Otherworldly Maine (44 page)

That was the measure of a human being's true worth, I felt sure. Not how many people ministered to
your
needs, but how many people
you
could help.

That girl—she had been brutalized, somehow, by society. Now I was to provide some counterbalance.

It was the surety of this duty that had kept me from blowing myself up with the old Delaware ferry, or jumping off that stern rail myself.

I glanced uneasily around and looked ahead. There was Ship's Head Light, tall and proud this time in the darkness, the way I liked it. I thought I could almost make out the marker buoys already. I started to get nervous.

I was certain that she'd jump. It'd happened every time before that we'd known. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, in this existence she won't.

I had no more gotten the thought through my head when she came around the corner of the deck housing and stood in the starboard corner, looking down.

She certainly looked different this time. Her long hair was blond, not dark, and braided in large pigtails that dropped almost to her waist. She wore only the string bikini and transparent cape the Vinlanders liked in summer, and she had several gold rings on each arm, welded loosely there, I knew, and a marriage ring around her neck.

That was interesting, I thought. She looked so young, so despairing, that I'd never once thought of her as married.

Her friend, as thin and underdeveloped as she was stout, was with her. The friend had darker hair and had it twisted high atop her head. She wore no marriage ring.

I eased slowly over, but not sneakily. Like I said, nobody notices the crewman of a vessel; he's just part of it.

“Luok, are yo sooure yu don' vant to halve a drink or zumpin?” the friend asked in that curious accent the Vinlanders had developed through cultural pollution by the dominant English and French.

“Naye, I yust vant to smell da zee-spray,” the girl replied. “Go on. I vill be alonk before ze ship iz docking.”

The friend was hesitant; I could see it in her manner. But I could also see she would go, partly because she was chilly, partly because she felt she had to show some trust to her friend.

She walked off. I looked busy checking the stairway supports to the second deck, and she paid me no mind whatsoever.

There were few others on the deck, but most had gone forward to see us come in, and the couple dressed completely in black sitting there on the bench was invisible to the girl, as she was to them. She peered down at the black water and started to edge more to the starboard side engine wake, and then a little past, almost to the center. Her upper torso didn't move, but I saw a bare, dirty foot go up on the lower rail.

I walked casually over. She heard me, and turned slightly to see if it was anyone she needed to be bothered with.

I went up to her and stood beside her, looking at the water.

“Don't do it,” I said softly, not looking directly at her. “It's too damned selfish a way to go.”

She gave a small gasp and turned to look at me in wonder.

“How—how dit yu—?” she managed.

“I'm an old hand at suicides,” I told her. That was no lie. Joanna, then almost me, then this woman seven other times.

“I wouldn't really haff—” she began, but I cut her off.

“Yes, you would. You know it and I know it. The only thing you know and I don't is why.”

We were inside Ship's Head Light now. If I could keep her talking just a few more minutes we'd clear the channel markers and slow for the turn and docking. The turn and the slowdown would make it impossible for her to be caught in the propwash, and, I felt, the cycle would be broken, at least for her.

“Vy du yu care?” she asked, turning again to look at the dark sea, only slightly illuminated by the rapidly receding light.

“Well, partly because it's my ship and I don't like things like that to happen on my ship,” I told her. “Partly because I've been there myself, and I know how brutal a suicide is.”

She looked at me strangely. “Dat's a fonny t'ing tu zay,” she responded. “Jost vun qvick jomp and
pszzt!
All offer.”

“You're wrong,” I said. “Besides, why would anyone so young want to end it?”

She had a dreamy quality to her face and voice. She was starting to blur, and I was worried that I might somehow translate into a different world-level as we neared shore.

“My 'usbahnd,” she responded. “Goldier vas hiss name.” She fingered the marriage ring around her neck. “Zo yong, so 'andzum.” She turned her head quickly and looked up at me. “Do yu know vat it iz to be fat and ugly und 'alf bloind and haff ze best uv all men suddenly pay attenzion to yu, vant to
marry
yu?”

I admitted I didn't, but didn't mention my own experiences.

“What happened? He leave you?” I asked.

