The Line Tender

by Kate Allen

  Maggie Kelly looked as small as a child, propped up between Fiona and Bridget. My eyes filled and I pulled a Kleenex from the pocket of my navy-blue dress. I hated seeing Maggie like that. When Mom died, Maggie drew a direct line to me. She fed me. She picked me up from school. She asked me if my homework was in my bag. I watched her, pressed into Fiona’s side, and I blew my nose into the tissue. Fred’s dad sat next to Bridget. I hadn’t seen him in a few weeks.

  Fred’s casket remained at the end of the long aisle in front of us, under a large, white cloth. The casket had been closed at the wake, and I let myself think that maybe he wasn’t in there at all. That he somehow escaped the quarry and was only missing.

  I suddenly felt hot and sick like someone was pounding a glowing forge in my gut. I started gagging on my own saliva. Unable to make a sound, I slapped Dad’s arm. When he saw the panic in my face, he said, “Go get some air at the back of the church. I’ll be right behind you.”

  He flattened his back to the oak pew, so I could climb over him, and I hustled down the aisle to the back of the church. Since the accident, I had trouble swallowing, and the more I thought about it, the worse it was. I focused on the light coming through the open doors, trying not to look at any faces, while I flew down the aisle like a lunatic. By the time I got near the end, I could hear the clicks of Dad’s crutches, as he began his long journey to the back of the church.

  “How are you now?” Dad asked, breathless. I didn’t hear the words over the fan and the priest’s voice, but I read his lips. Sweat ran down his cheeks from his sideburns.

  “Okay. Can we just stay here?”

  Dad nodded. One of the ushers brought him a chair.

  “It happened again,” I said, looking down at Dad.

  “I noticed.”

  “When’s it going to stop?”

  He shrugged. “Hopefully soon.”

  In the ambulance at the quarry, the paramedic had said the choking feeling was probably my brain’s response to the accident. That for a while, I might feel panic even when I was in no danger. In the back of the ambulance, with Fiona, I had tried to imagine a string that wrapped around my hand. It had threaded out the door of the truck. It had crossed the dirt path and avoided the feet of those watching the rescue efforts, draping over the cliff. It had dropped into the water, the end of the string moving toward Fred like there was a gravitational pull. And when it found him, the string curled around Fred’s wrist. I held the line.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  In the back of the church, I stood beside my dad, spitting saliva into a Kleenex. I couldn’t swallow.

  The deacon walked up to the lectern to give a reading.

  Dad squeezed my free hand. I remembered standing with Fred on the quarry ledge.

  In the pews I saw more kids than I’d ever seen in church. A half a dozen from the chess team were sitting together. Fred liked those guys, though he could beat them all. There were dozens more who didn’t give him the time of day. Some of them were crying too.

  I saw Sookie sitting beside Paulie. Officer Parrelli was out of uniform, but his clothes were perfectly ironed. Dad’s dive team took up two rows. The phone had rung many times since the accident and almost every time I asked him who was calling, it turned out to be one of the guys on the team. My dad ignored most of the calls.

  People in the pews were starting to move toward the aisle and I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  “I need to go outside,” I said.

  “I’ll wait for Mr. Patterson,” he said. “But I’ll be there soon.”

  I walked into the bright sunlight and heat, looking for a place to hide before ducking under a dwarf tree beside the church entrance. The mourners started coming out. I watched Mrs. Lynch, from the bookstore, come down the steps alone. She looked tired. Fred was one of her regular customers. A man from the funeral home opened up the back of the hearse and hurried into the church against the flow. And then I saw our science teacher, Ms. Solomon, come out. She was sobbing, like she had held it in until she walked out the door. Her husband was a builder, and I’d never seen him in a suit before. He held his hand on her back as they walked down the steps.

  He whispered something to her and squeezed her arm. Then, he picked up his pace and headed for the sidewalk.

  Ms. Solomon pulled another tissue out of her pocket, blew her nose loudly, and made a grunting sound. Watching her cry made tears spill down my cheeks again. She began walking toward my tree, and my heart started beating quickly. Had she seen me? What was I supposed to say? I just wanted to be alone.

  And then she caught my eyes.

  She sucked in a loud breath and walked over, stopping a foot in front of me. We were almost the same height now. Ms. Solomon had freckles like mine, and short dark hair. She wore comfortable, baggy clothes, even at a funeral. She took another step forward and hugged me with her whole body. I’m pretty sure I got snot on her shoulder.

  I had a history of being difficult in Ms. Solomon’s class. Like the time when she wanted us to act out the mathematical equation for photosynthesis and I rolled my eyes at her when I thought she wasn’t looking.

  She had said, “Did you just roll your eyes at me?”

  And I said, “No, I was trying to clean my contacts. I swear.”

  Except, I’ve never worn contacts.

  But here I was, hugging Ms. Solomon, in the heat, under a tree.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  Her dangly feather earrings tickled my neck.

  We broke apart and she wiped under her eyes with the backs of her hands.

