by Erica Boyce
* * *
The phone rang just as she was sliding the scallops onto her plate. She wedged the receiver between her ear and her shoulder and scanned her fridge for something to eat them with. Nothing but a weeks-old bag of spinach, the leaves gone dark and slimy.
“Jess? It’s Larry. Larry Mayfield, attorney.” He sounded harried.
“I know who you are, Larry. We were in the same class at DP High.” She closed the door on the spinach. She’d deal with that later.
“Right. Right.” He paused. “Listen, it’s about John Staybrook’s will.”
Her hand flew to her stomach. “But the Coast Guard’s still looking for him,” she said feebly, though she knew better than anyone they weren’t going to find anything good.
“I know.” He sighed heavily. “And it’s highly unethical for me to tell you anything until he’s been declared deceased. But my useless intern called John’s wife up prematurely and divulged some things he shouldn’t have. You hear that, Charlie?” he yelled, not bothering to cover the receiver. “If you weren’t already unpaid, I would dock your check for this!”
She didn’t laugh.
“In any event,” he continued, “there are some details I should tell you about before his wife comes after you with a pitchfork.”
“Okay,” she said. On autopilot, she picked up her plate and sat down at the card table where she ate all her meals. It had been her mother’s. She’d insisted Jess take it when they moved down to Florida.
Larry waited for more. When it was clear there was nothing coming, he started again. “Well. Okay. So. His boat. The Diane and, uh…”
“Diane & Ella.”
“Right. That. He left it to you.”
She swallowed, hard. “No, he didn’t.”
“I assure you, he did. Highly unusual in my practice,” he mused as if it were a logic puzzle for him to solve. “Ordinarily, the boat goes to the widow.”
It always went to the widow. She was to sell it and put the proceeds toward their kids’ college funds or toward getting the hell out of town. Fear rose in Jess’s gullet.
“He came in a few months back asking to change it, though. Said you’d earned it, fair and square, working for him for so long. And also, he left the fishing permits to Diane.”
Jess closed her eyes. Without a permit, the boat was useless, nothing more than a pleasure craft. She couldn’t so much as cast for a single striped bass from its deck.
“That’s everything, then,” he said. “That’s all I can tell you. And actually”—he lowered his voice—“I could get disbarred for even telling you that much, so keep it to yourself, would you?”
“Sure,” she said, then, “Yup.”
“Excellent. Much obliged,” he said, suddenly chipper. “Just thought I’d give you a heads-up. I respect you and what you’re doing, really. You know how Diane can be. I didn’t want to see you get blindsided by it all. Have a great day now!”
Her hand fell to the table with the phone in it. She stared at it for a second. She forced herself to eat a scallop, but it had cooled to room temperature, and she couldn’t taste anything.
She dropped her fork. “Dammit, John,” she muttered.
* * *
For years and years, there’d been a sort of uneasy acceptance between Jess and Diane. Every December, the Staybrooks invited her to their Christmas party. “We’ve gotta include Jess,” she imagined John telling his wife. “She doesn’t have anybody else in town anymore.” And every year, she went, because she didn’t have anybody else. She hugged Diane hello (really, the only physical contact they ever had) and usually wound up in the playroom with Ella and Lacey, sitting on the floor in her only skirt while Ella constructed elaborate games and fairy tales for Lacey to act out. Without fail, Diane would appear in the doorway at some point in the night.
“Everything okay in here?” she would say. She held a wineglass in her hand, its rim clouded with lipstick.
“Yeahhh,” Ella intoned while Lacey smiled up at Diane and nodded.
“Well. That’s good.” Diane lingered in the doorway for a few more seconds. Inevitably, this was when Jess looked down and realized she’d missed a spot when shaving her legs.
“I’ll just be upstairs if you need me. Okay, Ella?” Diane said. Ella didn’t respond, and Diane tapped her fingers on the doorway and turned to leave.
