The Ocean House

by Mary-Beth Hughes

  Cradle it, please, said Jemma. We don’t want to lose the charge now, do we?

  Sebastian shook his head.

  That’s right.

  Like he was four. He had a fast strange sudden urge to hurl the phone at Jemma. But not actually hit her, of course. If only Chloe were here, there’d be some clarity about who was family and who were temps.

  But Chloe, as always, was on her way. He carried the phone back down the long gallery full of his mother’s paintings toward the master bedroom. The phone cradle was in there somewhere, near the bed, though his mother stayed all the time in the space pod now. Only Bob slept under the canopy he’d built years ago as her wedding gift. Old fish-patterned boxers oozed from under his mother’s pristine hemstitch neck pillow. Buff or full pajamas, Chloe had said about a month into the Elle gulag. The first of many dictums to come. The phone rang again in his hand.

  Cantrell residence, he mumbled. Jemma insisted. So many services were calling, and it saved confusion. She preferred he didn’t answer the phone at all.

  Tardo. It was Chloe again.

  Hey, the commander has me doing things, like tasks.

  Well, that’s probably for the best. Listen. Karl wants to come up.

  Really?

  Chloe had a sniffle in her voice. Yes, he thinks it’s important that he support me, you know, now.

  Well, don’t you have a say?

  I do and he’s got a point. So I’m going to wait for him in Poughkeepsie. He’s getting on the train, or he probably already has. Anyway, I won’t be that delayed.

  Come on.

  So listen, go ask Bob if it’s okay.

  Bob?

  Well, yeah, it’s his house.

  It’s Mom’s house. It’s our house.

  Chloe seemed to be listening to something else. Sweetie, she said. Please ask Bob.

  Hold on.

  Sebastian tossed the receiver on the quilt and went down the glass walkway to the space pod. His mother was restless in her bed. The sides were pulled up for just these times when she tossed around. She’d fallen out more than once and had long frightening bruises on her left thigh that Jemma bathed with cool water and baking soda. She was moving her head back and forth and murmuring: Come here, come here.

  Sebastian came closer and touched her shaking hand. Always so graceful, there were two photographs of just her hands in the study because they were so pretty and full of good touch. He put his fingers under her palm as if to siphon off some of that good touch now.

  Mama, Chloe wants to bring Karl.

  Coming now, she said, but his mother was looking away from him, blinking toward the ficus. She’s coming.

  Chloe’s coming. Yes.

  No. No. His mother’s eyes flew wide open. No! she shouted.

  Then Jemma was hustling in with the full morphine syringe. She tilted his mother’s head gently right back like a cat’s and squirted. There we go, said Jemma. There we go. And with the release of her grip his mother calmed down.

  Let your mother rest now.

  Sebastian retrieved the phone buried in the quilt. Mom says no to Karl, he said. And then: Chloe? But Chloe was gone. The phone was out of juice.

  Maybe he should just get out of the house for a minute. The front door slammed behind him by mistake. He thought Jemma would come running, but he meandered down the driveway uninterrupted. The creek was only half-frozen so far, rumbling over the rocky outcroppings. This was something he usually liked to watch. They all did.

  When his mother first bought their house after the divorce, everything was in boxes and looked to stay that way for a while. No one had the heart to unpack. So they spent a lot of time in the meadow, by the creek. His father had just moved all the way to South America though the judge had given him half custody.

  Let him, said their mother, angry. Just let him. But her hand cupping his shoulder wasn’t angry at all. She didn’t hold tight, didn’t caress, and he could almost tolerate that. South America. Lima, Peru. One minute his father just wanted a little peace, the next he lived on another continent. Her hand stayed quiet on his shoulder, and an eagle flew up the creek, white head, some white belly feathers, white tail.

  It’s a dove! he cried out.

  And his mother gave that look of hers. Sweetheart? she said. He was only five. He thought dove was a pretty good guess. But it was a joke that lasted forever.

  Lately, there was talk of a cell phone tower finally coming into the area, which of course would make the whole phone thing easier. But there were those who felt it would ruin everything perfect here, the rural quality a convenient two hours from Midtown Manhattan.

