North of Boston (2 page)

—

Now, at Taffy's, a restaurant on the corner, Noah squares off in front of a hamburger and fries. He gets his fingers around the bun, lifts it to his mouth, and takes an enormous bite. He chews like a lion, gulps it down. He admitted he was hungry when I asked. It's possible he's actually starving.

It's been three days since his father drowned. I have no idea how much he knows about the accident. The story was on the news in a slightly-more-than-sound-bite form. A picture of Ned's regular-guy mug hovered in a small box next to the news announcer's perfect cover-girl face, then expanded to fill the entire screen. When his face was in the box, he looked like a nice guy you knew in high school who forgot to comb his hair. When it bloomed to fill the screen, you could see the brown discolorations on the side of his face from years of being outside. His tea-green eyes looked bloodshot, wary, possibly dishonest. Or maybe he only looked that way because, on the news, everyone tends to look like a criminal. In any case, it would have felt drastically wrong to Noah to see his deceased father on a television screen.

“You want to know how it happened, Noah?”

“OK.” He's learned to be accommodating.

“It was a crash, like the kind on highways, only this one was on the ocean.”

“I
know
that already.” He dips a French fry in a little paper bucket of ketchup to show how uninteresting this is.

Of course. He knows everything about crashes; he's seen a million on TV. Sparks fly, buildings dissolve, cars burst into flame.
Ho-hum.

I take the paper place mat from under the plate my BLT is on and turn it over. With a pen borrowed from the waitress, I sketch the coastline from Cape Cod to Maine. I put in the islands in Boston Harbor and roughly shade in Georges Bank. “Your dad and I were here,” I say, pointing to a spot that correlates to about twenty-five miles northeast of Boston. “The fog came in thick. Your dad was in the wheelhouse. I was in the stern baiting lobster traps. It was really quiet. I couldn't even see the bow. The next thing I knew, something huge crashed into us. Huge, Noah. A freighter. It hit starboard, broadside. That means right in the middle of the boat. I bailed, and when I broke the surface and looked back, your dad's boat was in splinters and the freighter was passing by.”

“My dad swam away, like you did.”

“The Coast Guard looked for him for about five hours that day, until the sun went down, and then from daybreak to sunset the next day. They had two patrol boats, two helicopters, and a C-130 search plane. Almost twenty hours of searching, Noah. Some fishermen were out there, too—your dad's friends. A lot of people were involved. They searched an eight-mile radius from where I was found.”

“Cool,” he says. His eyes are vacant, as if he doesn't know what I'm saying is real.

“They didn't find him, Noah.”

“He got away like you did. He swam underwater.”

“He'd have to come up for air sometime.”

“Not if he went to Atlantis.”

“Atlantis is a made-up place.”

“No, it isn't.” He looks at me reproachfully.

I've babysat him since he was an infant. I'm his good fairy godmother, the one who plays games and willingly accompanies him on flights of fancy, who doesn't ever tell him to be sensible or brush his teeth. This is a new me he is seeing.

I wait.

Noah dips another fry in the ketchup. He draws it several times across the thin paper at the bottom of his hamburger basket, leaving reddish streaks. Maybe he's writing a hieroglyph, trying to communicate. If he is, I'm probably the only person left in the world who would try to decipher it.

“A monster killed my dad,” he says, attempting.

“He drowned, Noah,” I say gently. “He's gone.”

Fury knits his brows together, makes his tiny nostrils flare. “Why did that boat crash into him? Why didn't they look where they were going?” He's been told that a hundred times.
Be careful. Don't run. Watch what you're doing
. But he's already figured out that adults don't play by those rules.

“It was an accident, Noah. Collisions at sea happen more often than you'd think.” I could kick myself for making it sound mundane.

“Why didn't the people stop to look for him?”

“Good question,” I say, buying time.

I feel helpless to the point of despair. I don't want Noah to see my rage. If the captain had stopped the freighter immediately, as soon as he realized what had happened, he could have saved us both easily. But he didn't. He just kept going. He probably wanted to spare himself an official inquiry and whatever damage his reputation would suffer.

I can't say that to Noah. So I give the typical response. “The Coast Guard is looking into it. They're going to find the people on the boat and ask them that.”

He looks at me with the weary, perplexed eyes of a disappointed man. He knows I'm holding back.

“It's possible that the people on the ship didn't even know they hit us,” I say. “That freighter could have been five hundred feet, and I don't even know how many hundreds of tons. Double steel hull. Bridge about three stories up. And in fog like that, what's the point of looking out anyway? They rely on radar in that weather. But the ocean is big and they're not expecting anything, so if they see something small like your dad's lobster boat, they might think it's just sea clutter, like floating oil drums or garbage.”

Noah's lip is trembling. He's trying not to cry. His tears are so rare that the prospect of just one falling makes my whole body hurt.

