I turned it upside down and ran my fingers along the edges, settling on the two creases on one edge where it looked like the bottom panel might slide out. They were narrow slots, too small for even a fingernail. The dental floss container sat on the counter next to my toothbrush, and I pulled a length out long enough for me to slide it between the two cracks. I gathered the two ends in one hand and held the box with the other, and gave a sharp tug. The panel pulled loose, and a strip of white plastic sat inside. The rest of the panel slid off easily, and I saw the back was just like my sea life jigsaw puzzle, set in tracks that I couldn’t see until it was a little bit open.
I took the package out. It was just a big Ziploc bag, like the bags Mom used for my sandwich in my lunchbox. I put it on the counter and stared at it. I could see a straight line the color of a shadow where the ashes ended and air filled the rest of the bag.
I wanted to feel something looking at it. But there was nothing about it that reminded me of Maddie. It looked like fireplace ashes. Not like the ones that sat in the bottom of our woodstove, all black with chunks of wood mixed in. But the light gray kind. The kind of ash that came from the hottest fire there ever was.
Maybe if I touched it, something would happen. Maybe my finger would tingle, or a shock would pass through me. I wanted something to happen. Anything. It opened easily, and some ash blew at me. I closed my eyes, lifted my head like Mom did when she prayed to Maddie in the closet, and pushed my finger deep into the pile, all the way up to the knuckle. I waited, swirled my finger around and waited some more.
My stomach growled, and the drip from the faucet made me want to pee, and my arm burned from being in the air the way it was. And that was it. Maddie wasn’t here at all. It was just a pile of ashes.
This is what my parents were fighting about? Spreading these? I took my hand out, and stared at the ash on my finger. I looked at the toilet, the water at the bottom of the bowl. If mom couldn’t do it, I could. It’d be one less thing for them to argue about.
I picked up the bag and stepped over to the toilet.
Then I thought about what Grandma said about Maddie’s favorite place.
From somewhere in the house, I heard a door shut.
I froze, waited, in the back of my mind Mom’s voice telling me I better be ready when she came down.
I went back to the counter, wiped my finger on my pajamas and closed the bag, rolled it tight like it had been and put the box back together. I couldn’t hear anyone walking in the house, even with my ear pressed to the door.
The house was still empty. I went to my room and put the box in my bottom drawer, way in back, rolled up in my long underwear and tucked under my snow pants, where Mom wouldn’t look. At least not before I got them out of the house.
I was standing in front of my bureau when Mom walked in.
“You’re moving slow today, Kat,” she said. “I told you to get dressed twenty minutes ago. Let’s get going. You have camp.”
Her eyes passed over my shirt, and then she motioned to the bureau. “Come on, no more standing around.”
She left the room, and I grabbed some shorts and a T-shirt out of the drawer.
It wasn’t until I took off my pajama shirt that I noticed the gray blob where I’d wiped Maddie’s ashes in my rush to put the box back together.
I pictured Mom’s blank look when she’d looked at me.
Even she didn’t know what she was talking about. Here was Maddie, on my shirt, just like she said she would be, and she didn’t feel a thing and neither did I.
I threw the shirt across my room, where it rolled under my bed.
?9
Jack
I overslept and left the house at six in the morning. It was later than I wanted when I motored out to our float, our buying station filled with tanks and freezers behind it.
The building had been falling down when Boon and I bought it when we were first starting out. But we both knew our way around a hammer, and after a few months, chipping away at replacing the floor joists and hanging new drywall, the warehouse started to take shape.
Neither of us took a day off those first years. There was the fishing, the buying, and the selling to get done. And once the shipping business got going, we had to fill orders. Before we knew it, we had a handful of local guys on our payroll.
And the not-so-local guys, like Manny, who was waiting for me on the float now, a yellow bandanna covering the top half of his dreadlocks.
I put the engine in neutral and let the tide inch me until the boat edged against the wooden dock.
Manny reached out, grabbed the line, and tied it off on the cleat. After the boat was secure, I walked to where he was standing and swung a leg over the side.
“Where you been hidin’?” Manny asked me, his accent thick, a sign that he’d been on the phone with someone back in Jamaica since I’d seen him yesterday.
“It’s been too long,” I said, stepping onto the gangplank. I walked past him to the stairs leading to the warehouse.
We had a similar exchange every day, just different words. I gave him the finger and he chuckled, his teeth a flash of white in the fog.
Manny had been our bait guy for so long, I sometimes forgot he’d planned to go back to Jamaica when we’d first met him.
He’d been at the Wharf Rat, sitting at the bar in shorts and a pair of flip-flops, even though it was March, and the air was still cold, snow on the ground. He’d told us his girlfriend had lured him to Maine with her blond hair and blue eyes and dumped him, and now he was heartbroken and broke and looking for work, just enough so he could get home.
Boon had asked him what kind of work he was looking for, and Manny looked at him sideways.
“The kind that pays, mon,” he’d said, moving his head to the music playing in the background, his dreadlocks bouncing off his shoulders.
We’d hired him, and he’d borrowed an air mattress and a small fridge from Boon and an old camp stove from me and moved into the room above the buying station, making sure the alarm clock he’d bought at the hardware store was loud enough to wake him at three every morning, when he was supposed to meet our bait guy. As far as I knew, more years later than I had fingers to count, he’d never kept the bait guy waiting.
I closed the door to the warehouse behind me now, the bottle of water I’d gone in for tucked in my back pocket. Manny was stacking traps on one corner of the float, reggae music coming from the old radio he kept lashed to the rail.
He’d loaded the bait on the boat already, the bin of herring a flash of silver in the dawn. When he saw me, he said something that came out in a jumble of sounds and words.
“Is that Jamaican for I quit?” I asked.
I knew it was patois. He’d slip into the language now and again. He hated when I called it Jamaican.
“It’s patois for you’d be in sorry shape without me. When I quit, I tell you in plain English.”
“How’s the crew back home?” I asked.
“You know, everybody missin’ Manny. Not enough to go ’round.” His laugh tumbled out in smooth waves.
“Too bad you’re not as popular here.” I stepped on the boat and heard his voice from behind me.
“You lucky I’m here. And the ladies lucky too. None of you locals got what I got. Listen,” he shouted, leaning over the railing toward me. “I’m a black marlin swimmin’ in a sea of flounder. You get what I’m sayin’?”
I turned the engine, noise filling the air, put her in reverse, and saw his lips moving as he threw me the line.