The Sabbathday River (17 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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“But you'll still …” This was taking a minute to sink in. It seemed to her that she was afraid even to say it. “We'll still be able …
Ashley.”
“Oh,” he said affably. “Well, sure. If you want.”
“If I
want
!”
The word came out loud. Polly woke with a flinch of put-upon surprise. She turned her tiny face to her father and stared, her eyes broadly open.
“We woke her,” Ashley observed, though he seemed to have gleaned
this without ever looking at Polly directly. “Guess I'd better get going.”
“Wait!” Heather said frantically.
When will I see you
? was what she wanted to know.
When are we going to
… “Where's my present?” is what she actually came out with.
“Oh.” He grinned. “It's that.” He had turned to his car and gestured.
Heather didn't see anything. “What?”
“I'm giving you my car. You need a car, don't you?”
Right away, she knew she was going to cry. Yes, of course, she needed a car. A mother with a small baby and an aging grandparent in a remote house needed a car, and just because she had been putting it off didn't mean she wasn't aware of her responsibilities. She had even planned, vaguely, to ask Stephen to drive her down to Peytonville soon, to look in the lots with her and help her pick out something serviceable. But this was something else altogether. Her lack of transportation had been the catalyst for her first lovemaking with Ashley, and as such, it was a perversely cherished thing. The car—his car, in which they had found themselves so sweetly entrenched—was a kind of holy ground to Heather, a portable Cave of Lovers in the guise of a rusted, eight-year-old Volvo with upward of a hundred thousand miles on the odometer. To drive it to the Stop & Shop seemed a kind of sacrilege. No. To drive it without Ashley in it was a sacrilege. That he even wanted her to was horrible. She felt the first tear make its treacly descent down her left cheek. How could he want her not to need him like this? It was callous, this obliteration of the circumstances that had brought them together. Callous and wounding.
“I can't take your car,” she told him, between chokes.
He looked at her, baffled. “Why not? It's a good car. And I just told you, I got a new one. I don't need it. You just need to take it to Peytonville and register it. The papers are in the glove compartment. You can write that you paid, I don't know, like a hundred bucks for it, on the transfer document. It's easy.” He frowned at Heather, who wept on. “I don't get this.”
“When do I see you,” she gasped, “if I have my own car?”
Now he got edgy. “Oh.” Ashley shrugged. “Well, you'll see me.”
“When?”
“Lots. When did you see me before?”
“When you drove me home!”
Heather cried. Polly started to cry, too. Heather put her up over her shoulder and rubbed her swaddled back.
He let her alone for a moment; then, when he saw she wasn't going to stop by herself, he stepped close and pressed his cheek against her wet cheek. Between sobs, she smelled: nutmeg and spicy sweat, then, fainter, the sweet talc of somebody else's baby. Polly moved against her, and for a moment she wanted to put her other arm around Ashley, to hold them both equally to each other and to her, but Ashley's mouth had found her ear and was distracting her. By force of habit, his lips closed over the lobe—he couldn't help himself. Faintness fell over her. She wondered, vaguely, where she might put the baby down. “I missed you,” Ashley said.
“I've missed you so much,” said Heather, who kissed him first. The doorway seemed to be getting smaller, the floor buckled beneath them. It was a scratch to the most gruesome and long-standing itch, in the deepest place—finally, he was touching her again. Places not yet healed were awake and complaining, and she felt like laughing. After all, he was hers. He still came to her for this, despite his other life. His lesser life, she thought, breaking off her kiss to kiss Polly. He was making his sound, the one she loved, the one that made her crazy as he pressed her. It was like a language of hums and breaths, happy and urgent. She really wanted to put the baby down. “Heather,” Ashley said.
By now Polly was notably unhappy, sputtering her small noises of distress and tensing her bundled body. Even so, it was Ashley's hand on her breast—so much harder now, and larger, and more tender—that made her think of what to do.
“Wait,” she said. She put up her free hand. “She's hungry.”
He seemed surprised, then a little subdued. “I should go, then.”
“Don't go.” Her voice was calm. “Come with me.”
She led him with one hand through the front hall and then into the living room, where she sat on the blanket-covered couch and deftly unbuttoned her shirt. Polly, sensing progress, grew still and admirably focused, but Ashley, who perched awkwardly on an armchair, looked quickly away. Then he looked back.
