Blue Moon (2 page)

Cass Keating Medieros, Eddie and Sheila Keating’s youngest granddaughter, was keeper of the flame, guardian of the freezers. Eddie was dead. Her parents no longer spent every day tending the business. Her eldest sister, Nora, ran Lobsterville, and their middle sister, Bonnie Kenneally, filled in occasionally. At thirty-seven, Cass was still considered the baby of the family, but if you owned a fish joint and you wanted fresh sole, you talked to Cass.

Cass sat in her office on the second floor of Keating & Daughters, the fish warehouse down the dock from the restaurant, trying to concentrate on the week’s accounts while listening for the sound of her husband Billy’s fishing boat. Josie, their four-year-old, lay on the splintery wide-board floor, making her Barbie drive clamshells as if they were cars.

Josie made sounds. Her words. She rattled along, telling a story her mother couldn’t understand. She crashed the clamshells, catching her finger, cried out.

“Be careful,” Cass said, knowing Josie couldn’t hear her. Josie didn’t hear right.

“Ow,” Josie said. She had panic in her eyes until she caught sight of Cass: it didn’t matter that Cass had been sitting there all along. Josie held out her finger for Cass to kiss, which she did, still calculating on the adding machine.

Comforted, Josie went back to playing. She made a rumbling sound like cars on the highway. Cass wondered what instinct or memory made that possible; Josie’s speech teacher said she couldn’t hear anything too high or too low in frequency: jet planes, the vacuum cleaner, birds, cars.

Josie was born to the fish life, just as Cass and her sisters and all their children had been. She already knew the difference between sole and flounder; she wasn’t afraid to pick up crabs; she could swim like a fish herself. Sometimes Cass let herself dream about what Josie’s future would hold.

For fifteen-year-old T.J., Cass and Billy’s only son, Cass wanted Harvard or Yale, maybe law school, more likely an oceanography program, eventually governor of Rhode Island, elected on an environmentalist platform. Right now he was having a little trouble
concentrating on his schoolwork, but if there was one thing Cass remembered it was teenage hormones, and T.J. was right on the cutting edge.

Belinda, aged thirteen, wrote poetry and the previous year had won a statewide essay contest for seventh graders. She could already steer a boat by the stars. She’d grow up to be an expert boat handler, falling in love with every handsome sailor who passed by, dating guys who drove cars with disgusting bumper stickers, like “If it smells like fish, eat it.” Cass imagined Belinda, after making it through adolescence, becoming a writer.

Cass’s dreams for Josie were on hold. For Josie, for now, all Cass wanted was placement in normal kindergarten. To keep her out of “special” school.

One night when she was two, Josie had wakened with a fever, crying and flushed with a dewy glow in the lamplight. Cass and Billy had already paced many nights trying to comfort feverish babies, so they weren’t really worried. By dawn, however, the glow had turned into a fiery red rash.

Just as Cass was dialing Dr. Malone’s number, Josie let forth a shriek from her father’s arms that made Cass think of the witch in the
Wizard of Oz
crying, “Melting! I’m melting!”

It was the kind of thing she could tell Billy. Cass believed it was what set them apart from other long-married couples with kids, the way they could sweat through each of their children’s crises while hanging on to their humor, to their old selves, when they were just Cass and Billy in Love, not Cass and Billy Still in Love—with Kids. Turning to tell Billy about her silly witch image, she saw something that made her drop the phone in terror: Billy fighting a wild animal, a tiger in a sack clawing to get free, snarling and writhing with such force it seemed about to fly out of his arms.

Only it was Josie in her baby blanket, having a seizure.

Roseola, Dr. Malone told them at the emergency room, instantly reassuring them it was a fairly common childhood disease. He wasn’t worried; he expected her to make a full recovery, with the possibility of “some mild hearing loss.”

Mild hearing loss at ninety, the age of Cass’s grandmother, was one thing. But for a two-year-old child, just learning to talk, it
meant a whole new world. Cass imagined it like this: Josie familiar with the sounds of her mother’s and father’s voices, Belinda’s laughter, T.J.’s rude stereo; Josie saying new words out loud, putting those words together, beginning to make her family understand her; then suddenly having her ears stuffed with cotton so that vowels and consonants sounded the same, without edges, like mush. Josie cried a lot.

