The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  I hold the page up to the light to make out the minute handwriting. The overall effect of the penmanship is of some intricate embroidery pattern. Even though it’s small, each letter is precisely rendered—as if the writer had just taken a class in calligraphy—and I’m able, once I stop looking at it as decoration, to make out what it says.

  Today we went boating on the river with Augustus Penrose, son of the owner of the glassworks which Papa has bought. He drew these sketches of Clare. He said she was his very ideal of a character in a poem which he recited by heart and is called “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. I thought it a morbid poem and wasn’t sure I liked my sister being compared to a sorceress who lost her wits for love of a stranger, but Mr. Penrose just laughed and said it was obvious we were both sorceresses to have so enchanted him and made him lose his wits. Then he asked if Clare would consent to pose for a painting of The Lady of Shalott. I began to answer that we’d have to ask our father, but Clare—ever impetuous Clare!—was already accepting and having the man write down the directions to his studio. I was sure Papa would object but instead he said that because he was connected in business to the young man’s family he supposed it would be fine. He said that as long as I chaperoned Clare he didn’t see any harm in us going. Clare was ecstatic and we spent the rest of the day altering my good white muslin dress for her to wear because, as she says, “I have nothing suitable to lose my wits in!”

  At the last line I shiver despite the warm sun on my back. What a chilling presentiment of Clare Barovier’s future madness! I can’t help wondering if it was some hint of that madness that caused Augustus Penrose to see her as the perfect model for his Lady of Shalott.

  I turn to the next page to see if the entry is continued but find a new date—several days later—at the top of the page. I flip through the rest of the pages and find that they’re densely crammed with Eugenie’s small, precise handwriting—the only sketches are those on the first page. What I’ve got here are pages from Eugenie Penrose’s diary from the day she met Augustus Penrose through the first weeks of their acquaintance—courtship, actually, because even though this first entry gives no hint of it (she makes it sound as if Clare were the object of Penrose’s interest) I know from what I’ve read about the Penroses that they married only three months after they met and left almost immediately for America. The only journals that the college has, though, date from after the founding of the college. These pages—which I very nearly destroyed!—represent an incredible find for the college archives. I suppose I should be excited, but all I can think about is that the person who would have been most interested in Eugenie Penrose’s girlhood diary is dead.

  IN MY DREAM I HEAR SOMEONE COMING UP THE STEPS FROM THE RIVER. I THINK IT’S Neil—it’s always Neil—but when I open the door I see it’s Christine.

  “We have to talk,” she says. She’s wearing the same slim black sheath, leather jacket, and knee-high boots she wore to give her lecture.

  “Of course,” I say, following her out onto the roof. She sits down in the torn vinyl lawn chair and I start to drag the rusted metal chair toward her but she holds up a hand.

  “I need something to drink first.”

  So I go into the loft and retrieve a bottle of water from the fridge but when I look for glasses I see that they’re all dirty. Dozens of Ernesto’s long-stemmed goblets are bobbing in dirty dishwater.

  I hold one under the spigot, delicately sponging away the gray water, but just when I’ve gotten it clean the glass shatters in my hand. I fish another one out of the murky water but it, too, implodes under the lightest pressure from my fingertips. One after another, each glass crumples in my hands until I’ve gone through a dozen of Ernesto’s lovely goblets and the gray dishwater is tinged pink with my own blood.

  Finally I open the cabinet above the sink and take out two jelly glasses decorated with faded Disney characters: Ursula from The Little Mermaid and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. I fill the stubby glasses with sparkling water and take them out to the rooftop. Christine has let down her hair and I notice that she’s intertwined long green-and-white-striped ribbons through the damp locks. I hand her the Ursula glass and sit down next to her. She turns to me but just as she begins to talk we both hear someone knocking on the side door.

  “He must have followed me,” she says.

