Mistwalker

THREE Willa

I wasn’t that late, but when I came in the back door, I was caked in mud and smelled like low tide.

Not a thing changed on Ms. Park’s face when she saw me. With one of our chipped coffee cups in her hands, she looked over her case folders and said, “I’m glad you could make it.”

She wasn’t even sarcastic about it, but my mom raised an eyebrow anyway.

“Sorry. I was working.”

“Bailey was here,” Mom said.

Guilty, I dumped my gear on the porch and went straight for the sink. I needed a shower, but it could wait. I turned the water on hot and then flipped the switch for the garbage disposal. “I’ll see her tomorrow.”

Gargling furiously, the disposal swallowed sand and silt as I pretended not to notice the prosecutor. Only, I knew the longer I looked away, the longer she’d be there. Waiting. Head down, I asked, maybe not even loud enough to be heard, “What do you want, anyway?”

Ms. Park cleared her throat, then twisted her chair around. Its wooden legs screeled against the linoleum, and I felt her move closer. “We need to go over your grand jury testimony.”

Digging mud from beneath my blunt nails, I said, “Don’t you have what I told the police?”

“Of course I do,” she replied. She sounded smooth, creamy even. The chair squeaked again, and then I could see her from the corner of my eye. “But I can’t have any surprises when you’re on the stand. You’re the only eyewitness we have, Willa.”

My tongue felt like liver, thick and heavy and useless. Everything I knew about courts and stuff came off TV, and it so happens that none of those shows get it right.

It’s not neat and clean, talking to the detectives, then going to trial, the end. No, I talked to the Coast Guard and Marine Patrol and then the police the night Levi died. And the next day, a detective totted up in a suit came and took notes.

When they arrested Terry Coyne, I talked to the detective again. My dad stood at my shoulder during the lineup. Even that wasn’t the same as TV.

They gave me a book of mug shots, rows and rows filled up with forty-year-old men with the same beaky nose and chickeny chin. It was scary, how much those pictures looked alike. I didn’t know until way after that I picked the right guy.

Now it was going to a grand jury. They had to decide whether there was enough evidence to indict him—whether there was even gonna be a trial. All the police had were two bullet casings that matched a box they found in Coyne’s trunk, and me. My eyes. What I saw. It was down to two bullets and my memory whether he’d ever stand trial for murdering my brother. If that wasn’t enough, he’d go free.

Cold, hard knots formed in my chest. “All right, what should I say?”

Ms. Park brushed her smooth black hair behind one ear and insisted, “I’m not here to put words in your mouth.”

“Then what do you want? I already told the police everything.”

“Everything?” Ms. Park let that question hang a minute. Then she went on. “Because I’m going to ask you about the gear war. It’s the only way this murder makes sense. And if you say nothing . . .”

“There wasn’t a gear war,” I said flatly.

“We know Mr. Coyne put his traps too close to yours. We know your father complained to the council about it.”

I shrugged. This, this part was Broken Tooth business. Ms. Park could ask all around town. Nobody would say gear war, because there wasn’t one. It was one lobsterman, me, taking care of business. Our waters were ours, our rules our own. Levi wouldn’t have told. He wouldn’t want me to either.

All we did was cut and dump. We went easy on Coyne. Last year, in Friendship, somebody sank Lobstah Taxi and Fantaseas in the middle of the night. Couple years before that, it was a scuttling in Owls Head and a shooting in Matinicus. You got up on a fisherman’s waters and he had to retaliate.

One fisherman against another, that was personal. When a whole town did it, orchestrated and arranged—that was a gear war. So I said nothing, and cast my gaze past Ms. Park.

She went on, barely ruffled. Working the sarcasm, she said, “Then, coincidentally, Mr. Coyne just happens to find you and your brother minding your own business on the wharf at two in the morning. Right after he discovered somebody cut all his trap lines, there you are. But it’s not related.”

“It wasn’t a gear war,” Mom snapped.

“Then what was it?” Ms. Park snapped back.

