The Drowning House (5 page)

Michael, as the object of her new attentions, was pleased. He didn’t see her looking over her shoulder, seeking an audience, when she twined her arms around his neck. So it was not something I could discuss with him. No one else appeared to notice any difference.

Bailey loved to show people how I took the shot. It became a feature of her play dates. Richie had given us one of the cardboard cutouts and it stood in Bailey’s bedroom. It was worn, one corner was broken, but when I tried to throw it out, Bailey shrieked.

“Why this sudden interest in housekeeping?” Michael asked. “If you want to pick up around here, why don’t you consider moving some of your stuff”—he meant my equipment, the lenses and other things I kept within easy reach—“out of the living room.”

“Because it’s convenient to have it here.”

“Okay. You have your things around, let her have hers.”

“But it’s broken.”

“It will fall apart soon enough.”

I had no answer. And so the cutout stayed.

But when Bailey had friends over, I found myself doing things I wouldn’t have ordinarily, dreaming up errands or excursions to get her out of the house, proposing games, once even making cookies from a worm of dough I’d bought at the supermarket to distract her. It rarely worked. Eventually the suggestion would be made.

“Let’s play something in the yard,” she would say. This was the inevitable prelude to the reenactment. It was intentionally vague and totally disingenuous. There was only one game Bailey wanted to play.

I didn’t watch anymore. It was too hard to see her doing a bad imitation of herself—a performance drained of all the spontaneity the marketing people had prized. But even with the kitchen door shut, I would hear occasional fragments of dialogue, Bailey’s newly complacent voice explaining the order of things. Insisting, “Now watch!”

Even her playmates tired of it, all except Phoebe, who was not popular because she had a lisp and a tendency to spit. Poor Phoebe, starved for any sense of belonging, would play the game over and over.

Like all mothers, I had tried to protect my child. From the stranger, a woman with oddly cropped hair and a shapeless coat, who talked to her in the park, who reappeared too often and seemed a little too friendly. From the dog next door, pacing and drooling behind the fence. There were more generalized worries too—poison, small objects, anything sharp, swimming pools, sash cords, traffic. There were car wrecks, plane wrecks, wrecks of all kinds. For a parent, the news was a nightly catalogue of disasters waiting to happen. But it had never occurred to me to worry about our own backyard. Even now, when I recall the worn grass, the shaggy tree and makeshift swing, nothing in that scene speaks to me of danger or gives off any alarm.

I couldn’t hear everything from where I was in the kitchen. I was looking over prints. I had a dozen or so spread across the kitchen table. The rhythm of the exchanges had, I suppose, become familiar, so that what I noticed first that morning was a silence that lasted
too long. And I remember that I got up slowly, slowly set down the magnifier, because I disliked what I knew Bailey was doing and didn’t want to see it. It wasn’t until I opened the kitchen door that I heard Phoebe’s thin wail and then a sound that was like the beating of a hundred wings, a sound I knew was only in my own ears. The air that was suddenly full of fear rushed in and hit me in the face and I saw the swing in a tangle.

I have been told that my going to her sooner would have made no difference. That she died almost immediately. I think a lot about that.
Almost immediately
. What does it mean? Was there a moment when she looked up, her neck at an implausible angle, and searching for someone, saw just the gray board fence? Was she confused? Frightened? Did she call my name?

Remember, I am a doctor’s daughter. I know what asphyxiation is. I know how long it takes.

“An accident,” Michael said, as though that explained it. When he, more than anyone, with his experience assessing responsibility and assigning blame, should have been able to recognize the chain of evidence stretching back over months—the acquiescences, the lapses of judgment, the acts of selfishness, small and seemingly insignificant at the time, but linked, traceable, like the paper-clip chains Bailey draped around her room.

It was over in a minute. In falling, Bailey had defied gravity and taken flight, shedding the weight of the world as easily as the sweater she hadn’t needed and had dropped earlier, that lay in a small pile beside her on the grass.

Michael wasn’t the only one to call it an accident. That was what everyone said, “an accident” or even “a tragedy.” But I had lived with him too long, listened to him and his partners preparing for too many trials. Misfortune was not a concept he believed in. How could he propose it now as a solution? He had said more than once,
Someone has to pay
. Who else was there but me?

Chapter 5

I COULD HAVE TAKEN THE SHORTCUT
across the alley to the Carradays’. The alley ran like a seam down the center of the block between the big houses on Broadway and the less impressive structures in back of them. It was a strip of raw, packed sand and gravel. Wild plum trees and pomegranates grew in the alley along with dusty clumps of cannas big enough for a child to hide in.

There had been a time when Patrick and I had gone back and forth that way—across the alley and through the oleander hedge—so often we had worn a trail that was visible from the upstairs windows. What architectural planners call a desire line.

But I hesitated. Any number of memories might rise up from that earth along with the smells of salt damp and vegetable rot. Instead I followed the street around to the formal front entrance.

Before the days of air-conditioning, Galveston’s grandest houses were built along Broadway, on the north side of the street. In winter the sun fell through their front windows and stretched into golden lozenges on the burnished parlor floors. In summer, the prevailing southeast breeze cooled the interiors when the temperature rose into the nineties, and even the flies sat motionless on the windowsills.

Across the back alley, facing in the opposite direction, was a series of more modest residences that didn’t benefit from the sun or the breeze. Because of the climate, this arrangement played out across the East End. Which explains why my father, the small-town doctor, and his family came to live directly in back of Will Carraday, whose grandfather had made and kept a fortune.

