The Tell

by Hester Kaplan

  Edward went off to look again for a kitten for Anya, and his voice calling for one faded down the road as flashes of the yellow plastic cat carrier snapped through the trees. Owen stood at the window and watched Mira and Anya lean over opposite sides of the boat and look down. He wondered if Mira was telling her about the pond dwellers now, if all this time, she really had seen something, maybe not what he’d hoped she’d see, but something of her own. Mira straightened up, and then Anya did. Mira was clearly trying to explain something while Anya shook her head. The water rippled as Mira stirred an oar. There were a million conversations that could be going on out there. They might even eventually forgive each other.

  Mira moved the boat around the pond and stopped in front of the new house. They watched it for so long, that Owen knew something must be going on there. Maybe the woman with the red hair had come down her path to talk to them—about crazy naked men who swam in the cold. When Mira had the boat in the center of the pond again, she turned to watch a bird swoop in to pluck something from the water. Anya grabbed one of the oars. Mira snapped back. Her own single oar still rested on the water. The trees around them bent in to get a better look. Mira offered the other oar to Anya, but she shook her head. Mira seemed to be explaining that they weren’t getting anywhere this way as the boat began to twist and drift. After a few minutes, Mira inched farther and put her hand on Anya’s oar. But Anya was stronger, bigger, and she jerked back. Mira refused to let go even as she was being pulled off her seat. Owen’s eyes blurred. The women were fighting and tugging. Their palms would be full of splinters. And then Anya let go, raising both hands in sudden surrender or victory, and Mira fell back off the seat. The oar handles pointed at the sky like the green soles of her sneakers. She had hit her head and wasn’t getting up. The stink of blood streamed through Owen’s sinuses as he left the house and ran toward the pond.

  But then he saw Mira pull herself back onto the seat. She was bent over and couldn’t or wouldn’t lift her head. Finally, in a slow recovery, she stood and saw Owen at the head of the arbored stairs, and when Anya dug the oars in hard, Mira fell into the water.

  Her entry was soundless. The surface barely noticed her. She was that light, that distressed. Owen froze with the realization that he wasn’t moving. Anya yelled and he tripped down the stairs and onto the sand, and then the water was at his ankles, his knees, a stab in his balls, his chest, as he swam to Mira who was about sixty yards away, a head rising and then disappearing, mouth open, mouth shut. Her sweater floated around her like a cape of deadly leaves.

  His own clothes weighed a thousand pounds. His limbs ached. When he reached Mira, he grabbed for her. Her lips were purple and her scalp was a transparent white. She fought and cursed at him to stop, to let her go, but he had a handful of sweater and an arm across her shoulders to pull her in.

  “Get away from me!” she screamed. “You’re drowning me.”

  Her hand raked his face, and her nails tore the skin under his eye. The pain wasn’t his then, or when she kicked him in the gut a minute later. His head went under and he swallowed a lungful of pond water. He believed he still held her still, feral in her fear, but what he held was cold, clear water. Her own panic was going to sink her, but she was out of his reach, thrashing her way to the beach, all dog paddle and determination. She stumbled out, gasping, and kneeled on the sand. Rivers ran off her.

  “You were pulling me down,” she wailed at him. “You were going to drown me.”

  “I was trying to save you.” Owen was vaguely aware of Anya still out on the boat, oarless and twisting. He didn’t care.

  Mira stumbled up to the house. Her waterlogged sweater dragged over the ground. Katherine and Edward stood confused at the top of the path as she brushed by them and he followed. Mira turned on the outdoor shower and struggled to undress, but her clothes sucked at her skin. She waved Owen away. She ripped and tugged at her pants, her socks, her underwear. She screamed in frustration, then whimpered and sat down. Finally, she let him lift the shirt over her head and she leaned over his bent back as he pulled off her pants. She stepped under the water and he closed the wooden door and stood just outside it. Cold had moved into his bones; there was ice behind his eyes, and a headache stomping in.

  “I can hear you freezing out there,” Mira said. “Come in with me.”

  “I can’t,” he said. She’d thought he was trying to drown her.

