Float (16 page)

“He’ll go through Seacrest’s, all right, right over me. Our contract says that if I die before I pay off the loan, he gets the factory. You’ve made
it
more valuable to him and
me
more expendable.”

Slocum stroked his mustache as he chewed on this information. “Well, that was a silly thing to sign, wasn’t it?”

“I was a desperate man.”

“And you’re not now?”

Duncan turned to go, and Slocum grabbed him by the arm.

“Duncan, I’m sorry. Osbert was going to either sue me or kill me over the jellyfish soup until Annuncia convinced him he could profit by it instead. Wouldn’t you rather have me alive? Duncan? Buddy?”

“
Annuncia,
”
whispered Duncan. He had showed her the photo that Beaky had slipped into his pocket a few days ago in the hopes that she would stop working with Osbert, that she’d see him for what he was, a thug. But no. She just told Duncan to be more careful about disposing of birds in the future and walked away. This could not go on any longer. If she insisted on handing Seacrest’s to Osbert, she would have to find a way to do it outside of the company, not in. He’d waited too long as it was. He’d waited too long for a great many
things.

Duncan stood motionless in the darkened dining room where he’d gone to escape the rising flood of Slocum’s apologies. He was in no mood, and—as his mother liked to say—this wasn’t the time. Slocum’s culinary blowout was due to take place in just a few hours. He dialed Annuncia’s number and left a message for her to call him. He wondered if she and Osbert were having an affair, love being the only force he could think of that would make Annuncia betray Duncan as she had. She’d been like a mother to him all these years, and it had come to this. She’d become as unpredictable as his own mother.

He looked around. He still had to get the place presentable for Cora. It was time to win her over, especially if he had a competitor for her affections out there. What with Annuncia and Slocum conspiring to make him vulnerable for extinction, it was time to set one thing right in his life before it
was
over.

Using a saddle-seated captain’s chair, he propped open a hall door to air the room out. His family usually ate standing up wherever hunger struck them, so the dining room was rarely used and smelled stale, like a ship’s hold. It was at the exact center of the house, a room left over from the badly conceived octagonal design, and because of this it had no windows. But what could have been a dungeon had been transformed into a fantasy when one relative or another had the walls paneled to bow out like a ship, then had a row of small, round recessed fixtures installed to mimic daylight coming in through oar-holes in a galley. He took off his shoes and, taking care to not pop out too much more of the inlaid wood on the marquetry, he climbed up on the tabletop to turn on the Venetian chandelier. Every crease and curl of the blown-glass light was filled with dust, and half the bulbs were out, but when he pulled the cord, the shells and coral arms glittered like phosphorescence on the evening tide.

Also reminiscent of the sea, in the worst possible way, was the seaweed collection that hung below the oar lights, dozens of framed and mounted specimens, labeled, dated, and signed by generations of Tarbells, like a family album. He was familiar with a great-great-aunt he might not otherwise had heard of because she had left behind
Toothed wrack (fucus serratus) Binny Tarbell, August 12, 1890.
He knew Cousin Tat by
Brown Algae (Padina pavonia),
Tatiana Tarbell, September 2, 1948,
and long-haired Uncle Fergot, who was only briefly married into the family before disappearing into Canada, immortalized with
Green laver (Ulva latissima)
Fergot P. Decker, April 29, 1967.
He removed the souvenir of his own youth from the wall,
Bladderwrack (fucus vesiculosus) Duncan Leland, July 1, 1987
. He’d been thirteen years old, soon to leave for boarding school, when he’d collected that seaweed off the beach with his father. He remembered the day. The two of them side by side, looking for just the right piece of seaweed to frame. Duncan had slipped on a wet rock and gashed his knee. Rather than tend to the wound, his father just sent him to rinse it off with seawater, which healed most any injury but stung like a serpent. “The joy you get out of life is tied to the amount of pain you’re willing to bear,” his father had said in response to his son’s unchecked cries. Duncan had been painfully aware of his childhood coming to an end that day.

As Duncan held the frame in his hands, he became wistful to have a child to call his own. And yet, how in all good conscience could he perpetuate his family’s mental infirmities? Cora accused him of being paranoid, but didn’t his paranoia just prove his point? He wondered if she would agree to an anonymous sperm donor. Then they could have their baby and their marriage, and if he was offed by Osbert, oh, well, only Cora and the fertility clinic would know it wasn’t his biological child.

