The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Yeah,” Danielle agreed. “Honestly, I’d always blame a woman first. Men just bumble around trying to do what’s right; it’s women who plot and plan. I know myself well enough to be suspicious of women.” LaRee laughed, a grim hoot of recognition at the backward pageantry of life, the secret undertow beneath every advancing wave. You had to be past fifty to laugh this way, and hearing Danielle join in, LaRee realized that they had continued their awkward truce for so long that it had become a kind of friendship. Ha, whoever knew what was coming? Who could predict…?

  But Vita was watching her, with the eyes of a young girl who believed in Good and Evil still.

  “Vinny always wanted to be just like Franco,” Danielle said, almost to herself. “’Specially after his father died. He was always hanging around the boys, trying to act like he was one of the family.”

  “What is it?” Vita was mouthing. “What happened?”

  “Danielle, Vita… I’ve got to…” It only struck LaRee now, what had happened. The murder had opened up beneath them suddenly, like an old well that ought to have been sealed. The day they arrested Vinny, Vita had been six years old. LaRee had gone to pick her up at school and found her playing hopscotch with Dorotea. The teacher had looked over their heads to her… with concern, probably, but LaRee had read it as a plea not to disturb the little balance they all managed every day. How would she ever have explained the truth? She said nothing, and heaven only knew what anyone said to Dorotea. There were more headlines: “Home Invasion, or the Date from Hell?” “Mismatched Pair Sipped Wine Before Murder.” Vinny’s court-appointed lawyer insisted that Vinny didn’t have the intelligence to have acted on his own, implying that Sabine had been his accomplice as well as his victim. The town was seized by a silent spasm. The explanation they had clung to—that a bad man from across the bridge, the kind of man a sophisticated woman like Sabine would have been likely to know in her earlier, more suspicious life, had followed her here and killed her—didn’t work. It was Vinny Machado—and they discovered that when he told his wife that he could kill her as easily as he had Sabine Gray.

  LaRee remembered seeing Vinny’s wife with a black eye and wondering if Vinny was responsible for it… and doing nothing more. She was a nurse; she had taken a seminar on recognizing domestic violence as part of her continuing education. This had entitled her to a raise, but it hadn’t pushed her to action. She hadn’t wanted to suspect Vinny—it would be awkward and messy to prove the suspicion; it would be the same old thing, a washashore assuming the worst of a townie. His wife would defend him. The police, who would turn out to be, in some circuitous way, related to him, would harden against her. She had let it go.

  Who would sit a six-year-old child down and try to explain it all? No one, and certainly not anyone who had just managed to guide that child through a black grief toward the light. And then… the waters had closed. By the time Vinny was convicted, the girls were in third grade. Vita could read every word she saw, up to and including tyrannosaurus. “Special Edition: Verdict in Gray Trial” would have given her no trouble. LaRee got her home, unplugged the phone and the television, and started baking. As long as they were up to their elbows in butter and sugar, they were safe.

  There were two sections of each grade; she made sure that Vita and Dorotea were never in the same group again. Dorotea herself would never hear the truth. It would go into the vault with the rest of the town’s secrets, become the kind of thing that was rude to bring up. By middle school the girls would have different friends; by high school they’d be in different galaxies. When did you say it, when the child turned ten, or twelve? “Dorotea’s dad slashed your mother with a fishing knife and we’ll never know why, but from what we can guess she’d been flirting with him and he was snorting oxycodone and…” If Vita hadn’t been so bad at geometry, she’d never have been in Dorotea’s math section and she would have forgotten who she was by now.

  No, LaRee had not told Vita, and over the years she had nearly forgotten it herself.

  “Of course,” Danielle said. “I’ll see you at the funeral, I guess.”

  “You were right,” LaRee said to Vita, sitting her down on the couch, holding her two hands tight. “It was something bad. Dorotea’s father died.”

  “But he’s in jail.”

