The Drowning House (17 page)

It was a mistake to look in the mirror before I left. My skin was pale, as always. There were hollows in my cheeks and gray shadows under my eyes. The color on my lips only made the whole effect worse. I rubbed most of it off with my fingers. The house was empty, no one saw me leave.

Lights were just coming on in windows and doorways, and it seemed to me that the street, closed and ordinary a few moments before, now revealed itself, full of interest and variety. Lamps, burning at entrances and above flights of wooden stairs, announced each house the way the riding lights of the ships out in the darkening Gulf established their shadowy presences.
Here we are!
Rooms appeared, bright interiors in what I could see now were dream houses, furnished
and ready for occupation, but at this moment, still, unpopulated, silent.

I walked slowly, taking in as much as I could. There was a longhaired cat on a low table, there a pile of books, there a striped armchair and a collection of painted plates against a cherry-colored wall. Looking into those lighted windows, I felt a familiar hunger, one that went back as far as I could remember. A longing to step into one of those waiting spaces, to stroke the cat, to turn the pages of the books, to curl my legs into the chair’s broad seat. To enter into that world where each element seemed securely in its place and be at home in it.
Here I am!

A couple pushing a baby in an umbrella stroller came down one of the side streets and turned in front of me. A small, dust-colored dog on a leash ran along beside them. The dog bounced, the wheels of the stroller went around and around, the baby stuck out her bare feet. The mother laughed and shook back an armful of plastic bangles. My first instinct was to caution them. I knew they were taking it all for granted.

The mother was overweight and plain, making up for it with a perky attitude and colored barrettes that were too young for her. I understood how that could happen, how she could fall in love with her child and want to appropriate for herself some of that sweetness. It was the same feeling that prompted mothers to dress themselves and their daughters alike, something I would never have considered. Still, I’d felt a twinge when Jules gave me his customary, uninhibited once-over, kissed me on both cheeks, and said, “Thank God, you aren’t wearing mommy clothes.” I’d thought all along that I was an unlikely parent.

I walked faster so I could see the baby better.

She was at least two and getting big for the stroller. She gazed at me, then put her fingers in her mouth and looked away, exposing the soft hollow at the nape of her neck. I remembered running my thumb along that place on Bailey’s neck, the springy tendons, the softness of the baby hair. I’d used the stroller only when I had to. I loved the tug of Bailey’s arms around my neck, the way her plump, creased legs
gripped me. Eleanor, on one of her infrequent visits to Washington, said, “If you don’t put that baby down, she’ll never learn to walk.”

I’d anticipated the frustrations of motherhood, but none of the pleasures. It was new to me, and intoxicating, the satisfaction that came with meeting Bailey’s simple needs. I was the overlooked sibling in the fairy tale who finally chooses the right path, discovers the key, unlocks the door to the treasure.

A child is a chance to be someone new and different—the adult reflected in those shining eyes. I might not have been a better person when I was Bailey’s mother. I might not have been stronger or more deserving. But I believed that I was.

The couple stopped to look in the window of a gift shop, and I hung back and leaned against a mailbox, pretending to adjust my sandal. I knew I was staring.

The couple went left onto the Strand, away from Lafitte’s, and I followed them.

The black cast-iron streetlamps came on. I knew they were electric, but with the elaborate façades of the buildings and the part-brick street with its high curb and steps, the effect was convincing—it really seemed like another time. A horse and carriage went by. On the corner a group of men and women in Victorian dress stood in conversation. Then one of the women laughed and raised her hand and I could see she was holding a cigarette. Actors from the Opera House on a break.

The couple stopped at the Mikasa Outlet and I heard the sound of Bob Marley drifting from one of the surfer stores that stayed open late. Then they stopped again in the middle of the sidewalk. They leaned their heads together, whispered, and nodded. I slowed my pace and looked around for something to occupy my attention, but the windows to my left were all dark. I walked to the nearest one anyway and cupped my hands against the glass, pretending to peer in. It was a gallery, the kind that sells nautical art and beach scenes in rope frames.

When I turned back, the couple was gone.

