Woman in Red (9 page)

Luckily, neither she nor Jeremy had been hurt when her car plowed into Owen White. Owen wasn’t so fortunate. Emerging from a coma after two days, he’d learned that he would never walk again. Alice had been out on bail when the news reached her, and it had been clear from the cold shoulders and pitiless looks she’d gotten as she’d walked the streets of Bell Harbor that she’d already been tried and found guilty. If it hadn’t been for her family, she didn’t know how she would have coped. The only one who’d been less
than supportive was Randy; he’d seen that final act of insanity as a betrayal of sorts, proof she had already left him, if only in her mind.

Four months later she was led off in handcuffs, bound for the Pine River Correctional Facility in Olympia.

Alice blinked away the tears obscuring her vision as she gazed down at David’s grave. It felt as if she’d lost two sons. But how could she expect Jeremy to forgive her when she couldn’t forgive herself? She wouldn’t shed any tears for Owen White; he’d only gotten what he deserved. But her family had paid a steep price for what she’d done, and for that she was deeply sorry.

She caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to see a dog streaking down the path that led to the outlook: black with a blaze of white on its chest—the border collie from the ferry landing the other day. Alice briefly considered going after it—maybe it was lost and its owner was looking for it—but the dog quickly vanished from sight. Anyway, didn’t she have enough problems of her own? No job, nowhere to live. Without her modest savings—her share of the inheritance when Nana’s house was sold—she, too, would be roaming about without a roof over her head.

With a deep sigh, she started back toward her car.

Colin found the dog curled asleep on the porch. It was the morning of his third day on the island and he’d just poured himself a mug of coffee and stepped outside to enjoy the sunrise. The furry bundle materialized into a dog on all fours: the border collie from the ferry landing. It scooted out of reach, then sat back to eye him warily.

“Good morning to you, too.” Colin placed his mug on the porch railing and squatted down on his haunches so that he was eye level with the dog. “Hungry?” he asked. The dog cocked its head, fixing its liquid, dark eyes on him with keen interest. “I’ll take that as a yes.” Colin went back inside, returning several minutes later with a bowl containing Rice Krispies mixed with a little bit of hamburger meat left over from last night’s supper. He set it down, saying, “I’m sorry if it’s not what you’re used to. I wasn’t expecting company.”

The dog took an exploratory sniff. Apparently it met with his satisfaction for he wolfed it down. It wasn’t until Colin tried to grab hold of his collar that he retreated, looking faintly offended that Colin had presumed he could be
bought off so cheaply. “All right, fair enough,” Colin conceded. He backed off, his hand held out in a conciliatory gesture. “You call the shots from now on.”

The dog was looking past him toward the house, ears pricked and eyes alert—eyes that seemed to hold an almost human intelligence—as if at any moment he expected to see his master step out the door onto the porch. “You’re welcome to have a look around if you like,” Colin told him, “but I guarantee you won’t find what you’re looking for. I’m afraid I’m it.” He regarded the animal ruefully. “A pretty poor substitute, I agree, but if you’re game, I could use the company.”

He’d forgotten how remote a landscape this was, a place where nature held sway and civilization seemed a distant rumor. On the plus side, he hadn’t slept this well in years. In the absence of modern-day distractions like TV and the computer, he went to bed when it was dark and rose with the sun. He ate when he was hungry, regardless of mealtimes, and found himself perfectly capable of sitting for hours on end doing nothing but gazing out at the water or watching the deer graze. His grandfather had left a sizeable library, art books mostly as well as biographies of notable artists, and Colin had been perusing them, regretting that he hadn’t inherited so much as a thimbleful of the old man’s talent. If he were an artist, he’d have been able to capture on canvas what remained locked inside him, just as William had in the portrait over the fireplace. He’d always heard that great art was born of great suffering, and if that was true, then he would have created a masterpiece.

After a shower and a breakfast of hot cereal and a boiled egg, he headed back outside. The sun had disappeared behind the storm clouds that had piled up along the ridge and
a cutting wind was blowing in off the ocean. In his old life, Colin would have opted for an indoor activity on a day like this. But he’d already adopted the islanders’ habit of ignoring bad weather. A long walk would clear his head, he thought, throwing on his parka and a pair of old Wellingtons that he’d found in the mud room.

The border collie was right where he had left it, holding vigil on the porch. Colin whistled for him, mildly surprised when the dog fell in behind him as he stepped off the porch. He started down the path to the cove, the dog following at a wary distance. Worn to a groove by decades of foot traffic, the path traversed the grassy slope like a frown line in a Brobdingnagian brow before disappearing into the rocks that lined the pebbled beach below. There, driftwood lay piled in heaps, like massive free-form sculptures. Farther out, the tide had retreated to leave a great flat of silt that glistened in the gray light, stubs of rebar bearded with algae protruding here and there like broken teeth: what was left of the old oyster beds. Useless now, growing nothing but barnacles.

Colin remembered when he was a boy looking out his window at night and seeing the distant glow of Mr. Deets’s lantern bobbing along the shoreline. Deets always did his harvesting after the tide had gone out, which at certain times of the year meant getting up at an hour when most people were still in bed, often making more than a dozen trips back and forth to his truck before his work was done, work that over the years had left him with calluses on his hands as thick and ridged as the shells of the oysters themselves.

In the daylight hours, Colin would often tag after him, helping to pound in stakes and tighten lines, digging out the oysters that had broken loose and become buried in the silt.
Deets, a crusty old loner, hadn’t been much of a conversationalist, but Colin had found him oddly companionable. At home in Queens, with his family, there had been nothing but talk, with very little of substance to say. His mom whiling away her free hours gossiping with the neighbors, and his dad and brother endlessly rehashing sports plays. At an age before Patrick could even add and subtract he could recite the batting average of every player on the Yankees team.

