The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  Rock reaches over to switch the kitchen light on. But then the fact of his present position stops him; as the dogs are making abundantly clear, he is essentially an unwanted intruder. Will turning on the light make his presence in the house more or less invasive? He hesitates for a moment, his hand stretched out before him. The house is trying to intimidate him. He can feel it puffing itself up, gathering its years of righteous, upstanding history, and putting on a fierce, defiant show for his benefit.

  With a bold flick of the wrist, he hits the light switch and sends the darkness running like so many frightened roaches into the chinks in the floor, the cracks in the wall, and the space behind the refrigerator. Even the dogs abruptly stop their barking. It gives him an oddly triumphant feeling. Rock walks into the dining room, flicks on the grim little iron chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and watches Sir Percival blink his way back into two dimensions, a flawed arrangement of charcoal and paper. He continues through the living room, into the study, the downstairs hall, the ridiculous brown receiving room, the TV room, and the old greenhouse, sweeping away the darkness and watching Dunlap ancestors withdraw, cowed, into the confines of their portraits, and the shadowy contours of ancient cupboards and footstools resolve themselves into everyday things.

  It seems this is actually what he came here to do—to touch all these old rooms and objects and, like a midwife, deliver them into the light. He can feel the insular placenta of dust and darkness fall away, the carefully preserved spirit of the place shift to accept his presence—a person of today, an American of nondescript heritage and standing. When he reaches Jack Dunlap’s room he realizes he is actually whistling like some disciple of Julie Andrews.

  When he has gone through every room and bright squares of light lie on the grass outside the house like a splintered halo, Rock feels nearly elated, buoyed by the conviction that, for once, without even a moment of deciding or considering, he has done exactly what was needed. He pads through the downstairs to the back of the house—the little butter-churn-chamber- turned-TV-room. Here he stretches out on the sofa and puts his feet up on the coffee table. It feels remarkable to be sitting again, to have the whole world of channels at his disposal. He flips past a sitcom, an old Burt Reynolds movie, the news, and settles on a live national cheerleading competition. There is nothing left to do but wait anyway—for Caroline to come home, for Jack to turn up, for the opportunity to save someone.

  CAROLINE IS SITTING across from Stephan in one of the back booths of the Artful Dodger Pub in Concord Center. “Give me some ideas,” Stephan is saying. “Quintessential Concord.”

  Caroline stares at him blankly over her gin and tonic. “Brigham’s?” she offers. She is still unclear on whether this is an informal drink—even date—they are on or an official brainstorming session.

  “Who’re they?”

  Caroline swishes her ice cubes. “It’s an ice-cream parlor.”

  “Oh.” Stephan nods, but looks disappointed.

  “Denise must have some good ideas,” Caroline can’t resist saying. “I mean, she knows people and stuff.” She watches his face for any sign that she has just brought up his lover as opposed to his bossy friend/ex-lawyer.

  Stephan shrugs and what looks like a cloud of annoyance passes over his face.

  The discussion is not going smoothly. It feels hard to focus, for one thing. The unsettling discoveries of the day—Eliot missing (he is back but has not offered a sufficient excuse as to where he was this morning), her mother freaked out, and a strange Spanish worksheet next to her father’s bed—have wrapped themselves around Caroline like a thick, dusty cloud she has to struggle to breathe through. And Stephan seems a little edgy—his movie, he has spent the last twenty minutes telling her, isn’t really progressing—or crystallizing, or blossoming, or whatever it is supposed to do.

  It’s not like a documentary needs to have a plot, does it? Caroline ventured a few minutes ago, and Stephan looked downright exasperated, as if the mere fact of her thinking this were part of the problem. And he was visibly displeased when she told him she didn’t think she’d be able to get him an interview with her father.

  “There’s the golf club,” she tries again. “The Summer Swing must be coming up—there’s a little cup ceremony and people give speeches and everything.”

