B000FC0U8A EBOK (10 page)

Dorotea’s dad is fond of saying this: A man only gets so many chances. He says it now, after dark, in Youngstown, Ohio, as he sits on Dorotea’s bed. And says this also: This is a real opportunity for us. His hands open and close. He grabs at air. Dorotea wonders about “us.”

Shipbuilding, he says. A man only gets so many chances, he says. We’re moving. To the sea. To Maine. Place called Harpswell. Soon as school’s out.

Shipbuilding? Dorotea asks.

Mama’s all for it, he says. Least I think she is. Who wouldn’t be all for it?

Dorotea watches the door shut behind him and thinks that her mother’s never been all for anything. That her father has never once owned, rented or mentioned any kind of boat.

She snatches up her world atlas. Studies the markless blue that means Atlantic Ocean. Her eye traces ragged coastlines. Harpswell: a tiny green finger pointing at blue. She tries to imagine ocean and conjures petal-blue water packed with fish gill-to-gill. Imagines herself transformed into Maine Dorotea, barefoot girl with a coconut necklace. New house, new town, new life. Nueva Dorotea. New Dorothy. She holds her breath, counts to twenty.

Dorotea tells nobody and nobody asks. They leave on the last day of school. That afternoon. Like sneaking out of town. The wood-paneled Wagoneer splashes across wet asphalt: Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, into New Hampshire. Her father drives empty-eyed, knuckles white on the wheel. Her mother sits stern and sleepless behind tracking wipers, lips curled above her chin like two rain-drowned earthworms, her small frame tensed as if bound in a hundred iron bands. As if crushing rocks in her bony fists. Slicing a pepper on her lap. Passing back dry tortillas painfully bound in plastic.

They see Portland at sunrise, after miles of pine bending over blacktop. The sun leers up behind slabs of cloud the color of salmon filets.

Dorotea trembles at the idea of ocean nearing. Fidgets in her seat. The energy of a caged fourteen-year-old piling up like marbles on a dinner plate. Finally the highway bends and Casco Bay shines before them. From across the bay the sun flings a trail of spangles to her. She lowers her nose to the window frame, feels certain there will be porpoises. Watches the glitter carefully for fins, flukes.

She glances at the back of her mother’s neck to see if she
notices, if she feels it too, to see if her mother can be touched by a shimmering expanse of sea. Her mother who hid under onions for four days in a train car to Ohio. Who met her husband in a city built over a swamp, cracked sidewalks, train whistles, slushy winter. Her mother who made a home, who never left it. Who must be boiling at the sight of unbounded water. Dorotea sees no sign that it is so.

Harpswell. Dorotea stands in the doorway of the rented house. This threshold of paradise. The sea a misty backdrop behind soft-rustling pines and coils of blackberry bush.

Her father stands in the tiny kitchen among shell ornaments hanging by strings from cabinet knobs, faded bottles on the windowsill, pushes up his glasses, opens and closes his fists. As if he expected to find shipbuilding manuals, polished brass, portholes. As if he hadn’t figured on this part of it: this kitchen with clamshells on the cabinets. Her mother stands in the living room like a bolt balanced on end. Stares down at boxes, bags and suitcases unloaded from the truck. Hair yarded into a big knot.

Dorotea stretches her arms, stands on her toes. She takes off her brown cardigan. Gulls screech in a wheel just past the pines, an osprey-shadow glides.

Her mother says, Ponte el sueter, Dorotea. No estás en puesta al sol.

As if the sun here was a different sun altogether. Dorotea walks a sandy path through brown grass to the sea. The path ends at rock, rust-colored, crenellated, heaved up from the earth long ago. The rock stretches into a haze at both ends. Nothing else but ocean and wind-bent pines and morning fog. At the sea’s lip she watches tiny green waves flop onto a slick slope of rock, nudge forward a receding ribbon of foam. Come, retreat. Come, retreat.

She turns and glimpses the small white house through the
pine trunks. Heavy-headed dandelions, sandy yard, paint flaking. The house slumped and wet on its foundation. Her father talking in the doorway, pointing at her mother, at the truck, at the rented house. Arguing. Sees her father’s hands open, close. Sees her mother climb into the truck, slam the door, sit in the passenger’s seat and stare straight ahead. Her father retreats into the house.

