Two if by Sea

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “You’re different,” Eden said to her brother. “You just smiled.”

  “I smile all the time.”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t.”

  Frank smiled again. “You look healthy, too, Eden. Well fed. Your wedding dress wouldn’t fit you now.”

  “But I’m still fit,” Eden said, slugging Frank hard. “And you can’t hit me back because of my delicate condition.”

  Like some vaudeville character, missing only an oily mustache, Frank’s new brother-in-law took this as a cue to sidle up to Frank and ask, “So, with Claudia Campo. Is it a match? You’re not getting any younger, Frank. Psychological studies show that guys who were happily married get remarried right away. I’m only saying.”

  “If I were going to do anything, I would be sure to rely on psychological studies before I did it, Marty. I can’t date a doctor anyhow. I only finished a year of college and that in night school. She wouldn’t have me.”

  “Maybe she likes those rustic types who aren’t cerebral.”

  “I’ll introduce her to some, then. We’re friends, and she’s good to Ian,” Frank said to Marty. “Her dreams are about the horses.”

  This wasn’t inaccurate. Claudia was hardly the type to follow Frank around with stars in her eyes and sighs on her lips. She was nearly always busy. Be careful what you wish for, Frank thought, for you will surely get it. Although on sabbatical, Claudia seemed to have a hundred friends who needed tending and a zest for daylong events with names like “Digging Your Grave with Your Teeth: The Link between Childhood Obesity and Factitious Disorder” and “Depersonalization Disorder: Out of Body Politics.” She trucked Prospero to therapy every week in Madison so he could swim in a pool half the size of a football stadium, and joined her friends for weekends in Chicago and New York, to shop and go to the theater. Why wasn’t she more obsessed with him? Frank wondered. The solace was his time alone with Ian. When Claudia wasn’t around, Frank didn’t always insist that Ian patter off to his bed. He pulled Ian’s compact furnace of a body close to him, and when he wakened, Ian had not moved.

  Finally, Claudia left for Kentucky, trailering Glory Bee, with Patrick riding shotgun. Frank didn’t hear from her, and worried. Old acquaintance aside, Jacoby wouldn’t be sentimental when it came to fielding a national team. But when Claudia hopped out of the truck, she was lit from within. Jacoby as much as promised he would try to throw his word behind her team hopes—which would mean her leaving eventually, to go to train with the rest, with a real coach. As much as he’d hoped for this moment, Frank was surprised that he was aggrieved. Gravely, Claudia thanked Ian for looking after Prospero. She said there was a surprise for him in the truck.

  It was his own saddle, the duty that Frank had neglected for months.

  Point, Claudia.

  Inelegantly, he asked, “Who made it? Elves?”

  “There were a few there that Mr. Jacoby already had,” Claudia told Frank. “I bought one.”

  “It probably won’t fit,” Frank said, hating himself.

  “You can try it on Saratoga,” Claudia said. “Eden’s horse.”

  “No. I want to ride Glory Bee,” Ian said.

  “Glory Bee’s working with me now on being a horse, a great show jumper. You can ride her in a few years.”

  “Years?”

  “And we can get you a horse of your own,” Frank said. So there. A horse was better than a saddle any day. They went criminally cheap at the auction in Baraboo. A college girl would sell a horse like used luggage, simply because she’d graduated. A pretty little horse couldn’t pull a plow, and often, those horses went unsold, to a heartbreaking fate.

  “When can we get this horse? Tonight?” Ian said. He was sitting on the saddle in the grass with his feet angled out to each side.

  “Pretty soon,” Frank said. “I can go to the auction in a couple of weeks.”

  “A couple of weeks?”

  “What do you want, Ian? Not everything happens in one day.”

  “A horse now,” Ian said. “I have a saddle! You have horses. I need my own horse.”

  Frank sighed. “How about lunch first?”

