Float (24 page)

“No word on Nod?” Wade asked. They leaned their chests against the floor and rested their arms on the floor as if they were settling down for a long night at Ten Bells. Both the museum people groaned.

“No Nod, but no body either,” Duncan said.

“Doesn’t mean anything,” said Annuncia. “The crabs and the gulls will make a swift and environmentally friendly end to him if he doesn’t show up soon.”

“There are worse graves than the clean, green sea,” said Wade, touching the painted expanse of water on the floor.

“Stop that,” said the museum man.

“Yes, stop it.” Duncan rested his forehead on his knees and felt very tired. As soon as his eyes closed, he dropped into wakeful REM dreams and had a vision of Nod, arms and legs extended, drifting and twirling down to the depths of the ocean like a leaf, through an autumn forest of coral and anemone. Cod the size of babies nosed at him as he came to rest at the bottom with their father.

“Was Nod wearing a gold earring?” asked Wade.

Duncan snapped awake again. “Why? Has someone been found with an earring?”

“No,” said Wade. “Just the polite thing to do. If he washes up on shore he should have enough gold on his person to bury him.”

“Used to be law,” said Annuncia.

Duncan just stared at them. In all this commotion, he’d forgotten he was mad at Annuncia. “You missed quite the happening last night at Seacrest’s with your buddy.”

Wade looked away and whistled, and Annuncia shrugged without changing the neutral expression on her face. She pushed herself away from the floor as if she were leaving the dinner table. “Speaking of which, we’ve got to head over there now. He called to ask for help with the netball installation.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me what he wanted the factory for?”

“That would have meant revealing his identity. That was for him to do, not me.”

“Besides, Mr. Leland, you would have said no,” said Wade. “It’s pretty far out. I was skeptical myself, all these art shenanigans.”

“I had to save the factory for a higher purpose,” said Annuncia. “You had to sign a contract so he could have access to a processing plant to fulfill his contract.”

“His contract?”

“An artist says he is going to do something, and he carries it out. That is the contract. Phase One of the Diatom Project was completed last night. Phase Two begins in the spring when we start shipping out the product. Phase Three is when the customers start spreading it in the soil. The fourth and final phase is when the rains wash it back to the seas. The idea comes from Adoniram, but we are all involved in the execution of his idea, as we were all involved in destroying the oceans in the first place.”

“Adoniram?” asked the museum man. “
The
Adoniram? The conceptual artist?”

“He’s alive?” asked the woman.

“Down at the Seacrest’s parking lot right now beaching a new installation,” said Annuncia. “The ugly consequences of human excess.”

“You can’t quite get it out of your mind once you seen it,” said Wade. “Smells, too, as the day warms up. Full of dead things.”

The woman turned to her associate. “You stay here and guard this. I’m going to Seacrest’s.”

“Adoniram,” the man said. “It’s a miracle.”

They all watched as the museum woman headed for the dock, tripping over all kinds of seaweed in her heels, and, with a raised arm, she motioned to the captain to start up his engine.

“Mr. Leland,” said the museum man. “Do you think you could remove yourselves from our painting now?”

“Please,” said Duncan. “Go home. This floor hasn’t been abandoned. It is not yours, it is ours. If you want to buy it, we’ll talk about that later. Right now, we have to concentrate on my brother.”

“But in the likely event that the floor is going to be ours, one way or another, I’d like to see to its safe storage.”

Duncan closed his eyes tightly. He heard the seagulls come to life directly over him, making a raucous noise, hanging in a current that Duncan could not feel. He sensed that they were looking down at him as they soared and circled, absorbing the big picture in a way that he could not. He wished he had that sort of distance. The tide was coming in, and he heard the grinding of stones as the water moved forward and then relaxed.

Chief Lovasco pulled himself up onto the floor without speaking. He was stern-faced, and Duncan could guess what that meant. When Lovasco knelt next to him, Duncan could smell coffee on his breath and the drying weeds of the ocean that were stuck on his rain gear.

“Duncan,” he said. “I just got a call. You’d better come to Colrain with me. They’ve found a body.”

Even though Duncan knew that this was going to be the end to the search, he longed for uncertainty again. “Nod?”

