The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  LaRee unlatched the arched door into the entry. The place was silent except for Margaret Capshaw, who looked like a greyhound, running in place as she read the bulletin board. Was she addicted to exercise, and if so, why? Or was LaRee just jealous, not of the thinness but of the ability to change the course of one’s life? Two curved staircases ascended on either side and she took the left one for the high window that looked out over Sedge Point, treading lightly on the stairs, aware of the muffling effect of the carpet, as if Vita were a fawn in the woods and she had to keep from startling her. The children’s room was empty, but she heard a page turn above and continued up to the reading room on the third floor.

  A girl was reading there, in one of the leather wing chairs with a view over the harbor—Fiona Tradescome. Her hair shone in the lamplight and she pushed it out of her face, looking up with a smile. She was two years older than Vita and light-years more poised.

  “Hi, LaRee,” she said brightly, and LaRee had to blink back tears suddenly. Why had this girl had a safe, solid life of the kind that left a person at ease in the world when Vita had so much to bear? Fiona played the violin and people would talk about it, how ironic that Henry Tradescome’s daughter had that talent when Henry himself had lost the use of his right hand in the last polio epidemic.

  “Hi, Fiona. How are you?”

  “I’m good. Are you looking for something?”

  “I’m looking for Vita.”

  “I’ve been up here for an hour, I guess, and I haven’t seen her,” Fiona said.

  “Oh, well, she probably…” The pier lights started to come on, one by one, out the window. Where would Vita go, in the dark? “We probably just got our signals crossed,” LaRee said. “If you see her, would you ask her to call me?”

  “Sure,” Fiona said. “I’m sure everything’s fine, though.”

  “I am too, honey. Thank you.” She started toward the stairs, then turned back, uncertain.

  “Do you want me to… Is there anything else I can do to help?” Fiona asked.

  Yes, I need your self-possession for Vita. You have two parents and that should be enough for anyone. That was what LaRee thought. “No, no,” she said. “She’s probably home already.”

  It was 6:42 and the wind was bringing the smell of seaweed up from the harbor. It was the new moon—the tide would be low, the men out working their oyster claims. The street was empty except for a cat rubbing itself against a broken picket on the old Snow house fence. All these years and it was still the lonely, dreamy street where LaRee had searched for a job that lost summer when she was twenty. Whatever you did in Oyster Creek, whether it was kissing a lover or knocking a stone out of your shoe, it had a little extra drama. The town acted like a stage set to remind you that every minute of your life was terribly, terribly important. That was reason enough to stick right here.

  A shadow emerged from the back of Matos Fish, a small, solid figure with a tight coif and an officious stride. Amalia was finished for the day, going through her closing routine for maybe the ten-thousandth time in her life. She came around and tried the front door to be sure it was locked, peered in through the window, and, reassured, tucked her cash pouch under her arm and started toward the bank depository next door. Then she felt LaRee’s presence and looked over her shoulder.

  “Hello, LaRee,” she said drily, as if she were used to finding LaRee sniffing around in her garbage.

  “Hello, Amalia. You’re working late.”

  “Can’t tell a load of lobsters to wait until morning,” Amalia said. “Lobster divers have to make a living, too,” she said, implying that LaRee didn’t care whether lobster divers lived or died. Then she remembered that she had a sharper grudge. “And Maria asked me to look in on Dorotea.”

  LaRee could feel retorts forming, little needles to jab Amalia with.

  “That’s nice of you, Amalia,” she said. “How is Dorotea?”

  “She is just fine. She has plenty of family, and we’re setting up a fund for her education.”

  “I’ll make a contribution. This is so sad.”

  “It certainly is,” Amalia said, pushing the bag into the depository slot with ironclad satisfaction. She was a certified victim and did not share one speck of the universal blame. She was carrying a book as well as the bank bag—Their Eyes Were Watching God.

