by CJ Hauser
“Yes.”
She crosses her arms, like I’m trying to trick her into seeing him.
I cross my arms too. “He’s worried about you. He doesn’t know where you are. He just wants to talk to you. How bad could it be?”
“You are a black kettle,” Leah says.
“You are drunk and conflict-averse,” I say. “What’s a kettle?”
“Have you talked to Carter yet?”
“We’ve talked plenty,” I say.
“I mean about your geeeeeeeenes,” Leah says as she pours some more White Horse into her cup. “Do you want some of this?”
“No thanks,” I say. I lean back in my chaise. “I don’t really know what to say to Carter anymore. I had that whole plan and then I messed it up. Now I have no plan.”
Leah reaches over and squeezes my hand. “You are winging it,” she says. “I am also winging it.”
There is a terrible sucking sound from the pool.
“There’s a squid in there,” Leah says.
I get up and look over the edge. There’s a turquoise plastic hose attached to a rubbery contraption, quite squidlike, that is presumably cleaning the pool. The squid vacuum suctions on to the walls with its mouth and scoots around. It gets stuck in the corner, where it clicks frantically before falling off the wall and floating in slow motion to the bottom. It makes no sound when it hits, but once it rights itself, it begins to whir again, blazing a small, marginally less slimy trail across the concrete of the deep end.
“Give me some taffy,” I say to Leah. She hands me a piece. It’s rock hard. “For fuck’s sake, Leah, let me take you home.” I chuck the candy over the fence.
“I can’t yet,” she says.
“Well, you can’t just stay here and drink White Horse forever,” I say.
“Then I won’t,” Leah says. She picks up her cocktail glass and tosses it into the pool. It plonks nicely as the glass fills with water and submerges. She lies back down. “There’s free Wi-Fi here. Will you bring me my laptop?”
“No! No, I will not. Besides, I thought you quit.”
“I did,” Leah says. “Now that I’m retired maybe I’ll become a novelist. I’ll write something a million pages long about crooked cops and public transit fraud. It will be one of those rectangle books you get at the supermarket.”
A ship’s whistle blasts from not so far off. It’s five thirty and already it is getting dim.
“Do you want to stay with Rosie and me?” I say. “You can.”
She shakes her head. No.
“We ran the piece, you know,” I say. “I wrote it from your notes. It was Charley who said to.”
“I figured you would,” Leah says. “What did people say?”
“They’re pretty pissed,” I say. “Henry’s taking the brunt of it. There are angry signs in your yard.”
She nods. “I just feel too tired. I’m too old and weary to fix everything I need to fix. I feel about a million years old.”
“Leah,” I say, “you are not old. We are not old. You’re a newlywed and you’re not even twenty-five. You’re eating rock-hard candy and drinking whiskey from the bottle.”
She looks around, as if cataloging evidence. “That seems like an accurate assessment,” she says. “Good analysis, Woodward.”
“Give me that whiskey,” I say.
She hands me the White Horse and I take a slug. Then I break out the cigarettes. “From Charley, with love,” I say. “She said your notes were good.” I put two cigs in my mouth, light them, and then pass one to Leah.
She inspects it, and then drags deep and natural. I should have known she was a pro. She stretches in her chair. “I am not old,” she says.
“You certainly don’t look very old right now,” I say. I twist my head on the chaise to look at her sideways. I stand and hold my cigarette in my mouth, smoke getting in my face. I lean over Leah, pull up her hood, and tie the two red cords of her sweatshirt in a bow under her chin. “There,” I say. “You’re fucking Shirley Temple. C’mon, get in the car. We’ll get something to eat and then we’ll decide where we’re going.”
Leah sighs and undoes the sweatshirt bow beneath her chin with a single tug. She pulls down the hood and takes off her sunglasses.
“This place is a dump,” she says.
29
Leah
We round the corner and it’s blue outside, almost dark. The clamshell driveway crunches under the tires in a way so familiar I feel like crying. The front lights illuminate the yard in overlapping circles. There’s baby grass there. Try not to walk on it if you can, Henry said when he seeded it. I’ve seen him pull ridiculous stunts to get from the front door to the drive, scooting around the perimeter of the house, back to the wall and arms wide like a cat burglar, just to protect those seeds.
