The House on Oyster Creek

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  She arrived back at the Latrousse house with cheeks flushed, hair tangled, and an expression of stricken dazzlement, but no one seemed to notice.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, proffering the cream. “There were these people kissing against the refrigerator and I didn’t want to bother them.”

  “We’re not above a little Cremora,” said the stoic Mrs. Latrousse. “Poached pear?”

  “No, thank you.” She sat sipping espresso on the Eames-era chair, listening to the Eames-era voices around her overlap, each more deeply certain than the last. They had spent their lives acquiring knowledge, the way other people acquired stock options or antiques, and now here they were, showing it off to one another. Henry admired them, and they were certainly admirable, but Charlotte could see only their pretenses, their lack of vital interest in one another, in life. But it didn’t matter now—her heart was beating with such joy and excitement she could barely hear what anyone else was saying. They might as well have been speaking Middle English. Then she realized they were speaking Middle English, quoting one of the lesser-known Canterbury Tales.

  24

  THE GHOST NET

  Charlotte was unloading groceries in the sidelong sunlight of a March afternoon when she heard a sound she’d almost forgotten: the tide sloshing in the bay. She set the bags back in the car and walked down to the water. The ice had softened and begun to break, the pieces swaying together on the movement of the tide. Spring was beginning. She’d lived in Wellfleet for nearly a year. She had a sense of the people around her, even people she barely knew, just from seeing them go through their mail at the post office, or push their children on the swings. When Nikki Miles’s brother came home from Iraq, Fiona heard it first.

  “Guess what,” she said, as soon as she got in the car after school, with big round eyes and the earnest excitement that was her most essential trait. “There’s a hero! A war hero, here! His sister is Mrs. Carroll’s friend Nikki, and she’s going to help him learn to talk again . . . and then, when he can talk, he’s coming to tell us about the war!” Of course, Darryl had said Nikki’s brother was in Iraq, and it was entirely likely that Nikki was Mrs. Latrousse’s cleaning lady, in addition to being the receptionist for the crane company. No one in Wellfleet had only one job.

  Charlotte hadn’t spoken to Darryl since the night of the Latrousse party. They found a kind of balance, like performers on a high wire: As long as each kept utterly aware of the other, they lived in a state of grace. Passing him on the highway, Charlotte would guess from the tilt of his head that he was worried, or was having a good day. He was doing his work, she hers. She had started tomato seeds under grow lights in the extra bedroom; as they unfurled she felt a little pride, the way she had when she and Darryl were working together. She told herself that this was enough, but now a soft breeze was blowing, and half her life was behind her, full of men who had protested that they didn’t really care, men with theories against monogamy, men who preferred their motorcycles, their newspapers, who didn’t seem to want a woman so much as a doll. Darryl had kissed her as if his life depended on it. To refuse to take a man like that straight to your heart . . . well, you’d have to be a fool!

  “The cherry blossoms are out in Washington, D.C.,” said Henry with mortal dread, from behind the newspaper.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “It’s three weeks early.” Of course, global warming. No one would feel this quite as deeply as Henry, who peeked out at life through his wall of ice. If it melted, the world would end. Of course he was afraid. Charlotte poured out the last of the cereal—half a bowl of crumbs.

  “Would you like a poached egg, Henry?”

  He put down the paper and looked at her as if she’d casually shown him the back road into paradise.

  “A poached egg on toast,” he said. “When did I last have a poached egg?”

  “Sometime before the cholesterol hysteria. You used to love them.”

  Henry pricked his egg and found the yolk just liquid at the center, cut it into halves, then quarters, then eighths, took a bite.

  “My father loved a poached egg,” he said, his voice thin suddenly. The lines in his face, already so deep they might have been marked with a knife, went deeper.

  “My life,” he said. “Where did it go?”

  “Henry . . .” Charlotte reached across the table toward him with both hands, but the distance was too great, and she had been trying to cross it for too long. She picked up the salt and pepper and blew on them, as if that was what she had intended.

