North of Boston (5 page)

Milosa looks directly into my eyes. “Like a cat, you escaped death. You must have done something.”

“I lay across a piece of wreckage and floated for hours.”

“No. If you were passive, you would have died. Maybe it was just a thought or a decision. But you did
something
to survive.”

Spritzing lemon on my shrimp, I say that I got very cold and very wet, and the Coast Guard picked me up.

He glances at me in sharp disgust.
“Vy ne byli gotovy umeret,'”
he insists.
You weren't ready to die
.

I realize that Milosa has a hidden, irrational belief that he wants my experience to confirm: Not that I, Pirio, wasn't ready to die. But that one doesn't have to die until one is ready. That sufficiently stubborn individuals can call the shots. Individuals like himself.

He brings another curled shrimp to his mouth, and I notice that his eyes are unusually dull and glassy. At seventy, Milosa could easily be mistaken for a much younger man. He stays fit with squash and swimming (he taught me when I was a child), and takes a regimen of dietary supplements that costs more per day than most families pay for food in a week. Every three months he goes to one of the most elite doctors in Boston for a full battery of expensive tests that all show him to be in perfect health. Milosa is terribly afraid of dying. He can't abide the prospect of defeat.

“Oh, let's not talk about those things,” Maureen says with a little shudder.

She announces that her new product line for teenage girls is coming along nicely. (Whenever we Kasparovs encounter emotional challenges, we start talking about work.) She intends to call it Sweet Surprise. It will be fruity—top note of grapefruit, bottom note of mango. Fresh and sassy, happy and brash. Target market: preteens and teens, thus inexpensive and gaily packaged in watermelon pinks and greens. First market entry: an eau de toilette, followed in quick succession by several flankers—a gel, talcum, and body wash, with possible spin-offs into facial soap and the kind of tubed lip gloss teenage girls are never without. All of it sold in drugstore chains with free scratch-and-sniff cards and a stand-alone display. Soon to be decided: the final formula, on which will depend the manufacturing schedule and launch date. Maureen's fondest wish now is for a famous celebrity face.

I agree to come to the meeting to finalize the formula when she's ready.

“Remember, we're talking preteens and teens,” she reminds me.

“In other words, fruity.”

“Exactly.” She seems relieved that I'm on board and shoots an anxious glance to Milosa, who hasn't said a word.

Jeffrey has cleared the entrée dishes and served his famous low-fat lemon custard by the time Maureen and I finish discussing the new line.

Maureen looks at her husband for several pensive seconds. His shoulders are slumped down like a pigeon's, while his spoon clatters clumsily against the small china dessert bowl. The words on the tip of her tongue don't fall, and her face lengthens in apparent disappointment. She wants his support, his admiration, but knows she won't get it because she never has. He married her, but he doesn't love her, and has always kept his heart to himself. Shadows flit across her face, probably flashed memories of previous hurts. Her jaw clenches; she bites her lip. I've seen her get to this point before—struggling to adjust to the yawning emotional gulf that stretches between her and the man she's still trying to love.

Maureen hasn't touched the mildly caloric custard, and now she seems to find it repulsive. She throws her napkin on the table and lobs a sharp question at me while glaring at Milosa. “Do you suppose that if we found your mother's private fragrance, Pirio, your father would take an interest in
that
?”

Milosa picks up his head, looks at her blandly for a second or two, and proceeds to finish his dessert. Maureen storms out of the dining room.

Another family dinner at the Kasparovs'.

Soon after, Milosa leaves the dining room as well, and I'm left sipping the coffee that Jeffrey serves me, glad to have a few moments by myself. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to piece together my parents' story from random details I learned growing up, and from my own insistent questioning of people who knew them well. There has always been a great deal of secrecy around them, possibly rooted in shame. What I've learned so far goes like this: Milosa was born in a godforsaken village whose name he pretends to have forgotten, into a family he barely mentions. As soon as he could, he went off to Moscow, hungry for the spoils of capitalism. He says he started a modeling agency; it's more likely that he was a pimp. I've tried to get him to admit it, but he masterfully evades the question. In any case, one of his clients was a famous American designer, and soon he was supplying Slavic and Baltic beauties to the New York fashion world.

