Two if by Sea

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “You killed a woman?” he said.

  “Marty, shut up,” Eden said.

  “No, I didn’t. She did it herself accidentally. But I would have, Marty,” Frank told him.

  “Where is she?” Marty asked.

  “She’s gone, someone took her, hand to God,” Patrick said.

  Marty said, “Claudia, maybe Ian would be safer in a lab setting, living in a nice, secure house on a campus where he can be tested because this is big, this could be very, very big . . .”

  “He’s my son,” Frank said. “He’s our son. I wouldn’t let that happen if he were a chimp.”

  “Nor would I. Nor would anybody who cares about chimps,” Claudia said. Marty looked downcast. “And what about Colin? The effect of what Colin can do is not so, well, dramatic, but the fact that he does it, and their mother could, suggests inheritance. But, Marty, none of these kinds of abilities have ever been clinically proven even to exist, in trials that can be duplicated, by anyone, anywhere, ever.”

  Suddenly Colin appeared.

  “Do you mind?” Everyone’s heads swiveled to stare at him as if he was a burglar. ”I would really like some . . . anything that’s food. I can get it myself, but you’re all in here yelling. You never gave us breakfast. And you never gave us lunch either.” He was dazed and jangled by a continuous loop of television. “But you guys are just sitting there eating all the muffins yourself.”

  “I’ll make you some sandwiches and then you should go outside and play,” Hope said.

  They all stopped, listening, as if for thunder. There had never been a time that anyone thought of the boys being unsafe on this land.

  Frank said, “You see that? We can’t stay here.” To Claudia, he said, “I had already been thinking. What if we just got out of Wisconsin? I think about that place Tura left me. An adventure.”

  “Whoa! Wait, Frank. We’ve had adventures enough,” Claudia said. “Anyhow, I’m not so sure I could pry you off this land.”

  “With a chopstick,” Frank said. “At least now.”

  “And this is something you discuss, not something you announce. We haven’t discussed this at all. There are other considerations . . .”

  “What if we don’t have time to discuss it?”

  Hope got up and slapped together fat turkey sandwiches for the boys and told them to play right where the adults could see them from the windows. Then they all got out plates and began to consume leftovers. Patrick reminded Frank that he’d promised to visit Tura’s childhood home, the farm she’d left to Frank.

  “It’s mine now, after all,” Patrick said. As an extra precaution, Frank, just days before, had transferred the title to Stone Pastures a second time, into the name of the laird Patrick Walsh, who purchased it for the sum of one United States dollar.

  But how did any of that matter? Frank thought.

  After they ate, Marty and Eden slipped away to watch a movie and Patrick to make a phone call. Frank stayed at the table with his mother and Claudia. For a long while, he spun a globe in his mind. In his mind, it lit up, everywhere he turned: no ports, no big cities . . . how could he have been in so much denial? How little any of his little precautions mattered, and how had he thought any of them would? It was the work of a keystroke to unmask any of it. Safety, or the illusion of it, was not the reason they should leave here, if it ever had been. They should go—or stay—for their own health. Their psychological health. Their health as a family. If they couldn’t disappear, they could still reincarnate. Many times, the Batchelders had offered to lease or buy, especially since the house and arena were updated. They would do that now.

  “I still think it could be a fresh start,” Frank told Claudia. “People do that when they get married. It’s not like I want to. This land has been in my family for four generations, starting with old Jack’s father. I never thought I’d leave.”

  Claudia rubbed the palms of her hands, with their tiny calluses that she massaged each night with coconut oil, sometimes slathering them and wearing cotton gloves to sleep. “Coming back here was Natalie’s idea,” she said.

  “But Australia was always a temporary thing, an escape. Of course, I didn’t count on Natalie.” He let out a breath. “When I came back, I knew this was home. I couldn’t imagine not feeling safe here, right here.” There was so much he would never have imagined. Frank turned to his mother.

  “Marty and Eden will have their own life, but would you want to live here, on your own, Mom?”

  “Not really, Frank.”

  “In town?”

  Claudia said, “If we were to go anywhere, and I’m not saying we are, we’d love it if you would come, too, Hope. I think you’re the only one who could make some farm at the end of the world seem like home.”

