North Haven

by Sarah Moriarty

  The grass had grown knee high, and she pulled her boots through it instead of stepping over it.

  “This always seems like such a good idea until we actually get out here,” Danny said as he began putting the first few tiny berries into his bucket. He took his phone out of his pocket, swiped a few times, and put it back.

  “We’re doing as the original rusticators did. Just keep thinking: blueberry crumble, blueberry crumble.” It was Danny’s favorite, and the only thing Gwen felt like eating right now. That and lobster. Everything else made her feel tired and gray.

  “Please, they had their servants do this shit,” said Danny. “They just sat on the porch under parasols drinking Chartreuse or something.”

  That sounded like heaven to Gwen.

  “Been keeping up with your Masterpiece Theater, I see.”

  “There’s more to me than High Life and ramen, thank you very much.” He threw a berry at her.

  Gwen tried to catch it in her mouth, missing, by a lot.

  She worked quietly for a while, smelling the warmth of the grass and salt, the richness of pine tar. Nothing about a baby seemed practical to Gwen, even this simple act of plucking blueberries from their brittle stems. How does one even do this with a child? How do you keep them out of the poison ivy, out of the frigid sea that wants desperately to devour them? Their warm flesh must hold something more vital, more enticing, than the porous husks of adults. The gentle lapping waves always seeking to pull them from docks, from the sterns of boats, even from the pebbled shores of quiet coves. How could a life jacket hold back all that hungry ocean? She had seen the sea’s appetite all those years ago, when Libby lay blue-lipped and soft on the hard stones of a beach.

  Gwen stood and stretched, looking out at the harbor. The boats on their moorings and the birds perched on the rocks all faced into the wind. The cormorants held their wings wide open to dry. Gulls jabbered over a slow-moving lobster boat. With crawling and crying, how do parents ever enjoy silence again?

  “So, are we going to talk about it?” said Danny.

  “Hmmm?” she said, mouth full of blueberries.

  “Who’s the daddy? You’re gonna have it, right? ’Cause don’t get me all excited about this uncle crap if you’re just gonna flush it.”

  Gwen sat down with a clunk of her pail and stared at Danny for a moment.

  “Well, fuck.” She pushed his shoulder, trying to knock him over. “What gave it away?”

  “You’ve been turning down booze. And you’re a fat cow, obviously.”

  “So tough. You’re the kind of guy who’d run out and buy miniature high-tops before the thing’s even firmed up.”

  “Everyone needs a pair of high-tops. Besides, the little bastard is going to need one sensitive man in his life. Wait, you did do this with a guy, right?”

  “I realize it’s surprisingly traditional of me. We’ll leave the turkey baster to Bibs.”

  “Have you told her? She’s going to be pissed you told me first. You told me first, right?”

  “Dan, I really don’t see motherhood as the next step in my artistic development, okay? So can you just dial it back a little. Plus, you guessed, so I haven’t technically told anyone.”

  “Guessed or saw the pregnancy test box in your recycling. Whateves. Either way, don’t go that route with her. She’ll kick your ass when it comes to technicalities. What about a name? The Executioner? Bonecrusher, maybe El Diablo?” he said, kneeling with his arms held high like Godzilla over Tokyo.

  “No wrestlers, no hair bands, no serial killers. If I were to have a baby, in the distant future”—she pinched her thumb and forefinger together and pointed at him, as if to pull any sense of excitement from him—“I would not let you chose the name. If it were a boy? Maybe Robert.” Their father’s name.

  Danny sat back on his heels, his bucket dangling from one hand, and began to cry. Gwen took his bucket and set it on the ground. She scootched toward him until they were hip to hip, and she rubbed his back for a second.

  “For now you can drink for two, okay?” she said. He nodded, gave a short chuckle between sniffs. She hugged him and passed him his bucket. He sighed. She hated to take this from him so quickly.

  “How you feeling?” Danny asked. “Seeing your breakfast in reverse?”

