“That was one smoking gentleman,” said Gwen. “I don’t know how I missed that one.”
“You dodged a bullet,” said Tom. He pulled onto the main road. He would’ve scuttled a hundred ships to keep that guy away from his sister.
“You didn’t let him pay for dinner, did you?” said Tom.
Gwen put her hand to her chest. “What kind of WASP do you take me for?”
With each passing car Tom lifted four fingers from the steering wheel in an automatic island wave.
“They can’t see you in the dark,” said Gwen, her feet now pressed to the windshield.
“That doesn’t mean I should be rude,” said Tom. Really he couldn’t stop if he wanted to. It usually took him an hour on Route 1 on his way home to stop waving to every passing car. It was a locational Pavlovian response. Car, wave, car, wave. Gwen unrolled her window and turned up the music.
Tom needed the windows up, the AC on. He wanted to feel the cold swirl around his feet. He wanted to retreat from his skin, deep into his body to get away from the cold. The island would recede, and he would be somewhere deeply internal, sterile, the inside of a conference room in a distant hotel, fluorescent lights and wall-to-wall carpeting.
All that flubbering wind drowned out their words. Tom put up all the windows.
“I’ve got the AC on,” he said. He wanted their words. He wanted to push Jeremy Aldridge’s face back under the surface.
His name is Jeremy. He’s a good swimmer. No.
“Dan, have you talked to Gwen and Libby about last semester?” Let Danny fall on his sword. I’m sorry, but please, Dan, just this once.
“Did you know,” said Danny, “that alligators can decide if their babies will be boys or girls? They look around at their alligator community and see what gender they need more of, and boom, they make more of that gender. Reptile genetic modification.” Danny slapped the back of Gwen’s headrest for emphasis. He was practically in Melissa’s lap.
Tom wanted to apologize to him. I know it’s not fair to put you on the spot until we’ve made arrangements, decided how to proceed with school. But . . .
“Clearly, they need to lobby Congress,” said Gwen. She turned to face Danny. “Can’t you see it, an alligator in a three-piece suit lumbering down the aisle to the Senate floor.”
Suddenly they were deep in a world of genetically modified, super smart reptiles running for office.
Tom’s knuckles hurt from gripping the steering wheel, and he flexed the fingers on one hand and then the next. Why had Melissa sent him up a day early? Or was she just putting off the inevitable? Or was she getting him out of their house? Was he going to lose both homes this year? He only wanted this one gone. This house had to be sold. Had to be. Get the fuck out of my house, Jeremy.
It was dark as they drove empty sections of North Haven Road, with the dotted yellow line and the dim arc of headlights ahead, then lost around a curve. Tom looked over at Gwen. She leaned her head against the glass and watched the sky as they drove. He hoped she would fall asleep; she always looked happy when she slept. Instead Gwen gave the constellations her own names: Perseus, King of the Druids; Androcles sitting in the mouth of his lion; Isis holding the severed head of a missionary. She begged Tom to turn off the headlights, just for a second.
“We can stop,” was his completely reasonable, in fact, accommodating, solution. No, not good enough, never quite close enough to the edge for Gwen. Danny agreed with Gwen.
“Light speed in the darkness,” said Danny in a guttural death-metal growl.
“Nocturnal birds in a dark forest,” said Gwen, going Goth. She rambled, and it made Tom tired, made him acutely aware that he did the driving while she sat there with her feet on the dash, singing along to the radio. He reminded her that without headlights there would appear to be no road.
“Yes! Does the road exist if the lights are off? It’s a philosophical exercise,” said Gwen.
Yet again his sister, his thirty-six-year-old sister, was demonstrating the mental development of an adolescent. Even at twenty-one, even being of an entirely different generation than the two of them, Danny usually, this past semester notwithstanding, had more sense than she did. But still Tom tried. On the next straightaway he gave her five seconds of what Danny called “Total Blackout.” But he saw a car stopped by the side of the road at the bottom of a rise, and as it pulled back onto the road, Tom flipped the headlights back on, and the expansive sky and boundless forest closed in on them again into a narrow tunnel of night driving, black and white.
And in that tunnel on the side of the road, they saw it.
