The Silver Boat

by Luanne Rice

  By the time she reached the farmhouse, she was cool enough to smile at the sight of Rory’s old blue wagon.

  “Hey!” she called as she walked into the kitchen.

  Rory and Delia were sitting at the table, but Rory jumped up at the sight of her. “Darrah McCarthy, you are a sight for sore eyes!”

  “Same to you, Rory-girl,” Dar said as they slammed into each other for a hug.

  “Me too!” Delia said, working her way into the circle.

  Dar was taller than both, and her arms wrapped around them. She felt as if she were trying to hold on to the moon. Small and bright as it waxed and waned up in the sky, but it escaped once a month, turning the nights black. She kept her sisters close, wanting them to stay hugging as long as possible, as if that could stave off what was coming.

  “Someone’s been smoking,” Delia said, breaking apart.

  “Remind me not to hug you again,” Rory said, shaking her short dark hair as if she could get the smoke out of it.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Delia said. “I’m thinking of Mom, heart disease. I love you and want you to live forever.”

  “Amen to that,” Rory said. “For all of us.”

  “Speaking of ‘amen,’ ” Delia said, “it just feels so weird to me to see the Buddha out in the garden.”

  “Well, Dad took Catholicism with him when he left,” Rory said. “At least as far as I’m concerned. Is it too early for beers?”

  “The sun’s over the yardarm!” Delia said.

  Rory opened two Heinekens and a Diet Coke for Dar. They all clinked and drank.

  “Where are the kids?” Dar asked.

  “The beach.”

  “Vanessa is so pretty,” Rory said. “What’s her mother like?”

  “She’s beautiful, eighteen, lives on the Internet,” Delia said.

  “Is there a chance she and Pete could get back together?” Rory asked.

  “Uh, no,” Delia said.

  “Well, I’m sure he’s making a lot of money up there, socking it away for Vanessa’s education. I’ve heard of crab fishermen pulling in a hundred grand a winter.”

  “We know someone who wanted to go there,” Dar said. “As a brilliant moneymaking scheme.”

  “Harrison,” her sisters said at once.

  “A little too much work, though,” Rory added. “Actually fishing.”

  The mention of their childhood friend lightened everybody up. Harrison had once come up with an idea for a guide called “The Lazy Man’s Guide to Life.” But he knew he’d never write it, because it would take work and he enjoyed being lazy too much. Dar took out the snapper blue fillets she’d broiled the night before, and Delia found one of their grandmother’s brown crockery bowls in the back of the cupboard.

  Rory cut slices of lemon on the butcher-block table, then squeezed them over the fish while Delia drizzled pale green olive oil and ground pepper and sea salt into the bluefish salad.

  Dar laid out slices of Rickard’s bread she’d bought at Cronig’s last night. While her sisters made bluefish sandwiches for each other and Sylvia, she found peanut butter and strawberry rhubarb jam for Jenny and Obadiah. They packed everything into a wicker basket, pulled on sweaters and fleeces, grabbed the two plaid wool picnic blankets, and went out to find the kids.

  They walked across the wide open field toward the beach. The frost had melted in the warm sunshine, but they saw footprints in the dry brown grass. Following them down the hill, around the pond, they spotted the salt-bleached boardwalk thrown into the reeds by a winter storm.

  “We’ll have to get that back in place,” Delia said.

  “Not this year,” Dar said.

  “You know what?” Rory asked. “Can we call a moratorium on the new owners and the whole moving thing for at least a day? I want to enjoy getting together without it turning into a wake.”

  “Good plan,” Dar said, not able to avoid thinking of the Realtor’s latest e-mail.

  “Denial has its place,” Delia said.

  They continued on, walking down the sandy path between two sharply wind-sculpted dunes. The blue ocean glimmered, and before Dar could spot her nieces and nephew, she heard them shout from down the beach.

  “Aunt Dar!” Obadiah yelled, skidding in at her feet, then scrambling up for a hug. “We saw someone naked!”

  “It’s true,” Jenny said.

