by John Case
‘This was the Marie Sanders birth certificate.’
‘Right. My birth certificate. It was in an old manila envelope that I’d been carrying around ever since I was eighteen and my uncle gave it to me. It had a couple of my baby teeth, a wedding photograph of my parents, a newspaper clipping of my grandfather at a ship launching, and some U.S. savings bonds which my parents had bought for me when I was a baby. That’s how I got to California – I cashed in the savings bonds.’
‘But –’
‘Look,’ she said, abruptly getting to her feet. ‘What I think is: we should get some sleep now – especially you.’ And with that, she blew the lanterns out, one by one, and disappeared.
That night, he slept like the dead, and in the morning woke to hear Jesse calling to his mother. ‘It’s so warm, Mommy. I don’t even need my mittens. Can I take them off? Pleeeze?’
‘Well . . .’
‘It’s almost hot, Mommy. You come out – you’ll see. It’s hot. And foggy, too. You can’t even see Bear Island!’
Lassiter heard the door close, and opened his eyes. Seeing that he was alone, he sat up, pulling the blankets around him. Then he swung his legs from the bed and, getting slowly to his feet, shuffled across the room to a chair beside the wood stove.
A minute passed. Then a second and a third. Then the door burst open and Jesse came running inside. Seeing Lassiter, he skidded to a stop. ‘Hey!’ he cried. ‘You’re up! Will you play pickup sticks with me? Mommy’s tired of it. Pleeeze?’
And so he did. He played pickup sticks and Candy Land all morning. Marie dug out some old clothes from a trunk in the loft, and he put them on. They were ragged and musty, but they fit.
Lassiter was amazed by the little family’s self-sufficiency. They had a root cellar, fishing gear, and eel pots. There were strings of dried fruit, braids of onions and garlic, ropes of dried red peppers, and bundles of herbs hanging from the beams. There were containers filled with staples – rice, beans, dried milk, and powdered eggs. Flour, sugar, oatmeal. There was water from a well that Marie, and even Jesse, standing on a stool, hand-pumped in the kitchen. ‘Sometimes it freezes,’ Jesse confided, ‘but we have a lot – I mean really a lot of bottles. And rain barrels, too. Want to see?’
The kid was irresistible, and Lassiter caught his mother, several times, looking on with an expression he remembered seeing on Kathy’s face: a mother’s love and pride. Isn’t he wonderful?
They had lunch, and afterward Marie gave Jesse a reading lesson. Lassiter sat in an old Adirondack chair on the porch, watching the ocean, listening. When the lesson was done, Jesse ran back outside, eager to show him how they moved heavy objects – the boat, the dock – to and from the water. ‘It’s just like the ’Gyptians,’ he said, dragging a crude sled from under the porch.
The sled was actually a piece of corrugated iron with a two-by-four nailed to one end. Holes had been drilled in each end of the wood, and a rope threaded through them, so the whole thing was easy to pull. To demonstrate, Jesse placed a rock on top of the sled, then took the rope in his tiny fists and pulled, lifting the contraption onto the first of two small logs. Slowly, and with a great deal of huffing and puffing, he began to drag the device and its burden toward the water’s edge, stopping every few feet to move one of the logs from the back of the sled to the front.
‘This is how they moved all the rocks to build the pyramids,’ Jesse said. ‘Because they didn’t have wheels.’
At dinner Marie said that if the fog cleared, the Coast Guard would almost certainly come by in the morning. ‘And Mr. Lassiter will be able to get back to civilization.’
‘Can’t he stay?’ Jesse asked. ‘It’s funner with him here.’
‘It’s more fun,’ Marie corrected. ‘No, of course he can’t stay, Jesse. He has his own life to get back to. Don’t you?’
Lassiter looked at her for a long moment. Finally, he said, ‘Oh, yeah, absolutely.’
It was a lie, of course, and he thought about it afterward, washing the dishes while Marie read to Jesse in the other room. The truth was, now that he’d found them, it still wasn’t over – and it wouldn’t be over until . . .
Until I know what happened, and why.
