Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea

by Sarah Pinsker

He just shook his head. It was as if he knew every trick for self-promotion and then set about sabotaging himself. Millie didn’t complain. When money was tight, when Jane needed braces or when a storm blew the roof off the garage, Millie found work. She tried not to resent the change. Whatever it was the other architects had that drove them to create no longer seemed to be a part of George. He designed bland suburban houses, and later strip malls and office parks. The high-rises and mansions and museums went to other, more ambitious draftsmen.

  “Show me your designs,” she begged him. “The projects you want to work on.”

  “They’re only buildings,” he said, shrugging. This time it was true.

  “A new subdivision?” She tried to ask in a way that sounded excited.

  “Yes. A whole neighborhood, but just three different house designs.”

  “Are you designing all of them?”

  “No, I’m in charge of the four bedroom, but I have to work with another fellow so that they look like they came from the same brain.”

  “You’re very talented, you know.” She said this as often as possible without sounding trite. “I wish you would get a chance to make all those things you used to talk about.”

  He laughed and turned away from the drafting table. “You’re sweet to say so, but it’s not art. It’s just my job. I make what they want me to make.”

  When the wives of the firm’s partners mentioned their husbands’ latest endeavors, she smiled and volunteered nothing. If he didn’t want to be an artist, he didn’t have to be, but she couldn’t understand how he took pride in his draftsmanship and dismissed it at the same time. Try as she might, she was unable to put her finger on what exactly he had lost. How could she complain about a man who helped with the dishes every night, who read to the children, who taught them to measure twice and cut once? She tried to encourage him, but he turned everything around.

  “Why don’t you get another degree?” he asked one day, after the children had both started high school. “You’ve always wanted to learn more about your plants.”

  She did it, half hoping to motivate him again as well. She had a master’s degree and a doctorate in botany by the time she realized she would never goad him into competing with her. He let her take over his office and his drafting table when she needed them for her garden designs. He corrected others when they assumed he was the doctor in the family, and spoke of her accomplishments, but never said a word about his own. When she tried to brag to others about his work, he responded with self-deprecation. She hated herself for wishing him to be anything other than what he had become, and worked on loving him for the person that he was. He was a match that refused to ignite; she felt selfish for wanting him to burn brightly.

  Over time, it ceased to matter as much. Her career bloomed, and she learned not to press him about his. The children grew up and left and came back and left and had children of their own. In retirement she found him to be much easier company. She enjoyed watching his comfortable way with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and loved it when he began to design new tree-house additions for the new generations.

  She wasn’t sure if it was fair to judge anyone by the man he had been in his twenties. The person you marry is not the same person you grow old with. She was sure he could say the same thing about her. She was sorry it had taken her so long to learn that, to stop pushing him, but that was probably the way of it.

  Raymond drove her to the hospital, then returned to the house. “I’m on to something,” he said, kissing her on the forehead and dashing out again. Millie watched reruns from the straight-backed chair beside George’s bed. Jane and Charlie took turns beside her, occasionally slipping out to talk in the hallway. She thought she heard Charlie say “retirement community” at least twice.

  She let the TV distract her. Every man on television seemed to be an architect. Every sitcom and every movie, from the Brady Bunch on, seemed to feature some young man with blueprints and skyscraper dreams. Why was that? It was artsy but manly, she supposed. Sensitive without being soft. A perfect occupation for a man with a creative side who also wanted to support his family, at least until the day he decided he didn’t want to do it anymore. That didn’t seem to happen on television.

  Raymond arrived back late in the evening, the glow of success evident in his face. It only took him a moment to convince his mother and uncle to go grab some dinner before the cafeteria closed.

  “I think I found what you were looking for, Grandma.” It was amazing how much he looked like a young George when he smiled. Taller, thankfully for him, and with a strange lop-sided haircut, but with the same rakish confidence that she had so admired. She returned the smile. She hadn’t really thought there would be anything to find, but it had been worth a shot.

  “There are a bunch of compartments all over the tree house, but most of them are still filled with toys and baseball cards and stuff. Anyway, I remembered that one time my cousin Joseph was chasing me ’cause he wanted my Steve Austin action figure. I didn’t know where to put it that he wouldn’t find it. I was almost to the top when I realized that the metal struts that support the crow’s nest are hollow, if you have something to pry them open with. I had my pocket knife with me. The first one I opened had something wedged in it, so I stashed Steve Austin in the second one until Joseph went home. Never thought to look at what was in that first one until now.”

  With a flourish, he produced a blueprint tube from behind his back. “I opened it to make sure there was something in it—there is—but I didn’t look at what’s inside.”

  She tried to keep her voice from quavering. She hoped the others would stay away from the room a little longer. “Shall we?”

  Ray slid the rolled paper out, laying the drawing across George’s legs.

  “George, we’re looking at the blueprints you hid.” She thought it was only fair to explain what was going on.

  This was the same prison he had drawn on the butcher paper. Done on proper drafting paper, and more detailed, but still with an unfinished quality. He wouldn’t have been allowed to bring the actual plans home; he must have sketched it again later. Her eye roved the paper, trying to understand the nuances of the horrible place. She had seen enough of George’s plans that they rose from the paper as fully formed buildings in her mind.

