by Hannah Tinti
Some were actual widows, their husbands lost at sea or struck down with heart attacks or smashed into trees while driving drunk, and when they knocked, they were the most apologetic, the most unsure of themselves. The rest were simply fishing widows, left at home while their men followed schools of cod or tuna out to the Bitter Banks, or made their way down the coast after swordfish, for weeks or months at a time. The women all brought food, but Loo thought they were the ones who looked hungry. Her father was caught once in the front yard as he was coming in from the beach, and the woman was so nervous and laughed so high and hard, backing him into a corner, that he started avoiding the house during the day.
A part of Loo felt guilty for closing the door in their faces, though she also hated it when the widows pushed their way inside, their eyes searching for clues while setting their baked goods on the kitchen table, right next to the watermark that Hawley had made over hundreds of nights, polishing his guns and drinking mugs of coffee. When they asked if they could use the bathroom, she didn’t even make an excuse. She just looked them in the face and said no.
In his brief, shining moment on the greasy pole, her father had wiped away the town’s ill will. The men of Olympus pulled him out of the harbor and carried him away on their shoulders, and the women of Olympus watched the water running down his scarred back and pressed their lips together.
A barstool was now kept reserved for Hawley at the Flying Jib. The fishermen welcomed him into the daily market, where he could sell directly to wholesalers and other restaurants besides the Sawtooth. In the meantime, gossip spread of how he’d earned those scars—as a cop, as a soldier, as a hit man for the mob. Whatever the case, Hawley wasn’t talking. And now no one stole his daughter’s shoes. Loo didn’t even have to do homework. Principal Gunderson gave her a hall pass so that she could come and go as she pleased. The other boys and girls still considered her a weirdo, but a few even made attempts at friendship, which she handled awkwardly, as she did most things. So while her father began to spend nights at the Flying Jib with Strand and Fisk, who had given Hawley a table right next to theirs at the fish market, Loo continued life the same as always, except that she was not fighting. No one in her school would fight her. Not even when she wanted them to.
There was a taste that filled Loo’s mouth whenever she was getting ready to hit someone. Tangy, like rust. She could feel it in the glands on either side of her jaw. As if she’d bitten her tongue. The first few times the taste came slowly, but soon it flooded her mouth whenever a situation was turning against her. Then the pull took over her senses, and for a moment she crossed over and became another person—a powerful person—even if it lasted only until someone punched her back.
And for a while they had punched back. After she broke the noses of Jeremy Strand and Pauly Fisk, Jr., there had been a brief hiatus, a summer spent fishing and clamming with her father interrupted only by widows dropping off casseroles. Then in September Loo had returned to school and started fighting again. She learned to swing first, and she usually did, first with Rachel Mirden (hair-puller), Sung Kim (biter), Wanda Gregson (leg-swiper), Katie Jeffries (pincher), Larry Humnack (crier) and Ria Gupta (surprising left hook), until finally Principal Gunderson called her in for another sit-down in his office. Any more violence on school grounds and he’d take away her hall pass. “I’ve got parents asking for you to be expelled,” he said. “Please don’t make me do that.”
Loo tried to control her temper, but when she got home from school she still felt angry, and the only people she had a chance of fighting now were the widows, who flocked to their house like birds. So far none had taken the bait, or tried to even slap her, no matter how rude she tried to be. Still, whenever she heard the sound of their timid knocks, Loo’s mouth would fill with saliva.
Then, on one unseasonably warm day in November, just a few weeks after Loo had turned thirteen, the knock was different: two quick raps, brisk and assertive. She opened the door, and instead of a widow standing on their porch it was a child. At least, Loo thought it was a child. Then she noticed the Birkenstocks and Indian skirt and unshaved armpit hair peeking out from her sleeveless top and realized the child was a very short, middle-aged woman holding a clipboard. Her skin was weathered, her teeth bright but slightly crooked. And beside her, at the bottom of the stairs, half hidden by a rhododendron bush, was the boy whose finger Loo had broken: Marshall Hicks.
