The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Hannah pressed her lips tight and gave a quick shake of her head.

  “Mommy won’t wake up,” Vita said. “She’s asleep on the floor.”

  A shot echoed in the woods and both women jumped.

  “It’s the ice…” Hannah said. She’d grown up in the hollow on the other side of the pond; her father had an auto repair business in the woods over there, not exactly licensed but trustworthy. Hannah wasn’t someone who usually looked people in the eye, but now she let LaRee see right in, trying to get something across to her above Vita’s head.

  “I mean, the ice is cracking. There’s no gun,” she said quickly, a red blotch spreading up her neck from her uniform collar.

  “No gun, but…” LaRee gathered Vita into her arms.

  “Right,” Hannah said. “But…something else.”

  “Hannah, stay a minute. I’ll make some cocoa. It’ll be like a little party,” she said to Vita in that high, false voice people use to speak to children and animals when they don’t know what else to do. Vita gazed up at her in silence, a rebuke. She had her father’s dark eyes and his hair, all tangled now and matted… with blood. LaRee could smell it; she felt through the child’s hair to check for a head wound.

  “She’s okay,” Hannah said. “It’s not her, it’s… I gotta go back. We thought if she could stay here, at least for tonight. She knows you.”

  “Of course. Of course. But what about…? Is… is there anything else I ought to do…? Anyone… else who needs me?”

  She turned, so Vita was facing away, and Hannah shook her head, grim. LaRee held Vita tighter, and the little girl snuggled in against her chest, sucking her thumb.

  “Her clothes were… We had to take them off,” Hannah said, and for a second there was the sound of bitter judgment in her voice, as if whatever had happened was the consequence of Sabine’s negligence, of the general license of the washashore community. Hannah glanced over at LaRee’s sink, filled with the dishes of the past two heartsick days, and nodded, having confirmed her sense of things.

  “I have to go back,” she said. “She’s got her teddy bear but… she needs a bath and I expect she’s hungry. The chief will call you. I have to go back. I… You probably ought to lock the door.”

  LaRee heard Hannah’s boots crunching through the snow as she made her way back down the driveway. The house had settled and the bolt didn’t fit into its hole anymore, or maybe it never had. She tried to lift the door by the knob, then to shove it with her hip, but nothing would force the alignment, and she could feel Vita becoming frightened just from watching her face.

  “How about some cocoa for you?” she asked. Vita shook her head. “French toast?” No. There was frost on the inside of the windows; she touched the top of the woodstove. Cold. “Here, I’m going to get a fire going, warm us up.”

  But as she bent to settle the child on the couch, a bare arm emerged from the blanket to clutch her neck. The other was still holding tight to her teddy bear.

  “No, no, don’t put me down!”

  “Okay… okay. I’ll just make myself some cocoa, okay?”

  This she could manage with Vita settled on her hip, and Vita might want some once she smelled it. One little ordinary motion after another: take the pot down, turn on the gas burner, pour the milk. The cocoa powder spilled onto the counter as she opened the box; she stirred with the wooden spoon. Then she tried to lift the pan off the stove, saw that her hand was trembling too violently, and everything started to spin. Sabine was dead, or terribly wounded, by some… accident? Vita’s hair was soaked with blood; she said her mother was asleep. Not a car crash. No gun. It was midweek, mid-January—the roads had been empty, everything was closed for the winter, still and silent. What had happened? What? She’d called Sabine the day before, as soon as she got back from the vet. “It’s done,” she’d said.

  “And it… went okay?”

  “I had him on my lap. So he was happy.” She’d started to cry, of course.

  “I only wish I could go that way,” Sabine had said. “I’ll probably fall off some scaffolding and go splat on the Sistine Chapel floor.”

  LaRee hadn’t answered. Sabine was always giving herself little airs like this. She had studied art conservation in Florence, but she spent most of her time now restoring the wide, dull abstract impressionist canvases painted by the generation who owned retirement homes in town. Her parents’ generation, Harvard alums who’d married Smith alums, who’d been analyzed by men who’d been analyzed by Freud, and dropped acid with men who’d dropped acid with Timothy Leary. Her own father had a degree from Oxford, or so he’d said. Sabine didn’t even know whether he was still alive. Her mother—Bennington—had sold the J. M. W. Turner portrait and bought an apartment on Washington Square. So Sabine could afford to study art at NYU, while LaRee, her prosaic roommate, worked toward a nursing degree.