  “Yes, you can.” She opened the door, pulled him in, and undressed him as he’d undressed her. The water seared the scratches on his face. A bruise bloomed on Mira’s shoulder, and when she lifted up her hair, he saw a raw red scrape on the back of her head. She tensed when the water hit it. They heard Edward down at the water shouting instructions to Anya to free the boat that was now caught in the reeds on the far side of the pond.

  “She tried to kill you,” he said.

  “No, she didn’t. She didn’t mean to do it. I was angry at something she’d said. It was an accident.” Mira’s words were final and forgiving. She would blame no one but herself. “I know better than to stand in a boat.”

  Owen spoke to her back. “That day I left you on the roof at Brindle, I went to Wilton’s house. We had a fight. I hit him. I told him that he’d ruined our lives.” The hot water was beginning to run out, and Mira shivered against him. “I said that I’d told Anya the one thing he didn’t ever want her to know—a story about what had happened years ago. The story you don’t know. I wanted to kill him with it. I wanted him to kill himself over it.”

  “I know.”

  He tuned her around to face him. “What do you know?”

  “I know what happened when he had Anya in the car, when he’d tried to kill himself and her. He told me that last night I was with him. But Wilton didn’t believe you’d told her. He said you were too good a person, that you wouldn’t do that to her. That last night I saw him? He was moved by everything you did for me. He knew you were trying to save me. He said he’d never been loved the way you love me. What devastated him was the fact that he’d never had love like this and never would. That it was too late for him. That’s all he was looking for. Anya seems to get that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew?”

  “I was waiting, O. I thought that if you finally told me, it also meant you’d forgiven me for what I’ve done. And if you didn’t ever tell me, then I’d have to live with that.”

  Wilton had protected him. Owen crouched down. He saw the backs of Mira’s legs, her ankles with their sculpted tendons, the lip of water around her heels.

  “Why did you leave him there, Mira?”

  “Because he wanted me to. It’s the only real thing he’s ever asked of me, O. It was what he wanted—to send me back home to you. He begged me to go.”

  Owen pressed his face to the back of Mira’s legs, and they stayed like that, the water growing quickly colder.

  Soon, they heard Katherine yelling for Owen, and he ran from the shower to meet her at the top of the stairs. Edward had gone into the water, she told Owen anxiously, to pull Anya back in the boat. Anya couldn’t figure out how to work the oars and was going in circles. It was too far, too cold, he was too old, Katherine insisted, her worried words tagging Owen down to the beach. Edward’s stroke was strong and competent, and he’d been doing this forever, but nothing was going to assure Katherine that he was okay. Owen dropped the towel from around his waist and went into the pond. Edward had stopped a few yards from the boat, and Owen caught up to where his father was treading water.

  “Did she send you out to check on me?” Edward nodded at the beach where Katherine stood, squinting to see them.

  “She did.”

  His father’s broad, shut-eyed smile was something beyond delight, a simple pleasure in knowing that someone was watching. Edward waved at Katherine and then looked at Anya, who was waiting in the boat with the oars inert in the water, her hands in her lap.

  “Christ. Who doesn’t know how to row a boat?”

  “
I’ll get her,” Owen said. “You go back in.”

  “There hasn’t been this much action on the pond in years,” Edward said. Life was more vivid all of a sudden. “Porter would have loved it. These new people could care less.” He flipped over and started a splashy backstroke to the shore and Katherine.

  Owen swam up to Anya. He had her take up the oars and toss the rope into the water. He pulled the boat, a smooth, familiar weight, up to the shore and hid his nakedness behind it when she got out. She didn’t say anything to him but hurried up to the house. When Owen got back, his father and Katherine were in the shower together, complaining about the lack of hot water. Inside, Owen wrapped himself in a blanket from the couch. He heard Anya talking to Mira in the bedroom. Anya was breathy with apology, but there was also some element of excitement at what had just happened and what she’d done. The strain was over now. They were all very much awake. Her father was still missing, and everyone in that house knew he wasn’t going to reappear, but she’d let some weight tip off the boat and sink to the bottom. She would have to write her own story about her father.

