by Deb Caletti
Right then, Isabelle misses her mother. In spite of the golf club memories, and her fear, she misses her mother so bad. She misses her voice on the phone, her humor, her roast with rosemary potatoes. She has some toddler desire to crawl on a lap and cry and have safe arms around her. Probably, she’s just missing something she never had, but still.
—
And then, another package comes.
It arrives at her work again. She sees it before anyone else, because she’s the first one there. She’s been going to the community pool very early every morning to swim laps. She swims because there is no place for all her anxiety except exercise. And she swims because it’s an approved way to get out of the house before Henry even wakes up. Swimming is a good thing, he thinks. The best form of exercise. A fine way to stay in shape. So she does her laps alongside old Cora Lee from the Theosophical Society, who, in her green suit, is thin and shriveled as an aging celery stalk. In the calm burble of underneath, Isabelle listens for some larger plan, something beyond the current one, which involves stepping quietly backward until Henry is so disgusted with her that leaving becomes his own idea.
That morning, her hair is still wet when she arrives at Island Air. The fog hasn’t even lifted, and Tiny Policeman isn’t on the job yet. But the package is there, shoved through their mail slot, stuck halfway in and halfway out. She knows it’s for her, because of the stamps: images of a strangely patriotic kangaroo with a British flag in the background. Also, smaller ones of animals, candidates for an adorable children’s book—koala, wombat, Tasmanian devil. They could all go on a journey together and find the real meaning of friendship.
She snatches the package. Now, she looks over her shoulder to see if Jane or anyone else is coming. Silly—it’s too early. The doors are still locked, shop is closed; the seaplanes are tied down next to the dock, propellers silent. It’s strangely quiet, without the usual rumble and roar of floatplanes leaving and floatplanes arriving.
Isabelle turns around. She heads over to the big storage center, where her old things are kept, and where Island Air’s ancient Zenith is parked, too, waiting for repairs. She crouches behind the far cement wall. A squirrel stops to stare at her from an evergreen tree. She rips open the envelope.
Photocopies, this time. Handwriting. Five pages of paragraphs, short and long. No dates, just messy, looped writing; the kind of writing meant only for your own self.
It’s a journal.
She crouches there and reads. It’s freezing outside, even though March is coming, even though Isabelle’s wearing Jane’s scarf and a hat over her wet hair. The morning has that cold smell of far-off snow and leaves burning.
He’s just trying to help. That’s what he says. So why do I feel like the box I exist in is shrinking and shrinking?
More, more: I can’t make a move without comment. Every clothing choice, every decision about food, or my body, or even which direction to go when I drive…I can’t take it anymore…I am thinking a lot about Virginia.
Sarah. Entries from Sarah’s journal.
This could be Isabelle herself writing. All of those lines—hers.
“No,” she says aloud. She must have said, because there’s the puff of her own breath. The morning darkness lifts; the sky has a stripe of pink. And here they come—the crows on their morning commute. First, just a few black bodies, working hard against the sea draft, and now more and more, a wash of inky satin on pink. Isabelle holds those pages on her knees. She chooses one thick bird among the many, and imagines she is that creature, heading somewhere else.
They come and they come. And after the mass of them passes over, after there are only the few stragglers left, Isabelle rises. She peers around the corner of the storage building. No one has arrived yet. She walks out to the dock. She stands at the end. She rips and rips and rips the pages into tiny pieces. She lays them down into the water and lets them soak and sink and be carried away.
There are too many pages to keep, and there is enough in that boot already. She won’t need those pages to remember the words, anyway. Especially those last words, the ones that tell her that the watch and the photo had once been Henry’s, and that Sarah had seen them and doubted, the way Isabelle is doubting now. Sarah doubted, and then she was gone.
