Two if by Sea

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  They purchased ten pillows in colors that the boys thought went very well with red—black and bright blue as well as beige.

  “It looks like the bloody circus,” said Patrick.

  “They’re very comfortable,” Ian told him. “I can’t wait for them to be in the house. Can we get the fish tank next?”

  “No,” Frank and Patrick said together.

  Freed again from domestic obligations, the boys ran in and out of the doors, sometimes wearing their dirty parkas or jean jackets or ski hats, just as often not even wearing their shoes, as burly men with hand trucks hefted heavy beds up the stairs and uncrated a double oven, a double refrigerator, and double bathroom sinks, along with miles of colored-glass bathroom countertop that Claudia insisted was the newest and sturdiest thing. “Can we keep the boxes, Dad?” Ian begged.

  “No! They’re full of nails!”

  Frank later spotted the long plywood fort the boys had built outside from those very boxes, after Pat slipped the deliverymen some cash to flatten the nails. Frank sighed.

  Yet, since they were eating fruit twice a day and brushing their teeth at least at night, Frank decided not to care.

  When Patrick and Frank set to work on an earnest finishing of the remodeling, the boys drove the pony cart up and down, dropping in on neighbors who would either be charmed or hate them, depending on the local character.

  Frank sighed.

  One day, a woman who went six feet and two twenty easily showed up at the gate. “I’m Grace Gerrick,” she said, with a grip that nearly brought Frank to his knees. Frank regarded the amazon warily until she said, “I’m great friends with your Colin and your Ian, and I’ve brought you some bits because they’ve said they haven’t a mother.”

  Colin’s voice in Frank’s head explained, I didn’t say we didn’t have a mother. I said we didn’t have our mother here yet. Frank smiled and thanked Grace Gerrick, who said her sons would help out if Frank liked. The bits included four meat pies, two fruit pies, two quarts of home-canned peaches, and Mrs. Gerrick’s specialty, homemade ketchup.

  “When everyone else in the county thinks you guys are orphans and outlaws, we’ll remember that Mrs. Gerrick said you have perfect manners,” Frank told the boys. They were eating the pies from flattened pizza boxes using plastic forks from Curry Corner. No one had the nerve to unpack the crates of Hope’s pearl-colored wedding china, twenty place settings that had endured fifty-one Thanksgivings and Christmases without a single chip.

  The remodeling went forward. Feeling like a laird, Frank helped a chimney sweep rout the nest of what he said must have been the unusual roost of a great gray owl. Patrick and Frank seven-times-sealed the thick planked floors, and concentrated on the upstairs.

  Back came the plumbers, to parcel off one of the five bedrooms into a smaller sleeping space and a third big bathroom. There were no closets at all, but in his rambles Patrick had come across a contractor tearing down an old house for a new one twice its size and scored eight roughhewn armoires the man was discarding. These they bolted to the walls. Both of them puzzled over a small, doorless depression in the wall near the chimney, kettle-shaped, about eight feet deep and eight feet wide, until Patrick figured that this had once been the house chapel, and the worn plaster niches in the walls must once have been shrines. Frank decided that this would serve as his office—for the luck of the lapsed Irish Catholic. From the back wall of that office, a tiny iron stairway ascended to a trapdoor and a flat porch on the roof that reminded Frank of the deck on Julia Madrigal’s house. Up there, a person could see the whole countryside laid out like a child’s farm set, the river valleys, the distant shrouded hills, and far off, the winking canals of the Pennine watershed.

  A couple of wet weeks kept Ian and Colin bundled up and indoors. The children consented to do their reading only after Frank thundered at them that they would end up ignorant laughingstocks among the much-brighter British children (“It’s not true, Dad. You just think they’re smarter because they have accents,” said Colin). Later the same day, the boys unpacked their own building equipment. They constructed a Lego metropolis, comprising many styles and time periods, along sixteen feet of shelving in their room. It ranged from a medieval marketplace complete with spitted pigs to the Lego Star Wars Death Star ship. Chronological history evidently did not preclude Princess Leia from shopping for pears in the twelfth century or flying back to her own digs in a modern American medevac helicopter.

