The Harbormaster's Daughter Page 3

  So a guilt-free liaison was not as appealing to him as Sabine might have expected. Her idea of an affair as a sort of spa treatment was strange. And… he didn’t trust it. She was trying to keep him there with her, just the way they all did. Her trick was to flaunt her Continental attitude, to promise she didn’t care. Jealousy, she insisted, was unknown to her. Sex was a kind of talent, didn’t he think? Like dance, or music, it was inborn, wrong to deny. When she heard his skates on the road, she’d get ready for him, and afterward she’d blow him a kiss good-bye, still lying among the sheets, with a sleepy smile. “It’s how I want you to think of me,” she said.

  3

  HOOKED

  Usually it was possible to make a graceful escape from such a liaison: One explained that one’s guilt had become too great; that though one loved the woman, whoever she was, one’s wife must come first. It was wrong, wrong to continue. There would be tears and protestations, all the more because a man who valued his wife as highly as Franco did became wonderfully attractive. The ache that followed would be sweet, and a little ribbon of tenderness would always connect the two hearts thus separated. And Franco could go home to a nice roast chicken and salad with Danielle’s special dressing, have a beer, watch the game, whatever game, in peace.

  Sabine’s rules effectively barred this exit. “It’s wonderful to tell you things, and know you’re not going to use them against me. Men always do, you know. You admit your saddest little weakness and then they tell you that’s why they’re leaving.” She held her hand up so the light struck through her opal ring. “My father brought this back for me, from Australia, when I was little. Look how it’s green and blue and purple, just like the bay.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Franco said, taking her hand to kiss it. It was this he couldn’t resist—the idea that his touch could heal. He did love her, but someday that healing effect would wear off, and the love would go with it.

  “He was in the precious-stone business. Do you know what that is? No, I didn’t either. Nor my mother. He’d come home and it was like a big celebration every time. But by the time I was in high school she was starting to figure it out—there was another family somewhere, in some country where women didn’t ask so many questions. I could never understand why he didn’t miss me the way I missed him.…”

  “But you deserve better,” Franco said. “You deserve more.”

  She looked at him as if she’d heard a proposal and he started kissing her neck, diving back into the physical to escape, but she twisted away.

  “Hank’s gonna be back from Barrel Point,” he said. “I gotta get going.”

  “See you Tuesday.”

  “I’m not sure I can come Tuesday.…”

  Her smile faded; she looked into the opal again. A stink wafted in through the window; Vinny Machado, his old pal Vince’s son, was pumping out the septic tank next door.

  “Maybe Thursday. I think Hank’s going out of town.”

  “You know you’re always welcome,” she said, but the stench ruined the effect.

  Franco avoided Vinny when he could. Vinny made Franco uneasy, guilty for staying alive when Vinny’s father had gone down with the Suzie Belle. They went out on a cold morning and couldn’t afford to come in when the seas got rough—they’d have lost one of the few fishing days the regulations allowed. The load, frozen with sea spray, shifted in the hold and before Vince could correct their course the boat capsized. Vince’s nickname had been Gonna—for all the things he was “gonna” do one day, when he retired. His leg washed up six months later—all that was left of him. Vinny had always been small and slow, and the loss crushed him. He tagged behind Franco’s sons at school, trying to act like he was one of them, but everyone called him Runt and left him behind. The town did what it could for him, which was not very much. Dunk Carlos gave him the septic pumping job and you’d find him on one corner or another, smiling in his goofy, red-handed way, with an edge of malice that grew over the years, as his fate was borne in on him.

  “Hey, Wheelie,” Vinny said. He seemed to be smirking, as if he knew all about Franco and Sabine and was going to use it against Franco somehow.

  “Hey, Vin,” Franco responded warmly. He must be going crazy if he imagined Vinny was any kind of danger. But that itself was a warning. It was time to break this affair off, before… whatever happened next. He could not imagine anything good happening next. He decided to take Danielle out to Tacoma to see Frank Junior. It would be worth maxing out the credit cards to make a clean break. When he got back he would just avoid Sabine, maybe say Hank was upset with his missing so much work. Or…

  He was considering how to frame it when she told him she was pregnant.

