by Terry Farish
“Near Rye Harbor. A winter rental. One of those cabins. That’s why I got this habit now of coming down here and walking the strip. Not much life, but enough.”
“My father lived in one of those winter rentals. It had everything. Near Rye Harbor? The ones in a horseshoe by the stone ledge?”
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s fine.”
It’s not.
I can tell from his face. He doesn’t want to go back to it. I’m not pure. I feel like I’m old, like the way I felt when he took off his sunglasses and dared me to look at him on the beach.
“Wanted to say thanks.” He is standing.
“For what?”
“Bad night, that night. Thanks for stopping. You could have run for your life.”
I stand to go, too, even while I’m pretending we are going back to his cottage, in the center of the horseshoe of cottages. From there it’s a short walk to a stone breakwater reaching out to the Isles of Shoals.
His phone beeps.
He zips his coat over his sweater and answers.
“Yup,” he says. “No problem.” Puts the phone in his pocket.
“Don’t tell my father,” I say.
“Tell him what?” Luke says. He’s distracted. He doesn’t look at me.
“That we’re doing this. He thinks I’m perfect, that if he warned me, I would never do this.”
At the door, he looks at me. Straight on. We are so close I imagine the hardness of his jaw under the shadow of beard.
“We’re not doing anything,” he says. He shoves his hands in his pockets when we step into the wind.
“Why do you say it that way?” I ask.
“I don’t want to get used to you,” he says. His jaw has hardened, and he moves ahead of me. He had not hesitated. But I know why he’s trying to put dark and space between us. I can name a dozen reasons why we should not get used to each other.
I catch up but let it be. We walk across the boulevard, our chests and hair quickly layered in snow. I am aware of his body and my body. He is barely two inches taller. Something happens to my walk. I feel it in my toes and my heels as my boots make silent prints beside his. I feel every part of them, making an arc as I am simply walking.
I’m already used to him.
FLYING
I get home at midnight from Dunkin’ Donuts and the Ashworth By the Sea where I ate dinner and smelled beer I never drank. My father is asleep. The sky must be clearing, and my father will go fishing in the morning. I am flying, simply remembering Luke’s eyes. Remembering when I first saw his boot on my truck’s runner, the bend of his leg, the charge through my body.
I make a cup of coffee with hot milk. I see Luke’s crooked smile and his dark hair that falls across his forehead.
My father snores himself awake. Then he’s quiet. I will sell our shrimp. Fresh-caught sweet northern shrimp to make us rich.
The house is still. The roar of traffic over the bridge has not stopped, but it has let up enough so outside there are seconds of absolute quiet. I have a memory of the sound of a helicopter’s rotors over the river the night my father and I worked on the shrimp nets. A witness must have seen someone stop his car, get out. I feel relieved tonight there are only the normal sounds of traffic, steady, people maybe going home.
While I pack my father’s lunch for him to take fishing, somehow I also think of the map of old Afghanistan Mr. Murray showed us, where traders made paths through the mountains as they crossed between continents.
In a few hours my father will be up and brewing coffee at three thirty. He’ll take the sandwiches I’m making. I’ll hear the truck start, and he’ll have food and hot coffee in a thermos as he steams off shore. And Luke will be on board.
GHOSTS
I wake in the morning. I remember the small valley above Luke’s lips under the shadow of beard. It’s mysterious how his eyes draw me. It’s as if we each know something the other wants to learn.
But when I come down the stairs, half asleep, I stop still on the landing. A figure steps onto the porch beside my father’s traps. Long dark hair down her back. I hadn’t heard the car. Pilot did not warn me. Pilot stands, curious. What now? She is my mother. She has seen me through the window, and I can’t pretend I’m not here. When she knocks, I stare. Then go to the door and allow her in.
My mother’s cheeks are thin while her belly is large. She pulls her hair up and folds it into itself at the back of her neck. She gives me her wide smile. “Sophea.” She says my Cambodian name, pronounced so-PEE-ya. Although no one calls me that, it doesn’t sound unfamiliar. I sit down in a chair, rigid, drawing my knees up and protecting my chest. “Why are you here?” I say.
