Two if by Sea Read online

  His heart banged like a dryer filled with tennis shoes. Frank reached out but the heat shoved him back. He shouted, “Natalie!”

  And he woke.

  No one had noticed: the airplane cabin was in turmoil, track lights flickering, images on the individual TV screens just so much fractured ice.

  “What’s going on?” Frank called to the flight attendant scurrying past.

  She held up one finger, rolling her eyes toward the cockpit.

  In seats in front of Frank, the copilots who were off shift threw down their blankets and sprang to their feet.

  Then the microphone came to life with its throaty absence of sound.

  “No need for panic, folks,” the pilot drawled. Why did all airline pilots, even this Qantas pilot, seem to draw their accents from a childhood in southern Virginia? “That sound you heard was lightning just barely glancing off one of the wings of this big Airbus A380 aircraft. Now, these airplanes are made to withstand this kind of weather interference, usually with no more than a scorch mark. The lightning engineers protect the electrical system, and metals just conduct that current right through the wing and back into the atmosphere. You heard some homemade thunder there, folks. But, as you see, your entertainment has resumed, and we’re just fine, passing over the Hawaiian Islands right at this moment. The last time a plane crashed because of a thunderstorm was way back in the Vietnam War. I’m sorry you were all startled. But settle back now, and enjoy a snack or a beverage on us. In five hours, we’ll touch down in Seattle.”

  The storm still bullied and blustered around the windows, and, suddenly back in himself, Frank raised the seat to check on the little boy, who’d been asleep next to him the last he saw.

  The child was gone.

  His bum leg burning, as it had for ten hours in the clubby rotisserie of business class, Frank vaulted awkwardly into the aisle. He nearly toppled a tiny, pretty cabin attendant. Her tag read Francie. A doll’s name. And she looked like a doll, like a pocket person, supremely slim and clean.

  “My little boy,” he said. “Did you see a child, blond, three or four years old?”

  Three or four years old? Some father he was.

  “Oh, Ian! He’s our best friend,” the woman said. “Don’t worry. We had him belted in a seat during the weather event.”

  Ian?

  Yes, Ian. That was the name on the child’s passport. But the passport was in Frank’s backpack. The manifest. Of course. They knew everyone’s name.

  Ian. One day, Frank had begun calling the silent, sunny child Ian. He didn’t know why he called him “Ian” rather than “Henry” or “Paul”; it just seemed right.

  Now Frank tried to move and clenched. An awl of pain bored into his eye socket, vying with the pain in his leg.

  He was out of reach of the painkillers he sometimes needed for his leg and needed urgently now for his wrist—the thing about a sprain hurting worse than a break entirely true. If he had the bottle, he’d have taken an overdose. Instead, he grabbed and drank three cups of water, three of a dozen or so he’d had since getting on the airplane. His mouth was as dry as the flap of an envelope. He’d had to go to the bathroom four times. With the combined tension over his wrist and his leg and his omnipresent fear about the kid, he should have had himself catheterized.

  The last familiar face he’d seen before the airport in Australia was Brian Donovan’s. Brian was back in the hospital, his leg healing poorly, requiring surgery. Frank brought him a stack of novels and, this had been a wrench, one of only three pictures Frank had left from his wedding. The one he gave Brian was of Natalie in a basket chair made of brawny brotherly arms, all five of them laughing as wildly as dogs without horses. Brian’s eyes spilled over, and Frank at first thought to apologize for upsetting him, until he realized that Brian was made of tears—and would be for some time to come. Brian’s leg was suspended in a sling. Without stopping to wonder why, Frank kissed his brother-in-law’s forehead. Brian cried harder. Ian came to the bedside and, with the hospital pen, drew that funny little line with arrows pointing right, then left. “This is the little boy from the flood,” Brian said.

  “He has someone in America who’ll be his family,” Frank said. “I’m taking him there for them.” Well, his mother and sister would be Ian’s family.

  “I’m going to do a documentary film,” Brian said. “To honor my family. So far as I can tell, this is the largest single loss of life in one family from one disaster, ever, in history. I’m going to do it as soon as I get out of hospital.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” Frank asked. He was horrified. It would be good, and end up being aired all over the globe. “Do you think it will be good for you?”

  “I do. I think it will be healing.”

