The Silver Boat Read online

  “I know,” Dar said, putting two scones in a pan. The oven groaned as it heated up.

  “Mom never gave in to the microwave I bought her,” Delia said.

  “She liked things as old and original as she could keep them,” Dar said.

  “Oh, Mom,” Delia said. “She tried to hold on to everything, balancing all the while. Imagine being stuck between Grandmother and her English ways, and Dad sounding like he’d never left county Cork.”

  “Yep,” Dar said, watching Vanessa clutching her doll, playing on the floor with Scup. “We’d come here and be blue-collar girls in a silver spoon world.”

  Delia laughed. Scup came over, tail wagging, and she leaned over to pet him. “Mangy old guy,” she said. “His poor tail doesn’t have any hair left on it. What are we going to do with him?”

  “I’ll keep him and the cats,” Dar said.

  “And where will that be?” Delia asked.

  “I’m working on it,” Dar said. “Where’s Rory?”

  “Coming on a later boat,” Delia said. “Something to do with Jonathan.”

  “She’ll get here when she can.” Dar paused. Tell me about Pete,” she said.

  Delia closed her eyes, remembered the day two and a half years ago when she’d driven Pete, her only child, to the airport. He’d dropped out of American University mid-semester. Delia and Jim had lost the tuition money they’d paid, and Jim felt betrayed and furious. Pete had spent three summers crabbing with the watermen out of Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay. But after leaving college, he decided to try his luck fishing in Alaska.

  The pay was good, he said. He could reimburse his parents. She believed him; she’d never doubted his integrity. But two days after he flew to Anchorage, a sheriff arrived at their house just outside Annapolis, bearing court papers for Pete, naming him in a paternity suit.

  “He’s missing all this time with Vanessa,” Delia said. “She’s nearly two.”

  “I know,” Dar said, setting the coffee mugs down.

  “Do you talk to him?” Delia asked, grabbing her mug, half dreading the answer.

  “He calls me sometimes.”

  “He calls me, too,” Delia said. “At home, when he knows I’m at work, and at work when he knows I’m home. He can’t stand to talk to me.”

  “It’s not you,” Dar said. “He can’t stand himself.”

  “My son is all the way up in Alaska, fishing in wicked weather . . . that’s when he can get on a boat. The fishermen up there are so suspicious of outsiders.”

  They were silent for a moment; Dar was thinking of dangers of storms, of what could happen to a person on a boat at sea. Delia couldn’t separate the past; it filled her thoughts and dreams with fear.

  “They’re big, steel-hulled trawlers,” Delia heard herself say.

  “That’s good. Well, the guys are probably territorial like the fishermen here,” Dar said. “And the watermen on the Bay, right?”

  “I know, but I worry about him being cold and hungry. He makes good money when some captain is desperate for crew and signs him on—but he can’t count on it. I’m worried when he’s on a boat, and nearly as much when he’s not. He’s one step away from welfare. Sometimes I think he doesn’t want to work, so Maryland can’t attach his wages for child support.”

  Dar moved her chair closer. “He’s figuring it all out,” Dar said. “I’m not defending him, but I know he’s going to come around. He’s got too much of you in him to keep doing this.”

  Delia shook her head hard.

  “You’re the most responsible person I know,” Dar said.

  “You mean boring.”

  “Never,” Dar said. “Just steady and good.”

  To Delia, coming from her cool, willowy, offbeat older sister, that still sounded dull as hell. But she gave Dar a smile, to let her think she’d accepted the compliment.

  Neither of them had mentioned their father or his dangerous sea voyage. They didn’t have to, because the story lived inside them, made them who they were. Whenever Delia picked up one of Dar’s graphic novels, she saw exactly how haunted their lives had been. Dar expressed mystery enough for all three sisters.

  Now they’d come to clean out their family’s house, and Delia wondered what surprises they would find, what leftover evidence of love, loss, and the great big question that remained.

