The Map of True Places

7

FINCH PRACTICED TOUCHING HIS thumb to his middle finger as rapidly and accurately as he could. He had succeeded fairly well with his right hand but was slower and clumsier with his left.

“There’s usually one side that’s weaker than the other,” the doctor said, taking notes.

“I’m aware of that,” Zee said. They’d been through the routine at least a dozen times. “We’re here about his medication.”

“Unfortunate,” he said. “But we did know that this one might not work. This particular medication came with warnings. It causes hallucinations in some people.”

“And clearly he’s one of those people. He thought he was Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

The doctor’s eyebrows raised. “Creative. Of course, considering his background…”

Zee fired him a look.

“Often men believe they’re working for the CIA, some covert-ops kind of thing. Women’s hallucinations often tend to be more sexual in nature,” he said, grinning at her.

Zee ignored his remark.

Neurologists have a rather warped sense of humor, Mattei had told her more than once.

“We’ll take him off it.”

“I’ve already done that,” she said. When she hadn’t been able to reach the doctor by phone, she had checked the PDR and had called a friend of Michael’s who was also a neurologist. There was no danger from sudden withdrawal, no weaning period.

“Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here,” Finch said. His voice, once loud enough to be heard unmiked in lecture halls of a hundred or more students, was now barely audible.

“Sorry, Dad,” she said.

“The hallucinations are not usually unpleasant. They’re generally more alarming for the family than for the patient.”

“Nevertheless,” she said, ending any possibility of continuing the meds. It seemed astounding to Zee when she thought of the side effects some doctors expected their patients to contend with. Any television ad for pharmaceuticals these days came with a list of contraindications so long it sometimes seemed amazing to Zee that people would dare to take so much as an aspirin.

The doctor stood up. “Can you walk for me, Professor Finch?”

Finch stood shakily. Her first impulse was to help him, but she willed her hands to stay at her sides.

With great effort Finch shuffled fifteen feet across the doctor’s office. Zee could tell how difficult his effort was only by his breathing. His face was masked, a classic sign of Parkinson’s.

Once a reserved New England Yankee, Finch had become more emotional with the progression of his disease. But his emotion showed neither on his face nor in any vocal inflection. It was a more subtle energy that told Zee how frustrating and impossible this short walk had become for her father.

She had often wondered at the fact that Finch didn’t have the shaking so common to Parkinson’s. Ten years into the disease, he had only recently developed any kind of resting tremor, and even that was so slight that anyone who was not looking for it would never notice.

Curiously, none of these symptoms had been the first signs of Finch’s illness. The first cause for concern had happened in a restaurant in Boston, the night Finch had taken them all out to dinner to celebrate the release of his new book based on Melville’s letters to Hawthorne. The book was aptly titled: An Intervening Hedge, after a review that Melville once wrote for one of Hawthorne ’s books.

Finch had been working on the book for the better part of ten years. The fact that he had finished it at all was cause enough for celebration; the fact that someone had actually published it represented job security. Finch didn’t need to work. His family had left him money. But teaching was something he loved, and teaching Hawthorne and the American Romantic writers was his greatest joy in life.

Finch presented a copy to both Zee and Melville, the name of the man for whom Finch had left Zee’s mother. That’s what Zee often told people who asked, though neither statement was very accurate. Actually, Finch never left Maureen, though he had met Melville for the first time during one of Maureen’s extended hospitalizations. And Melville’s name was really Charles Thompson. Melville was a nickname Finch had given him, one that stuck.

Zee opened her book to the title page, which he had inscribed to her. To my sweet Hepzibah, he had written in a hand that was much diminished from the one she remembered. A million thank-yous. Zee was contemplating just what those thank-yous might be for when she caught the dedication that was printed on the following page: FROM HAWTHORNE TO MELVILLE WITH UNDYING AFFECTION.

Zee had always had mixed feelings about the book, which hinted at a more intimate relationship between Hawthorne and Melville than had previously been suspected. Though even Finch admitted that the men of the times had been far more accustomed to intimacy than those of today, often writing detailed letters of their affection for each other and even sharing beds, the fact that Finch had tried to prove that there was something deeper there bothered Zee more than she liked to admit. In espousing this theory, it seemed to Zee that Finch was attempting some strange form of justification for his own life choices, justification that was, in Zee’s opinion, both far-fetched and unnecessary.

That Finch and Melville were the real thing, Zee had never doubted. Not only were they clearly in love, but because they were so happy and devoted to each other, they had provided for Zee the kind of stability that Finch and Maureen never could. So despite any damage their love might have caused to the family, Zee would always be grateful for that stability.

But the relationship between Hawthorne and Sophia was a legendary love story, the kind Maureen had always wished she could find for herself. The fact that it was a true story, and one her mother had loved so much, made it sacred for Zee. Although her father was one of the country’s preeminent Hawthorne scholars and, as such, had more intimate knowledge of Hawthorne than Zee would ever have, that didn’t make it any easier for Zee to handle. From the time she was little, Finch’s love of Hawthorne had made the writer’s life almost as real to her as her own, but until recently she had never heard Finch’s theory about Hawthorne and Melville. Maybe it was some kind of misplaced loyalty to her mother, or the desperate hope that The Great Love really did exist, but Zee hated the idea that Finch was messing with the story of Hawthorne and Sophia.

She felt her face getting hot. She could see Melville watching her. Not wanting to ruin the evening, she excused herself from the table. “I forgot to feed the meter,” she said, standing too quickly, almost knocking over her glass of wine. “I’ll be right back.”

She walked out the front door and onto the street. The truth was, she had parked in the lot and not at a meter. She walked halfway down the block before she stopped.

It was Melville finally, and not Finch, who caught up with her. She could feel him standing behind her on the corner. He didn’t speak, but she could sense his presence. At last she turned around.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She just stared at him.

“I had no idea he was going to write that dedication.”

“Right,” she said. She realized as she looked at him that it was probably true. She had noticed the expression on his face when he opened the book, the quick glance that passed between them. Finch loved him. That was the truth of it. They loved each other.

“ Hawthorne adored his wife,” she said to him. “There are volumes dedicated to that fact.”

“I don’t think anyone is disputing that,” Melville said.

“His whole book is disputing that.”

“I’ve read it,” Melville said. “It isn’t.”

They stood together on the sidewalk. People walked around them.

“It’s possible to truly love more than one person in this life,” Melville said. “Believe me, I know.”

She regarded him strangely. It was the first time she’d ever heard Melville say anything so revealing about his past.

She had no idea what to say.

“This night means so much to him,” Melville said.

He wasn’t telling her how to feel; he was just telling her what was true.

She felt stupid standing here, like a kid who had just thrown a tantrum. It surprised her. “I don’t know why that got to me.”

“I think it’s fairly obvious,” Melville said.

“You know that I believe you two belong together.”

“Of course,” Melville said.

“It’s just the way he does things sometimes. It brought everything back.”

“I know,” Melville said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Come on inside with me.”

They walked back together. Finch was sitting alone at the table, looking confused. She kissed his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “My car was about to be ticketed. Lucky for me Melville had quarters.”

Finch looked so relieved that Zee almost cried. The book sat on the table where she had left it. She picked it up and turned it over, reading the blurbs on the back. A picture of a younger-looking Finch stared out at her from the jacket cover. He was standing in front of the House of the Seven Gables. “To those hedges,” she said, raising her glass.

She could see Melville’s amusement at her toast. As much as she resented him sometimes, Melville was one of the only people in the world who truly got her.

They ordered dinner and drank several glasses of wine.

Since the celebration was in Finch’s honor, Melville had planned to pick up the tab. But Finch wouldn’t hear of it and insisted on paying. The bill came to $150, but Finch laid down $240 in cash, unusual for him, as a frugal Yankee. Melville reached over and retrieved three twenties. “I think these bills were stuck together,” he said, handing them back to Finch. “Damned ATMs.”

Finch looked surprised and then slightly embarrassed. He stuffed the returned bills into his pocket.

Zee could see that he was genuinely confused.

“WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH MY father?” she called to ask Melville the next morning. She was moving between classes, and the reception on her cell phone kept cutting in and out.

“He had a lot of wine,” Melville said.

“He always has a lot of wine.”

“Maybe the bills really did get stuck together.”

“Right,” Zee said.

At Melville’s insistence Finch had already made an appointment with his primary-care physician. Zee said she would prefer for him to see a neurologist in Boston.

She felt relief for about sixty seconds when the neurologist said it wasn’t Alzheimer’s.

“It’s Parkinson’s,” the doctor told them.

NOW, ALMOST TEN YEARS LATER, it took Finch more than a minute to shuffle to the other side of the doctor’s office.

“Good,” the neurologist said. “Though you really should be using your walker. Any falls since your last visit?”

“No,” Finch said.

“What about freezing?”

“No,” Finch said. “No freezing.”

The doctor pulled out a piece of graph paper and once again drew the wavy curves he’d drawn for them at every appointment they’d been to for the last ten years. He drew a straight line through the middle, the ideal spot indicating normal dopamine levels, the one that meant the meds were working. The waves seemed larger and farther apart in this new drawing, the periods of normalcy much shorter.

“The idea is to try to keep him in the middle,” the doctor said.

She knew well what the idea was. At the high point of the wave, there was too much dopamine and Finch’s limbs and head moved on their own, a slow, loopy movement that made him look almost as if he were swimming. At the low point on the wave, Finch was rigid and anxious. All he wanted to do then was to pace, but his stiffness made any movement almost impossible, and he was likely to fall.

“It’s a pity he didn’t respond to the time-release when we tried that,” the doctor said. “And the agonists clearly aren’t working for him. As you were informed, they do cause hallucinations in some patients.” He turned to Finch. “We can’t have you living as Nathaniel Hawthorne forever, now, can we, Professor?”

Finch looked helplessly at Zee.

“So what’s our next step?” she asked.

“There really isn’t a next step, other than upping the levels of dopamine.”

He took Finch’s hand and looked at it, then placed it lightly in Finch’s lap and watched for signs of tremor. “The surgery only seems to help with the tremor, and you really don’t have much of that, lucky for you.”

Zee had a difficult time finding anything lucky about the disease that was slowly killing her father.

“We’ll keep the timing of his Sinemet the same. But with an extra half pill added here”-he pointed to the chart-“and here.”

“So basically he still gets a dose every three hours,” Zee repeated, to be certain she was correct. “Though two of those doses will increase.”

“That’s right,” the doctor said. “Every three hours except when he’s asleep. There’s no need to give him a pill if he’s sleeping.”

“He nods off all the time. If I don’t wake him to give him his pills, he’ll only get one every six hours.”

“Wake him during the day, but don’t give him anything at night,” he instructed. “You have any trouble sleeping at night, Professor Finch?”

“Some,” Finch said.

The doctor reached for his prescription pad and wrote a prescription for trazodone. “This is to help you sleep,” he said to Finch. To Zee he said, “It should help with the sundowning as well, which should stop his wandering. And give him his first dose of Sinemet about an hour before he rises. He’ll want to move, but he’ll be too stiff. We see some nasty falls in the mornings.”

Zee looked at Finch.

“Your daughter will have to keep a close eye on you in the morning,” the doctor kidded.

She wanted to tell the doctor that she didn’t live with her father, that it was Melville he should be telling all this to, but Melville hadn’t come home last night, and she had no idea where he was. When she had asked Finch where he was, all he would say was that Melville was gone.

The doctor started to the door and turned back. “Do you have ramps and grab bars?”

“He has one grab bar,” she said. “In the shower.”

“I’m going to send over an occupational therapist to check the house. The OT can tell you what you’re missing.”

The doctor extended his hand for Finch to shake. “Nice to see you again, Professor,” he said too loudly, as if he were talking to a deaf person and not someone with what Zee had just now come to realize was advanced Parkinson’s. She wasn’t certain how Finch and Melville had kept that fact from her.

“I’m sorry the meds didn’t work out,” the doctor said. “Not so bad to be Nathaniel Hawthorne for a day or two, though, all things considered.”

Finch didn’t smile back. He took Zee’s arm as they left the office together.

“You lied to the doctor about the freezing thing,” Zee said. “I’ve seen you freeze.” She remembered the last time Finch had come to Boston for one of his checkups. As they were leaving the restaurant, he’d frozen on his way out the front door. He couldn’t move forward and he couldn’t move back. They had all stood helplessly waiting for the freeze to break, freeing Finch to step out the door.

“Not for a while,” he lied. “I haven’t frozen once since the last time he asked me that damned question.”

8

FRIDAY-AFTERNOON TRAFFIC NORTH FROM Boston was brutally slow. Zee dialed the house again from her cell, hoping that Melville would answer. She was really starting to worry about him.

“Did he go to see his family?” she asked. Melville had family somewhere in Maine, a sister and two nieces. They weren’t close, but he’d been known to make occasional visits.

“No,” Finch said.

“Well, where the heck is he?” Zee was frustrated. She had asked Finch where Melville was at least ten times and was tiring of his one-syllable answers.

Melville had seldom left Finch’s side for the better part of twenty years now, a fact that Zee found difficult to comprehend in these times of trial marriages and soaring divorce rates. The two had become a couple long before her mother’s suicide, though Zee had been too young to realize it at the time. When they’d first gotten together, Zee had believed her father when he told her that the reason they spent so much time with each other was that Melville was his best friend. It wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth.

Zee’s mother was the one who told her about Finch’s preference for men. As with many of the inappropriate things Maureen had told her during her manic episodes, Zee would only understand the full impact of the statement in retrospect. At the time the professor had begun to hang out with Mickey and his pirate-reenactor buddies on weekends and during school vacations, and Zee supposed that was what her mother had meant by a preference. Zee was very aware of how much partying they all did together. The pirates drank and they sang, and Finch, who was usually almost prim in his New England reserve, drank and sang with them. Sometimes she would hear him singing as he made his way into the house late at night, the clichéd songs of the gutter drunk that she recognized from the old movies she watched with her mother. Finch was the singing, tippling, happy drunk of 1930s comedies. His joy at such times, especially as it contrasted with Maureen’s growing depression, made Zee believe she understood why her father preferred the company of men. Men drank and sang and had fun. Her only wish at those times was that she could be one of them.

Maureen, being Maureen, eventually told Zee intimate details of Finch’s predilection for men. Much later, when Zee was old enough to have a reference point for such things, she began to understand what her mother had meant and why she had told the stories with such anger. Finch’s misrepresentation of himself to Maureen had become the major betrayal of her mother’s life.

In Zee’s mind, Maureen’s unfulfilled dream had always been to experience what she referred to as “The Great Love.” It was what she wanted most in life and what she had sworn to have from Finch when they first met and when they spent the early days of their marriage on Baker’s Island. She often spoke longingly of the night he had recited aloud to her-not the dark lines of Hawthorne but Yeats. On their wedding night, he had presented her a copy of the book the poem had come from, and that book became one of the treasures of her life. She kept it locked on Baker’s Island in the room where she’d spent her wedding night and which had since become her writing studio. That she no longer found such passion in her everyday life with Finch was her cross to bear. Being Irish and Catholic, Maureen Finch was all too familiar with the idea of burden, and hers had become an increasingly loveless marriage within the confines of a religion that vehemently discouraged her escape.

After it became clear to her that Finch had turned to men, a time Maureen referred to as “The Betrayal,” Maureen had holed up in her cottage on Baker’s Island and had begun to write the story she’d never been able to finish, which she had entitled “The Once.” Finch marked this as the first sign of her impending insanity, though when Zee thought about it now, it was more likely a very bad case of postpartum depression, and one from which Maureen had never fully recovered.

It had been a difficult pregnancy and an even more difficult labor and delivery. The fact that Maureen hadn’t bonded with the child she’d borne him was no great worry to Finch-he had bonded well enough for both of them. The birth of his beloved Hepzibah was the single factor that kept him in his marriage, for, not being a Catholic himself, he was more inclined to believe that the mistake he’d made with such a hasty marriage might be easily remedied.

The days leading up to Maureen Finch’s death had been so terrible that Zee and her father had never talked about them. Zee had talked with Mattei about them many times during her sessions, but never with Finch. In retrospect she wondered how many of those days Finch actually remembered, his drinking having progressed, on many occasions, to the blackout stage.

What Zee remembered only too well was a late night, not long before Maureen’s death, when Finch, drunk and dressed in his pirate garb, stood in the kitchen and recited Hawthorne in a voice loud enough to fill one of his lecture halls: “‘No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.’” At the time Zee had believed that he was talking about being a pirate. Now, of course, she knew better.

Whether Finch remembered the day of the suicide or not, Zee would never forget his face. Coming home from his revelry, singing up the alleyway, he was instantly sobered by the sound of Maureen’s screams. He rushed into the house and up the stairway to find Maureen bent backward, spine arched in backbend until her head was almost resting on the floor. Her arms stuck straight outward parallel to the floor as if she were performing a gymnastic feat of great difficulty. He stood in the doorway staring, then watched as his wife collapsed. It was such a bizarre and frightening sight that Zee thought of demonic possession and even of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Zee stood helpless and distanced, praying that the 911 ambulance she had called would arrive in time. She did not dare touch her mother’s body. A moment before, her touch had started her mother’s third convulsion-she was certain of it. Zee and Finch stood back, staring in horror, completely helpless as they watched Maureen die.

Ironically, it had been the wail of the approaching ambulance that had sent Maureen into her final convulsion.

FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS, until the day Melville came back for good, Finch had dedicated himself to the process of totally anesthetizing himself, leaving Zee stealing boats and otherwise fending for herself.

They didn’t talk about Maureen’s death, not directly anyway. One night almost a year later, Finch turned to Zee and invoked another quote from Hawthorne, speaking of “‘That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.’”

Finch was clearly distraught. Family life, strange though it might have been with Maureen, was nonexistent now. So when Melville came back and moved into the house to stay, with him came a certain peace that Zee had not previously known. Finch stopped spending all his leisure time with Mickey and the pirates. And he slowed his drinking to a pace that was quite respectable for a seacoast town in New England-that is to say, more than moderate but not too extreme. He didn’t sing anymore, but Zee could see that Finch was truly happy.

One day in Zee’s freshman year of high school, she came home and announced, “My friend Sarah Anne says that our home is not a normal place.”

Finch thought about it for a long moment before he spoke. This time, instead of quoting Hawthorne, he quoted Herman Melville: “It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

Zee recognized the quote immediately. Though Finch usually quoted Hawthorne, he had schooled his daughter well in all the American Romantic writers. Moby-Dick was her all-time-favorite book.

Zee had to admit that, for the first time she could remember, there was a semblance of family in the old house on Turner Street. And though it might seem an odd situation to the outside world, it was far more normal than anything Zee had yet experienced in her young life.

FOR HIS PART, FINCH SEEMED rather to enjoy shocking people with his new status, a fact that ultimately turned Mickey against him. Taking it up a notch, Finch often introduced his new partner to people he’d known his entire life, telling them that Melville was not only his live-in lover but an ecoterrorist as well. Actually, Melville was a journalist. Before he met Finch, Melville had been investigating a Greenpeace splinter group that was trying to interfere with minke whaling off the coast of Iceland. The nickname Finch gave him stuck. Everyone in town now called him Melville.

He wasn’t a bad guy. In some ways Melville was easier to be around than Finch. Her only real objection was that Finch always let Melville run interference for him. Melville handled everything that Finch found difficult in life, which was a lot. And although Finch was happily letting the rest of Salem know of his relationship with Melville, he had never really talked to his daughter about it. It had been Melville, finally, who explained the kind of love that he and Finch had for each other, though by the time he got around to talking to her about it, she had pretty much figured things out for herself.

Finch and Melville had started seeing each other during her mother’s final and longest hospitalization. The way Melville explained it, Finch had led him to believe that Maureen was probably never going to get out of the hospital. Zee always wondered about that. It was the opposite of what Finch had told Zee on their Saturday trips to see her mother. Every Saturday, on the way to the hospital, Finch assured his daughter that Maureen would be coming home soon and that they shouldn’t give up hope.

Still, she believed Melville when he told her that he’d been misled by Finch. It seemed important to Melville that she know this, desperately important somehow that she not think he was a man who would intentionally break up a family. Surprisingly, she believed him. Zee knew all about The Betrayal, though she was certain that Finch didn’t know she knew. Maureen was a talker, particularly when she was in one of her manic periods. Over the years she had told Zee much more than was appropriate to tell a daughter about her father. And Zee could do nothing with the information her mother had given her. Maureen had sworn her to secrecy. So Zee became aware, as Maureen had intended, that her father was sometimes less than honest and forthcoming when it came to getting what he wanted. She didn’t fault him for it. Zee knew better than anyone how difficult Maureen’s illness had become. But she noted it.

When Maureen had finally come home from the hospital, it was Melville who had disappeared, accepting a writing assignment that took him first to California and later as far away as the Aleutian Islands. He didn’t return to Salem until two years later. By that time Maureen was dead, Finch was spending his summer vacation drinking with the pirates, and Zee was out stealing boats.

Finch immediately sobered up, quit pirating, and moved Melville into the house.

Months later, when Zee was caught stealing a cuddy-cabin boat, it wasn’t Finch who came to post bail but Melville. It was also Melville who accompanied her to court and Melville who made certain that her juvenile records were sealed.

And when she was required to go to therapy in Boston, it was Melville who drove her. Finch, who had no idea she was stealing boats to get herself out to Baker’s Island and the house her mother had left her, not only was disgusted by her behavior but accused her of being just like her mother.

“You don’t understand,” she heard him say to Melville. “This illness runs in families. She’s showing the same kinds of signs, doing the same kinds of dangerous things. She’s skipping school. She’s stealing boats. I can’t have it,” he said. “I’ll send her away to school before I will deal with this again.”

And so Melville took her to a therapist and waited for her in the waiting room. The therapist found no signs of manic depression. While it was clear that Zee was acting out, the therapist thought it was a cry for help, or at least for attention from her father.

If the therapist was correct and it was a cry for help, it had been Melville, and not Finch, who answered it.

“He’s threatening to sell your mother’s house on Baker’s Island,” Melville told her on the way home from her session with the psychiatrist.

“He can’t do that,” Zee said.

“He can. You’re a minor, and Finch has been paying upkeep and taxes.”

Zee panicked. The house was the last thing she had of her mother’s. “I’ll get a job,” she said.

“It wouldn’t be enough.”

“I’ll quit school and get a job.”

“If you quit school, he will sell the house immediately. Don’t even think about quitting school.”

“What am I supposed to do? He can’t sell my house.”

“If I were you,” Melville said, “I think I would learn to behave.”

It was simple advice, and she heeded it. From that day on, Zee didn’t steal another boat. She didn’t skip school again. And, to the best of her ability, she tried to learn to please her father and do what was expected of her.

THE RIDE BACK FROM BOSTON had taken forever. Finch was weary, and so was Zee. She turned the car onto Turner Street, stopping to let a group of day-campers, who had just come from the Gables tour, get back onto their yellow school bus. After they passed, Zee pulled the car into the driveway next to Melville’s boat. Dusty, the cat next door, who had become the mascot for the House of the Seven Gables, was sunning himself on the bench in the stern. He looked up, yawned, then stretched and settled back into a more comfortable sleeping position.

The old lobster boat was wrapped in white plastic that had begun, over the years, to flake and tear. A screen door that was cut into the wrapping over the stern showed through to the boat’s interior ribs, revealing the vital internal organs: the galley, the bunk beds, the head. A yellow slicker she recognized as Melville’s was still slung over the brass cleat near the captain’s chair. The old boat gave the impression of a sugared Easter egg, the old-fashioned kind that contained a whole world inside.

Seeing the boat, Zee was prompted to ask one more time after Melville.

“What do you mean, gone?” she asked when Finch repeated the word for probably the fourteenth time.

“Gone, disappeared, poof!” he said, making an upward sweep with his hand.

In a way she wished, hoped, he had not altogether given up speaking as Hawthorne. At least Hawthorne would have answered her question with a recitation that might have yielded more meaning.

This time she changed her question. Instead of asking where Melville had gone, she asked, “Well, when do you think he will be back?”

“Never,” Finch said.

SHE SHOULD HAVE LET HIM off at the kitchen door, she thought. It would have been a much easier walk. Because they used the front door, there was a long and cluttered hall that Finch had to negotiate. She grasped his arm to guide him down the hall to the kitchen, but he shook her off. He could do it himself, he told her.

It took several minutes for Finch to travel the long hall from the front door to the kitchen of the old house. She followed his stiff-legged shuffle the length of the hall. The ceilings were low in this house. The wide pine floors sloped on the diagonal. A child’s marble dropped in the living room would end up in the kitchen, which made walking difficult enough. But the piles of newspapers Finch had collected over the years seemed to grow precariously out of the floor every few feet. They were waist-high in some places, and they seemed to sway when she walked by them like Disney rocks that were about to tumble. And then there were Finch’s books, piled on every surface: the mantels, the desk, the raffia awning-striped wing chair in his den. She was reminded of a pinball machine as she watched Finch navigate unsteadily through the room. His walker stood in the kitchen fireplace. Still wrapped in plastic, it was the same yellowing white as Melville’s boat.

After she helped Finch inside, Zee went around the side of the house and began to collect the assorted things that he had placed outside the window of the cent shop he’d created: two pairs of shoes, fishing gear, several lightbulbs of varying wattage, and a set of binoculars. Slowly she began to realize that most of the items Finch had been selling actually belonged to Melville. The hand-lettered sign he’d hung on the window, the one saying that EVERYTHING MUST GO, began to take on a new meaning.

Some people throw people’s belongings to the curb. Finch, ever the practical Yankee, had opened Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and tried to make a profit.

“Don’t bring that stuff back in here,” Finch said when he saw her coming through the door with a pile of Melville’s shirts.

“What the hell happened between you two?” Zee asked.

“None of your business,” he answered.

She put the shirts and the rest of what she could gather on Melville’s boat, forgetting Dusty was there and almost tripping herself in a last-minute effort not to step on his tail. “You’d better be getting on home,” she said when the old cat looked up at her. “It’s going to rain.”

By dinnertime Finch seemed almost his normal self again. She wondered how much of this was the meds. Though he was considerably better than he had been, she knew that the drugs were still in his system. The doctor had told her they wouldn’t totally clear out of his bloodstream for another forty-eight hours.

“Let me make you something for dinner,” she offered.

“No, look, I’ve got it right here,” he said.