  “You should wait awhile and see how you feel, Brian.”

  Brian clutched Frank’s arm. “Do come back, Frank.” It was a sorry state when you had to rely on a brother-in-law, Frank thought, to be the only proof that your family had ever existed, apart from an ancient auntie in Sydney. But just that must be what Brian was thinking, right now. Frank was all Brian had left.

  “I will,” Frank said, knowing even then he would never set foot on this continent again. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Going through security an hour later, Frank was sure that he was as close as he would ever come to some kind of cardiopulmonary event. Even on the job, faced with three or four amphetamine-torqued adolescents the size of a family of yetis, Frank had never been so scared. He watched his own hands shaking as he laid the blue-jacketed passports on the podium. The gate, A-2, was just beyond the security checkpoint, twenty feet away.

  Peering at his passport with a penlight, the uniform said, “Are you repatriating? Child born here?”

  Eyes popping, throat coated with suede, Frank croaked, “Yes. Bereavement. My wife died in the storm.”

  “Who was your wife?”

  Fuck, Frank thought. It was over. “I say, who was your wife, sir? Did you hear me?”

  Frank said, “Yes. Of course. I’m sorry. My wife was Dr. Natalie Donovan. She was chief of emergency services at Our Lady Help of Christians.”

  “I thought I recognized you.”

  Oh, sweet Christ! Fuck!

  “From the newspaper,” the fellow said. “The photograph, holding a child. You’re the fireman, the one went right out Christmas morning, with your own wife lost. And you an American.” Frank’s mind slapped shut, a freezer door, sealed and cold. “Davy!” the uniform bellowed. Everyone in line sprang to alert, keen as hunting dogs for sordid news. “Here’s the Yank went out rescuing people after his own wife died, the volunteer fireman. Frank Mercy.”

  Yank. In the paper!

  Jesus!

  How had he forgotten that picture, now the size of a roadside billboard in his mind? The one Natalie’s brother Brian spotted from his hospital bed?

  Frank smiled like a stroke victim, pulling muscles into place one by one. He managed to croak out the word “Yes.”

  “Going home now, with your boy?”

  “He has dual citizenship,” Frank said. “Yes. Mom was Aussie.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Say, how did you know my name? It wasn’t in the newspaper.”

  “No, but it’s right here on your passport,” the man said, rolling his eyes a little. “Now, I figured you had to be the man that my little brother Dicken told me about. Same name. Dicken’s on the volunteers. He was with you in the boat. He was all over the Yank that pulled the little boy from the van. About the same age as your lad, wasn’t he? That boy?”

  Dicken. The kid on the rescue crew. The boy rookie.

  Frank tried to show his teeth in a genial way. Stripping his lips back from his teeth was like trying to start a stuck tape roll. He nodded. What if the kid chose this moment to speak for the first time, to scream, to struggle away from him and cry out for his mother? He knew that the kid thought about the swamped van: every night, Ian came into Frank’s bed. Every nig
ht, he woke to Ian crying in his sleep and saw him put his small arms up over his face.

  “Sorry, Yank,” said the uniform. “Good luck to you now. You, too, lad.”

  And they passed through.

  What came next was even stranger, and more harrowing.

  As they approached their gate, Frank saw the man, a slim young light-haired guy with tortoiseshell spectacles, hands in his pockets, lounging against a pole just outside the melee of travelers at gate A-2. There was nothing about the man to suggest in any sense that he was a wrong guy, and yet Frank’s every instinct shrieked that he was indeed a wrong guy and that, moreover, he was here in the Qantas gate because of Frank. Unlike everyone else, surging forward as if to escape ten thousand zombies storming the terminal, this fellow took his ease as he dreamily watched the crowd. He carried no ticket or passport, no book or food, not even the smallest piece of hand luggage. Grabbing Ian, Frank ducked behind a deserted podium and set down his long duffel bag. He took out his silk windbreaker and several of the electronic board books Kate Bellingham had given him. “You stay right here,” he told Ian. “Don’t move. I’m going to find some chairs for us and it’s okay if you sleep a little. I’ll watch you.” Ian lay down, and Frank draped the windbreaker over him. As if the windbreaker were a magician’s cloak, Ian, entranced, let his eyes close. Frank slipped Ian’s orange backpack under the little boy’s head for a pillow, and laid his hands on the child, willing him to rest. Then he stood up stiffly and made a show of finding a seat thirty feet away. Making himself behave slowly and with fuss, as an inexperienced traveler might, he painstakingly opened his novel, searching for the place, twitchily shifting on the molded plastic seat, finally settling back. He felt rather than saw the man slip into the seat next to him. Frank looked up. The young man’s pale eyes met Frank’s, and he smiled, with a kind of lazy wink.

