The Great Offshore Grounds Read online

  ALSO BY VANESSA VESELKA

  Zazen

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Vanessa Veselka

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Veselka, Vanessa, author.

  Title: The great offshore grounds : a novel / Vanessa Veselka.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019057825 | ISBN 9780525658078 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525658085 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3622.E85 G74 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019057825

  Ebook ISBN 9780525658085

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image based on: A Breaking Wave by David James (detail). Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Vanessa Veselka

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book 1—Henry Hudson

  1 The Wedding

  2 The Keeper’s House

  3 The Tower

  4 Irish Lord

  5 1040-EZ

  6 Triumph

  7 Crown Victoria

  8 The Great American Desert

  9 Draft Horse

  10 Wolf Spider

  11 The Locust

  12 Ribcage

  13 The Essex

  14 The Fire Blossom Temple

  15 The Universe

  16 Polaroid

  17 The Wharf

  Book 2—The Lay

  18 New Archangel

  19 The Miracle of Aunt Jennie

  20 Athens and Sparta

  21 The Unicorn of Feminism

  22 The Storm

  23 The Bed

  24 One Good Reason

  25 Egypt, Again

  26 Physics

  27 Graveyard Point

  28 Mantra

  29 Eagle Ring

  30 The Mother Narcotic

  31 Raleigh

  32 The Crocodile and the Clock

  33 Hathor

  34 The Well

  35 Akutan

  Book 3—Metal Slovakia

  36 Lone Pine

  37 Blood Tree

  38 Neptune

  39 Every Rifleman

  40 Riding with a Kennedy

  41 Census

  42 Metal Slovakia

  43 Luck

  44 Briar

  Book 4—Upriver

  45 Waves and Light

  46 Justine

  47 Miss Thailand

  48 The Brochure

  49 Sarah

  50 The Proposal

  51 Everything You Do

  52 The Neva

  53 Jacksonville

  54 Aurora

  55 Salamander

  56 Postcard

  57 The Nurse Navigator

  58 Ishtar

  59 Static

  60 The Universe Returns

  Book 5—The Sea

  61 Ghost Ring

  62 Realm of the Sky God

  63 Hotel Titanium

  64 The Bridge of the Americas

  65 What Hills Are Those

  66 The Great Canal

  67 Above, the Fire

  68 The Hostel

  69 The Eighteenth Century

  70 The Letter

  71 Vigil

  72 The Southern Cross

  73 The Grief Channel

  74 Valley of the Kings

  75 The Fears

  76 Testament

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  This novel is for Violet Luna, my girl.

  BOOK 1—HENRY HUDSON

  Health to buzzards

  Cash to the drivers

  Euler for the lords

  An’ Greasy luck to the lifers!

  1 The Wedding

  FIFTEEN MILES south of Seattle and halfway across Puget Sound to the west is Maury Island. Shaped like an arrowhead aimed at the mainland, green as the inner fold of a grass blade, it can be seen from the air cradled in the crook of an elbow of water. Tourists ride over on ferries to watch for whales and UFOs. Jets turn around overhead on their final approach to the airport. Even on days when there is no rain, mist filters through the evergreens until it pulls apart like threadbare cloth and burns off.

  The wedding was to be held in the afternoon at Point Robinson, the site of an old fog-signal station that once housed a steam whistle fed by coal fire and water to warn away ships. In 1897, at the dawn of massive capital expansion and speculation, the whistle sounded for five hundred and twenty-eight hours, nearly killing the man who had to shovel the thirty-five tons of coal. The cargo had to be kept from the rocks, but who can halt the lumbering desires of the world?

  In 1915, the lighthouse with its state-of-the-art, fifth-order Fresnel lens was built. Powered initially by oil vapor lamps, its beacon could be seen for twelve miles. The lens was the perfect manifestation of Victorian technology, replacing simple flat lenses with faceted, crystal domes, prisms cut into tiers that made it both astonishingly beautiful and a breakthrough in optics. The Fresnel lens had a theoretically infinite capacity to capture diffuse light and, by way of internal reflection, cast it like a spear through darkness. It lit stages and celluloid, Polaroid shots and retinas for ID scans, and on Point Robinson, it lit Puget Sound.

