Short Story Master Writer

Slack Water

Marilyn Doucette set out two cups at 5:40, the way she had every morning for thirty-one years, and poured coffee into both before she remembered. She stood at the counter while the second cup steamed. Then she carried it to the sink and tipped it out, watched it spiral brown into the drain, and rinsed the cup and dried it and put it back on the hook where Frank's thumb had worn a pale crescent into the glaze.

Outside, the fog had come in off the harbor overnight and filled the yard like milk in a bowl. Across the cove, the lighthouse was doing its thing again: a beam, a stutter, a long dark, two quick sputters, then nothing for so long you'd swear it had given up. Then the beam again, fat and yellow, as if nothing had happened.

It had been doing that since April. The Coast Guard had sent someone out twice. The second time it was a boy who looked about fourteen and called her ma'am like it was a diagnosis. He said it was the wiring, or the lens motor, or the damp. The whole town had its own theory, and nobody said it to her face.

Her flip phone sat on the windowsill beside the African violet Frank had kept alive out of spite. A small envelope glowed in the corner of the screen. One new message. It had been one new message for six months and four days.

She put on her coat. By the door, Frank's Grundens jacket hung on its hook, orange canvas gone the color of old pumpkin, cuffs stiff with salt. She stopped, as she always did, and pressed her face into the collar. Diesel. Bait. The sweet, rotten smell of the bilge, and under all of it something that was only him, and every week there was less of it. Some mornings she had to breathe in twice to find it.

She found it on the second breath. She went to work.

The Blue Gull opened at six for the men who still fished into the fall and the men who didn't anymore but couldn't break the habit of being up. By 6:15 there were five of them at the counter, caps on, hands around mugs, the windows sweating.

"Specials board says eggs benedict's," said Harlan Moody, who had never once in his life ordered eggs benedict. "With an apostrophe."

"Rita wrote it." Marilyn topped off his coffee without being asked. "Take it up with Rita."

"You didn't fix it?"

"I'm retired."

"You fixed the menu last week. Their and there."

"That was a matter of public safety." She moved down the counter. Behind her Harlan laughed into his mug, a wheezy sound like a bellows with a hole in it, and she let herself feel the small warmth of it, then set it down.

The fog pressed against the glass. Somewhere out in it the bell buoy was clanging, slow and irregular with the swell.

"Light's at it again," said Dickie Rand, nodding toward the window. You couldn't see the lighthouse from the Gull, not in this, but everyone knew what he meant. "Went dark near a full minute last night. I counted."

"You counted," said Harlan.

"I was up."

"You're always up. That's your prostate, not the lighthouse."

Marilyn wiped the counter in long, hard strokes. She felt the silence arrive the way it always did now, a quick drop in the room's pressure, the men remembering who was pouring their coffee. Dickie studied his toast.

"Coast Guard'll sort it," she said. "Eventually. The boy they sent seemed very confident."

"That boy," Harlan said, grateful, "couldn't find his own ass with a chart and a Loran."

The bell over the door jangled, and Gus Theriault came in with the cold on his coat.

He saw her and hitched, one boot half-lifted, the way you do when you step onto a dock that isn't where you thought. Then he came in and took the stool at the far end, by the pie case, the stool nobody wanted because the heating vent blew right on your neck.

Gus had fished the Pemaquid grounds alongside Frank for twenty years. Their strings had run parallel off the point, and they'd argued about the Red Sox over the VHF so often that the harbormaster once threatened to report them both. Gus had been out the morning of the squall. Gus had been the one to find Frank, three hours after, in the water, in his orange float coat, face turned up to the sky as if he'd been waiting for a ride.

Gus had been at the funeral. He'd shaken her hand and said sorry, Mare, and then he had not looked at her for six months. He came into the Gull on Tuesdays and Fridays, her days off. Today was Thursday.

She brought him coffee. "Gus."

"Marilyn." He wrapped both hands around the cup. His knuckles were split and raw. "Didn't know you worked Thursdays."

"Since August."

"Huh." He looked at the pie case. Blueberry, apple, something Rita called a harvest crumble that was mostly oats and ambition. "Huh," he said again.

She took his order, two over easy, rye toast, and when she brought it he thanked her without looking up. She watched him eat like a man trying to finish before someone came to collect a debt.

At home she read in the afternoons, or tried to. She had a stack of novels from the library in Damariscotta, and she would get forty pages into one and realize she'd been reading the same paragraph since page twelve. Thirty years she'd spent telling twelve-year-olds that reading was a conversation. It turned out you needed someone to be talking to.

She did not listen to the voicemail.

She knew exactly what the call log said. She'd looked at it so often she could see it with her eyes closed, like a sentence diagrammed on a whiteboard. Frank Cell, 10:38 a.m., 1 min 12 sec — Voicemail. Then Frank Cell, 10:51 a.m. — Missed. Then Frank Cell, 11:04 a.m. — Missed.

