From Away Page 10

  Which, of course, she wasn’t.

  “Are you all right?” Kathleen’s eyes were wide and full of concern. It made her look younger and softer, and I wondered what had happened to her to make it take a drowning man to bring this out in her.

  The little girl crouched down and looked at me, her head cocked to one side. “I’m Jellica,” she said. “Play with me?”

  Then I passed out.

  EIGHT

  I wasn’t sure if it was me or the blanket wrapped around me that was stinking up the cab as Kathleen drove me home in her Ford truck. Probably both; the bait barrel had tipped over in the swell, so everything on the boat had been given a pretty healthy stench.

  Once it was clear that I wasn’t going to be dead any time soon, the soft, feminine side of Kathleen vanished, and she was back to her taciturn self. I don’t think I’d impressed her much as a sternman.

  She pulled the truck up in front of the house, and I saw you running through the grass, yelling to your mother, who sat on the porch wearing three sweaters and reading a Douglas Adams book. You kept saying you’d found a snake.

  “Snakes go to sleep in the winter,” Charlotte told you. She glanced at me as I climbed, soaking and freezing, out of the truck with an angry woman she’d never met before. It was disturbing how unsurprised Charlotte looked. “How was your day?” she asked.

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” I said, trudging into the house.

  Kathleen handed my sopping raincoat to Charlotte. “Your brother doesn’t function too well on his own, does he?”

  “Not really,” Charlotte said.

  She asked Kathleen in for coffee, and I was a little surprised when she agreed. So, we sat warming our hands on the stoneware mugs while Charlotte went to get me some dry clothes.

  “You’re not really a lobsterman, are you?” Kathleen asked me.

  “Not technically, no.” My Down Easter accent was long gone.

  “Why did Neil tell me all that?”

  “I needed the job,” I said, and it was only partly a lie.

  “Well, I lost a half day’s work and a trap. Not really what I look for in a sternman.” She pulled a Velcro wallet out of her coat, peeled off some bills and laid them on the table. “We’ll call it even.”

  She set the mug down and started to walk out. I knew I had to say something to salvage the situation. Or make it much worse.

  “Who’s Jellica?” I asked.

  She turned to me, sharply. “What?” As I said, I make it a rule never to talk about it with anyone when I see a spook; this is a good example of why. She was as angry as I’ve ever seen anyone.

  I tried to backpedal. “Didn’t you say that? When you pulled me out of the water? Something about Jericho, or Jello, or something?”

  I don’t know if she believed me (looking back, I guess she had no choice), but the anger cooled to resentment, she said a simple “No,” and walked out. I went to look through the window over the sink. She was standing on the lawn talking to you. You had found a snake somehow, even in winter. A little green garden snake, which you were displaying to Kathleen proudly. Kathleen didn’t flinch; I knew she wouldn’t. She petted it and said it was a pretty snake and that you should let it go back home.

  Charlotte came in with fresh clothes as I watched Kathleen’s truck drive up the hill.

  “I think she likes me,” I said.

  Winter came to the island the night after my debacle on Kathleen’s boat. The temperature dropped like a brick, without wind or rain, without even clouds in the sky, so the next morning looked bright and clear and shining. Apparently, the whole town had been waiting for the freeze. Neil called at six in the morning (sleeping-in time for a fisherman), and the eagerness in his voice made him sound like a kid on his birthday.

  “You coming down to the Mill Race?”

  I’d stubbed my toe half a dozen times on the way to the phone so my eagerness, to say the least, did not match his. “Why?”

  “It’s frozen over.”

  The Mill Race was a large pond behind Main Street. It was frozen over. I’d seen ice before. “So?” I asked.

  “Ice boats, Sammy. We’re ice sailing.”

  By noon the whole town was on the sloping hill above the Mill Race, bundled in heavy coats and blankets, smiling and laughing as if it were the first day of spring.

  The Race was scattered with a jaunty armada of ice boats, elegantly handmade from spare parts, daubed with bright colors, adorned with rigging and sails cannibalized from summer boats. On blades made from sharpened bed-frames, they etched the ice at breakneck speed, skittering across the frozen pond.

