North Haven Read online

  Here the word “divorce” flashes through her mind like headlights over her bedroom ceiling in the winter, and then it is gone.

  “No more fighting,” they say. “No more crying. We’ve cried enough,” they say. “We will talk with someone.”

  Here Tom leans his chair back again. Doesn’t he want them to stop fighting? Isn’t he glad their father has come home?

  Then they change, then they look like they have a surprise, like there is cake in the kitchen, like they are going to take them on a trip. Her parents hold hands and look at each other.

  A baby. There will be a new baby. It is growing, curling, a fiddlehead inside their mother’s womb. Now the older two sit up and forward.

  “You’re too old!” Incredulous, outraged.

  “We’re not changing diapers.”

  “You could’ve asked.”

  “We weren’t aware we needed permission,” says their father.

  “You don’t own this family,” says Tom.

  “I’ll feed it,” says Libby. “I’ll burp it and babysit and give it my favorite green baby quilt.” Though she regrets this offer immediately, she knows the impulse is right. The other two are full of sarcasm that she is just beginning to understand.

  “Just what this family needs,” says Tom.

  “Things will change,” they promise.

  “Yeah, right,” says Gwen.

  “We can’t promise no more fights.”

  “No kidding. Shocker.”

  “But we can promise it will get better. We do not want to go back to where we’ve been.”

  To this Tom says nothing. He looks at his mother and shakes his head. Libby watches him, watches him refuse to look his father in the eye.

  He will spend his time avoiding his father’s eyes. His father will be confused and afraid to make things worse. Tom will see this in every pained attempt at conversation. But Tom will not back down; he will not be the one to make it easy. He will stoke his little fire of anger, keep it glowing soft under brush and through rain, through heavy hands on shoulders, and small victories. When the acceptance letters come, Tom will have a moment, forgetting the fire, and look at his father with a proud and happy face, and then remember, stoke the fire, do not share joy with a liar.

  His mother is now like a child, like Libby, not strong enough to stand up for herself. She sits at the head of the table, a hand on the back of his father’s neck; even her hands are dishonest. He can’t respect her when she is happy to live a lie. Not just live it, but birth it, bring about a new life built entirely on sand. He thinks of this new baby, a monkey in a lab. He sees the monkey’s long fingers cling with love to its mother, a metal armature wrapped in a blanket. Underneath nothing but emptiness and wire. He wonders how long he has to sit here, the car keys growing warm in his pocket.

  Gwen stays at the table, Tom outside, the back door bouncing at his exit. They talk about names. Gwen pretends it will be fine. She understands now. She has been lost for the last six weeks, not knowing why he left, but thrilled to have him gone. She had assumed her father was sick of dodging plates, that he could no longer stand to watch the remnants of their wedding smashed to bits against the kick plates and wainscoting. But Gwen understands now; he was driven mad wanting to be close to their mother. She sees this in his face, as her mother’s hand squeezes the back of his neck. He so much like a dog, afraid to be left behind. He has been searching for this.

  Her mother would stand just out of reach and then accuse him of not trying. Gwen had heard that fight before, and then felt it herself in the last year. Her mother standing at the edge of rooms, in doorways and at the tops of steps. Come down, come in, Gwen would think. I can’t, I’m not wanted, said her mother’s figure on the other side of a door. There was no convincing her, and the distance remained.

  It had been so easy before, to fall into her lap, to lay a head on her soft breast and breathe in the smell of sleep and home. And her mother would rub her back, tell her stories, listen and listen, to Gwen, yes, to her father, no. But then her lap became the cushion beside her, then the chair beside that, then the next room. Kisses left, and listening went dim and far away like a foghorn, a moment and already fading.

  Gwen understands her father’s leaving. Sees now that her mother will not tell him about the local boy. Her interest in Gwen has now officially faded away. It is this baby that has taken her attention from them, that has absorbed what little she had left, stored it away in her womb. This is the summer her mother, not her father, left her. She thinks about boarding school. She looks at her little sister, thinks better of it. Libby will need her back rubbed, she will need to have someone while their father has their mother and their mother has a baby.