My mother thrust herself between us, reaching for the potato scrubber. She took it to my fingertips, rasping them mercilessly. She hadn’t done that since I was little; I could clean up after fishing and worming just fine on my own.

Still, she soaped and scoured, her thin fingers pressing hard into my palm. “Where’re you from, Ms. Park? Concord?”

Unamused, Ms. Park said, “Boston.”

Mom scrubbed a little harder, hiding the ugly sound she made. The one that called the prosecutor a Masshole, after Mom had tried to give her an out by asking if she was from New Hampshire.

Back stiff and voice steely, Mom pulled my hands under the tap and said, “A gear war’s something we’d vote on, in the village. It’d be all of us doing it, not just one kid, one night.”

“Ma!”

Snapping her head up, she looked at both of us hard. “I’m not gonna let that bastard get off scot-free because she doesn’t understand how things work here.” Turning her attention to Ms. Park, she went on. “If you say ‘gear war,’ nobody on that jury’s gonna listen to you.”

“Then somebody needs to tell me what actually happened.”

My head felt full; my ears ached, like I’d slipped too far under water. It wasn’t a crime anymore to cut off somebody’s gear, but I could lose my license for it. Three years before I could get it back. Three years when Daddy would have to pay a sternman to work the deck; all that time with money running out instead of flowing in.

I could fight it. Claim I didn’t know anything about the cut gear. I could ask for a civil jury to decide it. If they found me liable, I’d have nothing. My family would have nothing.

Though I could keep worm digging, it wouldn’t be enough. And the thought of watching the rest of the fleet sail without me, the prospect of standing on land instead of waves—that felt like dying.

But all that was if they found me liable. They probably wouldn’t. Juries were our people. They understood you had to protect your waters. Turning their eyes the other way, they’d shake their heads. Shrug. They’d probably let me off. Probably, probably.

Could they, if I got in front of the grand jury and admitted it? I didn’t know. Would Coyne get indicted if I didn’t? I didn’t know that either. My chest got tighter as I tried to balance the right thing with the way things were supposed to be.

Expectant, Ms. Park said, “Well?”

When I looked past her, I saw Dad sitting in his truck on the street. Orange light suddenly illuminated him. He was smoking again. Drawing on the cigarette, he sat back in the glow of the embers. He’d quit for Levi. That he was back on them, guess he thought we were already lost. Nothing was balanced, and I broke.

“I did it, all right?” I faced Ms. Park, clutching the edge of the sink behind me. “He kept dropping his gear on ours, and nobody’d do anything about it. He’s not even from here. What’s he doing fishing our waters?”

Ms. Park opened one of her folders. “Start at the beginning.”

“You already got the beginning,” I said.

I closed my eyes and listened to the sea in my memories. That night was so clear, I felt it on my skin. Cool wind and hot blood and the way my world ended in slow motion.

I didn’t know it was ending, not at first. My laughter echoed across the deck of the Jenn-a-Lo, a little eerie and removed. A few minutes before, the night was bright and clear—a black sky spattered with stars, hung with a fat, silver moon.

But pearly silk fog suddenly blotted out the sky, the shore. I couldn’t hardly see Levi in the wheelhouse, and he was three steps away. No one else could have seen us in the swirling haze, and that was good.

“How many are we going to do?” Levi asked. The question floated out to me, disembodied.

“All of them,” I said.

I leaned on the rail. Dark waters stretched out all around me. They murmured against the side of the boat, sea whispers that lulled me to sleep at night and called me to fish in the morning. They taunted me when I was stuck in school. Better than anywhere in town, I could see the harbor from school.

One day, Daddy was gonna retire. I’d be captain then. And my kids or Levi’s, they’d take up the stern. We’d been fishing in the shadow of Jackson’s Rock for three hundred years. If I’d had my way, it woulda been three hundred more.

And that’s why Levi and I snuck out in the middle of the night. It’s why we stole the keys from Dad’s pocket and slipped away from the wharf without a word to anybody.

