The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  That backed Dorotea into a corner. “Yeah,” she said. “I only have my mom.”

  “That’s why I came. Because… you could say we both have the same problem,” Vita said. By now she barely remembered that she had meant to be kind.

  “He didn’t kill her,” Dorotea hissed. “Get away from me.”

  “I’m your ‘friend from school,’ remember?” Vita said. Her tongue had been freed; it was frightening. “He was convicted of murder by a jury, and his appeal was refused.”

  “Doesn’t mean he killed anyone,” Dorotea said in a singsong.

  “D… N… A! DNA, that’s what! Did you fail biology, too? He killed someone! My mother!” Vita yelled this into Dorotea’s shuttered face, causing something to flicker there before Dorotea looked up at the sky and broke into a chant.

  “Did not, did not, did not! Loser, loser, loser! Everyone knows you’re a big loser! Nobody likes you!”

  The truth had felt so good, Vita couldn’t stop. “And it’s not your fault! You were just a baby, like me.”

  “La, la, la, la, I can’t hear you!”

  They headed up Point Road, behind the big fancy houses. Screaming began to feel inappropriate.

  “I said,” Vita said, lowering her voice, “that it’s not your fault what your father did.”

  “You don’t get to say what’s my fault and what isn’t, loser.”

  A truck rattled by—Dorotea’s mother on her way to work.

  “Friend from school?” Dorotea shouted after she passed. “It’s Vita Gray, you retard!” But her mother’s windows were up.

  “Okay, forget it. I’ll go back to your house and get my bike and go home,” Vita said. “Your mom won’t know we didn’t go.”

  Dorotea kept walking. “What’s your favorite ice cream?” she asked suddenly.

  “Peppermint.”

  Dorotea glanced over. “I like chocolate,” she said, as if this was proof that she was better than Vita. “I pray for you every night.”

  “What?”

  “Because you’re a heathen.”

  “What’s a heathen?”

  “See, you don’t even know that. It’s someone who doesn’t have a religion, so they don’t have any morals. So, I pray that you’ll, you know, abstain until marriage and stuff.”

  “You pray that every night?”

  “Well, sometimes I pray you’ll find God, but I always pray for you.”

  “You pray for me?”

  “Someone has to.”

  “Do you pray for Kayla?”

  “Why would I pray for Kayla? It’s not like she’s getting an abortion or anything.”

  “It’s not like she abstained until marriage, either. I mean, your father is… was… a murderer. Your house smells of shit. You look like a melted candle, the way you drag around. Why don’t you pray for yourself?”

  Vita covered her mouth with her hand—she couldn’t believe she’d said such things. But she’d had to, to keep Dorotea from binding her up in these ideas.

  “My dad would have lived with me if he could,” Dorotea said quietly. It was the winning stroke, and with it she became graceful. “I still feel bad about it,” she admitted, in the same dull, automatic voice.

  “About what?” Vita guessed what—the day in kindergarten when they were supposed to play together after school. She wouldn’t have thought Dorotea would remember.

  “Yeah, the time they wouldn’t let you come over,” Dorotea said.

  “Oh, yeah… I’d forgotten about that.” In fact Vita could still see Dorotea running across the playground toward her, holding out the tiny note that read Monday, a scrap as small as a fortune cookie message.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said to Dorotea now. It was the last thing she wanted to talk about. “It happened like a century ago. It’s not important.”

  “No, but they shouldn’t have.…” Dorotea was trying to lift her head and speak out her own thoughts, and the honest attempt changed everything.

  “It was so sad,” Vita admitted. “I still remember. I guess I understand it better now, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I thought your family was afraid of me because of… what happened, like you’d catch my disease or something.…Like revenge of the green slime—and you didn’t want it getting all over you.”

  “Yeah, that was kind of it,” Dorotea said, smugly, goading Vita.

  “But really it was the other way around. His—your father’s— awfulness had gotten all over me and he didn’t want to see me because of it.”

  “That’s not what it was. He didn’t want me to play with you because you don’t go to church. He was afraid you’d corrupt me.”

