The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Hugh was at some great remove from it all. “When you think,” he said, to Vita, or maybe to the bookshelf, “that most of us spend our lives learning ‘discretion’—how to keep things quiet—until some no longer have words for the most important things in their lives. Shakespeare lived in the opposite direction, working to say things that no one had put into words before.”

  Everything blurred. Hugh’s sentences swirled through Vita’s mind like smoke rings. A hot raisin flew over her head. She ducked away from the couch to the front window, through which she could see the slow-blinking blue light of the harbormaster’s boat as it came around the end of Barrel Point and crossed the harbor. It seemed like a sign, that someone was watching over them, keeping them safe.

  “Full fathom five thy father lies,” Hugh repeated to himself, thoughtful.

  “Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”

  18

  Rainha do Mar

  Darkness. Leaving the Walrus, LaRee looked up Front Street, past the library, Our Lady, Star of the Sea, and the First Church of Christ with its belfry lit against the night. Each of these solid, spired buildings, built here to reassure the inhabitants of a town set at the end of a thin curl of land in the middle of the sea. The night the Calliope burned, those steeples stood against an orange sky, the flames billowing up the hill behind them. Fire trucks barreled in from the surrounding towns, their horns and sirens howling, bellowing as if they could scream the flames down.

  And the next morning, the smell of wet ashes, the old hotel that everyone said looked like a wedding cake twisted and slumped in on itself. The carriage house had been the only thing left. Orson had restored it perfectly, painted it white and on summer nights would fly a long white pennant from the cupola. Light shone from his windows now but LaRee couldn’t look that way without thinking of the wreckage, the way all the leaves had been scorched off the trees—this must be one cell of what Vita felt, looking ahead toward her life. The black lacquer sky, the white steeples could flash over into horror—it had happened before.

  She headed down Sea Street, toward the locust grove and Mackerel Bay Park, and down the pier. The old fishermen would drive along it two and three times a day, gathering bits of news—the price someone had gotten for a tuna, an argument between neighbors moored side by side. It was quiet now except for a couple of men she didn’t recognize carrying crates of sea clams up a gangway from their boat.

  The pier turned right after the old fish-packing plant, but renovation money had run out before they could replace the pilings around the corner, and the Rainha continued rotting silently at her mooring there at the very end. Why Franco didn’t do something with her… Well, maybe he couldn’t bear to. LaRee ought to clean out her own closets, give away the pants that didn’t fit anymore, the velvet shirt she’d bought that year when she imagined she’d be dating Matt through the fall. Ha. She’d seen herself laughing in it, holding a wineglass in the firelight like some model in a clothing catalog. It was embarrassing to remember all she’d dreamed, so embarrassing that she didn’t care to look at the shirt for the three seconds it would take to stuff it in a thrift shop bag. Though, really, she had been lucky when Matt’s wife returned. The idea of making room in her life for a man again, someone to worry about and care for, who would fail her and be failed by her… No.

  It was right that Vita was the center of her orbit. If only she could find her. Where was she? Where would she go? Making a U-turn at the end of the wharf, LaRee thought she saw a light glimmer from the cabin of the Rainha. Would Franco keep a light on in there, a naked bulb such as they used to appease the ghosts in a theater? Heaven knew he had his ghosts, but… LaRee stopped the car, and when she did, the door of the Rainha’s wheelhouse opened a crack, then was pulled tight shut again from within.

  LaRee rolled down the window. “Vita?” Was this where she had been, all those days when she said she was “out walking”? Smoking weed on the Rainha with her friends? It seemed like every other teenager had—even Fiona Tradescome, who looked as serene as a madonna, had fixed the GPS on her cell phone so her mother couldn’t find her, or so Vita said.

  Teenagers did not know what they were doing, not even Fiona, not even Vita. And when you were mad at your mother, you ran to your father, even if it seemed like the last resort. “Vita, are you there?”

  No answer, but someone was aboard that boat. The tide was coming in around Barrel Point and the Rainha was rocking, just slightly, crosswise against the swell. LaRee got out of the car.

