Two if by Sea

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Do you like my hat?” Ian asked.

  “No, I do not like your hat,” Frank answered.

  “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Ian cracked up. Something about this exchange struck him so funny that he could not give up the book, and had committed every word to memory, even though he was now reading tiny chapter books about Father mowing the lawn and chewing up Owen’s rubber dinosaurs. Hope had given Ian so many books that Claudia called Ian’s room the Carnegie-Ian Library.

  The books completed, Frank had to break the news.

  As he suspected, Brian had received papers from the lawyer months before and had done nothing with them. He had found them a few weeks before under a jumble of photos and papers he’d used for the film. Part of that work took place in a care facility where his leg slowly healed, and Frank winced about letting the poor man languish there. Then Brian went home, to his house that still smelled of his girls and his wife, and took an indefinite leave from work, for nothing seemed to fit or make sense. The visit to the convent and the lonely, determined little boy had been among the first decisive things he’d done for months. It had been the first time Brian had driven his own car.

  “Won’t you come to see us?” Frank had asked, but Brian demurred, promising he would come, another time, when he was stronger. Brian’s perpetual twilight was in this sense a boon. To Frank’s relief, Brian didn’t even question Frank’s connection to Colin. By the same preposterous logic that made Frank responsible for Ian, he also was responsible for Colin. A call to one of Charley Wilder’s friends, an adoption attorney in Milwaukee, confirmed that a six-month period of foster placement with Frank, Ian’s adoptive dad, and the published search for known relatives could quite readily lead to Frank’s adopting the nearly nine-year-old Colin as a single parent. Frank asked, “What relatives?” Relatives in Brisbane? Or in Indonesia? The parents, he explained, had apparently died in Indonesia, but the boys were born in England. Well, then, the attorney said, it would be necessary to publish in all those places.

  Great. That was great. Fucking great.

  Here he was, the genial kidnapper father, the warmhearted capital criminal who spent time trying to think of ways that Ian could put the equivalent of a funny rubber nose on his superpowers, and this woman was suggesting a “published search” for known relatives on several continents. It wrung Frank’s neck muscles until he had the sensation that someone was slowly pulling his head back by the hair. Perhaps something would change. Sure. Fuck yes. Perhaps he’d wake up one morning and a big black helicopter would be sitting in the high pasture, or a motorcade of feds would arrive in the driveway. He’d been reduced to sentiments like the ones his mother’s batty friend Arabella often expressed, among Frank’s favorites being exactly what he now absurdly could not help but feel, Well, things can only get better . . .

  “I have to tell you something, honey,” Frank finally told Ian.

  “I’m not going to Catholic school,” said Ian. “It’s not really better. Grandma’s friend Johnny is daft.”

  Johnny was a sweet guy, gayer than Christmas and about forty years younger than Hope. He’d taken over her job at the high school library and they gossiped and cooked together with more vigor than anything Hope did with her book club or her lifetime sidekicks, Arabella and Janet. Johnny was a very big advocate of the Catholic school, which Frank and his friends, growing up, called Our Lady of Perpetual Misery.

  “He’s not daft. He just has his opinion. But no, you don’t have to go to Catholic school.”

  “I’m not getting a different horse. I can train Sultana myself. She doesn’t like Patrick.”

  “It’s not about Sultana.” Sultana did not, in fact, like Patrick. “It’s about Colin.”

  Ian, who had attached long pieces of tape to his toes and was pretending to drive the pony cart, sat up. “Is he here?”

  “Not yet. But he is alive. He lived after the flood. And he’s coming here. And we’re going to the airport in New York City to get him.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Ian said with a sigh, lying back and rearranging the tapes on his toes.

  No shock.

  No tears.

  No nothing but acceptance, as if the other shoe had dropped.

  “Was your name Ian before the flood?”

  From the universal gesture palette of childhood, Ian selected the head duck and eye roll that meant, duh.

  “How could I know, Ian? You didn’t talk!”

  “Well, you called me Ian.”

