by Paula McLain
She was doing her best to make it seem like an occasion, tying a dish towel with clusters of cherries around her waist as an apron, pushing the eggs around the little pan with flourish. She looked shiny on top—pink and clean with just-washed hair—but under the lamp, when she got close, Raymond could see faint purplish circles under her eyes and at their edges, raised skin like goose bumps, tiny lavender prick marks.
“What’s it like to sleep on this thing?” he asked as she took away the dishes and poured several fingers of warm gin in two paper cups. “I think I’d be sick with all the rocking.”
“You get used to it. It’s kind of nice after a while, and I like the sounds.”
It certainly wasn’t quiet. Waves came at the hull with a slapping rhythm that didn’t seem to vary. The dock was half a foot wider than the boat on each side, and though it was tethered in front and by ropes knotted around cleats, port and starboard (Suzette was now well-schooled in basic nautical terms by the doctor and used these terms unself-consciously, like an old salt), the boat still shimmied side to side, rubbing the buoys with a persistent gummy squeak. High overhead, various wires twanged and buzzed as the wind caught them.
“It gives me a headache,” Raymond said.
“Well I like it. I don’t want things quiet. Quiet is what gives me a headache.”
He just nodded and sipped at his gin and thought maybe it wasn’t so bad for her there. It seemed better than the last place she lived, in Truckee above Lake Tahoe, where her boyfriend Lars, a lumberjack or bartender or chicken farmer he’d never met, disappeared on her after a long and outrageous fight that had the neighbors calling the cops. Truckee was two hundred miles from San Francisco, straight over the Donner Pass, which always gave Raymond the creeps. When he found her, she had holed herself up in the bathroom of a rental house that probably went for three hundred dollars a month during the season, though it looked like it was just barely hanging on to the edge of a small lake. He had to knock for ten minutes before she recognized his voice and called through the door that he could come in. She was all set up in the bathroom with a teakettle and stacks of crackers on the edge of the sink, her blanket and pillow in the tub. She said she’d heard something out in the room she was scared of. Someone trying to break in, she thought. After that, she went to stay with him and Leon for a few weeks. While she was there, she watched TV all day, curled in a chair under an afghan, her hair unwashed, getting up only to make herself cinnamon toast. And then she was gone again, throwing off the memory of her trouble like the afghan. The apartment smelled like her for days afterward and Raymond couldn’t help but wonder, as the weeks passed with no word, what new drama she was investing herself too deeply in.
On the boat, Raymond slept in the “guest quarters,” a triangle-shaped hollow at the bow that he fit into only by sleeping hooked. Through the cushion he was using as a pillow the hull knocked and vibrated like a skull made of Styrofoam. It wasn’t warm either, and midway through the night, as he groped to find the shirt he’d taken off hours before, he heard Suzette whimpering, a puppy noise that reminded him of her as a little girl. She had been a sweet baby, not colicky as Raymond himself had been. She never even cried much, just made these little squeaks and moans, more a toy delivered to them from Santa’s workshop than a baby, he had thought. When they first brought her home, he was surprised and more than a little terrified that his mother had let him hold her right away. Berna had positioned him on the sofa in the parlor, and when she placed Suzette, who was swaddled tightly in a flannel blanket, in his arms, Raymond’s heart had thudded dully to a stop. She was so small, a tiny albino squirrel with feathery eyebrows that looked painted on. He looked at his mother, who smiled encouragingly from nearby.
“Isn’t she pretty?” Berna asked.
Raymond nodded. In fact she was incredible—a perfect package of pink-white skin and fine dark hair and bottomless eyes. Holding his breath, he rocked her lightly and pressed his nose down to touch her forehead. He exhaled into her eyelashes, his own warm breath shifting back on him, and just then, the baby closed her eyes, sighed, and with the sighing seemed to condense and grow heavier, more sound and solid. His mother beamed and he felt prouder than he ever had. He had made something good happen. He had put the baby to sleep.
