Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  Ruthie felt a band growing tight across her chest, crushing the air from her lungs. She opened her mouth and gasped, the sound of her breath at once hollow and rasping. The deputies shouldered their way across the room, leaving behind them a broken parting in the crowd. Highball glasses hovered halfway to the mouths of guests whose small talk caught in their throats. Ruthie dropped the napkin she was holding, and a lobster puff rolled away across the gently sloping, wide oak planks, stopping only once it reached the barrier of a beige stacked heel. The foot in the shoe kicked the mushroom away.

  “Ruthie?” Jasmine said. “Ruthie, what’s wrong?”

  Ruthie, freed at last from the electric grip of Matt’s gaze, lurched away, elbowing people aside as she rushed toward her father. She stared at the older deputy’s bent head, his murmuring lips, too far away to hear what he was saying. Her father grabbed the back of one of the pretty white slatted chairs, crushing beneath his thick fingers its ornamental corsage of purple flowers. He staggered. One of the deputies caught him around the waist, and eased him into the seat.

  “Dad!” Ruthie said. As she skidded to a stop in front of the chair, she tumbled from her left high heel, her ankle buckling painfully to the side. “What happened?”

  Her father shuddered, and upset a water glass as he groped for it, soaking the white tablecloth and the mauve wrappings of the little party favors Iris had arranged at every place.

  “What happened?” Ruthie said again, and then, as her father broke down, “Daddy?”

  Ruthie had never seen her father cry. At his parents’ funerals there had been a dampness in the corners of his eyes, but wild, hoarse weeping was impossible, a dark miracle, no less wondrous and terrible than if her father had suddenly burst into flames.

  “Stop it,” Ruthie whispered. “Stop it!” She clutched at his sleeve, shaking his limp arm. “Please, stop.”

  Daniel gulped and then pulled Ruthie onto his lap. He buried his face in the nape of her soft neck and held her tightly.

  Across the room Iris stood, her blood rushing hollow in her ears. She had seen Daniel and Ruthie crying, knew that they were hanging on to each other as if the seas were rising around them. But the only person in the narrow focus of her horror was the sheriff’s deputy, illuminated as though trapped in a blazing spotlight. He held his hat over his heart, the chin strap caught on the shiny metal of his badge. The noises of the crowd faded to silence, and somehow Iris heard the deputy’s words from across the distance of the hall as though he were whispering them into her ear.

  II

  Someone had switched on the two racks of fluorescent tubes slung from the Grange Hall’s rafters, and the gaily decorated tables and flower arrangements looked tawdry in the harsh light, like crumpled and torn Christmas wrappings after the gifts had all been opened. The fairy lights twined through the wires shone wanly, like headlights in the daytime. The candles had guttered and gone out, the place settings stood stacked and pushed aside, and a skyline of dirty tumblers and wineglasses was crowded at the far end of the empty buffet table. All joy and expectation had been drained from the room, and in their absence what had seemed whimsical and elegant was now gaudiness, pretense. For a while the guests stayed, clumped into small groups. Whether up from New York for the weekend or summer people who’d known Becca since she was a sag-diapered baby digging in the rocky sand on Red Hook beach, the Copakens’ friends stood together, gripping one another’s hands and shoulders in a sudden camaraderie of disaster.

  On the other side of the room stood the locals, the families of Jane and Frank and the few people not related to her whom Jane had invited. Unlike the from-aways, they were largely silent, each standing at a slight remove from the others, as though encapsulated in an invisible bubble of shock.

  Everyone drank. Whether they were lobstermen or investment bankers, they placed their orders and drained their glasses in one or two gulps. The bartender was kept busy, although his work was simpler now. No one was ordering G&Ts or sea breezes. It was all scotch or bourbon, neat.

  Then, as if by some inaudible signal, all together, the locals started to gather their things and head for the door. The summer people and out-of-town guests hesitated only a moment before following, a few stopping on their way out to lay a useless hand on Daniel’s shoulder or offer Iris a hug she could not bear to accept.

