Tourmaline

by Joanna Scott

  In the living room Patrick shrieked, “Idiot!” Harry threw a wooden block that hit Patrick in the head. As Patrick lunged at him, he kneed Nat in the back by mistake.

  “Dumbface!” Nat cried.

  “Jerk!” Patrick yelled.

  Murray was grateful for the uproar because it gave him the chance to get away from Francis. He attempted to mediate an elaborate truce among us. He wanted to hear Patrick’s account of the fight, then Harry’s. He invited Nat to add his own version. Yes, sharing should be encouraged, but on Christmas day a boy doesn’t necessarily have to share his new toy backhoe.

  “Let’s talk about sharing,” Murray said, his cigarette still clamped between his lips, the four of us watching in fascination as the long ash grew longer and still didn’t crumble.

  When he finally returned to the dining room to rejoin Francis, Claire was there and had already heard from Francis a good part of a longer version of the Adriana Nardi story. Had Claire ever met the Signora? Francis was asking as Murray settled into his seat.

  “Never,” Claire said.

  “She’s a retiring sort,” Francis said, “not much interested in life, as far as I can tell.”

  Or else, Murray considered, Signora Nardi was inordinately interested in life and had found ways to watch without being seen. Perhaps she knew how to keep an eye on her daughter and hired someone to follow her. An absurd idea — yet it had the force of a startling memory. Murray pictured the living room of his Le Foci house. The moonlight on the floor. Adriana on the sofa beside him. Someone watching through the window, just like someone had watched him from a window of La Chiatta as he wheeled his Lambretta from the courtyard.

  Murray had become a potential suspect in a potential crime — or maybe not. Maybe no one had given him a second thought. He attempted to return to his earlier mood. The satisfaction of a smoke after a good dinner. A glass of cognac. Adriana just an annoyance.

  At least the girl knew how to keep a secret — you could see this in her face, her pallor, her evasive sideways glances. She’d learned as a child to protect herself with secrecy, every word and gesture designed to deflect attention. But here was the paradox: her evasive manner invited attention, as though — no, not as though, in fact, she wanted to be seen, admired, exposed, to confess what she had been trained to hide.

  Unless she were mad, her shattered mind held together by a dark obsession. I’m here, Signor Murdoch. Go away, Adriana. I don’t want to go away. Go away.

  A woman’s voice. A rooster’s crow.

  He watched Francis and Claire talking, listened to the liquid, indecipherable murmur on the radio in the living room. He let himself drift, imagined a Saturday afternoon in his backyard in America. Screech of a blue jay, smell of fresh-cut grass, buzz of a chain saw in the neighbor’s yard, and the sound of children’s voices from the tree house — not so different from the sounds his children were making in the next room, reminding Murray of where he was, in a villa overlooking the Mediterranean, lured here by the simple promise of change.

  He’d have admitted to being a ridiculous man with ridiculous ambitions, but he had committed no crime and had no reason to run away. He looked across the table at his wife for confirmation. She was chewing her thumbnail while she listened to Francis describing what he knew about Signora Nardi. Murray reached for the cognac and refilled Francis’s glass and his own. Claire looked at Murray, and when their eyes met Murray was surprised to feel a different manner of scrutiny — the searching glance not of concern but of suspicion.

  “You think I have something to do with this?” he said calmly, setting the bottle back on the table.

  Claire flinched visibly but remained silent, and Francis watched them both with his lips pressed tight in what Murray read as a grin. The silence was unbearable. “I mean,” Murray continued awkwardly, “the girl might have told me back when…she could have indicated…but she didn’t, you know. She didn’t admit it. If she was troubled. Or something.”

  Claire worked the dry skin of her cuticle. “Something,” she muttered. The scorn implied by her echo ordinarily would have goaded Murray into an argument. Instead it stirred in him the same cool indignation he would have felt if he’d been holding a worthless hand of cards and Claire were threatening to call his bluff.

