The Salt House

by Lisa Duffy

  Now, with his long body stretched out next to me, I reached out and put my hand over his heart, felt the rise and fall of it. He was leaner than I’d ever seen, muscular still, his shoulders and arms thick from years of heaving heavy traps out of the water, but the slight softness that had formed over his belly in the last years was gone, a hollowness in its place. I knew every inch of this body. Every nick, every scar, the shape of every limb and joint. His breath was ragged, his eyes clenched in pain even in sleep.

  I put my head on his chest, turned until my lips were pressed against the wisps of dark hair. I felt the tears come, silently, swiftly. They trickled down my check and slid down to the hollow of his belly. I don’t know how long I stayed there, but when I sat up and wiped my face, an idea was forming in the back of my mind.

  In the kitchen, Kat and my mother sat at the table, a puzzle between them, half-done. I said it before I could change my mind, before another day of living in the past slipped by.

  “I think we should have a girls’ day at the Salt House today. You know, have lunch and go swimming. Spend the day together.”

  Kat stood up so fast, she knocked her chair over. “Are you serious?”

  My mother looked up at me, startled. “Well, now,” she said.

  Kat jumped up and down, and my mother put her hand on her chest at the noise it made. Kat had been begging me to go to the Salt House for months, but in the last week or so, she asked almost daily, sometimes two or three times a day. So much so that it seemed to border on an obsession. But when I asked her why it was so important, she was vague, just saying she missed it.

  Now, while my mother went upstairs to get ready and Kat went to her room, I called Boon and told him that Jack was sick and not to worry when he didn’t see him.

  “I was just going to call you,” he said. “I was worried when I saw his boat still here. Manny said he was sick as a dog yesterday.”

  “I didn’t see him, but he’s been fighting something for weeks. You know him, too stubborn to slow down.”

  There was a pause then. It seemed as if Boon was on the verge of saying something, but the line was quiet.

  “Boon? You there?”

  “So Jack didn’t come home last night?”

  “He came home late. Said he had to fix something on the boat.”

  “But he’s home now? He didn’t just call to say he was sick, right?”

  “What? No, he’s here.”

  After a moment, he said, “You’ve seen him? I mean, put eyes on him?” There was a hesitation in his voice. As if he had to ask but wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.

  “He’s in bed. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, good. That’s good.”

  I waited for him to explain, but there was silence on the phone.

  “Boon. What’s going on? Tell me what’s going on.”

  “I don’t know, Hope.” He paused. “There’s some blood on his boat. On the deck.”

  There was silence on the phone while I thought.

  “Oh. It’s probably from the cut. He has a cut on his hand. He said he hit it on the engine.”

  “A cut?” he asked. “That’s it?”

  I frowned. “Not like a paper cut. His knuckle is split open.”

  “His knuckle? On which hand?”

  “I don’t know. The right, I guess. Why?”

  “It’s just, well. It’s not a drop or two. It’s probably the cut, though,” he reassured, but he sounded doubtful.

  “Is there a lot of blood? I don’t understand.”

  He paused again. “Don’t worry. You know how blood mixes with water and it looks like a lot. More than it is. That’s all. Keep him in bed. He sure as hell needs the rest.”

  He said he had to run, that he was swamped, but I knew he was rushing me off the phone. I hung up and went back to the bedroom. Jack was still sleeping, and I pulled back the sheet, uncovering his body, my eyes searching for another injury. Boon’s voice in my head. Blood mixes with water and it looks like a lot.

  There was nothing on him out of the ordinary. Bumps and bruises that were always there, with his line of work. Two large bruises on each shin. A rope burn on his forearm. A gash on his knee that had scabbed over already.

  I pushed gently on his shoulder, once, then again, and he turned on his side, snoring, pulling the sheet with him, the back of him now uncovered.

  There was the mole on his left shoulder, and the scar that ran from the back of his knee to his ankle from a clumsy stern man who’d dropped a trap on him years ago.

