The Lobster Kings (33 page)

“Make some room up there,” Daddy called out from what felt like far away.

Kenny and I both took a step back, the space between us suddenly wide and safe. I saw Daddy walking briskly through the storm and up the steps. He stomped his feet on the porch and then unzipped his slicker. “Christ in a bucket,” he said, breathing heavily. “I can’t say I’m thankful for this kind of holiday weather.”

“Always some kind of weather, right?” Kenny said. He tapped Daddy on the shoulder, raised his eyes at me, and then stepped through the front door. Daddy pulled his slicker off and folded it over his arm. He had a bottle of wine in his other hand. He looked at me and then shook his head.

“What are you doing, girl? You and Kenny?”

“It’s none of your business.”

He shook his head again. “You’re my daughter, and you’re a Kings, and that makes it my business. You aren’t thinking, Cordelia.”

“Kenny is a—”

“Kenny’s a good man, and I wouldn’t have a problem with you two being together, but the man’s marriage just dissolved. You need to let the wreckage settle. This isn’t the right time.”

“There’s never a good time,” I said.

“Some times are better than others,” he said. “All I’m saying is, give it some time. It’ll be better if you do.”

He stared at me, and I could see that he was waiting for me to nod, but I couldn’t. “No,” I said. “It’s not like you have some sort of crystal ball, like you know everything’s going to work out nicely in the end. You can’t make me let go of this.” I did my best to look defiant, but Daddy surprised me: he stepped to me and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me tight against his chest. He was warm and smelled like he’d always smelled, a mix of cologne and the sea.

“Oh, honey, I’m not trying to make you let go of this. I’m not trying to make you do anything.” I resisted for a breath, and then I hugged him back. He kissed me on the top of the head and then ran his hand behind my neck and ruffled my hair. “I love you, sweetie. You can wait or you can decide not to wait, whatever you think is right, and whatever you do, I’ll be behind you. You just have to trust me. Things will work out the way they’re meant to. They always do.”

We looked up at the sound of the front door opening. Guppy stood there, leaning halfway out into the night air. “It’s raining,” she said. “You should come inside.”

I let go of Daddy and pointed my finger up at the roof. “We’re on the porch. It keeps the rain off of us.” She raised an eyebrow at me, a trick that she’d recently perfected, and we rewarded her with a laugh and followed her in.

Inside of Rena’s house, all the lights were blazing, and with the heat of the oven and the crush of the whole family, plus
Kenny and George and Mackie, and with Trudy and Fifth walking around and sniffing at everything and jumping on each other and surfing for scraps, the house was cozy. Daddy was sweating and complaining about how stuffy it was. He already had his sweater off. Kenny kept fidgeting with his tie; I’d never seen Kenny wearing a tie before, but I could imagine him, in different circumstances, wearing one every day, working in some brightly lit, overwhite office, his suit jacket hung on a coat hook, shirt pressed, shoes shined. He would have been miserable.

I was glad the weather was up, because otherwise I knew that all of us—all of us except Rena, Carly, and George’s wife, Mackie—would have been itching to be on the water. It wasn’t as bad for Tucker. He’d actually gotten some fishing in: he’d only been having to deal with the crappy weather for the last four weeks, which still meant more days on shore than the captain of a new boat was comfortable with, but at least it was something.
We
had to deal with the weather and the law. We’d been relying on the island fishermen to help pull our traps. With the weather cutting fishing time, and with Timmy’s traps already needing coverage, there was a lot of extra work to go around. The good news was that since we’d found the ghost ship, there hadn’t been any more of those James Harbor buoys in the water. As sure as I was that Oswald Cornwall hadn’t been spending much of his time fishing, our waters had been left alone since he’d taken the bullets through the back of his head. The other good news was that by tomorrow, Timmy and Etsuko were going to be back on the island with my new godson, and the cops of all of the various incarnations seemed to have decided they were done with us.

Daddy finished transferring the turkey to the serving platter and then slid the carving board against the back of the counter. He was sweating enough that he had to wipe his forehead with a paper towel. I watched him throw the paper towel in the trash and then lean against the counter. He looked up to see me staring and frowned at me. I knew I was driving him crazy, but I couldn’t help it. I’d asked him about his fainting in the doctor’s office, and
after blustering, and then after being pissed off that George had told me about it at all, he’d made me promise not to tell my sisters. “They’ll just worry.”

Rena clapped her hands. “To the table, everybody.”

Daddy picked the platter of turkey back up and set it in the middle of the table before sitting down next to Carly. Stephanie was sitting on the other side of her, and from the angle of Stephanie’s arm, it looked like her hand was resting on Carly’s leg. I was glad to see it. Stephanie had been quiet since we’d found the ghost boat, shaky on her feet. Daddy said she’d been fine on the
Queen Jane
the few days they’d been able to get out on the water, but it was clear, at least to me, that the whole incident had put a strain on her. At the head of the table, Tucker reached over and poked a finger in Guppy’s tummy, making her laugh and squirm, and then he let her blow raspberries on his arm. Kenny sat directly across from me, with George and Mackie on his left. Rena, the last one to the table as always, stood behind her chair and then lifted up her wineglass to quiet us.

