North Haven Read online

  “When you’re done can you dig a trench?” Libby had a pencil behind her ear and a list in her hand. This was a bad sign. She said it like she often asked people to dig trenches.

  “A trench. You mean like a long pit, that kind of trench?” Danny knew there was a reason he should’ve stayed in bed this morning.

  “Is there another kind of trench?” Libby wasn’t even looking at him but at her list. “It needs to run from the side door around the back to the pump house. We’ve got to lay some new PVC.”

  “Sure . . . That sounds relaxing.”

  Now she looked at him. “You big baby. Dump the food and get a shovel. I’ll help for a bit, then I have to go get Melissa. She’s on the late boat.”

  “I’ll be right back.” He took the plastic bag out of the bin and headed out the back door. There was no way he was coming back.

  Danny stood at the lip of the old empty swimming pool, upending the plastic bag of fruit rinds, rotini, and coffee grounds. The pool was a small oval of concrete, ten feet deep, lined with cracks and moss. On buying the house, their father had decided to try to fill it with brush and compost to eventually create a small garden. But over the last forty-four years, they had managed to only fill it halfway. While Danny didn’t appreciate Libby’s constant assignments, he did love coming out here. He liked to empty the compost bucket. To duck low branches and step over roots, to come out to this slight rise between the house and the boathouse beach, all hidden in woods.

  He liked to imagine how this must have once looked. The mild elevation would have given a perfect view of the water, if some trees were cleared. He wondered if, beneath the fallen logs and ferns, there was a mosaic floor, some Gilded Age extravagance depicting seals and porpoises, where tanned feet once slapped out a spray of water before them as they walked around to the deep end for another dive. The sunset would have been beautiful then. The waters of the sea and the pool would’ve reflected back all those long waves of light, the reds and oranges. He could see the long dresses, the seersucker blazers, the rolling trolley with spirits and ice. He imagined his parents, lean and tall, like Grant and Hepburn, dressed in white, drinking cocktails in low glasses.

  He had often begged his father to restore the pool. But the B.O.B. reared its head. This was the nickname they had given Bob Willoughby anytime he acted particularly lawyerly—stating the case, reviewing the facts, explaining the obvious and clear course of action. His father argued against Danny’s plea—the costs, the broken pumps used to bring the salt water up from the sea to the pool, the decadence of a pool with the ocean right in front of them.

  Danny thought his father was calling him greedy. It was one of the few times Danny had ever felt belittled by him. Danny only wanted a place to actually swim, not just jumping in and out again because the water was so cold it burned. He wanted to do strokes. Sometimes Danny thought his father had been right. He was greedy. Greedy for time. Standing on the mosaic terrace that existed only in a world buried under a hundred years of pine needles and moss, he felt the vastness of time stretching out beneath him, and at the same time how quickly it got eaten up. He thought of his father, napping on the porch. No more. Now under the water, sleeping with seaweed. He thought of his mother, but then he didn’t. He wouldn’t.

  After his father died, he could think of nothing else. Of all the moments that Danny had tried to catch his father’s attention, fixed always on his mother, like the sea always tending to the rocks, whispering, comforting, sometimes pleading, sometimes pounding. And she, like the rocks, seemed both to resist and absorb it. She would bathe in it, bask in it. There were moments of storm, too, of eruption of water, and the groan of rock shifting. Losing his father was almost worse, never having lost something before. It was losing something he’d never had, and again time felt both quick and slow. But it wasn’t worse. This was.

  Danny shook the plastic bag, let long threads of carrot peels slide forth, falling on corncobs and watermelon rinds. Must be Libby’s from the week before.

  “Hurry it up, Dan,” Libby called from the house. He ignored her.

  He’d had Scarlet those last three years, when she was no longer submerged in her love for her husband, or in his love for her. Really he had her before too. She was never so lost as his father. She could look up from beneath waves of devotion and see Danny, make some joke about deep-sea diving or mermaids, about how sweet and silly it all was.

