Two If by Sea (41 page)

“Sure,” Frank said, and to Rad, he shrugged, in what he hoped was the universal sign for
What can you do with kids?

Rad's mouth squirmed. “Your kid here, you should teach him some manners. If he was my son?”

“But he isn't.”

“Whatever a man does with his wife—”

“Is probably private unless he hits her and then it's not private, it's public. A few years ago, I met a whole lot of big boys like you who liked to tie one on and then knock their wives around. You might have friends who look the other way, but they're not as good friends as you think they are.”

“This from a volunteer fireman?”

“Yes,” said Frank.

“You don't talk like a fireman.”

“Well, Rad, for twenty years, I was a cop. And you know, a lot of guys, they feared domestic disputes, the way you fear going in a yard where some asshole has trained the dog to attack because he thinks it makes him have a bigger dick. But I loved bringing those guys out. I loved it. I bet I could still do it.”

“Be nice,” Ian said.

“You're right,” Rad said suddenly, and Frank gasped. He breathed heavily, like a man after a run, or a fight. “I never laid a hand on Rebecca before. But she can't take the . . .” He lifted the can and shrugged. “The booze. This stuff. She hates it with a passion.”

“Quit,” said Frank. “People do.”

Rad's already fuddled eyes watered. He stood and held the can in his hand. He said, “I'm afraid to try. But she's going to take my girls and leave me.”

“You wouldn't want your girls to be afraid.”

“No.”

“So try.”

“Okay,” Rad said.

Later, Claudia, Frank, and Ian lay in the little bed that had belonged to Claudia's mother, with Colin on the floor, on a pile of pillows covered by sheets. There were plenty of bedrooms, but neither of the boys was interested in being alone. After the excruciatingly long time she spent every night brushing her teeth (Frank was surprised that her gums weren't bloody rags), Claudia came into the bedroom, as fetching as a child in black buttoned-up pajamas with polka dots. Abruptly, still smiling at her, Frank fell asleep. And then he woke. There was a knock at the door of the bedroom. He glanced at the clock. It wasn't even ten. Why did it feel like a quarter to next week?

“Claudia?” said a deep voice.

“Dad?”

“I'm sorry to bother you.”

“Are you okay, Dad?” She got up, snapping on the low bedroom lamp, and Frank could hear her mentally rummaging for a stethoscope, as if her dad was clutching his left arm in pain.

“Claudia, there just wasn't time to speak to you two about this earlier, and it wasn't something I wanted to do in front of everyone.”

“Are you sick, Dad?”

“I'm as good as living forever, Claudia. I have something I'd like to give you, if you two want it.” Sitting down in the low sewing rocker, Albert opened a small ornate carved box.

Claudia said, “Those are Mom's rings.”

“Well, I wanted to know if perhaps you'd like to be married with your mother's wedding ring.”

“Dad, won't it hurt Rebecca? She's the oldest. And why . . . Dad, I was married before and you didn't offer me this.”

“Well, I had a feeling about that adventure,” Albert said. “Let's leave it at that. And I have a feeling about this one as well.”

Claudia kneeled next to her father's chair. Painfully swinging his aching leg over the side, Frank sat up in his sweats and Albert placed the yellow-gold basket-weave setting with the big old-fashioned pear-shaped stone in his hand. Frank said, “You're the one kneeling, Claudia.”

Shyly, she sat next to him on the bed while he slipped the ring onto her finger. She hugged her father, and Frank shook Albert's hand. “Those are very nice boys,” Albert said. “I apologize for Rebecca's husband . . .”

“No need.”

“But you handled it admirably. And so did Ian.”

Together, without words, Frank and Claudia lay with the boys tumbled around them, admiring the dusky majesty of the old ring. Then Claudia got up and lay down on the other side of Ian, scooching her body close to his, adjusting the light-blocking mask she said that she would need if she lived in an underground cave, then doing the thing that endeared her to Frank in a way that almost nothing else did, not her smarts, or her riding, not even her sexy. Claudia wasn't like other women, who needed to be draped in someone's arms as they slept. But she needed a little touch. What she did was straighten both her arms and tuck her hands under Frank's back as she prepared to sleep. Now Ian, Frank had noticed, did the same thing on those nights he slept next to Colin.

