Stiltsville: A Novel (30 page)

When Margo was six, she’d sneaked down the stilt house stairs and slipped off the dock. Dennis had heard her cry out and jumped from the porch into the water, then swam frantically until she was in his arms. I wondered if she remembered. Once she was old enough to drive the boat, she’d spent time at the stilt house without Dennis and me; probably it was those days she remembered instead, friends and boys and sunshine. “I’m getting in the water,” said Margo. She retrieved a snorkel and mask for herself and one of each for Dennis, but when she handed them over, he just put them down. I felt his sadness blanketing my own, and it was difficult to breathe.

“There’s nothing to look at down there.” To me, he said, “What’s for lunch?”

“Egg salad sandwiches,” I said.

“How do we know until we look?” said Margo. She stepped onto the bow and untied the drawstring of her shorts, then kicked the shorts to the deck. She stood in her turquoise two-piece, our colorful and curvaceous bowsprit, then stepped over the railing and dove into the water.

“You should go,” I said to Dennis.

“I’m hungry.”

“Me, too,” said Stuart.

“Eat later,” I said. “Go.”

Margo swam beyond the pilings and over the scattered debris. Her snorkel branched into the air and her rump crested the surface; she kicked her pale heels. I handed Dennis the mask and he put it on and sat on the transom, the snorkel dangling.

“What are you waiting for?” I said.

He shrugged.

I thought of him teaching Margo to ski, to ride a bike. “Want me to push you?”

“Not really.”

Stuart spoke up. “Want me to go with you?”

“Sure,” Dennis said.

There was a mask for Stuart but no snorkel. The men sat side by side on the gunwale, then counted to three and pushed off. I opened a diet soda and watched them swim. Margo and Dennis kept their heads down as they kicked around, but Stuart kept righting himself to breathe. Once when he came up for air, he called out, “Frances.”

I looked up. “What?”

He lifted a hand and waved. “Come in.”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

“I’m fixing lunch,” I yelled, though I was finished.

“Spooky down here,” he called, then lowered his face to the water. I didn’t want to go in—someone needed to stay on the boat, near the life preservers—but I gleaned a certain satisfaction from the invitation. I lay on the gunwale, a boat fender my pillow. The sky was vast and blue, and the site felt lonely and remote. It was a treasure, this sense of isolation. How would we achieve it, if we didn’t rebuild? Many of our friends had bought cabins in the Carolinas, but we didn’t have the money for that, and it wasn’t the same. Over the years, Grady and Gloria had used the house less and less, and rarely stayed overnight; the decision about what to do now would be up to us.

Dennis hauled himself onto the transom, arms shaking with exertion. I brought him a towel and we sat at the stern, eating halves of the same sandwich. “I think we should rebuild,” I said.

He looked at me. “We’ve got ten percent of what we’d need here, at the most.” He stared down the channel, toward the houses that remained. “Let’s let it go. Can we let go?”

It would be only five years before our lease ran out, permanently, no matter what we did. And Dennis had never seemed so certain to me, or so weary, so I didn’t argue. Margo and Stuart climbed aboard, and after we were done eating, we made our way back down the empty channel.

S
tuart came downstairs one morning while I was drinking my coffee at the kitchen counter. He said, “Margo would sleep until noon if I let her,” and I said, “Since she was a teenager.” He filled a mug from the carafe and stirred in creamer. The spoon clinked against the sides of the mug. Dennis was in the backyard, shoveling my rose plants—dead, every one of them—into a wheelbarrow. When he bent at the waist, I could see the faint, ridged trail of his spinal column under his T-shirt. Come here, I wanted to say. I wanted to say it all the time, whenever he was more than a room’s width away from me. Come here, sit down.

“Is Dennis OK?” said Stuart. “He seems tired.”

“He is. We all are.”

Stuart nodded. “The house on the water meant a lot to him. To you, too, I imagine.”

