“I know.” She squeezes my hand, once, quickly, then lets go. It’s enough.
I have to go in anyway. Frank is in my house with my books, like he’s sitting in my veins. For Alice I’ll get him, but only for her.
She follows me, but I stop her at the door. “You shouldn’t come in.”
“Don’t say anything awful to him,” she says. A tiny burst of envy runs through me — I want that defensiveness. She would wake me up if I had a nightmare; she’s that sort of person. She wouldn’t care about my breakfast face. She would learn to love my sister because I do. For that, I’ll talk to Frank.
“Honestly, it’s probably going to be the other way around, plus it’s dangerous inside.”
“What did he do?” she asks, quietly.
Telling her might make me better in her eyes. Or maybe it would break her. “He doesn’t deserve you.”
She looks across the street, to the window where her mother watches. “Maybe. But I decide who deserves me.”
The front door is stuck and I have to kick it open, rolling all my weight onto the bad ankle. Alice grabs my arm and holds me steady. Her skin is warm against mine and I can almost feel the paper cuts from library books, a chipped nail, but then she is gone. Back to the McAvoy house. Back to Leah.
Frank is at my desk, where the book lies open on makeshift props.
“You’re back. Good. I thought—” He shakes his head. “I don’t know what I thought. But there’s something you should see.” He hops up from my chair.
I close the book. “Go home, Frank. Alice is worried.”
He frowns. “Let’s not talk about Alice.”
“Why are you here?”
“I need to show you something.” He pushes past me toward the door. Two steps down the porch and he’s heading for the bluff. Alice and Leah watch anxiously from the McAvoys’ porch. Dragging an ankle that feels like an anchor, I try to keep up. By the time I catch up, Frank is at the cliff’s edge, where the grass breaks away into a tear of falling land. “Look.” He nods toward the shore.
“What the hell?”
“Exactly,” he says. “I meant to let you cool off, let us both cool off. We said some things we shouldn’t have.” He digs the toe of one boat shoe into the ground. “I was taking the Sunfish out for a sail, but I got to the cliff and saw them. Damndest thing. Then I remembered.”
Not hundreds, thousands of smooth brown horseshoe crabs are on the shore. This isn’t what Enola said, it’s not like when we were kids; this is massive. They stretch across the Sound like cobblestones. They don’t do this, not during the day, and never so many, piling on each other in strata, like oysters. Something else is different. “The buoys.”
“Damndest thing,” he repeats. The swimming area has drifted out, back and to the east, toward the power plant.
“They’re pulling them out to sea.” I start for the steps but Frank grabs my collar.
“Don’t go rushing off. While I was waiting for you I looked through some of your books.” He sees my reaction and grimaces. “You slept with my daughter. I’m pretty sure we’re beyond personal boundaries.”
“Touché.” I would tear his house from shingles to foundation to find a single hair of my mother’s, to take her back.
“I saw that list of names, the dates, some of what you’ve written. I couldn’t make sense of all of it, but I figured something out. You’re worried about Enola. You think she’s like your mother. You think she’s going to die.”
“I don’t know.” The things he told me this morning showed me that I knew far less than I thought. “But I’m worried.”
Frank draws in a breath and lets it out slowly. “She’s different from Paulina, I can tell you — sweeter in some ways, but meaner, too. I don’t know, I saw those names and then I saw this. The horseshoe crabs came like this a couple of days before Paulina died. Thousands of them. After she was gone a red tide came through and killed everything — crabs, fish, snails — all of it; the whole Sound looked like rust. I haven’t seen horseshoe crabs like that again until now.”
So this is why he collects them, why he dries their shells and hangs them from his porch, and why, perhaps accidentally, he taught his daughter to love them. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You’re looking for patterns, right? I could see from what you wrote. I don’t know if that’s a pattern, but it’s strange enough that I can’t forget it, and seeing this many crabs again made me sick.” We stare down at the writhing mass.
“About Alice…” I say, because I feel I should.
“She makes her own decisions,” he mutters.
“She’s worried about you. Go home, Frank.”
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, okay.” He repeats the word until he’s worn a rut into it, then walks back to his house and the women waiting for him. I should tell him that I haven’t said anything to Alice, that I won’t, but I still want him to suffer. I look back to the water.
The beach is packed not just with crabs, but people from the other houses on the cliff. There’s Eleni Trakos, I recognize her by her steel-gray bun and leathery skin, tanned to her body by decades of topless sunbathing. There are her grandkids, Takis and the other one. Next to her is Gerry Lutz from up the street, Vic and the cul-de-sac people, Sharon, the Pinettis. They cluster like it’s a crime scene, touching, whispering, talking.
Eleni and the grandkids have their toes right up to the edge. One of the kids picks a crab up by the tail and waves it around; the body arches at its hinged joints, exposed, blindly searching for footing, and flinging back and forth with each movement of its tail. I look at Eleni, then back up the beach to Gerry, Vic and Maggie Simms, Terry, Sharon and the other cul-de-sac people. It’s rare to see them all together. Weddings, maybe. I think the last wedding was Wyatt’s, Gerry’s son, and that was three or four years ago. And funerals, yes, everyone shows up for funerals. I can recall them all wearing black — suits, dresses with matching jackets, shiny funeral shoes. Eleni with just rings, no necklace.
At Mom’s service, Dad had been flanked by Frank and Gerry. Frank stood at my father’s side, mourning her too. Leah stayed with Enola and me. She put me in a too-big suit from the Presbyterian Church. Enola wore a black hand-me-down dress from Alice.
John Stedbeck paces by the boulder where Enola skinned her legs. Nervous and lanky, he shouts into a cell phone, bending and straightening, holding his arm out to search for reception. I borrowed his suit for Dad’s service. My father’s gray suit had been too wide at the shoulders and too short in the legs. He wore the black in the casket.
Faye and Sharon snap photos, Faye crouching as far as her knees allow. They brought us fruit pies, both times. Ted Melnick brought us a basket of oranges and handed it to me while apologizing. Gerry and his wife gave us lasagna, which Enola ate all of as soon as the house was empty. Eleni gave us baklava. “For the sweet in the sorrow,” she’d said. Though food poured from the doors and windows, though each of these people hugged us and begged us to eat, eat, eat, we tasted nothing.
The clicking and thumping of crab tails hangs in the air; a roiling wave, they clamber at the shore. The wind is full of crabs and the beach is filled with a funeral party.
* * *
Back in the house I try Churchwarry, but there’s no answer. Next to my keyboard is Legends and Poems of the Baltic, the other book I must return. Why did Mom fill my head with stories of kings under the sea and women who danced men into streams? I log on to my computer to find a short email from Anne Landry at Sanders-Beecher Archive. They’re still reviewing applicants, but would like to schedule a call at my convenience. There are questions about my willingness to move since they lack the capital to fund relocation. I tell her I’ll call in the afternoon on the twenty-fifth. There’s also a message from Blue Point. While they thank me for my interest, the previously listed position in reference has been eliminated due to budget restructuring.