The Vanishing Expert

by David Movsesian

  When Lucky reappeared, he walked briskly over to James and Max, greeting James warmly and patting Max on top of the head. In his other hand, he held a large slice of rare roast beef, which he offered to the dog. Max sniffed it, purely as a formality, and then devoured it in one bite.

  James smiled at Lucky. “You’re gonna make him fat.”

  “Nonsense,” Lucky said, dismissing it with a wave of his bony hand. He bent down and patted Max firmly on the ribs, and he laughed when Max turned and licked him on his face. “He’s a growing boy, and every growing boy needs a good piece of red meat to make him strong.” He stood up and patted James on the arm. “You bring him by tomorrow, and I’ll have some more for him.”

  Until he opened his mouth to speak, Lucky Meeks had the appearance of a native. He was nearly sixty years old by the time James met him, and he was compact and wiry with the leathery skin of a man who had seen a lifetime of Maine winters. But even after fourteen years on the Maine coast, his New York accent was still strong, refusing to give way to the cadence of his adopted town.

  With the exception of the accent, the city had gone out of him; even if the natives regarded him as having come ‘from away’. He was a Mainer in his heart, and an argument could be made that he appreciated the town even more than some of those natives who knew no other life. Having grown up in the city, he enjoyed living in a community where everyone knew his name; that everyone also knew his personal business took some getting used to, but over time, even that seemed normal to him.

  It was one of the reasons that he was always cordial to James, even early on when others were apt to be wary of him. He understood what it meant to come to a small Maine community from the outside. He remembered how long it took for the locals to accept him. It was common for those who’d spent their lives in the small towns along the Maine coast to be mistrustful of strangers. They knew from experience what can happen when ‘flatlanders’ arrive in a place like Southwest Harbor, drawn to it by its quaintness, its New England charm, and then almost immediately set about changing it to suit them, and in so doing, stripping the town of the very thing that attracted them to it in the first place.

  Lucky Meeks had a great love for his new home, and over time, the natives of Southwest Harbor accepted him, even if his accent would forever betray him as not being one of them. That James appeared to share Lucky’s love of the little market created an immediate connection between the two of them. Every time James visited, Lucky could see his fascination with the old fixtures. He noticed how James would run his fingers along the old wood of the counters, worn smooth in places, rough in others. As he strolled through the narrow aisles with their wide planked hardwood floors it was as if he could see and feel and smell the history of the place.

  On that Saturday afternoon in May, James stood on the sidewalk speaking with Lucky Meeks as if the two of them were old friends— James holding Max’s leash, Lucky clutching his broom— as they watched the locals and the first tourists of the season driving slowly by. Lucky asked about Peter, whom he’d known for years, ever since Peter had done some work in the market. He asked about Jean and Christina— the Berkhardt ladies, he called them— and it was obvious by the glimmer in his eye when he mentioned Jean Berkhardt’s name that Lucky was as smitten with her as every other man on Mount Desert Island.

  James explained that everyone was well, but gave no details. It was one thing to know everyone’s business; that was inevitable in a small town. It was quite another to broadcast it. So James agreed to pass along Lucky’s regards the next time he saw the Berkhardt Ladies, but he contributed nothing to the local rumor mill.

  He shook hands with Lucky as they parted, and as he began to walk away, Lucky called out to him and, as was Lucky’s habit, tossed him a peach from one of the bins under the awning. James caught it and thanked him, and he smiled when he saw Lucky remove a quarter from his own pocket and deposit it in the small wooden box by the door. James often did the same thing when Lucky wasn’t looking, whether he’d taken a piece of fruit from the rack or not, payment for all the free fruit that came sailing his way whenever he passed Sawyer's Market.

  It was still early in the afternoon, and James awaited Kate’s arrival with nervous anticipation. He hadn’t seen his sister since that snowy weekend in November when she’d brought Tracy to meet him in Freeport. She called him on Christmas day, and twice a month since, always careful to use her phone at work so Kenny wouldn’t overhear her or discover the frequent calls to Maine on the monthly phone bill.

  Kate called her brother a few weeks earlier to tell him she’d like to come to Southwest Harbor to visit him. She missed him terribly, she said, and she had something she’d been meaning to give to him.

  James had been the one to suggest that she bring Tracy with her; Kate was surprised by the invitation.

  “It’s time,” he told his sister over the phone. “I think I can handle it now.”

  He walked Max past the inns and the stately Victorian homes at the edge of the town center, and crossing the street, he began working his way back past the storefronts and cafes on the other side, peering inside to see the shopkeepers busily preparing for another tourist season.

  As he neared the bookshop, he heard a welcome voice calling out his name, and he turned quickly, pleased to see Christina waving and hurrying across the road. She was dressed in jeans and a white cotton shirt, and she smiled brightly as she joined him on the sidewalk. Max recognized her instantly as she approached, and he strained at his leash to reach her.

  “Hello there, Gorgeous!” Christina said to Max, crouching down and cradling his face in her hands and kissing him on his forehead. “You’re getting so big!”

