The Book of Speculation (39 page)

Peabody cared for Bess as his own. He doted on her and began to think of her as the crowning achievement of his years of captaining the menagerie. He ensured that she was taught to swim. Bess took to the water as if made from it. He delighted to see that the girl had a remarkable capacity to hold her breath. In evenings he began sketching plans. Alongside columns of figures, a diving tank took shape in brown ink. Glass. If only they could manage glass. Bess’s hair grew long and black like her mother’s. Her eyes stayed wide like Amos’s.

At her fifth birthday he presented her with a lacquered box adorned with intricately painted figures—a prince and a firebird.

“Bess, my little starling,” he rumbled as she worked to open its lid. “These cards are most special; they belonged to your father, a wonderful man, and in them are the keys to all the world. It is time you were instructed. I’ve heard from my son, Zachary. Our friend Benno has found you a guide. Her name is Katya, and she is the daughter of your father’s teacher.”

Bess’s soft fingers touched the orange deck, flipping over the first card. Lightning and flames—a broken sky. The Tower.

29

JULY 24TH

With morning comes pounding. We survived the night. Alice is at the front door, knocking on the glass with her forearm. She is in tall green rubber boots, practical as ever.

Enola rouses when I shake her. She smacks Doyle awake.

“Come on,” I say. “Help me move the coats so we can let Alice in.”

“She’s here? I thought we were leaving her the keys.”

“She probably just wanted to check in.” We move the chairs and throw the coats and sweaters aside, each landing with a saturated thud on the wet carpet. Outside, Alice is bouncing on her toes. Something is very wrong. We open the door.

“Oh God,” she says. “It flooded in here? How bad is it?”

The books. Of course, she’s here for the books. I didn’t know I’d wanted her worried about me until I’d been supplanted by books. “Downstairs got the worst of it. I kept whatever I could dry. I stopped the back door, but there wasn’t much we could do. I’m sorry. The whaling archive is safe, though.”

“Of course it is. In the archive we trust.” The words are joyless. She looks me up and down. “Are you all right?”

“Sure,” I say. Then her arms are around me in a quick hug, warm and good. She’s still in her pajama bottoms. “Are you okay?”

She takes a breath and holds it. In middle school the girls used to have contests to see who could hold their breath the longest; Alice once held it until she fainted. Her words shoot out all at once. “You have to come with me. Your house is going over and you need to get whatever you can out of it now.”

She says something else, but I can’t hear it because Enola is saying, “Shit, shit, shit.”

“It’s bad?” I ask.

“It’s bad. The roads are still flooded. My dad told me to get you. He kept calling and calling, and I didn’t want to pick up but I thought it could be my mother.” She tugs on her hair, wringing it out. “I’m really sorry. Look, I brought the truck. If you follow me I’ll take you back where the roads are good. You can put anything from the house in the truck.”

The water is more than ankle deep through the lot. We pile into my car and slowly move through the flooding, with Alice leading in Frank’s flatbed. She must have picked it up from him, which means she’s seen the house. She leads us nearly to the center of the island. Port must still be closed off.

Enola continues quietly swearing.

“You have a chance to get stuff,” Doyle says. “That’s good.”

We follow Alice’s taillights up Middle Country Road. Cars are stranded on either side—a ghost town of vehicles. She turns us toward the water, heading north, taking side roads around downed trees. When we reach Till Road, Enola starts to cry.

Alice pulls into Frank’s driveway and I park alongside her. I tell myself not to look until we get out of the car and can stare it in the face.

*   *   *

The house is in silhouette, hanging off the cliff’s edge, tilting like an Irishman’s cap. We stand beside it, four tiny figures, no more than paper dolls, two huddled together, the smallest spark dancing between their bodies. Children at the gates of our history.

“Throw whatever you can get in the truck and come back to my place,” Alice says. “You can stay with me.”

“Thanks,” I say. “It won’t be forever.”

“We’ll work it out.” She gives my hand a squeeze. “I need to talk to my mom.” She walks toward the house where she grew up, and for a minute I don’t know who has it worse, and then I do. It’s Alice.

