The Line Tender Read online

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Just hot.”

  We passed the little houses beyond the beach and turned onto King Street, then onto Smith. We coasted past our neighbors’ houses, dumped our bikes in my driveway, left Dad behind. We went into my house, took turns in the bathroom, and I poured a couple of glasses of water. Fred didn’t appear to be in any hurry to go home, so we went back outside and sat on the front stoop.

  “Sox play Detroit tonight,” Fred said.

  I nodded.

  “Maybe we can watch after dinner?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I want to enter the shark into the field guide,” he said. “Do you think it will still be there tomorrow?”

  “I bet it’ll be,” I said, though I had no idea. I wanted to reassure Fred, but I also didn’t want to go back to the wharf today. “Does my dad seem off to you?” I asked.

  Fred shrugged. “A little. He doesn’t like crowds.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s it.”

  I was about to suggest we head down to the wharf in the morning when I noticed my dad in my peripheral vision, naked in the side yard.

  “Oh God,” I whispered.

  Dad pulled his scuba suit off the clothesline and worked his feet through the ankle holes, pulling the black rubber skin up his legs like he was yanking on pantyhose, his backside to Mr. Patterson’s house. It was horrifying. There was Mr. Patterson on the porch, motionless in his rocking chair, police radio chirping beside him.

  “Dad,” I said, with my face in my hands.

  “What?” he said, with his suit now covering his lower half like he was dipped to the waist in tar. “I’m going to head down to Back Beach for a bit before dinner.”

  “You’re going in the water?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He was oblivious.

  Fred translated for me. “She means because of Sookie’s shark.”

  “Lucy, that shark was caught twenty miles off Rockport. And do you know what the chances are of being attacked?”

  “Yes. One in, like, millions.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’ll be okay,” Fred said. “But I wouldn’t do it. Not at dusk.”

  My dad rolled his eyes, gathered up his gear to drive a couple of blocks to the beach. While the wheels of his old Volvo wagon spit gravel down Smith Street, I wondered what would happen if Dad saw a great white while diving off Cape Ann. Because of the plankton and the cold, green waters, he might only be able to see twenty feet in front of him on an average day. If an eighteen-foot great white came into view, it would already be on him. If, for some chance, the shark swam out of sight, there would be no way of knowing how close it remained. It would be difficult for my dad to spot the position of his buoy in the murky water, and great whites attack their prey from beneath. I had to shake off the thought.

  I turned to Fred. My gut was churning. “Do you think that’s weird? I haven’t seen your dad naked before—anywhere.”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t live here anymore.”

  “You think I should apologize to Mr. Patterson?”

  “Only if you’re naked.”

  “How hard would it be for him to put his suit on in the house, or wear a bathing suit underneath?”

  “Not hard.”

  I picked at my rubber sole. Fred searched his pocket for his inhaler and took a puff.

  “You okay?” I asked, swiping my hand across his back.

  “Oh, crap,” he said, still sucking in. “There’s my mom.” He put the inhaler back into his pocket. “I’ll call you later,” he said.

  Maggie waved at me from her front steps and then she walked over. Maggie Kelly was tiny, but she walked with the thunder of a rhino. Even though she was a single mom with three kids, she still managed to keep an eye on me too.

  “Your face is red, Freddy. Have you been using your inhaler?”

  “Yes, Mom,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Bye,” I said, smiling up at Fred.

  Maggie escorted Fred into their house across the narrow street.

  After he left, I looked at my sneakers for a moment before calling out, “Hi, Mr. Patterson.”

  “Hello, Lucy.” The old man waved like the pope. “Your father has a hairy keister.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “I don’t like looking at it.”

  “No, sir.”

  4. Empty House

  Dad spent more time underwater than he spent on land. He was a scuba diver, both professionally and recreationally. If he wasn’t hauling people out of the water (dead or alive) with the rest of the Salem Police dive team, he was hunting our lobster dinner off the coastline near our house. It was typical for Dad to receive a call from the dive team outside his regular hours at the police station. Salem Police divers did double duty, working regular shifts as uniformed police officers or detectives, but also responding to emergency situations. It seemed like there had been more calls than usual that summer—people driving off bridges or swimming in dangerous waters. I didn’t like it when he was gone. When he was at the bottom of some harbor, the house felt empty. But he was always moving like a shark, swimming in order to breathe.

  That night, I learned later, some moron had driven his truck into Salem Harbor and that Dad was called to the accident scene to help fish him out. There was a mostly thawed block of chicken on the countertop that Dad might have cooked had he stayed home that evening. I didn’t know the first thing about transforming raw meat into dinner, so I sat at the kitchen table and leaned over a copy of the Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. Some of the recipes had my mom’s notes in the margin. It was always strange to see her handwriting, to see something that was so distinctly hers and that was still here.

  “Check at twenty-five minutes!” she wrote.

  “Can substitute with olive oil,” in another place.