He opened the fridge to reveal a row of labeled sandwiches. She noticed the script on the labels, cursive and feminine, decidedly not Melville’s. Peanut Butter, Tuna, Deviled Ham-dates scribbled under the titles. Finch took out the deviled ham, pointing to the others and telling her to help herself.

He couldn’t swallow very well anymore. She remembered Melville’s telling her that. Melville had also told her that bowel movements were becoming increasingly difficult for Finch, peristalsis slowing with the disease. She remembered he was supposed to eat prunes. She looked around for some, searched in cabinets and in the fridge. Then she wondered if they had settled on some medication instead.

She needed to ask Melville these questions. Even if he was gone, as Finch insisted, she still needed to talk to him.

“What do you want to drink?” she asked.

“Milk,” he said.

He wasn’t supposed to drink milk with his pills. He knew that. She poured him a glass of ginger ale instead. She chose a tuna sandwich for herself.

They ate in silence. She could see the difficulty he was having swallowing his food. It made her sad. But at least he was eating. Melville had long ago replaced Finch’s favorite Wonder bread with whole wheat. Two Oreo cookies had been placed on the side of each plate, Saran Wrap tight over the top. Finch had always loved Oreos.

She slid the two cookies on her plate across the table to him. He smiled at her. Standing up slowly, he shuffled toward the fridge.

“What do you want?” Zee asked. “I’ll get it for you.”

“I told you,” he said. “Milk.”

“You can’t have milk with your pills,” she said. “Milk interferes with dopamine absorption.” She was there when the doctor had told him that.

Finch acted as if he had no such recollection. But Zee could tell by his smirk that he was lying. This was his form of cheating. Oreos with milk.

“I took my pills half an hour ago,” he said.

“Twenty minutes,” Zee corrected.

He rolled his head back and forth to demonstrate the ease of movement. He was acting, exaggerating the range, imitating the looping head of the dopamine at its peak. “See, it’s working already,” he said. He was right, of course. If it weren’t working at least a little bit, he would be too stiff to fake any movement. As if to punctuate, he touched his thumb to his middle finger over and over, the way they made him do in the doctor’s office.

“Suit yourself,” Zee said. But he knew she didn’t mean it.

He ate the cookies and sipped at the milk. The fun had gone out of it for him, though. He left half a glass on the table when he got up and made his way into the den.

By 7:00 P.M. he was asleep in his chair, heavily dosed with Sinemet, his head flopping forward. A long string of saliva dripped out of his open mouth and onto his pressed shirt. He wouldn’t wake up again until it was almost time for the next pill. Then he would be agitated, looking for something, anything, to take away the tension his brain was creating. He might open his cent shop again for the tourists, though they had cleared out by now. Most likely he would try to walk, the worst thing he could do.

It turned out that Finch had been right. The medicine was working. The flattened midpoint of normalcy the doctor always drew on the wave graph had happened exactly when Finch said it had happened, when they were in the kitchen eating the Oreos. She realized that now. She should never have complained about the milk.

9

STRANGELY, IT WAS MICHAEL and not her father who finally let her know where Melville was.

“He’s been leaving you messages on the home phone,” Michael said.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“You’re in Salem. I figured you knew.”

She could tell that Michael was angry. She’d been feeling guilty about it all week, but now she was angry, too. He’d been traveling again, and he hadn’t called. She’d been leaving messages on the home phone as well as his cell. She’d also been texting.

“So how was the funeral?”

“Okay,” she said.

“Did it turn out as you expected?”

“I don’t know what I expected,” she said. “But no.”

A long pause, then from Zee, “Could we please get back to Melville?”

“I told you all I know.”

“He didn’t say anything else? Just that he had moved out?”

“That and the phone number,” he said.

She wanted to call immediately.

“How’s Finch?” he asked.

“Not good,” she said.

She could hear his tone soften as they talked about her father. The two men had always gotten on well together. In many ways they were a lot alike. “You want me to come out there?”

“Not right now,” she said, a little too quickly.

“Jesus,” he said.

“That didn’t sound the way I meant it.”

“You sure about that?”

“Let me call Melville and see what’s going on. I’ll call you right back,” she said. “Then we can decide whether or not you should come out.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” he said. “I already had plans for the weekend-we had plans, actually.”

More wedding stuff, she thought. “I can’t talk about any of that right now,” she said.

“Nothing to talk about. Just a statement of fact.”

“I’ll call you back,” she said, hanging up.

She dialed the number Melville had left for her.

He picked up on the first ring. “Oh, thank God,” he said. “You’re in Salem.”

“Yeah, I am. Where the hell are you?”

“Finch kicked me out,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“He’s very angry at me.”

“I can see that,” Zee said. “What did you do to him?”

“I don’t know.” He paused for a long moment. “Actually, I do know. But it doesn’t make much sense. It was something that happened a long time ago, something I thought we had worked out.”

“Evidently not,” she said. “He was selling all your things through the window when I got here.”

“Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“I’m not,” Zee said. “He has re-created Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop in the front room. He was selling all your belongings.”

Melville couldn’t help but laugh.

“It’s not funny,” she said.

“No, but it’s creative,” he said. “Forgive me, it’s the only time I’ve even smiled all week.”

“I rescued some of your shirts,” she said.

“For that I am eternally grateful.”

“The doctor thinks it’s the new meds,” she offered. “They were causing hallucinations. We took him off them.”

“What’s he doing instead?”

“More Sinemet. One every three hours with two half doses added in twice a day.”

Melville was quiet.

“Are you still there?” Zee asked.

“Yeah.” After another long moment, Melville changed the subject. “I hired a home health aide,” he said. “Her name is Jessina. She doesn’t work on Fridays, but she’ll be in tomorrow.”

“I don’t understand how you’ve been keeping all this from me,” Zee said. “Or why.”

Melville sighed. “Finch didn’t want to worry you.”

She thought back to the effort it must have taken them both to keep things from her. “Any other secrets?”

“You should come over here. We need to figure things out,” he said.

“Where is ‘here’?”

“I’m house-sitting,” he said. “Friend of a friend. Over by the Athenaeum. Come by tomorrow after Jessina gets there.”

She wrote down the address. After she hung up, she went to the bedroom to check on Finch. He was sleeping soundly. She walked back to the kitchen and dialed Michael.

It rang three times before it went to voice mail.

ZEE TOOK OUT HER ANGER on the kitchen. She cleaned. She scrubbed down stove and counters. She polished the toaster until it shined. As she pulled the canisters away from the wall and began to clean behind them, she found several items meant for decorating cakes: red and blue sugar, some bottles of food coloring, and some spices, including an old amber bottle-all stuff obviously left over from some baking project of Melville’s. She opened the amber bottle and looked inside at the tiny silver balls, the kind you might find on a fancy cake or maybe Christmas cookies-dragées, she thought they were called. They were probably too old to keep, but she didn’t want to throw anything out without asking, so she put all the bottles back in the cabinet with the other baking things.

Melville was a great cook, but he had never been great at cleaning or organizing. As she put the cake decorations away, she started reorganizing the cabinets, putting like with like, the canned goods in one cabinet, the spices in another. Her anger was fading, but the energy of adrenaline was not, and so she moved from cabinet to cabinet, wiping down the surfaces as she went, arranging the labels. She became aware that she was being a bit obsessive when she actually considered alphabetizing everything.

When she got to the third cabinet, she was surprised. Hidden behind the boxes of cereal, she found all the wine that Michael had given Finch, every birthday and Christmas for the last four years, all second-growth vintages, really good wines from Michael’s own collection. They weren’t stored on their sides but stood upright, a sure way to ruin the corks. Horrified, she pulled them out and set them on the counter.

Before his diagnosis of Parkinson’s, from his pirate days on, Finch’s alcohol consumption had been increasing steadily. He had developed a real fondness for wine. From a medical standpoint, this now made sense to Zee, though she’d never seen the phenomenon described in any of the medical journals she’d begun to read on a regular basis. Alcohol releases dopamine, the one chemical that Parkinson’s patients need.

Finch hardly drank at all now, not since he was put on dopamine, and Melville didn’t drink much either. She had tried to tell Michael that, but Finch was always so effusive in his thanks that Michael wouldn’t listen to her.

This was such a waste, though. She looked for the wine rack she had given them and found it under the sink. There was space enough for twelve bottles to be stored horizontally, but there were thirteen bottles here. She put the rack on the counter, moving the canisters down to make room. She had to look hard to find the corkscrew, which she finally located in the laundry room. She opened the thirteenth bottle and poured herself a glass. She was still angry with Michael for not answering his phone, but she was grateful, tonight, for his impeccable taste in wine.

10

SLEEPING IN A NEW place had always given Zee nightmares. Not that her childhood room was a new place. But it was certainly a strange place.

“The Museum of the Perfect Childhood” was how Finch referred to the room that Maureen Finch had created for her daughter.

Zee’s room was reminiscent of the fairy tales Maureen was so fond of writing: white canopy bed with pink roses hand-painted on the head-board, ballerinas in different poses on the wallpaper, a dressing table with mouth-blown perfume atomizer bottles, though Zee, who hated any kind of scent, had never filled them up. The silver brush-and-mirror set placed on the diagonal bore her initials in the classic signet H. F. T.

Zee had never actually found out her middle name. During her teenage years, Finch and Melville had joked that the T. stood for “trouble.” Trouble is her middle name, Finch was fond of saying. Sometimes, if he was in a particularly playful mood, he would sing her the song “Trouble” from the soundtrack of The Music Man, but then he would catch himself, saying that a dignified man of his age and persuasion should never be caught singing a show tune, that it was just too much of a cliché.

The fact was that even Finch had never had any idea what Zee’s middle name was. Hepzibah was the name he had chosen for his daughter, the derivation obvious to anyone who knew him as a Hawthorne scholar. Maureen was given the honor of choosing the middle name, and she had chosen T. Whenever anyone asked Maureen what the T. stood for, she always replied that it simply stood for the letter T. “It is what it is,” she was fond of saying.

Zee had always believed that one day Maureen would tell her what her real middle name was, but now of course it was too late. When Maureen died, everything was frozen in place, from Zee’s middle initial to the childhood room her mother had spent so much time decorating for what she clearly hoped would be the most perfect of little girls, her little princess.

That Zee was neither perfect nor a princess was evident elsewhere in the room. There were whole segments of wall where she had taken her Crayolas and colored in the ballerinas-head to toe to tutu. She’d had the measles at the time and therefore couldn’t be punished for her crime. Maureen, who didn’t believe in inoculation, had insisted that Zee stay in a dimly lit room for days with nothing to do. To entertain herself Zee moved systematically around the perimeter of her little world, decorating only as high as she could reach and choosing the colors she most preferred-Electric Lime and Fuzzy Wuzzy.

The colorful ballerinas were creative enough but fatally flawed, Maureen always said, though when Zee asked what she meant, her mother could never articulate a response. Instead Maureen had waist-high wainscoting put up around the room covering the flawed dancers. She painted it white and had rosebuds stenciled along the chair rail to match the bed. Just a trace of Zee’s artwork remained now, the occasional wild scribble looping upward past the wainscoting, then disappearing back down again.

There were other signs as well, through the years that followed, that Zee was not the princess type. Scuba gear dangled off the ballet bar, from a job she’d gotten untangling mooring and lobster lines from the propellers of the tourists’ boats that so often became caught in them. Those jobs paid forty dollars a pop, better than she could make waitressing, for a task that usually took less than twenty minutes. If she wore her bikini, she often got paid even more, but usually the men hung around and tried to help, which just made things take longer.

Regarding the room now, Zee thought that it did seem she was sleeping in a strange place, or rather the place of a stranger. The room had so little connection to her now that she found herself imagining what the girl who lived here might have been like. What did she want? What were her dreams? In some faraway part of herself, Zee seemed to know. But she couldn’t get to the answer.

ZEE HAD FINISHED TWO-THIRDS OF the bottle of wine before she crawled into bed. She was so tired that she didn’t even bother to change her clothes, just removed her jeans and slept in the T-shirt she’d been wearing. She had a lot on her mind: Finch, Lilly, Michael. She wasn’t angry at Michael anymore; she was simply exhausted, both emotionally and physically. She fell asleep in less than five minutes.

SHE AWAKENED FROM A DEEP sleep to feel another presence in the room. She was not alone. She sat up quickly, her heart pounding.

He was standing over her now, and the scent of him was familiar. And then a voice, one she recognized, barely above a whisper.

“Please help me,” Finch said.

As her eyes focused, Zee recognized her father. He stood still as marble, frozen in place, unable to break free.

11

FINCH HAD TWO MORE freezing episodes the following morning. It was Jessina, and not the neurologist, who finally taught them “Up and Over.”

Jessina and her son, Danny, lived in the Point, an area of Salem just off Lafayette Street that had a large Dominican population. She’d been a nurse back in the Dominican Republic and was taking night classes at Salem State, trying to complete her RN certification. Days she worked part-time in a nursing home and part-time as a private home health aide, initially for a woman who had died from complications of Parkinson’s six months before and now for Finch.

Jessina was addicted to the Lifetime Channel and to Swedish Fish candies, both facts that for some reason Finch seemed to find hilariously funny. For such a tiny woman, she had a huge presence. Zee marveled at the way she took over a house simply by entering it, speaking to Finch in a poetic stream of consciousness that included her native Spanish, Dorchester English, and an affectionate baby talk that she had developed to soothe her patients.

If Finch had minded the way the neurologist talked down to him, he didn’t seem to mind the baby talk from Jessina. It was clear that he genuinely liked her. They had developed a routine in the last few months. Breakfast cereal hand-fed, then a shower, then television-something that Finch had seldom, if ever, enjoyed.

“If you step up and over, you can break the freeze.” Jessina demonstrated the exaggerated step the next time Finch froze in place.

He looked at her strangely.

“Come on, you know this!” she encouraged. She turned to Zee. “It’s a different part of the brain that is used to climb.”

She helped Finch to lift his leg in an exaggerated fashion, Zee reached out to steady him. And it worked. The step freed him, and Finch continued his shuffle toward the bathroom.

“Thank you,” Zee said to Jessina.

She shrugged. “I taught him that trick a while back. He just forgot. Can you pick up some Depends while you’re out?” Jessina asked her.

Zee was shocked. “He wears Depends?”

“If you want to get the store brand without the elastic, it will save you money. I can just put them on inside his underpants.”

Finch grimaced. He didn’t mind the baby talk, but he clearly didn’t like this discussion.

“I’m sorry, Papi,” Jessina said, and squeezed his hand.

Zee could hear her singing a song to Finch through the closed bathroom door:

Los pollitos dicen pío, pío, pío

Cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.

La gallina busca el maíz y el trigo.

Les da la comida y les presta abrigo.

Bajo sus dos alas acurrucaditos

Hasta el otro día duermen los pollitos.

She wondered how Jessina would have reacted-did react, perhaps-when she heard Finch as Hawthorne. The thought of the Hawthorne monologues being answered in this lilting baby talk seemed surreal. Perhaps Jessina hadn’t even noticed the difference in Finch’s speech pattern. Perhaps she thought he’d simply been more talkative than usual.

ZEE COULDN’T FIND A SUITCASE, just a canvas bag from L.L. Bean that was on Melville’s boat. She went through the things she had rescued from the cent shop, packing the items she thought would be most important to Melville: two pairs of jeans, several dress shirts, a collection of ship’s bells. It was odd being on the boat again, and even odder that it hadn’t been in the water for so many years. When she was a teenager, Melville had allowed her to use this boat as a refuge when thoughts of Maureen had come back to her, and she couldn’t sleep. Melville’s mooring was directly off the Gables, and many nights she had walked down in her nightshirt and bare feet and rowed out in the skiff, sleeping on the deck and looking up at the stars, the movement of water the only thing that could lull her into a dreamless sleep.

Melville had always loved the boat even more than she did, and she wondered that he hadn’t put it in the water for so long. But Finch hated boats, and caring for Finch had taken so much time that she thought Melville probably had to let it go.

MELVILLE WAS LIVING OVER NEAR Federal Street in a condo he’d been taking care of for someone at the Athenaeum, the historic membership library where he’d been working for the last several years. His official job title was sexton, though Zee had for years called him “the sextant,” not in an attempt to be clever and name him after a navigational instrument but because she kept getting the words mixed up. Still, the job description had little to do with either sexton or sextant. A sexton was a caretaker, a position for which there had been budget approval at the time Melville was hired. What Melville actually did these days at the Athenaeum was more archivist than caretaker. Day to day he researched and documented the donated and acquired collections that included such historically significant items as the original Massachusetts Bay Charter.

Melville’s new place was on the second floor of one of the converted Federal mansions in the McIntyre District. The doorways had the traditional carved-wood friezes. The stairway wound three floors skyward in a hanging spiral. Though Zee thought it was a shame to chop up any of these old houses, this conversion had been done well.

Melville opened the door and hugged her. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

She handed the bag to him. “You’re lucky,” she said. “He hadn’t gotten around to selling this stuff yet.”

Melville looked terrible. His sandy hair hadn’t been washed, and he hadn’t shaved for days. He wore a dirty lime green Salem tee with a logo that read LIFE’S A WITCH AND THEN YOU FLY. He was a big man, muscular from working the boats and from years spent in the merchant marine before he became a writer and an archivist. “I know,” he said when he noticed the way she was looking at him. “I avoid mirrors.”

The second-floor condo was windowed, sunny, and historically perfect, with the same green-over-gray shade of verdigris that had been used in the sitting room of the House of the Seven Gables. She recognized antiques from the 1850s China Trade. The one suitcase Melville had brought with him sat opened by the door, the unfolded pile of grab-and-go that he’d hastily stuffed into it spilling out onto the floor in contrast to the perfect room. The chairs had the light, spindly legs of expensive antiques, and Zee couldn’t imagine Melville daring to actually sit on them.

“Nice place,” she said. She looked around for a place to sit, but this was more museum than living room, with feminine touches but altogether too perfect in its execution. It was definitely a gay man’s house, Zee concluded, probably someone who dealt in antiques. Her mind jumped to the reasons for the split with Finch.

“I’m just taking care of the place,” Melville said, reading her. He’d always been able to read her.

“You want coffee?” he asked, pointing toward the kitchen.

“Please,” she said.

The kitchen was obviously where Melville was spending most of his time. He gathered up the copies of the Boston Globe and the Salem papers and old National Geographics that covered the farm table. Several coffee cups in various stages of abandonment sat on the table and on countertops, one with a fuzzy white-and-green skin growing across the top.

“I’ve got to wash some of these,” he said, taking them to the sink.

“Nice light,” she said. The kitchen windows looked out on the North River. It was perfect New England painter’s light. Zee caught a glimpse of the dog park that ran alongside the river below. At least ten dogs were off leash, barking and chasing a tennis ball some kid had thrown.

Melville rinsed the cups and the old enameled cowboy coffeepot, a twin to the one she had in Boston, which Melville had given her the year she went away to college because he knew she wouldn’t make it a day without his coffee.

The Starbucks bag was empty. He rifled through the cabinets and found some Bustelo. “Pretty strong stuff,” he said.

“I can take it if you can,” she said.

He opened the fridge and reached inside, pulling out an egg, holding it up to her as a magician might, then making it disappear. It was a trick he’d developed to amuse her after her mother died. He presented the egg to her once more, from behind her head this time, and she took it, smiling.

He smiled back, then the misery overtook him again.

“Are you okay?” she couldn’t help asking.

“Do I look okay?”

It was the saddest she’d ever seen him.

“How is Finch today?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Pretty much the same, I guess.”

Like Zee, Melville was hoping it was the medication that had made Finch behave so irrationally after so many years. “This is awful,” he said.

He brought the old enameled pot to the table, along with a wooden spoon. He watched while Zee threw the egg into the pot, shell and all, heaving it as hard as she could, smashing it against the bottom of the pot. It was part of their ritual. When she was finished, he handed her the wooden spoon, and she stirred the egg, shell, and grounds into a paste.

She smiled, remembering the many times she’d made Melville’s cowboy coffee for people, first at school and later for Michael’s friends. Part of the shock value of making the coffee was the looks of disgust it brought to her friends’ faces to see her make it, then their looks of delight if she could get them to actually taste the stuff, which they all admitted was some of the best coffee they’d ever had.

The first time he made it for her, Zee accused him of teasing her. She was eleven and already had a caffeine habit from years of drinking it with Finch’s pirate friends.

“You shouldn’t be drinking coffee at your age,” Melville had said to her. “But if you insist on continuing such an unhealthy habit, you should at least have some protein along with it.” She watched as he threw a whole egg, shell and all, into the grounds, then added water and told her to mix it into a paste. She still thought he was kidding when he put the coffee on the stove and waited for it to boil, then dumped a cup of very cold water into the mix. He strained it into a cup and presented it to her.

“Gross,” she said, looking at the mixture in the strainer.

“Try it,” he said, and waited.

“No way.”

He shrugged. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said, pouring himself a cup and sitting down across from her at the table. He sipped his coffee as he read the paper.

Zee watched him drink almost a full cup before she took a sip.

“Not bad, huh?” He grinned.

“Not too bad.” It was the best coffee she’d ever had.

“The egg takes away the bitterness, and the shells make it clear.” He took her cup and dumped three-quarters of it into the sink. Then he took what was left and added milk, filling the cup.

“I drink it black,” she said.

“Not anymore, you don’t. When you’re sixteen, you can switch back if you want to. For now it’s café au lait,” he said. “Mostly lait.”

TODAY MELVILLE WATCHED AS ZEE stirred the grounds the way she had as a child, biting her lower lip, trying to make sure it was right. Finally she glanced up and handed him the pot. She couldn’t read his look. “What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he answered, taking the pot back to the sink, filling it with cold water to the spout line. Then he put the pot on the stove and turned the gas burner to high.

Some part of Melville had always foreseen this ending, the impossibility of the relationship with Finch. Bad beginnings don’t lead to perfect endings. How could they?

WHEN HE CAME BACK FROM sea that last time, he’d gotten himself a job at the Peabody Essex Museum. Just cataloging and doing a bit of writing, descriptions of their collections, the same thing he did for the Athenaeum now. The Peabody Essex had a huge maritime collection, much of it undocumented. It would be a long time before the museum opened, and they had little room for everything they’d acquired, so it sat in boxes and crates, with the directors of the museum not even realizing in many cases what treasures they had. Melville had been among those whose job it had been to figure it out.

He was grateful for the position, and even more so for the relative obscurity of it, and for the fact that he was back on dry land. For the last several years, he’d been running from something that he knew was absolutely wrong for him, something that had both intrigued and scared the hell out of him at the same time. He didn’t come back to Salem until he was certain that its hold on him had loosened.

The impossible affair was something that happened when he’d been working for a magazine, writing an article on whaling off the coast of Massachusetts and on the Greenpeace splinter group that was trying to stop it. They had met when he took his boat up to Gloucester to do an interview. On the return trip, the boat had engine trouble, so Melville stopped at one of the local islands to use a phone. He’d ended up staying the night.

The next day he’d booked himself onto one of the swordfish boats heading out from Gloucester, one he’d heard was looking for crew, thinking he’d do an article on it for a local magazine. Then, later, he signed on to a longer run from Portsmouth up to Nova Scotia, a trip that lasted past Labor Day. He slept with every man he could in every port. It was a stupid thing to do, a dangerous thing, and unlike him, really. And when it didn’t erase the night he was trying to forget, he found himself back on the island, but the houses were all closed up for the winter. Grateful, he booked himself onto a merchant marine ship headed out to the Middle East, thinking he’d write a book about the experience. He liked the life enough that he’d made three runs with them, and on the third the ship had an encounter with some pirates in the Strait of Malacca just off Sumatra. The pirates sprayed the ship with fire from several HK MP5 submachine guns that were probably stolen from the Malaysian army. Their attempt to take over the ship had failed-the cheap, low-mass bullets were no match for the thick steel plates of the ship-but several pieces of shrapnel had lodged in the muscles of Melville’s left forearm, impairing his grip and ending any thoughts he might have had of pursuing a career as a mariner.

When he got back to Salem, he’d found the job at the museum and rented the room on Essex Street. He went to the free clinic and got himself tested and counted himself luckier than he had any right to be.

He had met Finch through Mickey Doherty. Along with some of the other pirate reenactors, they were trying to raise money to reconstruct the Friendship, a 171-foot East Indiaman that had sailed out of Salem Harbor hundreds of years ago when Salem had been the wealthiest city in the New World. Melville liked the idea of raising money for the tall ship but hated pirates and told Mickey so. “We’re not that kind of pirates,” Mickey said good-naturedly. “We’re the old-fashioned kind.”

“The kind with parrots on the shoulders?” Melville asked.

“Not parrots.” Finch grinned at Melville. “Monkeys.”

“One monkey,” Mickey said, insulted. “And only because I won him in a poker game.”

In those days, before Mickey Doherty had become the Pirate King of Salem, the unofficial mayor of commerce, he had taken his pirating quite seriously. He considered the mention of parrots an affront. If anyone, upon seeing him in costume, made the regrettable mistake of uttering an “ARGHH” in his presence, that unfortunate soul would most likely find himself at the connecting end of Mickey’s fist.

The monkey, however, was another matter entirely. Though he would deny it if asked, Mickey had a genuine love of the monkey he had named Liam, after his dead younger brother, but that most of his friends now referred to as Mini Mick.

Melville told Mickey he would have to think about it.

Finch smiled at him. A flash of recognition passed between them. For the first time in months, Melville felt like himself.

MELVILLE MET FINCH FOR THE second time at the museum. Finch was doing research for his book on Melville’s letters to Hawthorne. Most of them were held by family or had been documented in previous work, but Finch was also interested in the museum’s journal of the Acushnet, a ship that Herman Melville had served on and then deserted in the Marquesas.

Finch was older. And brilliant. They hit it off immediately.

Over the next several months, they worked late nights at the museum.

Melville met Finch’s daughter.

One night Finch told Melville the story about Hawthorne ’s wife, Sophia. Melville was familiar with the tales of Hawthorne and Sophia. Theirs was one of the great romances of the literary world. But it was not their love story that Finch talked about that night.

Sophia had always had problems with her nerves, as well as terrible debilitating headaches that had plagued her most of her life. As a child she’d been quite sickly. One medical theory that was popular at the time, and one Finch had just heard about, involved mercury and teething. Every generation has its remedy for a particular malady, and every generation has something they blame for disease of any kind. These days it might be pollution or chemical sensitivity or even vaccination. In the days of Sophia’s youth, it had been teething. Teething was blamed for everything from paralysis to insanity to consumption. The belief was that the sooner one could complete the teething process (which was undeniably fraught with torment for the child), the better. Disease could be avoided only if the teeth poked through the gums in a timely fashion. For this reason parents would often cut the gums of their children with implements as unsanitary and as imprecise as kitchen knives. Then they would apply mercury to the open wounds.

