“What do people deserve?” LaRee asked her. “I mean, what would you say Vinny deserved?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’m not close to the case.”
“What do you deserve, do you think? When you sum up your life?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry for his family,” LaRee said. “That’s really all.”
She put the receiver back very gently, so she wasn’t so much hanging up on the woman as causing her to evaporate. Nurses must nurse; reporters must report. There was no reason for anger. Even the snoozy old Oyster Creek Oracle had roused itself to publish a special edition the day Vinny was sentenced, with two photos: one of Vinny looking back over his shoulder as he left the court and one of Vita, standing on the bench in front of the school as LaRee buttoned up her coat. The photographer, maddened by this chance at glory, had literally jumped out from behind a school bus to take the picture, scattering mothers and children like pigeons so as to catch LaRee’s hands carefully buttoning as Vita stood straight and still, the image of a good little girl. He had caught a true moment, and LaRee still had a copy of the picture on her dresser.
LaRee still entertained herself by imagining her life in tabloid headlines: “Slay-Tot Speaks Out: Stepmom Lied.”
It occurred to her suddenly that Sue Salatin might be calling from downtown. God knew who was waiting there to pounce on an unsuspecting child. LaRee had imagined Vita running past the Walrus and Carpenter, the pharmacy, and the Fishermen’s Memorial, the bronze fisherman statue in the roundabout at the top of Sea Street, pulling open the heavy library door and dropping into an armchair to take comfort from the ticking of the grandfather clock. She’d imagined the town would keep Vita safe. But she’d forgotten that the thing that shattered when Sabine was killed had left a shard in every heart, and that old wounds would reopen now. God knew what anyone would say—the reporters were sharks; they’d fight one another for a bite of her. She dialed Vita’s cell phone and heard a muffled “Hips Don’t Lie” start playing across the room. Of course. Vita’s phone was in her backpack, right there by the door.
“It’s for your own good.” That was what adults always said, how they rationalized every stupid thing they did. For Vita’s own good, LaRee had scrambled the story, never mind that the story was all Vita had left of her mother. If Sabine really had been killed by a stranger—a bad man who had come over the bridge like rabies and was locked in prison now—everything would have been different. But no, Sabine had been murdered by a man she saw every day… who had slashed at her with a fishing knife and left her bleeding on the floor. A stranger wouldn’t have guessed Vita was upstairs. A neighbor… Vinny Machado… He knew he was killing somebody’s mother! That Vita would come down the stairs in her little footie pajamas in the morning, and find… No wonder everyone laughed at her. She was the only person in town who didn’t know the real story of her own life! What a fool, what a stupid little fool.
She was not going to stay foolish; she was going to find out. What did she know, really, about her mother, except that she had slept with a married man and lived in Italy for a while, and been LaRee’s friend at college. Who could know, with LaRee guarding all the secrets, making up convenient fairy tales instead? What LaRee had hidden from her—these were the most important things in the world!
Coming down Sea Street, Vita saw what she thought was the Outer Cape Seafood truck parked at the harbormaster’s shack, then realized it had a satellite dish on top. It was the mobile news from WHUB in Boston. The front door of the shack was wide open and the phone was ringing. She put her head in and found the office empty. In the back room the kayaks rested across the rafters and the rubber boots were lined up against the wall. The smell of brine and seaweed struck her broadside—it was the smell that had meant she was visiting Franco when she was little, a smell of hope and trepidation. Would he really be glad to see her? Would he be the father she imagined, or the awkward, distracted man who usually met her on these days? She started to cry. How had she even gotten here? She had run away from home and her feet had just carried her down the hill to the harbor, to her father… her dad. “My dad,” people said, so simply, as if it weren’t anything important at all. Had she ever in her life said “my dad”? No, and she’d sworn he didn’t matter, and yet, here she was.