“No, we think it’s your father. And we have quite a few questions for your mother.”

“Things have a way of washing up there, don’t they?” said Chief Lovasco, his voice muffled as it came through the opening of the glass divider in the police cruiser. Duncan was squeezed in the backseat between his mother and Cora, on their way to Colrain Beach on the windward shore on the wild Atlantic, unsheltered by the bay or any nearby islands. It was a stretch of land famous for beachcombing.

“A dead whale rolled up on it when I was a kid,” said Duncan, wondering at his ability to chitchat on this grim occasion. But what else was there to do? Lovasco refused to talk about the body, and Duncan could not put his thoughts into words. That they should think they found his father after all this time was absurd—no flesh would have survived ten years at sea. Not even bones. Teeth, maybe. In all likelihood they’d found Nod, but to consider this option was to acknowledge that his brother was actually dead.

“You could smell the rot from the house,” said his mother, who was gazing at the passing scene from her window, the first time she’d seen this much of the world in years. When they had pulled out of the Boat Club driveway, then past the empty space that was once her house, Duncan braced himself, thinking they were in for a bit of rough weather from her, but no. She was acting as if a road trip around town in the back of a police car was an everyday event. It was strange that she did not even comment on how the landscape had changed since she’d last seen it, but then again, it was totally different from when he last saw it. Trees were missing, roofs were sitting in washed-out streets, and the very coastline was rearranged, as chipped and gouged out as if the earth were made of Styrofoam.

“Please,” said Cora, slumping down in her seat. “Let’s not talk about rot.”

Duncan put his arm around her and she closed her eyes, but as tired as he was, he could not close his. He could not even imagine sleep. His mind was so wired he was experiencing the world as one of those dreams where you can’t get to where you’re going. Only instead of the inexplicable barriers of the sleeping brain, such as giant frogs leaping at your head or your Spanish teacher holding a stop sign in the middle of the road—bizarre obstructions that make you forget just what it was you were looking to find—their delays were all too explicable. Flooding and utility work forced them to detour again and again, and even where the roads were open, Lovasco had to maneuver around workers trying to restore power.

“The world just picks up and moves on, doesn’t it?” Lovasco said, as a woman in a bright orange vest waved him around a fallen tree and sparking wires.

“What choice is there?” asked Cora, without opening her eyes.

“Are you sure this is my father?” Duncan asked, but Lovasco tightened his lips.

“I don’t think you have anybody’s body,” his mother said, leaning forward to lecture Lovasco. She was bundled up in a mishmash of Red Cross handouts, topped off with a shiny raincoat in zebra print. Her feet were still bare. “You certainly didn’t do a very good job of finding mine. A couple of museum curators with a charter did that, and now they’re going to snatch the floor while you hold me hostage. How much have they paid you to conspire with them on this ruse?”

“Don’t make things worse,” said Duncan, although he couldn’t actually imagine what would constitute worse. He lowered his voice. “Mom, let’s say he’s right and this is Dad’s body. Why does he want you for questioning?”

“I don’t think we need to go into it now,” she said and sat back in her seat to admire the passing scenery.

Cora leaned toward the open divider. “Could you roll down a window back here?” she asked Lovasco. “I’m feeling carsick.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Leland,” he said, squeezing the car past a boulder that had been tossed onto the road by a wave. “I can’t take the risk of the other Mrs. Leland escaping.”

“Escaping?” said Duncan. “From a moving car? Is she under arrest?”

“Duncan, dear,” his mother said. “This is no time.”

“Just a precautionary measure,” said Lovasco.

“I shouldn’t have had that coffee,” said Cora. “I thought I could get away with decaf.”

“It’s good to be a little seasick,” said Duncan’s mother, patting Cora on the leg. “Shows you’re catching enough air to steer clear of the rocks and shoals of the early weeks.”

“Early weeks?” asked Duncan.

His mother tossed up her hands. “Duncan, please, stop asking so many questions.”

“Yes,” said Cora. “The early weeks of pregnancy.” She put both hands on her stomach. “Not that you’ve asked how the appointment went. It’s the one question you haven’t thought to ask these days.”

“What?
What?
”

“You know what,” she said. “The insemination appointment a few weeks ago. You’ve never asked about it.”