Wielding the long, hooked gaff, I waited for the Jenn-a-Lo to glide up to the next green and blue buoy. I snagged it with the hook, and with a quick twist, I pulled it into the boat.

I wrapped the buoy end of the rope into the block, then wound it into the hauler. The whole time, I hummed the same note the hydraulics did, and watched as the lobster pot rose to the surface. Two fat lobsters waved their claws from behind wire mesh.

Sea spray stung my face; when I breathed, I tasted salt water and southwestern wind, and it was delicious. Trading the gaff for my knife, I cut the line between the buoy and the trap, then threw everything back in the water.

The lobsters would slip free on their own, but the traps would be lost, and that was the point. That’s what this bastard from Daggett’s Walk got for dropping trawls in Broken Tooth waters.

As the pot disappeared beneath the waves, I punched the air, burning on adrenaline. “Try hauling that!” I shouted.

Levi sped the engine and said, fondly, “Shut it.”

“Your face!”

With that, Levi laughed too. “I refuse to upgrade to ‘your mama’s face.’”

“No wonder you’re her favorite.” I grabbed the gaff and leaned over the side again. The Jenn-a-Lo cut through the night, steady and sure, toward the next pair of pots.

It should have been hard to locate every line dropped by another lobsterman. After all, part of the captain’s job was plotting his own lines into the GPS so he could find them again later. And part of legacy fishing was having your own waters. Your own secret places, where nobody fished but you.

But the interloper had found every red-striped Dixon buoy and dropped his gear right next to them.

The first time it happened, Dad was willing to call it an accident. Piss-poor fishing by a piss-poor fisherman, he figured.

We dragged his traps away from ours. That knotted up his traps underwater and left him a mess to clean up. It should have sent a message. And since we had plenty of water left in the season, we moved our traps closer to Jackson’s Rock.

Not two days later, green and blue buoys bloomed beside our trawls again.

This guy wasn’t just sneaking into waters that didn’t belong to him. He was outright stealing our catch and something had to be done.

Dad asked around and finally figured out it was Jackie Ouelette’s cousin doing it. Carrying a six-pack and his calm, Daddy went up the hill to Jackie’s place to talk to her about it.

Terry Coyne was there, and instead of talking, they had words. Coyne mentioned he was a boxer; Daddy pointed out he had a shotgun. Jackie got between them and sent my dad on home.

Not surprisingly, that little talk didn’t fix anything. The next time Coyne’s traps showed up on ours, Dad reported it to the Zone Council. He made sure everybody at the co-op knew where Coyne’s lobster was coming from. They refused to buy his catch, but other than that?

Nothing.

Nothing happened, nothing stopped him. It added an extra hour to his day to sail to the next co-op, and they didn’t give a damn where the lobster came from. Back in Broken Tooth, we were hurting, and nobody wanted to do anything about it.

So I bribed Levi to pilot the boat while I cut the lines on Coyne’s gear. Levi would have been happier at home drawing manga or sitting on the roof with Seth and Nick, talking about anime. He went along because I was his big sister. Because I asked him to. Because he liked being out at all hours of the night.

But for me, it was payback, straight up. If nobody wanted to help, I’d help myself.

The ocean agreed with me; the sea was on my side. It was smooth as glass that night. The fog wrapped around me; it felt like a kiss. Pulling twenty of Terry Coyne’s traps, I cut off every one and laughed the whole way.

Levi and I slid up to our slip at the wharf, still smiling. Me more than him, but it was one of those things. The thrill of getting away with something together. He hopped off the deck first and held his hand out for mine.

It never crossed my mind that Coyne might be out on the water too. He must have cut his engine the same time we did, so we didn’t hear him approach.

“Hey, Dixon,” he shouted.

We both turned, just in time for Coyne to appear in the mist. Just in time to see the gun, but not fast enough to do anything about it.

He fired twice.

It sounded like a wire snapping, hollow and high-pitched. It echoed forever, ebbing into the distance. I understood what happened, but I didn’t know it. Not until Levi stumbled back onto the boat and fell into me.

