Red Hook Road (28 page)

Jane was a neophyte insomniac—all her life until now her capacity for sleep had saved her sanity. At ten o’clock she would drop insensible into her bed, and once asleep she would not wake, not even when her drunken husband lurched into the bedroom, banging into the furniture and muttering incomprehensible curses. When the kids were little babies she had warmed their middle-of-the-night bottles without ever really coming to. But after the accident she lost her capacity for sleep and had not to this day regained it. She spent every night wandering the house, rarely managing to fall asleep before dawn. She groped through her days in an exhausted fog.

She drove on autopilot, thanking God that every twist, bend, and pothole was as familiar to her as the faces of her children. Jane knew that on Tuesdays and Fridays, Mehitable Hewins, who lived in the double-wide on the intersection of Route 179 and the Bangor Road, hung out her laundry. She knew that every weekday morning at 8:40
A.M.
the day-camp bus picked up the kids from Fletcher’s Landing in front of the post office. She knew which barns concealed police cars waiting for out-of-state speeders. The trip to Wal-Mart always took her three-quarters of an hour, give or take a minute or two, depending on how she caught the single stoplight in Red Hook and the three in Newmarket. Today, when she pulled into the vast parking lot, she realized that she had not the slightest recollection of the drive.

She parked the car and laid her head on the steering wheel, closing her eyes for what she intended to be a rejuvenating moment. Ninety minutes later, she was awakened by a rapping on the window.

Flustered and embarrassed at having been discovered sacked out in her
car like some kind of homeless woman, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and wiped at the saliva that had dripped from the corner of her mouth. Sheriff Paige stood there, his arms laden with two big shopping bags and a new red plastic cooler. He was out of uniform, and looked worried.

“You all right, Ms. Tetherly?” the sheriff asked.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You’ve been here over an hour.”

“You’ve been watching me sleep for an hour?”

“No, ma’am. I saw you when I pulled in. And as you were still here when I came out, I decided it might be a good idea to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just tired.” She collected her purse and opened the door, bumping it into his thighs.

“Oops,” he said, backing away.

“Sorry.”

As she closed the door, he said, “You might want to get those keys.”

Jane looked into the car. Hanging from the ignition was her key chain, loaded with her house keys, the keys of the Unitarian church, the keys of every family for whom she worked, and of course her car keys.

“Rough night?” Sheriff Paige asked, as she yanked the door open.

“They’re all rough,” she said before she could stop herself.

“Insomnia?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He nodded. “I don’t sleep well myself.”

In the uncomfortable silence that followed her failure to reply, she remembered the last time she had seen him, at the funeral. His forgiving smile when she had tried to make a stumbling apology for her disgraceful behavior at the scene of the accident had shamed her all over again. Now, nearly two years later, she blushed at the memory of those appalling days.

“You might think about taking something for it,” Sheriff Paige said.

“Excuse me?”

“They’ve got good sleeping pills nowadays. Won’t make you groggy like the old ones did.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Yuh.” He patted his pockets until he came up with a pen and a scrap
of paper. He scribbled the name of the drug and of his doctor. “You tell him I sent you,” he said. “Tell him what all you been through. He’s a good man. He’ll take care of you.”

Jane made an appointment that very day. Paige’s doctor blamed her sleeplessness on the change of life; insomnia was a frequent symptom, he told her. Jane did not bother to point out to him that she had gone through menopause years ago, early, like all the women in her family, with a minimum of fuss. Neither did she tell him about John. Her private grief was none of his business. She didn’t need a doctor to tell her why she hadn’t been able to sleep in two years.

That night, as she lay in bed waiting for the pill to take effect, Jane’s thoughts began to drift, first, and perhaps inevitably, to her son. She tried to remember his face, his shape, but whether it was due to the effects of the medication or of time, she found herself struggling to recall the simplest thing. Had his single dimple been on the right or the left cheek? Was it he or Matt who had the slightly protruding belly button? Disturbed by her failure to remember, she turned her thoughts to Matt. The expression on his face every morning when he left for work, dumb resignation, as though someone had forced him into this job and he wasn’t permitted to quit. As though he hadn’t brought it on himself. But these thoughts, too, were distressing, and so, almost against her will, she found herself thinking about the sheriff. He was a decent man. Steady, polite, even courtly; not like her ex-husband. And nice-looking, too. Then, with a gentle suddenness, as if a great black balloon had been inflated inside her head, she was taken by a deep and dreamless sleep. When she awoke seven and a half hours later she did not even remember that her final conscious thought before going under had been of the way Bill Paige’s strong jaw contrasted with the almost feminine cupid’s bow of his upper lip.

The house where Matt lived with his mother was on the far side of Red Hook Hill, off the Newmarket road, an area that shared nothing with the pretty little town of Red Hook but a zip code. The house stood far inland, with a view not of blue water but of austere hills from which the timber had been logged, and of blueberry bogs that were prettiest in early summer, when the mat-like shrubs bloomed pink and white. The road to the house was paved as far as the two abandoned chicken farms—massive, windowless structures from which periodic blasts of ammonia stench still emanated nearly a decade after the chickens and their manure were gone—but after that it turned to dirt, mud in the spring, and plowed only intermittently in the winter. Like the impeccably restored houses in town, their house was white clapboard (or the front and sides were; the back, unpainted for as long as Matt or anyone else could remember, was driftwood gray), but the clapboard was vinyl, an improvement his mother was still hoping to extend to the rest of the house.

