The Book of Speculation: A Novel

She blinks. “What the fuck are you reading?”


“I honestly don’t know.” My head is exploding and my eyes feel like I spent hours in the wind. If it’s possible to have a reading hangover, I have one. The desk clock reads 7:30; it’s early for Enola. I spent years dragging her out of bed for school, wrestling her as she kicked and growled. It’s possible she never went to sleep. “Why are you up?”

“There are horseshoe crabs all over the beach. Like crazy.” She smacks both hands hard onto my shoulders, pushing me into the desk and tipping over books—Alice’s books, the ones I should take back. I called her yesterday but she said she couldn’t talk. She can’t stay mad at me forever. Enola keeps jumping, and the floor squeaks with each bounce. “I went down to the water early. I thought I’d catch the tide when it was up,” she says. “They’re everywhere, just like before.”

“You went down by yourself?”

“So? Doyle was beat and you were asleep.”

It shouldn’t worry me, but there’s a new and persistent little fear. Not so little really. “Don’t go down there alone.”

“Stop parenting me. That doesn’t work well for us.” She rubs her feet against each other, sprinkling sand on the floor. She’s right. Much as I tried to look after her, it did end with her leaving. “Did you call Alice? Apologies are a good thing.”

I ignore her. “So, there’re lots of crabs?”

“A ton. It’s creepy. I thought they were dying out, but I guess not.” There’s the shuffling sound again—she’s playing with the cards. She looks at me and it hurts. I can feel her searching for the old me, from before she left, before Dad died. He’s in here somewhere.

“I remember you with horseshoes all over you,” she says.

“Me too,” I say, because it’s what you say. It was during the last days of Dad, the summer before he died. I’d seen the horseshoe crabs first, when I was looking down from the cliff, and needed to show her. I waited for her in her room—even then she’d snuck out, needing to get away from him, from me too, I suppose—she’d been out stealing change from pay phones and the quarters jingled in her pockets.

It was too late at night to go by Dad’s room, so I went through the window, folding up to squeeze over the sill, inching forward until my feet dropped to the ground. Enola followed. There’d been a tree then, a pine that had fallen in the winter and lay dead on the lawn. Ever the better criminal, she slid the screen closed to cover our escape.

We walked to the cliff, cutting through the yard’s tall brush, my hand pulling hers, no space between. I was barefoot. I remember stiff stalks of beach grass poking my feet. Looking into the yielding blackness, we decided against taking the stairs. I offered to piggyback her. She was smaller then and I could easily lift her, barely had to hold her. I walked down the bluff and she shifted each time I sank into the sand.

At the shore we let the waves bury our feet. After a few minutes something began brushing against our legs. Enola bent down to feel, discovering what I already knew: a cold shell, smooth and hard with ridges on the edge, and two bumps just there. Horseshoe crabs. I told her to look up, out over the waterline. Across the beach it looked like hundreds of glossy rocks had lined up by the shore. Farther out, dark shapes moved beneath the water, rising and falling. Before then I’d only seen a handful alive or come across the dead on the beach, carapaces hollow like cicada skins. There must have been hundreds of crabs, thousands, knocking into one another, their tails smacking and working like blind men’s canes.

Enola smiles and it wrinkles up her nose. I’ve missed that. “You told me they were old. Primordial. I remember wondering if they knew that everything around them had changed,” she says.

“They must.” From purposeless instincts, from the pieces of brick and asphalt they scurry around. They know because the giant sea monsters are gone. Only the crabs remain.

“I wanted to get Dad,” she says.

“It would have just made him sadder.” It wasn’t long before the end for him, when he spent all his time at the kitchen table, staring at an empty seat, imagining the woman who once sat there.

“I know,” Enola says. She’s back on the couch, picking at the arm. “I stayed on the sand, but not you; you walked out, horseshoe crabs all around your feet, laughing like an idiot.”

“You didn’t come with me?”