The Book of Speculation

21 JULY 21ST — JULY 22ND

“Have you come up with anything on Frank McAvoy’s family?”

“Simon, is that you? Where are you? It sounds like a war zone.”

“A carnival parking lot.”

“Oh,” he says.

“Did you get a chance to look into him at all? I’ve been trying to track down another name, the card reader, Ryzhkova. I think there’s a chance that Frank might be a relation. The portraits in the book, the ones Frank has, I’m fairly certain they were hers. I did some digging on genealogy sites. Ryzhkova had a daughter, Katerina, who married one of the circus performers, Benno Koenig. I’ve hit a snag finding their children, but if you’ve started from the present and I’m working from the past, I think we’ll meet up.”

A group of boys shouts as they spill out of the carnival and into the lot. I cover my ear. Though some of the ride noise still filters through, it blocks enough sound that I can hear Churchwarry’s breath hitch.

“I’m afraid I haven’t gotten much done at all. A client took up a great deal of my time. I had to track down a title for his mother’s birthday. Green Jade for Laughter. The closest copy is in Washington State in a library that wasn’t keen to let it go.”

“We’re protective of our archives; they justify funding.”

A dog barks in the background. Churchwarry shouts, “Down, Sheila!” followed by a scuffling noise. “Yes, well, they’re certainly funded now. It was all terribly time-consuming.”

A man passes by with a waddling little boy, sticky and screaming. I duck into my car hoping for more quiet. Inside isn’t much better, but with the windows rolled up I can hear, though it’s boiling inside and the phone slips on my cheek sweat. “I’m running out of time.”

“Do you think perhaps you’re too close to things?” he asks.

“It’s my sister.”

He clears his throat. “I’ve noticed the hours and frequency you’ve called and I can’t help but wonder — I’m sorry there’s no better way to ask, but are you still employed?” When I say nothing he continues. “I mean no offense, but I’ve known slow periods myself, long hours and financial strain do funny things to one’s perspective.”

My mouth goes dry. “My perspective is that I just saw my sister go into a trance and curse two teenage girls to a lifetime of misery, barrenness, and death. Also, I think I’ve just been offered a job as a carnival attraction, so I’m perfectly fine, thanks.”

Churchwarry coughs. I recognize the sound of spluttering tea. He is of course the tea type.

“I—”

“I’m a breath-holder, a swimmer.” Saying it to him is different than saying it to Thom Rose; it’s shucking the mantle of librarian and announcing an intrinsic part of me. “So was my mother, so is my sister and all the women on my mother’s side. Ten minutes, no breathing.”

“Ten minutes?” he says.

“Ten minutes. That’s how I know something’s wrong, Churchwarry. We shouldn’t drown at all, and definitely not so many of us.”

He starts and stops a few times before asking, “Was it a bad thing that I sent you the book?”

“No.” There’s something else, though, something nagging at me. “A man I just spoke to, a carnival owner, thinks that the book being at auction means that the show went under. Some of the people in the book — Koenig and his family — there’s no record of them after 1824.”

There’s a small silence while he thinks. I wait, peeling my arms from where they’ve stuck to the vinyl seat back.

“I don’t know that I should be encouraging you,” he says, though the tone in his voice says he’s thinking more. “But the book is very damaged, and if the Koenigs were with the show…”

There’s satisfaction. He’s thinking what I am. “I’m thinking it was a flood. That could be where this all started.”

“Maybe,” he says. “If you have a year range it’s a place to begin looking. Do you really think that a flood could be the cause?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “But my sister is pretty convinced I shouldn’t have the book. I wanted to ask her about the tarot cards in it, but she ripped all the sketches of them.”

“Really? Interesting. Symbols can be powerful triggers.” He pauses. I plug my ear with a finger, straining to listen.

Churchwarry hasn’t paused at all. My phone cut out. No connection, nothing but the brief memory of a window repair I had done in April, and falling behind on the phone bill. A repaired window on a house I’d just as soon fell off a cliff, a house I have to go back to in order to call Churchwarry.

* * *

The car flies over the dip in Buck Harbor Road, staying airborne for seconds. Enola took out the exhaust system here when she first learned to drive. When I pull into the driveway Frank’s truck is still parked in it, its shadow huge. I could just ram it. I pull the emergency brake and cut the engine but don’t get out. He’s inside the house, his stark profile in the window.

I wait. A broken spring in the seat pokes my back, scratching a reminder of something. Three of Swords, a heart triple pierced. Eight of Swords, the man stabbed in the back, run straight through. I don’t remember all the cards that were in the book and my sister eliminated any ability to check, but I’m sure some of them just appeared in her reading. Everything is getting mixed up. My mother moved back and forth between Frank and my father, and Frank has things I’ve seen in pages of my family history. Enola and Doyle are passing cards, sharing fates and futures, like ink bleeding down a wet page — the ruined end of a book.

