The Vanishing Expert

by David Movsesian

  Max barked and whimpered and paced frantically. As with anything James threw, he felt obliged to retrieve it, and he appeared genuinely distraught that he hadn’t been invited to participate in this game.

  James retrieved the cooler and removed a cold beer for each of them and then poured fresh water into a steel bowl for Max and they sat together absent-mindedly rubbing the dog behind the ears as they spoke in hushed voices. With the boat gently rocking upon the water, they reminisced about their father. The stories were sad at first, mostly about losing him and the void it left despite the fact that he hadn’t been there— not really— for more than three years. But they soon began to recall the happier times when they were young, and those seemingly endless summer days on the lake back when their family was whole. Kate closed her eyes for a moment, trying to conjure up an image of their father from those days when he was a much younger man, before the disease took him, leaving only traces of him behind, like the remnants of his ashes lingering upon surface of the water. Soon they would be gone as well.

  They were unaware of the passage of time until the sun had dropped low in the sky, resting upon the tree tops on the western shore, and the familiar chill of an autumn evening descended quickly upon them. They hadn’t run out of stories, but it was time to go. They realized they’d drifted quite a distance from the spot where they’d released Bud Moody’s ashes upon the water, and when James turned and looked at the surface of the water, he saw that they were all gone. There was no trace of him to be found.

  From the beginning, Gloria expected the drive around the lake to stir up some difficult emotions. She’d traveled these same roads many times over the years, always with Edward. It had been Edward who introduced her to the area that first summer they were together. Having spent so much of his youth on the lake, it seemed that every landmark reminded him of a story from his childhood. Over the years, he’d shared them all with Gloria.

  So it came as no surprise to her that her late husband’s memory pervaded her thoughts that afternoon. There seemed to be reminders of him everywhere— cottages where his family had vacationed, the beach and the arcades at The Weirs, and the ice cream parlors and the restaurants and the miniature golf courses. It was inevitable they would all stir up images of her late husband. What she was less prepared for were the haunting visions of Edward’s boat. Even to Gloria, who despised the boat, its silhouette was so distinctive that it would be difficult to mistake any other boat for Edward’s beloved Chris Craft.

  She first glimpsed the boat on Meredith Bay as they drove past the town docks. It was little more than a passing glance, there one minute and gone the next, and she assumed it was nothing more than her mind playing tricks on her. Back home, she was always imagining she saw Edward or heard his voice at odd moments. There would be some reminder of him and she would then imagine she’d caught a glimpse of him disappearing around a corner. Sometimes he seemed so real that she briefly began to pursue him until she realized the futility in it and she’d stop, embarrassed by her own foolishness. At other times, she’d swear she’d heard his voice somewhere in a crowd.

  It was most vivid in their house where he seemed to still inhabit every room, but she’d felt his presence elsewhere as well. It was always very real and unsettling, but she always came to terms with the fact that it was just a troubling illusion. It was, she decided, simply because Edward was in her thoughts. That afternoon, as they drove around the lake, he was in her thoughts more than ever.

  Even though she’d decided it was nothing more than an illusion, she found herself peering to her right whenever the lake came into view, searching the water for another glimpse of the ghost of Edward’s boat, and quietly hoping it wouldn’t be there. There was no sign of it in Center Harbor or at the head of Moultonborough Bay. By the time they passed through Melvin Village, she was finally satisfied that what she’d seen was likely nothing at all, and she was determined to stop looking and just enjoy the foliage moving briskly past her window. But she and Edward had once rented a cottage on Melvin Bay, not far from the home his family had rented as a boy, and she had such fond memories of the week they’d spent there on that little cove that she found it impossible not to peer through the trees for a chance to see it once again.