My mother was one of them, a six-foot, nineteen-year-old Estonian whose parents had been deported to Siberia during the Soviet occupation. She was raised in Tallinn by a brick-laying uncle who treated her badly in ways I can only guess. Like Milosa, she fled as soon as she was able.

They were ardent lovers from the beginning and remained so for two turbulent decades. Betting everything on her modeling career, they moved to the United States. They chose Boston, thinking they would have more peace here than in New York, but he grew bitterly jealous of her long absences, of her stratospheric rise, of so many desiring eyes upon her. The more he tried to control her, the more independent and mercurial she became, almost taunting him with her success. He wanted a traditional marriage; naturally, she refused. It wasn't until he understood her passion for creating scents, showed her the way to make her hobby a viable and then profitable business, that she in her late twenties agreed to a legal bond, achieving with my arrival a facsimile of a stable life.

If my mother was the heart and soul of Inessa Mark, Inc., he was the brains. He made her company happen, emphasis on
made
. His realm was in the shadows, where no one cared to look. He kept no records other than the minimum the government required, and these I suspect were mostly fictional. No one really knew what he was up to—it's likely that he had more than one business going on. We only saw the spectacular results.

Although my parents all but devoured each other in the realm of love, there is no doubt that their business partnership was as brilliant as they come.

The fact is that Milosa
would
take an interest if the formula for my mother's private fragrance was ever found. So would I. After creating L'Amour du Nord and some other perfumes for her line, Isa made a scent she never named. It was produced one bottle at a time at the factory in Grasse, according to a formula she didn't allow to be kept on file. It was her private fragrance, worn only by her. Professionals who knew it said it was exquisite, a scent that could rival the best of what was out there. A sure moneymaker, said some. I knew it only as the smell of my mother. I couldn't have separated the two. The fragrance belonged to her the way light belongs to a sparkling pool. The woman and the scent of the woman—both together made me feel happy, loved, and safe.

If only a few drops of the perfume had survived, we could have subjected it to a gas chromatograph and learned the formula. But when Isa died, the women Milosa hired to clean out her room took the last remaining bottle. When accused, they flatly and volubly denied it. It still rankles me that something so precious could have been lost that way. Now whenever someone at Inessa Mark mentions Isa's Scent, a moment of silence usually follows in honor of what might have been. It seems to me sometimes that what disappeared was not just a single perfume, but the possibility of her company someday becoming a true luxury house.

—

The ringing telephone wakes me. I grope for it.

“Who hit you?” Milosa asks without preamble. Normal words such as
Excuse me for calling at two a.m., but I have something really important to say
are not in his repertoire.

“What?”

“Who hit you? What ship?”

“Oh, that. I don't know.” I rise to one elbow, turn on the light.

Grumbling sounds emerge from the receiver. Milosa gives a shallow cough. Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 2 is playing in the background. I'd recognize those brooding, passionate chords anywhere. He's obviously ensconced in his book-lined office on the third floor of the town house. I have no idea what he does up there, other than drink brandy, smoke cigars, listen to classical music, and play chess with his computer.

“How can you not know? There must have been an investigation,” he says.

I tell him that the Coast Guard is looking into it.

“What do you mean,
looking into it
? This was a violent crime.”

“Please, Milosa. It's the middle of the night.”

“You believe those people? The Coast Guard?”

“Of course. Their job is figuring out stuff like this. It's what they do.”

He whoops at my stupidity. Distrust of public officials is ingrained in the Russian psyche. “You're too trusting. Always, too trusting. You Americans are soft.”

“No, we Americans just happen to live in a functioning society, where people are basically sane and rational.” I get some satisfaction out of making him feel boorish, since he so often makes me feel naive.

“Ha! You know nothing of the world.”

I swing my legs out from under the covers, rise to a seated position. “A little late for this kind of thing, don't you think?”

“You said it was a big boat, a freighter. How can it take so long to find a boat that size?”

