You think this glorified waiting room is weird now? Back when this building was the restaurant, there was always something weird going on. Before every Manhattanite started flushing their toilets directly into the Long Island Sound, before the Connecticut River burst into flames up near Brattleboro, you could buy anything you wanted from right off the boat. Pop would stock up on lobsters every morning. We had an aquarium full every day; you’d point to the one you wanted! Clams too, great pots full to make his famous Long Island Clam Chowder. Half-red, half-white. Halfway between Manhattan and New England, get it? That’s Long Island.
How would one know which lobster to pick?
I don’t know, I was just a kid then. I’d stare at them, try to make contact. Mental contact. Telepahthia . It’s a Greek word. But cousin Chucky used to say the real mind-reading trick with the lobsters involved the customers: some people picked the lobster they liked the most to have boiled alive for their dinner, others picked the one they liked the least. Told you what kind of person they were.
Cousin Chucky was a wild one. He worked for Pop; we all did. Even I had my little jobs, but Chucky was old enough to handle the seafood—it was his job to refill the aquarium as the night drew on. One time he took the rubber bands off the snapping claw of every single lobster in the cooler right during the lunch rush, when Pop was busy flipping burgers and pressing grilled cheeses for little tourist kids. When someone finally got around to collecting a few lobsters, I could hear the yelping and screaming from here, up on the third-floor dining room. The big windows looking out at the water, these ones here were reverberating. It was like I could put my palm on the glass and feel the words in English, Greek, Spanish. When the restaurant closed and the ferry company took over the space, they changed everything but the bones. Removed the kitchen, put up ticky-tacky walls you can kick right through, installed benches down here and filled the third floor with radios and satellite weather gizmos.
I had to help Chucky put the rubber bands back on every single lobster. Took forever.
There was always something weird going on. Always something coming out of the water, or going into the water. We had this waitress, Skinny Debbie, a friend of my sister’s. Every day, Pop would source doughnuts from some bakery—powdered jelly, chocolate frosted, crullers—all the classics, a dozen each, every morning. Before the lobsters, but still fresh. Debbie loved ’em. She’d ask Pop for a doughnut and he was so generous he’d say sure. And then she’d help herself to two, to three. One time, a police boat pulled up, and docked, and out came three county cops into the restaurant. Of course they wanted jelly doughnuts, enough for the whole crew. But Debbie had eaten them all. Here’s how nice Pop was to her: he said, “Listen, Debbie, when you’re so hungry, tell me. I’ll buy another dozen.” He would, too. Nobody ever went hungry at the Ferry House. Even the cops did all right that day; they settled on crullers, and grumbled into their crumbs. Skinny Debbie was embarrassed though. On her break she stripped off her uniform, and ran down the dock right past all the signs reading no diving $50 fine and threw herself right into the Sound.
“To work off the doughnuts,” she said, when the cops dragged her back from the low-tide sandbar she’d managed to swim to. The cops didn’t ticket her because she worked for Pop, even though there was a lot of evidence. A hundred witnesses of her crying and dropping a tray full of Arnold Palmers and running out the door, and the fact that she already had a bikini on under the uniform.
What else came out of the water? What else entered the water, that was so weird?
All sorts of things. One time Chucky convinced me and Greek Pete to take the clams Pop had boiling out of the big 100-quart pot and dump the cooking water back into the Sound. He was a persuasive type and worked fast. Clams only need to boil for ten minutes. He told me that too much fresh water from the Housatonic River was pouring into the Sound and that the bluefish were going to die if “we didn’t salt the water back up.” I love bluefish, on the grill, with lemon and olive oil and a little rigani. Greek oregano. I was wary, but then he said that Pop had told him to tell us to do it. Pop did tell Chucky to tell us to do stuff a lot, so that short-circuited my brain a bit.
You know how much a 100-quart pot weighs when it’s even two-thirds full of water? It’s like trying to lift a drunk who doesn’t want to go. Greek Pete was a big gooch of a guy, especially back then when he was young. I fished the clams out with a big koutala, and he just slapped the pot in a bear hug—a hot pot!—and walked it out the kitchen, into the parking lot, out to the pier and poured its contents right into the Sound. I don’t know why I saved the clams. Pop had to go out and get new ones anyway. You can’t boil ’em twice and expect the superlative chowder base the Ferry House was known for. It’s amazing the Ferry House stayed open as long as it did, given how generous Pop was, and how unlucky.