  “How do five-year-olds corrupt each other?”

  “You know… like you’d convince me to do stuff that was wrong.”

  “Like what? Jumping in mud puddles?”

  “Like you’d think it was right for a woman to have a married man’s baby,” Dorotea said, pious.

  “Or I’d think it was right for murderers to go to jail.”

  “He didn’t kill anyone!” Dorotea shrieked this, with her hands over her ears for fear of the reply. They were walking along the highway now and someone honked—probably Brandon or some other creep from school. Vita felt as if there were a brawl going on in her head—all the things she had thought and been told were punching and kicking each other and upending the tables.

  “He killed himself,” she said, in a high, triumphant voice. “So he has killed at least one person.”

  “You’re not supposed to talk about that,” Dorotea said.

  “So, is that the kind of thing your father thought I’d corrupt you into doing? Talk about the people he killed? And at night, before you go to sleep, do you pray that I won’t talk about it?” She felt herself taking the wrong path, but she couldn’t stop. If she didn’t confront all this… wrongness… right here, her whole life might be controlled by it, and the truth would be lost, and Sabine would be lost. Surely there was some way to be honest and kind? She couldn’t find it.

  “You’ll end up in hell,” Dorotea said.

  “Is your father in hell?”

  “You’re a monster. Only a monster would say something like that. That’s why nobody likes you. You’re a monster and you never should have been born.”

  Then she whispered: “Daddy’s in heaven, heaven, heaven,” and sat down in the weeds at the side of the road with her forehead to her knees.

  Vita sat beside her, pushing aside some little whiskey bottles, the right size for a doll. There were fiddleheads coming up out of the sand, like the ones in the stories LaRee used to tell her, about mice who lived in the woods. The mice would pull two of the scrolled fern tops together with a strand of grass to make the arch for their wedding chapel. An ache opened in the back of Vita’s throat; she tried to swallow.

  “My mother is dead, your father is dead,” she said carefully, setting out plain facts one by one. “We need to try to stop the… the green slime, before it does any more damage.”

  She had no idea what this might mean, but keeping herself calm in the face of Dorotea’s hysteria felt good, so she wanted to continue. It was a little like standing on a surfboard, trying to keep her balance as each new wave struck; with every lurch she was more aware of her own strength and stability.

  “What are you talking about?” Dorotea said.

  “Why would he kill her? Why would anyone kill anyone?”

  “Everyone hated her.”

  “I didn’t hate her.”

  “She did something to him, so he had to kill her.…”

  “What could that be?”

  “I don’t know,” Dorotea said, beginning to cry softly into her knees. “She was a slut,” she said, weeping as she tried to explain. “She’d spread her legs for anyone.” The cars were passing so close that Vita felt a dull awareness that they were in danger. “My dad wasn’t a bad man,” Dorotea continued. “Not until he met her. My mom made hi
m mad sometimes, but he loved her.”

  The TV truck came over the rise way too fast, swerving when the driver saw them, nearly hitting Matt Paradel’s pickup head-on. Vita took Dorotea by the shoulders and pulled her back away from the road, rolling over her, pulling her into the culvert.

  “What is wrong with you?” Dorotea said, fighting her off. “Get offa me!”

  “I’m trying to save your life, stupid.”

  “I don’t want you to save my life, you queer.” Dorotea stood up and brushed herself off. “Like you could save anyone’s life—look at you! Who do you think you are? You and your stupid green slime. You don’t know anything except that you think you’re so much better than me, even though you’re a bastard and your mother got herself killed from whoring.” She started walking back toward Point Road. Over her shoulder she said, “Save your own goddamn life.”

  Vita watched her. She had no idea what to do next. What would LaRee have done? She always seemed to know. Even when LaRee was wrong, you could tell she was obeying some inner compass, working toward kindness. And that gave her courage—she would take over without even realizing what she was doing, because she trusted her impulses. When a fisherman came into the clinic with a hook embedded in his hand, having been damned if he was going to come all the way back into port at midmorning and lose one of the few fishing days he was allowed, LaRee was the one who could lance the wound, push the hook through and snip off the point, all the while lecturing the guy so sharply that he barely noticed the pain. She didn’t go around wanting to save people’s lives; she just did it because somebody had to.

