The Salt House

by Lisa Duffy

  “You know who’s been asking for you?” he asked Kat.

  He whistled, and seconds later, a tiny, hairless dog bolted from around the corner, and Kat ran to meet it.

  “Kitty!” Kat squealed, bending to pick up the miniature dog, who jumped in her arms and crawled up her front, resting her head on Kat’s shoulder.

  “Can you take her in and get her some water?” Boon asked.

  Kat nodded and carried the dog inside.

  “That’s a dog?” I asked.

  “I take her for rides in the truck, and I’m in Karen’s good graces for the week.”

  Karen was his girlfriend, a tiny woman who wore colorful scarves and had a paint-your-own-pottery business in town. They’d been dating for more than a year, a record for Boon.

  “Kitty?”

  “It’s named after her favorite country singer.”

  I let it drop, unable to muster the energy to needle him.

  “Why’d you call anyway?”

  “To see if you wanted to go fishing.”

  “I fish for a living, Boon.”

  “Well, sit in the chair and drink beer, and I’ll fish.”

  “So I can watch you fuck up the line and not catch anything? I’ll spend my whole day untangling your mess.”

  He didn’t argue with me. He knew it was true.

  “Come over to the house instead. Kat can play in the pool, and I’ll flip you a burger.”

  “I’ve got to patch things up with Hope,” I said. “Clean up the mess from last night. And when the mess is clean, I’ve got a stack of traps in the back of the truck that need fixing.”

  He squinted at me. “This is what I’m talking about. Let me hire some high school kid to fix them for ten bucks an hour.”

  “They’re my traps. I fix them.”

  He sighed. “Do me one favor. Okay? I know you, and I know you like to handle your own shit. But promise me you’ll come to me before things get out of hand with the house. Banks aren’t fooling around now. The recession and all. They’re snatching up homes like it’s a game of monopoly. I can help, you know. . . . I want to help—”

  “You’ve helped enough, Boon,” I said, remembering pulling out my checkbook to pay for Maddie’s funeral services only to find they’d been paid in full; the envelope of cash Boon claimed had been left on his desk for me from an “anonymous donor”; the new engine for the boat he’d said he won in a poker game.

  Boon started to argue with me, and I put my hand up; we both knew I wouldn’t borrow money from him to dig me out of this hole. That was a rock bottom I wasn’t willing to hit. If I did, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get back up.

  Pigheaded. Stubborn. That’s what Boon called it. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was just Pop, his words in my head from all those years ago, remembering when I’d brought home a slingshot from school when I was a boy, the wood sanded smooth, glossy from a fresh coat of varnish. I’d gone down to Pop’s boat to show it off.

  “Where’d you get that?” Pop had asked.

  “I borrowed it from a friend,” I said, anxious to dig one of the rocks out of my pocket and give it a try.

  “Give it here,” Pop said, and held out his hand.

  “It’s not dangerous,” I argued. “I’m only going to shoot them into the water.”

  “Listen to me,” he said, taking it from me and putting it gently on the sorting table. “Give this back first thing in the morning.”

  “Why?” I whined.

  “Because first you borrow, and then you beg,” he told me. “There’s some wood down below. Go sort through it and find a piece without knots.” Two days later, after a long night in Pop’s workshop, my fingertips raw from all the sanding, I owned a slingshot.

  Now, Boon stepped back and threw up his hands. “You know where to find me if you need anything.” He stuck his hand out for me to shake, and when I took it, he pulled me into his shoulder, held me there in a grip.

  “Hang in there, brother,” he said. I tipped my head and he slapped me on the back and stepped through the door.

  Kat came out a minute later, the dog on her heels. She reached down and held the tiny animal with one hand and closed the wood-trimmed screen door with the other. The dog stood on her hind legs, clawed at the screen, and let out a flood of high-pitched barks that ended in a low, humanlike whine.

  “Don’t cry, Kitty. I’ll see you soon,” Kat crooned.

