The Lobster Kings (39 page)

I leaned against the fence and looked out over the water. The boat that I’d seen in the thicket of buoys was still there. Somebody was out working. I couldn’t make out whose boat it was. I tried squinting, but that didn’t seem to help. There was a time when I could have seen the boat clearly, would have known whose it was. I was barely thirty, too young to be getting old, too young to start needing glasses. Besides, I thought, Daddy was older than me, and he still didn’t need glasses for distance.

It took me a beat to remember. Daddy would never need glasses.

I folded my arms on the top of the fence and leaned my head on them. The cast felt odd and cool against my face.

“You are watching the boat?”

I looked up at the sound of Etsuko’s voice. After the crush of
the mourners, it was good to have a few seconds alone, but seeing Etsuko made me feel like myself again. For a moment I thought she had brought me my coat, and I started to tell her no, that I was fine, that I was warm enough, when I realized that it was a bundled baby in her arms. My godson.

“Here,” I said, reaching out. “Let me hold him.”

“You are okay with the broken arm?”

“It’s just my wrist,” I said. “I’m okay.”

She passed me the baby without any of the hesitation that I was so used to from new mothers. I cradled the baby in my right arm. I couldn’t do much with my left hand, but I had enough movement that I could pinch the blanket and pull the fabric down so that I could see his face. “Oh, he’s beautiful,” I said. He really was beautiful. His skin was smooth and he was lighter than I had expected. Timmy’s skin was so dense that even with Etsuko’s paleness, I hadn’t been able to picture the baby as anything other than a carbon of his father, but he netted out somewhere in between the two of them. “What colour are his eyes?”

“Green,” Etsuko said, “like his last name. Like the sea.” She put her hand on the rail of the fence. In places, the metal had rusted out; it was entirely ornamental, and when there had been talk about replacing it a few years ago, the consensus was that the age of the fence was part of what made the cemetery such an idyllic place, a comfort for the bereaved.

He was sleeping, but I turned so that the baby was looking out over the ocean. “There it is,” I said. “That’s where your daddy works and where you’ll work someday.” I stopped and looked at Etsuko. “I don’t even know what his name is.”

“Mordecai,” she said. “After Timmy’s grandfather. Mordecai Ichikawa Green.”

Mordecai felt so small and light in my arms that I could have been holding nothing. It was hard to believe that this was what Etsuko had been keeping inside of her for nine months. As I cradled him, I looked up over the ocean again. The sun flattened everything, and the sea seemed both endless and impossibly small.
The stream of boats leaving the harbour made a line toward the mainland, and out in the other direction, there was still that same boat moving slowly through the school of buoys. The lobster boat was closer now, close enough that when it turned away from me, I could see the name, and more importantly, the port, painted on the back:
JAMES HARBOR
.

E
ven with the steady stream of people who’d already departed the island, there were too many people for there to be a single building on the island that could handle the mourners. It would have been tough if it was raining or cold, but with the sun and the unseasonable warmth, the streets remained clogged. People spilled out of the Grumman Fish House, the diner, the Coffee Catch. They spilled out of houses and onto the streets.

I put my head down and turned and walked back to Daddy’s house. Inside, it was cool and quiet. For all the people on the island, nobody had thought to come to Daddy’s house yet. I closed the door behind me and then let my head rest against the door. All I wanted to do was close myself up somewhere dark. I slipped my shoes onto the boot rack and walked upstairs.

I went into Daddy’s room. I didn’t go in there often. The shades were open, and the light melted over the dresser and the floor. Daddy had made the bed with sharp corners, and when I sat on it, I was conscious of bringing creases into the world. I lay down for a minute, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, but I couldn’t smell anything. Nothing lingered behind in the air. I
wasn’t sure how long I lay there, but when I got up to pee, I went into his bathroom. I washed my hands and my face, and then I opened his medicine cabinet. There, on the glass shelf: prescription bottles. More than I had expected, but as many as I’d feared. The bottles were mostly full, and I picked one up to look at it. The date was from the spring, from when I’d found him out cold on the kitchen floor. Medicine he hadn’t told me about. I touched a couple of the other bottles and found the same thing: they’d been filled months before and were still full or barely emptied. Even with my nagging, he still hadn’t been taking the pills. I didn’t recognize any of the names, but there was an alphabet of untaken medicine on the shelf. I wanted to be angry at the stubborn bastard, but I wasn’t. I just closed the cabinet.

From his bathroom and his bedroom, I drifted down the hall to my own bedroom. It seemed small to me. I still had trophies from high school on my dresser, still had the same bedspread. There was a time when that room felt so familiar, so comforting to me, and though it felt familiar still, it wasn’t a comfort. I knew I’d be coming back to this house tonight, that I wouldn’t be staying in the rental house anymore. With Daddy gone, this was my house now. It wasn’t a decision, really. It was just the way it was going to be. But all I could think about was that in all the days and nights I’d spent in this house, I’d never felt alone.

That’s what I was thinking when I heard the knock on the door, and when I opened the front door to see Kenny standing there, that’s what I said to him: “I don’t want to be alone.”

He stepped inside, hung his suit jacket on a hook, and then shut the door carefully behind him. He was excruciatingly gentle with the close of the door. It barely clicked as he seated it home. “I’m here, Cordelia.”

“You don’t have to be so careful with the door, Kenny. You’re not going to wake him,” I said. “It’s not like he’s sleeping in the back.”

