Secrets Haunt the Lobsters' Sea

by Charlene D'Avanzo

  Abby reached down for my backpack.

  “Please,” I said. “I can get that.”

  She hoisted the pack to her chest and wrapped both arms around it. “No trouble, dearie. You carry up the rest, an’  I’ll show you where to tie off the boat so she doesn’t head off for somewhere like France.”

  Abby navigated the rocks and boulders so quickly I had a hard time keeping up with her.

  “You must’ve played sports when you were younger,” I said. “What was it, running or something?”

  She turned and waved a few fingers at the ocean. “Long distance swimmin’, deah. Comes in handy out this way.”

  Abby’s was a classic small New England home—gray shingled with two sets of pained windows on either side of a front door painted dark green. As I followed her in, she dropped my pack at the bottom of a flight of wooden stairs just inside the entryway.

  “Your room’s at the top of the stairs. It’s the neat one. Angel’s is on the other side up theah.”

  I grabbed my gear, climbed the steep stairs, and peeked into a neat, snug room with no signs of an inhabitant. Dropping the pack onto an old wooden bench between two windows, I leaned on the sill to check out the view. A splash of salmon low on the horizon above the ocean told me I was looking west. The setting sun complemented the room’s decor—a magenta braided rug at the foot of a double bed and spread decorated with little rose, cherry, and scarlet flowers.

  Still leaning over, I sensed a presence behind me—something dim, ethereal, shadowy. I straightened, turned around very slowly, and scanned the pine walls, painted ceiling, and floorboards. My time in the bedroom could be measured in seconds, but it seemed much longer, almost as if this were my room when I was a child. That realization should have struck me as odd, but it didn’t. I reached out to touch the bedspread, knowing just what it would feel like.

  Worn cotton, softened by hours hanging in the sun after a wash. Warm, safe, home.

  I ran my fingers across the smooth round bedposts before falling back onto the bed to stare at the ceiling. The intimate balm was receding, and I could not stop its progress any more than I could halt the ebbing tide. I blinked back my tears.

  Only few months earlier, I’d experienced something that wasn’t supposed to happen. The U.N. had sent me, Harvey, and Ted to the Haida Gwaii archipelago off British Columbia to investigate an international law of the sea violation. My first day there, I’d ended up in a kayak with a broken rudder, which had put me in danger of being swept into the ocean. Out of nowhere, a ten-foot raven specter had zipped by my run-away boat as the cold Pacific Ocean was about to claim me. Moments later, a Haida man motored alongside and helped me reach safety. I learned that his was the raven clan. Given my training as a rationale scientist, the incident had unsettled me, to say the least.

  Later, Angelo had proclaimed that anyone with an Italian father and an Irish mother should expect the occasional mystical episode. I decided to believe him.

  This time, though, I was on a Maine island and couldn’t turn to a rationale like a raven-clan rescuer. Besides that, I had felt, not seen, the inexplicable.

  From down below, Abby called, “You all right up theah?”

  I sat upright, coughed, and found my voice. “Perfect. Be right down.”

  I found my hostess lifting a steaming kettle off a gas stove in the tiny kitchen. “Cup of tea, deah?”

  “That would be lovely, Abby, thanks.”

  She tipped her head toward a small wooden table positioned to enjoy morning light from the window above. “Take a seat right theah.”

  Open shelves that held dishes and glasses along with pots, pans, and other cooking paraphernalia ran the perimeter of the kitchen. Abby reached up, pulled down two white mugs, carried the steaming brew to the table, and sat down with a sigh.

  “I splashed in some milk. Hope that’s okay.”

  I wrapped my hands around the mug. Compared to the mainland, fall’s chill came weeks earlier on Macomek. “Perfect. Thanks. Um, up in the guestroom I had the strangest feeling I’d been here before. Maybe as a child? Is that possible, do you think?”

  She ran fingers through windblown hair standing on end. It didn’t help much. “Could you’ve been in this house as a little girl? Maybe so. You’re what, thirty?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “So thirty yeahs ago, give or take. My dad was still in the house. Mom would’ve died before then. I was a few years older than you are now. I don’t recall a child out heah then. Where would I…?” She ran a hand across her mouth and turned her head toward the window.

