by Rumaan Alam
“You can put them in this bag.” Clay thought the girl’s bookishness reflected well on them. “Archie, can you bring this bag?”
“I need to go to the bathroom.” Archie lingered in there before the mirror. He was wearing his lacrosse shirt, the one he’d cut the sleeves off because he wanted people to see his muscles, and he studied them, happy with what he saw.
“Hurry up,” Clay called to his son, the irritation that necessitated this relaxation.
“I’ve got lunch in there. And water. And the blanket and towels.” Amanda was pointing at bags, sure they’d forget something even so, best-laid plans.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” A little Christ under the breath, which was more a reflex than he realized. Archie took the bag his father had left by the sofa. It weighed nothing! He was so strong.
The family trooped outside, loaded their things, and buckled their bodies. The GPS churned, unable to locate itself, or them, or the rest of the world. Without much thinking about it, Clay found the road to the highway and the satellite recovered its hold on them and they drove under its protective gaze. The highway turned into a bridge that seemed to lead to nothing, that led to the end of America itself. They wound into the empty parking lot (it was early) and paid five dollars to a khaki-uniformed teen who seemed himself made of sand—golden curls, freckles, browned skin, teeth like little shells.
There was a tunnel from the lot to the shore that carried them past a park, flagpoles towering as redwoods, flags of many nations cracking in the ocean air.
“What’s this?” Archie, derisive even when he didn’t mean to be.
They stood in flip-flopped feet in a little canyon of concrete, and Amanda read the inscription. “It’s for the victims of Flight 800.” TWA, bound for Paris. Everyone had perished. You heard that rendered as souls, sometimes, which made it sound more grand or old-fashioned or sanctified. Amanda remembered—conspiracy theorists said it had been an American missile, but logic said it was mechanical failure. We pretend otherwise, but these things happen.
“Let’s go!” Rose tugged on the tote bag slung across her father’s shoulder.
It was hot but the wind was relentless, bringing in a chill from the void of the ocean. There was something Arctic in it, and who was to say that wasn’t literally the case. The world was vast but also small and governed by logic. Amanda struggled to spread the blanket, something she’d found on the internet, block-printed by illiterate Indian villagers. She placed a bag at each corner to weigh the thing down. The children shed their layers and bounded off like gazelles. Rose investigated the detritus washed up on the sand, shells and plastic cups and iridescent balloons that had celebrated proms and sweet sixteens miles away. Archie knelt in the sand some distance from their encampment, pretending not to stare at the lifeguards, hale girls, sun-lightened locks and red swimsuits.
Amanda had a novel she could barely follow, with a tiresome central metaphor involving birds. Clay had the kind of book he normally had, a slender and unclassifiable critique of the way we live now, the sort of thing it’s impossible to read near naked in the sun but important to have read, for his work.
His glance kept straying to the lifeguards. So did Amanda’s. How could they not? There was a metaphor less tiresome—what would stand between you and death at the hands of nature but beautiful youth, flat stomachs, nipples the size of quarters, swollen biceps, hairless legs, browned skin, dry hair, mouths perfected by orthodontia, unquestioning eyes behind cheap plastic sunglasses?
They ate turkey sandwiches and chips that kept breaking off in the pasty guacamole (a smaller portion without the acrid herb, for the doted-upon son), then watermelon, bracing and cold. Archie slept, and Rose read one of her graphic novels. Archie woke and goaded his father into the waves, which were terrifying. Amanda watched for sharks because she had heard there were sharks. What would one of those teenage lifeguards do if there were sharks?
It was pleasant, it was diverting, it was exhausting. The sun was not waning, but the wind was winning. “We should go.” Amanda packed their empty plastic containers back into the insulated bag she’d found in the kitchen. It was in precisely the spot where you’d store an insulated bag in your kitchen (a cabinet beneath the microwave).
Rose shivered, and her father wrapped her up in a towel just as he had when she’d been a toddler fresh from the bath. The family trudged back to their car, strangely defeated, and drove back across the bridge.
