The Lobster Kings (22 page)

I guess it goes to show you that even on an island this small, it
is
still possible to keep some secrets if you try hard enough. It took two years for things to come to a head, and by then Rena said Tucker had gotten up to a six-pack every night, more on nights when he knew he didn’t have to work the next morning.

Tucker is mostly an okay guy. He tries too hard with Daddy and the other boys sometimes, trying to make up for what he can never make up for, which is a bad childhood in California. Rena tells me that he’s the one who always comes up with the idea for my birthday presents. He’s a pushover with the twins, and he adores the shit out of Rena, always kissing her and touching her and calling her made-up names that should sound funny coming
from a grown man’s lips but end up being endearing. But he found it harder than he expected on the island, and he turned out to be an easy drunk.

And all the while, Daddy didn’t notice anything. He kept talking about how good a job Tucker did on the boat, and how he could see Tucker keeping things up when Daddy retired. But that kind of talk ended when Rena moved out of the house with the twins. She told Daddy part of the truth, that Tucker’s drinking had gotten out of hand, but didn’t tell him the rest, which was that Tucker had been carrying on with another woman. There was a month or two of things being touch-and-go, and then Tucker came crawling up to the door, telling her that he’d changed, begging her to give him another go. She had, and things had been good for them ever since, but Daddy seemed like he’d forgotten any talk of Tucker being the kind of man who could have been born a Kings.

“I guess everybody deserves a second chance?” I said.

“You’ve heard Daddy say it often enough. A second chance, but never a third. Tucker knows it, too. He hasn’t had a drink since the troubles.”

I tilted back my cup and took down the last of the champagne. “At least Daddy doesn’t think he’s the second coming of Scotty anymore.”

Rena stood up and stared at me again, like she had a few minutes earlier, and it scared me. She looked angry.

“I’m not a fucking pushover, Cordelia. Just because you’re out on the water working with Daddy doesn’t mean that you know everything.” She glanced down at the plastic glass I was holding and then took it from me, slipping it under hers. With her hand free again, she poked me in the arm. “You haven’t been
chosen
by anybody or anything. And no matter how hard you work, you’ll never make up for the fact that Scotty’s gone and Momma’s gone. You’ll never make him forget that.”

She closed her mouth and then took what seemed like an
involuntary step. “Oh, my god,” she said. “Oh. I’m sorry. That just slipped out.”

I took a deep breath and then gave myself a moment to let it out. “Well, then. I guess, don’t hold back?”

She stepped to me and then wrapped her arms around me. I didn’t move away, but I didn’t hug her, either. “Oh, I didn’t mean that. I just …”

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was attacking your husband, and you took a swing of your own.”

She squeezed and then let go and wiped her eyes. She was crying, which wasn’t a surprise to me. She was always an easy cry. “Marriage is complicated, Cordelia. You just don’t know. That was a hard time. It wasn’t as simple as Tucker being the bad guy. He wasn’t the only one who was having a hard time with our marriage.”

On the boat, Fatty was sitting in the captain’s chair, and Tucker had opened the engine compartment and was looking in it with Guppy by his side. Guppy pointed to something, and Tucker shook his head and then guided her hand to the side. “He’s something else with those kids, isn’t he?” I said.

Rena leaned onto the rail. She smiled. I wasn’t sure if it was at Tucker or at me. “He never seems to run out of patience with them, even when they’re both ganging up on him.”

Tucker looked up at us, and when he caught Rena’s eye he smiled so fully and easily that it stung me to watch. I don’t know that I’d ever be able to get past what had happened, but in almost every way he’d turned out to be a good guy.

I couldn’t deny that he loved my sister or that she loved him back.

N
ear the end of July, I slept with a tourist named Otto. It was exactly what I needed: an excuse to stop thinking about Kenny.

