The Book of Speculation (13 page)

Toes sinking into soft ground, he crept to her upended tub. Tentative hands peeled back oilcloth and curtain. Wide eyes peered through. In the curved tub bottom she thrashed and kicked, not the woman he watched rise from the water but an animal caught in a trap. He listened. She panted. No, she choked. She couldn’t breathe, was tossing, was not right, was afraid.

He climbed in beside her, fingers grazing her cheek. He pressed a hand to her shoulder and felt a pull.
Come here.
He shook her gently, surprised by the softness of her skin and how cool she was despite the heat.

Evangeline’s eyes opened. She jerked away, knocking her body heavily against the tub’s boards, her mouth working but making no sound. Amos understood. There was too much sound, it couldn’t leave all at once. She shuddered against the wall.

He touched her collarbone. Her arms went around him and he noticed a deep red welt on her shoulder from the staves. It was a fascinating thing. He traced the edges, circling with his fingertips. A mottled, dark spot against her skin, a flush gone too deep—how could a bruise be so lovely? He tried to take her from the bed, away from the dream. He tugged her hand but she held tighter and cried more. Water ran from her eyes. He didn’t understand why, but it made him need to hold to her. When he tried to put her down, to coax her back to sleep, she would not move. She felt like something warm that wouldn’t take shape in his head, a fuzzy memory, something from before, when he’d been small.

He thought they would lie down, that he would curl up on the mattress with the very soft girl with the bumpy knees and the pretty bruise. She slept. Yes, Evangeline could sleep. Amos decided he would stay awake. Just in case. She was very scared and soft like duck’s down.

*   *   *

Desperate to empty the space of stale air and bad spirits, Madame Ryzhkova had opened her wagon door and looked across the rain-soaked clearing. Then she’d heard the scream. A shiver at the base of her neck, the cold a woman feels when the dead speak her name. She’d heard the sound before, had traveled oceans to escape it. She’d closed her eyes quickly, only to summon the image of a man’s pale hand with familiar square fingertips disappearing below the surface of a frigid stream. When she’d opened her eyes again she saw the shadow of her apprentice running. To where the drowning girl slept. Ryzhkova’s lip curled. She spat to keep from saying it, but the name would not be contained.
“Rusalka.”

*   *   *

In the first light of morning, Peabody found them together, a bundle of tired bodies, half buried in straw from a torn mattress. Amos’s arm curved tightly around the wing of Evangeline’s shoulder; his fingers brushed an ugly bruise. They made an oddly joined puzzle, but the pieces fit in the right craggy places. It had been years since he’d felt longing like the boy did, at least ten since his wife had passed. He wanted to pat the boy on his head, to muss his hair a little, but thought it best not to wake them. He quietly pulled the oilcloth down, then patted himself on the back at his good fortune. A future filled with wonderful children—Wild Boys and mermaids, fortune-tellers and dancers—profitable beauties, all.

9

JULY 15TH

The sound of shuffling paper wakes me. Enola is up, at my desk, and thumbing through my notebook, her hair sleep-flattened on one side. The front door is cracked and the wind off the beach is sharp with salt. I yawn. Without looking she points to the floor, where a steaming cup sits. We both know better than to talk before coffee.

It’s terrible coffee, burned, but not having to make it myself makes it delicious. She tips the chair back and drinks her own cup.

“Thanks.”

“I looked at your notebook,” she says.

“I noticed. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go through my things.”

“Those names, the women—they’re relatives?”

“Best I can tell. You know circus people. It’s hard to figure out who anybody really is.” Names have a way of changing as people disappear into shows and new anonymous lives, drifting in and out with the wind.

“They’ve all drowned.”

Something in her voice makes me say, “My sources are a little spotty.”

She gnaws a little on her lip. “You think they’re suicides, don’t you?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Alice thinks so.” It would be hard to rationalize such a string of deaths any other way, but something about the list doesn’t feel rational. “Some might have been accidents.”

“I can tell when you’re lying, you know. Your left hand twitches.” Enola puts a foot up on the desk. Her clothing is rumpled, slept-in, and her skirt hangs on her like a sheet. She starts to chew on her thumb, then slaps her hand, as if in punishment. “This started with the book, didn’t it?”

