by Karen Brown
“You will always have to go,” she said. She looked down at his face, his eyes and their sad cast, his mouth saying her name. If all those years ago Sweeney had asked her to leave her life she saw now she might have done it. If her mother had once held out her arms to her, Nell would have gone there, too. She still did not know if she was spared or robbed. She looked down at Teddy’s face and he watched her, wondering. She saw they would have love and terror, or they would have nothing. Nell felt her love for him, dire and urgent, like a hand over her mouth.
She sat up and found her clothing where he had tossed it. She dressed and went, moving through the house, its rooms in twilight, its decay masked. She felt at home there with the dust and the smell and the disuse. The St. Joseph had been small, plaster, the size of her hand, stolen from the nativity scene in the living room. Aurora had given it to her to hold while she dug. He wore a brown painted robe. He held a staff, the other arm extended, beckoning. He was the patron saint of the family and home, Aurora told her. That night was damp and starless. She had remembered to put on the quilted robe her mother gave her, draped across the foot of her bed.
“This is for the best,” Aurora said as she dug. Nell had smelled licorice on her breath that came out, cloudlike, around her head. Aurora swore her to secrecy. She told Nell that her mother and Vince would be better apart. “Sometimes that is the way of things,” she said. In her fervent child’s heart Nell had wished it so.
It was Nell’s mother who told Vince the statue was there, somewhere, who’d watched his drunken, desperate search from the doorway. Aurora packed and left the house in a cab. Nell, watching him on the lawn from her bedroom window, had felt her complicity. Vince dug for hours in the wrong place. He had made holes, they saw in the morning, all across the front lawn, cutting through the Saint Augustine with his trowel, scattering little clods of grass and dirt. A day later the buried statue would become part of her mother’s and Vince’s reconciliation, a joke between them, and in the living room the remaining figures in the nativity scene continued to pose in their tableau—Mary alone by the infant, her blue robe chipped, the wise man standing aside, waiting, his gift glued into his wonderful hands.
Nell stood on the lawn in the lamplight. She had forgotten her sweater, and the cold slipped down the front of her blouse. From the front porch she took twelve steps along the azaleas and stopped. The statue was there behind the hedge, buried close to the house. Nell moved in among the dry branches and scraped at the dirt with her hand. It was dense with the azalea roots, and smelled as she remembered it, of the fertilizer Vince used to make the shrubs bloom. Around her the neighborhood houses lit up warm and yellow. The darkness was a body bending over the hedges. She was not sure who watched her or if she was entirely alone. But she fell to her knees because she had once held the little statue in her hand, and she knew where to find it, prostrate in the bed of soil, its robe’s folds the same, its plaster palm upturned, still held out in the semblance of redemption. And though Nell’s limbs kept Teddy’s memory fresh like a wound, she sensed, already, the unconscionable ease with which she would forget him.
breach
On our third day they find the boy’s white dinghy upturned, scuttling back and forth in the breakers on the sandbar. It is midmorning. You are still sleeping. The beach is dotted with children excavating sand with their toes, gathering at the water’s lapping edge to point and wonder. No one knows what the thing is until a man in a cottage farther down rises with his coffee and binoculars and makes it out. He bangs on the cottage door next to ours and rouses the boy’s father from last night’s stupor. The father emerges in his madras shirt. I see his groggy look, his hand brushing back his hair. They head out with a neighbor in a motorized Sunfish and retrieve the dinghy. We all know the boat once they bring it in. We all think the same thing: the boy didn’t pull it up high enough overnight when the tide came in. Some of us return to morning toast, the newspaper, the tending of small children, the breakfast dishes. I stay at my window, peering out.
The mother of the boy stands on her screened-in porch in her bathrobe, clutching the sash. I can just make out the tautness of her hands. I hear her small cry, and I know she has checked the boy’s bed and found it empty, that she waits now for something other than a boat drawn up onto the warming sand, three men wiping off their hands. I imagine decorum, disbelief, prevents her from running out onto the beach. She calls from behind the porch screen. “Where is he?” Her voice is tight and edged and merciless. The three men stop. Their hands fall, useless at their sides. Two of them look at each other. The third, the father, faces the woman behind the porch screen. On his face is the look of a man who wonders what she could possibly mean—exasperated, without patience.
