North Haven

by Sarah Moriarty

  The children saw a rabbit out by the pump house yesterday. They want to catch it, not catch it, but see it again, lure it to them, just to be close to it. Tom says they could stuff it, add it to the collection of heads in the great room. The other two look incredulous for a moment, then disregard him. He is pulling their leg, telling tales. He is no bunny killer. Libby decides she’ll take no chance, though. If necessary, she is ready to step between brother and bunny, take a slingshot’s rock to the chest, tell on him, on everything she has ever seen him do that could be considered suspect. Gwen sees her sister’s thought, sees her defiance spread across her face like so much fire on a dry California hillside she has seen only on the television. She pats her sister on the head, gives her a smirk, a he-can’t-fight-us-both face. The forest sizzles and pops its last, and Libby’s face is black trunks and blue sky, a frown and a hopeful furrow.

  The thoroughfare changes color nine times while they stand in the trees behind the pump house, shushing each other. Their mother sits on the wide white railing and watches the water, having already removed the half-finished beer from her husband’s sleeping hand. She drinks the rest and watches—slate, violet, ashen, smoky, smudged, mossy, white, silver. The sun glares from the other side of storm clouds, and, for a moment, the town and the water go white. The wind picks up.

  “Southwesterly,” she whispers. And the water in the cove goes black, the pebbles of the cove’s beach washed-out gray as the boathouse beside them.

  She heads through the house, the dining room, the kitchen, pushes open the screen door from the top where it sticks, calls them. No response. Whistles sharply, once, a short burst so as to not wake her husband. With waving hair and knobbed, scuffed knees, they tromp high-kneed through the long grass, still humped and curved from a morning storm.

  “It’s blowing up out there,” she says. “The rain’s coming.” They nod, Libby keeping an eye on her feet; a twisted ankle last summer makes her wary. Tom looks out to the water at the side of the house.

  “Southwesterly,” he says. Gwen stays behind, walking arms out, like a mother duck, hustling her bairns along, stay together, head to the porch, say her wiggling fingers.

  “We should wake your father.”

  “The rain will wake him.” Gwen giggles, a streak of the devil in her always. The beer is still unfinished in their mother’s hand; she leaves it just inside the soapstone sink and doddles Libby off to wake their father.

  He will hold her over his belly, saying, “You’ll do for an umbrella, a bit wiggly, but dry enough.”

  She hates this. Feels his hands sink into her flesh too hard, holding her up above him; it hurts, but she laughs, and he doesn’t understand and she can’t say. He doesn’t know his strength or her weakness, her softness. He can’t balance her right.

  The storm is almost upon them now. The water goes from slate to a deep viridian that makes the trees seem brighter, more yellow in them, and the sky goes dark and steely, gunmetal, twilight hours early. They pull the cushions off the wicker porch furniture, their father doles out pillow after pillow to tiny waiting arms. Their mother holds open the door, motions for her husband to move the chairs under cover, annoyed that he drags the old wicker chairs, doesn’t lift them the way she would.

  The children tear around the rug room, cards out, the window seat lifted to reveal piles of board games. Tom, at the fire, carefully crumples newspaper, builds a teepee of kindling on top of it.

  “Get me a log, Bibs.” He waves Libby toward the woodpile.

  She drops her deck of cards on the table; slippery, they slide to the very edge. Gwen lounges on a chaise, pretends to paint her fingernails, lists game after game they could play, but dismisses each one before the others even notice. She will decide the game, and they will object. She will say, “I suggested that one, but we decided it was too slow, too few players, too long, too hard for Libby, too easy for Tom; this is the one we’ll play.”

  Now the fire is lit and the game—Parcheesi—is laid on the rug, all while their parents whisper harshly in the kitchen about the proper way to move porch furniture.

  The rain comes. It is quiet and there is tea and the turning of pages and the rolling of dice. Their father plays. Thunder, not an anchor, vibrates in their chests, in the window frames. Gwen sits by the window when it’s not her turn, watches for lightning, no fear. Their father lets out a whoop, sending two Parcheesi pieces back to the start. Libby and Tom groan in unison.

