Serpentine, Volume 3, Number 2, Spring 1999

Tide

by Mary Hazzard

        "You didn't need to do it," Ambrose Peale says to his sixteen-year-old son. They are in his wife's little gray Honda, driving toward the island that isn't always an island, toward what he thinks of now as the crime scene. He wonders if his station wagon will be cordoned off with yellow tape--if it's even still there.

        "Do what?" Justin, blank-faced, reaches out and turns on the radio, full blast. When a Haydn symphony blares through the car, he reaches again to find something more raucous. "It was an accident, Dad," he shouts over the noise. "Didn't you ever hear of an accident?"

       What Ambrose has always loved, more than his work or his family or any other person, is the sea--the expanse of lighted sky above Cape Cod Bay, the image of himself alone in a boat, with water lapping against the sides. Not that he sails or even rows very often, but he has to know it's possible. Two years ago, he took a one-term job as artist-in-residence in Albuquerque. As he drove the thousands of miles in his big dented maroon Plymouth, leaving the Atlantic further and further behind, his discomfort steadily grew. He hadn't known it before, but he needed to be near a body of water that he couldn't see across. Lake Erie was a reprieve, and then Lake Michigan, but as soon as Ambrose got to the first of those straight-edged states with almost no blue patches on the map, he panicked. By the time he reached Amarillo he was desperate, and Albuquerque was worse--tan and bleak in a waterless lunar landscape.

       He stuck it out for five days, his mouth parched and his hands damp, his sleep impaired by evil dreams. There was nothing wrong with the university; the students were courteous and willing, and probably he could have taught them something. But he felt like a sea creature, washed up and forsaken by an irresponsible tide. What was he doing here, anyway? Earning money, but that wasn't enough to keep him. He manufactured an excuse, loaded his easel and canvases back into the station wagon, and set off for home--detouring south to hug the Gulf of Mexico and skim the top of Florida, then tracing every bump and indentation along the east coast until he came to rest on the Cape.

       Hallie wasn't pleased; the salary in New Mexico was generous, and the family needed a larger income than she could earn by taking in bed-and-breakfast guests. But she wasn't surprised either.

       Their son was puzzled, though. Before leaving, Ambrose had given solemn instructions, in the studio with the door closed. "You're the man of the family now," he had told Justin. "I'm counting on you to look after your mother and your little sisters." And then, only weeks afterwards, there was Ambrose back again in his same intermittent way, with Justin demoted to his old position of powerless teenager.

       Justin remembers when he was little, when his father stayed home. Ambrose was high-spirited then--teasing the children and Hallie, drawing pictures that made them laugh. He could whip off a recognizable sketch of anybody or anything in less than a minute. Justin is almost sure he remembers this; now that his father is away so much, it's hard to believe.

       The market for Ambrose's work has dwindled, Hallie often explains with a perky smile. The magazine that used to buy his illustrations and cover paintings has acquired a new editor, who is looking for circulation-boosting naturalism. Ambrose understands what the editor wants, but he can't provide it; his muggers and prostitutes and drug lords turn cute as soon as they hit the page. Not just cute, but whimsical. Sprightly. The magazine bought only five drawings last year, and no covers. To make up for the loss of income, he has to teach classes in Boston several days a week.

       Justin knows this is true, but he suspects his mother of leaving something out. There is a growing silence between his parents that can have nothing to do with the art market. Also, last summer he took several phone messages for Ambrose which some instinct kept him from mentioning to Hallie. Things ought to be the way they used to be--his father painting in his studio and his mother baking cranberry muffins in the kitchen. Justin wishes Ambrose would stay on the Cape where he belongs.

       Hallie wishes the same thing, but she has more information. Theoretically, when her husband spends the night in Boston, he sleeps on the folding cot he keeps in his office at the college. However, neither of them pretends that this is true. Hallie's enlightenment began at a dinner with friends several years ago, when Ambrose raised his fourth glass of Beaujolais to toast romance (or more likely, Romance)--which he described as a precious gift which must be seized at every opportunity. Seeing the remark as macho social boasting, Hallie laughed along with everyone else.

