The Book of Speculation

9 JULY 15TH

The sound of shuffling paper wakes me. Enola is up, at my desk, and thumbing through my notebook, her hair sleep-flattened on one side. The front door is cracked and the wind off the beach is sharp with salt. I yawn. Without looking she points to the floor, where a steaming cup sits. We both know better than to talk before coffee.

It’s terrible coffee, burned, but not having to make it myself makes it delicious. She tips the chair back and drinks her own cup.

“Thanks.”

“I looked at your notebook,” she says.

“I noticed. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go through my things.”

“Those names, the women — they’re relatives?”

“Best I can tell. You know circus people. It’s hard to figure out who anybody really is.” Names have a way of changing as people disappear into shows and new anonymous lives, drifting in and out with the wind.

“They’ve all drowned.”

Something in her voice makes me say, “My sources are a little spotty.”

She gnaws a little on her lip. “You think they’re suicides, don’t you?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Alice thinks so.” It would be hard to rationalize such a string of deaths any other way, but something about the list doesn’t feel rational. “Some might have been accidents.”

“I can tell when you’re lying, you know. Your left hand twitches.” Enola puts a foot up on the desk. Her clothing is rumpled, slept-in, and her skirt hangs on her like a sheet. She starts to chew on her thumb, then slaps her hand, as if in punishment. “This started with the book, didn’t it?”

“It’s a puzzle. I like puzzles.” Does my hand twitch? Seeing Enola acting like Mom — there are nine days. To what? Now Enola is very much alive, vital. I’m missing something. Could it be tied to age? Mom was only thirty-two when she died. Her mother was younger, I think. Celine Duvel — hell. I’ll have to check again.

“Okay then, keep lying.” Enola stretches, popping every bone in her spine. “I want to go swimming. Get your bathing suit — unless you’re scared I’m gonna sink, or maybe you think you are.” She smirks, as if she can tell my stomach just clenched.

We take the steps down. Horseshoe crabs dot the edge of the water, shining stones with devils’ tails.

“Oh, it’s blue! No jellyfish,” she says, putting her foot in the water. “Nice. I just hate the damned horseshoe crabs.” She’s looking for a clear path to deeper water, but there are a lot of crabs.

“They’re harmless. Won’t even pinch you.”

“They just look like they’re up to something.” Then she’s out in the water, running forward, splashing and diving. I dash in after her. We gasp, grinning at the cold and then she dips her head under, a tuft of hair bobbing above the waves. Though the salt burns, I keep my eyes open. Enola’s are closed and her face is bunched like a drawstring. I start counting, out of habit, maybe curiosity. How long can she hold? How long can I? One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Enola paddles small circles, diving deeper. I follow. Eight Mississippi.

Simon.

Part of her is here, a whisper of our mother in the water — half wish, half fear. Of course she’d be here now that Enola’s home. I grab my sister’s hand and it’s cold, slick like a fish. I pull her toward me. Her eyes open. I’m heavy enough to hold us both down at the bottom; otherwise Enola might float away like driftwood. She sees me counting five-second increments on my fingers and shakes her head. I squeeze her arm. Forty Mississippi.

Simon.

Enola squirms, legs jerking hard, pulling me sideways. Forceful, quick, we shoot to the surface.

“Jesus, Simon!” she splutters. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve done that? Fuck drowning, you’re gonna kill me.”

Murder. There’s always the question of murder, though that wasn’t a possibility with Mom. No chance.

“You’re not even winded.” I thump the water from my ears. “You could always hold longer than me.”

“Well, it’s been a while.” She looks a little gray.

We throw our clothes on over wet bathing suits. Enola says it’s good to have salt drying on her skin. “Feels like summer,” she says. We walk toward West Beach, near the jetties. I watch the bumps of her spine, too thin; she’s always been skinny, but never painfully so. When we run out of beach we climb the bulkheads.

“I thought I heard something when we were under. Did you hear anything?” I ask.

“How the hell can you hear anything with water in your ears?”

“Never mind.”

Sand spills through the wood where a section of bulkhead has given way, and broken pilings lean into the Sound. Without discussion we start climbing the cliff, our feet burrowing into sand and dirt.

She’s breathing hard halfway up. “Dad would kill us for this,” she pants.

“Probably.”

He caught us once. We’d been running the cliff and were making our way up for another pass when he appeared at the edge. He grabbed us with hands so strong that days later his fingerprints ghosted my arm, reminding me I had a father. He dragged us back to the house, me by my collar and Enola by her pants. Her feet never touched the ground. I hated him a little.

At the top of the bluff we look out. A shell of a house tilts over the cliff’s edge, the back wall torn off. The remnants drifted away in the last hurricane.

Enola says, “That’s the Murphys’, right?” It is the Murphys’ and she could tell if she really looked and saw their refrigerator resting against the buckled siding and Mrs. Murphy’s dining table overturned, its legs long gone.