Enola tells Doyle to wait by the car. “This is excavation. Watsons only.”

Though he says
cool,
he conveys
be careful.

*   *   *

The door hangs off its hinges and the hole in the living room floor has become a pit. A wide split spiders up the wall between the kitchen and living room. I can see Mom’s hand wrapping around the corner, laughing as she ran down the hallway. We walk around the edge of the room, balancing against things—the couch—I can remember Enola hiding behind it, giggling—my desk, anything that will take weight. Enola sees me limping and offers her shoulder.

“Get that picture,” she says, pointing. “The one of me and Mom.”

“Frank took that.”

“Get over it.” She yanks it from the wall. My grown sister hands me her child self. “You’re going to want it.”

“You don’t want anything?”

She shakes her head. “You know I never asked you to stay, right? When it’s gone I think you should just forget it was ever here. Be happy, okay?”

A sharp whining screams down the hallway. We tense. Her fingers dig into my shoulder. The sound deepens to a low howl, then crashing. I clap my hands over my ears, but it’s too late. Enola mouths something—
what the fuck
. Plaster showers over us. I yell, “Run,” as the floor begins to roll. I tuck my head to my knees. Tossed against the front wall, back slammed into the desk. A sucking spasm. Emptied out. A great tearing sound. A chair topples. Glass shatters. Papers and books tumble onto me. Air, air pushes up from under.

The sound dies and the floor stops moving. My ears buzz. The room is thick with dust. Enola is huddled in the corner by the sofa, covered in papers, shaking.

“Fuck! Are you all right? Everybody all right?” Doyle is in the doorway, streaming nervous chatter. Daylight comes from the hall through the dirt and debris. Tentacled arms lift Enola, me, pulling us onto what’s left of the lawn and into the whipping grass; his grip has the bite of electricity.

*   *   *

We wind up on the hood of my car. The damage is incredible. The side of the house collapsed, spilling the contents of my parents’ bedroom across the cliff, along with bits and pieces of the stone foundation. The bed traveled farthest, mattress hidden among the beach grass, headboard kissing the remnants of the bulkhead, and Dad’s shoes toppled down the bluff until they bounced their way into the water. I wanted to throw them out, but I could never bring myself to.

The crabs are still here. They should be gone. They should have left after I’d burned Frank’s things and the book. Or rolled out with the tide as the storm that took my house pulled back. It’s stronger now, the feeling that I’ve missed something. Papers are scattered everywhere—leaves or snowflakes—pieces of my family thrown to the wind. Why are the crabs here? Was burning not enough?

“Is that Mom’s typewriter?” Enola asks. It is, banked against a scrub pine along with what must be manuals. A piece of chimney falls. Down the cliff, Dad’s tools dig themselves into the sand. It’s gone. All of it.

Enola takes her cards from her pocket. In the light of day they’re brown and worn, edges rounded out until there’s almost nothing left at all. They’re nearly pulp, worn by skin oils—hers, Mom’s, other people’s. They smell like dust, paper, and women. She sets them beside her on the hood of the car. Doyle hops down and begins pacing.

“Put those away, Little Bird.”

“No.” To me she says, “Cut.”

“Fine,” Doyle replies. “I’ve gotta walk. I need to walk.” He twitches his hand in the air and heads up the street.

I touch the cards, these things that were my mother’s. I try to feel her, but there is nothing except soft paper, fibers decayed beyond repair. I cut the deck deep. A thought takes root. It couldn’t be. They can’t be
the
cards.

“Three piles,” she says. She watches intently, as if expecting something to happen, then moves fast, shuffling, flying through paper and setting cards on the hood.

