Float (25 page)

“Mom, I think you should do what the chief says.”

She turned to Lovasco and pointed to her husband’s body. “Chief Lovasco, if you want to be of any use, you can find an empty cask for me. This one won’t do.”

Duncan saw the other officers exchange looks that made him think they were going to jump her with a straitjacket, but instead they all turned to watch a mud-splattered Land Rover slide down off the sand dune and onto the beach, heading right toward them before stopping at the yellow tape.

“Everard Blue,” said Josefa.

“Who?” asked Cora.

“It’s that man,” said his mother, with a venomous look. “I don’t care for him very much. Duncan, tell him to go away.”

“He’s a retired admiralty lawyer from New York,” Duncan told Cora, ignoring his mother. “He just moved to Port Ellery, and Slocum invited him to the party last night.” Duncan lowered his voice. “I think they have some chemistry.”

Cora raised her eyebrows.

Everard Blue waved away the officers who tried to keep him from crossing the tape. Chandu jumped out of the car and ran ahead.

“Out of my way!” Everard said. “I am Mrs. Leland’s attorney.”

“I don’t need a lawyer,” said his mother, bending to hug Chandu, who stiffened at the sight of the body on the ground, his former master. “What are you doing with my dog?”

“My dear Mrs. Leland,” Everard said, bowing deeply. He wore khakis and a waxed overcoat, with old-fashioned galoshes on his feet with the metal clasps undone. He looked at the body and shook his head. “I stopped by the Boat Club to check on my
Avocet
and heard about your problems. This fine animal insisted he come along with me, as I must insist now on coming along with you to the station.”

He reached out to her, and after a mild squirmish during which she kicked sand at him, he got hold of her hand and kissed it. His mustache brushed up against her skin, and she stood very still.

She looked at Duncan for guidance. “You do need a lawyer,” he said. “And Judson is still missing.”

“Judson?” She looked out at the water. “With
L’ark
?
”

“Fool,” said Josefa. “Must’ve tried to save her by bringing her out to sea to ride out the storm … him knowing squat about boats.”

His mother continued to study the water until Everard pulled her closer to him by her hand.

“It’s a sad fact, Mrs. Leland, that when a body is involved, the law must be involved.” He rested his other hand on top of hers. “There are details that must be gotten out of the way. First they’ll want to do an autopsy to confirm he died of drowning.”

“What else would he have died of?” she asked. “He was DD when he washed up on the beach.”

“DD?” asked Cora.

“British navy designation for Discharged Dead,” said Duncan, who knew this bit of arcana because DD was carved on some of the family members’ ancient gravestones, in spite of the fact that none of them had ever served in the British Navy. Or were, for that matter, British.

“
We
know that,” Everard said to his mother in a conspiratorial tone, “but we must be patient with the authorities. They have their jobs to do, and after a few formalities, the body will be released back in your care.”

“I’ll need a cask,” she said.

“You have no wine, no cellar, and no house,” Duncan said, wondering if a psychiatric evaluation would be one of those formalities the lawyer spoke of. “And even if you did, you’re not putting Dad back in a barrel.”

Everard smiled. “Let’s get the paperwork behind us first.” He held out his arm to her. “It’s time, Mrs. Leland.”

She looked around at the beach and the water, then at her husband. Chandu was sitting by him. Duncan would have thought his hackles would be up, or that he’d be howling at the sight, but he seemed to be simply observing a silence.

His mother raised her hand. “Good-bye, Brendan darling.” And then she took Everard’s arm. “Yes,” she said. “On we go.” And arm in arm they headed toward Everard’s Land Rover, cautiously scaling the garbage and seaweed, with Chandu right behind and, behind him, the police.

“Do you have a boat?” his mother asked Everard.

“Indeed,” he said, assisting her over a fish tub. “
Avocet,
a Crowningshield.”

“Gaf-rigged or marconi?”

“Gaf-rigged, of course.”

A muffled sound of approval came from his mother, and then Duncan lost the thread of their conversation as they loaded Chandu into the backseat, got into the car, and slammed the doors. When the Land Rover drove away in a spray of wet sand, the ambulance crew brought out a stretcher and set about to take the body away. One of the EMTs shook out a sheet. “Wait,” said Duncan, and he knelt down next to his father.

Josefa came over. “What a mess.”

