I thought that dropping Mariah at school would be just that and nothing more. She was armed with the usual accoutrements: new cell phone, computer, and a bit of spending money, all complete with what I considered necessary warnings, or as Mariah might put it, “strings attached.” Evergreen Academy had a strict 10:00 p.m. lights-out policy, so the phone and computer had to be shut off at that time. I requested that she not use the phone during class, and suspected that it was forbidden by the school also. While we unloaded the car, a group of three girls came over to greet Mariah and offered to help schlep suitcases, boxes, and bags to her room. Once the hugs and giggles subsided, we all stood at the back of my Jeep and stared at one another. I was waiting for Mariah to make introductions, and I suspected her girlfriends were, too. (In hindsight, I know that they were more interested in my leaving than who I was.)
Realizing that I was the adult, and the one setting an example of good manners for Mariah, I forced the introduction. I stuck my hand out to the girl closest to me and said, “Hi. I’m …” And I couldn’t complete the sentence. Who was I? Should I introduce myself as Mariah’s legal guardian? That is so sterile, I thought. I was not her mother. I was not her friend. I stuttered. “I’m Linda,” I finally blurted out. The girl shook my hand as if doing so was quite foreign to her. She never offered her name, so I didn’t attempt anything formal with the other two girls, and simply nodded and smiled a cheesy take-the-picture smile. I had never felt so out of touch with a generation in my life. I had always prided myself in being comfortable with anyone of any age, any background, any ethnicity, gender preference, religion, economic situation … But these girls were like aliens. They were subhuman, I thought. They were poised for me to leave, so it was clear I should make my exit.
Unsure how to leave with any grace or dignity, I opened my arms for Mariah to step in with a good-bye hug. She recoiled and shrank. One or both of us would now be totally humiliated, I thought. If I drop my arms and leave, I’ll be there alone. If I hug her, and she’s clearly mortified, we’ll be abashed in unison. Three Dog Night was surely onto something, I thought as I attempted a hug. Two can be the loneliest number since the number one. I have now read the thesaurus in its entirety, and there is no adjective that describes the one-way nonhug. As I let go of Mariah’s tensed shoulders, she did whisper, “Awkward,” which not only summed it up, but was also evidence that she had increased her vocabulary by 20 percent. Wow! And she hadn’t even started classes yet.
I hadn’t even left the Evergreen campus when I remembered a painful snapshot from my own teen years. My father and I were crossing a busy street in Brunswick, Maine; I was about fifteen years old, and he had had the audacity to take my arm. I broke his hold by jerking my arm out of his hand and gasping in disgust. What if someone had seen my father touch my arm? Although he never said anything, I had hurt my father’s feelings. And Dad was never the oversensitive sort. I hadn’t given that a thought in more than thirty years. But the memory was like salve on the new wound, and my mood brightened. Strangely, it seemed that the score had now been settled. Chalk one up for Mariah. Who knew that having a teenager could be so hurtful? Anyone who has ever survived one, I supposed. As I mindlessly drove the winding roads, enjoying some much needed windshield time, I was confused only by the fact that I was equating my relationship to Mariah with one that had always been a healthy, loving parental connection. Probably just my stunted maternal instincts run amok, I thought. The feelings might be natural, but the situation was anything but. I had always wanted children. And now that I had gone from zero to fifteen with the stroke of a pen, I had to work to shrug off second thoughts. C’est la vie.
The closer I got to hopping aboard my boat and heading home, the more distant Mariah’s emotional snubbing of me became. I wouldn’t have to deal with her again until Christmas, I thought, and even then she might go to Memphis. That, we had finally agreed, would be her call. If she wanted to spend the holidays with her biological family, I would buy her plane tickets and transport her to and from the airport. We had discussed the options at length, and had left it swaying in the breeze when Mariah couldn’t decide what to do. I told her that if she had been five years old and asked my opinion of a trip west, I would have forbidden it, but at fifteen, Mariah could decide for herself what was best for her. And I had vowed never to keep her from her family or to interject too much of my poor opinion of her mother. I had never met the woman. She might be fine. I had chosen to keep our correspondence to a minimum since her dreadful reaction to why her daughter was at my house. I suspected that Mariah’s mother was also a victim of abuse, knowing what I did about its being a learned behavior and a cycle that is difficult to break out of. All I knew about Mariah’s biological mother was that she sometimes worked as a chambermaid but more often did not work. Mariah had lived in a hotel room, her aunt’s basement, with her grandmother, in a house supplied by the church, and in a homeless shelter. She seemed to have a relatively close relationship with a grandmother and an aunt and uncle. Family is important, I knew. And no matter how much my family was welcoming and accepting of our new situation, Mariah would always have her real folks, however many really bad decisions they’d made about her or however much they’d let her down and screwed her up, et cetera. Blood ties were still important.