She looks like an exhausted teenaged girl who somehow got herself pregnant.
She smiles. Sheds her puffy white coat. She sits on the couch and watches me for a brief second.
“I don’t feel good,” she says. “Is Johnny here?”
I don’t like it. She has no right to need my father.
She leans her body forward, lowers her head, and a small moan escapes.
“He’s fishing,” I say.
“I might be sick,” she says.
Just in time I grab the big blue bowl my father and I use for lobster claws. My mother leans over and retches, and my thought, from nowhere, is that it feels tragic to see her loss of dignity. She is so perfectly made, her hair in waves, her blush, her straight spine, her English. She retches loudly, and tears fill her eyes. I turn around in my long johns till the sounds stop.
Under her coat she’s wearing velvety pants and a white shirt, and without her boots, she’s barefoot. Loose hair falls over her face. Slowly, she eases it back and takes the bowl into the bathroom.
“Mom,” I say when she returns. I don’t say her retching is making me queasy. “I’m getting ginger ale. That’s what my father gives me when I’m sick.” I jam my arms in the sleeves of his old coat. “Back soon,” I sing. But I could let the tide rise and fall and rise again before I come back, and my mother will not drink the ginger ale. She will put a leaf on her tongue. A Cambodian remedy. I’d have more luck if I got her a plant.
My mother is quiet. Her head remains lowered over the bowl. Any human person would rest their hand on the tight tendons I see in the back of her neck to comfort her. I can’t.
I am standing behind her, and she reaches her slender fingers over her head to touch me. This hurts me so badly. Like the wind, it will stop. Disappear. I see bracelets made of glass beads on her wrist. I know that she has eyeliner tattooed above her lashes. When she looks up it won’t be smeared, in spite of the tears that have sprung up with her sickness.
“Ginger ale’s the ticket,” I whisper. I open the door. A blast of snow flies in.
I hear her say, “I don’t need ginger ale. I’m pregnant. Ginger ale will not make me stop throwing up.” She leans over the lobster bowl, then stretches herself out, the length of the couch. Her bare, red-painted toes show at the hem of her trousers. I see her skin is nearly as brown as the wood of the armrest. I don’t think I had ever noticed.
“I know,” I say.
“What do you know? Wait till you’re pregnant.”
“I will never get pregnant.” I am sure of this.
“I will never get pregnant,” she repeats. Is she mimicking me? She throws her arms up, and her bracelets fall down her wrists and tinkle.
“How could you let yourself get pregnant?” I am standing over her, my arms are in the air. I am both ashamed and excited I might know where I could find my father’s bottle of gin because when my mother is gone I will take a small taste and let my head spin like a dream.
“I don’t know,” she says. “We were little kids in the camps. Bong Proh and me. He’s too old. I won’t go back to him.”
“I don’t want to know about your personal life.”
“It could happen. You aren’t perfect,” she says.
She goes right to my gut. I say, “I have to go to work.” I glance at her eyes that
I know are exactly like mine.
“How long since you came to see me?” my mother says. But she doesn’t listen. She stands. Beneath her unbuttoned shirt is a cami, stretched wide across her belly. She tenderly, slowly bends to lift a scarf from her back and tie it around her neck, slides her bare feet into boots. Even her toes, which must be so cold on the wood floor, somehow enrage me. She pulls her large, quilted jacket over the scarf. “Could you give me a ride?” she says. “I have a doctor’s appointment. They’ll check the heartbeat. I think something is the matter. I’ve been sick every morning, and I’m already seven and a half months. I have very bad karma.” She ends in a soft whisper.
“Why does the world revolve around you?” I say.
“Oh, it’s okay,” she says. “I’ll find a way.” Perfectly applied to shift the blame to me. Watch your mother with morning sickness turn and walk out the door. Seven and a half months.
“I don’t have a car.” I am both seething and helpless.
She takes me in, measuring me. She doesn’t ask, How would you go to work?
