Two if by Sea

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Frank wanted the ring he had put on Natalie’s hand. It had been his mother’s. He wanted to keep that ring close for however long there would be for him. He wanted a lock of Natalie’s dark hair.

  He wanted his wife and his life.

  Brian had been talking the whole time that Frank was cupping the mic of the phone to muffle the sound of his heaving. What a giant of a man Frank had turned out to be, he thought. His self-pity was so huge he could not console a man who had just lost his whole family. “It’s the girls, Frank. My wife . . . was a woman, and she’d had a life. But they never had a life. They never rode a motorbike or drove a car. They never slept a night away from home except at girlfriends’, or flew in a plane. They’ll never know what it is to be in love. They never saw a world outside Brisbane. At least they didn’t know what happened. Losing a child, you can’t endure it.”

  Frank said, “Of course,” and thought, It must be. “I’m so very sorry, Brian.” It occurred to him then. “How did you think to call me?”

  “They brought me a newspaper. Your photo was on the front, standing in a boat, holding a little child’s body. Didn’t you know that? Did the child live? If I hadn’t known you, I wouldn’t have been sure, your face was half hidden by the fold of that yellow anorak. But it was obvious to me that it was you.”

  Frank said, “That child did live. We didn’t save his mother or his brother.”

  “Our Natalie would be proud, then. Proud you didn’t give up. That’s what she would have done, gone out to try to help.” Brian asked then, “What will you be wanting for a funeral?”

  “I don’t know if Natalie would want that,” Frank said.

  “She would. She would want to be mourned extravagantly. But I thought, perhaps, all with a single stone. They will all be together.”

  “That is fine, Brian. Whatever you want. Whatever it will cost. Rest now. I’ll be along soon. Tomorrow, if that’s okay.”

  Oh Christ, the Irish, Frank thought. Brian was correct, however inconveniently, about what Natalie would think of him. Natalie would have sneered and cursed him for a sissy for even once thinking of driving his own car off the road and so disgracing her. She would have scorned him if he hadn’t gone straight back to business. And if he had been the one who had died, Natalie would have grieved him and outlived him because she loved life as a philosophical choice.

  Frank drove to the hospital.

  He knew that Brian Donovan was there, in his bed and banged up, but that visit could wait. He took the elevator to the morgue and did the thing he had done with hundreds of people—who had sometimes fallen to their knees and screamed and sometimes clutched Frank’s arm, but most often looked up at him as though to ask how it could be that they were on the other side of a glass picture window looking at the composed faces of their wives, or husbands or children or brothers. The bright, antiseptic smell meant to mask malodorous death stung his eyes.

  Frank looked at Natalie, her broad shoulders covered by a blanket and the light straps of her summer nightgown. Her tussocky short reddish hair had dried and wound its way into the curls she hated and fought to restrain. Her face was only pale, without a mark, her lips still a ruddy brick, her eyes slightly less than closed, as though she might at any moment open them. Frank asked the morgue attendant, “May I go to my wife?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Natalie wasn’t sick. She drowned,” Frank said, reflexively showing his volunteer first responder’s ID.

  “It’s not a forensic matter, sir,” said the young woman. “It’s a matter of possible contagion.”

  “May I have my wife’s wedding band?”

  “No,” said the woman. “I’m sorry.” Then she glanced around her and said, “Yes. Of course you can. I’m sorry for being such a bitch.” Pulling on gloves and a paper mask, she pressed the button to open the automatic door with her hip. Frank watched as she lifted Natalie’s hand, and it was then he caught a glimpse of the livor mortis, the purplish flesh of her arms and back. Humans usually drowned facedown, their legs and arms dangling, their extremities displaying this grotesquerie of gravity, then, as time passed, the swelling came that made them floaters. Natalie had clearly lain on her back, alone, on some surface, for a time after her death. Frank closed his eyes and squeezed his temples as if he could press out the indelible film of Christmas Eve, as though that could be accomplished short of his own senility or death. His mouth was filthy. His emptied stomach writhed for more food. How could his body still want?

  He thought of Natalie naked beside him on the floor of their living room. She’d told him to pretend that they owned a fireplace, but had pushed open the screen door to invite the sound of the river, because she loved sex outside—on a beach without even a blanket over or under them, on the hood of her car. She called it “home porn.”

