The Captain's Daughter

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  Eliza took Charlie to Val’s to have the conversation. They couldn’t talk properly in Charlie’s house—it would be too easy for Charlie to walk away, start fiddling with his truck or the traps waiting for repair in the backyard, or something. She figured that even one-armed he’d find a way to ignore her.

  It was late in the morning and all of the fishermen were out on the water. They didn’t pass by the harbor on their way to Val’s but she imagined the Joanie B, swaying alone on its mooring. They’d need a viable plan, soon, for taking care of Charlie’s traps.

  Val’s was almost empty. The only other customers were sitting on the same side of a bench in one of the booths. Tourists, if ever tourists there were. They were Brooklynish hipsters, the guy with a man bun and the woman with a turquoise T-shirt featuring a cat wearing its own hipster spectacles. Both were looking around with moderately eager expressions; you could tell they were spending the week in Bar Harbor and had Yelped the place, looking for a Genuine Down East Experience. You could tell that even though they were super happy to have found it they were also too hip to reveal the true depths of their excitement.

  Both Eliza and Charlie optimistically ordered the Fisherman’s Breakfast, Val’s specialty—optimistically, because the Fisherman’s Breakfast was massive. Eliza could see the hipster couple watching them and then looking back at the menu, pointing. Oh, for heaven’s sake, thought Eliza. Go back to Greenpoint and leave us in peace. She would have made that joke to Charlie, but she was pretty sure he didn’t know where or what Greenpoint was, and why should he?

  These were the same mugs Val had been serving her coffee in since time began: off-white, chipped in places, sturdy on the bottom, thick handles. And the counter stools were also the same. In Barton they would be called retro and the Coopers or the Rackleys would use them to outfit a basement bar. Here they were just old stools.

  “Okay, Dad,” said Eliza. “Sit down. We’re going to talk about this right now.”

  They were already sitting, both of them, but the exhortation had been part of Eliza’s rehearsed speech and she forgot to revise based on current circumstances. A small misstep, but nothing she couldn’t recover from, and Charlie was too kind or too stubborn to point it out. She pulled out a small black notebook where she’d written down her plan of attack. She’d started creating it on the Fourth of July, belowdecks.

  “Here we go, Dad. You’re not going to believe what I figured out when I was home—”

  Charlie sipped his coffee and watched her, saying nothing.

  “Wow, Eliza, what did you figure out when you were home?” said Eliza. She used that voice she used when her children were ignoring her and she said to them what she wished they were saying to her. Her children loved when she did that. No they didn’t, not at all, a lot of eye rolling always ensued. Even Evie was learning how to roll her eyes.

  Charlie remained impassive. His shoulders were slumped forward and he was using one hand on the table to steady himself. She could see in the way his cheeks sagged the effort this little breakfast outing of hers was taking him. And yet he’d said, okay, sure, let’s go to Val’s.

  She could almost see the tumor growing, invading the surrounding tissue, expanding, expanding, expanding. How big would it be now? The skull was so rigid, that goddamn tumor was pressing against it all the time. They had to shrink it right away.

  That had been one of Evie’s first full phrases, she was only two, toddling around, still in a diaper, saying, “More apple juice right away, Mommy.” Or: “Need to watch Doc McStuffins right away.”

  Val took the hipsters’ orders and disappeared into the kitchen. “So I’ll just go ahead and tell you,” Eliza said. “It starts with a coincidence.” Charlie blinked and gave a slight nod and drank some coffee.

  Eliza told him about Zachary Curry, and about the clinical trial. She told him about the enrollment process.

  Charlie cleared his throat, put down his coffee cup, and said, “No, Eliza.”

  “Even if you’re not selected for this trial, Dad, they can do the chemo from there, or radiation, however they decide to treat. I’d just really like to see you at a hospital with a research focus. It makes such a difference in a field where things are changing all the time. Some of these new therapies are genetically targeted, and that’s what you want to have at your dis—”

  “Eliza.”

  A tone in his voice stopped her. She’d been looking down at her notes while she talked, but now she looked up.

  “I said no. I’m not interested in going to Boston.”

