Hazard Page 21

  “Where is he?” Dylan cried, stricken.

  “Daddy’s checking on the studio,” I lied, in a lilting voice. “Let’s get all our stuff inside before he comes back. We’ll surprise him.”

  Dylan nodded his curly head, vigorously. “Yeah!” he said. Grabbing his tattered blanket, bag of toys, and crumpled pillow, he staggered toward the door. The next moment I heard him in the parlor, noisily wrestling miniature bulldozers and race cars out of his backpack.

  As for me, I grabbed the banister and steadied myself. I was pregnant again, four months in, with late-afternoon nausea that worsened with fatigue. My stamina this time around was alarmingly thin. This baby had surprised me, coming so close on the heels of Dylan’s birth, which had been a forty-eight-hour hard labor, ending in a cesarean. I didn’t feel quite ready for another.

  A moment of reflection would have reminded me that Dylan, too, had come as a surprise. Part of me knew that surprise pregnancies were the only way I’d ever have babies, given my childhood and my conviction as a young teen that it was better not to have babies at all. Since that long ago afternoon in Bea’s Laundromat when I was on the cusp of womanhood, I had tracked my cycles like a scientist, knowing exactly when I ovulated and down to the hour when I would start my blood flow. In my second year of college, the birth control pill burst on the scene and I dashed to the university health clinic along with hundreds of other young women for the slender package of protection. Nevertheless, Mother Nature stepped in and, in my early thirties, tweaked my hormonal cycle enough to ovulate one day earlier. Even more surprising was the reckless thrill I’d felt the moment I learned I was pregnant. Soon afterward, in a kind of romantic whirlwind, Don and I married and within the year we had a healthy baby boy. At last, I had my own family.

  Inhaling, I picked up the suitcase and mounted the front stairs, pausing on the landing for a few breaths. Beyond was the alcove, its sun-faded curtains drawn to the side. The view from its window was my favorite. Moving to the pane, I parted the sheers and took a deep breath at the sight: a startling rush of lush golden wheat, stretching to the distant road. On the left, a stroke of iron-red soil slashed down the side of the field, marking the half-mile rutted lane from the highway to this house. And in the far distance, chomping through the wheat was a dollop of dark blue, moving steadily, shrinking toward the horizon, then turning and swelling toward me.

  “Currie’s combine,” I marveled aloud. “We’re here.”

  Another wave of nausea swooned up my throat. I dropped the curtain and backed onto the rocking chair, perching on the edge. I wasn’t very good at this—the surging of nature, the upheaval of organs and blood and digestion to prepare the womb. Unlike Barbara Ann, who reveled in pregnancy and glowed through the months, I trudged from conception onward, vomiting all the way.

  Tiny feet clomped up the stairs, followed by a rumble, smack, and wail. Swiftly, I rose and reached for the banister. “Okay, honey, I’m coming.”

  Descending the steps to the landing, I squatted where Dylan sprawled on his belly, sobbing into his blanket. Hefting him up, I settled him on the top step, sat beside him, and checked for damage. None that I could see, save for his pride. As I brushed damp curls back from his forehead, a smoky odor whiffed up the stairs and encircled us.

  “What’s going on?” Don called from the bottom of the stairs, frowning.

  “Dylan took a tumble,” I said airily, “He’s okay.”

  “How did that happen? Was he running?”

  My husband didn’t believe in accidents. If someone got hurt, it was due solely to carelessness and wanton disregard.

  “He tripped on his blanket,” I said, cheerily, as if Dylan had done something delightful.

  I didn’t like the person who used this voice. She wasn’t me. She had a high-pitched, skittery tone, defensive and off-guard, and she was trying to head off what was going to happen next.

  “Your blanket stays at the bottom of the stairs from now on,” Don commanded, as if the blanket were a dangerous weapon. “Do you understand me?”

  Dylan leaned into me, buried his nose in his blanket, and pushed his tongue forward, massaging his bottom lip. Pressing my arm around his small shoulders I said, “How about if we make a bed for your blanket—we can put a basket at the bottom of the stairs, and your blanket can take naps while you go up and down.”

