The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  The TV camera closed in on the harbormaster’s shack. “Father of the victim’s love child in custody,” the caption read.

  LaRee turned it off; she couldn’t look. Two squirrels were chasing each other through the trees out back, leaping from branch to branch, tails twitching. The winter sky was bright, bright blue and clumps of snow had begun to drop from the branches. Thank God, something ordinary.

  “Vita’s asleep in my bed,” she told Charlotte. “I mean—this is off the record; you won’t tell anyone, will you? She thinks Sabine is going to wake up. And she’s just… she’s so new and open to the world, she doesn’t have any protective layers.” She realized she was begging. She couldn’t face this alone.

  “She’s with you?” Charlotte asked.

  “Where else would she be? She doesn’t even know Franco’s her father, and she doesn’t have anyone else.”

  The pregnancy had jarred something loose in Sabine. Suddenly she’d wanted to pick blueberries on the back shore with LaRee, and while they were stooped there Sabine had poked fun at all her ex-boyfriends until finally she sat down in the bushes and laughed and laughed and said, “Who was I trying to be, anyway? Anyone but myself, I guess.” And with one hand on her rounded stomach she had leaned back and looked up at the sun and said, so happily, “What a fool!”

  She’d had a date with Franco that evening—carefully contrived. Usually they saw each other only when Danielle was at work at the pharmacy, but there was a meeting of the county harbormasters association in Hyannis, and he’d acted as if he were going up with the other guys. Instead, he was taking Sabine to Chatham for dinner. “No one has ever been this… just nice to me,” Sabine said. “We’re going for dinner and a walk on the beach and pretend we’re tourists. We’ll be another couple on the street. No one will recognize us out there.”

  She had looked so pretty, her face filled out by the pregnancy and flushed under the sun. And then, at midnight, the phone rang and she was sobbing, shattered, as if her whole life had tipped over a precipice. Franco had taken her to a restaurant with white tablecloths, roses in every vase, a sweeping view over the sound. He had taken her hand and praised her—starting with the delicacy of her feet and working upward, a plush carpet of praises, leading to a guillotine: He had loved Danielle since he was fifteen years old; he could no more take leave of her than he could cut off his right hand. He’d been raised a Catholic—he certainly understood that Sabine wanted the child, but she had told him she planned to return to Italy. Wasn’t this the right time? At that he had taken something from his pocket—she’d bumped against it earlier and wondered if it was a jewelry box. It was a thousand dollars, in twenties, folded into a rubber band.

  “He was trying to buy me off! With a thousand fucking dollars! Can you imagine?”

  “Not to buy you off. To help you, I’m sure,” LaRee had said, scrabbling for a consoling answer.

  From that moment Sabine had despised Franco. The softness LaRee had seen in her that day was gone; she spent her time calculating, planning out new torments. She took any excuse to visit Danielle at the pharmacy. Sabine, buying her prenatal vitamins, solicited her advice, confided her story. “It’s kicking—feel it!” she’d said, and Danielle had rested her hand on the stretched belly to feel her husband’s child move there.

  “That woman must be an imbecile if she can’t guess who the father is,” she’d said, the day she first took Vita in to show her off. LaRee had wondered if Danielle wasn’t in fact a genius, turning Sabine’s torture back on her. But there was no stopping Sabine. The fire-eater, the opium addict… she could name them the way some could recite the rosary—all the way back to her father the son of a bitch, and for every one of them she would exact a price from Franco.

  “But he doesn’t have any money,” LaRee had said when she started asking for child support.

  Sabine had squinted at her, confused. What did it matter how much money he had? The point was to ruin his life. “I suppose you knew all along…” Danielle had said to LaRee when she finally found out the truth, holding up a hand to stanch the apology, standing there behind the pharmacy counter in her white smock and her half-glasses. “What could you do? Franco got himself into this mess, the big dope.” And then: “Still, it’s more family. I always wanted a girl.”

