The From-Aways

by CJ Hauser

  “I’m thinking that this section will be perennials and vegetables,” Henry says. His phone buzzes. I see him look at the screen, then silence it. “Closest to the house so you can pick flowers and vegetables easily,” he continues.

  “Good, good,” Alex says.

  Henry points. He describes the rings of shrubberies that will reach your elbows in five years’ time, rows of flowering trees that will bloom on and off with each season, an alley of grass between them, for children to run down, Henry says, of all things. I feel a catch in my throat as I see all these imaginary things rise up from the dust. Will Henry someday imagine grassy corridors for our own children to run down? He goes on: Here is where I will plant your imaginary cherry tree. Imaginary daffodils in the spring and imaginary cabbages in fall. As the foliage gets deeper, imaginary hellebores and shade-loving plants.

  “Alex,” Elena says. “Move your seat up, you’re squashing poor Leah back here.” Alex mumbles something and his seat moves forward on its electric track, releasing my legs.

  “Thank you,” I say. Oh, thank God, thank you. Elena wears the same perfume as my mother. Volupté. She smiles at me so kindly, and has freed my legs from the seat. I want this woman to tell me I am good, I realize, that she likes me and that it is okay that my local beat is taxidermy and that the little pieces of hair around my forehead are astray.

  “You know, Henry,” Alex begins awkwardly, “this sounds fantastic. Really fantastic but—” My stomach drops. Are they going to quash Henry’s hopes, after all this? “We were thinking—” Alex stares back at Elena. Help me, his face says.

  “Well, we know you’re primarily a designer, not some kind of a fieldworker,” Elena says.

  “We were wondering whether we might hire you on sort of a permanent basis,” Alex says. “To maintain the property.”

  “It’s just such a big job,” Elena says. “We won’t be here much of the year and we couldn’t possibly maintain the whole thing ourselves.”

  “We would make it worth your while, of course,” Alex says, rubbing his fingers together. Imaginary coins. Imaginary dollars.

  Henry looks back at me now, and he is beaming. “Of course,” he says. “Let’s talk about it, but yes. I’d love to.”

  “Excellent!” Alex says. He reaches over and they shake. Henry steers us over the dirt road and I reach over and put my hand on his shoulder to let him know that I am happy he has scored his dream job. He will be proud about the money, I know. We make enough, he and I, as we are now. But this job, on top of his Arden pay, will make Henry our breadwinner, like I used to be when we lived in the city. He will enjoy this reversal of roles.

  Henry’s phone starts buzzing in its holster. He silences it again.

  “It will be so nice to get out of the city,” Elena says.

  Henry and Alex talk about finances. Elena and I peep from the windows.

  Quietly, she says, “I think you’re quite brave.”

  “Brave?” I say.

  “It must be frightening at night,” she says. “With all the wildlife and quiet.” Her eyes are dark and very big. She seems less like a grown-up than she did a moment ago.

  “Oh, you’ll be fine,” I say. “It’s a small place. Cozy. There’s nothing too wild.” She squeezes my knee, but it is I who feel grateful. She is worrying about God knows what kind of animal, wolves or bears, and she has let me comfort her. For the first time I have gotten to be a local, someone who knows the ropes.

  I am still smiling at Elena as we round the corner to the eastern part of the property, the beach and the park and the carousel. There, stretched across the road, is a long line of cars and people. People I know. They are standing there with their arms spread wide. They are blocking our way.

  22

  Quinn

  Carter’s gang gets the tip-off that the Dorians are coming to inspect their monster-estate-in-progress because Jake Hanley from the construction crew was running his mouth at the bar. He was there, whining about how they were killing him with more overtime than he could handle leading up to the visit, which Jethro, on a bar stool down the way, heard and had a lucid moment. He convinced Hanley they should go tell Carter immediately. Jethro wasn’t up for driving, so he made Hanley give him a lift in his truck. They rolled up to Carter’s house at one A.M. leaning on the horn and flashing their high beams in his windows. Jethro was half falling out the window, shouting: It’s an emergency, Marks! An emergency!

