The Harbormaster's Daughter Read online

  “I worry, therefore I am,” LaRee said. “I think that’s sort of a common thread among mothers. And I don’t want you to forget Sabine… to lose her. But you’re right—there is nothing to worry about. Go, have a good walk.”

  “I will,” Vita chirped, and set off up the path behind the house, into the woods.

  “Did you take a coat?” she heard LaRee call. “It’s raw out there!”

  “I took a coat!” Vita called back. To herself she said, I took a goddamned coat. It was raw, and breathing the cold air deep, she felt a calm come over her; her heart stopped the infuriating slam-slam-slam that had totally to do with people, that sense they were always watching and she was always doing something wrong. This afternoon she had raced out of Western Civ so she could get to English class a minute early: Adam would be getting out of his class in that room and she’d have the chance to say hi. He had been the first one out, too—so he’d found her standing there waiting for him; she’d spit out her practiced greeting, “Hi, Adam! The Tempest tomorrow!” and died. He looked around to see who she was talking to in her “casual, natural” tone from a television show, and when he realized she was focused on him, he’d blushed and mumbled, “Oh, yeah, right,” and looked down at the floor. Who did she think she was? A normal person with friends and a family? No, she was a circus curiosity, the girl with the dead mother. Adults snuck glances at her when they thought she wasn’t looking; kids wanted to be sure she knew they were better than she was, that they were real Portagees, real citizens of this town. And Adam did not want her acting like she was his friend.

  At the outer shore you could count on being alone, even in the middle of the summer. And on a cold spring day like this, with the shadblow trees blooming in the damp air and every other bud closed tight against the wind, she would not see a soul. Looking back through the trees, she saw the low roof of the house, the moss growing on the east side where the hillside blocked the sun. They needed to put a bleach solution on the shakes before the trees leafed out, and to prune the wisteria back. LaRee loved her bungalow and its half acre, but sometimes it seemed to Vita more like a burrow, a place to hide out from life.

  Coming out onto the blacktop of Grace Pond Road, Vita heard a truck downshift on the highway at the bottom of the hill, and otherwise only the wind. If she’d lived in a different time, she might have come up here on some essential errand, maybe taking a cow to pasture or picking rose hips for a jam to prevent scurvy. She’d have looked out from the highest dune, scanning the horizon, hoping to see her father’s ship returning.

  Grace Pond Road ended at Outer Way, a flat, straight stretch of blacktop that ran along the high ridge of the cape, looking down to the barrier beaches on one side, and back through the furze—that’s what Shakespeare would have called it: “Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground. Long heath, brown furze, anything.”

  The opening of The Tempest. That was the play they would begin to work on tomorrow, the perfect play for Oyster Creek, as Hugh, the director, had said. Were they not all stranded here, reliant on one another whether they could bear one another or not? Did they not live among heath and furze, short trees with branches like bony hands reaching from the grave, thorned and crusted in lichen, sprouting thick, brittle leaves and maybe sour little plums with huge pits? Beach plums, cranberries… hard, bitter fruits that grew tough enough, low enough to live where the wind never stopped blowing. LaRee would remind her there were apple trees, too, and even pear trees along the back roads—but she would remind LaRee that those trees were here only because a ship full of seedlings had wrecked off Cahoon Hollow years and years ago. This place was known for its grit, and its wreckage. Rosa rugosa—rugged rose. Jack pine and scrub oak, covered with windblown sand year on year so that only their tops protruded from the dune. And against the ground, the furze: blueberry, bearberry, cranberry, red-topped British soldier, and other plants that kept their heads down to survive.

  The billboard for Doubloons loomed out of the hill, the only man-made thing in sight. OCEANFRONT DINING! RAW BAR! LIVE MUSIC! The letters had nearly been scoured away by blowing sand. A lone seagull hovered in close as if considering these options, but it was only looking for a bit of asphalt to smash a clam on, and it succeeded, flapping down, then pulling out the meat and soaring away. After Doubloons, the road curved southward, empty, and the ocean stretched east for a thousand miles.

