Vigil Harbor Read online

  Also by Julia Glass

  A House Among the Trees

  And the Dark Sacred Night

  The Widower’s Tale

  I See You Everywhere

  The Whole World Over

  Three Junes

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Julia Glass

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Glass, Julia, 1956– author.

  Title: Vigil Harbor / Julia Glass.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Pantheon Books, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021033121 (print). LCCN 2021033122 (ebook). ISBN 9781101870389 (hardcover). ISBN 9781101870396 (ebook).

  Classification: LCC PS3607.L37 V54 2022 (print) | LCC PS3607.L37 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021033121

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021033122

  Ebook ISBN 9781101870396

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover image by Matt Anderson Photography/Moment/Getty Images

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  ep_prh_6.0_139899382_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Julia Glass

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  [Let’s say it’s…]

  Brecht

  Petra

  Austin

  Mike

  [Political arrogance is…]

  Connie

  Margo

  Brecht

  [What would Austin…]

  Miriam

  Mike

  Egon

  Connie

  Petra

  [Once, for more…]

  Margo

  Austin

  Egon

  [Look down from…]

  Petra

  Mike

  Brecht

  Connie

  Margo

  [The more startling…]

  Miriam

  Margo

  Austin

  Connie

  Mike

  Brecht

  [A boy stands…]

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Dennis, Alec, and Oliver:

  my family, my harbor,

  my home

  Any apparent somewhere which you may inhabit is always at the mercy of a ruthless and omnivorous everywhere.

  —E. E. Cummings

  Let’s say it’s true that geography is destiny, place entwined with person. Would living on a peninsula—promontory, headland, bluff—make you peninsular by nature? Not someone who sticks out but someone who likes backing up to a body of water, who finds a cul-de-sac comforting, not cornering? You’d miss out on casual, unpredictable commerce with travelers merely passing through, because your town would be a place of beginnings and endings, of retreat or stasis, and after a while you’d likely notice a sameness to your neighbors. You’d all be a bunch of proud peninsulites: privileged, but also myopic.

  That’s how some outsiders see the people of Vigil Harbor, a town that thrusts itself into the Atlantic Ocean, all but completely enclosed by restless water, deflecting the longshore current like a crooked foot aimed straight toward the rising sun. On a map, the harbor itself resembles a long blue parcel held snug beneath a muscular arm against the Massachusetts coastline. At the big toe, two of the town’s oldest roads rise toward a park with a view raised high by granite cliffs. The shoreline here is rugged with rock, nothing like the bygone aprons of silken sand that once turned neighboring towns into summer playgrounds, much of that sand recently eroded by pummeling rains and swallowed by storms that no longer repay the ground they borrow.

  That park is where residents gather every year to watch their fireworks on a Fourth of July that lasts for days. In spirit, not much has changed on this day for a couple hundred years—not through depressions, recessions, pandemics, and definitely not during wartime. In wartime, town pride swells like a spinnaker in a sailing race at the yacht club.

  It begins at dawn: for two hours, the bells of the three remaining churches ring with abandon. At eight a.m.—shame on those who sleep in—veterans of wars and invasions from Vietnam to Venezuela march the twisting colonial ways or wave from an antique trolley, the high school marching band preceding them with off-key pomp and drumming. The Girl and Boy Scouts follow in turn like a ragtag militia, and a small fleet of jewel-toned vintage automobiles creeps along behind, klaxons blaring, the caboose to this train a 1969 powder-blue Volkswagen convertible owned and driven by the longest-standing elected official, a fourth-generation Harborite named June Smithson.

  The parade ends at the Old Burial Ground, where four hundred revolutionary patriots—most of them fishermen who tossed aside their nets to form George Washington’s navy—lie beneath slabs half-swallowed by the earth, their epitaphs worn thin as a whisper. June lays a wreath on the grave of a different soldier every year, his name pulled from a big mason jar of names by the town historian.

  Local merchants—the chowder café, the ice-cream parlor, the yarn shop, and the nestlike boutiques owned by women wealthy enough to lose their silk shirts on the bottom line—put their wares out on the sidewalk. They offer compostable cups of lemonade, along with the molasses cookies whose recipe dates back to the town’s first innkeeper.

  The Episcopal church hall displays local artworks and sells them to benefit a vaccination campaign or a refugee camp in some remote, far less fortunate country that few of the artists or donors could place on any map. Roving bands of tankard-wielding reenactors sing sea shanties and use their role-playing as justification to drink too much rum at noon. The blazing sun makes them drunker still.

  If the summer’s catch is decent, somebody runs the Scholarship Lobster Raffle. Tall-masted sailboats swan around the harbor, backyard grills ignite, and families turn from feuding to playing horseshoes and croquet. As day seeps into the folds of night, streams of sunburnt Harborites converge on foot at Emmons Head; spread their blankets, some seasons hem to hem, others distanced like tiny islands; and open their bottles of wine. Before the fireworks begin, they clamber to their feet, older folks feeling the kinks in their joints, and they sing the town song (first verse only).