Cass and Billy, madly in love since eighth grade and proud of it, ready for love action at any time, anywhere, hardly talked anymore. They “talked,” but they stayed off the subject of Josie. And Josie affected nearly every aspect of their lives. It was as if her speech problems were contagious.

Cass, who until recently had craved hot sex with Billy the way she had twenty years ago, found herself using excuses in bed. They didn’t make love as frequently as before. She no longer let him hold her all night. His arms around her felt too tight, and she had to pull away, roll over, take deep breaths.

Now she pressed her cheek against the window and watched for his boat. Wind licked the wave tops white. Summer yachts were racing the storm in from sea. The fishermen of Mount Hope wouldn’t think twice about this weather; she’d been surprised to hear on the ship-to-shore radio that Billy was coming in. Any minute now she’d see him. Wind rattled the window glass, spooking her. But she didn’t step back.

Mysterious to Cass was the lust she felt for Billy away from their house. Like now, at the office, she imagined them doing the wild thing the second he hit dry land, downstairs off the lobster-tank room in a dark nook furnished with two cots for exhausted fishermen who had too far to drive.

“Bob?” Josie said.

“Yes?” Cass replied instantly, facing her daughter, making sure Josie could see her lips. Josie didn’t mispronounce everything, but she said “Bob” for “Mom” and “On” for “Aunt,” and Cass wanted to make sure she enunciated properly when Josie was watching. “Yes?” she said again.

“I’m nnngry,” Josie said darkly.

Josie could have meant either “angry” or “hungry” but, given the
hour, Cass felt hopeful. “You’re hungry?” Cass asked, rubbing her stomach.

“Yes,” Josie said, nodding.

“Then we’ll go home. We won’t wait for Daddy.” Cass spoke normally, the way she would with her other children, and she didn’t stop to think which words Josie understood, because Dr. Parsons, Josie’s ear doctor, had told them Josie was bright, that although she skipped words and missed certain sounds, she comprehended what people meant. Kindergarten would start in a year, and more and more often Dr. Parsons mentioned a special school. He talked about options such as sign language. He described the deaf community, people who used sign language as their primary means of communication. To Cass it seemed as foreign as a country in Asia.

Dr. Parsons had referred them to Mrs. Kaiser, a blue-haired speech therapist with a walk-in dollhouse in her office and a wall of shelves filled with children’s books. Mrs. Kaiser worked with Josie on pronunciation and concentration, and she scoffed at sign language. In spite of the fact that Josie complained that Mrs. Kaiser smelled like a geranium, Cass liked Mrs. Kaiser’s approach better than Dr. Parsons’s.

Cass checked Josie’s hearing aids, to make sure the volume levels were set right. Then she threw her purse, the clamshells, and Barbie into a battered old sail bag. She locked the office door behind her, and she and Josie fumbled down the dark inner stairway to the vast and smelly tank room. The generator hummed, circulating seawater through the lobster tanks and running the freezers.

“Stay right here,” she said to Josie, patting the top of her head. Cass opened the big walk-in freezer and turned on the light. A blast of frosty air billowed into the damp tank room. Cass selected a particularly fine frozen pollack fillet, thick and stiff as a book, wrapped it in plastic, and dropped it into her bag. Josie stood right where Cass had left her, straight and still, her back against a green wooden lobster tank. The freezers terrified her.

Josie held Cass’s fingers with one hand, sucked the thumb of the other. Cass could hear her sucking noisily, still gripped by the fear
that her mother could have been consumed by the deep freezer. They hurried across the cobblestoned wharf, past Lobsterville. She and Josie waved at the window, out of habit, in case Nora or Bonnie was working at the front desk and happened to look out. Cass buckled Josie into the back of their green Volvo 240 wagon. They’d be home in ten minutes, and, with a jolt, Cass realized that she’d see the sign.

They drove through town, past the boutiques and restaurants, the yacht marina and the town fish pier. Condos were going up everywhere. Builders had ripped down the sheds and docks at Dexter’s Boatworks and laid the foundation for four buildings of time-share units. They’d turned Mack’s Lobster Pound into a stage-set village called Puritan’s Crossing. Pretty soon developers would brick up the whole waterfront.

They cut across Marcellus Boulevard, past the robber barons’ glitter palaces, to Alewives Park. Here the houses were cozy, ranches or Cape Cods. You could smell the salt air but couldn’t see the water.

