The Silver Boat (10 page)

The night had been so beautiful, and when morning came, Dar didn't want Andy to leave. She held him tight, trying to remember her dream. It had started with the bell buoy, the one they'd heard last night, tolling in the channel while the family danced. And then the dream-sound had turned to a phone ringing, with her father calling.

“What are you thinking?” Andy asked, stroking her hair.

“About my father,” she said. “It's so strange. A dream that's been a nightmare before suddenly feels different.”

“Why do you think?” Andy asked.

“I'm not sure. Cleaning out the house,” she said. “Having my sisters and the kids here, going through all our old things. It's comforting, in a way.”

“You sure did seem happy last night,” Andy said.

“We were,” Dar said.

“Do you think you're making peace with the idea?” he asked.

“The opposite,” Dar said. “Fighting as hard as ever, but coming up with a new idea.”

“Which is?”

Dar shook her head, edging more deeply against his body. “I'm not completely sure. Getting there, though.”

Andy kissed her and got up to take a shower, and Dar went straight back to sleep. By the time she woke up again, the sun was streaming through the open window. The earth smelled soft, green shoots half an inch high had emerged in the gardens, and the ocean was perfectly still.

Dar sat at her drawing table. She'd begun using the small pewter dory as a pen rest, and she gave it a long look before starting to shade her most recent work. She made lines so fine, even she could barely see them; she was pleased at the job she'd done making Argideen's SUV look evil. Lost in crosshatching, she barely heard the phone.

“Hey, where are you?” Rory asked when she picked up.

“I slept late,” she said.

“We all did. I think yesterday was harder than we expected.”

“It was.”

“Delia and I were thinking . . . would you feel like taking a walk to see Mom?”

“Yes,” Dar said. “I'd love it.”

The three sisters met on the road; they'd each picked a handful of dried herbs, beach grass, and lilac tips. They walked single file down the main road, turned left onto a country lane, and entered the Chilmark Cemetery. The land had small hills, granite boulders, and very old, tall trees; some of the oldest graves on the island were here, tombstones worn by time and weather, bearing carvings of death's-heads, angels of mercy, skulls and crossbones.

Colonel John Allen was buried here, having died in 1767; Mrs. Bethia Clark, whose tombstone read:

Andy had told Dar that she was a Mayhew, a distant relative, along with many other Mayhew graves in his family's plot here. Dar touched the stone as they walked past.

Over in the corner was John Belushi's grave, where his fans regularly left bouquets, letters, poems, bottles of beer. Sometimes they left cheeseburgers, but the food attracted raccoons and the caretaker took everything away.

Approaching the graves of their mother and grandmother, Dar felt a shock wave of grief. It still seemed so new and raw, to have lost their mother last fall. The three sisters fanned out before the granite stone. The inscription was simple: her name, dates, and the words
Beloved Mother
.

Each sister took her turn placing the dry herbs, lilac branches, and tall grass by their mother's stone. They couldn't help touching it, placing their palms flat against its cold surface, as if they could somehow reach her, let her know they were there.

They'd saved some lilac branches for their grandmother's grave, just a few feet away, and spent a few minutes arranging them there before turning back to their mother.

They listened to the breeze in the trees, one of their mother's favorite island sounds. This was their first visit together since her funeral, and Dar knew they were all thinking it would be their last for a while.

“She's not in there, you know,” Delia said finally. “She's in heaven. She's looking over us all the time, like a guardian angel.”

Neither Dar nor Rory replied. Dar nodded to Delia, wishing it could be true.

“She's in heaven,” Delia said again. “I know it.”

“We believe you,” Rory said in a voice that said the opposite.

They stood there for a few minutes, total silence except for the bare branches scraping overhead. The spot was peaceful and comforting. A few robins hopped around the new grass, and a downy woodpecker tapped high in an old maple.

“Mom and Dad have definitely been around this week. You know what I keep thinking?” Dar asked.

Her sisters waited.

“I know this is out of the blue,” Dar said, “but could the land grant be real?”

“Are you talking about Dad's idea?” Delia said.

“Yes,” Dar said, thinking of their early-evening walks. “Whether it was true or not, he was convinced that his family had been granted land here on the Vineyard.”

“By some English king,” Rory said.

“Talk about a pipe dream,” Rory said. “A British monarch giving land in America to a poor Irish potato farmer, or whatever he was.”

“Slightly far-fetched,” Delia said.

Dar didn't reply. After her father was gone, she had accompanied her mother to the Chilmark Town Hall at Beetlebung Corner. The memory was vague, but she knew they'd spent an afternoon looking through land records and talking to the town clerk. Nothing had come of it.

Her mother had researched land grants. They were far from rare—land given to colonists, granted by kings, to establish settlements. In the 1700s, Spain issued land to anyone willing to settle in Florida. Revolutionary War veterans were given property by George Washington to pay them for their service.

“Besides, don't you think if there was anything to it, the Littles' real estate lawyers would have turned it up?” Rory asked.

“The title search takes awhile. That's part of why we're holding their deposit in escrow,” Delia said. “Not that I believe they'll find anything. We'll be closing in a month at most.”

“Dad believed it was real. It's why he went away,” Dar said.

“If he'd found it, don't you think he'd have come back?” Rory asked.

