Water Finds a Way a novel

Contents

Prologue 1992

1. Present Day

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Prologue

1992

When Angel climbed the stairs to number 37B, Blake knew to take her clothes off in a hurry. She would fold them neatly atop the dresser beside her stuffed bear and schoolbooks and wait in her room that overlooked the old, dead mills, hair hanging black and loose the way he liked it, lips slick with strawberry balm. Most days, he hardly looked at her. She was a dependable toy. Shoving her face into the polka-dot sheets, he would grunt some ugly words, then stomp out to drop his pills in her mother’s waiting hand. On those days, Blake got her homework done. She wrote out her compositions in her marble notebook and cooked caldo verde while her mother floated away on an opium river. On other days, when a deal had gone bad or some prettier girl had failed to pay him worship, Angel Salazar took his time with her. On those days, Blake wailed atonement into the sweaty clamp of his palm, and afterward, her brain felt too banged up for math problems or cooking. She would walk to the park and slump upon the rusted swings, creaking back and forth as the secret, tender parts of her body throbbed with the lesson of his keys and cigarettes.

It happened weeks after one of Angel’s patient days, the May before Blake turned seventeen. She pissed on a drugstore stick and cracked apart a little at the seams. Once before, she had scraped up the money and brought it down to the basement on Ashmore Street with its stained subway tiles and its blinds drawn tight against the world. Afterward, she had gone home and bled, her departed father’s rosary wound so tight around her wrist that the beads left tiny bruises. Since then, she had sent all those beads and prayers clattering three flights down to the Dumpster. But the deep red smell of the basement had leeched into her dreams, so, that spring, Blake fled north to a pair of old, long-waiting people and the refuge of a cold, unfurling sea.

1.

Present Day

Blake left the car on the edge of the road and took the driveway on foot. It was a rutted vestige of a driveway that spelled death to city cars in mud season. The wind carried curls of woodsmoke and a pervasive current of salt, and she walked with her head bent against it, hands stuffed in the pockets of her big coat, the black rope of her braid smacking at her back. Patches of late spring snow still clung to the shaded slope where blueberries once grew. A dark fringe of evergreens shivered icy dew as she passed beneath them. The land was familiar still. She remembered the lichen-splotched knuckles of granite that poked up from the hill like a tease to clumsy feet. When she reached the house, a silvered skeleton of a farmhouse with a sagging roof and boarded windows up top, she allowed herself to pause briefly and acknowledge its emptiness. Then she beat her way through a gauntlet of thorns that clawed her coat. Beneath her boots, rusting disks of beer cans broke apart in the weeds. The loiterers and revelers had all gone. There were only ruins.

Her ruins now. Her single inheritance.

In the rear yard, she found the shell of a rotted-out skiff where her grandmother had once planted marigolds—great buttons of tangerine and gold that bloomed all the way to first frost. She blinked away the memory. The birdbath had toppled and cracked in two. Beside the shed, her grandfather’s wooden lobster traps sat decaying like a pile of old rib cages. She pressed past these relics, her eyes hard and determined, her heart an unrelenting drum.

The apple tree stood at the edge of the yard. It was a gnarled relic now whose tattered limbs still sported a few black, shriveled fruits. She knelt beneath it and pressed her fingers to the scarred bark, announcing herself. Then she worked them down to the base of the trunk and searched. Though weeds had engulfed the tiny slate marker, its etched initials had endured twenty-seven winters. She traced them once with a ragged fingernail, then lifted the stone clear, and with her knife, commenced to carve at the soil. The job proved difficult, the earth still winter-bound and reluctant there in the shade. She shucked off the coat and blotted sweat from her temples, set her teeth.

The urn she found first—a tiny vessel for a tiny purpose. She lifted it out and set it among the slick roots. Her heart shuddered once, then settled. She continued to dig until the blade struck the lockbox. Its weight as she pulled it to her lap reassured her, and when she thumbed the numbers and popped the rusted clasps, she found inside, still wrapped in plastic, the big nickel-plated Smith & Wesson. Six .357 Magnum rounds popped from the cylinder into her hand. She jangled them like loose change, reloaded them, hoisted the barrel. She pressed it to her cheek until she felt the metal strike her teeth.