Today, I found a photograph, hidden in a box in the garage. Virginia, wearing that watch from Henry’s drawer…
The sprinkles of white paper disappear like snowflakes. Behind her, Isabelle hears a car approaching. It is just Jane, who waves. Isabelle waves back, thankful that the bits of journal have now vanished. She has some strange feeling that she is part of a plan, though this may just be her usual passivity, her urge for rescue, since she does not have a plan of her own. Still she feels it, an odd connection to the package-sender. It’s almost a motion deep under the ground, a riffling in the air currents. It’s disturbing, and yet it feels like propulsion. Of course, there’s always a strange energy just before an earthquake, just before the plates shift, and everything trembles and wrecks.
Chapter 30
Right there in the New Delhi airport, Weary decides that the one-day conference he just attended will be his last. He is exhausted. There’s the time difference, for starters. He can’t handle it anymore. Five and a half hours for a trip that fast is enough for him to feel achy and spinning. He was awake all hours of the night, and now he is left with a strange pressure in his head. There was New Delhi itself, too, the mad crush of cars and strange little taxis and bicycles and people and jammed-together buildings and jammed-together languages and jammed-together smells.
And then there was the event, the International Conference on Animals. Even with his single fifty-minute talk, which came after Dr. Isaac Roseway’s on “The Neuropsychological Issues in Australian Kangaroos” and just before Dr. Margaret Che’s on “Wildlife Systems and the Epistemological Implications for Environmental Analysis,” it was stressful. Gavin Gray had always underscored the need for a normal yet cautious face in the world, a public presence for the facility, but Weary thinks passing this particular hat to his best Ph.D. students might be wise now. Even Gavin Gray might feel differently if he were alive today—two years ago, there weren’t so many phones, so much clicking and tapping and documenting of each and every moment. It’s utterly nerve-racking. In spite of the firm rules No recordings! Turn phones off! Weary swears he heard the whoosh that meant a photo was taken.
Must everything be shouted about and publicly demonstrated? Must every inane thought and minor occurrence be boringly proclaimed? Who really cares! If a tree falls in a forest and no one has taken a picture of it, did it really happen? What are we doing, watching everyone else eat and vacation and succeed, succeed, succeed? Document the forgotten lettuce leaf turned to liquid in the fridge, photograph the sore throat and the crushing failure! And how does anyone do anything surreptitiously anymore? How does anyone have a moment’s privacy? We are witnessing the age of the secret coming to an end, he is sure.
Still, the conference went well, and there was more than polite applause for his talk, “Intelligence in the Corvid Family.” He heard the murmurs of appreciation for the facts he conveyed: that corvid brain size in relation to their bodies is equivalent to that of great apes and dolphins. That corvids use a part of the brain with no human counterpart. That, while all corvid brains are large, the brain of New Caledonia’s Corvus moneduloides is largest of all. There were chuckles at Weary’s story of the university crows in Japan, who wait patiently on the curb along with the pedestrians for the traffic lights to change. When the lights turn red, they hop out into the street with their walnuts, plucked from nearby trees, and set them under car tires. When the light turns green, they collect their newly cracked bounty.
And there was a hum and buzz at one other story in particular. That of the Clark crow of North America, who collects up to thirty thousand seeds in the winter and then buries them for safekeeping in a two hundred square mile area. Over the next year, they manage to locate ninety percent
of those seeds or more, even when they disappear into deep, deep snow. Humans, he told the delighted crowd, often cannot locate their car keys from the day before.
That is the power of memory, Weary thinks, as he sits in one of the black vinyl seats set in a row on the gold patchwork rug of the Indira Gandhi International Airport, waiting to board his plane. That is the power of intelligence.
Intelligence is not something one usually ponders at the airport, not with the travelers baffled by shoe removal and metal bits in pockets, not with the balancing of too many things, like the man in shorts and a blaring blue graphic T-shirt coming Weary’s way, wheeling luggage while impossibly clutching a foil-wrapped dosa and a lassi with a plastic straw. With the conference finished, though, Weary can mentally luxuriate. He can ponder and pray and dream about hidden bounty and the best way to crack a nut. All Weary must do now is wait for the boarding call, bustle inside the plane with the other cattle, and sit for the too-long ride home. And then it will be time. When he gets home, he’ll send what he believes will be the last package. The package that completes the plan. That is, if Isabelle and her own intelligence can be counted on.