“I do,” she says. “But they took my license. Please drive.”
I do not ask what she did to lose her license or why she would drive to my house and not to the doctor. I imagine the archived tickets in her gold-lacquered vase, the driving without registration, insurance, license, glasses, Johnny to help her.
- - -
My mother and I sit at opposite ends of the doctor’s office waiting room. My mother is a snow queen in her white jacket, hood up, fake fur around her eyes.
Her eyes are black and wide with fear. Are mine? I move a couple chairs closer.
“What’s the matter, Mom?”
Her dark eyes flash to mine, almost as if she is embarrassed to show this side of herself to me. “There’s a ghost in me.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s true. You can feel it.”
She holds out her hand to me. I can’t bear it. I move to the seat beside her.
She takes my hand. She holds it to her belly under the white jacket. I am wearing finger gloves. I lift my naked fingertips. Only my protected palm feels the jump, of feet? Of a butt?
“Sometimes at night I hear the ghost singing,” she whispers.
I pull my hand back. I pick up New Hampshire Home from the stack of magazines.
I open to a house on the Piscataqua, a long porch with a view of the river, an elegant table set for dinner with goblets, and with napkins folded like birds.
“It’s true,” my mother says. “I remember the singing of ghosts. I heard it in the camp when I was a tiny girl.”
In the picture in New Hampshire Home, a single green rocker faces the water. I am there. I pretend Luke and I pull up to the dock by the porch in the boat, and we are sprayed with water and laughing.
“They are the ghosts of the people that died. They take you over. Do you remember when we lived in Lowell?”
I feel like I’m looking into a mirror. Who’s that girl? I remember my sparkly tiara.
“But the ghost crept into me there,” my mother tells me.
“It wasn’t a ghost. Dad said you couldn’t take care of me.”
My chest. There is a monster. It is squeezing my chest between its hands and taking my breath. I drop the magazine on the stack.
“I’m opening a fresh-off-the-boat shrimp stand. I’ll make good profit. So, Mom, maybe he doesn’t need to go to Chincoteague.”
Her scared black eyes meet mine. Does she know what this means? That she can’t move in. She and the ghost.
The nurse calls, “Lydia Sun.”
It’s my heartbeat you should check, I think. Something is the matter with my heart.
I don’t have one.
I wonder if I have a ghost in me. If it can happen to my mother it can happen to me. I have her fear, like a little animal in me.
FEAR
My father had a good trip. A good day. We don’t mention the soldier. But that night we let our guard down, exhausted, sitting by the woodstove in dim light. I’m on the couch, my father’s in his wide-armed chair, the seat sunken to his weight, our long legs stretched forward, feet crossed at the ankles toward the stove, leaning back, our heads against our clasped hands. Pilot, asleep on my boot.
This is us. But we’re also different. There’s something butting in. I want to give it a shove into the open; I want to talk about it. I say to my dad, “What scares you?” I wonder if the Motel 6 in Chincoteague is creepy; I wonder if the expanse of ocean off Virginia has more ghosts than the Gulf of Maine. He thinks about my question.
“Well,” he says. “Sometimes thinking about you scares the life out of me. When you were younger, you’d fall asleep, your hair would fall over your cheek. Just looking at your cheekbone scared me with how much I wished I could protect you.”
We are silent. I think about begging him to take me to Chincoteague. Me, Rosa, and Mr. Murray. But I don’t. I say my fear. “My fear is—trying to figure out how to say this. It’s about your first wife.”
“Who am I marrying next?” His exhausted eyes twinkle at me, and I love him.
“Don’t know yet.” The fire pops. “But the first one, she’s a wild card, isn’t she? We’re doing good, you and me, and then here comes Lydia, and everybody starts to fight. Who needs this?”
My father doesn’t answer that. I wonder if he knows about Bong Proh, the man too old for my mother, but someone from that war so they must be tight. The baby’s father. The baby who comes walking into our lives curled inside my mother’s belly.
In this deep scaredness inside me, there’s Luke. I don’t understand. I see his eyes bleary with no sleep, but they also warm me and hold me. So I make a fear up for Luke, one I don’t tell my father.