  We walked down the dock, Kat’s footsteps matching my own. She reached out and grabbed my arm and swung from it like Tarzan, the braids in her dark hair twisting like vines with the motion. When her feet hit the gangplank, she looked up at me and smiled at the loud noise it made.

  Her eyes stayed on me too long, though, and I knew she was watching me, like she had been all year. Watching, waiting, I guessed, for me to make everything better. There were no words to fix it, though. At least none that I owned.

  In the weeks after Maddie died, with Hope holed up in our bedroom, and my mother-in-law in the kitchen, baking, mixing, and icing, as if our sanity could be salvaged by a cupcake, or a homemade crumb cake, or a slice of carrot cake, if I could have, I would’ve slept on the boat.

  I didn’t know what to say to the girls back then. Especially Kat’s questions about Maddie. Why did she just stop breathing? Where was she now?

  Of course we didn’t mention the necklace.

  How do you tell a seven-year-old that her baby sister died choking on the necklace she got for her seventh birthday? You don’t. You lie. You say she just stopped breathing. You tell her sometimes that happens to babies. You say she’s safe in heaven now. You say too much. You say too little.

  And still she asks and then you stop saying anything because no matter what you say, there’s that same broken look on her face. So you work twelve-hour days on the water. Hours when there are no questions.

  On the boat with Kat, I pushed all of it out of my mind. All that mattered now was putting this past year behind us. I focused on that thought, untied the line, and shoved us off the dock into the black water.

  Above us, back at the shop, the dog named Kitty carried on, her cries following us, her high-pitched whine calling over and over for my daughter to come back.

  The sun had burned through the morning fog, and the sky was cloudless now. Kat sat on the seat and raised her face to the sun. The skiff moved smoothly over the water, and when I looked over at Kat again, she was curled up on the seat, her sweatshirt under her head as a makeshift pillow, her eyes closed.

  I turned the skiff away from home, heading in the other direction, out to the Salt House.

  It was named after a rocky spit of land on the easternmost point of Alden, connected to the mainland by a long wooden bridge. Great Salt Bay stretched out in front of the house, and Olde Salt River snaked past it, visible only from the bathroom window.

  The dirt road leading to the front door was marked by a wooden sign that read only SALT after time and weather erased the remainder of the words.

  Pop said the sign had always been that way. From the first day he’d moved there, when he was just a boy.

  When I was little, I’d imagined his family had moved to Alden for the beauty of it, for the water.

  But Pop had a different story.

  His father, Seamus, married with three kids by the time he was twenty-five, hated the water. He couldn’t swim and hadn’t held a fishing rod in his life. But his wife, Lydia, inherited the house from someone on her side of the family, and since Lydia was pregnant again, and not at all happy about bringing another baby into their already cramped duplex in South Philly, they sold whatever they couldn’t fit in their station wagon and drove straight through the ten-hour ride to the house on Great Salt Point.

  Pop would tell the story of that drive over and over through the years. Some details would change; the places they stopped to eat or the things they took with them, but his memory of seeing the house for the first time never faltered. The way he’d make his eyes open as wide as he could, let
his jaw hang open like it had a loose hinge. It was paradise, he’d say, effin’ paradise, with a whistle through his teeth.

  It was a poorly constructed barn made into a ramshackle farmhouse by Lydia’s self-proclaimed carpenter uncle. Rooms added to rooms with no logic; a hallway, long and narrow that ended at a wall, as if the uncle decided at the last minute that he’d grown tired of all that work and the room was no longer necessary. The walls were empty inside, not a speck of insulation. Cedar closets in the bedrooms, almost as large as the rooms themselves. Guy had those moths tapped down, Pop would say, shaking his head, no matter if the people inside were frozen solid.

  But that morning when Pop pulled up in front of the house, the sun was shining on a slope of grass that wandered down to the dark blue water. For a city boy who’d never seen the ocean, it was paradise.

