by Marco Rafalà
They held the jars up to the overhead light fixture. I did the same. The light brightened the hazy brick edges. The sediment settled. “This has a nice color,” my father said. Then he dipped his nose into the mouth of the jar and inhaled. “Smell,” he told me. It smelled like old leather and damp earth and overripe blackberries. “It was a good year,” he said.
“That it was,” Vincenzo said. “Salute.”
“Salute,” my father and I said.
We tried the wine. They let it sit on their tongues before swallowing. To me it tasted bitter, but I didn’t want to be the boy who made a vinegar face. So I finished my glass and held it out for more, and my father laughed and said, “Two more fingers. But take it easy, make it last.”
At the table, we ate the meal Vincenzo had prepared for us and drank the wine my father had made for me. They hunched over their plates, chewed with mouths open, lips smacking together, lifting their heads for the wine. Vincenzo got my father talking about the old days, the good days, as if there had once been a time when they could sink their teeth into the juicy flesh of a Saturn peach and never find a pit. When my father had sopped up the last of the sauce with a crust of bread, Vincenzo signaled me with his elbow and a nod of his chin.
“Papà,” I said. “Sam invited me to spend the weekend with him at his dad’s place in Stony Creek. Can I go?”
He furrowed his brow. “What’s his last name?”
“Morris,” I said.
My father repeated the surname, testing the foreign word on his tongue. He made a sour face. “What if something happens and I’m not there?”
“Nothing bad is going to happen,” I said.
He held his index finger up to his lips and shushed me as if I were inviting misfortune into my life. “Don’t say that,” he said. “You don’t know for sure.”
“Let him go,” Vincenzo said. “The boys, they look after each other.”
My father reached over the table and gave my bicep a gentle squeeze. “Mizzica,” he said. “Wow, your muscle, it’s like a stone.” Then he patted my cheek and said, “Okay. You can go.”
21
The notes from Tony stopped. The constant put-downs, the shoving in the halls, the spitball taunts on the bus, all of it stopped after our last Catechism class. I felt relieved but skittish, like a rescue cat in a new home. I caught glimpses of him at school, his red zipper jacket disappearing around every corner—in his wake, the rubble of classmates who took the brunt of his anger in place of me. He was the planet killer on Star Trek, the doomsday machine set in perpetual motion, and his maw chewed up all matter in his path. Between classes, Sam witnessed him calling people names and pushing them around with his good arm. But he was alone now. Chris Cardella had abandoned him.
At home, my father’s mood changed again, like a change in the weather, a low-pressure system moving in. Twice that week, Father Salafia phoned him. Twice my father argued about that no-good Morello family, how they were all the same bad eggs from the same sick hen. The tin-can voice of the priest buzzed through the telephone receiver, a garbled lecture from the teacher on a Peanuts cartoon. My father interrupted him with a chorus of No, no, no, and ended each call with a slam of the phone so hard the little bell inside chimed.
Friday, in school, Tony cornered me in the second-floor bathroom before lunch. I turned from the sink and was cranking the paper towel dispenser when I saw his reflection in the mirror, standing behind me. I faced him and he took a step forward, backing me up against the urine-colored tile wall. A foot of space separated us. The left sleeve of his “Thriller” jacket hung empty. He didn’t have a friend who would sign his cast.
“Did you send that priest after my dad?” He spat when he talked. “You trying to cost him his job, you little freak? You’ll regret it.”
“Whatever,” I said. I brushed past him to the door.
“Piece of advice, Marconi,” he snarled at my back. “Don’t be around when this arm heals.”
I flipped him the bird before the door swung shut behind me, then hurried down the stairs into the safety of the crowded cafeteria, where Sam had saved me a seat.
That evening, when my father came home from work, he washed his hands in the kitchen sink and mussed my hair. The day he’d had at the factory fell off his shoulders. And there it was, in the same silence, the words his body made, the ones I’d only just learned how to read. He warmed up the last piece of Zia’s leftover sausage and rapini scacciata and gave it to me steaming on a plate because he knew it was my favorite. He sat with me at the card table but didn’t eat. He would eat later, he said, with Vincenzo, after Sam and his father picked me up. He made me write down the address and phone number of Sam’s father’s house in case he needed to reach me. He reminded me for the hundredth time to be careful. “I know,” I told him. But he shook his head as if there was no way I could know. Then his body changed. His face and shoulders snapped taut like a frayed rope stressed to its limit. His jaw sawed back and forth.