But he gets himself together, gazes out the window. Across the street there's a lamp store, a Walgreens, and an Indian grocery. Down the street there's a park with a playground where he often went with his dad and where I've taken him, too. As a small child, he liked the swings but not the slide. On the swings he could keep an eye peeled for unusual occurrences; the slide was too disorienting.

I wonder what he's thinking. Maybe that the world is deeply unfair and dangerous, only he wouldn't have the words for that. Maybe he isn't thinking at all, just soaking it up. Cars, boats, fog. Drunken mothers, distant fathers. Crash. I wish now I hadn't said his dad's boat could have been mistaken for garbage.

I draw a vessel that looks like the
Molly Jones
. “There's something important I want you to know. Your dad probably could have jumped overboard and swum away, like I did. But if he'd done that, we both would have died because nobody would have known we were out there. So your dad stayed in the wheelhouse and called the Coast Guard.”

Noah is staring at me, and I'm having a hard time looking back.

“Your dad saved my life.”

Noah frowns. He picks up his hamburger slowly. “Did he want to marry you?”

“No. We were just friends.”

“Why?”

“Why were we friends?”

“Why didn't he want to marry you?”

“He just didn't. Marriage is a special thing. We were happy being friends.”

“How come my mom and dad didn't get married? Were they just friends?”

This one's tricky. I tell him they used to be more than friends, and then they became friends.

He puts what's left of his hamburger down, takes the bun off, peels a pickle out of its mustard-ketchup goo, and places it carefully on the wrapper. Without looking at me, he says, “If you and my dad got married, you'd be my stepmom.”

That's how I know how bad he's hurting; he's never said anything like this to me before. I take my time before I answer. “I'm not cut out for parenthood, Noah. But if I had to be someone's stepmom, I'd want to be yours.”

He looks into my eyes with as much trust as he can give to anyone, and I think three words I haven't used since my mother died.
I love you.
I would say them to him, but I'm afraid I haven't got what it takes to make good on the promise they imply.

Noah takes something out of the pocket of his jacket. It's a yellowish-white disk riddled with tiny veins and holes. Two inches in diameter, an inch thick, the edges smooth as glass.

“That's nice,” I say. “Where'd you get it?”

“My dad. He gave me other stuff, too.”

“Where'd he get it?”

“Off a whale.”

“Is that what he told you?” It looks vaguely like it could have come from an animal, but I've never seen a bone like that. My guess is it's some kind of rock. It's obviously been cut and appears to have been polished.

Noah leans forward and whispers, “My dad fought a whale once. He got in a little boat and followed it and killed it with a harpoon. The whale didn't die right away. It pulled my dad all over the world, but he hung on with all his might. The whale was bleeding the whole time and finally it bled to death, and my dad pulled it back to the ship. He stayed up all night cutting it into pieces, and he took some of its bones. See?” He waves the ivory disk. “A whalebone.” He gives it to me.

When Noah was a baby, he had enormous dark blue eyes. His lips would pucker in tiny exhaled kisses, as though he couldn't help sending the love that filled him into the world. We used to play a game together: We would sit face to face, he in a high chair, me in a kitchen chair. We would pass something—a rubber duck or ninja figure or some other little toy—back and forth for a long time while we smiled into each other's eyes. This reminds me of those times. Only when I try to return the disk, he pushes it right back to me.

Maybe the kind of hero I described—the kind who radios for help—isn't good enough. He needs one who wielded harpoons.

I turn the treasure slowly in my hand, inspecting it, respecting it. “Nice, Noah. Really nice.”

He grabs it and stuffs it in his jacket pocket, closes and buttons the flap, and looks around the restaurant at the people eating. Suddenly he's a restless kid again, perked up by a hamburger, secure in his right to believe stories that comfort him and to ignore facts he can't understand. There's still some time until he has to do homework, and he says, “Hey, Pirio, after this can we go to your place and play dominoes?”

I
t's Saturday morning, one week after the accident, and I'm sitting in a hushed television studio in Brighton. There's a live studio audience on the other side of the glaring stage lights—more than two hundred fans of the famed Jared Jehobeth, who occupies the club chair directly across from me. He appears completely relaxed. He shuffles his tie, apparently lost in thought, summoning his showtime personality from wherever he keeps it stored. A tiny table is on my left. I note that a glass of water has been thoughtfully provided, in case I choke.

This is one of the last places I ever thought I'd be. I hate television in general and morning shows in particular. So when the executive producer called me after reading the
Globe
's account of the incident and asked me to appear as a guest, I immediately declined.

Then I thought about it. No one had come forward to take responsibility for the collision. The more time that went by, the more likely it was that the freighter that sank the
Molly Jones
would get away. What if publicizing the story got a crew member to confess or to drop an anonymous tip? So I called the producer back.

