The Sabbathday River (23 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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Because of Polly, who even in this great haze of anguish could not entirely absent herself from Heather's awareness. She was Polly's mother, though now she was nothing else, not anymore. She had to get up and go home somehow, and somehow learn to navigate time with her new husk-self. She had to learn to coexist with this howling thing that wouldn't shut up and that ached so hard, and she had to learn to do it so well that no one would see it or—God forbid—guess its cause.
She wasn't strong enough. She wasn't strong enough to make him love her.
She had passed into her own future, a tintype landscape of false colors and blank, rigid expressions, where people moved about in brittle unhappiness. And the worst part was that Heather hadn't even noticed the wall she must have crashed through to get here, but it was behind her now, dense and high and vigilant, blocking even the memory of those few joyful moments when she had thought he had chosen her. And she would never get back. And this would always feel the way it felt right now, which was terrible.
A naked woman, breathing quickly, clammy with cold sweat and crusted with semen, lying on a plastic bag of shredded wool in the attic of an old mill on the bank of a frozen river. Her life.
She felt for her clothes, holding up what turned out to be her shirt, for the longest time, trying to figure out how it went on. Heather put it on. And her sweater. She couldn't find her underpants. She put her legs into her jeans, but they felt strange—the fly, it turned out, was in back, which was wrong. She took the pants off and put them on again. She discovered that it wasn't difficult to do these things. You just thought them and they sort of happened, even if you couldn't feel them the way
you'd felt them before. She would learn. She went downstairs. She went out the office door, closing it behind her, listening for the click of the lock. The world was still and the moon high and huge. She would go home now, and not think. She would put all of her effort into not thinking.
Heather started the car. Her breath frosted the windshield from the inside—empirical evidence that she existed. The steering wheel was freezing and she held it pinched between forefinger and thumb, her pinkies out in a posture of absurd gentility. She drove without intention, but the roads were clear and there were no other cars. The clock's hour hand was fixed somewhere between eleven and twelve; there was no minute hand. The earth was unpopulated. Only the ends of sodden sticks and logs and rocks broke out of the snow. The white fields fell away behind her, and the few still, dark houses. Where was he now? she thought, forgetting that she was supposed to be not thinking. She took the stab of new pain that followed as her due. Her cold foot groped for the brake. She turned onto Sabbath Creek Road.
The house was black and silent. For one queer moment, she wished herself back—through the night and the great wall into that warm swirl of transient happiness—into the mill attic, even alone, even after he had left, because at least there lingered there some remnant of him, but here, in her own house, there would be nothing. She did not want to go inside. At least not yet.
So she walked out behind the house, her shoes packing down the brittle ridge of ice, sinking two, three inches into the dense powder beneath; she moved slowly down the hill of the back field, all the way down to the bottom, where the slope sank to the small pond, its muddy water frozen now the color of steel. The moon seemed to rain down bone-whiteness on the field, a bleached-out planetary light. It reminded her, with a jolt, of that night so long before when she had walked home to her dormitory across the college campus, having left her virginity behind in the bed of some sleeping fraternity brother. How much more had she left behind tonight, Heather thought, and yet, for the first time, she felt a kind of perverse virtue to her unencumbrance. She was light, too, after all, and stripped clean, purified by sadness. And alive. All around her, the snow slept beneath ice, the earth beneath snow, and below that, innumerable creatures—all sleeping, each dug into the dark, rolled tightly into themselves. All around her in their houses, people
were sleeping, and even here, somehow under the muddy, half-frozen water, there were probably things not quite dead but sleeping.
She did not know how she had come to be the only person awake in the world, but if it could just stay this way, if they could all just stay asleep forever, it occurred to her that maybe it wouldn't seem quite so insurmountable, this ordeal of keeping on living.
Later, Heather would rue this thought. She would blame herself, and entirely without reason. Pick, after all, had been dead for hours by that time, cold on the couch before the fireplace, which was also cold, her tangled fingers by now hopelessly unyielding. Upstairs in her crib, Polly was cold, too, and wet—the skin of her thighs already blossoming in raw red patches—and still sick, naturally, since her chesty cough had gone untreated and uncomforted for many hours. But mostly hungry. She was so hungry, in fact, that she had only recently fallen asleep after a long, ragged evening of crying.
It was particularly cruel, Heather would think much later, that this vision of herself—alone and alert even as the world was sleeping—had made her feel as if she saw things clearly, as if she were somehow, finally, in control. Afterward, she would think of this moment only with shame, for her presumption. By then, the enormity of her ignorance, the
knowledge
of her ignorance, was crushing.
Of her dead grandmother and unhappy child she was unaware, of course—how, from where she crouched, at the bottom of the long hill and the edge of the dark pond, could she have known of them?—though she would make those discoveries soon enough. Nor could she know that eight months hence she would be here again, in this precise place, and even, almost, in this same posture, squatted in pain and wrung with misery. And as to the other thing—her conceit, naive and arrogant, that she was utterly alone on this bleak point of the deserted earth? The truth is, Heather could not have been more wrong about that, either.
