Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  He had gone to Boston alone the next time, and had returned gloomy and depressed. When she confronted him he claimed that the lectures were dry and dull and he was unused to sitting in a classroom, but she had been sure there was more to it than that.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Matt said now. “I mean, come on. How can you ask that?”

  When John had taken on the project of rebuilding the Rebecca, the restoration, while foolishly expensive, made sense. With every board foot of mahogany and piece of sandpaper, with every inch of sailcloth and handful of nails, John had been building a future for himself and Becca. There was no way John could have afforded a new boat of the Alden’s size and quality, even with the proceeds from the sale of Becca’s violin. Restoring the Alden was the only way he and Becca could realize their dream, conceived in the first days of their falling in love and nurtured tenderly throughout their courtship and engagement, of sailing the Caribbean.

  Matt had resumed the project three years ago with not even a clear idea of carrying John’s plans through to their full, logical conclusion. His only motivation back then had been a vague compulsion to finish what John had started. He had refused to admit defeat despite a multitude of mistakes and setbacks because to do so would have been a betrayal of his brother’s memory. Early this past winter, when he realized that he was close to finishing, he had been forced to confront the question of what to do with the Rebecca.

  The Rebecca was a good boat, with solid bones and a decent provenance: John Alden had built her for a New York plastic surgeon who had operated on the nose of Bette Davis, and the blue-eyed star had signed the boat’s log not once but twice. Even so, she was worth little more than what Matt and John had put into her. There was not much of a market for restored boats, whatever their history, especially if they were rebuilt in someone’s backyard. The men who could afford the indulgence of a wooden boat wanted one with the most advanced and state-of-the-art aerodynamic design, with a tank-tested keel and a carbon fiber rig. They wanted a boat built for them from the ground up, in a prestigious yard like King’s, and they were willing to pay a million dollars, sometimes a lot more, to get it.

  So even if he could have brought himself to part with the Rebecca after all the work and love he and his brother had sunk into her, Matt wouldn’t have been able to sell her. But neither could he afford to keep her as a pleasure boat. The only option Matt could see was the one that John had always intended.

  Matt said, “What about you, Ruthie? Are you, like, maybe projecting a little, or something?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re into it. You want to take her down to the Caribbean and run charters with me.”

  When Matt had first broached the possibility of following through on John and Becca’s plan, with him as captain and Ruthie in Becca’s role as chef and hostess, she had been under the influence of the warm and expansive feelings engendered by her very first Christmas in Maine, complete with tree, tinsel, sugar cookies, and carolers singing on the steps of the Red Hook Town Hall. Matt’s idea had struck Ruthie then as an attractive, sunny fantasy. She had managed temporarily to overcome her trepidation about sailing by concentrating on the Caribbean part of the plan. She loved the idea of visiting the islands; she imagined herself lying on the deck of a boat (tied up in a snug harbor), reading novels and eating mangoes plucked moments before from the tree.

  And if Ruthie didn’t have Becca’s natural maritime gifts, at least she knew how to cook; she had managed to learn that from her sister. As the winter progressed, she spent hours surfing the Web for recipes for flying fish and cascadura so she would be able to give their imagined clientele an authentic Caribbean culinary experience. It had been a welcome escape from the long, dark days, when it was so cold that her wet hair froze on the walk between the door and her car. She had happily reported to Matt that the temperature of the Caribbean sea was twice that of the Maine coastal waters. But after a while, as Matt doggedly took ever more concrete steps toward getting his captain’s license and preparing both himself and the Rebecca for this future, a feeling of dread began to overtake Ruthie. Her volunteer job had, as promised, turned into an actual one, with its own line in the town budget, complete with a tiny salary and health insurance. She did not need Jamaica or St. John’s; the cozy library, fires blazing in both the massive stone fireplaces at either end of the reading room, was respite enough, even from the most bitter weather. She reveled in the most mundane of tasks: helping elderly patrons log on to the Internet, sending out overdue notices, shelving. One of her favorite jobs was to work the reference desk. The desk lent a real authority to the person sitting behind it, and Ruthie was constantly amazed that people expected her to provide answers to the most complicated and esoteric questions. But there was a reference book on every subject, and if those failed there was the Web, so Ruthie could, with the help of the Dictionary of Collective Nouns, tell a patron that a group of dragons was referred to as a dreadful; or, after a glance at the Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, provide another with the name of the inventor of the Lava lamp (Edward Craven Walker, born in 1918 in Singapore). Ruthie had managed to make herself so indispensable in such a short time that, rather than close the library when the rest of the staff went to the state librarians’ conference in Augusta, the chief librarian had left her in charge.

