North Haven Page 25

  Gwen was still holding Danny’s hand, but she had stood up and was looking out at the water. She was far away. She was not used to being out of the loop; usually she knew everyone’s secrets. Had he disappointed her, too? Danny squeezed her hand. She came back from where she had been, her eyes glossy. She squeezed his hand back.

  “We should’ve brought her up here,” Gwen said. “I hate that urn. I hate trading her back and forth like she’s a goddamn set of silver. What was Tom thinking, what was she thinking?”

  “I never want it,” said Libby. “Tom just shows up with it, and—what am I supposed to say? I feel like it makes my house smell of smoke. But Tom’s just doing what she wanted; it’s not his fault.” Libby, the soother of rough edges. She must do this all day, Danny thought, smoothing ruffled heads when moms and dads leave. She has left them. He heaved a stuttering sigh.

  “I’m sure she loved the idea of being able to keep an eye on us,” continued Libby, “but now we get to decide who sleeps where. Now we’re the grown-ups.”

  “She probably just wanted to give us more time,” Gwen said, quieter now, able to look at Danny again, fully back from wherever she had gone. “To wait ’til we were ready to scatter her. I think we all need more time.”

  But Danny knew why Scarlet had wanted the urn, the cozy place on the mantel, rather than swirling under all that ocean. You can move an urn; you can’t move the sea. You can’t take it with you when you go.

  “I need to give you guys something,” Danny said. “I’ll be right back.” He went up to his room, went into his closet, and found what he was looking for. He came back out to the porch holding a package wrapped in newspaper and twine. A tight triangle like a folded flag. He sat down in a wicker chair, the package in his lap. His sisters stood in front of him, their shadows cast across his hands. The string untied, he unfolded the paper, letting the package unravel slowly in his lap. And in the center of the open newspaper, next to the headline “Glacier Shrinks” and “Death Toll Passes 500—City is Surrounded,” was Gwen’s gun. More accurately, Scarlet’s gun.

  Danny had kept it in the bottom of his sleeping bag, but afraid of possibly blowing off his own foot, moved it to the back of his closet, behind a box of mothballs and a pile of tattered pillowcases. After killing the deer, Gwen had put it in his hand, the barrel still so hot it had burned his palm, left a blister. She’d handed it to him as if it were an apple core she wanted him to drop in the trash.

  It had given him a profound sense of relief, sitting in the back of his closet waiting for him. Some days he’d just pat the closet door, knowing through it was an escape, a key, a ticket out.

  “Jesus Christ,” whispered Libby. Danny looked up at them. Gwen was biting on her lips.

  “I don’t want this anymore,” Danny said.

  Libby bent over and pulled Danny’s head to her, practically climbed into his lap. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  He nodded at her. His tears were back, though softer this time; he could breathe through them now.

  Gwen took the gun from his lap and stomped down the porch steps. Libby and Danny went to the rail and watched her stride down the path, dumping the bullets from the cylinder into her hand. She went past Melissa and Tom without pausing, and down the ramp, stopping only at the very edge of the float. She stood, looking out as if she was about to dive in, to swim to town, to boil the sea with her rage. And then she hurled the gun out in an arc like a boomerang, and sprinkled the bullets into the waves at her feet as if feeding the fish with lead. Danny thought of the gun at the bottom of the harbor, of giving the lobsters a fighting chance, of arming the Crustacean Revolution. He would tell Gwen that when she came back to the porch; she’d like that.

  TWENTY-SIX

  GWEN

  July 12

  Gwen was drawing on the south porch, overlooking the small cove that led to the Shaws’. The cove had a spit of low sea grass at its center and a stand of pine jutted a rocky foot toward the open channel. It was certainly picturesque. Too much so, really. The type of landscape popularized by so much diner or motel art. But not the typical washed-out pastels of southern beaches, beaches as far north as, say, Cape Cod; not here. These were primal colors, colors that ran in the blood of lobstermen. Color she had been avoiding. Washed-out watercolor was the most she could manage. She didn’t want to be so committed to the paper.

