by Deb Caletti
Already criminal.
Weary turns on his desk light, and the bulb hums like an insect. He leans forward, squinches; takes her in. So, here she is. His nose practically touches hers on the screen. He’s wondered who it will be, and now he knows. She’s lovely. She weirdly and wrongly looks happy, even if she also looks slightly perplexed. She looks too happy to know.
What comes to Weary’s mind, what fills his battered spirit (which only moments before was ready to surrender but which now begins to flicker with new life), is the story of the virgin princess in The Metamorphoses. As she walks by the sea, that creep Neptune, the God of the ocean, leers at her. He tries to flatter her and get her attention, and then, rebuffed, he attempts to take her by force. When he tries to rape her, though, the crafty, determined Minerva—always the one with a great idea—turns the princess into a crow. Her arms darken with soft plumage, her shoulders turn to feathers, and she lifts from the ground and sails high into the air, up and away from that asshole.
Round of applause for Minerva. Go, Princess Crow! It’s inspiring, come to think of it.
Very inspiring. He gets up, invigorated, once again ready for battle. He makes some coffee. He gets to work. First, he combs those Visa charges again. Had he missed something? A boat charter? An unusual expense to a new company?
No. Of course he hasn’t missed anything! You don’t check a Visa bill fifty times a day and overlook a boat charter.
All right. So, Henry paid cash. Or she chartered the boat. Or she owns the boat. He must find out who the boat belongs to.
He just needs the woman’s name. Now that he’s seen her picture, it feels like she’s only inches away.
He studies the images on ShutR. Those sailboats. It’s a race, which means race photos, and race photos mean there’s the slight possibility that Henry’s boat is in one of them, too, floating in the background. Regatta, Parrish, he tip-taps. Three regattas in the San Juans in one weekend? Good God. Which regatta? Enlarge, enlarge. All right. Very good. A part of a name on one of the boats. Val on one side of the sailors’ legs, rie peering from between two others.
He works into the night. Who can sleep now? He checks the lists of registered boats for all three races. Valkyrie. Class B, Spring Series Regatta in the San Juans the previous weekend.
Next. Search for Spring Series Regatta. He hunts for the photos taken by the race boat photographers, and any other participants. There are hundreds. Hundreds! He rubs his forehead. He urges himself on. He tells himself to remember Minerva and the Crow Princess. He pours more coffee. After a few hours, he switches to wine, because his head is spinning from caffeine and his hands have started to tremble.
In each photo he finds, Weary clicks and enlarges and searches the horizon. He’s looking for a boat out there, one with a woman in an orange T-shirt on board, and a man…Well, Weary knows what he looks like. Can you spot smugness in the pinpoint dots of a photo? Can you spot ego, blown large and tight to the point where a burst is easy and inevitable?
Hours pass. His neck aches, and the damn cramps start up in his legs. He stretches. He walks a loop around the room. Rolls his shoulders. At this hour, it’s him and the papillons de nuit, the hundreds of species of moths that come out only at night. He can hear the click of their wings against the screens.
The bottle of wine is almost gone. He’s exhausted. He should have gone to bed long ago. His eyes are bleary, but not too bleary to see that Radical Rapture (who came in third overall, by the way) posted photos of the race, important photos, critical photos, because there it is, the flash of orange on a boat just off of Radical Rapture’s starboard side. It’s a beautiful shot. Well, the shot itself is just okay, but it’s a perfect capture of a wooden vessel with two particular passengers aboard. Weary can’t see faces. They are both hunched over something, maybe a cooler. But he sees something more valuable.
The boat’s name.
The Red Pearl. It sounds like the name of a Chinese restaurant, if you ask him, the old kind of Chinese restaurant with red leather booths and murky aquariums and menus with pictures that resemble crime-scene photos. The boat looks like a piece of shit. If Henry chartered that thing, what was he thinking? Clearly, his standards have plummeted, or maybe he’s just being careful not to blow through the house money and his cashed-in pension. Either way, Henry North would praise his dilapidated choice. He’d declare it vintage or an antique—a classic. He’d call it The Grampus or something. Jane Guy, something from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. He’d hit it with a little Poe legitimacy, lame but handy. Then, he’d privately sigh with relief the minute he was able to ditch it. People like Henry, that’s what they do with everything and everyone in their life.
