sat side by side on a bench in the dark, chilly park as the wind plucked and tousled the leaves above their heads. Frank came back and shook out the blanket preparatory to winding Colin in it, but Colin stood up and screamed. They were twenty feet from the front of the police station, with a screaming child. An officer going up the stairs paused; Frank waved at him, and the man waved back and kept going. We’re just going to finish raping and abducting this kid and then stuff him in these big black bags . . . Frank was glad the guy hadn’t checked on them, but also felt alone at the end of a long promontory in dark water. Colin screamed again.

  “Colin, what?” Claudia said.

  “You’ll push it against me with that blanket!”

  “What?”

  “The blood! I have to take these off! I don’t want this shirt anymore!” He didn’t even want his new shoes. Using the toe of one on the heel of the other, he kicked and shoved, trying to force his sturdy high-top off his foot.

  “We’ll throw them out,” Claudia said. “It’s okay. Right here. We’ll put them in this old sack that’s on the backseat and throw them out.”

  Frank thought, Not yet.

  “We’ll burn them,” he said. But if the blood wasn’t Colin’s, Frank would keep at least the shirt and bring it to someone at the state hygiene lab, or ask Claudia to find an acquaintance to type and match it and run DNA. But why? They were ghosties. There would be no match in any criminal database. Frank extracted his pocketknife and, carefully, with the tenderest of unhurried movements, cut open the back of Colin’s shirt and pants, and helped him out of his socks and shoes. Claudia unwound her white scarf and used it to wipe the blood from Colin’s hair and face.

  “There’s a fountain over there, Frank. Wet this,” she said. Turning to Colin: “When you get home, you can have a bath.”

  “Collie killed her,” Ian said. “He had to. He had to kind of kill her. Almost.”

  “You saved yourself and your brother,” Claudia said. “You are a hero.”

  Weak with crying, Colin sagged against Frank. Frank draped the blanket and over Colin’s slight shoulders and then crossed one flap under the other, papoosing the boy. He pulled Colin down across his legs.

  “She was going very fast,” Colin said. “I had my skates over my shoulder. So I took off the rubber thing and I hit her with the rubber thing on the eyes and she put her hands up on her face and she tried to grab me, but the car went up over the side of the street, the bump there. She had to let go. Then she got out and said You are going in the back, you little buster.”

  “You opened the door . . .” Frank said.

  “She opened the door and I hit her head with my skate blade and she fell down and I jumped out and I pulled on Ian. He fell out with the bags. She couldn’t see. We hit her with the sticks. This man come with his dog and he said, You there . . . ! The dog started to run around and around. We ran away to the pool. I said, Ian, bash in the window. We both tried to break the window and we heard her truck and then somebody grabbed my neck but it was Claudia.”

  “Good job, Colin,” Claudia said. “Okay, let me wipe off your face now . . .” She dabbed at Colin’s face with the wet scarf—cashmere, Frank noticed—and showed Colin the stain. “Boy! This is coming off. Good. It’s almost all gone. And when we get home, you’ll have a bath and I’ll help you scrub if you don’t mind. You can wear your swimming trunks.”

  “Okay, but with bubble stuff,” Colin moaned.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THAT SATURDAY, IAN followed Frank outside and, unasked, as he always did, began to help him muck out the stalls and feed the horses. A few minutes later, Colin—as he never did—followed.

  “I’ll do it, Ian,” he said. “You go play with Sultana.”

  Freed, Ian skipped away. Frank wondered if Sultana would be able to keep her coat for the remainder of her life or if she wou
ld go bald in spots from being curried so relentlessly.

  “Sultana,” Ian sang to her as he brushed. “You are my orange and my banana. I like you as much as Grandma, rama lama lama lama . . .”

  Although Colin didn’t like the horses, he was competent with them, and, just as cats liked Frank—who could not stand cats—they responded to Colin with respect and affection. In this, Colin reminded Frank of himself. He did not adore horses either, but horses made themselves his.

  “You don’t have to do this, Colin. I got it,” Frank said.

  “I should help.”

  “You do help.”

  “I’m sorry I called Claudia a wowser.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” Frank said. “But she forgives you.”

  Colin said, “I’m sorry that your grandpa died.”

