by Lucy Treloar
We crossed the marsh just before the tide spilled across the road.
After lunch Josh came and shored up the corner on one of the stone edging walls. He liked being around people, even people such as us at a pinch. I was making something new, a cartwheel attached to a stand, which resembled a twirling umbrella or a maypole. Things hanging from it flew around: people of sticks with feathered wings, dogs of driftwood, birds of wire, three infant pomegranates that had shrivelled dry.
‘I like this one,’ Alejandra said. ‘Only it’s not very nice hanging them by their heads, Kitty.’
‘It’s not, is it? That’s the way it is, though. The problem is what to call it. Time or Midsummer or The Circle? I’m not sure.’
‘No, no, no.’ She shook her head. Later, she looked up from her work and said, ‘Carnival Ride.’
‘Oh, perfect, macabre. Clever girl.’
She was pleased. She climbed on a stool to spin the wheel and all the small creatures threw out their limbs, obedient to the force. ‘Are you going to move the strings?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Skulls and skeletons, the brokenness of life, people and creatures strung up: what was I thinking? Sometimes it was as if the world had been postponed. I didn’t think of the future. Even then, as much as I cared for her, I didn’t think of her first.
Luis and Cat looked like they’d been in an accident when they returned; they could have been sitting on a roadside, dazed and waiting for help. Alejandra had thrown herself at Luis. It was late afternoon, almost evening by then, so they must have driven some way.
They didn’t mention the town they’d been to, and I don’t know if they’d stopped at Shipleys first when they got back, or come straight up to collect Alejandra. Cat probably wouldn’t have come for that alone. She might have come to talk. I brought them a drink and they sat on the porch, mute. Surmising the news was not good, I gave them some time and came out after a bit to ask how many might be staying for dinner. Cat’s face was still in the late sun. Luis’s leg bridged the gap between his seat and hers and he rocked her gently, watching her. The sight seemed to soothe him. Alejandra left Luis’s lap and clambered up with Cat. Cat opened her eyes and put an arm around her when she snuggled in close. They swung some more until Alejandra fell asleep. Girl sat at their feet looking out, her eyes narrowed against the glare. It’s hard for some people to let themselves be peaceful. Cat was a person like that, and it was strange to see her like this, especially after such a day. Luis glanced at me and knew I’d seen how he felt, and seemed to be pleading with me to say nothing, acknowledge nothing, pretend I’d seen nothing even to him, because there was nothing that could be said or done that would make things right. But this, the way he felt, was some solace for him.
Josh came to the gate. ‘Hey, you could have stopped by,’ he called. I put a finger to my lips to shush him. ‘So?’ Josh said when he’d climbed the stairs.
It wasn’t a long story they had to tell.
They’d arranged to meet Luis’s father in a park pavilion in a town about ninety miles north. It was close to the road, Cat said. She’d passed it before on other journeys. They were there early and parked at a nearby corner, where they had a good view of the pavilion, planning to emerge only when Luis’s father arrived. It was quiet. There was a young couple sitting on a bench. A person wearing a cap and dark glasses walked by and stood further up near a traffic light – waiting for someone, they thought.
Then a young man who might have come from a long way south, judging by his appearance, entered the park. When he passed the couple on the bench they stood and dragged him from the path. The man punched him hard – he knew what he was doing – and he folded to the ground. They pulled a wad of papers from his pocket. The woman looked up the path and called out (they heard the sound, but not the words) and the man who had been waiting by the lights ran down to join them, removed his glasses and stood over the man they’d hit. He might have said something. He might have kicked the man, or he might have stopped himself before he made contact.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Josh when they were done. ‘That’s it? It wasn’t Luis’s dad?’
‘The one they attacked? No, he was just a young guy. He got up and left,’ Luis said. ‘His papers were good, I guess.’
‘And you came home?’
‘Yeah, we did,’ Luis said.
‘Why not wait longer?’