I looked down the street in front of me. I dropped all caution,
scanning anxiously left and right. Then I saw them. They must have crossed quickly—that was what they had been discussing and agreeing on. They were entering a pharmacy.

As soon as the glass door swung shut behind them, I darted over. Inside, under pink fluorescent tubes, a bored teenager was filing her nails at the counter. I pretended to sort through a bin of rubber sandals near the entrance. The father had disappeared down one of the aisles with the dog, but the mother stood at a display of cosmetics. The baby was fussing, and she picked her up, jiggled her, and put her back in the stroller. She tried on a pair of sunglasses, took a brush out of her purse and fluffed her bangs.

The baby twisted in her seat, straining to find her mother. She wailed, and I saw one round arm, then her head appear. Then the stroller tipped, and I rushed forward, feeling already in my own nerves and brain the impact as her small skull collided with the gray-flecked floor. I grabbed the curved handle of the stroller and righted it.

“Hey there. Just what might you be doing?” Up close, the father was older than I’d thought. He was soft around the middle and under his tan there were red veins across his nose and cheeks.

I was still flooded with adrenaline, still breathing hard. I could hear the blood pounding in my ears. “She could have fallen.”

His wife joined him. “We saw you following us,” she said. She stared at me, her eyes bright. Her plump hands opened and closed. She came a step nearer. “We both saw you,” she said. “Didn’t we, Robert? We almost called the police. I know about women like you, who want a baby. You’ll do anything. It’s kidnapping.”

“Kidnapping,” he said.

“That’s crazy!” I gasped. “Why weren’t you watching her? She could have hurt herself. She could have been killed.”

“You’re the one who’s crazy, lady.” He said it with force, but when I turned to look at him directly, something made him back off. He picked the dog up and held it protectively under one arm. “Look, if you had kids you’d know, they fall all the time. It’s no big deal. Cuts and bruises.” He shrugged. “They happen.” He looked over at his wife
as though weighing her willingness to move on. Clearly, he wasn’t a fighter.

But the mother was enjoying the drama. “Robert. There was one of them up in Missouri. Kidnapped the mom from in front of the Walmart and cut the baby right out of her.” Her skin was smooth, the kind that turns a pale apricot when it tans. She smelled like baby powder. She turned to face me. “Don’t deny you were watching her. I saw you. I saw you along the street and after we came in. In the mirror.” She preened at her own cleverness.

“Honey,” her husband said. “You’re okay. You’re not pregnant.” He touched her gently with his free hand. From the way he did it, I knew he loved her ample shape. “You ought not watch those shows if they upset you.”

“Who wouldn’t be upset with someone trying to steal their child?” She lifted her chin.

I could tell them what had happened to Bailey and take away their complacency forever. Instead I took a deep breath and said, “Yes, I was watching her. She’s a beautiful baby. I’m a photographer.” I put on a professional manner, told them my name, and mentioned my gallery.

Maybe it was just relief that I wasn’t violent, that I wasn’t armed with anything more dangerous than a camera, but when I asked them, they began to group themselves the way people generally do when you offer to take a photo.

It used to surprise me, the way people accommodate a photographer. Is it just that they have been conditioned by years of ceremonial picture taking, on birthdays, at family gatherings, to agree? Or does the picture taking send a signal? When I ask people to pose, am I telling them that they are important, that their lives matter? That they deserve to be remembered?

They would go on with their evening. They would buy postcards and forget to mail them. They would eat fried shrimp and drink beer. They would go back to their rented condo, put the baby to bed, and finish up with a couple of shots of Kahlúa out of glasses they would forget to pack. They would undress with the lights on and have sex in
ways they weren’t accustomed to and fall asleep suddenly and completely. They would get up the next morning and begin again.

It didn’t look hard to do. But that rhythm, the hidden heartbeat of married life, once lost, was impossible to recover.

My hair was coming down. I shook it loose and left it. The couple was at the checkout now, exclaiming over their purchases. I thought of the actors I’d seen earlier and wondered how they did it, every day, over and over. My legs felt weak as I crossed the floor. But I stopped at the door and turned and waved, the way you do from the deck of a departing ship when you are too far away to see the pier. A gesture meant for everyone and no one.

