The reality of the Adventist Church on present-day Pitcairn is as mercurial as...
As what?
She saves her work—work being a generous term for the single almost-sentence—and closes her computer. “Okay,” she says. “Sure. McLoons.” McLoons is just past South Thomaston, nearly a twenty-minute drive away. Louisa hasn’t been alone with her father since the post office outing—long before she learned about Kristie. She needs reinforcements. She invites Matty first. He’s on his way to the rocks, a towel looped around his neck.
“I had a really long excursion with Granny yesterday,” he says. “I think I want to hang here today.” Hang here, Louisa thinks, is code for hang with Hazel.
“Fair enough,” says Louisa. She tries the girls, who are on the porch, bent over the iPad and a bag of colored thread. “Abigail? Claire? Lobster roll at McLoons?”
“No thank you,” they say in unison.
“We’re trying to learn an ombre stripe friendship bracelet,” says Abigail.
“We’re concentrating really hard,” says Claire.
That’s it, then. No buffers. Louisa picks up the minivan keys from the front table and watches her father make his way down the stairs slowly, holding on to the handrail.
“Louisa,” Annie says. “Come here a moment.” She leads Louisa into the playroom and speaks softly. “You remember what Barbara always tells us? Be in the moment. Connect. Don’t agitate him, okay, sweetheart?”
“Why would I agitate him?”
Annie gives her a long look: they both know why. “I don’t thinkyou would on purpose, of course. But inadvertently. I’ve done it, without meaning to. You just need to stay calm and centered. Deep breaths. Like you do in yoga.”
“I don’t do yoga,” says Louisa. “I’m not patient enough.”
“But you know what I mean. Like other people do in yoga.”
“Be in the moment,” repeats Louisa. “Connect. Don’t agitate.”
The parking lot is packed—and it’s no wonder. McLoons’s lobster rolls are, in Louisa’s opinion, the best in Maine, and she’s eaten a lot of lobster rolls. And besides that, the views are seriously out of this world. When you’re sitting at the picnic tables you can practically touch the working boats coming in to drop off their haul at the little red shack, and even though you’d think that in Maine you might tire of another harbor full of more boats with more outcroppings of rock, well—somehow you don’t, because each has its own personality.
She sits Martin down at a picnic table and waits until her father has taken two bites of his lobster roll and thoroughly chewed and swallowed them before she lets everything her mother told her fly out of her mind like bees from a hive and she says, “Daddy. I found out about Kristie.”
Martin meets Louisa’s eyes and says, “I don’t know anyone with that name.”
Live in the moment. Connect. She can hear the chatter from the lobstermen pulling in, the ribbing.
“Kristie. Sheila’s daughter. Your daughter, Daddy.”
“I don’t have any daughters,” he says pleasantly. He takes a sip of his water.
Don’t agitate.
“Daddy. Of course you do. I’m your daughter. Louisa. You know me, right?”
He wipes his mouth with the napkin and considers her more closely. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Are you from Swords too?” he asks. “County Dublin?”
“No, Daddy. You know I’m not from Swords. I was born at Northern Light Mercy.”
“I don’t know where that is.”
“In Portland. Ninety minutes south of here. You know that. I’ve only been to Dublin once. I was in middle school, remember? We took a trip there. You showed us Dublin Castle. You took us to Saint Stephen’s Green. You and me and Mom. It was springtime. The daffodils were blooming. It was beautiful.”
“Saint Stephen’s,” he says. “I used to go to Saint Stephen’s with my brothers.” His eyes take on a faraway look and she’s wondering what he’s remembering; she knows the longer ago memories are often more accessible to an Alzheimer’s brain than the more recent one. A Christmas Eve with the seven of them crowded around the fire? His own father stumbling home from the pub? A snowball fight with his lads?