“Mercury?” Melville said to Finch. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Not at all,” Finch answered. “Mercury was used as late as 1960 in this country as an antiseptic. Are you old enough to remember Mercurochrome?”

Melville did remember Mercurochrome, though it was a vague memory, an old bottle with a fraying red-orange label.

“A lot of poisons were used to treat infection in the old days,” he said.

He went on to say that there was a new theory that Sophia’s headaches and her somewhat erratic personality were probably the result of mercury poisoning.

Melville couldn’t remember how Finch had segued from Sophia’s personality to Maureen’s, but he did remember that it had been masterly. Before Melville knew it, Finch was talking about his wife, her own mercurial personality, and the illness that had kept her hospitalized indefinitely.

“My wife is manic-depressive,” Finch had said. “She has been in and out of hospitals for as long as I can remember.”

“That must be difficult,” Melville said.

“It is difficult, most particularly for my daughter. This last time has been very difficult for all of us. This time I’m afraid she won’t be coming home.”

“I’m so sorry,” Melville said.

Finch looked at him so pitifully that Melville’s response was automatic. Though they were standing in the middle of the East India Hall, Melville reached out and hugged him. They stood for a long time, the sound of passing footsteps echoing in the halls around them as Finch cried quietly on Melville’s shoulder.

To say they started seeing each other would be wrong. It was more as if they kept seeing each other. Research turned to late dinners of takeout in Melville’s room on Essex Street, and when Finch expressed concern about leaving Zee for so long, Melville had his boat moved from its mooring down by Congress Street to one just off Turner Street. They began to meet on the boat, after Zee was in bed. Since her mother had been hospitalized, Zee often had nightmares, and the boat was close enough, sound carrying well over water, to hear her if she cried out.

“The first time we met, I thought you were straight,” Finch said to him one night.

“No you didn’t.” Melville called him on his lie.

“Bi, then. I thought you were bi.”

“I was,” Melville said. It wasn’t a lie. He’d once considered himself bisexual, but that had been a long time ago. “And may I point out that you are the one who is married.”

The weight of it hit them both.

“I’m a good deal older than you,” Finch said, “and from an entirely different generation.” Regret showed on his face. Then guilt. Neither of them brought up the subject again.

On Saturdays, Finch and Zee visited the hospital. On Saturday nights Melville would cook for them. They ate together at the kitchen table, Zee often quieter after the visits with her mother. Sometimes on Sunday, Melville would take Zee out in the harbor and they would fish for stripers, which they would clean and cook outside. Sometimes she would help him work on his boat.

Melville liked Zee. She was a good kid, if somewhat stressed and worried about her mother. Sometimes she would talk about it, saying she didn’t understand how her mother could be so unhappy. And she would talk sometimes about the other side of the disease as well, telling him some of the outrageous and amusing things her mother did. But he could see that it scared her. He could also see that for a long time Zee had been her mother’s caregiver, trying to keep her from hospitalization as the inevitable depressions set in. Zee didn’t have a lot of friends, just one or two from school. She hadn’t had much time to be a kid.

And though he felt guilty about his feelings, Melville found himself happier than he’d ever been. He felt bad about the situation, worse for Zee than for Finch. But he let his mind linger on the possibilities: that Finch’s wife might stay hospitalized forever, as Finch had predicted, that they could live as a family, that they could go on like this indefinitely. And he was guilty that the thought made him happy. But there it was.

And then, one Saturday in August, Maureen Finch was released. It was a surprise to Melville, although he found out later that Finch had known just before it happened but couldn’t figure out how to tell him. What he’d said instead was not to make dinner that night and that he thought they might be late getting back and would probably stop somewhere to eat along the way.

It was the first thing Melville had ever blamed Finch for, and it was a shock. When they pulled into the driveway and he watched as Zee helped her mother out of the car, he had a second shock. Maureen Finch looked up at him. Their eyes met and held.

Zee turned to see what her mother was looking at and spotted Melville. She started to speak to him, but something in her mother’s eyes stopped her.

Looking guilty, Finch helped Maureen into the house.

MELVILLE’S PHONE WAS RINGING OFF the hook by the time he got back to his room. He knew it was Finch. But he didn’t pick up. Instead he packed his things and, for the second time in his life, he ran, first to California and then up to the Aleutian Islands, where he stayed for the next two years.

THE STOVE BURNER SIZZLED AS the coffee boiled over the rim, pulling Melville’s consciousness back to the present. He jumped up and grabbed the pot by the handle, moving it off the burner.

“I’m glad you do that, too,” Zee said. “Michael thinks it’s only me.”

He poured a mug of cold water into the pot.

“How is Michael?” he asked. “God, I hope this doesn’t mess up the wedding plans.”

“I seem to be doing that all by myself,” she said.

He looked at her, choosing his words. “I thought Michael was the one who was making all the plans.”

“What gave you that idea?”

“I don’t know. It just always seemed to me as if the whole thing was his idea.”

“The marriage?” she asked.

“Everything, from you moving in with him to getting married. It always seemed more like his plan than yours,” he said.

“Well, it wasn’t,” she said.

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said.

“And what difference does it make whose idea it was?”

“You tell me,” he said.

She could feel her face growing red.

“Don’t get me wrong, I like Michael,” he said. “It’s just been a long time since I’ve seen you being you.”

“You know what?” she said, coming back at him.

He looked at her. “I’m sorry.”

“I came here to talk about your problem, not mine,” she said.

She saw him decide not to comment.

“Unfortunate choice of words,” she said.

“At least an interesting one,” he said. But he didn’t pursue it, and she was grateful.

When the coffee had settled, Melville strained it and poured each of them a cup. He brought the mugs over to the table, taking a seat across from her. He hadn’t been to the store, so there was no milk or sugar. He’d been meaning to go for days, he said, but he hadn’t gotten around to it. “Good thing we both drink our coffee black.”

“So what happened between you two?” she asked. “Why in the world would Finch throw you out?”

“It’s complicated,” he said.

She didn’t fill the silence. It was a trick she’d learned as a therapist. If you don’t talk, the patient will. But it didn’t work on Melville, or at least not the way she had hoped. He was better at this than she was. And he’d always been comfortable with silence.

“You met Jessina,” he said, changing the subject.

“I did,” she said.

“She’s quite a character.” He tried to smile. “She’s good with him, though.”

“Were you unfaithful?” She was thinking about the apartment again.

“Why would you even ask me that?”

She could tell he was insulted. The truth was, on some level she had been expecting it. He was so much younger than Finch, and the disease was so terrible. She realized she would forgive him for it if it had happened. But it wasn’t something you could say.

“I have never been unfaithful to your father,” he said as if wounded.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It was something that happened a long time ago,” he said. “Before you were even born.”

“You didn’t even know Finch before I was born,” she said.

“Exactly,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I don’t understand either.”

“Maybe it was the drugs,” she said.

He nodded. It was what he’d been hoping. If it wasn’t the drugs, it meant that Finch had entered a crossover stage, something that often happened in patients with advanced Parkinson’s, where they began to exhibit the signs of Alzheimer’s. He didn’t want to think about that.

“Maybe it will go away, when the drugs get out of his system, and you can come back.”

“Let’s hope so,” he said.

Just then an ungodly howl started from the back of the house, echoing up the stairway and shaking the walls.

“What the heck was that?”

Whatever it was howled again. Zee thought it must be one of the fright tours Salem was so famous for, or maybe one of Mickey’s popular attractions.

Melville went to the back door and opened it. Then he returned and sat down and sipped his coffee as if nothing unusual was happening.

It sounded as if a body were being dragged up the stairs. A moment later a very winded basset hound entered the room. He took one look at Zee and howled again.

“Zee, meet my roommate, Bowditch. Bowditch, this is Zee.”

The dog walked over, laid his chin on her jeaned leg, and gave her the most sincere look she’d ever seen.

“He’s begging. Bowditch loves coffee, but it’s not good for him.”

She couldn’t help laughing. She patted his head, and the dog did a sliding kerplunk at her feet.

“I’m dog-sitting, too,” he said.

“I think I just figured that out,” she said, still laughing.

MELVILLE AND ZEE BOTH DRANK their coffee black, and they both loved dogs. It was one of the many things they had in common: dogs, the ocean, Myrna Loy movies. They both had a love of dark chocolate and a virulent hatred of lima beans, which Finch adored and asked Melville to cook all the time. Finch preferred cats to dogs, especially Dusty, the cat at the Gables. And he didn’t share Melville’s passion for the ocean. Melville and Zee would go out together sometimes, on his day off. He would take her up the coast, sometimes as far as the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire.

Coming back one moonless night, Melville stopped the boat to look at the sky. Stargazing had once been his hobby, especially in the long months at sea when he was in the merchant marine. He owned a telescope, and he often set it up on their deck at home, finding specific stars and planets, showing Zee and Finch. “I always wanted to learn to navigate by the stars,” he told them one night. “But I’m afraid it’s a lost art.”

The only place Melville refused to take her on their outings together was the house on Baker’s Island, which had been left to her by Maureen. Both he and Finch refused to go there, but Melville would sometimes drop her off on the island on his way out to fish and then pick her up again at the end of the day.

Finch didn’t understand why she would want to go. He wanted to sell the place, especially if it made Zee sad. He refused to pay the taxes on it. But Melville got it. It was Melville, finally, who kept the taxes paid and hired someone to maintain the old place, keeping it shuttered but in good shape in case she might want it someday when she grew up and had a family of her own. “New life chases away old ghosts,” he once told her.

SHE STAYED AT MELVILLE’S FOR an hour and a half. “I have to go,” she said at last. “I have to pick up some groceries. And some Depends.”

“Walgreens has the best prices,” Melville said.

“How long has he been incontinent?” she asked.

He shrugged. “For a while.”

“You sure you want to come back?” she said.

“Don’t even kid,” he said.

“Let’s maybe give it a couple of days,” she said. “Wait until the medicine completely clears out of his system.”

On her way out the door, Zee walked past Melville’s suitcase. Something akin to an electric shock ran down her spine. She stood stunned and staring. When she could move again, she bent over and picked up the book of Yeats poems. It was right there in the top of his suitcase, its spine jutting out from under a green cable-knit sweater. She was surprised she hadn’t seen it before. “Where did you get this?” She stared at him.

“It’s mine,” he said, gently but quickly sliding the book out of her hands.

“It belonged to my mother.” It was the book Zee had gone to get from the island the day Maureen killed herself. She would recognize it anywhere. The book was white, but it had a purple mark down the front cover where one of Zee’s crayons had melted. Zee pointed to the stain. “It’s the book that Finch gave her on her wedding day.”

Melville looked surprised.

“Where did you get this?”

“From Finch,” he said, his surprised look slowly morphing into a wounded one.

She stood looking at him for a long time, the impact of his statement sinking in. The anger that she had once felt for Finch, that she thought she was finished with a long time ago, surfaced in her once again.

“I don’t believe this,” she said.

12

MAUREEN AMPHITRITE DOHERTY FINCH was a writer of fairy tales, not simple happily-ever-after stories that lulled children to sleep but much darker tales with wildly implausible happy endings, usually involving rescue from incredible odds. Very seldom were those rescues performed by handsome princes. Maureen often declared that she was allergic to princes, by way of being Celtic and Irish and fresh off the boat. She wasn’t fresh off any boat that Zee knew of. She’d come to America just after she had turned sixteen, after her brother Liam was killed, and there were no boats involved in their crossing. They had all traveled to Boston by plane. But there was no arguing with Maureen when she was telling a story.

Being Finch’s daughter as well as her mother’s, and more governed by logic than her maternal heritage might suggest, Zee had always tried to point out that there were Celtic princes Maureen could have written about, like Efflam and Treveur, as well as great warrior kings to choose from, like Cormac or Cadwallon. Zee suggested the latter two because she knew that her mother had always had an affinity for great warriors. But Maureen would simply reply that the Irish valued poets more than kings and princes.

Zee listened to the stories. The fact was, in those days she had loved listening to her mother’s voice. And during Maureen’s manic phases, when the urge to talk became something that seemed to take her over, Zee had become smart enough to realize that letting Maureen’s monologues continue uninterrupted would sometimes prevent the more drastic acting-out that she became prone to at such times. Occasionally her mother would stop, upset by something she’d just revealed, and Zee, who’d heard the same stories over and over again for years, would pitch Maureen ahead into her monologues, avoiding the parts that upset her, like an old vinyl record with a scratch that launches it midway into the next song.

Even in those manic times, Maureen was a much better storyteller than she was a writer, and the stories Zee loved were not the fairy tales at all but the real stories about growing up and meeting Finch.

MAUREEN TOLD ZEE THAT SHE and Finch met at Nahant Beach, the long stretch that connected what were once islands to the mainland and more particularly to Lynn, where the family lived now, in a house owned by Maureen’s new stepfather.

Maureen had just turned nineteen and was celebrating with her friends, three girls from the shoe-box factory where she worked as an elevator operator. The other girls worked on the machine line, but Maureen, being more beautiful than most, had been plucked from the line and trained to run one of the two elevators that took the executives to their seventh-floor offices. She was good at her job, if not enamored of it. She didn’t like being inside, in a moving box inside a much larger box, she said. She was accustomed to much harder work than this-suited to it, actually. Still, she knew the privilege of being chosen, and if she would have preferred the line, she simply had to listen to her friends, who daily offered to trade places with her, to appreciate what a lucky girl she was.

Her shift ended at three. Every afternoon, winter or summer, she walked Lynn Beach, not on the esplanade as most walkers preferred but far below it, on the sand itself. She loved the ocean. Living so close to water made the move from Ireland bearable, though she would have preferred staying there, moving south from Derry to a town in the Republic, maybe, to Ballybunion, where they had traveled once as a family, while her father was still alive and before they lost Liam, and everything changed so terribly, and the Dohertys moved to America and another coastline that, while wildly different and strange, was at least in the end a part of the same ocean.

The day Maureen met Finch was exactly five years to the day that she had stood with her brothers on the cliffs at Ballybunion. It was the first day of summer, and though there were no cliffs in this new world, there was a beautiful beach. Although the water was cold, one could actually swim here, in the protected crescent of bay that stretched toward Nahant. The Irish beaches that Maureen knew, with their wild tides and rough waters, had always been too dangerous for swimming.

On the day she met Finch, Maureen had not been swimming, though two of her girlfriends had. The waters were still too cold. It would take until July for Maureen to go into the water.

She noticed him immediately. He was wearing linen pants and a light cotton shirt, dressed more for a garden party than the beach. He had photo equipment with him, an old eight-by-ten plate camera on a worn wooden tripod. It was very old-fashioned, as was he. “Elegant,” is what her girlfriends called Finch. He had a Gatsby-era quality more suitable to the twenties than the seventies, but lovely just the same, maybe all the more so for its strangeness.

He had noticed all of them. But it was Maureen he approached.

“May I take your photograph?” he asked.

Her girlfriends smiled.

Maureen stared.

“I beg your pardon,” he started again, “but I wonder if you’d allow me the privilege of taking your portrait.”

The girls started to giggle.

“Are you a photographer?” she asked, because she wasn’t sure what else to say.

“Alas, no,” he said.

The girls fell into gales of laughter. “‘Alas’?” one of them repeated.

Finch’s face turned red.

“Why?” Maureen asked, realizing she was making it worse.

“You can take my picture,” the girl called Kitty said. “You can take my picture anytime.”

“Why would you want my photograph?” Maureen asked again, ignoring her friend.

“Because you are by far the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.”

Having brothers, she was not used to such flattery, and she was certain that he was making fun of her.

Convinced she had just been insulted, she turned away from him, but, as she did, she caught an expression on his face that broke her heart. He looked so stricken.

“You should go,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

But the look had caught her friends, particularly Kitty. “You should pose for him,” Kitty said. “Maybe he could make you a model or something.”

Maureen ignored her friend. Kitty was a silly girl who had no place giving advice to anyone. Maureen became aware that Finch was still standing in front of her. She could feel his eyes on her. He hadn’t moved.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Maureen,” her other friend said after it became apparent that Finch wasn’t going anywhere. “Let him take your damned picture.”

Maureen confessed to Zee that she had allowed Finch to lure her beyond the shore to where the tall beach reeds and the wild roses grew. He told her the light was better there, and the photo would gain a certain texture.

At this point in her rendition of their love story, Maureen would always turn to Zee and say, “You, my darling, will never be talked into such a thing by any boy. Going off into solitary places with a boy you do not know is the kind of unfortunate choice that leads to rape and murder.”

It was the only part of her story that ever rendered Zee speechless. She found herself unable to breathe until Maureen continued, laughing.

“Of course, we didn’t know then, did we, how absolutely harmless Finch was in that area.” Sometimes she would choke as she said it. Sometimes she would laugh.

Finch was older than Maureen-thirty-five, maybe, she said-and had always seemed to be from another era. Later, when she saw the way he had grown up, she would understand. There was a bit of the outsider about him-he always held himself a bit apart-which was something she understood well. In a time when the world was changing fast, they both seemed to belong to some other time and place.

When Finch won her heart, she said-and he did so quickly-it was not with his photographs but with poetry. Not Hawthorne, she said, but Yeats. Yeats spoke to her soul in the same way that Hawthorne spoke to his, and he had guessed this about her. He knew her soul, she said.

The night she finally knew she loved him, Maureen told Zee, they were out on Nahant, by the old coast guard station. An early hurricane was predicted, and already the winds were whipping around them and waves crashing white and foamy on the rocks below. Finch stood in profile, far too close to the edge, and recited “The Harp of Aengus,” his words delivered back to her on the wind.

Edain came out of Midhir’s hill, and lay

Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,

Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds

And Druid moons, and murmuring of boughs,

And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made

Of opal and ruby and pale chrysolite

Awake unsleeping fires; and wove seven strings,

Sweet with all music, out of his long hair,

Because her hands had been made wild by love.

When Midhir’s wife had changed her to a fly,

He made a harp with Druid apple-wood

That she among her winds might know he wept;

And from that hour he has watched over none

But faithful lovers.

Maureen and Finch married at City Hall in Salem, with Mickey as best man and Maureen’s mother conspicuously absent. Not only was Finch not a Catholic, but as far as Catherine Heaney (she had quickly remarried and left behind the name of Doherty in favor of the name of her well-to-do Irish-American husband) could determine, he wasn’t much of anything. A service that was not in the church was a slap in the face. Never mind that he had agreed to raise the children Catholic, a civil ceremony was tantamount to mortal sin. At the very least, they should have been married at the rectory, and by a priest. No good can come of it, she declared, and stayed away.

Maureen told Zee she had spent a week’s wages on the outfit she was married in, a pastel suit perfect for the trip to Niagara Falls the couple had planned. But on the day of the wedding, Maureen refused to go on their planned honeymoon and begged Finch to take her instead to the cottage on Baker’s Island, a place owned by her wealthy stepfather that had once belonged to his first wife. A generous man who was embarrassed by Catherine’s treatment of her daughter, he had presented the cottage to the couple as a wedding gift. And though Finch hated being on the ocean and was seasick for the ferry ride from Manchester, he canceled their trip northwest and took his new bride to honeymoon on Baker’s Island.

Her two-week vacation came and went, and when Maureen didn’t return to the factory, they replaced her with another of the young Irish girls, and life in the elevator went on without her.

Days and nights blended. Finch and Maureen lived by the sun and the tides. Food was delivered by boat, though Maureen insisted that they lived on love and never ate a bite. Pies made from wild blueberries were left on their doorstep by neighbors whose families had summered on the island for generations. The couple never came ashore until October 12, when the ferries and shuttles stopped running and Baker’s connection with the mainland was severed.

Every time Maureen told Zee the story, the honeymooners stayed longer and longer on their island. “We made love by starlight,” she often told her daughter. “We lay naked in the roses.”

When they got back to Salem, Maureen went on to say, she had changed from a girl to a woman. She was happy and contented. But when they settled in the house on Chestnut Street with its staff of native Irish, Maureen was mostly stunned. In the time they had courted, Maureen had no idea where Finch lived. She knew that his parents were no longer alive, and, being a proper Irish girl, she hadn’t thought it right to visit him unchaperoned. So she had never seen the old mansion with the twelve bedrooms and the staff kitchen in the basement and a cook named Brigid (of all things) Doherty, a slap in the face to both Maureen and the middle-aged servant who looked at the new lady of the house with immediate disdain.

The furniture in the house reminded her of the best that she had seen in Ireland, nothing like she’d ever been accustomed to growing up. It illustrated their class difference to her in a way that she hadn’t noticed when Finch was courting her. How had this happened? Only here in the New World would a wealthy gentleman such as Finch have anything to do with the likes of her. This kind of match would never have happened in the old country. Best that his family was dead, she heard Brigid say. If they had been alive, they would have stopped such a union before it ever started.

Maureen was miserable. Though the house was only a few blocks inland, she missed the smell of the ocean and the pull of the tides. She began to have bouts of insomnia and periods of panic where she almost believed that Brigid was trying to poison her, to punish her for over-stepping her bounds. She pushed back against these thoughts, and the reasoning of logic prevailed. She found that she could talk herself out of such thinking. Still, she ate little at all, and nothing prepared by the Irish cook. Maureen grew thinner and weaker as the months wore on.

If Finch noticed the change in Maureen, he never said so. Smitten as he seemed, he spent the winter photographing her and the rest of the time either teaching his classes on Hawthorne and the American Romantic writers or in his darkroom. And during that time Maureen started writing.

When she found the house on Turner Street, Maureen said, she convinced Finch, who would do anything in those days to make her happy, to purchase the old building and move there, getting rid of the mausoleum on Chestnut Street and firing the staff. He did it to please her, but the fact was that it pleased him, too. The house she had found was only a few houses removed from the ocean, which surely made Maureen happy, and it was almost directly across the street from Hawthorne ’s famous House of the Seven Gables. Since Finch had recently been awarded a grant to study Hawthorne ’s journals as well as his letters from Melville, he could think of no better place to be.

Maureen thrived in the new house. She and Finch were happy for a time, she said. But the winter after they moved in, things went sour. Finch traveled to New York to participate in a guest lecture series on America ’s Romantic writers at Columbia, and when he returned, Maureen’s mood was glum.

She began her fairy-tale collection that winter, a dark assortment that was, in Zee’s opinion, far more Brothers Grimm than Disney. “A fate worse than death” was one of Maureen’s favorite phrases. In her spare time, she began delving into the history of the house, which was so familiar to her that the only explanation she could offer was that she had lived in it in a past life and that it had lured her back. The house had a story to tell, she was certain of it.

Hearing her alarming theory, Finch might have convinced her to move again, except that he’d fallen in love with the house. He had friends at the Gables; he was very fond of their gardens. He loved everything about the place, including the re-creations of both Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and Maule’s Well that they had added to the property to match Hawthorne ’s story. And the fact that the settlement had recently relocated the house in which Hawthorne was born to the same seaside property as the Gables was an added bonus. All things Hawthorne were now within fifty feet of his front door.

That summer Finch had been offered a teaching post at Amherst at their summer theater, where they would be performing The Scarlet Letter. The college production included a newly created dramatic reading from the young Hawthorne himself, which they had invited Finch to compose. He was excited by the prospect of a summer of Hawthorne, immersed as usual in his hero’s life, but away from the classroom and in western Massachusetts, very close to the place Hawthorne had spent so many of his later years.

But, as she admitted to Zee, it wasn’t a good time for Maureen. As she found herself becoming more and more obsessed with the house and its history, she began to hear it talking to her and would sometimes answer directly in the middle of a conversation about something else.

And though he had planned to take her with him to Amherst, Finch found himself not telling Maureen about his offer. He couldn’t bring her along, not in her current condition, and he was starting to fantasize about escape. He did love her, that was true, but for him it had always been in the way one loves a beautiful painting or Bernini’s sculpture of Daphne and Apollo. It was love of the feminine ideal, and not based in everyday life. In their daily life, he was beginning to see how troubled she was. Finch had always wanted children. It hadn’t happened, and he was growing distant, unable to be near her now, sleeping separately in the downstairs guest room.

But then spring hit and, with it, the lengthening days and bright sunshine. Maureen’s mood brightened as well. She began to gather the things they would need at the island cottage: blankets for warmth, seeds for planting summer corn and tomatoes. Knowing his dream of having children, Maureen went to Finch’s bed at night. She brewed him tea and whispered to him in the dark about the beautiful and brilliant children they would have. They made love. But when Finch began to relax and told her of the summer appointment he had accepted without her knowledge, Maureen refused to go. It was a betrayal, she said. Moving that far from the sea would surely kill her.

And so, Maureen told Zee, Finch went to Amherst, and she went to Baker’s Island. But halfway through the summer, she realized that she was pregnant. She left the island and made her way to Amherst, announcing her impending motherhood in front of the entire cast, one of whom looked stricken, a student playing the young Hawthorne, a beautiful boy who, when in costume, achieved the haunted beauty of Hawthorne himself.

“I should have seen it then,” she often confessed to Zee. “I should have seen what was coming.”

BUT SHE DIDN’T SEE IT for a while, and neither did Finch. The pregnancy itself agreed with Maureen. She had never been as happy, she said. And Finch’s joy was so great that she rode her mania throughout the months of her pregnancy, not descending into sadness with the winter light, and almost to summer before the postpartum depression hit her so hard that she had to be hospitalized.

Maureen was diagnosed as manic-depressive. These days she would have been labeled as bipolar 1, with full-on hallucinations. Maureen heard voices, she saw spirits.

After her diagnosis Finch took over as caregiver, and when Maureen came home, he treated her as one might treat a priceless statue, fussing over her but not getting too close, fearing that the slightest touch might break her.

Maureen came home from the hospital only to remove herself the following summer to the island, where she accepted no visitors, not even Finch. She begged to be left alone, and Finch obliged, partly because he didn’t know what else to do and partly because Maureen had left Zee behind, and it was all he could manage to care for his new daughter.

In the two months that followed, Finch could do little but have neighbors check on Maureen’s safety and make sure she had food. She threw herself into her writing and produced several more fairy tales.

When she returned in September, Finch asked no questions. He was so happy to have his family restored and to have Maureen excited both about her new career and (at long last) about her new child that it never occurred to him that what he’d been witnessing for the last several years was the onset of Maureen’s mental illness, or so he had often told Zee.

