“What do you mean, no?” Rena said. She held her hand up and back, like she was thinking of slapping me again. “We need to keep looking for him. We’ll find him.”
I turned from the water, turned from watching Kenny make distance from the Kings’ Ransom, turned from the white line of the spotlight shining on nothing, to look at my sister. “No.” I shook my head. The motion made me dizzy, and I had to close my eyes briefly. “He’s gone. You know it, too.”
“But—”
She didn’t finish whatever she was going to say. She just leaned against me, dropping her head on my shoulder and putting her arms around me. Even though she was bigger than me and she was the one embracing me, I was holding her up.
I pulled back and put my hand on her cheek. “Daddy. We’ve got to worry about Daddy,” I said, standing up straight. “I wouldn’t be saying it if I wasn’t totally sure. Tucker’s drowned, and as much as I want to just collapse on the deck now and let everything go, what we need to do right now is to see about getting the engine started again.”
“We’ve got to keep looking,” she said.
“He’s gone under, honey. I’m sorry. And there isn’t anything we can do. We can’t even call it in.” I pointed up to the roof; the antenna was gone and half of the rig was missing, but at least there were no more flames. “The motor is old as shit, but I can probably get it running again. I wish it was different, but it isn’t. We can’t do anything for Tucker, but we can still get Daddy to a hospital.”
I looked back out at Kenny, and he was treading water, out where I thought Tucker had last been. The leash was tight on Kenny’s waist, the waves lifting and dropping him. He was struggling to keep his own head above water, but he was still looking around for Tucker. Stephanie tried to keep the light moving in circles around Kenny, even though there was no point: there was nothing to see but water, water, water. Just for a moment I thought I saw something, but it wasn’t Tucker. It was a silken curve of darkness, but it disappeared so quickly that I couldn’t tell if it was water, a seal, or my imagination. It was a moment that Brumfitt would have painted if he were there: Man Overboard. The boat, Kenny in the water, Stephanie with the spotlight, Rena and I on the deck, and something slick and dark moving through the water, a menace or a blessing. I stared at Rena, and finally she nodded. And maybe that nod took everything out of her, because she slumped to the deck and began to sob.
I wanted to slump over and cry, too, but instead I turned and marched to the cabin.
Carly was fussing with Daddy’s blankets. His eyes were closed.
He still looked pale and fragile.
“Tucker’s gone,” I said to Carly.
She didn’t look surprised.
“I know,” she said. “Daddy told me.”
“What?”
“He opened his eyes a minute or two ago and said, ‘Tucker’s gone. The ocean has him now.’ Just like that. And then he closed his eyes back up.” She blinked hard, twice, and then looked down at Daddy. “Is Daddy going to die, too?”
I crouched down beside him. My knees were already stiff from the beating of the waves, and when I touched my left hand down to the deck to balance myself I let out a sharp grunt and fell over. I’d forgotten about my wrist and felt a fresh surge of pain. The burn almost felt good, taking away from the throbbing in my face, my lips, my forehead. I struggled onto my knees and then brushed my good hand against Daddy’s cheek. It was cold and rough, the stubble rubbing against my skin. “No,” I said, sounding more certain than I felt. “No,” I said again, half to convince myself, and I stood up. “When Daddy dies, it isn’t going to be like this,” I said, and my voice surprised me in its strength. “I’m going to get the motor working and we’re going to get him to a hospital, and we’re going to get him fixed up just fine.”
I looked back to make sure that Rena and Stephanie were hauling Kenny in, and then I leaned against the captain’s chair and looked at the console. I could feel my wet jeans pressing against the backs of my legs where they touched the chair, and I realized I was shivering. It felt weird to be so cold and wet when my wrist was on fire. Once Kenny was here, I’d get the motor open and see what we could do. I was sure that anything with a circuit board was fried from the lightning: even if the antenna wasn’t gone from the roof of the cabin, the insides of the radio were probably melted. I’d be writing a hefty cheque at the boatyard sooner or later. The real question was the motor. I knew enough to do basic maintenance—I could turn a lug nut like anybody else, tighten belts, gap a spark plug on Daddy’s truck—but the question was how bad the damage was. I was suddenly thankful that when I’d been having problems with the engine two years ago I’d chosen to get it completely overhauled and rebuilt, rather than upgrading to something sexy. The new motors that the boys liked to run were so dependent on electronics that you needed an advanced degree just to turn them over. They were like new cars, where you needed a computer hookup to figure out that a piston was misfiring. That’s why Daddy still drove the same old truck; it was old enough that he could still fix it himself, which was a nice advantage out on the island. Same went, I hoped, for the Kings’ Ransom.
