Blue Moon (22 page)

“No, talking,” Josie said. “I’m saying, ‘Hi, Bob.’”

“With your hands?” Cass said, feeling a sinking in the pit of her stomach. Josie didn’t answer, but continued making the same gestures over and over, smiling as though she were enormously pleased with herself.

“Who showed you that, sweetheart?”

“Zach,” Josie said.

Cass wandered out to the nurses’ station. The nurses were huddled
together, preparing to change shifts, briefing one another on the previous night’s developments. A few doctors sat at a long Formica counter, writing notes for patients’ charts. Cass leaned against the desk, waiting for someone to look up.

“May I help you?” Josie’s nurse asked.

“Who’s Zach?” Cass asked.

The nurse pointed at a young man dressed like T.J., and not much older. He sat among the doctors, writing furiously. Cass approached him. He looked up, a friendly, inquisitive expression in his eyes. He had springy red hair and professor-style horn-rimmed glasses that did not succeed in making him look any older than twenty; he arched an eyebrow flirtatiously.

“I’m Josie’s mother,” Cass said.

“Great to meet you! I’m Zach Butler,” he said, pumping her hand. “Boy, do you have a terrific kid! Learns just like that.” Letting go of her hand to snap his fingers seemed to require a degree of concentration.

“Thank you. Could we talk, um, privately?” Cass asked. Zach’s powerful enthusiasm had all the doctors and nurses gazing in their direction. Cass felt like she’d just entered a crowded elevator with someone wearing too much aftershave.

“Sure! Let’s step in here,” Zach said, ushering her into a conference room. “First off, you’re wondering who I am, what business I have interviewing Josie. I’m a speech pathologist, certified”—he handed Cass his card—“and the hospital called me in to consult.”

“No one told me,” Cass said.

“That’s called bureaucracy,” Zach said.

Cass didn’t like this cavalier attitude. Did Zach know how it felt to have a four-year-old daughter in the hospital for five days, with people Cass didn’t even know going in and out of her room? “I’ll speak to the nurse,” Cass said.

“Good idea,” Zach said jovially.

“Let me get to the point,” Cass said. “Josie told me you taught her some signs.”

“She picks up right off the bat. Smart kid.”

“Josie’s not deaf,” Cass said.

“That’s absolutely true.”

“Signing will set her apart.”

“I only taught her one phrase: ‘Hi, Mommy.’”

“Still,” Cass said stubbornly, determined to explain her position to Zach. “I don’t like it. Josie’s been tested since she was two. Every step of the way, Dr. Parsons has told me she’ll need extra help, but she doesn’t need a different education than my other kids.”

“What if a different education would help her?”

“I’ll do anything to help Josie, but I don’t want her set apart. I don’t want her in the deaf community.” To Cass, that wasn’t Josie, a person who had to communicate in silence, with her hands.

“Everyone’s scared of the idea.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Look, Mrs. Medieros, I’m not trying to talk you into anything. I only taught her a couple of words.”

“And I’m not trying to put down your life’s work,” Cass said. “But I know how I want to raise my daughter.”

“She seemed excited to learn the signs,” Zach said, still smiling.

“Yes,” Cass said, seeing Josie’s face lit up, wreathed in pleasure.

“The hearing tests are necessary,” Zach said. “And they may seem to point you in the direction of a standard public-school education. But there’s a more important indicator.”

Cass hated how speech therapists, social workers, doctors, and school personnel spoke, using jargon like “indicator” instead of “hearing test.” But, politely, she went along with it. “Which indicator?” she asked.

“Josie,” Zach said.

Cass left the hospital early and stopped by the wharf on her way home. Bonnie had been filling in as part-time bookkeeper, and Cass hoped she hadn’t left yet. But when she climbed the rickety old stairs, she found the office nearly dark. Her father sat by the window with a single light burning.

“Dad, do you need help closing up?” Cass asked, alarmed by how lonely he seemed.

“No, Cass. I think I’ll just sit here a while. What are you doing here? How’s our baby?”

For a second, Cass didn’t know whether he meant Josie or Cass herself, and she felt a rush of affection for her father. She loved this wharf; coming here always made her feel steady and secure, part of something that went on forever, even in bad times.

