Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

Kit appeared. Beautiful and sullen in a black tank top, black jeans, and combat boots.

“What now?” she said.

“Go for a walk with Sean, you both need some air,” he said.

“I gotta wait for Jackie’s phone call,” she said.

“Oh, for goodness sake, he’ll be fine. And I’ll pick him up if necessary. Now get out of here, the two of you.”

Kit looked at me with resentment but she wasn’t going to disobey her father.

“Come on then, let’s get our coats,” she said with all the enthusiasm of a trip to the oral surgeon.

Drizzle. A path without a footprint. Shells crunching under our feet. Her big coat a sail that wraps me in the lee.

“Where are we going?” I ask her.

“Well, we live on an island, so there’s not many places we can go,” she says.

“Don’t tell me then,” I say.

And she doesn’t.

The beach is deserted except for a few hardy dog walkers and lunatic beachcombers and we walk in silence until we come to the very top of Plum Island.

A lighthouse, a Coast Guard station, and a long stone pier that protects the entrance to Newburyport’s natural harbor.

“Are you up for something?” she says with a conspiratorial grin.

“What sort of something?”

“Come on,” she says.

Threat and mischief spill from her face. She walks to the sandy tip of the island, finds a rowboat, takes off her shoes, and launches the boat into the water.

“What are you doing?”

“Come on,” she says, “get in, I’ll row. You just have to sit there as ballast.”

“Is this your boat?”

“No.”

I get in and she puts the oars in the oarlocks and rows me out into the channel where the Merrimack River, the Plum Island basin, and the Atlantic meet. It’s not rough today but the drizzly rain has kept water-borne traffic to a minimum and it looks as if a squall could come up at any minute.

“Where are we going?” I ask her.

“Over there,” she says, pointing to a spit of land on the other side of the Merrimack River.

“Is that New Hampshire?” I ask.

“No, silly, it’s still Massachusetts.”

“You know I’m not the best swimmer in the world,” I say, a grin trying to hide my concern.

“We’ll be fine.”

She rows against the tide and the river but it’s hard going to prevent us being taken out to sea.

“I’ll have a go,” I suggest.

“Ok,” she agrees, and after a precarious exchange of positions I take over. Kit sitting in the stern, soaked, smiling, her hair plastered over her forehead. A canny wee nature girl and no mistake. The waves chop water over the gunwales, and a passing Coast Guard cutter rocks us, but finally we’re in the middle of the channel. It’s as sensible to go on as it is to turn back. I row and the tide tries to suck us out and I adjust for it, pulling harder on the left-hand oar.

“You’re doing very well,” she says, her cheeks carnation-colored, her eyes today almost a sea green. In ten minutes, I feel sand under the bottom of the boat and I row us onto the north shore of the Merrimack. We pull the boat up onto a gravelly spit of land, with high dunes, marram grass, and scrubby bushes.

“What is this place?” I ask her.

“It’s a state park. It’s totally isolated, you can get here by road but hardly anyone comes. I used to row over here to smoke pot. It’s a great view.”

I can see most of Plum Island and Newburyport and a great swath of the Atlantic that’s more familiar now that it’s gray and threatening rather than blue and warm.

“I think you can actually see your house,” I say.

“You can,” she agrees. “It’s that huge one halfway up with all the flags.”

“You know, the Stars and Stripes should really be above the others.”

“What are you, mister patriot?”

The wind freshens and we huddle together in the dunes, Kit putting her arms together and moving close to me. Whitecaps on the Merrimack and a swell on the ocean. The breeze bucking over the sand and making a little seif dune parallel to the wind.

“Do you think we’ll be able to get back?” she asks.

“Who cares if we get back?”

The wind really howling, folding space about us in sandy logarithms, her hair dislodged and messed and blowing in her eyes. She looks at me and sneaks under my shoulder. I put my arm around her.

She doesn’t know what to make of me. What to do, or say. The wheel of her hand is flat on the arm of my leather jacket and tapping it. I take off the jacket and put it over us.

Suddenly, from nowhere, she’s about to cry. She fights it.

“Do you think everything’s going to be ok?” she asks.

“What are you talking about?”

“With my dad and with Jackie and everything?” she says, tears running down her face.

It’s only a couple of frigging stitches, love, I just about resist saying.

“Everything’s going to be ok. Do you mean last night? That was nothing. It’s all gonna be fine. I promise.”

“I hope so,” she says and a grimace comes over her face.

She wanted to be stronger and now she’s blown it. She sobs a little.

“Are you ok? What are you worried about?” I ask her.

“I’m not worried, honest, I, I just want to get it over with. We’ve been happy here, I’ve been happy here, and, you know, I understand that Dad has a bigger duty, something he has to do, but, well, I don’t want to lose him,” she says.

“You won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I know things,” I tell her reassuringly.

She smiles and holds me. We listen to the wind cutting the water and blowing over the dunes. It’s wild and lovely and she starts doing a little better.

“It’s Touched, you know, it’s all because of him,” she says angrily.

“Aye, he’s a bad one,” I tell her, sensing an angle.

She looks at me. She wants to open up further, but she doesn’t.

“My mom would have been happy here, up by the ocean, she was crazy about the sea, would have loved it,” she says.

“Where was she from?”

“She was from Long Island originally. Near the sound, I think. Then Boston.”

“Where you grew up.”

“Yeah, we lived in the city. Dad said he was always going to move up here to be near the sea. Not the Cape, Dad hates the Cape, but up here on the North Shore, where it’s more down-to-earth. And we were planning it, but she got this degenerative lymphoma, and, and we had to be near the hospital. We didn’t move here until after she…”

I know, Kit, I know.

I pull her close as a huge black cloud erases the view of her house and soon the other side of the Merrimack.

She shivers.

Bodies are dialogues and we tell each other things without a word. Her look into my eyes is trust and, perhaps, a seed of something else.

“I suppose that’s why she didn’t want any kids of her own, it was a genetic disorder. That’s why they adopted me. I guess I should be thankful in a weird way.”

I don’t say anything.

“Your parents are dead, aren’t they?” she asks.

“Yeah, my mom when I was little and my dad a few years ago,” I say automatically from Sean’s biography. “It sounds terrible, Kit, but I wasn’t really close to them,” I add from mine.

“It’s not terrible, it happens like that sometimes,” she says.

“Aye,” I reply gloomily. Gloomy because she is opening up to me and I’m giving back nothing but lies.

“He’s a loafer. He doesn’t do any work. Jackie worked hard for my dad and he goes in whenever Dad needs an extra body, and he’s got interests, he surfs and everything, he’s cool, but Touched doesn’t do anything,” Kit says, harping back.

“Well, I don’t like to cast a stone, but I’ve heard some ugly rumors about him,” I tell her.