Either the Beginning or the End of the World (2 page)

I scowl. “'Cause of the gin! Dad, I should have made you ground me, right then.”

Rosa and I got into his gin. She's into classic country, and she was playing a song Emmylou Harris sings, and I twirled while she played. Rosa said we looked so silly-drunk, no story would save us. But when my father walked in the door, he said, “Where's the supper?” That's all he said.

“What about the gin?” he asks while we're trying to eat chowder. “Jesus.” He does not want to think about gin or teenaged girls. He is in over his head with fatherhood. Forgetting to set curfews. Not a clue. I should have said,
Dad, I'm grounded until I tell you when
.

My father turns the problem of boys into our standing joke. He often tells me, “You can always come home. No matter what.” This is delivered in the open doorway, his long arms stretched wide, hands above the doorframe, to me as I head out the door to the grocery store, to school, to Rosa's. I glance back, deadpan, at his laughing eyes. Shake my head. He is my world. We know. We don't talk about these things. Boys. Girls with boys.

But usually we're golden. We deal with school—the rolling routines, deadlines we can predict. My teachers ask about him. The last of the fishermen, my teacher Mr. Murray calls him. I wonder what they see when they see a slow-talking, slow-walking man with the sureness of the sea who is raising a daughter alone.

Again, I imagine my mother. Her black hair is knotted together like my grandmother's as they lean in to eat their supper, which includes basmati rice and some kind of fish sauce. I remember the sweet rice and sharp smells of coriander, garlic, and lime. My mother is gauzy to me. She floats like a ghost. My father tells stories in which she's the heartbreak, dark-haired and lovely. To me she is as unreliable as the wind. I grew up and became a tall Scottish girl—my father's side—who chanced to have Cambodian eyes. Does my father see my mother when he looks at me?

I cock my head at my father and tie a kitchen towel around my forehead like his bandana. Two pirates. I tease and smirk and let my long hair sway. I go back to the language my father and I talk.

“I'm not alone,” I say. “Pilot and I have our own beach. I know the river as well as the seals, where the good sunning rocks are at low tide.” I start off trying to tease about the river, his and mine. We love it the same. “How the river narrows—how it gets a funnel like a snake in the middle—and rips back out to the ocean.” But his lips are taut. His face won't soften. I end, unsure, “Who's alone?”

My father works his forehead with his wide, calloused hand. “I want to do right by you, Sofie.” He turns his blue eyes on me.

“You
always
do right.” I hear my own voice, too urgent.

“I try to act on my instincts, not knowing how things are going to come out. Sometimes it's against any common sense. Sometimes it doesn't seem right.”

I can see it in the curve of his lips when the wolf comes knocking. Sometimes he sings me lines from his favorite Springsteen songs for the worry. But now he's not singing, and the worry's too heavy to fix. I gather the spoons and bowls.

“Got homework,” I sing.

“Sit down,” my father says.

“What?” I say.

“After shrimping, I'm going down to Chincoteague . . .”

Not maybe.

“When I go,” he finishes, “your mother's going to stay here a while.”

My head whips around toward him as if something had slammed against my cheekbone, and my father gets his look of tragic amusement. This look, like a shield, always comes when he mentions my mother and me. He takes the bowls to the sink. Then he fishes his glasses from his shirt pocket and sits on the couch with the newspaper. But he keeps saying words.

“I can't leave you alone here.”

“Coming
here
! My mother?”

“You might see something of your grandmother, too.”

A flash of my grandmother's angry bird eyes and bent, yellow fingers that scared me. The smell of turmeric. My father folds the newspaper back against itself. Pilot sits on her haunches, tense with the drama.

I am frozen.

I pull off the pirate towel.

“Sofie . . .” he begins. “What I'm saying is, she could use a place, and I have to go south where I can catch some fish. Fishermen got the wolf at the door.”

I knew it was about the wolf.

I swing open the back door. I stand by my father's orange oils that hang on the doorframe. The pants drip and make a puddle on the linoleum. I step through the piles of yellow traps, the rusted iron pots on the back steps, the transmission parts, past the blue skiff propped against the brick chimney.

