Red Hook Road (49 page)

As she rounded the corner to Jacob’s Cove, Iris drove into a wall of weather. The sky, clear and cloudless over Red Hook, out of nowhere turned a sudden, ominous black. Rain fell across the car like a sheet of steel. Iris had never seen anything like it. A blast of wind buffeted the car as it began to fishtail. Iris tried to turn into the swerve, the way you were supposed to do. For a long moment the car spun sideways, and coming at her was Jacob’s Cove—black beach, black arc of pine trees, black water. She held fast to the wheel with a horrified sense of connection to her lost daughter. Then she felt her tires catch hold of the road’s surface, and the car straightened out.

She went on slowly, her face inches from the windshield, trying to see beyond the useless flapping of her wipers. By the time she arrived home she was exhausted, her neck and shoulders stiff from clutching the wheel, her jaw aching from having clenched it so hard.

Iris ran into the house, allowing the screen door to slam shut behind her, and in those few seconds outside found herself soaked. Standing in a pool of water in the mudroom, she kicked off her shoes and took a beach towel down from the shelf. She wrapped herself in the towel and called out, “Ruthie?”

She found the Fourth of July picnic piled haphazardly on the kitchen table. “Ruthie?” she called again.

She ran upstairs, hesitating in front of Ruthie’s closed door, remembering the way that she and Daniel liked to pass the time during blackouts, when they were young and the power service to this part of Down East Maine was even less reliable than it was now.

“Ruthie?” Iris called softly. Finally, when no answer was forthcoming, she opened the door. The room was empty.

“Where the hell are you?”

She crossed the hall to her own bedroom, looked out the window and saw the boats in the cove reeling and crashing into one another like toy boats in a bathtub. Down by their dock, a little white tender was fighting its way across the choppy waters toward a sailboat that was heaving and rolling against its mooring, two dark figures sitting hunched against the wind.

Iris tore down the stairs, pulled on a pair of rubber boots, and ran out into the yard and the rain and the darkness.

If Jane had arrived at the bridge over the tidal stream on the outskirts of East Red Hook a moment or two earlier than she did, her truck would have been washed away. The combination of high tide and the crashing storm had flooded the stream, sweeping torrents of water over the railing of the bridge. Jane was stuck on the side of the bridge away from the village.

She could not remember a storm ever having come up so suddenly. When she had left her house to drive down to the Copakens’, it had not even been raining. The day was calm, with a light breeze coming in from the east. Certainly the weather had been nothing that would have dissuaded her from driving out to East Red Hook village, and she would have been easy to dissuade.

Jane had not at first intended to come to the celebration today. Indeed, she had planned to make a point of not coming, had left it to the girls to clean Iris’s house on their own all summer. It was clear to her that Samantha had blossomed in New York, that she had come into her own in a way she never could have in Red Hook, and perhaps that was part of why Jane was so unwilling to forgive Iris. Or perhaps it was merely that she considered it a fair bargain—Iris got Samantha, and Jane got the pleasure of having Iris leave her the hell alone for the rest of her life. She had exchanged no more than a brief greeting with her when Iris dropped Samantha off at the beginning of the summer, but after Mr. Kimmelbrod’s fall, Jane’s anger had abated, and when the time came for the celebration, she found herself putting on a decent shirt and clean jeans, and getting
into the truck. If Jane were the type to spend time analyzing her own motivations, she might have reasoned that to abandon the yearly memorial celebration would be, in some way, an abandonment of the memory of her son, a statement that she no longer cared enough to mark his death. But Jane was not given to unnecessary introspection, and, more important, she had always resented the notion that this Copaken celebration was any kind of fitting memorial. In the end she was willing to acknowledge only a desire to be polite to a family in crisis, and a decision not to leave Matt on his own to represent their family. Especially now, after the launch, when he was inexplicably gloomy. Let down, she supposed.