  So Sabine had lost again, though the suit proceeded. With Vita she was as tender as a woman could be, serving her little bowls of strawberries with powdery sugar, dabbing the shampoo from her brow in the bath. Then the subject would turn to Franco and she’d bare her teeth and hiss. She suffered from her own anger, worse than anyone else.

  “She wouldn’t let it go,” LaRee said to Charlotte. She was aware of the conversation as it passed, eavesdropping on herself—a few more moments of her own life gone. How she had cried yesterday over losing Rex; was there not a tear left for Sabine? “She just had to punish him somehow.”

  “You must know about Amalia Matos and Franco,” Charlotte said.

  “What?” Amalia Matos, Bobby’s wife, was Franco’s age—late forties somewhere—but her varnished hairdo made her seem a generation older. She had become more upright and censorious through the years until she was as rigid as a tuning fork, vibrating with moral superiority, offended by almost everything She was there, always there, behind the counter at Matos Fish Market, deft and efficient, setting down the fillet knife to rap sharply on the window when kids gathered on the sidewalk in front.

  “Franco and Amalia… like, a love affair?” LaRee asked.

  Amalia Matos in love? With Franco? Sabine would laugh into hiccups at this—LaRee had to call her. But her smartphone was not smart enough.

  “Let’s just say it has to do with their junior prom. Amalia is still feeling stood up.”

  “Oh God, I wish I didn’t believe that,” LaRee said. The things Drew said when he left—that he’d married her because he was too young to know what to do; that after all, she knew she wasn’t his type, he liked the sexy type, he always had. Idiotic though they were, the words still stung. “And Amalia’s there with her fishing knife, all day every day. Maybe she did it. Maybe she was trying to frame Franco.”

  “Or, Sabine questioned the freshness of the scallops?”

  “That would move Amalia to homicide.”

  “She wouldn’t need a knife, though. She’d accomplish it with a look.”

  “I know that look!” LaRee said, laughing. This, the fact that she and Charlotte had both suffered the disapproval of the same fishmonger, lifted the weight from her heart for a second. Which of course made her cry.

  “You there?” Charlotte asked.

  LaRee swallowed, managed to sound natural. “I just… can’t believe it. Can’t understand it.”

  “I know,” Charlotte said kindly. “Me neither. If you think of anything, LaRee, please call me, will you? I… I’d honestly like to write the truth. Which isn’t so easy.”

  “I will.”

  A drab little bird hopped through the bittersweet vines out back, plucking berries. LaRee and Drew had sited the house on the one level spot they had—behind it the hill sloped upward, blocking the morning sun, and the front dropped steeply to the west, wooded with low pines and knobby oaks whose leaves clung all winter. All covered with snow now, a sacred forest. The phone rang again.

  “LaRee, it’s Danielle, Danielle Neves.” LaRee always hoped to get Danielle when she called in a prescription from the clinic; she would rush the amoxicillin if a child was miserable with an ear infection, while Mary, the other clerk, seemed to enjoy making things difficult, citing one rule or another, savoring her little ounce of power. But LaRee and Danielle had never talked about anything except prescriptions or weather before.

  “Hi, Danielle. I guess you’ve heard?”

  “Franco’s at the police station,” Danielle said. Her voice was low, matter-of-fact. She had lived her life much as she would if her family had stayed in Gelfa: finished high school, married, raised her children. When their house was reposses
sed, she had convinced Franco’s boss at the Walrus and Carpenter to let them fix up the apartment over the bar. And she’d found all the good in the place; she’d made it a home. Danielle didn’t have a calling, a life plan. She just did what was necessary every day.

  “He didn’t…”

  “No, of course not,” Danielle said. “But, LaRee… where’s the baby?”

  “Here, with me. Hannah brought her last night.”

  “What happened? Do you know? They say… they said Franco is under arrest for suspicion of murder.” She sounded less frightened than amused—the cops all knew Franco; in fact, the harbormaster’s office was just a branch of the police force. He was there among friends.

  “Vita was alone with Sabine… with her body… for something like a whole day.”

  “Her body? Why? Who?”

  “Believe me, I’m trying to imagine,” LaRee said.

