“You okay?” he asked.
She shook her head. No. Yes. No. “Sure,” she said. “Just got a little dizzy.” Then it wasn’t her dad’s buoys making her dizzy, it was Russell’s proximity, his touch, the long-familiar weight of his fingers on her arm, all of it as unexpected and potentially devastating as the shock of an electric eel, because of the accompanying memories it brought up. Russell’s was the same body it had always been, long, lean, muscle piled on muscle layered over bone. Unselfconsciously strong. Different from Rob’s body. Russell had dark hair and dark eyes; Rob was fair with light eyes; it was almost like she’d sought out Russell’s opposite in every possible way.
Another life, she told herself again.
Russell made her sit down in the captain’s chair for a minute and drink some water from a bottle he pulled from his cooler. She squinted out at Charlie’s buoys bobbing in the water until she felt better and then together they hauled Charlie’s traps just the way they’d hauled Russell’s.
Eliza hesitated after they’d emptied the first trap.
“Whatcha doing?” asked Russell while she stood there dumbly, balancing the trap on the gunwale. “You waiting for a personal invitation to put some bait in that trap?”
“I thought we might pull them,” she muttered.
“Pull them? In July? You think Charlie would want us to pull his traps in July?”
“No, but.” The unspoken question was this: Is he ever going to get out here to haul these traps himself?
“Season’s just getting started. The best fishing’s still ahead of us. Rebait.”
She did what Russell said and he started the motor and moved the Legacy to another string.
“Geezum, these are full to bursting,” Russell said at the next string. “Unbelievable. I should leave my traps out that long, see what happens.” The lobsters were crawling all over each other, filling up most of the traps, and there was always a crab or two or a pregnant female or a lobster that was too big or too small, but you couldn’t argue with the fact that this was one hell of a catch. “Well,” said Russell. “Charlie Sargent did always know where to set his traps. I’ll give him that, the old bastard.”
Eliza nodded and swallowed hard and different parts of her wanted to scream, Touch me again, on the arm, anywhere! And then after thinking about it, Don’t get too close!
Did any part of Russell’s memory fire up with that touch on her arm? She couldn’t tell.
After they emptied each trap and measured each bunch, Russell put Charlie’s keepers into his backup holding tank to keep them separate from his own. Eliza knew he’d keep them separate when they got to the co-op to turn in the catch, too, and she knew he’d give Charlie what his lobsters had fetched and maybe even some on top of that, and he wouldn’t subtract for bait even though he was using double what he’d normally use by baiting double the number of traps for the day, because that’s how Russell was.
After that she let the motion and the physical work and the monotony take over her whole body. And although she was ravenous she wasn’t going to say anything until Russell did because it had occurred to her maybe an hour before that she hadn’t brought any food for herself. Rookie mistake. She’d starve before she’d admit to it!
She thought about the ladies of Barton, who were always trying to lose the last six pounds of baby weight or vacation weight or holiday weight. She would give them this, the Lobsterman’s Diet, hours of manual labor on an empty stomach under a punishing July sun.
Finally, finally, Russell cut the engine, reached again inside the cooler, and handed her a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Eliza was so hungry she almost ate the paper along with the sandwich.
“I don’t normally feed my sternman,” Russell said. “But I made an exception for you.”
“Take it out of my pay,” she said, unwrapping the sandwich.
“Ham and cheese,” he said. “Just for you, Liza.”
“Like hell it is,” she said, trying not to let her heart jump at the way he said her name. Lobstermen didn’t allow pig of any kind on their boats; it was a long-held superstition. She peered inside the bread. Turkey.
Here was Eliza Sargent Barnes, eating bread (white bread!) and lunch meat. She was inadequately sunscreened, and she smelled like herring, but despite all of that (or because of it) she was about as content as she remembered being in a long time. She wasn’t thinking about her dad’s tumor, or how the family would manage without her if she stayed up here longer, or about Rob and Cabot Lodge, or about whether Judith had served Zoe a cocktail yet. Or about Phineas Tarbox. The sun was high in the sky and it was glancing off the water and there wasn’t a hint of fog around: it was that rare perfect day, the kind of day they made postcards out of, the kind of day tourists who had never worked on the water imagined every day was like when they said things like, “I think when I retire I’ll buy myself a nice little lobster boat.”
While they ate, Russell said, “Charlie might have to hire you to take his boat out when things pick up, until his arm is better.”
She appreciated the fact that Russell was pretending Charlie’s main problem was in his arm.
“Right,” she said. “I’m sure I’d be his first call.”
“You’re doing okay, Eliza, you’re doing okay after all. Don’t sell yourself short.” She smiled and took another bite of her sandwich. If Russell had pulled a vat of Kool-Aid and a bag of Doritos and a box of ultra-hydrogenated packaged donuts out of the cooler she would have been happy to eat those too. Russell said, “I figure another hour or so and we’ll be done, you okay with that?”
Russell had been consulting his equipment, checking the weather, listening in on the VHF all along. Occasionally he chimed in, ribbing one of the guys, making a comment about the catch or the weather.
“Sure,” said Eliza. She wasn’t sure if she could make it another hour but she also wasn’t sure she wanted to stop. “An hour sounds good.”
After lunch they hauled another of her dad’s strings and then a few more after that, and when it was time to start up and head back to the harbor Russell moved the gear and nothing happened; the boat didn’t move.
Russell said, “Shit,” under his breath.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Why aren’t we moving?”
She could see a muscle tightening in Russell’s neck, and there was a certain look on his face. She knew that look—her dad took on the same look every so often: when his aftercooler got clogged up and he had to run the boat dirty; if the heat exchanger went; if he had to come up with a few grand to take the Joanie B to the machine shop and pay a mechanic to take the engine apart. Boat repairs could ruin your season.
“Russell? What’s going on?”
Russell moved the bait box that sat over the hatch. He opened the hatch, then climbed down. She peered into the hatch and saw that he was pouring from an oil can into the reverse gear.