The Lobster Kings (44 page)

The front door opened and Carly stood there. It wasn’t clear to me if she had come by herself.

It seemed at first like Stephanie was going to be okay. She held everything together, but then, maybe a week after everything had happened, she just disappeared. One morning Carly woke up and Stephanie was gone. She was off the island. Gone. By the time I was home from the hospital a few days later, Carly had tracked Stephanie down at her parents’ place, and had convinced her to come back to the island. But there was something broken in Stephanie. She’d gone back to her parents’ for a few more trips, and even though Carly kept bringing her back, we weren’t sure if Stephanie was going to be on the island for the holidays. Carly
didn’t talk much about what Stephanie was going through, other than to say that she was seeing a counselor, and that one of the few things Stephanie was always bright about was that I was pregnant. According to Carly, they’d even been talking about maybe the two of them trying for a baby.

Carly smiled at me and Rena, and then stepped into the house. Stephanie followed behind her. Rena let out a quick shriek and pulled Stephanie into a tight hug. “Merry Christmas!”

Stephanie had a pair of shopping bags in each hand, and after Rena let go of her she put them down on the floor. She looked embarrassed at the attention. “Just a few extra things we picked up at my parents’.”

I hadn’t realized that I’d been holding my breath until I let it out. I guess there was a part of me that hadn’t been entirely sure that Carly was going to be able to convince Stephanie to stay on Loosewood Island for Christmas.

“There’s pancakes in the kitchen,” Rena said, and she and Stephanie left me standing in the entranceway with Carly.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. She shifted, and then finally let out a sigh and unzipped her jacket. “Oh,” I said. And then I said it again. “Oh.”

She touched at the necklace and then tried to smile at me. “Is it okay?”

I reached out and let my fingers graze the pearls. “They make you look like her,” I said. “She would have wanted you to have them.” The words were a surprise to me, but they were true, and because I didn’t know what else to do, I hugged her. She just stood there for a second, and then she hugged me back. I saw Rena walk into the room and she leaned into our circle.

K
enny’s ferry wasn’t due for half an hour. We were planning to wait for the ferry before opening the presents so Kenny could be with us. That left me just enough time to go to Daddy’s house.

The island looked fresh and clean with the coat of snow. There wasn’t much of it; just enough to cover everything and to leave a place for me to put my footprints. It made the quiet morning even more hushed.

Almost everything was the same inside the house as it had been on the day Daddy died. It still looked as if Daddy could be living there. His coats hung on the hooks in the entrance; his reading glasses were on the table in the kitchen. The only real difference was the blue plastic trunk in the dining room.

It looked out of place in the dining room. I stood over the trunk, ran my hand along the top, and then pulled a chair out from the table. I don’t know what it was that had kept me from opening it; I’d had Chip and Tony carry it up nearly two weeks ago. With everything that had happened, with Daddy dying and what went on out on the
Queen Jane
with Eddie Glouster, and with the news starting to circulate that I was pregnant with twins
thanks to Kenny, and with Stephanie and Carly off and on and off the island, even Chip and Tony had started acting quiet with me. Etsuko was the only one who acted as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

I looked at my watch. Fifteen minutes until the ferry. Now or never, I thought. I flipped open the latches on the blue trunk. There was a sucking sound when I lifted the lid, the watertight seal breaking.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was something more impressive than what was inside the crate: a thick, plastic-wrapped tube that ran the diagonal length of the blue box. I put it on the table in front of me and started worrying the tape that held the plastic wrap closed. Once I had it opened, I was almost afraid to reach in, to feel the canvas against my fingertips. I rolled the bundle open on the table. There had to be twenty-five, thirty canvases. I knew I’d be back later that day to look through all of them, but with the ferry coming in, I only had time to look at the top painting.

Despite the snow outside and the fact that it was Christmas, the spring grass of the painting seemed appropriate. Brumfitt had painted it from the promontory off to the side of the harbour. He’d captured both the ocean and the island. I’d never seen Loosewood Island look so lush before in any of Brumfitt’s work. It was what the island looked like after a month of spring rain and spring sun. On the headland, he’d painted a woman having a picnic and sitting on a blanket with two children, a boy and a girl who looked to be the same age, and next to them, a pair of women standing and looking out over the water. One of the women was obviously pregnant.

I felt the drone of the ferry’s horn pass through the walls of Daddy’s house, pass through my body, and I knew that I had to start walking if I wanted to be there when Kenny got off the ferry, his first trip from the hospital, his first trip home since I’d killed Eddie Glouster. But before I was ready to go see him, before I was
ready to leave Daddy’s gifts behind, I needed to do one thing. I needed to turn the painting over.

On the back, Brumfitt had written,
Christmas, 1761
, and he had written the title of the painting:
The Queens of Loosewood Island
.

And as I read the title, I knew. I knew that I hadn’t imagined seeing Brumfitt’s wife the day I’d stood shot, bleeding, dazed on the deck of the
Queen Jane
.