  “You’re an American,” he said. Frank nodded. The slender man said, “Me, too. Time to go home, huh?”

  “Probably,” said Frank. “I’m not sure my wife would agree.”

  “She’s not American?”

  From the rind of his peripheral vision, Frank had spotted a woman in her thirties battling two little girls, the smaller one still in diapers. He lifted his chin toward the woman and the little girls, who were reaching around their mother to whack each other with the sandals they’d taken off. Please, Frank thought, don’t let her husband come.

  “Oh, your wife?” the man said. Frank knew accents. The man had none, so far as he could tell. His voice was as pure as Wisconsin tap water.

  “I can’t get enough peace to read a page,” Frank said, and his mind bellowed, Don’t let her husband come. Don’t let Ian wake up. Don’t let her husband come. Don’t let Ian wake up. Frank opened his book again, with an ostentatious sigh. When he glanced up, the man in the tortoiseshell glasses had moved on. As Frank watched, he strolled through the aisles of seats in the gate, and then stopped again. He exchanged pleasantries with another man. Another man on his own. Another man aged about forty, with brown hair and a medium build. The typeface of the novel wavered before Frank’s eyes as if he was trying to read through moving water. He looked up again, scanning the gate, when, just at that moment, Ian came running. Frank stood up, glancing around him, wildly, sweat exploding from his chest, his tee shirt as soaked as it had ever been after a five-mile run, back when he could run. The man was nowhere to be seen. Frank retrieved his duffel, then took Ian into the bathroom, where he washed himself as best he could with wadded paper towels, but ended up removing his undershirt, balling it up, and simply wearing his long-sleeved button-down over his skin.

  Time crawled toward five p.m. Frank watched the faces in the boarding area. Finally, he and Ian boarded the plane.

  When the big aircraft was fully boarded, using Ian’s supposed restlessness as an excuse, Frank quickly walked the aisles with the child, scanning for anyone who even vaguely resembled the slight young guy with the tortoiseshell glasses. But there was no one at all. By the time they took their seats in business class, there was Patrick Walsh, a kid of twenty or so who’d turned up at Tura Farms just a few weeks before, looking for a meal and a place to sleep. Patrick said he could work; Cedric was in no shape, and Frank was mostly gone running through those parts of Brisbane that had electrical power, rustling up legal and illegal paperwork, from Natalie’s life-insurance forms to Ian’s forged passport, which had cost Frank a thousand dollars. To everyone, he’d given Brian Donovan’s address instead of his own at Tenacity Farms in Wisconsin. Brian would forward whatever was Frank’s, including any more paperwork, or he wouldn’t. Frank didn’t care. He glanced over at Patrick. He’d forgotten all about Patrick over the past hour, but was glad of him now. With Patrick there, Tura Farms stayed crisp as a tuxedo shirt. Patrick knew horses, and he knew how to get things finished. Patrick was competent, clean and quiet, even though he sat down methodically on the side of his bed every night, reading library books on everything from extinct birds to Francis F. Kennedy, and steadily drinking brandy until he was cross-eyed.

  Ten days earlier, with Cedric’s consent, Frank asked Patrick if he would like an adventure, to go with him to the United States to get Glory Bee settled down at his home farm, at good pay, enough to bum around a bit before heading back. “How far is your place from Hollywood?” Patrick asked.

  “Not as far as you can go, but almost. A good five-hour flight, maybe three days’ drive straight through.”

  “But a fellow could do it.”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t mind,” Patrick said.

