The Salt House

by Lisa Duffy

  I sat on the floor and looked at the closet, and suddenly there was no air in the room. I closed my eyes and tried to envision the moment the wind lifted her ashes. I tried to fight against the suffocating feeling, tried not to think about how she was gone and all that was left were memories and ashes and I didn’t know how to live with either of them.

  A minute passed. I opened my eyes and listened to the sound of my mother’s singing trickling through the vent. I pictured a ten-year-old girl with an awful stutter in a beautiful costume hopping from foot to foot, singing her heart out on one of the largest stages in three counties. And note by note, my breath returned to my body.

   8

  Kat

  My sister’s ashes were in a box in Mom’s bedroom closet, hidden behind boots she used to wear out to dinner with Dad.

  The boots were leather with high heels, and when she wore them, Dad always said something like Holy Smokes, or Shazaam!, and looked at her in a way that made me giggle, with his eyes crossed and tongue hanging out.

  Last night I’d heard Dad say to Mom that now that Grandma was leaving, they should spread Maddie’s ashes. I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom outside their room, and I heard him say it in a careful way.

  “She’s been in your closet for over a year,” he said, and then my Mom said she wasn’t ready. And I’d made a face at myself in the mirror because how can you not be ready for something after a whole year?

  I never knew why sometimes I’d find Mom standing in the doorway of the closet, staring into the dark inside with her face tilted up and eyes closed like she was praying to the shoes. She looked like she wanted to step right in and disappear. She’d catch me watching her from the hallway, and say, “Go play, Kat,” in a whispery voice that made me want to do anything but play.

  I hadn’t slept at all last night, waiting to sneak into the closet and see what Dad was talking about. But now with the closet full of wild things, I wasn’t so sure.

  From where I was standing down below, the boots sat under a cover of dust, just the round toes poking out from the lip of the shelf, like two ugly mushrooms growing there in the dark.

  Mom had gone upstairs to visit with Grandma, and from the alarm clock next to the bed, she’d been gone three minutes. I figured I had another fifteen before she came looking for me. Twenty if Grandma started telling stories about the ladies at her old-age place and what she called their ninny pattering. They’d go on forever about that.

  The two open windows on the far side of the room were full of light when I’d dragged the chair over and climbed on the wooden seat. But now, in the shadow of the open closet, a dead smell came out at me, and those two mushrooms got bigger each second. Reaching down for me, it seemed. A breeze came through, and the belt hanging on a hook next to me twisted, like a snake hanging off a limb, sending me hurrying back to the doorway.

  This was stupid, wasting time like this. Mom had left me with strict instructions to get dressed.

  I heard footsteps upstairs and froze. The chairs scraping against the floor above me sounding like they were sitting down for breakfast in the bedroom with me.

  I didn’t know why Grandma visited so much from her other house in Florida. It had a pool and shuffleboard outside her front door. Upstairs there was hardly any room. Just a bedroom with an old bed covered in a white blanket with all these little round pom-poms hanging off the edges of it, and a kitchen that reminded me of the one on Dad’s boat.

  In the living room, there was the most uncomfortable couch there ever was, with awful clear plastic covering it. It made me sweat just thinking about sitting on that couch on a hot day, the way the skin on the back of my legs would peel off the plastic inch by inch, just like a caterpillar’s legs pulling off the tree down back, long strips of skin clinging to the bark until they finally popped off.

  I took a deep breath, two giant steps, and climbed back on the chair. I stood on my tiptoes to reach the box and shut my eyes tight when the back of my wrist touched the mushroom boot, expecting it to be slimy and wet, but it was fuzzy and warm. There was a blanket covering the box, and I unwrapped it, and put the blanket back on the shelf, fluffing it to make it look like there was something inside of it. The box was light, and I was careful not to drop it when I jumped off the chair. I put the room back the way it was just in case Mom came down—the chair back in its place between the windows and the closet door shut tight.