“The last of the porch went over two years ago.” Somewhere across the Sound, Connecticut kids make bonfires out of the porch where we sat with Jimmy Murphy, drinking lemonade.

“Then you’ve got, what, two years? Three?”

“Depends.” It’s not unheard of for a shore property to lose ten feet a year, depending on storms and the upkeep of the bluff. It’s been worse since the hurricane, and the Murphys’ place going over didn’t do mine any favors. Once their bulkhead went, water cut behind mine, eating away at both sides of the last barrier between me and the Sound. Between winter storms, nor’easters, a hurricane, who knows?

“Do you have money to fix it?”

“Not right now.” I’ll need a loan. Without a job, getting one will be nearly impossible, and the job hunt is glacially slow. I could ask Frank for money. My chances of success there might be better; money toward saving my house is money toward saving his, and this was my father’s house, and that’s important to Frank. But for Alice. It’s one thing to take money from Frank; taking money from Alice’s father is different. I should ask her, but best to try the Napawset Historical Society first; they could make it a cause, landmark it. I look over to see Enola swaying softly, matching the waves.

“You should come with me.” She sounds strangely urgent.

“Why?”

“What’s left here?” she says.

“The house. I can’t just leave it.” At times it feels like our parents are still in it, in the walls, and someone needs to see them through to its end. I’m as rootless now as I’ll ever be, but here I know what roads to take when the water’s up, where everyone is based on the tide, who’s a summer person, who lives here. Here my hard feet make sense. And Enola knows to come back here.

“Just come.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do and I wouldn’t know anybody.”

“You’d figure it out and you’d know me,” she says.

“That hasn’t always worked out so well.”

She makes a face, then sighs. “You’d be okay. I’d help you.” Her hand disappears into the skirt pocket and I can hear a soft shuffling.

“I saw you up last night,” I say. Her hands stop moving. “What’s going on with the cards?”

“They’re just being weird.”

When I press her about it, she pounces on me and rubs my hair with her knuckles, hard, burning my scalp. We both start laughing. She tickles my sides and I squirm to get free. An Indian burn ends everything when I twist her forearm until she howls and smacks me upside the head, stopping things as quickly as they started. We fall on the grass. For a second we’re right again.

“You had Alice over last night,” she says, gasping.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“What’s with you and her?”

“I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t, not really, but I want to protect this old new thing between us.

“I like her. She’s too good for you.” She breaks off a piece of beach grass, puts it between her teeth and chews. “You’d like Rose’s,” she says. “It’s the carnival that came around when we were kids. It’s a family business.”

“How’d you wind up with them?”

“A friend I met reading cards in Atlantic City. He’d worked with Rose’s before and introduced me. I read Thom Rose’s cards, we talked and wound up clicking. It’s good travel and a steady gig through the summers. The money’s not so bad.”

“Did you mention Mom?”

“I’m not an idiot. What, I’m not going to say that my mother worked the circuit? That’s probably why he hired me. He’d take you on if you wanted.”

“And what would I do?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

My understanding of carnivals is esoteric. Here is the reality, my knock-kneed sister with the wild eyes, asking me to run away. It would scratch the itch that’s always wondered what Mom was like before Dad. “Is it like it used to be?”

“Pretty much,” she says. “A little bigger, more rides now, more games. The sideshow’s changed, more acts, fewer bouncers.” She sees my confusion. “Jars, the stuff in jars. Never mind, you don’t want to know.”

Things preserved in formaldehyde, animals and otherwise. I remember standing inside a too-hot-to-breathe tent, fingers glued together by sweat, staring at a milky white pickled shark with two heads, one at each end. “You like it?”

“Sure.”

“You didn’t sound great when you called. And you look tired.”

“It’s not great all the time,” she says. “But what is? Eating crap, getting sick, shitting my brains out.” She stretches an arm over her head. Her shoulder makes a loud popping sound. “I got really sick last year outside of Philly. I go into a bookstore because they clean those bathrooms. I’m in there sick like I’m dying — guts rolling around, staring at the floor trying not to pass out and I see these yellow shoes sticking out in the stall next to me. The lady figures out I can see her feet so she pulls them back, like I’m not supposed to know she’s there. Like, if she picks up her feet she can forget she’s hearing my shit hit the water. You don’t deal with stuff like that. You’ve got a house. You’ve always got your own toilet.” She scratches the back of her neck. The bird tattoo on her wrist flutters. “But most of the time it’s good. Thom would love you.”

“Why do you want me to go so badly?”

“Maybe I miss you,” she says.

“I missed you too.” I did. I always do. Could I go? Pile my stuff in the car, drive down a highway, following a line of trailers, campers, spend days and nights in a chlorinated dunk tank, and come back in six months, dirty, gaunt, and lonely. No, not now. We’re just shy of the 24th and Enola’s here. It feels too coincidental. “Why’d you come home now?”