  One night when Danny was twelve, she’d been standing at their kitchen table chopping tomatoes, pulverizing them, actually. His father stood behind her, one hand searching for the weather station on the radio, the other rubbing the back of her neck.

  “If you’re not careful, I’m going to chop my fingers off,” she said to him.

  “A delicacy I will devour with my supper,” he said, kissing her behind the ear. She looked at Danny sitting across the table from her, bugged out her eyes, and stuck out her tongue, as if to say, Oh my God, I married a cannibal.

  But now, he couldn’t think of her. He couldn’t eat tomatoes or listen to the weather. He could think of his father, but not his mother; he could not let himself. He had to be vigilant, or he began to see her hands; thin with long fingers, the age spots beginning just below the knuckles; the rings, wedding, anniversary, something amethyst for the day he was born. He pressed a cut on his hand until it stung. It cleared his mind, and he stopped seeing her. He wanted his mind blank. He wanted to shut out all stimuli until his mind was just white noise.

  Danny walked around the pool, stopping at one end. The edge of the pool curved in, rounded by moss. The toes of his sneakers stuck out over that edge as if he were about to dive in. He wondered how much it would hurt to dive into branches and leaves. Would there be enough of a cushion or would he hit the bottom? His mother was an excellent diver. She used to dive off the bow of the sloop when they went sailing. Just the three of them. He stepped back from the edge, picked up a pinecone.

  In the woods toward the house he heard the crunching and cracking of footsteps. Libby. Man, she was really invested in this trench business.

  “Seriously, we need to get started,” she called again, much closer this time, but still out of sight. Danny looked around, trying to figure out where to hide. There was only one place. He sat down on the edge. At this end, the pool held mostly dead leaves and brambles. A vine grew into, or out of, the tangle, crawling up over the side. He lowered himself down onto the pile of detritus, and squatted, his back pressed against the side of the pool, the pinecone still in his hand.

  “Dan, where are you?” Now she was close enough that her footsteps sent an acorn skittering into the pool three feet from him.

  “It’s just one little trench,” she shouted in her sweetest voice. “We could have a digging race. You start at one end, and I’ll start at the other, and we’ll see who gets to the middle first.” She can’t get out of the nursery school teacher zone sometimes. To be fair, those tricks used to work on him really well. He heard her footsteps retreating. She must have thought he’d gone back to the house, snuck by her through the woods instead of sticking to the path. The pockmarked cement of the wall made his back itch.

  Danny couldn’t believe what Gwen had said, that some bloodsucker was after their house. What’s wrong with people? Should we have draped the place in black, like a giant covered mirror? Black sails on the sloop. Oh, but the sloop is gone. Maybe just hung a sign on the pier: “Do Not Disturb, In Mourning.” He turned his attention back to the pinecone. Seeds and symmetry were better things for him to focus on.

  Avoiding thoughts of his mother had gotten harder and harder. At first, being at school felt helpful, the space, the sympathy. You are forgiven for falling asleep in class, or talking incessantly about the importance of wetlands in the midst of your Gothic literature seminar, or telling your TA that she has perfect thighs, or staying in your dorm room for days, for weeks. When you are twenty-one and your mother dies, there is a pause that exists. Like when you stay home sick from school and yo
u have run out of things to watch on TV and there is nothing left to do but take a nap.

  It was good to have permission to be sad, to have a nameable reason. But that pause, that grace period, was coming to an end. He could feel it happening, a hardening of things, of people. So he had to leave campus, because it wasn’t over for him, and he couldn’t stand to do what was expected of him.

  Extensions turned to deadlines, phone calls turned to e-mails, a double room turned to a single. Finally, he decided to go and find time, to give it to himself. On any given day he could decide how much time he needed. He could tell people his mother had died the week before or ten years before. He had wanted a journey to real emptiness. The Grand Canyon.

