Here & There (65 page)

At the end of the shore, a river carved the edge of the beach into a sandy point. The estuary ran down into the ocean chasing after the fading tide. Eve let a recovered Otto down to explore the jetty of sand. He found his way to the edge, where the water whittled the bank into a miniature cliff of dried mud that rose twenty centimeters
up and out into a precarious precipice. Otto entertained himself by stamping his feet along the bank and watching hunks of dried mud calve off, slide into the current, and dissolve into the sea.

Eve looked back down the beach. Ecco and Reidier weren’t too far behind. Ecco stomped through knee-high water, Reidier trailed behind him as if in a daze. Eve squinted, wondering if the two were more Pinocchio and Geppetto or the Creature and Frankenstein.

“That’s far enough, Ecco,” Reidier said, as they approached the point, still fifty yards or so behind Eve and Otto.

Ecco stopped and looked back at his . . . at Reidier. A small wave rose up over his knees and lapped against the beach. Ecco giggled. He lightly patted his palms against the nearly smooth surface. Not too far from where he stood, a dark curve of blue rippled through the otherwise light azure of the glassy ocean. It was the current running off from the estuary. The river and ocean whittled the beach into a scythe of sand. Ecco continued his rhythmic, soft slaps as he pushed through the water toward the liquid border.

Eve wasn’t surprised that they had followed. She knew Kerek wanted to give Eve the space she needed, but could only tolerate so much distance. He was drawn after his wife and son with a gravity beyond his control, orbiting in wait with the patience of a moon.

Kerek risked a look toward Eve. He smiled slightly, then the corners of the smile dropped as he sucked his bottom lip beneath his top into a resigned frown. Kerek turned back to the water and watched Ecco pat the calm surface of the ocean with his right hand and the bumpy texture of the estuary current with his left.

She hadn’t meant to react so harshly. Had it been so bad? Was it simply boys being boys? She turned back and followed Otto along the bank of the point, back behind the dunes. As Otto stomped down the edge, she imagined her little son was a giant, destroying the cliffs of Dover. The water devoured every hunk of land he shook loose into its depths.

No, it wasn’t Ecco’s violence that bothered her, per se: it was his detachment.

Eve’s gaze tracked the river back as it curved through the sawgrass-lined banks and disappeared into the woods beyond. She used to think rivers were like they had told her at school. They swept through the forest, eating away at the earth all along and carrying chunks of land out to sea. Now she wasn’t so sure. It was all in the way one looked at it, really. People always focus on the land, don’t they? But maybe the river wasn’t eating away at the ground, carrying the land out to sea like everybody told her; maybe it was the land that was grasping at the water, trying to hold it back, keep it in, when all the water wanted was to get back where it belonged, where it came from.

The breeze blew another wisp of hair across her face. She tucked it behind her ear. Turning back, she could just see over the dune to the other side of the point. Reidier stood, fixed in the water, a ruin of Atlantis. He seemed calm, at peace. The water lapped at his knees, his hands resting in his pockets, as he gazed out at the ocean and watched the dark blue current carry an orange buoy out to sea.

The scream rose out of her throat before the realization registered with her brain.

It was a high-pitched, guttural, pained sound like an eagle’s screech upon spotting a predator in her nest.

It was a stunning pitch, literally. Otto froze in his tracks of destruction. Reidier’s muscles tensed and locked. The world stopped moving, except for the orange flotsam. And Eve.

For the second time in less than half an hour, Eve found herself
unexpectedly in motion, while her mind raced to catch up and get a handle on the situation. She sprinted up and over the dune, down the muddy shore, and into the water so quickly that her legs couldn’t keep up with the momentum of her upper body, and she tumbled into the ocean. Upon contact, Eve instinctually pulled herself forward with a breaststroke she had honed in secondary school.

