The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  MACHADO FOUND DEAD IN CELL

  “I’M SORRY,” ADOPTIVE MOTHER ADMITS

  Venceslau (Vinny) Machado, convicted ten years ago in the killing of Sabine Gray, a murder that shook the sleepy fishing village of Oyster Creek to its core and captured the national spotlight, is dead, apparently a victim of suicide, in his jail cell in Souza-Baranowski Correctional Facility. Machado was discovered Wednesday evening by a guard on his regular rounds.

  “The guards check on inmates every half hour,” a source said. “As a fisherman Machado had knowledge of ropes and knots and it appears he was able to hang himself from the top bunk while his cellmate made a visit to the infirmary.”

  “He was a good guy,” said Franco Neves, harbormaster of Oyster Creek, who fathered the victim’s daughter in an extramarital relationship and was a suspect in the murder for several years until Machado was apprehended.

  “I’m just sorry for the family, sorry about all of it,” said LaRee Farnham, the child’s adoptive mother, while refusing further comment. “There isn’t anything else to say.”

  Machado’s wife, reached at work at the Infinite Horizons Retirement Home, said, “Now they’re sorry, sure.”

  It was strange. Vita had expected that the newspaper article would make her feel terrible, but it didn’t. It was wrong in a million ways, from calling Franco the harbormaster to somehow making LaRee’s sadness seem like guilt. But the wrongness was a comfort—the newspaper would get things wrong and tomorrow it would go out with the recycling and be forgotten. Life would go on and things would change.

  The church bells had ceased. Vita heard the organ groaning as the funeral began. They were all in there: her father, Dorotea, Orson. His silver stilettos were beside the door and she slipped her feet into them and tottered toward the mirror. She had never been able to walk in heels—they made her feel as if she were balancing on the top of the Empire State Building. If Orson could do it, though—surely she could learn? She tottered across the room, but the shoes were four sizes too large. Last night the scarf-draped picture frames had seemed a natural part of the decoration—squares of bright color against the white walls, almost like stained-glass windows. One of the scarves had blown sideways when Orson shut the front door, and she reached to tuck it back over the frame, and saw that in fact it was covering a photograph, a black and white photograph of a man’s penis, very close-up and artful, as if it were an orchid. Or a tarantula. She dropped the scarf and jumped back. What was the matter with adults? Orson, who had covered her so gently while she slept, who could say things that lit everything with a beautiful warm light, things about a theater full of people following a story together, or that acting was the art of speaking honestly… and he was collecting close-up pictures of penises the whole time? Was adulthood like a disease you grew into? Maybe that was what had happened yesterday, when she had gone to Dorotea’s house thinking she’d find a kindred spirit and ended by screaming hateful things at her. A growth spurt.

  She kicked Orson’s shoes off, grabbed her high-tops, and ran out the front door, down the steps, into the street, which was steep enough that it propelled her toward Front Street and Our Lady, Star of the Sea.

  LaRee was just rounding the corner in the Subaru and stopped dead when she saw her. Vita turned and started back up the street. But where to? And what was she running from? She ought to be over the bridge, lost in some huge city by now. Instead, she’d never crossed the town boundary of Oyster Creek. It was shameful, to be so tethered to your home and your mother. Looking back over her shoulder, she saw that the car had not moved. LaRee was still sitting there at the bottom of the street, not pursuing her, just waiting for her return. So. That was that. She was caught, discovered, trapped, saved.

  20

  ANOTHER ONE GONE

  LaRee pulled her into the car, one hand under her arm, the other under her knee, as if she were saving her from drowning, or burning, or humiliating herself, or any of the fates from which mothers rescue their children.

  “I’m sorry,” she blurted, while she still had a grip on Vita, for fear she’d disappear again before she could get the words out, but Vita’s head hit her so hard in the diaphragm that the apology became a footballer’s grunt, and by the time she caught her breath she was laughing.

  “Is that your job in life, to knock the wind out of me? You used to do the same thing when you were six years old and I picked you up at school!”