  In the bathroom, I locked the door and set the box with my sister in it on the bathroom counter. Now that I had her here, I wasn’t sure what to do with her.

  Nobody ever said anything to me about why she wasn’t buried in a graveyard, like the one in the next town over where Grandpa was buried. Grandma just sat me and Jess down once, a few days after Maddie died, on the awful couch upstairs, and used some big word that meant that Maddie would go to heaven and her body would go back to dust. She said we could sprinkle this dust in Maddie’s favorite place.

  I told Grandma that was weird because Maddie’s favorite place was our cat, Orange Kitty’s, water bowl. She loved to crawl over and slap at the water until it went all over the kitchen floor. Mom finally got fed up and put the water bowl on the counter, but that was only until Orange Kitty’s fur got in Dad’s coffee.

  Grandma had taken off her glasses after I told her all of this and squeezed the little dents on the side of her nose. Jess had swiped at me with her hand and told me to hush up and just listen. But Grandma didn’t say anything more. She just asked if we had any other questions, and even though I did, I didn’t want Jess any madder at me than she already was. So I just shrugged, and then Grandma took us to the kitchen for ice cream.

  We never talked about Maddie’s dust again. Not because I didn’t ask. Even Jess, who used to tell me everything, clammed up tight every time I brought it up. And Dad wasn’t much of a talker to start with. Whenever I asked him to explain anything, he’d just tell me to ask Mom; she could explain these things better than him.

  But that wasn’t true either, because Mom just got tears in her eyes, and very quiet, and then Jess would yank me aside and whisper at me to stop it. You’re upsetting her, is what she’d hiss at me.

  The last time I’d asked Mom where Maddie was, she pulled me tight against her, my face pressed into her side, and said she was right there, and always would be, her finger pointing to somewhere around the area of my chest. I’d looked down at my shirt when she said this, as much as I could with her holding me as tight as she was.

  “Here?” I asked her, to double-check, because the only thing I saw was a chocolate ice cream stain, and that didn’t look anything like Maddie.

  But she just said, “Of course. Can’t you feel her, Kat? Because I can. I feel her.”

  And then she started to cry with my face still smashed against her.

  I looked at the box sitting on the counter in front of me. I turned it around and upside down before I saw the small sticker on the bottom. It said: Unlock: Turn box upside down, listen for sound of metal peg dropping (shake if necessary). Keeping the box upside down, slide bottom panel toward side with sticker.

  I turned it over and over. No sound. I shook it. Nothing. I turned it and shook it at the same time. Still nothing. I was running out of time before Mom came looking for me, and I still had to get the box back in the closet.

  I turned it upside down and ran my fingers along the edges, settling on the two creases on one edge where it looked like the bottom panel might slide out. They were narrow slots, too small for even a fingernail. The dental floss container sat on the counter next to my toothbrush, and I pulled a length out long enough for me to slide it between the two cracks. I gathered the two ends in one hand and held the box with the other, and gave a sharp tug. The panel pulled loose, and a strip of white plastic sat inside. The rest of the panel slid off easily, and I saw the back was just like my sea life jigsaw puzzle, set in tracks that I couldn’t see until it was a little bit open.

  I took the package out. It was just a
big Ziploc bag, like the bags Mom used for my sandwich in my lunchbox. I put it on the counter and stared at it. I could see a straight line the color of a shadow where the ashes ended and air filled the rest of the bag.

  I wanted to feel something looking at it. But there was nothing about it that reminded me of Maddie. It looked like fireplace ashes. Not like the ones that sat in the bottom of our woodstove, all black with chunks of wood mixed in. But the light gray kind. The kind of ash that came from the hottest fire there ever was.

  Maybe if I touched it, something would happen. Maybe my finger would tingle, or a shock would pass through me. I wanted something to happen. Anything. It opened easily, and some ash blew at me. I closed my eyes, lifted my head like Mom did when she prayed to Maddie in the closet, and pushed my finger deep into the pile, all the way up to the knuckle. I waited, swirled my finger around and waited some more.

