Ernie's Ark

by Monica Wood

  “I took it.”

  “When?”

  Francine hesitated. “Last summer, I think. It was last summer.”

  “That’s not last summer, honey,” Cindy said slowly. “That’s, what, four years ago, at least.”

  Francine shook her head.

  Now Cindy got serious. “I replaced that plant hanger a long time ago, Francine. When did you take this?”

  Francine sat back, her skin blotching. “Before Dad knew you,” she admitted.

  Cindy regarded Francine, accosted by a deep unease. “Why would you have taken my picture before Dad knew me?”

  Francine cast her eyes down, the pale lashes fluttering behind her thick glasses. “I don’t know. I picked you out. I told him and told him. Once I came in the shop just to look at you close.” She was crying a little, and Cindy hardly knew what to do. She was too shocked to be angry; she couldn’t imagine Francine, who would have been nine years old back then, roaming the streets of Abbott Falls looking for a mother.

  “Kenny’s leaving,” Francine was saying, not looking at anything but the image on the screen. “Don’t you leave us, too.” She passed a pudgy palm across her handiwork, which now looked desperate with effort. “You can’t leave. I’m going to make you rich.”

  “You don’t have to make me rich, Francine,” Cindy whispered. “I’m not going anywhere.” You can say that again, said a voice in the back of her head. Then she stroked the scratchy hair of this child who loved flowers.

  “Did that woman say something to you today, Francine?” Cindy asked. “The dead-sticks lady?”

  “No,” Francine said. “It’s not that.” She sighed like an old woman. “She just went away. I tried to explain, but she wasn’t listening. Nobody in this town is listening.”

  After Francine went to bed, Cindy sat up in the dark living room. Bruce, as usual, wasn’t home. Something at the college, an awards dinner or seminar or colloquium. Or.

  She heard her car pull up around midnight—that telltale whir—and Kenny sauntered in. Most boys his age would be red-faced and reeking, but Kenny seemed composed, as if he’d spent the evening discussing math theorems or sitting alone in a diner.

  “Where’s your husband?” he asked. In his voice she detected a note of resignation that moved her unaccountably. She wondered if what she had taken for scorn all these years had been something else altogether: pity, perhaps. He looked older to her, at this hour, in this room, in this quiet.

  Cindy got up, facing him. “That’s not your car,” she informed him.

  Kenny was all angles, both inside and out, but in his layered eyes resided something worn-looking, too bowed for a boy his age. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “Francine all right?”

  “Of course she’s all right,” Cindy said. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a terrible world.”

  “No, it isn’t, Kenny.”

  “No?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not a terrible world. And ask permission next time.”

  He observed her for a long, uncomfortable moment. She felt judged, but not harshly. “I can’t believe you’re still here,” he murmured. “Nobody else would be.”

  Then he went off to bed, and by the time Bruce arrived—he was red-faced and reeking—she had prepared and discarded a goodbye speech and simply told him, standing at the doorway in her blue bathrobe, “I’m staying, Bruce. I will not abandon the children.”

  He stood in front of her, weaving a little, looking raffish, irresponsible—exactly like the sort of man she would have fallen for had she gone to college herself. She knew this, and forgave the girl, whoever she was, forgave her stupidity, her yawning need to feel necessary.

  “Hey,” he said, caressing her shoulders. “What’s this? What’s this we’re talking about?”

  She leveled him with a look, feeling glassy and tall. She tried to picture him as he would look a few days hence, installed in a comfortable chair at the home of Don and Ann Pratt, realizing at this late date that he’d married a woman unskilled at riddles. “Francine needs me,” she said. “Kenny can do without, he’s done without, he knows how. But Francine, Francine found me, and here I am, and I insist”—she said insist like the character in the play she’d been in now for three years—“I insist that you behave better, Bruce, I won’t stand for this.”