  It’s really shocking, said their mother when they first arrived. And it was. They’d missed just about everything about the city. Friends, school, goofball doorman, sour tippler doorman, father. Their mother built her space pod, a glass octagon that took in every inch of sky and land and water. Chloe and Sebastian went to a Country Day School, and then quick as anything Bard honors for Chloe, then the dungeons of Elle. Meanwhile Sebastian was still working out the difference between an eagle and a dove. Ha, ha, ha.

  Give Bob a hand, his mother said when Sebastian first arrived. She was talking more then. That Chloe should have come much sooner was just a sad fact and now she’d be diluted by Karl, the flaky tyrant.

  What does Bob need help with, Mom?

  Just the two of them in the space pod and he was slumped in her old silk wing chair, playing dive bombers with the baby spider plants. Crashing the little tendrils into one another. His mother frowned.

  It’s a project? he said. A video thing I’m working on. This is like the choreography?

  She’d laughed at this blatant fabrication. Though it wasn’t entirely that. He would come up with something later that used time-lapse footage of small spider plants in violent mangling explosions. It was fascinating and took a whole semester to complete when they finally let him back into school. On pity parole, Chloe would say.

  What does Bob need help with, Mom?

  She was lying still, eyes closed. Her hair fanned out on the blue pillow. She’d been sweaty and her fragile hair knotted easily, but now Jemma had combed it into a transparent wavy white halo, so angelic it embarrassed him. If his mother knew, she’d scrap this nonsense. Always simple with her appearance.

  Mama?

  Bob’s not strong the way you are, love. You have to let him be a part of things, you know. You can’t just jettison him anymore.

  Why not? he wondered, but he didn’t say this out loud. And his mother opened her eyes and gave him the essence. Chloe had named it when they were young. They must have been bathed in it as babies, but later it was a rare event announced by the recipient and coveted by the listener, back and forth, back and forth. You know I’m not scared, right? she said. And he nodded. Because he did know that.

  Now the snow was getting serious, so he turned toward the house and got inside the front door just in time to see Bob running down the long gallery, then running back again to the foyer and waving Sebastian in as if he needed an invitation.

  That’s right, Bob was saying into the phone. That’s right. One-oh-four. I said one-oh-four. Four.

  Which could only mean his mother had popped one of her high fevers and Bob was flagging the doctor. Sebastian followed Bob. He shook off the old impulse to mimic Bob’s lock-kneed walk that Chloe could do perfectly. An affectation, she said, along with the combing of genealogy websites for Puritan forebears. Other than that, Bob was a freelance photographer. Very free, said Chloe.

  He has no one but us, their mother had told them solemnly one night just after Christmas.

  And Chloe had corrected: Mostly you, Mom. I mean, when you really think about it.

  Well, he’ll need both of you now, too, she’d said but didn’t elaborate. And the idea of Bob needing something from Sebastian felt lik
e a small bad flu.

  In the space pod, his mother’s sheets were tangled again from all the commotion. Jemma held a cool washcloth to her forehead. She had a glass of ice nearby to feed little chips into her panting mouth. Take a breath, Rebecca, said Jemma.

  No, said his mother, or more a head shake than the word. It hurt too much. It hurt too much. But the cloth was soothing and her breathing began to quiet down, and before the doctor was ringing the chimes instead of coming right in, her fever had already diminished a tiny bit. These spikes didn’t mean much the doctor said. He was glad to come out all the same. Let me take a look, since I’m here. And Jemma cleared the room.

  Back in his mother’s study, Bob had been compiling a list on a joke notepad decorated with a cartoon bumblebee. honey-do was printed on the top. These were the names of the first people they’d need to call, Bob said. He was dividing the names among the three of them.

  I’m giving Chloe your aunt Beatrice, said Bob and raised his eyebrows. This gave him the look, oddly, of a saint in a Florentine painting. Images his mother kept tacked up in her studio, especially the blue-faced Madonnas and their practical smiles.

