Seating Arrangements

by Maggie Shipstead

  She and Teddy were standing behind the generators, sheltered from the men’s attention. Flying sand stung her face and bare legs. She had only brought a light cardigan to dinner, and she hugged herself, gripping her arms. A wave washed around the whale, and the whole mess of bone and flesh rocked and fishtailed. The sea was trying to take it back. A hooded man, sitting astride one of the ribs and braced against the wind, dropped his flensing knife. When the wave receded, another man passed the knife back up. The lights rode the turbulent water in an imitation of moonlight. “See?” she said to Teddy, shouting over the wind and surf and growling generators.

  “I see,” he shouted back.

  She felt a rush of gratification. She had known he would understand. The whale would mean something to him, the way it meant something to her. What exactly it meant, she wasn’t sure, but she could feel its importance in her chest, straining her ribs, the way she had felt when she dove off the sailboat after the dolphin all those years ago. She was in a moment around which her life would take shape. “I wanted to come find you so you wouldn’t think I was avoiding you,” he had said on the deck at the restaurant. “I heard you were here.” It wasn’t exactly a declaration of renewed love, but he had taken her inside and bought her a drink and listened to her talk about her father’s terrible toast, speculating with her on what could possibly have gotten into him. He’d been interested in the whale; she hadn’t had to work too hard to convince him to drive her out for another look.

  She turned to him, squinting against the gale. “Isn’t it amazing?”

  He was silent. Then he said loudly, leaning close to her ear, “It really smells.”

  She laughed, giddy with nerves. “But you get it, don’t you?”

  “Get what?”

  She threw out an arm as though the whale were a room she was ushering him into. “That!”

  “What is there to get?”

  Another wave caught the whale and pushed it a few feet up the beach. Uncertainty crept through Livia. “I can’t explain it,” she said.

  He looked at the whale and then back at her. “It’s just a big, dead fish!”

  Despair caught her, almost crushing her. “It’s a mammal!” she cried. He shrugged. He was so familiar and yet such a stranger. The shadows sapped him of color. His brilliant hair looked dark and ordinary. In the car, she had reached out to touch his hair, remarking that she had thought it would be buzzed, but he had ducked his head away and said the army would cut it for him. “I thought you would understand,” she said. “That’s what I miss most about you—I miss being understood.”

  The whale was sliding up and down with every wave. “What?” Teddy said, cupping one hand around his ear. The man on top of the whale, who had been clinging on like a bull rider, slid down and landed with a splash.

  “I miss being understood! You always understood me!”

  He drew back, shaking his head, and then leaned close, making his hands into a bullhorn. “I never understood you!” he yelled into her ear.

  “Yes, you did!”

  “No, I really didn’t! That was the whole problem!”

  “You did! You do!”

  Firm as a schoolteacher, he shook his head.

  “You loved me!” she insisted.

  He took her hand, and the gentleness of the touch made her want to hit him. He said something she couldn’t hear.

  “What?”

  “I said,” he yelled, “not enough.”

  The conversation was a familiar one, their paths through it well worn, but the pain of his words took her breath away even though she had invited it. “It’s enough for me,” she said.

  He looked at her sadly before leaning close to her ear. “Livia, I don’t have a moral obligation to spend my life with you. This is better. You’ll see eventually.”

  She chewed her lip and willed her chin to stop dimpling. She watched the whale. The waves were getting bigger. Finally she shouted, “Promise not to die!”

  It was the impossible, universal request of the lover. He laughed. “I’ll do my best!”

  The whale was afloat. It skidded up the sand on a wave and then was drawn back out. The men splashed after it, trying to hold on to the exposed bones of its head, but the sea was determined. The whale rolled over, half submerged. A wave foamed up around it. Stripped of blubber and cut full of holes, the whale was sliding into deeper water, sinking back to rest its bones on the ocean floor. One of the men was knocked down by a wave. Livia could barely make out his head among the shadows and white water. “They have to let it go,” she shouted into the wind, not caring whether Teddy heard her. “Just let it go!”

