Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine

by Ann Hood

  THE DORM ROOM THAT Henry shared was a standard one—painted cinder-block walls, twin desks and bookshelves, and narrow beds. His roommate, Doug, was a premed student, and had posters of skeletons, the digestive system, and the brain hanging on the walls. Doug spent every weekend with his girlfriend back home.

  As Henry and Rebekah shared a bottle of wine, she grew quiet and he began to chatter nervously. He showed her a postcard from Pogo that said “Here today, gone to Maui” on the back. He showed her an autographed copy of a book of poems by John Ashbery. Then he took out an old picture. “Look at this,” he said. In the picture, Henry, Simon, and Johnathan are standing together. Simon has two fingers behind Henry’s head. Horns. Sitting cross-legged in front of them is Rebekah, frowning.

  “Do you think about him still?” Rebekah asked.

  “I used to yell at him for dying,” he said. “Like he could hear me.” He hesitated. “Sometimes—” “What?”

  Henry shook his head.

  Rebekah took his hand in hers. “I remember how different everything was before he died,” she said. “He always used to make me laugh. I saw a movie once about Houdini. Tony Curtis plays Houdini and his mother dies and he spends all his money trying to communicate with her. But he never does. After Simon died, I would lie in bed and will his ghost to me. Try to, anyway. I would say, ‘Simon, come and make me laugh.’”

  “Sometimes I wish I had drowned,” Henry said quietly. “Even now. It’s like my whole family died when he did and I’m the only one who’s still alive.”

  Rebekah turned to him. “My mother has cancer,” she said matter-of-factly. “She may die.”

  Henry put his arms around her. She didn’t cry, just fit her body against his, the contours of each settled into the other’s.

  “I’m afraid that if she dies, that’s what will happen to me. I’ll be completely alone.”

  Henry shook his head slightly. They sat that way for a very long time until their arms cramped and their necks grew stiff.

  Henry spoke finally as he undressed her. “I’ve loved you since I was five years old,” he said.

  Howard, Elizabeth, and Jesse, 1985•

  ONE DAY HOWARD CAME in from the store to find Elizabeth poring over old photographs. She was sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by snapshots. He didn’t tell her he was there. Instead, he stood in the doorway and watched as she picked up each picture and studied it. The room had begun to grow dark, yet she hadn’t turned on the lights.

  “I know you’re there,” she said finally without looking up. “I can smell the pottery chalk.”

  “We had a good day. Sold that gray-and-peach-colored set.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “The ones with the flowers that look like birds of paradise.”

  Elizabeth looked up then. She had her arms full of photographs.

  “This is it,” she said. “My entire life. Right here.” And then she cried, clutching the pictures close to her.

  ELIZABETH BEGAN TO STAY in her room, emerging only to go for her treatments. She lay in bed and listened to the sounds of her family as they lived their lives. The sounds comforted her. Rebekah and Jesse bickered. The telephone rang. Howard’s booming laugh floated upstairs to her.

  And the smells of life! The smell of dried leaves and autumn earth came in through her bedroom window and Elizabeth would sit beside it and inhale and feel alive. It was when she left this room that she became aware of the life that was leaving her. When she moved among the living she felt like an impostor. In the supermarket she saw pregnant women bursting with life and felt even more acutely that her own was slipping away. When she sat with her family and listened to Jesse talk about becoming an astronaut, Elizabeth began to miss living before she even died. And sleeping beside Howard, feeling the warmth of his body, she felt her own wasting away. She thought of the video game Pac-Man, where big-mouthed circles hungrily chased dots and monsters. That was her body, the cancer gobbling her life. It was easier to retreat now.

  One morning she woke up and found Howard sitting beside her, shirtless. Instinctively, she reached out to him, wrapped her arms around his waist and drew her head into his lap.

  “I wanted you to know that I gave Rebekah permission to do something,” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “I told her she could go to Brown. To see Henry. He’s been calling and she really wants to go.”

  “How will she get there?”

