Two If by Sea (15 page)

Ian nodded.

He smiled.

He waited for Frank to tell him that he would soon climb mountains and cross rivers and search in gardens until he found a boy who'd been dead for months.

“Honey, I don't think I can find him. I think his body swallowed too much water. I don't think his body could get better, just like my wife, Natalie.”

Then Ian shook his head violently. He lifted one hand like a crocodile puppet, and then snapped the fingers closed, plainly telling Frank to shut his mouth.

Was there, after all, any wonder that Ian was hoping that his brother was alive and Frank could bring him home? Frank lay down next to Ian in the twilight, remembering himself as a child in this very room, huddled under a delicious thickness of quilts that never seemed to be enough, reaching with his toes for the hot water bottle that Hope customarily gave him. The present was so hard that Frank was grateful he couldn't see the future. He put his arm around Ian and fell asleep.

•  •  •

The next morning, Ian got hurt.

Since Frank hadn't decided about school, he still kept Ian with him most of the time while he worked, figuring that a child who's survived a tsunami should have some credit at the happenstance prevention bank. Any experienced father—farmer, idiot—would have known that a farm is the most dangerous of all workplaces, a minefield of accidents literally waiting to happen, and that having someone there to look after Ian and Jack was only baseline prudent.

It was a Monday, and though Hope would be ready to look after him in the summer, this last term she was working long hours every day, training a new media specialist—the modern name for librarians, as libraries were now “media centers” and books apparently were “media.” Her pension earned twice over, Hope Mercy was finally retiring from the high school, after forty years.

Fetes and observances were planned.

With this and the wedding on the horizon, Frank should have waited for summer to start trying to mend the various messes and malfunctions at Tenacity. He should have attended to urgent things, like putting Ian on his medical insurance and getting Ian a Social Security card. But one dawn rolled as every repair uncovered another set of problems and tasks, and the mind under his mind was able to find a little study in which to think while his muscles were busy. That had always been Frank's way. There was money to hire someone to do the work, but there wasn't so much of it that Frank and Patrick couldn't make do. Activity led to practical considerations, but idleness bred speculative thought like burdock. Frank needed practicality. Concentrating on here and now was a struggle. Then and someday sang like sirens. Whenever he was alone and short of exhausted, his mind began to plow. What if the father came? What if Charley repented of his foolishness? What if Ian remembered everything and produced his family's phone number? He didn't want to remember Natalie's drained, inert face, or Brian's anguished mourning, all those identical Donovan coffins, or the purple minivan tumbling away with Ian's older brother inside, or anything else.

At least when he fell into bed these winter nights, he was spent. He'd never worked harder—not at Tura Farms, not on the job. No sooner did he lie down and surrender to the sounds of the house going to sleep around him, the doors snapping shut, lights flicking off, shades pulled with a swoosh, the heat clattering to life, than he went out, and no sooner did he go out than he woke before it was light when Hope snapped on the hall light and walked past his door on the way down to the kitchen.

That same morning, Hope said, “Do you think he'll stay with me in summer? Go with me and do the things I do? I don't think he will. He wants to be out there with you. He wants to be with you every minute.”

Frank said, “I'll make sure he does.”

Then it was too late.

Frank wasn't watching. There was so much to be done. Everything in the big barn was falling down, and when the big pasture bloomed in spring, there would be a whole new set of problems because, even under snow, he could tell it was a welter of burdock, mallow, poison ivy, and thistles as big around as broom handles. Weeds didn't really matter, but Frank hated weeds. The higher pasture would have been better for exercise; it was flatter, bigger, and drained well. But something big had taken out about sixty feet of fence in two places at some point, and neither his sister nor his mother claimed to know what it was, although Frank suspected Marty with a tractor. The family horses were healthy, but not for long. Eden's quarter horse, Saratoga, was just eight, but had ballooned to the girth of an oil drum from more than adequate food and inadequate exercise. Hope was an accomplished rider, and rode her big Clydesdale mare, Bobbie Champion, to visit neighbors the way other women might drive a car; she sometimes even rode her horse to school, although this created too much of a sensation to be practical. In summer, she harnessed Bobbie to her big-wheeled pony cart and went to and from town and the farmers' market. But now Bobbie needed the farrier and the door on her big stall hung off its hinges. Bobbie could have walked out anytime she wanted and gotten on the road to Madison although she never moved. Still, anything broken was dangerous. Frank put Glory Bee in the sturdiest of the boxes, but she succeeded in leaning out slats after the first two days. Forty days of work and more before the place was even safe, Frank thought. It was not safe. Ian would have been safer in a housing project on the west side of Chicago.