  It was Fred who had proposed the field guide to Ms. Solomon during the last week of school. Ms. Solomon wasn’t used to her students assigning themselves homework over the summer. I was surprised when she suggested that I help. To tell the truth, I had just wanted to hang out with Fred and I didn’t think we’d get very far anyway. Maybe I’d been right.

  A car idled on the street in front of the church. Ms. Solomon turned her head toward the sound.

  “You ready?” her husband called from the car window.

  She grabbed my hand and said, “Call me at home if you need anything.”

  It was hard to imagine ever picking up the phone to call Ms. Solomon. Fred and my dad were the only people I ever called.

  16. Out the Window

  After the funeral, i didn’t go outside for a couple of days. I mostly stayed in my room and watched the Sox downstairs at night. I kept an eye on Fred’s house from the window. Mostly visitors went in and came out shortly after.

  On account of his foot, Dad was pretty much living on the couch. One morning, I ventured downstairs and he had made his way into the kitchen and was sitting at the table, with his foot on a chair. We were on the same schedule: forage, nap, Red Sox, insomnia. It was unclear when he’d be able to go back to work, but he couldn’t drive for at least another five weeks.

  I gave the sports page to my dad and unfolded the metro region section. The day after the accident I began to piece together what happened at the quarry, trying to pull out the details that my father wouldn’t give me. After Fred went under and Bridget helped me out of the water, I spent the rest of the search under a blanket with Fiona, then inside the back of an ambulance. It was as if everyone was trying to keep me away from the scene.

  I read the Gloucester Daily Times and the Boston Globe every day. The Globe’s articles about the accident were short. I didn’t understand how Fred’s death could be reduced to a blurb. The Gloucester Times provided more details.

  The paper explained that a group of teenagers were swimming in the quarry after dark. A thirteen-year-old boy had gone missing in the water.

  The way I had imagined the search effort was accurate, but each article had a small detail that grounded the incident, yet made it seem impossible that I h
ad experienced the same accident. Most of the articles disagreed on the depth at which Fred was found.

  Monday’s Times quoted Sergeant Jalbert as saying the dive team untangled Fred from tree limbs. Tuesday’s Times included that “a family friend, Tom Everhart” was the diver to actually locate Fred. When I read the words, my heart stopped. My dad sat quietly beside me, eating cereal.

  “You found Fred?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t want to upset you.”

  This might have been true. But I knew Dad. Sometimes he didn’t like to talk about the things I wanted to talk about the most.

  That particular morning was Wednesday, and the papers reported another source of blame for the event. A new character appeared in the story, Essex County DA, Michael Murphy. His quote read that area officials suspected alcohol was a factor in the drowning of the thirteen-year-old.

  My stomach flipped.

  Dad dropped the Opinion section on the table and made a noise like he couldn’t believe what he’d just read.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  I picked up one side of the section. He grabbed the other end. The paper was stretched tight between us, like two stubborn dogs who refused to let go of a dirty sock. We stared at each other for a second before I looked down at the headline.

  “Absentee parents, tragic consequences,” I read out loud. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t read it,” he said. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  But I gave the paper a tug and it came free, as if Dad had already given up. It was a letter to the editor from one of the ushers at church.

  Last week, a boy died in a Rockport quarry. A thirteen-year-old boy. Statistically, it’s young adults who are most likely to die in a quarry accident. Blame it on a lack of judgment from thrill-seeking teenagers who walk around with a superhuman feeling that nothing bad is going to happen. It’s all the more reason for parents to keep a close watch on their children. Yet who was looking out for Fred Kelly the night that he died?

  “Why would he say that?” My voice cracked. “He knows Maggie.”

  Dad put his hand over mine and looked me in the eye. “He’s a nut.”

  “No, but WHY?” I asked Dad again.

  I could tell that he was searching for the right words, but he was struggling.

  “Sometimes it’s easier for people to make sense of things . . . if they can put the blame on someone.”

  “But why?”

  He shook his head.

  I heard Maggie’s voice in my head, barking at Fred about his inhaler. I put my face in my hands.

  There was a knock at the back door and whoever it was didn’t wait for my dad to let him in before opening the screen door.

  “There they are,” Mr. Patterson said, walking into the kitchen from the mudroom. “How are you both feeling?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Horrible.”

  On the night of the accident, while Dad was having X-rays, Mr. Patterson sat beside me in the waiting room. I wanted to thank him, but I didn’t know what to say.

  Mr. Patterson sat down at the table, and Dad offered him a cup of coffee.

  “Why don’t you go next door? Go check up on Maggie or the young girl,” said Mr. P.

  “Fiona?”

  “Maybe you could use each other is all,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say. I just hoped Maggie hadn’t read today’s paper.

  “If there’s anything I can do, Lucy,” said Mr. Patterson. “You know where to find me, dear.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m going to go upstairs for a bit.”

  And I stayed there all day, except to check on Dad a couple of times.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  Later that night, I was still sitting up in my room. Out the window, I heard boys’ voices coming closer as they whizzed by on bikes. I rested my elbows on the windowsill and knelt on the rug, watching as the two kids pedaled past the gazebo. I wondered where they were going, what they were up to. I stared at Fred’s house across the narrow street, wishing he would open his window.