  “What brings this up?” Frank said. “I married a doctor. I want a linen suit. I want an Odyssey dive watch.” This was an ongoing joke. In reality, they had so little clothing that their closet looked like the “after” picture in a magazine story about organization. Between them, unlike any other man and woman on earth, Natalie and Frank could easily share a closet that was six feet wide and eighteen inches deep. Frank called it a look-in instead of a walk-in. Of the women in his life, including the few he had spent enough time with to see what they wore when they weren’t wearing it, he had never known one who had only five pairs of shoes. Frank had five pairs of shoes. Natalie had seven. She joked that they should send to Paris for cheese because they had nothing to spend their money on.

  One night, just after she told him about the baby, chiding him for not guessing, for thinking she was simply getting fat, she said, “We once talked about living at your ranch for a while. Don’t you want to live there always? You wanted to train your own horses sometime. I would like living with your family.” Frank thought, On the same land. But in our own big house, about a mile away from the rest of them.

  He said, “Natalie, it’s not a ranch. You’re imagining a sheep station in one of those places here that has fourteen syllables and ends in . . . ‘gong.’ Or an American TV show. You don’t have to take a Rover and camp out in a tent to do the chores. You can walk across Tenacity in thirty minutes. It’s a little horse-boarding outfit with a couple of chickens and a cow and a great big white farmhouse like a thousand others, too big for just my mother and my old grandfather and my sister. It’s not as far as the eye can see. It’s eighty acres, twenty rented to a farmer to plant in alfalfa for the horses.”

  “Sounds grand. I’ve only ever lived on a street.”

  “You don’t like horses. It’s unsanitary and there are flies.”

  “I’ve cleaned maggots out of wounds, Mercy. I’ve put maggots on necrotic tissue to eat the dead flesh. I treated a baby whose father—”

  Frank said, “Okay! You’re the queen of tough.”

  “Don’t forget again,” she said. “Or you’ll pay for it.”

  She looked anything but tough now. She was tiny and forlorn, a dirty broken doll. He finally began to cry, shocked when it made a noise, snot running down his chin. Eden was wrong. The crying hurt worse than the dry wedge. Frank thought he might suffocate.

  The morgue attendant had returned and was standing quietly outside the door. She wiped down her wrists and the ring with hand sanitizer, snapping off her gloves, pulling off her bonnet and mask. She placed the ring inside a plastic glove and knotted the glove. Frank slipped it into his pocket. He wiped his face with the backs of his hands. The woman pulled off several wet wipes and handed them to Frank. She asked him if she could now close the curtain. Frank said yes, she could. She asked, “Will you want Dr. Donovan to be removed to a facility nearby here? I’m afraid the choices are very limited for the next while. We don’t know how long.”

  “Natalie’s brother is alive. His wife and children died. They were all at Murry Sand Castle Inn, as was my wife. The rest of her family died also. He is hospitalized here. His name is Donov
an, too . . .”

  “Yes, he was here yesterday. Brian, the news guy. I recognized him. But I knew Dr. Donovan. I admired her. We will all feel her loss personally.”

  “Thank you. I’ll see to it,” said Frank, immediately forgetting what he had promised to see to. He left.

  On the road back to Tura Farms, he pulled off at a farm track. He might kick in the side of the car, but his leg would rebel. He couldn’t pound the steering wheel: he’d sprained his tiny wrist, after all. And why wreck the car? Yet something must happen. The one hundred and thirty pounds of flesh on the table back there was his own family, his wife, his son. Back out on the road, Frank thought, perhaps Kate Bellingham would mind the child until they could find proper channels for someone nice to adopt him or take him into foster care. Maybe even Cedric and Tura would look after him, fostering the little kid informally, at least for a while. Was Tura up to that? The child couldn’t be more than three. Frank parked nearest the house, counting the cars. The truck, Tura’s old Volvo station wagon, Kate’s newer Audi. No sign of Miles’s old superstock Chevy, which the kid, for some reason, adored. It was possible to tear up the road around Tura. No one ever bothered with traffic stops in Queensland, unless you happened to be driving on the wrong side with a bighorn sheep in the passenger seat and then it was only to inquire how the sheep liked the view. It was one of the things Frank had liked best about Australia.