  The fish plant blocked the view from the rest of the pier, the harbormaster’s shack was locked up for the night, and the men with the sea clams would do their work, make their assumptions, and go back to New Bedford.

  Most of the boats had gangways that rose and fell with the tide, but the Rainha was fastened with just a rope at the bow. The boat jostled the pier, bumping away and against, the water sloshing up suddenly over the rail. LaRee took a deep breath and climbed up and over, slipping on the deck so that she fell sideways against the trawl. So she was in—bruised, scraped, and wet along her side, but in. “Vita?”

  Everything was gnarled and blistered with rust—the cables, the porthole, the trawl. The scallop chain seemed grown and swollen into itself. An orange life preserver ring hung on the outer wall of the cabin with part of the covering ripped away so she could see what looked like straw inside. Someone had nailed a board across the cabin door to keep it from splitting. She knocked. “Vita? Is someone in there?”

  No answer. She pulled at the door, but it was hooked closed from inside.

  “Shut up. Go ’way.” A man’s voice.

  “I’m looking for Vita Gray!” she called.

  The door opened a few inches and a huge dark face appeared, eyes popping. “Well, she ain’t here, so go away!”

  “Georgie! Does Franco know you’re here?”

  “Franco don’t ever look sideways at this boat,” Georgie said, lurching back as the boat shifted. He was drunk, and holding a bottle of beer. Something was cooking on a makeshift stove behind him—that was the light she’d seen, a can of Sterno flickering. “Go ’way now.”

  “Do you… Are you okay?”

  “Go away,” he hissed, looking up at her like a bullfrog, scrappy even though he was standing two steps below her. “Nobody bothers me here, and as long as they don’t see you, they won’t start.”

  “You haven’t seen her?”

  “Vita? I seen Vita this afternoon, ridin’ her bicycle down the highway.… She might be in Brewster by now.”

  “Her bicycle? What bicycle? Her bicycle’s at home.”

  But this made no sense to Georgie and he just shook his head and started back to his cooking. Then he looked back and saw her dripping sleeve.

  “Go up on the bow,” he said over his shoulder. “There’s a step there, see. She’s tied at the bow, so… you can get off without fallin’ in.” A skepticism crossed his face. “Probably,” he added.

  In the distance she saw a blue light slowly blinking—Hank Capshaw coming back across the bay from Barrel Point in the harbormaster’s boat. Any closer and he’d see her drive away, know someone was out here. She did not want to explain herself and she especially did not want to explain Georgie, so she went up on the bow, grateful for the wide soles of her nursing shoes, and stepped across onto the pier again. As she drove away down the pier, the sea clam guys looked up at her for the first time. One gave a perfunctory wave.

  Turning back up Sea Street, she saw the blue light coming closer. He’d tie up and head home on foot across the bridge around the island to the little house on Shep’s Alley that he and his wife had built. She’d be just back from a run or a yoga class, fixing a very healthy dinner for Adam and his little brother. At the moment LaRee would have paid for a glimpse of their dinner table with the family around it: a divine mystery.

  What could be
going on at Barrel Point that would require Hank’s presence, in the pitch-dark night like this? Someone poaching from an oyster claim? A whale stranding? They happened out there—the harbor was a bit like a weir in that creatures could find the way in but not out again. Then she felt everything stop. The other thing that happened at Barrel Point was suicide. First a man from the mainland who’d driven out here after his wife died shot himself on the beach, thinking the waves would carry him out to sea. He didn’t know the currents—the cops had to clean up the site and three years later, the one who’d been first on the scene had become despondent and remembered that Barrel Point was the right kind of remote place. He’d taped a vacuum hose to his exhaust pipe and left a note saying no one should be sorry, that he’d died looking out over the bay. After that Barrel Point stuck in people’s minds as the appropriate place for despair. Suicides, divorces, deaths, they were the broken threads that weakened the whole fabric. Then drugs got in and…

  Just as her blood turned cold, LaRee looked up to see something like an angel—Vita, a slender silhouette in Orson’s arched window, against what she thought was candlelight. Her hair was loose, and she was standing… confidently, with her arms stretched wide. Yes.

