North of Boston Read Free Page B

ivory disk. “A whalebone.” He gives it to me.
    When Noah was a baby, he had enormous dark blue eyes. His lips would pucker in tiny exhaled kisses, as though he couldn’t help sending the love that filled him into the world. We used to play a game together: We would sit face to face, he in a high chair, me in a kitchen chair. We would pass something—a rubber duck or ninja figure or some other little toy—back and forth for a long time while we smiled into each other’s eyes. This reminds me of those times. Only when I try to return the disk, he pushes it right back to me.
    Maybe the kind of hero I described—the kind who radios for help—isn’t good enough. He needs one who wielded harpoons.
    I turn the treasure slowly in my hand, inspecting it, respecting it. “Nice, Noah. Really nice.”
    He grabs it and stuffs it in his jacket pocket, closes and buttons the flap, and looks around the restaurant at the people eating. Suddenly he’s a restless kid again, perked up by a hamburger, secure in his right to believe stories that comfort him and to ignore facts he can’t understand. There’s still some time until he has to do homework, and he says, “Hey, Pirio, after this can we go to your place and play dominoes?”

Chapter 2

    I t’s Saturday morning, one week after the accident, and I’m sitting in a hushed television studio in Brighton. There’s a live studio audience on the other side of the glaring stage lights—more than two hundred fans of the famed Jared Jehobeth, who occupies the club chair directly across from me. He appears completely relaxed. He shuffles his tie, apparently lost in thought, summoning his showtime personality from wherever he keeps it stored. A tiny table is on my left. I note that a glass of water has been thoughtfully provided, in case I choke.
    This is one of the last places I ever thought I’d be. I hate television in general and morning shows in particular. So when the executive producer called me after reading the
Globe
’s account of the incident and asked me to appear as a guest, I immediately declined.
    Then I thought about it. No one had come forward to take responsibility for the collision. The more time that went by, the more likely it was that the freighter that sank the
Molly Jones
would get away. What if publicizing the story got a crew member to confess or to drop an anonymous tip? So I called the producer back.
    Right now I’m doubting the wisdom of that choice. I sweep my hair off my neck and twist it loosely over my shoulder, which causes an assistant producer to materialize at my elbow, spritz, comb, and put my hair back just the way it was. Under the hot lights, the pancake makeup they slathered on me is already starting to slide off my face. I’m glad I refused the rest of the cosmetic camouflage they tried to persuade me to wear. A young producer in a T-shirt and jeans stands below the stage, holding up fingers, counting down the seconds until the red on-air light will flash.
    Now the producer points his index finger silently, emphatically, at the two of us on the stage, and the on-air light blooms red in my peripheral vision. A rush of fear dizzies me. It’s as if a scaffolding has been pulled away. I look down to discover that I am, in fact, wearing clothes—a red silk shirt, a short gray skirt over black tights and high black boots. Meanwhile, Jared Jehobeth has lit up like a neon bulb. He exudes such confidence and charm that even his nondescript brown suit looks dapper somehow. He welcomes his studio audience and television viewers to
Jared Jehobeth in the Morning
. The vaguely suggestive implications of the title do not make him blink. Instead, his eyes shine like innocent blue balloons, and his mop of brown hair and the pink powder blush they put on him make him look as trustworthy as a Franciscan friar. But he has a reputation for hard-hitting interviews—he has