It’s a spread I haven’t seen before, not the Cross or the Six Rows; it’s seven cards in a V shape. Enola coughs and takes the cards before I can get a good look at them. “No good. Cut again.” She shuffles and spreads the cards faster. Before she clears the spread away I glimpse swords, a sea of them, and what might have once been a woman. Enola sweeps up the cards, taps the deck. She twitches. “Again.” I cut; she shuffles, spreads, then snatches the cards back. This time I catch a card that might have once been black. The Devil or the Tower, maybe. “It’s always the same,” she says and shuffles again, then sets the cards down to cut. I tell her to stop. She grabs my hand and forces me to cut the deck. When she tries to take the cards away again I catch her wrist.

I say, “Don’t.”

“Fuck,” she says. A perfect V of seven cards. The Devil, the Tower, the Queen of Swords, Three of Swords, a Hanged Man, and a card too worn to read. She tells me it’s the King of Swords. When I ask what it means she shakes her head and picks each card up, returning it to the deck and finally to her skirt. She flops back on the car, flat like a dead man. “They’re our cards,” she says, almost too quiet to hear.

“What?”

“It’s the same stuff over and over again.” She digs her index finger hard into her forehead. “They keep coming up in places they have no reason to be. Like if I’m reading some woman about having kids—bang, there they are. Tower. Devil. Death. And water. Shit, there’s water everywhere.”

A sick feeling comes, followed by a shadow. Yes, these cards are
very
old. This is what Churchwarry and I missed, the cards themselves.

“What did Frank tell you about the cards?”

“They were Mom’s and had been her mother’s before. I don’t know. It’s been more than six years. I don’t remember stuff like you do.”

The satisfaction in solving a riddle is the flash of insight that triggers a tiny burst of dopamine. This does not happen. This is cold sweat. The pictures in the book were Madame Ryzhkova’s cards, Amos’s, Evangeline’s. Enola tore them out because she’d seen them in her deck, Mom’s deck. The book found Churchwarry, a Ryzhkova, as if leading her back to Amos. Bringing us together to undo it. And I burned it. “You tore pictures of these cards out of my book.
These cards.
Why?”

“I had to, okay?”

I ask why, but she stays silent. “Enola, put the cards away.”

She won’t look at me. “No.”

“Give them to me.”

“No.” She gets to her feet. Enola with sea, sand, and shore. She’s tight and fierce, with no excess to her sinew and muscle, bones and bright burning like Blake’s tyger. She knows. Part of her believes she’s going to die.

A dresser drawer slides down the cliff, smashing into a bulkhead. That one had Dad’s watch that he wound long past the days when everyone else had switched to batteries. “I’ll fix it. I’m fixing it,” I say.

“There’s nothing to fix. This is just what happens.” Sick. Sick. Sick. A sour taste.

I hug her. She’s too old to piggyback, but I want to take us both away. “We’re going to leave. I’ll go with you. Anywhere you want. I don’t care. Let’s go. Wherever. You, me, Doyle, and Alice.”

“Brother mine, I love you some, but you’re a very bad liar.”

“I promise.” Mom must have been trying to get rid of the cards and Frank didn’t understand. A bookshelf careens down the bluff.

Enola looks out at the water. “It’s pretty here. I forgot that.”

“Can I see the cards?”

“Nope.”

“We don’t all die,” I tell her. “There’s me, and you don’t swim anymore.” I tell her we’ll go somewhere else, anywhere she thinks is pretty. I tell her there are libraries all over. I can work anywhere. We’ll be good again, she and I. I won’t parent her, I promise. I say I can teach her about books and she laughs.

Somewhere a part of us does this, leaves and gets right. We climb into her car and let the tires roll, counting one-eyed cars. We toss the cards in a river and it’s like Enola said, oysters up the sides like ruffles on panties. We rent a house, freshly painted and new. We start again.

This is not what happens.

There is a roaring sound when the foundation under the hallway breaks, followed by the kitchen, the refrigerator, cabinets, all toppling down. Frank runs out of his house, shouting. Shingles spring down the bluff. It is done. The house is destroyed.

Doyle jogs toward us from up the street. When he reaches us he picks up Enola in a hard, rocking squeeze. He puts her down when she smacks his side.

Frank has walked to the bluff. His hat lies behind him, discarded. He’s smaller, empty.