She was good at this. She held the baby in her right arm's crook and flicked the little buckle that latched the cup to one side of her nursing bra (fastening it up again was harder, but by then you could usually put the baby down and use both hands). The panel folded down, showing her breast, round and heavy, with a nipple rosy-dark, newly recovered from the blistering first weeks of nursing. She didn't give Polly the nipple
right away but held her still on her lap, looking down over her and stroking her avid face. She wanted him to see.
Only after, once the baby had latched on, did she look up. She loved this. At first it had horrified her, the way the baby's suck had made her feel. At first she had thought herself unnatural. But now it was in her face, and she didn't hide it. The fierce little mouth, single-minded and strong and made to fit her precisely, worked away, draining the tightness, the cement heaviness, from her breast. Even these weeks later, she felt her womb contract. She wondered what it would feel like to come now. She thought it might be different—richer, in a way, and more lasting, not so wildly furtive. She wondered if there would be pain and found herself hoping there might be, a little. She had been saving this for him. Heather unbuttoned her bra on the other side before Polly was ready. Her shirt was widely open, the sun warm across her chest. She knew him very well. She moved the baby to the other arm and looked up to find Ashley's eyes on her.
“I could use a lift back into town,” he said, his voice low.
Heather smiled. “All right. Let me just put her down and tell my grandmother.”
It was her first time out of the house since the baby. He let her drive, and it came back quickly, despite the long hiatus. She knew instantly that she loved driving this car, putting her hands where his hands had always been, sitting where he had sat. She loved looking across at him on the passenger side, his little frown. She had closed her shirt but left the cups of her nursing bra unbuttoned. The fabric was soft against her, and dampening in two dark spots over the nipples. Ashley, mesmerized, watched them. Since she was driving, she didn't even ask before turning off, taking him along for the ride. He shifted beside her, trying to get comfortable. It was hard not to touch him, to put it off even this little bit. The logging road was matted with windfall leaves, cacophonous and vivid-bright, and the tires made a choked and wadded sound. Heather drove a little faster.
“Easy,” Ashley said. “We'll get there.”
“I want to be there now.” She laughed.
His hand reached across. The wet over her nipple grew suddenly hot. “All right,” he told her. “Let's just stop right here.”
The Marketplace
A FEW WEEKS LATER, SHE WOKE TO NURSE HER daughter in the cool blue light before dawn and noted, as she unbuttoned her nightgown, the first real shudder of autumn. Downstairs, Pick was already at work in the kitchen, the waft of applesauce in mid-production (an annual and fairly arduous event) and the tinkle of radio voices her accompaniments. Heather perched on the edge of her bed, feeling the weight of the baby, who was wrapped thinly and balanced on her forearm as she sucked. She reached for Polly's quilt to bind her further into warmth, and the action struck her hard with the newness of its necessity.
On the chair beside her bed lay her current work, a pictorial sampler dedicated to twins unfortunately named Krystal and Kandi. Every element of this work had been specified by the client, from the hothouse pink of the thread to the inanely posed teddy bears on either side of the twins' birth date, to the injunction that only cross-stitch—surely the most uninspired and dully restrictive stitch ever devised—be used in its execution. It was demeaning, Heather thought, wondering how much of
Naomi's praise she must have absorbed in order to feel this way. With each uncharacteristically harsh jab of her needle she had had to fight the urge to sabotage the sampler entirely by making it so ugly that even this tasteless client would reject it. But she owed Naomi more than that, Heather thought, exasperated. She had given one of the teddy bears an impish leer, but it hadn't helped. Polly finished nursing, burped, and drifted to rest, subdued with milky happiness. Heather unwrapped the quilt and put her in the middle of her own bed, covering her. The baby jammed her left thumb into her little mouth. For some preposterous reason, this small act of independence made Heather feel terribly depressed. Placing pillows around the baby to prevent her somehow finding the edge of the bed, she went downstairs.
Pick was at the stove, churning her apples in a pot so big it partly covered a second burner, leaving a couple of outer coils exposed and glowing orange bright. The smell was wildly sweet, a vaporous cinnamon. She added sugar by the teacup and didn't turn around.
“Smells wonderful,” Heather said. “Didn't you say you were going to make it less sweet this year?”
“That was before the baby,” said Pick. “A little sugar will make the baby eat more applesauce.”
