Two If by Sea (28 page)

Patrick was now fully on board with Claudia's dream, and spoke of returning to England the following summer to sort out his life before attempting to become a permanent resident of the United States. After that, he would want to raise and train his own colt—preferably one Glory Bee threw after her retirement in a few years. As was only right, he had taken over coaching Claudia on Glory Bee, and was making good money because of it. Frank suspected that Patrick would pay a visit to the jockey school in Indiana while Claudia was at the clinic. Frank might have welcomed the chance to see Hiram Jacoby, whom he hadn't met since he was a child traveling with his father.

Frank welcomed the break. He needed their absence to think, and he was not a fast thinker.

He knew perfectly well how to name his feelings for Claudia, and had there been no Natalie, or, perhaps especially, no Ian, Frank might have known what to do with them. But there had been a Natalie. Frank had wanted all the things Claudia now seemed to want with him, but he had wanted them with Natalie. Claudia wanted children, her career as a teacher and a counselor, and a stable home life that would not, after this period, include competitive jumpers. She was certainly in love, and he supposed he was as well, his experience of love being limited to once and Ian. Frank didn't know if he could want those things again.

Really, though, what
did
love mean? He didn't want to be away from Claudia. They argued more than they agreed and they could argue about anything. Last night, it had been Dickens: Claudia had grown up on his stories and called him the great reformer, who would never let fat complacent Brits forget that the poor were always with them. Frank countered that if Dickens wasn't really a racist, he certainly was a cultural chauvinist.

“He was on the side of everyone in theory,” Frank said. “In real life, he didn't like anyone who didn't look like him.”

“He thought everyone could reach higher than his rank in life.”

“He thought the best thing that could happen to any fuzzy-wuzzy was to go through some kind of tea strainer until he at least looked like an English gentleman, or sounded like one.”

“What's a fuzzy-wuzzy?” Claudia asked.

“A person who wasn't European living in England. Someone from Southeast Asia. A black person. And Fagin . . . well, kids in eighth grade know about the ‘Jew' in
Oliver Twist
 . . .”

“Fuzzy-wuzzy? Who's a racist?”

“You mean me?” Frank said. “Give me a break. I was a cop.”

“Cops are some of the most virulent racists and I sure don't see many people of color in your life,” she said, biting off the words.

“Well, I just met a black woman in Madison I'm interested in dating,” Frank said. “I'm sure that psychiatrist school is loaded with people of color. Lots of them are psychiatrists.” Claudia lobbed her shoe at his head. “Anyway, you're patronizing me. You're pretending to be interested in British literature. Whereas I would never pretend to be interested in crazy people.” He repented that because Claudia had on the elbow-length rubber gloves she used to apply poultices to Pro's back legs. The next thing she threw, with good aim, was a turd.

They had fun. Not in the same one-of-the-guys way he and Natalie had . . . but they had fun. The sex they had still astonished him. His cock stirred if Claudia so much as reached inside her shirt to delicately untwist a bra strap. He came to visit her during the day at the lakeside condo in Madison that was basically one big room with four walls of windows framing an enthralling lake view, four strips of bookshelves crammed both horizontally and vertically, and a gigantic bed with about twelve pillows. Claudia had sex like she rode, as though this would be the last time and she didn't care if it killed her. When she finally let him put his mouth on her, she gently taught him to flatten his tongue to give her the best pleasure. She loved sitting atop him, and hated doing it with him behind her, and told him it felt lousy to women. Grown people, he and Claudia, lay on a blanket in the back of his truck, parked on the wooden bridge over Sandman Creek. Being naked outside was like being rich, Claudia said, sounding just like Natalie. He loved her mind, under her blond cap of feathery hair, as much as her body. Her head was filled with antic recipes for discussion, for discourse, for dinner. He thought of her hands—her strong and spatulate hands that seemed grafted onto her slight self from the model of an Italian peasant woman—on Glory Bee's shining neck, on Ian's milky, knobbly spine, on Frank's own neck with its humiliating farmer's tan, and he felt safer every day.

