How We Started

by Luanne Rice

  Vehicles began to off-load. She held her breath. This was the Steamship Authority’s newest ferry. Dar, her sisters, and their mother had stood on this dock, listening to Carly Simon, her son Ben Taylor, Kate Taylor, and others singing to welcome the new boat. Dar had done a drawing of the scene, given it to the captain. He’d flattered her, looking for her signature.

  “An original Dar McCarthy,” he’d said. “My daughters won’t believe it.”

  “Tell them I’ll draw them on deck in my next installment.”

  “Wow,” he’d said. “That better be a promise.”

  “It is,” she’d said, and she’d kept her word, putting the ferry and the captain’s children in a scene in her next graphic novel.

  And now, here came Delia, driving her green Volvo wagon, waving out the open window. Dar waved back, noticing Delia’s granddaughter, Vanessa, beaming from her car seat in back, as well as the fact that Rory and her kids weren’t in the car.

  Dar followed Delia over to an empty spot, hopped inside, and hugged her youngest sister. They rocked back and forth, not wanting to let go. Vanessa held a doll in the crook of her arm and shouted, “Hellohellohellohello!”

  “Hello, Vanessa!” Dar said. “Hello, hello! Where is Rory?”

  “Oh god,” Delia said. “I’ve been up since three, and I need a whole lot of coffee before I get into that. She wanted to take her own car. Can we go home, and then I’ll tell you? Have you heard from Pete? Oh, never mind that now. Let’s just get home, and we can talk.”

  “Of course,” Dar said. She held her sister’s hand, not wanting to let go or get out of the car. But Scup was waiting, and they were blocking traffic, so Dar blew Vanessa a kiss and ran back to her own car.

  *

  Delia Monaghan led the way. She talked to Vanessa, pointing out landmarks.

  “That’s where my best friend, Amy, lives in the summer, and that’s the old oak—see all the big, winding branches, all the way down to the ground and up again—we all used to climb, and that’s the creek where your daddy used to catch crabs and herring.”

  “My daddy!” Vanessa said.

  Delia met her eyes in the rearview mirror and smiled. “That’s right. Daddy.” She kept driving, was fine till they passed Chilmark Cemetery; glancing down the hill, she tried to find her mother’s grave. She could almost see herself and her sisters and half the island residents standing there in the October light. Summer people had returned to the Vineyard, and her fellow winter residents had gathered to say good-bye to Tilly McCarthy. Everyone had been there except Pete.

  “Oh, Mom,” Delia said. The funeral was the last time she and her sisters had seen each other. They usually gathered on the island for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but this period without their mother, and the reality of what was to come, had been too much to bear; they’d each celebrated in their own way.

  Delia had spent hers with her husband and granddaughter—Vanessa’s mother was only eighteen, pregnant again with another man’s baby, and took every possible chance for Delia to babysit.

  Rory had spent the holidays with her three children, and not with her husband.

  Dar had probably gotten together with Andy Mayhew; Delia could not figure out that relationship. It had lasted forever, but no one was getting married or moving in together.

  Delia pulled herself together before turning in to her mother’s driveway. The sight of the big old house filled her with yearning and made her think of childhood—her own and Pete’s, and now Vanessa’s. She could just see her mother, tall and sturdy, dressed in faded jeans and a linen shirt, white hair short and practical under a wide-brimmed sun hat.

  What a great mother she’d been, basically raising the girls on her own after their father had left. The whole situation had left the family stunned and devastated, but Tilly McCarthy had always tried to keep her daughters’ hopes up. Those linen shirts in beach colors—blue for sea and sky, green for marsh grass, orange for sunsets, deep pink for the beach roses that grew along the path to the beach—those colors chased the darkness in their house, let her daughters think, sometimes at least, that life was good and bright.

  She’d invent special, magical occasions. The girls would come down for breakfast and find clues on the table. Cut-out stars meant that night they’d be going down to the beach, spreading blankets on the cold sand, gazing up at the sky to learn constellations and watch for shooting stars.

