Chapter One
It wasn’t until I was about to enter kindergarten that my mother sat me in the captain’s chair to talk to me about something, with my father standing in the doorway of the living room, listening.
She had a familiar light yellow folder clutched in her hand.
Daddy was about to be on his way to his office building to work when she announced that she was going to explain things to me about myself.
He stopped with surprise and stepped back to the doorway.
“Things?” he asked.
“About her health,” Mommy said sharply. “Your sister said a girl her age would understand and should know.”
“Advice from my sister?”
“She is a nurse, Melville.”
“The only advice she’s capable of giving is how to be miserable,” he said.
Mommy smirked and turned back to me. I had seen her looking into the yellow folder she had in her hand often, but I did not know where she kept it or why it was so important to her, to me.
She never left it laying around anywhere in the house where I or anyone else could peek at what was inside.
I used to think it was just some secret business information about our lobster and fish company.
Mommy was sleeping more often in the smaller bedroom right past mine toward the rear of our house, so it could have been kept in there.
When I first asked her why she had suddenly decided to sleep in that bedroom, she said it was closer to me and until I was older and more in charge of myself, it was just a good idea.
That puzzled me at the time, the time before the captain’s chair, but I didn’t ask any more questions about it.
Daddy didn’t seem to be terribly upset with her sleeping and moving her things there. He often kept his feelings under wraps. The only thing I heard him say was that he had more room in their bathroom with all her “beauty gimmicks” gone. Mommy gave him a look that could spear a bluefin tuna.
Her violet-blue eyes got brighter and bluer when she was angry or going to say something very important, and that was the way they were when she told me to sit in the captain’s chair.
I could never turn away from those eyes.
I heard people, especially my father, say that she had a kind of “violent beauty.” Looking at her was like looking into a flame.
Before she started, she brushed her honey-brown hair away from her face.
My hair was her color and always kept about the same length, which made me feel pretty because everyone thought she was.
I couldn’t imagine being more beautiful than my mother, even though older people were always promising me that I would be someday.
“Your mother is the most attractive woman on Birdlane when she is unaware anyone’s lookin’ at her,” Daddy once said. I thought that was nice until he added, “Just like most women who put on airs when they know someone’s lookin’ at them.”
I quickly sat in the captain’s chair. My father was the one who mostly used this brown leather chair with nailhead trim.
It was the most important place in the room, because everything else, the two facing sofas and the oak wood coffee table, was arranged so that whoever sat in the captain’s chair commanded everyone’s attention.
I knew it was going to be an “adult” conversation.
Nothing would be disguised; there would be no “baby” talk, no putting the truth into magical characters or animals that talked like people, and I wouldn’t be permitted to look elsewhere or be distracted.
I had to sit up straight and put my hands in my lap, but that was never easy for anyone sitting or talking here, because there was a lot to distract him or her in our living room.
Framed in a high-gloss black finish was the front-page article in Fishermen’s Voice announcing my grandfather Charlie Baxter’s creating the Baxter Fish Enterprises Company on Birdlane Island to buy and sell Maine seafood.
Every Birdlane fisherman in one way or another now worked for the Baxter company.
We had our own office building on Main Street.
Grandfather’s office had big picture windows that looked out at Frenchman Bay.
Daddy complained about his own office not having that view.
He wanted more acknowledgment. Grandfather had finally made him officially the vice president.
At first we sold only on the East Coast, but today we were selling all over the country. What made our company front-page news back then was that Grandfather Charlie was only twenty-two years old when he stepped off a lobster-fishing boat and became what my father called an “entrepreneur.”
I had to pronounce that carefully because Daddy thought it was such an important word, especially since Grandfather had created the most successful business on Birdlane Island and the one that employed the most people besides fishermen.
Almost everyone in one way or another—the store owners and all the professional people, like lawyers, doctors, and dentists—was dependent on it, because if the fishermen didn’t make money, they didn’t, either.
