by Susan Conley
The boat is a haunted house to me. Cavernous. Forty feet of metal, with a mast that rises in the middle. It’s a whole world, this boat. The deck is made of a coarse gray metal that we have to repaint every year. The controls are in the pilot house in the midship, with the steering wheel and gear throttle and electronics.
Sam loves anything to do with the trawler. Sometimes I think he believes it’s his boat. He’s the one who begs to go on fishing trips with Kit. He knows his way around the boat better than Charlie or I.
He bosses Charlie around now until the deck is pretty much cleared.
I’m down in the cabin, where it smells like bilge oil. There’s an empty carton of Marlboros and a black transistor radio, and I feel like Kit is gone, gone now. Like he’s dead or something. It’s the oddest, worst feeling.
“Creepy,” Charlie says from up on deck.
How did he know what I was thinking?
“Creepy how?” I say.
“Creepy how this bilge oil spread and we stepped in it,” Sam says. He’s standing next to his brother in his blue hoodie.
Then he jumps down into the cabin and gets very close to my face. “Who do you love more, Mom? Me or Charlie?”
I’m so surprised by this question. And sad. I hate it when Sam asks me this. “Both of you.”
The boat rolls up and down on the swells, and I reach out my arm to balance against the hull.
“But can you even stand me?” Sam says.
“Sam, what are you saying?” I wipe my tears with my parka sleeve.
“Mom.” Charlie climbs down with us. “Mom. Please don’t cry, Mom.” Then he looks at Sam. “Of course she loves me more.”
* * *
—
LEBRON JAMES GOES MISSING back at the house, and Sam won’t leave for Canada without him.
“Where is LeBron?” He stomps around the loft. “I can’t find him!”
I finally find him at the bottom of the clothes basket in the bathroom. Sam puts him on and seems much better.
It’s eight in the morning now. We get out of The Duchess and climb in the car and drive out to the highway. Charlie’s in the front seat, texting or Snapchatting or whatever you call it. He keeps smiling and nodding at the screen, so it looks like an actual conversation, but not the kind I’m used to.
I’ve given Sam back his phone for the trip. He’s in the back, listening to his music on it with earphones, blissed out. He says he’s sure that Dad’s coming home with us on Sunday. Nothing can sway him from this belief. But I’ve tracked down doctors and hospital people for hours this week, until it’s felt like entire days, trying to understand the criteria for when Kit will be released, and I’m almost certain it won’t be this Sunday.
Sam and Kit share a language. They like to get inside the minds of fish and talk about what the fish would do and where the fish would go. They say they have to think like fish. Then they place their gear in the water and wait.
Both boys need Kit. But Sam needs extra Kit before he becomes himself again and puts down the little axes he likes to grind.
* * *
—
AFTER BANGOR THE FIELDS stretch for miles, and there are stone walls and herds of cows and sheep. It feels like I’m driving to the end of the earth. It’s good in this part of Maine, and so quiet it’s like a dream.
When the boys wake up hours later, they stare blankly at the trees. We pass a gray barn on a hill. I’ve always wanted to live in a barn. So did my mother.
“Where are the cigarettes?” she used to say when I was in high school.
I’d go find her menthols in the junk drawer under the sink and wave them in the air.
“Let’s head out to the patio,” she’d say and laugh, because we did not have a patio.
We’d walk outside and smoke in the tent thingy with the mosquito netting that my father bought used from someone at the mill. She had the calmest voice and knew more about my longings than she let on.
When I told her yesterday that I was driving the boys up to see Kit, she said, “Well, of course you are.”
* * *
—
“I THINK I’LL NEED to drink soon,” Charlie says after Sam falls back asleep.
“Drink what?”
If the car breaks down now, I don’t think that we’ll be found in these woods for days.
“Alcohol. I need to see if I like it.”
He’s wearing an old sweatshirt of Kit’s with the name of Jimmy’s lobster pound on it. archer’s is spelled in green block print across the chest. Candy had the sweatshirts made for everyone at the pound ten years ago.
Jimmy thought they were ridiculous. Who needed sweatshirts? Next thing you know, he said, we’ll have bumper stickers. I’m not sure there’s anything Jimmy hates more than bumper stickers.
“That’s the whole point of not drinking, isn’t it? To make sure you never find out if you like it.” I grip the wheel with both hands. I hadn’t seen this coming.
“I want to go to parties. I’m a junior now, you know.” Charlie puts his hand through his hair.
“I get it. Parties can be fun. But what if you pretend to drink?”
“I’ve thought of that already. It’s impossible. The guys will just give me more beers.” He leans back and closes his eyes.
He is earnest and lovely, and I want to freeze him like this.
“I’d like you to wait. I think you should wait.”
“But I’ll be much more respected if I drink.”
“But you already are respected.”
Why is it so important to him? This isn’t like him, to want to break the rules. But it’s also entirely like him to plan how he’ll break the rules.
