The Harbormaster's Daughter

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  He heard a small cry, as if doves were nesting in the corners—this had been troublesome the summer before.

  “Hello?” he said, and pressing a hand against his throat, tried a dove call, a clucking coo. “I can’t allow this, you know,” he said fondly, walking toward the sound. “In theory, of course, it’s quite lovely, but in practice…”

  The voice, which was human, though high and soft like a dove, said, “Hello? Orson? Oh!”

  This came from the hut. As he approached he saw something move inside.

  “Is it morning?” the voice said sleepily.

  He pushed aside some of the grasses woven into the chicken wire, and looked in. A girl was asleep there. Her dark curls fell against a shoulder white as a swan’s wing.

  “My goodness,” he said.

  “Orson! Mr. Desroches…” It was Adam Capshaw lifting his head but with one arm protectively holding the woman’s head against his chest, his face sleepy, his eyes narrow as if still caught in a dream. “I’m sorry. We…”

  The girl’s shoulders tensed as if against a blow, and when Orson didn’t speak, her hand emerged from the blanket to hold Adam’s. On the third finger was Sabine Gray’s opal ring.

  “My dear young people,” Orson said. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

  Vita had texted LaRee to say she’d be working through the night at the theater again, so LaRee had had the spring evening to herself, puttering in the garden, feeling a peculiar lightness as if she’d lost her center of gravity. Then it occurred to her that this wasn’t a momentary thing, that Vita was sixteen, about to get her driver’s license, about to go to college. She was at the edge of a new life; they both were. Matt popped into her mind at that moment, as if he’d been sitting there waiting for an opening. She resented it. There was a wide, empty canvas before her and she wasn’t just going to scribble some man into the middle. That was a twenty-year-old’s mistake. But she could imagine a motif, a ribbon running through.

  She was drinking her coffee on the front step next morning when Adam and Vita drove up. As soon as they got out of the car, it was clear. They came forward together, caught somewhere between sheepishness and pride, their hands just touching.

  “Hi,” Vita said sleepily, and when Adam heard this he smiled as if she’d just confided a wonderful secret. His shirt was misbuttoned and Vita’s hair was matted into a snarl, her cheeks blazing red and her eyes cast down.

  “Good morning,” LaRee said, looking up at them, shading her eyes from the sun.

  Adam cleared his throat. “Good morning,” he said, at least an octave too deep, so LaRee couldn’t help laughing.

  “You sound very Shakespearean.” They edged closer to each other as if this might be some kind of verdict. Vita saw the buttoning error and began to undo and redo all Adam’s shirt buttons with the happy air of a child dressing a doll.

  “Big night tonight,” LaRee said, seeing that this might go on for hours if she didn’t speak. “Adam, you’d better go home and get some sleep. And Vita, do you remember when you were little, we had to use peanut butter to get the snarl out of your hair?”

  “I remember when you used to make me blueberry pancakes,” Vita said, resting her head on Adam’s shoulder

  “She loves blueberries,” Adam said, as if this was the single most fascinating bit of information he had ever learned.

  “For now, it’s a day-old scone,” LaRee said. “I have to go to work, and you look like a shower and a nap might be in order.” Vita and Adam didn’t seem to hear this. They were in their own world together, looking into each other’s eyes.

  “What I mean is… Adam, shoo, go away! You’ll see each other tonight!” He did, looking over his shoulder as if she had cast him out of Eden.

  Vita sat down beside her as soon as he was gone. The peonies were bowls of soft light. “You… used protection, right?” LaRee asked.

  Vita jumped up. “HOW could you? How could you imagine that I would be so childish as… OH, OH, I cannot believe it! Do you really think that I am so stupid and immature that I would… take a lover… without having the proper protection? You have no faith in me.…”

  This went on, but LaRee was laughing, and she could hear the ground eroding beneath Vita’s outrage.

  “I was just asking,” she said finally. “I’m not mad at you. In fact I’m glad to see you cozy and giggly with Adam. I just thought it was important to double-check on the consequences.”

  Vita sat back down. “Really?”

