Float (9 page)

“I’m trying to see dear mum right now,” Duncan said. “If you’ll just move aside.”

“Why?” asked Wade. “She wouldn’t take notice of the factory ’less you strapped a spinnaker on the roof and pushed the building into the sea to see how fast it’ll go.”

“And Nod,” added Duncan. “He’s on the board, too. I have my responsibilities.”

“Your responsibilities are misplaced,” Annuncia said. A worker, one of the few apparently not out gathering garbage off the beach, puttered toward them in a forklift, heading for the loading dock. Annuncia stepped aside to let the machine pass, and Duncan slid out the door.

“Go ahead, go talk to your ‘board,’” she called. “But come back tomorrow with a signed contract, or none of us will be working by the end of the week.”

Duncan wanted to point out that no one was working now, but he kept his mouth shut in order to make a smooth escape. He felt their eyes on his back as he climbed into the pickup and drove off. What was the point of pretending he was still deliberating? He knew he would sign the contract, and not just because Annuncia told him to but because there was no other way to save Seacrest’s. Deep down, in spite of his ambivalence, he wanted to save it. Embarrassment was stronger than fear. He could not relinquish the company without a fight and still hold his head up in town. And maybe, just maybe, if he took care of one responsibility (Seacrest’s), the other (his marriage) would fall into line. He felt lighter just thinking about it. In fact, the farther he drove away from Seacrest’s, the better he felt about its future, so much so that he decided he would no longer wait for Cora to call. He would risk rejection and call her to discuss their own future. He fumbled for his cell and tried her office number.

“Duncan! Oh, what a relief. You’ve called.”

“I think we’re saved,” he said, positively giddy.

“We are?”

“I’ve found a temporary partner for Seacrest’s. He wants to process some garbage in exchange for enough money to carry us over until we launch the new fertilizer line.”

He waited for her to be happy for him, but when she finally spoke, it was in a voice touched with repressed rage that took the wind out of his sails. “Seacrest’s?” she said. “What about us? You haven’t seen or talked to me in three weeks. Three long, important weeks, and you don’t even ask about the biggest thing in our lives.”

Duncan started bailing with both buckets. “I thought you were supposed to call me when you were ready to have me back.” The light turned red, and when he stopped short a car screeched to a stop behind him. “Can I? Come home?”

“Home?” He heard her take some breaths. Was she crying? “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I need to relax, and you’ll just want to throw a panic party. You’re getting me very upset right now as it is.”

“I know, I’ve been such a wreck. I thought I was going to lose Seacrest’s. But that’s all going to change.”

“I’m sorry you’re having such a rough time of it,” she said. “But do you really have nothing to say?
Nothing
to ask me?”

What?
What?
He’d already asked to come home. What else was there?

He heard her sigh. He imagined her sitting in her office at the back of their house, a cozy room with teal curtains that let the sun shine through like water. She would be at her desk. Their orange cat, Dabs, would be curled up on the chair opposite her, like a reclusive client. Before he’d called and interrupted her life, Cora would have been making notes about the last client or reviewing them for the next. Behind her on the wall was a framed print of a quotation by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, which more or less acted as her family counseling mission statement:

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.

He was the alluvium she kept turning over in her hands. “What do you think it says about me that I’m with you?” she had asked early in the summer while they were waiting in the clinic’s office. “It says you like a project,” he’d said, with a laugh. She didn’t laugh back. “When we have a baby, Duncan, that will be my project. Our project. Think you can stand that?”

He’d squeezed her hand and pulled her close. “I can’t wait.” Soon afterward, though, the business had started going down and so had he. He needed Cora, but she was immersed in the minute changes of her hormones and could not be reached. He’d always depended on her to tell him about himself. Now she wanted him to figure it out on his own. It was like a pop quiz at school, only he didn’t even know what the subject was.

The light turned green, and he lurched forward.

“Okay, never mind,” she said in defeat. “Tell me about this garbage. Did you do a feasibility study or risk assessment?”

“There’s no time,” he said, a little sick to find himself sounding like his mother. “I have to make payroll this week or go under. I can’t draw on our own money to pay for it again.”

“No! Don’t even think about it. We need every penny now more than ever.”

“Then let me get the business stable so we can concentrate on us. Isn’t that what you wanted me to do when you sent me away? Clear the decks?”

“I thought you were going to Slocum’s for a few days so I could relax. Now I hear you’re living at your mom’s.” He heard her shuffle papers. “Although that might not be a bad thing. Revisiting the past might help you step into the future.”

