North Haven Page 15

  “It’s full of stars we can wake up with our fingers.”

  “We are reaching into space to distant galaxies.”

  “Yes,” their mother whispers from her seat on the end of gangway, its old wood wheels having rolled to the very front of their steel track. The float now just three feet below the pier.

  “The sea is holding us up,” Libby says.

  “It resists gravity,” says Tom.

  “It’s ruled by the moon,” says Gwen.

  “I’m an astronaut,” says Libby, reaching her arms out into ocean. Her knees bent, her little feet floating in the air, long toes like her father.

  “Yes,” their mother says. Her voice is far away. He has gone for the weekend again. “Sailing to Brimstone,” he said. He will bring them back the smooth black treasures that are the stones of another planet, without a mark and softer than the water that bore them. Smooth and black as space, as the water without the light, as the cove at sunset. He will come back, a pocket of his slicker fat and hanging low with the black stones. They have so many already. The walls, unfinished, showing their studs, are lined with them. Mantels and sills are humped and rowed with them. Tom uses one as a worry stone, rubbing it during exams. Gwen gives hers away to friends at home who believe that it is a piece of the dark side of the moon. Libby keeps hers, catalogs them, has a list, numbered, with a description of the stone, the date it was given to her, and the weather conditions under which it was found.

  She has realized, living in this place summer after summer, that weather is important. It is like luck, or praying, but also like a game that one must know how to play, when to hold a card, when to lay it down in books. Help yourself first, is the rule of cards and weather. She knows there is more to it than this, but she is still learning. Boats need so much help, so much minding of the weather with boats. The wind up, her father would usually be down on the dock putting the Whaler on the outhaul, can’t stay tied to the float. In a softer wind it could just be led to the leeward side, like a horse to a new stall.

  Their mother is sighing on the edge of the ramp. Libby hears.

  “I’m an astronaut,” she says again.

  “Yes, I see that,” says their mother.

  The older two go up, step past their mother as she leans to one side, not wanting to listen to her sighs anymore, but Libby makes her mother come and take their place.

  “Lie down, Mama, on your belly,” she pats the planks beside her. Her mother heaves herself up by pulling on the handrails of the gangway. She squats down beside Libby, first balancing on the tips of her toes, then rolling down to her knees, then walking her hands forward to lower herself down. She can’t seem to do much all at once, Libby thinks. Even this, lying down, is done in stages. Adults, she wonders, so strange. Her mother wags a hand in the water, keeping the other under her chin in a fist.

  “I see,” she says.

  “No, no, both hands. This water,” Libby explains, “is magic.” Her mother needs to see. With four hands in, they wave in unison, and the lights trail their fingers.

  “It’s only like this here,” Libby says. Only here.

  She often sees her mother sigh at the house, stand in the middle of the great room, a gray, damp dishtowel over her shoulder. She looks for more dishes, but stops and sighs. She looks at the ceiling, rubs the toe of her canvas shoe against a spot on the floor, joggles the loose plate of an outlet set, inexplicably, in the middle of the floor underneath the edge of the Ping-Pong table. Libby is suspicious of her mother, of these lingering looks around the house, of a casual comment about new wallpaper in her room. Their hands go back and forth.

  “Mama, you don’t really want to change the wallpaper in my room. It is my new room. My room, no more nursery. I like it like it is.”

  The paper is like a fairy tale, each little scene a story, the boy finds the lost girl among the rose bushes in June. They skate together in January. In July the girl and her sister wear bonnets on their way to a picnic, small baskets dangle from their wrists. December there is a puppy in a box with a bow. April there is a storm that is no match for her sturdy umbrella. May there are blue ribbons around a small bouquet set in her lap as she reads her lessons. March there is a muff around chilly hands. This is a story that continues, she is still learning it, the months stretch on for years, above her porch door, the chimney, the bit between the light switch and servant bell that no longer works. Like a doorbell in her room. Funny that there was a bell and it is gone. She wonders what it sounded like, big and tolling, a church bell, or the buzz like the doorbell at her nana’s apartment in the city. She wonders if the bell is buried in the meadow like an arrowhead. A relic, a treasure.

