“She came up here while you were still swimming,” Edward said, “and she always waits for you. She knows—you both know—that it’s not a good idea to swim alone. People drown that way. I’ve seen it happen.” He tapped his knife on the cutting board. “They drown when they think that being alone is exactly what they need.”
“I wasn’t going to drown,” Owen said. “The mosquitoes were vicious down there.”
“This is their hour. You have to respect that.” Edward sliced another tomato.
Owen went into his father’s bedroom to change out of his wet bathing suit, but he kept the door open.
“So what’s the problem then?” Edward asked, still at the counter. “And no bullshit now. Just talk to me.”
“I like the flowers. Nice touch.”
“I get the point, I’m no idiot. I won’t ask you anymore if you don’t want to talk about it. Maybe I’ll just ask Mira instead. When you’re not here. At least she’ll talk to me. She always does. You? Forget it.”
Edward still detected Owen’s moods like he detected bird song or the scent of a bay breeze. He could tell you if the bluefish were running. Owen felt intimately exposed. It had always been too tight here; he couldn’t swallow without his father asking what he was eating. Why not say something to the man now? It was easier when they weren’t looking at each other. He told his father that Mira had been going to the casino with their new neighbor, Wilton, and that he didn’t like it. As he talked, he noted that the bed was made, an unusual enough thing in itself, and the room was neater than he’d ever seen it. Clothes had been put away, piles of books straightened. The curtains had been washed. A fuzzy violet blanket hung over the footboard. Gold-plated nail clippers were poised like a grasshopper on the bureau. Christ, he thought, his father has a girlfriend. And they cut their nails together. They lay under the purple blanket. She picked wildflowers and put them in a jar. They watched the curtains lift in the air. He was astounded. Did Edward think he wouldn’t notice?
“So what? Sounds innocuous enough to me,” Edward said, standing in the doorway. He rubbed a basil leaf between his fingers and held them out for Owen to smell. “How often does she go?”
“I don’t know—once, maybe twice a week.” Last week it had been three times.
“Your mother played poker. She had a weekly game, nickels, dimes, nothing much. It was a social thing. So what’s the problem exactly?”
“I don’t like it. I don’t like the place. I don’t like how it makes her act.”
“But that’s you. Look, sweetheart, I know Mira, and the more you get worked up about this, the more she’ll bristle. Let her do her thing, no harm done. It doesn’t have to be your thing. You don’t know that by now? What do you want her to do? She’s a good girl, leave her alone. Don’t suffocate her.”
Owen laughed—a good girl. His father spoke with authority on women, when he hadn’t been with one for decades, or not until recently, under the purple blanket. He often came up with information about Owen’s mother at the precise time it was needed to form a unified parenting front. Your mother hated the city for its violence. Your mother never swam alone. Your mother wanted you to live here with me forever. Who could ever know what was true and what wasn’t? Owen finished dressing and poured his father a glass of the wine they’d brought from home, one of the many bottles Wilton continued to give them, sometimes using the key Mira had given him to come into the house and drop them off. Edward held his glass up to admire the color, which he said was the color of expensive.
Mira appeared then, dressed in shorts and a tight black T-shirt, toweling her hair. Owen was struck by how beautiful she was, with her skin holding the sun. Her arms were long and elegant, her single gold ring shining. He didn’t want to be angry at her anymore. She told Edward about the naked couple on the dock and how she had expertly run the boat into it several times just to piss them off.
“You should have seen the guy,” she said. “He was lying there with a hard-on and he started barking at us.”
“I know him. He looks like a bulldog?”
“A rottweiler.”
“Right, a real bastard.” Edward smoothed his hair, a gesture of care for Mira. “Porter would have hated him. He would have burned the land before selling to a prick like him. Did you see the monstrosity of a house he’s building? An eyesore.”
“Owen told him to go fuck himself,” Mira said. “Or something along those lines.”