  17

  Anya had offered them anything they wanted from Wilton’s house but urged them to take the television from his bedroom—which they did. Owen imagined all the nights Wilton must have unfolded himself on his big messy bed and clicked the thing on. At his feet was a version of himself in a linen suit and silk tie, feckless and permanently youthful. He was at his best there on the screen, maybe a genius. But in his head, when he turned himself off, the night would descend indifferent to celebrity and talent and invite all kinds of regret. His loneliness could make fire all by itself in the dark.

  For now, the television sat in the hall outside their own bedroom, while Owen took down the wallpaper. He’d thought that they would have been done with television after everything that had happened, but Mira wanted it—a useful reminder of the lovely confusion about what was real and what wasn’t. Liberated after a century behind rosy paper, chunks of plaster fell in puffs of toxic dust. The walls would have to come down to the studs, a job for the summer, Owen knew. A hole opened up to where the air was warm and fusty with the breath of another century. He’d heard of people finding love letters and confessions, stashes of money, bottles that were empty except for the gold stain of dried booze, behind old walls. He pressed his eye to the hole; maybe he’d discover in there some understanding of how it was that life could pick you up and toss you around and still return you to the place you’d started. Because here he was, just where he’d been a year earlier, as if he’d done nothing more than leave his chair to get a glass of water.

  When he drew back from the hole and the rush of yeasty air, he saw Anya next door. If you knew the father, did you know the child? There were the same oceanic, pale bare feet propped up on the porch railing, the graceful body balancing on the back legs of the chair, the unfocused attempts at reading. Always thinking, never really at rest. Anya pushed the hair off her forehead. If you’d known the father well—or maybe not at all—could you ever know this child? Did he want to know her? His grief for Wilton was borderless, his grief for her confined. She would be okay.

  Six days earlier, Wilton’s body had been laid out in a morgue in Hartford. According to the police, the car he’d been in, driven by a woman they assumed he’d met at the casino, forty-two, recently divorced, and with two teenage children, had left the dark Connecticut country road and slipped soundlessly into a deep, muddy marsh. Sunken, hidden by fog and cattails and the indemnity of private property and abandoned appliances, their tracks covered by new snow, the car had remained undiscovered until someone had come one early morning to dump a van full of old computers. Wilton must have thought, as the car slid off the road, what a fucking lousy way to go, what terrible luck when everything might just begin again, when they’d all survived what they’d done to themselves and to one another. He would have kept his eyes open as the dark water rose up the windshield and the mud locked them in.

  Owen imagined that if you’d been on the tenth floor of the hotel above Eagle Run, unable to sleep that night after Mira had left Wilton, you might have seen this lanky, coatless man walk out with the beautiful woman, and you might have thought they looked ready for anything, arm in arm. You might have seen them laughing it up into the heavy fog as they waited for her car to be brought around by the pimply valet. You might have watched them get in, and seen the car take the long route past the parking lots until it disappeared from view. Maybe, if you’d seen them earlier, you might have thought it looked like love between them. But who would ever know what it was, or where they were going, or what route they were taking? Or why Wilton was in the car at all? You wouldn’t have known they were entirely underwater and drowned when you finally managed to sleep.

  It was three days ago that Owen and Mira had driven Anya to Maine, forty minutes outside of Portland, where Wilton’s sister lived. On the highway headed north, empty on a weekday morning, Owen felt like they were chasing Wilton’s body and that this was some sort of gruesome race, but for what prize? But the body had been delivered that morning and was waiting at Pineview Cemetery—how many Pineviews were there, Mira wanted to know, indignant with heartache at the dumb name—as were Wilton’s sister, Susan, and her husband. The five of them, plus the casket, made an awkward group at the graveside, and later in Susan’s sunporch with the green indoor-outdoor carpet, where the louvered windows were open and the noise of the street repaving ground on. There was a kind of stunned feeling in the room as they ate sandwiches to the sounds of a jackhammer. It was the same house, Susan told them, that Wilton had grown up in.

  Owen searched Susan’s face for any resemblance to her brother. There wasn’t much she could tell them about Wilton, who’d been out of the house when she was still a baby. But the dead had the power to superimpose themselves, and here, after the morning spent standing by a deep hole and not knowing what to say to one another as the piney winds blew around them, Owen saw Wilton everywhere and in everyone. Susan looked like him around the eyes.

