The Book of Speculation (40 page)

I walk toward him.

“She did love this house,” he says when I approach, as though it’s his life spilling down the cliff, not mine. Creaking gives way to a sharp snap and Frank shoves me back. Enola’s bed scrapes down the broken boards, coming to rest on a partially collapsed wall. “It’s all my fault.”

“I need to know about the cards you gave my sister. Did my mother tell you anything about them?”

“Your dad was going to move you. I told her it would kill me if she left. I couldn’t help it. Then she gave me her cards and told me to hang on to them. They were her mother’s and grandmother’s. I figured if she gave me something like that she’d be back.” He looks away from the rubble, back to me. Eyes bloodshot like beets, like my father’s dead eyes. “They passed those things down like they were jewelry.”

My skin feels too tight, like I might rupture. My mother must have read the end, the cards Enola keeps reading, the same thing Verona Bonn read, all the way back to Ryzhkova. They passed the cards to each other creating history, fingers touching paper, imbuing it with hope and fears, fear like a curse. Of course they wouldn’t clear their cards, they were talking to their mothers, and isn’t that part of why I’ve stayed here? The book noted a falling out between Ryzhkova and her apprentice, a falling out over the mermaid. Enola said that cards build history—what a perfect way to wound someone. The cards were hers, Ryzhkova’s, then Amos and Evangeline’s on down the line, each leaving themselves in the ink, each pulling from the deck, pulling in fears that work like poison.

The wind blows a sheet of paper across a split board. The only paper of consequence was never in my possession—it was in Enola’s.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He waits for me to answer.

“I’m sorry about the house,” I tell him. I’m not.

I leave him at the bluff, grieving the house. I hear him shuffling through bits and pieces, looking for her in the rubble. He’s lost her twice now. I only lost her once.

I see Enola dig her hand deep into her pocket, each shuffle working a hex into her skin. Doyle watches me, craning over the top of Enola’s head. He asks after Frank and looks at me with wariness, too alert. He’s touched the cards, Doyle who my sister lies to because she’s scared, because she loves him.

Alice emerges from the McAvoy house and trudges toward her father. It hurts to watch her put a hand on his shoulder when she’d rather do anything but. But that’s who she is—a daughter, a practical woman, the responsible kind. It hurts to see her pull him away from what was my house, toward the place I once wished I’d lived.

I ask Enola if she’ll talk to Frank. “Alice shouldn’t be alone with him and Leah won’t kill him as long as you’re there.” The look she gives me is dark.

“Thought you’d be happy to see him dead.”

“Alice wouldn’t be. She’s mad now, but she won’t be forever.”

Enola glances at the tattooed man beside her, then back at me. “What the hell am I supposed to say to him?”

Doyle rubs her hair, possessive, comforting. She chews her lower lip.

“Please,” I say. “For me.”

“Fine.”

When Doyle starts to go with her, I ask him to hang around. He shrugs. We both watch her head toward Frank. With each step I whisper a refrain:
Be good. Be good. Please be good.

“You put a lot on her, you know,” Doyle says beside me.

“Maybe.” I start for the bluff, a slow limp. He follows. Again the wary look. “They’ll be fine. She’ll be all right.”

We walk to where the sand sharply dips, where Dad’s nightstand emptied its contents: pill bottles, magazines, keys to locks that don’t exist anymore. Off to the west a quiet horn signals the ferry’s slow trek. I ask, “Where did you say your family’s from?”

“Mom is out in Ohio.”

Ohio is good. It sounds like somewhere I would never go. It sounds dry, like there might be dry places.

“Why did you come here? What did she tell you?”

He shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his cargo pants. They bulge out. He breathes in, then lets out a prolonged hiss. “She told me you’re sick; she thinks you’re going to do something, something maybe like your mom did. I thought she shouldn’t be alone. Man, I don’t know. I heard about the mermaids and I saw you hold your breath, but I don’t know.”

“She lied.”

He turns quiet. Thoughtful maybe. “Enola doesn’t lie to me.”

“Yes, she does. I taught Enola how to hold her breath. She’s better than I am, or she was. Tell me, what’s worse than her brother being sick? Worse to you. Something she would lie about.”

His answer is pure reflex. “If she was sick.”

I say nothing.