In the first years of her life, Suzette was nothing if not precocious. She walked at ten months, talked in full sentences before she reached the age of two. She never stopped talking, her chirpy voice naming and renaming everything in her world. Raymond would follow her around the house, labeling new things and repeating what she said back to her. Kitty, that’s a kitty. Feet. Fur. Little black eyes. He was her interpreter, her translator, and soon she had seemed to completely internalize his voice, inflection and all—particularly his chidings and warnings. “Why do you do that?” he’d ask when for the hundredth time she inverted the nipple of her bottle with a chubby finger. “Don’t poke it,” he’d say, handing the bottle back fixed.
“Don’t poke,” she’d repeat. “Why you do that?” And then she’d poke it again.
It was funny, hearing his own words coming back at him, and soon Raymond understood that he didn’t need to chide her at all, because she was doing it herself, vocalizing his counsel like a second conscience, an angel on her shoulder. But he also couldn’t stop following and scolding her, because no matter what she said or seemed to have control over, she didn’t ever stop doing whatever it was she wasn’t supposed to do. She just rattled away as she yanked the cat’s tail, pitched over a potted plant, peed in the corner after somehow maneuvering her diaper off: Why you do that?
It wasn’t until Suzette was nearly four that Raymond began to notice how anxious she could be. If she spilled her milk at dinner, she’d whimper as Berna daubed the mess with a dish towel and refilled her glass. Was it shame? Was she afraid she would get yelled at? Raymond wasn’t sure, but the whimpering and the panicked look on her face made it hard for anyone to stay mad at her for long. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Berna or their father, Earl, or Raymond would sigh, and Suzette would repeat this too, her little face screwed up on the verge of tears. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.
Raymond was eleven and Suzette had just turned six when Earl died in a farming accident. He’d been plowing on an incline in the field when the tractor had rolled and crushed him underneath. Still alive when a neighbor found him; there had been just enough time for Berna to be fetched from the house. She knelt by him in the field while he whispered a confession of nonsense words, and then closed his eyes.
Earl had not been a good father, exactly, nor had he been a bad one. He put in long days in the field on the combine or baler, or flipping up leaf bases on reconnaissance for beet armyworms, then cared for the animals. When he finally came to the dinner table, he was sunburned and hungry. He ate without chewing and then listened to I Love a Mystery on the radio in the parlor, with a bowl of shelled pistachios in one hand and a bottle of cream soda in the other. He was the kind of man who hoarded his words cautiously, and his affections even more so—though no one could call him unkind. He had a particular fondness for animals, clucking to the hens in their own language as he coaxed their bodies to one side on the straw so he could gather eggs. He babied the sheep as well. When he moved them from their stall to clean it, he didn’t use a halter, just his hands on their black noses as he guided them, cooing a little under his breath.
When he was a boy, Raymond had sometimes followed his father out to the small animal barn, wanting to be near him, but was more often dissuaded by the chickens making their usual racket behind a twisted wire gate. Raymond hated chickens. They were too noisy and moved too suddenly, seeming to rush him. He didn’t like their small, too-alert eyes or the way certain hens sported raw, featherless patches from where they’d been pecked and harassed by the roosters or by other hens. Once Raymond saw a hen balding herself. This seemed to take effort, given the shortness of her neck and how far she had to reach to her hindquarters, but she was intent. After sev
eral sessions, each lasting forty-five seconds or more, Raymond could make out a rough diamond shape of pink, human-looking skin pricked with red where the blood came.
“Why do they do that?” Raymond had asked his father, who was nearby, rubbing chicken shit and down and bits of straw from eggs before placing them in a cardboard crate.
Earl had simply shrugged and looked into his egg rag. “Guess something doesn’t quite feel right to her,” he’d said.
Raymond, unappeased, had pressed: “Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Yes,” said his father. “I imagine it does.”
Very early on, Raymond had given up on Earl as a source of attention. If he wanted praise, or to have someone listen to the best bits of a baseball game, or answer questions about his homework, if he wanted, simply, to be touched, he went to Berna. Suzette, on the other hand, was magnetized by what Raymond thought of as Earl’s perimeter—that space around his father that seemed cordoned off by invisible fencing. As Earl sat in the parlor, Suzette, even at two, three, four, would hover around him, either in spite of or because of his seeming not to notice she was there.