But here is Henry now, in the grass, and here is Batman too. They are walking all over the front yard, drinking beers from cans. Everything is lit up: papers and signs and buoys. It looks like there’s been a party. I think, What the hell is wrong with Henry that he has thrown a party?
“Hey!” Quinn shouts. She leans on the horn twice. They both look at Quinn. Then they look at me.
It is not a party. The signs say DON’T KILL THE CAROUSEL and JUNKYARD. They have been rammed into the ground where Henry’s grass was growing. The buoys are rotted and rope-strung from the trees. I watch them swaying overhead in the blue dark. I imagine this is what the surface of the ocean looks like if you are a fish. I did this. The article Quinn wrote from my notes. Or is that not true? Did Henry do this to himself?
Quinn rolls down her window and I smell smoke. I roll down my window.
“What’s burning?” I say to Henry.
He is standing very straight, holding a sign in his hands. “Some signs is all,” he says. The last time I saw him he was dressed up so nice and clean. In his pressed shirt. His good pants. But now Henry is the way I like him best: in jeans worn white in spots and stained from fence paint, loose so they move about his legs as he walks. He is wearing his work boots and it is cold outside but he is wearing a T-shirt. He does not seem cold. He may not be who I thought he was but he is like a goddamn bear, my Henry. His face has not been shaved and his scruff makes him look more grown up. He is familiar and he is strange too, this man I am returning to.
“Leah,” says Batman. “Do you want to help us?” He holds up a beer, like he might throw it. His hair is pulled back in a shiny black knot. He is wearing the same blue anorak I saw him in the other day and I do not think that he is here because Henry has paid him. I think he is here because he is the kind of friend who comes over when there are signs in your yard calling you a traitor and someone needs to burn them.
Quinn gets out, so I have no choice but to get out too. I feel like a jerk standing there in my Down East motel sweatshirt but Henry doesn’t say anything.
“We built a fire pit in the back,” Henry says.
“She wasn’t at my house. Just for the record,” Quinn says. She offers her hand to Batman. “Winters,” she says. “I saw you at the tracks.”
Batman grins. “Bertilio,” he says, and shakes her hand. “I saw you too. You’re a fast runner.”
Quinn points to the car. “Can I give you a ride somewhere? I was about to head home.”
“Sure,” Batman says. He comes over and hands me the beer. “Welcome back, Leah,” he says.
They reverse out of the driveway and Quinn toots the horn twice to say good-bye. I think, Please do not leave us alone here in our own house like strangers.
Henry and I stare at where the car has left. His bare arms are red in the cold. Footprints indent the still-soft earth where the grass seedlings have been trampled.
“Come here?” Henry says, very quietly so it is a question. I step toward him. He puts his arms around me, wraps me up, my arms at my sides, and he clutches me to him.
I squash my face against his chest and I smell him. That same piney smell. Even out here I feel him warming me up. I am stil
l clutching Batman’s beer in my hand.
I keep my face close against Henry’s chest because I know that if I look up I will kiss him and it cannot be this easy. I press my sharp chin against his chest and I say, “Do you need help? Burning things?”
He says, “Yeah, I do.” So I squeeze him and then I let go. I pick up a big pile of signs from the driveway, and so does Henry. We walk around our house and there, in the backyard, near to the beachfront, is a real bonfire. I see that Henry and Batman have dug a hole, and in it they have built a fire of driftwood.
I heave signs into the bonfire. The flames come up the sides and the signs warp and burn, the edges being eaten inward. Henry throws his on too. The sound of the wood popping, and the beach, and the bell buoys not so far away, makes me sleepy. I stand in front of Henry and lean back into him. He grabs on to me and we watch the fire. Now I open my beer. We wait until the fire is small, glowing but no longer roaring. Then we go inside.
In the dark kitchen, Henry says, “Nice sweatshirt.”
“Ugh,” I say. I pull it over my head.
Henry smiles, and I feel a nervous spasm in my chest. Here we are. Real me. Real Henry. He leans against the counter, waiting. And I want to go to him. To cross the space of the kitchen and fix this.
