Professed

by Nicola Rendell

  The papers fisted in my hand, I ask again, “So what the hell is this?”

  “Nothing,” she says, all wide-eyed and flushed, coming to me and reaching out for my hands. “I was just trying to…”

  The fact is so simple I cannot believe it hasn’t hit her yet. I’m no good for her and I never will be. I’m blowing up her life and she can’t even see it.

  She makes a move to hang on to me, but I push her away. I don’t even look at her as I say, “Get the hell out of here. Right now.”

  43

  Yanking my pants back up, I get right in his face. I’ve never seen another human being look so angry, so broken, so dangerous.

  “What did you say?” “You heard me, Miss Costa. Get out of my house right now.”

  He catches my slap midair, squeezing my wrist so tight I feel the bones shift.

  I know what he’s thinking. That I fucked everything up for him. I feel the tears flood up into my eyes again. No. No way. I am not letting him see me cry.

  “What we did, we did together,” I say.

  “Get out.”

  “You can’t just push me away like this,” I say.

  “I can and I will. This was a huge mistake, Naomi. You cannot imagine what can happen to you now. This has to stop. We have to stop. So get the fuck out of my house.”

  And there’s something in the way he says it, something in the set of his jaw and the muscles clenched in his throat, that says he’s not talking about this, not anymore.

  I grab my stuff off the floor—my jacket, my bag—and take off through the blowing snow across the quad.

  The trip up those 72 steps has never, ever been longer. Every ten, I have to stop, to catch my breath, to keep myself from falling into a heap of tears.

  Most everybody has left for break, so I’m alone as I bolt for my room. My hands are trembling violently, and for one long moment, I just sit there in stunned silence. But then the tears do come in violent, jerking sobs, and I find myself with my cheek on the cold, wooden, slightly gritty floor.

  Over and over again, I hear him saying it. Thought a few fucks were worth blowing up your life for?

  It’s a yanking, angry, cranking feeling, like my chest is being pulled open, like my ribs are breaking against my heart. That cannot be what he thinks.

  I cry and cry until I can’t even breathe through my nose. And that’s when there’s a knock at the door.

  For a moment, everything goes into rewind. We didn’t fight. He didn’t kick me out. We weren’t caught. He’s standing outside my room, wanting to see me.

  Only he isn’t. Lucy is.

  “Oh boy,” she says, coming down on her knees next to me. “What happened?”

  She takes my head in her hands and lays it gently in her lap. My cheek is jammed up against her Sorel boot, and I feel some tears spill from my eyes down onto the fur lining. I sniffle loudly and uncomfortably, but no air passes through my nose. It just puts pressure on my brain and makes me remember everything over and over and over again.

  Lucy smooths my hair gently. She says nothing at all, except for quiet, soothing repetitions of, “It’s okay. It’s okay, Naomi. It’s going to be okay.”

  But no. It is not. It most definitely is not. Osgood knows, Ben is angry, I don’t even know what I am. Wrung out and horrified at the very least. At best, a scandalous embarrassment. This will surely follow me to wherever I end up next.

  Eventually, I do pick myself up off the floor and face her. My eyes feel puffy and enormous, my face hot and raw.

  She looks absolutely worried sick. “What happened?” she asks again.

  Closing my eyes, I put my thoughts in order, and then in a flood of words, nasally and hard to form sometimes, I tell her everything. Absolutely everything. The Lux et Veritas ball, the stairwell, the whiskey, the Master’s welcome dinner. Guest suite, letters. It’s my summary of the most heartbreaking story of my life.

  “Well holy shit, Naomi,” Lucy says. “I’ll be damned.”

  “What?” I say, wiping my nose with my sleeve, “I thought you had it all sussed out.”

  She shakes her head. “I mean,” she shrugs, “I thought you were with Osgood.”

  For two seconds, she keeps a straight face. My laugh comes out jagged and painful as I shove her to the ground.

  “Weird old insect collectors are such a catch,” she says, teasing me as we lie there on the floor of my room, looking up at the plastered ceiling like people look up at stars.

