“Why is it your job to stop it?” Judith asked. She was leaning against the door frame.
“I don’t know that either,” Naomi said honestly. “But it just is. It’s expected of me.”
“Ah,” she said darkly. “Outsider defending outcast. Ausländer aus!”
Naomi sighed. “I guess. Something like that.” She forced a smile. “Anyway, nothing’s happened yet. There’s still a chance they’ll get a grip and point themselves in the right direction. Do you mind if we, I mean, could we not talk about it anymore?”
“Of course,” said Judith. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I am.” She reached into the freezer and extracted two pints of liquid gold. “For you urban refugees, I went to special lengths.” She spoke with forced good spirits.
Judith, however, was genuinely delighted. “Häagen-Dazs!”
“Häagen-Dazs,” Joel exclaimed from the dining room. “Where did you find it?”
“Oh now,” Naomi laughed. “You just hang on there. You don’t expect me to divulge all my secrets at once, do you?”
Joel’s eyes were wide. “Oh my God. Rum raisin. Naomi, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
“The bottom of his stomach,” Judith corrected, carrying the coffee mugs out to the dining table. “The bottom of his ever-increasing stomach.”
“I don’t care what you say. Nobody can make ice cream like the Danes.”
Naomi nearly howled. “Danes my butt. ’Häagen-Dazs’ was dreamed up by some marketing person. It has no meaning at all, didn’t you know that? It’s words from a language that doesn’t exist. The stuff’s made in Jersey or somewhere.”
“You’re not serious.” Joel looked wounded. “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”
“It’s so. Joel.” She grinned. She liked him enormously. The telephone rang.
“Just be a minute,” she said. She went back into the kitchen. Mary Sully spoke her name as soon as she picked it up.
“Hello, Mary.” Naomi’s thoughts raced on ahead. She wanted to be ready.
“Naomi,” Mary said again. “It’s so awful. You won’t believe.”
I will, she steeled herself. “What is it, Mary?”
“Naomi, they arrested Heather Pratt last night. For murdering the baby you found. Oh, can you believe—”
“All right,” she said. She was amazed at how calm her own voice sounded. The enormity of her own task, the cup she couldn’t bring herself to turn aside. “All right, Mary. Thank you for letting me know. But, Mary”—she took a breath before saying this, before making her public debut as the girl’s defender—“let’s not get ahead of ourselves. They may have their suspicions, but I’m sure they don’t have the slightest idea what really happened. Let’s just see if we can try to give Heather the benefit of our doubt. She needs our help now, not condemnation. Let’s—”
“No, Naomi,” said Mary in a kind of wonder. “No, it isn’t that. I mean, you don’t understand. They arrested her last night and they said she confessed. Heather confessed.” Naomi rocked, trying to make the floor stand still. Her hand on the phone was wet. “She did it, Naomi. She killed her baby. She stabbed it with some kind of knitting needle.” Then Mary paused. A gulp of air, a twisted sob. Her new voice deep with rage: “That little bitch.”
Part 2
Heather
My hand moves into darkness as I write, The adulterous woman lost her nose and ears; the man was fined. I drain the glass. I still want to return to that hotel room by the station to hear all night the goods trains coming and leaving.
—Sarah Maguire, “Spilt Milk”
Chapter 9
The City on a Hill
NOT MANY PEOPLE KNEW THAT HEATHER PRATT had once been a matriculated student at Dartmouth College. She barely knew it herself, she had been in and out of that place so fast, and though it had taken place only two years earlier, it already seemed an immeasurably long time ago. When Heather thought of the episode at all, it was as a kind of white-and-green blur—the stark white buildings at the edges of the college quadrangle, its boundaries denuded by the trees it had lost to Dutch elm disease, but still verdant in its uniform lawn, dissected by straight white paths. She remembered the week she had spent unpacking and then rearranging her few belongings in North Massachusetts Hall, trying to find a common language with the girls from Choate or Andover or Fieldston, the nationally ranked tennis player from Palo Alto, the Olympic skiing hopeful from Nome, as they tentatively formed alliances and fanned out over the campus.