It wasn’t until Eve was several hundred yards out, shouting in sync with her strokes, “
Calme toi mon petite. Ça va mon trognon de pomme
,” that her brain finally began to decipher the semiotics of the situation that her body had already resolved. It wasn’t until she was choking on seawater that she could consciously see the vibrant apricot float bobbing on the water not as a weathered lobster buoy that had broken free, but as Ecco’s water wings.

Ecco smiled back at Eve, his extended arms still patting the textured surface of the current that was carrying him out to the deep. Ecco still rejoiced in the newness of it all, completely ignorant of the unknown. He even took to mimicking his . . . Eve. With a giggle, he kicked his feet back and forth and a flurry of white erupted behind him as he accelerated further away from her.

“Mais arrête! Arrête ça! Ça suffit!”
Eve shouted with a furious, almost hysteric tone.

Ecco stopped kicking.

Eve caught up with Ecco over half a mile out. The current and undertow had done most of the work. She had felt nothing but unadulterated intent on the way out. On the way back, with Ecco holding on to her shoulders and giggling in her ear, she felt nothing but exhaustion. Every striation of muscle tissue burned with lactic acid. The inside of her lungs had been scraped raw by CO
₂
and salt water. Intent might have gotten her out to sea, but anger is what got her back.

The mud was a relief under her toes. Well before it was shallow enough to stand, Eve would let herself sink down a foot below the surface. The cool water would briefly snuff out the heat rising off her head. Her pointed foot would tap against the ocean floor, and she would float down into a
demiplié
. Her arm extended upward, a perfect
écarté
with which she held onto Ecco’s hand while he bobbed at the surface. The world above was muted out for a moment, and her muscles stopped screaming. Then she would leap upward, completing her adagio underwater ballet, back up to Ecco, back up to the world, and a few feet closer to land. Incapable of swimming any further, Eve danced her way out of the sea. Finally, waist deep, Eve stood up, put Ecco on her hip, and walked out.

Reidier was still standing where she had passed him on the way in, a statue anchored in the knee-deep water. She stood in front of her husband, adjusted Ecco higher up on her hip, and slapped Reidier across the face.

Otto waited for Eve at the water’s edge. Eve scooped him up onto her other hip and headed back down the beach, a boy in each arm.

Eve and Reidier didn’t speak for the entire thirty-minute drive home. Nor did they speak that evening. That night, in her journal, Eve wrote, “My husband, the destroyer of distance, whom I’ve never been further away from.”
*

*
“One, two, three, four,” bills dropped on the library counter. I wanted to tell her to keep the $31.28 of change, but didn’t want to come off like a prick, and a memorable prick at that. Save the douchebag charity for another day.

She counted out my change, gave me a receipt, and asked me to wait while she retrieved the reserved material from my shelf.

It had to be Hilary. Who else? Who else would’ve—could’ve—taken out a shelf in my name? It had to be her.

The librarian returned with “my” material. Slid it across the counter. I didn’t give it a second look. Why would I? If it’s my material, I knew what it was. I smiled at her, picked it up, and asked her to direct me to a private reading room.

There were three items: a CD-RW in a plastic case, with RT, PE written on it with Sharpie; also there was not one, but two different copies of Faust. The first was from the

Collegiate German Reader in Prose and Verse

James Henry Worman

Kessinger Publishing, LLC (July 25, 2007)

and

Faust

A Tragedy

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Translated, In The Original Metres, by Bayard Taylor (1870)

Both books had half a business card stuck in them as bookmarks. The former’s between pages 129 and 130. On page 130, lines 382-385 were circled in pencil with a “?” in the margin next to it. It was Hilary’s handwriting.

Daß ich erkenne, was die Welt

Im Innersten zusammenhält,

Schau’ alle Wirkenskraft und Samen,

Und thu’ nicht mehr in Worten kramen.

German. Get fucked. German?!

Over to the other book where the business card was wedged between pages 18 & 19. Wouldn’t you know it, lines 382-385 (page 18) were circled in pencil.

That I may detect the inmost force

Which binds the world, and guides its course;

Its germs, productive powers explore,

And rummage in empty words no more!

