The Line Tender

by Kate Allen

  “This song is terrible,” Fred said, returning to his room. I felt like I should follow him, but Fiona was almost done with me. She handed me a mirror. I focused on my eyes at first, surprised by the thick line under my lashes, but the overall look was warm and clear, maybe even pretty. My freckles and red hair were still there and I looked at myself for a moment instead of turning away.

  Fiona smiled. “You look great.”

  “Her eyes are a little too much,” said Bridget, unfurling a boingy strip of hair.

  I heard feet pounding up the stairs, in a one-two rhythm that signaled Maggie’s arrival to the second floor. She stood in the doorway with both feet planted. She stared at me.

  “You look nice, Lucy.” I couldn’t tell if she was sincere, but it sounded positive the way her voice went up at the end of my name. Then she looked at me quizzically. “Who did her? Her eyes are too dark.”

  She grabbed a tissue off the counter for me and demonstrated how to peel off the top layer of eye makeup without losing the whole look.

  “All right, what are your plans?” she asked Bridget and Fiona.

  Silence. Fiona placed each case back into the cosmetic tray, one by one.

  “A bunch of us are going over to Lauren’s house to watch a movie,” Bridget offered.

  “Does ‘a bunch of us’ include Dominick Maffeo?”

  Dominick was Bridget’s new boyfriend. Dominick’s father owned a Sicilian bakery in Gloucester. Everyone thought he was a decent guy, but Maggie Kelly had sonar for boys who were interested in her girls and she was picking up a strong reading on Dominick.

  Maggie looked back at me and said, “You’re taking Lucy and Fred.”

  “What?” Fred yelled from his room before thundering down the hall, inhaler in hand. Puff.

  Fiona looked into the mirror and made eye contact with Bridget.

  “Mom, come on!” Bridget pleaded, leaning the hot rod on its kickstand. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No it’s not. If you are just watching a movie, there’s no reason why the kids can’t tag along. I’m sure your friends will understand. End of story.”

  “We are busy!” Fred bellowed. “Lucy and I have things to do. You go babysit Fi and Bridget.”

  “There’s an idea,” Maggie said, standing up straight. “Take your pick. It’s me or Fred.”

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  An hour later we were in Dominick’s car headed to swim at the quarries. This had been the plan all along, though the guest list had to be revised. Even though the weather had cleared by the end of the day, there was still a cool dampness outside that made me want to go in the water even less than normal.

  “Why did we spend all that time putting on makeup and doing hair if we were just going swimming?” I asked Fiona, who sat with Fred and me in the back.

  She shrugged. “What else we got to do?”

  We rounded the granite-curbed bends of 127, the ocean to our right the entire way. Several of the homes on the way to the quarries were built from huge blocks of granite, containing quartz, feldspar, and mica, all visible to the naked eye, as Fred once showed me. Even the base of the Statue of Liberty was made of granite mined from Cape Ann quarries.

  We veered off 127, away from the ocean, and drove to the edge of the woods.

  “I can’t see anything,” Fred moaned, looking out the window as the car stopped.

  Bridget unclicked her seat belt and turned around. “Freddy, try to have a good time.”

  “He didn’t ask to be here,” Fiona said.

  “What’s your problem?” Bridget asked.

  “Nothing,” Fiona whispered, leaning her head back on the seat. Dominick popped the trunk and was already outside the car as another set of headlights came up the road. A Bronco pulled in behind us, blaring ridiculously loud music. It was Lester, Sookie’s deckhand.

  Lester was built like an ox, which made him look more like a man than the high school kid he still was. Sometimes he sat next to Fred and me on the couch, and we’d watch the Red Sox while Fred’s sisters got ready upstairs. Lester was all right, but he wasn’t alone in the truck.

  Out the back window, Fiona watched Simon Cabot climb down from the passenger’s seat, and she straightened her back. Simon was a tall, blond boy who went to boarding school at St. Mark’s, which could have been in the Dominican Republic for all we knew. He returned to Rockport for holidays and summer vacations.

  “How many people are coming?” Fred asked, leaning over me to peer out his sister’s window.

  Bridget had already left the car, and Fiona gave Simon a small wave and a restrained smile. It was kind of awkward. No one was paying attention to Fred, and I didn’t have an answer for him.

  We cleared out of the back seat of Dominick’s car and started off down a short wooded path that Fred and I walked a hundred times in daylight, but never crossed in the dark. We couldn’t see a thing, but Dominick had taken a flashlight from his glovebox and Lester had a spotlight, so we took small steps to avoid tripping on any roots or rocks and followed the small beam. There was a damp smell of wet forest and fishy ocean. I heard a clanging of glass bottles in someone’s bag.

  Puff.

  At the end of the path was a huge, rectangular hole in the earth that seemed about a half mile around. Mr. Patterson had told me that over a hundred years ago, laborers had harvested the granite guts of the quarry to build a bridge between Boston and Cambridge. The quarry filled with rainwater, becoming a swimming hole.

  There was a crescent moon, which barely threw any light on the surface of the water. Lester’s spotlight blazed from the top of a small, flat rock, but cast only a small arc over the ledge of the quarry, out into the water.

