Finch looked at Mickey and then at Jessina. It was clear that he had no idea who Mickey was. He kept looking as if he were waiting for either an explanation or a punch line.
“How are you?” Mickey asked.
Finch seemed surprised by the question. “Fine, thank you,” he said. “And you?”
“Pretty good for an old man,” Mickey said.
“An old pirate, you mean,” Finch said.
“That, too,” Mickey said.
Picking up on Finch’s obvious confusion and wanting to defuse the tension Mickey must be feeling, Jessina turned to Finch. “Perhaps we should offer Mr. Doherty one of our cookies.”
Finch looked baffled by the thought.
“Would you like a cookie, Mr. Doherty?” Jessina said.
“No thank you, no,” Mickey said.
“I’m tired,” Finch said to Jessina.
“Yes, Papi, I know you’re tired, but Mr. Doherty has come to visit you.”
“It’s okay,” Mickey said. “I was just stopping by for a minute.” He had come in the kitchen door, but now he walked toward the front door, which was closer to the den. He couldn’t get away fast enough. “Just tell Zee I stopped by,” he said.
He could hear Finch chuckling softly to himself as he walked out. “We just had a pirate in our den, didn’t we?” He looked at Jessina for confirmation.
“We certainly did,” she said.
35
ZEE POINTED THE FLASHLIGHT along the path leading to the cottage.
She reached into the window box, fishing for the key. Skeletons of old plants and flowers, annuals planted when Maureen was still alive, crumbled under her fingers, but the key was still there. The screen was ripped and its frame twisted out of alignment. The last time she was here, she obviously hadn’t bothered to pull the door shut, and the winter damp had warped the wood. But the inside wooden door, though swollen, was still intact. She had to push hard to open it.
“Whose place is this?” Hawk asked.
“It’s mine,” she said. “But I haven’t been here for a long time.”
The kerosene lamp sat on the table in the middle of the room. Zee walked to the kitchen drawer and pulled out an old box of safety matches. They were damp and a bit moldy, but on the fifth try she managed to get one lit.
A circle of warm light radiated outward, illuminating the couch and the tiny kitchen with its soapstone sink and hand pump, the oak icebox. Zee walked to the sink and opened the interior shutters and the French windows beyond. The stars and moon reflected off black water. She walked window to window, opening them and letting the salt air erase the musty smell.
“This place is amazing,” Hawk said.
“You think?”
It occurred to her that Michael had never seen the place, had never seemed interested. Like Finch, Michael wasn’t a water person. Still, she wondered why she hadn’t insisted on showing it to him.
Hawk looked at the pump. “Is that salt or fresh water?”
“Salt,” she said. “There’s a well down that way for fresh.” She saw him pick up the bucket. “I don’t think the pump works,” she said.
“Let’s give it a try,” he said. He carried the bucket down to the tiny beach in front of the cottage and filled it.
It took many tries, but he got the pump going. Then he laughed at himself. “I’m not sure why I did that,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said.
She smiled. She pumped some water just to see it. When she was little, she had done their dishes in salt water, she’d had to stand on a stepstool to reach. It was a good memory of Zee and her mother, one of the only good ones, and she was grateful to Hawk for giving it back to her. Any good memories she had of her mother were from this place: Maureen reading her stories aloud while Zee sat on the braided rug sketching dragonflies and gulls, the summer they picked beach plums and made jam, hauling both the sugar and water from the mainland. There were a lot of scraps and flashes of memory that came to her now, and she was grateful for each of them.
They sat at the table and played gin rummy with an old deck of cards Zee found in the drawer with the matches. He won all but one hand. “So what do you want to do now?” he asked.
“How about an overnight?” she asked.
“Like at camp?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Just like that.”
“You got any marshmallows?”
“If I do, they’ve got to be twenty years old.”
“What about scary stories. Do you know any?”
“I know some,” she said, thinking suddenly of Lilly Braedon. We both know one, she thought. Then she thought about the other story she knew, the one her mother had written. She wasn’t about to tell him either story. Not tonight. She’d have to think of something else.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m game.”
Hawk blew up the old canvas air mattress while she rolled out the rug and got the blankets down from a shelf.
The cottage was situated in such a way that the views were almost 360 degrees. They lay down together, looking up through the huge doors that lined the west-facing wall. With the doors open, they had a clear view of the stars. They could hear the waves crashing on the rocks below.
First he pointed out the constellations, the easy ones she already knew, and the signs of the zodiac: Aries and Libra. Then he tried to point out some of the fifty-seven stars used in celestial navigation.
“I had an easier time with the zodiac,” she said.
“No, look, there’s the Big Dipper. Polaris is there.”
“The North Star.”
“Yes. Polaris is always within one degree of the North Pole. You can pick up your latitude by looking at Polaris.”
“I see the North Star, but I don’t see the other one you were pointing at,” she said. He moved her head into position and extended his pointing arm from over her shoulder, adjusting for her sight line. “Still don’t see it,” she said.
He laughed.
“Well, you see the moon. We use the moon a lot, and the horizon,” he said. “So you have three points of reference. You can only take readings at dawn and dusk, because when it gets this dark, the horizon disappears. But at twilight, for just a little while, the stars are still visible.” He pointed again, this time to a spot low on the western horizon. “Look, there’s Spica, in Virgo, one of the brightest stars in the sky. Spica is a blue giant, and it’s not really one star but two stars that revolve around each other so closely that they appear as one.”
“That’s either very romantic or hopelessly codependent,” Zee said, looking where he was pointing.
He laughed. “See it?”
She shook her head. He pointed again. “Do you see the Big Dipper?”
“Yes,” she said. “That I can find.”
“Okay, follow the handle of the Big Dipper.” He lay behind her, placing himself at her eye level and raising her arm with his until it traced the handle. “That bright star there is Arcturus. Now, if you keep tracing the straight line about the same distance, you’ll find Spica. Right there. See?”
She squinted her eye.
“Spica is key if you’re ever navigating at the equator.”
“Good to know,” she said.
“In another month you’ll hardly be able to see her in the night sky at all,” he said. “She won’t be back until next summer.”
“She?”
“Spica is definitely female. See her?”
“Sorry,” she said.
“Right there,” he said, tracing the line again.
“It’s sad when Spica disappears below the horizon,” he said. “But she has her heliacal rising right around Halloween.”
“Her what?”
“At morning twilight in the middle of October, Spica will be visible again on the horizon for just a few days. It’s like a tiny sunrise. It’s always good to see her again when she shows up.”
“I think you have a thing for this star.”
He laughed. “I just love bright, beautiful Virgos, what can I say?”
She laughed.
He traced the line one more time, pulling her closer to him, lifting her arm with his. “Right there. See? She’s the brightest star in Virgo.”