What would Luke’s fear be? Not the 95 bridge. Not the cars screaming. Not the speed of the current if a guy jumps. All these can ease a body. His fear is behind the eyes. It wedges his eyelids open. I imagine the clock ticking, the waves against the rocks, nothing he wouldn’t do for sleep. His fear is that he can’t go there. What do you do if you can’t sleep? He needs to keep sorting the net as it flies through the winch and shave the snow from his nostrils and mouth the way I’ve seen my father do on the boat. And now he doesn’t have a boat and that adds to his sleeplessness.
Pilot wakes and paces by the door, as if she feels tension in the house and she’s worried we might leave.
SPANISH DANCER
Rosa holds out a white paper bag. “My mother made these.” Inside are warm circles of pastry sprinkled with cinnamon. “Pastelitos,” Rosa says.
We sit at the Formica table and eat, dusting our lips in confectioners’ sugar.
“It’s illegal,” I say. “But we’ll do it out of the garage. Word of mouth. You in?”
“What do you mean it’s illegal?”
“Nothing’s going to happen. It’s a fisherman thing.”
Rosa lifts her guitar and begins to strum.
“We’re just selling shrimp, right?
“That’s all we’re doing. Just a hundred pounds. One tote.”
“I don’t see why you’re doing it. If it’s illegal.”
“If I can sell for him—by myself, to see how it works—it will change our whole business model. We’re not making it.”
“Sofie, nobody’s making it in the business. It’s not your dad. It’s the ocean.”
I feel my lips grow taut like my father’s when he’s angry, even though I know she’s right. Just last night Pete was talking about selling his quota of what the government allows him to catch to try to get out from under some of his debt.
“Forget it, Rosa. Just forget it, okay?”
Now Rosa tries to fix us. She says, “Okay, so my mom’s a pastry cook. What do I know?”
I don’t answer. I want to say, You’re right . . . you don’t know anything.
“I’m worried about you, Sofie. Don’t you eat anymore? Look at you.”
She reaches forward, runs her hands do
wn my cheekbones. I put my face up to hers and trace my lips with my finger to show her the confectioners’ sugar I can still taste.
“Who doesn’t eat?” And she traces her lips with her finger and we stick out our tongues and we laugh. But it’s true about how little I feel like eating.
“I’ll do it,” she says.
I say, “I have to fix the ocean. We need to make it here together, my father and me. Or he’s leaving.”
Rosa puts her guitar down and pulls up a song she’s been learning on her phone.
“Hold off,” Rosa says. “Fix the ocean later. Get your guitar.”
“No, you play.”
We listen to this melody while I begin to letter a sign for our illegal trade on the back of an old poster project.
Rosa plays along to the song on her guitar, “Spanish Dancer.” It’s a girl nervous about love, wondering what it was like for her mother, when she was young.
I pull up the chain of the dog tag that I now wear around my neck.
Sanna
Lucas
O negative
Protestant
Universal donor. His blood will match with anybody’s. Even mine.
- - -
We wear half gloves with the red tips of our fingers working machine fast. We pack plastic bags with Mrs. Tuttle’s shrimp. Put ten bags of shrimp over ice in an ice chest, with the sign mounted on poster board. Sweet Northern Shrimp Fresh Off the Karma.
We sit, our heads propped on our mittened hands, ready. Drivers do stop.
“How much would it cost for shrimp without heads, ready to cook?” a serious young woman asks.
“Six dollars a pound,” I say, believing a person would never pay six dollars for a pound of shrimp.
“Atlantic asks seven,” she says. “And I know your father. I’d rather have the Karma’s shrimp.”
“Take these, and the next time you come, we’ll have processed shrimp.”
The woman finally does take the whole shrimp and pays three dollars for two pounds. We sell all the shrimp we have.
BREATHING IN THE BUDDHA
It’s Sunday. My father’s out fishing. It’s today or maybe never. Could be only a few more landings till the government closes shrimp season. That’s the rumor.