The Salt House

by Lisa Duffy

  Thank him for stealing my trophy? Was she nuts?

  “My brother said you told him I won.”

  “I told him you won the trophy. I didn’t say anything about the race,” I pointed out. I was no tattletale.

  “You’re hard to give something back to,” he said, turning away, toward the house.

  “Hey,” I called after him.

  He turned when he reached the steps, and I said, “This doesn’t mean we’re friends. I still think you’re a jerk for what you said.”

  He kept walking up the steps, slowly though, as if he didn’t want to reach the top and have to go inside. Jess and Alex were sitting in the truck now, and the street was empty. I was still holding the trophy in one hand and the bag in the other. My face burned with anger. Who did he think he was, acting nice? Didn’t he remember calling me Kat Poop? Pinching my arm? Suddenly I wanted to throw the trophy at him. Make him take back his stupid words.

  I caught up to him, ran up to the top step, and stood in front of him.

  “Here.” I thrust the trophy out to him. “I don’t want it. And you can’t sleep here. It’s my house, and I say so.”

  He stared at me for a second. Then he looked down at his feet. When he looked back up, I lowered my hands. I know what people look like when they’re about to cry. And he looked like that. Mom was going to kill me if she came out here and he was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t cry.”

  “Who said I was crying? I don’t want to move into your house anyway,” he shot back. But he didn’t look up again. His ears were dark red.

  I was still holding the trophy out. I looked at it. Maybe he’d brought it as a peace offering. Sort of like the tomahawks that Indian chiefs gave to one another to make friends. We’d studied it in school last year, and Mrs. Whitley read us a book about it out loud, and even with her squeaky voice that made my ears ache, I still paid attention. And that says a lot.

  Grandma would say one good deed deserves another. And that people sometimes forget what you said and did, but they usually remember how you made them feel.

  “I didn’t mean that about you moving in. I take that back.”

  He shrugged. But his ears went back to skin color, and he didn’t look like he was going to cry anymore.

  “And I take back that I don’t want the trophy.” I moved it so it was partly behind my leg, so it wasn’t fully in sight, and cursed my big mouth for saying I didn’t want it.

  “And I’m sorry for bringing up your da— I mean your stepfather . . . you know, what I said.”

  “Okay! Jeez. Can you just take it and be quiet?” He looked at me out of the corner of his eyes, like I was a lunatic. I stood up as straight as I could. Who was he to say anything? A few minutes ago, he’d been pretending to be a man-eating sloth.

  “Do you want to come in?” I asked, sweeping my arm toward the door like the hostess did when she showed us to our table.

  He shook his head, opened the door, and went in. I stood on the porch. Mom’s laugh trickled out, and the smell of coffee filled the doorway. I held the trophy in front of me, traced the edges of it with my finger.

  I thought of Smelliot walking into my kitchen, into his new house that he didn’t want to live in. How his brother was leaving and his dad was in heaven and now his stepfather was gone too.

  I went inside and ran into the kitchen. Everyone at the table stopped talking and looked up, except Smelliot. He had his chin in his hand, staring at the tablecloth, a piece of date nut bread untouched in front of him. I wrinkled my nose. I hated that bread too.

  “Do you want to see my room?” I asked.

  He looked up at me, his face blank while our mothers nodded furiously.

  “I have a huge bullfrog,” I added, and Mom frowned. But Smelliot got up and walked over to me. Behind him, Dad winked at me.

  He didn’t find out until we got to my room that the bullfrog was a stuffed animal with a missing glass eye.

  But by that time I was telling him how cool his new house was. How the tree outside his bedroom window lost its leaves in the winter and you could see the dock in the backyard. And in the summer when the tide was out, there was always a little puddle of water at the bottom of the ladder that was as warm as bathwater.

  And there were these tiny little fish that you could catch in a jar, and at night, under a flashlight, they looked like streaks of silver under your blanket. Like a jar full of fireworks right in your hands. I told him not to mention that part to his mother. Taking fish from the ocean into your bed wasn’t one of those better choices Mom talked about.