  “Listen, Dad, they’re the cream of the crop down there. I know it seems like a haul, but you’re not going alone. Obviously. I got us an appointment next week. I’ll take you down. All you have to do is listen. Just listen to the recommendations, and we’ll take it from there.”

  “No. Not interested, Eliza.”

  “Or don’t even listen! Just sit there, plug your ears, I don’t care, and I’ll listen. I’ll listen! All you have to do is be there. Bring your brain, and be there.”

  One of the hipsters dropped a spoon, and it clattered to the floor. Val appeared, filled the hipsters’ coffee cups, brought a new spoon, looked significantly at Eliza and Charlie.

  “Eliza. You’re not the only one that can look things up, you know. I went to the library and did some of my own research. I know what’s coming. I know all about it.”

  He’d gone to the library! Little Harbor’s tiny library was open three hours a day, three days a week. Less in the winter, if you could believe it. Eliza imagined Charlie bellying up to the single computer, typing his own terminal disease into the search bar. The image made her want to cry. What would have come up for Charlie, of course, would be the very same information Eliza herself had found: a poor prognosis, an exhausting treatment plan that, if pursued, would leave him ravaged, buying himself maybe a few extra months, maybe a year, maybe more, but at what cost?

  “I’m not interested,” he said, “in suffering like your mother did.”

  “You’re not suffering yet, Dad! You look great.”

  This, obviously, was not accurate. Charlie didn’t look great at all. In all of Eliza’s thirty-seven years Charlie had never looked worse, or weaker, or more hopeless. Eliza knew that it wasn’t so much about the pain with this sort of tumor—the brain doesn’t have pain receptors, that was part of Year One Neuroscience—but his visual field cuts would get larger and larger, his fatigue would get worse and worse, his appetite would all but disappear, and that was just the beginning.

  He said, “Yuh.”

  “Dad! You’re giving up, before you’ve even tried anything. We have to at least meet with a doctor in Boston. We have to do as much as we can.”

  Val delivered them an obscene amount of food that neither one of them was going to touch. Eliza’s stomach rolled over once, twice, three times. The Fisherman’s Breakfast comprised two eggs any style, a giant pancake, two pieces of French toast, and two pieces of bacon. Charlie made no move toward his fork. Eliza gamely took up the maple syrup and squirted some on the pancake and the top piece of French toast.

  “Is this about the insurance?” she asked. “Because you know Rob and I can cover it, whatever it costs—”

  He watched her for a moment and then said, “It’s got nothing to do with insurance.”

  “But you don’t give up. You’re tougher than this. I know you are.” Charlie Sargent was tough with a capital T. Ten years earlier, when a few guys from a nearby harbor were cutting traps in Little Harbor’s waters, Charlie had tracked the guys down and knocked them from here to Southwest Harbor, all by himself, no backup. If they’d come back he would have done it again, whatever it took. But they never came back.

  Just two years ago, when there was talk of heroin coming in over the water from Canada, Charlie and some of the other fishermen had said, Not in our harbor, asshole, found the guy responsible, and paid him a middle-of-the-night visit that they never talked about. The guy went packing.

&
nbsp; Charlie had put his beautiful wife in the ground. When they threw the first shovelful of dirt on Joanie’s grave and Eliza couldn’t even see through the tears—she was crying with those giant, gulping sobs, crying so hard Val handed her tissue after tissue after tissue and she’d soaked through all of them—Charlie had gripped Eliza’s free hand and looked stoically ahead, blinking hard but never crying.

  He was tough!

  When Eliza was seventeen, Charlie threw his back out one night and hauled the next day as though nothing was wrong. He came home that evening—regular time, no earlier than usual—pale and shaking. Later his sternman told another captain that Charlie had vomited twice over the gunwale from the pain, but every single one of his traps in that day’s rotation was properly tended and rebaited and sent back down, and then he went back out and did it all again the next day.

  Charlie Sargent was the toughest of the tough.

