The Captain's Daughter

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  Eliza glanced quickly at Mary and then back again. They were passing Jordan’s. Eliza said, “Those are the best root beer floats in the entire universe.”

  Mary said, “I agree,” and after that they were both silent for a while, until Mary said, “I’m sorry. That was rude, what I said.”

  “That’s okay.” Eliza stood on the edge of her thoughts and walked back and forth across them for a while. “I understand why you feel that way.”

  “So what does it depend on?”

  “Well, most important, where’s the father in all of this?”

  She thought about what Russell said at the bar: They think he’s pulling some shit. That guy’s no good.

  Mary said, “I haven’t told him. So he isn’t anywhere in this, yet.”

  There was a long pause. They were on the outskirts of Ellsworth now: the big city. As it were. Eliza waited for Mary to speak, and eventually she said, very quietly, “He gets in these moods—”

  Eliza sucked in her breath and felt a thump in her stomach. She asked, “What kind of moods?”

  “Just these—black moods. Where nothing is right. You turn right here, and then left into the parking lot.” She nodded her head toward the window, and Eliza followed the instructions and then slid into a parking spot. At the same time the GPS announced, “You have reached your destination!”

  FAMILY PLANNING, said the sign. PRENATAL CARE. Eliza turned to face Mary, who was looking steadily to the side, out her window.

  Eliza reminded herself to tread carefully, reminded herself that this girl was not her daughter, that she had no true right to give advice, and said, “Let me ask you this,” said Eliza. “Why are you with him?”

  Mary shrugged and made a funny little motion with her mouth, curling her lip up. “I guess I’m not sure where else to be.”

  Eliza couldn’t believe how swiftly the wave of anger rose up in her, quick as a licking flame. “That’s a terrible answer. Mary, that’s an awful reason.”

  Mary put her knuckles to her mouth and bit them and nodded.

  “I’m sorry if that sounded harsh,” said Eliza, in a softer tone. “But it’s true.”

  Mary nodded again.

  This girl was only four years older than Zoe, only seven years older than Evie! Eliza owed it to her to ask the next question, just as she’d expect someone Zoe or Evie might confide in in a similar situation to ask them. (God, please, seriously, absolutely forbid Zoe or Evie being in a similar situation.) She asked, “Has he ever hurt you?”

  “No. No.” But Mary paused before she said it, she definitely paused. Black moods.

  Eliza pressed on, still looking straight ahead, in case that helped Mary answer more honestly. “Do you think he could?”

  Mary shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “But you don’t know that he couldn’t.” Eliza tightened her grip on the steering wheel even though the car wasn’t moving. She watched the white fill in her knuckles.

  No answer.

  Now she turned toward her. “Mary. You don’t know that he couldn’t, is that right?”

  Mary met Eliza’s gaze, unblinking. “I guess not.”

  “Then you have to leave him. Now, Mary. Right away. I mean it. You can’t be with someone you don’t trust. You can’t have a baby with someone you don’t trust.”

  “I’ll be late,” said Mary. She opened the car door and climbed out.

  Eliza said, “Wait!”

  Mary waited, the door open, her hand on the Audi’s outside door handle. Her hair hung over her face, and if Eliza had been Mary’s mother she would have walked around the car and tucked her hair behind her ear, and then she would have squeezed her shoulders and told her it was all going to be okay.

  Was it, though?

  Eliza sighed and said, “I wish I could decide everything for you, Mary. But I can’t.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Something changed in Mary’s face: a resoluteness seemed to come over it. An adultness, if that was a word. She pressed her lips together.

  “But I can tell you—” said Eliza. She stopped, unsure what to say next.

  Mary looked up from underneath her hair, and the resoluteness gave way to a hopefulness that made Eliza feel disconcerted and inadequate. “What?”

  Eliza cleared her throat. “I can tell you that there are a lot of different ways to be okay.” Mary didn’t say anything, but her gaze was steady, her hand still on the door handle. “All right? You don’t have to say anything. Just nod if that makes sense.”

  Mary nodded.

