This Must Be the Place: A Novel (55 page)

He waved Max closer. Max was staring up at the moon too, bewildered in the light.

Arthur crossed the boardwalk and his sneakers were off by the time he descended the stairs on the opposite side, down into the sand, cool and damp. He mashed it between his toes and couldn’t stop smiling—at the sound of the ocean, at the light of the moon. At the memory of his wife flopping around, a naked Deborah Kerr on the edge of the surf, white foam surrounding her in a liquid cloud, laughing, drunk, and lovely.

He unwrapped the parcel. The tin was cold in his hands, and the sand was cool and flat where the water had covered it. His feet made small dry dents that disappeared moments after he left them. Arthur lifted the lid on the box that held his wife and didn’t feel horror or sadness to see her like this, the last shape she would ever take; he felt triumphant, as though she’d been made complete, had finally taken a form that suited her true nature. His wife was as inscrutable and flawed as the gods of Olympus, and now she was other than human, other than God. She was a Titan, an immortal, an elemental force who could no longer be killed.

He walked parallel to the sea, his feet splashing in the shallow water, and tipped the box and poured Amy out in a fine ribbon of dust
that trailed behind him as he gained speed, as his legs pumped higher and his feet splashed harder into deeper surf. He released Amy and he flew, faster, lighter, as she released him. When he felt so light he thought he might fly off into the night and, like a helpless moth, be drawn up to his death against the gaping moon, Arthur Rook, gasping for breath, stopped and turned to see the distance he had come. Half a mile of beach lay behind him, sand pale and water blue as ink in the moonlight. A wave crept up the beach, farther than any waves had come before, and Amy, unbound, drew herself back to the depths.

Max waved to him and Arthur, breath calmer, waved back. Max Morris was an excellent friend. He needed to let Max know that, and apologize for hoodwinking him into helping him bury Amy here, in this place that must have always been her home. They would drive up to Boston and Arthur would spend perhaps a week with his mother and father and brother, and then Arthur thought he would fly to Los Angeles, but not to stay. To pack his belongings. To finish that life.

And when he returned, as he now knew he could, there would be a trail of white sugar petals to follow, a dotted line lighting the way home in the dark.

Oneida was the last to see Amy.

She was twenty-three and a first-year graduate student in art history. She thought she might specialize in preservation and archival technique—she was good at remembering and organizing, always had been—and the past eight years of Arthur teaching her how to look at the world had made her a visual adept. She saw things that had only just decided to be seen, Mona said once. “You’re a little spooky, kid, but I love you anyway.” And then Mona turned to Arthur, reading the paper with his bare feet on the kitchen windowsill and said, “This is all your fault,” and Arthur said, “It’s half my fault.”

Oneida hadn’t wanted to go to the new admit luncheon. It was a beautiful spring day, the kind made for lazing in the sun with a book, trying to forget about the multiple brilliant papers she needed to write by next Thursday. Her roommate Barry, a third-year Ph.D. in archaeology with whom Oneida suspected she was plainly and perfectly falling in love, convinced her free food was always worth it.

“It’s not even your department,” she said. “What do you care?”

“Aren’t SOs invited?” Barry had a widow’s peak and a nervous habit of tugging on his right earlobe. “Aren’t I a Significant-enough Other to attend?”

“Play your cards right,” Oneida said.

Professor Howard Rice, who specialized in impressionist painting but, as a devout child of the sixties, had a weakness for pop art, was hosting the luncheon at his museum of a house. Oneida shook the hands of a dozen admitted students, doing her best to woo bodies to the
university, which amounted to telling them all the same thing:
I’ve had a wonderful experience thus far—challenging, yes, but thrilling,
words just truthful enough to keep her gag reflex in check. Most of the admits were much older, and she could tell they thought she was strange: odd, and very young. And yet some of them saw themselves in her. They would come to school here next year, Oneida knew, and she told them as much before moving on to the next. “See you in the fall,” she said, and they all looked puzzled but smiled, having just realized for themselves that, yes, they
would
see her in the fall.

After an hour of telling fortunes, Oneida, warm with white wine, wandered off to explore Rice’s house. It was old and labyrinthine, every blank wall covered with a tapestry or a painting or an antique mirror. And there, in the hall that led off the main vestibule to the library, Oneida saw her mother.

She squinted and leaned closer. Yes. It
was
Amy, just as she had been the first time Oneida ever saw her: a faceless mystery, lying naked on a beach with her hair carried out to sea and to space.

