These little actions had made LaRee Vita’s mother, as much as the pain of labor ever would have. And in becoming Vita’s mother, she had lost the LaRee who needed one drug for ordinary anxiety and one drug for extreme anxiety. She was still not as good at life as she wished, but to have mothered one child well meant she had made some contribution.
“Franco is probably excited to be part of something with you,” she said.
“You know,” Vita said, “I do try to understand. I try to be nice about him, I do!”
“You don’t have to try to be nice about him,” LaRee replied.
“Yes, I do! If he was really my father, he’d get it. He wouldn’t horn in on Mackerel Sky any more than you’d try to join the girls’ soccer team at school! You wouldn’t, because you understand.”
“Fathers don’t understand. They bumble around trying to be helpful and get in the way. That’s the whole point of them. If Franco lived with us, you’d see.”
“I wish you were married.” Vita leaned her head against the window, sulking, half earnest, half comic.
“Whoever I was married to would still be irritating. Humans just are.”
“We never see Matt anymore,” Vita said suddenly.
“Oh, we do—it’s just that…” That LaRee didn’t point him out anymore. It used to be that she’d see him go by in the park ranger’s truck and say, “There goes Matt, off to work,” and now that she thought about it she realized she must have sounded hollow and left behind, as if she were saying, “There goes Matt, off to the moon.” Vita would have felt that; she knew the shades of LaRee’s voice the way her father knew the bay.
“Funny you should mention Matt,” she said. “I ran into him earlier.”
“Did you ask him to marry you?”
“No, I just backed into his truck and left it at that.”
“Really?”
“More or less.”
“Was he okay? Are you?”
“We’re both fine. Just feeling slightly stupider than usual. You know, even if I was married, Franco would still be your father.”
Vita made a growling noise and sank deep into her seat. “My DNA is nothing like Franco’s,” she said.
What was there to say? Washashore and Portagee rubbed each other raw. When Vita was younger and spent a weekend a month over at Franco’s, they always went to church. Not that Franco had ever had one sacred impulse, except maybe when he was out on the fishing grounds, but his parents had taken him to church every Sunday and he had taken his sons when they were little, and it seemed the right thing to do. Vita had learned to genuflect and say the Lord’s Prayer, and from the kids in the parish hall afterward she had learned that in the afterlife she would burn in hell. Having eavesdropped assiduously on LaRee’s conversations, she was able to reply that religion was more likely to breed hatred than love, and there was no hell or heaven either and… generally to get herself into deeper trouble. But even then she’d had that strength, to follow her own path. LaRee tried to imitate that strength sometimes.
She stopped at Route 6, waiting for the traffic to pass. Carpenters and plumbers and electricians streamed back from Provincetown at this hour, heading home from their day of renovating waterfront mansions. It was strange work, laying exotic wood floors for whoever had just bought a house, knowing that you might well be back the next year to rip all of it out for a new owner who preferred Carrera marble. But that was how most people lived here, now—at the whims, and on the leavings, of the rich.
The ambulance was coming up behind them, around the corner. LaRee pulled over, waving to the driver as he passed.
“He’s heading toward the hospital,” she said. If he’d been heading toward the clinic, she’d have had to go back. “And he came from town. I wonder who it is.…”
“I hope it’s Shyanne Holtz,” Vita said. “Broke her back sticking her boobs in Adam’s face.”
LaRee laughed. “It’s not a happy thing, you know, to think a man’s only going to like you for your boobs.”
“Oh, God, you sound like such a mom,” Vita said, but smiling. They watched the flashing lights disappear over the crest of the hill.
“Well, it won’t be a riptide,” Vita said, thinking of the girl and her father who had died the summer before. You must let it suck you away, no matter how frightening, and it would bring you back, land you safe on a new shore. If you fought it, you’d drown. Vita couldn’t stop thinking about the man diving after his daughter, dying with her. She had outgrown her fixation on ghosts and visitations… but she could not, in her secret heart, escape the idea that Sabine was out there beating on an invisible wall, trying to get back to her. She was haunted, not by a ghost but by this idea.
They turned up their road, through the woods where dark red and pale yellow leaves were just letting down from their buds. With the last sunlight from the west it looked as if the air were full of butterflies. There was the stark white tree at the end of their driveway; they were home.
“I got scrod for supper,” LaRee said, but there was no answer. At least they were home. Coming around the back of the car, she saw that she’d underestimated the damage. Matt’s truck bed was higher than her bumper and her taillight was broken. She did not need to spend five hundred dollars on the damned car right now.
Bumble had been watching from the little shed roof over the front door, and she jumped down to the plant table and to the ground and came galloping, rolling in the sand at their feet.
“You’re a good kitty, Bumble. You’ll be happy about the scrod.”
“I’m sorry, LaRee,” Vita said, dropping her backpack the minute she got in the door, heading into her bedroom. LaRee leaned back against the counter and closed her eyes—the best escape she had. Sabine, like Shyanne Holtz, had had that glamour that came out of need. She prided herself on never buying makeup when it was so easy to palm, and she was the same with people, sneaking in close to absorb their mystique or wealth or whatever she envied. She had admired a rosebush LaRee grew from a cutting. One year LaRee got home from work and found Sabine standing there with a shopping bag full of pink roses. She had clipped off every bloom.
