What the Waves Know (18 page)

I lugged the mop across the planks, looking for Riley and his bucket. When I found him, my heart jumped into my throat, and not because he was so handsome. He was hammering in a loose peg beside the ramp and Lindsey was standing shotgun chatting away. Her hands were folded across her chest and I could see the bright orange of her polish peeping out from where the fabric of her shirt bunched up. Remy must have read the hesitation in my step.

“I'm watching, there's nothing to worry about.” Her voice was softer than the moment before. “Go on.”

Taking a deep breath, I pushed the hair away from my eyes and tried to walk a little taller, telling myself I'd already stood up to Lindsey once, sort of—even if I was going to sweat my morning milk making up for it. Coming up alongside them, I tipped the handle of the mop at Riley, who ignored me flatly. Lindsey took one look at me and laughed.

“Oh my God! Riley, is this your new janitor?”

Riley glanced over at me, unamused, before driving another peg flush with the deck.

“What the hell was your aunt thinking?” Beneath Lindsey's snootiness, there was a flash of annoyance at my being there—something only another girl would have rec
ognized. Wrestling the mop skyward, I shoved it at Riley, who continued to ignore me. I looked over my shoulder for Remy, who was standing beside the front of the ferry clutching a bottle of Comet and a toilet brush, watching.

“What's the matter?” Lindsey's words sang into the world all sugary sweet. “Cat got your tongue?”

After considering my options, I let my lips curl into a smile and brought the mop down hard against the bucket's edge. The force of it flipped the bucket cleanly on its side, splashing the soapy water from her shins up to her perfectly painted face until she looked like a melting Rocket Popsicle with one color dribbling down over the next.

“You little . . .” She kicked the pail and drew her arms back as though she might shove me.

“Knock it off!” Riley caught her midswipe, balling his fingers tightly around her arm, green eyes blazing.

Lindsey wrung her hands out in front of her, letting water drip from her polished nails. Suds had caught in her blond hair and her mascara had left raccoon rings around her blue eyes. More than once, I'd wished for corn silk hair and sapphire eyes like Lindsey's, to be one of those girls who shuffle their way through boys' hearts as quickly as a deck of cards and leave them pining into grandfatherhood. Girls like that don't have to speak a word for the whole wide world to fall in love with them; but they always do. They can twitter out a song strong and sweet as canaries in the morning sun.

But just then, for a moment, at least, Lindsey was as speechless as me.

“You're gonna pay for that,” she whispered, collecting herself and pushing past me. I propped the mop handle against the boat beside Riley and marched back to Remy, trying to conceal the shock on my face from Riley defending me.

“Ha! Now
that
might have taught Miss Lindsey a thing or two,” she snickered, handing over the Comet. “Let's go. That was a sound start, but we have more shit to clean off this boat before we go.”

By the time
we'd finished the bathrooms, a thick curtain of fog was rolling in. Remy squeezed the lever on the shortwave radio, informing a bodiless voice in the box that we were pulling out, when a lanky figure lumbered across the deck. My stomach tightened as I realized Riley was still aboard.

Ten minutes later, people going to the mainland shuffled up the ramp, weaving in and out of one another to claim a place beside the rail until they blended together like a hive of bees and one passenger did not stand out from another. Then one did, a tall brown-haired man wearing a striped sweater and jeans. Three paces behind him, a woman with long hair cascading across her shoulders like spilled ink fought the crowd to keep up.

Here's how it works in my fantasy: I am walking down
the beach among a thousand people. I trip over a tall lemonade someone left in my path, and when I scoop it up to hand it back, there is my father staring up at me with a huge dimpled smile asking what took me so long.

Somewhere in my heart, I knew it wasn't him. But fantasies are powerful beasts, and my stomach dropped straight out from under my ribs at the sight of the man leaning against the rail. Light-years away, Remy was yelling to Telly to draw up the ramp. Before I knew they were moving, my feet were heading down the steps two at a time toward the striped sweater until I found myself sneaking up behind the man. Had I been paying attention I would have noticed the woman with him returning from the snack bar with an open bottle of Coca-Cola. But I wasn't. I tumbled right over her leg, grabbing the man's arm as the circle of people surrounding him gasped, hopping back when fat splashes of cola flung toward them.