The Second Baby
If you drained the ponds
in your back yards
you'd find more than you bargained for.
—Peter Fallon, “If Luck Were Corn”
A WorJ with Heather
JUST OVER NINE MONTHS LATER, THEY LED HER into the bland and undersized interview room down the hall from Nelson Erroll's office.
They had come for her in the late afternoon, in three cars following one another up the little lane of Sabbath Creek Road, slowly, sturdy vehicles painted dark blue with matching flashers turned off. She had looked out the window to see them come, not really surprised, but not afraid, either, because it had not occurred to her what might actually be about to happen. Polly was next door in the living room, playing with cards by smearing them about over the couch and turning them over, one by one. She had found the cards earlier in the week, in one of Pick's drawers, and had been instantly enthralled, particularly with the kings and queens. Heather half listened to her, and half to the radio, which said the fair weather was likely to hang on for a bit, good for the homecoming football game in Hanover, where the station was located.
She was cooking, the first time in weeks she'd felt up to it. There were two chickens nearly done in the oven and a pot of potatoes boiling
on the stove for Polly, who loved them mashed, and apples cut up in a bowl and covered with brown and white sugar, which was about all she could remember of how Pick had made Brown Betty. She felt good. After months, it seemed, of feeling terrible, one way or another, she had finally made her way through to this afternoon when she could stand in her own kitchen and feel, if not strong, then at least not unwell, and, if not happy, then at least not cataclysmically bereft. She heard Polly interrupt her baby solitaire with a sputter of discomfort. She needed a change, though she hated to be changed and tended not to complain until the problem was unignorable. From the living room she heard her daughter's single word: “Mama!” Heather smiled. She put the lid on the pot and lowered the heat under the simmering potatoes. Then she heard cars on the lane.
Now Polly was calling again. Not scared, really—she was too fascinated by human faces to be scared easily—but concerned. The police station wasn't big; she had driven past it all her life and knew it was only the size of a ranch house, but she hadn't ever been inside and she didn't know where Polly was. The cinder blocks let sound in, though it was muffled. She could have been on the other side of the wall.
“What happened to my daughter?” Heather said.
The man, Robert Charter, was writing something on lined sheets in an open folder. He didn't answer her, and some instinctive thing made her not ask again.
The clock showed it was nearly six. Polly hadn't eaten, of course. They hadn't even let her bring food from home. They'd only turned off the stove and left it all there, and the chickens would probably be dried out by the time she got home, and the potatoes stuck like glue to the pot. Charter frowned down at what he had written. Then he looked up at her.
“What did you say?”
“I said, what happened to my daughter?”
He seemed to give this an inappropriate amount of consideration. Then he sighed. “Well, frankly, Miss Pratt, that's exactly what we're hoping you can tell us.”
She stared at him. From beyond the cinder-block wall, Polly burst into a wail. Heather leaped to her feet. “Let me see her.”
“Officer Franks is with Polly,” Charter said calmly. “Lucy has two kids of her own. She brought some food in for Polly earlier. She knows what kids like; not to worry.” He actually smiled. “I'm glad you could
come down, Miss Pratt. I've been wanting a word with you. Appreciate your coming in voluntarily.”
“Voluntarily?”
said Heather. “There were three police cars at my house. You said if I didn't come—”
“But you did,” he said simply. “And voluntarily, as I said. And I appreciate it, as I also said.”
“So I could leave,” Heather said, as if it were a question.
“But naturally. Only then we'd have to go right back and invite you to come in again. Better to just have our talk now, wouldn't it be? Then we can all move on.”
“I don't know why you want to talk to me,” she said plainly. “I'm just telling you.”
He studied her. It was remarkable, the degree of blankness he managed. She could read nothing from him, which scared her. But if he was really willing to just say whatever it was he seemed to want to say, then it was worthwhile for her just to listen to it now.
“All right,” Charter said. Then he went blank again.
She thought he was very ugly. Not just without beauty, the way nearly all men—all but Ashley—were without beauty, the way men like Stephen Trask were fine, plain, unobjectionable but without beauty. She thought he was actively, strenuously ugly, with his florid face and ridged, combed-over gray hair. He sat with his stumpy fingers splayed on the tabletop, a thick gold ring on the left ring finger, a chunky gold school ring on the right. She frowned at the school ring. She had always thought they were stupid things.
“So, fine,” Heather prompted at last. “Say your piece. Then I have to get home.”
He considered her for a minute before speaking. “Tell you what. I'll just get a little background first, okay? Like your name. Full name.”
Heather Ruth Pratt, she told him. The clock said ten past six.
“And date of birth?”
“May 1, 1965.”
He looked down at the page. “Your employment.”
“I work for Naomi Roth's collective. It's called Flourish. I make samplers for her, but I can work at home, too.”
“And did you have any other employment before that?”
She hesitated. “Well, I worked for Stephen Trask at the sports center for a few months.”
