What's Become of Her

by Deb Caletti

  When the net comes down on Henry North, though, Weary will not feel bad. Not for a second.

  The thing about Henry—he’s not just smart, he’s evil. Evil enough to both avoid the trap and lay the trap. He’s not some wild-eyed, knife-wielding psychopath, leading some high-speed police chase. And he doesn’t twirl a villainous mustache, imagining the gleeful demise of some poor woman. It’s what makes evil so evil, the everydayness of it. It’s as regular as the boiled egg or the cat food set under the net, the things that draw you forward so you don’t notice the other things. Evil is a clinking teaspoon against the teacup, the good manners, the worldly hobbies and the passionate kiss.

  Evil is two women, gone forever. One down a cliff, one lost at sea. Going on your merry way afterward.

  But evil is Henry North just being Henry North in his daily life, too, Weary believes. Henry being his superior self, first sitting above a person, and then observing and calculating, peck, peck, peck. He’s like Corvus with a shiny object, turning it around, investigating, playing with it for a while until it gets boring, and then burying it. Whatever the object is, the point is that it’s an object, a thing that loses its shine the more he looks at it. It’s dull, it’s plastic, it’s subpar, it’s not as shiny as he thought, and so he jabs and turns it and jabs from another side, and then discards. At first, the object is the shiniest and most special object on earth until, look, just as he suspected, it’s only a gum wrapper, a piece of garbage.

  What or who could be up to the standards of such greatness? No one. Every single person is an inevitable disappointment next to his own hungry, beautiful self. Weary remembers Sarah’s slow decline. You could see it right on her face, like the air being let out of a party balloon that was once bouncing, full, celebratory. No matter how you make a person disappear—it’s wrong. It’s a misuse of power. But evil doesn’t necessarily even know it’s evil. It can’t see other, so its effect on other is meaningless. The self is king, and any damage, well, who cares? Move along! Objects are all in service of the glorious non-self, the shadow self, the empty vessel self of Henry North and others like him. Round of applause for the amazing, incredible Mr. Marvelous! Sweep the trash out of the way, so he can find more shiny things that please him.

  Push the once-shiny object off a fucking cliff if you have to.

  Lotto is a young Kanak, the original inhabitants of New Caledonia, and he wears a paseo in retro homage to some relative who supposedly first led the revolts in 1878. He also wears an American T-shirt on top, which sports an image of Bazooka Joe. Weary likes Lotto. He’s affable, and he cares about the birds. Something else Weary likes about Lotto—he does what he is told. And what Weary tells him to do after the trap is dismantled and the distressed Rouss set loose again is to go home. It’s early, but they’ve done good work, Weary tells him. Every crow adds to their understanding of the species at large, and of the human-animal world as a whole.

  Blah, blah, blah.

  Not that Weary doesn’t truly care about the research. Oh, he does. Very much. But since he lost Sarah, he’s lived with a divided mind. A divided life. Secret obsessions have a way of drowning out everything else. They pound a drumbeat that gets louder and louder and closer and closer. It can sound like a haunting, taunting heartbeat, or the thump of stone upon stone as the wall of a cave is closed up. Weary dislikes Poe by association, but Poe was right about one aspect of revenge. One must punish, but punish with impunity.

  That is the tricky part, yes? Weary drives the Jeep back down the mud-and-crater road of Mount Khogi. As he rumbles past the black trees and the banyans and the coconut palms, navigates through the diminishing sandalwoods stripped by hunters, he thinks about the way oppressed animals have the last word. Those lions, the ones made to jump through humiliating hoops and stand on their back legs like silly lap dogs, they get their moment, don’t they? The dolphins, too, after one too many cute wave and forced high five with a flipper—they finally snap.

  And the crows, Corvus, perhaps most of all—well, they will remember a dangerous human or a kind one. If you are evil or malevolent, beware. They will spread the word about you, they will describe you in detail to one another, and they will even tell their children, who will tell their children’s children. And then they’ll plot bloody revenge.

  Enough is enough, that’s the thing. For an animal, for anyone.

  Objects, well, they become enraged eventually.