  The Copakens and the Tetherlys sat at separate tables, each family in its own stunned huddle. Someone, perhaps it was the caterer, had stripped these tables of place settings and flowers and set down pitchers of water and a few glasses, though a bottle of rye, Jane thought, might have been more welcome. Frank was not among them. He needed a smoke, he had said, and to Jane’s relief, after fifteen minutes he was still not back. His slatternly girlfriend had gone after him. Now Jane didn’t need to worry about what her son-of-a-bitch ex-husband might do or say. Infuriating, how even ten years after their divorce, he managed to embarrass her, as if his disgraceful behavior were still a reflection on her. She had been young and stupid enough to marry him, and she was paying for it still. And now the best of the three good things to result from her stupidity was gone.

  John was dead. Even as she thought the words to herself, Jane felt a strange distance from them and her surroundings. She was proud that she had not broken down, that she hadn’t made an exhibition of herself. She was strong, like her mother, who had never cried, not even on the night her husband had been lost at sea. Jane was not the victim of her emotions. In fact, she was under such firm control that she was able to watch, dispassionately, as the old Wylie sisters, Jane’s clients for many years, sidled up to the long table on which were heaped dozens of gaily wrapped presents, some impressively huge and showy with ribbons, others tiny, no larger than a single silver spoon. Euphenia and Eudoxia Wylie conferred like a team of lawyers in front of the gift table, whispering behind their hands. Jane was not too overcome by sorrow to fail to observe as Eudoxia reached with a furtive hand for a shapeless package wrapped in silvery, well-creased snowflake-patterned paper; and plucked it off the large pile.

  Jane smiled grimly. Her world might have been stood on its ear, but at least the fundamental tenet of her philosophy—that no matter what they pretended, people looked out only for themselves—remained reliably in place. Look at the Wylie girls (as they were known, though both were well beyond girlhood or even middle age). Pillars of society, sat on the vestry of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, ran the charity jams-and-jellies booth at the Blueberry Festival. Proud descendants of one of Red Hook’s founding families. Yet they still paid Jane to clean their drafty old barn of a house what they’d paid her mother twenty years before—$10, an extra $2.50 if she did the windows. The really shocking thing was that Jane, a woman who never hesitated to speak her mind and get what she was owed, let the old birds get away with it. Jane had stopped being a woman who let others take advantage of her a dozen years ago, the first time that John calmly put himself between her and Frank Tetherly’s right hand. John was strong without violence, masculine without rage. He had shown her that she did not have to take for granted the history of men and women in her family. She could be different, too. She had borrowed money from her mother, hired a lawyer, and threw Frank out of the house. And from then on if someone tried to take advantage of her or failed to treat her with respect, she showed them the door. But she had never shown Euphenia and Eudoxia Wylie the door, even though after she paid her girls their $7 an hour each, it ended up costing Jane to clean their house. The Wylie sisters had been the first to hire Jane’s mother after Jane’s father died, and more than once their paltry $10 a week had been all that stood between Jane’s family and empty bellies. Even after her situation had improved, Jane’s mother had retained a soft spot all her life for the Wylie sisters. When she was a little girl, Jane had spent many an afternoon playing checkers with Miss Doxie, the more easygoing of the two, while her mother scrubbed out their icebox and swabbed Lysol around their kitchen floor.

  Jane watched the two old wome
n shuffle with their reclaimed booty out of the propped-open door, the floral fabric of their good Sunday dresses stretched across their flat rumps in a crosshatch of creases.

  Maureen, Jane’s daughter, followed her gaze. Maureen’s face was puffed up even more than usual, her eyelids and the end of her nose as pink as a rabbit’s.

  “Cheap old bitches,” Maureen said.

  Jane shrugged.

  Matt put his head down on the table.

  “You need to throw up again?” Jane asked. The boy, like his father, had a weak stomach. Matt shook his head, his cheek still pressed to the table. “Good,” she said.

  Matt had been following the limousine in John’s car—it had been his job to drive it to the reception—and had barely escaped getting into the collision. When the first sheriff’s car pulled up to the scene, they found him on the roof of the crushed limousine, trying to pound his way through the sunroof to get to his brother and Becca.

