Marriages die in pieces, I thought. That’s how it happens. I said, “Graham left on a trip for work. A month, he thinks. I’d bet a thousand dollars it will be longer.”
She sighed. “Maybe it will be good. Absence and the heart and all that.”
All the lights in the house across the canal were out except for the muted blue flashing of a television. Then a light went on in the kitchen, and the husband walked in and pulled down a bottle from a high cabinet, and at the same time the wife appeared at the back door and headed toward the canal. At first I thought she was approaching us, for some reason, but there was barely any light in Lidia’s backyard, and I doubted she could even see us sitting there. She carried something—a towel. I thought maybe she was going to the boat—it was a forty-foot cruiser, surely stocked with a TV and full bar—but then she stepped to the edge of the dock, dropped the towel and her blouse, and dove into the canal.
“Good Lord,” said Sally. “Aren’t there alligators in there? What the hell is she doing?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
There were alligators in the canal, yes. I knew this because my father was always talking about how over time the creatures were growing bolder, as if they’d been observing us and decided we weren’t much of a threat. Two or three times a year, one came right up onto the bank and snatched a dog from its lead. My father had said that he fully expected to hear a knock at the door one of these days, and open it to find an alligator barging in, demanding a cold beer and a shower.
We watched as the neighbor woman slipped quickly through the dark water, pale limbs scissoring. Then she rounded the bend and her wake settled, and it was as if she’d never been there at all.
FRANKIE’S APPOINTMENT WITH SALLY’S PEDIATRICIAN came up a week after Graham left. I’m not sure exactly what I’d expected, but while we were in the waiting room, a woman in a white coat stopped to pick up a file from the reception area, and this woman had a doll’s pinched blond curls and a double chin and smart eyeglasses—this, I guess, is more or less what I’d thought our doctor would look like. Instead, after an intake in the exam room with a kind-eyed nurse wearing floral scrubs, there was a quick knock on the door, and in walked Dr. Sonia. She was no more than five feet in heels, with an arched, handsome nose and severe brows. She had dark skin—she was Filipina, I guessed—and under her open white coat she wore a plunging silk blouse and tight pencil skirt and black pumps. She introduced herself with a slight accent and did not smile.
When I’d made the appointment, the receptionist had asked about specific concerns, and I’d explained the one as calmly as possible. Dr. Sonia scanned Frankie’s file—the nurse had skittered out of the room—and asked me to hold Frankie in my lap.
“Vaccinations?” she said as she listened to his chest.
I told her we’d been up to date until he was two, but we’d fallen behind since then. All of Frankie’s records had been sent; I think the doctor just wanted me to acknowledge my own delinquency. When she asked Frankie to say “Ahh,” he opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. She checked his lymph nodes, his reflexes, his ears. When she was done, she inched back in her chair and regarded Frankie.
“He needs Hep B. The others can wait. Runny noses that don’t seem to quit? Recurring fevers?”
“No,” I said.
“So just the one thing,” she said.
“Just the one thing.” I smoothed the hair behind Frankie’s ear. He looked back and forth between us, as if he knew what was coming next.
To Frankie, Dr. Sonia said, “You don’t like to talk?”
He pushed out his lower lip and jutted his chin.
“Tell me,” she said to me.
Frankie wriggled off my lap and beelined for a basket of books and toys in the corner. It was clear that Dr. Sonia was not a person who would suffer a mother unhinging in her office, so I steadied my voice. “It started when he was a year and a half. He’d been talking a little, a few words here and there, and then he stopped. It happened quickly, within a couple of months. Every so often he makes sounds, but not words.” I thought of him crying in the hotel in Round Lake, laughing with Charlie at the stilt house. “They haven’t found any kind of—” I moved my hands futilely, and all appropriate phrases left me. “They haven’t found anything wrong with him. He listens, he communicates, he pays attention. He signs all day long, we both do. He’s a great kid. He’s great.” My words felt very forceful leaving my mouth.