  “Ah, spring comes to Lucy Vincent Beach. What have you two huge people done with my little niece and nephew?”

  “We’re us!” Obadiah said.

  “Oh my God, you are,” Dar said. Then she turned to Sylvia, who was standing back and seeming shy. “Silvy, you’re so beautiful.”

  “I’m not,” she said, kissing Dar.

  “You completely are,” Dar said. “You look just like your mother.”

  Dark hair, blue eyes; they all shared the same coloring, but Sylvia had Rory’s spark, an almost-hidden ready-for-anything wildness. Dar thought back to when they’d been kids, how every boy on the Vineyard had wanted Rory. Huge blue eyes, long tan legs, and the tiniest bikini sold on Circuit Avenue.

  Rory and Harrison had been best friends and ringleaders for fun and trouble; they’d pile into Harrison’s father’s vintage Cadillac Eldorado, top down, a moveable party in a red-leather interior, driving all over the island, picking up and dropping off friends as they went.

  Dar remembered how proud Harrison seemed to have Rory up front beside him. She’d light his cigarettes for him, make sure the radio was tuned to the right station, never stop laughing at his effortless humor. They weren’t romantic, but they weren’t unromantic, either. It had been a great sexy monster of suppressed desire.

  Dar gazed at her sister now. Still lovely, she’d kept plenty of that mysterious spark. Rory walked beside Sylvia, talking low, laughing at something Silvy said. Dar wished she had her sketchpad.

  They all headed for the warmest spot, up in the dunes—bright with sun, sheltered from the sea breeze. Sylvia and Rory spread out the blankets; Delia took Vanessa from Dar, who opened the picnic basket. She passed out blue ironware picnic plates and faded floral cloth napkins.

  Andy surprised her and came down to meet them.

  “Well, look who’s here!” he said, walking over in construction boots and Carhartt jacket.

  “Andy, hi!”

  “Good to see you, Mayhew,” Rory said.

  “Back at you, Chase.”

  Dar smiled, made room for him on the blanket, gave him half her sandwich. He nodded, thanking her, and they smiled at each other. They kissed, and Dar felt her sisters watching.

  “How’s everyone’s winter been?” he asked.

  “Jim’s business was slow,” Delia said. “But we’re hoping things brighten up this spring.”

  “Pretty much the same here,” Andy said. “Building slowed down more than I’d expected. It’s picking up, though.”

  “Things will get better,” Delia said. “They always do.”

  “What’s the story with Harrison?” Rory asked. “He actually sent out Christmas cards with a picture of a wreath on a huge garage door.”

  “At least he’s festive,” Andy said.

  “Eternally so,” Rory said. “Thank God for that. But seriously—where is he living?”

  “Let’s just say he’s downsized,” Dar said.

  “Yeah, he had some legal bills back in January,” Andy said.

  They all knew the latest story. Harrison had gotten caught breaking into Town Hall to steal back the bronze bust of his father, Harrison Thaxter, Sr.—known for local philanthropy in better days—which had been auctioned off at the foreclosure sale two years earlier. The cops would have gone easy on him if he’d just returned it, but Harrison had taken the bust off-island, hidden it somewhere and refused to reveal its whereabouts.

  “They said it’s a second infraction,” Andy said.

  “The dogs?” Rory asked.

  “What about the dogs?” Obadiah asked. “Which ones?”

  “Har
rison’s,” Rory said. “He loved his dogs a lot. He just probably should have kept them on a leash more. They kept running away.”

  “Did they ever get back home?” Jenny asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Rory said, giving a reassuring hug without telling the kids the story.

  Four years ago Harrison’s father’s very old dachshunds had taken off yet again, found by Animal Control hunting rabbits in someone’s garden. Fines for previous incidents had piled up, and the officer wouldn’t release Fred and Rose without full payment.

  So Harrison had driven to the shelter after midnight, used a ladder to haul himself over the tall chain-link kennel fence, spraining an ankle on the way down, knelt, and squeezed his bulky frame through the swinging rubber dog flap to take his dogs right out the front door.

