The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “We do.”

  “Will you wake me up for rehearsal?”

  “Of course, darlin’.”

  She went into the bedroom for the quilt and by the time she was back Vita was asleep. She had slept like that when she was tiny, cheeks flushed bright and the one little hand curled into a loose fist on the pillow, as if the engine of her ambition was still pressing forward in her dreams.

  PART FOUR

  22

  WIDE-EYED

  “Remember, they’ve been stranded here since Miranda was a baby,” Hugh said. “She knows nothing of the world beyond this island; she is the epitome of innocence.” He sounded a bit drier than usual. Shyanne, who had no problem acting lascivious or haughty, could not quite bring herself to the role of Miranda. She shot Hugh a seething glance and bit her lip in a porno parody of a schoolgirl.

  “She’s too damned naive to be able to act innocent,” he growled to Orson. Vita heard it. Her hearing was as sharp as her sight was blurred, and her general sense of smallness in the face of the enormous adult world kept her still, and sometimes nearly invisible. “Mousy,” Shyanne had called her to Adam. Yes, she’d heard that, too.

  The bay was such a bright, hard blue it looked like you could shatter it with a hammer. The Sweet Shyanne was making a pass along Barrel Point, with Shyanne’s father at the helm and her brothers on deck, shucking cherrystones as quick as they could go. The smell of fried clams came in on every south breeze, a smell you always noticed in June before it became an ordinary part of the summer air.

  How did you ever change anything, when you were caught in the sway of home? Who could leave Oyster Creek, its sights and smells, the constant rhythm of the waves? Vita had lasted three days before she went back to school—she wanted to see what she’d gotten on her history paper, and she missed singing in chorus, hearing all the voices blending together like currents in a stream. School was what she did; it was part of her. And she wasn’t going to let Brandon think that he’d frightened her away.

  At first it seemed as if nothing had changed except her. She had traveled far and wide—to Dorotea’s house, to Orson’s house, and back to the time before she could remember, to all that had made her who she was today—whoever that might be. She saw everything and everyone through a different lens. But the same motes floated in the afternoon sunlight while Mr. Bergman wrote out the geometric formulas on the blackboard, and the boys still banded together, chanting “Octopus! Octopus!” all arms reaching high and low as she got up to leave the classroom. The cheerleaders pushed through, rubbing up against the boys while telling them this was the closest they were ever likely to get. Vita stood there, hands on hips, glaring. Then… well, one thing was different: Dorotea was illuminated, singled out and special by virtue of her father’s death. No one teased her anymore. No one got near her. She still hung her head, but when she looked up you could see some kind of triumph on her face. She was the tragic one and as she came toward the octopus, it dissolved. Vita stepped through in her wake.

  That was the other change, a change in herself. When Brandon belched in her face later, she said, “You disgust me,” without giving a damn what anyone might think.

  “That’s what I meant to do,” he said, all superior… but somehow this twisted back on him and the other guys held their laughter.

  “So I guess I win,” he said, waiting for affirmation. Nothing.

  “What are you staring at?” he asked the others angrily. “She’s the loser.”

  “Whatever makes you feel better, Brandon,” she said. Then they laughed. He seemed to shrink away right there, changing from a terrifying threat to a boy with a foolish grin and pale, uncertain eyes.

  Turning around, she came face-to-face with Adam. One corner of his mouth was crooked into a smile. She had an instinct to walk until she was right against him, and this instinct touched off a panic that kept her from moving at all. So that was still the same.

  “Hi,” she croaked.

  “Do you want a ride to rehearsal?”

  “I… I’ve got to go home first.”

  “We can stop at your house.”

  “It’s out of the way.…” She always took the bus home, and ate something and told LaRee the whole story of the day, changed her clothes, and then LaRee drove her downtown. That was her routine; she hardly knew how to do different. And she liked Adam so much that the idea of being in a car alone with him for fifteen minutes frightened her out of her wits.