  I turn back to tell her that he can wait but already the dream is fading, the long green ribbons in her hair—no, not ribbons, but grass, long strands of the striped zebra grass that grows at the bottom of the Hudson—are melting like glass canes twisted in the furnace. I reach out to touch her arm and her skin shatters like Ernesto’s goblets. I find myself in my own bed in a tangle of clean laundry and inert greyhounds—Paolo nested in the crook of my knees, Francesca curled up at my ankles—listening to a pounding in my head.

  I lie perfectly still, eyes closed, willing myself back into the dream to hear what Christine had come to tell me, but though I can see her face it’s like an image on a videotape that’s been paused. It has no power to speak. The only thing I hear is the pounding—which I realize now is actually someone knocking at the side door.

  When I lift myself out of bed I see that the sky is a pale overcast lavender that could be dawn or dusk. I can’t remember when I went to sleep or what day it is. All I remember is that Christine is dead.

  I open the metal door a crack, half expecting to find one of the drowned apparitions of my dreams, but it’s only Kyle carrying a sack of groceries tucked under one arm and a bottle of wine in the other.

  “I didn’t know if you’d still feel up to dinner but I figured you could use the company,” he says. “Were you working downstairs?”

  “No, I was sleeping. I didn’t get much sleep last night. What time is it?”

  Kyle tries to turn the hand that’s wrapped around the grocery bag, but it’s obvious that he can’t see around the bag to the watch. It’s equally obvious that I should be stepping back to let him in, taking the bag, or at least the wine, out of his hands, and then moving forward to … what? Kiss him on the cheek? On the mouth? I’m as confused about what stage we are in as I am about the time and the day. For the last few weeks Kyle and I have been hovering on the edges of romantic attraction. We’ve brushed up against each other at crew matches, gotten drunk after Bea’s gone to bed, and once, after one of my lessons at the college pool, made out in the sports equipment closet. I think we both expected this to be the night we’d end up in bed.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “I completely forgot about dinner … the house is a mess and I didn’t get a chance to go shopping—”

  “Juno,” he cuts in, “your best friend just died. I’m not here to be entertained; I’m here to take care of you.”

  I meet his gaze and see nothing but innocent compassion there. I could be looking at Francesca or Paolo when they want to be taken for a walk. He’s wearing a Creedence Clearwater Revival T-shirt, and his dark, shoulder-length hair falls loosely forward as he leans toward me. A boy, I find myself thinking, even though he’s the same age as I am. It’s only because I had Bea so young that men—and women for that matter—my own age often seem so much younger.

  I take the bottle of wine from him and lean forward to press my cheek against his, catching as I do a sweet earthy smell that reminds me at first of the river until I recognize it as marijuana.

  “I got some organic mesclun at the farmer’s market,” he says, setting the grocery bag down on the kitchen counter, “and three kinds of wild mushrooms for soup. Have you ever had kombu?”

  I shake my head and start rummaging through the silverware drawer for a corkscrew. Of course I realized before this that Kyle smoked pot and it’s not as if I hadn’t indulged in plenty of illegal substances in college. It’s just that with Bea to raise I’ve tried to stay away from any drugs stronger than a glass of wine and the occasional Advil. How else, I’ve asked myself over the years, could I tell her with a straight face—literally—to “just say no”?
And given what happened to Bea’s father under the influence of drugs, I think it’s a pretty good idea for Bea to stay away from them.

  “It’s seaweed,” Kyle tells me when I find the corkscrew, “harvested off the coast of northern Japan and sun-dried right on the beach. I’m going to use it to make a dashi—a stock for the soup. It’s excellent for digestion and the immune system.” Kyle opens a plastic bag and pulls out something that looks like a dried plant stalk bent in half. He holds it up for me to inhale its sweet, low-tide smell.

  “You have to take care of yourself when you’re grieving, Juno,” he says, laying the flat, broad blade of seaweed into a bowl of water. “Christine was very important to you.”