Black blood spread on the front of Levi’s shirt. And then it started spitting. His air poured out through his chest instead of his throat. My body moved on its own because I wasn’t thinking.

Silence swallowed me. I snapped the tab on our EPIRB, our emergency beacon. The radio inside it crackled to life, sending a mayday to the Coast Guard. And because we were supposed to use it out at sea, a strobe burst to life on top of it.

Blinded, I sank to the deck and clapped a hand over the hole in Levi’s chest. Heat spilled from it. Dark foam bubbled between my fingers. In my shock, I thought I saw his soul slipping out, a grey ghost that lingered near his chest.

But it was cold that night. It was just frost forming on the heat of his blood, the same way my breath hung in the air. Above us, the rescue beacon pulsed, lightning that bounced off the fog in eerie patterns.

“Coast Guard’s coming,” I told Levi.

The last thing Levi ever said was, “’Kay.”

I kept thinking, Too bad Dad doesn’t smoke anymore, because every time he watched Platoon, he’d tell us that the plastic wrap on a pack of cigs could close up a bullet hole. Slap it on, good as new. It was stupid trivia. Who even knew if it was true?

But that’s what I was thinking while I tried to hold in my brother’s last breath.

It wasn’t until Ms. Park left that Dad finally came in. While I boiled mud and memories from my skin in the upstairs shower, I listened to him talk to my mother in the kitchen.

Not his words—I couldn’t really pick them out. Just his voice, rising and falling. Slipping beneath my mother’s voice, strange and dark. Maybe it was about me. I didn’t know; I couldn’t tell. But it felt like an accusation.

It was always obvious to my parents what happened that night. Pretty much the whole village knew and understood. Our waters were our waters. If Coyne hadn’t dropped gear on top of ours, he’d have been dropping it on someone else’s.

Broken Tooth didn’t have much. We were all starving a little bit, shrinking every year. Bailey wouldn’t come back. A degree in political science wouldn’t do her any good around here. The bright ones like her, they went off to the world. To New York Cities and LAs and Londons. None of the Baileys came back.

Instead, tourists moved in, all romantic about living Down East. Untouched wilderness, rustic everything. Then they paved it and blocked off our beaches. They pitched a fit about how much noise we made in the harbor when we went out to fish. They held condo meetings about the stink of salted herring that lingered when we sailed out.

But our harbor was what we had. Our families and our town. The burying ground was full of slate gravestones, our names all the way back to the 1600s. Washburns, Dyers, Dixons. Archambaults and Ouelettes, on and on, over and over.

What I did, my neighbors woulda done too. The Coynes and the out-of-towners carried poison with them. No one in Broken Tooth would have blamed me.

Ducking my head under the water, I let heat flow through my hair and run the trail of my lips. Fresh water always smelled like blood, especially when it was turned up hot. The steam robbed me of deep breaths. I stared as sand collected in the bottom of the tub, slinking toward the drain.

Downstairs, Dad raised his voice, then the back door slammed. I didn’t hear it so much as feel it, an unexpected slap. Twisting the tap off, I listened to the silence that followed, then the low hum of his truck driving away.

They’d always known what I did, but tonight they had to admit it. The space gouged out of this house, this family, it was—

I was never afraid I’d get in trouble for cutting off Coyne’s gear. It was the telling that scared me. The confessing. Having to look at my mother and my father afterward. Having to look at myself. Having to say it out loud:

It was my fault Levi was dead.

Not in some roundabout, butterflies-in-Africa-starting-hurricanes-in-Maine kind of way. My little brother would have been a Bailey. He had a soft smile, and notebooks full of art. Full of good song lyrics that Nick and Seth put to bad music. He made stop- motion movies, and flipbooks, and plans to give up the sea entirely.

He could’ve; he would have.

Except I leaned in his doorway that night. I waited for him to pull out his ear buds and ask me, “What up, Willard?”

And instead of saying “Let’s go find the Grey Man” or “Nothing, I just wanted you to know I ate the last of your Trix on purpose,” I tossed him the keys to the Jenn-a-Lo.

He caught them on the first throw.