  Is respect so hard, Mr. Marvelous? Though, Weary supposes, a creature with a cold reptile heart and beady little reptile eyes will only slither and victimize and then lie on a warm rock, being who he is. A snake doesn’t think about that rodent or bird. He just thinks about being a snake, and what a snake needs.

  God, it fills him with fury. Finally back home, in his silent compound overlooking the sea (well, compound is generous, but it is spacious and cool with those lovely tile floors and walls and sliding doors and shutters made from the wood of the breadfruit tree and the coconut), Weary showers. It’s weird, maybe, but in private, he uses a lavender shampoo because Sarah did, and he uses a soap that smells like orange blossom on his own firm body, because that’s what she smelled like. And the smells bring her back like nothing else, as smells do. They make her come alive. It makes his heart ache.

  He sobs right there in the shower. He sobs so hard that he bends in half. And then he recovers. He regroups. He remembers what is still good, as lavender and orange blossom washes down the drain.

  He ties a robe around himself. Pads in his bare feet to the desk. He closes his eyes in a brief prayer that is not quite a prayer, because after everything that happened and is about to happen, he’s not entirely sure how he feels or should be allowed to feel about God.

  Please, he says, in a general way.

  He has, after all, been anticipating this all day. All week. Much, much longer.

  ShutR opens like a dream.

  There are three new photos. Weary’s heart is thumping so hard it’s almost a wild animal there in his chest. He tries to breathe—in, out. The anxiety and excitement is too much. If those photos are just Henry’s usual ho-hum flowers and sunset beach shots, the disappointment may be more than he can bear.

  But. You can feel when all your time and efforts and patience are about to pay off. Just like Corvus and the mist net, you can sense it about to happen.

  All right.

  Well, he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. There are new images, all right, but what is this? It’s a word, carved into stone. Walter. Walter? It makes no sense, and there are no other clues. It’s not a headstone, although it looks like one. There are no dates or even a last name. It’s a frustrating mystery.

  Next image, useless. One of Henry’s typical nature shots, dime a dozen, tree branches shot skyward. God rays of sun shining down, as if Henry North has more right to claim God than Weary himself does.

  Onward. Number three.

  Oh, it’s strange. So, so strange.

  It’s a table of sorts, a stone table in the woods. Weary will have to look this up. He will type in table and stone and Parrish Island. He will look up trail and woods and Parrish and Walter. His mind is clicking along, speeding down all the possibilities of his next move. He will find out what it is, and where it is, and then he’ll search for all recent photos anywhere by anyone. Maybe there’s a crowd of people there, not in that image. Maybe someone else snapped a photo that will—

  In all his leaping ahead and scheming his next move, he almost misses what’s right here in front of him this very second. But perhaps God (or fate, or whatever Weary manages to believe in on a given day) is tap, tap, tapping on his chamber door, urging, because he spots it.

  What is that?

  What is that there? Something almost out of the frame, but not quite.

  Enlarge, enlarge—zoom, zoom, zoom.

  It’s a hand, on the back of one of the stone chairs. There’s the bump of wrist bone, and a woven bracelet. Small, delicate fingers.

  A hand th
at Henry North, the great photographer (Mr. Marvelous is never as great as he is in his own mind), has neglected to crop out. And the most important thing about this hand (Calm down! Weary tells himself) is the bracelet and the shiny pink-orange polish on the fingers.

  It’s like he’s in the forest, crouched on his haunches with the binoculars pressed to his eyes. It’s like he’s spotted a singular and long-awaited specimen. Blood whooshes through Weary’s veins in the same pulsing way. He was right about the grocery bill, and later, that Visa charge at a restaurant. The Bayshore. He was absolutely right. Henry is seeing someone.

  There she is, he thinks.

  Oh, the color of that polish—it’s so hopeful, so open.

