The Starboard Sea: A Novel (24 page)

Thought she might call out my name and rush toward me. I wanted to believe that Aidan had told her mother about us. As she approached, I could smell the clove blowing off her cigarette. Her hands ablaze with rings. Aquamarine and amethyst stones the size of a child’s fist. She came closer and I could smell her perfume. Patchouli. Not the musky toilet water hippies bought at head shops. Her cologne was sultry and fresh. She smelled like California before everyone went west. When California was just an idea, just the ocean carrying its breath over land. I wanted her to take me wherever she was going.

I wasn’t sure if the man pushing the dolly was a driver or something more, a bodyguard or boyfriend. He popped open the trunk and didn’t see me as I approached Aidan’s mother and introduced myself.

“I was your daughter’s friend,” I said, my voice hoarse.

Aidan’s mother put her cigarette up to her lips. She inhaled, holding the smoke down deep in her chest, then exhaling with purpose. “Glad to hear my daughter had a friend.”

While the driver packed the trunk, we sat together in the back of the Town Car sinking into the plush seats. I wasn’t sure where to begin, what to say about Aidan, how to raise my suspicions. I couldn’t imagine the pain of losing a child. Of no longer being a mother.

“Are you young for a teacher or old for a student?” she asked. I smiled. “Student.”
She held out a box of Djarum cigarettes and told me to call her

Marieke.
“Marieke,” I said. “That’s pretty. I’ve never heard that before.” “It means star of the sea.” She lit my cigarette. “But it’s really just a

fancy way of saying Marie. Aidan used to make fun of all the kids here and their silly East Coast names. Tizzey and Dizzey.” Marieke reached over to the front seat and with one hand dug into an enormous leather purse. She immediately located what she was looking for and slipped either a mint or a pill into her mouth.

I took a long drag on the cigarette, the clove oil like candy on my lips. For a moment, I thought that if I made my eyelids heavy, my sight blurry, I could convince myself that it was Aidan and not her mother I was sitting beside. That Aidan had been returned to me. I wanted to tell Marieke that I was sorry for her loss that I missed her daughter. Instead, I just kept smoking.

Marieke opened the window, flicking ashes, straightening her rings. I let the cigarette burn between my fingers. When Aidan first told me about her mom, I’d imagined meeting her in Malibu, quizzing her about Jerry Garcia and Jane Fonda. This was not the happy occasion I’d hoped for. I kept thinking about the film Marieke had produced. A story about an old man and his cat. I’d never seen the movie, but Aidan had warned me that if I ever met her mother, I needed to tell her how much I loved it. “It’s an ego thing,” she said. “Tell her it made you cry.”

I feared that anything I said about Aidan would bore or annoy Marieke, afraid that at any moment she might finish smoking and be done with me. I was about to bring up Race’s party when she stuck her head out the window and summoned the driver, then turned to me and asked, “Can you show me where they found her?”

We drove to the beach. Marieke had dozens of silver bangles on her wrists, the bracelets crashing against one another like cymbals. I kept thinking of the cat, not the one in Marieke’s film but the one in Aesop’s fable, the one the mice gave the bell to so they’d always hear her coming.

Aidan had said that when her mother was a young girl, she’d used her inheritance to finance her freedom, running away from home, flirting with young musicians and old movie stars. Positioning herself as muse, starlet, businesswoman. “She’s not a bad mother, she’s just not interested in mothering. When she’s in a room, there’s not enough air for anyone else.”

The car windows were tinted brown. They turned the sky to smog, the sand to dirt, the ocean to mud. When we parked at the beach, Marieke leaned forward and asked the driver, “Is this what you thought it would look like?”

