The Tell (22 page)

“I know you've been wondering,” she said, “and looking in my things, poking around.”

How had he imagined she wouldn't notice? Did he not know her at all? He fished in his pocket for the sunburst earring and held it out to her. He'd carried it with him every day.

“Oh! I thought I'd lost it.” She said it had been her grandmother's. She reached for it but changed her mind and drew back.

“Take it,” he said. “I found it under the bedroom rug.”

“But I looked everywhere.”

He pressed it into her reluctant hand. “It's yours, Mira. You do with your things what you want—sell them, pawn them, give them away, whatever you want. It's your stuff, your money. Just don't fucking lie to me about it. I can't stand any more of that.” He sweat in the cold like a sick man.

“You think I'm selling the jewelry?”

“I don't care if you are, Mira. That's what I'm saying. But tell me the truth.”

“The truth? I dropped the earring and then I couldn't find it anywhere. I thought maybe I'd somehow managed to get it hooked on something. I looked everywhere.”

“Not everywhere. It wasn't so hard to find.”

“It was for me.” She pulled her coat hood up and turned to the water. Her face was entirely hidden from him in a puffy red frame. “You want to know what I was doing with it? I'd put on one of my mother's fancy old dresses, some jewelry, makeup, high heels. I was dressing up. I do that sometimes just to see what it feels like to look the way she'd want me to. I know it sounds pathetic, but it's a completely private thing, Owen, and I've been doing it my whole life. I don't have to explain it.” White clouds blew out from inside her hood. “And now that you've made me tell you—all your interrogations, your suspicions, your hounding, your invasion. You've humiliated me, made me feel so ashamed.” What had started out as her admission was now her furious defense. “I can't have anything that's just my own anymore?” She turned and started up the slight incline toward the condo.

Owen took a direct hit from the wind as he watched her. The image of Mira moving through the house in another woman's clothes—her mother's—playing at being someone else altogether, was strange and painful. Owen knew her less, not more, despite her revelation. Her private act was a form of captivity; she could not escape who she was. She waited for him at the condo door where a wreath of silk maple leaves and miniature ears of dried corn had been hung. She looked at him to say something, and when he didn't, she knocked disappointedly. A few kernels of the corn fell out like loose teeth.

Katherine appeared, flustered and amused, as if she'd just heard a dirty joke but didn't entirely get it. She grabbed their hands. Hers was rough. She was about Mira's height, solid, with short gray hair sculpted around a ruddy, earnest complexion. There was something sensible and direct about her—she made Owen think of a nun who, if she needed to, could chop wood in a blizzard or tend to bees. She was dressed like Edward, though her clothes were of a more recent vintage. She said their names, solemn as a vow, and kissed them both. “I've wanted to meet you since the first time Eddie talked about you. I knew I'd like you.” She pulled them inside. “Isn't the water gorgeous? It's the best time of year. In the summer, this could be anywhere, but in the winter, every day is a little different and exciting. You never know what's going to wash up.”

She introduced them to her son, Brady, who looked to be close to fifty, and his much younger wife, Lynn, who appeared closer to Anya's age. They both sat serious as cement on a brown couch that took up most of the boxy living room. Protected between them, the blond baby drank from a bottle and watched the football game on television. They didn't change their defensive pose; they knew what had happened outside, and they were going to hold it against Mira. Rey stretched out on the carpet as though he'd always lived there. There were framed photographs of nature's geometries—sea grass, a horseshoe crab, a shingle of sand—on the walls, but no fuzzy-bordered family portraits.

“I'm sorry about before,” Mira started. “I didn't see your baby. He's okay?”

“Not really. He's got a bump on the back of his head,” Lynn said.

“So what's Petey's favorite team?” Owen asked, cutting her off. Why should Mira let them punish her when she'd punish herself plenty?

“He's eighteen months old,” Brady said. He cast an unfriendly eye at Mira, who took a seat next to his wife. Still wrapped in her puffy coat, her face wild and windblown, Mira couldn't take her eyes off the baby, as if at any minute his real injury was going to reveal itself—with her name written all over it.

“Oh, please, Brady.” Katherine dismissed him, as she hooked her arm in Owen's. “Don't be such a tight-ass. Have a sense of humor for god's sake.”

A counter separated the living room from the yolk-colored kitchen where Edward, wearing an apron, was talking and pouring drinks for Anya and Wilton. Anya gave Owen an intimate smile and held his unwitting gaze until he yanked himself out of it. For an instant, he'd felt an exotic, warm pull. It was clear that Wilton had seen it happen.

“Come with me, sweetie,” Katherine said, and pulled Owen into the tiny dining room.

Owen recognized his father's quirky touch in how the table was set, silverware and glasses and napkins placed at odd angles, disequilibrium his own idea of balance. Owen liked that Katherine hadn't felt the need to fix it. Two small and dusty plastic figures of pilgrims, man and woman, stood in the middle, waiting for the company to sit down. Katherine's things—her furniture, her clothes, even herself—had the shine of well-used and frugal attention. Nothing extra, nothing wasted. A wide view looked onto the bay that had turned frothy under the clouds.

“They built this place with the view from here when it should have been there,” she said and ticked her head at the living room where Mira was still frozen on the couch. “Who spends time in a dining room? It doesn't make any sense. They did get the bedroom right, though. I can see the water from my bed, last thing I see when I close my eyes.”

“And a nice thing to wake up to.”

She looked at him as if what he'd said was full of hidden meaning. “Yes, you know about that, don't you? The pond is lovely. I can see why Edward's so attached to it. Funny to be attached to a body of water, isn't it?”

“Yes—especially when it's so indifferent to us.”