The Red Pearl, he types. Charter. Parrish Island.
It’s so easy. All you need is one right piece, and bam. Sail the beautiful waters of the San Juans on the beautiful Red Pearl! Clearly, the boat’s owners are weak in the adjective department, but why quibble? Jan Stephenson and Dave Lovell, plus a phone number, thank you very much.
Weary is so close to her now.
He checks his watch. It’s eight in the evening there, too late for a charter office to be open. Then again, the Red Pearl doesn’t exactly look like it is part of a business with a receptionist and a 401(k) plan. What’s there to lose?
Weary dials. The phone brrrr, brrrrs across the miles. No answer.
He hangs up. Tries one more time. Why not?
More ringing. Weary is about to call it a night when, much to his surprise, there’s a voice on the other end.
“I told you not to fucking call anymore.”
“Jan? Dave? I’m looking to rent one of your boats…” Weary asks.
“Oh, hey, man, I’m sorry. Yeah, it’s Jan. I thought you were my girlfriend.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“She just threw my goddamn keys off the dock!”
“That’s awful. What a shame! I’m sorry.”
“Blond, twenty-five, and crazy, what’re you gonna do.”
Weary hates this man. He’s a bargain-version asshole from the asshole catalog, Weary guesses, lacking a Ph.D. and Italian leather shoes. Honestly, he wants to tell the twenty-five-year-old, If you’re going to spend time with assholes, at least they should take you out to nice dinners and pretend to have manners. “I was calling about your boat. The Red Pearl?”
“Yeah, sure. I got that, but the Sunsurfer has a little more speed, if you want to ski.”
The guy sounds drunk. His S’s spin out and crash like a bad day at the racetrack.
“No, a buddy of mine just took out the Red Pearl and loved it. Henry North?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“He went with…Damn. I can’t drink like I used to,” Weary says.
“Tell me about it.”
“Totally forgot her name.”
“Isabelle? I never seen him before, but she’s a local.”
“Isabelle, that’s right.”
“When do you want it? Are you from around here? You sound, like, a million miles away…”
Weary hangs up. Really, why waste another second? That guy won’t even remember the call in the morning. Weary has what he needs anyway. There won’t be too many Isabelles on an island that size.
He shuts down his computer. He feels like he’s just survived a typhoon. Like the windows shimmied hard and the roof threatened to blow off, but he’s okay. He’s better than okay, because, while there may be a mess out there, he’s less frightened now, and he’s alive.
Isabelle.
He undresses, gets into bed. After Virginia and Sarah, the name Isabelle is as gentle as a flower petal. This is a worry. He hopes she’s stronger than she sounds. Tomorrow, he’ll find out everything about her that he can, starting with her last name.
He is so exhausted, he expects to conk out the second his head hits the pillow. But this does not happen. Stupid coffee, plus wine—uppers and downers, how do the rock stars do it? Fears lurk in, performance anxiety
, the weight of the world. He should have eaten a proper dinner.
All blueprints need flexibility, and no strategy can predict every potential problem, especially from this distance. He is working in the dark. How to go forward, yet exercise due diligence? As he lies in his bed, he tries to think like a careful physician. What is the best way to cure the cancer without killing the patient?
Watchful waiting—isn’t that what it’s called? It’s too early for step one, his first contact; he knows that. But he will observe every move as best he can for now and act accordingly. Any huge change or terrible danger on the horizon, any tumor encroaching on a vital organ, well, like it or not, ready or not, he’ll have no choice but to tip the whole thing over, alert the authorities, if they haven’t been alerted already. Weary doubts that’s even happened. He has to do everyone’s job. That’s why he’s here to begin with. He’s rock star, physician, researcher, destroyer. Lover, fighter, seeker of justice, too high from coffee and suddenly starving.
