18
Onion started his Coast Guard training about a month later, in early March. The training divided his time between field work—mostly spent cleaning the small rescue launch or the docked ferries and learning the names of the equipment on board under the supervision of his cousin Frank who everybody called Cracker and was already a First Mate—and classroom study. This consisted of his Uncle Berg or Aunt Dotty pulling a dusty manual off the shelf in Berg’s office and dropping it in front of him on the table in the dispatch office. “Memorize this then I’ll give you the test,” Uncle Berg would say, by which he meant that he would literally give him the test and let him fill in the answers out of the book.
Though the training was not rigorous, it did fill all of Onion’s weekdays. Brooke complained that he was “no more than an unpaid government flunky.” Onion, when he chose to respond to Brooke’s protests, would mutter something about “paying his dues.” In any case, Onion was hardly ever home, as he worked nights and weekends at the restaurant to make up for the weekdays spent in training.
And though he stopped smoking pot at home, following Brooke’s repeated nagging about “being a bad influence on Jodie,” she could tell he was smoking more often out of her sight, both after the restaurant closed (a daily ritual to “take the edge off”) and now sometimes while supposedly “in training,” probably off with Cracker at the end of the pier or in the break room with the windows open and the fan on. Brooke found it hard to complain about Onion’s marijuana use, since it had been a regular feature, and accelerant, to their courtship and early marriage, with her willing participation and occasional encouragement. But since Jodie’s birth she rarely smoked and never got high, seeing the activity as a vestige of bygone youth and youthful irresponsibility.
So now in the rare moments she saw her husband with both of them awake, he was almost always high. But instead of being the energetic and silly and creative free spirit he used to be when high, he was now mainly silent and sullen, escaping into his own world of non-responsiveness. At times Brooke envied him this escape, which only made her angrier as she realized that escape was now closed to her forever, by choice and circumstance.
As Onion found his escapes—and she could only imagine the full details of those escapes as he sometimes didn’t come home at night and other times arrived home disheveled and with the scent of an unfamiliar body clinging to him beneath the smell of pot or alcohol—Brooke explored her own options in this regard. The obvious opportunity was alcohol. With Jodie nursing less, she felt free to imbibe more—sometimes with Daphne but increasingly alone: at first a beer before dinner, then a beer before and with dinner, then a beer before and with and after dinner, sometimes interspersed with shots of rum. It was an easy slope to slide down, took the edge off her day and her loneliness.
Within the haze of that escape, she silently contemplated other escapes. There were lots of men on the island; and almost every one of them—single, divorced, or married—would have been delighted to sample her offerings. Though she’d largely damped her fires of sexual lure since choosing Onion, those fires and their attraction still blazed within her. The obvious choice, and safest, in this possibility was Dave Weldon. She didn’t cross paths with his often; but whenever she did, he’d stare calmly, fixing her with those piercing blue eyes. She could’ve stared right back, matched his taunt, but so far refused to engage in that game. She’d not spoken with let alone touched him since that day in his pick-up, the last day she spoke to Greta. But it was getting more difficult for her to turn away from those stares. And those weren’t the only stares that followed her as she ran her errands on the island. Even with Jodie almost always in tow, male eyes both familiar and strange would follow her every sometimes prancing step, the stare often accompanied by a low whistle or suggestive comment. Part of her—indeed, most of her—was glad for these attentions. But she feared what would become of her if she ever accepted those invitations and surrendered to that escape.
Finally there was the escape of a new drug in town, a white powder inhaled through the nose. She’d heard of it in college and had been at a few parties there where others had snorted it. But she’d never tried it until a get-together last fall for a waitress returning to college. The waitress, named Colleen, had pulled out a small vial of the powder and passed the mirror around for all to sample. After the stinging in her nose subsided, Brooke felt an unprecedented sense of euphoria, a formerly impossible combination of energy and comfort, the world both more brilliant and more secure. Colleen recognized the transfixed gaze in Brooke’s eyes and jotted a number on a slip of paper “in case you want more than this taste.” It was an island number with no name attached to it. Brooke had never dialed that number but kept the slip hidden beneath her underwear drawer.
Opposite these idle and often not so idle—in fact, sometimes quite urgent—musings, stood—or lay or sat or crawled or, just last week, tottered from standing beside the couch into her mother’s waiting arms leaning forward from the chair—Jodie. For a brief spell in the dimmest depths of a fog-bound winter, Brooke thought of her daughter as an anchor dragging her down, even backward, into the enslavement of maternity. But with the gradually brightening days reviving youthful needs and hungers within her—she was, after all, still only twenty-two—she began to perceive her daughter as a different kind of anchor, one that kept her from flying off into the realm of self-indulgent escape that had come to define her surroundings. She would picture herself as a bright colored balloon—red, of course—being tugged toward a brilliant blue sky by swirling ocean thermals only to look back and see Jodie seated on the sand in her sun bonnet firmly clinging to the string that tethered her balloon to earth. This image was planted in her mind one sunny afternoon when Malcolm White sampled his new canister of helium first by inhaling a bit and speaking in a funny squeaky voice and then by inflating a large red balloon and offering it to the mesmerized Jodie who refused to release it all the way through the walk home and her bath and dinner and bedtime story, not even while falling toward sleep. It finally came loose after she fell asleep, as she pulled her hand to her mouth to suck her thumb. Brooke realized that day the tenacity of her daughter’s grasp and focus, even so young, and committed herself to match that intensity in her search for a future that would benefit them both, not simply gratify some near-term hungers or needs.
But the path of that search would not be a direct one.