The Captain's Daughter

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  But these posters were talking about violence, hitting and pushing and hurting, actual hurting. Violence, not impatience. These posters had nothing to do with her, with Josh. She wasn’t these women. She didn’t need a card. When she was done she placed the cup in the little window, as Sarah had instructed her to do.

  Mary was relieved to learn that she didn’t have to take off her clothes for an exam, that the nurse practitioner would just talk to her once they had the results of the test. The nurse practitioner, Patricia, was older and taller than Sarah and had the slim body and leathery skin of a passionate hiker or a long-distance runner. She shook Mary’s hand and smiled, and when she smiled deep creases formed around her eyes. She said, very carefully, like the words were infants who required special care, “We have the results of your test. It’s just as you thought, Mary, you’re pregnant. About eight weeks, based on the date of your last period.”

  Even though Mary knew this already she realized that she’d been hoping for the test to prove her wrong. She thought, unexpectedly, of Ms. Berry writing a complicated problem on the board and looking to Mary to solve it.

  “Now,” said Patricia, “I’m sure you’ve been thinking about your options…”

  She waited and looked at Mary until Mary nodded.

  “And if you’ve made up your mind one way or the other we don’t have to spend too much time talking about all of them.” She waited again.

  “I haven’t,” whispered Mary. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “Not a problem,” said Patricia easily. She opened a drawer and selected papers from three different piles. “We have information here on abortion, adoption, and carrying to term and raising the baby yourself. I’ll give you all of these when you leave.”

  She laid the papers on the counter and looked again at Mary. Mary cleared her throat and said, “For, um.” She couldn’t get the word out, she kept tripping on it. “For an abortion.” Patricia waited. “How, um. How long…” Get it together, Mary, she told herself sternly. She cleared her throat again and thought of Andi and Daphne and how kindly they spoke to her, and how they used to tease her about Josh being her beau, making it all sound so innocent and fun, like something out of a movie about American high schools. She felt like she’d disappointed them, of all people, by getting into this situation. She said, “When would I need to? Decide by.”

  “We do not perform abortions here,” said Patricia kindly, and Mary thought what a funny word perform was in this context. Like this whole thing was a play or a YouTube video. Entertainment. “We can give you information on the procedure, but if you want to go that route you’d need to go to a clinic in Bangor. We can give you contact information for that clinic. The laws in the state of Maine dictate that abortions can be performed up until twenty-two weeks. But there is a limit to how far individual doctors and clinics are willing to go. In Bangor the latest is thirteen weeks and six days. After fourteen weeks you’d need to go to a Planned Parenthood clinic or down to Massachusetts.”

  “Thirteen weeks and six days,” repeated Mary softly. It was such a specific number of days.

  “That gives you some time from now,” said Patricia. “You would need to make an appointment earlier, of course. And if you’re certain about it, the earlier the better, it makes things easier all around.” She squinted at Mary, and Mary wondered how many times a day or a week she said things like that. “If you’re not certain, of course you want to make sure you are. We encourage patients who aren’t certain to at least call the clinic in Bangor and to make an appointment to get more specific information.”

  Except for that time she’d waited for him at the wharf, Mary had lately been avoiding Josh. She had it in her mind that after this appointment things would somehow change, that she’d be able to tell him, or that the need to tell him would magically have disappeared. When he showed up at the café, Mary ducked into the bathroom and asked Daphne to tell him she wasn’t working that day. If he came to her house she planned to turn off all of the lights and lock the door and hide under the covers. But Josh hardly ever came to her house.

  “Lover’s spat?” Daphne inquired. “Oh, too bad. I’m sure you’ll get over it. These things happen.”

  “Daph and I used to fight like cats and dogs,” said Andi cheerfully. “Now we’re older, who has the energy?”

  Mary laughed the way she thought they wanted her to laugh and pushed the broom vigorously into the corner of the café, where muffin crumbs congregated.

