From Away

by Phoef Sutton

  “Just doing my job, Kathleen.” He started the car and drove off.

  I tossed my crab roll into the trash and walked up to her. “You okay?”

  She gave me sad smile. “Sam.” There was a noncommittal greeting if I ever heard one.

  “I thought you were leaving.”

  “She wouldn’t let me.”

  “Who?”

  She turned to Neil and smiled. “He’s a scary guy, your friend.”

  “Keeps me up at night,” Neil said.

  She turned to me again, her eyes raw and bloodshot and just beautiful. “I saw Jellica’s mother on the ferry.”

  “What?”

  “She lives out on Brown’s Head Island. Turns out I was following her all along, I just didn’t know it.”

  We went back with Kathleen to her house, and it was then that I realized how much she hadn’t intended to come back. The place was shut up and cleaned out. No power, no water, no food. This woman doesn’t do things by half measures, I thought.

  We sat around the kitchen table with no coffee to warm our hands on. The sofa bed was pulled out, but there were no sheets on it. She must have camped out on it last night, but she hadn’t done a thing to make herself more comfortable. She was making it clear to the house that she wasn’t back to stay.

  Neil can’t sit in one place for long without something to drink or eat. He went out to his truck and brought in the only thing he had: a six-pack of Bud. He even offered one to Kathleen, and I was thoughtless enough not to stop him. She politely turned it down, though I saw her give the can a look of longing more poignant than any I’d seen her give me the night we’d made love. I wasn’t jealous. We all have a soft spot in our hearts for our exes.

  She leaned her chair back against a bare white wall and started to tell her story. Cold, simple, bare to the bones. A cop on the witness stand. When she started, she had a challenging glare in her eye, as if she was daring one of us to say she was crazy. Well, she had the wrong audience for that. Neil had too much island politeness to ever disagree with an ex-drunk, and me? I’d believe any shit anybody told me by now.

  After our parting words on the ferry landing, she had driven her truck up the ramp and jockeyed herself a fine parking space. Dead in the middle of the boat and pointed right at the ramp. “Once the ferry docked, all I was going to have to do was hit the gas and I’d be on the road.”

  She sat in the truck for the first half of the trip, then she got out to use the facilities. While she was making her way to the starboard cabin, she saw the woman.

  “White female, in her thirties, two hundred and ten pounds or so. Square build. Ruddy complexion. Short-cropped black hair. Fuzzy mustache.” It was a description that fit half the women on the island. The woman was sitting in the back row of the cabin, next to an empty shopping cart. “I have no doubt that it was her.” She said this calmly, making her report.

  Kathleen went back to her truck and waited, not wanting to be seen by the woman. She watched the pedestrians disembark once they reached the mainland. Mrs. Delecourt left among them, pushing her shopping cart up the ramp.

  Once off the boat, Kathleen parked her truck in the long-term lot and followed the woman on foot. Catching up with her was no problem. The problem was moving slow enough to stay behind her as she rolled that shopping cart up the long hill to Main Street, then down the asphalt sidewalk to the A & P.

  Kathleen waited outside for an hour and a half before the woman came back out, her cart piled high with provisions.

  “Weren’t you cold?” I asked.

  Kathleen looked at me like I was nuts. “What?”

  “Waiting outside all that time in this weather?”

  “Yeah, I was fucking freezing to death, can I go on?” Then, after a moment, she said, only a little softer, “Thanks for asking.”

  She followed the lady and her cart back to the ferry. It took the woman twice as long to get down the hill as it had to go up it, since the cart was now so full that she had to hold it back to stop it from careening away with itself. Now and then, a box or a bag would topple off onto the pavement, and she’d have to brace the cart with a foot against one of the wobbly wheels and stretch out her body to reach the fallen item. Once or twice, passersby offered to help her, and she brushed them off. Eventually, she rolled the cart back onto the ferry.

  Kathleen got her truck back onto the ferry, but stood on the deck the whole trip, watching Mrs. Delecourt through the little window in the cabin door. I didn’t bother to comment on how the wind must have bit at her on the open deck.