       But some days afterwards, when they were driving home from an opening in Provincetown, he said something more alarming. "Fidelity," he said as if this were part of a continuing dialogue, and then he glanced over at her and laughed. "What a mean-spirited concept!"

       "Excuse me?" What did he mean by fidelity (or Fidelity)? Was he talking about the marital kind, by any chance? Or about loyalty or dog-like devotion, or even about stocks and bonds? For the first time in their marriage, she felt an almost physical bewilderment--a sort of psychic shiver.

       "Yes, mean-spirited." He slapped the steering wheel. "Nobody but a wimp would let it control his life."

       Hallie looked over at him in amazement. They hadn't been discussing the subject as far as she knew, and this time he hadn't been drinking unless you counted Perrier. "What?" was all she could say. Since the day twenty years before at the town dump, when she first saw Ambrose, staring in bafflement at the recycling barrels, Hallie had thought of him as helpless --professionally skilled but personally uncertain. On that long-ago day she had explained gently about separating bottles by color, and he had seemed grateful. She wondered now whether his bewilderment could have been part of an act.

       She mustn't worry about their marriage, though, Ambrose went on as he drove along between dunes and glimpses of ocean, because he also believed in honoring his commitments. "And of course the same thing applies to you," he said without turning to look at her.

       "The same thing?" she asked. "What thing?" His profile, with the noble nose and uneven straying hair, looked as calm as if this were a normal conversation. "Ambrose," she commanded. "Stop the car." If he was determined to talk this way, they should at least face each other. "Stop!" But he kept on driving, and so she opened her door. (She wasn't going to do anything more than that, as she tried to explain afterwards.) He screeched to a halt then, and wouldn't even listen when she pointed out that she still had her seat belt on. Apparently he hadn't planned for her to be upset.

       Soon after that, evidence began to spring up wherever she looked--wrong numbers, mysterious ticket stubs, ambiguous remarks. Hallie had thought of herself before then as buoyant, but her new knowledge made her feel like a balloon with a leak, sagging to the ground. However, if she no longer holds her former view of her marriage, she still believes in her family. She will simply have to be stronger than she realized. So she explains too much to the children and forces herself to smile. Lily and Josephine, six and eight years old, accept her explanations, but Justin's dark looks indict her: If Hallie were a better person, his father would come home at night.

       Actually, Justin fears that his own criticisms may have done as much as his mother's gloom to drive Ambrose away. Though he does want his father to stay at home, the father he wants isn't the real live Ambrose, with his irregular hours and his self-cut hair and ill-fitting thrift-shop clothes. Justin doesn't see why an artist necessarily has to behave like somebody's idea of an artist. Most of the painters on the Cape look like everybody else, and they visit a barber once in a while instead of just snipping off whatever tuft happens to stick out. "What's wrong with you, Dad?" he demanded recently, and received only a weak smile in return.

       It isn't Ambrose's appearance, though, or even his truancy, that troubles Justin most. What he longs for is a real father--a strict, unyielding patriarch who governs the household instead of floating above it like some aimless figure painted by Chagall. Justin wants rules, and he wants to know what those rules are. About the big maroon station wagon, for instance, with its rust-eaten undercarriage and dangling tailpipe and the headlights held on with duct tape: Since Justin's sixteenth birthday, he has been allowed to use the car on the days when Ambrose hasn't taken it to Boston. However, it isn't clear what those days are. Weekends? Thursday and Friday? Sometimes Ambrose leaves home a day early or stays away an extra night, and he doesn't let Justin know in time to make plans.

       Hallie could tell Justin how useless plans would be. She visualizes the woman in Boston--the most recent one--as a capricious type, a Zelda-esque flapper with an adorable pout, wearing a skimpy sequined gas-blue dress. (She and Ambrose loll on a velvet couch in a bay window above Commonwealth Avenue, raising champagne glasses. "Tchin-tchin," they say. And then they do something intricate and sexual which Hallie can't quite picture--since, she thinks meanly, the woman would certainly have to take the initiative.) Such a woman wouldn't think twice about disrupting other people's schedules.

