The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  “And you bent forward and sang to your stomach.”

  “I did. He could hear me. Not the words, but me. Waves of me.”

  Robert smiles.

  “You weren’t a very good singer.”

  “I’m still not.”

  Irene rubs her eyes and attempts to pull up the blanket around her legs.

  “Let me help,” Robert says, and rolls the blanket back above her ankles.

  Her feet aren’t swollen, but they are a bluish color.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  He presses the bottom of her foot with his thumbs, running his nail up the wrinkled crevice, moving toward her toes, covering them with his hands, massaging the sides of her foot. Then he moves to the other foot, developing a rhythm as though picking up an instrument he once knew how to play, remembering how to play, simple and flawed, but his own hand, his own style, recognizable to Irene.

  No one else can see how beautiful he is at failing.

  “We had some good times, didn’t we?” she says.

  “We did.”

  “And we loved each other, and the boys, and we were happy.”

  “We were.”

  “That’s good,” she says and closes her eyes.

  Once she is back asleep, Robert bends down and smells her hair, the sweet scent of an almond split open. He whispers he loves her. Then he quietly leaves the room.

  * * *

  Irene feels the sheet lower and spread out over her, falling like a shadow, landing softly, covered by a blanket and her head pushed up, then let to drop onto the soft pillows.

  Nathaniel and Andrew stand beside the bed. She grips their hands. They are a secret of images and patterns, lost, then found, then lost again; her creations, as she had made them, that very instant they came from her was the last stroke. Then they were changed and rearranged, damaged, challenged, called by different names, hung in other rooms, reemerged as new works, no longer hers, but of those people they had encountered once they left home.

  “Nathan, you were so big,” she says. “You were so beautiful.”

  “As a baby?” he asks.

  She tries to speak.

  “She needs to be resting,” Andrew says.

  Nathan kisses her on the lips. She strokes the hair on the sides of his head.

  Then they are gone.

  Irene struggles to free herself from the tucked sheet, finally kicking the end free and letting the cool air flow over her legs. She relaxes, listens to her heart pump hard, as if she has just finished a race, and is standing on the track with her hands clasped behind her head. She feels the flow of adrenaline, the sweat that pours from her body, the shakiness in her knees.

  Uneasy on her feet, by the window, looking out at the boys as they stand on the lawn: Nathaniel smoking, Andrew checking his phone, both of them in unguarded postures. Then, in an instant, they are gone. Milk-white smoke still drifts upward from the finished cigarette Nathan has carelessly flicked away.

  Beyond exhaustion, she lies in bed with her eyes closed and crosses her hands over her stomach. She exhales, feeling the final, fumbling rhythms of her body play out. And it is not a flash of white or a shot of dark. It is a passing through halls of color, which, she hopes, will never end.