  “I guess no one’s immune,” he said, with a surprised little laugh, shaking off the burst of feeling. “A poached egg is truly a marvelous thing.”

  “Some of the finest mediums in history have relied on the humble poached egg,” Charlotte said. He allowed a smile. Charlotte pulled Fiona onto her lap, rocking her, holding her tight.

  “Daddy’s remembering your grandpa,” she said.

  “Crystal’s grandpa lives right in the same house with her,” Fiona said bitterly. “And they have a ferret too.”

  “What else did your father like, Henry?”

  “Oh, the stock market. Propriety. A really good game of bridge. And . . . trees. I’d forgotten. He knew every tree in the forest. He’d show me how to identify them—the bark and such. The sassafras has mitten-shaped leaves. It bored me silly; I never paid attention. A lot of the trees on Point Road were salvaged from a shipwreck—all those apple and pear trees that bloom in the spring.”

  “I guess you paid some attention.”

  “You can’t help it; your parents get into you.” He cleared his plate and began to wash up. Bad enough that his parents had gotten into him; Charlotte wasn’t to join them.

  “He loved this house,” he said suddenly, turning back to them. “He’d . . . I don’t know what he’d think if he saw I was living here now, after all I did to break away. And with my family . . . my daughter? I swore to him I would beget nothing but books.”

  A shadow passed over him, a cloud from another century. He turned to the sink again, leaning over it in a little spasm. Then he came back to the table suddenly and kissed Fiona on the top of her head, looking as startled as if he’d just done a cartwheel. And then, searching for something to absorb the excess tenderness, he scooped Bunbury up and kissed him between his pricked-up ears. “Yes, you like the warm weather, don’t you, Mr. Puss . . . you like to feel the wind in your fur. . . .”

  The tide ebbed, taking the ice with it, icebergs the size of trucks that bobbed companionably in the water, like boats when the striped bass—stripers, everyone called them, but Charlotte didn’t feel entitled to the word yet—were running. One by one the oystermen came to survey the scene: Bud in the old red pickup he used only for the flats; Jake, whose truck had a cap on the back so he could take his paintings around in it; Trent Mulligan in a huge, gleaming new Chevy 4 x 4. They stood conferring as the flats came into view, like continents on a map, for the first time that year. The familiar landscape had returned, and with it the familiar routine. Carrie drove in with Desiree, rolled down her window to talk to the men, then turned around and gunned the truck up the driveway. The oysters wouldn’t go back in for a couple weeks. There wasn’t much to do but check the clams, see what the winter had wrought. Someone found a broken lobster trap sticking out of the sand and threw it in his truck bed. Jake started driving all the way around the water’s edge, looking for other flotsam.

  As the rest were leaving, Darryl arrived. He’d put it off, having begun to feel about Charlotte’s house as he did about the Mermaid—that it was a seductive place that must be avoided. He watched for Charlotte always, and a glimpse of her counted as a good sign, like finding a penny heads-up on the sidewalk. One morning he’d been passing the preschool and seen her lift Fiona up for a good-bye kiss, and it gave him a burst of confidence so that he dared call Matty Soule and take up the matter of the money he was owed for putting the new deck on Matty’s house. Darryl had expected Matty to comp
lain that the bill was inflated or the workmanship poor, but in fact Matty was sheepish, said he was sorry and would get it in the mail that day. The most ordinary, daily magic, and it would work as long as he kept Charlotte at the proper distance. Get too close and . . . well, look at Dev, who’d made it through rehab by reciting his mother’s recipe for biryani. Dev went home to his wife clean and sober, and stayed that way two years, until she left him. Six months later Dev was dead of an OD. Love was a life-or-death matter; that Darryl had come to understand.

