by Melanie Finn
Upstairs, in the kitchen, she turned on the gas cooker, all four burners. They hissed eagerly, exhaling their toxic, eggy scent. Then she went out the front door, closing it firmly behind her. She was pleased for all the care she’d taken over the years to shore up the insulation, the weathering seals on the windows and doors. She thought about how one day she’d paint it. Heavy oils, thick brushstrokes. She’d paint it from memory, the only place it would still exist.
The Tercel with its new catalytic converter started instantly, and the hills bowed up into the morning sky, jade green sails of earth and rock that caught the wind and pitched the planet forward. Up there in the rustling green, smothering green of trees, so much moved and lived in secret; the woods had chosen what to reveal to her — glimpses, shadows, paw prints. Not one creature, not one trout lily or mushroom or rock up there would miss her or even note her absence. And yet how much she had depended upon those things, they had been her outer hearth, they had kept her soul warm and her belly full in the leanest days. One last glance, and then she swung the Tercel onto the road and she did not look in the rearview mirror.
Down the hill, the channel of her days, the road grooved as ice upon granite, the greenhouses, the small, fervent church, the corn fields, hay fields, cows. This early, only the farmers were out in the fields and the shift workers on the roads. She turned at the traffic light, not left to the interstate, but right. Right.
Through the sleeping, slow-stirring town, out the other side.
No one had arrived — Silas was due in half an hour, at six. Rose had the place to herself. She parked and walked directly to the sheds. The huge fans hummed eternally, the smell was as sharp as old cheese, old shoes. Closer, closer than she had ever been, and at every step she retained the ability to turn back. What would she gain, other than a vision she’d never be able to erase? She couldn’t change a thing, couldn’t make anything better, she wasn’t going to save a single chicken. Turning back, turning away now isn’t the same as denying, she decided. Denying is the resort of the weak, the incapable, the lazy. It’s adult pretending. Santa Claus exists and the lodger is a nice man who makes Rosie laugh.
Thus, Rose kept going, feeling queasy, another hot flash rising from her low back, her nose pricking with the oncoming stench of the sheds. No surprise awaited her — she wasn’t going to discover that Bob was growing marijuana instead of chickens, or some vast meth lab or sweatshop of illegal Guatemalans dutifully sewing underwear. She opened the door.
They had minds, they had existential awareness of themselves as individuals. This was the worst of it. They did not aspire, they did not know that other chickens had better lives, they did not know green fields existed or the sunny farmyards of children’s books. They did not believe in heaven or hell, they had no hope nor concept of hope, and yet they were hopeless. They were miserable, because true misery — this kind of daily, joyless, mechanical living — is not a comparison but an inescapable condition, a docile acceptance. The hens laid egg after egg after egg, each taken from them, day upon day upon day. And the end of their obedient servitude was death, a twirling of Silas’s wrists to break their necks. To Silas and Bob, they were simply reproductive systems. But they were chickens with chicken brains, and in that chicken brain an egg was tended and then it hatched into a chick and the chick was tended and a chick was loved with all of a chicken mother’s capacity. The hens’ misery was not just one of physical discomfort — the claustrophobia, the raw-pecked backs and necks, the clipped-off beaks, the ceaseless, staring light — but of thwarted mother-love; this primal force that makes all life possible: the desire of the mother to bear and tend her young.
Rose sank to her knees in sorrow.
“Rose?”
She stumbled upward, not quickly, for her knees were stiffer these days. Nick stood before her. He looked confused. He was wearing his overalls open to the waist, and she silently noted the beautiful, firm symmetry of his form, the smoothness of his skin. He was marble and godlike in this Hades.
“What are you doing in here?” he asked.
“I was —”
She looked away, gathering herself like a loose spool of middle-aged wool. The ragged green dress. The early hour. She looked like a crazy lady. She sprang for the door, escaping out into the morning. He followed her. “Rose — what’re you here for?”