       Last Christmas Ambrose gave Hallie a book of Matisse reproductions, an unusually expensive gift. She was pleased, but after she glanced through the book, she wondered. Many of the early paintings featured Matisse's dark-haired wife, Amelie, whom he clearly--Hallie was sure of it--adored. But then there began to be models named Laurette and Antoinette, and by the time the artist got to be fifty years old, Amelie had been replaced by a blonde called Lydia. Was this a hint? Did Ambrose mean something by it? He was just fifty himself.

       The woman in Boston, as it happens, is nothing like Hallie's imaginings. She isn't even in Boston, but across the river in a shabby part of Cambridge. Ambrose met Sara Hall and her sociologist husband at a faculty reception a few years ago, just before the husband moved in with a woman from the Philosophy department. Sara has lived by herself since her two sons fled to film school in California, as far away from their father as they could get. A trim, serious-minded book designer who wears turtlenecks and jeans and certainly can't afford champagne, she doesn't know that Hallie even suspects Ambrose of having a lover (if that's the word--it does seem to Sara that she and Ambrose are more like comforting acquaintances). Hallie's ignorance doesn't of course make everything all right, but Sara is glad of it; all of them would be unhappy, surely, if Hallie knew. Ambrose seems to be in Sara's life by accident, only because he popped up on her doorstep when she was in a weakened moment, about two hours after her husband left. She's still in the process of thinking the whole situation through. In the meantime, though, she has coached Ambrose--warning, for instance, that he must never call her from home, where her telephone number would appear on the Peales' Nynex statements; this precaution wouldn't have occurred to him.

       And there are other traps. Sometimes Sara wishes that the modern age, with its opportunities for communication and betrayal, could be repealed. That woman wouldn't have been teaching in the philosophy department or anywhere else if they all lived in the nineteenth century, and Sara's husband wouldn't have found it so easy to arrange those secret meetings. She knows all too well about the dangers of telephone calls.

       This is pretty much how things stand on the fine July day when Ambrose conceives the notion of taking Justin to visit the class he teaches in Life Drawing. The boy has a morning appointment with his orthodontist in Brookline, and Ambrose hopes to make the day into a therapeutic father-son expedition. Justin has loved the Museum of Fine Arts since he was six years old, when he discovered the mummy cases in the Egyptian collection. The two of them will eat lunch in the museum cafeteria, then finish the day in the big airy studio with Ambrose's favorite class. When Justin sees his father surrounded by respectful students not much older than he is himself, he may pick up a little of the respect. Afterwards he can deliver the car back to the Cape, and on the next morning Ambrose will catch the boat to Provincetown, where Hallie will pick him up.

       It doesn't work out, though. At the museum Justin gapes at familiar paintings as if he'd never seen them before. The Egyptian section is creepy, he pronounces, and he doesn't care for the antique furniture in the downstairs galleries. "It looks like a department store," he says in a snobbish voice. He also professes, possibly ironically, to be scandalized at the number of nudes. "Pornography," he mutters, as if to himself.

       Ambrose suspects that Justin's puritanical reaction has less to do with the paintings than with his own presence. It should have prepared him for the Life Drawing class, he realizes later. The minute he opens the door to the studio, something about the angle of his son's head tells him that the visit won't be a success. The model--a student on work-study--is lounging on the edge of the platform, still in her scarlet kimono. Most of the students have set up their easels. Ambrose introduces Justin, who looks into space. "Would you like to sketch?" Ambrose asks him. (Well, why not? The boy has talent, and he used to like working along with his father.)

       "What?" Justin asks in seeming amazement. "No, thanks. Have you got anything to read?"