  They went in, and Ian ate his peanut-butter-and-potato-chips on toast, with carrot sticks. Frank wanted a nap when coffee failed to restore him. So Claudia asked Ian if he’d like to draw. Frank didn’t mistake the slight hitch of tension. He felt it himself. He wanted to complain, What, now? Even Ian knew that drawing was code for Claudia’s gentle brand of therapy.

  “I’m only drawing one picture,” he said.

  “One is good. What is it? What’s it going to be?”

  “A boa.”

  “A snake?”

  “No, the kind you wear. I want to get one,” said Ian. Frank could not suppress his laughter: Marty routinely insisted that Ian was headed for a career in musical theater. “No, I changed my mind,” Ian said then. “I’m going to draw where I lived before.” Frank stood at the sink, unable to move.

  “Where did you live?”

  “Etry Castle,” Ian said quietly, coloring furiously, the green thickness of waxy crayon darker and darker, like slime in a floor drain. “I told you five times.”

  “Etry Castle? Wow,” Claudia said, warning Frank with her eyes not to react. “Are you sure you can draw that?”

  Ian shook his head. “I can, but decided I don’t really want to draw it after all.”

  “Is your mother still there?”

  “Nope.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s dead, too. Like your mom.”

  Ian went back to drawing big circles filled in with hexagons of color, like kaleidoscopes or stained-glass windows. Frank struggled to control his breathing. After a while, Claudia said, “I’m sorry that your mother died. What, ah, died her?”

  “Some guys. Some bad guys. She took some medicine that died her. I don’t remember.”

  Frank took a long step, but at a warning look from Claudia went back to the sink and ran water into his coffee cup, then began to dispose of the grounds in the pot.

  “What’s this, Frank?” Claudia said, suddenly behind him, her voice no more than a breath. “His parents were Natalie’s relatives. They died in the tsunami. What does he mean?”

  “I have no idea,” Frank told her. He found plates in the drainer that were already clean and began to rinse them, too. He really did have no idea, he consoled himself. Until he had to jerk his hand away, Frank didn’t realize he’d been holding a plate under water so hot that his skin was red and beginning to puff up. “You know what you said about how kids deal with grief.”

  Claudia said nothing for so long Frank was sure that she’d walk out. Instead, she went back to Ian.

  “And there’s your brother!”

  “Colin,” Ian said.

  “Who was in the car in the flood when Dad came?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Well, Colin went into the water. No one knows where Colin is. Do you think he got hurt? I think maybe he got hurt.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe Colin is even dead. I said that. It was a very bad flood.”

  Ian began to laugh. Frank’s guts squeezed like wet towels. Why was he laughing, about the boy who had forsworn his own salvation to push Ian through the window, telling Frank that Ian was “important”?

  “What’s so funny, Eeny?” Claudia asked, and even her voice wobbled.

  “Because he’s not dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Colin isn’t dead. He would say if he was dead. My mom died. I had another dad and he died. I don’t remember. My dad now is doing the dishes.”

  SIXTEEN

  CLAUDIA CLAIMED THAT there was no way of knowing what a child meant when he said his parents were dead.

  “He means his parents are dead,” Frank said. They were huddled in the back of Pro’s cushy recovery stall, just after Hope had left to drive Ian to school. It felt as though they were hiding from the headmaster. They spoke in whispers.
/>   “He has no real understanding of their deaths . . .”

  “He’s almost four, Claudia. He’s not a newborn.”

  “That’s only forty-eight months old, Frank. Whatever happened to Ian happened at a good time for Ian. It’s called the latency period, and it’s a very stable time of life that starts maybe just about when you start school and ends at about puberty. You’re not a baby, and you have deep feelings, but some people think that this is when a child is able to have a sort of amnesia about the earliest traumatic or evil memories. So we go nuts when we hear about somebody raping a two-year-old but for the two-year-old, it’s actually easier to recover from sexual abuse and adapt to live a pretty normal life, if she gets the chance, because of being little.” She paused. “Still . . . bad guys?” She regarded her nails. “Are you in trouble, Frank? Who were those men in the black car?”

