Two if by Sea

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Hope said, “He’s all right. He can go to bed later. So, Frank, it isn’t just getting people to buy him candy. What if that had been Camp David, Frank? What if those two guys had been Mahmoud Abbas and Binyamin Netanyahu . . .”

  “Are those guys still . . . ?”

  “Frank, that’s not the point. What if it had been the leader of South Korea and North Korea, whoever they are, now or in the future, or any generals in Somalia, and Ian could tell them to be good? What will people want from him in the future? What do they already want from him?”

  Frank said, “I think about it all the time. I keep coming back to how it would be okay, somehow. He wouldn’t have been given this if—”

  “Oh, Frank, that’s just stupid. There are violin prodigies who end up in mental institutions! Maybe if he had . . . bodyguards and was . . . a Rhodes Scholar. He’s not even four! He weighs about as much as the dog!”

  Thoughts of Claudia’s muscled legs gathering him to her, of Glory Bee’s strong legs bunching before the water jump, Claudia’s sweetness, Glory Bee’s stunning prowess, Patrick’s stoic skill, the little jockey Patrick fancied—all those thoughts swirled in Frank’s mind, like ingredients in a hot dish first flamed then peppered. One spoonful would be too much. He had to sleep first. Hailing Ian, Frank stumbled upstairs, leaving the trophy on the table, falling on the bed thinking of all the ablutions he had neglected.

  The third-to-last thought he had before he dropped out of consciousness, aware of a button pressing into his cheek but too spent even to adjust so that he would not have a bruise in the morning, was of Claudia.

  Where was she now?

  What was she to him now?

  Frank decided to let Claudia figure that out.

  The next-to-last thought he had was about the Ian effect on the rumble in the McDonald’s parking lot. If it meant what Hope thought it meant—global speculations that Frank had acknowledged long ago—he would have to make a plan. He would have to do what men do, to gather up the things that were his and make them safe, in a fortress with only one way in, and Frank standing guard.

  They used to play cards on Friday nights when he was a cop. It was serious. No one dared miss short of a funeral, an immediate-family funeral. No Texas Hold ’Em either. Real poker. He remembered the crumpled look on the face of an Italian guy who felt sure that he had the cards, but knew for certain that he had a fierce Italian wife. All in, the guy would say, his face scaffolded between hope and despair.

  Hope had identified herself as Ian’s grandmother. She was all in. Frank was all in.

  Then there might need to be a fortress. The last thought he had was of the rough breeding farm in the Yorkshire hills that he had never seen.

  FIFTEEN

  THAT’S A VERY good picture,” Claudia said. “That picture really looks like a man. Most guys your age just draw a stick figure with hands that are too big, but your guy has a neck, and look how his neck goes right into his shoulders and his arms are the right length compared to his body.”

  Claudia spent more time at the farm. It seemed entirely natural. Every time she talked with Ian, Frank was more impressed by the way she did it. Calling a preschool child a “guy” automatically inducted him into the paradise of men. She didn’t stop with “Good job!” but explained in specific ways to Ian what was remarkable about his drawing (and it was remarkable). Although Ian seemed largely indifferent to a number concept of any kind, his facility with drawing and reading was fierce for his age. Claudia went on: “So now I’m curious. Who is that?”

  Ian flicked an eyelid, a wink or a grimace, but didn’t look up. He went on drawing, carefully fitting out his man with boots that hit just below the knee, then tooled the leather with triangles. He said nothing, but reached for a darker brown crayon. This also happened every time Claudia sat with him, now a total of four times.

  “Who’s that?” Claudia asked again. “Is that your dad?” After he painstakingly colored in the darker brown of the boot that framed the lighter diamonds, Ian nodded. “Is that your dad now or your dad who was your father before the big storm?” Ian indicated Frank, who was sitting at the kitchen table, ostensibly reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee, but actually watching. “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s looking at Grandma. You can’t see her, but she’s outside the barn putting Bobbie Champion on the pony cart.”

  “Okay. Why isn’t Dad helping her?”

  Ian laughed. “Grandma says he makes her be like an old lady.”

  “Well, Dad probably just likes to do things for her.”

  Ian shrugged and then smiled.

