LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
“Buy you a coffee?” said Eliza.
Russell glanced up at her, then back down, and concentrated on the knot he was using to tie the skiff to the float at the end of the wharf. A cleat hitch. Russell said, “I don’t drink coffee in the afternoon, keeps me up past my bedtime. You know that.”
“I’m not even a lobsterman and I can’t drink coffee past noon.”
“You make a hell of a sternman, though.”
“Don’t even,” said Eliza. She looked at the sky, which was cerulean, with scattered puffs of clouds. Eliza didn’t know which kinds of clouds they were, but she bet Zoe, the budding scientist, would know. “A beer, then?”
He laughed kindly. “You sure that’s a good idea, Eliza?”
The vomiting, the scrub grass, the ride of shame home in Russell’s pickup. She said, “I’m sorry, about all of that. I’m really sorry. What a rookie move.”
He straightened and said, “That’s all right. I’ve seen people drink too much before. I’ve seen you drink too much before.” He had: summer before senior year, the night they camped out on Turtle Island, and other times besides. Russell gave her the full force of his smile. Other fishermen were standing around in little knots or heading back to their trucks. A couple of them glanced over at Eliza and waved: Elton Cobb, Merton Young. She no longer felt like a stranger out here; she was turning back into a daughter. She was going native.
She tried not to remember how Russell’s hand had felt holding hers under the table at The Wheelhouse the other night.
She thought of what she’d said to Rob: You draw pictures of things for other people to make with their hands. What a mean-spirited thing to say. She’d had to call back four times before he’d talk to her, before he’d accept her apology. And even though he had, it was still, and would be forever, a thing she’d said: she couldn’t unsay it.
“I’ll behave myself,” she promised. “You have a beer, and I’ll have a decaf. We’ll go to The Cup, since they have both.”
The day before, when Eliza and Mary had returned to Mary’s car, Eliza had used her AAA account to call for service, and after fifty-five minutes a tow truck from a garage in Gouldsboro had come out and jumped the battery. Mary’s car had started right up. Now the only acknowledgment between them was a quick, shy smile on Mary’s part and a (she hoped) cryptic answering nod from Eliza.
After they had their drinks, Eliza sat down, and then Russell sat down, and then the Thing They Would Never Talk About pulled out a chair and sat at the table too. Invited or not, it was there. Fine, thought Eliza. She’d waffled on the decaf and then ordered a Sauvignon Blanc, liquid courage with a side of flowery peach, and she took a minute to feel the effects of the inappropriately large sip she started with. Then she thought, Let’s do this.
“You know when I said the other night that I don’t think about it?”
Russell nodded. She loved that she didn’t have to explain herself more than that.
“That’s not true,” she said. “I do think about it.” She took another giant sip to try to tamp out the burning feeling in her heart.
Russell waited, his gaze on hers.
I don’t have a nineteen-year-old kid, if that tells you anything, she’d said to Mary.
“I think about it. I’ve never stopped thinking about it. When Zoe was born, I thought about it constantly. When she was born early I thought it was punishment for what I did back then.”
“Eliza—”
“No, wait, let me finish. I thought I deserved it. She was so tiny. So fragile and vulnerable! Like a shedder.”
Russell smiled.
“Those first few days of her life all I could think was, ‘If there’s something wrong with this baby it’s all my fault.’ ”
Russell’s hand, on the table, twitched—it looked almost like he wanted to cover hers with his own. She put her hands in her lap, because she was afraid they might want that too. She went on: “That’s one reason I dropped out of med school, I think it was sort of a penance. Like I didn’t deserve it all, like I had to pay the price.” She lowered her gaze back to the table and asked, “Do you? Think about it?”
Russell took a long sip of his beer and didn’t answer.
“I didn’t, for a while,” he said. “I got over it, and I met Beatrice.”
“Beatrice Prince,” said Eliza. She added softly, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Russell ignored that. He was much classier than Eliza was, all things considered. He said, “But she didn’t want to have kids, and that’s what really killed me. Because you know I did want that, Eliza. I always wanted that. A family.”
She felt like someone had taken a pair of pliers to part of her heart and twisted. “Do you wish—do you wish we had done things differently?”
“Yeah,” he said. No hesitation.
“Really?”
“Of course I do, Eliza, you knew that back then, you knew that’s how I wanted to do it, keep the baby, get married.”
Eliza tried on the next words for size. “Do you think we made a mistake?”
“Yeah.” He took a long pull of his beer and set the bottle down, tracing the bottle with his fingers. “I always thought it was a mistake. But you didn’t ask me. You just went.”
“You knew I was going. I told you.”
“You told me. You didn’t ask me.”
“You knew, and you let me go off alone. Why’d you let me go off like that, to Bangor? Without you? Why’d you let me go at all?” The inside of Val’s Civic, the antiseptic smell of the room, the kind face of the doctor leaning over her, Val brushing her hair out of her eyes after it was all over.
