The Captain's Daughter Read online

  Eliza stood motionless, holding the phone. She wasn’t sure what to do next, call the children over to her, or go back to her bag, to start getting her things organized, or call Rob, who she knew was in the middle of a meeting with his client, the indomitable Mrs. Cabot.

  Eliza was for a moment quite paralyzed. Fresh Bloody Marys had arrived at the table, and Deirdre brought one to Eliza, first putting it into her hand, and then closing Eliza’s fingers around the plastic cup. “You look like you saw a ghost,” said Deirdre.

  “I did, sort of,” whispered Eliza. “Thank you, Deirdre.” Her father, who never needed anyone, needed her. Russell Perkins, who never called her, had called her. If she left in an hour she’d be in Little Harbor before sunset. Cue the Springsteen. There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away. Eliza tipped the cup back; she downed the whole drink in three gulps.

  2

  LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE

  Eliza

  Zoe had called Eliza twice when she was going through New Hampshire, where cell phone use while driving was not allowed. Then Zoe had texted her twice but Eliza had been disciplined and had not looked at her phone, thinking of a very effective campaign she’d recently seen in the supermarket that featured a driving texter failing to see two elderly people crossing the road.

  The third time Zoe called Eliza was passing through Ellsworth. Three teens from Ellsworth had died on this road when Eliza was in high school—for the longest time there had been three wooden crosses there, adorned with flowers, teddy bears, bright strings of beads. Now Eliza slowed significantly on the curves, centering her car—Rob’s car; she’d left hers behind for kid-related reasons—exactly between the yellow lines and the edge of the road.

  Once she had passed the danger zone outside of Ellsworth she called Zoe back. She listened to her for a while and then said, “Oh, sweetie.”

  Jackie Rackley had started doing extremely enviable things with certain friends and posting the photos on Instagram and then tagging other girls who weren’t included. Just to hit them over the head with their un-includedness. (Zoe had had to explain this to Eliza twice.)

  “All this happened in the last four hours? I’m perplexed. We were just with Jackie this afternoon.” Maybe, thought Eliza, most friendships had an element of treachery to them—grown-ups were just better at hiding it.

  “No,” said Zoe. “The pictures were taken at different times. She’s just posting them now.”

  “It’s okay to be upset,” said Eliza carefully. She had read that you were supposed to validate your kids’ shifting emotions as they were growing, so they would continue to confide in you.

  “I’m not upset,” said Zoe. “I’m mad. She’s being a jerk.” If this had been Evie it would have been a waterworks show, but Zoe wasn’t crying. She never cried. She snarled. She snorted. She seethed. Sometimes she raged. But she didn’t cry. Even as a young child she’d borne insults and injury stoically, blinking hard and going internal. This was probably unhealthy, but Eliza didn’t know how to change it. You couldn’t force someone to cry, could you?

  Even so. If Eliza could have, she would have turned the car around, driven back to Barton, parked in the Rackleys’ driveway, rung the doorbell, and unleashed a bucketful of venom on Jackie. For many obvious reasons, that wasn’t practical. But also. You had to be so careful with teenagers. Your children wanted you to save them. Or they didn’t want you involved at all. They wanted you to tell everyone. Or they’d die if you told anyone.

  Because she was nearing Little Harbor, Eliza opted for a practical, efficient approach: “Do you want me to talk to her mother?”

  “No! No, do not do that. You have to promise me you won’t do that.”

  “I won’t,” said Eliza. “I promise. But you really can’t waste any mental energy on it. You’re a smart girl, you don’t need friends who would do something like that.”

  “She’s not my friend,” Zoe snarled.

  “Exactly!” said Eliza. “You know who your real friends are, and they don’t treat you this way.”

  “That’s not the problem.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that now everyone who follows me can see that I wasn’t included. And I can see that I wasn’t included. That’s the problem. It sucks.”

