Two if by Sea Read online

  He loved caring for his partner, the big dark gray Morgan, a retired carriage racer named Tarmac. He loved it even when he worked almost every summer holiday, well into the night, his partner’s massive flanks and nerveless bulk sidling up to hysterical concert crowds. He loved being able to go where squad cars couldn’t. He loved cutting through lots to run a punk down and seeing the big man cower and throw his weapon away at the sight of Tarmac’s flaring nostrils. He hated being the one to spot nine-year-old Suzie Shepard’s lime-green sweatshirt where her killer had thrown her, in a culvert not far off the bridle path in the forest preserve. He didn’t even mind the silly stuff—like the way that mounted police had their pictures taken in parades more often than Miss America. The extraordinary pleasure of unexpected usefulness never went away.

  Then, it all went away.

  After the accident, ranks of brother and sister cops came bringing pizza they ended up eating themselves, doughnuts they ended up eating themselves, and candy they ended up eating themselves, as well as true-crime books, funny tee shirts, fishing poles, a huge aloe vera plant, and cases of beer. His sergeant, a man the size of an offensive tackle, taught Frank to knit. His first partner on patrol, Elena, organized a Sunday-night poker game at the hospital. Just before he moved to rehab, the detective Frank had been dating on and off for a couple of years came to visit as well, although Frank hadn’t reached out to her. She visited, twice, and the very air in the room seemed to shrink with the awkwardness between them. Frank opened the card she brought to the second visit, and out tumbled a note, asking if their time was up. Frank set the small vellum note on his stainless-steel tray, and studied the worms of puckered flesh that banded his leg and considered how this detective, a smart, sturdy southside Irish girl, who now starred every night in Frank’s drug-stoked erotic dreams. He finally admitted that what he longed for was not this woman, but a woman, an extraordinary and good woman who would put up with a diffident guy with a bum leg, a fondness for nineteenth-century British novels, and an aversion to sports and amusements of any kind except the archaic diversions of equestrian show jumping, a sport for little girls who read Pony Club books. Trying to force this woman into that space, given that neither of them to this point had the candle to take the next step, would be like trimming pieces of a puzzle to make them fit.

  When the friends thinned out, Frank spent the enforced solitude and inactivity in deciding what to do with at least some of the money. Over his mother’s vigorous protests, he hired a contractor to remodel the kitchen and library of the farmhouse at Tenacity, adding a full first-floor bath and a brand-new twenty-year roof. When his sister told him that the old machine barn was so tumbledown as to be calamitous, Frank installed a new one, and a big arena, although he wasn’t sure he’d ever live there again and his mother needed a new arena like she needed another nostril. For good measure, he retooled the inside of the big barn, adding four new stalls and a commodious and well-equipped bunkhouse with a double bath for the teachers and grooms his mother didn’t employ. When he was finished with all that, there was still a shitboat of money left over, and then Frank had no idea what to do with what promised to be a fairly long life, and with what was certainly too much money for a cop whose career had been distinguished by little glory and no corruption.

  It was in watching one of the slew of neglected documentaries that he happened upon Cedric Bellingham.

  Not in personality, but in early achievement, Cedric Bellingham reminded Frank of Jack Mercy, his own grandfather, whose second horse had taken Olympic silver. Cedric’s Gentle Griffin had taken Olympic silver in the eighties, and years afterward, the great-grandson of that horse, called The Quiet Man, a gold. Cedric had trained both of them, ten and thirty years before, respectively. Cedric rode Gentle Griffin himself, until the riding part of his life was snipped off by a leg injury not very different from Frank’s own. Unloading some feed, Cedric had fallen from a truck bed, just the wrong way.

  They traded a few emails.

  Next came a phone call.

