Two if by Sea

The next-to-last day came. Then the last day came.

  Night upon night, Frank Mercy considered how, until this point, he’d based his life nearly entirely on logic and also on law. Even marrying Natalie was a choice born of incandescent love, but also logic. Frank didn’t expect to meet his match, but when he did, it was time to have a family. He did not bring it up with Natalie, only hoped that she’d feel as he did. At forty, he was grown, nearly overgrown. Natalie was strong, self-reliant, a professional woman who wouldn’t want to completely domesticate him. She didn’t want a four-over-four with a garden. She would want to ramble, family in tow, and would thrive with Frank or without him. He was not so sure he could thrive without her. He had not counted on the completeness of his surrender.

  And certainly, he hadn’t counted on what he felt about the child. The child was a small stranger, and yet what Frank felt was the pilot light of the full-blown flame he had felt for Natalie, the same sense of stewardship in miniature. Since he hadn’t yet grieved for Natalie, beyond a few spasms and a few sleepless nights, everything else that came after could have this result. He might be an emotional snowball, picking up debris, heft, and contour as it swept downhill. Shock and grief, followed close upon by the power of being a half-assed savior, brewed up a recipe for rebound attachments. From what little he’d learned in college psychology classes, he knew that children grieved backward, their sense of loss growing in direct proportion to the time the loved person was missing from their lives. He didn’t even know about Ian’s family. Sunny as he seemed, the boy was clearly afraid. As much as he sounded like that dreaded granny, Cedric was right. Ian had given Frank a purpose in life.

  Quotidian concerns about Ian occupied him, forcing Natalie quicker into history. Still, he would always be that man who had loved Natalie. He would waken on holidays, especially Christmas, and on the October day they had married, and the life that he had, in those moments, would be Natalie’s alone. There would never be another wife.

  October 4, he realized now. They chose ten-four, so, Natalie joked, Frank, a cop, would never forget it. And as he would never forget it, he had chosen that day for Ian’s birthday.

  SEVEN

  WHO HAVE WE . . . HERE?” Eden said, when she finally let go of Frank’s neck and stood back to make sure he was really here, and really alive. “Did you escort a child for somebody?”

  “I did,” Frank said. “This is Ian.”

  “Hi, Ian,” Frank’s sister said uncertainly. Her fiancé, Marty, grinned at Ian and waved. Ian waved back.

  Because Ian didn’t speak—or at least, didn’t yet speak—Frank found himself sometimes forgetting to speak directly to him. He tried to be mindful of it, and so now he turned to Ian and said, “Ian, this is my sister, Eden. This is Marty. Eden and Marty are getting married.” Ian jumped behind Frank and refused to look out.

  “Where’s Mom?” Frank said.

  “Whose kid is that?”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “Mom’s at home, crying, and cooking everything in the world,” Eden said, her eyes going wide in a parody of surprise as Patrick lifted his silver pocket flask, had a nip, and then turned to the marked door of the bathroom behind the baggage claim. “Who’s that?” Eden asked.

  “He works for me,” Frank said. “I think.”

  “You think?” said Eden. “You don’t know?”

  Patrick emerged just minutes later, smelling of wintergreen instead of horse sweat, wearing a blue chambray shirt and fresh jeans. Eden was maybe five six, like Natalie. Patrick had to look up at her. Frank saw Eden recalibrate to accommodate the fact that Patrick was a grown man of an eleven-year-old child’s height and weight.

  “Patrick Walsh,” he said, offering his hand. “I work for your guv. Your brother, that is.”

  “Hi,” Eden said uncertainly. “Welcome to America.” She had not expected a little man and a little kid to accompany the prodigal brother—only a big horse. Turning back to Frank, she said again, “Whose kid is that?”

  “Well, he’s my kid,” Frank said. “I’m his . . .” Father? Jesus Christ. “Guardian. Actually, this happened suddenly. I adopted him. A family member. His parents died . . .”

  All humans were family.

  “You’re lying,” said Eden. She’d known Frank too long. “Whose kid is that?”

  “He’s really mine. Now. One of the brothers’ wives was married before.” Each of these essential facts was singly true. “I can’t explain any more now, Edie. I’m worn out and I want to go home.”

