The Captain's Daughter

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “Of course you’re welcome too,” said Judith. “You and your father.”

  Eliza tried not to laugh in Judith’s face at that, but it was difficult; the image was riotous. Sick or not, Charlie Sargent would rather eat a fistful of sandy lobster shells than put on a collared shirt (which he might or might not own) to eat at the yacht club with the summer people. He’d do The Lobster Trap, because of the girls, but he’d draw a hard line at the yacht club. Eliza was trying not to be rude, so she demurred politely and said Charlie was tired. She told her daughters to put on sundresses and she sent them on their way.

  It was arranged that Eliza would pick up the girls when dinner was over so Judith didn’t have to drive them back. (This was Eliza’s idea, to prevent Judith from tipsily piloting her BMW down the Point’s winding road.) As she drove to the club, she lowered the window and breathed in the truly excellent summer air. There really was something about it—it was as if the fog that rolled in almost every night had its very own texture. You breathed it in, of course, but you also absorbed it through your very pores, and somehow you felt cleaner for it. It was a magical time of night, a bit past twilight but not quite dark, and she could see figures on the porch of one of the big summerhouses; she could practically hear the ice tinkling in the glasses and smell the limes from the gin and tonics.

  She got to the club early and stood silently near a small window that looked into the dining room where the girls were finishing dinner with Judith and Gail Byron. The table was clear of dishes; the women were drinking coffee, and Evie and Zoe had glasses in front of them with what looked like the dregs of Shirley Temples. Each girl still had a napkin on her lap and Evie was telling a story that involved lots of gesticulating.

  Everybody at the table had a head tipped back in what looked like genuine laughter. From the get-go, from the time she’d said her first word (pajamas—three syllables!) at eighteen months, Evie had known how to tell a story.

  But there was something else that made Eliza’s heart stagger and wobble along in that particular way. Standing there in the dark, an outsider in the literal sense of the word, practically trampling on the hydrangea bushes that circled the building, she had to wait for a moment to figure it out.

  Yes, here it was.

  Her children were utterly comfortable and at ease at that table, in Eliza’s own hometown, in a place she’d never been as a guest and wouldn’t have known what to do if she had been. Her children knew which fork to use for shrimp cocktail! While deep down Eliza was still the scrappy kid she’d been at their ages: riding around on lobster boats, baiting traps, biting her nails, refusing to comb her hair, dirty hands, dirty feet, dirty mouth. Her children were wise and funny and tender and they’d probably end up teaching Eliza way more than she’d ever be able to teach them. Which was comforting, but also really, really vexing.

  The next day, as Eliza helped Judith and the girls pack their things into the BMW, Judith said, “I wish you could have talked Rob out of his decision.”

  Eliza said, “Huh?” Then she corrected herself and said, “Excuse me?”

  “He said it was both of you, but I’m sure he was at the helm. So to speak.”

  “I’m sorry, Judith, I—”

  “The money,” said Judith, her voice lightly tinted with exasperation. “As I told him, I planned to head right into some investments that make the bulk of it inaccessible. Which I have since done. And I just hope it was the right decision for all of you.” She raised one eyebrow at Eliza. She had always heard that this was a genetic talent. Eliza couldn’t remember if her mother had it. If so, she hadn’t passed it on: Eliza couldn’t do it.

  Eliza said, “I’m confused.”

  “Oh,” said Judith, and she put the eyebrow back down again and considered Eliza. “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought Rob said the two of you had decided together—”

  “Decided what together?”

  “My goodness, will you look at the time? Say goodbye to your mother, girls, we’ve got a drive ahead of us, and I want to get on the road.”

  And just like that, Eliza was hugged and kissed and left standing all alone in the driveway of her father’s house.

  34

  LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE

  Eliza

  Later that day, when Eliza was talking on the phone to Rob, confirming that the girls had made it home safely, she remembered Judith’s cryptic comments about money. “She said that she hoped it was the right decision? What did she mean by that?”