  Take to your boats; oh, men, take to the sea!

  Hoist anchor, loft sail, like your fathers ’fore ye!

  Leave behind hearth; oh, leave behind brides;

  We are sworn to the ocean, our fate in her tides.

  This be our fortune, the bounty down under.

  Leave whales to New Bedford; ’tis cod we shall plunder.

  Women and babes, let thy vigilance burn

  Until to the harbor your mariners return!

  People who now make their living from forces unseen—chips and codes, chromosomes and neutrinos—are mo
ved to tears by a cornball song from an era they count their lucky stars never to have lived in. In the picturesque gloaming, they stand and sing and shed all sense of irony, skepticism, threats of despair. It is an intimacy both true and artificial.

  As an almost-island, Vigil Harbor has not suffered as badly during waves of contagion as other, landlocked towns. It has so far, you might say willfully, remained aloof from political extremes. Town Meetings remain bipartisan in a cantankerous but ultimately collegial fashion now regarded as arcane in most parts of the country. In the last election, only seventeen residents registered as members of the EndTimer Party, the angry spinoff of the failed campaign to elect Kip Kittredge to the White House.

  But unsettling times will unsettle everyone. Struck by a recent rash of divorces, beginning with a pair of well-known yacht club members who swapped their respective marriages for a shared membership in a survivalist commune, Vigil Harbor is a little less secure about its resilience. Because love, as firmly as war, is stitched deep into town lore. Approach by water and, at the mouth of the harbor, you must circumnavigate Ruby Rock, originally Arabella’s Rock, Arabella the widow of Samuel Thesper. They were married hardly a month when Samuel launched his fishing dory and small crew to challenge the entry of a British ship in search of patriot outlaws. He meant to hold them off long enough that a meeting of rebels in a local sail loft might disband and hide. But he was shot through the chest by a hotheaded Regular equally intent on breaching the harbor. Samuel fell overboard, and his body washed ashore on the island, a place used for drying cod on vast wooden racks. Two days after he was buried, Arabella swam to the island and threw herself from a ledge on the far side. Three women who had rowed in pursuit made it there only in time to bring her body back. She was interred next to Samuel, near the peak of the burial ground.

  Such stories, though always a little suspect in their fairy-tale pathos, are countless in a town like this one. Towns like this one are, after all, mostly the sum of their stories, or the voices that tell the stories. Add to those stories this one.

  Brecht

  Like every basic Saturday night, the windows in my room are shaking in their frames. Not an earthquake but my stepfather’s music. He stays up way late and plays it so maxed up, basso profundo, that the walls in the living room vibrate clear to the third floor. It pumps through my veins, frazzles my nerves. He gets a river of random heritage tuneshop flowing along, thumpa thumpa thump, everything from Nina Simone to Code Dread, and whether there are guests or it’s just him and Mom or even just him, he dances. Austin is a dance maniac. He says dance is his number one narcotic. But sometimes he also breaks out that champion leaf he gets from he won’t say where. He promises Mom it’s throwback, the kind they swear won’t pickle your judgment, and it does have a smell more like some weirdass tea, less like skunk. He only smokes if it’s just him or he’s only with Mom, though I don’t think she smokes. Austin would never smoke with clients, and all friends, he claims, plus even strangers you pass on the street, are future if not past or present clients. So the whole basic world is a client.

  Sometimes I vext him to turn it down. Maybe he does, by a margin that doesn’t matter.

  He’ll yell up the stairs, “Earplugs, dude!” in that diluvian-but-who-cares tone, and I’m like, what if I slept through something asteroidal? Austin says don’t be melodramatic. He says I’m a doomseer, too typical of my generation. He says it lightly, in a faux-jokey voice, but when he doesn’t think I’m in earshot, I’ve heard him refer to Generation F: failure, fuckup, fatalist; take your pick. If you want to get poetic, flotsam. Others call us Generation NL (out loud, nil): No Life, as in having no lives worth living, or maybe as in Get a Life, which it’s true a lot of us cannot seem to do, or not according to some fossil definition of “grown-up.” As in, going out there to Be Something. People who are hard on us like that tell us to look at the kids who came of age in the pandemic years, the ones who survived and even, somehow, figured out how to live lives of their own while ducking in and out of lockdown during the surges.

  Austin, who has no kids genetically his own, says our allergy to independence (that’s what he calls it) is the fault of our parents, but collectively, not individually—because he wouldn’t want to get Mom too far down. I was twelve when she married Austin, so there wasn’t much he could do, he says, except root from the sidelines. As if me and Mom are some kind of sporting event.

  It’s so obviously not her fault that I boomeranged home, that I’m in this state she sees as deep limbo, but she’s always felt responsible for who I am. I think she can’t help feeling guilty about us losing Dad—which is nuts, but I get it. Maybe it’s also middle age and the whole mortality thing, but she’s in this fragile place right now.

