“In the basement,” he said. “They tied him up down there and…”
“And what?”
“We don’ know what,” Cabbage said firmly.
“You’ve gotta be tough when you’re out on a dragger,” Franco said. “Or you don’t survive.”
“He wasn’t a townie,” Cabbage said, “so they rode hard on him.”
“He was born here, wasn’t he? His mom grew up here too.”
“But his father was fishing out of New Bedford and they lived there until Vinny was in third grade. So, to the kids, he wasn’t one of us.”
“So they were out to get him from the start,” Franco said.
“They took his clothes,” Cabbage said. “And he’d been sick all over himself. I had to wrap him in a plastic tarp, that was all there was down there.”
“Did you call the police?” LaRee asked.
“It was the police,” Franco said. “More or less—the chief’s son had a mean streak. He’s a security guard in Chelmsford, or he was the year Vinny went to prison. I don’t know what he’s up to now.”
“He didn’t hurt him, just scared him,” Cabbage said. “There wasn’t any blood.… Anyway, after that, and after Vinny’s dad died, he wasn’t the same. He liked driving the big truck, though.… He liked that pumper truck.”
LaRee sat down on the stool beside Matt. “Whiskey, okay, Franco?”
So Vinny, who she knew from his stupid grin and the way he’d push his cap back to scratch his head, had been a small boy once, tied up and humiliated by the others. He’d been brought up to work on his father’s boat, but the boat went down. Sabine had invited him in for a drink, been flirtatious with him because that’s what she did with men, then pushed him away. “The same way a man treats a woman,” she used to say. “Why not?” Her affairs began in either admiration or pity, but they always ended in revenge.
Matt watched her taking it all in, considering it. From the very little time they’d spent together, he really knew her and, she noticed, loved her. Meaning he was interested to know how she thought, to weave those thoughts in among his own.
“It’s on the house,” Franco said kindly, bringing her whiskey. Sabine would never have forgiven him for not falling in love with her, when she was young and beautiful and educated and worldly—so far, far above him. Seducing Vinny would remind him that he was just a dumb Portagee, that all the compliments she had paid him, about his knowledge of the sea and the town being worth more than any book learning, were only flattery.… Had he really believed her? Was he that much of a fool? The Sox were up again and Cabbage had left the conversation.
“They stripped him naked and tied him up and just left him there?” she asked Franco.
“Reminds me of my fraternity days,” Henry said.
“You know how kids are,” Franco said uncomfortably.
“I guess I don’t.”
He looked out the window over her shoulder. Finally he said, “We’ve all got ours back a thousand times over, for the things that happened.…”
“Vita didn’t do anything, Franco, except to be born.”
She didn’t expect an answer, and didn’t get one. The whiskey he had given her was as smooth as silk, top shelf, a peace offering, like everything that went between them. Since she had never loved him, it was easy enough to forgive. He did the best he could, like everyone else.
“Listen, Vita’s probably home already,” he said, coming back up the bar to her. “Kids that age, they have to get in a little trouble. I mean, Danielle got pregnant when we were fifteen, and not by accident. Our parents tried to keep us apart and we knew if there was a baby coming they’d make us get married instead. Kids don’t know what they’re getting into.”
“That’s very consoling.”
“Well, I don’t mean Vita’s gonna do that,” he said. “But they all have to do something. They have to tear themselves away or they’d never go.”
“I never thought of that.”
Franco smiled. “Young Frankie, the first time he ever drank liquor, he was walking home and decided to dive off the pier. It was low tide, he broke both his arms and one shoulder and he was lucky it wasn’t his neck. It’s a stage they go through.”
The Sox struck out. Cabbage turned back to them and said, “I always thought you married Danielle because you were afraid of Amalia.”
“Nah,” Franco said, “’Course not. Amalia was just so used to bein’ in charge, you know, ’cause of her dad. She wasn’t a romantic kind of girl.”
“What would Amalia Matos have to do with you marrying Danielle?” LaRee asked.
