“My land? So you were trespassing.” He started down the stairs, the cat bounding past him and out the door. “Maybe I should call the police and report you. Have you arrested.”
Diana gave his smirk a disapproving look, then noted his bare chest with its wisps of hair, the ways his bones protruded, his nose arcing out from his face like a challenge. Aug peered into the container she’d put on the table. Two toads in a corner stared at twigs and moss.
“I used to like these things when I was a kid,” Aug said, tapping the side. “You could pick them up by the dozens in the alleys. Come on boys, let’s see a little action in there. Hop to it.”
“Don’t do that,” Diana said. “You’ll scare them.”
“Alice, come look at these things.” Aug waved me over, but I stayed in the kitchen doorway. He was playing with Diana, his disgust in that single finger which continued to bang on the plastic.
“They’re on the watch list, you know,” she said. “If you build that house you’re planning, you’ll destroy their habitat. I just wanted to make sure you understand that.”
Aug began to take off the top of the cage. Diana said she’d prefer he didn’t do that. “Keeping them in this Tupperware thing doesn’t seem so environmentally friendly. Shouldn’t we let them go?” he asked, all false benevolence. “Let them be free-range toads again?”
He picked up the container and went to the door. It looked like he was going to fling the toads in their plastic UFO to their death, and I thought, he’s capable of anything now, even acts of cruelty. But then he kneeled and let the toads out with the gentlest push. They were like tourists, unsure which way to go, but he coaxed and assured them it was okay to move forward.
Diana squeezed my arm too hard and I yanked away. “Can’t you do something?” she pleaded. “He’s your husband.”
“Go away,” I whispered. “Please, just go away. Leave us alone.”
The three of us spotted the cat lurking under the day lilies, waiting for gifts—birds, mice—to kill and bring to Aug, her lover. Diana’s toads would be next. She handed me Aug’s lost glasses and left.
“I don’t think,” Aug said as he went back upstairs, “that woman knows I’m on the watch list, too.” He looked down at me with a blank expression. “I woke up the other night and you weren’t here. Where were you, Alice?”
“Here. I’m always here,” I said. “It was a dream.”
“Maybe I dreamed that when I called for you, you didn’t answer, and when I came downstairs and looked for you, you were gone, the car was gone.”
“You were asleep all night.”
“Possible, but I don’t think so.” His accusatory tone was corrupted by a sudden bout of coughing. He waved me away, but said, “Don’t leave me, Alice. I get scared when you’re not here. I think I’m already dead then. Do you know what that feels like? Please don’t leave me.”
“I won’t leave you,” I said. “I promise.”
The night I’d come back from the Tillman house and slipped into bed next to Aug, he hadn’t moved. I wondered what he’d detected on me even in his sleep—the beer, the bug spray, the scratches on my legs from the blackberry thorns. When Aug was back upstairs, I called Molly and left another message. Come see your father, I said. She didn’t call back.
Aug’s cat killed one of Diana’s toads, and its battered body lay by the door, untouched for two weeks, a kind of desiccating trophy I stepped over. One evening, I went again to the Tillman house. I was sure Ray had gone back to Chicago by then, but he stormed out of the house when I pulled up.
“Go away. This is private property,” he yelled even before I’d gotten out of the car. He was furious and looked ready to grab something menacing. “You’re trespassing.”
I hesitated. Did he know it was me? I leaned out the window, but it took him too long to consider who I was. “Okay, going,” I yelled back.
“Jesus. Alice? Is that you?” he said. “Sorry, I don’t have my glasses on, and these assholes keep showing up. I’m going crazy.”
He asked me inside and showed me a jar of beach plum jelly one of the Shoreline Citizens had dropped off that morning. Yesterday, there’d been a van full of German tourists stopping to see the site before heading into Boston for the weekend. Someone else had brought him steamers that he’d made for dinner and which I’d clearly interrupted. Bribes, he called the booty, offering me a seat and a clam. Ray seemed different, more comfortable in the house, as though he’d finally realized he had something others wanted.
“The trouble is that these people still don’t get that it doesn’t matter what I think,” he said. “I have no power, no say over what happens. It’s your land, not mine.”
“Not mine, either,” I said. “My husband’s.” The steamer was sweet and messy and left the scent of the ocean on my upper lip.
“Isn’t it that the same thing though? Yours and his?” he asked. When I gave a pained shrug, Ray consoled me by dabbing a drop of butter off my chin.
“I want to explain,” I said.
“Please, don’t. No need. Eat up. There’s fudge next.”
Ray struck me as a man who was alone a lot, though not by choice. I knew almost nothing about him, but you cannot put a man and a woman in a room—not with a bowl of steamers, not with the bay looking on and slapping the sand—and not have it occur to the woman, at least, that sex might be possible. The calculation is primal, essential. Attraction has almost nothing to do with it; sometimes it’s about survival and possibility. Ray dangled a steamer above his mouth.
“Why do you hate this place?” I asked.
“You know, I’m supposed to be back in Chicago by now. I have work.” He stroked his upper lip in evasion and looked down at an evening shadow playing on the table. “My father and Tillman used to sit on the deck and drink gin and send me down to the beach to swim. I was scared to swim alone. They were lovers and they wanted their time together. I didn’t figure it out until I was about fourteen,” he said, shaking his head at how dense he’d been. It was a sad story.
“And all those paintings of women,” I said. “Maybe not making love to them was what it took for Tillman to get them right.”
“That’s a scary thought. I’d like to get a woman right one of these days.” Ray smirked.
“You must have been surprised when your father left you the house.”
“Yes, surprised. It would have been nice to know why, when we were about as distant as a father and son can be, but it’s hard to make a corpse explain itself.” He sat back in his chair and wiped his hands on his shorts. “If you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.” We laughed. “I came by because I thought I’d take you to a pond for a swim, if you’re interested. It’s the only time I can go without being hassled—and it’s beautiful at this hour.”
We left the house, the steamers and the shells still scattered across the table, and when we got to the pond, the last car was just pulling out. It slowed to get a look at us gathering our towels from the trunk. The water was brassy, the surface broken by dipping dragonflies. Ray was a slow and graceless swimmer, breathing too hard and following me too far out. I turned around, worried about him getting back to shore.
When the water was at his waist, and he’d caught his breath, he said, “They tell me your husband’s not doing so well. They say he’s going to die before anything’s decided.”
The trees ringing the pond were still. A current wound around my ankles. Diana must have reported back about Aug’s