by Deb Caletti
“What happened with you and Mom and the ocean?” I asked. He flung around so suddenly that the lid of the pot that was on the counter fell to the floor with a clatter, along with a wooden spoon, which splattered dots of red sauce on the floor.
His mouth was open, but no words came out.
“I saw Annabelle today. She said it must be hard for you to be here.”
He just kept staring at me. “Fuck,” he said. He ran one hand through his hair. “Fuck.”
“Why would it be hard for you to be here?”
He thought. He moved his head back and forth a little with the effort of it. “It’s . . . Your mother loved the water. We had our honeymoon . . .”
He was lying, it was so obvious. Searching around for words, grasping and frantic, like when you’ve lost your car keys. “Did it have to do with Fiona Husted?” It came out like an accusation. I don’t even know why I said it. Her name just seemed bad-familiar, like when you run across someone you’d met before, couldn’t recall it, but still had a sense if the experience had been a good one or not. Maybe I’d heard that name a long time ago when I should have been sleeping. While I lay awake in my bed with my pink blanket and my plastic horses, words winding their way up through the heater vents of our old house.
“Jesus, Clara,” he said.
“What happened? What?”
“Clara, stop this. Nothing happened.” His face was blazing red. His eyes—we caught a raccoon once, eating the grapes on Dad’s vine. We saw him in the glare of our porch light that we’d suddenly turned on. My father’s eyes looked like his. Caught.
“You had some stupid fling with Fiona Husted. Mom got so upset she made herself sick?”
“You can’t make someone have an aneurysm, for Christ’s sake.” He stepped to me. “Clara, come on. Stop this.”
“Wait. You were gone. She was sick and you weren’t there. You were off with someone else.”
“I was right there. I did everything I could. Everyone did. They even said at the hospital—there was nothing more that could have been done.”
His voice caught. He put his palms to his eyes. “Jesus, please.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Dad. I’m sorry.”
“Let it alone, Clara.”
The little blue flame under the sauce was still going. Red sauce started to boil and rise, threatening to spill over the sides. He grabbed the handle and shoved it off the stove, burning his hand. “Fuck!” He flung the faucet handle up, stuck his hand under the cold water.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He didn’t respond. Just kept moving his hand slowly under that water. I picked my shoes back up. I grabbed my sweatshirt out of the closet. I left through the deck door, went down the steps and out to the beach. I was done with him right then.
The sun was setting. There were streaks of an artist’s pink brush in the far-off parts of the sky. They wouldn’t last long. It got cold at night on the beach. I walked toward town, away from the lighthouse and Annabelle Aurora’s shack. If I kept walking and walking, I could end up near the docks where Obsession was, and the small house that Finn had pointed out to me, the one where his family lived.
I looked down; my eyes picked amongst the shell chips and rocks and seaweed bits for something worth keeping. I didn’t understand what was happening. My father had always been clear and whole and present to me. He was there for me in any way I needed, and I was there for him, too. We were on the same side. But something felt changed about that now—a dividing line had been drawn. I was the sand, and I could see where it started and ended. But he was the sea, and it went on and on, to places I didn’t know or couldn’t imagine.
Still, I had places of me he couldn’t see, right? So there was no good reason it couldn’t work the other way, too. I wondered if parents had an easier time with the secrets their children kept than children did with the secrets of their parents. A parent’s secrets seemed like some sort of betrayal, where my own just seemed like a fact of life and growing up and away. I was supposed to be independent, but he was supposed to be available. Him having his own life seemed selfish, where me having my own was the right order of things.
I thought about Annabelle Aurora’s daughters. They must have felt that, too, when she moved across the country, away from them, to this beach. I kept walking until I was too cold. Until I realized that we complain about our parents acting like they own us, and yet maybe we’re worse at that than they are.
I headed back home. I thought I’d come to some conclusion in my mind, that I would just let things be. He could have his secrets if they meant that much to him. Fine. But then I saw the car gone. Inside, that pan was back on the stove, the blue flame flicking low, the sauce burned down to a black crust. He could have burned our house down.
