Port of Call

by Melissa McPherson

Nora stands in her backyard. The grass is wet from the rain and the trees are clinging to what remains of their leaves as if desperate to hold on to summer. The black dress Nora is wearing is not warm enough for the weather, but she left the house without her sweater, or her shoes. The cold grass is making her feet ache. She looks back at the house; she can see the people in there, all of them crammed into the modest split level that she had grown up in. She can hear them too, through the window her mother had opened. The low murmur of their voices reminds her of a beehive. Someone laughs and Nora thinks that is strange. She turns around and walks toward the fence that separates their yard from the empty lot on the other side. There is a hole at the bottom of the fence, and Nora crawls through it now. A broken piece of board scrapes along her back, snagging the dress, and her knees sink in the mud. She stands, catching her breath and wipes her dirty hands on the dress. The dress is ruined now, but Nora does not care; she had not wanted to buy it in the first place.

The lot behind her house is not really empty. In the far corner, to the left of where the parking lot for the Crossroads Community Church used to be, is an old wooden pirate ship, marooned on a sea of weeds and long grass. It is a ruin now, but once, long before Nora had found it, kids had clamored on that ship, pretending to be swashbuckling pirates, explorers finding new lands, and dazzling mermaids luring sailors to their deaths. The pirate ship, like many good things, had been an accident. The money the church had raised in order to build a playground for its young parishioners had been spent on an ark, not a pirate ship; but after three days of building done by volunteers, it became obvious that the wrong item had been received. The company, who made the mistake, had offered the church half of its money back if they would be willing to keep the ship instead of returning it, so that’s what they had done. They painted the hull a bright red and replaced the jolly roger with a Christian flag. The children were not fooled. No one ever pretended to be Noah.

Three years before Nora and her sister were born, an earthquake was recorded in town. It was hardly enough to rattle the pots and pans in most of the houses, but it was strong enough to knock down a massive, and long dead, tree in the churchyard. The tree had been the subject of many a budget meeting, but it was always tabled as a problem for another day; that is until it landed directly on top of the churches roof, crushing it. Everyone thanked God it had not been a Sunday. The church was rebuilt in another location, but the pirate ship, too heavy to be moved, and unharmed in the disaster, had remained.

Nora heard all of this from various sources over the course of her childhood; the loudest and most consistent had been her parents, who told Nora and her twin sister Cora to never go over the fence and into the abandoned lot. They had promised, and they had never broken that promise. After all, they went through the fence, never over it. As usual, Cora had been the first. They had been eleven. Cora had shaken Nora awake in the middle of the night. This had not been unusual, and before she opened her eyes, Nora was scooting toward the wall on the narrow bed and lifting the blankets so that Cora could climb in. They had gotten separate rooms when they were eight; their mother had said it would be good for them, but neither had ever gotten used to being alone and they would often tiptoe into each other’s rooms at night. It irritated their mother for reasons Nora did not really understand, but they did it anyway. This time though, Cora shook her head.

“I have to show you something,” Cora said in a loud whisper.

“What?” Nora whispered back, glancing at the clock on the desk. It was nearly midnight. “It’s late.”

“I know,” Cora replied. “I had to wait for Mama to go to bed. Hurry up.” And so, Nora had gone, following behind like the pokey little puppy in the story their mother used to read—out the sliding kitchen door, down the deck stairs, through the backyard and the small strip of woods behind their old, rusted swing set (the one Daddy had been threatening to take down for years), and finally, through the hole in the fence. Nora was half expecting to find Narnia on the other side, but instead, found herself in the empty lot. After they made it through, Cora turned on a flashlight with a weak beam and pointed it at the ground.

“Be careful; there’s glass.” That was the first time Nora noticed that her sister was fully dressed in jeans and her community rec softball tee with her sneakers on her feet; the same sneakers Nora had left in her bedroom. Nora, having been pulled from her bed was wearing an oversized shirt with a rip in the neck. It had been fine for bed of course and even in the backyard it had been alright because the night was mild, but in the empty lot, although the backyard was only two feet behind her, she suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable. She crossed her arms over her chest, still flat as a board even though Mom had bought Cora a training bra when they went school shopping that fall.