  Danielle laughed, a low, dry sound. “Me, I suppose. I had the reason.”

  “I don’t think anyone will think that.”

  Now Danielle gave a real hoot. “You must be a young soul,” she said. “There are at least a hundred people in this town who would be just thrilled if I was tried for murder. I mean, where to begin? Sheila Lopes? She thinks Cabbage ought to be assistant harbormaster, just because he’s a more upstanding citizen than Franco. Meaning that the guy’s tail is so tight between his legs he wouldn’t jaywalk across Sea Street at midnight in February for fear of getting a ticket. Or Elfa Soares, who won’t ever forget that I was on the school board when her son didn’t get hired to teach third grade. And that’s not to mention all the people who’d throw me or anyone to the dogs just for a good story… a fishwife-with-fish-knife story.”

  “Guilty, guilty as charged,” LaRee said. “But there’d be a lot of us on your side.”

  “Franco would miss me. And the Fitzsimmonses. They’d have to clean the cottage changeovers themselves. That’s three.”

  “And me!” LaRee said. “Who’d put a rush on the amoxicillin prescriptions if you were in jail?”

  They were laughing, but it would have been nice if this was a little further from the truth.

  “I’ll come over and pick up the baby,” Danielle said.

  LaRee sank down into the couch. She was cold and tired and frightened—not of some madman with a fishing knife, but of what was going to happen when Vita woke up.

  “She’s fast asleep, Danielle. Her hair is all matted with her mother’s blood. I’m not going to…”

  “A child needs her father,” Danielle said, her voice rising.

  “Yes, but she doesn’t even know Franco is her father right now.… Listen, Danielle, come over here, why don’t you. We can have a cup of tea, we can try to make some kind of sense…”

  She regretted this instantly. She could not bear the weight of one more human need. Sabine had a will that made LaRee Vita’s guardian. She had not expected to die, but she was damned if Franco—or worse yet, her mother the gorgon—was going to get anywhere near that child. Of course Franco might contest the will; blood relation must carry some weight.… But she did not want to explain any of this to anyone right now.

  “Danielle, let’s just do one thing at a time, okay? Get Franco back from the police station, get Vita a bath… just…”

  “It’s okay,” Danielle said. “There’s a news truck parked outside anyway. They’re waiting for me and they can wait all damn week if they want.” She laughed and LaRee did, too. Defiance they recognized, admired, and trusted, Portagee and washashore alike. “The cesspool’s backed up; Vinny’s supposed to be here with the pump. He was supposed to come yesterday.”

  “So, he’ll be there within the week,” LaRee said, absurdly grateful for this bit of connection, that they both knew Vinny Machado would get there when he got there, with the “honeypot,” the pump truck. When the neighborhood was stinking, it meant Vinny was nearby, and Vinny was going to give you a look that reminded you it was your stink, not his, and that without him you’d be drowning in it.

  “His father was my cousin,” Danielle said, quietly reminding LaRee that she had no right to laugh at him. There was a soft thump, and LaRee heard the footsteps—the happy, deliberate footsteps of a child just awake and ready to begin another of the days children have. You might see a toad hop in the grass and then you might catch it, feel its cool, dry skin and its back legs pressing into your palm. You might learn to make an angel in the snow. Your mom might put rainbow sprinkles on the cupcake, or show you how to cut a heart out of construction paper, or…

  Vita came bounding out of the bedroom wearing the old T-shirt LaRee had put her to bed in, her eyes sparkling, her hair still in one big snarl.

  “When is Mama coming?” she asked, and jumped onto the couch beside LaRee.

  PART TWO

  6

  LEARNER’S PERMIT

  “My boobs are bigger! Much bigger! They’ve grown just this week!” Vita cupped her breasts in her two hands with immense satisfaction.

  “Most heartfelt congratulations,” LaRee said. She didn’t remember this all being quite such a big deal—but it was so far in the past, who knew? Vita had her mother’s small stature; she was not likely to become voluptuous. She had Franco’s wild dark hair, but her skin was as pale as Sabine’s, and sometimes she had an intent, innocent expression that pierced LaRee’s heart—as if she’d had a glimpse of Sabine before life hurt her and hardened her. If someone had protected Sabine, kept her safe from the rain of ordinary daily cruelty, she might have been someone entirely different, less inclined to toy with fate. She might be alive now.