  “It’s the same,” she said, but as she said it, she caught the flaw that she had missed in the cruder drawing. She looked closer, but there was no mistaking it. In this all-seeing prison, a small blind spot. To her knowledge, George had never made an error on a blueprint. Had he done the same thing on the original? Had anyone else noticed, in the engineering or the construction? She had no way of knowing if this sketch was true to the thing that had been built, or if he had changed the design in retrospect. She could still only guess at what to say to ease his mind.

  Millie leaned over to kiss George’s stubbled cheek. She whispered in his ear. “Maybe you did it, old man. Maybe you gave them a chance.”

  Jane spent the drive home updating her mother on her own work and the escapades of various children and grandchildren. Millie lost track, but appreciated the diversion. When they got to the house, her daughter headed straight for the kitchen.

  “Tea?” Jane was already picking up the kettle.

  “Tea would be wonderful,” Millie agreed, before excusing herself to the bedroom.

  She crossed the room in the dark and opened the French doors, letting the winter air inside. She had never tired of this view, not in any season. Tonight, the light of the full moon reflected off the snow and disappeared in Raymond’s footprints. The naked branches of the sycamore were long white fingers outlined in light; they performed benedictions over the empty platforms of the tree house.

  Millie stepped through the doorway and onto the patio. The drifts were nearly up to her knees. She took two more steps, toward the tree. The cold made her eyes water.

&
nbsp; She wished she could go back to that night in 1951, ask George what he had done and how she might share his burden. She was too late for so much. She allowed herself to grieve it all for a moment: her husband, their life together, the things they had shared and the things they had held back. It surrounded her like the cold, filling up the space expelled by her breath, until she fixed her eyes again on the tree house. Everything missing from the body in the hospital was still here. The Georgeness.

  “Oh,” she whispered, as the day hit her.

  “I won’t leave,” she said to the tree. Raymond would help her, maybe, or she would hire someone who would. The lights continued to dance after she had made her way back inside. They danced behind her eyelids when she closed her eyes.

  Millie remembered the dream house that George used to promise her, back when this was a passing-through place, not their home. She was suddenly glad he had never gotten the chance to build it, that he had instead devoted himself to countless iterations of one mad project. Even the best plans get revised.

  In the morning, there were pamphlets for a retirement village on the kitchen table.

  Jane looked apologetic. “Charlie says we should talk about your options.”

  “I know my options,” Millie said, setting a mug down on one of the smiling silver-haired faces.

  She refused to let Jane help with the briefcase she carried with her to the hospital. When they got to George’s room, she sent Charlie and Jane to get breakfast.

  “I’d like some time with my husband,” she said.

  Then they were alone again, alone except for the noisy machines by the bedside and the ticking clock and the television and the nurses’ station outside the door. None of that was hard to tune out.

  “We’re going to draw again, old man.”

  She opened the briefcase and pulled out a drawing board, a piece of paper, and a handful of pencils. She managed to angle a chair so that she was leaning half on the bed. George’s hand closed around the pencil when she placed it against his palm. All the phantom energy of two days previous was gone. Her movement now led his, both of her hands clasped around his left.

  He was the draftsman, but she knew plants. They started with the roots. She guided him through the shape of the tree, through the shape of his penance. Through every branch they both knew by heart, through every platform she had seen from her vantage point in the garden. The firehouse pole, the puppet theater, the Rapunzel tower. The crow’s nest, which had kept his secret. Finally, around the treehouse, they started on her plans for the spring’s gardens. All that mattered was his hand pressed in hers: long enough to feel like always, long enough to feel like everything trapped had been set free.

  — No Lonely Seafarer —

  On the nights Mrs. Wainwright let me work in the barn instead of the tavern, I used to sing to the horses. They would greet me with their own murmurs, and swivel their ears to follow my voice as I readied their suppers. That was where Captain Smythe found me: in the barn, singing a song of my own making. I shut up as soon as I heard the door squeal on its hinges.

  “You’re Freddy Turlington’s boy, aren’t you?” His voice was rummy but not drunk. There were men around I felt the need to hide from, but he didn’t seem like one of them.

  “Turlington was my father.”

  I watched him from one of the stalls. He sat down heavily on a bale of bedding straw, grunting as if the effort pressed all the air from his lungs. He wore a well-fitted blue coat and his boots still shone with care, which set him apart from most of our patrons these days.

  “You must be, what, ten now?”

  I didn’t answer, but resumed my feeding rounds. Thirteen. Close enough. The horses rumbled their pleases and thank yous.

  “What’s your name, child?”

  “Alex,” I answered.

  “Alex, do you know who I am?”

  “Captain Smythe. My father sailed with you.”

  “Freddy was a good sailor and a good cook. I was sorry he got himself killed.”

  That one didn’t really have an answer, so I left it. I climbed up into the loft, dangling my legs over. He looked up at me. His face was red, but less from drink than from exposure, as far as I could tell from the uniformity of the color. His skin had the look of leather left out in the sun.

