Herring Girls

The clipboard was still in my hand when I pushed open the kitchen door, and the first thing I registered was the smell. Vinegar, sharp enough to make my eyes narrow, and under it the mineral weight of old shellfish. My mother sat at the table with a paring knife and an empty cutting board. Her hands moved in short arcs, the blade tapping the wood at the end of each pass, a rhythm she kept without looking down.

I set the clipboard on the counter next to a jar of pickled beans gone cloudy. My mother did not turn. The knife rose, fell, rose. The board had no marks on it beyond the pale crosshatch of years. I counted seven strokes before I spoke.

“Mom. It’s Maura.”

She lifted her chin. Her eyes were pale and dry, and she looked at me with the mild interest of someone checking a tide clock. Then she went back to the cutting.

I had driven from Augusta that morning with a cooler of samples in the trunk and a phone full of voicemails from the home health aide. The aide’s last message had been precise: Colleen had stopped eating unless someone put a spoon in her hand. She had started the hand thing at night, standing by the sink with the water running, slicing at nothing. The aide had used the word “perseveration.” I had written it on my clipboard under a column labeled Observed Behavior and drawn a line beneath it.

The house was a saltbox on a rise above Corea harbor, three miles from the herring weirs where my grandmother had worked and where my sister had drowned. I had not been back in nine years. The kitchen had not changed: the same black iron stove, the same row of canning jars on the windowsill, the same calendar from a propane company still turned to October 2009. The date was wrong. I fixed it without thinking, flipping the pages to the present, and the small tear at the top of the month gave way under my thumb.

I made tea. My mother’s knife kept its rhythm. I poured her a cup and set it beside her elbow, and her free hand closed around it without acknowledgment. The other hand never stopped.

The aide had left a binder on the hutch, each day logged in ballpoint on ruled sheets. I read the entries while the tea steeped. Refused toast. Ate half a banana. Up at 3 a.m., hands moving. Asked for Eileen. Eileen was my grandmother, dead since 1997. The aide had written, Told her Eileen passed. No response. Hands continued. I copied the last line onto my clipboard, then crossed it out. It was not the kind of data I could use.

My mother said, “The tide’s late.”

Her voice was low and factual. I looked at the clock. It was 4:12 p.m. High tide had been at 3:48. I opened my mouth to correct her, then closed it. The knife tapped the board.

I spent the first night in my old room, under the sloped ceiling and the smell of moth flakes. The window looked toward the water. I lay awake and listened to the house settle, and I thought about the cooler in the trunk, the way the ice had melted around the sample jars, the labels peeling. In the morning I would call the board and tell them I needed another week. Maybe two. The compliance audits could wait. The shellfish farms would still be there, their tanks humming, their intake pipes pulling the same water that had taken my sister.

That was the thing I did not say to the aide, or to the doctor, or to anyone: I had not come back because of my mother. I had come back because the state had assigned me to inspect the Corea processing facility, and I had run out of reasons to refuse.

I found the photographs on the second day, in a tin under my mother’s bed. The tin was a square box that had once held butter cookies, now rusted at the seams. Inside, a stack of black-and-white prints, each one stuck to the next by a film of salt. I peeled them apart on the kitchen table while my mother watched from her chair.

The first photograph showed a row of women outside a herring shed, their oilskin aprons dark with water. Their fingers were wrapped in white cloth, each hand bound to the knuckle, so that the women looked like they were wearing small, neat mittens. The shed behind them had a roof of tarred shingles and a door that hung open on one hinge. I turned the print over. Nothing. I turned it back.

The second photograph was the same shed, closer.