The Ocean House

by Mary-Beth Hughes

  And the potential client, Jill Marks, looked as if Faith had just delighted her. She’d only said that Cece, like Jill’s young daughter, had been a swimmer. The 6:00 a.m. swim team practices, the green Speedos, and the freezing water in the saltwater pool, splashing her feet, while she stood, dutifully, drinking tepid coffee from a paper cup. This was after Bernadette left and of course after the brief and bitter rule of Lee-Ann. Then she’d taken Cece to the club herself. In all the summers that followed, she’d taken Cece. So she could swim.

  Wait, said Jill Marks. Tell me where your cabana was.

  The club was always terrible in this way. Bald in its ranking of members. Oh, said Faith, waving it off. I forget. Maybe third from the end?

  You mean the stand-alones?

  I don’t think we called them that, laughed Faith. More like the huts. They were a disaster, leaky roofs, impossible bathrooms. Rust. Rust as design element! And then she felt they’d done enough preliminary talk. She pulled a yellow legal pad out of a tote bag, pushed forward the lead on a mechanical pencil. This wasn’t just a signal to the client. Since starting her business, Faith had learned how much these gestures helped her.

  But Jill Marks was still smiling as if they were old friends, reconnecting, reconstructing the lost years.

  Oh, they don’t bother with the coffee anymore, Jill said. Green juice! There we all are: the green suits, the juice, the awn­ings, green everything! Honestly, they could use your help.

  Faith smiled but unsteadily. Her help?

  Well, said Jill Marks with a wave toward the blue enamel of the Italian espresso machine. The lofty new windows of the coffee shop. As if Faith’s presence here were enough to make things very nice indeed.

  Faith sighed audibly, and Jill finally slipped a large cell phone out of a pink leather sleeve. Okay, she said. Here’s the thing.

  It was almost a good idea. Jill was creating a babysitting service slash rehabilitation job training. Kids who needed a second chance but not much of one. These were teenagers who’d gotten into a little bit of trouble, suspended from school for tardiness or in a fender bender with a questionable friend at the wheel and so on.

  Now Faith held back the sigh and found she was also holding her breath—heard her mother say, What’s the trouble, bubble? Nothing, she hoped. And Jill Marks talked on and on. She spoke of the young miscreants like adorable merchandise that would fly off the shelves. It was very odd to Faith but not unfamiliar. Children as units to be shifted. After all, how had she landed here in the chic coffee shop? Courtney Ruddy. Who even now liked to keep a hand in.

  Ten years ago—at least, more—Courtney had left J. P. Morgan and the Jersey Shore to marry, for the first time, a much older poet living in Upstate New York. The shock! Faith attended the wedding out of pure curiosity. She found a cluster of swaying, graying men, mostly, on a steep hillside overlooking a cow pond. They recited many poems. Faith remembers the way her legs felt—on fire—high heels sinking into the loose soil. And the way Courtney looked nymph-like and beautiful, like a sexy child, in the company of these men. Just this week she’d written to say she’d tossed Faith’s number to a young entrepreneur. She needs a bookkeeper and a bit of good sense. Don’t thank me!

  2.

  Hadley’s eyes felt as if they’d been poked hard by small sandy fingers while he slept. A dense pinching throb. Here come the jasmine towels delivered on a tray. A scent he disliked, but the damp and heat might help. Also a handful of aspirin and a last-minute vodka. Then the gray Atlantic below would give way to the suburban beaches of Long Island. The usual tangle at Kennedy Airport awaited. Boris would be there, as always, leaning against the wall with the other drivers. The town car parked someplace close and illegal. Boris waving like family as Hadley emerged into the International Arrivals area. Before that, a shuffle and slide through customs. It would be tedious and fine. Then he’d be in the car heading home. A bike courier could take Owen’s dubious gift the rest of the way downtown.

