“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was attacking your husband, and you took a swing of your own.”
She squeezed and then let go and wiped her eyes. She was crying, which wasn’t a surprise to me. She was always an easy cry. “Marriage is complicated, Cordelia. You just don’t know. That was a hard time. It wasn’t as simple as Tucker being the bad guy. He wasn’t the only one who was having a hard time with our marriage.”
On the boat, Fatty was sitting in the captain’s chair, and Tucker had opened the engine compartment and was looking in it with Guppy by his side. Guppy pointed to something, and Tucker shook his head and then guided her hand to the side. “He’s something else with those kids, isn’t he?” I said.
Rena leaned onto the rail. She smiled. I wasn’t sure if it was at Tucker or at me. “He never seems to run out of patience with them, even when they’re both ganging up on him.”
Tucker looked up at us, and when he caught Rena’s eye he smiled so fully and easily that it stung me to watch. I don’t know that I’d ever be able to get past what had happened, but in almost every way he’d turned out to be a good guy.
I couldn’t deny that he loved my sister or that she loved him back.
Near the end of July, I slept with a tourist named Otto. It was exactly what I needed: an excuse to stop thinking about Kenny.
That sort of getting together between tourists and islanders happens more than you’d think, though not usually with me. Usually it’s one of the boys who puts on his slickers for a lonely housewife from Indiana or South Dakota who thought taking a month-long rental on the island would be just the thing to spark her inner artist. Sometimes the women were single or married but travelling alone and just wanted “a taste of the local seafood,” as Rena liked to put it, and sometimes those things ended up working out, like with Timmy and Etsuko. Usually it didn’t mean anything beyond a few nights of fun. The boys like to joke that you got to break out the fishing pole more during the tourist season than you did when you were actually fishing. Of course, there was also the long-running joke that when the single boys on Loosewood Island weren’t catching lobsters, they were catching crabs.
I’d been having a hard go of it. It had been nearly three months, and I missed Kenny. Sally waited until school finished before she had her boyfriend move her out—turned out the therapist she’d been seeing on her own had been putting her on the couch in a serious way—but there just wasn’t a trace of Kenny from the day he found out. I suppose if we would have lived somewhere other than Loosewood Island, somewhere with cell phone reception, I might have been able to call his mobile, but there wasn’t any way to get in touch with him that I knew of. Some nights when I took Trudy out for a walk I detoured by his house, but with Sally gone, the lights stayed off and the house was just a blot against the darkness of the sky.
I fished without a sternman for the spring, but once the season ended, I was left with trying to keep myself busy, trying to pretend that I wasn’t just spending my time waiting for Kenny to come back. June and July were broken-up days of doing a bit of everything: I fixed stuff at the rental houses, painting and doing general maintenance, ran “lobstering” tours for tourists, took visitors on Brumfitt Kings walks, gave Rena a hand at the fish shop, and took the twins two nights a week so Rena and Tucker could have “date nights.” It was make-work, but still, I had plenty of downtime. I even took a week with Daddy to fix up the garage behind my house—we’d decided I’d move into the smaller of the rental houses so that Stephanie and Carly could take my house—into a studio for Stephanie to do art when she wasn’t on the Queen Jane.
And that still left too much time for me to think about Kenny.
I’d started jogging in the mornings, heading out early, trying to work off my fretfulness. With Kenny gone, I was up to six miles a day. I still wasn’t sleeping much, so it was only about five-thirty by the time I’d gotten halfway into my run and I stumbled across Otto.
I’d taken one of the oceanfront paths that the island maintained out of its general funds, which only meant that we paid some of the teenage boys to keep it in shape, threw down crushed shells every few years. I was maybe three miles in when I saw Otto sitting on a rock and staring across the water.
I can’t say what it was that made me stop and talk to him. Perhaps it was his stillness. He was just sitting and looking at the water, and that seemed like it was enough for him. For the week we were together, he seemed content the whole time, whether it was sitting there on the rock, having a beer with me and some of the boys at the Grumman Fish House, lying in bed after we’d had sex, or even out in the Kings’ Ransom with me. Well, not as much in the Kings’ Ransom, since being out on the water didn’t seem to agree with him.
