The Midcoast, page 8
Behind Ed were the diminishing lines of beige lockers, the dim fluorescents overhead. It occurred to me then, as perhaps it should have well before, that Ed’s investment in the playing field had much more to do with his daughter’s own success than any desire to give back to the community. I’d grown used to this kind of parent in Boston; I just hadn’t expected to encounter it here, not in the form of my old colleague from the docks, the lobsterman in rubber boots and a camo hoodie.
“Did you know,” he said, “that you’re the only kid from this town who’s ever played lacrosse in college?”
I knew this but couldn’t tell if he meant it as a compliment or an insult.
“You could show me how,” he said.
“Show you how to what?”
“How to get Allie a spot.”
“Oh,” I said, “well, there’s really no way to game the system,” although this wasn’t quite true. College rosters were full of young men and women who came from households with lax walls and live-in tutors, and every prep school and club team in the country pitched their access to top-tier programs as the principal return on a parent’s investment.
“Let me take you to lunch,” Ed said.
“Allie’s only a sophomore, isn’t she?”
“She is,” he said, “but they say you gotta start thinking about this stuff wicked early.”
He wasn’t wrong, and it seemed harmless to accept the offer—harmless except in that it bruised my ego, the implied imbalance of a free meal—so I found myself agreeing to the date. We exchanged phone numbers, Ed shook my hand, and we said we would see each other soon.
Which we did. And then we saw each other the next month, and the next month, until these meetings became something like a tradition. They were always at King Eider’s Pub, always at the same booth in the corner, always on the same subject: Allie Thatch’s burgeoning lacrosse career. In the beginning, Ed knew nothing. I had to explain what a NESCAC school was, what an SAT was, what to expect from a summer recruiting tournament like FLG in 3d. He was a visual learner, I discovered, so I brought hard copies of charts and lists, which he would examine, not saying much. At the end of our lunches, I would always thank him, but he would insist on thanking me instead, and I found that I was looking forward to the sessions, even once Ed’s knowledge began to surpass my own. After a few months, just as I was beginning to run out of resources, he surprised me with his own sheath of printouts: rankings of schools he’d found on the web, emails he’d received from coaches, flyers for recruiting showcases.
Sometimes it could feel like he was pushing too hard, and I wanted to do right by Allie, as I would have for any of my student-athletes, so when Ed would suggest hauling her to a seventh summer showcase, I would remind him to beware of burnout, and when Ed suggested a school that I didn’t think was a good fit, I would try to guide him elsewhere. At one point he wanted to send Allie to a prospect day at a Division I school with a very successful program. It wasn’t all that far from Maine, which was important to Ed—he would have preferred all the schools to have campuses on the Midcoast—but I warned him that this particular college tended to attract kids who were well meaning but sheltered, born of extreme affluence and privilege.
“Yuh,” Ed said, “that all sounds good.”
“No, what I meant is that it’s just kind of a narrow worldview there,” I said. “I guarantee you ninety percent of that lacrosse team goes on to work in finance. They brag about it on Twitter.”
“What happens to the other ten percent?”
“I don’t know—tech?”
“So they all get good jobs.”
“They all earn plenty of money.”
“There you go.”
I let it pass, having done my best, and was relieved when Ed stopped mentioning the school, presumably because the coaches had stopped expressing interest in Allie. Mostly what I did during these lunches was listen and nod and feel satisfied that I’d done my job as teacher, given my student—Ed, I mean—the necessary tools to venture out on his own. He kept using me as a sounding board, well after I’d lost my original utility, and I kept drinking a few too many IPAs for the middle of the day.
Obviously, there were times when we’d said all there was to say about Allie’s options or the lacrosse world in general, and in these interludes of silence, I thought about asking Ed how it all came to be, how he’d made it happen. Whenever I worked up the courage, though, Ed’s phone always seemed to buzz or the check always seemed to arrive. It’s possible that he could sense what I was trying to do and found ways to keep me from doing it, I don’t know, but eventually I stopped looking for the right moment and decided that it wasn’t meant to be.