She said, “You’re not on duty until ten. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“The eye infection,” he explained. “I have to treat them. I feel sorry for them.” Then he touched her arm, “Rose —” and all regrets flared within her. She wanted to touch him right back, lay her hand upon that smooth, warm chest. She wanted to kiss him and fuck him and have him plow into her 17-year-old body — to experience the deep, unashamed lust she’d never had, and never would. She was ugly now, a saggy carapace.
“I’m leaving,” she said.
“Why?” He frowned. “Is it my dad? Did he fire you?”
“No.”
“So, like, leaving here, this particular shithole, or what?”
“This town.”
He turned his head, she noted his profile, the slanted cheekbones, the straight nose. Then, he regarded her almost angrily: “But you’re my friend, Rose.”
“I am. But I have to go.”
“Where?”
“Far.”
“Where?”
“Far, far.”
“You’re not going to kill yourself, right?”
“Not that far.”
“Can I come with you?”
She felt the time, and she could feel Silas nearing them and how this singular moment was already fraying at the edges.
Nick said again: “Please, Rose, can I come with you?”
She thought: maybe all that happens in life is that you get to see your own life from a different perspective, up instead of down, or inside out, like a reversible coat.
“Wait here,” she said and ran to the car, and got the brown bag. Then she ran back to him. “Listen, Nick. Can you listen? Because I’m going to tell you something important.”
He nodded.
“There are moments, fulcrums upon which our entire lives depend. When we’re young we don’t see these, we don’t understand their rarity. We think we have endless possibilities. We don’t understand the suction of time. And I’m telling you now, this is one of those moments and in the future you’ll look back and see it so clearly.” She felt the bag’s weight — the weight of her own plans, gas, food, several months of rent, of the new start, where she wasn’t yet sure, but far, far. “I’m giving you money, enough for you to leave and go anywhere you want. It’s money, that’s all, not a perfect, tragedy-free life.”
He opened the bag. “Holy shit.”
“Don’t tell anyone where you got it, don’t let anyone take it from you. Go to a bank in another town, open a safety deposit box and keep it in there.”
She leaned in, kissed him chastely on the cheek like an auntie, and then fled. She passed the fire trucks roaring out of their station and heading up to Kirby Mountain where a house was burning to the ground, a propane-fueled explosion.
Stopping at the last traffic light before the interstate, she fished around in her bag, found her phone and Pamela Fornier’s card. With a light patter of her fingertips, she attached the screen grab of Bob’s favorites bar — daddydome and naughteen.
And sent it.
Kennebunkport began like any other town on the Maine coast, with a seafood restaurant and a liquor store. Yet as Rose moved closer to the center, she noticed the differences. For instance, there were rust-mottled cars like hers, and there were extremely expensive cars. The serfs and the nobility. Nothing in between. The roads were immaculate, there was no McDonald’s, no Pizza Hut. The chain drugstore was a quaint white-clapboard house with window-boxes containing real red geraniums.
Do the very rich even know what the rest of America looks like? she wondered. Possibly, they think it’s the same, only with smaller houses, a
nd thus their failure to comprehend the populist calls for better healthcare and schools; to the rich, poverty is merely a matter of scale, and not wintering the polo ponies in Boca. Or it is inner cities burning in protest, self-immolation displayed through the long lens of a CNN camera. On the other side of the equation, most poor have no idea of how the rich really live — they cannot comprehend the vast amounts of disposable income, most of which has been dubiously gained or merely inherited or made from the blood and toil of the poor, if not here, then some other blighted country. They cannot comprehend the power that money brings, the choices, the options. The poor lack imagination: what do a million grains of sand look like? What about a billion? Jeff Bezos, a trillionaire. A trillion what? Stars? Dollars? How? And why? What could possibly be the point of that much money? The poor blame themselves for being poor, the rich take credit for being rich.
Her directions took her through town, toward Cape Porpoise. Behind the walls and fences were not mere houses or even mansions. An entirely different noun was needed to accurately describe the multiple buildings, tennis courts, pools, croquet lawns, staff quarters: compounds. Not for chickens or survivalists in army fatigues, but for leisure, for comfort. Private movie theaters, indoor pools, guest houses, boat houses. Most of the owners were here for a month or less, because there were new WASP frontiers — ranches in Montana, tents in Serengeti, villas in Costa Rica. And in between, they lived in their residences in Manhattan, Greenwich, Southport, Old Lyme, Marblehead, Chesapeake Bay, and, if absolutely necessary, San Francisco.