Dorotea turns back, shades her eyes, sees the mist breaking. To her left, a gliding green current, a river mouth. To the right, trees lining the sea edge. Five hundred yards or so down the coast she sees a rocky point.

She walks to it; her sneakers bend to steep rock. Occasionally she has to step into the sea, water eddying around her knees, cold salt stinging thighs. Sea mud sliding underfoot. A rag of mist descends and she loses sight of the point. In a place the rock is steep and she wades to get around it. The water rises above her waist, shocks her belly. Finally the rock climbs back on an upslope, her feet dig in, and she climbs up, mud in her fingers and salt drying already on her skin, legs lifting her dripping out onto the shelf of rock. The point still half-obscured in mist.

She shades her eyes, again takes in the ocean. Are there dolphins out there? Sharks? Sailboats? She sees no sign of them. Of anything. Is ocean merely rock and weed and water? Mud? She had not expected emptiness, flittery light, a blotted horizon. Waves march in from some obscure haze. For a terrifying moment she can imagine herself the only organism on the planet. And she is about to go back.

Then she sees the fisherman. Just to her left. Wading. As if he came from nowhere. From nothing. From the sea itself.

She watches him. Feels lucky to watch. The world peeled back and left with only this vision. This silent flying wizardry. The rod seems an extension of his arm, an extra and perfect appendage, his shoulder pivoting, his bare brown chest, his legs tapering to calves buried in the sea. So this is Maine, this is how it can be, she thinks. This fisherman. This grace.

He rears back with his fishing rod and swings his line in great unrolling loops, far behind, then far in front. When the line unfurls so it is horizontal with the sea, he brings his rod tip back, and the line shoots in the opposite direction, over the rocks, almost to the trees, as if it surely must wrap around some low branch, but before it can the fisherman flings it forward again, out over the sea. Then slings it back. Each subsequent cast longer, more desperately close to the trees. Finally, when it seems his back cast is yards into the scrub, he shoots the line straight out, over the wave tops, into the sea. Then he wedges the butt end of his pole in his armpit and strips in the line with both hands. Then casts again, those hypnotic loops of line swinging back and forth like the wave-break itself and finally shooting out over the sea where it settles across the tiny swell. And strips it in again.

She stands on the rock, feels the packed rows of fossil beneath her feet. Holds her breath. Counts to twenty. And then splashes from her shelf of rock into the sea, her sneakers again on barnacle and slippery weed. She walks a hundred yards, head up. Toward the fisherman.

Turns out he’s a boy, sixteen maybe. Skin like calf leather. A string of small white shells on his throat. Looks at her through brick-colored hair. Eyes like green medicine.

He says, Funny to be wearing a sweater on a morning like this.

What?

Warm for a sweater.

He casts again. She watches the line, watches him feed it into the cast from the neat coils floating around his ankles. Watches the line swing back and forth and back and forth and finally shoot into the sea. He strips it in, says, Tide’s turned. Be coming in soon.

Dorotea nods, not sure what this information means.

She asks, What kind of fishing pole is that? I’ve never seen a pole like that.

Pole? Poles are for bait fishermen. This is a rod. A fly rod.

You don’t fish with bait?

Bait, he says. No . . . Never bait. Bait makes it easy.

Makes what easy?

The fisherboy hauls in his line, casts again. This. Casting to fish. A’course a striper or a blue will bite on a hunk of squid. A’course a mackerel will take a bloodworm. What’s that? It’s a game with the rules removed. No elegance.

Elegance. Dorotea considers this. Had no idea that elegance had something to do with fishing. But watch him cast! See the mist tear away from the pines.

The boy continues, Bait fishermen toss a herring out there, move it around a bit. Drag in a striper. That’s not fishing. That’s criminal.

Oh. Dorotea struggles to understand the coarseness of bait-fishing.

He hauls in his line, pinches the leader. Holds the fly in front of Dorotea. White hair tied with neat wraps of thread to a steel hook. A tiny painted wooden head. Two round eyes.

Is that a lure?

A streamer. Bucktail streamer. That white hair there’s dyed buck’s tail.

Dorotea holds the fly gently in her palm. The neck wrapped with perfect tiny wraps. Did you paint this? The eyes?

Sure. Tied the whole thing. He reaches in his pocket, removes a paper bag. Pours its contents onto her palm. Dorotea sees three more flies, yellow, blue, brown. Imagines how they must look in the water, to a fish. Long and thin. Like little fish. Like a snack. Perfect. Marvelous. Soft beauty lashed to sharp steel.