How it had all come to pass in the first place she still wasn’t entirely sure. In Goddard, the high-school guidance counselor routinely pushed the top two or three in the class in the direction of Hanover, managing to get a kid in every decade or so, and the college tended to turn a lenient face to the cream of New Hampshire students—part of an academic noblesse oblige that went back centuries. When they accepted Heather Pratt, she was far too alarmed to express doubt.
Not that she wasn’t clever. Heather was bright enough, and she read, but she lacked that special thing—the hunger—that served as catalyst for a mind truly going places. It had never occurred to her to go anywhere, for example. She had no sense of the world beyond what she had actually seen of it, which was basically the White Mountains only, with a senior trip to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston and consume platters of spaghetti and meatballs in the North End. Of the vast and intense variety of the earthly domain, Heather knew only enough to get by, nor did she care to know more. She did not yearn to see the few sorry icons—Hollywood, Disney World—her own country and culture had managed to drum up, and travel to other countries was incomprehensible—what possible purpose could that serve? The known world of the mountains, the little towns that stuck like tenacious burrs to their hillsides and riverbanks, had drawn itself around her as a reliably comfortable thing, and in Heather’s experience, comfort was not to be taken as a given.
Through this myopia, the Dartmouth course catalogue—with its bulk and variety, with its heady, complex requirements for that vaguely unreal item called a bachelor’s degree—was a blurred and terrifying churn. Heather, who did not make a habit of thinking in terms of what she wanted, looked around herself in her dormitory or the great chattering dining hall and could barely register that she was of an age with these avid proto-professionals. Watching them, absorbing the rhythms if not the content of their debate, she found that she bore them no ill will at all, nor was she covetous of what they had or their sheer effortlessness in this dizzying place. They were simply Other. When they paused in their revels of mutuality, she knew that they must know her for what she was not, and that they must then, with no particular rancor, purge her from their midst. Her decision, when it came, was merely to do it first.
Of course, she was not the only one of her kind at Dartmouth, but the handful of impoverished local kids—who seemed to find one another at once—had a kind of vicious tunnel vision about the college, a determination to milk the place for every drop of enrichment and future prosperity it might be inclined to throw in their direction, and she could not share that, either. For Heather there was no goal at the end of the tunnel, and nothing for her to focus on amid the blur of Fair Isle sweaters and waving lacrosse sticks. Her fellow New Englanders, those noble savages lifted to this city on a hill by the power of rank aspiration and raw tenacity, seemed to sense this about her, marking her as pariah even before the wealthier offspring of the Eastern megalopolis did.
Her two roommates were a sweet girl with a tiny Southern voice and a dazed expression, and a rough-and-ready army brat whose mission, those first days, was to figure out which stereotypes of men were in which fraternities, so she could concentrate her efforts. They shared a large overheated room with a small adjacent chamber into which their bunk and single beds barely fit, and a bathroom with an ancient, yellowing tub. Heather went to a freshman party and sat for an English placement exam and met her advisor, who seemed reluctant to advise. She learned the school song, with its romantic idea
lization of the White Mountains—the still north, the hill winds—and incomprehensible lyric about “the granite of New Hampshire in their muscles and their brains,” which everyone giggled at but Heather found somehow insulting: granite for brains! On the fourth evening, she accompanied the army brat to Alpha Delta, where a rugby player danced with her on the sticky basement floor, then took her upstairs to his fetid chamber. She did not know why, precisely, she went with him. Sex was something she had always assumed she would have sometime, with somebody, but she hadn’t otherwise spent much effort thinking about it. The rugby player, Heather decided, had known this about her, or had taken her nonchalance for sophistication. Either interpretation pleased her, and besides, he was himself pleasant, in a drunken and otherwise distracted manner. He breathed malt into her brown hair, his fingernails were clean. When he was finished, she felt altogether that some benign but hardly earth-shattering thing had been accomplished, though as far as she herself was concerned, she felt the same as before, essentially. They parted amiably, though it later occurred to Heather that he might have been half asleep at the time. In any case, she made her own way home after midnight and, forgetting the security code at her all-women’s dormitory, was forced to wake up a girl in one of the ground-floor rooms, thereby acquiring for herself the woman’s resentment and a fully formed reputation in one swift and economic motion.