  Frank didn’t want to be a trainer like Cedric, but thought that it might be fun to be around one—horses being all he knew except police work. Completing college would have been attractive if, once he was on his feet, Frank could have even remotely considered the prospect of a sedentary way of life. Not only Frank’s background, but his willingness to work for almost nothing except bed and board was the big attraction for Cedric, who was cheap except where it came to horses. It didn’t hurt that Frank was the heir to men who’d trained ranked horses for riders from all over the world. Frank wanted to assure himself that the Cedric he encountered would be at least a vestige of the man in the documentary, not some bitchy old martinet soured by his past glories and present difficulties. But vocally at least, Cedric was as vigorous as a man half his age, more vigorous than the current version of Frank Mercy, and without a single bleat of self-pity. As unfamiliar and odd as Queensland seemed in every astonishing detail, from its deserts to its rainforests to its bizarre fauna, it couldn’t have been different enough from the Midwestern United States to satisfy Frank, who wished he could relocate to the moon.

  “What do you think of Australia?” he asked Hope one night as his mother worked on mending the spines of some books. Frank had finished the excruciating series of contortions that were supposed to increase his mobility and flexibility—and probably had, since he could now move like a spry eighty-year-old, a step up from the four-wheeled walker just retired.

  “I always wanted to live in England,” Hope said. “Like the Brontës.”

  “I might move to Australia,” Frank said. “Not anything like the Brontës. And not forever. Just . . . for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “It seems like a place a guy could get lost.”

  Hope’s face crumpled. She was so certain that Frank’s disability had pushed him to the ledge of life that she’d succeeded in making him wonder if he actually was still itching to put a bullet in the back of his neck. With no thought at all for how foppishly Edwardian it would have looked to an outsider, Frank got up and awkwardly knelt next to Hope’s chair. “I’m not going to end up wearing dreadlocks and ranting in the outback, Mom. And I’m not going to leave you forever.” Looking away from him, Hope lightly touched Frank’s hair.

  He said goodbye to someone he loved, who counted on him. Now he would say goodbye again. It was bright clear to Frank that he would not stay, equally clear that Cedric and Tura, who needed him, too, would feel the loss keenly.

  Frank passed through the gates and under the arch, considering as he did that unless they were extraordinarily lucky, Cedric and Tura would mourn tonight, just as Frank would. Their daughter, Kate, had been singing last night, somewhere down the same beach from the Murry Sand Castle Inn. Frank hoped to Christ that Kate Bellingham had finished at midnight and hurried to join her parents far up in the town of Barry, where Tura’s old mother lived.

  Instead of opening the door to their house, he knocked.

  Kate Bellingham opened the door. She grabbed Frank around the neck. “Where were you? Where is Natalie?” She stood back when she saw Frank’s face. “Have you heard anything, Frank? Is Natalie lost? Surely there’s a chance?”

  In a low, measured voice meant to convey a calm that he certainly did not feel, Frank said, “I don’t think so. All her brothers and their wives and kids were there, too, on the beach at the Murry Sand Castle. I’m glad to see you, Kate.”

  “I left the place I had the singing job, with my boyfriend. It was eleven. He’s religious. We went to church up the road here and picked Granny up then, but we ended up coming back here. The news isn’t all good for our family, Frank.”

  Tura Bellingham came down the back staircase, carrying a pile of folded blankets, which she let fall to the floor in a heap when she saw Frank. “Thank God you’re here. You’re not even wet. I’m just bringing these blankets down to the church. Kate will do it now. They’re full, sleeping bags every inch of the school and the
community hall, as everywhere. Frank, tell us. How did you make it? Where is Natalie? Is she out there in the car?”

  “Natalie was asleep when the wave hit,” Frank said. “Natalie’s whole family, her brothers and their kids and her father, they were asleep. I wasn’t there because I got up to call my mother and have a beer with Natalie’s brother. Today, I just thought I would come out and check on the horses. And you, of course.”

  Natalie’s mother had died a few years before, struck down by flu.

  That was all of them.

  Tura shook her head, casting her eyes down away from Frank. “Natalie,” she said. “I don’t know what this means, this force of the world turned on innocents. Nothing, I expect.”

  “You’re probably right. Nothing.”

  “Ceddie!” Tura called. “It’s Frank come! He’s alive.”