That day, it was so cold that he and Patrick were encumbered by thick Carhartt overalls and gloves. Frank had forgotten the raw misery of a Wisconsin February.

“Sweet fucking Jesus, guv, how would you bear it ever?” Patrick said. “Filthy fucking cold.”

“You don't get used to it,” Frank said.

At least, inside the big barn, they were out of the wind.

“What did you do before?” Patrick asked. “When you lived in the States.”

“Police,” Frank said. “Mounted police. In Chicago.”

“Did you like that?”

“I liked it. Now that I look back, I loved it. It was the best thing I ever did.”

“Stopped out, though?”

“I got in an accident.”

“On horseback?” Patrick was suddenly still, steeped in attentiveness, and it was fearful to think of him remembering the screams of the horses, the curses of riders, the clatter of stiles and crisping of smashed foliage that attended a fall in a jumps race. For pure unluckiness, such an accident felt like a house fire.

“No. I got hit by a car in the rain. I had been covering for a regular traffic cop.”

“Whyn't be a detective? Or some big toff like that?”

“Detectives in Chicago are just regular police, not commanders. They work on major crimes, murder and big robberies. I liked working with the horses,” Frank said. “I liked how people saw the horses. Police show up and everybody hates you. Firefighters show up, and everybody cheers. Hooray! Here come the Marines! I was police, but that's how people reacted to the horses. They respected them.”

“Your own horse?”

“No. He was a donated horse, Tarmac, a Standardbred. Dark gray. Like asphalt. A funny color. They started to train him as a harness racer . . . would you call that a carriage racer? It didn't work out.” Frank finished the interior patch of a three-foot-round hole in the roof of the barn, over an unoccupied box stall. The shingling would have to wait for better weather. “What about you? Did you always want to ride?”

“I didn't want to do it when I did it,” said Patrick. “I hated it. I just had the knack. I was the youngest of six boys, ten kids altogether. I was for a priest. I graduated with honors from seminary and had a scholarship to college.” Frank knew better than to ask what changed, as some kind of pain shimmered, then melted like mist. Patrick wiped away nothing on his mouth with the back of his glove and said, “Bastards.” Frank wasn't sure if Patrick meant the moldy, studded boards they'd just thrown down or whoever had driven him from the steeple to the dangerous thunder of a steeplechase.

That was when Ian screamed.

Frank leaped down five rungs of the ladder, staggering on his bad leg. Ian had stepped on one of those curled roof boards studded with rusty roofing nails Frank had thrown down. Blood pooled where the tender rind of his pink heel was pierced in two places, right through the sole. Everything he'd heard about horses and metal and tetanus flooded Frank's brain. Taking Ian in his arms, he judged where the big veins were, and knew he should pull out the nails. He pulled them out, ignoring the child's screams as he wet a towel with hot water and pressed it to the small foot.

Summoned, Hope was back in five minutes. She drove to the emergency room while Ian wept (loudly; he
did
have quite a voice) and clung to Frank's neck.

The tetanus shot was ferocious, as was cleaning the wounds, which went deep, because Ian had been running. If she hadn't known Hope since high school, the doctor looked as though she would have liked to report Frank.

“That's not a child-friendly environment,” the doctor said.

“It's his home, and I have to teach him to be careful there.”

“You can't really teach a three-year-old kid to watch his feet every minute, Mr. Mercy.”

“I know. It's my fault. I feel awful about it.”

Hope and Frank took Ian to the achingly expensive tourist-grandmother toy store in town and bought him hundreds of dollars' worth of Legos. For two days, whenever Ian gently disengaged himself from Frank to play with his new toys, it was Frank, not Ian, who seemed emptied out, bereft. Devoutly he wished Ian did not have superpowers, because he could not discern what Ian was eliciting from him, and what Frank really felt on his own.

