He flinched back. “Jesus.”
You become a creature I can’t understand, my mother sometimes said to me.
He pulled away and looked at me then smiled and came for me again. But I had enough space now to put out my arms and shove him off of me. The weird thing was, Hugh’s body fell so willingly. He fell backward over the lip of the tub and his head hit the tiled wall with a perfect clack, like the castanets in “It’s a Small World.” It worried me that he didn’t open his eyes. I picked up the diapers and unlocked the door.
I knew I should tell Thomas or Mary or call 911 from the phone in the little room, but I walked outside toward the pool. I rehearsed not what I was going to say to Mrs. Pike or Kay but what I would write to Gina from jail, how I would explain it to her, the way he went down so easily, like a slinky you just have to nudge at the top of a staircase. I needed to remember to bring my notebook with me to jail.
“Well, the diapers must have been somewhere in California,” Mrs. Pike said.
Kay had either dozed off or was pretending to, with Elsie in a deep sleep on her chest.
I was saying things in my head but nothing was coming out.
“Look, Cara, look! Look at me!” Stevie called from the pool. “I’m doing this all by my lone self!” He swam the whole width of the pool slowly, his arms and legs beneath him moving every which way, his head between the inflated wings on his arms, his mouth in a concentrated frown.
“Good job.”
“What’s wrong with your voice?”
“Nothing.”
“I’ll swim all the way to there”—he pointed to the deep end—“if you come with me. You can be my own pet wolf shark.”
“A wolf shark? That sounds scary.”
“They don’t have to be.”
It would be odd now if I said suddenly that I’d bitten Hugh and also he might be unconscious.
“Look!” Stevie lay on his back then flipped over onto his stomach, put his whole head underwater, then flipped over again onto his back. A week ago he was too scared to be the only one in the pool. Now he was doing tricks.
“Mrs. Pike,” I began, my voice still strange. But behind her something caught my eye. Across the lawn and up at the very top of the mansion, nestled between the peaks of the two turrets, was a small widow’s walk. Hugh was leaning against its railing, looking out to sea. He was still in his bathing suit, a square white bandage on his bare shoulder.
“Did you have something to say, Cara?”
“No. Just— Would you mind passing me the fins?”
She had to bend down to reach them.
“A wolf shark needs her fins,” I said and slid them on.
At the edge of the pool I let out a howl and jumped. I could hear Stevie cheer me on just before I went under. I wasn’t sure if wolf sharks actually existed. At four and a half, Stevie knew far more about the natural world than I did. But I hoped they existed. I hoped there was such a thing.
Five Tuesdays in Winter
Mitchell’s daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them or lead them to very clearly marked sections—if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books?— while they complained that nothing was arranged by title. He would have liked to have a bouncer at the door, a man with a rippled neck who would turn people away or quietly remove them when they revealed too much ignorance.
His daughter loved the customers. She sat behind the counter at the cash drawer every Saturday, writing up receipts in an illegible imitation of his own microscopic hand and chatting like an innkeeper. She was too tall and too sophisticated for a Maine preteen. She made him uneasy. She had recently learned the word “reticent” and used it on him constantly.
“Isn’t he the most reticent person you’ve ever met?” she asked Kate, his only other employee.
“Maybe not the very most,” Kate said, not looking up from her pricing.
“But he’s—”
“That’s enough, Paula,” he said, then, feeling an unexpected pulse of blood to his cheeks, fled to the stockroom in back.
Mitchell had good ears, and just before he shut the door behind him, he heard Kate’s gentle reprimand: “I think as a rule people don’t like being spoken of in the third person.”
He’d hired Kate three months ago. She’d recently moved to Portland from San Francisco for a man named Lincoln. They lived in a small apartment in Bayside. On their answering machine, Lincoln sounded high-strung and full of anticipation, as if he only ever expected good news after the beep. Despite her strong résumé, Kate had unexpected gaps in her knowledge of books. She had never read The Leopard or The Go-Between. She had never even heard of Machado de Assis. Once he overheard a customer ask how many lines were in a sestina, and she didn’t know. She was a reader （she borrowed and returned as many as ten books a week） but not a speller. On the dupe sheet, she wrote J. Austin and F. Dostoyevski. At the end of the day, when she stapled the credit card receipts to the ticker tape totals, she didn’t always align the edges evenly. She let the mechanical pencils run out of lead. She had thin, sometimes dry lips that she picked at when she was thinking deeply and that he would have liked to kiss.