  Dar could almost see them on the beach: herself, her sisters, and baby Pete: the first grandchild, her first nephew. Building sandcastles, playing in the shallow water, showing him how to use a plastic shovel and pail, tilting the striped umbrella so he could nap in the shade. The summer he was two, they’d taken him on the Flying Horses in Oak Bluffs, for Mad Martha’s ice cream in Edgartown. Jim, Delia’s husband, rarely came to the Vineyard; he considered it too snobby and preferred to stay home.

  As Pete got older, Dar and her sisters had taught him to swim and bodysurf. When he was thirteen, Dar and Andy had helped him catch his first wave on a long board. They’d shown him the best surf-casting spots at sunrise and sunset, watched him catch his first striper. Harrison had welcomed him aboard his Hatteras Sportfish so Pete could enter the island’s bluefish tournament, taught him to tie knots, shown him how to sail on his family’s Herreshoff 12.

  By then Pete was ready to race at the yacht club, and he found some friends with a Rhodes 19. Dar had loved when he’d admitted racing and the yacht club weren’t for him; he’d rather just let the wind take him, not have to worry about competition or who had the most expensive gear.

  As Pete’s aunt, Dar saw it her duty and blessing to pass on to him all the beach, nature, and maritime things she’d always loved. So much had come from her father, and she’d tell him about Mike McCarthy, what a great father and boatbuilder he had been. His hands had been permanently rough and creased, and she was proud of his carpentry and hard work.

  Dreaming back to a much younger time, the summer she was eleven, Dar remembered being with her parents on the beach. She saw herself and sisters bodysurfing the crests of long waves, swimming out with their mother again and again, thrilled by every perfect, curling wave carrying them over the white sand bottom. Her father, used to the saw-edged rocks of southwestern Ireland, had wanted to run in and rescue his daughters every time.

  They’d run out of the water, completely chilled, and lie on blankets up in the dunes, where the sun baked down and the wind was screened by beach grass. Their mother would have brought a picnic, and they’d all dig in. She had loved seeing her parents side by side in their low beach chairs, her mother completely in her element, her father awkward in bathing trunks and sunglasses, as if he’d rather be in his work boots and overalls, planing a plank, joining it to the next on the boat he was building. Dar had loved that her mother tried teaching him to relax.

  The McCarthy family lived between two worlds. Getting off the ferry, they’d leave one life behind and enter another one. Throughout the school year in their small house in Noank, Connecticut, Dar would watch her mother pretending not to have grown up rich and trying to get used to balancing the checkbook and packing her husband’s and children’s lunches every day. But when summer came and they returned to the big house on the salt pond, the wide porch, and cocktails at sunset, she again inhabited her realm. Dar and her sisters joyfully joined in, and their father had his own reasons.

  Dar, her sisters, and their best friends would ride their bikes twenty miles into Edgartown. They’d spend the day sailing, and if it got too late, their mother would pick them and their bikes up in the station wagon. They would ride to Menemsha, talk to the guys on their fishing boats, eat lobster rolls on the dock. Rainy days, they would huddle under the porch roof and learn how to make and mend sails, using waxed thread and vintage leather sailmaker’s palms, talking nonstop.

  Community Center dances were sweet, wild, and romantic. A local band would play, and everyone would dance. Dar remembered her racing heart, the intensity of slow dances, usually with Andy, pressing their bodies together, hardly able to breath
e, never wanting it to stop. But it always did—the dance would end, and it would be time to go home. Dar always wished for happiness to last, for all love and good things to stay the same, but she had received early proof that they never did.

  The year she was twelve, Dar’s life as she knew it ended. Her body kept moving, but her spirit had flown away, after her father. Her parents separated that winter, and that summer he sailed to Ireland on a boat he’d built. He made one call home from a port in Kerry, but then he disappeared somewhere off the craggy, razor-sharp rock coast between Dunmore Head and county Cork.

  Dar alone had watched her father sail away, in the clear light after a rainstorm, and as if she’d been his keeper, for a long time she’d felt it was her fault he didn’t return.

  Rocking her in her arms one of the worst nights, Dar’s mother had tried to soothe her. She explained what Dar already knew: that her father had come to the Vineyard as a young man, looking for a tract of land his Irish grandfather claimed was his birthright. He’d fallen in love and married her mother, had children, spent years building boats, but he’d never forgotten his initial reason for coming to the Vineyard.