  To please Pop even more, the house came with a boat, just a dinghy, but it had a motor and wasn’t in bad shape. Seamus wanted to sell it, and Lydia didn’t care much for it either. She was a young mother of three with one on the way. She had little use for a boat unless it was bringing food to the table or helping her with the mounds of laundry. But Pop wanted that boat, and he knew getting through to his mother was his only hope of keeping it.

  He made it his mission. When he wasn’t pestering her, he was working: painting the buoys that had sat unused on the boat for years: a bright green ringed with blue, the same color as the family coat of arms his mother hung next to the cross in the kitchen. He took out library books on lobstering and taught himself how to restring the old wooden traps that were piled in a heap against the back of the house. And he kept at his mother. And at her, and at her, and at her. After three months, she relented with one condition. He wasn’t to go out on the boat unless his father went with him.

  Pop would chuckle when he got to this part of the story. His mild-mannered father had whipped around to his wife when he heard this bit of news and said, “Have you gone feckin’ nuts, now, Lydia?”

  But Lydia had gone nuts, she told them both. Absolutely out of her mind from that boy on her all the time about that damn boat. She had her hands full enough with the other kids, and besides, a lobster or two a week, maybe some fish here and there, wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

  So two mornings a week at the crack of dawn, Seamus and Pop motored out and set two traps, all that Pop managed to salvage from the old heap. The boat had fared better than the gear, and the blue dinghy, with its tinny buzzing motor, became my grandfather’s home away from home.

  Seamus clung to the sides of the boat, white-knuckled and pale, for the near dozen trips they took. Finally he put his foot down and told Lydia that his son was more than capable of going out alone, and for the love of Pete, what was he going to do if something happened anyway? Pop would always act out this part of the story, mimicking his father. “It’s not that I can’t swim, honey,” he’d say, a wild look in his eye. “I sink, Lydia. Sink.”

  By the time I was born, Pop had built up steadily from those two traps to more than five hundred. When he died, Hope and I had inherited the house, and even though Pop had put in a woodstove and done some updates, it was still rustic living, and with the girls so young, we’d only used it as a summerhouse every year.

  Now it was another ten minutes before the house was in front of me, set back from the water. The lawn overgrown, a layer of green mold covering the back stairs, as thick as two-day stubble.

  Hope had been the one to suggest renovating the house, moving into it for good. Can you imagine, baby, she’d said, waking up to this? What a gift.

  We’d jumped in with both feet finally. Never in my life did I think I’d have two mortgages. But it was only supposed to be for a few months while we did renovations. We had a crew come in, and Boon was usually good for a day’s work as long as I had a cooler full of cold beer.

  We’d planned to move in at the end of summer last year and have the girls settled before school started.

  Then she died. We hadn’t been to the house as a family since. I knew Hope hadn’t been back at all.

  But I couldn’t stay away. Sometimes I drove over and mowed the lawn. Checked the house to make sure there were no problems. I didn’t feel the same way Hope did. She was afraid to go back. Afraid of all the memories piling up on her. I felt the opposite. But the more I pushed at her, the more she shut down.

  Hope had suggested we sell it. She’d said it once. And once only. I stayed silent. Because if I spoke, the words would have been that we wouldn’t come back from selling it. Our marriage. We wouldn’t make it back. Not just from her forcing me to do it. But from her giving up on it. Giving up on us.

  Looking at the house now, with the water shimmering in front of it, and the yellow clapboards so bright, it seemed hopeless. I had no idea how to get Hope to change her mind. How to make her feel how she did once about the house. What a gift.

   6

  Jess

  I crossed the street on my bike and headed to the wide paved road that divided the town like a lazy river.

  It took me ten minutes to reach the town dump, and I turned left down the pebble-strewn street that led to the housing development where this kid lived. Peggy’s address had been in the book on my mother’s desk, and now I hopped off my bike and pushed it slowly, trying to read the numbers on the doors. The Finns’ house was number 25.

  I’d lied to Kat. I wasn’t there because of what this Elliot kid said to her about the divorce. I was there to tell him to stop picking on her.