  “Of course. I mean, you’re young. Maybe you’re too young—I don’t know. But he’s clearly pretty fond of you.…”

  “LaRee, he is so, so wonderful.… We can talk about anything at all, and he’s not closed off to it—he’s listening, he’s interested to think about it. Nobody’s like that, at least not anybody in high school.”

  “So he’s worthy of you?” LaRee’s eyes filled, her voice cracked; she hid it under a cough. Vita was grown; she was heading off into life.

  “LaRee, last night was the nicest night of my life.”

  Vita would have gone on but was afraid to put it into words suddenly. Once she had stepped over the caution tape, they’d begun to trust that the feeling would stay with them, and they had climbed the dune and sat with the lighthouse looming above them to watch the moon come up. The changing light through the water, the beam from the giant lens flashing overhead, the line of his collarbone as she traced it… The world was entirely new. Once the sky was dark they went back to Mackerel Bay Park, where the thick lawn was soft underfoot and the set for The Tempest, closed in under the tent, felt like their own new home. Adam rolled up his jeans, waded into the bay, and said it was warm enough, but she didn’t believe him until she felt it herself. They had both folded their clothes carefully and had averted their eyes until they were in the water. And that was when it was all natural and true and right.…

  “You know how you can see the phosphorescence in the water at night? We went swimming, and when we came out our skin was lit up like we were magical creatures,” Vita said.

  “And you are, Vita. You both are.” A weight was slipping away from her—the fear that Vita’s heart would never be light, that she would never give in and let life surprise her… that she would never recover.

  “How come we never have marshmallows around here? I mean, we grill all the time, we have fires at the beach, but we never have s’mores.”

  “I… What made you think of marshmallows?”

  “We have them on the set—Prospero gives one to Caliban when he’s good, and last night we got hungry and that was all there was. And I—I don’t think I’ve ever had one before.”

  “Well… marshmallows. The night Hannah brought you here you said you always had marshmallows in your cocoa, but I didn’t have any. And you got upset—but when I said we’d get some the next day, you realized that meant you weren’t going home the next day. And I think that was when you realized your mother was really gone. So I just avoided the subject of marshmallows for the next… twelve or thirteen years.”

  Vita laughed, sadly, sitting back down on the step and resting her head on LaRee’s shoulder.

  “That poor girl,” she said. “I feel so sorry for her. You’d hardly know she was me.”

  LaRee leaned her head against Vita’s. “She’s part of you,” LaRee said. “I see that part all the time, and I’m always amazed by it. You’ve lived through fear and it’s made you less afraid. You’ve been hurt and it’s made you more sympathetic. I wish it always worked that way.…”

  “I just laughed out of sadness, didn’t I?” Vita said.

  “I hadn’t thought…”

  “I did! Listen…” She tried it, and again. “It’s so funny. I laughed where I could have cried.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “People do that. Characters do…”

  “Vita Gray, you’re making art out of this!”

  “Don’t you think my mother would approve?”

  “She’d be
so proud of you.”

  “I think she might,” Vita said, looking down the driveway toward the white tree, its graceful, reaching form against the green profusion of the woods behind it. “Do you remember when I used to think I saw her all the time?”

  “Of course. It broke my heart.”

  “Last night when Adam was asleep, the ghost light was on, on the stage, and it was shining on the stone of my ring, so I could make reflections with it. And I thought—well, she’s right here, isn’t she? I look like her. I am like her. She’s right here.”

  “It’s true,” LaRee said. “We have to reckon with her, every day.”

  “We,” Vita said emphatically.

  “We. Always.”

  “LaRee?”

  “Yes, my dear…”

  “Do you promise not to die?”

  That was the question.

  “I will do my very best,” LaRee said.

  “Well, that’s honest.”

  “You did insist on the truth.”

  “You know, I think I’ll take a shower,” Vita said, stretching. “I can’t believe it’s opening night!” She jumped up and went inside, but a minute later she popped back out, wrapped in a towel. “I’ve never been so happy in my life!” she bubbled. “LaRee, to think of all I didn’t know yesterday…”

  “Into the shower, my magical creature, into the shower! You may just have learned it, but I’ve only just managed to forget!”