Luis looked at Cat. He said, ‘My dad was never going to be there. But Cat and I knew him, the guy with the glasses. I saw him at the church after school a couple of times. I didn’t know his name, though.’
‘Who was he?’ Josh asked.
‘Your dad. It was your dad, Josh,’ Cat said.
Luis looked at him with sadness – that’s the closest I can come to describing it – as if he’d let him down, or maybe as if he understood what it might feel like to have a father let you down. Josh looked like he’d been hit. ‘My father? What? No fucking way would he— How do you know? Why would you even say that?’
Cat said, ‘I know your dad, Josh. I know him. And he’s in Homeland Security. It was weird.’
Josh said quietly, ‘I know he can be an asshole, but this isn’t even his level. He’s not a street guy.’
‘I told you it was weird,’ Cat said.
‘It was a trap,’ Luis said. ‘I don’t know why he’d want me, unless it was to get to my dad.’
‘You think you’ve been emailing with my father all this time?’
‘I guess it was him.’
‘Did he say anything about me?’
‘Why would he if he was pretending to be my dad?’
‘How’d he get your address?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘My father.’ Josh got up and leapt down the stairs and headed towards the marshes.
I watched his dwindling figure, and said, ‘I don’t understand. Could they have caught your father, Luis?’
‘I don’t know why they would want me and Alejandra if they had,’ Luis said. ‘I don’t think he’s around. I don’t think he ever was. He never used Alejandra’s name. Maybe he didn’t know it. I should have realised when he mentioned going south. The plan was always to go north. I was stupid. We got lucky today.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked Cat.
‘Reversed up the side street.’
‘Slowly,’ Luis added.
Josh came back and was quiet through dinner. He was shrunken. We couldn’t talk about it since Alejandra was there. It was the way Luis wanted it, but Alejandra knew something was going on. Her eyes moved between people’s faces, assessing, trying to fit things together. Later, when she’d gone to get something from her desk, I asked about the church, whether they might have passed on Luis’s contact details by mistake to someone claiming to be his dad.
‘Why would you think the church would be the good guys?’ Josh said.
Cat and Luis turned sharply at that, all apprehension.
Seeing my interest, Luis said, ‘A church guy gave us some trouble once.’
‘The fight,’ I said, thinking of the bruises and cuts Luis had when they first arrived.
‘You remembered that? Yeah. He doesn’t work for them now.’
While they waited to hear from the lawyers, Luis thought they were as safe on Wolfe as anywhere – safer, since they wouldn’t be stopped or searched. How would anyone find them on Wolfe, much less capture them? It was hard for Josh, realising what his father might do, and that we knew too.
I went to visit the prisoner later that week, as we’d arranged a few weeks before. I don’t recall ever before being relieved to leave Wolfe behind, but I was then. I passed graveyards for cars and boats and people, boats marooned in stubbled fields, the rusted hulks of vehicles nosing around forest edges. Factories lined the highways outside of towns. I passed a lot the size of an airfield filled
with shipping containers, with a sign out front: For All Your Home and Storage Needs! No surprise – I’d seen it all before and wondered. People lived there on tidy streets of containers that were dark grey or rusted to the colour of dried blood, or in the nicer streets prettied up with a hope-filled lick of paint. One had a garland of flowers painted each side of its metal door. Each had a narrow path leading to the door, small windows punched in, and an outdoor chair or two or a rocker, and even a pot that might have flowers in summer – geraniums or sunflowers, perhaps. Chimneys poked from the roof of a couple, and smoke oozed out, falling and drifting along the ground, the air was so heavy. In the middle of the metal village was a dirty white farmhouse office, the only thing left of its country past. The land can’t ever have been much – not enough of it to show a profit, or maybe the soil went sour, or maybe those who owned it got sick and lost their money. There are so many ways to be trapped and not many ways to break free. Behind it all were dead woods and silvered pines, stark and stiff, their branches beginning to snap off in the winds. Salt ruin. But it was better than a prison.