  “Um, about three minutes out of the way.” He shrugged. “But that’s fine, I’ll see you there. I just thought…”

  “No… thank you… yes… I mean yes, thank you! If we can make a quick stop at my house, that would be great.” She fell in beside him, walking stiffly toward the parking lot, hardly able to speak. The trees that had been like knobby old hands reaching up from the grave all winter were all leafed out now, immense and lush and moving with soft grace above.

  “You turn on Grace Pond Road,” she managed, “and left around the next corner, by the white tree.…”

  Spring had turned to summer overnight. The fog cleared under a hot sun, the wisteria blossomed all at once, and the peony buds were suddenly as fat as golf balls, with tiny ants patrolling the honeyed edges of the petals. LaRee was kneeling among them and stood up when she heard the car. Why? A helpful person would have crouched in behind the daylilies and kept her head down. Vita tried to leap out of the car, imagining she could get into the house, grab the script, and get back in the car before LaRee could come over and make conversation, but her backpack strap caught on the stick shift and brought her up short.

  “Hi,” LaRee said, infuriatingly.

  “Get down! I mean, thank you. Adam’s giving me a ride to rehearsal, no worries, you can just keep working.”

  “Okay, have a good time,” LaRee said, taking a step back as Vita seemed to be armed and dangerous. “Do you still want me to pick you up?”

  “Yes. Please. You can keep planting.… Just keep planting.”

  “I’ll keep planting,” LaRee said, dropping back to her knees behind the new pea vines.

  So, maybe a lot had changed. But none of it in the way she had expected. Adam drove her to rehearsal every day now, falling in beside her as she headed down the path after school. They had, by accident, become friends. If Orson hadn’t signed Franco up as the boatswain, Vita would have been too shy to speak to Adam. So maybe that hadn’t been the worst thing that had ever happened after all. She followed Adam’s gaze across the water, watching a tall sail come around Barrel Point while Franco and the others roared through the end of the shipwreck scene, howling and accusing one another as their ship split beneath them, stranding them on Prospero’s island.

  “‘Would thou mightst lie drowning… the washing of ten tides!’”

  Franco’s brow furrowed and he looked toward Hugh.

  “A pirate’s dead body was left through several tides, as if enough tides would scrub it clean enough for proper burial. It was sign of disrespect,” Hugh said.

  Franco repeated the line as a curse, and when Hugh suggested he try a lower, rasping voice, he sounded like Popeye the sailor man suddenly and everyone laughed.

  Vita went through life unnoticed, blending into the background, while Franco emerged from the harbormaster’s shack for five minutes and was anointed a star. And there he was, beaming, like the big old fool he was. But—

  “She’s my daughter,” he said suddenly.

  “What?” Hugh squinted in his direction.

  “She’s my daughter. Vita is,” he said; and then, “Really, she is!”

  Hugh turned to inspect her. She stood still and held her breath.

  “I see it,” he said. “Yes. But…?”

  “It’s not important,” Vita said, but Franco was undergoing a revelation.

  “You don’t know?” he asked. “You don’t know who I am?”

  “He doesn’t believe in television,” Orson explained. “He only reads the New York Times.”


  “It’s not important,” Vita said between her teeth. She was clenching her toes to keep from clenching her fists. The washing of ten tides… it would have been… eight tides, at least, that Sabine had lain there bleeding, the long day and night and day that was lost to Vita’s memory but indelible in her imagination. There. Indelible. The washing of ten tides or ten thousand would not erase what she had of Sabine. She did not have to clutch at it, to try to get back an exact memory. Sabine was more than her death—she was present, right there in the way Vita turned her face to the sun.

  “It’s a long story,” she said to Hugh. “A long, long story.” Orson would tell it as soon as she left. She glanced at Franco and dared to smile. Hugh’s compliment had given him the courage to claim her as his daughter. She’d had it backward. All this time she’d been sure he was ashamed of her. In fact he’d assumed she’d be ashamed of him.

  Sam and Shyanne entered, as Prospero and Miranda.

