Men and Dogs (5 page)
Authors: Katie Crouch
“There’s a nail in her head,” Daisy says. “It poked a hole in her skull.”
“Brain damage?”
“Don’t sound so hopeful.”
Palmer snorts but stops laughing when it becomes clear that there will be responsibilities allotted.
“She’s arriving tomorrow,” Daisy says. “So, two choices: you can either pick her up at the airport or have her over for dinner in the next couple of days.”
His temperature is rising again. Then, just as the sweat starts actually trickling down his forehead, Tom flips Palmer the bird and marches upstairs.
“We’ll have her over for dinner.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, Mom. This week.”
“I don’t think you understand the magnitude of the situation, darling. Your sister is in trouble. She needs you.”
“God,
enough
.”
“Excuse me?”
“I get it!” He is shouting now, which both embarrasses him and pisses him off even more. “I get it, Mom, OK? Sorry. Call me when she gets in, all right?”
Palmer hangs up, sits down at the table, and eats his dinner, now cold. After a brief moment of consideration, he eats Tom’s as well. He cleans up the kitchen and pours himself a whiskey. Palmer almost never drinks hard liquor unless they have guests,
but already the night has careened from mildly unpleasant to slightly horrific. Whiskey seems highly appropriate, and Palmer is nothing if not that.
Tom has left one brochure on the table. gay today, love tomorrow: teaching your children tolerance . Palmer crumples it up and shoots it in the trash. All right. He really will have to end it now. But when? The question vexes him; he slams his palm on the table, then reproaches himself. This feels dangerously close to the old anger he has been able to put aside for years.
As a teenager, of course, he was a mess, but he long since beat that old, unruly self. Things are different now. He’s a different person. He fields his mother’s demands, weathers his stepfather’s lewd remarks, caters to Tom’s whims—all without so much as an inkling of his former unpleasantness. He has been able to rise above!
Still, there is one dark corner of his life that will not be neutralized, no matter how much he ignores it or breathes into it (Tom’s suggestion) in order to be “present with his pain.” It’s a seldom-visited, bottle-green pocket where the subject of his father’s disappearance lives, and where his sister, both by association and through her actions, also happens to stubbornly reside.
* * *
When Palmer thinks about being thirteen, he remembers the house on Atlantic Street as a place that was always moving. Previously reliable floors suddenly floated; the walls turned to Jell-O. He was surrounded by grown-ups who had no answers. It
could
have been suicide, Palmer heard the adults and police tell one another as they gathered in the living room for hushed cocktails.
It might have been an accident. He may have been able to swim to shore. He would have come back, wouldn’t he? He may have been cheating. He could have been depressed. Palmer waited, paralyzed, as they went on with their suppositions—theories so obviously empty, it made him sad just to hear them spoken.
And then, after a few weeks, the subtle shift in the form of a police letter. Palmer was in the first year of his teens,
already radiating hormones, in and out of first love; yet nothing he had come across in his short life had touched him as deeply as that report. Finally, after weeks of fear and uncertainty as to what they would find, the grown-ups had agreed on a conclusion: It was sad but certain. Buzz Legare had drowned and was gone.
The facts presented were clear. And ever since, Palmer has been required to recount them to his bonehead of a sister at least once a year, when she calls with her disheartening theories. He remembers poring over the report the police presented—a slim sheaf containing a list of items and statements. The report did not contain theories. It contained the information everyone was actually certain of.
There was a boat. This boat, a sixteen-foot flat-bottomed aluminum craft, belonged to Palmer and
Hannah’s father. He bought the craft for fishing purposes on June 16, 1983 , and registered it to his name. He had a slip for it at the Charleston Boat Club, which cost about $24 per month, in addition to his membership dues and sizable bar tabs.
On April 9, 1985, this boat was found four miles outside of Charleston Harbor. It was reported that morning by a shrimp-boat captain who had spotted it the night before, when it was still floating near some rocks that mark the mouth of the great waterway. When the coast guard recovered the vessel, it contained no people. The engine was in its lowest forward gear, long since run out of gas. On the boat were items almost identical to a list of things Hannah said they had taken on a trip three days before: water, Coke, beer, a net, a pole, sunscreen, unused life jackets, and one highly anxious, hungry dog.
