Granite Harbor, page 8
“Of course you do, sweetheart. But, I mean … well, we live here—this is home. We work here. We’ve talked all about—”
“You can stay here. I’m going back to America to have my baby.”
Shocked by the matter-of-factness of tone, short-circuited by an overabundance of possible responses, he said simply: “What, to Texas?”
“No. Definitely not there. I need to stay away from my toxic family. We can go to Maine. It’s beautiful. You’ll love it there. It’s full of writers. We can come back later, I’m not talking about any great change in plan. I just want to have my baby in the States.”
My baby, she kept saying.
She emailed him links that showed pictures of fall foliage and harbors full of sailboats. She’d gone to college in Boston and had rented houses in Maine. He’d missed that part. There was so much he didn’t know about her.
She was commandingly resourceful. She arranged a shipping container for the antiques and paintings she’d bought in London, and there was room for a few boxes of Alex’s books, and his sofa. From a website, she rented a house on Bayview Street in Granite Harbor, on the Maine coast, and somehow had it stocked with groceries when they arrived.
Morgana beamed with relief after their first consultation with Dr. Bob, her new ob-gyn at Midcoast Obstetrics, who sported an armful of tattoos and wore Birkenstock clogs. He grimaced sympathetically when she recounted the episode with the amniocentesis hypodermic.
“We don’t go in for pain here,” Bob said.
Morgana looked at Alex and teared up with joy.
Dr. Bob explained the rotation of the doctors in the practice, but not in a way they understood, so they were surprised when Morgana went into labor and Bob was unavailable for the next five days.
“It’s my first baby!” the attending ob-gyn, Sarah, a partner in Bob’s practice, told them excitedly—on her watch, she added. She’d delivered hundreds of babies, of course. This was her first as presiding physician. But after a long day of the worst pain she had ever felt, Morgana told the doctor she wanted a C-section.
“I know it’s hard,” said Sarah, not unsympathetically, “that’s why they call it”— she flicked her fingers to make air quotes—“labor—”
“IT’S NOT COMING OUT AND IT HURTS TOO MUCH!” Morgana screamed at her. “I WANT A C-SECTION—NOW!”
Sophie was delivered by Caesarian half an hour later.
With what seemed like divine providence, a film option on Alex’s Booker short list novel came shortly after Sophie’s birth. He was offered a couple of semesters teaching writing at Bowdoin and Colby Colleges. But the film option expired, and the teaching gigs paid little more than gas money and were soon over. The strands of his long-labored-over third novel unraveled like overcooked noodles. He ran out of money. He borrowed a little from his sister, a computer programmer in the burgeoning Northern tech industry.
Morgana knew how things were with him. He’d always been honest about how little he’d made. It was all going to change with the next book—the bestseller Morgana was expecting—but waiting for it to appear had turned her brittle and short-tempered.
“I’ll be better off when we go back to London,” he said. He’d be back in his world, he explained, where he knew magazine editors and publishers, where he had friends and contacts, and people understood who he was and what he wrote about. “Out of sight is out of mind. When I see the people at the LRB again—”
“I’m not going back to London!” Morgana said, as if he were a moron. “Sophie will be completely disoriented. My milk will stop if we move. People don’t make any money in England anyway. You need to get a real job.”
When Sophie was ten months old, Alex laid her on the living room sofa to get her into her down-filled snowsuit to go outside and see the wonder of falling snow. When she was all zipped up, he laid her on the floor so she wouldn’t wriggle and fall off the sofa while he went to fetch her boots. As he bent down in the mudroom and put his hands on her little red boots, Morgana screamed from the living room:
“YOU FUCKING IDIOT! SHE FELL OFF THE SOFA ONTO THE FLOOR!”
She wasn’t mollified when he told her he’d put Sophie on the floor because he’d anticipated that possibility.
From that moment on, Alex was an impediment between mother and child. A clear and present danger to Sophie. Except at night, when Morgana was too exhausted to breastfeed and Alex got up to give her warmed bottles of expressed milk and walk her around the quiet house.