He said, “Ma’am, I didn’t make a clear picture.”
“I think it’s rather ordinary.” Marieke unzipped her tall purple suede boots and slipped out her feet. I wasn’t used to noticing things like nail polish, but Marieke’s toes were painted a familiar cobalt blue. From her purse she removed a small cloth bag with a drawstring and said, “Show me what my daughter saw in this place.”
There wasn’t much to see. The yachts were gone. The sea grass matted down. The low tide had left behind pockets of brackish water. Dried beds of seaweed made the beach seem shabby, unkempt. I walked Marieke down to the sandbar, pointed to the groin of rocks. “That’s where she was standing the first time we met.” I paused, then asked, “Did she ever mention me when you two spoke?”
“Hard to say.” The winds swirled around Marieke, her dress rippling against her body. I could see how thin she was. She had a flat chest, the buds of her nipples pushing against the silk. Marieke held up her hand and pointed to one of her rings. “Aidan gave me this little gem.” A large green stone towered over her index finger. “We were watching the surfers climb the waves along Dana Point. Aidan found this piece of beach glass. She must have been ten years old. I had it made into a ring. See how the light shines through.” She held the ring up for me to see.
The green stone glowed warmly from within, emitting a strong yellow nimbus of light.
I said, “Aidan was like a light meter. She could mea sure whether a person gave off light or took light. Your daughter was incredible.”
“We all take more light than we give.” Marieke asked if I wouldn’t mind putting some sand in her little cloth bag. “I’m making a reliquary.”
I didn’t know what that word meant, but I squatted down and sprinkled dry sand into the tiny sack, slipped in a pair of shiny yellow shells, jingle shells, Cal called them, inside before handing the bag back to Marieke.
“I’m not going to blame myself,” Marieke said. “Mothers are always blamed when their children are hurt.”
I tucked my hands into my jeans pockets.
“It’s her father’s fault,” Marieke said. “I could never kill myself.”
Without meaning to, I’d stumbled on to something. Marieke reached out and brushed a few stray hairs off my forehead. “What’s your name again?”
“Jason.”
“Jason, you’ll have to forgive me. I’m feeling terribly lost. My therapist says I’m creating my own stages of grief.”
Her perfect hair blew across her face. She reached up, gathering her curls together, tying them into a knot. Her bracelets chiming in the wind. An airplane flew overhead. Across the water, boats were being salvaged, ships were being built, money was being made.
“I really don’t think it was a suicide,” I said. “An accident maybe. But I think these boys, the ones with the silly names, they might have done something. There was a party and I don’t know what I happened but I can imagine—”
Marieke shook her head and interrupted. “Until this morning, I was willing to believe anything. But your headmaster, he gave me the letter they found. I wish he hadn’t. Now I know it wasn’t an accident. Aidan wanted this. You have no idea how sick this whole thing makes me.” She turned her back to me for a moment. Her body shivered. “I forgot how cold it gets,” she said. “I thought my daughter would be safe here. Why did I think she’d be safe?”
Marieke twisted the ring off her finger. She held up the green glass to the light, showed me how the ocean had smoothed the surface, how a single bump in the glass looked like a wave. Then she knelt down onto the beach, her dress blooming around her. “I imagined setting up a memorial out here. Maybe making a cross out of driftwood. That seems foolish now.” With her manicured hands she dug deep into the wet sand, scooping out piles of pebbles. When she finished digging, she dropped the ring down into the hole. She said something, a prayer maybe, performing her grief.
A hermit crab sidestepped around the gully. Marieke picked up the crab, its red body retracting inside its small brown house of a shell. She poked her finger into the opening where the crab had disappeared, and when the crab didn’t pop back out, she dropped it down the hole. Marieke cast a handful of sand down after the crab. She buried the ring and the crab together. Like a child collapsing a sand castle, she patted down the wet beach. “There,” she said. “Enough.”
The letter complicated matters, but it didn’t change the fact that Aidan had been at Race’s. I tried to imagine what was in Aidan’s note, what turn of phrase had convinced Marieke that her daughter had taken her own life. More than anything, I wanted to read the letter, but that was not an intimacy I could demand. Driving back to Bellingham, I struggled over bringing up the party again. It seemed cruel to force the issue. Instead, I reassured Marieke that Aidan had been happy these last few weeks.
“Sometimes,” she said, “happiness is the boost people need.” Marieke jangled her bracelets. “My therapist doesn’t worry about her depressives until they begin to feel better. That’s precisely when they summon up the energy to walk into the ocean.”
I looked out the window. “When did you last speak with Aidan?” I asked. “How did she sound to you?”
Marieke had placed the tap shoes on the floor. She held up the blackand-white patent leather shoes and asked if Aidan had ever shown them to me. Then she leaned forward and showed the driver. He said, “Wow, Astaire had small feet.”
Marieke turned to me and asked, “Do you want them?”
I did. I wanted something of Aidan’s. Cal’s mother had promised to give me his watch. An old Breitling with an enormous face and a marine chronometer. The kind of timepiece a sailor could actually use to determine longitude for celestial navigation. Caroline had meant to give me the watch at Cal’s memorial ser vice, but I saw her wearing it around her own thin wrist. It was much too big. It looked like it actually hurt her wrist to wear it, but she claimed she couldn’t bring herself to let it go. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it’s a comfort to me.”
Marieke held up the tap shoes, offering them again. I said, “You don’t remember, do you? You don’t remember the last time you spoke with Aidan.”
“I know it was a few weeks ago.” She cleared her throat. “I just don’t remember anything my daughter said.” She held the tap shoes against her chest, then put them down between us.
“You shouldn’t give them away,” I said. “You’ll regret it.”
“They’re ghost shoes,” she said. “All they’ll do is haunt me.”
I left the tap shoes in the car, watched Marieke drive off behind tinted windows. She had a plane to catch, a life to return to. There were an infinite number of ways to mourn, and I figured that Marieke would try on as many as she could. For now she seemed resigned to her daughter’s death. Maybe Aidan really was her father’s daughter. Maybe she had inherited his fate.
Before Marieke left, she told me I was handsome. She held her hand up to my cheek and asked if I’d ever broken my nose. I told her it had been broken for me. “I bet you photograph well,” she said. “That broken nose of yours gives you character. Be sure to take care of it.”
“My nose?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “your character.”