  It hurts to see it. And it hurts to see that bracelet, too. It reminds Weary of Virginia’s watch, things ripped and torn in moments of anger. He’s crushed. And now the anxiety, the fear, really shoves forward, because how did he not anticipate this, the responsibility he’d have to this girl? Dear God! He’s been waiting, he’s been wishing, and suddenly, she’s here, and his plan is in motion. But he hadn’t thought this through. He should have helped Sarah sooner, and he didn’t, and it’s the biggest regret of his life. He now realizes he has timing issues. He now realizes he has even larger worries than he first thought. Because a plan is fine. But another dead woman is not.

  Chapter 9

  Isabelle has the weekend free, since Taylor Han comes in to do all the secondary tasks that Island Air doesn’t really need Isabelle for anyway. Kit had a kidney stone and had to take a few days off, but Jane already arranged for a contract pilot from Anacortes to keep their schedule on track. Phones get answered; payments get made. The planes go in and the planes go out as they have for years, splashing down, lifting off, right on time. Really, Isabelle feels as useless at Island Air as she did in college working at Nordstrom’s Brass Plum, where she’d hang back shyly as the other “sales associates” boldly approached shoppers looking for the right sweaters to go with certain jeans. Isabelle is not passive; she hates that word. Just, if people are larger and louder, she tends to let them go ahead being larger and louder.

  But, hey, it’s great, because Saturday is hers. And it’s the kind of spring day that gives spring its reputation. You can smell that summer is coming with just a few more twirls of the planet. The air is warm, and dewy arrowheads of bulbs have recently edged up. Isabelle should be going through all her mother’s stuff, she should at least have a conversation with Jenny Sedgewick, who’s called more than once, saying her son, Thomas, wants to buy the house if she’s selling. She should maybe mow the little lawn in the back; the small patch where the two lounge chairs overlooking the sound now resemble a pair of cats crouched in long grass. She should maybe do a hundred different things. But this is a day she wants to greet.

  And Henry has called, as he does now every morning and every night. They’ve both decided that it’s too beautiful a day to waste. They, meaning the two of them, making decisions together. Waste, meaning every have-to on her list. It’s true, though—in the Northwest, days like this are ones you should take advantage of. The weather of the San Juan Islands is mercurial, stormy. It’s as moody as Isabelle’s mother was. The clouds can go from plump and angelic one minute to dark and vengeful the next, spitting a fury of hard rain. Blue sky days make everyone a little euphoric. The convertible tops come down and the shorts go on, even if it’s sixty degrees out.

  And now that the endless, dull metal-gray of winter is mostly over, tourists are starting their annual migration, so it’s good that she and Henry had decided to meet over by the harbor rather than in town. It’ll be quieter, without ferries dumping traffic onto small streets.

  Let’s go out, Henry had said.

  Out?

  Out-out, like on the water.

  There’s a couple of boats you can—

  Just come. I’ll handle it. We can pretend we’re away from all this.

  There isn’t much of all this that Isabelle wants to be away from lately. Look at the old hotel, sprawling like an aging actress managing to keep her graces, look at the green lawn rolling down to the docks, look at the blue water and the perfect white V of a seagull propped in a postcard sky. It all makes Isabelle feel glad. It makes her want every bit of it, and more. And here comes Henry, his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts, his shirt untucked, his brown hair loose, and an overlooked dot of sun lotion on his nose. A dog trots beside him.

  “You made a new friend,” she says, as they kiss hello.

  “This is Rocko, who’ll unfortunately be returning to The Windswept.” Rocko’s ear twitches at his name. Henry scruffs the dog’s neck. Even Isabelle’s mom would have approved. Good guys like dogs, she always said. Isabelle’s father (no wonder she hates the word passive) liked cats, and Harv didn’t like anything, even Maggie, it often seemed.

  “Pleased to meet you, Rocko.”

  “I rented us a boat. The Red Pearl.”

  “Oh, wow. Yeah. I know the boat.” She wants to laugh, because the Red Pearl is a cabin cruiser that’s been docked at Delgado Harbor forever. Isabelle didn’t even know the motor actually ran. A couple of sleazy former divers, Jan and Dave, own it, and there always used to be high school parties on it, with young girls in bikinis aboard. Now, Jan and Dave are at the age of Viagra and bad knees. Back then, though, the Red Pearl was for losing both your virginity and your common sense.