Beyond this list of items, the Legares were forced to rely on the interpretations of others in order to piece together Buzz’s last day. This was where things got frustratingly shady. Take, for example, the time at which Buzz’s departure was witnessed.
According to the Boat Club logbook, Buzz departed at 7:24 p.m. But after a pitifully small amount of questioning, the dock boy tearfully admitted that he was not certain about that. Turned out he’d spent the better part of the hours between six and eight o’clock in the buoy booth with a highly enthusiastic clubhouse waitress, and while the boy had taken mental note of the comings and goings he saw through the fogged-over window, his precision as to the time could only be called “compromised.”
So Dr. Legare, he admitted, might have left at 6:24 p.m. But maybe it was 7:45? All the boy really knew was that Buzz had departed during the most fortunate part of the boy’s shift, and that the sun was still up.
The Legares know some other things. They know, for instance, that Buzz had breakfast with them. They know he went to work.
They know that Buzz liked to drink, but that didn’t make him much different from any of them.
Whether because of or despite this jumble of facts and observations—messy yet as telling as the contents of a woman’s purse dumped onto a table—the police came to a conclusion: Buzz Legare was dead. The conditions were not survivable. There was no way a man could swim in from that far out.
Palmer saw the police report as a gift. It was terrible, knowing his father was dead. Even now it gives Palmer a bruised feeling to think of it. Still, it was better than the waiting, and at least now the Legares could get on with their lives.
But Hannah didn’t want to. Indeed, this is precisely what caused the ever-widening rift between them. Rather than viewing the evidence as the key to a door out of the nightmare of their father’s disappearance, Palmer’s sister saw it as an excuse to remain trapped there.
She’s been protesting the facts presented in the police report ever since its appearance on their kitchen table in 1985. “But there was no body,” she said, looking at them steadily. God, that stare! At the time, Daisy and Palmer thought her ideas were merely part of a phase. But, to Palmer’s mounting fury, even though he’s tried to show her how much better it is simply to accept the truth, she still, more than twenty years later, won’t let it go—she still picks at the scab. “He wasn’t suicidal,”
she insists, as if
this
time she will surely persuade him. Or, “He knew perfectly well how to swim.” And then, her favorite: “We have a
responsibility
.”
It is this line that always infuriates Palmer the most. Responsibility? When did his sister become an authority on that subject?
Every time she calls, she tells him something new that indicates yet again how completely irresponsible she is. She’s having problems with Jon, she needs more money from their stepfather, she needs advice or just someone to listen to her talk on and on about her life. These time-consuming phone calls royally piss Palmer off. Does he call her just to burden her with his petty problems? His entire life is about being responsible, where she is anything but. He’s the one who stayed in Charleston,
choosing to open his animal clinic here. He is the one left to cater to his mother’s whims. Palmer has built a home
here,
even though—as Tom is happy to point out with some frequency—there are any number of better places to live as a gay man that are more fun, accepting. What does Hannah do for the family? Nothing. Instead she just trots around in her fabulous life out in California. Calling home with her delusions, upsetting Daisy and Palmer both. Goddamn it, why can’t she just keep it together? Why does she have to pull this bullshit now?
Palmer takes off his sweat-soaked shirt and lays it carefully over the back of his chair. He tosses the rest of the whiskey down the sink and climbs the stairs. When he enters the bedroom, Tom is watching
Top Chef
with the sound off.
“I like the guy with the spiky hair,” Tom says without looking up, “but I can’t stand to hear him talk.”
“Listen, I’m sorry.”
“I know,” Tom says, eyes still on the TV.
Palmer stares at his small lover. When will I have to let you go? he thinks. In four weeks? Six?
“So your sister’s visiting? Is that why you’re so pissy?”
“Yes,” Palmer answers. “She got drunk, I guess, and fell off a balcony.”