  “I’m taking her to the bus station now. She’s going to spend the night in Providence and come back tomorrow afternoon.”

  Elizabeth disentangled herself from him, lifted her head. “You should have talked to me first. Before you said yes.”

  “Well, I told her she could.”

  “I thought fathers were supposed to try to keep their daughters little girls forever,” she said without emotion.

  “She’ll be back tomorrow afternoon,” he said again.

  “Why didn’t we decide this together?”

  “Well, you haven’t been very verbal lately.”

  “I’m dying,” she whispered, again emotionless.

  “I know,” Howard said, his voice cracking. “And I don’t know what to do.”

  He waited for her to answer, and when she didn’t, he left.

  Later, Elizabeth heard Rebekah and Howard and Jesse laughing at the front door.

  “Are you going to sleep in the same bed as Henry?” Jesse shrieked. “Yuck!”

  “Dad,” Rebekah pleaded, “make him stop.”

  “I wouldn’t sleep with a girl ever. Even if there was a nuclear war and we were the only two left on the planet and there was just one place to lie down—”

  The door closed, muffling his voice and ending the conversation for Elizabeth. She opened the curtains and raised the window to watch them go. The fall air sent goose bumps up her arms. Rebekah had an old flowered bag of Elizabeth’s thrown over her shoulder. Elizabeth recognized it from their days in New York. She remembered the day she bought it on Orchard Street. The tapestry pattern was worn now, threadbare even from this distance. Jesse ran ahead and, though she couldn’t make out the words, Elizabeth heard the taunting tone. She watched as Rebekah turned to Howard for help, her arms outstretched. Howard scooped Jesse up and threw him over his shoulders. Their squeals and laughter made Elizabeth laugh too. For a moment she expected them to turn and wave to her. But they didn’t. It was as if she were already gone.

  “MOM,” REBEKAH SAID THROUGH the door, “I’ve got your dinner.”

  Elizabeth looked up, startled, from the book she was reading. Since she had gotten sick, Rebekah had ignored her almost completely. At first, she had refused to look her in the eye, then she deliberately avoided touching her. Ever since Elizabeth had retreated to her room, she heard Rebekah quicken her steps when she walked by.

  “Cream of artichoke soup,” Rebekah said, almost shyly. “I made it.”

  She put the tray on Elizabeth’s lap and took the book.

  “Little Women?” she asked.

  “It used to be my favorite book when I was little and I felt like reading it again.” Elizabeth recognized the defensiveness in her voice and quickly tried to cover it up. “This looks good,” she said with fake cheerfulness.

  Rebekah sat in the chair across from her mother.

  “I understand that you saw Henry this weekend,” Elizabeth said.

  “Dad said you were angry.”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “I don’t know. It seems to me that you may be a little young to be spending the night with a boy in his college room. I don’t know.”

  “I told Dad that you weren’t angry. I told him that you probably just didn’t care.”

  Elizabeth stopped eating.

  “You don’t care, do you?”

  “Rebekah,” she said, but nothing else.

  “Why don’t you come downstairs anymore and sit with us?”

  Elizabeth picked up her spoon and began to eat the soup again.

  “You’re g
etting just like Henry’s mother. Living in your own little world. Next thing I know I’ll find you lying under a tree talking to yourself.”

  “Enough, Rebekah.”

  “I need a mother, you know. Not some crazy—”

  “I said enough.”

  “And what about Daddy? I went into the spare room to get an extra blanket last night and he was sleeping in there. What’s Daddy doing sleeping by himself?” Rebekah asked, accusing. “Don’t you even sleep with him anymore?”

  Elizabeth jumped up, spilling the contents of the tray all over the floor. “I guess you can take care of that for both of us now that you’re sleeping with Henry, can’t you?” she said. The soup formed a white puddle at her feet.

  “I hate you! Why don’t you just die already?” Rebekah gasped as soon as the words were out. She stood, paralyzed for a moment, then ran from the room.