Home sans kid or Cowgirl … Being alone in my house was something I had never taken for granted, and I had now developed a real longing for it. As I slipped through the stillness in that direction, I was tempted to push the Mattie Belle’s throttle up to full to hasten toward the feeling of home. But it was such a dark and silent night, and the water was so calm for that time of year, that I knocked the engine out of gear and shut it down in midtransit instead. Drifting just beyond Merchant’s Island—just far enough along to be perfectly positioned to see lights neither from Stonington nor Isle au Haut—I sat on the stern transom dangling my feet over the deck and breathed a sigh of relief. So much had happened in such a relatively short time. Ken was in a local jail waiting, as we all were, to learn his fate. Mariah was at a wonderful school where she would receive opportunities that she deserved. And I was on track to have my “normal” life back.
Blackness had fallen like an anchor out of a hawse pipe with the turning off of the radar and chart plotter. When my eyes adjusted to it, the darkness warmed to a degree that allowed shadows of the surrounding islands to emerge like giant whales from the inky bay. The moonless night liberated the stars in a way that can be witnessed only from a vessel floating silently at sea. Whether I was totally empty-headed or contemplating life as I knew it, it didn’t matter. I could have stayed there forever. But a boat ride back to reality was imminent. I cranked the engine back up, flipped on the electronics, and headed home, carving a groove in the surface that quickly filled behind me, leaving no trace. And tomorrow morning at first light, when the bay would swell with boats buzzing around yanking traps from the bottom and splashing them back in, no one would be the wiser.
I secured the Mattie Belle to the mooring and zipped ashore in my skiff. My truck refused to start, requiring me to walk home, which didn’t bother me because I enjoy a walk from time to time. I crawled between cool sheets knowing happiness. The next day was spectacular. And if asked how so, I’m not sure I could say. And maybe that’s what was so special about it. There’s just something magical about this place—so steeped in the past, so unchanging that it truly is the rock we refer to it as. This feeling I so often experience and can so seldom articulate may be one that is inherent in the place we call home. But I tend to think that it is more about what I am doing while here than the island itself. When I am at my happiest, I feel like Thoreau when he took to the woods to “live life deliberately.” That deliberate, simple lifestyle suits me as well. I guess that is part of what I cherish so much in being at sea. Then it hit me: This happiness that I have while home is something that I want to share with Mariah. It is probably something she has never had. Sure, she’ll always have a connection to Memphis,
but the island will be her physical (and, I hoped, emotional) home until she is eighteen. And after that, she will be free to do as she pleases. Until then, I vowed that she would have my unconditional care and guardianship. I fell asleep embraced by the maternal part of the island that holds, consoles, and encourages good thoughts in those lucky enough to be open to it. And I prayed that Mariah would find openness to what it and I had to offer her.
Sometimes life slaps you in the face. Like the nondescript stretch of road that lulls you into heedlessness until you are suddenly at your destination with no idea or recollection of how you got there, a period of time elapsed, leaving me with glimpses of landmark events but no concept of the passage of days or weeks. I literally woke up one day struggling for all my heartfelt beliefs, idealism, optimism, and life philosophies. Someone or something had pulled a weight-bearing stone from my island’s foundation and things were caving. An outside force had found a chink in the island’s armor and was working at it, exposing weakness. Sure, even the most virtuous among us are capable of indiscretion, but the events that littered this passage of time went beyond scandalous. I was thankful that Mariah was away at school so much of the time in the way that any guardian wants to protect her ward.