After Earl died, Suzette became even more fixated on him as a figure, a symbol, an idea. She wanted to talk about him all the time, wanted a larger picture of him put up on the mantel, though clearly these reminders upset their mother. Suzette also became inordinately interested in death, what it meant to be dead. What was the soul, exactly? When you were buried, could your soul wake up in the casket and wonder where it was or how it could get out? And could you suffocate that way? Like dying again? When she went to Raymond with these questions, he didn’t know how to begin to answer them. He would have asked Berna for help, but she was in a kind of grief trance and would be for months, sliding past her children in the kitchen or the yard, not seeming to see them or remember they needed supper or baths. She seemed to be sleepwalking.
In the mornings, as Raymond made oatmeal for Suzette, Berna would stare out the window that faced the road. There was nothing out there, just the mailbox, the patch of switchgrass on the slope Earl had been too busy to keep mowed, and the one old Macintosh tree that bore sour fruit every other year. There was nothing to see, but that didn’t keep Berna from standing at the window for hours every day as if her feet were strapped to sandbags. At other times, she boiled water down to nothing on the stove, singed the toast, let milk sour on the table. She lit cigarettes and forgot them on the edge of the sink, where they burned themselves down.
Raymond missed his mother terribly, but there was so much to do in the way of caring for Suzette that he soon found himself drawn into an even tighter orbit around his sister. If he had worried about her before, that anxiety doubled, tripled after Earl’s death, as she began staging mock funerals for the animals on the farm—undead cats and chickens and Earl’s dog Milton who, with heroic patience, let her drape him with a white sheet and tuck weeds around his deaf old head.
“She just has an overactive imagination,” Berna said tiredly when Raymond finally did consult her about how to handle it. “She needs more exercise.”
So Raymond cajoled her out in the yard to play several times a day. Once there, however, Suzette would begin the long process of embalming Milton, or sketch a clown face in the dirt with her finger, adding fangs and exploded stars for eyes. At school, they both had friends and lives apart from each other. Both got good grades and were well liked, but none of this seemed to apply once they climbed off the school bus. As they went up the dirt driveway, the front porch steps, the creaky stairs to their rooms, the world shrank and closed off, and it was just the two of them again, with Berna busy but distant in the parlor, dusting the already spotless mantel.
At night, when Berna was tucked behind her bedroom door, reading Ladies’ Home Journal or sleeping, Suzette would come into Raymond’s room, asking for bedtime stories, by which she meant ghost stories. She was a funny little kid that way, liking to be scared, the palpitations and breathlessness, the moments when she’d have to pinch her eyes shut or cover her head with a pillow. Against his better judgment, Raymond would give in and tell her the one about the escaped mental patient with a hook for an arm, the one about the big horned owl swooping off with the baby—and she would listen transfixed until she was too scared to sleep. Later, he’d hear her whimpering through the wall, or she’d knock on his door in the middle of the night, asking if she might sleep on the floor. And then the next night, she’d want the same. It occurred to Raymond that the eight-year-old who wanted ghost stories wasn’t much changed from the toddler who poked her bottle so she couldn’t drink from it.
Raymond woke to the boat’s manic rocking and the tail end of a half-dream about being pitched from a wheelbarrow. His feet were numb from sleeping in a vee, and he had a crick in his neck. From the cabin, he could smell eggs frying; didn’t Suzette know how to cook anything else? He dressed and maneuvered his way out of the bunk, complaining about his night in the torture chamber. Suzette wasn’t complaining, though she looked even more tired than she had been the night before.