  Three watercolor brushes tied with ribbons of marsh grass hinted that she’d planned an artists’ expedition; they’d pile into the station wagon and find a cove, or salt marsh, or hilltop. Unloading easels, watercolor pads ordered from Sennelier in Paris, miniature Winsor & Newton watercolor kits for each of them, they would set up and paint en plein air, an all-girl version of late-twentieth-century Impressionists. Only Dar would stick with her paintings; Delia and Rory would get bored and wander off, exploring. Their mother didn’t mind, as long as everyone had fun.

  “Well, here we are,” Delia said, unbuckling Vanessa’s car seat.

  Dar walked over, and they gave each other a long hug. “Hi, Vanessa!” Dar said.

  “Beach!” Vanessa said.

  “Yes, soon we’ll go down to the beach,” Delia said.

  The kitchen was chilly, so Dar threw a few logs into the woodstove. Delia looked around. When they used to come to open the house each Memorial Day, they’d have to sweep out dead wasps and mouse droppings and broken acorns dropped down the chimneys by squirrels. Once they’d found a complete fish skeleton in the fireplace and could only imagine an osprey had lost its grip flying overhead.

  “Oh my god,” Delia said, going to hug Dar as she made coffee. Her older sister felt lean, almost skinny; she’d always been that way, as if following some private, inner asceticism. Delia felt fat by comparison, folds of flesh and pudgy wrists. She pulled away and instantly felt thinner. “You have no idea how much I’ve been dying to talk to you in person. The phone just doesn’t cut it.”

  “I know,” Dar said, putting two scones in a pan. The oven groaned as it heated up.

  “Mom never gave in to the microwave I bought her,” Delia said.

  “She liked things as old and original as she could keep them,” Dar said.

  “Oh, Mom,” Delia said. “She tried to hold on to everything, balancing all the while. Imagine being stuck between grandmother and her English ways, and Dad sounding like he’d never left county Cork.”

  “Yep,” Dar said, watching Vanessa clutching her doll, playing on the floor with Scup. “We’d come here and be blue-collar girls in a silver spoon world.”

  Delia laughed. Scup came over, tail wagging, and she leaned over to pet him. “Mangy old guy,” she said. “His poor tail doesn’t have any hair left on it. What are we going to do with him?”

  “I’ll keep him and the cats,” Dar said.

  “And where will that be?” Delia asked.

  “I’m working on it,” Dar said. “Where’s Rory?”

  “Coming on a later boat,” Delia said. “Something to do with Jonathan.”

  “She’ll get here when she can.” Dar paused. Tell me about Pete,” she said.

  Delia closed her eyes, remembered the day two and a half years ago when she’d driven Pete, her only child, to the airport. He’d dropped out of American University mid-semester. Delia and Jim had lost the tuition money they’d paid, and Jim felt betrayed and furious. Pete had spent three summers crabbing with the watermen out of Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay. But after leaving college, he decided to try his luck fishing in Alaska.

  The pay was good, he said. He could reimburse his parents. She believed him; she’d never doubted his integrity. But two days after he flew to Anchorage, a sheriff arrived at their house just outside Annapolis, bearing court papers for Pete, naming him in a paternity suit.

  “He’s missing all this time with Vanessa,” Delia said. “She’s nearly two.”

  “I know,” Dar said, setting the coffee mugs down.

  “Do you talk to
him?” Delia asked, grabbing her mug, half dreading the answer.

  “He calls me sometimes.”

  “He calls me, too,” Delia said. “At home, when he knows I’m at work, and at work when he knows I’m home. He can’t stand to talk to me.”

  “It’s not you,” Dar said. “He can’t stand himself.”

  “My son is all the way up in Alaska, fishing in wicked weather … that’s when he can get on a boat. The fishermen up there are so suspicious of outsiders.”

  They were silent for a moment; Dar was thinking of dangers of storms, of what could happen to a person on a boat at sea. Delia couldn’t separate the past; it filled her thoughts and dreams with fear.

  “They’re big, steel-hulled trawlers,” Delia heard herself say.

  “That’s good. Well, the guys are probably territorial like the fishermen here,” Dar said. “And the watermen on the Bay, right?”