“You’ll catch up,” Mom had told her. “You always do.” And that was true; it had been since the day they were born, when she had followed her sister out of her mother’s womb and into the world, and was again, as she skip-stepped to catch up with her now.

“What are we doing here?” Nora asked, no longer whispering.

“It could be our secret place,” Cora said, shining the light onto the big ship. Her voice was full of excitement when she said it. She had been wanting a secret place since their mother had read them A Bridge to Terabithia. The story had made Nora cry, but Cora had loved it.

“It’s hardly a secret,” Nora pointed out. Everyone knew about the big ship; their own parents complained often about it, and the graffiti scrawled on the hull proved without a doubt that they were hardly the first kids to come here. Cora grabbed her hand.

“Just come on,” she said and pulled her through a doorway in the hull.

Alone now, and in the full light of day, but still barefoot, Nora walks across the lot to the big ship, stepping carefully to avoid cutting her feet. She goes inside the small door on the side of the ship, looking around first to make sure she is not being watched. She has to bend over almost in half to fit through the opening. The room is so small that Nora cannot stand up straight without scraping the top of her head. She worries about spiders and remains crouched as she looks around. The smell of the wood is strong and comforting, like the smell of an old book she has read a hundred times. There is a bench running along the wall and two port holes on each side that let in sun. She knows that if someone comes along now, they will not see her unless they come right up close. Nora sits on the bench with her back to the wall and the portholes on either side of her. The bench is low, and her knees are bent almost to her chin. She stretches them out and nearly hits the opposite wall. It is so small in here, she thinks. Has it always been so small?

The inside of the ship is fairing much better than the outside and there is hardly any graffiti in here, although there are a few scattered names carved into the soft wood. She finds hers and Cora’s next to a misshapen heart. She traces her finger over them now, remembering how Cora used a knife from the kitchen to carve them. Afterward, Cora pricked first her own finger and then Nora’s.

“This is our place,” Cora said. “We have to promise.” The blood beaded up and Cora touched her finger to Nora’s mixing the blood together before she used it to draw the heart beside their names. Nora wanted to tell her that mixing the blood was pointless, that their blood, like every other part of them, was virtually identical; natural clones is what her science teacher had called them, but Cora was stubborn when she got her mind around an idea, and besides, Nora liked the pirate ship.

The heart is a faded brown now, but still here. A piece of them, maybe the last piece, is still here. Nora gets to her feet and walks through another narrow entry, and up a few steps to the deck of the ship. Here, there is more carnage. Over the years, this ship has become less of a secret. Kids in Nora’s class and even kids below her like to come here to drink and get high. Empty beer cans and cigarette butts litter the wooden floor, along with a scattering of dead leaves. In one corner, someone has left and old beanbag chair, the kind she has not seen since she and Cora were in Ms. Taylor’s Kindergarten class. Nora knows better than to sit in the thing. Instead, she clears a spot on the deck floor with her foot. A Budweiser bottle rolls through the railing and falls onto the long grass below with a soft thump that is entirely unsatisfying. Nora picks up another bottle and throws it as hard as she can, aiming for the cracked cement that had once been the parking lot of the old church. This time the glass shatters with an almost musical explosion. She shivers, it is even colder up here than it had been in her yard, and when she sits down, the deck is wet, soaking through the back of her dress. But morning has given away to afternoon now and she can feel the sun reaching down to warm her skin.

She reaches into the pocket of her dress, which had been its one redeeming quality when her mother had forced her to buy it, and pulls out a joint. She had found it in her sister’s room. In the hollowed out copy of Insomnia where she kept all her contraband. It was a little old school, but it had fooled their parents well enough. The damned thing was sitting right there on her desk when Nora had walked in. She places the joint between her lips and lights it with the little yellow Bic that she had also found in the book and takes a drag.

