“They’d laugh. Unless we have reason to believe she’s senile.”
Fenno walks to the gap, looks up and down Commercial. The street is now a concourse of gawkers and meanderers, even this far from the tawdry center of town. People are making up for their lost Saturday.
Kit follows him. “Too strange.”
“Should one of us go and look for her?” says Fenno, though he dreads the thought of striking out into what Walter refers to as the vortex of gaiety.
“I could use the exercise.”
“Though I’m the one who knows where things are. To some extent.”
Kit smiles. “Half a lifetime of marriage has trained me to ask directions.”
Fenno laughs, but he regrets that he did not insist on going with Lucinda. Of course, she would have refused. She is as independent as the woman he met when Mal was still alive; and, to his surprise, just as hopeful, too.
Fenno cannot relax enough to read. He scrubs the kitchen counter and puts the games back in the proper cupboard. Daphne stripped her bed and put the sheets in the washer. All right then: he adds underpants, tea towels, socks, and a faded sarong that Walter used to dam the back door against flooding. He turns the dial.
Walter rings, as promised, from outside the restaurant in Wellfleet. “So where could she go, other than church?”
“Kit’s gone to search for her. Needle in a sodding haystack.”
“Should I keep the children away or bring them back? They’re hankering after ice cream. The line at the good place is ridiculously long.”
“Do you mind?”
“Am I allowed three scoops?”
Fenno smiles. Walter is the boy-man so many of their friends long for—or do not realize they should.
“I grant you dispensation for four,” says Fenno. “Then do come back.”
He takes the cushions off the porch furniture. A few at a time, he carries them up front and lays them in the sun on the picnic table and benches.
In the kitchen, he opens the computer. Safari takes him straight to Walter’s favorite weather site: Provincetown is to be sunny and hot for the next several days. They have one more week here, one more set of guests coming up from the city. Fenno finds himself feeling sorry that they must leave before summer ends.
Lucinda’s mobile, which he left in the living room, rings. He hesitates, then realizes that Lucinda herself may be calling.
“Hello.”
“Mom? I’m looking for my mother, Lucinda Burns.”
“She’s out,” he says. “Christina? Is this Christina?”
“Fenno?” Christina’s voice—which Fenno hasn’t heard since he met her after her brother’s death—is shrill.
“Are you all right, Christina?”
“Can I speak to my mother? Please tell me she’s with you.”
“She’s here for the weekend.”
“Yes, I know. But can you please put her on?”
“She’s gone out,” he tells her again. “I’m assuming she’s at church, or was. She forgot her mobile.”
Christina is sobbing. Bloody hell: Zeke. “Is everything—is it your father?”
“My father’s fine, I’m with him now, he’s fine, but Fenno, the police there—the police in Provincetown called here. I don’t understand.”
Fenno walks outside, to the street. He stands on tiptoe, scanning the tapestry of faces in both directions. Let her walk up now, laden with gimcrack souvenirs, gifts for her great-grandchildren: kites, key chains, lighthouse night-lights.
“A wave,” says Christina through her crying. “A rogue wave?”
“Christina, do you need me to ring the police? I’m sorry, but I’m not understanding you.”
“I’m going to the airport. I’m flying to Boston, then somehow I’ll get there. I have to rent a car. But if it’s all … A rogue wave?” Her voice rises so high that it cracks. What she says next he cannot decipher.
“Christina! Christina, I’m going to ring the police. Please stay there. I will ring you back. This number, is that the best way to reach you?”
“I can’t stay. I have to go,” she sobs. “Get there. Fly there. Catch a plane.”
She rings off.
Fenno stares at the sky, its garrulous everything’s-jolly-brilliant-now blue. He must ring Kit. Or Walter. Walter, then Kit. He sits on the chaise. Arranged in concentric rings, on the table beside him, are the beautiful stones. A ring of gray around a ring of pink, then subtle green, then—at the center—a single round white stone, thin as a coin, the inverse pupil of an eye. Somehow, the wind and rain did not disturb the primitive elegance of Fanny’s design.
