Emma nods, watches Mel drop the cards in the out-of-town mailbox outside.
“Now what?” Emma asks.
“Now we wait for something wonderful to happen,” Mel says.
“NINE,” EMMA WHISPERS ONCE they’re back at home, Mel already halfway to the kitchen where Emma’s mom is making the girls their favorite: grilled cheese and bologna sandwiches. Mel says bologna is made from the lips and buttholes of pigs, which is totally gross, but makes eating it kind of like a double-dog-dare, which is why it’s their favorite.
Emma lingers in the front hall, stares into the great unblinking eye of the moose, and realizes for the first time (how could she never have noticed it before?) that Francis’s eye, the iris a rich brown flecked with sparkling gold, is exactly like Danner’s. Then, she’s sure she sees it: the lid closing for a mere fraction of a second, the moose giving her the tiniest of winks.
Chapter 2
“LOOK, DADDY, I’M A frog!"
Dog paddle. Frog kick. Splash. Legs bent. Extended. Pretzel-thin limbs. Her face goes under. Henry holds his breath too. His heart beats double time in his chest. His breath goes whistley. He knows she’ll drown. He’s seen it in his nightmares a thousand times.
Since summer vacation started ten days ago, Emma’s been in the pool every day, sometimes with Mel, which he can’t bear. Too much horseplay. They pull each other under. Pretend to drown. He yells at them and they yell back, laugh, call him the Fuddy Duddy Daddy. Mel says he needs to Take a chill pill, and Emma only laughs harder at that, which makes his chest ache.
Emma swims to the side of the pool, touches the white cement wall, bobs up, smiling, blond hair slicked back. She has Tess’s small, elfish nose and Henry’s deep brown eyes.
“Dad! Did you see me? I’m a frog!”
He lets himself breathe. Bites his tongue to keep from saying the words: Are not. Now get the hell out of the water.
His jaw hurts from keeping it clenched tight. He opens it wide, like he’s yawning, trying to get the muscles to relax.
He watches Emma go under, holding her breath, her lime green bathing suit shimmering through the water. She has a special waterproof watch she uses to time herself. Tess gave it to her on her birthday. He gave her a camera. A nice one. Digital. For taking pictures on land. Safe old solid ground.
Emma pops up, gasping, her eyes bright red from chlorine. “One minute, nine seconds, Dad!”
He gives her a smile, nods wearily. “You’re the champ,” he says. “Where are your goggles?”
But she’s already underwater again and doesn’t hear him.
She starts doing laps. Nine times back and forth across the pool, touching the edge, counting out loud.
He should have filled in the pool when his father died. Put in a tennis court or a greenhouse for Tess. Anything but this. He knows one day his daughter will drown. Feels it in his bones. In his shaking muscles each time she jumps in. Swan dive. Belly flop. Sinking down, down, nearly to the bottom while he gnaws the insides of his cheeks like a desperate animal, until he tastes blood.
In his dreams she’s there in the water, reaching for him, calling, Daddy! as she goes under, sinking down, down, down.
HENRY LOOKS MUCH THE same as he did when he graduated from college. Same close-to-the-skull haircut, same way of walking with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Only he wears chinos these days more than ripped jeans. The scruffy beard is gone. And there are faint wrinkles around his eyes. He’s still very boyish. Fidgety. A stranger would look at him and call him handsome. Would say he was a lucky man with a beautiful wife and daughter, a successful business, a swimming pool. A stranger would look at him and think Henry would be a fool not to be in love with his life.
But a stranger wouldn’t know that Henry actually lives in a converted barn out back beyond the pool and hasn’t slept in bed with his wife for nearly a year. And as far as sleeping with his wife in the conjugal sense, it had been a year and a half. Sex had become increasingly unsatisfying and more of a trial than anything else. Tess put more of an effort into reviving it than he did. She bought books, sensual massage oils (including one that was supposed to be arousingly warming but caused an allergic reaction, burning his penis), but in the end, he just didn’t feel all that interested. Passion, Henry told himself, was for young lovers, poets and artists. None of which he was or would be ever again.