“Hannah! Is she all right?”
“Some minor wounds. Her mouth, unfortunately, is completely intact.”
“Well, when she comes over I’ll hide the silver,” Tom says.
“Come on, now,” Palmer says, rubbing Tom’s back. Switching off the light and the television, Tom rolls away. Clearly he is still a little angry, but there are so many things in the bed between them already. Best to let it lie.
Let it lie
. Something his father used to say.
Palmer is gifted at sleeping. Within a minute he is drifting with associative abandon toward dreams. He thinks of Hannah.
His mother. Salmon. Tom’s back. He thinks of the contestant on the show Tom was watching. Something familiar about him, his mind whispers just before giving out. Something in the eyes. Or, no. The nose.
T
HE DEWITT HOUSE—one of those places that actually deserves a proper name—stands with well-earned arrogance in the grandest section of Charleston, just off the cool, oyster-shell-paved square of White Point Gardens. The DeWitts are one of the oldest families in town, and their house reflects their long-standing social status in every detail, from its classic Georgian architecture to its historical scars.
Note
the exposed brick where carpetbaggers ripped the velvet from the dining room walls, the tour guides whisper when Hannah’s stepfather allows visitors in for the semiannual house tour.
Look
at the cracks in the walls from the 1886 earthquake. This is an enviable, hulking pre–Civil War city mansion, a landmark by any standard. What person, she has often heard tourists say to one another in passing, wouldn’t want to live here?
Hannah’s stepfather, Will DeWitt, inherited the house over his two younger siblings, and it is his constant proclamation that he will never sell, despite the full-time maintenance staff required and property taxes that, were they a salary, would surely appease not a few of her Stanford classmates. Other families, Will nearly bellows at tonight’s dinner,
other
families might be giving in and selling their South of Broad houses to outsiders and retired couples, but not the DeWitts.
There is but one word to describe Hannah’s stepfather: “loud.” Loud voice, loud golf shirts and pants, loud stories, loud boiled-crab skin. When he enters a room, Hannah cannot stop herself from picturing a Kool-Aid commercial circa 1986—the large, wobbling pitcher of pink liquid breaking walls and wreaking havoc.
“HannahBanana!” he bellowed upon seeing her this afternoon. “Lordy Lord, are you a sight! You actually make my eyes sore with that wound on your head. Hell!”
Will DeWitt eats like a Viking. He moves about the house like a drunken wildebeest. He could be worse, Hannah supposes. He never bothers her directly and gives her money when she asks for it. Still, Hannah has always had trouble comparing him to her own sleek otter of a father. It would be hard for anyone to fill Buzz Legare’s shoes, but Will DeWitt stretches and soils them with his bunioned, swollen feet.
Not that, she has to admit, Will ever got an inkling of a fair shot at winning Hannah’s favor, because he married her mother so soon after her father’s disappearance. What kind of man does this? Daisy swears she’d never met Will DeWitt until after her husband’s funeral. Yet Hannah has never been able to shake the suspicion that her mother is lying. Discovering your wife was having an affair with Will DeWitt would be enough to make a man leave, wouldn’t it? Hannah’s never been able to find proof, but she holds fast to the theory.
Her first night home: a dinner of chicken in a pool of butter (her mother’s favorite secret ingredient) and a monologue about
New Charleston. “It’s the new people ruining everything,” Will blusters at them over the banquet-sized dinner table. “Buying up the best houses, driving the prices up, and they don’t even
live
here. They come for, what, maybe two weeks a year! Charlie’s old house? Where he and his father grew up? You know who owns it? Some asshole from Palm Beach!”
“
You
could buy a house in Palm Beach if you wanted to,” Hannah observes. “You’ve got enough money. Then you could be the asshole from Charleston.”
Will ignores her. “These people are driving up taxes. And they’ve got no idea. None. We went to one of their parties—”
“They all want to be friends with us,” her mother whispers.
“And these Yankees were serving Frogmore stew. Frogmore stew isn’t for
parties,
for God’s sake! It’s what your wife cooks up when all you have is leftovers from the boat!”