  The child nearly knocked Frank off his feet. He had come from nowhere, now clad in antique denim overalls and a red shirt with kangaroos all up the arms. Like a cub, the child climbed Frank, resting his head on Frank’s shoulder with a clinging softness and strength. Frank laid a hand on the boy’s back and felt the silent, regular throb of his heart. Carefully, he carried him into the kitchen, not bothering to knock.

  “You’ve a friend,” Tura said. “He’s been out running all day.”

  “How old do you think he is?”

  “Three and a bit. He’s small but he can take good care of himself. The toilet and so forth. I had a deal of work to keep him out of the stable. Everywhere Cedric went, he went, and mimicking the way Cedric walks. Kate was laughing and Cedric, too.” With a sharp stitch of fear, Frank imagined the kid slashed by Glory Bee’s hooves as she performed her daily martial-arts routine.

  “You didn’t let him in by Glory Bee?”

  “Good God, no, Frank. Cedric throws that horse’s food over the wall and leaves her.”

  What would become of Glory Bee when Frank left?

  Cedric would sell her for the glue if he had to.

  Frank would hate that. Glory Bee was the only horse he had ever truly cherished. As much as she hated Cedric, she loved Frank in her way.

  Unlike the men of his family before him, Frank had no special feeling for animals. Horses were big, odd, and generally dumb. They did not feel about people the way people felt about them. Only in training Tarmac for the force in Chicago, and in moments with Glory Bee, had Frank experienced the lyric properties of man and horse, the ones his father insisted were just south of sorcery. Tarmac would have done anything Frank asked, and had, more than once, wading into harm’s way with the implacable grandeur of a warhorse on a Roman fresco. Tarmac, however, had literally been that, a warhorse, not like Glory Bee, a finely strung fluty thing meant for the airs above the ground. Tarmac demonstrated no more feeling for Frank, personally, than a car would have shown. In fact, during his first months at Tura Farms, Frank had done grunt work and stayed away from training. The old man finally combusted, taking the piss out of Frank for what he called “false pride.”

  “If you can’t be the trainer your grandfather was, you’ll take your bat home, that it?” Cedric roared.

  “Not even a little!” Frank, who was not given to roaring, roared back. “I’ve spent more than thirty years trying not to follow in their footsteps.”

  “Then pack your kit,” Cedric said. “I won’t work around a dosser who says he’s Jack Mercy’s grandson.” Frank did pack his kit, and left for a week. When he returned, there were no words between him and Cedric: Frank simply moved into the bunkhouse and put his back into it, humbly emulating Cedric’s nephew Miles, fifteen years Frank’s junior and an incarnate centaur. He learned the language of the outsized, glossy beasts, who didn’t know they could kill anything they chose and cringed from a fallen leaf like kindergarten girls at a picnic. He learned that he did have what Cedric called a sense, that he never had to speak sharply, or above a normal tone of voice; the horses listened. They seemed to wait for him.

  No one was more shocked when one of Frank’s riders placed high up in All Australia. He was stuck, then—train or emigrate. He trained.

  The horses, properly speaking, were all Tura’s: they came on airplanes from the working breeding farm in Yorkshire where Tura had grown up, where she had met Cedric and his family. She’d come out to Australia with her mother and all her earthly goods, as Cedric and his sister had done. If Cedric vexed her, she reminded him that all his bluster and skill were nothing without her mounts, and that she could always leave him and go back to her own place. Every year, with Kate, Tura did go back, for a visit, and every year, she returned to dusty Queensland longing visibly for the haphazard heather and the imperial purple-ink cloud banks massed on the hills of her rocky moorland home and the unretouched goodwill of those who lived there. Increasingly, Tura spoke of going back—now not just to infuriate Cedric but as a woman yearning homeward as the evening light grew shorter. To Frank, who’d never been to Yorkshire, or to England at all, she issued an open invitation to go and spend time at Stone Pastures.