Edward kissed her forehead, his hands on either side of her face. “My son makes us so proud.”
Mira sat on the sagging couch. She stroked the orange cat in the corner. Books and papers were pushed under the armchair and the low table. The wooden walls of the cottage had aged to a deep, oily brown, while the tacked-up photos of Owen as a kid had faded to x-rays. Edward had left New York at thirty and moved to this cottage, one never meant to be lived in year-round, before he met Owen’s mother. They’d lived together in the months before Owen was born, twenty months after until she died. Of a drug overdose, Owen had always suspected. Edward replaced things in the house only when he absolutely needed to—the sink faucet or the screen door—but never added anything new. And that included a woman. Except now there were the flowers, the blanket, the nail clippers. Owen noticed a box of tissues on the mantel above the fireplace. His father usually used his sleeve. An array of shells and fish backbones and one delicate mouse skull covered a sill. The Museum of Natural History, Mira had dubbed it after her first visit. It was nothing to like as a kid, the skeletons of tiny animals hanging from walls so thin he could hear his father talking in his sleep, hear him farting. It was no place he’d ever wanted his friends to see. But Mira loved it.
Owen went outside to watch the sun pull away from the locust trees as he walked the dirt road toward Route 6. The sky was too bright to look at, while his feet were already in darkness, so the night appeared to rise from the ground instead of descending from the clouds. Rey followed him. Returning home often brewed up an unstable mix of melancholy and impatience, the acknowledgment of life already passed and the expectation of life ahead. He knew that the death of his mother ranked as tragedy, but he hadn’t ever really felt that. He’d never known her, and she had never been more alive to him than she’d been dead; they were equal states.
As a child, his constant view had been of the water ringed by trees. He’d seen the way the surface of the pond reflected even the smallest change in the weather’s temper, and he’d felt captive to a moody spirit. He’d always been restless here. And this time of year brought back the pinch of loneliness. During the summer, the houses around the pond had been full and busy. The children all looked beautiful and lucky to him, the older girls exquisite in their bikinis. The renters brought life and clamor and junk food, bags of red licorice and tubs of cheese balls, and their goal for their vacation week or two was to not think about what they called “real life”—when this was his very real life all year long. What did it mean—except his father’s profound relief—when they’d all left and the pond was silent again? It was like standing still while a very fast train blew by you and lifted your hair. What remained was what had been forgotten or abandoned: a towel in the bushes, a single sneaker, a cat, a brightly colored plastic ring still drifting on the pond.
The year he’d turned thirteen, he became desperate to leave. It was as if something had invaded his blood overnight. Where before he’d listened patiently to his father talk and read his work in progress out loud, and he’d offered his opinions, now he couldn’t stand another word about tide pools and perch populations. Nature irked and bored him. His temper made him itch. He had no interest in trudging down the beach to see a whale that had washed up and lay swelling in the sun. Where the hell were the people? Where was the noise of life, the romance and sex and action? There must be something wrong with his father if he could stand this, he decided. Owen had turned on the television to discourage his father from talking to him, and he didn’t plan on turning it off until he left. F
or a while, Edward had continued to yap over the television’s racket, and then he’d stopped, and he stopped asking Owen to take walks with him, to listen. He’d stopped reading out loud what he’d written. Often their dinners were wordless and painful.
The television was an ancient thing bought by Edward so he could watch the Watergate hearings, and when the set finally began to die, Owen’s campaign to get a new one was relentless. Edward suggested a book instead. When he said, Your mother didn’t approve of television, Owen said he didn’t give a shit about what a dead person thought. Edward picked the television up, walked it down the path and through the arbored tunnel, and threw it into the pond. Owen had laughed weepily at first, mostly out of disbelief. He was furious with his own helplessness, though he was already as big as his father and much stronger. The thing stayed in the pond, one sharp corner breaking the water’s surface like the bow of a shipwreck, its cord a useless line snaking onto the sand. Sometimes a bird perched on it.
