The Boatman's Wife
Noelle Harrison
Chapter One
Rockland, Maine, 18th October 2017
Lily had always been lucky. Her daddy said it to her from when she was a little girl.
‘Darling, you were born under a lucky star.’
He described the night of her birth as if it were a fairy tale. Early December in Rockland, Downeast Maine, with the whole town coated in thick snow, the full moon iridescent and otherworldly. The lucky northern star beckoning as he held his newborn baby girl in his arms. Cradling her up to the winter night sky as if casting her in moonlit magic. Her parents had waited so long for her arrival. It had seemed a miracle. That was why her father had always said she was extra special, brimming with all the good fortune due her parents after years of disappointment.
Though Lily’s mom told her daddy off for filling their daughter’s head with nonsense, deep down, Lily had believed him. Her whole childhood, everything she had wanted had come true. Right from her first days in school, she had won all the competitions. Best at art, spellings, and sports. Lily had always been the first picked randomly out of the hat. Everyone wanted her on their team because that was the one which won. Her luck had lasted all these years.
She and her daddy had won the Lobster Races three years in a row. Of course, he’d named every one of his boats after her – Lily May – for luck. All those summers she’d spent working on his boat, early mornings banding lobster, shivering with cold from the streaming Atlantic chill, she’d felt lucky. Nothing was better than the look her daddy gave her when they brought back a big haul of lobster.
‘You’re a born fisher,’ he would say to her with pride.
Lily knew she was everything to her daddy: son and daughter. It was she who made each lobstering season better than the one before, as if she were a lucky charm bringing them good fortune as soon as they set out.
Her first memory was of being on the boat, despite her mom’s grumbling that she was too little. Lily had slipped out of her grasp and clambered onto her daddy’s boat. Let him swing her in the air, laughing all the while.
‘She belongs on the ocean, Sarah!’ he’d declared, letting Lily sit on his lap as he began to steer their boat out of the harbour. Out into the wide blue open, while her mother stood on the wharf and watched, arms crossed and frowning.
It was true. The ocean was home. Lily loved every part of it. The days of stillness when she’d catch her reflection in sheer pools of silken water, and the rough days when it felt like they were riding a wild horse. Bucking all the way back to port. She loved the smell of the ocean. It sank into the pores of her skin, and her hair was always tangled and wild from the western winds.
Of course, Lily had stood out a little at school. None of the other girls wanted to fish, and Lily had no interest in fashion or movie stars. That all seemed so fake to her. Lily’s idea of a great time was hiking. Scrambling up boulders, and dangling legs over ledges with fishing rods. She was too much of a tomboy for dates; had once punched a boy for trying to kiss her on one of those hiking expeditions. After that, none of the others dared ask her out. Lily hadn’t cared back then. At sixteen, she’d rated herself lucky to be single when she could count the number of hurried weddings among her school friends on both hands. Girls just out of her high school with babies, already worried their husbands might not come back from sea one day.
That was it. Where to have luck was a matter of life and death. Working as a lobster fisher would never stop being risky, no matter what. Because the Atlantic Ocean could never be tamed. But Lily’s star had shone bright. Always. So many times they’d been caught in storms, daunted by towering waves, but she’d never thought, not once, that she and her daddy wouldn’t make it back.
As the years passed, though, Lily changed. Four years ago, on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, she’d woken up feeling lonely. Realised every single girl she had known at school was married, or at least had a fiancé. For the first time, she’d felt sneaking envy. What did it feel like to be loved the way her father loved her mother? Would she ever find a boy for herself? Thinking of all her fishing mates, not one of them made her think so. She’d seen them covered in fish guts, stinking and swearing. They were her friends, and she couldn’t imagine touching any of them intimately.
On the December morning of her twenty-first birthday, on a rare day off lobstering, Lily had risen at daybreak and slipped outside. Icy air bit into her as she tucked her gloved hands under her armpits and made her way down the hill to the freezing wharf. It was cold, so cold, but there was no wind. Lily took the rowboat out, and as she rowed slow and steady through the thick, glacial water, she stared back to shore at the weave of white wooden houses along the craggy Maine coastline, the little one-rock islands and sparse pine woods. She lifted her face to the sky and asked silently for a soulmate. Felt the frigid air film her cheeks. She asked again, out loud.
‘I want someone,’ she said, unable to say the word ‘husband’ because it made her feel pathetic. In her heart, she wanted it more than her own luck. The husband and the babies. As she rowed back to shore, she felt a bit disappointed in herself. After all, she was like the other girls.
Here she was now. Four years later. Her twenty-first birthday wish hazy and near-forgotten. Yet it had come true. The very next summer, she’d met Connor. Had she ever thanked the ocean for him?