Blue Water

by A. Manette Ansay

  But my mother shook her head. “Anna thinks it’s some kind of financial trouble. Evie Haldiger heard the same thing. You went to school with one of the Haldigers, didn’t you?” She cocked her head, thinking. “Vivian? Or was it Beatrice?”

  I couldn’t have cared less about the Haldigers just then. “What expenses could he have, Mom?” I said. “The fish store’s up and down a bit, but he makes good money on those charters. Besides, you and Dad would help him out, if he needed it. And Mallory works, too.”

  “Actually, we offered to buy that cottage for them. A wedding gift.” My mother held out the peeled egg. “Anything to get him out of that hellhole.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You aren’t getting enough protein, I can tell.”

  I took the egg; it was rubbery, cool. “So why did they break their contract?”

  “I don’t know. But you should know that Toby refused our help with it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he felt—well, he and Mal were concerned that it might cause problems with you and Rex.”

  “They can’t think we’d be jealous of the money,” I said, flushing at the casual way my mother shortened Mallory’s name.

  “They think,” my mother said pointedly, “you’d object to us doing something for him that would also benefit her. And I must admit, I had qualms about it myself. For Evan’s sake.”

  I ate the egg. I didn’t know what to say. Had Rex come back from Echo with the news—Christ, your parents even bought them a place to live!—of course, I would have felt betrayed. And yet, I realized, I sincerely wanted Toby to have a home. I wanted him to be happy. He and Mallory were remarkably right for each other, despite the difference in their ages, their lifestyles, their assorted idiosyncrasies. The times they’d babysat for Evan, Rex and I had returned home, late, to find them playing Scrabble at the kitchen table, classical music on the radio, sipping tea made from herbs that Mallory had gathered, wild, along the railroad tracks. Profligate intersecting with claxon; civisms running up against elision. Toby was smart, even brilliant, but he’d barely graduated high school. Mallory had dropped out at sixteen, yet the camper she traveled around in every summer, selling jewelry at festivals and craft fairs, was crammed with paperback classics: Tolstoy, Austen, Camus. Where else would Toby find someone with his level of education, coupled with his own intellectual intensity? Where else would he find somebody who practiced what she preached about the virtues of inner beauty? Beneath the wool cap and the oversize shirts, Mallory was attractive, vibrant. Beside her, Toby both reflected that beauty and, somehow, absorbed it, too.

  A few months prior to Evan’s death, Mallory had invited us all to dinner at her efficiency apartment over the mill. “Will we all fit?” I’d asked Toby, who’d said, “Why don’t you come and see?” Rex had begged off, claiming work, but when Evan and I arrived, we discovered a lovely meal laid out on the floor, spread across an Indian print: spinach lasagna, homemade bread, apple pie for dessert. The apartment itself, like Toby’s, was a festival of code violations: taped-over outlets, that bathtub still in the kitchen, the toilet—so I discovered—in a sinkless cell so low that you had to duck your head. But the boarded-up window overlooking the parking lot had been painted with a beaming, golden sun king, and the cracked plaster walls were concealed beneath the long, thriving arms of hanging ivy. A cast-iron dog, nearly three feet tall, kept the warped closet door from opening. A salvaged carousel horse pranced, midair, from its pole; it actually seemed to be bracing up the ceiling.

  Evan, of course, had been delighted with it all. He suggested that we abandon our own dining table as soon as we got back home. He liked the futon couch, which doubled as a bed. He especially liked getting to choose his own tea mug from the mismatched assortment that hung, in a descending row, from hooks pushed into the wall.

  “You found these in the trash?” he said, his voice scaling upward with admiration and awe.

  “It’s amazing what people throw away,” Mallory said. “Pretty much everything in this room is something I found at the curb.”

  “Including me,” Toby said, only he was laughing as he said it.

  “That’s right,” Mallory said. “Dusted you off, changed your diet—”

  “Now, if you could just get him to trim that beard a little bit,” I said, trying to join in, but it was wrong.

  “I like your brother’s beard,” Mallory said, meeting my gaze.

  I said nothing.

  “Total acceptance,” Toby said, jumping in to fill the silence. “What more could any man ask for?”