On another wall hung one of Grandfather Charlie’s original lobster traps.
He’d had the others bronzed and given them to us.
The opposite wall had ten pictures of Grandfather on his boat; three of them included Daddy as a young boy.
He said he wasn’t much older than I was at the time.
He added that sons of fishermen were expected to grow up faster than other children.
I wondered about daughters, but it was rare to see any girls working on fishing and lobster boats.
Mommy had told me that girls usually didn’t want to get “fisherman claw hands,” hands that had calluses and got really sore.
In most of the pictures of Grandfather’s boat, you could see some of the lobster catch.
I always felt sorry for the lobsters, which Daddy and others often called “bugs.” I would avoid saying how much I felt sorry for them when I was growing up.
The one time I did, when Daddy had two of his and Mommy’s friends to dinner, his face turned lobster red and his head nearly exploded with anger.
“That’s our bread and butter!” he cried. “You should have respect and gratitude, not pity!”
“Melville,” my mother said, sharply enough to sting his ears. He simmered down like boiling milk when the burner on the range was lowered.
Unlike the parents of other children my age, mine were very concerned about shocking me with reprimands, my father less so than my mother.
Even when she was upset with something I had done or was doing, she spoke in a soft but firm voice.
When I was very young, I didn’t think that was so unusual, but after my mother had sat me in the captain’s chair, I painfully understood the reason. I would have rather been yelled at.
I had been to see Dr. Bush, who ran the small clinic on Birdlane Island, and I had vague memories of being taken to see a doctor at Mount Desert Island Hospital in Bar Harbor.
I could recall the scary-looking equipment he used when examining me.
But it was some time since I had seen the specialist and had gone to see Dr. Bush.
No one really had told me anything I understood.
Aunt Frances had tried to say something once.
I remembered that just as she began her sentence, both Mommy and Daddy practically pounced on her.
Mommy opened her special file and took out a paper with official-looking doctor’s office information at the top. She turned it so I could see the picture. It was a visual of the heart. Mommy held it with her left hand and pointed to it with her right forefinger.
“You know what this is,” she said. I nodded. “You know that it pumps our blood around our body.” I nodded again, even though I never fully understood that. No one had really ever explained to me where our blood came from and where it went.
She took out another paper that showed a picture of the heart cut so you could see into it.
“There are four valves in the heart that keep our blood flowing in the right directions. You don’t have to know their names right now or what each one specifically does. You just have to know that one of yours wasn’t working correctly when you were born.”
That frightened me, and I looked at Daddy, who smirked and shook his head.
“If you think it’s time to get that technical, why don’t you let a doctor tell her?” he said.
Mommy didn’t turn completely around. “Because he wouldn’t care as much as her mother, and he’d hide behind science so he wouldn’t have to show any emotion. She’d be scared to death.”
“Well, whaddya think you’re doin’ to her now? Especially if you’re followin’ Frances’s advice.”
Mommy looked at me closely. “She’s all right. She’s a big girl.”
Daddy grunted. “I’d feel gawmy doin’ that,” he said, “gawmy” being a word we used in Maine to mean clumsy, awkward.
“You’re not doing it. I am. You don’t have to stay, Melville,” Mommy said. “Go to work. I’ll take care of it.”
Daddy started to turn to leave but then turned back.
“Go on,” he said. “I’d like to hear how you tell her about it, too.”
Mommy pressed her full lips together for a moment and took a breath, which I knew was her way of swallowing back anger. She fixed her eyes on me again with an intensely serious gaze.
“When you were born, the doctor who delivered you heard a whooshing sound in your chest, and that was when we really had you examined and were told you were fine but we should always keep an eye on you. Now that you’re going to start attending school, I want you to help by keeping an eye on yourself, too. ”
I looked at Daddy, who tilted his head a little and this time looked more surprised, like he did when he said, “I wonder why I didn’t think of that.” It was truly like he was blaming his own brain, as if it was one of the Baxter employees.
“How do I do that, Mommy?”