“Memories,” I said. I thought of telling him that when Margo was ten she’d spent an entire weekend lying in the stilt house hammock, reading
The Grapes of Wrath
from start to finish. Then, during a storm that had rattled the shutters and left foamy puddles on the porch, she’d written her book report at the kitchen table. Years later, she and Beverly had spent the afternoon slinging water balloons at a sailboat from the upstairs porch. You should have seen it, I wanted to say to Stuart, how the balloon punched the sail—
thwack
—leaving a wrinkle that filled with breeze, causing the boat to heel. You should have seen how the balloon slipped down the fabric and burst on the deck, and the captain hollered and the girls ducked into the house, leaving Dennis to gesture apologies. You should have been around a few years later, I wanted to tell him, when Margo and Dennis took up studying survival tactics. They’d quote to each other from camping manuals and field guides: “
You can tell a manta ray from two sharks swimming side by side because the ray’s fins will submerge at the same time
,” she’d read to him. Then, he’d read to her. “
To survive one must overcome the need for comfort and maintain the will to live
.” Once, she and Dennis had spent an entire evening on the stilt house porch discussing what to do when lost at sea, how to tell which fish are poisonous and how to catch and kill the ones that aren’t, how to bail the boat and check the wind.

Oh, let her tell him, I thought.

The night before, in bed, Dennis had remarked that Stuart seemed more self-confident than most short men. The comment struck me as both sensitive and callous—Dennis was tall, and so it seemed indelicate of him to comment on another man’s stature—and I wondered if Dennis was as good a sport as he seemed. We spoke regularly but obliquely of Stuart, the way we would come to speak of the hurricane: by listing each feature, struggling toward perspective. It continued to unsettle me that my daughter had become engaged to a man I’d never met. Did Margo not consider my opinion worth gathering? My mother had met Dennis during our courtship; I hadn’t asked for her blessing, exactly, but I had given her the opportunity to speak her mind. I worried not only that Margo did not want to hear what I had to say on the subject, but that she simply didn’t care. This wasn’t Stuart’s fault, of course, but it felt like it was.

Dennis took the wheelbarrow around the side of the house, and when he returned it was empty. Stuart dumped the remainder of his coffee into the sink and went outside to help.

That night, we lay on top of the sheets, craving breeze, listening to the crickets call up through the window screens, and I remembered that there was something Dennis had forgotten to tell me. “That policeman,” I said, “in the kitchen—what was that all about?”

He sat up and looked at the wall of our bedroom, where moonlight sliced by palm fronds interrupted the darkness. “Oh, Frances,” he said. “The Kleins’ oldest son—he’s missing. No one’s seen him since the day of the hurricane.”

The Kleins lived in the house across the canal. We’d been invited to a barbecue when we’d first moved in, but had scarcely said more than a few words to them since. Every so often we were in our backyard while they were in theirs, and we all waved amicably to each other. Their youngest son was named Ezra, but I wasn’t sure how old he was. Their oldest, Elijah, was at least eighteen, a few years younger than Margo. The night of the storm, Dennis explained, Ilena Klein had thought Elijah was at his father’s office, where he’d been all day. When the telephones had stopped working, she’d assumed that both men were stuck there. David Klein had arrived home alone the next morning; he hadn’t seen Elijah since the previous afternoon. “I didn’t want to tell you,” said Dennis. “I knew you’d be upset.”

I had a distant memory of Elijah jet-skiing down the canal in Bermuda shorts, chubby around the middle like his father. The image dissolved. I would find that my mind wouldn’t focus on Elijah. Instead, he teetered on the edge of my awareness like a slowing top.

We took long drives in the evenings, luxuriating in the car’s air-conditioning and gawking at the devastation: homes stripped of walls and ceilings, lots stripped of homes. But Dennis’s car—the junkier of our two—was running low on gas. We didn’t want to harm mine by driving it through debris-filled streets, and lines at gas stations were a mile long, so we decided to siphon gasoline from my car into his. I stood shading my eyes from the sunlight while Dennis inserted one end of a garden hose into the fuel tank of my car, then took the other end between his lips. He drew a breath and made a face, then moved the hose to his car. A splash of fuel hit the ground. He spat and I handed him a glass of water. “Disgusting,” he said, smiling.