  Frank heard the scrape of a chair shoved across the planks above and Cedric came pounding slowly down.

  “Frank, there you are!” he said, the Yorkshire vowels still broth in his mouth, although Cedric hadn’t seen the moors for longer than Frank had been alive. “You’re here and so is our Kate.”

  Frank said nothing, but nodded and gave Cedric his hand to shake. In Cedric’s bluff good humor, there was the hollow clap of an exception. Someone was missing. Cedric’s nephew, Miles, everything but a son to the old man, was not there. Frank decided not to mention Miles until someone else did.

  There were bound to be rescuers lost, too, and Frank would need to go back out.

  “There’s a child there,” Tura said then, uncertainly.

  Now Frank would have to explain what he couldn’t explain even to himself.

  “Yes,” Frank told her, gently leading the little boy into the room from the Bellinghams’ enclosed mudroom, still surprised by the confident strength of the white, tiny hand that wound around his thick thumb. For the first time, Frank noticed that his hair was blond, a strange almost milky color, his lashes nearly invisible against his deeply tanned cheeks.

  “Who is that?” Tura asked.

  “We pulled him out of a van this morning. His . . .” Frank stopped. He had been about to tell Tura how the child’s mother and older brother had been swept to their deaths before the firefighters’ horrified eyes. But the kid hadn’t yet spoken. Shock, or he didn’t understand English, or was hearing impaired. At the mammoth tent, Frank had found some dry clothes only a size or so too big and helped the boy into them, horrified by the child’s tiny, trusting willingness, thanking Christ he wasn’t some kind of soft-fingered, candy-bearing monster pervert. They would be abroad on Christmas Day, the child stealers, looking for bargains, little peaches to keep or kill or sell. That was why the boy was still with Frank, or at least this was what Frank conjectured. He’d intended to leave him with the first decent minder he met, and yet he had not left him with the first one, the volunteer at the gym, who was just that kind—everything that could go right if you were a native of Brisbane, jolly, smart, comforting, primed. “I don’t know why I brought him, Tura. I just did. It seemed right. He needs someone to look out for him while I go back out for a while to try to help out,” Frank said. Tura knew he was a volunteer first responder, who, one weekend a month, helped out with small urgencies and prepared for just this, the impossible full-scale emergency. “I have to see to Natalie and her family, too.”

  “Of course, he can be here,” Tura said. Cedric’s phone rang.

  “My sister,” the old man said, apologetically. “Our Miles is still missing.” Miles had been expected at Kuranda, where the family presumed he’d gone with his girlfriend. No one had called Cedric’s sister. No one at all. Frank heard Cedric murmuring about phone service interrupted and early days yet. Then he turned back to Frank. “Could be he’ll turn up. You did, didn’t you?”

  “What if our Miles is gone for good?” Tura said, her eyes filling.

  The child had let go of Frank’s hand and approached Tura, who sat down and, without seeming to think, took him onto her lap. “Get out some biscuits and cheese, Kate, before you go, and put on a kettle so we can give Frank his tea.”

  “No need,” Frank said. “I had some. I drank it too hot.” He remembered then that Natalie could not eat, or nourish their baby son, curled inside her. He wanted to be alone, and to be free to scream and kneel and keen. He had to go back to the rescue crew. How had he forgotten? Even for an instant? His very thoughts were slowing to a drip.

  “You’ll want a cup,” said Tura. “What’s happened to your wrist?”

  “Nothing,” Frank said, unwinding the bandage. “A bruise.” The wrist was fat and blue. “Maybe some ice for this.” The boy had begun to eat the wafers and cheese, taking small bites. Frank sat down and waited for his tea, in the strangely quiet kitchen inside a reconstructed universe.

  FIVE

  FRANK WOKE WITH a shriek, embarrassed. He had been asleep in the boat when the new man driving it nudged him. The fellow told him to head off to wherever he would sleep the rest of the night. The bright dial on the man’s watch indicated that it was four in the morning.

  Frank said, “I’m good still.”