I felt almost free driving down the highway on my own. Even my thoughts had become noisy on Wolfe. I rarely felt at peace.
The prisoner and I talked about my garden, and what I should plant in it – he liked green beans, he said, and carrots, and these little white flowers his pop had grown up on that high roof – and about Girl, who he wished I could bring inside with me for a visit. ‘I always liked dogs,’ he said. I told him about my family – I used that word – who had been staying with me for a few months. I might have been more animated than usual, seeming further away. He made himself listen; he was being brave, though his eyes fell to his manacled hands, his fingers moving together. I didn’t realise that until the drive home. I wished I hadn’t mentioned them.
There was a sweetness in him that reminded me of Tobe. I hated that. I wanted to smash him in those moments. But I noticed threads, not between them, but within each of them. It seemed like the rooftop garden was where the prisoner felt safe and the place he wanted to see again, and that was like Tobe and Wolfe Island, like Luis too, just then. Sometimes it seemed as if Tobe’s own dark side had killed him, as it would the prisoner in the end. I asked the prisoner if he dreamed about it. A sick look came upon him then, a bad look, like his dreams could not be spoken.
‘Not about, you know – I mean your pop’s garden.’
He looked as if I’d released the noose about his neck. ‘I think about it,’ he said. ‘I remember little things, you know? My pop had a cookie in his pocket once. He gave it to me up there. It was nice of him. I think he might have liked me.’
‘Were those little white flowers Queen Anne’s lace?’ I asked.
‘Kind of tall and fluffy, it looked like one flower but it was lots of tiny flowers, kind of flat,’ he said.
‘Sounds like it was. The prettiest weed in the world. Or it might have been hemlock. Looks about the same – hemlock’s poisonous, though. It can kill you. I hope he told you to be careful in the wild.’
He dropped his eyes, embarrassed that he’d killed my son, embarrassed that the subject had come up – that in the end everything between us led to that – when we’d been getting along so well. He wished he’d thought of another flower. He might have wanted to spare me or he could have been thinking of his own mother’s sorrows. I thought about that. ‘I’ve never even been in the wild, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t know how to get there.’
‘There’s a patch of wild country not far from here,’ I said. ‘Not too big, but it gives you a feeling for it.’
But he’d come in a prison transport without a window to see from. He hadn’t seen the outside for years.
I left the prison then. Girl was waiting for me in the car, windows down. She could have jumped out if she wanted to. (I mention this in case anyone thinks I’m ignorant about dogs and cars and the dangers of overheating. I know it.) It helped to think about her waiting when I was speaking with this broken creature, who I actually hated as well as pitied.
‘They’re taking babies away,’ Luis said, and it was like ice water thrown over us all. ‘I heard this afternoon.’ In this way, when I returned from the prison visit that afternoon, I was plunged back into the complications of their lives.
Cat said, ‘What?’
Luis put a finger to his lips. Alejandra was on the other side of the garden and he didn’t want her to hear. He spoke softly then. ‘From their parents. To make them agree to things or to tell things, to scare people.’
‘From people who are running?’
‘And illegals. I don’t know if it’s everyone.’
She looked horrified, a subdued horror that had struck somewhere deep. ‘I didn’t think. Why didn’t I think of that? I shouldn’t be doing this. I won’t be able to do this.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘If I got caught, what might happen with the baby . . .’
I said, ‘Cat.’
‘Love makes you weak,’ she said, looking at neither of us.
‘Don’t say that,’ Luis said. The thought seemed to pain him terribly. ‘It makes things clear. You learn who you are. You know what matters.’
‘I loved before this and I could do what I should,’ Cat said.
‘Were any of those people threatened?’
After a pause she shook her head slowly. ‘Not before this.’ She hugged her belly.
‘That’s when you learn,’ he said.
‘What use am I now?’
‘This is not all you are. You can stay in touch, do the checking and arranging, and Josh can do the driving,’ Luis said.
