The Daughter Ship: A Novel

TRUITT   I want to introduce you to my girls. We all live together in a U-boat. Why are we trapped in a German submarine? Because my dad Craig is a World War II buff. We grew up browsing his bookshelves in Virginia Beach. It’s a naval town, home to aircraft carriers and battleships. Fighter jets rip the sky above the dunes. Somewhere underwater, and not too deep, is our submarine, a ghost ship, a wreck, a childhood. Ping. (That’s the sound of the echo sonar, searching for a target.)   I may not be the smartest kid in the submarine, but I’m the loudest and the strongest, and it’s up to me to decide what’s true. The others have their own idea of true—Smooshed Bug, Star. They have their stories.   Smooshed Bug says, “There’s no such thing as true.”   “I know what’s true,” I tell her. “I know what happened.”   “True to you,” she says, “is not the same as true.”   I’ll give you a tour of the Unterseeboot, and that’s the last German word I’ll use. Undersea boat. You know the shape, a cigar. I’ll start up front: powered torpedo room and crew quarters (bunk beds soldered into the hull), officers’ quarters, galley kitchen, radio closet, control room . . . keep coming, follow me through . . . here’s the engine room, and then, at the very back, another torpedo room. Two hundred and twenty feet, bow to stern. We’re starting this very claustrophobic. Everyone lives on top of each other. There’s pressure on every inch of the boat from all that water. Ping.   My dad loved to read about Adolf Hitler, Japan, Italy, all that mess. His bookshelf was full of red and black. He also loved boats, cars, tractors, anything with an engine. He spent most of his free time on his back gazing at the underbelly of a car.   Dad’s garage was a run-down shack, the only structure left when my parents bought the lakefront property. They built an angular, supermod house but left the doorless shack in the house’s shadow with a dirt floor and one broken window, dusty and jagged.   I see myself standing in that dirt in my scouting gear. Khaki shirt, white kneesocks, shorts, and a tidy red scarf. (I’ve earned twenty-five badges, which isn’t easy.) A humid summer night, still not dark, though it should have been. I was waiting to say something to my dad, to get his attention. He was under the car, and he didn’t like visitors. Why was I out there? Maybe it was time for dinner.   He held a greasy black wrench in his hand. He was mad. Something was wrong. Maybe he couldn’t fit the connecting rod into the crankshaft. He took his wrench and whacked a pipe. Any old car, Dad could get it going. He had a magical ability to fix his special things, and they were always breaking.   There were three radios lined up next to each other on a workbench inside the garage. He also had an extra refrigerator out there, where he kept his beer. He tuned all his radios to the same station, a talk show. Dad yelled at callers, every single one, as he worked. “Goddamn idiot!” I agreed with his disagreeing. I hated what Dad hated, including Mom.   He didn’t look up, even after I called out to him, so I went inside the house, where it wasn’t time for dinner. Mom was upstairs, writhing on the bedroom floor. I didn’t like that, whatever it was, maybe excess energy in her body, an overload to the power station. I wanted nothing to do with it.   Dad stuck his name on everything we shouldn’t touch. He had a plastic labeling gun, very high-tech. He typed out his initials on stiff pieces of tape so there was no mistaking what was his. Band-Aid box, camera case, glass bottles of Coke. He even labeled his pencils. He moved the tape down as he sharpened them.   As soon as I was old enough, I climbed onto a chair, broke into his briefcase, and chewed through his pack of Juicy Fruit gum. His ten-speed bike had a leather tool case, a fitted satchel with snaps that attached under the seat. There was tape on the satchel, tape on the seat, tape on the handlebars. Plus, the seat was too tall for my legs. I rode it anyway. Fell, got hurt. Did it again.   If there had been someone to see me try and fail, some kind of witness, it might have gone better. A watcher. A scout for the scout. (There never is one, you know.) What would that other scout have seen? Me, the girls, all of us. Being pulled toward a fan in socks on a well-oiled floor.