Oyster River

"So, are you going to get in your Tardis and go back to the past?" Ben asked.

"No," she said, shaking her head, "I'm going to get in my Prius and go to Maine."

Michelle, Summer 2016

There had been a mist in the air all day. Michelle had no more than a dozen traps left to haul when it changed to a steady rain. "At least it held off until I'm almost done," she muttered to herself.

She dropped the empty trap and steered the twenty yards to the next buoy. She pulled on her windbreaker, then hooked the trap line, swung it into the hauler's pulley and hit the switch. When the trap emerged from the water, it took all her strength to drag it over the rail. Her hands were cramping, her shoulders ached and there was a sharp pain in the small of her back. Nonetheless, she smiled when she saw four good sized bugs in the trap. Today's catch had been light.

She reset the trap, dropped it back into the water and moved on to finish the string. By the time she finished the last trap, the rain was coming down hard.

The sea was choppy as she headed back to harbor, making it slow going. By the time Carol Anne's hull bumped against Dean's wharf, it was nearly dark.

She loaded her lobsters onto a cart and pushed it inside, the load feeling heavier with every step.

Stan and Butchie Dean were sitting in their little office when she parked the cart at the weighing station.

"You're the last boat in again today, Michelle," Butchie said as they came out to meet her.

"Doing the best I can, Butchie," she replied.

Stan shook his head. "You got to get yourself a sternman, honey."

Michelle turned her hands up in the air. "You know anybody?"

Stan shook his head. "Used to be you could always find some young fella looking for work. Not anymore."

Butchie nodded in agreement. "This younger bunch, all they want to do is get high and knock up some girl to collect their welfare." He blushed. "I mean, I know you ain't like that..."

"It's okay," she said, "I'm sorry to keep you guys waiting. Thanks for being here for me."

"The Deans and the Roberts been doing business since our grandad's days," Stan said, "We ain't about to jack you up when you're having a streak of bad luck."

The three of them loaded the lobsters on the scales and weighed them. Stan went into the office to cut Michelle her check.

"So how's your old man doing?" Butchie asked her while they waited.

Michelle shrugged. "Not too bad. They adjusted his medication. He don't forget so much now. I mean he does, but not like before."

"Well, tell him we said hello, all right?"

"I will, Butchie, thank you."

Stan returned with her check. She stowed it inside her jacket and left the building. She had the urge to run back to the boat to avoid getting soaked, but she did not have the energy. By the time she climbed back on Carol Anne, her wet hair was hanging in her face.

The Deans were right, she thought, as she headed up the river toward home. She could not keep running three strings of traps on her own. But in the last year, she'd had four sternmen quit. It was hard work, and the pay wasn't great. She supposed she could cut back the number of traps she put out, but she wasn't about to give up water the Roberts had worked for eight generations.

She pulled up to the dock, tied off the boat and went into the house through the kitchen door.

"Michelle?" she heard her father call in his slightly slurred voice.

"I'm home, Pop."

He rolled his wheelchair from the living room into the kitchen. "You had me worried there, sweetheart, you're awful late."

"I know, Pop. Takes a lot more time without a sternman."

He nodded. "Ayuh, I know it's wicked hard, honey."

She kicked off her boots and hung her wet jacket next to the door.

"Let me change into some dry clothes," she said, "Then I'll get supper started."

She trudged up the stairs to her bedroom, where she stripped off her wet clothes and tossed them into a hamper. She put on a pair of sweatpants and an oversized sweater and went back downstairs.

Her father had rolled to the table. He had two bottles of beer in front of him. He handed one to her.

"Thanks, Pop," she said, taking a swig. She put a frying pan on the stove and lit the burner. then fetched a package of pork chops from the refrigerator, along with a bowl of boiled potatoes. She dropped a spoonful of bacon grease into the pan and put the chops in, then cut up a couple of the potatoes and tossed them in to fry.

"What do you want for a vegetable?" she asked her father.

"Don't need no vegetables. Meat and potatoes is fine for me."

"That ain't healthy, Pop, you got to eat some vegetables."

"I'm eating too much since this goddamn stroke," he grumbled, "I'm starting to get fat."

"I don't think that's from eating vegetables, Pop."