  Vita turned to leave, her arms crossed as if she were holding her memories tight around her. LaRee suddenly imagined wings budding beneath her sharp little shoulder blades, thickly feathered, muscular wings that would carry her a long, long way.

  “Nothing else matters, nothing,” Vita said. And then—“Except the show! Opening night! Oh my God!”

  The plumbing went clunk as she turned the water on, and she began to sing, “There is sweet music here,” the song she had been singing in chorus, at school. She could never seem to hit the high notes when she was practicing, but now they came one after another, clear and strong. And then, of all things, “Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse…” A song LaRee hadn’t heard in years. Vita’s voice was more mature, and she’d had three years of French, but hearing it, LaRee could see her again in her yellow sleep suit, dancing and singing with Sabine.

  LaRee had left for work by the time Vita came out of the bathroom, her hair wrapped in a towel and LaRee’s ratty old bathrobe cinched at her waist. LaRee had left a scone and butter and apricot jam on the little old café table she’d inherited from Sabine. The table had been rusted and wobbly when she got it but she’d stabilized the legs and painted it a soft blue that fit in with all the various greens in the garden. She’d set a place for Vita with a linen napkin and a yellow rose, and Vita sat down in her chair among the daylily blades. This perfect, beautiful life was what LaRee wanted for her—wanted the way Napoleon had wanted dominion over Europe. Vita could see her now, clipping the rose, poking it into the vase like a quill into an inkwell. This flower, like everything, was part of her grand plan to save Vita’s heart, keep it fresh and open to life, when there was every reason for it to scar over and constrict and fail.

  “You’ve done it, LaRee,” she said aloud. “You have. So you can stop now.” She’d expected to cry, but instead she was laughing. She was alive and whole and having a buttered scone in the garden. And wanting not the lovely resuscitation LaRee practiced on every single thing she touched, but real life, full of struggle and confusion and surprise.

  27

  HIS MORE BRAVER DAUGHTER

  “Is your father proud of you?” Hugh asked Vita. She was in her Iris costume, the silk scarves lifting and falling with the slightest breeze. The day was so calm that the one duck crossing the bay in front of them left a twenty-foot wake.

  “He didn’t say anything…” she said.

  Hugh puzzled over this, one bristly eyebrow lowered, the other raised.

  “You know, he’s a man,” she said, with a shrug. “He doesn’t know how to say things like that.”

  “I used to be a man,” Hugh said. “It wasn’t much fun, but it seemed awfully important at the time. I clung to it for so long I forgot to have children. It’s rather sad, really.”

  “Oh, Hugh! You have me.”

  She hugged him, without thinking, and felt his surprise and discomfort until his hands came to rest on her back and he said, “And you have me,” stiff and formal. Life still made him uncomfortable when he didn’t have a great author as intermediary.

  Franco was standing beside the Rainha, or what was left of her, appearing to test the mooring, but really, Vita thought, paying his last respects. And Hugh must have seen the same thing because he said suddenly, “Do you know the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford uses a real skull as a prop? It was willed to them by a pianist who loved Shakespeare… something like having your ashes scattered at sea, I suppose.”

  “I’m going to leave my skull to Mackerel Sky!” Vita declared.

  “Not for a long, long time, my dear,” he said, setting his hand on the crown of braided ribbon that rested on her curls.

  Beached, the Rainha dwarfed them all, their heads barely reaching the painted waterline. Adam and the others from the shipwreck scene had come across the lawn to join them.

  “I never realized how big a dragger is,” Vita said. It was all she could think of. She hadn’t seen Adam since the morning and it seemed as if now that he was all dressed and combed, his warm, open self must have retreated back into its hiding place. But he caught her glance and held it—they had the best secret in the world together.

  “Like they say about icebergs,” Franco said. “Most of it’s underwater.”