“Papà,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
My father spoke through his teeth. “When you come home, you stay away from Morello’s boy. He bothers you again, you come to me.”
“But you told me to fight back,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter what I told you before. Now I tell you something different.”
Sam’s father—Mr. Morris—took Route 9 south out of Middletown. He drove faster than mine ever would, the windows of the pickup truck rattling in the wind. Sam sat in the middle of the bench seat, playing DJ with mix tapes he’d made. I leaned on the armrest in the door, cheek pressed against the glass. When I was little, the way my zia spoke of how my father worked construction, you’d think no one else had been on the job. She made it sound like he single-handedly paved all the roads and built all the bridges in the state. I used to ask him which roads were his, which bridges, and he shrugged off the questions. A crew of men made them, he’d say, and a crew of men were as strong as concrete.
We passed under an overpass, the blue beams flecked with rust. I imagined him, kneeling in the median strip, arms stretched wide, completing the span. The immigrant holding up the New World. That was how I wanted to think of my father.
The highway soon sliced through wooded hills, walled in by exposed layers of rock in the roadcuts. A star could only show us a glimpse of its long life in the light that reached us here on Earth. But these rocks laid their whole stories bare—the how and the why and the when—if only you knew how to read them.
In Old Saybrook, we took the exit for Interstate 95 south and followed the shoreline highway. I’d never been on 95 before, never gone farther down Route 9 than Old Saybrook. I’d gone fishing there a couple of years ago, off a causeway with Vincenzo and my father. They caught a bucket of flounder and snapper blues, while my line got stuck and snapped in jagged rocks in the brackish waters below.
Mr. Morris turned off the highway at Branford, just as the setting sun reached the treetops. He took a scenic route down a wooded road with large homes set back at the end of long driveways, and then turned onto Thimble Islands Road and gave me a tour of the seaside village of Stony Creek. We drove past an antique store, a market and pizza place, and a small public beach with a gazebo. We pulled over onto the side of the road opposite a seafood restaurant and a bait and tackle shop. The truck idled at the curb. Mr. Morris folded his arms over the steering wheel and rested his chin on his wrists. In silence, we watched the boats come in, the sun dipping low over the islands that dotted the water. A group of teenage girls hung out on benches by the shore, but I didn’t spot Jamie’s Mohawk among them.
“Do you like it?” Mr. Morris asked. “The water, the boats, I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said. A dark-blue hazy line spanned the horizon.
“That’s Long Island,” Sam said, reading my mind.
“It’s amazing.”
“Sure is,” Mr. Morris said. He backed the truck out and made a U-turn, and we were on our way again. Soon, we parked in the driveway of a stone-and
-shingle waterfront house off Prospect Hill Road. The house looked like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, with ivy climbing the worn stones of the arched front door and two-story exterior chimney. Mr. Morris ran a bed-and-breakfast here. It had been a tumbledown house when he bought it, and he’d completed most of the restoration work on his own. After the divorce, he converted the garage into a one-bedroom for himself. Sam kept his room in the B&B for when he visited every other weekend.
The sun burned the horizon and bled into the clouds and sea, a scarlet wound soon healed by the deep-blue night. On a secluded beach east of the house, Mr. Morris built a small fire. His white Jimi Hendrix T-shirt hung on his lanky frame, billowing in a breeze. At the edge of the firelight, we gathered smooth triangular stones. They taught me how to skip the stones across the water with a sidearm toss. “Nice one,” Sam’s father said, and Sam shouted, “Awesome!” at my first four-bouncer. “Beginner’s luck,” I said. The tide would return the stone to shore, and the waves that rolled over it would roll it back into the sea.
“Hey, Sam,” two teenage girls called out in harmony from the rocky end of the beach. They walked along the waterline, heading in our direction, one of them waving. Two smudges against the silver line of ocean and sky.