When, again and again, he reruns the day, Fenno knows that there is nothing anyone might have done to alter the course of events. And supposing he were a believer in that hokum theory about world wars set in motion by the twitch of a butterfly’s wing. Then what would he blame—the tea he shared with Lucinda? The toast? The knife or even the last of that homemade beach-plum jam scraped from the jar? The children’s exhaustion? Ah: perhaps the tree that failed to fall on the house in the middle of the night, sending them all to one of the makeshift refugee centers.
That infernal tree; Fenno will think about it for weeks. Even three days later, as he and Walter prepare to leave, the tree still leans at the halfway point between upright and prone. For all he knows, it will stand that way for years, ignored. Is there any evidence it hadn’t stood that way to begin with? Perhaps he and Walter simply failed to notice it until the day of the storm.
She went for a walk, by herself, on the breakwater. The tide was coming in, though she would not have known that. Living inland all her life, why would she think about tides? Fenno ought to have told her, when she asked about the way to the lighthouse, that it was impassable, impossible for all but the most intrepid hikers to attempt. Why had he let on that casual strollers might venture that way? Had he gone with her, would they both have been swept off the causeway, both struck their heads and lost consciousness, as she apparently had? No, because Fenno would have declared the expedition positively daft. He would have helped her find the Portuguese bakery, shop for souvenirs.
Walter and Fenno canceled their final guests and decided to leave the Cape early, two days after seeing Kit off with his family, after putting Mal’s sister on the plane that would take her mother’s body to Boston and then to Vermont. On their final morning, they vacuum sand from the rental car, pack the boot, walk through the house twice (each of them once) in search of small, easy-to-miss items. The travel alarm, Walter’s Swiss Army knife, a palmful of change on the bathroom shelf.
They lay a towel across the backseat, secure Felicity’s cage, and, over her muttering protests, lock her in.
The weather is sadistically perfect. There is no logical reason they cannot stay through the following weekend, but they’ve been drained of every recreational impulse imaginable. All they would do is sit together—at the beach, at the picnic table, on the porch with its absurdist view of a half-fallen tree that no one else seems to notice or worry about—in a state of bereft numbness.
Walter has work to distract him. Fenno, envious, sees that he cannot wait to let it engulf him once they return. Since they arrived here, Walter has stayed in close touch with his staff, but he’s rarely mentioned their texts and calls—until now. Now, out of the domineering silence, he will sigh and say, “The blueberries this week are bland and mealy again. I am so sick of pandering to the locavore mafia. Is Maine such a dirty word?” Or “Do you know who came in last night? Sacha Baron Cohen! What do you mean, ‘who’? Borat, that’s who.” Or “So Hugo came up with a new special this week: sushi tuna casserole. Sounds revolting, doesn’t it? Well get this: it is a hit.”
He tries valiantly to drag Fenno back into the palliative currents of ordinary life, the balm of its petty irritations. But Fenno can hardly speak, let alone sleep. He does eat. He’s been doing so aggressively. One morning, while reading (or skimming and not quite absorbing) the news, he somehow op
ened and ate an entire bag of crisps. He is not even partial to crisps.
When the car is packed, Walter locks the front door. He waters the large planter filled with petunias and coils the hose over its saddle.
Fenno is already buckled into the passenger seat. Walter gets in and drives without any of his usual banter. (“Everyone been to the potty?” “I hosie the driver’s seat!”) They cruise past the Red Inn and the memorial park by the breakwater, swing right onto Bradford. Fenno looks for damage done by the storm, though none of it seems all that dire, nothing like the damage they’ve endured. The ubiquitous hydrangeas, buxom and bright just a week ago, are frowzy and louche, their heavy heads bowed toward the pavement. Here and there, a house is missing a shutter or a patch of shingles.
Bradford runs for long stretches without any pavement or shoulder, thus discouraging the knots of pedestrians that hinder passage on Commercial. Still, they pass a group of revelers tarted up in shiny wigs and lolly-colored gowns, as if they are off to a midday cotillion. None of the pageantry is funny anymore.