“But no one thinks he even had the chance to look, right?” Delia asked. “Something happened sailing from Kerry to Cork, and he never made it.”

“I know,” Dar said. “But here we are, visiting Mom. We've never done the same for Dad.”

“How would we even try?” Delia asked.

“We have no idea where his boat went down,” Rory said.

“That's true,” Dar said. “I'm not thinking of a particular spot in the sea. This morning I was drawing, and I looked at that little dory Dad took from his grandfather's boat shed . . .”

“You're thinking we should go over there?” Rory asked.

“I don't know,” Dar said. “Maybe.”

“Ireland?”
Delia asked.

“What if he did have the chance to look?” Rory asked after a minute.

“For . . . ?” Delia asked.

“We think he never made it to Cork at all. But what if he did? And went looking for proof, the king's document, or whatever it was.”

“He would have come home,” Delia said.

“But what if he didn't find it?” Rory asked. “Whatever was eating him so badly—he had to leave his family, go looking for this thing—if he made it there safely, but couldn't put his hands on the deed, might he decide he couldn't come back?”

They stayed in the cemetery a little while longer, cleaning up the leaves around their mother's grave. Dar had always imagined her father in the ocean, his spirit in every wave. Something tugged at her memory, but she could not believe that if her father was alive, even if he'd decided not to come home, he wouldn't have let them know. He couldn't have had it in him to be so cruel.

Gathering a small pile of leaves, twigs, and pinecones, she thought of her father's pride. The look in his eyes when he'd shown her around the
Irish Darling
. All those twilight walks around her grandmother's land, looking for property markers. His determination to sail solo across the Atlantic. And the letters he'd written to Dar's mother during the months they were separated.

Dar glanced at Rory, caught her sister's sharp gaze and wondered what she was thinking. They walked home, met the kids in the yard, trying to untangle the line on an old fishing rod. An osprey flew overhead, long wings streaked black and white underneath, sticks in her beak. Everyone watched, following the hawk's progress to a nest pole across the salt pond.

“Listen,” Rory said. “I'm not ready to go back inside and start packing again. Does anyone else feel like going to the beach?”

Jenny did a happy little barefoot shuffle, winding up with her arms around her mother. Obadiah ran to get the fishing rod.

“Sounds good to me,” Delia said. She picked up Vanessa and turned to Dar.

“I think I'll stay here,” Dar said.

She waited on the porch until she saw her sisters, the kids, and Scup troop down the beach path, and then she walked inside. The first floor was stacked with boxes, some packed and sealed, others open and half-full.

Walking slowly through each of the rooms, she let her eyes rest on every surface not already in boxes, taking in all the love and history of her complicated family. The walls, radiators, fireplaces, kitchen stove, refrigerator, woodstove, wide oak floorboards.

Dar finished looking through the Vineyard house's first floor and went up to the second, where she went through the same process, sending her gaze over every wall, brass sconce, fireplace, and other fixtures, taking her time to get where she was going.

She stepped inside her mother's room, gazed at the thin mattress of her white metal bed, peered up at the bright red, orange, and purple glass of the Murano chandelier her grandmother had brought back from a year in Italy.

By the time she got to the attic door, she took a deep breath. The old cats had come out of nowhere to gather at her feet.

Slowly opening the door, she felt the cats scoot past, slinking up the wooden stairs. The sound of paper flapping in the wind—thirty bats disturbed from their sleep by the five ancient predators. The cats chased them all to the slatted vent in the roof's peak, and the bats flew out the cracks into daylight.

“Good job,” Dar said, but the cats weren't finished stalking. They slunk around the attic's perimeter, then pounced from one leather-and-brass-bound steamer trunk to another: the luggage with which Dar's grandmother had traveled as a young woman from England to Boston, to marry Archibald Daggett, Jr.

Although Dar had been up here a hundred times, played among the trunks and their contents many rainy summer days, she felt as if this were the first time. Prolonging the moment, not quite ready to find what she was after, she glanced at an old trunk filled with silk and satin gowns, moth-eaten furs, fringed silk scarves and brocade shawls, custom-made hats, soft leather boots, black satin high heels. She and her sisters had dressed up in everything.

She walked purposefully across the attic, to the stone chimney and small fireplace. The cast-iron screen, grate, and fire tools were still in place. There was a cupboard on either side of the chimney, and she tried to remember which one her mother had used.

Turning the brass latch of one, she peered inside and saw that except for a mouse skeleton caught in a cobweb, it was empty. She closed the small door, crossed the fireplace to open the other.

A blue pouch wrapped in plastic, nibbled at the corners, lay pushed back as far as it would go. She had watched her mother place it here more than two decades ago, after the Noank house was sold. Dar's stomach twisted, and she reached all the way in, grabbed the pouch by two fingers, and pulled it toward her. She held it in both hands, sat on the floor, back to the wall.

Slowing unwrapping the plastic, unzipping the soft padded blue silk pouch, she pulled out a slim stack of onionskin stationery and thin blue envelopes, held together by a rubber band that broke the instant she touched it.

The envelopes were addressed to her mother. They were written in fountain pen, as she remembered, in her father's hand. Tears caught in her throat as Dar held the letters in her lap, staring at her father's beautiful, perfect handwriting and looking at the long-ago dates and postmarks.