I glanced down at Daddy, hoping to see him sitting up, ready to help me with the engine. He’d be able to get it started, I knew, but he was still lying there in the blanket, looking like he was sleeping. Carly couldn’t help. No point in asking her. I closed my eyes, trying to steady myself. I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to throw up or just pass out, and I had to work at keeping my breathing down. When I opened my eyes, I kicked at the console. I kicked it hard enough that it hurt my toe, and it was nothing more than frustration that made me do it, but it was a tiny miracle.
The engine coughed up, sputtered twice, and then caught. The radar stayed off, and the radio didn’t move, but the LCDs swam with blots of contrast, like they were trying to tell me something, and then, as the motor turned to the familiar purr, the lights blazed on fully, bathing the deck in brilliance. After all of the events of the night so far, it was the least, I thought, that the ocean could do for me, and despite myself, I mouthed the words, Thank you, Brumfitt.
“Jesus,” Carly said. I looked down and she was shielding her eyes from the sudden brightness. And then I realized Daddy was squinting up his eyes. I nudged Carly with my foot, and she saw and then smiled. “That’s something, at least, right?”
I heard Rena bark out my name and I hustled back to where she was still standing at the rail. Stephanie had put down the spotlight and was hauling at the line. Kenny was swimming toward the boat, trying to help her as best he could, but without the line tied to his waist, he wouldn’t have made it back.
Stephanie saw me and yelled, “We can’t find him.”
I nodded. “I told you. He’s gone.”
“You got the motor running,” Rena said. She was back on her feet, holding on to the railing, swaying with each hit the Kings’ Ransom took. Her voice wasn’t exactly flat, but she was quiet enough that, with the storm, I had trouble hearing her and had to lean in. “Let’s get Kenny on board and get Daddy to the hospital,” she said.
I touched my hand to the back of her neck. “I’m sorry, Rena. You have no idea.”
She let go of the railing and, without any deliberate hesitation, without making any kind of a moment out of it, slipped her wedding ring from her finger and dropped it into the water. She glanced sideways at me but didn’t say anything.
I opened my arms to her and she turned fully toward me and collapsed inside them. She sobbed and shook, and I didn’t know what to do other than to hold her tight, struggling to keep her upright. I didn’t let her go until Stephanie and Kenny dropped to the deck beside us.
Stephanie bounced back to her feet, but Kenny stayed on the deck, shivering and curled over. The line, still attached to his waist, snaked over and under him, and the lobsterman in me made a note to talk to Stephanie about keeping rope coiled to prevent accidents, ankles snagged, bodies caught up in traps. I couldn’t help but th
ink of Scotty.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get him out of the rain, get him wrapped up in some blankets. Sooner we get to shore, sooner we get Daddy to the hospital, sooner we can get Kenny warmed up and dry.”
Stephanie opened her mouth, but then she looked at Rena and then me and just let her mouth close. It was obvious, even to her, that Tucker was a lost cause. As we three women stood there, over Kenny, the rain started to bang at my face, and the sound of water falling turned to something tinny and clattering. Despite knowing better, I looked up at the sky. The stones ticked against me. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I said. “Hail?”
