“I don’t know about this,” said Cam.
“Come on. You just need to get outfitted. Here,” said Asher. He pulled a long wool hat with earflaps over her head and gave her some big rubber boots and huge orange gloves that looked like lobster claws. “Adorable,” he said.
“Ew. I don’t want to be part of your fisherwoman fetish,” said Cam.
“Too late,” said Asher. “Get in.”
Before they could leave, though, Royal pulled up and maneuvered a different boat to the dock. He was with another robust Maine teen named Grey.
“You’re late,” Grey said as he wound a line around a metal mooring. “We already took care of it, boss.”
“You did?” Asher asked.
“Ayuh,” said Royal.
Cam was impressed by how willingly these guys had left their boyhood at the dock and shouldered the responsibility of men. It was refreshing to meet people who actually worked. She would never meet this kind of person at Harvard, she thought. (Not that she was going there.) People who were still connected to the land, the sea, their community. People who felt responsible for something other than their grade point averages. She shed immediately her cutesy little refusal to eat lobsters and vowed to eat one as soon as they got back.
“Lucky us,” Asher said. “I guess this is just a pleasure cruise, then.”
“All dressed up and no place to go,” Cam said, holding up her orange-gloved hands.
“We can catch at least one for you,” Asher said.
“Can we eat it, too?”
“As you wish.” He winked.
Asher anchored the Stevie in the center of a tiny secluded cove of the bay, shielded from the world by steep gray rocks that enveloped them like a fortress. They rocked violently next to a buoy. Asher pulled it from the water, threaded the line through a complex pulley system, and began hauling. He pulled and pulled at the rope.
“Here, you get it the rest of the way.”
He handed the line to Cam, and she threw her whole weight into it like a little kid ringing church bells. The trap was heavy with the whole ocean on top of it. When it finally surfaced, Asher grabbed it, opened it up, and began picking out the seaweed. The sun glinted off of his sunglasses and the yellow highlights in his hair. The sight of him literally stopped Cam’s breath for an instant. She would never admit that to anyone in a million years. Or the few weeks she had left.
Two lobsters faced each other in the trap, holding their big, awkward claws out as if delicately clasping teacups. “Here, you do the honors. Just grab them by their backs,” Asher said.
The first one she pulled out was infested with thousands of tiny black globules stuck to its belly.
“Ew!” Cam almost dropped it.
“Wait, those are eggs,” Asher said. “We have to throw her back.”
The next lobster’s shell was the exact width and circumference of Homer’s. Cam pulled it out tail first and flipped it over to check for eggs. It unfurled its tail and snapped it a few times, like a happy Labrador retriever whacking his tail on the floor.
“Easy, boy,” she said.
She turned him around to the side and noticed some seaweed wrapped around the joint of his pincer. She used the index finger of her gloved hand and wiped at the algae-covered thing on the lobster’s arm. F . . . R . . . E . . .
“Um, Asher,” she called. He was busy rebaiting the trap with a dead fish. “Asher! You’re not going to believe this!”
“It’s a lobster, Cam. I see hundreds of them every day.”
“Asher . . .” Homer snapped at her again, and Cam dropped him. He landed with a thud on the bottom of the boat.
“Did you get pinched?” Asher asked. She was silent as he bent down to pick him up.
“Homer?” he said.
“Is it possible?” Cam asked.
“And he’s already found a lady. Way to go, Homz.”
“He can’t seem to leave Promise.”
“I know the feeling. Here. Give him a kiss and we’ll throw him back.” They lifted him to the sky once more, and they both yelled, “Freedom!” as Homer swirled through the air and then belly flopped back into the ocean.
Cam took a deep breath. The air had the cool clean-sheet feeling it had had on the day they first arrived in Promise. Asher put his arm around her waist and hooked his thumb into one of her belt loops as they stared out at the blue-gray cove that was Homer’s new home. She felt the weight of Asher beside her and noticed a softening in her gut. An unfamiliar warmth inside her that she realized, slowly, was the feeling of contentment.
