I started thinkin about goin into her room and lookin through her closet and bureau drawers, but then I got disgusted with myself. I may be a lot of things, Andy, but I hope I ain’t never been a sneak. Still, even havin the idear made me see that I’d spent way too much time just creepin around the edges of whatever was goin on, hopin the problem would solve itself or that Selena would come to me on her own.
There came a day—not long before Halloween, because Little Pete’d put up a paper witch in the entry window, I remember—when I was supposed to go down to the Strayhorn place after lunch. Me and Lisa McCandless were going to turn those fancy Persian rugs downstairs—you’re supposed to do that every six months so they won’t fade, or so they’ll fade even, or some damned thing. I put my coat on and got it buttoned and was halfway to the door when I thought, What are you doin with this heavy fall coat on, you foolish thing? It’s sixty-five degrees out there, at least, real Indian Summer weather. And this other voice come back and said, It won’t be sixty-five out on the reach; it’ll be more like fifty out there. Damp, too. And that’s how I come to know I wasn’t goin anywhere near the Strayhorn place that afternoon. I was gonna take the ferry across to Jonesport instead, and have it out with my daughter. I called Lisa, told her we’d have to do the rugs another day, and left for the ferry landin. I was just in time to catch the two-fifteen. If I’d missed it, I might’ve missed her, and who knows how different things might have turned out then?
I was the first one off the ferry—they was still slippin the last moorin rope over the last post when I stepped down onto the dock—and I went straight to the high school. I got the idear on my way up that I wasn’t going to find her in the study-hall no matter what she and her home-room teacher said, that she’d be out behind the woodshop after all, with the rest of the thuds… all of em laughin and grab-assin around and maybe passin a bottle of cheap wine in a paper bag. If you ain’t never been in a situation like that, you don’t know what it’s like and I can’t describe it to you. All I can say is that I was findin out that there’s no way you can prepare yourself for a broken heart. You just have to keep marchin forward and hope like hell it doesn’t happen.
But when I opened the study-hall door and peeked in, she was there, sittin at a desk by the windows with her head bent over her algebra book. She didn’t see me at first n I just stood there, lookin at her. She hadn’t fallen in with bad comp‘ny like I’d feared, but my heart broke a little just the same, Andy, because it looked like she’d fallen in with no comp’ny at all, and could be that’s even worse. Maybe her home-room teacher didn’t see anything wrong with a girl studyin all by herself after school in that great big room; maybe she even thought it was admirable. I didn’t see nothing admirable about it, though, nor anything healthy, either. She didn’t even have the detention kids to keep her comp‘ny, because they keep the bad actors in the lib’ry at Jonesport-Beals High.
She should have been with her girlfriends, maybe listenin to records or moonin over some boy, and instead she was sittin there in a dusty ray of afternoon sun, sittin in the smell of chalk and floor-varnish and that nasty red sawdust they put down after all the kids have gone home, sittin with her head bent so close over her book that you’d’ve thought all the secrets of life n death was in there.
“Hello, Selena,” I says. She cringed like a rabbit and knocked half her books off her desk turnin around to see who’d told her hello. Her eyes were so big they looked like they filled the whole top half of her face, and what I could see of her cheeks and forehead was as pale as buttermilk in a white cup. Except for the places where the new pimples were, that is. They stood out a bright red, like burn-marks.
Then she saw it was me. The terror went away, but no smile come in its place. It was like a shutter dropped over her face… or like she was inside a castle and had just pulled up the drawbridge. Yes, like that. Do you see what I’m tryin to say?
“Mamma!” she says. “What are you doin here?”
I thought of sayin, “I’ve come to take you home on the ferry and get some answers out of you, my little sweetheart,” but somethin told me it would have been wrong in that room—that empty room where I could smell the thing that was wrong with her just as clear as I could smell the chalk and the red sawdust. I could smell it, and I meant to find out what it was. From the look of her, I’d waited far too long already. I didn’t think it was dope anymore, but whatever it was, it was hungry. It was eatin her alive.
I told her I’d decided to toss my afternoon’s work out the door and come over and window-shop a little, but I couldn’t find anything I liked. “So I thought maybe you and I could ride back on the ferry together,” I said. “Do you mind, Selena?”
She finally smiled. I would have paid a thousand dollars for that smile, I can tell you… a smile that was just for me. “Oh no, Mommy,” she said. “It would be nice, having company.”
So we walked back down the hill to the ferry-landin together, and when I asked her about some of her classes, she told me more than she had in weeks. After that first look she gave me—tike a cornered rabbit lookin at a tomcat—she seemed more like her old self than she had in months, and I began to hope.
Well, Nancy here may not know how empty that four-forty-five to Little Tall and the Outer Islands is, but I guess you n Frank do, Andy. Most of the workin folk who live off the mainland go home on the five-thirty, and what comes on the four-forty-five is mostly parcel post, UPS, shop-goods, and groceries bound for the market. So even though it was a lovely autumn afternoon, nowhere near as cold and damp as I’d thought it was gonna be, we had the aft deck mostly to ourselves.
We stood there awhile, watchin the wake spread back toward the mainland. The sun was on the wester by then, beatin a track across the water, and the wake broke it up and made it look like pieces of gold. When I was a little girl, my Dad used to tell me it was gold, and that sometimes the mermaids came up and got it. He said they used those broken pieces of late-afternoon sunlight as shingles on their magic castles under the sea. When I saw that kind of broken golden track on the water, I always watched it for mermaids, and until I was almost Selena’s age I never doubted there were such things, because my Dad had told me there were.
The water that day was the deep shade of blue you only seem to see on calm days in October, and the sound of the diesels was soothin. Selena untied the kerchief she was wearin over her head and raised her arms and laughed. “Isn’t it beautiful, Mom?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said, “it is. And you used to be beautiful, too, Selena. Why ain’t you anymore?”