  “Yes! That’s why I was born,” Vita said, and she started to cry. Traffic had backed up behind them. It was nearly Memorial Day and summer people were coming into town to pick up their beach permits and propane for their grills. Carpenters were finishing up their spring jobs before the season really hit. And as always when there was a funeral, all the parking spaces on both sides of the street were taken. One hand on the wheel, one under Vita’s arm to keep her in the car, LaRee maneuvered toward the curb with Vita’s feet still out the door.

  Vita got herself twisted around and sat up. “It’s not your fault,” she said, meaning to sound forgiving, though she only managed to sound polite. Which implied distance, which cut LaRee to the quick. Vita felt that—she always felt what LaRee felt—but there was nothing she could do. “There was no answer, no good way around.”

  “I could have—” LaRee began, but thought better of it. Vita couldn’t grow up to assume all the blames and burdens in life; she had to know that mothers fail, too. “Well, I don’t know what I could have done. But whatever it was, I didn’t do it, and here we are. I brought you something.”

  Cinnamon rolls from the Upper Crust Bakery—of course, it was opening day, and it had been their tradition to go together, since the time Vita was five years old and would skip beside LaRee, holding her hand. The rolls were still warm. They smelled all wrong, somehow—cloying, like a sweet, homemade lie.

  “I’m not hungry. I mean, thank you. Why don’t you have one, LaRee?”

  LaRee nearly snapped that she was not hungry either. “No, thanks,” she said, as lightly as she could manage, looking straight ahead.

  “This isn’t the kind of thing that gets resolved with cinnamon rolls,” Vita said.

  “I didn’t expect them to resolve anything,” LaRee said. Though once they would have, because they were a tradition, a ritual that was theirs together and belonged to no one else. LaRee looked away so Vita wouldn’t see her lip tremble.

  “I mean, thank you. Really, thank you,” Vita said, squeezing LaRee’s hand. “I’ll have some later. Or… we can come back tomorrow, LaRee, and have cinnamon rolls. Okay?”

  She sounded the way LaRee had when Vita was disappointed about a dropped ice-cream cone, when she was little. It was terrible.

  LaRee managed a laugh. “Thank you, my dear,” she said. “The cinnamon rolls will be good all summer.”

  “I just want to get away from here!” Vita burst out.

  “Who could blame you?” LaRee agreed.

  “No. Not just from here, from you! To a place that feels like a real home, with a real family—”

  She stopped. Was this what Vinny had felt when he stabbed Sabine, so angry that she would destroy whatever was nearest? She must remember it, in case she ever had to play a murderer. “LaRee! I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no need to be,” LaRee said. “No one ever wrote an etiquette guide for murder survivors.”

  When Vita didn’t laugh at this, the world seemed to dissolve. LaRee wanted to cry, to say how she had been going on and on with no love or reassurance, just the daily grounding of motherhood, and the feeling that every tide was eroding that ground under her feet, that she had tried, done her best.… But the thing to do now was to give Vita the chance for anger. She could call Charlotte or… anyone, later, and weep.

  Vita nodded. LaRee must have just had a shower; she could smell the almond oil soap. It seemed a very long time since she’d been home. “I can’t go back to school,” she said. “I can’t ever go back there.”

  “Let’s start by getting throu
gh today.”

  “No. I will not go back to that school, do you understand?” She pushed all the way to the other side of the seat, against the window.

  “Of course, of course,” LaRee said. “We’ll… manage it.”

  “I need to know everything about the murder and about Sabine. Absolutely everything.”

  She scrunched over into the corner, wearing her slit sweatshirt like a cardigan, her hands pulled into the sleeves, arms crossed over her chest, nose red from crying. She looked like someone who wanted to know nothing.

  “Truth, all of it.” It was no less than Shakespeare would ask. “Not the polite, appropriate garbage. The real stuff.”

  “I will tell you. Every single thing, as much as I know. Not the polite, appropriate garbage and not the rude inappropriate garbage either. Just as much of the mixed-up, confusing truth as I can tell. If you just want to get out of here we can go away for a week… or more. Maybe a month…” LaRee suddenly envisioned a whitewashed cottage on the coast of Ireland. “That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Go someplace new and explore it so we’re not just stewing in it the way we always are here.”