He grunts and drops his head down. He kicks a pebble with his bare foot and it caroms off a shattered mirror, vanishing into the crabs. The tentacle tattoo extends down, twisting around his ankles, stretching out to his toes. “Damn.”

“You know some about my family. I’ll tell you about some other things, about the cards, specifically the cards.”

The sun is high, a bright bullet above the water. I tell him about the menagerie, about a Russian woman and a deck of orange cards, and how when you touch them you leave a piece of yourself behind, how these pieces work like a curse and the thoughts they contain seep into you like venom, how sometimes you hold on to things because you’re searching for someone in them, someone you want desperately to love you. How the very best intentions kill us.

We watch as Enola and Alice take Frank back to his house. The tide moves out, thick with horseshoe crabs. After a long time he speaks.

“Do you want me to get the cards from her?”

“I should take them so you don’t have to. I think we’ll be fine once they’re gone.”

“I can pick her pocket,” he says, quietly. “I used to, you know.” Of course he did. “She’s got this box for them. You want that, too?”

“Sure.” I look at him, this boy. He twitches his fingers to imaginary music. “Can I ask you something?”

A shrug.

“Why the octopi?”

He blushes, a dark stain under the ink. “My pop was in the navy. It’s an old sailor thing. Wards off evil.”

“Can I ask you something else?”

“The electricity?”

I nod.

His mouth quirks up. “A doctor told me there’s too much salt in me, that it makes me super conductive. I don’t think he really knew what it was. Maybe I just touched a light switch and it lit me up instead of the lamp. Is it really important to know why?”

“You love my sister.”

“I’m going to steal from her for you.”

Across the water the ferry has passed the Middle Ground Light. The tide is past peak, the tops of boulders just breaking water. Doyle looks at me, squint-eyed, head tilted. He turns and jogs the distance to Frank’s house and I watch his loose-limbed gait, the slow questing of tentacles. At the door he calls her name, then vanishes inside.

I wait, watching the remnants of the house. It’s alive with crumbling plaster, blowing papers. It was a house before there was an
us
. After we die there will be nothing to say that we ever were, no house left to speak of us, we’ll have all vanished into the water. But that will be later, much later. Not today.

Just now Doyle’s hand must be reaching into a pocket, maybe as he brushes her back, maybe as he leans over her. When he lifts the cards it will be almost like the tentacles are sucking on them. I feel hope. With the cards gone, it will stop.

Not more than a quarter hour and he returns, bounding through the grass, box in hand. I ask if she noticed. He shakes his head no.

“She’ll be pissed,” he says. But she’ll be alive to be angry.

“I’m sorry you had to touch them.” He should go back to Enola before he’s missed. Doyle cracks his neck. He wears guilt like another tattoo. Moments later he disappears back into the house across the street.

The box is smaller than I’d thought; I can hold it with one hand, rounded edges pressing into my palm. Dark red wood shows through layers of damaged paint. The top is covered with dulled illustrations—a man with a moustache, a faded bird with a tail made of flames.
Oh, I remember you.
I lift the lid and shock zips up my fingers. Maybe this is what it feels like when Doyle touches a light. Inside, the paper is orange faded to yellow, soft and ragged from my family’s touch. I snap the lid closed.

*   *   *

My right foot hits the beach and a horseshoe crab walks over it. There is hardly a place to stand for the winding and writhing of the crabs.

Simon.

The crabs have dragged the buoys out, pulled them far below the water so that not even the anchor buoys show; I’d need to walk for hours to find them. I take the box from under my arm. I’ll need sand, rocks, anything for weight. Quartz pebbles and ground-down bricks mark the high-tide line. As if knowing my intent, the crabs clear a path. I take as many rocks as I think will fit, but the box is so small that pebbles may not be enough. I’ll need to bury it, to make sure that when I leave they won’t come back. To give the Sound time to do its work.

The water is frigid, like April rather than July, and the first step strikes out cold. But even in the water the box feels hot like flame. Clawed feet swarm, and crab shells slow my walk to a shuffle. They circle, churning sand, tails switching and whipping my heels. As my bad foot moves forward they begin pushing, urging me along. Sharp feet pinch on my pant leg and the crabs begin to climb, clinging like a child to its parent, hanging on as if at any moment I might run. I dust off one and another grabs on.