  “You’re tough enough to beat this thing,” she added. Then she cringed, hearing herself say that: it was such a nonmedical, vague, and ultimately ineffective way to approach the situation. And also it wasn’t true. Tough didn’t really have a part to play in this scenario. Glioblastomas were universally fatal, no matter who you were.

  And even so, even knowing all of this, there was still that part of her that said, Fight, Dad. That said, Don’t give up. That said, You might be the one to beat the odds, why not, why shouldn’t it be you? That was the daughter part of her, not the medical part of her, of course. The medical part of her knew better. But the daughter part had a louder voice.

  “I know they can’t take out the tumor, Eliza. They told me that already, in Ellsworth. You know what they also told me? That if they tried, there’s a good chance I’d end up blind.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said, although she knew it was true; since the tumor was in the occipital area of the brain, blindness was a very likely outcome of surgery.

  “You ever met a blind lobsterman?”

  “Dad—”

  “Did you?”

  “Maybe not,” she said.

  “Course you haven’t. ’Cause there ain’t any.”

  “But there’s chemo, radiation, clinical trials. What are your other options, Dad? Are you just going to sit around and let this happen to you?” She tried not to let her voice rise to a hysterical level, but it was hard.

  Charlie talked over her and waved his fork for emphasis.

  “I don’t need to go to some upscale doctor in Boston to find out this thing is going to kill me. I know that already. Something bad happens, some emergency, I can drive myself to Ellsworth and see a doctor there.”

  “You can’t drive if you have double vision. You can’t drive if all of the straight lines have gone wavy on you! Or if you can’t see out of the right side of both of your eyes.”

  Charlie considered that. “Fair enough. Val’ll drive me.”

  “You are so exasperating, Dad!”

  He shrugged and cut into his pancake and said, “I’ve been called worse. I expect I’ll be called worse again before I die. Now you listen to me, Eliza, and you listen good. I watched your mother fight through cancer. I watched her waste away right in front of my eyes. I watched her lips crack and her hair fall out and her appetite leave her. I watched her until she didn’t recognize me and she didn’t recognize you and she didn’t know what the hell she was doing anymore on God’s green earth. I don’t want to put you through watching me fight. I don’t want to put myself through the fighting, neither. I don’t.”

  That’s when she lost it—never mind the Brooklynites, never mind Val, never mind the pimpled teenager who washed dishes for Val, never mind any of it. The tears came and she let them slide down her face like rain down a window. She didn’t care. She wiped a big glob of snot with a napkin that already had maple syrup on it and she didn’t care about that either. She cried like a little girl and between sobs she said, “I can’t lose you too. It’s not fair, Dad. It’s not fair. I need you. It’s not fair. I’ll be all alone.”

  Charlie put down his fork and reached for her hand and covered it with his own bigger, calloused one, and he said, “You don’t need me anymore.”

  “Yes I do! I do!”

  “You’ve got your own family, Rob and the girls.”

  “I do need you. You’ve got grandkids. They love you. They need you. We can’t lose you.”

  “You’re losing me anyway, Eliza.”

  “Stop it, Dad. Don’t say that. You’re not allowed to say that.”

  “It’s true, honey. And I’d rather not have my body all stove up by a bunch of doctors down in Boston into the bargain. Just take it how I’m saying it. Take me at my word.”

  Charlie Sargent’s word was solid gold, everyone knew that. He asked anyone in town to take him at his word and they’d do it without a second thought and normally Eliza would too, but this time she couldn’t. She wouldn’t! Eliza stared hard at the cat wearing spectacles on the Brooklyn T-shirt. “No,” she said. “I won’t. I won’t let you just give up. I don’t accept that. I’m sorry, but I don’t. I’m not leaving here without you.”

  Charlie picked his fork back up and filled it with food that never made it to his mouth. “Well, then,” he said, “I guess you’re not leaving.”

  19

  LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE

  Eliza

  “Hey, Eliza. You up for hauling with me tomorrow?” That had been Russell, on the phone.

  She’d thought that he’d been joking. Hilarious. Tell me another. She’d said, “I’m sure that would be entertaining for you, Russell, but my dad has an appointment to get his stitches removed, so I’m afraid I’m not available.”

