Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea (20 page)

“I know.”

“Yeah. All askew.” Chuck made a tentative square with his hands, a ragged thing. He broke them apart again. “We've taken our hits.”

“Mom?”

“Her too. Big time. It hurts,” Chuck said, placing a palm on Ethan's brow. “It hurts that I haven't been able to hold things together. Keep us together.”

“Not your fault,” Ethan said, wondering where all this was going, fearing he wasn't fully able to follow.

“No, I deserve my fair shame of the blame,” Chuck said. “I do. Maybe we all do.”

“Maybe,” Ethan said uncertainly.

Chuck removed his palm, clapping his hands together. “Got a call from Bobby Stone today, Ethan. A very interesting call.”

Ethan kept still, holding his breath back on a leash.

“Very interesting call. You know, until a couple of days ago, he didn't even know you were working at the Sizzleator.”

“Funny.” But it didn't feel funny. Ethan found the sheet balled at the foot of his bed and drew it closer.

“Yeah, funny thing. He was looking over the books, you know, opening a few spreadsheets, and he saw something strange. Compared to last year, revenues at the Sizzleator have been down. But…”

“But what?”

“But Walter's been ordering the same amount of inventory, even a little more. What could account for the difference? That's when he looked at wages and employees.”

“Huh,” Ethan said, glad that it was dark and that his father would have difficulty reading his face. “Is Walter in trouble?”

“Don't know,” Chuck said. “Because that's not why Stone called.”

In the fields he had just left, there were holes to climb in, rocks to hide behind. Ethan wished he were there now. He closed his eyes to see if he could find them again. Everything was blurry.

“Ethan,” his father said, bringing his face down to him, brow to brow, his breath warm and sour. “Ethan, I have good news.”

“What?”

“My old job. Stone thinks it may be time, time to bring me back.”

“Really?” Ethan sat up with relief. “Really?”

“This could be the turning point, Ethan,” Chuck said, sitting up straight, his face toward the bedroom door. “A new beginning. Your mom
—
”

“You tell her yet?”

“Not yet. Not yet. There's just one thing.”

Ethan waited for it.

“Bobby Stone, he mentioned something about a journal.…”

 

chapter fifteen

rats

“Dan's asked me to move in with him,” Betty said, just like that, without preamble or fuss. She and Rachel were sitting on the couch, watching a summer reality program neither really cared for; the dancers, the gowns, the applauding audience
—
placeholders for their attention.

“Interesting,” Rachel said.

“I won't do it, of course,” Betty said.

“We're a team.”

“Of course.”

“That was fast,” Rachel said, thinking of the escalation of the romance. It was one thing to take a man to bed; it was another to have him take you into his home.

“Sometimes, when you know, you know,” Betty said.

“Really? You love him?”

“I think so.”

“Does he love you?”

“I think so. I don't think he'd ask me if he didn't. He has a nice place. Cozy. Has a deck facing the water. He built it himself.”

“Handy,” Rachel said. “Is there an extra room?”

Betty reached for the remote and turned up the volume. “You're so funny,” she said.

*   *   *

Mrs. K said that people had a surprising capacity for renewal, for turning their lives around
—
she had seen it many times.

Rachel, who had never seen such a thing, shrugged it off as a consequence of age
—
if you lived long enough, you might see any number of extraordinary things, like double rainbows or rivers that had reversed their flow.

“No,” Mrs. K said, “it has nothing to do with time. You see what you're able to see.”

Or want to see, Rachel thought.

In Tucson, Bob Leary testified to being born again through the saving power of Jesus Christ. He grinned from the center of a family lineup, his arms outspread, not on a cross, but across the shoulders of a wife on one side and a daughter on the other. Two smaller boys were posted in front of them. They were all outdoors with a haze of desert mountainside at their backs, squinting into the sun as if there was only so much grace they could take.