Cam shook her right hand, shocked that she’d touched Homer again. She remembered what Elaine had said about paying attention to coincidence. Was finding Homer a coincidence? Or was it a sign? Even if it was a sign, a sign of what? That she was on the right path? Path to where? Did it mean she was one step closer to life, or to death?
Cam looked out to sea and decided that it was a coincidence. But she was starting to pay attention.
TWENTY-SEVEN
CAM SUNNED HERSELF ON THE BOW WHILE ASHER COOKED IN THE TINY galley. The boat had rocked her almost to sleep. Each time she began to feel a little too much sun, a gentle breeze would stream right over her and cool her off. She could have stayed there forever, listening to the music of the gulls and the clanging of the masts of the sailboats in the harbor.
“What do you want to do?” Cam asked Asher when she finally joined him in the galley. He was sitting behind her now, his smooth biceps wrapped around her, trying to help her crack her first ever lobster claw.
“What do you mean, do?” His forearm brushed against hers as he worked on the claw, and all of her hair stood on end.
He pulled the white meat from the claw and fed it to her with his fingers dripping in drawn butter. “I mean, you can do anything. Go anywhere. Be anyone. What are you going to do with all that possibility?” She was in love with how capable Asher was. He could fix things. And he could pilot the boat and catch the lobster, cook it, and feed it to her. He was one of those people who could survive anywhere.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never leave. I’ll be doing this forever, and that might be okay.” He kissed her neck.
“What about school?” If she could live a normal life, she would go to school forever. She loved school. The new notebooks, the pencils, the pens, the new shoes. The first day of school had always been her favorite holiday. She couldn’t imagine giving that up.
“What about it?”
“Don’t you want to go?”
“Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you want.”
“You should go.” She turned around, straddled him, and pinned him down on the small cushion behind them.
“Who’s going to make me?”
“I am,” she said, giving him a buttery kiss.
“Wait, what are you going to do in September?’
“Nothing. Probably. But I got into Harvard.”
“You brainiac. That’s only three hours from here, you know.”
“Like you would visit me.”
“I might,” he joked, and he sat up and flipped her over so that he was on top of her on all fours. His golden five o’clock shadow was beginning to sprout, and Cam noticed for the first time the sexy, über-masculine cleft in his chin.
“Ou te alofa ia te oe,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll tell you some other time.” She pulled him toward her by the collar of his T-shirt.
They were covered with the one grayish white sheet that happened to be on the boat, and it didn’t seem very clean. Cam got up to get dressed.
“Come here,” he said after she had tugged on her sweatshirt. He hugged her and pulled her back down onto the couch-slash-bed-slash-dining-table of the boat’s tiny cabin. The boat rocked back and forth, and the water lapped at the sides of it with little tongue-clicking sounds. Cam lay back with her head on his chest. Through the porthole she could see a seagull floating by, right a
t her eye level. Asher kissed the top of her ear and whispered, “Do you believe in love at first sight?”
“What do you think?”
“Probably not.”
“I just recently began to acknowledge the concept of romantic love. I didn’t really believe in it,” she told him.
“And you do now?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Because of the sex?”
She smiled up at him. “No.”
“Because that was just sex,” he told her seriously.
“It was?”
“Ha! Campbell. I’m just kidding. Can’t you tell it was more than that?” he asked, tickling her ribs. “The moment you walked into that lobster pound and asked to adopt a lobster, I was head over heels.”
“You were?” asked Cam. She lay on top of him, propped up on her elbows so she could see his face.
“I was.” They kissed again, playfully at first, then more romantically, until Cam found herself undressed all over again.
“I love you,” he told her when they were through. He hugged her and kissed the top of her head and said it into her hair again.