  Children ran along the frosted shore trying to keep up with racing waterbug boats, while old men placed bets on who was the fastest and teenagers on ice skates sped around the racing craft with daredevil cunning and their parents screamed for them to get the hell out of the way.

  Ice boating was an old tradition on the island, recently revived by Neil and his cronies. They’d seen some photos from the turn of the last century in the museum Mrs. Day ran in the barn behind her house, and during the idle months of a freezing winter four years ago they had decided to see if they could build such contraptions on their own. The Fox Island Ice Boat Armada had been born and had since become a winter institution.

  Neil’s boat was the most beautiful. Made of blond wood, its four blades painted with red enamel, it was a sleek bullet of a boat. He rode it stretched out on his belly on the narrow cab, rudder under his arm, the crossbars spreading away from him like wings or the arms of Jesus on the cross. His sister, Dora, had embroidered a golden sun on the sail that billowed above him, so that the boat looked like the bastard child of a drag racer and a Viking galley. He saw us and skidded it to a stop, then leapt to his feet and skated across the ice to where you and your mother were waving and laughing.

  I’d never seen Neil look more handsome or more full of life. His husky body seemed as graceful as a gymnast’s as the ice sprayed from his skates. A movie star smile spread across his face. He scooped you up in his arms, and you laughed gleefully as he slipped you under his arm like a football and skated back to his boat, you screaming and giggling the whole way.

  I scanned the crowd every few seconds, expecting to see Kathleen in the mob, planning things to say to her that would make up for the disaster of the previous day. No sign of her. A weathered fisherman’s wife next to the bonfire was chuckling and pointing at Maggie.

  “Wicked cute, isn’t she? Gonna break a lot of hearts, that one.”

  “That’s an odd compliment, isn’t it?” This from a man stretched on his belly on the frigid grass—a strange-looking fellow with long, yellow-white hair and prominent cheekbones, whose broad smile somehow gave a handsome, swashbuckling cast to his skull-like face. He spoke with a faint Eastern European lilt. “‘When you grow up, you’re going to hurt men.’ Is that the best you can wish for her?”

  I laughed at this, but the fisherman’s wife edged away. I remembered the man. Joe something. A Hungarian or Czech or something. An artist. There were quite a few of them on the island, or used to be. Back in the days when real estate prices were low, this place had been a haven for starving artists and poor college professors. Now that the prices had gone up, more and more doctors from Connecticut were moving in. There went the neighborhood.

  I had encountered this man once before, while I was kayaking in one of the coves over on Brown’s Head Island. He’d been stretched out in the bottom of a canoe, smoking a joint and looking like Klaus Kinski gone to seed, if such a thing were possible.

  At first I’d been a little irritated to see him—to see anyone at all in the lonely place. Brown’s Head Island was almost unpopulated except for a few dozen inbred Mainers on the west side who kept aggressively to themselves. Solitude was what I’d been searching for after one of those inconclusive fights with my mother about why I didn’t want to go to graduate school. She refused to see how a person could be worthwhile without a series of initials
after his name. I maintained that all that was superficial intellectual tripe and that there were a million other things I wanted to do with my life than sit in a classroom for another four or six or eight years. Not that I could come up with any examples, but fortunately I stormed out before it came to that.

  So, all I wanted to do was be alone and float in my boat and watch for seals and ospreys. I’d even heard bald eagles had started to roost here. Wouldn’t it be a thrill to see one of those? I sure wasn’t in the mood to share my cove with this obviously decadent left-wing pinko-type. (Not that I was conservative, but when you’re rebelling against liberal parents you’re forced to take some strange positions.)

  I heard the oddly small peeping cry of an osprey and searched the sky. There, hovering over the water. I could watch them for hours, gliding through the air. Waiting, waiting. Then, down it plummeted, striking the water with a silver splash not far from me, seizing a wriggling fish in its talons and zooming off. Glorious.

