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  Rather than commit to anything so specific as a baby, he finished the sentence with an awkward … the future. He stared at the paper. So much empty space. He looked outside the window to focus but could see nothing through the fog that now coated the harbor, and he considered the water, how it could change its very nature, turning into fog or ice with only the most delicate swings of temperature. Yet underneath it was water, no matter the form it took. His mind continued to stalk the essential nature of matter and meaning before snapping him back to the task at hand: the letter.

  The thing to do was to throw in words Cora liked to use. Harmony. Peace. Openness. Adjustment disorder with mixed emotional features.

  No, no, that was all wrong. Truth be told, he’d rather not be using words at all. Cora had once said that their marriage would last forever because there was something in each other they couldn’t reach, and it was that unknown quantity that fueled erotic tension. Over the years, his hands had traveled miles over her body, searching for that something. When they’d first met, they made love as if they were an endangered species, but then it all changed when it seemed as if that could very well be the case. When they had to act on precisely timed couplings meant for procreation, there was no more searching for anything other than the right fertile moment. Conscious action had been his undoing. He picked up the photo of her he kept on his desk. He had taken it a couple of years ago, in their backyard, a landscape she kept in a perfect balance of nature and cultivation, very much as she kept herself. Her dark hair flew around her oval face in delicate wisps, and she wore no makeup except for a little pink on her lips to make them more kissable. Her eyes were a soft, animal brown, so wide and alert she seemed like some beautiful creature of the forest. Sometimes she dabbed cover-up under her eyes because she hated what she considered bags, and what he thought of as depth.

  He reread the words he’d written, and with elaborate precision he ripped up the page. He pulled out a fresh sheet and, starting at the upper left corner, he wrote “Cora, my sweets, I love you, I love you, I love you” down the page to the very bottom, turning it over and covering the back, until he reached the lower right corner, where he signed his name.

  When he was done, he folded it up as carefully as a memorial flag and slipped it into its Florentine-lined envelope. He closed his eyes as he wet the flap with his tongue. He was oozing with warmth as he picked up his pen to address the envelope, but when he was done and saw his former street—his real home—written out in his own hand, he began to feel remote, even from himself. How was it possible that he could live in the same city with Cora and yet be so far away? What was keeping them from getting back together? He hoped it was not someone new.

  “Duncan?”

  Nod, wearing sailing shorts, a light windbreaker, and a baseball cap with the logo of a sailmaker on the front, stood at the door, looking down at his boat shoes. He left the house so infrequently these days, it was a shock to see him. With his bald head covered by the hat, he looked more like the Nod of their childhood—rounded cheeks and cherubic lips, a perennially burnt nose, and a shy but determined look about him. He would be thirty-seven in a few weeks. Who could have foreseen that this would be his life? Nod was the oldest son—why wasn’t he sitting here, at their father’s desk with all these worries, freeing Duncan to live his own life far away?

  “Hey, Nod. Did you sail here?”

  Nod shook his head and looked around the office. “I just came back from Portland. I went to buy a Duck.”

  “Duck?”

  Nod inched slowly into the room, as if he were a lobster entering a trap. “You know, a Sea Duck, an amphibious vehicle. Army surplus.”

  They stared at each other for a minute, both unable to bring the topic to its next natural step. Duncan broke the spell. “Why?”

  Nod smiled and cleared his throat. “I thought about, you know, the money thing. I was thinking, here Mom and I just drain the company of dividends, when I should be doing something to help.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “The bank let me borrow against the house. Mom is all for it.”

  “The house? I couldn’t borrow against it to save Seacrest’s, but it’s okay to do it for a boat?”

  “Not a boat. A business. I’m going to run sea-land tours here in the summer, right off this beach. I’ll do Kelp-in-the-Wild tours. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Here?”