  “Teresa is reading it at school,” she explained. Teresa was her granddaughter—one of the pack of girls who scooped at Ice Cream Tuesday in the summers and drank behind it in the off-season. She played soccer and fit in perfectly with her team, as she had with her Girl Scout troop years ago. Of course Amalia would cheer her on at soccer games, but, reading the books for English class? LaRee wouldn’t have imagined it and it made her wonder what else she didn’t know. Amalia straightened her back and her face, and clicked away on her heels, turning up School Street toward her mother’s. The old woman’s face peered like a ghost out the front window. Of course Amalia would go to her mother’s. This was the kind of news that demanded company, a lightning flash that lit everything so bright for a second that it seemed to have revealed an alternate world. Sabine’s murder had been another of these, and the night the Calliope Hotel burned down, and the loss of the Suzie Belle. Amalia’s brother had been the captain of the Suzie Belle, and their mother had not left the house since the day it went down, though she would sometimes put up the window to speak to someone in the street.

  LaRee also had a brother—his name was Robin. “He has the creative spirit,” her mother would say, but it was more that Robin didn’t dare take a step in any direction. He lived on disability now, after a back injury twenty years ago. Sometimes he’d get drunk and call up full of cheer, telling LaRee he was going to reinvent himself, that he’d been doing some watercolors and they were damn good, damn good. This was the genteel equivalent of going down on the Suzie Belle, LaRee supposed. Down the street she saw a breath of smoke dissipating under the lighted Walrus and Carpenter sign. Franco would be behind the bar—Vita might have gone to him. And even if she hadn’t, LaRee needed to see someone else who had been part of this story all along.

  The Walrus was full; there was a Red Sox game on television. Henry Tradescome, Fiona’s father, was there, Westie Small beside him, and some guys LaRee recognized without really knowing them: Sal Bemba from Sea View Auto Repair, and Cabbage Lopes, whose real first name was long forgotten.

  “People been saying they seen a ghost,” Sal said. “A light in the wheelhouse of the Rainha, late at night.” He laughed at the idea, looking down the row at the bar to see if anyone would take it up.

  “If there was a ghost on the Rainha, it’d be your father, Franco.”

  “There’s no ghost on the Rainha,” Franco said. “If Vinny came back… I don’t think he’d haunt a dragger. He never even went out on the wharf after his father passed away.”

  “I used to work with Vinny,” Cabbage said. “His dad was in my class at school.”

  “I know,” Franco said. “I was in your class at school, too.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed you’d remember that, Franco. Seeing I wasn’t a girl.”

  Franco wiped the bar in front of Cabbage and set down another draft. LaRee couldn’t help being glad to see him. Both of his jobs consisted mostly of shooting the breeze with other men—either on the dock or at the bar. He enforced the law with a fond regret. He was sorry about all of it—sorry that lobsters didn’t just wash up with the tide as they once had, that there were so few that laws had been passed to protect them, that the laws made it harder yet for men to earn their living, sorry that they broke the law, and mostly sorry that he, who should have been at the helm of the dragger Rainha do Mar, cresting one wave after another with no boundaries, not so much as a stop sign to obey, should be left writing tickets for small infractions, enforcing the law on his friends. He was sorry to be so easily bewitched by women, so tender and confused toward Vita that he could hardly speak when he was around her; sorry about Sabine, and Vinny, of course; sor
ry he’d hurt Danielle; just sorry. He leaned on the bar with both arms, hanging his head for a moment, then looked up with a big, sheepish, glad-to-see-you smile.

  “LaRee!” he said. “Tequila sunrise?”

  “That was my drink—in 1985,” she said. It felt like home here. She could trace the names carved in the bar, the sound of the men’s voices over the television just the same as it had been always. The low, dark room was lit by a strand of Christmas lights and a few cheese graters with yellow bulbs, so the bottles over the bar looked full of amber light. And there was always the atmosphere of a wake—a sense of communal mourning, resignation, and good cheer. They didn’t always have a person to mourn for, but there were plenty of departed hopes: Cabbage’s wife had left him and taken the kids up to Maine; Henry was writing a book that never seemed to be finished. But they were here together—they’d survived to try again.

