The Boatman's Wife(8)

The vehicle stank a little of sardines from all the bait trips her mom made. Before Lily had been allowed to go out fishing with her dad, this had been her job as well. Driving out to Booths Canning Company. She hadn’t liked this minor role at all. Right back from as far as she could remember, Lily had wanted to be a fisher like her daddy.

At the age of five, she’d sat on the big sill in the front window, crying, waiting for her daddy to come home with the smell of the ocean on him, and a shine in his eyes from a big haul. Her mom would try to console her by getting her to bake cookies, but Lily wasn’t interested in playing house. Every day, she’d asked if she could go fishing. At first her mom had told her she was too young, and then she’d told her that lobster fishing wasn’t for girls.

Then when she was thirteen, her dad had started taking her cousin Ryan out with him. Lily had gone into a fury.

‘Ryan told me he hates fishing,’ Lily had complained. ‘But I want to fish. It’s not fair. Who says girls can’t fish?’

‘It’s heavy work, Lily,’ her mom had told her. ‘You’re not strong enough.’

‘But I’m stronger than Ryan!’ she’d complained. ‘I beat him all the time at arm wrestling.’

‘Let her go with me,’ her dad had said to her mom, much to Lily’s excitement.

‘I guess once you see what it’s really like, you won’t want to do it again,’ her mom had said, giving in.

But as soon as Lily had set foot on her daddy’s boat, it had felt like a kind of home. Not a safe place, no: but somewhere she belonged. Way more than Ryan did. Sure, he was a good second mate now, but it had taken years for him to get it right.

Even her dad had been astonished at how quickly Lily had picked it up.

‘Well, it’s not rocket science,’ Lily had said, making poor Ryan feel even more stupid. She’d always been fast at things. Lobstering suited her.

When they were both fourteen, Lily and Ryan had worked their first summer lobster fishing with her dad. Lily had felt sorry for Ryan. He clearly hated it, but lobstering was what Smyth men did. His father, Uncle Joe, had been a lobster fisher before the family had lost him to lung cancer. It was Ryan’s destiny to follow in his father’s footsteps. Ryan’s lack of natural inclination for lobstering was one reason why Lily’s father took her out with them. It was as if Lily was Ryan’s shadow, helping her cousin.

That summer, Ryan had confided in her that he was having nightmares about giant lobsters chasing him across the ocean. Sea monsters with enormous pincers, crazy eyes on top of their hard shell heads, and long, spidery antennae.

‘You need to lay off the pot,’ Lily had laughed at him.

Lobster were living product to Lily. They were the means to her family’s survival. There were rules and regulations, and of all industries, theirs was one which had always been focused on conservation. Their livelihoods depended on the survival of lobsters.

The next summer, her father switched Lily and Ryan’s roles, and Lily became sternman. Her job was to pull each trap in as it was hauled up by the winch, then open it and take out the lobsters. Chuck the shorties, those too small to be legal to fish, back into the Atlantic, and throw the rest in a container ready to measure and band. She’d push the empty trap down to Ryan and he would take out the old bait bag, throw it in another box, then fix the new bait bag, before closing the lid of the trap and putting it on the shelf down the centre of the boat, ready to drop in a line with the others. Lily moved so fast, sometimes Ryan would be hollering at her to hold up. As soon as they’d emptied all the traps, she and Ryan would turn to the boxes of squirming greenish-brown lobsters and band their pincers. Of course, Lily flew through them, careful to measure any she was uncertain of, while Ryan laboured over the task. Now and again, a big mama egg-bearing lobster would land in their catch, and Lily got the job of snipping a V in her tail so other fishers would put her back in the sea. She never chucked the big ladies so hard – after all, they were carrying precious cargo – but dropped them gently into the ocean.

When Lily and her dad had taken Connor out with them the week after they’d got married, Lily had been astonished to see he was even slower than Ryan had been. All fingers and thumbs. But Connor, of course, was examining each lobster and thinking about which would be the best one to cook. His mind was always on food, or the creation of food. As fishing had been her passion, cooking was his. Over the past three years, his fishing skills had improved, but it had never been a consideration that he would become a fisherman like her father and Ryan. In Maine, fishing was an inherited occupation, and that was the way it was. Fishing licences passed down through the generations. You had to trust your fellow shipmates with your life. That kind of trust only came from family, even if you didn’t get on.

Rain and sleet lashed into them and the wind buffeted the station wagon as Lily drove down the road, aware of the giant waves crashing onto the beach. Her mom’s silence was enough to tell her she was deeply worried, too. They drove to the point, but it was too dangerous to get out of the vehicle and they couldn’t see anything. It made Lily feel even worse. The thought of her family out in their small fishing vessel, trying to ride back into port over at least sixteen-foot waves was enough to make her want to vomit. It was one thing considering how her father and Ryan would manage, but what about Connor?

It was all her fault. If she hadn’t have been so obsessed with wanting a baby, she wouldn’t have made the appointment at the clinic, and Connor would be sitting in the station wagon with her mom right now. While she would be out on the ocean with her dad.