  “I need more funding to get Sea Turtle off the ground. Bear is going to refit the engine to run on used cooking oil. I’m getting that from Slocum in exchange for an ad painted on her side. He says that if his ship comes in by next summer, he’ll even invest in the business, but I wanted to offer it to you first. For a price, Seacrest’s Ocean Products can be her main sponsor.”

  “Who knows if there’ll be a Seacrest’s next summer?” said Duncan. “If I don’t come up with the money to pay the loan sharks back in a few months, they’ll own it, not me.”

  “Maybe I should talk to them.”

  “If I lost the company to Osbert, you wouldn’t do business with him, would you?”

  “You know, Duncan,” said Nod, looking out at the blank wall of fog outside the window, “in sailing, to change direction is a risk because if you’re caught in the eye of the wind, you stop dead and go in irons. You have to have momentum to change.” He turned to look at Duncan. “One of the benefits of the Duck is that it can adapt quickly to changing conditions, on land or sea. It might be our salvation. It might be yours.”

  “What is your point?”

  Nod laughed in his peculiar way, a prolonged haa that sounded like the whiz of the wind. “No point.”

  Duncan stood up with his envelope. “I’ve got to go to the post office,” he said. “I guess you’ll just have to see who’s sitting at this desk when you’re ready to paint a sponsor’s name on the Duck.”

  “Sounds like a deal,” Nod said, not understanding that Duncan was being snarky. No matter. If Duncan lost Seacrest’s, he would be out of this town in a heartbeat, so he wouldn’t have to look at some treacherous ad on the Duck.

  “Come see my baby,” said Nod, turning to the door. “She’s in the parking lot.”

  “She is? You own her already?”

  Nod smiled. “I took my car to Portland and drove the Duck back. The dealer took the car as part of the down payment.”

  “You have no more car?”

  “I won’t need one anymore. I’ve got the Duck. Now I’m going to motor it home along the harbor.”

  Duncan had a hard time imagining Nod doing errands around town in a massive barge-like vehicle, whether he came by land or sea. But it was harder still to believe that Nod had the initiative to start a business, or that come next summer he would give up racing in order to run it. He wondered if his mother understood what changes lay ahead.

  ~

  “Sea Turtle.” Duncan said her name out loud as he walked around her metal hull. There were restaurant and ferry ads painted on her side, remnants of her former life running out of Portland. Under the scratches, he saw her old camouflage paint, and he wondered if she’d been at the D-Day landings. Osbert, with his Churchill fixation, would love that.

  “I thought I’d have big, colorful turtles painted on her sides,” said Nod, holding his arms out and wiggling them. “Have the paddled arms and shells available for sponsors’ ads. Come on up—have a look at these controls.” Nod arranged himself in the captain’s seat while Duncan stood on the wheel bumper and watched him push a lever to change it from land to sea. The frame sank slightly as the wheels raised up. “It’s not any harder than changing to four-wheel drive. Want to come along for her maiden voyage?”

  “She’s not exactly a maiden,” said Duncan, jumping down to the pavement. “I think I’ll let her show you the ropes first.” He looked out at the fog. He heard the sea breaking on the opposite shore, and the bell buoy clanged a warning. “Are you sure you should be going home by way of water? Is your radio working in case something go
es wrong?”

  “Bear is going to install new electronics this winter. I’m going to hug the shore until I can beach her at the Boat Club landing. Then I can just drive around the corner to home.”

  “Do you have a mariner’s license to drive her?”

  “Don’t need one,” said Nod. “I have a driver’s license, so I’m halfway there.”

  “Halfway there,” mused Duncan, patting the side of the vehicle. “Maybe Mom’ll go for a ride with you someday. Maybe this could get her back into the world.” Nod fiddled with some controls. “She’s not out of this world now.”

  “Nod, her feet have barely touched earth since Dad died.”

  “Just because she doesn’t want to leave the house? She’s perfectly sane. Just cautious.”

  “Not cautious. Nuts.”