  When Zoe was born and had finally stopped screaming like a fisher cat (she hadn’t had a problem crying that day) long enough for Eliza to breast-feed for the first time, the careworn nurse had said, “Here’s your daughter.” Ah, thought Eliza. Lovely. And then the nurse had said, “I’ve got four of them. Good luck!” Eliza had looked at her newborn little girl and thought, Maybe you needed the luck, Nurse Whoever-You-Are, but I have good sense on my side. Then, after some sustained effort, Zoe had latched on for her very first meal. She’d been so small and fragile (she’d been born almost four weeks early), Eliza had felt like she was holding a collection of raw eggs.

  Eliza wanted to knock the teeth out of the world that had turned that trusting, slurping little thing into a girl left out of someone’s stupid Instagram post.

  “Zoe, sweetie? I’ll call you soon. For now, go do something! Get your mind off of it. I promise Jackie Rackley isn’t worth an ounce of your anything.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Ride your bike!”

  “You always say that. Riding your bike is your solution to everything.”

  Eliza did always say that; she loved bike riding. “That’s because fresh air and exercise clear your head.”

  “Fine,” said Zoe. “I’ll ride my bike.”

  “Wear your helmet,” said Eliza, and at the exact same time Zoe said, “I know. Wear my helmet.”

  “I’ll call you soon, little bunny. I love you.”

  “I’m not a little bunny,” said Zoe. And then, maybe reluctantly but then again maybe not: “I love you too.”

  Eliza hung up the phone the exact second she crested the last hill and the harbor opened up before her. She gasped the same way she always did. It was so beautiful, it really did take her breath away, the craggy shoreline, the stands of pine, the gray-blue water. To the right, she knew, just out of view, was the wharf, and off to the side, all of the lobster boats rocking on their moorings. If they were in for the night. Would they be in? She checked the clock on the dashboard: six thirty, yes, they’d all be in. She opened her window and took a deep, cleansing breath. Even the air felt different here: unadulterated and pure, like air from biblical times.

  She pulled over, for just a minute, and got out of the car. When Eliza had first brought Rob to Little Harbor she’d stopped the car here and made him get out just like this and she’d said, “Breathe. Breathe.” Rob had breathed, and then he’d looked at Eliza like she was a teacher and he was a student afraid of getting the answer wrong, and then he’d said, “Yes!” although she never really knew if he was pretending or not. Not that she’d blame him if he were: Rob was from away, and there were certain things you just didn’t know if you were from away. Such as: what the sky looks like when the boats go steaming out at dawn, a bright white ball just above the waterline, and around it a yellow glow like a halo, the sky going from black to gray to orange in just a blink.

  You didn’t know the way the town feels before the first set of the season, the whole place lit up from within. That Christmas Eve shiver, when you’re waiting to see what’s going to get brought to you. You didn’t know what a boat looks like setting out with a full load of traps stacked six high and six across; you didn’t know what it was like to see a little boy of seven or eight, sitting on top of a pile of his daddy’s traps, grinning like there was no tomorrow, wondering how long it would be before he’d grow into a big strong man too. You didn’t know the way you can look at a man who’s been out on the water his whole life and see nearly every trap he’s hauled and every line he’s tossed over just in the set of his eyes, the pleats in his face.

  Of course, growing up here she couldn’t escape fast enough. If it h
ad been possible to put wings on her shoes and fly up and out she would have done it. What were the chances that the motherless daughter of a lobsterman would get into an Ivy League school, would actually figure out how to go? She’d not only beaten the odds, she’d downright obliterated them. She’d had to take out student loans from here to eternity, but she’d done it: she’d gone.

  At Brown, in her freshman composition course, Eliza had described her hometown as “a tight knot on the edge of the Atlantic—an angry little knuckle.” Beautiful! the teaching assistant had scribbled in the margins. So vivid! “An angry little knuckle,” indeed. What a pretentious college freshman she’d been. Luckily she’d abandoned the writing when she’d decided to go to medical school. Although she’d always thought she might have liked law school too.

  She thought of Phineas Tarbox and shuddered.

  Next to Eliza on the car’s seat was her Givenchy bag, and inside the bag was a letter her mother had written to her as she lay dying. She’d left it with Val with strict instructions to give it to Eliza on her sixteenth birthday. Val had been Eliza’s mother’s best friend: a BFF before BFFs existed. You might have thought them an unlikely pair: Val, native to the bone, and Joanie, a Main Line Philadelphia transplant who’d washed up on Little Harbor’s shores and never left. But it had worked.