“Size has nothing to do with it. There are procedures they have to follow that may be time-consuming, but in the end I'm sure they'll they get it done.” Now I'm beginning to doubt it myself. It's been nine days, and no word from the Coast Guard. But I'm not about to let Milosa disturb my sleep with his dark, theatrical views.

“What are you going to do?” He plows right into this question as if the premise—that I'm supposed to do something—were already clearly established.

“What can I do?”

“You ask me what you can do?” One of his most irritating habits is the way he repeats the stupid question you just asked in a voice that makes it sound ten times stupider.

“What I'm saying, Milosa, is this: it's not my job.”

A pause. He's letting me hear the fading notes of my passivity. “Remember
The Maltese Falcon
?”

Oh, another thing Milosa does in his third-floor study: he watches detective movies. Not thrillers, with their busty, panting women and trashy special effects. Detective movies, where the protagonist has to think.

“It's two a.m. What are you getting at?” I say.

“Sam Spade said, ‘When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it.'”

I groan. “Please, Milosa. Go to bed. Put down the brandy and go to bed.” I hang up and turn out the light. Flop on the pillow, twist and turn, come to rest with a sigh, eyes wide open. The headlights of a passing car flicker across the ceiling. I wait for the next sweep of headlights. There it is. I start counting the number of cars that pass by on the street below. When I get to ten, I swear and fling back the covers. I shuffle to the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, stand barefoot in the spill of yellow light.
Sam Spade,
I think as I reach for the orange juice.
Jesus fucking Christ.

A
t nine in the morning, I call the Coast Guard from my office at Inessa Mark. I'm put through to Captain Anthony Cavalieri, chief of staff of the U.S. Coast Guard First District. He apologizes for not having gotten in touch with me before this. The initial accident report, dated September 7, has been reviewed. There are some complications, some concerns. He'd like me to come down to the station to make a more detailed statement. He bumps me back to his secretary, who tells me that he has an opening in his schedule at three o'clock.

My stomach knots.
Complications, concerns.
Every day since the collision I've been expecting the Coast Guard to call with news that they'd found the freighter and that official sanctions were being enforced. Instead, I discover that mysterious problems have cropped up
,
and no one even bothered to let me know. I'm glad that I dressed for work carefully this morning: a black wool below-the-knee dress over black tights and ankle boots in soft hunter-green suede. An indigo Jil Sander single-breasted coat with a demure round collar, Mikimoto pearl earrings, hair in a smooth bun at the nape of my neck. Clothes (except the boots) that might remind me to behave myself.

I skip out of work in the afternoon, and on my way downtown I try to remember what I said the day of the accident, when I was interviewed for an hour by a shy officer with strawberry-blond curls and endearingly chubby hands. He asked question after question, sometimes circling back to ask the same question again in a slightly different form, which made me wonder later if he'd been trained in interview techniques. It seemed that he was jotting down volumes of information, more information than I was actually providing, studying me occasionally with pink-rimmed, brotherly eyes.

I have no idea what I told him. I felt loopy, as if I'd drunk a few glasses of champagne. I knew they hadn't found Ned, but what that meant hadn't sunk in. Instead, the foggily pleasant thought that he was bound to turn up soon intermittently crossed my mind. When I saw him, we'd laugh in relief. What a day we had! The miraculousness of my own rescue wasn't apparent to me either at that point. I liked that the guys were making a big fuss over me, but why they kept telling me I was amazing was anyone's guess. I'd been given a spare Coast Guard uniform that felt like love. A warm blanket was draped across my shoulders. Everything was sweet and nifty in my book, even the watery hot chocolate my interviewer served me in a paper cup.

By the time he flexed his dimpled knuckles and assured me that a thorough investigation would commence immediately, I was ready to be handed a stuffed animal and tucked into bed. I had no brain cells left to pay attention to the procedure he explained—something involving ships' logs, physical evidence, and an official-sounding agency. All I heard was that I was to go home and not worry. That sounded pretty good.