  The little boat that cruised through the bay was closer this time, and she was certain she could see the driver, standing at the wheel peering over the long bow exactly as Edward always did. The pine trees along the shoreline afforded only another fleeting glimpse of the water as they drove, and she found herself torn between the desire to look at the boat and the equally strong compulsion to turn away. She looked away for a moment, and when she turned back, her view was obscured and the boat— if there really was one— had vanished, just as it had done earlier in Meredith Bay.

  They drove for miles in silence. Tom peered across at his companion several times, wanting to speak to her, but he understood that Gloria was in one of her quiet moods. She experienced them often, and he’d learned long ago that the best thing he could do was to not intrude upon them. His approach was always to stay close but to stay quiet and wait for her to emerge. When she was ready to discuss whatever was on her mind, if she ever was, she would let him know. And so he observed her as she peered out the window at the colorful scenery, and he noticed how she appeared to search the distance whenever the lake presented itself.

  At one point, she noticed his attention and she turned to him and attempted a smile.

  “This wasn’t the best idea, was it?” he asked, his voice kind and understanding.

  Gloria’s embarrassment was evident on her face. “I’m sorry, Tom,” she offered. “I know I must be terrible company and I probably ruined your trip.”

  Tom shook his head, clearly surprised by her comment. “Nonsense,” he said. “I’m glad you’re with me.”

  They drove for a few minutes in silence, each pretending to be enjoying the scenery. Gloria considered sharing her visions with him, but thought better of it. As if he knew what she was thinking, Tom reached over and patted her hand.

  “You know you can talk to me if you need to,” he offered.

  Gloria smiled and squeezed his hand. They drove for several miles before she realized she was still holding it.

  When they arrived in Wolfeboro, Tom parked his Lincoln so the two of them could stretch their legs. They strolled around the quaint village, wandering in and out of a few shops, and finally made their way to the docks. The late afternoon sun was sinking low in the sky, and the boats that remained in the bay were bathed in a golden light. Gloria couldn’t resist scanning the horizon for the boat, but it didn’t appear, and she returned her attention to Tom and the perfect autumn day they were sharing, hoping to block out the unwelcome visits from Edward’s ghost.

  It was only as they prepared to leave a short time later that Gloria once again spotted the familiar silhouette. It was much further from shore this time, and even though she was afforded a longer look at the boat, it was too far away for her to discern any detail. As best she could tell, there seemed to be two people aboard, and they seemed to be peering over the side with their backs to the shore. She assumed at first that they were fishing when one of them stood up quickly and hurled something into the water.

  She watched as the couple aboard the boat sat together for some time. It was difficult for Gloria to avert her eyes, the scene reminding her so much of those sunny days she and Edward had spent upon the lake. That was in the early years of their relationship when the boat still belonged to Bud Moody, and Edward would borrow it for day trips and weekends. At the time, she thought it was a lovely boat, and she enjoyed the afternoons they spent skimming across the lake and exploring the many coves that James had learned to navigate as a boy. It was only later, when he began taking the boat out on the ocean, which terrified her, that she stopped accompanying him on his excursions. That was when her contempt for the boat began; when it seemed to come between them, setting into motion the long, slow p
rocess of removing him from her life altogether.

  It wasn’t until Tom placed his hand on the small of Gloria’s back and started to lead her away from the shore that she realized that she’d drifted off again, and it occurred to her, as it had many times over the last few hours, what a disappointing companion she must be for Tom

  “It’s a beautiful view, isn’t it?” Tom finally said, smiling at her.

  Gloria nodded and then turned her back to the water. When she did, Tom saw the tears welling in her eyes.

  His arm naturally found its way to her shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “A lot of memories for one day,” she offered.

  As they walked back to the car, she couldn’t resist the temptation to look back at the boat one last time.

  They spent an hour strolling around Wolfeboro before proceeding on their way around Alton Bay and back up the near side of the lake to Gilford. Gloria never spotted the boat again. At some point, without realizing it, she simply stopped looking for it.