Cam had never really anticipated this moment. If she had had to guess what it would feel like, she’d have thought she would feel giddy, excited, joyful, flighty. But instead, she felt instantly grounded, as if she’d finally arrived home after a long journey. Of course you do, she wanted to say, because it all just so instantly made sense.
“Ou te alofa ia te oe,” she whispered again.
Cam got dressed once more and combed her fingers through her shiny, thick black hair. She climbed out of the cabin and sat cross-legged on the bow of the boat. She watched the sun setting as usual behind the lighthouse as Asher battened down the hatches or whatever it was he had to do to prepare for their ride home.
When she sat down, her mind started racing, and she began to Harvard seminar–ize this experience. If she could study the experience in a rousing informal discussion with Harvard freshmen, what would she call it? Male Adolescence and the New England Landscape, Lobstering Economics, The Psychology of Coincidence, Chaos and Contentment . . . Asher came to the top of the boat and sat her on his lap. The Chemistry of Young Love . . .
A piece of white feathery fluff drifted down from the sky, followed by another.
Cam held out her hands to catch some in her palm. It was bitingly cold. “I think it’s snowing,” she said, but even she didn’t quite believe it.
“It’s July, Campbell.”
“Look!”
He looked up and squinted at the sky. Fluffy flakes the size of sand dollars were falling softly and straight down because there was no wind. They formed a sheer curtain in front of the fiery sunset. Already a half an inch covered the surface of the boat.
Cam scooped some up and made a snowball to throw at Asher. He threw back until they ran out of snow. It was surreal. Cam looked to the shore of the cove, where the snow had collected in downy puffs at the ends of the pine branches. A heron took flight to escape the cold.
“The flamingos!” she cried, suddenly remembering.
“What about them?”
“They’ll die if their pond freezes over. We need to get them out of here!”
Cam stood behind Asher with her arm around his waist as he sped the boat, pounding violently over the waves, back to Smitty’s dock. The snowflakes, like big butterflies now, splashed her in the face as they went.
He quickly tied up and covered the boat and grabbed some big boots. “We’ll need these,” he said as they dashed to her car.
Just as Elaine had predicted, the flamingos simply stood there shivering in the snow. Most of them had tucked their heads into their feathers to shield their faces from the wind, like ostriches burying their heads in the sand. The water around their ankles was just beginning to solidify into a thin film of ice.
“Come on!” Asher said, and he started running toward them, flapping his arms and squawking, trying to get them to take flight. Cam was about to follow him, but she couldn’t because she was too busy doubling over in laughter.
“Come on!” he yelled. “You’re the one who said we should do this.”
“I’m sorry. You just look so funny. Okay.” Cam took a deep breath. “Here I come.” She donned her boots and ran out into the mud, flapping her arms and yelling as well. A few of the birds removed their heads from their feathers, looking at her curiously. They paced nervously, but none of them took off in flight. Cam kept circling the perimeter. “Which way is south?” she yelled to Asher. “We should guide them toward the south.”
“How should I know?” He was walking now, trying to shoo the birds with an underhand sweep of both arms.
“Use your nautical instincts,” Cam said, and she ran again straight at another clump of them. Her boot stuck in the mud, and she fell flat on her face into the brown sticky muck. Now it was Asher’s turn to laugh. She was completely brown, as if someone had dipped her front side in chocolate.
When Cam finally peeled herself out of the mud, she was directly eye level with Buddy, who was still sitting on his stump. This is why they won’t go, she thought. Buddy’s mother was standing directly over him, reaching her long neck down to anxiously peck at him. Trying to get him to fly, perhaps? But he didn’t yet have wing feathers.
“I’ve got him,” Cam said to the mother. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him.” She tiptoed closer and tried not to startle the mother bird. She had learned from Animal Planet about the protective instincts of mother birds. She also knew that once she touched the baby, the mother would abandon him forever. What she didn’t know was whether Elaine had the wherewithal to take care of a baby flamingo, but she would have to take the chance. It helped that she now smelled entirely like flamingo poop.