When Marie returned from putting Jesse to bed, the two of them sat in front of the fireplace. She seemed sad, and he said so.
‘It’s just that . . . with you here . . . Jesse’s so excited . . . and it makes me realize . . . how selfish this is.’
‘Living on the island?’
She nodded. ‘But it won’t go on forever. He goes to kindergarten in the fall, so . . . we’ll have to find a house in town.’
‘Aren’t you afraid someone will recognize you?’ Lassiter asked.
She shook her head. ‘Not really. It’s so out of context, and . . . I was different then.’
‘You mean, the way you looked?’
‘No. I mean the way I felt. Somehow, all that doesn’t seem so important anymore. What’s important is Jesse.’
Lassiter nodded. ‘Right. And that’s exactly why you’ve got to get out of here.’
She threw him an impatient look. ‘I thought that was settled,’ she said.
He sighed. ‘All right, so it’s settled. But do me a favor: when the Coast Guard comes, tell them you haven’t seen me.’
‘Why?’ she asked, glancing at him suspiciously.
‘Because the same people who are looking for you are looking for me, too. Which – trust me on this – is not good for you. Because if the Coast Guard takes me back to the mainland, someone’s going to have to write a report – and that report’s gonna have my name on it. And because a local guy got killed, the papers are gonna pick it up. And the next thing you know, you’ve got people in town that no one’s ever seen before. And guess what? They’re asking things like, “He rented a boat? To go out in a storm? Where was he going? Who was he going to see?”’ He paused and took a breath. ‘It’s a big problem. Better I get to the mainland on my own.’
‘How?’
‘You’ve got a boat. You could take me to shore.’
She pulled her knees up to her chest. ‘And then what? Just drop you off on the rocks somewhere?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s crazy. What would you do?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
She shook her head. “The boat’s not even in the water yet. The dock’s not even in the water.”
‘What do you mean, “The dock’s not in the water”? Where is it?’
She looked at him. ‘You have to pull it up in winter – because the ice would take it out. The cove freezes once or twice a year.’
‘Yeah, but if something’s tied up –’
She laughed. ‘We’re talking tons of ice. When that starts to melt, and the tide goes out –’
‘There isn’t any ice out there –’
‘Not now, but . . .’ She heaved a sigh. ‘I guess we could put the dock in. And then . . . I suppose I could take you to shore.’
‘That’s all I’m asking.’
‘All right. That’s what we’ll do.’
They fell silent for a moment. Lassiter looked away, and then turned back to her. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Jesus!’ she said. ‘You’re as bad as Jesse.’
‘No, seriously – about the clinic. All of the people who died had the same procedure, and I was wondering . . . why did you have it?’
‘What . . . the oocyte donation?’
‘Yeah. I mean, at your age . . . it’s unusual, is all. The other women were like Kathy . . . they were older. I mean, I thought that’s what it’s for, it’s . . .’ He looked up at the ceiling. ‘I guess I’m getting kind of personal.’
‘Why not?’ she said in a what-the-hell voice. ‘I’m telling you everything else. In my case it wasn’t because I was infertile. I could have children. And I really, really wanted to carry a baby to term. But it had to be someone else’s genetic material. Not mine.’
‘Why?’<
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‘Duchenne’s syndrome.’
Lassiter gave her a blank look. ‘What’s that?’
She stared at the fire. ‘There’s a gene . . . women carry it, and pass it on – though it doesn’t affect them. It affects males.’
‘And what happens?’
‘It’s an X-chromosome disorder, like hemophilia – except it can’t be treated. Everyone who has it, dies young. My brother was only thirteen.’
Lassiter remembered Maude talking about the brother being carried out to the boats, wrapped in blankets. ‘I’m sorry.’
She sat back down in the chair and told him in a detached tone what the illness was like – a progressive, wasting disease of the muscles. It begins just below the calves, and moves slowly upward. Walking is awkward, at first, then difficult, and finally impossible. The leg muscles atrophy and, still, the disease moves higher, until the diaphragm is afflicted – and it becomes difficult to breathe, and impossible to cough. In the end, the victims get pneumonia or some other infection. And then they die. ‘I had the test in my twenties. And I found out I’m a carrier.’