That sort of getting together between tourists and islanders happens more than you’d think, though not usually with me. Usually it’s one of the boys who puts on his slickers for a lonely housewife from Indiana or South Dakota who thought taking a month-long rental on the island would be just the thing to spark her inner artist. Sometimes the women were single or married but travelling alone and just wanted “a taste of the local seafood,” as Rena liked to put it, and sometimes those things ended up working out, like with Timmy and Etsuko. Usually it didn’t mean anything beyond a few nights of fun. The boys like to joke that you got to break out the fishing pole more during the tourist season than you did when you were actually fishing. Of course, there was also the long-running joke that when the single boys on Loosewood Island weren’t catching lobsters, they were catching crabs.

I’d been having a hard go of it. It had been nearly three months, and I missed Kenny. Sally waited until school finished before she had her boyfriend move her out—turned out the therapist she’d
been seeing on her own had been putting her on the couch in a serious way—but there just wasn’t a trace of Kenny from the day he found out. I suppose if we would have lived somewhere other than Loosewood Island, somewhere with cell phone reception, I might have been able to call his mobile, but there wasn’t any way to get in touch with him that I knew of. Some nights when I took Trudy out for a walk I detoured by his house, but with Sally gone, the lights stayed off and the house was just a blot against the darkness of the sky.

I fished without a sternman for the spring, but once the season ended, I was left with trying to keep myself busy, trying to pretend that I wasn’t just spending my time waiting for Kenny to come back. June and July were broken-up days of doing a bit of everything: I fixed stuff at the rental houses, painting and doing general maintenance, ran “lobstering” tours for tourists, took visitors on Brumfitt Kings walks, gave Rena a hand at the fish shop, and took the twins two nights a week so Rena and Tucker could have “date nights.” It was make-work, but still, I had plenty of downtime. I even took a week with Daddy to fix up the garage behind my house—we’d decided I’d move into the smaller of the rental houses so that Stephanie and Carly could take my house—into a studio for Stephanie to do art when she wasn’t on the
Queen Jane
.

And that still left too much time for me to think about Kenny.

I’d started jogging in the mornings, heading out early, trying to work off my fretfulness. With Kenny gone, I was up to six miles a day. I still wasn’t sleeping much, so it was only about five-thirty by the time I’d gotten halfway into my run and I stumbled across Otto.

I’d taken one of the oceanfront paths that the island maintained out of its general funds, which only meant that we paid some of the teenage boys to keep it in shape, threw down crushed shells every few years. I was maybe three miles in when I saw Otto sitting on a rock and staring across the water.

I can’t say what it was that made me stop and talk to him. Perhaps it was his stillness. He was just sitting and looking at the
water, and that seemed like it was enough for him. For the week we were together, he seemed content the whole time, whether it was sitting there on the rock, having a beer with me and some of the boys at the Grumman Fish House, lying in bed after we’d had sex, or even out in the
Kings’ Ransom
with me. Well, not as much in the
Kings’ Ransom
, since being out on the water didn’t seem to agree with him.

We talked for an hour or so, mostly me telling him what it was like to be a lobsterman—“But you are a woman,” he said, which, despite the fact that he spoke English fluently, seemed particularly charming with his accent—and him telling me about his job as a curator at the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, which I later realized was kind of funny given his inability to keep his food down on a boat. He told me that despite the presence of the ocean, Loosewood Island wasn’t anything like his home in Germany.

There was nothing more to it than that. Neither one of us pretended we were falling in love. I suppose if we had more time together it might have been possible. He was good in bed—as graceful as he was, he was also forceful enough that I didn’t have to worry about myself. I liked his fingers skittering across my back, snapping open my bra, threading down and across my hips. His lips whispering against my neck, the length of his body pressed against me, the way he shuddered in my arms when he came. Each moment with Otto was a moment with Otto and nobody else.

Actually, when Otto and I weren’t having sex, mostly what we talked about was Brumfitt and painting. He was fascinated with the idea that I could trace a direct line to Brumfitt. Maybe the third or fourth night, I was lying on my stomach and Otto was propped up on one elbow, lightly rubbing my back with his free hand. The moon was strong enough that it felt like we were covered in light. He’d asked me what it had been like to grow up thinking of Brumfitt as something personal, as part of my own history rather than as an artist.