A tap on the windshield. Small, pink, oval fingernails surrounded by dotted skin. Alice.

“What happened between you and my dad?” Little wisps of her hair escape her braid, giving her the curious look of being almost on fire. “I asked you to stay away from him. This is why I didn’t want you taking his money. He’s been in there for hours and says he won’t come out until he talks to you. What did you say?” Her voice is high, tight.

I didn’t say anything, he did the talking. No, that’s a lie. I told him I’d fucked his daughter — but of all the sins spoken, that was the least. That was the one thing I did right. And now I know I won’t tell her; it would kill a piece of her.

She crosses her arms over her stomach. “You didn’t tell him, did you? You didn’t tell him I slept with you.” I glance back across the street. Leah is peeking out from a bent slat in a window shade. Our eyes meet and the blind snaps shut. Alice takes my silence as assent. “You did? Jesus. Why? That wasn’t for you to say.” The mix of anger and worry is striking on her. “Go talk to him,” she says, softer now. “I can fix it later, but just get him out of the house. He’s got high blood pressure. Being this upset isn’t good for him.”

She knows his blood pressure, his cholesterol, each arthritic joint. Things I never knew about my father, even after he was gone.

“I’m not taking money from your dad. I told him.”

“What?”

“I don’t want it. You’re right; he’s too wrapped up in my family. The money would make it worse and I don’t want that. I’m letting the house go.” I didn’t know until I said it, but it’s true. “Please don’t be mad at me anymore.”

“I don’t want to be mad, but you keep doing things.” She steps back from the car enough so that I can open the door. When I get out she asks, “Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know. I could go with Enola for a while. Her boss seems all right. I put in for the curator job in Savannah and they’re calling my references. Liz can talk anyone into anything, so there’s a chance.”

“Oh,” she says, and I wish it was more. She looks down at my ballooned ankle. “Foot any better?”

“Better is a range.”

She laughs and I’ve never heard her more bitter. “Can you please get him out of there before he gets hurt?” She leans against the side of the car, khaki summer shorts riding up her thighs.

“Was he a good father?”

“Excuse me?” Her eyebrows pull together and the freckles between them kiss.

I repeat.

“Yes, he’s a good father,” she says. “Stubborn, but good.”

“When you skinned your knee, did he put a Band-Aid on it?” I bandaged Enola’s legs, pulled out splinters, not Dad. I’ve got scars on my shins, my knees, my hands, that Dad never touched or cleaned.

“Sure.” She shifts her weight to one hip in that cockeyed stance that belongs only to women. “Can’t you just get him? He won’t come out and it’s scaring the hell out of my mother. Whatever is going on with you two, it’s not her fault, or mine.”

“He was at graduation, right?”

“Yes,” she says. She looks like she might cry, which makes me wonder if I know her at all. “Yes, he could be shitty and stubborn, and maybe a little obsessed, but he helped me sell Girl Scout cookies. Took me to the circus. He was fine. You know, you were there.”

I was alongside her, watching, wanting to be taken with her. The McAvoys were my phantom limb.

Alice glances back to the house. “I don’t know what he did that you’re so pissed off about, but it doesn’t matter; he’s not talking to me and it’s frightening. Get him out of your house. Please don’t be mean to me right now, I can’t take that.” She’s bright pink, blondish eyebrows standing out against her skin. Upturned nose. Small lips. Square jaw. An exact cross of Frank and Leah, and I’m making her cry.

I touch her hand. She doesn’t pull away.

“I’m sorry. I can’t promise that he won’t try to fix the house, but I swear that’s not because of me.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

“I know.” She squeezes my hand, once, quickly, then lets go. It’s enough.

I have to go in anyway. Frank is in my house with my books, like he’s sitting in my veins. For Alice I’ll get him, but only for her.

She follows me, but I stop her at the door. “You shouldn’t come in.”

“Don’t say anything awful to him,” she says. A tiny burst of envy runs through me — I want that defensiveness. She would wake me up if I had a nightmare; she’s that sort of person. She wouldn’t care about my breakfast face. She would learn to love my sister because I do. For that, I’ll talk to Frank.

“Honestly, it’s probably going to be the other way around, plus it’s dangerous inside.”

“What did he do?” she asks, quietly.

Telling her might make me better in her eyes. Or maybe it would break her. “He doesn’t deserve you.”

She looks across the street, to the window where her mother watches. “Maybe. But I decide who deserves me.”

The front door is stuck and I have to kick it open, rolling all my weight onto the bad ankle. Alice grabs my arm and holds me steady. Her skin is warm against mine and I can almost feel the paper cuts from library books, a chipped nail, but then she is gone. Back to the McAvoy house. Back to Leah.

Frank is at my desk, where the book lies open on makeshift props.