“A toast, I think, is in order. First of all, to Guppy and Fatty, thank you kindly for setting the table.” Rena put her forearm on the back of her chair and leaned over. She was wearing a dress instead of her usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt, but she hadn’t taken her apron off, and it hung loosely from her neck. I noticed the silver chain she was wearing—a gift from Tucker, I guess. Almost without thinking, I touched my thigh; I’d slipped the pearl necklace from the pocket of Kenny’s coat to the front pocket of my jeans.

Rena stood straight, lifting the glass up so that the straw-coloured wine filtered the light from the kitchen behind her. “Perhaps it’s so obvious that I don’t even need to say it, but I’m going to say it anyway. I’m thankful that we are all here this year, in light of everything that has happened”—I glanced at Guppy and then Fatty, knowing that neither one of them knew about Oswald Cornwall—“and I don’t want to forget how lucky we are to all be here together. Carly,” she said, and my sister smiled, an
openmouthed grin, careless and unguarded, like almost everything about Carly, “it makes me so happy to have my baby sister back home.”

“She’s not a baby,” Guppy said, and we all laughed.

Rena raised her glass up and said, “To family.”

I couldn’t help staring over at Kenny as Rena said it, watching the way he said those words, “To family,” along with us, the way he looked like he believed it. He was looking across at Carly and Stephanie and smiling, and I thought that maybe, despite everything that had happened with Sally, he recognized that there were relationships worth having.

O
n the island, a mermaid’s kiss is what we call it when a man gets taken out of the water after floating facedown for a couple of days: the delicate bits are all eaten away. Fish get at the soft tissue of the lips, the ears, the eyes, the nose. Bone exposed, flesh torn away and left as flaps and white streaks. In the painting
The Mermaid’s Kiss
, Brumfitt takes us to the rocks down right near where the wharf is now, where the fishing boats pulled up even back in Brumfitt’s time. The sun glows with a creamy intensity that comes only a few days a year on Loosewood Island; you can almost feel the heat glazing off the sand and the rocks. High enough in the corner that you might not notice them at first, gulls circle greedily above the body. The boy—even if you didn’t know the family history, or that this was Brumfitt’s grandson, the next in the line of Kings boys to be taken by the sea, it is obviously a boy—is tangled up in nets, floating in the shallows. Two men, one old, the other in the prime of his life, stand ankle-deep in the water, hauling at the nets. There seems to be no argument that this is Brumfitt and his only living son.

The boy in the nets is turned three-quarter profile. Standing close to the painting, you see that the face shows smudges, streaks,
but take a few steps back and it resolves into what it is meant to be: the victim of a mermaid’s kiss. Despite the savagery of his flesh and the strain of Brumfitt and his son pulling at the nets, the boy looks peaceful. He appears to almost be reclining in the net, one hand resting languorously on his thigh, the other arm crossed up and bent high across his chest. He could be sleeping. For me, however, there are two things that turn the painting from a sad tableau into something heartbreaking and devastating. The first is that the boy is missing one of his boots. His small size, and his face, despite the ravages, are part of the reason we know he is a boy, but it is that missing boot that gives him an aura of innocence, that makes him seem so tender and vulnerable. Without having a child of my own, just looking at the painting, I can understand a mother’s impulse to cradle her child, to try to protect the child from what is impossible to protect against. The second thing that just destroys me about
The Mermaid’s Kiss
is that it is not complete. Brumfitt completed a triptych about the death of his eldest son,
The Drowned Boy
series, but it seems as if something about the death of his grandson broke him. He couldn’t hide behind his paints and his canvas. Perhaps fishing his grandson out of the water was what made him truly understand that the bargain he had struck when he married his wife was one that could not be broken, that it would carry on through the generations of his family as long as the generations of his family carried on through. And maybe because of that, at the bottom corner of the piece, next to where there is a girl standing with a look of horror on her face, where there is a soft bundle of clothing that I think can be nothing other than a sealskin coat, there is just a blank, unmarked space where I truly believe that Brumfitt’s wife should have been painted in.

B
y the time we finished eating and moved into the family room, the storm had gotten even worse. The rain seemed solid at times, like the ocean come to land, and lightning sheeted across the sky in an almost predictable rhythm.

“Did you know that old saw about counting between thunder and lighting is completely off?” Daddy said. He let out a small burp and tapped his hand twice against his chest before wiping at the sweat on his forehead. “Excuse me. Darn pie.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Rena said. She was sitting on the couch with both of the twins curled up on her lap. “You tell us that every time there’s a storm.”

Daddy didn’t let it faze him, turning to Tucker, who had heard it as often as we had, but who was happy to listen again. “Every second is about a quarter mile, not a mile, so if you’re counting one Mississippi, two Mississippi between thunder and lighting, it’s hitting awfully close.”

“And not much you can do about it if you’re fishing in this kind of weather,” Tucker said. “Just hope for the best.”

Stephanie came into the living room and sat down by the sliding door, leaning against the wall and staring out into the night.
Rena had turned the lights off, so the room was lit by a pair of votive candles in the fireplace and the spillover from the kitchen. Kenny and Carly were still in there, finishing off the dishes, the music just loud enough to carry over into the living room and to mute their voices. George, as was his habit, had fallen asleep in one of the recliners almost as soon as he sat down.

“Okay, you two,” Rena said, squeezing her kids, “five more minutes, and then time for bed.”