Either the Beginning or the End of the World (6 page)

Luke knocks his cap down half over his eyes. “Where the hell did you come from?” he teases.

We cross the streets, D Street, C Street, B. “I walk the strip a lot,” he says. We come to the Ashworth By the Sea. My father and I don't come here. But I know this is where we visited that Christmas years ago, a motel room on a side street that my mother rented. I know that some fishermen's kids work here as waiters and dishwashers in season. Luke opens the door.

“Food here?” I say.

We enter a dimly lit dining room with white lights strung across the ceiling like stars. We have entered a universe. I glance at this guy I am with, then around the Ashworth overlooking the seawall and the ocean. It's a dream to come here with him to eat dinner, two people who are very nearly strangers, but I can't remember not knowing him.

We have our pick of tables since the only other people here are zipping their parkas and paying their bill. We sit at a window table where we hear the waves crash on the seawall. I take off my coat. Then I take off my Dunkin' Donuts apron. I stuff it inside my coat to hide the scent of sugar and chocolate and coffee, but the smell is in my hair. Luke drops his cap on the table. Then he folds it and puts it in his pocket. I see his hands shake on the table. His eyes are green, wary, and bloodshot. His hair is dark. He plants his palms on the table. I think this is to steady them. We scan the menu and order fish and chips from the waiter.

He gives me his crooked grin. “Found you,” he says.

“Maybe 'cause you gave me this,” I say and slide his dog tags from my pocket. He glances at them.

“I wanted to set your mind at ease,” he begins.

“I'm at ease.” Like a challenge.

I look at him through my hair that I know is blown wild.

He shrugs.

“You mean about the gun,” I say with an airiness I don't feel. “I've seen guns. This is New Hampshire.” I laugh at my joke about a state where people come across the border to buy any kind of gun, rifle, handgun, AK-47.

I pull my hair back off my face and glance at him. He shrugs. It occurs to me there's no room with him to be fake.

“Maybe it's my mind I'm worried about,” he says. “I'll quit obsessing over yours.”

His eyes shift to the door, to the waiter bearing water. We hear the click of saltshakers that a busboy gathers on a tray. Is it like the click of a weapon when it's engaged? We're not going to talk about what he was doing with the gun. The question just sits on the table, a little groggy, while we watch each other and glance away, trying to pretend we're not.

The waiter is vacuuming. We are the only customers. Snow has begun to fall harder over the boulevard and into the sea. The food comes, and we dig in, famished.

“This place haunted?” Luke says, shifting his eyes to a dark hallway where the waiter turned off the lights.

“Oh, probably.” I press my palms to my head, laughing. “Maybe it's the statue of the lady across the boulevard. It says, ‘Breathe soft ye winds.' She's asking the waves to be gentle to sailors who died at sea.”

He eats fast. He's cleaning up. He motions,
eat, eat,
at me and my plate that brims with golden fries. He eats, and I begin to tell him things. I tell him my mom is moving in.

“Heard a few things about that,” he says, and I think of the long hours my father and he had on the boat. Did they talk about me?

I say, “She was sixteen when she had me. I hardly see her. When I was little I told my teacher she was a selchie, a seal woman, and she'd gone back to live in the ocean. Dad had to go and talk to the teacher.”

Luke hoots. “A seal woman?” He lifts his chin, downing a beer. I smell the beer. I smell some scent, maybe the wool of his sweater. Some smell that is him. “You said she became a seal?”

So I tell him the Scottish tale about the carpenter who fell in love with a woman and they had a child. But she was also a seal, and when she found her sealskin, she swam back to her seal family in the ocean.

Luke leans in toward me, his head on his fists. His green, bleary eyes are staring at me like I've got something mysterious he could use. I can't turn my eyes from his. He says, “I'd like to try on a sealskin. Get out of this skin.”

Then I pull back. We both do. He calls for another beer. I hug my coat around myself, chilled beside the black windowpane. I say, “Since this threat of seeing my mother, I keep having these flashbacks about her.”

His eyes narrow, like I've become dangerous. “Did something happen you can't let go of?”

“Just moments. Just smells. What about you?” I say. “I want some secrets, too.”