And there he was, leading the reporter and cameraman to the very end of the pier, where the Rainha was tied. She’d been rusting there for as long as Vita could remember, her net reel thick with seaweed, the cabin door rotting like a tooth. Why did Franco have to take the reporters all the way out to the end of the wharf? To be near his poor wreck of a boat? Or because it was the right backdrop for a boatswain? It caught the sense they were looking for, of some kind of real, concrete life, the kind of life all the people watching longed for. Franco in his peacoat, the restless water behind him, the boat with its rust and rot and seaweed… a whole man, with a life fully lived. Who wouldn’t watch him with fascination?
The camera rolled; Vita watched from just inside the back door. Franco was speaking into the microphone, talking and talking. He was the foremost authority on the murder, called in yet again to explain it to the world, and he had the look, the stance of a man who was doing something Very Important. The wind switched and she could hear the reporter’s voice: “… your daughter, Franco?”
“Oh, she’s, she’s fine,” he said, but for once he had no answer; he was at a loss for words. Sabine had left him two things: a daughter, and a spotlight. And he sure did love that spotlight! She thought of running down the pier, grabbing the mike and pushing him away—one step back and he’d be in the water. Then she would say, “You want to know how his daughter is? This is how!”
As if she had the guts to do such a thing, but no, she was small as a mouse, quiet as a mouse, and like a mouse she edged along the wall out of sight. His bicycle was leaning there, and she took it, wheeling it around to the front of the shack while the others were distracted by the cameras, swinging a leg over and heading down Breakwater Road around the harbor. The marsh grass was a bright, cold green, and a man was mowing the lawn at the Winthrop Inn. All of life going on by quiet rote—how did it happen, how could that be? A man had killed a woman, left a motherless child, gone to prison, and finally had hung himself, in shame and despair… and there was another man coming out of the hardware store with a brand-new ladder, and a young couple crossing the little bridge over the marsh, holding hands. The most terrible thing was just another thread woven through ordinary life. That bridge led to a sandy path around the edge of an island, and then, except at the highest tide, to Sedge Point, where Adam lived. What would happen if she knocked on his door? She’d like to imagine he would take her in, understand it all, and they could run away together, hitchhiking across the country, sleeping in barns, doing odd jobs to earn their meals. She had read too many books. Adam’s thoughtfulness made him awkward—if he saw her at the door he’d panic as he tried to think of the right thing to say, and say just the wrong thing, and she of course would say the wrong thing, too, and very soon she would say she had to leave, just because she wanted to save him from his embarrassment, and she’d see how grateful he was to see the last of her. So it was probably good luck that the bike wouldn’t go on the sand path. The seat was too high for her, so she stood to pedal, and with each stroke the bike raced forward, carrying her past that turn, toward the day when she would leave here altogether and for good.
It occurred to her now that she wasn’t alone. There was a whole community of the bereaved; almost everyone belonged. Most people had some hole in their lives, an abyss they spent every day toeing around, so their lives weren’t so much aimed at getting anywhere, but just not sliding back into the dark. It was funny to think she’d been feeling left out, as if she had to be valedictorian or class president or the star of some show in order to belong—when she had been one of the group all the time. She might be failing geometry, but if there were a standardized test for living with grief, she would
be in the ninety-ninth percentile.
And Dorotea Machado would need a tutor now. At the highway, Vita turned south toward Fox Hollow, and the Driftwood Cabins.
LaRee didn’t like her riding her bike on the highway, though everyone did it. On the map, you could see how delicate the cape was, long and narrow and frayed into points and inlets like a rag, riddled with bogs and ponds and the streams that ran between them, with estuaries that forked so far inland they nearly reached the other shore. Out here, the strip of land was so thin there were only a few miles between the bay and the ocean, with the highway running straight down the middle, the only connection between one bumpy road and the next. And LaRee didn’t understand that Vita had grown up, that she could fight her own battles, get where she wanted to go without help. There was a lot LaRee didn’t understand. She hadn’t been there when Sabine died. Vita didn’t remember it, but only because it had become part of her, like another organ: her heart, her lungs, her liver, her mourning. Now that both Sabine and Vinny were dead, Vita was the only one left who had been there, though every single person in town had the story in his imagination, pinned to whichever truth he or she preferred.