“I was mad,” Russell said. “I was so mad at you, Eliza.” He twisted his hands together and stretched them in front of him, cracking his knuckles.
Eliza thought of all kinds of things then. She thought of the day she and Rob brought Zoe home from the hospital, and how they set her car seat in the center of the dining room table and stared at her, awed by her perfect little features, cowed by the responsibility now pressing down on their shoulders. She thought of Evie’s first day of kindergarten and how she wore ribbons on the end of her braids. She thought of the way Judith had said, “Who gets married in the winter?” when she and Rob had planned a December wedding. But it had been gorgeous, the bridesmaids had fur muffs, the ballroom of the Ritz was decorated like an ice castle, and the Christmas decorations were up in the Public Garden.
“But even after—you never once tried to get me to stay, not once that whole time, not ever. You never tried to get me to come back.”
Her first two months at Brown, Eliza felt like a gorilla in a land of gazelles. Everyone around her was so assured in the world, so confident. Eliza reread her mother’s letter a dozen times a week, wearing the paper down so that it felt like suede.
Russell’s hands were steady around his beer bottle now. “You think you would have been happy here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes roamed the café, caught on the menu board. “Yes. Maybe.”
Russell snorted. “It’s not that I let you go or made you go or anything else. You went. You did what you needed to do. You never thought you belonged here. You wouldn’t have been happy.”
“I might have been,” she said. “My mother was happy here. My mother was the happiest person I’ve ever known.”
Russell nodded and said, “Okay, Eliza. Okay.”
“Russell,” she said, thinking of what she’d heard from Val, about Beatrice Prince taking Russell’s money, thinking of the almost-broken reverse gear.
“What?” His voice cracked a little bit.
“Do you need money?”
The corner of his eye twitched. “Do I what?”
“Do you need money? Because—” She lowered her voice, like she was offering him drugs or human organs. “I can help you out, if you need help.”
“Are you goddamn kidding me?”
She felt the same shame she’d felt at The Wheelhouse, trying to refuse the sternman pay. She whispered, “No.”
“I don’t need charity from you, Eliza.”
“I didn’t say charity.”
“You said money.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Yes it is.”
“Of course it’s not. It’s a friend helping out a friend.”
“Why is it—”
“What?”
“I mean, how’d you turn from what you were into—” He paused.
“Into what?”
“Into a person who thinks money fixes everything?”
Were they really doing this? They were. Fine. “It fixes a lot, Russell.”
He stood and put his beer bottle on the table, hard, so she jumped.
“Bullshit.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Russell. Of course it does.” She felt her voice growing sharp. “Of course money fixes things. That’s the point of fucking money. To make things easier. And better. It’s not noble to pretend it doesn’t. It’s just stupid.”
“Well, then, I guess I’m stupid. That’s what you think really, isn’t it?”
“That’s not what I meant. You know it’s not.”
“Didn’t go to college, I guess you think I can’t understand the basics. I’ve been running my own boat for years now, Eliza. Years.”
“I know you have. I’m sorry, Russell, of course you have. I just thought—”
“Thanks for the beer, Eliza. I’m going to get going now. I have an early day tomorrow.”
“Just like that?” she said. Her throat was burning. She still had half a glass of wine left.
“Just like that.”
Eliza sipped the wine slowly, giving Russell time to leave. Then she left a ten-dollar tip on the table for Mary because money did help, of course it fucking helped, and walked slowly back toward her father’s house. At the last second she changed course and veered back to the wharf. There were a few guys milling around, a couple of trucks left, but nobody paid her any mind.
She sat down and breathed in as deeply as she could: it was the complicated, briny, utterly alive smell that meant she was home. Something inside her loosened and she began to cry, for her mother, for her father, who couldn’t drive, couldn’t haul traps, couldn’t see right. For the little baby who had never been born, who would never row a skiff from the dock to a mooring, would never giggle when he touched a piece of bait for the first time.
She wiped savagely at her face and thought, What if this is where I was supposed to be all along?
Lesson Number Four: When you’re choosing a cantaloupe, go by smell, not by feel. A ripe cantaloupe smells like a cantaloupe. An unripe cantaloupe smells like nothing at all. If you’re planting tomatoes mix a little limestone into the soil. And there’s so much more I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you about love and sex and how to shape your eyebrows and how to learn to drink coffee and choose a lipstick and what to do when you make a mistake and how to cook chicken cutlets the way your father likes them and not to be scared of childbirth and dozens, maybe hundreds, of things like that, but the truth is I’m running out of time
Her mother had died before she finished the letter. No more lessons. Not even a period at the end of the last sentence. That was the ending: no ending at all.
Her phone buzzed, giving her a start. A text from Evie.
I GOT THE PART! I GOT IT. FERN, IN CHARLOTTE’S WEB.