Over the next several years, Finch tried his best to get Maureen the help she needed, but treatment was of an era, and though she tried the medications of the time, each new one left her hazy and sluggish and more depressed than the last. Eventually she rejected them all in favor of the wildly manic episodes that fueled her creative energy even as they left her family devastated and exhausted.

One big thing that evolved out of Maureen’s untreated illness was a strange and inappropriate mother-daughter relationship that only got more disturbing as Zee grew older. Sometimes unable to attach to her child, at other times Maureen treated Zee as a best friend, confiding much more than a mother should ever relate to a young daughter, outrageous facts and stories that were more embarrassing than helpful: the far-too-early uncensored facts of life from periods to promiscuity, and even sex tricks and methods of seduction to use on boys, details that no normal mother would ever share with a daughter and that Zee had no business knowing. Such confidences assured two things: that Zee would seldom bring a friend into the house and that, at some point much too early in her childhood, Zee and Maureen would switch roles, with Zee becoming the mother figure and Maureen reverting to adolescence.

Maureen had three more breakdowns that required hospitalization during Zee’s childhood. The first two were short stays, less than a month in duration. And the last one was the long one, when Melville came into their lives.

13

TODAY ZEE WAS THINKING about Finch’s affair with Melville, the relationship that had ultimately put an end to the substance of their marriage if not the form.

She was still angry about the Yeats book she’d seen this morning at Melville’s house. The long months of darkness leading up to Maureen’s death had been something she had tried for years to forget. Seeing the book brought it all back to her, that and Lilly’s suicide.

She wasn’t angry at Melville-she was angry at Finch. How dare he give Melville the same book he’d once given to her mother! Sometimes she thought she hardly knew Finch. She knew he had ultimately won Maureen with Yeats. That much her mother had told her. Perhaps that was the way he won all of his conquests, she thought.

She wondered about the boy at Amherst, the one who played the young Hawthorne. Had he been given a volume of Yeats as well? Perhaps Finch had purchased many copies and made it part of his romantic ritual. The thought made her angrier. But it didn’t make much sense. Zee knew in her heart that there weren’t several copies of Yeats that Finch had doled out to potential partners; there was only the one copy. The book she had seen protruding from Melville’s suitcase was the same book Finch had given to Maureen. It had sat for years on top of the bed at Baker’s Island in a room that was no longer used as a bedroom but as Maureen’s writing room.

Desperate to lift her mother’s spirits, she had gone to Baker’s Island that last day to get the book of Yeats for Maureen. Zee’s original idea had been to take Maureen out there for the day, and she had even borrowed Uncle Mickey’s dory to get them there, but Maureen refused to go, saying she was sick and opting to stay upstairs in her bed. Frustrated, Zee went by herself. If she could only get the book to her mother, something Maureen had wished for aloud on many occasions, maybe it would do the trick.

It was something she had always blamed herself for. Had she not gone to the island that day, or had she gotten back earlier, she might have saved her mother’s life. As it was, Zee got back sooner than her mother had expected, soon enough to watch her agony but not soon enough to save her.

Zee often talked about her guilt in her sessions with Mattei. But while her mentor would always listen to her rehashing the story, she would not let her take the blame for her mother’s suicide.

“Clinging to this idea makes you responsible,” Mattei said. “You make yourself guilty and then ruin your own life because you’re too afraid to be happy when your mother was not so lucky. It’s the easy way out, and it keeps you from having a good life. Frankly, it’s beneath you.”

Zee had been angry and guilty for years. Though she blamed herself, she also blamed her father and Melville, and in good part she blamed her mother, too. It was that anger and blame that she was working on these days with Mattei. When asked to be more specific about her anger as well as her other feelings about her family, Zee was not able. In a family that had erased the boundaries between parent and child, she had never known exactly where she fit in. She knew that it was this undirected anger and the resultant guilt that had propelled her headlong into a career that she was beginning to doubt she was suited for, especially in light of what had just happened with Lilly Braedon.

Since Lilly died, Zee found that her anger had quickly begun to focus on more specific recipients. She was angry at Michael, though she had no real reason for this except that he so clearly knew what he wanted in all areas of his life, while she couldn’t seem to make as simple a choice as whether or not to serve sushi at the wedding. And when she saw the book in Melville’s suitcase, all the unresolved anger she felt for her father came flooding back.

“Girls marry their fathers” was another favorite psychological cliché that Mattei was fond of quoting. Michael and Finch were in many ways very similar. Zee wondered how much of her reluctance to make her wedding plans was somehow related to her unexpressed and poorly directed anger toward her father. But just as it was difficult to be angry with Maureen, who had unquestionably been ill, it was almost impossible to be angry at Finch when she looked at him now. She wanted to scream at him. How dare he give Melville the book her mother had treasured? How could he be that cold? But when she looked at Finch now, she didn’t feel anger, she felt sad. In a very real sense, the man she was angry at no longer existed. Any anger she felt for Finch, she now directed at the disease that was consuming him.

She needed to talk to Mattei, and to Michael. But she couldn’t go back to Boston. Not yet. Not until Melville returned or they figured out some other means of caring for her father.

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON ZEE LEFT another message for Michael. Then, tired of waiting for him to call back, and getting antsy sitting around the house, she asked Finch if he wanted to take a ride.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Up Route 127,” she said.

He looked doubtful.

“We can turn back anytime you like, if you get tired,” she said.

He still wasn’t sure.

“I’ll buy you ice cream,” she offered.

“Done deal,” he said.

They drove up through Prides Crossing, and then on through Manchester-by-the-Sea. When they passed Singing Beach, Finch wanted to stop. They tried walking in the sand, but it was too difficult for him, so they returned to their car and sat with the windows rolled down. She remembered the night she got stuck here, remembered Finch in those pirate days. It was hard to reconcile that man with the one who sat next to her now. She felt many emotions when she looked at him today, the largest of which was empathy. She realized to her surprise that this Finch was easier for her to understand; his vulnerability sparked something in her, perhaps some misplaced maternal instinct she’d been unaware she had.

ZEE HAD NEVER WANTED CHILDREN, a fact that Michael knew and didn’t seem worried about, but one that Mattei had found troublesome for a number of reasons.

“Why aren’t you worried?” Zee asked Michael just after he proposed.

“Because you’ll get over it,” he said, confident.

“You don’t think it’s possible that I might never want them?” She had been frustrated by his lack of concern. “I know you want to be a father.”

“When the time is right,” he said.

Zee doubted seriously if the time would ever be right. Though Michael refused to talk about it, she and Mattei spent the next four sessions discussing children. At the end of the month, Zee was confused but unchanged.

“What do you want instead?” Mattei had asked her.

“I want a life,” Zee said.

“What kind of life?” Mattei had asked.

Zee had once known exactly what kind of life she wanted. Now she drew a complete blank.

THEY DROVE AS FAR AS Hammond Castle before they turned back. Zee bought Finch a coffee ice cream in a cup at Captain Dusty’s on their way back through Manchester, and she drove out to the point where there was a clear view of Baker’s Island.

“We should sell that house,” Finch said, frowning.

“No,” she said too quickly, realizing only now that it was the one place that was really hers, though she hadn’t been there for years. It had been left first to Maureen and then to Zee with Finch as trustee. “It has some good memories,” she said. “Even for you.”

“I never set foot on that godforsaken island,” he said.

She knew better. But she also knew enough not to argue with a man who in her opinion was beginning to show signs of dementia. Finch’s temper had quickened. She had no idea what was going to set him off these days. If his quick and apparently permanent dismissal of Melville for some old grievance was any indication, Zee thought it better not to risk any such confrontation.

She realized suddenly that she had forgotten to give him his three-o’clock meds, then cursed herself for not giving them to him before the ice cream. She got some bottles of water from the ice-cream shop and went back for a paper cup when she realized that Finch could no longer coordinate the use of a straw.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said after a few minutes.

He was too stiff to navigate, so they parked in the handicapped spot, hoping not to get a ticket. Realizing he wasn’t going to make it alone, she steered him toward the ladies’ room. If he noticed, he didn’t say so.

The door to the stall didn’t lock, and she held it closed for him. Several women came in and out.

“Do you need help?” she asked Finch.

“No,” he said.

She stayed, leaning against the door for what seemed a long time. After several more minutes, she let the door open slightly and peered into the stall. Finch sat, pants around his ankles, looking as if he were about to cry. The diaper he’d been wearing was now half on, half off and hanging into the toilet.

Oh, God, she should have been helping him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she answered. She gathered up the soiled diaper and stuffed it into the box marked FEMININE HYGIENE. She wiped him clean and helped him pull up his pants. “We’ll get you a shower when we get home,” she said.

He nodded.

When they exited the stall, Zee noticed a grandmother standing at the row of sinks with her grandchild, watching while the girl washed her hands. Zee walked Finch to the sink next to them and helped him with the soap dispenser.

“There’s an old man in the ladies’ room,” the little girl said to her grandmother.

Finch’s face flushed.

The grandmother gave Zee an apologetic look.

“Men are supposed to use the men’s room,” the little girl said to him.

“Be quiet, now,” the grandmother said.

“But they are.”

“Hush,” the grandmother said, trying to distract the girl.

“But they are!”

Zee had never wanted to slap a child before, but she wanted to now.

Instead she took Finch’s arm and walked him outside. As she let him into the car, she was trying hard not to cry. Things were hard enough for her father without her falling apart.

FINCH FELL ASLEEP IN THE car on the way back to the house. He refused dinner, saying he just wanted to go to bed. She felt bad about doing it, because he said he was too cold, but she made him shower first, not washing him completely, just using the sprayer to wash his lower region. It was the first time she ever remembered seeing her father completely naked. His skin hung in folds, no fat on his frame, his muscles rapidly disappearing. He was wasting away.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she toweled him off.

They walked together to the bed. Zee tucked him in and kissed his cheek.

He smiled up at her. “‘Life is made up of marble and mud,’” he said, quoting Hawthorne.

“Sleep well,” she said.

THERE WERE NO MESSAGES FROM Michael. He hadn’t called her back. She knew he was angry with her, not only about the wedding planner but about the fact that she’d told him not to come. She guessed that she was being punished.

She opened another bottle of wine and drank more than half of it before she was finally calm enough to sleep.

ON MONDAY MORNING SHE CALLED one of the other psychologists and asked her to cover her patients. Then she called Mattei and left a message on her voice mail.

“Hi. It’s Zee. I’ve forgotten, maybe you’re at the clinic this morning. I wanted to talk to you live. I’m in Salem with my father. He’s not doing well. He and Melville broke up, which no one bothered to tell me, and, long story short, Finch was having some kind of reaction to his meds, a really bad reaction with full-on hallucinations.” She paused, realizing she was saying more than was necessary. “Call me when you can. I need to take some time off. I already asked Michelle Berman to cover my patients for the next week, or to cancel them, which she said she was fine with.” A long pause. “I need to stay. At least until I can sort out what’s going on here.” She struggled for more words. “Just call me, okay?”

At one o’clock Mattei called back.

“What’s going on, Zee?”

“Did you listen to my message?”

“I did. How’s Finch?”

“Not good,” she said, her eyes filling up again as she heard her words.

“I figured something was wrong. Otherwise you would have been here. Michael is not being his normal, social self.”

Only as Mattei spoke did Zee realize why Michael had been so angry when she spoke with him on Friday night. It wasn’t wedding planning that they had scheduled for last weekend. They had planned a long weekend in Chatham with friends of Michael’s and Mattei’s from medical school. Everyone was taking Monday off. It had been in the works for months.

Damn, she thought. “Is Michael there?” she asked too urgently.

“Rhonda and I are on our way back to the house. They’re all at the nineteenth hole.”

“Will you ask him to call me?”

“I will,” Mattei said. “We miss you.” She was temporarily distracted by another conversation. Zee tried to recognize the voice but couldn’t. “Listen, take as much time as you need with your father,” Mattei said. “Just keep me posted, okay?”

Zee hung up. She’d been angry at Michael for being angry at her, first about the wedding plans and then for not understanding her need to be here with her father. When he said they had weekend plans, she’d thought he meant more wedding planning. He had a right to be angry about that, or at least annoyed. But in light of what Finch was going through, it seemed rather cold. Now she understood. This weekend meant a lot to Michael. The fact that she had completely forgotten it was unforgivable.

She called his cell and left a message. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve been so confused by this whole thing, first Lilly and then Finch. I completely forgot about this weekend.”

WHEN MICHAEL DIDN’T CALL BACK, her mind started in on her. She thought about what a bad fiancée she was. So bad he’d actually had to ask her if she really wanted to get married. A question she had never answered as it turned out. After that thought churned for a while, she started to think about Lilly. Bad fiancée, bad shrink. Two for two. She should have seen Lilly’s suicide coming, but she hadn’t. She’d seen danger all right, but she hadn’t seen suicide. She hadn’t been able to predict it any more than she’d been able to predict Maureen’s. Let’s see: bad fiancée, bad shrink, bad daughter, the Triple Crown.

There were similarities here between Lilly and Maureen, things that went beyond the obvious diagnosis of bipolar disorder and the suicide. There was something else, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. The real similarity, of course, was a personal one, and one that Mattei had pointed out when she began to treat Lilly.

“Lilly Braedon isn’t Maureen Finch,” Mattei said.

“I know that,” Zee said.

“Yes, and I’m going to keep reminding you.”

As it turned out, Mattei should have reminded her more often. Not long into Lilly’s treatment, Zee began to see Maureen. In one of their sessions, Lilly had declared, “I should never have had children,” and Zee, without realizing, had nodded her agreement, something she had quickly covered. As time went on, Lilly became more and more important to Zee; it became increasingly important to help Lilly work out her relationship with her kids, important ultimately to save her. Still, when Zee should have seen the signs, she saw nothing. Even now, though she had seen the newscast and heard the eyewitness accounts, Zee was having trouble believing that Lilly’s death was suicide.

“Denial is a funny thing,” Mattei had said to her the next day.

“Not that funny, actually,” Zee answered.

THAT MAUREEN’S DEATH HAD BEEN a suicide was something Zee had never questioned. The image of Maureen’s last hour was so permanently etched in Zee’s memory that for years she had trouble seeing anything else about her mother except the brutal way she’d killed herself. It took five years of therapy as a teenager and another two with the famous Mattei for her to be able to see the more everyday images of Maureen and not just that last horrible day. Zee knew that the fact that these images were now merging with her images of Lilly was cause for concern. She knew it would take some serious therapy to untangle them, but she was not ready to begin the process. Not yet. She understood that at least part of the grief she was feeling at Lilly’s death was a delayed reaction, something she should have felt and didn’t when her mother died. When Maureen died, all Zee felt was disbelief.

That night, after Finch was asleep, Zee slipped the key out of his desk and unlocked the door to the room on the second floor, the room that had once been the master bedroom. After Finch had moved permanently downstairs, this had become her mother’s room. It was the room where Zee had heard most of Maureen’s stories. It was also the room where Maureen had died.

Zee didn’t linger. Instead she looked around to find what she’d come for, the half-finished story her mother had been working on for so long and had never been able to complete. As soon as she found it, she switched off the light and took the loose handwritten pages back downstairs, locking the door behind her. She didn’t put the key back in Finch’s desk but in the kitchen drawer, where she could access it more easily. Then she poured the rest of the bottle of last night’s wine into a glass, glanced out the kitchen window at the dark water of the harbor and the even darker and starless night sky. She closed the windows in the kitchen against the rain that was on the way, took a seat at the kitchen table, and began to read.

14

THE ONCE-BY MAUREEN AMPHITRITE DOHERTY FINCH

Once upon a time, Salem was a great world trading port. Hundreds of her ships sailed out of these waters, and there were thousands here who made their living from the sea. There were pepper millionaires and those whose ships made the far runs to China and Sumatra and other ports, trading the lowly New England cod, magically turning it into other treasures, first into molasses from the West Indies and later into such luxuries as French brandy, salt from Cádiz, Valencia oranges, and wine from Madeira.

Arlis Browne was an ambitious young seaman who had worked himself up the ladder in the whaling fleet of Nantucket. He had once been, if not exactly handsome, then clearly striking in a rough-and-tumble kind of way, and he had caught the eye of many a young girl in Nantucket. For the most part, the islanders did their best to keep their daughters away from him, for they could see that under his flashing white teeth lurked a sharper set of canines. But when Arlis Browne turned his gaze in the direction of a local merchant’s daughter, the man was so happy to have a suitor for his only child (who was not a beauty and had no other prospects) that he did not look closely at the seaman, and most certainly never checked his teeth.

The merchant died less than a year later, leaving his daughter and all his worldly goods to Arlis. A few months after that, the daughter died, some say under mysterious circumstances. Arlis sold the house and the shop and left Nantucket before any fingers could point in his direction. He had heard about Salem’s pepper millionaires, for many of the whalers were leaving the whaling fleet to make their fortunes on the wealthy merchant vessels that sailed from that famous port. With his newfound money, Arlis Browne intended to purchase his own ship and to turn his meager fortune into a grand one.

But Arlis Browne had no idea of the kind of riches he was to encounter in Salem. The merchant vessels were much larger and fancier than the ships he was accustomed to, and they were owned mostly by the old shipping families: the Crowninshields, the Derbys, and the Peabodys, or by the new partnerships and trading companies established by their heirs.

Salem’s was an aristocracy of wealth and power controlled by a handful of families for their own enrichment. So when Arlis Browne approached the shipowners with his meager offer of purchase, he was nearly laughed out of town, a slight that didn’t sit well with the prideful seaman and one he would not soon forget.

Having nowhere near the fortune needed to purchase a ship, Arlis Browne turned to the thing he knew second best: supplying the goods and services that sailors needed when they were in port.

Thus the disappointed seaman bought himself a decent if not grand house on Turner Street near one of the more than ninety wharfs that lined the bustling Salem waterfront. The house that Arlis Browne bought was not nearly as grand as the one he had sold in Nantucket, and its acquisition left him in a lower social position than the one he had abandoned, a fact that embittered him profoundly. Still, he was resourceful, and more determined than ever to succeed.

Through his harsh travels, Arlis Browne had lost some of the striking appearance that had heretofore attracted the ladies of Nantucket. In the more worldly port of Salem, his weathered face did not turn many heads. Nevertheless, he wasn’t discouraged. He knew well what he was entitled to, and he was determined to get it in any way he could. One day soon he would have power, and he would have money, and when he had enough of both, he would also have the prettiest girl in Salem as his own.

Arlis Browne hired a housekeeper, a Haitian woman, once a slave, who had been picked up in port by one of the Salem captains after her husband was freed from slavery by the British and then impressed into service in the British navy, leaving the woman alone and defenseless. She had become the captain’s mistress while on board ship, and when he grew tired of her, she was used by some of the crew as well, with the promise of release once she reached the city of Salem.

With his new housekeeper in charge, a woman who had developed the crusty, no-nonsense edge of the damaged survivor, Arlis Browne set about making money by renting rooms to sailors, providing beds and enough hard liquor that his Turner Street address became the most popular rooming house in all the port. Still ruthlessly opportunistic, he booked onto one of the ships owned by the very people who had laughed at his offer of purchase, embarking on journeys that often lasted more than a year. Coming back to port only long enough to bank his money and return to sea. Over time, he amassed a considerable fortune.

Arlis Browne’s fifth trip as first mate was a long and difficult voyage, first to Sumatra, then on to Java. When the ship arrived in Salem once again, the captain was gone and First Mate Arlis Browne had taken over the ship. No one ever knew what happened to the captain. There had been a brief inquiry into the matter, but the fact was that the ship came back with such enormous bounty, its best haul in history, that its owner quickly let his ledger sheet override his suspicions. And since jobs on a merchant ship were lucrative and hard to come by, sailors were unlikely to stick their necks out as witnesses, least of all for a dead man. With no one coming forward, the inquiry was brought to a swift close, the missing captain listed as lost at sea. The very next day, the ship’s owner hired Arlis Browne permanently as his new captain.

Having secured the position as captain, Arlis turned his attention from commerce to courtship. And just as he had in business, Arlis Browne schemed, plotted, and eventually succeeded.

Her name was Zylphia. She was a girl he’d met in town, not higher in station than he-he had learned his lesson about that-but achingly beautiful, with titian hair that sparkled red in the sunlight. She was so beautiful that her father had received many offers of marriage for the girl but had held off, hoping to snare one of the merchant-ship owners and thus secure his own fortune. But he’d been waiting for quite a while, and all the merchant owners who would pay for such a beauty were already married off to the daughters of the other prominent shipping families. And so when the offer came from Captain Browne, Zylphia’s father accepted it gladly. She was nearly nineteen, with no other prospects in sight. This was the best that could be done. No dowry needed to be offered-in fact, the reverse was true. Her beauty commanded a price in itself, the securing of the father’s future and enough money for him to retire.

Upon the announcement of his betrothal, the captain quickly kicked the sailors out of his rooming house, keeping only the housekeeper, who had become his eyes and ears in town. Then he set about renovating the house to make it suitable for his new bride. He even added a widow’s walk to the very top of the roof, so that Zylphia could search for his ship on the horizon as she waited patiently and longingly for his return.

After the wedding Zylphia’s father took his payment and moved inland, to more country parts, where he could live for a long time on his small fortune. His daughter never saw him again.

Zylphia was not a happy bride. She had loved her father and believed with all her heart that he loved her, too. But never for one moment had she loved the captain, whose canines she saw immediately, though it was clear to everyone how taken he was with her. He didn’t want her out of his sight, not for a minute, and when he was on land, she was required to be at his side at all times. He brought her wonderful luxuries from his travels: an ivory fan from Shanghai, silks from Calicut, and sugar from the Caribbean.

Everyone in Salem loved Zylphia. The towns people were always happier in her presence, the way people are often happier in the reflected light of great beauty. Simply to gaze upon her lifted one’s spirits. And gaze upon her they did. But they were careful never to speak to her. The captain required that when his wife speak at all, she speak only to him.

Arlis Browne sorely wanted Zylphia with him when he sailed, but it was well known that it was bad luck to have a woman on board, bad luck for many reasons, not the least of which was the large number of men. And he knew that he did not have the complete loyalty of his crew.

For his part, Arlis Browne had begun to resent the voyages. He was becoming a rich man now and still wanted to own a ship of his own. Yet any time spent away from his young wife filled him with jealousy and fear. What does she do in the long days when I am away? he wondered.

Every time he set out to sea, Arlis Browne gave strict instructions to the housekeeper to accompany his bride everywhere she went or, better yet, to see to her every need and make sure she went nowhere at all.

And so the girl became a prisoner in her own home. Night and day she could be seen on the widow’s walk. Everyone talked about it, assuming that she was gazing out to sea, looking for her husband. What a great love they have! everyone said. What a wonderful thing to have such longing for your husband!

But, alas, it wasn’t love at all. It was a terrifying panic. She knew she was trapped. The more she watched for his ship on the horizon, the more frightened she became.

Then one night a young sailor happened by. He had been at sea on the East Indiaman Friendship, which had just docked and was undergoing repairs. The sailor had not been back in the port of Salem for a few years but had stayed at the captain’s rooming house once before and, not having heard of the change, went back there to seek lodging. He knocked on the door, but there was no answer, for the housekeeper, having nothing much better to do, had recently taken to the drink and had as a result become a very heavy sleeper.

Frustrated by the lack of response from within, the young sailor pounded harder on the door. When finally he awakened the housekeeper, she was angry. She yelled at him to go away and leave her in peace. The sailor quickly apologized for the disturbance and went to sleep in the gardens of the gabled house across the street. He intended to awaken at first light and be gone before anyone was the wiser. He soon fell into an exhausted sleep.

But the moonlight was bright, and the sailor was awakened by its luminous glow. As he looked heaven-ward, he saw a vision, a beautiful girl on the neighboring widow’s walk. He told himself that this was surely a dream, for he had never before seen such beauty. Then, just as he was dismissing the vision as impossible, Zylphia turned to face him. Their eyes met. There was such a look of sadness on her face, and such longing, that he found himself weeping, though he hadn’t wept since he was a small child.

The sailor came back the next night, and the next, and every night she appeared to him, and every night she looked at him with the same longing. After many nights he realized that her sadness had vanished and that only the longing remained. And from the way her eyes gazed into his, he understood that the longing she felt was for him.

He realized then what he had to do. He had no fear of heights as some of the men did. In a storm he would be the first to climb the rigging and unfasten the sails. He was first in the crow’s nest to search for foreign land. And so he easily climbed to the lady who longed for him, making his way carefully up the side of the old house, using only the wisteria and ivy vines as foothold. When he reached the widow’s walk, she took his hand. He knew her immediately. He felt as if he had always known her.

They made love on the widow’s walk under the moon and the stars. He thought they would die in each other’s arms. Such perfection could happen only once in life, and he found himself wishing not to live past this moment. He wished with all his heart for a chill winter wind to blow from the east and freeze them together forever in place.

But the winds were those of summer, and not winds at all but gentle breezes. And every night, after the housekeeper had drunk herself to stupor, the young lovers met on the widow’s walk. He knew that he was risking his life for her. He knew he was risking hers as well, for surely one night they would be caught or at least spotted high up above the world by some passing ship or even by a neighboring family who happened by.

He had known with their first kiss that this was to be no happily-ever-after tale. He could taste the bitter with the sweet. But even as he knew their fate, he was powerless not to play his part. He could do nothing else.

When the captain returned from sea, he was quick to hear the stories. He had his spies everywhere, and there are always people who love to be the first to tell a person bad news. The town gossips never thought about the consequences, as gossips never do. If they had known that he would take his revenge on Zylphia, whom they loved deeply, they might not have been so impulsive in their tale telling. They might have stuffed stones into their mouths to keep from speaking, or sewn their lips shut with flaxen thread. But, alas, it was too late. The dreadful damage was done.

He immediately dismissed the housekeeper, calling her a useless drunkard and casting her into the street. Then he went upstairs to take vengeance on his betraying wife.

Yet when he saw her beauty, he could not bring himself to hurt her. Instead he fell down on his knees and begged her to love him. But she could not, and her innocent eyes were too unwily to hide what it would have been in her best interest to disguise. Enraged by her refusal, he chained her to the wall of the bedroom below the widow’s walk, and there he sat with her, brooding and scheming.

Evening came and went. And then another.

Each night the sailor climbed to the widow’s walk, and each night Zylphia was not there. With no food or water, she failed to thrive. And as she grew weaker, the captain, who was fueled best by jealousy and bile, grew stronger.