“Nothing. She had a crush on me. A schoolgirl crush, like they say.”
“She’d been saying she was goin’ ta marry you from the time she was ten years old,” Cabbage put in. “She said her father promised her, and that he was in charge of the town.”
Franco laughed. “And he was, too. Everyone was afraid of him.”
“He thought he owned the town and everyone in it,” Cabbage said. “He couldn’t believe it when you didn’t ask Amalia to the prom. It was supposed to be an honor that she liked you.”
“You know, he was just used to different ways. They were the important family back in Gelfa, they had the biggest house, the newest boat.… He’d have picked his daughter’s husband if they still lived there.”
“I’ve got to go find Vita,” LaRee said.
“Here, I’ll come with you.” Matt drained his beer and stood up.
“No. No, thank you but… I want to find her and talk to her by myself.”
He sat back down, looking wounded.
“I’ll call you,” LaRee said. “I’m grateful for the help.” If there was one thing she didn’t need, it was some man listening earnestly and being honestly concerned; convincing her to rely on him just so he could pull the rug out from under her later on. “I’m sure it’s some dumb teenaged thing just like Franco said, and I don’t want to embarrass her.”
“It’s probably some kid took my bicycle,” Franco said.
“Not Georgie? He forgets, these days.”
A look crossed Franco’s face: anger and resignation. “It was behind the harbormaster’s shack. It’s not like I left it out in the parking lot here.”
The day after Drew left for good, LaRee had wheeled his bike down and leaned it up against the side of the Walrus and Carpenter. It was known that if you left a bicycle untethered there, some drunk would ride it home, and she just wanted to be rid of it. After two days it was gone, but she could remember the way she’d watched it, as if as long as it stayed there, there was a chance he’d come back home. No, but the handlebars had turned up as part of a sculpture a few years later, on display at a gallery on Back Street, and when the gallery became a restaurant the sculpture turned up as a coatrack beside the door. This she had noticed on her one date with Matt, who had hung her sweater up with chivalry, and without realizing he was hanging it on her ex-husband’s handlebars. This town was made of stories like that, all woven together into a fabric so tight that every thread tugged a thousand others. Amalia was still smarting from a date she hadn’t been asked on forty-five years ago; Vinny had pulled Sabine into a nightmare that began when he was in fourth grade. The kids here might not inherit a dollar or a half acre, but every fear, every disappointment, every anger had been passed down in perfect condition.
“Please, Franco, if you see her, ask her to call me,” LaRee said. “I’m going to go… find her, somehow.”
“She’s a kid,” Franco said to her back. “She’s fine.”
17
FLAPDRAGON
Vita sat beside the highway for what seemed like a long time, digging her fingernails into her palm, thinking of the back shore, the sea heaving and crashing, that huge restless being that was her best comfort. She should have turned toward the water instead of the town, let the human world go to hell on its own. How had she imagined that she and Dorotea were going to make some kind of friendship when the poor girl’s mind was
like… Vita pictured a bubbling bowl of entrails with a scaly tail curving through, and that image was curious enough to shake her out of her trance. She stood, brushed the dead leaves and pine needles off her jeans, then couldn’t help trying out Dorotea’s posture, shoulders hunched, head pulled in as if she were bracing for a blow. Her low voice, stubborn and angry, was directed inward. There was no hope another human would hear when she said, “You’re the one that oughta be ashamed.”
By imitating Dorotea exactly, Vita had understood her a little better. So let Franco talk about her being an actor as if that meant she was stupid, that she dreamed of being a Disney princess. She wanted to become someone who understood people by slipping into their skins, moving as they did, speaking as they did, until she could very nearly feel with their guts. Franco didn’t get that. LaRee did. But LaRee had lied, and lied, and lied, about Franco, and Vinny, and… who knew what else? Until her whole life was disordered, like a map torn and taped back together wrong.