  They knew they could count on their littlest, and here she is living up so much to their expectations. “She will be the easy one,” they said. Even as a baby, she the quiet one, so quiet forgotten one day at the school, asleep in her stroller. Arms full of coats and bags, ears full of tales of stone soup and multiplication, they were at the car before their mother realized, my littlest. And here their small girl is listing names, mostly the boys from her class.

  “What about Daniel,” says their middle child.

  “Sounds like a prince.” Their littlest. Gwen will come around, too, they see it; for Libby she will come around too. But Tom has carved himself a new life out there on the slim roads of the island. Out in the Whaler on the thoroughfare. They hope it’s a boy, something to bring Tom back. But there may be nothing that can.

  The sun is lower now, and the light has gone red. Their mother gives them fifteen minutes to run around, drink Shirley Temples on the steps and watch for seals before setting the table. The two girls go out, and the two adults are left alone. They will make dinner together. He will help more, she will let him. She will make room for him, she will call back all names she has called him, knowing that they were parts she cast him in, not ones he wanted. She will live up to every word in that letter. And asks that he show it to her so she can remember—don’t let me forget. Don’t let us go back there. Reach for me; I will not retreat, not a slick fish against your searching hand. I am not sand or water; reach for me, I will stay, a shell, a stone. Put me in your pocket.

  PART IV

  TWENTY

  DANNY

  July 9

  In an awkward arabesque—a hand on each side of the boat and one foot in it—Danny pushed off the float with the other foot. Then he quickly swiveled down onto the seat, took the package wrapped in a plastic bag out from under his shirt, and tucked it under his seat. He plugged in the oarlocks and oars and took his first strong pull. The movement of the stubborn, squat dinghy was a tug at first, resisting the water. But by the third pull the water unseamed, and they—boat and boy—slid through.

  His back to the bow, Danny watched the float recede. The house became a house, not a mountain, not a ship, not even a grand pile like a giant stone Buddha forgotten in the jungle. It was vulnerable there on its point, so close to the rocks. How many more storms could it withstand? Danny felt the water just beneath his feet choose to allow his boat through. Really, he thought, it is the ocean that owns the planet. Humans think they’re in charge, in control, but really the ocean lets them play. “Poison me all you want. My vastness is beyond your stupid comprehension. I am a universe. I will keep your islands of garbage only to deposit them back on your little shores. The land is just a third of this surface. I am in all dimensions. And your little land is shrinking. I am coming.”

  Danny could see the sea flexing up over beaches, over seawalls, over the undulating bricks of the Back Bay. It would put out the gas lamps, burble up through the city drains of Cambridge until Avon Hill was an island, Fresh Pond a bay, and here . . . All this gone like a town drowned by a reservoir, forced out of existence by others’ needs. It is a ghost. Danny looked at the house and saw fish swimming through broken windows. He felt sick. He realized he had stopped rowing and was drifting in toward the boathouse beach. An
d the ocean said, I will drown cities. I will send my hunters to your safest shores. I will take whatever I like because no amount of rock or sand can stop me. I am time. I am deadly.

  Here, at the boathouse beach? Too close to the house; they might hear. But he stayed there for a moment, twisting one oar and then the next to keep from drifting. He was so tired. That after-lunch haze mixing with an exhaustion he couldn’t get away from. He was so tired he could sleep anywhere at any time. He’d nap, not just a midday resting of the eyes, but a deep, dreamed-filled sleep, full REM. His subconscious welcomed him home at any time, all he had to do was open the door. He could sleep forever right here in this boat.

