The Sperm Donor’s Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family (16 page)

She turned towards the sink again, but he stood behind her, hugging her for awhile. The house smelled richly of his childhood: musty and metallic like an old range heating up, and something not unpleasantly earthy, like potatoes at the back of a storage bin that have just begun to sprout. He nuzzled behind Lynette's ear and she shut the water off. “What is it?” she asked, laughing. But he didn't answer and she stood still, leaning against him. He wanted to place her in his history, and he couldn't: telling her the story of every rock and tree would not make him see her there. So they stood, she looking down at his hands around her waist, he looking through the kitchen window at the faded wind sock flying from the flag pole, and the blue and white Spanish tiles set into the garden wall, and the pathways of smooth round stones and opaque beach glass that his grandmother had made, and the lemon tree that had split at the base in a storm years ago and grown back together, and the nasturtiums that grew in profusion around totems of driftwood.

When he'd brought the last of the bags in, he remembered Annie.

“She was with the boys a minute ago,” Lynette said.

He looked out the living room window and made out Lynette's sons: Marcos and Kyle squatting together around one of the pools left by the low tide, and Randall farther off, staring down pensively at something. Anthony turned to walk down the hall but stopped when he saw the hand prints on the sliding glass door, Annie's size and at her height. He understood then: up on her toes and at the window, circling the house to locate Lynette and avoid her. He imagined how carefully and slowly she'd slid the door open.

“Is she out there?” Lynette called from the kitchen.

“No,” he called back, trying to sound casual. “She probably got tired of poking sea anemones with sticks.”

Annie was not one of Cupid's dimpled, round-faced cherubs, but Anthony was thankful she was as stubborn and durable as she looked. Her jaw was wide and her chin definite as a thumb print. Her slate green eyes were narrow but long, inquisitive, observant and unsparing. Anthony had had her hair cut short after Diana died. There was such a lot of it. Like her mother, she had a real head of hair. Now cropped in a bowl shape, it was so thick the bangs stood off her forehead, framing her face like a little helmet.

When he came in, she was making one of those pictures that require most of a box of crayolas: a coating of black over a garish assortment of colors, then a pin to scratch lines through the first layer of paraffin.

“Hi Daddy,” she said, without looking up.

He sat down on the end of the bed and watched her applying black crayon with great force. After a few strokes she stopped and leaned against his leg, gazing at him.

“It's going to be pretty,” he said.

“It's going to be for you.”

“Lucky me,” he said, adding quietly, “Didn't you have a nice time with the boys?”

She shrugged and turned back to her picture. “They do the same things over and over.”

He smiled, looking at the back of her head and shaking his own. She would do better at battling adult banality.

“I put all my clothes in one drawer,” she announced.

“Why'd you do that, pumpkin?”

“It smells like mommy.”

“Show me,” he said, and they went together to the chest of drawers, and she lifted the shelf paper from one corner and showed him the fine dusting of Jean Nate powder that lay beneath. He felt like picking up the chest of drawers and throwing it into the sea. Instead he picked up a handful of Annie's clothes and pressed them to his face.

“C'mon” Annie said, as she sat back down to her artwork, “This is the good part.”

He closed his eyes against memory and heard Diana anyway, pounding down the hall on her heels. He saw her come in as she once had, at this time of day, in this light, standing at the end of the bed with her feet planted far apart, shouting at him: “You shut out everything! You shut me out!” Then he heard doors in the house being wrenched open, slammed shut … Annie's baby cries. He sympathized with the house, ransacked by her rage. The force wasn't necessary. Doors could be easily sprung by a thumb and two fingers, swing free suddenly, make a breeze and relieve your clothes of their stiffness. Doors you could put a shoulder to, give a good leaning to, press in on the knob and lift the tongue past the warped latch. But with her, doors were either open or closed. When she challenged him, he could feel all his weight pitch against the surface she was pounding on, and it seemed to him now that the two of them had been unable to know each other. And he hadn't shut her out, he just couldn't come at things dead-on.

His body filled with an ache that backed up inside him like smoke and pressed against the top of his throat as though it were a damper thrown closed. The entire time she'd beat on the front door, the back had stood wide open … wide open. If she'd whispered his name in the dark, even once, whispered it.