Naively, he’d accepted the picture Morgana had presented of herself: a collector of antiques, fine art, with a good eye that she’d parlayed into a career that would no doubt improve after her Christie’s course, just as he had accepted her statement that she wanted to live in London, “the best of all worlds.”
Once the divorce commenced, the real Morgana, what lay behind her lifestyle that was, he found, independent of any cultural aspiration or commercial effort, came out. The Texas and Oklahoma mineral rights and gusher monthly income that fluctuated with the price of West Texas Intermediate crude that had generated the family trusts, the phalanx of lawyers, and her father’s Chinese factotum, a frequently invoked savant named Ming Huang who had overseen the prenup. Alex had seen the prenuptial agreement as a peculiarly American tic and cheerfully signed it to reassure her that he wasn’t after her furniture, her paintings, her well-earned livelihood of which she was so proud. But now he was hog-tied, gulley washed down-ditch, and horsewhipped with legal costs.
At Morgana’s urging, he’d applied for U.S. citizenship, available through their marriage, as soon as they’d arrived in Maine. There would be tax benefits, she said, for the money he was going to make as a bestselling author. By the time Sophie turned three he was a divorced American. He hoped his new status would get him better teaching positions, or any legal job. But jobs in Maine were hard to find. The state was full of Pulitzer Prize–winning authors, and MFA-degreed academics in their twenties and thirties who filled positions at all the colleges Alex applied to. Cold necessity finally forced him to inquire about jobs, with benefits, then being offered by the town.
At the time, there were just two. High school custodian and police officer.
Police officer applicants in Maine had to be over twenty-one—there was no upper age limit. He passed written and physical tests, a polygraph (Have you ever taken drugs? Well, a bit of pot at university, actually. Oh, heck, we expect that.), and the Police Board interview. He was accepted into the eighteen-week police training course at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy in Vassalboro, a castellated brick building that appeared modeled on the Tower of London, sitting with its back to the forest, facing the Kennebec River, an hour’s commute each way.
His patrol officer’s starting salary was $42,500, with health benefits that included Sophie’s pediatric care. For years he’d lived hand to mouth as a writer, occasionally buoyed by an illusory sense of success and prospects. More often, and most recently, he was anxious and frightened about money. Now he was stunned at the regularity of the biweekly checks.
He began to wonder if he would ever write again.
Sophie would have no memory of her father in his dark blue uniform, shiny badge, black duty belt, and the holstered gun he wore for two years. Alex made detective and was back in his own clothes before her fourth birthday.
His salary as detective rose to $49,500. He traded in his old Jeep wagon for a late-model Subaru Outback, and bought a bed, desk, and bookshelves for Sophie’s bedroom in his rented house on Mountain Street. He was no longer anxious about becoming homeless, but he didn’t know who he was anymore. He felt deracinated—the word that kept coming to him. Torn up by the roots, cut off from the world that had produced him, set down in an alien landscape. He liked Maine—it was beautiful and unspoiled—but he was no longer who he had been or might have been going to be. He’d lost his identity.
He was a divorced policeman in America.
* * *
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Upstairs in her room.”
“What’s happened?”
Morgana let rip one of her intentionally fake theatrical cackles. “Go up and see for yourself.”
Upstairs, at the end of the long, wide landing, Alex knocked on Sophie’s door.
“Sophie, it’s me.”
“Come in,” he heard her say quietly.
He opened the door. Sophie was sitting on her bed, beneath the Matisse, girls in airy frocks floating against a blue background, her back against the wine-colored toile headboard, knees drawn up, reading an actual book. She looked up at him. Her expression was open, even affectionate.
“Oh, Sophie.” A convulsion squeezed his chest and he thought he was going to burst into tears.
“Dad”—a calm down tone to her voice—“it’s not real.”
He crossed the room and sat down on the bed beside her, looked into her face for a moment, then reached out and touched the dark, blue-black letters, an inch and a half high, that spelled SHANE across her forehead. He moved his thumb with a soft kneading pressure across her brow, as he had when she was a baby in the way that used to make her eyes close and send her to sleep—remembering this even now, the long early nights cradling his beautiful new little girl—across the letters that seemed embedded in her smooth pale skin.