  Delayed, apparently, the plane began coasting in the wider, slower circles. They dipped down over the flame-shooting oil refineries of Elizabeth. On the Jersey Turnpike, cars moved faster than the plane tilted in a mid-air stall. He hated being a messenger for his brother. It makes me a liar, he thought, like a kid. Like they were still boys and Owen had a new bad plan. Something they’d be whipped for later. He could almost smile. And any number of people would smile along with him at the idea of Hadley taking umbrage at a lie. But he’d agreed. It’s nothing! Owen had said in Hong Kong. Now the nothing was stuffed into a sparkly pink suitcase and stowed at the front of the cabin.

  Finally, they landed. Immediately, there was a problem. A burst of new construction had erupted while he was away. The flight from Paris roamed lost around the runways for an hour.

  Off the plane, at last, he carried little with him. Just a briefcase and small leather grip. What they might want to look for—but, really, why would they?—had already been walked through customs by the flight attendant. Hadley fixed his eyes on the sliding glass doors beyond the makeshift stations and put something tired and fond into his face, as if a wife, a daughter were waiting. The new customs area was only half-built so far. A temporary setup of folding vinyl-top tables and clamp lights on trellises, while the more formidable black booths were still underway. The trick was to stroll right through.

  Over here, sir, waved an official. Right here, please.

  Hadley looked ahead through the glass doors to his imaginary wife and saw Boris, his driver, bobbing in the crowd.

  Right here. Passport, please.

  Hadley puffed air through his lips, the weary traveler, and pulled the passport from his blazer pocket.

  The agent thumbed to the most recent visa, then more slowly, after a glance up, he turned the pages backward one at a time. He got to the photograph, the address. Closed the passport, kept it curled in his hand, signaled a supervisor with a cough. Please follow me, he said.

  Hadley turned to look at Boris once more, face drained.

  Now, sir.

  When he saw Boris go still, he nodded to the officer and reached for his bag and briefcase.

  Don’t touch those. Come with me.

  A second official was already diverting passengers to other tables or out the sliding glass doors. Yet another man in sweatpants with a badge clipped to a sun visor stepped forward to photograph Hadley’s grip and briefcase from several angles with a square black camera.

  Right now, sir.

  I don’t understand. What are you doing?

  The official stepped closer to Hadley. He had deep crescents of red under his eyes, like someone with an allergy or a tragedy. He said in a low voice: I don’t want to touch you.

  All right, said Hadley, and he didn’t look for Boris again.

  They went out a pair of swinging rubberized doors through an unlit vestibule stacked with lost luggage, then into a bright hallway. The official knocked before opening a door. They were in an empty foyer now, just old blue plastic chairs pushed against new sheetrock. Then they were in a second room with a table, a telephone, and a plate glass window looking out to equipment parked under a steel canopy. The room had a din, the concentrated sound of several engines running at once. Take a seat, said the official. Then he stepped out, closed the door, and flipped the bolt lock.

  3.

  Jill Marks clicked open a file on her phone to show Faith the proposed floor plan of a space. The training center. A loft above the old furniture store right next to the hospital. And then, incongruently, a list of the speakers Jill would like to invite to visit. Political. High profile. She seemed to believe that sleepy suburban childcare and urban social justice formed an essential chemistry.

  And maybe she was right. Faith would be the last to claim insight here. Cece, when she spoke to Faith at all, liked to walk her through the vectors of atrocity. She used the phrase without irony. Th
e atrocities often referred to the deep confusing pockets of sorrow Cece had learned about in graduate school—graduate school!—Cece had learned to clear and organize confusion for other suffering children. It was always other children or teens, always young people. But Faith understood. She understood that in Cece’s mind one thing (Cece’s childhood) had led to a terrible other. And that’s why, for years, she’d told Faith nothing. And when she did, she couldn’t bear to listen to even one word from Faith about the “incident.” Faith must keep her horror and rage, her reeling sadness, all of it, to herself. But Cece did talk about the textbook cases. Then cases in the clinic. Then finally her own clients, only just recently. The tiniest patients, a handful to start. Cece was still under supervision.