  “Hey, you got a match?” The idyllic mood was shattered. I glanced over to Joe’s canoe and saw him sitting up and patting his shirt. “Fucking, whaddayacallit, ember fell off my joint. You got a match?”

  I tried shaking my head, but we were a little too far apart for him to see, so I yelled, breaking the mood even further. “I don’t smoke.”

  “Well, shit.” He shifted around in his canoe, looking at the water. “I dropped my lighter. You don’t see it, do you?”

  I decided to paddle over so we wouldn’t have to keep yelling. It didn’t seem right for this crystal paradise to be echoing news of drug paraphernalia. “Do lighters float?” I asked when I got closer to him.

  He shrugged, rocking his boat back and forth. “Fuck it,” he said, slipping the remnants of his joint into an empty plastic film canister and putting it in his shirt pocket. “You’re Gordon Kehoe’s son, right? From the Thorofare house?”

  Father and house. That was how one was identified on the island. “Yep,” I said.

  “I’m Joe Kelan.” He extended a hand. I reached over the water and shook hands, each of our boats tipping unstably.

  He didn’t say anything else, so we sat in uneasy silence for a moment until I opened my mouth to tell him I was heading off. He lifted a finger to his lips and pointed at the skyline.

  There on the top of a tall pine sat a mature male bald eagle. What a sight. It took my breath away. Like the first time I saw the Northern Lights. There are things that you see represented so often, in pictures and posters, on coins and stamps, that when you see them in real life you have to keep reminding yourself that what you’re seeing is real. That this glorious beast, huge and regal, a bear with feathers, was actually up there, occupying the same air I was breathing.

  We watched in silence, Joe and I, for I don’t know how many minutes. Didn’t even bother to look away when an osprey splashed down and caught another fish in the middle of the cove. The eagle mesmerized us.

  All at once, like a dragon from a children’s book, the eagle spread its huge wings. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink. Effortlessly, it lifted off, riding the wet air. Its grandeur brought tears to my eyes.

  It headed straight for the osprey. I frowned slightly, not understanding. The eagle dive-bombed the smaller bird, who screamed out in protest, twirling away, doing evasive maneuvers. The eagle circled back, diving again, not striking the osprey, just strafing it, scaring it. Again the osprey evaded. Again the eagle attacked. Finally, as the osprey screamed in protest, the glistening fish dropped from its talons and smacked the surface of the water. In an instant, the bald eagle was down, snatching it up, flying off, grand as ever.

  I was appalled. The bald eagle had mugged the osprey. Stolen his fish. I felt ashamed for my whole country.

  “That’s terrible,” I said, involuntarily.

  “Why?” Joe said. “The fish is just as dead either way.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about the fish. What about the poor osprey? He did all the work.”

  “Let that be a lesson to him,” Joe said, lying back in his canoe and pulling his cap over his eyes for a nap.

  Now, here he was again, a few years older and even more dissolute. I smiled and Joe nodded back, but I don’t think he recognized me. Charlotte was with me now, laughing and directing my attention to Neil’s ice boat. You stood up, arms spread in your best Titanic pose, while Neil lined the boat up with others for the race.

  “I think you’ve got a rival for Maggie’s affection,” Charlotte said, watching Neil.

  “I don’t think she’s the one he’s after.”

  I meant it as a joke, but somehow it took the smile right off your mother’s face. “You think he’s trying to get to me?”

  “Don’t be a cynic, Charlie. He likes Maggie. He also likes you.”

  She withdrew into herself. “Yeah. He likes everybody, I guess.”

  I never could recall the moment your mother stopped believing people could like her without wanting something from her. It was the curse of being beautiful too young, I suppose. Of hearing compliments too often, assuming they were honest, then learning they were tactics.

  I directed Charlotte’s attention back to the race. The ice boats were ready to go. There was no consistency to their design—some had three and some had four blades; some were made of wood, some of fiberglass or metal; some wide, most teardrop thin; some elegant, some awkward, all beautiful. They lined up in soapbox derby formation, and old Byron from the fire department fired a flare gun to set them off. Maggie’s piercing yelps almost drowned out the roar of the crowd as the sails billowed and Neil’s boat flew into the lead.