In the room behind me you turn and the old bedsprings recoil.
“Come back to bed,” you say. Your voice is full of the same annoyance I read on the father’s face. The breeze is still damp and sweet. The foghorn that woke me has stopped its lament. The sun burns slowly through the haze, and I see the little pebbles, the iridescent pieces of shells, rolled and tumbled together at the water’s edge. The yellowed window shade flaps.
“I don’t want to,” I say back. My body has cooled, separated from yours.
I hear you groan. We are vacationing on the Connecticut shore, in this cottage rented for three times what my family paid twenty years ago. A narrow, tarred street fronting a salt marsh accesses the cottages that stand all in a row on stilts, painted different colors. They are untidy and small, each distinct with the clutter of families with young children—brightly colored floats and tubes, tennis rackets and buckets and fishing poles thrown on porches, clotheslines sagging with towels and bathing suits. When we arrived, driving down the row of cottages to our own, I sensed your disappointed silence but pretended I didn’t.
Outside, the moment of the men’s idleness passes. They turn to each other and gather that they must take charge. On the beach are the charred remains of last night’s bonfire and the tents the children made of the heavy woolen blankets provided with each cottage. One of the men ducks his head inside them, searching. The children by the water step toward each other, forming a small group. Men from other cottages come out. Their screen doors close on rusty springs, a loud bang followed by two softer ones. Nearly all of the men are fathers, some uncles, visiting for the weekend. They consult, hungover, unshaven. They inspect the dinghy—its fiberglass bottom scraped raw on broken shells and sand. There are holes big enough to put a finger through. Might he have rowed out too far, in fog, and the boat filled with water? Would he have tried to swim and lost his bearings? In one of the cottages a child begins to wail. The men on the beach disband with a seeming plan. Up and down the row of cottages I hear murmurs on the screened-in porches. I imagine the women whispering back and forth, their coffees’ steam a willowy stem. Most are dressed by now in their bathing suits, some in shorts and halter tops, on their way out to the Laundromat at Black Hall or the A&P in Old Lyme. Today, the mothers abandon all plans. They call in the children, their voices conveying the sharp urgency that accompanies a reprimand. The water still laps, quiet as a clam.
When we arrived the cottage was the same as I remembered. Nothing had changed, not the kitchen linoleum, or the old countertops, the knotty pine walls, the burned-in outline of an iron dropped by a great-aunt, a child in 1945, on the floor by the nook cupboard. All of the cottages are the same. They hold the same tweedy upholstered couch and chair, the same desk and brass-armed lamp bolted to the wall, its shade a tobacco-colored map of old sea trade routes. The shelves of the nook cupboards are lined with dark green drinking glasses, faceted, like emeralds. In the kitchen cabinets, similar aluminum cookware, plastic plates and bowls and cups. As a child I’d visited the cottages of friends and been surprised by the sameness. Now, I am reassured. The past is partly recoverable, I thought. I told you this, and you shrugged, tossed your bag down at the bottom of the narrow stairwell. “No, it isn’t,” you said. Your hands, free
of the bag, reached out to clasp the tops of my arms. You buried your expression in my hair.
It is July, warm enough not to need a fire, but the smell of wood-smoke tells of mornings chilly with fog when my sisters and brother and I sat wrapped in blankets in front of the fireplace. Girls came around calling “Doughnuts” in plaintive voices, and we fished money from our sleeping parents’ pockets to buy a dozen; glazed and cinnamon and chocolate iced. Once, I told you, I drove with the girls to the bakery in Sound View, where they loaded up the car’s trunk with the white bakery boxes. Then, I walked up and down the row of cottages with them, carrying the boxes in my arms, my jean cuffs dragging and fraying in the wet sand, the fog encircling our ankles. When I told you this, it was our first morning here and we were still in bed. You had your hand spread flat on my stomach, your face pressed to my breast. I was twelve the summer I helped sell the doughnuts, my body sleek and still unwanted, like a boy’s.