“Rose’s was coming by anyway. I asked Thom if I could take time to see you. I thought maybe we could talk.” We watch waves grind sand until mosquitoes start in at us. She smacks one. “I do love you some.” Some. It’s what she’s always said, but the way she says it is better than if she’d said she loves me wholly. Those years we were alone, maybe I didn’t do so badly. We pick our way through brush and poison ivy to the path leading to the house. Her hands slip back into her skirt pocket and I hear the slide of paper against paper.

A beaten-up yellow car sits in our driveway — not hers. A lean form stands by it, arm propped on the hood. The figure could not be more striking. Serpentine and crawling with unknown potential.

Enola breathes deep like a diver, shrieks, and takes off running. “Doyle!” Unrestrained joy. Then she’s in this person’s arms, looping her legs around his body. Her shoulders block his face. All I can see are two skinny — tattooed — arms around her waist.

He twirls around, back to me, and she is up against his car. I jog over. Without looking, Enola says, “This is my brother, Simon.”

“Hey. Heard a lot about you. Don’t worry, it’s all good.” A voice made of casual and surf. His hands stay on my sister’s hips. He spares no glance my way, allowing me to stare at a line of tattoos that creep up the side of his neck, over his shaved head, ending in dark green tentacles that wind along his jaw.

“Simon, this is Doyle.”

I say I’m delighted to meet him. I’m not sure what else I say, because I can’t stop staring. Nobody gets a tattoo like this unless they’re actively courting gawkers. The ink slithers as he talks, tentacles writhing over skin. I feel sick. They pull apart.

“Long drive,” he says and stretches, sleeves sliding up to reveal more ink, more tentacles. Does it cover his entire body?

“I didn’t know you were coming,” she says.

He nuzzles her neck, unmindful of my presence, and mumbles something about needing to “siphon the python” and heads into the house. Enola trails behind him, almost skipping. I catch up and put a hand on her shoulder, stopping her short.

“Who is he?”

“Told you. Doyle.”

“And what is a Doyle?”

“A Doyle is a guy who drove a really long way because I told him I was going to see my brother. Be nice,” she says and follows him. Over her shoulder she adds, “We fuck.” There are few things with more visceral power than the sudden awareness that your sister has sex. The image of tentacled arms is too much. It is a full five minutes before I can go inside.

* * *

Doyle is sprawled across my sofa, my bed. I pull my chair into the middle of the room and sit in front of him. Yes, there are tentacles crawling up his arms and face. I can see the fine lines of each elliptical sucker. Enola shuffles pots around in the kitchen. For the moment Doyle and I are alone. There’s a shiftiness to his pointed features. If I turned on the lights he’d skitter behind the couch.

“Wild place you got, man. Wild,” he says. “Your house is pretty much hanging off the cliff.”

“Erosion. It’s a problem around here,” I say. We fuck, she said. This thing copulates with my sister.

“Yeah, yeah. That’s right,” he laughs. A lazy half wheeze. “I’m shit at remembering stuff like that.” He makes a twitching gesture. His hand is also covered with tattoos. Squid? Octopi? “Slept through earth science.”

“So you and my sister.”

“Yeah. She’s a down chick, you know? Real cool.”

I stare.

Enola returns with a box of cookies I’d forgotten about. She flops on the couch, draping herself over Doyle. Neither minds that they’re in my bed. She feeds him a stale cookie and asks if we’re getting along. Of course we are. Just beautifully.

“How did the two of you meet?”

“In Atlantic City, on the Boardwalk,” she says. So this is the one.

“Yeah. She had her cards out and I thought, man, that’s a sweet little bird.”

He might not see the murder in me but Enola does. She puts her arm around his shoulders and the pale underside of her wrist attaches itself to his tattoo’s suction cups. I ask what he does.

“I’m the Electric Boy.” The lightbulbs in the back of her car begin to make sense.

“What exactly is the Electric Boy?” I lean back in my chair, almost tipping it. I know what’s coming.

Enola cuts him off before he can answer. “You know, the Human Lightbulb?”

I nod. It’s a static electricity act, pedestrian really, the sort of thing that’s popped up since the discovery of electric current. Sometimes it’s a deferral of current trick with a hidden metal plate; that’s how they work electric chair acts. Nothing special.

“Doyle can light a hundred-watt bulb with his mouth and three in each hand,” she says.

That is different. “Impressive.”

“He does contact juggling with the bulbs while they’re lit. It’s crazy beautiful.”

“Uh-huh.” A tentacle-covered man juggling lightbulbs sounds gorgeous.

“I’ll show you. Little Bird, where do you keep the bulbs?” He starts to get up but Enola shakes her head.