  Those few days in March when she was the queen of the Red Hook Library had been the most pleasurable of her entire life. Matt took the excuse of her absence to work on the Rebecca, and thus she had not felt guilty about leaving him. Keys in hand, she had arrived at the library so early that it was still dark outside. She’d started up the computers and the copiers, checked in the books that had been dropped into the return slot the night before, and wandered through the rooms turning on lights. In each section she had carefully reshelved the display books and spent a long time choosing new ones. For the children she laid out Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, one of her favorite books when she was a child, and a few choice selections of the Frances oeuvre, including Bread and Jam for Frances, which she considered the most delightful children’s book ever written. For the teens she went with a fantasy theme and, avoiding Harry Potter, offered them Half Magic, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and the The Wind in the Willows. Let them find the Gossip Girls books on their own. In the periodical room she fanned the National Review with The Nation and Commentary, with a stray, inexplicable issue of Heeb that had somehow ended up in the collection. There was not much she could do with the new releases, other than to place Lorrie Moore prominently in the middle of the display and to put all the cat mysteries spine-forward. The patrons of the Red Hook library had an insatiable appetite for murder mysteries featuring cat sleuths, and Ruthie was not worried about those books finding their readers. It was the other, less popular volumes that she was concerned with. Each of them was a lost child looking for its mother, or a lover searching for a soul mate, and Ruthie was the matchmaker, tasked with the joyous job of introducing them. There was nothing, she thought, that she was better at. Around mid-morning she noticed a young woman—in her late teens perhaps—slowly spinning through the rotating rack of paperback romance novels. The girl came in every week or so and left with a pile of these paperbacks, always choosing the ones with covers festooned with heaving bosoms and Regency gowns.

  “You like those, don’t you?” Ruthie asked her. “The Regency romances?”

  “I love them,” the girl said, tucking a lank strand of hair behind an ear still pink from the cold.

  Ruthie selected a volume from the rack. Like the others, the picture on the cover was of a young woman in an elegant frock, but this one was not so décolleté. “Have you read this one?”

  The girl shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Why don’t you give it a try,” Ruthie said. “It’s one of my favorites.”

  The next week, when the young woman came back to the library, she found Ruthie straightening up the computer section (Dewey Decimal Nos. 004 to 006) and said, “Tha
t book was really good! It’s different from the others. But I liked it. It made me cry, and I loved the ending, but it’s really funny, too, isn’t it? I mean, at first I didn’t really notice—or I guess maybe I didn’t get it—but once you’re into it, it’s funny. Like Mrs. Bennet? She’s, like, a complete idiot.”

  “You’re absolutely right. She is a complete idiot. Would you like to try another by the same author?” And thus did Ruthie create a reader in her own image, one of many girls she would direct, without ever allowing a hint of condescension in her voice, from Barbara Cartland to Jane Austen.

  Although she never spoke of it to Matt, the more real the charter boat plan became, the more her apprehension grew, and the more the library became her refuge, a place of asylum from the gathering stresses at home. She talked more and more about the library, both because her work there made her so happy and because she wanted him to know how happy she was. As if once he caught on he might say, “Hey, let’s forget the whole boat thing and stay on land, where we both clearly belong.”