  Sabine had loved that nursing degree. “You’re so lucky to be normal,” she would say—meaning that she, like Sylvia Plath, or one of the other great artists whose biographies she had memorized, was cursed with genius and madness, set apart from—above— the normal.

  “Here, let’s use the cups your mom brought me,” LaRee said to Vita. They were simple and perfect, hand-painted in some town in Italy specially known for its pottery. LaRee usually used the big mugs she and Drew had picked out at the thrift shop, when they were young and poor and so in love they’d stayed awake all night just to feel themselves skin to skin.

  “She cut herself, that’s why she’s so tired,” Vita said, shaking her head very seriously. LaRee carried the cups to the coffee table one by one so she could keep her promise not to put Vita down. Then she pulled the quilt off the bed and wrapped it around the two of them, propping Vita’s little teddy bear on her lap. As soon as Vita sipped, she relaxed, sat up suddenly, and became the bright little creature LaRee knew.

  “She didn’t even wake up when the police came.”

  “What made the police come?” LaRee asked.

  “They had to wake her up! But she was sleeping too hard! Right by the front door and she didn’t wake up in the morning!” Vita drained her cup.

  “Do you want mine, too?” LaRee asked. Had the police called Franco? Of course, Vita didn’t know he was her father, so what would have been the point? Vita took the cup LaRee handed her, but noticed something amiss.

  “Where are the marshmellows?”

  “Oh, sweetie, I don’t have any marshmallows.”

  “We have ’mellows,” Vita said suddenly, severely, as if she had just discovered LaRee was a criminal. “We always have ’mellows in cocoa!”

  “Well, you know what? Tomorrow morning, as soon as the store opens, we will go straight there and get marshmallows. What do you think of that idea?”

  Vita looked up at her, troubled and accusing, through the snarl of dark hair that had fallen over her face.

  “I won’t be here tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m going home.”

  As Vita spoke, LaRee saw her realize what she had no words to explain. She didn’t know what death was, though she’d been alone with it for hours. When LaRee said “tomorrow” so easily, as if she expected Vita to stay, Vita understood that her mother was not going to wake up. She flung her arm out suddenly, dashing the cup away so the cocoa sprayed across the room, butting her head into LaRee’s shoulder.

  “I want marshmellows now!” she wailed, as if her heart was being torn from her chest. “Tomorrow I’m going home!” She threw the teddy bear down and when he hit the floor she began to scream as if she had killed him.

  “Here, look, Little’s fine,” LaRee said. She picked him up, kissed him, tucked him into the blanket with Vita. “He didn’t get hurt, see?”

  But Vita had been sucked into a black vortex and flailed at LaRee with her little fists, kicking until the quilt slipped off and left her in nothing but her nightshirt. She was tiny, filthy, terrified, and LaRee pulled her up onto her lap, holding her tight, taking one of her little bare feet in each hand. They w
ere like lumps of ice—had she been without socks all this time in the cold?

  “I’m right here with you, right here…” she said, and she felt the tense little body give in slowly to her warmth. The kicking stopped; she bent to kiss the toes. Was this what it was like to be a mother—you had to stand by, powerless, while life struck its blows? Who could bear it? No wonder Drew had been so set against having a child.

  Then Vita was asleep, nestled against LaRee’s shoulder, breathing steadily, sucking her thumb.

  What had happened? What would happen next? In the morning… But it was the morning. Six a.m. and still so dark the windows mirrored her life back to her—the paperwhites she’d gotten to bloom on the countertop, the lamp over the couch, her book still facedown on the arm, and Rex’s torn old bed beside the woodstove. She’d been bleary with misery a few hours ago; now her head was so clear it hurt. She covered Vita with a folded quilt and got the fire going, sat down beside her. Her curls were crusted with blood—LaRee rubbed them between her fingers to flake some of it away. The teddy bear was stiff with blood, too, so LaRee opened Vita’s little fist with her thumb, stuffing a corner of the blanket into her hand to replace the bear, then ran the sink full of cold water and put him in to soak. She rubbed dish soap into the plush, rinsed him again and again. The stain wouldn’t show too badly—he was, of course, a brown bear. Sabine had shopped obsessively for him, going through every toy store on Cape Cod to find this particular bear, whose black bead eyes and sharp snout made him look so poignant and alert.