It was always that way between them, every time a wary kind of circling that left Jess wondering if she’d even been walking in the right direction. And always John in the middle, amiable John, trying to pull these two women closer together.
Even after his death, still trying. Diane could conceivably lease the permit to someone else in town and sever ties with Jess completely. But at one of those Christmas parties—toward the end, when she’d had a few glasses of wine—she had pulled Jess aside and murmured, “Thanks for helping John out with his taxes this year. I know I should be managing it, like all the other fishing wives, but I don’t want anything to do with it, to be honest.” She burped delicately.
Jess had stuttered. She wasn’t sure what to do with this secret, which, after all, wasn’t much of a secret; everyone in town had already discussed the fact that Diane hardly ever put in an appearance on the docks. She wasn’t sure what Diane wanted her to do with it. She forced a smile and said, “No problem. Happy to help.”
No, Diane wouldn’t want to get involved in the business of leasing or selling the permit to someone else. Jess jammed a few scallops in her mouth and tossed the rest in the trash. The simplest thing would be for her to lease it to the person who’d already been fishing it: Jess. Of course, the right thing to do would be to give the boat back to Diane. For just a moment, Jess tried to think of where she could get two hundred, three hundred grand to buy another one. Impossible. This might be her only chance.
So they were tied together, Diane with the permit and Jess with the boat. Somewhere, John was mighty pleased with himself. Jess chuckled at the thought, then sighed, and then, for the first time since she’d returned to shore the night before, she allowed herself to cry.
* * *
Diane was doing nothing in particular when the doorbell rang. There were so many things she should be doing, she knew. Calling the Coast Guard to make sure they knew how important it was to find her husband. Speaking to the principal at Ella’s school to discuss how they were going to handle her sorrow. Getting in touch with her office to explain the cursory email she’d sent late last night saying she wouldn’t be in this week. She was almost grateful for the doorbell, for the small, contained task it afforded her: open door, accept casserole, smile. Say something brief and profound about John and the kind of life he’d chosen.
When she opened the door, Jess was standing there, red-eyed and disheveled. And was it her imagination, or was the woman swaying a little bit on her feet?
“Diane,” she said. “Can we talk?”
Diane glanced back, looking for evidence of the many other things she had to spend her time on today. There was nothing. She stepped back to let Jess in. Yes, she definitely stumbled a little as she walked toward the kitchen. When Jess pulled out one of the stools, its feet skidded across the floor. Diane winced.
“I just wanted to say again how sorry I am,” Jess began. “He was such a good man, and I can’t imagine—” She folded her arms and tucked her chin to her chest.
Diane realized she was still standing in the kitchen doorway, and she walked to the counter calmly, deliberately, giving herself a moment to rearrange her features. How dare this woman come into her home and spill her grief onto the kitchen floor? How dare she express herself so freely? How dare she lay claim to John in this way?
When Jess looked up, Diane had balled her hands into fists. “I got a call from Larry Mayfield,” Jess said. That incompetent lawyer. “I was gonna wait for you to bring it up. But, well, I’m really sorry, Dian
e. John shouldn’t have done that.”
Diane walked over to the other side of the counter and steadied herself against it. Jess watched her like she was a shark. “Sorry?” Diane said. “Why are you sorry? You got what you wanted, didn’t you?” She immediately regretted it. The words felt hot and unruly as they left her mouth.
Jess bowed her head again. Her short, cropped hair fell over her forehead.
Anger gripped Diane by the shoulders anew. Jess’s relationship with John was always so uncomplicated. He asked her to do things, and she did them, and then John would admire her work ethic, her drive. And all the while, Diane was onshore, sitting at her computer or making meatballs with macaroni just the way their daughter liked, wondering when John would be coming home that night. Wondering how many hours of shitty TV reruns she’d have to watch until the door opened and she could finally fall asleep.
