Winter Tides (24 page)

For long minutes there was nothing more to be seen beyond the door. His legs cramped up, and he moved around the closet to loosen up. Somehow he was
compelled
to stay, even though his spying on them was not only fruitless, but it made him mad. Several times he made up his mind to go, but each of those times he lingered, waiting for something. It dawned on him now that he had lost control. He
wasn’t steering the car any longer; it wasn’t his foot on the accelerator. He had become passive. Probably it was at least partly anger—the same anger that he’d felt earlier when he’d seen Dave and Anne together drinking coffee. Anger and loss of control weren’t conducive to his art; they were weaknesses.

He told himself this, but he didn’t leave. He crouched in front of the door again. Their voices were low, like flies buzzing, as if they were baiting him. Probably he wasn’t
meant
to accomplish anything tonight. And he certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with Anne when she was polluted with Dave’s persona. He wasn’t interested in being the next in line. Tomorrow, perhaps, some of tonight’s pollution would drain away, and she’d be more approachable, more worth approaching.

He stood up again and examined the dark space around him with his flashlight. There were a couple of boxes on the floor, but they contained nothing interesting, just some clothing and a box with a few pieces of costume jewelry. He looked at it blankly, waiting for it to suggest something, but it was all junk—rhinestone pins and gaudy necklaces and a cheap pocket watch with a train engine etched into the hinged cover.

He was struck with the desire to create something right here, something for Anne—a simple piece that would startle and shock her, edge her mind out of the rut it had fallen into under Dave’s tired influence. What he wanted here was a simple tableau—an artistic arrangement that would disarrange her! Suddenly happy with his own brilliance, he took a moment to pull his gloves on again before bending down and folding back the lid of one of the boxes. He bent his doll in the middle and set it so that it reclined in a bed of Anne’s clothing, looking straight back at him so that it would seem to be looking into Anne’s own eyes when she discovered it.

He arranged the doll’s robe so that it was less discreet, more truthful. It would remind Anne that somewhere within her lay obsessions and desires that she couldn’t continue to deny. He felt its flesh for signs of living heat, but the doll was cool to the touch. If it ignited in the closet … Well,
then it ignited in the closet. He couldn’t help that. It would simply be a
fait accompli
He wasn’t going to start second-guessing his instincts now. That was the death of an artist.

He concentrated on his task, letting his mind run, and almost immediately it settled on the pocket watch in with the costume jewelry. He dug out the watch, wound it up, and set it to the correct time. Carefully he lay the watch between the doll’s legs. It was perfect. It hid a small part of the doll’s nakedness, so it made the whole tableau more subtle, superficially less indecent. And yet the watch and its placement suggested hidden things. Time was running, the watch seemed to say. Soon something would come to pass, something that was long
meant
to come to pass….

Anne’s imagination would
have
to react to something as potent as this. She would see her own art in a startlingly new way: the artist rediscovering her own passions! The Day Girl and the Night Girl, face to face.

He stood for another moment looking at the tableau, shining his flashlight on it, spotlighting it. He knew that leaving this token was a fairly chancy move; it would probably change things irrevocably. But perhaps it was time to change things irrevocably.

He closed the closet door softly when he left.

D
AVE STOOD AT THE WINDOW, WATCHING THE TRAFFIC ON
Main Street. The night was clear and warm with the winds. He heard her teapot whistle, and a minute later Anne brought him a cup of tea and sat down again.

“Was that what you saw in the coffee grounds today?” he asked, not turning away from the window.

“Actually, it was. Except I saw it in your face. Simple recognition, I guess. All along you’ve looked familiar to me.”

“After fifteen years? You’ve got a good memory.”

“There are some things you don’t forget. Some faces stay in your memory, and you carry them around for the rest of your life. Sometimes because you’re afraid of them, and sometimes because … because you’re not, I guess. You haven’t changed that much. And besides, you’ve always been a kind of ideal, you know.”

“Don’t stretch things
too
far….”