“There’s a Starbucks.” Amanda pressed her hand onto her husband’s right forearm, excited.
He pulled in to the lot, and Amanda went inside. Alee, away from that wind, the air was still hot. The shop was the same as all locations of a chain tend to be, but wasn’t that comforting? The signature colors, those dependable brown napkins—always a stack in the car for blowing winter noses or mopping up spills—the green plastic straws, the heavyset devotees paying seven dollars for cream-topped milkshakes in cups the size of athletic trophies. She ordered black coffees, though it was after three and it would keep her up late, or maybe it wouldn’t, because proximity to the ocean always made her so tired.
There was a desultory de-sanding of limbs, using the backyard hose. Archie sprayed the thing directly down the front of his suit, his balls shellacked with actual tiny shells, then figured that was good enough and dove into the pool. He rubbed his scalp and could feel sand being dislodged, drifting away into the water.
Amanda washed her feet and then went inside to shower. The house felt reassuringly familiar after fewer than twenty-four hours. She played a podcast on the computer—something to do with the mind, she barely paid attention to it—and shampooed her hair again, hating the effect of the salt water on it. She dressed and found Clay whistling as he rinsed the sandy Tupperware.
“I’ll make pasta,” Amanda said.
“The kids are in the pool. I’m going to run to the store and get some cereal for Archie.” He meant he’d run to the store, smoke a cigarette in the parking lot, go inside, wash his hands, come back with a hundred dollars’ worth of food. “They’re saying it might rain tomorrow.”
“You can almost feel it.” A promise in the air, or maybe it was a threat. She had brought her computer into the kitchen with her so she could keep listening to the podcast. She set it on the counter. “Get something sweet? Like . . . a pie. Get a pie. And maybe some more ice cream?” The night before, postcoital and woozy from the hot tub, they’d eaten an entire pint between the two of them. “Maybe some tomatoes. Another watermelon. Some berries. I don’t know, whatever looks good.”
He kissed her, an unfamiliar thing to do when running out on a simple errand, but sweet.
The window meant that she could watch the children as she did something else. She zested the lemon, dumped that into the softening butter, minced garlic and added that. She used the kitchen shears to hack at the parsley, which had a sharp and astonishing smell. She folded this all together into a thick paste. The hot pasta would dull the taste of the garlic.
She used the pot filler over the stove, helped herself to the kosher salt in the pantry, poured a glass of red wine. It made her stomach churn, red wine over black coffee. The water boiled. Her attention had drifted. Beyond the pool, through the woods at the property’s perimeter, Amanda saw a deer, then adjusted her eyes and saw two more, smaller. Mother and children! Wasn’t that fitting. The animals were cautious, nosing through the brush in search of—what did deer eat? Her ignorance embarrassed her.
She strained the cooked pasta, dropped the herbed butter into the nest of noodles, replaced the lid, and opened the glass door. The air had grown cooler. It would rain, or something would happen, and they would have to spend the next day inside the house. There were board games, there was the television, maybe they’d watch a movie, there was a glass canister of dried corn in the pantry, maybe they’d pop some, lie about all day.
“It’s time to come inside, guys.”
Archie and Rose were in the hot tub, pink as cooking lobsters.
&
nbsp; Amanda insisted the children bathe and banish that chlorine smell. She poured herself another glass of wine. Clay returned with a surprising number of paper bags.
“I went a little overboard.” He looked sheepish. “I thought it might rain. I don’t want to have to leave the house tomorrow.”
Amanda frowned because she felt she was supposed to. It wouldn’t ruin them to spend a little more than was usual on groceries. Or maybe it was the wine. “Fine, fine. Put those away and let’s eat?” She wasn’t sure she wasn’t slurring a little bit.
She laid the table. The children, redolent of marzipan (Dr. Bronner’s, in the green bottle), sat. They were the best kind of tired, docile, almost polite, no burping or name-calling. Archie even helped his father clear the table, and Amanda lay on the sofa beside Rose, her head in her child’s warm lap. She didn’t mean to sleep, but she did, full of wine and pasta and bored by the television’s prattle. Amanda was perplexed when she was roused twenty minutes on by an especially shrill commercial and Rose’s need for the bathroom. Her mouth was dry.