5
Of course, none of our friends or neighbors knew anything more than I did, not until that reception for Amherst Women’s Lacrosse when the cops showed up and stories began to hit the papers. Cammie and Colin came to our place just a couple weeks later, early June, for an emergency dinner. We had so much to discuss. The Boston Globe had just published a big “This Is What We Know” timeline, and everyone wanted to break it down. The earliest listed event was in the early Neptune & Mercury. I would have been a senior at Exeter then, so I wouldn’t have heard about it, but my father insists that the boat’s arrival caused quite a stir around town. Million-dollar sailboats just didn’t make it all the way up our river all that often, especially so late in the season. The boat was from Rhode Island and was ninety-two feet long, built in Holland, owned by an investment banker with a home in Newport, but it was the banker’s son and daughter-in-law, a lawyer and his wife in their early thirties, hailing from the western suburbs of Boston, who had been cruising along the Midcoast at the time.
On their first night in town, they took the inflatable dinghy in to the Schooner, had dinner, stayed late for drinks. On the second night in town, they did the same thing. It was on this night that Ed steered his Whaler up the darkened river, cutting the engine as soon as he rounded the buoy that marked the edge of the harbor, and rowed himself to the yacht’s transom. I don’t know exactly what he was looking for, but by then he knew Steph was pregnant, and his family had been telling him to let her go, let her make her own decisions, and they had also reminded him, trying to reassure him, take the pressure off, that he couldn’t even afford a ring to put on her finger or a roof to put over her head. This was young love that was meant to burn bright and fast and then fade away, they told their son, and just because Ed and Steph had clipped the wick beneath the flame didn’t mean she couldn’t recover, no matter which choice she made, and get back on the track that she was bound to follow, off to college and then to a suburb of some midsize city where she’d marry a businessman and have the family that she’d always been destined to have.
Ed said nothing to his parents, but when he imagined Steph raising their kid on a golf course with some slacks-wearing executive serving as stepdad, he also imagined stuffing the guy in a weighted bag and drowning him in the nearest water hazard. There had to be a way to prove his parents wrong, but only if he did something bold, if he found a way to show Steph that he was worth more than even his own family suspected. So on that night, the Neptune & Mercury’s second in Damariscotta, Ed climbed into the yacht’s cockpit. He went down the ladder and past the galley. There was a panel of red lights casting a glow across all the bunks, and Ed glanced inside each chamber until he found himself in the master cabin. Next to the bed was the wife’s jewelry. It’s standard practice to take off all rings and necklaces when on a boat because they can get caught in the rigging and sever a finger, so it was all there, her necklaces, watch, earrings. Ed took only what he needed and left everything else behind. According to the article in the Globe, the ring he stole was worth $30,000, which must have shocked him when he found out what he’d taken. But I doubt he felt remorse. Stealing that ring would have been like speeding on the way to the hospital with Steph in labor, the kind of crime that’s not really a crime when all you’re doing is what’s best for your family.
Next to the timeline in the Globe was a sidebar about Ben Thatch, Ed’s father’s cousin, fifteen years Wade’s senior, who’d passed away shortly after Maeve and I moved back to town. I knew who he was—he lived by himself in an old farmhouse on the river and had an antiques store on Main Street that sold furniture, jewelry, local knickknacks, the kind of place where a pine-scented candle was always overpowering the senses. I can’t say if he was the one who told Ed how dumb it would have been to give Steph the ring without altering it, how many eyebrows it would raise around the county, or if Ed arrived at that conclusion on his own, but regardless, the ring Ed stole was not the one, not exactly, that he gave to Steph when he proposed a few weeks later. Ben had dismantled the original, removing the large central diamond and the four smaller stones from the platinum band. He fenced the diamonds through an antiques wholesaler and returned the band to Ed, swapping out the monstrous keystone for a much smaller diamond. To make the band whole again, Ben soldered in a length of white gold. This is the ring that Ed gave to Steph. Ben assured him that no one would ever recognize the band without the diamond, and no one would ever see the part of the band that wasn’t platinum, and he was right—no one ever did.