  “I didn’t know you were coming home this weekend,” James said to her. “Are you finished with school?”

  “No,” she said. “I have another week and then finals.” Max nudged her with his nose, concerned that he wasn’t getting her full attention, and she hugged him firmly around the neck. “I just came home for the weekend to help my mother with the gallery. It’ll start getting busy in a couple weeks, and I always help her get ready. It’s sort of an annual tradition for us.”

  James smiled. He knew all about family traditions, and he thought back to all those rituals he’d shared with his family. He remembered their family outings when he was a small boy, before his mother died. He could only vaguely remember her, but he remembered piling into the old Pontiac station wagon at the beginning of August each year for a week on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee. He remembered the first time each spring that he and his father threw a baseball in the yard behind their house, and he could still remember the scent of his old baseball mitt, the leather freshly rubbed with mink oil after laying in his closet all winter. It was one of those scents that would always remind him of his childhood, and of summer.

  There were a handful of smells that would instantly take him back to those carefree summer afternoons of his youth; the scent of fresh-cut grass on a Saturday afternoon, and the unmistakable aroma of the exhaust from the Chris Craft, which always reminded him of the first time they started her engine each year. It was as blissful a scent to him as that first breath of spring, though it always made Gloria wretch.

  It always surprised him that the memory of such trivial things could remain so vivid, and yet he could no longer remember the sound of his mother’s voice. He knew what she looked like from the photographs his father kept of her, but every memory of her played out like those old silent 8mm movies his father always shot on their summer vacations on the lake. He remembered all of them gathering each year in the living room where his father set up the projector and the movie screen, and watching the films of that year’s vacation over and over, soundless except for the rhythmic sputter of the projector in the darkness. His memory of his mother was like that; in his mind, he could see her as clear as ever, but her voice was lost to him forever.

  It was one of the things he’d always loved about the Chr
is Craft. Over the years, he’d had to replace nearly all of the bottom planks and several of the original frames, but it still looked and smelled and felt exactly as it did when he was a boy. It was his connection to that time in his life that was becoming less clear to him all the time, back when his mother was alive and his father was young and vigorous. Even during those last years in Rhode Island when his life became so cluttered and confused, he always knew that everything in the world could be set right by the rumble of its engine or the feeling of its smooth wood beneath his fingers or the spray of lake water in his face as they skimmed across its surface.

  “My mother wanted to invite you to have dinner with us tonight if you’re not busy,” Christina said.

  “That would be nice,” James told her. “But I’m expecting company. My sister and a friend of mine are coming up for the weekend.”

  At first, Christina was disappointed, but she brightened at the prospect of meeting James’s sister and learning more about his past. Except for their conversations about his failed marriage and his decision to move to Southwest Harbor, she knew so little, and she hoped to fill in some of the gaps of his history.

  Given the secrets Tracy was keeping, James was anxious about introducing her to Jean and Christina. He was thinking of that when Christina leaned against him and nudged him with her elbow.

  “Look at that boat!” she said.

  James looked up in time to see Kate’s car making the turn onto Clark Point Road. In tow behind it was the Chris Craft, looking sleek and shiny in the afternoon sun. The sight of his father’s boat was so unexpected that he was unable to move, and he watched it silently as it disappeared from view.

  Christina gazed at him with concern. “What’s wrong?” she asked, touching him on the arm. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  James shook his head slowly. “That was my sister,” he said. There was a vacant quality to his voice, and he appeared suddenly unsteady, as if he was half expecting the sidewalk to fall away from under his feet. “And that was my boat.”

  “Really?” Christina asked, unable to contain her excitement. She took his arm and began to pull him in the direction of where they had last seen the boat. “Take me to see it!”

  “Sure,” James said, forgetting, for the moment, the obvious risk of an unplanned meeting between Christina, Kate and Tracy. They hurried down Clark Point Road, Max happily trotting along beside them.

  James was uncertain how he would react when he saw the boat up close again. When he abandoned it that day almost a year earlier, he was sure he’d lost it forever. Even after he knew it was safely stored at Ray’s Boatyard in Narragansett, he never expected to see it again. For a year, he’d mourned it like a lost friend.

  Kate’s car was parked in the road in front of Ruth Kennedy’s house, the Chris Craft resting uncovered upon its trailer; Kate had removed the cover just outside of town so they could make a grand entrance. As James and Christina arrived, they found Kate and Tracy removing bags of groceries from the back seat. James called out to them, but even as excited as he was to see them, he was unable to take his eyes off the boat.

  Kate turned and her brother’s name— Edward! — was perched precariously on her lips when she realized he wasn’t alone. She felt her stomach tense as she became aware of the mistake she’d nearly made.

  “Hey, big brother!” she said. She hurried toward him and embraced him firmly, kissing him on the cheek. She felt Max nuzzling against her leg and she drew back and patted him briskly on the head. “And this must be Max.” She squatted down and rubbed him behind the ears, Max wagging his tail wildly.