It was all so lucky for Jess. Once again, it crossed Diane’s mind that it wasn’t a mistake. Perhaps John had been on that boat with Jess, and she’d—what? Pushed him over? It seemed absurd, but Ella was right. Going out on your own in a tuna boat was a reckless thing to do. Her husband was not a reckless man.
She went on. “Must be nice for you, having a business fall in your lap like this. Must’ve been waiting for that, all those years of working away for him.” She knew that was why Jess had come: to talk about the permit. She stepped the heel of one foot onto the toes of the other and ground down until the pain shot up her leg, clean and gratifying. “But if you think I’m going to lease you that permit to go with it, you’re sorely mistaken.”
Jess finally met her eye. “I understand,” Jess said.
Diane wanted to scream. She shouldn’t understand. She should fight back and yell and throw their nice pepper grinder at the wall.
Instead, Jess stood up and said, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.” And she walked out the door.
Diane watched her from the kitchen window as she headed down the sidewalk, her hands tucked up into her sweatshirt sleeves. Diane noticed for the first time that there were slippers on Jess’s feet.
She reached for her phone and pulled up Maureen’s number. She needed someone to tell her that her anger was justified and she’d done the right thing. Maureen was good at that. She let Diane say even what was unspeakable and convinced her that there was at least one person who understood. She was on Diane’s side. By the end of their conversations, Diane was always laughing.
The phone rang only once before Diane came to her senses and hung up. She couldn’t lean on Maureen. Not now. Not ever. Diane had burned that bridge—and with good reason, she told herself.
If John were here, he would touch her shoulder in that way he had whenever she said something he knew she’d regret, too bitter or mean. Sometimes, she hated it and would walk away to do the dishes or check her email, playing the conversation over and over in her head, imagining all the ways it could have gone differently. But sometimes, she turned into his arms, and he’d rest his chin on her head and say, “It’s okay. You just care so much you get carried away sometimes.” And she would nod into his chest, yes, yes, wanting so badly to believe him.
That wasn’t right, though. She’d crossed a line with Jess, and he would’ve wiped his mouth and left the room without looking at her. This was Jess, after all. He reminded her year after year that Jess was family and deserved to be invited to parties and dinners on top of the hours the woman already spent with John every day.
“Remember,” he’d said to her the year before, “you have her to thank for every night I come home safe.”
Diane had looked up from the Christmas card list she’d been annotating. “Don’t I know it,” she said flatly. He shrugged and continued on to the living room, knocking his fist against the lintel as he went. There was a graying spot in the paint where his hand always hit that no amount of scrubbing would remove.
He would never forgive her for this.
Chapter Thirteen
Lacey checked the clock on her mom’s van for the twelfth time. Ella got out of school in two hours. It was thirty minutes to the clinic, thirty minutes back. Kind of like a math problem. Exactly how screwed is Lacey?
“You take your Suboxone this morning?” Maureen asked, even though Lacey knew she’d been watching from the dining room table when she did.
“Yup.” Those individually wrapped orange strips that she had to stick inside her cheek every morning coated her tongue with a cough-syrupy taste. It was supposed to curb her cravings by binding to the same receptors in her brain that were built just for the pills. Maureen stored them in a drawer in the kitchen, next to a tin of Altoids. Her mom had read peppermint helped fight the flavor, so when the Suboxone was all dissolved, Lacey followed it, dutifully, with a mint chaser. It made her mouth ache.
“Is that all working for you?” Maureen motioned vaguely at the windshield.
“Sure. I guess.” Lacey leaned toward the window and closed her eyes. Lately, she’d been waking up in the middle of the night. She’d been dreaming of pills, of a flame under foil.
“Great! Maybe you could talk to Ms. Bray about lowering your dose?”
“Yeah, maybe.” She wanted to say more and make Maureen laugh the way she once would’ve. The beetle told her she had to. But after the morning with Ella, she didn’t have the energy.
Lacey had just dozed off when they got to the clinic. “We’re here,” Maureen said, one uncertain hand on her shoulder. “I’ll be waiting for you when you get out,” she said while Lacey squinted out at the sky.