“Have a nice nap?” Clay was teasing, not amorous (he was still sated) but romantic—even better or rarer. They’d made a nice life for themselves, hadn’t they?
Amanda did the New York Times crossword on her phone—she was afraid of dementia, and felt this was preventative—and the time passed strangely, as it did when measured in minutes before the television. If the night before she’d been eager to look at her work and fuck her husband, tonight it felt important to linger on the sofa with her children, Archie dopey in his too-big hooded sweatshirt, Rose infantile, wrapped in the itchy woolen throw left on the sofa’s arm. Clay served bowls of ice cream, then collected the bowls, and the dishwasher ran with its reassuring gurgle, and Rose’s eyes looked blank and Archie yawned loudly, suddenly, so like a man, and Amanda sent the children to bed, telling them to brush their teeth but not standing sentry to verify that they did.
She yawned, was tired enough to go to bed, but knew somehow that if she moved, she would not fall asleep. Clay changed the channel, pausing a moment on Rachel Maddow and then switching to a thriller that neither of them were able to follow, detectives and their prey.
“Television is idiotic.” Clay turned it off. He’d rather play with his phone. He dropped some ice into a glass. “You want a drink?”
Amanda shook her head. “I’m done.”
She didn’t yet quite know which switch controlled which light. She flicked one, and the pool and the grounds beyond it were illuminated, pure white beams shot through the green branches overhead. She turned the light off, returning things to their black state, which seemed right, seemed natural.
“I need some water,” she said or thought, and made her way into the kitchen. She was filling one of the IKEA glasses when she heard a scratch, a footfall, a voice, something that felt odd or wrong. “Did you hear that?”
Clay mumbled; he wasn’t truly listening. He checked the little buttons on the side of his phone to make sure the sound was turned off. “It’s not me.”
“No.” She sipped her water. “It was something else.”
There it was again: shuffle, a voice, a quiet murmur, a presence. A disruption, a change. Something. This time Amanda was more certain. Her heart quickened. She felt sober, awake. She put her cup down on the marble counter, quietly—suddenly that seemed right, to move stealthily.
“I heard something.” She was whispering.
Such moments, Clay was called upon. He had to be the man. He didn’t mind it. Maybe he liked it. Maybe it made him feel necessary. From down the hall, he could almost hear Archie, snoring like a sleeping dog. “It’s probably just a deer in the front garden.”
“It’s something.” Amanda held up a hand to silence him. Her mouth was metallic with fear. “I know I heard something.”
There it was, undeniable: noise. A cough, a voice, a step, a hesitation, that uncategorizable animal knowledge that there’s another of the species nearby and the pause, pregnant, to see if they mean harm. There was a knock at the door. A knock at the door of this house, where no one knew they were, not even the global positioning system, this house near the ocean but also lost in farmland, this house of red bricks painted white, the very material the smartest little piggy chose because it would keep him safest. There was a knock at the door.
7
WHAT WERE THEY SUPPOSED TO DO?
Amanda stood, frozen, a prey’s instinct. Gather your thoughts. “Get a bat.” That old solution: violence.
“A bat?” Clay pictured the flying mammal. “A bat?” He understood, then, but where would he get a bat? When had he last held a bat? Did they even have a baseball bat at home, and if they did, had they brought it on vacation? No, but when had they decided to forsake that American diversion? In their foyer on Baltic Street they had a clutch of umbrellas of varying degrees of broken, an extra windshield scraper, Archie’s lacrosse stick, some of those circulars, never asked for, a sheaf of coupons in rainproof plastic that would never biodegrade. Well, lacrosse was from the Indians, maybe that was more all-American. On a console table, beneath a framed photograph of Coney Island, there was a brass object, an artful little torque, the kind of made-in-China geegaw meant to add character to hotel rooms or model apartments. He picked it up but found it weighed nothing. Besides, what would he do, wrap his fingers around it, strike some stranger in the head? He was a professor.