  These days, every modern ship has a GPS and the little lighthouse is just a decoration on a brochure, a destination for a grade-school field trip. The mechanisms that rotated the original lantern remain on the first floor, which is now a tiny museum of technology with gauges and wheels and iron bolted into the base with lines that lead nowhere and do nothing.

  * * *

  —

  Back across the sound in Seattle, Livy looked out the window of her basement apartment. Her father was getting married that afternoon, and though it was already late April, a cold, wet breeze still whistled through the gaps in the caulking turning her skin to gooseflesh. A few feet away stood her sister, Cheyenne, poorly slept but already dressed.

  “I’m freezing,” said C
heyenne. “I’m turning on the space heater.”

  “Turn on the oven. They charge us for electricity,” Livy said.

  Cheyenne rolled her eyes but went over to the little white gas stove. Cranking the temperature to broil, she leaned back against the oven door so she could feel the heat on her hamstrings while the oven warmed.

  Yesterday they’d spent the whole day picking rocks out of Livy’s landlord’s garden in trade for a patch of soil near the sunny side of the fence so that Livy could grow food. It wasn’t political. Livy didn’t care about pesticides or permaculture. She was just the cheapest person Cheyenne had ever known. She lived off past-date groceries. She washed her clothes once a month with a teaspoon of dish soap in a tub. She made her own bras. Cheyenne was pretty sure she would have rinsed and reused dental dams if she thought it would work. Recently, Livy had become convinced she could feed herself off three square yards of land. It was ridiculous, but since Cheyenne had appeared out of nowhere and moved in on her without warning or rent, she didn’t have much of a say.

  Taller and unfreckled, Cheyenne had chosen a rose-colored capped-sleeve shirt with eyelets and a pair of black pinstriped suit pants. She could pass in the crowd they’d be in today. Her secondhand clothes came off as vintage, while her misadventures in body art made her seem a fine vase, badly cracked and chipping but a gritty accent to any room.

  “Cyril didn’t come to my wedding,” Cheyenne said. “Why should I go to his?”

  “Did you invite him?”

  “Hell no. He would have arrived like a lord and expected to walk me down the aisle. Here. Let me give you away. Oh hey Dad, I’m pretty sure you did that.”

  “You’re right. He would have,” said Livy.

  “So why are we even going?”

  “I have a day off work and it’s cheaper than a movie. I’m tired of ramen and hot dogs and there’ll be rich-people food so I’m taking Tupperware.”

  “Please don’t make it obvious,” said Cheyenne. “We’re already going to look so out of place.”

  “Because you have jailhouse tats of hearts and clubs on your knuckles? Or because I don’t shave and look like a landscaper?”

  Cheyenne spread the fingers of her left hand. “Not just clubs and hearts. The one on my thumb is a diamond and the pinkie is a spade. You just can’t tell anymore.”

  Livy crossed to where she’d laid out her newly washed blue painter’s pants and pulled them on over her long johns. “I’m going to the wedding because it’s a show of support that costs me nothing. I have never thought of him as a dad so I don’t care. At his worst he’s just a big blank. A disappointment. He gets a clean slate. That’s my wedding present. A pass. It’s the only decent move.”

  “I shot my better angels,” said Cheyenne.

  “They’re angels. You can’t kill them.”

  “If they were real you could.”

  Livy could feel Cheyenne’s eyes burning holes in her ribs. She zipped her fly and flattened her pockets.

  “I have clothes if you want to borrow something,” said Cheyenne.

  Livy froze for a second then bent down to roll the cuffs, making sure they were perfectly even on both sides and all the way around. “I have a white shirt. It has buttons. I can tuck it in,” she said.

  “What do you think his bride will be like?” asked Cheyenne.

  “A full-blown voodoo narcissist like him.”

  “He couldn’t take the competition. I predict Anglo geisha.”

  “I can see that,” said Livy.

  “We should at least get drunk before we go.”

  “I’d rather do it on his dime,” said Livy.

  “I bet inviting us isn’t even his idea. I’ll bet it’s the bride’s.”

  Livy smiled. “Maybe he has cancer and his doctor warned him that guilt suppresses the immune system.”

  Cheyenne propelled herself off the stove with her back foot.