She put a pot of water on a burner and got a bag of frozen peas from the freezer.

"So, how did the day go?" He asked as she cooked their supper.

"Not too bad," she said, "I left the check in my jacket pocket if you want to see it."

"That's all right, you're the one doing the banking now, just like you got to do every other goddamn thing."

"East end of the string we done good. Seems like the traps closer to shore, we're catching fewer and fewer."

"Water is getting too warm."

She plated their food and sat down across from him.

They were halfway through the meal and Pop hadn't said anything more. Michelle knew what was bothering him.

"Pop, we'll get by, it'll be okay. There's open water out in the bay. If we keep getting fewer in close we can move the string a little further out."

"Further from shore means more time and higher fuel costs," he said. "Honey, you're killing yourself now."

"You hear me complaining?"

"No, but I see how tired you are and I know that you don't go out nowhere. You're still young. You should be having fun. For chrissake, Michelle, you should be dating."

"Pop, even straight girls around this town can't find a date."

"Well they ain't as pretty as you."

They finished eating and Michelle took the dishes to the sink.

"Sox and the Yankees are on," Pop said, "Watch the game with me?"

"Sure, Pop, that'd be great."

"Bring a couple of them beers with you, honey," he said, rolling toward his bedroom.

Michelle got the beers and followed him. She helped him into the second hand hospital bed that she had gotten from a used furniture store in Lewiston. He found the remote under his covers, switched on the TV and put on the game. The Yankees were up two nothing in the third inning.

"Sonsabitches," Pop muttered.

Michelle was drowsy and would rather have gone to bed, but she spent so little time with her father anymore that she stayed to watch the game with him, even as her eyelids drooped.

By the sixth inning, with Boston behind by five runs, Pop reached over and tapped her shoulder.

"Why don't you go on to bed, sweetheart?" he asked.

Michelle stretched and yawned. "Alright, Pop," she said.

"And listen. Just for now, what I want you to do is, when you pull traps tomorrow, don't bait the first twenty five. Drop 'em empty. That way, it takes some of the load off you but keeps our claim on the water."

"And cuts our income by a quarter."

"It's temporary, just until you find a sternman. And you said yourself, you ain't getting a good catch in those close waters."

"Alright, Pop, sounds like a plan." She rose and kissed his forehead. "See you in the morning."

She wearily mounted the stairs, exchanged her sweater for a tank top, and crawled into bed.

Despite her fatigue, she laid awake for a while. Her father was right, the smart thing to do was to cut back a bit for now. She was overworked and that's when mistakes were made. She could get hurt, or even worse, through tired carelessness.

Maybe if she cut back, she might not be too damn tired to have a social life again. Not that she expected much. She figured that, by now, she knew every woman within fifty miles who was attracted to other women. She'd been to bed with a good number of them. And yet, she'd never had a relationship which lasted more than a month or two.

And, there were summer girls. When she was in her twenties, she had found a summer girl nearly every year. College students, usually, from Massachusetts or Connecticut, spending their vacation with mommy and daddy and looking for some fun. There had even been one that she fell in love with, but that ended badly and the hurt had never really gone away.

But she was older now, and summer girls were like summer itself; they glowed for a season, but when the days grew shorter and the nights cooler, they blew away like the first leaves of autumn, and never returned.

Laurel and Michelle, Summer 2016

Laurel knew that the idea of going back to Maine, finding Michelle, and somehow getting a do over, was crazy. Michelle probably didn't even live there anymore. And if she did, where, exactly, did she live? If she wasn't working on her father's boat anymore, how would she find her?

It was a three hour drive from Boston to Port Harmony. Laurel spent most of the trip running the same series of possible scenarios through her head. What if she was married, or with a partner? What if she had been, as Laurel had thought she had for so long, just going through a phase of thinking she liked girls?

None of that really mattered, she told herself. The most likely outcome of her trip was that she would find Michelle, they would go for coffee or have dinner together, and share a few laughs about their awkward encounter. They'd wish each other well and go their separate ways. And that would be enough. This is about the journey, not the destination, she tried to convince herself.

But maybe that was wrong. Maybe she was meant to go to Port Harmony, to meet Michelle again. Maybe there really was such a thing as destiny.

