The Book of Speculation (16 page)

Something grabs my hair and yanks from the roots. A rush of air blinds me. I jerk to the side and a hand clamps around my arm. I try to wrench free, but the water makes me slow. The grip is tight. The fingers release my hair and grab my other arm. My gut spasms and the last of my breath is in front of me. Arms lock under my shoulders. I pull, but they don’t move. Fight hits my tongue, bitter. I kick. The light grows wider and brighter as I’m dragged upward.

I choke, struggling to get free, pulled backward, stomach to the sky, water pouring into me. The arms slip higher, crush my neck, block my airway. I claw. Can’t breathe. Can’t spit the water out. Blackness slides in. Speckled shadows move until there is only dark. I flail. Try to break free. Breathe.
Breathe.

Shit, we are cursed.

*   *   *

I’m on my back, a sand flea gnawing on my shoulder. Something on the outer edge of my hearing. A voice. A hand slaps my face. Eyes open. A head blocks the sun, shadows swallowing features. Not shadows—a tattoo. Doyle.

“Hey, guy. You okay? I squeezed harder than I thought. Really sorry.”

I launch at him. I pop up fast, but am unsteady.

Tentacled fingers wrap around my fist, inches from his face. He holds it, turning my hand, as if examining the blue of each vein. He says something; it sounds like “Ease up, Bro.”

“Are you trying to kill me?” I spit. Swing with my left hand. He brushes it away.

“The fuck?” he says. “You were drowning.” He’s unruffled, like we’re talking over a beer. I push, but he twists my elbow behind my back. “Dude, you do not want to hit me.” He locks me in a bear hug. “Chill, man,” he says. “You’re just freaked. No air. Makes your head all wonky.” He’s not even breathing hard.

From up the cliff, a shriek. Enola. The stairs—it takes a full minute to run them and the pounding means she’s already started. I struggle, but it’s just fighting shame. A single punch. I couldn’t even get in a single punch.

“Dude, I saw you go under. I yelled but you didn’t hear. You were down way too long, man.”

“I was fine.”

When Enola reaches us she smacks Doyle on the shoulder. “Let him go.” He drops his hold, and she squeezes me tight. I can feel her panting, shaking against me. “Are you all right? What happened?”

“Your boyfriend tried to kill me.” She lets me go so quickly I lose my balance, and then she’s hitting—not hard, but if she stays at it long enough I’ll have a dead arm.

“He did not. He wouldn’t do that.” The rest is high-pitched squealing. I grab her arms and hold them at her sides. Doyle stands a few feet back. I can feel him smiling.

“Easy, Little Bird,” he says.

She is the opposite of easy. I am not easy. We will never at any point be easy.

Once she realizes I have no intention of letting her go, she sinks her teeth into my shoulder. I shout and she scoots free to look Doyle over for bruises. He mumbles, “I’m good.”

I check my shoulder. There are white half-moon marks from Enola’s teeth. “I swear he strangled me,” I say.

She turns on Doyle, fists ready.

“He was drowning, I pulled him up.” Hands in the air, innocent.

“Don’t be stupid. My brother doesn’t drown.”

In spite of myself, I grin. “That’s what I told him.”

“He’s a swimmer,” she says. “He can hold his breath a really long time.”

“Ten minutes long?” He makes a whistling sound with his teeth.

“Ten minutes?” Accusations all around.

“He tried to choke me.”

“Doyle’s a pacifist.” This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard her say. “I told him to come get you. There’s a contractor at the house. Frank sent him. You need to talk to the guy.”

We are on the stairs, Doyle climbing ahead of us with simian ease, when she taps my shoulder. “Been doing that a lot?”

“Getting choked by your boyfriends? No. You should come home more. Almost dying is fun.”

“Ten minutes is dangerous even for you,” she says.

I’d say that Doyle exaggerated, but I don’t know how long I was down. Her hands twitch inside her pockets. I see a quick flash of a card with what looks like a leg with a hoof. The Devil? But not like the one in
The Tenets
. Enola tucks it away.

“Sure,” I say.

*   *   *

The contractor is Pete Pelewski, a heavyset man with bushy salt-and-pepper hair. He wears a checked shirt and beaten-up tool belt, and writes with a carpenter’s pencil, a trustworthy costume designed to lessen the blow. Nothing a contractor says comes without pain.