T
his is what will happen.

It will be the end of April. We will have had four days of warmth and sun and we will have no traps in the water; I’ll be too pregnant to work on the boat, and Kenny still won’t be able to haul things the way he needs to. I’ll have woken that morning craving Indian food, and in the way that boyfriends can be indulgent toward their pregnant girlfriends, Kenny will offer to take the
Queen Jane
across the water to Saint John to pick up food from Daddy’s favourite Indian place on Canterbury. I’ll know that it won’t be the same as having it fresh in the restaurant, but it will keep fine in the cooler, and this way Kenny will be able to pick up food for as many as who want to come to dinner: me and him, Rena and the kids, Carly and Stephanie, George and Mackie, Timmy, Etsuko, and baby Mordecai, Chip Warner and his fiancé, Tony Warner and his girlfriend. They will fill the table, fill the house, and the absences—Tucker, my mother, Scotty, Daddy—won’t be as noticeable.

This is what will happen. That afternoon, while we wait for Kenny to return, I’ll suggest to Carly, Stephanie, and Rena that
we go for a picnic. Up on the promontory, Rena will spread a blanket for the kids to sit on. She will bring an old-fashioned wicker basket loaded with glasses and a pitcher of lemonade, a batch of cookies wrapped in cloth. She’ll sit down with Fatty and Guppy and laugh at something one of them says. Carly and I will stand near them until I look out over the water and see a boat coming across the distance. I will point and say something to Carly, and we will turn in profile to watch Kenny coming home. Stephanie will be standing apart from us, taking pictures with the medium-format camera that she’d brought from her studio and lugged up the hill. She won’t be laughing exactly—she won’t be there yet—but she’ll be smiling. She will be far enough away that she can capture both the water and the stunning spring green of Loosewood Island. As Carly and I turn in profile, Stephanie will take another picture, capturing the ocean and the island, capturing Rena and the twins on the blanket, capturing Carly and me. This will be the only picture that comes out clear from the entire batch of film that Stephanie works through during the outing.

All of this will happen, and yet, I won’t have told anybody about the paintings. I won’t have told anybody about what Daddy left behind for me. I won’t let anybody else see
The Queens of Loosewood Island
, or the other twenty-seven Brumfitt paintings. These will still all be my secret. It will be my secret that
The Queens of Loosewood Island
even exists, that there are paintings of more than just me pregnant and standing on the promontory with Carly, with Rena and the twins. There are twenty-seven other paintings: enough to make me believe in Brumfitt Kings, to believe in Daddy, to believe in Loosewood Island.

T
his is also what will happen.

While I am standing on the promontory with Carly, looking out over the water at Kenny in the
Queen Jane
coming home, I will feel the babies moving inside of me, and I will know that I carry both a boy and a girl, and they will be named Kings.

And this is what will happen.

I will hear Daddy’s voice calling my name. Though I will look around, I will not see him, but his voice will tell me that even if he hadn’t chosen me, I had earned the right to carry the Kings name upon the water.

And this is what will happen.

I will know that Rena, Carly, and I, all three of us Kings, will have sons and daughters who grow up healthy and strong, the kings and queens of Loosewood Island; they will carry the Kings name as a blessing, the bounty of the seas theirs unto each and every generation, and they will carry with them nothing else, the curse of Loosewood Island no more.

I would like to thank my editor, Jill Bialosky. A good editor is an artist in her own right.

To my agent, Bill Clegg. Again, thank you.

Paul Taunton and Anne Collins.

Adria Iwasutiak.

At W. W. Norton & Company, Random House Canada, and William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, big thanks to Chris Clemans, Dave Cole, Raffaella De Angelis, Anna DeRoy, Shaun Dolan, Marion Garner, Alison Liss, Bill Rusin, Rachel Salzman, Jessica Scott, Rebecca Shultz, Matthew Sibiga, and everybody else who helped along the way.

All of the many booksellers and librarians who were advocates for
Touch
.

Téa Obreht and Jared Harel.

Matt Grice.

Jennine Capó Crucet, Shawn Goodman, Christian Howard, Etsuko Ichikawa, Jon Katz, Peter Mountford, Alison Pick, Brian Turner.

Sara, Sandy, Lynda, Mitch, Justin, Alec, Larry, Lori, Joel, Ethan, and Ari.

Ari, Kathryn, Rigby, and Teo.

Laurie, Sabine, and Zoey.

Hopper, Ditto, Tootsie, and Turtle. Good dogs, past and present.

Alexi Zentner
is the author of
Touch
, which was published in a dozen countries. A finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, The Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award,
Touch
was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Zentner’s fiction has been featured in
The Atlantic
and
Tin House
and he is the winner of the 2008 O. Henry Prize and the 2008 Narrative Prize for his short fiction. Zentner was born and raised in Kitchener, Ontario, and currently lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife and two daughters.