  On the desk, Bob had gathered a little pile of photos he planned to make copies of later to give away. Don’t touch these, please, said Bob, then left again to check in with the doctor.

  Sebastian rifled through the stack for anything incriminating.

  As a photographer, Bob’s career was launched on a series of chance images taken when he first met Rebecca and her children. Before that he was an artist about town. Also, someone who brought a good eye to the holes in a slate roof or the decayed gingerbread woodwork unspooling along the porch beams. Bob came to fix their bluestone patio and that week snapped a photo of Sebastian, five and naked, climbing out of the creek with a feathery fern sprouting from each armpit. Then rolling in the long grass to solve an itch. Then finally, surprisingly, dead asleep in bright sunshine. Fourteen photographs in all. And thanks to Rebecca, some found a tiny but permanent home in the photo collection of Goldman Sachs. Sebastian at rest in the archives.

  Now Bob stood whispering something to Jemma outside the study door in the long gallery. Some of his mother’s excellent paintings, the ones that had made her name, were cunningly framed and lit. Bob never spoke of them. They were so good, Sebastian told Chloe when they were young teenagers, that Bob had to shield his eyes just to get into the bedroom and do his duty. Even now, his head cranked away from the display as he alerted Jemma, his whisper voice carrying, that the doctor had decided to stay.

  Jemma nodded like she knew that already and Bob had finally caught on. They both ducked back toward the bedroom, and Sebastian realized, his stomach quivering, that he needed to call Chloe and really speed her along. Who, he suddenly wondered, had his father on their honey-do list? Sebastian hadn’t spoken to him in years, and like a coward—he thought this, I’m a ridiculous coward—he hoped it was Chloe, because then she could analyze the call with Karl afterward and at least have that little benefit. And just as he was thinking all this, the headlights of Chloe’s old Mini Cooper swept up the driveway, Karl’s big cube of a head behind the small wheel.

  He watched them through his mother’s paper snowflake and laughed that she’d placed this so strategically. Like a nice obfuscating screen so not too much reality about who’s arriving came through all at once. Break it to me gently. Her favorite thing to say. Whatever was happening with Karl was nicely fragmented, but it was still clear he was out of the car and sinking to the ground in some deep expression of something or other. Chloe stood over him in a white fur vest and skinny jeans, shivering and, from the way she held her hands, pleading with Karl to get up off the ground.

  It took nothing for Sebastian to decide he’d just go out there and shame Karl into a little decency, when Jemma started shouting, no whispery commands now. She was actually shouting for him to come immediately.

  In many interviews over the years, especially when Sebastian and Chloe were small, their mother said her work meant the world to her but her children mattered more. It made her extremely unpopular in some places. But Sebastian and Chloe believed it to be true and felt they were lucky in this, their belief. Even so, she was likely to forget their particulars, such as food preferences and their teachers’ names. They had to admit that Bob kept the details straight. And he was a decent cook. So they’d accepted him as they did the power outages and the mice nesting in the stove as part of their country life. But in a Goldman Sachs newsletter, when Bob’s photo of sleeping Sebastian spent a brief tour in a conference room before the naked little boy was sent back to the underground stacks, Bob said his work was all that mattered. Ever.

  The last photo of the original fourteen still hung in the kitchen. Again of Sebastian but this time with Chloe, too. Watching television in their mother’s study, faces rapt as angels. Chloe on the floor leans into Sebastian’s knobby legs and he braids her hair, some complicated weave and snarl that later took their mother a long time to unravel. Sebastian’s hands flutter above Chloe’s white hair. An eerie light drenches their throats and chins. Karl hated this picture and it had come up more than once in his battle for Chloe’s maturity. Her woman’s capacity to love that he craved.

  Sebastian banged on the glass, hard. But Karl had stretched out flat in the snowy driveway. Christ, Chloe, come on! But she couldn’t hear him. The funnel, their mother called Karl. When Chloe’s near him, her whole self gets poured right in. Her babyish dopey inade­quate self, added Sebastian.