He downs half the new glass of beer. He says, “Zurmat. Paktia Province.”

I know these names. Afghanistan.

“So you're back, you're not going.”

He nods. “I think about going back, all the time.”

“What did you do?” I say.

A tiny squinting of his eyes. He had shaved. But I can see a shadow in the valley over his lips. “Medic,” he says. “Cordon and search missions.”

I don't know what that is. “I've seen photos of Afghanistan,” I say. I place myself in a classroom with Mr. Murray showing photos on the screen. “Mountains and valleys,” I say. “They need to irrigate the little farms.”

His eyes shift to mine. “You're so pure.”

I don't know what to say. I just nod. Then, “I need to go.”

“I know,” he says.

“Where do you live?” I say.

“Near Rye Harbor. A winter rental. One of those cabins. That's why I got this habit now of coming down here and walking the strip. Not much life, but enough.”

“My father lived in one of those winter rentals. It had everything. Near Rye Harbor? The ones in a horseshoe by the stone ledge?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It's fine.”

It's not.

I can tell from his face. He doesn't want to go back to it. I'm not pure. I feel like I'm old, like the way I felt when he took off his sunglasses and dared me to look at him on the beach.

“Wanted to say thanks.” He is standing.

“For what?”

“Bad night, that night. Thanks for stopping. You could have run for your life.”

I stand to go, too, even while I'm pretending we are going back to his cottage, in the center of the horseshoe of cottages. From there it's a short walk to a stone breakwater reaching out to the Isles of Shoals.

His phone beeps.

He zips his coat over his sweater and answers.

“Yup,” he says. “No problem.” Puts the phone in his pocket.

“Don't tell my father,” I say.

“Tell him what?” Luke says. He's distracted. He doesn't look at me.

“That we're doing this. He thinks I'm perfect, that if he warned me, I would never do this.”

At the door, he looks at me. Straight on. We are so close I imagine the hardness of his jaw under the shadow of beard.

“We're not doing anything,” he says. He shoves his hands in his pockets when we step into the wind.

“Why do you say it that way?” I ask.

“I don't want to get used to you,” he says. His jaw has hardened, and he moves ahead of me. He had not hesitated. But I know why he's trying to put dark and space between us. I can name a dozen reasons why we should not get used to each other.

I catch up but let it be. We walk across the boulevard, our chests and hair quickly layered in snow. I am aware of his body and my body. He is barely two inches taller. Something happens to my walk. I feel it in my toes and my heels as my boots make silent prints beside his. I feel every part of them, making an arc as I am simply walking.

I'm already used to him.

FLYING

I get home at midnight from Dunkin' Donuts and the Ashworth By the Sea where I ate dinner and smelled beer I never drank. My father is asleep. The sky must be clearing, and my father will go fishing in the morning. I am flying, simply remembering Luke's eyes. Remembering when I first saw his boot on my truck's runner, the bend of his leg, the charge through my body.

I make a cup of coffee with hot milk. I see Luke's crooked smile and his dark hair that falls across his forehead.

My father snores himself awake. Then he's quiet. I will sell our shrimp. Fresh-caught sweet northern shrimp to make us rich.

The house is still. The roar of traffic over the bridge has not stopped, but it has let up enough so outside there are seconds of absolute quiet. I have a memory of the sound of a helicopter's rotors over the river the night my father and I worked on the shrimp nets. A witness must have seen someone stop his car, get out. I feel relieved tonight there are only the normal sounds of traffic, steady, people maybe going home.

While I pack my father's lunch for him to take fishing, somehow I also think of the map of old Afghanistan Mr. Murray showed us, where traders made paths through the mountains as they crossed between continents.

In a few hours my father will be up and brewing coffee at three thirty. He'll take the sandwiches I'm making. I'll hear the truck start, and he'll have food and hot coffee in a thermos as he steams off shore. And Luke will be on board.

GHOSTS

I wake in the morning. I remember the small valley above Luke's lips under the shadow of beard. It's mysterious how his eyes draw me. It's as if we each know something the other wants to learn.