  Rob cleared his throat, and said, in a way that caused Eliza to shift uncomfortably in the straight-backed kitchen chair in which she sat, “I don’t know if we have time to go into that right now.”

  “I’ve got plenty of time.” Her father had gone upstairs. He was tired again, always tired.

  What had Eliza been doing in April, when Charlie was diagnosed? Worrying herself silly over Phineas Tarbox, avoiding signing those stupid papers, shuttling the girls to and from their activities, planning her herb garden? Drinking margaritas at Don Pepe’s with the ladies on Tuesdays? What was she doing in the weeks, maybe months, before that, when the tumor was first forming, the nefarious collection of cells banding together, intent on their evil mission? We will get you, Charlie Sargent. You don’t know we’re here, but we know. We know, and we’re coming, and we’re not going away.

  She’d taken the keys to his truck. She’d bring him some supper in a while, see if he felt like eating a little bit, but until then she had nothing to do. She said, “Do you have somewhere to be?”

  Rob made a whistling sound, a quick exhalation, which signaled to Eliza that his nerves were on edge, and then he started talking. He told Eliza about the changes he’d experienced right around his fortieth birthday in the spring, about his newborn desire to support his family solely on his income, about his personal declaration of independence from a martini-infused, pre-Pippin Judith one night in Boston. He told Eliza about Judith’s reaction, and about what Judith had told him regarding the money that usually went to Eliza and Rob—that if he was sure, if he was really, really certain, Judith was going to put it in an investment that her financial adviser, Bucky, recommended very highly, and which would make the money completely inaccessible until Judith’s death. He ended by saying, “I should have told you, Eliza.”

  “Should have told me? What do you mean, told me? Never mind that you should have told me, shouldn’t we have decided this together?”

  Rob hesitated, and then he said, “I wanted to surprise you. I know it’s always bothered you, how much we take from my mother.”

  She let the weight of that settle around her: that was true. “Well, of course it’s bothered me,” she said. “You know that. But don’t we need it?”

  “As soon as Cabot Lodge is done and I get the next job—”

  “Then, what? As soon as that, what?” She felt a rising sense of panic.

  “We’ll be fine.”

  “We will?” She realized then the extent of her ignorance about their finances. How much would Rob make from Cabot Lodge, and how much from the next job? How much, exactly, did they get from Judith each month? She didn’t know. Stupid, stupid of her: she didn’t know.

  “For a while.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I’ll get another job after that, and make more money from that job too. Like…well, like a regular person. Like a person without a safety net.”

  Eliza was quiet, and Rob hurried to fill the space her silence left. “I will get another job, Eliza. Mrs. Cabot has all of these friends, and they all want houses, and you know how they are, those ladies, each one will want one bigger than the last one. Cabot Lodge will look like a cottage compared to what’s coming. I just have to nail this job first. I have to nail Cabot Lodge, and then I’ll be golden.”

  At another time, in another conversation, Eliza might have said, Nail Cabot Lodge. No pun intended, right? But now, in the present circumstances, she whispered the next part, like it was a secret: “But Rob. Our l
ife is really expensive.”

  As soon as she said that Eliza sensed a reordering of the conversation, and when Rob spoke she heard a tightening in his voice. “You know what? I’m surprised, Eliza. I thought you’d be on board with this. I thought you’d be…proud.”

  “If you thought I’d be on board,” she said, “if you thought I’d be proud, why’d you keep it a secret?”

  “I told you! I wanted to surprise you!”

  Eliza felt a dread, long latent but still familiar, rise in her throat. How were they going to pay the girls’ school tuition? The club fees, the mooring fees for the Hinckley? Even the electric and gas bills for a house the size of theirs, the grocery bills, the upkeep on the pool—Judith’s money paid for so much of their existence. “Well, mission accomplished,” she said, more nastily than she wanted to. “I’m surprised.”

