“But Michael said he went there to borrow the money.”
“Well, maybe so. He’s got a lot of pride. His father thinks of him as nothing but a plastic hippie, that’s because Michael’s having trouble finding himself, you know. But he’s got a lot of pride and I can see him only asking for a loan and not for the money as a gift. I know it bothered Michael that he was living on the boat freebies, that his father was letting him use the boat, you know? He kept telling me he wanted to buy a boat of his own. But in the meantime, you know, his father never went out on it, Maureen would get seasick even if it was just the bay, never mind the Gulf. So he offered the boat to Michael to live on, and Michael said sure why not?” Lisa shrugged elaborately. “But I know it bothered him. Because they’ve had hassles, you know. Michael’s not a bum, you know, he’s just having trouble getting his head together; in fact, he’s been talking about going back to school, I think he’s really seriously considering it. That’s something you ought to know because... I mean, how could he have killed her? I mean, why would he have killed her?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.”
“Well, it was Maureen who was encouraging him to go back. I mean, I don’t care if he goes back or not, whatever makes him happy. But Maureen was the one talking about his future, and about did he want to be a busboy all his life? They really got along fine, he respected her a lot, he really did. There was a conflict there for him, you know, he felt guilty about relating to Maureen when he had a mother of his own. But Michael found it difficult to talk to either of his parents because of all the trouble—”
“What do you mean? What trouble?”
“Well, you know, all the hard feelings about the divorce. It isn’t easy, you know, take it from me. Michael was only ten when his father split, twelve when he finally married Maureen. Those are tough years for a kid anyway, never mind divorce. And his mother didn’t make it any easier, told both kids their father had been playing around with half the women in town, made Maureen out to be just another tramp, you know, like that. What I’m saying is Michael gave his father a pretty rough time, and I’m not sure his father’s forgotten it yet.”
“What kind of a rough time?”
“Well, like I just told you.”
“You only said there were hard feelings about the divorce.”
“Well, yeah, but... like the time in Virginia. You probably know about it.”
“No. Tell me.”
“Well, she sent Michael away to a military academy—”
“Yes, I know that.”
“And he got caught smoking pot there, the general caught him smoking pot. He was about sixteen at the time, the general refused to let him go home for the spring break — the spring furlough, he called it. So Michael’s father went all the way to Virginia to see him, and Michael just wouldn’t give him the right time, told him to go to hell.”
“He actually said that?”
“No, but he told his father he was doing fine without him.”
“What else?”
“Well, you know about the trip to India...”
“No.”
“Well, Michael started school at UCLA — this was after he got out of that place in Virginia — and then he dropped out of there and went first to Amsterdam and then India, and Afghanistan, I think it was, or Pakistan, one of those countries. He was following the drug route, you know, he got into drugs pretty heavy in Amsterdam—”
“He’s not involved in drugs now, is he?”
“No, no,” Lisa said. “He was never into the hard stuff, anyway. He’s never put a needle in his arm. He never would. He may have sniffed coke while he was in Europe, I don’t know about that, he was traveling with a junkie in Denmark. But what I meant was acid, he got into acid in Holland. And, of course, pot. But everybody smokes pot,” she said, and shrugged. “The point is, he never wrote to his father all that time. He had the man going crazy, he admits that now. Sending letters to the American Embassy, writing to Washington, while Michael’s climbing the Himalayas and sniffing flowers and having his hair and his beard dyed red by mountain priests. He used to write his father about the spiders in the hut he lived in. Big spiders. Told him about the spiders to make him worry even more, that was all. Never a return address on the letters. I’m in the mountains, period. With priests and spiders. Lots of mountains there, man.” Lisa shook her head. “What I’m saying is the relationship with his father was strained, you know what I mean? It was getting better, but it was still strained.”
“How about his mother?”
“How about her? Have you ever met her?”
“I’ve met her.”
“Then you know. A fat pain in the ass. Always using Michael as a messenger boy — tell your father this, tell him that. Phoning him three, four times a week, sending him letters. He was fed up to here with her.”
“So he talked to Maureen instead.”
“Well, he talked to me, too,” Lisa said, “but that’s different. I mean, we’re lovers.”
I looked at her.
She was seventeen years old, another child of divorce, mother in Connecticut, father in New York — or was it the other way around? Her parents knew where she was, she’d said, and thrown her cigarette over the side as abruptly as her parents had thrown her over the side — or so she must have thought or felt. “They know where I am, yes,” the cigarette hissing into the water with the sibilance of the final “yes,” the silence echoing with the unspoken corollary, “And don’t give a damn.”
I wanted to ask her... I wanted to say... I wanted to talk about the divorce of her parents. I wanted to know how she’d reacted — when had it been, how old were you, Lisa, which of your parents asked for the divorce, was there another woman involved? Do you ever see your parents, Lisa, do you ever see your father? What kind of person is he, do you love him and respect him, do you love him? Have you forgiven him for leaving? Will you ever? I looked into her eyes and into a future I could scarcely imagine, no less hope to comprehend. My future. My daughter’s.
“Is Michael allowed visitors?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Where is he now?”
“They’re holding him at the police station. He probably won’t be moved across the street till tomorrow morning.”
“But he’s in jail, you said.”
“Yes. At the police station. They have cells there.”
“I wonder...”
“Yes, Lisa?”
“What I should do now? I mean... where should I go?”
The dockmaster’s office at Pirate’s Cove was just adjacent to the motel office, the pair of white entrance doors set side by side in an otherwise red-shingled structure. I knocked on the door, got no answer, tried the knob, and found the door locked. I went into the motel office, and asked the woman behind the desk there where I could find the dockmaster. She said he was outside someplace. I went outside again, circled the building, and saw a grizzled old man bent over a bed of geraniums, turning the sandy earth around them with a trowel. He was wearing a battered, soiled yachting cap tilted low over one eye, a striped T-shirt, blue jeans, and scuffed topsiders.
“Excuse me, sir?” I said.