  “It’s so sad, about the fire and everything,” she said. It took a great effort to speak, for fear of saying the wrong thing, or acting the wrong way. He was her father, really. Biology drew a clear line between them. Everything else was murky, unknown… dangerous. But if you didn’t grope through it… “I mean, it’s your boat, your father’s boat.”

  Franco sighed, smiled sideways at her, and she backed up against Adam, who touched the small of her back and made her smile.

  “She’d had her day,” Franco said. “But Georgie…”

  Orson came up beside them. “Still no body?” he asked.

  “No,” Franco said. “The Coast Guard searched the channel, they had all the currents plotted, didn’t find anything. And we thought, maybe when we lifted the wreck… but no.”

  “Who’d have guessed he’d leave something so beautiful behind?” Orson said. “Of all people…”

  “Everything’s like an iceberg,” Vita said, nearly jumping at the sound of her own voice. For sixteen years she had been watching, listening, and suddenly she had things to say. “Or, everyone. So much underneath…”

  Franco blinked, looked at her again. “I made you something,” he said, surprising himself. As he was building the dory he had told himself that it was just a project, not really for Vita, that it would be easy enough to paint over the name and choose something else, auction it for Dorotea’s scholarship fund maybe.… But now it struck him that there was plenty of time to make another. “Come with me.”

  It was moored behind the Rainha, a little boat whose sides belled out before rising to a point at bow and stern. It was the same green as the light angling through the low water, and the rim was the same purple as a patch of seaweed deep beneath. There were two plank seats and a pair of new oars, and if she could imagine navigating the serpentine channels of Oyster Creek in it, someone else would think of rowing out past Barrel Point when the bluefish were running.

  “You made this for me?”

  “I… thought you should have your own boat.” She barely heard this, but in the years ahead it would grow louder in her memory, an honest declaration of love.

  She took off her ballet slippers and lifted the long slip so she could wade in.

  “Here,” Franco said, tying the scarves loosely behind her to k
eep them dry. She stepped in—the water seemed colder than it had been the night before—and ran her hand along the rim, feeling the smooth new paint. Iris was painted in an old-fashioned script on the bow.

  “She’s named for you,” Franco said. For a minute Vita didn’t understand. Then she put her hand up to touch her makeshift crown and gave him such a glance that he knew it all, how lost she’d been, and how brave. It felt like he’d been prying, though, like this was something he shouldn’t have seen, and he averted his eyes.

  “She’s light,” he said, “so you don’t want to take her out if it’s choppy, but that means she’ll be quick, too, if you just want to paddle along the bay or up Oyster Creek into Moon Pond, maybe.”

  “Thank you,” she said, gravely. “I… thank you. I can’t believe you named it Iris.”

  “Well, you’re an actor. I thought it would be right to name it for a character you played.” He smiled, rather shyly for a lothario. “It seems… right. I only had sons before, so… I didn’t know.”

  “I took your bicycle,” she blurted. “I’m so sorry. I left it at Dorotea’s.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s fine.… It’s maybe a good thing. Dorotea wants to learn to ride, and I said I’d help her. It’s good that she wants something.”

  Dorotea was just arriving, coming down the center aisle with her mother. She waved to Franco, with just her fingers, and he waved back.

  “I’m thinking you can help me,” he said to Vita. “With helping Dorotea. Maybe we can talk about it after the show?”

  “Of course,” Vita said. From her whole mad conversation with Dorotea she remembered one thing clearly: Dorotea’s apology for their broken playdate in kindergarten. Ten years Dorotea had suffered, for her father’s sins, and she still wanted to right that one small wrong. Vita did too. “I’d like to help.”

  The chairs were in rows with ribbons denoting a section for the Machado family. Mackerel Sky productions were usually pay-what-you-wish, but tonight tickets were twenty-five dollars apiece, with all proceeds going to benefit the Dorotea Machado fund. Amalia had the cash box tight in her hands, and a look of indignation ready for anyone who wanted change. This town was going to pay obeisance, finally, to the people who had built it, braved the seas and bent over the deep fryers in the clam shacks all summer, every day, just to keep themselves going another year.