  Vita took the path through the bushes to the top of the bluff. The land stopped suddenly where the last storm had bitten it off, and there she stood, alone, high above the ocean, the waves slamming one on the next, surging up the beach. There were two shoals slightly offshore here, and between them a riptide would form when there was a storm nearby—last summer a young girl had been caught in it and carried out to sea. The family was visiting from Missouri; they didn’t know anything about the ocean and the father had swum out thinking he would save his daughter, but both were pulled under and drowned. It had happened before, LaRee said, and they’d put up signs, but there were miles and miles of beach out here and no one could watch over all of it. Vita felt a strange satisfaction in looking down at that spot—knowing that savagery was part of nature, that it had torn up other families, too.

  You weren’t supposed to slide down the dune for fear of causing an avalanche, so she pulled herself up onto the porch of the Shillicoth house, a shuttered gray behemoth that had been a lifesaving station back in the days of clipper ships and shipwrecks. She always expected to feel a ghost catch her by the collar as she crossed the Shillicoths’ deck, and she avoided the rotten board in the corner out of some superstition that she would be pulled through the hole.

  A ghost—no such luck. The wind moaned constantly, but it was only wind, not a lost being returned for one last good-bye, offering a whisper of advice or admonition. Still Vita felt at home up here, in contact with something essential. Sere, stark, desolate… real. The closest thing she could come to remembering something of the long night when her mother’s life bled away. No image was left, though—only the cold misery, the physical feeling.

  She studied the horizon as carefully as she used to look for Sabine in a crowd when she was little. It was mortifying now, to remember how she used to “see” her mother, running through the woods out the side window, or passing the other end of the supermarket aisle. She would always call LaRee, who would miss the sighting by a second, then say something like, “Isn’t it nice to know her spirit is still here with us?”

  The right words, what she’d been taught by the grief man: Acknowledge the child’s sense of things without denying the loss. LaRee was smart that way—she had known what Vita needed to believe in. But Vita was smart, too; she could hear LaRee humoring her, and she hated it. It had just been a part of her growing, that one day she stopped looking for her mother and found herself just looking, watching the horizon like a sailor. She stopped seeing Sabine, but she still saw plenty: the varying flight patterns of a swallow and a dove, the S-shaped track of a snake moving over a dune. She’d heard the whales were back already and she looked out for a spout now: a puff of mist that would blow up out of the water and hang just above the surface for an instant before the breeze swept it away. She saw only splashes, as the gannets drifted high, spotted fish, and plunged after them, straight down, fifty feet maybe, into the water. That was the kind of thing she noticed—the differences between splashes—and when she did notice, she felt the way she used to when she caught a glimpse of Sabine. It was like having a special power, one that she had learned from her mother.

  An oil tanker was passing, way out in the gray distance where sea was indistinguishable from sky. She started down the steps to the beach. From there she could walk the wrack line, as the men from the lifesaving station had years ago. They lived here through the winter, watching from the belfry, walking the beach—four miles north, then four miles south, through every night of the winter—looking for ships that had foundered on the shoals, hoping to save the sailors.
But the chances were slim. The same wind-driven waves that had pushed the ship toward land would batter it to splinters. Often enough the coast guardsmen couldn’t get close enough to rescue a soul.

  It was slack tide, a wide beach and… yes. The wreck—her wreck, as she considered it—was right there, its bones exposed like the ribs of a dead animal. The ship had been buried in the sand for years—centuries probably. Each rib was made of a single board, three inches thick and maybe thirty feet long, bent so it curved into the shape of a keel, secured by pegs. The big storm last week had uncovered it, but at this time of year no one walked here except Vita, and she did not mention it to anyone.