“Poor Dad,” he said, and he felt a decade of unspent grief well up inside of him. It had been so easy to think of his father as being somewhere out there all these years while there was no body to prove otherwise. But here he was, in the wasted flesh, the man who had taught him how to measure danger by the sound of waves on the shore and showed him how much easier it was to right a boat when it was pointed into the wind. He’d told him how to take conditions as they come and make the best of them, and that one day he would have to learn to deal with uncertainties he would rather avoid. This was the man who believed that to harvest something from the sea, you first had to love the sea. And as for a sudden violent squall that could end a life in a nanosecond, there was sometimes nothing to be done.

All these lessons, and yet he had learned nothing. Cora stood behind him and rested her hand on his shoulder. The seagull struggled in Josefa’s arms, so she put it down, and it limped away. They all watched for a moment, then the EMTs went back to work and took the body away.

By ancient proclaim, the third Sunday in October was set aside every year by the early settlers of Port Ellery to give thanks to the fish for food before hunkering down for the harsh New England winter. All adults and children of a certain age, led by the mayor, would dress in robes of cod skins trimmed in lobster claws and run into the sea. This practice continued well into the nineteenth century and was still unknowingly observed by the dozen or so hale citizens who took a ritual plunge into the icy Atlantic every New Year’s Day. But the old date was still remembered by some, so Josefa chose it for Kelp Day. A cold front was moving in later that week, but that was later. For now, the day was unseasonably warm, and the air was filled with the salty breath of the sea. Everyone in town who still had a boat in the water was motoring, sailing, or rowing out for the celebration. Fueled by used cooking oil from Manavilins,
Sea Turtle
was in service again, even though her propeller shaft was still a bit out of truth after her rough beach landing at Seacrest’s. She led the fleet outward bound with the tide to the mouth of the bay, near Chester Island, where Kelp and a few other birds would be released. The old sea-worthy hulk had lost her plastic canopy and a few rows of seats, but that suited the day’s purposes just fine, as it created an open staging area for the event, with room for tables and a grill for a party afterward.

Tucked in a shady corner of the Duck, the newest reiteration of “Kelp” stood watch in a cage, suspiciously eyeing the hoopla building up around him. Stacked alongside were four other cages, the other seagulls and seabirds rescued and rehabilitated in the wake of the storm. The ones that survived. Josefa, Slocum, Clover, and Harley fussed about in the stern setting up tables, while Duncan sat at the wheel in the deck house with Cora. It had only been two weeks since he had sat in that very seat, prepared for the Duck to morph into his coffin, but it turned out to be his kind of vessel: solid, dependable, and willing to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. It had restored his love of the sea.

“On such a beautiful day it doesn’t seem possible to have bad weather again,” said Cora. A film of autumnal gold reflected off the smooth water and made her glow. Then she crinkled her face and turned her nose to the back of the boat, where fishy exhaust fumes rose up from the engine below. “If only it didn’t smell so bad.”

“Smells better than diesel,” Duncan said, with one hand on the wheel and the other resting lightly on her leg.

“Better than old fried clams?” Her hair was tied up in a ruby-red scarf to keep it from blowing around, and she wore large sunglasses so that in profile she looked like some starlet from an old movie magazine, only with a tint of early pregnancy in her complexion. He crept his hand up over her nylon windbreaker. It would not be long before he could feel the baby floating inside. He had gone with Cora for her first real obstetric appointment a few days before to view the fishlike shape on the ultrasound screen. Dr. Zander had explained that humans revisited stages of evolution during gestation, and their baby was still working its way through the Paleozoic Era. “We begin our lives as saltwater animals,” he’d said, “suspended for nine months in a saline fluid in the womb. Then
poof!
We’re forced out into the air to suck oxygen, and any water in the lungs will kill us. What a system.”

Duncan thought of the gill on Nod’s ear and felt a rush of sadness. He gazed back at Port Ellery’s harbor, whose edge was thick again with lobster buoys, most of which had been recovered on distant shores in the days after the storm, but others were replacements for the ones lost forever. All the washed-up trash was pretty much gone now, too, returned to the sea by the constant repetition of tides, out of sight and out of mind until the next time. Even the massive ball of plastic and sea flesh that had settled on the beach would have rolled back to the ocean floor by now if it hadn’t been for Adoniram pulling it up onto the earth and calling it art.