  I glanced at her, outside, back to my hostess.

  Abby stared down at her tea, picked up the cup, slowly lifted it to her mouth, took a sip, and carefully set it down on the table. She wet her lips. “Like I said, Dad was living heah. He did invite visitors, particularly ones who made you think, he’d say. Did your parents work on the ocean?”

  “They were marine scientists like I am.”

  “There you go. It could be they came ovah for a visit when you were little.”

  I leaned back in my chair. Bridget and Carlos, my mother and father, in this very house—walking through the front door, sitting at this table, staying upstairs in the guestroom, sleeping in the same bed I’d sleep in tonight.

  And me, maybe two or three, with them.

  Abby placed her hand on mine. With our own memories and regrets, we sat like that as the sound of waves on her beach drifted through the window.

  Up and back, up and back, up and back.

  “Abby, since it’s getting late, could we walk into town?” I asked. “I’ve never been on Macomek and Gordy tells me you’re the best person to tell me about the island.” I rubbed my hands together. “More hot tea when we get back would be great.”

  “Be happy to show you the place.” She pushed the wire glasses higher up on her nose. “And not just tea when we get back. Suppah. Got a nice fish chowdah. And deah, as we walk along, you might as well tell me what upset you so.”

  We followed a dirt road banked by tall clusters of light purple asters and gaudy yellow goldenrod. The last of the season’s monarch butterflies drifted lazily on a breeze. There was not one house in sight.

  “How many people live on the island?” I asked.

  Abby bent down to pick up a penny. “Winter it’s thirty, forty at most. Summertime, it’s twice that, maybe a little more.”

  “Doesn’t it feel, ah, too closed in? What do they call it? Island fever?”

  “I’ve heard of that but nevah had it. It’s hard to explain what it’s like to live out heah. You know, we’re literally on the edge. When the weatherman starts talkin’  ’bout the Hague line, that’s what we listen to.”

  The Hague Line, I knew, divided US and Canadian fishing waters at the northernmost part of the Gulf of Maine. Cross the Hague Line and you’re in the Great White North.

  “But what about things like grocery stores, hospitals, restaurants?”

  “Yup. We got no regular stores, no doctors or dentists, no restaurants, not even a post office. I take care of letters an’  such, but it’s not official or anything.” She said all this with a good dose of pride and little regret.

  “So how do you deal with—I don’t know—everyday things like dentists?”

  “Humor helps a lot. We’ve got some sayings like ‘You know you live on Macomek if you ask the dentist to do all five fillings at once. And your kids’ve never been to Disneyland or played on a baseball team, but at eight years old they could drive a truck.’”

  As she said the word, the first motor vehicle I’d seen, a truck, bumped down a road away from the harbor. The thing was classic island transportation—old,  rusted,  missing the passenger door, and probably used for short hauls of heavy or bulky items. It might have a license plate, but I guessed the date would be something like 2003.

  We were approaching the lobster shacks I’d seen from Gordy’s boat. Rusty-red, the tall weathered sentries overlooking t
he harbor listed like old men.

  “Still, it really must be hard sometimes,” I said.

  “Spring’s the worse. You’re finally done with winter. Then the street’s a muddy mess, and the fog comes in so thick your hand disappears at the end of your arm.”

  “So what keeps you all here, Abby?”

  “Partly it’s the independence, doing for myself. Heck, I can fix a washing machine, shingle my house, and catch bluefish off the rocks. But more than that, it’s the people. Out heah, we’re like a big family that helps each othah.” She gestured at the ocean. “When a lobstahman’s in trouble, every boat’s out theah to help. If a woman’s husband dies, people’re with her day aftah day so she’s not alone.”

  The melancholy in Abby’s eyes came and went so quickly I nearly missed it.

  At the harbor, she stepped around stacked lobster traps and coils of line and peered down to appraise the scene twenty feet below. The pier’s pilings were now half-bathed in salt water.