It was March then, still very cold, and Owen trudged to one of the houses on the other side of the pond. He’d been inside one summer, invited by a brother and sister who’d rowed their rafts over to him one day. Their parents had fussed over Owen like he was a strange specimen and fed him Pop-Tarts and hot dogs. When he looked in the windows, he expected to see the bowls of bright food still on the table and, most importantly, the television. He kicked open the side door. His strength was new and still surprising, like his own hard-ons. He took the television and brought it home. That night, Edward baked fish that stank up the place, and Owen insisted on leaving the door open to the cold night air as his own retribution. As they were eating, he looked over Owen’s shoulder at the water and extracted another fish bone from his mouth. He laid it on the table, reconstructing the skeleton. The next morning, Edward dragged the old waterlogged television out of the pond and left it in front of the house under a sheet like a corpse. When Edward finally bought a new set, Owen took the stolen one back to the house across the pond and repaired the busted door. Neither of them ever said a word about it, this test of their opposing wills.
Owen led Rey back to the house. Inside, Mira had lit two mysterious pale pink candles. They ate the lentil soup, the bread, the tomatoes, and the chocolate cake Mira had made. Owen opened another bottle of wine. Mira leaned back in her chair, pushing off from the table with her palms, and told Edward about the adult life-drawing course she was going to offer soon, maybe just after the New Year.
“It makes sense,” she explained. “If Brindle is going to survive, I have to start getting a different crowd in there. You know, one that can actually pay, one that doesn’t cost me money. One I don’t have to also feed and clothe. The place can’t survive on goodwill or liberal guilt anymore.” She talked about replacing the leaking windows in the gallery, updating the two bathrooms in the building, hiring another teacher or two.
“Where’s all the money going to come from?” Owen asked. It was the first he’d heard about any of these plans. “You’re talking about some very serious work. The windows alone—”
“I know, Owen. Lighten up. I’ll get it. Listen, I have to make some decisions about the future of the place. Expand or fold.” Mira demonstrated like she was opening and shutting a book. “I can’t keep waffling. It’s making me crazy. Wilton and I’ve been talking about how it doesn’t make any sense to be in the middle anymore. It’s just too hard, too wearing.”
“Were you going to let me in on this?” he asked.
“Life drawing,” Edward said, cutting in between them. “Some artists learned by looking at cadavers. Audubon did. Do they call that death drawing?”
Mira pressed cake crumbs under her thumb. “Men and women, everyone’s just crazy to look at naked boobs.”
“Maybe you should try the class, Owen,” Edward suggested. “Expand your horizons. Loosen up a little. Relax.”
“I’m all set for naked boobs, thanks.” Rey’s long snout rested on his thigh.
Edward shrugged. “I’d like to meet this Wilton. He sounds interesting.”
“You’d like him,” Mira said. “He’s been incredibly generous to us—and to Brindle. He’s basically floating the place now.”
There was something about the way she said it that made Owen pull up short. “Has he given you more money?” he asked her. “More than at the fundraiser?”
Mira tapped her fingers against her lower lip. “You know he has, O. I already told you that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I did, but you forgot.” She spoke slowly to make her point. “With school starting and all your tutoring, you’ve been distracted and busy. It’s okay.”
“No, trust me, I would have remembered.” He supposed it was possible that he hadn’t been listening when she’d told him—his mind focused only on the casino business—but he didn’t think so. “Maybe you’re the one who forgot.”
“There’s nothing wrong with money.” Edward smoothed the air again. He’d retreat rather than fight or listen to one. Mira determinedly forked cake into her mouth and swallowed his collusion. She wouldn’t look at Owen. “You’re not sleeping with this man, are you, Mira?” he asked.
Her laugh was an explosion. Crumbs flew onto the table and her hand covered her mouth. “I can’t even believe you asked me that.”