Annie was pulling on his fingers, complaining.

“I only get one black crayola in the box and it's the one I use the most.”

Anthony stood in the living room, in the dark, listening. The seals wouldn't quit their barking. Voices so hoarse and full, hearing them made him hear again the cello sonatas Diana used to play. He smiled, remembering how the cats used to come sneaking back in after the weekly house cleaning, skulking and looking left and right. One seal's voice asserted itself over the rest, on and on: an aria, a solo, a lost love. Anthony didn't know why he was up.

Lynette's sand dollars were spread out all over the coffee table. She spent hours drilling holes in them with a needle and threading dental floss through so that they could hang as ornaments in the Christmas tree. How like Lynette, making this a memory now so that it could be stored up and then brought out again at Christmas and the memory of their first Christmas together joined to it. They needed a new reserve of memory, both of them.

He told himself to go to bed but didn't make a move. Late at night, he and Diana had fought. Towards the end, he often stayed up alone, wondering when enough would be enough, or what, and wondering if it would come in a terrible exhalation of silence.

He sat down on the cold hearth stones and closed his eyes. Annie loved the seals. There was an enormous one the surfers fed sandwiches. It would swim up the beach while he and Annie walked, and back with them when they turned round. The seal would swoop beneath the surface, and Annie would sing a few lines of her seal song, and then they'd spot his head coming up again just beyond the breakers.

This summer, she wore her grandmother's wide brim straw hat everywhere … stubbed toes, protruding belly and the huge pink hat. She'd pestered him about the seal while he was cleaning up breakfast, and he'd told her she could go to the edge of the property and look. Coming in to clear plates from the table, he'd stood for a moment and watched her climb over the thick ice plant and up the dunes, the tutu skirt of her swimsuit lifting and falling. She'd glanced quickly at the house, where reflections on the sliding glass doors prevented her from seeing him, then turned back to the seal, pulling off the hat in one hand and waving grandly.

The next morning, Anthony heard the boys' voices carried on the wind as he walked. A tiger shark's tail left cross hatches in the sand as it thrashed and snapped at the three boys jumping around it.

“Grab its tail!” shouted Marcos, still holding the rod.

“No way. You do it.” Randall, the middle brother, shook his hands in excitement as he side-stepped the shark.

“Chicken shits!” Marcos yelled. He dropped to his knees, frantically digging at the sand to make a place for the rod. “Kyle,” he shouted, “get over here and hold the rod.”

“No,” the youngest boy wailed, transfixed by the eyes of the shark that threatened a malevolence worse than his brother's.

“Here, I'll do it,” said Randall, scampering in a wide circle around the fish which twisted like a lash.

But before he arrived at his brother's side, the line broke, and Anthony saw all three boys look up at the filament floating in the air.

“He's loose!” shrieked Kyle, running for higher, drier sand.

Marcos dropped the rod and charged the shark. He grabbed it by the tail and as its head jerked back towards him, he wrenched it into the air and began to spin. He whipped round and round, sighting off the end of the animal's flat snout, letting its weight hold him upright as he increased speed.

Randall hugged himself in fear. Kyle was the first to turn and look down the beach, secretly hoping for adult intervention. “Geezer Noise is coming,” shouted Kyle, making a move in Anthony's direction before he remembered himself and stopped.

Marcos let go of the shark, sending it skittering over the hard sand. He ran after it, his body zigzagging after his head as though he were diving through the air. By the time Anthony arrived, he was standing over the shark, feet spread apart, breathing hard. Kyle was the first to greet his stepfather, gibbering in his high-pitched voice about Marcos' heroics.

Randall stood at a distance watching Anthony pick up the rod and blow sand out of the reel.

“Well, what have you got here?”

Marcos looked up and squinted, a calculated moment, as though he needed time to recognize Anthony. “What's it look like?” he said, sneering, and then abashed at his own arrogance, he added, “Good thing we put fifty pound test on the rod this morning.”

Holding the rod in front of him, Anthony replied, “It's going to take a good part of the evening to get the sand out of this reel.” Then surprised at the edge in his voice, he reminded himself: they're just boys.