  When they docked at Fox Island, Kathleen again watched her roll the cart up the ramp. Again, items dropped. Again, the woman refused all help. Slowly, she pushed that top-heavy cart through the parking lot and down the road to Carver’s Harbor. She rolled it all the way to the Municipal Dock where an old, beat-up Boston Whaler was moored. Methodically, she loaded her groceries and the cart into the boat until it was piled high, then she yanked the sputtering motor to life and pushed off. Kathleen watched the woman thread her little open boat through the crowded harbor, watched her round Norton’s Point and enter the Thorofare.

  “I couldn’t follow her after that.”

  She asked around the dock if anyone knew who the woman was. Tommy Ireland said sure, she was Jake Moseby’s daughter, Nancy. Didn’t she know the Mosebys? They’d lived on Brown’s Head Island as long as anybody could remember. Nancy had run away or something years ago. But she’d come back. Island people always came back.

  “I wanted Donny to take me over there,” Kathleen concluded. “Just to see. Just to find out….”

  She let the sentence hang. Once she had the story out, none of us seemed to know quite what to do next. The energy she’d used to tell it seemed to be all she had in her. She looked around in something like surprise to see herself back here in the house she’d moved out of, with a guy she’d broken up with (if you could say we’d ever been “together”). The answers to the questions that had tormented her for years were close by, just over the choppy water, and it ought to have been clear what to do next. Instead, the thought seemed to exhaust her. And it left me totally at a loss.

  If Kathleen had been some other woman, she’d have burst into tears now, and I’d have held her close and maybe we would have gotten somewhere. If I’d been another man, I’d have gone ahead and held her close whether she cried or not. But we were stuck being who we were, so instead we sat in the silent white room and looked very sad and very uncomfortable and didn’t say a word.

  It was Neil who spoke with his usual wisdom.

  “Anybody want a pizza?” he said.

  How did he always know the right thing to say? We agreed that a cheese pizza from the Pizza Pit would be a good first step on the journey of the rest of our lives. Neil gestured for me to go with him. I hesitated, but Kathleen rolled over on her bed and told me to go ahead. She was going to nap anyway. The whole damn thing had exhausted her.

  I supposed I should have objected, but I’m ashamed to say that the prospect of being left alone with Kathleen right then filled me with discomfort. I couldn’t imagine saying a thing that wouldn’t be wrong; I couldn’t imagine that she’d want to hear my voice or see my face. But, I reproached myself as we walked out to Neil’s truck, I couldn’t leave her alone, not feeling the way she did. I might not have been the best company for her, but I had to be better than nothing. And “nothing” wasn’t what she’d be alone with, anyway, I remembered with dread.

  I was about to tell Neil to take off. To turn and head back in and just lay down in the bed next to her and be all strong and silent and masculine and comforting. But then Neil asked if we maybe ought to go talk to Nancy Moseby. Sort of on the way to getting the pizza, you know?

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t know what Kathleen’s business is with her, but it sounds pretty serious. You know she’s gonna go over and talk to them eventually. I thought maybe you’d want to talk to ’em first. The Mosebys can
be pretty touchy about strangers.”

  “You know them?”

  “Sure. You remember Jake Moseby. Lives across the Thorofare. The house with the green roof. You know the one. You can see it from your beach.”

  A cold bead of water ran down my back and I knew Jellica had dropped it there.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It started to snow just as we rounded the Point. Big, sloppy snowflakes that splatted on the fiberglass surface of Neil’s boat and glittered on his eyebrows as he leaned out over the gray, churning water. That same snow is falling outside the hospital window as I write this. Is this really only yesterday that I’m telling you about now?

  Neither of us spoke as the boat crossed the Thorofare; I’d done enough talking on the way to the dock, telling Neil about Kathleen and Jellica and doing a pretty poor job of it, leaving out my part of the story, leaving out Jellica’s ghost. Despite my omissions, the story was awful enough to make an impact, to leave a grim scowl on Neil’s normally cheerful face. “That’s the first time I ever heard a story about why somebody started drinking where I understand why they started drinking,” was all he said.

