CHRIS HADN’T CROSSED Route 28 close to the Airport Shopping Center. I checked twice. That meant he’d entered Hyannis. I checked again. I vaguely remembered being there as a girl. Maybe it had been just one of our many outings during those summers in Chatham.
That night I called my father.
“Dad?”
“Yes, honey.”
“When we spent the summer in Chatham, were we ever in Hyannis?”
“Yeah, once or twice. But just passing through.”
“What do you mean, passing through?”
“Hyannis is where you can catch the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Don’t you remember when we went to Martha’s Vineyard? It’s the island where they filmed Jaws.”
“That’s right, now I remember . . .” I recollected with a smile. “And apart from remembering it being a pretty island, why does Nantucket seem so familiar to me?”
“Well, probably because I drove you up the wall telling you over and over how Nantucket was a whaling port, and it was there that Ishmael set off on the Pequod under the orders of Captain Ahab.”
Moby-Dick is my father’s favorite book.
“Ah, right. You used to read me bits of that book when I was a girl.”
Nantucket. Whales. Moby Dick. Was Chris Moby Dick, and was I Captain Ahab? How did Moby-Dick end? Who won? Did he catch the whale? Did Captain Ahab end up half-mad after trying to chase down the impossible? I didn’t remember, but my impression was it turned out badly, terribly badly. That was a sign. Let it go, Alice. It’s not legal to hunt whales anymore.
“Hey, Dad. Do you have a copy of Moby-Dick?”
“Of course. A first edition, 1851.”
“What for?”
“To read it.”
“Honey, it’s worth thirty-five thousand dollars. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to handle a thirty-five-thousand-dollar book. I’m leaving it to you in my will. After I’m gone, you can do what you want with it.”
The next day, my father came over with a hardcover copy of Moby-Dick. I was surprised, because he said he was going to buy me the e-book. But he wasn’t much of a fan of digital.
“The feel of the paper will bring you closer to the characters. When you turn the pages, you’ll feel the breeze of the sea as you navigate aboard the ship.”
“Thanks, Dad.” I opened the book and flipped through it. “What did you say it’s about? I don’t mean the plot, but the message.”
“Well . . .” He reflected a few seconds; he didn’t like to talk idly. “It’s about the need to face evil. About creating demons and chasing them to the point of madness, or out of our own madness, basically to keep from examining the ones we have inside us.”
“Got it . . .” I tried to keep him from detecting in my voice the fireball that was blazing in my mind. “But just one thing, Dad. The book ends badly, right?”
“No, honey, it ends the way it has to.”
He gave me a kiss and left. My father never wants to be a bother or interrupt whatever someone is doing. Because he also doesn’t want to be bothered or interrupted in his discreet passage through life. Beyond that, he never asks me how I am, because my mother already takes care of that a thousand times a day. My father reads me; he smells me from a distance. He looks at me and knows, without asking. His love is silent. He’s like that old pilled blanket you bundle up in on the couch at night to watch television. Not because you’re cold, but because it makes you feel cozy, protected, comfortable.
“Where are we going, Mommy?”
Olivia was sitting in her booster seat in the back of the Cherokee, paging through the maps with the routes marked in red marker. I suddenly realized it was a pigsty back there. Empty water bottles, Styrofoam containers from all the places I had stopped to get food—I always ate in the car, like Karl the banker—containers I hadn’t thrown out, because I wanted to recycle them. Paper cups, markers, notebooks, CDs, and traffic tickets. I’d gotten more than one, and every time the cops stopped me, the first thing I thought was I was busted, they were going to arrest me, and I’d end up in jail, charged with a crime against Chris’s privacy.
It was midafternoon. I could have left Olivia with my mother, but I wasn’t ready to start up her questioning machine yet. So I did the only thing that occurred to me, I took her with me.
“What are we doing, Mommy? Where are we going?”
“Put that down, honey.”
“It looks like a treasure map. Are we looking for treasure?”
“Yes, Oli,” I said, taking the map out of her hands.
“What treasure?”
“I don’t know; we won’t know what it is until we find it.”
“Whose treasure is it? Did Daddy leave it for us?”
“Yeah, more or less.”
“Are we going to find pirates?”
“I hope not.”
“Did a pirate kill Daddy?”
Maybe it would have been better to leave her with my mother.
The preceding days had been a blur. On June 5, I found out that Chris had entered (or left) Hyannis by way of Barnstable Road. (Courtesy of the Church of the First Born. Donation: one hundred dollars).
June 6 was a washout.
On June 7, Chris’s mother, Betty, turned sixty-five. My mother had warned me: We can’t skip, honey; we have to maintain a good relationship with them. They love us very much. And we love them, too; of course, that goes without saying. I know it’s going to be a sad day, but it’s important we’re all together, don’t you think?
