by Hannah Tinti
Mabel led her back down the hall, then sat on the bench in front of the loom. She motioned for Loo to join her. There were pedals underneath the machine, and Mabel pushed them with her feet. Each pedal lifted a different set of strings, creating a pattern.
“Try it,” she said. “It’s like a piano.”
Loo sat down. She ran her fingers across the beater and shifted it back and forth. It was like the safety bar on the Galaxy Round Up.
“What are you making?”
“A blanket,” said Mabel. “This pattern, it’s called an overshot. You pass the shuttle like this.” She took up an oval-shaped piece of wood, with a bobbin of blue yarn wrapped tightly inside. She pressed one of the pedals, one of the harnesses lifted and a pattern of cords rose through the teeth of the comb. With one quick movement, Mabel eased the shuttle underneath, until it slid out the other side. She took Loo’s hand and placed it on the beater. “Now use this to bring it all together.”
Loo slid the beater forward and pressed the yarn into place. It felt both odd and familiar, like everything in this house.
“If you want, I can teach you,” said Mabel Ridge.
When Loo didn’t answer the old woman’s mouth set into a hard line. “I thought you’d want to learn something about your family.”
“Do you have anything of my mother’s?” Loo asked.
Mabel exhaled loudly, then got up from the bench and opened a closet in the hallway, removed a cardboard box, lifted the lid and took out a pair of black lace gloves. They were cut short at the wrist, in the style of the 1940s. “Here,” she said, passing them over.
Loo slid one of her hands inside. The fingers were longer than hers. It was like putting on someone else’s skin. “I thought only old ladies wore these kinds of things.”
“Lily was artistic. She could have gone to art school.”
“Why didn’t she?”
“She got into trouble instead. The kind you fell into tonight.”
The old woman frowned, and for the first time Loo understood that her mother had once been a teenager who had also lied to her parents, and made out with boys in the woods, and snuck out to parties. Her mother had touched this loom, looked in that mirror nailed above the sink, knocked the pineapple knocker. Every object began to glow with possibility. Starting with the gloves on Loo’s own fingers.
“She’d do anything to make herself different. Anything that was dangerous. She was like her father that way. The Coast Guard arrested her once, for jumping off the breakwater and swimming laps in the harbor, cutting back and forth between the boats in the shipping channel. We fought about it. We fought about a lot of things. But she thought it was funny.”
“Funny,” Loo said.
“She had a wicked sense of humor.”
Mabel continued rummaging through the box, pulling out books and tins of drawing pencils. A silver belt buckle in the shape of an arrow. Postcards from Alaska, North Carolina and Wisconsin. A couple of scrapbooks. Loo opened and closed her fingers, feeling the gloves tighten against her skin, and tried to memorize it all.
“This one is my favorite.” Mabel Ridge held out an old photograph, bent on one side, and Loo leaned in to see. There was her mother, around eleven or twelve. She was covered head to toe in seaweed, like something washed up on the beach, the creature from the Black Lagoon. Her eyes were rolled back, her arms clawing at the camera.
“Can I have this?”
“No,” said Mabel Ridge.
Loo tightened her grip on the photo. “She was my mother.”
“In her will she left me all of her possessions. Her clothes and her notebooks and pictures,” said Mabel Ridge. “Why do you think she did that?”
“I don’t know,” said Loo.
“I was her mother. Her family,” said Mabel Ridge. “Not him.”
Loo thought of the scraps on the walls of their bathroom. How carefully Hawley took them down and replaced them each time they moved.
“Is that what you said, that day we came here?” she asked.
Mabel pressed her palms together. “Your father wanted me to see you, but I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready.”
Loo bent the gloves into fists. “I thought you hated me.”
“Oh, my dear,” said Mabel Ridge, taking the picture back. “I don’t hate you. I’ve never hated you. I hate your father.”
She said it without emotion, like she was reciting a fact of the universe. And that was enough. Loo didn’t want to hear any more. She pulled off her mother’s gloves and tossed them on the table. She stood up.
