The Harbormaster's Daughter Page 6

  “See?”

  “Well, I didn’t mean you should stop in the middle of the road, just closer to it.”

  “That’s always the way, isn’t it?” Vita said. “I’m always too close or too far. Nothing’s good enough for you. I can do this, you know. Mr. Webster said I had very good defensive-driving skills.”

  “I’m sure he’s right,” LaRee managed to say. Vita would hear the strain in her voice and respond to it badly, but it was the best LaRee could do. What was more infuriating than sitting in the passenger’s seat—the death seat—with a driver who, based on three minutes of experience, was certain she knew more than you did, although you knew very well that she could barely walk across a room without bumping into the furniture, was so damned stubborn she wouldn’t wear a raincoat in a monsoon—and that every one of her failings was probably somehow your own fault? Fingernails digging into her palm, praying to sound relaxed and upbeat, LaRee continued. “So, here we are at the Stop sign. What next?”

  Vita turned right, too widely, but she ended up in the right lane and they went nearly a mile with ease. Down the hill, through the light even, and LaRee had just gotten her heart rate down when they saw a bicyclist ahead: Georgie Bottles with a basket of clams over his handlebar.

  “What is he doing way back here?” Vita asked.

  “Living in the Fitzsimmons’ cottage, I think,” LaRee said. “I guess Jeb Stone’s junkyard was spilling over onto National Seashore property and he had to get rid of those old cars. So Georgie’s moved into the cottage and been there all winter, or that’s what Charlotte said.” Georgie’s sister usually came out from New Bedford and got him cleaned up every few months, but her mother was dying and she hadn’t been around.

  “Do the Fitzsimmonses know?”

  “I doubt it. But Danielle cleans for them, so when she opens the house for the summer I’m sure she’ll get it fixed up—no one will be the wiser.”

  Georgie wobbled into the road, drinking from a beer in a paper bag.

  “What do I do, LaRee? Oh my God, what do I do?”

  “Well, you slow down and drive behind him until there’s no one coming on the other side. Then you can cross a little bit into the other lane and pass.”

  “I’m going to hit someone—I know it!” She looked as if she was about to cover her eyes.

  “No, you’re not,” LaRee said evenly. “Just go slower.…”

  But the mufflerless Chevy behind them was tailgating as if it wanted to push them out of its way.

  “Brandon,” Vita said, checking the rearview mirror. “Oh my God, I hate him.” Brandon pulled out and passed her, nearly running the driver in the opposite lane off the road.

  “I can’t do this, LaRee, I can’t! Help!”

  She was crawling along behind Georgie.

  “Why don’t I take over until we get to a quieter spot? Just slow down, let Georgie get ahead, and pull over.”

  Vita crossed the center line straight into the opposite lane, down which an oil truck was barreling.

  “Oh my God, no! What are you thinking of! Stop right now!”

  Vita slammed on the brake.

  “No, I didn’t mean to stop the car; I meant to stop driving in the wrong lane! What on earth? Pull over, pull over onto the shoulder!”

  “Do what with my shoulder?”

  LaRee grabbed the wheel and steered the car off onto the side, out of harm’s way. “This is what ‘pull over’ means. Do you understand?”

  “How would I know that? You said pull over! You didn’t say which direction to pull over in!” Vita burst into tears, her head against the steering wheel so the horn blew suddenly, causing a new flood. “I can’t do it. I can hear it in your voice that I can’t do it and you know!”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I’m just nervous. I’ll try to do better.” LaRee managed to laugh a little, to cover herself. Disaster had been averted after all, even if the lesson had not exactly been successful. How was it that Vita was still too afraid of the gas burner to make herself a bowl of soup? How was it that in spite of her wish for an immense bosom, she gave the appearance of an aspirant nun? The same delicate features had counted for beauty in her mother, but Vita resisted beauty, the way she resisted nearly everything. She was all bravado and no true confidence, holding herself stiff against any influence that might have shaped her. It was as if she had bound her natural instincts as tight as her hair, overthinking every movement she made so she lost track of how to do the simplest tasks. If LaRee had done differently, left her on her own more instead of rushing in to fix everything all the time—or who knew what exactly, just anything different—things would have been otherwise. But she had only done the best she could, and apparently that was going to have life-threatening consequences.