“It’s a puzzle. I like puzzles.” Does my hand twitch? Seeing Enola acting like Mom—there are nine days. To what? Now Enola is very much alive, vital. I’m missing something. Could it be tied to age? Mom was only thirty-two when she died. Her mother was younger, I think. Celine Duvel—hell. I’ll have to check again.

“Okay then, keep lying.” Enola stretches, popping every bone in her spine. “I want to go swimming. Get your bathing suit—unless you’re scared I’m gonna sink, or maybe you think you are.” She smirks, as if she can tell my stomach just clenched.

We take the steps down. Horseshoe crabs dot the edge of the water, shining stones with devils’ tails.

“Oh, it’s blue! No jellyfish,” she says, putting her foot in the water. “Nice. I just hate the damned horseshoe crabs.” She’s looking for a clear path to deeper water, but there are a lot of crabs.

“They’re harmless. Won’t even pinch you.”

“They just look like they’re up to something.” Then she’s out in the water, running forward, splashing and diving. I dash in after her. We gasp, grinning at the cold and then she dips her head under, a tuft of hair bobbing above the waves. Though the salt burns, I keep my eyes open. Enola’s are closed and her face is bunched like a drawstring. I start counting, out of habit, maybe curiosity. How long can she hold? How long can I? One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Enola paddles small circles, diving deeper. I follow. Eight Mississippi.

Simon.

Part of her is here, a whisper of our mother in the water—half wish, half fear. Of course she’d be here now that Enola’s home. I grab my sister’s hand and it’s cold, slick like a fish. I pull her toward me. Her eyes open. I’m heavy enough to hold us both down at the bottom; otherwise Enola might float away like driftwood. She sees me counting five-second increments on my fingers and shakes her head. I squeeze her arm. Forty Mississippi.

Simon.

Enola squirms, legs jerking hard, pulling me sideways. Forceful, quick, we shoot to the surface.

“Jesus, Simon!” she splutters. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve done that? Fuck drowning, you’re gonna kill me.”

Murder. There’s always the question of murder, though that wasn’t a possibility with Mom. No chance.

“You’re not even winded.” I thump the water from my ears. “You could always hold longer than me.”

“Well, it’s been a while.” She looks a little gray.

We throw our clothes on over wet bathing suits. Enola says it’s good to have salt drying on her skin. “Feels like summer,” she says. We walk toward West Beach, near the jetties. I watch the bumps of her spine, too thin; she’s always been skinny, but never painfully so. When we run out of beach we climb the bulkheads.

“I thought I heard something when we were under. Did you hear anything?” I ask.

“How the hell can you hear anything with water in your ears?”

“Never mind.”

Sand spills through the wood where a section of bulkhead has given way, and broken pilings lean into the Sound. Without discussion we start climbing the cliff, our feet burrowing into sand and dirt.

She’s breathing hard halfway up. “Dad would kill us for this,” she pants.

“Probably.”

He caught us once. We’d been running the cliff and were making our way up for another pass when he appeared at the edge. He grabbed us with hands so strong that days later his fingerprints ghosted my arm, reminding me I had a father. He dragged us back to the house, me by my collar and Enola by her pants. Her feet never touched the ground. I hated him a little.

At the top of the bluff we look out. A shell of a house tilts over the cliff’s edge, the back wall torn off. The remnants drifted away in the last hurricane.

Enola says, “That’s the Murphys’, right?” It is the Murphys’ and she could tell if she really looked and saw their refrigerator resting against the buckled siding and Mrs. Murphy’s dining table overturned, its legs long gone.

“The last of the porch went over two years ago.” Somewhere across the Sound, Connecticut kids make bonfires out of the porch where we sat with Jimmy Murphy, drinking lemonade.

“Then you’ve got, what, two years? Three?”

“Depends.” It’s not unheard of for a shore property to lose ten feet a year, depending on storms and the upkeep of the bluff. It’s been worse since the hurricane, and the Murphys’ place going over didn’t do mine any favors. Once their bulkhead went, water cut behind mine, eating away at both sides of the last barrier between me and the Sound. Between winter storms, nor’easters, a hurricane, who knows?

“Do you have money to fix it?”