“Josie’s coming home tomorrow,” Cass said. “All the swelling’s down.”

“She’s sure had us scared. You hate seeing a little kid all alone in the hospital. Your grandmother couldn’t stand it the night we visited. She gave Josie the doll, and then we had to leave.”

“Josie loves the doll.” In two days it had become her new favorite toy. Josie, never fickle about her dolls, had abandoned her old faithful Barbie in favor of this new one, a pucker-faced baby that looked to Cass like it belonged in an incubator. Maybe Josie had somehow sensed it needed more care than she did, and giving it made Josie feel stronger.

“I wanted to keep this place going strong for my grandchildren,” her father said. “It’s going, but not strong.”

“My taking so much time off hasn’t helped.”

“Bonnie’s been handling it. Hard to get used to having her here afternoons, I was so used to having you here all morning. But I hear Bonnie on the phone just like you, discounting scallops, discounting lobsters just to move them out of our tanks. That’s not even breaking even.”

“We have to discount just to keep our customers,” Cass said, reminding her father of what he had taught her. “Joe at the Edge-mont Inn said he’d just as soon buy shark, make cookie-cutter scallops. Cheapskate.”

“Hell, what are business problems compared with having a kid in the hospital? Don’t think about this place till you have Josie squared away.”

Growing up, Cass had turned more to her older sisters than to her parents. But suddenly she wanted to talk to her father.

“Some guy at the hospital taught Josie sign language,” Cass said. “Just a couple of words.”

Her father shook his head. “She doesn’t need that.”

“That’s what I say!” Cass said, patting his shoulder.

“She does just fine with what she has.”

“Sometimes kids make fun of the way she talks. Even I can’t always understand her.”

“That’s the hell of it. She does sound funny.”

“You think so?” Cass asked defensively.

“It’s a fact, Cass.”

“She misses certain sounds, but we work on it all the time. I’d rather have her in the mainstream than using signs,” Cass said, slipping into the jargon.

“Is that what they call that sign language—signs? Well, I don’t see our Josie doing that. You see people in the restaurant once in a while, gabbing away with their hands so they can barely eat their meal. It’s bizarre, their hands moving a mile a minute.”

“What do you mean?” Cass asked, shocked.

“There’s something freakish about them, handicapped people,” he said. “It’s right there, for everyone to see. The white canes, leg braces, whatever. You can see they’re different.”

“They’re not freaks, Dad,” Cass said, becoming furious. Her father had an underground streak of bigotry that surfaced occasionally, proving to Cass that she didn’t really know her father.

“Maybe not,” James Keating said. “But their handicaps set them apart. So does talking with their hands.”

“It’s how some people communicate,” Cass said stonily, feeling sick. She had used those same words to Zach: “Signing will set her apart.”

Her father looked around the room, as if searching for a new topic. His expression flickered from neutral to cloudy as something apparently occurred to him.

“So, we’re losing Billy,” her father said.

“The company is,” Cass said coldly. “We’re not.”

“The other captains look to Billy. Doesn’t speak well for the Keating fleet when my own son-in-law leaves.”

“You know that all the guys want their own boat.”

“I can’t afford to run this place the way I used to. Got a new tax bill today. The state’s trying to drive me out of business. I’m charged the same rate as all those real estate holdings around the harbor,
and I’m not making anywhere near the income they are. And I can’t stand disloyalty.”

“Disloyalty?” Cass exploded. “Are you talking about Billy? Isn’t it disloyal to call your own granddaughter a freak?”

“I did not,” her father said. But he stayed in his chair, seeming to stare out the window at the harbor lights. Cass saw that his eyes were fixed on his own morose reflection in the amber glass. She stood still, wanting to say something more, to leave on a better note. But when her father refused to look her way, she took her things and slipped quietly out the door.

T.J. and Belinda would be waiting at home, but Cass walked the waterfront from Keating’s Wharf to Doc Breton’s. The October evening was frosty. In the ugliest way possible, her father had mirrored Cass’s own fear: that the outward signs of Josie’s hearing loss would alienate her from the world. She shook her head to dislodge the thought and hurried along, feeling the chill.