Here's how generous Pop was. The Ferry House wasn’t open in the off-season, but Pop would bring me and Chucky and Greek Pete downtown in his big white Caddie sometimes, to work in the kitchen, in the winters. We’d make catered Christmas dinners for our regulars, prep huge feasts to deliver to the endless armies of cousins who all shared our names and our noses and our hairy knuckles. Pop would buy fish from his poker buddies, serve free coffee to the lobstermen and the ferry crews. Chucky was front of the house, and really good at it. No strangers, no daytrippers, just people who belonged in our chairs, at our counter. No matter how hungry or drunk outsiders who came to the door were, and no matter how obviously busy we were inside, Chucky could convince them that the Ferry House was closed for the season, and to try Tara’s up-port. Greek Pete was amazing in the kitchen; he could shoulder a pair of whole lambs and spit them himself. And me, I was fast. I peeled carrots like I was in Hell and the next one would get me out.
And on one of those nights, I made contact. With an outsider.
So I understand.
It was late. The moon was new but somehow the snowflakes—this was back when it snowed, when snowflakes could come off the Sound the size of dimes—shined all bright and silvery. Chucky was playing hand after hand of a new kind of solitaire he had invented, and only pitching in when Pop called for him. Greek Pete was working on a half dozen trays of pastitsio at once, and Pop was in the dry storage area, doing inventory. I’d just finished washing dishes, so helped myself to a big glass of pure Coke syrup and walked up to the third story to watch the weather. The Sound was choppy, like hills of black and white glass. There’s always something going into the water, or coming out of the water, but something different happened this time. The water left. It was dark on dark except for a tiny sliver of silver out where churning water used to be. It looked like a road, or the back of giant glowing whale or a sci-fi submarine straight from the domed city of Atlantis. The Coke on my tongue was thick and flat, but it started bubbling now, not just in my mouth, but in the glass in my hand. The big windows I was standing in front of—Chucky always bragged that they were bulletproof, naval artillery proof, even—started quaking.
I pushed with my mind, sending hello hello, yeia sou yeia sou, and for the first time something answered.
I guess I yelled loud enough that Chucky came up to see what was going on, and then he started yelling too. “Holy crap, a waterspout! Georgie, get away from the windows!” he said, but he sounded very far away, like he was the one out in the middle of the storm. He felt very far away too when he grabbed me and tried to pull me to safety, like a kitten tugging on a sweater. His powers of persuasion had failed to work on me, but he shouted something convincing enough in Greek that Pete appeared and just snatched us both off our feet, tucked us under his arms like a pair of footballs and ran down the steps. We passed Pop on the way up. He had a fire extinguisher in hand. The lights flickered, but stayed on.
And what answer did your greeting receive?
First came the window. They all held, almost. Chucky was right; totally shatterproof. The head and the jambs of one of them didn’t. Behind us, that window was just pushed out of its frame by a huge gust of wind. In that wind, I heard something. It wasn’t words, wasn’t a voice, but just a feeling. Body language. I talked about it to my therapist in the hospital, wrote about it over and over in my journal. I guess if I had to boil it down, it was two distinct messages. The first was we are coming. The second one was we are here.
Pop came down the steps, slow but steady, like he was carrying a tray or had been hit on the head. Behind him was… in my journal I use the word “her.” Just imagine a silhouette of a bald woman, but white instead of black. Not glowing, not really, a paper doll that was somehow flat but always facing me, no features, no clothes. An outline. I draw her in my journal a lot, and I can’t even draw.
She was about half a flight of steps behind him, following him just as steadily. Pop gestured to Greek Pete to put us down, which he did, and then he turned and extended his arm toward her, like he was presenting her.
“Georgie?” he asked. I didn’t know anything except that my ribs were hurting and I could barely breathe.
“Talk to it,” Chucky said.
“What? Why me!” I said, but I knew the answer. Because I could. I talked about my crazy attempts at telepathy all the time. I was a weird kid. It’s hard to tell when a head without eyes or even a chin is turning, but she did scan the room, taking us all in.
“I’m going to call… my wife,” Pop said, which was a strange way of putting it. Pop’s wife, yiayia, was my grandmother, Chucky’s great-aunt, and Greek Pete’s first cousin once removed. She went by Teddy, though some customers would call her “Mom”, which we all hated. Anyway, Pop said something in fast Greek to Greek Pete, who shrugged and said something back, then left to use the phone by the front of the house. I looked to Chucky. I never could quite get the hang of reading a human mind.