  There were no waves in this little cove. The water was just absorbed by the pebbles of the beach, not soft like the lapping of a lake. Here the slopes of granite turned back into the ground and left a small-pebbled shore that seemed to filter the water, not withstand it. The water came in quiet and ragged, like breathing through your teeth. Danny took a few breaths through his clenched teeth. He held the oars out of the water and looked. To him this little beach always seemed like the place where a great sea monster—a scaled, long-necked amphibious beast—would emerge to look for food for her young, or come ashore to lay her eggs in the gravel that, to her gigantic clawed feet, actually felt soft and yielding. It was a place where arctic mermaids with blue lips and key-lime skin would lie on the soft, slippery rocks pillowed by seaweed, arms spread like cormorants, creamy breasts turned to the sky. But he was tired of mythical breasts. He was tired of things mostly existing in his mind and on TV. Even when things were right in front of him, it was as if he watched it all on a screen. He tapped his heel against the package beneath his seat, checking to be sure it was still there.

  He swept the oars in opposite directions to keep the boat steady. The water looked black. He held the ends of both oars with one hand and touched the water with the other. It was cold enough to make his hand ache. He left it in until his eyeballs started to hurt. As if the cold was rushing up through his blood to his brain. An ice cream headache. He used to like ice cream. But now all he could taste was the fat. Lipids. He couldn’t eat with a word like “lipids” floating around in his mind. But this was new. He used to want ice cream all the time. Actually, he really only wanted one thing.

  He remembered the three of them on that small beach: Danny, at fourteen, watching his parents mussel. Really his mother had musseled, and his father, as he put it himself, had supervised. His mother, wearing blue running shorts over a black bathing suit and green rubber boots, had stood in the mounds of seaweed-covered rocks. She parted the strands of seaweed to expose the rock, like hair on a giant head, pulling mussels from beneath, the same way she picked lice from his head when he was nine. His father was shirtless; his endless body hair glistened with sweat. Danny had always wondered how anyone could have so much hair not on their head. He had wondered when he might have chest hair and if his father looked this way at fourteen, a teenage yeti. His father’s beard was a three days’ growth, and he wore the same faded pair of madras swim trunks he’d worn every summer that Danny could remember. His father stood knee deep in the water, facing the sea, smoking his pipe, his back to Danny. They talked, his parents. They seemed always to be talking.

  “Should we move the mooring into the cove, or is it better off the float?”

  “Should we buy Gwen a new car or get Tom to pass his on to her? What about a trade-in?” Danny had thought about the stones under his feet.

  His father turned from the water, wanting to show Danny how to build a cairn. The forest edge was rough and brambly, webbed by lichen in the low branches of the underbrush, looking decayed, brittle, flaky. Knitted with the desiccated trunks was soft, flat moss, a thin overlay with the tapered fingers of roots that surfaced, the ancient hands of the trees coming up, knuckles first, through the forest floor. The trees themselves seemed to pull at the earth, drawing the moss up their trunks where the trees pull up the hem of their skirts away from the damp. It was at the edge of this that they needed a cairn, his father had said, something to mark the trail.

  “A trailhead must be marked, the place where the sea stops, where the highest tide cannot reach.” His father said this in a low, booming voice that he projected to the back of some imaginary theater.

  “Oh, God,” said Danny, turning on a heel to go back to the water’s edge. His father threw a small rock at his leg.

  “We’ll make a trail,” he said. “This will be the start, a trail to the ridge and then out to the point.”

  Danny had liked this better. He needed more ways to travel, more places to go. And he liked watching his father collect the perfect stones.

  “Like this,” his father said, “round but a bit squashed. No, bigger.”

  They hunted together through the large stones at the high-tide mark, kicking aside tangled bunches of seaweed; the dry ones crunched, the wet ones squelched.

  “How’s this one?”

  Danny and his father made a pile of stones to choose from, and his father began, explaining as he went. They each began a cairn about four feet apart. Danny could hear the pipe click in his father’s teeth. The smoke swirled up into the pine boughs. The tobacco smelled of Sunday afternoons and naps on the couch, and what he imagined Morocco must smell like—ivory, vanilla, cloves, cardamom, ladies with veiled faces.