Olivia got sick during the celebration, due to the heat—to top it off, she was wearing a princess costume—plus the games, food, excitement, ice cream and candy. She ended up vomiting. And naturally, there was a lot of sadness and yearning, because the scene was normal only on the surface. The absence of Chris consumed almost all the available oxygen.
June 8. Chris had crossed Main Street to continue up Ocean Street. (Courtesy of the owner of the Yankee Peddler Pawn Shop. Five hundred dollars and a children’s illustrated edition of Treasure Island acted out by mice, which immediately became Olivia’s favorite book).
June 9. Chris had proceeded down Ocean Street until he reached the port, where the various ferry companies disembarked. (Courtesy of the bartender at the Black Cat Tavern. Four hundred dollars.) And he had turned left on Ocean Street, entering what looked like a parking lot. (Courtesy of the manager of the Hyannis Harbor Hotel. One thousand dollars. I paid that ridiculous sum not because I had the feeling I was getting closer to the end—or to the beginning—and that the information was therefore more valuable, but because I was unusually nervous and incapable of haggling.)
And now it was June 10. I stopped the car right where Chris turned, where I’d lost sight of him. It was the entrance to the parking lot for the ferry terminal. Tachycardia. The pier for the Robin Island Ferry. Robin Island? I’d never heard of it. I had trouble breathing. From the Weweantic River along US 6 to the Robin Island ferry terminal: 37.5 miles. Would the red-marker route end there? My legs shook when I got out of the SUV. “Stay here a second, babe,” I said to Olivia with a trembling voice. “You never let me get out, Mommy; this is stupid; I want to look for treasure, too,” Olivia complained.
I approached a worker who was directing cars onto the ferry.
“Excuse me, does this ferry go to Robin Island?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s why it’s called the Robin Island Ferry. We’re original around here, as you can see,” he answered, without any trace of malice.
“And it only goes to Robin Island?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And can you go elsewhere from the island?”
“You can get to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, but only in the summer months. Anyway, it’d be silly to do that because the ferry terminals for Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are right over there, they go direct, they’re more modern, and they take a lot less time. There’s even an express service. So if you want to go to Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, it’s not worth it to go to Robin Island.”
He looked at my car and at Olivia, who had ended up disobeying me and getting out.
“One vehicle, two people?” he asked.
“Are we going to get on the pirate ship?”
“Olivia, get in the car.”
“Round trip?”
“I want to get on the pirate ship.”
“Forty-five dollars. I’ll only charge you for one, the girl can ride free.”
“We’re going to Treasure Island!”
I was falling out. I was starting to faint. The euphoria I thought I felt at my discovery was just the beginning of an anxiety attack. The fastest way out, I thought, was to pay, and that’s what I did, trying to hide the shaking of my hands.
“Go to lane one,” he said, indicating the spot. Two vehicles were already waiting there.
I got into the car with Olivia and started it up, putting it in reverse. I nearly rammed the car behind me, and they honked. I didn’t apologize and instead pulled away. In the rearview mirror I could see the worker waving his arms as if to say, Hey, lady, where are you going? while Olivia complained bitterly.
“But, Mommy, I want to go to Treasure Island!”
Despite the nausea, I managed to make it home. I didn’t stop. The only reason I didn’t faint and collapse right there was the animal instinct that took over to protect my daughter. My two daughters. I was enraged with myself. Why did you have to do all this? What’s the point? Do you want to ruin your life? But you can’t turn back now, you’re fucked.
We entered the house. Olivia asked me to watch TV, something I didn’t usually let her do. “OK,” I said. I went up to the bedroom and vomited in the bathroom. When a person vomits, no matter how unpleasant it is, there’s always a certain relief afterward. This time, I didn’t feel it. My tangle of emotions had subsided somewhat but still remained. I had Moby Dick within me, fighting for his life, or trying to put an end to mine.
There was a security camera in the sales office of the ferry terminal. I saw it the first time I went in. By now, I’d developed a talent for sniffing them out. It watched over the parking lot and the ferry entrance. Why didn’t I try to get the recordings? The worker had seemed nice, and he clearly liked me. Surely, he would have gone along, and if not, someone who worked in the terminal building would have.