Vita and Dorotea barely knew each other, though they took the same school bus every day. Dorotea was surrounded by her family, which was half the town by the time you counted the in-laws and cousins. She moved along, expressionless, following the Gelfa traditions, serving at the Our Lady altar, giving the censer a swing as Father Lomba laid out the cloth for communion. She worked at Skipper’s takeout window, handing over a clam roll between two paper plates, pointing out the condiments, moving the orders down the line. She had been allowed to see only one movie in her life: The Passion of the Christ. Who would have guessed they had something in common?
A cold misery pierced Vita, a shard of the bleakness that would cause a man to take his own life. She pedaled as fast as she could, to get this stretch of highway over with. A car passed so close it nearly brushed her knee. Shyanne and her friend Steph were coming along on foot, both in burgundy dresses with white aprons: the waitstaff uniform at Pizza by the Sea. Vita rode out around them and they looked straight ahead as if they hadn’t seen her.
She was riding so hard she felt as if the bicycle would take flight. Dorotea was the other person in town, maybe on earth, who had seen the underside of everything the same as she had. She swooped right, down Point Road, over the bridge and past what she and LaRee called “the renovation house” because carpenters or landscapers or plumbers were always working on it, but never once had they seen anyone who appeared to live there. That was on the water side of the street, where the houses cost millions, which meant, oddly enough, that the people who owned them had many houses and didn’t spend very much time in any of them. On the other side, backed up to the woods of the National Seashore, lived the people who could barely afford their one house—many in the Driftwood Cabins, a colony of tourist cottages turned to year-round rentals, and, on the two dirt roads that snaked around behind it, houses built on lots made of “fill” along the edges of the salt marsh.
It would be illegal to build here now, but Bobby Matos had sold this land as cheap building lots back when nobody thought about protecting the wetlands. Single-story houses with a few little windows on each side, a truck parked in back and maybe a shed for the oyster gear. It felt lonely here in spite of the beauty of the marsh. Or maybe because of it: the green flaring against the silver estuary, silent and full of mystery—it looked like you could paddle around a bend into another world. But instead you were in this world, where everyone was too tired and worried and frustrated with life to look out the window.
She found the Machado house by the wrought-iron sign affixed beside the door, with the name printed under a clipper ship. Their Christmas decorations were still up: a wreath gone brown and a tall plastic candle in a red base tipped over beside the front steps, as if a burst of good feeling in December had sagged back into discouragement. Vita leaned the bike against the side wall, just uphill from the basement window, through which a pump was draining spurts of brown water.
Her stomach turned; revulsion gave onto fear. She was about to get back on the bike and ride home except that a man came out of a house three doors down and shot a curious look at her, so she felt constrained to act normal, which meant somehow that she had to continue with an errand that seemed stupid and even dangerous now.
She rapped on the door, setting off a dog inside, but got no human response until finally a woman called, “Shut up, Viper, just shut up.” The door opened a crack and Vita looked up into the dark, wary eyes of Maria Machado, Vinny’s widow, Dorotea’s mom.
“Hi,” Vita said. “I… was out on my bike and I thought maybe Dorotea…” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence but it didn’t matter. Mrs. Machado’s face relaxed and she pushed her hair back, wiping her hands on her T-shirt, to open the door. Viper was a big German shepherd with a long nose, wagging his tail in frantic welcome even as he continued to howl.
“Here,” Mrs. Machado said, grabbing the dog’s collar with both hands. Feet planted firmly, she threw all her weight back and managed to yank the dog inch by unwilling inch into the bathroom, and shut the door. There was a powerful stench; Vita tried to breathe through her mouth.