  “I know about the appointment. Val can take him, I already asked her. I need a sternman for tomorrow, just for tomorrow.”

  “Why do you know about my dad’s—oh, never mind.” Small-town life. Not that Barton wasn’t small, it was, but next to Little Harbor it was a bustling, full-blown metropolis. “You don’t need a sternman,” she said. “You have a sternman. You have Gavin Tracey.” Gavin Tracey had been hauling with Russell all summer.

  Russell coughed and said, “My sternman’s useless.” Zoe had told Eliza a few months ago that when a healthy person coughed or cleared his throat before speaking he or she was probably lying. It was a signpost. This was one of the fascinating and sometimes useful pieces of information Zoe had picked up from obsessively watching Brain Games on the National Geographic Channel.

  “That’s the first I ever heard of a Tracey being useless,” Eliza said. The Traceys were hardworking and loyal; most of them came out of the womb holding a V-notch.

  Not literally, of course.

  On the phone she heard a familiar sound that she knew was Russell sucking air in through the gap between his front teeth. He’d never gotten the space fixed. Children in Little Harbor did not get their teeth fixed or their palates expanded or their eyes checked or their reading deficits tutored as a matter of course the way they did in Barton. She herself had a slightly crooked eyetooth and still, in the odd moment, alone in front of a mirror, considered (and then always quickly abandoned the idea of) adult braces.

  “All right. He’s not useless, but he needs the day off tomorrow and the lobsters are really friggin’ crawling. I can’t keep up. I’m stuck.”

  “You’re stuck? There’s nobody else in the whole town you can ask to haul with you, Russell?” By this point Eliza was arguing more for show than anything else. A big chunk of her wanted to know if she still had it in her.

  “Okay, okay, Eliza. Are you going to make me say it?”

  “I think I am.”

  “I want to haul Charlie’s traps while we’re out there. Someone should. Some of the guys offered but he wouldn’t let anyone.”

  Eliza knew it was killing Charlie to leave his traps untended, so she let Russell continue. Technically, they needed permission from Marine Patrol to haul someone’s traps.

  “I thought if you came with me he’d be okay wi
th it. Anyway, we won’t tell him until it’s all done, until we give him the money, and he’s not going to get mad at you.”

  “Okay,” Eliza said, a little frisson of excitement bubbling up despite herself. “Fine. I’ll haul with you. What time are you going to pick me up, around seven thirty?”

  “Yuh.”

  “Really?” He was taking it easy on her. Nice.

  “Hell no, Eliza, of course not. Day’s practically over by seven thirty. Why don’t you go ahead and set your alarm for four. Unless you need to do your hair first.”

  “Go to hell, Russell.” Do her hair.

  “Pick you up at four thirty.”

  “Fine.”

  Now they were, improbably but also inevitably, on the way to Russell’s boat, a forty-seven-foot fiberglass beauty named Legacy. Eliza was wearing the clothes Russell had brought her: a pair of boots that were slightly too big, overalls that fit dismayingly well. She actually looked the part. White cotton gloves, because that’s what the full-timers wore. It was the part-timers who wore the blue rubber gloves; the full-timers always had the tanks of hot water to warm their hands in when it was really cold. You got a real ribbing on the VHF if you wore the blue gloves. “You washing dishes over there?” she remembered her dad saying to someone more than once. “You just get your nails done and don’t want to mess them up?”

  Lobsterman humor was a very specific kind of humor.

  The sun was rising spectacularly, pinks and oranges that later would turn to a clear and cloudless blue. That was the best part of summer hauling: the sunrises. In the fall it was the way the mist hung over the harbor, and in the winter, well, it was when the day was done.

  Russell’s skiff had an outboard motor; Charlie still rowed his with oars, he was as old school as it got. Lots of the fishermen’s houses in Little Harbor had an old-fashioned skiff in the front yard, given over as a plaything when it got too old to serve its original purpose. Kids would fool around in them, practicing hauling traps, pretending to be their daddies.

  “Think you could still row a skiff if you had to, Eliza?” Russell asked, pulling the rope on his outboard.