by Susan Conley
He yelled that I was wrong and that I always assumed things about him.
Charlie said I was way off. “You have no right to come back and accuse us of things, Mom. No right at all.”
We drove in silence after that. Kit’s accident had already made us meaner. I didn’t know what would become of us. We took The Duchess to the island, and I cooked them pasta and went to bed.
When I woke up in the morning, my thoughts were less dramatic. The trees outside the windows dripped with water, which meant it had rained while I was sleeping, and there was a thick fog so everything looked unearthly. I put my raincoat on and went down to check the boats. The water was a dark slate color, and calm. More like a lake than an ocean. The fog was thickest by the shoreline, and I could move my hand through it like I was slicing weighted air. I started thinking about the woman with the dog in the hospital. Then I thought I was making things up.
When I went back inside, Charlie asked me where Kit’s boots were. I pointed to the metal bin next to the door. Then I drank my second coffee at the table.
Sam climbed down the ladder in his boxers. Charlie was already on the float, bailing The Duchess in Kit’s boots, and I knew Sam would be mad about the boots. Sam wants almost anything Charlie has, and I think this is partly birth order and also just their personalities.
Sam ate his eggs cold and said he wanted to be wearing something of Kit’s, like Charlie was.
I said this was a great idea and that he could go into Kit’s closet and find anything he wanted.
This is how I appeased Sam without his knowing. They can never know.
He came out of the bedroom in an old wool vest I’d forgotten Kit had.
I told Sam that Kit was going to be okay.
He nodded at me like he believed me and needed to believe me. He looked so young.
I stood up from the table and went to him, and he let me hug him. This was why I’d come home.
PART TWO
SAY VERY LITTLE
I CLIMB OUT OF bed now and stir the coals in the woodstove and put two logs in. Who would be so stupid as to put a picture of themselves smoking pot on Instagram? The sun rises above the trees and fills our little house with light. When I call up to the boys, their names condense in the cold.
It’s dangerous to talk to Sam about punishment before he’s had calories. You never know how he’ll react. I wait until he’s eating his oatmeal at the table by the windows before I tell him I’m taking his phone away.
“Why,” he says, “would you ever, ever do that?” He looks at me for a moment like he’s really afraid.
“Because of your Instagram crime that will go henceforth unmentioned until after school, but of which I’m sure you’re aware.”
“Please stop talking so weirdly. It’s not what you think. It’s not.”
“Cameras don’t lie, Sam.”
I reach for his phone by the stove, because what else can I do?
“Stupid move, Sam. What were you thinking?” I don’t know if I’m angrier about the pot or the photo. “Oh, and you’re grounded this week.”
“Mom, that word’s like from another century. What does it even mean?”
“It means come home right after school and no going to Robbie’s house for band practice.”
He pushes the chair back and stands. “How long are you going to keep the phone? How long? Until infinity?”
“Probably infinity.” I take a long sip of coffee by the sink. My hands are shaking. “I’m keeping the phone a week, but really, Sam? That’s all you have to say? How about sorry?”
“Please don’t take it. It’s my life. Why do you obsess over it, Mom? It’s like you’re obsessed.”
“I don’t obsess.” I put the phone by my heart. “I parent. This is called parenting.”
It’s good that he’s mad. But he rattles me, and I try not to show it. I walk into my bedroom with the peeling windowsills and hide his phone in my underwear drawer like it’s a small handgun.
Sometimes the line between empathy and consequences gets so blurred with him that I can’t see it. When to press and when to let up. I want to go back to the way we were before Liam died, as if we were only ever happy then.
“You know what?” I walk into the kitchen. “I had ambition in art school, so even though I didn’t have money, I was okay. Don’t give up on yourself, Sam. Don’t stop being ambitious.”
He fakes a smile at me. “Once again I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, Mom.”
“Just say, ‘Okay, Mom,’ ” Charlie coaches him. “Just say, ‘Yes, Mom. Whatever you say, Mom.’ ”
Sam stands and salutes me. “Yes, Mom. Yes, sir!”
I laugh and go put my arms around his shoulders.
He screams like I’m physically hurting him.
Then he tries another tactic and lectures me on the merits of edible marijuana. Will I buy him some?
He wants me to laugh, because I always forgive him when he makes me laugh.
“Edibles?” I’m trying to do something with my hair in the mirror by the door. I recently dyed it a burned black color, and it now sits on my head in the shape of a helmet. “Have you completely lost your mind?”
I turn and stare at the channel between our island and the mainland, looking for signs of whales. The water is a rich gray, and it ripples and swirls like the thickest silk. It’s cold water. But the air is colder and robin’s-egg blue, and you can see for miles on the straight horizon line. There are rarely whales, but I like thinking about them and other prehistoric things that live in the ocean. This gives me comfort. Kit’s trawler pulls on its mooring ball in the channel like a large chained animal, and this doesn’t give me comfort.
I finally train my gaze on Sam. He’s something elemental to me, like good bread or water. But someone needs to save me from him.
