The Probability of Miracles (28 page)

“Lobster traps. Do you want to come?”

“Me? Kill lobsters?”

“Only the big ones,” Asher called. “The small ones you throw back. You can think of it as saving baby lobsters.”

“Well, when you put it that way,” Cam joked.

The boat, named the
Stevie
because Smitty had a thing for Stevie Nicks, was docked behind the lobster pound. It rocked and bounced and squeaked against its bumpers as the waves knocked it around. Inside it was a tangled mess of ropes—“lines,” Cam learned to call them—mesh traps, buckets and hooks, and knives and pulleys. Everything looked sharp and dangerous. Like a floating lobster torture chamber.

“I don't know about this,” said Cam.

“Come on. You just need to get outfitted. Here,” said Asher. He pulled a long wool hat with earflaps over her head and gave her some big rubber boots and huge orange gloves that looked like lobster claws. “Adorable,” he said.

“Ew. I don't want to be part of your fisherwoman fetish,” said Cam.

“Too late,” said Asher. “Get in.”

Before they could leave, though, Royal pulled up and maneuvered a different boat to the dock. He was with another robust Maine teen named Grey.

“You're late,” Grey said as he wound a line around a metal mooring. “We already took care of it, boss.”

“You did?” Asher asked.

“Ayuh,” said Royal.

Cam was impressed by how willingly these guys had left their boyhood at the dock and shouldered the responsibility of men. It was refreshing to meet people who actually worked. She would never meet this kind of person at Harvard, she thought. (Not that she was going there.) People who were still connected to the land, the sea, their community. People who felt responsible for something other than their grade point averages. She shed immediately her cutesy little refusal to eat lobsters and vowed to eat one as soon as they got back.

“Lucky us,” Asher said. “I guess this is just a pleasure cruise, then.”

“All dressed up and no place to go,” Cam said, holding up her orange-gloved hands.

“We can catch at least one for you,” Asher said.

“Can we eat it, too?”

“As you wish.” He winked.

Asher anchored the
Stevie
in the center of a tiny secluded cove of the bay, shielded from the world by steep gray rocks that enveloped them like a fortress. They rocked violently next to a buoy. Asher pulled it from the water, threaded the line through a complex pulley system, and began hauling. He pulled and pulled at the rope.

“Here, you get it the rest of the way.”

He handed the line to Cam, and she threw her whole weight into it like a little kid ringing church bells. The trap was heavy with the whole ocean on top of it. When it finally surfaced, Asher grabbed it, opened it up, and began picking out the seaweed. The sun glinted off of his sunglasses and the yellow highlights in his hair. The sight of him literally stopped Cam's breath for an instant. She would never admit that to anyone in a million years. Or the few weeks she had left.

Two lobsters faced each other in the trap, holding their big, awkward claws out as if delicately clasping teacups. “Here, you do the honors. Just grab them by their backs,” Asher said.

The first one she pulled out was infested with thousands of tiny black globules stuck to its belly.

“Ew!” Cam almost dropped it.

“Wait, those are eggs,” Asher said. “We have to throw her back.”

The next lobster's shell was the exact width and circumference of Homer's. Cam pulled it out tail first and flipped it over to check for eggs. It unfurled its tail and snapped it a few times, like a happy Labrador retriever whacking his tail on the floor.

“Easy, boy,” she said.

She turned him around to the side and noticed some seaweed wrapped around the joint of his pincer. She used the index finger of her gloved hand and wiped at the algae-covered thing on the lobster's arm.
F . . . R . . . E . . .

“Um, Asher,” she called. He was busy rebaiting the trap with a dead fish. “Asher! You're not going to believe this!”

“It's a lobster, Cam. I see hundreds of them every day.”

“Asher . . .” Homer snapped at her again, and Cam dropped him. He landed with a thud on the bottom of the boat.

“Did you get pinched?” Asher asked. She was silent as he bent down to pick him up.

“Homer?” he said.

“Is it possible?” Cam asked.

“And he's already found a lady. Way to go, Homz.”

“He can't seem to leave Promise.”

“I know the feeling. Here. Give him a kiss and we'll throw him back.” They lifted him to the sky once more, and they both yelled, “Freedom!” as Homer swirled through the air and then belly flopped back into the ocean.

Cam took a deep breath. The air had the cool clean-sheet feeling it had had on the day they first arrived in Promise. Asher put his arm around her waist and hooked his thumb into one of her belt loops as they stared out at the blue-gray cove that was Homer's new home. She felt the weight of Asher beside her and noticed a softening in her gut. An unfamiliar warmth inside her that she realized, slowly, was the feeling of contentment.