* * *
—
After the reception, the whole state, it seemed, was obsessed. I was, too. I started thinking back to every interaction I had ever had with Ed or Steph, and then I started jotting down all those recollections in a notebook, then another notebook. At some point, I found myself standing in the pantry, too distracted to remember what it was that I’d come there to eat, probably a cookie or one of the kids’ fruit snacks, when suddenly I decided that the pantry really ought to be a home office. A writer’s office. For me. By the afternoon, I’d torn out all the shelves, brought a pair of sawhorses and a piece of plywood up from the basement to make a desk, and duct-taped a corkboard to the wall next to the narrow cracked window, our neighbor’s garage forever blocking what would have been a nice little view of the woods. I printed out maps and articles and tacked them to the board, and then when I ran out of room, the wall.
Soon I was conducting casual interviews, asking friends and neighbors if they knew anything I didn’t or had any color to add to our understanding of Ed and Steph’s lives. And then one day, on a whim, I called Steph’s cellphone. She didn’t pick up, so I left a voicemail, saying I was working on a book about her family (which I wasn’t, not yet) and wondering if she might be willing to give me her side of the story. I thanked her, hung up, then moved on, never expecting to hear back.
In the afternoons, I started going for long jogs around the salt bay—I needed to after sitting in a narrow pantry all morning—and then I spent the rest of the day making calls to local sheriffs and reporters, anyone whose name had shown up in the papers, but I’m not an investigative journalist and had no idea what I was doing. Nobody wanted to talk. I asked my dad if he knew anyone, and he connected me with a gnarled old barnacle on the island of North Haven whose carpal tunnel my dad had repaired fifteen years prior. This lobsterman named Walt spoke in the most classic Maine tradition, a true lilt, and as soon as I asked him if he knew anything about the Thatches ever coming up to the island, he interrupted and said, “Ya know, it’s a funny thing—you’re the second person who’s called me asking that very question.”
I said, “Oh, did the police reach out?”
“No, no,” Walt said, almost dreamily, “it was a fella from up around this way who lives in some far-flung region now, I can’t remember which. I know his folks, and they put him in touch.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“About three, four years ago, I’d say.”
And so I had a lead, although it’s hard to call it a lead when all you’re doing is calling someone who’s already done the work for you.
* * *
—
That trip to Amherst College had left Steph feeling unsettled, ashamed, and then resentful, and this little angry seed began to grow and grow until its branches overtook every part of her and Steph felt stiffened in revolt against the life she’d made for herself, or against anyone who might judge her for living this life, anyone who might presume to know what the rest of it had in store. She went to the library and started checking out every kind of book—romance novels, spy novels, biographies, memoirs, history books, cookbooks—anything in print, but the reading began to feel pointless and scattered, so then she started requesting brochures from universities around the state, and she read and read until finally she pushed herself away from the kitchen table one night and came over to the couch. She looked down at Ed and said, “I have to go back to school.” She wanted to study civics, she said, and she would need a car because she and Ed had been sharing his truck ever since the transmission fell out of her mom’s old Camry.
“Yuh,” Ed said. EJ was sitting next to him, running a plastic truck up and over his thigh. “Guess I’ll just have to work a little harder.”
“Well,” Steph said, “let’s talk about that. I’m ready to work harder, too.”
“Nah,” Ed said, turning back to the TV. “I got it.”
“Ed—”
“Don’t even worry about it.”
“Well, I worry about it because I don’t want to end up in the Goddamn poorhouse—”
“That ain’t happening,” he said.
“It’s not? How do I know it’s not happening?”
“Because I got it.”