But a stranger would not know any of this. They would have no idea that Henry sees every part of his life as a miserable failure. True, he loves Emma profoundly, painfully—yet surely he is failing her too.
Fuddy Duddy Daddy. Take a chill pill.
Fuck.
Henry chews the inside of his cheeks. Feels a headache coming on. It always starts with a little tickle just behind his eye. Then the tickle turns to a pinprick and Henry imagines his skull, like the body of a pinhole camera: that little pinprick lets in the pain and magnifies it; projects it onto the wall of his skull where it vibrates until even his jaw and teeth are sore. He carries aspirin around in his pocket the way some people carry breath mints. He shakes the bottle with his fingers, hears it rattle. There’s comfort in that. He pulls it out, pries off the lid, lets three tablets fall into his open palm, tosses them into his mouth and chews. The aspirin burns the cuts on the inside of his cheeks. Eats away at the exposed flesh there—wounds that never heal.
AT FIRST, HE’D MADE Emma wear a bright orange life jacket. Then water wings. Eventually, Tess argued that Emma was too old, too strong a swimmer, that the flotation devices did more harm than good. Into the garage they went, any hope of saving his daughter piled up with the mildewed camping gear and bald tires.
Henry doesn’t even own swimming trunks. Doesn’t take baths, just three-minute showers. Lather, rinse, out. Tess calls it a phobia.
“Survival instinct,” Henry says. “We were not born with fins.”
Sometimes, though neither of them says it, when they look out at the pool, they remember the dark water of the lake.
Tess remembers out loud what a good swimmer Henry used to be. How he and Suz would race out to the rocks from their beach at the lake. They’d have contests to see who could go farthest underwater, who could hold their breath longest. Suz usually won but Tess suspected that Henry let her.
“You used to love the water,” Tess says, shaking her head mournfully.
Secretly, Henry now wonders if he’ll have the courage to save his daughter when the time comes. In his nightmares, his feet are concrete blocks and he has no hands. When he dives in to save her, he goes straight to the bottom, trying to picture Tess’s face when she finds them both there—waterlogged on the cement floor of the pool—and he’s sorry he won’t be able to come back to life for an instant to deliver his final words, sound traveling up in bubbles escaping his blue lips: I told you so.
EMMA’S TOWELING OFF WHEN the phone rings. The sliding glass doors leading from the patio to the kitchen are open, and he hears it through the screen. Tess will never hear the phone in the basement, iPod buds in her ears as she works out.
“Stay out of the pool,” he tells Emma. She just rolls her eyes. He stops, rolls his own back at her, which gets a laugh. He jogs into the house, through the sliding screen door, picks up the phone just before the answering machine kicks in. Technically, this phone is now Tess and Emma’s, although there is still an extension in the barn. When the office can’t reach him on his line in the apartment side of the barn, they call the other house line. People at work have no idea he lives apart from his wife and daughter—he tells them the first line is for his workshop and to always try there before calling the home number. Somehow, his entire life has come to be about deceit.
“Hello,” he stammers, out of breath.
“Is this Henry? Henry DeForge?” A woman’s voice. Young. The words carefully enunciated and crisp as pressed linen.
“Yes.” None other. The Fuddy Duddy Daddy himself.
“My name is Samantha Styles.”
Henry draws a bla
nk. A client? He doesn’t think so. But there’s something familiar about the name. Something that tells him he should recognize it. He searches his brain, but the headache is coming on strong now and not leaving room for much else.
“Yes?” he says, not willing to give away that he has no idea who she is. He just wants to get rid of her and take some more aspirin. Or maybe he’ll head for the medicine cabinet and steal one of Tess’s codeine tablets. She’s got some old Percocet in there too. That might take the edge off.
“I believe you were a friend of my brother, Spencer?”
Henry feels the pain in his eye go off like a firework, blossoming into the rest of his face.
“How did you get this number?” he asks.
