The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  When he arrived home with Fiona, she bounded in from the car talking so fast Charlotte could hardly understand her, about how she had shown him the hamster, the fish, and the snake.

  “He had a pet snake when he was little,” Fiona told Charlotte knowingly. “Daddy! Let’s paint a picture!”

  “Oh, no, no, I’ve got to finish Mailer’s obituary. He’s in the hospital. He could go any day,” Henry said, disappearing down the stairs like the white rabbit, with Bunbury at his heels.

  “I love him!” Fiona said, peering down into the basement, then back at her mother with her little hands sprung open in surprise.

  20

  LONG NIGHT MOON

  Mailer recovered, allowing some further edits. Charlotte found a Mulligan to rig a shower in the bathtub. January was cold and clear; the fire department opened the gates and plowed the snow off Shadblow Pond and on Friday nights turned the fire truck’s floodlights on the ice. The whole town came out to skate. Betsy Godwin floated and spun, way off in the middle of the pond, and Carrie, who had played on a girls’ ice hockey team when she was young, skirted the edge in quick, powerful strokes. Fiona, Alexis, and Crystal stayed together close to shore, skating in little clicking steps, falling, laughing, falling again just for fun. Charlotte stood near the campfire, pouring cocoa and looking for Darryl. She hadn’t heard from him; she should try to keep from thinking of him, but that didn’t seem possible.

  She worked on the house with a vengeance. Taking a corner of the bedroom wallpaper, she pulled as hard as if it were the only thing getting in the way of her happiness. The sheet came off whole, bringing down hunks of plaster so she coughed in the dust. It felt almost wrong, as if she were disturbing the souls who had lived here before her. Henry’s grandmother, tired from a journey, so glad to be back in the salt air, would have pulled out her hatpin at the oval mirror of the dressing table. The cameo Charlotte had found in the safe-deposit box, of the brave woman with bare feet and a spear, must have belonged to her. Her gloves were still in the top drawer—kid leather with six buttons along the wrist, the same blushing gray as the wallpaper background. The paper on the inner walls was stained so lightly it was only romantic; Charlotte decided to leave it up and took the gloves to the hardware store, to find paint to match.

  It had been snowing lightly all morning and now a squall blew up; no one was on the road and there was not a car in the hardware store parking lot. As she was opening the door, a snowball hit her, softly, just at her collar. She turned around but there was no one—it must have slipped from the overhang. Then came another, just grazing the top of her head.

  “What the hell . . . ?” She looked up to see Darryl astride the roof of the house next door, packing a soft snowball. “What are you doing?”

  “A leak,” he said. “A rotten fascia board right under the peak here.”

  His sweatshirt hood was cinched tight around his face; the snow was blowing off the harbor directly at him.

  “In this weather?”

  “It came up kind of quick.”

  “Darryl Stead, I have never!” No, never ever, not once, felt such elation. She packed a big snowball and threw it up toward him but it fell apart midair.

  “Has no one ever shown you how to make a snowball?” He pulled his leg back over the ridge and let himself down to the ladder, and there he was beside her, with the snow sifting down over them.

  “No,” she said, “I guess no one did.”

  He looked up and down the street—not a soul. “How are you?”

  “I’m good . . . how are you?”

  “I’m . . . Charlotte, did you . . .”

  “Did I what?”

  “Nothing. I just . . . thought you’d said you’d write to me. I checked my P.O. box like twice a day until Leslie Harding asked if I was already expecting my tax refund. . . . Then I thought, maybe, maybe you didn’t want to send it in the mail. You might have slipped it in my glove compartment while I was away from the truck. Then I saw something under the windshield wiper and my heart leaped and . . . it was a parking ticket.” He laughed. “Of course.”

  “You never came, and I called you and you said you couldn’t talk, and . . .”

  “The cemetery was a bad idea. It’s a good place to hide—hardly anyone even knows it’s out there. Rob and I used to meet our customers there when we were dealing. I don’t want to go back there.”

  “Darryl, everyone has stuff they regret in their past. Selling pot in high school—it’s like baseball, a national pastime.”