Frank lay awake, listening to some chuffing and coughing noise in the near distance that was certainly too big to be anything but a bear. Somewhere out there was the nutty old woman they would go to see tomorrow, stirring a pot filled with eyeballs and dried frogs, who Claudia seemed to think might hold the key to their future. Frank was sure she had the key to nothing. What else was out there?

He never wanted to get out of the soft bed, which felt like an old refuge where two hardheaded people guarded two kids who were not only small and vulnerable, but who knew it. If only there were just bears, or wolves or sharks, or anything with simple reasons for their rampages.

T
HE SIGN READ,
Please Park Here Wildflowers
.

“Is that a signature? Or a reference to the flora and fauna?” Frank said.

“I don't remember it this way,” Claudia said, taking Ian's hand. Frank took Colin's hand. Colin shook him off, and then, glancing up, repented. Ian counted each of the two hundred and fifty-six steps that led up to what they all assumed would be a house, although nothing was visible from the stairs except a dark crowd of fir and maples, second-growth trees huddled along the jaw of a ridge. When they got to the top, even Claudia, who now regularly ran three or four miles around Lake Monona or at the farm, was pulling her soaked linen shirt away from her breast and gasping. Frank's bad leg and his lungs were burning flaps.

Ian was spent.

Colin was fine.

As they drew closer, they saw the house, which to Frank looked so little he could scarcely believe it was inhabited by humans and not elves, but it was sturdy, the yard so colorful it was almost a sound. Instead of the traditional southern wraparound porch, there was a sort of squared-off widow's walk with high railings on top, which Frank imagined must give a killer view of the valley and the hills beyond, this afternoon cloaked in the blue clouds that gave the range its name.

“Do you think she's here?” Claudia said. “I sent her a note, just as I was supposed to do. Do you think we have the right time?”

Some heightened sense of his own made Frank turn around, so quickly he almost elbowed the tall, dark-haired woman standing so close behind him she could have cut his throat with the large set of garden shears that lay in the flat basket she held. She smiled, a smile that burst up into her all but black eyes like a small sunrise. Not pretty . . . the word that came to Frank was
arresting
. Her hair was very long, and though Frank couldn't tell how old she was because her face was fair and unlined, she was probably past the age when his own mother said that women needed to cut their hair so as not to seem to be pretending to be the girls they were once. “I think we're looking for your mother,” Frank said.

“You'd have to go all the way to Tampa for that,” the woman said. “It's me you're looking for.” She set the basket on the ground and held out her hand. “Hello, Claudia. It's been a long time, but you look just the same.”

Claudia said, “You recognize me?”

“Not that many medical students come to see me. In the thirty years I've lived here, you make a grand total of two,” said the woman. “I think the other one was my kinsman, your professor. I must have seemed so old to you then.”

How long could she have lived here, alone on this mountaintop? Frank studied the woman's face. If she was forty, that would have made her less than thirty when Claudia first visited this place. She had to be older than that. The thick mink-colored hair was not graying, however, and although she was dressed for the outdoors, it was in modern and expensive clothes, tapered gray pants and a long black sweater that hugged her thighs. She wore silver filigreed earrings and a touch of expertly applied makeup.

“Do you have children?” Frank asked.

“Have we been introduced?” she said, with a disarming smile.

“I'm so sorry. I had the feeling that we had been. I'm Frank Mercy, and these are my sons, Colin and Ian.”

“And I'm Julia Madrigal. There are dozen of Madrigals all over this county. I do have children. I have one son. His name is Hale. His name is Hale Winslow, though. His dad's name. He's at basketball right now. Colin, you don't have to be bored. Go up there behind the house. There are about six tire swings.”

“You heard him?” Frank said.

Julia said, “Sure.”

“That was rude, Colin,” Claudia said.

“Well, he is bored.”

Colin glanced at Frank and then took off.

“Telepathy is pretty useful and amazing. I think I know about thirty senders and that many receivers, about ten who are both.”

“Their mother, before us, was both,” Frank said.