  “I just liked the name.”

  “Because . . . It. Was. My. Name.”

  “Are you excited to see Colin?”

  “Yes.” Ian carefully removed his tapes, stowing them on the headboard. “Is Cora dead?”

  “I don’t know. We can ask Colin.”

  “I think she’s dead. Like Natalie,” Ian said, and proffered the books. They finished one, and then Ian said, “Do you know what, Dad?”

  “What?”

  “We might need an ark, too, for floods.”

  “Hmmmmm,” Frank replied, half asleep, for the reading worked better on him than on Ian. “I don’t know how to make an ark that would float. We could build a little one.”

  Ian said, “Not good enough.”

  “There’s no reason to worry. Go to sleep.”

  “I’m not tired. Could we get Colin now?”

  “In a few sleeps. Six sleeps. I’ll make you a calendar, with the one from the bank. The sooner you sleep, the sooner we go.” He kissed Ian’s forehead, and then his eyes.

  Downstairs, he found Hope, who offered him some of the tea she’d just made. Frank said, “Where’s Claudia?”

  “She went home. That girl is a nervous wreck, Frank.”

  “Mom, I’m a nervous wreck.”

  Perhaps Claudia was only tired. Tomorrow was a training day in the indoor arena: two events, one in Florida and one in the Netherlands, were on the horizon.

  That was it. Claudia was tired. And other hallucinations. Life was hurling events at the two of them like a pitching machine stuck on fastball. Claudia was at her limit.

  “I hope you know what you’re getting into, Frank, with this other little boy,” Hope said suddenly.

  Frank poured his tea, sat down, and bit his lip. Hope was in all things a patient and open-minded woman, her love for Ian immense and her temperament generally a region where the month was always May. When she said things like this, rarely enough, Frank wanted to pick up the cups one by one and smash each of them against the fireplace brick. He had no idea if this desire was triggered by his own impossible pickle, or the inherent tension of being a grown man living in his mother’s house, or because he simply couldn’t fathom why anyone as smart as Hope would say something so ludicrous. What could Frank do? Turn away Ian’s brother, who had, impossibly, made it to safety from that buried van after the tsunami? Lived in an orphanage? Had the ingenuity to understand that the man holding his little brother in the photo was somehow linked to the things he heard in a television program? If Frank wanted to, how could he even presume to deny Colin, who, in the teetering van with that filthy water swamping the bow of the powerboat, had looked clear-eyed at Frank and said, take my brother first, he’s important? If Frank did end up going to prison, at least it would take years to extricate Colin and Ian from Tenacity Farms, from Claudia, who would fight to keep them, who would deny she ever knew about any wrongdoing, from Marty and Eden, who would do the same thing, from Hope herself.

  At least, once Colin got here, he would be . . . something like home.

  “I have no idea what I’m getting into,” Frank said. “The nuns said he’s a good boy. Natalie’s brother Brian went out there and said he seems very nice.”

  “How is Natalie’s brother?”

  Who knew when Brian would work full-time again? Just before they hung up, Brian haltingly—as if abashed by bringing it up at all—described the bequest that Natalie had left to each of her brothers. Hugh, of course,
was not legally dead. Brian apologized for glancing at Frank’s private papers. Frank decided to send a check that combined the portions for all the brothers, the next day. Brian was not only struggling financially, but barely respiring emotionally. If he’d had Natalie or any of his brothers, or his parents, or his wife. He had no one.

  By contrast, the Donovans were tight, always, close in age, mates as well as siblings, as likely to call each other to get up to fishing or bashing a ball around as to call a friend. As short a time as he’d known them, Frank admired their comradeship, Natalie just the same as one of the brothers, and had thought this might be the family he would have one day. A corner of consciousness lifted like a hat brim in a stiff breeze and, for an instant, Frank saw a thought, that he might still have . . . such a family.

  He might still pull this off. There was a chance. Trauma could never be outlived, but it could be survived.

  He would ask Claudia more about trauma.