Sea Turtle
clanked solemnly past the Cove, and everyone went silent as they passed his mother’s house with its lone chimney still standing, like an ancient obelisk. It was not being rebuilt. There was simply not enough stable land. While his mother waited for the insurance company to arrive at a figure, she planned to sail the Caribbean on Everard Blue’s yacht for the winter, and in the spring she was coming back to run the Duck, even going so far as to talk with Slocum about doing sunset barbecue Duck tours. “Charred Charters,” Cora joked. In any event, his mother was leaving the property to return to the sea. If she missed the old house, she did not say it. Duncan, on the other hand, felt its loss immensely. When he told Annuncia what the plan was, she said, apparently by way of consolation, “Humans and their creations are the aberrations of nature, Dun’n. Good-bye and good riddance is how I see it.”

She was wrong, but he did not argue the point. Humans were part of nature, and their inventions were, too. It was just that nature was not all deer frolicking in the woods or the sun rising over a perfect sea. Sometimes it was brutal, if not bizarre, in its capacity for destruction and disorder. Annuncia was right about one thing, though: He should not dwell too long in the land of painful memories of the past. He wouldn’t. With a baby coming, he was already feeling nostalgic about the promise of the future. He could not wait.

As the Duck sputtered through the gray-blue waters, they moved between small piney islands whose brittle trees were jagged and raw from the gale-force winds. Wet blobs of seals sunned themselves on the surrounding rocks. A whiskered seal glared at them, raised its flippered tail, and slid off its rock into the water. Duncan watched the streamlined body move just under the surface, gliding forward before disappearing into the unknown darkness below.

“I think I might take up diving next summer,” he said.

Cora sucked in the corner of her mouth for a moment as she stared at him. “You won’t find Nod that way,” she said, softly.

“I know,” he said. “I just want to see what’s under it all.” And he spread a hand out in a hopeless gesture.

“I’m not sure that’s possible,” she said. “I think it’s like a therapist trying to unlock the human mind. Even after years of sessions, we can only understand the teeniest bit of someone, and that probably none too well. The ocean is not only stranger than we think, it’s stranger than we
can
think.”

“I’m pretty good at thinking strange,” he said.

Cora nodded without comment, and they both went back to studying the backwaters among the islands, lost in separate thoughts. A moment later the harbor suddenly opened up around them, and Duncan felt a shiver of belonging. Here he was, part of the scene he had so long pondered from the lofty distance of his office window, where it had seemed as if the water had nothing to do with him.

“Look,” said Cora. “You can see that nasty ball from way out here.”

The Sphere, as Adoniram called it, was still in Seacrest’s parking lot and had become the poster child of the green seas movement, attracting crowds and media. Adoniram, now that he was officially alive again, was a Happening unto himself. Duncan was going to ask Adoniram to sit on Seacrest’s board. He would be the first non-family member in that position, but considering how involved he was in the new product line, it only made sense. He was an investor, after all, but no longer an ominous one. Apparently, the ashes from their contract had been in the barrel with the diatom dust.

“The contract was an interesting exercise in words,” said Adoniram. “As Sir Winston Churchill said, ‘Play the game for more than you can afford to lose … only then will you learn the game.’ I’d say you learned, Duncan. You’ll learn more. Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”

In exchange for going along with the Diatom Project, “Go Kelp!” was to be properly labeled, saying that it contained diatom dust. Marketing was playing the dust up as a bonus slug control, not conceptual art, as Adoniram was pushing for. Duncan trusted that word about the Diatom Project would leak out on its own, and that whatever the benefits or repercussions that resulted would just happen, with or without his worrying about it.

“I’ll miss the Sphere when it’s gone,” said Duncan. Beaky had sold the Sphere to the museum curators who had rescued his mother, but they did not get the Dodge floor, which was safe in storage. Adoniram had convinced Duncan’s mother that it should be the star exhibit in a proposed regional museum for the Adoniram archives, such as they were. The two of them had become as thick as thieves since he’d come “alive.” It seemed she’d been a huge fan of his early work. Who knew? The museum might help keep Port Ellery’s head above water until the fish stocks revived. If they didn’t—well, then. Well, then.

“You’re just a sentimental fool.” Cora rubbed her stomach. “I won’t miss the Sphere; it stinks.”

