The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Come in, come in,” LaRee said, and Danielle came toward them, smiling a big, candied, frightening smile, leading Franco by the hand.

  “She’s not my mother,” Vita said, afraid LaRee meant to give her away.

  “No, I’m not,” Danielle had said, kneeling in front of her. “But Franco is your dad, and he’s…”

  “Go away!” Everyone knew that parents came in pairs.

  And he had reached out to her suddenly, eyes full of a kind of love she’d never seen before. The nice man from the Walrus, with tears in his eyes, begging her to accept him. It was the first time she had understood that adults were not infallible, that they could be as uncertain as children, as fragile. The pie was on the counter, along with a little china pitcher of flowers from the garden; the room had the cool green feeling it got in the summer when the sun came through the leaves… and she was pierced by a cold fear. There was a trapdoor beneath, always, and at any minute it might give way and you’d be dropped into the dark and no one, not even a father, could save you.

  “Why don’t we just have some pie,” LaRee said.

  So they sat down at the table, Vita on LaRee’s lap, Danielle talking and talking as if she was trying to drown out some dreadful sound in her mind. Franco fidgeted and tapped his foot.

  “I only had boys before,” he said finally. “It’s… like… you throw a ball… or, there’s fishing.”

  “Did you teach them to ride bikes?” LaRee asked.

  “I guess you could call it that. They just got on and rode away.”

  “Well, Vita got a new bike for her birthday. Maybe in September, after Doubloons closes, you could take her up to the parking lot there?”

  “No, you teach me,” Vita said.

  “Franco knows all the tricks,” LaRee said.

  “You,” Vita said. What had she done, crying for a father? She certainly hadn’t expected LaRee to produce one. She’d thought she would get to pick.

  “We’ll all go together,” LaRee said. “Danielle, you’ll come too?”

  “I’d love to,” Danielle said, watching Franco’s face.

  Even in memory this was faded like an old Polaroid. She had known it was momentous, though it felt, from every angle, wrong. He had been there all along, standing behind the bar at the Walrus, making her a special drink with a frilly toothpick. Why hadn’t anyone told her before?

  “You’d had enough,” LaRee said. “We all wanted you to have a place you felt safe in. Your mom had asked me to take care of you if anything happened, and by the time everyone knew Franco hadn’t… committed a crime… (Vita had already been aware of all the euphemisms people used for murder and death; it was quite satisfying to hear that little hesitation before someone said “passed away,” to see people try to wriggle away from reality. She might be an awkward, orphaned girl, but unlike the rest of them she had already looked death in the eye.)

  “By that time, you were cozy here with me. I couldn’t send you to live with Franco. To have you lose your home twice, before you started second grade? Franco wouldn’t let that happen to his daughter. And I’d have missed you too much! So we waited until the right time, and… this seemed like the right time.”

  Everyone would need to be patient, LaRee said, to keep trying, to be grateful and forgiving.

  For ten years they had been patient. Vita spent every other Saturday with Franco, usually Franco and Danielle. Once they had flown to Seattle so she could meet her half brothers—one was an airline mechanic and the other worked in the accounting department at Boeing. Both had pretty wives and young children. The accountant was carefully polite, but the mechanic had hugged her warmly and said, “Welcome to the family! We wouldn’t be real Creekers if we all had the same mom!”

  Danielle had rolled her eyes and answered that she didn’t think it was possible that she could be his mom, though she vividly remembered his birth. “Never so glad to see a pair of forceps in my life! I said, ‘Get that thing out of me, now!’ But you’re still a big pain.”

  Vita had been glad for this story—it was something to tell LaRee. She spent all her time back then saving up stories, because they reminded her that LaRee would be there to listen. She was a real woman, not a mirage who would vanish while Vita was in the other room, or on the other coast.

  “Are you cold, honey?” Danielle had draped her jacket over Vita’s shoulders, but it wasn’t that, it was the feeling that she ought to be standing guard at home, in case some harm might come. Oh, she was dizzy; she… “Danielle, can I call home? I need…”

  “Of course, honey, of course.”

