The Tell (13 page)

“That's the idea,” Mira said. The boat knocked against the dock again. “Oops. I'm not so good with these oars.” She was only pretending to be inept. “Thanks for being so friendly, by the way. Have a nice evening.”

The man rose on all fours like a dog, his ass high in the air and his balls swinging. Blood surged to his face. “I don't have to be friendly.”

“Relax,” Owen told him. “There's no problem here. We're leaving.”

“Right, there's no problem. This is my property.”

“I don't fucking think so,” Owen said. His voice was tight; he could have sprung at any moment.

“You're very wrong about that.”

The man had forgotten he was naked, until he remembered and slapped down on his stomach. The woman still hadn't moved, but Owen caught a glimpse of her brilliant orange hair hanging off the edge. Mira gave the dock one more definitive whack before steering away. In a few minutes, they were in the middle of the pond again.

“He had a very small dick,” Mira said. “Maybe I should have said something about
that
property.” Owen's laugh drained his anger. Rey barked on the beach. “Now are you ready to swim?” she asked.

When he stood, Mira playfully rocked the boat to see him teeter, then he arced up into the water. Sometimes he delayed this first swim as a kind of wonderful torture. The water was soft, like fur against his skin, with just the slightest note of cool deep below the surface. It took the edge off his anger at the man. He scissored his legs, and his feet looked like pale fish in gold water. With his ears under, he picked up the electrical vibration of the pond and the purr of its shifting sandy bottom. He was tempted to circle back to the dock and swim under it. He might punch the wood just to feel the man jump, just to wake the woman, just to disturb them, but he floated on his back for a while instead and felt the sun lowering on his eyelids. When he lifted his head, he saw Mira pulling the boat onto his father's small beach. She scratched Rey's head and disappeared in the tunnel of honeysuckle without looking back. She had always waited for him before. This was new and disturbing. He swallowed a mouthful of pond water.

When he got back to the house, the familiar mulchy smell of stewing lentils hit him. He was still dripping from his swim and the parched floorboards sucked up the water. His father was hunched at the counter, his head at a hawkish level as he sliced the tomatoes Owen had brought from home. At seventy-five, Edward's bones didn't want to work as hard anymore to hold his tall body straight. Age had whittled away the softer parts of his face and left his nose and chin sharper. The tops of his ears were almost transparent. His wild white hair clung to his head. When a kitten prowled across the counter and ran its tail across Edward's face, he gave it a tug. His spirits were high; he loved their visits.

“Where's that wife of yours?” he asked.

“Sounds like she's in the shower,” Owen said.

The only shower was outdoors, boxed in by shingled walls and canopied by trumpet vines in the summer. In the winter, Edward insulated the pipes and steam rose from the enclosure in giant, shivering clouds. As a kid, it had been both exotic and impossible for Owen to shower outside while the pond creaked under a thick layer of ice. As a teenager, it was less spectacular, bordering on hatefully weird, but his father had stubbornly never seen a need to move the shower inside.

“Yes, I hear her singing,” Edward said. He wiped his hands down his front and left a trail of tomato seeds on his shirt. His clothes were ancient, like most things in the place, and not necessarily clean. Sometimes it was hard for Owen to tell just how derelict his father was, or if he was derelict at all, when his head was anything but. He still put out a new book every few years, articles and reviews in between. His mind was fertile if not always well-tended. Owen heard no singing from Mira, just the sound of the water hitting the shingles.

“Things okay between the two of you?” Edward asked.

Owen surveyed the narrow kitchen with its open shelves of old cans and boxes and bottles. A bunch of wildflowers was stuck in a jelly jar on the table, not a gesture he would ever have expected from his father. “Sure. Things are fine.”

“Just wondering.” Edward's voice was gravelly but suggestive. “You know how I pick up on these things. Something's just a little off. I can tell.” He toggled his hand. His eyes were a pale flecked green and unusually bright, even if rimmed with age's red crayon. There was something different about him, something tuned and tightened. “I know even when you don't say anything. Which you never do, by the way. Still my silent, guarded son.” He touched Owen's shoulder. “It wouldn't kill you to talk.”

