Float Page 4

  “One shoe,” he said. “It gets the sand off of one shoe. What about the other?”

  “Oh, Duncan, dear,” she said, with a laugh. “The things you think about.”

  So the house was always filled with sand. Mrs. McNordfy, the cleaning woman, came twice a week to push the small dunes around with a broom, abrading the teak floors white before she sat down for a two hour mug-up with his mother. The Oriental carpets were heavy from the weight of the sand, but by his mother’s reckoning, this was a good thing. It was only half as much as it could be! “If you live on sand, you’re going to live with sand,” she always said. Ethel had built the house sometime in the 1860s on this sandy basin surrounded by a ring of stone outcroppings. It was during a brief period when architects promoted octagonal homes in the belief that they were not only more economical but increased sunlight and ventilation to boot. In reality, they did exactly the opposite. The rooms themselves were not octagonal, which meant the interior was a confused warren of wasted triangular space and halls, leaving most rooms with only a single window clouded with blown salt, making them dark as well as disorganized. Few octagonal homes remained standing today, and the ones that did were both a curiosity and a cautionary tale.

  And yet, for all its faults, the house could be lovely, especially at night, when moonlight illuminated the romantic architectural details—porthole gables, shapely balustrades, and an ivy-covered dovecote. It was strong daylight that revealed a house that looked as if it had been built by pirates. The exterior was covered in rounded shingles that overlapped like scales, with so many of them loose or curled it looked as if it had a fish disease. The building had lost a few foundation stones, like missing teeth, but that had given it a strange stability, allowing rogue storm tides to come and go underneath without causing significant damage, though, like most things, it all depended on a person’s definition of the word. His mother believed only total annihilation could be considered real damage; everything else was just regular maintenance. Bits and pieces of the house had been torn off by wind and water over the years, replaced with inappropriate styles and patched with whatever was on hand. Old masts served as joists, fishing nets replaced trellises, and briny driftwood was fitted and nailed to fill in the blanks. Duncan had been begging his mother for years to get a structural inspection, but she waved him away, and the house mocked him by staying firmly in place. It was no use even trying to get things properly repaired because she was proud of its strange ruination. “Shows the world we can survive any disaster!”

  That remained to be seen. Duncan reached his hand out blindly for the Chinese porcelain lamp on the hall table, tripping over a pile of canvas shoes and a sail bag, but he managed to keep dinner safe. Working his way to the kitchen, he zigzagged through the dark rooms, turning on a series of iron floor lamps as he went, like marks on a course. There were no wall switches. The only overhead lighting in the entire house was the dust-glazed Venetian chandelier in the dining room, which was all blue-green glass frills, designed to look like seaweed. It could only be turned on by standing on the walnut table underneath, which was inlaid with marquetry compasses and other nautical motifs that popped out with every footstep. It was missing its North compass point altogether.

  He switched on the electrified whale oil lamp on the mantel in the living room and was, as always, briefly startled by a single eye staring at him. The eye belonged to the marlin mounted over the beach-stone fireplace. The tail was rotting along the edges, and the once brilliant silver scales were dull with age and smoke. His mother had caught it in the Bahamas during her honeymoon decades before. She had fought the fish on the line for five hours and was severely dehydrated when she finally pulled it in. Then she scratched herself on the fin, bled profusely, and got nauseous. As soon as she finished posing with her fish at the weigh-in, his father rushed his young bride to the emergency room. She’d won the tournament but spent a feverish week in the hospital, and it was the last time she ever set foot on a moving boat. As much as she wanted to be out on the water, she blacked out the moment she approached a gangplank. After that, she threw her life into being onshore navigator for her husband, Brendan. When he died, Nod took over the tiller of the bunged-up catboat, and she managed his racing career, such as it was. Duncan did not sail anymore, and his mother called him a nonstarter. Cora suggested he had psychosomatic sympathetic seasickness, but it didn’t make him ill. He just didn’t care for being on the water anymore, which set him apart from most of the community who regarded the sea as an extension not just of the land but of themselves.