  “The paper is stained,” her mother says.

  Her little hands are growing cold, but she washes them, agitating the little creatures.

  “The paper is old and faded,” her mother continues. “Let’s paint it, simple and white.”

  This makes Libby cry. Simple, cover the stories of years with a great white storm? Blot it all out, bury it like a bell in the yard?

  “No. No,” she says.

  Her mother sits back. “It is just wallpaper.”

  The tears come fast, Libby stands quick, no stages, just up. Her little hands bleeding cold water into her pant legs, her shirtsleeves.

  “I love it, though,” she cries. “I don’t want it to change.”

  And it is this word that she holds on to. Change. It is this word that makes the tears come faster, the breath hiccup in her chest, her hair sticking to her face, her hands too wet and cold to pull the strands away.

  “We’re painting all the rooms,” says her mother. “Ours is already done.”

  “Not mine. Not mine.”

  The word rings in the air around them. She is cold now, wet arms, no sweater. She is having trouble breathing, so much crying. No more change. Her father has been away most weekends this summer. He even has started traveling for work, gone for a week here or there. She sees him less, hears her mother’s sighs more. This house is the place that is the same. Not the new school that she had to start this past year, where kids left her low and heavy alone on the seesaw. No, she would put her little six-year-old foot down. Wallpaper is where she draws her unsteady line. Wallpaper is a thing that can stay the same. Wallpaper in her big-girl room, her alone-without-her-sister room (though she is right next door, so no need to be scared in the night). Wallpaper. The calendar of a fairy tale.

  “Fine.” Her mother wraps her arms around herself, rubs her shoulders with her own wet hands. Fine. Wallpaper.

  Her mother does not have the energy to fight this littlest of battles, with this tiny general aflame at her feet. Fine. One room can remain stained and veined and peeling at the edges. It’s one less room to do. She has already started on the kitchen, painting the floor a bright yellow. Then the back hall and bathroom, periwinkle. The new color brightens things, but still there are things that can’t be fixed. The hair was painted into the bathroom floor, a small twisted J of a hair. Something that she looks at each time she uses the room. Something she can’t get away from. Whose is it? It is thick and wiry, not the downy plume that her two older children have started to bear, much to her dismay. Is it mine? His? Someone else’s? This is not a question she wants painted into her bathroom floor, to ask herself before each meal, after her morning cup of coffee, between swims with a wet, sticky bathing suit drawn around her ankles. This is not a question she wants her son, who uses that bathroom most, to ask as he brushes his teeth, as he bathes, as he fills the compound bucket in the tub to aid in flushing because the chain tank stopped working last week. This uneasiness is not something she wants her children exposed to. But clearly, it is upon them too, a ringing suspicion that things are changing.

  Let her have her wallpaper. That is one thing I can protect, one thing I can preserve. The rest I must fortify against, she thinks. For each time he leaves she pulls herself further away. Soon he will come home to an ocean in the rug room, a cold exp
anse across which she will be under a dim lamp with a dog-eared book. She will grow that ocean. If he must be in a boat, she will give him a great empty plane to sail through.

  She hustles Libby sniffling up the gangway, the pier light a lonely bulb in a cage. She will leave that on. She still wants him to cross that ocean. To come home to her.

  SIXTEEN

  LIBBY

  July 8

  Libby noticed almost immediately. But she wasn’t able to approach Danny for some time. Not until she kneeled in the flower bed by the front porch pulling up all violets that threatened to suffocate the peonies. Danny sat in a chair, his feet up. After each sip his beer bottle left a growing wet ring on the arm of his chair.