  “I have rehearsal,” Vita said.

  Across the street, the church doors opened and Fatima Machado’s casket emerged, carried by Bobby Matos and Cabbage and some of the others, all looking deeply uncomfortable in their dark suits. Men in Oyster Creek started out cocky and ended up stoic. The oldest ones—Ilidio Codinha and Antone Guerra, whose son had died in a car crash the year before—stood erect, at attention, but staring off beyond the horizon as if grief and disappointment had turned them to stone. The women wore black shawls and heavy wool skirts, the same clothes they would put on for the Blessing of the Fleet next month. Amalia, standing with Maria Machado and Dorotea, glanced across the street and saw LaRee’s car, and her face became tighter, tougher than ever.

  “Oh God, of course,” LaRee said. “Now we’re spying on a funeral. Or clowning at a funeral? Or… just guilty as charged.”

  Amalia took Dorotea by her bare shoulders—she was wearing her homecoming dress, strapless black satin with flesh brimming—and turned her away so she wouldn’t see them. A gust blew a paper bag up the street and lifted the flaps on the men’s jackets. A Mercedes convertible came through, driven by a man with silver hair and a look of sensual pride on his face. DC plates—maybe he was a senator. What would he see here? The last of an old world? Or a constituency so small and poor it wasn’t worthy of notice? The hearse backed up and the men loaded the coffin in. Once the door shut, the pallbearers relaxed: They had discharged their obligation and could return to their lives. Only two or three cars followed the hearse to the cemetery.

  “‘Sorry for the family.’ I’d think she would be,” Amalia sniffed to her husband, who stood at attention and gave no sign of hearing.

  Franco and Danielle were standing kitty-corner at the short edge of the grave; the remark was intended for them. If Franco had lived his life among his own people and according to their ways, LaRee Farnham wouldn’t have been up on her high horse watching this last pathetic chapter from across the street, pitying them all in public. Franco paid no attention to the comment, focusing on the priest and keeping one arm tight around Danielle, who tucked her hair back, though the wind caught it instantly and blew it across her face again. Amalia’s hair was so stiffly coifed it was impervious to wind. The years had sealed her over. If she’d stayed in Gelfa, she’d have been one of the women who sat watching the street from behind her shutters and warning her grandchildren: “Estadia em casa.” Stay in the house and you won’t get in trouble. You wouldn’t get in trouble and you wouldn’t have to change. Danielle had mixed in the world, been hurt and disillusioned, fought hard and forgiven hard. Everyone said how young she looked—a curious, interested face. The two women gazed down on Fatima Machado’s coffin.

  Fatima hadn’t been able to trust much of anything in her life, except maybe cigarettes. She was supposed to be a fisherman’s wife, not his widow. She was supposed to have a son who grew up strong and capable, took over his father’s boat, had a family of his own. He was not supposed to be Vinny. But she’d managed, living on disability pay, staying in the house where she could dote on her son in peace. Well, the cigarettes had done their work, set her free.

  The group looked larger because the grave had only three sides, the fourth being taken up by the earth that would shortly fill it, covered with a green velvet drape. The cemetery workers lowered the coffin and stepped back as the priest leaned over to murmur a blessing. The old part of the cemetery, where the sea captains rested with their wives and children, was at the crest of the hill, with cedars and apple trees growing between the headstones. Only the low, flat land was left now. Vinny’s ashes would be interred with Fatima when the state sent them. His wife and daughter stood there stolid, Dorotea tugging alternately at the top and bottom of her dress, trying to cover herself. Franco took off his suit jacket and put it around her shoulders, and she started to cry.

  Amalia stepped forward and dropped a white gladiola. Danielle had cut some of the pink roses that climbed over the picket fence outside the Walrus. Orson came from the back, detached his boutonniere, and let it fall. As they were turning to leave, and the cemetery workers were taking out their shovels, a dark, bowlegged figure came over the hill toward them, hurrying in spite of his awkward gait, carrying something.

  It was Georgie Bottles with his beer in a brown bag, and as he came upon them he stopped short, embarrassed. Of course, he was taking the shortcut to the liquor store. Seeing them, he immediately struck a fighting pose.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” he muttered.