  Make it. Don’t define it, or interpret it, or line it up against older work to assess how you’re progressing. No. Just make it. Gwen took a slim tin of Cray-Pas out of a canvas bag that bloomed with charcoal smudges. She rolled one between her fingers, drew bright lines on the edge of her paper.

  She used pencil first, but almost right away the color too, and then carved the pencil back in on it, seeing the indent of the line. She worked slowly, and sank deeper into the image, into the looking, the seeing. Soon she saw only what was there, not what she knew or remembered. Her knuckles occasionally locked under the intensity of her grip. Tom came around the corner, stood under the stone arch and then sat down on the railing, watching her work.

  “I like what you’re doing,” said Tom.

  “Thanks,” she said, as surprised by the comment as she was by his presence in this quiet moment. Tom shifted on the porch railing, facing the house, his back to the water. She could feel his unease, like a wobbly chair, there was no balance, no solidity. She wanted to slide a cardboard coaster under one of his feet.

  “How are things going?” He motioned to the drawing. “With everything?” Tom owned one of her drawings, a portrait of Libby reading the paper at her kitchen table. He’d bought it through the gallery; Gwen hadn’t even known he was the buyer until she saw it hanging in his study.

  “Things are good. I had some decent traffic at my last open studio, some interest. Celeste keeps telling me I need to work larger, and in paint. She’s tired of my black-and-white shows. She says, work big, make us both money.”

  She knew his asking about her work was his go-to procrastination technique. He had done something similar when the three of them told Danny their mother was dying.

  She kept drawing, waiting; he’d get there eventually. Like waiting for a snail. As kids she and Libby would pull snails from the rocks at low tide, hold a small, knotted shell on their palms, staying still until the slick trapdoor opened and the snail slid out. Gwen had always felt sorry for them, having to carry their houses on their backs. How tired they must be.

  “Keeping it is just not realistic, Gwen,” he finally said.

  She put a hand to her belly, surprised, offended, but then she followed his gaze as he looked at the roof, the stone arch, the sagging gate leading out into the meadow.

  She rolled her eyes at the cove. He can’t let this be. She turned to him, rubbed hair out of her eyes with a bent wrist, fingers already sticky and green.

  “Tom, I don’t think anyone, besides you, is ready to make this decision. You gotta back off.”

  “It may not be a question of readiness. It may be a question of necessity,” said Tom. “Think how much that roof will cost to replace. A whole new shingle roof, maybe seventy thousand dollars.”

  “I wasn’t the one up there hammering away at it with a broom,” she said. She felt sort of sick at the thought of anything costing that much.

  “That doesn’t even include the interior work. I don’t have that kind of money to spend; I need an influx of income right now.”

  “You got a bookie to pay off?” She liked this joke, the one about him living a secret, illicit life.

  “Divorce lawyers, I guess, are kind of like bookies,” Tom said. “Just a shade above breaking fingers.”

  She had been fearing this, she and Libby had been theorizing. She could recognize the signs, when love stops, or when it stops being enough.

  “Well, fuck.” She stood there a moment, both surprised and not. “Being a divorced man just isn’t as sexy as being a divorced woman, you know? I wonder why that is?”

  “Thanks, G. Very nic
e.”

  She sat down on the rail beside him, rubbed her fingers as clean as she could get them on her shorts, and put her arm around him. He was taller than she was, and it was uncomfortable to sit that way, but she didn’t move. He slumped down a bit, maybe to make it easier for her, maybe because he could either sit up straight or not cry, but she could tell he couldn’t manage both.

  “Sometimes getting divorced is what you’ve gotta do. You know I love Melissa,” said Gwen.

  At this he sniffed, almost harrumphed—ever his father’s son. She was amazed he hadn’t already made a break for the Whaler.

  “But I love you more.”

  He nodded, leaned into her a bit. Then waved his hand at the house. A question.