He pulled over to the side of the road because he could not keep driving and have this conversation at the same time. He forgot to signal, and the driver behind him leaned on his horn as he passed. A gray Mini Cooper. He recognized Beaky Harrow and felt a damp chill run through his body. What did everyone want from him?

“Can we talk about this in person?”

There was a hollow sound on the other end of the line, and he thought she’d walked away from the call. “Duncan,” she began again, a little tearily, “right now I just can’t take care of you. You have to take care of yourself. As for me, not that you’ve asked …” And then she paused. In a swift, terrifying moment he wondered if someone had told her about Syrie kissing him at lunch that day. Or seen her foot on his at the Boat Club. Then, in an even more terrifying moment, he wondered if she had a Syrie—a male, virile Syrie, willing and able to do what Duncan could not—and that was what she wanted to tell him. It was a confession he did not want to hear. He pressed on his horn.

“Someone’s telling me to move,” he said over the sound. “I’ll call you later.” And then he clicked the phone shut.

He rested his head on the steering wheel and felt his sweat against the cold plastic. A truck rumbled by full of empty clam shells from the processor, and when it hit a pothole a shell bounced out and landed on his windshield with a sharp crack. He sat upright and touched the damage, a sparkling circle of shattered glass the size of a dime. “One more thing to repair.”

Two of his employees walked past the pickup and stared at him. He smiled and waved cheerfully at them as if nothing was the matter, then started his engine and pulled out into the traffic. He could not stay where he was.

Duncan was so turned around by his conversation with Cora that he was suddenly unsure of his ability to navigate. “Water on my right, water on my right,” he said to himself as he drove, a silly mantra when all he had to do was stay on Shore Road. While he lamented the shipwreck that was his marriage, he mourned the equally disastrous changes in his old route. It was no longer the road of his blissfully rudderless youth, when this long stretch was the somewhat wild and untamed curve of the bay, dotted with signs of warning—
Swim at your own risk
and
Caution: strong tides
—which had only encouraged recklessness. This area had once been so sparsely settled that as kids he and Nod could walk the few miles from their house to their dad’s office without ever taking their feet off the rocks. Often that meant racing to get to town before an advancing tide forced them up onto the civilization of the sidewalk. How they had loved the damp band of earth that was neither wholly sea nor entirely land, a constantly changing landscape that offered their prepubescent souls new, exciting dangers to overcome. They had felt themselves gifted at avoiding the perils of the seaweed slicks; they had leaped across the cracks and crevices with ease, even grace, and had waded unafraid through tide pools full of barnacles and crabs. They had stepped over lobster traps and avoided the many minefields of trash. They were masters of their world, demigods of the water’s edge.

But their infinite kingdom was gone. They’d be arrested for trespassing if they tried that today, if it was even possible to climb over, under, and around all the new docks and fences. The shoreline had been rapidly built up over the recent years, and now, as fast as it had all gone up, it was coming down. He passed the unfinished “Lightkeeper’s House,” as the developer called it, a plywood mansion with a fake lighthouse attached. The protective plastic that had once covered the raw wood had blown away in shreds, waving like battle standards. Another ruin in the making, like so many others along the stretch, abandoned during construction due to the homeowner’s or builder’s financial apocalypse. The wrecks were signs of a lost civilization, like pagodas in the jungles, soon to be smothered with vines and inhabited by gangs of monkeys.

He stopped by the side of the road, between two houses where there was still a window to his old world, and got out of the truck. He put one foot on the guardrail and looked out at the water, which rose and fell as methodically as a breathing chest. Rheya was out there, rowing her dory listlessly around and around, as if she could not rest until all the parts of her husband were together again.

A gray Mini Cooper drove by, and Beaky waved from inside his little shell of metal.

“Leave me alone!” Duncan shouted as it disappeared down the road. Would this be his life if he signed the contract, constantly being watched and supervised? What would be his life if he didn’t sign?

He got back in the truck and sped off, turning wide onto Cean Avenue, his mother’s street. Years ago, long before he was born, it was Ocean Avenue, but the “O” had cracked off the end of its hand-painted sign, so it became Cean Avenue first by custom, then by law. It was pronounced
keen
, as to wail loudly. He turned into his mother’s driveway, killed the ignition, and sat. He closed his eyes. Over the sound of the surf slapping the rocks, he heard his mother’s voice, as sharp and piercing as a gull’s, carping at poor Nod down by the water. Duncan pulled himself out of the truck, taking with him the manila envelope and the tin gallon of soup.

