by Leary, Ann
I braced for the wave of anxiety to hit me, but … nothing.
“Peter wouldn’t just make something like that up,” I said. Had I just dreamed that he had come by?
“Well, come inside now,” I said. “I’ll make some coffee.”
Tess followed me into the kitchen, and as I started to fill the coffeemaker, she said, “What happened to your other chairs?”
I turned and was surprised to see that there were only two chairs at the kitchen table. There are usually four. Four charming little antique chairs with hand-spooled legs and wicker seats that Scott had picked up at some estate sale or other. Now there were only two. This was perplexing.
Then I had a foggy memory.
I had carried a chair down to the cellar last night—those little kitchen chairs are so light, it was easy to carry by myself. I needed a place to sit. I figured I wouldn’t fall asleep on the floor if I was sitting upright on one of those stiff chairs. I placed the chair in my favorite corner down there and had just returned to the kitchen for a corkscrew when Peter arrived. The man was absolutely loaded. I don’t know where he had been, but it was obvious that he had been drinking before he arrived here, and he was quite amused when I invited him to join me in the cellar for a little wine. He carried another chair down for himself.
“I needed to have the seats refinished. The wicker was getting worn, it all needed to be replaced,” I explained to Tess as I measured the grinds into the coffeemaker. I was so relaxed. This was usually the time in the morning when the alcohol started to burn out of my system, when I felt those glass shards in my gut and a hammering in my forehead. But thanks to whatever Peter had given me, Zantax or Zanaz—whatever he’d called it—I was calm and felt no pain. And even the confusing news about Jake didn’t affect me the way it should have. I knew that Jake was safe. I knew it. Peter had told me so.
Tess placed Grady on the floor and then followed him as he toddled from my kitchen into the dining room and then on into the living room.
I had told Peter, the night before, about the time I woke up on the floor down in the cellar and he agreed with me that this was a clever solution. He sat on one chair and I sat on the one opposite, smiling at Peter. Dear Peter Newbold. We were so close that our feet almost touched.
Peter understood why we needed to stay in the cellar. He knew I didn’t want Frank to come back and see me drinking. I didn’t want anybody nosing around—the whole town was in snoop mode, unfortunately, with Jake Dwight missing. I just needed to drink off the night before. Peter understood this. I would stop drinking again, Peter assured me, taking a hefty swig from the wine bottle I passed him. We didn’t bother with glasses.
“I’m so glad you came back, Peter,” I had said when I was uncorking another bottle of wine. “Do you know, you’re the only person who’s ever come down here with me? I don’t like to drink alone. That’s why I liked drinking with Rebecca so much. OOOPS, maybe I shouldn’ta mentioned Rebecca to you, Peter. I’m … I’m so sorry.”
“No, don’t be, Hildy,” Peter said as I passed him the bottle. “Everything’s fine now.”
“It is? Oh, I’m so glad, Peter,” I gushed. “I can’t stand the idea of you two hating each other.”
“No, I never hated her,” he had said, smiling at the thought and taking a healthy sip of the wine. “I love her still.” What a difference in his demeanor since the day before. He looked so happy now.
“You know, I rather love her, too,” I admitted, giggling shyly into my hand.
“I know,” Peter said, winking at me.
“Do you think she has a lot of … inherited wealth? You think old J. P. Morgan had enough cabbage that it still supports the progen … the pro-genie … Wait, what’s the damn word … the … her generation?”
“I would think so, but you know, she would never talk about money.”
“No, people from her kind of money—old money—they never like to talk about it. They’re soooo refined. Sooooo above it all. You know, it always bothered me that Rebecca married a billionaire. Why not leave the billionaires for a poor girl like me?”
“You’re not poor, Hildy Good. You’re worth quite a lot, but you just keep losing sight of that. You’re not poor at all.” He handed the bottle back to me.
“Nor will you be, Petey, once I sell your house. You’re gonna be rich, rich, RICH.”