The Christmas card of our mystery host sat on the kitchen table where he’d left it. I wished this was something my mother could do—send a card after all these years to tell us how she was doing wherever she was. Funny, she had always been my mother and not Mom in my mind, as if we didn’t quite know each other well enough yet to drop the formality.
God, I know that’s not how she ever would have wanted it, though. It was my one comforting thought, how she’d never have left if she could have helped it. It gave me some weird reassurance, like her arms were around me still. She would have wanted to be with me always, to know my favorite music, to know I hated scratchy tags and green peppers and that my allergies got bad when the Scotch broom bloomed. That’s what a mother would always want, right? See, we had a complicated relationship, my mother and I.* I wondered what she would say to me now. It was strange how near she felt lately.
The house was too quiet. I thought about starting dinner all over again so that it would be fixed when he returned, but I decided I wasn’t even that hungry. I ate a bowl of cereal in the name of dinner-duty, and the pouring of the milk sounded loud, and so did the spoon against the bowl and the sound of my own crunching in my head.
Sometimes maybe you should let someone you love travel great distances away from you. You shouldn’t think you needed to set out to retrieve them and put them back where they belonged. Sometimes they were only safe and happy, like Annabelle Aurora. And then other times, it was just possible they were lost at sea. It would be your duty, then, to get out into the boat and search, even if the waves were choppy and the wind was howling the protests of the dead.
My father didn’t come back that night. At least, not until the very early hours of the morning, just before my own alarm went off. I knew, because I was sleeping the 60 percent sleep of worried people, where part of your mind is listening from the shallow depths of a dream. I woke up when I heard the car’s engine and the crunch of tires driving up. He was trying to be quiet, but I knew how that went. I had snuck out before to see Christian. I understood the near-silent turning of door handles.
I let Dad sleep and went to work. I was surprised to see Roger trotting around freely in front of the visitors’ center, sniffing and digging, his little butt sticking up and his nose down in a hole he’d made.
“Roger!” I called. He looked up. I might as well have just caught him with a bag of loot in front of the bank. Anyone who says dogs don’t feel human feelings are wrong, if you ask me. You see guilt and shame and disappointment and hope right on their sweet furry faces. They’ve got everything but words.*
“What are you doing out here?” I asked.
I would have liked to hear the answer to that one. You wonder if dogs would lie, too, if they could talk. But Roger was too shocked to do the dog lie of slinking off. He was still standing there being the stunned perpetrator.
I scooped him up and went inside. The air smelled like frying butter and vanilla. A familiar smell I couldn’t place at first. Then I realized. French toast. Sylvie came downstairs when she heard the door.
“Oh!” she said. She wore a soft lavender blouse I’d never seen before and the same expression Roger had had when I’d walked up.
“Roger was out front,” I said.
“Oh, no! I did not even see him escape,” she said.
Sure, because love or sex or whatever it was could make you careless about the other people around you. It could make you careless about everything, even the love and sex itself, that’s how powerful it was. I knew about this. I put my nose in Roger’s fur. He smelled like he’d been gardening—that aroma of cool, fresh dirt. “Lucky he didn’t go far,” I said. I set him down. He started hopping around on his back legs near Sylvie, but she didn’t pick him up.
“What do you want me to do here today?” I asked. My voice was sharp.
“Just the usual, Clara.” Sylvie opened the cash register with her tiny keys.
“All right,” I said. “Fine.”
“You’re angry with me,” she said.