  “Oh, Harrison,” Delia said. “Can’t he ever just do things by the book?”

  “Never has, never will,” Andy said. “He probably doesn’t even know what the book says.”

  “Yeah, he does,” Rory said, choked up. “He just doesn’t care. Loving his father and his dogs means more to him than the rules.”

  “Try telling the town that,” Delia said.

  “When can we see Uncle Harrison?” Jenny asked.

  “Soon,” Rory promised.

  “Are there sharks in the water here?” Obadiah asked, shielding his eyes as he looked out to sea.

  “Sometimes,” Andy said.

  “Daddy said he used to surf right over them,” Obadiah said. “Blue sharks and makos, and once a great white.”

  “I doubt that about a great white,” Rory said.

  “Just because Dad said it?” Obadiah asked.

  “There was one trapped in a salt pond on Cuttyhunk a couple of summers ago,” Andy said. “Full-size.”

  “I don’t mind about sharks,” Obadiah said. “I can’t wait to learn to surf over them. Dad said he’d teach me. We’re lucky, because even though we have to sell Granny’s house, Jenny and I can still come to the Vineyard to stay with Gram and Pop.”

  “Daddy says we’ll always have the Vineyard,” Jenny said.

  “That’s true,” Rory said.

  “But I don’t get it,” Jenny said. “How can we have it, when you won’t?”

  “Oh, sweetheart. It has to do with taxes. Money. Sometimes people can’t afford to hold on to things they love.”

  “Just like Harrison,” Andy said.

  “Just like,” Rory agreed, and once more Dar wished she had her sketchpad to capture the look in her sister’s eyes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Family togetherness and impending change brought Dar’s father back to her again. That night she dreamed of him, young and darkly handsome. She was twelve, and they were standing on the dock in Menemsha Harbor, just a few miles away. The dream felt real as life, the details the same, the questions the same.

  He’d come to America from Cork. He’d worked at boatyards from Southwest Harbor, Maine, to Tiverton, Rhode Island, always aiming to save money and make his way for a long stay on Martha’s Vineyard. People teased him, saying fate had led him straight to Mathilda “Tilly” Daggett. He would come right out and say yes, it had, courtesy of King Charles I.

  The tilt of Tilly’s mother’s chin said it all: she was convinced her son-in-law’s attraction had been to Daggett’s Way and not Tilly’s heart. From Dar’s youngest days she had picked up on friction between her grandmother and father. It made her want to defend him even when, on the outside, things seemed okay. The family would have dinner together. Her grandmother would ask her father to grill the steak. What should have been normal felt as if she was ordering him around. It didn’t help, the way he’d pace her land after dinner, staring at the ground even after it was too dark to see anything.

  Whether at the Vineyard or back home in Noank, Connecticut, her parents always argued about money. Whispers from their bedroom with the door closed, in the front seat of the car when they thought their daughters were asleep, and the way the dining room table was always covered with bills, just like a jigsaw puzzle, Tilly trying to figure out how to put it all together, Michael refusing to accept any help from his wife or her mother.

  That Memorial Day had been the worst of all. Dar’s parents had been separated for months. Her father had worked doubletime, finishing the sailboat he’d been building for two years.

  He’d used a friend’s boathouse, across Menemsha Bight, a waterlogged shack that swayed with the tide. He’d taken the ferry alone to the Vineyard on winter weekends, leaving the family behind in Noank.

  In spite of the separation, he took Tilly out for the first sail; Dar had watched her parents leave the harbor, heeling over as they sailed into Vineyard Sound and out of sight. The sky had been bright blue, no clouds. But by the time they returned, her mother was red-eyed, and her father looked set and determined.

  “Was Mom crying?” Dar asked when her mother walked down the dock, leaving them alone.

  He didn’t answer, just checked on the lines, making sure they’d been properly cleated.

  “Doesn’t she like the boat?” Dar pressed.

  “Of course she does,” he said, gazing at his masterpiece: twenty-eight feet long, the hull and cabin painted oyster white; the mast, boom, and other brightwork varnished golden brown.

  “This boat’s not like the others you make,” Dar said.