  Then, that bored them as well.

  Finally, the days began to come up windy and fair, and the boys ran out to explore the old farm buildings, finding handmade wooden pegs burned black in some ancient fire, a drinking tankard pounded out of metal, a gigantic old sleigh in better shape than the shack it stood up in, and enough spearheads to start their own museum. Now able to hitch Bobbie Champion up without help from any adult, they went collecting farther afield, dutifully wearing helmets, and they brought back everything—an iron box containing medals from World War I, a piece of rock with real prehistoric figures cut on it, the handle of an old sword, seashells from a place that had seen no sea in millennia, a crushed hawk’s nest, and a crumbling shredded leather bag green with age and with some kind of broken earthenware vessel inside it. Each night, they displayed their booty while Frank and Patrick murmured their stunned appreciation.

  The boys now introduced themselves to neighbors from farther away. They ended up well fed.

  Beyond the amiable Gerricks lived a German couple with a girl Ian’s age, as well as the Lashes and the Shepsons. Ian and Colin first had to go miles to turn the cart around in the village square, as they weren’t allowed to cross the road without an adult. However, it didn’t take them long to find adults so taken with the two little boys in the cart that they would stand in the road to stop traffic for them. Directly across was another American—a man writing a novel, and his girlfriend—and next to them, a married couple, husband and wife just seventeen years old with a newborn baby girl.

  Frank was glad that he could consider them safe—at least according to the shopkeeper Harry—to explore even the next town beyond Stead. To his relief, he thought that they would never get bored with exploring. To his amazement, they did.

  One night at dinner, Ian said, “We should build something ourselves on this house.”

  “We need a fire escape,” Colin said. “There is no back door.”

  “Right you are, mate,” said Patrick. Frank conceded the point.

  This being heavy work, they recruited the help of Grace Gerrick’s massive twenty-year-old twin sons, who said such a thing could be built with nothing but what was right at hand in the field. The Gerrick boys were six five and six eight, making their mother and their older brothers look dainty. Starting with a wide base beneath the boys’ bedroom window, they made their own dry stone wall from field remnants, a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle they knocked into eternal fit with rock hammers. After not too many hours, they had a pyramid with indentations at irregular intervals. On each of these indentations, they fitted lozenge-shaped paving stones, hoisting the midlevel stones with a makeshift pulley hung from the bucket of the Gerricks’ huge John Deere tractor, the twins lowering the last two from the bedroom window with straps fashioned of old horse tack. From the fields, the staircase looked like some sort of artful chimney, but Colin could swing his feet out the bedroom window and be safely on the ground within seconds. It became his favorite place to depart for his morning run. The first run he had ever taken was with Claudia, but he’d kept it up and found the activity soothing and strengthening. These days and nights, he grew serious about it, going out at least three times a week if not more. Cautious about hypothermia, Frank made sure he had a flexible bottle of hot tea in his little backpack.

  “Run with me, Dad,” Colin urged, nudging Frank, who had fallen asleep with his napkin in his lap, a plate of rice and beans and bread untouched before him. “If you ran, maybe your leg would get better.”

  “My leg can’t ever ge
t better,” Frank said. “I’m lucky I still have it attached to my body. You think I’m lazy?”

  “I think you’re a little fat but not that much. And I don’t see why you won’t try.”

  Frank laughed. He had worked hard in his life, but never so hard as this, and was feeling pretty much like the architect of the domestic world. But a father who couldn’t run was something a kid simply didn’t choose to see. How had Frank lived forty and more years of life without ever knowing . . . anything . . . and figured himself a real student of human nature? In human years, Frank calculated that he’d come home from Australia at about twenty-six, and had grown into his true age like a plant in time-lapse photography over the course of a couple of seasons.

  “I want to be able to run,” he said, lying. “Maybe I’ll try someday. Right now all I want to do is get this joint ready for Grandma coming home and Mom’s visit.”