  My stomach growled, and the drip from the faucet made me want to pee, and my arm burned from being in the air the way it was. And that was it. Maddie wasn’t here at all. It was just a pile of ashes.

  This is what my parents were fighting about? Spreading these? I took my hand out, and stared at the ash on my finger. I looked at the toilet, the water at the bottom of the bowl. If mom couldn’t do it, I could. It’d be one less thing for them to argue about.

  I picked up the bag and stepped over to the toilet.

  Then I thought about what Grandma said about Maddie’s favorite place.

  From somewhere in the house, I heard a door shut.

  I froze, waited, in the back of my mind Mom’s voice telling me I better be ready when she came down.

  I went back to the counter, wiped my finger on my pajamas and closed the bag, rolled it tight like it had been and put the box back together. I couldn’t hear anyone walking in the house, even with my ear pressed to the door.

  The house was still empty. I went to my room and put the box in my bottom drawer, way in back, rolled up in my long underwear and tucked under my snow pants, where Mom wouldn’t look. At least not before I got them out of the house.

  I was standing in front of my bureau when Mom walked in.

  “You’re moving slow today, Kat,” she said. “I told you to get dressed twenty minutes ago. Let’s get going. You have camp.”

  Her eyes passed over my shirt, and then she motioned to the bureau. “Come on, no more standing around.”

  She left the room, and I grabbed some shorts and a T-shirt out of the drawer.

  It wasn’t until I took off my pajama shirt that I noticed the gray blob where I’d wiped Maddie’s ashes in my rush to put the box back together.

  I pictured Mom’s blank look when she’d looked at me.

  Even she didn’t know what she was talking about. Here was Maddie, on my shirt, just like she said she would be, and she didn’t feel a thing and neither did I.

  I threw the shirt across my room, where it rolled under my bed.

   9

  Jack

  I overslept and left the house at six in the morning. It was later than I wanted when I motored out to our float, our buying station filled with tanks and freezers behind it.

  The building had been falling down when Boon and I bought it when we were first starting out. But we both knew our way around a hammer, and after a few months, chipping away at replacing the floor joists and hanging new drywall, the warehouse started to take shape.

  Neither of us took a day off those first years. There was the fishing, the buying, and the selling to get done. And once the shipping business got going, we had to fill orders. Before we knew it, we had a handful of local guys on our payroll.

  And the not-so-local guys, like Manny, who was waiting for me on the float now, a yellow bandanna covering the top half of his dreadlocks.

  I put the engine in neutral and let the tide inch me until the boat edged against the wooden dock.

  Manny reached out, grabbed the line, and tied it off on the cleat. After the boat was secure, I walked to where he was standing and swung a leg over the side.

  “Where you been hidin’?” Manny asked me, his accent thick, a sign that he’d been on the phone with someone back in Jamaica since I’d seen him yesterday.

  “It’s been too long,” I said, stepping onto the gangplank. I walked past him to the stairs leading to the warehouse.

  We had a similar exchange every day, just different words. I gave him the finger and he chuckled, his teeth a flash of white in the fog.

  Manny had been our bait guy for so long, I sometimes forgot he’d planned to go back to Jamaica when we’d first met him.

  He’d been at the Wharf Rat, sitting at the bar in shorts and a pair of flip-flops, even though it was March, and the air was still cold, snow on the ground. He’d told us his girlfriend had lured him to Maine with her blond hair and blue eyes and dumped him, and now he was heartbroken and broke and looking for work, just enough so he could get home.

  Boon had asked him what kind of work he was looking for, and Manny looked at him sideways.

  “The kind that pays, mon,” he’d said, moving his head to the music playing in the background, his dreadlocks bouncing off his shoulders.