  “I think if I hadn’t met Christine I would have spent my four years of college in the library or in my dorm room,” I say turning the screw in the cork. “After my mother died I retreated into this hole. Christine pulled me out of it. She’d lost a parent, too. Her father died when she was little and her mother’s always been a miserable person—shit, Christine’s mother. Detective Falco said he was notifying her, but I should call to find out what she’s doing about a funeral …”

  Kyle takes the corkscrew—which I hadn’t even realized I’d pulled out of the bottle—and folds my hand in both of his. “Take it one step at a time, Juno. The police probably won’t release the body for at least another week.”

  “Did Detective Falco tell you that when he questioned you this morning?”

  Kyle’s hands on mine feel suddenly cool and damp. He gives my hand a final squeeze and lets it go to reach for a knife. “He told you that he talked to me?” he asks, turning back to the cutting board and starting to chop the mushrooms.

  “Yes, but it’s not like he said you were a suspect or anything …”

  “A suspect!” His voice sounds surprised but he keeps chopping in the same, even rhythm. “A suspect in what? Don’t they think she killed herself?”

  “Did Falco tell you that?”

  “No, but I remember you told me that she was a little unstable—didn’t you say she had a lousy childhood and a drinking problem? And that she was on antidepressants?”

  What he says is perfectly true and no doubt I did tell him, over a few glasses of wine, all about Christine’s awful, near Dickensian, childhood—how the family worked in Briarwood and the only picnics they ever went on were with the patients and how no one understood why she wanted to go to college and study art history. I probably concluded that it was no wonder she ended up with a drinking problem and hadn’t been able to settle into a real relationship for years. I’m sure I told her story with compassion and real regret that things have been so hard for her but the thought, now, of dragging Christine’s problems out in front of a man I hardly know leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. It reminds me a little too much of the way Fay talked about Christine the other day in the sauna.

  “So what’s the difference between taking antidepressants and smoking pot? At least prescription drugs are legal.” The words are out of my mouth before I even know I thought them. In fact, I’m not sure I do think that prescription drugs are better than pot. Kyle has stopped chopping now, the silver blade poised over the pile of finely minced brown flesh.

  “Juno? Do you have a problem with me smoking? I mean, I knew you wanted to keep it hidden from Bea, but I thought you said you wouldn’t mind getting high after she left for her rafting trip.”

  Did I? It sounds like something I might have said after a few glasses of wine.

  “I’m not sure that doing anything illegal would be such a good idea with the police around …”

  “Exactly what illegal activities did you have in mind?”

  I’d only been thinking about the pot, but something in the way Kyle’s avoiding eye contact with me makes me wonder if there’s something else he’s not telling me. “I don’t know, Kyle,” I say, “is there something you want to tell me about?”

  Kyle turns to me slowly, the knife still in his hand. “That detective told you about what happened in Colorado, didn’t he?”

  “Detective Falco didn’t tell me anything, Kyle.” I look down at the point of the blade trembling in the air between us and he, following my gaze, lays the knife down on the counter. When I look back up at him I see tears standing in his eyes. “What happened in Colorado?”

  “It wasn’t my fault. There was an accident on a youth hostel rafting expedition I was leading and when the police came in a couple of the guides had some pot in their backpacks … it wasn’t like we were getting high with the kids or that had anything to do with the accident …”

  “What kind of accident?”

  Kyle sighs and runs a hand through his dark, shoulder-length hair. I notice when he pulls the hair back that there are silver strands mixed in with the black. “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew it would freak you out about Bea’s trip. A kid was killed. He capsized and hit a rock. He broke his neck.”

  “Shit, Kyle. How could you not tell me a thing like that?”

  “Yeah, well, I guess it’s a little like you not mentioning that your husband tried to drown you and Bea.”

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath to steady myself and instantly I’m on the river that day in the boat with Neil and Bea. We’ve rowed out to the middle of the river where the currents are most dangerous. World’s End, the Dutch called it, because of the confluence of currents that wreaked havoc on ship navigators. Neil loved going there. He said he could feel the spirits of shipwrecked sailors calling to him from the bottom of the river. He’d been up for days trying to finish a series of paintings for his first really big gallery showing. I’d been up, too, nursing eight-month-old Bea through whooping cough—Neil had refused to have her inoculated because he believed the vaccination program was a government plot to compromise our immune systems or control our dreams—I can’t remember which.