  “Whoo-hoo!” Lester bolted out from the right and flew into the water, making a splash like an anvil hurled over the side. “It’s July,” he yelled. “Why is it still so friggin’ cold?”

  “Incoming!” Dominick yelled from the dark before running into the spotlight and turning to face us as he backflipped into the quarry.

  “I never want to see that again,” Fred said to me in a monotone, which made me laugh.

  Simon appeared next. He entered the water like an Olympic diver. The boys started splashing and lunging at one another. They held each other underwater in the deep reservoir. I couldn’t understand why it didn’t seem to freak them out.

  And then Bridget came into the light, shrieking, covering her chest with one arm and holding her nose with her opposite hand. She plunged into the quarry and resurfaced, spitting and slicking her hair back, all that work down the drain as makeup and hair gel dissolved into the stagnant water. She kept wiping under her eyes.

  “It’s too quiet,” Lester yelled.

  There was another splash. I turned to see Fiona’s head surface, while she yelled, “It’s cold!”

  “Have you had enough yet?” I whispered to him, but there was no answer. “Fred?”

  Puff.

  He reached for my hand. Goose bumps covered my back like a cape. We stood there watching the others.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  When most of the kids had toweled off and redressed, we sat on blankets and the older kids passed around bottles of Boone’s Farm, Wild Turkey, and Colt 45. Lester placed the spotlight at the base of a tree nearby. Simon was still floating around in the quarry.

  The Boone’s bottle came closer. Fiona took a drink and leaned into the circle, so she could skip over Fred and me, to pass the wine to Bridget. Fred intercepted the bottle. Fiona held on to it, looking at Fred, confused. He took the bottle and tipped it to his lips, drinking the pink wine.

  “Freddy, take it easy,” Bridget said.

  “You’re too young,” Fiona added.

  Fred looked at Fiona. “So are you.”

  And then Fred passed the bottle to me.
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  I looked at him, as if to say, What am I supposed to do with this?

  He shrugged.

  I had a flashback to fifth grade, when Officer Parrelli came to health class as a guest speaker. I remember role-playing what you’re supposed to say if someone offers you a drink and you feel like you’re in over your head. But in every scenario at school, it had been a fifth grader, who’d been pretending to be a bully, that had tried to get me to drink. It was never a group of people I loved who were handing me pink wine that smelled like fruit.

  I swallowed a mouthful of Boone’s, which tasted like carbonated Smarties.

  Simon climbed out of the water and dried himself in the darkness before dressing and joining the group. “The quarry freaks me out,” he said.

  Fiona wrapped a towel around her shoulders. “At least there are no sharks.”

  I nodded.

  “What could Sookie do with the dead great white anyway?” Fiona asked. “Why would he drag it all the way home?”

  “He could’ve sold the teeth or the jaws,” Fred said.

  “Sookie would’ve kept the jaws for himself,” said Lester. This was probably true.

  “Or he could’ve called a biologist to dissect it,” I said.

  Fiona nodded. I knew she was thinking of my mom too.

  “What would a biologist look for?” asked Bridget.

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  An hour or so later, Fred’s head was in my lap. We were stargazing, except that whenever I tipped my face back to look up at the sky, I felt dizzy. When I leaned forward, I could smell alcohol and breath, but couldn’t distinguish his from mine. Fred was giggling from the story he had told five minutes ago about the time I walked halfway to Gloucester with the back of my skirt tucked into the waistband of my underwear.

  “When was the last time you wore a skirt?” he asked me.

  “Two years ago.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Not at all.”

  Then with the grace of a windup robot, he shifted position, cupped his hand behind my head, and kissed me. The kiss itself was neither dry nor sloppy. Surprised, I stayed there with my mouth pressing against his mouth. Fred’s lips felt warm. A current began radiating through my legs. My whole body relaxed like someone was rubbing the bottoms of my feet. I kissed him back, until the dizziness returned.

  Our faces broke apart. I thought I might be sick. Immediately I stood up, forcing Fred to move away. I needed to find my sea legs. My foot pressed into Fiona’s hand, as she and Simon carried on a conversation. She was so enraptured that she didn’t flinch.

  Fred jumped up and followed me.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his eyes darting around, trying to read my face. “Was that okay?”

  “Yeah, it was okay. Weird, but okay.” I smiled.

  “Weird?” he repeated.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I like weird.”

  He smiled and I saw all of his teeth.

  “One last time!” Lester announced. Stripping off his shirt, he jumped from the ledge.

  I watched Fred as he saw Lester plunge into the quarry.

  “Let’s go,” Fred said.

  “Swimming?”

  He nodded.

  I shook my head. “I’ve had enough weird tonight. I’m good.”

  “No, c’mon,” he said. “The stars.”

  He pointed to the sky over the giant hole in the earth. The clouds were breaking like a roof opening above our heads.

  “I’m gonna go,” he said, pulling off his sweatshirt. “Come swimming if you want.”

  He smiled again and jumped off the ledge in his shorts. I watched the spot in the water where he entered the quarry until he rose up and his head broke through.