We talked for an hour or so, mostly me telling him what it was like to be a lobsterman—“But you are a woman,” he said, which, despite the fact that he spoke English fluently, seemed particularly charming with his accent—and him telling me about his job as a curator at the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, which I later realized was kind of funny given his inability to keep his food down on a boat. He told me that despite the presence of the ocean, Loosewood Island wasn’t anything like his home in Germany.
There was nothing more to it than that. Neither one of us pretended we were falling in love. I suppose if we had more time together it might have been possible. He was good in bed—as graceful as he was, he was also forceful enough that I didn’t have to worry about myself. I liked his fingers skittering across my back, snapping open my bra, threading down and across my hips. His lips whispering against my neck, the length of his body pressed against me, the way he shuddered in my arms when he came. Each moment with Otto was a moment with Otto and nobody else.
Actually, when Otto and I weren’t having sex, mostly what we talked about was Brumfitt and painting. He was fascinated with the idea that I could trace a direct line to Brumfitt. Maybe the third or fourth night, I was lying on my stomach and Otto was propped up on one elbow, lightly rubbing my back with his free hand. The moon was strong enough that it felt like we were covered in light. He’d asked me what it had been like to grow up thinking of Brumfitt as something personal, as part of my own history rather than as an artist.
I rolled over onto my side so that I could see him. “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s kind of like asking a fish what it’s like to breathe underwater.” Otto looked down at me, but he didn’t seem to understand. “It’s always been this way. It’s not the same for my sisters, but for me, for Daddy, Brumfitt isn’t just some guy who we’re related to. Wherever I go on the island I see Brumfitt’s paintings. I don’t think, oh, there’s a rock, there’s a wave. I think, that’s where Brumfitt painted The Whale’s Tail, there’s where he painted Wife on a Winter’s Day. That’s what I see when I’m on the island.”
“But so do I,” Otto said. “That is why I have the guidebook.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not the same. You see the paintings, but I see the way that the paintings tell the story of the Kings. There’s no Loosewood Island for me without Brumfitt.” Otto lowered himself so that we were both lying down and facing each other. “Daddy likes to say that Brumfitt painted both the history and the future of the Kings family in his paintings, and all you have to do is look at them in the right order.”
“Is this true?”
I leaned forward and kissed him lightly. “I don’t know. But there’s no question that Brumfitt hid something in his paintings. You know about the Harel find, right?” He shook his head. “Really?”
“I like Brumfitt, yes? I come here because of Brumfitt, but I am not living here.”
“This would have been maybe fifteen years ago,” I said, though I know exactly when it happened, because it was the summer after Scotty died, after Momma killed herself. “There was an academic, C. C. Harel, who had this theory that Brumfitt left a coded message in the landscape of Sea Bounty. A sort of map. She spent three months on the island with a team of graduate students, and
they eventually found a chest buried inside a cavern on the lee side of the island. There were more than twenty Brumfitt paintings in the chest.”
“Where are the paintings?”
“Tied up in court. Things get complicated pretty quickly when both Canada and America start fighting. But we get a steady stream of tourists who come to the island with a shovel and the idea that they’re going to find themselves a treasure trove.”
“Has anybody else found any?”
“No,” I said. “The tourists all leave disappointed.”
He smiled and moved a little closer. “I’m not going to leave disappointed.”
He was quiet for a few seconds, and just when I was beginning to think that he was planning to kiss me, he said, “Do you think there are more paintings to be found?”
I pushed his shoulder down so that he was flat on his back and then swung my leg up and over so that I was straddling him and looking down at him. “Yes,” I said. “No. Maybe. Daddy claims there are others, that he knows of a stash of hidden Brumfitt paintings and he’s just waiting for the right time to bring them out. Sometimes I think Daddy’s a little bit crazy”—I winced when I said it, but I don’t think Otto noticed, and he certainly didn’t know of Daddy’s history in the loony bin—“but sometimes I think that he knows what he’s talking about.”
