The Salt House

by Lisa Duffy

  Away from Jack too.

  And now he was sick from working all those hours on the water. Hours he worked so he didn’t have to be home, fighting with me about spreading the ashes, or selling the Salt House, or arguing over the contents of the bank statements on my desk. Statements that I refused to open, as if by ignoring them, I could pretend they didn’t say we were out of money. Pretend they didn’t say, See. Look what you did.

  I swallowed, steadying myself against the urge to grab the ashes, put them back in the box, bring them home, and wrap them in the blanket again.

  I hadn’t been prepared to do this today. Not in a million years could I have imagined this moment, how it would unfold. I thought of the last time I’d talked about spreading her ashes, my mother’s words. Sometimes in life what you think is going to happen is nothing like what actually happens.

  I hadn’t believed her. I’d been afraid of this moment, afraid of everything I would feel, afraid of everything I had lost.

  But that fear had robbed us. Robbed us of talking about her, of sharing our memories of her.

  My daughters were waiting. There was no turning back from this moment. The last year had been leading up to this. Somehow we’d managed to survive losing her, each of us in our own way.

  But now we had to figure out how to live without her. Together.

  With the ashes pressed against my chest, and the cold Atlantic rising, and my daughters surrounding me, I thought of the letters Josie had given me from our readers. Every one of them telling me: you are not alone.

  I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. The sun was radiant, the light off the surface sparkling the water, blinding me.

  I blinked the girls into focus. The water was now waist deep on Kat. I held out my hand to her and she took it. I looked at Jess, not speaking, but she saw my face, and nodded, as if agreeing.

  We waded through the surf to the beach. Kat put the backpack on the sand and gently placed the box on top of it. When she turned to me, I held the bag of ashes out to her.

  “You’re right,” I said. “She doesn’t belong in my closet. And this was her favorite place. So let’s spread them together. Just a little, though. Because I think the next time we should be together as a family. Okay?”

  Kat reached out slowly, and took the bag, then paused, holding it in midair. “We can save some for Daddy,” Kat said. “And for Grandma. There’s a whole bag, you know.” She held it up, offering proof.

  Kat put the bag on the sand, and one by one, we reached in and took out a handful of ashes. Then we stood side by side, our toes at the edge of the ocean, the water in front of us shimmering under the bright sun.

  “Ready?” Kat yelled. I heard Jess call back that she was.

  I looked down at my hand, my fist full of ashes. Tears blurred my vision. But my mouth opened and the air filled my lungs, and I was calling the girls to me, finding my voice, yelling that I was ready.

  We formed a circle, the shallow water under our feet clear and calm.

  We held our hands out, opened them, and the ashes stirred, but our bodies blocked the wind, a cocoon shielding what was left, protecting the perfect circles of ash in the center of our palms.

  We turned and faced the water. A moment later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw arms swing and ashes billowed out before us.

  The sky in front of us was awash with a film of silvery white, sparkling and luminous above the sunlit ocean. Gusts of ocean air, salty and thick, grabbed hold of the opaque cloud, and suddenly it was alive and swirling. A life of its own, rising and falling with each tug of the wind. I felt my daughters lean against me, one on each side, their arms circling around me, our faces turned to the sky.

  “Bye, Maddie,” Kat whispered, waving her small hand.

  A quiet good-bye as the last of her ashes scattered soundlessly in the gasps of salted air.

   21

  Jack

  Monday started out bad and got worse. I was soaked through when I woke up, feeling like I hadn’t slept in days, even though I could count on one hand the hours I’d been awake since Saturday. Awake wasn’t even the right word. Alive was more like it. Breathing. Existing in a state of fever and delirium and pain.

  I’d slept through Sunday. Or most of it. When I was awake, I was convincing Hope it was just the flu. She’d made soup, and I’d had a few sips of it, my appetite gone. It was raining outside, and Kat was watching TV. She asked me to sit next to her on the couch. I must have fallen asleep again, because then it was dinnertime and Hope was pushing more soup at me.