  “Also, you’re wrong, Mary. I do know. I know.” Mary turned back toward her. “I do. I’ve been where you are now, at almost the same age.”

  Mary looked stricken. “And what did you do?”

  Eliza sighed and folded her hands on the steering wheel. “Well, I don’t have a nineteen-year-old kid, if that tells you anything.” Mary narrowed her eyes at Eliza and then she nodded slowly and started to back away. Eliza said, “I’ll wait here, until you’re finished with your appointment.”

  “Thank you,” Mary said. “Thanks.”

  When Mary was gone, Eliza pushed the seat back and stretched her legs in front of her. Rob would have a fit if he knew she was driving around in his billion-dollar car after running and before showering. She should be sitting on an old towel, like a dog. She’d wipe down the seat when she got back to Little Harbor.

  She opened the Audi’s sunroof and lifted her face to the glorious summer sun. She tried to keep herself from allowing the ghosts of the past to linger. Rob would also have a fit if he knew she was imagining Zoe seventeen and pregnant. She’d try to stop.

  Zoe, whose biggest problem to date was how many people had liked her last Instagram post. Zoe, whose twelve-year molars were not even in yet, even though she was thirteen.

  Why was it so easy to get yourself in trouble, if you were a girl?

  And why was that the expression, getting yourself in trouble? Like it took only one person, like it took only the girl. What kind of a world was this? Eliza wanted to punch the world square in the mouth. Stupid freaking world.

  27

  BARTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  Rob

  Rob had been up with the lark—before the lark, even. Now he was driving down Main Street on his way to pick up bagels for the girls, who were sleeping like a couple of suntanned logs. When he’d checked on his daughters and seen how innocent and vulnerable they’d looked sleeping he’d felt a surge of tenderness for them. Zoe had turned off her iPhone before going to sleep, just the way she was supposed to, and Evie was hugging her giant rabbit like it was a life raft and she a noble drowning girl on the brink of rescue. He’d wanted to do something nice for them. Something parently, something like what Eliza might think to do if she were here. All he could come up with was fresh bagels from the shop downtown. Later that morning, he had to go up to Naples to check out the new floor tile that Mrs. Cabot had chosen, and Judith had a hair appointment she’d made months ago and simply couldn’t cancel. He thought he’d ask the girls to stay home alone rather than make the trip. Bagels might help soothe the desertion.

  Eliza might not approve of the desertion—they left the girls alone to go out in town, but she still called a sitter when they ventured beyond Barton. But he couldn’t very well ask Deirdre for help; she might get the wrong idea. Besides, the girls would be fine. He’d be very strict. No swimming. Limited screen time. Three chores each that had to be completed before his return. He’d pay Zoe to babysit Evie, and then, because Evie hated the idea of being babysat by her own sister, he’d pay Evie to obey Zoe. But he wouldn’t tell Zoe about the arrangement with Evie. It was the perfect backroom deal, shady and clever. And there would be the bagels.

  Eliza, of course, would do the bagels better. She’d know each of the girls’ favorite kinds and whether they liked them toasted and what they liked on them. But Rob didn’t know any of that. To make up for his ignorance he’d get one of every kind, plus two big tubs of cream cheese, one plain,
one flavored. Strawberry.

  Wait, what if they both liked the same type of bagel, and he was perceived to be playing favorites by getting only one of that kind? He’d better get two in every flavor. Zoe was so sensitive these days.

  It was exhausting, being a single parent. And he felt such a constant ache for Eliza; he wished there were more he could do for her, and for Charlie.

  He was so occupied and distracted by his deep and bagely thoughts that he blew through the pedestrian crosswalk on Main Street, completely missing the woman and the black Lab waiting to cross. Pretty much every citizen of Barton had a black Lab—it could have been part of the town’s charter—and he hadn’t gotten a close enough look at the woman to see if he knew her or not. She could have been one of Eliza’s friends, who’d recognize Eliza’s car and slide the story into the Barton gossip wheel: Robert Barnes Almost Ran Over My Dog.

  He’d better take it easy, or all sorts of things would start getting back to Eliza.