  He waved to Bud and Westie as he drove down to the flats: a comradely half salute. As he saw the water stretching away toward the pinkened western sky, his heart moved with something more solid than joy. He belonged here: He knew the place by its smell, by the color of the water and angle of the sun. The seagulls were gliding over, back to their nests on Try Point; you could set your watch by them. He parked as far out as he dared—the tide was coming in. Another few months, just to fatten up after the winter, and his clams would be ready for sale. That would be a big step toward a down payment. . . . The rest of the summer could fill it out so he’d own land by winter, start to build next year.

  As he walked out to the claim, he could see something was different. The sand had shifted over the winter, of course—but he scored the rake along the top without finding the net. Deeper: Still no net, no clams. He knelt, and began to dig with both hands, at first gently, then like a dog, pulling up handfuls of muck. A foot deep, his hand closed on a shell—round and heavy. Yes. He pulled it up, let a little wave rinse over it—it flipped right open; it was full of mud. A few feet farther on, he dug two fingers in and found the piece of net he and Charlotte had left on the claim back in December. It had become a ghost net, moving with the water, icing over whenever it bobbed to the top until it rolled into a frigid tumbleweed and the withdrawing tide pulled it over his grant like a harrow, catching on the nets over the clam beds, tearing them up so the sand beneath them washed away. In summer the clams would have dug themselves farther down, but now, dormant, they floated up and were caught in the flux of the tide. What few were left had been drilled by moonsnails—every one had a neat hole, as if some ticket collector had come through with a paper punch.

  He took one corner of the net and yanked, unearthing it bit by bit. The best he could do was to get it out before it did any more harm. Thinking back, he could see himself there with Charlotte, unable to pull away so those last minutes, as the tide closed over the claim, were lost. By the time he noticed the net, they were balancing the overloaded canoe between them. Charlotte didn’t know the waters; if he’d let go of his end, the whole thing could have tipped and all of his oysters spilled into the bay. He knew her well enough to fall in love with her, to feel as if he were pulling bliss itself toward him when he kissed her; he just didn’t know her well enough to trust her with the damned canoe. So he had left the net in the water. If the cold hadn’t come so fast, it would likely have washed out with the tide, become another piece of flotsam in the vast continent of junk swirling in the sea. If . . . Oh, he could feel it now, how easy it would have been to take the few steps over to retrieve it. He’d been wrong to leave the net, wrong in the smallest way, and still it had come back to get him. Two years’ crop, two years’ labor, two years of reminding himself every day that if he worked patiently the results would confirm him as a solid, honest man. All of it was gone.

  Charlotte had kept away from the window. The house was a fishbowl with its big old windows set across from one another; it seemed that if Darryl looked up from the beach, he would see right through to her heart. And the loneliness, the yearning there . . . no one would want to see that. So she kept busy in the kitchen, making brownies with Fiona, thinking of the biryani that had saved Darryl’s friend’s soul. Almonds, raisins, jasmine rice—she could see how a man could find his way out of a wilderness by repeating such a recipe over and over. The thought of Darryl planting his oysters had the same effect on her. That he was out there working meant there was an orderly goodness in life, just as the crocus tips proved that spring, and hope, would always come around again. She would not have believed that he could lose half of all he’d worked for without her sensing it. When she heard his truck come up the driveway she steeled herself, knowing he wouldn’t stop—but she felt as if some thread of herself were caught on his button and she would unravel as he drove away.

  The sunset cast a pink light over everything, with blue shadows behind it. Some of the icebergs had been left on the beach and caught the colors in every hollow, like Monet’s haystacks. Once the men were gone, Charlotte took Fiona out to explore them.

  “It’s spring, it’s spring!” Fiona cried, climbing to the top of the highest one, twirling, sliding down the side. “Oh, Mom, I forgot there was anything but winter!”