  I looked at Don. This was our pattern: he swooped in, punched the dough, and slapped it on the table. I reached in, kneading, softening, shaping it into something palatable. In the years to come, he would hurl these incidents back at me, claiming that I undermined his authority, emasculated him in front of his son. Now, he simply gazed at me, levelly, hatefully, and then turned and disappeared, footsteps pounding out the door.

  I exhaled and listened. The car engine turned. He’d show me now: drive off to the shore and his art studio, just as he often stomped off to his studio back home in Massachusetts, and stay there for hours. I had not yet snuffed the cinder of resentment that flared in me every time he did this, but I no longer challenged him. When he was in one of his moods I preferred his absence.

  “Come on, sweetie, let’s put your clothes away,” I said. “Then let’s sit on the balcony and have a snack.”

  At that point in my life, I trusted my mothering instincts, one of which had been to leave my journalism career to cover the home front—running interference with playdates, Gymboree sessions, skinned knees, naps, doctor’s appointments, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I hadn’t started out thinking Don and I would work our marriage this way. I’d hoped he and I would share the home front equally—particularly since I had come with an established career and credit cards. But deep down, my husband felt diminished by childcare, unable to manage the tedium and frustration or to ignore his own father’s attitude that childcare was unseemly work for a man. This had become a splinter between us, our quarrels prickling with ever-increasing fervor. Bit by bit, partly out of a longing for calm, I had let go—agreeing to more hours of childcare, vacuuming, cooking, and less time at my writing table. I did not want my children growing up as I had, in a fraught and unhappy home, hole-punched by disapproval. I wanted harmony.

  To that end, I now set about the house, creating our summer nest: making beds, unpacking toiletries, opening windows. I clipped peonies and larkspur from the garden and set vases throughout the house. When Don returned at dusk to my oven-fried chicken, he came with a handful of wildflowers plucked from the field. I smiled, kissing him on the mouth.

  “Better?” I teased, relieved to push my own anger aside. I didn’t ask what I would have a year ago, when we were honest with one other: “Why do you resent our life? What is festering inside you?”

  A thin sliver of time ago, when art, sex, and Pad Thai were all we needed or wanted from life, Don and I would awake tangled in the sheets of his bed in his small studio. Outside, the garbage truck growled in the alley right behind our heads, and across the stretch of floor, beyond the easels and rolled canvases and spattered cobalt and ocher, through the cuts of factory windows, the city traffic pitched a high white hum. I would slide from the sheets into dance clothes and slip out for a morning class, returning to find him in a spattered painter’s apron, palette in one hand, moving toward the canvas, then back, cropping his vision with a flat hand, lunging forward again. I’d set his coffee on the paint-smeared table and sit in whatever chair was not covered with rags and random images ripped from magazines, scissored into new shapes, new ways of seeing. I wrote by hand until the light faded, not looking up until he said my name and gestured for me to come around to the front of the canvas. Standing off to the side, he waited for my reaction, for me to tell him what I saw, what spoke to me in the language of arc and line. I was not a painter, nor he a writer, but inside those moments we breathed the same air and spoke a melded language that was inherent and effortless.

  On the farm, we inched our way to these moments—granted, with an altered flavor and a toddler between us, but we settled into a
simple and easy rhythm. Rising early, I fed and dressed Dylan, then handed him to Don, who roused a good two hours after I did. The two of them, father and son, snorted and rough-housed among the covers before tromping outside to fix the lawn mower. This arrangement suited our biorhythms, mine being the early bird, Don the all-nighter. It didn’t do much for eroticism—but neither did caring for a toddler or vomiting. I trusted that one of these days, when all of this was over, I’d feel my body wake again.

  This phase of my life—being out of control, out of body, and largely without adult company—made me desperate for distraction. I missed the grittiness of being out in the city chasing stories and then racing down the radio station’s hallway just before I was to go on the air. I had given all of this up when I was eight months pregnant with Dylan, largely because I just couldn’t move that fast, not with nearly nine pounds of baby pressing on my bladder. But my desire to be a writer had persisted and no matter where I was, I searched for ways to satiate my thirst for writing and telling stories.