  It came over her, scalding—Sabine was gone. Sabine who had been so uncertain that her every word was a pose, so hurt that she had been willing to smash Franco’s life to bits when he didn’t fall in love with her… so anxious for Vita to have the perfect soft toy. The bear looked up at her from the sink, with his bright, expectant eyes.

  LaRee wrapped Little in a towel to squeeze him dry, then set him on a stool beside the stove. “Here’s a nice warm spot for you,” she whispered. It was good to offer comfort, if only to a stuffed animal with a sympathetic expression. If only she could have been so kind to Sabine. Surely there are worse sins than imagining yourself restoring the Sistine Chapel ceiling. She leaned against the sink with stiff arms, lifting herself off the ground for a second. She’d been a gymnast in high school, seventh in the state, and she still looked to the strength in her arms for reassurance. After all these years. The window over the sink looked east, up the hill to the back shore, and she saw through the trees the faint red glow of the new day.

  5

  TOMORROW

  LaRee had never put a door on the bedroom, but a velvet drape hung across the opening. She had carried Vita in and settled her in bed there, while she waited for… whatever would come next. The television, muted, showed a banner across the bottom of the screen, which changed from “Body Found in Cape Town” to “Nightmare in a Dream Cottage” over a loop of the Straub place with its wide porch wrapped in yellow tape, police cars parked haphazardly, and the chief looking flustered and self-important as he conferred with the state cops. Last week’s police report had listed two instances of Operating Under the Influence and one of Assault and Battery with a Dangerous Weapon (clam rake). There hadn’t been a murder in Oyster Creek since 1974. They showed a picture from Sabine’s Facebook page— LaRee had taken it, of Sabine and Vita making a pie at Thanksgiving, holding out their floury white hands.

  The phone rang every five minutes: first, Hannah. “How’s Vita?”

  “Still asleep. Hannah, what on earth… ?”

  “She… It happened a long time before we found her. Probably the night before last, but there was the snow yesterday and… I was driving by and the lights were on and the storm door was banging in the wind, so I went up and looked in. And… oh my God, it was an awful mess and Vita was just curled up in the crook of Sabine’s arm. I called the rescue squad and they came over with the defibrillator and everything but… oh, my God, dinner on the table and blood and… I tried to straighten up some, but it was hard with the baby.”

  “Yes, she tidied up the murder scene,” Charlotte Tradescome said a few minutes later, sighing. Charlotte was new in town, a reporter for the Oracle. She had a daughter a couple of years older than Vita who came into the clinic for her checkups. They’d recognized each other the way expatriates might in a foreign city, though they didn’t know each other well. Charlotte had called to find out what she could about Sabine’s death, and of course that led them to gossip. “Hannah didn’t want the state police to think our townspeople are bad housekeepers.”

  Of course not. LaRee thought of the woods behind Hannah’s father’s house, the carcasses of old cars… and everything else… piled there. Georgie Bottles lived in an abandoned school bus back there, and there were maybe twenty toilets all lined up from the days when the town had to switch over to a one-gallon flush. Heaven knew what use they could possibly be, but Jeb Stone couldn’t help holding on to things. “I can imagine what neatness might mean to Hannah,” LaRee said.

  “And the rescue squad tromped all through the snow, around the kitchen, everywhere. They can’t find a whole footprint, or a tire track, and Hannah washed up the wineglasses.”

  “My God, anyone who’s ever watched a cop show knows you don’t wash the wineglasses!”

  “I think it was second nature. Death is bad enough; she didn’t want Sabine to be embarrassed, too. When in doubt, a Portagee cleans.”