  “I swear, I never thought it could happen!” she said. “But I guess with you, anything can.” She rubbed her hand along his chin. Five o’clock shadow was a noontime thing for him.

  “But it’s not what you wanted,” he said.

  “Oh, no! It’s what I’ve wanted more than anything. But I thought it couldn’t happen—the doctor said…”

  What had the doctor said? Anything? She’d have learned to lie from her father; of course. People like that didn’t know how to tell the truth.

  She kissed his chin, drawing her mouth against his beard, speaking huskily as if they were about to make love. His stomach dropped.

  “When I think about it, I think, when I saw you I knew, I just knew you were the one who could…” Where was her sophisticated distance, her ennui? She spoke in a breathless rhapsody, like a teenager.

  “But I—” he said. His heart was slamming. Of course, hadn’t he known it was an act? These people were acting all the time, pretending to poverty in their little cottages while they waited to inherit their parents’ houses back in Westchester, pretending to art to excuse their idleness. They didn’t know how to tell the truth. He took a deep breath. “I… well, so would you go back to Italy, then? You’d like to raise a child there?”

  She looked as if he’d slapped her.

  “I haven’t thought it all out yet, but…”

  “I’m a married man!”

  “Oh. You remembered.” This was the sound of a mousetrap springing, as if she had secretly despised him all along. And her face turned vengeful, vicious, like Bobby Matos when he was caught in one of his schemes.

  “They never winterized this place,” he said stupidly.

  “No. I’m only here until September. Then I’m house-sitting for the Straubs, up on Sea Street. I cleaned their Jeff Koons last year. They’re happy to have someone there over the winter. I only have to pay the utilities.”

  He could guess that “their Jeff Koons” would be a painting, and from the twist in her voice he knew that it was also a credential, one of the things that separated the sophisticated from the ordinary people. The Straubs had bought their cottage, a tilting old shingled cape, from Sal Bemba after his parents died. Sal bought Sea View Auto Repair and the Straubs gutted the place, put in skylights and maple floors and an alarm system so complicated that no one could really get it to work, so they needed to have someone in the house with the paintings. It was two blocks from the Walrus and Carpenter; Sabine would know when his car was there, when the lights were on, everything.

  “But you said…”

  “You said you loved me.” Her voice was as hard as her eyes.

  That was the beginning. It seemed there would never be an end. A few weeks later, Danielle had come home from the pharmacy with a bit of gossip.

  “You know that girl who stayed over in the Beach Rose Cottages last summer? The little pixie one? She’s pregnant—she came in for prenatal vitamins!”

  Confidentiality didn’t come easily to Danielle. Franco knew who was depressed, who was on Antabuse, whose prescription for Percocet seemed to come from a different doctor every time.

  “I’m not sure I remember her,” he said.

  “Oh, you do,” she said. Danielle had a deep voice and a seen-it-all laugh. She’d borne two sons and a stillborn
daughter, years of poverty as the nets came up empty, a stint of terrifying wealth when Franco started using the Rainha to ferry cocaine to New Bedford. Her brother was known as Lefty: Three of his fingers had been torn off in a scallop chain when he was sixteen. The fact that her husband kept track of every pretty woman in town might have been upsetting to her when she was younger, but by now she was more concerned with the price of heating oil and the mice in the kitchen wall. “LaRee Farnham’s friend from college, I think? Rode her bike like she was goin’ into battle?”

  “Oh, yeah, maybe. How is LaRee?” After LaRee Farnham’s husband left her, she’d started taking Valium for anxiety and then Ativan for “acute anxiety,” although her life looked to Danielle to be entirely untroubled. The husband had deeded their house over to her, she was a nurse, the steadiest job on earth, no kids—what could the problem be? She was so fragile, she seemed to be allergic to herself! Danielle laughed about it because it made her feel better about the way she made it through life, never letting the knot in her stomach win out.