  I thought he might look at me like I was strange again. But he looked out the window at the dock. When he looked back at me, he was smiling, as if he already knew how bright those fish would look under that black quilt covered in soccer balls.

  It’ll be our secret, he told me, and I knew from the way he looked back at the water, his eyes wide, that he was telling the truth. And just like that, me and Elliot were friends.

   25

  Jack

  Late-August mornings on the water are the pearl in the oyster shell. The air is still cool from the night and it gives you that first taste of September. Wait an hour or two, and the sun is high, and you’re stripping down to a T-shirt, the water so flat and clear, it’s like hauling traps in a bathtub. The wind nothing more than a whistle past your ear.

  This was what I was telling the girls over breakfast when Hope reminded me that I wasn’t cleared to be hauling until the doctor said so. As if I needed reminding. As if the horse pills I downed three times a day to fight whatever nonsense had taken residence in my lungs weren’t reminder enough.

  I didn’t say that to her, though.

  Boon had told me in the hospital room that it was Finn who’d fished me out of the water. Finn who’d slammed on my chest until water stopped spurting out of my mouth, until I was alive and breathing.

  Boon didn’t let me speak, told me shut up and listen. When he was done, he said that every man gets a limited number of free passes on being an asshole, and he was pretty sure mine were used up. He crossed the room and closed the door before he said it. Like he knew if someone heard him harassing a patient, he’d get thrown out.

  “Exhaustion play tricks with your mind,” I told him, repeating what the doctor said.

  But Boon had grunted, grimaced. “So can stupidity,” he said.

  Then he told me that a string of traps had washed ashore off Turner Point not thirty yards from my territory. Hank Bitts’s string, the dark blue buoy in pieces on the rocks. I thought of the traps I’d cut, the ones marked with a purple-striped buoy that I thought were Finn’s.

  Boon didn’t accuse me of cutting them. He didn’t need to. He just put the envelope full of cash on my chest and folded his arms, his way of telling me that he knew I’d played my part in this thing. That it was over, this back-and-forth with Finn, whether I wanted it to be or not. I nodded, not saying a word, thinking that I’d have to remember to give Bitty some cash, tell him I’d run over the string by accident.

  Not that it mattered. Any of it. What mattered to me was sitting across from me in the chair next to my hospital bed when I woke up, looking at me like I was someone she didn’t know.

  I had to work my way back into Hope’s good graces.

  Finishing the Salt House helped. That kid Alex turned out to have a knack for carpentry. And he worked cheap too, said he’d give me a week’s work for free if he could have the skiff behind the warehouse. I told him the skiff was junk, a crack in her hull the size of the Grand Canyon. That’s why I want her, he told me. It seemed like a fair deal to me until he gave me a day’s work. He got more windows framed in two hours than Boon did all day.

  When I pointed this out to Boon, he put down his nail gun, went to the cooler, and cracked open a beer. “If you like that speed, you’re going to love this one,” he said.

  Boon had told me in the hospital room that Hope knew about Hannah. He’d been pisse
d about that too, being put in that position. But he was more worried about what Hope was going to do to me.

  “If I were you,” he said, “I’d go back into surgery. It’d be less painful.”

  Hope waited until I was home from the hospital, in my own bed, my head propped up on the pillow, and my eyes just about shut before she closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Tell me about Hannah,” she said. “And don’t make me ask again.”

  I saw from the look on her face that we’d go around and around until she got what she wanted.

  “What do you want to know?” I asked, too tired to argue.

  “I want to know all of it,” she said.

  I didn’t sugarcoat it, pretend it was something it wasn’t. I told her the truth, said I was sorry for not telling her before, but I hated thinking about it.

  “That’s not enough,” she told me. “I deserve to know what happened.”

  “I told you what happened.”

  “You told me the events.”

  “Isn’t that what you asked for?”