  “Do you love him?” she asks.

  I roll over and nod. I can’t even say the words. I press my head into her arm.

  Eventually, I wipe my eyes and finally realize it makes no sense, her being here. It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and Lucy is sitting here with me, when what she should be doing is drinking dry martinis and eating cashews in Greenwich with her parents. “What are you still doing here?”

  She looks oddly satisfied. “The storm has stopped the trains.”

  The trains. I’m supposed to get on a train myself in an hour. I gulp. Oh God. If I am stuck here for Thanksgiving break, I’ll die. With Ben right downstairs, I cannot even handle that idea.

  “Are they coming to get you?” I ask.

  “Well, newsflash, I hate my family, so I was looking forward to a weekend of popcorn and wine. You, on the other hand, probably want to get out of here.”

  “You can’t imagine,” I say. “But I don’t know how I’ll get there now. All the trains are closed?”

  “You know Amtrak and the MTA,” she says. “They’ll run the trains off the tracks on a sunny day. Storms? Pullleease.”

  Rubbing my face, I think that if only the damned storm had hit one day earlier, this could all have been postponed. I could have gotten stuck here. Maybe I’d have snuck into Ben’s house. Maybe, maybe, maybe, if only.

  If only.

  Only no.

  Just the thought of it all sends my whole world reeling again.

  Lucy pulls her phone out of her pocket. “Roads are still open,” she says, turning Google Maps to face me. It’s all blurry under my swollen eyelids.

  “It’s not that far to Greenwich,” I say. “Zipcar was great.” I try to sound optimistic, but all the snot in my nose just makes me sound so, so sad.

  She shakes her head and furrows her perfectly plucked brows. “How about you and me take a trip to Maine.”

  “In the blizzard?” I try to open my eyes a little wider and unsuccessfully sniffle again. A sort of sucking noise comes out instead.

  She shows me her phone, now with the radar map flashing across it. “It’s not that far north yet. What do you say, you and me? Outrun Winter Storm Veronica. Thelma-and-Louise style.”

  I swallow and I feel it in my ears. “I’m working the lobster glut with my dad.”

  “Ahoy, matey,” Lucy says, and helps me up off the ground.

  She has no conception of how horrible it’s going to be. Lobster fishing for twelve hours straight. So cold and so god-awful, it’s like the circle of Hell Dante cut out in edits.

  “Are you sure?” I say. Because really, she cannot possibly be sure.

  But she nods. “Four extra hands, they have to be better than two.”

  Lucy drives while we listen to Taylor Swift on full volume, so loud it makes the speakers in the doors buzz. The trip home is seven hours on a good day, but in the snow it’ll takes us almost nine. I don’t mind it at all. Being in the car with her, the world white and strange around us, and putting miles and miles between me and Ben feels like the only thing that will help me get over him.

  If I even can.

  I know I’m going to have to. He made that much crystal clear, and as much as I wanted to take him by the shirt and say, You love me, I love you, that’s the thing that makes everything worthwhile, it’s bad logic in the face of disaster. The whole idea, from the very first, was lunacy. We were in a haze. And now?

  It seems he’s seen his way out of the haze. While I, of course, haven’t. Not at all.
>
  Halfway home, just outside Kittery at the New Hampshire-Maine line, we get out to stretch our legs and fill up on gas. Lucy leaps out and swipes her card at the pump before I can even stop her.

  We go inside together. While Lucy’s in the bathroom, I make her a coffee with plenty of cream and sugar, and a tea for me. It’s ancient gas station Lipton tea, but it’s enough. The least I can do to repay Lucy, I figure, is shell out a few bucks for tea and some snacks. As I’m standing in line at the register, I feel my bag buzz against my body. My phone, more precisely, giving me that ominous single pulse of a notification.

  All the way here, I haven’t looked at my phone. I just couldn’t bring myself to look, not with my head pounding from the crying and everything in me just wanting to get away. I’d even left my bag in the back seat so I wouldn’t be tempted.