  Plans were made, and Rosie is so excited about it all that she’s forgotten to be mad at me. So I’m tagging along, as a representative of the press, of course.

  From where I’ve parked, I can see Carter’s gang, all huddled together. It’s cold out. The snow has melted but the ground is still rock hard, glittering with little crystals of frost. In the huddle is Mikey from the bait shop, Sara-Riley-who-hates-me from the bar, Joseph Deep and Billy, Jethro, some of the guys from the docks, and some schoolteachers too. They’re milling around in the park. Jethro sits on the carousel base with a cup of coffee in his hands. Billy’s bent upside down trying to inspect a horse’s wooden teeth. Everyone has parked their trucks and cars in a line across the Sanfords’ old property. The line is at the juncture where it was commonly understood their pine-sheltered backyard ended and the rocky, sandy stretch of oceanfront park began.

  The blockade, cars fender to bumper, separates the rest of the Dorian property from Neversink Park. Jethro’s F-150 is parked at the far end of the line at a challenging angle, flush against a station wagon on one side and near an enormous pine tree on the other. A lot of these guys’ cars have gun racks. When Rosie said they were going to have a protest, I pictured hippie song-singing with organized chants. This is way more serious than I thought and a look at Rosie’s face shows she’s trying real hard to be brave, but she wasn’t expecting it either.

  Rosie is all dressed up as only Rosie can be. She’s wearing a dress, red with little white dots. The hem hits around her blue-jean knees and she’s got her waitress-white no-slip sneakers on, so she means business. She is clean-faced today, no makeup, and her skin is almost glowing it’s so pale. While girls in bands wear many earrings, small-town political renegades don’t, it seems. She’s wearing a single pair of silver studs.

  “Rosie,” I say, “where’s your jacket?” I sound like someone’s terrible boring mother, but April in Maine could freeze a person dead.

  Rosie says, “It will ruin the effect.”

  I spot Carter drinking coffee from a plastic mug. I have promised myself we won’t reprise last time’s performance. Not today with Rosie all worked up. He’s wearing a green sweater, jeans, and work boots. His face is colorful in the cold and he’s looking at Rosie in her red dress like she is the sweetest thing he’s ever seen. I start worrying that he might be writing a song about her in his head. Composing some stupid folk ballad that’ll make its way to J43 in the Uncle’s jukebox.

  Carter tugs his collar closer to his jaw and says, “Good morning, Quinn.” I give him the salute. “Good morning, Rosalind. You look nice,” he says. The other men laugh a little.

  Sara Riley, wearing a thermal shirt, her fierce little breasts perked up in the chill, shakes her head. She pushes her enormous tortoiseshell glasses that may or may not be for her vision up on her silver head. She’s staring, not at Rosie, but at me. Like, Don’t you know you’re ruining everything? Sara may hate me but I know for a fact that she lives in a nice little clapboard house on the other side of town with the branch librarian, a plain, quiet woman almost as tall as Leah who sometimes goes jogging down by the boardwalk in a full wind suit. I know they have three dogs. I know this and I know that there are a lot of women like Sara in hard little towns like these. A lot of women like me too, I guess. Women who don’t want to have to talk about things all the time, for Christ sake. Luckily, in Menamon, no man, woman, fisherman, or child wants to talk about a goddamn thing. New Englanders know that some things can just be understood and left be. That is, unless you show up to the motorc
ade with your girlfriend in a red dress.

  Carter stands next to me, still looking at the men. He speaks out of the side of his mouth, in a low voice. “You shouldn’t let your girl walk around in the cold like that.” I wheel around to ask him what the hell he knows about anything, but once I’ve turned, I can see in Carter’s face that he’s not ribbing me. He doesn’t want Rosie to be cold either.

  I fold my arms and settle into place beside him and say, “She left her sweater at home. On purpose.”

  “Ah,” Carter says. He crosses his arms. “You going to join the line today?”

  “I can’t do that,” I say. “But I’ll write it up.”

  “That’ll be good,” he says. “Get Rosie in the picture.”