  He gave her a woozy smile. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” he said, then opened the front of her robe as if parting curtains. She gave him a shove, stomped out to the porch, and stood shivering under the stars for as long as she could stand it. The sky shone clearer these days, the mill smoke having thinned in the strike’s long wake. Production was down. The nightly gauntlet—the banging and shouting, the flashing lights, the signs being raised and lowered like pistons—was too distant to hear, though she strained to hear it, that desperate desire to take back, reclaim, salvage, repossess. Perhaps the picketers had quit for the night, Danny and his brothers and the rest of the displaced having already shut their separate doors, leaving the town to this shocking stillness. She would see Francine through high school. She believed she could do at least that. She sensed the dull, pleasant town of her childhood as a recognizable entity somewhere just beyond reach, as still and poignant as a dead animal, beautiful and beyond revival.

  Visitors

  James Whitten, software consultant

  When James arrived at Karen’s new apartment, he could not help but note how young she looked, how honeyed and golden, as if to prove her contention that divorcing a man like James Whitten would take years off a sane woman’s face.

  “What do you want?” she asked, politely enough.

  “My mother died.”

  The sweet folds near her mouth softened, making her look, suddenly, her age, which was forty-five, two years older than he was. “Oh,” she sighed, letting him in. “I’m sorry, Jamie. When?”

  “Last night,” he said, moving into the polished light of Karen’s bay window, from which he could just make out the artful curve of the Golden Gate Bridge. “My father called me.”

  She guided him to a chair, then sat across from him, knee to knee. “Your mother was a brave woman.”

  “I bought two plane tickets,” he said. “I was hoping you’d come with me.”

  “Of course I’ll come,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I come?”

  “Because you hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you, Jamie,” she said gently. “It’s just that I’m not suffering as much as we thought I would.” She lifted her head. “Did you think to call Carrie?”

  He said nothing.

  Karen swiped a hand through her hair—recently shorn, boyish and sexy—a gesture he recognized as irritation. “Do you even have her number?”

  “An old one,” he said. “Who the hell can keep track?”

  “I’ll call,” Karen said, getting up. She whisked into the bedroom, where he overheard enough to reassure himself that despite her denials, Karen shared his disgust at their daughter’s latest caper: singing in some Alaskan bar with her smug, prettyboy, guitar-smashing boyfriend. He went to the doorway of her bedroom, where she was just hanging up. “She claims she’ll call her grandfather,” Karen said, “but she won’t.” She flicked the briefest glance at James—chip off the old block—then hauled a suitcase out of the closet and threw it on the bed.

  “There’s something you should know,” he said.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him. “Let me guess,” she said, her lips drawing into a predictable line. “You didn’t tell them about the divorce.”

  He shook his head.

  “And I suppose you were thinking, Good old Karen, she’ll come to the funeral, make everything comfy, and then drop an oh-by-the-way as we’re getting back on the plane.”

  “Something like that,” he admitted.

  She snapped open the suitcase and dropped some underwear inside. “You said you’d tell them, Jamie.”

  “Well, I di
dn’t.” He looked at the floor. He’d been hoping for a little more in the way of sympathy. “What difference does it make?” he asked. “You would have come anyway.”

  “Not as your wife.”

  “Technically, you still are,” he said.

  Her eyes held him evenly. “Ten more days.”

  He lifted his arms, a gesture reminiscent of a thief showing his empty pockets. “You were her daughter-in-law for nineteen years, Karen,” he said, fearful that she might change her mind. “You ought to be there.”

  She stood up, her leggings bunched at the knees, making her look like a child at a parade. “Yes,” she quavered. “You bet I ought to be there. Marie was the soul of sweetness. God, I was going to call her this week. Yesterday I was going to call her, and I didn’t. I had the damn phone in my lap, and I didn’t.” She drove her hands across her eyes, smearing her makeup. It was Karen who had called his mother after every round of her tests, Karen who sent bed jackets and bath beads even as they fought in a therapist’s office once a week and prepped their finances for the big breach.

