THE DOCTOR WHO put tape on Frank’s wrist had known Natalie since school days.
“One thing you don’t want to do is to give up,” said the man, who’d been born in Hong Kong. “Certainly not on Natalie Donovan.”
“I won’t. Although it’s hard. I saw it happen.”
She must be dead, Frank thought. He glanced down at the little boy. Had the child spoken?
“I treated a man this morning who had been sitting on one of the lampposts outside the theater since it happened. The police went right past him and assumed he was safe, until this morning. And he is safe. He has some infection, but eventually his legs and feet will heal. I don’t know what to say,” the doctor told Frank. “Certainly, I would not give up on Natalie Donovan.”
Finally, Frank said, “I’ll try not to.”
The child sat at Frank’s feet, quietly winding surgical tape around his right shoe. His shoes were small Converse high-tops, a bright orange through the thick brown mud stains.
“He’s fine,” the doctor said. “Isn’t he? A bit damp and dirty. You were married before Natalie? He’s a lovely kid.”
Frank said, “He’s not . . .” and then added, suddenly, “He is my nephew. One of Natalie’s brother’s boys.” Why did he lie? Frank had no idea. In his time, he’d rescued twenty kids from circumstances fully as dire. He liked children, at least better than he liked adults. They seemed comic, as a group, but he never had a particular feeling for one child. And yet now he couldn’t take his eyes off the little boy from the flood—despite his own distress, Frank was fascinated by everything the child did. This was undoubtedly a subconscious reaction to having, in a sense, just lost his own son.
His own son. The only child he would ever have. Now the child he would never have. The floor canted.
“Would you like some tea?” the doctor said. “You look shattered.”
“Sure,” said Frank, for the first time fully grasping the Anglo-Celtic avidity for the solace of any hot beverage. Where most doctors would keep samples of enticing drugs, this one had an electric kettle, mugs, sugars, and a wooden box of teas. He handed Frank a steaming mug.
“Natalie was sort of a legend,” the man said. “She made doctoring like space exploration. We would hear of her exploits in emergency. Fearless. She was fearless.”
Frank set down his cup.
Had she been fearless when she woke in dark water, without Frank beside her, clutching her belly, trying to break the surface? Had it been so fast . . . ? Frank picked up and drank the tea in a single gulp, his eyes smarting at the pain. He could feel little flags of flesh unfurl from the roof of his mouth. The doctor said, “You’ll want to let it cool . . . well.”
The doctor pulled a packet of gum from a drawer and handed it to the little boy, who accepted it with an amazing and trustful grin.
“You’ll look after Uncle, won’t you?” the doctor said.
The boy stood and slid the gum packet into the rucksack, which was very small and also pale orange, with a soccer ball decaled on it in silver. Carefully lifting the doctor’s outsized silver pen and a prescription pad from his metal desk, the boy drew a line, along which he carefully drew an intersecting arrow facing up and to the right, then one up and to the left, finally holding out the finished product, which was no more than an inch long, as if this explained everything. What did it mean? Was it some sort of writing?
Had that little woman, the mother, been Japanese?
She had not been Japanese.
And this was not Japanese, or anything else.
When the doctor nodded, the child delicately lifted his two small hands and swung them in a small arc in front of his chest, back, forth, back, describing in the air the same angle as the lines he drew. Frank thought, He’s trying to behave. Behave? What? Had the child spoken? Frank said, “He’s shy. Now, especially.”
Frank led the little boy down the stairs and out the door. They walked a quarter of a mile down the street to a big makeshift auditorium, a square block of canvas tent with the Red Cross flag on a high pole, visible even to the ships at sea. The line was halfway down the street. Frank took out a couple of the Vicodin given him by the doctor and bit down. He had a prescription for more of it, and just where would he find the nearest operating pharmacy? Some wily entrepreneur was selling lemonade and stuffed pita. Frank bought two of each and he and the boy stood in the line, munching on some sort of fried vegetable stuff with yogurt as a sauce. The child had a good appetite. Gradually, the line of the hopeful, dirty, deranged, sleepless, and damned shortened. In a moment, Frank would be able to present the child to the caretakers, where he belonged. Finally, they came to the front of the line, and a sweating volunteer fixed on them—exhausted but desperately good-natured. And Frank looked down at the child and thought crazy shit he hadn’t thought since he was writing poems during night school lectures with the goal of toppling girls into his bed. This child was his pulse . . . he was Frank’s. No one else could have him. Nothing could change this. Frank took out his mobile, although it hadn’t rung. “Of course!” he said loudly. “Yes. Great. Be right there.” He nodded to the volunteer. “Found his dad! All’s well. Thanks anyhow.”