The wind came softly there below the hill. It washed over her broad shoulders and sighed away across the tidal marsh. She drew slow breaths, her finger bent around the trigger, the damp of the ground bleeding through her jeans. A squirrel skittered through nearby bushes and stopped to peer with its beady eyes. At last, she lowered the gun and zipped it inside her coat.

Her first test. She had passed.

She reburied the urn and the empty box. When she was satisfied that the place looked no different, she stood and smacked the mud from her knees and retraced her steps past the old front porch. She glanced again at the boarded door with its sun-bleached sign, the broken chair pushed against the railing where she once sat picking out distant stars. Silently, she sheathed the knife that hung muddy in her hand and trudged back down the hill, leaving the house and all its tethered ghosts behind her.

The village stood six miles east, a tangle of weathered buildings overlooking a shabby wharf. Long ago, her grandfather had kept a boat there. He would sell his lobsters on the pier with a handful of other wind-chiseled men who had since passed into whatever afterlife they imagined to exist beyond the vast smear of ocean and sky. A quarter century had slapped another layer of gray on the town, but mostly, she found it as she had left it. She drove the main street, dodging debris that had rattled loose from fishermen’s trucks, noting the shuttered windows and flapping screens, the paint that persistent fog had peeled away. There was a restaurant now, a place named Coasters with a tattered awning and salt-streaked windows. It abutted the squat, brick hardware store and the pharmacy that still called itself an apothecary. After that, business trickled off quickly in a smattering of machine shops and warehouses that screamed their failure from gaping doors and shattered glass panes. If Raker Harbor had been a hard place then, it was a harder place now, but Blake was well-adapted to hard places.

She swung west onto the Post Road and followed graded dirt past a handful of capes and sagging trailers until the land opened up once more onto the marsh. There, perched on the ragged edge of things, she found number 54, a faded red saltbox with a tacked-on porch set back from the road. A detached garage dwarfed the house, its front festooned in teal and orange buoys. In the yard, a wooden lobster boat squatted on a trailer, blue tarp flapping from its transom like a naughty skirt. Blake coaxed the Kia up the gravel drive and saw that a rust-chewed pickup sat beside the house, driver’s door ajar.

She swapped the revolver for her Merits and climbed out.

The yard was tidy for a Maine yard, with evidence of garden beds visible in spots where the snow had receded. A dozen metal wind spinners whirled along the walkway. She gave the front door three hard raps, then stepped back and lit a cigarette. Listening. A great V of geese honked past overhead and vanished into a pastel portal of clouds. Tugging the cuffs of her coat down over her wrists to hide them, she stood alert to the soft creaking of the spinners, the pat-pat of meltwater leaking from a clogged gutter. Then she spotted the purple crocuses poking up from a seam beneath the porch. Fragile and stubborn, perfect. The surprise of their beauty caused something in her brain to scramble. She gazed at them, eyes fogging with moist heat. When the lock finally scraped back on the door, she jumped and stamped out her cigarette.

The woman who peered out at her stood engulfed in a man’s enormous John Deere hoodie. Deep shadows cut her fine-boned face, which was dominated by thickly lashed eyes. Clutching the doorframe, she attempted to wiggle one child-size foot into a comically white sneaker. It took a moment for her exhausted features to betray the faint alarm to which Blake had grown accustomed when introducing herself to strangers.

May I help you?

You Honora Hayes? I emailed you about the apartment. Name’s Blake Renato.

The woman’s foot dropped back to the floor with an unnatural heaviness. "You’re Blake Renato? One hand flitted to a tiny gold cross at her throat. But I thought . . . you were a man. I mean, I just assumed, from your name . . ."