  She had been gone five years. Most of the time, Dad and I were okay without Mom, even though I still thought about her every day. But my grief for her was like a circle. I always came around to missing her again. It could be a birthday that triggered the new cycle or something more unexpected, like finding something in a drawer that belonged to her.

  I started reading the recipe names in a whisper. “This one sounds simple. ‘Whole Chicken Baked in Salt. Lemon and ginger cooked in the cavity perfumes the bird.’”

  But the recipe called for four pounds of Kosher salt. Four pounds. I wondered how a chicken cooked in four pounds of salt was still edible. When I reached the part where the chicken cooks for two hours in a wok, I closed the book. We didn’t have a wok. Or four pounds of salt.

  I opened the fridge. The combination of old food and nothing made me lonely. I pulled out the garbage can from under the sink and started pitching—lettuce, both rusted and soggy; fourteen-day-old moo shu pork that looked deceptively edible; and peaches with skin like a mummy’s. There was half a Corningware dish of lasagna from last weekend. I imagined bacterial colonies beginning to creep up, so I used a knife to wiggle it out of the pan and let it flop into the garbage, which had just about reached its limit.

  I wiped the shelves with a wet rag. Now we were left with nothing—a half gallon of milk, a pitcher of Tang, some onions, and a door full of stuff in jars. I poured a glass of the orange drink, grabbed a short stack of stale saltines from the pantry, and walked into the den. I gotta learn how to cook.

  Through the open window I could hear the leaves rustling in frequent swirls of wind and Mr. Patterson listening to dueling radios on his porch—the Red Sox on WEEI and a police scanner. It was an odd and familiar sound—Joe Castiglione’s voice and the crack of the bat, layered with occasional farty blips and cryptic messages between cops and dispatchers. I didn’t hear anything from the dive team.

  Eventually I walked over to
the TV and flipped it on, taking a leisurely stroll through the channels on my way to the Sox game. And there was Sookie on Channel 7, wearing his mirrored sunglasses and speaking into the reporter’s microphone. I never saw people I knew on TV. I picked up the phone.

  “Turn on Channel Seven. Sookie’s on TV.”

  “Okay,” Fred said.

  I could see the wharf and the harbor behind Sookie.

  “Holy crap, it’s T Wharf.”

  “I’m getting there, I’m getting there,” he said.

  The camera panned to show the shark’s body in the near distance, hanging awkwardly from the winch. The shark would have looked powerful swimming in the ocean, but it seemed freakish hanging in a loop on the dock, bunched up in some places and stretched out in others. The reporter asked Sookie if he had ever seen a great white in all of his years of fishing off the Massachusetts coast, and Sookie said, “Nope. Only in the movies.”

  “There we are!” Fred yelled. “Over by the garbage cans.”

  I didn’t like seeing myself on TV. I looked way too tall, especially standing next to Fred. The reporter looked into the camera and launched into a brief history of great white sharks in the North Atlantic. Fred was getting agitated. I could hear him breathing into the receiver.

  “That’s wrong,” he said. “They can swim in subarctic water.”

  Then the news story cut to a section of old footage.

  And there she was. Talking to the camera while sitting on a boat, her hair blowing around, her face with freckles like mine.

  “Lucy. That’s your mom,” Fred said.

  “I know,” I said. Somewhere off camera, a man asked her a question.

  “Am I afraid? Being in the water with sharks?” She grinned. “No. You just have to remember that you are swimming in their home. You have to know how to behave when you are the guest.”

  “Seriously,” Fred said.

  “What would you like people to know about sharks?” asked the man off camera.

  She looked up at the sky for a moment. “I guess that there is so much we don’t know about them—where they go, or how many there are. And we fear what we don’t know. If we knew more about sharks, maybe we would be in a better position to help ensure their survival.”

  The boat kept rocking and my mother smiled at the camera. It was as though she were smiling at me. At me. I looked right into her eyes and it was like we were staring at each other. The fine lines around the outer corners of her eyes deepened as her smile grew. I shuddered. The phone slid from under my chin and hit the floor.

  I didn’t take my eyes off her.

  She sighed and kept looking at me. Then, too abruptly, the clip ended and we were suddenly back on T Wharf with Sookie and the newscaster. It took me a minute to realize that I had been talking to Fred. I wiped my face, bent down, and picked up the receiver.

  “Lucy?” said Fred.

  “Fred, what was that?” I asked, sniffling.

  “It was a clip from an interview with your mom.”

  “No, I know that. But where did it come from?”

  “I don’t know. Ask your dad.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Not really.”

  “Want me to come over?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

  The circle had begun again.

  5. The Storm

  I hung up the phone and turned off the TV, my scalp tingling like the static inside the blackened television. I felt as restless as the wind picking up in the trees. Seeing her on the screen was like being with her in a dream and wanting the dream to last for hours. I wondered where the interview had come from and if there was more footage. I wished I could remember her words exactly.

  I looked at a photo on the bookshelf and picked it up, holding it close. It was probably taken moments before a dissection. Mom was wearing white coveralls, like a painter, and a headlamp glowed like a star in the center of her forehead. In the dark, she knelt beside a giant shark that had spilled out of the ocean and beached itself in the sand. The shark’s teeth were as white as her miner’s light.