“What a lucky wife,” Hannah says, looking sadly at the table’s lonely, used-up bottle of wine.
“Now,” Daisy says. An authoritative, matron-of-the-house, we-must-stop-chitchatting-and-address-the-situation-at-hand sort of delivery. “Explain to me again how one gets a nail in the head.”
“Mom, we went over this.”
“Well. I just think if your life had a little more
structure,
you wouldn’t be getting yourself into this trouble all of the time.”
Hannah smiles wanly. Daisy DeWitt is all about structure. Hannah doesn’t think her mother could even imagine a day of free,
fluid time, let alone endure one. The woman lives by her ever-clutched lizard-skin planner. Lunch with a friend from the
Gibbes Museum board. A meeting with the tailor at two to have some pants taken in. (Yes!) Pilates at three. Tennis at five.
Then dinner—dinner could be counted on for hours of time. The planning of, shopping for, preparation of, and consumption of the night’s meal leaves no time in the evening for anything except a bit of guilty television watching or (better for the aging mind!) a chapter or two of a book.
“I do my best.”
“For example, what are you doing tomorrow?”
“I . . .”
“What about a shopping trip? I’m not at all for this new style you’ve adopted.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just a bit . . . young for you.”
“Jeans?”
“The
tight
jeans.”
“They’re not that tight.”
“Painted on, Bo-bana,” DeWitt pipes, heading to the sideboard for brandy.
“Pour me a splash?”
“No more liquor for you, Hannah,” says Daisy. “Your head.”
“Sorry, Cabana.”
“I just think, darling, it’s best to wear things that are a bit looser when . . . how do we say it? The bloom is . . .”
“Off the rose!” DeWitt chortles.
“All right,” Hannah says, rising from the table. “I’m going to bed.”
“Now don’t get in a snit. I’m trying to help.”
“Bed. Good night.”
Hannah spends her first two days’ worth of waking hours wandering the mansion. The first-floor ceilings are eighteen feet high, and a grand helix of a staircase with a smooth, wide banister (excellent for sliding) spirals up four stories. Will studied period antiques for a few years in Europe and is therefore truly obsessed with keeping the house “authentic,” while
Daisy, if not as wealthy as Will, is as Old Charleston enough to have known not to refinish or overdecorate upon her arrival twenty-odd years ago. New curtains here, a velvet pillow there. That was it. Which, in the DeWitts’ opinion, is what separates the new people from decent non-Frogmore-stew-serving locals like themselves. For this reason, the ballroom, though grand,
is adorned with tarnished mirrors. The piano in the music room is a bit out of tune. Will and Daisy discuss these things endlessly—topics mind-numbingly dull to anyone who does not happen to own an antebellum mansion. Yes, let the mirrors tarnish! Keep the piano out of tune! As far as Hannah can tell, this house serves as fodder for almost all of their conversations.
There is, however, one corner of the house neither her mother nor her stepfather has discovered: the back of Hannah’s closet.
DeWitt, having the plans to the house, must at least vaguely know of the dimensions of the storage area. Still, Hannah doubts he’s ever thought much about it, as the house is filled with any number of other, more interesting spaces—a room adjacent to the wine cellar accessible only by a secret panel door, an underground network of tunnels used by slaves in the eighteenth century.
Hannah herself forgot about it until she woke the second morning at home. She was hanging up some clothes, wondering if they were, in fact, too young for her, when the opening to her old fort winked at her from behind a bathrobe.
Nowhere. That’s what she used to call it. A thirteen-year-old’s joke.
Hannah, you’ve been missing for hours. Where have you been?
.
Nowhere
Or:
Hey, where are you going now?
.
Nowhere
Each time she said it, she got a little rush, a little twinge at the pleasure of fooling the mortals. It was a riddle she knew that her father, in particular, would appreciate. Now Hannah runs her fingers over an old dress, nearly undisturbed since her departure about a decade and a half ago.
