The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“Better is a range.”


She laughs and I’ve never heard her more bitter. “Can you please get him out of there before he gets hurt?” She leans against the side of the car, khaki summer shorts riding up her thighs.

“Was he a good father?”

“Excuse me?” Her eyebrows pull together and the freckles between them kiss.

I repeat.

“Yes, he’s a good father,” she says. “Stubborn, but good.”

“When you skinned your knee, did he put a Band-Aid on it?” I bandaged Enola’s legs, pulled out splinters, not Dad. I’ve got scars on my shins, my knees, my hands, that Dad never touched or cleaned.

“Sure.” She shifts her weight to one hip in that cockeyed stance that belongs only to women. “Can’t you just get him? He won’t come out and it’s scaring the hell out of my mother. Whatever is going on with you two, it’s not her fault, or mine.”

“He was at graduation, right?”

“Yes,” she says. She looks like she might cry, which makes me wonder if I know her at all. “Yes, he could be shitty and stubborn, and maybe a little obsessed, but he helped me sell Girl Scout cookies. Took me to the circus. He was fine. You know, you were there.”

I was alongside her, watching, wanting to be taken with her. The McAvoys were my phantom limb.

Alice glances back to the house. “I don’t know what he did that you’re so pissed off about, but it doesn’t matter; he’s not talking to me and it’s frightening. Get him out of your house. Please don’t be mean to me right now, I can’t take that.” She’s bright pink, blondish eyebrows standing out against her skin. Upturned nose. Small lips. Square jaw. An exact cross of Frank and Leah, and I’m making her cry.

I touch her hand. She doesn’t pull away.

“I’m sorry. I can’t promise that he won’t try to fix the house, but I swear that’s not because of me.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

“I know.” She squeezes my hand, once, quickly, then lets go. It’s enough.

I have to go in anyway. Frank is in my house with my books, like he’s sitting in my veins. For Alice I’ll get him, but only for her.

She follows me, but I stop her at the door. “You shouldn’t come in.”

“Don’t say anything awful to him,” she says. A tiny burst of envy runs through me—I want that defensiveness. She would wake me up if I had a nightmare; she’s that sort of person. She wouldn’t care about my breakfast face. She would learn to love my sister because I do. For that, I’ll talk to Frank.

“Honestly, it’s probably going to be the other way around, plus it’s dangerous inside.”

“What did he do?” she asks, quietly.

Telling her might make me better in her eyes. Or maybe it would break her. “He doesn’t deserve you.”

She looks across the street, to the window where her mother watches. “Maybe. But I decide who deserves me.”

The front door is stuck and I have to kick it open, rolling all my weight onto the bad ankle. Alice grabs my arm and holds me steady. Her skin is warm against mine and I can almost feel the paper cuts from library books, a chipped nail, but then she is gone. Back to the McAvoy house. Back to Leah.

Frank is at my desk, where the book lies open on makeshift props.

“You’re back. Good. I thought—” He shakes his head. “I don’t know what I thought. But there’s something you should see.” He hops up from my chair.

I close the book. “Go home, Frank. Alice is worried.”

He frowns. “Let’s not talk about Alice.”

“Why are you here?”

“I need to show you something.” He pushes past me toward the door. Two steps down the porch and he’s heading for the bluff. Alice and Leah watch anxiously from the McAvoys’ porch. Dragging an ankle that feels like an anchor, I try to keep up. By the time I catch up, Frank is at the cliff’s edge, where the grass breaks away into a tear of falling land. “Look.” He nods toward the shore.

“What the hell?”

“Exactly,” he says. “I meant to let you cool off, let us both cool off. We said some things we shouldn’t have.” He digs the toe of one boat shoe into the ground. “I was taking the Sunfish out for a sail, but I got to the cliff and saw them. Damndest thing. Then I remembered.”

Not hundreds, thousands of smooth brown horseshoe crabs are on the shore. This isn’t what Enola said, it’s not like when we were kids; this is massive. They stretch across the Sound like cobblestones. They don’t do this, not during the day, and never so many, piling on each other in strata, like oysters. Something else is different. “The buoys.”

“Damndest thing,” he repeats. The swimming area has drifted out, back and to the east, toward the power plant.

“They’re pulling them out to sea.” I start for the steps but Frank grabs my collar.