Two if by Sea

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  For years, Frank and his friends slept out here on summer nights, first roasting marshmallows, then smoking pilfered Marlboros, and, finally, smoking other things.

  Sometime, he would bring Colin and Ian out here for a fire.

  As Frank sat there now, he was aware of a waiting silence. It reminded him of the moments before the wave. There was no birdsong, and no breeze (Frank could remember his mother saying to the child Eden, “The wind is always blowing, even if you can’t feel it . . .”). The few bright amber leaves that spiraled down seemed to wrestle themselves free without benefit of a push, weary of holding on. Rossetti, he thought, wrote about how falling leaves made death seem a comely thing. Funny what you remembered from college. Funny when you remembered it.

  She was gone without a trace.

  What would he have done if she had been there? Called the police? Would he have tried to bury the girl, breaking a machine blade in ground frozen hard as a church floor? Would he simply have moved her to a ravine and let her lie there until bow hunters found her or spring came?

  It didn’t matter. They’d come for her. They had taken care of their own, their sacrificial creature, only after she was sacrificed.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  FRANK WENT TO the farm alone, on the day after Christmas. After he looked after the horses, he decided to take a turn through the house. He could hear the phone ringing before he pushed open the door.

  It was Brian Donovan.

  To his shame, then, Frank realized he had not called Brian on the anniversary of his own wife Natalie’s death, on the anniversary of Brian’s whole family’s death—Frank, the only other survivor and witness, had not called his brother-in-law. Brian must think he had already consigned him to the past.

  There was no way to explain, so Frank simply apologized. “This must have been the hardest day of your life, Brian.”

  “I spent it with my father’s sister, a good old soul. Yes, though. A year without them. I want to call them and say, Enough now, you can all come back. Even my da still had good years ahead.” Brian added, “It’s not all real to me. I got your card with the photo. She’s lovely, Frank.”

  A week earlier, at Claudia’s insistence, they’d had a portrait taken to announce their engagement in the Raleigh-Durham News and Observer.

  “Yes,” Frank said.

  “You, too.”

  “Why, thanks, Brian,” said Frank, his abortive laugh a cough.

  “You must have been so busy with the children, with the day . . .” No, Frank wanted to shout into the phone. I was not waylaid by joy. Not even close. He said, “Actually, Brian, I would have called earlier. There was what appeared to be a hunting accident on a hill on the farm. Someone died. It took hours to put it right.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s been a year of bad events, in some ways.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you hear from your wife’s relatives, Brian? Is there any other news since the documentary you made?”

  “Only word of the boy. My aunties and I walked to the graves today. It’s a small, pretty place now, with a few houses now, and lanes.”

  For the good are always the merry, save by an evil chance . . .

  “I miss her, Brian,” Frank said. “I don’t want you to believe that my going on means I don’t. I will say this. I think if I were to lose these boys, though they have been mine for such a short time, I would feel not the way you do, but close to it. I understand now how a father’s love is different.”

  “It’s all in all.”

  “It is. Brian, what can I do?”

  “Nothing, Frank.”

  “Well, good New Year, Brian. Do try to think of a way to come to us.”

  “I will, Frank.”

  • • •

  They all came home from the inn two days later. As Ian explained to the owner of the inn, the fish needed them.

  Frank supposed it would be years before he would stop thinking about Linnet’s lonely death. His powerlessness infuriated him.

  When he was on the job, there had been things he’d despised. One, the way people had looked at him. They swore at him and let their kids spit on the tires of his car, even when he was trying to help them. It made his gut burn when fear on their faces curdled into hatred after he said he had to ask just a few questions. When he and Elena were rookies, working together on the near north side, Elena could back down a Cuban guy the size of a sequoia with a machine-gun barrage of Spanish, but Frank’s Spanish was halting; he could tell that the hermanos thought Elena was the one with a dick.

  What he had loved about being on the job was that he could know everything that civilians couldn’t know. Driving home some nights, past windows where the lights were going on for dinner, past the dim blue eyes of TV screens, he actually felt pity for regular people watching things on the news that he knew all about—who the bad guy was, and where he was, and how soon they could turn his girlfriend.

  Even so, he did not truly feel the satisfaction of a proper fit until he joined the mounted patrol unit. From then until the accident, he thought he must be as happy as a man could be in his work, and not only because people looked up to him, literally as well as figuratively. A surplus of imagination, Frank knew, was not his gift. Unlike his father and his grandfather, he had not, having felt it once brush his hands, chased the contrail of a dream of glory. Until Natalie, and Claudia, and especially the boys, he had simply done things that he knew how to do, handling horses, generally handling people, solving problems not slowly, but slower than some, generally to the best effect.

  He was just a civilian now.

  He didn’t know more than anyone else, or how to find out more.

  Even if he called Elena, what would he say? For fun, he looked her up, Elena Vasquez. Captain Elena Vasquez. Mija, I’ve been back here for a year, and I haven’t even bothered to push a button and call you, but now I have this dead woman in my woods, and I have the feeling she’s the girl from nowhere.