“Not right now.” I’ll need a loan. Without a job, getting one will be nearly impossible, and the job hunt is glacially slow. I could ask Frank for money. My chances of success there might be better; money toward saving my house is money toward saving his, and this was my father’s house, and that’s important to Frank. But for Alice. It’s one thing to take money from Frank; taking money from Alice’s father is different. I should ask her, but best to try the Napawset Historical Society first; they could make it a cause, landmark it. I look over to see Enola swaying softly, matching the waves.

“You should come with me.” She sounds strangely urgent.

“Why?”

“What’s left here?” she says.

“The house. I can’t just leave it.” At times it feels like our parents are still in it, in the walls, and someone needs to see them through to its end. I’m as rootless now as I’ll ever be, but here I know what roads to take when the water’s up, where everyone is based on the tide, who’s a summer person, who lives here. Here my hard feet make sense. And Enola knows to come back here.

“Just come.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do and I wouldn’t know anybody.”

“You’d figure it out and you’d know me,” she says.

“That hasn’t always worked out so well.”

She makes a face, then sighs. “You’d be okay. I’d help you.” Her hand disappears into the skirt pocket and I can hear a soft shuffling.

“I saw you up last night,” I say. Her hands stop moving. “What’s going on with the cards?”

“They’re just being weird.”

When I press her about it, she pounces on me and rubs my hair with her knuckles, hard, burning my scalp. We both start laughing. She tickles my sides and I squirm to get free. An Indian burn ends everything when I twist her forearm until she howls and smacks me upside the head, stopping things as quickly as they started. We fall on the grass. For a second we’re right again.

“You had Alice over last night,” she says, gasping.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“What’s with you and her?”

“I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t, not really, but I want to protect this old new thing between us.

“I like her. She’s too good for you.” She breaks off a piece of beach grass, puts it between her teeth and chews. “You’d like Rose’s,” she says. “It’s the carnival that came around when we were kids. It’s a family business.”

“How’d you wind up with them?”

“A friend I met reading cards in Atlantic City. He’d worked with Rose’s before and introduced me. I read Thom Rose’s cards, we talked and wound up clicking. It’s good travel and a steady gig through the summers. The money’s not so bad.”

“Did you mention Mom?”

“I’m not an idiot. What, I’m not going to say that my mother worked the circuit? That’s probably why he hired me. He’d take you on if you wanted.”

“And what would I do?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

My understanding of carnivals is esoteric. Here is the reality, my knock-kneed sister with the wild eyes, asking me to run away. It would scratch the itch that’s always wondered what Mom was like before Dad. “Is it like it used to be?”

“Pretty much,” she says. “A little bigger, more rides now, more games. The sideshow’s changed, more acts, fewer bouncers.” She sees my confusion. “Jars, the stuff in jars. Never mind, you don’t want to know.”

Things preserved in formaldehyde, animals and otherwise. I remember standing inside a too-hot-to-breathe tent, fingers glued together by sweat, staring at a milky white pickled shark with two heads, one at each end. “You like it?”

“Sure.”

“You didn’t sound great when you called. And you look tired.”

“It’s not great all the time,” she says. “But what is? Eating crap, getting sick, shitting my brains out.” She stretches an arm over her head. Her shoulder makes a loud popping sound. “I got really sick last year outside of Philly. I go into a bookstore because they clean those bathrooms. I’m in there sick like I’m dying—guts rolling around, staring at the floor trying not to pass out and I see these yellow shoes sticking out in the stall next to me. The lady figures out I can see her feet so she pulls them back, like I’m not supposed to know she’s there. Like, if she picks up her feet she can forget she’s hearing my shit hit the water. You don’t deal with stuff like that. You’ve got a house. You’ve always got your own toilet.” She scratches the back of her neck. The bird tattoo on her wrist flutters. “But most of the time it’s good. Thom would love you.”

“Why do you want me to go so badly?”

“Maybe I miss you,” she says.

“I missed you too.” I did. I always do. Could I go? Pile my stuff in the car, drive down a highway, following a line of trailers, campers, spend days and nights in a chlorinated dunk tank, and come back in six months, dirty, gaunt, and lonely. No, not now. We’re just shy of the 24th and Enola’s here. It feels too coincidental. “Why’d you come home now?”