She started toward town, toward home. It was a five-mile walk maybe, and the bicycle was back at Dorotea’s. If she turned back they’d have let her use the phone at the SixMart. But she couldn’t. It would be going farther from LaRee, and she felt that if she stretched that bond any farther it would break. Tim Cloutier drove by with his truck full of lobster traps—it was time for that; he’d be putting them on the boat tonight so he could get out first thing in the morning. Then some tourists with New York plates passed, and one with Montana plates towing a new sailboat. She’d heard some people from Montana had bought the old Narville place down on Tradescome Point; it was probably them. She started to cry. She knew everything about Oyster Creek and nothing about any other place. How would she ever get away? The tears streamed down her cheeks and, as she walked into the north wind, down her neck into her shirt. One trickled down her back like a spider. She had to go home; there was nowhere else for her. She was going to be here forever, stepping among the land mines planted years ago by her careless, thoughtless, asshole mother. Oh, they were all right. Sabine had deserved to die.
The brutal thought sobered her, the same as if she’d twisted a burning cigarette into the crook of her elbow. An adult needed to be ready for the violence of life. The books on the shelf over her bed at home… Little House here, Little House there—LaRee had read them all aloud to her, she had been so set on making a safe little nest. A safe, false little world.
The mail truck came over the rise and rattled past, full of all the letters and packages people were sending from Cape Cod, across the bridge into reality. Messages in bottles—Save me, I’m stranded here.
Behind the truck came Sam and Leo in their little old Chevy. She wiped her sleeve across her face—they couldn’t see her like this, so upset she felt barely human. Maybe they wouldn’t recognize her. But Sam waved—ugh, they would never like her now.
He stopped and came backing up along the shoulder of the road.
“Do you need a ride somewhere, honey?”
“No,” she said. “No. No, I don’t. I’m fine.”
“That cannot possibly be true,” Sam said. “No one who is standing on the roadside next to Route 6 has ever been fine. That person obviously needs a ride somewhere. Get in, and we will take you.”
“I don’t know where I’m going,” she said. “Just… away.”
“Well, move the birdcage over, that’s right. And we’ll take you ‘away.’ Though you realize you’re walking into town, not out of it.”
“Oh,” she said, and laughing, began to cry. They were so beautiful and they loved each other with such grace; there was a charge in the air around them wherever they went. Who would have thought they would even recognize her outside the theater, never mind stop for her! And here she was in the car with them, moving the birdcage and making room for herself amid the red tricorn hat and the long satin gown in which Leo had played Juliet to Sam’s Romeo last spring. She couldn’t wait to tell LaRee. Then she remembered that she was not going to speak to LaRee ever again.
“So, why are you going ‘away’?” Leo asked. He and Sam exchanged a glance in the front seat—as if she were a stray kitten they’d found, a treasure. Vita felt she was in love with him, or really, with them, both of them together. She would just like to stand between them and feel it all and… Oh, sex as she imagined it was just magic, sacred magic. And people talked about it as if it were a disgusting joke. Who knew? She didn’t want to. Sometimes there would come a break in rehearsal and Sam would lean up against Leo—he was a little shorter so he could rest his forehead against Leo’s cheek—and say something Vita couldn’t hear, but their smiles would sweeten and Sam’s hand would rest at the small of Leo’s back for a moment, and for ten seconds you felt something like the first warmth of spring.
“I’ve lived here all my life,” she groaned. “I have to.”
She was not going to tell them the truth, that her mother had seduced a poor stupid drug addict and he had killed her and now he had killed himself and somehow everyone in town, even she, blamed Sabine. It was a bloated, reeking shame. She put her hands over her face, to keep them from seeing it. “Isn’t that bad enough? To have lived in one place your whole life, known the same old people all that time?”
“I don’t know, I lived in Ann Arbor until I was eighteen,” Sam said. “It was cozy.”