  Before James could introduce his sister to Christina, he noticed Tracy moving tentatively toward them. For as long as he’d known Tracy, he’d never acknowledged that the two of them shared anything more than a solid friendship. Kate used to point out Tracy’s contempt for Gloria as a sign of her love for him, but James always shrugged it off, reminding Kate that she shared the same contempt for his wife. It didn’t mean what she thought it meant, he’d assured her.

  Now, as he watched Tracy moving slowly into their circle, he noticed the cool gaze that seemed fixed on Christina. He didn’t instantly attribute it to jealousy— even now, he couldn’t imagine Tracy loving him— and it would be unfathomable for anyone not to love Christina.

  Tracy joined them near the boat. She and James shared a long firm embrace, and she closed her eyes in an effort to told hold back her tears. When she finally opened them, she was confronted with Christina’s lovely face, and she drew back from James, feeling foolish. She greeted Christina with a cautious smile.

  James introduced Christina to Kate and to Tracy, and after an awkward silence, they all regarded the boat.

  Kate had taken it upon herself to store the boat at Ray’s Boatyard in Narragansett, where James had always stored it during the winter. Knowing how Edward had always loved the boat, and understanding the family’s grief, Ray offered to clean the boat up himself and ensure that it was properly prepped for storage.

  When Kate had called Ray a week earlier to tell him she’d be coming for the boat that Saturday morning, Ray had personally cleaned and polished the boat and placed it on the trailer. Kate wept when she saw it waiting for her, and Ray assumed she was experiencing a moment of grief over the loss of her brother, when in fact she was simply imagining her brother’s expression when he and the boat were reunited later that day.

  Now that James had the opportunity to inspect it up close, he could see the great care Ray had taken with the boat. Even James, who knew the boat as intimately as anyone could, found it hard to imagine that it had been found half-submerged in salt water a year earlier.

  He walked around the boat, running his fingers along the hull’s smooth finish, no longer looking for defects and blemishes, but simply admiring its form, studying the curves and angles he’d long ago memorized. As he came around the bow, he stepped over the hitch to the port side, and he pressed his hand against the hull on the very spot where he remembered his father placing his hand after their last journey together. Had he been alone, he might have wept, but instead, knowing the others were watching him, he turned and regarded them with a sad smile.

  “It looks great,” James said to Kate, as he rejoined them at the boat’s stern.

  “Ray does nice work,” Kate said. She knew James hated the idea of anyone else working on it. “But nobody knows this boat better than you do, so I figured you’d want it back.”

  James admired the boat, its sleek hull gleaming in the afternoon sun. “Are you sure?”

  Kate smiled. “It’s your boat,” she said. “You should have it.”

  James embraced his sister and buried his face in her thick hair. “Thank you!” he whispered.

  He walked with Kate to the front of the trailer, away from Christina and Tracy, who remained standing at boat’s stern.

  “How do you plan to explain it to Kenny and Gloria if they find out it’s gone?” he asked her.

  Kate anticipated his question. “Gloria won’t know. Once she realized she couldn’t sell it, she never wanted to see it again.”

  “What about Kenny?” James asked.

  “If he asks, I’ll tell him I moved it to New Hampshire to get it away from the salt air.” Kate said. “He won’t question it.”

  James smiled, satisfied that Kate had covered her bases. “How’d you get to be such a good fibber,” he asked her. He seemed to be almost proud of her.

  “Runs in the family, I guess,” Kate said.

  James invited them into his apartment, and much to Tracy’s displeasure, Christina followed. Tracy tried desperately to understand the nature of James’s relationship with this striking girl who appeared at least a decade younger than he was.

  Tracy was somber when she saw the small, sparsely decorated apartment. There was a small table and two chairs in what passed for a kitchen, a well-worn sofa and coffee table and lamp in the living room, and a mattress o
n the floor of the bedroom; nothing familiar. On one wall of the living room was a frame containing three pictures of Christina and a woman who, based on the resemblance, Tracy assumed was her mother. She noticed only one book, a copy of A Christmas Carol resting upon a shelf in the living room beneath a thin layer of dust. Beside it was a small, framed portrait of Christina gazing alluringly off camera. She stopped and studied the photograph, which unlike the book, was free of dust, cared for.

  Tracy searched everywhere for something she recognized, something that connected the man who lived there to the man she’d known for more than fifteen years, but she found no evidence of Edward Moody.

  Though she would never have admitted it, a part of her hoped that James’s invitation had meant that he’d finally realized his true feelings for her— that having shed those obligations that had kept them apart for so long, he was finally free to be with her. She’d come to see him that weekend secretly hoping that, after years of waiting, there would finally be some spark between them. She imagined him lonely and depressed, willing, even eager, to finally give her a place in his life.

  But James seemed content and comfortable with his meager existence. He had so little, but especially now that his beloved boat had been returned to him, he appeared to have all the things that mattered to him.

  She found it difficult to be happy for him. Now it appeared that this beautiful young girl stood between them, filling the space where Gloria had once been, keeping her from him. But it was Edward Moody, not James Perkins, that Tracy loved, and she could now see, even in those first few moments in his little apartment that the man she’d hoped to find there was all but gone.