He didn’t know what to say, and so he asked, ‘Would all of your children get it?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s fifty-fifty, every time. Which means there’s a one-in-four chance that you’d have a boy with Duchenne’s.’
‘That doesn’t seem so bad –’
‘You’d do better at Russian roulette. And the thing is, it’s someone else’s life you’re playing with – and it’s someone you love more than anything in the world.’ Her hands flew up and floated down.
‘I keep wanting to say I’m sorry,’ Lassiter said, ‘but –’
‘It doesn’t matter. I have Jesse . . . and there’s no way in the world that I could ever love anyone more than I love him.’
‘I can tell.’
‘And it’s not like I was devastated when I found out about the disease. I mean – I wasn’t involved with anyone, I wasn’t thinking about having a baby. It was a door that closed, but I wasn’t even knocking on it.’
‘What made you change your mind?’
She shrugged. ‘I was living in Minneapolis. I had this kind of secret life. It was all so . . . lonely and disconnected. And I knew if I had a baby, it wouldn’t be that way – and I thought of adoption, but . . . with Callista and all that, it was just too complicated, it wouldn’t have worked. And then I saw an article about this new technique, using donor eggs – and I was galvanized. Two months later I was on a plane to Italy, and two months after that I was pregnant.’
When the Coast Guard came, late the next morning, Lassiter and Jesse were on the far side of the island, ‘exploring.’
It was unseasonably warm, almost springlike. Fog hung in the trees as Lassiter followed the boy on a narrow path through the woods, treading on a thick carpet of pine needles. Their first stop was ‘the dock,’ where two boats sat on a rocky ledge, high and dry amid a litter of broken clamshells. The boats were upside down, resting on their gunwales, secured by lengths of rope to the trunk of a red pine. One of the boats was a skiff, about fifteen feet in length; the other a dinghy. Nearby was a small shed and in it, ‘all of our boat stuff.’ There was an Evinrude outboard, resting on a wooden brace; gas tanks, oars, life jackets, moorings, anchors, fishing tackle, and more.
The dock itself was new, and painted gray. One part was permanently attached to the ledge, extending out over the high-water mark like a plank suspended out to sea. The rest of the dock, consisting of a raftlike float and a short ramp, were pulled up onto the ledge until it came time to hook them up.
He followed Jesse from one cove to another. They liberated a pair of crabs from one of the eel pots, and Lassiter was duly impressed when Jesse showed him an oak tree growing up through a discarded iron bedstead, the thick trunk nearly engulfing the metal. Their last stop was a cove at the end of the island, where the old boathouse was, and the slivered remains of an old dock. ‘They used to keep the boats in here in the winter,’ Jesse explained, ‘but now –’ The little boy cocked his head and held up a finger.
Lassiter heard it, too: the low drone of an engine.
‘Coast Guard,’ Jesse said. The engine grew ouder and then cut off. Soon afterward they heard the whine of another, smaller engine. ‘That’s their little boat,’ Jesse said. ‘It’s a ’flatable.’ He peered at Lassiter. ‘Did I show you my fort yet?’
‘No.’
‘Come on,’ he said, and taking Lassiter by the hand, led him up a spongy path to ‘the fort’ – a clearing bounded by a tangle of small spruces and firs. There, in the clearing, Jesse had created a series of small ‘rooms’ by dragging pieces of deadwood into a sort of floor plan. Leading Lassiter into the fort’s ‘living room,’ the boy seated himself on a rotten log – ‘the couch’ – and with Lassiter beside him, recited a fable about a lost seal and the people who were looking for him.
It was a strange story, and the moment it ended, a soft whistle came to them, undulating through the woods. Lassiter recognized the tune and knew what it meant: ollie-ollie-in-come-free. The Coast Guard had come, the Coast Guard had gone.
‘What about Roger?’ he asked.
Marie shook her head. ‘They didn’t find him. But they will – eventually. The current takes everything down past the Nubble, so –’
‘Did they ask about me?’