There is no television. Instead, we read all day long on the beach. We watch the tide come in and deposit long brown strands of kelp, Irish moss, and dead man’s fingers. One day, the delicate remains of a horseshoe crab. You give nicknames to the people in the other cottages, invent their lives, critique their bodies in their swimsuits, and then head inside for long naps on the couch. I stay to listen to the families squabble. The fathers gather in the late afternoons with cans of beer or glasses iced and clinking, silent behind their sunglasses. The mothers sit in low-slung chairs by the water, dabbling feet, keeping an eye out. I try to hear what they are saying, what they talk about, but their voices and the shushing water meld. Some evenings, dressed in sundresses and pink skirts and floral blouses, the mothers head out with their husbands to dinner at the Griswold Inn, and I see the kind of clothing they wear in their regular lives—pretty and pleasing, mothers’ costumes.
I watch the children with their buckets on the jetty, how they still, as I once did, crush the mussel shells with rocks and tie them to string, dangle the string into the jetty’s crevices. The jetties are covered with snails and barnacles, slippery with algae. The mussels’ meat is bright orange. The little ones shriek, afraid of the crabs they catch. One day, the boy who rows the white dinghy caught an eel and flung the abhorrent thing back. He rows out every day, his arms brown and strong.
“He reminds me of my brother in his boat,” I told you the first time I saw him.
That day, he dragged the boat up on the sand and I had gone over to talk to him. He was eleven or twelve, with sun-bleached hair. He kept a distracted distance, born from shyness. I told him how I came to this same cottage as a child, that my brother had a boat like the dinghy. It was made of fiberglass, its interior a pale aqua color, with a place for a daggerboard and a mast and a rudder. They boy’s face lit up. “This may be his boat, then,” he said. He told me they found it across the street, abandoned behind the dilapidated shed. They’d had it repaired, he said. But they didn’t outfit it with a sail.
“I remember the mast and sail leaning by the furnace in my parents’ basement,” I told him, laughing.
The father and another man have taken the Sunfish back out. I imagine there is hope of finding the boy elsewhere—clinging to a jetty, wandering the beach at Point O’Woods. The mother is dressed now, in wrinkled shorts and a T-shirt, and scrambling along the row of cottages, tapping on doors. “Is he here?” she asks, wondering if he has spent the night with friends. She does not come to our cottage. We are childless, just the two of us. During the long afternoons I’ve seen the looks we get from the husbands, from the wives. The women smile in our direction, covertly, almost wistfully, with masked envy. The men stare, bold and sniggering. Inside our cottage, at all times of the day, we have sex, exactly as they suspect. I have brought you here because this is the closest I could get to sleeping with you in my childhood bed. I had meant to show you something of my life, but my body is enough. You do not seem to need anything else.
I told you the story of the gypsies in the blueberries. I walked you down Center Avenue and showed you the place that was once a cart path, where my father as a boy used to walk to work in the afternoons. He held a job at One Hundred Acres Golf Course. The gypsies, he said, came each summer in wagons and stayed in the clearing, picking the wild blueberries. All of the children were instructed to keep away. The gypsies stole children, placed them in burlap sacks, flung them over their shoulders and ran down a secret path into the blueberry thicket. I think about this now, faced with the drama below me on the beach. I imagine the boy taken off in a painted wagon. I see him eyeing his captors, eating blueberries, almost happy to be off on an adventure. The gypsies were wild-haired and dark, my father said. He would pause to take a long sip of his watery drink. “Beware,” he told us all, small children stunned by apprehension. The afternoon I told you this, you took my hand and tugged me into the long shed by the tiny beach store. Light came in through cracks in the plank walls. I made out the shapes of the old wooden rowboats we used to rent, the broken Adirondack chairs piled up in a stack. It smelled of freshly cut firewood and oil paint, of the dried leaves that had blown in and become part of the dirt floor. Once, there had been a swing hung from a great elm outside. As children we would come to the store for raspberry-flavored candy and Archie comics. Now, the elm leaves whirred with insects. You and I were in our bathing suits. Mine came off, quickly, efficiently, in your hands.
Now, I lean into the window frame, place my head on my folded arms. I think about going down to the beach to discover what is happening with the boy, but I realize I am watching the shape of the father in the Sunfish, his rumpled madras shirt, and waiting for him to return. I see the mother pass by our cottage. She stands by the water, hugging herself, watching the Sunfish crawl past the sandbar, beyond the jetty barrier, into the open current of the sound. Three children come down the beach to stand by her side, two little girls in one-piece suits, another older girl in a bikini, her legs long and thin. They do not touch the mother. They stand around her like sentries, casting up occasional looks. Under their feet they tread the delicate butter shells my grandmother taught me to string into bracelets.