  Danny smiled at her and put three blueberries in his pail—plink, plank, plunk. She was only eight weeks pregnant, but she could feel his smile was not just for her. She felt both his love for her and his love for what she carried. It felt good and sad. In a few weeks, he would love her less.

  “You gonna tell them?” Danny asked, checking the ground for a clear spot and moving to a different bush.

  “Soon there will be nothing to tell, and I don’t want to hear it from Tom.” Gwen moved next to him, and they both looked down the slope toward the water. “Why tell them? So they can tell me I’m not getting any younger?”

  “You might push Tom over the edge anyway. He seems like he’s hanging by a thread. That shit with the Windex in the car?”

  “Everyone puts their feet on the dash. I don’t know how that is news to him,” said Gwen.

  “I thought he was going to leave you by the side of the road. His ears turned purple.”

  “It was a spectacular freak-out.” Gwen swept one hand wide in front of her as if gesturing to the word “freak-out” spelled in glittering lights.

  “Dude, he was about to turn green and burst out of his clothes. Unless he’s now selling plutonium instead of media strategies, something’s up.”

  “Maybe he’s selling plutonium strategies.”

  “See, you are totally ready to be a parent. You’re thinking outside the box.” Danny patted her shoulder.

  Not getting any younger. My youth is closing, she thought, and that great expanse of middle age is opening its door. She saw an illustrious theater with gilded chairs and red plush curtains, filled with the quiet rustling of programs and the adjusting of jackets and purses. The wink of opera glasses being opened and lights that seem perpetually dimming, something always about to start, but never does. This was what Gwen saw through those doors, this stuffy world, this interminable waiting.

  “I’m not going to spend my life sitting in a carpool line.” Always waiting, always keeping up appearances. “No fucking way.”

  “I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than that,” said Danny.

  “You’re right. It’s a fabulous parade of bodily fluids and sleep deprivation.”

  “You know, if you spew this much negativity the kid is going to grow a tail or hooves. All I’m saying is keeping secrets is a bad idea; that’s how people get tumors. You’ll end up with a Minotaur baby.”

  “I thought about telling her, it’s just . . .”

  Four weeks ago, three days before Libby left for the house, Gwen and Libby had had dinner at Gwen’s place in Cambridge. Gwen had wanted to tell her then.

  “Your doorbell isn’t working,” Libby had said as she peeked around the corner of Gwen’s house to find Gwen watering the garden dressed in a half-slip, bra, and wellies. “Christ, you’re gonna give Mr. Ciccone a heart attack.”

  Gwen’s outfit was partly for practical purposes and partly because this was what summer looked like to her. For the last eight years she had lived in the same first-floor apartment of a triple-decker. She usually paid Mr. Ciccone her rent on time, though she had bounced two checks, only because he cashed the checks too soon, too enamored of her to suppose she might not have the funds to cover it. He made those checks their private joke, happy to have something to share with her, since he couldn’t rib her in any other capacity. He didn’t care about the shavings of paper glued to the herringbone floors, or the charcoal fingerprints all over the front door. He spontaneously upgraded her appliances and fixed dripping faucets. The last time she came to Maine she returned to find he’d retiled her bathroom.

  “If you aren’t careful, he’s going to break in and mosaic your name into the kitchen floor, or maybe he’ll ju
st slip between the sheets and wait for you,” said Libby. “Betcha he’s a rose man.” She pantomimed clenching a flower between her teeth. Here was Gwen’s chance: “I’m pregnant with his baby, ha-ha, just kidding, about Mr. Ciccone, not the baby.” But she just overwatered the peonies instead.

  “Men are pathetically dependent on flowers,” said Libby, “and women, on letters.”

  Gwen thought of a letter she had sent nine years earlier; she had drawn doors all over the envelope, all shut with dark, gaping keyholes. But one small door, in the lower right corner on the back, was open just a crack. There had been no reply. Maybe I would’ve had more luck with flowers. Maybe I shouldn’t have left in the first place.

  Gwen pointed a dirt-rimmed finger at a bottle of white wine and an empty glass on the porch.