  AGATHA, NO STRANGER to being left in dark rooms by men, waited in the attic, still propped up on one hand, until her palm began to itch from tiny curls of sawdust sticking into her skin. She eased around, leaning back on the rogue toilet with her legs straight out in front of her. Above, the hatch where Winn had disappeared was a dim purple rectangle. Stray gusts of wind fell down into the attic, stirring up dust and raising goose bumps on her bare arms. She hugged herself. Where was he? Pressing with her good hand on the toilet, she got to her feet and made her way toward the ladder, arms stretched out in the darkness.

  Coming up through the hatch, she could see the widow’s walk was empty, and, with a horrified thrill, she thought he must have jumped. She leaned over the railing, peering down. She couldn’t see the ground, not clearly, anyway. She saw shapes that might have been sacks of cement or piles of flagstones but might also be a body. “Winn!” she called. “Winn!” Then she saw it, moving slowly along a ridge of the roof: an illuminated disc of shingles and, behind it, a long, dark, creeping shape.

  HE HEARD HER shouting for him, but he could not reply because his mouth was plugged with the flashlight’s rubber handle. If he had one thing to be grateful for, it was that these clouds had not yet brought any rain. They seemed to hang only inches above him, a billowing purple canopy. If he could have risked loosening his grip, he might have reached up and touched them. Since his first trip on an airplane as a child, he had always wanted to touch a cloud, to really feel the substance of one, and though he had come to understand the impossibility, the desire had not left him. Pinching the roof between his knees, his jaw and leg aching, he inched along Jack Fenn’s abrasive and unyielding shingles. Finally his fingers hit brick—a chimney. All he had to do was squeeze around it, ascend a short crag of a gable, traverse another ridge, and then he would reach the pretentious little cupola that supported the weather vane.

  With the care of a mountaineer approaching the summit of Everest, he pulled himself to his feet, his fingers inching up the bricks until they found a grip on an upper ledge. He embraced the chimney as though it were a dance partner. A particularly strong gust buffeted him, bringing with it the first few drops of rain, and he clung to his handhold so hard that his fingernails burned. One, two, three. A swooping pivot around the chimney, a rapid uphill scramble, and, after a panicked leap, he found himself belly-down atop the apex of Jack Fenn’s house. He had to scrabble with both hands and both feet to keep his purchase, and the flashlight slipped from his mouth and rolled away down the sloping shingles, its beam streaked with rain as it described sickening arcs and turns until it bounced off a gutter with a clang and fell silently into the dark.

  Without the light, the weather vane was a black splotch hovering in the near distance. Almost blind behind his droplet-speckled glasses, he wormed his way along the ridge like a sailor on a spar. The shingles had torn open his pants, letting in a thousand splinters and sandpapering away his skin. Still he continued, crawling through the rain, full of grim certainty that the weather vane was an opponent he must face, even though, when he reached it, it proved to be nothing more than a cold assemblage of copper bits, larger than it looked from the ground and squeaking loudly as it tacked the few inches to starboard and back to port. The pointlessness of his mission had, by then, begun to dawn on him, soaking through at the same rate that the rain saturat
ed his clothes, but he had started this, and, by God, he would finish it. He felt around the weather vane’s base on top of the little cupola. His fingers discovered three small bolts, three frigid and slippery hexagons securing Fenn’s ridiculous finial to his ridiculous house. One bolt was loose, and he twisted it out of its socket and sent it the way of the flashlight. The other two would not budge. He twisted at the wet metal until his fingers were raw. The time had come for the final push, the last great effort. Standing bow-legged, his feet curved into either side of the roof, his shredded pants whipping in the wind, he grasped the weather vane by its hull and pushed against the cold, smooth metal. The solder gave, just a fraction of an inch, but still it gave. The ship listed at an angle. Even the proud nautical crown of this sham of a house was tacked on with spit and a prayer. Triumphant, Winn found a better handhold, weaving his fingers through the stiff wire rigging, and inched around until he was balanced atop the ridge. Agatha had stopped shouting for him. “You’re not hard,” he heard her say with her voice full of disdain, and he winced, his concentration wavering at the precise moment a gust of wind struck him square in the chest. He tipped backward and then, clinging to the weather vane with an awkward, sideways grip, he overcorrected forward and found himself with his chest against the cupola, his feet running in place on the wet slope of shingles. A metallic pop. He slid backward as the weather vane pitched forward, its masts going horizontal as its prow aimed down into the deep. But the welding held, and Winn, grappling painfully with the slippery sails and piano-wire rigging, made a last-ditch attempt for a better handhold. Disengaging his right hand, he swung his arm around and pushed with his toes, propelling himself far enough back up the roof to grasp the ship’s smooth hull. He hooked his arm over it. For a moment, he was safe. Then there was another pop and a wrenching, and the ship pulled loose. Winn found himself cradling it in his arms, a sharp copper baby, as he took his first roll and slide down the roof.