  And she had run into the bedroom to call home. All the time they were trying to draw her into their family, she was resisting. Always that feeling of how wrong it was, a puzzle with too many pieces, still missing its center. She’d opened Franco’s Christmas presents—the stuffed panda as big as she was, the music box with a clipper ship inlaid in ivory—but even as she gave a carefully delighted cry, the wrongness would be sifting into the room like soot. The adults had reasons and explanations, but she only understood that he was her father and he’d been down the street pretending to be someone else for most of her life.

  Of course, as she grew, she came to understand. No one would take a child whose mother had just been murdered and give her into the custody of the man suspected of that murder. She hadn’t even known he was her father. By the time they arrested the real murderer, Vita was in kindergarten, settled with LaRee. Aside from the surreal moments when she was sure she’d just caught a glimpse of Sabine, she was happy. Even Franco had agreed it would be wrong to tear up her life a second time.

  Franco had become famous in the meanwhile. The news truck that parked outside the Walrus and Carpenter the morning they found Sabine’s body, waiting to interview him, had discovered a star. He had walked toward the camera, brimming with confidence and energy and… sweetness… as if he were walking toward a beautiful woman. It had been a bright January morning, the sun spilling across the bay, and he saw himself as a host to these visiting reporters. He had started to tell them about the town, the way it had been when he was young, how his mother would send him down to the pier to get a fish for dinner and anyone would have given him one. How they’d dive for quarters the tourists threw—he was always the quickest one, the one who could guess from a glimmer where to aim. He had a wealth of stories just waiting to be told and the world was full of people who’d been working in cubicles, whose dreams were something like his daily life. The camera loved him. Nightline, Dateline, 48 Hours, Anderson Cooper, Nancy Grace—they all wanted to hear what he had to say. Not because he was famous—because he was real.

  Before the murder he’d been Franco Neves who lived over the bar because he’d let the Rainha slip through his grasp and couldn’t afford his own place. Now he was Franco Neves as seen on TV. Now if the phone rang during dinner, Danielle would say, “It’s the Larry King show,” with just the same irritation as if it had been Hank Capshaw asking him to work an extra shift. And Franco would clear his throat, square his shoulders. Larry King had turned out to be a nice guy, and interested in Franco in a way no one in Oyster Creek ever had been.

  Vita was too young to understand, though not too young to know that people looked twice when they saw her with Franco, that she was set apart somehow. She was too full of the storybooks LaRee read her: Anne of Green Gables, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. School had frightened Vita; she didn’t like to let LaRee out of her sight for a whole day. But the promise of a friendship such as the ones in these books exerted a great pull on her, though she might be quaking as she crossed the threshold into the kindergarten room every morning to face all those huge alphabet letters in their clashing colors, and the other kids, who might become friends (the word had a glow of secret joy for her, so that she couldn’t speak it aloud) if only she could dare lift her eyes from the floor.

  And it had happened. Dorotea Machado and she both liked to play with the family of stuffed rabbits, inventing little rab
bit meals for them of carrots wrapped in a lettuce leaf, or peas and beans and chives, lining them up for storytime, laying them down under a blanket when the class had its afternoon rest. One day the teacher spoke of them as friends and they risked a quick glance at each other to see that yes, this was true. What glory! Plans were undertaken—LaRee said of course Dorotea could come over, any day, and the next morning Dorotea had come to school with a scrap of paper balled up in her fist. “Monday,” it read. The little girls had hugged each other, held hands on the playground. Over the weekend, LaRee made a gingerbread house for them to decorate—there were peppermint pinwheels for the front path, Necco wafers for the roof, and spearmint leaves to make bushes beside the door.

  On Monday, though, Dorotea had arrived at school in tears, shaking her head and refusing to go near Vita all day. And at the great moment when the two had been supposed to head home together, Amalia Matos had driven up to the school doorway to pick up her granddaughter Teresa, and speaking in Portuguese, told Dorotea to get in the car.