The walls of Duncan’s throat went dry as the news swept through him like a hot wind. He tried to stand up in the police car, but the roof forced him to sit back down. He took off his glasses, then put them on again. He felt for Cora’s hand and tightened his grip on it until it seemed as if he could feel the ridges of her fingerprints on his palms. As this stunning piece of information slowly seeped into his brain, he felt his body flooding with sensation.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said at last. “I guess I assumed you weren’t going to go through with it while we were fighting.”

“We weren’t fighting. Not then, anyway. I just needed to be calm for the implantation, and that wasn’t going to happen with you hanging around fretting about blimps and death. So I sent you to Slocum’s for a few days, and you never came back. Then we
were
fighting because you hadn’t bothered to ask how it went, or what the results were, or anything. I thought it was your way of bugging out. I thought I was going to have to be a single mom.”

He placed his hand on her stomach. “Why didn’t you just tell me? You know I’m an idiot. I thought I wasn’t supposed to come back until I worked out my problems. I thought you didn’t think I was sane enough to have children.”

“Duncan. Really. You’re sane enough. If I suggested that you see someone, it’s only because I wanted you to get help for you, not me. I want you to be happy when the baby comes, not tied up in knots about it. You’ll only raise a Nod that way.”

Lovasco whistled.

Cora bit her lip. “I’m sorry. That’s my hormones talking. I’d love a Nod baby as much as any other baby.
Any
baby. I can’t believe, after all we’d been through to get to implantation and what we paid for it so far, you thought I wasn’t going to have it done. Was that wishful thinking? Are you really ready for this?”

He pulled her close. “I’m ready. I just wish I could have been there.”

“No, you would have been too tense, and you would have made me tense, and then my uterus would be too tense for a zygote to hang on. Besides, I didn’t want to make a big deal about the appointment. It’s rarely a success the first try. But it turned out there was nothing particularly wrong with your sperm or my eggs—they just needed a little
push
to get them together.”

“That’s the spirit,” said his mother. “Take determined action, I always say.”

“Did you know?” Duncan asked her.

“Of course I knew,” she said. “Cora told me when I called to invite her to the party, but I’d already heard the rumors from Mrs. McNordfy. Even Noddy, who never leaves town, saw her going into a fertility clinic in Portland when he went to buy
Sea Turtle
. You have got to start paying more attention to the world around you, Duncan!”

There was some silence as Duncan considered the source of this accusation, and then he considered that she still might be right. He had not been paying attention to the important things around him. “Was I really so stupid?” he asked Cora.

She leaned her head back and groaned. “Duncan, please, this isn’t the time.”

“What a mess,” said Lovasco, and for a moment, Duncan thought he was referring to their lives. But no, he was talking about the mountains of trash deposited by the storm that were increasing in height and frequency as they got closer to Colrain. The road, puddled and scarred, looked freshly reopened. On one side was the ocean, still white-tipped and wild, and on the other side were the battered marshlands. They were designed by nature to help absorb flooding, but nature could not have foreseen all the indigestible trash in modern water. The exposed mudflats were covered with so much shredded polystyrene it looked as if a dirty blizzard had swept in from the sea along with the pieces of boats, and of those, it seemed no size or class was spared. There were modest wooden boats and immodest fiberglass yachts, working vessels and Boston Whalers. But no deflated bodies of inflatables. Not yet.

Lovasco turned into the parking lot and headed to the far corner, where an ambulance, two fire trucks, and a half-dozen police cruisers waited, all in a hyper sense of emergency with a full spectrum of lights blinking. As Duncan helped Cora out of the car, Lovasco took his mother’s elbow, but she shook him off. He motioned to two officers, who approached with their hands resting on their holsters, to stay on either side of her while he walked ahead, leading them over the dunes to the beach where they came upon the full expression of the storm’s wrath. It looked as if half of Port Ellery had gotten sucked into its vortex and been left there to die. Scattered along its length were gray plastic fish bins, kitchen countertops, aluminum siding, and mooring balls, and at the end of the beach, where the sand changed to rocky cliff, the sea was still worrying a lobster boat against the piles of broken and eroded stone. A long tangle of traps and buoys rolled back and forth at the tide line, out of reach of the lobstermen who were lined up to sort them out, held back by a labyrinth of yellow police tape. It was a crime scene. On the other side of the tape stood Josefa, holding a subdued seagull under her arms as she talked to the police.