“A hundred and fifty thousand,” he says. My gasp is audible, but he bulldozes forward. “That’s the basic bulkhead repair and a start on a terrace. The house,” he shakes his head. “The foundation’s in bad shape. You’ll need masons and landscapers to secure the bluff. I work with some guys. I won’t have a full estimate until talking to them, but expect another hundred thousand. Bare minimum.” He taps his pencil on his notes. “And you need to move fast. We’ve got to be able to get trucks on the beach, and the ground’s got to be solid enough to support grading.”

I’m saying appropriate things, asking how many trucks (four if the town will allow that many), how much time (weeks, months, depends on the trucks), can I live here while the work is done (until the foundation work starts), and now I’m shaking hands, asking for an estimate in writing, and exchanging pleasantries.
Isn’t Frank great? Yes, wonderful; my family’s oldest friend.

And then Pete Pelewski is gone and I’m leaning on the kitchen wall, next to the key hooks. The wallpaper is stained with fingerprints, Dad’s fingers, Mom’s, mine, Enola’s, touching the wall as we hung up our keys, for years and years.

Four, three, two, one.

“You need to ask Frank for money,” Enola says from the kitchen table. She’s in Mom’s spot, where the string from a teabag would hang over her cup, swaying, as she clinked spoon against porcelain.

“I’ll try the historical society, see if they have landmark restoration grants.”

“Sounds like it’d take awhile,” she says.

“I’m good at grants. It’s what I do.”

“Did,” she says. “If you asked Frank he’d probably say yes.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Why?”

“Why do you care?” There are harsher things I could say, things I’ve compiled and archived, each with a catalog card.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Dad lived here. I lived here.” Past tense.

“You don’t anymore.” The divots in the floor from the chair, those are mine. The stained quilt is hers. The clothing she didn’t take. A one-eyed teddy bear. Things she left behind.

“It’s still mine.” She slides her hands into her pockets, shuffling the cards.

Fine, let’s play direct. “What’s with your cards? I see you playing with them and you tore that picture out of my book.”

Doyle answers, “She’s had some really bad readings lately. Messed-up kind of shit.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Doyle.” She stomps. Chair legs scrape linoleum. “I’m not talking about it. That means you don’t get to talk about it.” She yanks open the kitchen door and stalks into the backyard.

Doyle grimaces, dragging down the tip of a tentacle, shadows mixing with ink. “She’s been touchy.”

“For how long?”

“Couple months.”

Shit.
And I have a week. “Any reason?”

“She just says she’s worried.”

I sit in my chair, the one that faced Dad’s. It will always be my father’s table though it’s been more than ten years since he died. I don’t have to close my eyes to see him, where Doyle is, waiting—though he would never say it—for Mom to come back.

I was nineteen, Enola was fourteen, and his was the first dead body we ever saw. Eyes bloodshot, paused over a newspaper he’d never finish reading. Enola came home from school and found him. A stroke, a tiny vessel blocked then burst like a snapped string. He’d been dying since the day Mom left.

We didn’t cry until after his body was removed.

She sat on the sofa with her knees in an inverted
V,
staring out at the water. From then on she would be the only other person to know how we grew up, how to cook a steak like Dad, how it felt when he knocked the backs of our heads, the only one who understood the loneliness.

“I hate you,” she said.

“I know.”

“I hated him.” We looked at the walls. The first sign of a crack starting.

“Me too,” I answered.

“What happens?” she asked.

In the dark I said, “I’ll take care of you.”

Doyle and I look out the window, but Enola isn’t there. He chews on his thumb. I hadn’t noticed before, but his fingers are like mine, gnawed to the hearts.

“She won’t go far,” I say. “There’s nothing to do in Napawset.” I should probably tell him that most relationships with my sister involve leaving. The tattoo makes it difficult to see him beyond elliptical suckers and hours of pain. “How old are you anyway?” I ask.

“Twenty-four.”

I had thought him closer to my age, edging thirty, maybe older. “I have to ask what you’re doing with my sister.” I am careful not to say
intentions,
because it’s fatherly.

“Whatever she wants for as long as she’ll let me.” A right answer to a question that had none. “What’s with you and staying underwater so long?”

“It’s a family thing. Our mom taught me. She did circus and carnivals for a while, too.”

“Didn’t she drown?”

“That was different.”