  Frank was relieved, but also rueful: a part of him had hoped Cedric might take to Patrick and go on with the work of the farm once he got his mind around the death of Miles. But Cedric was quick to send Airborne back to England. Cedric then sold his driving team, and, last of all, his own fond Saddlebred, Welly. The other four fillies were yearlings, and Cedric said they’d go for the glue if needed. At this, Frank saw Patrick wince. Although his burr identified him as an Irishman, in one of perhaps five sentences he’d spoken the whole time at Tura Farms, Patrick said he’d spent time around Liverpool. That, his ease with the horses, and his size—for he was a miniature human, a hundred pounds, if that, with feet no longer than Frank’s opened hand—told Frank the young man once was a jockey of some kind. Once, Frank overheard him say something to a feed dealer about wrecking his back in a crash in a pack, and that meant a bottleneck of horses. Another time, Patrick got up and left the room with a muttered curse when Cedric turned on the TV for a moment to watch a jumps race at Aintree, the home of the Grand National Steeplechase, a race that a colt of Airborne’s was favored to win. Evidently, Patrick had a history there, and not a good one. And evidently, he shared Cedric’s bias. To the extent that he cared about anything, since Miles’s death, Cedric was appalled that Airborne’s foal, Sky Pilot, was a jumps racer. He watched the race in horrified fascination, as any decent horseman would. It sickened Cedric that the sport went on in the country where he lived, at least in southern Australia and Victoria, touted at Warrnambool. It was outlawed elsewhere.

  What had happened to Patrick, that luckless day in the pack? He wasn’t saying. Frank had seen Patrick grimace and knead his back, but youth was also on his side. Most days, he scaled ladders and walked up canted roofs with the agility of a howler monkey. Now he shrugged at Frank, clearly asking if he thought Glory Bee was okay. She had boarded, Patrick said, reasonably calmly for an animal that was, the young Irish said, “daft at her best.” Now how would she be?

  Jesus Christ, what a piece of work he was, Frank thought, looking back on the last two weeks—the scurrying and prodding, the obeisances and formalities, the rude time-lapsed dismantling of a life. What if the goddamn plane crashed in this pounding storm and Frank had plucked this child from the flood and from his own land (and possibly his own people, somewhere) only to treat him to a dreadful, horrifying, conscious death?

  “We’re going to be serving some food in a few
minutes,” said the flight attendant, interrupting Frank’s reverie of distress. It was Francie, Ian’s new best friend. “Will he eat steak? We can bring him a hotdog.”

  “He’ll eat anything,” Frank said, proud (proud?) that this was true. Perhaps Ian’s family had been chefs. Perhaps they had been beggars who ate out of restaurant dumpsters. Either way, the boy was happy to eat anything from fish and chips to eggplant Parmesan.

  “He’ll have steak, then, won’t you, mate?”

  As Ian nodded, several of the other flight attendants gathered around again, like so many sleek waterbirds in their black uniforms with slashes of pink and orange.

  “Later on, we’ll play Go Fish, Ian,” said one of the younger flight attendants, a guy, who was still pale about the lips—assurances about “lightning engineers” notwithstanding. He still didn’t look entirely sure he wanted to be on this dark highway in the sky. Frank watched as the boy put down his drawing pad and touched the man on the shoulder, and how the young man’s shoulders visibly unpleated.

  There it was again.

  Kidnapping? Surely, that’s just a legal thing.

  What was it?

  If he’d doubted the kid’s effect on Cedric and Tura, he’d seen it plainly with his lawyer friend Charley, who wanted no part of black-market passports until he shook hands with Ian, and who then helped Frank obtain one anyway. Once or twice, Frank could have put it down to Ian’s waifish charm, a kid being little and cute and alone and blond as a dandelion. But it had happened with Glory Bee. Little and cute and charming didn’t count with a horse.

  Patrick was now motioning urgently to Frank, who realized he was thinking slowly, woozy from the cocktail of ibuprofen, prescription painkiller, and Benadryl he’d stuffed down in order to try to sleep in his pod. He must have heard the boom of the lightning slash with the inturned ear of sleep, at the moment in his dream when Natalie stepped into the steep shaft of boiling water.

  Settle down, he lectured himself. Breathe.

  Lightning veined the clouds outside the window again, and Frank thought of his grandmother saying, “The bad ones are struck by lightning . . .” which was no more than another ladle of Irish fantasy. If lightning really struck down bad-deed doers, the prison guards at the big maximum-security prison at Joliet would report each morning for work with shovels and dumpsters to dispose of the previous night’s crispy corpses.