  At last, she is somewhere toward the beginning; not to be outdone by the big-breasted, wide-smiling, overtly sexual competitors in Norwalk County’s Annual Junior Beauty Pageant, Irene Duffy, age sixteen, stuffs two plums in her bra and sings “Moon River” while standing uncomfortably erect. She is halfway through the song when she feels one of the plums release from the cup in her bra and travel down and out the chute of her gown. She stops singing and looks at the plum, which has rolled past her left foot and stopped in a small indentation in the stage. She can hear laughter, but when she dares to pass her eyes across the crowd, she sees her parents, mortified and stunned, and the judges looking at the plum as if it’s the last breast in all the universe, and Eddie Prince with his eyes on her eyes, circling an extended finger as if winding up a spool, mouthing the words “keep going.” She cannot remember the second verse of the song. So instead, she pops the other plum out of her dress and takes a bite. The audience erupts—no fakeness about this girl—and she regains enough confidence to pick up the other plum and toss it to Mr. Ockmann, the former mayor, long retired and recently widowed. Mr. Ockmann stands up and rubs the plum against his cheek, as playful an exhibition as he has ever given in all his years in the public spotlight. When the three finalists are announced, Irene is not one of them, nor does she think she deserves to be. But it is her plums that are remembered and immortalized in the history of Norwalk High.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Slowly, the summer slides into autumn. Locals return to the beaches with their dogs; the last of the fruits are sold or jarred; signs on the stores along Main Street read, SEE YOU AGAIN NEXT YEAR. Only the schools and the mall operate on a normal schedule. The rest of the people in town reduce their working hours, drink more often, return to gossiping about each other rather than complaining about tourists. On page 1 of the most curious locals’ manifest is the fact that Nathan and Andrew Kelly are now living back home. Irene is sick, but her sickness is physical. Those boys, they have always seemed off. It was their father’s doing. He left them right when they needed their father the most. Are you surprised? Don’t you remember Kelly’s own father, Red? You could hear him whaling on that poor boy all the way from Mulberry to Southbay. But Robert Kelly came back, too. Again? Again. When? Oh, six or seven months ago. Didn’t you hear? I did, but I never thought he’d show his face in this town again. He had one of those home monitoring things around his ankle. Poor Irene. And those boys. Robert, too. Yes, him, too. He deserves some mercy. The Kellys. They’re no different than any other family, I guess. They suffer under the weight of that name.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Since his mother’s funeral last week, Nathan has quit smoking and every morning runs along the beach, down past the Tidewater Hotel his father and brother had planned to open by Labor Day—Andrew going so far as to slide an official invitation under his bedroom door—but now has been postponed until the end of the month, due to their mother’s death. Nathan has already decided he will not attend. That world is not his. He jogs the length of the beach, then up Southbay, until he reaches the Wequaquet Harbor. He sits in a coffee shop across from the harbor, watching the ferryboats shove off toward Nantucket. The tourists take day trips and return with luggage full of crap—T-shirts and coasters and painted seashells. Nothing is old or new. That’s the problem with trying to escape, he thinks. There’s no place for anyone anymore. Boston is no place; Baghdad is no place; San Diego, La Paz, Paris, Florence, Madrid, Las Vegas, Beijing, none of them truly exist.

  Today, he finishes his coffee and puts a few dollars on the table for keeping the seat as long as he has, and walks down the harbor gate, toward the bulkhead, where the commercial fishing boats are docked, the hulls grimy, nets hanging limp, still dripping. Derek Coe, captain of the Whisky Gun, wears a baseball cap and has an auburn-colored beard. Nathan has been out with him before, a month back, for a quick shrimp haul. But he’s heard Derek has gotten a contract to keep him out longer, bring them to different ports along the East Coast, and he asks if he can get a job on the boat. Derek says it’s possible. Someone just backed out. He says he can’t pay much.

  “I don’t need much,” Nathan says.

  * * *

  The first day on the boat, Nathan empties his pills over the side. He begins each day at three in the morning with a series of stretches and a hundred push-ups and sit-ups. The physical exertion steals away the shakes from quitting the benzos cold turkey. He believes in something now. He believes he can begin again.

  The work is hard and repetitive. Set the net, wait, close the net, wait. Hydraulics pull the net up and release the catch on the deck, sorting, and storing. He eats simply and spends his few hours alone reading by the stained lamp next to his bunk.

  At p
ort, he never leaves the ship. Some of the younger men think he’s strange, and Derek says he might think about spending a night out in order to develop some camaraderie.

  “It goes with the job,” he says.

  Down in the Keys, he hands Nathan a twenty-dollar bill and tells him to have a night.

  The men like to go to a bar called Lacuna, where the well drinks are two for one. The locals there still respect fishermen and know their worth. The women are thick with round shoulders.

  The men on the boat call Nathan Hero, or Big Hero, or Big H. Nathan can’t tell if they’re mocking him or not. They are strong, stupid men. They don’t know what it means to go to war. They don’t need to know. Nathan admires this about them. Most of the men are high school dropouts or pill heads or failed athletes. Some have grown up with only the boat and the sea. The ones who clean the deck and cabin are ex-cons, and they turn over at every port.

