The blister on his hand burned. He watched the boats chugging toward their moorings, all those little satellites, all those distant stars. He knew what she had meant. She was the sun and his father, the moon. And Danny had been caught between them, standing in their light, in the love they had for each other. At least they saw him. Even if it had just been a way to watch each other.
They were gone. Danny’s chest hurt, his stomach clenched. His breath went short and shallow. He pulled the heavy plastic bag from under his seat and set it between his feet. They were gone, and his siblings were basically missing in action, sucked into the battles of their own lives. Here, they were always about to leave. There were good moments, the first day or two were usually good. Here their rooms were still theirs. But then they drifted. First to their own rooms and then to boats and then ferries and then back to their own houses. Back in Archer Avenue Scarlet had turned their rooms into studies, guest rooms. Tom’s old room had become just a collection spot, an eddy in the stream of stuff that moved through the house. They had called it the Bird’s Nest. And then the house wasn’t even theirs anymore. Sold. Her little apartment was gone too. Now he had no room at all. One day this place would be taken and them with it. It was this thought that got Danny rowing the boat again. This and the package at his feet.
Danny sat in the Little Devil, hauling at the oars, letting the little bathtub-shaped boat follow the shoreline. He thought the squeak and clunk of the oars in their locks was saying, Big black hole, big black hole. The universe wasn’t expanding, it was imploding; it was going to crush them all to death, one by one. It was already happening. Everything sounded far away. He could’ve taken the Whaler, but he had never felt comfortable in it. Driving boats belonged to his siblings. Just another way the world kept him young. He was incapable of learning all those knots. He rounded Zeke’s Point. It was hard against the wind, still high, still early afternoon. So he stayed in close to the rocks. The plastic bag at his feet rustled in the wind. He found the cove he was looking for, long and thin with a small bridge at its far end. It was fringed at its apex with sea grass, the sharp kind that cuts your legs. There were wands of purple blooms deeper in the grass, where the land thickened and the sea was forced back. “I pine for lupine,” his mother used to say. Danny scraped his blister along the edge of the boat, ashamed that he had ever felt embarrassed by her. Maybe they were irises. He couldn’t tell. He was already forgetting.
He imagined her sitting in a creaking wicker chair among a diminutive forest of lupine. He wished there was a grave, a place to go, a place to plant lupine. Instead it was just the urn, his mother in a knickknack. The bridge, still in the distance, was flaking white, and here at the cove’s mouth he was out of the wind. Still a good roll of wake from a passing boat could send the Little Devil dancing, send it over. He imagined this bathtub boat turtled, claw-and-ball feet turned toward the sky. This was the place. He would give himself a place.
It was just far enough. They rarely ever came up this way. Usually Tom preferred to head out the thoroughfare past town or deeper into the island, not toward open ocean.
He liked imagining his mother looking out toward him. And then he didn’t. He hated imagining her face; he hated that he already struggled to see it in its entirety. He could remember her nose perfectly, the snaggle of an incisor, the mole on one ear making them looked pierced though they weren’t. But he couldn’t put those pieces together, except in dreams. There she was whole, and he hated that more. He hated waking up crying.
He had chosen this dinghy on purpose. He didn’t want to taint the house with one more death. He drew the oars into the boat and took the oarlocks out. They hung like empty bells from their strings, clunking the hull. Danny picked up the plastic bag; from that came the package wrapped in newspaper and twine, like a packed-up piece of fish. He had thought about the discovery, the cleanup, about what would be the least traumatic for the others. He thought about the bathtub in his parents’ bathroom. He figured if he did it when they were out on a walk, most of the blood would drain before they found him. But then the thought of another death in the house made him feel nauseous, and the Little Devil, another tublike thing, came to mind. And then he would be with them, sailing, swimming, rising, falling, rolling in waves and sun and sky. He would be a proton, no, a quark. So small, he would pass right out the other side of the black hole into a new compressed dimension. He would just be energy, raw and pure and immeasurable, hidden and everywhere.
Here in the cove, once done, the dinghy would inevitably dump him into the sea. Back to the sea and the lobsters and the ashes. His pockets were filled with rocks. Danny tightened his belt. Just one more bad thing in a boat. That was what his mother always said, “Bad news comes in boats.” He knew his father had left the summer he was conceived. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t some lobsterman’s baby. But he wasn’t natural enough on the water to be a seaman. Plus, he looked like Tom, like Tom after a long illness that weakened his bones and thinned his hair. Maybe that was it, he was a shadow of Tom, never meant to be born, a spirit that should’ve flown over his parents, not stopped and taken root. He was never supposed to have been on a boat.
Danny was living on a boat the day he found out his father died. He had been on Outward Bound for weeks, living on a sailboat, just a few hours from their house. One night, when he had to hang his ass over the side in front of the sleeping heads of the other kids, he thought, I am only three harbors away. Danny felt a constant pull to steal the boat in the middle of the night and sail past seals and gulls right to his own dock. He knew the way. The next morning the “captain” took him to the bow, put a hand on his shoulder, and told him there would be a boat to motor him home. “Because of your father.” Danny wondered if he had made it happen. Careful what you wish for.
The water moved with the wakes, the trees with the wind. Everything was reacting. The wind rubbed against the trees like a cat, nuzzling up branches and pressing leaves flat against each other. Danny watched the path of the wind wind through the branches. Perfect. And it would be gone soon, taken by fall, by cold and frost. Taken away by some fucking suit who saw investment potential and market growth. Real estate winter.