  LaRee swallowed. Of course, Vita knew this much. That was the way it was in Oyster Creek. Some dads were in jail. Maybe for cocaine, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (shod foot). One had scratched his girlfriend’s name on a bullet and put the gun to her head.

  “Did he have a heart attack, or…?”

  “He killed himself.”

  “Wo-o-ow. Just wow.” Vita was afraid of mothers dying, not fathers. Her eyes widened and she looked absolutely thrilled, just like the people who drove up the tabloid sales after her mother’s death. “How do you commit suicide in jail?” she asked.

  “He hung himself with his bedsheet; that’s what Danielle said.”

  LaRee was grateful to see Vita nod. She’d been afraid she’d have to tell her what hanging was. Like all parents, she was used to keeping secrets. Who filled the Christmas stocking? What happened at Abu Ghraib? Why isn’t my father married to my mother? Why didn’t I go to live with him?

  “With a bedsheet?”

  “You can twist it up like a rope,” LaRee said by rote, watching as the disaster approached.…

  “But what would you hook it to?”

  “I… Maybe the top bunk? I don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  “His mom died the night before—that’s why we saw the ambulance, I suppose. Maybe he was sad about that, or he didn’t want to kill himself while she was alive? I guess everyone in prison wants to die. The prison system in this country… I don’t know. We don’t give people any reason to hope, any tools to make their lives better, then they act out of despair and we slam them in prison. We’d rather build more prisons than more schools,” LaRee went on, blindly, playing for time. Building this house, with all these windows, they’d been thinking of sunlight. But when clouds lowered, as they did now, they could dim the room so completely it felt like being underwater. Rain started pelting, big drops of cold spring rain. Vita’s face was in shadow.

  “And just leave his family, Dorotea and her mom?” she said. “Now he’ll never see them again, when if he’d just waited a little longer, he could have been with them.”

  “Mmm, it’s true,” LaRee said. Though it wasn’t. Vinny had been sentenced to life.

  “When was he supposed to get out?”

  “Not for a long time.”

  How had the damned prison failed to keep him alive? Of course Vita would have learned the truth eventually, but the story would have come slowly into focus. By the time the whole picture came together, she’d be out in the world, she’d know how complex even the most ordinary things were. LaRee would explain how fragile Sabine had been, so lonely that she would almost assume another identity to seduce a man, so lonely that someone like Vinny might have seemed like a kindred spirit in some way. By then Vita, grown into a confident, thoughtful woman, would smile sadly—would understand.

  “For holding up the SixMart with a souvenir machete?”

  “That wasn’t Vinny! That was Ed Callows off his meds.”

  “Oh, I always thought that was Vinny. But then, what did Vinny do?”

  It was like that; you didn’t remember how children outgrew the safety measures, pulled the covers off the outlets, sprung the gate at the top of the stairs.

  “What?”

  “What was his crime? Drugs… or…”

  LaRee’s throat closed. She remembered Vinny trying to talk to the parrot Della kept in the coffee shop—“Polly wanna cracka?” The parrot had repeated “Polly wanna cracka,” in a mocking tone, and Vinny had suddenly tried to wrench the cage door open, but his big fingers wouldn’t fit between the wires. He’d hit the cage, knocking it to the ground. The parrot squawked and flapped: “Closing time, closing time!” over and o
ver in self-defense. And Vinny stood there, humiliated as always, a man who could be hurt into fury by a talking parrot. If Sabine had seemed to promise him love, and then denied it…

  “He killed someone.” What choice was there? Her mind raced for some escape—take Vita away for a week until it all blew over, or… But no—she’d have her laptop, she’d look at Facebook, in two clicks she’d be reading the Herald, and then…

  Vita’s gaze snapped into focus.

  “Who did he kill?”

  “Vita, you were too young.… I couldn’t tell you; it would have been wrong.… It…”

  “Him?” Vita said. “Dorotea’s father killed my mom?”

  LaRee nodded. Oh, how she wanted a cigarette, though she’d given them up the day Vita’s adoption was final. She’d made a pact with fate: As long as she didn’t smoke, Vita would be strong and happy. It made it almost easy to quit.