When we weren’t in bed, I showed Otto some of the places on the island that I didn’t think he’d find on his own, and we spent some time painting together. Mostly he painted what he saw, realistic pieces that were decent enough, though he did do a few pieces that clearly mimicked Brumfitt. When he left, he gave me a small painting showing the Kings’ Ransom tied up to her mooring buoy in the bay, a storm rolling toward the island in the background, and something sinister and indistinct in the water by the boat’s transom.
“My little ode to Brumfitt. For you. Like your father said, to show you both what has happened and what it will feel like for you when I am gone,” he said. He smiled in his shy way that was so unlike the men I was used to from the island, and for a moment I thought about asking him to stay. I didn’t, however, because we both knew that things had run their course. I thanked him instead, and then we stood awkwardly waiting for him to board the ferry. We said we’d email each other, and he made sounds about maybe coming back to Loosewood Island next summer, but I knew that next year he’d go somewhere else on his vacation—Thailand or Italy or Mexico—and I didn’t see myself getting to Germany anytime soon. I didn’t see myself living anywhere but Loosewood Island.
Despite my fling with Otto, the summer seemed to drag forever. It felt like all I did was wait: for Carly and Stephanie to move to Loosewood Island, for the fishing season to start again. Finally, the day before the season started, in mid-August, we moved Carly and Stephanie onto the island. I’d volunteered to give them my house and move into one of Daddy’s smaller rentals—it made the most sense, but it was also a peace offering—but it meant I was going to have to move in with Daddy through mid-September, when the rental house opened up. Moving me was easy, since the rental was furnished, but Stephanie and Carly were a different matter.
Daddy, Tucker, and I drove down to Portland to help them pack up and drive the rental truck, and it turned out that they had a lot more stuff than you would have expected in a one-bedroom apartment.
“I’ve heard of people with baggage,” I muttered, “but this is ridiculous.”
Carly didn’t smile. “Some people have more baggage than others, Cordelia.”
I didn’t bother responding. My baggage didn’t need to be carried down three flights of stairs.
Even with Daddy, Tucker, and I leaving Loosewood Island before dawn—which is early, in August—we weren’t back to the docks on the mainland and loading up the Queen Jane and the Kings’ Ransom until late afternoon. By the time we hit the island and were down to the last dozen or so boxes, I was beat. I skipped over a large box and then another one that had BOOKS written on it, and grabbed a small box marked for the bedroom. Carrying it into what used to be my bedroom, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, and I didn’t see that Trudy had spread herself out across the doorway.
I didn’t fall that hard—it was more of an awkward stumble—but I landed partially on the box and the side split open. I got up on my knees and started stuffing the contents back in, a few shirts, a bathrobe, a scarf, and then I saw the necklace. It had been tucked inside a delicate wooden box, and when I’d fallen, the lid of the box must have slid open. There were only a few pearls of the necklace showing. I reached out to touch it, but then I hesitated.
I stood up and carried the box into the bathroom, putting it down on the counter, and then reached in and touched my fingers to the pearls. They were cool. I pinched them and then gently, very gently, pulled them out of the wooden box that they had been wrapped inside, and held them in the light. The necklace pooled in my hands. There was no question to me: this was Momma’s necklace.
I looked in the mirror while I put the strand of pearls around my neck. I could feel my fingers fumbling—I thought of how nice it would be to have Momma still alive, to have her fasten it for me—and then it was on. I touched it, trying to remember exactly how Momma’s fingers looked when she touched the necklace.
“What are you doing?”
I didn’t jump, despite being surprised, and I didn’t turn to look at Carly. I could see her well enough in the reflection. “You’ve had it the whole time?”
“What are you doing in my stuff?”
For a second I thought about explaining how I’d tripped, how I hadn’t been snooping, but I was too angry to bother. “I thought it was gone. You took Momma’s necklace. You just took it?”