  LaRee tapped on the window. “Amalia, is something wrong? Dorotea was going to come over to our house for the afternoon.”

  “Her mother wants me to take her,” Amalia said, without turning her head.

  “But—”

  “Her mother asked me to pick her up,” Amalia repeated, as if LaRee might not speak English. Then she spoke in Portuguese to Dorotea, who sat stiff in her seat, facing front as if her life depended on it, and they drove away.

  Then the kindergarten teacher, just out of school herself, who had seen it all through the window, rushed out to lecture Vita on Accepting Cultural Differences, and LaRee had called her a little idiot when they were back in the car. “It’s because I don’t have a father,” Vita said, and LaRee said, “Don’t be silly. You do have a father.” But she knew what Vita meant. She had called Fiona Tradescome, who was in second grade and thus considered by Vita to be a goddess, to come help with the gingerbread house. “Yeah, they hate us,” Fiona piped absentmindedly, lining up gumdrops along the path. “Just hang around with someone else; it’s not a big deal.”

  And it had not been a big deal. After that she and Dorotea avoided each other’s glances and the family of stuffed rabbits lay neglected in the corner. By middle school they went to Outer Cape Regional with kids from all the different towns. Vita was in the red group, which everyone knew was the smart group, and Dorotea was in blue. And it turned out that nobody had a father. Teresa’s dad was fishing out of New Bedford. Brandon’s had been in town as a tourist and conceived a son with one of the waitresses at Doubloons—no one had ever seen him again. There were dads in rehab, dads in the Marines, dads in jail. It was like the red group and the blue group, a matter of etiquette: You didn’t bring up the subject of fathers, didn’t ask a lot of questions, didn’t make a big deal about Father’s Day.

  9

  HOW SHE WALKED AWAY

  Vita got out of the car down at Mackerel Bay Park, where they were rehearsing The Tempest, and started to skip across the wide lawn before she caught herself and settled into a measured, adult pace. LaRee watched from the car, half praying. It was all walking away now; there was nothing to do but watch from an ever-growing distance, with the faith that some light from the past would shine on every forward step. Vita took a quick look back at her, and waved a hand to shoo her off. Heaven forbid the people at the theater should associate her with some… mother. Which was as it should be. LaRee let up on the brake and started toward home.

  It was the first plankton bloom and the fresh bright smell cleared LaRee’s mind of every doubt. She drove up the road from the harbor, past the simple frame houses where fishermen and merchants had made their homes two hundred years ago, and turned down Front Street, thinking—here I am, done with another day at the job I’ve had for twenty years, going home to the house I helped build, getting some dinner for my daughter—my daughter! Who’d have imagined it? Some people hated the term washashore, but she had always liked it. It was true to the way she’d turned up here, driving a twenty-year-old Volvo with all her possessions stuffed in the back. Worked all summer at anything that paid, went on unemployment the minute the season ended, put down roots without even realizing. Heartbreaking and backbreaking things had happened, she’d been confused and stumbled blindly through, but somehow everything had led to something else, and the life she’d built of rags and shards had knitted itself up into something beautiful and whole.

  She usually avoided Matos Fish Market. It was better to go a little out of her way than to feel the draft of cold disapproval that came with the bay scallops Amalia Matos handed across the counter. She still remembered her first encounter with Amalia, back when she’d just arrived. She had pointed to a piece of cod that looked particularly nice and Amalia had deliberately put a different one on the scale. When she said again that she wanted the first, Amalia had said with asperity, “You don’t get to choose.”

  Back then only tourists went into the market. Anyone who lived here either caught their own fish or bought it down on the pier when a boat came in. Hannah Stone said you could get into Amalia’s good graces by bringing her flowers and complimenting her grandchildren, but years of LaRee’s obsequiousness had had no effect. Amalia bristled during every transaction, as if LaRee was asking for something much more important than a pound of fish.