Edward looked at Owen. “Okay. She’s not sleeping with him. Then I don’t see what the problem is. Everything’s fine. Your neighbor sounds generous, that’s all.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Owen said. “Maybe you should stay out of it.”
“Owen,” Mira cautioned. She ate another piece of cake.
They slipped down in their chairs, a retreat. The season’s last cicadas revved up. Edward pulled the candles closer. “Any word from the police?” he asked Owen.
The question was inevitable, even seven years after the shooting. It was always just a matter of when his father would ask. There hadn’t been any word from the police or anyone else involved since the first months after Caroline’s death. No one had ever been arrested and no one ever would be.
“It’s always the same. No word,” Owen said. “Maybe it’s time you stop thinking about it.” He stood to shake off the unease his father’s question always provoked. “Stop asking, while you’re at it.”
“I can’t very well control what I do or do not think about,” Edward said, made petulant by the wine and the hour. He held Mira’s hand in his and looked at her. “We’re much closer to tragedy than we ever think.”
“But sometimes we see it coming and we move away. O dodged it, didn’t he?” Mira asked. “Nothing happened to him.”
They’d had this conversation before. She wanted to relieve Edward of this oppressive sense of precariousness and erase for him the notion that Owen could just have easily been the one killed, that his only child wouldn’t be there, just inches from him. She did more than Owen ever could to calm his father, whose eyes had begun to well up. He blinked out the tears. Mira stood behind Edward and placed her hands across his chest. She kissed the top of his head.
“It’s okay,” she said, looking at Owen. “He’s okay, we’re all fine, we’re all safe.”
Edward sniffled. He was fiercely attached, a man who’d been left with a child without knowing how to care for one. He’d been clueless a lot of the time, but Owen had never doubted his father loved him. Maybe it was that particular brand of love that had made Owen feel so suffocated in a place where there was plenty of everything but never enough air. It was the essential problem of two—one would always leave first. That inevitability had hung over them from the beginning. Mira went over to the radio and dialed through the stations until she found some slow music. She pulled Edward up to dance with her, and they laughed together at how clumsy he was. She told him not to look at his very ugly feet. They made a funny couple, one alert with evasion, the other brittle and tentative and moved by life’s fragility, with skinny pale legs and shins scabbed by thorns and branches. Af
ter a few songs, Edward disappeared into his bedroom. Mira stood with her hands on her hips.
“Looks like he ditched you,” Owen said.
“Seems like that, doesn’t it.”
“Wait for me. I’m coming back,” Edward yelled.
He emerged, cradling something in an old towel that he put on the table. Owen unwound the towel and stared at a handgun, an obsidian black against the faded yellow, small and fearsomely precise.
“What the hell is this?” Mira asked, flipping the towel over it.
Edward disrobed it again. “Well, it’s a gun, wouldn’t you say?”
“We get that part,” she said. “Why are you showing us a gun?”
“Why do you even have a gun in the first place?” Owen picked it up. The weight was exciting.
“Put it down, O,” Mira said. “I don’t even like to see you touching it.”
“I’m giving it to you, to both of you,” Edward told her. “In case you need it. You should be prepared.” He put a handful of bullets on the table.
“Who are you, Charlton Heston?” Owen asked.
“I hope not. He’s dead.” Edward fished a chewed-up tennis ball out from under the couch. He opened the screen door, and threw it out. Rey tore after it. “If you get broken into again,” he said, “you’ll be glad you have it.”
“Glad? Why, so we can shoot and kill the guy this time?” Mira asked.
“Yes,” Edward added. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Everything is wrong with that. We’re not going to take it. This is absurd. Please, O, will you put it down?” She turned away. She didn’t want to see his hand still wrapped around it.
I’ve had a gun stuck in my face, Owen thought. I’ve smelled its mineral sweat, and heard it rip open the air. I’ve seen what it can do to flesh, but I’ve never held one before. He hadn’t known how much he’d wanted to until that moment and he gripped it harder.
The Tell Page 10