“Okay, Dad,” Sam said, elbowing his father. “Time for you to make like a banana and split.”
Mr. Morris laughed and started walking away from us and the girls. “Just don’t get me into trouble with your mother,” he said. “You need anything at all, you know where to find me.”
Jamie and another girl came into high relief. Shapes carved on the surface of the night. Both girls wore black jeans, black tank tops, and piles of silver jewelry and silver-studded black leather jackets. They each held a backpack slung over one of their shoulders. Jamie’s dorsal-fin Mohawk—now dyed sailfish blue with black tips—crested from the darkness to greet us by the fire.
“You’re a sailfish,” I said. “Cool.”
“It’s a crime you had to shave yours off,” Jamie shot back. “Parental units.”
In the firelight, the smoky lines of the new girl’s Eye of Horus makeup wavered on the white of her skin. Tousled black hair fell around her collarbones. She smiled, and her cheeks dimpled. She pulled at me, at the raw materials of stars within me, cooked some billion years ago in a stellar nursery in some distant part of the galaxy.
“Never saw a girl before?” she said.
“No. I mean—” I stammered.
“David, right? I’m Em.”
“You two just gonna stand there?” Jamie teased over her shoulder. She and Sam were dragging a Y-shaped driftwood log to the fire pit for a bench. “We could use some help here.”
Together, we hauled the log into place and then went back for one more, a two-seater. We sat down beside the fire, Jamie and Sam on the smaller log, Em and I on the letter Y. Em unzipped her backpack and took out blue plastic cups and a bag of ice.
Jamie held up a four-pack of wine coolers. “Topping for your ice?”
We passed around the cups, ice, and wine coolers. Sam took one of the twist-top bottles and a handful of ice and poured his drink like he’d done it a hundred times before. He fell into easy conversation with Jamie, their shoulders touching. She quizzed him about life in Middletown since Butterfield.
The cap on my bottle was slick under my sweaty palms. “Let me,” Em said. It twisted right off in her hands. Silver rings on her fingers glinted in the light. She handed the bottle back to me, each of her black-painted fingernails a period at the end of an unspoken sentence.
“Thanks,” I said. I sipped my wine cooler, trying to think of something interesting to say. The drink tasted sugary and fruity, much better than the wine my father made. I sifted sand through the fingers of my free hand and quoted Carl Sagan, “‘The total number of stars in the universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth.’”
“Cosmos, right? I love that show.”
“So, you’re into astronomy?”
“Astrology mostly. But it’s all the same thing, right? The study of stars.”
It wasn’t the same thing, not really, but in that moment I didn’t care. “Did you see Halley’s Comet?”
Across the fire, Sam and Jamie started kissing. Em rolled her eyes. “Get a room,” she said. Jamie answered with her middle finger.
“Classy,” Em said. She elbowed me. “Let’s go for a walk.”
I took a long drink from my cup and set it in the sand beside Em’s, then followed her down to the water’s edge. We stood at the damp tide line where the sea rolled in, looking out at the horizon. Waves slapped against the shore. Pebbles tumbled forward, carried by the waves. The water soaked my sneakers and socks and the olive-drab canvas at the ankles of her combat boots. The sea tugged at my feet as it rushed back in a slow build toward high tide.
“Did you feel that?” I asked.
“Listen,” she said.
Pebbles crackled like cereal flakes in milk.
We took off our wet shoes, rolled up our jeans, and waded into cold water up to our knees. The pebbles were slippery smooth under our bare feet as we made our way to the far end of the beach. Em had known Sam and Jamie since second grade. A dinosaur’s age, she called it. For as long as she could remember, they were more like brothers and sisters than friends. But all that changed when Sam’s parents divorced and he moved away. Jamie and Sam’s status became amorphous. There were days when they acted platonic and days when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. But they never spoke about it, not even with Em. “It’s gross,” she said. Then she splashed me and asked about Vincenzo and his café, since Sam had gone on and on about it the last time he was in town. I told her about the old men and their cigarettes, the smell of coffee and Italian pastries. We talked about nothing but it felt like everything.
