The Tell (41 page)

Edward took a big bite of cake and spoke with his mouth full, spewing crumbs in his strange excitement. “What you girls need is a ride in the boat tomorrow morning before you go home,” Edward said, his mood so high it might finally burst through the roof. “This time of year, for only a few days, you can see straight down to the bottom of the pond. It's remarkable, like the whole thing's lit from the bottom. It will help us all.”

Down at the water in the early morning, Edward, who was still elated from the night before, took off his flannel shirt and dried the rain from the seats of the rowboat. It was a funny, gallant move, stripping half-naked. His stomach was distended in the way of old men, his chest fuzzed with white hair. He directed Mira, who'd taken the oars, to row to the far left side of the pond where the reeds grew thickest. Anya held hard to the sides; she didn't know how to row and she was shivering in the cold. Owen told them to wait. He ran back up to the shed and came back with two ancient orange life jackets, stained with mildew and the silhouettes of insects.

“Come on, O. That's no fun,” Mira said. “I hate those things. And they smell.”

“But you have to,” he said. “You can't swim.”

“Who said anything about swimming? We're boating. Stop being such an old lady and give us a push.”

Owen dropped the life jackets and he and Edward pushed the boat out. For a minute, Owen imagined that Mira and Anya were feeling that first thrill of the solid flow of water coursing under them.

“Come on, old lady. Let's leave them alone.” Edward put his hand on Owen's shoulder as they made their way through the arbor back up to the house. At the top, where the fragrant overhang of spring branches blocked the sky, Edward stopped to catch his breath. He'd buttoned his shirt up wrong and one side of the collar whisked his ear.

Edward went off to look again for a kitten for Anya, and his voice calling for one faded down the road as flashes of the yellow plastic cat carrier snapped through the trees. Owen stood at the window and watched Mira and Anya lean over opposite sides of the boat and look down. He wondered if Mira was telling her about the pond dwellers now, if all this time, she really had seen something, maybe not what he'd hoped she'd see, but something of her own. Mira straightened up, and then Anya did. Mira was clearly trying to explain something while Anya shook her head. The water rippled as Mira stirred an oar. There were a million conversations that could be going on out there. They might even eventually forgive each other.

Mira moved the boat around the pond and stopped in front of the new house. They watched it for so long, that Owen knew something must be going on there. Maybe the woman with the red hair had come down her path to talk to them—about crazy naked men who swam in the cold. When Mira had the boat in the center of the pond again, she turned to watch a bird swoop in to pluck something from the water. Anya grabbed one of the oars. Mira snapped back. Her own single oar still rested on the water. The trees around them bent in to get a better look. Mira offered the other oar to Anya, but she shook her head. Mira seemed to be explaining that they weren't getting anywhere this way as the boat began to twist and drift. After a few minutes, Mira inched farther and put her hand on Anya's oar. But Anya was stronger, bigger, and she jerked back. Mira refused to let go even as she was being pulled off her seat. Owen's eyes blurred. The women were fighting and tugging. Their palms would be full of splinters. And then Anya let go, raising both hands in sudden surrender or victory, and Mira fell back off the seat. The oar handles pointed at the sky like the green soles of her sneakers. She had hit her head and wasn't getting up. The stink of blood streamed through Owen's sinuses as he left the house and ran toward the pond.

But then he saw Mira pull herself back onto the seat. She was bent over and couldn't or wouldn't lift her head. Finally, in a slow recovery, she stood and saw Owen at the head of the arbored stairs, and when Anya dug the oars in hard, Mira fell into the water.

Her entry was soundless. The surface barely noticed her. She was that light, that distressed. Owen froze with the realization that he wasn't moving. Anya yelled and he tripped down the stairs and onto the sand, and then the water was at his ankles, his knees, a stab in his balls, his chest, as he swam to Mira who was about sixty yards away, a head rising and then disappearing, mouth open, mouth shut. Her sweater floated around her like a cape of deadly leaves.

His own clothes weighed a thousand pounds. His limbs ached. When he reached Mira, he grabbed for her. Her lips were purple and her scalp was a transparent white. She fought and cursed at him to stop, to let her go, but he had a handful of sweater and an arm across her shoulders to pull her in.

“Get away from me!” she screamed. “You're drowning me.”

Her hand raked his face, and her nails tore the skin under his eye. The pain wasn't his then, or when she kicked him in the gut a minute later. His head went under and he swallowed a lungful of pond water. He believed he still held her still, feral in her fear, but what he held was cold, clear water. Her own panic was going to sink her, but she was out of his reach, thrashing her way to the beach, all dog paddle and determination. She stumbled out, gasping, and kneeled on the sand. Rivers ran off her.

“You were pulling me down,” she wailed at him. “You were going to drown me.”

“I was trying to save you.” Owen was vaguely aware of Anya still out on the boat, oarless and twisting. He didn't care.

Mira stumbled up to the house. Her waterlogged sweater dragged over the ground. Katherine and Edward stood confused at the top of the path as she brushed by them and he followed. Mira turned on the outdoor shower and struggled to undress, but her clothes sucked at her skin. She waved Owen away. She ripped and tugged at her pants, her socks, her underwear. She screamed in frustration, then whimpered and sat down. Finally, she let him lift the shirt over her head and she leaned over his bent back as he pulled off her pants. She stepped under the water and he closed the wooden door and stood just outside it. Cold had moved into his bones; there was ice behind his eyes, and a headache stomping in.

