They sail into the docks of Ribeira Grande, on São Miguel, under the cover of a fog-shrouded night. From the wheel, she sees nothing but a smear of lights on a black shape of ascending land. The first step of land beneath Emily’s feet makes her uneasy.
George carries their linens to a laundry. While he’s gone, Emily moves through the market displays and thinks of sailors. Heaps of fragrant fruit gleam. Jewelry clinks in the wind. She imagines them land-starved and stumbling into narrow alleyways packed full of waiting merchants. Cotton blouses, cotton shawls, cotton skirts billowing in the salt-laced wind. She smells cooking fish and gardenias blooming in pots. Such sensory stimulation following a long interment between the bright sky and the rugged blue sea feels expensive; food, the jumble of bodies, the scent of new skin beaten down by the bitter breath of greenery”to surround oneself with bought things feels like worship, a tithing.
The ground shifts, her legs haunted by the ghosts of the ocean. She enters the heart of the market and her life struggles to unfold into land-bound dimensions. She buys herself a pair of skirts, a pair of blouses, a dress, a shawl.
She buys a woven bag to carry them in and walks to the outer edge of the market, into a tiny outdoor cantina. She orders a bowl of beef stew. She sits beneath a canopy of bougainvillea, shocking fuchsia petals falling, and she watches the people as she sips broth from the bowl’s edge. She breathes in the steam, remembered tides settling to stillness between the bones in her feet. Distance murmurs, a quarter-turn of the globe let loose beneath her skin. She swallows. The broth is rich, beaded with tiny drops of fat, laced with onions and brown blood. Long fingers of wind reach all the way from Nantucket to stir the bright petals of the bougainvillea. The fog’s chill clings to her nose, to the tips of her fingers.
“Get anything?”
The wind blows Emily’s hair off her face. A woven bag rests at her feet. “Here.”
George slides into the seat beside her. He leans over the table and sniffs. “Smells good.”
Her stomach growls. She picks up a spoon. “There’s more than enough.”
The waiter arrives. He stands at the corner of the table and takes George’s order of stew, bread, white sangria.
“You know something?”
Emily shakes her head. She takes a sip of broth.
He watches the tourists. “My mother used to come home at night. Late. There would be some party in the city, she was into that, you know, the parties and the fundraisers.” He leans forward and puts his chin in his hand. “She’d come home and she’d open my bedroom door and stand there, looking at me. I wasn’t asleep. I’d look at the wall and count the seconds of each breath so they all sounded the same.” He pauses. “Together we’d wait. I’d see her shadow on the floor and the flashes of light thrown off her sequins, scattered onto the walls.” His free hand waves in a circular gesture. “Those weird spinning flecks of light.“ He shrugs. “You know what I mean. I don’t know what we were waiting for. What she was waiting for.”
The soup comes. George straightens up and takes the spoon, but he doesn’t use it. Unasked, the waiter places an empty glass beside Emily’s bowl and fills it with sangria. She watches George as he watches the people in the market, the spoon resting in his fingers. Emily picks up the glass of sangria and takes a sip. Its sharp fruity flavor is discordant, jangling against the oily taste of his words. She sets it down on its ring of moisture.
“Now my father, on the other hand.” He takes a bite of stew. “I saw my father at each quarter of the school year, in the library. He sat on the other side of the desk. The room smelled like whiskey and leather. Such a cliché,” he sneers, chewing and swallowing. “He worked so hard at it, you know, to be the kind of father he thought he was supposed to be: a distant figure handing down judgments from on high. His own father was rich, all that money was inherited along with this…this thing, this studying the report cards like they were artifacts.”
“Your mother studied you.” Emily turns the sangria glass around. “Your father studied your grades.”
He nods and glances at her glass. “Yes.”
Emily takes a bite of stew.
“I used to think that she…you know, wanted to fuck with me but didn’t have the guts to do it, standing in the doorway like that. I knew she was looking at me. I could feel her eyes on me, on my body, my legs under the sheets. On the.” He leans back in the chair, looks into the bowl. He takes a bite. “Shape of my cock. But then I got older, and I thought maybe it was something different: she was afraid of me in there by myself. That maybe something would happen and she wouldn’t be able to watch.” He pauses. “That maybe I was plotting in there by myself. To do something to her, or to my father. She never quite learned to trust me.” He puts the bowl on the table and breaks bread. “She never gave in all the way.”
“What would you have done?”
He dips the bread in the broth. He glances sidelong at her. “If she’d wanted me?”
Emily turns her spoon inside her stew. “Yeah.”
He shrugs a shoulder.
“Did she even feel like a mother?”
“No,” he says. “So I guess it wouldn’t have been a big deal.”
“Were you? Were you plotting in there by yourself?”
George looks at her, holds her gaze. “We had an understanding.”