  She was not going to be distracted. “Pay attention—this is a good story!” she said.

  “Yeah, I can picture her,” he said, praying he sounded bored. “Pregnant, huh? She got a father for it?” His heart seemed to have stopped entirely.

  “She said it’s an old boyfriend. He bolted when he heard. Men—they’re never there to deal with the consequences.”

  “You’ve only heard one side,” he couldn’t help saying.

  She just laughed. “Oh, yeah, she’s probably a rapist. Really, she seems like a nice girl. Don’t know why I call her a girl; she’s pushing forty. But it’s her first. She’s nauseous all day. She asked me what to do.”

  Sabine was proving to be a most subtle torturer.

  “It’s nice that somebody’s interested in my opinion,” Danielle said. “She’s in the pharmacy every other day wanting to know something. She worries about every pound she puts on. I told her flat out—I never took off all the weight, either time. It’s just part of being a woman.”

  The ultrasound, the amnio, the birthing classes… he heard about them all from Danielle. And then, the first place Sabine turned up with the baby was the pharmacy.

  “About the cutest baby I’ve ever seen,” Danielle said. “Black hair, if you could believe it with the mother so pale, and the brightest little eyes! Vita, she named her—it means ‘life.’ She said the father was a tourist, just passing through, but if you ask me, that baby looks a lot like a Portagee.”

  The first fish Franco ever caught with a hook and line had been a striper, a really big one, maybe twenty-five pounds. He remembered the tug, and the mastery he felt as he jerked the line back and the fish began to fight. “Let ’im go a ways,” his father had said, “then you start reeling him in. Be patient—remember, every move he makes just sets the hook deeper in his mouth.”

  Sabine pushed the carriage past the harbormaster’s shack daily. Franco tried to stay out on the water every minute he could. Then she began calling him, at the shack in the mornings, the Walrus at night. Your own daughter, Franco, and you haven’t even bothered to visit. A child needs a father. She looks more like you every day. Then: You don’t have the balls, do you, to own up to what you’ve done?

  “No guilt!” he said. “You said it would be like swimming, an hour in a different element!”

  “Not when there’s a child involved.”

  “You said you couldn’t…”

  “I admired you,” she said bitterly. “I thought you were different from the others.”

  Next she pushed the carriage right in through the shack’s front door. “Can I talk to you?”

  “Sure,” Franco said. Hank, gauging the situation, said he was going out to check a mooring on Sequasset Neck.

  “I need you to put Vita on your health insurance,” Sabine said.

  “What?” Franco was slow to anger, but Sabine seemed determined. If she couldn’t inspire love, she’d settle for rage.

  “You have a job with insurance. I don’t,” she said.

  “Because you’re living on a trust fund.” He was whispering, though they were alone in the shack. Out the little window he saw the harbormaster’s boat heading wakeless across the brilliant bay.

  “No one can afford health insurance,” she said.

  He took her arm. “My wife sees all of that; she’d have to know.”

  Sabine shrugged, pulling away. “She’s your daughter. I guess your wife ought to know about her.”

  His blood raced, he could feel his face blazing. “Well, I guess that’s why you’ve been down at the pharmacy giving her the blow by blow for a year and a half now. What are you trying to do? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “The mother of your child.”

  Danielle was used to bearing things. She bore this, too. Her misery was so sharp it broke his heart open and resuscitated every tender feeling that had ever lived between them. They made love as if it were a matter of life and death. This child cemented their marriage in the same way the birth of their own first child had. He had Danielle’s name tattooed in a heart on his bicep—a rope heart tied at the point in a bowline knot, “which neither slips nor binds.”