  “Why didn’t Brian Donovan take him? The news guy?”

  “He barely knew this kid either. And Brian’s got some complicated injuries and he lost not just his wife but his entire family. It would be the way it would be for you if not only Marty died, but Mom and I, too.” Eden nodded ruefully, accepting, and Frank pressed his advantage. “I won’t ever be able to explain what it was like there. Or why he ended up here with me. It was the right thing, though.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t the right thing.” To Ian, Eden said, “Come out if you want any presents later.” Ian knew better than to ignore that. “Well, I’m your auntie Edie. Did you bring your horse?” The child nodded, and with a deep, shaky breath, he summoned himself to take Eden’s hand. Eden blushed. “That’s good. Because we brought a trailer for her to ride home in. She’s a girl, right?”

  Ian nodded.

  “And you right in the back with the horse.”

  “Don’t say it. He would,” Frank said. Turning to Marty, he reached out and squeezed his future brother-in-law’s shoulder. “Still in gradual school, man?”

  “It’s very gradual,” Marty said. “I don’t want to actually be a psychiatrist. What do you think I am, nuts?”

  Eden began to cry. She leaned against Frank in an attitude of yielding that was entirely unlike her compact, keen, businesslike self. “I can’t tell you how hard it was for us to wait until we knew that plane was in the air.”

  “You, too, Marty?” Frank said.

  “I wept like a baby,” Marty answered, then added, “Frank, a joke is beyond even me. It was hard to look at those videos of that place and picture someone in your family there. Maybe we imagined it was worse than it was. But it looked like hell.”

  “It didn’t look worse than it was. It was like hell.”

  “Frank, we’re so sorry about Natalie,” Eden said. “We loved her. We would have loved her more.”

  Frank could only glance away. The thought of being here without Natalie was as new as having loved her. It was not durable. He had grown used to being a husband in small increments, sometimes glancing at himself in mirrors and mouthing the words my wife. When the idea of himself as a husband was ordinary at last, it was over. This scene should have been happening months from now, and everyone alight over newborn Donovan Mercy in Nat’s capable arms.

  Frank longed to see his mother. His one fat suitcase circled the carousel, as did Patrick’s comically battered leather case, and the Glenlivet Scotch duffel bag that contained the three outfits Tura had found for Ian.

  “He didn’t come with much . . .” said Eden.

  “He’s not a plastic play set,” Frank told her, sharper than he meant. “Everything he had was gone. Everything I had was gone. It was only a miracle I had my passport in my briefcase with my medical cards, and that it was in my car. I have no idea when I put it there.”

  “Don’t bite,” Eden said. “You know what I just noticed?”

  “What?”

  “No one has a winter coat. It’s ten degrees out there. What did you plan on covering up with?”

  Frank had remembered a horse blanket for Glory Bee. The cold. Another surprise fact he forgot that he knew. “I came from a place where the median temperature was in the eighties. If I have a winter coat, it’s at the farm.”

  Eyeballing sizes, they decided that Marty would go to the big-box store at the first exit north and get coats and gloves for all of them. Marty did, bringing back the same blue down jacke
t for the two men and a red snowsuit for Ian, who was fascinated. On a plane he might have been . . . Frank had the sense that it hadn’t been Ian’s first flight, but he might never have experienced cold. Marty also brought back a car seat, surprising them all.

  “I’m a physician,” Marty intoned. “It’s my responsibility to make sure this child is properly restrained.” Frank’s jaw tightened. He’d driven all over Brisbane with Ian in the backseat of the Mini without the first thought of a car seat. Marty said, “He’s nowhere near sixty pounds. This one converts into a booster for when he gets bigger. By then, we’ll probably need it, huh, Edie?” The knit cap that Marty brought for Frank was a Hello Kitty hat with pink bobbles that Frank happily pulled on over his wiry brown hair. Ian was delighted.

  Eden said, “You have a wild look and a two-day beard. With that hat, you could be a child molester.”