  Frank said, “But, Mom, you leaving Spring Green? After fifty years? Your friends? Your church? It’s hard to see you anywhere else.”

  “That’s not accurate, Frank. My life has changed, too. I think, perhaps, I would welcome the opportunity to live in England,” Hope said. “Not that you’ve actually invited me. I’d have my own place, of course. England is a librarian’s literary amusement park, and I’ve been there twice, and been drawn there all my life. I wouldn’t like to think of seeing Eden only once every few years . . .”

  “It would be more than that, Mom. You could come back every year at least once. I’m sure Eden and Marty would welcome you, for as long as you wanted.”

  “I’d love to help raise the boys. I’d love to have that adventure you talked about, at my age.”

  When Patrick returned, Frank told him the substance of the discussion.

  Patrick said, “I like the USA, myself. I’ll live here one day, maybe teach at that college that . . . well, that the girl tried to give out that she went to. Maybe have my own spread like this one. Maybe this one itself if I can afford it. But I’d just as soon go with you now, for I don’t want to give up on Glory Bee . . .”

  “You’d have to ride her, then,” Claudia said. Seeing Patrick’s mouth, and Frank’s, fall open in consternation, she said, “No, Pat, Frank. Listen. I’ve been thinking as I’ve been sitting here. Frank, you just threw all this at me. It’s too much to train and compete and handle everything . . .” She waved her hand around her head like a small cyclone. “The boys could be uprooted yet again. Frank and I are just starting out. The children are going to need me. It’s not a good time for me to try to give that dream what it deserves. Or to give Glory Bee what she deserves. My heart just would not be in it.”

  “What’s this, then? You’re the rider, Claudia,” said Pat. “All your life. That dream.”

  “Dreams don’t always come true,” Claudia said.

  “Yours can,” Patrick said.

  “Claudia, where’s this coming from?” Frank wanted to know.

  “It’s logic, Frank. Maybe there’s still time for this dream. An equestrienne can compete for a long time, until she’s fifty. Maybe I’ll end up on Glory Bee’s foal, down the road. Or maybe I won’t. Either way, it’s not the primary consideration.”

  “If this is going to ruin everything you’ve dreamed of, we shouldn’t even consider this move,” said Frank.

  “So I’d be responsible for something bad happening to Ian, then?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Frank said.

  “Claudia, you never said a word,” Patrick went on. “You have your career. Your own family. You’re okay with this? This move?”

  “Pat, no one has asked a single thing about me,” said Claudia, and walked out the back door.

  Hope got up, shaking her head ruefully. Patrick stared at Frank, who couldn’t deny any of it. He’d thought of everything, except his best girl. How had he taken her so for granted? Claudia was a professor with tenure, a minor wunderkind. She had a life for which she’d worked exceedingly hard, friends, a community, and respect. In exchange, Frank offered her isolation, uncertainty, a staff job at some dinky hospital, and the surrender of her own hopes as an athlete.
/>   Frank got up and followed Claudia, who was pacing in the dooryard.

  “I’m a knob,” he said.

  “There you go, being easy on yourself again.”

  “I’m an asshole.”

  “It’s not just that you don’t take my feelings or even my life into consideration. That’s bad enough. Why is here any worse than anywhere else? It’s probably better. Remember what Julia Madrigal’s priest said about a community that would always protect her?”

  “Julia doesn’t have a past with a network of thugs. A thug didn’t come after Julia Madrigal and try to burn down her little house on the wildflower hill. No one was murdered there.”

  “I can’t take it all in now. We’ll talk about it later. You just presented this as if you were saying, Okay, troops, let’s mount up and ride!”

  That evening, Claudia’s bedtime drill was particularly military. “Teeth. Ears. Story. Yes, prayers, Ian. In you go. I’m telling a story tonight. No. Don’t complain. It’s a good one. It’s about a tree that was really a ghost . . .”

  Frank stayed below, still sitting at the table, as though he’d been drilled and filled with lead. Around him swirled ordinary people who’d had satisfying and dependable lives until everything they counted on as real was shaken up and dumped out like a jar of marbles—by his choices.