  “I know, but I worry about him being cold and hungry. He makes good money when some captain is desperate for crew and signs him on—but he can’t count on it. I’m worried when he’s on a boat, and nearly as much when he’s not. He’s one step away from welfare. Sometimes I think he doesn’t want to work, so Maryland can’t attach his wages for child support.”

  Dar moved her chair closer. “He’s figuring it all out,” Dar said. “I’m not defending him, but I know he’s going to come around. He’s got too much of you in him to keep doing this.”

  Delia shook her head hard.

  “You’re the most responsible person I know,” Dar said.

  “You mean boring.”

  “Never,” Dar said. “Just steady and good.”

  To Delia, coming from her cool, willowy, offbeat older sister, that still sounded dull as hell. But she gave Dar a smile, to let her think she’d accepted the compliment.

  Neither of them had mentioned their father or his dangerous sea voyage. They didn’t have to, because the story lived inside them, made them who they were. Whenever Delia picked up one of Dar’s graphic novels, she saw exactly how haunted their lives had been. Dar expressed mystery enough for all three sisters.

  Now they’d come to clean out their family’s house, and Delia wondered what surprises they would find, what leftover evidence of love, loss, and the great big question that remained.

  *

  Dar could almost see them on the beach: herself, her sisters, and baby Pete: the first grandchild, her first nephew. Building sandcastles, playing in the shallow water, showing him how to use a plastic shovel and pail, tilting the striped umbrella so he could nap in the shade. The summer he was two, they’d taken him on the Flying Horses in Oak Bluffs, for Mad Martha’s ice cream in Edgartown. Jim, Delia’s husband, rarely came to the Vineyard; he considered it too snobby and preferred to stay home.

  As Pete got older, Dar and her sisters had taught him to swim and bodysurf. When he was thirteen, Dar and Andy had helped him catch his first wave on a long board. They’d shown him the best surf-casting spots at sunrise and sunset, watched him catch his first striper. Harrison had welcomed him aboard his Hatteras Sportfish so Pete could enter the island’s bluefish tournament, taught him to tie knots, shown him how to sail on his family’s Herreshoff 12.

  By then Pete was ready to race at the yacht club, and he found some friends with a Rhodes 19. Dar had loved when he’d admitted racing and the yacht club weren’t for him; he’d rather just let the wind take him, not have to worry about competition or who had the most expensive gear.

  As Pete’s aunt, Dar saw it her duty and blessing to pass on to him all the beach, nature, and maritime things she’d always loved. So much had come from her father, and she’d tell him about Mike McCarthy, what a great father and boatbuilder he had been. His hands had been permanently rough and creased, and she was proud of his carpentry and hard work.

  Dreaming back to a much younger time, the summer she was eleven, Dar remembered being with her parents on the beach. She saw herself and sisters bodysurfing the crests of long waves, swimming out with their mother again and again, thrilled by every perfect, curling wave carrying them over the white sand bottom. Her father, used to the saw-edged rocks of southwestern Ireland, had wanted to run in and rescue his daughters every time.

  They’d run out of the water, completely chilled, and lie on blankets up in the dunes, where the sun baked down and the wind was screened by beach grass. Their mother would have brought a picnic, and they’d all dig in. She had loved seeing her parents side by side in their low beach chairs, her mother completely in her element, her father awkward in bathing trunks and sunglasses, as if he’d rather be in his work boots and overalls, planing a plank, joining it to the next on the boat he was building. Dar had loved that her mother tried teaching him to relax.

  The McCarthy family lived between two worlds. Getting off the ferry, they’d leave one life behind and enter another one. Throughout the school year in their small house in Noank, Connecticut, Dar would watch her mother pretending not to have grown up rich and trying to get used to balancing the checkbook and packing her husband’s and children’s lunches every day. But when summer came and they returned to the big house on the salt pond, the wide porch, and cocktails at sunset, she again inhabited her realm. Dar and her sisters joyfully joined in, and their father had his own reasons.