  With bright happy eyes—so unlike her tender searching Cece, and Faith now realized they were about the same age—Jill Marks said she would sketch one sample miscreant up for renewal at her center. Just as an illustration. So Faith could get a feel for the goals. A fifteen-year-old girl with a bit of a craving for violent romantic adventure. Jill said she wouldn’t go into specifics. But then came a long vivid description of this girl’s pierced and scarified labia. And some speculation, in lurid detail, of where those expressive labia might have landed her recently. Jill Marks winced. Then added a world-savvy smile. This young woman with the loose chignon, the Hermès ready-to-wear. Her fifth-month belly decoratively buckled and zipped.

  Faith stared at Jill Marks in disbelief. Then she felt herself go rigid. Even from Upstate New York, Courtney Ruddy had delivered her bull’s-eye.

  4.

  Hadley picked up the phone. An old analog with push buttons on the dead receiver. Naturally his mobile was in his briefcase. He followed a tangled line to the wall jack, then the door squealed like a hinge being forced with a screwdriver. Someone taller now, almost as tall as Hadley, brought the fug of diesel fuel in with him. Young, with black hair, shaved sides, flat on top, a military cut, a practiced squint. He pointed to Hadley and said, Sit. And Hadley did.

  Then he pulled up a chair to the table, sat down himself, elbow up, suspended, fist to his mouth, as if considering a punch, recovering from a punch?

  This was stupid, really. All of it. Hadley watched him for another second, then said, Probably a mistake. Right?

  For who? You. You have something to say? You’ll get your chance. Many in fact.

  He was about thirty, pushed in around the nose, like his cheekbones were too small for his face. He looked accustomed to being passed over. Hence the fist.

  So, you’re in charge?

  In charge of you.

  He wore a cobbled-together uniform of sorts. Black shirt with buttoned chest pockets, black cotton trousers almost like a carpenter’s pants, useful loops and more pockets but no insignia of any kind.

  This seems a little improvisational.

  Not your high school drama teacher, bud. Bet you wish I was.

  Hadley smiled. I need to make a call, he said. Tell my wife and daughter I’ll be late.

  Go ahead.

  Hadley picked up the receiver, still dead. Any court of law, he said, this will go badly for you.

  That’s funny. But yeah, you should definitely be thinking about a courtroom. Nice and dramatic, right?

  5.

  Faith might have drawn up a suitable business plan for Jill Marks and if that went well, she’d keep the accounts. That had been the premise of the meeting.

  But now Faith couldn’t find the next thing to say. Through the new windows, out in the sunny parking lot, Jill Marks’s little black coupe looked vulnerable. As if someone must target it for a scratching. Whatever this tremor was, starting in her hands, she usually kept it out of sight, out of her mind. That had always been important. That deferral. But now it was rising in her chest, fluttering. And if she opened her mouth, even for the most perfunctory word she could find, she knew she would say something vile. And she would mean it. But Jill Marks was a silly little girl. Please remember that, Faith told herself. Please. Jill Marks was only a little toy soldier wound up here today by Courtney. Who must be very bored in Upstate New York. That’s all. That was all. Same old Courtney Ruddy. Old, old news.

  Jill had a smile-and-laugh combo that ruffled across her pretty face like a breeze, then she held it still at the end for a beat. She watched and waited. Smiling.

  Faith refolded her legal pad, tried to retract the mechanical pencil, but that didn’t work. Moving slowly. Faith’s hands were still shaking, and under her arms the dampness felt oily, but Jill Marks kept smiling.

  Faith picked up her tote bag and nodded. Now she was formulating a goodbye. It would come to her soon. It would be wise to say something encouraging in her farewell.

  But Jill Marks spoke first. She said, Courtney mentioned something about an X factor? When she was setting up the meeting?

  Faith waited.

  You know, just like at the club? The kids? The ones who can’t stay afloat or even breathe right but still get to be in the race. The fragile ones. The X factors. Because everybody gets to be in the race. Isn’t that right?

  6.

  The boom of a plane coming in for a landing, the flight path directly over this room. Everything trembled for a minute, then a blackening shadow rushed over the tarmac. The huge belly of the plane appeared ten feet away before veering up to a sharp left.