He paused in front of the house. Usually he would get to the backyard by the wraparound porch, but he and Nod had just stored all the lawn furniture on it before the fall winds arrived to blow them away. Instead, he used the ratway, a narrow path squeezed in between the house and the neighbor’s high stone wall. Zoning would not allow a house to be built that close to the property line today, but there was so much about the structure that was grandfathered in, it might as well be a boat in dry dock for all that it conformed to modern building code. Even the porch railings, which canted inward like a ship’s rails, were more nautical than domestic.

The ratway was overhung by hairy evergreens, casting him in a green underwater light. The trees had been planted on the other side of the wall decades ago by the abutters and left by subsequent owners as a barrier against the irregular life of the Lelands. On his left, open latticework concealed the crawl space under the porch, and he kept his eyes averted for fear of spotting furry things creeping among the terra cotta towers of flowerpots and stacks of storm windows, beyond which lay the foundation of the house, the crude heavy stones upon which all the rest depended, and upon which the old house had teetered during gales, always—amazingly—managing to set itself right in the end. And behind that wall of stone, in the cellar, lay Great-Uncle Fern’s casks of mulberry wine, on which his mother depended. Beneath Duncan’s feet, the path crunched with layers of sea glass, the dumping place of a century’s worth of family beachcombing. As a hobby, Cora made whimsical mobiles from sea glass and sometimes scoured for pieces from the path because the supply on the beach was so rapidly dwindling. It had once seemed an unending source of material, but now, between the change to plastic and the ban on dumping, sea glass, that perfect collaboration between man and nature, was becoming a relic of the past.

Well, weren’t they all?

At the end of the ratway, a stone arch spanned the house and the wall, and he had to duck to get out from under it. It wasn’t until he stood up straight in the open expanse of the backyard that he realized he’d been holding his breath. He felt dizzy as he looked around. It was getting late, but the sky was blue, and a rising sea breeze moved through the branches, flickering the sunlight in yellows and greens. The season was changing, and it was change at its most beautiful—unlike his life, which was change at its lowest ebb. Keeping to the edge of the yard, he passed the grotto made by his Great-Aunt Hilda in her youth, where she had pressed seashells, fish bones, and seaweed into concrete, creating a fossilized ocean cave, complete with hidden piping that dripped water from cement stalactites. He paused at the still, black pool full of pine needles, where insects made ripples and clouds of gnats hovered over the water. Off to the side sat a streaked verdigris marine monster with a scaled tail, webbed toes, and a somewhat human head from whose nostrils spurted water in the summer, when someone remembered to turn it on from the house. Duncan reached in his pocket and tossed in a penny. “Cora,” he said out loud, and then headed for the Drop.

At the top of the stairs was the last remaining mulberry tree, old and twisted and hanging by a root-toe to the land as it leaned precariously toward the sea. In late summer, the tree rained buckets of treacly berries to the ground, where they attracted yellowjackets and birds before being tracked into the house, darkening the floors and tinting the rugs. One tree could not produce enough to make more wine, but his mother was able to scavenge a few quarts for a cloying jelly that she and Nod lathered on toast. Duncan looked down at the beach, and there they were, messing with the inflatable’s outboard motor. He reached for the iron railing to start his short descent down the Drop, and with each footfall on the loose stones, bits of rubble tumbled to the beach below. Halfway down, a gnarly wild cherry tree had sprouted from the crevice of the rocks and served as a newel post. He wondered how it stayed alive in such inhospitable earth. As it was, it was twisted and contorted, a third the size of its kin near the road. “What a difference a good home environment makes,” Cora once noted. As he neared the bottom, he passed the spray zone where seaside goldenrod and beach pea held the earth in place. Judging from the visible tops of the stone pilings where Uncle Lloyd had kept up his herring weir, it was mid-tide. Duncan wondered how the market for herring was these days. He had to start thinking of what he would do for work if he could not make Seacrest’s fly.

Chandu met Duncan at the bottom of the steps, and the two of them walked gingerly along the shingled beach toward his family, who did not look up. They were near the jetty, whose ramp was hanging limp in the water with no float attached. The rubber inflatable was beached because of it and seemed to be going nowhere, if their carrying-on was any indication. Around the crescent tip of beach, Duncan heard the rattle of chains and the sound of moorings being pulled at the Boat Club basin. A screaming seagull passed overhead and released a mussel, shattering the shell and splattering its occupant on the rocks. A half dozen gulls arrived to fight over it. “There’s never any shortage of animals willing to share in the profits of others, eh Chandu?”