At his house, Claudia fell easily into a routine of asking Hope to teach her things, pitching in when Hope was armed with an immersion blender the size of a small rifle, “putting up” tomatoes, tomato soup, tomato salsa, tomato relish, tomato sauce—a fetish from her newlywed days and no longer any kind of economic necessity. Claudia said the jewelly jars of produce made her feel satisfied in the same way riding did—a job of substance and shape. Though Hope was ironic about almost everyone, and well aware that, as Natalie had said, Frank had a “crush” on his mother and a wise woman would honor that, she was still not immune to Claudia's robust cheer, at right angles from what one might expect of a professor of psychiatry. And Ian liked her. He liked everyone, but he liked Claudia more. They had private jokes; he called her “Cloudy.” She called him “Eeny.”

“You're different,” Eden said to her brother. “You just smiled.”

“I smile all the time.”

“No,” she said. “You don't.”

Frank smiled again. “You look healthy, too, Eden. Well fed. Your wedding dress wouldn't fit you now.”

“But I'm still fit,” Eden said, slugging Frank hard. “And you can't hit me back because of my delicate condition.”

Like some vaudeville character, missing only an oily mustache, Frank's new brother-in-law took this as a cue to sidle up to Frank and ask, “So, with Claudia Campo. Is it a match? You're not getting any younger, Frank. Psychological studies show that guys who were happily married get remarried right away. I'm only saying.”

“If I were going to do anything, I would be sure to rely on psychological studies before I did it, Marty. I can't date a doctor anyhow. I only finished a year of college and that in night school. She wouldn't have me.”

“Maybe she likes those rustic types who aren't cerebral.”

“I'll introduce her to some, then. We're friends, and she's good to Ian,” Frank said to Marty. “Her dreams are about the horses.”

This wasn't inaccurate. Claudia was hardly the type to follow Frank around with stars in her eyes and sighs on her lips. She was nearly always busy. Be careful what you wish for, Frank thought, for you will surely get it. Although on sabbatical, Claudia seemed to have a hundred friends who needed tending and a zest for daylong events with names like “Digging Your Grave with Your Teeth: The Link between Childhood Obesity and Factitious Disorder” and “Depersonalization Disorder: Out of Body Politics.” She trucked Prospero to therapy every week in Madison so he could swim in a pool half the size of a football stadium, and joined her friends for weekends in Chicago and New York, to shop and go to the theater. Why wasn't she more obsessed with him? Frank wondered. The solace was his time alone with Ian. When Claudia wasn't around, Frank didn't always insist that Ian patter off to his bed. He pulled Ian's compact furnace of a body close to him, and when he wakened, Ian had not moved.

Finally, Claudia left for Kentucky, trailering Glory Bee, with Patrick riding shotgun. Frank didn't hear from her, and worried. Old acquaintance aside, Jacoby wouldn't be sentimental when it came to fielding a national team. But when Claudia hopped out of the truck, she was lit from within. Jacoby as much as promised he would try to throw his word behind her team hopes—which would mean her leaving eventually, to go to train with the rest, with a
real
coach. As much as he'd hoped for this moment, Frank was surprised that he was aggrieved. Gravely, Claudia thanked Ian for looking after Prospero. She said there was a surprise for him in the truck.

It was his own saddle, the duty that Frank had neglected for months.

Point, Claudia.

Inelegantly, he asked, “Who made it? Elves?”

“There were a few there that Mr. Jacoby already had,” Claudia told Frank. “I bought one.”

“It probably won't fit,” Frank said, hating himself.

“You can try it on Saratoga,” Claudia said. “Eden's horse.”

“No. I want to ride Glory Bee,” Ian said.

“Glory Bee's working with me now on being a horse, a great show jumper. You can ride her in a few years.”

“Years?”

“And we can get you a horse of your own,” Frank said. So there. A horse was better than a saddle any day. They went criminally cheap at the auction in Baraboo. A college girl would sell a horse like used luggage, simply because she'd graduated. A pretty little horse couldn't pull a plow, and often, those horses went unsold, to a heartbreaking fate.

“When can we get this horse? Tonight?” Ian said. He was sitting on the saddle in the grass with his feet angled out to each side.

“Pretty soon,” Frank said. “I can go to the auction in a couple of weeks.”

“A couple of weeks?”