  Nod laughed his breezy laugh again and put Sea Turtle in gear. With that, he turned the heavy vehicle slowly around, her parts and panels creaking with the effort, and headed for the water, where she transformed into a seagoing vessel. She was not elegant, she was not graceful, but she moved forward, churning and bobbing happily into the harbor before disappearing into the great banks of fog.

  “Good luck,” Duncan whispered.

  As he zippered his jacket, he looked up at Seacrest’s. It was slab-sided and flat-topped, but in the softening mist, it seemed magisterial in its bulk, and as much as he resented the drain it took on his psyche, there were times when it had a pull on him that went beyond reason. He was glad he had risked doing business with Osbert to save it. It would have been much nicer if he could have avoided it, oh, say, by mortgaging the family home as Nod had just been allowed to do—Nod with no business experience and no work experience. But still. It was nice to know that Seacrest’s was safe for the moment. He touched the envelope in his jacket. Now he had to secure his marriage.

  As he left the parking lot, he waved to the men on the loading dock. The savory odor of marijuana cut through the motionless fog. It used to be that the smell of rotting fish parts covered up all other scents, but now that the new system contained all the vapors, pot smoke was the predominant note outside the factory. He ignored it. If he had to handle shipments of decaying chum all day, he’d want to hover a few inches above it, too. He wished he had such a simple chemical solution to all his problems.

  Maybe he did. Pheromones. He took the envelope out of his pocket and slipped it under his shirt and against his skin, where his essence would rub off on his walk into town. Cora would vaguely wonder why she could not put his letter down. He hurried his step up the hill toward the post office. It had been unseasonably hot before the fog rolled in, so the damp pavement gave off an urban smell of cement and asphalt. He missed the city. He yearned for those years of anonymity again, when he could be anyone he wanted, as opposed to being here in Port Ellery, where it seemed the most intimate details of his daily life were played out in the open.

  Duncan put his hood up and tried to disappear inside of it as he hurried through town, but he was stopped by every passing pedestrian to chat. He had a fresh appeal for the locals, as if being on YouTube had transformed him into a different person—familiar, yet totally strange. He found himself trying to avoid people he knew, but there was no place to hide, no alleys or streets where he would not bump into someone, so he just walked faster. He was practically running as he turned the corner to the post office. The collision with Syrie was sudden, loud, and dramatic. She dropped her armload of packages and squeaked in profound delight. Her dog, protected in a quilted shoulder bag, growled.

  “Duncan!” she said, pushing back her golden sheet of hair. “I had so much in my arms I couldn’t see where I was going.”

  “My bad,” he said, already scrambling to pick up the boxes. “I’ll get them.” As he stacked them in his arms, he wondered at their lightness.

  Syrie dug around in her bag for her keys, and the dog made irritable noises. “Do you mind?” she asked, swaying to the music of her own voice. “My car is only right there.”

  “Sure,” said Duncan. He stood up with the packages and dropped two of them, which she retrieved herself, bending over from the waist, and as she did, her white raincoat slid up her back, exposing purple form-fitting slacks.

  “This way,” she said, standing up and gesturing with her bag of dog.

  The fog was thick up on the hill, and the packages were piled so high in Duncan’s arms they blocked what little vision he may have had, so he stuck as close as a barnacle behind her. She rippled when she walked, as if waves were passing through her body. He almost bumped right into her again as she stopped abruptly in front of an older lilac Jaguar.

  “I know this car,” he said. “It’s my mother’s. It’s the one she drove before she … before she didn’t.”

  “I know,” Syrie said as she opened the trunk. “Last summer Nod told me he needed room in the garage and did I want to buy it. It’s been on blocks all these years, so it was in good shape for the years.” She ran her hands down her raincoat. “So I bought it and had it restored. I love the older models, don’t you? The cracked leather, the varnished wood. You know, when I was young, I always looked up to your mom. I wanted to be just like her.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do. Or I did. She was so carefree, she didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought of her or what she did. It was too bad she sort of buried herself in that house after your dad died. They must have loved one another very much.”