On the third day, the sailor did not return. He began to doubt that she had ever loved him. He began to doubt that true love existed at all. And his mind began to play tricks on him. Who was he to think he deserved such love? She was the wife of a captain-how could she love him?

“You see?” the captain said to her when the sailor did not appear again. “He does not love you enough. He does not love you as I do.”

The captain grabbed an ax and began to chop the widow’s walk from the house. When he was finished and his anger exhausted, he unlocked the chains and kissed the cuts and bruises on her wrists while he cried with despair at what he knew would leave scars and spoil her perfection. “Tell me you love me,” he said to her as he carried her to the bed. “Tell me you love me and I will forgive you all.”

But the girl could not. She could not lie.

Now bad times were coming to Salem. The British had placed a trade embargo on all American ships, hoping to stop their lucrative trade with France, with whom Britain was at war. Since Salem’s profound wealth was almost completely dependent on trade with foreign ports, the city had been severely damaged by the embargo, and the only ships sailing out of port these days were the newly commissioned privateers, which the British ships stood waiting just off the Atlantic coast to intercept.

Like so many others, the captain’s ship was at the wharf, with no sail date on the calendar. And though he did not want to leave his wife again, he had begun to hatch a plan that would end his troubles. But the plan involved going to sea. So when he was approached by Leander Cobb about a new venture, he was more than eager to hear the man’s proposition.

The Maleous was an old slave-trading ship that was as evil-looking as its name implied. After five years in dry dock, the ship still held the stench of death and decay.

Though there had been slave traders in Salem as in Boston, the Salem ships had long ago given up the practice. Most of the old slave ships had been destroyed, some set afire and cheered as they burned, but the Maleous was different. It was a huge vessel, and there had been plans to convert it to a merchant vessel, but that had never been done, many considering it cursed. For years it had sat empty and neglected at the far end of Cobb’s Wharf.

Old Leander Cobb was a practical man, who owned many ships. Not wanting to risk his other vessels in such dangerous times, he had begun to have the Maleous restored, removing the rough wooden sleeping decks where slaves had been forced to lie on their sides so that they occupied less than three square feet of space as cargo.

Aided by the embargo, which had stolen the livelihood of many a sailor, Cobb was fairly certain he could muster a crew for the Maleous, cursed or not. But there was only one captain whom he would consider for the job, and only one likely to take it. Cobb knew that Arlis Browne would come at a price. And with all trade suspended and his fortunes dwindling, Leander Cobb was more than willing to pay that price.

Cobb offered Browne more shares of the ship than he had ever earned as a captain, an amount large enough to ensure him voting rights with the promise that he could purchase the Maleous as soon as the embargo was lifted and Cobb was able to go back to sailing his full fleet. Arlis Browne would finally get his ship. Browne easily agreed. It not only fit his lofty idea of himself as a ship’s owner, but it suited the new and more devious plan that he had hatched for the young sailor who’d stolen the heart of Zylphia.

Cobb had been right-the captain had little trouble getting his crew back together. Most of the sailors had already spent all or most of the money they’d earned during their last voyage. Broke and debauched, the men were eager to go back to sea and had scant prospect of sailing if not with Captain Browne.

Hard times engendered more loyalty to their captain than was previously seen, and so when Browne asked their help with the young sailor, no one was able to refuse his request, its being a condition of their new employment on the Maleous, one of the only ships likely to sail from Salem anytime soon.

What the captain was asking was not unheard of. He was not asking for murder or even revenge on the young sailor. All he asked was that his crew get the sailor drunk and press him into service on the Maleous in much the same way that the British navy was pressing sailors into service on their ships every day.

It was not difficult to get the young sailor drunk. He’d been drinking every night in an effort to forget his true love, whom he now believed to be deceitful and false. A simple lie did the rest of the trick. The crew of the Maleous told the young sailor that they were taking him back to the Friendship, which had been repaired and was preparing to sail. It was in fact just what the sailor had been praying for. He went along easily and far too drunk to notice, on that starless night, that it was the Maleous they were boarding and not the Friendship.

Early the next day, with the seaman still asleep, the Maleous sailed out of Salem Harbor. Zylphia was left on her own, with no housekeeper. Of course the captain was also gone, and for now that was enough. Propelled by love, she searched ceaselessly for the sailor, but to no avail. Those who knew the truth of what had happened were too afraid of Arlis Browne to tell her the story. They looked away. Someone who’d seen the seaman that last night said he had sailed on the Friendship, but the Friendship had not yet sailed, and the seaman was not on board. She began to despair.

True love speaks from the heart, so the town could not stay mute forever. A sailor who took pity on the lovers told her what he’d heard, that the captain had taken her lover on board the Maleous and that the young seaman was not likely to return alive.

Zylphia screamed in horror. She sobbed. She begged God to save her sailor, she begged the towns-people to do something, anything-but what could they do? The ship was on the high seas, en route to Sumatra and Madagascar, and would not return for over a year. She should go on with her life, they advised her. She should go home and live the life of a captain’s wife, as was fitting to her station. She should forget her seaman and the notion of true love. There was nothing to be done but that.

With no other choice, the girl went back to the captain’s house. When she was there, she grew strong again and waited for her sailor to return. For she never lost her faith in true love, and she knew, somewhere deep inside, that he was still alive. She would know if he wasn’t. The world would stop if he was no longer part of it, she was certain of that.

One day Zylphia saw a beggar on the wharf. She recognized the brown skin, the familiar hunch of shoulder. It was the housekeeper. Though she had once known the woman as her captor, Zylphia was kind, with a forgiving heart. She knew well what a woman alone was sometimes forced to do. She took the beggar back to her house, for the former servant was as alone in the world as she was, with nothing and no one to save her. The housekeeper who had been cast out was welcomed back to the house on Turner Street. Zylphia nursed her back to health.

Together they opened a cent shop and sold goods through the window to the towns people. The housekeeper instructed Zylphia in the ways of the islands. Long ago, back in her native land, she had been a practitioner of the healing arts. She taught Zylphia to formulate poultices using bread, milk, and herbs. They brewed cough syrup by boiling bark and bethroot. In the year they had spent together, the old woman and the captain’s wife became not just friends but sisters. The towns people came to the shop for medicines, for cures for everything from boils to pneumonia. Zylphia learned that a poison used to kill the huge rats that came off the ships could also be used in minute amounts to cure respiratory ailments.

And when the mast of the Maleous was one day sighted on the far horizon, Zylphia knew what she must do. She paid the housekeeper all the money she had in her accounts and said a tearful good-bye to the woman with whom she had grown so close. Then she waited for the ship to reach the wharf.

But the Maleous did not head directly into the harbor. Instead she stopped, as ships did in those days, on the Miseries to drop off her sick sailors, for there had been an outbreak of yellow fever and many of the crew were ill and dying of it. Falsely fearing contagion, the port of Salem would not allow the ship and its bounty to unload at the wharves with sick sailors on board. So Captain Browne discharged the ship’s ill and dying on the Miseries, neighboring islands aptly named for the sailors who were left to die within sight of the homes they were struggling desperately to reach.

Now, try as he might, the captain had not been able to kill his wife’s young lover in the long year they had been at sea.

With each day he feared their return to Salem and the loss of his young wife, whom he had begun to dream of feverishly every night as they got closer and closer to home. He began to pray that the sailor would die before they reached Salem. And as even our darkest prayers are sometimes answered, the unfortunate sailor contracted yellow fever. And so the captain left him on the Miseries, to die with the others before the waning of the moon.

The captain returned to port, and his wife was waiting on the wharf as the ship landed. His heart leaped at the sight of her. Was it possible? Did she finally love him? But it wasn’t to be. When she looked at him, her eyes held nothing but hate. Her gaze moved beyond him, scanning the crowd for her true love. His rage was murderous, and he shouted aloud without any thought to listening ears. “An entire year gone and not even a tender look for me?”

And though it would have been in her best interest to do so, she could not feign even the slightest warmth for the man who had taken her true love from her. She could not lie.

During his long months at sea, the captain had almost been able to convince himself that she would love him one day, but now he feared it would never be.

He rushed toward her, grabbing her roughly by the arm and pulling her down the street. “Your lover is dead,” he told her coldly. “He died of the yellow fever, crying out in pain and suffering. And he never cried your name, but the name of the South Sea maiden he got the fever from.”

“You killed him,” she said, not believing his story about the maiden but desperately fearing that her true love might be dead.

“Don’t you hear me, girl?” he said, digging his fingers into her arm. “I told you he was dead. Infected, as all men are, by a faithless woman.” Then he dragged her back to the house while the towns people watched in horror.

He beat her until she cried out. But without her sailor, Zylphia had no will to live. She did not try to stop him. When he finally struck her with his closed fist, she fell to the floor, motionless and mute.

For the first time, the captain feared he might lose her, not to the sailor but to death. He cradled her in his arms, begging her to come back to him and vowing to nurse her back to health.

He carried her downstairs, to a room with cooler air and a view of the ocean. In the days to come, he cooked for her. But she would not eat. He bought fresh fruit and sugar, which he knew she had loved, but still she would take nothing. On the third day, the housekeeper appeared at the door, with a pig roast and apples and some soup made of mutton and celery.

“It is no use,” the captain said. “She is beyond nourishment and will take no food.”

“Let me see her,” the old woman suggested. “For it is her choice to live or to die.”

Desperate for her help, and knowing about the Haitian woman’s healing powers, the captain let the old woman into Zylphia’s sickroom.

“Leave us,” she said, and the captain obliged.

The old woman sat on the edge of the bed. “Your true love lives,” she whispered, and at those words Zylphia opened her eyes.

The captain was so grateful to the housekeeper that he offered to take her back with full wages, but she refused, saying she would stay only long enough to prepare their meal. When the food was ready and the table set, she returned to Zylphia and whispered softly in her true friend’s ear, “Make your peace now with your husband. Eat your evening meal at his table. Take what nourishment you can, for you will need your strength. But do not drink the porter. Not one drop.”

The housekeeper helped Zylphia to the table. Then she left the house.

The captain was so happy to see his wife alive that he ate a hearty meal and then drank heavily of the porter, filling himself with ideas of what he would buy his wife now that she had chosen to live.

When the convulsions began, his arms standing straight out by his sides, she sat wide-eyed and disbelieving. His head arched back until it almost touched the floor behind him. She stared as his body stiffened, then collapsed. She had no strength to move.

By the second round of convulsions, the housekeeper was at the door carrying clothes needed for travel and medicine to heal the sailor of his fever. “Come quickly,” she said.

Released from her nightmare, Zylphia followed the housekeeper out the door and down to the stolen dory. “Your true love is alive on the Miseries,” the housekeeper said. “Hurry on now, and do not look back.”

Zylphia, weak only moments before, now found the strength it took to row.

As she left the mouth of the harbor, she passed the Friendship, just hoisting sail and making ready to head out to sea. She passed one of the smaller fishing boats coming into port. She looked at neither but kept her eyes focused straight ahead, never taking them off the island where her true love waited…

15

MAUREEN’S MANUSCRIPT OF “THE ONCE” had never been completed. Though she wrote dozens of drafts with varied endings, she had never been able to finish the fairy tale. Maureen had re-created the legend as far as historical documentation would allow, but she had no idea where to go from there.

What she did know about the story was that the chief clerk at Derby Wharf had reported the missing dory to the Salem authorities. It was found days later and returned by a ship heading into port after dropping off sick sailors on the Miseries. Its thole pins (or oarlocks) were worn down and ruined from the long row. No sign of either Zylphia Browne or her young lover was ever seen again.

Maureen’s own belief in The Great Love would dictate a happy ending, but she could not seem to find the happily-ever-after for the fairy tale she was writing. The reason was simple. Partway into the story, Maureen had decided that the only suitable escape for the star-crossed lovers was aboard the Friendship, not the re-creation of the tall ship that sat at Derby Wharf these days, the one the tourists lined up to see, but the ship that had sailed out of Salem during the early 1800s.

Maureen had done significant research and had discovered that the young sailor of her story had originally been part of the Friendship’s crew. But the problem was that, on the very voyage in which the Friendship might have been instrumental in carrying the star-crossed lovers to their happily-ever-after, the ship was captured by the British in the recently declared War of 1812. There was certainly no record of the young woman, who would most probably have tried to disguise herself as a man or, barring that, as a cabin boy, in order to safely make this voyage with a predominantly male crew. A woman’s passage as anything but a captain’s wife was not only considered unlucky but dangerous for her as well. Yet when Maureen searched the records of the Friendship, she was unable to find any mention of either the young man who had sailed earlier aboard the ship or, had he decided to travel under a different identity, of any new names on the ship’s register.

That the young woman, Zylphia Browne, had escaped her home and her abusive husband was a matter of public record. Whether or not she had poisoned her husband was speculation. The captain, who was known for his brutality, had many enemies. It was well documented that he had been poisoned with a substance that was most likely brought back on one of his own ships and that his death was as painful as the beatings he’d been known to inflict not only on his crew but on his servants and his wife.

Even Maureen had to admit that there’d been little real evidence about Zylphia Browne’s escape. There was some documentation by an eyewitness who had seen someone rowing the stolen dory in the direction of the Miseries. The witness knew it to be Zylphia, he said, only by the red hair that escaped from under the brim of a boy’s cap. The dory was later discovered on the Miseries, oarlocks worn down to bare wood. But no sign of the young lovers was ever found.

Maureen never questioned the idea that the lovers escaped. Her belief in The Great Love would allow for no other possibility. But try as she might, she could never find the happily-ever-after ending that she so needed to complete the story. Though most of her stories were fictional, and though her original intention was to create the happily-ever-after, she found herself obsessed by her search for the truth. In the writing of the story, she had developed a strong bond with Zylphia Browne. She knew the woman well, she said. She told Zee that it almost felt as if she were walking around in Zylphia’s skin.

Zee had known for a while that her mother had begun to believe that the story was her own. And so when Maureen announced one day that she was certain she’d been Zylphia Browne in a prior lifetime, Zee wasn’t as alarmed as she should have been.

Looking back on a tragedy, there is often a moment one can point to when everything changes and begins to move more quickly toward its inevitable climax. As Zee looked back, she realized that the moment for Maureen had been the day she began to talk about reincarnation. For while she had initially believed that Maureen was talking about who she had convinced herself she’d been in her last life, Zee realized only later that she was also talking about who she was most certain to become in her next.

“People reincarnate in groups,” she told Zee in those last days. “So do not despair, for we will most certainly see each other again in another place and time.”

16

ON TUESDAY MORNING THE occupational therapist showed up. Jessina was there, hand-feeding Finch. Oatmeal spilled down the front of his shirt.

“Can’t he feed himself?” the OT asked.

“He can,” Jessina said.

“Then he should be doing it.”

“He likes it when I feed him this way, don’t you, Papi?”

Finch managed a weak smile.

The OT addressed Finch directly. “It’s important that you do this yourself. You have to keep up your skills.”

She walked through the house taking notes, more like a Realtor than a medical professional. She pointed out two more spots in the bathroom that needed grab bars, one more in the shower next to the one that Melville had put in earlier and another one next to the toilet. “You should raise the seat in here,” she said. “Try Hutchinson’s on Highland Ave.” She also suggested a hospital bed. “They can be rented,” she said. “His insurance will probably cover it.” Zee followed her back to the hall. “You’ll need a railing in this hallway,” she said. She looked at the tilt of the floor, the slope of old pine.

“Do you know of anybody who can install one?” Zee asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t. But a local carpenter can probably do it for you.

“And get rid of these newspapers,” she said. “Falls are inevitable with Parkinson’s, but this is an accident waiting to happen.”

The OT wrote out her report, leaving a copy for Zee. She said good-bye to Finch, who ignored her. Zee walked her down the long hallway to the front door.

“He really should be in a nursing home,” the OT said.

It shocked Zee to hear it. “I was thinking maybe assisted living of some sort.” There was a nice place in Back Bay not far at all from where she lived. But even that was only in case of emergency, meaning if Melville didn’t come back and she couldn’t figure out anything else.

“He wouldn’t qualify for assisted living,” the OT said matter-of-factly. “He’s incontinent, and he needs to have his meds administered. A few years ago, maybe, but not now.”

Zee barely heard the rest of the instructions. All she wanted was for the OT to leave.

“Make sure he showers every day. And gets dressed. I forgot to ask you about skin breakdown.”

“I haven’t noticed any,” Zee said.

“Pay attention to his skin,” she said. “There’s always a danger of skin breakdown with incontinence. And skin breakdown can kill them. That and falls.” She gestured toward the newspapers again.

“I’ll take care of those,” Zee said.

SHE WORKED ALL AFTERNOON ON the piles of papers. When Jessina was making dinner, Zee decided to walk down to the wharf to pick up some more recycling bags.

“Can you stay a little longer tonight?”

“Sure,” Jessina answered. “What else do I have to do?”

“I can’t tell if you’re serious or if you’re being sarcastic,” Zee said.

“I am never sarcastic,” Jessina said.

“Again,” Zee said, “I can’t tell.”

Jessina laughed. “Go. Take your time. I can give him his pills and get him to bed if you like.”

Technically, Jessina wasn’t supposed to give Finch his pills. But with her nurse’s training, she was certainly capable. Zee left the seven-o’clock dose on the table.

“Thanks,” she said, then added, “don’t let him have milk with them.”

ZEE WALKED DOWN DERBY STREET toward the wharf. This was a street of American firsts: first candy shop, first brick house. The street was named after America’s first millionaire, Elias Hasket Derby, a man known locally as “King Derby,” who had been made famous by the lucrative shipping trade that came into this port. Zee remembered her Uncle Mickey telling her something about the first elephant in America as well. It had come in on one of the Salem ships. For some reason she thought the elephant had a drinking problem and laughed to herself, dismissing the thought as a trick of memory. But then she remembered the story. Running low on water, the crew had fed porter to the elephant. By the time the ship arrived in Salem, the elephant had developed a strong taste for the stuff. That much of the story was true. Uncle Mickey’s embellished version included 1800s AA meetings and elephant detox.

She thought about Mickey and decided to stop by. There was no love lost between Mickey and Finch, not since Maureen had died and Melville had come into Finch’s life. But Zee hadn’t yet said hello to her uncle. She knew she should tell him what was going on, and she figured he might know someone who could install the rails and grab bars Finch needed. If anyone was connected in the city of Salem, it was Mickey Doherty.

Zee ducked into Ye Olde Pepper Companie to buy Finch some Gibralters. The Salem confection was the first commercial candy in America and might have been responsible for some of the success of the Salem ships, which stocked the candy as ballast on their outbound voyages. They were hard candies with a shelf life longer than the life span of any human, and it is said that the captains bribed the customs officials in the far ports with Gibralters to get more favorable trading rights. “The original strangers with candy,” is what Finch called the Salem ships.

Finch loved Gibralters, and he loved Black Jacks as well, so she bought both for him. She helped herself to one of the Black Jacks, smelling the sweet molasses as she opened the bag.

She walked past the Custom House with its gold roof, where Nathaniel Hawthorne had worked his day job before his writing made him famous. Then she crossed the street to Derby and Pickering wharves.

There were only a few wharves left in Salem now. In the shipping days, there had been almost a hundred, along with all the businesses that went along with the shipping trade: coopers, boatwrights, stables with wagons for transportation, and shipyards.

In those days there were many rivers that emptied into the sea here. New Derby Street, where it connected to Lafayette and Salem’s Route 114, would have been mostly underwater, with the North River running down the other side of town. It was possible back then to get around Salem almost completely by boat. Even the Point, where Jessina and many of the Dominican and Haitian population lived now, had once been bordered on three sides by water. The street noise from the wharves and the resulting trade eventually became loud enough to send the shipping millionaires uptown, either to the Common or to Chestnut Street, depending on their politics.

Now there were only a few of the old wharves left down here-Derby Wharf, where the Friendship was docked, and Pickering, where Mickey’s store and Ann Chase’s witch shop were.

These days Derby Street was an endless array of tourist traps. Costumed pirates and monsters handed out flyers for haunted houses and wax-museum tours. Though the main attraction was still the witches, any unrelated but marginally frightening side business was fair game. The real witches, who didn’t exist at all in Salem back in 1692, thrived here in great numbers now.

A number of shops and tours belonged to Uncle Mickey, whom the locals referred to as the “Pirate King.” Mickey had seen the tide turning in Salem way back in the seventies and was entrepreneurial enough to take great advantage of it. For the most part, the witches kept a lower profile, selling their wares for cash but practicing their religion quietly, as if they were never quite certain that their new elevated status would last in a city that sported images of witches riding broomsticks on the doors of their police cars while at the same time it launched a campaign to “Ditch the Witch” in favor of Salem’s less famous but in many’s opinion more significant maritime history.

But for now that campaign had not taken hold, nor had the ordinance that someone had proposed to limit the number of haunted houses per city block, a proposal that Mickey had vehemently opposed, owning so many of them himself.

Zee started her search for Mickey in one of his many haunted houses. Summer hires from Salem State College worked the counter as they munched on Wendy’s takeout. Their fake scars looked disturbingly real alongside their piercings and tattoos from the Purple Scorpion down the street. Screams echoed from behind the hanging curtain, followed by demonic laughter that Zee recognized as Mickey’s recorded voice. Cackling and trying to frighten one another, a group of tourists exited through the gift shop.

“Oh, my good God, what was that!” A woman in her sixties giggled nervously and tried to catch her breath.

A man with a crying child was less impressed. “That is extremely frightening,” the man said. The kid, who wouldn’t let go of his father’s hand, seemed equally frightened by the teenagers behind the counter. “You ought to have an age limit. Post a sign or something,” the father said. As he stepped down into the brighter lobby, the kid tripped, the father dangling him by the arm until he righted himself.

“Wimps,” the tattooed girl said under her breath.

“It says right on the door.” A kid sporting a Frankenstein half-head extension with bolts glued to his neck pointed to a sign: THE SCARIEST HAUNTED HOUSE IN SALEM. Frankenstein reached for one of the girl’s french fries, and she slapped his hand.

“Is Mickey here?” Zee asked. She didn’t know any of these kids. Mickey had a new crop every summer.

“He’s at the other store,” Frankenstein said.

“No he isn’t. He said he was going to the Friendship,” the girl said.

“One or the other,” Frankenstein said.

Zee thanked them and exited as a large group of tourists crowded through the door. They all wore red T-shirts saying DON’T MAKE ME CALL MY FLYING MONKEYS! Zee navigated her way through the crowd, crossing the street in front of their silver tour bus, heading for Pickering Wharf.

She could see the masts of the Friendship in the distance, but she figured she’d stop at Mickey’s shop first. Then she saw her Auntie Ann.

Ann Chase stood in the doorway of her store, the Shop of Shadows. Its name was a reference to the Book of Shadows, a well-known journal used by real witches to record spells, rituals, and philosophy, plus recipes for herbal potions and teas. Ann was in costume today, her black robes rustling in the early-evening breeze. “Hello, Hepzibah,” she called when she spotted Zee. “I heard you were home.”

“Hi, Auntie.” Zee smiled and walked over. Ann was not Zee’s real aunt, but she’d been Maureen’s best friend. Zee had called her Auntie for as long as she could remember.

They hugged each other.

“So great to see you,” Ann said, looking at her. “It’s been a while.”

Zee thought back. It had been over a year. When she came home to visit, she always stopped by the shop to see Ann, but the last time she’d been here, Ann’s shop had been closed, and there was a sign on it saying that Ann had flown south for the winter along with the other snowbirds.

“How was Florida?” Zee asked.

“Warmer than here,” Ann answered, laughing. Then, more seriously, she asked, “How’s Finch doing?”

“Not great.”

“I heard he broke up with Melville.”

“Word travels fast,” Zee said. Salem was more small city than small town, but people still had a way of knowing one another’s business. “Does Mickey know?” Zee asked.

“He’s the one who told me.”

On some level Mickey would be glad. It was no secret that Mickey blamed Melville for his sister’s death. Though Ann had loved Maureen, she held no such grudges. Everyone who knew Zee’s mother well also knew how sick she was. Mickey had always been in denial about her illness, and finding someone to blame was easier for him than looking at the whole truth.

Zee believed that her Uncle Mickey had always been in love with Ann Chase. For Ann’s part, she seemed uninterested and barely tolerated his constant flirting. Every once in a while, she would get annoyed, especially when his rival but bogus witch shop advertised something that she found personally offensive, like the time his aura machine broke and he made coupons sending a bus full of tourists from Cleveland over to Ann’s shop advertising that Ann Chase, one of Salem’s most famous witches, would tell their fortunes by reading the bumps on their heads for half her normal price.

“Group rates!” he said when she yelled at him. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about-I sent you forty-five brand-new customers.”

Mostly, though, Ann and Mickey got along well. To their credit, most of the witch and horror shops in Salem got along. The only exception had been a recent issue about a psychic street fair that came to Salem every October. Almost everyone agreed it was a good thing, but some of the witches, particularly those who paid rent all year long down on Essex Street, where the fair was held, resented the itinerant psychics who came in to make a quick buck during the peak tourist season, then left town. The witches said they were afraid some of the traveling psychics might bilk tourists out of too much money or give them bad advice, thereby sullying the reputation of the year-round fortune-telling community.

For this reason the town had recently begun to require all practicing psychics to be licensed if they wanted to tell fortunes in Salem. Though Zee had wondered exactly how one goes about licensing a psychic (Salem, in the end, had adopted San Francisco’s policies, which included a fee of twenty-five to fifty dollars and a record of permanent address along with a valid Social Security number), she nevertheless thought it was a good idea. She remembered a horrible incident that she and her mother had had with a psychic named Arcana not long before Maureen committed suicide.

AS SHE WAS WRITING “THE ONCE,” Maureen had become convinced that she was not only the writer of one of the great love stories in history but that she was its heroine as well. She began to believe she was the reincarnation of its main character, Zylphia Browne. So absorbed was she in the story that she’d started searching for someone who could confirm her belief.

First Maureen went to her friend Ann, asking for a past-life reading. But Ann, whose New Age belief systems had only recently led her to Wicca and not yet to reincarnation, said she didn’t do such things. The only things Ann read in those days were the bumps on your head and a few astrological charts, and even those were a recent addition to her repertoire of New Age razzle-dazzle.