“Oh,” said Heather, who had no idea when Polly would be ready for applesauce, or indeed for anything that didn't come from her own breast. “Well, good, then.”
“There's coffee.” Pick pointed with her elbow. “You're up early.”
“Yuh,” Heather said, pouring herself a cup. “But at least she's sleeping through the night. I'd rather get up early than have to get up in the middle of the night.”
“She's a good baby,” Pick observed. She threw another teacup of sugar in the pot. “But I hope you don't think she slept through the night.”
“What?” Heather blinked.
“
You're
sleeping through the night.” Pick was chuckling; her wide back moved under the housecoat. “I changed her, about three-thirty.”
Heather shook her head. “I didn't hear a thing.”
“I don't sleep like I used to,” Pick said. “You get nearer the end than the beginning, you start thinking what a waste it is, giving over all that time to sleep.
You
need it, though. I know. You sleep now. You'll have plenty of time when I'm not around to get up and down all night long.”
“Oh, Pick,” Heather said. “You'll outlive us all. Next time just wake me up.”
Pick frowned down into her applesauce. “You got that car all seen to?”
Heather had. She'd driven into Peytonville the day before, gingerly and slow on the roads already clogged with flatlanders ogling the leaves. The car, it turned out, would not pass inspection until she handed over two hundred dollars to a bald mechanic located strategically near the DMV, and the inspector himself had taken one look at Polly, whom Heather had placed on the passenger-side floor in her basket, and started screaming, so she'd had to drive right to the Peytonville Wal-Mart and buy a car seat she'd outgrow in another five pounds. Altogether, the gift car had wiped out a good chunk of her savings, but it was still worth it. She had been wrong, she now understood, to respond so poorly to his gift. It had been hateful of her, too, because now it was all too clear why he had given her the car. His car. The car was known in town, after all, as his, and in giving it to Heather he had said that she, too, was his, and the child was his, and he acknowledged them. It was a great gift, and she had wept over it, because she had doubted him, which was also hateful. Sometimes she felt she deserved neither of them, Ashley or Polly.
That said, however, she hadn't exactly felt the need to use the car at all, especially since Ashley had developed a knack of materializing whenever her anxiety about seeing him hit some critical point. Such was the imperative of their connection: when she longed sufficiently, he was suddenly there: coming up the drive in his own new car, an apple-red station wagon with an infant carrier latched in the middle of the back seat. And he seemed to need her even more now than before, and could barely make himself wait until they had reached their place at the end of the logging road. He was so sweet to her, too, and inexpressibly gentle with her hurt places. He did not mind that her waist had not reappeared after Polly's birth, or that her hips were marked with dark ridges, or that her breasts leaked and hung and had ravaged nipples. She was bigger inside, too, which she hated, but Ashley appeared not to notice. He seemed to float in her, buoyed by contentment, his hips slender between her spread thighs, like something lithe and light and small on a dense, vast surface. She felt this more now than she had during the pregnancy, which was odd, because technically she was
lighter by fifteen pounds. When she apologized about her size, he shrugged and said it made no difference. He mentioned, once, that Sue wouldn't let him near her.
Heather poured herself some coffee and sat at the table, setting aside the
Goddard Clarion
Pick had been reading and flipping a spoonful of sugar from the bowl into her cup. A few crystals fell on the newsprint. She pulled it closer to flick them away, and without warning he was there, next to a Stop & Shop ad featuring a dancing potato and the reminder that it was time to stock up before the snow fell, bold-printed under the heading
Recent Arrivals!,
subcategory Mary Hitchcock Hospital—one great big healthy boy born to Ashley Deacon and Sue Locke Deacon, a nine-pound bruiser to be known as Joseph Locke Deacon from now till the end of time, the cellulose glue between his parents who grinned on either side of him in a gray, grainy photograph, Ashley's face half covered by shadow, half by his son's big head. Heather's throat seized up.
“You okay?” Pick said. “Need a pat?”
She shook her head and whipped over the page.
“You knew about this?” Pick said archly, evading the evasion.
“Oh sure,” said Heather, her voice straining for nonchalance.
Pick turned back to the stove. “You might go into town. We could use milk. And you've got a ride, anyway.” This was said with some sarcasm. To Pick, the old Volvo in the drive was a reminder of its former owner's bad behavior, and indeed, she seemed to bear it a greater grudge even than Ashley himself. Perhaps she'd figured out that Polly had been conceived in the back seat.