Tears stream down my face, and I taste salt and onion. Pilot licks my salted fingers. When the ache from the cold is too much I come back inside to the woodstove. My father glances over his tan-framed Walmart glasses. “It's something we got to think about. A girl needs to know her mother.”

I shout, “Stop!” I just need him to stop talking. It is completely offensive, my shouting, since my father is steady like a boat in calm waters. And he loves me. My mother gave me away. I am accustomed to aching for her and hating her. I never ever want to see her again after what she did to my father and me.

WHILE WE MEND NETS

Later that night, when I can't stop my mind from spinning, I come down the dark stairs with Pilot so close behind I can feel her head against my thighs. I want my father to say,
Got it covered. All's well
. But when I get to the living room, he's standing at the window in the dark, talking to someone on his cell. He is silent. The occasional low
yup
,
all right
. Someone else is talking. He never talks on the phone, except to check in with crew. He never listens in the dark.

I stay in the shadows on the stairs. I feel Pilot's heartbeat as she leans into me.

The beating wind fades, then comes around. It has a steady rhythm, like my father and me when we work on the nets. We weave twine through the shrimp nets, pulling the shuttles through as we weave the torn parts tight. Row after row after row. Sometimes nets cover our living room, drape over furniture, as we work and wait for shrimp season to open.

Fishing is a family business. When he's groundfishing, my father steams five, six hours off shore to Platts Bank, Jeffrey's Ledge, Fippennies. I enter tiny numbers in our log to keep track of what he puts into the
Karma
and what she brings back from the sea. I'm also in charge of grocery coupons. This morning I'd found a soap coupon,
Buy one, get one free
. That's why at this moment in the dark we both smell like the same floral soap I found on sale.

- - -

Months ago, at Thanksgiving time, while we worked on the nets, the wolf came up, like it does. I'd said, “I'm old enough for the business.” He'd said, “Somebody around here got to have a head for it. You're the boss.”

Then we heard the sound of helicopter rotors. The sound continued for hours as a helicopter hovered over the river, searching the water on either side of the Piscataqua River Bridge. This has happened more than one time since my father and I moved to the Heights. Our house is a row house, one of the small brick houses built before the first World War for shipbuilders and their families on the river. The sound of the rotors plying the river slowed our hands as we worked.

Eventually my father had left the nets and the twine and sat in the growing dark beside the woodstove. I wished the helicopter would pull away and hush. They would stop if the search crew found what had fallen into the river. Or jumped into the river.
Poor bastard,
was all my father said. But he couldn't work, and I knew he was shaken by whoever it was whose life hurt him so badly that he had come to a bridge with a 135-foot clearance below at high tide. Add another 9 feet at low tide. My father had laid his hand on my head.

- - -

But now no reassurance comes. No hand on my head. No hug to his shaggy hair. I stay in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs, already knowing, not taking the chance.

But if he'd just turn. Give me a look of shared confidence—my father in his bandana and me, the girl he swore he'd die for—the exotic-looking one, strangers probably say when they meet us. His daughter's got those dark, swimming eyes.

Like I'm from some Asian war nobody clearly remembers.

BRIDGE

The Piscataqua River Bridge rises and arches like an enormous heron, its wings wide in flight.

In the morning Pilot and I follow our unplowed street to the river path, then slog through the snow to our stretch of beach beneath the bridge. I barely see its shape in the morning dark, even now that I'm standing beside it. But I know the wings of the bridge curve out to the sky. Suddenly Pilot bays a high, chilling animal alarm. Nobody hangs out here. Especially in cold so fierce a body could crack. But I see a person in the snowy dawn, balanced on one of the rusted I-beams of a pier that was once here, maybe destroyed by the fast-running river. At low water the narrow beams reach long, first over rocks and then the river. Who'd want to be so near thirty-five-degree water screaming by?

His feet are wide. A him?