She regarded me, then turned to him. “Frankie,” she said. “You don’t want to talk?”
Frankie held up a toy bulldozer. I signed: Speak? He shook his head.
“Why not?” she said.
How long had it been since I’d even asked him? Had it been an entire year?
He came over and stood close, studying her face.
“We know you can hear,” she said to him. She cupped his ears with her birdlike hands, then tugged on the lobes. “These are working, I think.” He nodded. She rapped lightly on his skull. “Seems like this works, too.”
He smiled.
She opened a drawer and pulled out a handful of flash cards showing pictures of animals: a cow, a dinosaur, a brown bear, a frog, a rabbit. “Frankie,” she said, holding up the dinosaur card, “do you know what this guy says when he talks?”
Frankie nodded.
“Can you please tell me?”
He opened his mouth. He gave a very low roar. I took a breath.
She went on. “That’s about right. But dinosaurs are very big and very scary, so they make a little more noise.” She held up the cow card. “Can you tell me what this guy says?”
Frankie mooed, then jumped a little in place and eyed the other cards in Dr. Sonia’s lap. One by one, they went through each: the pig snorted, the bear growled, the frog croaked, all softly but clearly. When she got to the rabbit, she said, “Rabbits are quiet, but can you show me how they move?”
Frankie squatted, hands on the floor, and then he was off. He crossed the room, hop by hop, then returned the same way. A nurse came in and left a tray with a hypodermic needle and a vial, and Frankie stood up and eyed it suspiciously.
“Do you know what a shot is?” said Dr. Sonia.
Frankie nodded.
“And what sound does a boy make when he gets a shot?” said Dr. Sonia.
“Ow,” said Frankie. Each sound was bracing, like a fall of cold water over my head.
“That’s right,” she said. She readied the needle. “Are you ready to say ‘ow’?”
Frankie nodded. She leaned down and pulled up the hem of his shorts.
“Ow!” said Frankie. He rubbed his leg and glowered at her.
“You’re like a voodoo doctor,” I said to her.
“That only works once,” she said. “Frankie, what’s your favorite thing to do?”
He arced one arm, then the other.
“Swim?” she said, and he nodded. “What else do you like to do?”
He mimed casting a line.
“Fish,” she said, nodding. “What else?”
He signed again: one hand flat and the other scrawling above it, pinkie finger out.
“Draw?” she said, and he nodded.
This was a recent development. He’d always enjoyed crayons and paper, but not until we’d started going out to Stiltsville had Frankie’s interest deepened. Charlie had given him a box of colored pencils and a sketch pad, and was teaching him to draw human figures using a wooden manikin that moved at all the joints.
“Just as I suspected,” said Dr. Sonia. “I like all of those things. And I like to be quiet, which I know you like. But sometimes I like to talk, too.”
He knitted his brow. She got up and opened the door and called for the nurse, who appeared immediately. “Ten minutes,” Dr. Sonia said, indicating Frankie. To Frankie, she said, “Get yourself a lollipop.” He followed the nurse into the hall.
Dr. Sonia put a box of tissues in my lap. “All right,” she said. “Here’s what I see. He hears
fine. Maybe there was some early hearing loss that wasn’t caught, but I doubt it. There’s a language and speech person I work with. Call her from the front desk, make an appointment. Tell her I said to make it speedy. Let’s double-check what’s already been checked, just in case.”
“Okay,” I said.
She picked up a pen. “How does he eat?”
“Fine.”
“Any siblings?”
“No.”
“How does he sleep?”
“Fine.”
“What hours?”
“Down around seven, up around eight.”
She frowned. “That’s too much. Naps?”
“One, a couple of hours or so.”
“Too much,” she said again. “Stress in the family? Changes?”
“We just moved here. There’s been some stress, yes.”
“Divorce?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to guess?”
I stammered. “There—there was an incident, back in Illinois. Frankie’s father has a—sleep disorder. He went through a window in the middle of the night. Frankie saw it happen.”