  “He cheats,” they say. “Gwen, come from the window, we need a witness.”

  Tom hears his parents one night. At thirteen he is no longer in the nursery with the girls, no longer lies next to Libby when she whimpers in her sleep, no longer fetches cups of water in the night. He is downstairs now, down the back hall off the kitchen, the glassed porch with a brass bed that his mother says is fit for royalty. It’s his father who says it is an old-lady bed.

  He hears her first. Early, before the birds. The black, shagged limbs of the pines around his room go prickly and yellow in the sudden light from the kitchen window. He hears the pull clink against the bare bulb. He hears the whine of the cabinet in the pantry, tea and cookies. The water sloshes fast and tinny into the kettle and the stove snaps to light itself. His mother’s bare feet pad the painted floor; he hears her go from the sink to the back door, to the pantry, to the bottom of the back stairs. Is she looking for something? The kettle thinks of whistling and the stove clicks off, and he knows the tea is steeping and she is at the kitchen table, her feet on the rung of a chair. He hears her breath stutter out of her; he knows that sob. Libby cries like that, labored inhales and exhales. Like an asthmatic, he thinks. Though he knows no one with asthma. He pulls back the blanket, tugs it from its hospital corners, and wraps it around his shoulders. Sitting on the step of his threshold he leans against the closed door and waits.

  Tom sits and whispers, “Please, birds, wake up, please let it be four fifteen, let the sky lighten, birds, please start singing.”

  He has never thought much about the birds and their chatter, about Sam Peabody or the towhee who tells you to Drink Your Tea. Now he craves their soft first flights, from low branch to low branch. Their songs will fill the nursery, and his sisters, for a moment, will be awake too.

  Scarlet leans into the steam. Her stuttering breath brings it in and then pushes it away. Her hand encircles the mug but doesn’t touch it, the mug too hot. And nothing seems worse, which makes her breath harder to move. Sometimes it just stops all together. The less she breathes the more she cries. The window is ajar, and the breeze through it chills her, blows right across her shoulder blades, making her press her elbows to her sides. She wishes for her bathrobe, but she can’t close the window, for closing the window would mean moving her hands, and she wants only to hold the mug.

  Gwen is still in the nursery, but Scarlet knows it is in her, too, the strange realization that beds could be for more than sleeping, and certainly should be far away from one’s siblings. Their mother sees only Libby, with her tanned skin and downy hair, like she was born from the warm summer hay of the meadow. Scarlet has forgotten what beds are for.

  Her husband, their father, thumps and bangs down the stairs, not at all like it is the middle of the night. The stairs creak under his feet, under his shushing slippers, shush thump shush thump. He stands in the doorway at the bottom of the steps, his hands grasping high on the doorframe like he’s ready to launch himself into the room. But as with most of his entrances, he flags, hesitates. He tucks his wide chest under shoulders and slides past her to the fridge, cracks and shuffles an ice tray, and slides back to her side. He slips two cubes into her tea, and she turns to him quickly. But the ice has already softened at the edges and he has turned away.

  She starts anyway. Who needs his help, she says, all venom and whisper. He robbed her of something; that it isn’t right, that the tea should just cool on its own and then she can hold the mug. Now the mug is still too hot and the tea too cold.

  Even the
way you drink your tea is oppressive, says the roll of his eyes. She misses it.

  He wants to make her more tea, but it is too late, her moment for tea is lost. He hates that she robs him of every opportunity to be close, to do something nice for her, and she hates that she can’t get near him without him ruining things. He hugs her too hard. He does that to the children too, she sees it in their faces. And she knows that he has found someone to hug as hard as he wants. She doesn’t know that he brought another woman here once.

  The woman from the other island, he brought her here when his family was in their winter home, back for a wedding that he couldn’t tolerate. He brought her to the house and let her touch the animal heads, something he hated anyone doing, but he let her. He laughed with her when she broke a wineglass.