  LaRee stopped herself: might as well join the rest of the town and blame the murder on its victim. She had been tarred with the same brush as Sabine—a washashore, a loose woman. You did not find the local wives dancing at Doubloons on a summer night, wearing nothing but a little scrap of dress and an armful of gold bangles. And you did not find the local wives murdered in their own homes. LaRee had seen plenty of them at the clinic with black eyes, broken noses, yes, but these injuries were inflicted by their own husbands and boyfriends. From the time Sabine died, there was the quiet, pervasive assumption that she herself was to blame. What had she expected, seducing Franco when everyone knew he couldn’t resist that kind of thing, and then carrying his child and raising her here, right in his wife’s face, instead of moving away as any decent woman would have? People said they saw a red light in her bedroom, that she opened the door to the UPS man in nothing but her panties.… People said just about anything. When Vinny Machado was arrested for her murder, two years after it happened, the first thing anyone said was, “Wow, what’d she do to him?”

  “Is that possible, though?” Vita asked, pulling the neck of her shirt out so she could peer into her bra. “I mean, a week ago they were just not the…”

  “Basketballs? Watermelons? That they’ve become?”

  “Exactly!”

  Vita was giggling, happy—sitting in the driver’s seat of the Subaru for the first time since she had passed her permit test, ready to take to the road. She adjusted the rearview mirror, smiled radiantly at her image there, adjusted it again. She had that same smug, delighted little look as the day she first learned to ride a tricycle, as if she had mastered life completely now. And her delight was LaRee’s drug: One twinkle in that child’s eye and all regrets, disappointments, and fears burst like soap bubbles in the sun.

  “Oh, my girl! How did you get so grown-up?”

  “I’m practically the last one to get my license,” Vita said. They were in the driveway of Outer Cape High, on top of a hill that looked west over Mackerel Bay and east to the hard blue of the Atlantic Ocean. The kind of real estate development you could put on that property now would be worth millions. But back when the school was built it had been nothing but an old woodlot, of no use to anyone. Cars and trucks streamed past, driven by kids LaRee remembered dressed as snowflakes for their kindergarten concert, each carrying a rose in their eighth-grade gradua
tion. How had life gone by this way? She reached across to wrap one of Vita’s curls around her finger. Vita hated her hair and kept it yanked back into a ponytail so tightly that LaRee worried it would affect her circulation. LaRee thought it was the most beautiful hair she’d ever seen—like the tangible proof of Vita’s resilience, curling every which way, with a will of its own, as they said. Vita wanted only to subdue it.

  “Okay, can we go?” she asked.

  “I’m ready when you are. Foot on the brake, take the emergency brake down… and… that’s right, just a little press on the accelerator…”

  The engine revved, loud but impotent, and Vita looked around to see who might have noticed.

  “First you have to shift into drive,” LaRee said evenly. Thirty hours of driving time and six months to do it—not so bad really. It was like everything about motherhood: You provided a calm, encouraging presence, and the kid just climbed up through the limbs toward the sun.

  Vita shifted and the car lurched forward. They drove down the driveway and stopped at the road, or ten feet before it. Vita looked both ways.

  “I can’t see.”

  “You need to go up closer to the road.”

  “Mr. Webster said to stop before the Stop sign.”

  “Well, that’s right, but not so far before the Stop sign.”

  “He’s the driving teacher—I guess he knows better than you.” Vita sat absolutely rigid, her hands at ten and two, her knuckles white.

  “I’m sure he does, but I’m also pretty sure he means you should stop where you can see up and down the road you’re turning into.”

  “All right, then.” She drove halfway into the intersection, across one whole lane, and stopped. “Is that better?”

  “Back up, back up!” Cars were coming both ways, half of them driven by sixteen-year-old boys with their nerves all bristling with testosterone.