  Abby said, “Water’s comin’ up fast now.” She scanned the horizon. “Ayuh, three boats on the way in. There’s still a couple more out theah somewheres.”

  I followed her gaze, couldn’t see a thing, and was about to say so when a bobbing speck morphed into the shape of a boat. A titanic ocean for such small vessels. “Does it happen often, Abby, that a lobsterman gets in trouble out there?”

  “Twice, maybe three times a yeah. And mostly it turns out good. But when it doesn’t, it’s truly awful. The worst thing is when you come up on a boat that’s going ’round and ’round in circles and nobody’s on it.”

  From behind there was a skittering noise, like scurrying rats in an alley. I whipped around and caught a flash of green vanish behind a pile of traps.

  8

  Abby said, “Let’s go out on the pier and wait ’til the boys come in.”

  With the ease of someone half her age, Abby perched herself on the edge of the wooden pier and dangled her legs over the edge. Like two kids, we swung our feet back and forth.

  “At the Maine Oceanographic Institute I eat lunch outside and sit just like this,” I said.

  “So tell me what it’s like, bein’ a girl ocean scientist?”

  “I expect it’s the same for females who lobster for a living. Some guys’re threatened and act like jerks, but most give you a chance. The thing is, you’ve got to be better than good. I had to prove myself—that I was smarter than most, worked harder than most, got big grants, published lots of papers, all that. Now that I’ve got a good job, it’s easier.”

  “So your mum and dad studied the ocean too?”

  “They did, but both drowned in an accident when I was nineteen. They were studying a coral reef. The sub got stuck.”

  She reached over and rested her hand on mine. “You poor, poor thing.” Tenderness and compassion flowed through me like a balm.

  Offshore, the drone of lobster boats announced their approach. Quintessential Maine, for me it was a sunny throb announcing that hard-working fishermen had made it home once more. In one line, three boats plowed thought the water, bows up and proud, sterns buried in their own wake as waves peeled away to each side. Inside the harbor, captains throttled down, and their craft slowed and settled level in the water. Each left behind a smooth, wavy path that would remain long after the boat arrived at its mooring.

  Captain and crew on each boat quickly unloaded their catch at the other end of the pier, then scattered and found their moorings. The closet one, Lucky Catch, sported a bright red hull and crisp white wheelhouse capped by expensive-looking navigation gear. Water streamed off the aft deck as a guy garbed in a soiled orange apron washed off trap slime, bait guts, and other debris from the day at sea. I assumed he was the sternman, a crewmember who grabbed traps as the captain lifted them aboard, pulled out lobsters, added new, foul-smelling bait, and slid re-baited traps off the open stern. It was hard, repetitive, and dangerous work feet from a frigid open ocean waiting to claim them. None wore life jackets, of course, and many couldn’t swim. I’d heard that many sternmen were chosen for their brawn and not necessarily their brains.

  On Lucky Catch, a guy with an army buzz cut, bright yellow bib-pants, and black T-shirt leaned over the bow to haul in his dinghy. Hand over hand he worked with lightening speed.

  “She’s a good looking boat,” I said.

  “Lucky Catch belongs to Calvin Ives. That’s him in the bow. Best lobstahman on the island, a highliner. Calvin’s a smart, hard-workin’  guy who’s always lookin’ at what’s next.”

  Highliners, I’d learned from Gordy, consistently brought in the most lobsters. Typically from generations of fishing families, they were highly respected and seen as leaders in their communities.

  The lobster boat farthest away from us was already swinging on its mooring as its dinghy was rowed to shore. “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Malicite Dupris is at the oars, and that’s his sternman with ’im. Boat’s named Look to the Future.”

  “Dupris is someone I really want to meet.”

  “Gordy told me that, deah. Malicite’s comin’  for suppah.”

  A guy from the third boat stood in its dinghy and extended an arm to the white-haired man still above him.

  “The older one who looks like he’ll fall in the watah, that’s Lester,” Abby said with a catch in her voice. “Lovely man, gettin’ on like me. Looks like he had a swig or two las’ night since it’s comin’ up on the anniversary.”

  “The anniversary?”

  “Yes, deah. Day when he lost his sternman in a storm a long time ago.”