The deer was huge and reclining, as if in some medieval tapestry, head held high, legs folded primly. But the backdrop was not a flat expanse of flowers curling in on themselves, just blackness. The deer was panting, mouth agape, tongue lolling pink. Red. It was in Technicolor. It stared straight at the aurora of their lights with the glossy green eyes of the night forest. There was a huge gash on its hindquarter that moved from its knee over its hip to its belly. Her belly. As full and taut as a horse’s. The torn red flesh and white of sinews looked wet and utterly wrong.
Tom jerked the wheel slightly but recovered quickly when he realized the thing wasn’t going to move.
“Poor thing,” said Melissa.
He kept driving. His neck itched. His ears popped. He didn’t think of the road or the car or the deer. He thought of the first time he saw Kerry asleep in her incubator, looking more like a wild thing than a baby, curled up under the nurse’s hand. Her eyes fused shut, covered in down, sleeping in a box like a newborn puppy. He thought of Libby, who was the baby until Danny came along. Libby, years before, all feather-limbed and barely in double digits, sinking fast to the bottom of the cove. Things about to die.
“Gwen, call 911,” he instructed.
“Stop the car, Tom,” she said.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
“Stop the car.”
Tom drove past the doe. A muffled noise came from the backseat.
“Stop the goddamn car, Tom.” She said it quietly, sitting forward in her seat, no seat belt, facing him, one arm stretched along the dashboard, her hand close to the wheel.
“It would be dangerous and pointless for us to stop.” He looked at her. Her eyes were like the deer’s, not wild with fear but black and unyielding.
Danny pulled himself forward between the front seats. “I’m gonna throw up.”
“Pull over,” said Libby.
The brake lights lit the trees behind them as they came to the shoulder, then the reverse lights lit them low and white, like a dropped flashlight in the woods. Tom came within twenty feet of the thing. The doe struggled to stand. She tried to shift herself in their direction, to face her death, and in doing so, in one last expression of bravery, of instinct, save herself. Tom had felt this diving in after Libby, the moment the water hit his chest. The water, cold enough to make him gulp for air, was at most fifty degrees. That spring he had failed the YMCA lifesaving course when he almost drowned trying to tread water without using his hands. But he had thought, I swim, she lives; I breathe, she lives; I live, she lives. He told Melissa that story when he realized he wanted to be a father. When he realized he wanted to be brave. Sensible and brave. He and Libby had never talked about it. He wasn’t sure she even remembered.
Gwen got out of the car, the hardscrabble of the shoulder crunching under her feet.
“We’ll just wait for the police,” Tom shouted after her. He needed to find his phone. He needed to catch his breath. His chest hurt. He felt cold and not the way he wanted to. Danny was already on his hands and knees heaving into a stand of ferns. Libby was rubbing Danny’s back. Melissa sat in the open door looking after her. Tom, sitting in the driver’s seat with his seat belt still on, heard Danny mumble something about lobster rolls. Gwen laughed.
The car doors were open, and the car’s insistent dinging, requesting closed doors and seat belts fastened, drowned out most of Dan
ny’s words. But Tom could still hear his voice. Then Danny’s tone changed. Something in it went quiet and into the back of his throat.
“Tom?” Libby called to him. Tom had visions of the deer hurtling toward his sister. He’d heard of animals’ crazed instincts and power in their final moments. What if she charges?
The seat belt recoiled as Tom jumped out of the car. Gwen’s purse lay on the ground. She leaned against the trunk of the car facing the doe. In her hand she held something thick and heavy.
“Jesus Christ, Gwen, a gun?” said Tom. “Where did you get a gun?”
Melissa jumped out of the car and stood behind Libby, peering over her shoulder.
“You’re a vegetarian,” said Danny.
“Our mother grew up on a farm,” said Gwen.
“Not a munitions farm. Is it loaded?” Tom.
“She got it when the Boston Strangler was loose, used to sleep with it under her pillow,” said Libby to Melissa. “I thought she got rid of it.”
“Can I shoot it?” asked Danny.
Gwen ignored them all. “I’m going to shoot it.”
Melissa whispered to Libby, “How do you forget your shoes but remember your gun?” Libby put her finger on her nose.
