The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“Don’t go rushing off. While I was waiting for you I looked through some of your books.” He sees my reaction and grimaces. “You slept with my daughter. I’m pretty sure we’re beyond personal boundaries.”


“Touché.” I would tear his house from shingles to foundation to find a single hair of my mother’s, to take her back.

“I saw that list of names, the dates, some of what you’ve written. I couldn’t make sense of all of it, but I figured something out. You’re worried about Enola. You think she’s like your mother. You think she’s going to die.”

“I don’t know.” The things he told me this morning showed me that I knew far less than I thought. “But I’m worried.”

Frank draws in a breath and lets it out slowly. “She’s different from Paulina, I can tell you—sweeter in some ways, but meaner, too. I don’t know, I saw those names and then I saw this. The horseshoe crabs came like this a couple of days before Paulina died. Thousands of them. After she was gone a red tide came through and killed everything—crabs, fish, snails—all of it; the whole Sound looked like rust. I haven’t seen horseshoe crabs like that again until now.”

So this is why he collects them, why he dries their shells and hangs them from his porch, and why, perhaps accidentally, he taught his daughter to love them. “Why are you telling me this?”

“You’re looking for patterns, right? I could see from what you wrote. I don’t know if that’s a pattern, but it’s strange enough that I can’t forget it, and seeing this many crabs again made me sick.” We stare down at the writhing mass.

“About Alice…” I say, because I feel I should.

“She makes her own decisions,” he mutters.

“She’s worried about you. Go home, Frank.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, okay.” He repeats the word until he’s worn a rut into it, then walks back to his house and the women waiting for him. I should tell him that I haven’t said anything to Alice, that I won’t, but I still want him to suffer. I look back to the water.

The beach is packed not just with crabs, but people from the other houses on the cliff. There’s Eleni Trakos, I recognize her by her steel-gray bun and leathery skin, tanned to her body by decades of topless sunbathing. There are her grandkids, Takis and the other one. Next to her is Gerry Lutz from up the street, Vic and the cul-de-sac people, Sharon, the Pinettis. They cluster like it’s a crime scene, touching, whispering, talking.

Eleni and the grandkids have their toes right up to the edge. One of the kids picks a crab up by the tail and waves it around; the body arches at its hinged joints, exposed, blindly searching for footing, and flinging back and forth with each movement of its tail. I look at Eleni, then back up the beach to Gerry, Vic and Maggie Simms, Terry, Sharon and the other cul-de-sac people. It’s rare to see them all together. Weddings, maybe. I think the last wedding was Wyatt’s, Gerry’s son, and that was three or four years ago. And funerals, yes, everyone shows up for funerals. I can recall them all wearing black—suits, dresses with matching jackets, shiny funeral shoes. Eleni with just rings, no necklace.

At Mom’s service, Dad had been flanked by Frank and Gerry. Frank stood at my father’s side, mourning her too. Leah stayed with Enola and me. She put me in a too-big suit from the Presbyterian Church. Enola wore a black hand-me-down dress from Alice.

John Stedbeck paces by the boulder where Enola skinned her legs. Nervous and lanky, he shouts into a cell phone, bending and straightening, holding his arm out to search for reception. I borrowed his suit for Dad’s service. My father’s gray suit had been too wide at the shoulders and too short in the legs. He wore the black in the casket.

Faye and Sharon snap photos, Faye crouching as far as her knees allow. They brought us fruit pies, both times. Ted Melnick brought us a basket of oranges and handed it to me while apologizing. Gerry and his wife gave us lasagna, which Enola ate all of as soon as the house was empty. Eleni gave us baklava. “For the sweet in the sorrow,” she’d said. Though food poured from the doors and windows, though each of these people hugged us and begged us to eat, eat, eat, we tasted nothing.

The clicking and thumping of crab tails hangs in the air; a roiling wave, they clamber at the shore. The wind is full of crabs and the beach is filled with a funeral party.

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