“No, I mean it. You’ve always been a kind of guardian angel. And I used to imagine that you’d reappear some day.”

Dave was silent. It was almost funny. This wasn’t at all what he had wanted. It was far
more
, in a way: the woman you’ve gone crazy for admits that she’d been waiting for you to appear for years, except that it turns out that you’d let her sister drown, her twin sister. He wasn’t anybody’s guardian angel, and he didn’t at all want to be. What he wanted was something else entirely.

“Edmund had told me about it anyway, told me about you, that is. About a little girl drowning on the beach, and your being involved, and it screwing things up for you.”

“Edmund
told you about it?”

“Basically. He was way off base with the details, and he left out the part about your saving me, so at the time I didn’t think he was talking about the same incident. He even had the date wrong. And of course it was too far-fetched to think there was any connection.”

“Out of all the gin joints …”

“That’s what I thought. But then when we were drinking coffee this afternoon, and you were staring toward the ocean, it was simply obvious. Starkly obvious. I’m telling you, you haven’t changed.”

“You have.”

“I was thirteen. You do a lot of changing between thirteen and twenty-eight.”

There was a silence now. It seemed to Dave that he had spent all day long building a card house, and that it had just fallen—a little like finding out that the woman you’re
in love with is your long-lost sister. Worse, perhaps, since there might be a certain joy in finding your sister. “Look,” he said to her, “I’ve got to take off.”

“Why? It’s just after ten.”

“I’m a little tired, I guess. I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to go.”

He shrugged.

“Well, can I ask you one thing? And if you don’t want to answer me, that’s all right.”

“You want to know what happened with Elinor? Why she drowned?”

“That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

“Because what happened was that I was in big trouble swimming around out there. I was cold and I was tired, and suddenly I started thinking of dropping her. Just letting her go and saving myself. I wasn’t
considering
it, you know. It wasn’t as if the question had come up, and I was debating it in my mind. It’s that it occurred to me that I
would
drop her, if I had to. A part of me, somewhere down inside, wanted to drop her. I wasn’t strong enough to help myself.”

“You mean to help yourself and her too?”

“Yes and no. I mean that if I couldn’t help both of us, I wasn’t strong enough to drown for her sake.”

“For
her
sake? Let me get this straight. It seems to me that if you had drowned, so would she. Obviously she couldn’t save herself. How is that drowning for her sake?”

“I can’t answer that, although I’ve tried to a couple of times.”

She stared at the floor for a moment and then asked, “
Did
you drop her? Let go of her? Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.”

“No,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t have a chance to. A wave washed over us. She got swept away.”

“Then how do you know you would have?” she asked quietly.

He shook his head. “At the time it just didn’t matter. I lost her. She drowned. I don’t even know when it happened exactly. I was tired out, we were tumbling around in the wave, and all of a sudden I wasn’t holding on to her
anymore. I saw her face for a moment, her hair, the color of her swimsuit, but she was gone so
fast.”

“I’m sorry.”

“To hell with it. It was nearly fifteen years ago, like you said. That’s what Casey’s always telling me: ‘You’re a man now. Pull up your pants and get on with your life.”

“Well, I won’t tell you that.”

“You might as well; it’s true. Anyway, was that the question you wanted to ask?”

“No, it wasn’t. Not even close. What I wanted to ask was why you left that day on the beach. Why you just disappeared. We gave the lifeguards about ten minutes’ worth of information, and by that time you were long gone. My mother wanted to thank you, you know. Years later, when she died, she still wanted to thank you. And I’m not saying that because I think you should have stuck around and chatted. I guess I know now why you couldn’t have. I only want you to know that my mother was never anything but grateful that you saved me, and that you tried to save Elinor. I wish you could have known that back then.”

Dave stood up and looked out the window again. He put his hands in his pockets and stared at the neon across the street. “Thanks for telling me that.”