The Robert Leary of Ottawa had become a motivational speaker, his bio said, to share the “unlimited strength” he'd found once he shed the interior deadweight that had been dragging him down. He had a ten-step process for Self-Renewal that began with Radical Honesty and ended with Welcoming Wealth. He generously invited site visitors to purchase a cornucopia of books and DVDs that would guide them on the path, all major credit cards (and PayPal) accepted.

Meanwhile, Sledge Leary was thinking of trading a lifetime of smashing things for a quiet cabin on a distant lake: what was the point of fighting the zombie hordes when zombie hordes were pretty much all that was left in the world?

“I wish you would put in as much time searching for
schools
,” Mrs. K said.

“Sure,” Rachel said. She reached into the cargo pocket of her pants. “I've brought you something.” Biting her lip in anticipation, she watched as Mrs. K unraveled a skein of off-white tissue paper, releasing a candy-colored figurine into her palm: a little boy and girl holding hands, their cheeks pinchy pink and eyes ice-pick blue.

Mrs. K let it lie in her hand. She looked pained, as if the sweetness of the thing had given her a toothache.

“Well?” Rachel said. All day, in the booth, she had rehearsed in her mind the way she would say “you're welcome,” how it was just a small way for her to give back, to return the favor, to show appreciation for all of Mrs. K's thoughtfulness over the years. She'd felt light-headed with goodness.

“It's lovely,” Mrs. K said. “But.”

“But what?”

“I can't take this.” She returned the figurine to Rachel. “I know how you got it.”

The figurine seemed to burn in her hand. “I don't know what you're talking about,” she said weakly. Rachel was never impressed with her own skills as a liar.

“Curtis told me,” said Mrs. K. “Sitting where you are now. He was confused. Me too. I thought about saying something to you, but I had hoped it was just a phase, something you would outgrow. So I didn't say anything. Should I have?”

You didn't want me to stop coming here with Curtis,
Rachel thought. She put the figurine back into her pocket. Not knowing what else to do, she left, ignoring Mrs. K's pleas that she stay.

That night, Rachel lay awake in the dark, listening to small, scuffling sounds in the alley
—
the rattle of cans, the tinkling of jostled glass. For years, Betty had said it was raccoons, specifically, a family of raccoons. Thinking of them as a family of something made the noise less threatening, even endearing. But she had come to believe they were rats, not raccoons, and that even if they traveled in packs, their efforts were solo, each rat to himself.

Was it always that way? In the afternoon, a young couple had approached her booth with linked arms, hands slipped inside each other's ass pockets. They laughed and touched brows together. At the window, he asked for fifty tickets. When told it would be thirty-five dollars, he pulled a knot of tangled bills from his front pocket and found he did not have enough. She dug in as well, and the two of them made a game of compiling their cash, straightening out the crumpled bills, stacking them together. “Here,” he had said, sliding the stack under the window. “It's all we got. I think we just made it.”

Out in the alley, there was a mad dash of little feet
—
the flight of startled animals from a sudden noise, an unexpected burst of light. Then quiet again, an oppressive silence.

In the end, Rachel thought, it would be as it was in the beginning: she in a room, listening to her own thoughts, Betty finding a new home to grow restless in, Mrs. K content to grow old where she was.
As it was before, is now, and ever shall be.

The figurine burning in Rachel's hand. And school, school, school
—
Mrs. K was obsessed with it.
But,
Rachel thought,
you can learn the things you really need to know just about anywhere.
For example, what had she learned in Sea Town this summer?

Lesson one: If a thing is worth giving, it's worth paying for.

Lesson two: Your esteem for a person is measured by how much you're willing to pay.

Lesson three …

Rachel fell asleep trying to think of one and dreamed about Leonard instead. He was imprisoned in her Pirate's Playground booth. He wanted to know why he was in there when she held the key that would let him out.