  Yes. She was fine, she was just fine, and soon she would stride into the world with that halo of curls and that posture and …a tear rolled down LaRee’s cheek, then another. Then it was as if the world of sorrow Vita had interrupted when she arrived thirteen years ago yawned open again.

  LaRee escaped that world by being Vita’s mother, day by day by day, leading Vita out of her own loss and consequently, rescuing herself. Vita was safe at Orson’s, doing exactly what a sixteen-year-old girl was supposed to—finding her way into life.

  LaRee went home, to take a leaf from Amalia’s book and read Their Eyes Were Watching God.

  19

  MORNING

  Vita woke up on Orson’s sofa, under a comforter as white and fluffy as last night’s dessert. A slice of sunlight angled across her knees, with a Gothic point like the window it came through. It was all peace and order and light here. Of course. Orson had no relatives at all.

  “Vita,” he said, looking down from the top of the stairs. “Are you awake, dear?”

  “Yes,” she said, pulling the cover to her chin though she was still fully dressed underneath it. A burnt raisin rolled out from under her pillow, proof that last night had really happened.

  “May I come down?”

  “Of course! I… What am I doing here?”

  “You were sleeping so soundly, I couldn’t bring myself to disturb you. I called your mother and she said just to let you stay. Do you drink coffee, dear?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, not wanting to sound childish, though she had never had coffee and the bitter smell repulsed her. “But she’s not my mother.”

  Orson had tied a white scalloped apron over his clothes and brought her a mug of coffee and a linen napkin. His small, soft hands had dimples instead of knuckles, and seemed strangely bendable, as if he had cartilage instead of bones. But he propped up her pillows efficiently and threw the front door open to the world. There was the bay shining like a mirror, with the boats bobbing against the pier. A quiet morning, the summer people—college professors mostly, right now—here already, but the tourists, the day-trippers and barhoppers, yet to come. Her accusation rang in her ears as the childish insult it was, guaranteed to hurt LaRee only because she cared so much. She heard flip-flops and saw the top of a kayak go past down the lane. Orson lived in paradise, not a mile from Dorotea’s hell.

  “She’s worried about you,” Orson said simply.

  “She lied to me. All this time I’ve been the only person in town who didn’t know the truth about my own mother, Orson.”

  “What truth is that?”

  “That Dorotea’s father was in jail because he killed her. Everyone else knew that, except me.”

  He untied his apron, silent again. He was wearing a silk shirt and pin-striped pants. “Where are you going?”

  “To Fatima Machado’s funeral.” He paused for an instant, gazing down with respect for the dead, Vita thought, until she realized he was contemplating the shoes in his closet.

  “I didn’t know you knew her,” Vita said.

  “I used to live next door to her, when I first came here. I’d buy her a tank of oil for Christmas, that kind of thing. She was already losing her memory when Vinny went to jail and she started to be suspicious when I went over to visit. Didn’t like having a strange man in the house.”

  Vita pulled her knees up against her forehead. “My mother wrecked their lives,” she said.

  “What on earth can you mean?” Orson asked, sitting down across from her.

  “That she was a…” She forced the word out. “A slut.”

  “I have never been clear about the meaning of that word,” Orson said.

  “Well, you’re the only one who’s not clear about it.”

  “Does it mean someone who deserves to be murdered?”

  “No, of course not…”

  The church bells down on Front Street started to ring, and Orson jumped up and went back to the closet for his suit jacket and opera cape.

  “It means that she didn’t have respect for love, that she didn’t honor her own heart.” Vita hardly knew what she was saying, but she had to get it out into the air.

  He folded the cape over his arm and turned to look at her. She saw this was a new idea to him—that she, Vita Gray, who had failed geometry and been given the smallest part in the play, had just surprised the impossibly sophisticated Orson Desroches.