Marcos stared at the shark, which lay dazed and convulsing in the sand. Randall still had his arms crossed. To Anthony, Randall's whole body belied waiting, waiting to decide with whom he should ally himself. The silence mounted and Kyle blurted out, “Isn't he a beaut?”

“Yes,” said Anthony, hoping he could win Marcos with a little admiration. “That's a good-size tiger shark, must have put up quite a fight.”

“Yeah, sure did,” said Marcos. “We were all three on the rod at one point.” And then he checked himself, kicking the sand.

“Look at the markings on him,” chirped Kyle, “just like the decals on my Tiger Fighter.”

Anthony's ears filled with the racket of sea gulls and waves breaking and for a moment he couldn't think of what it was the boy was talking about. Then he remembered the shelf of prized model airplanes and turned his attention back to the boys.

“What do you want to do with it?”

“Keep it,” said Marcos before the others could answer.

“What for?” Anthony asked, unable to keep from smiling.

“As a trophy. You know, like deer heads on the wall.”

Kyle watched the shark gasp and shiver, watched its mouth open and close, and the magnitude of Marco's suggestion dawned on him. “But then it will have to die.”

“So what. It's a mean old shark,” said Marcos, sounding less sure of himself.

Anthony decided to opt for practical considerations, aware that an appeal to mercy with Marcos would only get him labeled “panty waist.”

“If you want to make it a trophy, you'll have to pay to have it done.”

“Naw,” said Marcos. “I'll just let it dry out.”

Anthony couldn't keep from laughing. “It would stink to high heaven first.”

“Let's put it back,” whined Kyle, who couldn't stand to look at it anymore and couldn't take his eyes off it.

The shark's skin had gone from sheen to mat. A strip of eel grass was pasted to its belly.

“No,” shouted Marcos, stamping his foot in the sand. “It's mine. You leave it right there. I'm going to ask Mother if I can keep it.”

Anthony watched the animal's belly pulse, wanting all of a sudden to make Marcos gut it, remembering the first fish he ever slit, instructed by an uncle to punch the blade into the soft place. He hadn't expected the life inside to have so much color: bile and blood, yellows, reds and blues on a palette of slime.

He stood to his full height, dreading the role of disciplinarian, a voice in him saying, “Go ahead, let your mother deal with you,” only he knew chances were good that she'd send Marcos back and let him have the final word. He warred with himself over this, whether she was in fact right in asking him to assume a fatherly role, or if it was simply a way to avoid becoming the target of hostility herself.

Randall, until now silent, was the one who settled the matter. Of the three, he was the most reserved and deliberate.

“Marcos,” he said, not avoiding his brother's wrathful look, “you know she'll just agree.”

Marcos snorted heat and sand from his nose, furious at his brother for assuming the authority he felt he had wrested from his stepfather. “Well shit,” he said, turning his back on them all and stalking off down the beach.

Anthony picked up the shark and hurled it back into the sea. Then he watched Marcos' skinny figure recede, scuffing up sand with his feet, shoulder blades sticking out like folded wings.

Marcos had been his paper boy, the reason he'd met Lynette, and nearly not married her. But he had, and he told himself things were loosening up. The boy displayed a willfulness that Anthony was sure, on good days, portended great success; on bad days, a juvenile felon record. He'd reasoned with Marcos, joked with him, shouted at him from the front door, tipped him at the bottom of the driveway, and always the same slick assurance: “No problem, guy.” In six months, he'd dug the paper out of the rhododendron bushes, retrieved its soggy remnants from the gutter, hunted for it in his backyard, replaced his television aerial.

“Never have I found it at my door,” he told the business office. They claimed no similar complaints had been made. Then, early one summer morning, a tall ash blond stepped from her car, walked to his door and dropped the paper beneath his mail slot. For three days he watched her. He was up at that hour. Annie had to be fed and dressed and readied for Mrs. Hargrove, and he usually did a few hours of computer drafting before driving to the tool and die plant to meet with the other engineers. On the fourth morning, he turned the Levelor blinds horizontal, though it increased the glare on his computer terminal, and waited for her reaction to seeing him. She smiled and waved, then ascended the steps without hurry.