  “Yes,” she said. “He did.”

  “But why?” And before LaRee could answer, Vita grew up. Her face changed, and her posture, and she wasn’t LaRee’s child anymore.

  “He killed my mother,” she said quietly. LaRee would rather she had yelled. “And… no one told me—you just let… you let me go to school without knowing. But they all know, don’t they? I’m the only idiot who didn’t know.”

  “Vita, you were six years old when Vinny was arrested. You… you’d survived it, your little self was so strong… you found ways to grow and live. Your mother lived in you. That she wasn’t here…it was terrible, but her love was still in you. And you missed her…. But…”

  LaRee couldn’t find the words. They talked often of Sabine, how excited she had been when she was pregnant, how she had called LaRee with every little story—the first time Vita had kissed her mother good night; her first ice-cream cone, consumed in pensive silence over a long half hour. They didn’t speak of Sabine’s death any more than they spoke of the ground they walked on. It was just always there.

  “But there were some things it was easier not to tell me,” Vita said now, in a high, accusing voice. It seemed she had spent her life cross-legged under a table while the adults whispered about her mother’s murder above. And maybe that was good: It kept them from prying at her, dripping their sentimental pity into her wounds. They chose their words carefully, which was funny, because it was the tone—the little insinuations, the savage curiosity or the singsong smarminess with which someone would refuse to be curious—that had bored through and made an impression on her heart.

  “Whether I needed to know or not, you didn’t tell me. You just kept me here like some kind of pet, when I was a human being who deserved to know the truth.”

  “Vita, don’t be silly.”

  “What choice do I have? Ignorant is silly! Vinny hung himself, in prison. Because of my mom!”

  “No, Vita, he hung himself because he couldn’t live with himself after what he did to your mom.”

  “You know what she was—a whore!”

  “Vita! What on earth? Where did this come from? Your mom was a beautiful, wonderful woman who loved you and… she loved your father, too. She didn’t do anything to anyone. Vinny murdered her, because he was a violent man and he was on… meth, or God knows what.”

  “And why did she let a violent, drugged man into the house?”

  “Oh, honey… look, we don’t lock our doors here, even now. Why wouldn’t she have let Vinny in? He’d pumped her septic tank the day before. She probably thought he was bringing the bill.”

  “No… because she was just like he was—depraved.”

  “Where did you get this idea, Vita? Who ever even considered such a thing?”

  “Just every person who’s ever looked at me, that’s who. Everyone at school… they all know what happened—people were honest with them. That’s why they hate me. That’s why.… You’ve been lying to me, all these years?” She jumped to her feet as if she couldn’t bear it sitting down.

  “Vita, stop this right now and listen to me.” LaRee had almost never had to speak sharply to Vita before. “I may have done wrong by keeping this from you. Maybe I did. I didn’t know what to do; I don’t always know. But we will try to understand it together, and we will manage, just like we’ve managed everything else.”

  Vita had stopped and taken a deep breath, just as LaRee had asked her to. LaRee reached to take her hands.

  Vita spun away as if she were resisting the most pernicious temptation she had ever faced. “No!” she said. “No. No.”

  And she ran out the door, down the driveway, onto the street. It was so quiet, that spring quiet: no traffic on the highway yet. LaRee could hear every footfall. In cross-country season five miles a day was nothing. Who knew how far those long young legs would carry her? But maybe that was best; let her run it out of her system. The sense of her own strength would buoy her up, calm her.

  The footsteps stopped, and a shriek echoed across the pond. It was as if a trapdoor had opened and dropped them back to that first night, when Vita had no words and there was nothing to do but howl in fear and fury.