  “You know I have to bring him home, Mom,” Frank said. “And if I didn’t want to, I still would. Nothing else is possible.”

  “Of course,” Hope said, lightly touching Frank’s shoulder. “I just worry for you. So much, in such a short time.”

  “It’s not as if it makes it worse. It somehow makes it better. If anyone ever finds out what I did . . . Whatever comes, I know you’ll vouch for how well we looked after them . . .”

  “Don’t say such things, Frank. I know that you love Ian more than you have ever loved anyone.”

  “I think he’s bewitched me.”

  “What if he has? He wants you to be happy so he’s happy. It’s what the world could use more of.” Hope began to clear the teacups. “What I meant was . . . another child. You’ve only had this child less than a year. Colin is not . . . like that, is he?”

  “No, Mom. He’s just an ordinary kid.”

  NINETEEN

  NOW HE WOULD lose Claudia.

  Frank had nothing but contempt for guys who said, Gee, I never realized how much she meant to me until she was gone.

  Saps.

  Or cops.

  “Ode to My First Ex” was the police brotherhood theme song. Now he would be one of them. If someone had asked him even just a month before what he felt about Claudia, he would have said she was just great. She was great, and they had a great time. What a fool he was. To have thought he really believed that it was only a great time. He would tell Claudia the truth, and she would cringe away from him, like a normal person. He would beg her not to do more, although her doctor’s oath, he presumed, extended to crimes against children. She would leave him, and the place she left would throb with his pulse like a bruise. It would grow less. But so would he. He had lied to Claudia. Had he lied to her because he loved her? It didn’t matter.

  He had to stop this now, whatever happened.

  From an envelope in a manila folder in the back of his desk, he retrieved one of the copies of the newspaper page with his picture on it, carrying Ian.

  When Claudia came inside after her ride, he summoned her up to his room and spread the page out on the desk.

  “Frank,” she said, raking her fingers through her sweaty hair. “That’s you. I knew you participated in the rescue. But that little child, it looks like Ian.”

  “It is Ian.”

  “How was he hurt? You never told me.” Already, there was the slight tang of resentment. There can be no secrets.

  “No.”

  “Why is he soaking wet?”

  “I found him in a van that was sinking in the second wave. After my wife died. He and this boy, his brother, I know now, were in the van with a woman. I couldn’t get either of them out. The other boy or the woman. The van just went end over end, and it was gone, swept away.”

  “I don’t understand,” Claudia said. “Why was Ian in someone else’s van?”

  “That’s how I got Ian, Claudia. He’s not the child of a relative of Natalie’s. He’s not the child of anyone I ever knew. He’s a child I found when I was on rescue patrol, the morning after the tsunami, the morning after Natalie died, last Christmas . . .”

  “Then how did you adopt him?”

  “I didn’t.” Claudia sat down hard on the padded bench, lips parted on a sigh. “I just took him. I got a friend to make up dummy papers. I should have given him to the Red Cross workers the first day, but I didn’t.” Claudia spread her hands and seemed to study them. “Claudia, I don’t know why I did it.”

  “I’m sure Ian knows why,” Claudia said. Then, in a moment, she seemed to grow smaller in the chair. Claudia was strong, as physically strong as any woman he had known—stronger than Natalie had been. When she was tired, or angry or sad, though, she folded into herself, like the morning glories Hope planted in summer around the stone pillars at Tenacity, which closed into tiny pale umbrellas at night. Frank lifted her loosely fisted hand and kissed her knuckles.

  “I know you’ll leave me now. And if you hesitate, I should make you leave me.”

  “You can’t make me do anything, Frank. I hate you for thinking you can just dismiss me when you decide to drop the big bombshell.”

  “No one’s dismissing you. Now that Colin is coming—”

  “Colin is probably going to be afraid of abandonment because he never knew if anyone would ever find him. He probably thought he’d have to go looking for Ian when he was finally eighteen. And Ian? Ian could make one wrong turn and end up actually going to a bank and asking the teller nicely to give him ten thousand dollars . . . All those bad things could happen. That’s the worst that could happen. What about the best?”