• • •
Later, after what seemed many hours, but could not have been, for it was still early afternoon, Frank ended up at the entrance to the place he’d lived and worked until he met Natalie. He glanced up at the scrollwork arch that spelled out Tura Farms.
He stopped, reluctant to drive into what he supposed had been the only other home he’d ever known, except for his own farm in Wisconsin. He didn’t count the series of anonymous apartments he’d barely inhabited around Chicago, places where he’d never so much as made a meal. He’d never settled down, never come close to it, despite how much he loved Chicago and his job. He moved every year. In one of his (very brief, very few) therapy sessions after his accident, the police psychiatrist had basically kept her shoe planted on Frank’s chest until he admitted that he kept everything temporary on purpose. He had been waiting. It once seemed possible that he might fall enough in love with a woman that she would install him like an appliance in her own life. In anticipation of that unlikely event (made more unlikely by dating women to whom he felt about as attached as he might have felt to a very good TV show), Frank didn’t want to become overly fond of a certain neighborhood.
“Or a china pattern?” the psychiatrist asked him.
“Things like that, sure. Fabric or leather for your sofa. Whatever it might be. I just wanted to stay flexible and keep my options open.”
“I would say you accomplished that,” she told him.
Frank hadn’t expected to become attached to the farm’s owners, Tura and Cedric Bellingham, although he probably should have advised Tura of that before she began setting a place for him each night at their table—just as she did for their adored nephew, Miles. At those dinners, listening to Tura’s discourse on her upcoming exams for her volunteer paramedic certification, her views on cheese as a binge food, and her gratitude toward Helen Mirren for making it safe for middle-aged women to be considered babes (“Middle-aged if you’re hoping to live to be a hundred and twenty-five,” Cedric commented quietly), and working beside Cedric, watching the man’s vast and unassuming skill with animals, Frank tumbled unawares into the kind of affection he had felt for no one except his own mother and his father, dead since Frank was seventeen.
So he sat. When he pressed the button, the gates would swing open and he would have to find out if anyone in Cedric and Tura’s family was lost; he would have to divulge Natalie’s death, and everything else about this astounding, harrowing day. He sat thinking of the first day he’d come to Tura Farms, hesitating at this same gate, just seven months after he’d spent thirty days in the hospital, two weeks in a rehab facility, and a solid summer in the rack at the house where he’d grown up.
All those months, his leg was suspended, long enough for ivy to have twined around the pulley, and he took handfuls of pills and watched everything from Masterpiece Theatre to Swedish porn, his laptop strapped to an aluminum stand and propped on his stomach. Finally, before starting in on a series of documentaries assembled by his mother, a high school librarian, despair at his state of weakness caught him. His thoughts turned mortal, and snaked out toward the future, which he realized, quite suddenly, was his to have or have not as he chose. If he took too many of these pills, not even his mother would know it was by choice. Pills were a messy choice, though, Frank thought, and he would have to wait until he was able-bodied enough to get to his gun, and by then, given that it was only his leg and not his mind that was maimed, he might no longer want to do anything so dramatic. Still, his life would always be neatly sliced into two eras, one before and after a single blunt moment.
On a rainy, cold spring night, when Frank was two days past twenty and a block from his house, he spotted an older guy struggling to change a tire. Frank would have stopped even if he didn’t have time, but he had time. He was planning a leisurely hot shower and a fast nap before a late dinner with a woman he was seeing, and had two hours of grace. The old man’s car was in a bad spot, invisible until a motorist pulled out of a long downhill curve. Parking his own car safely in front of the guy’s, Frank showed him his badge and they set to work. No more than three minutes later, a seventeen-year-old with a brand-new license cut the curve too fast and crushed Frank’s right leg with such an impact that surgeons had to extract a quarter that had been in Frank’s pocket from the muscle of his thigh. It shouldn’t have meant that he was finished as police, but it had. He was unable even to sit for long enough to hold a desk job, unable to stand for the work of a shift, so he got full disability. He also got all sorts of combat dollars and payouts from insurance policies he’d forgotten that he ever had, and a fat check from the family of the kid who’d been driving the car that hit him. Frank kept returning the check, and the family kept sending it back to him, desperate with gratitude because Frank refused to ruin a good kid’s life with some foolish charge of aggravated vehicular assault. Finally, Frank kept the money.