  His smile was pained, a recognition that she didn’t understand.

  “My last day in the halfway house,” he said, needing to shock her, glad to see her take it in, “I asked my counselor, ‘How will I know if I’m going down the wrong path?’ He said—‘If you can’t be open about something, don’t do it.’ ”

  “So why should I write to you, if it’s so wrong?”

  “Because . . .” His hands were inches from her two arms, and she could feel the circuit that would connect if he touched her. His eyes, his face showed everything, how much he felt, how little he dared.

  Westie Small’s van came around the corner into the parking lot and there was just a quarter second to glance a good-bye to each other as they turned back into their public selves.

  “So what are you here for?” Darryl asked, in his hearty carpenter’s voice.

  “Paint,” she said, holding out the gloves.

  “Gloves need a new coat of paint?”

  “No, but they match the wallpaper in the upstairs bedroom, you know, with the peonies?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve thought a lot about that room.” He caught her eye one last time before Westie got out of the van. “Hey, Westie . . . a nice snow, eh?”

  Westie grumbled that it might be snow but he didn’t see anything nice about it.

  “About those pipes,” Darryl said to Charlotte, “call me if you have any more problems.”

  “Oh, thanks, I will.” The snow glittered everywhere, over the roofs of the Lemon Pie Cottages, on the sides of the wavy locust trees, like physical proof that he loved her.

  Driving home, she saw a truck stopped dead, half in, half out of the breakdown lane. Carrie’s truck. Charlotte pulled over just in front of her.

  “What happened?”

  Carrie, who had just put the hood up, turned and looked at her without interest.

  “Died,” she said, turning back to the engine.

  “Can I help?”

  “No-o-o.”

  “Give you a ride?”

  “Naw, I’ll wait here. Someone will come along.” Charlotte wasn’t someone.

  “Did you call for help?”

  “No,” Carrie said, as if this were just the kind of idea to be expected from a spoiled bitch like Charlotte, who probably had a cell phone in every pocket.

  “Well, let me take you then. . . .”

  It was about to become awkward when Westie drove up behind them.

  “First one Stead, then the other,” he said to Charlotte, and to Carrie: “Whadaya need here?”

  Carrie laughed, a dry hoot. “A joint would have done me, in the old days,” she said. “Rob’s got a speed trap going back at the church, so there’d be no worries.”

  “How ’bout a jump?”

  “We’re way past that,” she said. “The battery’s about the only thing that does work.”

  “Well, let’s get ’er outta the way here,” he said, rubbing his beard. They went to work together, opening both doors and rolling the truck carefully forward, Westie, the gentleman, taking the roadward side. “Easy does it,” he said, as if the truck were a balky horse. “That’s a girl, here we go.” Charlotte stood there with her arms hanging useless, like Henry.

  “Okay, now back to the garage, we’ll get a tow, we’ll see what needs to happen,” he said. To Charlotte, whose name he didn’t know, he touched his forehead, like a cap. “Nice of you to stop.”

  “Of course,” Charlotte said. Carr
ie glanced at her, wary. “Would you like me to bring Timmy home from Mrs. Carroll’s later?” she asked.

  “No, thanks,” Carrie said. “Desiree’ll be home from school by then.” Desiree was her oldest, a bouncy blond thing, no relation of Tim Cloutier. Carrie had married him years later, when she was expecting the middle boy, Matt.

  Carrie cast an acerbic smile toward Charlotte as they drove away. How had that happened exactly—that she stopped to help and ended up standing here alone? But the snow, the snow! She started back toward the Volvo and saw Betsy coming along the other way, driving home from Orleans.

  “Charlotte!” Betsy stopped cold in her lane and there was a terrible screech of brakes behind her—some young guy in an old sports car who had no doubt been following too closely.

  Charlotte rushed into the road as if she thought she could shield the two cars from each other. Betsy screamed. The guy in the sports car, who had skidded to the side and stopped just before he hit her, rolled down the window and yelled, “Assholes, New York whores, fuck, fuck you!” Betsy looked as alarmed as if she’d just discovered a blatant run in her stocking, pulled off to the side, and the guy backed up and screeched away, his middle finger out the window.

