Chapter 6 - The Room by the WaterfrontOn Saturday morning, I went to Pine Creek alone. Miles had taken a shift at the local ambulance bay to clear his head, and Graham was back at the motel handling work calls from Seattle.
The facility was quiet. A nurse with a silver stud in her nose gave me a small paper cup of water and told me Dad hadn't eaten his breakfast.
"He's in a state of hyper-fixation today," she said, checking her clipboard. "He thinks he’s still working the night shift at the fuel dock. If he gets agitated, just tell him the boats are tied up for the storm."
When I walked into room 114, the blinds were drawn against the glare of the water outside. My father was sitting on the edge of his bed, his bare feet hanging down toward the linoleum floor. His legs were thin and white, the skin translucent enough that I could see the blue tracery of his veins. He was clutching an old brass boat cleat in both hands, his thumbs moving over the smooth metal with obsessive rhythm.
"The cleat’s slipping," he said as I closed the door. He didn't look up at me. His voice had that dry, whistling quality of someone who hadn't drunk enough liquid. "Nora, tell the boy to double the line on the stern. The south swell is coming over the breakwater."
I sat in the vinyl chair next to his bed. "Miles isn't here, Dad. It’s Tess."
He stopped rubbing the brass. He turned his head slowly, his cloudy blue eyes focusing on my face with an effort that looked physically painful. "Tess. The little one."
"Yeah," I said. "The little one."
"You have your mother’s ears," he muttered, his mind drifting back into the grey fog for a second before snapping back with a sudden, terrifying clarity. "Nora took the Subaru. I told her the alternator was whining. She didn't listen. She never listened to me after Sarah died."
Sarah was my mother’s name. It was the first time I had heard him say it since I was eleven.
"She listened to you at the bank, Dad," I said, leaning forward, my hands flat on my knees. "She signed the affidavit in 1998. Why didn't you tell us about the tax debt? Why did you let us think you just wanted Celia’s kid instead of us?"
Dad let go of the boat cleat. It dropped onto the mattress with a soft thud. He looked down at his own long, scarred fingers, his knuckles swollen with arthritis. "A man doesn't tell his kids he lost the house, Tess. A man doesn't tell his son he can't buy him grease for his truck because the county’s got a lien on the garage."
"So you let Nora be the bad guy," I said.
He let out a short, wet sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. "Nora was never the bad guy. Nora was the only one who could run the line. She was like her mother—when the wind came up, she just got heavy. She told me if I didn't send the four hundred every month, she’d bring the sheriff down to the marina and show them the original deed from Arthur."
He reached out, his hand hovering in the space between us, cold and shaking. "I wanted to see you, Tess. I drove up to that apartment on 4th Street. I sat in the truck across from the grocery store for two hours. I saw you walking home with a loaf of bread under your arm. You were wearing that yellow jacket."
My breath hitched. I remembered that jacket. It had been missing a button near the collar, and Nora had replaced it with a blue one from my mother’s old sewing tin.
"Why didn't you get out of the truck?" I asked, my voice breaking.
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"Celia said it would ruin the deal," he whispered, his eyes filling with that slow, confused terror that vascular dementia brought in its wake. "She said if the bank found out I was supporting two households, they’d call the note. They’d take the house anyway. She said we had to wait until the ten years were up on the modification. But by then... by then the letters were coming back with that red ink."
He looked past me, his gaze fixing on the doorframe where Nora had stood two days ago. "She’s still there," he whispered. "She’s always standing in the door."
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