My old Saab courses down Stuart Street, through Chinatown, to the waterfront, up Atlantic Avenue to the North End. It's a chilly gray day in Boston. They usually are. I park in a garage, cross tides of tourists strolling along the wharves. The Coast Guard building is a plain brick square with some glass-and-steel triangular structures popping out of the top. Minus those modernist architectural oddities, it's as clean and upright as a buzz cut on a skull of tar.

I looked up Cavalieri on the Internet this morning, so when he introduces himself it's like meeting someone I already know. The posted picture was kind, and about ten years out of date. In person, his eyes are closer set, his cleft chin less cleft, and his neck not so beefy. His office is as depressingly functional as everything else in the building.

“I'm sorry about Mr. Rizzo,” Cavalieri says as he ushers me to a seat. He walks behind his desk. He is trying not to check me out but can't help it, and he's not sophisticated enough to be furtive. He must like what he sees because when he sits down he's smiling way too much for someone who just delivered condolences.

“Four hours in forty-two-degree water. I've never heard anything like it. Not exactly a lot of fat on your bones either,” he says, taking another opportunity to survey my body.

“I bruised a rib,” I say, which is true. It still hurts.

His smile widens, as if my bruised rib only makes me more spectacular.

My rib, hearing its name, starts to ache.

“Twenty-seven hundred vessels pass through this harbor a year,” Cavalieri explains. “That's roughly seven or eight ships a day. On September 7, three were in the area of the incident at the right time of day, but they were all within established shipping lanes, anywhere from three to six nautical miles from where you were picked up. We photographed the ships' hulls at the waterline a few days after the event and found no forensic evidence, no paint chips, scrapes, or dents. Written statements from the captain, chief officer, second officer, and chief engineer of each vessel were obtained and put on file. They all deny being involved in an accident. The ships' logs show nothing unusual and correspond as expected to the positions recorded by the Vessel Monitoring Systems. Satellite views are useless because of the fog.” He pauses. “The search turned up your boat's EPIRB—it had drifted a few miles by the time we found it.”

“EPIRB?”

“A small device that's designed to emit a radio signal on being submerged in water. Unfortunately, the signals aren't always monitored as closely as they should be.” He looks dutifully apologetic. “There wasn't much at the location of your recovery. Just some wooden wreckage, an uninflated life raft, and an oil slick. The raft probably didn't inflate because part of the sea-painter was wrapped around it.”

“Sea-painter?”

“That's the line that attaches the life raft to the boat. A mistake due to inexperience is my guess. The
Molly Jones
was a brand-new boat, and I suspect Mr. Rizzo was unfamiliar with all the equipment on board.” He shrugs. “The life raft wouldn't have done any good anyway if you were struck with little or no warning.”

He sits back, loops his fingers together behind his head, elbows pointed out. He's done his job, and now it's as if he's waiting for the start of a movie he's been dying to see. He asks me to tell him what I remember.

I say I saw a big boat, but I don't know what kind. Thought it was a freighter, but it could have been a tanker or container ship. When I was in the water, looking back, I didn't see much more. The fog obliterated all but the portion of the ship that was crossing directly over the
Molly Jones
. I never saw what was on the deck, never even saw the deck, much less any identifying marks. I'm actually not sure of the general shape of the thing. The one thing I think I know is the color: gray.

“You
think
you know?” he repeats.

I nod.

“Gray,” he repeats gingerly, as if he's trying out an unusual hors d'oeuvre.

Admittedly, that isn't much to go on.

Having read Cavalieri's Internet bio this morning, I know he's had vast seafaring experience. He's been an engineer aboard an icebreaker, a commercial vessel inspector, instructor at the Coast Guard Training Center, a federal on-scene coordinator, a federal maritime security coordinator, and a search and rescue mission coordinator. My eyes glazed over as his titles and awards accumulated. For me the takeaway was this: Cavalieri's used to dealing with bad stuff and delivering bad news.

“Ms. Kasparov, I'm sorry to tell you this, but we're coming up short on this thing. Other than your eyewitness testimony, I don't even have proof that a collision occurred.”

“What do you mean,
other than my eyewitness testimony
? Isn't that enough?”

“Of course. What I'm saying is, I have no hard evidence of a collision. I can't corroborate your story.”