The rain surprised her outside of Red Hook, on the road near Jacob’s Cove. In itself this was not unusual; thundershowers often came on with thrilling suddenness. But there was something wrong about this rain. It hung before her in a solid wall of falling water, so that as she drove into it she felt as if she had entered another place, a world of rain. The wind, too, was stronger than anything she could remember since the night a hurricane had taken her father’s life. All those decades ago she’d watched the wind peel the front porch off the house across the road and send it cartwheeling away. Her mother had pulled her away from the window, and they listened huddled in the basement to the freight train noise as it bore down on them. Tonight as she arrived at the bridge, Jane saw an entire swath of pines keel over, their newly exposed roots white and naked. Her two-ton pickup shook as if it were made of aluminum foil and rubber bands.

Jane slammed on the brakes at the bridge as the water overtopped it, and, although she was not a praying woman, she thanked God that they held. She sat in her truck watching the wild flood. One hundred yards away, on the other side of the washed-out bridge, was the Copakens’ house. She would have to turn around and go back. She put the truck into reverse and began carefully to turn it around. The wind abated enough for her to feel like she was not in danger of flipping. She had just looked behind her, one arm draped over the car seat, the other gently rolling the wheel, when she caught a glimpse of something bobbing out in the cove. Jane slammed the truck into park and peered closer.

Beyond the shelf of clouds hanging directly over East Red Hook the sky
was clear, and so it was light enough for Jane to make out, through the rain blurring her rear window, a small figure on the water, straining at the oars of a rowboat. The waves tossed the rowboat, it bucked and reared, but the figure at the oars rowed steadily on, skirting the tidal stream, then inching closer to the shore. Jane put her truck back in gear and carefully turned it around so that it faced the cove. Her high beams sent two fuzzy shafts of light far across the water. Clutching her jacket at the throat, Jane jumped out of her truck, and was drenched at once. Though the air was muggy, the rain was cold, and it made her gasp. She hopped down the small embankment, and her boots slipped in the mud. She grabbed an exposed tree root and caught herself in time to keep from tumbling all the way down. She landed on one knee and felt a sharp stabbing pain in her kneecap. Swearing, she scrambled the rest of the way down and limped to the water’s edge just as the rowboat crossed the beams from the truck. The figure turned toward the light. It was Iris Copaken.

At that moment a large wave washed over the rowboat, but Iris stopped only long enough to shake the water from her eyes before bending once again to the oars. Jane lifted her arms over her head, waving frantically. Was the woman such a fool as to be out in a storm like this, having herself a nice little tour in her rowboat? Didn’t she grasp the power of this storm? Had she never seen houses destroyed by a hurricane, cars flipped, branches torn from trees? Didn’t she realize that a boat could capsize and be sent plummeting to the bottom of the sea, the bodies of its crew to be torn apart by tides, consumed by fish, never to be found? Didn’t Iris Copaken, the woman so confident of her own intellectual superiority, understand that a storm could erase a person as though she had never been?

“Watch out!” Jane screamed as another wave washed over the rowboat. This one, larger than the first, swamped the boat, sinking it beneath its occupant. Iris hesitated for a moment, and then leaped out. She bobbed to the surface almost immediately, about ten yards from Jane standing on the shore.

“Iris!” Jane shouted. “Swim in!”

Iris attempted a crawl stroke, but before she got more than a few feet, another wave wrapped her up and pulled her under. By now Jane was ankle-deep in freezing water, trying to shout Iris into shore. But Iris was
tiring. Her trip across the cove in the rowboat had depleted her strength; the waves were too much for her. Jane took another step, but her shoe lodged in the muck as though the land itself were trying to hold her back, to keep her safe. Jane took a deep breath, trying to steel herself against the tide of panic that threatened to overwhelm her whenever she got too close to the sea. Iris’s head slipped under. Jane kicked off her heavy shoes and plunged into the water. When it reached her armpits she began to swim.