“About five months, that would be?”
She stared at him. “If you know, how come you're asking me?”
Charter smiled, as if this were funny. Then he put down his pen. “Shortly after you began working for Mr. Trask, you made the acquaintance of a married man named Ashley Deacon. You pursued him and began a sexual relationship with him. You became pregnant. You were proud of your pregnancy, even though it was the result of an adulterous affair. In fact, it's generally felt that you flaunted this pregnancy. In any case, you neither hid it nor denied it. You had the child in”—he flipped over the slender top file to a somewhat thicker file beneath, opened it and rummaged, and read—“August of 1984. Your daughter Polly. You flaunted the child, too. You went up on the porch over at Tom and Whit's and opened up your shirt and started to breast-feed, and you continued to do so even after people asked you to stop. You are hardly demure, Miss Pratt.”
Heather, struck dumb, could only gape at him.
“Shortly after your daughter's birth you recommenced your affair with Mr. Deacon, although by now he had also begun a family with his wife.” Charter paused. “Was that smart?”
“I want to go,” Heather managed. “I don't have to listen to this!”
“Is any of it untrue?” he asked, looking concerned. “Are my facts wrong?”
“Why am I here?”
she shouted.
“To help me,” he said. “I need your help.”
For an instant, her panic abated. He did look concerned, even a little needy.
“What help?” she asked. “About what? You obviously know all about me already. What else do you want to know?”
Charter reached up to his own head, patting the wave of hair thoughtfully. “About the baby,” he said evenly. “Tell me about the baby.”
“What?”
Heather nearly shouted. “She's not even a baby anymore. She's fourteen months old.” A thought occurred to her. “Is this, like, a child-abuse thing? Did someone tell you I'm not a good mother or something? Because I am a good mother. I'd like to know who said that!”
“No one has said you aren't a good mother, Heather.” Charter's voice was soothing. “In fact, people have gone out of their way to tell me what a good mother you are.”
“People?
What, are you doing a survey or something? On what kind of a mother I am? What kind of detective are you, anyway?”
He leaned back in his chair. “I'm no kind of a detective. I'm a district attorney. I work in Peytonville. I'm just here to find out about the baby.”
Heather went chill. She had finally realized what this might mean.
“The baby,” she said, her voice hushed. “You mean that baby Naomi found.” She waited for his confirming nod, then permitted herself a small moment of relief. “But, Mr. Charter, I don't know anything about that baby.”
He nodded, as if he'd been expecting these very words. “Then you're denying you gave birth to that baby. The one Naomi Roth found in the river.”
“Well, of course I am. Of course I am!”
He wrote something down. She tried to make out what it was, but he flipped the folder over it. Then he looked up again. “But let me get this straight. You're not denying that you
had
another baby. Not your daughter Polly. A second baby.”
She tried to keep her face still. “I do deny that, yes.”
And why shouldn't she? What business was it of his? It's not as if he could change anything.
“You absolutely deny it.” He waited, intent.
The clock said six-thirty.
“Let's go back,” he said, resuming his easy tone. He never took his eyes off Heather. “Let's talk about Ashley, all right?”
“Will it get me out of here faster?”
“Very probably. Did Ashley make it clear to you that he was married?”
“He never lied to me,” Heather said, since she still felt that to be true.
“But that didn't stop you from pursuing him.”
“I didn't pursue him,” she said hotly. “We fell in love. We both did.”
“You no more than him?”
Heather shrugged.
“Who initiated sex?” He looked at his hand as he wrote, not at her.
“We made love,” Heather said with strained dignity.
“In his car,” Charter noted.
And other places, she started to say, but there was only the mill attic, and Heather didn't like to remember that time. Certainly she didn't want to talk about it now.
“And what contraceptive were you using?”
“Obviously,” she said tightly, “we weren't using any.”
“And whose idea was that?”
She paused to collect her thoughts. “Well, we were both happy about the … about me having Polly, if that's what you're implying.”
He put down his pen. He looked affronted. “But I'm not implying anything, Miss Pratt. That's not my job, either here or in court. I just have questions and I think you might have answers, that's all. So I ask and you answer, and then everybody can leave. Is that all right with you?”
“Fine,” said Heather. “You want to know all about my love life, you ask any question you want. But I don't know anything about that baby, so if you're trying to find out about it, you're going to be pretty mad about wasting your time with me.”
“Well, that's all right.” Charter sighed. “Don't you worry about that. Now tell me, was Ashley supportive of your pregnancy?”
“Of course. He saw how happy I was, and that made him happy, too.”
“So the idea of having children by his wife and his mistress born within a week of each other, that didn't seem to bother him, then.”
“You'd have to ask him,” Heather said evenly.
Charter went to his thick folder and dug in. Delicately, he searched. There were many sheets of yellow paper. Heather, realization dawning on her, looked on in horror. Pages of words, about her and Ashley. People who had sat and talked about her, about her personal things, to this ugly man.

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