Either the Beginning or the End of the World (4 page)

Rosa takes the dog tags. Holds them in her palms. “You know what you're doing,” she says. “You always have.” She drops the tags back in my hand. She trusts me.

I want to say,
I do not know what I'm doing
. A chill travels through me. She draws her hands back.

I stand. I take in all the usual things at Kilim's.
Unattended children will be given espresso and a free puppy
. The sign's been there since I can remember. The smell of hot chocolate, the notes on the wall.
I'll give:
deep muscle massage For your: used fridge. Homemade Pies for Your Party. Deck Hand,
and a number, in jagged black letters,
Atlantic Co., Local broker buying fresh caught landings
.
Excellent Prices
.

I am sailing away.
Rosa, hold on to me
, I want to say. Rosa wraps herself with scarves. I zip myself in my father's red quilted jacket. I have always worn his jackets. Am I like my dog? Pilot makes a nest of my shirts and boots—my
boots
. I laugh when I try to picture her hauling my boot into a sunspot so she can sleep when I'm gone. She doesn't chew it, just rests her forehead in the curve of the leather.

“Rosa, wouldn't it be fun if we went to Chincoteague with my father? Do you want to come? Dad said they live on BBQ chicken and beer in the Motel 6. Or we can eat popcorn from the 7-Eleven. Sound good?”

“Outstanding,” she says. “And Mr. Murray.” We like our World Civ teacher. “What if we kidnap Mr. Murray? Do you think he'd mind? He'd be fun to have on a trip.”

I'm picturing all of us squeezing in at the Motel 6. “Our problems are solved,” I say. “Wait till I tell my father we're all coming.”

“I didn't have any problems until your dad had to leave,” Rosa says.

‘‘Except how to get hired at the Press Room to play a few songs.”

We decide we'll work on that when we get to Chincoteague. How to break into music in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

- - -

We walk out, and our silly fantasy makes me homesick for being on Chincoteague with Rosa and Mr. Murray, where none of us has ever been. Rosa doesn't mention this is the opposite of finding the soldier. If she had, I couldn't explain. We walk along Islington Street through a tunnel of snow, holding tight to each other's arms.

SECRETS

Under streetlights, a snowplow shapes a narrow crescent around the curve of our street in Atlantic Heights. In the woods between our rows of houses and the bridge, pine boughs bend down, laden with snow. I see no path to the river. No trace of anyone ever walking through the deep snow and into the woods. Where would the soldier have gone? I wonder where he sleeps.

I imagine the soldier with his yellow-green eyes weighted down with snow—like the trees—emerging from the woods. I want to keep talking with him, to tell him,
“My mother is coming to live with me, after all my life of forgetting she has me.”
I imagine his eyes and straight lips. He's listening to me. I imagine if I touched him. Just my palm. To his arm.
“My father says a girl needs to know her mother,”
I would tell him.
“But what does he know about girls? He just knows about everything else. He knows about fish.”

Just then my father's truck rattles around the curve. I stay busy, shoveling out the front doorway. His door squeals opens. Slams.

“You going to work?” he calls. “You need the truck?”

“Tomorrow and Friday,” I say. The reminder of the smell of pumpkin spice lattes at work makes me queasy.

My father begins to shovel the snow that all but buries the towers of traps, the porch steps, and the driveway. Pilot races to the top and bottom of the crescent path. I help dig out the driveway to make room for the truck, then I dig out the path and stone steps to the porch. Layer by layer I take off clothes as I work till I'm down to my sweaty shirt. I heave shovelfull by shovelfull, getting clammy with sweat, my arms gone weak. But this is better than making lattes at Dunkin' Donuts.

I wish I could race into the woods and on to the little beach on the river. But the path is snowed in, and we are snowed in.

My father fries up chicken and mashes potatoes, my favorite meal. While he cooks, I rekindle the fire in the woodstove. We don't talk. His shoulders round over the stove as he turns the chicken in the skillet. They seem to sag like an old man's shoulders. For a second I imagine him old in his plaid work shirt, bent over from the toll fishing takes on a body, like our friend Pete. He's got fingers permanently bent back, a big scar above his eye, knees that don't bend right so he shuffles. The image of my dad that way makes me wince.