“What the . . .” the man shrieked. “Let go!” Those very words had repeated on me every minute of every single day since my father had plucked me off his leg like a diseased tick. The words that had long ago shriveled up inside me like winterberries crept up my throat:
I'm sorry . . . sorry . . . sorry
.

Recovering from the shock of me dousing him with a wayward bottle of cola, the man helped me back to my feet before peeling his sweater off over his head and dabbing at my sleeve.

“Sss – sss - orry.” The word spit into the air between us on its own, and when I looked up to find Remy standing beside me holding Riley's mop, I saw the question move across her eyes.

“It's just cola.” A silky softness settled into the man's voice, but it was all wrong. No lemonade or excited hug, no dimples, and when I blushed, turning my head away, the only thing left of the beach was a shrinking strip of sand.

When the mess was mopped clean, I followed Remy back to the control booth, passing Riley on the stairs.

“Told you,” he whispered at Remy, who nudged him quiet.

I climbed back up the stairs and into the control room numb as a shot of Novocain and crumpled into the seat beside Remy. Every bit of me wanted to cry a thousand tears, drain out the embarrassment and hurt inside, but my throat was so tight it wouldn't come. I just sat, letting the cyclone inside me die down.

“Makes you wonder, doesn't it?” Remy took hold of a wayward sprig of hair, coiling it around her ear, and began flipping switches on the panel until a burst of static broke over the radio. “You dump a bucket a' water over Lindsey Stuart, and the world turns right around and soaks your butt right back! Damn karma. Gets me every time.” She laughed lightly, as though there was something cosmically hilarious about the whole thing. “Either that girl's got one hell of a reach, or it's poetic justice. I wonder
who that poor guy down there dumped on to deserve a good drenching!” She glanced down at the man, who'd been reduced to a T-shirt on the deck below. “He must've done something.” She chuckled again.

When I didn't answer she added, “So I thought maybe we'd bring your mum her car this time. Then I thought, nah.” She tossed me a wink, making no mention of the fact that she'd heard me speak, and I count this as the precise moment I knew for certain somehow she understood the storm blowing out of control inside me. “We need some sort of fun in our lives.”

Kch, chh
, the radio squawked. “Clear the docks,” Remy ordered into the receiver.
Kch!
“
Mirabel
departing.”

Then she pushed the black AV box and, as sweet as Grandma Jo's gooseberry pie, her voice came over the loudspeakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, we will be pulling into open water momentarily. Please make yourself comfortable. Our traveling time will be approximately one hour and ten minutes, give or take twenty-five hours for fog. Anybody out there have radar vision?” A soft rumble of laughter rose from the crowd.

“They think I'm joking.” She laughed. Tossing the mouthpiece aside, she eased the ferry on course and leaned against the control panel, politely watching out the window as I blew my nose.

Neither of us moved again until we were a mile from land.

“I don't guess you want to tell me what bee buzzed your bonnet out there?” Remy asked, laying a sheet of paper and pen in front of me.

I looked at it but made no move to pick up the pen.

“Yeah, I didn't think so. Then I guess I'll tell you something instead.” Leaning over the controls, she studied me with a cautious glance. “Nobody's legs are built to run forever, girl. One of these days they'll either drop right out from under you or run you right in a damn circle.”

With that, she turned back to the windshield, and the
Mirabel
slipped through the narrow throat of the break wall toward Tillings's pier. I got to my feet and made my way onto the skinny deck outside the control room, breathing deeply. The houses on Tillings stood on tall weathered gray stilts just visible through the mist. A lone osprey sat on the break wall, nothing more than a crooked black shadow against the white rock watching us.

“Anybody up to
walking into town?” It was the afternoon of my sixth birthday. Through the window the sun dipped low on the horizon preparing to dive beneath the waves. We'd only been at the Booth House for half an hour, but I could hear the excitement in my mother's voice even though it was muffled behind the bathroom door. On the other side, I was dancing around the hallway waiting for her to come out to save myself the sprint down to the
first-floor powder room. What one single person could be doing in there for so long was a mystery. “Maybe we can stop and get ice cream.”