  HOWARD HAD NOT SLEPT through an entire night in weeks, ever since he had moved into the spare bedroom. He would fall asleep, only to awaken a few hours later in a panic. Elizabeth’s dead, he would think when he reached his arm out to find her and then discover that he was alone. Then he would lie there and tell himself that she was indeed alive. He would try to relax, but his chest remained gripped in terror. Sleep wouldn’t return to him until dawn.

  Perhaps, Howard thought, if he worked until he was so exhausted he would sleep through a night. And so he began to build an addition onto the store. It felt strange, making so many decisions alone—the decision to let Rebekah go to visit Henry, adding on to the store, and even the decision to buy a used car to take Elizabeth for her treatments—everything hung completely on his shoulders.

  And now there had been this fight between Rebekah and Elizabeth. Howard stood, cutting the boards he would use as the frame. Last night he had heard the shouting, the door slamming, and then sobs from both Rebekah and Elizabeth’s rooms. Howard had sat at the top of the stairs, his head bent, immobilized. Jesse had come down from his attic bedroom and stood on the landing.

  “Dad?” he had asked. He wore his space suit for pajamas and there was sleep in the corners of his eyes.

  “Dad?” he asked again, and then sat beside Howard. That is where they sat until Jesse’s head slumped against his father’s arm in sleep and Howard carried him up to bed.

  Jesse had gotten the space suit at a yard sale in Otis in July. The thing he liked best about it was that it didn’t look like E.T. or Darth Vader. It was an old-fashioned one-piece silver jumpsuit with a faded square drawn in the center. Inside the square were colored circles, although most of the colors were cracked and washed out. All the circles had words underneath them, but the only one still legible was UP. A space helmet came with the suit. It slipped over the head and had a big circle cut out so a face could show through. Jesse had never seen anything like it.

  It crinkled when he walked. He liked to pretend there was no gravity. He would lift his legs very high and very slowly as he floated around the backyard or up the stairs to his room in the attic, the suit crinkling the whole time.

  When Rebekah first saw it, she asked, “Isn’t it hot in that stupid suit?”

  But Jesse didn’t answer. She was an alien on a faraway planet, speaking a language he didn’t understand. He loped toward her, shielded his eyes from the three suns that burned down on them, and peered into her face.

  “Get away, Jesse.”

  He moved closer.

  “What funny-looking people live here,” he said. Then he reached out and touched her cheek. “Get out!”

  The alien ran away.

  “I come in peace!” Jesse shouted after her.

  HOW MANY TIMES, JESSE wondered, had he seen dead squirrels or cats on the side of the road? Once, during dinner, a bird flew against the dining room window and broke its neck. A friend from school liked to take a magnifying glass in the sunlight and hold it over caterpillars until they exploded. That was it. That was what he had seen of death.

  Now they told him his mother was going to die. He remembered all of those animals, the fur peeling off them, the bird’s wings growing stiff, the frozen expressions on all of their faces. But his mother wasn’t an animal. She hummed in the kitchen while she cooked and made him laugh and taught him about the stars.

  His mother had found him the space suit. The couple holding the yard sale were getting divorced even though they were old and their children were old. Sometimes that happens, his mother told him. They were selling stuff from a long time ago. Baseball cards of the 1962 Red Sox. A meat grinder that had to be cranked. And the space suit. His mother pulled it out of a box and smiled.

  “Look, Jesse,” she said, and held it up.

  Just the two of them had come to the yard sale on their bikes. Jesse liked having his mother all to himself. If Rebekah was with them, she would start a fight and make their mother mad. And if his father was there, the two of them would be flirting and holding hands. This way was best.

  “That’s an old Halloween costume,” the woman having the sale said. She looked like an ostrich, tall, with a little head and big feet. Her husband was shorter than her and didn’t speak. He shook his head sadly whenever someone asked a question or bought something.

  “It was my son Roger’s,” the woman said.

  Jesse took it from his mother. “Wow,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  His mother slipped the helmet over his head. “Ready for blast-off?” she asked him.