  “Yes!” she said. “No.” She held up her hand. “Wait,” she said, “I have it. He found God…and God said unto him,” Cheyenne threw her arms wide and boomed, “Stop being such a dick! A dick, a dick, dick…echo, echo, echo…”

  Neither sister had seen their father since they were fourteen. The wedding invitation had arrived only two weeks before the date of the ceremony, just on the heels of Cheyenne’s reappearance, something their mother, Kirsten, considered prophetic. It was obvious from the short window that the decision to include them was, at best, the result of a long debate or, at worst, an afterthought. Their initial instinct had been to ignore it and the invitation was repurposed as a coaster for days before it was seriously considered. But in the end they could not ignore it. It tapped at a hidden door…Shh…he is a king in a castle; he has only stashed us away in the village to keep us safe; someday he will call for us, claim us, and make everything right.

  “I kind of understand why we’re going to the wedding,” said Cheyenne, “but why is Mom going?”

  “For her own reasons.”

  “Without a doubt.”

  Livy’s eyes met Cheyenne’s for a second then moved to the clock. “What time is Mom picking you up?” she asked.

  A car honked outside.

  “Now,” said Cheyenne.

  * * *

  —

  Kirsten’s twenty-year-old Toyota was stopped in the middle of the street with the hazards on blocking half the road. She was wearing a black velvet camisole with a long black skirt and black cardigan. There was a ring on every finger and totemic silver jewelry hung around her neck. Tiny zircon studs pierced the indigo blue sun and the crescent moon tattooed on her earlobes. Cheyenne took one look at her and knew that her mother was totally prepared to make an awkward situation more awkward.

  “Get in or we’ll miss the ferry,” said Kirsten.

  The dashboard of Kirsten’s car rattled with the engine.

  “Keep the window rolled down,” she said. “The defroster doesn’t work.”

  Kirsten and Cheyenne hadn’t spent any time alone since Cheyenne returned so Cheyenne had agreed they would go out to the wedding together, while Livy rode in with their brother, Essex. The minute Cheyenne got into the car, though, she regretted it. Kirsten had questions. About Cheyenne’s failed marriage. About its aftermath. About Cheyenne’s spiritual analysis of this moment in her life. Cheyenne tried to change the subject to one of Kirsten’s many interests—domestic violence legislation, her coven, what books she was reading—but it always turned back to Cheyenne’s psyche and the archetypal trauma that must be feeding her cycles of disintegration. Cheyenne told her mother she was tired and pretended to sleep but Kirsten talked anyway.

  “You’re a mystic by nature,” Kirsten said as they drove onto the ferry. “You’re drawn to shadowlands.”

  Cheyenne rolled over and fell into a deep fake nap.

  * * *

  —

  When they arrived, Kirsten went to find out where they were supposed to park. She saw Cyril, dressed in white, in the distance by the edge of the water. Walking over, Kirsten noted that his black hair was still long in front and combed behind his ears as it had been when she’d first met him, a rail-thin twenty-four-year-old holding forth about social norms and Hesse, quoting the Dalai Lama. It had all turned out to be plumage.

  She’d never held him to any kind of child support outside the occasional hospital bill, but recently her attitude about that shifted. She didn’t expect anything out of him, but maybe the girls should. She wasn’t sure. Cyril was one of those rich people who viewed his wealth as the natural fruit of his spiritual voyage.

  The rain had stopped but the air was chilled and her shoes were wet by the time she reached him.

  Cyril kissed her on both cheeks.

  “Thanks for coming early,” he said.

  “You said you had something for the girls.”


  “Yes, but not now. I’ve set aside time before things get too hectic,” he said.

  Kirsten watched a large foamy wave burst into a white star on the rocks behind him.

  “I’m not young anymore,” she said. “I could have cancer or drop dead of some zoonotic disease and you’d be their only blood relative.”

  He smiled. “I have faith in your immune system.”

  “Won’t save me from getting hit by a bus or shot by some teenager with an AR-15.”

  “That’s a little dramatic,” he said.

  She eyed him without expression, then laughed.

  “I just hope it’s good,” she said. “Whatever you’re giving them. Like a house. Or an education.”

  He turned to the water. Facing the sound, the breeze caught his hair.

  He raised his hand to point at something and Kirsten walked off. Such a fucking Leo. Returning to the car, she knocked on the window to rouse Cheyenne.

  * * *