Stiltsville: A Novel (31 page)

“How did you get her to leave us alone?” said Margo.

“I asked her to,” said Dennis.

In the kitchen, Margo opened all the cupboards and I watched her, imagining the dinners they would prepare there, stir-fries and omelets and shish kebob: newlywed food, no recipes required. Before we’d added an addition, our first house had looked much like this one, with its particleboard cabinets and cheap windows. We’d supplied charm in small doses, with area rugs and fresh paint.

Stuart opened the sink faucet and out ran a steady stream. He’d told Dennis he knew a lot about commercial real estate, but next to nothing about residential. “What should we be looking for?” he said.

“Well,” said Dennis. He walked to the refrigerator, opened and closed it, then spoke in a hushed voice. “It’s no bigger than the houses around it—in fact, it’s a little smaller. That’s a good thing. You see why?”

“Resale,” said Stuart.

“Right,” said Dennis. “The wiring’s been updated. The water pressure’s good. We’ll check the water heater and hire an inspector. I’d like to see what happens after a heavy rain.”

“What about a hurricane?” I said.

“Good point.” He lowered his voice. “Otherwise,” he said to Stuart, “there’s no telling what will happen until you move in.”

“Honey?” said Stuart. Margo looked at him and they seemed to communicate: What do you think? I like it. Do you? I like it, too.

“I think this is our new house!” said Margo loudly, and Stuart rushed over to cover her mouth with his hand.

We were bystanders, Dennis and I. Within the year, Stuart would help Dennis plant our new rose garden and fix the flashing on the roof and—this took my breath away—drive the boat, navigate the bay. They would camp in the Everglades, something we hadn’t done since Margo was a child, and boat down to the Keys to go fishing. I wonder now if Dennis looked forward to the relationship he would form with this boy, this new incarnation of fatherhood. And I wonder if he was relieved to welcome another man into our lives, someone to whom he might entrust responsibilities. In many ways, they were alike, he and Stuart. They were both curious and unself-conscious and sometimes serious; they both itched with activity. But of the four of us, Dennis and I were the romantic ones. Despite the hasty wedding, Margo and Stuart were more sensible than we’d ever been. One wishes a million things for one’s child, and many wishes are not realized. For Margo, I wished for a man who made magic from ordinary life. Maybe Stuart could have been that man, but Margo—my own daughter, unlike me in as many ways as she was my twin—preferred hard reality to magic.

Dennis and Stuart walked out of the kitchen toward the garage—and as they went, it seemed to me that Dennis’s left foot dragged for a step or two. But in the next moment, the next step, I thought I must have imagined it. Margo was at the oven, turning on each burner to test the flame. “We’ll have an alarm installed,” she said, nodding to herself. “We’ll get the best one there is.”

“It’s a good neighborhood,” I said, but I could see that this was not reassuring. The Williamsburg Village Apartments had been in a good neighborhood. I knew that she believed that in our home she was safe, and really nowhere else.

“Mom?” she said.

“Yes?” I went to the window, where I could watch the men walk to the garage.

“I’m happy.”

I turned toward her. What she wanted to say—I knew it even then—was that she was sorry for keeping her romance with Stuart a secret, for shutting me out of her life and wrenching me back into it, for always doing everything her own way. A flame of irritation rose inside me, and I knew it was Margo—not Stuart—I resented for the secrecy and the bombshell, for rushing me into accepting this next stage of her life. “Then I am, too,” I said.

I excused myself and left the house, and the heat hit me like a cobweb in the face. I wanted to return to the air-conditioning, but I’d been spotted by Penny Morales, who stood on the lawn in a jogging suit, smoking a cigarette. She wore a heavy gold-twist necklace and several rings. She had a sharp patrician nose and high cheekbones and smooth tan skin, and though I thought she wore too much eye makeup, her face was beautiful. She spoke with a heavy Cuban accent. “What do you think?” she said. “Good enough for your daughter?”

“Maybe.”

“I hate to leave it. Divorce.”

“I’m sorry.”