Just another quotation. An epigraph to resonate with some new chapter she had yet to write into the report. It might as well have read, “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

The exhaustion hit me like an airbag. As did the nausea. I had to put my head down, rest it on my hands. Breathe in the darkness. At this point I didn’t give a damn what RT and PE stood for, unless the CD contained an animated treasure map or the new Imagine Dragons album.

My inhales were warm this close to the desk.

The sensation started in my colon and bubbled up with a fierce velocity until it erupted out of me. A belly laugh shook my entire body. All the time, all the effort, all the Maseratis, and I wasn’t solving riddles, I was chasing down nursery rhymes.

I should’ve held on to her. What was the use in setting Lorelei free? Protecting my mother’s “legacy”? All it got me was a couple of overdue library books. Who cares if Lorelei’s with the Department or not? Christ, I’d been doing the Department a favor keeping this report from them. Saving them from the labyrinth in the rabbit hole that wasn’t a maze at all, just a downward spiral with a bunch of shit at the bottom.

With my forehead still resting on the back of my hands (which were still resting on Goethe), I shook my head back and forth. A beleaguered denial that ended with my cheek atop my pillow of fingers. The cubbyhole desk in the private reading room was still in pretty good condition, with only a handful of pencil marks and a couple of ink stains on its walls and tabletop. A shelf ran across the back of the cubby-desk. From my vantage point, I could see underneath it. Someone had carved:
What do I do when the puzzle pieces don’t fit?
Someone else had carved a response:
Use your knife.

I smiled at the zeugmatic call and response.

My gaze dropped down to the desktop. I fidgeted with the first bookmark, brushed my fingertip against the soft fibers of the torn edge. The irony of it was pleasing, how violently ripping something in half can leave behind such a soft centerline. I pinned it down with my index finger and spun it with my thumb. Like I said, fidgeting. Something about the rotation of it caught my eye, though. Some subliminal hieroglyphic effect that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I stopped spinning it and read:

Steven A.

Director, Obsessive-C

Butl

345 Black

Provid

T:(40

Steven meant nothing to me. As far as I could recall there was no Steven anywhere in the report. Still there was that feeling, that hooked hieroglyphic hanging off my anterior superior temporal gyrus, creaking around the right hemisphere of my brain like one of those plastic hanging monkeys from the old board game.

I lifted my head up and unwedged the other bookmark half from beneath Goethe.

Rasmussen, MD

ompulsive Disorder Program

er Hospital

stone Boulevard

ence, RI 02906

1) 455-6200

The hook of insight sharpened, slicing into my cerebrum, but still not yet pulling back the curtain. I held my breath as I pushed the two halves together.

Steven A. Rasmussen, MD
Director, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Program
Butler Hospital
345 Blackstone Boulevard
Providence, RI 02906
T:(401) 455-6200

The two places leapt out at me as the hook ripped back the curtain, and I was face-to-face with Oz.

Butler Hospital.

Both Lovecraft’s father and mother went crazy and died in Butler Hospital just a few miles from his home,
Lorelei had said. Just a few miles from 454 Angell.

Blackstone Boulevard. Blackstone.

While the right state of mind might prove a dead end, the left proves infinitely versatile. Especially if you have a philosopher’s stone on black stone.
It wasn’t a Hilary typo. It wasn’t a black stone, some oracle onyx, philosopher’s Rosetta Stone cypher. It was an address. A goddamn location!!

I wrapped up the two Goethes in my coat and tucked them under my arm before my brain caught up with everything and then leapt ahead. I slid the CD in my back pocket, stopped at the librarian counter, and casually asked for some Scotch tape on my way out the door with two stolen books.

The next morning, Eve and the boys are gone. Reidier finds only a cup of cold coffee and a note from Eve.

R,

I had another dream last night. We were sitting in my père’s study, in Provence. You and I on the leather sofa,
him in his Louis XIV chair with his back to the French doors. It was evening, but part of the garden was lit up by a distant floodlight.