She was right. I guess I was. I didn’t know why, exactly. I took my seat behind the register. Sylvie had now become someone my father had turned to, someone who could be important to him, and I had to decide how I felt about that. My feelings were jumbled up. You could have Feeling A and Feeling B and Feeling C, but once you got to D and E, it was all too much and they smashed together in a big mess.*
I didn’t have time to sort anything out, though, because just then a couple poked their heads around the door—a bookish man with a white beard and a small, sparrowlike lady. They whispered, the way you do in quiet places, like you might awaken the place itself with your voice. They asked if they could see the lighthouse, and instead of leading them outside toward the small narrow lighthouse door or telling them sharply that the lighthouse itself was not open to the public, Sylvie tossed me her keys. She handed over three sets of the gloves visitors wore inside to protect the highly polished brass of the upper floors.
“Go,” she said.
I guess sleeping with my father earned me some increased responsibilities on the job. I hoped it meant a pay raise, too.
I’d never opened the small lighthouse door on my own before, and I had trouble with the key. Finally we were inside, looking up the long curve of metal stairs. The stairs wound around the cement center pole, which housed the clockwork. Long ago the clockwork used to rotate the shade around the lamp so that the beam of light would appear to go on and off.
It was freezing in there. And there was good reason Sylvie didn’t usually let people go up. First, the long climb on steep, narrow steps. Then, once you finally got to the uppermost floor where the lamp was, there was the shock of where you stood. The lamp was in the center, and you stood on the deck around it. Around that deck was the old crystal casing you could see when you were outside, the glass that acted as a giant lens, making the light visible for miles. Meaning that when you stood there and looked through that glass, you saw only the hundred-foot drop down to the rocks below. There was the vast stretch of ocean, the cliffs, the most amazing view around, but the visual fact of how high up you were was impossible not to notice. The first time I went up with Sylvie, my stomach dropped and my heart squeezed in warning. You knew that the old glass has been there forever. You knew you wouldn’t suddenly drop through. But, obviously, certain pieces of you didn’t quite believe that.
Of course, we never took anyone out to the outside deck, where the brave keepers (and now a special service) used to go to clean that glass. The deck where The Lovely Mrs. Bishop leaped to her death.
Our feet clanged loudly on the steps, a long rhythmic march. On the way up, the couple (who’d introduced themselves as Hal and Sharon) stopped to gaze out of the long rectangular windows, though it was probably just a sneak move to catch their breaths. It was beautiful in there in a cold, silent way—the white walls made of large rectangular stones, the paned windows, the upper floors of mahogany and brass high above your head. It made you think of medieval towers and long-ago fortresses, places meant to keep you safe with their serious, straight spines.
I explained that there used to be four keepers who switched off their watch duties. I told the couple what Sylvie had told me and what I had read about in the white comfort of my room: that the lamps used to be lit with paraffin rather than the lightbulb that was there now; that a bell would have to be rung in times of danger, rather than the foghorn of today. Everything was automatic now, I said, as we reached those top floors, as Sharon’s gloved hand reached out to touch the brass rails for safety and as Hal cleared his throat at first sight of the drop down.
Hal snapped a few pictures, but Sharon was ready to take the stairs back. I didn’t blame her. I felt the same way. I decided I didn’t mind that Sylvie took this as her duty only. It was gorgeous up there, where you could touch sky and stand above the sea, but the silence inside was so great that you could hear a hundred old stories spoken all at once. Endless hours of desperate waiting. Storms and panic and battering, crashing waves. Clattering bells and shouting voices. The turn of that brass latch of the uppermost deck. The winds howling or stilled, who knew, when Mrs. Bishop lifted her skirts and climbed that rail.
Maybe this is how you felt the presence of ghosts in the daylight.
I locked the door behind me; I was sure I did. The couple went into the shop and bought a snow globe and two children’s T-shirts for their grandkids, and Sylvie rang them up. Hal pressed a ten dollar bill into my palm and thanked me for being a “super tour guide.” Sylvie rose from her seat, left the visitors’ center to me. I heard her rattling dishes upstairs, cleaning up. I dusted and straightened and then sat down again and read through one of the display books about Captain Bishop. He had weathered more than one storm before the wreck of Glory. His men talked about what a great leader he was. Eliza was said to be a difficult woman. She was “quarrelsome”* when he was home, but despondent when he would leave. Sailors’ wives would take turns sitting with her in the first days after he set out, bringing her food she wouldn’t eat.