There were tears in her eyes. “Ya, in a vay, ya. Goldier he jumped out a tventy-story building, he did. Und itz my own fault, yu know. I shud haff been dere. Or, maybe I didn't giff him vat he needed. I dunno.”

“Then you of all people know how brutal suicide really is,” I retorted. “Look at what it did to you. You have friends, like your friend here. They care. It will hurt them as your husband's hurt you. This woman with you—she'll carry guilt for leaving you alone the whole rest of her life.” She was shaking now, not really from the chill, and I put my arm around her. Where the hell were those marker lights?

“Do you see how cruel it is? What suicide does to others? It leaves a legacy of guilt, much of it false guilt, but no less real for that. And you might be needed by somebody else, sometime, to help them. Somebody else might die because you weren't there.”

She looked at me, then seemed to dissolve, collapse into a crescendo of tears, and sat down on the deck. I looked up and saw the red and green markers astern, felt the engines slow, felt the
Orcas
turn.

“
Ghetta!
” The voice was a piercing scream in the night. I looked around and saw her friend running to us after coming down the stairway.

Anxiety and concern were on her stricken face, and there were tears in her eyes. She bent down to the still sobbing girl. “I shuld neffer haff left yu!” she sobbed, and hugged the girl tightly.

I sighed. The
Orcas
was making its dock approach now, the ringing of bells said that Caldwell had managed to raise the bow without crashing us into the dock.

“My Gott!” the friend swore, then looked up at me. “Yu stopped her? How can I effer? . . .”

But they both already had that ethereal, unnatural double image about them, both fading into a world different from mine.

“Just remember that there's a million Ghettas out there,” I told them both softly. “And you can make them or break them.”

I turned and walked away as I heard the satisfying thump and felt the slight jerk of the ferry fitting into the slip. I stopped and glanced back at the stern, but I could see no one. Nobody was there.

Who were the ghosts? I mused. Those women, or the crew of the
Orcas?
How many times did hundreds of people from different worlds coexist on this ship without ever knowing it?

“Mr. Dalton!” snapped a voice in my walkie-talkie.

“Sir?” I responded.

“Well?” the captain asked expectantly.

“No screams this time, Captain, I told him, satisfaction in my voice. “One young woman will live.”

There was a long pause and, for a moment, I thought he might actually be human. Then he snapped, “There's eighty-six assorted vehicles still waiting to be off-loaded and might I remind you that we're shorthanded and on a strict schedule?”

I sighed and broke into a trot. Business was business, and I had a whole world to throw out of the car deck so I could run another one in.

T
he summer she'd drowned, Rosetta woke hungry. She hungered for light and color, for small things that glittered, for warmth and life. Someone, anyone; the need was new to her. She had yet to learn discernment.

Isobel sniffed the air, chill and wet. The lake was just visible through tall pine and birch. Her boots tracked over the root-humped ground, in the silence among the trees. At the lake edge, the tall shadow of the woods brushed the water. From this little cove, the other summer places were invisible.

The lake conveyed its great size through the echo of its waves lapping beyond the inlet. The edges of the cove, shaggy and ice-rimmed, had half-swallowed and partly digested the wooden dock their father had built. A few more years of neglect and it would be gone.

Isobel stepped out onto it and sat down, hiding her hands inside the sleeves of her sweater, arms around her knees. A mourning dove called from the woods.

Her sister Rosetta surfaced. She looked at Isobel across the chill expanse, then sank back down; a moment later she resurfaced close to the rotting dock.

“Ross,” Isobel greeted her. She examined her sister's face for changes. “When she'd first seen Rosetta, two weeks after her drowning, there'd been changes. Her skin was a clear, pure thing, an essence. Her face, which had been fiercely expressive, now looked remote, beautiful. Expressions came into it like light through a pane of glass, vivid, but not integral to the glass itself.

Rosetta stared back, her eyes darker than Isobel remembered them, the color of the deepest parts of the lake. “Isobel,” she said, having retrieved the name like a pearl: precious, cold, and streaming wet. She looked at Isobel with pleasure in the stillness of her face.