  “My mother heard you telling her that. In her head at church. I’m going to go plant a little tree on his grave. Do you want to come with me?”

  Colin said, “Okay.”

  For the next hour, working quietly, Colin was a different child. It was as though the hell-raiser rheostat on Colin’s personality had been turned down to dim. Lately, he was polite even with his mind. Hope sometimes heard him speak to her: I’m sorry, but I don’t like mashed potatoes because they make me gag. So did Ian. Ian, you can be the deadliest pirate if you want. In a sitcom, Hope would have been taking his temperature. Time would tell whether this was Colin’s personality or the aftermath of fear.

  When Claudia knelt at the mound of dirt under the biggest hickory tree on Penny Hill and wept like a little girl for Prospero, Colin as well as Ian knelt on either side of her, each holding one of her hands.

  “Pro was a very nice horse,” Colin said. “Ian is good to the horses. More than me. But Pro was very, very nice to me.”

  “He liked you,” Claudia said. “He could tell you cared about people, horse people, too, even though he was sick.”

  Claudia told Frank later that Colin said then, “Come on, Claudia. I can see Frank all the way down there. He’s knocking that porch down that burned up. The barn bits, too.”

  “That’s good,” Claudia said. “It’s dangerous, with all those old nails.”

  “He’s got a magnet picks them up,” said Colin. “Did you ever see it?”

  Colin was telling her, Claudia said, that life goes on.

  Colin and Ian took a long time choosing the little evergreen that would grow near Jack Mercy’s grave. Frank explained that it couldn’t get too big, because they needed to respect the graves where other old people were buried, so they would have to look at all the trees around the one they chose and make sure they weren’t too big. They chose a juniper that might get to be five feet tall, and Frank then drove them over the hill to the cemetery, with the tree in a bucket of fragrant dried manure.

  “Are they all old people up here?” Colin asked.

  Frank thought, Oh no.

  “Not every one of them.”

  Ian said, “Look, Dad! This one was only one years!”

  Frank thought, Oh no.

  He said, “Long ago, doctors didn’t know how to make babies get better if they got sick . . .”

  “This girl was only one, two, six, ten, sixteen!” Ian yelled. “Look, you can see her picture!”

  “Let’s plant Jack’s tree,” Frank said. “Most people grow up.”

  “Our dad died from being sick,” Colin said.

  Nearly flinching, Frank asked, “Did you see him when he was dead?”

  “No, but I saw him when he was sick. He was in the bed. I heard people talking about him being dead soon, he would die pretty soon.”

  “What did they say?”

  “What if those boys find out they were dead this whole time? What if it messes Ian up? Then the old guy said, oh well, boo-hoo. We will un-mess him up.”

  “What about your granny?”

  “She was a nanny.”

  “I don’t mean Cora.”

  “I didn’t have a granny. My dad said, Mary, you and the kids are my only family I have. That was when he wanted to stop taking drugs.”

  “When was that?”

  Colin thought hard. “It was a long time ago. Maybe I was seven. Maybe. It was before we lived in the tree.”

  “What tree? This would be just right before the flood. Right?”

  Colin shrugged. For what did years mean to a child? The time before Christmas was the same as the time before dinner, the time that Ian found the sea turtle’s shell was the same as the time Ian got a cold coin for making the red horse win the race, and the time when they had a swimming pool was the same as the time as when they lived in a tree. They weren’t real memories but collages cut from shadows and circlets of memories and photos and murmurs overheard.

  On the subject of his father’s death, however, Colin was firm and detailed.

  “He had stripes in this throat. They didn’t let him go to a doctor because he would tell about Mum and us. He got very sleepy and even more sleepy. Then one morning I woke up and he wasn’t there. Then Cora took us to the place with the pool.”

  “I know!” Ian shrieked, raising his hand. “I had a burn.”

  “Did you have to go to a hospital?” Frank asked.

  “It was just a sunburn!” Colin said. “He got a sunburn right before we left the island with the tree castle.”

  “What was it?”

  “A tree castle.”

  Not Etry Castle. A tree castle. They really did live in a tree house.

  “What was that like?”

  “It was really, really big. It was built with all these pretty walls with different grass baskets for shelves. It had ten rooms but not a fridge. It had beds but not a real roof. You could run on the swingy sidewalks.”