  What made a person grow up to be Linnet? What made a person into a thing? Who did that to her? Frank had to admit he didn’t ask himself the same questions about the little street kids he ran into back in Chicago days whose mothers swore at them viciously, hit them with their fists, gave them beer in their baby bottles. Linnet didn’t look like what she was. At some point, someone must have cradled her, told her that she was pretty, given her a sense of fun, put books into her hands, taught her to be well mannered and well spoken, to fix her hair, to smile up in a quaint way, to make her hands sure and cause horses to trust her. And so, Linnet looked and sounded like an entire person. Nothing about her set off Frank’s bullshit detector, not a single thing, until the fake dad showed up in the fake Volvo. Like that Olympic runner from Madison who lived a double life as a high-priced call girl, Linnet projected a welcoming sweetness, her voice pealing with vowels like small bells, an invitation to mirth. He’d left her with Glory Bee and felt easy about it.

  That same voice with the small bells under it told him not to fucking talk, the same thing she had told his boys when they were trapped in the truck.

  Yet she left nothing. No purse, not one unopened bottle of mineral water. Not a thing in the trunk. Under the passenger seat, Patrick found a single earring, a silver hoop, and a card for Tenacity Farms on which someone, in neither Patrick’s handwriting nor Frank’s, had written the words BIG GATE.

  That was it.

  Linnet meant nothing to anyone. She knew that she meant nothing to anyone. Frank’s work had not brought him in contact with very many killers, and none who were not the parents or siblings of their victims. He had probably met more than one psychopath but didn’t know it, since that was their gift.

  Yet, undeniably, Linnet had felt the Ian effect when Ian faced off with her. She stood down, and Colin said she had relented once before—on the night that she allowed them to escape with Cora. Did this mean, then, that the girl was not really evil? Did this mean that he had essentially murdered a girl who still h
ad human feelings? If Ian could find the finest fissure in any personality, then that fissure had to exist.

  Frank had changed all the locks, on the buildings and on the house, but if there was anything police knew, it was that if they were coming in, they were coming in. But Sally was a better alarm system than any air horn that would go off next to the Sauk County sheriff’s head if anyone so much as opened a window from the outside at Frank’s farm.

  He had no answers, but he owed them all an explanation.

  No one worked on December 27, and Frank knew he violated every law of God and nature at eight in the morning by waking people who had planned a luxurious sleep.

  Marty said, “Is this some other brutal Christian rite? This is not civilized. This is why Jews worship at night.”

  They all sat down, having parked Ian and Colin in front of a movie.

  “Someone came to the farm the other morning,” Frank said.

  “You don’t mean a guest. That’s twice in six months,” Hope said, removing a tray of cranberry muffins from the oven. “What’s this town coming to? Did you chase him away?”

  “It was a her, and yes, I did,” Frank said. “But there’s way more to it than that.”

  Patrick arrived then, late, with boxes of his own Christmas gifts for everyone. There were long mufflers, brightly colored and neatly made, that he’d knit himself from merino wool. “You did not make these!” Claudia teased him, modeling hers, a deep russet orange. “You did not!”

  “It helped stop me drinking,” Patrick said. “There were times I knit so long I couldn’t close my hands in the morning.” He said to Frank, “You told them?”

  “He hasn’t told them,” said Eden. “And if he doesn’t tell them, I’m going back to bed.”

  “Just, can you all sit down at the table for a moment? If you want something more to eat or drink, bring it over. Edie, there’s still half a turkey in there . . .”

  “Frank, I’ve gained exactly twelve pounds with this pregnancy . . .”

  “It only shows because you were such a slender wraith to begin with, Edie . . .”

  “Shut up! You’re not even pregnant and I can see you let your belt out a notch since last year. That could just be natural aging, though. What are you, fifty now?”

  “Come on, much as I’d love to continue, this is serious,” Frank said.

  He really would have loved to continue it, to stretch out this last moment of life that even passed for ordinary—teasing Edie, the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the primeval home-bringing scent of warmed spices a sneer against the winter outside the window. So they brought their mugs to the table, and Hope put out her platters. Within moments, everyone had eaten two of everything, because they were there, because they were nervous. “Okay,” Frank began. “Edie, Marty: Mom knows this. There’s something I have to tell you about the boys.”

  “They’re okay,” Edie said tensely. “Right? Nothing’s wrong?”

  “They’re fine.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, I’m going to just say it. I never told you how it was that I came to adopt Ian and Colin. They really aren’t my relatives through marriage. In fact, I never saw Ian before in my life until I pulled him out of a van the morning after Natalie died, the morning of the tsunami, when I was out on rescue patrol.”

  “We all know that, Frank,” Eden said. “Or something like it.”

  “What? How?”

  “Your widowed brother comes home with a little kid. Even he can’t figure out how his wife was really related to this little kid, so he tells you three or four different things. You think, your brother doesn’t really have a gift for lying, so he must have lost his mind. Or something else is up.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “What would we say?” Marty said gently. “Clearly, Ian loves you. You love him. There must be an organizing principle, if he has no one else.”