  Carter walks off to join the huddle, and I find a stump to sit on. I get my notebook out. I tell myself this is an important role I’m playing. Leah and Charley have no idea I’m here, because I decided not to tell them, keeping Rosie’s tip-off to myself. When I show up with this story Monday, I’ll be a hero.

  Everyone stands in front of the car line. Rosie too. She’s not making any small talk, showing these guys she belongs. Jethro is standing next to her, dead sober. There’s something tight-wound about his features that must come unspooled when he’s drinking. The wind picks up and I’m wondering whether it will rain when I hear the car. All along the line the protesters stand tall, their bodies and their cars between the Dorians and the park.

  Holy shit, I think as I crouch there on the sidelines, worried and excited: it was me who started this. No one will ever know it but it was. I know it was just some gravel I threw, just an imaginary window I shattered. But all that time ago, with Rosie at the substation? It was me who cast the first stone.

  23

  Leah

  As we approach, I piece together the missed calls: they must have been from Batman. Cars form a barrier between us and the park, a Volvo with a gun rack on one end and Jethro Newkirk’s truck on the other. At first I think, What are they doing here? Carter, Billy, Jethro, Rosie—but then I understand. Not only that this is some sort of protest, but that I am going to be busted, sitting in this car with these New Yorkers, confirming everyone’s worst suspicions.

  Batman is squatting, smoking a cigarette. He stands up and nods as if to say to Henry, Yes, what you are thinking is true. This is why I called you the three times you didn’t pick up, you fucker. He tosses his hair over his shoulder. There it is, the Batman move.

  “Goddammit!” Henry says, and throws the car in park. We have come to a stop not fifteen feet from the line.

  Carter waves. “Welcome,” I see him mouthing. The word rolls hugely off his lips.

  “Well, is this a little early-spring planting?” Elena says hopefully, still smiling at me.

  Henry slams out of the car. Outside, he drops the kindly-rural-landscaper routine and rages at the line of people, pointing desperately away from the park and out of his imaginary orchard. I can see it happen down the line of people as they look at my husband. I watch them realize that Henry is complicit in this: the theft of the park and the carousel, the advent of city people. I watch one face after another look at this man they have known since he was a kid and think, Not Henry? Hank? A Lynch? Joseph Deep is the worst. When he sees Henry it’s as if some vital part him goes dim. His face is like a movie screen with no picture showing.

  Jethro is the first to start shouting back. From inside the car everything is a murmur. Henry yells and then he’s pointing at Carter Marks, really getting his finger up near his face and Carter is no longer smiling. Instead he gestures for everyone to stay calm. Henry is still shouting and waving his arms when Rosie Salem shakes her head back and forth as if to say, No, no no. Then she shouts something. Whatever she’s said freezes Henry in his tracks. He stops waving his arms and stands very still. He says something, calmly, to Rosie. Something that makes her raise right up on her toes like she wants to rush at him. But she does not break the line. None of them do.

  And then a figure rushes in at Henry, rabbitlike, from the bushes, and I realize it is Quinn. Her hair is loose and down and all her sharp angles are in motion, moving with angry energy as she yells at my husband.

  “Leah, what’s the matter?” Elena says. And I can tell that she is frightened. Like she would be of the bears or wolves. “Alex, I think maybe we should go.” She grasps her husband’s shoulder firmly as she says this.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Alex says.

  “Everything will be fine,” I say, which is absolutely a lie. “Just give us one minute.” I jump out of the car. I tell myself that I am going to stand beside Henry, but then I feel the gravitational pull of everyone in the line and I want nothing more than to be one of them, a local, like I got to be with Elena in the car. Henry is wrong. He should be in the line too. This is what real Menamonians do. What we need to do, to live here.

  “Quinn!” I yell. Quinn snaps around to look at me. Everyone in the line looks at me. Most of all, Henry looks at me.

  Quinn says, “What the fuck are you doing in that car, Leah?” And I don’t know what I thought she would think, my climbing out of this black SUV. The Dorians slam the car door and I hear the locks click.

  “I can explain,” I say, to everyone.

