He Had Me Drowned, Then Wept at My Grave novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Dara

Five years later in Astoria, Oregon, Daphne works as Dara Lund, tattoos a burn scar, meets bar pilot Anders Halvorsen, and a deckhand recognizes her from the sponge docks.

Five years later I was Dara Lund, and I covered other women's scars for a living.

The shop was one chair and a back room on Commercial Street in Astoria, Oregon, with the Columbia River running gray outside the window.

It was September and it was raining, as it does there, and the freighters were sliding up the channel one behind another.

My customer that morning had a burn scar on her forearm, the shape of an iron.

"A husband?" I asked, because I never assumed.

"An oven," she said.

"A restaurant, my first job.

"I just hate looking at it."

"Then we'll make it a heron," I said.

I drew the first line of the bird's neck over the worst of the shiny skin.

She watched the needle with the face people make when they've waited a long time for something to stop being theirs.

At the counter by the register, my daughter was drawing.

Irini was five, black curls, a gap where her front tooth had been, a box of crayons she wouldn't let anyone else touch.

"Mama," she said.

"The heron has to have a boat."

"Why a boat?" I asked, not looking up.

"Because everybody in my pictures has a boat."

She drew three people on the deck.

She always drew three: a big one, a medium one and a small one, and a boat under them.

I didn't ask who the third one was.

I had stopped asking her that in the spring.

Down the street the bell at St. Mary's began for noon, and my right hand lifted to my forehead before I could stop it.

Forehead, chest, right shoulder, left shoulder.

The Orthodox way, right to left.

Nobody in Astoria did it that way.

I finished the cross by smoothing my apron, as if that were what I'd meant.

A man at the shop door was watching my hand.

He wore a deckhand's orange rain bibs and a wool cap, and he'd come in for a flash sheet and hadn't picked one.

He was fifty, maybe, with a dark face and a gray mustache.

I didn't like him.

The door chimed again behind him, and Anders Halvorsen ducked in under the frame.

He had to duck, he was six-three, and he came in shaking the water off a navy rain jacket the way a dog does, without any shame.

He was forty-three, a bar pilot on the Columbia, the man who climbs a rope ladder up the side of a moving ship in the dark and takes it over the worst water on the Pacific coast.

He had a rope scar on his left forearm, pink and shiny, from a line that parted.

He had never asked me to cover it.

He had never asked me for anything.

"Don't mind me," he said.

"I just want to sit."

"The chair's occupied," I said.

"The bench is fine."

He sat on the bench under the window with his big hands between his knees and watched the rain.

He'd been coming in two or three times a week since June.

He hadn't once pretended he wanted a tattoo.

"I brought something," he said, and held up a paper bag.

"Salt water taffy, for the artist in the corner."

"Her name is Irini," I said.

"I know her name."

He crossed to the counter and put the bag down in front of her.

"Strawberry's the good one," he told her gravely.

"Don't let your mother have them."

Irini giggled.

I turned my face away so nobody could see mine.

The customer paid, and tipped, and went out into the rain with the heron under her bandage.

The deckhand was still by the flash sheets.

Anders had a smear of black ink on his wrist where he'd leaned on my station.

"You've got ink on you," I said.

"Hold still."

I pulled off a glove, wet a paper towel, and took his wrist in my bare hand.

His skin was warm and weathered, and his pulse was slow and steady under my thumb.

I wiped the ink away longer than the ink needed.

He didn't move.

He said, very low, "Dara."

"What?"

"Nothing.

"I like it when you do that."

I let go of his wrist.

My face was hot, and I turned to the sink and ran the water so I wouldn't have to look at him.

I had sent three money orders in the last three Januaries, to a student boarding house in Athens, in the name of the girl who drove me out of Florida.

For the first two years I hadn't dared send anything.

All three had come back stamped UNCLAIMED.

I told myself she had moved.

I told myself Callie was twenty-six now, and had a life, and wanted nothing from a woman who'd pulled her into a storm.

I had never once gotten a postcard.

When I turned around, Irini was showing Anders her heron.

He was studying it with total seriousness, one finger on the paper.

The deckhand had come up to the register.

He put a flash sheet down in front of me, on top of nothing, and said quietly, "Parakalo."

It means please.

It's Greek.

"You're Rallis's girl," he said, in Greek, soft enough that Anders wouldn't hear.

"From the sponge docks."

My hand was on the register.

I did not look at my daughter.

"I'm sorry," I said in English, "you have the wrong woman."

He looked at my cross, and the wrist, and then at Irini.

"Tarpon Springs," he said.

Then he turned, pulled his cap down, and walked out into the rain.

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