  “Your mother was an angel,” she went on, swiping a black dress off a hanger. “I’ll never forgive myself.” She added a small tumble of clothing, a few cosmetics, a pair of shoes. Then she took off her shirt, stripped off her leggings, and found a skirt and a silk blouse, a purple one he’d always liked. Karen was the only person he knew who still dressed up for plane rides.

  “I was waiting for you to tell them, Jamie. I was so sick of pretending we were still together. I haven’t called once in three weeks. Her three final weeks, it now turns out. I was waiting you out, because you said you’d tell them, and now it’s too late.” She stopped abruptly, turning to him, a bra he’d never seen catching the light in a soul-filling twin flash. “Do you mind?”

  James turned around, the view out her bedroom door considerably less inspiring. Her place was all hardwood and white walls and airy furniture, the opposite of the stolid furniture she’d filled their life with over the years. He was stuck with it now, all that weight. In the end it was she who had left.

  “I wanted her to die not knowing,” he said after a while.

  “How considerate,” she muttered. She was referring to his parents’ visits to California over the years, James always busy with work, leaving Karen and Carrie to take them around, chat on the deck, ride the cable cars. He had not been a considerate son.

  “Turn around,” she said. He did. Fully dressed, she stood with her arms crossed, head cocked as if listening for alarms. “You know why I’m doing this?”

  “Because you like my parents,” he said. He had said this before.

  “Do you know why I like your parents, Jamie?” she said, the thin cords of her neck pulsing.

  James tried to look calm, unirritated: he needed her. “Because they keep your name by the phone,” he recited. “They remember your birthday. They show more interest in you from three thousand miles away than I ever did from across the table.”

  She made a low, anguished groan, which reminded him uncomfortably of sex. With her. “They’re in love,” she said, swinging the packed case off the bed. “That’s why I like them. The way they look at each other, after all those years, it makes me want to gouge out my eyes.”

  Though James agreed that he and Karen had never belonged together, that for nineteen years he had been cold and vague and a distant father and unsuited to the tasks of love, that he was little more than a visitor in his own life, that being James Whitten’s wife was a purgatory no woman should be forced to endure, he could still be surprised by her anger. She was at heart a temperate woman.

  “Christ,” she sighed. She covered her face. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “How is he?”

  “Who?”

  “Your father, Jamie. God.”

  James said, “All right, I think. He didn’t say much.” Then, because Karen had always been the keeper of tickets—theater, movie, plane—he handed them to her.

  She studied them, frowning. “We’re staying one day? With your bereaved father?”

  He put his fingers to his temples, his head throbbing. His sports coat felt tight across the back and sadly wrinkled, like a costume for an actor playing the overwrought salesman. “I’ve got clients lined up around the clock, Karen.”

  Her eyes—he suspected tinted contacts, another surprise—went liquid and pitying. “You tell them your mother died, Jamie,” she said softly. “This is something normal people understand.”

  Her words hurt. “Are you going to do this all the way to Maine?” he asked.

  She shook her head, moving toward him. “No,” she said, touching his face, and she meant it, for by the time his father picked them up at the airport in Portland, James felt very nearly married again, Karen in the dark front seat, her head inclined, coaxing a few words from his father, filling the silences between two silent men with her own brand of mercy.

  In the frigid light of the next morning, James discovered, between the sunporch and the neighbor’s fence, a bizarre, shed-sized structure made of wood. Under a shroud of old snow, it resembled a boat, but not quite.

  “That’s an ark,” his father said, trudging out the door. “I built it for your mother.”

  James exchanged a look with Karen. She said, “I didn’t know you were the seafaring type, Ernie.”

  “It’s not for sailing,” his father said. “It’s for looking at.” He turned to James, his lower lids red and sagging. At sixty-five he had passed overnight into old age. “What with the strike lasting a God’s age, I had nothing else to do. Your mother likes art.”