  Guilt sounds like the crinkle of aluminum foil. The clank of a knife against the half-open lid of a tin can. A gas burner hissing without a flame. A cat clawing at a sofa’s upholstery. Dry leaves blowing on pavement. Scotch tape being crumpled into a ball.

  Claire heard guilt in Murray’s voice, though not the guilt of a man who is pouring another glass of cognac when he’s already drunk, which is the only kind of guilt she would have expected right then. When she looked at him suspiciously, it wasn’t, as Murray had thought, in connection with Adriana Nardi. Fine to be concerned about Adriana, but at that moment Claire was more concerned about Murray’s drinking, trying to decide how much was too much as she watched him refill his glass.

  The sound of guilt is a man asking his wife if she thought he had something to do with a girl’s disappearance. With this, Murray introduced to Claire a new kind of suspicion, causing her to wonder above all why his voice was unnaturally calm, and next, why he had to ask such a question at all.

  Francis stayed past midnight. By then Murray was slurring his speech and bumping his knuckles against his glass. Claire took his drunkenness to be a retreat from the conversation he didn’t want to have. The possibility that Murray had something to hide was more unsettling to Claire than drunkenness. Drunkenness was no more than a lapse. Claire decided to wait until the next day to talk with him.

  But the days following filled up too quickly for her to pull Murray aside. He would set off early in the mornings, and in the evenings he’d bring home friends — Lorenzo, Mario and Pia Ginori, Francis. There was no time for Claire to have the kind of talk she wanted to have, a talk that would lead in a direction she didn’t dare predict. She didn’t even bother to tell Murray that for the time being she’d given up making arrangements to book our passage home.

  Murray’s uncles wired more money in early January, bolstering his confidence, and he was able to afford the rest of the down payment on the Mezza Luna property. He even sent photographs of the land to his uncles and promised to look for other potential acquisitions. His uncles wrote back to ask Murray what the hell he thought he was doing, buying land with the money they’d sent to help cover his expenses!

  But Murray was undaunted. As the days passed, Claire felt less inclined to disturb his good humor, and she made an effort to convince herself of his innocence. Maybe the worst her husband could be accused of was to be trapped by someone else’s affection. Sometimes, she reminded herself, we get entangled by accident.

  At the end of January, during the quiet of siesta on an unusually warm day, Claire was reading on the terrace when someone knocked on the door. Directly overhead a gull glided lazily in circles, as silent as the words on the page —

  The town, the churchyard, and the setting sun,

  The clouds, the trees, the rounded hills all seem,

  Though beautiful, cold — strange — as in a dream…

  The sea rippled in the distance. The sunlight warmed Claire’s face. And then came the rude interruption of the three brittle knocks.

  A moment later Lidia came to the terrace to announce that Claire had a visitor. “Who?” Claire asked. Lidia turned around and went back inside without responding. Either she didn’t hear or she pretended not to hear, leaving Claire to assume that the cook judged the visitor of too little importance to introduce.

  No — the visitor was of great importance, and Lidia had already invited her into the living room and left to make coffee. When Claire approached, the woman extended her hand without bothering to rise from her chair. Claire smiled uneasily. She pretended to be pleased — pleased to make the acquaintance of…it must be Signora Nardi, she said gently, adding Piacere, which the Signora countered in her gravelly voice,
“Thank you, Mrs. Murdoch.”

  She had bulging almond eyes, heavy lids, a long nose, and metal gray hair tied up in a bun. She wore a black wool dress that hung loosely on her small body, with a black shawl embroidered with delicate flowers. Claire thought of the woman on the Casparia, the woman who’d been dressed in black linen on a hot summer day, the one Claire had seen weeping at the rail. It occurred to her only now that she’d never seen the woman on the ship after that first day.

  She was sorry to hear about Adriana — was this what she should say? Or this: She and her husband shared Signora Nardi’s concern. But Claire sensed that the woman would appreciate directness.

  “What news do you have of your daughter?”

  “No news, Mrs. Murdoch. My daughter has disappeared like water into the air. You call it…what do you call it?”

  “Evaporation, you mean?”