She nodded. ‘They said Roger was taking someone out to see me, and that they’d found a car in Cundys Harbor.’
Lassiter turned his head and muttered to himself. Fuck.
‘And then they asked if I knew a man named Lassiter.’
He groaned with exasperation. ‘So why didn’t you tell them I was here?’
‘Did you want me to?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Because . . . it just didn’t feel right. They should have had a salvage boat, to begin with, and anyway, I could tell: they weren’t all Coast Guard.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Two of them were wearing suits.’
‘And what did they look like?’
Marie shrugged. ‘Big.’
‘You think they were cops?’ Lassiter asked.
‘They could have been.’
‘But maybe not.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘That’s what worried me.’
Lassiter sighed. ‘What did they want to know?’ he asked.
‘Well . . . about you. And if we’d seen the boat go down, and – oh, yeah, they wanted to know where Jesse was. “Where’s the little guy?”’
‘And what did you tell them?’
‘I told them we were asleep when it happened. And the next day, when we found the boat, there wasn’t anyone. And I said Jesse was taking a nap.’
‘You think they believed you?’
She nodded. ‘Yeah. I’m a really good actress. Used to be, anyway.’
Later that afternoon, when they’d had lunch and the tide was an hour from high, they began to put in the dock. It was a complex operation that took almost three hours to complete. When it was done, Lassiter paddled the float around while Jesse and Marie lowered the ramp with pulleys and ropes. Finally, Lassiter snapped the fittings together, and sat back.
‘I can’t believe you do that by yourself,’ he said.
Jesse was insulted. ‘She doesn’t.’
The dinghy was light enough to lift, and with Jesse’s help, Lassiter carried it to the water. Then he and Marie rolled the skiff down toward the dock on three wooden poles. Every few feet Jesse yelled ‘Okay!’ and they stopped, waiting for him to drag each bypassed pole up to the front and reposition it under the bow. When they reached the water’s edge, they flipped the boat over onto some planks and pushed it into the sea. Going into the shed, Lassiter emerged with the outboard in his arms and a look of amazement on his face: that she could lift this deadweight by herself was astonishing. Together, they clamped the motor to the transom of the skiff and hooked up the gas tank. Meanwhile, Jesse, looking like the Michelin man
in an enormous life vest, clipped the fuel line, first to the motor, and then to the tank. Then he squeezed the rubber bulb four or five times and, with his mother looking on, pressed the electric starter. After a few tries the motor caught and roared, churning out a cloud of dense, blue smoke.
That night, when Jesse had gone to bed, they sat in front of the fire, Marie in the rocking chair, her knees pulled up to her chest.
‘Do you have any money?’ she asked suddenly.
Lassiter was taken aback. ‘I do okay,’ he said.
Marie smiled. ‘I don’t mean that. I mean with you. So when you get to shore . . . you won’t be stranded.’
Lassiter nodded. He thought he’d been making progress, but . . . she obviously couldn’t wait to get rid of him. Slowly, he got to his feet and crossed the room to where his leather jacket was hanging on a peg. ‘I think I’ve got enough,’ he said. ‘The real problem is, what do we do about you?’
Marie shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about us,’ she said. ‘We’ll fade away in a day or two. I’ve got money. We can set up somewhere else. This time, I’ll do it right.’
‘I could help you with that, y’know. I used to be a pro at it.’ He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled his wallet out. A soggy envelope fell to the floor, and he stooped to retrieve it. Baresi’s letter.
‘You could take Gunther,’ she said. ‘It needs work, but –’
‘You read Italian, right?’
‘What?’
‘Can you read Italian?’
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘but . . .?’
There were three or four onionskin sheets inside the envelope, still damp and stuck together. Returning to the fireside, he sat down at Marie’s feet and pulled the pages apart, very carefully. ‘Thank God for ballpoints,’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a letter that Baresi wrote to the priest in Montecastello. The priest gave it to me before he was killed, and – here,’ he said, handing the pages to her. ‘Tell me what it says.’
Reluctantly, she took the pages in hand, and began to read, haltingly at first, and then almost fluently. ‘August second, 1995. My dear Giulio . . .