  Ruthie had ached to talk about her anxiety with her mother, to ask her for advice, but while Iris had greeted Matt’s plan with studied nonchalance, Ruthie knew how intensely she disapproved. Any apprehension Ruthie expressed would be greeted with relief. There would be no opportunity for the unbiased consideration of the options that she actually sought. So instead of turning to her mother, Ruthie had found herself confiding once again in Mary Lou Curran.

  Mary Lou had gotten it into her head that the children’s room needed reorganizing, and the library director, all too aware of the fruitlessness of opposing one of Mary Lou’s ideas, had asked Ruthie to try to mitigate the damage, under the guise of offering assistance. Mary Lou sat perched on a miniature chair and directed Ruthie around the room.

  “I think the beanbag chairs should be distributed throughout the room,” Mary Lou said, “rather than gathered in a circle.”

  “That’s an idea. Except that the little ones like to sit in the beanbag chairs for story time.”

  “They can sit on the carpet for story time,” Mary Lou said. “Instead of lolling about on beanbag chairs.”

  Ruthie laughed. “Have you actually ever seen story time?”

  “Of course I have. And it wouldn’t be such a free-for-all if the children sat in a quiet circle. Don’t put the blue beanbag chair under the fish tank. They’ll climb on it and end up sending the tank flying. Again.”

  “Mary Lou,” Ruthie said, once she’d situated the beanbag chairs to the elderly woman’s satisfaction. “Can I ask your advice about what to do next year?”

  “Advice? From me? You can certainly ask. Whether I have any to give is debatable.”

  “I think you’re a veritable fountain of sensible information,” Ruthie said.

  “And now you’re teasing me.”

  “Well, yes.” Ruthie smiled. “But it’s true. You’ve always given me good advice. You’re the one who told me to come work here.”

  Mary Lou nodded. “That certainly has worked out, hasn’t it?”

  “It has,” Ruthie said fervently. “I love working in the library.”

  “All right, then, I will give you some advice. And, like all of my very best advice, it’s not based on anything you actually asked me or told me at all. It’s offered in total ignorance. A shot in the dark.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  “Go back to school, and get a master’s in library science and information studies. I believe Simmons College in Boston has a very good program. Or, if you like, you can even do it online. I met a lovely young woman at the conference who got her degree from Rutgers but did the whole thing on the computer.”

  Library science! She had known that people got degrees in library science, naturally. She had worked with trained archivists and librarians, first at Harvard and now here in Red Hook. But the idea that this job she merely loved could be more than something she did while she waited to figure out what she was supposed to do had never occurred to her. That she could be a librarian, rather than simply work at a library. She was inclined to blame her mother for the fact that she had never considered the idea. She knew exactly how Iris would regard such a career path: true intellectuals, true lovers of literature and of books, did not become librarians, they became scholars. But Ruthie wondered if she really could lay the blame at Iris’s feet. Wasn’t the fault for her failure of imagination, in the end, only her own?

  Now, as she drove up Red Hook Road on her way to visit her ailing grandfather in the hospital, she wished she could just tell Matt exactly how little she wanted to sail to the Caribbean.

  “We’ve got to figure this insurance thing out,” Matt said. “We’re putting the boat in the water in two days.”

  “I don’t know, Matt. Maybe it’s just an insoluble problem.”

  He looked up from his papers. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s just too much money.”

  Matt sighed heavily. He folded the papers in half and dropped them on the floor by his feet. “I’ll figure it out. Maybe we can get a loan or something.”

  “We can’t borrow any more money, Matt.” They’d already taken money from Daniel, over her objection.

  “I know,” he said. “The money’s my problem. I’ll figure it out.” He looked at her quizzically. “Or is it something else? Are you trying to tell me that you don’t want to go?”