  Frank had been given the chance to bring Ian into the huge community center gym and give him over to the genial Red Cross volunteer. Even if he hadn’t known what was to come, or where Ian had been before, could he have given him up? Back then?

  He could not have.

  If Frank had learned nothing else about the essence of parenthood—in the six months that amounted to six minutes of his life—it was that parenthood was not composed of bikes with playing cards in the spokes and tooth fairy pillows, tenpin bowling and extra ketchup, plaster handprint plaques and Nerf footballs, soccer shoes and bike helmets, bedtime books and clapping games. All these bright things guarded its primitive essence. After a certain span of years, a man who has no family of his own becomes if not dangerous, then impervious. The covenants that bound Frank’s life now might easily have missed him by a narrow margin. He could have been another man. Except for them.

  His life was Ian’s now. His death was Ian’s. And now Colin’s as well. And so was Claudia’s.

  • • •

  Frank woke, with an electrical spark of terror along his arms, first uncertain where he was or who was behind him. He jumped up, then slowly reassured himself that he’d only fallen asleep at the kitchen table. Quickly, he glanced at the clock. It was nine, and he’d forgotten all about the horses. He shrugged into his barn coat and boots, but everything was quiet in the stalls. Patrick had seen to all of them. Inside again, Frank went into the boys’ room, tucked the comforter around Colin’s shoulders, then went back to his own room, sitting down on the padded bench in his room, watching Claudia sleep, trying to anticipate the consequences of dismembering a family, a place, a life, simultaneously admitting that he had no way of dealing with the consequences if he could anticipate them. Earlier, he’d finally decided that the best reason he felt so called to leave was that, if anyone did follow them, it would at least assure that his sister and her family were safe.

  But that had not worked with Tura and Cedric.

  He had barely fallen asleep when the sound of Claudia stirring awakened him. She pressed her body close to him, hungrily, and exhausted as he was from working his brain like a circular saw, Frank reached eagerly for her, fumbling with the buttons on her nightshirt to free her breasts, handling and suckling them, until he tasted the salty wetness on her neck.

  “What’s the matter? Claudia. Sweetheart?”

  “I don’t know if I can do this, Frank,” she said softly.

  “We don’t have to,” he said.

  “I don’t mean sex. I mean, I don’t know if I can leave.” Frank knew that he should say the right words. He also knew that if there were such words, he didn’t know them. “It’s not because I don’t love you and the boys. You’re the reason I’d give up competing. It’s not because of my job. I don’t mind practicing privately. I’m not in love with teaching.”

  “Then why?”

  “What if there’s never a place to stop?” Claudia wrapped her legs around Frank’s and fitted her hips to his. “What if that story on Christmas morning had a different ending?” She pushed away but Frank wouldn’t let her go, wanting to pull her clothes off roughly, his selfish body aching and swelling for her. “Frank, no, wait. Why does it have to be only one way—go, and go now? You don’t give a good goddamn that I was invited to give a lecture series that is very prestigious, and very lucrative, that people twice my age would kill to do . . .”

  “Claudia, I don’t even know about this. You didn’t tell me.”

  “Would it matter if I had?”

  “Ian’s not more important than you . . .”

  Claudia said, “Yes, he is. I believe that, too.”

  Frank sat up and settled himself against the headboard, wrapping his arms around his knees. Why did it have to be go, and go now? Why did it all seem so urgent? He was not an impulsive man. Until Christmas morning, he had been content to wait and to watch. Then he saw Linnet, her face heartbroken at the end, surprised, and the dark stain under her small body spreading on the snow, the stain Frank would always see, even if it were to be washed away by a dozen seasons of rain and sun and wind and snow. But if it were to be him alone, he could live around it. But for Ian, who imbibed every emotion and assimilated it into himself?

  “I don’t think that Ian can forget and just be a kid here. He made a girl put down her gun to save me. And she shot herself in front of him, Claudia.”

  She closed her eyes and rocked, gently back and forth. Finally, she said, “Yes. He can forget. He’s outlived other memories, Frank. There will always be the memory of the tsunami for him.”