  His eyes were dark, and he had lost weight since she’d seen him at Easter. It wasn’t anything specific, but she saw the signs. When their father returned the summer she was ten, after he had left without saying good-bye, after weeks away sailing, he looked like this. Almost. He was gray and dragged. But there was a relief to him too—like a runner at the end of a marathon, or a passenger saved from some North Sea ferry disaster—the look of a survivor. The summer she was ten, she was still so young, still living in the tiniest details of things. She had noticed the scars on her father’s wrists that he kept covered, one under a tight watchband and the other tucked beneath a long cuff. One sleeve rolled up, the other always down. But still pink ends crept from beneath the leather band, peeked out from the keyhole above the buttoned cuff. She knew what this meant. Had seen it in TV movies. The scars were the sign of something wrong that, thankfully, was past, moved beyond, healed over. Almost immediately she had put the sight of those scars away in some deep strange little drawer inside herself. It wasn’t that she forgot it but that she chose never to think of it again. So that it became as far away from her as the moon, deep inside her internal universe.

  Looking at Danny, the drawer had sprung open. With Danny there were no visible scars. She knew if it hadn’t happened already, it was in the works. He was still running his race. He was still treading in those icy waters.

  “Why don’t you stay up here with me for a while, Dan?” she suggested. “You don’t need to be anywhere, right?”

  “Where would I need to be?” He said this drawn and slow, like it tired him to even think of obligations, of places or plans.

  “School doesn’t start too early this year?”

  “School will start whenever I show up. It’s convenient that way.”

  The day after they’d arrived at the house she had, on a hunch, called the registrar’s office. Danny was not registered for the upcoming semester, nor had he finished the last one. This was the power of dead parents and the knowledge of a social security number. Having asked about matriculation, deferment, payment plans, correspondence courses, leaves of absence, she had solutions. And she had a deadline too.

  She worked the ground with the cultivator, loosening all around the runners that snaked under the topsoil of the bed. Weeds, insidious, a disease. She eased the runners up, an explosives expert exposing a trip wire, found their noduled and gnarled core, and pulled it all forth, the circulatory system of death.

  Danny took long drinks from the green beer bottle, the color of the sea but so much smoother.

  “I think you should stay up here a few extra weeks, maybe Gwen too.”

  “What about your crew, aren’t they coming up next week?”

  “It’s the first week in August, but—” She paused. She had not fully considered this. Danny and her friends in this place together? She had always been so careful to keep them all apart. The family in July, the friends in August. That was the deal. That was the only way it worked. She had tried to mix them once and had learned what Scarlet was truly capable of. But now, without Scarlet here, things were different. Things didn’t need to be hidden or minimized. Her worlds could merge without repercussions, not including Tom, of course.

  Danny was like one of her students. One left late in the afternoon, the early darkness of winter closing in. The blank curb, with no car waiting, the only thing staring back at him. As with any forgotten child, she needed to stay with him, or to keep him with her. This house has the power to cure, she thought, I can’t keep it all to myself. Herself and her eight friends.

  Though now it could be seven. Patricia, the eighth, would she come? Did Libby want her to? If Patricia came it would mean only that the decision had been made in Patricia’s favor. It felt out of Libby’s hands. And if she told Patricia to stay home, more accurately to stay out of her home, then her friends, those seven, would ask and discuss and accuse and berate and generally heckle.

  Danny would, selfishly, be a shield. Danny would be a sad, dark river separating her from them. A new geological phenomenon that sprang up during the long winter, it would be unexpected and it would change the landscape of their vacation, one that had been the same for the last six summers.

  “Maybe school can wait.” She said this casually, tossing the strings of roots and blades of grass to the pile of detritus in front of her.

  “I don’t know, Bibs, some of those books, those ideas, might expire. Marx, Freud, Hobbes, they’ve been on the shelf awhile now; pretty soon they won’t be safe to consume.”

  Always so cute, always the little smart-ass. If she could get him to stay, then she could get him alone. If she could get him alone in a boat, where they could really talk, she knew she could get it out of him. Where he’d been for the last six weeks, where he wanted to go, if he’d tried anything, started giving his possessions away, written notes? Did he have a plan?