  She took a deep breath. She herself, in high school, had been one of those girls who clung to a boyfriend as if she might otherwise drown. The boy had bangs down over his eyes and smelled of hay and manure; he had to do barn chores before school. She had been… well, no less lost than Vita was now.

  “It was a mistake to start right here, right after school,” she said, watching Georgie pedal crookedly around the corner. Two girls from school walked along on the other side of the road in flowered skirts, glossy hair streaming. Perfectly normal high school kids, talking about boys probably, or what they were going to wear to the prom. Not that LaRee wished Vita would obsess over boys or proms. It was just that, for all her love and effort, for all the trips into Boston to see the specialist in children’s grief, and the snow scene made of cotton and glitter with figures skating on a mirror under the Christmas tree every year, the fluffy kitten, Bumble, who slept curled up behind Vita’s bent knees, the dollhouse and the storybooks read over and over and the glow-in-the-dark stars in the exact shape of Orion and the Big Dipper on her ceiling, Vita was still suffering, still unsteady on her feet. And it meant LaRee had failed.

  “Mr. Webster didn’t teach you what ‘pull over’ means?” she asked. Surely someone else could have done that much, given her just one of the thousand billion things a child needs to learn.

  “I don’t know—maybe he did. There’s too much to remember all at once, LaRee. I mean, you get out in the road and somehow everyone just knows which lane to drive in? How is that supposed to work? I can’t do this. I just don’t understand it. This is impossible. It’s the kind of thing your mother has to teach you or you never get it right!”

  Whatever went wrong, Vita was always going to assume that it was happening because Sabine was gone. And LaRee was always going to wonder if she was right. The last time she went to the dentist she’d had two cavities and he had said her molars were strangely soft. It was probably the lack of calcium. Vita had never liked milk, so Sabine had fed her hot chocolate with every meal. But since the night Sabine died, she had pushed the cup away, insisting that cocoa wasn’t the same at LaRee’s. Suppose Vita wasn’t wired for driving? Sabine hadn’t gotten a driver’s license until she was forty, and never used her car if she could avoid it. And Franco was a sea captain, not a driver. There might be some loophole in Vita’s mind that her parents would recognize and understand. Who knew what blood bond might have synchronized those three? She pulled Vita close with one arm, kissed the top of her head. They were not kin; there would be glitches between them. But all consolation went back to the great consolation, that first week, then the first year, of holding Vita tight against a grief so large it was beyond understanding. The connection there was different from that between a mother and daughter, but as strong as… well, she thought of the fishing line display at Gonsalves Bait Shop—strong as a spiderweb, some of them were, and they could go for miles.

  “You’ll get the hang of it; everyone does.”

  “I think I’m getting my period, that’s all,” Vita said, wiping her eyes. She had been gripping the wheel so hard that when she let it go, the color came back into her face and hands. “I’m fine, really. I’m sorry I’m yelling at you. You’re such a good teacher. You�
��re such a good mother.”

  “But not your own mother,” LaRee said gently. It was important to keep the door open to the truth, for whatever good it might bring to Vita, who had, from the very beginning, a determination toward goodness as pronounced and sometimes as crippling as a clubfoot.

  “You are my own mother,” Vita insisted. “You always will be.” There it was, that infernal attendance to LaRee’s needs, just when LaRee was trying to minister to hers.

  “Of course I am. I am!” LaRee said. “But… well, we don’t have to set a place for Sabine at the table, as if she was Elijah.… We both know she’s there.”

  “I don’t even remember her, LaRee. It doesn’t matter a damn.”

  “Ha-ha! It matters immensely. But you will learn to drive, and you will do it well. Mr. Webster already said so. It’s even possible that I will learn not to panic when you’re not sure what you’re doing.”

  “That would be a miracle,” Vita said.

  “We can always hope! Ready to try again?”

  “Mmm… maybe tomorrow. I’ve got cramps.”