  The knowledge that there’s a notification makes me feel a little bit faint. I don’t know what to do. Should I answer? Should I give us space? Should I throw my phone right in the garbage so I don’t even have to think about this ever again?

  The lady at the register coughs to get my attention, and I step forward.

  “Some kind of weather,” she says. “And you with a hole your gloves.”

  Weirdly, amazingly, I don’t feel so ashamed of that here. I nod. “We came up from New Haven. It’s worse down there.”

  Ringing up the tea and the bag of peach circles I grabbed on an impulse, she says, “Where you headed?”

  I dig the requisite few bills from my wallet. “Down East.”

  And she smiles at me for the very first time. That smile of belonging, that smile of recognition. It hits me hard and fast. I haven’t had anybody look at me like that in ages. That’s the feeling of going home. “Be careful, honey,” she says, “And Happy Thanksgiving,” she adds, giving me my change.

  That smile of your people welcoming you home? There’s nothing like that on earth. For one second, I think, screw the transfer papers. What if I just threw it all in and came home to the boats? What if I became my mom?

  Would that be so bad?

  Life would be hard. I might be petrified to go back on the water at first, but at least I’d have gotten away from the mess that my life had become at Yale. Surely, somehow, this disaster will follow me wherever I go. I’ll get shamed to pieces and have to come home anyway. Osgood will tell someone and that someone will tell someone, and pretty soon I’ll be the girl who screwed the Master of Durham. That’d follow me to UConn, to community college, everywhere. The slut who fucked the Master. I can hear it already.

  It makes the lobster boats seem not so scary at all.

  I steel myself and take my phone out of my bag as I step aside for a fisherman, there to buy tobacco. I slip my gloves off and put them on the counter. Then I open up my phone.

  It wasn’t him. It was the freaking weather app. Again. I open up Signal. The last message was earlier today, time stamped 9:32 am. Now, it’s damn near three o’clock. He meant it. Get out of my house, was just another way to say, Get out of my life.

  Part of me wants to write him, but what am I going to say? I’m not about to plead my case. I wouldn’t know how anyway, not right now, and I know for sure I don’t want to be where I’m not wanted. Where I don’t belong.

  And so as Lucy comes up beside me and takes her coffee, she says, “Ready, captain?”

  I press the power button on my phone and swipe the screen to lock it. I zip it up in the side pocket and vow to myself I’m off the grid. Peace and quiet and no more notifications. And then I say, “I should probably explain a thing or two about lobsters.”

  44

  Sleeping next to Lucy in my childhood bed involves a lot of shin kicking, hair in my face, and periodic flirtatious moans of, “I didn’t know, Officer!” and “Please do, search me!”

  I kid you not.

  And then, at 5:00 am, Dad pounds on my door with all the grace of a SWAT commander.

  This jolts Lucy awake. “Officer?”

  “Not real,” I groan, rubbing my face. I don’t think I slept at all. “Time to catch some fish.”

  “What should I wear?” She’s stretched out like a cat in the warm spot where I was lying.

  “Every single piece of clothing you brought.”

  But once we get ourselves dressed and head down to the docks, I am provided with possibly the best distraction that ever was: watching Lucy Burchett work a lobster boat in the middle of a bone-freezing storm, with so much icy spray that we have to take a hammer to the rails to break it off. And as an extra added bonus, there’s no cellphone service that far out at sea, so I haven’t brought my phone. I stayed strong through the night and didn’t check. Didn’t want to check. Didn’t want to know. All of the above.

  Being on the boat is terrifying, but not as bad as I’d thought. The fear of the fear was the very worst part of all, and enough time has passed since the accident for me to shake it off. At least Dad understood that and didn’t start asking me to help until this year.

  “She’s coming in something fierce,” Dad hollers over the spray.

  I know he’s talking about the weather, but it seems entirely possible that he’s talking about Lucy. I don’t know if it’s because she’s trying to make me laugh or what, but she is outrageously entertaining to work with. Like a little Tasmanian devil with top-of-the-line highlights. Her cheeks are bright pink and her eyes a particularly stunning shade of amber out here under the solid gray sky. At first, she’s clearly kind of freaked out by the lobsters. Dad and I use the hauler to bring two traps on board, and I flip them open.