Peter shrugged and smiled. “Sam and Elise will be, I suppose.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. I took a swig from the bottle. “Sam and Elise won’t leave you. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure they never find out. And I’ll keep an eye on Rebecca. But why are we carrying on about this? POOR JAKE. Poor Jake Dwight. What has happened to Jake, Peter? What’ll Cassie and Patch do?”
“Jake’s fine,” Peter had said. He seemed surprised that I hadn’t heard the news already.
“What?” I cried out. “Has he been found? Where is he? Is he home?”
“He will be soon,” Peter said, smiling.
I cried tears of joy at the news. “Peter, I thought … I had a little accident last night and I thought maybe I accidentally bumped into him with my car.…”
I remembered having looked at his chair, but it was empty. He must have left, but I didn’t recall him saying good-bye. I was drunk; time does strange things when I’ve been drinking. I forget little bits of time. I lifted the bottle to my lips, then leaned over and patted the girls, who lay at my feet. My sweet girls. My sweet familiars. And Jake was safe.
Jake was safe.
When Tess returned to the kitchen, I told her again about Dr. Newbold’s news.
“When did you see him?” she asked.
“Last night. He stopped by for a little while. Maybe the people you saw hadn’t heard that Jake was found,” I said.
“No, Mom, I told you, it was on the news this morning. Let’s go see what’s going on. The search parties … all the organizers are on the green. Let’s take the coffee with us. I want to go help.”
“Okay,” I said, but when she was filling her coffee cup, I hurried downstairs to the cellar. Perhaps it had all been a dream. But there were my two kitchen chairs. There were three empty wine bottles lying next to them. I tiptoed back up the stairs and closed the cellar door carefully behind me.
twenty
If you just happened to be driving by Wendover Green that hot spring morning, you might have thought you were passing a festive country fair. People were milling about everywhere. Old people, young people, small children. And there were balloons. Everybody was carrying brightly colored balloons. The Congregational church had become the official headquarters for the Jake Dwight search effort and Trooper Sprenger was there, standing on the top of the steps to the church, hollering out instructions through a loudspeaker. He was thanking everybody for coming and asking that people enter his cell phone number into their phones so that they could contact him immediately if they found any signs of Jake. People were handing out flyers with a photo of Jake on the front. Sharon Rice handed one to me and I looked down at it in dismay. There was young Jake, gazing into the camera. In large bold type were these instructions:
IF YOU FIND JAKE, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TOUCH HIM. JAKE IS VERY FRIGHTENED OF BEING TOUCHED BY PEOPLE HE DOESN’T KNOW. PLEASE SPEAK HIS NAME QUIETLY AND DIAL 911 IMMEDIATELY.
It was all so confusing. I knew that it was possible that Peter had just had his information wrong, or that he was confused due to his drunken state, but he had filled me with this idea—no, more than that—an absolute conviction that Jake was safe.
Sharon Rice’s husband, Lou, had set up a table on the lawn next to the church and was handing out water to the volunteers. John Althorp, the manager of the Hickory Stick Toy Shop, was using a helium tank to blow up dozens of colorful balloons. He was handing them out to all the volunteers with a great flourish and a smile, adding to the bizarrely festive atmosphere, which was spoiled only by the presence of Trooper Sprenger, the flyers, and the search-and-rescue dogs. Tess and I walked t
hrough this strangely merry and mournful scene in a sort of daze, when, suddenly, I felt someone grab my arm. I almost leapt out of my skin.
“Hildy?”
It was Mamie Lang. She had dozens of balloons clustered above her head and was trying to untangle some of the strings that were wrapped around her hand.
“What’s with all the balloons?” Tess asked.
“Jake loves them,” Mamie said, and she handed one to each of us. Grady began giggling and batting at the balloon. “If you find Jake, you’re supposed to just show him the balloon and hope he approaches you.”
Tess was tearing up.
“Aw, honey, do you want to leave Grady here with me and Mamie so you can go search with the others?” I asked, touching her arm tenderly.
“No,” she said. “I want to keep him close. But, Mom, come with me. Let’s go together. You look a little stressed. The walk will be good for you.”