  He had become obsessed with his dreams. I remember that. Ever since I told him the story of Halcyone and Ceyx he’d been convinced we could visit each other in our dreams. Try, he’d whisper in my ear before I fell asleep each night, to visit me tonight and hold something in your hand—don’t tell me what—and I’ll tell you what you were holding in the morning. I’d go to sleep imagining that I held a feather, a rock, a blade of grass. A surprising number of times he guessed right in the morning, but the morning he took us out in the boat he said I’d come to him in his dream carrying a knife and that I’d slashed his paintings. But you didn’t even sleep last night, I’d pleaded with him.

  It’s that you don’t trust me anymore, he said, ignoring the truth of what I said. He asked me to come out with him in the boat. He said it would prove I trusted him. I pleaded that Bea was still too sick. I suggested we at least drop her off at my father’s house, but he said he had to know I trusted him with our child’s life. I knew that since Bea was born he’d felt like I had withdrawn from him, that I’d become too protective—too timid. I wasn’t the girl who’d scaled heights with him and rowed across the Hudson in a summer storm. And what about him, I’d wanted to scream, was he the same boy I’d sat next to in Dante class? The gentle artist who’d sketched my face and made me feel more beautiful than I ever imagined myself? The boy who’d recite the cantos to me in Italian while we made love? No, he wasn’t the same boy, but still I didn’t believe he’d hurt us.

  “Who told you about that?” I ask Kyle, my eyes still closed.

  “Bea told me. She said it was the reason you didn’t like to go out on the river.”

  I open my eyes and I’m looking down into a bowl filled with fat green slugs, swollen things smelling of brine and drowned bodies. Even when I realize it’s the seaweed, not slugs, I’m already gagging. Kyle snatches the bowl away, slopping poisonous green water on the counter. The dead sea smell rises up like a noxious gas as Kyle pours the bowl into the sink and the bloated seaweed slithers over the lip of the bowl like a live eel. I can feel the bile rising in my throat. It’s how Bea and I both smelled when the Coa
st Guard fished us out of the river—a brackish odor that lingered in our hair and on our skin for days and lingers still in my dreams.

  KYLE STAYS FOR ANOTHER HOUR OR SO AFTER THE SEAWEED INCIDENT. WHILE I HEAT up a can of Campbell’s tomato soup he makes us grilled cheese sandwiches. To his credit, he doesn’t say a word about preservatives or the evils of dairy. In return, I don’t ask him any more about the boy in Colorado, but he tells me anyway. How he knew the instant he saw the raft overturn that the boy had been killed—I was ten feet behind him and even over the roar of the rapids I heard the crack of his head against the rocks—but still he risked his own life diving into the water and dragging his body to the shore, where he performed CPR on him until the ambulance came.

  “Could the same thing have happened to Christine? Could she have hit her head on the stone wall when she capsized?”

  Kyle shakes his head. “I can’t see the impact being hard enough to kill her in a slow-moving creek like the Wicomico. Although I suppose it might have been hard enough to knock her out. Then—if she were alone—she might drown.”

  “Or if the person she went with was ahead of her at the time and didn’t see her capsize he—or she—might not get to her until it was too late.”

  Kyle looks up from his mug of soup and smiles. “Sorry, Juno, Falco already tried that trick on me—giving me a chance to confess that I was there. He even told me that they found a pill container in her pocket so I’d feel less guilty if I had been there. But I wasn’t. Besides, if I had been crazy enough to take her out on the river at night I’d have stayed behind and kept an eye on her the whole time. So unless you believe I deliberately killed your friend …”

  “I don’t, of course I don’t believe that, Kyle. Falco presented the same scenario to me. I guess he thinks it could have been me in the other kayak.”

  “It makes more sense. The other kayak was wider. It’d be the one you’d pick if you were going out on the river at night.”