  I sighed and took the sheet from under his arm, snapped it until it spread out in the air and landed over him. I smoothed it out and looked at the bandage on his hand. The cut had been deep. It would have bled. But how much?

  I walked to the dresser and dug out my swimsuit, slipped it on, and threw a T-shirt and shorts over it. I moved slowly, telling myself that it was because I didn’t want to disturb Jack.

  But every inch of me was dreading going to the house. I thought of the last time we’d been to the Salt House as a family. Last June. Not long before we lost her.

  Jack and I had decided to stay at the Salt House for a few days before the girls got out of school. The kitchen needed to be packed up, and Jack had a list of things he wanted to work on. But by lunch every day, we’d end up on the beach in front of the house with Maddie, lounging on the blanket, watching her crawl to the water as fast as she could.

  Jack would leave in the afternoon to pick up the girls from school, and I’d spend the hour he was gone rocking with her in the chair on the porch while she napped.

  I hadn’t wanted the week to end, with Jack around as much as he was with the week he’d taken off of work. But I remember feeling worried that we were behind on renovations. That we wouldn’t be ready to move into the house by September.

  Looking back now, it’s hard to believe this was my only concern. My biggest fear.

  Now I went to the kitchen, and Kat skipped over to give me a hug. Her excitement filled the room. I saw that she was dressed, her bathing suit strap peeking out from under her shirt. She had her backpack on her shoulder, and when I reached to take it, she stepped back, away from me.

  “We have things to do before we leave, Kat. That’s going to get heavy.”

  “I don’t want to forget it. Besides, Grandma’s ready. And Jess is kind of grumpy because I woke her up, but she’s getting dressed too.”

  “I need a cup of coffee. And there’s breakfast too.”

  “Can we just eat there?” she whined.

  There was a bagel shop on the way. It was probably just as well to get out of the house. With Kat jumping around like she was, I was afraid she’d wake Jack.

  It was a half hour before we were finally in the car. I’d packed us lunch, and Jess and Kat had loaded some cleaning supplies in the trunk. Jess was quiet, but less sullen than she had been all week. I knew that Alex was away for the weekend. Peggy had mentioned that he was going back to his hometown, but she’d been busy in the last weeks with looking for a new place to live, and the one time we’d managed to talk on the phone had been cut short when the Realtor came up on her call-waiting.

  I hoped visiting the house today would be a good thing for Jess. She’d always loved our summers there. But unlike Kat, she hadn’t said a word about how much she missed it.

  Kat, on the other hand, could barely contain herself, fidgeting in the seat. I smiled at her in the rearview mirror, and she waved at me, giggling. Even though her excitement was contagious, my stomach flipped.

  There’d been days in the past year when I’d pointed the car in the direction of the Salt House and told myself to just go. Get it over with. But I’d change my mind and end up turning around.

  But there was no backing out now. There couldn’t be anyway.

  Lying next to Jack this morning, I’d felt him slipping away from me. Maybe it was the hollow spot where my hand had rested on him that made me feel that way. Or the thought of his blood on th
e deck. But there was something else. Something in his voice last night. I can’t. It wasn’t just the words. It was his voice when he said it. How it sounded empty. Indifferent.

  Now I was thankful for my mother’s company in the car. She turned in her seat, the seat belt cutting across her hip, and played the alphabet game with Kat, each of them picking out things they saw outside of the car, working their way down to Z. Jess joined in eventually, and the chatter kept my mind occupied.

  We were barely stopped in the driveway at the Salt House when Kat clambered out, her sneakers crunching the crushed shells as she ran to the front door. Jess followed, her long legs striding across the lawn.

  My mother looked at me, rested a hand on my forearm. “Take your time. I’ll get the girls to help me drag the picnic table out of the basement. We can eat outside.”

  I handed her the keys, and she joined Jess and Kat on the front porch.

  I waited until they were inside the house before I got out of the car and looked at the front porch.

  I let the moment wash over me. Months ago, I would have fought the flood of emotion, pushed it away, let it overwhelm me.

