PIRATES

When the January catch is slim in the Gulf of Maine and my father can’t pay for even the fuel for the Karma, rumble begins about taking the boat down to Chincoteague. Maybe in the spring, he and some other fishermen begin to say. When shrimping’s done, maybe it’s time to go to Chincoteague. Virginia’s a distance from New Hampshire, but there he can fish—groundfishing, for monkfish that have teeth like a shark.

It’s just my father and me in our family. My mother has never lived with us, though I have a memory of living with her and my grandmother in a room with long windows in Lowell, Massachusetts.

This spring, if my father goes to Chincoteague, I know he will not take a sixteen-year-old, me, his only daughter. But we’re a team. I hold bear-tight to winter.

As the cold encases our small house, among all the row houses by the river, I’m aware of the glitter on snow lit by the moon. I let my eyes follow up and search for the rabbit in the moon’s lines and bumps. My father says no other fishermen do this, just us. Rabbit running. Rabbit stirring a pot with a long spoon. Rabbit with one ear up, one ear down. I’m usually aware of the moon like I’m usually aware of how much the birch trees bend, a way that I can judge the velocity of the wind. That’s how I know if my father will go fishing, if the boat can handle in the sea. That’s how I can predict his return.

No moon shines this January night. It starts to snow at dinnertime.

My father is on the phone while I chop a white onion and drop the bits to spit in hot oil.

Pilot thumps her tail on the wood floor like a drum, ever hopeful for scraps when I cook. My father holds the phone to his ear over the bandana he ties around his forehead and his shaggy hair. Whoever he called must not have answered.

“Sleep in,” he says into the phone. “We’ll wait out the storm.”

I stir milk into the sizzling onion and chunks of fish and simmer our chowder. I’m suddenly aware that my finger is bare, no ring spins around. My tiger’s eye. Somewhere, it slipped off. Your only good taste in fashion, my friend Rosa teases me about my ring, and it’s from my dad.

We’re not too big on fashion here. Dad says if I come at him sideways he’d miss me anyway. Boots, jeans tucked in. Year round. Keeps you ready. The ones at the Goodwill have creases and life. The rest of me is still unplanned. Rosa says I’m trending, though, a kind of fisherman–co-op–rat look. Snarled sweaters. Stocking caps over thick, wound-around hair.

Noticing my hand, though, I miss my ring something awful. I don’t like me bare.

- - -

Snow falls faster. Hard snow. The outdoor spotlight shines on my father’s tower of lobster traps. In twenty minutes the traps disappear under snow. Snow flies into the window glass, fast, heavy, and silent.

My father still wears his rubber knee-high boots, his plaid shirt—the cuffs rolled, showing the veins and muscles in his arms. I pull two bowls off the shelf and dig the ladle from among the spoons, beaters, scrapers in the drawer.

“Was that the new deckhand?”

My father had mentioned somebody who’d been crewing with him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Good crew.”

I scoop steaming chowder into our bowls. My father lowers his body into the chair. Curls of pale hair hang down from beneath his bandana and graze his long neck. I adore his face, pocked with scars from snapped lines and hard work on the sea.

My mother has black hair that her mother tied in a scarf when they lived in Cambodia. My eyes are my mother’s. We have identical dark eyes, almost black. If people should see us, no one would miss that we’re mother and child.

My father and I settle into the chowder. We eat with big spoons and break off hunks of biscuit to dunk in. He says, “I leave you on your own too much, Sofie.”

I scowl. “’Cause of the gin! Dad, I should have made you ground me, right then.”

Rosa and I got into his gin. She’s into classic country, and she was playing a song Emmylou Harris sings, and I twirled while she played. Rosa said we looked so silly-drunk, no story would save us. But when my father walked in the door, he said, “Where’s the supper?” That’s all he said.

“What about the gin?” he asks while we’re trying to eat chowder. “Jesus.” He does not want to think about gin or teenaged girls. He is in over his head with fatherhood. Forgetting to set curfews. Not a clue. I should have said, Dad, I’m grounded until I tell you when.