“What do you want, Ian? Not everything happens in one day.”

“A horse now,” Ian said. “I have a saddle! You have horses. I need my own horse.”

Frank sighed. “How about lunch first?”

They went in, and Ian ate his peanut-butter-and-potato-chips on toast, with carrot sticks. Frank wanted a nap when coffee failed to restore him. So Claudia asked Ian if he'd like to draw. Frank didn't mistake the slight hitch of tension. He felt it himself. He wanted to complain, What,
now
? Even Ian knew that drawing was code for Claudia's gentle brand of therapy.

“I'm only drawing one picture,” he said.

“One is good. What is it? What's it going to be?”

“A boa.”

“A snake?”

“No, the kind you wear. I want to get one,” said Ian. Frank could not suppress his laughter: Marty routinely insisted that Ian was headed for a career in musical theater. “No, I changed my mind,” Ian said then. “I'm going to draw where I lived before.” Frank stood at the sink, unable to move.

“Where did you live?”

“Etry Castle,” Ian said quietly, coloring furiously, the green thickness of waxy crayon darker and darker, like slime in a floor drain. “I told you five times.”

“Etry
Castle
? Wow,” Claudia said, warning Frank with her eyes not to react. “Are you sure you can draw that?”

Ian shook his head. “I can, but decided I don't really want to draw it after all.”

“Is your mother still there?”

“Nope.”

“Where is she?”

“She's dead, too. Like your mom.”

Ian went back to drawing big circles filled in with hexagons of color, like kaleidoscopes or stained-glass windows. Frank struggled to control his breathing. After a while, Claudia said, “I'm sorry that your mother died. What, ah, died her?”

“Some guys. Some bad guys. She took some medicine that died her. I don't remember.”

Frank took a long step, but at a warning look from Claudia went back to the sink and ran water into his coffee cup, then began to dispose of the grounds in the pot.

“What's this, Frank?” Claudia said, suddenly behind him, her voice no more than a breath. “His parents were Natalie's relatives. They died in the tsunami. What does he mean?”

“I have no idea,” Frank told her. He found plates in the drainer that were already clean and began to rinse them, too. He really did have no idea, he consoled himself. Until he had to jerk his hand away, Frank didn't realize he'd been holding a plate under water so hot that his skin was red and beginning to puff up. “You know what you said about how kids deal with grief.”

Claudia said nothing for so long Frank was sure that she'd walk out. Instead, she went back to Ian.

“And there's your brother!”

“Colin,” Ian said.

“Who was in the car in the flood when Dad came?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well, Colin went into the water. No one knows where Colin is. Do you think he got hurt? I think maybe he got hurt.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe Colin is even dead. I said that. It was a very bad flood.”

Ian began to laugh. Frank's guts squeezed like wet towels. Why was he laughing, about the boy who had forsworn his own salvation to push Ian through the window, telling Frank that Ian was “important”?

“What's so funny, Eeny?” Claudia asked, and even her voice wobbled.

“Because he's not
dead
.”

“How do you know?”

“Colin isn't
dead
. He would
say
if he was dead. My mom died. I had another dad and he died. I don't remember. My dad now is doing the dishes.”

C
LAUDIA CLAIMED THAT
there was no way of knowing what a child meant when he said his parents were dead.

“He means his parents are dead,” Frank said. They were huddled in the back of Pro's cushy recovery stall, just after Hope had left to drive Ian to school. It felt as though they were hiding from the headmaster. They spoke in whispers.

“He has no real understanding of their deaths . . .”

“He's almost four, Claudia. He's not a newborn.”

“That's only forty-eight months old, Frank. Whatever happened to Ian happened at a good time for Ian. It's called the latency period, and it's a very stable time of life that starts maybe just about when you start school and ends at about puberty. You're not a baby, and you have deep feelings, but some people think that this is when a child is able to have a sort of amnesia about the earliest traumatic or evil memories. So we go nuts when we hear about somebody raping a two-year-old but for the two-year-old, it's actually easier to recover from sexual abuse and adapt to live a pretty normal life, if she gets the chance, because of being little.” She paused. “Still . . . bad guys?” She regarded her nails. “Are you in trouble, Frank? Who were those men in the black car?”