  He heard himself bellowing. When he struck the first dormer and went slipping down at a new angle, he managed to thrust the weather vane away, tossing it out into space. It vanished as though it had never existed. Clawing at the shingles, he managed to slow himself down, and for a miraculous moment he paused atop a gambreled curve. But exhaustion loosened his grip with merciless quickness and sent him down, down, until, after an even briefer dangle from a drainpipe, he fell.

  Seventeen · The Maimed King

  Daphne was still crying. Dominique sat beside her on the bed, watching her pregnant belly quake each time she drew a breath. Piper was perched on a sea chest by the window, her arms wrapped around her knees. “Why are you crying?” she asked for the third time, her voice small.

  “I don’t know,” Daphne said, also for the third time. She took a deep breath. “Everything just caught up with me all at once.”

  “It’s okay,” said Dominique. “You can cry.”

  “No,” said Daphne, “I have to stop or my eyes will be all puffy tomorrow, and I won’t be able to look at the pictures without remembering that I’d been crying.”

  Piper pulled her knees in closer and rested her chin on them. “When my sister was pregnant, she cried all the time. Her skin looked amazing, though. Your skin looks really good, too. You’ll look good in the pictures.”

  “I can’t remember the last time I cried like this.” Daphne gazed at the ceiling, awed by her own tears.

  “You’ve been under a lot of stress,” Piper said. “I say just let it all out.”

  “They’re not back yet,” Daphne said to Dominique.

  “Who?” Piper asked.

  Dominique held Daphne’s gaze. She gave her friend a sad smile and reached out to smooth her hair off her forehead. Daphne looked afraid. In a crisis of faith, Dominique thought, two ways lie open. Daphne could push aside her doubts, sing loudly to drown them out, and go on marching toward the luminous cloudburst she now saw to be a cardboard prop hung from the rafters. Or she could embrace her knowledge, look through a dark lens, and face a truth.

  “No one,” Daphne said to the ceiling. Tears ran down into her hair. A few puddled in the curl of her ear like raindrops in the turnings of a flower.

  Piper cupped her hands against the window and peered out. “Someone’s home,” she said.

  In a few minutes, there was a soft knock on the door, and Livia came in. She looked like she had been pulled from the sea again. Her black dress clung to her in wet wrinkles, and her hair dripped around her face. She, too, had been crying, but she looked beautiful, vital, new. Without a word, she went and lay down on the bed beside her sister, draping an arm over her.

  “What happened?” Daphne asked.

  “I saw Teddy.”

  “God.”

  “No, it’s okay. I realized that I don’t know him anymore.” Livia propped herself up on an elbow and tentatively placed a hand on Daphne’s belly. “A niece,” she said.

  Daphne guided her sister’s hand around her side. Dominique knew Livia had never felt the baby kick; Daphne had told her so. “Do you feel her?” Daphne asked.

  “I think so. Yes!”

  “Someone else is here,” Piper said, looking out the window again.