Chapter 11
They’ve been seeing so much of each other that they’ve established a routine. After work, after taking phone reservations, and tying down planes, and greeting new arrivals, and after her daily meeting with Jane, who keeps Isabelle in the loop out of sheer politeness while Isabelle keeps herself in the loop out of sheer duty, Isabelle heads straight over to Henry’s house. When she arrives, he is cooking something fabulous. They eat and drink and talk as the sky turns shades of sherbet, as the sun drops below the horizon and the lighthouse begins its slow, endless arc across the sea of black.
There are late-night confessions about hard childhoods, personal failures, life’s disappointments; there are morning chats about the big dreams that still shine away in spite of it all. Occasionally, they might read or watch television—entwined or cozily side by side—interrupting their reading or their television watching to have sex. She stays the whole weekend, and now that it’s early summer and Parrish is perfect, they do something outdoorsy in the day. Henry likes to hike. Isabelle needs the exercise. He appreciates the chance to see things from a high, craggy distance, and she wants the butt firming, so they hike a lot.
Maggie’s last birthday gift, the silk robe embroidered with the crane, is now at Henry’s, and so are some of Isabelle’s clothes, which spill from an old suitcase. An extra toothbrush stands alongside his in a cup by the bathroom sink, like a pair of dental soldiers. She’s barely at her mother’s house anymore. At Maggie’s, there’s a bottle of catsup in the fridge and pancake syrup left over from her mother’s own never-to-be-made breakfasts. There are a few eggs and real butter and English muffins from the one time Henry stayed the night. There’s a container of peanut butter, and a tin of tuna, and two or three Marie Callender’s in the freezer for those rare nights she and Henry have some squabble or need a little space from each other.
Her mother’s house is feeling ghostly. Without Isabelle or her mother living in it, it’s all dust and echoes. It’s past tense. No new memories are being made, and, weirdly, there, her mother seems to be getting farther and farther away. In her head, it’s another matter. You should hear Maggie, going on and on. She’s pissed that Isabelle is disappearing into another relationship. She doesn’t believe men can be trusted. Isabelle never uses her good sense. Does she even have good sense? And what’s with that haircut? It’s unflattering. It makes her face look round. She looks like she’s gained weight.
Actually, Maggie’s just pissed because Isabelle has abandoned her. That’s what Isabelle thinks.
The lounge chairs on the back lawn have really disappeared now, to the point that getting a mower through there will be a chore. The house is starting to have a shut-in smell when Isabelle returns to locate a certain belt or pair of shoes. Why are you the one to live out of a suitcase and not Henry? Maggie asks. God, she’s a bitch! Sure, the arrangement is more convenient for Henry, but Isabelle doesn’t really mind. It’s sort of a pretend life at Henry’s. There, her worries are suspended, like a sick body frozen until the time a cure is found. At Henry’s, they’re a couple, and she’s cared for, and the view is better, anyway. Cared for is a crooked finger, summoning you to tempting, delicious inertia.
She’s learned so much about him: the crisp way he turns pages, his generous laugh, his strong opinions on electronic books, the secret ways to make him come. He adds spices with a flourish, as if he’s making up the recipe as he goes. He handles tickling with strong wrestling moves. He spends his day at the library, working on his poems or reading, or hiking dunes with his camera. He gets sunburned when he’s not careful.
Yet there’s much that is still unknown. Why does he feel like a mystery? How can he be so available and so held back at the same time? She’s sure this is mostly her own, skewed perception. She’s not used to mature men, who exercise boundaries and discretion. Evan would burp as loudly as he could. He revealed every tidbit from every former girlfriend, from their small breasts to their lesbian interludes. No secret was safe with him. Henry likes his own corners. He doesn’t even show her his poems. She caught a glimpse of a few of them on his desk once, and even his writing was unrevealing—it was full of Poe flourishes, bells tolling, cities by the sea, but no baring of the soul, no spilling of painful romantic history. To Henry, the past is the past. He’d like it kept there. Let sleeping dogs lie, and all that.
The dogs, though—they don’t seem to be sleeping. That’s the problem. The absence of the past makes the past loom. Or maybe Isabelle is just reading too much into everything. Silence can do that. You fill it. Your imagination does. She catches him gazing out at the sound, his face troubled, and she thinks, Sarah. On beach walks, he climbs the cliffs away from her, stands atop some ledge as if considering a plunge, and she thinks, Sarah. He switches off the television at any mention of Boston or the nearby cities he lived in, as if it’s too painful to hear.