‘That’s a shitty thing to ask him.’ Cat walked around a bit, rubbing her belly with her flattened fingers, pushing lightly against a small movement from within. ‘I will ask him.’
They hung around until I asked if they cared to stay for dinner – Josh too, if he was hungry.
‘He can find us if he wants to,’ Cat said carelessly.
To see Cat’s swelling belly in profile at the window – she was such a slender thing – was to know that we were drifting. I asked her for help in the kitchen so we could talk about the baby: where she’d have it and who would help. I was thinking of Doree, I told Cat, even if I wasn’t sure how to explain the situation to her. I thought telling Doree as much of the truth as possible would be the best approach, leaving out Josh and Alejandra and Luis.
‘Your friend Doree in town? I didn’t know she was a nurse.’
‘Why would you know? But yes – she still does a couple of shifts. I think she’d help out. You’re sure you don’t want to go home?’
She gave me a wild look at that, like I was about to take her baby and deliver it to hell.
‘I’m asking you, not telling them,’ I said.
But the truth was that the choices were Doree, returning to Claudie, or driving for miles to the nearest hospital when the time came and throwing herself on their mercy. Whether they would admit her I didn’t know. Everyone knew stories of people who’d died because they couldn’t pay.
It was a good evening. Alejandra told Luis about the old clothes in the attic, and when he said he didn’t believe it she dragged him and Cat up to see. Their laughter and conversation rang through the floors, and for the next while the girls were up and down in crinolines and frilled nightgowns and corsets, straw hats and panamas, bell-bottom jeans and parasols, waistcoats, caftans and dainty muslin jackets.
‘I told you, Luis. You look very nice,’ Alejandra said, admiring his pinstripe suit.
I found some music – some kind of waltz – and we began to dance. It was unfortunate that Josh arrived at that moment and saw us all. Girl ran at him and barked, and he hung at the door until Cat said, ‘Oh, come on, Josh, you just surprised her. Here, Girl,’ and Girl let him be.
It was too late for him to pick up the threa
d of the evening. He stayed when I thought he wouldn’t, backed into a corner of the sofa, arms crossed, unsmiling. His eyes tracked Cat as if he might otherwise lose sight of her – as if he suspected that was her intention. The attention he conferred on her had always seemed like a form of self-regard: how fortunate she was to have captured his eye; how special she must be to deserve it. And now her patience and maybe her feelings were wearing thin. What was wrong with her? his manner seemed to say. Cat became louder, gayer. It seemed half taunt to me, or as if she was caught and could not quite break free. Alejandra – tired, I supposed – subsided to a chair in a distant corner of the room. Finally, Cat took pity on Josh and led him away. Alejandra asked if she could stay the night, which Luis didn’t mind, so I made up Claudie’s old bed and Alejandra sat up in it like a lady in an old white nightgown, all pintucks and frills, a lovely thing. Girl jumped up, soft and heavy, and sat on her feet. Alejandra’s eyes shone. When I went downstairs to bank the fire and put things to rights, Luis had fallen asleep on the sofa, a boy again. I found a warm quilt and laid it over him and left him there.
In the morning over coffee Luis told me that the authorities had taken Selma away from their mother. No one knew where she was. He didn’t want Cat or Alejandra to know. He pressed his fingers against his eyes. His shoulders were convulsing and a terrible sound came from his throat.
Later, I watched as Josh, Cat alongside, brought the boat into harbour, slow and careful, three or four times, until he was ready to do it solo. He sped out on the water so it flew away on either side, suddenly free, and harnessing his high spirits he turned in a wide loop and came back slowly, finally berthing the boat. On the dock he sort of shook himself into place, letting the tension of it go, and flung his arms around Cat and spun her so her legs flew out behind. That was the last time I saw that sort of thing between them. He thought she was coming back to him. He couldn’t see that she had cut him loose.
Chapter 10
Summer