Cam shook her right hand, shocked that she'd touched Homer again. She remembered what Elaine had said about paying attention to coincidence. Was finding Homer a coincidence? Or was it a sign? Even if it was a sign, a sign of what? That she was on the right path? Path to where? Did it mean she was one step closer to life, or to death?

Cam looked out to sea and decided that it was a coincidence. But she was starting to pay attention.

CAM SUNNED HERSELF ON THE BOW WHILE ASHER COOKED IN THE TINY galley. The boat had rocked her almost to sleep. Each time she began to feel a little too much sun, a gentle breeze would stream right over her and cool her off. She could have stayed there forever, listening to the music of the gulls and the clanging of the masts of the sailboats in the harbor.

“What do you want to do?” Cam asked Asher when she finally joined him in the galley. He was sitting behind her now, his smooth biceps wrapped around her, trying to help her crack her first ever lobster claw.

“What do you mean, do?” His forearm brushed against hers as he worked on the claw, and all of her hair stood on end.

He pulled the white meat from the claw and fed it to her with his fingers dripping in drawn butter. “I mean, you can do anything. Go anywhere. Be anyone. What are you going to do with all that possibility?” She was in love with how capable Asher was. He could fix things. And he could pilot the boat and catch the lobster, cook it, and feed it to her. He was one of those people who could survive anywhere.

“I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I'll never leave. I'll be doing this forever, and that might be okay.” He kissed her neck.

“What about school?” If she could live a normal life, she would go to school forever. She loved school. The new notebooks, the pencils, the pens, the new shoes. The first day of school had always been her favorite holiday. She couldn't imagine giving that up.

“What about it?”

“Don't you want to go?”

“Sometimes it doesn't matter what you want.”

“You should go.” She turned around, straddled him, and pinned him down on the small cushion behind them.

“Who's going to make me?”

“I am,” she said, giving him a buttery kiss.

“Wait, what are
you
going to do in September?'

“Nothing. Probably. But I got into Harvard.”

“You brainiac. That's only three hours from here, you know.”

“Like you would visit me.”

“I might,” he joked, and he sat up and flipped her over so that he was on top of her on all fours. His golden five o'clock shadow was beginning to sprout, and Cam noticed for the first time the sexy, über-masculine cleft in his chin.

“
Ou te alofa ia te oe
,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“I'll tell you some other time.” She pulled him toward her by the collar of his T-shirt.

They were covered with the one grayish white sheet that happened to be on the boat, and it didn't seem very clean. Cam got up to get dressed.

“Come here,” he said after she had tugged on her sweatshirt. He hugged her and pulled her back down onto the couch-slash-bed-slash-dining-table of the boat's tiny cabin. The boat rocked back and forth, and the water lapped at the sides of it with little tongue-clicking sounds. Cam lay back with her head on his chest. Through the porthole she could see a seagull floating by, right at her eye level. Asher kissed the top of her ear and whispered, “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“What do you think?”

“Probably not.”

“I just recently began to acknowledge the concept of romantic love. I didn't really believe in it,” she told him.

“And you do now?” he asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Because of the sex?”

She smiled up at him. “No.”

“Because that was just sex,” he told her seriously.

“It was?”

“Ha! Campbell. I'm just kidding. Can't you tell it was more than that?” he asked, tickling her ribs. “The moment you walked into that lobster pound and asked to adopt a lobster, I was head over heels.”

“You were?” asked Cam. She lay on top of him, propped up on her elbows so she could see his face.

“I was.” They kissed again, playfully at first, then more romantically, until Cam found herself undressed all over again.

“I love you,” he told her when they were through. He hugged her and kissed the top of her head and said it into her hair again.

Cam had never really anticipated this moment. If she had had to guess what it would feel like, she'd have thought she would feel giddy, excited, joyful, flighty. But instead, she felt instantly grounded, as if she'd finally arrived home after a long journey.
Of course you do
, she wanted to say, because it all just so instantly made sense.

“
Ou te alofa ia te oe
,” she whispered again.

Cam got dressed once more and combed her fingers through her shiny, thick black hair. She climbed out of the cabin and sat cross-legged on the bow of the boat. She watched the sun setting as usual behind the lighthouse as Asher battened down the hatches or whatever it was he had to do to prepare for their ride home.

When she sat down, her mind started racing, and she began to Harvard seminar–ize this experience. If she could study the experience in a rousing informal discussion with Harvard freshmen, what would she call it? Male Adolescence and the New England Landscape, Lobstering Economics, The Psychology of Coincidence, Chaos and Contentment . . . Asher came to the top of the boat and sat her on his lap. The Chemistry of Young Love . . .