  When he got to the kitchen—a stark, stuccoed affair built for servants—he took off his jacket and began to open cabinets and drawers, the sound of which drew his mother’s Newfoundland shuffling into the room.

  “Chandu!” said Duncan as he took out some tarnished silverware. “No one feed you yet?”

  Chandu sat and drooled. Of course not. Dogs had discovered centuries ago that to live in comfort it was only necessary to feign affection for humans, but they had apparently not reckoned with sailing season. Duncan scooped up some kibble and filled a bowl, then crouched next to Chandu as he ate. The dog spent his days on the water’s edge, staring out to sea, ever hopeful for a sinking ship. “Old man,” Duncan whispered, and patted him on his back. His thick black fur was matted and smelled of the tide. After washing his hands, Duncan turned his attention to human food, but first he had to move from the counter the empty wine bottles, which gathered in corners and under tables waiting for his mother to refill them from wooden casks in the basement. Great-Uncle Fern, Ethel’s son, had gotten it in his mind to raise silkworms and planted fifty mulberry trees on the property. When the trees were big enough, he sent to Japan for cocoons, and they hatched into millions of worms, all of whom got to work on the business of spinning. Then came a nor’easter that blew the worms into the sea, so Fern had to content himself with the berries. He took up wine-making, hence the pyramid of casks in the basement from which his mother still drank. It was a sticky liquid, fermented from slightly unripe fruit. Duncan would rather eat the worms, but his mother loved the stuff and had ramped up her consumption in the years since his father died.

  Cora thought his mother was an alcoholic. “Wine has drowned more people than the sea,” she’d say after another woozy dinner with her mother-in-law, but Duncan knew better. Great-Uncle Fern was no vintner, so the mulberry wine had minimal alcohol content. It was not much more than stale juice. It certainly did nothing to relax her. On race days, she hunkered down in the cupola with her binoculars and her jelly glass of mulberry wine, her nostrils puffed up in excitement like sails. She tried to give direction to Nod by running signal flags out on a pole, but he was always too flustered to look up for help. Poor Nod. He was out to sea in more ways than one. The onslaught of hormones at puberty had acted as poison to his system. Something had gone wrong, but no one, least of all Nod, could say just what. Cora called him NQN—Not Quite Normal—but that was an opinion, not a professional diagnosis. His mother insisted Nod was fine and didn’t need help. He spent one miserable year at boarding school and never went back. He attended Port Ellery Regional High instead and refused to go to college. He’d sometimes helped his father down at Seacrest’s, doing inventory or processing orders, but other than that he never held a real job or had a girlfriend. When Duncan lived in New York, he could never get Nod to visit. Finally, when Nod was in his late twenties, he made plans to move out of the house, but then their father died, and he felt he could not leave his mother. The only thing that made living back at home bearable for Duncan was the knowledge that at least he’d once left it.

  He put the calzone in the microwave, then opened the refrigerator for bottled water. Standing in the wash of cool light, his thoughts turned to his vial of orphaned semen in the fertility clinic freezer. He closed the refrigerator without taking anything out and stood there with his forehead on the door. The appointment for implanting the fertilized egg had been scheduled for the week he’d lef
t home. The day had come and gone without a call from Cora, and he knew she’d given up on him. It was just as well. Any child of his was bound to be unbalanced.

  The microwave timer dinged and pulled him back to shore. He got the calzone out, and as he cut through the crust, small tendrils oozed from the cheesy filling and curled in on themselves. It was a far cry from dinner with Cora. They used to cook elaborate meals together; she’d taught him to chop and sift, to stir and have patience. She educated his palate, explaining how subtle differences in seasoning made big differences in the finished product. “Taste this,” she’d say, holding a spoon of some new dish to his mouth. “Close your eyes and tell me how it makes you feel.”

  He took his glasses off and wiped them. She’d make a great mom.