  Dar, her sisters, and their best friends would ride their bikes twenty miles into Edgartown. They’d spend the day sailing, and if it got too late, their mother would pick them and their bikes up in the station wagon. They would ride to Menemsha, talk to the guys on their fishing boats, eat lobster rolls on the dock. Rainy days, they would huddle under the porch roof and learn how to make and mend sails, using waxed thread and vintage leather sailmaker’s palms, talking nonstop.

  Community Center dances were sweet, wild, and romantic. A local band would play, and everyone would dance. Dar remembered her racing heart, the intensity of slow dances, usually with Andy, pressing their bodies together, hardly able to breathe, never wanting it to stop. But it always did—the dance would end, and it would be time to go home. Dar always wished for happiness to last, for all love and good things to stay the same, but she had received early proof that they never did.

  The year she was twelve, Dar’s life as she knew it ended. Her body kept moving, but her spirit had flown away, after her father. Her parents separated that winter, and that summer he sailed to Ireland on a boat he’d built. He made one call home from a port in Kerry, but then he disappeared somewhere off the craggy, razor-sharp rock coast between Dunmore Head and county Cork.

  Dar alone had watched her father sail away, in the clear light after a rainstorm, and as if she’d been his keeper, for a long time she’d felt it was her fault he didn’t return.

  Rocking her in her arms one of the worst nights, Dar’s mother had tried to soothe her. She explained what Dar already knew: that her father had come to the Vineyard as a young man, looking for a tract of land his Irish grandfather claimed was his birthright. He’d fallen in love and married her mother, had children, spent years building boats, but he’d never forgotten his initial reason for coming to the Vineyard.

  “Sweetheart,” her mother said, “your father was driven by something inside. Do you know what that means?”

  Dar listened, not wanting to let on that she did.

  “A feeling so strong, it began to matter to him more than anything else in the world.”

  “Did he go back to Ireland to get away from us?” Dar asked.

  “No,” her mother answered. “The opposite. He had this idea that if he went, and brought back proof about his land, that we would value him better, love him more.”

  “I could never love him more,” Dar said, but her mother didn’t reply. Maybe their love had already been tested too much; his resentment and determination had pushed her away. Only twelve, Dar had observed and taken in the way her parents’ closeness had swirled and dissipated, like a beach being eaten away by winter storms, over that last year.

  Dar
had seen what “driven” meant. She remembered her father walking this property belonging to his wife’s mother. She’d gone with him so many times, exploring all fifteen acres, from the gorse hedge at the land’s eastern end to the yellow shack, known as the Hideaway, at the westernmost. They’d walked from South Road to the edge of the salt pond, searching for surveyors’ markings and stakes.

  “What do they look like?” she’d asked, walking beside him.

  “A crosshatch on a boulder, an iron stake or maybe a granite post.”

  “What do they do?”

  “They mark where one person’s property ends and another’s begins.”

  “But this is all grandmother’s,” Dar had said. “Why are we looking here?”

  “Because you never know what you might find.”

  She’d glanced up, scared by the intensity in his eyes. “I’m no one special,” he said. “A boatbuilder. But there’s a treasure right here, Dar. Straight from our ancestors, a land grant from the king of England.”

  “Dad, you’re Irish,” she’d said. That had brought a dark smile to his face.

  “Exactly.”

  Feelings too much for Dar overtook her, and it was on that walk with her father that Dulse began to materialize.

  PROLOGUE

  February 14, 1993

  My hands are bandaged, but I’m not supposed to care that they hurt. When I was treated at the scene, the husky EMT said flatly, “He’s a lot worse off than you.” The police officer had to remove my handcuffs; he snapped on latex gloves to avoid having to touch my burned palms and wrists.

  They drove me in a squad car to the East Hampton station house for booking, and finally into the sheriff’s van for the ride here to the county jail, fifteen miles away in Mashomuck.

  I’ll tell you one detail because it’s frozen in my mind. The phrase “two to the head.” That’s what I’ve been hearing since the police arrived. “She gave him two to the head.” Then they laugh at me. It’s supposed to be a big joke about how inept I was.