  “Hmm.” Stephan raises his eyebrows and picks up his pint glass and drains it. His hands are very brown and long-fingered, with perfect half-moons across the base of his nails. They look capable and clean. There is a familiar stirring in Caroline’s gut.

  Stephan puts the glass down and looks at her intently, his head inclined slightly backward in a contemplative way. At the table next to them a woman is reading the history of the Louisa May Alcott house aloud to her tired-looking husband and children in a shrilly instructive tone. Caroline can feel herself blushing under Stephan’s gaze.

  “So did you like growing up here?” he asks finally.

  “I don’t know—I guess—yeah, there were some things I liked about it.”

  “Like . . . ?”

  “Brigham’s,” Caroline smiles. “And . . .” She tries to picture her childhood as a collection of distinct parts she can turn over and assess in her mind: carpool, swim practice, the smell of the Drumonds’ basement. It is hard to decide whether she actually liked these. “Peanut butter and fluff sandwiches,” she says.

  Stephan smiles, but keeps up his scrutinizing stare. He is very comfortable with prolonged eye contact.

  “Does anyone ‘like’ having grown up anywhere?” she asks, spinning the ice cubes in circles at the bottom of her glass.

  “Sure.” Stephan shrugs. “My brother says he loved growing up in Cambridge.”

  “Did you?”

  “It was all right.” Stephan looks out the window into the twilight and his face takes on a look of self-conscious disinterest that makes her think of the fact that, according to Rock, his real name is Wendel. He probably hated every minute of his adolescence.

  “Can I get you another?” Stephan gestures at her empty gin and tonic.

  Ordinarily Caroline would feel the need to go through an awkward round of refusal, of getting out her own wallet and getting up herself, or at least offering to—but today she just nods and says thank you. She can feel the gin reaching her knees, light and tingly. For the first time since waking, her body has begun to relax. Maybe it doesn’t matter that her father is carrying around condoms in his jacket. Maybe it doesn’t matter that Eliot leaves the house before she wakes up on mysterious missions and spends the rest of his time closeted with a giant papier-mâché sculpture. After all, if she were driving across country with Dan, what would she know of all this? The thought seems to somehow absolve her of responsibility; after all, it is just an accident of fate that she is even around to notice anything strange.

  Caroline rests her head against the wooden back of the booth. For a pub in Concord Center, the Artful Dodger, with its jukebox full of Bob Seger and its dirty stained-glass lampshades, is not that bad. There is something soothing about its generic outfitting—she could be in Alabama, or Ohio, or anywhere. She could be driving across country to a real job, or internship anyway, at the Film Archive, rather than trying to understand if “production liaison” is a euphemism for “jackass.”

  “Madame,” Stephan says, placing a fresh gin and tonic in front of her. There is a spiky-haired older woman staring at him from across the room. He is really so striking. Caroline feels her heart give a little flip-flop of excitement that she is here with him.

  “So, I forgot to tell you—I ran into your brother this morning,” he says, pushing his hand through his hair. The warm wishy-washy feeling growing in Caroline blows out like a snuffed candle, leaving nothing but a cold wisp of premonition.

  “Where?” She puts her drink back down, sloshing a little over the rim onto the table.

  “At the pharmacy.”

  “What was he doing?” Caroline tries to sound casual.

  “He was phot
ocopying something,” Stephan says, again with the unabashedly watchful stare.

  “Photocopying?”

  Stephan hesitates significantly. “Does he know someone who was kidnapped?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was copying something that looked like a flyer with a photo of this kid on it—a really young-looking black kid—and underneath, it said ‘missing.’”

  The faint pull of dread Caroline has felt all day turns into a real force of nature. Eliot is involved in some tragedy. Or he has lost his mind? Or he has gotten tangled up with a cult or something. Her face grows hot and then cold and Stephan’s eyes remain on her, inscrutable as a one-way mirror. It feels as though she can’t even think under his observation.

  “Maybe it was for a school project,” he says after a moment.

  “Maybe,” Caroline says, although she knows it isn’t.

  “What’s he doing this summer? Does he just take care of himself now that there’s no babysitter?”