  Now Mary took a deep, shuddering breath that felt like it traveled all the way down to her toes. Did the baby inside her feel that breath? Did he or she sense where Mary was at that very moment, what she was talking about?

  “What about my mom? Does she need to sign a form or something?”

  “Doesn’t have to be your mom,” said Patricia. “A trusted adult needs to be involved in the decision for someone under eighteen. That can be a grandparent or someone else. And if you have no trusted adult in your life there are licensed staff at the clinics who can fill that role.”

  Mary thought again of Andi and Daphne; she thought of Ms. Berry. She even thought of the phone number Eliza Sargent had tapped into her cell phone at the wharf. She couldn’t, in a million years, imagine asking any of these warm and wonderful women to help her undo her pregnancy. Undo. It sounded so easy and technical, put that way. Delete.

  Mary tried to read from Patricia’s tone of voice what she thought Mary should do. Surely she had some opinion! But her voice was easy and neutral, just like Sarah’s had been. She was giving nothing away.

  “Now. If you’re considering carrying the pregnancy to full term, Mary, we have information on here on proper prenatal care, including vitamins, healthy food, and so on. We don’t offer prenatal care at this clinic, but we can give you a list of doctors who do. Getting your baby off to a healthy start now is essential. If you’re smoking, if you’re drinking, if you’re using drugs, any of these actions can be extremely harmful to the fetus.”

  “Okay,” said Mary obediently. “I’m not.”

  At the front desk, Mary was relieved to learn that the clinic charged for visits on a sliding scale; for those without insurance and no ability to pay there was no charge, just a voluntary donation. Mary dug in her wallet for a five-dollar bill, which seemed inadequate—less than a movie!—but the woman took it with a smile. The people at this clinic seemed to be the least judgy people on the planet. Mary was almost sorry to leave.

  Now she had the pamphlets (literature, the bosomy lady at the desk called it—another funny word, in Mary’s opinion); she had a packet of prenatal vitamins; she had a list of care practices in Ellsworth and Bangor; and she had a gnawing sensation in the center of her body that could have been hunger or panic but more likely was the certainty of her future settling in like an anchor.

  The only, only thing that sounded good to Mary after that was a root beer float, so she pulled into Jordan’s on Route One on the way home. When she was younger and her father still took his weekend fathering duties seriously, he used to bring her here to sit at one of the wooden picnic tables with a grilled cheese and a vanilla soft-serve. Thinking of grilled cheese now made her stomach turn over.

  She realized her mistake as soon as she turned the ignition off and saw Alyssa Michaud climbing out of her father’s steel-gray Jeep Cherokee. A little-known fact about Alyssa was that she had failed her driver’s test three times—twice for inadequate parallel parking and once for driving on the wrong side of the road at the very beginning of the test. (“I thought it still counted as the parking lot.”)

  Mary knew this because she and Alyssa had once been best friends; in fact, they’d been best friends all the way through junior year, when Tyler Wasson had dumped Mary in favor of Alyssa. He later dumped Alyssa too. After that, Alyssa got serious about college and Mary got serious about Josh.

  So it was a miracle that Alyssa Michaud was even driving, but anyway. Here she was, in the Jordan’s parking lot, catching Mary
’s glance and heading her way.

  Alyssa was wearing a baseball cap with—of course—BATES written across it in maroon. Alyssa was the top in their (tiny) graduating class and was going to college in Lewiston, where she was going to walk from one brick building to another and (according to the catalog in Alyssa’s bedroom that Mary had seen, before everything went down) spend a lot of time lying on beds of colorful leaves with stacks of books by her side. Alyssa’s father owned a Jeep dealership in Ellsworth, and when she was a junior her parents had paid for a college counselor to walk her through the application process, and now, here she was, in a Bates cap, wearing white short-shorts and platform flip-flops. It was hard not to resent her for all of those things.

  Mary had lived in Maine her whole life and she couldn’t remember a single time she’d lain on a bed of colorful leaves. By the time the leaves fell, the ground was always damp and cold and you wouldn’t want to lie around on it. But, to be fair, maybe the weather was different in Lewiston.