There is a surprisingly fine line separating being responsibly concerned and minding one’s own business. With the Ken situation so fresh, we all questioned things when we might otherwise have just shrugged, looked the other way, or drawn the blinds. Many of us were in shock that abuse had gone on undetected and unsuspected right under our noses for so long. And then we started looking for signs of trouble everywhere. My sister Bif anguished over what she thought she was seeing developing in an inappropriate relationship with some underage island girls and a middle-aged man who had moved to Isle au Haut to work for the electric company. Bif thought she was doing the right thing by approaching the girls’ mothers with her observations and concern. The mothers were by and large insulted by what my sister suggested. Her concerns were unwelcome and denied, leaving Bif questioning her own judgment and wishing she had buried her head in the sand rather than perhaps falsely accuse. Bif was still feeling the sting of the women’s wrath when the electric worker allegedly committed suicide.
The authenticity of the suicide was questioned. There was a note. There was a drifting kayak. There was a wallet found precisely where the note had indicated it would be. But there was no body. And there was rumor of a sighting of the electric worker alive and well and wearing a kayak skirt on the mainland. It was all so seemingly staged, and officials didn’t appear to spend much time searching. But there was an obituary. In my mind, it didn’t really matter whether the man was dead or not. He was gone. He took with him some secret that would never be divulged, and one that made it impossible for him to remain here on the island. Either way, he had been a coward, to my thinking, and had taken the easy way out.
Plunging the murkiness into a shade darker was the sudden and shocking arrest of yet another island male. This one, a lifelong resident, was charged with unlawful sexual contact with a minor. Some of us wondered whether island residents were now hunting witches or whether we actually had perverts under every stone. The overfriendly uncle was hauled off to jail. But he wasn’t there long before an unrelated island resident bailed him out and housed him for a short time while he waited for the legal chips to fall, causing even the most demure among us to ask, “What the fuck?”
It was during this same span of time that a photograph surfaced via e-mail to me and most everyone I knew on the island with a computer. The picture was of Mariah, Ken, and Howard Blatchford. They were all aboard Howard’s boat and had clearly been hauling traps because the focus of the photo was a very large lobster. The caption read “Island Daycare.” I am certain that people distanced from the situation found some humor in this, but it sickened me. And it also raised the question again of whether we had an epidemic or whether our awareness of abuse had been recently heightened. Up until just recently Howard Blatchford was the only sex offender among us, or so we thought. He had made a mistake, had served his time, and now went about his business of fishing and living mostly as a partial exile. Howard had been ostracized by the community for good reason. Nobody wanted him around their children. But Isle au Haut being Isle au Haut, Howard did fish among island lobstermen, although he had been blackballed by our Lobster Association. I had always had a cordial relationship with Howard. I enjoyed an occasional conversation with him. He was a savvy fisherman. He was clever and appeared to make do with very little. I recalled how hard he worked in fighting a house fire that had threatened to total a summer home. He had nearly been in tears. But this perspective was now tainted. Seeing Mariah in this picture standing between these two men nauseated me. And it brought on a whole new onslaught of questions.
The realization that we now had three sexual offenders of children living within a scant population that had diminished to well below fifty was disheartening. When I expressed my dismay to a respected friend, his reply did nothing to make me feel better, although I know it was intended to. “We are right at the national average. It just seems like a lot because we all know one another. Most people living in other places don’t know the child molester next door.” Information like that tends to make you look at everyone differently.
There was a string of lesser disturbances that further fouled the island, or at least my perception of it. Two of our longtime residents appeared to be trying to drink themselves to death. Not that this is in any way close to sexual abuse of children, but it was another boil that came to the surface within or about this same time frame. I’m not talking about getting drunk; I am talking about getting drunk and staying that way. I am talking about being so drunk that you are found in a ditch, unable to walk or talk. Then there was a rumor that the state was coming out with drug-sniffing dogs. I have friends who smoke a lot of pot—some of whom grow their own. Now I worried that marijuana farms would be discovered and we’d be all over the local news with yet another black mark. An island high school student got pregnant. Again, not the end of the world—it happens—but I also heard that she was not certain who the father was.