“When we met, Edward reminded me of some animal that lives in the trees and watches everything without ever moving his head. Just the eyes go from side to side. You're a little like that.”

“A monkey, maybe?”

She squeezed his arm. “The eyes, dark like yours, the hair—” She reached up to brush his back. “How can I describe it? Primal? No, that's not the right word.” She shrugged and gave up.

She was intent on taking him on the full tour—though you could see the whole thing from one pivoting spot—and they went into the single bedroom. There were matching nightstands on either side of the tightly made bed, one with an electric clock, the plastic aged yellow like old teeth, the other with a radio that leaked a repetitive traipsing of classical music. Edward's wallet and keys were on the bureau. There was a portable crib set up in the corner. Katherine sat on the bed and motioned for Owen to sit next to her.

“Your father told me that you don't talk much,” she said. “That's okay, by the way. I don't think we all need to be talkers. I want you to know that I'm the one who gave your father the gun.”

“I'm not sure if I should thank you or not. We're not exactly gun people.” His fingertips were itchy with the memory of the thing hidden in the rug. “Not at all, in fact.”

“It's fine. I don't like violence either. Some people do, you know.”

Edward called her into the kitchen to taste his sweet potatoes. Owen leaned back against the pillows and stretched out on the bed to give the view the same horizontal gaze Edward might give it. He wanted to see what his father saw. Edward had been without a woman's attention for a very long time, and now it appeared before him as effortlessly as this vista. It was beautiful and boundless, and something to envy. He could easily fall asleep.

“Ah, excuse me,” Brady said. Owen shot up. “I was going to put the baby down for his nap.” He pointed at the crib in the corner.

“Sorry. I was just—” Heat crept up his neck.

“I know. Checking out the view. My mother wants everyone to like it as much as she does.”

“That's understandable. It is pretty spectacular.”

Brady sat on the bed with all the careful effort of a middle-aged man. The baby was almost asleep on his shoulder, his mouth pulsing with dreams. Veins mapped the boy's fluttery eyelids. “So, our parents,” Brady said. “Interesting.”

“Right. Our parents.” Owen hovered his hand over the baby's warm back. Brady gave him a nod of permission to touch. “We're practically stepbrothers.”

“Not really.”

“I was joking.”

“They're moving fast,” Brady said, undeterred and humorless. “Too fast, if you ask me.”

Brady's disapproval made Owen think about the man's own story. Was this his first or maybe third time around in marriage? He was stocky like his mother, but had too much padding; his clothes were just a little too tight. There was no play in the guy—he was all swollen seriousness.

“I don't think so. They seem happy to me,” Owen said.

“My mother was attacked years ago by one of her students in the school parking lot at night. No one knows what happened exactly because she wouldn't say and she wouldn't press charges. She spent over a week in the hospital. She could have died.” He went to the crib to put the baby down. “I'm telling you this because my mother's a very tough woman. And she knows how to protect herself.”

“Good to know.”

Why was Brady telling him this? Was it some kind of warning, and a way to say his mother was not a woman to be screwed with? It was Brady, after all who'd given her the gun, Brady who also tenderly pulled a blanket over his baby.

Beyond the bedroom window, Owen saw Edward, Katherine, Wilton, and Anya standing at the head of the beach stairs. Brady began to sing a breathless tune to the baby as Owen left. Mira, still on the couch, eyes closed, had taken off her coat but clutched it to her chest. Lynn was locked onto the television and didn't look up. Owen went down the road to the stairs. Katherine had taken Wilton and Anya to the sandbars and Edward watched them through the binoculars.

“You've been talking to Brady,” his father said, and gave him the glasses. “He's a gloomy little shit, isn't he?”

Owen laughed. “Pretty gloomy. I don't think he approves of you two kids. Says you're moving too fast.”

“So I've heard.”

“He also says his mother's not to be messed with.”

“I've heard that, too.”

Through the binoculars, Owen followed the progress of the others in the thickening mist. “Can I ask you something? Did you have girlfriends all along? When I was kid, when I lived with you, and I just never knew?”

“Oh, sure,” Edward said. “You never met any of them because there was never anyone I was serious about. Kids get all sorts of funny ideas, and I didn't want you think this one or that one was going to be your mother or move in with us. I think we did pretty good, just you and me. I didn't see the need for anyone else, long-term, that is. Short-term's another matter.”

“Amazing. I had absolutely no idea.” All those treks his father had taken in the late afternoons—was he really getting laid then?

“That was the point,” Edward said, pleased with himself.

The others came back from the beach, breathless with the cold. Inside, Wilton looked startled, his expression blown open by the bay. Sand clung to his eyebrows and cheeks. He watched Anya too closely—how she loosened and then pulled her hair back with the silver clip, how she adjusted her black sweater, how she turned away to check her phone, how she went into the kitchen to help Edward. Katherine orchestrated the seating, assigning water views to Wilton and Anya. Lynn had a glassy look of displeasure, while Mira blinked herself alert. Brady went at the turkey with a stern knife.

“I'd like to say something,” Wilton announced, rising theatrically from his chair and holding his glass. “We're very grateful to be here in this beautiful place, not far from the first Thanksgiving, in fact, and at this table, and with all of you, our new friends. But especially, I want to thank you for including
my
family—me and my daughter.” He turned to Anya, and the sand on his face sparkled. She glanced at Owen and raised a reluctant glass. Wilton waited for her to look at him, but she wouldn't.

“Yes, to you two,” Mira said, exploding into the silence. Her voice was too avid and sharp. “And to Edward and Katherine.”

Wilton didn't sit, still waiting for Anya to look at him, and his face changed from expectation to disappointment. When he took a sip of his wine, his hand shook.

“Watch out, you're spilling,” Anya said to him. Her tone was more sympathetic than scolding.