I reached down and took one of Kenny’s hands. Stephanie took the other, and we helped him get to his feet. He leaned heavily on me, and where his arm draped around my neck, it burned with cold. It didn’t help that we’d hauled Kenny directly from the water onto the open deck of the Kings’ Ransom in the middle of a raging storm. The hail was skittering on the deck and bouncing like fish flopping out of the water. The pieces of ice were small, rock salt, and they didn’t do anything more than sting, but in the twenty seconds they had been falling they had already begun to pile over the deck of the boat. Despite it being crowded with all of us packed in, it was a relief to get under the cover of the cabin. With Daddy still wrapped in blankets on the floor, Carly beside him, with Rena and Stephanie bundling Kenny up, I stood at the helm and pushed the throttle, driving one-handed. The Kings’ Ransom started moving in the water again, leaving Tucker, leaving the emptiness of the ocean behind as we headed to shore.
The inside of the ambulance was white and loud after the darkness of the storm. Just as Mackie had promised, they were waiting for us at Blacks Harbour. The paramedics tried to take care of me first, thinking that I was the reason they were waiting—I was a bloody, broken mess—until I screamed at them to help Daddy. Once they had him on the stretcher, they made a token effort to keep my sisters and me out of the ambulance, but when they saw that Daddy seemed to be stable, they let us pile in. The last image I had of Kenny that night was of him standing on the asphalt, his arm around Stephanie; he and Stephanie were going to spend the rest of that night answering questions about Tucker for the Coast Guard.
In good weather and with a heavy foot on the gas pedal, it was a forty- or forty-five-minute drive from Blacks Harbour to Saint John, but I couldn’t have told you how long it took in the ambulance that night. Rena, Carly, and I sat side by side on the vinyl bench, the paramedic strapped into the jump seat. I wouldn’t let him tend to me—I wasn’t doing anything until Daddy was taken care of—but I took gauze to press against my head so that I wouldn’t keep dripping blood all over the ambulance. We had a keyhole view to the front of the ambulance, and I think that I spent a lot of time alternating between obsessing about Daddy’s vital signs and watching the windshield wipers smear at the rain, every passing car haloing its lights on the glass. Daddy was unconscious the whole way, and Rena sat with her head in her hands, sobbing about Tucker. Carly and I took turns holding her, stroking her hair, whispering all of the stupid, useless things that you whisper when somebody has died. I wanted to tell her that there was still a chance that Tucker was out there, that maybe he’d grabbed one of the life jackets, that Kenny and Stephanie would be out there with the Coast Guards from both sides of the border scouring the water, that they could still rescue her husband, but like Rena, I could feel that none of that was true. Tucker was dead.
The paramedics banged through the doors of the hospital. We followed, coming in from the dark blow of the storm and squinting at the harshness of the fluorescent lights. The ambulance had been warm, but the hospital was chilly, like air-conditioning in August, and with my clothes still damp, I started to shiver the second the air hit me. A pair of nurses grabbed the gurney from the EMTs without breaking stride, taking a corner at a half jog. The nurse in front barked out something and a young-looking doctor—or maybe he was a resident—flattened himself against the wall. I caught him staring at me as I passed by, and I figured I probably looked a mess. Ahead of us, a young woman in a lab coat held open a door, and the nurses whisked Daddy through.
The woman startled when she looked at me, but she said, “You’re going to have to wait outside.”
At another time I would have stepped aside, would have gladly sunk onto one of the chairs lining the hallway, but after losing Tucker, I wasn’t having any of it. “No,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
I didn’t bother repeating myself. I was gentle about it, but even with my injured wrist, it wasn’t that hard to push her aside and walk into the room.
I could feel Rena and Carly crowding the doorway behind me. One of the nurses threaded a drip into Daddy’s arm, and the other, a heavyset Asian man, was doing something with the machine that took vitals and other signs. The four white-coats were moving deliberately as well, and despite them all looking young to me, it was clear who was calling the shots.
The doctor in charge didn’t even look up before saying it: “Get out.”
“No,” I said to her. I felt Carly pull at my arm and I shook her off. “I’m staying.”
One of the other doctors, a pair of scissors in his hand, glanced at me and then did a double-take. I realized that I’d pulled the gauze off my head, and I could feel the uncomfortable tickle of trickling blood again.
The doctor in charge still didn’t look up from what she was doing. “Every time I have to tell you to get out of this room it takes my attention away from … is this your father?”
Rena answered. “He’s our daddy.”