Emily takes a bite, her guts turning over on themselves. The potatoes and onions are soft, the meat tender. The disturbance is vague yet restless in her blood. The thought, unformed and ruthless, squirms its way deep down inside her mind: the teenage son at the heart of the fruit, devouring it from the inside out. She flushes and swallows. She crosses her legs, pushing the bowl away. His eyes follow the course of her hands.
She looks at him, at the side of his face, and a rawness softens into her voice. “What if you’d had a sister?”
“I don’t know,” he murmurs.
“If she’d wanted to get in bed with your sister.” Emily weighs down the space between each word with handfuls of silence. “What would you have done then?”
“I know what you want me to say.”
Her voice draws close to a whisper. She searches his face. The sounds of the cantina leak through her words. “Would you have done it?”
He puts the spoon down and looks into her eyes.
“What if your sister had been like you?”
“That girl might’ve slept with a knife under her pillow.” His voice lowers and his smile unfolds into a slow secret. “She might’ve played with it in her bedroom at night while she waited.” He picks up her hand. “I think she might’ve been like you.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
Emily smiles. “You would’ve liked her, then, this hypothetical sister of yours.”
He shrugs.
She turns toward him. “Would you have killed your mother for getting into bed with you?”
“It depends.”
Emily moves hair out of her face. “On what?”
He looks at her. “What if I’d liked it?”
Trapped in his gaze, Emily is helpless not to imagine it: a white door opening, an expensive door, spilling light into onto the darkness of a room that smells like boy, like young man, all those racing hormones soaked into the sheets. She sees the mother, older but well-preserved, wrapped tight in a cocktail dress. She’s tottering on her designer heels. She’s had just a little too much to drink.
Where’s John? Somewhere in the sleeping house. Maybe not, maybe he’s gone out, she doesn’t know. George is asleep. It’s dark in the room, a little light from an alarm clock. The mother thinks he’s asleep but in the back of her mind, at the bottom of hot cave we all retreat to when made primitive by our fears, she watches his sleeping form and knows there’s something…off. He sleeps like a creature lying in wait. He looks like any adolescent boy asleep, his breathing is even and deep, but in the darkest chamber of her mind, in its most secret place, she knows. The thought makes her sweat. Her body breaks down the traces of her expensive perfume, the one she had made in Paris, splintering the molecules of her good taste and setting them adrift on the darkened air; she stands in the doorway, her shadow cast long and thin, and she thinks about this young man, her son, fourteen or fifteen or sixteen years old, whenever he started to grow, to become muscular, to gasp awake in the night into a clot of sticky sheets”she looks on him in his bed and thinks of him as an animal, a beast separate from her, and she sweats into her silk. This thought arouses her more than any other, kindles more fear.
Emily watches the birds hop around the table legs, confused perhaps by the lights, cruising for dropped crumbs. She watches them, the heat racing into her cheeks. She focuses on the antics of the birds, the little hops, how they cock their heads and look up at her. Her thoughts don’t distract her from the scene rising in her mind, summoned and unfolding: George runs a finger up the back of Emily’s wrist, the shiver hidden inside the sensation anchoring the image of the mother, his mother, a middle-aged woman with an expensive figure constructed of a photograph. The short tight dress made out of black sequins. The light on her neck, highlighting the hairs pulled loose from her twist, earrings swinging above the shoulders, the expression on her face distant, befuddled, trapped, hungry. One long white hand rests on the doorframe. The gemstones on her fingers sparkle. Perhaps it’s snowing outside, one of those New England storms blowing up the coastline. It doesn’t matter because in the house, it’s quiet. John is asleep or John is out, he is away from this moment. Her eyes linger on the bed as she eases off her heels.
Emily leans forward, picks up her sangria glass. She feels George watching her. “Do you…do you think…” She glances at him and takes a drink. She swallows. “Do you really think you would have?”
A wind stirs through the bougainvillea. “She wouldn’t have dared,” he murmurs. “So it doesn’t matter.” He touches her chin. “I’ve made you uncomfortable, haven’t I?” A small smile twitches across his face and his voice softens. “I have discomfited you.”
She nods and takes a drink. “Yes.”
“You’re imagining it. Aren’t you?”
She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “Yes.”
He rests his forearm on the back of her chair. “Which part?”
“What do you mean?”
His mouth quirks in a transient smile. “The part where she tries to get at me? Or the part where I kill her for it?”
“I don’t…” Emily swallows. She puts the glass down. She half-turns in the chair, looking at him. “I don’t go past the part where she takes her shoes off.”
He grins as he starts to chuckle. He touches her cheek. “You’re blushing.”
Emily turns her face. “This is what you’re going to talk about when we get on land?”
“I’ve been here before,” he says. “The first time I was here with my parents. I was sixteen.”
Her eyes find his. “So there are memories.”
He nods.
“Are you going to tell me about them?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes.”
Her hand turns over inside his. Her knuckles fill his hand and their palms flatten together, hot, fingers curling around one another like snakes. He leans in close and holds her gaze with care, with tenderness, like it’s something dangerous.
“Yes,” she says.