“Who?” asked Livy.
“Your mom.”
“I—”
“I knew someone in a halfway house who replaced his windshield wiper fluid with vodka and ran a small hose into the car so anytime he wanted a shot he just toggled the wiper arm. He’d sit in the driveway and get plastered. They kept searching his room and his car but could never find out how he did it. Ingenious. You might like those folks. The control-freak part of you would be in agony but they’re charming in their way. What do you think would happen if you called her?”
“My mom?” asked Livy.
“We could role-play the conversation if that would make the call easier.”
Livy looked horrified. Sarah laughed.
“Got it. Not your kind of role-play.”
Sarah crossed her arms and looked at Livy. She walked toward the kitchen then turned and came right back.
“You know it’s not just you. I grew up here and that asshole lives in my town.”
“Sarah, you should see his daughter. That girl doesn’t need one more thing to make her life harder.”
“You don’t get to decide alone.” Sarah’s jaw tightened and she burned holes in the carpet with laser eyes. “This is how they do it. They force you to choose.” She jabbed her finger in Livy’s direction. “They force you to be the better person and act magnanimously. They rely on it.”
“I do not have a magnanimous bone in my body,” said Livy, “trust me.”
Sarah tapped her thumb against Livy’s collarbone in agitation.
“You should see her,” said Livy. “It’s written all over her. I don’t think she has anyone. I’ll be fine but she’s a mess. Please.”
“Fuck! Okay. Fuck. I will not out him publicly but I will warn everyone I know.”
“That’s fair.”
“And tell them to warn everyone they know.”
“Also fair.”
Sarah paced in a tight circle then let out a long breath. Livy thought it was over so she started to make a grocery list on the palm of her hand with a pen but then Sarah screamed, “I fucking hate this!” at the top of her lungs and Livy dropped the pen. She stared wide-eyed, on alert for more yelling, but none came.
“I’ll respect it,” said Sarah after a minute, “but I think you’re wrong.”
“Thank you.”
“By the way. We’re going to have guests. We’ll need to set up the room you’re staying in.”
“Of course. Just let me know when they’re coming.”
“I don’t know when they’re coming. They’re tall-ship sailors.”
“Tall-ships sailors? How are they getting here?”
Sarah rolled her eyes.
* * *
—
Livy was on her way to work a week later when she saw the high square sail of a fully rigged 1800s tall ship sailing up the Gastineau Channel. She heard commands shouted by a single voice and repeated in chorus. Fenders up! Fenders up. White eggs in the morning dark, the floats were raised from the water. When they reached the dock, a woman by the bowsprit threw a coil of yellow line. More lines and they made fast to the bollards. Starboard watch coil and hang! Coil and hang. Portside watch lay aloft! Portside watch laying aloft.
A crowd formed, watching the sailors climbing the shrouds. A hundred feet up in the dark, leaning out over the yard, tipping forward and back like seesaws. Livy heard the command to harbor furl followed by cursing. A gangway went down between the ship and dock. A burly woman with brown hair, a flat face, and wide-set puffy eyes carried a sandwich board across.
Discover the days of sail! Tour the authentic Russian ship the Neva.
Livy noticed that the ship on the sandwich board wasn’t the same as the one docked before her. This Neva had three masts where the one in the picture had two.
* * *
—
That night Livy heard the sailors on Sarah’s porch before she got halfway up the hill. She counted five voices in the dark in at least four conversations.
So we’re making for Death’s Door to avoid Hell’s Asshole…
And they throw us a party, roast a pig in our honor, set off fireworks, open bar, trays of chocolate, and we’re starting to sea stow and go…
Yeah, well I heard you went all the way to Liverpool with your sea cock hanging out.
Laughter.
Oh fuck you. There was some pretty valiant shit done on that boat you know nothing about.
The gun captain’s gone full Crazy Larry.
Not speaking ill of the dead. I just think someone should have taken them to court years ago.
No, Cinderella, we changed our minds. Not until you harbor furl.
Hotter than a welder’s ass.
Say again?
Hotter than a half-fucked fox in a forest fire.
I heard he was third mate when it went down.
Some things are unnecessary.
Blacker than a cow’s insides.
Sarah opened the porch door and told them to shut up and get inside. Livy entered on their heels. In the kitchen, she was introduced to the sailors of the starboard watch, mostly all women. The one who’d set up the sandwich board was Marne. She was also the one giving the other sailor hell about the sea hen, or sea cock, whatever.
Three sailors bunked in Livy’s room that night.
So they walk us right through the sandwich line and out the back door with only a plate each. All these re-creationists coming up. Hi! I’m Jim Smith the tinder. Elijah Owen the blacksmith, if you need a horse well-shod, I’m your man. And we’re crawling with chiggers in our tarries and James is wearing that tie-dyed Phish shirt and Shaney just dyed her hair blue.
I remember that day. I got hit on twice by the Mayor of Imaginarytown.
Did he want to see what you looked like dressed as a handsome cabin boy?