I hesitated. My anxiety was starting up again. My convictions about Jake’s well-being were starting to fade. I needed another pill. Maybe I could sneak one from my purse while we walked.
“Okay,” I said finally.
It was Tess’s idea to search the bird sanctuary behind Old Burial Hill. The sanctuary was only a short walk from the Dwights’, and though there wasn’t a trail leading there from the woods behind the Dwight house, Tess reasoned that Jake might not be one to look for trails. He was likely to just blaze his own. I looked at the roadside as we drove to the sanctuary, staring at the gullies and weeds with dread.
We parked the car on the side of the road and I helped Tess put Grady in his backpack. Grady protested at first. He wanted to walk, but we distracted him with the balloon, and once we began walking, he enjoyed his vantage point from above Tess’s shoulders and he batted her head with excitement.
“What a great idea, those backpacks for kids,” I said as we headed into the cool shade of the wooded trail. “I wish we’d had those when you girls were babies.”
“I think they had them,” Tess said. She was leading the way, taking great strides but being careful to duck around branches so that Grady wouldn’t get scratched.
“Really? I don’t remember them.”
Tess let out a little laugh. “I doubt you were out looking for one,” she said.
This was Tess’s old gripe. I didn’t spend enough time with them when they were little. I was working. Somebody had to pay the bills. This fact of life never seemed to penetrate the girls’ bitter reminiscences of their childhoods.
“I would have liked to have one. To take you on hikes like this when you were a baby.…”
“Really?” Tess replied. “Watch your step here, Mom, it’s rocky and a little slippery.”
We were starting down a slope toward Hodge’s Pond, which was at the center of the preserved sanctuary land.
“Tess,” I said, “I would have liked to have spent more time at home with you girls. I had to work. Your father never made any money in antiques. He actually operated at a loss most years.”
“Mom. I know. Why are you bringing this up?”
“You brought it up. By making the remark about the backpack.”
We were being careful now. We were at the steepest part of the trail. Tess was making her way down sideways and I supported Grady’s backpack from behind, in case she slipped.
After a few minutes, Tess said, “It wasn’t just that you worked all day. It was at night, too. You went out so much.…”
“In those days, you really had to entertain clients more, Tess.”
“I know, but even on nights when you were home. You would be pretty sauced. Before dinner even.”
“What?” I said. “I didn’t start drinking that much until after Daddy left.”
“Oh, okay, think what you want,” Tess said bitterly, and then she stumbled and grabbed a tree trunk while I grabbed Grady’s leg until she was steady. We were almost at the bottom of the hill, but we stopped to catch our breath. Grady batted at his mother’s head. “Go, Mommy, go,” he cried out.
We both laughed then, Tess and I. Tess turned to face me. “I’m sorry, Mom. I can’t believe I’m still holding on to those old resentments, even now, when you’ve given up drinking and everything. I should go to Al-Anon or something. I’m sorry.” Tess hugged me then, and I hugged her back. “I’m proud of you, Mom,” she said.
We made our way through the quiet woods. The path was heavily shaded here. Blissfully dark. I knew that in a short while the trail would open onto the meadow that surrounds the pond and that the sun’s bright rays would be upon us again. It would have been nice to have remained in the protective shadows of the great old oaks and hemlocks just a little longer. Just to clear my head a little. Just to give me a few minutes to stop my hands from shaking so.
twenty-one
In the sixty years I’ve lived in Wendover, people have drowned. There’s a fierce riptide—a strong seaward current—just above North Beach and sometimes people get caught in it. Somebody from Boston drowned at North Beach a few years ago and now there’s a Coast Guard sign down there on the beach with diagrams about what to do and what not to do if you’re caught in a riptide. The last thing you should do in that situation is start swimming for shore, but that’s the first and only thing you want to do. There’s the beach, just yards away, but the more you try to swim toward it, the harder that greedy current sucks you back out to sea.
