Two Rivers (22 page)

Betsy’s eyes were brimming with tears. “Don’t yell at me.”

“All you’ve ever talked about your whole life is getting out of here,” I said, aware, even as I said it, that I was being ridiculous. Cruel.

“Stop it.” Betsy’s face looked pained.

“And now here I’m telling you we can go. We can really go. And we can be together. Make a
life
,” I said, reaching for Betsy’s chin and making her look at me.

Betsy looked out the window at the cottage, which we had broken into more times than I could count. In the mornings, when the sun came up inside this house, it patterned our bodies with pink and orange and violet light.

“We can’t keep borrowing other people’s lives. Trespassing. Playing house. It’s time for us to make our own life. Be grownups.”

“Who says?” she asked, her jaw set hard.

“You’re so worried you’re going to wind up like your mother,” I said, so angry and miserable now I could barely stand it. “But I think you’re crazier than she ever was.”

I knew I’d gone too far, but still Betsy’s slap startled me. The left-hand side of my face stung. “Take me home,” she said.

Betsy didn’t speak to me all the way back to Two Rivers. When I pulled up in front of her house, she looked at me hard and then got out, walking quickly up her sidewalk to the front door. She didn’t turn around; she just opened the door and disappeared inside.

Head buzzing, I made a U-turn and parked the car in our old driveway, forgetting for a moment that I couldn’t just go home. I looked at the plot of land where our house used to be. The people my father had sold it to had put up a chain-link fence. According to my father, the new owners planned to build a house using this same foundation. Despite the devastation to the rest of the house, the substructure was unharmed. I got out of the car and went to the fence, climbing over easily and standing at the edge of the concrete basement below.

Everything was gone now. My entire childhood had been reduced to a hole in the ground. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw myself into that awful cement grave like a tragic widower. But instead I stood at the edge and concentrated on my breath. It was June, and the air was redolent with the smell of lilacs. The lilac bush in our backyard was in full bloom. Petals had fallen and covered the basement floor like a layer of pale purple snow.

I got back into my car, jaw clenched tight, and headed first to St. Johnsbury and then east. It’s only about 250 miles from St. Johnsbury to Bar Harbor, but you can’t go very fast, because Route 2 goes through just about every small town along the way. I stopped for lunch somewhere near Farmington, a little diner attached to a lady’s house. I was the only patron, and the woman who ran the place seemed grateful to have me there. I ordered clam chowder, toast and a cup of coffee. The chowder was thick, the coffee thicker. She brought me a slab of raspberry pie smothered in vanilla ice cream. By the time I got back on the road I was full and exhausted. I hadn’t slept for over thirty hours. As I drove through a sea of birch trees, my mind started playing tricks on me. The birches with their white bark became tall white monuments. As I drove, I felt like I was back at the cemetery, navigating my way through the headstones with the lawn mower. I gripped the steering wheel, trying to stay awake, thinking about the bodies buried beneath me. I was delirious, hallucinating tombstones. By the time I got to Bar Harbor, I knew I had to get some sleep.

I found some run-down cottages on Frenchman’s Bay, about ten of them in a perfect row, all of them overlooking the water. The woman at the main house insisted on giving me a tour, gesturing grandly to the grungy kitchenette inside and the rusted barbeque outside. “Ever been to Bah Hahba befoah? How long you stayin’?”

I offered some half-baked story about sightseeing, about hiking in Acadia National Park, thinking only of climbing into bed and falling asleep. Finally she left me, waddling back to her own cabin, and I went to bed without even bothering to take off my shoes.

I awoke at dusk, completely disoriented. I drew back the heavy curtains to reveal a twilit sky and so much water. The chowder and pie were the only things I’d had to eat all day. There were still raspberry seeds stuck in my teeth, but I was weak with hunger. I hadn’t brought a change of clothes, but I knew I had a long-sleeved shirt in the car. I went out to the DeSoto and grabbed it. The neon light hanging in the main house’s window blinked
NO VACANCY
in flashes of red light, but none of the other cabins appeared to be occupied. I walked up the gravel walkway to the main house and went inside. The woman who had rented me the cabin was sitting behind the counter, knitting and watching TV.

“Full house tonight?” I asked, gesturing toward the sign.

“Sign’s broke,” she said. “Not so great fah bizness.”

“Why don’t you turn it off?” I asked.

“Not
my
bizness.”

“Mine either, I guess.” I laughed. “There a good place to get dinner around here?”

“Sure, lots of places on Main Street. Any one of ’em’s as good as the next.”