  “Ohmigod,” she says. “They’re so…weird.”

  “They’re angry,” I tell her.

  “I've only seen them in supermarkets. In tanks. At the Elm Street Oyster House. These are just so…huge.”

  “Careful not to get pinched there,” I tell her, and open and close the pot, showing her the hinge, which shifts a little when opened, just enough to crush a pinkie.

  The trap is nearly bursting and the lobsters are trying to tell us how unbelievably infuriating this whole experience has been by lashing out at our fingers with their claws. I set to work banding them. I show her how to sort them. I fling a female off the bow and Lucy shrieks. “Jesus!”

  “She’s fine. Totally fine. These ones,” I show her, picking up a big one, “are marketers. The smaller ones are canners. Never mind, you’ll catch on.”

  With a big male, I show her how to band the claws.

  Before I can stop her, she’s put her fingers on the edge of the pot as she’s watching me. And that’s when she gets pinched on the pinkie by a female covered in seaweed and eggs on her belly.

  “You mean little fucker!” she says, sticking her finger in her mouth.

  “Oh shit,” I say, and pull her finger out of her mouth to take a look. It’s not that bad. She’s probably going to lose that nail, but God forbid I tell her so right now. “You’re doing great. Lobsters are the assholes of the sea.”

  She snorts, and then picks up a male of her own. Awkwardly, she measures, and I give her the go ahead with two rubber bands. She’s wearing one of my dad’s coats, and she vanishes inside it. Also, a brown Carhartt beanie, slightly off to one side, with her long blonde braid a little damp on her rubbery yellow shoulder. She looks so stinking cute that if I had my phone with me, I’d snap a burst of photos and post every single one on Facebook.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Dad watching us. What Lucy probably doesn’t realize is she provides the best buffer ever between us. A mutual project. There’s nothing like a greenhorn to bring the rest of the crew together.

  “Naomi,” he yells. “Pull the pots over to the portside. Don’t want you to get caught up in the spray.”

  I nod at him and drag the pots across the deck. That was how it happened five years ago, in a storm just like this.

  “Careful there,” Dad says, now standing behind Lucy, “Or else…”

  And he wiggles his fingers, showing nin
e instead of ten.

  “No way,” Lucy says. In her distraction, another lobster makes a grab for her. This one, though, he doesn’t just pinch. He out-and-out hangs on.

  She doesn’t scream. I’m watching her with a sort of tickled amusement. She just grits her teeth and stares at me, wide-eyed and angry. “If I lose my finger, I’ll never speak to you again…ever!”

  My dad comes to the rescue, and uses his big old meaty hands to pry the claw off of her.

  “Pretty tough for a city-girl,” my dad says, and winks at me over her shoulder.

  His coat is worn out, and he looks more tired than I’ve ever seen him. The traps have been mended, and there’s a crack in the standing shelter. It hits me then that times have gotten really tough, and fast. All that pressure on me to come home, which felt like guilt, it was much simpler than that. It wasn’t him rooting against me. He’s broke, and lonely, and sad. He needs the help. I’ve misread everything. Or maybe I’m just wrecked inside and feeling like shit makes the world a whole lot clearer.

  The day passes in a fury. We eat lunch on the fly in the bulkhead, grabbing halves of peanut butter sandwiches and swigs of water in the minuscule breaks between hauling more traps up from the deep. On and on. Lobster after lobster, rubber bands everywhere, freezing fingers. Somewhere in the toil of it all, I do forget Ben. A little. Or at least he moves away from the center of my mind, in the background, just a touch.

  By sundown, when we leave the deep water, we’ve made such a good haul that his boat is damn near overflowing. I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it too: We might’ve hit the quota, the three of us. Maybe just.

  Dad and I are in the bulkhead while Lucy is hanging her head over the side into the light spray that batters the hull at intervals.

  “Thanks,” he says. He’s never been big on words, or gratitude. So that one means a lot. “Really, kiddo. Thank you.”