Open Water (26 page)

H
olly was sitting upstairs with Rennie. Willis’s dominoes were spread across the quilt. Rennie was teaching her the game. When it was Holly’s turn to shuffle the ivory pieces, Rennie recited, “Shake ’em, Jane, my fingers are in pain.” If it had been Willis sitting opposite, she would have said, “Shake ’em, Jake, my fingers ache.” Holly wasn’t allowed to take her turn until she repeated the correct refrain. The extra pieces were left in a pile called the “boneyard.” Every time Holly believed she understood the rules, Rennie invented additional restrictions. “That’s double sixes. You can’t put that there.”

“You did last time,” Holly said.

“Maybe I did. Whose draw is it?” It wasn’t malicious, perhaps Rennie couldn’t remember the game. Even so, the ladder of “bones” grew across the covers in hazardous angles until they spilled onto the floor.

Holly looked out the window and noticed two men prowling the edge of the cliff, lighting smokes. Then, the tiny Chihuahua scrambled across the driveway. Nicole’s kids were running up and down after it. The Chihuahua galloped back the other way until Lindy scooped it up and handed the dog to his little sister. The children tugged the dog back and forth between them.

The last time she had seen Willis, he was in Rennie’s shack painting the InstyPrint truck with a straw broom and a gallon of K-mart Rustbuster. Fritz knew someone in New Jersey who might want to buy the truck off them. Willis didn’t want to drive two hundred miles with InstyPrint writing all over them. Holly had watched the men sweep the broom over the new van, the dead black paint dripped unpredictably; it had the consistency of pudding that wasn’t set.

Rennie came over to see what Holly was looking at. The hem of her nightgown dragged in a soft crescent, dusting the old oak planks. She paired up with Holly and watched the intruders. “Are those men with you?” Rennie asked Holly.

“With me? Of course not.”

“Those surveyors are on private property.”

“Is that what they are? Surveyors?”

“They’ve got a tripod set up. They must be making a survey. Did Munro give them permission to pace out this plat?”

“Is that what they’re doing?” Holly said.

“Century 21,” Rennie said.

“You mean those real estate professionals?” Holly said.

One of the men in question walked up the middle of the driveway in long strides and wrote something down on a clipboard. Next, he pushed a wheel gauge across the lip of the cliff.

Rennie teetered by the window in her harlequin satin bed jacket; the clownish jacket over her skinny frame made her look like a Mardi Gras puppet.

“They can survey all they want but I’m not selling,” she said.

“Of course not,” Holly said.

“They think they have the authority. We’ll see. In shallow
waters, shrimps make fools of dragons,” Rennie said.

Holly nudged her back to bed.

“A person is sick upstairs and they’re disturbing her rest. Go tell them that,” Rennie said.

The phone started ringing.

Holly went to the hall table and picked up the receiver.

Showalter wanted to know about Willis.

“Willis is driving today,” she said.

“WASTEC doesn’t have him. Who’s he driving for?”

Holly said, “Shit, I don’t know. In any case, I’ll tell Willis you called.”

Showalter said, “Willis is making life harder on himself. Plain English. Tell Willis that there is a late charge on my vehicle. A severe penalty if it comes back after hours. You tell him that. Number two: the animal needs proper attention. Do you think that’s happening? It’s getting proper attention?”

Holly said, “What animal?”

Holly noticed a sudden change in the telephone reception, a hollow echo. Rennie had picked up the other line in the bedroom. Holly heard Rennie say, “My son Willis is a free agent. If you contract with him, you have to pay whatever he wants and accept his terms.”

Showalter kept quiet.

“You should be ashamed of yourself trying to strong-arm this girl.” Rennie put herself firmly in the ointment, whether he liked it or not.

Then Rennie started coughing. She bent over and hacked and hacked into the hem of her bed jacket. Holly replaced the hall telephone in its cradle and went over to Rennie. She patted her between the shoulder blades.

One of the surveyors had come onto the porch. Holly heard him knocking. Rennie said, “Bring him in. Let’s hear it.”

Holly helped Rennie downstairs. She noticed Rennie’s whole posture had changed, crumpled. She walked without lifting her feet. Her nightdress swallowed her up. Her gown might have been perfect if Rennie could stand straight and throw her shoulders back.

The workman stood on the rush mat and waited for Holly to answer the door.

Holly invited him into the foyer. “Are you from Century 21?”

The man laughed. “No. We’re Invisible Fence.”

Holly looked outside the door and saw the man’s partner working in the yard. He was planting vinyl flags on wire stems around the perimeter of the property. A score of flags in a straight line to the edge of the cliff. Holly wondered what kind of surveyors would place tiny flags in the dirt like that.

“Invisible Fence? What’s that?” she said.

“We fit your dog with an electronic collar. It can’t move beyond those flags without getting zapped. You have a dog problem here?”

“Fritz has a dog.”

“The name on our work order says Federico?”

“That’s right. His sister won’t let him keep the dog at her house.”

“We’re finishing up. We need a signature.”

Rennie came over. “Explain yourself,” Rennie told the man. “Who do you represent? Did my son commission you to harass me?”

“Your son?”

“Aren’t you from Château-sur-Mer?” She tugged the man’s cuff and pulled him into the parlor. The Fresnel lens showered lemon-lime twists and slices all over him.

The man said, “I think we’re on different tracks here.”

Rennie turned to Holly. “Is Munro out there in the car?”