  “What?” Caroline says.

  Stephan is saying something about latchkey kids in cities, what about the suburbs, but Caroline is stuck a few sentences back. How does he know Eliot has no babysitter? She has never mentioned this. She has the feeling of pieces struggling to place themselves in her mind, of a large exhausting thought pulling itself up out of the darkness. Only she can’t quite make it out because here she is, sitting in the Artful Dodger across from Stephan.

  “Are you two close?” Stephan asks.

  Caroline takes a big swallow of her drink and cocks her head to stare back at him. “Kind of,” she says. Behind him, the spiky-haired woman is now smoking, blowing thick yellowish clouds of smoke out of her nostrils. Caroline puts the glass back down. “Would you mind bringing me home now?”

  16

  ELIOT IS NOT AFRAID of bears, or burglars, derelicts, rabid dogs, ghosts, goblins, Halloween masks, anything you might see in a horror movie. He is not afraid of traffic or heights or snakes or enclosed spaces. He is not like Caroline, whose fears have a certain adaptable logic. In the house alone at night she is afraid of rustling sounds and creaking floorboards; on the ski slopes she is afraid of loose bindings and ice patches and rogue snowmobiles. And he is not like his mother, whose fears spring from unpredictable shifts in her internal weather.

  Eliot is afraid of guerrillas. He is afraid of men who come out of the jungle with machetes and machine guns, men who are not afraid to terrorize innocent people in the name of justice, who think nothing of taking a small boy away from his mother to learn to fight and be strong and hard and angry. Men like those who took Roberto.

  But they will not come here, Rosita would say when Eliot locked the doors or tensed at the sound of unfamiliar wheels on the driveway. Not to this country, or to this neighborhood. This is a protected place, a place of nice people. Rosita trusts in greenery, in quiet streets and brand names and money. But Eliot is unconvinced. It is not these men themselves, who he knows are separated by hundreds of miles of desert and jungle and American soil, but the possibility that anyone could become like them—this is what is frightening. They are ordinary men, Rosita says, who have children and parents and favorite television shows and whose lives have been changed by anger. They were not born like this.

  Eliot used to think danger belonged to the outlandish—to unfamiliar people and things that donned all the obvious and muscular trappings of death, violence, and hatred. But if it can come from even good men—or at least not really bad men—how is it to be avoided?

  Since Rock’s car rounded the driveway to the house, Eliot has been in hiding. First in the mudroom closet, then behind the garage, now in the wood at the edge of the golf course. Holding his breath behind the coat rack, he could hear Rock walk in, call out, stand absolutely still for a moment with the dogs barking madly before switching the lights on.

  Now it is late enough to get started. In the hour since Rock arrived, the fallen leaves and branches on the ground have been obscured by darkness and the sky has faded from a prescient glowing lavender to a deep, indifferent shade of purple. Eliot feels calm, sluggish almost, from the prolonged effort of anticipation—like one of those elephant seals he has seen on the Nature Channel, whose heartbeat slows to four per minute as they make their way underwater up the icy Canadian coastline. He navigates his way out to the edge of the lawn, which he can skirt protected by shadows, all the way to the break in the bushes that divide the Dunlaps’ land from the Dellars’. Once on the softer, more artificial expanse of the Dellars’ manicured lawn, he straightens and tugs the straps of his pack tighter. He has what he needs—his copies, his Paul Revere britches, Forester’s set of keys.

  He imagines for a moment that he is Roberto. He is walking through the patch of uninhabited jungle outside the town his grandmother lives in when he hears gunshots and shouting. Which makes him run, only this time he will run like the wind. He will not let himself be grabbed by some fierce-faced man who wants to make him into a soldier. Eliot will fight back, he will run down the hill he imagines leads out of the lush green jungle. He will run and run—here on the path he breaks into a jog—away from this man and the others. He will make himself disappear into his own life, not the one they have imagined for him. Eliot’s legs pound the packed dirt, avoiding roots and fallen branches, staying on the path his flashlight illuminates before him, until he is completely winded. Then he slows back down, shining his flashlight twice behind him to be sure there is no one there, and of course—of course, he reminds himself—there isn’t. There is the rush of cars in the distance and the sweet, bleating sound of the night peepers.