“Your father,” the doctor continued. “And if you don’t leave this room I’m going to have to stop what I’m doing to make sure that you leave this room. I’m assuming you’d rather have me paying attention to your father?” She looked up at me and then frowned. “Marcus, get somebody to see to her. She’s injured,” she said, and then she let us away from her attention. The Asian nurse stepped away from the monitor and grabbed my arm. I let him pull me out of the room.
A before and an after.
What we had and what we didn’t have.
Sixteen stitches, just below the hairline. A broken wrist set in a cast. That’s what I had.
A husband lost to the ocean. An empty casket. Two children without a father. That’s what Rena had.
And then, 2:46 A.M.
Woodbury Kings.
That’s who we no longer had.
I kept looking back at the two coffins strapped to the deck of the Kings’ Ransom, one empty, one not.
The wind was dead calm, the water flatlined, the late morning light white and tunneling over us. There was nothing left of the storm. The instrument panel was dead, and there was a faint smell of ash from the fire that had been on the roof of the cabin, but the Kings’ Ransom cut through the water like a shovel through loose dirt; one night in the hospital and then another night in a hotel were enough for all of the vestigial fury from the storm to wash away.
I couldn’t figure out what day of the week it was, but the ocean was deserted. Even close to shore we hadn’t passed more than a handful of boats, and out here, near enough to the island that I was starting to see familiar buoys marking sets of traps, there was no activity. I hadn’t expected anybody to be out today. I knew the whole island would be at the funeral. Nobody was going to be pulling traps today. We passed a line of John O’Connor’s familiar white with a band of blue and a band of green, then a cluster of Petey Dogger’s. I could see up to where Timmy and Harly both had a patch of buoys floating, and I knew that past that, close enough to shore that you could reach them with a set of oars and a wooden skiff, like Kings had done for generations before we moved to boats with motors, I’d be coming to one of Daddy’s larger sets.
There was a part of me that wanted to stop and pull his traps. Even in my funeral clothes—we were heading straight from the docks to the cemetery—I thought there’d be something comforting in reaching a gaff out under one of Daddy’s buoys, snagging
the line, slapping it into the hauler, the familiar whir and then the break of the wire through the surface of the water. There’d be a fine haul in there, that I knew, and even with my broken wrist, the ache of the stitches, and the bruises on my face, I’d be more comfortable out on the wreck that was the Kings’ Ransom than receiving mourners at Daddy’s house. Given the state that they were in, I didn’t think Carly or Rena would even notice if I stopped to haul a couple of traps, though I wasn’t sure that I could handle it with only one good hand. Steering the boat in calm weather was one thing, but handling a trap was another. If I had Kenny out there with me, I thought, I could spend the entire day on the water instead of on land among the suits and black dresses.
I was running slow, trying to time things so that we could go right to the cemetery without having to wait, and I realized that up ahead, past the last of Timmy’s buoys, the colours floating in the water were all wrong. Yellow with a triple ring of sky-blue and a band of green. James fucking Harbor. There wasn’t a single one of Daddy’s buoys left. Whoever it was had cut every single one loose. They’d erased any sign that Daddy had ever been here, that he’d been fishing these waters for nearly forty years, that our family had been pulling lobsters from this patch of ocean for three centuries. I turned to call for my sisters, but when I did, I saw that they hadn’t even noticed.
Rena had spent the entire trip with her back to me, leaning against the washboard and looking back at where we came from, as if she wanted to wait as long as possible before seeing Loosewood Island. She looked oddly beautiful like that, in her mourning clothes, her hair fluttering in the breeze. The previous afternoon, after we’d taken care of choosing caskets for Daddy and Tucker, I’d left Rena and Carly at the hotel and gone to a department store to buy clothes for the funeral: three black dresses, three pairs of black tights, three pairs of flats, three black peacoats. Even given the circumstances, I hadn’t just been able to buy clothing that we’d throw away, and the coat cut a flattering silhouette for Rena now. Carly was standing behind Rena and leaning against her, the two of them a bulkhead against the grief that we were carrying.
The Lobster Kings Page 26