  All of Hope’s things were installed in the suite of rooms to the left of the entrance to the main house, along with a shiny new black desk and a sleek maroon sofa to match the old maroon chair from the kitchen at Tenacity. Even the dishes were gingerly placed in a china cabinet. For Hope and Claudia, there would have to be flowers in jugs everywhere. There would have to be new sheets for those new beds, and shiny kettle made right here in West Yorkshire.

  Finally, the women of the house made their entrance.

  Hope had mailed her clothing. She filled her suitcases with American schoolbooks, peanut butter, maple syrup, chocolate chips, and Frank’s Hot Sauce, which Eden and Frank had grown up calling “No Relation.” One of Claudia’s silly, heavy leather suitcases was packed plump with presents—vapor guns, giant sketchbooks and tempura paints in sticks, e-readers with games, and new running shoes (“They’re called trainers,” Colin said, and Claudia replied, “I know. I speak British.”).

  With Colin proudly driving the pony cart, the boys took their new mother and grandmother—new to them and new to the neighborhood—to meet every single shop owner in Stead, including the postal clerk. They visited every neighbor they’d met, and Claudia brought each one a card with her name and a small wrapped wedge of Wisconsin cheese. A few days later, they were buried in pork pies and shepherd’s pies and currant buns and scones—more than any family of six—counting Patrick—could ever have consumed. The groom and local workers toiling away at the barn and house were delighted. They spoke gently of “the missus.” Claudia praised them lavishly in turn, especially in awe of the gleaming countertops, the well-measured risers on the stairs, the artful fire escape. Hope crooned over the kitchen.

  Like a boy of eighteen impressing his mom and his girl, Frank felt the ego strokes literally drawing him up in bravura straight-spined pride. He delighted in simply driving to Stead and sharing a coffee with Claudia in the morning. Life had never seemed so perfectly measured and tender, like an aspic to be slowly consumed. One morning, just as it grew light, he heard a horse come down over the closest arm of the miles-long outcropping called Whitsunday Crag, against which this part of the county nestled, like a kitten against a recumbent cat. It was Claudia, astride Sultana.

  “Where were you?”

  “I wanted to see the dawn from up there,” she told him. “It’s such an old beauty. It doesn’t care if we’re here or not.”

  “Fortunately, it seems that most of the people do.”

  They did. Lavishly. Some of the older women, Hope’s age, remembered Tura from her girlhood, when Tura wanted to “read” for veterinary medicine and her gruff old father wanted to herd her into marriage. They remembered riding Tura’s horses up to picnics by the waterfall and trudging all together to the school building that was now the village arts center.

  Walking with Ian, Claudia met the author’s wife-to-be, a doctor who had been a biathlete in the 2010 Winter Olympics. One night, when she and Frank joined them for pasta with leeks and peas, they said that they had rented the house for a year, but often thought they might never leave. In Stead, Claudia spent several hours with Harry’s wife. Their older daughter had Down syndrome and had begun to exhibit violent behavior as she entered her thirties. She visited the small psychiatric hospital called Hope of the Moor, where she might one day hope to find a job. On the two weekends, they went to York and took the train to Edinburgh.

  Then the month was over, and it was time for Claudia to prepare for her fourth lecture.

  At the airport, Colin clung to her, begging her not to leave. She clung to him also.

  “This was a terrible mistake,” she said to Frank. “I need to be here. I need to be with my family.”

  “It’s only two more months,” Frank said. “And I’ll come in September.”

  “Remember how tough you said you were?” Colin reminded her, although drops hung on his lashes. “Just like me?”

  “Lots of tough women are done in by a handsome guy,” said Claudia, taking Colin’s chin in one of her hands.

  Then, one late afternoon six weeks or so later, Frank came down from the barn to find a taxi in the driveway. The wedge in his throat dissolved at the sight of the full set of Claudia’s old, unwheeled caramel leather luggage sitting on the steps. Then Claudia got out, filling the cabbie’s hands with pounds sterling.

  “I’m home!” she said. “I’m home to stay!”

  When the cab left, without a word, Frank picked her up and carried her over the threshold, in his best imitation of a bridegroom. He kissed her, and he didn’t ask why.