“She’ll never do edibles,” Charlie says with his mouth full of oatmeal. Then he slides to the fridge in his white tube socks, takes out the OJ, and slides back. “Don’t you understand she’s a big no on drugs?”
“See.” I point to Charlie, who looks much older in Kit’s red flannel shirt. “I’ll never do it.”
Sam gets up to pee and the whole little house creaks. There are sixteen pine planks from floor to roof, which have darkened and swollen over time. Sam hardly ever closes the bathroom door all the way. I can hear the torrent of pee and am sure he got it all over the seat.
What can be so incredibly difficult about putting the seat up? If I had to count the times I’ve sat in his cold pee I’d be a sad, bitter woman.
“Dad will be home in a couple weeks,” I call to him. It’s the Canadian doctor’s best guess on Kit’s recovery.
“Weeks?” Sam comes and leans on the counter. His khakis are rolled to look retro, but really they’re just too short.
“Don’t forget we’re driving up there on Friday,” I say. “That’s in four days, Sam. Count them. Four.”
He doesn’t say anything.
Maybe he hasn’t heard me.
Then he says, “Really, Mom? Weeks? Who are these doctors, anyway? Dad’s already been gone the whole f—ing fall.”
Charlie brings his oatmeal bowl to the sink and says, “That was commendable, Sam, not to swear.”
KIT BROUGHT ME TO the island for the first time in his old dayboat with the black steering wheel. This was in August of 1997, and I was a waitress at the lodge on the mainland where he delivered lobsters and became the boy most of the waitresses wanted to sleep with. Think Dirty Dancing without the Catskills. Our boss was a former high school wrestling champion who called me Pretty Girl several times a day. Hey, Pretty Girl, why aren’t you smiling?
I was smiling. Just not at him. But even he couldn’t stop me from loving that job.
Our waitress uniform was a royal-blue polyester dress t
hat zipped up the front, and in the mornings we had to turn the industrial coffee machine on and pour water in. Except one morning near the end of that summer, I forgot to put the water in. When the burning smell made it out to the dining room, several guests asked me what we were incinerating in the kitchen.
My boss found me next to the walk-in freezer, getting more ice for the water pitchers, and he was so angry about the coffee machine situation that he grabbed my arm and tried to twist it.
I ran out to the porch, where Kit was unloading lobsters from his flatbed. He stopped and walked over to me, and we stood together looking out over the rusted dumpsters.
“What’s his name?” he said.
“Whose name?”
“The guy who made you cry?” He had excited blue eyes, and wavy hair, and an ease about him. Like no calamity was too big.
I dried my eyes and smiled. “Why do you think there’s been any crying?”
He laughed at me then and his eyes crinkled in the sun, and that was pretty much it for me.
* * *
—
FIVE DAYS LATER HE took me to the island in his boat and pointed to the little house on the ledge and said he planned to live there someday. Then he steered us over to the tip of the spear and took his T-shirt off and handed it to me. I climbed out the bow with my camera around my neck and his shirt in my hand, while he anchored and swam in. It was one of the last truly hot days of summer, and he put the shirt back on and we made our way up the ledge together, holding hands on the steepest part.
It was the first time we’d really touched, and I couldn’t believe it was finally happening. I think I said something silly, like “God, I love islands.”
He said, “But I didn’t think you were a romantic.”
I thought it was sexy, how he believed he had some deeper knowledge of me.
He pointed to the moon then, which was starting to rise over the horizon. I thought this was romantic of him, and I wondered if he was playing with me. I couldn’t tell yet if he was the kind of person who really trusted anyone.
We walked through the forest in the middle of the island, and I took photos, but what I really wanted to do was kiss him. I was leaving in the morning because the summer season was over, and everything on the island was hypnotic with meaning, if you were me and wanted it to be.
At the southern end the ledge was high and steep, and he said we could pretend to see all the way across the ocean to France. He took my hand again, and my heart made the loud, pounding sound.
The afternoon had the yellow, glassy light that we get in late August in Maine, and the heat felt loose around my body so it was still possible to pretend summer wouldn’t be overshadowed by fall. I let my arm brush against his and was glad for his taut stomach above his narrow hips and for the fact of his body.
We sidestepped down the rocks, hand in hand, until we came to the little beach. I’d been to a beach almost every day that summer with the other waitresses, and we’d shared our Coppertone. Kit said we had to jump the final part down to the sand. When we landed, we kissed, and his mouth was warm and perfect.
He pulled me down on top of him in the sand, and we kissed again, harder this time. He moved his hands over my T-shirt, first across my breasts and then down the sides of my ribcage. My body felt almost new to me, and there was this vast happiness.
Later, we lay on our backs looking up at the sky, and he said, “A storm is coming tomorrow, while you’re on the road.”
“How do you know that?” I leaned over and kissed him again. “How can you tell?”
“The wind’s shifted south to north. You’ll be gone. It will rain, and I’ll never see you again.”
He wasn’t usually dramatic. So maybe we really would never see each other again. But this didn’t seem possible.
I said, “What do you care?” But I knew he could detect my fakeness, and that I didn’t need to try so hard around him, the way I did at school when I pretended I wasn’t from a part of Maine no one had heard of.