  “I suppose.” Duncan let the packages fall out of his arms and into the trunk. “What are all the boxes?”

  “Promotional gifts. Velvet masks to put over your eyes when you sleep, with my ad printed on them.” She opened a box and removed a small plastic bag, through which Duncan could see the purple mask and the words Wake up smiling, Dirty Talk Wake-up Service and a telephone number. She handed it to him. “Take one, and let me give you a ride back to the office.” She slammed the trunk shut.

  “Why not?” he said, and he slipped the mask into his pocket. The fog settled in sparkling drops on her face, and he saw her as through a white gauze—innocent, even angelic. She smiled at him as she unlocked her door, and he smiled back, but the moment he lowered himself in the soft leather he immediately regretted his decision. This was the car he’d learned to drive in. It was that very backseat where he’d lost his virginity. With Syrie. His shoulders stiffened to sharp points, and he began to feel a subliminal current pulling him to her side of the car.

  “Buckle up,” said Syrie as she turned on the ignition. “I had to have seatbelts installed, of course. Your mom didn’t believe in them.” She pulled down the reflector and freshened her lipstick in the vanity mirror until her lips shimmered like the underside of a shell. The dog sat in her lap and showed Duncan his mean little teeth.

  In an effort to make himself busy, he put his jacket hood down, and rivulets of condensed fog ran down his shoulders. “I’m getting your seat all wet.”

  She gave him a sidelong smile. “I’ll turn the blower on, but it’ll take a couple of minutes for the windows to defog. The old girl needs to get up to speed.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” asked Duncan.

  She turned to face him. “If I can ask you one.”

  “I’m curious. Why did you tell me your suspicions about Osbert, then turn around and start doing business with him yourself? And what did you need money from Osbert for, anyway? I thought business was booming.”

  “That’s two questions,” she said.

  “I know, but still.”

  “If you paid more attention to Club gossip, you’d know all about it.” She ran her palms over the dark, hand-whipped leather of the steering wheel and gazed at its center as she spoke. “When Lance and I were married, I was that oblivious, too. I didn’t have anything to do with the bills. He took care of all that. Then one day I opened a phone bill looking for a number and found one—nine thousand four hundred dollars. You can imagine my surprise. It wasn’t long before I found
out we were in serious debt because of his phone-sex addiction. After the divorce, we were both broke. And I thought, if phone sex is that good, maybe I can get my money back from it. I called some of the nine-hundred numbers and learned a few tricks. But I didn’t want to work nights, and I didn’t want to actually talk to those perverts. That’s when I came up with Dirty Talk Wake-Up and started advertising on Craigslist. I record a new message every day, but recently I’ve had to start hiring other voices. Men like variety.” She gave Duncan a wry smile before continuing. “The business just grew and grew, and I needed to update the system, but none of the banks would listen to me. When I heard you and Osbert on the Club porch that day, I realized he was the answer to my prayers. You and I were in the same boat, Duncan. The banks wouldn’t give us any more money and Osbert would. But unlike you, I rather like the danger involved in dealing with him. But you—you’re so easily frightened.”

  “I am not,” Duncan said. “Of Osbert or anything.”

  Syrie looked down at her teeny dog and scratched its head. “I remember when you were a kid, and you’d stand on the rocks as storms came in, letting the waves hit you, and you wouldn’t budge. You were absolutely fearless. Now you’re even afraid of me, and I’m rather a mild danger compared to Osbert.” She raised her hand to the top button of her blouse and peeked over at him.

  Duncan smiled and looked down at his hands. “I remember standing in the waves. When my father caught me, he said I was thicker than a sea slug. And he was right. It was a stupid thing to do. I’d never let a kid of mine … ” He trailed off into an awkward silence.

  “You were so fearless, you actually left Port Ellery.”

  He felt his face get warm. “Are you still mad at me for going?”