Right now I'm doubting the wisdom of that choice. I sweep my hair off my neck and twist it loosely over my shoulder, which causes an assistant producer to materialize at my elbow, spritz, comb, and put my hair back just the way it was. Under the hot lights, the pancake makeup they slathered on me is already starting to slide off my face. I'm glad I refused the rest of the cosmetic camouflage they tried to persuade me to wear. A young producer in a T-shirt and jeans stands below the stage, holding up fingers, counting down the seconds until the red on-air light will flash.

Now the producer points his index finger silently, emphatically, at the two of us on the stage, and the on-air light blooms red in my peripheral vision. A rush of fear dizzies me. It's as if a scaffolding has been pulled away. I look down to discover that I am, in fact, wearing clothes—a red silk shirt, a short gray skirt over black tights and high black boots. Meanwhile, Jared Jehobeth has lit up like a neon bulb. He exudes such confidence and charm that even his nondescript brown suit looks dapper somehow. He welcomes his studio audience and television viewers to
Jared Jehobeth in the Morning
. The vaguely suggestive implications of the title do not make him blink. Instead, his eyes shine like innocent blue balloons, and his mop of brown hair and the pink powder blush they put on him make him look as trustworthy as a Franciscan friar. But he has a reputation for hard-hitting interviews—he has exposed the perpetrators of defective products to public scorn, made abusers and deadbeat dads break down and beg forgiveness from their families.

He explains that today he has a very special guest, a young lady of exceptional courage, who is here to tell an amazing tale that can barely be believed. This sounds so good that I forget for a moment he's talking about me.

“Turn off
Survivor
, folks; this is the real thing. After a collision at sea sank the fishing boat she was on, leaving the captain presumed drowned, this incredible young woman spent nearly four hours stranded in the North Atlantic in water temperatures of forty-two degrees before she was rescued. As far as we know, no one has ever done such a thing before, my friends. The longest the average person can expect to survive in such temperatures is one to two hours, max. She's an inspiring survivor, a medical marvel, and one very lucky young woman!” He turns to me, eyes glowing with generous admiration. “I thank you for coming, Pirio Kasparov. Now tell us what happened out there.”

My throat closes up. I feel like bolting off the stage. I look at him in silent, apologetic horror.

He slides a microexpression of intense irritation my way.

I tell the truth, knowing it sounds like a hedge. “I don't remember much, I'm afraid.”

Jared Jehobeth rears back in dramatic disbelief. “You swam clear of a sinking boat and spent hours paddling in icy water—still conscious when they found you, I was told. You must remember something!”

OK.
There's no way out but through.
I gather courage, concentrate, go back in time. Immediately, as if it had been waiting a few feet offstage for its cue, a vast wall of streaked gray water appears above me, hovers, arches, and begins to fall. I hold my breath instinctively. There's a horrible roar in my ears, and I feel such utter terror that I would willingly give my life to be released from it.

I must be blanching visibly, because Jared Jehobeth intervenes. “Go back to the moments just before the accident. What were you doing?”

“It felt like . . . well, first . . . I was standing in the stern. My friend, Ned Rizzo—”

“The man who died. A father of one, am I right?”

“Yes.” I trust Noah's not watching. He doesn't watch much TV, and
Jared Jehobeth
is not his kind of show, but I told Thomasina to keep him away from the television this morning anyway.

“I was baiting lobster traps. It was very foggy. From where I was standing, I could just make out Ned in the wheelhouse. He was wearing a yellow oilskin. Those things are so bright, you know?” I'm veering off into irrelevant details, anything to keep from plunging ahead.

Jared Jehobeth holds my gaze in a sort of visual headlock. His eyes are compassionate, imperious. When this interview is over, I'll never see him again. But for now he is like a best friend, of sorts.

“I stopped baiting when I saw blood oozing from the base of my right thumb. The hinges on the lobster traps are really sharp. I dropped an empty bucket over the stern rail, pulled up seawater, and dipped my hand inside to numb it and make the bleeding stop.” I hear myself speaking and am impressed. I sound so competent!

“You must have known that being immersed in water that temperature for even a short period of time was potentially fatal.” He is a genius, this man.

“I wasn't thinking about that.”

“But you knew.”

“Yes.”

Jared Jehobeth shoots a triumphant grin at the audience. He's going to make me a hero; that's what this is all about. I feel silly for not having seen it coming. And slightly awed. To think a person can be reinvented so easily and so falsely. All I did was jump out of a doomed boat to save myself. Then my body, all by itself, went into some kind of medically mysterious, rarely documented hibernation that somehow managed to preserve a minimum temperature in my critical organs until the Coast Guard arrived and hauled me out of the drink. I was a limp sack of bluish, water-saturated flesh when they found me. Nothing there I can take credit for, nothing I
want
credit for.