  “Where’s yours?” Libby asked.

  “I’m working,” said Gwen.

  Libby was quickly distracted, and they moved inside, dishing out dinner in the kitchen.

  The two of them ate on the porch, plates balanced on their knees. Gwen complained about the ivy creeping over the neighbor’s fence, about the morning glories that looked so sad and deflated in the shade of the cedar tree. All spring she had wanted to attack the garden, restore and revitalize it as a way to thank Mr. Ciccone, as a way to show him he would never get anything else from her.

  “We could move the morning glories to the south side, over there past the fall of the shadow.” Libby pointed with her fork to the far corner of the garden. “Or you could chuck them completely and put herbs there, and maybe ferns under the cedar here.”

  Gwen put down her plate and went and stood in the bramble of flowers and weeds, demonstrating the sun’s daily path with a sweep of her arms. Between the main course and dessert they managed to rip out half the garden. They stood in the turned soil, detached roots worming sadly toward the sky, discussing the risks of moving peonies and the life span of the skeletal rhododendron. Back on the porch they worked up hasty, dirt-smeared sketches while they ate cold, store-bought pie. They envisioned the woolly yard as a garden of wildflowers and herbs, with cascades and falls and sprays and mountains of hairy blossoms, of petalled eyes, of spiny-leafed monsters. It would have the look of an abandoned English garden, the yard of some doddering vicar. They had done the same thing to Libby’s dining room eight years before (her drop ceiling dismantled during dinner), when Gwen couldn’t manage to tell Libby she was getting a divorce.

  Even though this house was full of projects to use as diversions, it would be hard to hide from Libby for a week.

  “Libby is going to kill you if you keep it from her much longer. Better tell her before el bebe starts to show,” said Danny, poking her belly. She knew Danny was confused as to the pace of things.

  Just then in Danny’s face she saw their father, whose smirk she knew was in all of them. Would her child smirk? Was this her only chance of having a child who would see this house, who would run barefoot down the steps, hold sparklers on the dock, eat lobster and emphatically state that, when pouring the liquid off, “Ewww gross, it’s throwing up,” as Libby had? What did you do with jars of murky watercolor rinse? With palette knives and tubs of glue? How were you supposed to wear a papoose when on your hands and knees uprooting ivy leaping over your neighbor’s fence? Her house was a beautiful poisonous garden, something from the illustrated conservatory of Charles Addams, flowers made of razor blades and giant insecticide pumps full of aerosol glue, beautifully illustrated seed packages full of toxic pigments. Contents under pressure. Combustible. Maybe she could raise a dismembered hand, but that was it, nothing whole.

  “If Tom knew, he’d try to change my mind. He’d give me a combo it-takes-a-village and life-begins-at-conception speech. He’d try to get me on his side about the house. He’d want me to be reasonable, whatever that means. Maybe we could keep the house without him. You and me and Libby.”

  “Is that really what he’s thinking? He’d seriously want to get rid of this?” Danny waved at the house, the sea, and her eyes followed.

  “He doesn’t have the power to obliterate a landscape, don’t worry. He just might be intrigued by the cash money involved. His ears would perk up for three million.”

  “That’s awfully specific there, G.” He turned to face her and stroked his chin like a villain.

  “There is no secret. I mean, besides the one you already guessed—snooped. The point is moot. So you don’t need to stress.” She patted his knee. Danny gave her a sidelong, yeah-right look.

  “Fine. It can just be you, me, and Bibs. And baby makes four. I can drop out of school and help you,” said Danny. He patted her belly. Gwen shoved him over. She was sure he believed in that math, that the addition of a baby would make everything better. There had existed some sort of magic between their mother and father and Danny. The three of them. But Gwen was not three. She was only two. And soon she would be one.

  “Sorry, D, you’re stuck in your ivy-covered prison for another year. You’ll have to run away and join the circus on your own time.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” said Danny. Propped up on his elbow, he had his phone out again. “All I’m saying is Little Junior Mint needs to see this place.” He cocked his head toward the house. “Maybe they should be called Embryo Mints; they sort of have that curled up, fetal look. Stupid reception.”