  Later in bed, Hope was talking about the Salt House, but my eyes wouldn’t stay open. My head roaring as if a train was running through it again. And then suddenly the clock read six in the morning.

  I got out of bed quietly, trying not to wake Hope. It was still raining out, but I had traps to pull. They’d sat Saturday as it was. I got my stuff together and left before Hope woke up. I had to stop in the shop to get some bait I’d put in the freezer and was surprised to see Boon’s truck in his parking space outside the shop.

  I was more surprised to see him sitting behind the counter, straight-backed, a cup of coffee in front of him. He didn’t get up from his seat when I came in, just looked at me, as if he’d been watching for me in the parking lot.

  “You look like you’re waiting for a kid who’s blown his curfew,” I said.

  “What I’m waiting for is a guy who should be home in bed.”

  “What?” I asked, walking past him to the freezer.

  I opened the door, flicked the light switch, and walked into the cold air. The bait container was on the bottom shelf, and I knelt to grab it, my legs burning from the small motion. When I stood, Boon was in the doorway.

  “Hope called on Saturday. Said you were sick.”

  “It’s just a cold. Flu or something.”

  “She said you’d say that. She also said she knew you’d be here this morning even if you weren’t better. She asked me to speak to you.”

  “Well, consider me spoken to.” I popped the lid off the container to make sure I had the right one, and I heard him clear his throat.

  “Where were you on Friday night?”

  “Boon. I don’t have time for this. I’m dealing with enough shit as it is.”

  “So I hear,” he said, flat voiced.

  I pressed the lid back on the container, and a sharp pain shot up my arm from the split knuckle that I’d wrapped before I left the house.

  “What happened?” he asked, his eyes on the bandage.

  “I cut it.”

  “On what?”

  “I don’t know. The engine.”

  He waited as if he expected me to elaborate. When I didn’t, he massaged his temple with his finger. “I ran into Eddy when I got here on Saturday. He was asking for you. Said some weird shit was happening down by your boat Friday night.”

  I felt my jaw tighten when he said this, and tried to keep my face from showing it.

  “Said some girl with her shirt half off came running up the dock, right near your boat.” His voice was low, halting. I couldn’t tell if it was because it was early and he was still waking up or because he didn’t want to be having this conversation in the first place.

  I raised my hand to stop him. “Don’t worry about it. It was a misunderstanding.”

  He lifted his eyebrows at me. “Before he left, he went to your boat and there was blood on the deck. Not just a little. A pool of it.”

  The cold air of the freezer gave his voice an edge, even though he was speaking in a tone I’d heard him use with Kat or Jess when he was explaining something they didn’t understand. I pressed the palm of my hand into my eye socket, pushed against the heaviness that had settled in my head.

  “I said it was a misunderstanding.”

  “Well, help me understand the misunderstanding,” he said, his voice tight.

  “It’s the none-of-your-business type of misunderstanding.”

  Boon tossed the clipboard he was ho
lding on the shelf, and it skidded across the steel bars. He turned and kicked the door of the freezer so hard, it bounced off the wall. When he turned, his face was bright red.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he growled.

  I didn’t want to talk about the other night with Boon, for more reasons than I had fingers and toes. It was my problem, and it was my problem to fix.

  “Nothing you need to be involved in,” I told him.

  “Let me make that call. Your head’s up your ass lately.”

  He was quiet, waiting for me to speak. He stared at me for a long moment, then shook his head back and forth.

  “You think screwing another woman is going to help? Is that it?” he asked.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I looked down at my watch, frowning at the time.

  “A woman gets off your boat in the middle of the morning with her damn tits hanging out, and you want to tell me you’re playing Parcheesi with her?”

  He was in my face now, and I felt something rise up inside me, all the yelling and words from the other night swirling inside my head and making me dizzy. The fact that he thought I’d cheat on Hope hit me somewhere deep inside, somewhere I hadn’t expected. I wanted to slam him up against the shelves and make him eat his words. I wanted to beat the words back into his mouth, to smash the thought from his head that I was the kind of man who would cheat on his wife and kids.