“You never know,” Owen said. “It might.”

Edward considered Mira a rare, heroic species of bird and believed she had saved his only child by swooping in to pluck him up when he was so far down he could hardly be reached. She was the antidote to Owen's tragedy, and he was grateful to her in a way that made him weepy. He kissed her hands. He didn't hide that he was afraid of what would happen to Owen if they ever split up. What kind of parent, Mira asked, amused, actually talks about that out loud? She loved Edward in return, in a way that she hadn't ever been able to love her own remote and bullying father. Edward's big emotions sometimes toppled him like a rogue wave, which was why it made sense for him to live on the dry land of solitude.

“She came up here while you were still swimming,” Edward said, “and she always waits for you. She knows—you both know—that it's not a good idea to swim alone. People drown that way. I've seen it happen.” He tapped his knife on the cutting board. “They drown when they think that being alone is exactly what they need.”

“I wasn't going to drown,” Owen said. “The mosquitoes were vicious down there.”

“This is their hour. You have to respect that.” Edward sliced another tomato.

Owen went into his father's bedroom to change out of his wet bathing suit, but he kept the door open.

“So what's the problem then?” Edward asked, still at the counter. “And no bullshit now. Just talk to me.”

“I like the flowers. Nice touch.”

“I get the point, I'm no idiot. I won't ask you anymore if you don't want to talk about it. Maybe I'll just ask Mira instead. When you're not here. At least she'll talk to me. She always does. You? Forget it.”

Edward still detected Owen's moods like he detected bird song or the scent of a bay breeze. He could tell you if the bluefish were running. Owen felt intimately exposed. It had always been too tight here; he couldn't swallow without his father asking what he was eating. Why not say something to the man now? It was easier when they weren't looking at each other. He told his father that Mira had been going to the casino with their new neighbor, Wilton, and that he didn't like it. As he talked, he noted that the bed was made, an unusual enough thing in itself, and the room was neater than he'd ever seen it. Clothes had been put away, piles of books straightened. The curtains had been washed. A fuzzy violet blanket hung over the footboard. Gold-plated nail clippers were poised like a grasshopper on the bureau. Christ, he thought, his father has a girlfriend. And they cut their nails together. They lay under the purple blanket. She picked wildflowers and put them in a jar. They watched the curtains lift in the air. He was astounded. Did Edward think he wouldn't notice?

“So what? Sounds innocuous enough to me,” Edward said, standing in the doorway. He rubbed a basil leaf between his fingers and held them out for Owen to smell. “How often does she go?”

“I don't know—once, maybe twice a week.” Last week it had been three times.

“Your mother played poker. She had a weekly game, nickels, dimes, nothing much. It was a social thing. So what's the problem exactly?”

“I don't like it. I don't like the place. I don't like how it makes her act.”

“But that's you. Look, sweetheart, I know Mira, and the more you get worked up about this, the more she'll bristle. Let her do her thing, no harm done. It doesn't have to be your thing. You don't know that by now? What do you want her to do? She's a good girl, leave her alone. Don't suffocate her.”

Owen laughed—a good girl. His father spoke with authority on women, when he hadn't been with one for decades, or not until recently, under the purple blanket. He often came up with information about Owen's mother at the precise time it was needed to form a unified parenting front.
Your mother hated the city for its violence. Your mother never swam alone. Your mother wanted you to live here with me forever
. Who could ever know what was true and what wasn't? Owen finished dressing and poured his father a glass of the wine they'd brought from home, one of the many bottles Wilton continued to give them, sometimes using the key Mira had given him to come into the house and drop them off. Edward held his glass up to admire the color, which he said was the color of expensive.