I found a pub with outdoor seating near the pier and ordered myself a real downeast feast: fish chowder, boiled lobster with steamers and mussels, French fries, cole slaw, homemade biscuits and, because nobody asked for ID, a bottle of red wine. I dipped most everything with butter and was dripping in it by the time I pulled the last bit of meat out of my lobster’s claw. I drank the whole bottle of wine myself too and felt pleasantly relaxed for the first time in months. It was chilly outside with the wind coming off the water, but the wine made me happy and warm. I asked the waiter if there was a good place to go get a drink around here.

“There’s the Quonset hut, but it’s pretty dead ’till after the Fourth of July. Probably not much going on in town. You might want to drive up to Ellsworth. Go to Jasper’s or the Hilltop Lounge.”

“How far’s that?” I asked.

“’Bout twenty miles, I’d say.”

“Thanks,” I said. I didn’t want to drive even another mile, so I found the Quonset hut. The place was quiet, except for a handful of pretty girls and a couple of local boys playing pool. There was no band tonight, just music coming from the jukebox. I bellied up to the bar and ordered a bourbon and soda from the bartender. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, blond curly hair pulled into a ponytail and blue eyes like the Neptune marbles Brooder and I used to collect. I watched her for a while, washing dishes, replenishing the condiment tray with cherries and lemons and limes.

“Pretty quiet this time of year?” I asked.

“Ayuh,” she said without turning around. The scent of lemons was strong.

“What do you know about Nova Scotia?” I asked, feeling cavalier and a little drunk.

She turned around then and looked at me sadly. Her eyes were startling, even in the smoky half-light of the bar.

“I mean, what’s it like this time of year? I was thinking about a day trip. Take the ferry over tomorrow.”

She turned back to the cutting board and grabbed a lime from a box on the counter. “It’s cold,” she said. “Lot like here. Windy. Better bring a coat.”

I nodded, though her back was still to me. I left the bar and put a quarter on the pool table. I watched the game they had going and then dropped my coin in the slot to release the balls when it was my turn. I played and lost in a matter of minutes. I shook my opponent’s hand and returned to my roost at the bar.

“That was quick,” the bartender said.

I shrugged my shoulders. “You got some matches?” I asked.

She tossed me a pack of matches and I lit a cigarette to give my hands something to do.

“Shouldn’t smoke,” she said. “It’ll give you cancer.”

“That’s the least of my worries,” I said. A little too dramatically, I thought.

“Want another drink?” she asked.

“Why not?”

She poured me a fresh cocktail and cleared away my old glass, washing it in the sink. I dug around in my pocket for a couple of dollars to pay her. She must have heard me rustling around because she said, “S’on me.”

“Thanks,” I said. I’d never had a girl buy me a drink before. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but after a few sips I didn’t really care.

I stayed until after she had put all the chairs up on the tables (except for mine) and after she’d swept up the cigarette butts and peanut shells that littered the dirt floor.

“I’m closing up,” she said after a while.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the drink.”

The girl nodded and then turned out the lights behind the bar.

I made my way to the front door. “Can I walk you home?” I offered.

She looked at me suspiciously.

“I’ve got a girl,” I said, partly to let her know I didn’t have any ulterior motives, and partly to remind myself, though I wasn’t even sure if that was true anymore.

Whatever my motives were, it seemed to ease her mind. Her shoulders relaxed for the first time all night, and she smiled. “I don’t feel like going home yet,” she said. “You got a car?”

We walked back to the cabins and I cleared the junk out of my front seat to make room for her. “Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“I don’t care. Just let me roll the window down so I can get some fresh air. I can still smell the smoke in my hair.” She undid her ponytail, releasing a cascade of curls down her back. I felt my heart quicken in a dangerous way. And for a terrifying half-moment, I thought that maybe I’d been mistaken. Maybe there wasn’t just one single future awaiting me. Perhaps there were many, many possible lives I might live. Maybe I’d gotten it all wrong.

And then the girl said, “Tell me about your girlfriend. And about why you’re really here.”

We drove up Cadillac Mountain with the windows rolled down, and I told her everything. I told her about Betsy at twelve, sipping on an Orange Crush by the barber pole, about the way she could climb a tree just as good as any boy. I told her about the way Betsy was afraid of thunder and about the time, in the barn, as heat lightning illuminated the sky. I told her about the fire that lit up our house like a jack-o’-lantern and about the hole in the ground that remained. I told her about Two Rivers (gave her all of the colors of autumn and spring). I told her about snow, about rain, and about the sound of the train. And then I told her about the dreams I’d been having lately, the ones I’d been too afraid to say out loud. The ones where I was on my belly, crawling through the jungle. About the snakes that slithered from my dreams into my waking, how I woke up sometimes convinced I was being strangled.

“Tell me about Nova Scotia,” I said.

“My brother’s over there,” the girl (her name was Nancy) said.

“Canada?” I asked.

“Vietnam.”

My whole back tensed.