  She wouldn’t have paid attention to it, any more than any of the carcasses that washed up here—seagulls, sharks, once a gelatinous blob the size of an armchair in which she could find no eye, mouth, or fin. She wasn’t one of those people who wrote poems about beach glass and counted a cast-off horseshoe crab shell as a sacred totem. But Hugh had said he wanted to build Caliban’s hut out of driftwood, so she’d come out here one warm day in January and dragged home an old branch she found tangled in the seaweed along the wrack line. The next week she got a hurricane flag, square with a thick red border, still attached to the rope it had flown from. It must have come loose in the wind and blown out to sea, maybe at Chatham; the current flowed north from there.

  It had become an obsession; the more wood she found, the happier Hugh would be, and the more she would belong at the theater. She’d get itchy if she hadn’t been out to the beach for a while, worried that she had missed some essential flotsam the way some people worried they’d missed their chance to win the lottery.

  The wreck had never been completely uncovered and it was already partly blanketed with sand again. But she had already broken pieces off— a backpack full of old, wormy-looking wood that had crumbled into pieces along its grain. The best piece was a massive joint that made her think of a giant’s shoulder, crusted with salt, riddled with holes, stained black and rust from… well, she didn’t know what. It would look just right as flotsam scavenged from an ancient shipwreck, because that was what it was. She couldn’t wait to give it to Hugh.

  There was a little hole, like a clam hole, in the sand, and though she hated clams she couldn’t resist digging. She clawed through the sand, trying to come in six inches under the hole—and hit something hard, pulling it up in a cold handful of black sand. It was… a key, maybe? It was old, and it must belong to the ship somehow; and really, you weren’t supposed to take as much as a single cranberry from the National Seashore. But it had been out here for centuries, buried in the sand with no one knowing—it might as well be on her dresser at home.

  And it belonged to the ship, which, she had come to feel, belonged to her. Like every single thing that floated, it would have been named for someone’s daughter. The Teresa, the Sweet Shyanne, the Little Dorotea… When Vita was little she used to watch them line up at the pier for the Blessing of the Fleet, every girl in her class riding with her family in a boat with her own name on it. She’d boil herself into a black fury over it back then. She wanted to be like the rest of them, with a father and a fishing boat to be sprinkled by the bishop of the Fall River diocese on the first day of summer. By now she understood that families, and boats, were fragile, subject to the wind and tide, likely to wreck on an unseen shoal. That was why art mattered. The Tempest would be whole and beautiful… full of truth. They would shape it together, she and Hugh and the others, and they would make it out of what they knew of life, what it had been like to live on an unmapped planet hundreds of years ago, and what it was like to live on an unmoored one now.

  There, the day had been set right again. Her hands were freezing, but she had in her pocket another piece of whatever puzzle it was she was trying to put together for herself. She was ready to try driving again, to forgive LaRee. The Shillicoths had taken the last few feet of their beach steps in for the winter, so she had to grab the bottom of the handrail and pull herself up. Then up she went and across the porch again, and home by one of the fire roads that cut through the woods, on quick, light feet.

  8

  AS SEEN ON TV

  “It went over to my forgetting side,” Vita had explained to the patient detectives who asked her again and again what she had seen that night, what she had overheard. She had believed, then, that by tilting her head she could shake things over into the dark and get rid of them. It worked like a lobster trap, though: easy to get things over to the forgetting side but almost impossible to pull them back. The psychiatrist LaRee used to take her to had asked if she wanted to keep her memories of her mother to herself, feeling as if she might lose Sabine if she talked about her.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to share when you don’t have as much as you need for yourself,” he’d said, his voice so careful she didn’t trust it. She could never seem to think when she was in his office, even though she was allowed to go out into the waiting room as often as she needed to, to be sure LaRee was still there. Dr. Karp was a nice, nice man, and she had wanted to be nice back, but… she would end up singing, “Sur le pont d’Avignon.”

  “That’s a pretty song,” he said. “Where did you learn it?”

  “Can I go say hi to LaRee?”