  We’d hired him, and he’d borrowed an air mattress and a small fridge from Boon and an old camp stove from me and moved into the room above the buying station, making sure the alarm clock he’d bought at the hardware store was loud enough to wake him at three every morning, when he was supposed to meet our bait guy. As far as I knew, more years later than I had fingers to count, he’d never kept the bait guy waiting.

  I closed the door to the warehouse behind me now, the bottle of water I’d gone in for tucked in my back pocket. Manny was stacking traps on one corner of the float, reggae music coming from the old radio he kept lashed to the rail.

  He’d loaded the bait on the boat already, the bin of herring a flash of silver in the dawn. When he saw me, he said something that came out in a jumble of sounds and words.

  “Is that Jamaican for I quit?” I asked.

  I knew it was patois. He’d slip into the language now and again. He hated when I called it Jamaican.

  “It’s patois for you’d be in sorry shape without me. When I quit, I tell you in plain English.”

  “How’s the crew back home?” I asked.

  “You know, everybody missin’ Manny. Not enough to go ’round.” His laugh tumbled out in smooth waves.

  “Too bad you’re not as popular here.” I stepped on the boat and heard his voice from behind me.

  “You lucky I’m here. And the ladies lucky too. None of you locals got what I got. Listen,” he shouted, leaning over the railing toward me. “I’m a black marlin swimmin’ in a sea of flounder. You get what I’m sayin’?”

  I turned the engine, noise filling the air, put her in reverse, and saw his lips moving as he threw me the line.

  “Don’t wait up,” I yelled out. He blew me a kiss, covered his mouth with the back of his hand as if he couldn’t contain the emotion.

  I put her in gear and headed out to the trawl I was hauling. There was a handful of us that fished all year, moving our traps offshore when the water was colder and inshore when spring came, following the lobsters looking for warmer water.

  I motored out, cutting across the channel and heading north, the tops of my buoys barely visible in the distance.

  Ten minutes later, I pulled up alongside the first buoy and squinted, thinking my eyes were playing tricks on me. On top of my traps were buoys I didn’t recognize. I throttled over, gaffed the line, and pulled it to the rail.

  The buoy was purple. A single thick stripe around the center.

  In the summer, new buoys always appeared in the water, but they were recreational licenses, with one or two traps in the shallows off the coves where someone might catch a handful of lobsters if they were lucky. But summer folks were usually smart enough to stay far clear of the territories of working lobstermen. Those who weren’t smart enough lost their gear, cut loose to tumble
on the bottom. Although, there were other methods as well.

  The Frazier brothers had a chainsaw stashed on their boat for when they found a trap too close to their own. It was a sport for them, slicing the traps in half and throwing them back in the water.

  Hank Bitts, nicknamed Bitty even though he was the size of a linebacker, was the most reasonable in the group, with his miniature beanbag lobsters he stocked up on at the dollar store. He’d give them out to kids at the lobster festival, but they had another purpose on the water. He’d stuff a couple of them in a trap he found too close to his own, but not before he mutilated them, leaving holes where the eyes should have been or cutting off a claw, or disemboweling it, as if to warn whomever found it in the trap that next time, it might be him that got mangled.

  I’d never destroyed gear before. The way I saw it, you’d spin your wheels and start a war if you weren’t careful. People got shot, boats got sunk, sometimes nobody knew who started it, or over what, but by that time, it was its own thing and it didn’t matter.

  But these were Finn’s.

  He’d warned me, after all. As much as told me he was going to mess with my territory. I knew all the colors that fished out of this harbor and these weren’t ones I’d ever seen.

  And I was going to cut them. That much I knew.

  The tightness in my chest was back, not exactly pain, but a heaviness that made it hard to breathe. A heat spread up my neck, a ringing in my ears now. I blinked, swallowed, resisting the urge to slice my knife through the line, smash the buoy on the deck until it came apart in chunks. I had hours of work to do, and traps tumbling on the bottom into my own was not what I needed.

  I let the buoy go, watched it drop back in the water, wobble, and right itself.