Even this early in the season, there was a knot of tourists in front of the Carradays’, some of them with cameras. A young woman in an embroidered blouse was posing at the iron gate while a man with sunburned forearms tried to take her picture. He was losing patience because she kept looking over her shoulder at the tall windows. I knew what he had in mind—the kind of vacation shot that furnishes proof:
We went to the Gulf coast, we visited the sights, we were happy
. Probably, like most tourists, he had overestimated his capacity for new experience. What he really wanted now was something familiar, even if it was only the routine of the picture taking.

“Excuse me.” I moved to go around them.

“Do people actually live here?” he asked. I knew what he meant. Built to astonish, the house still achieved its purpose. He glanced at the girl, he wanted her to agree, but she was examining a blister on her heel.

According to the guidebooks, at the turn of the century the Islanders purchased twenty-three grand pianos and more than three thousand gallons of French wine in one year alone. Now the sidewalk was split in places where it had heaved and buckled. There was a row of parking meters. I opened the gate and started up the walk.

The Carraday house was famous in its own right. But the story of Stella Carraday, of what had happened to her there, gave it special fascination. I wondered if the tourists at the gate had heard it. If the young woman had lain awake, thinking about Stella, after her boyfriend had gone to sleep smelling of Solarcaine.

I stopped and looked back. The girl smiled. She had the round eyes and full cheeks of a child. Stella had been only seventeen when she drowned. If you believed the story. So many strange things were said to have been discovered in the aftermath of the storm. A horse, thirsty and disoriented in a second-floor bedroom. Dead snakes dangling from trees.

My father was skeptical. “It’s quite a tale,” he said. “I understand they’ve named a dessert for her over at the hotel.”

My mother looked past him into the fireplace. She appeared to be
studying the bunches of dried hydrangea that filled the unused space. “Strawberries Stella,” she said.

Stella’s death, her naked body—the storm waters tore the clothes off most of the drowned—had the lurid blaze of melodrama. Whether the account was true or not, its sensationalism violated my father’s view of what history ought to be. For him, even reenactments and people in costume portraying historic figures betrayed an excess of enthusiasm, like wanting to use the chamber pot. Learning from the past, effortfully, as my father had once learned from a cadaver, was acceptable. Trying to revive and take foolish pleasure in it was not. But he and Eleanor were asked so often, by so many visitors, that the story had to be told.

Growing up, I’d heard it many times. I had visited Stella’s room in the Carraday house too, stroked the ivory brushes on the dressing table and examined them for hairs. I would have explored further, if Patrick had been willing to wait. Sometimes I imagined her conversations, her thoughts. The events of her courtship. Given my father’s disapproval, it was a subversive act.

I reached the veranda and the Carradays’ front door opened.

“Faline.” I stopped, overwhelmed by the pleasure of saying her name. She flew out the door and hugged me to her so suddenly I stumbled. Then she stepped back and held me at arm’s length. “Look at you,” she said. She smoothed my shirt. “No shoes. Clothes still all over the place. I suppose nobody at your house got an iron?”

“You look just the same,” I said. It was true. She had not so much changed as become more plainly herself since I had last seen her. She had always been slender, but now the tendons showed in her hands. And what had been a streak through her black hair fanned out from her forehead like white veining in a rock.

She folded her arms. “That car you been driving. It don’t look much better.” She shook her head. “But you want that miserable old vehicle, go on around and talk to my Otis.”

“I want to talk to you.” There were things I wanted to know, questions I couldn’t ask anyone else. A whole line of inquiry I had kept to
myself for too long. Questions about Patrick and me that only Faline was likely to answer.
What did you tell them? And, more important, why?

“Not now, baby. You hear that racket?” Faline tilted her head in the direction of the garden. I could make out hammering and shouted directions. “By tonight we got to have a dance floor outside. You ask me, some people go to a lot of work to entertain theirselves. Come by when it’s over. I guess you know where to find me. Like always.” She looked me over again and shook her head. “I hope you intend to clean up for the festivity.”

I smiled. Faline favored those she cared about with a steady stream of disparagement. Even her shows of affection hurt. When I was young, she would catch me as I ran by and pull me to her so hard that my shoulder popped. I had seen her squeeze the back of Patrick’s neck until his eyes watered.

“Is Patrick here?” I asked.

“Here in this house?” Faline tilted her head and looked at me slyly. “How should I know? I’m supposed to keep track of his where about? He’s a grown man, not that you’d know it.” She seized the vacuum cleaner as though she expected it to resist and turned it on. She shouted above its roar, “Go on now. Unless you forgot where the garage is.”

“I’ll come and find you after the party,” I said.

She waved, and the heavy door swung shut. I stepped out of the archway into the blinding light.

The Carradays’ garage was a two-story building with corner turrets and a taller central tower. Originally, it had been the stables. Upstairs, there had been six servants’ bedrooms, each about the size of one of the stalls below.

I crossed the yard and went around to the side street where the double doors stood open. A man with his back to me leaned over the engine of the station wagon. He spoke without moving. “You could get ant bit, going around with no shoes.” A pair of tattoos snaked up his arms into the sleeves of his T-shirt. A rag hung out of the pocket of his work pants. He straightened, and I saw that his hair was shoulder length, pulled into a ponytail.

“I know about fire ants,” I said. “I was born here.” The stone floor was cool and dry under my feet.

I made out five cars, not counting mine—a Bentley, a jeep, a two-seater convertible, and several others. Vehicles of every description for Patrick to wreck. I came closer. I saw that the mess had been cleared out of the station wagon, and the whole car had been cleaned and polished. The hubcaps gleamed and even the tires had a dull sheen. I stepped closer and saw, with relief, the familiar dings, the tired upholstery. I spotted my old canvas suitcase in the back.