Matt’s late great-uncle, a determined if not particularly talented carpenter from whom Jane had bought the house, had added a two-story extension to one side to accommodate his large family, but had failed to take adequate care in pouring the foundation, and the annex had sunk a foot lower than the rest of the house. The line of windows across the upper story deviated from the horizontal at the seam between house and annex, giving the whole establishment a cockeyed look.

Once Matt had left for college, he’d figured he’d never again take up permanent residence in his mother’s house, but after he dropped out he moved back in. Lately, though, he had come to spend most of his time in the barn. When he wasn’t at work down at the boatyard, he was working
on the
Rebecca
. When the weather got warm enough he had pulled an ancient mattress down from the attic and laid it on the floor in the corner farthest from the door, fashioning himself a little bedroom area with a nightstand made from a plastic milk crate on which he placed a battery-operated lamp. In the crate he kept an ever-rotating stack of library books. The mattress smelled of mildew, and the Hudson Bay blanket he used as a bedcover was worn through in places. When he didn’t feel like going all the way back to the house he just pissed out the door. The barn had no power, so he relied on the long series of extension cords John had long ago run from Jane’s kitchen window across the long expanse of the yard to the barn. Every so often, whenever Jane decided she couldn’t stand the mosquitoes and moths flying into her kitchen, Matt would be plunged into sudden darkness.

Other than laying claim to the small area immediately surrounding his mattress, Matt had done nothing to change the barn from the way it had looked before the accident. John’s tools were still laid out on the shelves he had built above his rough-hewn workbench. John’s work clothes still hung on the nails he had hammered into the bare studs of the walls. John’s gloves were still in their place on the hook next to his circular saw, their fingers still curled into the shape of his hands.

This evening it was only a few days away from the summer solstice, and although it was dinnertime, the fat sun still hung high in the sky, filling the barn with light. The sun picked up the dust motes in the air and they glowed yellowish gold, like tiny bits of floating confetti. The wood floors were warm, especially near the windows and the open barn door. A shaft of light from one of the skylights that John had cut into the ceiling fell across Ruthie’s bare legs. She lay on Matt’s bed, naked but for the stretched and faded Rolling Stones T-shirt that Matt had been wearing a few minutes before.

Last summer, when Matt and Ruthie had begun seeing each other, they had taken refuge in the barn to keep away from the prying eyes of the town. People in Red Hook talked. They knew which lobsterman had drunk away his profits and stood to lose his boat, which father of three had been accused of fondling his children’s young friends, which postmistress was meeting her sister’s husband at the motel on Route 3 every Tuesday at
lunchtime. The locals knew and talked about the summer folk because they took care of their boats and houses, waited on them in the restaurants, filled their gas tanks, and bagged their groceries. The summer people mostly knew one another, and spent most of their time pondering the personal lives of their fellow yacht club members. The middle strata—the boatbuilders and back-to-earthers, the retirees and professionals, those who liked to think of themselves as locals but whom the locals referred to as “year-round summer visitors”—talked about everyone. As the Copakens and Tetherlys traversed all these groups, Ruthie and Matt did their best to maintain a very low profile. They kept themselves to themselves, as his mother would say. They had not reached an agreement to conceal what was going on between them; rather they understood without discussing it that their relationship would be the stuff of gossip, something they both wanted to avoid. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, every time either of them had walked into the library or the liquor store, Neptune’s or the food co-op, there would settle over the crowd a little hush. It was the same for the other members of their families. It made going out in public that much harder. By now, though, the tragedy had faded in others’ minds. They could pretend to be no different from anyone else. But if people came to know of their relationship, once again they would find themselves back in the spotlight, something neither Ruthie nor Matt could tolerate. And so from the very beginning they’d kept things quiet.

Ruthie traced their relationship from the August night, the summer of the accident, when together they had set off the last of the wedding fireworks. Although they had not even kissed, that was when she considered it to have begun. Matt dated things from the next Fourth of July, after that second evening of fireworks, when they had made out in the dark on the steps of the Grange Hall. Ruthie had led Matt there after the last bottle rocket had been set off because she needed at that moment to touch him, to feel his hands on her body. Watching those bursts of light exploding in the sky had made them both feel untethered, disembodied, as if they, too, were at risk of disappearing like fading sparks in a dark summer sky. They made love for the first time a week or so later, huddled under a blanket on the deck of the
Rebecca
.

Because of the secrecy they had imposed on the relationship, they could not go to the beach, or to the movies. They could not share a pitcher of beer at the Neptune or even an ice cream cone at the Bait Bag. Sex had given them something to do while each enjoyed the comfort of the other’s company. Sex was their primary occupation, and yet, even so, once they were separated by thousands of miles they managed to maintain their connection. This despite the fact that Matt did not have a computer and the lines to use the ones in the library were so long that it had taken tenacity and a real sense of purpose to answer Ruthie’s e-mails from England.