  After Chandu finished his kibble, Duncan let him outside through the back door, then started upstairs with the tray of food. The third floor had its own staircase, which was tight and winding, narrowing as it went, making him feel as if he were being forced through a nautilus shell. He passed a plaster niche in the wall, which, according to family lore, had housed a wooden saint that crumbled away to dust the night Great-Aunt Cecilia died of a broken heart when her sailor never returned from Barbados. Love notwithstanding, the entire house was crumbling away. Powderpost beetles gnawed at it night and day, leaving small piles of sawdust under all the furniture and rafters. His mother had replaced the saint with one of the many sailing trophies won by his father, and in it she stored Duncan’s caul, the withered snot of birth sac considered lucky for sailors, protecting them from a death from drowning. Nod had arrived tangled in his umbilical cord and hence no caul, but Duncan was born so lethargic that he couldn’t be bothered to break his ahead of time and was delivered encased in his egg, floating in the middle like a yolk. When his mother left the hospital, she held the boxed caul in her lap as his father wheeled her to the car. A twelve-year-old candy striper walked behind them, carrying baby Duncan in her arms.

  “Shouldn’t the caul be in the boat?” he once asked her when he was old enough to wonder what it was and why it was on the stair landing. “We’re not likely to drown in the house.”

  “Of course we’re not going to drown in the house,” she’d said. “We’ve got the caul!”

  While the caul was busy protecting the house, his father slid off the boat one day in a squall and drowned. Duncan sometimes wondered if he should have just ignored his mother and put it in the boat himself. But then if he did that, he’d be buying into her wacky belief in the caul to begin with. There was never a right answer where she was concerned.

  When he got to the top of the stairs, he slipped off his shoes as if entering a temple. The third floor was different from the first two stories in that it was not divided into strange little rooms but had been gutted to create one huge, well-lit space. It was smaller than the other floors because it gave up footage to the widow’s walk that circumnavigated the house, making it look like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. French windows faced out in every direction, and any surface that was not glazed was paneled in teak. On one of those spaces hung a photograph of his father in a seashell frame, fixed with a medal and the insignia from his uniform. His parents had known each other since childhood but had not fallen in love until he joined the Navy. She still kept his uniform under their bed. Faded racing pennants hung from the beams, and one wall held a trophy case displaying the family’s glory, the mounted silver boats and urns won by his father or grandfather, his aunts or uncles, his cousins or in-laws, and the many variations thereof. There were no trophies won by the living. It was a room where the present was measured against the past and had come up empty-handed. But it was not through lack of trying. The focus of the room under his stockinged feet remained the same. Beautifully painted in marine paint on teak floorboards was the coastline of Port Ellery. The map had been commissioned by Ethel Tarbell, who paid a local teenager two dollars to recreate the harbor as a teaching aid to her children. The young artist signed and dated it in the far corner—Benjamin Bellamy Dodge, 1875—and then moved out West to create the luminous American landscapes he was to become famous for. This floor was his only surviving New England work. Museums made increasingly frequent inquiries about buying it, but his mother ignored their pleas. “No oyster ever profited from his pearl,” she’d tell them before hanging up.

  With envy Duncan eyed the floor, whose fortunes had been rising as Seacrest’s had been sinking, and he contemplated the fleeting nature of business compared to the eternal value of art. The vaguely anatomical shape of the harbor beneath his feet was as recognizable now as it had been to his ancestors, with only the slightest alterations. Over the years, family members had sketched in new dangers, such as a sunken boat or a new shoreline due to erosion or rising water levels. Great-Aunt Hilda had penciled a toothed eel where she claimed to have seen a sea monster while rowing out to check her lobster pots. On the shore, fish sheds had been overlaid with honeycombs of condos, but Seacrest’s still sat in the little loop off the inner harbor, its stack a landmark for sailors. Black cans and red nuns and other important navigational markers were repositioned as needed, while isobars in a fine teal line marked the depths. Dotted lines indicated the different tides, and at the far end of the room were the words Aqua incognita.