“I need a ride home.”
The old woman wiped her blue hands on the rubber apron. She adjusted her goggles. “I haven’t driven for years. But you can take the Firebird.” She slid the picture back inside the box and closed the lid, then turned to bring it to the closet, and as she did Loo snatched the gloves up again and stuffed them into her pocket.
Mabel Ridge did not ask if Loo could drive. She just handed over the keys to the rusted-out Pontiac as if they were nothing, walked Loo out to the driveway, said goodbye and shut the car door. Then she knocked on the window. When Loo rolled it down, she passed her a small photo album with a black leather cover.
“You can have this,” she said. “But I want you to bring the Firebird back. Not right away, but sometime soon. And then we’ll talk some more.”
“Okay,” said Loo. She watched the old woman shuffle up the steps of the porch and move inside. The lights still shone in all of the windows.
The Firebird looked like it had spent its life on cement blocks, but to Loo’s surprise it turned over quickly. She backed out of the driveway and the pedal lurched under her foot. The bucket seat nearly touched the ground, the engine rattled and the brakes were weak—she had to press to the floor before they caught. Loo gripped the wheel and took a breath. You can do this, she thought, and then she shifted to drive and started down the empty street, barely moving twenty miles per hour, her heart thumping like she was on a raceway.
The only time she’d ever driven was with Hawley in an empty parking lot. He’d promised to give her more lessons but she didn’t have a permit yet. Luckily, the streets were deserted, and the few cars she passed seemed to be driving just as slowly as she was—drunks hoping not to get pulled over. A few blocks from their house, Loo slid the car to a stop next to the sidewalk and turned off the ignition. Her hands were trembling.
She flipped open the album Mabel Ridge had given her, hoping to see her mother’s face again, but instead of pictures there was only Lily’s obituary and a few newspaper articles, yellowed with age. One of the articles said that it had taken days to find her mother’s body. That the lake had been dragged with a net. At the memorial service, they had played “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Apparently it was her mother’s favorite song.
When Loo had finished reading she closed the book and slid it underneath the driver’s seat. She got out and locked the door. As she walked home she thought of the photo she’d held between her fingers of her mother covered in muck, looking like a monster from an old black-and-white B movie. In the tiny mirror above the sink in Mabel Ridge’s kitchen, shaking bugs from her hair, mud on her face, Loo had not looked very different.
When she reached the corner she saw her father’s truck parked outside the house. She paused for a moment, considering her chances of sneaking in. Then she climbed the front steps. She slid the key into the lock. Instead of flipping the light switch, she kept her flashlight on and maneuvered past shadowy chairs and tables, then up the stairs. When she passed Hawley’s bedroom, she felt him there behind the closed door, waiting.
He was awake. She was sure of it. Hawley never slept much, and when he did Loo could always sense the difference in the house—a thickening quiet. Now the floorboards in his room shifted, which meant he was standing and that he had his boots on. He had been out looking for her. For hours, maybe.
The doorknob turned and a flood of brightness came over the hallway. Loo shaded her eyes against
her father’s haggard face. It was as if a drain had been opened and all the life had been sucked from his features. He looked worse than he did on the nights when he did not sleep and only sat and stared at her mother’s things.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Loo answered.
Hawley was shaking, the same way he had that day she went missing at the county fair, throwing off the security guards, unrecognizable in the moment before he saw her waiting at the carousel. Loo turned off her flashlight. She braced for the shouting to begin. But instead all she heard was the familiar clink of a gun being opened, and the sigh of bullets sliding from their chambers and jingling into her father’s palm.
“Then good night,” he said.
“Good night.” Her voice came out in a whisper. She waited for something else to happen, but he only stepped back into his room and closed the door, taking the light with him. Outside there were birds singing and inside it was as dark as Dogtown. Loo traced her fingertips along the wall. And then she was in her own room with her own bed and her own door to close.