She was generally pretty rational, but there was one thing that kept that little ember of far fetched hope alive. When she had gone online, knowing how hard it would be to find a place to stay during the busy tourist season, she had learned that Harborview House had been converted into an AirBnB, and that they had a vacancy. If fate had held a room for her, what else might it have in store?

She stopped and had a lobster roll for lunch at a roadside stand on Route One. It was buttery and briny and delicious. She wondered how often Michelle ate lobster. She had probably had her fill of it years ago.

Shortly after lunch she turned on to the road that led "down the neck," as the natives said. She remembered the drive as being much longer than it actually was. In less than half an hour, she crossed the bridge over the Oyster River and entered Port Harmony.

There was a Dollar General and a new Dunkin' Donuts on the edge of town, but everything else seemed just as it had been a dozen years earlier. She found Bluff Road easily, and had no trouble recognizing Harborview House. As she parked, she caught her first glimpse of the harbor. It was just a sliver of bright blue between the house and its nearest neighbor, but she felt a quickening in her breath when she saw it.

She got her bag from the trunk and went inside. She remembered that the door to the left led to a parlor, but now, it was closed, and adorned with a sign reading "office." She knocked and heard a muffled reply.

A moment later, the door opened. A small woman looked up at her, smiling behind a pair of jeweled cat eye glasses.

"You must be Laurel," she said in a very non-Maine accent. New Jersey, Laurel thought.

Laurel nodded and started to speak in reply, but the woman turned and walked into the room. "Well, come on in," she said.

Laurel stepped into a room that seemed almost completely filled with overstuffed furniture and shelves crammed with knick knacks.

"I'm Andrea, by the way," the woman said. She picked up a tablet from the coffee table and looked at it. "The internet here is terrible." She held it a few inches from her face and stared at it for a couple of minutes, while Laurel shifted from foot to foot, trying not to look impatient.

Finally, Andrea looked up and smiled. "All set," she said, "Your payment went through and you clicked on the agreement. Now, you booked a month, but you said you might not stay that long."

Laurel nodded. "If I don't, I'll pay for what I booked."

"Just wanted to make sure that was clear." She fished in her pocket and brought out a key.

"You know," Laurel told her, "I stayed here with my mom and dad when I was nineteen. We rented the whole house."

"Yeah, that was before we bought it and remodeled. Hell of a time we had, too. These Mainers with their historical preservation rules and all that. I got you in 2B, top of the stairs."

"Thanks," Laurel said, taking the key. "Hey, can you still go up to the widow's walk?"

"Sure, most guests do. I wouldn't be caught dead up there, myself. I got the vertigo."

Laurel went up the stairs and unlocked her room. When she stepped inside, she realized it had been the bedroom her parents had slept in when they had stayed here. Nothing creepy about that, she thought.

She decided to wait before unpacking; she needed to decompress after her long drive. Lying down on the bed, she realized she felt a little bit sick to her stomach. For a second, she wondered if there was anything wrong with her lobster roll, but she knew it was nerves.

Mr. Eaton hadn't been happy when she told him she had a personal issue and wanted to take the four weeks of paid leave she had accrued. She wondered what she might've done if he had said no, but after some grumbling he had acquiesced.

That made her wonder, though. She had just rented this room for a month, and it was expensive. In a little while, she would go down to the wharf and with any luck, that green and red boat, Caroline? would most probably putter up to the wharf.

She told herself that if Michelle wanted nothing to do with her, she would respond graciously and bid her goodbye. But then what? Maybe Andrea would refund her money, most likely she would not. Coming was a choice she had made it, she would have to live with the consequences, financial as well as emotional.

There was a wing back chair by the window with a lovely view of the garden. She had brought a copy of The Girl On The Train, and sat down to read, but it was impossible to focus on the book. At five o'clock, she gave up, set it aside and found the stairs to the widow's walk.

She was pleased with how accurately she had remembered the town. Nothing much had changed. Some of the store fronts downtown seemed to have been spruced up and the frame of a new house was going up on what had been a field of lupines on Kittredge Street. When she looked at the harbor it seemed more crowded with boats than before.