  I tried to get a little more out of him, to ask him whether he believed the Moseby girl could be capable of doing these things. All he said was, “Brown’s Head Island folks can be pretty strange.”

  Brown’s Head Island and its strange folks were drawing closer as we corkscrewed in the frigid water. Maybe it was on account of the leaden sky, but as we approached, that bright green roof that had always looked so vivid from our beach took on a dingier cast, and the house beneath it seemed less like a summer cottage than a white-trash hovel.

  Why were we going there, just the two of us? What were we hoping to accomplish? Why hadn’t we brought Kathleen with us, or even told her we were going?

  I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know. I only knew that I couldn’t go back to Kathleen in that empty white house with nothing to say and nothing to offer her but a rubbery cheese pizza. I had to have something for her—some news. Proof that Nancy Moseby was Jellica’s mother. Proof that she wasn’t. In the best and most impossible of all worlds, proof that Jellica was alive and well and playing happily on Brown’s Head Island. (Sure, the cloud in that silver lining would be that I’d have to have been insane all along, but I’d have happily taken that on.) Even bad news would be better than nothing. Bad news might at least lead to that mythical thing they discuss on the afternoon talk shows—closure. It would be a way to help Kathleen without actually being in the same room with her. So, yeah, I was taking the coward’s way out, even if it led me straight into the home of the enemy.

  Neil pulled the boat up to Moseby’s dock, jumped out to tie her up, and promptly fell on his ass. The wooden ramp was sheeted in ice. I tossed Neil the rope, and he tied it up with red, chapped hands. I climbed carefully onto the ramp, and we walked toward shore, shifting our feet over the planks as if we were on roller blades. Another time we would have laughed.

  As our feet finally reached frozen soil, the door to the house with the green roof swung open, and Jake Moseby came out to greet us. Neil had been right. I did know him, by sight at least. His was one of the faces I’d seen on the island all my life, though I’d never learned his name. Always old, from the time I was a kid, he was the one your mother and I used to call Yellow Beard. (Because he had a beard and it was yellow. Not blond, mind you, but yellow. An unhealthy wash of jaundice over white, like pissed-on snow.)

  “Eh, Amudsen, you crazy fuck,” he said to Neil. “What you doing out in ugly weather like this? You as dumb as you look?”

  “Can’t say I am, ’cause I ain’t. Blame this fucker.” Who was me. “He heard you were thinking of selling your piss pot boat and he wanted to check it out before it sank.”

  That was our hastily pre-arranged cover story. It was safe to assume that any fisherman on the islands was considering selling his boat at any given time, and there was no better way for Neil to express interest in the craft than to load on the insults.

  Moseby looked me up and down with the expression of a displeased Old Testament prophet. “You thinkin’ of takin’ up lobstering?”

  “God, no,” I said hastily. Then I added, even more quickly, “I’ll leave that to the experts. I just want to do some tooling around.”

  The Prophet squinted at me. “Tooling, eh? You want to cheat the ferryman out of his money?”

  For a moment, I thought he was making an allusion to death and Greek mythology (ah, the curse of being an English professor’s son), then I realized he was just talking about the Maine State Ferry system, so I laughed and nodded.

  “Come on. Check her out,” Yellow Beard said.

  So, we climbed into Moseby’s stinking dingy and rowed over choppy water to Moseby’s stinking lobster boat. We spent the next hour going over it from reeking stem to reeking stern, while the wind got colder and the water rougher. I knew when the sales job was over, I’d have to find some way to stay and talk to this man, to delve into his past, to find out if his daughter was here and if she was the monster Kathleen suspected her to be, so I was in no hurry to conclude things and asked all manner of perceptive and foolish questions about the boat and the waters around the islands. All this persuaded him of my sincere interest in the boat, if not of its future safety under my command. In time, though, the wind and water got so bad I knew I had to get to solid ground, even if it meant facing the reason I’d come here in the first place. So, in the middle of his discussion of the bilge system, I told him I thought I’d heard enough and that I’d give him my answer as soon as I’d talked it over with a wife I made up on the spot. The old man gave me a Book of Genesis glare, and I guessed that discussing financial matters with a wife was suspect in Moseby’s world.