First things first. The entire herbarium had to go. “Out to the porch, the stinky lot of you,” he announced. He’d ask his mother if he could give them a permanent home in Seacrest’s lobby—while he still had a lobby—where displaying seaweed varieties made at least a little sense. He gathered the pictures in a box and carried them out along a groined corridor to the porch, where the wind almost knocked them out of his arms. He stowed the frames securely behind a garden bench and hose, then braced himself against the wall to watch the storm coming in. The sea was troubled and noisy as the tide fought the wind, creating crests that shimmered white against the iron-green water. Seahorses, his father used to call them. Hundreds of gulls struggled to make land with wings outstretched, suspended in the wind as upright as angels. There were still a few restless yachts in the Boat Club basin, bows facing the wind and yanking at their mooring lines like nervous fillies, halyards slapping against the rigging, the wind whistling through their metal masts.
L’ark
, with her solid mast of wood, was still out there, too. If Judson couldn’t get her pulled that afternoon, he’d better motor her out of the harbor and let her ride out the storm in the relative safety of the open water. It would take guts to do it, but if he loved her, it was what had to be done.

Duncan tested the ropes holding down the lawn furniture so that the chairs wouldn’t go flying around like wooden missiles. Attached to the porch rails out back was a sun-bleached ship’s wheel, where his mother often stood pretending to steer a yacht, but it was now spinning dangerously in the wind. He hadn’t put his shoes back on from standing on the table, so he didn’t want to climb over the splintery furniture in his bare feet to lash the wheel to the rail. He’d wait. The wheel was right outside the library window, and since he had to go there for the guest book anyway, he’d secure it then. As he turned to go back inside, he thought he saw a small boat, like a dory, rise in the waves, then drop out of sight. He stood still for a minute to see if it would reappear, then decided it was a trick of the eye.

~

Nod sat in the green-leather wing chair in the library, hunched over the laptop on the desk in front of him, and did not look up when Duncan entered.

“Do you know where the guest book is?” Duncan asked as he looked around the cluttered mess, seeing the room through Cora’s eyes. It was clearly the home of deeply troubled souls, but as long as he lived there, too, he could not point fingers.

“It’s right there,” said Nod, still not looking up or indicating in any way what
right there
could possibly mean. Duncan began to sort through stacks of withered books in red morocco bindings and titles of gold. With a smile, he ran his hand across Great-Uncle Abington’s “curious” books, as the family called his collection of nineteenth-century European pornography, chaste etchings of
grandes horizontales.
The books had probably not been touched since he and Nod were boys, and Duncan would not have been surprised to find mice nests instead of pages in between the covers after all this time. But he could not afford to linger in a happier past. Failing to find the guest book where it should be, he began to rummage through the shelves and counters, where crystal decanters of mulberry wine hid behind dusty volumes and broken knickknacks. He opened a drawer and found sheaves of documents going back to colonial land grants, all bearing the round red stains of glasses. On a side table, hidden among sea fans brought back as souvenirs by old family mariners, was the cast of a coelacanth he’d bought at a seafood conference. The coelacanth was a prehistoric fish once thought to be extinct but discovered to be still living in the modern ocean. It seemed somehow emblematic of his family, and he’d given it to his mother at Christmas.

As he worked his way around the room, he paused at a framed photo of his father at the tiller. He realized he did not even own a picture of his father and wondered why that was. Maybe he was still angry with him for dying.

“Where’d
that
thought come from?” he said, though he had not meant to say it out loud.

“What?” asked Nod.

“Nothing.” Duncan slipped the photo into his pocket to have it copied.

“We’d better cancel the party,” Nod said as he cleared his throat. “Have a look at this NOAA weather map. Mom’s gone upstairs to double-check all the instruments.”

“We’re not canceling anything,” said Duncan. “I need to see Cora.”

Nod looked up at him and blinked rapidly. “You need a party to see her? Just get in the car and go.”

Duncan was annoyed at the question. It was his job to point out irrational behavior to his family, not the other way around. “I’m giving us time to process.”