“Here, come in. I was just trying to get some chores done.…” She flapped a hand in the direction of a disorder such as Vita couldn’t have imagined. There was a big television in the living room, and across from it a bare mattress with piles of clothing heaped on it. A refrigerator, a stove with a crusted pot on one burner, and a cupboard with cups hanging from hooks made a kind of kitchen along one side of the room. A half-full can of chicken soup sat on top of the dishes piled in the sink.
“I just can’t seem to keep up with it,” Mrs. Machado said. “I’m working double shifts and with… everything…”
Something moved in the corner—a spotted rabbit. It nosed along beside the mattress, stopping to relieve itself in the folds of a damp bath towel.
“Precious, now look!” Mrs. Machado said. “Dotty! Dotty? I have asked Dorotea to keep her in the cage,” she said, “but you know how kids are, and I can’t do everything around here. The vacuum’s broken, that’s the problem.”
A door opened and Dorotea emerged.
“Oh, hey,” she said, seeing Vita.
“It’s your friend from school,” Mrs. Machado said. Dorotea pulled in her chin—she had no friends at school and Vita knew that. Mrs. Machado was wearing clean lavender scrubs and white sneakers. When she left the house she would bring no trace of its disorder into the world. But the effort to appear whole would cost her so dearly that when she returned she would have to fall onto the mattress and stare at the soap operas just for the sake of a glimpse of ordinary life. To be able to say to her daughter, “It’s your friend from school,” was a luxury for her. If Vita could make her happy by acting the part, why not?
“Hi,” Vita said. “I just thought… would you like to go get some ice cream?”
Dorotea looked at her as if she had gone mad.
“Ice cream?” Mrs. Machado said. “Ice cream! At the drive-in. Here, I’ve got…” She rummaged through the clothing on the bed until she found her purse, and scratched around in it until she found two dollar bills and a handful of change. “Ice cream. A nice day for two friends from school to go get some ice cream.”
“Mom,” Dorotea said, shrinking back into the doorway. “You wanted me to clean.”
“Not when your friend from school is here,” her mother said, pleading.
“It’s so hot inside,” Vita said. “Do you want to take a walk?”
“I don’t open the windows,” Mrs. Machado said. “The airs from the marsh, they’re no good.”
This alone made Vita dizzy. “I shouldn’t have come,” she admitted, leaning back against the wall, letting truth leak into her voice.
“Don’t be rude to your friend,” Mrs. Machado said now, poking the folded bills at Dorotea. “Go. G
et ice cream.” The dog began to bark again when she raised her voice. “‘Go,’ I said. I’m going to work.”
“Will… will the rabbit be okay?” Vita asked, as they left the house. “The dog won’t… do anything to it, will he?”
Dorotea rolled her eyes, shut the door and started down the steps. “Nobody likes you,” she said. It was hard to tell if she meant this as an insult or an observation.
“I know,” Vita said. “Well… Abby and Sarah like me.”
“Nobody important, I mean.”
“Who’s important?”
Dorotea looked at Vita as if this question revealed a bottomless ignorance. “I don’t have a bike. We have to walk.”
“Oh, okay. I’ll leave mine here.”
“Well, yeah, where else would you leave it?”
They started down the road together.
“I heard about… you know…” Vita began.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Dorotea said.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Vita said, though somehow it sounded more belligerent than sympathetic.
Dorotea said nothing. They scuffed along in the pine needles at the edge of the road.
“So, I sort of thought I should come over. Because, you know, we have something in common.”
Again, nothing.
“And I don’t have rehearsal today,” Vita said. “I’m in The Tempest, you know, down at the park.”
“Shyanne’s the star, right?” There, Dorotea had hit where she was aiming. Her own life had been a series of blows and her usual choice was between escape and retaliation. Vita had left her no avenue of escape.
“I’m playing Iris, the goddess of the rainbow,” Vita said.
“That’s not a good part, is it?”
They rounded the bend at the back of the Driftwood Cabins and came out behind the Tradescome house, and the vista of the wide blue bay rose up to confront them.
“It’s not,” Vita said, in self-defense. “But my dad’s in it, too, and it’s nice to be doing something together.”
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