  When Eliza was home, Joanie’s letter lived in her nightstand drawer. But anytime she left the house for more than a night she took it with her. It was single-spaced, written on yellow legal paper, and the handwriting was terrible, but that didn’t stop Eliza from reading it over and over again.

  Not that she needed to read it anymore; she’d long ago memorized every single word. In it, Joanie laid out four lessons. She’d meant to lay out ten (Val told Eliza) but she’d died somewhere between four and five. Sometimes when her heart ached and she felt lost Eliza wondered what the other lessons were.

  My dearest, dearest Eliza, began the letter.

  The first thing I need to tell you is that cancer sucks. Everyone knows that. But I didn’t really know it, not for real, not until it came for me. I never took it seriously, I thought it was a disease for other people.

  The cancer itself sucks, and so does that awful heartbroken look in your dad’s eyes that he tries to hide but can’t, and the brave expression on Val’s face, and the well-meaning hospice volunteer who speaks to me in a way that makes me want to haul off and punch her.

  If only I had the energy.

  I am thirty-one years old, Eliza, and you are twelve, and I won’t be here when you turn thirteen and that, as they say, is the long and the short of it.

  Thirty-one! I thought I would live twice as long, maybe even three times as long, and the fact that I won’t is just so incredibly surprising to me. Like it can’t be right. There must be some mistake! I want to call out every time I see a nurse, a doctor, anyone. Excuse me, ma’am? Sir? You have the wrong person, I’m only thirty-one and my daughter is only twelve. And she needs me.

  But people die all the time, young and old, short and tall, black and white, parents of infants and toddlers and preteens and teenagers and adults. It’s the circle of life, it’s all perfectly natural.

  I just never knew the circle would be so very small in my case.

  I have to write this letter in little bits and pieces, Eliza, because I tire so easily. So don’t hold it against me if it reads as somewhat disjointed. I myself am disjointed now, and I expect I will be until the end. Whenever that may be.

  I don’t want Val to give you this letter right away, my darling Eliza. I’m going to ask her to wait until you’re sixteen. Sixteen seems like the right age. You’ll have a lot of questions you’ll need answered when you’re sixteen.

  When you die, Eliza, which I know you will do many many many happy years in the future, I strongly advise you to choose a different path. Heart attack. Stroke. Something quick. Slipping away blissfully in the night at the age of ninety-four. There are so many better options than this endless, useless, goddamn painful suffering, which takes so long and at the same time goes by so, so quickly.

  There. I’ve finished complaining. I want you to remember me as strong and beautiful, not as ugly and suffering and whiny. Being beautiful has always been important to me, maybe more important than it should have been. (That, my mother, your grandmother, would say, is how I got myself in trouble in the first place. Never mind that what she considered “trouble” is what I considered “my life.”)

  If I have to die young (thirty-one! I can’t stop repeating the age, as if repeating it will make whoever is in charge Up There reconsider), then I would like to die in a much prettier way, not wasted down like this, not with mouth sores and throat sores with my beautiful hair shorn close to my head.

  Shorn! What a deliciously descriptive, awful word.

  Do you know, Eliza, when I was a student at The Baldwin School (Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, a place you have never been and I suppose now you will never go) I won the prestigious Baldwin Creative Writing Award? Diane Douglas thought she had it all tied up, but in fact she did not.

  I never liked Diane Douglas.

  I was meant for wonderful things, that’s what my senior English teacher, Ms. Collier, she of the stylishly cropped gray hair and nonchalant printed scarves, always told me. I was meant to go off and write Something Important. The Great American Novel, maybe, or a small but meaningful book of poetry.

  Do you know what I’ve written, Eliza? Shopping lists. Recipes. Thank-you notes (you can’t escape your upbringing, no matter how you try). A couple of letters home that went unanswered. Which breaks my heart for you, because I would love to leave you with more family than you have.

  That’s it, until now. Now I am writing my magnum opus, my masterpiece. My letter to you.