  “Claudia, I have no idea. Nobody like those guys ever came up this driveway before. Maybe I just overreacted.”

  “If you overreacted, why didn’t you ever talk about it? You expected it.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to think anything’s out of the ordinary. At least not until I have to. Claudia, let me tell you. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in predicting the future. I probably don’t believe in anything. Whatever I did believe in once, that probably hit the ground with the very first call I went out on, the three-year-old little girl her own father pushed off the fifth-floor balcony one sunny morning right after church. I remember driving up there with my partner Elena and this little girl was just on the grass like a doll, in her little yellow dress. No blood. Just like a little doll. The mom? The mom is upstairs crying with her arms around the dad and telling Elena it’s a big misunderstanding, that he really loved his little girl, and that he was possessed, and did we really have to arrest him? If I did believe in the woo-woo, I’d be standing outside the 7-Eleven every Saturday night at ten minutes to twelve to buy my Powerball. Visions, faith healing, God. It’s all the fucking Easter Bunny. But what Ian does, I can see. It’s like the scientific method. Try it, test it, try it again. I’m not the first person who ever saw it.” He told Claudia about the gladiators at McDonald’s. “So if I’m not the first person, who else has? When he puts bad guys together with his mother and father, I think, What if somebody’s looking for Ian? What if I interrupted certain plans? You think they’d be okay with that?”

  “Let’s try to be pragmatic. He’s never said that anyone used—”

  “Fuck pragmatic. I am being pragmatic. You tell me. What if somebody got hold of your Mrs. Madrigal? What if she started brokering peace treaties, like Hope said? Yeah, sure, the hope of the world, huh? But it wouldn’t be. Tell me the profit in peace on earth and goodwill toward all men. I think Mrs. Madrigal was smart. If everybody knew about her, somebody would want to make money off her. And after somebody wanted to make money off her, somebody would want to stop her. What if what Ian wanted was the wrong thing?”

  “That’s a fair point. Not that I think Ian would ever want the wrong thing. But I’m surprised at it coming from you.”

  “Surprised? Why?”

  “These were cousins of your wife. Cousins, right?” In his haste, Frank had tripped over his own lie, knocking over a pole. He bent to retie his boot, rationalizations snapping through his mind like the flip-books you thumbed to make moving images, little books he found in cereal boxes when he was a kid—somehow so much more magical than actual animation.

  “Just . . . it was more . . . her brother who knew them. At least knew them well.”

  “But still, Ian is probably explaining this symbolically. Bad guys means something to him. The storm, maybe. He’s not only a relative by marriage. You love Ian.”

  “I didn’t know what a father’s love really was, Claudia. When I agreed to adopt Ian, I didn’t know the extent of how he was.”

  “Would it have stopped you?”

  “No! But what I do know, from seeing them at their worst, is how people act, Claudia. Even people who would describe themselves as good parents . . . Take something that doesn’t even matter. Fucking beauty pageants! Child abuse for a trophy some shill bought for a hundred bucks the gross. Ribbon that went for fifty cents a thousand. Maybe the family gets a check for a hundred bucks, for the five thousand they spent.”

  “You could say that about jumping horses. That’s what I mean.”

  “You could say that, and half the time I do! But at least there’s something going on there, some athleticism, some work-to-success ratio, something . . . anyway, that has nothing to do with it. I’m just going to have to talk to Ian about it. About why he thinks his mother was killed by bad guys. And about what he’s feeling when he does what he does. And about how it’s not a great idea for people to know.”

  Claudia said, “Or I will.”