  He always said “of course” because he thought she’d feel safe enough to stop asking. But that was wrong. “I’m sorry,” she’d said, starting to cry.

  “Why?”

  “Sorry I can’t remember.”

  She knew what Sabine had looked like, from the picture on her bureau of a thin, anxious-looking woman with a round-eyed baby on her lap. It was the only picture she had of the two of them, and Vita had stared at it so hard for so long that it didn’t seem to show real people any more than a valentine cutout did a real heart.

  Her first clear memory was of seeing Sabine, though—seeing her out the window, soon after she went to live with LaRee. It was just a glimpse, but Vita had known it was her mother, moving among the trees on the hillside above the house.

  “LaRee!” she’d said. “Mama’s out there!”

  “Oh, Vita…” LaRee had sounded so sad, had lifted her onto her lap and kissed her. “What do you mean? What did you see?”

  “She went through the woods, right over there.” Vita had pointed to the spot. She could see it exactly even now, the way the lower branch had broken and the vine looped down. The snow had been so sparkly, with tracks through it as if a single doe had crossed there. No footprints. Even now Vita could see the white snow and the black trees and her mother glancing over her shoulder as she slipped between them. It had not occurred to her to knock on the window, or to call for Sabine. Somehow she knew that wasn’t how it worked. She’d cuddled deeper into LaRee’s lap, sucking her thumb and looking out the window at the sunlight that fell across the space where her mother had been.

  At first LaRee had been excited and happy when Vita said she’d seen Sabine, but later she would smile sadly; then she became perplexed and finally worried. It was LaRee who sat beside her all night when she was sick, telling her stories about the tiny girl who lived in a bird’s nest and had adventures in the trees. LaRee was her guide to every beauty—the pearly seashells they gathered along the wrack line at low tide, the winter picnics on the iced pond, where they drank hot cider from a thermos at a table built of snow. When Vita had been frustrated to the point of fury, tearing up the pictures she’d colored because they didn’t look exactly like what she saw, LaRee had pulled a book of impressionist paintings off the shelf for her. “Have you ever seen a starry night that looks like that? But starry nights feel like that sometimes.” If someone was mean at school, Vita would put her hand over her heart and think of LaRee until she felt safe and steady again. She didn’t want to hurt LaRee’s feelings, so she had stopped telling LaRee when she saw Sabine. Which was sad, because nothing ever seemed quite real until she had told it to LaRee.

  Of Franco she had all too many memories. On Tuesday nights LaRee would take her to t
he Walrus and Carpenter, where the bartender would bring her a Shirley Temple and, if it wasn’t too crowded, sit down at the table with them. Sometimes he’d have a little gift for her—a tiny flowerpot with real flowers growing in it, or a Hello Kitty pencil. All week she looked forward to Tuesdays, until one midsummer day at the beach when she looked around to see fathers everywhere, chasing after volleyballs, building sand castles, even just sleeping in the sun. Where was hers?

  LaRee decided the time had come. “He’s right here, actually. Franco at the Walrus? He’s your dad.”

  Vita had stamped her feet. This was wrong, a lie or a mistake like everything else, something she was supposed to believe even though she could see by the evidence that it wasn’t true. A dad lived in the house with you, pushed you on the swing, lifted you sleeping out of the backseat of the car and carried you through the dark to tuck you safe in your bed. “He is not my dad. He’s the bartender! How is he my dad?”

  “Well, he and your mom were in love…before you were born… and…”

  They made a date for him to come visit—it would be like Christmas, a time when people were filled with warmth and kindness just because of the day on the calendar. LaRee baked a blueberry pie with a lattice crust, Vita up on a stool helping. She would run into Franco’s arms as if he were a soldier just home from the war, he’d swing her up and hold her tight in both arms, and at that moment he would begin to be her father and everything would feel solid and certain.

  Except that he was not returning from war, he was emerging from a lie. He stood there with Danielle in the driveway, looking nervous and obsequious, guilty, while Vita clung to LaRee in the doorway.