She threw herself down on the mattress. Slowly she unlaced her boots, peeled off her wet socks. Her clothes smelled like sweat and smoke and the sharp air of the woods. From her pocket she took out her mother’s gloves. She slid them onto both of her hands and pressed her fingers against her eyes. The black lace clouded her vision, as if she’d opened her eyes underwater.
She was nearly asleep when she heard her father come out into the hall again. He paced up and down the rug a few times, and then he stopped outside her door. He talked to the wood, his voice winding through the keyhole.
“You’re all right,” he said again.
“Yes,” Loo said.
“Then I don’t care where you’ve been.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t start saying you’re sorry,” her father said, “or you’ll be saying it for the rest of your life.”
“I’m still sorry,” she said.
“Don’t,” he said.
For a few minutes there was nothing but his breath at the door and Loo began to wonder if he’d been drinking. Then she heard him strike a match, and the scent of his cigarette filtered through the cracks. She listened as Hawley made his way downstairs. The door to the bathroom creaked open and shut. He would be in there for the rest of the night. Loo knew this like she knew her own body. And now she knew something else, something more than his old photographs and scraps of paper and haunted words. She knew that her mother dove off of breakwaters. That she was strong enough to swim through a shipping channel. That she wore gloves and rolled around in seaweed and had a father of her own. That she had grown up in a house full of color. And that she had lived a whole life before she’d met Sam Hawley.
Bullet Number Three
JOVE AND HAWLEY DROVE FROM Portland to Seattle, then took the ferry from Mukilteo out to Whidbey Island. It was Hawley’s first time in the Northwest and he was surprised how different the air felt, the mist that clung to his skin, the fir trees and cliffs and mountains looming over the edge of the sound. Jove drove their car right onto the boat, and together they bought a couple of coffees from the canteen and watched the hulking white form of Mount Rainier rising in the distance.
Jove leaned over the rail and pointed. “Watch for the spout.”
“A whale?”
“Gray, I think.”
“How can you tell?”
“It’s got two blowholes.”
Jove held the cup with the tips of his fingers and passed it between his hands. Hawley peeled back the plastic lid on his own coffee, took a sip and burned his tongue.
“How big do they get?”
“Around fifty feet.”
The men waited in silence. Hawley had never seen a whale before. He kept his eyes on the spot Jove had pointed to and felt a strange thrill in the pit of his stomach. He tried to imagine the whale’s body, hidden under the waves. All that weight lifted by fins and tail, the thick, crusted skin and giant gaping mouth beneath, opening and swallowing. Minutes came and went. The creature did not surface, and Hawley realized that the whale was just another thing in life that he was going to miss out on.
“You think this fellow Talbot knows we’re coming?” he asked.
Jove shook his head. “Not a chance.”
He took out a map and passed it over, showed Hawley the road that would lead them to the north end of the island, where Talbot was supposed to be holed up. Talbot was a hired gun, like them, but he’d taken off with the goods he was supposed to deliver. Now it was their job to get the goods back. As long as they got the drop on Talbot it would be easy. Collect what had been stolen and bring it back to Ed King, Jove’s old friend from prison. If things went well, King had promised there would be other jobs. And Hawley and Jove both needed the money.
“How’s your hand?”
“It’s all right.”
“You should use your left more.”
Hawley tossed his coffee lid into the ocean, then wrapped his busted knuckles around the warm paper cup. Last night Jove had had too much to drink at the hotel bar and a couple of bikers had pushed him off his stool and tried to take his wallet. They hadn’t realized Hawley was with him, even though the two had been sitting next to each other for hours. Hawley had been thinking on this all morning—how good it had felt to throw those punches, the satisfying crunch of bone, the blood on the barroom floor; and also how he’d been so closed off that everyone had thought he was drinking alone.