He heard her say, “There they are … ” She and everyone else stopped talking when Duncan and his family came into view. His mother stepped around a boat pump that had been ripped from a hold of some ill-fated boat. Yards of snapped wire sprang out from all four sides.

“Looks like a giant spider, doesn’t it?” his mother asked of no one, and the instant the officers turned to look, she struck off. At first, Duncan thought she was on the lam, but she wasn’t running away from the crime scene; she was heading toward whatever it was that awaited them all behind the yellow tape. Duncan could see a pile of broken staves.

“It’s one of her wine casks,” he said, not bothering to chase after her but continuing to pick his way through the mess with Cora, conscious now of the dangers of stumbling. “Cracked open like an egg.”

“She seems so desperate about the loss of her wine,” said Cora. “I wonder if she shouldn’t go into detox.”

“That would take care of her housing problem for a while.” They almost started to laugh, then Duncan stopped when he saw a human shape on the ground next to the broken barrel. “Stay here,” he said. “Don’t look.” He lifted the tape over his head, then stopped, unable to fully register the sight before him. His mother, on her knees, was by the side of the body.

“Brendan,” she said.

“So it’s true,” said Lovasco. “You can identify this man as Brendan Leland?”

Duncan went momentarily deaf at the mention of his father’s name. He looked at Josefa, who gave a little shrug and clutched her seagull. She must have found the body, and she would have known exactly who it was.

“Who else would it be?” his mother asked impatiently, and she took her husband’s purple hand into hers.

Duncan heard Cora gasp, and in a minute she was by his side. They both stared. His father’s form was strange and unearthly. He was in the sailing shorts and T-shirt he’d worn his last day on earth, but now, along with his clothes, his bare arms and legs were pickled and dyed purple from the mulberry wine. He was not perfectly preserved—the wine was not high enough in alcohol for that—but it had kept the body from decaying altogether. He was considerably shrunken and folded up as tight as a fetus.

“He saved my life,” his mother said, smiling.

“Your life?” Lovasco asked, and Duncan noticed an officer taking down notes. His mother was in serious trouble. For all he knew, she’d killed him and hidden the body in the cellar all these years. He wondered how far they could go on an insanity plea.

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” his mother said peevishly. “He saved me and Chandu. We were in death’s hands when the house fell out from under us, but when the floor landed on the casks, I knew Brendan would keep us afloat. He always has. It’s been such a comfort all these years knowing he was beneath my feet. I couldn’t bear to leave him. Neither could Nod.”

“Nod?” asked Cora.

“Noddy found him that day on the beach. He was such a help. I’m not sure I could have done it on my own. It’s not easy squeezing a man into a barrel. But of course, they used to do it all the time in the golden age of sail, packing their captains in alcohol rather than feeding them to the sharks. They got them home that way.”

“But he was already home,” said Lovasco. “If what you say is true, he washed up practically at your back door.”

She stood up. “What do you mean, ‘if what I say is true’?”

“Poor Nod,” whispered Duncan. If, in fact, what his mother said was true—always a dubious proposition—then it wasn’t the death of their father that had kept Nod at home—it was finding his body and stuffing him into the barrel that had sent him over the edge. He must have felt implicated and decided to stand watch all those years.

Duncan put his arm around Cora. “So, you still think we’re not any worse than any other family?”

She touched her stomach, and a worried look came over her face. “You win.”

“Mrs. Leland.” Lovasco took a step toward his mother. “You’ve got to come to the station with me for questioning. You have the right to remain silent—”

“Don’t be absurd,” his mother interrupted. “I’ve told you what happened, and that’s all you need to know.” She used both hands to wipe her pink pants of sand. They were too short for her by far, and now the knees were soaked through. She could get more clothes from the Red Cross to hold her over, but Duncan could not let her go into a shelter. Here he was, finally about to go back to his own home, ready to start a family, and he’d be taking his mother back with him. Unless, of course, she was locked up.