“Pop asked Pete if he could just pick the ghost up and throw her out, and Pete said he was a lover, not a fighter,” Chucky explained. I glanced over at Pete. Pete shrugged again, giant palms wide. The white outline definitely was not a ghost. Whatever she was, the Greeks don’t have a word for it. She was almost bioluminescent, like something that had come from the depths of the sea, but brighter than any chemical reaction could make a body. And she didn’t shine, didn’t have a shadow. It was like someone had erased a girl-shaped spot of the world to reveal a patch of the pure white canvas under it. She smelled like the sea though, and looking at her was like looking out at the sea, if you know what I mean.
What do you mean?
It goes on forever. It’s… expectant. The Sound, you can see land, at least north to south. Not so the ocean.
My yiayia used to say that her door was always open, and it was true. The big round dinner table in her kitchen was always full of family close and distant, neighbors, friends of my aunts and uncles, strangers she had met while out on errands, you name it. That was half the reason Pop had us all at the Ferry House that night, during a winter storm. One oven was not enough for all the cooking, especially close to the holidays. Pop came back from talking to yiayia, and he looked very pale. I noticed his pistol grip hanging out his back pocket.
“Georgie,” he asked me, “what does she want?” I didn’t know what to say. “For dinner?” Pop added. Chucky snorted under his breath. “The angel. Your yiayia thinks we have an angel for dinner.” Greek Pete said something in Greek I’d only heard people say at church.
The figure standing before us was no angel, no ghost. But she did want something. I reached out. I always pictured my skull like it was a little boat, and I was the pilot at the helm. Reaching out meant opening a porthole and sticking my head out. I did just that then.
And?
And I guessed. She had been journeying, so probably something filling. How do you fill a great wide universe? She had been in the water for a long long time, and came out hungry, so I got the sense that she didn’t want seafood, or poultry, or anything that she could have just, taken from the Sound. Estuary water is brackish; salty enough for sharks, but there’s plenty of freshwater bass, tons of invertebrates, marine birds and mammals, seaweed, you name it. What could we offer her that she couldn’t have gotten herself?
“Moussaka,” I said, frowning. “The vegetarian kind. That’s what she wants.” The frown was just to make it look like I was concentrating, but I just figured she’d never seen an eggplant, or lentils. Pop had started cooking moussaka with lentils after my sister said that ground beef made her stomach hurt, and it took off at the Ferry House too. A lot of Connecticut yuppies were trying vegetarianism for the first time back then. “And limeade. No, Diet Coke.” Maybe she had seen limes. I imagined shipwrecks, barrels of limes in the galleys, to keep the sailors from scurvy. But she’d never seen béchamel sauce either. For a second I considered saganaki—the cut-out girl couldn’t have ever seen fire either—but no, showing off open flame to a being from another place just seemed dangerous.
It was getting cold. We didn’t turn on the heat for these late-night cooking sessions, and the upstairs dining room was open to the storm and the snow. “We should all go to the kitchen and help,” I said. Chucky opened his mouth to say something, probably Help with one serving? but then realized that he would get to retreat to the kitchen too, and closed his mouth.
“You all go,” Pop said. “I’ll wipe down the table for the… guest.” Greek Pete waved us into the kitchen and walked past the ovens and the prep stations to the lockers by the loading area. He and Chucky put their coats on.
“We can’t leave Pop!” I cried. Really was a cry too; my voice was cracking that winter, and I was upset. “We have to get the moussaka.”
“Vre Georgie, he sent us here to escape,” said Chucky.
“But how is Pop going to escape?” I said. “Are you going to bring me to yiayia’s house and explain that we left Pop here with ‘the angel’? She’ll just make us drive back and bring her along!” I imagined my grandmother making the sign of the cross as she struggled into her coat, then loading her rolling pin into her purse just in case she would have to fight the angel for Pop’s soul.
“What do you want to do?” he asked me.
“Let’s serve her dinner, and see what happens,” I said.
“Her, eh? Weirdo.” Chucky said. Then he said he was pretty curious too. Greek Pete shrugged and headed back to the main area of the kitchen. He wasn’t going to drive off and leave two kids to fend for themselves. And none of us were going to leave Pop.
None of us were looking at the clock as we got the meal together, but we knew the ferry was due. There’s a horn you can hear all the way up port, and growing up in town you just got used to hearing it three times a day. Your body learned to anticipate it. But the horn didn’t sound when it should have. Like the blank white girl in the dining room, the ferry was conspicuous by its absence.