Sylvie stood in the doorway, startling me. I slammed the book closed. She held two cups of tea again. She had changed out of that blouse and was back in a blue work shirt I had seen lots of times.
I wasn’t really in the mood for tea. It was a sunny day, and although you never really felt the heat by the sea, I could tell it was going to be warm. Sun was coming through the windows of the visitors’ center, and I was glad for my sundress and sandals. Still, I took the cup and thanked her. I wasn’t sure why I saw her as the enemy.
“Did you lock the lighthouse?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Clara.” She leaned one hip against the counter. She sipped her tea. Roger lay in a circle of sun, looking sweet and well-behaved with his chin resting on his paws.
I waited. I studied my palms. I looked at the lines there and wondered about them. My life line was a mess. A “gypsy” told me this during a carnival my school put on, and even though the gypsy was my algebra teacher, Mrs. Yacovich, this still bothered me.
“I know you are worried about your father,” she said finally.
Now she waited. The truth is, I let her think I was worried about him. But I wasn’t, not really. When it came to Sylvie Genovese, anyway, I think I was worried about me.
“Yes,” I said.
“I want to let you know something,” she said.
The hard thing was, her voice was so beautiful—that rich, musical Italian that made you think of cellos playing, different from the thick, concerto rhythms of Christian’s accent. She rarely used our sloppy conjunctions—“I will” and “you have” were never “I’ll” and “you’ve”—new at the language, she sounded careful with it, the way you are with other new things. And she was gorgeous, too. Those dark, dark eyes. Truth was, they made a beautiful couple.
“Okay,” I said.
“I do not just say these things. I do not like for people to think I am weak with soft spots like a bad melon.” She laughed, but I just looked at her. That long dark hair. My mother had brown hair. In her pictures it is always pulled back in a ponytail or away from her face in a barrette. Her plain hair would never be able to compete with Sylvie’s
.
“But he is safe with me, all right? I understand broken hearts. I can look out for the lost because I have been lost.”
“Well, maybe you should be careful yourself, then.” Dad would have killed me for saying that, but if there was one thing I learned from Christian, it was this. “A person who is drowning can grab on to you for help, and you’re the one that ends up going under.”
“Yes. But your father is not drowning.”
Now I really felt pissed. I was so glad she knew more about him than I did, someone who’d spent every day of the last seventeen years with the guy. “That’s good news,” I said.
“There’s a difference between drowning and struggling with the . . .” She moved her free arm over her head in a circle. “The swimming stroke.”
“The butterfly.”
“Yes, all right,” she said as if I had just made up the word and she had decided to agree to it. We sat there with each other in that silent, prickly hum of bad feeling. She sighed. “I am taking the boat out for a while,” she said.
She had already given up on me. I was not going to get the ass kissing I thought I deserved right then.
“Have fun,” I said.
I hated the way my own voice sounded.
I bought a sandwich after work, wrapped part of the roll in a napkin. I stopped and saw Cleo on my way to Obsession .
“I brought your seagull a present,” I said.
“Oh, my God, don’t encourage him,” she said when I showed her the roll. “I went outside last night to get a book out of my car, and who do you think I saw on my frickin’ front porch? The front porch! Standing there like it was the goddamn bus stop.”
“You’re his gull-friend.”
“Ha ha. Oh, Jesus, don’t even say it. I’m just the food, baby. Just the food.” She looked over at him. “You know he’s really smart? You wouldn’t believe this, but he actually has a favorite brand of chips. Doritos Ranch. He can open the bag. You got some Barbecue Lay’s? Forget it. Salt ’N’ Vinegar? Nope. He picks the Doritos Cool Ranch. I saw him do it—pick only the old bags of Doritos. So I tried an experiment. Sure enough. He chooses.”
