*
In her arms on the way to the car Marc carried her bags and Sam. Irene carried an urn with the ashes of the child she’d never seen. There had been no funeral. She hadn’t wanted that. Hadn’t wanted the outpouring of grief. Her dead baby was hers, and hers alone, just as the fault was. She wanted that pain, needed it. She held it inside, right next to her love for the baby she’d never watch grow old.
She named him Jonathan, though she never told anyone and never would.
*
Marc tried to talk to Irene while he drove her home, but while she responded to his questions, her answers were short. She wasn’t rude. She smiled to let Marc know she was listening, but really, the baby held all her attention.
Sam was in the backseat, in the baby carrier. Irene sat in the back, too, staring at the child.
Sam, she’d called him, for her father. Marc thought it was a good name for the boy. Sometimes people have to grow into a name, but the boy was a Sam from the moment he was born.
‘Sam,’ she whispered. Maybe she thought Marc couldn’t hear her, but he could, and he smiled, too. He knew she would have called him Paul, but it didn’t seem right to name one Paul and not the other. Maybe it didn’t matter now, maybe it did, but Marc understood. It never would have felt right, and she had to do the best she could by Sam. It’d just be the two of them, growing together in the Blue House, learning.
Healing?
Marc nodded to himself. She was still broken from Paul. She would never be completely whole again. But what could she do but to go on? Sam needed her. She’d be there until he needed her no longer, however long that day was in coming. She wouldn’t let him down.
And neither would he, resolved Marc.
The boathouse rose from a mild fog, common on the coast as autumn drew on. His car wouldn’t make it across the sands out to the Blue House, so he pulled up.
The boathouse was well weathered, with wooden sidings, about fifteen feet high. Irene’s boat was back at the Blue House’s dock, but Marc’s boat was docked just down a bumpy shingled road that led down to the muddy estuary that ran a mile or so inland from the sea. The water was high enough to set off. He pulled his car into the wide gravel park of the dock and helped Irene get out of the car. She was obviously still in pain.
‘Can I do anything?’ he asked.
‘Carry Sam? Can you manage my bag, too?’
‘No problem,’ he said, and carried him in the nook of his elbow, the baby carrier swinging as he walked, her bag full of baby things on his shoulder.
She smiled her thanks at him with a dim smile, unlike the usual brightness she showed. He wondered what it was like to have such joy tempered by such sorrow, as he unmoored his small boat.
The three of them headed out to the point, the fog rolling across the bow, the boat cutting through it.
He’d never know the kind of pain Irene suffered, never having children himself. His life was insular. He had David, he had his friends, and he had Irene. He’d lost both his parents, but he knew losing a parent and losing a child was different, somehow.
Irene, on the other hand, seemed to take the things that hurt and turn them into strengths. Small; tiny, almost, she exuded confidence. He knew he loved her, and he’d do anything for her. She was the best friend anyone could ever wish for, and it broke his heart to watch her suffer so.
Even though she’d cried solidly for the last five days, there was plenty yet to come, though he knew he wouldn’t catch her in a moment of weakness again. He didn’t think of her tears as weakness, but he knew she hated people seeing her upset. She was the rock, the sculpture carved in stone, and that was the role she’d taken on. The role she needed to take.
Maybe it was some kind of reaction to the abuse she’d experienced before she married Paul. Maybe something to do with the horror of losing him.
Marc wasn’t a psychologist. He didn’t understand the why of it, but he could see the results of the tragedy she’d survived in her every action.
He smiled and looked over his shoulder at her, riding in the backseat of the boat. She didn’t acknowledge him, but that was fine, because she was wrapped up in her love for her child. Some parents, maybe they’d blame someone for a tragic death like that. But not Irene. No blame, except maybe that she bore herself.
Irene sat up front, staring ahead, like she was hungry for that first sight of the Blue House. She seemed so strong, her back straight, her hair blown wide by the wind, like a figurehead on some proud Viking vessel.
But the pain was always there in her eyes, and the way she rubbed at her shoulders, as though shivers passed through her at old memories. That pain would deepen, Marc knew, and he would have to be there for her, when she was ready. Never before, but when she was ready. He would be, too.
She was proud, and strong, and brave, but somehow she would always be frightened, too.
Looking at her proud back, thinking of the horror of this last week, and her life until she’d reached some kind of tranquillity, acceptance, whatever it was that she used to get through each day.
If he’d been through what she’d suffered, he was sure he’d want to die.
Looking at his beautiful, amazing friend, Marc felt like a fool. His present seemed stupid, now. Nothing like enough, and somehow inappropriate, too. But it was too late to take it back, because it was already there, waiting for her in the Blue House.
*
Marc pushed open the door for Irene with his free hand. A sudden gust snatched the door from his hand and it slammed against the jam. The glass in the door didn’t break, but it rattled hard.
Marc winced, but Irene barely noticed. All her attention was on Sam in his carrier on Marc’s arm. It was maybe the first time he’d known her not to smile at the sight of Blue House. But that probably wasn’t so strange. She’d just lost a baby.
