Gwen understands her father’s leaving. Sees now that her mother will not tell him about the local boy. Her interest in Gwen has now officially faded away. It is this baby that has taken her attention from them, that has absorbed what little she had left, stored it away in her womb. This is the summer her mother, not her father, left her. She thinks about boarding school. She looks at her little sister, thinks better of it. Libby will need her back rubbed, she will need to have someone while their father has their mother and their mother has a baby.
They knew they could count on their littlest, and here she is living up so much to their expectations. “She will be the easy one,” they said. Even as a baby, she the quiet one, so quiet forgotten one day at the school, asleep in her stroller. Arms full of coats and bags, ears full of tales of stone soup and multiplication, they were at the car before their mother realized, my littlest. And here their small girl is listing names, mostly the boys from her class.
“What about Daniel,” says their middle child.
“Sounds like a prince.” Their littlest. Gwen will come around, too, they see it; for Libby she will come around too. But Tom has carved himself a new life out there on the slim roads of the island. Out in the Whaler on the thoroughfare. They hope it’s a boy, something to bring Tom back. But there may be nothing that can.
The sun is lower now, and the light has gone red. Their mother gives them fifteen minutes to run around, drink Shirley Temples on the steps and watch for seals before setting the table. The two girls go out, and the two adults are left alone. They will make dinner together. He will help more, she will let him. She will make room for him, she will call back all names she has called him, knowing that they were parts she cast him in, not ones he wanted. She will live up to every word in that letter. And asks that he show it to her so she can remember—don’t let me forget. Don’t let us go back there. Reach for me; I will not retreat, not a slick fish against your searching hand. I am not sand or water; reach for me, I will stay, a shell, a stone. Put me in your pocket.
PART IV
TWENTY
DANNY
July 9
In an awkward arabesque—a hand on each side of the boat and one foot in it—Danny pushed off the float with the other foot. Then he quickly swiveled down onto the seat, took the package wrapped in a plastic bag out from under his shirt, and tucked it under his seat. He plugged in the oarlocks and oars and took his first strong pull. The movement of the stubborn, squat dinghy was a tug at first, resisting the water. But by the third pull the water unseamed, and they—boat and boy—slid through.
His back to the bow, Danny watched the float recede. The house became a house, not a mountain, not a ship, not even a grand pile like a giant stone Buddha forgotten in the jungle. It was vulnerable there on its point, so close to the rocks. How many more storms could it withstand? Danny felt the water just beneath his feet choose to allow his boat through. Really, he thought, it is the ocean that owns the planet. Humans think they’re in charge, in control, but really the ocean lets them play. “Poison me all you want. My vastness is beyond your stupid comprehension. I am a universe. I will keep your islands of garbage only to deposit them back on your little shores. The land is just a third of this surface. I am in all dimensions. And your little land is shrinking. I am coming.”
Danny could see the sea flexing up over beaches, over seawalls, over the undulating bricks of the Back Bay. It would put out the gas lamps, burble up through the city drains of Cambridge until Avon Hill was an island, Fresh Pond a bay, and here . . . All this gone like a town drowned by a reservoir, forced out of existence by others’ needs. It is a ghost. Danny looked at the house and saw fish swimming through broken windows. He felt sick. He realized he had stopped rowing and was drifting in toward the boathouse beach. And the ocean said, I will drown cities. I will send my hunters to your safest shores. I will take whatever I like because no amount of rock or sand can stop me. I am time. I am deadly.
Here, at the boathouse beach? Too close to the house; they might hear. But he stayed there for a moment, twisting one oar and then the next to keep from drifting. He was so tired. That after-lunch haze mixing with an exhaustion he couldn’t get away from. He was so tired he could sleep anywhere at any time. He’d nap, not just a midday resting of the eyes, but a deep, dreamed-filled sleep, full REM. His subconscious welcomed him home at any time, all he had to do was open the door. He could sleep forever right here in this boat.
There were no waves in this little cove. The water was just absorbed by the pebbles of the beach, not soft like the lapping of a lake. Here the slopes of granite turned back into the ground and left a small-pebbled shore that seemed to filter the water, not withstand it. The water came in quiet and ragged, like breathing through your teeth. Danny took a few breaths through his clenched teeth. He held the oars out of the water and looked. To him this little beach always seemed like the place where a great sea monster—a scaled, long-necked amphibious beast—would emerge to look for food for her young, or come ashore to lay her eggs in the gravel that, to her gigantic clawed feet, actually felt soft and yielding. It was a place where arctic mermaids with blue lips and key-lime skin would lie on the soft, slippery rocks pillowed by seaweed, arms spread like cormorants, creamy breasts turned to the sky. But he was tired of mythical breasts. He was tired of things mostly existing in his mind and on TV. Even when things were right in front of him, it was as if he watched it all on a screen. He tapped his heel against the package beneath his seat, checking to be sure it was still there.
He swept the oars in opposite directions to keep the boat steady. The water looked black. He held the ends of both oars with one hand and touched the water with the other. It was cold enough to make his hand ache. He left it in until his eyeballs started to hurt. As if the cold was rushing up through his blood to his brain. An ice cream headache. He used to like ice cream. But now all he could taste was the fat. Lipids. He couldn’t eat with a word like “lipids” floating around in his mind. But this was new. He used to want ice cream all the time. Actually, he really only wanted one thing.