She motioned inside with her cigarette. “They’re newlyweds,” she said. “I can tell. Something is wrong with me—I see a happy couple and I want to tell them to enjoy it while it lasts.” She looked at me. “You probably think I’m a monster.”

“Not at all.” Actually, I’d been wondering what she must have thought of us. I’d met several Cuban ladies at the YMCA, and in their presence I always felt mild-mannered and drab. Miami was more than half Cuban at this point, and yet I could count the Cuban couples in our social circle on one hand.

Dennis emerged from the garage and Stuart and Margo followed. We told Penny Morales we would be in touch, then started walking. Soon the blue dim of evening settled. We followed a winding trail through piled debris. There was citronella in the air, which reminded me that inside the dark houses, whole families lived and breathed, impatient for a time when they could close their windows against the heat. We approached our neighborhood from the south side of the canal, intending to cross the bridge and circle back to the house, but then a ways off we saw that a house on the street behind ours was brightly lighted. When we got closer, we saw that it was the Kleins’. Light spilled from every window onto the lawn, just short of the sidewalk. The sight was as striking in the darkness as a lighthouse seen from the sea. A rapid-cycling motor rumbled from the side yard: generators. They must have spent a fortune.

Through the windows we could see a number of people—detectives, probably, plus some family and friends—milling about in what appeared to be the Kleins’ living room. Ilena Klein sat in an armchair, staring up at a man in a suit who had his hands in his pockets. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell he was speaking. She lifted a hand to touch her hair, then returned it to her lap. Whatever the man said—an update on the search, perhaps—appeared not to make much difference. The man walked out of the room and Ilena Klein turned to the window. I feared she would see us standing there, but we were cloaked by the night.

“Frances?” Stuart’s voice came out of the darkness behind me. I turned. Stuart stood with his hand under Dennis’s arm as Dennis crouched on the sidewalk on one knee.

“Did you fall?” I said. “Are you OK?”

Dennis opened his mouth. He looked at me but didn’t speak. His eyes were bright and fearful, but his face was blank.

“Oh, my God,” I said.

“Something is wrong,” he said.

“What is it?” I said, but he just stared at me, his blue eyes. “OK,” I said. I helped him stand. “We’ll get a doctor. You’ll be fine.”

“Should I call an ambulance?” said Margo.

“No,” said Dennis.

“It’ll be quicker if we drive ourselves,” said Stuart. I nodded, thinking: ambulance? hospital?

We clustered around Dennis and started to walk, and before we turned the corner I looked over my shoulder at the Kleins’, and I understood that my life was going to change. It was terrifying, that knowledge. I have wondered, in rare, metaphysically inclined moments, if misfortune might be contagious. Perhaps the Kleins’ misfortune overwhelmed their house and spilled out with the light. Perhaps it stole across the canal to my doorstep.

S
tuart knocked on our bedroom door a few mornings later. Dennis and I were awake but still in bed. Sunlight saturated the room. Dennis’s hand was on my stomach, his thumb stroking my skin. I find that the lens of memory focuses on him, regardless of what held my attention at the time, the heat or hot flashes or miscellany. “Swimsuits and towels!” called Stuart through the door. “Sunscreen and snorkels!”

The state of Florida had notified us by mail that it would send a demolition crew to raze the stilt house remains—at our expense, of course. We could have fought the decision, but we didn’t. We were adjusting our bearings. It was Stuart’s idea to have a last look around. “You need closure, Frannie,” he’d said to me. He was the only one who had ever called me Frannie, and I’d found I didn’t much mind it. “We’ll just throw anchor and say toodle-oo, old house.”

Again we coasted past the herons on the retaining walls, and Dennis steered through the bay to our spot of land. Stuart stepped over the boat railing and clambered onto the flat top of a piling. He sat there, balancing. “You brought the camera?” he said to me. I nodded. To Dennis, he said, “Back up a bit, would you? I want to see how it feels.”

Dennis shifted into reverse and we drifted away, leaving Stuart to perch over the water. I snapped photos as Stuart posed, arms and legs spread. Dennis cut the engines and stood beside me. He leaned close. “Should we leave him?” he said.