She had been at the kitchen table with a stack of essays from the Lincoln Academy kids she tutored on the side. Discuss the role of the sea in The Old Man and the Sea. Thirty of them. The phone had buzzed across the oilcloth, and she had looked at it and seen FRANK CELL and thought, He wants to know if we need milk. She had thought, He can call back. She had thought, and she remembered this with the particular clarity of shame, He's calling to smooth it over, and I'm not done being mad.

Because they'd fought that morning. Not a big one. A small, stupid, thirty-one-years-married one. He'd said he was thinking of fishing one more season, maybe two, and she'd said his back sounded like a bag of gravel when he got out of bed, and he'd said his back was his business, and she'd said, Fine, Frank, it's your funeral, and he'd laughed at that, actually laughed, and kissed the top of her head on his way out, and she had not kissed him back.

The Coast Guard report put the squall at 11:10, give or take. Wind shift, gusts to fifty, a wall of water off the point that came out of nowhere and was gone in twenty minutes. The Marilyn J. went over and went down and never came back up.

So she knew what the calls were. She'd done the arithmetic a thousand times. Three calls in twenty-six minutes, the last one six minutes before the squall. He'd seen it coming. He'd been scared, and he'd called her, and she'd been underlining a comma splice in some child's paragraph about the marlin.

She did not need to hear it. She knew what fear sounded like in Frank's voice; she'd heard it once, when Danny was four and fell off the wharf. She was not going to put that sound in her kitchen.

Danny called at six on Sunday. Not 5:59. Not 6:01. When he was little Frank used to say the boy had a clock where his heart should be, and Danny, nine years old and furious, would say that's not even anatomically possible.

"Hi, Ma."

"Hi, sweetheart."

He told her about work, something with municipal water systems in Portland that she understood only in outline. He told her about his girlfriend Priya's sister's wedding and a dispute over whether the band would play "Shout." Marilyn stood by the window, phone to her ear, and watched the lighthouse. Beam. Dark. Beam, beam. Long dark.

Around eleven minutes in there was a pause, and she felt it: the place in the conversation where Frank used to reach over her shoulder and pluck the phone out of her hand. Gimme that. Danny boy. You catching any fish down there in the big city? No? What the hell do they pay you for? She'd stand there with her hand still up by her ear, holding nothing, pretending to be annoyed.

The pause went on. Neither of them filled it.

"Ma," Danny said. "Did you ever listen to it?"

She watched the lighthouse. Dark. Dark. Dark.

"Listen to what."

"Ma."

"I've been busy. They've got me on Thursdays now."

He breathed out through his nose, the exact sound his father made. "Okay," he said. "Okay. I'm just saying. If you want, I could come up. We could do it together."

"We are not," Marilyn said, "going to make an event of it."

"That's not what I—"

"How's Priya's mother's hip?"

He let her change the subject. He was a kind boy, which was Frank's fault, and he let her do it, and when they hung up at 6:24 she stood with the phone warm in her hand and the envelope glowing on its screen, and across the water the light came back on and burned for a long time, steady, then stuttered and went dark again.

Thursday, Gus came in at 6:40. He took the stool by the pie case. She brought him coffee. He ordered two over easy, rye toast, and when she set the plate down he said, not looking at her, "Mare, you got a minute after?"

Something in her chest pulled tight, a line taking weight.

"I get off at eleven."

"I'll be at the wharf."

The fog had burned off by eleven, leaving the harbor flat and pewter-colored under a white sky. Half the moorings were empty now, boats hauled out for the season and propped on jackstands in yards all over town like beached whales. Gus's boat, the Lucy T., was still in, tied up at the float, and he was on the stern coiling line that didn't need coiling.

Marilyn went down the gangway. At low tide it pitched steep, and she held the rail. The float rocked under her. The air smelled of rockweed and cold and gasoline, and a gull on a piling watched her with one flat yellow eye.

"Gus."

"Marilyn." He set down the line. He picked it up again. He looked, she thought, exactly like Ricky Albert in her third-period class, 1998, trying to confess to stealing the class hamster. "I should've come to you before. I know I should've. I kept thinking it wasn't my place, and then it got to be so long it was worse."

"Say it, Gus."

He wiped his hands down his oilskins. "That morning. Your Frank and me, we were on the radio. Like always. Talking nonsense. And round ten-thirty, quarter to eleven, he says he's gonna get off channel a minute, he's gotta call you."

She stood very still. The float moved beneath her and she moved with it without thinking, the way she'd learned to at nineteen, on a date with a boy who'd taken her out to haul traps and told her she had good sea legs for a girl from Augusta.

"He'd seen the weather," she said. Her voice came out flat, a teacher's voice, a voice for reading attendance. "He was calling because he'd seen the weather."

Gus looked at her then, for the first time in six months. His eyes were red-rimmed and very blue.

"No, Mare. No. Sky was clear as anything at ten-thirty. Nobody saw it coming. That's the whole— nobody saw it." He shook his head. "He comes back on after, and he says, She's not picking up. And I say, Well, what's so urgent? And he says—" Gus stopped. He rubbed his jaw. "He says you'd had words that morning. And he'd been thinking. He says, Gus, I'm gonna be sixty-one years old, and I can't remember the last time I told that woman I loved her in plain English. I think it was the Carter administration."

