by Hadley Dyer
This is why you are here, I reminded myself, patting my face and neck down with water, to earn money to go to a university where you will learn to be less of an idiot. Someday, maybe, I’d have a grown-up conversation where I said all of the words correctly and someone could bring up the history or politics of a random faraway place and I’d know—really know—what they were talking about. I used to fantasize about getting into a debate with an Ivy League grad at what appeared, in my imagination, like a kitchen party at Woody Allen’s apartment. Oh, that’s a rather simplistic way of looking at it, don’t you think? I’d say. What about the long history of turmoil between the Frodites and the Schmirnites? I believe the native word for it is . . . And everyone around us would smile into their wineglasses. How did you become a person like that when you were from a place like this? Could you?
I gave Shaggy a drink from the hose. He chewed at the stream of water, then put his head into it and shook like a dog. I gasped as the cold water splattered all over me.
“Okay?” Francis was leaning against the corner of the barn chewing a piece of straw, the same pose I’d pictured Rupert in earlier.
I pulled my wet shirt away from my body. Navy, thank god. “I think it’s passed.”
“Look, what you said before—”
“Oh, please don’t—”
“No, a while back, about finding the guy at his mother’s house. You were right; that’s where he turned up. I should have been more grateful for the advice. I guess I hated that I needed it so much.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“There’s this other thing I wonder if I should do. That is, I wonder if you think I should do it.”
He was looking over at a giant pumpkin sitting on a skid by his car.
“Where did that come from? Are you—”
“From the Johnsons’ farm up the road. And yes, yes, I am. Pumpkin regatta-ing, on behalf of the force. Or I’m supposed to. Do you think I should?”
“I think you should have made up your mind before you did whatever it was you had to do to get that pumpkin over here.” It was, well, large enough for a grown man to sit in.
“The Johnsons have a forklift.”
“So, you’re asking me if you should disembowel that pumpkin, decorate it, take it down to the bay, climb inside, and race it in the freezing-cold waters?”
“Why, you make it sound so impractical.”
I turned the hose on him.
“Holy shhhh—!”
I hit him again.
This time, he ran at the tap—“Ha! Ho! Ho! Ha!”—and wrenched it off.
“It’ll be a touch colder than that,” I said.
“Only if I tip over!” He shook the water out of his ears like Shaggy, then leaned over to catch his breath. “Is that a no?”
“No—I mean, yeah, I think you should. It’s like Dad said, let the community see you.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“The race was his idea—did you know that? This is the first time he’s missed it in, like, ten years.”
Dad had a tradition of always wearing his uniform, plus a little something extra. The previous year it was a purple tutu that collared the top of the pumpkin when he sat in it. He wasn’t even planning to watch this year. Said he wanted to be properly on his feet before going to a public event, and none of the people who’d called to coax him into making an appearance had been able to change his mind about that.
“I know,” Francis said. “That’s why I want to do it.”
He walked down the slope a ways. “Every day I wake up and open the window and I can’t believe how beautiful it is. Look at those trees.”
I joined him, the water from our clothes dripping onto the ground like raindrops from an eaves trough after a storm. The valley was alight with fall colors, Rupert’s blueberry patch a lava-like spread of deep pinks and reds. “You’ve seen better trees than this, I’m sure.”
“I know it’s hard for you to believe it, but in this one way, it’s better here. And it’s better in there”—he nodded toward the house—“because of you. And better at work too. So thanks.”
Eighteen
It started with “The Fish,” I think, and got stronger at the pumpkin regatta, but really took hold when I went to clean the bathroom sink.
It wasn’t Rupert’s fingernail I found there. He liked to sit in an old rocking chair on the side veranda and file his nails while he looked over the fields. And here’s the thing: If you see a fingernail in a rose-colored bathroom sink—or anywhere—and you do not want to murder its owner for the offense of leaving it for someone to find, when not too long ago that same person’s tea bag crimes were enraging, and if sweeping said nail into the garbage can feels intimate and homey and leads you to wonder if he has any dirty laundry you could take care of, then you are in a new kind of trouble.
Each week the temperature had dropped one degree outdoors and warmed one degree between me and Francis. We no longer moved around each other like accidental contact would be nuclear, though we were still a smidge too polite, a touch too agreeable—not like people who had made out but also not like people who were over the fact that they’d made out.
I’d watched him race for the detachment at the regatta—a fierce contest, with accusations that the fire marshal’s vessel was leaking because it’d been tampered with, possibly by the handbell choir. Francis had to give him a tow, and still came in second. When he climbed out of his giant pumpkin, his uniform sopping wet and covered in pumpkin slime, he saluted the crowd before accepting the second-place ribbon and handing it to me in the stands to pass on to my father.
“Lot of people said they missed seeing you this year,” I told Dad when I gave it to him.
“They’d still be missing me if I’d gone,” he said, “seeing as I’m not myself.”