  They switched seats. It was the beginning of May and the air was straight off the water, sharp and cold and smelling of seaweed. They’d stopped in front of the old Allerton farm—the land had long since been sold off for summer cottages but the farmhouse looked as it had two hundred years ago, daffodils ringing the old pump. “There, that’s better,” LaRee said, readjusting the mirror.

  “Ibuprofen,” Vita groaned.

  “Check the glove compartment.” She started the car, a big wagon she’d gotten when Vita was nine and they’d been part of a car pool. A hundred and thirty thousand miles and still going strong, though it could have been cleaner. “There’s a half-full water bottle in the backseat, I think.”

  “Nice, LaRee. Very sanitary.”

  “Any port in a storm,” LaRee said. She felt absolutely light-hearted now that she was back at the wheel. “We can stop at the SixMart instead, if you can stand to wait.”

  “I can’t.” Vita gulped the pills and sank against the window.

  LaRee remembered the first time she’d bathed her, tipping her head back with the cloth over her eyes, pouring warm water to rinse the blood out of her curls, wishing she could rinse all of it away so easily. There was something about tending to a child—whatever piece of yourself was hurt and longing felt the comfort, too. She’d found an old pill bottle in the back of her medicine cabinet the other day—Valium, eight years out-of-date. She never felt anxious enough to need a pill anymore.

  “We’ll make a hot water bottle when you get home. Actually, that’s probably why your chest got bigger all of a sudden. That tends to happen right before your period.”

  “It does?” Vita said. “No, it does not!” She sat straight up, wounded, appalled. “What kind of a thing is that to say? The best thing that’s ever happened to me, the most important thing in the world, and you’re saying it’s just hormonal? You… How can you?”

  Now the tears she had carefully avoided began to pour. “What’s wrong with me? What is it?” she asked. “Nobody likes me—they all want to hang around with one another and it’s just like I’m always in their way. I think… I don’t know, but something’s wrong.” She put down the visor so she could examine herself in the mirror on the back, find the flaw.

  “There is nothing wrong with you,” LaRee said. Her own head was slamming; she’d thought she’d calmed Vita down. Having a teenage daughter was like having your own personal little tornado—always spinning, though you never knew where it might touch down. For one thing, they thought that television represented reality. This in itself was a catastrophe. Vita was sharp enough to know that people in general didn’t live like the characters on Gossip Girl, but she couldn’t help feeling that life was strangely unscripted, random, and lonely.

  “You’re a beautiful young girl,” LaRee said. “A great student, and most of all, you’re kind.”

  And kindness was no mean feat. There were days—more days than she liked to admit—when LaRee herself could barely manage it. Mary Attlekin had brought her twins to the clinic that morning, with measles. Measles! Mary was just twenty herself, and when LaRee asked for the twins’ vaccination history, Mary had said that vaccinations were a scam, and she wasn’t going to have her kids poisoned like Kyle Monder had been. Kyle Monder had fetal alcohol syndrome, which his mother, understandably, preferred to attribute to his vaccinations. Of course LaRee couldn’t say that, or anything else, except to commiserate over the poor sick kids and settle them in examining rooms to wait for the doctor. A new doctor, Alice Nguyen, who was doing three years of rural medicine to reduce her student loans. She was no match for the parade of human frailties that ran through her office all day, and maybe least of all for Mary Attlekin, who had dropped out of high school when she got pregnant and lived pretty much according to her fears now. Alice lived by the cold light of current medical thinking, considering that it was a clinician’s job to remind each hairy, flabby soul shivering on a steel bed in an open gown of the many and various failures that had led him down the sorry path to illness. LaRee had tried to explain to Alice that Mary Attlekin’s allegiance to poverty and ignorance was a kind of loyalty to her family, who had always lived that way. Alice looked as if these were the cruelest words she’d ever heard. Well, maybe they were. LaRee was trying to respect Mary’s plight. Alice respected her potential.