“You always said I was welcome to anything,” she’d said. She’d seduced Franco in that same spirit; being a real fisherman, a real townie, he had more cachet than any other man in Oyster Creek. Sabine got a child out of him the way she’d slip a tube of lipstick up her sleeve. Except that it had been LaRee who’d wanted a child.
And LaRee had wished her ill, waited for the comeuppance that must be just around the corner. A wish that had come way too true.
“Anyway, I pretended I’d never met him,” Vita said later, with a kind of airy bitterness. She’d showered and scrubbed her face with some substance meant to clear her skin, and she settled into her chair, pulling up her knees and resting her chin on them so she looked like a small marsupial with large eyes, something that would cling in a tree. She was so alive and alert and resilient—the woman Sabine might have been herself if her life had had a little more kindness in it somewhere. “I just said, ‘Hello, I’m Vita Gray,’ and shook his hand. Hugh didn’t notice. I don’t think anyone did, except Leo and Adam.”
Vita had that look on her face that came just before she launched into a dreamy rhapsody about a boy.
LaRee poured herself a glass of wine. “But Adam figured it out right away, huh?” An open door.
“He’s just so smart,” Vita said. “And so sweet. He looks like a baby devil.” She might have been talking about a kitten. “His hair isn’t curly exactly, but it sticks up a little and… and you can imagine there might be just the stubs of little horns starting there.”
“God help us,” LaRee said under her breath.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing—I’m sorry, go ahead.” In sixth grade Vita had come home with a simple health class assignment: She was to choose one person, a buddy who would help her resist the lure of sexual love through her teenage years. LaRee, listening out of one ear as she dr
ove Vita home that day, heard this and said, reflexively, “Well, don’t look at me!”
“LaRee! What do you mean?” Vita had been horrified. The nice teacher at school had explained it so clearly. It had made perfect sense and now LaRee… “It has to be you!” Vita had said. “Who else would it be?”
“Well!” LaRee said. “Well, it’s just…” She’d felt herself opening and closing her mouth like a fish. “Well, what I mean is… it’s not as easy as it sounds, to resist that kind of feeling. I mean, of course, I’ll be your… abstinence buddy. I mean, if it seems appropriate.”
Vita’s hair had been down to her waist back then, and she had undone her braids as she spoke, fluffing the bristly mass of it out with her fingers before she began to braid it again, her hands moving as fast and sure as a lacemaker’s.
“I want to have children,” she’d said, doubling the elastics. “So I guess I’ll have to have sex. Unless… Maybe I’ll get Chinese girls.”
“Now that’s colonialism,” LaRee had said, laughing. She hadn’t guessed how fast the years would pass, how quickly Vita would grow and change. The night before she started high school Vita had parted the endless hair carefully into sections, made ten braids, and cut each one off at about four inches.
“Your generation has a thing about looks,” she’d said. Then she took a shower and the next morning there was a beautiful mop of curls, Franco’s curls, and she had burst into tears and pulled them back tight. “The stubs of little horns—how adorable,” LaRee said now, keeping her face turned so Vita couldn’t see her expression.
“You’re laughing at me,” Vita said to her back.
“Smiling, not laughing. When someone describes a man the way you just did, I smile. Because I’ve been in love myself,” LaRee said.
In love and out the other side. From this distance it looked like one of those conditions that had to be borne because no vaccine had yet been found. She could remember sobbing when Drew left, as if she’d been ripped open. Such misery, and it was only a few years later that she was crazy for Bill Shipman, the surveyor, and would find any excuse to be near him. Nothing was left of that now except a vague embarrassment when she saw him in the supermarket. And Matt… well, she could still get her heart to beat a bit faster for him, if she really worked at it. And sometimes she wanted to work at it, to remember what it had felt like when love went through her defenses like a hatpin and everything was new.
Mostly she was grateful that those days had passed, that she was safe on the solid ground of her own life. Her thighs were just lumpy extra flesh now—why bother anyone else with them? Whatever had been revealed to her by love, she could learn from a long swim in the pond. Contentment meant another log on the woodstove, Bumble on her lap, Law & Order on TV. For a night out, one of Vita’s choral concerts at school.
“And his beard is like a little devil beard!” Vita said happily.
“His beard?” He was a boy, where did he get a beard? Vita had said the word Adam as if it were a two syllable prayer.… What if he didn’t answer?
“It’s so soft-looking, it makes him look even sweeter. A lot of the guys have those beards that make them look mean.”
“A lot of the guys…?” LaRee turned to the sink so Vita couldn’t see her face. Of course Kayla Anderson came in for her prenatal visits, other girls from Vita’s class were on the pill, but Vita… she was still a child!
“The raccoon’s been in the compost again,” LaRee said, looking out the window. “It’s all over the place. I swear, he gets mad when I put bread in there.”
“Maybe he has rabies.”