A sound came out of Marilyn that was nearly a laugh.

"He says, I figure I'll tell her before I lose my nerve. And I gave him a hard time about it. Course I did. Said he'd gone soft. And he laughed and said he'd try her again." Gus's voice roughened. "He tried you a couple more times. He was laughing about it, Mare. Said you were probably grading and mad at him and he'd earned it. Last I heard him, he was singing. Terrible. That Patsy Cline one. Then the wind came round."

The gull lifted off the piling and wheeled away, crying.

"I should've told you," Gus said. "At the funeral. I just figured. I figured you knew what he'd called about. And then I figured you didn't, and I didn't know if it'd help or make it worse."

Marilyn looked out past the breakwater. From here you could see the lighthouse on its ledge, white and small, the lantern room catching a little of the flat noon light.

She had spent six months hearing a man drown in a message she had never played. She had built it carefully, sentence by sentence, the way she built everything: the panic in his voice, the wind behind it, her name. She had lived inside that house of her own construction, and it had never occurred to her to check the foundation.

She's not picking up. Laughing.

"Mare?"

She realized her hand was over her mouth. She took it away.

"Thank you, Gus," she said, and her voice didn't sound like a teacher's anymore. It didn't sound like anyone's.

He nodded, miserable, and she turned and went up the gangway, holding the rail, and did not cry, not there, not on the wharf with Dickie Rand watching from the window of the co-op pretending to read a tide chart.

She did not play it that afternoon.

She sat at the kitchen table with the phone in front of her and did not play it. She got up and made soup she didn't eat. She sat down again. The light outside went gold and then gray. The fog started coming back in, the way it did most evenings now, low over the water, feeling its way into the cove.

At some point she got up and took Frank's jacket down off the hook. She had never done that before. She had never wanted to disturb it, as if the shape of him still hung in it and might fall out. It was heavier than she expected. She put it on. The sleeves came down past her fingertips, and the canvas was cold and stiff and crackled when she moved, and when she turned her head the collar was right there against her cheek. Diesel. Salt. Him, faint as a word spoken in the next room.

She sat back down at the table in the dark kitchen, drowning in orange canvas, and opened the phone.

The envelope glowed.

Outside, across the water, the lighthouse sputtered. Beam. Dark. Beam.

"I kept meaning to call you back," she said to the empty kitchen. Her voice cracked on back, and she let it. "I kept meaning to. I was going to, after I finished the stack. And then I was going to, after the Coast Guard came. And then I was going to, when I was ready. And I'm not ready, Frank. I don't think I'm going to be. So."

She pressed the button, and then the speaker, and set the phone on the oilcloth between her hands.

You have. One. Saved message. Message one.

A hiss of wind, gentle. The low throb of a diesel at idle. Then:

"Mare. It's me. Nothing's wrong."

She made a sound she had not made in front of anyone. There was no one to make it in front of.

"Nothing's wrong, don't— I know you. You're sitting there with your red pen thinking I sank. I didn't sink. I'm just— listen. About this morning. You're right about my back. You're right about most things, it's very irritating." A laugh, his laugh, rough and warm and a little embarrassed. "I just— I was out here hauling and I was thinking, and I realized I don't say it. I figure you know, and you figure I know, and we're both too damn stubborn, and one of these days— anyway. I love you, Marilyn Jean. There. In plain English. You can grade that."

The wind in the phone. A gull somewhere, six months away.

"Call me back, okay? Or don't, I'll try you again. I'll be home by four. Don't make the chowder with the clams from Hannaford's, they taste like a tire. Okay. Okay. Bye, Mare."

End of message. To delete this message, press seven. To save it—

She closed the phone.

She sat for a long time with her face in the collar of his coat, and her shoulders shook, and the kitchen was quiet except for the refrigerator's hum and the far-off clang of the bell buoy, and nobody saw, and it did not matter whether anybody saw.

When she finally lifted her head, the window had gone blue-black, and the fog lay thick over the harbor. Out on its ledge, the lighthouse turned its beam across the water. It swept the cove, the moorings, the dark shapes of hauled-out boats, the front of the house, and passed across her kitchen and across her hands.

She waited for it to stutter.

It came around again. And again. Steady, patient, unbroken, laying its long gold arm across the fog every twelve seconds, the way it was supposed to, the way it always had.

Marilyn got up. She filled the kettle and set it on the burner and took down one cup. Then she took down the second one, the one with the pale crescent in the glaze, and held it a moment, and set it on the table across from her own. She did not fill it. She just let it sit there, the light coming around and around, finding it every time.

Author's Note: I built the story around a misreading. Marilyn is a teacher who has "diagrammed" her husband's death from the call log and never checked her premise, so the twist corrects her interpretation rather than bringing in new facts. That let the lighthouse's steadying come across as a change in how she sees things, not as a supernatural sign. The final unfilled second cup was my way of keeping the hope quiet: she stops erasing him from the morning without pretending he's coming back.