  LaRee had lived here too long to remain optimistic. There was the time before Vita, then the time of trying to help her fit into the community, and finally the time of guiding her upward into a larger life than Oyster Creek could offer. If Vita were to thrive, to live with joy and energy and resilience, it would mean that LaRee was a success, a bigger success than Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey, someone who had faced down her terrors and made the world safe for one person who would otherwise have been lost. “My little kangaroo baby,” she used to call Vita, who would always zip herself into LaRee’s sweatshirt, as if it wasn’t enough to sit on her lap. Vita had been so delicate at heart that she’d seemed almost translucent, sticky, like a baby kangaroo, in need of a pocket. Twelve years later LaRee still felt as if the child’s skin wasn’t thick enough, that anything might harm her.

  And now she had her learner’s permit and she’d be driving away. They crossed the highway and drove through the familiar landscape, past rows of shuttered cottages along the deserted beach. This summer there would be laundry lines strung between them with bright towels and dripping bathing suits, and in every one a family with a dad grilling hamburgers and a mom calling the kids up off the beach for supper. Now the clouds were heavy and low and the bay a cold, opaque color that might as well be called Hypothermia Blue. The sign was up at Skipper’s Fry Shack—it was opening at the end of the week; but the giant neon ice-cream cone at Ice Cream Tuesday was still wrapped in a heavy tarp against the weather. While the rest of Cape Cod had become wealthy and modern, Route 6 still looked like 1957. The mini-golf, the drive-in movie, the little cottages just the size you could dare to dream about, because that dream was small enough that it might come true.

  “First rehearsal tomorrow!” LaRee said, falling back on the ancient maternal technique of distraction. High school hadn’t changed much, apparently, since her time—its main purpose was to be sure someone was always left out, thus reassuring the others that they were not. Vita’s uncertainty—her realization that there were many ways to see, many paths to try—left her utterly vulnerable at school, but at the theater she was loved for her openness and curiosity. In return she loved the theater—Mackerel Sky, their little summer theater with its one play a year—with an absolute passion. As soon as it started up in the spring Vita would be there every minute, rehearsing or working on the costumes or doing whatever was necessary.

  Which meant she would not spend hours upon hours on the back shore, as she had been doing lately. LaRee told herself that, after all, Vita could have been addicted to video games or, Cape Cod being what it was, cocain
e. In the winter when the sand was drifting against the snow fences and every parking lot held a shrink-wrapped boat, the kids would drive around the National Seashore sharing a blunt and a bottle of vodka, and call it friendship. And sometimes she thought she wouldn’t have minded if Vita was one of those kids. It could not be healthy or right, for a girl of sixteen to spend so much time alone, especially not back on those high, windy bluffs that looked out on nothing but the heaving ocean as far as the eye could see.

  Distraction worked. Excitement blazed up in Vita’s eyes. “I feel like I can’t wait another minute,” she said. “Adam Capshaw is in it, too—did you know?”

  “You may have mentioned that,” LaRee said, teasing her.

  “Oh, LaRee… he’s just so… so perfect.” Vita sighed. “Don’t you want to hear more about him?”

  And LaRee did, because when Vita was happy all the troubles on earth thinned and blew away, like fog on a breeze.

  7

  THE OUTER

  “I think I’ll take a walk while it’s still light out,” Vita said the minute they were home. She saw the flicker of concern on LaRee’s face, and saw LaRee suppress it, but was infuriated anyway.

  “You know, LaRee—if you could stop worrying for five whole minutes… or, maybe take it slower, stop worrying for just two or three minutes at a time.”

  “I thought you weren’t feeling well.”

  “Sometimes a walk helps.” She ran cross-country at school every fall; she was half addicted to the feeling of covering distance, each step pushing the last away.

  “Fair enough,” LaRee said. “I will try not to worry.”

  “Don’t try. Just don’t worry, okay? There’s nothing to worry about, except your worrying!”

  Then of course she was sorry, and she took LaRee’s hand in both of hers. “LaRee, you’re a good mother. A wonderful mother. You’ve been my mother for as long as I can remember, literally. I don’t remember Sabine, not one thing about her. Nothing about that night, either. It’s over and done; there’s nothing there for you to fix. I’m no different from anyone else, a regular old girl from Mackerel Bay. You don’t need to worry about me.”