  “Is that what you think? You think I was fooling around with the woman on my boat?”

  “No, I don’t,” he said quietly. “But now I have your attention. So talk to me about what’s going on.”

  “There’s nothing going on. How many different ways can I say it?”

  “You can say it six ways from Sunday, and I’m telling you don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I put the word out on Saturday that I was looking to find out what happened on your boat. And you know who called me? Keith Miller.” He waited for my reaction, tilted his head at me.

  “Keith said you two met out on the water a while ago, and he was worried because you didn’t seem good. He wouldn’t say how that went down, given that you work out of different harbors and neither of you are exactly friendly. Which tells me something right there,” he said accusingly.

  I kept my expression blank, trying to push that day out of my head. How I’d chased Keith’s boat and told him I was cutting Finn’s traps. I felt the back of my neck turn hot, embarrassed by the memory of it.

  “You know what else he said?” Boon continued. “He said you might be messing with Finn again. Did you know he’s back in town? That he’s got his boat in one of the slips? Did you know that?”

  I could tell from the way he asked that he knew the answer. I nodded, and he attempted a grin, but it just looked like he was baring his teeth at me.

  “Yeah. I thought you might.” He chuckled. A sweat broke out on his forehead, even though the air in the freezer was frigid.

  “So is he part of the nothing that’s going on here? The none-of-my-business type of misunderstanding?” He reached out and yanked my arm up, holding my bandaged hand in the air. “You cut your hand on the engine? Give me a fucking break. Go take a look at your boat. The blood’s gone, but the stain is still there. Unless that engine was running in the middle of your deck, and you walked in here cut up in ribbons, that blood didn’t come from this.”

  I pulled my arm from his grip. “I’m going to say it one more time, Boon. Leave it alone.” I couldn’t involve Boon in this. Cutting those traps had been my fight. My mistake. Not his.

  “You know, I may not be their real uncle.” His finger pointed to the door, gesturing I assumed to the picture of the girls in the hallway. “But you’re a fucking brother to me. You know what this year’s been like? Having to watch the people I call family fall into a million pieces and there’s nothing I can do about it?”

  I stepped away from him, the emotion in his voice making me uncomfortable. He looked as worn-out as I felt. For a moment I considered telling him what happened. But Boon knew too much, and his temper was unmanageable. I didn’t trust that he’d let me handle it. There was no way in hell that if Boon knew, he’d stay out of it. Not after the year he’d been through with us. And by cutting those traps, I’d put myself on the wrong side of Boon. It wasn’t who he was. It wasn’t even who I was. Or who I had been. Now he grabbed the clipboard off the shelf and shoved it against my chest so hard, I stumbled backward.

  “Eddy needs two dozen oysters. Leave them in the front case with the yellow copy of the slip.” He stomped away. “Maybe that half-naked woman will magically appear on my boat,” I heard him mumble before his office door slammed shut.

  By the time I got to the boat, it was late. I started the engine, my hand on the throttle, when I heard someone shout from the dock. I turned to see Gwen Arden walking toward me from the other side of the pier. I shut the engine and waited.

  Gwen had grown up a street away from me. We graduated the same year from Alden High School, and she was the owner of Arden Fisheries, one of our top competitors. She was a tall woman, with a face as pale as a scallop shell and a head full of carrot-colored hair. After graduation, Gwen moved west, worked as a ski instructor at one of the big resorts. When her father died, she came back and took over the family business. A rumor went round that a lobsterman from the next town over went to Gwen’s buying station a week after their tryst, and she’d sent him packing, said the lobsters were too small, not up to her standard, with a nod to his middle section.

  Gwen and I had ended up at the same table at a wedding of a mutual friend a few years back. Hope and Gwen had sat next to each other, chatting away. At some point, with the band playing loud and more than a few drinks in, Gwen had offered up that the rumor was true . . . and she’d made it known on purpose. Turns out she got tired of being hit on by every Tom, Dick, and Harry who sold to her.