“I found it in an old address book of Spencer’s. My brother…” Her voice falters. “Spencer killed himself two days ago.” The words come fast, a nearly inaudible blur, no longer careful and crisp.
Henry falls back against the wall, covers with the sweaty palm of his hand the eye that feels as if it has an ice pick going into it. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs into the plastic phone. Really, he’s more terrified than sorry. He hasn’t thought of Spencer Styles in ages. He just put a wall around that part of his brain. Caged the Spencer memories in. Or, more appropriately, tied them up.
He remembers the feel of the rope in his hands—rough, un-yielding hemp—and Suz’s voice, Tighter, Henry. Tie it tighter.
He blinks the memory away. Mustn’t start down that path. No sir-ee.
“He didn’t leave a note,” Samantha Styles tells him. “But he was found with a postcard from Vermont. All it says is, ‘Dismantlement Equals Freedom’ and…” She pauses, and he imagines her peering at the postcard to read it carefully. “And ‘In order to understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.’ Does that mean anything to you, Henry?”
Oh Jesus. Does it ever.
“Not a thing.” His voice is just above a whisper. He’s pressing his hand into his eye, trying to quell the pain as he wonders why Spencer would have kept an old postcard and why, in God’s name, he was holding it when he offed himself. It’s been ten years.
“The postmark says that it was sent from Vermont last week,” she tells him.
“Last week?” Impossible. The only remaining members of the Dismantlers in Vermont are he and Tess. It must be a mistake. A card lost in the mail all these years. That kind of thing happened now and then, didn’t it?
Shit, Henry thinks. Suz would have loved this. He actually smiles at the thought of it. Can’t help himself.
“My father’s hired a man, a private investigator, to look into Spencer’s death. Whatever the words on the postcard mean, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He’s planning a trip out to Vermont. I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you.”
The smile turns back into a grimace of pain. Suz would not love this part.
Fuck. If some private investigator shows up and starts sniffing around…
“I don’t know how much help I’ll be.” Henry hears the words leave his mouth, but he’s hardly aware of having formed them. He’s down on his knees now. The lines of grout in the tiled floor are wavering, making the floor seem to ripple. The light is impossibly bright. His mouth has the salty iron taste of blood.
“The memorial service is next week,” she says. “Here in Chicago. It would be great if you could make it.”
“I’m afraid I can’t get away. I run a painting business. This is our busy season.”
There’s a long pause. He resists the urge to just hang up. Get rid of this woman the quickest way he can.
“You know,” she says, “I don’t think Spencer had many friends after college. Not like the friends he had then. It would mean a lot if you could come.”
Tighter, Suz said. Tie it tighter. By then Spencer had given up fighting.
Henry’s palming his eyeball, trying to keep it from popping out from the pain, the pressure of the explosion happening inside his head. He listens as Samantha Styles rattles off the address, date, and time of the memorial service, pretends to write it down, just in case he’s able to get away. He hangs up just in time to get to the sink and throw up. There’s blood in his vomit from his bleeding cheek. He runs water, turns on the garbage disposal. The Electric Pig, Emma calls it. He peeks out the window. She’s lying down in a chair beside the pool, her skin streaked ghostly white from the sunblock she’s applied. Good girl.
He takes the stairs to the basement slowly, gripping the rail, his legs rubbery. He hears the sound of Tess’s gloves on the bag, the rattle of the chains. Her grunts, gasps, heavy breathing. It’s incredibly sexy, the boxing. Sometimes when he’s alone in his bed at night he plays little movies in his head of Tess boxing. In his fantasies, he’s holding the bag, feeling the force of each punch until he can’t take any more, then she guides him to the floor, he slides her shorts down and she climbs on top of him, her padded gloves pushing down on his shoulders as she rises and falls with him inside her. His fantasy sex life is much more exciting, more vivid than the real thing had ever been.
It was her idea that he move out of the house last April.
“It’s not working,” she said. “I’m tired of just settling.”
Her decision wasn’t based on any one thing, rather the accumulated years of struggling, just getting by. One day she woke up and decided she’d had enough.