She scribbled quickly. “Listen,” she said, “when the speech therapist gets to your place, I want you to tell her what you just told me.”
My mouth was so dry I couldn’t lick my lips, couldn’t swallow. “He stopped talking long before that.”
“Just tell her.”
“Okay.”
She sighed. “There’s something called selective mutism. I can’t say for sure that’s what’s going on, but it’s my best guess.”
“I’ve never heard of that. Why haven’t I heard of that?” I thought of the first, lengthy visit from the language pathologist back at the cottage, all those hours with the social worker.
“It’s not easy to diagnose. And it’s not something they’d just toss out.”
I tried to speak evenly. “Maybe you think I’m an idiot. But I spend every day with my son. I spend every waking minute with him.”
She tilted her head. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you spend every waking minute with him?”
I felt a surge of defensiveness. “I don’t understand.”
“Have you thought about preschool?”
“I thought maybe next year—”
“Put him in preschool. Two or three days a week, at least,” she said. “Look, some kids don’t need preschool, some do. It’s not easy to let go—I know, I have four. I stayed home with the youngest until I’d forgotten how to dress myself.”
This gave me pause over my own outfit, one of a few similar cotton skirts I wore almost every day, and a sleeveless blue T-shirt.
She continued. “We’re not perfect teachers just because we’re good mothers.”
“You’re saying—”
“I’m not saying it’s your fault he doesn’t speak.” She placed one chilly hand on my shoulder, then took it away. “I don’t know why he doesn’t speak. Could be something, could be nothing. But most kids Frankie’s age talk a great deal, and he doesn’t. He needs to be around other kids. He can’t talk like you talk, but my guess is that he can talk.”
It was an enormous relief, this courage of conviction, this fortitude. But it made me feel spineless and ineffectual, which were two things I’d never thought of myself.
She saw my doubt. “I know,” she said. “You wake up, you fix food, you clean up, you go to the store, you read him a book, fix more food. Then it’s a new day.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And there’s other stuff going on, sleepwalking husbands, what have you.”
“Preschool?” I said.
“And the speech pathologist. Back here in a month, please.”
She left the room, taking most of the oxygen with her, and the nurse returned with Frankie. We made an appointment at the front desk and walked to the car, each breath in my lungs deeper than the last.
On the way home, we were detoured by construction on LeJeune, and ended up on Ponce de Leon, a pretty street hedged by low coral walls and smooth pink sidewalks and ponytail palms. As I made my way around a neatly landscaped traffic circle, I noticed an unassuming storefront on the far side: the Abyss Gallery.
I parked and pulled Frankie out of his car seat. Just inside the gallery was a wall that ran parallel to the door, so not until we’d navigated the wall did we spot a cluster of frames filling one corner of the deep room. A man came from the back and I told him we were just looking. I made for the corner, where Charlie’s name, CHARLES F. HICKS, was painted neatly across the wall in handsome letters. Above and beside his name were the prints I’d chosen—the drowning clipper ship, the menacing sea snake, the sparring sea horses. Since I’d last seen them, Henry Gale had shaded them in jewel colors, which had given them depth and soul. And Henry had done something a little different with these: he’d burnished the shadows, lending the emerald and ruby and aquamarine a sinister appearance. Together, Henry’s talent and Charlie’s talent added up to something greater than their sum. Henry must have brought the portraits to the gallery himself, or sent a messenger. I hadn’t been to the print shop in more than a week.
Beside me, Frankie stared. In his hand was a small brown walrus, the most recent addition to his collection. When he saw me watching him, his hand came up, pointing. And surely it was Dr. Sonia and her game, her commanding presence, but still nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. My son spoke one word, clear as sunlight: “Charlie!”
