The Tell (39 page)

“Thank you,” the silvery blond woman said, breathlessly. “We've been calling and calling and no one answers.”

Her friend gave Owen a generous smile. “We're thinking of taking a class. Can we look around?”

“Brindle's closed now,” he said. “I'm sorry.” Their perfume was a strong, confusing bouquet. “You'll have to come back.”

“No, come in,” Mira said, moving up from behind him. She ushered the women past Owen. “We're just doing some renovations,” she explained, instantly bright and chatty. He was struck by how effortlessly she switched her mood. “That's why it's such a mess. And you know how these things go. It's taking much longer than we expected.”

“I know how
that
goes,” one of the women assured her. “But you'll be open soon? We wanted to take a drawing class. You know,” she glanced at her friend, “with a model. Life drawing.”

Mira explained that the class would start in the late spring. She pulled a notebook from her bag to take down their information. The women said they'd heard good things about Brindle. Mira's pen was poised, but Owen knew she sensed their sudden reluctance. The disheartening air of the place had begun to leach into their lungs.

“The place is going to be beautiful,” he said. “You'll see. And the light in the building is amazing.”

“This will change your life,” Mira said, placing a hand on one woman's aqua forearm. A different picture, and this woman could be her mother. “I swear it will. There's nothing like drawing, painting. You'll start seeing everything in a different way once you learn how to really pay attention.”

The woman was startled by Mira's intimacy and her intent, colorless gaze. You could feel Mira was looking inside your head at a time like this, and that her hand was on your heart and not just your sleeve.

“How?” the woman asked. “How will it change my life?”

“You'll have to find that out for yourself,” Mira tossed off, clicking her pen for emphasis and laughing. “That's the mystery. Then later, you'll have to tell
me
.”

Her answer was no answer, really, but it satisfied the women. Mira had planted the suggestion that seeing differently could transform you. The notion was simple and anyone could swallow it. You didn't have to know anything, have anything, come from anywhere. It was the same idea he offered his students every year and every day. Maybe he'd try it himself, a different way of paying attention, a different view of life. The women talked for a while, blinking in the sun, before they wandered back to where they'd come from, no longer hooking arms. Owen locked the front door and followed Mira upstairs to the studio.

“I know you think I'm full of shit, O, but I meant what I said out there about getting Brindle back. I'll sell what I have to sell to do it.”

He pictured their house empty of all its valuables, the wind whipping through cleaned rooms. “And how about the part about changing the women's lives?”

She turned around to smile at him. “Well,
that
—who knows? It's always possible, isn't it? I can't offer a guarantee. People want the change to be like an earthquake, but more often it's a tremor they don't even register until much later.”

There was nothing false in how her mood had shifted. She still came to life in this place. He sat on a stool facing the model's deserted and scuffed platform. There was a half-eaten muffin on the shelf, reminding him of how hungry he was. His appetites were either huge or nonexistent. He needed a shower and some food.

“That muffin over there,” he said, pointing to it. “You're going to get roaches next.”

Mira handed it to Owen. She tapped it with her ring: clay, glazed white and cakey, complete with blue dots for blueberries. “One of the kids made it,” she said. “Pretty convincing, apparently.”

She sat on the model's platform and leaned back on her elbows. The sun hit her face and she closed her eyes. “Sometimes I think Wilton's turned into vapor,” she said. “I see drops of him collecting on leaves and beading up in the mirror. He's the water on the outside of the bottle. He's the fog on the inside of the windshield. He's on my glasses. I can wipe him away and he comes back.”

She was talking about death. Owen had begun to see Wilton's scattering everywhere, too—on the aging faces of the women earlier; in the sight of George's dutiful hand dusting the shelves in the apartment, always losing his battle with the dirt and war; in the way some of his students looked hopeful in the morning, their eyelids flecked with optimism. Mira spread a blanket over the platform. She lay down on her side, facing away, and asked him to lie down with her. But he was stuck where he was and wasn't sure he wanted to lie next to her, because how could he ever get up again if he did? He traced her figure in the air. He didn't know how to draw or paint or do anything else she taught others to do. He didn't know how to make much at all. He felt like a man of very small abilities. His finger followed the upsweep of her legs to the sharp fall of her hip, the rise again of her ribs to her head as she supported it with a hand. She looked over her shoulder at him.

“Anya thinks Wilton's in love,” Owen said. “That he met a woman that night and the two of them have gone off somewhere. That he's so in love he's forgotten about everything and everyone.”

“That's what she should believe,” Mira said, after a minute. “That's her idea of how it works—that love makes you forget everything, that love can save your life.”

“What do you think happened to him?” he asked. “Where is he?”

Mira turned to face him, and her pose reminded him of women on the pond's crescent beach in the summer, languid and half-dazed by the heat. He etched the line of her chin and neck, the mouth, the swoop of her breasts, the flat of her stomach, the gullies of her hip bones that disappeared under the waist of her pants. He drew in the air and felt the contact of his finger against the line run hot up his spine. She took her glasses off. Her head was down, and her shoulders rounded forward. Her bare toes curled and uncurled. He lay down on the platform and fit his body against hers.

“I don't know what's happened to him,” she said.

Owen's mouth was just above her ear; he didn't have anything more to say.

“Where is he?” She tried to roll against him, but he didn't want her to see his suffering. “I don't blame you for anything, O. Come home to me, please, O.”

He said he would—he was ready.