“You’re back. Good. I thought—” He shakes his head. “I don’t know what I thought. But there’s something you should see.” He hops up from my chair.

I close the book. “Go home, Frank. Alice is worried.”

He frowns. “Let’s not talk about Alice.”

“Why are you here?”

“I need to show you something.” He pushes past me toward the door. Two steps down the porch and he’s heading for the bluff. Alice and Leah watch anxiously from the McAvoys’ porch. Dragging an ankle that feels like an anchor, I try to keep up. By the time I catch up, Frank is at the cliff’s edge, where the grass breaks away into a tear of falling land. “Look.” He nods toward the shore.

“What the hell?”

“Exactly,” he says. “I meant to let you cool off, let us both cool off. We said some things we shouldn’t have.” He digs the toe of one boat shoe into the ground. “I was taking the Sunfish out for a sail, but I got to the cliff and saw them. Damndest thing. Then I remembered.”

Not hundreds, thousands of smooth brown horseshoe crabs are on the shore. This isn’t what Enola said, it’s not like when we were kids; this is massive. They stretch across the Sound like cobblestones. They don’t do this, not during the day, and never so many, piling on each other in strata, like oysters. Something else is different. “The buoys.”

“Damndest thing,” he repeats. The swimming area has drifted out, back and to the east, toward the power plant.

“They’re pulling them out to sea.” I start for the steps but Frank grabs my collar.

“Don’t go rushing off. While I was waiting for you I looked through some of your books.” He sees my reaction and grimaces. “You slept with my daughter. I’m pretty sure we’re beyond personal boundaries.”

“Touché.” I would tear his house from shingles to foundation to find a single hair of my mother’s, to take her back.

“I saw that list of names, the dates, some of what you’ve written. I couldn’t make sense of all of it, but I figured something out. You’re worried about Enola. You think she’s like your mother. You think she’s going to die.”

“I don’t know.” The things he told me this morning showed me that I knew far less than I thought. “But I’m worried.”

Frank draws in a breath and lets it out slowly. “She’s different from Paulina, I can tell you — sweeter in some ways, but meaner, too. I don’t know, I saw those names and then I saw this. The horseshoe crabs came like this a couple of days before Paulina died. Thousands of them. After she was gone a red tide came through and killed everything — crabs, fish, snails — all of it; the whole Sound looked like rust. I haven’t seen horseshoe crabs like that again until now.”

So this is why he collects them, why he dries their shells and hangs them from his porch, and why, perhaps accidentally, he taught his daughter to love them. “Why are you telling me this?”

“You’re looking for patterns, right? I could see from what you wrote. I don’t know if that’s a pattern, but it’s strange enough that I can’t forget it, and seeing this many crabs again made me sick.” We stare down at the writhing mass.

“About Alice…” I say, because I feel I should.

“She makes her own decisions,” he mutters.

“She’s worried about you. Go home, Frank.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, okay.” He repeats the word until he’s worn a rut into it, then walks back to his house and the women waiting for him. I should tell him that I haven’t said anything to Alice, that I won’t, but I still want him to suffer. I look back to the water.

The beach is packed not just with crabs, but people from the other houses on the cliff. There’s Eleni Trakos, I recognize her by her steel-gray bun and leathery skin, tanned to her body by decades of topless sunbathing. There are her grandkids, Takis and the other one. Next to her is Gerry Lutz from up the street, Vic and the cul-de-sac people, Sharon, the Pinettis. They cluster like it’s a crime scene, touching, whispering, talking.

Eleni and the grandkids have their toes right up to the edge. One of the kids picks a crab up by the tail and waves it around; the body arches at its hinged joints, exposed, blindly searching for footing, and flinging back and forth with each movement of its tail. I look at Eleni, then back up the beach to Gerry, Vic and Maggie Simms, Terry, Sharon and the other cul-de-sac people. It’s rare to see them all together. Weddings, maybe. I think the last wedding was Wyatt’s, Gerry’s son, and that was three or four years ago. And funerals, yes, everyone shows up for funerals. I can recall them all wearing black — suits, dresses with matching jackets, shiny funeral shoes. Eleni with just rings, no necklace.

At Mom’s service, Dad had been flanked by Frank and Gerry. Frank stood at my father’s side, mourning her too. Leah stayed with Enola and me. She put me in a too-big suit from the Presbyterian Church. Enola wore a black hand-me-down dress from Alice.

John Stedbeck paces by the boulder where Enola skinned her legs. Nervous and lanky, he shouts into a cell phone, bending and straightening, holding his arm out to search for reception. I borrowed his suit for Dad’s service. My father’s gray suit had been too wide at the shoulders and too short in the legs. He wore the black in the casket.