  The rocking chair on the front porch was in the basement now, put away since Jack had closed up the house last year.

  But I looked at the spot where it sat, remembered the last time we’d rocked in the chair. I felt the weight of her in my lap, felt her hand snaking up to curl a strand of my hair as she drifted off to sleep. I didn’t move until the memory of it faded enough that I could breathe again.

  I walked across the lawn toward the backyard, the ocean spreading out before me. The grass was short, and I wondered when Jack had stopped over to cut it. I knew he came here often. He didn’t ask me to come with him anymore. The answer had been no so many times this past year, he’d stopped asking.

  To the right was the hammock, the worn rope stretched between two tall elms. I saw the girls swinging lazily in the morning, Maddie nestled between them.

  Inside the house, I heard voices in the kitchen. My mother’s laugh, and then Jess’s. There were boxes stacked against every wall. My mother had opened the windows to air out the chalky smell of dried plaster. I climbed the stairs, turned left down the hall, passing bedrooms. Some walls were flat gray: the ones we hadn’t plastered. Trim board lay stacked on the floor.

  A project abandoned for more than a year.

  The nursery was the only room that was finished. We’d insulated it before she was born, and the girls had helped me decorate it. I walked to the wall, remembering the day the girls picked out the wallpaper.

  We’d spent an hour tucked inside a nook in the design store surrounded by stacks of sample books. You choose, I’d said, she’s your baby sister. They agonized, picked one, found another they liked, then another. They finally settled on a thick yellow paper with a border of butter cream, sage, and lavender hearts. It took us two days to wallpaper the room. Jack popping in every so often, telling the girls to call him when they gave up, with a wink to me, my belly large—eight months pregnant—wallpaper glue stuck to my hair. The girls shouted for him to get lost. He’d bet them twenty dollars they’d be begging for his help after an hour. They shoved him out the door, and he caught my eye before he shut it. The look on his face said he was lucky. He knew we were lucky.

  I moved to where the crib once was. Next to it there was a window, and I opened it, glanced down to the sunflower garden below.

  There was a noise from the hallway, and then my mother was in the doorway, out of breath.

  “Is Kat up here?” she asked quickly.

  “No. Why? I thought she was with you.”

  “She was with me. Right next to me and Jess in the basement, and then she said she forgot something in the car, and now I can’t find her. I told Jess to check by the water and I’d look in the house.”

  I looked out the window at the ocean. The sun shining off the blue water. The tide was out, and a dark stretch of sand was uncovered. Something yellow caught my eye, and I squinted, not able to make it out.

  Then there was Jess, running across the lawn to the flash of yellow, to the water. Not jogging. Sprinting. As if every second mattered.

  I flew past my mother, out the bedroom door, my mother following me, calling absurdly from behind me to be careful on the stairs, the yellow finding its place in my mind—Kat’s backpack that she’d insisted on holding on her lap on the ride over.

  She knew better than to be at the ocean by herself. It was a rule. One she’d never broken. Until now.

  The lawn ended at a stone wall with a four-foot drop to the beach below. But the flash of yellow I’d seen wasn’t at the wall. Or on the beach. It was farther out, at the water, where the ocean began and stretched for miles and miles.

  In front of me, Jess reached the wall and disappeared over it, out of my view. I ran after her, my legs pumping as fast I could get them to move, my lungs burning. There was panic. Then anger. What the hell did she think she was doing? Low tide would have the water thirty or forty yards out, but when it came in, it came fast.

  Kat knew this. Her father was a fisherman. She didn’t need to be told the sea had its own set of rules. She’d heard the stories we all knew by heart. Boats sunk or damaged. Men hurt or missing. Sometimes found. Many times not. She knew better than to be out there alone.

  It was only five minutes before I reached the wall, but time moved in slow motion. The girls were two dots in the distance, the sun flashing off the water, blinding me. I ran to them, the only sound my breathing and the slap of my soles against the packed sand. Somewhere in the sky above, a seagull let out a shriek, a shrill cry filling the air.