Blake stood rigid on the stoop. She watched the woman’s eyes move over her the way everyone’s eyes did, taking in her drab clothes and men’s work boots, her olive skin and the scar that ran the length of her jaw, her absurd height, good for nothing but drawing attention she did not seek. Blake stuck out her hand, surprised when the woman received it in both of her own. A self-conscious smile dispelled some of the shadows in her face and revealed a woman much younger—and prettier—than Blake had first assumed.

"Forgive me! Of course you’re a woman. How silly of me! Yes, I’m Honora. Just Nora, actually. Please."

She spoke with a soft voice that neglected its r’s and suggested a penchant for booze or pills or whatever else turned a person’s speech languid before 6 p.m. Blake knew of a buffet of things.

You want to see the space? Just give me a second. I’m a bit of a mess today.

Blake waited while the woman located a hiking pole she had propped just inside the door. When she stepped out upon the porch, she tested her balance against the steel shaft. Her face reddened when she spotted the open pickup.

Well, she sighed. There’s the proof.

As she veered to shut the truck door, Blake saw that she did not so much limp as defer to the pole to pick out steady ground. Her sneakers made soft scuffs on the grit of the driveway. Blake found something inexplicably lonely about the sound.

It’s just you here?

At the moment. My daughter’s back at school. A junior at UVA. Nora’s smile faded. She took a leave during fall semester, after my husband’s accident.

Accident? Blake wondered but didn’t ask.

Nora gestured toward the mothballed Beals boat looming like a dark monument in the yard. That was Ed’s pride and joy. But I think . . . I think it killed him.

The shadows returned to her face, lent it a quiet woundedness.

He was hauling traps one morning last August and vanished. Marine Patrol thinks he went overboard. His heart, maybe. I don’t know. It’s usually their hearts, isn’t it?

Turning from Blake, she shook a ring of keys from her pocket and wedged one of them into the tarnished knob of the garage door.

They never found him?

Poor Glory—my daughter—was out there all autumn looking. Nora shook her head. I’m glad she didn’t find him. You ever see a drowned body?

Blake watched the key twist in the lock and muttered no.

Count yourself lucky, then.

Inside the garage, a brigade of fluorescent lights flickered on with a buzz that made Blake’s stomach tighten. The space reeked of oil and rust and projects unfinished. She gazed at a wall of plank shelves that sagged under the weight of Hamilton Marine paint and sinking line, big blocky tackle boxes and engine parts. A black Ford Ranger in an even sorrier state of repair than the one in the driveway occupied the first of the enormous bays. In another, a dinged-up speedboat listed starboard onto stained concrete. Blake made note of the gun safe, the game cooler, the pink Huffy bike with purple streamers collecting dust in the corner. Then she followed Nora up a narrow flight of stairs and waited as another key turned.

The finished loft boasted three big windows and a nineties-era kitchenette. A pair of Quaker rockers stood sentry beside a pool table that might have been salvaged from a bar, judging by its stains and scars. Several mismatched braided rugs broke up the expanse of the buckling laminate floor. In one corner, beneath a sun-bleached poster of Hopper’s Nighthawks, stood a double bed made up with a new duvet whose somber colors reflected the presumption that the tenant would be male. The tacked-on bathroom was tiny, but it would hardly be the worst place she had been required to shower or shit. Blake walked the wide space end-to-end, her big boots making noise and tracking mud.

Five hundred a month, you said?

Cash, if you have it. I hope I mentioned that in my email?

Blake turned her gaze from the tidy bed and focused it on Nora Hayes, holding it there until a flush rose in the woman’s cheeks.

Check is fine, too, Nora added hurriedly. It’s just that things have been tight since Ed passed, and I’m trying to put something away for Glory. I waitress four days up to the restaurant now, but things are slow this time of year.

Without comment, Blake produced a leather wallet, counted out five crisp hundreds. Nora appeared to shrink farther beneath the hoodie as she accepted the bills and folded them into the pocket of her jeans.

You’re from Massachusetts? Fatigue bled into her voice.

That’s right.

What is it you do?

Ex-military. I’m between jobs. Blake unzipped her coat and set her cigarettes on the counter. Okay to smoke in here?