“It’s not a real tattoo?”
It certainly looked it. The thin and thick strokes consistent, the letters evenly situated across the whole frontal plane of her forehead for maximum effect.
“No, Dad.” She gently pulled his hand away.
“It washes off?”
“No. It fades.”
“How long?”
“Ten days maybe, two weeks. It depends.”
“Not a needle?”
“No, Dad. It’s drawn on, with a pen. It’s ink that goes just beneath the surface so it doesn’t wash off. But it fades completely. It’s not illegal. It’s just a drawing. With my permission. It’s no different than someone writing on my arm with a Sharpie.”
He looked at the rest of her face now. Her big eyes were looking down at her hands. “You knew him?”
The eyes flew up at him, hurt. “Dad! You knew him! He came to our house—Shane! You don’t remember?”
She’d brought many friends, boys and girls, home to his house. They mostly stayed in her room, playing music, laughing, on their phones. He’d tried his best to give them space.
“I guess,” he said. “You’ve had a lot of people over. Was he a boyfriend?”
“No.” She made an annoyed face. “What, just because he was a boy? Dad—I have friends who are boys, just like girls. And nonbinary and trans friends.”
“Right. I understand.”
“Shane was friends with everybody.”
“That’s what I’m hearing. And why did you want to get this tattoo?”
“Because we’re not going to forget him. Ethan and Jared got one with me.”
“They did?” Alex had just seen Ethan that morning—since then? Did Isabel know? “Same thing, on the forehead?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“This afternoon. We did it together.”
“But why on your face, Sophie? Why not on your—”
“Because then everybody will forget! People are always forgetting kids who get killed! We’re not going to forget Shane!” She began to cry.
“Sophie.” He held her tight and stroked her hair. “I’m so sorry. Sweetheart, I’m so sorry.” His mind was filled with pictures—Sophie in all the stages of being a little girl: Easter egg hunts, parties with his friends, a carousel whip-pan of images—and her friend Shane strung up with a frog coming out of his stomach.
Sophie released him and pulled back enough to look up into his face.
“Who killed him? Are you going to find who did it?”
“Yes.” Alex leaned forward and kissed her forehead.
“Can you get Mom off my back about this, please?”
He kissed the top of her head.
* * *
Morgana was on her feet when he came downstairs, standing near the kitchen door. She was dressed, as always, in an equestrian outfit, as if she were on her way to a dressage performance, or a fox hunt. Shirt and tie, tweed or velvet hacking jackets, leotard slim cream or khaki breeches with suede fabric seats and inner thighs and knees, riding boots. When he first asked her about this unvarying costume, she replied, “I dress for work.” This had been the habit of her grandfather, a Texas rancher, whom she referred to in tones of respect and awe. “Dress for work and people will respect you,” he had inculcated in her, and she’d adopted the practice.
Now her jacket was draped over a stool at the vast granite island. She was in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, black kerchief still knotted at her neck.
“You need to make an arrest,” she said.
“It’s not a real tattoo. It’s temporary and it fades. I can’t arrest anybody for that.”
“This is the disfigurement of a child! A minor!”
“It’s not illegal.”
“Are you kidding me? Someone who did that to a minor, who doesn’t know any better? Corrupting a minor?”
“She’s not corrupted. She’s expressing grief.”
“Oh, for God’s sake! I can take care of her grief—I’m her mother. I know how to help her. But this? She’s supposed to go to school like this? For weeks? With that thing on her forehead? She has band practice! And she just got home, God knows where she’s been.”
“This is not a police matter, Morgana. Sophie did it, I believe, as an act of solidarity. I think it’s more positive than some other ways she might be expressing herself—”
“You’re pathetic. I might have known—”
“Right, cheerio,” said Alex, heading for the kitchen door.
“Use the front door!”
He was already out, Morgana’s squawked command spilling out behind him. He turned toward his car—
A rustle in the bushes on his left, movement in his peripheral vision, made his head spin to the side, and he saw a man in a baseball hat. Crouching.