“I don’t know.” Her whisper was built for the stage. Surely whoever was on the other side of the door could hear her. “Who could it be?”
This was ridiculous. “I don’t know.” Clay put the little objet d’art back in its place. Art could not protect them.
There was another knock at the door. This time, a man’s voice. “I’m sorry. Hello?”
Clay could not imagine a killer could be so polite. “It’s nothing. I’ll get it.”
“No!” Amanda had this terrible flash of feeling, a premonition if the worst came to pass and passing paranoia if it did not. She did not like this.
“Let’s just calm down.” Maybe he was unconsciously channeling behaviors seen in films. He looked at his wife until she seemed to calm, like what tamers did with their lions, dominance and eye contact. He didn’t entirely believe in the act. “Get the phone. Just in case.” That was decisive and smart; he was proud of himself for having thought of it.
Amanda went into the kitchen. There was a desk, a cordless telephone, a 516 number. In her lifetime the cordless telephone had been both innovation and obsolete. They still had one at home, but no one ever used it. She picked it up. Should she press the button, dial the nine and then the one and wait?
Clay unbolted the lock and pulled open the door. What was he expecting?
The interrogatory light of the porch revealed a man, black, handsome, well proportioned though maybe a little short, in his sixties, with a warm smile. It was funny, how quickly the eye could register: benign, or harmless, or instantly reassuring. He wore a rumpled blazer, a loosened knit tie, a striped shirt, those brown pants every man over thirty-five wears. He held up his hands in a gesture that was either conciliatory or said Don’t shoot. By his age, black men were adept at this gesture.
“I’m so sorry to bother you.” He sounded as people rarely did when saying those words: sincere. He knew how to put on an act.
“Hello?” Clay said it as if he was answering a telephone. Opening a door to an unexpected visitor was without precedent. Urban life contained only the guy who came to deliver an Amazon box, and he had to buzz first. “Hi?”
“I’m so sorry to bother you.” The man’s voice was gravelly with the gravitas of a news anchor. This quality, he knew, made him sound more sincere.
Beside but just behind the man was a woman, also black, also of an indeterminate age, in boxy linen skirt and jacket. “We’re sorry,” she corrected, an italicized we; it was so practiced that she had to be his wife. “We didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Clay laughed as though the idea we
re ridiculous. Frightened, he was not frightened. She looked like the kind of woman you’d see in a television ad for an osteoporosis medication.
Amanda lingered between the foyer and the kitchen, behind a column, as if this provided some tactical advantage. She was not persuaded. An emergency call might be in order. People in ties could be criminals. She had not gone to lock the children’s bedroom doors; what kind of mother was she?
“Can I help you?” Was that what one said in such a circumstance? Clay was unclear.
The man cleared his throat. “We’re sorry to bother you.” A third time, an incantation. He went on. “I know it’s late. A knock at the door, way out here.” He had imagined how this would transpire. He had rehearsed his part.
Now the woman picked it up: “We couldn’t decide if we should knock at the front door or the side door.” She laughed to show how absurd this was. Her voice carried, implied long-ago elocution lessons. A trace of Hepburn that sounded like aristocracy. “I thought this might be less frightening—”
Clay protested too much. “Not frightening, just surprising.”
“Of course, of course.” The man had expected as much. “I said we should try the side door. It’s glass, so you could have seen us and known that we’re just—” He trailed off, a shrug to say We mean you no harm.
“I thought that might be stranger, though. Or frightening.” The woman tried to catch Clay’s eye.
Their near-unison seemed charming to the point of comedy, like Powell and Loy. Clay’s adrenaline fermented into annoyance. “Can we . . . help you?” He hadn’t even heard their car, if they had come by car, but how else would they have come?
Clay had said we, and so, telephone tight in her hand like a child’s favored plush toy, Amanda stepped into the foyer. They were probably lost motorists, or had a flat tire. Occam’s razor and all that. “Hi!” She forced in some cheer, as though she’d been waiting for them.
“Good evening.” The man wanted to underscore that he was a gentleman. That was part of the plan.