  “I’m sorry,” Betsy said. “I was just wondering if you needed help and instead I almost got you killed.”

  “Danger is my business,” Charlotte said. Her heart was beating as if it were trying to escape. “I’m fine. I’ve got to learn not to throw myself between colliding automobiles; no good can come. You okay?”

  “I’m fine!” Betsy said. “I almost got to try out the air bags. New York whores, are we?”

  “I guess so. . . .”

  “Wanna get a cup of coffee?”

  “I’d love to,” Charlotte said. In the circumstances she liked Betsy better than just about anyone. “Let’s try the new place . . . Della’s.” Della was Jamaican—she’d come to work one summer and stayed, heaven knew how. Her new place was right on the highway and had a sign advertising DELLA’S COUNTER SERVICE; FRESH BREAD AND MEAT. Charlotte had not seen trucks in the driveway there—the oystermen went to the Wicked Oyster. Darryl hadn’t wanted to be seen with her; she didn’t want to be seen with Betsy. She parked around the back, where a cat was sitting patiently by the kitchen door, hoping for a fish.

  Inside, Della’s was painted a brilliant yellow, with pineapples and watermelons dancing along the walls. The music was an infectious rap-reggae version of “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall,” and the coffee was indeed strong—Charlotte remembered that she’d gotten high the first time she drank coffee, interviewing a dairy farmer for the local newspaper, an internship in high school. Sitting at that kind man’s kitchen table, listening to his story in the morning sunlight, she’d thought how wonderful it would be to be a reporter and do this all the time.

  Betsy had an unself-conscious ease about her. It didn’t occur to her that one might feel uncertain or out of place—she was small and pretty and had been welcome as an ornament all her life. She was warm to Della, who had worked for her at the jewelry shop one summer, and settled in with Charlotte at the one little table as if they’d been girlfriends for years.

  “We ought to get the girls together more often,” she said, sipping her coffee. “They’ll be growing up together—it won’t be long before they’re shopping for prom dresses together. Alexis’s already sweet on Dylan Mulligan. You can practically see hearts bubbling up over her head when she’s with him.”

  “I hope it won’t all go quite that fast,” Charlotte said.

  “Oh, I know,” Betsy said. “Back in Rochester—that’s where my family is—you should see; they’re wearing little white satin corsets to their first communion!” She shuddered. “Boy, am I glad I got out of there.”

  “How did you?” It was the first question on everyone’s lips; no one ever moved to Wellfleet to study, or take a better job, or any of the usual things—you came because you lucked out, like Charlotte, or lost out, like Darryl, and couldn’t get away.

  “Oh, I came out for the summer, met Skip, and the rest is history. Sometimes I wonder whether I married him or the town. What about you?”

  “Oh, it’s all because of Henry. I grew up in New Hampshire . . . near Manchester. . . .” The name itself gave her claustrophobia—the old mills looming, graffitied over with the names of the kids who scuffled in their shadows, barely aware of the life in the larger world.

  Betsy laughed. “You’re kidding,” she said. “I figured you for Scars-dale, like Skip. My father’s a butcher,” she confided suddenly. “His brother was a priest, so we didn’t have to go to church to confess. We went into the meat locker! That’s right, and my uncle would sit on a stool, with a side of beef hanging between us on a hook, and I’d confess all my sins to this hunk of meat.”

  Charlotte covered her mouth with both hands.

  “Yes,” Betsy said, delighting in her story.

  “It’s a wonder you’re not insane!”

  Betsy made a comic face and leaned back in her chair. “You can’t get much farther from a butcher shop than a jewelry store. I used to dream about it—these sparkling glass cases, all the gold on blue velvet, the clean little tools.”

  “I dreamed of hanging laundry out to dry, looking out over the sea.”