Despite her loathing for the sea—or perhaps because of it—Jane was a strong swimmer. Her father had taught her, and every time she went to a pool—never the ocean—she had continued to practice as if for this moment or one like it. Jane did not swim for sport or pleasure. She swam only because it was the only decent alternative to drowning. Now she struck out toward Iris with a sure, powerful stroke. She swam against the current, and for every stroke she took, the waves battered her back. She gained a foot and was pushed back two, gained another and was pushed back. She threw her hands forward at the ends of her arms, steady as hammers. Slowly, creeping along, she made her way toward Iris.

When they were within arm’s reach of each other, Jane took another deep breath, ducked under, and with a massive kick propelled herself to Iris’s side. She looped her arm around Iris’s neck and Iris sagged against her. She knew enough, at least, not to fight her rescuer.

Even with the current in their favor it was rough going. Almost immediately a big wave grabbed them up and tumbled them. Blind, sputtering, Jane worked to keep hold of Iris, tangling her hand in the tail of Iris’s shirt.

Jane felt herself being dragged under. Her grip on Iris’s shirt loosened, and for the length of a single breath she considered letting Iris go. It was too much, she could not save them both. Then she cursed herself, and cursed the sea, and cursed her poor hapless fisherman of a father. She kicked her powerful legs and broke through to the surface, her grip on Iris now surer than before. Iris began to kick, too, and together they wrestled their way through the waves to shore. When Jane’s feet touched the rocky bottom she dug her toes in.

“Can you stand?” she shouted, hauling Iris up behind her. She felt the ache in her arm subside as Iris struggled to her feet. Together they splashed out of the water and collapsed on the rocky beach. They sat side by side,
their legs splayed out in front of them, the wind driving the rain into their faces and whipping their hair around their heads. This would not do. She took Iris’s arm. “Truck!” she shouted, and dragged Iris to her feet.

After they got in and slammed the doors shut, they were enclosed in a sudden silence, the only sound the muted roar of the sea and the rushing of their own breath. Iris’s eyes were closed, her head tipped back against the headrest of the truck. Her chest heaved, her lips were blue, and her teeth chattered. Her hair hung in long, dark coils around her neck. She coughed, then gagged, and for a moment Jane feared she might vomit.

“Are you all right?” Jane said.

Iris wiped the water from her face. “I think so,” she said. She worked to gain control of her breathing. “Thank you.”

Jane pulled a crumpled tissue out of her purse and used it to wipe her face.

“Current was in your favor. You’d have made it in.”

“No I wouldn’t have,” Iris said. “Is this a four-by-four? We’ve got to get around. To the other side of the cove. The fire trail is probably washed out by now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Matt and Ruthie. They sailed the
Rebecca
over to the far side of the cove.”

Aghast, Jane said, “Why? Why would he do something so stupid?”

“He must have thought that he’d be able to take shelter there. But it’s too rocky. If the wind picks up again it will smash them right up against the jetty. Or on the cliffs. We’ve got to get out there and warn him.”

“Why the hell didn’t he keep the boat in the marina?”

“I don’t know.”

Jane turned the key in the ignition. The engine coughed and both women held their breaths until it caught. She jammed the truck into reverse and headed back to the road.

“I don’t think he understood what was going on,” Iris said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It was like a tiny tornado, just right here. Look!” She pointed over the bay toward Red Hook. “It’s not even raining in town.”

“A microburst,” Jane said.

“A what?”

“It’s like a ministorm. Huge winds. Only lasts ten minutes or so, sometimes less. But it could come right up again.”

“Turn here,” Iris said, pointing at a small break in the foliage.

Jane veered off the main road. The small East Red Hook village bay was flanked on one side by the houses of the village, and on the other side, toward Red Hook, by a long fire trail through protected woods. The fire trail led from the road along the shore to the far end of the bay, where Matt had sailed the
Rebecca
to try to seek cover. It was no more than two ruts filled with muddy water. Jane thanked God that she had decided to drive her old pickup rather than the minivan, that she hadn’t bothered to change her snow tires this year. They bumped along, sloshing through the mud.