  Which, of course, she was. She was asking to be considered a fellow member of the community. It was crazy, she thought, cocking her head vaguely and studying the empty refrigerator case just to avert her eyes. Why should Amalia Matos have the power to accept or reject her when she had lived here for two decades and some, cleaned cottages in the summer on top of her schedule at the clinic, lived the same life as the rest? Arteries severed by oyster shells, feet crusted with barnacle infections, fingers and once a whole hand severed by a fishing line… not to mention a foot caught in a boat propeller… jellyfish stings, poisonous dogfish spines—she had dealt with all of them, every kind of marine misery. She’d administered measles/mumps/rubella vaccinations to two generations, seen boys grow into men and marry and begin again. When Lynnie Testa got leukemia at age seven, LaRee had managed the search for a bone marrow donor, though she’d known Lynnie had almost no chance of surviving. But she’d understood that the community itself would sicken if it didn’t have some concrete way to help. It was that kind of thing: years of small efforts and kind words that made you belong to a place.

  Or that was the way LaRee saw it. Amalia would disagree. Amalia considered that LaRee was dithering now, posing in front of the freezer case aware of her willowy height, the hair pulled back so simply with wisps escaping, her dreamy expression as she felt the top of her head for her glasses, checking the date on a bottle of clam juice, as if she had all the time in the world. Amalia was a small, muscular woman, about sixty. She had taken over the operation of Matos Fish Market the day she returned from her honeymoon. (Fort Lauderdale, where she had spent every day lying beside a pool while Bobby fished for marlin. At night they shopped for gold necklaces and danced in the hotel lounge.) Whatever fantasies she might have had about married life, or life on the mainland, had died in Florida, and from then on she followed her mother’s example in all things, raising her daughter as she would if they’d still lived in Gelfa (of which she remembered only the sunlight reflecting mirror-bright off the sea, the whiteness of the houses, and a dog that lay in the middle of the street all day).

  That was what belonging meant to Amalia. It meant surviving in this place where the sun never shone as bright as it did in Gelfa, and holding tight to the old ways. The washashores came over the bridge with the idea they could buy their way in here, that everyone would fall at their feet because they’d been lawyers or doctors in Boston or New York. And they called themselves locals! Let ’em shuck a hundred pounds of cherrystones on the stern of a dragger in a biting wind. They thought their children were natives! If their cat had kittens in the oven, would they have called them muffins?

  She h
ad been picking lobster meat in the back room when she heard the bell, had washed her hands and come out into the shop to find LaRee Farnham standing there saying “hmm,” and cocking her head this way and that, as if she didn’t care whether she kept Amalia waiting or not. Amalia’s life did not allow for little luxuries, decisions between one treat and another. She had the market and the rental cottages on Try Point; when it came time to retire she would sell everything and go back to Gelfa, while the taxes she had paid all her life went to support people like LaRee, who lived only for pleasure and wouldn’t have bothered to save.

  LaRee could feel Amalia’s impatience and it caused her to linger over the clam juice, partly from spite, partly because she didn’t want to turn and face the cold. By now she hated Amalia. Hate was not too strong a word. She knew that look Amalia had had the day (ten years ago, yes) when she drove Dorotea away from school while Vita sobbed. It was the look of a woman who would step over you if you were bleeding in the street.

  “Can I help you?” Amalia asked, in her thin, bitter voice.

  “I’m just thinking,” LaRee said airily over her shoulder, pulling her glasses off the top of her head and putting them back on her face, turning, and looking past Amalia to read the blackboard: Scrod was $11.50 a pound. Salmon was cheaper, but she had spinach already and Vita loved spinach with scrod.

  Amalia wanted to say that she had ten more lobsters to pick, four bushels of silt-covered littlenecks to scrub, cod to fillet, sea clams to chop for pie. LaRee had stayed in the examining room with her the last time she went to the clinic. Amalia did not allow her own husband to see her undressed, and for LaRee Farnham to see her, to sneer, probably, at the thick dark body so unlike her own… No. LaRee, like her friend Sabine, had come here from the mainland, bringing with them the values that had devastated this town. Everyone knew that when the lust roared out of a man, violence was sure to follow.