  “Can you sail, child?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I wished he would get to his point, whatever it was, but he was in no hurry. He closed his eyes. I thought for a moment he had fallen asleep, but then he addressed me again.

  “I’d like you to sail out with me next week.”

  I assessed him again. I hadn’t thought him drunk, but he had to know we couldn’t sail anywhere. I chose to take the practical tack first. “I can’t. My father bonded me to Mrs. Wainwright when he left me here.”

  “I spoke with Mrs. Wainwright about buying your bond. Or leasing it, I should say. I’ll only have need of you for a short trip. I need somebody your age on board. Do you know why?”

  I considered for a moment. “You think I can get you past the sirens?”

  He smiled. “Well done. Yes. We must get past the sirens, and beeswax doesn’t bloody well do it, contrary to anything Homer said. Bright child.”

  It didn’t take intelligence. There wasn’t a person in Dog’s Bay who hadn’t heard about the sirens now nesting on the headland, singing at anyone who tried to pass, keeping ships from getting in or out. The streets and the taverns and the boardinghouses were all clogged with sailors, who were in turn clogged with their desire to be back on the sea. It was part of why I felt so much safer in the barn. The Salt Dog tavern became rowdier with each passing night. Fights and fires would come next, according to Mrs. Wainwright. She said she was old enough to have seen it all before.

  “What about sirens?” I had asked her.

  She shook her head. “Not personally, but search the sea long enough and you’ll see most stories have some truth to them.”

  Everyone in port had an opinion on how to get past the sirens. In recent evenings past, clearing tables, I had heard debate after debate on the matter. Lucius Nickleby had been the first to try to leave. He and his men had stuffed their ears with beeswax, the way the Greeks had done. John Harrow watched through his spyglass on shore as they threw themselves from the deck. Ahmed Fairouz, with his fluyt Mahalia, had attempted to outrun the bewitching songs. The Mahalia was dashed to splinters on the rocks below the promontory. A month later, pieces were still washing to shore with each tide.

  “You understand what I’m proposing, boy?” Smythe asked.

  “You’re hoping that their voices don’t work on a child.”

  “I’m betting my life on it.”

  I dropped down from the loft and walked over to where he was sitting. He was not a large man, though I was much smaller. Up close, his blue coat was stained and split-seamed. It made me bolder than I might have been otherwise. “You’re betting my life on it as well. Do you expect to rouse an entire crew of children, then? Or am I to tie all your men to the masts until we pass?”

  He was silent as he appraised me afresh. Maybe my voice was older than he expected, or maybe he caught a glimmer of what Mrs. Wainwright called “the off thing” about me. When he spoke again, the false cheer was gone from his voice. “I’m thinking it would be the two of us, in a small fishing boat I purchased for the purpose. And yes, I would have you tie me up, but no use risking my men or my ship if I’m wrong. If I’m right, we can pass unharmed, then return to port. If I’m mistaken, well, at least I die at sea, as I was meant to do.”

  “As you were meant to do,” I echoed, emphasizing the “you.” His chosen destiny, not mine. Not that I had any reason to expect a choice. If Mrs. Wainwright wanted to sell or rent my bond, she had every right. Then again, I liked that Smythe had come to me as if it were a question. I liked the idea of seeing something beyond Do
g’s Bay, even if only briefly. I had never considered myself an heir to my father’s wanderlust, but maybe some small sliver of it in me begged to be entertained. I wanted to see how the ocean differed from the cove, and why it called to all of the men of our town as persuasively as any siren.

  “If you’ve already spoken with Mrs. Wainwright and she’s said I’m to go, I’ve no business saying otherwise.” His rough hand dwarfed mine when we shook on it.

  I waited until the next day to seek out Mrs. Wainwright. I found her overseeing the morning meal, making sure the twins ladled each customer exactly the right amount of porridge. She rarely cheated a patron, just made sure they got what they had paid for and nothing more. It had taken a long time to get the twins to understand that nuance; now, at seven, they needed only minimal supervision.

  I waved a greeting. Eliza waved back, but Simon was clearly using all his attention to make sure the spoon got to the bowl and back without making a mess.

  I came around the bar and Mrs. Wainwright swatted me with a towel. The gesture was friendly, her tone only mock stern.

  “Don’t be distracting them now. I might allow them to serve stew if this comes off right. Are the horses fed and watered?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That little chestnut that came in with the knife salesman is still not drinking, though.”

  “Hopefully he’ll leave again before he notices. Bit of a fool in any case. Try giving it some beer in its water when you go out next. Maybe the water here tastes different from the other side of the island. I’ll tell you, I’ll be happy when all of these opportunists hitch up and drive away and things get back to normal.”

  She squinted at me, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “Something bothering you, Alex?”

  “That captain you sent out to the barn last night?”

  She nodded. “Smythe. Good man. Used to come around a fair bit back in the day. Bad luck for him that the first time he swings out our way in a dog’s year is when those screechy biddies settle down to roost. Here, make yourself useful.”