  Patrick brought Glory Bee out of her stall and began to warm her up, and Claudia, who would be leaving midweek for an event in Saratoga, New York, was drawn away. Frank stood leaning against Prospero’s neck, left alone with the vivid snapshot, never fully realized but ineradicable, of the older boy’s face when he caught sight of the navy boat arriving, there in the car filling with brackish water. Even conjuring with the idea that Ian had some way of knowing that his brother had survived was, he would have agreed with Claudia, silly—no matter what gifts Ian had. Ian and . . . well, Colin, were not identical twins. The brother was older by at least three years, maybe four. Frank had sat up late scanning the Web for Etry Castle, Aintree Castle, Atterbury Castle, but Australia was short on castles, so Frank expanded his search. He found an Etry Castle, which looked like a glorified mansion on Lake Michigan, in Annet-sur-Marne, in France. There was no online description of the place—who had built it or why, who owned it now, or what function it fulfilled, domestic or ceremonial. Was it a park or a museum? A private home? Was it one of those places owned by some Asian or Eastern European billionaire whose own name was virtually unknown and whose wealth inhabited numbered bank accounts and bullion caches in neutral nations and island hermitages around the globe? Could Ian have been born in France? He had no trace of an accent except his lazy, flat Australian nasality that was beginning to fade. Some moneyed thug. That was the kind of man, or being (why could it not be a woman?) Frank imagined having an interest in Ian. He’d mentioned bad guys. It was paranoid in the extreme—the stuff of airport reading at its sleazy bubbling—to invest in a preschool child’s worldview. But something about Ian’s reluctance to give up the merest details of his life before the tsunami, as well as how tight-lipped he’d remained about the identity of the woman in the van, how the information seemed to burst forth suddenly from a broken seam, stoked Frank’s sense that what Ian said was genuine, so far as Ian understood it. Frank also had the strong sense that Ian had decided to repair that seam of confiding as quickly as it opened, and had not told half of what he knew. And this person was forty-eight months old. Ian’s general grace in the world, the more Frank knew of what the boy may have endured, was staggering.

  Frank went out to the ring and watched as Patrick reconfigured the jumps. Claudia sidled Glory Bee closer to the fence.

  “I want you to concentrate on what you’re doing,” he said to Claudia. “You shouldn’t even be involved with me when you’ve set yourself this kind of job.”

  “Sue Smith trained a Grand National winner, and her husband was an Olympic show jumper. Don’t you think they ever fucked, up there in the Yorkshire moors?” Claudia said. “Do you think it frightened the horses?”

  “If Patrick overhears this, I’ll end you,” Frank said in a whisper, struggling not to laugh. Were all doctors so bawdy? Natalie was possessed of the same vinegar. Was that the source of Frank’s attraction? Was he trying to fill in the outlines left by his dead wife? And what if he was? A man could do a great deal worse. “I meant, don’t worry about Ian. I’ll handle that. I don’t want you involved.”

  “You should have told me that before you involved me.”
>
  Frank went into the house and made himself his obligatory grilled cheese. He made another and ate it with leftover potato wedges from the fridge. Because food was something he could take or leave, his mother noticed his indulgence. “Did you forget breakfast? What’s with all the comfort food?”

  “Comfort.”

  She said, “Are you worried about Ian?”

  “News travels fast.”

  “I could say that you wouldn’t be in this state if you hadn’t done what you did in the first place.”

  “But you wouldn’t say that because it reeks of self-righteousness.”

  “That’s right. But also, I love Ian, and deplore as I may however he got here to us, I’m not sure that wherever he was before wasn’t worse.” She paused in her reading and said, “What does Claudia know?”

  “Just that I adopted a kid whose parents were killed, a shirttail relative of Claudia’s. Like Eden.”

  “Except Eden and Marty think he was the son of one of Natalie’s brothers. Your nephew by marriage. Although Eden doesn’t believe it.”

  “Jesus, Mom. What am I supposed to do, host a family meeting and confess all?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what you should do.”

  “Has he said things to you, Mom?”

  Hope sat down. “Give me one of those potatoes,” she said. Frank liberally salted and peppered a thick wedge and handed it to Hope in a paper towel.

  “Do you want ketchup?”

  “Vinegar.”