  When we got back home, Evan raced up the stairs to the crow’s nest, eager to tell Rex that we ought to get rid of our table so we, too, could eat on the floor. I put away our coats, cleaned up the remnants of Rex’s solitary supper—he was good about putting dishes away, but never noticed crumbs on the counter—then sat at the table, sorting through the mail, thinking about the way Mallory had looked at me when I’d commented on Toby’s beard. The way I would have looked at anybody, any woman, who’d made a similar remark about Rex. I would never like Mallory Donaldson, I decided. I’d never be fully comfortable in her presence. But I could see how, over time, I might come to like her—even love her—for Toby’s sake.

  For her goodness to him. For her protectiveness.

  “So what did she serve you?” Rex asked, coming down the stairs. “Weeds and seeds?”

  “Lasagna,” Evan said, trooping after him, wearing his spaceship pajamas.

  “Everything was homemade,” I said, determined to be positive. “And no white flour. No sugar. The apple pie was sweetened with dates. Did you brush you teeth?” I asked Evan, who arched his back and clung to the banister, echoing, “Brush, brush, brush!”

  “Did he brush his teeth?” I asked Rex.

  “Not yet,” Rex said, and he was laughing. “I’m sorry, I just can’t imagine Toby eating that way.” He picked Evan up, turned him upside down, carried him down the stairs by the knees. “Do you know what your uncle used to eat for breakfast every day?”

  “Eggs!” Evan shouted. His head swung a mere inch from each step; I had to look away.

  “A Snickers bar and a Coke.”

  “Diet Coke,” I said. “Be fair.”

  “And there he is, poor bastard—”

  “Rex.”

  “Poor chap, eating tofu three times a day.”

  He dropped Evan into my lap, right side up, and Evan said, with sudden seriousness: “Mallory doesn’t eat anything that has eyes, Dad.”

  “You mean,” Rex said, lowering his voice in exaggerated horror, “she only eats things that are blind?”

  For a split second, Evan’s expression mirrored Rex’s, albeit sincerely. Then—zing. He got it. He shrieked with delight. We all were laughing together, now: uncontrollably, deliciously, cruelly. The laughter of people who belong to something, in the presence of someone who doesn’t.

  Now I sat with my mother in silence, swallowing the last, dry mouthfuls of egg. Voices passed outside the door, a family heading toward the elevators, the mother’s voice low, but carrying: Don’t run.

  “Anna told me something else,” my mother said. “About Cindy Ann. If you want to know.”

  I waited.

  “She’s not going to be at the wedding. She’s checked herself into some kind of hospital. For people who have been, you know, abused. Sexually, I mean. It’s somewhere north of Madison.” My mother tapped her finger against the glass tabletop. “I never heard anything about her being abused before, did you? Though the stepfather, what was his name—”

  “Dan Kolb.” Suddenly cold, I tucked my bare feet under my robe. At least, I thought, I won’t have to see her. At least, she won’t have to see me.

  “Anything’s possible, I suppose,” my mother continued. “But it seems like something an attorney would suggest, doesn’t it? To make her situation seem more sympathetic? Though I guess that wouldn’t matter, now that you’ve dropped the suit. And I have to
say, I’m glad you did.”

  I glanced at her, sharply, but no. She did not suspect the truth. Had there been so much as a whisper afloat, she’d have had the whole story from Evie Haldiger.

  “I couldn’t care less about her, you understand,” my mother continued. “But I always hoped she’d pull herself together, for the sake of those girls. And Mal is a decent person, a good person. You can see how hard she tries. She sent us a sympathy card, did I tell you that? On Evan’s anniversary?”

  “We didn’t drop the suit,” I said.

  My mother looked stunned. “But—of course, you did. Before you bought the boat.”

  I got up, walked over to the TV, picked up the FedEx package. “I thought we did,” I said. “But it turns out that Rex didn’t. He and Arnie got a detective to follow Cindy Ann around, taking pictures.”

  “Pictures of what?” my mother asked.

  I dropped the package between us on the table. “Pictures that document the fact that she’s still drinking. She’s been drinking all along, Mom. Rex always thought that she was.”

  “And driving?”