       Ambrose hands him last month's Artforum and goes about setting up the class. When the model takes off her kimono and steps onto the platform, Ambrose registers her nakedness; somehow, he has never seen a model who looked so naked. He glances at Justin, who is studying his magazine with the concentration of an actor pretending to read onstage. Ambrose goes to the model and arranges her, a hand on one hip, bare foot on a block of wood. He can see every dimple and dent in her flesh, every chicken-pox scar on her back. She's young--not pretty but with a firm body and legs like smooth pink pillars, her navel pierced by a painful-looking gold ring.

       The class goes on as usual, though with an overlay of tension which Ambrose hopes he is the only one to feel. As soon as the students have left, Justin drifts up to him with a martyred expression. "Can we go now?"

       "You can," Ambrose says. He holds out the car keys. "Here. You know where it's parked."

       "What do you mean, I can?" Justin asks. "Both of us are going, right?"

       "No, just you." Surely the plan was clear. "Your mother will pick me up tomorrow at the boat."

       "But, Dad." Justin's composure has shattered. "We were going back together." His disappointment seems genuine.

       Was he really counting on Ambrose's company? Would they finally have been able to talk? But Sara is waiting. "I'm sorry," Ambrose says, and he really is. "There's a friend I have to see."

       "A friend? What friend? I'll go with you."

       "It's a dinner engagement. Just business. You'd be bored." Ambrose is talking stupidly, improvising.

       "No, I wouldn't. Do you think I'm a child or something?" All at once, Justin's face turns crafty. "Is it somebody you don't want me to know about?"

       "What? Don't you dare talk to me like that." Ambrose hears his own voice, charged with fake indignation. He sounds the way Justin does when he's been caught sneaking in late. "Don't you dare," Ambrose says again, helpless to change his tone. "A son shouldn't talk to his father that way."

       "Sure, Dad." A son shouldn't have occasion to talk that way, Justin is obviously thinking. "Right."

       But what can he possibly know? Sara has never called or written. "I don't know what you're talking about," Ambrose says.

       "Oh Dad," Justin says, more in sorrow than in anger. "Do you think I don't know about Yvonne?"

       "Who?" Ambrose's indignation becomes real. He hasn't heard from Yvonne since she went back to Montreal last year. It's true that she didn't have Sara's discretion, but whatever clue the boy may have stumbled upon is obsolete by now.

       The rest of their exchange goes no better. Ambrose doesn't plan, he swears, on seeing Yvonne--if there ever was any such person--on that night or any other. The words ring as false to him as any lie he has ever told. If Justin were older, and able to profit from the principles his father has gradually come to hold, Ambrose could explain that it's ultimately for the sake of his family that a man mustn't be tied down. But Justin wouldn't understand, and Ambrose isn't going to betray those hard-won principles now, for the sake of a constancy that he doesn't believe in.

       Justin, in a cool rage, walks off with the car keys, and Ambrose takes the MBTA to Central Square.

       Sara, reading in her porch swing, waves to Ambrose as he comes up her front walk. "Hi." She has changed out of her jeans into a white Greek caftan embroidered in blue, and her feet are bare and brown. She leads him into her white-painted front room and sets her book and glasses on the low round table before she finally, discreet Sara, puts her arms around his neck. "What happened to your car?"

       "I let Justin take it." They sink onto the worn leather sofa, and Ambrose tells her about the museum and the Life Drawing class. "He used to love Boston," he says, feeling hurt all over again.

       She studies his face. "He's sixteen, and you took him to a Life class?"

       "A bad idea, you think?" Well, obviously it was. "It wasn't just the class, though." He cradles her bare feet and begins to stroke the spaces between her toes. "He wanted me to go back to the Cape with him tonight." He tries to laugh. "He actually scolded me."

       "You didn't mention me, I hope?"

       "No. Oh, no."

       "But how will you get back?" She's frowning.

       "On the boat in the morning." Ambrose looks forward to sitting on the deck in the sunshine. He can drink coffee and sketch passengers leaning against the rail.

       Sara pulls her feet away. "No. Not in the morning."

       "Sara. What ...?"

       "Tonight." She stands up. "That poor boy."

       "He's already left. What difference will it make?"

       "Do you need cash for the fare? I can lend it to you." She crosses briskly to her little antique desk.