  The following day, as James made the long trek up the Maine coast in his Jeep, he frequently found himself peering into the rear view mirror at the bow of the boat, and he considered what it had come to mean in his life. He recalled not just those sundrenched summer afternoons they spent on the water, but also the countless days he’d spent renovating it with his father.

  Since the day they began working on the old boat, their progress marked the chronology of every other aspect of his young life. It was shortly after his mother’s funeral that they began to scrape and sand the hull. It was his twelfth birthday when he accompanied his father to purchase the spotlight, though it would be months before they installed it. It was on the anniversary of his mother’s death when they applied the final coat of lacquer to the bow. Their work on that boat was, more than anything else, how he came to measure time.

  Just as important, the boat became a lasting bond between them; a physical connection they always understood would remain unbroken regardless of anything else that happened in their lives. James often wondered what his relationship with his father might have been were it not for their shared love of that boat.

  Particularly in those weeks and months following his mother’s death, it provided a common outlet for their restless energy and an opportunity to take their grief or their anger and pour it into any task the boat presented to them. During those long hours they spent toiling together in silence, when their emotions were simply too raw and too painful to express aloud in words, they were able to express them in their relentless attention to that boat. He remembered days when he tirelessly scraped and sanded the hull, driven only by his own rage. And when their work was nearly finished, and nothing remained but to polish every surface until it gleamed in the afternoon sun, he poured his heart into that as well, believing that his mother, whose uneasiness in water gave her no great love of boats, would nevertheless have found it beautiful.

  Once he realized that, he knew that his connection with the boat wasn’t simply a love of the thing itself, but an understanding that it had become a part of him, and he of it. He’d breathed in its dust, taking it into his lungs, just as the wood had absorbed his sweat and his tears. In the end, they were joined, as if by blood.

  He quietly wondered how he could ever have allowed himself to sacrifice it as he nearly did on that stormy day in Narragansett Bay when it was all but swallowed up by the waves and lost for good. Somewhere north of Camden, on a quiet stretch of coastal Route One, he eased the Jeep to the side of the road and came to a stop. And he wept.

  It was sometime later, as he continued up the coast, that he remembered Ben Jordan, the man he’d met on the pier in Northeast Harbor that first day he put the Chris Craft in the water after it found its way back to him. He remembered dismissing the man’s proposition to restore a boat he owned, but now, as he thought about the connection he’d discovered with his father in the Chris Craft, and the bond he’d forged with the thing itself, he wondered if he might allow himself to try to find it once again.

  And so somewhere along the Maine coast as he drove back to Mount Desert Island, he came to a decision that he would call Ben Jordan in the hope that the work he offered might fill a void that he never knew was there until that moment. The irony wasn’t completely lost on him; that he would resort to such drastic measures to escape his old life only to find himself trying to recapture some piece of it that he’d left behind.

  When he glanced again in the rearview mirror, he caught himself smiling. He was still uncertain if he would take on the project. He would know once he saw the boat. But he hoped that it would provide him with the one missing piece of Edward Moody that he wished to reclaim.

  19

  Ben Jordan

  At nearly seventy years of age, Ben Jordan was still lean and spry, appearing a full decade younger than his years. Though he was widely considered a bit of a recluse, the locals who encountered him when he chose to venture out found him to be an amiable sort, though not someone who was given to expanding his social circle. Those he passed on the street he regarded with a friendly greeting and a tip of his hat, though he was unlikely to break his brisk stride to linger over a casual exchange. He seemed always to be walking with a purpose, rarely just out for a leisurely stroll.

  The locals sometimes encountered him at social gatherings around the island, usually in Northeast Harbor where he made his home, but just as often he appeared in Bar Harbor as well. He wasn’t one to seek out those social functions, but he’d long ago decided that it was rude to decline an invitation when one presented itself. Whenever the purpose of the gathering was to raise funds for a particular cause, it was inevitable that he would find himself on the guest list, and to those whose charities and interests he graciously supported, he was widely regarded as a generous benefactor.