  I guess we are doomseers, me and Noam and the rest of us, but why shouldn’t we be? We’re not Timers, we’re not that stooge. No way would we flee to the deep woods just because we’re afraid the next bomb will flash-fry our own town square, the next virus turn that town square into an emergency graveyard. Nor are we desperate enough to join the Restitution Corps, forget the army! But we see that the bar’s going up on surviving what’s to come, some of which is certain, some not. Like the growing list of Hot Spots on the Global Climate Watch. (Picture a map punctured with cigarette burns.) I heard one of Austin’s clients saying that his son’s college has a major called survival studies.

  Me and Noam have a bet going. It’s about the next tsunami, the one that some seismologists are sure will be set off soon, maybe even tomorrow, by a slip in plates that meet somewhere off the coast of Spain. The projections show it pointed in our direction. So we’ve taken positions on exactly what date the big wave will rise, on how much time it will take to cross the ocean, on how long a stretch of coast will take the max hit, on the number of fatalities. We’re allowed to change our minds as we please. It’s a subject we like what-iffing.

  We know that unless there’s some futuristic warning system in place, we might not be alive to see who wins. Our town is bull’s-eye center of the wave’s projected path. (Farewell to Cape Cod, or what’s left of it.) Anyone who thinks that our being up on a cliff will protect us, that the wave will just crash politely into the granite ledge and slither back, is totally stooge. The wave will roar up and over Emmons Head, then horizontalize its King Kong fury, probably even smash off parts of the ledge. All the fine old antique houses? Four centuries’ worth of driftwood in a flash. My stepfather’s clients’ brand-new houses? Lethal sheets of fractured steel and glass turned into shrapnel.

  The Big T, as we call it, would make Cunégonde, that monster storm from three years back, look like a fairy princess. On Back Harbor, Cunégonde ripped every dock off Harrow Point, blew out nearly all the windows, toppled a dozen power poles, sent three roofs flying out to sea, and buckled two new houses cardboard flat (houses not designed by Austin, he’ll be quick to tell you). On Ruby Rock, the bunkhouses must’ve vaporized; not even the kiddie toilets remained. The summer camp was toast and lost its insurance. They put a For Sale sign on the island, but the sign’s now totally covered in guano. Me and Noam took Austin’s tender out there last summer: what a wasteland. I never went to that camp—we moved here when I was too old for stuff like that—but Noam said it was a cool place if you were little and liked running wild: bows and arrows, camping under the stars, bonfires and ghost stories, dissecting dead fish, Huck Finn stuff. Now the island’s been conquered by seals, refugees from the Cape, which lost miles and miles of beach, megatons of sand. Some afternoons, they make such a ruckus, barking, squabbling, yodeling, you hear it from all over town. Some people think they’re a nuisance, other people say they bring us “closer to nature.” But conservation rules give them squatters’ rights.

  Where there are seals, you’re always warned, there will be sharks. Big ones. But Noam says where there are seals, there will be selkies. He says if you hide out and watch super close, and if it’s one of the rare days they strip off
their silky fur pelts, all you have to do is poach one on the sly and, jackpot!, you’ve got the naked maiden who owns it. She is yours, so long as you keep hold of her skin and take good care of it. She will do your every basic bidding (though not sure I like the medieval sound of that). And just try to picture the two of us sneaking a pair of feral maidens up to my parents’ third floor. We could do it when Austin’s stoned, but no way would Mom fail to notice.

  I told Noam that story’s got to be from a children’s book, and he said it is, okay yeah, but the story in the book is based on a million stories from history, nautical facts recorded in ship’s logs. I asked him when did he ever read a ship’s log, and he said he totally did, in fact he read several, back when he had to do a research paper in American history class for Ms. McCarthy. He went to the town archives and dug up this crazy stuff. No way, I said, would Ms. McCarthy ever let a paper be about mermaids. First of all, Noam told me, selkies aren’t mermaids (those are fictional, he says), and second of all, he wrote about ship’s logs from cod-fishing voyages back like four hundred years ago. Those guys were at sea for months on end, I told him: all sailing and no sex, never mind sanity! But okay, I conceded, we’ll call it history. Besides, what harm is there in looking out for naked girls on Ruby Rock? And if we get lucky, we will pounce. I do like Noam’s brand of eccentric.

  Noam is a year older than me. We both went to the High, and we lucked out on being young enough that we didn’t have to yo-yo on and off screen through those years, but we didn’t hang out. Maybe we had a math class together; we can’t quite remember. Afternoons, I ran cross-country or track, though I was no star; he played basketball in winter (he was a star), took after-school marine tech in spring. He thought he’d go to a maritime college, maybe get to be a naval mechanic, but he had a GPA blowout. I only found this stuff out much later, when we became friends.