  In her father’s driveway, Eliza saw the familiar blue pickup and Val’s ancient, rusty Civic. That car had been brand-new when Eliza was a senior in high school, two thousand years ago. Frugal didn’t even begin to describe the way Val was about cars.

  Val ran one of the two restaurants in town—one of three, now, if you counted the new café, The Cup. Four, if you included The Wheelhouse, which was really just a bar. Although a lot of the locals turned their noses up at The Cup, Eliza was not planning on turning hers. She could tell from her father’s descriptions (“fancy-pants coffee,” “avocado smoothies,” “bread with little seeds and things stuck in it”) that she would embrace the menu at The Cup with guilty, open arms.

  After Joanie died, Val stepped into the role of Eliza’s proxy mother—she never got married, never had her own kids. And Joanie’s parents never forgave Joanie for embracing a life so different from the one she’d been groomed for; they shifted their focus entirely to the three children who had remained loyal and near. So it was Val who bought Eliza her first box of tampons, her first real bra, her one and only prom dress. It was Val who helped get together the application to Brown, and Val who came to every one of Eliza’s cross-country meets when Charlie was hauling. It was Val’s house Eliza went to after school each day the first dreadful year after Joanie died, when Eliza couldn’t bear to go to her own empty house. And it was Val who’d taken Eliza on that awful trip to Bangor in that car, all those years ago. Eliza felt a little spasm of something terrible when she thought about that.

  She parked behind her dad’s pickup and had no sooner gotten out of the car than Val appeared, wrapping Eliza in a giant hug. Val smelled like maple syrup and cinnamon (the pancakes at Val’s were to die for—Evie always got two servings and ate them both); she smelled like the ocean and vanilla. She smelled like home. It was unnerving how much Val made Eliza think of what she’d lost and at the same time about what she’d gotten instead.

  “I’m so glad you’re here. I need to run home to feed Sternman, but I didn’t want to leave your dad.” Sternman was Val’s stout old Lab. “He doesn’t know you’re coming,” said Val. “After you called me I decided not to tell him, thought he could use a surprise.” She loo
ked at Eliza with an expression that Eliza couldn’t quite read, and then she said, “Oh, Eliza. I’ll come in with you for a minute.”

  Eliza wasn’t sure what she was expecting when she walked into her childhood living room, where her dad was dozing in his old leather recliner, circa 1982, a rare gift to himself after a good season. Val entered before Eliza and went to stand protectively behind Charlie. She touched Charlie gently on the shoulder of his good arm and said, “See who’s here!” Charlie opened his eyes and looked around with a startled expression that reminded Eliza of a bewildered old dog who’d been flung out of sleep. She felt a ball of dread begin to form in her stomach.

  Eliza knew about the sprained arm, so she wasn’t surprised by the sling; she knew about the gash on the head, so she wasn’t surprised by the bit of shaved scalp and the line of stitches above Charlie’s temple. She knew that head wounds bled like crazy and often looked worse than they were. But something else wasn’t right. Charlie had just visited Barton in March, only three months before, and he’d been his regular old self then. He’d even gone into Evie’s fourth-grade class with a lobster trap and a V-notch to show the kids. (Every iteration of both kids’ classes had seen this routine numerous times, but they never tired of it.)

  Now he looked frail—not at all like the big strong ox who had hoisted her up on his shoulders so she could work the hydraulic hauler for the first time; not like the man who’d won the trap race three years running at the Lobster Festival; not like the man whose big hand had taken hers at her mother’s funeral and had crouched down and whispered, “We’re gonna be okay, me and you.” Charlie Sargent was sixty-four years old now, but after one fall on the deck of his boat he looked one hundred and ninety.

  “Hey, Dad,” she said. She bent and kissed him very carefully on the cheek, avoiding the stitched-up area on his head, avoiding the sling. “It’s so good to see you. Russell had me worried there for a minute, but you look fine to me. Right as rain.” She could hear the falseness in her words rolling around her throat in the same way that the Bloody Marys from earlier in the day were rolling around in her stomach. She never said things like “right as rain.” (Who did, really, besides Mary Poppins?)