  By the time Ian finished his riding lesson with Patrick, and Colin came in from his run, a small lorry had arrived, and the owners brought in the few things Claudia had decided to keep. Beyond her clothing and her medical books, there was an antique writing desk that family legend said had belonged to Louisa May Alcott’s sister Abigail, her pillow-topped space-foam mattress, her grotesque multiplicity of pillows, and trunks filled with all those dozens of paper-thin embroidered quilts. There was also a huge box with what looked like dozens of rods and armatures that fit into canvas loops. It was called a Kelso Speedster.

  Claudia asked the boys to put the contraption together.

  “This is for good, then,” Frank finally said. “And you’re fine.”

  “It is,” Claudia told him. “And I am.”

  “The lectures . . .”

  “Were wonderful,” she said. “I’m going to finish the last two next year. I met with the committee after it became clear that I needed a dispensation for medical reasons, as I kept having the persistent wish to barf all over the podium. In fact, I have that persistent wish still.”

  “Medical reasons.”

  “Ordinary ones,” she said with a smile.

  “Are you expecting, Claudia?”

  “I am,” Claudia said. “Hooray!”

  Frank gasped, as elated, frightened, thrilled, and disbelieving as any father-to-be.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Are you okay? Is the baby okay?” He put his arms around her, leaving a full six inches between their bodies, gently hugging her shoulders.

  “Frank!” Claudia tugged him into a close embrace. “You know better. I could probably bounce down a black-diamond ski run and not have a miscarriage at this point. You went through this before.” A minor note plucked, distantly. Natalie. So far? So early? So soon? As she recognized her gaffe, she compressed her lips and turned to the children, who had set out the dozen bags of screws and bolts and the lengths of aluminum pipe on the floor around them. “How about that, boys? What do you think of another girl around here? A little bitty one?” she said. Ian and Colin smiled politely. “Just three months, and all systems are go, despite my very advanced age.”

  Ian patted her flat belly. He said, “You’ll be like Glory Bee. She’s having a baby, too!”

  “As soon as I can quit throwing up, I’ll eat more than she does,” Claudia said. “I dream in scones now.”

  Vaguely annoyed, Colin said, “You really are having a baby. This thing is a baby stroller! It’s not a scooter.”

  “
Alas, not everything is for you,” Claudia told him. “But I saw these Razor scooters in New York that have motors. I think there might be a couple of them stashed in the truck with the rest of my stuff. And maybe if you’re very good—”

  “Are you sure it’s a girl?” Ian asked.

  “I am sure it’s a girl,” Claudia replied. There was no way of knowing.

  “Well, I want to name her Guinevere,” said Ian.

  Frank and Claudia stared at him.

  “What? It’s a nice name,” Ian told them, trying to see if he could fit in the seat of the Kelso Speedster and propel it with his feet.

  Life turned another page.

  Frank asked which of the rooms Claudia wanted for a nursery, and she told him none, thank you, the baby would sleep in their room until she was ready to sleep in a bed. “There’s never been a proven case of SIDS for a child sleeping in bed with the parents. All those stories about people who rolled over on their babies and suffocated them, well, either those people were drunk or they suffocated the baby on purpose. I don’t approve of cribs. Maybe a little cradle for naps.”

  “Okay, then,” Frank said, and went back to working on the new barn.

  A few weeks later, they went to the Keighley Clinic for an ultrasound. Not having been to a doctor in the area, Frank expected something quaint and thatched, out of James Herriot, but the clinic was all cliffed verges of granite and glass, with vertiginous floor-to-ceiling windows in the examining rooms.

  “Guinevere appears to be Arthur,” Claudia said as the incontrovertible image swam into view under the ultrasound technician’s expert pressure. The technician gave them pictures, but she let Frank hold them. She let Frank make the next appointment and spun the door, and was gone. When he caught up with her outside, Claudia was sitting on an ornate wrought-iron bench, sobbing. Thinking himself wise and prescient, Frank veered slightly away to an outdoor stall, where he purchased a big cup of tea with extra sugar and a plain biscuit for Claudia. It always worked in BBC movies. By the time he got there, however, she was nearly inconsolable, shaking—way past the cup-of-tea-dear stage.