The Book of Speculation: A Novel

Her eyebrows lift. “I thought you remembered everything. I stayed on the beach. Those things scared the crap out of me. But you, you walked right into the water with the crabs. They crawled all up your legs, climbing you like a tree. I don’t think you thought for a second that you could get hurt, that they could just swallow you up.” Just now she seems younger, like her fourteen-year-old self. “The whole time you were laughing I was on the beach thinking, fuck, if they pull him under, what am I gonna do?”


Maybe I do remember her on the beach, shouting, begging me to come back in. But it felt good to be in the water with living things all around me, crabs crawling over my feet, tiny pincers scratching and tickling, the touch of ancient things. But nothing climbed me, no. Nothing like that.

“You were half covered in horseshoe crabs, like you weren’t all you anymore.” The soft flicking sound of cards is alive in her skirt pocket. I can almost see her running her fingers around the edges. “It looked like they were coming to pull you away. Like Mom was coming to get you.” A bridge, a fall, she tamps the deck in her palm. A card emerges—a man and a woman, nude?—and is quickly tucked away. The Lovers?

“They were mating. It happens every year.”

“I know that now, asshole,” she says. “I was just saying that I was worried about you. Fucking horseshoe crab whisperer.”

Then Dad died and there were no more crabs or beach nights, just us alone, and after that—much later—Enola left. As soon as she could.

“Why did you leave?” I don’t expect myself to ask it, am startled that I do. But it hurt. It had been just us for years; even before Dad died it had been the two of us.

“This house is a mausoleum,” she says. She looks out the window, over to Frank’s driveway. “A memorial to people who didn’t love me enough to bother staying alive.” She glances at me. “I know, I know. You were here and you still are. If anyone gets a medal for staying, it’s you. Mom didn’t bother; she offed herself before she knew me. What Dad did was almost worse. Did he spend a single second on us after she was gone? No. He didn’t do anything but pretend to be alive until he wasn’t.”

“I understand being angry.”

“You don’t know what you looked like. I knew every table you waited, dish you washed, the hours at the library, at school, and that you did it for me.”

“We both had to eat and live, it wasn’t just for you.” I remember being tired, yes. Long days, knowing that there was no choice but to do, to keep on doing. “Was it so bad?”

“It would have been easier without me,” she says. “Don’t bother saying it wouldn’t. You could have sold the house and gone wherever you wanted, except that I was here. If I’d stayed you would have wanted me to go to school.”

“Probably.” She’s smart. She should have gone.

“And you would have kept working like that. I couldn’t watch you anymore, knowing I was doing it to you,” she says. Her fingernails are scratching the couch fabric, digging and picking. “It was hard, Simon. Maybe you don’t want to think about it, but it was. I was a burden and it isn’t easy being deadweight. I really thought you’d leave after I did. I wanted you to.”

It’s too hard to say that I kept the house not just for Mom and Dad, but for her, in case she came back. I know now, fiercely, that I wanted her to come home. Where would she come back to if not this house? “If you hate the house so much, why do you care if I fix it?”

“You like it,” she says. “I’m not entirely selfish, I promise.”

Then there’s guilt, and not a little of it either, because I have thought her selfish. Over dinner with Alice. I make coffee while ghosts of us walk the kitchen. My younger self, leaning on the counter, tired like a dead man; Enola, watchful and quiet, curled up in a chair, trying to disappear. I fill two mugs. Enola: cream, three sugars. Mine: black. I drink it while it’s still hot enough to scald.

“Why do you think Dad left this place such a wreck?” she asks.

“Grief, I guess.”

“The great excuse.”

We stare at our coffee, much the way he did. “He told me things sometimes, when he could talk about her.” It was a year before he could say her name, longer before he could talk to me without his eyes looking painful and red. “He said that when he first saw her, she was wearing a blue sequined fish tail and swimming in a tank. She put her hand up to the glass, smiled at him, and he knew that he would marry her.”

It had been more than that. I remember the words and his sour coffee breath. I saw her in the water and I believed her. I knew it was true, even if she didn’t really have a tail, even though there’s no such thing, she was a mermaid. My whole life before that moment I’d been in a locked room, and then all the doors opened. And Frank had stood there, witnessing that moment of falling in love. Dad went back to the show every night for a week. “She did different things. The mermaid act, card reading. He saw her being sawed in half by a man so old he could barely lift the saw. She was in a box, hands out the sides, feet out the bottom, helping the guy move the blade.”

Enola shrugs. “Boxes get banged up on the road, the saws bend, they get stuck. You know.”