  Kelly Fern had an office on the back of the island. A man with the name of a flower, or a stylish purse, or a talk show host, was their father’s age, would’ve been, and he was a psychologist. She could take Danny to him. Maybe Kelly Fern could explain how to mourn, how to keep going. Because what she saw, in the gray skin, in the sharp collarbone, was the deep void left by their mother. Like a door that had been left open, with Danny standing right in that cold draft.

  “How’d school end for you, Bibs?” He scratched the back of one leg with the opposite foot.

  “Good, it’s always good at the end.”

  “When they can finally wipe their own butts, and tie their own shoes?”

  “Butts, yes; shoes, no.”

  Good, because she loved them. Good, because they learned the schedule, and sat in their spots at circle time, and put away paints before nap, and washed hands after wiping said butts. They learned what she taught, and she loved them for it. But also just for them, for their words and songs and small feet. For five hot dogs wiggling in a frying pan, pantomimed with the wiggling fingers of one hand on the sizzling palm of the other. For the sly tastes of Play-Doh, homemade or not. For slow nudging of a halved grape toward one reluctant and satiated turtle. For questions like, “Why won’t he eat it?” For declarations like, “My chin is an umbrella for my neck” and “I’m going to be a dinosaur catcher.” Or the instruction that preceded bad behavior: “Miss Willoughby, just look over there (away from the activity), I’ll tell you when you can look; just don’t pay attention for a minute, okay?” Even the heart-breaking certainties that “Girls don’t like dark colors” or “Boys don’t have long hair.”

  Gwen, Tom, and Melissa were all napping. It was that time of the day. This left the house hushed and made Libby feel as if she and Danny were having a secret meeting.

  “When are you and Patricia going to have a little butt wiper of your own?”

  He never shied from questions. He got that from Gwen. His beer gone, he rubbed the wet bottle on the back of his neck, then brought the bottle’s lip to his and blew across the top, sending a low moan, his own feeble foghorn, out into the sun of the afternoon.

  “We aren’t there yet, not even on that road yet. I don’t even know if we’ll get there.” She had wanted a baby with Riley. She had wanted a lot of things with Riley.

  Riley was her third girlfriend, the one just before Patricia. There were w
omen in college who were more passing storms or breezes or great and powerful ideas, hardly what could be called relationships. Tiffany’s upturned-collar-and-pearls name belied her actual tattooed-lesbian reality. Before Tiffany, Libby had just a few frenzied gropings in the common room after three a.m. Tiffany told her that women were meant to be together, goddesses on the mountain. And that men should serve simply as vehicles for fertilization, the sinewed arm that dropped grapes into their mouths. This was college.

  Then there was Carmen, another woman who lived the opposite of her name, a buttoned-up writer who found the library to be the most erotic place on the map. Libby was constantly pulling up Carmen’s tweed pencil skirt, bunching it around her waist while they writhed in a distant carrel in the geology section. Or pulling stockings down to Carmen’s ankles, letting them hang accordioned from one foot. She laid Carmen back on the linoleum conference table in the basement closet that served as the office for the college lit mag. It was, as Carmen often said, steamy. There were no politics with Carmen. There was just Anaïs Nin, Colette, bell hooks, and, in their nostalgic moments, even passages from Judy Blume’s Forever.

  And then there were years of no one special. After living with Carmen for a year, Libby felt that women demanded a kind of attention and closeness that made her skin dry, made her ears clog, made her lose her sense of balance and have to lie down on the couch with one foot on the floor to steady the room. Women came in every opening, through every door and window. Their belongings crept into drawers that had long been empty for the glorious pleasure of one uncluttered space. Their hair wove long strands into her sweaters, was brought gagging from the back of her throat. Not her own hair, no, these were great long red hairs that belonged to Carmen, then black waves that drifted from Patricia’s mane. Patricia’s hair, in its fullness, gave the look of someone perpetually turning her head, always a seductive bounce and sweep. Not lank and still like Libby’s own. Libby couldn’t even make a ponytail bounce when she walked. It hung stock straight like it was weighted at the bottom.