  Chloe! he pounded again on the window. But then Jemma was back in the kitchen, grabbing a blue suction bulb in one hand and more morphine in a prefilled syringe in the other. Jemma smelled urgent. Like she’d ratcheted up her aroma, so he’d know she wasn’t kidding around. Her scent left a trail that he was bound to follow, down the long gallery to his mother’s bedroom, which had become chaotic in the last few minutes, piles of sheets soaked in vomit dragged in, spilled ice. Bob lay flat on the bed, red faced and sloppy with weeping.

  Sebastian looked away and drifted down the walkway to the space pod, where it was very quiet. His own feet felt too light to him as he walked closer to the railing of his mother’s bed.

  Where’s the doctor? he asked no one, because Jemma had forgotten something and ran back past him. His mother was very still. All the lights had been lowered, so only a night-light played softly along her jaw. Her mouth was compressed as if annoyed or waiting.

  Mama? he said, and her eyes flew open, sharp as bees flying right at him, furious.

  You’re awake, she said. Go to bed.

  Mama? Mom?

  Go to sleep, she said. As soon as she comes, I’ll sleep, too.

  Chloe’s here. She’s in the driveway.

  So stupid, she said. So stupid.

  What is? he asked. And her chest rose up, gleaming with sweat, her nightgown soaked through, the linens, too. She arched like something plucked her up from above.

  That’s four, she said tight in her throat as her body fell back again, eyes wide with surprise. He smiled into her open face. That had always been the warning. They had five counts to get their behavior together. Not one more. Then Chloe came rushing into the space pod, at last.

  When the honey-do lists had all been called and Sebastian finally had to dial his father in Lima, his father answered bleary voiced like a drunk, but it was just sleep, just late. Sebastian broke the news and his father didn’t speak. No sorry, no anything. He just said merci.

  Merci? That’s not even Spanish.

  What did you expect? said Chloe, whose face looked pinched and pale after soothing Aunt Beatrice. Tardo? Hey. Come on. She smiled. She patted his arm roughly like he was a big dog, then smacked his shoulder, but all that stopped when tearstained Karl stood in the study doorway.

  Poor Bob, he said. Poor sad fucker. I told Jemma to just give him something.

  Jemma’s still here?
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  We need to pay her, Tardo, if you want her to go home. God, how is this all going to work? I guess I can write a check.

  Don’t even start, said Karl. He slid down hard into their mother’s maple rocker and sat hugging one big knee close to his big chest. It will just ruin us, he said.

  Sebastian blinked at the word “ruin.” Merci? he said to Karl. And when Chloe scowled at him, he said, Take a walk, Clone?

  What’s that? said Karl.

  Take a walk with me, Chloe? Air? Lungs?

  She looked to Karl, who considered, then he nodded in the direction of the foyer, giving permission.

  I won’t be long, she said and dropped a soft kiss on his pursed mouth.

  Out in the driveway, Sebastian tapped Karl’s imprint with his toe. Look. He made a snow bunny, he said.

  Don’t start.

  No, it’s the money we’re not supposed to start with. Good thing I’m here to interpret.

  I’m going back inside, she said.

  No, don’t. Come on. Don’t.

  They shambled down the sloping drive, out of the circle of the house lights into the dark gray of first morning. Birds were just beginning to call, tentative. Singular. A zigzag-sounding whistle, then a short hoot.

  Maybe we have owls.

  Maybe.

  Their footsteps crackled hard in their ears. And the cold stung their damp faces.

  You know she left him the house, right? said Chloe.

  Bob?

  Yup. I mean, you know, provisionally. Someday it reverts to us.

  What does that even mean?

  I don’t know. She called a couple of weeks ago and told me. It’s his home. That’s what she said.

  She told you?

  Chloe shrugged.

  Sebastian looked back at the house. The space pod was lit up now like a giant light bulb, which was horrible and wrong. His mother preferred mood lighting. But we can still stay here, right? I don’t understand.

  I guess we’ll just have to see if Bob got the inclusion talk.

  Sebastian stared at Chloe. But what if he didn’t? Where am I supposed to go?