What was going on with me? I had found Chris’s hideout, and all of a sudden I had run away in terror. But besides the fright, there was something more. I was so close that a single false step could startle my prey. I had to proceed with caution. I couldn’t bribe anyone to get the security camera footage because that would alert everyone on the island. I couldn’t come in and pass undetected. Nor could I show the worker a photo of Chris and ask him if he knew him, if he’d ever seen him before. They could even be pals. If Chris took that ferry often, he probably gave the man a friendly greeting. Chris was like that, attentive and kind to everyone. Maybe I was just inventing excuses to keep from solving the mystery/secret/lie. I was terrified. But . . . Fine, what if I show the photo to the worker, and he says, Yeah, Chris went to the island all the time; I remember him perfectly; I never forget a face. From that point on, I’ve shown my hand. It’s not a matter of figuring out if he went to the island or not; it’s about figuring out what he was doing there. The worker could notify the person he was supposed to notify, saying: Hey, we got a pregnant woman asking questions about Chris, watch out. No, I can’t ask, or try to get the security camera footage . . .
That said, maybe Chris didn’t go to the island. Maybe he just left the Escalade parked in the lot. It was public, free, unsupervised, and open twenty-four hours a day.
June 11. The guy who runs the garage had called me several times complaining that he couldn’t keep Chris’s SUV there any longer, and no matter how often I told him he could charge me whatever he saw fit, he kept repeating it wasn’t a matter of money, but of space.
So I went there to look the car over one more time before sending it to the junkyard. While I examined it, the mechanic went on with his litany of complaints.
“Mrs. Williams, you need to understand, the vehicle can’t be repaired, it’s totaled, and I understand your situation, I really do . . .”
At that point, I stopped listening, because I had lowered the driver’s visor—I had already looked there the last time—and under a plastic flap—where I hadn’t looked the last time—I found two keys on a bare ring. One was a car key with a button in the center to control the locks. Ford, it said. The other was small, Master was the brand, for a padlock or a locker. Two keys, one ring. A Ford? Did Chris have, had he ever had, a Ford? Was that key a talisman, a relic he had kept from his first car? He inherited his first car, an old Buick Skylark Gran Sport, where our first sexual encounters took place, from his grandfather. And the other key, the small one? Did he have something locked up at home? Was he a member of a gym, club or some other place that had lockers?
“Besides, with all due respect, Mrs. Williams, I don’t think it’s good for you . . .”
I cut him off.
“Get rid of it.”
Before I went back home, I went by Chris’s parents’ place to pay them a visit. On the front porch, I edged over toward the garage and pushed the button on the key fob, hoping one of the cars would react. Nothing.
After having coffee with Christopher and Betty, and worrying—genuinely—about how they were, I went up to Chris’s room, which had been left as it was since he was a teenager, with posters of his tennis idols (Agassi, Sampras, McEnroe and Chang), his musical idols (Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC), and his movie idols (Bruce Willis in Die Hard). The shelves were packed with tennis trophies, and on the corkboard there were photos of him with his classmates from high school and with me at the prom. Now it had become a mausoleum in memoriam. When I shut myself up in there, his parents took it to mean I needed a little time alone with Chris. Maybe it was true. I couldn’t help crying as I looked over his things, but I found no clue to the Ford or the other key.
When I got back home, I scoured every corner of the house trying to find a lock that fit the little key that I had already started calling the Master Key. Later, I went to bed exhausted and fell asleep with the two keys in my hand, trying to fit together the pieces of the puzzle. I woke up at six thirty the next morning with an overwhelming urge to piss and a new resolve to return to the ferry terminal.
June 12. When I arrived at the ferry terminal, there were seven vehicles in the lot, two of them Fords. A Taurus and a Ford Ranger pickup truck. First I tried the Taurus. It didn’t open. I discreetly approached the truck, pretending to talk on my cell, convinced that my intuition had failed me. The truck was gray, a color Chris detested, and at least fifteen years old. It was also filthy. Chris was meticulous about his cars and how they were maintained. No, it couldn’t be.
But it was. Again, I felt the urge to run off. I didn’t get into the truck right away. I glanced around first to make sure no one saw me, even though I was in the rear part of the terminal, the most discreet and least trafficked area.
The truck was practically empty. A few rags, a bottle of water, an empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup, and a kid’s Ninja Turtles backpack, very old and worn out. Also empty. I had the feeling it had been Chris’s; I even thought I might have seen it somewhere in the attic at home.
I got behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. The engine hesitated, then started up. The tank was almost full. I opened the glove compartment. The registration and insurance were inside, in his name. He had bought it, and paid in cash, at MBM Auto Sales, a secondhand car dealership in Hyannis. Almost three years ago. Three years? My Lord . . .
I don’t know how long I was there, still, with the motor running, absorbed in my thoughts, until I noticed three small rectangular stickers, different colored, stuck to the windshield. I got out to take a closer look. They were passes for the Robin Island Ferry, for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015.
I thought that if the key to the truck Chris took to the island for more than two years was on the same ring as the Master Key, then whatever it opened had to be there, on Robin Island.