“My
story
?” This is worse than I thought it would be. “What sank the
Molly Jones
wasn't a story, Captain.”

Cavalieri stands, paces behind his desk. He's not liking this any more than I am.

“At least one of those ships' logs must have been falsified,” I insist heatedly. “Don't tell me it hasn't happened before.”

“No, no.” He waves away my question. “It happens. One degree off course is enough for a large vessel to slip outside the shipping lanes. Once they realize what happened, they adjust their course, but in the meantime they can't turn, can't maneuver, can't even slow down very well. The crews are notoriously inattentive, and they don't want to be blamed. There've been plenty of cases of maritime hit and run, especially with the foreign carriers, we suspect, and there are relatively simple ways to cover it up. I just wish I had more information to put in my report to the NTSB.”

“Am I supposed to know what those letters mean?”

He hears the edge in my voice, eyes me warily in case I'm about to become hysterical. “National Transportation Safety Board. The governmental agency that deals with accidents at sea.”

“You mean you don't do it?”

“The Coast Guard submits an initial report, but the NTSB carries out the investigation and files a final comprehensive report. Their version is the official story.”

At the mention of the federal government, my worst fear turns into certainty. I'm now convinced that the ship that crushed the
Molly Jones
and took Ned's life will never be identified. This is when I realize I've been holding my breath for the last ten days, waiting for justice. Also truth, solace—whatever you want to call it. Wanting it not for my sake, but for Noah's. That day at Taffy's, when I tried to explain to him why his father died, and heard how flimsy and ridiculous the reasons sounded, I realized how important some kind of real explanation would be. Because if a child's parent has to be killed in a freak accident, that child deserves to see an aftermath of concern and accountability. He deserves, at minimum, an apology from the people who screwed up.

I ask Cavalieri how long the NTSB investigation will take.

“It depends on what they find. It could be anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, even a year if things get complicated. They're careful, and slow. Which reminds me—you can help by filling this out.”

He takes a clipboard with some papers attached to it off the side of his desk and hands it to me. The top sheet is Form 157K3 Collision Report. It's several pages, small type, answers to be written in the spaces provided. For my convenience, a pen has been attached to the clipboard by a chain.

“I've already given you all the information I have.”

“We need the forms for the file,” he says, mildly apologetic. His voice turns smooth as he prepares to dismiss me. “I want to assure you that everything that can possibly be done is being done. I'll let you know the minute I get any new information.”

“What about Mr. Rizzo's remains?”

“We're not equipped to find bodies in water that deep. The Navy could do it with special divers or an undersea robot, but they won't look unless it's part of a larger research project.”

I stand so we're eyeball to eyeball. “What are the names of the three ships near the site of the collision on September 7?”

His chin pulls back a notch. He wasn't expecting this, but he's quick on his feet. “Let us take care of it, Ms. Kasparov.”

“I want to know.”

“I know this must be hard for you. . . .”

“I want to
know
.”

He sizes me up again. He must be pretty sure at this point that I'm not going to be slipping off to a motel room with him after work, because he lets his voice dip to a cold governmental temperature. “I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to divulge that information.”

“Why not? It's got to be public information. How could it not be?”

“The situation is sensitive,” he replies, blinking slowly.

Ah, I see. He doesn't want me harassing captains, making accusations, clambering aboard restricted vessels, creating an international scene. I almost smile. He must think I'm just a woman in a black designer dress who'd rather be on Newbury Street shopping. “It's OK, Captain. I don't need your help. I'll find the ships myself.”

A flinty light comes into Cavalieri's eyes. “As you wish.”

He comes around the desk quickly and opens the door to his office. I see his secretary look away. He motions me to a bench in her area where presumably I am to fill out the form.

I leave his office, sit on the bench, and fume. If it were up to me, I'd leave the form on the bench and walk out. But for Noah's sake I pick up the pen.

The first section asks for a large amount of useless information about the crew members aboard the affected vessel. I don't even look at the rest. I crumple the paper in my hand, trusting Noah would understand. My hands are shaking, and I realize that I am roiling with stored trauma—enraged, powerless, and still terrified.