  “This place,” she said, “is ours. It brings us all together, Tom. That’s not something I’m looking to get rid of, okay?”

  “But we’ll always be together. You three are my best friends.”

  Gwen blanched at this. Blanched at the sad idea that this was his notion of friendship, of closeness. What must life be like for poor Melissa in the vacuum of his heart?

  “Funny that we both end up divorced, when Scarlet and Dad somehow magically made it through,” said Gwen. “I’m convinced they must’ve been sacrificing goats or babies.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s easy to stay married if you don’t care how you make the other person feel. Lies are a hell of a lot easier than the truth.”

  She assumed he was talking about himself. So much bitterness; she had no idea it had gotten so bad.

  But then he went on. “What was so twisted is they knew the truth and still believed the lie. How does that even work?”

  “Which lies?”

  “Their split.”

  “Their relationship was shit before that,” said Gwen. “God knows, but I don’t think there was much lying going on. Sometimes I think if Scarlet had just not told him about being pregnant and jumped right into therapy he would’ve never had his lost weekend. You know, like John and Yoko.”

  Tom looked confused.

  “They split for a year, and when they were back together they referred to their break as John’s ‘lost weekend.’”

  This was how Gwen had always explained it to herself. The baby, their unplanned little Danny, heralded the split, which was like a log jammed against a rock in a river. The waters rose, hiding their love under feet of water, making it appear gone. But then the log broke; their father missed her, wanted to be the husband he hadn’t been, the father too. And so he came back. The waters lowered, and there, revealed in the shallow depths: their love.

  “Anyway, Dan was a surprise; you don’t think they planned that, do you? And Dad didn’t want to go through the whole rigmarole again, he wanted it”—she used a low voice here—“taken care of.” Then back to her normal voice. “Scarlet told him to get on his stupid boat and fuck off.”

  “Why do you think he came back?” Tom asked.

  “He’s a sucker for her. Once he really thought about her having another Willoughby without him, my bet is, he lost it. Or maybe he just got a taste of life without her. Why do you think he came back?”

  “I think he didn’t want to give her the house,” Tom said.

  “Wow, man.” She took her arm back. “You’re going through a divorce. I think that may be coloring your views a mite cynical.”

  He sat up straight now and looked at her.

  “You don’t know,” he said.

  Gwen was pretty sure she knew most things.

  He continued. “It wasn’t the fucking baby, Gwen.” His swearing made her nervous, made her feel like maybe he might break a window. She had only heard him swear twice before, once when he was rear-ended in a mall parking lot, and once, under his breath, after the doctor told them Scarlet’s prognosis.

  “All those trips he took, all that cruising without us? He wasn’t alone.”

  “Really? I always figured if one of them cheated it would be Scarlet.”

  “Yeah, well, there was another man . . . so you were half right.”

  Gwen gave him an incredulous look. She didn’t appreciate his pulling her leg like that, even if he was depressed and on the verge of divorce.

  “I saw them, G. Scarlet caught them together on the sloop, and the guy just dove overboard naked. He was young, like twenty—looked like Luke Duke. I had a front-row seat.” He motioned to the front porch. “He walked right past me, left footprints on the porch, he didn’t even see me sitting there. Then Mom and Dad each rowed in from the boat. It was in fucking slow motion.”

  Tom’s voice got louder now, the words coming faster. “Scarlet came up the path ahead of Dad and yanked me over here”—he pointed to the stone arch and rubbed his wrist as if she had just let go—“like she was trying to hide me from him, already protecting him.”

  Gwen watched Tom’s trapezius twitch. He held the edge of the railing and drummed it with his fingers. She was sweating, the south porch always a bit hotter, always in the sun and out of the wind. She wished a cloud would pass over the sun.

  “What did she say?” Gwen asked.

  Tom made a guttural scoff, a noise she heard regularly when they were teenagers. He was stretching taller, straining toward the sky, toward the water, like he wanted to run but was tied to the railing.