“You’re welcome. You know, it’s almost funny. Both of us have been carrying Elinor’s ghost around with us, haven’t we? I absolutely hated her. I haven’t told you about that yet. I was glad she drowned. That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“I can’t answer that. She was a strange kid, though. We talked a little bit when we were out there, and all I can tell you about it is that she was full of some kind of weird anger. Worse than anger. She would have been hard to like. I quit liking her as soon as she started talking.”

“I can imagine. You didn’t have to like her, though. You were a stranger. I was her sister. Her
twin
sister. We were supposed to share everything, you know, like you read about. We were supposed to think alike, pull pranks on our teachers.”

“But you didn’t think alike?”

“Never. And anyway, when I said I was glad she had drowned, I meant it. When you were out there saving her, I was hoping that you wouldn’t. Then when you didn’t, it was like the biggest relief you could imagine.”

“And you never blamed yourself for thinking that?”

“I
always
blamed myself, at least for thinking it. But I didn’t ever really believe that she drowned because of me. And you can’t really believe that she drowned because of you, either.”

He shrugged. “What I believe is that I don’t know what I would have done in the next five minutes if that wave hadn’t pulled Elinor out of my hands.”

“Who cares? it didn’t happen, Dave. You didn’t fail. You only found out that it’s possible to fail. And if that’s the first time you found that out, then you must have led a sheltered life. And you can’t argue with what I’m saying, either. I’m right. You’re wrong.”

“Okay, so I’m wrong. Don’t beat me up with it.”

“I might just beat you senseless if you don’t quit moping around.”

“All right, all right. No more moping. We’ll move on. You know, there was one thing that I haven’t told you. She was wearing a bracelet, with her name on it—beads with letters spelling out Elinor.”

“I had one too. We made them at a fair, at a bead booth, I guess when we were ten or eleven.”

“When the wave pulled her away, I ended up holding the bracelet. I kept it. I was going to give it to your mother, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

“We already worked through that one.”

“I know we did. I kept the bracelet, though, for some reason. Strange kind of souvenir, I guess. What I was thinking, though, is that there was something about her wearing it that made me like her a little bit, something that reminded me that she was a child, I guess. I don’t know … maybe that just made it worse when she drowned.”

“So what did you do with it?”

“I kept it. It’s hidden in a drawer, where I’ll never see it unless I look for it. If you want it, you can have it.”

She shook her head. “I kept a few things too, and I don’t really want
them
either. My advice is to throw it into the ocean. Get rid of it.”

They sat without speaking until Dave asked, “So you think it was Elinor that you saw on the pier?”

“Why not?” Anne said. “You don’t believe in ghosts?”

“I can believe in damned near anything right now. Sure. Ghosts—why not? I should have expected this after you told me you read coffee grounds. And you’re telling me that it was Elinor that I saw on the sidewalk the other night?”

“From the way you described it—what it sounded like, what it smelled like. It’s nearly always the same.”

“Even though I didn’t see her clearly, I
know
she looked just like you. Dead ringer.”

“A couple of times I’ve seen her … her adult reflection in a window. I think it’s me, but then she fades away, and there’s no reflection at all, and I realize there never had been—not a reflection of me, anyway.”

“What’s she after?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she wants something from us.”

“Maybe we want something from her,” Dave said.

“Maybe we do.” They sat in silence for a moment, and then Anne asked, “How about you? What do you want right now? More tea? Cold dumpling, maybe?”

“I’ve had it,” Dave said. He turned to the window again, watching the headlights on Main Street. “I better take off.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

“Yeah. You’ll see me tomorrow. I’m sorry if I turned out to be bad company this evening.”

“I don’t think you’re bad company at all. I think that I’ve waited fifteen years to tell you what I thought. Now I don’t think I said it very well.”

She let the subject drop, and after another moment of silence and of staring out the window, Dave turned around to look at her and found that she was crying. He closed his eyes, tried to speak, and couldn’t again.

“Sorry,” she said, standing up and stepping toward him. And then, before he could react, she leaned forward and kissed him softly on the cheek. She walked across and opened the door, and he walked out into the corridor. “See you in the morning.”