  WINN OPENED the screen door for Agatha and eased it shut without a slam. She did not speak or touch him but made directly for the stairs, carrying her shoes in one hand. He stepped out of his loafers and set them side by side against the baseboard. He had lost his glasses in the fall, and so the house was a dim cave; the floor swallowed up his shoes. He rested a hand against the cool wall, steadying himself. Down the hallway, light spilled from the living room. He walked, conscious of the unevenness of his steps, toward it.

  A woman was on the sofa under a blaze of lamplight. He thought it was Biddy but feared it might be Celeste.

  “You should go up to bed.” Biddy. The sound of a page turning, and he discerned an open book in her lap. He lowered himself into an armchair. “God,” she said, her tense voice opening up with surprise. “What happened to you? Where are your glasses?”

  “Gone,” he said, stretching out his bad leg and propping it on the coffee table. He wondered if a worker would find them caught in a gutter or half buried in a mulched flower bed. It was mulch that had saved him, an earthy-smelling mountain of it. He had landed on it and rolled down, coming to rest against the side of Fenn’s house. What if his glasses were found near the downed weather vane, a clue too convenient even for the Hardy Boys? Leaning close, he examined his raw flesh through the ripped knee of his pants, studded with dark crumbs of dried blood. “I fell off Jack Fenn’s roof. I tore down his weather vane.”

  “His weather vane?”

  “Sort of a clipper ship thing.”

  “Why?”

  He rubbed his naked face. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Temporary insanity?”

  “Is it temporary?” Biddy asked.

  “I hope so.” He smiled at her blurry shape. He felt strange: happy to be alive, full of shame, bound on his edges by a ringing sound, and filled, at his core, with love for his wife.

  BIDDY OPENED UP the red plastic box that held the family first aid kit and unpeeled what was left of Winn’s bandage from his leg. His torn stitches stood up like eyelashes along the edges of his wound.

  “If Sam Snead were here,” she said, “she’d get a needle and thread and sew you up herself.”

  “She’d use a fishhook,” Winn said. “And catgut.”

  She held up a spray bottle of antiseptic. “Ready?”

  He gritted his teeth while she sprayed him. “I blame her, you know. She gave me pills before dinner.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  “I don’t know. Something to take the edge off.”

  “But she wasn’t the one who took them.”

  “I only took one.”

  “And,” Biddy continued, “she wasn’t the one who chased a pill with a couple of bottles of wine. Or who suggested marriage is a form of death. Or who vandalized a house when he said he was ta
king a girl to the ER.” She peeled paper from the back of a butterfly bandage and, holding his wound together as best she could, stuck it to his skin. “I would send you back to the hospital tonight and make sure you actually got there, but I think it’s best at this point if we just go to sleep. You’ll have to go in the morning or between the ceremony and the reception. You’ll survive. Your scar might be uglier, but that’s your own fault.” She added another butterfly bandage and then ran a roll of gauze around his leg and secured the whole mess with tape. She had been sitting on the couch for hours thinking about what to say. She snipped the tape and sat back. “Part of the reason I married you was that I thought you wouldn’t do anything to surprise me. I have to say, I’m not happy you’ve decided to become a loose cannon after all these years. I didn’t sign up for this. I never expected you to be perfect, but I expected you to be, I don’t know, steady in your imperfections. I’m a realist. I’ve always been a realist.”

  “Biddy.” He leaned close, and at first she thought he was trying to kiss her, but then she realized he was only trying to get a read on her expression. Without his glasses he was moleishly nearsighted.

  She turned away, repacking the first aid kit. “To bed.”

  “Biddy,” he said with reluctance, “I have to tell you something.”

  She snapped the kit closed. “I don’t want to hear it,” she said firmly. “Wait until after the wedding. Or never. Tell me never, Winn. I don’t want to move to the village of the truth tellers. I don’t want to know about tonight. I don’t want to know about the past. Nothing. This has never been something I wanted to know about. Like I said, I’m a realist.”