  “Well, I always wanted a daughter,” she said finally. “I guess a stepdaughter will have to do.” And the next thing the town knew, she was showing Vita’s picture to everyone. “Look at this, a new little Neves! Finally a girl and she looks just like her dad. I hope she’s got more sense than the old tomcat.” It was a forgiving complaint, the same she made when he forgot to take off his boots and tracked low-tide muck in at the kitchen door.

  “She’s acting like Vita belongs to her,” Sabine complained. How was it that she, whose great-grandmother’s portrait had been painted by J. M. W. Turner, was being outmaneuvered by a pharmacy clerk? “She doesn’t seem to get it.”

  “I think she gets it,” Franco said, proud of his wife, entirely relieved. “She’s glad Vita’s a part of her life.”

  “Good,” Sabine said, “because I’m suing you for child support.”

  4

  3:17

  LaRee had been so deep asleep that the knocking was absorbed into her dream at first. She was with Drew again. They were picking apples in a vast orchard when the light went strange and a storm came out of nowhere. Everything blew sideways and she heard the apples going splat, splat, splat against the barn—the swaybacked barn behind the house she grew up in. Then they were inside the barn, crouching in the back corner while the storm sucked at the door. Together again, and safe, the way things were supposed to be. Then, suddenly, she saw that Drew was gone.

  And woke up, enough to realize someone really was knocking, banging a fist on her front door. The clock read 3:17 a.m.; after this, she never saw the number 317 without thinking, That’s when my life turned. Who could it possibly be at that hour? It was the bleak middle of January, and the pond road was so icy that she’d had a frightening skid coming home from the clinic, then tromped up the unshoveled driveway, shutting the door behind her so she could sink down on the couch to cry.

  She’d had to have Rex put down the day before; he was so old his joints were gone, and lately he’d been whimpering even while he was asleep beside the stove. It would have been cruel to keep him alive, but his death seemed beyond bearing. Sabine had said to come over for wine and tears, but LaRee’s grief seemed too awful to let show. Rex had been their puppy when she and Drew built the house, and losing him was like losing the marriage all over again. Two years and she was still undone by it; it was too sad and stupid to inflict on Sabine, and three-year-old Vita would be frightened to see an adult in such a state. So LaRee had counted it as “extreme anxiety,” and knocked herself out with Ativan. When she woke up this morning she’d felt even worse, as if the weight of misery was dragging at her flesh until she barely had a human shape. It had snowed three more inches overnight, and she swiped the windshield with her arm and fishtailed off to work in the truck, managed the day of
taking weights and blood pressures, came home to eat cold cereal for dinner and crawl back under the covers. She couldn’t get herself to shovel. The snow would melt and freeze, the driveway would be hopeless all winter, but what did it matter? She didn’t have to worry about Rex slipping and hurting his shoulders anymore.

  So here she was, stark raving alone with someone pounding on the door. She used to be frightened out here all by herself. The other houses on Grace Pond Road were summer places, pipes drained and windows boarded before there was chance of a freeze. Rex would bark cholerically (wagging his tail all the time) whenever a car even turned around in the driveway, but in fact there had never been an intruder, all these years. If she was woken by some presence in the night, it would be a pair of raccoons fighting at the garbage pail or a deer tearing shoots off the burning bush plant outside the bedroom window. In Oyster Creek only the summer people locked their doors.

  “Who is it? What’s the matter?” She found her bathrobe and pulled it around her. “I’m coming—hold on!”

  “Police!”

  LaRee opened the door to see Hannah Stone in her uniform, carrying something in a pink Hello Kitty blanket.

  “Hannah, what on earth?”

  She had known Hannah Stone since Hannah was a little girl, standing for her measles vaccination with a set, stolid face, walking away proud. She still had that same look when she held up a hand to stop traffic so the schoolkids could cross to the bus. She’d found her place in town; she had the uniform and she was allowed to shout, “Police!” instead of the meek “It’s Hannah.”

  Two wild eyes looked up out of the blanket at LaRee.

  “Vita! What…? Hannah! Where’s Sabine?”