Faye and Sharon snap photos, Faye crouching as far as her knees allow. They brought us fruit pies, both times. Ted Melnick brought us a basket of oranges and handed it to me while apologizing. Gerry and his wife gave us lasagna, which Enola ate all of as soon as the house was empty. Eleni gave us baklava. “For the sweet in the sorrow,” she’d said. Though food poured from the doors and windows, though each of these people hugged us and begged us to eat, eat, eat, we tasted nothing.

The clicking and thumping of crab tails hangs in the air; a roiling wave, they clamber at the shore. The wind is full of crabs and the beach is filled with a funeral party.

* * *

Back in the house I try Churchwarry, but there’s no answer. Next to my keyboard is Legends and Poems of the Baltic, the other book I must return. Why did Mom fill my head with stories of kings under the sea and women who danced men into streams? I log on to my computer to find a short email from Anne Landry at Sanders-Beecher Archive. They’re still reviewing applicants, but would like to schedule a call at my convenience. There are questions about my willingness to move since they lack the capital to fund relocation. I tell her I’ll call in the afternoon on the twenty-fifth. There’s also a message from Blue Point. While they thank me for my interest, the previously listed position in reference has been eliminated due to budget restructuring.

In the middle of my inbox, hidden among the spam, is a message from Raina at Shoreham. She’s found Greta Koenig — rather, Greta Ryzhkova. My hunch was right, only she didn’t bear her mother’s name for long. It seems that her mother remarried, and Greta took her stepfather’s name. A Victor Mullins of New Orleans. In 1826. The Mullins name pings back a glut of hits. But why the remarriage? Katerina Ryzhkova was widowed. I flip through the book, running my fingers along the warped pages. Toward the middle, before the switch in handwriting, there is a delicate drawing of a boat — it looks like a rudimentary prototype of the kind of steamers that once crawled up and down rivers throughout the country.

I look up to see the light still on at the McAvoys’, and Frank and Leah’s silhouettes on their living room couch. This is how it’s always been. I’d thought it had been Leah watching us, but it was me on the other side of the glass, wanting in.

Then I begin the hunt. A hunt for a flood between 1824 and 1826, the kind that might swallow a troupe of traveling performers, perhaps a floating circus. The kind that might have killed enough people to imbue any objects left behind with a spirit of loss deep enough to cause a curse. I know in my heart this is poor research. Wild chases go against the fundamentals of good research. But the book found its way to me, which works against all logic as well.

Hours pass before I discover it. In 1825, the Mississippi River floods, inundating New Orleans. Katerina Ryzhkova remarried in New Orleans. It fits geographically and with the timeline.

I catch sight of a small sketch on the page opposite the little steamer boat. I’d seen it before but it hadn’t seemed important, just another absentminded doodle of a man prone to think through sketching. At the corner of a page, just above a quickly jotted note about oppressive heat and fog, is a delicate brown illustration of a horseshoe crab.

I shut the book and leave the house as quickly as my ankle allows. I need to get into the water, to clear my head. My foot and the stairs make for slow going. The bottom two steps have washed out, but someone installed a pool ladder on the bulkhead, so I’m able to tumble down. On the sand, crabs scramble around my feet and over each other. The tide has come up since the afternoon, hiding the thousands more horseshoes that lurk beneath. They seem to part, making way as I shuffle into the water.

Three deep breaths, in, out, in, out, in, out. One last deep sharp breath down, spreading the ribs wide, stretching each muscle and filling it with air, and then I am in the black relief of night swimming. Below is life, tails switching against shells, above is water, then sky — in the in-between there is only me. I swim farther into the dark.

I open my mouth for just a moment, tasting the salt.

There is a cycle at work. My mother knew her mother drowned. My grandmother must have known the same. They must have feared, like every member of the Wallenda family who takes to the wire knowing the specter of death is a breath of wind away, until the wire becomes a curse. A combination of thought and tragedy makes it so. Binding Charms and Defixione, that bulky text Churchwarry sent, puts the source of curses as the written word, intent manifested through language. Below crab tails smack against shells, conjuring the image of Peabody’s drawing. The boat, too, followed so shortly by the water-damaged pages, as though the sketch itself called a flood. My stomach rolls with a cold undercurrent.

Curse tablets bore the names of their targets, sometimes little more. To name a thing is to set it apart — imbuing it with power, or steering it toward destruction. Bess Visser. Amos. Evangeline. Curse tablets were hidden, buried where they wouldn’t be discovered until long after the charm had done its damage. A discovered tablet could be smashed, breaking the charm, just as burning letters can exorcise old lovers. The book hid itself, through flood, finding homes with people interested in books and old things, people who wouldn’t dare destroy such an interesting piece of history. Until it found its way to me.

It’s ready to be undone.

I let my breath out and sink down to the sand bed, dangling my feet until they touch the smooth top of a carapace. It shoots out from under me, slick, and unknowably old. For the first time in days I feel like smiling, and almost gasp in the salt. By the time I emerge from the water, shivering, dawn has crept up.

I know what to do.