Either the Beginning or the End of the World

Copyright © 2015 by Terry Farish

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farish, Terry.

Either the beginning or the end of the world / by Terry Farish.

pages cm

Summary: Sofie, sixteen, lives alone with her father, a Scottish fisherman, on New Hampshire's coast and is not prepared for the return of her pregnant mother, a Cambodian immigrant, or for the forbidden relationship she has begun with a young Army medic back from Afghanistan.

ISBN 978-1-4677-7483-3 (lb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4677-8813-7 (EB pdf)

[1. Single-parent families—Fiction. 2. Fishing—Fiction. 3. Cambodian Americans—Fiction. 4. Racially mixed people—Fiction. 5. Veterans—Fiction. 6. Secrets—Fiction. 7. New Hampshire—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.F22713Eit 2015

[Fic]—dc23

2015001606

Manufactured in the United States of America
1—BP—7/15/15
eISBN: 978-1-46778-813-7 (pdf)
eISBN: 978-1-46778-974-5 (ePub)
eISBN: 978-1-46778-973-8 (mobi)

F
OR
T
Y

 

L
ULLABY

Ma sings to me, her long hair flowing.

I love her more than the dark loves dawn.

She was sixteen. She sang to me.

We climb above the water while she sings her baby song.

When the moon draws the water, Ma draws me too.

And she draws her small brother.

My family rides in the curve of the moon.

—Sofie Grear

FEBRUARY 28

Luke and I have plans like deer in winter have plans. The trees are bare. The moon is full. We could shelter in place. We could run.

The cabin looks out to the rocky Atlantic coast, and tonight you'd think the wind and the waves could wash the very boulders back into the sea.

I know Luke has barely seen his family since he came back from Afghanistan, where he served with the New Hampshire Army National Guard. I have seen his mother's texts. I saw a photo she sent of Luke's little sister in a white angel gown in front of a Christmas tree. The child has a gleeful gap-toothed grin, her little white-sleeved arms crossed over the gown's pink inlay, and curls spiraling from beneath her tiara. She holds a sign in crayon letters.
I made you pancakes do you remember me? mandy
Sometimes I can hear his mother crying out from her texts—
lucas, call us day or night
—and I feel sad for her.

“What if we go away from here?” I say. “From the ocean.” It's nearly midnight, but the wind gusting makes us vigilant. I look up from the edge of the bed, where I sit. Luke paces as if to ensure that he doesn't close his eyes.

He says, “That's most of the country.” I grin, but I begin to shake in the night chill of this bare winter rental. He stops. Kicks up the fire in the woodstove. Comes to me. Buttons my sweater against the cold. To take in each other's eyes would break us down. His hand pauses at my hip. I touch his dark hair. We are framed by the window covered in crystals of ice.

If I go, I would leave my father. I see him outlined as simply as a boat on the horizon beside a red ball of sun. My father always says he loves to go fishing to see the red ball of sun rise out of the water.

I get out my phone, and Luke and I check Google Maps for some of the places we've pretended we'd go. We sit cross-legged on his squealing bed. Our foreheads touch. We make up stories about us living here, together. We have a cupboard with cereal bowls and a drawer with spoons tucked in each other.

Wherever we are, I know he'll have the gun.

My shaking is so bad, my teeth tap against each other. I wrap the thin bedspread around us. My dog, Pilot, sleeps by the stove in a knot she's made of my coat, which she dragged there.

“What do you have against the ocean?” Luke says. His voice is tight but unrushed. I think we are both acutely aware of everything. A flicker of light from a buoy in the distance, when Pilot circles, drops down again. Is it like the talk before soldiers go on patrol? This is a part of him I try to imagine. “You're a fishing family,” he says. “I don't understand.”

We're just telling stories. Now I look at him.

I can't see the green of his eyes. His face is an outline. I need his voice to hold on to who he really is. But I feel his calm. He always says he's most steady in chaos. “My mother says I came out stillborn because of a curse from the Pol Pot time. But I took this big gasping breath, and all the Cambodian side of my family was there and they all breathed with me.”

My breath is shallow as I tell this. It aches to breathe.

“I don't trust the ocean,” I say. “It knows. It's beautiful and it calls me. It suspects I'm really a stillborn.”