Rosetta had drowned the year before during a storm. She'd gone out in the canoe, despite a sullen sky. The violence of the storm had been like the Maine summer itself: promised but unexpected.

The lake had been dredged, but Rosetta's body had not been found.

That summer, first in a new life for Isobel, two dogs disappeared near the lake. Nobody dredged for dogs as they did for people. Syd Grainger's was a retriever, Beth Williams' a collie-Lab mix.

Several days after the second disappeared, Isobel had seen Rosetta. Apparently the swift, straightforward energies of two dogs had been enough to resurrect her.

Now Isobel had come to the neglected cabin after dreaming about it five nights in a row. Her father would not come to the cabin again, he said. He had begun to seem to her like a figure in a Chagall painting, floating somewhere above her, connected to his family by a few threads of color, and the suggestion of a shared context. Her mother had stopped coming many years before Rosetta drowned. When Isobel was eight and Rosetta nine, their mother had left the summers in Maine behind, much as she'd left her marriage behind, in search of warmer climes.

In the hardness of the end-of-April light and the barren darkness of the land, Isobel saw her sister's existence differently than she'd seen it last summer.

She watched Rosetta swim a lazy circle. “What did you do this winter?”

“Sleep,” Rosetta spoke slowly, her inflections and intonations different, though her voice tugged familiarly at Isobel. “For three months, under the ice.”

“I talked to Dad before I left; he's going to marry Grace.” Isobel rubbed her finger over a rough spot in the worn wood. “Mom told him to sell the cabin.” She was getting cold. Rosetta swam in lazy, small circles. Suddenly she dove. She surfaced a moment later with something glinting wetly in her fingers. She brought it to Isobel and set it on the dock before her. Isobel picked it up: a glass eye. It cut one sharp crescent of refracted light across her palm. She rolled it around in her fingers. The eye was blue, and heavier than she would have expected; it dripped icy lake water onto her hand.

Isobel had an old coffee can filled with the things Rosetta had brought her last summer, small things carried from far parts of the lake: three thumbnail-size carved jade beads; an antique pair of bent, gold-wire eyeglass frames with half of one cloudy lens still intact; a set of rusted camping utensils linked on a metal ring; a miniature train, also rusted; assorted marbles; a plastic doll's head with brilliant gold hair; buttons; matchless earrings; and about two sixty-eight in change, though some of the coins were so old that Isobel thought they might be worth more.

“Bring me the things?” Rosetta said, bobbing slightly. The water beaded on her dark blonde eyelashes and glazed her lips. “The pretty things.”

She kept the coffee can in the cabin, on a shelf with the paperback murder mysteries her father had read over the summers. She went to get the can, poured its contents out, and watched her sister's face as she ran her fingers over them. Leaning up over the edge of the dock, she picked each one up and held it to the light. Her face had a slightly perplexed look of concentration. When she had gone through all the objects, her dark eyes turned up to Isobel. “It's not here,” she said slowly. “What I need . . . it's not here.”

Isobel narrowed her eyes, trying to understand. “What, Ross? Is something missing?”

“No. Yes . . . what I need.” Rosetta stared up into Isobel's face, her eyes moving slowly. She touched Isobel's hand and poured her gaze into Isobel's until a faint droning filled Isobel's head. Isobel swayed.

Abruptly Rosetta removed her hand and drifted from the dock, watching Isobel. A tiny line creased the smooth skin between Rosetta's eyes.

The droning faded slowly and Isobel rubbed her ears, feeling like she'd been de-pressurized too quickly. She watched Rosetta drift farther away, wondering what had just happened.

Toby came to see her, as she did every summer. Isobel was getting split logs from what was left of last year's cord when the older woman came out of the woods, walking up from the cove. She wore an assortment of layers, among them long johns, two skirts, a wool sweater, and a flannel shirt. In one hand she gripped a pair of heavy leather gloves.

“Heard you were up,” Toby said, kissing Isobel gently on the cheek. She smelled of tobacco, chill wind, and mint. “My nephew's here visiting me, thought you might like to meet him.” She glanced behind her into the woods, called back, “Jay, where are you? Come on up.”