It’s too hard to say that I kept the house not just for Mom and Dad, but for her, in case she came back. I know now, fiercely, that I wanted her to come home. Where would she come back to if not this house? “If you hate the house so much, why do you care if I fix it?”
“You like it,” she says. “I’m not entirely selfish, I promise.”
Then there’s guilt, and not a little of it either, because I have thought her selfish. Over dinner with Alice. I make coffee while ghosts of us walk the kitchen. My younger self, leaning on the counter, tired like a dead man; Enola, watchful and quiet, curled up in a chair, trying to disappear. I fill two mugs. Enola: cream, three sugars. Mine: black. I drink it while it’s still hot enough to scald.
“Why do you think Dad left this place such a wreck?” she asks.
“Grief, I guess.”
“The great excuse.”
We stare at our coffee, much the way he did. “He told me things sometimes, when he could talk about her.” It was a year before he could say her name, longer before he could talk to me without his eyes looking painful and red. “He said that when he first saw her, she was wearing a blue sequined fish tail and swimming in a tank. She put her hand up to the glass, smiled at him, and he knew that he would marry her.”
It had been more than that. I remember the words and his sour coffee breath. I saw her in the water and I believed her. I knew it was true, even if she didn’t really have a tail, even though there’s no such thing, she was a mermaid. My whole life before that moment I’d been in a locked room, and then all the doors opened. And Frank had stood there, witnessing that moment of falling in love. Dad went back to the show every night for a week. “She did different things. The mermaid act, card reading. He saw her being sawed in half by a man so old he could barely lift the saw. She was in a box, hands out the sides, feet out the bottom, helping the guy move the blade.”
Enola shrugs. “Boxes get banged up on the road, the saws bend, they get stuck. You know.”
“I guess the act was going really wrong, but there was Mom, dismembering herself and smiling.”
He talked to me before the sun was up, about the way her hair looked that night. The way she blushed. Like a ripe peach. How he’d ditched Frank with some friends from the marina and waited around for hours until the show shut down for the night. He’d lingered outside the magician’s tent until he saw her in shorts and tennis shoes, her hair in a ponytail. Like a normal girl.
“He told her he’d come by every night, just for her, and that if she didn’t go for a walk with him he’d spend the rest of his life wondering if she’d been real.”
“Doesn’t sound like Dad at all.”
No, not the Dad Enola knew, but the one before, the memory who told stories about fish so big they’d swallow a little boy in a single gulp. Mom went walking with him. He took her down to the harbor and under the docks. I’ve done it myself when the tide is out and the air is sweet with the smell of ocean and the sound of boats pulling at their moorings. It’s a rite of passage for Napawset boys to take girls down there, to lean against a piling and wrap their arms around them. That was the sort of thing my mother loved — rituals in place for years that never changed. She’d been used to living in trailers, RVs, hotel rooms. He hoped that the lure of a home would be strong.
“He promised Mom the house,” I tell her.
“Well, he could have bothered to take care of it.”
I shrug and drain the last of my coffee. “Maybe with her gone there was no reason to.”
She smirks. She doesn’t have to say it: we should have been reason enough. She stretches and shakes her head. “You fucked things up with Alice.”
“I know.”
She swirls the coffee around in her mug. “She’ll forgive you, though. She just needs time.”
“You think?” During dinner she’d seemed unbending, disgusted. It’s hard to recover from disgust.
A shrugged shoulder. “Sure. If you want her to. But you can’t take money from Frank.”
“I don’t really have a choice.”
“You do, you just don’t like making choices. It used to take you forty minutes to pick out a shirt.”
“It’s the house, not a shirt.”
“Exactly. You could just come with me and Doyle, forget the house, and give Alice time to cool off.”
“I can’t do that, okay?”
“Fine. Suit yourself,” she says. “Oh, I looked at your book some more.”
“Tell me you didn’t tear out any more pages.”
Her eyes roll. “I bet you don’t know what you have.”
In point of fact, I don’t. “I know it’s old. The earliest date in it is 1774. It follows a circus — well, not exactly a circus since there wasn’t really circus in America yet. It had multiple owners, I don’t know how many. A lot of it is ruined.”
“It’s an owner’s log. Thom let me see his. Circus masters, carnival guys, they all keep them. You put in everything that happens on a show, who signs on, who leaves, what they make, where you travel, dates, everything. It doesn’t stay with one person; it stays with the show. Thom’s book is from his father. He’s got a case of books that go back to the sixties. His dad bought the show when the last owner retired to Sarasota. It helps you keep track of the important shit.”
“I figured it was sort of a show history.”
“It’s kind of like a family Bible. Yours, though,” she nudges the book. “That’s weird. It’s not supposed to be like a diary. Thom’s isn’t sketched up that way, either.”
“It’s old. There probably wasn’t an established way of doing things.”
She taps her fingers two at a time, pinkie and index then middle and ring. Dad did that too. “Maybe. Still, you shouldn’t have that book. The way it’s all ruined in the back it looks like it survived a flood or something. Maybe that’s why it’s not with the show or with the family.”
“What do you mean?”
“Books like that aren’t supposed to leave a show. It’s all inside information, history kind of stuff. Valuable. If there was a flood or fire, though, maybe somebody left it behind.” She chews her lip and I can hear the unspoken words. Its owners left in a hurry, or its owners died.
“It’s with family, kind of. Mom’s relatives are in it.”
“It’s just weird that you have it. You should send it back to that guy — I know you won’t. You should also forget about the house and leave, but you won’t do that, either.” Her hand twitches, a quick jerking motion, half wave, half threatened slap. “Why does talking with you always end with me being pissed off? I’m gonna get Doyle. We should check in with work today. And,” she adds as she stops down the hall, “you need to talk to Alice.”
Doyle is on the bed in her room, cross-legged, and meditating. The tentacles on his neck ripple with each breath. Enola says his name and his eyes flutter open. “Hey, Little Bird. I heard you guys talking so I figured I’d just…” He pops his neck. “You guys should talk more, right? It’s good when people talk. Brothers and sisters especially.” He says this as though it’s profound.
“Yeah. Sure,” she says. “Thom’s going to want us to come by. We should get going.”
“Right. Gotta keep an eye on the work situation,” he drawls. He says sitchyation and stretches, moving like a man who needs to scratch. “We should talk to Thom about your brother, yeah?”
She nods.