“Well, Chattanooga was not cozy; it was clammy and the insects were enormous and I wanted to get out of there just as fast as I possibly could,” Leo said. “Of course, I knew I’d have to dance my way out. And nobody’d ever heard of Billy Elliot back then, by the way. Chattanooga was a circle of hell… the ninth circle. Or maybe the eighth, but still… Every porch had a porch swing and on every porch swing was a daughter, waving and saying ‘Le-o? Hi, Leo. Come on and have some sweet tea.’ And you knew that just inside the door was a mother waiting, and a father with a shotgun. And I was just thinkin’, Sam, I know you’re out there, Sam, and…”
His accent got stronger with every line—he couldn’t help acting it, entertaining them. Oh, she loved him.
“We’re here, love,” Sam said suddenly. They had driven into the narrow shell driveway at Orson Desroches’ house, a tiny, ornate structure at the top of Sea Street, all white shingles in diamond patterns, with a wide porch topped by a smaller porch topped by a dome that looked as if it were made of meringue. Vita had sold Orson Girl Scout cookies, magazine subscriptions for the cross-country team, and oranges for the music department, but she had never been invited inside.
“We didn’t take Vita home,” Leo said.
“She wasn’t going home.”
“Well, we didn’t take her… away, either.”
“This is away,” she said eagerly, just as Orson stepped out his front door.
Sam squinted, Leo shrugged, and another car pulled into the driveway behind them. Hugh got out, wearing a tweed jacket, carrying a bottle of wine.
“Are you hungry?” Sam asked Vita.
“I… I don’t want…” To intrude, to be in the way, any more than she had already been in this life. But Orson was standing at the top of the steps with one arm magisterially outstretched, and his gaze so perfectly affixed on Sam that it was clear that everyone else would be utterly invisible to him.
Or nearly. “We have a special guest, I see,” he said, coming to the edge of the porch in his sock feet. “Hmmm… I may want to tidy up just an extra bit. Have you all seen the view from the side balcony? Why don’t you take the circular staircase, right there, and I’ll be out in just a minute or two.”
All of the town was spread beneath them, the steeples silhouetted against the soft silver of the bay, a pale sunset reflecting pink in the lee of every wave. Adam’s mom went running down Front Street with her light, measured steps, running in place for a minute as she spoke to Danielle, who was closing up the pharmacy.
Sam spread his arms and went up on pointe.
“Show-off,” Leo said. “You’re competing with a sunset; you’re going to lose.” But
he struck a complementary pose. Vita pushed up onto the balls of her feet, too, to see what it might feel like to be Leo and Sam. A light came on in the old Moody house at the end of Sedge Point, a plain little place with a laundry line across the front and zinnias in the garden in summer. Then the streetlamps blinked on, one by one, all around the harbor, and some in among the pines on Sedge Point, maybe at Adam’s house. And one in the Rainha’s wheelhouse—no, of course not, it had just been a last glint from the sun. But it had made her happy for a second, as if it were a flicker from the candle her mother must be carrying through the afterlife.
“Entrez, entrez,” Orson called. “Martini, or cosmo?”
They came down onto the porch and into the house, which felt like a tiny white church, especially because of the staircase leading to the loft, the tall pointed windows, and the fact that the pictures on the wall were covered with bright silk scarves. Vita was still dressed in her jeans and sweatshirt from school and she felt as if the day’s sweat and tears had made her filthy. They couldn’t really be happy to have her here. Did LaRee even care that she was gone? Probably not. She had played her part well but after all, she was not really Vita’s mother; they would never have that visceral bond. The principal had put his arm around Dorotea, she remembered suddenly—he was fatherly, concerned for her. He had never paid any such attention to Vita; in fact, he was always getting her name wrong, calling her Virginia and then apologizing and making it worse with some long explanation. She just didn’t register; she was like a ghost herself. Too shy to make a sound, she shrank behind Sam and Leo.
Orson stood rapt in the kitchen doorway, stirring martinis in a chrome shaker.
“Can you hear it? There’s a tone that comes when they’re properly mixed. You could say that a perfect martini has its own chime.…”
“Perfect madness has a chime, too,” Hugh said, twinkling. He looked like a blue heron, tall and angular with long spindly legs and a few long wisps of hair combed back over a bald spot. “Even now it is ever so faintly ringing.”
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