“Is your father home?” the woman asked.
“No,” said Loo.
“Well,” the woman said. “I’m here to talk about something very important.” She held up her clipboard. “Did you know that in ten years, there will no longer be any codfish in the North Atlantic? Unless we create a marine sanctuary in our waters, we’re looking at an environmental holocaust.”
Loo leaned against the doorframe and peered down at Marshall Hicks. The boy was dressed in a shirt and tie, nicer than she’d ever seen him in school. His forehead was shiny with sweat and he, too, was carrying a clipboard, as well as his mother’s jacket. He stared into the heart of the rhododendron bush, as if he wished it would swallow him up.
The woman pressed a pamphlet into Loo’s hand. What happens when the ocean is empty? Stop commercial overfishing at the Bitter Banks. Save the Atlantic cod! Loo turned the page. There was a photograph of a drift net full of dead fish.
“I need your father’s support. This is about saving lives.” The woman’s lips twitched as she spoke. Her eyes pinned Loo in the doorway.
“He should be back soon.”
The woman smiled and stepped inside. “Honey,” she said over her shoulder, “why don’t you keep going down the block. I’ll catch up with you later.”
“Mom.” Marshall Hicks glared at them from the bottom of the stairs. Loo nearly felt bad for him—for being beaten by a girl, for having to lie to his friends, for having such an embarrassing mother. But then she didn’t.
“Bye,” Loo said, and closed the door on him.
When she turned around, Marshall’s mother was already walking through the living room, looking at photographs, checking the spines of their books. The volumes were stacked from the floor to the ceiling. Hawley had made the bookshelf in their garage, and Loo had taken great pleasure filling it up with science fiction trilogies and textbooks about the constellations.
“Did you bring anything?” Loo asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“They usually bring something. The women who come for my father.”
For a moment Marshall’s mother looked flustered. Then she put down her clipboard. She reached into her bag and took out a bottle of wine. “I’m Mary Titus.” She held out her hand.
Loo shook it. “I thought your last name was Hicks.”
“That’s Marshall’s father’s name. When I got married again, I took my second husband’s. You know the TV show Whale Heroes?”
“No.”
“Well, Marshall’s stepfather is the captain of the Athena. The boat that rams the Japanese whalers. He’s off filming in the China Sea right now. We’re divorced.” Mary Titus stood there holding the bottle. “Got a corkscrew?”
They settled in at the kitchen table. Mary Titus poured out the wine. Hawley had never let Loo drink before, and she hesitated for a moment before picking up the glass. Once she’d snuck a beer from the fridge and ended up pouring nearly all of it down the sink. The wine looked more promising. It smelled sweet and was the color of honey. Loo took a sip and held it in her mouth while Mary Titus talked about the petition. With five thousand signatures of support from the community, she’d be able to submit her petition to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a marine sanctuary to be created at the Bitter Banks, an area of underwater plateaus sixty-five miles off the coast of Olympus, that brought nutrients to the surface and created a massive breeding ground for all kinds of fish, but especially cod. For centuries, fishermen had traveled out to the Banks and brought back massive hauls, but now, with trawler nets and giant commerci
al boats, the species was dwindling.
“The cod’s not as flashy as a whale,” Mary Titus said. “But it’s an important part of the food chain.”
Loo drained her glass. The wine was making her feel generous. And there was something compelling about Mary Titus, who seemed as if she were riding the edge of some great emotion. As she spoke about trawler fishing, the widow’s eyes brimmed with tears one moment and then she would bark out a laugh the next. She told Loo she’d seen her father selling his clams at the Sawtooth, where Mary Titus worked as a waitress.
“He looks lonely,” she said. “Do you think he’s lonely?”
“No,” said Loo.
The woman picked up Loo’s star chart from the table. “What’s this for? Is your dad into astrology?”
“Astronomy,” said Loo.
“I’m a Cancer,” said Mary Titus. “The crab. Loving but dangerous.” She held her hands up, fingers pressed together like claws. “When’s your birthday?”