  Lester straddled a seat in the dinghy and patted the younger man’s arm, a guy probably the age of the sternman who died. I could certainly understand why Lester numbed himself to such a dreadful memory—like the one that had driven my own grandfather out of Massachusetts and into Maine.

  On our way out of “town,” Abby waved a hand at a grey-shingled structure with a white, paint-chipped side door. “That’s our everything building. In the summah when there’s more people out heah, that’s where one of the ladies on the island sells home-baked bread an’  such. There’s a bull’tin board with notices ’bout traps for sale, things like that. When the mail comes in on the ferry twice a week, dependin’ on the weathah, I put it in a place where everyone knows to get it. And there’s one room that can hold twenty-odd folks for a meetin’  if somethin’  real serious comes up.”

  “Like what?”

  “Last summah, a guy shot ovah the head of another guy. Didn’t hurt ’im. It happened right as boats came back in at sunset. A bunch of us saw it. Calvin Ives got us togethah before the Marine Patrol arrived.”

  “But why? If the shooter was guilty, wouldn’t the patrol officer take care of it?”

  “Besides no doctors or dentists, there’s no law enforcement out heah. Like I said, we take care of our own.”

  I envisaged vigilantes in the old west. “Um, what did you decide about the shooter?”

  “That Tyler did the right thing. He warned a guy who set traps off the island the day before. Nobody traps off Macomek but folks who live heah.”

  “Tyler Johnson?”

  “That’s right. Do you know Tyler?”

  My stomach tightened. “Gordy mentioned him.”

  We approached her house where the guest room’s pair of windows looked down on me. “Abby,  I can’t stop thinking about being here when I was young.”

  “That’s really troublin’  you, deah. I’ll put the tea kettle on and heat up the chowdah. Then we’ll have a good talk.”

  While Abby busied herself in the little kitchen, I sat at the well-used table beneath the kitchen window. Two wide boards spanned the tabletop.

  Abby turned to see me run a hand along the grooved surface. “That’s an old oak table we use for everything from all our meals to cleaning an’  splicing line durin’ winter months. My dad brought it down from Nova Scotia.”

  She slid a mug across the table, and I wr
apped my hands around it. The warmth was soothing. “Thanks.”

  “You miss your parents terrible, an’ somethin’ with this house makes you think about them. Is that right?”

  I bit my lip and nodded.

  “You seem like a strong young woman. That’s good, but sometimes even strong ones need to let it go. What we keep inside. Does that make sense?”

  “I’m beginning to realize that, Abby.”

  “Took me quite a while. If you jus’  work on the strong side, the othah part might shrivel up. Then, you can’t get at it again.”

  “You’re right. It’s another thing I’m beginning to understand.”

  She stood and patted my hand. “Time I worked on suppah.”

  There were four of us for “suppah.” Abby’s daughter Patty stopped by for a few minutes and decided to stay. Malicite arrived right on time and helped us move the kitchen table so we could, following Abby’s instruction, “properly set it for foah.”

  The chowder—potatoes, onions, carrots, and seafood—was filling and delicious.

  “Wow,  Abby,” I said. “This is terrific. Besides the fish, what else is in it?”

  “Lobstah. Out heah, there’s lobstah scrambled eggs, lobstah mac an’  cheese, lobstah brownies. You name it.”

  Deciding not to comment on lobster for dessert, I said, “Patty, I understand you’re, um, hanging out with Gordy.”

  Patty shared several traits with her mother—zeal, devotion to Macomek, and dirty blond spiked hair she kept in line with a wide black headband. The haircut looked better on the younger Burgess.

  “What a great guy!” Patty used her spoon for emphasis. “Knows boats inside out, wicked funny,  good cook.…”

  “Gordy cooks?”

  She tipped her head and grinned. “Sure. Burgers on the grill, spaghetti, things like that.”

  Wondering what else I didn’t know about my cousin I said, “Huh. So where is Gordy?”

  “He wanted to talk with Calvin Ives. Don’t know why, but he got all serious when I asked.”

  The little hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention as Gordy’s mission came to mind.