But when I come down the stairs, half asleep, I stop still on the landing. A figure steps onto the porch beside my father's traps. Long dark hair down her back. I hadn't heard the car. Pilot did not warn me. Pilot stands, curious. What now? She is my mother. She has seen me through the window, and I can't pretend I'm not here. When she knocks, I stare. Then go to the door and allow her in.

My mother's cheeks are thin while her belly is large. She pulls her hair up and folds it into itself at the back of her neck. She gives me her wide smile. “Sophea.” She says my Cambodian name, pronounced
so-PEE-ya.
Although no one calls me that, it doesn't sound unfamiliar. I sit down in a chair, rigid, drawing my knees up and protecting my chest. “Why are you here?” I say.

She looks like an exhausted teenaged girl who somehow got herself pregnant.

She smiles. Sheds her puffy white coat. She sits on the couch and watches me for a brief second.

“I don't feel good,” she says. “Is Johnny here?”

I don't like it. She has no right to need my father.

She leans her body forward, lowers her head, and a small moan escapes.

“He's fishing,” I say.

“I might be sick,” she says.

Just in time I grab the big blue bowl my father and I use for lobster claws. My mother leans over and retches, and my thought, from nowhere, is that it feels tragic to see her loss of dignity. She is so perfectly made, her hair in waves, her blush, her straight spine, her English. She retches loudly, and tears fill her eyes. I turn around in my long johns till the sounds stop.

Under her coat she's wearing velvety pants and a white shirt, and without her boots, she's barefoot. Loose hair falls over her face. Slowly, she eases it back and takes the bowl into the bathroom.

“Mom,” I say when she returns. I don't say her retching is making me queasy. “I'm getting ginger ale. That's what my father gives me when I'm sick.” I jam my arms in the sleeves of his old coat. “Back soon,” I sing. But I could let the tide rise and fall and rise again before I come back, and my mother will not drink the ginger ale. She will put a leaf on her tongue. A Cambodian remedy. I'd have more luck if I got her a plant.

My mother is quiet. Her head remains lowered over the bowl. Any human person would rest their hand on the tight tendons I see in the back of her neck to comfort her. I can't.

I am standing behind her, and she reaches her slender fingers over her head to touch me. This hurts me so badly. Like the wind, it will stop. Disappear. I see bracelets made of glass beads on her wrist. I know that she has eyeliner tattooed above her lashes. When she looks up it won't be smeared, in spite of the tears that have sprung up with her sickness.

“Ginger ale's the ticket,” I whisper. I open the door. A blast of snow flies in.

I hear her say, “I don't need ginger ale. I'm pregnant. Ginger ale will not make me stop throwing up.” She leans over the lobster bowl, then stretches herself out, the length of the couch. Her bare, red-painted toes show at the hem of her trousers. I see her skin is nearly as brown as the wood of the armrest. I don't think I had ever noticed.

“I know,” I say.

“What do you know? Wait till you're pregnant.”

“I will never get pregnant.” I am sure of this.

“I will never get pregnant,” she repeats. Is she mimicking me? She throws her arms up, and her bracelets fall down her wrists and tinkle.

“How could you let yourself get pregnant?” I am standing over her, my arms are in the air. I am both ashamed and excited I might know where I could find my father's bottle of gin because when my mother is gone I will take a small taste and let my head spin like a dream.

“I don't know,” she says. “We were little kids in the camps. Bong Proh and me. He's too old. I won't go back to him.”

“I don't want to know about your personal life.”

“It could happen. You aren't perfect,” she says.

She goes right to my gut. I say, “I have to go to work.” I glance at her eyes that I know are exactly like mine.

“How long since you came to see me?” my mother says. But she doesn't listen. She stands. Beneath her unbuttoned shirt is a cami, stretched wide across her belly. She tenderly, slowly bends to lift a scarf from her back and tie it around her neck, slides her bare feet into boots. Even her toes, which must be so cold on the wood floor, somehow enrage me. She pulls her large, quilted jacket over the scarf. “Could you give me a ride?” she says. “I have a doctor's appointment. They'll check the heartbeat. I think something is the matter. I've been sick every morning, and I'm already seven and a half months. I have very bad karma.” She ends in a soft whisper.