  Thankfully, they’d brought both the farm truck, with the trailer that Patrick would use to take Glory Bee to the equine disease control center, and the eight-seater Suburban van stenciled with the name of Tenacity Farms. Working quickly, they all filled the van’s wayback to bursting with the suitcases and some boxes that held a few things of Natalie’s from her office, including an album of their wedding pictures, and Frank’s oldest training tools, the tack pieces that had been his father’s. There were a few more boxes and a big crate Frank had shipped that would arrive later—or maybe never. There was his life, Frank thought, contained in a four-by-three-foot space, the life he had thought, for a short while, would fill up the world and brim over. He lowered the hatchback.

  They all drove around to the loading area outside a metal-pole barn, where animals were kept until they were claimed.

  The sedative had worn off, and Frank recognized Glory Bee’s angry, high-pitched whickering. She was still tethered to the stanchions that formed the travel stall around her, but pulling back with all her might, her muscles bunching under her gleaming black hide.

  Frank heard Eden’s sharp intake of breath.

  “Oh! She’s beautiful,” his sister said. Frank could easily forget that Eden, the computer research whiz, was a horse farmer’s daughter. “Make sure that he . . . Ian! Don’t go near her now.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Frank said as Ian stroked Glory Bee’s leg, and made that funny little motion with his hands that seemed to be his default in times of stress—right, left, as if his little hands were paintbrushes.

  “You’re awfully casual about his safety,” Eden reproved Frank.

  “He’s got a way with animals.”

  “No animal is trustworthy, Frank. Jack always taught us that.”

  “How is Jack?” Frank asked. Eden compressed her lips and shook her head.

  With half a shot of sedative in her, Glory Bee went placidly into the trailer and turned to her bag of grain. They all prepared to set off on their journeys.

  “See you in a few days, guv,” Patrick said.

  “Do you even know how to get there? Do you even know how to drive on the right side of the road?”

  “It’s only a frontage road from the airport,” Marty said. “I programmed it in. Patrick can follow us there.”

  “I’ll practice driving on the odd side while I’m here,” Patrick said. “Should be something a person can do. Tourists do, when they come to Ireland.”

  “When was the last time you drove?”

  Patrick laughed and used his thumb to flip two Life Savers candies off the roll. “I’ve a lousy memory for dates. Some months, though.”

  Probably twenty or thirty, Frank thought.

  “Got my GPS. I ordered it last week,” said Patrick.

  “Leave the people in the town some of their brandy,” Frank told him. Pat grinned and left.

  The rest of them got back into the van, Eden and Frank first taking turns threading and securing the car seat, which seemed to be built with the complexity of a lunar module. “I’m so glad you’re home,” Eden said as they tucked Ian in. The child was already asleep on the backseat, and hardly stirred when Frank snapped on the harness.

  “You just don’t want to muck out the stalls.”

  “Frank, how can you joke?”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said. “I don’t know how not to. For twenty years, it was what you did when the worst got even worse.”

  “How long are you going to stay?”

  “I don’t know how long. I don’t have plans.”

  “For a while, then?”

  “Do you guys mind?”

  “Of course not. It’s a big house . . . there’s plenty for all of us. Frank, it’s your home, too! I wouldn’t mind if Marty and I lived in a trailer.”

  “I would,” Marty said.

  “Well, I don’t mind living at home. I have to figure out what I’m going to do, and I have enough to live on.”

  “I hope we’ll have our own house soon,” Eden said.

  Marty said, “Define soon.”

  “Then Mom will be on her own.”

  “She’d probably like that,” Frank said.

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Frank fell asleep for a while, his head pillowed on a clean horse blanket he found in the backseat. Under the surface of his slumber, he could hear Marty and Eden’s companionable murmur, the slight rise and fall of their conversation against the blat of the radio. When he awakened, they had crossed the border from Illinois into Wisconsin.

  “Wow,” Frank said. “I zonked out.”

  Eden said, “You should sleep for weeks. How are you even walking? I mean at all? I couldn’t live through losing Marty that way.” As imperceptibly as a child grows an inch, the landscape began to change, the slurry of rubbled parking lots shoved up against apartment sprawls and strip malls giving way to stretches of snowfield, some dotted with a smudge of trees clubbed around a plain house with straight-up walls of red brick or whitewashed clapboard.