“How?”
“Well, you’re asking for it, ain’t you?”
His boots were on the coffee table, which was littered with little paper balls. He did have a point. Anything Steph had ever asked for, Ed had given her in the end, this was true, but she didn’t like the implication that she was being gifted an education, that she needed his permission or even his help to earn a degree.
“What’s with the trash?” she said, waving at the balls.
“Not trash,” Ed said. “Gravel.”
“We’re playing dump truck,” EJ said.
“Sounds fun, honey,” Steph said, before swinging back to Ed. “So since when are you good at this?”
“Good at what?”
“Accounting. Math. Numbers.”
“Got us a place to live, didn’t I?”
“You got us a trailer,” she said, arms crossed.
“Which is a place to live.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I’ll get you a car,” he said.
“And tuition?”
“That too.”
“What if I want a pony?”
“You got it.”
“Or a personal assistant?”
“You want a personal assistant, tell your mom to get her ass back to Maine.”
Steph took off her glasses—she wore glasses to read now—and said, “I’m filling out the applications then.”
“You do that.”
Steph was about to walk away, but then she paused and kissed Ed on the cheek, just above the black beard, and then she put a hand on his chin and turned his head so she could kiss him on the mouth. EJ was still playing with his truck and making rumbling engine noises, so Ed went back to watching the game, and Steph went back to the kitchen and applied to every public institution within a two-hour radius. A few months later, she received a letter congratulating her on her acceptance to the University of Southern Maine in Portland, and a few months after that, she began to transfer all that intensity from the library books to her textbooks. Any energy not spent waiting tables now went into studying her notes, typing her papers. She and Ed kept trading off the parenting duties, or if they both had to work, EJ watched Ninja Turtles on the floor and ate Golden Grahams straight from the box.
Ed was helping Steph, and Steph was helping Ed. Whenever he had to go away for a day or two on a big haul, she would look after EJ, no questions asked. The price of lobster was always in flux, Ed had told Steph, so whenever demand was high, he and Chuck had to spend extra time on the water, outworking their rivals, raking the ocean for every last bug. This was how they could get ahead, Ed said, and Steph felt genuinely moved by how much he was doing on their behalf, as if these efforts were what he’d given her to replace the simple movements—cracking a beer, Cammie had said, or wiping away sweat—that used to make Steph forget where she was and dream crazy dreams. Later, when she would run for town manager, these years would be described as foundational in her origin story, the stump speech she insisted on making at every baked bean supper: While she was taking classes, Ed was hauling a living out of the river, the gulf, all those coves and inlets.
On only one occasion did Steph have to say no. This was June of 1998, and Ed was heading out the door, early in the morning, around four, ready to head up the coast. Steph ducked out of their room with eyes half-shut and said, “You have to take EJ.”
“I can’t take EJ,” he said.
“I have an exam,” she said.
After three years of classes at USM, Ed had thought she was done with exams, thought she was working on one last thesis to earn her BA, but apparently not. He was about to mount a protest, but Steph turned around and went back in the bedroom and shut the door.
He called his parents, but they said they had to work at the Pound—someone had to hold down the fort while their sons disappeared for the day. Ed considered calling Steph’s father Raymond, but Raymond was ill-equipped to babysit on his own and wasn’t likely to answer the phone so early in the morning.
So an hour later, Ed and EJ were in the boat with Chuck, heading east, and Ed was peering into the wet dawn, checking his instruments, checking the radar. They always left the dock at the same time as the other lobstermen, their buckets full of bait. They kept a hidden string of traps stocked with live lobster so that when they returned to the dock, they had something to show for their efforts. They beefed up their engines and entered lobster boat races all across the region. Ed had purchased the boat from his father, painted her the color of mist, and christened her the Miss Stephanie. They didn’t care about winning the races. The competition wasn’t important. What was important was making good time on a run up the coast, getting home before anyone noticed they were missing.