  “You’re the best that could happen, Claudia. You and I together with them, that’s what’s best. But what if I’m putting you in danger just because I don’t want to lose you? I don’t want to be melodramatic about it, but you know it’s entirely possible that people are after Ian. I know that sounds like a bad movie. It’s true, though.”

  “You can protect him better alone than both of us can?”

  Frank got up and laid his hands against the frame of the big window. “No.”

  “And you’d protect them better if you lost me? Is this what this little boy Colin deserves? A father mourning again for someone he loved and who left him? Well, maybe I flatter myself.”

  “Claudia, you know I love you.”

  “You never said the words.”

  “I love you, Claudia. If I had a life I could plan, I’d want that life to be with you.”

  “But you only have this life. What are you going to do with this life?”

  She stood up and kissed him and he tasted the tears and sweat on her mouth. They lay down on his bed, and shrugged and tugged until all their clothes were rolled around their feet like children’s beach towels, and then, though they were in a house where other people were wandering around downstairs, they made love without thought of intrusion or conclusion.

  “We forgot to use anything,” Frank said suddenly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Claudia said. “The chance that I could get pregnant right now is pretty small. I’m a doctor. I know.”

  “But it could happen! What if it did?”

  Claudia sat up and rummaged in Frank’s bureau for one of his ten identical pairs of navy-blue sweatpants. She took these and a tee shirt into the shower and hummed old John Barry movie themes as she rinsed her hair and scrubbed her body. When she came out, turbaned in a towel, wearing the sweatpants and shirt, she next unfurled her quilt, which made Frank a nervous wreck. He was always thinking he’d roll over in bed and put his foot through one of the soft-as-tissue quilts stitched in Italy by Claudia’s great-grandmother Campo. Although Claudia believed heartily in using things that were old, she also grieved every popped thread and was always paying extravagant sums to have the Fancy Dance or Rosewood Border reinforced. Once cocooned in it, she said, “What if I did get pregnant? Big deal. I could take care of a child on my own. After all, you do, with only the help of your mother and me, and Patrick, and the whole village
.” Claudia wrinkled her nose to take the sting out of her words. “I could get a job in North Carolina, where my father and my sisters live.”

  “North Carolina?”

  “People raise children there all the time, when they’re not eating possum and having sex with close relatives.”

  “I mean, you’d leave here? Away from me?”

  “Do you want children, Frank?”

  “I have children.”

  “I mean, children with me?”

  “Claudia, this isn’t . . .”

  “Well, I don’t mean tomorrow. It’s nine months until the World Cup, and then the Olympic team is chosen. By then I’ll be thirty-four. I mean after. If I do have children, I want to have them then.”

  “And I’ll be forty-five then.”

  “So what? You’re forty-two now, so this boy, Colin, was born when you were my age. Ian was born when you were thirty-nine. Natalie was forty and pregnant for the first time. That’s not extraordinary on the age charts for postmillennial parenting.”

  “Aren’t you worried about it being too late? Biologically?”

  “Weren’t you with Natalie?”

  “She was a doctor.”

  “As am I. Frank. Why do people think that psychiatrists aren’t real doctors?”

  “A woman’s fertility declines . . .”

  “Frank, I just said this twice. I’m a doctor. I know what the propaganda is. Yeah, women miscarry more as they get closer to forty and a lot of those are early miscarriages because there’s something wrong with the fetus, maybe a birth defect. By then, there’ll be a simple blood test for chromosomal abnormalities, probably by the second month. Even without that, when you put it all together, if you had a seventy or a seventy-five percent chance that Glory Bee would take a silver medal, would you think those were good or bad odds?”

  Frank shrugged. “I’d say those were good odds.”

  “Those are about the odds we would have a healthy kid. And I’m an Italian girl, Frank, and I want to have a baby. End of story. End of our story maybe because—”

  “Claudia, let me catch up. Let me take one thing at a time. I’m a widower for nine months here!”