“Why do you want a reading?” Ann asked. She had of late begun to worry about Maureen, whose behavior had been growing more and more erratic in recent months, causing her to neglect both her home and her child in favor of this fairy tale she couldn’t finish. Though it was based on a true story, like many true stories it was left uncompleted, and Maureen had taken it upon herself to supply the happily-ever-after ending the story needed. But she’d been agonizing over the tale for several years, and it had become Ann’s opinion that not only was Maureen never going to finish the story but that in all probability the story might just finish Maureen.

“I think I was Zylphia,” she told Ann one day when they were at the shop. Zee had been busy flipping through the pages of the book entitled 100 Easy Spells for the Young Witch.

“Excuse me?” Ann said.

“I think I was the main character in my story,” Maureen said. “In another life, I mean.”

At this point Zee looked up. Her eyes met Ann’s.

“What makes you think that?” Ann asked as calmly as she could.

“Don’t patronize me,” Maureen said.

“I’m not.”

“And don’t be careful with me either. I hate it when people are careful with me.”

“I’m not being careful with you. I just asked you where you got this rather unusual idea,” Ann said.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Maureen said. “I live in her house, I have the same bad marriage.”

“Not exactly the same, I hope.” The husband in the story had beaten and tortured his wife and essentially held her prisoner.

“You know what I mean,” Maureen said.

Zee was pretending to be absorbed in her book. But they both knew she was listening, so they lowered their voices, which only made the girl listen more intently.

“It isn’t just that I live in her house, it’s everything else,” Maureen said. “I dream about her all the time. I know the torture her husband put her through. I even know how she killed him, or how the housekeeper did.”

Maureen had spent the better part of last summer trying to figure out how Arlis Browne died. It was murder, no doubt, but historic records were sketchy about who had poisoned him. Maureen had determined (for the sake of her story) that it was the Haitian housekeeper and not Zylphia who had administered the poison. Though she was determined to stick to the facts in her storytelling, she needed a sympathetic heroine, she said.

“Strychnine,” Maureen said.

“They didn’t have strychnine in the early 1800s,” Ann said. “It wasn’t even introduced until the 1840s.”

“Yes, but they had the nux vomica plant, which is where strychnine comes from.” Maureen smiled at her discovery. “It grows in India or Southeast Asia, and it is quite possible that it could have come in on one of the Salem ships.”

Zee had put down her book and was now clearly listening to the conversation.

“You can buy the stuff at a garage sale,” Maureen said. “Do you know they used it as late as the sixties in small amounts as a medicine? This incredibly toxic substance, and they were feeding it to us.”

Ann wanted to say that they were still using it, that you could walk into the homeopathic section of any health food store and find nux vomica, which was still widely used, though the amounts were minute. But she decided against telling Maureen.

“Let’s change the subject,” she said, indicating Zee’s interest. Not only did Ann not want to talk about such subjects in front of a twelve-year-old, but she hesitated to talk with Maureen about such things at all. The previous year Maureen had taken Ann’s advanced herbal class for the sole purpose of learning how to poison someone, which hadn’t helped either the class or Ann’s reputation in Salem. Ann was studying to be a Wiccan high priestess and wanted to make sure her respectability was sacrosanct. In those days witches were not yet commonplace in Salem. Ann had been one of the first. Though Ann knew a lot about many substances and their effects, both good and ill, she didn’t think it wise to share any information that could potentially hurt anyone.

Ann tried to avoid talking to Maureen about her story. She didn’t like the idea of Maureen fictionalizing the tale, filling in its historic blanks. Some stories should remain unfinished, Ann told her friend. But Maureen didn’t listen. She was too obsessed by the plight of the young wife and by trying so hard to prove her happily-ever-after. The only real evidence of any ending to the story was the husband’s poisoned body and the worn oarlocks or thole pins in the abandoned boat. How the young lovers had escaped Great Misery Island, if they had indeed escaped at all, was anyone’s guess. It was a dark story, and one that Ann believed should be left alone, especially by someone as impressionable as Maureen Finch.

Ann told her again that she didn’t do past-life readings and didn’t know anyone around here who did. “I think you’d have to go out to California for that kind of thing,” she said.

“As if I can do that,” Maureen said.

MAUREEN’S OBSESSION CONTINUED LONG INTO that last summer. She tried the First Spiritualist Church, where she’d had some luck before, but they were mediums, not past-life regressionists. She read a book about Edgar Cayce, who believed strongly in reincarnation. She read many books about Buddhism, hoping to unlock the secrets to samsara or the process of rebirth. But she still couldn’t find anyone to help her.

Late that July she finally found a psychic down by the Willows who said she did past-life readings for a fee and booked an appointment for Maureen before she had a chance to change her mind.

Zee was immediately suspicious. She seemed to remember some kind of scandal a year or so back, where a psychic who lived down by the old amusement park had pretended she had a talent for talking to the dead and conned a senior citizen out of two Social Security checks before the old woman’s children had gone to the police. Zee didn’t know if this was the same psychic, but she wasn’t taking any chances. Though she knew that there was no talking Maureen out of anything once she decided to do it, Zee wasn’t about to let her go alone.

They parked the car over by the arcade and walked around back to a three-decker house with peeling paint and a second-floor sign that read WORLD-FAMOUS ARCANA, PSYCHIC TO THE STARS.

Their feet echoed up the two flights of stairs. A bare lightbulb cast a weak halo around itself on the upper landing making it appear, as they approached, as if it were an aura around Maureen’s head.

Arcana threw open the door just before they reached it, as though she had psychically sensed their presence. The gesture was overly dramatic and clearly for effect. Anyone with two ears could have heard them coming, but Zee could tell that Maureen bought it.

“Who are you?” Arcana demanded of Zee. Her feet were unshod, and she was wearing a caftan with a towel around her head, as if she had just washed her hair and couldn’t be bothered to dry it.

“I’m her daughter,” Zee said.

“It’ll cost you extra if you both want a reading.”

“She doesn’t want a reading,” Maureen said. “She just came to keep me company.”

The psychic grumbled and lit a cigarette. She gestured them to a card table covered with a plastic cloth. Zee noticed the posters on the walls, photos of Indian mystics, all wearing turbans. Maybe she hadn’t just washed her hair, Zee thought-maybe this was a bad attempt at a turban.

It wasn’t difficult for Zee to see that the psychic hated Maureen on sight. She demanded the money up front, which Maureen was glad to provide, but Maureen was nervous and couldn’t find where she’d put her wallet. Flustered, she sent Zee back to the car to look for it.

Zee looked under the seats and in the glove compartment but found nothing. Then she knelt down by the driver’s door and looked under the car, but all she found was an empty Almond Joy wrapper and one dirty child-size cotton sock. When she came back, Maureen was tense but finally located her wallet in her jacket pocket. The psychic rolled her eyes but took the money-and ten dollars extra because Maureen had brought Zee along. “I’m not used to working in front of an audience,” she said.

“You have done past-life readings before,” Maureen said.

“Of course,” Arcana said. “I do them all the time.”

Zee could tell that it was a lie, but the look on Maureen’s face was so hopeful that Zee took a seat on the couch and was quiet as the psychic had instructed.

Though the table was flimsy and the decorations looked fake, the psychic had some high-tech tools. On the floor under the table were two switches: a dimmer and a dial that controlled the sound system.

“I demand silence,” Arcana announced with the authority of a sanctimonious second-grade teacher.

Zee wondered at the declaration, since no one had uttered a word.

With her bare, simian feet, the psychic flipped the two switches, grabbing them each with her toes and turning the dials expertly. First the music came up, a cross between Indian mystic and theremin music from a bad fifties sci-fi film. With the other foot, her toes dialed the lights down until Maureen and Zee were left in near darkness. The only source of illumination was the neon sign for the midway across the street.

Maureen was anxious. “Am I supposed to do anything?”

“Not yet.”

For the next four or five minutes, the psychic did breathing exercises. Deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth, making a great show of her hyperventilation.

When she spoke again, her voice had dropped an octave.

“Hello, this is ARCANA,” she said. “What is your question?”

Zee tried to keep from laughing.

“I don’t have a question. I’m here to find out about my past lives,” Maureen said softly.

“What is your question?” Arcana’s voice boomed.

Maureen looked at Zee. “I guess my question is whether I was Zylphia Browne in a past life.”

It wasn’t going at all as Maureen had told Zee it would. Somehow she’d gotten the idea, or had read somewhere, that she would be the one going into the trance. In the book she had read on past-life regressions, the therapist would put the seeker into a trance and then record the outcome. When the seeker woke up, she would be able to listen to what she’d said under hypnosis. Or, barring that, another approach would be that Arcana might go into a trance herself, the way Edgar Cayce did, and just start relating her impressions. Maureen seemed surprised that she would have to ask a question herself.

Zee was trying hard not to laugh.

The psychic said nothing. But Zee could feel her annoyance through her supposed trance. She couldn’t tell for sure that Arcana was faking it, but she would have bet she was. Zee was aware that the psychic was watching her. In another minute, if she couldn’t stop giggling, she was pretty certain that Arcana would kick her out.

“What is your question?” Arcana boomed.

“She told you. She wants to know if she was Zylphia Browne in another life,” Zee finally said.

“Silence!” Arcana hissed.

Maureen shot Zee a warning look. Maureen’s voice shook as she once again formed the question. “Was I Zylphia Browne in a prior life?”

Everyone in Salem knew the story of Zylphia Browne, who had killed her husband and then disappeared, never to be seen again.

“The MUR-der-ess?” Arcana bellowed, stressing the first of the separated syllables and arching her eyebrows like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

It was wrong to classify Zylphia as a murderess; rather she was a victim of severe abuse who happened to escape. Even Zee believed that much.

It didn’t take a psychic to figure out the answer Maureen wanted to hear. It also didn’t take a psychic to know how much this woman didn’t like Maureen. Maureen was a beautiful woman with a childlike presence that could seem ingenuous if you didn’t know her and which often had the effect of enraging women who had to make their own way in the world and weren’t having an easy time of it. Arcana seemed instinctively to know that her answer could do some damage to Maureen. And she seemed fully prepared to do it.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” she said to herself. The growl of a Harley from the street below drowned her words.

“Excuse me?” Maureen strained to hear her. Even Zee sat forward in her seat.

“You are not Zylphia Browne,” Arcana said in a voice that neither of them could miss. “But your daughter is.”

Maureen stared at her, uncomprehending at first.

Arcana poked an accusing finger out from under her caftan and pointed at Zee. “Your daughter is the young Zylphia Browne come back to life.”

Maureen stared in disbelief.

Arcana seemed to know immediately what she had won. The look of devastation on Maureen’s face was unforgettable.

And though she didn’t buy it for a minute, a chill ran down Zee’s spine.

As they descended the stairs and through the midway to the car, Zee could see that Maureen was in shock. They got into the car and sat in silence.

“You know that she was playing you, don’t you?” Zee said.

“What are you talking about?”

“She didn’t like us from the moment we walked in.”

Instead of having the desired effect, it had the opposite.

“You didn’t have to be so rude!” Maureen said. “You didn’t have to laugh!”

“I’m sorry,” Zee said.

Maureen’s hands were shaking as she turned the key in the ignition. She flooded the engine several times before the car finally started. Zee fought the urge to tell her mother that she wasn’t doing it right. She’d already said far too much.

ON HIS WAY BETWEEN SHOPS, Mickey had spotted Zee talking to Ann in front of her store. He walked over to join them. “What?” he said. “You’re stopping to see her before you say hello to me?”

When Zee looked at Uncle Mickey’s eyes, it was like looking into Maureen’s. It had always been disconcerting. Uncle Mickey had the same deep blue Irish eyes that his sister had had, though the look in his had always been much more playful.

He lifted her up and spun her around. “How’s the little bride-to-be?” he said.

“Good. Fine,” she said. “A little dizzy, actually.”

He laughed and put her down, winking at Ann. “How’s Finch?”

“I think you know,” she said.

“I’ve been meaning to get over to see him,” Mickey lied.

He’d been saying the same thing for years. Zee didn’t challenge him.

“I need a carpenter,” she said. “One who can put in some railings. I thought you might know someone.”

“Sure,” he said. “I know a couple of people who could probably do that for you.”

He thought about it for a moment, then they said good-bye to Ann, and he walked her over to the next wharf, where the Friendship was moored.

At 171 feet, the tall ship was impressive. It had always seemed an odd coincidence to Zee, with so many ships having sailed out of Salem in the age of sail, that the Friendship of Maureen’s book was the same historic vessel the city had later chosen to re-create. There had been no real connection between the Friendship and Maureen’s book, no record that she had ever been used for the young lovers’ escape. As it turned out, the very voyage that Maureen had chosen, the only one that would have accurately fit with history, had been the Friendship’s final one. On that final voyage, the East Indiaman had been captured by the British, and its entire crew had been taken prisoner. Maureen’s choice of vessels had rendered her desired happy ending impossible.

When they got to the rigging shed, Mickey put two fingers to his mouth and gave a loud whistle.

Zee spotted the man Mickey was whistling at, perched high in the rigging of the Friendship’s forward mast.

When the man didn’t turn, he whistled again. Then yelled, “Hey, Hawk, come down here a minute, will you?”

The man started down the web of rope. At first glance Zee thought he had fallen, his descent was so rapid. It was only when he got closer that she saw the way his arms and legs moved in rhythmic coordination. Like a dancer. Or a spider.

He walked over to where they stood. He looked very familiar. She had seen him before.

“What’s up?” He glanced from Mickey to Zee and back again.

“This is my niece, Zee. She needs someone to do some carpentry work.”

“I’m not a carpenter,” he said. “I’m a rigger.”

“Rigger, carpenter, navigator-this guy can guide a ship home just by looking at the stars.”

“That’s a slight exaggeration,” Hawk said.

“Seriously, he’s a jack-of-all-trades,” Mickey said to Zee.

“And master of none,” Hawk said, laughing.

“And he’s modest, too,” Mickey said, slapping him hard on the back.

“Thanks a lot,” Hawk said, and Mickey laughed. Hawk turned to Zee. “What do you need done?”

“Just railings,” Zee said. “And some more grab bars in the bathroom.

“It’s for my dad,” she added.

“I guess I can do railings.” He looked at Zee for a long moment. “I know you,” he said. His eyes did a body scan, and he clearly liked what he saw. He squinted at her face, analyzing. “Where do I know you from?”

“She’s engaged,” Mickey said, lifting her hand to show him the ring, not realizing he’d already seen it. “And she’s a shrink. Meaning she’s far too smart to fall for a tired old line like that one.”

“A shrink, huh?” Hawk said. He grinned and shrugged. But he kept looking at her, as if he were still trying to figure out where he’d seen her before.

She knew immediately where she’d seen him, though she didn’t want to say so. It had been just a few days ago, at Lilly Braedon’s funeral. And before that on the bridge as she watched the television the night Lilly jumped. He was one of the eyewitnesses, the one in the blue van who hadn’t wanted to talk to the reporter.

“When can you do the railing?” Zee asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe tonight or tomorrow night. Are you in a hurry?”

“It’s not urgent, but it is important.” She wrote down the address and handed it to him.

“I’ll get there my first free night,” he said.

“Hey, Hawk, we need you up here!” one of the guys yelled from the rigging.

“I’ve gotta get back.”

“Thanks,” she said.

He nodded and smiled.

Zee and Mickey watched him walk back to the ship.

“His name is really Hawk?” she said to Mickey.

“It’s a nickname. Short for Mohawk, someone told me. That’s his boat,” Mickey said, pointing to an old lobster boat tied up at one of the slips. Instead of displaying a name on the stern the way most of the boats did, this one featured a painted image of a hawk in flight. “I hear he’s the best worker on the ship. Don’t know if he has any Native American blood, but he sure can climb.”

Zee felt her dizzy spell return as she watched him climb back up the rigging. She put out her hand, grabbing Mickey’s arm for support.

“I know,” Mickey said. “I can’t even watch him.” He turned to her. “How much time do you have?”

She looked at her watch. “About an hour.”

“Come on. I’ll buy you a drink,” he said, steering her toward Capt.’s, a waterfront restaurant and bar on the wharf directly across from the Friendship.

17

MELVILLE STOPPED AT THE post office to pick up his mail. Then he walked over to Steve’s Quality Market to get some of the prime beef he knew Finch liked. Finch could no longer chew very well, and he had trouble swallowing. But the butcher at Steve’s would grind the beef for him, and then Zee could scramble it with mushrooms and some garlic and oregano. It wasn’t much, but at least it wouldn’t be sandwiches. He hoped that Zee was giving Finch his vitamins. He’d have to remind her.

For the first time in weeks, Melville felt hopeful. Maybe it was a side effect of the new drug that had made Finch behave so erratically, he thought. That would explain everything. Why else would something that had almost killed their relationship once before have come back so suddenly, as if the whole thing had happened not more than thirty years ago but just in the last few weeks? Melville hoped it could be explained away by the new drug that Finch was taking, the one that was said to cause hallucinations in some people. It would be great if Finch’s rage were mere hallucination. Melville would move back in, and he would never mention the fight they’d had. They would go on as usual, as if the whole thing had never happened.

Finch had been off the drug for several days. It should have cleared out of his system by now. But if Melville were honest with himself, he’d have to admit that the whole thing had started before the new drug. It had begun a few months ago with an offhand remark about Maureen. Before he knew it, they were fighting about everything, from the dripping kitchen faucet to the piles of newspapers in the hall.

The subject of Maureen had come up many times lately. And just as Finch always did when he didn’t know how to say something, he had quoted Hawthorne: “A woman’s chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“If you have something to say, I’d appreciate your saying it straight out,” Melville replied. He didn’t like talking about Maureen. His guilt on that matter had almost done them in. He put a hand on Finch’s shoulder. “Tell me what this is about.”

“I don’t know,” Finch had said, suddenly realizing how confused he was.

Melville leaned over, taking Finch’s face in his hands. “‘This relationship has to succeed, not in spite of what happened with Maureen but because of it.’” He looked at Finch. “Those are your words,” Melville said.

“I know.” Finch was crying.

“You know how much I love you,” Melville said.

“Perhaps you had better keep reminding me,” Finch said.

He was losing Finch to this damned disease. It was a fact he seldom faced directly, yet there it was. He knew the inevitability of demise, but they had been together for so many years, happily together. Even after the Parkinson’s, they had been happy. He knew that the illness would rob him of Finch eventually. He’d found himself looking away when the shaking began, not wanting to see it. Luckily, shaking had not become a major part of Finch’s case, though there were many other elements of the disease that had taken their toll. He had to remove himself sometimes so that Finch wouldn’t see him cry.

He had read all the books, knew that there’d be a time when there was some crossover. If he were to look at things honestly, he would have to admit that it had already happened. Parkinson’s patients, if they lived long enough with the disease, often got what was called the “Alzheimer’s crossover” and started to show signs of dementia. When Finch had initially presented with a bit of dementia, Melville remembered how relieved they were to find out it was only Parkinson’s. Only. That was a joke. To say something was only Parkinson’s was like saying that Hurricane Katrina was only in New Orleans for a day. Parkinson’s was one of the cruelest diseases out there. If you lived long enough with it, if something else didn’t get you first, you’d end up in the fetal position in a bed in some institution, sometimes for years. Melville often wondered-often hoped, in fact-that he would have the strength it took to help Finch end things if it came to that. He knew Finch’s wishes, and he also knew that Finch had been saving pills for years against the inevitable.

But things were changing, and they were changing fast, with a look, an offhand remark, or a sarcastic tone of voice that he’d never heard Finch use before.

The night he kicked Melville out, Finch threw the volume of Yeats at him, hitting him in the head, leaving a bruise. Melville hadn’t seen the book for so many years-he and Finch had put it away after Maureen’s suicide, in a place where Zee would never find it.

“Get out!” Finch had screamed. “And don’t come back!”

Melville called a doctor he knew in Boston, a neurologist friend of a friend, and someone he’d had coffee with a few years back.

“Dementia is funny,” the doctor said. “Sometimes it’s worse when it starts. There’s so much anger involved. The patient is trying to hide his symptoms yet is clearly terrified. But then there’s a second stage, when things start to settle down. And usually that gets better for everyone for a while. I call it the honeymoon period. Of course there will also be a time when he may not even know you at all,” the doctor said. “But, hopefully, that won’t happen for a long time.”

THE PLAN THAT MELVILLE AND Zee had come up with today had been logical enough. He would drop by, ostensibly to pick up some of his belongings. Then they would see how things went. If Finch’s anger had been a product of the drugs, maybe he would have forgotten it by now. Melville would move back in and take care of Finch until the end. And if it were something else, some new progression of the disease, then they’d figure out what to do next.

It felt odd to knock on the door. He didn’t think he’d ever done that before. When he had first become involved with Finch, when Maureen was in the hospital, he’d almost never come into this house. He and Finch had always met elsewhere, usually somewhere in town. And later, after he’d moved his boat up here, when he thought Maureen wasn’t coming home, Finch had started leaving the door unlatched for him and he’d slipped into the house as quietly as possible late at night, so as not to wake Zee. In those first years, they had been very careful.

ZEE ANSWERED THE DOOR. “HE’S asleep in his chair,” she said. Melville checked his watch. “Three-fifteen.” Finch’s pill was due at four. He should have timed this better.

She was bundling papers in the hallway, her hands blackened, an old bandanna from Finch’s pirate days around her head.

“I’d been meaning to do that,” he said, remembering how Finch had talked him out of it every time Melville started to clear the newspapers. Finch had claimed he was going to read them all, though he couldn’t read anymore, hadn’t been able to for quite some time.

Finch was a bit of a hoarder by nature. Such was his respect for the written word that he could never bear to part with any printed material. Even the ad circulars from the weekend papers had to be kept for at least a month, with Melville sometimes sneaking them out of the house and down the street to throw them away, so that Finch, finding them missing, wouldn’t raid the trash and bring them back inside.

“Does your father know you’re doing that?” Melville asked Zee.

“He knows,” she said. “He doesn’t like it, but he knows.”

Melville helped her get the recycling bags to the curb. They were lucky-tomorrow was trash day, and in his current state Finch was unlikely to try to reclaim them.

They sat in the kitchen making small talk, waiting for Finch to wake up. She didn’t mention the Yeats book, and neither did he, though he wanted to. Part of him wanted her to have it. But years ago he’d made a promise to Finch, and Melville always kept his promises.

Zee checked her watch. It was almost four. “It’s nearly time for his next pill,” she said. “He should be waking up soon.”

As if on cue, she heard the sound of Finch’s walker.

“You got him to use his walker?”

“Yup,” she said.

“I’m very impressed.”

Neither of them spoke as they waited while Finch negotiated the long hallway.

Melville willed his heart to slow down. He couldn’t stay seated.

“I hired a carpenter to put some railings in the hall,” she said, sensing his nervousness, trying to calm him.

“Good idea.”

He took a breath and held it. He stared at the floor. When the walker paused at the kitchen threshold, Melville looked up at Finch.

Their eyes locked.

“Hello, Finch,” Melville said.

Finch stood still and stiff, his expression masked and unreadable.

“I brought you some sirloin,” Melville said. “I put it in the fridge.”

Finch lowered himself into his chair. Falling the last few inches, he winced. When he finally spoke, it was not to Melville but to Zee.

“I want him out of here,” he said quietly. It was almost time for his next pill, so his voice was gone. The sound scratched as if tearing his throat. But his words were unmistakable.

18

ZEE TOOK THE PHONE into the den. She’d been talking to Melville for the last half hour, trying her best to calm him down. By the time she hung up, Jessina had put Finch to bed and had left Zee a note.

“Get some sleep,” she said to Melville after they’d talked in circles for the third time. “We’ll figure things out tomorrow.”

The television was still on, but muted. Zee sat on the couch, flipped the remote, finding Turner Classics: Jane Eyre with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. She didn’t turn up the sound but just sat staring at the screen. “Who is Grace Poole?” she said to the television set. It was a game they had invented, she and Melville and Finch, a kind of Jeopardy! for the literary set. Something Finch had tried on his lit classes. Who is Grace Poole? was the answer. The question was one she had written herself: She takes care of Rochester’s crazy wife in the attic. No one had talked about the parallel to her mother when the question was asked. She thought now about the way her question should have been worded: She takes care of Rochester’s crazy wife. There was never any mention of an attic in Brontë’s book, and, in the film, it was more like a tower room than an attic. She had always gotten it wrong. It was Maureen and not Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife who lived in the attic. And though both Finch and Melville had challenged wrong answers all the time and must certainly have noticed the error of her question, they had never challenged Zee on this one.

Zee fell asleep to the sound of foghorns. She dreamed of the stars and of the Friendship, not the reproduction that was at the wharves today but the old one that Maureen had tried to write about. Then she dreamed about Bernini’s sculpture of Neptune and Triton as it had once been described to her by Maureen. Or maybe it was Lilly… No, it was Maureen.

19

THE DAY MAUREEN KILLED herself, Zee had borrowed Mickey’s dory and gone to Baker’s Island to get the Yeats book in an effort to cheer her mother.

Maureen’s mood seemed better that day. Certainly she was kinder to Zee, whom she had been ignoring ever since the visit to Arcana’s psychic studio. The last few months had reminded Zee of the Snow White fairy tale, not just because of Arcana and an image she kept having of her holding out a poisoned apple, but because her mother, who had once loved Zee so much, had grown cold ever since the pronouncement of the psychic, as if the very existence of Zee were keeping her from her fairy-tale ending.

That was the way it was between them for the rest of the summer. Maureen stopped writing “The Once”-in fact, she stopped writing altogether. Mostly she just stared out at the water or sat upstairs in her room. She hardly ate and rarely if ever slept.

So on her way to the island to get the book, Zee was encouraged. Her mother’s mood seemed lighter, and though Zee hadn’t been able to talk her into coming along, Maureen had sounded almost interested when Zee told her what she was planning to do.

“You’ve always loved that book,” Zee said hopefully.

“Thank you for doing this,” Maureen said, and actually got out of bed and came down to the kitchen to see Zee off.

“I love you,” Maureen said to her.

It seemed an odd thing to say, because of how bad things had been between them since the episode with the psychic. But Maureen was smiling when she said it, another encouraging sign, or so Zee thought at the time.

In retrospect, Zee knew that such behavior was a common occurrence in suicide cases. The victim would often feel much better once the decision to end things had finally been made. The uplift in spirits often left family members that much more shocked when the suicide happened. “She seemed so much better,” they would declare.