“October twenty-fifth,” said Loo.
“Scorpio, then. That means you’ve got a hidden stinger.”
“Stinger?”
“Sex,” said Mary Titus.
Loo reached for the bottle and refilled her glass.
Mary Titus did not seem to care that she was drinking with a minor. She ran her palm across the table. A puddle of milk had dried into the wood, and she started picking at it with her nail. “It was stupid of me to come here.” She swung her tiny legs back and forth underneath the table. Her eyes brimmed with tears again. “I’m crying because I miss my husband.”
“I thought you were divorced.”
“From my second husband. I miss my first husband. He was the one I really loved. He died when Marshall was seven.”
Loo kept drinking and listened to Mary talk about this dead husband, how he was washed overboard during a storm near the Banks, and how she couldn’t stop picturing him lost under the waves, about the fish eating his skin in little pieces, about barnacles and mussels attaching themselves to his bones. She said that after it happened, she rolled a blanket and put it in bed next to her, just to feel the warmth, and sometimes she pretended his hand was touching the base of her spine, his voice murmuring at the back of her neck. She said her skin smelled like him when she woke up in the morning. She said she felt like she was losing her mind.
“And then I met Marshall’s stepfather,” said Mary Titus, “but he left me, too. For a whale.” She sighed and wiped her cheeks with the hem of her Indian skirt. Then she leaned her face into the cloth. Loo did not know what to do. No one had ever confided in her like this before. She patted Mary Titus on the head.
For as long as she could remember, Loo had noticed women noticing her father. And when they failed to get his attention, they tried to reach him through her. There was the waitress at the diner outside Kansas City, who took Loo into the bathroom and showed her how to braid her hair. The shopkeeper in New Mexico who helped Loo try on her first bra. The landlord’s wife in Virginia who slipped Loo a box of Tampax and a copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves. A girl without a mother, the women would say. So sad. So sorry. And they would bat their eyes. And they would lean in close. But their attentions would only send Hawley brooding. And not long after, Loo would come home from school and the car would be packed and they’d be moving on to someplace else. Someplace new. And she would have to start all over again.
She handed Mary Titus a napkin to dry her eyes. “You’re not the only person who’s lost someone,” she said. Then she led the widow to the bathroom and opened the door to her mother’s shrine.
The room was still muggy from the shower Hawley had taken before he left, the papers and photographs moist and curled. Mary Titus’s eyes went wide at the cascade of memories taped to the walls—picture after picture of the same crooked smile, followed by the letters, the jars of cream and lipstick, the cans of food, the chewed-on pencils, the hospital bracelet, the cashed checks with Loo’s mother’s signature, the torn-out pages of novels with words underlined and the lock of dark hair pinned by the mirror.
Mary Titus sat on the side of the tub. “Is everything hers?”
“Yes.”
The widow took hold of a receipt that was taped to the wall. Loo knew the list of items like she knew her own name: two bars of French lavender soap, bug spray, AAA batteries, a package of Uniball pens, a roll of breath mints and a birthday card. The birthday card had been for Loo’s first birthday. Her mother had bought it right after Loo was born. She had died before she had a chance to sign it. The card was taped to the wall next to the receipt. A picture of a cupcake with a single candle. Each year, on her birthday, Loo would open it. The inside was always blank.
Mary Titus tore the receipt off the wall. “He’s crazier than I am,” she said with a laugh. “Thank God.”
All that Loo knew of her mother was in this room. She’d grown so used to the objects piled in the corners and the scraps of paper on the walls that most days she barely looked at them. But Mary Titus had brought the photographs and cans of food back to life, their importance and their details into focus. The Polaroid by Niagara Falls had bled between the layers, so that the plastic was rubbery and her mother’s face was stained. There were split ends in the lock of hair by the mirror. The bottle of perfume in the corner was open—it hadn’t been earlier this morning—and Loo realized that her father must have been smelling the perfume, that maybe he even took the small glass stopper and slid it down the length of his chin. And suddenly this world of adults seemed much too complicated, and all she wanted was for Mary Titus to stop laughing.