  He didn’t know any other mother who knew so much about astronomy. She would go outside with him at night and point out the different constellations.

  “We got that at Cape Canaveral,” the woman said. “In 1961. You know what came with it? Two tickets to the moon.”

  The man shook his head sadly.

  “We’ll take it,” his mother said.

  Alone, wearing the space suit that smelled vaguely of motor oil from sitting in a box in a garage for so long, Jesse would press the button marked UP and travel to a faraway planet. From Earth, it looked like a tiny sequin in the sky. But it was a planet where nothing died—not squirrels or birds or caterpillars. And not mothers.

  Once, while his mother was asleep, Jesse took a strand of her hair from a brush on the bureau. He held it in his hand tightly and went up to his room.

  “Ready for takeoff,” he said, and squeezed his eyes shut.

  He pressed the button marked UP and rocketed into space, past the moon and the Big Dipper into a different galaxy until he landed on the distant planet. There, he gave the strand of hair to the benevolent leader. His mother would live.

  A NOVEMBER MORNING WITH bright sunshine and, remarkably, seventy-five degree weather. Howard and the children ate breakfast in silence. Before they left for school, he drew them into a hug. “It will be okay,” he promised. And he meant to make it okay.

  It was late afternoon and he worked, his shirt off, his T-shirt soaked with sweat. Howard stopped to wipe his forehead with the red bandanna he had stuck in his back pocket. He mopped up the sweat, then tied the bandanna across his forehead.

  “You had more hair the last time I saw you with one of those tied around your head.”

  He looked up and saw Elizabeth. She looked pale in the sunlight. Her hair was in a braid and she had her knees hugged close to her chest.

  “I brought cider,” she said, and held up a thermos.

  Howard put the saw down and went to sit beside her.

  “What’s all the wood for?” she asked him.

  “I thought I’d enlarge the store.” His eyes met hers. “I love you,” he said.

  She nodded. “Me too.”

  “I promised myself today that I would make everything okay for Jesse and Rebekah. And us.”

  Again she nodded. “Me too. I promised too.”

  Then: “I thought it would be easier to break away now. And then it was anger that kept me away. On Saturday I watched you all walk away and I felt as if I had already died.”

  Howard looked at her but s
aid nothing.

  “I’ve been selfish,” she said, and her gaze was frank and honest. She nodded. “I have.”

  “We’re all dying a little, Elizabeth. But you’re the one who’s really doing it and I can’t know how that feels.”

  “Maybe I won’t die at all. That’s what I thought of this morning. Maybe I won’t die and I’ll just be sitting in that room hiding. Or maybe I will and then I’d die without having had your arms around me for such a long time.”

  Howard lay back on the grass and looked up at the sky.

  “Why are you building an addition on to the store?” Elizabeth asked, and laid back too.

  “It seemed like a good idea.”

  “What will you put in it?”

  “Nothing. Maybe I won’t build it at all.”

  Elizabeth smiled. “I don’t think we need it.”

  Howard reached out and took her hand. He felt, just then, like a bird after it takes off, lifting, soaring, high, higher.

  WHEN REBEKAH HEARD THE knock on her bedroom door, she knew it was her mother. Elizabeth came in and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Lately it seems like I never do the right thing. But I’m not going mad like Claudia.”

  “Henry said that since Simon died he’s felt all alone. If you die, that’s what will happen to me too. Daddy will never be the same and Jesse’s just a kid. I’ll be all by myself.”

  “I always wanted my mother to see me get married,” Elizabeth said. “We were very different, but it seemed like the one common ground we could meet on. I was always so headstrong and rebellious. The sixties were a good time for people like me because there were so many causes to fight for. In 1967, Daddy and I drove to Washington for a peace march and my mother thought I had gone crazy. ‘You’ll never come to any good,’ she told me.”

  Rebekah laughed. Her grandmother had died before she was born. In old pictures though, she looked just like Rebekah and Elizabeth.