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he admitted. “I never really knew your mother—but what I saw of her was a pretty woman who loved her little girl. I’m sure she had her eccentricities.…” (He was slipping his feet into a pair of black pumps.) “We all do. But she did not ruin anyone’s life. Vinny ended her life, and he might have ruined yours, but from here at least it doesn’t look that way. It looks like you’re a person who takes life in her hands and makes good of it.”

  “It does?” But even as she asked this she saw a glimmer—it was true that she had gone to talk to Dorotea, tried at least to come to terms—and not just to come to terms with an idea, but with another person. And what a mess that had made.

  “You’re on your way home from here, I presume?”

  She flinched, every muscle. “No! I can’t go home. I won’t. It’s not even really my home, Orson, and you know LaRee’s not my mother.” She said this with a child’s high-pitched finality that made him smile for a second before kindness straightened his face.

  “Vita—” he started.

  “I’ve made up my mind. I’m Sabine Gray’s daughter.” As she said this, it occurred to her for some reason that she had beautiful hands, delicate with long, pale fingers. The kind of hands you didn’t see much in Oyster Creek, where women were proud of their oyster-shucking abilities. She stretched her right hand in front of her, so Orson could see Sabine’s ring on her finger, as if that would prove something.

  “Quite an opal,” Orson said. “Was that hers? An heirloom?”

  “It was hers. I guess an heirloom.” Who knew? Who knew anything?

  He took her hand to see the light angle through the ring. “It’s like looking into the bay—the peacock colors,” he said. “And you’re right. No matter what else happens, no matter who else you love, you will always be Sabine Gray’s daughter. And Franco’s daughter, too. And Oyster Creek will always be your home.”

  This left all the other questions, a great world of questions, to her.

  “Just close the door behind you,” he said. “No need to lock.”

  “Orson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you always wear high heels?”

  “They give the illusion of a longer leg,” he explained, and headed down the steps, stopping to snap off a couple of lilies of the valley, smell them, and tuck them into his buttonhole. Then she heard hi
s heels clicking as he went down the street. He probably didn’t realize Vita was supposed to go to school.

  She got up, folding the quilt and plumping the pillows so the room would stay perfectly orderly. She was alone entirely, in a little house such as she might live in herself one day, not as a frightened child trying to convince herself that her mother was only asleep but as an adult who, as Orson had said, had taken her life in her hands and made good of it. To think of it, a place of her own, built from salvage like LaRee’s house or Caliban’s hut, or white and perfect like Orson’s… whatever she wanted to do.

  Which, right now, was to sit on the porch, in the wicker chair, with her cup of coffee. The day was sunny and almost warm, though the fog lingered along Sedge Point as if it were caught in the pines there. At the bottom of the block four old women were coming along Front Street together, looking like pigeons in their dark clothes. Then Amalia Matos with her mother on her arm, and Franco and Danielle, with Danielle’s parents behind them. She could still hear Hugh quoting Shakespeare—people spoke of a sea change as if it were some wonderful metamorphosis, a beginning. But Shakespeare said, “Suffer a sea change.” He meant what happened to you after you died, when you were lost underwater and creatures were living in your bones and the people who had known you as a breathing, yearning soul were taking your memory and using it for whatever they wanted. Stealing it, making it into something of their own. It was worse than robbing a grave.

  “Mom,” she said, testing the sound, but it was too strange; she could not do it. “I’m sorry.…” This she could say aloud. Her mother, being her real mother, would know who it was meant for.

  There at her feet was the newspaper, rolled up where it had landed when Cabbage, who delivered the papers in addition to his other jobs, had thrown it from his car window that morning. Vinny’s mug shot was on the front page; she’d never seen it. He looked accursed, heavy eyelids half closed and a look of resignation on his face, as if he’d always expected to end up in prison. She couldn’t help thinking that he’d been the bull, while Sabine was the toreador—sometimes there’s an accident; the wrong one dies.