‘Sam, we’re home,’ she said. Marc held the door back against the gusting wind as Irene stepped into the front lobby of the house. The lobby was wide, with a split staircase leading to the second and third floors, and the observation post that sat above all.
In the centre of the lobby was Marc’s present.
Irene curled her nose up.
‘Shit,’ she said.
There was a stench there that hadn’t been there before. Marc felt embarrassed, but he didn’t know why. He certainly didn’t smell...but something did. Something he’d smelled before, like meat gone rotten or...shit. Shit and rot. That covered it.
He remembered the smell, then, from before, back in the shop.
Irene looked up from baby Sam and saw the mannequin. For a moment she had a disquieting sense that she’d seen it before, but she couldn’t place it. The feeling passed as soon as it came, and she had no idea why she would have been afraid of a simple mannequin.
Afraid? Now why would she be afraid of it?
Marc had stripped back the worn and mouldering material to find good solid cherry underneath. He’d sanded it, polished it to a high shine with a ton of beeswax. He’d filed the rust from the iron pedestal and polished it so it gleamed like new.
And he was sure it hadn’t smelled when he’d brought it over on the boat.
Irene smiled, tired, but a good smile, nonetheless.
‘Marc,’ she said, not needing to ask if he’d put it there. Of course he had, because she hardly knew anyone else in the whole world. She kissed him on the cheek.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful. Where did you get it?’
‘The delivery I told you about? The wrong mannequin? Well, this is it. I spruced it up a little, that’s all. It’s an antique for sure. I hoped you’d like it...’
‘I love it,’ she said.
Marc thought maybe she’d make it through. Just maybe.
‘I swear, it’s not the mannequin that smells...’
Irene laughed. ‘I know it’s not. The sea...smells out here sometimes. Sam’s probably pooed, too,’ she said, but Marc thought she didn’t sound so sure.
&nb
sp; ‘I better head back before dark,’ he said. Hardly anyone was stupid enough to risk the waters out to the point in the dark. The sea was untrustworthy, and even though it didn’t run deep, it could be fast.
‘Here OK?’ he asked. She nodded, and he put Sam’s carrier down on the lobby’s wooden floor and her bag alongside him.
‘Be careful,’ she said.
He kissed her and Sam goodbye and took the boat back, wondering about that awful smell.
*
Marc shut the door as he left. Irene waited until she heard the outboard motor on his vessel start up, then fade. She kept her coat on because there was a fine drizzle in the air through the fog, and the sea was choppy and cold.
Dark was maybe an hour off.
She put Jonathan’s ashes on a large cabinet by the front door and pulled her coat tighter. It could get up a wind down at the front. Already the wind was blowing away the fog and bringing in the rain.
Sam was bundled up in an all in one suit, and the baby carrier had a hood over the top half. There was a rain cover, too, but she didn’t think he’d need it. He’d be a hearty boy. 6lb and a single ounce, which he’d probably already lost since being born. She read that babies could lose anything up to half a pound, sometimes more, in the first week after birth. She wasn’t worried about Sam, though. He was strong. His grip on her finger was firm when she stroked his face. He gripped her hard when he was feeding, and he fed well.
Yes, he was hale.
She pushed open what she thought of as her front door, the one that led out onto the beach, facing out to sea.
She walked down, Sam in his carrier, the carrier in the nook of her elbow. Over the dunes, through the rain, until she reached the shore.
The sea was getting rough. Maybe a storm was coming in, but it might amount to little more than a squall. A seal popped its head above the water and then disappeared again. The birds weren’t wheeling, but bobbing in the surf. The wind blew fine grains of sand into her face, into her hair.
She laid the baby carrier and Sam beside her in the sand. He was sleeping peacefully, his chubby little face scrunched up.
She sat next to him, not worrying about the wet sand on her shoes and her clothes. Things like that didn’t bother her at all.
The sea swelled and the rain grew a little heavier while she sat and stared out at the clouds rising and the dark coming in from the east. She watched the gulls and the terns whirl in the wind, crying, like they were singing a dirge for the last of the day.
For the first time since leaving the hospital, Irene felt at peace.
She put her face in her hands and cried.
*
‘Oh, Paul,’ she said. She didn’t know where to start. How do you tell your husband what you’ve done? When you’ve killed his child? All that was left of him.
You don’t. You tell it to the sea. Vast, uncaring, and the best listener in all the world. Let the water take her sorrow, out on the tide.
‘OK...How do I start this?’
She remembered the first time she’d done this. When she’d bought the old home by the sea. The Blue House.
She remembered telling the sea about Paul. How he’d been beautiful in so many ways, ways beyond number. How he’d kissed her every morning when they woke. Even though their time together had been short, she knew he would have done so had they grown old together.
How he’d made her breakfast every Sunday, tried to talk when he was brushing his teeth, given up smoking for her, even though she smelled it on him whenever he went to the pub and how she never said a thing about it.
Truths and lies, like any fine marriage. It was just a matter of keeping the important truths and the important lies straight in your head.
A short marriage, but one that would last a lifetime for Irene. She had no doubts about that. Paul’s death was still fresh, but she knew it wouldn’t get easier with time. When people said it did, they didn’t know. They never knew.