Just then, a harsh and forgotten sound came from inside the house: The telephone! Civilization! The sight of land through desperate binoculars. We ran inside. Margo had the phone to her ear and was writing on the palm of her hand. She said good-bye and hung up.

“Who was it?” said Dennis.

“Penny Morales,” said Margo.

“Who?” said Dennis.

“The woman selling that house in Coconut Grove.” Margo and Stuart had decided to save money by not using an agent—his work paid well enough, but he was just starting out—and this had slowed the house-hunting process considerably, even before the hurricane. They’d called half a dozen home owners before the hurricane had brought down the phone lines. “She’s going to open up for us on Friday,” said Margo.

“We’ll go with you,” said Dennis, who was concerned about Margo’s poker face. He wanted to knock on walls and declare them sound.

Margo yelled upstairs for Stuart. “What?” Stuart called.

“There’s a house!”

“What?”

Oh, just go up there, I thought.

“A house!” she called again.

Stuart’s steps on the stairs rattled through the kitchen, and he appeared. “Was that the phone?” he said.

“It was that woman from Battersea Road,” said Margo.

He took her in his arms. “Which one was that?”

“The two-bedroom we saw in the paper.”

He swiveled her and she dipped. I looked away. “Excellent,” said Stuart. To Dennis, he said, “No offense, but we’re ready for some solo time.”

“So are we,” I said. I hadn’t intended to say it. Margo and Stuart righted themselves and stepped away from each other. I turned to the sink and opened the faucet, then busied myself washing dishes. Margo and Stuart left the room, and Dennis put his hands on my shoulders. He reached over me to turn off the faucet.

“All right,” he said. “You have to be nicer.”

“She’s my daughter,” I said, thinking: I want someone different for her. Someone taller, smarter, richer, more handsome. Things I never would ask for myself, I want for her.

Dennis turned me to face him. “This isn’t like you,” he said. “You’re generous.”

“I feel stingy.”

“None of it will matter. They’ll stay together or they won’t.”

“You think they’ll break up?”

“Who knows? Either way, you’ll want to know you were fair.”

Dennis was so reasonable, so conscientious. “I’m trying,” I said.

“No, you aren’t,” he said. “You are not trying.”

W
e set out on foot—this was Stuart’s idea—to meet Penny Morales at her home. We carried mosquito repellent and bottles of water, and upon arrival received a delightful surprise: electricity, that elusive and munificent commodity, had returned to a several-block radius in Coconut Grove, including 4044 Battersea Road. We stood in the living room as the sweat dried on our skin, grinning. Dennis had given Margo and Stuart a little lecture about keeping their opinions to themselves in the presence of the seller, so we did not speak, but I’m sure our faces gave us away: the place was great. An oasis.

It was not, beyond the chill in the air, a remarkable house. The kitchen lacked counter space, there was no room for entertaining, and the closets were small—but the bedrooms were large and the ceilings high. Margo and I walked through the back den, which was flanked on two sides by sliding glass doors, and I saw a shadow of anxiety cross her face—surely she could not choose a house without evaluating its safety, even in a good neighborhood like this one. But then the look was replaced by determination, and she led me away, toward the dining room. There, our attention went immediately to the floor: glossy dark green tiles patterned randomly with dime-size black shapes. Margo checked over her shoulder for Penny Morales. “I love this floor,” she whispered.

I nodded. I loved it, too.

Stuart came in. “What in heaven’s name?” he said, staring down.

“You don’t like it?” whispered Margo.

“It looks like squashed bugs.”

“I think it’s elegant,” she said, and he looked down, reassessing.

Dennis joined us. “She’s out front,” he said in a low voice. It was great fun, this conspiring. “We have a few minutes.”