Though Lilly had been Zee’s first suicide since she’d become a psychologist, she had heard stories from other therapists, including Mattei. A vast and rapid improvement in a depressed mood can be cause for alarm. In bipolar patients it is often the signal of impending mania. In suicidal patients it often means that they’ve made that final decision and, upon making it, feel an almost exhilarating sense of relief. But Zee had no such knowledge when Maureen died. Though to most people who met her, she seemed older, Zee had only recently turned thirteen.

Baker’s Island wasn’t as close by as some of the other Salem islands were; it was actually closer to Manchester than to Salem. When Zee finally got there, it was after three. She tied up the dory and hurried up the ramp.

Zee walked past the spot where the residents parked their wheel-barrows, the only vehicles used to carry things to and from the old cottages, and then she headed toward the cottage, greeting people as she passed, grown-ups and children she’d known since she was little, whose families had summered here for generations. She wanted to stop and chat with them, but she couldn’t. Not today.

She let herself into the cottage with the key that Maureen always left in the window box. The front room was dark and shuttered. Maureen hadn’t been here once all summer, a clue that only in hindsight Zee realized should have been cause for alarm. Every summer since Zee was a baby, Maureen had used the cottage as her writing space.

This year the house had not been opened. As Zee entered the doorway, she watched a mouse dart and hide; she couldn’t see where it went. The cottage was tiny, only two rooms, the large front room with a small soapstone sink and hand pump and an old-fashioned icebox. A round table sat in the middle of the floor. If the house had been on the mainland, its decoration might have been right out of the Shabby Chic or Maine Cottage catalogs, but here one recognized it as the accumulation of hand-me-downs or discarded items from other places that had been collected over a number of summers: an old rubber bathing cap hanging on a hook, its chin piece cracked and splintered, a straw sun hat from the 1920s that had once had a silk flower on top but that now had only a small hole where that flower had once been attached.

Zee pulled open the four French windows over the sink, then pushed out the shutters beyond. Bright light flooded the room. A nursery web spider took shelter in a crack between the rafters.

Zee had always loved this place. When Maureen planned to stay overnight, she usually brought Zee along, her only requirement being that Zee learn to amuse herself, so that Maureen could write undisturbed. That was fine by Zee, who spent as much time outside as she could. On rainy days she would sit on the rug and draw pictures or play solitaire while her mother worked on her stories. Sometimes Zee read the old Nancy Drew mysteries that had been left there by her step-grandfather’s first wife when she was a child.

The rug was rolled up in a corner. It bulged slightly in the center, something she hadn’t noticed before. Either it had been improperly stored or something had been rolled up with it. Her cards, maybe? A box of crayons?

The door to the bedroom was closed. Zee hesitated before it. For as long as she could remember, she’d been forbidden to enter what had once been the bedroom. Though there was a double brass bed in the corner, they did not sleep in the room when they stayed here. Maureen slept instead on the couch and Zee in a sleeping bag on a huge canvas air mattress on the floor next to her mother.

Zee opened the door and stood looking at what had once been her parents’ marriage bed. The brass was greening where a leak in the roof had caused a slow drip. She could see the sheets on the bed, never changed, and she could make out the faded green chenille bedspread, which smelled musty from the leak.

On that last day of Maureen’s life, Zee stood again in the bedroom on Baker’s Island. But something was wrong with the picture. It wasn’t just that the roof was leaking or that the green chenille bedspread was mildewed from the moisture. It was something else. As she looked at the pillow, she realized that the Yeats book was not there. The one thing her mother wanted, the one thing she had come here to get, was missing.

Zee tore the house apart looking for the book. She looked behind and under the bed. She looked in the icebox and in all the drawers. She even looked outside, around the whole perimeter of the house. Finally she spotted the rug and again noted the bulge in the center of it.

She rolled out the rug, and with it something went tumbling. The force of the rolling threw whatever it was across the room. Hopeful, she took a step to retrieve it, and she saw the mouse. It was the same mouse that had scurried across the floor earlier, and with it was a tiny mouse, presumably its baby. Their eyes were wild. The mice were frozen in place. Zee realized that in rolling out the rug she had destroyed their home. Beside the baby mouse, as if in haute décor, was the silk flower the mice had gnawed from the old straw hat and the ball from her game of jacks that had rolled under the bed so long ago. Next to it was the book.

STRYCHNINE WAS THE POISON MAUREEN had researched for her story, the one she’d had the housekeeper use on the captain. It was also the poison Maureen ended up using on herself.

There were many easier poisons available, a few she had learned about from Ann and others as nearby as her garden. Maureen had considered and rejected them all. Strychnine is a poison that travels up the spinal cord and heightens the intensity of the convulsions it causes. It is a terrible way to die. Any emergency worker who has ever seen strychnine poisoning would be unlikely to forget it. The seizures are often brought on within ten minutes of ingestion and are triggered by stimulation of any kind-from fear of death to bright light to the sound of a distant car passing on the road. Theoretically, it is possible to survive strychnine poisoning, if one could keep the poisoning victim absolutely calm and quiet for twenty-four hours or so, until the poison clears out the system. But it almost never happens. A noise, or even the softest touch, will set off seizures that flex the back until the head and feet touch the floor, the body creating an almost perfect arch. After each seizure the victim will collapse in a heap, gathering the energy to seize again. After five or six seizures, the body’s energy is drained, and the victim dies of respiratory failure or exhaustion.

MAUREEN PLANNED HER DEATH CAREFULLY, if not well. Finch was on summer vacation from teaching and was carousing with his pirate friends, who were participating in a two-day encampment at Winter Island. And with Zee gone for several hours, Maureen had taken advantage of the opportunity.

The note she left behind was hidden in a place where only Finch would find it. At the bottom of the note, she finished with the verses that matched the book her daughter was just that moment bringing back to her.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild.

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Less than fifteen minutes after Maureen took the poison, Zee came home with the book. She slammed the screen door in the kitchen before she bounded up the stairs. It was the sound of the slamming door that sent Maureen into her first seizure.

20

WHEN ZEE WOKE UP, she was still on the couch. The sky had cleared, and the moon was rising over the harbor. It was huge and yellow, and she hadn’t seen one like it for a long time. As she sat up and got her bearings, she realized that it wasn’t the moonlight that had woken her but the sound of someone pounding on the door.

Finch was already in bed, and Jessina was gone for the night.

At first she thought it might be Hawk. He’d said he might come by tonight to do the railings. But when she looked at the clock, she saw that it was after eleven. Confused and still sleepy, she made her way to the door.

It was Michael.

“I got your message,” he said. “I’m sorry, too.”

THOUGH THEY WERE BOTH EXHAUSTED, neither Michael nor Zee slept much that night. Zee’s childhood bed was an old-fashioned double, and it dipped in the middle like a hammock, which was fine for Zee alone but not great for two people. And Finch was sundowning again.

In the short time she’d been here, Zee had noticed that Finch seemed to become disoriented as the day slipped into evening, often leading him to get very agitated by normal activities like washing or dressing for bed. A normal occurrence in some patients with dementia, it was called “sundowning.” He often seemed fearful at such times, and he often wandered, which is what he’d been doing that first night he stood at Zee’s bed before the freezing episode began. Sundowning was something Zee knew about, but it was more common to Alzheimer’s patients than those with Parkinson’s.

When he was sundowning, Finch often didn’t want to take medication. It took her until 4:00 A.M. to convince him to take some trazodone, and by 7:00, when he was due to have his first dose of Sinemet, Finch was fast asleep.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said to her again after witnessing Finch’s deteriorating condition. “I thought you were just being dramatic.”

It was the same phrase that William had used to describe Lilly when he’d first brought her to see Mattei. It was an interesting choice of words, and one that Zee might have called Michael on if they both hadn’t been so tired. She bristled but decided it wasn’t worth an argument.

“I hate to say it, but I agree with the occupational therapist,” he said. “Finch definitely needs to be in a nursing home.”

“He would rather die than be in a nursing home.”

LATER THAT MORNING, CLEARLY FEELING guilty, Michael helped Zee clean out more papers. She was making a pile of Melville’s belongings, things she would get to him or things he could come sort through one day when Finch was out of the house.

They talked little as they worked.

At six o’clock they sent out for Chinese, and they ate it in the kitchen with Finch and Jessina, who was making jokes about the chopsticks, threatening to feed Finch with them instead of the fork she was using.

“Let him feed himself,” Zee reminded her. Everyone was quiet as they watched Finch try to manipulate the fork.

After dinner she opened a bottle of twenty-year-old port that Michael had given Finch for his sixty-fifth birthday.

“He still has this?” Michael was amazed.

“He still has most of them,” she said, showing him. “Melville opens one every so often, but Finch doesn’t drink anymore.”

“Man,” Michael said.

“I told you that a long time ago,” she said.

He looked at her as if her last statement couldn’t possibly be true. Then, trying to cover, he searched the cabinets until he found a proper glass for the port.

ZEE HAD TOLD MICHAEL MORE than once that Finch had stopped drinking, but Michael could never seem to remember it and continued giving him expensive bottles of alcohol on birthdays and holidays. There were other things he’d forgotten as well, things she was pretty sure she’d told him that he didn’t remember. She told herself his job was stressful. And the added stress of the wedding plans she hadn’t been making only made things worse.

It hadn’t always been like this. At least she didn’t think it had. In the beginning of their relationship, they’d talked about things. Or maybe it had been Michael who did most of the talking. He’d always been so clear about what he wanted. And the fact that he’d wanted her was flattering. Michael could have anyone. And though it angered her lately, Zee had originally liked his certainty. There was something attractive and almost seductive about knowing where your life was going. It was new for Zee.

But somewhere along the line, she had stopped talking to Michael. Maybe it was because he was no longer listening, or maybe she’d never really talked to him that much. She had certainly never told him her dreams. But that was largely because she didn’t know what they were. Beyond completing grad school and getting her license to practice, she hadn’t really allowed herself to dream much at all. She knew that this was a product of childhood, of living with Maureen’s illness and not ever being able to make plans. But the fact was, from the moment they met, Michael had always just assumed that he knew Zee. He had never asked her what she wanted out of life. Which was probably a good thing. Though she might have known when she was twelve, these days she had to admit that she had no idea.

TONIGHT MICHAEL WAS DRINKING TOO much. He had finished the bottle of port and had found and opened a Côtes du Rhône. As he drank, his face reddened, and she could feel the tension building.

He reached to pour another glass and caught the lazy Susan with his sleeve, setting it spinning, sending the salt and pepper shakers and Finch’s prescriptions flying.

She started to reach for them.

“I’ll get them,” he said angrily.

She waited while he retrieved the bottle of Sinemet and the salt shaker.

“This is a dangerous drug,” he said. “I don’t understand how anyone could be stupid enough to leave it on the table.”

Zee said nothing. She knew he was trying to start a fight.

“Stupid,” he said again. He got up and walked to the bathroom and put it in the medicine cabinet. “Someone should have done that a long time ago,” he said as he sat back down at the table.

Zee said nothing for a moment. Then, instead of engaging him, she asked a direct question. “When did we get so angry with each other?”

“You may be angry. I’m not,” he said.

“Please,” she said. “I’ve never seen you so angry.”

“I was angry this weekend,” he admitted. “But you explained and apologized, and I totally understand what happened.”

“You were angry the night Lilly jumped off the bridge.”

“That wasn’t anger, that was frustration.”

“Semantics,” she said.

“I had to pay the wedding planner six thousand dollars.”

“I’ll pay the wedding planner,” she said. “I told you that.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I hated the wedding planner. She was bossy and intimidating, and I didn’t like her taste.”

“You liked the sushi.”

“Of course I liked the sushi. Everyone in Boston likes O Ya sushi. I didn’t need a six-thousand-dollar wedding planner to tell me I liked O Ya’s sushi. Which, by the way, we never would have served to over a hundred people. I don’t even think O Ya caters.”

“So we’ve established that you didn’t like the wedding planner.”

“Did you?”

“Not really,” he admitted. Then he thought about it. “Actually, I couldn’t stand her.” As soon as he said it, he started to laugh.

“Then why the hell did you hire her?” Zee smiled back at him.

“It’s what you do. You fall in love, you propose, you hire a wedding planner.”

“Simple, simple, case closed,” she said, quoting Mattei.

“For most people,” he said.

“Evidently not for my people,” she said.

“True enough,” he said.

His glass was empty, and he filled it again. He started to fill hers, but she put her hand over the top. “I’ve had enough,” she said.

“So what do we do now?” he asked.

“I don’t have any idea,” she said.

“Do you want to postpone the wedding?” he asked. “I mean, in light of what’s going on with your father.”

“We probably should,” she said.

“But you still want to get married,” he said.

“I never said I didn’t,” she said. “You were the one who said that.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, we can postpone,” he said.

She wanted to say something else, something definitive. She knew she should, that he was waiting for something more from her, but nothing came. She was exhausted. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Are you coming?”

“No,” he said. “I think I’ll stay up for a while.”

She could hear him pouring himself another glass as she walked down the long hall to the bedroom.

LATE THAT NIGHT MICHAEL FINALLY crawled into bed next to her, rolling them both into the sagging center of the old mattress. Zee awakened to the smell of good wine turned sour on breath. Michael was kissing her.

Instinctively, before she was awake enough to catch herself, she turned her head away.

“I’m sorry,” she said when she saw the hurt look on his face and realized what she had done.

She knew he was angry, but he was also very drunk. And she was too exhausted to talk about it now.

She picked up her pillow and went to the den to sleep, leaving him the bed.

By the time she woke up the next morning, Michael was gone. The note on the table was short but clear.

Dear Zee,

You were right. I am angry. I’ve had enough.

21

ZEE CRIED MOST OF the day on Wednesday. More than a few of the tears were relief; because it was over now, she had no big decisions to make. Some of the tears were for the last three wasted years of her life. Some were for Finch, some for Maureen and The Great Love, and some were for Lilly Braedon.

She listened to her thoughts roll around her achy brain. Her sinuses were swollen from crying, she didn’t dare look in the mirror. She went into the bathroom, ran cold water in the sink, and splashed it onto her face.

Outside, she heard the sound of Finch’s walker. Jessina was in the kitchen making breakfast. Zee dried her hands. She noticed the engagement ring on her left hand, wondered what she should do with it. Should she send it back to him? Should she even call him? She didn’t want to, realizing on one level how relieved she was not to have to call and, at the same time, understanding that she would have to get in touch with him eventually to pick up her things. Eventually, but not now.

WHEN SHE COULDN’T STAND BEING in the house any longer, she decided to take a ride, driving Lafayette Street into Marblehead, then taking a left onto West Shore Drive. There was something she’d been meaning to do, and now was the time. She stopped at the Garden Center and picked out a grave planter basket, with geraniums, trailing petunias, and dracaena spikes. Then she kept going until she reached Waterside Cemetery.

She pulled the Volvo down the narrow, tree-lined lane and up to the office, where she parked and walked inside.

“Hi,” she said to the woman sitting at the desk. “I hate to bother you, but do you think you could direct me to Lilly Braedon’s grave?”

Cathy took in Zee’s blotchy face. Normally she might have had to look up the location of a grave site, but Lilly Braedon’s headstone had been installed only yesterday, and Cathy had seen Lilly’s husband and kids come by to visit it as she was leaving last night. So sad, she thought, wondering what would have caused the young mother to make the leap from the Tobin Bridge into the Mystic River. She felt particularly sorry for the kids.

Cathy walked Zee to the door and pointed up the hill. “It’s right up there next to the pavilion,” she said. “Under that big oak tree.”

“Thanks so much,” Zee said.

Zee left her car by the office and carried the flower basket up the hill, stopping at one of the faucets to water it. When she reached the top of the hill, she took in the view. From here she could see all of Salem, from the Willows to the Gables, to Shetland Park and the old mill buildings with their peaked rooflines that looked like a row of white tents. Beyond Shetland was the district called the Point, with the tenement houses where the mill workers had once lived-the Irish, the Italians, the French Canadians. The mills were long gone, but the housing remained. These days it was mostly Dominicans. Jessina and her son, Danny, lived in the Point.

Zee found Lilly’s gravestone. It was simple granite, a matte gray. On it just Lilly’s name, her date of birth, and the day she died. Zee found herself doing the math. Lilly was thirty-four, only two years older than Zee and the same age as Maureen had been when she committed suicide, but Lilly had seemed younger than Zee ever remembered her mother being. Certainly more naive, she thought, though it was odd to make that judgment, Maureen’s era would have almost certainly dictated a lesser sophistication than Lilly’s. Looking back on it now, Zee realized that it was the filter of a child’s vision that had clouded her perception. If she saw them next to each other, most likely they would have seemed the same. In many ways, of course, they already did seem the same, at least in Zee’s mind’s eye. It was barely possible to keep them separate while Lilly lived, but now their images were blending more and more.

Zee placed the basket on the flat base of Lilly’s grave. She hadn’t thought past doing it, but now she thought she ought to say a few words or, barring that, at least a silent prayer or something, but nothing came to her.

She tried her best to clear her head, to think about Lilly, but when she looked at the gravestone, she just wanted to cry again, which would have been appropriate except that she didn’t think she could stand to cry anymore. Her head ached so much from crying that she willed herself not to. Instead she walked up to the pavilion and sat looking out over the harbor toward Salem.

The House of the Seven Gables was partially visible from here. She tried to identify Finch’s house, but it was blocked by the boatyard across the street. The light from the Salem Harbor power plant blinked on and off, and for some reason, standing here, she thought for a moment of Gatsby standing and looking out at Daisy’s pier, though that light was green and not white, and lower to the ground and not on top of some coal-fired smokestack that people in both towns were trying their best to get rid of.

Zee fell asleep watching the harbor. It surprised her, first that she could sleep in the daytime-she had never been one to take naps-and second that she could sleep out in the open in a public place. The added confusion of an interrupted dream cycle meant that for a few seconds after she woke up, she had absolutely no idea where she was.

It had been the sound of an engine that had awakened her. A red truck was moving along the narrow lanes, driving first up one side of the hill and then down the other, taking each parallel street slowly, finally stopping and backing up when it came to Lilly’s grave. Adam didn’t turn off the engine before he got out of the truck. It idled and sputtered, creating a sound track that in retrospect would make what Zee saw him do seem more like a film than real life.

Adam walked over and stood for a long time in front of the grave. He looked at the headstone and then at the basket of flowers. Then he looked around to see if anyone was watching him. He picked up the flower basket Zee had just laid on the grave and heaved it. She watched as it arced in slow motion up and over the gravestones, finally landing on the pavement, where it smashed and scattered. Then Adam got into his truck and took off.

Zee was so shaken that she didn’t move for a while. She didn’t walk into the office and report the incident. Instead she got into her car and drove back to Salem. When she stopped for a red light, she dialed Mattei’s number and left a message.

“I know you told me to let it go, but I just saw something that made me think that Lilly Braedon’s death really wasn’t suicide. I need to talk to you.”

22

FOUR HOURS LATER MATTEI sat across the kitchen table from Zee. She’d had a hell of a time finding a parking place and ended up leaving her car way down on Congress Street at a four-story public garage, where she still had to wait almost twenty minutes for a space.

Zee had left her two phone messages that day, the first while she was still at the house, requesting a leave of absence so that she could take care of Finch, and the second two hours later, declaring that she didn’t think Lilly’s death was a suicide.

MATTEI HADN’T BOTHERED TO CALL Zee back. Instead she had gotten into her car and driven to Salem.

“I KNOW WHAT I SAW,” Zee insisted as they sat across the table from each other.

“I’m not disputing that,” Mattei said.

“He smashed the flower basket,” Zee said. “He’s dangerous.”

“We don’t know if he’s dangerous. He certainly seems angry.”

“We know he threatened her.”

“Yes,” Mattei said.

“You didn’t believe it before,” Zee said.

“I never said I didn’t believe it. It was the Marblehead police who were skeptical. And Lilly wasn’t exactly reliable. Or cooperative, for that matter.”

“She wasn’t suicidal,” Zee said.

“She jumped off a bridge.”

“What if he drove her to it?”

“What if he did?” Mattei asked.

“Shouldn’t we tell someone?”

“Tell them what?” Mattei asked.

Zee looked frustrated.

“Let’s think it through,” Mattei said. “There’s absolutely nothing anyone can do. You can’t arrest a person for driving someone to suicide. If you could, the jails would be full of husbands, wives, relatives, and employers. Isn’t it always somebody else’s fault?”

“Even so…” Zee said.

“She was bipolar,” Mattei said.

“I’m well aware of that,” Zee said.

“Well, you know from personal experience that this is how things sometimes end.”

“You mean my mother,” Zee said.

“Yes,” Mattei said.

“My mother was BP1. And unmedicated.”

“Medication doesn’t always work. Case in point, Lilly Braedon.”

“I would have known if Lilly was suicidal,” Zee said. Before Mattei had a chance to respond, she added, “I was thirteen when my mother died. And if it happened now, with my training, I would have seen the signs.”

Mattei was silent.

“And there’s something else,” Zee said.

“What’s that?”

“You didn’t think she was suicidal either,” Zee said.

“Now you’re telling me what I thought?”

“You wouldn’t have given her to me to treat if you thought so,” Zee said. “Admit it. She was as much part of my treatment as I was of hers.”

“Interesting theory,” Mattei said.

“You knew she reminded me of my mother. You thought I could treat her and make it turn out differently. Hell, that’s what I thought.”

“As in, ‘They all lived happily ever after’?”

“As in, ‘Work out some issues.’” Zee was clearly getting agitated. Her hands were shaking. She clasped them together, trying to steady them.

“Take a breath,” Mattei said.

Zee looked frustrated. But she obeyed. She took a deep breath and held it as long as she could. Then she slowly exhaled.

“Are you okay?”

Zee nodded.

“This is all very predictable. You just lost a patient. One who was important to you. You broke off your engagement. Your father is very ill. I don’t want you to underestimate any of this,” Mattei said.

“I’m not,” Zee said. “I’m well aware of the effect all this is having on me. I just think that we should tell someone about Adam.”

“‘We’ already have.”

“Then we should tell them again.”

“Again, let’s think it through,” Mattei said, more forcefully this time. “Think of the family. Do you really want to put them through more than they’ve already suffered? Lilly was having an affair with Adam. And from what the police told us, there were other men she was involved with as well. Is this really something you want to pursue?”

Zee remained silent. Mattei was right.

“If it’s any consolation,” Mattei said, “you were right. I didn’t see it coming.”

There was a sound at the kitchen door. Someone was on the deck. Jessina let herself in with her key, then looked at them.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you want me to come back later?”

“No, you’re fine. Jessina, this is my friend Mattei. Mattei, this is Jessina. She takes care of Finch.”

“Nice to meet you,” Mattei said, extending a hand.

“I was going to make cookies for him,” Jessina said, holding out a bag of flour she’d brought.

“Jessina is a great baker,” Zee said.

“From scratch, not a mix?” Mattei asked.

“I never use a mix,” Jessina said.

“Very impressive,” Mattei said.

ZEE AND MATTEI MOVED OUTSIDE to the deck off the kitchen. From here there was a great view of the harbor, only partially blocked by the boatyard to their left. The house straddled two streets, Turner and Hardy. It was long and narrow, with an entrance on either end.

“This is a really old house, isn’t it?” Mattei said, looking back at the twelve-over-twelve windows, the central chimney.

“Except for the deck,” Zee said. “And the widow’s walk.”

Mattei looked up. “I don’t see a widow’s walk.”

“Just the remains of one. See, up there? That flat part on top of the roof?” She pointed. “This house was purchased by a sea captain back in the late 1700s. Eventually he added the widow’s walk, then reportedly chopped it down in a fit of jealous rage.”

Mattei walked over to the historic sign posted on the side of the house: HOME OF ARLIS BROWNE, SEA CAPTAIN. “Wasn’t that the captain in your mother’s story?” Mattei asked.

“The very same.”

“Nice guy,” she said.

“Yeah, right,” Zee said.

A double-decker tour bus pulled out of the Gables’ parking lot and got itself stuck trying to make the right onto Turner Street. It backed up, then went forward, and then finally all the way back into the parking lot, where it did an exaggerated U-turn and exited the wrong way onto Derby Street, leaning precariously as it emerged, sending tourists scattering.

“There are a heck of a lot of tourists in this city,” Mattei said.

“Boston has tourists,” Zee said.

“Not dressed in witches’ hats, we don’t.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, gazing out at the harbor. The sun was bright and playing on the water, making it look as if the light were emerging from the water itself, a million random bubbles of silver popping to the surface and then disappearing.

“What’s that over there?” Mattei pointed across the harbor.

“That’s Marblehead,” Zee said.

“Ah, the infamous Marblehead.”

Jessina brought out some lemonade and two glasses, placed them on the table without saying a word, and then turned to go back inside.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Zee said. “But thanks.”

Jessina smiled, closing the door carefully so it wouldn’t slam.

“She seems great,” Mattei said.

“She’s a treasure. Melville hired her. She was a nurse in the Dominican Republic. She’s raising a son by herself and trying to finish a nursing degree at Salem State. All that with English as a second language.”

“I’m in awe,” Mattei said. “Aren’t you?”

“Every day,” Zee said.

Mattei sat and considered for a moment before speaking. “So I take it Melville’s not coming back.”

“He tried. Finch kicked him out again.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea. I know they had some kind of disagreement, but Melville said it was an old argument that had been settled a long time ago.”

“Evidently not,” Mattei said.

“That’s exactly what I said,” Zee said.

“So that leaves you as caregiver.”

“Pretty much,” Zee said. “At least until I can figure something else out.”

Mattei looked at her.

“I want to do this,” Zee said.

“That’s very noble.” Mattei paused. “But caregiving is very difficult.”

“I have Jessina,” Zee said.

“Even so.”

“It’s been okay,” Zee said.

“And you’ve been doing this for what? A week?”

“Nevertheless,” Zee said. It was meant to end the conversation, and Mattei knew it.

“Just promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Promise me you’re not just hiding out here.”

Zee thought about it. “I’m not,” she said.

“Okay,” Mattei said. “Take a leave of absence. But I don’t want to lose you. You’re too good a therapist.”

“Recent evidence to the contrary.”

“Stop it,” Mattei said.

MATTEI LEFT ZEE WITH THE name of a caregiver-support group at Salem Hospital and a prescription for sleeping pills.

“I don’t need the pills,” Zee lied.

“You told me you weren’t sleeping,” Mattei said. “It doesn’t hurt to fill the prescription. If you don’t need them, don’t take them.”

“Thanks,” Zee said.

Zee thought about it before bringing up the next subject. “There’s one thing we haven’t talked about,” Zee said.