  As a result, his reputation was that of a private man who was a good friend to the community but something of an enigma to the people in it. None of those people realized that Ben’s affable nature concealed a difficult and tragic past. That, like so much else in his life, he preferred to keep to himself.

  He was born in Portland, Maine in 1923, at roughly the same time that the Philadelphia Deacons were building their grand estate on what had been Earl Langston’s dairy pastures. Like most Mainers, Ben Jordan came from working stock, more interested in earning a fair wage for an honest day’s work than with the trappings of wealth; had their paths ever crossed, the Jordans would have had more in common with the Langstons than the Deacons.

  Ben’s father, Clayton Jordan, had worked for the railroad most of his adult life. In Ben’s dim recollection of his father, and from what his mother told him later, Clayton Jordan worked long, grueling days at the Rigby Yard in South Portland. He usually left the house before Ben and his younger brother, Charlie, could awaken to catch even a fleeting glimpse of him as he shuffled out the door and walked the twelve blocks to the railroad yard. Ben still recalled those few times that he blinked through sleepy eyes at his father’s back as he lumbered out the front door and into the dim morning light, lunch pail in hand, without so much as a glance back over his shoulder. They were flashes of memories, really; almost frozen images of his father’s greasy coveralls— sometimes hidden beneath an equally greasy wool coat, and sometimes not— and his broad shoulders sagging as if the weight of the world rested squarely upon them.

  For decades, long after those images were all that remained of his father, Ben replayed them in his mind, wondering if, by chance, one of those brief recollections of his father’s departure happened to his last one, when Clayton Jordan simply left their home one morning as he always did, and never returned. Ben always wondered if on that final morning, when his father gravely lumbered out the door for the last time, knowing— though they did not— that he would never see his family again, did he look back then? And if he did, did he see his young boys sleepily watching him go?

  Rigby Yard was built in 1922,
just a year before Ben was born, on the land that had once included Rigby Park, a short-lived horse-trotting track that had opened in 1892. Its well-packed peat moss base combined with the damp coastal air helped to earn it a reputation as a fast track, where even average trotters seemed to perform at their best. As a result it became a popular track for the competitors as well as the fans who packed its impressive grandstands. Even so, the park enjoyed only a few brief years of prominence before succumbing to financial difficulties and closing in 1899, just seven years after it opened.

  Rigby Yard, the railroad terminal that consumed Rigby Park, quickly became the largest and busiest railroad yard north of Boston, situated at the junction of the eastern and western routes of the Boston and Maine, and the termination of the Maine Central Railroad that carried mostly agricultural products from northern Maine and Canada. At the time, Portland was thriving as a seaport used for the export of these goods to Europe, and as a direct result, the local railroad yards were reaching their peak as well.

  The Depression hit both the railroad and the seaport hard. By then, the Canadian exports had been rerouted to New Brunswick and Halifax following the nationalization of the Canadian railroad system, and even the goods arriving from the north, west and south had declined to a mere fraction of what these terminals had handled at the turn of the century. Even before the stock market crashed in 1929, many of those who’d made their livelihoods working for the railroad or the shipyards in Portland found themselves looking for work. Less than a year into the Depression, there was simply no work to be found.

  By the autumn of 1932, Clayton Jordan, finding no way to support his family, could no longer face the humiliation of arriving home penniless to his wife and his two young boys, all of them ill-fed and dressed in rags. By then, they’d lost their home to the bank and were crammed into a squalid one-room apartment in a three-story walkup off Union Street. The building was situated so close to the railroad line that whenever a freight train passed, the lights flickered and the dishes— what few they still owned— trembled and rattled on the shelf over the sink. When the last train rumbled through each night, Clayton, who’d spent all of his adult life around trains, could tell by the sound alone whether it was heavy or especially light. A light train always meant there would be no need for extra hands at the terminal the next morning. There weren’t many heavy trains anymore.