After eating and washing up, they went for a walk along Oxnard’s small and slightly run-down boardwalk. There was a saltwater taffy place and a gift shop and a shop where pink and gray and striped fish lay packed on ice, their eyes glazed and rubbery and unreal. The sun was finally out, making everything, aside from the stiff fish, look cleaner and more hopeful than it actually was. When a little boy in bib overalls ran up with a paper cup full of hermit crabs, wanting to sell them for a nickel apiece, Suzette gave him a quarter for the lot and peered in at them. Half were dead already; the other half were trying to climb over each other slowly, as if drugged or lost. She walked over to where a clot of seagulls congregated around a tar-stained pylon, and poured the cup out. “Here’s breakfast on me,” she said.
At the end of the boardwalk, they stopped at an ice cream parlor and watched through a squeaky-clean picture window as a pretty girl in a pink apron and skirt poured thin batter into a contraption that was like a giant waffle press.
“I work here,” Suzette said. “That’s Marie. She’s Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. I’m Mondays, Wednesdays, and weekends.”
Inside, the air smelled like bubble gum. Everything was glass or chrome and cold-looking. Suzette introduced Raymond to the girl behind the counter, who was also quite pretty, and to her boss, Stanley, who stood to one side in a long white apron smeared with chocolate. He offered Raymond a cone on the house, like some goodwill ambassador of ice cream, but it was too early to eat dessert. Is he sleeping with her? Raymond wondered as he thanked Stanley and declined.
Out on the wharf again, Suzette was too chipper about her job, how nice everyone was, how they each got to take home a pint of free ice cream a week.
“You gotta get out of here, Suzy.”
“What? Why? It’s a good job,” she said. The wind picked up the tips of her hair and blew them across her eyes in a screen. “You’re always getting down on me. I can take care of myself, you know. It’s a good job,” she repeated. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing, it’s fine. Great. But what are you doing down here?”
“Working. Taking care of myself.”
“Why here? You don’t know anyone.”
“John,” she said. “And Marie and the other girls, and Stanley. I know lots of people. And why do you care, anyway? Where do you think I should be instead?” Her face was becoming blotchy, pink islands blooming along her cheekbones and just under her eyebrows.
“Let’s drop it,” Raymond said. “It’s fine. I just want you to be happy.”
They had run out of boardwalk. To the left, there was a horseshoe of damp sand, and off in the distance, a water-treatment plant that looked like an enormous white kettledrum groaned every few minutes. It was an ugly place, which you could forget only if you faced the ocean and refused to turn your head.
“I’ve had a letter from Benny,” she said after some time had passed.
There it was, then. Raymond had be
en waiting for her to bring up the phone call and whatever it was that had shaken her up so, but didn’t want to force the issue until Suzette was ready. Benny had always been a loaded subject, a radioactive ex-boy-friend Suzette seemed drawn to in a pathological way, like those mice in scientific studies who couldn’t stop nosing electrified tabs in their cages. “How did he find you?”
She looked out to sea. “I don’t know. How’d you find me? How does anyone find anyone?”
“I thought you decided it would be best not to be in touch with him.”
“You decided. I just said okay if you remember.”
Raymond sighed and tried to keep his voice level. “In any case, it’s been years, hasn’t it?”
“I guess so. It doesn’t really matter. What I was trying to tell you is he’s dying.” Her voice dropped dramatically with this last word.
“Benny? What does he have?”
“I don’t think it’s a disease or anything.”
Raymond was growing more than a little frustrated with this game, dancing around, trying to ask just the right question so she’d give him the information she clearly wanted to if only he’d work for it first. “What then? How is he dying?”
“I don’t think he knows yet, that’s the thing. He had this dream.”
“A dream?” That was the end of Raymond’s patience. “You’re flipping out because Benny had a bad dream? He’s crazy, Suzy. You know that, and you’re crazy for taking him seriously. In fact, I can’t even believe you’d read a letter from him. Just burn it.”
When Suzette turned to face him, she had tears in her eyes and looked stung. “You don’t know everything, Ray.”
“No, I know I don’t, sweetheart,” he said, softening. “I don’t if you don’t tell me everything.” But he’d gone too far or she had, and she was crying for real now. He reached out for her arm and she pulled away fiercely, childishly. “Sweetie, please.”