The Drowning House (10 page)

I sat down in the wing chair and pushed back into it so Faline would understand I wasn’t giving up, that I had no intention of leaving. I looked over at the pile of newspapers. The banner read
DEATH OF MAN RULED AN ACCIDENT
.

In general, Faline disapproved of storytelling. “Don’t waste my time,” she would say, when Mary Liz tried to read to her from a paperback. She made an exception only when Patrick and I were hurt or unhappy. Even then her narratives were different, sad and shocking. “One time there was an explosion at a warehouse,” she would begin. Or, “One time there was a woman jumped off Pier 22 with a baby on her arm.” Patrick and I sat slack-jawed, listening, our own pain forgotten. Later I realized that her stories came from the week’s sensational headlines. I was suddenly aware of how close Patrick and I had come to being featured in one of them.

“I can’t talk to Michael,” I said. “He doesn’t talk, he makes speeches. The same ones, over and over, with variations. That’s what he’s good at.”

“Maybe if you would listen he wouldn’t have to repeat hisself.”

I shook my head. “Faline. There are things I need to know. Things he can’t tell me.”

She turned back to the stove. “Why you got to go into all this now?” she said. “Life supposed to go forward. People supposed to grow up. Everything all right. Why can’t you leave it alone?” She was rubbing hard now.

“Everything isn’t all right,” I said.

Faline stopped her polishing. She leaned forward on both hands and sighed and her head dropped forward. Somewhere in the house water was running. The sound of it through the walls was like distant rain.

“I was a good mother,” I said.

“Well,” said Faline, “I know that, baby. I surely do. You don’t have to tell me.”

I rested my hands on the arms of the chair where the fabric was worn and stringy and the stuffing showed through, the places where she must have rested hers. “That old chair,” Faline said. “Same one, all these years. The footstool, though, that’s new, Otis got me that. I’m still thinking about putting my feet on it. You want to, go ahead.”

I looked down at my bare feet. Probably the soles were dirty. “I better not,” I said. We stayed there for a while, neither of us having any idea what to say next. I tried to formulate a sentence, but it was like climbing sand, I kept sinking in and sliding backward. Finally I said, “After Bailey … after she … I kept thinking about the Island. I don’t know why. What I wanted was to remember her, how she looked, the things she said. To keep her memory, at least, safe. But instead I kept thinking about”—I looked around—“all this.” I stopped. “Faline, do you think the dead have dreams?”

“If they do, they good ones. There got to be some peace after this life.” Faline turned around to look at me. I sensed something different in her manner. “You asking all these questions,” she said. “Pull on a string, no telling what going to be on the other end.”

“I don’t care.”

“Easy to say now. You don’t know what you going to find.” She folded her arms. Again I saw the resemblance, and I wondered where Otis was.

“Otis gone over to Kemah,” she said. “See about a boat.” She smiled. “You always been easy to read. Not like your mama. She keep herself to herself.”

I thought of Eleanor at dinner, her face above a blue-and-white bowl of flowers, the light from the candles shining on her hair. Her posture unyielding. Her eyes half closed, as though she were entirely absorbed by something no one else could see.

Faline stepped over to the kitchen table. I remembered its cool surface, Faline holding a needle to the light. Sleep tugged at me, but I made an effort to rouse myself. “Faline,” I said, “do you remember the time you sewed my dress? What you told me?”

I’d torn the waistband and bloodied my arm climbing through the
window of an empty house on Avenue K with Patrick. You couldn’t call it breaking in when we hadn’t broken anything—someone before us had removed most of the glass.

Faline shook her head at my torn dress. “Look like you been to the club with your family at some point. You and Patrick out fooling around, you couldn’t go home and change?” She complained, but she didn’t ask any questions. “Put your arm where I can see,” she said. “At least you had the sense not to bleed on the fabric.”

I rested my arm along the enamel tabletop and watched as she washed the dried crust off with a dishcloth. The refrigerator hummed softly, the mixing bowls nested on top of it gave back their own ceramic trill. When she was done, Faline said, “You understand now I got to boil this.” When the bandage was in place, she pulled out her work basket and chose a needle. Somewhere outside, a car backfired. Faline said, “How am I going to sew with you jumping around? Hold still, while I tell you something.” She examined the thread, then licked the end. “It so happen, I have the very shade.”

She went on talking while she sewed, and her voice soothed me the way it had when Patrick and I were small. Except Faline wasn’t recounting events from the paper. She was talking about herself. Probably she thought I was too young to comprehend or recall the details.
This thing sometimes happens. No way to explain it. One love, too young, and you don’t get another chance
. It was Otis she’d been talking about. Now they were together. What did that mean for me? The possibilities blazed like fireworks—beautiful, far-off. In no way dangerous.

“You said people don’t get a second chance. And I believed you. But you and Otis, you’re married now.”

Faline took a step back. There was an expression on her face I didn’t recognize, a guardedness, and I didn’t know what it meant.

“Is that why you here? Baby, tell me that not so.”

Before I could answer, the shadows around us deepened, and I realized there was someone in the doorway.

Otis was wearing a dress shirt that covered his tattoos. It must have been two in the morning, but the points of his collar stood out
crisply, his belt buckle gleamed. I remembered something else Faline had told me.

“You were in the army, weren’t you?” I asked.

“The Marine Corps.”

I nodded as if what he’d said explained everything about him. I didn’t want to admit the truth—that Otis was someone who understood how things worked, who knew how to fix or find them. Whereas I was someone who broke or lost them.