  PART THREE

  15

  SOMETHING IN COMMON

  It was one thing to run away. But where did you run to? Vita didn’t even ask herself at first. She flew down the long driveway, along the road toward the highway, breathing the wet spring air, the fresh scent blowing in off the bay. She felt as fast as a tiger, in love with the way her legs worked, the deliberate rhythm of her steps, down one hill and up the next without quickening or slowing. The pond lay still and black in its hollow. Coming to the top of Tavern Hill, she stopped, not to catch her breath but to notice she didn’t need to—she could have run for days. The town with its three steeples on interlaced hills lay below her, the harbor with Barrel Point curving protectively around, then the long reach of the bay, and Plymouth a distant shadow on the other side. This little view, which she saw nearly every day of her life, touched a nerve in her now, as if it were an enchanted place that she could never return to. And where else could she go? The highway that came all the way from California ended ten miles north of here at a little roundabout in the middle of a salt marsh, as if to say, “Three thousand miles, and you’re still in the middle of nowhere.”

  There was a bus. It came through at seven thirty in the morning and five in the evening, and you could change in Hyannis for Providence or Boston or New York. She had five dollars in her pocket, but her wallet was in her backpack, dropped by the front door at home. She could go to the harbormaster’s office, she supposed, and ask Franco for money—except he was worse even than LaRee. He had kept the same secrets, told the same lies she had. She was not going to start relying on a traitor now. If only there were a rehearsal, where she could be safely following a script! Except there was only a tiny part for her in that script. Even they believed in Shyanne, not in her.

  That was when she screamed, like an animal caught in a trap. LaRee would hear—she wanted LaRee to hear. Vita had grown up in the shadow of this murder, been shaped by it even as she became beautiful and strong. LaRee had protected her, fed and clothed and guided and comforted her, and Vita had picked up her speech patterns, her mannerisms, her way of singing to herself while she worked, her way of looking at the world around her… everything. And now—it was all woven through with lies! If Vita wanted to escape the lies, and the murder, it would mean tearing herself away from everything that sustained her. She wanted LaRee to know how it felt.

  LaRee stayed still in the doorway, biting her knuckle, long after the echo subsided. Where would Vita go? Maybe the library? It was in the old Presbyterian church and it still felt like a safe and sacred place. She’d collect herself in the quiet there and soon would come a text message: “Sry, so dumb. Come get me? Xoxo.” And LaRee would reply, “Not dumb at all. See you soon. Xoxo.” And they’d get pizza at the Walrus and bring it home, and LaRee would apologize and Vita would be understanding; then they’d sit down and probably figure out a way to help Dorotea and her mother—victims of
the same man, after all.…

  She heard a truck downshift, hurtling along the highway—probably the fish truck coming from Provincetown, the driver anxious to get back home to Fall River now. How long had she been standing there, pulling her sleeves over her hands, not wanting to move, to admit Vita had really gone? The sun found a thin place in the fog and struck sparkles against the dark surface of the pond. And there, the phone was ringing.

  “Hi, honey.”

  “Ms. Farnham? Hi, this is Sue Salatin from the Herald.”

  Well, of course it was. She didn’t know Sue Salatin, but she knew how the phone would ring whenever there was a new wrinkle in the case. Twelve years ago it had shrilled incessantly; then nine years ago when Vinny was tried, it had begun again.… By that time, Vita had reached the age of intuition and could have put everything together from overhearing three words and seeing a tension in LaRee’s shoulders. “I’m sure you’ve heard that Vinny Machado has taken his own life.”

  “Yes, I have, thank you.” This was where you said, “I have no comment,” and hung up. But LaRee was just stupid enough to feel guilty for being short with a tabloid journalist.

  “Does this change anything, from your point of view?”

  “What would it change?” she asked. Why was she getting into this conversation?

  “Do you feel he’s escaped justice, evaded the penalty handed down by the court?”

  LaRee laughed. “By hanging himself? No… I just… I’m just sorry, sorry about the whole thing.”

  “Why would you be sorry?”

  “What else would I be? It’s loss and heartbreak all around.”

  “So, you think he got what he deserved?” This girl had probably been in high school when Sabine died. She and her friends might have giggled over Franco’s picture in Cosmopolitan. Would you date this murder suspect?