That stuck with me, and I noodled it again as I finished cleaning Rupert’s upstairs bathroom. Did Dad think that people only wanted him around if he was being the tough but fair-minded and always reliable Sergeant? I’d always thought people liked him as much, maybe more, when he was strutting along the dock in his purple tutu.
I placed a fresh bar of herbal mint soap—Francis’s favorite—in the shower and stood there staring at it. I’d gotten into the habit of doing little things for him, like shining his black work shoes and lining them neatly at the bottom of the back staircase, or stuffing the tea box to overflowing, which finally broke him of the tea bag habit. Just being friendly, right? Can’t read anything into a tea bag or a bar of soap.
Bullshite, I heard Lisa say. So clearly, I almost turned around to see if she was standing behind me.
Right. And what would Nat say, if we were exchanging more than the occasional smile? That if Francis and I were real friends, he’d be doing things for me too.
I took the soap out of the shower and brought it downstairs with the cleaning supplies, then went up and put it back and then took it out again.
“Get it together, Frances,” I muttered, forcing myself to drop it in the dish for the third time.
Francis came home before I could change my mind again. “I’ve been meaning to ask you how the chords are going,” he said, pulling off the shoes I’d polished for him. He tossed them in the direction of the mudroom off the kitchen.
“Great.”
“Show me your left hand.”
I held it up, and he crossed the freshly scrubbed linoleum and touched the pads of his fingers to mine. I’d backed into the kitchen counter as he came toward me, and a drawer handle was now digging into the back of my hip. I could also feel a faint throbbing in my hand—was it his pulse or my pulse? Maybe he felt it too—or standing like a pair of mimes got too awkward.
“No calluses,” he said, heading for the fridge.
“I don’t callus.”
“Not if you don’t practice, you don’t.”
I escaped upstairs again, where I had nothing left to do, so I changed Rupert’s sheets sooner than they needed it. I
crept down, slipped the pink tennis shoes I’d taken to wearing around the farmhouse into my bag, and grabbed my coat from the banister. The top button, the button that had been hanging loose for weeks, was tightly sewn in place. My mother or . . . ?
Francis was in the doorway, holding two guitars. “Hey. Thanks,” I said.
He shrugged. “Before you go, come in here and show me what you’ve been doing.”
I put the coat back on the banister and followed him into the living room, where Rupert was dozing in his yellow rocker. “Oh!” he said, jerking awake. “Very good.”
The cheery wood guitar Francis handed me was so much better than my old beater. Not only did mine not have a good sound, there was also the rack situation. If I tucked my chest behind the guitar, I felt like I was miles away from the strings and my shoulders and ribs would begin to ache within minutes. The alternative was to use the top of the guitar as a breast display shelf. This guitar of Francis’s was thinner, slicker, accommodated my chest behind the instrument, and it rang out beautifully.
“For starters, you’re holding too tight,” Francis said. “Pull your wrist down. Now let’s see B-minor.”
I couldn’t get my fingers to stay in the right place on the fret, and whistled the note as I strummed to cover my flubbing.
“I’ve never heard anyone whistle like you do. Who taught you?”
“No one, that I can remember. I can’t make both hands work at the same time on the piano, and, well, here’s how I’m doing on strings. But whistling, you just do it, if you can.”
He adjusted my wrist—firmly, nurse-like, somehow still sending a shiver up my arm—then watched me switch between G and D. “Stop doing that with your—”
“I’m not—” I slapped away his hand before he could touch me again.
“No slapsies!” Rupert called over from his rocker.
“I’m trying to help you,” Francis said. “When you strum a single chord, it’s good, clear. Switching . . .”
“There’s no rule that says you have to play more than one chord at a time.”
“Set an egg timer and do the switch again and again until you can get through two minutes without grinding your teeth.”
As soon as he said it, I felt my teeth clench.
“Or I can give you a simple song to practice, which is more fun than random chords. You like blues? No? What about a waltz? You have this nice background cadence—dum-dee duh-duh—and the melody floats up from it.”
“Mmm . . .”
“How about . . .” He played a riff on his guitar. “Soft, see? Sweet. And you can add a little dissonance to make it interesting.” His fingers trebled over a minor note, and now the shiver raced up my arms to the very top of my head. God, were the hairs on my neck actually standing up? I had to start strumming to make it stop.
It took a couple of runs to get the chords even halfway right, and then we started playing the song on repeat. Once I stopped tripping over D-minor, he began to sing very softly under his breath.
Here so far away
The ocean is a finger lake
The highway is a well-worn path
That brings me back to you
“It’s a ballad,” I said.
“You object to ballads?”
“They’re like commercials for relationships.”
Francis nodded. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Would it be less disgusting if we call it a lullaby? If you thought of a mother singing this to her child?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s a lullaby. Look behind you.”
In the small window over Wilfred’s birdcage, the moon was full and pink.