  I couldn’t make Kat stop worrying about my parents, but I could tell this little bully that if he called my sister Kat Poop one more time, the varsity wrestling team was going to show up at his house and twist him into a human pretzel. It was an empty threat—I didn’t know anyone on the wrestling team—but he wouldn’t know that.

  Of course, if he wasn’t outside playing, my plan was useless. But Kat had told me he carried a basketball with him everywhere he went. It was a hot Sunday in June. Worth a bike ride over to see if this kid was outside shooting hoops in his driveway.

  I was lost in this thought when I heard a train whistle, right on top of me, it seemed. My heart flipped and I flinched, catching something out of the corner of my eye. On the steep incline across the street, a train rumbled by, chugging past the houses sitting below it. When it was out of view, the air had a dead silence to it.

  Then came the sound of a ball bouncing. The thump, thump, thump of it coming from a house down the street. I pushed the bike in front of me until I stood a house away from two boys playing basketball in a driveway. A large tree stood on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, and I leaned my bike against it, shielding my body behind the wide trunk.

  Number 25 was a small box of a house, sandwiched between two others. Chipped-gold-plated numbers sat above each plum-colored door. A black metal mailbox was mounted next to the door with the word Finn stuck on it in individual stickers, each letter sitting lower than the last, with the last n hanging off the bottom edge of the mailbox, as though even the name wanted to run away from the house.

  Train tracks sat high on a steep slope behind the row of houses, and a massive chain-link fence ran as far as I could see to the left and right. From where I stood on the street, the rooflines of the three houses seemed to be holding the tracks up. I studied number 25 and imagined there were times in that house that it felt like the train was rumbling right through it. A hundred tons of smoking black metal steaming around the bend into your pancakes, all warm and syrupy on a cold winter morning.

  No wonder why this kid was hassling Kat. I’d be angry if I lived here too.

  I was leaning against the tree, staring at the house when I felt a puff of air on the back of my neck, thick and earthy, like the smell in the back of my father’s pickup truck after he hauled the wet leaves from the lawn to the dump.

  I turned quickly, the sharp teeth of the bike pedal digging into my ankle. I hopped to get away from the bike, my foot
slipping off the street curb, twisting as I fell. I landed on my butt on the street, my hands slapping the pavement underneath me.

  I looked up. Standing in front of me with a half-burned cigarette in one hand and a plastic cup in the other was Mr. Finn.

  “Boo,” he said quietly.

  He wore a shirt that said Plumbers Lay Good Pipe. The sleeves were cut, the fabric torn and stretched, giving the impression that his huge muscles had ripped through the material.

  I heard something over my shoulder and turned to see the two boys pointing at me and snickering. My ankle was throbbing, my hands pulsing from smacking against the street. I bit the inside of my cheek, forced the tears back into my eyes, and stood up.

  Mr. Finn sucked on his cigarette, blew the smoke out of the side of his mouth, and said in a short bark to the boys, “Get over here.”

  They stopped laughing when they heard him, and the smaller boy lagged behind the tall one as they walked over to us.

  “You think that’s funny?” Mr. Finn asked, gesturing at me with his elbow.

  The tall boy looked at me, and I could tell by his eyes that he thought it was funny, and when he looked at Mr. Finn and shrugged, the smaller boy took a step back, away from all of us.

  “Go home, you little pissant,” Mr. Finn said, and the smaller boy took off down the street like he knew what would happen if he had to be told twice.

  “Here,” Mr. Finn said, holding the cup out to me, his cigarette in the other hand.

  I took it, and he reached out with his free hand and slapped the back of the boy’s head. It was a sharp clap in the air, and I dropped the cup. It hit the ground and splashed onto Mr. Finn’s pants.

  The liquid was clear, small drops on my hand that felt sticky and thick.

  “Ah, shit,” he said, swiping at his pants. “So much for a little hair of the dog.”

  I reached down and picked up the cup. My hand shook when I held it out to him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He took the cup, waved off the apology, and flicked the boy’s chin up with his index finger. “Who raised you? Don’t embarrass me. Apologize to this young lady for laughing at her when she was in pain.”