  He was giving her the perfect opportunity. All she had to do was agree, to tell him that she was afraid, that she hated sailing and didn’t want to be trapped on a boat, not with him, not with anyone. That she had finally, she thought, found something that she wanted to do, not what her mother wanted for her, or what he wanted. Not what Becca had been meant to do, but what she, Ruthie, was meant to do. She took her eyes off the road for a moment and looked at him. His eyes were wide. He looked frightened. “No, it’s not that,” she said. “It’s just … maybe we’re not ready.”

  “You don’t think I can do this.”

  “I do. Of course I do. It’s just … I don’t even know if you want to do this.”

  “We’re not talking about what I want. We’re talking about what you want.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to …”

  “Well, what is it, then? You don’t have faith in me. You think I’ll just fuck it up.”

  She had allowed the moment to slip through her fingers, and now she saw no way out. “I do so have faith in you,” she said. “I love you.” She reached blindly for his hand and squeezed it. “I love you, Matt.”

  He brought her fingers to his lips and kissed them. “I love you, too.” He sighed again, one of the heavy, burdened sighs she had heard him heave so many times. “Ruthie, I have spent three years of my life on the Rebecca. I can’t just throw her away.”

  “Of course you can’t. Just ignore me. I’m upset about my grandfather. That’s all it is.”

  After a few long, silent minutes, Matt leaned over, snapped on the radio, and turned up the volume so that there was neither the need nor the possibility of them conversing the rest of the way to the hospital in Newmarket.

  III

  The risk, Iris told Ruthie and Matt as they stood outside Mr. Kimmelbrod’s hospital room, was due not so much to the broken hip, nor even to the surgery that had attempted, with a certain amount of success, to repair it. What had the doctors worried was the possibility that Mr. Kimmelbrod might, as a result of the trauma both of the fall and of the surgery, develop a pulmonary infection or congestive heart failure.

  Iris looked terrible. She had dark purple circles under her bloodshot eyes and her curls had gone flat. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail and tied it with a rubber band without benefit of a mirror; her ponytail was off center, sticking up from the back of her head like a broken handle. Her lips looked chapped and bitten.

  “I brought you fresh clothes,” Ruthie said, holding up the tote bag she had brought along. “And some moisturizer. The air is so dry in here.”

&
nbsp; “Thank you, honey,” Iris said. She took Ruthie’s hand. “You’ve been so helpful. Grandpa and I both appreciate it so much. You too, Matt. Thank you.”

  Ruthie squeezed her mother’s hand. “Do you want to go home? Just for a couple of hours? You can take a shower, and maybe have a little nap? I can stay here with Grandpa.”

  “I don’t think I should leave him,” Iris said.

  “It’s okay, Mom. You’re so tired. If you really want to help him, you have to stay strong for him.”

  Iris shook her head, but she was clearly exhausted. Dying to take a shower, to get some sleep.

  They tiptoed into the room. It was a small box crammed full of instruments and monitors, with barely room for a single chair. Both the front and back walls were made of glass. Pale green curtains partially obscured a view of the parking lot and a strip of spindly evergreens at one end of the room, and of the nurses’ station at the other. Iris went to the bed and tugged the blanket up higher on Mr. Kimmelbrod’s chest. His eyes were partly closed, only the whites visible above the pink rims of his lower lids.

  “Is he awake?” Ruthie whispered.

  The corners of her grandfather’s mouth turned up in a faint, brief approximation of a smile.

  “He is,” he said, opening his eyes. His voice was at once creaky and soft, as if the effort of expelling sufficient air to speak were almost too much for him.

  “How are you feeling, Grandpa?” Ruthie asked.

  He raised one of his long, snowy-white eyebrows.

  “Worse than I look,” he said. “Trust me.”

  Iris said, “We’re waiting for the morphine drip to start up again.”

  “Is something wrong with it?” Ruthie said. “Should I go tell the nurse?”

  Iris shook her head. “They say that he’s supposed to be able to control it himself, and that’s true up to a point. But it only gives out so much in an hour.” She leaned across the bed and picked up the button and pressed it a few times. “See?” She pointed at the drip. “Nothing.”