  “My wife will ask about that.” This woman is building lies as she stands here separate from me. Her presence is a new lie I have to tell. But he didn’t take her to her house, buzz her quickly over the thoroughfare, a fast ride of slap and spray. Instead, he took her to a room, the last room down the back hall filled with mothballs, and pillows that didn’t make it back to their rightful spots when they opened the house. She told him her hair would smell of camphor for weeks. He said that she should be happy; she would repel bugs. It was black fly season.

  PART II

  SIX

  GWEN

  July 4

  On the Fourth of July they always ate lobsters. Gwen looked forward to this feast all year. The decadence of it all was not lost on her. Remy had come by that afternoon and dropped them off, while Gwen and Libby lay on beach towels on the float. Too numb and sleepy from lying in the sun most of the morning, they hadn’t even heard the boat until it bumped up against the float.

  “Hello, Willoughbys,” said Remy.

  “Hey, Remy. Hey, Maddie,” said Libby, looking up at the caretaker and his daughter standing in their boat.

  Remy pulled their spare trap up from the water, where it was tied to the float, while his teenage daughter, playing stern man in yellow waders and a tank top, sorted out five shedders. They exchanged a few pleasantries, or tried to, with Remy’s response always being “Suppose so” or “That’s the truth.”

  Gwen and Libby looked at each other quickly in shared awkwardness and guilt, lounging in their bikinis while Remy’s daughter, muscled and mud smeared, had just literally brought their dinner up from the bottom of the harbor. As the boat putted away to join the circles of other lobstermen chugging from pot to pot, Gwen and Libby shook their heads and laughed. It was just part of being summer folk, embarrassing themselves like that in front of the locals.

  Gwen had always wished Remy had a son. She loved lobstermen. The way they talked; the way they looked in short sleeves and waders, hauling on lines; the way they watched her motor in too fast to the town dock before throwing the thing into reverse at the last moment.

  “Gonna drop an engine one day, Gwen. That ain’t no sports car.”

  “Yeah, but it sure drives like one,” she’d say with a wink.

  She liked the way, after spending an afternoon anchored in a cove with a lobsterman, she’d smell of salt and mud, streaks of it up her back, down her legs. She didn’t need to go in the cabin like the local girls; she’d do it right there on the engine cap, on the pulpit. To them she was spoiled and beautiful and on the fast track to nothing good. They’d say this to her, as she led them up the back steps. “You’re nothin’ but trouble.” Despite her leaps off the ferry tower, her drinking with the locals on someone’s boat, bringing those locals into her house, her bed, she knew she’d always be a bit of a joke, a bit of a legend.

  That evening, Tom and Libby stood in front of the soapstone sink full of lobsters and seaweed. Melissa hid out in the rug room, taking refuge in a crossword. Gwen was beside them at the stove while Danny sat at the kitchen table messing with an old tape deck. The whir of the deck fast-forwarding changed pitch with the varying strength of the ancient motor. Libby and Tom argued. They reminded Gwen of their parents, of their parents before Danny came along. It was silly and sad, but also soothing.

  “You must get the water to a rolling boil and then drop them in,” said Libby slowly, as if giving instructions to a caterer.

  “No, you have to start them off in cold seawater, then bring it to a boil. It’s the humane way to go,” said Tom.

  “Are we cooking lobsters or are we euthanizing them?” said Libby.

  Gwen laughed as she changed one large pot for an even bigger one. Libby, so straightlaced, could always be counted on for the unexpected zinger.

  “You got an opinion there, G?” said Tom.

  “Nope, I’m just the sous-chef. I do as I’m told, though I don’t think it matters if you use seawater or not.” She wasn’t about to get involved in their age-old lobster fight.

  “Of course it matters,” Tom and Libby said together.

  “Why don’t you hypnotize them?” Danny suggested. Tom and Libby ignored him. Gwen picked up a lobster from the sink and brought it over to Danny, setting it next to the tape recorder.

  “God, this isn’t even the right pot.” Libby stormed out of the kitchen and into the pantry. They heard the rattle of pot and lid, the crunching of paper, and the skittering of kibble across the painted wood floor.

  “Why do we still have dog food?” said Gwen.

  “Aw, Beardsley,” said Danny. He stuck out a pouted lip. Gwen mirrored him.