I rolled over onto my side so that I could see him. “I don’t
know,” I said. “That’s kind of like asking a fish what it’s like to breathe underwater.” Otto looked down at me, but he didn’t seem to understand. “It’s always been this way. It’s not the same for my sisters, but for me, for Daddy, Brumfitt isn’t just some guy who we’re related to. Wherever I go on the island I see Brumfitt’s paintings. I don’t think, oh, there’s a rock, there’s a wave. I think, that’s where Brumfitt painted
The Whale’s Tail
, there’s where he painted
Wife on a Winter’s Day
. That’s what I see when I’m on the island.”

“But so do I,” Otto said. “That is why I have the guidebook.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not the same. You see the paintings, but I see the way that the paintings tell the story of the Kings. There’s no Loosewood Island for me without Brumfitt.” Otto lowered himself so that we were both lying down and facing each other. “Daddy likes to say that Brumfitt painted both the history and the future of the Kings family in his paintings, and all you have to do is look at them in the right order.”

“Is this true?”

I leaned forward and kissed him lightly. “I don’t know. But there’s no question that Brumfitt hid something in his paintings. You know about the Harel find, right?” He shook his head. “Really?”

“I like Brumfitt, yes? I come here because of Brumfitt, but I am not living here.”

“This would have been maybe fifteen years ago,” I said, though I know exactly when it happened, because it was the summer after Scotty died, after Momma killed herself. “There was an academic, C. C. Harel, who had this theory that Brumfitt left a coded message in the landscape of
Sea Bounty
. A sort of map. She spent three months on the island with a team of graduate students, and they eventually found a chest buried inside a cavern on the lee side of the island. There were more than twenty Brumfitt paintings in the chest.”

“Where are the paintings?”

“Tied up in court. Things get complicated pretty quickly
when both Canada and America start fighting. But we get a steady stream of tourists who come to the island with a shovel and the idea that they’re going to find themselves a treasure trove.”

“Has anybody else found any?”

“No,” I said. “The tourists all leave disappointed.”

He smiled and moved a little closer. “I’m not going to leave disappointed.”

He was quiet for a few seconds, and just when I was beginning to think that he was planning to kiss me, he said, “Do you think there are more paintings to be found?”

I pushed his shoulder down so that he was flat on his back and then swung my leg up and over so that I was straddling him and looking down at him. “Yes,” I said. “No. Maybe. Daddy claims there are others, that he knows of a stash of hidden Brumfitt paintings and he’s just waiting for the right time to bring them out. Sometimes I think Daddy’s a little bit crazy”—I winced when I said it, but I don’t think Otto noticed, and he certainly didn’t know of Daddy’s history in the loony bin—“but sometimes I think that he knows what he’s talking about.”

When we weren’t in bed, I showed Otto some of the places on the island that I didn’t think he’d find on his own, and we spent some time painting together. Mostly he painted what he saw, realistic pieces that were decent enough, though he did do a few pieces that clearly mimicked Brumfitt. When he left, he gave me a small painting showing the
Kings’ Ransom
tied up to her mooring buoy in the bay, a storm rolling toward the island in the background, and something sinister and indistinct in the water by the boat’s transom.

“My little ode to Brumfitt. For you. Like your father said, to show you both what has happened and what it will feel like for you when I am gone,” he said. He smiled in his shy way that was so unlike the men I was used to from the island, and for a moment I thought about asking him to stay. I didn’t, however, because we both knew that things had run their course. I thanked him instead, and then we stood awkwardly waiting for him to board the ferry.
We said we’d email each other, and he made sounds about maybe coming back to Loosewood Island next summer, but I knew that next year he’d go somewhere else on his vacation—Thailand or Italy or Mexico—and I didn’t see myself getting to Germany anytime soon. I didn’t see myself living anywhere but Loosewood Island.