I’d prefer you didn’t. Our fire department is all volunteers.

Blake’s eyes swept the ceiling. I don’t see a smoke detector. And I doubt that thing you’ve got passing for a heating unit up there is up to code. That propane? She locked her hands before her, unable to curb the frost in her voice. How about that door, there? Does it have a fireguard?

Nora’s face lost what remained of its color, telling Blake what she needed to know about the lobsterman’s widow.

You haven’t had tenants before, have you? She tried to soften her tone, but the words came out tight, almost strained.

Just my mother-in-law, before she broke her hip. Reaching for the hiking pole she had propped against the sill, Nora tucked a limp strand of hair behind one delicate ear. The space was just going to waste, so I figured why not rent it?

She dodged Blake’s stare, plucked an invisible speck of lint from the curtain. You didn’t say what brings you to Raker Harbor. In your email, I mean.

Did I need to?

I only wondered how long you might be staying.

Now Blake turned her back and peered down at the muddy yard with its empty lobster boat and its lonely spinners that turned and turned. She took a sharp breath and released the fog of it onto the windowpane.

Just tell me if you need me gone.

She had packed her whole life into three duffel bags, and after Nora clacked away with her pole, Blake carried them up from the car. The heaviest contained her books. She arranged them on the pool table, alphabetically by author, enjoying the look of them there, gathered like a vigilant regiment of old friends. Next, she folded her clothes into the pressboard dresser, taking care to remove their discount store tags. When this was done, she stuck the revolver in a box of sponges below the sink, then set about taking an inventory of the dusty dishes and glasses, the half-dozen cooking pots rimed with char. Inside the fridge, she found two cans of Coke and a sixer of Coors. She poured the beers down the sink and rinsed out the bottles, leaving them to dry in a glistening line atop the counter. Then she cracked a can of Coke and dropped into one of the rockers to pick apart the remains of a gas station sandwich.

The wind turned angry as darkness fell. It shook the windows and teased the cheap voile curtains. Blake watched them sway, her head tipped back against the chair, her fingers, stained still with dirt, curled around the worn, oaken arms. Solitude pooled around her like the waters of a warm bath, and she stretched out her long legs to bask in it. Gradually, her thoughts slipped their mooring, drifted back to the apple tree and the old couple and a distant summer when she first experienced a love that did not slap or bruise or crackle like some five-buck firework. It was a love she had not known what to do with. A love she had cast away.

She stood with a jolt. When regret took hold like this, Dawn Evers had advised, she must breathe and redirect her thoughts. She found the phone that she was still learning how to use and opened Dawn’s last email. Status report, Alvares?

Made it north, Blake typed back, big fingers clumsy on the tiny, glowing keys. The house is still standing. Needs work, though. Have rented an apartment. Will find a job soon. I’ll be fine.

She hit send, hoping she was right. Had no idea what fine was, really, absent the confines of steel doors and cinderblock, the predictable course of windowless corridors and scuffed tile.

The last light had winked off in the house across the drive, so she walked down to the garage, feet bare on the cold concrete. There, she propped the hood of the Ford Ranger and assessed the maze beneath, surprised to discover no missing caps or severed hoses. The alternator looked new, and the belt was in decent shape. The wiring showed no obvious deterioration. Someone had worked on the vehicle recently. The husband, maybe, before the accident. She thought of his bones tossing beneath the sea and eased shut the hood, then walked the shelves of gear, touching tools and other hardware in an effort to recall their purpose. Her memory was good. Toward one corner stood a metal desk framed in corkboard. Pinned to it, she found several photographs of the dead lobsterman and his penny-haired daughter—a sturdy girl with her mother’s cheekbones and her father’s reckless smile. They stood on the boat whose transom bore Glory’s name, posed with various oddities they had hauled up in their traps. Beneath this collage hung a single picture of Nora Hayes. She squatted on a beach, supporting a chubby toddler by his sandy hands. Her sunlit face, fuller then, contained an old-Hollywood beauty with its large eyes and full, arched lips. Blake got the impression she was staring at a phantom. She turned from the smiling young mother and continued her exploration.