Luke nods. I can make him out now. I cock my head to study his unflinching eyes. I thought this would make sense to him, since he talks to dead people he knew from the army. I touch his ribs beneath the thick yarn of his sweater. “Superstitious fisherman's kid.” I shrug, pushing my hair off my face. Then I sit still except for my tapping teeth and let the sound of the waves fill my body. He's lean like a wild dog. We should eat.

If I go, I'll leave my mother. Since I met Luke, I've remembered a song she sang to me when I was little. She sang about a rabbit in the moon, and I became the rabbit in my child imagination, and she became the moon. Later, when I didn't see her, I remembered her long hair, how I used to twist it in my hands as I made little words and pretended I could sing them in Khmer.

I love you more than the dark loves dawn.

You were sixteen. You sang to me.

We climb above the water while you sing your baby song.

“Couple a loonies,” Luke says over the banging in the wind of the loose cabin window.

“But you're used to me,” I say.

“Christ help me,” he says.

I say, “Me too.”

We are dangerous. We have warned each other about this. Part of him is stillborn too. “Some things you shouldn't know.” He often wishes this for me about what happened in his war. We've tried to protect each other since we met. But here we are together by the open sea.

PIRATES

When the January catch is slim in the Gulf of Maine and my father can't pay for even the fuel for the
Karma
, rumble begins about taking the boat down to Chincoteague.
Maybe in the spring,
he and some other fishermen begin to say.
When shrimping's done, maybe it's time to go to Chincoteague
. Virginia's a distance from New Hampshire, but there he can fish—groundfishing, for monkfish that have teeth like a shark.

It's just my father and me in our family. My mother has never lived with us, though I have a memory of living with her and my grandmother in a room with long windows in Lowell, Massachusetts.

This spring, if my father goes to Chincoteague, I know he will not take a sixteen-year-old, me, his only daughter. But we're a team. I hold bear-tight to winter.

As the cold encases our small house, among all the row houses by the river, I'm aware of the glitter on snow lit by the moon. I let my eyes follow up and search for the rabbit in the moon's lines and bumps. My father says no other fishermen do this, just us. Rabbit running. Rabbit stirring a pot with a long spoon. Rabbit with one ear up, one ear down. I'm usually aware of the moon like I'm usually aware of how much the birch trees bend, a way that I can judge the velocity of the wind. That's how I know if my father will go fishing, if the boat can handle in the sea. That's how I can predict his return.

No moon shines this January night. It starts to snow at dinnertime.

My father is on the phone while I chop a white onion and drop the bits to spit in hot oil.

Pilot thumps her tail on the wood floor like a drum, ever hopeful for scraps when I cook. My father holds the phone to his ear over the bandana he ties around his forehead and his shaggy hair. Whoever he called must not have answered.

“Sleep in,” he says into the phone. “We'll wait out the storm.”

I stir milk into the sizzling onion and chunks of fish and simmer our chowder. I'm suddenly aware that my finger is bare, no ring spins around. My tiger's eye. Somewhere, it slipped off.
Your only good taste in fashion
, my friend Rosa teases me about my ring, and it's from my dad.

We're not too big on fashion here. Dad says if I come at him sideways he'd miss me anyway. Boots, jeans tucked in. Year round. Keeps you ready. The ones at the Goodwill have creases and life. The rest of me is still unplanned. Rosa says I'm trending, though, a kind of fisherman–co-op–rat look. Snarled sweaters. Stocking caps over thick, wound-around hair.

Noticing my hand, though, I miss my ring something awful. I don't like me bare.

- - -

Snow falls faster. Hard snow. The outdoor spotlight shines on my father's tower of lobster traps. In twenty minutes the traps disappear under snow. Snow flies into the window glass, fast, heavy, and silent.

My father still wears his rubber knee-high boots, his plaid shirt—the cuffs rolled, showing the veins and muscles in his arms. I pull two bowls off the shelf and dig the ladle from among the spoons, beaters, scrapers in the drawer.

“Was that the new deckhand?”

My father had mentioned somebody who'd been crewing with him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Good crew.”

I scoop steaming chowder into our bowls. My father lowers his body into the chair. Curls of pale hair hang down from beneath his bandana and graze his long neck. I adore his face, pocked with scars from snapped lines and hard work on the sea.

My mother has black hair that her mother tied in a scarf when they lived in Cambodia. My eyes are my mother's. We have identical dark eyes, almost black. If people should see us, no one would miss that we're mother and child.

My father and I settle into the chowder. We eat with big spoons and break off hunks of biscuit to dunk in. He says, “I leave you on your own too much, Sofie.”