“Process?” Nod turned back to his computer screen. “Sounds like working a load of fish through a conveyor belt.”

“I didn’t know you were such an expert on relationships,” Duncan said, intending a sharp poke at Nod’s isolated life. But if Nod perceived any insult, he didn’t show it. He looked up at the coffered ceiling in deep thought and then put his hands in his lap and spoke.

“I am an expert. There are many relationships to consider on the water, all more elemental than some silly marriage. In a boat, I’m not in a struggle with a mere mortal like a wife, but with Nature herself. Unlike marriage, a relationship with the water expands your horizons instead of shrinking it. It’s both unknowable and changing, simultaneously. The trouble with you, dear brother, is that you are impatient with the unknown, when that’s the most exciting thing there is.”

“I hope all that excitement compensates for never winning a race,” said Duncan, surprised not just by Nod’s strange outburst but by his own nastiness.

Nod smiled his odd one-sided smile. “I’m not racing against the others, I’m racing against myself, so I always win. Every race takes me one step closer to understanding the mystery of my soul, making me feel whole. It cultivates patience and endurance under adversity and keeps alive my fires of hope, just like any good religion. More important, it’s taught me how to steer around all the useless garbage life throws at me.” Nod looked right at him. “It wouldn’t kill you to try it. As far as I can tell, you’ve been clinging to an anchor in the middle of the sea.”

Duncan was stunned to silence. He’d never heard so many words from Nod in his life, and certainly never ones pulled up from such depth. He softened his voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What anchor?”

“Your ego. You want to win this fight you’ve been having with Cora, at any cost. Even if it means living here again.” He looked around him and laughed. “Are you
insane?
Winning means nothing. You’ve got to love just being out there, or pull in your sails and call it a day.”

“I’m not trying to win any fight, I’m trying to win Cora back.”

Nod shrugged. “Win, win, one way or another,” he said, then turned his attention back to the computer screen. Before Duncan could organize some sort of defense, their mother sailed through the door with a sextant under her arm.

“The blow’s a bad one, my hearties,” she said. “But the good news is that it will miss us entirely.”

Nod clicked a few buttons. “It says here that Port Ellery is right in the way of the storm.”

“By ‘us’ I didn’t mean the town,” said his mother in an exasperated voice. “I meant ‘us’ the house. There’s no reason to call off the plans for tonight. After all, Cora is coming, and we have much to celebrate. But first, Nod, you go and tow the float back from the Boat Club before it washes away again and gets destroyed in the storm.”

Duncan looked at Nod. “You haven’t gotten the float back yet? They asked you to move it weeks ago.”

Nod stood up. “I only got the gas can filled this morning. Contrary to what you may think, my life is very full.”

“If you want to keep that life you’d better stay on shore,” said Duncan, pointing outside the French window. “Look at the waves.”

“A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner,” their mother said, tucking the sextant under her arm like a baton before walking out of the room.

Nod turned to the window and smiled at the raging sea. Trees were being quickly stripped of their leaves, and the sun had disappeared completely behind black fists of clouds. It was three in the afternoon, and it was already dark.

“Nod. You don’t have to do this just because Mom told you to.”

“I’m not. I’m doing it because I must. As Dad always said, never turn down a challenge.”

“Don’t go. It’s suicide to sail during a hurricane, not a challenge.”

Nod laughed. “I’m not
sailing. That
would be crazy.” He clicked off the computer. “I’m motoring over in the inflatable.” He continued to snorfle to himself as he unplugged his cell phone from its charger.

Duncan let it rest. No one could quarrel with a man who laughed like an idiot. Nod would go down to the dock and discover for himself that it was impossible to go anywhere, under any power. Duncan was turning away to go about his business when from the bottom of his bare feet he felt the house tremble, like a ship under way. There was a roar outside, and he turned to look. The cedars bent as if being held down by two heavy hands, and the air filled with dry leaves being sucked up into an invisible vortex. He saw, too late, that the ship’s wheel on the porch was whipping around so fast it was gyrating its screws out of the wood. In one wild turning frenzy, it freed itself from the railing and in the same moment crashed right at them through the glass door, which burst
into a galaxy of shards.