My father and I thaw out our achy hands and feet at the woodstove. He serves up the chicken and substantial gravy over our potatoes with the skin. I save most of mine for the next meal. If he notices, that's not the fight he wants to fight. I don't find a space in the quiet to describe to him what happened below the 95 bridge. I pull away in my own secret place. This is new, our having secret places. I shut my eyes in the firelight, and I don't have to see his shoulders. My father says he's going out fishing at four a.m. Needs some sleep. “I'll drive all night,” he says. He is still tall, filling the frame of the door to his room.

“Me, too,” I say, letting Springsteen talk for us. It's a song about loving somebody so much you'd drive all night to bring them nothing but shoes, if shoes is what they want.

Alone by the fire, I remember last night, knowing now that Luke had been my father's deckhand. I remember the message my father left on the phone when the snow started.

I try to imagine the night of the storm for someone home from a war. The soldier's eyes said he didn't sleep. It had started to snow at dinnertime and did not stop.

My father had called him and the phone rang and rang, maybe six or seven rings.

Maybe Luke stood in the dark, not answering. Maybe the snow flew into his windows like it did at our house, at right angles into the glass.

He would have listened to my father's message, “Sleep in. We'll wait out the storm.”

WORLD CIV

Someone on snowshoes had made a path through the woods. The sea smell of low tide washes over me at the river. The rocks appear large on the beach, exposed by the tide. What if the soldier might jump down the rocky bank to the beach? I breathe in very slowly. Would he appear? Pilot scrambles across the stones, chasing a gull. I think of the dog's owner in a book I once read,
Cracker.
A soldier trained a dog to detect land mines in Vietnam. Once they even went on a rescue mission to Cambodia. I try to imagine the soldier and his dog—if they took a wrong step, the world could end.

The soldier doesn't come, not before I have to run back up the bank and through the white woods to go to school.

At 7:30 a.m., Mr. Murray will be at his desk. He's like a clock, and I like school with the steadiness of Mr. Murray. When Mr. Murray walks in, we settle in for the ride. World Civilization. He sits at his desk beside the blowup of a documentary photo my cross-country friend Daniel took. It's a tug, nearly fogbound, guiding a tanker in the dogleg of the Piscataqua River. On the facing wall is a map of the world as wide as the room without any borders to the countries, just rivers and mountains. Mr. Murray wears a blue shirt, white sneakers, khakis, and sturdy red suspenders with double hook straps. He glances up at the class almost sheepishly, his mouth lost in his white beard.

I almost laugh. He doesn't even know Rosa and I are taking him to the civilization of Chincoteague for the spring while my father wrestles the wolf and we eat BBQ at the Motel 6.

But my mind snaps back to the cold of the beam I might have walked on, balanced over the fast, outgoing water. The bridge, the blue-black river. The snow. The soldier.

“Would you join us, Miss Grear?” Mr. Murray says.

I look up, startled. I want to get him his coat right now and say hey, Mr. Murray, we're out of here. We're getting away from my mother and whatever fire is about to catch over the soldier—he is trouble and you know it—and head down to Chincoteague. With Rosa we'll howl and sing all the way, 533.4 miles by road my father says. But then I look out our window and think, Jesus, would the moon come, too?

I remember being on the edge of sleep as a little, little child riding with my mother in a car and seeing the moon keep pace, and hearing my mother singing, light and beautiful, about the rabbit in the moon.

I make myself sit in my hard desk chair and glance at Daniel, the photographer, and Taylor, whose black hair is teal blue today, and Binny, whose sister waits tables at the Friendly Toast. Mr. Murray hooks his thumbs under his suspenders and guides us back into the last century where I do not want to go.

HOLDING ON

After school on Friday, I wait down at the co-op for my father to steam in. I wait until the sun is bright pink and just threatening to sink beneath the end of the water. That's when I see the
Karma
come around the tip of Four-Tree Island. She's a steel-hulled boat, a shrimp dragging net rolled up on the steel spool at her stern,
her name in red on her black-painted hull. I watch her slow progress through a white mist. On the boat, my father seems like a god. Is Luke his crew today?