The following week, Frank took Ian to school. Just before he went inside, Frank realized he had no idea what to say.

“He doesn't talk,” Frank told the teacher, after telling Ian that it was okay to go over and play with the blocks. “He talked before the tsunami, but not since then.”

“That's hard,” the teacher said. “For you and for us.”

For her? Frank thought. Had she not heard the word
tsunami
, or was that not common lingo every day on Center Street in Spring Green, Wisconsin? He had to remind himself that this was the nature of teachers, a kaleidoscope with a very narrow lens. His leg began to drum.

He said, “Well, at least he won't be disruptive.”

The teacher said, “We do teach kids who have handicaps.” A little girl sat in the corner with a grubby doll tightly clamped between her feet, twisting a strand of her hair and rocking metronomically. “Has he had his hearing tested?”

Frank said, “He doesn't have a hearing deficit. We think it's a result of trauma.”

“But does he have a history of ear infections?”

“No.”

“It's not always easy to tell. Some children form scar tissue without parents ever knowing. Their hearing is then like this.” The young woman with her ingenuous clusters of hair ribbons stuffed both index fingers into her ears. Frank wanted to stomp on her foot. “Has he had a hearing test since you've been here?”

“No, but doctors in Australia know about hearing,” Frank said.

“Doctors at the University of Wisconsin specialize in children who have hearing loss at the upper and lower ends of the spectrum.”

“I would guess this was the result of emotional trauma.”

“What kinds of emotional trauma?”

“Besides seeing most of his family die in a flood on Christmas morning?”

“Yes, besides that. Were there other kinds of abuse?”

“No! Isn't that enough?” Frank said.

“We're set up to handle only a small range of differences . . .”

“He's not as different as that little girl in the corner is. I don't know if he's going to grow up gay or allergic to cashews . . .”

“What other allergies does he have?”

“He isn't allergic to anything I know of.” Frank glanced over at Ian, who carefully bared his teeth in a monster face and put up claws, waggling his head back and forth. Frank laughed. “Do you have some papers I should look at? I'm sure his pediatrician can fill out the forms you need, too.”

“We have two open spaces in this class. But we would need the full tuition for the semester that started in January.”

“Okay. That's fine. Why?”

“Well, he needs all the same things as if he was starting school in January. School supplies, an art cart, tissues, a sturdy backpack . . .”

“I see. You supply all that?”

“No, those things are supplied by the parent.”

“So . . . I don't mind paying, but what am I . . .”

“Paying for? It's more demanding of our staff expertise with individual child development to mainstream a student with learning problems coming in midterm. We'll have to wait and see,” said the teacher with the cherubic face and satanic soul, as though preschool was something mysterious and arcane, like the Electoral College. “If you can get those papers back to us by next week?” Proudly, Ian held up a paper on which he had written all of his letters, capitals and lower case, and his name, IANMRCY.

“Did Dad teach you this?” the teacher asked, and Ian nodded. Frank had no idea that Ian could write those letters. Ian gave her the paper, and did his small motion—right, left. The sabertooth preschool warden melted. She knelt and hugged him. “Welcome to school, Ian.”

•  •  •

“You made her do that,” Frank said. Ian chuckled soundlessly. “And you've been holding out on me. Where did you learn to write letters?” Big, elaborate grin and shrug. “You think you're smart?” Frank tickled Ian so hard that the whole car seat shook.

The following week, loaded down comically with ten pounds of school supplies, Ian joined his class. When Frank left, Ian's hug was urgent, tenacious, but the other kids were eyeing him closely, and after a moment, Ian straightened his shoulders and gave Frank a cheerful salute, his eyes overbright. As Frank turned away, he thought, Good boy. And he thought, Well, I can do this. For the first time since Natalie's death, and since Ian came to him, he could see a clear path. If nothing else went awry, he could walk that path. Putting the invisible house of his life in place had taken months of human effort. Knocking it awry was but the work of a moment for the gods, and nothing would ever be the same.