  We climbed back into the bucking dingy, and I saw that in the hour we’d spent on Moseby’s boat, the snow had transformed Brown’s Head Island into a Rankin/Bass Christmas TV special. Powdery white and preciously beautiful. I could almost appreciate it as I swallowed my bile and gripped the side of the lurching boat. For a moment, I thought Moseby would just drop us off at the dock and wave us good-bye, but Neil hitched at his pants and said he could sure use a piss and a beer, so Moseby invited us in. No diplomat was more expert at the niceties of cultural interaction than Neil.

  The house smelled of wet dog, moldy wool, and stale urine. The fire in the woodstove was blazing, so we quickly added the scent of our sweat to the potpourri. Moseby pulled off his sweater, giving me more of a glimpse of his mottled gut than I was prepared for, and hollered, “Nan! We got company! Bring some beer!” He threw his sweater onto an aging recliner, then dropped on top of it himself. “Lazy bitch probably sleeping.”

  Neil stripped off his jacket and took a spot on a stained brown sofa. Despite the sweltering heat, I kept all my clothes on, wanting as little of myself exposed as possible.

  Moseby offered us smokes from a pack of Kools and let us know how much he hated Clinton, while two huge, square-headed dogs trotted in and started digging at what was left of the carpet. The bigger of the two rubbed a sore spot on his back against a stack of newspapers that lined the back wall. We took the cigarettes to be polite, and Neil and Moseby discussed how bad the lobsters off the Brown’s Head shoal had been last summer (apparently, the Democrats were to blame) while I kept quiet, sucking in the chemical cold of the cigarette and studying a laughing Jesus torn from an old magazine. It was pinned to the wall next to a framed print of that old chestnut of the two kids crossing the bridge under the white-winged pin-up girl angel. I started to cough, and the dogs gave me a growl to shut me up.

  “Nan, get your lazy ass in here! These boys want beers!” He started to haul himself, red-faced, out of his chair.

  “I’m here, Daddy.” Nan came in, carrying three Rolling Rocks on a TV tray in a show of hospitality that struck me as more sad than welcoming. But then, everything about this woman struck me as sad. As square-headed as one of her father’s dogs, s
quat and burly, with a face like a clenched fist, not even true love or last call could have made her attractive. Her drooping eyes were downcast and runny. Her mouth was set in a fish-like, Edward G. Robinson frown. I remembered my father quoting George Orwell something to the effect that “after forty, a man has the face he deserves.” I had an idea what Nancy Moseby had done to deserve this face, but my heart went out to her anyway.

  “Where the hell have you been?” barked Moseby. “Sleeping again?”

  “I’m still not feeling good,” she said.

  Moseby snorted. “Flu!” He tossed us two cans of beer. “I’m surprised we got any of these left. That’s what’s keeping her in bed.”

  She sat down heavily on a duct-taped vinyl chair. “Dr. Hopley says it’s Epstein-Barr.”

  “Something from the bar, anyway.” He laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever said, which it probably was. “You got any kids, Neil?”

  Neil shook his head, but I piped up, even though I hadn’t been asked. “I have a daughter. Four years old. Little blond girl,” my eyes were fixed on Nan. “Blue eyes. Cutest thing you ever saw.” Oh, I was clever. Moseby’s daughter didn’t respond in the least.

  Moseby shook his head like one of his dogs. “Yeah, when they’re little you think that shit. You got some use for ’em then. Wait till they grow up. You can’t get rid of ’em.”

  “I thought I heard you moved off island, Nan?” Neil gave her a quiet smile. There wasn’t a tense muscle in his body.

  Nan opened her mouth to respond, but Moseby started laughing even harder than before. “Oh, she moved off all right. But she came back. I told her she’d come back and she come back. Her man run off on her.”

  “He died, Daddy.” She didn’t say it angrily, exactly. More like a little petulant, a tired shot in an argument that had been going on for months.

  “So you say! I got my own ideas on that one.”

  “You ever have any kids, Nan?” It was my turn to ask a leading question, but unlike Neil, when I spoke, you could have bounced a quarter off every one of my nerve endings.