527 Queens Road was worth millions — millions. Once, a simple lobster shack, it was now a carefully weathered cottage with a cerulean-blue front door, extensive decks, and private ocean frontage. On the land side were the property’s real assets — a dozen acres of hay fields, though Rose doubted these were hayed in the way real farmers hay: to feed their livestock through the long winter. She suddenly thought of Hobie’s van Eyck — how these fields were the same thing: the way WASPs surreptitiously signal their wealth to other WASPs. Bennett semaphoring with silks scarves. That had been funny, hadn’t it?
The drive curved through the fields — a tidy track with a grass strip up the middle to retain the “rural” charm of the property. Her tires made a pleasing sound on the gravel, a democratic sound — exactly the same as the hunter-green Jaguar parked in front of the house. As she got out, Rose peered inside the car: buttery leather seats, walnut dash, an overflowing ashtray.
Her knock on the cottage’s blue door triggered the crazed yapping of multiple small dogs. She could hear them skidding and skittering on the floor on the other side of the door. Shortly, there was the sound of human footsteps, a woman’s rebuke: “Fuck’s sake, Minty, get out of my way!” The voice was posh, almost British, the way actors used to speak in old movies.
The woman opened the door, the dogs surged around Rose. They were Jack Russells mainly, but Rose spotted the odd tawny fur-ball. A Yorkie? “Bloody dawgs!” the woman shouted. She was mid-70s, tall, her thick silver hair held at bay by a wide velvet hairband. She stank, even from a few feet away, of booze and cigarettes. She squinted at Rose — as if at a prescription bottle, not just to read the tiny writing but to ascertain the contents. Her voice rose above the barking, “Are you lost?” The “o” sounded as if she was rolling marbles in her mouth.
“Barbara?”
“Rather, I believe the question is, who are you?”
They were speaking above the yipping dogs.
“Rose Monroe.” And because this was an entirely insufficient resume, she added: “I knew Bennett. A long time ago.”
“What?” WOT? The insane barking.
“Bennett. A long time ago. More than 30 years ago.”
Suddenly, the dogs surged away from them like a school of fish taking fright; they dashed into the field in a tight pack. Rose and the woman were left in silence.
“Neighbor’s cat. Hope they kill it. Can’t stand the things. Murder all my birds.”
Sure enough a cat flew vertically into the air, pivoting like an acrobat, before disappearing into the grass again. It was going to have a very close call.
“Bennett. Bennett? Bennett. Bennett?” The woman seemed to be trying to place him.
“Are you Barbara Kinney?”
The woman resumed her squint. “Why?”
“It’s about Bennett. I just want to talk with you. I won’t be more than ten minutes.”
She gave Rose a look from top to toe. “Is that a Lanvin? I once had one just like that. Come in, then.”
Barbara led her down a hall lined with dark grey bead-board and framed watercolors of seascapes. The paintings were able, though trite. The hallway opened into a living area with a full glass front to the sea. It was a different house here — modern, full of light. The furniture was either utilitarian or valuable antique. There were books everywhere, stacked on an elegant tiger mahogany table, in columns on the floor, stuffed into floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Persian rugs covered the wood floor. These were of quality but Rose smelled dog urine. The dogs had circled around from the field to the deck and were hurtling themselves against the glass doors. Barbara let them in, they surged onto the furniture, occupying every seat.
“Anywhere,” she waved an arm. “Just shove them awf.”
One of the brown tufty dogs curled its lip at Rose, but she was not deterred.
Barbara wore no jewelry and her clothes, on closer inspection, were dirty with food and dog hair. The room gave other clues: books, cigarettes, an open bottle of sherry, a TV in pole position with the comfiest armchair, a bird guide, stacks of unopened mail. Barbara had never been beautiful, but she was tall and strong, she had an athlete’s frame. She resembled Bennett, and in this female form, Rose clearly saw Miranda — the thick hair, the shape of the occipital bones, the jawline, the oceanic eyes. The resemblance, once detected, was eerie and contaminating. The tributaries of DNA ran concurrently through the Kinney veins, and Rose had the sudden impression she’d merely incubated Miranda for this powerful genetic lineage; it wasn’t until now, seeing Barbara, that Rose realized how little Miranda looked like her.