Colin lowered himself onto his haunches, scooping up water as clear as gin from one of the tide pools. He recalled Deets’s telling him that there was no better place on earth for growing oysters, and now it seemed a shame to see it lying fallow. But Colin had far bigger concerns at the moment. Like deciding what to do with this place. The sensible thing would be to sell it. As Clark Findlay had pointed out, the land alone was worth quite a bit, and Colin could certainly use the money. When the small account he’d inherited along with the house was depleted he’d be broke, with no prospects. Then what? He’d be just another recovering drunk standing amid the smoking ruins of his burned bridges.

Nonetheless, something kept getting in the way of common sense. For one thing, this place was the only thing keeping him anchored. Without it, he’d be truly lost. More so than in the days and weeks after 9/11, when, in a city plastered with grainy Xeroxes of missing loved ones, he’d at least had a role to play: that of Family Member. For in losing his wife on that day he’d been thrust into the ranks of the similarly bereaved, their collective grief a kind of national emblem. Like the war heroes of previous generations, they’d been sought after by the press and trotted out at official ceremonies. Politicians had courted them and charitable institutions
had raised money on their behalf. And if the outpouring of public sympathy had seemed overwhelming at times, it had provided him both with a dark purpose and a reason to go on . . . and to drink.

Two years later, he’d come to the realization that the statute of limitations on his mourning had run out. He’d watched the compassion in other people’s eyes turn to pity, then disgust. Yes, you lost a loved one, they seemed to say, but so did a lot of other people, and look how they’re moving on. His excuses for not showing up for work on time had worn equally thin, and his frequent hangovers hadn’t gone unnoticed. His boss had begun assigning him the bottom of the barrel cases: petty offenders and prostitutes, low-level drug dealers and, in one nastily ironic instance, a drunk driver charged with reckless endangerment. Outside of work, friends who’d helped him through the early days of his bereavement had stopped calling. In the end, there had only been his best friend, Billy Munroe, whom he’d known since the second grade, and even Billy had finally checked out on him after one too many drunken late night calls. “Christ, man, get it together!” Billy had exploded before hanging up for the last time. “This is getting old.”

But by then Colin had been past the point of being able to pull himself together. He’d realized on that day, to his horror, horror that had gradually hardened into a kind of grim acceptance, that his dead wife was no longer the reason he drank. While the keenness of his loss remained undiminished, except when dulled by booze—a Ground Zero-size hole in his gut that no amount of public sympathy could fill—it wasn’t why he’d been pretty much shit-faced all day, every day. Colin had drunk because he couldn’t not drink.

It hadn’t always been that way. In college, and later on in law school, at Columbia, he’d done his share of partying, sure, but he’d known when to stop after the party had gone on a little too long. And maybe Nadine had had something to do with it as well. He’d met her during his first year of law school. Even after all this time, he could still recall every detail of that meeting. He’d stopped for a bite to eat at his favorite diner, on Broadway and One Hundred and First, where the food was cheap and the portions enormous, enough to last him all day and still leave money for subway fare, when he’d looked up from the menu to find, in place of his regular waitress, a black-haired beauty with buttermilk skin and the most kissable lips he’d ever laid eyes on.

“You’re staring at me,” she’d said, with a self-conscious laugh, as he’d sat there gaping at her in speechless wonderment. “Do I have something in my teeth?”

“No, I’m sorry . . . I just . . . you’re not Sally,” he’d stammered in reply.

“No, I’m not Sally.” The girl had given him a saucy little smile, as if they were in on some private little joke. “Did you want to order, or would you rather come back when she’s here?”

He’d smiled back. “I’ll have the BLT, light on the mayo.” She was scribbling the order on her pad, when he’d remarked, “I haven’t seen you around before. You new here?”

“It’s my first day.” She’d leaned in to confide, with a whiff of some subtle scent that had gone through him in a heady rush. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not really a waitress. This is just what I do to pay the rent.” She’d explained that she was an actress, injecting a note of irony into her voice, to let him know she was aware that she was a walking cliché.

“Have you been in any plays I might have seen?” he’d asked.

“Not unless you were one of the six people who caught the off-off-Broadway production of
Cry in the Wilderness
,” she’d said, with a twinkle in her eye.

He’d found her attitude refreshing. The other actresses he’d known all took themselves so goddamn seriously. When his sandwich came, he’d found himself eating more slowly than usual, stealing glances at her as she’d bustled about. When she wasn’t taking care of other customers, he’d chatted her up over endless refills of coffee.

Her name was Nadine and she’d lived in the city all her life, he’d learned. She was a fan of Woody Allen movies and her favorite music was jazz; until two years ago she’d lived with her parents, in a co-op on the Upper West Side, but now she shared a fifth-floor walk-up in Chelsea with three of her friends. When the check came, Colin had asked if they could meet for coffee later on. Nadine had grinned at that—he was already so wired on caffeine it would take him the rest of the day to come down—but she’d taken him up on the offer nonetheless.

Six months later, they were married. He’d been in his second year of law school and she’d still been making the rounds of auditions, waitressing on the side. They were living in an Alphabet City tenement, barely able to make ends meet, yet he had never been happier. With Nadine, every day was an adventure. She had friends from all walks of life, and the parties she was fond of throwing were a mix of young professionals and out-of-work actors, hard hats and transvestites, university students and professors. Colin grew used to coming home from a day of classes to find his wife out on the stoop chatting with one of the homeless people from the neighborhood.