  No one has ever looked for Roberto. No one has ever helped Rosita hunt him down and demand he be returned to her. What about the police? Eliot has asked. What about the law? It doesn’t work like that there, Rosita says. She does not like to talk about it. Eliot does not understand this. If there are no police, what happens to the thieves and lost children?

  At the top of the hill he stops for a moment to adjust his backpack and checks his watch: nearly ten o’clock. The black digits race over the illuminated watch face like industrious carpenter ants—breaking down and building up minutes, exposing the machinery of time. His wrist thrums with the motion of recorded instants, sends a buzz up through his shoulder and around the curve of his armpit, all the way back down through his body to his toes.

  There is an unfamiliar light to his right, just visible between the slender trunks of a stand of white birches. Eliot takes a few steps toward this, and then looks up to get his bearings. Yes, he is at the rim of the hill that climbs up behind Memorial Road—and it is, yes, his own house, there below him, lit up as if inside it there is some great, all-encompassing fire blazing. He stands spellbound for a moment, all thoughts of Roberto and his father frozen by the bright and unfamiliar definition of his house against the land around it, as if, for the first time in three hundred years, it has decided to stand up.

  FAITH HAS ALLOWED herself to be lured into eating at Jean Pierre’s “most favorite restaurant on the Eastern Seaboard” now that she has managed to reach Eliot from Jean Pierre’s cell phone. He was just out walking this morning, he said—or she thinks he said. It was not a good connection; his little voice kept cutting out in spaces. He was at home, though. Not missing. Not wandering along the median of a highway somewhere. The knowledge is a huge weight off Faith’s shoulders, although she still feels a prickle of unease in her chest. If she could have heard him more clearly, or had the privacy to ask more questions—what the map is for, for instance, and why it was in her pocket—she would be more certain of his safety. More convinced there was nothing to worry about. But it is silly to be so demanding. She has spoken to him. He has assured her everything is all right. She tries to smooth over the stubborn wrinkle of unease with one of Dr. Marcus’s positive attitudes.

  From their table in the dining room of the Wilford Inn, they can see through the twilight all the way out to the elegant sweep of the Bourne bridge and the
rise of Cape Cod on its other side. From here it all looks so basic—dark land and pale water, as simple as the language of ones and zeroes.

  “It is a fine view, no?” Jean Pierre asks.

  Faith nods appreciatively and takes a sip of her wine. It has been a delicious meal—bluefish and baby parsnips, buttery warm biscuits, and a blueberry cobbler.

  “Such an American place,” Jean Pierre said when they walked in, gesturing at the furnishings of the tiny front hall: a shaker bench, a braided rug, a whole series of needlepoints hanging behind the desk, one of which was embroidered with Friends welcome, relatives by appointment. “You see?” he had said, pointing at this. Faith nodded blankly. Was this really somehow quintessentially American?

  “Are you Lucy’s only—” Faith stops short and blushes. “French cousin” sounds suddenly like a euphemism—or something derogatory. “Do you have siblings who come to Pea Island also?” she rephrases her question.

  “Siblings?” Jean Pierre looks blank. “Ah—brothers and sisters! No, no—I am the only one of my parents’ marriage. They were not so—how do you say—much interested in le bon famie.”

  “Why not?” Faith asks.

  Jean Pierre shrugs. “Too much in love for having children.”

  “Oh,” Faith says, taken aback. It has never occurred to her that people who have children could be in love. There is something awfully brave and at the same time foolish about the idea of it. She pictures love as a pond to be stepped into, swum around in, and then climbed out of and toweled off before getting too chilly. Only Jean Pierre’s parents have just gone on swimming, defying laws of gravity and resilience, challenging the durability of human skin.