Erika Swyler - The Book of Speculation

“Little Bird,” Doyle calls. She flips him the middle finger and disappears upstairs, heading toward the whaling archive. He starts to go after her but I stop him with a hand on his elbow.

“Don’t. Let her go.” Enola can sulk effortlessly for days. She once refused to speak to me when I brought Lisa Tamsen home after a shift at the Pump House. She shouted that Lisa smelled like old fry oil. I got seven days of silent treatment before she admitted that Lisa’s sister had filled her locker with dissected grasshoppers from the biology lab. She’d glared at me as if I should have known what I’d done. I know what Doyle’s done. “What do you know about us? I mean everything.”

“Pretty much what I said.” He shrugs and searches for somewhere to sit. He props his feet on one of the lounge chairs in periodicals and they land with a squish. “My friend collected circus stories so he’d have shit to talk about. He was big on accidents. Like, I bet you didn’t know that they lynched an elephant in Tennessee, right?”

No. I did not. The wind has started clawing at the windows. Lights flicker.

“Yeah, this circus elephant snapped and killed somebody — trampled or strangled, I don’t remember — so the town decides to put it down, but they can’t figure how. They wind up using a crane to hang it. Anyway. He used to talk about train wrecks, fires, people breaking their necks on the high wire, trapeze stuff. Sometimes I think he was just waiting to see if I’d electrocute myself. I told him it doesn’t work that way.” He doesn’t elaborate on how exactly it does work. “So, we’re down somewhere around Atlanta and it’s so unbelievably hot, and we’d just spent all day putting up tents. I guess I said something about wishing we had a dunk tank, and that starts him on a jag about mermaids. He says there are these women that pop up on the circuit every once in a while, they can hold their breath for an insanely long time and swim like they’re half fish. They’ve been around forever. It’s one family and they all look the same — black hair, and so skinny you could break them. Everybody takes them on, no matter what show, since a woman like that brings in cash like crazy, because you’re watching the impossible, the actual impossible.” He looks at me. Impossible meeting impossible. “The whole time I’m listening for the catch. His stories always had catches.”

“They die.”

“Yeah,” he says. “They drown. Hardly any of them ever make it past thirty.”

“Did you ask him how he knew about the women?”

“No. Dave had this way of picking up stories. I figure most of them were bullshit. I mean, drowning mermaids?”

“But you believe it now.”

“The breath-holding? I’ve seen you swim.” He grimaces, showing a slight snaggletooth. “The rest? A couple years later I’m working for Rose’s. The first time I showed up with Enola, Thom took one look at her and I swear he nearly crapped his pants. He asked if I knew who I had with me. I told him she was the best damned tarot reader I ever saw. Thom kept asking if she swam or not. I said all I know is that she does cards. Pretty soon he tells me almost the same story Dave did.”

“You know they drown.” I won’t say we. A question floats between us. Doyle nods.

“Enola doesn’t swim. She reads cards,” he says.

She hasn’t shown him. She’s said nothing of the breath-holding lessons, the hours I spent teaching her how to float on her stomach, how to push all the air out of her then fill up her belly, how to dive and listen to the water, or how we used to pretend that our mother was there in the deep. She’s out there past the rocks, plucking mussels from the boulders, eating scallops from the bay. She feels you holding your breath. Enola’s black bathing suit made her into a slick seal pup, a little selkie girl who trusted me when I held her face into the water. The trust is gone; she’s been keeping secrets from Doyle, from me. “I’m worried about her.”

“So why’d we burn that stuff? It wasn’t about Frank, was it?”

“No.”

Enola’s footsteps pound down the stairs. Perhaps it won’t be a long sulk this time. “It’s freezing in here. I need a blanket or something.” Her arms are hugged tight across her chest, her hoodie drenched. The whaling collection is kept cold; it’s better for the books.

“There’s always a coat or two in the lost and found. It’s in the back of the kids’ section, downstairs.”

“I’ll go,” Doyle offers. He walks toward the steps, touching every outlet and computer plug as he goes.

“Does he pick up charge from that?”

“Don’t know,” Enola says. She curls up in the chair next to me. “He says it feels good.”

“Strange guy.”

“He’s okay.”

“You didn’t tell him you can hold your breath.”

“Why would I?” She stares down at her feet. Her red tennis shoes are wet all the way through. She peels them off, shivers, and tucks her feet beside her.

“Did anyone ever tell you about our family? If Doyle knows, someone must have told you. Thom Rose spotted me right away and I barely asked him anything. Did he tell you something?”

“No.” A small tic in the upper lip.

“What did he tell you?”

“He asked me if I swim, the same as he asked you. I told him Mom was in a carnival. That’s all.” She takes the cards from her pocket and begins laying them out on the chair arm. A quick horizontal line of six, then clear. Repeat. Her fingers crab walk.

“Thom would have told you.”

Quick six, clear, repeat. “I told Thom that I read cards, I don’t swim. The same as I told Doyle. I said that if he bugs me, I leave and Doyle goes with me.” A tap of the cards. Slide, shuffle, repeat. “Doyle would go, too. Nobody wants to lose him. He’s special,” she says. “I didn’t know he knew about us.” The cards slip against each other fiber against fiber, a little molecular exchange. Paper that old means the cards have bled into each other, becoming a single object, a single mind. “He should have told me.”

“Why?”

The cards stop moving. “Because nobody tells me things. He doesn’t. You don’t. You think I don’t know things, but I do.” She resumes shuffling.

“You keep secrets. From me, from Doyle.”

She shoots me a look. “Because it’d be good for him to know that I’m capable of carrying on in the footsteps of my suicidal mother. Who drowned .”

Doyle nearly killed me trying to pull me up. Yes, it might be safer if he doesn’t know. “Maybe.”

“I wonder how long she was planning to do it. What if she woke up every morning for a year knowing it was one day closer? Maybe that made things seem more precious.” She fans out the cards and then snaps them together into a neat pile.

“I don’t think it works like that,” I say.

“How would you know? Is there something you’re keeping from me?”

“No.” Silence stretches between us, filled only by quiet shuffling. She looks tired, washed out. “Are you sad?”

“I’m not like Mom,” she says, softly. “I’m careful. I read cards, I don’t swim. I don’t tempt stuff. When you come with us, I don’t want you saying anything to Thom or Doyle.” She deals a perfectly balanced row on the chair arm. The Fool, the Eight of Swords, the Queen of Swords among them, startlingly familiar. They’re faded, worn. Familiar is not even the word. I’ve seen these pictures before. This is a hand-drawn deck. Maybe it was hard to recognize because I’d seen them in brown ink, but I remember the curling shoe on the Fool, the tortured expression on the Eight of Swords.

“Found you a coat.” Doyle jogs up the stairs holding an enormous black parka that looks like it’s made from garbage bags. Enola stuffs the cards back in her pocket. He approaches and she hops up, letting him put the ugly thing around her shoulders.