  “Sweetheart,” her mother said, “your father was driven by something inside. Do you know what that means?”

  Dar listened, not wanting to let on that she did.

  “A feeling so strong, it began to matter to him more than anything else in the world.”

  “Did he go back to Ireland to get away from us?” Dar asked.

  “No,” her mother answered. “The opposite. He had this idea that if he went, and brought back proof about his land, that we would value him better, love him more.”

  “I could never love him more,” Dar said, but her mother didn’t reply. Maybe their love had already been tested too much; his resentment and determination had pushed her away. Only twelve, Dar had observed and taken in the way her parents’ closeness had swirled and dissipated, like a beach being eaten away by winter storms, over that last year.

  Dar had seen what “driven” meant. She remembered her father walking this property belonging to his wife’s mother. She’d gone with him so many times, exploring all fifteen acres, from the gorse hedge at the land’s eastern end to the yellow shack, known as the Hideaway, at the westernmost. They’d walked from South Road to the edge of the salt pond, searching for surveyors’ markings and stakes.

  “What do they look like?” she’d asked, walking beside him.

  “A crosshatch on a boulder, an iron stake or maybe a granite post.”

  “What do they do?”

  “They mark where one person’s property ends and another’s begins.”

  “But this is all Grandmother’s,” Dar had said. “Why are we looking here?”

  “Because you never know what you might find.”

  She’d glanced up, scared by the intensity in his eyes. “I’m no one special,” he said. “A boatbuilder. But there’s a treasure right here, Dar. Straight from our ancestors, a land grant from the king of England.”

  “Dad, you’re Irish,” she’d said. That had brought a dark smile to his face.

  “Exactly.”

  Feelings too much for Dar overtook her, and it was on that walk with her father that Dulse began to materialize.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rory McCarthy Chase was now aiming for the noon ferry, but it was looking less and less likely they’d make it. She’d started off late at seven a.m., driving along I-95 from Old Lyme, Connecticut, knowing there was no way she’d meet Delia for the nine o’clock boat. She’d called Jonathan at one in the morning, losing all hope of falling back to sleep.

  “Come with us,” she’d said, as if it were a normal conversation at a polite hour. “The Vineyard is where we started. Let’s go back there, start fresh, forget all that’s happened.”

  “Rory,” he’d said, groggy and slurry, “I know you. You can’t forget all that’s happened. It’s hurt you too much.”

  “At least you admit it,” she said.

  “See what I mean?”

  “No, it’s late, I’m just so tired . . .”

  “Should you be driving tomorrow?”

  “Drive us,” she said. “That’s how we always used to do it. You’d drive, and I’d play games with the kids. We’ll miss you too much. How can we go without you?”

  “Rory,” he said slowly, waking up. “We’re separated. I still . . . I still care for you. But I’m the one hurting you, and I can’t also be the one to comfort you. Go out there, be with your sisters. Let Sylvia, Jenny, and Obadiah have fun on the beach, play with Vanessa. Let their aunts spoil them. And you too, okay?”

  “Do you really love her?” Rory asked.

  “Alys is beside the point,” Jonathan said. “But yes. I do.”

  Rory let out a shriek. She hung up and lay awake analyzing every word they’d said, and why Jonathan had lost his mind, and how she was convinced his falling in love with someone young had to do with all the money they’d lost in the art market crash and how his fragile male ego couldn’t hack it, and how sad it was, and how much she still loved him, and how sad that was. Around four she fell into a thin sleep.

  Finally they were on the road, having grabbed breakfast at the Niantic Burger King drive-through. The traffic on I-95 was light, and as soon as they turned onto I-195 in Providence the highway was lined with scrub pines, filling the car with their spicy scent that had always reminded Rory of family vacations. Even before Jonathan . . .

  “Why didn’t Daddy come?” Jenny asked, having held the question inside for over an hour.

  “Well,” Rory began.

  “Because he’s with Alys now,” Obadiah said.