  The next thing I knew, Fiona jumped in, followed by Simon, Bridget, and Dominick. I watched everyone from the overhang. I took off my sweatshirt, but I couldn’t bear to remove anything else. It felt wrong to be with these older kids. There was only four years’ difference between Fiona and me, but it felt like an enormous divide, like a whole canyon with Fred and me on one side and the rest of the group on the other.

  I stood on the ledge, wondering if I had really just kissed Fred. He called to me from the water below.

  I jumped from the rock into the cold water. I wasn’t afraid. A cocoon of bubbles spun around my body as I plunged down and bobbed back up to the surface, my T-shirt ballooning away from my chest. When I wiped the hair out of my face, I began treading water.

  In the daylight, the water was clear enough to see fathoms beneath the surface. This gave the illusion there was a bottom that might be safely reached, when really the quarry was so deep even a strong swimmer should consider it bottomless. At night, it was a different story. Since the light beams from Lester’s spotlight didn’t shine directly down into the water, the quarry seemed black, with unending depth. I could see Lester’s head bobbing.

  Bridget and Fiona splashed each other before attacking Simon.

  I stopped thinking about the darkness and depth when I looked up into the night sky. There were millions of stars surrounding the crescent moon. Bluish Vega, Cassiopeia. Ursa Major.

  “Fred,” I yelled. “Meteorites.”

  They were tiny white lights zooming behind black curtains in the sky. I could feel the water covering my ears so that I heard nothing but the blood in my head pulsing and saw nothing but pinpricks of light above.

  “Fred?” I called.

  He never answered.

  14. The Golden Hour

  When a child is lost at the bottom of a quarry, every minute counts. Dad had told me this plenty of times before. The primary diver enters the water tethered to a search line as tall as a skyscraper. The line tender holds the line above the surface. The primary diver descends through the dark and cold until he hits bottom, stirring up a thick cloud of silt and sediment. It is so dark that even with a searchlight nothing would be visible. Touch is the only useful sense. He gives a tug on the line to let the line tender know he has reached bottom.

  The line tender holds the line and directs the diver in an arch search, the primary diver moving in a three-foot circle around himself, feeling for the child. If the primary diver does not find him, he goes out another three feet and searches that field. And so on, making larger circles on the quarry floor.

  After twenty minutes with no sign of the child, the primary diver would have to resurface. The pressure and cold at that depth is dangerous. The safety diver takes the primary diver’s place while the primary diver rests.

  The divers would hope to find the child within sixty minutes, a time span known as the golden hour. The child’s heart rate slows. His blood stops flowing to his fingers and toes, his hands and feet, his arms and legs, to conserve blood for the heart and brain. Children are particularly resilient when submerged in cold water.

  On the surface, the line tender, the family, the police, and the paramedics wait for four tugs on the line. Four tugs from the bottom of the quarry signal that the child is found. Six tugs signals an emergency. Everyone prepares to take him from the water, wrap him in blankets, give him rescue breaths and chest compressions, all while they bring him to the ambulance. They don’t quit until he is either conscious or pronounced dead at the hospital.

  Fred was pronounced at 11:52 p.m.

  15. In Our Best Clothes

  Dad and i sat near the front of the church, beside the Station of the Cross, Jesus meets his mother. Mr. Patterson was to my right. People fanned themselves with programs in the July heat while the organist plodded out hymns. Every seat was taken.

  Like most churches on the North Shore, this one suffered from a lack of air-conditioning and we were all sweating in our best clothes. There were two giant fans at the front of the church, one by the tabernacle and one n
ext to the statue of Saint Joseph. It was like sitting on a tarmac instead of in a sanctuary. I could barely hear, as if my ears were still full of water.

  When my mom was alive, I’d gone to church more often. She’d told me once that she didn’t believe that any one religion was doing it right, but that she was open to the fact that there might be a higher power. Sometimes she’d felt it at church, sometimes she’d felt it on the ocean. She and I didn’t go to church every Sunday, but we used to go to mass outside of Easter and Christmas. Dad would come with us occasionally, but after she died, we started skipping even some of the holidays. When I sat in the pews, I remembered the times that Mom and I came here together, but I bet Dad mostly thought about her funeral.

  Dad sat with his right leg sticking out into the aisle, a hard cast wrapped around his foot like a cement boot. Under the pew, I tapped his metal crutches with the tip of my blue canvas shoe. He was one of the rescue divers called to the quarry to find Fred. In the darkness and rugged terrain of the quarry bottom, Dad’s foot was crushed by a tree limb. Six tugs to the line tender.

  I looked at Mr. Patterson beside me. He was wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. I don’t remember many details from my mom’s funeral, but I do remember how sad Mr. Patterson was that day. He sat up front with Dad and me, like he was Mom’s father. He had outlived all of my biological grandparents, and he had owned the house across the street from my mom since she was a baby. My dad held Mr. Patterson’s glasses, so that he could wipe the tears from his whole face.

  “The Pattersons didn’t have kids of their own,” Dad had told me later that night. “So she was theirs too.”

  “You doing okay?” Mr. Patterson asked, putting his handkerchief in his lap.

  I nodded.