  “I know you’re happy. Do you think about your dad from before? Or your brother? It’s okay to think about them, even if it doesn’t make you happy.”

  Ian shrugged. Visibly, he drew away from Claudia, not in a way that could be measured in inches, but as though he had opened a book he now hastily closed. Claudia had explained to Frank that children’s grief behavior was different. She described it as “taking bites.” Little children, who didn’t have the large vocabulary necessary for ritual mourning, were sad in small “bites,” but then rushed away to play. For this reason, people used to believe that children’s natural resiliency healed them sooner. Anything but, Claudia said. Kids just didn’t always look the way we think people look when they’ve suffered a tremendous loss.

  “It’s good that Dad now knew him, and he knew your mom, too.”

  Ian shook his head, glancing at Frank. “He did not know my dad before. Only bad guys knew my dad before.”

  “He did know your dad, not very long.”

  “When we lived in Etry Castle?” Ian said. “My dad now didn’t come there. They would kill him if he came there.” Listening, Frank was appalled—not only at how close Claudia was tailgating the truth, but at the cold calm with which Ian described the certainty of mayhem as an ordinary part of his little life.

  “Were they bad guys like in cartoons?” Claudia smiled. “With robber masks?”

  “No,” said Ian. “They wore normal clothes, but they were . . .” He rapped on the table three times. “Real. Bad. Guys. Like the ones who came to our house. ” Ian turned one of his hands into a pistol and fired. “My brother said he saw them where he is.”

  “Your brother? Your brother . . . we think your brother was so hurt in the storm that he died, Ian. All of us are sad about that. Where was he this other time?”

  “I mean, today.”

  “Oh, well, okay.” She paused. “I like to pretend I’m not sad sometimes when I really am. You might be really sad about your brother.”

  Claudia shifted, and began to draw her own picture. From the table, Frank saw a woman take shape, a drawing not as good, really, as Ian’s. “This is my mother. My mother died, and I miss her.”

  “I’m sorry she died,” Ian said suddenly. This was the most conversation he’d had with Claudia since he’d asked for the plastic horses at Eden’s wedding. “What died her?”

  “She had strep throat, a bad sore throat, and that is the kind of disease that most people get better from, but she did not get better because she didn’t know that she had it so very badly as she did. This was seven years ago, and I was almost grown up, but I was very, very sad and so were my sisters.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Rebecca and Miranda.”

  “What was your mother’s name?”

  “Mary Ann.”

  “I had a dad who died like your mother. Well, Collie had him. I don’t remember him.”

  Ian drew a square-faced boy with a mop of blond hair. Claudia asked, “Is that your brother?”

  Ian nodded at the paper. Then he looked up at Claudia with a half smile and an arched eyebrow that said plainly, This conversation is over.

  Claudia stood up and poured herself a cup of coffee, lightly kissing Frank on the side of the head, which made Frank want to pull her down on his lap or else slap her away the way Glory Bee slapped a fly with her tail. It wasn’t
as though Natalie had even been Ian’s mother: still, every time Claudia made some perfectly ordinary display of affection in Ian’s presence, Frank felt as though he was cheating not only on Natalie, but on the kid. What would a psychiatrist say? And what would a psychiatrist say about Frank’s web of lies, Claudia asking if Frank didn’t have any wedding pictures with Ian’s real parents in them, Frank saying those were all lost in the flood, Claudia saying couldn’t Brian Donovan get hold of some of them, Frank saying he didn’t like to impose on Brian’s grief . . .

  “Frank, what’s going on? You knew Ian’s family. What does he mean?”

  Desperately, Frank shrugged, the universal gesture that was supposed to mean, Kids? Who knows? He displaced another shovel load of lies. The only person to whom he couldn’t lie was Ian.

  “She’s your girlfriend,” Ian said of Claudia.

  “Yes, but we’re not married.”

  “I know that.”

  “And we’re not getting married.”