       "There isn't a boat at night," he protests. "Not even a bus. I checked last week."

       "Then you can use that cot in your office that you told me about. Because you can't stay here."

       "Why not?" The cot isn't meant to be used, and she knows it. "I don't see the rush."

       "I'm sorry," she says. "But you can't stay." She pushes two twenty-dollar bills at him.

       He'll need money for the boat, whenever he takes it; the day at the museum has left him with nothing but a five and two ones. "I'll write you a check." He fumbles for his reading glasses.

       "What are you doing?" she asks as he leans over the table with his pen. "You can't make out a check to me."

       "Why not?" He's never seen her this way.

       "Don't you and Hallie have a joint account?" she asks patiently.

       A light goes on over his head like the ones he draws for comic characters. "Ah," he says. "Like the phone bill." He sets down his glasses and stands up.

       "No checks. Ever. You don't need this, though. I forgot, there's an ATM in the square." As she takes back the bills, she shakes her head. "You're so reckless. How can Hallie not know?"

       "Well, she doesn't know it's you, anyway," he says playfully.

       "Wait a minute." Sara's eyebrows go up. "She does know there's somebody?"

       "That was a joke," he says. "But possibly. She may have figured out that much."

       "Because there always is somebody?" Her mouth becomes a straight line. "Is that what you mean?"

       His mind strays to Yvonne and a few others. "Oh, honey." He puts his hands around Sara's shoulders. "I've told you about my principles."

       "Your principles." She's thinking of her hedonistic husband, he can tell; she ought to know that Ambrose is nothing like that. Sara lacks his moral originality, of course. What he has told her about the looseness and freedom of his marriage might not exactly fit her standards of truthfulness. But it stands for the truth: It's the way his marriage would be if he and Hallie were conducting it with complete integrity. "Darling," he murmurs, "don't be unhappy." He rubs his chin against Sara's hair and strokes her back, feeling her sharp delicate shoulder-blades. She's smaller than Hallie but probably less fragile in some ways: Sara would never shriek in jealousy or open the door of a moving car. "Why should I give up love?" he asks, and touches his lips to her forehead. "Why should you?" He has said all this to her before, surely. It's Justin that has made the difference.

       She shakes him off. "Have you always thought that way? All your life?"

       "What way? What's wrong with it?"

       "It's irresponsible."

       "Sara, sweetheart ..." He's never seen a resemblance between her and Hallie before. That time in the car, when Hallie flung open the door, he was shocked and repelled by the crazy expression on her face.

       Sara doesn't look crazy, but her eyes are wide open, and her face is still: "Did Hallie know about your principles when you got married?"

       "I don't believe either of us did. Not then."

       "I see."

       He hopes she does. One of the things he values about her is her quiet good sense.

       She's still looking at him. "The models in your Life class. Are they students?"

       "The models?" But she can't suspect a thing like that. "Now, wait a minute. I hope you don't imagine--"

       "No, I don't think you fool around with students. Of course not." But she doesn't sound convinced. "Come on," she says. "It's time to go." And she hands him his glasses and leads him outside to the ATM machine. Sara has never consented to appear with him in public, and right now she's glancing around cautiously as if Hallie had spies everywhere. At the entrance to the subway, she clasps both of his hands and looks at him steadily. "Ambrose. Don't come back."

       "What?" She can't be serious. "Because of Justin, you mean?"

       "Not only that." She has been thinking of her own sons, no doubt--for the last half hour, all the time he was talking about his day. He pictures the two young men now--standing on each side of her in long angelic robes, wearing Justin's disapproving expression.

       On the boat the next morning, Ambrose feels more than emotionally wounded. The famous folding cot proved, last night, to be too narrow for comfort, as well as being bisected in the wrong place by a cruel aluminum bar. There was no hot water in the men's room at the college, either. What harm would it have done for Sara to let him stay one more night in that blue-sheeted king-sized bed, in the room with the flowered wallpaper? What was the point of making him leave?