Before they had finished their coffee, the captain announced they were landing, and the men got back into the Chevy. They’d stolen the car in Portland and it was on the small side—Hawley had to move the seat all the way back to fit his legs. The boat hands waved them through and they drove off the ferry and onto the island. They went past Useless Bay and then got on the road to Freeland and up through the state park. The house they were looking for was on a reserve, perched high above an embankment overlooking the water. They pulled onto an unmarked gravel road and traveled a mile into the woods until they reached a low wooden gate. Hawley got out and lifted the rope latch and then looped it over the post again after Jove had driven through. They parked, blocking the entrance, and went the rest of the way on foot.
Hawley had brought his father’s rifle. He always felt better with a rifle if he was in the woods. It reminded him of hunting, of listening close and feeling ready. Jove took a .45 revolver and stuffed the gun down the back of his pants. They walked another quarter-mile up the road and then Jove said they should cut through the forest. They passed a grove of cedars, trunks ribbed and flared where they met the ground, then came to a shaded ravine that was awash with bright-green ferns. Hawley stopped for a moment, knee-deep in those ladders of leaves. The ferns were thick and lush and Hawley was flooded with the same sense of anticipation he had had on the water, when he was looking for the whale. Then Jove called his name and he gripped the rifle and continued on through the trees.
Twenty-nine years old and Hawley still carried the feeling he was not where he was supposed to be. He had spent the last years drinking and moving from place to place, having one-night stands, working retrievals like this, pulling the occasional robbery, playing cards whenever he could find a game and losing, losing, losing. The bad luck had gone on so long now he felt marked, like a smudge had been left on his forehead. He kept expecting something to happen, some outside force to sweep in and change everything and take him in some new direction, give him a more normal life. But instead it had been years of loneliness, and now here he was again with Jove.
Talbot’s place was set in a clearing at the top of the ridge, overlooking the water. The view was spectacular compared to the house, which was not much more than an old beach shack. The boards were worn white by the weather and the front steps sagged as if soaked through with water. There was a crumbling chimney releasing a thin cloud of smoke. Parked beside it was a cherry-red monster pickup, high off the ground, with double tir
es and a cabin big enough for six.
A woman opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. She was in her fifties, with high cheekbones and thick gray hair that curled around her face. She was wearing men’s clothes, a flannel shirt over a tank top and a beaded Indian belt holding up a pair of jeans. Right away Hawley saw there was something wrong with her eyes. The left was all milked over and wandering, while the right was the color of violets and stared straight and clear and curious.
“You Talbot’s wife?” Jove asked.
The woman nodded. “He’s out fishing,” she said, and then she noticed their guns. Her mouth had been a little bit open as she spoke and now it closed up tight. She moved into the house and tried to slam the door, but Hawley got there before she did and jammed it back. The edge of the wood bashed her nose and she stumbled and blood ran down across her lips and chin.
“Ed King sent us,” Jove said. “You know who Ed King is?”
She stayed bent over, pressing the sleeve of her shirt against her face. She nodded.
“Talbot disappointed him.”
“He disappoints me, too,” she mumbled.
“I guess he’s not a very good husband, then,” said Jove, and he stepped past her into the house.
The woman raised her head. Her milky eye twitched nervously over to Hawley, who was still gripping the door. She shuffled out of the way and let him pass.
Inside he felt like a giant in a doll’s house. The place was only one floor, the ceilings low and the furniture close to the ground. There was a fireplace with a fire going in it, a pile of wood in a basket, a worn-out sofa and two chairs, a rolltop desk and a card table in the corner.
“You know what we’re here for,” said Jove. “Why don’t you get it for us, and there won’t be any more trouble.”
Talbot’s wife didn’t answer. She kept her sleeve pressed to her nose. She walked past both the men and their guns and into the kitchen, which was just off the living room, opened the freezer and took out a bag of peas and leaned her face into it. With her other hand she picked up a teakettle. She filled it with water from the sink and then she set it on the stove and lit the burner. Her nose was already swelling up, blood smeared across her chin. “He’ll be home soon. You can ask him where it is.”