Last night, there was a bonfire on the beach in front of the cottage next door. You and I watched, at first, from the screened-in porch. The husbands and wives circled the fire in their low-slung chairs. They had bottles of wine wedged down into the sand. Every so often someone offered to freshen drinks made in the dark green glasses. They knew we were there on the porch, and eventually the father of the boy in the white dinghy called up to us to join them. There was a kind of vocal flutter from the group—not quite laughter. You and I looked at each other, but you were up before I said anything, eager for the distraction. The screen door banged behind you. They made room for us in the circle. Someone gave up a chair for me, and you sat cross-legged on my right. The fire spit and blew sparks. The smoke burned my eyes. You urged me to tell my story of the gypsies, but I would not. Instead I told them how when I was young the mothers and fathers all sat in similar circles around fires on the same beach. Once, I said, the fathers all decided to row out to the motorboat buoyed beyond the jetty. It was my father’s boat, and the idea was probably his. They took the boat out and the mothers sat abandoned around the fire, furious at first, then, as it grew later, more and more fearful.
I saw the faces in the circle glance out toward the dark water. None could imagine doing anything so foolish.
“But they came back,” someone said, after a while.
“Oh yes,” I tell them. “Eventually.”
They had docked at a restaurant in Niantic and gone inside to the bar. How they made it back to the beach, the lone buoy glowing in the dark, none could say. Someone stood up in the little dinghy on the way in and it capsized, the mothers shrieking down by the water’s edge wearing sweaters, clutching their drinks. The fathers returned to the fire, chastened, their clothing wet and steaming. I did not tell them how the children, left on the fringes of the bonfire, did what they wanted—sometimes eve
n sitting undetected by a mother’s elbow. I saw now that their own children were gathered on the beach, lining up the Adirondacks, draping them with blankets to make tents. We had even done that, once, and been bitten by sand fleas, woken up freezing, the blankets soaked from dampness and the tide that had risen to lick their woolen edges.
As a child, I had watched the fathers flip the dinghy that night through the same window from which I now watch the fathers search for the boy. Then, my sister and I shared the bed behind me. I had gasped with fear, and she had risen and come up to see what was wrong. She was my little sister, and I would not let her look. Now I see the men, joined by a dispatched Coast Guard boat, turn to head in. A group of mothers holding infants gathers on the water’s rim. The older children, ordered to watch their siblings, sit bored in the growing heat near the cottages’ wooden stilts, running the sand through their hands, telling little brothers and sisters to dig holes to China with bright plastic shovels. I see a man in his crisp police uniform, badge and buckle shining, emerge from between two cottages and head toward the group in leather shoes.
Last night at the bonfire the boy’s father had leaned toward me and whispered something into my hair. His breath was warm with whiskey. I didn’t hear what he said, so he leaned over again. He was smiling. “Take a walk with me,” he said. I gave him a look of surprise and shook my head. After, his eyes were mournful, staring into the fire as if he was alone and had forgotten he’d spoken to me. I saw he was very drunk. I watched his profile in the firelight, sharp and handsome, and I felt something for him, a longing, a blooming need. For the three days of our stay I have watched him travel the jetty with his children, swinging the mussel shells tied to string. I’ve seen him launch the dingy with his son at the oars, giving it a gentle shove. I imagined he has seen me looking, that he’s looked back at me with a tacit understanding, shaken his head at me, slowly, his mouth soft and tentative. You and I know each other, his look has said. What is it you really want? During the long afternoons I have felt his gaze. Once or twice, I have glanced over and met it. I have smiled at him, mildly. I have feigned indifference. Now, I see him wade into shore, tugging the Sunfish. I see him approach the police officer like a small child, beaten down by fear and guilt. His shoulders slope under his madras shirt. I imagine he smells, still, of whiskey, and his eyes carry the same mournful weight. Behind me you toss in the bed, throw off the blanket, smash the pillow. I hear your feet hit the floor and you are up, moving through the room.