“I've got to get some work done. Why don't you and Iz go ahead?” My father shuffled into view with a stack of papers, pausing to laugh at my frantic dance. “You'd better unlock that door and let this girl in or we'll be mopping up a puddle in the hall.”

“Why don't you do your work after dinner?” The hammer clicked back on the lock and my mother slid into view.

For a full minute, I forgot I had to go to the bathroom at the sight of her. Dark hair floated down around her face, twirling into loose curls at the shoulder, making what had taken so long plain. Her eyes, which almost never saw makeup, were carefully lined with charcoal shadow, and a shimmer of gold brushed all the way to her brows. I couldn't yank my eyes off her. But my father didn't seem to notice. He turned away without a second glance, plodding down the steps; a thing I might have wondered more about had I not been frantically dashing for the toilet and barely six years old.

“Can't,” I heard my father sigh, “I really have to get this done today. Maybe . . .” The front door thudding shut lopped off the rest of his thought. Through the bathroom window, I saw him cross the yard and flop into an old wooden Adirondack chair out back.

“Oh.” My mother's whisper was barely audible, her feet statue still on the other side of the door.

When I finished, I scurried to the kitchen to find that my mother's feet had not only gotten going, but were pacing about sixty miles an hour from the counter to the refrigerator. She had a sort of lost look in her eyes, stopping only to chop the heads off three stalks of broccoli with unjustified force. When she ran out of broccoli stalks to behead, she spun on her heel, going after a head of cauliflower, then a bag of carrots, peppers, and snap peas until there was nothing left to attack with a knife that wouldn't buy her twenty-five years in the penitentiary. The notion struck me that if anyone got in her way, she would either march clear over the top of him, or freeze right up solid with no idea what to do.

Slipping through the front door, I followed my father outside, crawling up in the chair beside him. He laid his papers aside with a smile that poked the dimples in at his cheeks and made him the most handsome man alive. His fingers crept up to play with my hair, and over his shoulder I saw my mother in the kitchen window, watching us.

She looked at me and I saw it—the question brimming in her eyes that ached to ask by what magic I had persuaded my father to love me. In a matter of half seconds, it overflowed, quietly running down her cream cheeks in crooked, black smudges.

Even then I knew. I knew I had to hold tight to him
or he might flit away. With his deep dimples and shaggy brown hair, he looked like one person, but he wasn't. He could change in a single wink and he was always running toward you or away, depending on what corner of the earth the Nikommo were calling him to that day. If a person wasn't willing to run with him, she'd be left behind.

Back in the
control room I slid the journal over the control panel and let it settle in front of Remy, who studied it as if it might be rabid and ready to pounce.
How did you know him?

“Who?”

I yanked the paper back, scribbled hard, and shoved it back at her because I knew she knew.
My father.

“I grew up here. He spent summers here. It's a small island.”

Her response sounded rehearsed, like my mother's responses. I studied her carefully, reading her body.

Here is how you know if a person is fibbing or avoiding: it's in the distance. A person who really doesn't know, but wants to; they'll lean right into a question and dig. It's in our nature. A person who does know, but doesn't want to, will pull away and pretend to be ignorant and nonchalant about the facts in the way a person might slowly back away from a cougar ready to strike.

How well did you know him?
I tapped the tip of my pen to the page.

“I don't know. He was the kid that lived down the lane. . . . Son of a green-nosed bastard! It's fucking pea soup out here.” We had been sailing through dense fog the entire way to the mainland. Now Remy was squinting angrily through the white cloud wrapping itself around the
Mirabel
like an enormous scoop of melted marshmallow. “Seeing the damn wharf would be helpful in docking the ferry.”

That the
Mirabel
bumped into the dock without sending anyone over the rail is a flat-out miracle, and when the worst of the pitching settled, Remy cut the engine, looking out at the crowd waiting onshore. The mainland wharf was a carnival of vendors selling crab cakes, deep-fried clams, crawfish boils, and popcorn shrimp. Some booths doubled as a mini-mart for beach wares and tanning lotion. An entire tunnel of boogie boards lined one side of the dock where a boy with yellow dreadlocks leaned easily against the rail chewing gum.