  “Okay. For sure?”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said helplessly. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you being here, with me and Grandma. Or your room or anything.” After weeks of negotiation, Ian had agreed to sleep in his own bed, although he would not go to sleep in his own bed unless Frank or Hope read four books. One night, exhausted, Frank got fed up and read three, and Ian didn’t protest. But at six the next morning, when Frank got up to see to the horses, he looked in on Ian, who was wide-awake in his bed, the stack of books still beside him. Wordlessly, the child got up with Frank, straightened his blanket, put on his boots, drank the milk with a splash of coffee and three spoons of sugar he had every morning, and followed Frank outside. Frank knew that Ian had not gone to sleep, and Ian knew that Frank knew.

  Ian said now, “Why would Claudia want my room?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Don’t be afraid of that.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  Of course she didn’t want his room. Frank’s hands were big and his cheeks swollen hot, a great idiot staring down at an attorney less than forty inches tall.

  Ian left, but then returned.

  “Would you leave?” he asked. “For her?”

  Frank had to physically restrain himself from clutching at Ian.

  “I would never leave,” Frank said. “For anyone.”

  Ian vanished.

  It was only a question. Ian, thankfully, now had friends, and no longer felt the need to be Frank’s shadow, at least all the time. He went bowling—bowling was his passion—and on what Frank learned to call playdates, the modern equivalent of what Frank used to call “playing over.” His favorite friends were unregenerate hellions, Henry, Oliver, and Abe, triplets whose forty-six-year-old mother had the look of someone who’d just regained consciousness and didn’t remember the nature of her injuries. She wore clothing even Frank knew was expensive, but so haphazardly that she looked like a scarecrow.

  One Saturday, she dropped Ian off—while Oliver, Henry, and Abe howled like coonhounds from the backseat of their big SUV.

  “Thanks for having him,” Frank said. He’d been building new stalls and was filthy. “I’m sorry. I must stink.”

  “You’re fine,” the woman said seriously. “You know, Frank, Ian is unusual.”

  Frank froze.

  “My boys are what you would call incorrigible. I say this as a loving mother. There are days that I think Abe will hit Oliver and actually disable him. I am no match for them. But when they’re around Ian, they settle down. They play board games they’ve never touched instead of breaking the furniture over each other’s backs. They wash their hands after they use the toilet. They’re nice. What do you feed him? Do you want to board him out?”

  Frank felt saliva at the corners of his lips. Jesus Christ, he was drooling. As though he were folding a piece of linty gum he found in his pocket, he made a show of removing his striped glove, glancing down to unwrap the gum, and composing his face. “Oh, his mom taught him manners,” Frank said.

  “It’s more than that. He’s like . . . a good influence.”

  Frank couldn’t get Ian into the house fast enough. Oliver and Henry were throwing empty soda-pop cans out of the car windows.

  • • •

  It was full summer then, but for a brief period the heat suddenly withdrew, a cloth whisked away from a table. Everyone took a long breath. That cool time was a foretaste of fall. Wisconsin was like a young woman with gray hair at her temples; you never got a chance to forget that winter was only briefly on hiatus.

  Claudia had put in her bid and been accepted to Hiram Jacoby’s legendary weeklong clinic in northern Kentucky—a dozen riders and “their pets,” as Jacoby put it, including some promising newcomers and some veterans like Claudia. Among these high-point scorers were certainly at least some of the United States Equestrian Team members-to-be, and the team for the summer Olympics in Sydney. Jacoby traditionally arranged a sit-down with each of the riders to give counsel on the projected goals and plans. Jacoby had known Frank’s father, and was interested in Claudia’s protégée status at Tenacity. If Claudia couldn’t sit Glory Bee like paint on a rocking horse—as Patrick had—she was more willing than Patrick to take chances. Frank knew that she would learn more from Hiram in a week than she would from him in a year.

  Patrick was now fully on board with Claudia’s dream, and spoke of returning to England the following summer to sort out his life before attempting to become a permanent resident of the United States. After that, he would want to raise and train his own colt—preferably one Glory Bee threw after her retirement in a few years. As was only right, he had taken over coaching Claudia on Glory Bee, and was making good money because of it. Frank suspected that Patrick would pay a visit to the jockey school in Indiana while Claudia was at the clinic. Frank might have welcomed the chance to see Hiram Jacoby, whom he hadn’t met since he was a child traveling with his father.

  Frank welcomed the break. He needed their absence to think, and he was not a fast thinker.