I had never thought of Faline as graceful, but when she went to him and put her arm around his waist she seemed to glide across the kitchen floor. She fitted herself against his side—she was almost as tall as he was—and he shifted his weight slightly to accommodate her. They looked back at me out of the same dark eyes.

I should have been happy for her. I should have rejoiced to see how the arched doorway with its double outline framed the two of them, making the pose somehow formal and definitive. Instead I closed my eyes.

Faline said, “I suppose you planning to stay there all night.”

Chapter 10

BOTH FALINE AND ELEANOR CLAIMED
that my past—the fire and its aftermath—had been forgotten. I wondered if what they really meant was that now people remembered things differently. That was the way in Galveston. Real events were absorbed into the Island’s narrative and in time became something else. So that life there could go on.

In the days after the fire, Eleanor, my father, and the Galveston chief of police—a nervous, balding man in a suit—all asked me, over and over, to explain what had happened. I told them that Patrick and I had taken a car and driven it to an abandoned house. I said I didn’t know how the fire started. When they asked if I knew the girl who had died, I hesitated. Then I said, truthfully, “Not really.”

Those are the facts, and they are as meaningless as a row of stones.

When I think of that night, what I recall is the winter fog that wrapped the Island, that surrounded Patrick and me, alone in the car. I remember that we talked about going away together, and that for a fraction of a second, I thought it might be possible. I felt hopeful in a way I never had before, and I didn’t want to give up the feeling. If keeping it alive meant stealing a car or burning down a house, whatever it meant, I would go along.

Not that I ever said so. I never spoke or acted or even made a real choice. I wanted to be with Patrick, that was all, and I trailed after him, doing whatever that required. I never thought to question what he did. As for Patrick, I don’t think he made a conscious decision that night either. He just acted, impulsively. We were so young, our lives were not ordered toward any purpose. They were as formless as water.

The adults interrogated us separately. They must have been testing our accounts for inconsistencies. Don’t imagine this taking place at the Island’s police station. I never saw it. To this day I don’t know where it is. We met at Will Carraday’s office, a brick building with an impressive white portico. When I wasn’t being questioned, I waited outside Will’s door. The walls were thick, the doors heavy, so I couldn’t hear what was being said. The only sound was the tick and whir of the tall clock in the corner. I remember the sorrowful moon that looked down from above its face, the chained weights hanging side by side, inches apart, in the case below. The clock seemed to have a message for me, if only I could make sense of it.

I went there on three successive days. At first I thought I’d encounter Patrick. Then I realized that our visits had been timed to keep us apart. At home I watched for his signal from my bedroom window. But the light in Stella’s bedroom never came on.

What do you call it when you wake up each morning anticipating one eager presence? When you register his smallest gestures, a code only you can decipher? Patrick’s role in my life wasn’t something I thought about. If we’d been asked about our relationship, I doubt that either of us would have used the word
love
. But I couldn’t imagine a world that didn’t include him. As I sat waiting in the hall, one ankle wrapped around the leg of the chair, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see Patrick again.

The newspaper article was brief, no names were mentioned, the heading read simply
UNOCCUPIED HOUSE BURNS
. It was buried deep within the second section. It must have been Will’s influence that kept the story off the front page, that kept our names out of it altogether. I didn’t understand then that he must have used it in other ways as well. I was fourteen, and he was still
Mr. Carraday
to me.

It was my mother who drove me to his office every day, who brought me sandwiches and sat with me while I ate. Who talked to Will’s lawyer, and also to a heavyset woman with puffy eyes and long artificial nails. The woman carried a square, shiny purse that she held in front of her as though it offered protection. When Eleanor introduced herself, the woman said, “I know who you are.” They stood, their gazes
locked, the woman clutching her purse. Then Eleanor dropped her hand.

At home, Frankie treated me with new respect. She approached me cautiously, the way you would someone who had survived a difficult illness, someone whose strength you weren’t sure of. We didn’t talk much, but she didn’t question or harass me either.

Frankie and I had always agreed on one thing—that the most desirable feature of the room we shared was the window seat overlooking the back garden. As the older sibling, Frankie had claimed it as her right. After the fire, she took down the clothesline that divided our space and let me sit by the window whenever I wanted. She knew what I was watching for.

When several days had gone by and there was still no sign from Patrick, I crossed the lawn to the Carradays’ kitchen.

Faline was working a ball of dough on the marble counter. When I came in, she didn’t stop what she was doing or turn to look at me. A fine mist of flour hung in the air around her. She said, “You may as well know. Patrick have gone.”

“Where?” In my mind,
gone
meant over the causeway, to the mainland. Maybe as far as Houston. “When will he be back?”

“Gone to Europe. You know, where Miz Rhetta live? His aunt. Patrick gone to school there.”

“School?” I said. “But it’s almost Christmas. School will be over in …” I paused, trying to see the calendar, to remember the dates.

Faline took her time rinsing her hands. Then she shook the drops off and reached for a towel. When she was done, she leaned back against the deep porcelain sink as if to steady herself. “This is something had to happen,” she said. “You don’t understand now. But you will one day. I’m sorry, baby.”

It wasn’t what she’d said—I was still struggling to work out what she meant—but the way she spoke, the words she chose, let me know we were talking about something terrible and final. “Don’t cry now,” Faline said. “You a strong girl. You got to be strong.”

A few days later, Will Carraday’s plane delivered me to the small, private airport outside Cleveland. There was snow on the ground
when the plane landed. I had only the clothes I was wearing—too light for a Midwest winter. My grandmother, in zippered boots, waited at the edge of the tarmac. Her glasses were fogged with the cold. She touched my shoulder tentatively. “Your mother told me you were artistic,” she said.