“Oh, hell. Those were Paulina’s,” Frank mutters.
Churchwarry looks for cards in the waves. He thinks of all Simon told him and what little he remembers of the book. Of course. It was the tarot cards. There had been something more about the sketches, something outside the pleasure of old paper and fading ink. It makes sense, he thinks, that the family of mermaids would destroy a curse with water, far more sense than burning things. He chuckles. More poetic. He looks at the man next to him, then thinks of the young man he never met. Alive. Churchwarry knows it matters little how much of it he believes, only that Simon believed. And he’d like to as well. For all the wideness of the water, the town he is in feels closed, isolated. Perhaps the book opened a door; books have a way of causing ripples. He watches a card dip and vanish under a whitecap and sees in the water’s spray a hope so bright it blisters.
At the shoreline a dark shape skitters near the sand. Churchwarry can make out the gentle movement of a sharp tail. He leans closer. “Horseshoe crab,” he says softly. He turns to Frank, smiling at the descendant of the book’s original author. “Magnificent creatures.” He thinks on how they grow and shed shells, each new skin a soft and glistening beginning. Millennia of crawling, traveling, and clearing their tracks with swishing tails, patiently correcting. He smiles.
“Mr. McAvoy, I’d like to see that letter now. Then I think we should have a drink if you are so inclined. I suspect that we could become friends.”
* * *
The car is the only noise for a hundred miles, even when passing through the city, as if the world has gone to sleep around them. The toll collectors make no remarks at the dented yellow trailer pulled by a car barely held together by rust.
“It looks like hell, but the engine is still good,” Enola says.
Alice doesn’t know whether to believe her, or whether to care. Being broken down in Delaware would still be preferable to being broken down in Napawset. She feels bad for leaving her mother, but knows that staying would have been worse. Impossible. Her mother needed her to go. It’s not good for children to see a parent grovel, her mother told her on the porch. Go for a while. When you call and both your father and I pick up the phone, come visit. Alice knows her mother, how she can shame someone with a look. Her father will grovel. She almost feels sorry for him, but then it is easier to decide not to think about him at all.
When they drove past the reedy salt marshes and the clam diggers crouching in the loam and muck, she knew it was the last time she’d see them, and that she’d miss them. Now Alice stares down the highway, knowing that what she’ll miss is the rhythm to her days — dawns spent fishing on the pier, looking at the playwright’s house and wondering about the torrid affairs that took place inside it. She glances in the mirror at the two men sleeping in the backseat. Simon’s shaggy black hair is pressed against the cracked vinyl. He sleeps as if making up for years of being awake. No, not beautiful, but hers. Doyle snores softly. Now and then a tiny snap of a blue spark dances off the end of a fingertip when it touches the window.
From the passenger’s seat Enola turns to Alice and whispers, “It’s like licking a penny.” Alice does not reply and so Enola continues. “People wonder what kissing him is like. He’s like a fresh penny.”
Alice stays quiet. Thirty or forty miles of New Jersey later Enola says, “Thank you.” Then much more softly, “I couldn’t get to him. I just couldn’t.”
Alice takes her hand from the wheel. She finds Enola’s thin fingers and squeezes them, because she’s not good at explaining, other than to say that there are things you do for someone you’ve known your whole life, and that pulling them from the water is the very least.
They stop in Maryland. There is a shop with special paper, ragged edged, old feeling, the sort that likes a fountain pen but loves a quill. He wants leather, too, but there’s no money for it. They pay in cash — Enola’s money, crumpled twenties that Doyle had squirreled in one of his duffels, Alice’s own, and the hundred dollars that Frank forced on her when she said they were leaving. The clerk’s eyes bulge at the sum. Doyle has a difficult time lifting the reams.
At night, in scratchy motel beds on the way to Savannah, Simon stays awake to write. When his head starts to nod, Alice bends over him, kissing his arms on the bruises. Dark smudges from where she hung on to him as she dragged him from the Sound. Marks of living, she’d call them, and is grateful for the years of lifting volumes, of fishing, of being practical, for things that made her grip strong. Later, when he curls around her, when her spine curves to his stomach, he whispers, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She hears, “Thank you.”
He is building the book again. As they approach the bearded trees that mark the true Deep South, she wonders if this is just another obsession. She asks him why it matters when they’re starting over, starting new. He answers, “I am this manuscript.” The words hang heavy between them until she catches him drawing a rudimentary sketch of a black-haired child, and knows it is Enola. He’s building his history, the menagerie at its start and everywhere after, all his notes on the forgotten women, the Ryzhkovas, the Peabodys, and her.
“What will you do if you can’t find enough information?”
“Churchwarry will help,” he answers. “Sometimes we’ll make it up. The dirty secret about history is how much of it is conjecture.” He shrugs. “And we’ll fill in spaces. They were good at inventing themselves.” He’s referring to the women, the dead that have preoccupied him, but he means himself, too. He says we now. He didn’t used to.
She knows that her name will find its way into his speculations. So will his. Because there are things you do for people you’ve known your whole life. You let them save you, you put them in your books, and you let each other begin again, clean.
About the Author
ERIKA SWYLER is a graduate of New York University. Her short fiction has appeared in WomenArts Quarterly Journal, Litro, Anderbo.com, and elsewhere. Her writing is featured in the anthology Colonial Comics, and her work as a playwright has received note from the Jane Chambers Award. Born and raised on Long Island’s North Shore, Erika learned to swim before she could walk, and happily spent all her money at traveling carnivals. She blogs and has a baking Tumblr (ieatbutter.tumblr.com) with a following of sixty thousand. Erika recently moved from Brooklyn back to her hometown, which inspired the setting of the book. The Book of Speculation is her debut novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
