“He took it.”
“I didn’t want to lose him, either. He’d have followed her anywhere. She was like that; she could do that to a man.”
I remember my father manning a folding grill, Leah and my mother sitting in beach chairs. Frank telling a story about kids running aground on a sandbar. Would anyone have noticed if his eyes lingered? “No. You don’t buy a house for a friend.”
“No,” he says. “You don’t.”
There is the other half of the story, and he tells it like a drunken man. Mornings at the dockmaster’s came with quick touches, kisses, things they’d meant to stop. That they did stop, eventually. “After a time,” he says. He is kind in that he’s not explicit. “She loved your dad, I know she did. I loved him too.” So he began dating Leah, a teaching student at St. Joseph’s, and married her. They all became friends. Of a sort.
“You slept with my mother.”
“If you want me to apologize, I won’t. I’m not sorry for knowing her.” He gets up to pace and feel for cracks in the walls. He stops by a photograph of Enola in the water, in my mother’s arms. “I took that picture.” He starts in about how it was the end of June when the water gets warm but the jellyfish aren’t out yet. “Paulina didn’t want Enola to get stung, so she made me go in first, just to check. I’m not sorry for knowing you, either.”
“Don’t pretend you’re my father.” I see him wince. “You slept with her.”
“Yes.”
“How long did it go on? How long did you fuck under my father’s nose?”
“Don’t talk about her that way.” A floorboard creaks.
“Was it before I was born? After? After Enola? How long? Months? Years?”
“A while,” he says quietly.
“Am I?” We both know what I mean. Am I his.
“No.”
“Enola?”
“No.”
“Dates,” I say. “I need to know the goddamned dates.” I need to be sure.
“We stopped when Dan wanted kids. We were apart a year before she got pregnant with you. It wasn’t me.” His cheek twitches as if holding back a wince. “It was hard to look at her sometimes, hard enough knowing I was sharing her, but then she wanted his kids.” And not Frank’s. “It tore me up some, but I’d give her anything she wanted. When you were around two we started up again. On and off for about two years. Then she wanted another kid, a little girl. I guess she saw Alice and fell in love. She cut it off, said she was done. We hadn’t been together in a year and a half before Enola.” Here is a new awful part: all the time he wanted my mother, he had his wife, and they had Alice. Quiet, perfect Alice. They threw us together—was it to keep Leah occupied? Were we an intentional distraction? My gut hurts. For me, for her. Frank sits down again and reaches over as if to touch me, but he stops.
“Dates,” I say.
“I don’t have them.” He’s almost shouting. “I didn’t write it down. It’s not something—it’s not the sort of thing I ever thought I’d have to explain to her son,” he says. “You’re his. Hell, you even chew your fingers the way he did. It was never a question. Your mom wouldn’t let it be. No matter how much I wished you were mine sometimes.”
“Stop lying.” I’m up. My ankle shouts, but it fades into the rest of the noise. My teeth hurt. My veins hurt.
“I wouldn’t lie about that. You’re not mine, but I wished you were.”
“Did she know you gave him the money?” He doesn’t answer. “Did she know?”
“Yes,” he says, at length. “It was the one thing I could give her. And it’s gone to shit, Simon—”
“How much did you give him?” He looks at me blankly. “How much did the house cost?” We’d been family, all of us. Frank, who’d shared a boat with my father, gone sailing with the man whose wife he slept with. I’ve eaten at his table. Kissed and loved his daughter.
“Two hundred fifty thousand.”
There is no apology in him, and that, of all things, is most repugnant. “And for how many years? How long were you two together?”
“Five years, on and off,” he says.
Five years; 1,826 days. “If you look at it logically, that’s fifty thousand a year to sleep with my mother. How many times a year do you figure?” His jaw clenches and his Adam’s apple bobs. Still, no remorse. “Once a month would be around four thousand and change. Once a week would make it roughly a thousand. So, my mother was worth a thousand dollars a week to you. That’s like keeping a family on the side, just for fucking.”
His fist slams into the wall and an apple-sized hole devours it. He pulls his hand out, cradles his fingers, then examines the wall. He touches all around it, murmuring, apologizing—to the house, to my mother.
“Did my dad know?”
“We didn’t tell him.”
It’s answer enough. “He knew.”