“Nobody’s heard from him in three weeks.”

I didn’t know what to say, and so I didn’t say anything. For the first time in hours I kept my mouth shut. When she looked at me, she seemed to need something, though she must have known I had nothing to offer. No words anyway. And so I just reached for her hand.

We sat in the car until the sky started to fill with light. I think I must have slept a little. I know she did. But she never let go of my hand.

“Did you know this is the very first place in the United States that you can see the sun rise?” she asked sleepily, rolling her head against the headrest to look at me.

“Really?” I asked. “Then we’re the first people in the whole country to see this sunrise?”

She smiled and nodded.

“Good morning, then,” I said.

“Good morning.”

The sun rose over the water. But even from here land was impossible to see. Nova Scotia was as far away as Vietnam. As much of a dream.

We drove back down the mountain, through the pines, the sun glowing warmly around us. I pulled into the driveway of her parents’ house and got out of the car to open her door to let her out. “Nice meeting you, Harper,” she said, and politely shook my hand.

“You too,” I said.

She hugged me then, awkwardly.
“Go home,”
she whispered into my ear. “While you still can.”

Later I fell asleep on Sand Beach, on a towel I stole from the cabin. The whole beach was made of crushed seashells; when I awoke they had pressed a crazy pattern into my skin. My face was red and pocked when I stared at my reflection in the rearview mirror as I pulled out of the cabin’s driveway. They faded as I drove, away from the shore, past the giant Paul Bunyon statue in Bangor, and through the birches. And by the time I got home, I could still feel where the shells had imprinted my skin, but the marks were long gone.

Betsy must have known I would be back. She was sitting on her front porch when I pulled up. And without saying a word she forgave me, holding me until I finally stopped crying.

I
carried the train ticket in my pocket all weekend, and all day at work on Monday I thought about how I might go about offering it to Maggie that evening. I’d arranged for her to catch the Montrealer back down to Washington, D.C., and then transfer to the Crescent, which would deposit her in Tuscaloosa. Of course, it was up to her. There were dozens of stops along the way. A dozen other places she could debark. I would give her some money, enough to get by for a little while. The rest was her decision. I assumed she would accept the ticket, and tried not to think about what would happen if she refused. By early afternoon, I felt a sense of calm resolve. Even Lenny’s idiocy couldn’t dampen my spirit.

“You catch SNL this weekend?” he asked, standing in the doorway of my office, picking his teeth. He smelled vaguely of whatever he’d had for lunch. Something with garlic. There were traces of whatever it was on his tie, which hung crookedly down his barrel chest.

I shook my head.

“That Belushi’s a fucking riot,” he said. He flicked his toothpick into my trash and picked up a ruler off my desk. He started flailing his arms about, swinging the ruler wildly, just missing my head.
“Hi—ahhhhh.”
He squinted his eyes. “That samurai shit’s a fucking riot.”

“Is there a reason you’re here?” I asked.

Lenny stopped his routine. “You mean
here
, on
earth
?”

“Yes,” I said, and couldn’t help but smile. “That’s
exactly
what I meant.”

I rode my bike home leisurely that night, stopping to pick up some apples that had fallen to the ground. The first ones I found were just crab apples, hard and sour, but not much further down the road I knew there was a Macintosh grove. I kept one for the ride, and filled the leather bag strapped to the back of my bicycle seat with the rest. The apple was hard and tart. Perfect.

At home I spilled the bag of apples into a colander and offered one to Maggie. She eyed it suspiciously. “This like Snow White?”

“Hmm?”

“The poison apple? Evil witch? Glass coffin? Damn, you raisin’ a little girl and you don’t know about Snow White?”

“I just…” I said, my good mood instantly deflated.

She picked up one of the biggest apples in the pile and took a bite. “You got some lemon and cinnamon, I’ll make us a pie.”

Maggie made tuna casserole for dinner. String beans. Apple pie. Shelly was especially talkative, chattering away about school.

“And then Mrs. LaCroix makes Jason Stimpson stand in the corner with gum on his nose! But the funniest thing was…” Shelly was shoveling the pie in, talking with her mouth full.

“Close your mouth when you chew, honey,” I said.

She closed her mouth and chewed, rolling her eyes impatiently as she labored to swallow. “The funniest thing
was
…his fly was unzipped! You know, XYZPDQ?”

“Did you hand in your report?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” Shelly said. She and I had spent most of Sunday rewriting the Lincoln report. Maggie just kept bringing food and drink to the table where we were working, and after only a few hours Shelly seemed to have grasped the concept of the five-paragraph essay. I had piled up carrot sticks, balancing saltines on top to demonstrate the idea of supporting sentences.

“So, he’s got gum on his nose, and the barn door’s open…”

“Shelly.”