I watch till my father hurls up the line to tie up. I swallow my pride to meet him like I used to meet him in the old days, the day before yesterday. He leaps onto the pier. Despite the tension between us, I feel the rush of relief when he wraps his arms around me. The cold from his body crosses into mine. But I look past him to the crewman still on board.

“Mighty cold night for you,” he says, but he sees me looking on board, turns away, shakes his head. The crewman's face is buried in a hoodie and slicker. But I already know it's our old friend, Pete. “We got some work to do,” he says. Pete is hosing down the deck. The driver is here to drive the totes of shrimp to Gloucester. They work fast. Pete's hands work with a rhythm. He hooks each tote on the winch, the crane lifts, the green box swings and rises to the pier.

The pink sun descends. For a while it hangs between the towers of the lift bridge that spans the river, the bridge nearest the co-op and the opening to the sea.

“Count 'em, thirty-four totes,” my father calls up from the boat. I will write the number in the book at home. Thirty-four. A good enough trip.

“Can we go soon? Got work tonight,” I say. I think of forlorn Vincent, my manager at Dunkin' Donuts. He hates me being late. I always am.

My father says he'll drive us home, then come back to finish up. The wind cuts through me, and the sun descends without a trace into the river. I leap into the truck that's weighted with lines and buoys and thick with the smell of fish and gear. I love the smell. I miss my father and want us back. The way we were without a mother.

“Dad, you don't have to go to Chincoteague. We'll have more good days.”

I don't say my mother and grandmother won't have to move into our house.

He says, “Shrimping's almost done, and it just got started. I'm going.”

We clank round the turns in the rattly truck that might be colder inside than the bare outdoors. He downshifts, and the snowy night muffles the truck's complaining screams. At our house the stack of traps spills over the driveway. The truck's headlights catch the blue dinghy.

“Dad,” I say, “why don't we sell some of this at the winter market? Sell it ourselves.”

“Can't,” he says. “Don't have a permit.”

“We'd get more money. We could make a lot with thirty-four totes.”

“Like the way you think, boss. Maybe next year,” he says, then lets it drop.

His mind is someplace else. And I also think of the phone number at Kilim.

Atlantic Co. Local Broker. Good Prices.

We begin to unload the truck, and we stash a bucket of shrimp in a bin with ice. My father holds some back to give away or stock up in the freezer. “What if I take some to Atlantic? See what kind of deal we can get there?”

He shrugs. “Never saw them to support local fishermen. But you're the boss.”

The moon plays through the trunks of the trees. I race to open the door, and Pilot flies into the snow dust. That's when I see my mother's yellow Corolla slide up in front of our house.

YOU THE DAUGHTER

In winter I have seen my grandmother grow orange peppers in her bedroom, saving the seeds for next year's garden. I saw it when my father and I visited my mother one Christmas. He had said, “Come on, it's Christmas. You need to see her.”

I'd sat slumped in my mother's room, one that she rented with two other girls, all of them housekeepers at the Ashworth By the Sea near the strip at Hampton Beach. My grandmother slept there, too.

I was nine and sullen and dressed like a boy. That's what my grandmother said. I only remember I loved racing down to the river, filling bait bags with herring if my dad was hauling traps, stretching belly-down on the pier, calling out to the seals. How else was a kid going to dress?

That day, I was supposed to be at Rosa's, decorating little wreaths and reindeer cookies with sweet sugar glitter. Instead, I kept my distance from my grandmother, with her mean little eyes and sharp sour smells of cooking. My mother sprawled in a chair, her arms dangling over the sides. “Maid,” she said. “I never worked so hard in my life. You don't finish a room in thirty minutes, they say you aren't working.” Her eyes scrunch up. “Oh, my legs ache.” My grandmother wasn't listening. She was yelling at my mother, and I understood that she wanted my mother to go with her to Lowell, to their old apartment.

“These Cambodian girls in America,” my mother and grandmother had said. “They grow like giants.” They were looking at me, mussing my T-shirt, my baseball cap. My grandmother talked in English that didn't match, and sometimes she didn't bother with verbs. Mostly I remember my grandmother demanding, “You come. You the daughter.” I took my father's big, calloused hand to ward her off, terrified that she could make me. I would not take the cup of sticky rice that she tried to jam in my chest. But my father took it, and under his stern eyes, I ate.