  “I know. You’re fine. But you need to be back later tomorrow. There are people trapped we haven’t seen yet.” The man must have been up all night: his skin had that telltale patina of Queensland sweat and dust dried and reapplied. Yet he seemed as alert and relaxed as if they were fishing. The rookie girl had been replaced, although the boy still hung in. The boat made widening circles, heading in the direction of pale faces that swam into the light or shouts at first faint and then urgent. They had spotted more bodies. The pilot steered the boat over to a man so young and robust-looking that he must have been knocked unconscious to have drowned. Leaning out, Frank stuck a numbered pinny on his chest, as they did with two old women and two teenage girls, whose chic shoulder bags still festooned their tanned shoulders. Those bags would have had ID in them, Frank thought, and cursed himself for a fuckwit for not trying to anchor those children before they sank—for if their parents were alive . . . They brought the living, a bedraggled man sobbing for his wife but clinging to his son who clung to their collie dog, as well as an American woman with her sister and the sister’s boyfriend. They left behind two grannies, who refused to leave their cats. Frank remembered that people in New Orleans had died after the hurricane because they would not leave behind their pets.

  “There’s too much to do,” Frank muttered.

  “The chief said you lost your wife. You need a rest and a meal at least. She said to call you off.”

  Dropped at the makeshift levee near a huge car park that remained above water, Frank got back into his car. He reclined the seat and somehow, his leg awkwardly outstretched in a futile attempt at elevating it, he must have fallen asleep again. When he opened his eyes, it was to a watery sunlight. He turned the key. At the same moment, his phone lighted. Along with another list of phone calls from his mother, the unidentified caller had tried again. Impatient, his leg run through with a soldering iron from sitting cramped in the rescue motorboat and then this tiny car, Frank punched the return dial.

  “Frank?” said Brian Donovan. Frank couldn’t speak. The voice was indeed his brother-in-law’s. Frank had heard it last on Christmas Eve, but dozens of times before he even knew Brian, when Brian read the news on MAT21, the Brisbane iteration of the national public channel. Ten times or more throughout his and Natalie’s brief courtship and the year of their marriage, they’d done some small thing with Brian and his wife, although Brian was older, in his fifties, mad for football, everything Frank was not—but still a good and comical man. “Frank Mercy?” It was just past nine on Boxing Day, the day in Australia when people visited relatives they didn’t like as much. Frank liked Brian very much.

  Now Frank found his voice and said, “Brian! You’re alive.”

  “Just. I was still down in the bar and we were swept out, the bartender and me, up onto the roof of some broadcast tower. We hung there for hours.”
>
  “Where are you now?”

  “My leg is broken and my shoulder. I’m in hospital.”

  “Natalie, Brian,” Frank said. “I know what I saw, but you might . . .”

  There was a reason Frank Mercy had lived, and saved the boy. It was fair dinkum for Natalie’s life.

  “No, Frank. The only hope is for my Adair, but her . . . her things were found. Her shoes. And her backpack. And my brother Hugh and his wife, Mairead, have not been found.”

  “All the rest?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Brian.”

  “They have me doped up. Can you even understand me? I feel like I’m speaking from inside a balloon . . .”

  “I understand you just fine,” said Frank.

  “All the rest. They were found. My wife and Kelly. And Da. My brothers. I’m on the fourth floor and they’ve taken me down to identify the bodies. You’ll want to see our Natalie. Frank, Jesus God.”

  Frank said, “Yes.”

  Silently, opening the door to shield him so no one could see, Frank threw up there on the dirty blacktop. Let me cry, he thought, the grief a dry wedge thrust thick end up from his chest. He threw up once more, all the day’s food, a disgusting greasy pile, and still he retched, like an old drunk. Tears were at least pure. Tears, he heard from his sister, dissolved the wedge; they had hormones of grief in them that were released by the crying. Brian had actually seen her, seen Natalie. It seemed indecent, that he had seen Frank’s own dead wife.

  But she had been Brian’s sister long before.