"What's the name of Lucy's counselor at Edgehill?" I asked right off.
"I'm assuming they've assigned someone to her by now."
"Doesn't matter. Lucy's not there anymore."
"I beg your pardon?" I asked.
"What did you just say?"
"She didn't like the program and told me she wanted to leave. I couldn't force her. She's a grown woman. And it's not like she was committed or something."
"What?" I was shocked.
"Is she there? She returned to Miami?"
"No," said my sister, who was quite calm.
"She wanted to stay in Newport for a while. She said it wasn't safe to come back to Richmond right now, or some nonsense like that. And she didn't want to come down here."
"She's in Newport alone with a goddam head injury and a problem with alcohol and you're not doing anything about it?"
"Kay, you're overreacting, as usual."
"Where is she staying?"
"I have no idea. She said she just wanted to bum around for a while."
"Dorothy!"
"Let me remind you she's my daughter, not yours."
"That will always be the biggest tragedy of her life."
"Why don't you just for once keep your fucking nose out of it!" she snapped.
"Dorothy!" I heard my mother in the background.
"I don't allow the F word!"
"Let me tell you something." I spoke in the cold, measured words of homicidal rage.
"If anything has happened to her, I will hold you one hundred percent accountable. You are not only a terrible mother, you are a horrible human being. I am truly sorry you are my sister."
I hung up the phone. I got out the telephone directory and began calling airlines. There was one flight to Providence that I could get on if I hurried. I ran out of the room and kept going just as fast through the Willard's elegant lobby. People stared.
The doorman got me a cab and I told the driver I would double his fare if he could get me to National fast. He drove like hell. I got to the terminal as my flight was being called, and when I found my seat, tears welled up in my throat and I fought them back. I drank hot tea and closed my eyes. I was unfamiliar with Newport and had no idea where to stay.
The taxi from Providence to Newport was going to take more than an hour, the driver told me, because it was snowing. Through water-streaked windows I looked out at dark faces of sheer walls of granite on roadsides. The stone was lined with drill holes and dripping with ice, and a draft creeping in from the floor was damp and miserably cold. Big flakes of snow spiraled into the windshield like fragile white bugs, and if I stared too hard at them I started to get dizzy.
"Do you have any recommendations for a hotel in Newport? " I asked the driver, who spoke in the manner peculiar to Rhode Islanders.
"The Marriott would be your best bet. It's right on the water and all the shopping and restaurants are within walking distance. There's also a Doubletree on Goat Island."
"Let's try the Marriott."
"Yes, ma'am. The Marriott it is."
"If you were a young lady looking for work in Newport, where would you go? My twenty-one-year- old niece would like to spend some time here." It seemed stupid to pose such a question to a perfect stranger. But I did not know what else to do.
"In the first place, I wouldn't pick this time of year. Newport's pretty damn dead."
"But if she did pick it this time of year. If she had time off from school, for example."
"Umm." He thought as I got caught up in the rhythm of the windshield wiper blades.
"Maybe in the restaurants?" I ventured.
"Oh, sure. Lots of young people working in the restaurants. The ones on the water. The money's pretty good because the main industry's tourists in Newport. Don't let anybody tell you it's fishing. These days, a boat with a thirty-thousand-pound hold comes back in with maybe three thousand pounds of fish. And that's on a good day."
He continued to talk as I thought about Lucy, about where she would go. I tried to get into her mind, to read it, to somehow reach her through my thoughts. I said many silent prayers and fought back tears and the most terrible of all fears. I could not deal with another tragedy. Not Lucy. That loss would be the last. It would be too much.
"How late do most of these places stay open?" I asked.
"What places?"
I realized he had been talking about butterfish, something about them being used in cat food.
"The restaurants," I said.
"Would they still be open now?"
"No ma'am. Not most of'em. It's almost one a.m. Your best bet if you want to find your niece a job is to go out in the morning. Most places open by eleven, some earlier than that if they serve breakfast."
My taxi driver, of course, was right. I could do nothing now but go to bed and try to get some sleep. The room I got at the Marriott overlooked the harbor. From my window the water was black, and the lights of men out fishing bobbed on a horizon I could not see.
I got up at seven because there was no point in lying in bed any longer. I had not slept and had been afraid to dream.
Ordering breakfast, I opened curtains and looked out at a day that was steely gray, water almost indistinguishable from sky. In the distance, geese flew in formation like fighter planes, and snow had turned to rain. Knowing not much would be open this early did not stop me from trying, and by eight I was out of the hotel with a list of popular inns, pubs, and restaurants I had gotten from the concierge.
For a while I walked the wharfs, where sailors were dressed for the weather in yellow slickers and bib pants. I stopped to talk to anyone who would listen, and my question each time was the same, just as their answers were all the same. I described my niece, and they did not know if they had seen her. There were so many young women working in places along the water.
I walked without an umbrella, the scarf around my head not keeping out the rain. I walked by sleek sailboats and yachts battened down with heavy plastic for the winter, past piles of massive anchors broken and eaten with rust. Not many people were around, but many places were open for the day, and it did not occur to me until I saw ghosts, goblins, and other spooky creatures in the shop windows of Brick Market Place that today was Halloween.
I walked for hours along the cobblestone of Thames Street, looking in the windows of shops selling everything from scrimshaw to fine art. I turned up Mary Street and passed Inntowne Inn, where the clerk had never heard my niece's name. Nor did anyone know her at Christie's, where I drank coffee before a window and looked out at Narragansett Bay. Docks were wet and dotted white with sea gulls all facing the same way, and I watched as two women walked out to look at the water. They were bundled up in hats and gloves, and something about them that made me think they were more than friends. I got upset about Lucy again and had to leave.
I ducked inside the Black Pearl at Bannister's Wharf, then Anthony's, the Brick Alley Pub, and the Inn at Castle Hill. Callahan's Cafe Zeida and a quaint place that sold strudels and cream could not help me, and I went into so many bars I lost track and wound up in some of them twice. I saw no sign of her. No one could help me. I wasn't sure anyone cared, and I walked along Bowden Wharf in despair as rain fell harder. Water swept down in sheets from a slate-gray sky, and a lady hurrying past gave me a smile.
"Honey, don't drown," she said. "Nothing's that bad."
I watched her go inside the Aquidneck Lobster Company at the end of the wharf, and I chose to follow her because she had been friendly. I watched her go into a small office behind a partition of glass so smoky and taped with invoices that I could see only dyed curls and hands moving between the slips of paper.
To get to her I passed green tanks the size of boats filled with lobsters, clams, and crabs. They reminded me of the way we stacked gurneys in the morgue. Tanks were stacked to the ceiling, and bay water pumped through overhead pipes poured into them and spilled onto the floor. The inside of the lobster house sounded like a monsoon and smelled like the sea. Men in orange bib pants and high rubber boots had faces as weathered as the docks, and they spoke in loud voices to one another.