“Quit it,” said Loo.
The widow looked at her but she didn’t stop, her eyes wet now and her teeth flashing, and before Loo knew it, the taste of rust was crawling up her tongue. The friendship she’d felt a few moments earlier for Mary Titus faded, just like her mother’s writing on the walls, and Loo watched as her own hands went up and shoved the widow hard. Mary Titus fell backward into the tub, her short legs kicking the air, her body twisting and her skull cracking against the faucet. The widow’s eyes fluttered for a moment before she sat up and touched the back of her head. Her fingers came away crimson, the same color as the ancient lipstick on the counter. Mary Titus shifted her legs in the empty tub and leaned all the way back, as if she were taking a bath in her clothes. There was blood in her hair and down her neck. She was still laughing but now it was more like crying.
And then Hawley came home. Loo recognized her father’s boots on the porch, shuffling slowly and steadily the way he did when he’d spent a long day at the market, and she had just enough time to slam and lock the door to the bathroom before he called her name.
“Quiet,” Loo said to the widow.
“Is that him?” Mary Titus giggled.
Loo pressed her hand over the woman’s mouth. If there had been water in the tub she would have drowned her. Hawley moved into the kitchen and she imagined him picking up the bottle, sniffing the top, noticing the two glasses on the table. He called her name again, and this time it was a question.
“I’m in the bathroom,” Loo called.
“Who’s here?” Her father was on the other side of the door; she could hear him shifting his weight. “Have you been drinking?”
She had never lied to Hawley before. But she did now.
“No.”
“What’s going on in there?”
Loo knew then that she had made a mistake letting an outsider into their bathroom. Revealed something no one else should see. Mary Titus was struggling under Loo’s hand. She kicked her tiny heels against the porcelain tub. And just as Loo was about to answer her father, the widow bit the girl hard and freed herself.
“Sam Hawley,” Mary Titus yelled, “you’re crazier than me!” Then she fell into another round of hysterics.
For a minute there was nothing but silence on the other side of the door. Then Loo’s father tried the knob. When that did not work he broke the lock with a single kick. He stepped inside.
There was Mary Titus in the bathtub, rolling back and forth in a pool of blood, and Loo holding her own palm, imprinted with the widow’s teeth.
It was a small bathroom, and with the addition of Hawley the last of the air leaked out. Loo watched her father and waited. He was the person she knew most in this world. She had seen him disappointed and angry enough to throw someone off a pier, but she had never seen his face harden in the way it did when the widow pointed at the photos of his wife and laughed.
Hawley’s shoulders filled the entryway. He smelled of fish guts and brine, his hands red and rough from handling knives and opening oysters, and he used them to scoop Mary Titus up in his arms. In two giant steps he had tossed her out onto the porch as if she were a dog and shut the door on her. Then he was back in the bathroom with Loo.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No,” said Loo but again she was lying.
“Show me,” he said, and Loo turned her palm over. Hawley ran his fingers across the bite. He closed the lid of the toilet and set Loo down on top. Then he turned his back and opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out their medical kit: a bright orange toolbox with a red cross on the lid. The orange box had saved Hawley’s life once in Alaska, and after Loo was born it had traveled with them across the country, stocked with gauze and bandages, flashlights, bottled water, freeze-dried meals, tablets of iodine, knives, duct tape, plastic tarps, matches and a crank-powered radio. Whenever one of them was hurt, the answer to fixing them was always inside.
In one quick sweep, Hawley gathered her mother’s toothbrush and perfume and the crimson lipstick and put them in a drawer. In the space made he set down the toolbox, opened the latches and took out a bottle of witch hazel and some cotton balls. When he turned around his face was calmer. He sat on the edge of the tub, doused the cotton and pressed it where Loo’s skin was broken and swollen. They could both hear Mary Titus, who was no longer laughing. She was screaming and pounding her fists on their front door.
“Did you hit her?” her father asked.