In her cage, Felicity bathes noisily in her water dish; inexplicably, it’s the first thing she does whenever they take her along in a car. She will splash in the dish and then perch on its edge, shaking herself like a dog. Fenno feels the spray hit his neck, soak through his sleeve.
“Did I ever tell you how much I once worshipped Walt Disney?” Walter says, breaking the silence.
“Yes, you did,” says Fenno. Tell me again, he thinks. The drive to New York will be insupportably long.
“But did I tell you that I actually wrote a whole paper about him? In ninth grade. In English class we had to do an essay called ‘My Surprise Hero,’ about somebody unusual whom we admired. You know, not George Washington or Golda Meir. I have this theory that my fixation was part of all the painful stuff before coming out. I think I had some unconscious notion that maybe Walt Disney was gay.” Walter makes a sound approximating laughter. “You won’t believe this, but it didn’t even hit me until I was writing a draft that he had the same name as me. No one ever called me Walt. Not if I could help it.”
He reminds Fenno that this was long before the Internet; he had to look up newspaper articles about Disney in the library. He called the Disney headquarters in California and managed to find a sympathetic woman in PR, willing to spend fifteen minutes on the phone with a boy in a hick town writing a paper for school. “Do you know,” says Walter, “they actually sent me a set of passes for rides at Disneyland? As if Granna, at her age, could have taken me all the way from Massachusetts. I think I still have them somewhere in a box. Think they’re still valid? We could make that our next vacation.” After a stretch of silence, Walter sighs. “Okay, jokes verboten.”
They pass the row of identical bungalows named for flowers, right at the edge of the bay; exposed as they are to the elements—the “rogue waves”—they seem to have survived the storm unscathed. Fenno realizes that he longs to see some vicious destruction, an affirmation of tragedy.
They pass Pilgrim Lake. Walter accelerates now that they’re on the carriageway, the asphalt spine of the Cape. “Andiamo, cowgirls,” he says quietly. He glances in the rearview mirror. “Home we go, Miss Monster.”
After a few miles, Walter turns on the radio. “Music or talk?”
“Your choice,” says Fenno. “You’re the pilot.”
“Copilots matter, too.”
“Thank you. I’m ever grateful for that.”
Walter settles on the Provincetown station: vintage show tunes. “It’ll fade out pretty soon, but for now I’m good with this.” Would Fenno please get Walter’s sunglasses out of the glove box? Fenno does. He watches Walter adjust the glasses, scratch his nose.
“I meant that, about being grateful. And I’m so sorry about everything. The past week. Everything. I should have … recused myself somehow.”
“Stop right there,” Walter says sharply. He glances at Fenno, his expression illegible behind the shades. Fenno half expects him to stop the car, but he cruises onward, returning his attention to the road. “What happened to Lucinda isn’t your fault. You have to stop with the blame. As for the stuff before, you did the right thing, like you just about always do. Except when what you do is nothing. You know what? I figured something out. By doing this thing, bringing these people together, you bucked the instinct that drives me crazy: your total resistance to risk. Your passiveness. The way you hide stuff and hide from stuff. You wish you’d ‘recused’ yourself?” Walter snorts. “Oh, honey. At times I think you’re tempted to recuse yourself from life.”
When Fenno says nothing—what could he say?—Walter speaks again, but he softens his tone. “And these people—Kit and his entourage? They’re a part of our lives now. Not a big part, but still. For better or worse. And you know what? It’s fine. Maybe more than fine. We’ll see, won’t we?”
Once again, hardly for the first time in all their years together, Fenno wonders how, when he’s the one who relishes literature, who cherishes books—who, as Walter puts it, “scarfs down words like Wheaties at the training table”—it’s Walter who knows how to narrate their lives.
Fenno wants to say, Does this mean we’re through the woods? But that would be too straightforward. Straightforward is risky. And if he did, Walter would probably answer, What woods? Or even, Forget the woods, sweetheart. We have to deal with the Cross Bronx Expressway.
Which would be Walter’s way of acknowledging that he understands what Fenno can and cannot endure when it comes to discussing emotions—though understanding will not always mean accepting.