12
EVERY TIME I ARRIVED AT Stiltsville, I experienced a strong sense of inverted, irrational nostalgia. It was as if rather than being there in that moment, I was somewhere else, wishing I could be there. It wasn’t unlike the feeling I had sometimes after putting Frankie to bed, even after a long day, even if I’d been relieved to say good night—sometimes I was seized by the desire to wake him just to be in his presence again, to reassure myself of him. The strange reverse-nostalgia itched at me every time I stepped from the boat to the stilt house dock, and it was several minutes before I could slough it off and relax. I think as much as anything else it was a weighty sense of gratitude, as well as the foreknowledge that whatever this was—this occupation, this friendship, this parallel life—it would not last forever.
In the forty-eight hours since Frankie had spoken Charlie’s name, I had been unable to make contact with Graham. I’d known that once he was transferred to the research ship, which was called the R. V. Roger Revelle, getting him on the phone would be something of an ordeal, involving a message center on land that routed emergency calls and other messages, and a shared ship phone meant to be used sparingly. But until that time—and he wasn’t scheduled to be transferred for a few more days—he was staying in a business hotel in Jacksonville with his colleagues and the team from Scripps, and I’d assumed getting in touch would be as easy as calling his room. This hadn’t been the case. I’d left three messages at the front desk. Once, Lidia had taped a note to the screen door of the Lullaby saying he’d called me back on her line—there was no phone line leading out to Lidia’s pier, which was a logistical complication that hadn’t occurred to me when we’d bought the boat. The message, written in Lidia’s sloppy script, had read: Graham got your messages. Has been very, very busy. Love.
Since I couldn’t tell Graham, I told Lidia, who shrieked and squashed Frankie to her bosom, and Sally, who also shrieked. I planned to tell Charlie as soon as we saw him next. But when he came down the stilt house stairs to greet us, shirt unbuttoned and bare feet slapping the wood, talking about taking Frankie for a walk on the flats while the tide was still low—the impulse faded. I suppose I was sheepish about telling him because I hadn’t yet told Graham, and because he figured so prominently in the story. Also, I wondered if he would appreciate the significance of what had happened, the magic of it. I’d already convinced myself not to make too much of Graham’s response. Rather than being jubilant, as I’d been, it was likely he’d be impatient
, as if I was excited over what amounted to very little. At the library, picking up books for Charlie, I’d read a little about selective mutism, and what I’d learned was not encouraging. In two days, Frankie’s voice was already fading from my memory, but still each time I recalled it, I felt a shiver of glee.
Charlie handed Frankie a toy scuba diver, and Frankie rose to his toes, bouncing a little, and signed his thanks.
“We’re off, then,” said Charlie. “Okay, Mama?”
“Be good,” I said to Frankie. I handed over the sunscreen and carried Charlie’s cooler upstairs.
Some days, it was so hot and humid in the office, despite all the open windows, that the pages wilted in my hands. I wet my hair in the bathroom sink and wore a bandanna around my forehead to keep sweat from dripping onto the paper. Later that afternoon, while Frankie napped, Charlie sat in the low chair in the corner of the office, working on correspondence that he would send back with me to the mainland: letters to his wife and Henry Gale and Riggs, and usually at least one message for a curator interested in showing his work, which I would deliver. He silently steamed in the heat, breathing hard through his nose, his face flushed. He seemed to be making a point of not complaining, so I kept quiet until I couldn’t take it anymore, at which point I simply said, “This heat is insufferable.”
Charlie was out of his chair and heading into the hallway as soon as I spoke. I stayed where I was, kneeling in front of a pile of leatherback sea turtles—these had started to appear after I told Charlie what had happened in the Dry Tortugas—until he returned with a towel, which he tossed at me. “Let’s go,” he said.
Frankie had been asleep just under an hour. “I can’t—”
“We’ll be quick. Hurry up.”
I found him on the porch, one leg over the railing. Balancing, he pulled off his shirt and dropped it to the deck, then swung over his other leg. I came up beside him and looked down at the jade water. The tide had risen—I could tell because it swallowed the barnacle line on the pilings—but beyond the patch of water, the dock doglegged. If I jumped too far from the house, I’d land on wood.
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