  In the four days it took to drive from Bard to Arizona, Danny had imagined standing right at the lip of the canyon, but, once there, a post-and-rail fence had kept him back from the edge. Someone had dropped a magnet in the dirt, an image of a red convertible parked at the rim of the canyon. Danny wondered why it looked better in the picture. It wasn’t what he had been expecting, at least not in a strict sense. It was beautiful and big. But some things are just too vast to be understood. It was easier to feel just a part of it through the TV screen than all of it through your skin. So the fifteen minutes he stood at the lip of the Grand Canyon felt too long. But he knew it was just long enough that he could say, without lying, that he’d been there. He had watched tourists moving along a path, black specks on a trail, ants in their farm. He couldn’t understand those people who wanted to hike down to its vascular center. Why would they want to feel the chill crawl over their bodies as they distanced themselves from the sun, to follow a path, past the striated sediment of millions of years in a few hours, on a mule led by a guy named Paco John who was from Michigan and wore a Baja? He wanted to feel time flow at its natural pace, not sped up. He did not want a millennia-lapsing hike.

  But life away, life in small diners and campsites, when he was just another guy cruising through with no story, no dead parents, had been harder than he expected. He had been dropping a coin into the slot of a press-a-penny, cranking the wheel and choosing his image, when he was supposed to be taking his finals. He should’ve been in a room with graduated seating and chairs with the swiveling desk arm. He should’ve squeaked that arm down over him like the safety bar on an amusement ride, cracked his knuckles, and set three sharpened pencils perpendicular to himself. He preferred when things were perpendicular, though he wasn’t sure if that was a visual or auditory preference. He never liked the word “parallel.” It sounds snooty, preppy, too good for the other lines, he thought.

  The canyon, with its irregularities and sunken verticality, seemed off-putting, like a fallen cake. It was something that could have been perfect, but had not worked out. What had been a great expanse of rock, or ocean floor, a plane of infinite axes, was now a mathematical mess. Even pressed into a penny, he could feel its incongruities.

  After his fifteen minutes as a tourist, Danny had gone back to the car in the visitors’ lot. He had assembled a bologna sandwich from the contents of a small cooler in the backseat. It was his fourth day on the road. He had at least two weeks before they would expect to hear from him, four or five before he’d need to see them, eventually making his way back north to the house.

  He sat facing sideways on the backseat with the door open and his feet on the ground. His forearms rested on his knees, as if the effort of holding up the sandwich with both hands was too much. He’d been feeling that way recently, that the small things were tiring. He could hike a mountain or fuck a girl, no problem (or, at least, the two times he’d done it there hadn’t been a problem), but parallel parking exhausted him, as did washing dishes or getting dressed. During the last cold snap of spring, he wore his duck boots all day, every day, sleeping with his shod feet hanging off his single bed. That meant wearing the same pants as well, being unable to get them off over the boots.

  The school counselor had encouraged him to fuck those girls. He hadn’t said it like that, but that’s obviously what the guy meant by, “Maybe you should just be young, let loose, allow your guard to drop.”

  So Danny took his prescription and he tried. First with his RA, who had been practicing her best shrink voice and poses on him, the earnest nod, the crossing and uncrossing of the legs. And then with his roommate’s girlfriend one morning when, having waited until her boyfriend left for class, she simply climbed out of one bed and into another. Her pure ballsiness was so impressive. He couldn’t help himself.

  Neither hookup led to anything. The roommate moved out a few weeks before Danny left. He wanted to believe it was because of the girl, but he knew it wasn’t.

  Danny hauled himself out of the pool, convinced Libby had finally given up. His knees ached from squatting for so long. He walked the perimeter of the pool, stepping over a fallen log woolly with lichen. He heard a screen door slam back at the house. It was late afternoon, someone would be getting dinner ready soon, pasta with pesto, mozzarella, tomatoes. They all ate what they always ate here. There were no diets, no new foods. Wasabi peas, a gift from a friend over for a drink, had been unceremoniously rejected as the friend’s boat pulled away from the float.

  He thought how the raccoons must treat this pool like a buffet. They must crouch anxiously on their branches waiting for the sun to go down, then come to sit on the edge of the pool. Dangling their little rodent feet in the imaginary water, they hold corncobs in their claws and suck out the roots of every kernel.