“I used to watch her swim in the mornings. Even after,” he says. He doesn’t look at me. Can’t. “That’s when your dad figured it out. It was a little more than a year after Enola was born. He was coming down the steps and I was going up. He passed me and asked if Leah knew. I said there’s nothing to know. There wasn’t by then, hadn’t been for a good couple of years. Next thing Paulina says he’s looking to move you all upstate.”
Away from anywhere that might be a good place for a man who works on boats.
“I loved her,” Frank says, softly. “Every day even after I knew it couldn’t continue, I loved Paulina. We stopped because I loved her, him too. Then she was gone.” He pulls his hat from his head, crumpling it in his hands. “If you stay out of the house for a while, I can fix it up. I’ll get Pete and we’ll start working, but it isn’t safe here now. You could get hurt. I loved you, too, you and Enola. It would have killed me if he took you all away.”
Picture life over again. Picture the things I sometimes wished. Frank as my father. The family across the street would be strangers, people who occasionally got our mail by mistake, people we’d see as we took out our boat. But where is Alice? There would be no Alice.
Mom died. Dad sold the boat. We saw less of Frank, only when I was on the beach with Alice, or when Leah watched us. I’d thought grief had made Dad cut Frank out, but it was worse. My mother drowned and he cut ties with his best friend. It’s a simple logic chain.
“Your money fixed nothing. All it ever did was break things. Us. The house went to hell because he wouldn’t lift a finger on it. Not once. He didn’t put a penny into it. He didn’t care if the whole thing fell down because you bought this house to hold on to my mother.” It’s a crippled token of one man’s love for another man’s wife. Dad knew it. He must have sat at that kitchen table, praying it would collapse. “You killed him, too,” I say. “It just took longer.”
“Simon,” he pleads.
“No, you don’t get to say my name.” I can’t be here in this place that smells like varnish, sawdust, and carpenter’s glue—like Frank.
I go to the car. I would run but my leg won’t let me. Frank follows. He’s talking, but I can’t hear him through the car door. I don’t care. I can barely feel my hands on the wheel. I pump them a few times to get the blood back in the fingers; stress causes both vasoconstriction and vasodilatation—a fact I picked up when helping a student with a term paper—this is vasoconstriction. Three pumps. Frank is at the car. He’s broken, but not broken enough. I roll down the window. He puts his hands on the roof, hooking his thumbs into the interior, creeping inside.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “You have no idea how much I wished you’d been my son.”
“You never came by after he died,” I tell him. “We had to go to you.” My shame is that I could have loved him, despite everything, if he’d so much as tried.
“It was too much. With your dad and the house, and there was Leah and Alice,” he says. They hadn’t been enough to stop him before. No, Alice and Leah were only concerns after, when Enola and I were difficult to love, not as convenient as the family he already had. The fruit is too ripe to not be picked. I feel myself smile, knowing I look insane. I throw the car into reverse, spinning the tires. Frank stands in the driveway, covering himself with his arms like he’s naked.
Yes, Alice will be mad at me, but she is already. I lean out the window and yell, “I fucked your daughter. Go ahead and fix my goddamned house.”
At dawn Amos woke, legs tired from dreams of chase. Evangeline lay beside him, a soft presence, warm with sleep. He looked toward Madame Ryzhkova’s round-topped wagon and was gripped by unease. Once, he’d seen a man keel over dead while hefting a cask; the man’s face had turned beetle-shell dark before he gasped and dropped like a stone. Ryzhkova’s face had been a similar color the prior night. Her warnings were twisted and misguided, but she cared for him and it was rare enough to be cared for that it should not be taken lightly.
He climbed from the bed, moving slowly so as not to wake Evangeline, and crossed the camp to Ryzhkova’s wagon to wait at the stairs by her door. She’d always known when he approached, teasing, “I can smell your unwashed hands coming near.” When he sniffed himself she smiled and said, “Think you I would not know my own? I know when you seek me.”
Amos waited until impatience demanded he knock. When there was no answer he turned the handle, only to find the door locked. A hard pit settled in his chest. Ryzhkova was dead and he had killed her. He ran to Benno’s wagon and pounded on the door until flecks of yellow paint stuck to his hand. The acrobat opened the door in disarray, peering out through a crack. Behind him the shadowed form of another sprawled across a mattress. Benno stepped down and hastily closed the door behind him.