  “We got our wishes,” Betsy said. “Not like it was easy. That first year when I was pregnant and Skip was really just doing title searches, his parents weren’t charging us rent, but the heating oil was more than we could afford. But now . . .” She leaned across the table to confide. “I’m redoing the kitchen. Wait till you see. Granite counters, a chef’s stove, and a fireplace in the corner so there’ll be a little sitting area there for the kids. It’ll be crazy for a while, but by summer the dust will have settled, hopefully it’ll be a good season, the coffers will fill, everyone will be in a better mood. We fall apart in the winter around here. In the summer everyone’s so busy, but January comes, they’ve got time to think . . . they go a little crazy.” She stretched her hand out in front of her—admiring it. It was a very small and delicate hand. “In the winter the slightest thing blows up into a scandal.”

  “Like the Narvilles’ lawsuit . . .”

  “Yeah, that seems to be what everybody’s talking about. Skip’s gotten some pretty upsetting phone calls. I mean, he’s a lawyer; he’s doing a job he was hired to do.”

  But her voice was tight; she had some qualm of her own. Charlotte would have liked to say: And what Darryl and the others do: They raise oysters. She was too timid, so she told herself she was just gathering information. It turned out that she didn’t have to say anything. Betsy kept defending herself point by point.

  “It’s not like the outcome would be different. They’d have hired someone else if Skip had refused,” Betsy went on. “I feel bad for Carrie; she’s got way more than she can handle. Desiree’s expecting, did you know?”

  “I did not,” Charlotte said, heart sinking, thinking of Ada’s saying that birth by neglect led to death by neglect in the Stead family. “Desiree’s still in high school, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, she’s not graduating till next year. But a new baby, a new life in the house, it’ll be nice for them, exciting.”

  “Not if they can’t afford it.”

  “Honey,” Betsy said, “by the time those oysters are sold, for forty or forty-five cents apiece, so much effort has gone into them . . . bagging groceries at Stop and Shop pays better. No one’s been allowed to raise shellfish in Truro for years, you know. And everything seems to work out fine. Yes, you can fish on private land, but aquaculture is farming. It’s from Pazolt versus the Division of Marine Fisheries, 1994. Pazolt v. the Town of Truro, 1993. Jeb Narville, and the rest of them, they paid a lot of money for their land. They deserve—”

  “What about work?” Charlotte asked suddenly. “What about all the labor that . . . Carrie . . . and the others have put in? A guy like Narville—he paid a lot of money but he hasn’t lived in that house a whole m
onth yet. The Steads, and the others, they’ve been working that land for years and years.”

  “You do realize that if you were lying in the street, Tim Cloutier would drive right over you? I mean, you understand that?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. “I know he’s trouble. I just wish . . . Why couldn’t Skip have argued the oystermen’s side?”

  “It’s not what he was paid to do,” Betsy said simply. A question crossed her face. “People don’t blame you, you know, honey,” she said. “There’s nobody here who wouldn’t have sold that piece of land.”

  “It’s just . . . I’m so glad to have a little part of this town. I don’t want to have had a bad effect here.”

  “You didn’t,” Betsy said, her voice full of kindness, as if she were talking to a child. “You have nothing to do with it. Things change. Wellfleet has changed a million times; it’s always changing. No one ever got rich oystering—you break your back year in and year out; then a red tide wipes you out and you start over. The Narvilles, the other new people coming into town, they’ll change our fortunes. Boating people tie up at the marina and take their credit cards for a walk through town—a thousand dollars for a pair of earrings, it isn’t a big deal for them. They’re opening a Marc Jacobs on Commercial Street. And a new steak-and-seafood place down where the Dairy Queen used to be, by the wharf. There’re going to be jobs, jobs that really pay. I hear,” she said, leaning in for a delicious confidence, “that Blair Settenbee, the publisher, bought the site of the old Sea Witch Inn, out on Try Point. His architect is flying in from Easthampton.”

  “There goes the neighborhood,” Charlotte said. Blair Settenbee was the publisher of Celeb, and SportsNow, and Summit Design, which was the thickest, glossiest magazine with the highest advertising rates in the business. Charlotte had ridden in an elevator with him once—he glowed as if he were made out of something harder and brighter than most people. If he did build a house on Try Point, he would occupy it only a few weeks a year. He had his place overlooking the Bosphorus and the flat beside Le Jardin du Luxembourg. And the villa on Mustique.