The thing to do, if you’re caught in a riptide, is to swim parallel to the shore. The thing to do is to relax and swim parallel to the coast and not panic. You can swim out of the current that way. But most people—kids especially—the minute they feel the loss of control, the fierce grip of the sea, they’ll panic and paddle and kick like crazy, and it won’t be long before they’re gulping water, before the seawater enters their stomach and lungs, and then it’s all over.
I’ve heard that drowning is painless, that when the lungs start to absorb more water than air, a sort of euphoria sets in, and the panic dissipates and soon the body becomes aquatic.
One day, not long ago, Tess made me watch a YouTube video of a woman who had had a near-death drowning experience. Tess’s intention was to soothe me, I know, to make me feel better about what had happened. The woman on YouTube said that she was swept from a rock by a rogue wave and was unable to make it to shore in the rough water. She eventually sank, holding her breath for as long as she could. Then she had to inhale.
She described the feeling she experienced when inhaling the sea as “exquisite.” There had been a beautiful blue light. A symphony. A timelessness.
Then she was rescued.
A drowned body will initially sink, but then it will rise to the surface again, once decomposition begins. It has something to do with gases formed by bacteria. And I’ve heard that the body will sink again, and then rise again, and it’s only after the body has risen to the surface the third time that it will settle, finally, to the ocean floor. But I think that may be an old wives’ tale. I think it was my cousin Eddie who told me that when I was a kid, but he may have had the story mixed up with the story of the Resurrection of Christ.
Who knows.
The body found floating outside Wendover Harbor that Sunday morning was discovered, unfortunately, by two Wendover boys—the Hastings brothers: Connor and Luke, ages thirteen and fourteen. The Hastings have always been a big sailing family. The boys’ dad ran Wendover’s race week every year and all four kids sailed. That morning, the boys were planning to sail out past Peg’s Rock, even though their father had told them not to leave the harbor.
Peg’s Rock was not completely out of the harbor, the boys reasoned, and you could always catch a strong wind there. So they rigged up their 420 racing boat and set off. They chatted above the flapping of the sails and the rising wind. It would be a good sail. They approached Peg Sweeney’s Rock and listened, as all kids do, for the cry of the ghost of poor Peg. Then they sailed on a little farther, toward the mouth of the harbor. They had a strong headwind and want
ed to ride it just a little longer. They leaned back mightily as the boat heeled over and they shouted to each other with bravado. They were flying. They steered around colorful buoys marking lobster traps and aimed their bow for Singer’s Island. They would only sail on a little bit farther, just a little bit farther, and then they would turn back.
Suddenly, just ahead and right on their course, they saw what looked like an inflated white plastic bag floating in the water. When they sailed closer, they realized what they were seeing were the white shoulders and partially submerged torso of a human body floating facedown. They glided past, gasping and cursing, forgetting for a moment to watch the wind, and for a brief instant, the current actually pushed the body against the boat’s stern, causing the boys to scream and almost capsize the boat in their frantic efforts to come about and head back for the harbor.
Luke, the younger brother, burst into tears, though later, when his older brother Connor reported this, repeatedly, he denied it. The kids didn’t mention Jake Dwight to each other at the time, but they both had the boy on their minds. They sailed for the harbor, Connor manning the tiller with shaking hands. Ahead of them, a lobster boat was leaving the harbor. It was Manny Briggs’s boat. The boys waved their oars frantically at Manny and he turned his boat toward them, and when he was alongside, he reached out with a gaffer’s hook and pulled the boys’ sailboat alongside the chugging Mercy.
The boys told him what they had seen. Manny had old Joe Sullivan with him, and the two men tried not to think the worst. “Lower yer sails quick and climb aboard.”
“I bet it was a dead seal. People always think dead seals are bodies,” Manny grumbled after fashioning a towline from Mercy’s stern to the bow of the little sailboat, but he was so anxious that his back seized up on him when he reached out to help the younger boy onto his boat, and he cursed and shouted at the older boy to hurry and jump on board.
“It was a body. It was a dead person,” Luke cried, running to the bow and pointing.