  And then his light went on.

  For a second I let myself believe that he was home. The shades were up, curtains wide-open. I could see the Zeppelin poster of clasperless Icarus hanging over his bed and the framed picture of Richard Feynman on the wall. I heard Fred’s voice in my head, “He won the Nobel Prize AND he could play the bongos.”

  “Whatever! He helped create the A-bomb, for chrissakes,” I had said.

  Then I saw Maggie. She stood in the bright room, staring at the artifacts the way I stared at Feynman. She sat down on Fred’s unmade bed, grabbed a sweatshirt down by the foot, and buried her face in it. I assumed she was crying, but when she brought the cloth down to her lap, she just looked pale. Maggie, Fred, and I all had Irish skin that turned red just before we cried. Maggie was still white. Then she did it again, but this time when the sweatshirt dropped below her nose, she saw me across the narrow street, watching her from my own room.

  My heart was beating triple time, but then I waved at her involuntarily, like I was brushing away a bee. She got up and opened the window.

  “Hi,” Maggie said across Smith Street.

  “Hi.”

  We just stared at each other.

  “You want to come over?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I’m going to Fred’s,” I yelled, closing the front door. I didn’t realize how weird it sounded until it was already out there, but I kept walking.

  * * *

  ° ° ° °

  Maggie met me at the front door wearing a Rockport High School T-shirt that looked like it had belonged to Fred’s dad and a pair of shorts that showed 98 percent of her compact legs. She looked top heavy. We both studied each other’s face. Maggie’s brow furrowed.

  She hooked me around the back with her arm and pressed my head into her hair. Maggie raised her face to kiss my cheek, and I bawled all over her. Her breath smelled like booze.

  “You doing okay?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Me either. Let’s go upstairs.”

  Wiping my eyes, I looked down the hall into the kitchen and wondered if Bridget and Fiona were home.

  “I’ll go get some more Kleenex,” Maggie said. The light was still on in Fred’s room. It was hard to tell if anything had been touched. Fred was meticulous. All of his books were on the shelves. The drafting table was bare except for a blotter and a Sox mug full of mechanical pencils. His postcard of Miles Davis wearing the bug-eyed glasses was pinned to the bulletin board above his desk. Fred’s music was tucked away in a storage case, except for a smaller case on top of the stereo that held maybe a dozen CDs. It looked like a small, square book, except the cover was an old Massachusetts license plate. This was where he kept the music he wanted to listen to most.

  His laundry sat in the hamper, except the sweatshirt Maggie had draped over the foot of the bed. But the unzipped backpack, leaning against the leg of a desk chair—and the sheets, balled in the middle of the mattress—made me feel like he was alive. Fred was not a bed-maker. A fresh glass was sweating all over the bedside table—something with ice and brown liquid.

  I spied Fred’s inhaler and the bug-eyed glasses on the bedside, and for the first time in my life—though I’d always been curious—I picked up the inhaler and gave myself a puff the way I had seen him do a thousand times. With a swift kick, my heart started racing, and just as I returned the inhaler to the table, Maggie appeared in the doorway.

  With jittery fingers, I blew my nose into a Kleenex and sat on the bed, careful not to disturb the disturbed sheets. Maggie sat in the chair. She handed me the
sweatshirt and grabbed her drink.

  “Smell it,” she said, flicking her index finger toward the sweatshirt.

  I looked at her.

  “Smell it.”

  I sniffed back the mucus in my nose, like I was clearing my palate, and put the sweatshirt up to my face. It smelled like nothing. Like cotton.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t smell like anything.”

  Her nose started blooming red, so I put my face back into the thick fabric and tried again. Maybe detergent, maybe deodorant. Fred wasn’t great about remembering to slick up his pits in the morning. Still, it didn’t smell like sweat, either.

  “You want it to smell like Fred?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t smell him,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I wish I did,” I said.

  She breathed in heavy through her nose and gave me a flat smile. Her ankle started twitching and her bare toes tapped the carpet. “How’s your dad?”

  “He’s doing okay,” I said. “Has to wear the cast for six weeks.”

  “I’ve been meaning to check up on him.” She sighed. “What have you been up to?”

  “Not much.” I put down the sweatshirt.

  Maggie looked into her glass. “I’m so sorry I sent you and Fred to look after Bridget and Fi that night. That was wrong.”

  I didn’t know how to respond, so I just nodded.

  “I thought you were just gonna watch a movie and come home.”

  She took the last sip of her drink. “I thought Dominick was the one I had to worry about.” Her ankle twitched faster. “Not Lester.”

  “What?” But as soon as I spoke, I understood her accusation. I no longer thought she might cry. Her eyes looked like a wolf’s.

  “I was counting on Lester to be more of an adult.”

  Her tone made me hope that we weren’t alone in the house, which is something I had never felt before with Maggie. Her face was red and it looked like she could spring out of the chair.