  The hills around the harbor were included in Dodge’s portrait, too, along with the town graveyard, where crosses had been added over time due to natural causes or when the family called a missing sailor dead, as they had done for his father. On the hopelessly distant shore was his real home, where Cora sat, refusing to call him back to where he belonged.

  Neither Nod nor his mother looked up as Duncan walked across the water, stepping on green islands with names lettered in black archaic script. He knew enough not to get near the fleet, the dozen or so foot-high, felt-bottomed boat models being maneuvered around the floor with a velvet-bumpered tool, a cross between a push broom and a croupier stick.

  “If the wind comes in from the southeast, you’ve got to head up towards the lighthouse, then work your way around Parker’s Island on the lee side,” his mother said, tapping Nod’s blue boat along. She wore, as she so often did, canvas ducks and a tailored shirt with the Boat Club burgee knotted like a scarf around her neck. Her feet were bare and perfectly pedicured in red. “Like this.” She moved swiftly across the harborscape, expertly prodding the little boat between the shore and the island, then gave it a firm shove with her stick out to the center of the room, where it skidded a few feet until it finally rested at the head of the pack. She leaned on her stick with both hands, her face pink with satisfaction. She’d once been a redhead, but the bright color had softened with age to a shade of orangey-gray, which she kept in a long braid that fell down her back like a serpent. Her nose was pronounced, and the tip of it glowed when she was happy, as she was now, when winning was still possible. The race—and her life—was perfect as long as it stayed in her head and in this room, which went a long way toward explaining why she had not left the property in close to a decade. At first, everyone, Duncan included, explained away her self-imposed house arrest as an expression of deep grief when his father died, and, while odd, it was perfectly understandable when judged against the family baseline for “normal.” Soon what was once a temporary derangement became the new norm, especially since no one called her on it. Cora marveled that Duncan never even tried to get her out. “It’s hard to say who’s the crazier,” she often said with a laugh.

  “But what if Roger tries to follow me in Dragon’s Teeth and blocks my wind?” asked Nod, who spoke, as always, through rising bubbles in his throat. He was tall like Duncan, but his shoulders were so bowed he seemed inches shorter, and his clothes were too big, which only added to that impression. He wore racing shorts and a green collared T-shirt emblazoned with his boat’s name on the back—Ariel. He had gone prematurely bald, and his hair was a black sickle above his neck, framing a head so sun-damaged it was as spotted as a trout. He had a clean-shaven face that
added to his overall monkishness. He’d been born with an anomaly on the edge of his ear of which he and his mother were inordinately proud: A gill, a very small pinpoint of a hole that was an evolutionary throwback, like webbed fingers or a stub of a tail. The two of them claimed that in the same way the caul protected her, the gill would protect him from a watery grave. They shared a strange, isolated existence that they constructed with myths and truths of their own making.

  If this was Nod’s first choice of any life he might have lived, it had not seemed that way when they were children, when he was bright and engaged with the wider world. Cora had once pointed out that addicts were stalled at the age they started using their substance of choice, and it did seem that racing had kept Nod a perpetual adolescent. Lately Duncan began to wonder if that’s how she thought of him, too, as stuck in his life. If she thought of him at all.

  Nod motioned at the floor with his stick. “I’ll have enough trouble finding air behind the island.”

  His mother swung her stick and whacked Dragon’s Teeth’s little white hull. The boat skidded sideways across the map and ended up at the far side of town, near the dump. “Blow him out of the water with speed and cunning.” She tapped her temple with her stick. “Speed and cunning, my boy! Put some lift in your sails.”

  Nod took on a slack expression, as if he were already accepting his defeat. He put up with a great deal of abuse from their mother. Once, when he had not bailed out the boat to her satisfaction, she made him carry around two buckets of water for the rest of the weekend so he could see how heavy water was. It never occurred to him to just say no.

  “I’ll get my head handed to me if I cut across his bow,” Nod mumbled.

  His mother set the boats back up at the starting line and sighed. “Let’s begin again. The wind is from the southeast, the tide is high but going out. What do you do?”