  Wilton might have claimed to like how direct Susan was, how her bright, pedestrian geraniums reached for the sun, how there was a lack of pretension in any of this. Hers was the kind of life Wilton said he envied, but who knew if he meant it. Soon, Owen and Mira and Anya would get back in the car and drive the hours back to Providence, and they might all feel that this day had stumbled along and their stupor and sorrow had prevented them from asking the right questions. And that this was their only chance.

  Owen had asked to use the bathroom, and Susan’s husband was sent to show him where it was. Owen tried to picture Wilton in this low-ceilinged, compact house, sitting at the round table in the kitchen with the sunflower salt and pepper shakers and plastic tablecloth, his feet on the worn linoleum, his body relaxed in the tight living room. The view from the bathroom upstairs was of woods without end. It was an invitation of deep green amnesty. Owen would never know what Wilton saw in these trees growing up, or what he saw in the trees the woman’s car crashed through, or where it was he wanted to go.

  Owen left the half-stripped bedroom and the house and crossed the driveway to stand at the fence. Anya glanced up from her book.

  “You look like a coke fiend,” she said. “Or a vision of your future. Your hair is completely white. I can see every wrinkle in your face, even from here. You should see yourself.”

  “No, thanks. I don’t want to witness old age just yet,” he said, dusting himself off and explaining what he’d been doing.

  “I think it would be interesting to see ahead like that. Get a preview of the next fifty years.”

  “That because you’ll always be beautiful.” He hadn’t meant to embarrass her, but he had. Her strain of modesty was not Wilton’s. “I know I’ll look like my father. I’ll have hair sprouting from the tops of my ears and out of my nose.”

  Anya gave him a soft smile. He sensed that they had only a certain number of words left to say to each other. Packages still being
delivered to Wilton were piled up on the porch, and he offered to carry them inside for her.

  “I was hoping someone might steal them. They just keep coming.” Anya eyed the boxes warily. “Even the guys who cut the grass still show up, and I can’t bear to tell them to stop. It’s like they’ve come to the party, but no one’s told them the host is dead.”

  Owen pushed through the gate. He made two trips inside with the boxes. The place had a picked-over feel to it—how much more had Anya given away, and why so urgently? What remained were the indents of chair legs in the rug, small squares of evidence that someone had once lived there. He thought of the outline of the former owner’s bed upstairs. Anya was undoing piece by piece what Wilton had put together for himself and for her. His comforter was on the floor in front of the couch. Anya had been sleeping downstairs. She brought Owen a knife to open the boxes.

  “No, you do it,” he said. “Or you could just leave them unopened.”

  “I don’t want any of it. I didn’t ask for it, but everything’s mine, anyway.”

  She kneeled to open the first box. She hesitated; her father’s aspirations were packed inside. Here was a bread maker, boxes of chocolates, drinking glasses, three different kinds of vinegar, and another cashmere sweater for her birthday in two weeks. She sat surrounded by it.

  “Maybe I’ll miss it when the packages stop showing up,” she said. “That day in Maine, I didn’t understand what was going on, not really. Everything meant something else. Even the house didn’t feel real to me. Who were those people I’m related to?” Her eyelids were violet and faintly quivering. “I feel like my father came from nowhere and disappeared into nowhere.”

  After Owen helped pack up Anya’s car with stuff to drop off at Goodwill, he walked to Spruance. He stood across the street from the school with his back against chain link. In the weekend afternoon sun, the building was the color of yellowed paper smudged with erased words. There were still weeks left of the school year, but already the place looked shut down, unplugged and locked up. In every window, the faintest shadow of chicken wire embedded in the glass fell on the parchment shades. Weeds peeked out along the foundation and at the base of the wide, chipped steps. At the end of June, when the building would finally be closed for good, what was forgotten in lockers and desks and children’s heads would stay there. Like the captive air behind his bedroom walls, the school’s breath would have been witness to all sorts of history, but the kids wouldn’t discover it; maybe no one would.