“What is this?” he muttered, rubbing a hand across his sleep-drunk face.
Amos took Benno’s arm and dragged him down the steps and to Ryzhkova’s wagon. He pulled the handle to show Benno that she would not answer.
“It is early yet, Amos, barely light.”
Amos smacked the door with the heel of his hand, jarring the hinges until they clanked. Inside no one stirred, but Amos continued to knock, looking at Benno in desperation.
“Stop. You cannot work with bloodied hands.” Benno took hold of Amos’s shoulders, gripping tightly until, at last, he stilled. “I’ll help. Wait here.” Benno jogged off, reappearing a short time later with a small leather pouch. He bid Amos stand aside as he produced a series of thin brass strips. Amos looked on while Benno gently pushed the door until the lock caught.
“Where I am from it is necessary for a man to have skills that are not always looked upon kindly. On occasion they prove useful.” Benno put an eye to the sliver of space between door and wagon frame and proceeded to slip two of the strips along the door’s edge, wiggling them around the wood.
He was a thief, or had been. Though they’d traveled years together, Amos knew little about him, only that he was quick to smile and easy to be around. Amos watched him bend one of the brass pieces, molding it to the door. Then, a flick of his wrist and the lock was open.
“For you only do I do this.” Benno returned his clever keys to the pouch. “Forgive me if I do not stay. I have another matter to attend to,” he said, and hurried back to his wagon, pouch tucked against his side.
With a light push, Amos swung Ryzhkova’s door open. What he found inside was confusing. The cart was stripped bare. The walls bore the faint outlines of where the portraits had hung. She was gone.
Amos staggered down the wagon steps and fled, running toward town. Burlington. She must have gone into Burlington; nothing else was near and she wouldn’t venture to the river alone. He bit his tongue and the blood rose sharp with anxiousness. The road into town was not far behind Peabody’s wagon; he could see chimney smoke from morning fires puffing into the sky and he ran toward that smoke, past the blacksmith and the butcher, and into the streets. The shops were not yet open, the inn was still dark, and the roads were empty save for a half-starved mongrel dog. The streets were so well traveled that searching for her footprints proved impossible. Madame Ryzhkova had vanished as if she had never been. His stomach rolled with a pain worse than hunger. He returned to camp, to Peabody’s wagon.
Peabody lifted the latch and peered out, squinting. Hatless, his scalp glinted pink in the early morning light. He murmured a quick apology and fumbled at a side table before clapping on a curly brimmed hat. “What devil finds you awake? None with a soul is about at such an hour.”
Amos gestured in the direction of Ryzhkova’s empty wagon, but Peabody would have none of it.
“I am aware of what occurs in this menagerie. You quarreled with Madame Ryzhkova,” he puffed. “She is a temperamental creature; I’m certain it is nothing that rest and a new town won’t find the fixing of.” His smile was cut short by a yawn.
Amos seized Peabody by the shirtsleeves and pulled him from his wagon despite his protestations. Heads poked out of doors, Meixel and Nat, Susanna. Evangeline woke. Benno stood on his steps and Melina appeared behind him, rubbing sleep from her eye. By the time they reached Ryzhkova’s wagon, Amos and Peabody had garnered an audience. Amos threw back the door to reveal the barren interior.
Peabody’s face turned ashen. “My dear Amos, I am in terrible need of making apologies. I simply…” His worlds faltered. “Hell. She has done it. No, that is not right. Ah, Amos. I am sorry.” He doffed his hat, touched it to his chest, and wandered to his wagon in a fugue. Amos lacked the will to follow. He sat on Ryzhkova’s steps, dangling his legs and taking note of the air—something of old flowers in it, something like his teacher. He studied each dent on the steps she’d climbed for countless years, outlining the marks left by her boot heels.
Meixel came to him first, giving Amos’s back a rough pat before walking to start the morning’s fire. Nat, the strongman, inclined his head, and Melina squeezed his knee. Their touches did not feel like comfort, more like gifts for the departing.
Benno touched Amos’s shoulder. “I do not pretend to understand why she is gone, but know that it is not for want of caring for you.”
Amos flinched.
* * *
Evangeline waited, knowing that he would come to her in time. He would learn that she’d quarreled with Ryzhkova, that she was the reason Ryzhkova had left. She wondered if everything she touched would sour and die.
I am a killer.