  James followed his father outside, regarding the ark in a mute awe, wondering how Ernie Whitten, a pipefitter on strike, had come to imagine himself an artist between James’s last visit and this one. A long time between visits, granted. But still. He passed in front of the ark’s strange weight and opened the car door for his father.

  The funeral would simply have to be gotten through, James thought; and of course he did get through it, sitting in the front pew next to his father, who remained rigid and mute during the service, no more or less trouble than if he were an armoire James had been consigned to lug around. Karen tended to the mourners, weeping intermittently. In the churchyard it was left to him to drive his father home. As he pulled up to the house, James realized he’d been counting the hours and they were almost up.

  A woman stood on the doorstep, waiting. A skeletal, spent-looking woman about James’s age, carrying a big beaded purse. She had faded blond hair and a sad, complicated mouth.

  “Mr. Whitten?” she asked.

  James and his father answered simultaneously: “Yes?”

  The woman’s eyes rested on Ernie. “I’m Tracey Martin? Used to be Brighton? Tracey Brighton? Back when I—when I met your wife?” Her breath made tiny clouds that James could almost read.

  “Thank you for coming,” Ernie said. He sounded scraped clean.

  “You remember me?” the woman asked, purse rattling as she clutched it to her chest.

  Ernie continued through the door, looking exhausted and benumbed. Not knowing what else to do, James ushered the woman inside. He glanced up the street, hoping to find Karen, who had stayed behind in the icy churchyard to invite people back to the house.

  The woman glanced around the foyer, then took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, is what I came to say.” Her bony hands shook. “I came all the way up from New London, Connecticut, to say that.”

  “Thank you,” his father said. Then he struggled upstairs as if walking on burned feet.

  The woman, Tracey, watched him until he made the landing and disappeared. She gestured vaguely after him, looking confused, then turned to James. “Are you the son?”

  “I am,” he said. “Look, my wife’s bringing some people back. You could have a seat while we wait.”

  “Oh, if you’re having people,” she said, looking around frantically. Her purse rattled again. “Look, if I
could just have a word with your mother. It won’t take long.”

  “Pardon?” James asked, alarmed. His mother had befriended all kinds over the years.

  “Your mother,” Tracey said. “Just a word. I have something for her. If she’ll see me, that is. Not that I’d blame her, I wouldn’t.” She placed the purse on a chair as if staking claim, looking directly at James through large, unnervingly blue eyes.

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” James said. His neck felt odd and tingly.

  “This is the Whitten residence?” she asked. “Marie and Ernest Whitten?”

  The front door opened and in walked Karen. Behind her came Alma and Brad Collins, longtime neighbors, carrying groceries. All down the street came the muffled dominos-dropping sound of car doors being opened and then slammed shut.

  “Am I in the right place?” Tracey asked, her strange mouth quivering.

  “Yes, yes,” Karen said. “We’ll have things set out in a jiffy.” Alma and Brad moved closer into the room, bearing the polite, wounded smiles of the bereaved.

  Now Tracey seemed on the verge of tears. She worked at the top button of a too-large coat, a homely blue car coat ill-suited to the December cold. “Where’s your mother?” she asked James.

  He stared at her. “We’ve just come from her funeral.”

  Tracey’s hand flew to her face. “Oh! I’m sorry!” She grabbed her big purse. “This is so embarrassing! My God, I’ve never been so embarrassed!”

  Alma and Brad fled to the kitchen. James longed to follow them: he’d spent many a childhood lunchtime at Alma’s table, eating alphabet soup and saltines. He looked helplessly at Karen.

  “Can we do something for you?” Karen asked Tracey.

  “There are things I wanted to put right,” Tracey murmured. “I’m in a program.” James feared she might cry, and he didn’t think he could bear one more person’s tears, not today. Karen had cried into the night but wouldn’t allow James in the bed. He’d lain on the rug, using his overnight bag as a pillow. Karen had taken all the luggage when she left—a statement, he realized now, about his own physical and emotional absences—and he’d made do with the one bag ever since as a sort of penance.