by John Enright
Susan was waiting for Dominick back at the cellar door. On the way there he had grabbed his grip bag from where he had left it on the kitchen porch. Without a word Susan lit his way down the steps and led him into the cellar toward the back of the house. As he followed her light through the dirt floor rooms he noticed for the first time that she was wearing a long pale skirt that dragged in the dust behind her. Susan seemed to know her way well. They came to the room with the raised wooden platforms and through there to the chamber with the metal barrel hoops on the floor. When Susan raised the latch on the low plank door on the room’s back wall, it rushed open toward them. A blast of fresh air, smelling of dirt and field, pushed past them into the cellar like some wild escaped animal leading a stampede. Above them they could hear the house shudder and heave like an old lung gasping for air. They ducked against the stream of air through the low door into the room of the trunks. They left the door open behind them.
Susan continued onward, the air stream fluttering her long skirt behind her.
“Wait,” Dominick said. He got his penlight out of his pocket and played its bluish light over the trunks, still up on their stone shelves in the wall. But now both trunks were open and the clothes they had contained were randomly strewn about as if in some teenager’s room. Susan had stopped and come back. He played his light on her now. The antique unbleached linsey-woolsey Mother Hubbard had been made for a larger, more mature and muscled woman. It hung on Susan’s almost anorexic frame. She looked like a girl dressed up in her grandmother’s clothes. A pale, delicate collar bone showed in the rough square neckline.
Dominick said nothing. Susan said nothing. In his grip bag were the long leather case of papers and the green-covered ledger that he had intended to return. Susan stared into Dominick’s light and then with a slight twist of her head gestured for him to follow as she turned and headed on into the narrowing darkness.
***
The roadblock was where the county road met State Route 9W. They had made it that far without any hassles. Susan had guided Dominick from the dirt farm roads behind the barn back to the county road at a point beyond where all the vehicles were parked at the Van Houten driveway. They had hid for a bit on the side road with the lights turned off as fire trucks and more law enforcement vehicles, with all their lights and sirens on, raced past along the county road.
“They sound like they’re in such angry pain,” Susan said. She was in the front seat with Dominick, curled up against the passenger-side door.
“Why not? Should they sound happy?” Dominick said. Off to his left he could see the red glow, low on the skyline.
“I could never be an emergency responder,” Susan said.
“Why not?”
“I think they enjoy it too much,” she said, “night after night, day after day, year after year. They must get off on it, other people’s tragedies.”
There was a new smell in the car, the smell of the past. It was coming from Susan, from her Mother Hubbard. It was not an unpleasant aroma, just unfamiliar, primordial. After the emergency vehicles passed there was no other traffic, and Dominick pulled cautiously onto the road headed out. When the lights of the state troopers’ cars at the roadblock appeared ahead, Susan climbed over the seat into the back and made herself as small as possible in her oversized dress.
“Officer?” Dominick said to the trooper who waved him to a stop. “What’s going on?”
“Where are you coming from?” the trooper asked, shining a flashlight into the car.
“Just up the road, a friend’s house,” Dominick said. “Is there something wrong?”
“Virginia plates?”
“Tourists, here for the festival and to see old friends. What …?”
Susan spoke up from the back seat, “Daddy, can’t we go? I have to pee.”
The trooper had missed Susan in the back seat entirely. He now shown his light on her and then stepped back. “Okay,” he said, and he waved them through.
A ways down 9W headed for Catskill, Dominick asked, “Do you really have to pee?”
“No, I’m alright. How are you, Dominick? Are you going to be okay?”
“I am free, I guess,” he said, setting the cruise control and leaning back in several types of pain.
Chapter 26
They stopped for the night somewhere in mid-Massachusetts at a roadside motel where the “No” before “Vacancy” was not lit. Susan was sleeping comfortably in the back seat, but Dominick could go no further without some pills. He left Susan sleeping or pretending to sleep when he went in to register. They had stopped at Vernon’s place outside Catskill for Dominick to retrieve the rest of his things, but Vernon was not there. Dominick had left him a check and a note on the kitchen table. It seemed best just to keep traveling. Across the bridge in Hudson he had to ask Susan for directions to Sissy’s house, but she said no, she was not going back there. “I’ve left that place,” she said. She had already packed all she needed in Dominick’s trunk. Like an instant parent Dominick now held responsibility for someone.
He parked the car in front of their room off at the dark end of the motel lot and woke Susan, touching her shoulder. She was happy to stay where she was, she said. “I like your back seat for sleeping. You could bring me a pillow.” He brought her two pillows and the blanket from the bed. He opened all the car windows a couple of inches and locked the car.
“Good night, Dominick,” Susan said in her small voice, her head already snuggled into a pillow.
“Good night, Susan,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”
Dominick took two pills, then showered, then took another pill. There were just a few left. Dr. Toby in Edgartown could get him more. Another reason to be Vineyard-bound. He could introduce Susan as his niece. Would Toby care? Maybe. He was New England enough to be a prick about such things in someone else. They would just wing it. Susan would have to lose that dress, though, and return to being her almost invisible self. What would he have to teach her immediately? It was a long time since he had been a houseguest with a female companion, and those were all women who had come from the world they were visiting. He stretched out on the bed in his boxer shorts. The pills were fading in. It was not just pain but cares they took away. They offered distance, safety, a space of his own.
There was a knock at the door, and Dominick got up to answer it. It was Susan. “Got to pee,” she said and she walked past him into the room toward the bathroom. She had taken off the Mother Hubbard and was wearing just her panties. From the back Dominick could have counted each of her vertebrae and ribs. She closed the bathroom door behind her. He tried to remember how many vertebrae there were in the human body. He heard the toilet flush, and Susan re-emerged. She stopped at the sink to drink a glass of water from the same plastic cup Dominick had used to wash down his pills.