  Tom tried to convince Gwen of his system; she nodded, an expression of utter seriousness on her face.

  “Just like frogs, if you throw them into boiling water they jump out. If you put them in cold water and slowly bring up the heat, they won’t even know they’re being boiled to death.” He lowered his voice and leaned toward Gwen. “She’s being such a child, always wanting to have things her way. Half the time she acts as if we’re all guests in her house. Like she’s the hostess in charge of who sleeps where and which boats can be used on what days, and how to cook—”

  But here was Libby again, marching forth with the largest pot. Handing it off to Gwen, she pushed up her sleeves and gripped the rim of the soapstone sink as if about to jump into it. They continued to snap back and forth, “They’ll cook unevenly if you put them in one at a time,” “But you’ll run the risk of overcooking them if you start from zero.” Libby pulled a beaten and stained copy of The Joy of Cooking down from a wooden shelf and held it open toward Tom. He rolled his eyes; he had seen that page dozens of times. Gwen wished she had popcorn. She sat down next to Danny, holding the pot in her lap like a great oval cat.

  “They’re really channeling the B.O.B. on this one,” she whispered.

  “She went for the cookbook too early,” Danny whispered back. “She should’ve built up to it.”

  “Lobstermen don’t use cookbooks, Libby,” said Tom.

  “So now you represent the masses for us? How nice. I’m glad you can keep us in touch with the people, Tom. Are those Teamster loafers you’re wearing?”

  Libby spent six weeks a year in this house, cooked lobster at least twice every summer. She had complained to Gwen for years that Tom thought he understood the task better. That he was somehow more in touch with this place than she was. Gwen thought it was hilarious that it all mattered so much to her sister. Cooking lobsters and tying up boats; how hard could it be? As long as you didn’t poison anyone, and the boats were still there in the morning, job done.

  “How is cooking lobster a class issue?” Tom demanded. Gwen had seen this fight many times before, but it was always different. Like a photograph of the same spot at different times of day. Maybe she should go back to photography. It was all so much simpler—click, capture, done. Painting was visceral, all emotion and misunderstanding. Maybe that was why she resisted acrylics as her medium, too much mess. Watercolor gave her the strokes without the heaviness, the colors without the texture of the medium itself, though certainly still visceral.

  The rest of them couldn’t see the picture they were
part of, except Danny. She sometimes thought Danny could see through time, deep into the universe to some dark star. He was still a kid, after all, and kids have magic and vision. She watched Danny as he held the lobster upside down on the table, balancing on the tripod of its head and claws. Danny slowly rubbed its green back, and its flapping tail calmed and its claws relaxed. He smiled up at Gwen and she took the now limp lobster from him and placed it on a bed of seaweed in the sink.

  She heard the tape deck click, Carole King suddenly sounding bright and strong through the kitchen for a second. Then Danny stopped it, the music replaced with a whirring. Gwen took sticks of butter from the freezer and stacked them on the kitchen table. Just keep things rolling. Libby slammed a saucepan down on the stove, and Tom leaned on the counter watching her and aggressively bit his nails. Danny pressed play again, more Carole, then click and whir, then play again.

  “Dear God, Dan, just play it or don’t,” said Gwen as she took the lobster pot from the stove and shoved it at Tom.

  “I was just hoping there was something else on this tape. Guess it’s this or Godspell.”

  “Godspell,” said Tom and Libby together.

  Tom grudgingly left to fill the pot with seawater. When he returned Gwen stood in the kitchen doorway. Gwen was too hungry to wait for them to decide how to cook dinner. She took the pot from him, water sloshing, saying, “We got it from here. You’re in charge of cocktails. I’d like a Shirley Temple.” While the water boiled Gwen and Libby watched the lobsters stumble and clunk in the sink. Danny spread the inside of a baguette with garlic and butter. Carole King felt the earth move.

  The five of them sat at the dinner table. At first there was just the cracking of shells as everyone tucked into their plates. Gwen wished that Kerry and Buster were here. One of them usually got full, or lazy, partway through the meal. She always sat between them.