  “Start with the largest,” said his father, “then work your way up. The weight should keep them steady.”

  Danny’s stones kept toppling to the ground in a tumble of clunks and taps and a quick jumping of toes. His father’s tower grew higher, and Danny felt at once proud and defeated.

  “Keep at it, my man. Hey,” he whispered, “what should we do for your mother’s birthday this year?”

  “Either Constantinople or rafting down the Amazon,” said Danny. They always ate lobster on her birthday; they celebrated it here every August. Just the three of them.

  “I’ll book the raft,” said his father. “You bring the life jackets.”

  Danny had made a pile of rocks that looked nothing like the articulated corpuscles of his father’s cairn.

  “Your mother’s really the master of this,” he said. “You should get some direction from her.”

  “I’m a little busy,” Scarlet said. They had forgotten how easily their voices traveled over water. There was strain in her voice as she yanked two handed on her cultivator.

  “And I have one word for you,” she continued. “Piranha.”

  “What would a vacation be without the local fauna,” called his father.

  “Bob Willoughby, biologist extraordinaire. I’m pretty sure your interest extends only to those species that can be boiled and eaten with butter,” said Scarlet.

  “I have unexplored depths, Mrs. Willoughby,” said Bob. He stood, brushed his hands on his suit, and said, “Our work here is done. The trailhead of the mystical path is marked.”

  They will know where to begin, but not where to go. Danny left his father to admire his handiwork, and began to pitch stones into the cove, practicing his throw. He felt in this posture he looked more manly. He’d been practicing. His father made his way over to his mother and rested his hand on the small of her back as she bent over to pull up mussels.

  “Time for a swim,” said his father. He moved off the rocks. The slick seaweed and sharp barnacles never seemed to affect him. He walked like he was descending the stairs in the great room. Then into the water with his pipe still clenched firmly in his teeth, he began a smooth backstroke. The water is so cold, Danny couldn’t understand how his father could bear it, how he could keep his legs moving under him, keep himself from settling on the floor of the cove forever. Swimming here feels like a fight. But not for Bob Willoughby.

  Scarlet had brought her bucket and stood next to Danny and they watched his father swim out toward the mouth of the cove. A stone warm from the sun lay in his hand.

  “When I met your dad he taught me how to really swim.”

&n
bsp; From out in the water came his father’s voice, remarkably clear despite the distance. “Damn straight,” he said. “And preferably without suits.”

  “Gross,” said Danny. “Don’t talk like that around me.” But they always did.

  His father emerged from the water, all that hair in jet rivulets down his chest and stomach, a great walrus of a father who lumbered from the sea. Danny had thought of his own pale thin chest under his T-shirt. I need more sun, he had thought, and more testosterone. He had imagined himself doing pushups and drinking egg yolks. None of which sounded appealing. His father set his pipe on a bed of seaweed and went back in to dunk himself under. Then he returned to shore, picked up his pipe, and said, “Ablutions and libations, in that order.” And with that he grabbed the bucket full of mussels out of his wife’s hand and headed toward the house. Danny was theirs, hers. She put her arms around him as they watched his father walk away through the woods, a towel draped over his shoulder, the bucket swinging heavy in his hand.

  “How lucky I am to have a son like you,” she said.

  He wondered if she said this to Tom too.

  “Oh, yeah?” He said. But he knew he was lucky too. He had suspected that to her he was different from the others. Sometimes that felt good. They looked out at the ocean together, at the town and at the whole universe that seemed to swim and sail past their little cove.

  “I love you the way you love summer vacation,” she had said.

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  She had taken the stone from his hand and, whipping her arm, had hucked it far out to the center of the cove. She had a good arm. Had had.

  The blister on his hand burned. He watched the boats chugging toward their moorings, all those little satellites, all those distant stars. He knew what she had meant. She was the sun and his father, the moon. And Danny had been caught between them, standing in their light, in the love they had for each other. At least they saw him. Even if it had just been a way to watch each other.