She snuck up behind Buddy, trying to walk gawkily like a flamingo with her head jutting forward. Then she scooped him up and cradled him in her right arm, defending herself from the mother’s wild attack with her left. The mother flapped and kicked and pecked Cam in the head with her beak.
“Asher, help!” she yelled. But he was laughing again, and all he could do was say, “Run!”
Cam ran toward the fence with Buddy tucked under her arm like a football. The mother chased after her, on foot at first, and then she spread her wings. With two flaps, she took flight. A squawking chatter spread through the entire flock, and then they alighted in orderly rows, following the lead of Buddy’s mother, an enormous pink cloud of feathers drifting upward through the snow.
It took ten minutes for the entire flock to float overhead. Cam let herself wonder for a second if they had indeed been a sign. What if they had come there for her? Maybe the big universe unfolder in the sky was folding her life into a neat origami swan instead of crumpling it up into a ball and tossing it unfinished into the wastepaper basket like she was a big cosmic mistake. Maybe she would live for just a little bit longer.
She closed her eyes and tried to envision it. The bricks of Harvard Yard, the color of Boston’s beloved baked beans. Asher walking around Cambridge in his flip-flops. Studying with her on her narrow dorm room bed. Drinking pints with new friends in ancient low-ceilinged pubs.
She took a deep breath. “We did it,” she said.
“We did,” Asher agreed. He took her hand in his as the last of the birds faded out in the distance, a pink-and-black undulating quilt of flamingo stitched together by sparkling bits of sky.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“I BROUGHT YOU A PEACE OFFERING,” CAM SAID AS SHE WALKED INTO Elaine’s mudroom.
“Cam?” asked Elaine.
“And Asher,” Asher called.
Cam was afraid to face Elaine alone. She hadn’t spoken to her since the donkey incident, and she wasn’t sure if Elaine had cooled off yet. James Madison had thankfully recovered and was standing in his corral, dressed in a navy blue blanket to shield him from the snow.
“Oh, my goodness, Cam, let me get you some clothes. Stay there.”
Elaine returne
d with a huge red PROMISE JAMBOREE 1993 sweatshirt that she said Cam could wear as a dress. “What is that smell? God, maybe you should take it outside.”
And just like that, Cam was forced to take another one of those frigid outdoor showers, while Asher broke the news to Elaine about Buddy. At least it had stopped snowing. It felt good to get clean, and Cam let Buddy join her. He took a birdbath, splashing and shaking his little self in the puddle at her feet. “Oh, Buddy,” said Cam. “What are we going to do with you?”
Asher was waiting for her in the mudroom when she came back inside. She wore her sweatshirt dress tied around the middle with his belt.
“You look gorgeous.”
“It’s nice. It has an eighties Flashdance thing going on,” she said, and she pulled it down over one shoulder.
“I know. I wasn’t joking,” he said.
Buddy had already taken to following Cam as if she were his bird mother. She turned to look at him walking down the hallway behind her. He looked really happy, flopping his big webbed feet down one after another like a strange upright duck.
“Elaine, meet Buddy. Buddy, Elaine,” Cam said when she entered the kitchen. Elaine was sitting in the built-in pine breakfast nook, blowing on her cup of hot chocolate. She had set two other mugs on the table for Asher and Cam.
“What am I going to do with a Buddy?” Elaine asked.
“I thought you could keep him here until he can fly south,” Cam said. “We had to shoo the flamingos. Not like you shoe horses, shoe, I mean like we had to shoo them like you shoo flies, shoo.”
“I know what you meant, but unless one of you is willing to eat some shrimp and throw it up for him, I don’t know how we’re going to feed him.”
Cam and Asher were silent.
“Well, I’m thinking we could call the zoo in Portland and find out what they feed their baby flamingos . . . or something,” she suggested.
“What happened to flowers or a box of chocolates?” asked Elaine. “You steal my donkey and then to apologize you bring me a flamingo?”