  “She said, ‘Your father is like the ocean in a storm. It changes with the weather, but is always the same underneath. He’s the same man, same as yesterday, the same tomorrow.’ Only he wasn’t really a man at all, was he?”

  “He was gone so much anyway, and then that trip. But I never thought . . . Was that why he left? Because he’d been caught? Have you told—”

  “Who can I tell?” he said quietly. Not a question at all.

  He looked her in the eyes, and she knew there was no one. Maybe Melissa, but not anymore.

  “So this house? I don’t want this place. I don’t want to run into that guy at Schooners. Fucking Jeremy. I can’t.” Here he deflated, his shoulders dropped. He hunched over slightly, as if examining his knees. She understood. The house didn’t hold the mending of his parents, that taming of the river—it had happened after he left for college. He only ever knew them as some couple that crushed down secrets and desires for the good of the children. He knew them as liars.

  “That guy? Shit. I still think Mom and Dad loved each other,” said Gwen.

  Could that love have been fake? I don’t buy it. She squeezed her hands between her knees. All that fire and heartache was love. Wasn’t it?

  “They were kids when they were married; no one taught them how to have a healthy relationship. There was no Oprah,” said Gwen. She stood up and faced the cove, her hands on her hips leaving green fingerprints on the hem of her shirt.

  “One dude, Tom, no matter how hot, does not a gay man make. They probably felt like they had to separate, to go to hell to see that they didn’t actually want to move there. They had to find other options, you know? Anything, because being apart must’ve just felt wrong. And then the baby brought them back to each other. Danny saved them. That’s still the bottom line, right?”

  She folded her arms and paced between Tom and her drawing. Tom shook his head. He seemed to be growing smaller, his arms close to his body now, knees squeezing together.

  She was reeling, defending a stance that didn’t quite make sense anymore. But they seemed happy, eventually. Was Scarlet just a beard? What a sad, pathetic thing for her to be. Were they happy just because he was off fucking college boys while she . . . What was she doing? What was her happiness? Danny? Keeping the family in some false state of togetherness? She’s always thought her mother was stronger than that, better than that. She didn’t want to believe it.

  And yet, she could see it. She saw the two dinghies float one after the other, she saw it all in her sad and defeated brother. It was certainly true for him. She saw that.

  She saw it all now. How he’d been carrying this house on his back for two decades; how it had made him tired and old eve
n in his youth. The effort of it had taken him away from them.

  She stood in front of him now. She wished she could take it all from him, to be the one sitting on the porch that day, to have beat him back from the quarry. She took a deep breath, tried to breathe in his pain and breathe out relief for him. Standing in front of him, she hugged him to her, and felt ashamed that she had somehow allowed him to be alone in this for so long. Tom leaned into her and hugged her, both arms around her waist.

  When he let go, Gwen sat down next to him again, looked at her hands. “I wish you’d told me sooner.”

  Tom nodded.

  “I’m so sorry,” whispered Gwen.

  Tom put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head.

  She wished she had remembered to take off her rings; they were already coated with green wax. She tried to rub her knuckles clean on her shorts, but she knew the color would leach into the lines on her hands, aging her. They sat silently, Tom looked out at the cove as she assessed her drawing. Funny how it had stayed there, the same, even as the rest of her world changed. Even so, the lines kept going, kept calling her to continue where she’d left off.

  She thought of the baby inside her. Not a baby, just a collection of genetics incubating. And yet it was her genetic collection, something she had made, her tiny but epic installation. Because now it was all different. Babies didn’t fix families or break them. They were just another piece of a long and intricate history, another tick on the timeline. Danny hadn’t saved her parents, or ruined them. Her mother could have had him alone, could have let her husband disappear across the sea with some frothy-headed coed. Would it have made a difference? Could they have been happier alone? Would it have made a difference to Tom? She picked up Tom’s hand and held it. Figured he could use a little color on his skin.