  “Hey!” said Alyssa. “Long time no see, stranger.” Her face, to Mary’s surprise, looked genuinely happy.

  Mary glanced behind her to make sure her literature wasn’t visible from the car window. In a place like this, her news would be practically broadcast across the very high frequency radio—the VHF—before she even got home if Alyssa found out about it. She blocked the car with her body just in case.

  “Hey,” said Mary. She worked up a smile and threw it at Alyssa, waited to see if it stuck. Alyssa’s hair looked shampoo-commercial bright and shiny, and her T-shirt was so thin and tight you could see her belly button and her toned ab muscles. Mary felt a powerful spasm of envy.

  “Whatcha doing over here?”

  “Nothing,” said Mary. “Just getting some stuff done, day off. Thought I’d get a root beer float.”

  “I love the root beer floats here,” said Alyssa firmly. “They’re the best. I might get one too. Or maybe a clam roll.”

  At the mention of clam rolls Mary’s stomach again rocked dangerously. How could she be so hungry and so nauseous at the same time?

  Alyssa jerked her head toward Route One and said, “I’m actually on my way back to the nail salon. This gel color lasted, like, a minute. I’m going to scream at them.” For evidence she held up her hands.

  “You should,” said Mary, although she actually thought that Alyssa should not, and also that she probably would not. She peered at Alyssa’s nails; the only thing she could see wrong was a tiny bare spot on one pinky.

  “I haven’t seen you in forever,” Alyssa said, kicking at the parking lot’s asphalt with a flip-flop.

  “Yeah,” said Mary. She stared hard at the giant representation of a soft-serve ice-cream cone that had stood on the roof of the restaurant since long before Mary had had her first root beer float. “I’ve been busy. Working.”

  Alyssa squinted and blew a strand of hair up toward the rim of the cap. “Good for you,” she said. “I should have gotten a job this summer, I’ve just been going to the beach.” She looked with manufactured dismay at her tanned legs.

  “Screw ’em,” Vivienne had said, after Tyler dumped Mary for Alyssa. Mary had taken the unusual step of crying in Vivienne’s arms, that’s how badly she’d been hurt by the betrayal. She wasn’t ready to have sex with Tyler, that was part of the problem, and apparently Alyssa was. Vivienne had never liked Alyssa; she thought she “put on airs” because her dad owned that dealership in Ellsworth and her mother had some mysterious secret store of money. “That little bitch was always too big for her britches,” Vivienne had said, stroking Mary’s hair with uncharacteristic tenderness, not even mentioning that she could use a conditioning treatment. Mary remembered wincing at the word choice, but she also remembered that it felt good to have her mother on her side.

  “You’ll find someone else,” Vivienne had gone on. “You should come out with me and the girls after work. We’ll show you a good time, show you how it’s done.”

  “Um,” Mary had said. “Maybe?” Vivienne was young to be the mother of somebody Mary’s age, for sure, but she wasn’t Mary’s age; she was still her mother, and Mary couldn’t envision a scenario where she’d want Vivienne or “the girls” to “show her how it’s done.”

  It didn’t occur to Mary for a long time, not until after the summer had taken all of its tragic—and just very occasionally comic—twists and turns, that maybe Vivienne could have suggested to Mary a different kind of immediate future, maybe one without a boy or a man in it.

  Mary started to move with little shuffling steps toward the counter. It was only eleven but already a line was forming: lots of older tourists (RV types) in L.L. Bean shirts, a few unfamiliar teenage girls in spaghetti-strap tanks. Mary was trying to work her mouth around a farewell that would show Alyssa that there were no hard feelings anymore, that she wished her well in college, but before she could make the words fit together a great wave of food odor—not just clams, but fries and shrimp and scallops and the ubiquitous lobster roll—swelled forward and hit her with a force as powerful and surprising as a punch. Then everything in front of her separated into rainbow-colored pixels and Alyssa moved to the very edges of her vision as Mary hit the ground.