  “I want to know how you felt about it. I want to know what it meant to you.” She was angry, shouting at me.

  “Stop yelling,” I said. “Calm down.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I told you what happened.”

  “No. There are other things I want to know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just things!”

  “Like what, Hope? For God’s sake.”

  “Like did you love her?” she shouted at me.

  I felt something inside of me let go. “I didn’t even like her,” I said, and Hope flinched. “Is this what you want, Hope? Is this the stuff you want to know?”

  She nodded, but her face told me she wasn’t so sure. But she’d pushed and pushed, and now I couldn’t reel it back in. I’d have been shouting if I had the voice for it.

  “You want to know I slept with a girl I didn’t like? That I knew it was wrong, and I still did it?”

  Hope stared at me. I waited for her to look away, but she didn’t. She sat next to me on the bed, looked me straight in the face.

  “You want to know that when she told me she was pregnant, I told her it wasn’t mine, even though it could’ve been. I left her crying. Did you know that? This wonderful husband of yours left a girl just one year older than Jess crying in her house all alone.”

  Hope reached for me, and I pushed her hand away. I felt empty inside.

  “I left her standing there. Then two days later, she walked upstairs, swallowed a bunch of pills, and killed herself.”

  “And you’re blaming yourself for all of it? Jack. You were eighteen. And what about Finn?”

  I scowled at her. “None of that matters. Doesn’t make what I did any better. I knew she was trying to mess with Finn’s head. I pretended it had nothing to do with me. That I was getting what I wanted. And Finn was getting what he deserved. I was too stupid to realize she needed me to walk away. She needed me to be one of the good guys. And I wasn’t.”

  “How could you not tell me this? I can almost understand you didn’t tell me because you don’t like to think about it and it was a long time ago, but I’ve been asking you about what happened between you and Ryland, and you said it was nothing to do with me.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. This was my fault. My mistake. The last thing you needed this year was this. The last thing you needed was me making it even harder for you.”

  She started to speak, and I put up my hand, shook my head.

  “There’s nothing more to say, Hope. I wasn’t one of the good guys. And I’m sorry that I wasn’t. That’s all I can say. I’m sorry that I wasn’t.”

  “But you’re a good guy now, Jack. You’re a good husband. A good father.”

  “Am I? I’m lying here useless. Instead of fixing everything, I’m out there making it worse, screwing it all up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Fixing it, Hope! Making it better. For you. For the girls.”

  “You can’t fix what happened, Jack. You can’t make it better for everyone.”

  “So I just do nothing? Well, I can’t do that, Hope. I won’t do that.”

  “Well, what? You’ll do this? Working a hundred hours a week so you end up in the hospital. After all that happened with Hannah, you went to work. Boon told me. You refused to talk about it, refused to deal with it. And here we are, twenty years later.”

  “One has nothing to do with the other, Hope. That was a million years ago.”

  “It’s grief, Jack!” Her voice was loud now, full of emotion. “Grief!” She leaned into me, her face inches from my own, finding my eyes, making me look at her.

  “It’s called grief,” she said again, her hand on my cheek, stopping me from turning my head away from her crumpled face, the anguish in her eyes, the tears streaming down her face.

  The knot in my throat unraveled and a noise slipped out, guttural and raw.

  Hope stood up, went to the door and locked it, pulled the shade, even though it was the middle of the day. She walked to my side of the bed, took off her clothes, and climbed into bed next to me. We didn’t speak. It hurt to move, but I wanted the pain. As if everything that hurt inside of me needed a way to get out. We stayed in bed for hours, not saying a word.

  And later, when Kat knocked on the door, and Hope opened it and told her, go tell Daddy how good he is, how much we love him, I pressed into the pillow to hide my face.

  Maybe it was the medicine clearing my lungs, or the sleep clearing my mind, but things seemed different after that day. There wasn’t that heavy feeling inside of me anymore, and the dread that had hung in the air was gone.