  He pays for the first and second rounds and sits with a club soda at the bar while they drink at two wooden tables pushed together and play cards. Some of the men gather around the pool table and put quarters on the side and stare down the players until one scratches the eight ball on purpose.

  “Hero,” the one called Randy shouts. “You play?”

  Nathan remembers what Derek has said about camaraderie.

  “Cutthroat,” Randy says.

  The other player is a new guy. Nathan can’t remember his name. He has oily hair and a mean, thin face.

  Nathan takes up a pool cue and dusts the tip with the blue square and waits to see how the numbered balls spread out along the felt. He hasn’t shot pool since the army, but it comes back to him the way most things do the first time you try your hand at a game you used to know well.

  Nathan sinks all but one of the balls. The other men from the boat are by the table now. Randy’s sitting on a stool drinking a long neck. He gives a hard clap. The new guy looks at Nathan, then at the table, then at Nathan again. He lines up his shot in the web of thumb and forefinger, but when he goes to strike the cue ball he barely hits it and the ball spins and nestles up against the side of the table. The other men burst out laughing and the new guy throws the stick on the ground and walks back to the table and sits with his arms crossed over his chest, sullen.

  A few local girls tag along with the six men from the boat as they head back to port. One girl slaps Randy in the face when he takes his penis out to show it to them. Then the girls are gone and the men walk along the harbor, and some go down to the rocks on the shore, throwing their empty bottles into the sea.

  Nathan sits on the hard sand and listens as the water touches the earth and pulls away. After a while, he can’t hear the other men.

  He understands how you need someone to protect you in this world or else you have nothing, and he thinks that must be the reason so many people believe in God or whatever, and why so many others are scared or crazy.

  He feels now that he is everywhere the sea is, and this is his home, his purpose. But he is not without doubt, not tonight, having been out with the guys from the boat, drinking, shooting the shit, hearing stories about treacherous catches, nasty accidents where other men died, storms and sicknesses and seedy drifters. There is chaos everywhere. The goal, he thinks, is to survive the chaos.

  As he pushes up off the beach, he hears a bottle break behind him. He turns and, in the swift final second of recognition, sees the jagged edges swing toward him. The blood pumps out of his neck and the new guy with his dead eyes is holding the end of the bottle. He looks at Nathan with a kind of disappointment, then turns and hurls the broken bottle into the ocean, before walking off, kicking up wet sand, the sound so familiar, so quiet, so peaceful.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The grand opening of the Tidewater Hotel is not without its setbacks. First, it’s been raining since early this morning, and the marble floor needs to be constantly attended to. Then there are issues with the catering service. They’ve forgotten the lobsters. What good is having a restaurant in a hotel on the Cape if there is no lobster on the menu? Luckily, the water has been unnaturally warm during September, and lobsters are cheap and readily available. In the few hours that are left, Andrew and the caterers empty out every fish house and supermarket within twenty miles, put the lobsters in a half-dozen tanks, and have the chefs boil them on an outdoor range away from the party. A group of kids have broken in through one of the windows in the east wing and ripped up the carpet and torn the television sets off the walls and drawn large, coming penises on some of the reproduced Monets. The entire wing is now closed off. Andrew’s father has the idea to put up a sign that reads: RESERVED FOR PRIVATE PARTY.

  “What private party?” Dennison asks when he arrives.

  A dense fog has made it impossible for the Belgian’s boat to dock at the harbor in time, but Dennison has showed up just late enough, with two young blond-haired women with skin the color of sand. Andrew and Dennison have met only once before, when Dennison came down from Boston to yell at whoever was laboring on the property. He reminds Andrew of the men at Birken’s firm. Like them, and like Andrew not so long ago, Dennison thinks his money buys time, not work. He smokes thin, lady cigarettes and wears short, pink shorts and a navy blue polo. A diamond-encrusted bracelet around his right wrist matches his diamond-encrusted watch on his left. Most likely, Dennison had been ridiculed as a boy, and he is forever making those other boys pay.