  “I hate her,” Jenny said.

  “Honey, don’t say ‘hate,’ ” Rory said. She kept both hands firmly on the wheel, leaning forward as if it could get them to the ferry faster. She remembered the mysteries of her mother and father’s separation—no one, especially Irish Catholics and English bluebloods—talked about such things back then. But her mother had been so good to her daughters, easing them as carefully as possible through most of it. Rory aspired to that.

  “Your father still loves you,” Sylvia said. “That is the important part.”

  Rory gave Sylvia—her wise oldest child from her first marriage, even that a rebound from one of her and Jonathan’s breakups—a grateful glance in the rearview mirror.

  “But he loves Alys more,” Jenny said. “Or he’d be with us.”

  “Breakups have nothing to do with children,” Sylvia said, and Rory recognized her own words, spoken long ago.

  “That’s true,” Rory said. “Daddy loves you as much as ever, and he always will.” She tried really hard to smile as she drove, to reassure Jenny, eight, and Obadiah, nine, that their half sister Sylvia, fourteen, knew what she was talking about.

  Now, finally reaching Woods Hole, Rory drove into the standby line. It wasn’t too bad, and Dave the deckhand waved them onto the noon boat with moments to spare. The horn blew and the crew began casting off even before Rory and the kids were out of their car. The hold smelled of exhaust and salt air. Everyone hurried up the staircase to stand on deck.

  They lined the rail, watching Nobska Light and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution recede, then turning to face forward and watch the Vineyard get closer. The wind in their faces was brisk, but the sun felt warm. In spite of everything, Rory felt the excitement of going home.

  Dar took a break while Delia fed Vanessa her lunch, and took Scup back to her place. An eighth of a mile from the farmhouse, through acres that had been in her mother’s family for hundreds of years, they ran through tall grass, past lilacs, through breaks in crisscrossing stone walls, past the old cellar hole, through a small grove of gnarly apple trees, all the way to the ramshackle one-story beach cottage her family had always called the Hideaway.

  Built of pine, on stilts in case the salt pond overflowed, with an outdoor shower hooked up only from June through October and a perpetually sa
ndy floor, it had been a place for the family to keep their beach things, to change and take a shower in the sun.

  When Dar had moved full-time to the Vineyard the fall after art school, she’d insulated and re-roofed the Hideaway wearing painter’s pants, a Mad Martha’s T-shirt, a Red Sox cap, and latex gloves to keep her fingers safe from the stinging pink fiberglass.

  She’d offered beers to anyone who wanted to help her, and the day had turned into a party with all her friends left on the island post–Labor Day. They’d painted the cottage yellow, and Andy had built her a small porch that she loved.

  Now, inside, she quickly checked her e-mail. This place was geeked out; she had an iPhone charging; a seventeen-inch MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air; and her old silver Wacom CTE-640 digital drawing tablet, one edge held together with duct tape. Her Japanese publisher had given her a newer one as a gift, but Dar was attached to the old model and the stories that had come out of it.

  The least technical and most important parts of her space were the view across the salt pond to the Atlantic Ocean and her memories of times her family had come back here after spending all day at the beach. Dulse hovered behind the cobweb above, wanting to be called down. Dar didn’t glance up. Scrolling through her e-mails, she knew what she would find.

  There it was—the Realtor’s latest plea to let the new owners and their architect stop in during their children’s spring break, so they could start construction right after the closing.

  Dar gave Scup a biscuit. She opened the window beside her bed and felt the sea breeze. For half a second she thought about the spring ritual of putting screens in the windows here and at the farmhouse. It wouldn’t be her problem this year.

  Walking back to the big house, she tried to practice Tonglen. She went on yearly retreats to an island north of Nova Scotia, meditating and learning to let go. She had gotten her mother into Tibetan Buddhism during her last few years, and it had given her a measure of acceptance and peace while her heart slowly failed. Tonglen was a way to develop compassion for other people by breathing in their hot, tarry pain and breathing out cool, blue love. Picturing the new owners and their architect, she got stuck in the hot tar.