  He knew perfectly well how to name his feelings for Claudia, and had there been no Natalie, or, perhaps especially, no Ian, Frank might have known what to do with them. But there had been a Natalie. Frank had wanted all the things Claudia now seemed to want with him, but he had wanted them with Natalie. Claudia wanted children, her career as a teacher and a counselor, and a stable home life that would not, after this period, include competitive jumpers. She was certainly in love, and he supposed he was as well, his experience of love being limited to once and Ian. Frank didn’t know if he could want those things again.

  Really, though, what did love mean? He didn’t want to be away from Claudia. They argued more than they agreed and they could argue about anything. Last night, it had been Dickens: Claudia had grown up on his stories and called him the great reformer, who would never let fat complacent Brits forget that the poor were always with them. Frank countered that if Dickens wasn’t really a racist, he certainly was a cultural chauvinist.

  “He was on the side of everyone in theory,” Frank said. “In real life, he didn’t like anyone who didn’t look like him.”

  “He thought everyone could reach higher than his rank in life.”

  “He thought the best thing that could happen to any fuzzy-wuzzy was to go through some kind of tea strainer until he at least looked like an English gentleman, or sounded like one.”

  “What’s a fuzzy-wuzzy?” Claudia asked.

  “A person who wasn’t European living in England. Someone from Southeast Asia. A black person. And Fagin . . . well, kids in eighth grade know about the ‘Jew’ in Oliver Twist . . .”

  “Fuzzy-wuzzy? Who’s a racist?”

  “You mean me?” Frank said. “Give me a break. I was a cop.”

  “Cops are some of the most virulent racists and I sure don’t see many people of color in your life,” she said, biting off the words.

  “Well, I just met a black woman in Madison I’m interested in dating,” Fr
ank said. “I’m sure that psychiatrist school is loaded with people of color. Lots of them are psychiatrists.” Claudia lobbed her shoe at his head. “Anyway, you’re patronizing me. You’re pretending to be interested in British literature. Whereas I would never pretend to be interested in crazy people.” He repented that because Claudia had on the elbow-length rubber gloves she used to apply poultices to Pro’s back legs. The next thing she threw, with good aim, was a turd.

  They had fun. Not in the same one-of-the-guys way he and Natalie had . . . but they had fun. The sex they had still astonished him. His cock stirred if Claudia so much as reached inside her shirt to delicately untwist a bra strap. He came to visit her during the day at the lakeside condo in Madison that was basically one big room with four walls of windows framing an enthralling lake view, four strips of bookshelves crammed both horizontally and vertically, and a gigantic bed with about twelve pillows. Claudia had sex like she rode, as though this would be the last time and she didn’t care if it killed her. When she finally let him put his mouth on her, she gently taught him to flatten his tongue to give her the best pleasure. She loved sitting atop him, and hated doing it with him behind her, and told him it felt lousy to women. Grown people, he and Claudia, lay on a blanket in the back of his truck, parked on the wooden bridge over Sandman Creek. Being naked outside was like being rich, Claudia said, sounding just like Natalie. He loved her mind, under her blond cap of feathery hair, as much as her body. Her head was filled with antic recipes for discussion, for discourse, for dinner. He thought of her hands—her strong and spatulate hands that seemed grafted onto her slight self from the model of an Italian peasant woman—on Glory Bee’s shining neck, on Ian’s milky, knobbly spine, on Frank’s own neck with its humiliating farmer’s tan, and he felt safer every day.

  At his house, Claudia fell easily into a routine of asking Hope to teach her things, pitching in when Hope was armed with an immersion blender the size of a small rifle, “putting up” tomatoes, tomato soup, tomato salsa, tomato relish, tomato sauce—a fetish from her newlywed days and no longer any kind of economic necessity. Claudia said the jewelly jars of produce made her feel satisfied in the same way riding did—a job of substance and shape. Though Hope was ironic about almost everyone, and well aware that, as Natalie had said, Frank had a “crush” on his mother and a wise woman would honor that, she was still not immune to Claudia’s robust cheer, at right angles from what one might expect of a professor of psychiatry. And Ian liked her. He liked everyone, but he liked Claudia more. They had private jokes; he called her “Cloudy.” She called him “Eeny.”