My father turns the problem of boys into our standing joke. He often tells me, “You can always come home. No matter what.” This is delivered in the open doorway, his long arms stretched wide, hands above the doorframe, to me as I head out the door to the grocery store, to school, to Rosa’s. I glance back, deadpan, at his laughing eyes. Shake my head. He is my world. We know. We don’t talk about these things. Boys. Girls with boys.

But usually we’re golden. We deal with school—the rolling routines, deadlines we can predict. My teachers ask about him. The last of the fishermen, my teacher Mr. Murray calls him. I wonder what they see when they see a slow-talking, slow-walking man with the sureness of the sea who is raising a daughter alone.

Again, I imagine my mother. Her black hair is knotted together like my grandmother’s as they lean in to eat their supper, which includes basmati rice and some kind of fish sauce. I remember the sweet rice and sharp smells of coriander, garlic, and lime. My mother is gauzy to me. She floats like a ghost. My father tells stories in which she’s the heartbreak, dark-haired and lovely. To me she is as unreliable as the wind. I grew up and became a tall Scottish girl—my father’s side—who chanced to have Cambodian eyes. Does my father see my mother when he looks at me?

I cock my head at my father and tie a kitchen towel around my forehead like his bandana. Two pirates. I tease and smirk and let my long hair sway. I go back to the language my father and I talk.

“I’m not alone,” I say. “Pilot and I have our own beach. I know the river as well as the seals, where the good sunning rocks are at low tide.” I start off trying to tease about the river, his and mine. We love it the same. “How the river narrows—how it gets a funnel like a snake in the middle—and rips back out to the ocean.” But his lips are taut. His face won’t soften. I end, unsure, “Who’s alone?”

My father works his forehead with his wide, calloused hand. “I want to do right by you, Sofie.” He turns his blue eyes on me.

“You always do right.” I hear my own voice, too urgent.

“I try to act on my instincts, not knowing how things are going to come out. Sometimes it’s against any common sense. Sometimes it doesn’t seem right.”

I can see it in the curve of his lips when the wolf comes knocking. Sometimes he sings me lines from his favorite Springsteen songs for the worry. But now he’s not singing, and the worry’s too heavy to fix. I gather the spoons and bowls.

“Got homework,” I sing.

“Sit down,” my father says.

“What?” I say.

“After shrimping, I’m going down to Chincoteague . . .”

Not maybe.

“When I go,” he finishes, “your mother’s going to stay here a while.”

My head whips around toward him as if something had slammed against my cheekbone, and my father gets his look of tragic amusement. This look, like a shield, always comes when he mentions my mother and me. He takes the bowls to the sink. Then he fishes his glasses from his shirt pocket and sits on the couch with the newspaper. But he keeps saying words.

“I can’t leave you alone here.”

“Coming here! My mother?”

“You might see something of your grandmother, too.”

A flash of my grandmother’s angry bird eyes and bent, yellow fingers that scared me. The smell of turmeric. My father folds the newspaper back against itself. Pilot sits on her haunches, tense with the drama.

I am frozen.

I pull off the pirate towel.

“Sofie . . .” he begins. “What I’m saying is, she could use a place, and I have to go south where I can catch some fish. Fishermen got the wolf at the door.”

I knew it was about the wolf.

I swing open the back door. I stand by my father’s orange oils that hang on the doorframe. The pants drip and make a puddle on the linoleum. I step through the piles of yellow traps, the rusted iron pots on the back steps, the transmission parts, past the blue skiff propped against the brick chimney.

Tears stream down my face, and I taste salt and onion. Pilot licks my salted fingers. When the ache from the cold is too much I come back inside to the woodstove. My father glances over his tan-framed Walmart glasses. “It’s something we got to think about. A girl needs to know her mother.”

I shout, “Stop!” I just need him to stop talking. It is completely offensive, my shouting, since my father is steady like a boat in calm waters. And he loves me. My mother gave me away. I am accustomed to aching for her and hating her. I never ever want to see her again after what she did to my father and me.