Heather considered. She understood that the first time she appeared in downtown Goddard with Polly, telephones would ring in her wake, threading their way to the farthest points of the Goddard and Goddard Falls web. They had to talk about her, didn't they? She was, after all, their ordained example of what bad behavior looked like, and her not caring was an additional affront—a gratuitous fuck you.
But what could they actually
do
to her? Express disapproval? Utter aspersions? They couldn't take her child away or throw her in jail; in New Hampshire, too, these were modern times, if not quite so modern as they were elsewhere. Even her newly affixed license plate beseeched her to Live Free or face an unacceptable alternative. And she had only loved a man and borne his child—a child who was radiant and healthy
and strong. And if she had the temerity to be happy and healthy herself, after doing something so unnatural, then all was wrong with the universe. But the universe wasn't her problem.
“Sure,” Heather told Pick. “Make me up a shopping list.”
A few hours later, she squeezed herself into the only pair of her jeans from before that accommodated her, maneuvered a still-sleeping Polly into her car seat, and drove into Goddard.
The light was shrill through the leaves, as yet unfallen but just beginning to wave their colorful farewells. She passed the mill, its small lot crowded with cars from out of state, and drove to the traffic light opposite the dingy church, where Goddard Falls Road met Elm. There was one car before her and one car behind. Her hand had unthinkingly flicked the right directional and it clicked a hollow beat. Heather looked right, where Elm veered off toward the Stop & Shop, then left, down to the town's core, such as it was: the squat Federal homes in their colonially correct colors, the new church with its spiky salvaged steeple, the black glint of the sports center where the road curved out of town. And she saw the spanking white of the snug house that was Tom and Whit's, its crammed back house and barn lined up behind it like graduated forms. The big Adirondack chairs on the front porch seemed unreasonably bright red and were filled with tourists in plumage as polychromatic as the leaves they'd come to see. In a rush, she longed to sit among them, to show herself first to this gentler jury of the wider world. She bit her lip.
The car behind her gave a discreet honk. The light was green.
She swung the car left, downtown.
Tom and Whit's was the single reason Goddard didn't get a Stop & Shop, or any other kind of supermarket, till the seventies, when there was enough of a summer community to make a stink about the lack of facilities. People used to wide aisles and elegant displays were just not equal to the idea that a little country store could possibly have the single specific thing they needed, whatever that single thing happened to be, notwithstanding the store's motto, helpfully displayed on a sign out front: IF WE DON'T HAVE IT, YOU DON'T NEED IT. True enough, but the locals were equally aware of the coda, unwritten though it was:
Sure we have it, but first you have to find it.
They could hardly be blamed for feeling dubious, or just preemptively exhausted at the prospect of looking. The space immediately accessible from the street was an unassuming general
store, not terribly large and not terribly crowded, with a central tourist-friendly table laden with local honey and homemade muffins (later a coffee maker), and a corner given over to paint. To get the rest you had to go—oh, they used to joke about this—behind the green door.
It really was green. It led to the back house, crammed with bulk foods and animal feeds, which itself led to the barn, so crowded it seemed as if whole farmhouses had been disassembled for parts and packed away here. Clothes were in the basement (Whit Chase had to show you the way himself), and the attic was divided between hunting and fishing things and regulation supply for the National Guard (Whit was a colonel). The farther in you went, the more vast and the more plentiful, but getting what you needed out of Tom and Whit's required a kind of stubborn, homegrown Zen. For just about everyone else, it had got to be a pain, driving to Hanover or even Peytonville just for the same grocery run the whole rest of the world had around the corner.
Heather parked on the road and scooped Polly out of her car seat. She was stirring, making little puckers with her mouth, slowly formulating the concept of what she wanted next from life. There was avid interest as she crossed the porch, and Heather agreeably showed the baby, turning to the “Oohs” around her as she threaded through the Adirondacks to the front door. “What a cute bitty thing,” one woman said, leaping to her feet. Unbidden, she tickled Polly's chin, then poked at her tummy through the baby blanket. Polly, wide awake now, gaped in mute disbelief. “What is she, two months?”
“Two months,” Heather confirmed.
“What a sweetheart!” said the woman. “I've got a little grandniece the same age.” She poked again. “And what a sweet little dress.”

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