Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,103

and over the scattered debris. Her snorkel branched into the air and her rump crested the surface; she kicked her pale heels. I handed Dennis the mask and he put it on and sat on the transom, the snorkel dangling.

“What are you waiting for?” I said.

He shrugged.

I thought of him teaching Margo to ski, to ride a bike. “Want me to push you?”

“Not really.”

Stuart spoke up. “Want me to go with you?”

“Sure,” Dennis said.

There was a mask for Stuart but no snorkel. The men sat side by side on the gunwale, then counted to three and pushed off. I opened a diet soda and watched them swim. Margo and Dennis kept their heads down as they kicked around, but Stuart kept righting himself to breathe. Once when he came up for air, he called out, “Frances.”

I looked up. “What?”

He lifted a hand and waved. “Come in.”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

“I’m fixing lunch,” I yelled, though I was finished.

“Spooky down here,” he called, then lowered his face to the water. I didn’t want to go in—someone needed to stay on the boat, near the life preservers—but I gleaned a certain satisfaction from the invitation. I lay on the gunwale, a boat fender my pillow. The sky was vast and blue, and the site felt lonely and remote. It was a treasure, this sense of isolation. How would we achieve it, if we didn’t rebuild? Many of our friends had bought cabins in the Carolinas, but we didn’t have the money for that, and it wasn’t the same. Over the years, Grady and Gloria had used the house less and less, and rarely stayed overnight; the decision about what to do now would be up to us.

Dennis hauled himself onto the transom, arms shaking with exertion. I brought him a towel and we sat at the stern, eating halves of the same sandwich. “I think we should rebuild,” I said.

He looked at me. “We’ve got ten percent of what we’d need here, at the most.” He stared down the channel, toward the houses that remained. “Let’s let it go. Can we let go?”

It would be only five years before our lease ran out, permanently, no matter what we did. And Dennis had never seemed so certain to me, or so weary, so I didn’t argue. Margo and Stuart climbed aboard, and after we were done eating, we made our way back down the empty channel.

Stuart came downstairs one morning while I was drinking my coffee at the kitchen counter. He said, “Margo would sleep until noon if I let her,” and I said, “Since she was a teenager.” He filled a mug from the carafe and stirred in creamer. The spoon clinked against the sides of the mug. Dennis was in the backyard, shoveling my rose plants—dead, every one of them—into a wheelbarrow. When he bent at the waist, I could see the faint, ridged trail of his spinal column under his T-shirt. Come here, I wanted to say. I wanted to say it all the time, whenever he was more than a room’s width away from me. Come here, sit down.

“Is Dennis OK?” said Stuart. “He seems tired.”

“He is. We all are.”

Stuart nodded. “The house on the water meant a lot to him. To you, too, I imagine.”

“Memories,” I said. I thought of telling him that when Margo was ten she’d spent an entire weekend lying in the stilt house hammock, reading The Grapes of Wrath from start to finish. Then, during a storm that had rattled the shutters and left foamy puddles on the porch, she’d written her book report at the kitchen table. Years later, she and Beverly had spent the afternoon slinging water balloons at a sailboat from the upstairs porch. You should have seen it, I wanted to say to Stuart, how the balloon punched the sail—thwack—leaving a wrinkle that filled with breeze, causing the boat to heel. You should have seen how the balloon slipped down the fabric and burst on the deck, and the captain hollered and the girls ducked into the house, leaving Dennis to gesture apologies. You should have been around a few years later, I wanted to tell him, when Margo and Dennis took up studying survival tactics. They’d quote to each other from camping manuals and field guides: “You can tell a manta ray from two sharks swimming side by side because the ray’s fins will submerge at the same time,” she’d read to him. Then, he’d read to her. “To