Once we all adjusted to the idea of a minor having a baby, most of us remembered that babies are happy occasions, and we welcomed the new resident with open arms. We sure needed something positive in the midst of all of the badness. I even hosted a baby shower at my place that was very well attended. It seemed that every time an individual or joint effort forced something fun and positive down our throats, something evil would induce vomiting. I’ve got news for those who believe that bad things come in threes: This crap just kept going, on and on. Every time I spoke with friends I heard another report that made me glad Mariah was away at school. When one of my pals remarked that “we are becoming Matinicus,” I couldn’t muster any evidence to the contrary. Matinicus has always been the butt of jokes about incest, drunkenness, domestic violence, and drug abuse. Isle au Haut was above all of that. Or at least that’s what I once believed. Disillusionment, when cast in the face of a believer as devout as I had been, hit hard.
Being an islander had always been something of a religion. And in my case, coupled with my identity as a fisherman, “islander” described what I valued most. The island had always been a sanctuary, a refuge from mainstream America. Reverent only in these two things, I longed for home while at sea as much as I longed for the sea while home. My beliefs as an islander had now been desecrated. My reverence for life at sea came to the forefront. Everywhere I looked was another sign pointing out that island life was real and hard, and not the idyllic playground I once believed it was. Some of these signs were quite literal. “For Sale” signs popped up on the lawns of summer places in what threatened to become a plaguelike scale. Were people bailing out of what they perceived as a sinking ship? Or was it just a bad economy? Some of our staunch year-rounders became seasonal residents, wintering in faraway, sunny, happy places. I couldn’t pin that on economics. I thrive on hardscrabble
, but minus romanticism, island life is plain old tough with no benefits.
Was this real life? I couldn’t wait for an opportunity to get offshore, where it’s Mother Nature you mostly have to deal with. Human nature isn’t grand enough in the middle of the ocean to spoil breathtaking beauty or lessen the fear or dampen the excitement. Fishing had always been my escape from personal issues that seemed like nothing in comparison to what I had coped with lately. Until now my problems onshore had been too many men and too little money. I could cast the lines from the dock and return to home port three months down the road to no men and, I hoped, enough money to take care of what I had hastily left in payables. But I couldn’t desert my problems now. A kid isn’t like a utilities bill, something I could just shove in a drawer. She sure complicated things.
Friends on and off island—with and without children—told me that life with Mariah would get easier. And I actually believed them for a long time. Eventually I grew to know that my friends didn’t have a clue. The second time I shut off her cell phone for not following the simple rules and for running up seven hundred dollars in overages in just one month, Mariah did seem remorseful. I just didn’t understand how it was possible to send 3,200 texts in a single month while being a full-time student in a rigorous program. I got a hint when grades came out, though. To say that Mariah was not a student would be generous. She landed herself on probation at Evergreen by entertaining a young man in her dorm room—absolutely forbidden. Mariah was pretty pissed at the girl who “ratted her out,” which was symptomatic of the syndrome: Nothing was Mariah’s fault. Her particularly poor grades were due to “stupid teachers.”
The next round of friendly advisers explained that Mariah was testing me. Testing? She’d better not make it too difficult, I thought. I might fail! And looking back, I suppose that some testing was warranted. She had no reason to trust adults. Her experience with people who had had guardianship of her, whether biological or legal, had been bleak. My opinion of her biological situation did not improve over time. Mariah did go to Memphis that Christmas, and she returned with quite a litany of horror stories, and an even worse attitude than what she had left Maine with. My first New Year’s Eve with the kid was a joke. I was optimistic that December 31 would be the end of a bad year. Simon had been gracious enough to agree to celebrate with us and planned a fun night with entertaining Mariah in mind. Simon’s hometown had a history of hosting quite a dazzling “First Night” gala, including a live music venue for teens. Mariah was unsure about joining total strangers at the teen event, and was unhappy about the prospect of spending her New Year’s Eve with “old people.” After much debate, we decided to stick together and enjoy all the activities, including dinner, music, and fireworks. Just before leaving Simon’s house, and after Mariah had polished herself up for the big night, Simon read in the local news that “First Night” had been canceled. Well, this did not go over well with the princess. She bit Simon’s head off and flew into a rage. It was as if Simon had somehow canceled the night himself. And Mariah hadn’t been overly excited about it in the first place. But now she was in a total snit.
Lifesaving Lessons Page 15