“Okay. Thanks, Mom,” she said.
* * *
When the D.A.R.E. program came to her sixth grade classroom, a wave of snickers passed around her as the cop stood at the front of the room with his arms crossed and started talking about good decision-making. It was Officer MacArthur, and everyone knew he had just been busted for public urination in the next town over. The boys in the back of the class made a psst noise meant to approximate the sound of pee hitting the side of the building. Officer MacArthur reddened and ran his forefinger and thumb over his mustache.
He decided to pull out the big guns. He reached into the cardboard box behind him and, one by one, laid baggie after baggie on the table in precise, right-angled lines. When he was finished, he pressed his fists into the table and glared out at the class.
“These were all confiscated in drug busts this year. I want you to know what to look out for and avoid”—he narrowed his stare at the back row—“now that you’re in middle school. Come on. Get a closer look.”
Chairs squealed across linoleum as everyone wandered to the table. They watched, awestruck, as Officer MacArthur pointed one meaty finger at each bag and identified it. Cocaine. Oxy. Heroin. Meth. When he pointed to a bag of blunts, one boy crowed, “Hey, Skinner, you know what those are!” This time, all Officer MacArthur had to do was glance up, and the giggles ground to a halt.
Dread burned quietly in Lacey’s stomach. She had heard about drugs before, of course; she’d taken fervent notes during the D.A.R.E. classes in the two prior years. When her mom came home from a parent presentation at the beginning of the school year, she sat Lacey down and solemnly asked her to promise that, if she needed a ride home from a party, she would call her. “I won’t ask any questions, I swear,” Maureen had said. “I just want you to be safe. And not get a DUI.”
Lacey stared at her, bewildered. She wouldn’t even have a learners’ permit for another four years.
This was the first time she’d actually seen drugs herself, in person. Her fingers twitched, and she crossed her arms tightly, jamming her hands between her ribs and her biceps as if they might otherwise reach out and grab something. The beetle’s wings clicked. They looked so innocent and boring, the white powders and pills.
Officer MacArthur scanned the crowd of transfixed twelve-year-olds and cleared his throat uneasily. �
�Well, you get the point,” he said and started gathering the baggies up again. “That’s enough for today.”
She saw the substances only a handful of times after that. There were Solo cups and dubious bowls of punch at every house party, of course, and she drank it wincingly once or twice, but for the most part, she clutched her water bottle and tried to ignore the beetle telling her everybody thought she was a loser. Other than that, there was a pack of kids who hung out at the end of the school driveway every day, just outside the school property line. “Druggies,” her friend Amanda would mutter as they passed, coughing delicately at the cloud of pot smoke. Not once did the kids even acknowledge their presence, much less leap out into their path and offer them free smokes, as Officer MacArthur had implied they would.
Her senior spring, she was up at bat during softball practice. She relished her turns at bat and the way the rubber grip felt between her palms, how it turned her hands raw and red after a particularly long session. She liked to imagine the ball as the beetle, and when she got a clean hit to the sweet spot, it went soaring high and away, and she felt so clear.
This time, though, when she twisted with the bat and grinned as the ball flew toward the woods, she heard a small and quiet pop. And her knee seemed to forget how to hold up her body. She laughed along with her teammates and pushed herself back up from the dirt, but the minute she tried to take a step, she fell again.
Coach Johnson was there in an instant. “You okay, Carson?” The whistle around her neck dangled in Lacey’s face.
“It’s my knee,” Lacey said, cradling the kneecap between her hands.
“Shit.” Coach Johnson stood. “Can one of you girls call her mom?”
The doctor said she’d torn her ACL. By that time, her knee had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. “I’m recommending a couple days of Percocet for the pain and six weeks of physical therapy,” he said, pointing to the X-ray.
“Um,” Lacey said. “Sorry. Is there any way I could do something other than Percocet?”