“I can hear you freezing out there,” Mira said. “Come in with me.”

“I can't,” he said. She'd thought he was trying to drown her.

“Yes, you can.” She opened the door, pulled him in, and undressed him as he'd undressed her. The water seared the scratches on his face. A bruise bloomed on Mira's shoulder, and when she lifted up her hair, he saw a raw red scrape on the back of her head. She tensed when the water hit it. They heard Edward down at the water shouting instructions to Anya to free the boat that was now caught in the reeds on the far side of the pond.

“She tried to kill you,” he said.

“No, she didn't. She didn't mean to do it. I was angry at something she'd said. It was an accident.” Mira's words were final and forgiving. She would blame no one but herself. “I know better than to stand in a boat.”

Owen spoke to her back. “That day I left you on the roof at Brindle, I went to Wilton's house. We had a fight. I hit him. I told him that he'd ruined our lives.” The hot water was beginning to run out, and Mira shivered against him. “I said that I'd told Anya the one thing he didn't ever want her to know—a story about what had happened years ago. The story you don't know. I wanted to kill him with it. I wanted him to kill himself over it.”

“I know.”

He tuned her around to face him. “What do you know?”

“I know what happened when he had Anya in the car, when he'd tried to kill himself and her. He told me that last night I was with him. But Wilton didn't believe you'd told her. He said you were too good a person, that you wouldn't do that to her. That last night I saw him? He was moved by everything you did for me. He knew you were trying to save me. He said he'd never been loved the way you love me. What devastated him was the fact that he'd never had love like this and never would. That it was too late for him. That's all he was looking for. Anya seems to get that.”

“Why didn't you tell me you knew?”

“I was waiting, O. I thought that if you finally told me, it also meant you'd forgiven me for what I've done. And if you didn't ever tell me, then I'd have to live with that.”

Wilton had protected him. Owen crouched down. He saw the backs of Mira's legs, her ankles with their sculpted tendons, the lip of water around her heels.

“Why did you leave him there, Mira?”

“Because he wanted me to. It's the only real thing he's ever asked of me, O. It was what he wanted—to send me back home to you. He begged me to go.”

Owen pressed his face to the back of Mira's legs, and they stayed like that, the water growing quickly colder.

Soon, they heard Katherine yelling for Owen, and he ran from the shower to meet her at the top of the stairs. Edward had gone into the water, she told Owen anxiously, to pull Anya back in the boat. Anya couldn't figure out how to work the oars and was going in circles. It was too far, too cold, he was too old, Katherine insisted, her worried words tagging Owen down to the beach. Edward's stroke was strong and competent, and he'd been doing this forever, but nothing was going to assure Katherine that he was okay. Owen dropped the towel from around his waist and went into the pond. Edward had stopped a few yards from the boat, and Owen caught up to where his father was treading water.

“Did she send you out to check on me?” Edward nodded at the beach where Katherine stood, squinting to see them.

“She did.”

His father's broad, shut-eyed smile was something beyond delight, a simple pleasure in knowing that someone was watching. Edward waved at Katherine and then looked at Anya, who was waiting in the boat with the oars inert in the water, her hands in her lap.

“Christ. Who doesn't know how to row a boat?”

“I'll get her,” Owen said. “You go back in.”

“There hasn't been this much action on the pond in years,” Edward said. Life was more vivid all of a sudden. “Porter would have loved it. These new people could care less.” He flipped over and started a splashy backstroke to the shore and Katherine.

Owen swam up to Anya. He had her take up the oars and toss the rope into the water. He pulled the boat, a smooth, familiar weight, up to the shore and hid his nakedness behind it when she got out. She didn't say anything to him but hurried up to the house. When Owen got back, his father and Katherine were in the shower together, complaining about the lack of hot water. Inside, Owen wrapped himself in a blanket from the couch. He heard Anya talking to Mira in the bedroom. Anya was breathy with apology, but there was also some element of excitement at what had just happened and what she'd done. The strain was over now. They were all very much awake. Her father was still missing, and everyone in that house knew he wasn't going to reappear, but she'd let some weight tip off the boat and sink to the bottom. She would have to write her own story about her father.

A
nya had offered them anything they wanted from Wilton's house but urged them to take the television from his bedroom—which they did. Owen imagined all the nights Wilton must have unfolded himself on his big messy bed and clicked the thing on. At his feet was a version of himself in a linen suit and silk tie, feckless and permanently youthful. He was at his best there on the screen, maybe a genius. But in his head, when he turned himself off, the night would descend indifferent to celebrity and talent and invite all kinds of regret. His loneliness could make fire all by itself in the dark.

For now, the television sat in the hall outside their own bedroom, while Owen took down the wallpaper. He'd thought that they would have been done with television after everything that had happened, but Mira wanted it—a useful reminder of the lovely confusion about what was real and what wasn't. Liberated after a century behind rosy paper, chunks of plaster fell in puffs of toxic dust. The walls would have to come down to the studs, a job for the summer, Owen knew. A hole opened up to where the air was warm and fusty with the breath of another century. He'd heard of people finding love letters and confessions, stashes of money, bottles that were empty except for the gold stain of dried booze, behind old walls. He pressed his eye to the hole; maybe he'd discover in there some understanding of how it was that life could pick you up and toss you around and still return you to the place you'd started. Because here he was, just where he'd been a year earlier, as if he'd done nothing more than leave his chair to get a glass of water.