An ill-attended child with a Hello Kitty roller bag bumps his shoes, but he barely scowls. No, all the horrors of the airport fall away as Weary imagines it: He envisions himself flying to the very spot in the two hundred square miles where the document is buried. He imagines unearthing it, even though it is covered in layers of time and secrets. But he will not peck and consume and indulge. He’ll set it in Isabelle’s hands instead. He’ll deliver it like a shiny treasure. The next move will be up to her.
Finally, they board. Well, eventually, Weary does. There is first class, and MVP this, and MVP that, and Gold this and Silver that, special this, special that, until it is practically just Weary and the man with the now half-consumed dosa.
He is filled with exquisite joy, though, when he finds his seat. He has struck the real traveler’s gold, hit the mega jackpot, because there is an empty seat between him and the young Indian woman in her salwar kameez, the loose trousers and tunic in shades of orange. The woman has her book already open, and Weary is next to the window. He feels fortunate, because his thoughts need this extra room. He hopes the space between him and her, his fellow passenger, muffles the ba-bamp of his heart. Now that the conference has been ticked off the list, there is just Weary and his deepest desire, and he is terrified and buoyant and impatient.
Honestly, he can’t wait.
Here comes the safety business, exit aisles and flotation devices, with the accompanying cheerleader gestures from the flight attendant and the nonsense about the whistle on the life jacket. The plane roars and lifts. Weary is already checking the time. There will be the cab ride home, the sleepless night, the next morning at work, the excuse and the escape to Jean-Marie’s. He will leave Jean-Marie’s sweltering apartment, knowing he has done all he can. Then he will wait to see what happens.
Brain size to body: There are the dolphins and the great apes and the corvids. But larger still is the human brain. Weary is counting on this. He cannot spell out the most important information in that document, not without putting himself in danger. It will be up to Isabelle to see what’s really there.
Weary peers out of the plane window, which has tiny crystals forming at the edges. Clouds stretch to infinity. Here, it is too high even for birds. But Weary is soaring. He flaps to that glass house on that cliff. He imagines Isabelle with her brown hair and kind eyes. She’s smart, because Henry wouldn’t be with her otherwise.
Still, when she was with him, how smart was Sarah? How smart was Virginia?
God, it makes his stomach lurch with nerves, or maybe it’s just the chaat he ate at the Hotel Delhi.
Come on, Isabelle, he says to those stretching clouds. Come on, he pleads, as the woman in orange turns another page.
Chapter 31
Managing the beast looks like this: One is soft and sweet when the beast is in a stormy mood. One jokes when he is sullen. One avoids certain topics—past loves, neglected needs, anything else that might trip the circuits of insecurity. One makes promises that won’t be kept, about cross-country moves and wedding dates and future plans. One secretly continues to plot escape, even if so far this still only includes vague, mental packing, and quietly but purposefully disappointing him until he leaves of his own accord.
To keep her anxiety down, to keep from jumping out of her own skin while she waits for him to leave her, Isabelle swims. And she swims. Her hair lightens from the chlorine in the pool. The muscles in her arms turn hard as baseballs. The rains lessen, too, finally—the temperature rises. Tiny daffodils pop up along Main Street. Driving past, Isabelle sees the usual corner of her mother’s yard filled with purple crocus. At Remy’s, the trees begin to blossom. Outside, it smells warm and pastel when the sun comes out.
She could probably swim in the cove now, like she used to in high school. One day, she hunts around in the storage unit until she finds her old wetsuit. Henry thinks it’s a crazy idea, but she hangs it in her closet, where it droops like a rubber woman.
Henry buys an almanac. He pinpoints two days in July with the least rainfall. “Twenty-one or twenty-seven?” he asks Isabelle.
She knows the right answer. The earlier date, not the latter. Choosing the latter equals rejection. “Twenty-one?”
Their wedding date.