Alex began to turn and orient his body in a defensive stance against the child killer here for his little girl. Until a quick, anxious voice stayed his hand already grasping the gun in his armpit.
“Oh, hey, Alex! How’re you doing?” said Glenn Bell, in a greasy tone of casual surprise. “Oh, hey, Morgana.” He looked different, hiding in the shrubbery, wearing a hat, than he did behind his desk at the Historical Society. “I was just taking a walk down to the shore, cutting through your yard, I hope you don’t mind—”
“Shut up!” Morgana snapped at Glenn, who drew back. She reached Alex, and before he saw it coming, pushed him hard toward his car, shouting, “Get out! Get off my property!”
Inside his car, pulling away, he looked back in the mirror and saw Glenn standing beside Morgana, both looking in his direction as he sped out of the driveway. Then Alex saw Morgana turn toward Glenn in an unmistakable manner. He was about to hear from Texas.
Naturally, there were men who were attracted to Morgana. Local wealthy types, who spoke of their helicopters and houses in Aspen. Nothing ever came of it. Morgana was an autocrat. Normal intimacy didn’t work with her. It would be like having a relationship with Mussolini. It could only be an affair of mutually advantageous power brokerage, and he saw no contenders in Granite Harbor.
Morgana and Glenn?
His stomach muscles contracted reflexively. He took a breath and it was expelled before he could pull in enough air. He couldn’t stop laughing. It was the first funny thing that had entered his mind for ages.
17
“Oh, Chester, I’ve been calling you and texting you,” said Nancy as he came in the door. She rushed to him and hugged him. “Why didn’t you answer?”
“I’m sorry.” He made a confused face. “My phone was in the cupholder.”
“I was worried about you.” Then she hated hearing herself say that. She didn’t normally call or text him, most of their interaction was face-to-face. She didn’t want to crowd him. “It’s just that after everything that’s happened…”
“Roger and I were cleaning up. The police and everybody were there all day and they made a lot of mess. They dug things up and moved things around and we had to put it all back. I’m sorry. But I’m okay.”
He looked so apologetic that Nancy hugged him again, tightly. She stood on her toes, still unable to reach his cheek and kissed him where she could find his warm flesh, low on his neck beneath the beard. “That’s all right, darling. Don’t worry about it. I’ve made us dinner.”
“I’ll go wash up,” said Chester. He bent down to unlace his boots and took them off. When he stood up he smiled at Nancy and she would have hugged him again but he turned and walked toward the bathroom down the hall.
Oh, what is this? Nancy thought, as she had so often in the last month and a half. This crazy thing called Chester. This bulky, rough-looking man, who beneath the beard and the construction clothes and boots and calloused hands and the reserve she had come to understand was a mask for an immense shyness, who now seemed to her sometimes like a boy. A sweet, shy boy, who was slowly, slowly opening up to her and making her feel … what? Love? It wasn’t like any love she remembered. But she was no longer the woman who had fallen in love with her husband Graham and lived with him for thirty-four years. What was that expression: never the same river twice? She was sixty-seven and Chester was thirty-nine, and it was absurd—except for the tender lovely feeling that had grown inside her for Chester, and that he seemed, in his way, to return for her. It was the last thing she had expected to happen to her after Graham died. Thirty-four years and she was then sixty-five, and she’d assumed that was it.
Nancy certainly wasn’t looking for another husband. Or a lover—unimaginable. Or a partner, that tepid description of a comfortable companion that many people seemed to find, or put up with out of fear and loneliness in their later years. She was quite happy on her own. She hadn’t even been that lonely since Graham died—that had been a relief after eighteen months of aggressive, metastasizing prostate cancer. Nancy had been busy, first with the sale of Belvedere, the enormous old captain’s house she and Graham had run for years as a bed-and-breakfast, and getting rid of so much stuff, and her move to her new house, a small Cape overlooking the harbor. And her new job at the Settlement. Exciting, all of it, and she’d felt at peace. Happy.