  “Gross. You just ruined my favorite movie snack.” Gwen pointed at his phone. “You gotta go to the float if you want that to work.” He rolled his eyes and put the phone back in his pocket.

  “Sure you’re not just getting fat? Maybe it’s a beer baby? Just name him Stella. I know, Frito.” Danny pulled a few more berries off a bush.

  “Please, he would be a genius. Fig Newton is way more appropriate.” Gwen was using both hands to separate branches, to search out the hidden berries.

  “As in Wayne?” said Danny.

  “As in Isaac. Aren’t you in school?”

  “Now I’m craving beer and Fritos. Sympathy pregnancy.” Danny stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. He walked up the ridge a bit to get a better look at the view. Suddenly, he started waving one hand around his head and jumping up and down.

  “Bees!” he shouted. Gwen ran down the ridge twenty feet and turned to see Danny running in circles. “Bees!” he cried again. Now he was swinging his bucket wildly and whacking his back with it, blueberries flying. She tried to say something, but she couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Run toward the house,” shouted Gwen, “not in circles, you fool.” She wasn’t sure he could hear her over the thunks of the bucket and the snapping of brush. She started waving her arms toward the house. Danny, bucket helicoptering overhead, jelly-legged on the uneven ground, veered toward the house. He bore down on Gwen, who stood directly in his path.

  “Move!” he shouted. Now she was running too. The two of them sprinted across the meadow as if a cloud of killer bees pursued, as opposed to a trail of squashed blueberries. They ran through the house, buckets still in hand, and out onto the front porch.

  On the porch Danny lay down on the warm planks. “I think we lost them.” Gwen headed into the house, the screen door slamming, then she was back out, ordering him to sit up. She had a bottle of ammonia and some cotton balls.

  “Let’s see,” she said. He lowered his head and showed a sting on the back of his neck and two on his arm. She swabbed down the bites, blew on each one.

  “I lost all my berries.” He held his empty bucket, slightly dented, between his knees. “I told you this wasn’t a good idea. You really need to start listening to me.”

  Poor Danny. He just wanted a little more life and a little less death.

  THREE

  DANNY

  July 2

  Danny woke up from an unintentional nap in a chair on the porch, his book was closed in his lap. He’d lost his place. Maybe that was for the best. He’d been reading the same page for weeks. Thirsty, he looked over his shoulder at the house. He could hear someone in the dining r
oom opening and closing drawers in the sideboard. Libby. He decided he’d have to go in through the great room door if he was going to avoid her.

  Libby was fairly good about letting everyone read or laze around on the porch, but if she caught one of them walking around, on their way to the bathroom, getting a glass of sun tea, she inevitably had a job for them. Danny was an expert at avoiding her. To get to the kitchen for a drink he would have to go up the main stairs and down the back to avoid her as she probably sat at the dining room table sighing over the week’s menu. This was a habit she had picked up from their mother. The preoccupation with food: purchasing, storing, preparing. He recognized it, and knew, as with Scarlet, the best defense was a good offense. If he could have, he would have walked the ridgepole to get out of doing work.

  Danny walked softly across the porch and opened the screened door to the great room, slowly, to keep the hinges quiet. But once inside, he nipped fast to the base of the main stairs to stay out of sight, and pressed himself against the wall directly under the taxidermied moose head. Then began the painstaking process of getting up the old stairs silently. This was an exercise in hope and memory. Which side of the third step creaked? He always got it right. At the top he walked quickly down the hallway. He descended the back stairs mostly using his hands on the banisters to support his weight. He emerged into the bright kitchen, to find Libby holding the compost bucket. Damn it.

  “Oh, good. I could use a hand.” She held the bucket out to him. And then she went back to, he wasn’t sure, checking the levels of the various cooking oils?

  “Mother!” he said under his breath. He put the bucket down in front of the sink and took a drink from the tap.