“Wot’s this about Bennett?” Barbara took a sip from the delicate crystal glass of sherry on the table beside her. It didn’t occur to her to offer anything to Rose.
“You’re his sister?”
Barbara frowned, she did not encounter strangers, not out here on this rarified shore, not here in her lonely life. At length she said, “Wot’s he done?” A barely detectible twitch at the edge of her mouth.
“I lived with him in Vermont. In your house.”
“My house?”
“The farmhouse in Kirby.”
A long scavenging of the memory. “Oh! You mean Aunt Kit’s place. She married some kind of farmer.” At the close of every sentence, Barbara’s jaw thrust slightly forward and up, and Rose recalled this affectation in Bennett. “I just sort of got it in a will and didn’t think anything about it, never wanted to go. Vermont! Why would I? Never been a skier.” She settled her eyes on Rose. “What on earth was he doing there?”
“We lived together. Bennett and I. We had a child. Miranda.”
“Miranda?” Barbara sounded incredulous.
“She turns 30 this year.”
A pause. Barbara thinking. “Is this about money?”
“No —”
“Because he’s dead.”
“How do you know that?”
A choppy laugh. “He stopped asking for money.”
“When — do you remember when, exactly?”
“So if it’s money you’re after —”
“No. It’s not money. It’s just —” What? Just what? Rose suddenly floundered. The vast and uncontrollable future circled, she was its prisoner once again, brought here by the folly of her decisions. It was impossible to explain or warn, or to ask Barbara for an alliance against Diane. If PI Di wished, if she bullied and manipulated, she would get her warrant, the house — what was left of it —
would be searched, and if the police searched hard enough, the can of gasoline, the shards of human bone might be discovered and DNA’d. Then — then — a net would cast upon the land, and Rose brought to justice at last: a murderer in chains. The maudlin story would appear in the local paper, Diane would be victorious, and Miranda would know what had happened to her father. But that terrible, pointless knowledge was not the same as the truth.
Two dogs suddenly exploded into a fight. Like a whirling, furry ouroboros, it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Barbara hurled a book at them with surprising accuracy. “Knock it awf! Little turds!” Yelping, the culprits diverged onto separate chairs, one dislodged a fat black duck decoy. Now Rose noticed: the room was filled with duck decoys — it was like a Magic Eye, she just hadn’t seen how they were placed among the books, on top of magazines, cluttering up the windows. Had he made them? Ducks, whimbrels. When had he been here? How long had he stayed? Was this their childhood home? Questions arrowed through time. Where and how had he learned to lie? And why? Who had he loved? Had he found his mother on the bathroom floor, bleeding out? Had he gone to Paris? Studied history at Oxford? What had he been like as a child? What about the Picasso and Truman Capote and Cuba?
“May I use your bath —” and she remembered “— your W.C.?”
“Down the hall, awn the left.”
Down the hall. Awn the left. Facing the fields. First room. Wall to wall copies of National Geographic, decades of them. Awn the left. Second room: bathroom, smell of urine and potpourri. Awn the left. Third room. An unmade bed, disarray, men’s clothes, boxes of papers and books. She recognized the Harris Tweed, the worn brogues and Brooks Brothers shirts. Bennett. She smelled him. For a brief, terrifying moment she thought he was alive, and this another ruse. And she felt exactly as the young girl she’d been in his wake, the painful insufficiency of self. She’d clung to him like a buoy in a storm, only to discover he’d had no anchor. He was barely afloat himself.
There is no sharp end of life, Rose thought. There isn’t even direction — no culmination of knowledge or grand arrival. Every moment is continually being lived and relived. There’s no closure, no past. There’s nothing tidy or succinct. Even forgiveness is just emotions shapeshifting. It’s all overflow, a chaos of conflict and definition. It’s just constant wading.