Then, there was nothing to do but heal and face a future washed all to shades of dun.
He had loved being police: he had wanted to be police all his life. All little boys do, and Frank, simply put, never stopped. His mother cherished the idea of Frank as a professor of literature; his father publicly endorsed that wish, but hoped that Frank would grow into the love of breeding and training horses for the highest levels of competition on their own home farm, the place that Frank’s grandfather had christened Tenacity. Frank liked horses well enough, and admired his family’s work, but on his own would probably never even have trained a beagle to fetch. Certain that he didn’t want the latter, Frank compromised and tried the former. As it turned out, he loved college, and the immersion in books, but after a semester, he dropped out to enter the police academy for no reason other than he wanted to do both, and one couldn’t wait. For his mother, his work then became a source of alternating distress and chagrin, as Hope was certain that Frank would end up grievously hurt—as he had. Even for him, the job was not without its drawbacks, chief among them the bloodlust that some of his fellow officers openly displayed. When he finally trained for and joined the thirty other mounted officers in Chicago, two of his worlds folded together, and he was so content that he never even wanted to take his vacation days.
He loved caring for his partner, the big dark gray Morgan, a retired carriage racer named Tarmac. He loved it even when he worked almost every summer holiday, well into the night, his partner’s massive flanks and nerveless bulk sidling up to hysterical concert crowds. He loved being able to go where squad cars couldn’t. He loved cutting through lots to run a punk down and seeing the big man cower and throw his weapon away at the sight of Tarmac’s flaring nostrils. He hated being the one to spot nine-year-old Suzie Shepard’s lime-green sweatshirt where her killer had thrown her, in a culvert not far off the bridle path in the forest preserve. He didn’t even mind the silly stuff—like the way that mounted police had their pictures taken in parades more often than Miss America. The extraordinary pleasure of unexpected usefulness never went away.
Then, it all went away.
After the accident, ranks of brother and sister cops came bringing pizza they ended up eating themselves, doughnuts they ended up eating themselves, and candy they ended up eating themselves, as well as true-crime books, funny tee shirts, fishing poles, a huge aloe vera plant, and cases of beer. His sergeant, a man the size of an offensive tackle, taught Frank to knit. His first partner on patrol, Elena, organized a Sunday-night poker game at the hospital. Just before he moved to rehab, the detective Frank had been dating on and off for a couple of years came to visit as well, although Frank hadn’t reached out to her. She visited, twice, and the very air in the room seemed to shrink with the awkwardness between them. Frank opened the card she brought to the second visit, and out tumbled a note, asking if their time was up. Frank set the small vellum note on his stainless-steel tray, and studied the worms of puckered flesh that banded his leg and considered how this detective, a smart, sturdy southside Irish girl, who now starred every night in Frank’s drug-stoked erotic dreams. He finally admitted that what he longed for was not this woman, but a woman, an extraordinary and good woman who would put up with a diffident guy with a bum leg, a fondness for nineteenth-century British novels, and an aversion to sports and amusements of any kind except the archaic diversions of equestrian show jumping, a sport for little girls who read Pony Club books. Trying to force this woman into that space, given that neither of them to this point had the candle to take the next step, would be like trimming pieces of a puzzle to make them fit.
When the friends thinned out, Frank spent the enforced solitude and inactivity in deciding what to do with at least some of the money. Over his mother’s vigorous protests, he hired a contractor to remodel the kitchen and library of the farmhouse at Tenacity, adding a full first-floor bath and a brand-new twenty-year roof. When his sister told him that the old machine barn was so tumbledown as to be calamitous, Frank installed a new one, and a big arena, although he wasn’t sure he’d ever live there again and his mother needed a new arena like she needed another nostril. For good measure, he retooled the inside of the big barn, adding four new stalls and a commodious and well-equipped bunkhouse with a double bath for the teachers and grooms his mother didn’t employ. When he was finished with all that, there was still a shitboat of money left over, and then Frank had no idea what to do with what promised to be a fairly long life, and with what was certainly too much money for a cop whose career had been distinguished by little glory and no corruption.