  The house and its history provided that for me. It seduced me with its tales, vivid and colorful, retold for miles around Rocky Point. The original owner, Jeb McAlister, had boated his family to these shores in the 1800s and designed a stately home that was romantically impractical, with a high-peaked red roof, a balcony off the bedroom, a sweeping lawn, and, inside, an elegant banister of cherry wood, a parlor, a dining room with a chandelier, and, in every room, finely crafted ceilings with ornate trim. Off the kitchen, a small staircase led up to a spare bedroom reserved for the farm hand, which now served as a mini art studio for Dylan’s drawing and clay projects.

  In the long afternoons, with Don away in his studio, I packed a snack and took Dylan’s hand and we wandered around the property, coming upon rusted and weed-infested plows, discarded tools, hunks of boat hulls half buried in the sand. They stirred the past, whispering moments of closure and abandonment. I sensed the hopes and dashed dreams that had come before us, unrecorded in census figures and deeds. Apparently, Dylan sensed these, too.

  “Mama, can I see the puppy place?” he asked one warm afternoon, two weeks into our stay. We were camped out on the balcony, munching on apple slices and animal crackers.

  “The what place?” I replied, confused. We had never owned a puppy, much less brought one up here to the island.

  “Where the puppy sleeps,” he insisted, looking up at me, mouth rimmed in crumbs.

  It dawned on me. He meant the grave that lay at the foot of the rotting elm, its marker stone flush with the ground and sinking beneath the grass. A dog’s grave. I’d forgotten about it since we were here last.

  “All right,” I said, “I think it’s under the big tree.”

  Descending the back stairs, we crossed the yard and passed by the hulking chestnut to arrive at the base of the elm. Dylan pulled me around the trunk, serious and intent on the ground.

  “It’s here!” he cried, squatting down and tearing away the thatch of grass covering the stone. Chiseled into its surface was one name: Blue.

  I knew only a small part of this story. Blue had once belonged to Audrey, the middle daughter of the McAlister family. She had fallen in love with a Catholic boy from across the cove, a forbidden love. Her Protestant parents refused to let her marry him. As a parting gift, the boy gave Audrey a puppy to keep her company and to remember him by. In the months of tears that followed she doted on the puppy, feeding it from her plate and keeping it with her inside the house, unheard of on a farm. When Audrey finally married, it was to a Protestant man, a charmer and gadabout who was known to spend plenty of evenings at the bars in Charlottetown. Audrey’s puppy never took to him.

  “He’s a nice puppy,” observed Dylan.

  “Oh?” I said, surprised and amused. “How do you know?”

  “I saw him.”

  “Aha.”

  Dylan was a vivid dreamer. I had discovered this not too long ago as I was tidying up breakfast dishes in our little converted barn house in Massachusetts. I had settled down on the rug to read him The Nose Book. Suddenly, he pointed to the ceiling and announced, “The couch is all gone, Mama.”

  “What couch do you mean, sweetie?” I had asked, puzzled.

  Lying back on the rug, miniature body dwarfed by the furniture, Dylan pointed up again and said, “The couch up there, with Grandpa in it.”

  Looking up, I stared at the ceiling and pictured a floating couch with dust balls clinging to the underside and Dylan’s grandpa, my father-in-law, peering over the side with his dour moustache. After a few minutes I stretched out next to Dylan and proceeded to explain the idea of dreams; how they were in your head, sometimes resting, other times waking up. They weren’t real.

  Now, I wondered if Dylan had dreamed another dream—triggered, as mine often were, by this hundred-year-old place.

  “Well, that’s good to hear,” I said. “I’m glad Blue was such a nice dog.”

  “He is a nice dog,” Dylan corrected me, insulted.

  I paused, realizing I was still new to this mothering thing, with its constant unknowns. How much to reveal, how much to withhold, how much to protect this small boy’s heart from disappointment and the hard reality that all beings come to an end?

  “Let’s go find him,” Dylan insisted.

  For the most part I believed in imagination, the joy and fun of it, and in those early days of motherhood, I rode it with courage. “Okay, then. Where shall we look?”

  “The beach,” he said, instantly.

  I paused and weighed this idea. “You know, Daddy’s studio is down there, on the shore. We can’t disturb him.”