  “See, I remember a lot,” Franco said, turning his back to her to get down the gin for Henry Tradescome. “I remember when the leg came up in Bobby’s net, too. I thought Vinny’d just shake until he crumbled.”

  “Vinny’s father went down on the Suzie Belle?” LaRee asked. Franco looked at her as if she’d asked whether George Washington had been president.

  “At least they found part of ’im,” Cabbage said. “It’s a comfort, whether you think it would be or not. Otherwise you just keep wonderin’.…”

  He trailed off and there was a moment of silent respect, observed instinctively by all.

  “So,” Franco said, then. “What can I get for you?”

  “Franco… do you have a minute?” LaRee asked. The cook had come out to sit at the bar and watch the game, so she pulled Franco into the kitchen for privacy. “Have you heard from Vita?”

  He laughed sadly, shook his head. “No, why?”

  “Oh, she’s upset… I mean, she’s furious. When she found out about Vinny… she just… oh God, you can imagine.”

  Franco squinted, scratched his head. “She’s upset about Vinny?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did she even know him?”

  “No, but you know his daughter’s in her grade at school… so…”

  “Dorotea,” he said, nodding, absorbing. “But why would she be mad?” He looked through the window in the swinging door to see if anyone needed a drink, but unfortunately no one did.

  “Franco…” LaRee watched him puzzling. “She’s furious that we never told her…”

  “Told her what?”

  “That Vinny killed Sabine.”

  “We didn’t?”

  “Well, I didn’t. And apparently you didn’t. I should say she’s not furious at you.” That wouldn’t have occurred to her.

  “I never even thought… She was just a little girl. Why would anyone have told her?”

  “I know. I said the bad man went to jail, that she was safe.”

  And Vita used to ask, too: Was the bad man still in jail? Yes, he will be there forever. And then, how could anyone be so bad that he would kill someone? Because of drugs—he was crazy with needing drugs; he didn’t know what he was doing. He must be very sad now, to think that he killed someone’s mother.

  LaRee had to repeat the story over and over—a story she had completely invented. No one knew what had happened really, not even Vinny. He had sworn he was innocent, even after the DNA matched. He’d been drinking, and yes, maybe he’d had some cocaine. The man was desperate to get money for drugs. He came to the door. Sabine was always so generous; of course she let him in. She offered him something to eat. (There had been two wineglasses on the table, but Hannah had washed them. Hannah was used to cleaning up after people; she was not used to investigating murders. Still, it was hard to imagine Sabine having a glass of chardonnay with Vinny.) But he asked her for money. She gave him all she had, but it wasn’t very much. He needed more. (In fact, her purse was still hanging on the kitchen chair with sixty dollars in the wallet.) And he didn’t know what he was doing (he had slashed her with a fishing knife, a knife no one had been able to find) and… he didn’t know there was a little girl upstairs, a little girl who needed her mom. And Vita, six years old, planning to adopt a fox cub one day, had worried for this poor man: Does his family visit him in jail? I always think we should forgive one another as often as we possibly can, but sometimes… “Would you forgive me, LaRee, if I killed someone?” The only way you would kill anyone, Vita, would be in a horrible accident, and of course I would forgive you. “What if it wasn’t an accident?” It would be an accident. “But what if it wasn’t?” Vita, there are some things a grown-up just knows. “Then why didn’t my mom know the man might kill her?”

  “It made sense to talk about it that way when she was little,” LaRee said. “Oh, I wish…”

  Franco’s face furrowed—he was trying to understand too many things at once. Danielle had taken their boys through a steady progression of rules, responsibilities, and events that marked off the stages of their lives: christening, first steps, first communion, football, driver’s license, graduation, wedding, fatherhood. LaRee was like some kind of snake charmer, guiding Vita upward by dint of perfect focus. It reminded him of his father, who understood fish so well that he would sense them and seem to see them even at twilight or in a fog so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

  “I wish I’d thought it through better,” LaRee was saying. “I’d have… Oh, I don’t know what, but I’d have done it differently, that’s all!”