  He had managed to keep his road trip a secret, but he wasn’t sure how long he could keep it hidden. His brother and sisters always wanted to hear about school. They were still young, or on the young edge of old, and still nostalgic for their college days. They wanted to live vicariously, and he just wanted to live with them. He wanted to be able to smoke joints with them. He wondered what they’d been like in college, dancing on tables and playing I Never. Gwen, the second oldest, was the only one he had seen do that kind of thing. Plenty of joints had passed between them. But Gwen was like a river, and rivers don’t get old, they just keep going.

  And now she was pregnant, barely. But it was already changing her. He could see it in her face. He didn’t want to consider the loss of one more Willoughby, even a proto-Willoughby. He could talk around whatever doubt Gwen had. But it made him nervous, how careful she was being, avoiding terms, looking the other way, slouching. She was not one to swallow words. He knew it was his fault. She looked like a dog who had stolen something out of the trash, because he probably made Gwen feel like she was throwing something away. As if it belonged to him. Like uncle-dom was a valid form of ownership. He felt like a jerk. Who asks their sister to have a baby she doesn’t want?

  She had the gift of always knowing what she wanted. All that certainty of hers usually made him envious, but also filled him with admiration. She would not slink away to the Grand Canyon in a leased Subaru. If it were her, she might not have told their siblings she was leaving, but only because she would’ve decided between her house and the gas station, not because she was afraid of what they’d say, afraid that they could convince her not to go. She would’ve just sent postcards: “Oh, by the way, I’ve dropped out of life and I’m riding the rails, sailing around the world with a Rastafarian band, selling handmade dolls at the base of Kilimanjaro.”

  Gwen would have liked the Grand Canyon for about five minutes. She would’ve driven right by and blown it a kiss on her way to a motel with cable and a pool. Danny still cared about what he would say to people, people who would suspect him of taking a trip instead of exams and not going to see the Grand Canyon, blowing off the blow off. That is what Libby would think. Danny refused to even consider what Tom would think. Of a whole semester’s tuition down the drain, of incomplete grades on everything, of being a five-year senior, or worse, never making it to senior year at all. Tom would have things to say about all of it. Long, drawn-out things that would be said across a large, empty dining room table as they sat in hard d
ining room chairs, while Melissa whistled like a fairy tale in the kitchen. Tom would have things to say.

  Danny kicked fallen branches into the pool, scraped quilts of moss up with his shoe, kicking them toward the pool’s edge. He wanted to dig down through the pine needles and weeds. He used his heel, chopping at the dirt. He got down on his hands and knees, pulled and scratched. He pushed and dug. Rocks went over his shoulders, sticks flung to the side. I need a shovel, he thought. An osprey flew over, crying and circling, her nest nearby. Danny sat back on his heels; he watched her circle, this mother eager for him to move on. She flew low out over the water, glared at him through the tree trunks.

  If his mother had been here she would have understood about school. After their father died, she did what Danny had done; she had run away. Technically, she stayed, and everyone else left. Danny wished he had that luxury. She stayed in the house well into fall, something they’d never done. She never talked about why or what she had done in that time. The others were a gossipy mess over it, clucking over phone lines. Gwen imagined her mother and Remy carrying on a clandestine affair. Libby thought that she must have been writing their father’s biography. Tom believed that whatever she was doing was ridiculous and that she needed to be with her family in a safe, urban environment with central heating. Danny stayed quiet on the subject. Speculating held no interest for him, which only convinced his sisters that he knew something.

  Danny knew, without being told, that she was watching the water, watching the light change over it, because in the water there was life and hope and time passing, a union of all things. Because her husband was scattered in that water, and she wanted to watch him slide over the backs of seals and foam at the keels of schooners and dash against rocks that they had walked on together. She spent a month and a half saying good-bye.

  Danny’s father had died the summer after his senior year in high school. He had to leave Outward Bound three days early; they dropped him off at this house. His family was on the float waiting for him. They sat there among their bags and cried together.