  “We had a setback,” Andrew’s father says. “Nothing to worry about, really. Everything will be running smoothly by next week.”

  “So there isn’t a private party?”

  Andrew notes that Dennison is half-cocked, and because he’s very rich, he works now with the dangerous and damaging combination of power mixed with unchecked ignorance.

  “No. There’s no party,” Andrew steps in. “But the west wing is sold out, and your suite is ready. We have an exciting tasting menu prepared once you get settled.”

  “Oh, my,” Dennison says, looking back and forth at the two girls on his sides. “I’m so tingly I might just make a mess in my pants.”

  The two women fake a giggle, placating their rich host, whose tact Andrew can tell has completely unnerved his father.

  A yachtsman wearing too much cologne lights himself on fire trying to get a match started for his cigar on the restaurant veranda; a child has to be given the Heimlich after swallowing a fat piece of overcooked steak; a seagull, having dived down through the sliding door left partly open to one of the rooms, sends an overweight couple running naked through the hall.

  “This is what happens at hotels,” Dennison says, bumping into the table where Andrew and his father sit quietly, nervously. “Life.”

  * * *

  After dinner, the guests make their way to the lawn where fireworks are set off from the beach, lighting the sky in bursts of red, white, and blue. Andrew watches from the veranda, no longer worried about the night, because he is in it now, and the reporters in attendance will write what they want, and the guest reviews will start flooding the Internet before morning, and something else he cannot account for. He has to let it happen, let it come down, because Dennison is right, this is life.

  Andrew walks down the long set of steps to the beach, then looks back at the hotel lit up in the floodlights and the people milling about on the lawn, and the flag curling in and extending out like a wave.

  It’s as though the Tidewater has been here forever. This is the place you are always returning to, even if you don’t know it. He wonders where Nathan is right now, if he returned to Arizona or has ventured to some exotic locale, where no one can find him, and where he’ll never be heard from again. Andrew hopes so. Nathan belongs out there, he thinks, with the odd and the infamous, a warrior, a loner, guided by a universe Andrew knows nothing about.

  In a green dress and black top, sitting on the slope of a dune, a dark-haired woman, head turned slightly, gazes out at the calm waters, one hand under her chin, the other holding the stem of a champagne glass,
the sandals she wore to the opening at her side and her toes buried in the sand.

  “What are you thinking about?” Andrew asks her.

  She turns the glass like a paper drum back and forth between her fingers.

  “I don’t know if I was thinking about anything, really. More like, I could see myself. Or, I mean, my past self. How pretty I was—or thought I was—how interesting everything around me seemed. All the questions I asked. The games I played. Pretending to be this or that.”

  “We had our own little worlds back then, didn’t we?”

  “Now everything is just average, blah. Eventually a slice of cheesecake tastes like dust, money feels like a weight, joy like a warning. Geez, listen to me.”

  Andrew has been listening. He feels in her words the same feeling he had the day of Birken’s funeral, and even years before, when he and Nathan were kids and would run wild around the neighborhood, through hedges, climbing fences and hills and trees, always trying to top the other, to be king of some invented kingdom, and how it felt so deserved, and how nothing felt deserved anymore unless it carried with it a certain kind of risk, because risk had diminished over time, risk was calculated and avoided or else created and embellished to make it seem like the impossible was possible. No way would the hotel have been financed if there was too much risk involved. But the property had been appraised and construction costs prefigured and any kind of setback worked into the budget, and here they are now, celebrating.

  Years later, when Andrew and Sara, the girl on the dune with the thick eyebrows, have married and moved into a small home on Block Island, they return to the Outer Cape, with their two daughters, to the beach beyond the Tidewater Hotel, and watch as the girls’ eyes grow big and wide at the shimmering sand and giant waves and the other children jumping off the docks.

  As in the old photographs he has kept, and his parents had kept, the ocean is still the same, no matter how quickly and without warning the land surrounding them has changed and shifted. They play sharks and pirates and deep-sea divers. The games his father and brother had taught him. And everything Andrew had collected when he was a boy, he now gives away.