Mira appeared then, dressed in shorts and a tight black T-shirt, toweling her hair. Owen was struck by how beautiful she was, with her skin holding the sun. Her arms were long and elegant, her single gold ring shining. He didn't want to be angry at her anymore. She told Edward about the naked couple on the dock and how she had expertly run the boat into it several times just to piss them off.

“You should have seen the guy,” she said. “He was lying there with a hard-on and he started barking at us.”

“I know him. He looks like a bulldog?”

“A rottweiler.”

“Right, a real bastard.” Edward smoothed his hair, a gesture of care for Mira. “Porter would have hated him. He would have burned the land before selling to a prick like him. Did you see the monstrosity of a house he's building? An eyesore.”

“Owen told him to go fuck himself,” Mira said. “Or something along those lines.”

Edward kissed her forehead, his hands on either side of her face. “My son makes us so proud.”

Mira sat on the sagging couch. She stroked the orange cat in the corner. Books and papers were pushed under the armchair and the low table. The wooden walls of the cottage had aged to a deep, oily brown, while the tacked-up photos of Owen as a kid had faded to x-rays. Edward had left New York at thirty and moved to this cottage, one never meant to be lived in year-round, before he met Owen's mother. They'd lived together in the months before Owen was born, twenty months after until she died. Of a drug overdose, Owen had always suspected. Edward replaced things in the house only when he absolutely needed to—the sink faucet or the screen door—but never added anything new. And that included a woman. Except now there were the flowers, the blanket, the nail clippers. Owen noticed a box of tissues on the mantel above the fireplace. His father usually used his sleeve. An array of shells and fish backbones and one delicate mouse skull covered a sill. The Museum of Natural History, Mira had dubbed it after her first visit. It was nothing to like as a kid, the skeletons of tiny animals hanging from walls so thin he could hear his father talking in his sleep, hear him farting. It was no place he'd ever wanted his friends to see. But Mira loved it.

Owen went outside to watch the sun pull away from the locust trees as he walked the dirt road toward Route 6. The sky was too bright to look at, while his feet were already in darkness, so the night appeared to rise from the ground instead of descending from the clouds. Rey followed him. Returning home often brewed up an unstable mix of melancholy and impatience, the acknowledgment of life already passed and the expectation of life ahead. He knew that the death of his mother ranked as tragedy, but he hadn't ever really felt that. He'd never known her, and she had never been more alive to him than she'd been dead; they were equal states.

As a child, his constant view had been of the water ringed by trees. He'd seen the way the surface of the pond reflected even the smallest change in the weather's temper, and he'd felt captive to a moody spirit. He'd always been restless here. And this time of year brought back the pinch of loneliness. During the summer, the houses around the pond had been full and busy. The children all looked beautiful and lucky to him, the older girls exquisite in their bikinis. The renters brought life and clamor and junk food, bags of red licorice and tubs of cheese balls, and their goal for their vacation week or two was to not think about what they called “real life”—when this was his very real life all year long. What did it mean—except his father's profound relief—when they'd all left and the pond was silent again? It was like standing still while a very fast train blew by you and lifted your hair. What remained was what had been forgotten or abandoned: a towel in the bushes, a single sneaker, a cat, a brightly colored plastic ring still drifting on the pond.

The year he'd turned thirteen, he became desperate to leave. It was as if something had invaded his blood overnight. Where before he'd listened patiently to his father talk and read his work in progress out loud, and he'd offered his opinions, now he couldn't stand another word about tide pools and perch populations. Nature irked and bored him. His temper made him itch. He had no interest in trudging down the beach to see a whale that had washed up and lay swelling in the sun. Where the hell were the people? Where was the noise of life, the romance and sex and action? There must be something wrong with his father if he could stand this, he decided. Owen had turned on the television to discourage his father from talking to him, and he didn't plan on turning it off until he left. For a while, Edward had continued to yap over the television's racket, and then he'd stopped, and he stopped asking Owen to take walks with him, to listen. He'd stopped reading out loud what he'd written. Often their dinners were wordless and painful.