C
hocolate and sugar mixed with the sweet honeysuckle and damp earth as Owen turned the car off Route 6 and onto his father's road. The air smelled like birthday cake, he said. He tried to catch Anya's eye in the rearview mirror, but she stared resolutely into the trees, one arm resting on the cat carrier she'd brought to carry home one of Edward's wild kittens in. A week earlier, she'd watched as her own cat was snatched up by a coyote in Wilton's backyard. In the morning, she'd shown Owen the red collar that lay coiled like a vein in the grass.

“Maybe we're on Cake Cod, not Cape Cod,” Mira said. Her terrible stab at humor—and her failed attempts to reach Anya—made her shift uneasily in her seat. “Edward always makes his own birthday cakes. They're kind of magnificent. Wait till you see.”

The silence was enormous. Owen parked between the locust trees and scrambled out of the car; he couldn't get away from the tension between the two women fast enough. He closed his eyes against the fluttering shadows, inhaled the scent of new leaves, silt, wet bark, tadpole ooze, the ammoniac sting of fish. Then his car alarm went off—the opposite of the painful silence but just as loud. Was it habit that made him automatically set the alarm, even when the women were still in it. Or did he really want to lock the women away? He laughed at his mistake and their surprised cartoon faces behind glass and turned the alarm off. Mira smirked at him; she found the unintentional the most amusing, too. But Anya was stony and stood against the car as if she were ready to leave in the next second, no need to take another step forward into the day. Edward and Katherine rushed out of the house and formed a shield around her as if they'd agreed on this unified compassionate front beforehand. Katherine stroked Anya's hair. Rey stuck his head in her crotch. Edward scolded Owen about the noise.

The pond was as high as Owen had ever seen it. Sun spiked up from its floor, the moon sleeping in the woody depths. He couldn't say exactly what had changed inside the house. There were still the bleached, almost indecipherable photographs thumbtacked to the wall, the faded couch with its ripped cushions decorated with animal hair, and his father's reading chair frayed from decades of ideas and cats scratching. There was his father's listing birthday cake on the table, rose-colored, dotted with gumdrops, unrestrained and beautifully hopeful.

“Do you see? We got rid of so much stuff,” Katherine said, opening her arms to the room. “All those shells, rocks, those animal skeletons and feathers. It was your father's idea.”

Here was the end of the Museum of Natural History. Katherine squeezed his arm; the day would be made up of these small touches of commiseration.

Outside, Owen and Mira watched Edward take Anya to the arbor to find a kitten. He peered into the bushes and parted the tall grass, Anya leaning over with him. Two cats leaped away. Edward tried another bush, then another. He whistled and clicked. With his longer absences from the house, the animals were no longer desperate for his food or his company. Owen was struck by the realization that his father was most likely never going to live here again, and this marked the end of a part of his own life, too. He didn't know what would become of the place. He spotted a stack of plastic boxes partially hidden by the propane tank and the dormant trumpet vine. He showed Mira. Edward's collections from the house, not thrown out but not quite kept either, and probably hidden from Katherine.

“My father's way of leaving without fully going,” he said.

Mira sighed. “I love this place. Who could ever really leave? I could see us living here.”

Owen wondered if she meant it. After lunch, they squeezed into Katherine's ancient Camry with its pine-stinking tree hanging from the mirror and went to look at the ocean waves at Head of the Meadow Beach. Edward twisted to talk to the backseat and detail for Anya what she was seeing along the way: the variety of trees, a new house that had violated building codes and he hoped would be torn down, a summer resident's large garden he disdainfully said was cared for by paid hands. A faded cross on Route 6 where a high school kid had died last year in an accident.

“One of the most dangerous roads in the country,” he told her.

Katherine drove fast and loose with one hand hooked on the bottom of the steering wheel. She took turns wildly, forcing Owen against Anya, then Mira. He was stuck between them with his knees almost at his chest. Large sections of asphalt at the beach parking lot had collapsed and sand flurried around in their depressions. The place was deserted—it always was, except in the teeming summer. The cinderblock bathrooms were stoic at the far end. Edward delivered his somber update: more erosion.

“A few decades from now with the way things are going, who knows what the place will look like. Fortunately, I won't be around to see it. Everybody zipped up?” he asked. “Hats? Gloves? The wind's fierce. Mira, you zipped?”

“Zipped,” she said.

She got out first and pretended to be blown away by the wind, her feet running backward faster than she could keep up. Her arms windmilled and she grew smaller and smaller in the haze of sand and afternoon. When she came back to the car, her nose was red and she was out of breath.

“It's a bitch out here,” she yelled through the wind. “Be careful!”

This false clumsiness and the acting were unlike her—and much more like Wilton. It was disconcerting to watch. Was she hoping for the same easy affection and laugh he always got from his acrobatics? Was she still just trying to thaw Anya out? Her playfulness only seemed to sting Anya more. They crested the pale sliding dunes to see the water, a stormy blue expanse with enormous rolls. Owen inhaled greedily. It was impossible to tell what was the sound of the water and what was the wind. Even Edward realized it was useless to talk and gave up his attempts to educate them anymore. Katherine took pictures, waving people into better views. She forced Anya and Mira to stand together for one, Anya's head tilted away from Mira. Edward shivered, his face frozen into a grimace of pleasure. Tears from the cold spilled down his cheeks. He mimed to Owen that he'd forgotten his hat in the car, and Owen mimed back that he'd go get it. Anya had pulled her striped bumblebee hat down almost past her eyes. Only Mira ignored the cold as she bent to examine something on the damp, sloping sand. For a moment, they were each alone.