Howard Rice, coming out of the library, paused and leaned in beside her.

“You’ve a good eye,” he said. “That’s an exceptional work.”

Oneida hadn’t yet had Rice for any of her course work, but still she knew he was a clueless windbag, harmless, really, but totally out of it—sort of like Sherman Russell, which predisposed her to treat him with particular kindness. Sherman, despondent and distracted after Anna finally moved out of the Darby-Jones, had slipped on a patch of ice in the high school parking lot and broken his leg in five places. Now he got around using Bert’s old cane, which belonged to the house—like all of Bert’s possessions—after she finally passed away, peacefully, in her sleep one Christmas Eve.

She smiled at Rice and asked what he meant.

“It’s a lost Joseph Cornell.” Rice grinned like a kid and pointed at the white painted mesh. “One of his later pieces. You can tell from the more abstract expressionistic touches. The mesh. The fields of white paint.”

“Where did it come from?” she asked. “How did you acquire it?”

Rice smiled again. “Private sale. Cornell was always making little things and sending them off to people he admired, people he loved from afar. It was the only way he could tell them how much he cared about them. Lost Cornells pop up every once in a great while, though in the past five years they’ve been springing up like daisies. And the pieces themselves have been more elaborate and exceptional, like this. Supply has created more of a demand, I’d think. A bit of a vogue.”

Wendy, Oneida thought. Wendy, following in his father’s footsteps. The more she considered it, the more sure she became. The last time she and Wendy spoke, a year after they graduated from high school, he had told her he was going to do something totally nuts, just for the hell of it.

There’s a shocker, she’d said, and hugged him, hard, because even then she knew it might be the last time. He’d been dating Dani for a year at that point—Dani and Wendy had just finished their freshman year at Syracuse—and even though Oneida could see that they belonged together far more than she and Wendy ever had, being the third wheel on their bike was too difficult. She kept Dani; she let Wendy go. And then so did Dani.

“It’s quite enigmatic and quite moving, though, isn’t it?” Rice said. “Who do you think she is?”

Oneida looked through the glass at Amy. She saw her own jaw, her own long legs. And she saw Arthur and Mona building wedding cakes together in the kitchen and driving off in the old station wagon,
Jones & Rook, Baking and Photography
, detailed on the side. She saw her mother on her own wedding day, laughing hysterically for no reason when Arthur showed up in his tuxedo shirt, adjusting cuffs that drooped under the weight of a pair of enormous ruby-red cuff links. She saw Dani crying on a giant blue beanbag in the prop loft and, in a photograph taken in Zimbabwe, her arms high above her head to catch a red rubber ball of a sun. She saw Wendy, eye blacked by Andrew Lu; she saw Eugene, loping away from her on that last day, longer and leaner and assless as ever. She imagined him in a closet of an apartment in New York City, the tools of his trade spread before him: wood, glue, and a thousand memories made of paper and glass and plastic. Telling the world he loved it, one work of art at a time.

She saw herself, reflected in the glass—her eyes large and dark and open to see all the world. Older, but not quite as old as her own worthy soul.

Getting there.

“She’s the beginning,” she said. “Of everything.”

Thanks are due

To my editor Marjorie Braman, for her insight and energy, and everyone at Henry Holt, for being so enthusiastic from day one.

To my agent Bonnie Nadell, for her guidance.

To Lee Konstantinou, for being the linchpin.

To my friends, for their tireless cheerleading, and especially my early readers, for their feedback: Megan Frazer Blakemore, Jason Clarke, Karen Daugherty Clarke, Grace Hsu, Rob Kloss, John Mullervy and the Boston Writing Workshop, Katy Pan, and Laura Quinlan. And to my kindred BAWs, for their love, support, and inspiration: Manda Betts, Sandra Lau, and Jenna Lay, who holds the other half of my brain and keeps it sane. None of this without you, either.

And to my parents and my family, for their sense of humor, their excitement at my successes, their unconditional love and understanding, and their goonieness. Every day, you all remind me where I came from, why it matters, and why I’ll always love coming home.

About the Author

K
ATE
R
ACCULIA
grew up in Syracuse, New York. She has been a bassoonist, a planetarium operator, a proposal writer, a designer, and a karaoke god. She received her MFA from Emerson College and lives in Boston, Massachusetts. This is her first novel.