—
Something else happens, just after the first green leaves unfurl and the clouds part, showing kaleidoscope blue: Tiny Policeman gives up his mission. One night, Isabelle looks outside their front window to find the street empty. There’s just a lamppost shining its circle of light, and the neighbor’s cat slinking around. Officer Ricky Beaker is gone in the day, too. It was probably those early hours at the pool that got him, plus just plain boredom. He apparently came to the conclusion that he had a better chance of making some big bust with his old punk nemesis, Kale Kramer, than with Henry, who drives the speed limit and always goes to bed before eleven.
One warm Friday, Isabelle sees Tiny P. coming out of the Front Street Market, dipping the spoon end of the straw into a Slushee.
“Good afternoon, Isabelle,” he says.
“Good afternoon,” she says.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” His teeth are stained a light purple from the grape liquid, making him look like an overgrown child. Still, he watches her face. It’s strange, but in spite of the Tostitos debacle of the past and the Slushee of today, she can feel him reading her, taking in the possible facts. The question is not about blue skies and summer.
“Yes,” Isabelle says. “It is.”
“All right. Good. Well, turn your tires to the curb when you’re parked downhill. You don’t want to risk rolling into traffic.”
“Thank you, Officer. I’ll do that.”
Tiny Policeman goes on his way. She never realized how reassuring it was to have him there, until he was not.
—
It’s pure luck that she hears the rumble of the truck. It happens to drive up in the time between Eddie’s next departure (with a pair of couples who’ve just spent the week at Asher House B&B) and Liz’s arrival (the first load of employees from the Binyon Optical annual retreat). The point is, no seaplane engines are roaring. Usually, she can barely hear herself think, which is convenient. But now, there’s only the sound of the truck heaving up the road, grumbling to a stop: Big Jim Roberts from UPS, bringing a package. A padded envelope.
Isabelle runs. She runs up the dock to Big Jim Roberts, not away from Big Jim Roberts. She knows the package is for her. She doesn’t want to see what’s in it, but she also has to see what’s in it. That day—more luck—there’s a problem with the credit card machine, and Jane’s on the phone in her office, distracted. No one else in sight cares one bit about what she gets in the mail. Or, at least, if Ray in the customs trailer sees her rushing to accept a package, he’ll think she’s excited about a delivery from Amazon. When she reaches Big Jim, she’
s out of breath.
“For me?”
“Yup. Where the hell is Nouméa?” Big Jim asks.
“Nouméa?”
“Never heard of it, either?”
“My friend is on a trip around the world.”
“Trip around the world. I may never get off this island. Signature required.”
“Really?”
“Your friend wants to know it arrived.”
Oh, wow. It’s a new development, and the uneasiness starts back up again, that giant, restless creature who stirs in the pit of her stomach. Big Jim hands her the machine and the stylus.
She signs. “Have a good one,” Big Jim says.
Now, bad luck. No purse, no coat. As soon as Big Jim drives off in the brown truck, she shoves the package inside her sweater. It’s practically a living thing against her skin; she feels its pulse and its will.
Where to go? She sneaks around the back of the building, past the ailing Zenith, which she’s sure eyes her with disapproval. More good luck, though—her keys are in her pocket, after a trip back to her car earlier for her forgotten lunch. One of these keys fits the storage unit, but which? Her hands tremble. It’s like she’s got the kilos of cocaine and must now start the getaway car. It’s tricky business for someone who gets nervous parking for fifteen minutes in a ten-minute zone.
There. She opens the storage unit, closes the door behind her. It’s cold inside, echoey. There’s her mother’s dining room table, and boxes with her mother’s handwriting on them. Holiday Decorations. Isabelle—Childhood. There are boxes with Isabelle’s own quick, upside-down scrawl, too: Books. Misc. Living. There’s a floor lamp from her and Evan’s place. A propped-up headboard from her mother’s bed. There’s that leather chair she used to read in when she was a child and couldn’t bear to give away. She’s forgotten about this stuff. It’s been hidden away in this frigid place, but it’s still here.