  “I know!” Ian cried out again. “You had to go in the boat to the town. We had cookies and ice cream in town. I never had ice cream!”

  At night, they took the ladder down and left them up there with Cora. “It was four hundred feet,” said Ian.

  Colin said, “Like high as the racehorse spinner on the barn.”

  Colin meant the weather vane. So thirty or forty feet up, perhaps more. The red-haired girl, the same one Colin hit with his skate blade, came one morning to bring their food and unlocked the door to the stairs and let the stairs fall down from the tree house. She turned her back when they climbed down the stairs.

  “Did Ian make her do it?”

  Colin nodded. He didn’t know why that day and not another day.

  Cora drove them to the airport in a Jeep she found on the street. He didn’t know why.

  They met a lady who gave them the purple van and gave Cora money and bought them backpacks and shorts. He didn’t know why.

  They went shopping and had corn and ice cream. Then Cora was crying and pushed them in the purple van. The man who wore soft shirts was chasing them in a car. He didn’t know why.

  They drove too fast, and Cora wasn’t a very good driver, and she drove off the road, right down into the flood.

  Colin didn’t remember very much of his first few days in the hospital, except that he always felt like he was just about to wake up or just about to go to sleep.

  Then a woman came, with a tape recorder the size of Colin’s smallest finger. Another woman took pictures. She talked to Colin and asked him where he lived and what his mommy and daddy’s names were. Colin didn’t answer. Then two men came from the TV station, calling him “Moses.”

  Colin said nothing to them either. He knew that his parents would not come, but he was afraid that the girl with the red hair would. She didn’t. Neither did the tall black man with lightning tats on his head, or Hula man, or the man with the sharp nose who wore soft shirts. No one came, despite newspaper pictures, and stories on the telly and police searches.

  Colin never told anyone about his family, or the house in the tree, not even the nurses or the doctors.

  After a while, he got better and went home with Helen, wearing what he described as a big s
carf around one arm, which Frank interpreted to mean a sling. Helen had cut out the stories about him, and put them into a folder from the church that had a big blue-and-gold cross on it. She got him a new backpack and offered to clean the rubber-coated envelope. Colin liked the new backpack, a big North Face Borealis, orange and blue, but he would not give up the brown envelope even to be cleaned. She might steal it. Once, he woke from sleeping in the church house and heard the minister and Helen having a fight. Helen was begging to keep Colin, and the minister was saying that his flock were their children, although at the time Colin didn’t know that the minister meant people and not sheep.

  Colin heard her crying, “Robert, it’s as if God Himself sent him to us.”

  But the minister said, “I’m sorry to see you this way, Helen. Maybe you are suffering from division.”

  The wife said, “It’s not a case of division to want a child! All women want a child.”

  “God didn’t give us a child, so there must be a divine raisin. It’s up to you to find the raisin in this.”

  The minister’s wife had a sister who was a nun, Sister Mary Francis de Sales. The minister said he would drive Colin to the convent if Helen didn’t.

  One day, Helen drove him to the convent, and hugged him goodbye, still crying, as she had for days, pretty much all the time—but her sister did not. Helen smelled of pears and face powder, and she was a little too old and sad to be a mother. Still, he would have rather stayed with Helen and the minister than with the nuns.

  The nuns were even older, and they liked the seven girls but not any of the boys, except the littlest, who was only two. They ate the same food every day—porridge for breakfast, toast and potato soup for lunch, carrots and eggs for dinner, and on Sundays some nasty fish and more potato soup. There was a box of dominoes and a box of checkers, but so many pieces were lost there was no way to make up proper sides for a game. After a couple of months, some ladies brought other things, writing and drawing paper and pens for everyone, and puzzles with a thousand pieces, and a race car set. The older boys took the race car set and wouldn’t let the boys Colin’s age or younger ever touch it. But Colin got writing paper and pens and hid them in his backpack. For months, he slept and played in a long room high up in the nuns’ house, with the seven other boys bigger and littler than him. The big ones farted all night. The little ones cried for their mummies and the big ones cried, too, but just when it was dark. The littlest boy cried until he was sick on the floor about once a week. The biggest one punched Colin’s face and pinched and pulled on his willy, and told other boys to do the same but only one did. The boy said he’d say Colin tried to grab his butt in the shower if he told.