  When I was closer, I saw that the girls were standing in the water, the yellow backpack floating between them, the ocean lapping at their feet, the tide already making the turn in.

  Jess was holding something. Holding it the air, away from her body.

  It was another minute before I reached them. Kat was crying, her face red and tearstained, a scowl on her face. The backpack was at her feet, open and on its side, water filling it with every wave. Next to it was a wooden brown box, half-submerged.

  Jess’s face was blank, her arm straight out in front of her. In her hand was a bag full of ashes. It took me a moment to register. Maddie.

  “Take it,” Jess said to me urgently. “She was trying to dump it in the ocean.”

  I reached out, dumbfounded, looking from the ashes, now in my hand, to Kat, to the box tumbling in the water at our feet.

  “I wasn’t dumping it,” Kat screamed through her sobbing. She bent down and took the box out of the water. “You made me drop it, and now look.” She grabbed the bottom of her T-shirt and frantically rubbed the cotton against the wood, trying to dry it even though water streamed from the corners.

  Jess hadn’t moved, her expression a mixture of emotions that I knew mirrored my own: confusion, shock, disbelief.

  My fingers were curled around the plastic bag, my other hand supporting it from the bottom. I hadn’t blinked since Jess thrust it at me, hadn’t breathed, it seemed.

  There was a noise behind us, a shout, my mother in the distance, standing on the lawn, the word okay making its way out to us. I held up my hand, signaling that we were, and she put her hand to her heart to show her relief.

  I turned back to the girls. Time stopped. No one moved. No one spoke. There was just the sound of the ocean. And Kat’s sniffling.

  I wondered how long Kat had hidden the ashes. When had she taken them from my closet? How had she even known they were there?

  I thought back to this morning, picturing them in the closet. But I hadn’t seen them, I realized.

  I’d looked at what I always looked at: her baby blanket, the one I wrapped around the wooden box the first day I’d brought it into the house and placed it on the shelf in my closet. I hadn’t taken it down from the shelf once the entire year.

  I couldn’t bring myself to touch it, knowing the smell of the blanket would gut me. The s
oftness of it against my cheek would bring me to my knees. The thought of her wrapped in it, fresh and clean out of her bath, would put me on the floor.

  Now Kat looked over at me, her face flushed. Her voice was hoarse, choked. “She’s supposed to be in her favorite place. So I brought her,” she said.

  I swallowed, choosing my words carefully. “This is something important, Kat. Something we should do together. As a family.”

  “You told Dad you didn’t want to. You fought about it. I heard you.”

  “I meant that I wasn’t ready. Not that I didn’t want to.”

  “Well, that’s not fair. Dad’s ready. I’m ready. And Jess is ready. Aren’t you?” Kat asked Jess, whose eyes were still on the ashes.

  “Where has that been?” Jess asked. “How did you even get it?”

  “In Mom’s closet,” Kat said. “Way up on the shelf where it’s pitch-black and scary. She would have never wanted to be in there.” Kat looked at the ashes cradled in my arms. “I brought her here because she loved it. Remember? She’d crawl right to the edge of the water, and you’d chase her and pick her up, and she’d cry and kick her legs and make you put her down. Then she’d just crawl around at the edge all day, slapping at the water, splashing it everywhere.”

  Jess looked at where Kat pointed, a faraway look on her face that seemed to say, Yes, I remember.

  Her words sunk into me, and I shut my eyes, desperate to block out the image. But there she was, scurrying across the hard-packed sand. And there was Jack, standing guard in the shallow surf, delivering her to higher ground now and then, carrying her under the arms, and holding her out from his body to avoid her flailing limbs. Want a water baby? he’d say, placing her on the blanket next to me, where she’d abruptly turn and crawl to the water again.

  I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t speak. If I did, my voice would fail, and the girls would hear me sobbing. They’d see my anguish. My despair.

  For a full year, they didn’t know their sister was on a shelf in my bedroom closet. I’d kept her there. Away from them.