“Something’s wrong,” Maggie said, setting her knife and fork down.

“What?” I asked. “Are the apples bad?”

“With the baby. Something’s wrong with the baby.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Maggie said. She pushed away from the table and hung her head down. When she looked up again, she was bent over, clutching her stomach. “My belly ain’t never felt like this before. It feels like, it feels…oh lordy, it’s like cramps. Like my monthlies are comin’.” She stood up, still holding her stomach as if it were something about to fall.

Embarrassed for her and for myself, I stood up. But once standing I wasn’t sure what to do. I started clearing away the dishes from the table to keep my hands busy.

“I think I need to use the restroom,” she said, and ran down the hall.

After the bathroom door slammed shut, Shelly said, “She needs a doctor. A baby doctor.”

She reached for the phone book in a stack of junk on the kitchen counter and started thumbing through the yellow pages: a ridiculous task since there was exactly one baby doctor in all of Two Rivers: Dr. Owens, who had delivered both me
and
Shelly (as well as almost everyone else in Two Rivers). The only babies he hadn’t delivered were the ones born in the backseats of cars on the way to the hospital.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s just see what Maggie wants to do.”

When Maggie didn’t come out of the bathroom, I thought about asking Shelly to go in after her, but Shelly (as far as I knew) hadn’t even started her period yet, and I didn’t want to scare her. However, the prospect of checking on Maggie myself seemed both inappropriate and terrifying. And so I gave her a few more minutes and then I went down the hall to the bathroom door and knocked softly.

“You okay?” I asked. It was dark in the hallway, only a sliver of light under the bathroom door. I could hear her shuffling across the bathroom floor. The sound of the faucet running.

“Just a minute,” she said. She sounded breathless.

I was about to knock again when she opened the door. Her face was twisted, the whites of her eyes shot red. “I’m bleedin’,” she said, quiet and scared. “I got to get to a hospital. Quick.”

“Last time I tried to start it up, it wouldn’t turn over,” Mrs. Marigold said, digging through a basket full of junk for the keys to my Bug. I had given them to her when she started watching Shelly. She looked at me suspiciously, maybe still a little mad that she had been usurped by a fifteen-year-old.

“Thank you,” I said. “It’s sort of an emergency.”

“Shelly okay?” she asked, worried.

“Yes, she’s fine.”

“Is it that colored girl?”

I nodded.

“What’s the matter with her? Something with the baby?”

And because I didn’t know how I was going to explain anything to anyone, because panic was growing like an electrical storm, buzzing in my head and shoulders, I said, “She’s bleeding.”

“How far along is she?”

“I don’t know, maybe four, five months?”

“Bring her over here,” she said. “I’ll take a peek at her. You may still have to take her to the hospital, but I’ll be able to tell if it’s something to worry about or not.” She paused then. “Save you a trip to the doctor.”

I sent Maggie over to Mrs. Marigold’s and returned to my apartment, where Shelly was pacing back and forth in the kitchen. The whole kitchen smelled like apple pie. Vanilla ice cream was melting on all three of our abandoned plates.

“Will the baby be okay?” Shelly asked.

“I’m sure everything’s going to be fine,” I said, though I truly had no idea.

“What if Maggie
dies
?” she asked, her voice breaking.

“Shelly, honey,” I said. “Come here.” I motioned for her to come to me. She leaned into me, and my arms closed around her. I could feel her chest heaving against mine, her heart beating against mine. “I won’t let anything happen to Maggie.”

After about twenty minutes, Mrs. Marigold knocked on the door. She was alone.

“Can I talk to you?” she asked.

“Sure, come on in. Shell, hon, can you give me a few minutes to talk to Mrs. Marigold alone?” I asked. She was sitting at the table, pushing the soggy pie around her plate.

“Why? She’s okay, isn’t she? Is the baby okay?” Shelly looked panicked.

“She’s fine, honey. She’s just getting some rest,” Mrs. Marigold said. “Promise.”

Shelly reluctantly left us and went to her room. I waited until I heard the door close before I spoke. “Does she need to see a doctor?”

Mrs. Marigold shook her head. “She’s fine. The bleeding was just hemorrhoids. Real common. I gave her some witch hazel. That should help. And the cramping is just Braxton Hicks contractions.”

“Contractions?”

“Just practice ones. Also real, real common.”

I sighed, louder than I had intended. The relief more intense than I expected.

“Then she’s okay?”

“She’s fine. But listen, there’s something you should probably know. She’s a bit further along than you thought.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mr. Montgomery, she’s about seven months along already. She’s only got a couple of months to go. And I don’t mean no offense, but it hardly looks like you’re ready.” She gestured vaguely toward the living room. “If I’ve done my math right, we’re looking at a Christmas baby here.”