  One great shame that would chase Eliza for a long, long time was not any of those words but the feeling underneath the words: that even with cancer clawing its way through her dad’s brain, and with the past beating on her head like an anvil, and with regret gnawing at her insides, the idea of returning to a place where lack of money was a constant worry, a constant potential source of embarrassment, sat somewhere between dismaying and horrifying.

  Rob: “You always said you didn’t care about the money. But from the way you’re reacting I can see that you cared, Eliza. You care now.”

  “Not in the way you think.”

  “But in some way.”

  “Yeah,” she said finally. “In some way.” He had her: it was true. She’d come so far from that girl in her freshman dorm room, counting out how many packages of ramen noodles she had left, pretending she bought her jeans from the vintage clothing store on Federal Hill because it was trendy, not because she needed to, saying no thank you to a night out because she didn’t have even the dollars for dollar-draft night. Not allowing herself to think about the student loans piling up on top of each other.

  She didn’t want to go back; she didn’t want to be that girl again.

  “Well, I’m sorry I disappointed you.”

  And then, for the second time that summer, and also for the second time in the entire time she’d known him, Rob hung up on Eliza.

  For some minutes after that Eliza wallowed pretty comfortably in her pool of self-righteousness. Rob should have told her, they should have talked about it before he went to Judith. It wasn’t right that he hadn’t, it wasn’t fair!

  She tried to banish the girl with the noodles, the motherless child with the tangled hair and the lobster traps and the chicken cutlets bought in a twelve-pack on sale at Dave’s Shop ’n’ Save, the girl who’d absorbed everything around her at Brown, always sitting back carefully, cautiously, in case someone noticed her and called her out for what she was: a fraud.

  But the girl wouldn’t go away. No matter what Eliza did or how she turned the situation over in her mind, the girl wouldn’t go away.

  ———

  Twenty-two minutes later, not that Eliza was watching the clock, Rob called back. “Don’t hang up on me,” she said, and to her own ear her voice sounded high and tight and not like hers at all. “Ever again. That’s not what we do, that’s not how we are!”

  “I’m sorry, Eliza,” he said. “You’re right, you are. I never should have made that decision without you. We should have talked to my mother together.”

  Eliza swallowed hard, and said, “I wish we had.”

  After Brown, that same girl, grown into a woman, always watching before doing, always trying to understand, to learn, so that she wouldn’t make any shameful mistakes that would reveal her. Those college loans had been such a burden on her, driving her nearly into the ground, and the two years of medical school on top of that. Judith’s lifting of that weight, an easy gesture for her, merely a tiny fraction of her wealth, had felt like the lifting of a hundred bricks from Eliza’s shoulders. She’d liked being able to offer money, to her dad, even to Russell; she’d liked the feeling of being able to say, “Go ahead, get this treatment, fix that boat, buy that drink, that dinner, whatever you want, I can pay for it.”

  She couldn’t explain all of that to Rob, not right then, not over the phone—she wasn’t even sure she could completely explain it to herself.

  Then Rob said something surprising. He said, “Eliza. We talk all the time about how hard it was for you growing up without a mother.”

  She felt herself start to bristle. Of course she talked about it! Her mother’s death was the defining event of her life: it had made her who she was, and it had also made her who she wasn’t. She said, “But—”

  “No,” said Rob. “Don’t talk, Eliza. Don’t interrupt. Just listen. Listen to me.”

  Meekly, chastened, she said, “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “We talk all the time about how hard it was for you growing up without a mother,” Rob repeated, and Eliza remained silent. “But we hardly ever talk about what it was like for me, growing up without a dad.”