Her lungs spasm and she coughs harshly, but after the second hit, her lungs give in to the assault. She lays back and stares at the cloudless sky. It would have been better if I had come at night, she thinks, remembering how bright the stars were back then. The first time she smoked pot, had been at night, in almost this exact spot. It was Cora who had gotten it for them from one of the kids at school. Though Nora had never seen her sister smoke anything before, when her sister lit the joint and took the first hit, it seemed to Nora that Cora knew exactly what she was doing. Nora tried not to feel resentful. Cora was allowed to do things without her; she knew that. Their Mom had been telling Nora for weeks that she should find her own thing now that Cora was cheerleading. Nora, who had tried out for the team but had not even made the first cut, had found that she had little interest in doing anything else. If she had been honest, she had not even wanted to be a cheerleader. It had been all Cora could talk about for weeks and she had only tried out because that was what Cora was doing.

“You should come with me,” Cora said as she exhaled a cloud of smoke that billowed around their heads. She passed the joint to Nora who had taken it with an unsteady hand.

“You’ll be cheering; I won’t have anyone to hang out with,” Nora pointed out.

“So? All the kids go,” Cora replied. “Make some friends.”

“I don’t need any friends; I have you.” She looked away from Cora and tried to mimic her sister’s casual confidence, but she had coughed hard enough to make her eyes water and Cora had had to smack her in the back a few times.

“Why are you so obsessed with me?” Cora said adopting a fake cheerleader voice. Nora’s cough had turned into laughter.

“You go,” Nora said, passing the joint back to Cora. “Maybe I’ll catch up later.”

Nora takes one last drag on the joint, and as she does, she feels a click inside her head that tells her the high is coming. A swimmy feeling fills up her head. She sits up a little ungracefully, knocking into more beer bottles and puts out the joint, returning it to the pocket of her dress. She pulls herself up onto her feet by the railing and only slightly feels the splinter that embeds itself into her palm. She turns and climbs up one more small flight of stairs to the highest part of the ship. Here she can see the roof of her house over the fence, but not the people inside it. She wonders when they will leave and hopes that it will be soon. Maybe everyone had already left, but she knows if they had, her mother would have been looking for her and calling from the other side of the fence. If she is still cold, she no longer feels it. Nora bends to look through the old telescope; it is mostly for show; the scratched-up lens barely magnifies the empty lot around her, but she looks through it anyway, just as Cora had done the last time they had come.

“What do you think it will be like?” Nora asked. She looked over at Cora then, even though she hated to. Her sister, her twin, no longer looked the way Nora had always expected her to. Her long dark hair was gone, replaced by a bright pink ski cap, which she was wearing along with a sweater, though it was August, and the night was almost hot. When she lifted her face from the old telescope, her blue eyes seemed too big for her thin face. In the near dark, they looked like big dark holes. It was like looking into a mirror and finding a ghost there instead of your own reflection, and it made Nora feel like crying. Cora sat down, putting her back against the railing. She was too weak to stand for long and their walk to the old ship and up to the top deck had been a hard one. Nora had had to practically carry her, but Cora had insisted.

“I dunno,” she said. “The idea of harps and white robes and pearly gates, seems a little hokey, doesn’t it? I mean just floating there in the sky?” Nora nodded in agreement, even though she wanted those things to be real. She wanted it so badly she could have screamed. “But there has to be something,” Cora added. She looked up at the great expanse of the sky. Nora looked up as well. That night had been a clear one and Nora was able to make out the little dipper but not the big one. “It’s too big for there not to be something, right?” Cora asked.

“Right,” Nora said. Her voice barely a whisper because of the tears that were burning her throat. She sat down next to her sister; though there was barely enough space for the two of them, Nora wanted to feel the press of Cora’s side against her own.

“Maybe, I’ll get to be everywhere. Like the wind,” Cora said shifting automatically to make room for Nora. Nora took Cora’s hand in hers and squeezed it hard. Cora squeezed it back.

“I wish I could go with you,” Nora said. She was crying then, and Cora let go of her hand long enough to put an arm around her and tuck Nora’s head into the hollow of her shoulder.

“You can,” Cora said. “I just have to go first.”

Nora looks out from the deck of the ship. The space around her is suddenly too big and empty and all at once, she wants to be back in her house with all the people pressing in, and soft murmuring filling up the silence in her head, but before she goes, she closes her eyes and lets the wind blow her hair back from her face.

“I’ll catch up,” she says into the wind, and then she turns and heads back the way she came—down the stairs, out the door in the hull, across the empty lot and back through the hole in the fence, to the house where they would all be waiting.