The dog whined in response, and Duncan saw that his front paw was tangled in fishing line. As he stopped to free him of it, he took in the sheer amount of garbage that had washed up lately. Detergent bottles, lobster buoys, beach chairs—the tide of garbage rose and rose and never seemed to ebb. Annuncia told tales about a flotilla of plastic trash the size of Texas rolling around in the South Pacific, and seeing how much there was just on this small patch of land he could well believe it. “A million seabirds,” he’d heard her scold a boat captain recently. “One hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles, dead by ingesting our plastic every year. If I hear again that you’ve lost a deckload of fish bins and you don’t go back to get them, you’re going to join them.”

Another satisfied Seacrest’s client.

“There you go, old boy,” he said, and he held up the filament for the dog to smell. Duncan remembered how he and Nod used to string line they’d scavenge off the beach with fish vertebra they’d collect at the high-tide line and make presents of them for their mother. She wore them still.

“Duncan, dear,” his mother called. “Stop talking to the dog and come help us!”

Nod stood unsteadily in the rubber dinghy, which was half in the water, half out, with the outboard motor end in. His mother stood on the rocky beach and directed Nod’s pulls on the starter rope. Duncan had a moment of déjà vu, remembering this scene from years before, except it was his mother and father bickering over the motor. Nod should be arguing with a wife about the boat, not his mother. Duncan tried to remember if this was what his parents’ relationship had been like, and if his father had been forced into a life of racing through her thwarted ambitions. He seemed not to care so much about winning but liked being out on the water and enjoyed the camaraderie of other sailors. She was the one who insisted he come home to sail every day at lunchtime for practice, and he was so good-humored and eager to please her, he usually did, through most all types of weather. It was on one of those sails he had disappeared forever.

“If we knew what was wrong with it, we could get it started,” said Nod. He kicked an empty Clorox bottle that served as the inflatable’s bailer.

“Duncan, you get in there and give it a good pull,” his mother said.

Duncan did not move. He was mesmerized by the sight of a bird eating another creature. “I think that’s a crow eating a baby crow.”

His mother looked over at the gruesome scene and sighed. “Every mother struggles with the impulse to both raise her young and eat them.”

“They do?”

“Duncan, dear, will you please snap out of it and help get this started?”

“Remember that tame crow that used to take spoons out of the kitchen and hide them in the boat shed?” said Nod. “Maybe they’re related.”

“I can’t pull any better than Nod,” Duncan said. “I came down here to talk to the both of you about this proposal for Seacrest’s. I’ve found a way to keep its head above water for a few more months, but there are risks.”

“This is no time, Duncan.”

“We’ve got to get this started first,” said Nod, clearing his throat.

“Tighten that screw there, Nod.” His mother squatted down and pointed a finger at the motor.

Duncan was jealous of the freedom that insanity gave his mother and brother. They didn’t have to worry about the future of Seacrest’s or, for that matter, any future at all. Still, he had to make an effort to make them understand, but he could see he was not going to get anywhere until the dinghy was working.

“Is the gas can full?” he asked.

“Of course it is.” Nod picked up the red can, which was attached to the motor by black tubing, and shook it to prove there was gas. But there was no sound. Nod unscrewed the cap and looked in. “Huh,” he said.

“You carried the gas can down from the house without realizing it was empty?” Duncan asked. There were some men, like his brother, who should be protected by law, like fish and game. Was it any wonder he still lived at home? Then Duncan remembered that he was living at home, too. Was this how people saw him? Incompetent and not fully aware of the world around him?

“Duncan, dear,” said his mother. “Run back up to the house and get the other can out of the shed. Nod has got to retrieve the float.”

“There is no other can,” said Nod. “I left it at the gas station.”

“Someone found the float?” asked Duncan.

“The Club called,” said his mother. “It washed up where they want to store their ramp. Why don’t you go siphon some gas out of your truck?”

“No,” he said. If he agreed to it this time, they’d never get gas from the outside world again. “It’s siphon-proof.”

“Nothing is siphon-proof,” said his mother. “If it can go in, it can come out.”

“We might as well wait until tomorrow,” said Nod. “By the time he returns with gas it’ll be too dark to bring the float back. I need to get enough for the car, too. I’m planning a trip.”

“Read this,” said Duncan, handing his mother the manila envelope. She pulled the papers out and gave them a quick glance. In the dim light she seemed younger by decades, and he had a vision of how she appeared to him when he was a kid, when her hair was bright red and her face had the rough beauty of a woman too distracted to cultivate her looks. She was very much out in the world then, going to stores, parties, even traveling a bit. She had friends; she had a life outside of sailboat races. Normal, he always thought, but what did he know? He was her child, and there was no distance between them yet for him to question such a thing. Looking at her now, though, he remembered how her eyes, large and bluish-green, were always a mystery, the way her pupils never stopped moving and never settled, not even on him.