  This is how a life went down, it was a fact: one mistake, which might seem innocuous, followed by another, followed by another, until before you knew it you were running down black Labs and their owners in pedestrian crosswalks and kissing your wife’s friends in dive bars. Most likely Bernie Madoff himself had started off with a single ethical failing, something small and relatively harmless. And from there, well, it was easy to slide. The moral slope was so very, very slippery.

  Rob continued down Main until a red light stopped him in front of Barton’s Catholic church, St. Matthew’s. Rob had been raised Protestant, sporadically attending Trinity Church in the Back Bay, but as an architect he appreciated a good, simple house of worship. St. Matthew’s was an eighteenth-century New England church, white, center-steepled, a large gold cross above the narthex. Classic. The landscaping was simple and elegant, well cared for, with a mix of annuals and perennials—daylilies, snapdragons, a neat line of coleus—bordered by a low and tasteful stone wall.

  Rob loved a good New England stone wall; he loved the history behind them, which he’d learned about in architecture school. First exposed during frost heaves after rapid deforestation, the stones were cleared from farmland during the early, arduous days of New England farming, often dumped on the edges of the farms. After such an unceremonious dumping, there was real artistry behind the eventual rebuilding. Rob admired people who could look at a pile of rubble and see something beautiful. Mo Francis put up a stone wall anywhere his clients would allow him to, and some places they didn’t.

  Rob sat for a moment—there were no other cars on the road—thinking about the landscaping at Cabot Lodge. He would suggest that Mrs. Cabot ask the landscaper to include some daylilies; they really would pop against the blue of the lake. Just then, he saw a familiar figure emerge from the side door of the church and hurry toward the parking lot. The figure, a woman, had her head down as though she didn’t want anyone to see her, but even from a little bit of a distance he recognized the set of the narrow shoulders, the legs.

  Deirdre!

  Rob’s palms, beginning to sweat, started to slide on the steering wheel. He checked the rearview mirror: no cars coming down Main. He pulled over to the side of the road. He didn’t even know Deirdre was Catholic. And even if he’d known that he wouldn’t have thought her devout enough to attend church on, of all things, a Thursday morning. Then Rob looked at the sign in front of the church. Beneath the list of Mass times was this: DAILY CONFESSION, 6:30 WEEKDAY MORNINGS.

  Deirdre had been confessing!

  Confessing her sins.

  Confessing Rob.

  Rob was a sin.

  Now he felt worse than ever. Sure, Deirdre had been the one to kiss him. He’d been weakened by his fight with Eliza. You don’t work with your hands. And, admittedly, by the worry he felt over Eliza spending time in her hometown, with her high school boyfriend. And by the strains of building Cabot Lodge. And, of course, by the many, many beers. But he had been the one who’d brought up the Colemans’ holiday party, he’d been the one to stir the pot. And so, in a sense, what had happened had been his fault. And now Deirdre was sneaking out of St. Matthew’s at six forty-five in the morning after telling a priest about it. Not only had he driven Deirdre to that, but he’d hurt Eliza.

  Did it help, confessing? Was regret like the stomach bug, when you ached and ached until finally you disgorged your last two meals and then you felt better almost instantly?

  He got out of the car and loped across the street until he was close enough to Deirdre to call her name. She turned, and when she saw him she frowned. She was dressed conservatively, in tan pants and a blouse with a little ruffled sweater on top. She said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Bagels,” he said. She nodded, as though that explained everything. “Hey,” he continued. “I thought we should talk.”

  “I tried to call you yesterday. You didn’t pick up.”

  “I got—busy,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.” She squinted at him. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, the way she had been at The Wharf Rat, and she looked somehow both older and younger than she had that night. “What…what do you want to talk about?”

  “Well. What happened, I guess.”

  Deirdre cleared her throat and flicked her eyes at him. “What happened is that you kissed me.”

  “Um,” said Rob. “Come again?”

  “You kissed me, Rob,” said Deirdre.

  “What? No, I didn’t. You kissed me.”

  “Did not.”

  “Then why are you at confession, if you don’t think you did anything wrong?”