What astonished and frightened him most, next to Lucinda’s death, was the force of Kit’s emotion. In retrospect, Fenno is glad that he asked Kit to return to the house before telling him what the police had confirmed.
A fisherman rowing from shore to check on his mooring saw the wave knock Lucinda off the breakwater. (Fenno pictured a spiteful hand toppling a tiny porcelain figure from a shelf.) The fisherman radioed the Coast Guard. A man walking a dog along the beach also saw her go in; had it not occurred at such a distance, he claimed, he would have dived in to save her. The Coast Guard pulled her out of the water just before noon. Her purse had wedged itself between two stones in the causeway.
After Fenno spoke with Christina, Walter was the first to return to the house, along with the children—their lips tinted blue by some newfangled flavor of ice cream designed to flout the all-natural bias of grown-ups. As they got out of the car, Walter saw Fenno only from a distance and put his finger to his lips. Behind him, Fanny emerged in the middle of reciting a poem—or its conclusion; Fenno recognized the poem.
“ ‘O, but Everyone / Was a bird!’ ” she trilled with the drama singular to a young girl hoping for fame. “ ‘And the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.’ ”
A beat, and then Walter applauded. When he turned again to Fenno, who walked steadily toward him, he read the look on Fenno’s face as disapproval. “So it took us twenty-five minutes to get through that line,” he said defensively. “Will my witnesses please confirm that fact?”
Will nodded emphatically. “Like forever.”
Fanny said, “They gave us a free scoop because we had to wait so long.” When Will started for the house, she shouted after him, “I get the downstairs!”
Walter faced Fenno, hands on hips, poised to become indignant.
Quickly, quietly, Fenno said, “Something terrible has happened. Worse than terrible.” That’s when Kit walked through the hedgerow.
He told the two of them together. Knowing that the children might rejoin them within minutes, he delivered only the brunt of the news: that Lucinda had been swept into the water and drowned.
Kit cried out, “What are you telling me? What are you saying?”
“Unless there’s been a colossal error,” said Fenno. “This being the place it is, I’d like to think what I heard is nothing but lunacy—and until Christina gets here, we can hope the police have bollixed ev
erything up. But—”
“Where are my children?”
Walter clasped Kit’s shoulders. “In the house. They’re fine. They’re fed, they’re fine, we just got back. They’re safe.”
“Safe!” Kit looked as if he’d gone mad. He ran toward the street, and for a moment he disappeared through the privet.
Walter started after him, but Kit, reversing course, ran back toward the house. Too loudly, he called his children’s names.
“Bloody bloody hell,” whispered Fenno. “What now?”
Walter was already through the door. Fenno followed.
Wild-eyed, his voice shaky, Kit was telling his children to take their books and go read in their room. “It’s hot up there now,” Fanny complained.
“Sweetie,” said Walter, “why don’t you two go in our room. We have a jumbo fan.” He handed Will the bag they had dropped inside the door, their loot from the book sale, and he led them upstairs.
Fenno, who couldn’t bear to look at Kit, listened for the sound of the fan.
“This cannot be happening.” Kit started to whimper, then to cry loudly, uninhibitedly. He sat on the couch and doubled over.
Sit beside him, Fenno ordered himself. Awkwardly, he tried to put an arm around Kit’s shoulders. What could he say? What could anyone say? The policeman on the phone had spoken as if he were ashamed of the facts, as if the circumstances could have been averted; not as if this woman had heedlessly tempted fate. It crossed Fenno’s mind, uselessly, that some people would level blame at the town or the Coast Guard: sue someone for failing to prevent or thwart such a mishap. Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend that while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt.
Kit cried like a child, plaintively, forlornly, without any sign that he would try to take control of himself.
Fenno went into the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. “Kit, drink this. Please.”
Kit paused to look at the glass of water, then resumed crying.
Where was Walter? Was he explaining to the children? Did they see Lucinda as anything more than a benevolent stranger? Fan or no fan, they would hear their father’s calamitous lament through the gap-toothed bedroom floor.