I could see Carly weighing it, trying to decide what to say. “I didn’t mean to. I just, you know, clearly your place was out on the boat with Daddy, and Rena and I were home with Momma, and I wanted …” She couldn’t look at me. “I wanted something for myself. It was on her dresser. She wasn’t wearing it when she …”
“Fuck you, Carly. Okay? Fuck you.” I started to walk past her but she grabbed my arm.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like, Carly? I’m taking it.” I grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand off my arm.
She looked pale, like she was going to be sick. “You can’t just take it.” She started to reach out again, but then she let her arm fall to her side. “Please,” she said. “You’ve already got Daddy. What more do you want? Let me have it. It’s mine.”
I touched it again, and the thought of giving it back to her filled me with a kind of fury. “It was never your necklace, and it was never even Momma’s.”
“Don’t tell me you believe that story of Daddy’s?” She straightened up and actually gave a rough laugh. “That this is the necklace Brumfitt’s wife was wearing when she was delivered from the ocean? Please don’t tell me you believe that. What, the necklace doesn’t belong to me because it belongs to the Kings?”
I pushed the rest of the way past her. “Welcome home,” I said, tossing the words over my shoulder, but I didn’t have the last say.
“If you believe that, Cordelia, then you better remember that there’s a price for being a Kings,” Carly said.
By the time I got back to the house I’d already taken the necklace off. There was a part of me that felt terrible, and I knew that I should take it back and give it to her, but I couldn’t. Not yet. The pearls were cool and smooth in my fingers, and they made me realize how much I missed Momma; there wasn’t that much that she had left behind. And it wasn’t as if Daddy or I knew that the necklace still existed and had decided to give it to Carly in the first place. She had just taken the necklace on her own. I thought about bringing the necklace to Daddy, but in the end I hid it in one of my drawers and then took a shower.
I cleaned up and had a bite to eat and then it was time for the co-op meeting. We always held them the night before a new season started, and we always held them at the Grumman Fish House,
partly because the co-op offices weren’t big enough, and partly because the Grumman Fish House had beer. Mostly the latter.
Daddy waited until we’d all had a couple of drinks and the official business was finished before he brought it up. He came right out and said it. “So you probably all know, Carly’s back on the island.” He said it loud and in a break in the chatter, and everybody piped down. “And you probably all know that she’s brought a girlfriend.”
Timmy gave me a grin and I could see the Warner brothers, who were only in their second season of running their own boat, roll their eyes the way they did anytime they thought the old men were talking like old men. They’d had the same reaction when their dad spent most of January thinking aloud about getting “one of those computers” so that he could send “electronic mail.” I wasn’t worried about them, or any of the younger boys. Besides, Chip and Tony owed me after what had happened with Eddie Glouster, and I figured they knew what I’d do if they raised my hackles. No, it was different when you hopped generations from ours to Daddy’s: it was people like George Sweeney and Mr. Warner and those fellows that Daddy was talking to, and I waited to see how it was going to go.
“Shit, Woody,” George said, “I’ve known Carly since she was born, and it doesn’t matter if she’s dating a man or a woman, long as she’s happy.”
“As long as it’s not some bastard out of James Harbor,” Mr. Warner said, and at that everybody laughed a little harder.
Daddy shook his head. He had a small smile, but that came off his face as he raised his hand and spoke. “James. Fucking. Harbor.” The room came to complete quiet. “That’s what we need to talk about.”
“I say we just cut ’em out,” somebody called.
There were a few choruses in agreement, but Daddy held his hand up again. “No. You know as well as I do how that works,” he said. “We cut a few of their traps, they cut a few of ours. The James Harbor fellows who are fishing out here are running a different season than we are, and they’re running big rigs, at the limit or close to it, seven, eight hundred traps. They lose five or ten traps, it’s going to seem a lot less personal than if we lose five or ten. We go to war, we go to war, but let’s not hasten things.”
The Lobster Kings Page 16