“Jesus Christ, I’ve been driving with a loaded gun in the car? How many laws does that break?”
“What about the right to bear arms?” said Danny, looking at Tom. “I thought you were into that.”
“I’m not a Libertarian.” Always ribbing him for voting Republican. Lincoln was a Republican.
“Holy God, both of you shut up,” shouted Gwen, looking over her shoulder. “We are going to do what needs to be done here.”
She walked forward in the glow of the reverse lights and stood between the car and the panting, bloodied deer. They could see its mangled hindquarter clearly now. Its clumped fur. The deer’s eyes glowed a quick iridescent flash in her shadow. From fifteen feet away, Tom could hear Gwen whisper something to the doe. “I’m sorry.”
Gwen lifted the gun and held it steady with both hands. Her feet were together, and she looked as if she were about to say a prayer, or take a bow. And then flash flash, crack crack. The animal slumped over.
Shaking, Gwen got back into the car, leaving her purse in the dust of the roadside. She found Tom’s phone and was talking. Melissa and Libby got back in the car and seemed to be comforting Gwen, rubbing her shoulders as she spoke into the phone. They are all insane, thought Tom. Danny and Tom looked at each other over the roof of the car, listening to Gwen. “North Haven Road just before Murch’s Brook, not in the road, off the road, on the shoulder . . .”
“She’s probably the leader of some underground sect, a militia of underappreciated artists,” said Danny. “I should’ve seen this coming.” He started to laugh, but it devolved into a grumble. Danny got back in the car, a hand on his stomach.
Tom, walking to scoop up Gwen’s empty purse, thought that the stand of ferns looked particularly appealing. He wouldn’t mind purging himself into that green fringe. But instead he had to swallow it down.
TEN
ANOTHER SUMMER
Gwen is eleven years old. She stands on the covered portion of the front porch. A cut on her bare leg births a thick drop of red. She is in the shadow, watching Libby play with dolls in her tin dollhouse. The blood begins to make its way down her leg, slow and steady. Gwen stands there while her parents are on the other side of the screen door.
“I can’t keep her tied to the house like a dog,” says their mother.
“You could try watching her, telling her what she can and can’t do,” says their father.
“She’s your daughter too.”
Back and forth they go, while Gwen stands there and the blood slides into her shoe, wet sneakers, no socks. Where had she left her socks? Her pointed anklebone sends the rivulet around and down. Drops from the sea still cling to her ankle. Her clothes are wet, her hair matted in thick strings that send salt water down her back, slow through her cotton shirt. The blood is dark on her leg; the cut is starting to sting. It hadn’t hurt, but now the wind brings it sharp to her attention.
“Did you know what she was doing?” her father asks.
“The locals jump the tower all the time,” says her mother. “I didn’t know that she did it.”
Libby keeps playing. Maybe she can’t hear them, maybe because it is not about her it doesn’t matter. Gwen wants to play with her, but she is afraid to move. Sitting would make the cushions wet, playing would make her seem unapologetic, though she isn’t sure exactly what she has done wrong. She assumed they already knew. She has been jumping from the ferry tower for two summers now. Some kids jump a beat or two after the ferry leaves the dock, when the water is still roiling, still oily and flat in spots, and frothy and churning in others. It only pushes you under the dock for a second, then sucks you back out again. At first she had done it only when the ferry was gone and the water quiet. But she watched the older boys, locals only, do it as the ferry left. She has been working up to it all summer, and today was her victory.
She climbed the green metal ladder as the automatic grated ramp went up. As the ferrymen slipped wedges under car wheels, she shuffled out onto the catwalk, and as departing families stopped waving good-bye to their friends, their summer island, she jumped. She was stirred in the pot of black soup, she thought, brought up and pushed down, a bobbing carrot nub. She swam against the current as she’d seen those boys do, and then rode it in swirls, a moment under the dock, sharp rock against her thigh, just above her knee. She emerged, climbing up the ladder that curved to an end on the thick wood ties of the dock, those blocks of wood that weep black oil in the heat. She emerged dripping in her bathing suit and shorts. She wore the shorts on purpose, not wanting to look too much like a girl, too slim and frail up on top of the tower, like a diver or a weathervane. She emerged, and they cheered for her, the first summer girl to have done it.