  Hope was different too. I’d waited for her to close back up again, but she went the other direction. I told her after the third night in a row that we’d made love that I wasn’t sure this was what the doctor meant when he’d said to rest. She slipped out of her clothes and said, Then let me do all the work. How can you argue with that?

  We’d put the last window in at the Salt House this morning, the last day of summer vacation before the kids went back to school. Hope was writing her column in her office and it was already a day late, and all the hammering wasn’t helping. She yelled out to everyone that we should go look at paint colors for the house, but what she really meant was take the kids and go look at paint colors so I can get some work done. Anything but red or green or yellow would work she told us, and Kat shouted “Purple!” and Hope had looked up from her computer and told us that anything actually meant white or tan.

  What she didn’t mention was the number of different shades of white and tan.

  So Jess and I had been standing in front of the paint samples for almost an hour now, while Kat played with a stack of them on the floor next to us, arranging the square cards in a pyramid, the puff of air that came in when the front door opened threatening to demolish the delicate structure.

  We’d picked out a dozen colors and placed them on the flat edge of the display in front of us when Jess reached out, picked one up, and handed it to me. It was a light, clean color, but not what I had in mind. I shrugged and held it back out to her.

  She didn’t move to take it. “Mom picked it out,” she said. “Last year. When she was thinking of doing Maddie’s room over.”

  I looked down at it. It wasn’t a color I thought Hope would’ve wanted for a little girl’s room.

  “Really?” I asked. “It’s so . . . white.”

  “Read,” Jess said, pointing to the small letters on the bottom right.

  I pushed the paint sample away, squinted, and brought it closer. “I don’t have my cheaters, Jess. What is it?”

  She leaned in, pointing to the word as she said it. “Salt,” she said. “The name of the color is salt.”

  I looked down at it, then up at Jess.

  “I was with her when she found it. She got all weird. I didn’t get it then,” Jess
said. “I mean, I got that it was the name of the summerhouse, but I didn’t get why she was so excited. Why it had anything to do with Maddie.”

  “It was where we . . . It’s um . . .”

  “Where Mom got pregnant,” Jess said, rolling her eyes. “I know how it works.”

  “Right,” I said, looking back at the color, remembering that weekend with Hope.

  It had been the second weekend in September, and we’d gone to the Salt House one last time before closing it up for the season. The weather had been unseasonably hot for that time of year, and the girls had gone to sleep in our room, the only one with an air conditioner.

  After they’d gone to sleep, Hope had grabbed a cold bottle of white wine from the fridge, and we’d sat outside on the Adirondack chairs, a breeze finally stirring off the water. At some point I opened another bottle.

  Later, we’d pulled a mattress down from upstairs, put it on the floor of the screen porch off the kitchen, and made love. I remember Hope scrambling to find her tank top and shorts the next morning, throwing my boxers at me when she heard our bedroom door open, the girls’ feet slapping against the linoleum floor.

  It’s like camping, Kat had said when she saw the mattress where we’d slept, and Hope had caught my eye and pressed her hand against her mouth to hide the smile. It was a joke between us now. Let’s camp tonight, wink, wink. Or it’s been forever since we went camping. A month later, Hope missed her period.

  I looked over at Jess now, thinking of how it didn’t seem that long ago that Hope was pregnant with Jess. And just the other day she’d turned seventeen. I cleared my throat. Thought of where to start.

  “That Alex kid. You like him?”

  She glanced at me and nodded.

  “Your mother said I should apologize to you.” I cleared my throat again. “And she’s right, as usual.” Jess’s cheeks colored, and I saw that Hope had talked to her. Had told her that I wanted to speak to her. Not that I wanted to talk about this. But I knew I needed to.

  “It wasn’t about me not trusting you. Not wanting you to date,” I said. “I just . . . I made some bad decisions when I was younger. And um, well, it was my stuff, Jess. I mean, heck, you’ve got so many more smarts up here than your old man does.” I tapped my knuckles on her head, and she flushed and laughed.