  “Because she’s our family’s alone. I built her for us and not for pay.”

  Her father had taken Dar sailing before—but always on other people’s boats. He was so good, they’d hire him to design and build their boats, then hire him again to teach them everything he knew about sailing and the sea.

  “My grandfather would be proud and I don’t say that lightly,” he said.

  “Why wouldn’t you say it lightly?” Dar asked.

  “Well, I don’t like to brag. But I learned to be a carpenter in his shop, and no work was too fine for the old man. He could be critical. Very tough. But he taught me all his tricks. Will you look at that fairing?”

  “Fairing?” Dar asked.

  “Sanded so finely you can’t see the seams.”

  “She’s the most beautiful boat I’ve ever seen.”

  “Her name is Irish Darling, after my darling Dar.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “Yes. And after your mother and sisters. With a name like that, she could easily sail from Menemsha to Cork,” he said. “Across the Atlantic and straight into Kinsale Harbor.”

  “I want to go to Ireland,” Dar said.

  “You will, Dar. I promise, someday. Not this summer, but soon. Once I bring back the proof.”

  “The proof of what?”

  “Of our birthright.”

  “I still don’t get it, Daddy.”

  “Oh, it’s a fairy tale about a troublemaker.”

  “Is the troublemaker bad?” Dar asked.

  Her father laughed in a way that gave her chills and made her beam. Even at twelve, Dar had magical threads running through her veins, picking up every sensation and emotion in her family. When her father laughed, there was nothing better.

  “No, not at all,” he said. “Some of the best people are troublemakers.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Certainly.”

  “Can we go on board?” Dar said. Her father lifted her down from the dock and she went straight to exploring. She tried opening all the cabinets and hanging lockers, got the hang of the secret latch on each one. He’d sanded everything so carefully, made the wood fit even the tightest spots, painted the surface with glowing amber varnish, created narrow shelves above the berths so they would have a place to keep their books and notebooks and paints.

  “Can you find the hiding place?” he asked.

  “For a person to hide in?” she asked.

  He laughed. “No. Smaller.”

  She’d looked in every drawer and cabinet, reaching back, closing her eyes, feeling for spots that weren’t supposed to be there.

  A
gain he’d laughed, watching her try to figure it out. Finally he showed her: the deck looked solid, made of teak and holly. But if you pressed one tiny square of wood, a block of floor lifted out, leaving a hole just deep enough to hide passports, tickets, tide tables, and a brass sextant.

  “It’s so cool,” she said, hugging him, smelling the familiar mixture of smoke, sawdust, and varnish.

  In the dream she felt him drifting away, not only his body but his mind, as if he had already left to cross the ocean, and Dar’s chest ached, wondering how any document, no matter how important to him, could make him leave. She had woken up, sweating in a panic.

  Most of the year, Dar’s family lived in a cozy, gray-shingled, blue-shuttered house in the harbor town of Noank, Connecticut: a bus ride to school, a bike ride to the boatyard where her father worked. Her grandmother had bought the house for her parents soon after Dar was born.

  But in Dar’s artwork, their normal little house morphed. She wrote a series of graphic novels about Dulse, a girl whose father disappeared from her life—despite his promises—just as Dar’s had from hers. Scenes of black, white, and gray; perpetual winter, dirty snow, ice across Mystic River and the contours of Noank Harbor.

  The dream-house’s windows overlooked a cove full of swans frozen into the ice. Dar floated through the rooms like a ghost, dissolved into vapor just as she had the day her parents separated. They didn’t call it that; they just said he was going to sleep at the boatyard for a while. But Dar knew.

  Then they said he was going to take a trip to Ireland. Dar had almost felt relieved. Maybe he could get that document and come home and everything would be better.

  But things got worse and eventually fell apart. He sailed across the Atlantic, called once to say he’d made it to Ireland, and then never came home again.

  Dar’s bones had turned to water, and her skin had become as fragile as cobwebs. She had broken open, and she felt as if her heart had been stolen by one of the bald eagles that flew down from the Arctic every winter.