THE OFFICIAL NAME OF THE PLACE
was Lafitte’s Fort. It was at the bottom of the Strand, where the imposing rows of historic buildings trailed off into humbler, one-story structures housing marginal shops and bars. Most of them opened with fanfare, lasted a year or two, and were then replaced by something so similar no one noticed. That Lafitte’s had survived for a generation was a wonder, and for that reason, it had achieved a certain status on the Island.

It had no visible windows, which helped to preserve the inscrutability of the place. The only door opened onto the side street. From the Strand, the weathered exterior with its random repairs seemed to have been boarded up and abandoned.

Every so often, tired shoppers passed me on their way to the parking lot at the end of the block—a sunburned family with too much to carry, a pair of older women in matching pastel Bermudas and sunshades. Every so often the door to Lafitte’s flew open emitting a flash of multicolored light and a burst of sound that startled anyone nearby into a trot. Otherwise, the Strand was silent. Emptied of visitors, the place felt oddly purposeless.

It was that moment when the character of any bar changes, when the early patrons leave and the late-night crowd arrives. Some of the first group had probably been there since eleven or so when Lafitte’s opened, drinking steadily—Bloody Marys and beer. They were not
looking for excitement, just getting through the day. Now they exited, moving cautiously and paddling with their hands as though they were wading through waist-high water, hoping to make it home before passing out in someone else’s yard.

I went inside and took a couple of quick steps, then caught my foot on a massive fissure in the concrete floor and stumbled forward. No one paid any attention. I walked to the bar and climbed onto a stool crisscrossed with duct tape.

There was a shuffleboard table at the back and next to it an upholstered bench that looked as if it had been kicked in by someone impatient for a turn. Overhead, sagging loops of exposed wire festooned the ceiling. Damp-stained cardboard boxes labeled
COCKTAIL NAPKINS
and
TOILET PAPER
were stacked here and there.

Behind the bar hung a portrait of the pirate. The artist seemed to have struggled, reworking parts of the painting, and Lafitte’s features hadn’t really come together. One of his eyes regarded me, the other gazed down at a battered TV where a baseball game was in progress. The drone of the crowd was the noise I’d heard from outside. “High and outside,” a voice announced. The woman next to me shook her head and muttered.

I lifted my elbows as the skinny bartender wiped the surface of the bar. When he was done, he folded his arms and scratched his biceps. “Well?” he said irritably.

“I’ll have a beer.”

“I’ve got Bud Light,” he said. “Or …” He gestured toward a chalkboard. I wondered if he thought I was a tourist.

“A Shiner Bock,” I said and lowered my arms, but the wood was still moist and gritty. I drew back quickly and put my hands in my lap. The bartender grinned, showing stubby grayish teeth. He passed me a chilled glass and a bottle.

I turned back to the room, to the spot I knew Patrick would occupy when he came. I’d picked it out right away. It was impossible to imagine him at the tables with the heavyset men who sat unmoving, wreathed in smoke. Or slumped at the bar with the woman in the flowered muumuu who occasionally raised her head and let fly a
stream of commentary aimed at no one in particular. But I could see Patrick at the shuffleboard table, a drink in his hand, shifting from one sneakered foot to the other, bending down to send a puck skimming toward the end of the board. Patrick would do it without effort, without even appearing to think about it, just a lazy back and forth of the arm, and no one would be able to beat him.

I had never told anyone about Patrick and me, because I didn’t know what to say. I had no words to describe our relationship. Now that it was too late, I wanted that other life. With Patrick. On the Island. I wanted to disappear into it like a diver going under, arms reaching, no part of me held back.

I dabbed at my face with the hem of my skirt. I took a long swallow of beer without tasting it, and then another. I asked myself why I had left the Island that winter. I could have refused to get on the plane. I could have run away, like Stella. Why had I been so passive? I had again the old feeling that there was something wrong with me. My inability to act was part of it.

The bar had emptied and was filling up again. They shared one trait, these Islanders, you could see it in their eyes. They were idealists whose colorful inner visions had outlasted all the evidence decades of hard living could provide. They were just waiting for things to fall into place.