  At the next table Iris sat, her face gray and crumpled, like a used tissue. Her mouth hung open, sagging at the corners, a thin string of saliva wavering between her lower lip and the bodice of her silk gown. Jane felt an unkind relief at seeing Iris’s face made ugly by grief. Usually the woman looked perfect, even when she wore her gardening clothes—a beat-up old straw hat, khaki shorts, and an old white shirt of her husband’s, tails hanging down her thighs. Jane would rush in, sweaty and dirty from a day driving the girls from one house to another, picking up a bottle of Windex if they were low, swapping vacuums when one blew out, getting down on her hands and knees to help scrub a floor if they were running behind, and there Iris would be, cool and elegant, sipping a cup of tea on her screen porch, a pile of papers on her lap, a pencil holding her mess of curly black hair in a knot on top of her head. She always offered Jane a cup and Jane always refused it. No need to sit through ten minutes of awkward chitchat with someone with whom you had nothing in common.

  Now, though, with her makeup smeared, blurring her features, for once the woman looked worse than Jane. How could she allow herself to break down like that, in front of everybody? Jane had never understood this willingness on the part of these from-aways to peel up the scabs of their emotions and let everyone see their festering sores. They were like children that way. They had no shame and even less self-control.

  Look at the girl, Ruthie, lying across her mother’s lap, her whole body shaking. Maureen indulged in no such melodrama; she had two daughters to stay strong for. Although Jane could not deny that Maureen and John had never got on. Maureen had picked and prodded at the boy his whole life, and yet John had never laid a hand on her. He gave as good as he got, but never physically, teasing her instead about everything from her weight to her cooking. Even as adults, when all this nonsense should have been behind them, they never managed to heal the rift; Maureen never tired of saying that John had his nose in the air ever since he got back from the yacht design course and started as an assistant designer at the yard instead of paying his dues at the bottom, like everyone else had to.

  Jane had kept Matt out of the troubles among his siblings by taking him with her to work, just like her mother had done with her. After school and during the summers when he was a small boy she used to fill a basket with his G.I. Joes and Tonka trucks and deposit him at the kitchen table of whatever house she was cleaning. Before he was old enough to resent having to tag along with her, Maureen was out of the house and Jane could safely leave him alone with John. She’d felt bad about that, both for John, who spent most of his free time keeping an eye on his little brother, even dragging the boy along to his job at the yacht club in the summer, and for Matt, who got thrown out of his mother’s orbit so early. But there was no point in feeling guilty. She did what she had to do to survive. Her kids knew that and understood. Once her business had begun to see a decent if sporadic profit, they’d come to appreciate that the sacrifice was worth it. Jane had regularly bailed Maureen out; the girl never kept a job for longer than a couple of months, and the welfare check stretched only so far. Jane had helped pay for John’s design course, and she had made up the shortfall between Matt’s scholarship and the costs of his college tuition and expenses. Her kids had been appropriately grateful. They were well-mannered people. They knew how to behave.

  Jane glanced over at the Copakens, still crying, the lot of them. Only the old man managed to keep himself under control. A proper gentleman, he’d always been.

  Jane swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. She poured herself a glass of water, scowling at the way the pitcher shook in her hand. She gulped down the water and wiped away the sweat that dappled her forehead. When she turned her head it felt like her brain kept moving, bumping into the side of her skull with a thud. Suddenly she could feel the heat emanating from Maureen’s and Matt’s bodies, warming the air. She couldn’t breathe. She put a hand to her cheek. It was at once clammy and hot.

  “I have to get out of here,” Jane said, struggling to her feet.

  Maureen said, “You want to go home?”

  “No,” Jane said, collapsing back in her chair. Then, suddenly, she knew where she needed to be.

  “I have to see it.”

  “You don’t want to do that,” Matt said, not looking at her.

  Maureen said, “The deputies’ll tell us as soon as we can go see him. They said we should wait.”