Except for a ghostly wind and the skittery sound of a hundred water rats, Doc’s pier was silent. Cass knew that her father sometimes came here for solitude, and she could understand why. She tried to shake free of the fear and anger that gripped her. With her back to the town, facing out to sea, she could pretend it was an earlier time, the dawn of the twentieth century, when rules were a rich man’s racket and smuggling a way of life.

This was Cass’s territory, the waterfront. Breathing the sea air, Cass felt how closed off she had become. Wrapped tight as twine, she couldn’t draw a deep breath at home. Since Josie’s fever, Cass had lived small, in the interior, watching for little signs and missing the big ones.

She headed back toward Keating’s Wharf. The cold night was clear, full of star trails. Venus hung just above the harbor; Cass believed she could chart its iridescent progress through the night. She headed past Lobsterville and the warehouse, now totally dark. Her father had gone home.

Up ahead, Cass saw lights on the
Aurora.
She wondered whether John Barnard was aboard, getting ready for a long trip. Approaching the big stern dragger, Cass saw him coiling lines on deck. For a
minute, she hung back in the shadows. She heard music coming from speakers onboard.

“Hi, John,” she said.

“That you, Cass?” he asked, peering up.

“It’s me.”

He hesitated, and suddenly Cass felt shy.

“Come down here where I can see you.”

When Cass didn’t move, he offered his hand. She took it, jumping onto the deck.

“Are you heading out to Georges Bank?” she asked.

“Later tonight. I gave the crew shore time till midnight.”

“Oh. Leaving on the old tide, huh?”

“Middle of the night, yeah,” John said. “Convenient.” He and Cass had been standing close since she’d jumped aboard. Now he raised his hand, moved it so close to her face that she wondered if he was going to brush back her hair.

She felt her heart skittering in her throat, waiting for his touch. But then, as if he had just realized what he was doing, he stepped back.

“Great news about Billy’s new boat,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“I’ll be right behind him,” John said. “Next year at this time, I’ll have my own ship.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Cass said. “Not that we want you to go.”

There had been something awkward in the air, something dangerous and romantic, but it had passed, and they leapt at the chance to talk business. Cass pitched in, helping him coil lines on deck.

“Cass, your father needs to put some serious money into his boats or he won’t have any captains left. He keeps up the fishing equipment, because that’s where the money is. But everything down below is bad. The bunks are mildewed; that might sound petty, but when you’re out for fourteen days straight …”

“It doesn’t sound petty,” Cass said.

“Jimmy’s heart is not in it anymore,” John said.

“No, you’re right about that. How’s your life raft?” Cass asked.

John grinned. “Old Jimmy stocked up on survival suits after you lit into him. So we’re all set if we sink. But we won’t.”

“It’s getting cold. You can’t have many trips left to make this year.”

“We’ll be fishing till January,” John said. “She may need some work, but this boat rides through storms like you wouldn’t believe.” The way he scoffed at weather reminded Cass of her husband. In their world, waves couldn’t rock you, boats didn’t capsize, fog didn’t matter as long as you had loran and a radar reflector.

“I wish I could go,” Cass blurted out. She meant it: she had a vision of herself hauling nets full of herring, breathing the cold, fishy air, free from worries about Josie and the business, free from herself.

“You want to come fishing with me?” John asked, standing close again. She felt his breath on the top of her head. If she tilted her face up, he would kiss her. Cass felt the kiss before it started, warming her from the balls of her feet straight into her shoulders. Cass closed her eyes and melted against John’s body.

“Cassie,” John whispered, using the name he used to call her.

Cass tried to say his name, but she couldn’t speak.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that,” John said, but didn’t let her go. Outside her jacket, he traced up her backbone with one finger. He reached beneath her hair, held the back of her neck. He was waiting to see if she would push him away; she didn’t. She leaned back, pulling his head down to kiss him again.

John’s hands slid under her jacket, untucking her shirt; they felt rough and cold against her smooth skin. Shivering against him, she felt her whole body shaking, and she knew it wasn’t from the cold.

“I want to make love,” he whispered against her mouth. “I still want you, Cass.”

“John …” she said, confused by how good it felt to hold him, by how much she wanted to go below and lie with him in his bunk.

He stopped kissing her. He held her very tightly, full of tension, waiting for her to make some move. She leaned her head against his chest, trying to catch her breath.