“Really? What is that?”

“I’m assuming you talked to Michael.”

“We’ve spoken, yes.”

“Just tell me one thing,” Zee asked. “Is he okay?”

Mattei thought carefully before she spoke. “He’ll be fine. Given the right amount of time and enough red wine.”

Zee nodded. She didn’t want to know any more.

23

HAVING FORGOTTEN THAT HE’D agreed to teach the class tonight, Hawk had planned to go to Zee’s after work to install the railing.

As part of his employment contract for the summer, he was to co-teach a celestial-navigation course sponsored by the National Park Service. Though most of the Friendship’s navigation was done by GPS, Hawk was the only member of the crew who was proficient in celestial skills, and the captain wanted each of the ship’s journeys logged as if it were still the early 1800s, when all navigation was done by the stars.

This would have been fine with Hawk, except that many of the classes, which were taught at the Visitors’ Center and not at sea, conflicted with his duties on the ship. When he had agreed to teach, he’d assumed that the classes would be held on the Friendship as she sailed, allowing the students to learn to take the twilight sights. What he didn’t know at the time was that the Friendship rarely sailed at all, and when she did, she sometimes carried a few VIPs, but almost never any regular passengers. Though she was coast guard-certified to sail, as a general rule the Friendship stayed in port except when she served as Essex County’s or the National Park Service’s flagship for maritime festivals up and down the coast. Most days she sat at the wharf while large groups of tourists boarded and disembarked.

Recently an application had been made to the coast guard to commission the ship, which, if accepted, would allow the Friendship to take passengers out to sea and provide students and any other groups with a firsthand experience of Salem’s sailing history, something they were unlikely to understand any other way. But commissioning was a slow process. Hawk was able to bring the class aboard the moored ship to practice noon sights and learn to determine latitude, but he hadn’t been able to take them out to sea. For the most part, this summer’s celestial-navigation course had been confined to the classroom, something Hawk found appalling, and he didn’t hesitate to say so.

He was no less vocal the night of the first class when the other instructor, a man who had been teaching the course for the last five years, espoused the theory that sun sights alone were sufficient for navigation and that he had made several trips across the Atlantic taking nothing but sun sights.

“What other instruments did you have?” Hawk sounded doubtful.

“Well, we didn’t have GPS, I can tell you that much,” his co-teacher huffed.

Hawk’s co-teacher was an older gentleman named Briggs, a seasoned veteran with good credentials, who had once crossed the Atlantic solo from Plymouth, England, to the United States in a sixty-five-foot multihull. Hawk thought the guy was lucky to have made it. He didn’t criticize Briggs in front of the class, but he later expressed a strong opinion that the class should be taught using more than one navigational technique. Sun sights were certainly a part of celestial navigation, but so were moon, planet, and star sights, and Hawk could not conceive of teaching a course without all of them.

“They will learn to use a sextant,” Briggs said. “And for this beginning class, sun sights are quite satisfactory.”

In an odd twist, this year’s class consisted entirely of women. The other crew members kidded Hawk because the online brochure for the class had featured photographs of both instructors, and they were certain that this was the reason for the exclusively female enrollment.

“He looks like a young George Clooney,” one of the crew said, referring to Hawk’s photo.

“Shut up,” Hawk said.

After the first class, Hawk wanted to quit. Not only did he think an inside class was ridiculous, but the conflicts in his schedule left the Friendship shorthanded. And there was another reason. For the most part, the class full of women was fine with him, but there was a small group of them, known well to the other instructor, that the crew had nicknamed the “Yacht Club Cougars.” Three of them attended the first class. By the second, the group had expanded to seven. It wasn’t that he had anything against them, though they were a little cliquish and very outspoken, which tended to keep the other, less outgoing women from asking many questions. But their attempts at humor were fairly bawdy and were usually directed at Hawk, which might have amused him had it not made Briggs envious and argumentative. After one particularly disagreeable class, Hawk decided to talk to his boss. Contract aside, this class didn’t need two instructors, and the two men clearly didn’t like each other. Hawk would volunteer to quit.

But the other instructor beat him to it. “I can’t work with him,” Hawk overheard Briggs tell their boss. “You’re going to have to choose one or the other of us, and let me remind you that not only do I have seniority, but my family has donated quite a bit of money to this project over the years.”

Hawk quit the class. But a few weeks later, his boss came back to him. They’d had some complaints from the enrollees, who agreed strongly with Hawk’s assessment that the class should be taught at least in part on the water.

“Great idea,” Hawk said, happy that the students would finally get their money’s worth. “But why are you telling me?”

“We have an issue,” his boss said.

“Yeah? What’s that?” Hawk said.

“Over the years Briggs seems to have developed a problem with seasickness.”

“You’re kidding.” Hawk couldn’t help but smile.

“We were hoping we could convince you to take them out in your boat. It would only be for one class,” he said. “And we do have a contract.”

Hawk was well aware that they hadn’t docked his pay when he’d stopped teaching the class. “Okay,” he said. “Which class are we talking about?”

“The one on twilight sights,” he said. “We’ve titled it Rocking the Sextant. The sign-up sheet is already full.”

“I’ll bet,” Hawk said. Behind his boss, some of the crew were snickering. “You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that title, would you?” he asked one of them.

“Not guilty,” his friend Josh said. “But if you’re looking for crew to help out with the Cougars, I’m sure you’ll get some volunteers.”

“Funny,” he said.

“So you’ll do it?” his boss asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not without a pay cut.”

HAWK ARRANGED TO TAKE THE class out in his boat, a 1941 Sim Davis lobster boat, a forty-footer with the winch and gear removed, which Hawk had spent last summer restoring and was now living on just a few slips down from the Friendship.

THERE ARE TWO TIMES A day when it is best to take sights: dawn and dusk. Twilight sights are taken just before the horizon disappears into either darkness or light, in those few minutes when the planets and locator stars are still visible. It’s a moment in time, and it takes practice. For the beginner especially, it would be important to get to a spot where Hawk knew that the stars would be visible along the horizon. Which meant they had to get away from shore.

They left an hour before sunset in order to make it to open ocean. It was a relatively calm evening, and his boat was sturdy, so they wouldn’t have to deal with much chop. This was both good and bad. The sextant was a durable instrument meant to take vertical angles from a moving ship. One of the reasons for going out was that the students would get used to the movement of the boat and accustomed to taking readings in any conditions.

The women arrived early, with picnic gear and bottles of wine.

“I hope you also brought your notebooks and sextants,” he said when he saw the bottles sticking from their L.L. Bean canvas bags.

They headed out, passing the tiny lighthouse on Winter Island, then the Salem Willows Park with its long wharf lined with men fishing for stripers. When Hawk passed the confines of Salem Harbor, he gunned the engine, heading between the Miseries and Children’s Island and as straight out to sea as was possible in the sheltered waters that ran between Salem and Cape Ann.

“Where are we going?” one of the Cougars finally asked.

“We have to get past land by twilight,” he said. They sat quietly in the stern. He finally stopped the boat at a spot he knew well, where the chop wasn’t too bad. Behind them, fading into the distance, was the entire North Shore, and to the south the vague outline of the Boston skyline. But straight ahead, if you didn’t look back, was a clear horizon line.

“It’s a bit rough out here,” another student said.

“Not at all,” Hawk replied.

“What if we’re in the middle of a shipping lane?”

“Sometimes a shipping lane is a perfect place to be,” he said, laughing.

They all looked around nervously.

“Relax,” he said. “We’re not in a shipping lane.”

“Phew.”

“But can anyone tell me when a shipping lane might be a place you’d want to be?”

They all looked at each other.

Finally, one of the shyer women spoke up. “If you get in trouble and need to be rescued,” she said. “A shipping lane would be a good place to get to. Like if you’re breaking down or something.”

“Are we breaking down?” Another woman asked, horrified.

“Relax, ladies, we’re not in a shipping lane, and we’re not breaking down. But I’m glad to see someone has been reading the book.”

One of the women had pulled out a bottle of wine and was looking for a corkscrew.

“I didn’t know this was a party,” Hawk said.

“I generally like to have a little wine before I rock my sextant,” the woman said.

The other women giggled, and Hawk hoped he wasn’t blushing.

“You ladies are relentless,” he said.

“We prefer to think of ourselves as focused,” one of them said.

“I think you’ll focus better without the wine,” he said.

“You’re not very playful.” The woman sounded disappointed.

“Work now, play later,” Hawk said, taking the bottle and putting it back in the bag.

They got out their notebooks and their plastic sextants, things Hawk hated but had to admit were adequate for this class. He kept one of them himself as a backup, though if he had to, he could get a reading without a sextant at all. Watches were another matter. In order to get an accurate reading, you had to track Greenwich Mean Time to the second. If you spent enough time on the water, you planned for all possible worst-case scenarios. He knew at least three sailors who had horror stories about failed GPS devices. Some were ocean legend, but he knew that at least a few of them were true.

Tonight the ladies were all wearing quartz wristwatches, something you didn’t see much in these days of cell phones. Hawk turned on the shortwave and tuned in to WWV to sync with Greenwich Mean Time. He listened to the tick and the tones until the time was announced, and he looked on as the women checked their watches. So far they seemed to know what they were doing. A good sign, he thought.

Only one of the women hadn’t brought a watch, and he quietly handed her his. He had at least two more of them in the cabin-more worst-case-scenario planning. It was possible to figure Greenwich Mean Time by taking moon sights, but it was difficult and not nearly as accurate, and he didn’t like to do it except in an extreme emergency. He wasn’t going to even bring up moon sights tonight. He didn’t want to confuse them. Let them master using the sextant first.

“OKAY,” HE SAID. “FIND A spot you’re comfortable with and set up your sextants.”

He watched as the women positioned themselves in the stern, setting up their instruments and consulting their almanacs.

“Have you all done your calculations? Do you know what stars you’re looking for?”

They couldn’t have tracked their present location in preparation for tonight, but they were close enough to where they started that the locator stars should be the same. He walked around, checking their calculations. They looked pretty accurate.

“Now what?” a woman said.

“Now we wait.”

Hawk went below and checked the time. He had hoped to be back in time to do Zee’s railing tonight.

“May I please use the head?” one of the women asked him.

Hawk pointed her to the bow of the boat.

When she came out, she spotted the brass sextant in the mahogany case that sat open on the table.

“That’s a beautiful sextant,” she said. “Is it an antique?”

“It was my grandfather’s,” he said.

“May I try it?”

“Sorry,” he said. “There’s an aluminum one over there, if you want to give that one a try, but this one’s off-limits.”

He handed the other sextant to her, and she went back on deck looking as if she had just won a prize.

“Hey, where’d you get that?” one of the other women asked.

“Jealous?” She laughed and set up the aluminum sextant in the stern.

Hawk came out on deck and checked the sunset. In the distance the landscape of Boston glimmered red and purple.

Seeing the trace of Boston skyline, Hawk’s mind jumped to Lilly Braedon and her fall into those same waters. Though it hadn’t happened that way at all, in his mind’s eye her fall was in slow motion, the cell phone falling with her as it dropped out of her hand. It seemed such a surreal sight that his mind played it in slow motion frame by frame until she disappeared into the shining sapphire of the water below, slow, dreamlike, impossible to believe even in memory.

Quickly he turned away from the image and in the opposite direction, toward the horizon line. The sun had set about ten minutes ago. It was twilight.

“Check your watches,” he said. “It’s time.”

The chatter that had been a low part of the sound level stopped.

“Tonight we’re looking to fix our position on at least two of the three stars you have chosen. With any luck we will be able to see all three. They should be low on the horizon. This won’t be like the sights you took from the Friendship. There’s a lot more motion out here. You will want to rock the sextants back and forth, watching the arc, and keep adjusting until the star you sight is sitting directly on the horizon line.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “These instruments are built for chop. It’s actually easier to get a reading on a moving ship than from a fixed position.”

He walked back and forth, helping the women position their instruments. “Don’t be fooled by the planets. We’re looking for stars. Planets look more like disks-they don’t twinkle.”

It took a while, but they all seemed to get it. When they began to take their readings, the group grew even quieter. The shyest of them gasped. Hawk leaned over and took a quick look at her sight, then smiled at her.

“Nice, huh?” he said.

“Beautiful.” She seemed amazed.

He had done this thousands of times, but it never failed to fill him with awe. There was a moment when you spotted that first star, a pinpoint of light just where (if you had done your calculations correctly) it was supposed to be in the sky. He’d heard it described as a religious experience. He wasn’t sure about that. But when you spotted that first star or when the stars crossed exactly where they were supposed to cross, there was nothing better. Even if you’d been dead reckoning in the middle of a storm, or if overnight the Gulf Stream had taken you a hundred miles off course. If you had done your calculations properly, there would be a moment when you found that the star you were looking for was exactly where it should be on the horizon. In that instant the universe made sense, and you knew that no matter what else happened in the world, the stars would always tell you where you were, and when they did, you would always be able to find your way home.

The group was quiet on the way back to Salem. Some of them were writing in their logbooks, some just watching the stars as the sky grew darker and the constellations moved higher in the sky.

When he pulled into his slip, some of the crew were there to meet them. His friend Josh tied them up, and another crew member handed him a six-pack of beer he’d brought along.

“You can open the wine now,” Hawk told the ladies.

“Really?” They seemed surprised.

“Sure,” he said. “You earned it.”

Josh handed Hawk a beer. Hawk looked at his watch. It was almost eleven. He definitely wasn’t going to get to Zee’s railing tonight.

24

ZEE ATTENDED THE CAREGIVER-SUPPORT meeting at Salem Hospital. The room was surprisingly crowded. There were coffee and pastries in the back. It was rather more like a twelve-step program than she had expected. One by one, the people got up and told their stories.

A low level of depression seemed to run through the group, or maybe it was exhaustion. Certainly there was disillusionment and resentment, tales of siblings who didn’t help enough or of parental demands that put such a strain on the caregivers that for the most part they seemed to have given up their lives. One woman, who had teenagers at home, talked about the stresses of trying to care for an ailing parent and deal with teenagers and menopause at the same time. Several other members of the group commiserated or nodded approval.

“Aren’t you a little young to be here?” one of the women asked Zee.

“My father is in his late sixties,” Zee said. “And he has Parkinson’s.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said.

Though Zee got some good and practical tips for Finch’s care, for the most part this group was depressing. She couldn’t help but wonder if Mattei had known it would be. Perhaps this was a cautionary tale.

“Caring for an ailing parent is a lot like caring for a baby,” the group’s moderator said. “Except with a baby, you get to look forward to the results.”

THAT ZEE WAS ALREADY A bit depressed seemed evident to Jessina, who kept making excuses to stay a little later each day and to try to engage her in conversation, often talking about her son, whom she clearly adored. Tonight she told Zee that Danny wasn’t home and that she’d been wanting to bake a cake for Finch. She didn’t have a proper mixer or the right pans at her apartment, she said. Zee knew it was an excuse, because Jessina had just recently baked Finch a cake at home. So far that cake was only half eaten. Jessina hovered around her and kept asking if there was anything she needed. She didn’t need anything, Zee said, but she appreciated the offer.

At seven forty-five, Jessina finally went home, leaving a spice cake with white frosting in the refrigerator for Finch. At eight o’clock, someone knocked on the front door. At first Zee thought that Jessina had forgotten something, but no, she always came in the kitchen door at the other end of the house, and she had a key. Zee found herself holding her breath, hoping it wasn’t Michael.

In the events of the last few days, she’d almost forgotten about Hawk and the handrails, but she found herself relieved to see him standing here now. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and was carrying a tool bag.

“I have to take some measurements for the railing,” he said, as if thinking Zee might have forgotten why he was there. “Sorry it took me so long to get here.”

She led him to the hallway.

“Is this an okay time to do this?” he asked, seeing her expression. “I can come back tomorrow if you want.”

“No,” she said. “Now is fine.”

She showed him where the OT had said the railing should go, about thirty inches off the floor.

“Usually they’re thirty-four.”

“The OT gave me the height,” she said. “She wants it to match the height of my father’s walker.”

“Makes sense,” he said. He looked inside the tool bag, cursed, then went out to the blue van for a tape measure.

When he came back, she was still standing in the hallway. He made her hold one end of the tape while he measured the wall once and then again.

“I’ve got to run up to Home Depot to get the stock,” he said.

She nodded. “You want some money?”

He shook his head. “Just pay me when I finish the job.”

WHEN HE RETURNED THE NEXT night, Hawk started trying to guess where he knew her from. Over the course of the evening, it had become a joke between them-a game, really-and the only conversation they made.

“The yacht club,” he’d say.

“Not likely.”

“What about Maddie’s?”

“In Marblehead?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Nope. Sorry. Never been there,” she said.

Zee tried to keep things light. But she wished he would give up the game. It made her nervous. The last thing she wanted to do was to explain her relationship with Lilly to Hawk. Patient confidentiality prohibited any discussion of Lilly’s case, any explanation of why, as Lilly’s psychotherapist, Zee had been unable to save her. Not that she had any explanation that would satisfy anyone anyway. The truth was, she hadn’t seen it coming. She had failed.

HAWK CAME BACK THE FOLLOWING night at six, and the night after that, and by the fourth night he had completed the handrail. It was a nice job, rather more finish carpentry than Zee had expected. He had sanded and varnished it so that it was smooth and splinter-free.

“It looks like a ship’s rail,” she said, running her hand across the sanded surface.

He smiled. “At least I didn’t make it out of rope,” he said, and she laughed.

She could see him notice the spot on her finger where the engagement ring used to be, the patch of paler skin that highlighted its absence. She quickly let her hand drop from the railing.

“Really, it’s nice,” she said. “It should work well for him. Thank you.”

“I’ll come back Thursday night to do the grab bars,” he said.

“Thursday’s good.”

He looked at her again.

“What?” she asked.

“I know where I saw you,” he said. “We met at the fund-raiser for the Home for Aged Women.”

“Excuse me?”

He pointed in the general direction of Derby Street.

“Oh.” She laughed, remembering the building from childhood, though they had changed the name on it over the years. “No, I wasn’t invited to that one.”

“I’m not giving up,” he said. “I never forget a face.”

ON THURSDAY NIGHT, JUST BEFORE it was time for him to arrive, she was surprised to find herself peeking in the mirror to check her hair. She realized it had been a while since she’d even bothered to look. But tonight she found herself putting on a little makeup as well, just some mascara and lip gloss, but she noted it, and it surprised her.

Hawk was an attractive guy, dark-haired and good-looking by anyone’s standards. He had a winning smile and a fading scar that ran down the right side of his face, just enough imperfection to make him interesting. But he wasn’t her type. Not that she even knew what her type was. Her mind went to Michael. This was ridiculous, she thought. It was too soon. And there was Lilly.

She put the makeup away and frowned at herself in the bathroom mirror.

INSTEAD OF WAITING AROUND TO see him, Zee took a walk. She wandered down by the Willows and played a game of skee ball, then walked over and got herself some popcorn and sat on a bench listening to music and feeding the gulls. In the cove a class of first-time kayakers practiced rolling over and righting themselves.

When she got back, Hawk was standing in the kitchen, his tools packed away. “The job is finished. You want to see it?” he asked, already leading her down the hall toward the bathroom.

She moved past him in the small space, stepping toward the tub, then turning to face him. “Good work,” she said.

“Didn’t require a lot of skill.” He looked at his work. “I hope the height is okay. This was the only place I could put them that had wall studs.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “Thank you.”

He grinned at her. “So what’s next?”

“I guess we’re done, and I should pay you.”

He laughed. “Okay.”

“Let me get my checkbook.”

It was a small bathroom, and as he moved back to let her pass, she brushed by him. He tried to step out of her way, but she miscalculated and went in the same direction, bringing them chest to chest in the tiny space.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Not a problem.” He didn’t move out of the way immediately but stood there looking into her eyes for an extra moment before he stepped back. “After you,” he said finally, acting out as much of a chivalrous bow as the small space permitted.

He smells like the ocean, she thought as she moved past him.

SHE LOOKED EVERYWHERE FOR HER checkbook, but it was nowhere to be found. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is ridiculous. I had it this morning.” She thought about it. “I can drop off a check to you tomorrow when Jessina comes,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll stop by and pick it up tomorrow night after work.”

“Are you sure?”

“No trouble,” he said.

She walked him to the door. “It gives me one more day to figure out where I’ve seen you,” he said. “Or you could just tell me.”

“What?” she said.

“I could tell that you recognized me that first day on the wharves.” It wasn’t a confrontation, more a statement of fact. “So I figure you can just tell me so we can stop this dumb game we’ve been playing and maybe move on to something more interesting.”

He smiled at her, and she felt herself flush. Damned Irish skin, she thought.

Not giving her a chance to answer, he turned quickly, and before she could say anything, he was gone.

ZEE HAD TROUBLE SLEEPING THAT night. She kept thinking about Lilly Braedon and the funeral and whether or not she should tell Hawk where he had seen her. She didn’t mind him knowing, but she didn’t want him to ask a lot of questions. As Lilly’s therapist she had confidentiality issues, to be sure. But it was more than that. Whether or not he was attracted to her, Zee knew that the minute she admitted it, she would be judged. Therapist of a suicide? He would judge her the same way she’d been judging herself.

She finally fell into a fitful sleep at about three in the morning. She didn’t wake up until almost eleven. She was alarmed as she looked at the clock. Jessina was supposed to leave at ten-thirty, but she wouldn’t leave Finch alone.

Zee pulled on her cutoffs and a clean tee. For the last several nights, she had been sleeping in Maureen’s room, where it was quieter and the one place that Finch wouldn’t wander.

Jessina and Finch were sitting in the kitchen. He was wearing a canary yellow shirt with red pants and eating a piece of cake accompanied by a big glass of milk. Zee couldn’t help but smile.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to both of them. “I really overslept.”

Finch, as if just realizing where she’d been sleeping, looked up the stairway but said nothing. He had long ago closed off Maureen’s room. Zee could tell he didn’t like the idea of its being opened again.

“You look better,” Jessina said.

Zee realized that she felt better.

“You want some cake?” Jessina offered.

“For breakfast?” Zee laughed. “No thanks. I might have a piece after lunch, though.”

Jessina looked satisfied. She removed the apron she’d been wearing and draped it onto the hook. “How do you like your father’s new look?”

“Colorful,” Zee said.

Finch groaned.

“You look younger,” Jessina said, patting him on the head as she passed. “Younger is never a bad thing for a man. You get out, you see. The ladies will fall on you.”

Finch looked at Zee in horror.

“I think she means the ladies will fall all over you.”

“Yes,” Jessina agreed. “That’s what I said.”

Finch’s expression of horror was no less pronounced.

“How’s Danny?” Zee asked, trying to change the subject.

“He’s fine. He’s going to day camp to learn to swim.” Jessina pointed up-harbor toward Children’s Island.

“That’s great,” Zee said.

“I’m just cleaning up before I go,” Jessina said. “Anything else you need me to do?”

“I think we’re all set,” Zee said. Jessina came in twice a day, once in the morning to feed and bathe Finch, then later to give him dinner and get him ready for bed.

“I’ll see you at dinner,” Jessina said to Finch. “Fish tonight.”

He smiled weakly as she left.

“I don’t think she realized the nature of your relationship with Melville,” Zee said, pouring herself a cup of Dominican coffee that Jessina had brewed.

She was trying to engage him in conversation about it, as she had promised Melville she would. But Finch wasn’t biting. Instead he turned and looked up the stairs. “Why are you sleeping up there?” he said. “You have a perfectly good room down here.”

She didn’t want to tell him the reason; she was afraid it would hurt his feelings. The real reason was that she couldn’t take his sundowning. It scared her to wake up and find Finch in her room. He was simply checking on her, the way he had when she was a child, but it kept her from sleep. Ever since the freezing episode when she’d awakened to the fearful look in his eyes, she hadn’t been able to sleep downstairs.

She knew that she wasn’t required to answer, that the question was rhetorical. Finch was simply expressing his disapproval at the door, which, having been locked for so long, now stood open and leading up the stairway to the room where they’d found her mother.

ZEE KEPT HERSELF BUSY CLEANING all day. But she couldn’t stop thinking about what she was going to say to Hawk. Finally she realized that the only logical thing to do was to tell him that they’d seen each other at Lilly’s funeral and stop the game. She had a certain curiosity about what had made him attend the funeral in the first place, though it was not that uncommon among witnesses. But she knew she wouldn’t ask him that. And she couldn’t discuss anything about Lilly. She would tell him that she’d seen him there and hope that ended it. She was pretty certain it would, along with any attraction that he either did or did not feel for her.

Zee tried to keep busy and not think too much more about what she was going to say. But as the day wore on, she found herself growing more and more agitated.

At five-thirty she opened a bottle of wine. She sat on the deck drinking and watching the boats.

At six o’clock Jessina brought her out some cheese and crackers to go with the wine. “You shouldn’t drink that with no food in the stomach,” she said.

Zee thanked her and was about to invite her to join her for some wine when the doorbell rang. Jessina hurried to answer it.

Zee watched as Jessina led Hawk to the deck.

“Nice view,” he said.

“Pretty much the same as yours,” she said, looking back toward the Friendship.

“Yeah, but you own yours,” he said.

She smiled. “I don’t, my father does.”

She got her checkbook and started to write. Then she looked in her wallet and realized she had money she hadn’t used to reimburse Jessina for groceries. “Would you rather have cash?”

“Always,” he said.

She was a little altered from the wine. She saw him notice the bottle.

“Would you like a glass?”

“I’m not much of a wine drinker,” he said.

“How about a cracker?” she asked. “The cheese is pretty good.”

He took a cracker, but he didn’t sit down.

If she was going to say anything, it had to be now. “Please,” she said. “Sit.”

He took a seat opposite her at the table.

There was no way to say it but straight out. Emboldened by the wine, she went ahead. “I’m going to tell you where we saw each other,” she said.

He looked at her.

“It was at Lilly Braedon’s funeral.”

“What?” He couldn’t have looked more surprised.

“You were the eyewitness on the bridge,” she said.

He was quiet for a long time. “Were you a friend of Lilly’s?” he finally asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

She had resolved not to tell him more, but she found herself explaining. “I was her therapist.”

It was worse than she’d thought it would be. She should never have said anything. If she hadn’t been a little buzzed, she never would have opened her mouth. She could feel his eyes on her, judging her. I couldn’t save her, she wanted to say, but instead she just sat there waiting for him to say something.

It took a long time for him to speak.

“Damn,” he finally said.