  She ran along the beach, trying every iceberg, like Goldilocks—on a flat-topped one she made a snow angel; on another they drew a door and windows, then burrowed in until it collapsed around them. The tide was coming in; the first wave turned, then another, the sound of the world starting up again. Everything was possible. It was cowardly to let love lie around unused. She ought to find Darryl, insist on . . . well, something. A heron coasted down, landing at the edge of the Narvilles’ koi meditation pond, leaving with a long and undoubtedly very pricey goldfish wriggling in its bill.

  When they got inside the phone was ringing.

  “Andrea, hi!” Charlotte said. “How are you? How was the Georgia winter?”

  “Oh, it’s drab down here,” Andrea said. “No snow, none of the atmosphere you get up there. Charlotte, I’ve got a favor to ask you.”

  “Of course.” Favors were good—they implied trust, kindnesses given, bound to be returned. “What can I do?”

  “Listen, honey, can you keep Fiona off our part of the beach? I mean, really we don’t mind a child, and especially when we’re not even there.” She gave a dizzy, nervous little laugh. “But right now, with the decision just in, we’ve got to enforce it pretty strictly. You know what I mean—first it’s a child playing, then a family walking by on the beach; then suddenly they’re counting it as an easement and farming on our land!”

  The floor dropped from beneath Charlotte’s feet. “So, you won the case?”

  “Well, it’s pretty cut-and-dried,” Andrea said. “Truro’s just ten miles up the beach. It’s not likely they’d have a different rule for Wellfleet.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Those icebergs do look pretty tempting,” Andrea said, changing the subject.

  “What? How do you know?”

  “My security cam,” she said brightly.

  “Your security cam?”

  “Yeah, you know, the little cam that scans for burglars? We got one for the waterside too.” Charlotte tried to think of a reply and failed.

  “Don’t you have a cam?” Andrea asked. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have one down here.”

  “I don’t know anyone who does.”

  “Listen,” Andrea said, her velvet glove slipping, her voice harsh. “No one benefits more from this ruling than you do. The size of your property just doubled. I’d think you’d be grateful.”

  “I don’t want that land!” Charlotte said. “I have no use for a piece of tide bottom. I like seeing the oystermen out there.”

  “So I hear.”

  25

  A TOURIST

  The Driftwood Cabins were laid out along a grid of rutted dirt roads on the back side of Point Road, the side away from the water. It was better than the trailer park, or that’s what people said. At least these were houses, or miniature replicas of houses, with peaked roofs and real front porches. The driveways held pickup trucks whose ladder rails, like antlers, communicated their owners’ station in life. Charlotte could easily have walked there, but it felt so foreign, she was glad to be safe in the car. Some boys were kicking a soccer ball back and forth across the road and they stopped to let her through, their postures wary and menacing. The
second she passed, one kicked the ball straight at the car, and a cheer went up as it bounced off the bumper.

  The Very Honorable Truck, with its very modest ladder rails, sat beside the plainest of the cottages, and when Charlotte saw it, fear spilled through her. But then, fear was always spilling through her—if she allowed it to stop her she’d be living under the bed. She ought to tell Darryl about Andrea’s call. And she had to see him, to look into his eyes and be sure his feelings hadn’t changed. In the rearview mirror she saw the boys watching her, wondering—a strange car was news here. She pulled in behind the truck, got out, and, feeling almost too self-conscious to walk, went up the front steps. The storm door had no glass in it, so she reached through it to knock.

  No answer, but the truck was here and Darryl must be with it. She tried again. The dog in the next yard barked cholerically, wagging its tail at the same time. The world was backward, upside down, she was wrong to be here; everything was wrong. She kept knocking, for lack of a better plan.

  A woman popped her head out the next-door window. “Shut up, Digger,” she said wearily to the dog, and to Charlotte: “You looking for Darryl? I think he’s at Carrie’s.” She pointed across the road to one of the larger cabins, a buzzing hive with an old Chevy in the yard, oyster gear brimming out of the garage, a faded plastic playhouse lying on its side in the last little crust of snow. A diapered creature came flying out of the house toward Charlotte, followed by little Timmy, then Carrie.