She splashed me again and this time I got her back, and we chased each other out of the water and sprawled out on the sand far from Jamie and Sam and the crackling fire. The heat of Em’s body simmered inches from mine. Above me, scant clouds and stars, a grinning moon. Staring long enough gave me a floating feeling.
Em took my hand.
Our fingers locked, as if our hands were carved from the same piece of stone. With her free hand, she pointed out a long W in the sky. “That’s Cassiopeia,” she said. Then she drew a straight line in the air from the W to the North Star. “Polaris,” we said in unison, and she smiled her dimpled smile and made a second line high in the sky. “The Big Dipper.”
I followed the curve of her moon-pale arm back to her shoulder, her neck, the line of her jaw. She rolled on her side to face me. Her black eyeliner swept out to her temples from the crinkled corners of her cat eyes. My ears felt hot. A static charge building up. I touched the curved tail of the Eye of Horus, traced it to its swirling end high on her cheek. She didn’t pull away. She smelled like salt and lavender. Her lips tasted like candied peaches.
Back at the fire, after the girls had gone home, Sam and I wore Cheshire grins. The firewood snapped and popped, sending sparks trailing up into the sky like falling stars in reverse.
Saturday morning, Mr. Morris cooked a full breakfast for the guests of his B&B-a honeymooning couple and four seniors. He set the table in the dining room, serving farmers’ omelets with home fries and bacon, buttered toast, and tall glasses of orange juice.
In the kitchen, Sam showed me how to make pancakes. I cracked eggs into a bowl and whisked them with a fork. I was still smiling from last night. Sam added flour and baking powder. Then, as if reading my mind, he said, “Sailing’s not their scene, but maybe they’ll swing by later tonight.” He poured the milk and melted butter into the bowl. “Stir that,” he said. “But keep it lumpy.”
We cooked the pancakes until both sides were golden. Then we piled them on plates, enough for his father and us. I set the round glass-top table. Sam brought out the maple syrup and a bowl of strawberries. When his father returned from the dining room, he sli
ced two bananas and added them to the bowl. “You boys did a great job,” he said.
After breakfast, we walked to the wharf where Mr. Morris kept his twenty-foot sailboat docked. When I boarded the Molly Brown, I felt the water beneath my feet, the deck swaying this way and that. Sam put on his life jacket, and then he helped me put on mine. He asked me if I knew how to swim, and I lied and told him that I did. His father ticked off a memorized checklist of safety rules for me to know before we could leave. He showed me how to stop the boat in the event of an emergency by releasing the lines controlling the sails—the mainsheet and the jib sheet. He told me where to sit so that the boom, the pole along the bottom of the mainsail, wouldn’t hit me if it swung from one side of the boat to the other. He explained how to shut off the outboard diesel motor, pointed out where he kept the fire extinguisher, and taught me how to radio for help.
We left the pier under power of the outboard motor, moored boats waggling in our wake. Sam helped his father remove the sail cover. They worked in silence, sensing how the boat carried itself through the water. If they spoke at all, they spoke two or three words between them. They anticipated what came next, tuned to the cadence of the other’s presence. The way my father knew when I was on the porch roof or waiting for him at the edge of his garden.
I squinted overboard at the hull, frothing the water white. A breeze sprayed a salty mist in my face. Clear of the harbor, Sam’s father directed the boat into the wind while slowing our speed. They raised the sails and shut off the engine, setting it in the up position. Sam watched the coast pull away from us. He trailed his fingers in the Long Island Sound. An estuary, he called it, a place where fresh water mixed with the salt of the ocean.
“You know,” his father said, scratching the scruff on his chin. “In the old days, I’m talking before radio, before the sextant, before the magnetic compass even, sailors relied on the natural world for navigation. Take the stars, for instance. The way Scorpio chases Orion across the sky. That was their compass. A perfect balance of rising and setting stars.” He sounded zen, like old Ben Kenobi from Star Wars. “You can find that harmony all around you. Just look at the ocean, how it’s shaped into swells. These guys, they could read the water the wind had written for them. They paid attention to the position of the sun, the movements of the clouds, even the birds. They didn’t set sail in search of land. They listened and read the signs, and that brought the land to them.”