All the curves of a full woman’s body were there, but promised, not pronounced. Her breasts were real but so new as to look fragile, the nipples a tender pink. Her sleep-twisted hair hung down over her slender shoulders.
“Night,” Susan said as she walked past him back out the door, stopping to give him an absentminded peck on his lower jaw, as high as she could reach, her sleepy eyes half closed. She walked back to the car and got in the back seat, closing and locking the door behind her. Dominick waited a while and then went out to make sure all the car doors were locked.
The next time Susan knocked at the door and Dominick got up to open it, a blast of morning sunlight greeted him. Susan was dressed again in the Mother Hubbard, which looked even more like something from the grave in the bright sunshine, and she was carrying a small backpack. “Morning,” she said as she walked on through to the bathroom. The shower started almost immediately. At the sink outside the bathroom door, Dominick fixed the miniature pot of motel courtesy coffee and got dressed as it dripped. The shower was still going when he poured himself a cup of aromaless brown fluid and stirred in the packets of white powder. The coffee only woke up his stomach to the fact that it w
as otherwise empty.
“I’m starving,” Susan said as she came out of the bathroom, dressed in her Walmart shorts and T-shirt. Her hair was still wet and combed down to frame her face. She was carrying her backpack but not the Mother Hubbard, which was tossed in a corner by the tub with her used towels. “Can we get some breakfast?”
Dominick asked at the office as he checked out, then followed the desk clerk’s directions to a diner a couple of miles away on the other side of the highway. They both ate well. The coffee was real. Susan ordered both sausage and ham with her eggs. “No meat at Sissy’s,” she said. Dominick enjoyed watching her eat. She cleaned her plate then ate what was left of Dominick’s toast.
The diner was on the edge of a small town, and on their way back to the highway they had to slow down for traffic exiting a church parking lot. Services had just ended. It was Sunday morning, Dominick realized. Sunday morning in that other world that ran on a calendar and repeated itself with regularity.
Susan was up in the front seat with him now, and she was watching the families leaving the church. “Why were those people attacking your house?” she asked.
“They didn’t say,” Dominick answered.
“You can guess,” Susan said, still looking out the window.
“Then I would guess that they did not like the idea of who was in the house.”
“They didn’t like the idea? They attacked an idea?”
“Well, they didn’t know the people in the house, so I can’t say they didn’t like the people.”
“Maybe they didn’t like the house.”
“The house had been there a long time. It was a good house. No, I don’t think it was the house that they didn’t like.” Dominick stopped and waved to the cars from the church driveway to cut in front of him. He was in no hurry. He was studying the people in the cars.
“They were trying to shoot you but they didn’t know you?”
“We never met,” he said. And he had tried to shoot them.
“The people down at the road and the people up in the house were all the same. I mean, they were just like these people here.”
They were all the same, but they were not like us, Dominick thought. They belonged some place. They had a place to belong to. Maybe that was what they were fighting about.
“I think the house burned down,” Susan said.
“I think so too.”
“It was a creepy old place.”
“History also includes what is missing,” Dominick said. The last car was pulling out in front of them. In the back seat a boy of ten or twelve went to the trouble of flashing them the finger.
Susan laughed and blew him a kiss in return. “Did you see that?” she said.
“Have you ever gone to church, Susan?” Dominick asked as he fell in at the end of the long line of church cars.
“No. I don’t get it. The God thing, I mean. What’s that all about? What’s the point? Did you go to church?”
“No, never had to,” Dominick said. “I never could see the point either.”
It was only a few hours’ drive before they pulled into Woods Hole and Dominick parked the car at the end of the line for the Vineyard ferry. He got out to go pay the fare in the office. When he came out with his ticket, Susan was standing at the dock railing looking out at the harbor. The ferry was not at the dock or in sight.
“Where are we going?” Susan asked when he joined her.
“Martha’s Vineyard,” he said. “You’ll like it.”
“A vineyard?”
“An island.”
“Why are we waiting here?”
“We have to wait for the ferry that will take us there.”
“A ferry? A boat, not a bridge?”
“It’s just a short ride.”
“Over water,” Susan said, as if proving her point. She turned and headed back toward the car. Dominick followed her. Susan opened the driver’s side door and reached in. She hit the trunk release switch and the trunk swung open. She went to the trunk and pulled out her day pack, her only luggage.
Dominick caught up with her. “Susan?”
“It’s not my time yet, Dominick. I’m not supposed to cross over water for a while. I’m not sure when, but there is an order, a sequence that has to be followed. It is not yet my time to cross over water.”
“But where …?”
“Just before we got here I saw a sign for Buzzards Bay. I think I know some people there. I’ll look them up. You go on.” She slipped her thin arms into her backpack.
“But how …?”
“If it’s supposed to happen it will, Dominick.” She gave him something like a scolding smile.
The ferry’s horn sounded behind him. It had rounded the point into the harbor.
“Your boat,” Susan said, and she stepped up to give him a kiss on the cheek.
“But wait,” Dominick said. He reached into a pocket and pulled out his clasp of folded money. He pulled out all the bills—he had no idea how much, a couple of hundred bucks perhaps—and held it out to her. “You will want to eat,” he said.
She took the bills and put them in the pocket of her shorts. “Thanks. I’ll eat.” The horn sounded again. “And, Dominick, stop looking back. All of that has already happened. It’s what about to happen next that matters.”
As Susan walked away, Dominick could not help but watch as she hiked between the lines of waiting cars then disappeared behind a truck. A fellow nomad.