“I was feeling seasick, actually. I'm not an experienced fisherman. I didn't like being cold and wet.”

The audience titters affectionately. I'm just like them.

“Ned told me I'd get used to the motion eventually, but it was the smell I couldn't stand. All those diesel fumes mixed with the bait, which is basically just putrefied herring guts.”

The audience groans sympathetically.

“Anyway, I was pretty miserable, and the fog made it worse. I kept peering into it, trying to find the horizon line, but I could barely see the bow. Right before the, uh, collision, everything was quiet—too quiet. I noticed a huge black wall a few feet off the bow, sort of lurking there in the haze. At first it didn't seem to be moving. Then I realized it was sliding quickly along the starboard side. The next thing I knew the steel hull of a huge ship—so high I couldn't see the top—was crushing the gunwale about ten feet from where I stood.

“The deck started cracking under my feet. There was a horrible loud noise. The next thing I knew I was diving over the side. I don't remember being afraid. I was just thinking how unfair it was, that I was already miserable and now I would be soaked.”

“What else were you thinking?” Jared Jehobeth asks breathlessly.

I close my eyes and concentrate. “I was thinking . . .
Don't die, Ned.
”

“Ah.” He sits back, well pleased. “And then what happened?”

“You feel shocked when you hit water that cold. Every bit of you, shocked. Then you don't feel anything. I swam underwater for a while, surprised that my arms and legs could move.”

“What was it like under there?”

I almost smile. He wants a travel report, as though I'm just back from a foreign place. The world of Little Nemo, possibly. Or Planet of the Giant Squid.

But my story is rushing along, no time for questions. “I didn't gasp. My airways just closed up. My arms and legs were going like crazy—it was all instinctive. I used to swim in high school, and I still swim a couple of times a week at the Y. That probably helped me—I don't know. I saw a glow and figured it was the surface, so I went that way. Then I was in the air, gagging, trying to keep my head above water. Finally, I looked back.”

“What did you see?”

I ever so slightly shake my head. This part I won't say. It hurts too much. Yet, in my mind's eye, the scene is perfectly clear: the front half of the
Molly Jones
rolling away from the huge slicing ship like a severed head falling from a guillotine, listing, pausing, then sliding under the waves, faster than I would have thought possible, while the freighter glides soundlessly out of one fog cliff into another, a huge floating fortress of steel.

Ignoring Jared Jehobeth's drama-seeking eyes, I go on with the story. “A board bumped into me as I floated there. I grabbed it, slid one end between my legs, and lay along its length. Eventually the wake of the ship surged over me in huge swells. I'd be submerged, then come up again. That's when I was the most scared, I think.”

“Were you in pain?”

“No. Hypothermia doesn't hurt. You get groggy and just sort of . . . go to sleep.”

Jared Jehobeth lifts his tie, pats it down, and smiles. “Well, we certainly are glad you're with us today, Miss Kasparov. Now tell me how it felt when you realized that you were being rescued, that after everything you'd been through, you were going to be safe.”

“I wish I could answer that question, but I don't recall the actual rescue. They tell me I was conscious, but all I remember is waking up naked in a sleeping bag, curled in the strong arms of a very warm, very living man.”

“Ah, wonderful!” Jared Jehobeth says, brightening up and winking at the audience. “The exchange of bodily warmth is an accepted treatment for hypothermia. Were you surprised?”

“I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.”

The audience erupts in applause, and I swear Jared Jehobeth gives a nanosecond wink at me, too, recognition from one performer to another. I grin in spite of myself, not quite believing it. I'm acing this thing. It feels sickening and delirious.

“You were in fact on a Coast Guard helicopter, being transported to safety,” he explains. “That is truly an amazing tale. Thank you so much for sharing it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Pirio Kasparov, a true survivor!”

The audience resumes enthusiastic clapping. I can't see beyond the blazing lights, but I can feel their amassed approval flowing toward me. It's surprisingly nice.

Jared Jehobeth swirls in his chair to face the cameras. “Stay with us, folks. We'll be back on the other side of this short station break.”

The on-air light goes off. Jared Jehobeth deflates. He takes out a handkerchief, mops his brow. The assistant producer appears at my elbow and ushers me off the stage, back to the drab greenroom where the next guest, a diet guru, is being led in. She thanks me, hands me my coat.

“Is that it?” I say.

She smiles coolly. “Yes, you can go now.”

Minutes later, I'm in the parking lot, a light rain misting in my face. I feel a bit helium brained, a bit unreal. Cars on the Mass Pike scream on one side of me; monster industrial buildings loom on the other. I head back toward the city in my twelve-year-old Saab, wondering if anyone will call in with a tip.