He is casting again, splashing down the coast.

Dorotea follows. The water higher on her shins than before.

Wait, she says. Your hooks. Your streamers.

You keep them, he says. I’ll tie more.

She refuses. But does not take her eyes from them.

He casts. Sure, he says. A gift.

She shakes her head but puts them in her pocket. The wave-break laps her knees. She studies the sea, looks for signs of sealife. Fins bending? Sea creatures leaping? She sees only the sun laying gold coins across the waves, the ever-retreating fog. When she looks up the fisherboy has nearly rounded the point. She splashes after. Watches him cast. The waves sough as they collapse.

Hey, she says, there’s fish out there, right? Or you wouldn’t be fishing.

The boy smiles. Sure. It’s the ocean.

Somehow, I thought there would be more. More stuff in the ocean. More fish. Where I’m from there’s nothing and I hoped that maybe here there would be and I thought there was but now it just seems huge and empty.

The boy turns to look at her. Laughs. Lets his line drop, bends and reaches into the water at his feet. Digs into the mud, brings up a fistful.

Look here, he says.

In the dark clump Dorotea sees nothing at first. Mud clots dripping. Shell fragments. Water droplets. Then she notices microscopic movement, translucent flecks squirming. Hopping like fleas. The boy shakes his hand. A tiny clam appears on his palm, its foot half-clamped in the shell like a bitten tongue. Also a snail clinging upside-down, its minute unicorn horn shell pointing at the earth. And a tiny translucent crab. Some kind of eel squirming.

Dorotea pokes the mud with her finger. The boy laughs again, washes his hand in the sea.

He casts. Says, You haven’t been here before.

No. She looks out at the sea. Thinks of all the creatures that must be under her feet. Thinks how much she has to learn. Looks at the boy. Asks his name.

After dark Dorotea stands in her tiny new room and looks around. She tacks a map to the wall. Sits on her sleeping bag and traces the state of Maine with her eye. The land with its borders and capitals and names. Her eye is drawn continually back to the blue that stretches into the fringes.

A moth hurls itself at her window. In the trees outside insects rasp and scream. Dorotea thinks she can hear the sea. She pulls the bucktail streamers from her pocket to admire them.

Her father stands in the doorway, knocks softly on the door frame, says hey, sits on the floor beside her. He looks caved in by sleeplessness. His back and shoulders are round.

Hi, Daddy.

What do you think?

It’s so new, Daddy. It’ll take some time. To get used to it.

She doesn’t talk to me.

She hardly ever talks to anybody. That’s her way.

Her father slumps. Gestures with his chin towards the streamers in Dorotea’s hand. What are those?

Flies. For fishing. Streamers.

Oh. He does not bother to conceal that he is elsewhere.

I want to fly-fish, Daddy. Can I tomorrow?

Her father’s hands open and close. His eyes are open but not seeing. Sure, Dorotea. You can go fishing. Fishing. Claro que sí.

The door closes behind him. Dorotea holds her breath. Counts to twenty. Hears her dad inhaling slowly in the other room. As if each breath taken summons barely enough courage to take the next.

She pulls on her brown cardigan, slides open her window and climbs out. She stands in the wet yard. Exhales. The galaxy wheels above the pines.

The bonfire is in a grove near the point. The wind is clean, the grass drowned with dew. Clouds slide in ranks below the stars. Her sneakers are soaked. Forest mulch clings to her cardigan. She crouches in pine needles outside the circle of firelight, sees dark figures shifting, their warped shadows thrown up into the pines. They sit on logs, stumps. They laugh. She hears the clink of bottles.

She sees the boy among them, sitting on a log. His smile orange in the firelight. His necklace white. He laughs, tips back a bottle. She holds her breath a long time, almost a minute. She stands, turns to go, steps on a stick and it snaps.

The laughter fades. She does not move.

Hey, the boy says. Dorothy?

Dorotea turns from the shadows, steps out into the firelight, walks with her head down, sits next to the boy.

Dorothy. Everybody, this is Dorothy.

The firelit faces look at her, look away. Conversation starts up again.

Knew you’d come, the boy says.

Did you.

Sure I did.

How did you know?

Just knew. Felt it. Like I told you, we have these fires every night, just about. I said to myself, you just wait. The girl will come. Dorothy will come. And here you are.