Warren—
Warren Meyers. Even now, she bursts a little with the memory of her old boyfriend’s hands, the pause before a terrified whisper.
She wonders, for a moment, where he might be.
Warren, come up to Nowhere with me
.
It looks like an ordinary closet, but it’s not; someone, long ago, erected a false wall behind most of the clothes. In order to get to the hidden room, one must part the thick layer of skirts and dresses on the left side of the closet, then slip through a dark, narrow crevice. Nowhere is pitch-black, and to see anything Hannah always had to crouch down and switch on the kerosene lamp she stole from the camping gear her father left behind. But once that light was on—if her memory holds—the space was a teen paradise: the walls draped in old silk and velvet curtains; the floors littered with pillows stolen from her mother’s less-frequented sofas and chairs. Stacks of books and magazines lined the walls, as well as photographs, torn out of
Vanity Fair
and
National Geographic,
of places she thought she might want to live someday, like Paris and Botswana. Anywhere, she used to tell whoever was listening.
Anywhere but here.
There’s a tapping in her chest as she parts the dresses and puts her arm through. An eruption of dust. It’s darker than she remembers, and when she reaches around the wall for the lamp, something soft brushes her hand. She screams and shoots back to the center of the room, tripping on her robe and landing on the floor.
God. When did she become so afraid of everything? She puts her head on her knees and stares at the floor. She has too much time on her hands, she thinks. The day yawns ahead. Maybe she’ll find a flashlight, a much-needed project. Something to pass the hours until she gets through this prescribed period of exile.
The last thing Hannah remembers about that horrible night is falling. She has no memory of hitting the ground, or of being discovered by the neighbors, collected by the paramedics, and shuttled to a hospital room. She woke up to a snapping fluorescent light. Someone down the hall groaned. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a nurse enter.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” the nurse said, devoid of tone. Unable to breathe correctly, Hannah refrained from immediate reply.
There was a horrible ache in her side, and something was pressing on her forehead.
“What happened?”
“You broke a rib and fractured your skull slightly. You also came within two centimeters of dying.”
“Really?”
“There was a nail in your head, though it didn’t actually puncture anything other than your skull. Had it punctured the brain,
you would have died within two minutes, tops.”
“Is anyone here with me?”
“Your blood alcohol level was at .22 percent. Do you have any idea what that means?”
“That I was very, very drunk.”
“Rehab wouldn’t be the worst idea.”
“I was drunk because I found out my husband is sleeping with someone else. That hardly warrants rehab.”
Hannah looked out the window. She was not in a nice part of town. Down the street, a woman seemed to be performing a business exchange through a screened doorway.
“So, did Jon bring me here?”
“You were brought here in an ambulance and accompanied by a nice young couple.”
“ ‘Nice’ is not the word for what they are.”
“They waited for a while for you to wake up and then went to get breakfast.”
“Are you serious?” They were
brunching
while she bled?
“They said they’d be back.”
An inner twist. A stab of pain.
“God!”
“Yes,” the nurse said. “That would be your rib poking your lung. You still have a lot of alcohol in your system, but I’ll give you a little something just so you don’t faint from the pain.”
“I love you.”
The nurse smiled dryly, found a vein, and roughly pushed Hannah back into the padded chamber of drugged unconsciousness. When she opened her eyes again, the sun had changed positions and Jon was in the room.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Thanks for coming to see me,” he said. “A valiant effort.”
Hannah squinted at her husband. He was taller than she remembered from the dream she had just been having. Then again, in her dream they’d been chasing each other in a locked dollhouse.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve always hidden a key beneath the ivy plant closest to the door. So you actually didn’t have to break in and trespass on my property and privacy, or terrify the elderly upstairs neighbor, or upset her new Scottie puppy, or cause yourself major bodily harm. However, I’m going to take that key away now in case you come after me again with your lunatic ways. But I’m just saying, this could have been a hell of a lot easier.”
“That was not a puppy. It was some wraith from the underworld.”
Jon leaned over and pushed a button on a remote control next to Hannah’s arm, causing the bed to incline. Pain ripped into her side.