“I can’t follow her, drive five miles an hour behind her bike,” says her mother.
“You can lock up the bike,” says her father, “you can take her with you, you can be sure she’s hanging out with kids who won’t force her to risk her life.”
She doesn’t want to touch it, but the cut wants to be touched, washed, dabbed with alcohol, flooded with peroxide, smeared with Bactine and covered with a Band-Aid, a big one that looks like a small bumper sticker. She’s earned a big one. Her feet are starting to feel sticky, not slick, in her wet shoes. She takes four steps, slowly, backward toward the stairs, and goes to sit on the top step.
“Please stay on the porch,” her father calls through the door. She is bent, about to sit, and his words make her freeze, assess how “on the porch” this second-to-top step is. She sits. Here the sun comes in under the overhang. Here the gray wood is hot, even through her wet shorts; it warms her.
Back and forth they go.
Libby comes over and sits beside her, looks up at her big sister.
“You’re bleeding.” She is the first to notice. “I’ll get you a Band-Aid.” From inside, there is a smash, a shattering. They both move down a step.
“Well, if you weren’t on that damn boat all the time.”
“I need to get away from you, from this.”
The girls move down another step. It is their mother who is breaking things. She goes for their wedding china first. Gwen figured it out earlier this summer, watching her mother furiously hunting through the china closet for the right dish to throw. But even this is better than what comes.
They cry. Her parents, the adults, cry. Together, holding each other. They sit on the floor, on the landing of the main stairs, on the edge of a guest bed, on the rail of a porch, and cry together. “It shouldn’t be this hard,” they say.
And then they drift away, and it is quiet again for months. He drifts to his boat and she, to her books, and they are apart. And the three of them, Tom, Gwen, Libby, leap off ferry towers, and jump from higher and higher ledges at the quarry,
and fling themselves from the dock. Trying to fly away, up high enough to become birds, to swim away deep enough to become fish. But Libby, in her life jacket, Libby standing at the top of the swim ladder too afraid to jump, she keeps them there. She is too small to make the change, and they are too big to leave her behind. Tom is off on his bike now, riding over the low hills and through sharp turns. Soon, he will journey on boats, not bikes. Soon, he will have his way out.
The girls move another step down until their feet touch grass and rock. Gwen whispers in Libby’s ear, and on the count of three, they run for it. Down, down the path, down the pier and the ramp, down to their own float. Libby trails her life jacket behind, always waiting for her at the bottom of the steps. She is golden, with a great orange streamer against the green trees. Once on the hot planks, Gwen buckles Libby in, and they jump. I will wash this cut in the sea, give the blood back to the hungry ocean that tried to take it from me. They splash and laugh. They hear the screen door slam. They are in for it now.
Their mother comes and stands at the edge of the pier under the limp flag. She stands with arms crossed and watches them swim, determined not to let them drown, not to let her husband accuse her of being a bad mother. She doesn’t have the energy to haul them out of the sea, to spank them, at least Gwen, as she deserves. She doesn’t want to talk to them, or him, or think about all her failings, as they have been so conveniently listed for her in the last half an hour. She watches her children swim. Though they have paused and hang with little fingertips from the edge of the float, peeking up at her. She gives them a wave, tells Gwen that they will talk about it later, which means not at all. And they both know that. So they splash and squeal and scamper in and out, up the ladder and down again, up and lofted over the edge of the float.
“Mom, watch this, are you watching, Mom? Watch, look, look, look at this, wanna see something? Mom.” Gwen does a cartwheel off the end, while Libby watches, all adoration. Libby then hangs off the ladder, one hand and one foot loose, and then drops herself in. Gwen cheers wildly for her sister. “Again, again,” she says. But before Libby has a chance, Gwen is back up, taking up their mother’s attention, a handstand at the edge and a backspring into the water. Their mother sees a cut on Gwen’s leg she hasn’t noticed before. The next time she surfaces, her mother asks, “Is that a cut on your leg?” Gwen looks at it as if she has never seen it before.
North Haven Page 10