  “I have to see him now,” Jane said, forcing herself to stand up. “I’m going down to Jacob’s Cove.”

  “They won’t let you down there. They blocked the road on either side of the cove,” Matt said. He put his head back down on the table.

  “Like hell they won’t.” She tried to remember where she’d left her car keys. In the ignition, she thought. Unless she’d slipped them into her purse to make sure none of the kids tried to drive off after having a few too many. Or that Frank didn’t do the same. It would not be the first time the idiot drank so much he forgot that the van wasn’t his anymore.

  She had left her purse under a chair at the head table. She stood up and set off toward it on unsteady legs.

  “Miz Tetherly?” said the younger deputy. He’d been left to babysit them while the older one returned to the scene of the accident. “Miz Tetherly? You need something?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Miz Tetherly? You want me to drive you somewhere?”

  “I can drive myself. I’m going to see my son.”

  The deputy grimaced. “Oh no, ma’am. That’s not a good idea. When they’ve got everything … you know … when they get them over to the hospital the sheriff’ll call over here and I’ll take you. You know. To identify the … your son.”

  Jane glared at him. “I’m not going all the way to Newmarket to see my son.” She had her purse looped over her arm now.

  “Jane?” Iris said, struggling to lift her daughter up off her lap; the girl was sprawled across her like a giant baby, her arms wrapped around her neck and her head drooping over her shoulder. Ruthie clung to her mother, ignoring Iris’s effort to free herself. With a final heave Iris pushed the girl over to Daniel. “Jane? Are you going? Are you going over there?”

  Jane sighed and looked away.

  “Jane?” Iris said.

  “Yeah,” Jane said finally. “I’m going over there.”

  Iris pushed her hands roughly across her cheeks, rubbing away her tears. Ruthie tried to grab her hand but she shook her off. “I’m going with you,” Iris said.

  “Iris,” Daniel said. “Sit down.”

  She ignored him, setting off toward the front door of the hall.

  “Mommy!” Ruthie called.

  Jane’s jaw twitched. The last thing she wanted was Iris’s company.

  “Let’s go,” Iris said.

  Jane narrowed her eyes, sizing Iris up.

  “Let’s go,” Iris said again.

  Jane set her shoulders. “Fine,” she said, walking out the door, knowing, without looking, that Iris was following close behind.

  III

 
Jacob’s Cove lay on Red Hook Road about halfway between town and the little village of East Red Hook. From the Unitarian church in Red Hook to Jacob’s Cove was about four miles, and the village of East Red Hook was another three and a half miles farther along. Unlike the town of Red Hook, which had grown larger and more prosperous in the period between its founding in 1778 through the mid-nineteenth century, when the wooden shipbuilding industry reached its zenith, and on into the 1880s, when it began its current incarnation as a summer destination for people from away, the village of East Red Hook at the beginning of the twenty-first century was no larger than it had been at the end of the eighteenth. It was composed entirely of a dozen houses, the Copakens’ among them, a post office open or closed at the postmistress’s whim, the Grange Hall, and an empty storefront that had been home to Witham’s Country Store until the last Witham daughter closed up shop and moved down to Florida.

  A tidal cove, Jacob’s was deep and swimmable when the tide was in, nothing more than a broad, shining mudflat when it was out. At high tide in the summertime, the narrow arc of rocky beach at Jacob’s Cove filled up with beach chairs and blankets. Young mothers liked the cove because the water was shallow and a little warmer than at other beaches. Teenagers liked it because no one bothered them about smoking, or hollered at them if they threw their beer bottles up the rocky creek that fed the cove, where they shattered among the bottles that their parents and grandparents had thrown there before them.

  There was little traffic along Red Hook Road, and thus people tended to take its curves faster than they should have. The blacktop was scrawled with a wild alphabet of wobbly skid marks written by kids showing off, boys trying to frighten their girlfriends. The stretch running alongside Jacob’s Cove was not the most dangerous, but there was a sharp bend just before the cove. In the late afternoon, the sun hung low in the sky and dazzled the eyes of drivers coming around the bend.