“The waterspout,” Chucky said. We were all thinking the same thing. “The ferry’s probably still docked on the Connecticut side for safety’s sake.” He slipped on an extra waiter’s jacket, which looked silly over the red and green Christmas sweater he was wearing. I filled a tall glass with Diet Coke, no ice, and placed a lemon slice on the rim. Then came a noise, but it wasn’t the ferry’s horn, it was a siren.
A cop car rolled into the parking lot, painting the dining room red and white. Pop stepped in front of the guest, but she was a head taller than he was.
“Chucky,” Pop said, and Chucky handed me the tray and went to the door to talk the police out of coming in.
I never did any front of house stuff, as I was, strictly speaking, too young to work, but I wasn’t nervous. here we are here we are is all I got from the guest, and that soothed me. She didn’t sit at the chair Pop pulled out for her. Who knows if she even could sit, as she had a different kind of dimensionality. You’d have to assemble a chair around her to make it work. I was about to describe the dish—did I have to explain what an egg is to explain an eggplant? Probably not, but béchamel is made from eggs, so maybe I did?—when Chucky came barreling back into the dining area, one of the cops behind him shoving him forward.
“There’s flooding,” the cop said. “And you got a window collapsed upstairs. Pop, you gotta evacuate! What are you even doing—”
“If we have to evacuate, why are you pushing me back into the restaurant!” Chucky barked, as he turned on his heel and waved his hands in the cop’s face. Greek Pete interposed himself between the cop and our guest and Pop stepped forward.
“Officer Ronaldo, hello! We’re—”
I didn’t know what to do. If the girl had been curious about eating, she wasn’t anymore. She turned, somehow, and walked right through Greek Pete. The cop freaked, drew his pistol. Chucky grabbed at it. The cop grabbed him, threw him to the ground, and kicked him. Greek Pete charged. I heard a gun go off. Twice.
One was the cop’s. One was Pop’s.
There was enough blood that I didn’t know whose it was at first. The cop’s, Chucky’s, or Greek Pete’s. Then I saw that the cop was missing a big part of his head. Chucky was crying, brain on his face. Greek Pete scooped him up. The girl kept drifting forward.
Everyone loved Pop. The Ferry House was practically town hall and church and the bank and a concert venue. Everyone in town called him Pop because everyone was family. But there’s no way you put a hand on his blood, pull a gun on his blood, and get away with it. But in the same way, no matter how beloved you are, how well-connected you are, you don’t get away with whipping out your gun and shooting an officer of the law in the head in the middle of your own restaurant.
Unless.
I reached out to the cut-out with all my might. Nothing I could articulate, just plain begging for her to do something. I didn’t know what she could do, if she even understood the difference between a living person and a corpse. Could she reverse time, erase memories, bring someone back to life, animate a body? I had a million dumb comic-book ideas, all at once. And she told me here we go here we go and there she went and she took the cop’s body, every atom associated with it, with her.
Pop shouted, “Everyone, upstairs!” He wasn’t much of a runner, but he ran, and Pete followed him, Chucky in his arms. I was stunned, didn’t know what was happening, until the flashing lights of the police car drifted away.
A huge black wave from the Sound swept into the parking lot and took the cop car with it when it receded. Another wave took Pop’s big white Caddie. That thing looked like a beluga whale till it went under. The whole building shook and shuddered like a boat in a hurricane. The third floor was soaked, the carpet a sponge. Pop threw his pistol out the big open window. It was too windy to hear a splash, but we all got to see the police car’s lights flicker and sink into the churning water.
What else was there to do but get soaked and nearly freeze till morning? We reported the Cadillac going into the drink, so the local police just assumed that Officer Renaldo and his black and white did so too. Small town cops, especially back then, didn’t radio in every little stop they made. The building was a wreck; all of down port was flooded. Everyone loved Pop, so the town let him off easy by purchasing the building and turning it into this office slash HQ slash waiting area with its ugly carpets and old-timey nautical maps. Now there are ten waterspouts a year instead of one every ten years, and when the moon is high sometimes that sandbar—the silvery one from somewhere else, not the plain old stretch of land any waitress can swim to—makes an appearance.
Is that what you’ve been waiting for?
Yeah. Every time it rains hard enough to flood downtown, I’m here. I had to jimmy the locks to get out of the weather. How about you? You just walk in to sit here all night? Why are you here, in this waiting room, at midnight?
The same as you. Here we go here we go.