“Don’t bother,” she says. Doyle looks at her. “You can show him later, okay? You didn’t bring beer by any chance, did you? Simon’s got fuck all and I could kill for a beer.”

“Sure thing,” he says. He oozes from the room.

Enola leans forward, hands on her knees, and I spot the tattoo on her wrist again. A little bird. Jesus. “Quit being a bastard and pretend you like him. For me, okay?”

“I’m not being a bastard, I’m being your brother.”

“Well, that’s new,” she snaps. It’s true. I’ve been a parent, not a brother.

“I’m just concerned, okay? I know nothing about him.” Or her, for that matter.

“For once, can you just be a little nice?”

“I’ll try.”

Doyle lopes back in, six-pack in hand. “Want one?”

“Sure, thanks.” His tattooed finger pops open a can, and all I can think about is having needles so close to the nail bed. He catches me staring, so I ask, “That hurt?”

“Like a sonofabitch.” He smiles and clicks his teeth together.

“Good beer,” I say. It tastes like warm piss.

We drink in relative silence, which is me being nice. After another drink they begin chattering to each other. Names are tossed around — friends, cities, towns. She giggles, a different person from the one I saw last night. I glance over at the book. I’m missing something.

Neither minds when I flip through a few pages. Later, Enola drags him out to the bluffs to watch the sun brush the water. I am left alone with my books.

At some point music drifts in and I look out the window to see the moon and the dome light from her car. The driveway is bathed in blue and they’re dancing. She is frenzied motion, elbows flinging, hips shimmying, dancing and detonating. Sweat covers her, eating moonlight as she sidles against him. Doyle flows over her as if held together by a thin layer of ink. The car shakes with bass vibration. A slower song comes on and they mesh their skin, fingers entwined. They’ve ceased to know I’m here. Like they never knew.

Alice answers the phone, sleepy, soft-sounding. “Hey. What’s up?”

“Do you want to go out? Are you up for a drink? I need a drink.”

She yawns and I hear the pop of her jaw on the receiver. “I’ve got work tomorrow.” There’s a small silence between us before she says a quick, “Sorry. That came out wrong. What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just a little stir-crazy, I guess. Enola’s boyfriend showed up. Too many people in a small house.” Never mind that four of us once rattled around here.

“And here I was hoping you’d say you miss me.”

I do. I miss her walking up the library steps. I miss her writing the program schedule on a white board and the curl of her lowercase g. I miss the Alice I don’t see anymore. “Sorry. I’m just off. It’s weird seeing my sister’s mating dance.”

“I’ve never felt so lucky to be an only child.” She yawns again and I know I should let her go. “Tomorrow, okay?” she says. “I promise.”

“Sure, sure.” Then she’s gone. I could have told her about the money, how much I need, but I’m not there yet. Close, but not yet. I turn my computer on and dash off an email to Liz Reed, asking if the situation at North Isle’s changed at all, that part time would be fine if that’s all there is. My inbox is empty but for a lone response to an application. The interlibrary coordinator position at Commack has been filled internally. I scroll through the listserv again, looking for changes, new positions. I think of things to call myself — Information Specialist, Information Technician, Information Resource Manager — I can be anything a job wants me to be. Eventually words blur and there’s sand behind my eyelids.

I wake not with the sun but with a light in the window that pulses like a heartbeat. Doyle is in the driveway, a moving shadow except for his hands, which are lit by two forty-watt lightbulbs. He spins the bulbs, balancing them, passing them over the backs of his hands in smooth waves. The rolling incandescence illuminates small portions of the tattoo, a diver shining a lamp into darkness. Tentacles curl and ripple. A flash of light, movement, then gone. The lights roll across his chest, his face briefly visible in their glow. White teeth. Then black. The light moves, Doyle extends, dances. The undulating light passes across my sister, leaning against the car. Watching.

He’s performing. For her.

I watch until it feels like spying, then close the window shade. Light leaks through. I go back to the book, to my notebook and the names. It’s time to do a little math. Verona Bonn was born in 1935, making her twenty-seven when she drowned. Her mother, Celine Duvel, died in 1937, when Verona was two — the same age as Enola when Mom died. Celine’s obituary doesn’t list a date of birth. A short amount of digging on the computer turns up a marriage license between a Celine Trammel and Jack Duvel. Her date of birth is February 13th, 1912; that’s twenty-five years old when she died. Young, but not the same age as my mother or grandmother. No, there’s something different.

The telephone rings. It’s Churchwarry.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” he says. We both know he hasn’t, but I make polite assurances.

“No, it’s fine. What’s the matter?”

“Nights and an old dog. Sheila can’t make it through a night without a walk anymore and Marie has declared that my duty. These days once I’m up, I’m up.”

I understand the feeling.

“I found a book that I think you might find useful. I was wondering what might be the best way to get it to you? It’s rather heavy.”

“Overnight it.”