The Park, a development built in the fifties, contained dozens of dead-end streets. The developer had planned it that way to prevent drivers from speeding around, from using the Park roads as shortcuts to the waterfront or the navy base. Most of the streets were too short to work up any speed at all, but Coleridge Avenue, where the Medieroses lived, was the main thoroughfare. It was the only street that had a stoplight, and it had a posted speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour.

Last month, Dawn Sullivan, a high school senior, and a carload of friends came whipping down Coleridge just as Tally, a neighbor’s dog, decided to cross the street. Josie ran after Tally.

Cass heard tires squeal. Instantly alert for Josie, she tore for the door. Brakes screamed.

There was T.J. lifting Josie off the sidewalk. Dawn ran around the front of her family’s Blazer. Tally, oblivious, sniffed her way up the Camarras’ driveway across the street. Time froze, and Cass’s ears rang.

At first Cass thought Josie had been hit. Halfway out the door,
she stopped dead and couldn’t take the next step. There was Dawn crying, her round face nuzzled in Josie’s neck, saying, “Why didn’t you look both ways, don’t you know this is a busy street?”

Then Josie lifted her head, caught sight of Cass, and let out a wail. Cass grabbed her from T.J. and held her tight, feeling for bumps or broken bones.

“She’s okay, Mom,” T.J. said, sounding shaken instead of sullen for a change.

“I didn’t hit her; she’s just scared,” Dawn said. “She couldn’t hear me coming. She didn’t look both ways. She must have her hearing aids turned off.”

“They’re on, Dawn,” Cass said into Josie’s shiny dark hair. “She heard you, that’s why she stopped.”

“She’s not fucking deaf, you know,” T.J. said.

“Hey, I used to babysit for her, and for you, too, so don’t say ‘fucking’ to me, T.J.,” Dawn said shrilly.

Neighbors came out to see what was happening, and someone called the police. Officer Bobrowski measured the black tire marks, still reeking of rubber, a parallel smoky trail the length of three lawns, and issued Dawn a summons. An hour passed before things went back to normal, and for days afterward people talked about the teenage speeding problem and the danger it posed to the little deaf girl.

Cass believed that Josie’s hearing problem had nothing to do with it: Josie was just chasing a little dog, the way any child might. Cass blamed herself, for letting Josie out of her sight for that instant, and she blamed Dawn, who had babysat for all three Medieros kids and plenty of other Alewives Park families, for driving too fast.

In spite of Cass’s and Billy’s protestations, the property owners’ association allotted money, previously earmarked for improvement of the basketball court, for two yellow signs to be posted on Coleridge Avenue, to be spaced one-eighth of a mile from the Medieroses’ house in either direction.

The idea of them terrified Cass, just as the thought of a special school did. Driving home from work with her hungry daughter, knowing what she was about to see, she shouldn’t have felt such
shock. Shock and something else. Fear? Shame? There it was, half a block away:

“What’s that, Bob?” asked Josie, pointing. As if to compensate for the cotton in her ears, Josie had eagle eyes.

“A new sign.”

“What say?”

Turning into their driveway, Cass navigated the wagon around T.J.’s mountain bike, the lawnmower, and Josie’s Big Wheel. “It says ‘Drive Slowly, Children Playing,’” Cass said, making sure Josie could see her lips.

After two weeks at sea, Billy Medieros was heading home. He usually loved this part of the trip, when the hold was full of fish and his crew was happy because they knew their share of the catch would be high, and they’d all sleep in their own beds that night. He drove the
Norboca
—the best boat in his father-in-law’s fleet—around Minturn Ledge, and Mount Hope came into view.

Billy stood at the wheel. The tide had been against him, and he knew he had missed Cass. She would have left work by now, was probably already home cooking supper. He could picture her at the stove, stirring something steamy, her summer dress sticking damply to her breasts and hips. His wife had the body of a young sexpot. Other guys at sea would pray to Miss July, but Billy would look at pictures of Cass, her coppery curls falling across her face, her blue eyes sexy and mysterious, delicate fingers cupping her full breasts, offering them to the camera. She had given him a Minolta for his last birthday, but for his real present she had posed nude.

Lately, to Billy, Cass had seemed more real in his bunk at sea than she was at home. In person, Cass looked the same, she smelled the same, but she seemed absent, somehow. Raising Josie changed her every day, and Billy resisted the transformation. He missed his wife.