“Ian, you're about four or five, right?” Julia said. “Do you watch TV too much?” Ian nodded. “Hale does, too. But not on school nights.” She gestured toward her door. “I built this house myself. You won't believe that, but I'm very handy. Our old house was much bigger, on this very site, but not nearly so energy efficient. You know, Claudia, I am still a kindergarten teacher. Do y'all have Saturday kindergarten? We're thinking of starting it here. I've just been picking in my kitchen garden and puttering around until you came.” Julia Madrigal smiled, displayed a full set of very straight and well-kept teeth.

Not one element of her appearance or demeanor conformed with what Frank had envisioned. She lived in a Spartan cabin. She had herbs in her basket—but they were parsley and oregano. She looked like an Eddie Bauer model. Something about all that ordinariness made Frank wonder if she was an authentic . . . what? They'd never figured out a name for it. Should they call Ian a healer? A medium or some goddamned thing?

Opening the unlocked door, Julia invited them in.

The house was little, but gave the effect of spaciousness because it was so spare and studded all around with cut-glass windows. The table and benches were built into one wall, as were two benches that snapped flush when they weren't in use, and two chairs that could be pulled up to little shelflike desks: Frank imagined the young Hale, who had feet the size of a teenager judging from the rubber muck boots stationed on a sisal rug at the door, doing his homework. There was a galley tightly fitted with almost miniature kitchen appliances. The ceiling, crowded with three big triangular skylights, went straight up to the peak of the house. A small spiral staircase probably led to the top deck. Loft railings jutted out on three sides—the two bedrooms, Julia explained, and the room that jumbled together a library, TV area, and playroom for Hale, as well as spillover sleeping for guests.

“My husband, Cato, he just loved the old house. But you could have pushed a rat through the holes in the walls, and when I saw the state of that cellar after I tore it down, I reckon that plenty of rats had done just that. Cato died when Hale was just five, in an accident . . .”

“You couldn't warn him?” Claudia asked, and then, embarrassed, put a hand up to shield her eyes.

“I'm not a psychic,” said Julia Madrigal. “I can't do what Colin does, send messages or speech telepathically. I can't see the future, honey. There was a logging truck and its brakes failed. Cato was just pulling out of the grocery store. That trucker came down Canaan Road like a freight train and the poor driver was killed as well.”

“You must have been happy together,” Claudia said. “You and Cato. Imagine being able to get your husband out of a bad mood just by being around him.”

“We were happy. I never met anyone else I enjoyed talking to as much as Cato. We could sit and talk for eight hours, and, when Hale was a baby, sometimes we did. Cato built furniture. Yeah, I know. That seems just like what you'd have to do if you live in the Smoky Mountains, but he was from Brooklyn, and we met in college. He taught me to build and do woodwork. He studied graphic design, but he never did that.”

Claudia said, “What did you major in?”

Julia smiled at Ian. “Witchcraft,” she said. “No. Elementary education, since here I am, showing kids that if you pour a half a cup of water with yellow food coloring and a half a cup of water with red food coloring, you get a whole cup of orange. What I'm like, what there is about me . . . what I can
do
, if you want to say that, is not learned.”

“Can everyone in your family do it? Because you all should be working for the diplomatic corps, don't you think?” Claudia said. She never said “you all,” or lapsed into any other southernisms, in Madison, but her speech had stretched out like taffy since she set foot in North Carolina.

“Nobody else in my family can do this. Nobody even wants to know about it. And as for diplomacy, that's the last thing our government would want—or any other government either. Too evolved for them.” What Frank had fussed around with for so long, picking at pieces and edges, suddenly merged: this woman was entirely correct. There was no money in peaceful coexistence. Someone who could foster it was as perilous as a nuclear weapon.
Be happy.
Hell no!

They will for sure kill her, then
.

Julia was brewing coffee, slowly slicing a small loaf of banana bread. Colin came in, sweaty. Julia asked the boys if they liked Legos “because Hale has about seven thousand five hundred and eighty-two Legos up there, if you want to play.” Ian glanced at Colin, then Frank, then Julia. “Does he have the Death Star?” She nodded. Colin asked, “Could we have some of that bread first?” They did, and then disappeared. “Hale will be sorry he missed them. Not too many boys his age right near here.”