  “You do, though. There are moments when it’s all too bright and loud or beautiful. Then you catch yourself just living, noticing a sunset, happy to be in a soft bed. And you hate yourself . . .”

  “I can’t imagine it.” Eden sighed. “Marty, do you want to drive for a while?”

  He said, “Sure. There’s that highway plaza in a couple of miles. Pull off.”

  “You can’t imagine,” Frank said, after a moment. “I saw her, and I kept thinking I could wake her up.”

  “You saw her? Oh, Frank. Of course you would, at the funeral. Or, was it like that?”

  “I saw her at the hospital. And before the . . . burial. She wasn’t, well, disfigured. She looked like Natalie.”

  “Why did you tell us not to come, Frank? My only brother. My only sister-in-law. We should have been there with you. All this would have been easier.”

  “It was dangerous there.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Eden said.

  “What they tell you is true. I thought, there was such chaos, it could have been someone else. Even now, I expect her to turn up. I pick up the phone to call her twice a day.” Frank stopped. “I don’t want to talk about Natalie now.” He put his warm arm against the glass, polishing a porthole in the fog on the side window the way he had as a child. “What’s going on at home? It’s been a long time.”

  Eden admitted that it had been hard, working her job at the library, finishing her master’s, trying to help their mother with Jack—worse every day mentally and sound as an oak plank physically—and keeping up with the ten horses they boarded.

  They pulled off to change seats. Ian slept on, not even flinching when the door slammed.

  “What about your man here?” Frank said.

  “I’m the Jewish stableman,” Marty answered. But Marty was in medical school. How much time could he realistically spend on a farm that was always a mess at best? At least it was paid for. Frank’s mother, Hope, often said that if she had to be widowed, she was glad it happened fast, in a freak explosion at the grain co-op where Francis Mercy worked a few days a week. She was glad bec
ause Francis never had to be sick. He never had to face waking up and seeing that death had taken a step closer to the door. The big insurance settlement meant that Hope did not have to sell the farm and move Eden to an apartment in Madison. There was a sum set aside for Frank and for Eden, and Hope didn’t have to work, although she acted as though the high school library would be gone in a frenzy of book combustion if she took a sick day.

  It was more than twenty years ago, now. Frank had been in his first year of college and Eden in first grade, but to Frank it seemed a lifetime. He could hear his father’s voice, but no longer summon up his face.

  “You have kids come to help,” he said to Eden.

  “One girl,” Eden said. “I tried five boys. It’s not like I couldn’t pay them. Something, at least. But you can’t pay enough. Because they don’t really do anything.”

  Frank could imagine Patrick preening.

  Patrick would see to Tenacity and its tenants . . . Hollywood might have to wait. Like most jockeys Frank had known, Patrick would have been a gypsy, and like most of them, he seemed adept at other physical things, like acrobatics and tumbling. Maybe Patrick wasn’t interested in gawping at movie stars. Maybe he wanted to be a stunt man. He’d probably read about that kind of world, on one of the many nights when Patrick plowed steadily through a book and a bottle. Frank didn’t even know if Patrick had a family. He didn’t speak of them. Patrick probably would not leave Wisconsin for a while, possibly a long while. That was good; it would help Frank manage the jaw-dropping prospect of slipping back into the life that was never really his, as an adult, in any case. It would be his now, though. Tenacity Farms was at least something he could put out his hand and touch, that would not give way. It was Eden’s as well as Frank’s, but Eden wouldn’t want any part of it after she and Marty were married in the spring.

  Married, Frank thought suddenly. Eden? Of course, she was now, what? Thirty? Thirty-one. To Frank, Eden still seemed like a child.

  And to their mother, Frank was sure that even he was still a child.

  He longed to see his mother more now than at any other time in his life, except for the days Hope spent at the University of Wisconsin Hospital after Eden’s complex birth, when Frank was eleven. At the wedding, Natalie said, “You have a crush on your mother.” She said it with the same sweet and sour fusion that tinctured Hope’s voice once when she described Frank as emotionally retarded. It was probably true. What cause had he to assume the mantle of a man in full? He played with guns and horses. They said most people truly didn’t grow up, until they had a child.