“Don’t you ever want more, Henry?”
“No,” he’d told her.
She shook her head mournfully. “You used to.”
“But I love you,” Henry said. He’d been saying those three words for so long. They were the three magic words that were always supposed to make everything better.
And it wasn’t a lie. He did love her. Maybe it hadn’t ever been this bright, passionate thing that she imagined it should be, but it was solid. It had a strong foundation. He firmly believed that he and Tess were bound in some deep way by the things they’d shared. They were meant for each other. No one else would have them. No one else would ever understand who they each truly were, where they’d been. When he looked at Tess, he saw all of her: the college student, the Compassionate Dismantler, the mother, the artist, and now, the boxer. How could he help but love someone he saw so completely?
And they’d been happy together, hadn’t they? It was true that their marriage hadn’t been picture perfect every moment, but it was good, it was fine. It was enough. Or it should have been. But Tess always seemed to want more; that ever elusive more that Henry could never manage to get his head around.
“I love you,” he repeated again. A mantra. An incantation.
She shook her head. “I’ll never be her, Henry. And I know that every morning, you wake up from your dreams, open your eyes, and some part of you is always a little disappointed. Isn’t that right?”
He packed his clothes and moved into the barn that night. All his father’s old widower furniture was still there: the dusty daybed, the small table and desk.
Only later, tossing and turning under his father’s duck-decoy-print sheets, did he realize he should have said something more to her (something along the lines of But you’re real, you’re alive); he should have put up a fight. But by then, it seemed too late.
HE GETS TO THE bottom of the stairs and turns to the left, there she is, her back to him, pounding the shit out of the hanging bag under a flickering fluorescent light. She’s a small-framed woman. Barely five feet tall and ninety-five pounds, nearly all of it muscle. She’s wearing a sports bra and running shorts. Her body is soaked with sweat. It flies from her closely cropped brown hair as she lunges at the bag, going in for the full assault, grunting with the effort of it.
Henry circles around his dancing, punching wife so that he’s in her line of sight. She gives a surprised little shriek.
“Jesus, Henry! I had no idea you were there!”
He smiles apologetically. He sees her tremble a little and imagines being able to lay a reassuring hand on her arm, say, “Sorry, love,” maybe ev
en take her in his arms. He’d like that. To take her in his arms again. Feel her damp body against him, the heat radiating, warming him in the deepest way.
In the early years of their marriage, when they slept together, she fit so neatly, so perfectly against him, filling all his empty spaces. And she was always warm, even on the coldest winter nights when she’d shriek at the feel of his frozen hands and feet on her bare skin.
She’d take his hands, tuck them under her body, then, once they were no longer painfully cold, she’d guide them to her warmest places, and soon, he’d be hot, sweating, throwing the covers off.
He clears his throat. “Didn’t mean to startle you. I just got a phone call.”
She uses her teeth to un-Velcro the thick boxing glove, pulls it off, then removes the other. Underneath, her hands are wrapped in what looks to Henry like black bandages for extra support and protection. Once the gloves are off, she removes the earbuds. He can hear the music thumping out of them. One of the snarling women Tess listens to when she exercises.
“From whom?” she asks, reaching for a towel to mop the sweat off her face. Tess looks worried, her damp brow creased. She knows he wouldn’t have interrupted her if it wasn’t important.
Henry closes his left eye to keep the pain at bay.
“Another headache?” she asks, her voice soft.
She used to take her thumb and rub this spot just under his eyebrow. She’d start out soft, then press hard against the ridge of bone, the pain almost excruciating, and just when he thought he couldn’t stand it anymore, she’d stop and the headache would be gone.
He nods, then, one eyed, he tells her about the phone call from Spencer’s sister: Spencer’s suicide, the postcard, the private investigator coming to Vermont.
“If the truth comes out…,” he starts to say, looking at her through one eye, Cyclops eye.
Tess nods. Her shoulders slouch, her knees bend, her head drops down, and she closes her eyes tight, as if she’s making a wish.
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