  “Try being a single woman in this business,” she’d said. “I used to get harassed and ogled all the time. Now guys go out of their way to keep it professional unless they want to sell their catch somewhere else.”

  “Was it that bad?” Hope had asked.

  “Mostly the married ones, unfortunately. You landed one of the good ones here,” she said, jabbing her thumb at me.

  I stayed out of the conversation, but I heard what she was saying. I’d worked in this business my whole life, been down on the docks since I was a boy. I tuned it out now, didn’t even hear it anymore. But now and then, over the radio, a guy would go too far, and I’d bark out to take it somewhere else. I had my own girls at home. I had a new respect for Gwen after that night. It was a tough business, and she’d found a way to hold her own.

  Now Gwen reached the boat and walked over to the gunwale to where I stood.

  “I’m glad I caught you. Thanks for waiting,” she said.

  “What’s up?” I asked, hearing the impatience in my voice. I wanted to get out on the water. I had a bunch of traps to pull.

  “Maybe nothing, but I wanted to give you and Boon a heads-up.” She looked behind her and lowered her voice. “I had someone call me yesterday, a girl, called herself Bess, or Tess, I don’t know, it was hard to hear her—sounded like she was calling from a pay phone. Anyway, she was trying to sell me a couple hundred pounds of lobster.” She paused for a moment and looked around.

  “And?” I asked, glancing at my watch. Almost seven fucking o’clock. Jesus.

  “She was evasive about what boat she was off of. Said it was her boyfriend’s boat, and he was sick in bed. She gave me a name I never heard of. Now, I know everyone in this area. You’re pulling a couple hundred pounds of lobster, I know your name, if you know what I mean.” She had her hands on her hips and seemed to be getting riled up talking about it.

  “Did you meet with her?” I asked, trying to figure out what she wanted so I could get to work.

  “I tried. Believe me, I tried. Oh, no, she wanted nothing to do with meeting me. One excuse after another of why this couldn’t be a face-to
-face deal. She wanted me to come get the lobsters . . . she couldn’t be there . . . had to tend to her boyfriend. But I could leave the cash in the boat . . . in an envelope in the cabin!”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “I told her she was out of her flippin’ mind,” she screeched. “I mean, what the hell kind of business does she think I run? We’ve got a coastline of lobstermen trying to off-load their catch, and I’m going to schlep on down to some mystery boat carrying a boatload of cash. Wacko.” She took a deep breath, and I looked at my watch, then back at her.

  “Gwen. Tell me what you need.” I was done being patient. I had my own lobsters to haul.

  “Did Boon talk to her? Did she call you guys to sell them?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “He didn’t mention anything?”

  “No. But he wouldn’t. I catch; he buys and sells. End of story. Plus, you know Boon. Boon likes women. If a woman invited Boon to a boat by himself, he’d go.”

  Gwen nodded. “I get your point. But keep your ears open. My guess is the lobster was stolen.”

  I gave her a doubtful look. That was a death sentence around here. “That’s not just one or two traps; that’s a trawl, maybe more.”

  “I hear you, Jack, but I’m telling you this girl wasn’t right. She sounded high, drugged up. And she didn’t have a clue about lobsters. I asked her to give me her boyfriend’s buoy colors, and I could tell from the silence that she had no idea what I was talking about. She hung up on me when I pressed her on where she got the catch.”

  The sky was white now; a dull stretch of gray darkened the edge of the horizon. Gwen turned to see what I was looking at, then tapped her hand on the wash rail, a quick rap of her knuckles.

  “Go. Weather’s coming. Tell Boon what happened, and keep your ears open.”

  “You got it,” I said, turning the key to start the engine.

  “Tell Hope I said hello,” she yelled.

  I raised my hand to signal I’d heard her as the Hope Ann pulled away from the dock.

  Once I was out of the cove, the sea turned choppy. Waves slammed against the hull and sent a cold spray over the bow. I kept her at twenty knots, a good clip to get me out there in a hurry.