Doyle shakes his head and octopi glide across his throat. “Man, I don’t know. My family’s all pipe fitters.” He laughs and cracks his neck. Impossible as it should be, I’m starting to like him.

Creaking comes through the window, the sound of someone sitting down at a half-rotten picnic table. We both look. Enola is cross-legged on the table my father built, not the bench—never proper—facing away from us, bent-backed.

“I’m worried about her,” Doyle says quietly. “She’s getting a little strange on the cards.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

“Okay, man.”

The concrete on the back stoop is broken, so she hears me coming and picks up whatever cards were on the table. The paper looks tattered and yellow, very old, the colors faded. I can make out the shape of a skeletal arm, half worn away, before she snatches the cards and stuffs them in her hoodie. She twists around to look at me. I sit on one of the benches and feel the old wood sag under me.

“Is that a Marseille deck?” That’s what’s in
The Tenets.
I’ve seen Waite decks, too, illustrated in the 1900s. Delicate pictures. This is not that.

“No. And I’m not talking about it,” she says.

“Sure.”

She stretches her legs and leans back across the table. “Why did Dad build this? It’s not like we ever ate outside.”

“We did once or twice.”

“Not after Mom died, right?”

“No.” Everything stopped after Mom died. “Doyle’s nice,” I say.

She scrapes a small patch of lichen that’s grown on the table. “He likes me. I know that’s hard to do sometimes.”

“You’re not so terrible. He’s weird-looking, though. Even for you.”

“I know,” she smiles. “It’s kind of why I’m with him.”

“Where do you guys travel?” I want her to talk. It’s been so long since I’ve spent time with her that it feels good to listen to her. The thing I don’t miss about the library is the silence—the middle of winter days when there’s nothing to listen to but the hissing heaters, the hum of computers, and pages turning. Why did I never just pull Alice aside to talk?

“Winter last year Rose’s went deep into Georgia. Cards can be slow there. Churchy people.” She rolls her eyes. “The houses down there are gorgeous. You’d like them,” she says. “I took a ghost tour of an old brick place on this river that feeds into the ocean. It’s got oysters on each bank, piled up like ruffles on panties.” She stretches slowly. “Never seen anything so pretty.”

Manuscripts aren’t so different from ruffles; both need a light touch. I think about the job in Savannah. This morning Liz sent an email saying that the Sanders-Beecher Archive called her for a reference. She chided me for laying it on too thick with them, but said she corroborated my credentials. I’d do the same for her. Liz and I have always understood each other. I look at my sister, Enola, who I don’t understand at all. “What’s your show like?”

“Basic. Boring. The carnival is what you’d think, mostly. Swings, whack-a-mole, everything. Freak show.”

“Is that where Doyle is?”

“Yeah. There’s a maze with a Cyclops lamb and bouncers. We’ve got taxidermy monkey babies made into Siamese twins. It’s like stumbling across an enormous dog shit—you need to stare. I mean how the hell do you get monkey carcasses shipped to you?” She looks at the kitchen window, perhaps at Doyle. “We’ve got a swallower, Leo. Does swords and flames. He’s okay and he’s almost normal. Wife, kids, middle-aged spread. We’ve got a piercer, too, kind of an asshole, but he knows a lot about anatomy.” She digs a bit of grime from under her fingernail. “He hangs cannonballs from his nipples, pokes needles through his arms, that sort of stuff. At night shows if you pay extra you can see him lift stuff with his dick. George—he’s the fat man—handles the cash. Doyle works mostly nights.”

It makes sense. “The lights play better in full dark, I guess.”

“Yeah. In daylight he moves well, but it’s different at night. You get why he did the tattoos. In the dark he’s not really human. You see the bulbs but the light comes from him, like he’s part stars, part water. You look and think maybe you could be on that skin, move like that, and light would come from you, too. Sometimes I think the ink holds the light in so I can look at him, like maybe he did it because he wanted me, someone like me, to see him.”

She drags her fingers through her hair, scratching her scalp. I remember cutting out a chunk of her glue- and glitter-matted hair.

“He’s really good. He’s better than me,” she says.

My phone buzzes in my pocket.

It’s Alice; her voice is flat. “I need you to explain something.”

“Hey, what’s wrong?” I get up from the table and Enola follows, listening in. She mouths,
Alice?
I put up a hand, but she hangs over my shoulder.