  “I ask for your help, Mrs. Murdoch.”

  “We’ll do anything we can.”

  “You are American.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have contacts.”

  Contacts — the word suggested a secret truth, as if Signora Nardi knew more about her than Claire knew about herself. “What do you mean, contacts? ”

  “In the government.”

  Her tone as much as her words suggested paranoia rather than reliable information. Perhaps, Claire thought with some relief, the Signora had read too many spy novels.

  “The American government? We don’t know anyone in the government, not personally. Not even a state senator! We’d very much like to help you, Signora Nardi, but we’re not the kind of people who have important friends.”

  “You have money.”

  Claire had to stifle a laugh. “We’re barely able to make ends meet!” She wanted to go on — they had no savings, and the Averils were losing patience. “But that’s not the point. The point is, we want to help you if we can. Let me think. We could organize a search party. Do you know what that is — a search party?”

  Lidia was back with the coffee tray. She handed a demitasse to Signora Nardi, offered her the sugar and a spoon. Claire watched the woman tip back her head and down the caffè like a man swallowing a shot of whiskey. When she spoke again, her rattling voice had turned into a growl.

  “I do not need your parties. I need you to find for me the American diavolo who has stolen my daughter.”

  Guilt is the sound of a Lambretta carrying a man home shortly after dawn. Claire looked past her guest through the window and at the terrace beyond, where she’d stayed up waiting through the night back in November.

  “What do you mean?”

  Signora Nardi’s laughter came abruptly. She started to explain, “He — ” and then thought better of it. “I want to find the American who can tell me where my daughter is.”

  “There are other Americans on the island,” Claire said stupidly. “I met an American in Porto Azzurro just last week. He asked me for directions. If we knew the name of his boat, we might be able to track him down.”

  “He was a man much older than my daughter — that is all I know for certain. Buonasera, Signora Murdoch. Arrivederla.”

  “Arrivederla, Signora Nardi. We will ask around, I promise.”

  It was a weak promise, Claire admitted to herself after Adriana’s mother had left. A dismissive promise. She sipped her bitter caffè and told herself what she hadn’t been willing to say to Signora Nardi. Asking around wasn’t good enough; she could do better.

  “Signora, please —” Claire caught up with her as she was getting into the taxi that had been idling in the drive. Signora Nardi waited, holding the door open.

  “You suspect my husband, don’t you?”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Suspect …the word…to suspect someone is to —”

  “I know what it means. But I do not understand why you think I suspect your husband.”

  “That’s why you came here, isn’t it? To share your suspicion?” The woman drew in a deep breath, and Claire braced herself for the release of fury. But the Signora let the breath escape in a gentle sigh that suggested sympathy instead of anger. “Signora Murdoch. How should I say this? If I spoke in Italian. Never mind. Signora, at no time have I suspected your husband. I have met your husband. And I know what my daughter said. She said he was a good man. Molto vivace. A silly man also, she said. She trusted him, and I trust him.” She paused, studied Claire’s face, and asked abruptly, “Do you believe me?”

  Startled by the woman’s candor, Claire said, “Yes, I do, I do —” though she was thinking the opposite.

  Patrick went twice into the Mezza Luna zone with Murray. The first time, the day after Christmas, Murray told him to look for colored stones amidst the dirty white quartz. When Patrick found a pinkish wedge lined with cracks, Murray identified it as feldspar. That was the extent of Patrick’s first geology lesson.

  The second time Patrick accompanied Murray was on a bright cold Saturday in early February, and Carlo was there, to Murray’s surprise. He’d come to look for a knapsack he’d lost back in December and was sitting on a boulder beside a shallow, muddy pool of run-off water, finishing the wine in his flask, when Murray and Patrick arrived. Patrick spoke more Italian than Murray did by then, and he accepted Carlo’s offer to accompany him on a walk around the site.