Pilot races in a wide arc around him. “Pilot,” I call softly. She is black and invisible in this light, except for her feet, which are white. I can't find her feet running. Then a strip of pink light shows between the river and the sky. She's there. A black cartoon nearly grown puppy with a licorice tail. The person turns, a figure etched in the new light, unaware of me.

I make out camouflage baggy pants. Boots. A muddy-colored cap pulled low.

Soldier things. The soldier shifts his feet on the beam like it's a tightrope. I drop to the sand and hold out my arms. Pilot's bony frame slams in. I fix on the marks on the soldier's clothes and the cap that covers his eyes. His shoulders sag. He holds something in his right hand, his far hand from me. The sun's pink tinge creeps through the mist and out of the water. The sun!

My beach is not long, just the rocky shore you can walk at low tide between the bridge to the east and woods of white birch and oaks to the west. I'm not twenty feet from him. I call “Hey” toward the pier. He doesn't say “Hey” back.

Everything's different this morning. It's a school day. And I'm here, and there's a soldier in the silver light. After what my father said last night.

Pilot escapes my reach again. She gives out a ridiculously deep bark for the baby she is, all eleven months of her, a gangly puppy with pancake-sized feet.

The soldier moves.

“She's friendly,” I say.

Pilot calls up a gravelly howl from deep inside her. The soldier finally turns his head toward us. The soldier's right hand seems to tremble and drum against his leg. Pilot's body shakes with concentration on his every move. The pink light streaks over the sky. The soldier's head bends at a funny angle, and for some reason I think of the Tin Man.

“I'm not going to hurt her,” the soldier says. “The dog.” He scatters his words into the cold air. I glance at him directly. I see more of his face in the new light.

Pilot sprawls flat, from muzzle to tail, watching him. “You're on her beach,” I say.

A low sound comes out of the soldier. It isn't worried like Pilot's. It's flat.

Pilot lets out a yip that cuts through the cold. “Excuse me,” I say, “do you have any treats? She's food motivated. That's what they said at the shelter. If you had a treat, she might stop howling.”

Looking at the soldier, I don't think he's much older than Jamie, next door, who turned nineteen in December. He wears a thick watchband with a face as wide as his wrist. An American flag is stitched on his shoulder, only it's in black and white. His lips are small, straight lines, except for a part that's bloody and swollen. I want to tell him,
Stay away from the Page. People get shot in that bar.

Was he a soldier in Afghanistan? With Mr. Murray we are studying the country the way it was before we were at war.

The soldier gets the word
treat
. Finally he pats his chest pockets. His hip pockets. He even has pockets on his sleeves. Above the flag are stripes like arrows.

If he answers I don't know. The roar of traffic from the bridge sucks up any words.

Finally the soldier comes up with a packet of airline peanuts from one of his millions of pockets. “She like peanuts?” I think he says. He doesn't focus on either of us.

“Her name's Pilot,” I say. “Call her.”

The birches moan when the trees lean into each other, and then the wind suddenly stops. The soldier lets out a long, quivery whistle. It's as if he heard a command—call her—and obeys.

Pilot lifts her sleek self, walks straight to him. She scarfs up every peanut he holds out in his hand, then licks the scent from his open palm.

My eyes are drawn to a glint of light, something in his other hand. I take a step nearer. But the soldier does some kind of trick, pulling something from another pocket. I freeze. I see what he drops into a place beneath his coat. What had glinted in the sunlight shining through falling snow was a gun.

The warnings my mother would try to scare me with flash in my mind. Danger is everywhere. Trust no one. The spirits will get you. They want to take you to live with them. Watch out for spirits on your path. They lie in wait. For you, Sophea.

I am not afraid.
I don't know any Khmer Rouge or the Pol Pot time my grandmother talked about. I am not Cambodian. I am American.
I am not afraid.
I have no past. I have no ancestors. I have no mother. I make myself from scratch every day.

“Found this hanging from the fence.” The soldier gestures to the cyclone fence that divides the woods from the riverbank. My eyes leave his face and glance at what he holds. My ring. The black slit in the tiger's eye stone gleams. He holds it out to me. I am aware of the ring, the rock, the soldier, the sun, the moon sucking the river back into the sea.