  Her face was four feet away from the shark’s open jaws and her expression was completely calm, as if she were posing for a family photo with Dad and me. This made sense, seeing that the shark was dead and, therefore, unable to raise its head and snap her in half. It was a safe time for collecting data. But that was the thing about my mom. She would have collected data four feet away from a live shark.

  There was something shiny in her pocket. I moved the photo closer to my face like an old lady reading a menu. The object looked like a silver pen, clipped to her pocket cuff. I wondered if it was a roller ball or a ballpoint (roller balls were smoother to draw with) and I wondered how she could use a pen if her hands were covered in fish guts. I wondered what she wrote and if she made sketches during the dissection. She wasn’t much of an artist. But I was.

  I dialed the phone.

  “Fred,” I said into the receiver. “Let’s work on the field guide.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I wanna sketch the shark,” I said.

  “At the wharf?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll meet you outside,” he said.

  I walked across the creaky floors to look out the window. In the light of the streetlamp, the leaves were bending upside down like it was going to rain. Mr. Patterson was on his porch, listening to the radios.

  In the kitchen, I scanned the counter for my house key. I stuffed a sketch pad into my backpack and walked across the street.

  “Any news about the shark?” I asked.

  “Police are keeping watch,” Mr. Patterson said.

  “What are they waiting for?” I asked.

  “Who knows? It’s positively gothic.”

  “Any news about Dad?”

  Mr. Patterson shook his head and pointed to the police scanner. “Still at the harbor.”

  Fred came out his front door.

  “Fred!” I yelled. “Over here.”

  Fred changed course and walked next door to Mr. Patterson’s.

  “The shark’s still there,” I said to Fred, zipping my pack.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  He nodded.

  Through the darkness, we rode our bikes into the wind down Beach Street, passing Front Beach and the old cemetery. The waves beat down on the sand louder at night, breaking even stronger than usual. At the Captain’s Bounty Motor Inn, there were no guests on the balconies. We rounded the bend onto Main Street, past the bookstore, and coasted down the hill. The temperature had dropped. I regretted not packing a sweatshirt.

  “It’s definitely gonna rain,” Fred said.

  “I’ll be quick,” I said.

  Our tires kicked up gravel that nicked my legs as we approached T Wharf. And right away, I saw the shark, still hanging over the water, like a torture victim. There was a Rockport Police squad car a stone’s throw from the shark. I rode up to the window and peeked inside.

  “Officer Parrelli!” I yelled. He was reading the newspaper by flashlight.

  “Lucy, what are you doing here? It’s late,” he said. “Hi, Fred.”

  “You mind if we have a look at the shark?” I said.

  “Go ahead. Then I’ll give you guys a ride home. Storm’s coming in.”

  I dropped the bike in the gravel and walked over to the shark. There was a tremendous fishy odor like a thousand tuna cans had been opened, and a sizable pool had formed on the ground below its mouth—blood, seawater, and mysterious shark fluids. Floodlights on the dock lit the corpse. I looked up at the shark’s face, if that’s what it was called.

  A few of its teeth jutted out in crooked directions. The shark�
��s mouthy expression and big black eyes looked human, as if it might strike up a conversation. Mind if I eat your dad?

  The shark was anything but human. It was gigantic. There was a long tail and fins. It breathed underwater. I wasn’t even sure it had bones.

  The longer I stared at the eye, the more I thought it was really blue. Scars marked the snout, but one scar stood out from the rest—the letter M, with loopy humps like cursive.

  Fred pointed to a small chunk missing from the dorsal fin.

  “What happened there?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said, pulling my backpack over my shoulder. “Fight?”

  I unzipped the bag and pulled out a pencil and the sketch pad.

  “Freaky, isn’t it?” Officer Parrelli said through the cruiser window.

  “Yup,” I said. “Sookie decide what he’s going to do with it yet?”

  “Tomorrow he’ll cut it down and dispose of it. I think he’s out celebrating tonight.”

  “Are you guarding it until then?” Fred asked.

  “Yup. The captain’s worried about weirdos trying to do something to it. But Sookie promised me a cooler full of lobsters if I sit here all night. You ready to go?”

  “No,” I said. “I just need a few minutes.”

  Fred crouched in front of me and I leaned into the sketch pad on his back.

  I drew the strange arc of the shark’s body in a single line like a big nose on the page, just for shape. I added the bands around the body and drew in the ropes that connected the shark to the winch, drawing the basic structure of the contorted shark to show how it was possible for something so large to be suspended in midair.

  “What is she doing?” Officer Parrelli asked.

  “Drawing the shark,” Fred yelled over his shoulder.

  “Why?”

  “She’s an artist,” said Fred.

  I smiled, filling in the fleshy bulges at the sides of the bands, and adding fins and teeth. I couldn’t be too precious with the details once Fred’s knees started shaking.

  “Just one more minute,” I said to him.

  “Okay,” he said.