He tried to smile at me, but his face looked broken. He took my hand in his. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t try to do that. It’s okay,
Cordelia. You don’t have to act tough. Just, don’t. Not with me. I’m here. You don’t have to be alone. Okay? This isn’t the kind of day when you have to be alone.”

I wasn’t sure if he pulled me into his arms or if I stepped into them, but either way we stood in the entrance, with him holding me.

I kissed him.

My lip was still sore from smashing it on the boat the night of the storm, and I was gentle. I had my good hand around his neck and I bent him down to me, brushed my lips against his lips, sent my tongue touching against his mouth. I pressed my body against him, and I said his name, “Kenny,” so quietly that I thought maybe I’d just thought it.

“Cordelia.” He breathed my name out, and I responded by pressing my lips harder against him, until the soreness of my lips turned into something good. I felt like I was drunk, my head going light. My hand was shaking on the back of his neck. His fingers were in my hair.

“Cordelia,” he said again, barely pulling back, our lips still whispering against each other. “What are you doing?” I could feel him hesitate, the way he wanted to push back against me, but he closed his eyes and leaned away, into the door. “Why now, Cordelia?”

“Please,” I said. “I’m asking you. I need this. I need you.” I tiptoed up and pulled him down to me so that I could kiss him again, and when I did, his lips matched mine. I leaned into his body, pressing my breasts against his chest, my hips into his, and I could feel him getting hard.

“Cordelia,” he said, as I moved my mouth to his neck, and let my hand slip over his collarbone, down his side, and across his stomach. My left hand felt weird and numb against his hip, like it was dead inside the cast, but the rest of my body was incredibly alive. My stomach was swimming and my legs quivered like I had a boat bucking beneath me. I pushed my good hand firmly
against his stomach and then turned it so that I could slide my fingers between his shirt and his waistband.

“Cordelia,” he said again. He grabbed my arm and stopped me from slipping my hand fully into his pants, but his grip wasn’t that strong. “Cordelia. We shouldn’t do this. You know we … You don’t want to do this. You’re just upset. You’re not thinking.”

“There’s no reason not to, Kenny. I want to. I need to.” I slid my hand farther down into his pants and he let the grip on my arm relax. I felt him shudder, taking a breath when I touched him. He felt hot in my hand. I wanted him inside of me more than I’d ever wanted anything. I took my hand back out and then fumbled with his belt, the cast on my hand making things more difficult than they needed to be. I fished the loop of his belt out, flicked the pin out of the hole, and then slipped the button on his suit pants.

“We shouldn’t, Cordelia,” he said, but he wasn’t making any more moves to stop me. He closed his eyes and leaned back heavily against the solid door as I touched him again, the skin of my fingers closing around him.

“Shh,” I said. At that moment, with my hand on him, I didn’t care.

“I—”

I pressed my lips against his to quiet him, and then he reached back and locked the door. We moved without speaking, and it was like we’d been doing this together forever, like we were out on the water on the
Kings’ Ransom
, the way we moved in concert. He put his hands against the outside of my thighs and scrunched my dress up under his fingers until he was touching my skin, and then he ran his fingers up even farther until he hooked them over the edge of my panties. I pushed his pants down past his hips and then let them fall out of my hands. I lay down on the floor of the front hall, holding his hand and taking him down with me, and he was slow and careful as he let the weight of his body press against me. I kissed him again, and we stayed with that for a few seconds, his
tongue just brushing against the edge of my lip. I shifted my leg up, bending it, letting him move closer, but he hesitated.

“Are you sure, Cordelia? Are you sure this is a good idea?”

I didn’t answer. I just reached down and took hold of him. He let out a thick breath and closed his eyes before pushing in all of the way. The tile was cool through the back of my dress, and I tucked my face into the hollow between his shoulder and neck. He rocked against me and in me, and the pressure of him was the only thing I could concentrate on.

There was knocking at the door, but Kenny and I stayed quiet. It was just our breathing and the rub of our bodies on each other, the slide of my back on the floor. I don’t know how long it was that we were like that, but all of a sudden Kenny’s breath started to catch, and then he pushed hard and stayed there, burying himself and shaking.

We lay like that for a while. His weight was warm and made me sleepy. Finally, he kissed my ear and rolled to the side.

“I hope …” He trailed off and then tried again. “What’s it going to be like tomorrow, Cordelia?”

“Tomorrow?” I turned over and propped myself up on my elbow, resting my cast on his stomach. “I guess we’ll have to check the weather report, see what the seas are going to be like. I’m hoping for another warm, sunny, calm day like this one. We’ve got traps to pull.”

“We’re going fishing?”

I leaned over and kissed him on the lips. For an instant I was terrified, because he didn’t respond, but then I felt him come alive underneath me, kissing me back. I bit his lower lip softly and then pushed myself to my feet, my hand on his chest. “The lobsters won’t catch themselves, Kenny.”

He got to his feet and slowly pulled his pants back up, tucking in his shirttails and smoothing himself down. “You can’t help yourself, can you Cordelia?” He shook his head, but he was smiling. He grabbed his jacket from the hook and then swung it on. “What do you want me to do?”

“Will you head over to Rena’s with me? I don’t think I can face all of them alone, all those people talking about Daddy.” I frowned, and then winced. I’d forgotten about the stitches and how, when they were pulled tight, they ached.

“Of course I’ll come to Rena’s,” he said. He reached out and pushed a loose strand of my hair back behind my ear. “Of course I’ll be there.”

I closed my eyes and let myself lean against him.