She did not want to go to sleep. She did not want to let herself into the tiny room that was nominally her own, with its little beds and breathing, sleeping girls. Instead, Heather wandered into the dormitory common room, a dingy parlor with an old piano and battered armchairs arranged in a silent semicircle that faced the door, like a disappointed but stubborn audience. There were no sounds from the hallways around and above her, and even the battling stereos that were normally perched on the windowsills of the dormitory next door—facing out in a gesture of collegiate altruism—had been retired for the night. There was moonlight on the college green, the white chill of autumn moonlight which Heather knew well enough—it was the specific moonlight of her own home, bleak and hard and utterly familiar—and yet over the coddled lawns that moonlight struck her as discordantly alien, and she felt as if she were somewhere far away in some other country she had never sought to visit, rather than only an hour from the house on Sabbath Creek Road.
On the jutting fireplace mantel lay a small green book, pocket-sized, tooled in real leather. She picked it up and fanned the leaves against her thumb, riffling the silvery alphabet marks, the pages unpopulated but for the lines that waited to be filled with names and places and numbers. Inside the front cover was the owner’s own name, written in a gesture of pure optimism, of plain anticipation of the life that was to be led in this place, among these people. For the person who had left the address book here, Heather saw, the strangers in the classrooms and the dining hall and the fraternity basements were only raw material-like whatever stuff the alchemists had turned to gold. They were the unknown quantities, not yet converted into companions, or lovers, or rivals, perhaps. Heather was suddenly, retroactively aware of the formation of a social structure within this miasma of her peers, the spontaneous divisions and connections that were occurring all around her as she herself wandered along her way, the couples and feuds, the newly minted best buddies. She tried for a moment to imagine that this was her own book, its pages crowded with ink, with men and women jostling for space, each entry suggestive of a face or a voice or some incident that was somehow pleasant to remember. She felt a heaviness grow in her, then a surge of panic. That was when Heather knew.
By mid-week, she had tentatively told her roommates that what she wanted to do, really, was study physical therapy.
Physical therapy? Um, they exchanged glances, did Dartmouth offer a degree in physical therapy?
The thing was, it didn’t. So Heather took herself in hand and went to the Dean of Freshmen.
Physical therapy was its own red herring, of course. She hadn’t the least idea what a physical therapist did, but it sounded so exact and so concrete: a discipline. To Heather it seemed to offer an unarguable logic. “What I really want to do,” she told the grim woman, whose mind was elsewhere, “is physical therapy. I know that now.”
“But”—the dean glanced down at the file in her lap—“Heather, you know that Dartmouth is a liberal-arts institution. We offer the bachelor of arts degree only. There’s no reason you couldn’t go on to get a specific degree in physical therapy later, but here the emphasis is on a more well-rounded education.”
Heather shrugged. She wasn’t obligated to say anything, she knew. Her being here was enough to get it done.
“If you knew that you wanted to be a physical therapist,” the dean pushed, a little irritated, “why did you apply here?”
“I just decided,” Heather said. “I mean, it just became clear to me, you know?”
The dean did know, and Heather could see it. Lurking behind her expression of rank disapproval was the accusation that Heather might have thought this out a bit earlier, thereby allowing some truly deserving poor kid from New Hampshire to have a shot at a decent life. But no.
She was out that afternoon, and back in Goddard Falls by dinnertime.
Chapter 10
A Speck of Dust
THAT AUTUMN, HEATHER FOUND WORK IN GODDARD, at the sports center.
The sports center was new, a bit of the federal brass ring the town council had managed to grab as it whooshed overhead, swinging south to Keene and Manchester and the snug, prosperous towns scattered between them. The center had opened that June with enormous local fanfare, but when the summer residents headed home it became clear that townspeople considered working out in the gym, with its new machines and shiny free weights, something of a laughable activity, and they were disinclined to learn the gentlemanly sports of squash and racquetball, leaving the little courts abandoned—shiny wooden rooms hoarding stale air. Swimming was the only draw, and swarms of kids turned up after school for group lessons, but the center stood depressingly empty throughout most of the day and showed little promise of ever being able to sever the federal umbilicus.