  As they crossed a gulch Carlo found a forked twig about two feet long. He whittled the tip to a taper with his pocketknife and then showed Patrick how to grasp the stick with his clenched fingers held toward the sky. If Patrick happened to step upon a patch of ground over a vein of precious mineral, the twig would begin to turn and twist, Carlo explained, mimicking the motion with his hips. Then he led the way up the slope, stepping carefully between the brambles of rock roses.

  The divining rod shook at ten different spots, Patrick told us later, and though he didn’t find any gems, he did, with Carlo’s help, find a geode, which he busted open on a flat rock, shattering one half, leaving the other circle of crystal intact.

  We were awed by the crystal, especially after Patrick repeated to us what Carlo had told him — that it was a piece of a meteor from outer space. And if it came from outer space it must be magic, Patrick said.

  “Magic how?” Nat asked.

  “Magic like in being invisible?” Harry asked.

  Magic like sawing a person in half? This was my question, though I kept it to myself.

  “Magic like the kind that shows you the future,” Patrick said, with a confidence that suggested expert knowledge. The problem, he went on to explain, was figuring out how to make the magic work. We pondered the geode half, stared at its crystal peaks and shards, but failed to decipher its code. And since potential magic becomes boring more quickly than real magic, we hid the geode in the bedroom closet and ran back outside.

  That day we played a new game, invented by Patrick, who had heard from Carlo about a tribe of giant ants living in the mountains of Elba. They were bigger than foxes, smaller than wolves, and when they dug tunnels in the sand they brought up nuggets of gold the size of raisins. We used pebbles for the gold and long green twigs for our antennae. Harry and I were ants. My job was to guard the horde of pebbles while Harry watched for intruders. Patrick and Nat would creep toward us from separate directions, taunting us with insults from their hiding places. Harry and I would throw handfuls of little pine cones at every moving shadow.

  The game absorbed us. We played even when a misty rain started to fall. The gold made us greedy; competition made us violent. Harry scratched Patrick with a stick, Patrick pushed Harry to the ground, I hit Nat in the eye with a pine cone, Nat yanked a fistful of my hair. No one cried or threatened to go home. If our gold was depleted, we would reverse roles, and we, the giant ants of Monte Giove, would try to steal the gold back.

  Death to the ants. The ants must die!

  We have come to take back our gold.

  The gold belongs to us now.

  The gold belongs to us.

 
; Vai, vai!

  Scemi!

  We smelled the needles carpeting the damp earth. We saw the black-and-white flash of a cuckoo against the dusky sky. We formed a circle and pissed into the opening of a burrow. Rain was as thick as syrup on our short hair. These are the memories I share with my brothers. But there are other details none of us can recall accurately. Was it Harry or Nat who climbed high into a pine tree and leaped to the branch of another tree? Was it Nat or me who tripped over an exposed root and knocked his head against the hard ground, blacking out for a few seconds? Who decided to band forces and collect more gold? We gathered striped granite gneiss, coarse gabbro, simple, brittle quartzite. Who found the greatest treasure of all, a mica schist with two little tourmaline crystals poking up from the side? Patrick says he found the schist; Nat says Harry found it. Harry doesn’t remember.

  Give me that!

  It’s mine and you’re dead!

  We didn’t realize how dark it had become or how far we had wandered up the mountain until we heard our father calling for us. His voice was plaintive, without the tremor of impatience or the promise of punishment — the voice of a guilty man who blames himself for the disappearance of his sons. Which meant, if we were interpreting the tone correctly, we were blameless and could even add to our father’s torment by hiding from him.

  His flashlight beam was the searchlight of the giant ants, and we were their prisoners of war. We would attempt a perilous escape.

  Follow me, shhhh. We slid on our bellies down the side of a gulch toward freedom.

  Ouch!

  Shut up.

  You shut up.

  Murray’s flashlight beam swept over our heads, swung back, and centered itself on Patrick’s face.

  “Patrick!”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Where are…there…two…three…four, you’re all here, right? You’re all okay, right?”

  “Right, Dad.”

  Murray squinted through the rain and moved his lower jaw as if to chew a tough piece of meat. “Now tell me what the fuck you were doing.”