  Franco reached out and patted him on the back. “Good to see you, Georgie,” he said, but Georgie pulled away.

  “I’m not getting out of there,” he said to Franco. “I got nowhere else.” He threw the beer can into the grave and continued on.

  “Georgie,” Amalia began… but Danielle shook her head.

  “He’s off his meds,” she said. “Prescriptions just piling up. I called his sister. Meanwhile…”

  “Meds,” Amalia said, looking around. Even a harsh, unyielding spirit seeks a kindred soul. She found none and stood a little straighter in the wind. “That’s what it’s come to.”

  Father Lomba peered into the grave.

  “Leave it there, Father,” Danielle said. “Fatima would appreciate it.”

  “What wrecked that family is there’s no more fish,” she said as soon as they were back in the car. “They weren’t good for anything but fishin’.”

  “You could say the same thing about me,” Franco said.

  “No, you’re good for propagation. You’ll be gettin’ more fan mail after last night. Funny, I never thought to send a mash note to a murder suspect. Just no imagination, I guess.”

  He laughed—more like a sigh. He couldn’t think why she’d stuck by him, now the kids were grown and they’d lost the house and she knew about Vita and Sabine. She never once said, “I was the prettiest girl in the class, I could have married anybody I liked, I wouldn’t have to live over the Walrus and Carpenter and hear the same jukebox songs coming up through the floor every single night.” She didn’t say, “You betrayed me,” either. Not anymore. She laughed about it, did her best. She and Franco were kin. If they separated neither of them would stay whole. He put on the blinker.

  “Where’re we going?” she asked.

  “The house?”

  “Vinny’s house?”

  “We have to.”

  Danielle’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t make a dish,” she said.

  “They won’t care.”

  Danielle laughed. “They’ll talk about it for the next forty years,” she said. “I can hear it now: ‘She couldn’t even be bothered to bring a covered dish to the funeral.’ God, poor little Vin. Remember how he used to love the broom? He always had that broom. He was sweepin’, sweepin’. He felt so important with the broom in his hand.”

  “He
shoulda been a janitor; he’d have had something to take pride in.”

  “He could never get in at the DPW.… He’s not related to Bobby.” In addition to owning the fish market, Bobby Matos was somehow the progenitor of the entire Department of Public Works. Everyone who worked there was a son, a nephew, an in-law. When it snowed, Matos Fish and all the family driveways were plowed before the roads. They had garbage pickup six days a week.

  “He couldn’t live on without his mother,” Danielle said, resigned to the luncheon by now, staring out the window as they headed down Route 6 toward Tradescome Point. Ice Cream Tuesday was open, its red and white striped awnings unfurled, the UPS driver ordering a cone at the window. “Couldn’t stand to live one day past her,” Danielle continued. “Not one day.”

  Cars were streaming up the highway now, for the long weekend—New York plates, New Jersey, Ohio. Another summer and everything would happen again, just as it always had: Young people would arrive in search of work and love and adventure; the sound and smell of the surf would quicken their pulse, give them courage. Just because they were here they’d take new risks, try new loves, suffer a moment’s taste of bliss that would linger in memory ever after, or conceive a child who would return to knock on the door in twenty years. A swimmer would be caught in the riptide and carried out to sea, and there’d be talk of closing off that beach, but it would be pointed out that locals knew how to deal with the tides and they’d decide to put up more signs. An old lady turning left off the highway would be rear-ended by a truck driver who was speeding around some poky tourists looking for the turn to Fox Hollow. There’d be an afternoon wedding under a tent beside the harbor with flower girls tottering along strewing rose petals, a baby born in a car stuck in traffic on the Fourth of July. These fates were just waiting here for the people who would step in and live them. In August, Skip McGee would moor his sailboat in the harbor and move in (so as to rent out his house—twelve thousand for the month). Every night he’d lean back in the stern at sunset and play his saxophone. And on land, people in the rental cottages would finish up their dinner dishes with a deep satisfaction, saturated with sun and seawater, ready to face another year.