As when taking out the anchors, I have to move slowly. With each step crabs grip higher, weighing me down. As the water reaches my chest, they’ve managed to dig into my shirt. I squeeze the box tight to my side. Now. Air out. A quick breath out that sucks in the stomach. Diaphragm up, like a tight drum. Navel to spine. One. Two. Three. Then in, quick breath, spread each rib. The trick is to breathe wide and not let go. The trick is to breathe like you’re thirsty. A crab loses its grip, falls to the sandy bottom. I am under.

Simon.

My mother’s voice lives in the waves as it always has, as though she never left. Each step is heavy, aching. The light from above fades, lost in the seaweed and the growing horde of crabs. If I look up I can see faint rays spiraling through the salt. I have to get farther out. I can’t chance they’ll wash up. A sharp tail pricks under my arm, tapping at the box. I pass a bicycle half buried in sand and rock, encased in barnacles and covered with crabs, now part of the Sound. My stomach flutters. A hiccup of air escapes. I walk.

A clawed leg digs at my neck then burrows into my hair. Skin crawls, electric. Stop. Hit it away. It scuttles down my back, clicking over others. More hooking, clawing. Twitch. Shake them off.

Simon,
she whispers. Hush. Hush, I have work to do.

More scratching, pricking. The weight. Another hiccup. Pull them off. The box drops. One moment, falling slow to the ground, lid open. Cards scatter, drifting. Horseshoe crabs swarm the box. Prince Ivan clawed. Firebird drowned. A hiccup. More air gone. I reach for it, but my arms won’t lift. Horseshoe crabs hang on my sleeves. Back up my neck they pile on. The Tower floats, then is flicked away by a crab. I kick. Scuffle them away. The bad ankle rolls. I fall, sag, to the bottom. Crabs move in.
Ah, god.
A thousand legs, a hundred tails. Onto my stomach, my rib cage, shoving me back. I look up. A beam of light, weak, clouded with algae and brine.

Simon.
Sweetly, she says it, calling me home. I can hear her tell me I’m a good son, can feel the eggshells of that last morning beneath my fingernails.

My legs will not lift. My chest won’t rise. More breath is pushed away under the weight. On the shore they might look for me. My fingers brush something smooth. A card. A small thing, simple. Water and salt will eat the ink, wipe away its face. Good. Burning was too quick. A slow curse demands slow breaking. The orange will bleed into the Sound. The oil from our fingers will wash away and the paper will soften and dissolve into the sand, into the water’s mouth. As the cards break away, so will we.

Octopi for good luck. That’s fine. They’ll pull the trailer along to Ohio. Enola will lean an arm out the window, her hand flying over the wind. His family will be wide and warm.

I have saved her.

There is a woman with my sister’s eyes, and hair long and black like ink—my mother, but not—a silent man beside her—then the mermaid girls, the diving queens, the fortune-tellers and magician’s assistants, a sea of black-haired women with odd eyes, chests made wide for swimming and breath-holding, with laughs that sound like shattering plates. There are little girl hands, and scraped legs that I bandaged, knobby knees on my shoulders when I carried her down a cliff, the girl who left me because she wanted to live.

Ah, and now among the black hair and breath-holding, the fortunes and drowning, a single long red braid. Beside me, a pair of freckled hands digs into the beach with mine, French conjugations, cursing my family when I could not, the sweetest taste at the base of the neck, the curve of an arm reaching to the top of a library shelf. A life lived beside mine. I have not been alone. I can feel her now. I was never alone.

There. The last air. The crash of water around me. I am drowned, but it feels like being lifted—the sky’s hands on me, pulled up from the sea as I am swallowed by it. Light. Brine. And here, a voice.

You are home.

The fingers on my wrists are hot, almost burning. Though it might be the fire from skin being cold. There’s a tear in the black, a pinprick of light. It stabs deeper than the touch.

My name in a thousand voices.

A sharp electric snap, frigid. Bright.

Gagging.

Breath.

A soft voice. Two voices. Far back, distant smudges moving closer. My back hurts, itches, can’t get warm. Louder. My name again. Two sounds, a hiss and a mumble. One voice now.

Simon.

My lungs, my guts, pushing out water—not coughing but turning—outside in and inside out, forcing me dry. Dry. Dry, just once I want to be dry. There are arms around my back, pounding my shoulders, beating my spine, clutching and holding. They’re wet. Soaking.