I slept on the deck and got woken up by fucking musket fire.
Livy asked them to be quiet. They apologized. Two minutes later they were whispering to each other like drunks.
Yeah, totally, on my last boat you weren’t supposed to clip in. Someone was washed over, gone.
A bunch of fucking yachties is what they got…
Yeah, well you can go over just walking around on deck.
I love these bastards who say it’s not traditional to clip in. Sailors used to lash themselves to shit all the time in big weather.
A hand for you, a hand for the ship.
Say again?
One hand for you. One hand for the ship.
* * *
—
At 2:00 a.m. Livy gave up and made for the living-room chair. Sarah heard her and invited her to sleep in her room. A lit candle flickered in a jar by the mattress. She looked at the butcher paper on the walls and it seemed different. It wasn’t gibberish but something more delicate; Sarah’s mind captured on paper, how she thought of the world. Looking in the candlelight now, words and names, Sarah was tracking gossamer belief systems, childhood relationships. Her creativity reseeded itself on each wall, tendrils, vines.
Livy lay down nearby. She was nervous. She wasn’t sure how close to Sarah she should be. Her meters were failing.
“What do you think of them?” Sarah asked.
“They seem to mean well. How did you meet them?”
“Marne and a couple of the others were part of that coalition against PRAJNA last year.”
Livy could feel the heat from Sarah’s body so she scooted back. Her hands were shaking. Her own body was untrustworthy.
“They’re my free ride to Panama,” said Sarah.
“That’s a slow ride.”
Sarah took out her gold drop earrings and put them by the base of the candle jar.
“What’s your deal with Panama?” asked Livy.
“I lik
e the sun.”
“They don’t make sunblock for skin like yours.”
“It’s called clothing.”
Livy smiled. “And buildings.”
Sarah got into her sleeping bag.
“But really, why there?”
“Oil companies. Capital. It’s one of those places assholes meet and hide their money.”
“I thought that was everywhere,” said Livy. She ran her hand across the carpet. “Sarah, I don’t know how to say this.” She paused. “Don’t waste your life on politics.”
Sarah didn’t say anything. Livy felt like she was staring so she looked away.
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?” Sarah asked. “My landlord might let you take over this place. It’s not bad with a roommate.”
But Livy didn’t really hear any of this. Behind Sarah’s flame halo of hair, words flickered and blinked in the candlelight. Circles and circles, arrows and arrows. Sarah shifted and those went away, now lost behind her shoulder, exposing a list of names. Some were underlined, others had stars by them. One was her father’s name. Livy turned her head slightly as if seeing it in the periphery would make it make sense, but when she turned her head back it was the same.
Livy gestured toward the wall. “Who are those people?”
Sarah twisted around to look. “Board members. Investors.” She resettled herself.
Cyril’s name was now slightly higher over Sarah’s head, as if it had risen in the night sky. The importance of his name, a shell containing a vapor, nothing at all. The strangeness of it next to the rightness of it, because everything in this moment was right. Livy wanted it no other way. If he was part of it, so be it. Whatever it was, let it all come.
Just before Sarah blew the candle out, Livy traced again the line of her shoulders with her eyes. Sarah’s body was unlike other bodies. Her narrow ankles and bony elbows, her long neck and thin limbs, they were not brittle like Livy originally thought but made of unbreakable silver metal. Her arteries painted fine blue lines on her arms and wrists and temples. She was almost translucent and reminded Livy of the plastic doll she’d had as a kid that was clear so you could see its organs. Livy wondered if the blue veins leading to and from Sarah’s heart would be visible on her breastbone.
You can’t fall in love in two weeks. Anybody who says so is lying.
You can’t fall in love in three weeks. If you do, you’re in love with a projection.
Livy could deal with the idea that her feelings might be lies. But the idea that Sarah was just a creature of her mind, that was unbearable. Even if today was the last day she ever saw her, it meant a great deal to Livy that Sarah was in the world.
50 The Proposal
IT WAS EARLY NOVEMBER when Essex was granted a full day of liberty. He decided to rent a car and drive south to see if he could find Cheyenne. Kirsten had given him Justine’s address, but that was more than a month ago. Given his sister’s ability to burn through entire social scenes in under a week, it was just as likely that she was a thousand miles away as it was that she was in North Carolina. But having nothing better to do he drove, taking the scenic route, not rushing, but heading generally toward where Cheyenne might be.
Parking at the monastery, he wandered into the temple where he found a man dusting an enormous green Buddha. The man had a coastal Southern accent, the kind Essex had come to love and associate with an open welcome. When Essex asked about Justine, the man’s expression changed and a reserve set in, but he was polite and told Essex where he needed to go.
The deciduous trees were bare, the swamp as much mud as water. Once on the small dock he saw Cheyenne through the windows of the yurt. He watched her for a minute, stunned that she could not feel him, then knocked.
She looked up but did not move because he could not be there.
“Aren’t you going to let me in?”
She jumped to open the door. “Is everyone okay?”