There is still nothing of him here—no favorite books or photo albums, no shirts from college he can’t get rid of or sentimental cards from his family. He takes calls from his brothers in private, walking down the street in front of Remy’s house with his phone pressed to his ear. He’s slammed the lid of his laptop shut when she’s unexpectedly entered a room, as if he’s been caught attempting to stalk his ex. At least, this is what Isabelle guesses he was doing. She understands, because she only recently cut Evan free from her cyberlife after finally tiring of that game.
But what about his restless sleep? Isabelle notices him lying awake, staring at the moon-cast shadows on the ceiling, or else twisting, turning, giving the quilt an occasional punch as if he’s been buried alive. She once woke and saw him standing by the bed, his dark outline as startling as an intruder’s. Another time, realizing the bed was vacant, she got up and there he was, curled into a fetal ball in the corner of the couch.
I have bad dreams, he said.
Come to bed, she said.
I don’t ever want to hurt you.
God, it was awful. But the mattress at Remy’s house is hard, and the room gets stuffy, and occasionally the foghorn moans and moans like a slowly dying man, none of which contributes to a peaceful night’s rest.
And here’s another worry, something stupid, because she has zero evidence, really, but she suspects that Henry never liked his mother. He’s dismissive when he speaks of Ellie North, as if she were the housekeeper, a person he never really saw. Isabelle can’t get a feel for who Ellie was; there are no funny stories or favorite foods or forgivable quirks. Instead, Henry’s mother is lumped into generic piles—simpleminded, naïve, uneducated.
You’ve always overlooked the obvious, Isabelle, Maggie scolds. Disdainful-asshole comments about the deceased Mrs. North are not to be ignored! Men and mothers, girl. Come on! Haven’t you been reading your Cosmo Psych 101? Your Huff Post Ten Things That Tell You Everything? Pretty basic stuff, sweetheart.
Clearly, Isabelle has no right to talk about people and their mothers.
And regardless of these small, nagging concerns, these
unsettled rumblings, Isabelle is crazy for Henry. It’s his command. She has completely forgotten that what most draws you will be your biggest problem later. She likes his strong shoulders and decided jawline, and the way he holds himself in the world. He is sure of his opinions, confident in nearly every situation. He was important at the university where he worked, too, she can tell, and while it’s perhaps a shallow thing to like, it underscores his calm authority. Clearly, his students adored him and his colleagues respected him. She’d love to read one of his many articles on Poe or American Romanticism, but until he gives her a copy as promised, she won’t. She’d have to find them online, and he looks down on all the searching and investigating and delving that goes on anymore. He has made this clear. He wants an old-fashioned love affair based on trust, and after the Maggie-Evan background-check disaster, Isabelle agrees. There’s a purity to it. And after all the recent snooping and prying in the life of pre- and post-divorce Evan, a relief.
It’s all a relief. His command, his confidence, his surety—the relationship itself, which seems to be a decision of some kind, made. It’s a relief, and it feels like safety to Isabelle, too. Safety is such a beautiful lure. It’s the only thing she craves. She’s a desert traveler, so thirsty that there are mirages all around.
Safety—is it even possible? Does she dare believe? It seems possible. There are signs that it is. She feels more at peace already. Her anger at Evan feels distant, and already the story editors are on board, erasing, tweaking, making meaning. Evan, their marriage, that pain—it was all supposed to be, all leg-bone’s-connected-to-the-thigh-bone, all if-that-hadn’t-happened-this-wouldn’t-have-happened. She could even feel generous toward Evan, the poor, lost soul. And the more ancient fury at her mother, the acid flowing in the deep, unexplored aqueducts, well, that’s mostly gone, too. She feels softer lately, sexier, jazzed up with hope and not pointless resentment. She’s looking up, not down. She thinks mountain, not iceberg. She thinks of all the hope rising above yet to be discovered, not all of the bad stuff hidden below where she can’t see it.