We kept playing on a loop, and after a while I began to sing too. Under my breath at first, and then a little louder, my voice still buried underneath his. I wanted to see if I could play and sing at the same time, which I could. And then, without warning, Francis switched to harmony. Tricked. Like when you’re learning to ride a bike and suddenly you realize that no one is holding the back of your seat. I leaned in and followed his voice like the curves in the road. I wanted to go and go and go.
“I don’t want to break up the party, son, but didn’t you say you had to meet this lady by eight?”
“Oh. You have a date,” I said. “I’m keeping you.” I stood up abruptly, giving the E string an accidental twang.
This time, Francis didn’t follow me to the hallway. I slipped on my boots, picked up the bag holding my tennis shoes, and stopped. Why did I always bring them home? It was silly, wasn’t it? To cart them back and forth every time, these very pink ladies’ tennis shoes?
Bullshite, I heard Lisa say again.
Ignoring her, I set the shoes on the landing of the staircase, off to the side so they wouldn’t trip anyone but would still be plainly visible to, say, a guy and his visitor going upstairs to one of the bedrooms.
Nineteen
A week later, I was no better. I found myself playing Yahtzee with an eighty-two-year-old on a late Saturday afternoon, hoping to hang around long enough to see if Francis was going on another date after his shift. I’d spent three days looking forward to my next trip to the farm on the off chance I would see him, however briefly, because seeing him had come to define whether it was a good day and not seeing him left me with a void I couldn’t fill, not with food, not with obsessive chord practice that left my ribs bruised and my fingers dented and stinging, and most definitely not with anyone else.
“You planning to get up to no good tonight?” Rupert asked.
“Probably.”
I’d need to leave soon if I wanted to catch Bill’s hockey game against East Riverview. I didn’t think he’d mind if I missed it, especially after he said Nat was planning to go, but I could see he was disappointed when I told him that Rupert might need me to stay late at the farm. Maybe even hurt.
“Do you want me to set up dinner before I leave?” I said to Rupert. “Or is Francis coming home before he goes out tonight?”
Rupert shrugged. If he knew something, he wasn’t saying.
The phone rang. “That could be him now,” I said, reaching for it.
“Good, you’re still there,” Dad said. “The old man in the room with you?”
“Yeah, right here.” I mouthed to Rupert, My dad.
“George, try to fix your face so he can’t tell what I’m about to say to you. Can you do that? Can you stay calm?”
“Course.” I got up and wandered as far from Rupert as the cord would let me go.
“I just got off the phone with June. McAdams responded to a nine-one-one call that came in from the Scotch Shore as he was passing through. Someone saw a man stranded on a boulder out in the bay. Caught by the tide, probably.”
It was getting dark. The water was freezing.
“He wouldn’t go in after him.”
“She thinks he did. You want me to tell the old man what’s going on?”
“No, I’ll do it.”
“Better wait to until there’s something to report. Can you spend the night, if need be?”
“I will. Thanks, Dad.”
“Try not to assume the worst, kiddo.”
I hung up. Took a breath. Found a lower gear inside me.
Steady.
“What’d your old man want?” Rupert asked.
“Oh, he was talking to June—you know Constable Basque? She mentioned that Francis has to work late. He thought he’d send that on in case you didn’t know.”
“That’s what passes for exciting gossip in these parts. Well, you don’t have to stick around. There must be a nice fella who wants your company tonight.”
“Actually, you’d be doing me a favor if I could stay here.” I made a mental note to call Bill in the morning. “Dad said my mum is having people over for oysters and sauerkraut tonight.”
Rupert coughed. “There. I have a bad cold and need a nurse.”
We gave Shaggy a bath in the tub and fed him oatmeal and Rupert beat me three more times at Yahtzee before h
e went to bed with Shaggy in tow.
I was just about to call my dad again when I saw the lights turn up the drive.
Francis came in wearing what looked like a borrowed sweat suit, much too big. His hair was wet, face gray and blotchy, eyes haunted. He held a duffel bag in one hand, a paper bag in the shape of a bottle in the other.
He looked startled to see me. “George.”
“How are you doing? You didn’t drive yourself.”
“June brought me home.”
Should I ask? “And the man?”
“We got him.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“But his wife . . .”
Francis leaned against the wall in the entryway as though he couldn’t keep himself upright.
“His wife was there too? In the water?”
He nodded, then shook his head.
“She didn’t make it.”
I don’t know what I intended when I went over to him—to hug him, help him make his way all the way inside—but he put up his hand.
“You can go,” he said. “It’s so late.”
“I already told my parents I was staying over. I’ll curl up on the couch. You can sleep in and not worry about what Rupert is getting up to.”
“Okay. Okay, thanks, George.”
When I heard the shower upstairs, I called Dad, who’d gotten word that Francis was heading home. He said the couple were tourists and the emergency responders didn’t know about the woman until Francis dragged the husband to shore. They didn’t expect to find her—or most likely, her body—until it was light out.
“He saved one of them,” Dad said. “Going into rough water like that, this time of year . . .” I could practically hear him shaking his head. “It’s what the staff sergeant would call ‘stupid courage.’”