It was in watching one of the slew of neglected documentaries that he happened upon Cedric Bellingham.
Not in personality, but in early achievement, Cedric Bellingham reminded Frank of Jack Mercy, his own grandfather, whose second horse had taken Olympic silver. Cedric’s Gentle Griffin had taken Olympic silver in the eighties, and years afterward, the great-grandson of that horse, called The Quiet Man, a gold. Cedric had trained both of them, ten and thirty years before, respectively. Cedric rode Gentle Griffin himself, until the riding part of his life was snipped off by a leg injury not very different from Frank’s own. Unloading some feed, Cedric had fallen from a truck bed, just the wrong way.
They traded a few emails.
Next came a phone call.
Frank didn’t want to be a trainer like Cedric, but thought that it might be fun to be around one—horses being all he knew except police work. Completing college would have been attractive if, once he was on his feet, Frank could have even remotely considered the prospect of a sedentary way of life. Not only Frank’s background, but his willingness to work for almost nothing except bed and board was the big attraction for Cedric, who was cheap except where it came to horses. It didn’t hurt that Frank was the heir to men who’d trained ranked horses for riders from all over the world. Frank wanted to assure himself that the Cedric he encountered would be at least a vestige of the man in the documentary, not some bitchy old martinet soured by his past glories and present difficulties. But vocally at least, Cedric was as vigorous as a man half his age, more vigorous than the current version of Frank Mercy, and without a single bleat of self-pity. As unfamiliar and odd as Queensland seemed in every astonishing detail, from its deserts to its rainforests to its bizarre fauna, it couldn’t have been different enough from the Midwestern United States to satisfy Frank, who wished he could relocate to the moon.
“What do you think of Australia?” he asked Hope one night as his mother worked on mending the spines of some books. Frank had finished the excruciating series of contortions that were supposed to increase his mobility and flexibility—and probably had, since he could now move like a spry eighty-year-old, a step up from the four-wheeled walker just retired.
“I always wanted to live in England,” Hope said. “Like the Brontës.”
“I might move to Australia,” Frank said. “Not anything like the Brontës. And not forever. Just . . . for a while.”
“Why?”
“It seems like a place a guy could get lost.”
Hope’s face crumpled. She was so certain that Frank’s disability had pushed him to the ledge of life that she’d succeeded in making him wonder if he actually was still itching to put a bullet in the back of his neck. With no thought at all for how foppishly Edwardian it would have looked to an outsider, Frank got up and awkwardly knelt next to Hope’s chair. “I’m not going to end up wearing dreadlocks and ranting in the outback, Mom. And I’m not going to leave you forever.” Looking away from him, Hope lightly touched Frank’s hair.
He said goodbye to someone he loved, who counted on him. Now he would say goodbye again. It was bright clear to Frank that he would not stay, equally clear that Cedric and Tura, who needed him, too, would feel the loss keenly.
Frank passed through the gates and under the arch, considering as he did that unless they were extraordinarily lucky, Cedric and Tura would mourn tonight, just as Frank would. Their daughter, Kate, had been singing last night, somewhere down the same beach from the Murry Sand Castle Inn. Frank hoped to Christ that Kate Bellingham had finished at midnight and hurried to join her parents far up in the town of Barry, where Tura’s old mother lived.
Instead of opening the door to their house, he knocked.
Kate Bellingham opened the door. She grabbed Frank around the neck. “Where were you? Where is Natalie?” She stood back when she saw Frank’s face. “Have you heard anything, Frank? Is Natalie lost? Surely there’s a chance?”
In a low, measured voice meant to convey a calm that he certainly did not feel, Frank said, “I don’t think so. All her brothers and their wives and kids were there, too, on the beach at the Murry Sand Castle. I’m glad to see you, Kate.”
“I left the place I had the singing job, with my boyfriend. It was eleven. He’s religious. We went to church up the road here and picked Granny up then, but we ended up coming back here. The news isn’t all good for our family, Frank.”
Tura Bellingham came down the back staircase, carrying a pile of folded blankets, which she let fall to the floor in a heap when she saw Frank. “Thank God you’re here. You’re not even wet. I’m just bringing these blankets down to the church. Kate will do it now. They’re full, sleeping bags every inch of the school and the community hall, as everywhere. Frank, tell us. How did you make it? Where is Natalie? Is she out there in the car?”