  Halfway across the pond, the wind died and the boats drifted to a standstill. The men got out and pushed. Teenagers pelted them with snowballs. The whole thing degenerated into a free-for-all that was more fun than the race ever would have been.

  After it was over, all of us soaked through with sweat and slush so that we were shivering like mountain climbers after a hard ascent, Neil invited us to a friend’s house for “beer,” a word that encompassed all socializing on the island.

  It was something like a college kegger—wall-to-wall people smelling of steamed wool and Budweiser. Somebody dug up some sparklers from last Fourth of July, and you ran across the dark lawn with half a dozen other urchins, trailing sparks like comets.

  I kept darting to my tiptoes to see over heads. To spot Kathleen if she should walk in. It seemed like everyone on the island was there but her. Was she holed up in her room, watching Ally McBeal? A sad life. Couldn’t I make it better?

  “Oh, God! Did I burn you with my cigarette?” a woman asked. There were sparks on my pants leg. A very young, very thin woman was standing next to me, waving a cigarette and apologizing profusely. “God, I’m sooo sorry, I don’t even know how to smoke these things, I should never have started.” She dropped the half-finished smoke into a Pete’s Wicked Ale bottle on the arm of the sofa.

  “It’s okay,” I said. Smiling. Friendly.

  Joe Kelan was next to her now, arm around her waist in that proprietary gesture all males recognize; this is mine, keep away. “She almost burned you, why is that okay?”

  I looked around for help just in time to see somebody pick up the ale bottle, bring it to his lips and blend into the crowd.

  “Because she didn’t,” I said.

  Joe laughed like this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard and pulled me out onto the porch, where it was too cold but at least you had room to breathe. “You’re Gordon Kehoe’s son, right? The Thorofare house?”

  I nodded.

  “I was sorry to hear about that. I liked him.”

  I nodded. So did I.

  It turned out this was Joe’s house, but he didn’t tell me who his father was. The girl who didn’t know how to smoke was named Shara, and she was from Denver and was staying with Joe for a while. With all important information conveyed, we stood in silence, watching you children run and play. Neil and Charlotte were sitting on the step below us,
not arm in arm, but close to each other, very close.

  We didn’t talk. Just sipped beer. That’s how friendships are formed on the island. The rest of the country could take a lesson.

  The girl in front of you stumbled and fell and you tripped over her and the boy behind you tripped over you and it turned into a sparkler-lit, ten-kid pileup. Charlotte and a couple of other parents ran to help, but it didn’t look like anyone was seriously hurt, so I hung back. Joe had his hand all the way around Shara’s waist now and was diddling her tattooed belly button with his middle finger, so I moved down to sit on the stoop with Neil and give them some semi-privacy. “How’s it going?” I asked Neil.

  “How’s what going?” Neil asked, defensively. “Nothing’s going. What do you mean?”

  I smiled. “Nothing, nothing at all.”

  It was a perfect night. Or would have been if Kathleen had walked up.

  “You haven’t seen Kathleen, have you?” I asked, nervous.

  “She here?”

  “Is she?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen her,” I said.

  “Neither have I.”

  “I mean,” I said, “you haven’t seen her since I went out on the boat with her?”

  “Just to say hello.”

  “She didn’t…she didn’t say anything about me, did she?”

  “Can’t say she did, ’cause she didn’t.”

  “I kinda fucked that up.”

  “I kinda gathered,” Neil said.

  “I don’t mean just falling off the boat.”

  “That wasn’t enough?”

  “It think I scared her, Neil. I think she thinks I’m crazy.”

  “Well, she’s not a stupid woman.”

  I laughed. But only a little. “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”

  “Do you think you’re crazy?”

  “Sometimes I wonder.”

  “You could go see Dr. Hopley. He’ll give you some of that Prozac shit.” There was only one doctor on the island, and he was a firm believer in Prozac. Half the island was on Prozac. It was a very relaxed place.