“We don’t have rabies out here. They put meat out with vaccine in it, along the canal, so the rabies doesn’t travel. I’m surprised you even know about rabies.”
“It’s in our English book.”
“What’s that?”
“Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
“I’ve never read it.”
“You should,” Vita said, in the tone adults were prone to take when lecturing teenagers. “It’s really good.”
“I will. I always like the books you suggest.”
She propped the colander in the sink. She had perfected the maternal art of hovering, disguising it under one and another little chore so she was always somewhere in the background, able to put in a quiet word.
“You have good taste in people, too,” she added.
“I do, don’t I?” Vita said. “In fact we had a very nice conversation today, Adam and me.”
She blushed, though, remembering—even her ears felt hot; had she spoken the word kiss in front of Adam Capshaw? And then that mush about Shakespeare and beauty, so of course he had teased her about King Lear—the senior English classes were reading it. Ugh, what was she thinking? Why not just wear a big sign that read I’M A FOOL? And Shyanne squirming all over him with her face in those pornographic expressions.
“I can’t believe Shyanne’s playing Miranda,” she said.
“I’m sure it’s just because she’s older, honey. She looks more…”
“No joke. I’m surprised she doesn’t wear neon arrows pointing to her cleavage,” Vita said bitterly. “And you know what? She’s all wrong for it. Miranda is supposed to be innocent!”
LaRee washed spinach. She wasn’t going to get it. Shyanne’s shy, “demure” Miranda was profane as far as Vita could see—a mockery of the grave, gentle character Vita would have played. Vita had studied and worked and prayed as if Shakespeare were her god! A wave of bitterness rose in her throat. She had seen Franco’s gaze rest on Shyanne, and the earth went out from beneath her when she did. There was something missing from her, something Franco had taken, and it left her alone and awkward while Shyanne stalked around in two pairs of false eyelashes grabbing whatever she liked. And apparently Vita’s own father admired her for it.
“Hillary didn’t invite me to her birthday party,” Vita said into the air. “Everyone who sits at the lunch table except me. It’s not that I care—I wouldn’t have had a good time. I just… You know, it would be nice if one time someone wanted me to be the star, or wanted me to be their friend, or their date, or… anything at all.”
“It sounds like Adam wanted to talk to you,” LaRee tried.
“Probably he did. Now he can tell his friends how Vita Gray said whatever I said. And, ‘Isn’t she weird? You know about the murder, right? They say she lived off her mom’s dead flesh for days.’”
“Vita, honey…”
“That’s the kind of thing they say! We were going around in English class telling scary stories and suddenly somebody looked at me, and then they all looked at me, and then there was a dead silence and we were dismissed early.”
“Sometimes I think we should have moved away,” LaRee said. “I wanted to keep you near your father, and didn’t realize what it was going to be like at school.”
“Oh my God!” Vita said. “Thank God we didn’t move! What would my life be like without Mackerel Sky? I can’t even imagine it. And it’s not the… past. It’s not Portagee/washashore—or not so much. It’s that we’re not like everyone else. We’re not so different, but you don’t have to be very different. Life is frightening enough. People want to be with people who are just the same as they are, who like the same food and laugh at the same jokes. We go to school and learn about diversity, and a rich cultural mix with everyone bringing different things to it, and black and white and Asian people all laughing together in every single picture. And meanwhile the kids from the Church of God’s Word are thinking no one else is Christian enough, and the indie kids are thinking no one else is weird enough, and Shyanne and her crowd think they’re too cool for school—everyone has their group, and the slightest thing marks who belongs and who doesn’t. We’re a bunch of white people who all live on the same sandbar and we can’t really say anything much to one another except maybe that racism is bad and the Red Sox need to win the World Series! Without Mackerel Sky I would literally be dead. How long till the fish is ready?�
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“Fifteen minutes?” LaRee said. “You’re a smart girl, Vita.”
“For all that’s worth.”
“If you could invent a shirt with neon arrows you could make your fortune and open your own Shakespeare company.”
Vita laughed, grudgingly.
“It’s kind of cool to be playing Iris the rainbow goddess, I think. You do have that shimmer.” And Vita did, too, when she was just herself at home, running down the narrow path to the pond on a summer morning, diving again and again from the float. Oh, when she just let herself be for a minute, she was such an amazing girl!
Vita rolled her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous, LaRee.”
“It’s not ridiculous! It’s hard to invent a compliment without inspiration. Vita, listen to me—I’ve been alive… forever. Just live, just keep going, mistakes and everything. Your instincts are good. You like Adam, just let him see that; he’ll respond. Trust me, there’s no research necessary. At your age, hormones do the rest of the work! Then, once it’s under way, you just get to sit back and watch the disaster unfold.”
There, she’d let the cynicism of middle-age creep in. Vita did not need to hear her assume that love would always precipitate disaster.
“Yes, Mother,” Vita said, mocking, but LaRee could see a very slight satisfaction warm her face. She ate hungrily and went off to write a paper about Their Eyes Were Watching God, and in half an hour or so LaRee could hear her reading The Tempest out loud— Miranda’s lines, of course:
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