  LaRee laughed. “And a washashore drinks. Do you know anything more about Vita? Did she see… whatever happened? Or…”

  “It sounds like she was asleep upstairs, came down in the morning and found Sabine there. She tried to revive her—they found vitamin pills in her mouth that Vita must have put there. And a bag of little marshmallows she had tried to feed her. But Sabine would have died hours before—she was stabbed in the throat.”

  “Vita was there with her all day alone? Trying to bring her back to life? What…?” What was she, or anyone, going to do, to save the child’s heart and soul?

  “That’s what they think,” Charlotte said. “I mean, they might be wrong. I’m so sorry.”

  “I can’t believe it. I don’t really believe it.”

  “Who would?” Charlotte asked. “I don’t think Hannah or the guys on the rescue squad even thought there could have been a murder. They saw someone bleeding, and a baby… and a mess. They’re questioning Franco, you know.”

  “Oh my God… can you imagine Franco Neves,…?”

  “Of course not,” Charlotte said. “But he has the motive, and the means. He was a longline swordfisherman years ago, apparently. You know what that is.”

  “Yes,” she said. Miles of line, hundreds of hooks, and on a good day, a fish almost the size of a woman on each arm, to be hauled flailing into the boat and slit open with one stroke. She hoped Sabine had not put out her hand to protect herself. She did not want to think of her hands being cut.

  Captions scrolled along the bottom of the television: “Oyster Creek has for generations given safe harbor to all sorts of travelers, but a gruesome discovery has shocked this pristine New England village, and people who thought it couldn’t happen in their hometown are thinking again.” The camera panned the harbor with the roofs and steeples packed around it. “The tot found suckling at her dead mother’s breast yesterday had apparently tried to care for the victim as her life ebbed away.” And a close-up on the Facebook picture again.

  “I need to come home,” Sabine had written to LaRee. She’d been in Italy for years. At first she was in love with a waiter from a café on Santo Spirito whose addiction to opium was in abeyance. Their affair, the beautiful union of two tortured souls, was consummated in the same room where Elizabeth Barrett Browning had once stayed. It made a good story, edgy—international, with a pinch of romantic poetry and a dash of pulp fiction. Sabine soon became distracted by another man, an itinerant fire-eater who added a Pre-Raphaelite aspect, making her the focal point of the triangle. Then it turned ou
t that the fire-eater had been the opium addict’s dealer (and lover) all along. “But there’s no home to come to.”

  Of course LaRee had told her to come to Oyster Creek. And the minute Sabine stepped off the little plane in Provincetown, looking worn and rumpled, her fine hair blowing across her face, LaRee had regretted the invitation.

  “You were right,” Sabine had said, in a fragile, distant voice that reminded LaRee of her collegiate fixation on suicidal poets. “I believe this light could cure anything.”

  Soon the opium addict and the fire-eater were forgotten; there was a new story under way. Franco made a wonderfully picturesque lover, leaning in the door of the harbormaster’s shack with his slow smile, and behind him a dragger coming in from George’s Bank with a load of cod. Falling for him was like falling in love with the whole town: the stinging wind off the water; the crabs popping in and out of their holes alongside the marsh; the layers of history back and back and back, through the mackerel fishery, the New York intellectuals and plein air painters, the whaling captains with their clipper ships. It was real—feet-planted-in-the-tide-bottom real. And nothing else was ever real anymore.

  Now the television had their photos side by side, Franco in his peacoat and fisherman’s cap, Sabine with a paintbrush in hand—the fisherman and the artist, the Portagee and the washashore. Cultures would clash; there was glamour, mystery, a romantic location. News directors were thanking the heavens.

  LaRee had found herself kissing Franco once, years ago, in the side doorway of Doubloons Beach Bar after a long summer night of dancing. She was not yet married; his sons were still young. There was no lechery in him; he just fell in love all the time, and she could feel him slip into love with her, right there as he bent in toward her mouth. In his mind, he was the one submitting and she was the seducer.

  She had laughed and sent him home to Danielle, but Sabine was hungrier, older, more desperate. She would take him because she needed him; she didn’t care who suffered. Of course there was a catastrophe on the horizon, but… not a catastrophe like this.