“That’s the point, according to Adoniram. What we’ve done to the ocean stinks. He’s going to install it outside on the museum plaza in Boston next week so everyone can smell the marine animals decompose. A webcam is already recording the process as it slowly reduces to a pile of dust and irreducible plastic bits. I think he’s going to scratch
God Help Us
on the pavement around it.”

“Tack, Everard! Hard to port!”

“Your mother,” said Cora. “I’m still not used to seeing her out in the world.”

Everard Blue’s rather spiffy yacht,
Avocet,
was coming up on the starboard side of the Duck with intent to pass. Annabel Leland blew twice into the whistle around her neck, then resumed barking like a coxswain to Everard, as if she could propel the boat forward by the force of her blistering words. She was enjoying the intoxication of unleashed wrath. She yelled against the wind and against the sea, but Everard, for one, remained unmoved as he stood at the varnished wheel, calmly smiling ahead. The wind picked up its pace, and the boards creaked as the sails began to bellow out with success.

“What a couple,” said Duncan.

“Whatever works,” said Cora. “That’s my motto at the office these days. Whatever works.” And with this she reached over and patted his leg. “Like us.”

Avocet
tacked in front of them with a sheetful of air that sent them across Duncan’s bow.

“Annabel, my ducky, what was our time from the red nun?” Everard shouted. Chandu looked up from where he was lying on the deck, letting the spray hit his face.

“Seven minutes, thirty-eight seconds,” she shouted back. She was in fine feather in her new clothes, a green racing jacket with white cropped pants. Her feet were bare, and on her head was a first mate’s cap, under which her orange-gray braid swung like a pendulum in the middle of her back. “Not good enough,” she shouted. “Come about and do it again!”

Chandu stood up and resettled himself away from her fury, but he could not escape the coil of rope she tossed on his broad back for safekeeping. He looked at it, then let his drooling head relax back down to the deck.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how much of her old personality was the mulberry wine, and how much was just her,” said Cora. “If she was self-medicating all these years, she could turn stranger now than she was before. There’s always that danger when you remove someone’s crutch.”

“The silt is still settling to the bottom on that one,” said Duncan. “At least she’s out of the house.”

“That’s because there is no house.”

“True, but she could be living in the ruins, like a hermit.”

As it was, she was living under Everard’s roof, and Duncan didn’t want to know the sleeping arrangements. He was grateful that Everard, who’d been a hammer-thrower in college and ran a successful admiralty legal practice in his working years, had come along when he did to retire in Port Ellery. As Cora said, it would have been too psychologically complex for Duncan to have finally left his childhood home only to take his mother with him. But Everard had done more than give her a roof—he gave her back some meaning and purpose to her days, without which any life might seem pretty colorless. She waved at them as the yacht tacked again, ducking under the swinging boom without even glancing at it, then blew the whistle twice.

Everard tipped his white captain’s hat as they circled around
Sea Turtle
, returning on the port side, and Duncan tapped his horn hello. Apart from escorting his mother back into the world, Everard had been a huge help in sorting out the legal problems surrounding his father’s body and expediting the autopsy. At the hearing, he brought in chemists to testify that the wine had hallucinogenic qualities which would have led to warped decisions on his mother’s part, and a psychiatrist testified that the trauma of finding his father dead on the beach would have distorted Nod’s cognitive ability as well, making him susceptible to his mother’s order to stuff his father into a cask. The autopsy confirmed that Brendan Leland had died of accidental drowning ten years before. In the end, no charges were brought against his mother. The body had been released back to the family earlier in the week, and they had held a private burial at the family plot across town, finally laying him to rest under a stone erected a decade before.

“He would rather have had a burial at sea,” his mother said when it was done. “I never thought of him as a man buried under green grass.”

“I want him where I can keep an eye on him,” said Duncan, who had gone to the funeral home before the burial to peek in the casket to make sure he was there. As for Nod, who knew where his body was? His mother believed he was still alive, and if that kept her going, so be it. It wasn’t particularly necessary for her mind to exactly mesh with reality as she floated though the rest of her life. Stranger still, whenever his name came up, she quoted the Koran: “Put your child in the ark and let him be carried away by the river.” It was anyone’s guess how she had happened upon that, or why it gave her any comfort. Still, according to custom, in three months’ time, the family would bury an empty coffin in Nod’s name and call him dead.