  “That wasn’t his home.”

  Claudia sat still for a long time. Then she reached up and placed her hands firmly on either side of Frank’s face. “But, Frank? Do you feel that somehow nothing will ever happen again? That he’ll never see anything again that’s horrible, wherever we go?”

  “He . . . he’ll get older. And when he’s older . . .”

  “It won’t get easier, Frank. You don’t think that, do you?”

  Frank said, “I hope it. But no, I don’t think that.”

  Claudia turned to him tenderly. “At least you’re not fooling yourself about that.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  THEY WERE MARRIED on New Year’s Eve.

  Marty and Patrick were Frank’s witnesses; and Claudia’s were Hope, Eden, and Claudia’s sister Miranda, who, as Frank’s wedding surprise, met them on the steps of the courthouse, with their dad. The ceremony lasted exactly six minutes. Even Frank found it cursory. But his bride’s beauty and demeanor compensated. In a cream-colored 1940s suit she’d found in some antiques store, carrying calla lilies and white roses, Claudia looked like Grace Kelly. When Claudia made the ancient promises, she surprised Frank when her eyes filled. She had glanced around proudly at the small group and put out her hand to Ian and Colin, pulling their hands between hers and Frank’s as Frank placed the ring on her finger.

  “Pronounce us, please,” Claudia asked prettily. “Husband and wife, and parents and children.”

  Not many women would have taken him on, Frank thought, and almost none would have taken all three of them. When people spoke of emotional baggage, they rarely meant a virtual mud wagon of wet rocks and manure. But so she had. With the help of a social worker Claudia knew well, the paperwork for a stepparent adoption was already under way, and the home study and interviews with Colin would begin as soon as January.

  As Claudia arched her back to toss her flowers, Frank spoke to Natalie, his own eyes stinging. Wish me well, my sweetheart, my generous girl.

  Protect us.

  After the wedding and a lunch at Old Anthony’s, an Italian place they
both loved, they all went back to Tenacity Farms. It was a mild day for the last day of the year, and Claudia changed out of her wedding dress, surely the only bride who celebrated her wedding day by putting her horse through a small exhibition. Her father, the other Dr. Campo, said to Frank, “She’s something, isn’t she? I didn’t know how she’d recover from Pro.”

  “Claudia’s gifted, and she trusts me, and Glory Bee trusts her. I would have never imagined either one of those things happening.”

  “Can she go all the way?”

  Frank couldn’t imagine tamping down the old man’s pride by revealing Claudia’s decision. Since there was a hope, slim but real, of another time, Frank played along. “Nothing’s certain, but she’s already come further than most. I feel good about it.”

  “You’ve made her happy,” Miranda said.

  “I don’t quite know how all this happened,” Frank said, laughing. “But I’ll take it. I’m the one who’s lucky. Claudia’s too good to be true.”

  “Wait until you get a taste of her temper,” said her dad.

  “I have and I’m sticking to it. She’s too good to be true.”

  The following week, Frank began the process of dissolving Tenacity. Tearfully, Eden decided to give Saratoga to her best friend from childhood. Frank obtained passage for Glory Bee, Sultana, and Bobbie Champion. Finally, on a bitter January day, he chose to walk past the lower corrals, around the indoor ring, and up Penny Hill to hand over the lease on Tenacity to the Batchelders. They could exercise the option to buy after two years unless Frank and his family returned.

  When he came back, he was freezing, and quickly slipped through the outer and inner doors to take refuge by the fire in one of the leather chairs that wasn’t new—an old high-backed oxblood-colored thing that had belonged to his father. How many times had he sat in this very chair, removing his gloves and liners, holding his fingers out to the fire, trying to pick out the bouquets of spices—turmeric or cumin or oregano—that described the dinner to come. He sat back and looked up at the rubbed hardwoods of the wide stairs, the marks on the wall beside the downstairs bath that signaled the incremental growth of Eden Constable Mercy, the great half-moon window at the end of the living room that showed the rise to Penny Hill and, each night, showcased the sunset. How many other Mercys before him had done the same thing?