PART FOUR
BORDER CROSSINGS
WE CROSS THE BORDER into Canada easily, and the landscape widens into even more trees, if that’s possible. The land feels bigger here. The view more expansive. I’m not sure if this is true, or if it’s just that we’ve left America behind and are somehow relieved.
Charlie falls back to sleep.
I have to pinch my face to stay awake. Joan Jett comes on the radio. When I worked on the videos in London, I did lighting primarily, and some sound. Joan Jett was more beautiful in person than she was on MTV. Though beautiful isn’t the word I mean. I mean a word that combines strength and beauty.
This part of my life feels odd when I think about it, but it was very natural then, and for a while afterward I just wanted to be like her.
When the videos were done, I traveled to the northern coast of Italy by myself and met a man named Matteo, who drove me into the hills to his stone house, where his friends were eating dinner. They were kind to me, even though it was strange that I had come, and I found out later the friends had dared Matteo to go to the village and find a woman tourist who would agree to a meal with him.
After dinner he drove me back to my hotel in the village and called me Venus de Milo. After Botticelli, he said.
I thought this was funny. I was still so young.
Then he got out of the car and walked me around the natural pools on the north side of the town where we had to balance on stone walls that separated one pool from the other. He said many people swam there.
I could have fallen into the ocean, or other things could have happened to me. I knew Lara would be mad at me for going with him, and I kept her with me like a witness.
When I thought about Kit, he felt impossibly far away. I didn’t know if we’d ever close the distance between us again, and this was okay, because my life was changing. I stayed in the village with Matteo for several weeks before I saw that he was holding on to a false idea of who I was, and then I left.
* * *
—
WHEN CHARLIE WAKES UP, we’re about an hour from the hospital, and he says he’s so hungry. Could we please
stop for food? Any food?
I have the impulse I get on car trips to explain everything I feel to the boys—Matteo and loving people with all your heart and daring to leave them to be true to yourself.
I have dangerous amounts of adrenaline because of all the driving, but I know if I tell Charlie about Matteo, he’ll say, Why are you telling me this? What about Dad? Where was Dad during all of this?
He’s often worried about Kit’s feelings. In this way Charlie is our emotional accountant as well as moral police.
He tells me that Lucy wants to apply for early decision at Smith College in Massachusetts.
“It’s a great school,” I say. Even though I had no idea Charlie knew what Smith College was. “What’s she writing her college essay about?”
“The life and death of stars. You know she’s taking quantum physics, right? You know she’s really into it?”
“I did not know. You tell me little.”
“Astrophysics and intersectional feminism.”
I don’t think that he ever used the words intersectional and feminism together in a sentence before he met Lucy. I try not to smile.
“Maybe I’ll apply to colleges in Boston,” he says. “She wants me in the same state.”
Then the song “Party in the U.S.A.” comes on. Miley Cyrus says, “Got my hands up, they’re playing my song.”
I love this song. And the boys seem to love to make fun of the way I love this song. I don’t care. I hold on to the steering wheel with my left hand and wave my right hand in the air above my head.
The DJ played the song at Candy’s oldest daughter’s wedding in June, before Kit left, and Sam got up in the yard and danced. He’s a natural dancer, like his father, and it was the greatest thing to watch him dance again.
I’m not a natural, but I put my hands in the air with Miley Cyrus, and I jumped up and down in the yard with everyone else, and I loved it.
Sam looked embarrassed and stopped dancing and came and took my hands. “Hands down, Mom. Please dance with your hands below your hips.”
Charlie stood over by the wedding cake table, laughing at us.
I couldn’t stop. I put my hands in the air again.
I think it took several days for Sam to forgive me for this. He might still be forgiving me. There was a girl from his school at the wedding he was trying to impress.
But when the chorus starts up in the car, both boys sing with me. Sam is smiling, and we all have our hands up in the air.
THE HOSPITAL IS IN a residential part of Halifax where the streets are lined with pine trees and one-story wooden houses from the 1970s. The building itself looks more like a brick retirement home than a hospital. When I park in the lot the boys jump out and run inside.
By the time I get to Kit’s room they’re kneeling by his bed, and he’s touching their hair and faces. I try not to cry. Because there he is.
His hair has gotten longer in the week I’ve been away, and someone should cut it. I will cut it. I should have already done that. The fluorescent lights make his skin look orange.
I’ve decided to forgive him for the woman with the dog. I know nothing about her, and it’s selfish of me to hold on to it.
This is what I think Charlie would say. That I need to get over it and that I should never have left the hospital in the firstplace.
Charlie says I worry too much about Sam and him and that I have to stop and let them grow up.
But when I was up here last week, the boys told me I had to come home, and Sam smoked pot in the McDonald’s parking lot. It’s confusing to me how I’m not meant to worry.
Sam arm-wrestles Kit on the bed and lets him win.
“You’re a tough boy now,” Kit says. “Look who’s beating you, Mr. LeBron James.”
Sam smiles and gives Kit a hug and lets out a little yell, like he’s releasing pent-up emotion.