  “No,” Hugh said. “No, Shyanne. Miranda may indeed sulk; she’s a teenaged girl and she’s stuck on this damned island with her father. But she would not have expressed it with that slump. They were wide-eyed, all of them, in a way we can barely imagine, but we want to make it possible for the audience to feel something of it. When Shakespeare was writing The Tempest, the world was very much unexplored. The Mayflower, for instance, hadn’t arrived on these shores.”

  Shyanne rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, she is such a loser,” she said under her breath, but Hugh was entranced by his vision, waving a hand toward the water to remind them all that the Mayflower had indeed arrived just a few miles north of Mackerel Bay.

  Vita tried to feel what it might have been like to live in 1580, looking out over an ocean that seemed infinite. Beyond the horizon mysterious societies flourished, and ships would go and come in spite of the serpents that lived in the sea, bringing gold and silk and spices.… Something washed through her, like a scent from that time.

  “That Shakespeare should imagine Prospero might have magic powers—why not?” Hugh asked. “They were using dried toads as a medicine for plague; magic was only one step beyond.”

  Orson flashed a secretive grin—he had long imagined what mischief he might make if he had magical powers. Franco watched with open curiosity, reminded of the stories his father had told him of the Portuguese explorers. Sam had his arms around Leo’s waist, his cheek against his shoulder—Vita edged a step closer to Adam.

  “We live in a time of recycling, conservation,” Hugh said. “They couldn’t have conceived of it. They had boundless natural resources. Knowledge, however, was limited. Societies lived by imagination: dread and wonder. Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, these characters are very different from anyone who lives in our time. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes!” Vita said, militant. Shyanne rolled her eyes.

  “Okay, I get it,” Shyanne said, tonguing her chewing gum to the back of her cheek and positioning herself opposite Adam, deferential toward Prospero and too shy to meet Ferdinand’s eyes. She was getting closer to the real character. But Franco was watching Vita, with curiosity and maybe even admiration.

  Vita stepped back away from the group—she didn’t come onstage until Act Five anyway—and went to sit at the picnic table. Families would be having barbecues here soon; this was the perfect beach for them. Cape Cod formed a protective arm around the bay, and Barrel Point guarded the harbor from the surf. When the tide was out there was a vast expanse of flats where children could run and splash, dig new channels and collect hermit crabs. The Good Humor truck came around every hour in the summer. It was heaven on earth, this beach. And only Vita really understood that it could split with a stroke, fall away.

  Ferdinand made his exit, and Adam sat down beside her. “I got into BC, off the wait list,” he said. “My mom texted me—they just called.”

  “Congratulations!” She meant: “So, you’re abandoning me, like everyone else.”

  They sat there, silent. Someone had chiseled a heart with initials into the tabletop, years ago when people still did things like that. Vita’s gaze was caught there; she couldn’t look away. “Why BC?” she asked finally.

  “I hardly know,” he admitted. “Gothic architecture, or something. When I was walking around on the tour, it felt kind of solid, you know. Like being in a church before you start asking yourself how there could possibly be a God.”

  She couldn’t think of a thing to say, not a thing.

  “God, what crap,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s not! It’s more real than the stuff people usually say.”

  “Oh God, that’s bad.”

  “It’s good!”

  “I’ve always wondered… what it was like for you,” he said. “I mean…”

  “I know what you mean,” she interrupted, because she didn’t want him to put it wrong, and no matter what he said it would feel wrong; it always did. She was going to hear some judgment in it. It would be prurient, gooey with curiosity disguised as concern, or casual, as if brutality was nothing out of the ordinary. And so it would infuriate her, and she did not want to be infuriated right now, when she was feeling almost close to someone. “You mean my mom being murdered.”

  “Yes, that,” he said, embarrassed. She was embarrassed, too. It was something you didn’t mention, though it had changed the landscape they lived on just as if it were a tornado that had ripped through the town. “I don’t know how you managed to live. I don’t think I could have.”

  “I don’t remember it,” she explained. “So, it’s okay. Your mom was gone… for a while… right?”