The bike she saved for last. Cobwebs wreathed the rusted spokes of the tires. Blake squatted before it and ran her fingers through the dusty streamers, pressed them to her cheek. A moment passed in which she felt herself drawn to the edge of something windy and dangerous. Then she pulled back and retreated up the stairs to the loft, where she dutifully locked herself in for the night.

In the gray light before dawn, her grandfather woke her, calling gently as she uncoiled from dreamless sleep. He was careful never to touch her, just waited there, a lanky silhouette, beside the bed until she pushed herself up on one elbow and gave him a nod. While he thumped downstairs to help her grandmother pack sandwiches, Blake pulled on layers of pilled fleece and a pair of elastic-waisted jeans. They talked little on the ride to town. He smoked Winston Golds with the window down, and she watched the house lights blink on across the marsh, chapped hands folded lightly across her swelling abdomen. The rubber waders hid her well. She always pulled them on before they trooped down to the wharf past the other lobstermen who watched them over the rising steam of their coffees.

Early on, he let her row the skiff to the mooring, but as fall arrived and she grew bigger, he took over the oars and pulled them swiftly through the dark water. When they reached the Edna Star, Blake hauled herself aboard and tied off the painter while he coaxed the big diesel engine to rumbling life. Then they stood side by side in the cockpit and motored into break of day, the silence between them sacred as prayer. He had taught her how to navigate, and sometimes, he let her steer the boat out past the ruin of the lighthouse and the stubby pine isles that dotted the horizon at that hour like so many dark stars. She liked the solid feel of the brass wheel under her grip, the subtle kick of the throttle. She liked the old man beside her, too, and the peace that washed over his haggard features the farther they motored from shore. Sometimes, that same peace lapped against her until she let it in. If she was lucky, it lingered all day while they toggled from buoy to buoy, he hauling up the traps on the old, groaning winch, she changing out the bait sacks and inspecting the catch. She had learned how to measure the lobsters with the metal gauge she kept clipped to her waist, how to check the females for eggs and carve a notch in their tail, if she found them. Her grandfather was adamant; eggers were to be protected. When he said this, his gaze lit upon her with rare warmth.

On land, his speech came labored, but on the boat, his words tumbled out in full sentences, and Blake collected them carefully as she might insects in a net, savoring their cadence, their salty wisdom. He spoke mostly of fishing and the natural world, never of the war that had left him with a limp, and never of Blake’s troubled mother, who had fled the peninsula at seventeen and left him with a heartbroken wife. Blake did not ask about those things, aware she was the product of a coupling they had not condoned, and that her presence in their home was a piercing reminder of another’s absence. For these reasons, she did not ask for more than the favor of their roof. Yet, by mid-autumn, her grandfather had built her a crib, and her grandmother had knit her a wardrobe of tiny jumpers. They had driven her to her first appointment in Machias, where they waited in a lobby full of swollen bellies and screaming babies while Blake was led in, stiff and terrified, to be examined. And afterward, when her eyes refused to quit streaming, they took her for ice cream, the three of them pressed together on the front seat of the Ford, scraping at plastic dishes as they studied the shadowy printout she laid upon the dash. Blake loved them for these things. It frightened her how fast and how desperately she loved them. And it frightened her, too, that she loved the little smudge on the image—a smudge put into her by a hateful man. On land, the fear could stop her breath. But when she stood on the boat, with the water rolling beneath her and the big diesel engine’s rumble in her bones, her breath came freely. There, on a deck strewn with fish guts and cigarettes, Blake’s heart found a brave, new rhythm. It belonged to her grandfather. It belonged to his ocean. . .

The wind died in the night, and she woke to a stillness that made her jump. She peeled her face from the pillow and tasted a residue of salt, but when she rose, her body felt strong again and ready. Dropping to the floor, she worked through a routine of push-ups and sit-ups. Twenty years in a prison cell had ingrained some unbreakable habits. Then she ran to the shower and let its cold water pummel her shoulders, bracing herself for the day and the things she must do. When she stepped out into the raw brilliance of the morning, she discovered that Nora’s pickup was gone. A note fluttered from the wiper of the Kia:

Working til 3. Need anything, call cell. Cooking lasagna tonite if u r interested.