There was a hint of a chill in the late afternoon air. She remembered her father explaining to her how the Seabreeze cooled the shore each day. She scanned the ocean but saw no boats coming in, so she went back to her room, put on a light cardigan and set out for the wharf.

She thought of how much she had enjoyed her walks around Port Harmony, but she decided to take her car. Michelle might agree to go to dinner with her; she thought about that place on the water were they had gotten the the fish sandwiches.

She drove down to the harbor and parked on the town landing, then sat with her eyes closed and took a few deep breaths before getting out. The landing and the shipyard were just as she remembered; the boats on jacks, the stacks of lobster traps, the smell of salt in the air. She walked along the boardwalk as she had before, took her position at the end and waited.

***

The big schooner was under engine power, moving too fast and coming too close. Michelle couldn't imagine that the pilot didn't know she was there, but she gave them a blast on her horn to be certain. A buxom blonde woman in a very tiny hot pink bikini stood at the stern and waved as Carol Anne rocked in the schooner's wake. Michelle shook her head. She thinks I was just saying hello, she thought. Well, jump in, honey, I'll come fish you out.

It had been a good day. She followed her father's advice about cutting the number of traps she baited, and the work was going easier. The catch was down, but prices were up, as they usually were in the summer. If she could find a sternman by September they'd be in good shape.

A group of kayakers were paddling across the harbor and she slowed to let them go by. Peering over at Dean's wharf to make sure

it was clear for her to dock, she noticed the figure standing on the boardwalk, but didn't think much of it. The town was full of tourists and a lot of them liked to come watch the boats. The kayakers passed and she concentrated on making her turn around and laying up against the wharf.

Laurel watched the Christmas colored boat as it came toward her. When it slowed for the kayakers, she could see a silhouetted figure in the wheelhouse, but could not make out whether it was Michelle or her father or someone else. There did not appear to be anyone else on the boat, and her heart sank. It must be her dad, she thought, she's likely moved away. But when the boat bumped against the wharf, the person in the wheelhouse stepped out and she saw that it was Michelle.

Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of her. She watched her tie the boat to the cleat, then hop over the rail and walk into the warehouse.

Laurel's feet did not at first seem willing to move. This is what you came here to do, she told herself, and stepped off the boardwalk into the gravel yard. She was halfway across the wharf when Michelle came out, pushing a cart. Someone inside was speaking to her, and she was looking back over her shoulder. When she turned to face forward Laurel was standing in front of her.

Michelle's first thought was that it must be her imagination playing tricks on her. She had pictured the woman in the bikini jumping off the schooner and swimming to her boat, now she was having a fantasy about the summer girl who had stood her up all those years ago. But then, the fantasy girl spoke to her.

"Hello, Michelle," Laurel said.

Michelle cocked her head and looked at the woman closely. "Laurel?"

Laurel smiled. "I didn't know if you would remember me."

"Of course I remember you. How are you?"

"I'm okay, how are you?"

"Getting by," Michelle said. She pushed the cart forward. "Excuse me, I've got to unload."

Laurel stepped aside. From a distance, Michelle had looked the same as she had the day they met, but up close, she can see that her face had gotten a little weatherbeaten. Her eyes looked tired, they didn't have the sparkle that she remembered.

Michelle parked the cart alongside the boat. Carol Anne, Laurel now remembered. She watched Michelle transfer the lobsters from the hold into the bins on the cart. Stepping a little closer, she asked, "Where is your dad?"

Michelle stood upright and brushed her hair from her face. "He had a stroke. He can't go out no more."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that."

"Thanks," Laurel said, returning to her work. She paused for a second and said, "Thanks for asking."

Why is she here, Michelle thought, why now? She couldn't make sense of Laurel's return. It had been, what? twelve years? She wasn't sure if she wanted to embrace her or throw her off the wharf. All the long buried pain and embarrassment of being abandoned, just as she was starting to understand the strength of her feelings, rose up like bile in her throat.

She finished unloading and climbed out of the boat. "So you up here on vacation or something?" she asked.

"Yeah, something like that, and I was wondering if maybe you'd like to go to dinner or at least go get a drink or something."

"I don't know," Michelle said, frowning, "Let me weigh out, then we can talk."