 

chapter sixteen

what you do with a broken shell

Ethan had a theory favoring plain sight as the safest place for hiding; if Rachel would meet him at St. Augustine's, she could return the journal to him there. By then, Rachel could have photocopied the pages she wanted, the pages referencing safety, park rides, and questions about the Rock-It Roll-It Coaster. Pages about the accident.

Sitting beside Ethan, groggy from the faint scent of old oak and incense and the drone of God's Word read in a voice as flat as the ocean's horizon, Rachel made another promise as well: no more games with Ethan or anyone else. Her frustration was tempered by the backpack between them
—
once she returned the journal, maybe she could let everything else go too.

“Well?” Ethan whispered. “Let's go.”

“Can't,” Rachel said between her teeth, fixing her gaze at the painting beyond the empty choir benches in front of them. “Too many people.” If only Ethan had sat at the back, she thought. But no, the master spy had arrived early and sat up front where the morning mass crowd wouldn't pass him as they shuffled to their regular places among the middle pews. He hadn't considered that once mass began, they wouldn't be able to make a discreet departure until the services were over.

“Hoisted by your own petard,” Rachel said under her breath.

“What?”

“Just keep still.”

They rose from their seats for the gospel, then sat for the homily, the brief rumble of parishioners returning to their seats a kind of passive protest against the tired discourse that, Rachel was certain, would inevitably come. At Curtis's funeral, the last time she had attended a St. Augustine's mass, the priest had rambled through a homily that made a tenuous connection between the “mystery” of Curtis's life and the mystery of the Trinity illustrated in the church's choir painting, a work of art the priest never tired of referencing.

“Saint Augustine was a clever man, a clever man,” the priest had said for what seemed the hundredth time, his bald head tilted over the papers he held, trembling, in both hands. Rachel had heard the story since she could remember and could virtually lip-synch it as it emerged, one familiar step after the other, retold with the enthusiasm of a man certain he was blazing a fresh trail: the clever Augustine writing about the Trinity; the frustrated Augustine walking along the beach, seeking inspiration; the distracted Augustine coming across a boy pouring seawater into a hole in the sand (here, the priest pointing to the painting, inviting worshippers to bear witness themselves); the witty Augustine telling the boy that he wouldn't be able to get all of the ocean into that little hole; and the surprised Augustine chastened by the boy's response, spoken just before he evaporated in a sudden mist, “Just so, you'll never get all of the Trinity into that little book of yours.” The delighted priest had chuckled softly to himself while the confused mourners looked to one another, seeking the invisible connection between Augustine's “clever” shock and their own stupefying grief.

The sun streamed through the stained-glass windows, illuminating the pews in garish circus colors. Rachel wiggled her fingers through the palette, tallying up the summer so far: Mrs. K disappointed, Betty in love, Leonard awaiting trial, Ethan recovering a family, and herself? If she stepped from the fog that had shrouded her these last few weeks, she would see that she had been distracted. It was natural, given the circumstances. But she had only herself to blame for not looking ahead. Other kids her age were packing up, getting ready for college. Maybe it was time to leave the past behind, to plan next steps. To move on.

So what was in her way?

An inability to accept things as they were. Accidents happened. Impulsive boys died. Foolish, brokenhearted teenagers slipped and fell. And the people they left behind tried to assemble wholes from pieces that were never meant to fit together.

They kneeled for the consecration. “He looks like you,” Rachel said, lifting her chin toward the painting.

“The saint?” Ethan asked.

“The boy,” said Rachel. “The blond hair. The puppy dog eyes. That air of determination. That's you all over.”

Leaning forward, Ethan crossed his elbows over the back of the pew in front of him, resting his head in his arms, saying nothing. If people looked over, Rachel thought, they'd assume that he was praying.

They rose again for the Our Father. While the congregation prayed, struggling to find a common rhythm for their words, Ethan finally turned to Rachel. “A puppy dog? What do you make of the shell?”

“What shell?”

“In his hand.”

Rachel glanced at the painting. She had grown weary with it, with Ethan, with everything. “What about it?”

“It's cracked.”