  “I suppose it’s safe to assume,” I said, “that if there’s one, there’s probably the other.”

  “I don’t believe it,” my mother said. “I just can’t believe she’d be so stupid!”

  “Here’s proof,” I said, nodding at the package. “And a settlement offer, too. Supposedly, she’s already signed it. Rex, too—or, at least, Arnie signed on his behalf. All I have to do is write my name on the dotted line.”

  My mother was studying my face. “But you don’t want to do it?”

  “If I don’t, I think it will be difficult for Rex and me to live together again.”

  Suddenly, I felt so unbelievably sad that I had to close my eyes. For God’s sake, I thought. It’s Christmas Eve. It will be our second Christmas without him. And I just stood there for a moment, missing him so overwhelmingly: his body, his physical presence in the world.

  “I imagine,” my mother said, gently, “that it’s difficult for two people to live on a boat during the best of times.”

  “It’s more than that. We’re not getting over this. We seem better, at least on the surface, but we’re not. We’re just as furious and helpless and—”

  My mother put her hand on mine.

  “I can’t even talk about it,” I said, “because it just goes around and around in my head. Maybe Rex is right and this won’t ever be resolved unless there’s some kind of concrete restitution. God.” I stood up, but I didn’t move away from that anchoring hand. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I probably shouldn’t have come back. I wish sometimes that a big wave would come and just—take us. End things. Once and for all.”

  For a long time, my mother didn’t speak. Then she said, “You would know, from experience, how I’d feel if that happened.”

  I squeezed her hand, sat down again. “I know. I don’t mean it,” I managed to say, although, at that moment, I did. “I guess I ought to look at the photographs, anyway.”

  “May I see them, too?”

  I shrugged. “Go ahead. It’s just pictures of her sitting around, drinking.”

  But when my mother opened the package, dozens of page proofs slid out onto the table, black-and-white glimpses of Cindy Ann’s life, moment by moment, day after day. Unloading groceries, checking her mail, taking out the trash. Standing in front of the bank with Amy; exiting the Cup and Cruller with Monica. At the upscale gym on Lakewood. Sitting on the curb after a run. A separate sleeve of photos had been taken at night, the telescopic lens aimed toward the lighted windows. There was Cindy Ann with Laurel, the two of them watching TV. The four of them eating dinner together. Cindy Ann and Monica playing with one of the cats. And I suddenly saw not only these photos, but also the ones that hadn’t been taken, thousands of intimate snapshots that the detective had glimpsed during that week of her life. Cindy Ann undressing for bed, lamplight pouring down over her body. Passing, bare-shouldered, before the bedroom window, wet-headed from the shower. Dashing out, half-dressed, for the morning paper. He’d been diligent, the detective. Of course, he would have seen everything there was to see.

  It was moments just like these Dan Kolb had stolen thirty years ago, biding his time. Private moments of quiet concentration. Casual clothes, careless limbs. A glimpse of a breast, a pale slice of skin.

  Maybe he thought you wanted him to.

  At the bottom of the pile was a manila envelope with a Post-it note stuck to the back. Jackpot, Arnie had written. Inside, I found enlargements of the most condemning photographs: Cindy Ann at Discount Liquors. Cindy Ann carrying the empty bottles out with the recycling. Sitting at the kitchen counter alone, another bottle in front of her, a half-empty glass. That same glass in her hand. That same glass at her mouth. Her expression like the pale, lost face of a ghost. Lines on either side of her mouth, purplish shadows under her eyes. Flesh thickening, slightly, around her upper arms. A body that might have been my own.

  I guessed that Arnie had sent all the photos on purpose, in order that I might see for myself what, once, had galled me, enraged me. The semblance of normalcy in Cindy Ann’s life. The trips to the store, to the bank, to the gym. The meals with her daughters, the bedtime routines. But the longer I looked at each picture, the more obvious it became to me that nothing had been normal in Cindy Ann Kreisler’s life for a very long time. Still, her signature on the settlement agreement looked exactly as I remembered it—swollen with looping circles, curlicues, that dangling, girlish y.