“Natalie was asleep when the wave hit,” Frank said. “Natalie’s whole family, her brothers and their kids and her father, they were asleep. I wasn’t there because I got up to call my mother and have a beer with Natalie’s brother. Today, I just thought I would come out and check on the horses. And you, of course.”
Natalie’s mother had died a few years before, struck down by flu.
That was all of them.
Tura shook her head, casting her eyes down away from Frank. “Natalie,” she said. “I don’t know what this means, this force of the world turned on innocents. Nothing, I expect.”
“You’re probably right. Nothing.”
“Ceddie!” Tura called. “It’s Frank come! He’s alive.”
Frank heard the scrape of a chair shoved across the planks above and Cedric came pounding slowly down.
“Frank, there you are!” he said, the Yorkshire vowels still broth in his mouth, although Cedric hadn’t seen the moors for longer than Frank had been alive. “You’re here and so is our Kate.”
Frank said nothing, but nodded and gave Cedric his hand to shake. In Cedric’s bluff good humor, there was the hollow clap of an exception. Someone was missing. Cedric’s nephew, Miles, everything but a son to the old man, was not there. Frank decided not to mention Miles until someone else did.
There were bound to be rescuers lost, too, and Frank would need to go back out.
“There’s a child there,” Tura said then, uncertainly.
Now Frank would have to explain what he couldn’t explain even to himself.
“Yes,” Frank told her, gently leading the little boy into the room from the Bellinghams’ enclosed mudroom, still surprised by the confident strength of the white, tiny hand that wound around his thick thumb. For the first time, Frank noticed that his hair was blond, a strange almost milky color, his lashes nearly invisible against his deeply tanned cheeks.
“Who is that?” Tura asked.
“We pulled him out of a van this morning. His . . .” Frank stopped. He had been about to tell Tura how the child’s mother and older brother had been swept to their deaths before the firefighters’ horrified eyes. But the kid hadn’t yet spoken. Shock, or he didn’t understand English, or was hearing impaired. At the mammoth tent, Frank had found some dry clothes only a size or so too big and helped the boy into them, horrified by the child’s tiny, trusting willingness, thanking Christ he wasn’t some kind of soft-fingered, candy-bearing monster pervert. They would be abroad on Christmas Day, the child stealers, looking for bargains, little peaches to keep or kill or sell. That was why the boy was still with Frank, or at least this was what Frank conjectured. He’d intended to leave him with the first decent minder he met, and yet he had not left him with the first one, the volunteer at the gym, who was just that kind—everything that could go right if you were a native of Brisbane, jolly, smart, comforting, primed. “I don’t know why I brought him, Tura. I just did. It seemed right. He needs someone to look out for him while I go back out for a while to try to help out,” Frank said. Tura knew he was a volunteer first responder, who, one weekend a month, helped out with small urgencies and prepared for just this, the impossible full-scale emergency. “I have to see to Natalie and her family, too.”
“Of course, he can be here,” Tura said. Cedric’s phone rang.
“My sister,” the old man said, apologetically. “Our Miles is still missing.” Miles had been expected at Kuranda, where the family presumed he’d gone with his girlfriend. No one had called Cedric’s sister. No one at all. Frank heard Cedric murmuring about phone service interrupted and early days yet. Then he turned back to Frank. “Could be he’ll turn up. You did, didn’t you?”
“What if our Miles is gone for good?” Tura said, her eyes filling.
The child had let go of Frank’s hand and approached Tura, who sat down and, without seeming to think, took him onto her lap. “Get out some biscuits and cheese, Kate, before you go, and put on a kettle so we can give Frank his tea.”
“No need,” Frank said. “I had some. I drank it too hot.” He remembered then that Natalie could not eat, or nourish their baby son, curled inside her. He wanted to be alone, and to be free to scream and kneel and keen. He had to go back to the rescue crew. How had he forgotten? Even for an instant? His very thoughts were slowing to a drip.
“You’ll want a cup,” said Tura. “What’s happened to your wrist?”
“Nothing,” Frank said, unwinding the bandage. “A bruise.” The wrist was fat and blue. “Maybe some ice for this.” The boy had begun to eat the wafers and cheese, taking small bites. Frank sat down and waited for his tea, in the strangely quiet kitchen inside a reconstructed universe.