  Franco rubbed his temples, seeing Vita as she’d been the week before, a young woman pushing her shoulders forward and her head down, the hard look she had given him as she shook his hand. A surly teenager. Weren’t they all?

  “She’s going through a phase,” he tried.

  “Franco, of course she’s going through a phase. That’s why she needs her parents!”

  “I’m right here,” he said. “She doesn’t want me.”

  “No, Franco. It’s not that. It’s that she’s not sure you want her. She… It’s all been so strange and out of focus for her.… You were here and she didn’t know you were her father, and her mom is gone, and everyone else is… Do you know that she’s always wished there was a boat named after her?”

  “Why?”

  “Because every other girl in town has one! That’s how men name their boats, after their daughters. Yours comes from before she was born, but still.…”

  “Wouldn’t be much of a compliment to have an old bucket like the Rainha named for you,” he said with a laugh.

  “No, no… It’s not the boat so much. It’s…”

  Franco thought of his kayak skimming along, away from land and all the troubles on land, his skateboard…

  “Somebody stole my bike,” he said suddenly.

  LaRee hit the swinging door with the flat of her hand and walked out into the barroom. She must have been pretty desperate to look for help from Franco Neves. It was the fourth inning and from the din she guessed the Sox had just scored. Matt had come in while she was in the kitchen with Franco and had sat down on the other side of Henry Tradescome.

  “Has anyone here seen Vita?” she asked. Cabbage poked his finger into his ear and scratched violently, as if her voice had irritated it. Westie said, “I haven’t seen Vita since she was yea high. I’m not sure I’d recognize her.”

  Henry looked up. “What’s the matter?”

  “She’s upset about Vinny… and everything. She went for a walk this afternoon and she hasn’t come home.”

  “Did you check the library?” The lines on Henry’s face were deep from years of thought and… pity, or rue, and this alleviated her dread. How far could Vita have gone, really? What cruelty could she really meet with, in Oyster Creek? Even Amalia was doing her best.

  “Thanks, Henry, I did. Fiona’s there, by the way.”

  “Hmmm… I think I’m supposed to pick her up,”

  Matt touched her arm to catch her attention, holding her eye. He always had to remind her, they had
this secret stream between them, like the aquifer Oyster Creek shared with Wellfleet. Oh, September 10, day of innocence, sunlight, plenty!

  An ad came on and LaRee decided to try again. She tapped the side of a wineglass with a spoon. “Listen—if any one of you sees Vita, please ask her to call home, okay? I’m a little worried about her.”

  And they all looked up to the television, all at once. Were they idiots?

  No. It was the news break, and there was Franco standing at the end of the pier with the derelict Rainha behind him, the rusted pulley there beside his head, and the heavy chain that hung down from it, and the rolled net with wisps of seaweed caught in it, and the gray surf sucking at the hull. He rubbed his chin like a seasoned commentator and said, “Vinny wasn’t a bad guy, really,” and a red banner flashed across the bottom of the screen: “Jailhouse Suicide: Slain Woman’s Lover Speaks Out. WLLZ News at 11.”

  “Franco, has it never occurred to you to say, ‘No comment’?”

  His eyes opened wide. “He came all the way down from Boston, over the bridge,” he said. “I couldn’t send him back without saying something.”

  LaRee cast her eyes heavenward, and Franco realized he’d erred, without understanding how. “Vinny wasn’t a bad kid. You have to remember what he went through.…”

  “I do,” Cabbage said grimly. “I was the one who found ’im.…”

  Franco was shaking his head. “I don’t know why it was,” he said. “Somethin’ about bein’ tough enough, I guess, proving it.”

  “Found him where?” LaRee asked. “You mean, when they found his father’s leg?”

  “Nothin’, nothin’,” Cabbage said, but Franco had never learned how to say, “No comment.”