  Glory Bee was one of five foals born out there the first year Frank lived at the farm. She was ravishing, with, Tura claimed, not a single white hair on her coaly hide, a dynasty horse whose only flaw was her temperament. She looked like a great jumper, and moved like one, unless anyone came near her. Even then, it would have been possible, just, to make a great broodmare of her, had it been possible to convince anyone that it would be possible to touch, much less ride, one of Glory Bee’s offspring. Frank adored her, although every morning he had to start with her anew, as she pitched and plunged and pawed, her eyes rolling, more white than brown, foam in drifts at the corners of her mouth. He sometimes imagined he could hear Glory Bee’s thoughts, and that there was an implicit apology in her resistance. This isn’t personal, she seemed to be telling Frank as she strained and strived, this is how I’m wired.

  Cedric would not go near Glory Bee, not even to feed her. The sire, a big red Dutch Warmblood, a steeplechase horse called Say Amen, had the same exquisite gait, height, musculature, natural ability, and the same personality—according to Cedric, who’d been back to Yorkshire exactly twice in thirty years, that of a serial killer. Cedric, who had recently trained the great young stallion Airborne, and now made more than a good living from Airborne’s progeny, and he hoped Frank could train Glory Bee. If Glory Bee could medal reasonably, she could go out to auction. Frank, who loved their battles, couldn’t bear to think even of that.

  But he couldn’t stay.

  “I’ve made something to eat, Frank, nothing really, some pasta and beans.” Tura was a horrifying cook. Still, Frank sat and ate, with a grim will, as though he was trying to medal in food consumption, beside the child who silently and politely spooned up everything in his small bowl. “The clothes belonged to Miles. Ceddie’s sister kept some here for him, so many years ago. I’m as bad a housekeeper as there is to still have them.” Frank glanced up. “No word about our Miles.” Tura pressed her lips together and went on. “The lad doesn’t say a word. But I know he hears what I say. He hears the telephone.”

  Frank shrugged. “Maybe he never could talk. Some kids can’t.”

  “He does a funny thing with his hands.” Tura held her hands out before her and swung both of them, once, left and right.

  “I know,” Frank said. “Do you think that’s autism?”

  “Frank, for heaven’s sake, no. It’s a sign. It’s speech of s
ome kind. Sign language.”

  “I’ve never been around a kid, Tura. How would I know?”

  Cedric banged in at the door, meticulously sluicing off his mucking boots in the foundation that sloped down from the slop sink, slapping his gloves and his duster. Frank stepped behind him and pushed the door open. The day was cooler, but still thick with the promised punishment of withheld rain. Tura said, “I’ve told the boy he wants a sleep. He doesn’t seem to agree.”

  “You can lie down,” Frank told the child. “For just a little while. Just here. You don’t have to go in the bed. On the sofa.” The boy held up his begrimed hands and Frank lifted him to wash him off at the kitchen tap. Frank had lifted newborn lambs that weighed more. After he’d covered him with a blanket, Frank came back and sat down with the Bellinghams. “I’ve seen Natalie’s brother. He survived. And I’ve seen Natalie.” There was a beat of silence. Then another beat.

  “Natalie,” Tura said.

  “Yes,” said Frank. “I wouldn’t say she suffered.” He hadn’t let himself think about it. Drowning was not the easy death people liked to imagine. There was a great deal of air in the submerged body. It took time and the body fought.

  Lethal injection, he thought; now, that was a good death.

  “She was a lovely girl,” Cedric said. “Will you still go back to the States now, Frank? The way you and Natalie talked about?”

  Frank said, “Yes.” He added, “Later. I have to . . . I don’t know what you do.”

  “Call your agent,” Cedric said. “Ask the funeral fellow. There are forms.”

  Cedric meant that Frank should call his lawyer. Frank didn’t have one. A real-estate lawyer had signed papers when they bought the condo.

  The telephone rang. No one moved. It rang three times and stopped, no message given. It rang again. Finally, Tura got up and answered, on the fourth ring. Plainly as if the telephone had been a bullhorn, her face said that Miles Bellingham had been found dead. Tura listened, punctuating her nodding with murmurs of “Oh, my dear . . .” and “Of course, anything . . .” She gestured to Cedric, who shook his head severely. Finally, she put the phone down.