  “Oh,” Dylan said, hesitating now, uncertain, a tiny wrinkle in his brow.

  This stirred some embers in me, my husband’s entitlement to quiet and focus, imperative for creative work and so out of my reach, which I couldn’t accept. I yearned for my old rituals—not only the solitude and time, but also the ability to focus for endless hours without thinking of Dylan, without the trickle of guilt that inevitably seeped into my consciousness when I was trying to work on my writing, to descend to the depths I knew were necessary. Those depths had eluded me for three years now, retreating behind some scrim, some netherworld into which I had forgotten how to cross. Instead, I had settled for small snippets of sentences scratched in various notebooks, particles of thought that floated around the house like moths, fluttering awake and then settling again. I had no idea what I was doing, why notebooks were accumulating, what if any purpose they were serving, except to remind me that I had lost the concentration and discipline it took to be a writer, or that I had never possessed it in the first place. Enough of these tiny bloated notebooks had accumulated to fill a large box, which I hauled with me up to the island, ignoring Don’s exasperated sigh as I had wedged it into the back seat of our packed car.

  “Let’s go anyway,” I said to Dylan, surprising myself. “We can go the long way around. Then Daddy won’t hear us.”

  “Okay!” said Dylan, popping up and fisting his hands in the air. Then he stopped and crinkled his brow. “What if he barks?”

  “Who?” I said, brushing grass off my knees, “Daddy?”

  “No, Mommy, Blue!” Dylan rolled his eyes.

  “Oh!” I burst out laughing. “It’s okay if Blue barks—just you and I have to be quiet.” I whispered the word “quiet” and crouched into a furtive tiptoe, waving him to follow me.

  “Okay,” he whispered back.

  I believed wholeheartedly that I was protecting Dylan. By teaching him to accommodate his father’s short-wicked temper, I was hoping to avoid it myself, to calm the household. I had been doing this all of my life, mollifying my mother and Roddy and now my husband, a habit so ingrained I kept on doing it. I hadn’t yet realized the futility.

  We took our time. This was the part of mothering I relished, slowing down, being where Dylan wanted to be, allowing him to be an explorer, loosening the rules and the schedule. That afternoon, he transformed into a sea creatu
re in the tidal zone, dropping to his hands and scuttling from one pile of exoskeletons to another. Gathering sea glass and shells, I meandered alongside him, squatting from time to time to see what wonder he found in the sand. This was as new to me as it was to Dylan. I had never explored like this as a child—on a beach with my mother beside me, digging clams. Mama had rarely, if ever, played with me. Even if she was as curious as I was about the muck of nature, she couldn’t have messed about this way, not with Roddy along. I thought of her now, with two more young children and still with Roddy, a thirty-year-old man. As such, my mother had never had a chance to be a grandmother, not to Barbara Ann’s children, or to mine, and I knew it was unlikely she ever would. I had already turned to Don’s mother for that, and in many ways I had grown closer to her than I’d ever been to my own mother.

  When Dylan and I finally came upon the studio, perched high above us on the shore cliff, we climbed the rocks silently, crouched past the studio windows, and ran down the path to the house. Dylan was happily tired and didn’t protest a bath and rest time in his room. He fell into a deep sleep halfway through a lullaby, opening a rare free hour for me at that time of the day.

  Whenever one of these windows of time came to me unexpectedly, I turned to laundry, partly because it was mindless and kept me from sinking into my writing, at least until I knew Dylan was fully asleep. Most often, he snoozed for twenty minutes and then padded around the house to find me. Far easier to stop mid-towel and swoop him into my lap than to yank myself away from a quest for the exquisite word or synonym.

  I mounted the wide staircase with an armful of towels, tiptoeing, pausing, and assessing the noise level from Dylan’s room. In truth, I just wanted to lie down. My limbs felt sluggish, as if my blood was slowing and pooling in my ankles. My breath turned shallow and, on the landing, I leaned against the wall, still holding the basket. For a moment I thought I was going to faint, my dizziness veering toward a swoon. Swallowing, I exhaled slowly, turning my head to the alcove, and froze. Something was over there, by the window—a form of some kind.