  Fucking moron.

  You’re a pilot?

  No one lands over here. He’s lost.

  There was a sustained shuffle outside the door, like the plastic chairs were being quickly rearranged, pushed around. Two voices, then a third, female, which Hadley took for a good sign, irrationally, he thought, and then silence. Ten minutes later, the voices were back and the shuffling. The doorknob jiggled. A rattle of keys and this time the door was opened without force. Mr. Barlow? An airport customer service representative waved at him. A red cap hovered behind her. Mr. Barlow, your wife called to explain our mistake.

  She did. Hadley nodded. Good.

  That’s right, sir. We’re terribly sorry.

  What the fuck? The man pushed away from the table, raising that wayward fist of his. Get the fuck out of here, he shouted. Both of you. Now.

  This way, Mr. Barlow. We’ll escort you to your car.

  The fuck you will. But the fist dropped and Hadley stood slowly. The woman kept smiling in the door frame. The red cap, a teenager, was smiling, too. Hadley stayed close to the wall until the man stepped aside and hung his head. His chin close to his chest as if in terrible defeat, bested by bland courtesies and a smiling kid. Hadley edged toward the vestibule. He knew from experience how south that feeling could go and how quickly.

  Follow me, sir, said the red cap. The door slammed behind them. Just as Hadley passed through the lost luggage, the shouting started—someone else involved now. Then he entered a restricted outdoor area where Boris had the car idling, the briefcase already inside. Hadley fished around for a hundred-dollar bill for the red cap, then dropped down into the back seat of the car. His head sinking into the leather. As if the worst thing had been the insult of a plastic chair. When he took a breath, his lungs fluttered. His trousers felt grimy. He stank of diesel like the angry pilot. The comfort of this seat. This beat-up old car. The cardboard tree dangling from the rearview smelling of fir. He’d told Boris to chuck it a thousand times. But now it smelled like something necessary.

  7.

  Cece had promised Faith she would be at the house by six. They’d celebrate Faith’s birthday after the fact. And since Faith’s meeting had ended abruptly and early, there was plenty of time to get ready. How good that Cece was coming down today. What a meeting.

  Get a job! That had been her husband Owen’s parting shout to her. Get a job. He was weary of her uselessness. And there was no saying back that her use had been incalculable, beyond measure. Endless entertainment for Owen and his brother, H
adley, if nothing else. But there had been a great deal more. Faith knew that. Every day, she thought of Owen. Every day. Something he said or did revving around, digging a groove, before she knew it. Get a job!

  But she knew how to peel good advice from a foul delivery. So once Owen was finally settled on his new perch in Hong Kong, she’d gone first to the community college to begin to finish, slowly, at long last, her degree. It took years. But in the end there’d been a lobster dinner to celebrate, Cece eager to begin her own college in the fall, before she, too, left school for an indefinite while. Her mother, Irene, cogent that night, celebratory. Lobsters and very cold white wine. The three of them in a seafood joint on a salt-breezy pier by the ocean. They’d been so happy.

  8.

  In Owen’s stupefying glass box of a living room on Repulse Bay, Hadley spotted the drawing in question on a side table. He might have dropped a drink on top—it was just a scrap of paper—if Owen hadn’t glanced up and yelled, Hey, that’s the thing! He shuffled over, his hand-embroidered slippers dragging across the stone floor, pulling a frogged silk, black brocade shirt over his belly. Owen tipped the lamp so the bulb shone bright over the tiny sketch.

  Hadley didn’t know anything about art, but he liked beauty, and there it was.

  Owen just wanted him to deliver it, as a love token, to a young trader on the desk at Oppenheimer in New York. It’s nothing, said Owen. This is easy.

  Hadley, of course, didn’t believe him. Eventually, he heard a tall tale about a strapped Moldovan client making partial payment in art. Quite possibly it was a study by Derain. And almost certainly stolen. A smudged and ugly, even bloody, provenance. But in its essence, and this had been Owen’s final argument, just a bit of pencil on paper. I could do better. Then do better, Hadley had said.