       As the Boston skyline recedes, he feels Sara drifting away from him, as if she were the one on the boat.

       Justin Peale comes down to the kitchen at eleven-fourteen A.M., braced for his mother's sarcastic ‘Good morning.' He had his atomic-war dream again last night, but he's not going to tell her. She only laughs at his nightmares, as if hydrogen bombs were something he'd grow out of. Some of the characters in the dream were industriously digging a trench, and others were rehearsing an opera, and they wouldn't listen when he said that all their work was in vain. After dragging himself awake, he was forced to read for an hour to make sure he wouldn't fall right back into the dream. The book, a crumbling paperback of The Picture of Dorian Gray from his parents' shelf of old college texts, didn't improve his mood. He enters the kitchen feeling jaded and weary, to find his mother, in the hand-woven purple shift from her hippie days, singing ‘Greensleeves' off key and making five-grain bread. ‘Alas, my love, ye do me wrong,' she carols as she slams the dough against the breadboard. How true, he thinks, if she only knew it. But what he has to tell her is nearly as bad.

       His poor deluded mother stops singing and says "Good morning." Can she still consider this humorous?

       "The circadian rhythms of adolescents aren't the same as those of adults," he says as he slumps into a chair. He was pleased to find this information last week in the New York Times. "We have a biological need to sleep late."

       "So do I," she says. "I only wish I could." She sinks both fists into the mass of dough.

       This is no way to prepare her for his news, though. "Mom," he says, plunging ahead. "You know the car?"

       "Your father's car?" She has a car too, a Honda with rickety suspension, which she doesn't let Justin use. "What about it?"

       He pinches off a lump of dough and rolls it between his palms. "You're not going to like this."

       "Oh, no, you didn't run out of gas again?"

       "Mom, please." What kind of idiot does she think he is? "But you know the road to the island?"

       It isn't a true island, but a peninsula which extends into the bay. It contains four cottages, and the road that leads to them is under water at high tide but passable the rest of the time. So it's technically an island for just a few hours a day. The residents time their trips by the tides. "Yes?" Hallie's hands stop moving.

       "Well," Justin says as he shapes his lump of dough into a miniature brioche, a tiny ball on top of a larger one. His voice squeaks.

       "Justin," she says, "what happened?"

       He didn't do it on purpose, he swears he didn't, but last night for once he did happen to have the car, and one of his friends on the island was having a party, and ...

       Hallie pounces. "You weren't watching the tides? You had to leave the car on the island? Then how did you get back?"

       "No, no," he reassures her. "Nothing like that. I never even got the car to the island."

       "What, then?"

       "Please, Mom," he says. "Don't get excited." He can't stand it when she loses her temper.

       "Are you trying to tell me that the car broke down?"

       "Right. Sort of."

       "And it's sitting somewhere waiting to be towed?"

       If only that were all. He goes on, in a rush. "It's just ... The water was higher than I thought, and the tide was coming in not going out, and ..."

       "You submerged the car? You swamped it?" She's nailing him with her eyes.

       "I guess Dad's going to be really upset." He squashes his brioche and starts to form a croissant, flattening the dough into a neat triangle on the board.

       "I guess he is," his mother says, with less rage than he expected.

       At twelve-thirty, filled with feelings that she hasn't sorted out, Hallie sits in the Honda by the pier in Provincetown. Justin should perhaps have been the one to pick Ambrose up, but she'd rather not give him a chance at her car. The boat from Boston pulls in, and she sees her husband walking toward her, his portfolio weighing him down, random stubble on his face. His gait is despondent, as if he'd already heard Justin's news. "That cot is impossible," he complains as he climbs heavily into the car. "I hardly slept two hours."

       "Uncomfortable, is it?" She doesn't believe in the cot, as he must know perfectly well.

       "Did Justin get back all right?" he asks.

       "Oh, yes," she says. "There's a problem, though."

       "What problem?" His voice is sharp.

       "I'll let him tell you," she says.