  “Wait!” Vita called, standing up, plucking at her pant legs, damp from the ground.

  “What?” Dorotea kept walking.

  “You’re right.”

  She stopped. “What do you mean?”

  Vita wasn’t sure, except that she knew people would listen to you if you began your sentence with “You’re right.” “Everyone has to save their own life.”

  “Not me,” Dorotea said. “My life is fine.”

  She turned off, into the woods. There was a spot where the ditch narrowed so you could step over it. The grass was worn away there—Dorotea and anyone else walking into town from the Driftwood Cabins could save time by cutting through the woods, and enough of them brushed through the overgrowth every day that they had made a narrow path. Dorotea had taken Vita around by the road, either because Vita was too dainty to be exposed to the poison ivy and the catbriar looped like razor wire through the trees or because the path was a secret privilege not to be shared with her. It was a place for kids to drink and smoke dope, a way for people to get to the SixMart for beer and cigarettes and doughnuts and lottery tickets and the other small comforts they relied on back in the Cabins, and since it was a secret it had become a point of pride, of belonging. Dorotea was not going to share it with anyone, most certainly not with Vita Gray. She stood on the other side of the ditch—her side—and said, “It’s you who ought to be ashamed.”

  16

  KIDS

  The mother fox had brought the cubs out from under the shed. That was how still LaRee had been, leaning in the doorframe, staring without seeing while the argument, and Vita’s life, passed through her mind over and over. Twenty minutes, had it been, or an hour? The clouds were moving away and the sun angled in from the west, making a warm spot for the cubs to bat and pounce while their mother napped beside them.

  It was only a few years since Vita had dreamed of taking a fox family in as pets. She still had her child’s sense that she could become friends with any bright-eyed creature.… She and LaRee had fed chickadees from their palms so often that all they had to do was reach a hand up and birds would flit down to settle. To think of Vita running out to pick a parsley sprig for dinner, or starting off up the road to pick blueberries on a July afternoon… Their hill was a storybook of sunlit adventures, set like bricks in a wall against the past. She should have remembered the way walls come down. A slap of anger hit her over, of all things, the day ten years ago when Dorotea had been supposed to come over to make a gingerbread house. That insipid sheep of a kindergarten teacher telling Vita she must be respectful of those who excluded her. Then LaRee caught herself: murder, imprisonment, suicide… and she blamed the sentimentalist? The teacher had moved away; she was probably selling bumper stickers somewhere now.

  Maybe LaRee should have taken that as a signal to move away, to start fresh. Vita had been so young she might have forgotten all of it, even forgotten Sabine. Once Vinny was arrested, LaRee had felt an obligation to stick here, to show them (whoever “they” were—Amalia and anyone else who’d ever looked at her cross-eyed) that this was her home, too. “They” seemed to blame her, as if it were Sabine’s fault, and by extension LaRee’s fault, that Vinny had committed murder and was going to jail.

  She should have moved, sold the house and left the whole misbegotten thing behind. It wasn’t like she was a shellfish farmer; nurses could always find work. Drew, in his guilt, had deeded the house to her for a dollar; she could have sold it, bought a condo in Boston, started a new life. She saw herself fumbling for keys on the front steps of a brownstone in a golden autumn light, with a little mitten-clad hand held tight in hers…

  She’s a nurse at Mercy Hospital, has a little girl. I don’t think there’s a man in the picture.

  That was what the neighbors would say. No more. Nurses were like chipmunks: ubiquitous, unnoticed. Vita would have spent her weekends with Franco until the relationship attenuated and he became a distant memory, an ache on a rainy day. Sabine—she would have become a beautiful story, her life a creative adventure, a treasure for Vita to build on. The problem was not that LaRee hadn’t told the truth to Vita; it was that she hadn’t made up a big enough lie. LaRee herself might have met someone, a guy like Matt, only single, and when she felt safe enough she’d have confided it all, the murder and how she’d felt she had to leave. The story would weave the silk of family tighter between them; they’d have married.… She could see Vita playing with a dollhouse while she and this man made dinner. She’d have read about Vinny’s death in the paper—the last chapter of an awful story. And then she’d have closed the newspaper and gone to pick up Vita—a Vita whose hair billowed into curls, who was a bit of a science geek, planning to go to college pre-med—at her school. And she wouldn’t have mentioned it, not because she was keeping a secret but because it had slipped her mind.