  “Yeah. But she was just up in Provincetown, not…”

  “Dead,” she said, simply. The corner of her mouth tugged and trembled and insisted on sadness. That was what she got, for demanding the truth.

  Adam’s hand moved toward hers but didn’t dare touch it. “You’re the bravest person I know,” he said.

  23

  QUEEN OF THE SEA

  Franco had woken up the morning after Fatima’s funeral with an image of clean, new wood in his mind. He could see the grain, smell the sawdust. It had been years since he’d built anything, and driving to the lumberyard he felt as carefree as when his boys were little and he would have one of them always beside him in the truck. His tools were in the basement, and Hank was happy to let him work in the garage bay at the back of the harbormaster’s shack. He was building a dory named Vita, but as he worked, planing and sanding until every inch was smooth, sealing with epoxy and covering the hull with fiberglass so it was watertight, painting her a luminous pale green that would stand out against the water, with a deep purple rim that would be visible in the fog, he kept hearing his daughter’s grave young voice saying, “I’m an actor,” as if this were a sacred calling. The way she listened to Hugh, the way she worked with Leo to learn how the goddess Iris might move… her ambition and the way she carried it out. Imagine having a daughter like this! She had taken the best in him—his openness—and made an art of it. In some back corner of his mind he was thrilled she had taken his bicycle: It proved that she too felt their relation. By the time he came to paint the dory’s name, he knew it ought to be the Iris. And here she was, a fine, compact craft, named for Vita and for her aspiration.

  Danielle had redone her window boxes with some of the leftover paint from the dory. She was standing on the front deck watering them when she heard the explosion and saw the plume of black smoke puff up behind the town hall. The building blocked her view of the pier, but she could see the harbormaster’s shack, and Hank Capshaw, who ran out the front door and around the side of the building toward the pier. For a moment there was absolute silence, except for the sound of… flames; that was what it was. They sounded like a heavy flag flapping in a gale. Danielle was always expecting an emergency. There had been so many when she was young—from her brother putting the shucking knife through the meat of his thumb and hitting the artery, forty years ago, and the sinking of the Suzie Belle, to the Calliop
e fire, when she’d had to use the garden hose to wet down the roof of the Walrus and all the other buildings around it. Sometimes there were sirens and commotion, sometimes, as with Sabine’s death, icy silence. There was always a kind of relief in catastrophe, though—after all the waiting and worry, here it was, to be grappled with at last. She slipped her feet into sandals and set off down the street, untying her apron as she went.

  It sounded like a cannon, Amalia would say later. One heavy boom and then a complete, expectant silence, as if the whole town were holding its breath. She could hear the slap, slap as someone ran down Sea Street in flip-flops. The screen door of the fish market looked away from the harbor, but she could see the tourists stopping in mid-amble, turning toward the sound. Then someone started yelling, “Fire, call the fire department!” and Matt Paradel’s truck came careening around the corner. She dialed 911 because it was the appropriate thing to do, but of course they said the firemen were on the way. She locked the market up tight, walking right past an elderly couple with a Florida plate who had just pulled into the parking lot. The sirens began to howl. Amalia bustled down to the street entrance to take down the OPEN flag, leaning it across the front door to make her point again to the customers, and started off toward the pier. Danielle was ten steps ahead of her and she slowed her pace to avoid catching up.

  At the clinic, LaRee heard it come over the scanner: Code 111, 10-44, 10-46—fire at the pier, request ambulance, request police.

  “It’s okay,” Alice Nguyen said. “A boat… exploded?… at the end of the wharf, but it sank right away and… I guess it put itself out? The ambulance is coming up with… the former harbormaster, I guess? He fell over in his chair? They think he has a concussion?”

  The question marks meant “What am I doing in this godforsaken place, treating the injuries of neglect and despair?” Who could answer? Alice’s parents had been professors back in Vietnam. When they got to the United States, her father took a job as a gas station attendant in Lowell and saved enough to buy the place, and to send Alice to med school. So here she was in Oyster Creek, treating Manny Soares for a folding-chair injury.