  12

  BARTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  Eliza

  Eliza had spent hours trying to get her dad to come to Barton with her, with no luck, and by the time she’d given up she hadn’t wanted to start home after all. The roads leading out of Little Harbor were so long and winding and lonely, and Eliza was a terrible night driver—she always had been.

  She’d gotten up with the sun to drive home instead; she’d left so early that The Cup wasn’t open. Val’s was open. Privately Eliza was not a fan of Val’s coffee.

  During the drive to Barton, Eliza thought again about the meeting with Phineas Tarbox, which had come about after their previous attorney had retired and moved to Florida. Years ago, their previous attorney had walked them through the creation of their wills, their estate planning, all the minutiae of living in an adult, responsible world. Then, when he notified them that he was leaving the business, Rob had been anxious to get their affairs settled elsewhere.

  Affairs settled? thought Eliza. Are you planning on dying, Rob?

  “I’ll just feel better,” Rob said. “When everything is taken care of.”

  Better than what, Rob? Eliza had wanted to ask, but hadn’t.

  It had begun as sort of a nice evening. Phineas had only the last slot in his day free, a five o’clock appointment, and they planned to go for tapas and sangria after.

  “We are pathetic!” said Eliza. “Our Date Night is a trip to talk about wills.” But she was looking forward to the tapas and the sangria.

  They’d sat with Phineas Tarbox, who turned out to be a jocular, suntanned man with large hands and minty breath, and gone over all of the paperwork submitted by the previous attorney’s office. And, yes, Eliza’s eyes did glaze over a little bit with all of the details, and, yes, she did spend some time studying the law school diploma on the wall (Yale) to verify that his name really was Phineas Tarbox.

  It was.

  Then, suddenly, Phineas Tarbox was frowning.

  “There’s just one thing,” he said. He flipped through the papers. “I don’t see that you’ve appointed guardians for your children.” He frowned harder, and the suggestion of a crease appeared between his brows. Only the suggestion, though—he probably got Botox. Men did, these days, rich men.

  “I thought we did that,” said Rob. He glanced at Eliza.

  Eliza shifted uneasily. “I’m not sure. Did we?”

  Phineas shuffled the papers some more. “You didn’t. I don’t see it here—no, no, you haven’t. It’s not here anywhere. So that’s something we’ll want to take care of right away.” He looked up, flashed a courteous smile. “It’s not uncommon, people begin the process before they have children, maybe, and then they forget to complete it, and then they turn around and their kids are—”

 
“Thirteen and ten,” said Eliza.

  “Right,” said Phineas. “Exactly. As long as you’re ready to pull the trigger—just an expression, of course!—we can draw up the papers right now, and you can sign them here, and then you can go on your merry way.”

  “Great,” said Rob. “We can pull the trigger anytime. The guardian will be my mother, Judith Barnes.” He said this very firmly.

  “Hang on,” said Eliza.

  “I adore Judith,” said Phineas. His smile was odd enough (almost coquettish) to make Eliza wonder if something besides paperwork had passed between Phineas and Judith. “I simply adore her,” Phineas added. Eliza could smell the mint on his breath.

  “Many do,” said Rob.

  Phineas made some notes on a Post-it. Eliza stage-whispered to Rob, “We’ve never discussed this.” She couldn’t believe how easily he’d answered the question. How presumptuously. Like the script had been written, and he was just reading from it. She turned to Phineas and said, “I’m sorry. But I don’t think we’re prepared to—I mean, we haven’t…”

  Phineas looked from Rob to Eliza and back to Rob again. He tented his fingers and nodded kindly. He smiled so that the little crinkles around his mouth deepened into rich-person wrinkles, the kind created on ski slopes and sailboats and nurtured by the Monaco sunshine. This probably happened all the time, in his office, in his line of work, this sort of confusion. Didn’t it? Did it?

  Rob said, “Eliza.”

  “We’re not going to die, Rob,” said Eliza. “I mean, both of us? What are the odds?”