“Yes,” I whispered, but the bile was gone.

Stuart tried to stand but lost his balance and sat down again. “Don’t fall,” called Margo, and Stuart blew her a kiss.

Dennis started the engines and put the boat into gear. When we reached the pilings, Stuart gestured to Dennis. “Your turn,” he said, stepping onto the boat. “It’s surreal.”

“Take the wheel,” said Dennis. Dennis stepped onto the gunwale, using the rail for balance, and my heart seized. I wanted to stop him—what if he fell again?—but I did not. He climbed awkwardly onto the piling and shifted until he was facing us, then sat still with his hands on his knees, his shoulders slumped. I saw the shadow of the boy he’d once been flash across his features, then disappear. Stuart put the engines into reverse, and Dennis, unmoving, grew small.

“What did it feel like?” I said to Stuart.

“Scary,” he said. “Lonely.”

The doctor at the emergency room had referred Dennis to an internist, who’d referred him to a neurologist. We’d scheduled an appointment but it was weeks away. I now think of this period as stolen time, time to which we were not entitled and which we did not appreciate: an interlude. In the interlude, Elijah Klein’s body was found. He’d gone out on the bay with friends, and they’d run out of gas and capsized when the storm hit. The entire crew had drowned. Elijah had been invited at the last minute, apparently, and initially hadn’t been counted among the fatalities. I could not conceive how Ilena Klein would survive, how she would not simply stop breathing.

Also in the interlude, the National Guard left south Florida, the electricity returned, and Margo and Stuart secured a mortgage to buy the house on Battersea Road. They used money my father had left Margo as a down payment, and on the day they closed we brought over champagne and cleaning supplies.

I searched through old photographs to show Stuart the stilt house—but in our photos, there is only a dock under Margo’s feet, a railing behind Dennis’s arm, a doorway framing my face. There was no photo of the house the way I remember it: from a distance, wholly intact. I did not understand, taking those pictures, that history must be collected while the subject exists. If not, what goes unrecorded can fill an ocean.

I do remember, though, the night of hurricane Andrew. Margo and Stuart stayed upstairs in her bedroom and I sat in the living room, watching the local weatherman’s updates on a battery-operated television. It was late and the house was dark. Dennis stood at the French doors, staring out at the backyard and the boat bobbing on the canal. I wasn’t concerned about the boat—if it was damaged in the storm, we would have it fixed; if it tore loose, we would find it, or we would figure out a way to buy another one. I was concerned, though, that debris would strike the glass door and it would shatter, with Dennis standing close enough to see his breath on the glass. “Dennis, please,” I said. “We should be near walls.” Still, I went to stand with him. Between flashes of lightning, the sky was purple-black and inky, more substantive than air and water and wind, as if the storm were its own form of matter. The melaleucas in the backyard bowed, nearing the ground and lifting, bending again. Leaves and twigs swept across the lawn, licking the surface of the swimming pool. A tree branch raced by, and there was a sudden, throaty crack of lightning. I saw the jagged light to the south, but the target—tree or house or other object—was concealed. In quieter moments, the wind relented and the trees righted themselves and the canal stilled. I hoped in these moments that the storm would ease, but then the water rose and lapped the pier again, the wavelets like little soldiers approaching battle on their bellies, and the wind returned, more furious than before.

One moment was quieter and lasted longer than the others. Dennis loosened his grip on me and went to check the news report. The eye of the hurricane—a black center on the radar screen, encircled by speedy strokes of red storm—had found our house. The yard and canal were still; not the stillness of a clear day, but that of a room with no windows, that of a bubble of air trapped underwater.

I knew that when the storm started again, it would be instantaneous, a dropped curtain. Dennis stood several feet away, his eyes on the television, and the promise that he would return to my side tethered us like a mooring line. I felt a calm anticipation, a sensation I recalled from when Margo was an infant, from late nights when she finally fell asleep. The storm would return, but for now the world was quiet. Dennis was not beside me but he was nearby, and this fact filled me with relief so intense that, as the wind started again in the trees, it welled inside me and spilled over, and I cried out for him.