  “How do you know I was at confession?”

  He jerked his head toward the sign at the front of the church.

  “Then how do you know what I was confessing? Maybe I have other sins, Rob. Maybe I have lots of sins.” She pulled her sweater closer around her. “Anyway. It’s not like we—” She lowered her voice and glanced around. “It’s not like we had sex.”

  “God, no!” said Rob. “It was a silly kiss, nothing.”

  Deirdre chewed on a thumbnail. “Well, you don’t have to look like the idea of having sex with me is abhorrent to you.” She gestured downward, to her tanned, toned body.

  “It’s not. I mean, it is, because I’m married.”

  “You looked like I suggested eating slugs.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did. Are you going to tell Eliza?”

  In a nearby tree, a bird chirped in a manner that was probably flutelike and summer-morning beautiful but in Rob’s addled mind sounded aggressive. “Nooooo. Are you going to tell Eliza?”

  “No.” She crossed her arms carefully in front of her.

  Another bird joined in, then another. (Show-offs.) There was no equivocation in Deirdre’s answer.

  He thought about Charlie’s tumor. Recurrence rate of nearly one hundred percent, even if treated. Pressing down on the part of his brain responsible for vision. The fact that Charlie wouldn’t consider any treatment was killing Eliza: as a former med student, as a daughter, as a person who truly believed that you should give up on something only when you’d exhausted all of your options. “No,” he repeated. “I feel bad enough to think that I hurt her. I don’t see any reason to burden her with the hurt. For nothing.”

  Deirdre nodded slowly and then said, “You’d better hurry up, they always sell out of cinnamon raisin early.”

  “Huh?”

  Deirdre sighed—it was the exasperated sigh women had been directing at men since time began. “Cinnamon raisin,” she repeated. “Zoe’s favorite.”

  “Right,” said Rob. “I know. Of course I know what her favorite is.” (In fact, he had thought it was sesame.) “And Evie’s is plain.”

  “Used to be plain,” she corrected. “Now it’s everything.”

  Was there no solace for the dad who was trying his best?

  “Before I go,” said Rob.

  Deirdre said, “Yes?” a little too eagerly, in a way that caused a twinge in his
heart.

  “I was just wondering if you found my lucky coin. If it fell out when we—” He decided not to pursue the verb after all. “If it fell out in your car.”

  “You have a lucky coin?”

  “Yes,” he said defensively. How little Deirdre knew about him, after all! “It’s a ten-baht. From Thailand. From my dad, from when I was a kid.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her face softened. “No, sorry. I didn’t see it.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Well, bye, Deirdre.”

  “Bye, Rob.”

  She started back toward her car and he toward his, then Deirdre called after him, so he turned back. “Don’t worry, Rob,” she said. “I meant what I said. I’m not going to go all Fatal Attraction on you. I’m not going to boil your bunny!”

  “I didn’t think you were,” he said. Then, after a beat: “We don’t even have a bunny.”

  Deirdre turned toward the parking lot and pointed her key at the Tahoe, pressing the unlock button until the car beeped.

  “One more thing,” said Rob, and she turned toward him with a hopeful expression that made him cringe. He hurried his words out, lest she get the wrong idea. “Did it help?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Confessing. Did it help? Do you feel better?”

  She looked at him for a long time, and finally she said, “No. I don’t feel better. I feel like the worst friend in the world, and like a terrible wife. I feel like shit.”

  ———

  Two and a half hours later, at Cabot Lodge, Rob held, in his sullied hands, a square of the reclaimed tile from the English castle that Mrs. Cabot had discovered in Vermont.

  The tile was gorgeous; he agreed with Mrs. Cabot.

  “It comes from an eighteenth-century English castle up in the north of the country,” Mrs. Cabot said. “Let me see, I wrote down the name of the castle somewhere, I’m just looking—” She plunged her hand into her giant Louis Vuitton bag and rummaged around. “I can’t find it anywhere! It was right here, I’m sure, on a little sticky note, before I left the house.”

  “That’s okay,” said Rob. “You can tell me later.”