  But no, she hadn’t had the courage to tear her own roots out of the soil here. She’d told herself things would settle down, go back to normal, as if that were even possible. She’d wanted to keep Vita near Franco, near the place she knew as home. Had she imagined the tide would wash over and smooth everything as clean and fresh as the morning beach?

  Did you ever know for certain that any action was for the good? An hour ago, when Vita ran down the driveway, LaRee had been sure it was right to let her go. Vita was sixteen, she was learning to make her own choices, and LaRee had to learn not to rush in every time with her own answer to a problem. Vita had reason to be angry, and at her age there was no difference between being mad at the world and mad at your mom. She would escape, go downtown and maybe bump into Hugh or Adam or someone who’d cheer her up a bit. She’d come home, and she and LaRee would sit down and think things through. All of which would have made sense if Vita had been upset over a boy or a test score or any of the ordinary things. But leaving a girl whose life was made of grief to manage the next terrible consequence by herself? Was she out of her mind? She ran to the car, backed it around, and headed down the hill into town.

  And into the fog. Everything was lavender, murky, unknown. The light turned red just as she reached it and she waited while the fish truck from Provincetown went by, then the mail truck, then the bus.

  The bus. She followed it down Hallett Way, parked behind it when it stopped at the pharmacy, went in. Kyle Monder was there buying a ticket and a pack of cigarettes, his hood up as if to conceal his face. Be
hind the counter, Mary Attlekin rang him up and handed him his change and he went out the door, keeping his head low. Ashamed of …everything. Born because two wretched souls found a minute of warmth together, alive the way blind creatures are alive miles under the sea. Aware, in the vaguest way, that others lived in the light. Kyle got on the bus; the driver stood there for another minute, looking up and down the street, tossed his cigarette in the gutter, swung into his seat and pulled away.

  “He’s off to Boston, huh?” LaRee asked.

  “Yeah, his dad lives up there,” Mary said. “Boy, you couldn’t get me up there.”

  “Not a Boston fan?”

  “I don’t like cities,” Mary said. “I lived in Holyoke when I first had the twins.… Oh, no, you’re not going to get me into a city. I do not like cities.”

  “Have you been to New York?”

  “Nope. And got no plans.”

  “Mary, has Vita been in this afternoon?”

  “Haven’t seen her.”

  “If you do, would you ask her to call me?”

  “I’m closing up in fifteen minutes.”

  “Well, just in case.”

  “She giving you trouble?”

  “I’m a little worried about her, that’s all.”

  Mary gave her a hard little glance. “Teenagers,” she said with disdain, though as far as LaRee knew she was still a teenager herself. “Nothin’ but trouble.”

  The lights were on in the library. The tall arched windows advertised warmth and comfort, thoughtful ease. It had been the Presbyterian church, built in 1857 when the town was a thriving port. It was said that you could walk across the bay to Plymouth on the backs of the whales then, and the sea captains built churches as solid and ornate as their homes, so God would see they were grateful. Mackerel Bay had been full of mackerel. By 1898, kerosene had replaced whale oil, steamships were replacing clipper ships, and mackerel were as scarce as Presbyterians. The church steeple was torn off in the Portland Gale and never rebuilt. A few steely fishermen from the Azores had found their way to town, and sent for their families, and built the Catholic church across the street. Presbyterians attended one another’s funerals, their knobbed fingers folded in their laps, while weddings and christenings spilled from the doors of Our Lady, Star of the Sea. In 1995 a man who’d summered in Wellfleet and made millions in the first wave of the Internet boom bought the derelict church building and gave it to the town to use as a library.