  “I feel like an idiot,” said Frank.

  Eden said then, “And we know the rest of it, too. Mom decides she’s going to buy an aquarium the size of Lake Mendota one day. And a bag of every kind of candy at Miller’s Market. Sure, maybe this is all Mom wanting a grandkid, sure, but Mom is a stern woman. She gave us grapes and said they were candy. And then . . . just wham! She buys all the Lego Star Wars sets there are. Sets that cost fifty bucks, a hundred bucks. This is the same mom who used to try to get Tupperware small enough that she could save two teaspoons full of peas, because who knows when you might need two teaspoons full of peas, right? She’s driving to Chicago because Brookfield Zoo is better than Dane County Zoo. I didn’t even know they had a zoo in Chicago until I was in high school. One day I say, that kid is going to get rickets, because Ian’s eating a corn dog for breakfast and a corn dog for lunch. She says, well, Eden, that’s what he wants. And she sounds a little like the Children of the Corn. So I asked Mom about . . . how Ian is. And she told me. And, wait up, Frank, if she hadn’t, we would still have known. We have our own eyes and brains.”

  At least that was in the family, Frank thought. This was turning out easier than he’d thought it would be. No expressions of disbelief or disapproval had come forth, and who cared if Ian had something to do with making everyone be nice? He turned to Claudia. “And you haven’t told anyone else, have you?”

  “Yes, I have,” Claudia said. “Of course.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I told people what he did on Eden’s wedding day, of course.”

  Frank was incredulous. “Why would you do that?”

  “What do you do if something amazing happens right in front of your own eyes? You tell people, right?”

  “Wrong,” said Eden. “He wouldn’t tell anyone, and not because he’s a former cop, because . . .”

  Claudia ignored her. “How was I to know that I’d train with you? How was I to know that I’d know you more than that one day? All I knew is that I’d seen this little kid do something I only ever heard of once before in my life. I wanted to ask you if I could observe him, but then I came here, and I began to care about Ian, and about you . . .”

  Marty went into the kitchen to brew more coffee. He said, “Be fair to Dr.—to Claudia, Frank. She didn’t have any responsibility to keep what she saw a secret.”

  “You told people?” Frank bored in, still staring at Claudia.

  Claudia shrugged. “I didn’t give a lecture. But yes, some friends. And some colleagues. And later, I called my former professor, the one who introduced me to Julia Madrigal . . .”

  “No wonder the whole fucking world knows.”

  “It’s not because of me!” Claudia shouted, jumping up from the table. She pointed to Patrick. “You think that asshole kid who was trying to steal Glory Bee didn’t blab to his buddies? And what about Patrick here, the cockney Romeo of southern Wisconsin?”

  Patrick said quietly, “That’s hard, Claudia. And it’s unfair. I never said a word about Ian since the day on the plane. Not once.”

  Claudia began to cry. “I’m sorry, Pat. I’m sorry. I’m scared. What a bitch.”

  “There, never mind,” Patrick said. “Never mind. You’re on edge.”

  “Do you know what the consequences of this are?” Frank said. “Does anyone think how these boys might be prized for their gifts? Does anyone know that was the first reason why I wanted them with me?”

  Claudia whirled to face Frank. “Don’t make yourself out like the big self-sacrificing hero, Frank. Yes, you rescued Ian. But you wanted Ian because you wanted Ian. You wanted Ian because he wanted you to take him. He was the one who knew that you were the right dad for him.”

  “If it weren’t for Frank, the boys would be dead,” Hope chided her gently.

  “I know,” Claudia said, and cried harder.

  “This has to be contained!” Frank said. A voice in his head said, We’re starving, Dad. We want pancakes.

  “Well, it can’t be, Frank. These kids go to school. We live in the world . . .”

  “But
. . .”

  Hope spoke up. Even when she panicked, Frank and Eden had rarely heard her raise her voice, and she didn’t raise her voice now. There was, instead, a magnificent stillness about her that brought all their rustlings and whisperings to a halt. “Frank, Eden is right. You can do whatever you want to make sure that this stays in the family until the boys are older. But you can’t contain it. Whoever came here, or whatever he did or she did, maybe that wasn’t even because of Ian and Colin. Maybe it was. You haven’t told us that. But if it was, it started a long time ago. And not because a few people talked to their friends,” Hope said. “Anyone who really wants to know where someone is, even a child, has a vast net of resources, a multilayered buffet of information spread like a three-dimensional net of dots to connect. You really wouldn’t need a detective to find someone who’d been living a normal life, doing normal things, just as Eden said, going to school, going to the dentist, for example. All you’d need would be a librarian with a computer.”

  “So what happened with this person who came here?” Eden asked. “My back is killing me, and no, I’m not in labor.”

  Quietly then, knowing his mother was right, Frank told them everything, from the moments with the animals in the cargo hold of the airplane coming to the United States to the horror of the Christmas morning visit. Marty breathed in sharply.