       Back at the house, Ambrose stumps into the kitchen, where Justin sits with a look of doom. "All right, what's going on?" Ambrose asks, going to the stove and shaking the coffee pot, which of course is empty. Why can't Hallie have coffee ready for him the way Sara does?

       And they tell him about the car, Hallie filling in the story when Justin falters.

       Ambrose feels disbelief at first--or tries to. He doesn't have the energy to get angry right now, especially without coffee. "Justin!" he finally yells, "how could that happen? You know about the tides!"

       His shouts bring Lily and Josephine to the doorway, where they hover with tentative smug smiles, their yellow hair hanging down unbraided. "Your brother ..." Ambrose says, "Do you girls know what your brother ...?"

       "I forgot," Justin mumbles, looking away.

       "You forgot? How could you forget?" Ambrose has worked up to a roar. He points to the refrigerator, where notices are posted with alphabet magnets left over from the children's infancy. "Look at the tide chart! Look." He takes his glasses out of his pocket and focuses on the chart. "‘High tide,'" he announces, "See?" But the numbers are fuzzy. He takes the glasses off and wipes them on his shirt and looks again. No better.

       "What's the matter?" Hallie asks. "Ambrose?"

       "Nothing." He takes off the glasses and, squinting mightily, is just able to make out the chart: "High tide, 9:54 PM." He recalls Sara now, standing beside her coffee table in her embroidered blue-and-white caftan, setting her book and glasses carefully down; and he sees himself putting his own glasses there after she stopped him from writing the check. Right next to hers. How ridiculous. He feels like a comedian in a silent movie, Buster Keaton, perhaps--no, Harold Lloyd. Ambrose hasn't been thrown so far off balance for quite a while. "9:54," he says to Justin, working up his anger again. "You were already at the party by then, right?"

       "I guess so."

       "And the car was under water, but you didn't know it. What did you do, leave it parked below the tide line?"

       "Oh, Justin," Hallie breathes.

       Ambrose shushes her and turns to Justin. "So when did you try to find it?"

       "I don't know. Not too late. But I couldn't--"

       "You did look for it?"

       "Of course I did, but I didn't even know ... " All at once the boy seems carried away, almost enthusiastic. "You should have been there. It was unreal, nothing but water."

       "So you decided to abandon the car?" Ambrose says. "You made that decision?"

       "I didn't abandon it," Justin objects, some image of a sinking ship possibly crossing his mind.

       "Very noble. And it was still there ..." Ambrose consults the tide chart, squinting again. "... at 3:40 A.M.?"

       "Before that. We could see it by two o'clock. But it wouldn't start, not even after the tide went out." He seems aggrieved, as if the car had failed him.

       "No."

       "It was obviously hopeless," Justin says, "so I got a ride home." He looks down at the table. "I guess we'll have to have it towed."

       "I guess we will."

       "We can't leave it there," Hallie says. "When does the tide go out again?"

       "3:50 this afternoon," Justin says. He yawns luxuriously and goes toward the stairs. "I'm really tired."

       Ambrose wonders what exactly Justin had in mind last night, if anything. "I'll wake you at three," he says. Hallie is watching him, but he can't read her thoughts either. She has wished, he suspects, for a disaster to befall him--nothing serious, but just enough to limit his wanderings. (She has suggested several times that he apply to teach at the local community college, but he has chosen to ignore such hints.) As for Sara, she'll have to see him again to exchange reading glasses, but he can't expect more.

       Hallie notices the little girls gazing after their brother in what looks like admiration. Nor does she herself feel as downcast as she would have imagined, with her husband and son at war and the family car sunk beneath the waves. She's actually elated--possibly because something has finally happened, instead of everybody just creeping around being miserable. "We have to tell the police about the car," she says. "I'll call them."

Mary Hazzard is the author of three novels and numerous plays. She has been writer-in-residence at Lehigh University and the College of William and Mary and has received a playwriting grant from the NEA. She lives in Waban, Massachusetts, where she writes and rents rooms to actors. Her novel Family Blood was the winner of the 1998 Ariadne Fiction Prize and will be published by Ariadne Press in October 1999.


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