Blake crumpled the note. She made a sweep of the house and found the side door unlocked. Her hand rested a long moment on the knob before she let it drop and trooped around to the rear yard. There, she discovered a small greenhouse filled with tender plants, a fenced-in plot where she imagined summer vegetables grew. There was a garden shed, too, a little place prim as a dollhouse with white shutters and a Bible verse stenciled on a placard: The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. Blake took all of this in and then climbed into her car and drove to town. She dangled an arm out the window and let her hair blow loose. Behind the mirrored glasses, her eyes searched for a glimpse of the sea through gaps in the passing trees. She could feel its nearness, the cold throb of it, and her heart beat faster at the knowledge.

Stopping at the hardware store first, she purchased a roll of duct tape, bleach, and a smoke detector. Then she explored the apothecary, with its dusty postcards and deep-discount Easter candy, and picked up a local paper with a Classified section. She carried the paper to the restaurant, where a shrill brass bell announced her entrance. A handful of gray-haired diners turned in unison to take her measure.

Blake chose a corner booth by the window. She propped her elbows upon a surface still tacky with breakfast syrup and waited for a trio of grizzled men in heavy flannel and Xtratuf boots to swivel back toward their plates at the counter. The squeak of the kitchen doors distracted them. Blake blinked as Nora Hayes emerged, toting a pot of coffee. Her hair sat in an elegant pile atop her head, trickling honey-hued curls down her slender neck. A generous amount of powder had muted the shadows in her face, and her snug sweater and jeans ensemble revealed a ballerina’s figure, all long lines and delicate curves. She flashed a smile at the fishermen before she made her way toward Blake. Only the care with which she planted one sneakered foot before the other suggested anything amiss with her gait.

You got my note, I guess.

I got it, Blake said.

And?

Blake shrugged. Not a huge fan of lasagna.

Oh. The little gold cross at Nora’s throat caught the sunlight through the window as she reached to fill Blake’s mug. She smelled of buttermilk waffles and shampoo, of mornings cloaked in the comfort of routine. I hope everything was all right last night. I heard that awful wind. If you need some extra blankets—

Blake pushed the laminated menu back at her. What’s decent here?

I like the blueberry pancakes. But if you want something spicier—

Spicier? Blake arched an eyebrow at her.

I just meant . . . some people find the food here a little bland.

Uh-huh. She snapped open the newspaper. Pancakes sound fine. You can hold the hot sauce.

Nora fidgeted with the coffeepot. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .

Blake waved away the apology, bored of the assumptions her father’s dark eyes and skin tone inspired from strangers. She stabbed a finger at the Classifieds. I’m looking for a job. Know anyone who’s hiring?

What kind of job?

On a boat. She glanced toward the fishermen at the counter. Maybe one of them needs help?

Nora set down the coffeepot and crossed her arms beneath her small breasts. I don’t think so. Those old soakers are mostly retired. Her frown bore an edge of pity. Do you know anything about lobster fishing?

I know it’s not rocket science to stand on someone’s stern, stuffing bait sacks.

You’ve done it before?

A long time ago. Blake lowered a hand over the steam rising from the mug. You know anyone else who runs a boat?

I know plenty of people—but none who are going to hire a woman who just showed up to town yesterday.

Blake met the striking amber of Nora’s gaze, found it empty of hostility but full of a curiosity for which she had no patience.

Pancakes, she said. And no hot sauce.

When Nora had returned to the kitchen, Blake tore a corner from the paper placemat and squinted out the window at the wharf. A half-dozen battered pickups occupied the lot, several piled high with lobster traps. She sighed and commenced scrawling a grocery list. Dawn—and AA—had taught her the necessity of lists, of tackling each day, each task, in careful steps. Midway