She never thought she’d be telling her sorrow to the sea again. This time, doing it again for her son.
*
When Franklin Jacobs proposed to Irene Harris her mother cautioned her to sleep on it, and she did.
Sometimes it seemed she remembered more about Franklin than his brother Paul. It was unfair, and stupid, but she’d had months now to mull what was unfair, and what was stupid.
What was unfair was raising a child on her own. It was unfair that she’d been robbed of the only man she’d ever loved.
Nothing made any sense. It never had.
What she remembered most about Franklin Jacobs was his hands. He hadn’t been a big man, nor broad, but his hands had been heavy. And hard.
*
Music played on the stereo. It was something old. Franklin’s IPod was on shuffle, and she seemed to remember it was some tune she hated. The Stranglers. For the life of her she couldn’t remember the tune that night. She’d never listened to The Stranglers since, and never would. Thank God they’d fallen out of fashion.
Franklin drove her to a pub. The Dog and Duck, it was. She remembered that there was a collection of beer mats tacked to the wainscoting, brass horseshoes hanging down from the bar. They sat by the fire because it had been three weeks before Christmas when they first got together. It was a cold night, she wore a wrap-around top that she thought showed her breasts off – just enough, not too much.
That first date, she didn’t know. She had no idea what she was doing. She’d always been a pretty good judge of character, but maybe she’d been blinded. He drove her to the pub in a BMW that was only three years old. He was a good looking man, big, thick hair. She liked tall men, even though she was short.
She guessed she’d been beguiled by him, but the smell of him, a deep hard man smell. He worked for a building company, in the office, but he was confident and strong with gymnasium muscles. A little older than her, but not so much that it was weird.
He hadn’t started hitting her until they’d been together for six months, but she should have seen it coming after they’d been together for a few weeks. She should have got out right then, the first time he got angry that she wanted to go out with her girlfriends.
If she didn’t see it coming then, she could have stopped it any time in the build up to the hitting, but she was young, and like many abused women, the abuse built slowly, until it became normal and she thought it was her fault and not his.
She should have known, but she was young. So young.
The way he tried to control her, stopping her drinking, eventually being such a pain in the arse about her going out with her friends that she just spent all her time with him. He corralled her like a sheep, and by the time he hit her she already knew who the sheep was, and who the big dog was. The hitting wasn’t necessary, but then abusers have to take it higher.
By then she’d met Paul, though, and things became far more complicated, because while she was afraid of Franklin and could see no way out, she was falling in love with Paul. Paul was sweet and tender and kind, but he had a streak in him, a hardness that Irene needed in a man.
And Paul knew Franklin for what he was. They were brothers, after all. Paul saw her bruises, and one way or the other it had to come to a head.
Had she wanted it? Had she led Paul to fight her battle, or just let him?
She didn’t know. She’d thought about it long and hard plenty of times and never could get to the bottom of it, even in her head where no one else could see if she was guilty or not.
But the fact of it was that Paul saved her from Franklin, and in a way, things panned out from there. Her and Franklin splitting up, getting married to Paul. Paul’s death. It all stemmed from that first fight over her.
Maybe if she’d been a little older...a little wiser...maybe things wouldn’t have worked out like they did. But then...she wouldn’t have had Paul.
And as time moved on, the abuse got worse...she knew she wanted Paul, and wanted him more than anything else in the world.
*
Paul saw the bruise high on Irene’s cheekbone.
His face darkened like heavy clouds, like steel cooling. The only time she ever saw him angry was on that day, and it was somehow terrifying...but she was naive, then, too, and it was also somehow flattering.
‘Irene,’ he said. ‘Don’t think you have to put up with this. You deserve better,’ he said.
He boiled a kettle for her. She was in their family home, waiting for Franklin to return from work. She knew he was making tea to keep himself busy, to give him something to do so he wouldn’t have to look at her, show her how angry he was.
She saw that his hands were shaking while he stirred the tea. She wondered what it would be like to have Paul’s hands on her instead of Franklin’s. Paul’s softer hands, with narrow fingers and light hair on the back. She wondered what it would be like to run her hands though his hair, blonde, where Franklin’s hair was black.
She tried to concentrate on something else, and when he brought her tea she didn’t look at him, but stared down at the tea, still swirling from being stirred.
‘Irene?’ he said, not letting her ignore him, though she wanted to.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, forcing herself to meet his eyes.
He shook his head. ‘Yes, you do. You think Franklin’s never done this before? He’s my brother, Irene. I know him well enough.’
She put her head down. She couldn’t bear to look at that angry face, angry, and yet soft, for her. She knew Paul liked her. She wasn’t that naive. She liked him, too.
How much did she like him before the fight?
Plenty, she knew. It wasn’t all about how he’d saved her, given her back her dignity.
‘You’ve got to leave him.’
She couldn’t tell Paul right then, but Irene was half way past beginning to think one of the reasons she stuck with Franklin was...well, it was Paul.
‘I can handle it,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, you can’t.’
A Home by the Sea (A Supernatural Suspense Novel) Page 3