Stephen Trask, a son of Goddard Falls who’d made it to the University of New Hampshire and then beat it right back home after graduation, was the director of the center, and he hired Heather in part because he appreciated the gravity of what she’d just done and wanted to be in a position to lean on her about going back to school. Trask still had family in Goddard Falls, but he lived in Goddard now, in a new ranch on a new street near the Stop & Shop, with his wife and sons. The Trasks—who read books and belonged to a mail-order video service that allowed them to rent foreign films—were probably the only Goddard residents who tried in more than a perfunctory way to make friends with some of the summer people, an effort that consistently proved frustrating to all concerned, since the couple hoped to talk about culture and politics and the visitors seemed to want to talk only about local lore and the scandals of Goddard neighbors they barely knew. Celia, his wife, worked too, at Tom and Whit’s, and even though she came from Manchester, she’d done well in Goddard, where she was considered sophisticated but still comfortably native. When things got bad for Heather at the sports center, it was Celia’s idea to bring the girl to Naomi.
But things didn’t get bad for a long time, because in fact Heather liked her job. She liked leaving her house in the morning and waiting by the roadside for Martina, who was the center’s entire housekeeping staff, to pick her up and ride her into Goddard. She liked Martina, who had been born again in a West Lebanon church made of cinder blocks, with an ARE YOU ON THE RIGHT ROAD? sign out front. And she liked the center itself, a clean white box of a building with skylights over the basketball court and a cozy lunch bar in back whose windows overlooked the slope down to the Sabbathday River. Perhaps most of all, Heather liked the fact that from her swivel chair at the reception desk she could blamelessly watch the interplay of husband and wife, of parent and child, of boyfriend and girlfriend. H
er experience of what she had, since the age of reason, thought of as “normal” life was little more than superficial, since her own and her grandmother’s interaction with neighbors had always been minimal and since high school had a skewed normality all its own. Here, in her official capacity, she loved the fresh tone of authority in her own voice, her ability to answer the questions asked of her. She loved introducing herself on the telephone as “Heather Pratt, over at the sports center,” and hearing the “Ah yes” of recognition that had absolutely nothing to do with her. She typed Stephen Trask’s letters and checked ID and called up parents when their kids got too rowdy in the pool, and she walked the rooms and corridor with an authoritative gait, making a note of anything that needed seeing to, since who else would know what to look for?
She felt, for the first time, the satisfaction, if not the nobility, of work, the comfort of real fatigue at the end of her day. She enjoyed being able to return to her role as her grandmother’s emissary to the world of the town of Goddard, a post she had filled de facto while in school. Now, for the first time since graduation, she had her observations to offer at dinnertime. She had the relative variety of her days, the relative panorama of humanity upon which to embroider her stories as she and Pick embroidered together, and she knew the good effect of this steady, carefully regulated influx of other people into the stilted air of the farmhouse.
Pick, who had earned her nickname as a perfectionist eight-year-old (the precise incident involved a Four-Star quilt, assembled over a period of ten months, disassembled for six, and reassembled for a solid year, all because it wasn’t good enough the first time), was nearly seventy when Heather came back from Hanover. She was frail, like something that had grown too tall and now buckled under its own height, but she was still up most days at dawn. When she had pain, she found something to do sitting down, and she had pain a lot, which was why the house was full of objects she had made—pillows etched with flowers, sheets crowded with pattern, every chair needlepointed and every floor hidden by some confection of salvaged cloth. Pick had taken care of Heather on her own since Ruth, her daughter and Heather’s mother, had set out west from Goddard Falls fifteen years earlier, her trail turning cold shortly thereafter, somewhere west of Chicago. Heather did not remember Ruth and seldom had occasion to miss her. Pick remembered Ruth all too clearly, and so missed her even less.
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