Kit pushes himself up with his hands and hangs his legs over the side of the bed. He’s allowed to wear his own sweatpants now. The gray ones. And he’s got on the long-sleeved T-shirt with the name of his cousins’ lobster house in Lubec on the front.
He looks older today, with the longer hair. A little out of it, honestly.
“How are you feeling today? I mean really. How?”
“Terrible, Jilly.” He laughs.
Then the boys laugh too.
“Just look at me. I’ve got to get out of this place. You have the keys to the Subaru, don’t you, Charlie?”
Charlie smiles, and Sam says, “That’s why we’re here, Dad. To take you home with us.”
“All right, then.” Kit puts his hand over his heart and taps his chest a few times. “All right.”
Then he asks Sam to bring him the walker over by the door.
Sam lunges for it and carries it over.
Kit stands up from the bed using the walker to balance himself. Then he bends over the walker, like he’s resting, and we can’t really see his face, but I think he’s wincing from the pain.
He starts moving slowly toward the green chair, which has been moved to the window since I left.
He uses the walker to help lower himself down, and winces again. I see it this time. He can’t hide it.
“Are you really supposed to be doing this?”
“It’s better now, Jilly.”
He sighs this big sigh I’ve never heard before, and asks Sam about the basketball team and whether they’ll finally beat Sagmore this year.
“How long before you leave?” He seems spacy.
“You mean like leave and go to the hotel?” I ask him. “But we just got here. Remember?” What’s he talking about?
Sam pulls one of the white plastic chairs next to Kit and puts his feet up on the windowsill over the heating grate.
Charlie goes into the bathroom and takes a shower, which I can’t believe. Since he started dating Lucy he’s much more concerned about hygiene, and I’m sure the shower here is better than ours on the island. But right now?
Then Linda, the nurse, comes in and points at Sam. “Is that one of yours, Kit? Is that your baby?” She smiles.
Kit smiles this big grin. “That’s Sam, the younger one.”
“You came all this way to see your father, didn’t you?” she says. “Lucky boys to get to see your father. Lucky father to see the boys.”
Last week Linda told me she grew up in Kenya but has lived in Canada since she was eighteen, and she likes it here except for winters and the fact that her mother and father and brother are still in Nairobi.
“I miss them,” she said, “like you could not believe.”
She puts two fingers on Kit’s wrist now to get his pulse. “This is good. This is what we want. Let’s keep the number that way.”
I follow her out to the hall. “He doesn’t seem like himself in there, Linda. What meds is he on today?”
“Percocet.” She nods as if she’s counting to herself. “Let’s see. Yeah, Ambien. Because he wasn’t sleeping well this week. He says the pain is bad.”
When I go back in the room, both boys are in the plastic chairs by the window, listening to music on their earphones. Kit naps with his right leg extended out from the chair.
Charlie smiles at me and points to his father and does the thumbs-up sign. Then he stares at Kit for another minute, like he’s checking to make sure his father’s still breathing.
* * *
—
LINDA COMES BACK AN hour later and looks at her watch. Then she puts her hand on Kit’s shoulder. “It’s that time of day again, Kit.”
“Linda.” He opens his eyes. “Please don’t do this to me.”
She points to the door and smiles. “I know you love your physical therapy.”
He stands up from the chair using the walker, and seems so wobbly I can’t believe we’re letting him do
this. Linda follows right behind him.
“Come rescue me,” he says when he makes it to the door. “If I’m not back in an hour, come rescue me.”
He was injured badly only once before. It happened when Sam had just started walking. We took the boys to Wiggins Beach, and Kit decided to swim around Sag Island. It’s a thing the locals do. He’d made it around to the back side, where we couldn’t see him anymore, when a wind came up.
I’d walked the boys back to the car and strapped them in their car seats and gotten in the driver’s seat and closed my eyes. I was often trying to steal little rests from them back then, and I didn’t see the woman in the blue windbreaker come up next to the car.
She tapped on my window. “Are you with the swimmer?”
I told her if she meant my husband, then yes.
“Well, it looks bad.” She was older, with wrinkled skin around her entire mouth. “The lifeguards are with him, and I’ve called the fire department.”
A wave had picked Kit up and carried him to the rocks near the fort, and at first the doctors thought he’d broken his back. He had to lie in bed that whole month of August. He couldn’t fish at all.
I took the burned-tasting Sanka to him in bed, and I wondered how long we could hold on to the trawler.
But he was funny about it. He seemed resigned, or like he even enjoyed it. He wanted to make love in new positions because of his back. It was amazing to have him to myself and not have to share him with the boat.
LINDA PUSHES KIT BACK from physical therapy in a wheelchair, and he has his arms up in the air like he’s victorious, but he can’t get his breath. I don’t know if he knows that I see it, and that I’m watching him.
Sam’s lying on the bed with his eyes closed and the earphones in. He’s stopped talking, at least for now, about how beat the state of Maine is and how he’d like to live in the hospital with Kit and help the nurses do stuff.
He doesn’t say which stuff he’ll do, and we don’t ask.