  Putting down the pictures, sliding them back into the envelope, I felt as if I was putting away the dark weight of my anger. Again, that unalloyed sadness overwhelmed me: heart to stomach, muscle to bone. How it hurt, and there was nothing to distract me, protect me. I would have to stand and take it on my own.

  “Will she go to jail?” my mother asked, and I knew she was seeing what I had seen, because her voice sounded small and sad.

  “She could. She isn’t supposed to be drinking.” I touched the fat settlement agreement. “But this is a financial settlement. Basically, she’d be paying us to keep these photos out of court.”

  “With what? Evie says her trust money’s gone. The bank’s fore-closing on her house. Her oldest daughter has moved in with friends. From the sound of things, she’s ruined herself completely.”

  I waited to feel something: vindication, satisfaction. Instead, what I felt was concern. I remembered Amy in that Dairy Castle uniform, moving toward me like a ghost. Thinking to myself, how strange it was, that she’d have to work the same, terrible job her mother had held. Had hated. Cindy Ann had never said so, but I knew.

  A thought occurred to me then. “Have you heard where the younger girls are staying?” I asked. “While Cindy Ann’s at this hospital, I mean?”

  “Who knows? Her mother certainly can’t take them. I suppose they’re with her other sister, you know, that Jehovah’s Witness.”

  But I was up out of my chair, pacing around the room. I’m not supposed to talk on the phone, that clear little voice had said. The voice of a girl, roughly eight years old.

  The voice of Cindy Ann’s youngest daughter.

  “I know why Toby is avoiding us,” I said. “He and Mallory are taking care of those kids.”

  “In that hellhole?” my mother said. “Good god, I hope not. For everybody’s sake.”

  But I was already making plans. I needed to shower and dress. I needed to phone Lindsey Steinke, set up a time to go over our financials. I needed to stop by our house, check on our tenant, pick out a couple of sweaters, mittens, proper boots. After that, however, I’d be free to do some detective work of my own.

  “I’m going to find out,” I said.

  The potholes scattered through the mill parking lot had been spackled by thick, yellow slabs of ice. Slowly, cautiously, I pulled around back and parked beside the exterior set of stairs leading up to Toby’s apartment. The shades were drawn, but behind them, lights—all the lig
hts, it seemed—were burning gold, the excess spilling out into the gloom. It was barely afternoon and yet, already, there was that sense of impending twilight that seems to linger even on the finest winter days. Clouds lay heavily at the edges of the fields, and the air held the faint, metallic tang that promises below-zero cold. I got out of my mother’s car and nudged my backpack onto the floor, fat with the cedar-smelling socks and pullovers I’d taken from the attic. There was no sign of Toby’s truck or Mallory’s weather-beaten Nova. Still, I could see dark shadows drifting, fishlike, behind the living room shades. Suddenly, I wished I’d waited for my parents, who’d promised to arrive later on in the afternoon. They were probably sitting down to lunch in the Schultzes’ warm kitchen just about now: Anna’s roast chicken, her pineapple upside-down cake.

  “Join us,” my mother had said. “Whatever’s going on at the mill will keep for another few hours.”

  Instead, I’d called our tenant, Chester Logan. Chester was from Chicago, a twenty-something Internet entrepreneur. He had “checked out of real life”—or so he’d explained, six months earlier—in order to write a technological thriller, something quick and snappy. It was going to sell a million copies, Chester was absolutely certain; Rex and I had listened to the entire plot, sitting at our kitchen table, wishing Chester would just sign the lease and go. Now, Chester was just as certain this novel was going nowhere. He was spending more and more time in Chicago, getting back into the technology game. What would I say if he found a subletter? Or, perhaps Rex and I were getting tired of life at sea? In which case, all I had to do was give him a few days’ notice. All I had to do was say the word.

  “Let’s talk about this face-to-face,” I said.

  Standing in the entryway of the home where I’d lived for nearly twenty years, I struggled not to burst into tears. The floor tiles were crusted with road salt and grit, the living room carpet hopelessly stained. Dried-out pizza boxes littered the kitchen counters, and a pyramid of empty Budweiser cans decorated the antique buffet. Worst of all was the smell of mildew, the dark spot on the ceiling over the dining room light fixture. Had there been some kind of leak? Chester looked pained.