Holly said with some finality, “Rennie, this isn’t anything to do with Munro.” Either Rennie had turned a corner and had lost her coherence or she was putting on an act.

She turned to Holly and changed the subject. “Where’s that little pea? The one we got in the mail? I want that pea. It’s driving me crazy.”

“It is? Rennie, you never said you wanted that thing. You really want that pea?” Holly tried to calculate Rennie’s actual level of dementia. She looked at the contractor and looked away.

The man went to the door.

Holly told him that Fritz would sign his paper. Fritz was in the shack. She turned around to see Rennie climbing back upstairs, taking the bannister in both hands, tugging herself up the incline, one riser at a time. Holly asked her if she wanted to call a doctor about her relapse.

“The doctor reports to Munro,” Rennie said.

“We can get a different doctor if you need something.”

“
If I need something
, she says.”

Rennie’s irony was stinging. Holly followed Rennie upstairs, thinking it was unfair when Rennie talked like this. Her own father, as he faced death, would never have been so acid—if he could have talked in his last days—but Rennie was smiling at her now. She was sitting in bed, writing in her doomsday book. Something in huge indigo letters.

P
aint fumes had collected in the tiny garage and the men were feeling sick. Holly opened the plank doors and braced them with old cement blocks to ventilate the shack. “You idiots,” she said. They dropped their arms and watched her until she was finished scolding. Willis told her to stand in the doorway to keep a lookout.

“Is Showalter coming over here? He says you make life difficult for everyone,” Holly complained to Willis.

“Forget him,” Willis said. But Willis wasn’t sure if Munro had squawked to the police about the truck. Munro might keep it to himself for a while and use it as an ace later on. Willis understood how a snitch might savor his opportunities.

Fritz was watching the puppy learn the limits of its environment. Once or twice, they heard it yip if it edged over the Invisible Fence. It fell back on its haunches and tipped its head sideways as if it was examining its situation. Nicole’s children looked forlorn until Fritz explained that the row of flags didn’t prevent them from playing with the dog as long as it stayed in its ghost corral.

“It’s not going to learn if they keep lifting it out.” Willis told Fritz. “You throw your money around, you know that?”

Holly watched them work on the truck. The InstyPrint lettering kept floating up. Random words reappeared through the dark coat. The truck looked like a Magic 8 Ball where psychic warnings surface.

“This doesn’t cut it,” Willis said. He backed up and crossed his arms. He didn’t seem very concerned. He wasn’t really interested in disguising the truck or driving the truck to New Jersey. Holly saw that Willis liked marking the van the way dogs kick dust to cover their waste. He was happy just to defile it.

“Point,” Fritz said. “It’s black, isn’t it? We leave here at dark. It will blend right in with the night. Shit, this is a fucking night-mobile if I ever saw one.”

Willis said, “Let me ask you. Who’s on the highway at night? Swarms of cruisers. Our two taillights all by their lonesome look sweet as cherry Life Savers. The paint won’t even be dry on this thing.”

“The wind will dry it.”

“I say we wait another day and apply a second coat.”

Fritz agreed to postpone the trip.

“You know what we have? We have an Insty
hearse.
”

Fritz was laughing with the same recognition. Fritz was right there, at the same mental spot. Willis sometimes wondered how they arrived there together like that.

Holly didn’t join in. “I don’t see what’s so comical. Let’s see how you two pull it off before you laugh it up. Get rid of the thing, then you can try out for
Late Night.
”

Willis and Fritz had never been successful with any scheme. Despite their brotherhood, or whatever it was that gave them a boost of telepathy and kept them united, they had never once turned a profit.

At sixteen, they had tried to sabotage a rubber-duck race, a fund-raising event for a capital campaign at Newport
Hospital. The hospital sold rubber ducks representing chances on a sports car. The race was held at the Newport Country Club. A lively freshwater stream threaded the golf course through dense pitch pine and beach plum. Willis thought he and Fritz could sneak into the underbrush, hide out, and defraud the hospital.

They waited in the undergrowth before dawn. A cold dungeon t’ick moved in from Brenton Point; the fog coiled their hair and water dripped down their cheeks. At daybreak the greenskeepers rode machines over the course, vacuuming up the condensation from the short grass. One of the workers started whacking the thicket with an iron. He sliced the golf club through the branches over their heads with little regard for the sports equipment until Willis and Fritz emerged and he chased them off the golf course.

While the men painted, Holly discovered boxes of shiny beads and enamel buttons, plastic rosettes and hollow beans, white discs with rolling black poppyseed pupils, a thousand tiny doll’s eyes. Rennie’s jewelry supplies, beside the doomed truck, added to the desolate feel of the shack. It was like a Warehouse of the Damned. Holly’s mother had saved old buttons like these in a glass jar. Each button was singular, unique, lost from its set. They were saved in hopes of one day matching up with their likeness, their own kind. Other than the small, white, interchangeable shirt buttons, most were never claimed. They were artifacts. Every artifact represented a specific family member, and all of these members, like the buttons, were estranged from the rest.

She stacked the boxes against the garage wall and went outside. She leaned against the door and listened to the men bicker over the gallon of paint. She slid down the side of the plank door and rested on her heels. She saw someone coming up the driveway.

She recognized him immediately, it was her ex-husband, Jensen.

Jensen was wearing his shearling coat. After all these years, he had dug it out of the closet. He was wearing the coat to motivate Holly, she knew he didn’t wear it for his health.