The black speedboat cut its engine fifty feet off my stern. Brandon stood at the wheel with his hair blown flat and his mouth open, and beside him my sister Dot clutched the rail of the windshield in her red coat. We had not been in the same place in thirty one years. She had grown stout, and her hair was gray under a plastic scarf, but I would have known the set of her chin anywhere. I held up her text message so she could see it on the screen. “Dot,” I called across the water, “what really happened to Earl boat in 1994?”
Brandon tried to gun the engine and Ronnie Higgins, standing in the skiff with the radio against his chest, said very quietly that the Coast Guard cutter was four minutes out. “Son, you will want to cut that motor,” he said. Brandon did. In the sudden stillness I could hear the swell slap against the Ruth Ann hull and a gull screaming over Egg Rock. Dot put her hand to her mouth. “Ruth, I never meant it to come to this,” she said, and her voice cracked in a way I remembered from when we were girls.
“Tell me,” I said. Dot stood at the bow of the speedboat with her red coat flapping and told it in front of Ronnie, her son, and the gulls. In the autumn of 1994 her husband Walter, now passed, had cut Earl mooring pennant with a boat knife the night before the nor easter. Walter was in debt, and he believed that Earl boat insurance would settle a loan he owed to Earl. The boat sank. The insurance paid out. Dot knew, and had kept silent for thirty one years, and the silence had eaten her.
A runaway lobster boat, a sisters forgotten quarrel, and a baker who wrapped three muffins for the one who came home.
I will tell you what I felt. I felt almost nothing. “Dot, I have known since 1995,” I said. She stared at me. “Earl told me the week after it sank. He found the cut end of the line when he hauled the wreck. He said, Ruth, I think Walter did this, and I do not want to know why. He said family was the one thing a man cannot salvage, and he would rather lose a boat than a sister in law.” I looked at her across the water. “I stopped speaking to you because I could not stand to see you carry it. I did not know how to say, I forgive you.”
Dot began to weep openly, in the middle of Frenchman Bay, with her scarf blown off. I put my hand out over the gunwale and she took it. Her fingers were cold. Ronnie, bless him, kept his eyes politely on the horizon. For a long minute we held on, two old women in two boats, rocking on the same gray swell. “I have been so ashamed,” she whispered. I said the shame had been the only thing Walter left us, and that I was tired of hauling it. She nodded and could not speak.
Then the Coast Guard cutter came around Bar Island with its blue light turning, and a young petty officer boarded the Ruth Ann with a clipboard. He found the fuel valve in the engine room twisted shut, and the engine fouled on purpose, and the bill of sale with Dot forged signature. Brandon sat in the speedboat with his head in his hands. “Aunt Ruthie, I just wanted to keep you safe,” he said, over and over. I said a man who shuts a fuel valve on an eighty year old woman boat is not keeping anyone safe. The officer put him in handcuffs, gently, and read him his rights.
The county attorney in Ellsworth charged Brandon with forgery, tampering and attempted fraud. Dot, who had signed the papers, agreed to testify against him in exchange for a lighter charge, and the judge, who had known my husband, gave her probation. Brandon took a plea of eighteen months in the county jail. I wrote him a letter there. I said I would visit once a month, and that I wanted him to learn how to splice a line before he came out. I mailed it with a stamp bearing a lighthouse.
As for the license, I made my own decision. Earl used to say the license was the real boat. I called a young woman named Kayla Bunker, a deckhand of nineteen who had worked for me one summer and who had been on the waiting list for six years. I signed over the Ruth Ann and the license to her, on the condition that she let me ride along on the first day of every season. She wept in the kitchen. I told her to stop and write a check for a dollar. Her mother wrote it, laughing.
The first morning of the new season, Dot came aboard with a thermos. We rode out of Bar Harbor in the dawn, the three of us, Kayla at the wheel, my sister on the bench, and me in the stern with my hands on the rail. Nobody said much. The sun came up gold over Egg Rock. On the way back, Dot reached over without a word and took my hand again, and it was warm this time, and she held on until we reached the dock and the gulls came wheeling down to greet us.
On Tuesday I walked into the Morning Glory Bakery at seven. Theresa was behind the counter with her apron dusted in flour. She looked at me, and at Dot standing at my elbow in her red coat, and she did not say a thing. She just put three blueberry muffins in a paper bag, one for me, one for my sister, and one for Kayla, and folded the top down twice. “Wild blueberries only, Theresa,” I said. And she smiled with her whole face and said, “In Maine, Captain, they are all wild.”