“I care.” He sat up and took my hand and appeared to be studying it. He was so focused on this part of me that it allowed me to become more myself, if that was possible.
He was deciding about me then, while the waves poured over the seaweed, and I didn’t think that in the end he would be able to accept me. It had to do with class, though this wasn’t really accurate, because neither of us was from money. It had more to do with fishing, which was its own status in Maine and wasn’t about class but something bigger, tied to the past and the ocean and survival.
He told me then that the island was in his blood and that fishing was all his family knew, so it was his destiny. I think he really believed this. I didn’t know anyone else who talked like this.
I already knew I’d leave Maine. I didn’t know how or when, but it was my destiny in a way. In Maine you were either staying or going. Both required their own set of skills and risks, and you had to choose.
The ocean looked almost aquamarine, and the trees were bright from all the rain, so the island had a strip of green running through the middle. I told myself I’d never forget the island or the kissing. No matter where I went or what I did. But some part of me was also trying to win Kit’s heart so that I could keep it. I really wanted to keep it.
OUR DOCK SITS IN a tiny cove near the point of the spear, protected from currents and tides by the rock ledges. To get down to it we have to take the wooden ramp Kit built over the rocks and go past the wild rosebushes and sumac and cedar scrub.
The Duchess won’t start again today. But Sam keeps pulling on the engine rope until I’m sure he’s flooded it.
“I live in a police state,” he says. “The way you’re always watching me. That should be illegal, Mom. For you to go on my Instagram.”
I’m up in the bow, where I want to remind him not to flood the engine again and that years ago he let me “follow” him on Instagram. But I stop myself from saying anything.
We had another killing frost last night. But the potatoes are all dug now, and the gardens are covered with seaweed. I’m not afraid of the cold. If anything, I’m afraid of Sam, because he isn’t in control of himself anymore now that his father’s gone.
Your dad almost died. This is what I told the boys when I first explained the accident to them. Your father almost died in the boat fire. I told them this because it’s true, and also so that the boys would remember to be nicer to me. I don’t really mean that. I told them so they could understand how serious things were.
I read an article in Kit’s hospital room last week about a painter in Los Angeles named Laura Owens who had a retrospective at the Whitney in New York at the age of forty-seven. My mother always told me the whole world was waiting for me, and in this way I was not one of the girls whose appetite was taken away. But who gets a Whitney retrospective at forty-seven?
The question for me is how to survive on the island with the boys and remain chill. The question blows up almost every day. Candy says you wait it out and the boys come back to you. She says it can take maybe five years. I don’t know if I can wait that long.
Laura Owens kept a journal in her twenties called “How to Be the Greatest Artist in the World,” with a fourteen-point checklist with things like “Think Big” on it. And “Do Not Be Afraid of Anything.” And “Say Very Little.” I’ve decided to try to implement the say-very-little concept as a new communication strategy. My hope is that by withholding, I’ll receive signs that my little boys are in there behind the faces of the impostors.
“Shit.” Sam kicks the black casing of the Evinrude, then kicks the side of the boat.
“Please don’t do that.” My mind is stuck on thinly rolled joint, thinly rolled joint. Joint thinly rolled.
“Don’t do what?” He kicks the side of the boat again and looks at me.
“Swear.” But what I really mean is, Don’
t kick the boat.
Even that’s not true. What I want to say is, Don’t seal yourself off in your pain. And, Don’t smoke joints in cars outside McDonald’s. And, Don’t die. And, Where are you these days? Where are you?
The ocean is a mysterious plum color with engravings like the back of a nickel.
“Please don’t swear and don’t kick the boat.” I try to speak with as little emotion as possible in hopes of neutralizing him. “If you do it again, we’re getting out and no one’s going to school.”
I’m not used to giving orders and am vaguely embarrassed that my strategy until recently has involved being more like their friend. But now that Kit’s gone, it comes down to how to recognize opportunities with the boys and convert.
When Sam and Charlie were younger, they called themselves the smoking police and decreed that Kit couldn’t smoke in the house anymore. It was a blow. He liked to come home from fishing trips and smoke and stare out the window at the trawler. It seemed back then that we might have caught all the fish there were to catch in the Gulf of Maine.
Then the government organized the Maine fleet into something called sectors, which are cooperatives with an allocation system of how much fish you can catch, based on numbers of fish you landed the ten years before 2006. Kit didn’t have great numbers for his landings. The groundfish in the Gulf of Maine had pretty much dried up then, and the Jillian Lynne is only forty-feet long—not big enough to go farther out to sea. The math on his quota punished him, and he had terrible allocation.
He patched it together by shrimping in the winter, but six years ago they shut down the shrimp fishery. Haddock and flounder have started to come back now, and many fishermen say there are more cod. But Kit doesn’t have good quota, and the prices at auction in Portland leave him almost in the negative. Plus it all just keeps consolidating. More regulation and more corporations from away buying up boats and permits. Maine isn’t an industrial fishery. At least not yet. Local people own the fleet. They’re just trying to make a living.