  Henry is the first to understand that I am defecting. His face says, Don’t.

  “Get back in the car,” he says quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and go join the line. I take Rosie’s hand in my hand. I take Jethro’s hand too. He looks angry or confused that I have broken their grip, so I say, “Move over, Jethro. Make room for me.”

  Carter’s face is stony. This is not happening the way he thought. But he says, “Hello, Leah Lynch. Welcome.”

  Quinn comes and yanks me away. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I shout back at her, “You’re pissed when you see me over there and you’re pissed when I’m over here too! Where do you want me to go?”

  Quinn breathes heavily and drags me over to the tree line, where she sits on a log and pulls me down next to her. “You go here,” she says. “Don’t you have that goddamn notebook? Pull that out right about now, huh?” That Quinn thinks objectivity is possible at this point is crazy; even I can feel the wattage crackling in these people, Henry and the Dorians and Carter and the others. But she’s right. This is what I’m meant to be doing. I can help better by reporting than by standing in a line. So I take out my notebook, and Quinn takes out hers, and we realize that it’s gone quiet, so we look up to see everyone staring at us.

  “Has the peanut gallery been settled?” Carter says.

  Henry looks at me, angry and injured, the same way he did when I turned his father’s car into a lobster pot. I know he’s still hoping I’ll get back in the car, but once opened, some boxes can’t be closed, and I’m not even sure I want to close this one. Guilt and anxiety squeeze my throat tight. My brain vaults forward to how I’ll have to explain and apologize and smooth this over later. I shake my head to dislodge the thought. Later. Right now the only thing I can do is what I was meant to be doing all along, so I start writing things down, taking notes for the story.

  “Listen, Hank,” Carter says. “I don’t know what you have to do with those people but you’ve got to tell them they can’t go through here today. You have to tell them they own all of that, but the park and the carousel, it’s ours.”

  Henry shakes his head. “This is their property, Carter.” He looks around at the line. “They paid some of you for this property, in case you don’t remember.”

  “They’re going to kick us out of our shops and raise our rent!” Billy yells, and a wave of affirmative shouts rises behind his words.

  “Shit,” Quinn says, looking at my notebook. “How have you taken all that down already?”

  Henry yells at Billy, “These people have nothing to do with Deep’s. You have no idea who those people in the car even are.” He points at the black-tinted windows.

  Ro
sie pipes up. “Hank,” she says. “Hank, you’ve got to know your father wouldn’t have wanted to see a house like this in town. Your mother neither.”

  And I remember now that they had gone to school together. That Rosie was a small blond thing in the junior high when Henry was a senior. That to her he must be something very different than he is to me. A Lynch. Hank. From an old family with a wicked older sister you knew better than to mess with. Maybe this is why Rosie thinks she can get away with saying what I never could.

  “My father,” Henry says, “would have let this town rot away until it was the worst pit in Maine. He would have driven in the last coffin nail himself just to be sure nothing changed. And my mother, if this place wasn’t what it was, might be here still. So you should probably just shut up, Rosalind.”

  Rosie is quivering in place. “You’re not the only one who has family from this town, you know, Hank? You act like you’re the only person who wants to make anything better or cares, but what do you think we’re doing here?”

  “I think you’re a bunch of ignorant fools,” Henry says. “Fishing is dying. The ironworks is dying. The local businesses are dying and have been for years now. We’ve got to come up with a plan B or we’ll just be a town full of drunks telling sad old stories in our junky yards who no one gives a damn about.”

  In the middle of this proselytizing, Jethro has broken the line. He charges at Henry. Carter moves to stop him but not before Jethro’s clocked Henry in the jaw. A sucker punch.

  My stomach drops out. I want to rush to Henry, but I freeze—because what was that he said? And the way he said it, all shot through with bitterness and anger, I didn’t know Henry had that inside him. Sad old stories? Those stories are what I fell in love with. And so I look at this man, who has said these things, who is bleeding from his nose, and the truth is he looks like a stranger to me. So I stay where I am. I don’t go to him, this man who cannot possibly be Henry.