  “Come on. I got us all set up.”

  There it is, the Red Pearl, same as it ever was. “Fantastic old wooden boat, don’t you think? What a beauty.” Henry hops on board. He holds out his hand, even though Isabelle doesn’t need it. She’s been stepping onto rocking vessels since she was a toddler, and can drive a boat like a captain. When you grow up on Parrish, water is your element.

  “Oh, it is. It’s lovely,” she says. She doesn’t know why she’s lying. All she sees when she looks at the wood cabin and brass rails is Kale Kramer puking up too much tequila over the side. She smells the faint pee-tang of beer, too, but maybe it’s just her memory adding details.

  “This right here is history. Imagine the stories.”

  Well, she doesn’t exactly have to imagine. And she doesn’t tell him this, either. She’s doing that thing, the thing she swore she would never do again, the hiding, the pleasing, the polishing. If she can’t be herself entirely now, if she can’t say what she really thinks, when will she? When she’s ninety?

  Henry ducks into the chartroom. “Hey, look!” he calls. He’s sitting on the wooden stool mounted in front of the desk, one hand cupping an old brass compass. “This probably brought the old girl in from rough waters many a time.”

  If anyone was in rough waters, it was young girls. Young girls in rough underage waters, and the captain didn’t so much sit on that stool navigating high-sea adventure as sit on that stool getting blow jobs he should have been arrested for.

  “I’m sure it has,” Isabelle says. A person could misunderstand and think that all the careful steps and mini-evasions are about keeping herself perfect in his eyes, but they’re really about keeping him perfect in his own. If she tells him the truth about the boat now, he’ll feel like a fool, and she perhaps already senses that Henry’s ego is a fragile thing that must be held carefully, lest it break. Isabelle performs this self-saving service for everyone, not just the men in her life. She buffs up the esteem of repairmen and grocery clerks, fellow passengers on airplanes, and waitresses. It’s a tough job, helping everyone feel good about themselves. An exhausting job.

  And to all the strong women in her head who judge her for performing this endless service, especially for the men in her life, women like her friend Alice, who’d never dance around a person’s mood or flagging self-image, she says, Shut up. She says, You have no idea, and Alice doesn’t. Alice was raised with the right to speak her mind and not be smacked for it. Alice got her MFA because she wanted to. Alice doesn’t take shit from anyone. But Alice had not spent her formative years making nice to avoid being in
trouble, in big trouble. Alice had not been a little child weatherman, watching the sky, bolting for shelter, holding the kite with the key in the lightning storm. Alice will never get the way childhood fear can lead to paralysis and perpetual anxious tending, so shut your mouth, Alice! Isabelle knows full well what she does and why. She just can’t get to the next part, where she stops.

  “They don’t make boats like this anymore,” Henry says, outside again. “Don’t you hate those big Bayliners with the cup holders and the giant speakers pumping music?”

  “Evan loved those,” she says.

  “And we won’t go hungry.” He nudges a cooler with his toe. She looks inside. Cheese and wine and fruit, stuff the Red Pearl’s never seen before. Its usual fare was Budweiser, maybe. Bean dip in a can.

  “Wow. That looks amazing.”

  Henry sits in the driver’s seat outside, turns the engine, which coughs and then spits black noxious gas before clearing, like an old smoker with emphysema. Isabelle lifts the top of a bench and tucks her bag inside. She could back this boat out of this marina with her eyes closed, and she knows just how far they can go out on the sound before the water gets too rough. But she tosses her sweatshirt on the padded chair next to the captain. It’s okay. For now, he can drive. “Where are we heading?”

  “A little trip around the island?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Isabelle is untying the floats when Jan himself comes jogging up the dock with a few life jackets under his arm. They’re the retro orange kind, the sort you used to wear as a kid, that strap around your waist and buck your chin high.

  “I just remembered that these were on the Sunsurfer! Coast Guard regulations.” Jan’s got a big gray beard now, and booze eyes. He can still see clearly, though, because he says, “Isabelle Austen, is that you?”