  He paused, and the weight of what he was saying covered Eliza like a lead vest. Rob went on. “Nobody showed me how to work hard, how to be a good provider. I’m trying to figure it out on my own here. The only thing I ever learned from my parents about money was that it was something to fight about. A bargaining chip, in a shitty, shitty game.” Rob was right. He never talked about his dad; they never talked about his dad. She had always figured that because of the difference in their circumstances—her mother had been an angel, and she died, and hadn’t wanted to, and Rob’s father had been a bastard, and had left, and had wanted to—she was allowed to feel more pain than he was. After all, Robert Barnes I had deserted the family, had taken up with another woman, had begun a whole new life on the other side of the world. But now Eliza saw that that was such a grossly entitled way to look at things. Robert Barnes I chose Thailand and Malai, but he also didn’t choose his son and his first wife; he chose not-Rob over Rob. Eliza’s heart ached for Rob: suddenly, almost violently. She said, “You’re right, we don’t. It’s not fair. I’m sorry.”

  There was a long silence. Finally Rob said, “Thank you, Eliza.” His voice cracked on her name. Then, to his credit, and with the perennial optimism she’d always loved about him, he tried again. “At least one of Mrs. Cabot’s friends will come through, I’m sure of it. There’s one woman, Nadine Edwards, she’s practically committed already.”

  Eliza could still hear a wobble in Rob’s voice, and the molecules rearranged themselves again and she softened further. Here he was, her husband, a guy just trying, like everyone else. She blinked at the kitchen wall, where she could see the faint marks that measured her yearly growth from the time she could stand until her mother had died—they’d let the habit drop after that. The doorbell rang, but Eliza didn’t want to risk dropping the cell connection by walking to the front door—the signal was much stronger in the kitchen—so she ignored it. It must be Val; she’d call her later, or, if she felt like it, Val would come in without an invitation. “Of course,” said Eliza. “Of course they’ll come through. Of course it will be okay. You’re a talented architect.”

  “Even though I just draw the pictures?”

  She took a deep breath and made herself acknowledge how much she’d hurt him with those words, how fraught they’d been, and how she’d known they were harmful when she’d said them, and how she’d said them anyway. “Especially because you draw the pictures, Rob. Especially. Without the pictures, there’d be nothing to build, right?”

  A sigh of relief traveled over the cellular waves, binding them together in a way they hadn’t seemed bound in a long time: because of Charlie’s illness, because of Eliza’s long absences over the course of the summer, because life was hard and marriage was complicated and there was really no such thing as smooth sailing.

  “Rob?”

  “Yeah?” His voice sounded rough. She took several seconds before she spoke again.

  “I think it’s a really good idea,” she said finally
. “We should be independent. I agree with you. It’s the right thing.”

  “Thank you. Thank you, Eliza. I won’t let us down.”

  “Anyway,” said Eliza. “I guess if something crazy happens and Cabot Lodge blows up—”

  “Don’t even say that.”

  “I don’t mean literally, like goes up in flames—”

  “Even so.”

  “I mean, if things don’t go the way you’re expecting, which I understand is a Very Big If, I guess we can always sell the Hinckley.”

  “Don’t say that either. Take it back.”

  “I’m kidding,” she said. “Of course.”

  “Still.” His voice was strained. He was such a believer in jinxes and superstitions: he always picked up pennies, never walked under ladders, didn’t allow open umbrellas inside. It was one of the first things she’d found endearing about him. Forget about black cats: he’d cross three streets to avoid one. And, of course, there was the irreplaceable ten-baht. “Take it back,” he said, and then, more gently, “Please.”

  “Okay,” she said, “I take it back.”

  Then Rob said, “Eliza—” and before he could say more three things happened. The doorbell rang again. She heard the front door open and Russell’s voice call out, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  And, at almost exactly the same time, from upstairs, an awful noise, a clunk, and then a sort of awful roll, which could only mean one thing, and that was that Charlie Sargent had hit the floor.

  35

  LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE

  Mary

  “Mary! Mary, over here!” A familiar voice, one of those out-of-context voices that took a few seconds to recognize. Mary had her hand on the door handle of A Cut Above, but she turned when she heard her name and saw her twelfth-grade math teacher making her way down the sidewalk. Ms. Berry was holding a leash, and attached to the leash was a German shepherd: this must be the famous William. “Mary!” said Ms. Berry. She and William were both panting a little bit by the time they got to her.