I’d ditched my classes and failed to make it to the infirmary. I’d ridden in cars without permission, violated curfew, brazenly sneaked in and out of dorms, smoked countless cigarettes, imbibed all sorts of cheap liquor. Even for a school that catered to rule breakers, I’d broken an extreme number of rules. It wasn’t clear that anyone would be looking for me or that anyone even cared about the rules I’d broken, but I decided to turn myself in, to go to the headmaster and tell him that I was having problems. I also thought that maybe there was some small chance that if I mentioned my doubts about Aidan’s suicide, if I brought up Race’s party and, without saying anything specific about Leo, suggested that Aidan had been out on Powder Point during the storm, then maybe Windsor would feel the need to do something.

I hadn’t been inside the administrative offices since arriving at Bellingham. Tinks sat behind the reception desk barking into a red phone. A pair of eyeglasses balanced on the tip of her nose while another rested on the top of her head. I saw a third pair by the typewriter on her desk. Three different ways of seeing. In the background, two different phone lines were ringing and a small portable TV was turned on and flickering. Red banners flashed along the top and bottom of the screen as numbers scrolled by. A voice narrated film of a warship and images of oil platforms. Tinks nodded at me and held up two fingers, signaling for me to wait. I could hear the phones in Windsor’s and Warr’s offices ringing.
Tinks returned the phone to its cradle and it began to ring again. She flashed a quick smile. “You need help?”
I explained that I wanted to meet with the headmaster and she informed me that that wouldn’t be possible. “Why are you out of dress code?”

“I’m sick,” I said. “Caught that cholera Windsor warned us about.” “Quel tragedy.” Tinks clucked her tongue and switched the glasses on her nose with the ones on her head. The phone rang again and Tinks answered and asked the person on the other end to hold. “You’re Jason Prosper,” she said, as though informing me of some crucial unknown fact. “We’re going to need to speak with your father.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Crisis control,” she said.
“Does this have anything to do with Aidan?” I wondered if somehow the news of Race’s party had leaked, if Leo had gone to the police.

“Everything’s topsy-turvy. The stock market’s crashing. We bombed some oil platforms and might be going to war with Iran. The dean can meet with you in an hour or so. In the meantime, let’s try and get your dad on the phone. Maybe he can save us.”

I hardly ever called my father at work, but when I did his secretaries usually put me straight through. Every number I tried was busy, and when I finally reached a person, she told me that my father was unavailable. “I’m his son,” I said.

The voice on the other end said, “I’m sure he’ll call you back.” Tinks looked up from her desk. “Couldn’t reach him? Not as much pull as I thought.”

“This crash couldn’t come at a worse time.” Dean Warr ushered me into his office. “Our endowment’s going to take a hit. Have you spoken to your father yet? Will he come out of this with his shirt?”

“My father’s divorcing my mother. I think she gets to keep all his shirts.”
“Laughing to keep from crying,” Warr said. “We’re counting on your father for those dorms.”
This was the second time I’d been pawned off on the dean. I wasn’t qualified to talk about money. Riegel was right—I didn’t really care about wealth. I could afford not to. “I’m sure everything will work out,” I said, wondering just how bad this crash would turn out to be. If, at that moment, bankers were diving out of windows. “My father prides himself on weathering storms.”
Warr’s arms were small for his body, like a dinosaur’s, a T.rex. He waved them in front of himself, declaring their uselessness, then got up from his desk. “Well, be sure to have your dad call us when he has a minute.” Warr struck me on the back and began escorting me from his office.
We’d barely spoken, and already I was being shown the door.
“I wanted to talk to you about Aiden.”
He nodded his head. “Terrible business. The mother was here this morning. The headmaster and I did our best to comfort her. Poor child was a lost cause.”
“See, that’s the thing,” I said. “Aidan wasn’t a lost cause.”
Tinks came into the office with a stack of papers. She said, “The Dow dropped five hundred points, lost over twenty percent of its value. Tuition is due this week.” Tinks looked at me and said, “You’re still here?” She walked out without waiting for an answer.
Warr flipped through the papers Tinks had dropped on his desk. He half listened as I explained about the party, how I wasn’t there but how I knew that Aidan had been out at Powder Point. When I finished, Warr looked up and asked. “Anything else?”
“I just don’t think it was a suicide.”
“You were sweet on this girl.” Warr’s lip caught on his dry teeth. “I’m glad to hear things are going in that direction.”
It was a straight shot and I felt the blow.
“I’ll look into this party matter.” Warr nodded toward the door.
It was time to leave. “One last thing.” My pulse quickened. “The party was at Race Goodwyn’s house. I’m pretty sure your son was there.”
It was a ballsy move on my part, but I figured I could risk it. Warr didn’t need me, but he needed my father’s money. If the world had in fact come crashing down, if the stock market had fallen, if we were headed toward a war, I was happy to lead the charge. Happy to let it all crumble.
In Whitehall that night, Tazewell kept playing the same R.E.M. song over and over again. The lyrics carrying down the hallway and into my room. The voice resigned but sincere: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”