“They’re fine,” he said, pushing on the screen door, which was swollen in the humidity, until it popped open and he walked into the yurt.
“What’s your problem?” he asked.
“I thought you might have bad news.”
She hadn’t seen him in almost five months. He had become oddly muscular and his hair was shorn. His blue nuclear-reactor-pool eyes followed her. He shifted in his cheap Mexican shirt with roses embroidered at the collar. It didn’t quite fit in the shoulders, so he rounded them to compensate. She noticed his caving posture but attributed it to something else. There was still a shadow of late-summer tan fading on the back of his neck and on his forehead. Damp from crossing the swamp at dusk, irritated, his ears reddened and the skin around his hairline turned pink while she took him in.
“You look like you should have a serial number tattooed on your neck,” she said.
“You should see us in uniform. We’re a bucket of matching marbles.”
“What are you doing here?”
Justine called from the dock, “Get the door. My hands are full.”
Essex saw panic on Cheyenne’s face.
“What is with you?” he said.
He opened the door for the woman because he was closer.
As Justine came in, he stepped back to give her room and was standing behind the screen as she passed. He saw immediately what Cheyenne had seen when she first arrived: Livy.
Justine set the groceries down.
“This is my brother, Essex,” said Cheyenne.
Justine introduced herself then went back out for another bag of groceries. As soon as she was gone Essex turned on Cheyenne.
“Does Livy know?” he said.
“Know what?”
Annoyance crossed his face.
“Livy doesn’t care about any of this,” said Cheyenne.
“What about her?” He pointed to Justine. “Does she know?”
Cheyenne said nothing.
“You know what, I don’t care,” he said. “What you do is your business. But if Livy ever asks me I’m going to tell her the truth.”
“She won’t ask.”
“Just letting you know I’m not a part of this.”
Justine returned.
“So you’re Kirsten’s boy,” she said.
“Not biologically,” said Cheyenne.
“Yes,” said Essex, “I am her son.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in the Midwest?” said Cheyenne. “Or on some kind of island?”
“They sent me to Lejeune for infantry training. It wasn’t my choice.”
Cheyenne laughed. “I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Do you know where you’ll end up?” asked Justine.
“Wherever they want him too,” said Cheyenne.
“The Middle East most likely,” said Essex, looking at Cheyenne. “Not yet, though.”
Cheyenne started to put groceries away. An animal scurried across the steps. The sound was followed by a small splash into the water. Essex straightened like he’d woken up.
“What time is it?” he asked.
Justine glanced at the west-facing windows. “About six.”
“It feels later,” he said.
“It’s the swamp,” said Cheyenne. “The sun sets earlier here because of the trees.”
“The sun sets at the same time with or without the trees,” said Essex.
“No, it doesn’t, because we turn around the sun and what we see or don’t see is relative. And since we invented the whole sunset thing, if it appears to be dark earlier, the sun sets earlier.”
Essex brushed the wrinkles out of his shirtsleeves. He was sure she was wrong.
“I have to be back in a few hours. I want to take you to dinner,” he said.
“You should go,” said Justine. “There’s a spaghetti place about twenty minutes north of town. Y
ou’ll have just enough time if you leave now.”
Cheyenne grabbed her jacket and a flashlight. Justine waved them off.
At the dock’s edge Cheyenne shone a light on the black swamp water. Essex stepped where she directed but his leg disappeared up to midcalf and he wondered if she was doing it on purpose.
“You should have taken your shoes and socks off,” she said.
“They were already wet.”
She stepped into the swamp with her shoes on and went around him.
“I can’t believe you haven’t told her,” said Essex.
“Save it for the restaurant, please.”
He stopped, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted into the trees. “Justine looks exactly like Livy! Livy, Livy, Livy, Livy…” adding the echo the heavy swamp air couldn’t offer.
Cheyenne turned to slosh back to the yurt but Essex grabbed her arm. “Come on. It’s a joke.”
“It’s not a joke. I’m sure she heard you.”
“What’s going on with you? You’re not a liar. You’ve never even been able to keep a secret. What are you doing?”
“Justine and I could be related. We’re alike in ways that aren’t physical.”
He looked at her in shadow light.
“You don’t need to be ashamed about being wrong. No one is going to hold it against you. You’ve been wrong lots of times and you’ve certainly fucked up plenty.”
She stopped. “Apologize for that.”
“I’m not apologizing. It’s true.” He threw back his head and sang, “Livy, Livy, Livy…”
* * *
—
The spaghetti place was not a spaghetti place but a diner that advertised Chinese and American food with two pasta dishes, spaghetti with meatballs and lasagna. After five, the paper place mats went away and were replaced by red-and-white-checked vinyl tablecloths. Oil candles in scalloped glass holders shaped like eggplants were lit at the end of the day.
“Get fried rice or orange chicken and I’ll split it with you,” said Cheyenne.
“Order a full meal.”
“I am. I’m having lasagna too.”
The Great Offshore Grounds Page 26