I feel dizzy, because does that mean I still love Henry? Even if Henry is not Henry?
We fell in love so quickly. It was recognition in the bar that day: You, you are the one I can love best. But we didn’t know why. We didn’t know the first thing about each other. Just that this was what the lightning strike was meant to feel like.
We’ve been married almost a year and finally, now, I think I see who Henry is. The idea of him I had, that carefree, wisecracking, earth-working Mainer? That was a fantasy. Someone from his tall tales. A romantic idea I loved so much I didn’t want to let it go. But he is more than that. He is funny, yes, but he worries about things too. He is strong, but I am capable of hurting him. He tells magic stories, but he also takes out the garbage. He is responsible, a man in a house with a wife. He is ready for this, our grown-up life together. More ready than I am, for sure.
We fell in love with the people we thought we were. And we were wrong about those people. But we were right, I think, about the love.
I wonder if Henry feels the same.
After all, I am certainly not who Henry thought I was. Which was what? The tall newspaper lady who drank as much as he did? The girl who hung on his stories and begged for more? The New York journalist who would throw it all away and spend her days loving him by the sea?
I wish I could be her. Whoever that girl was that he thought he was marrying. I bet that girl is wonderful. I bet I would marry her too, if I could.
Sadly, he is stuck with me instead.
“Come on,” I say. “Can we go upstairs?”
“Sure,” Henry says.
We climb, a procession of two, me following him up the steep and narrow stairway. He opens the door to our room. It is just so large, the bed. The dresser is big and hollow as a boat. The so-high peak of the ceiling and the shaky ceiling fan and the amount of space to be filled, I cannot do it.
“Come here,” I say. I take Henry’s hand and lead him across the hall. Here is a room we do not normally go into. Henry’s room. It looks exactly like I imagine it did when he was small. It wasn’t Henry who preserved it, of course, it was June. “Here,” I say to Henry. The bed is made with a red starred quilt. It is small, but big enough for both of us if we press together. “Lie down with me.”
Henry looks around the room. The walls are pale yellow and one whole wall is a bookshelf full of hardbacks: The Hardy Boys and Greek Myths and Edible Plants of New England and A History of the Maine Coast for Young Men. There is a mobile of boats hanging over the bed: small carved-wooden skiffs, dinghies, and sailboats. Henry pushes a sailboat with his finger. The mobile sways.
Henry takes off his boots and lies down on the bed. The boats go slowly round and round. He pulls a book off the shelf, American Heroes. Says, “Do you want to hear about Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan?”
I take off my sneakers, my socks, my jeans. I unbutton my bra under my shirt and pull it out one armhole. “Paul Bunyan,” I say. I lie down and press up close to Henry. I take a sip of my beer and then I put it on the windowsill behind the headboard, which has a spyglass on it. A fossil of a seashell. Some brown shards of beach glass Henry probably collected as a child. Shards that were probably once pieces of beers drunk and thrown overboard.
Henry flips the pages. The book smells old, like children’s books always smelled when you were small and the librarian read to you. Or June. I imagine that June read to Henry. I imagine she chose Johnny Appleseed and not Paul Bunyan. I take the book from Henry’s hands and put it on the floor. I pull the covers over both of us. We watch the little boats. I feel so much better here, in this child’s room, than I ever did in the master bedroom. Here, I think, maybe, Henry and I can be more like ourselves. Here, I will be able to work out the way to love the man he actually is instead of the man I thought he was. Here we will be the way we are supposed to be instead of pretending that we are grown-ups who sleep in a master bedroom and have it all figured out.
“I like this room,” I say. “We should sleep here more often.”
“Okay,” Henry says. “We can do that. Listen—”
I cut him off. “Hen, I don’t want to . . .” Because maybe everything can be this easy. We can start over and sleep in this child’s room and not have to hash through the mess we’ve made. Maybe Henry won’t have to realize just quite how strange I am.
“We’ve got to talk some,” he says. “This is what grown-ups do, Leah. They talk.”
“Talk about what?” I say, like an idiot.
“Do you think we made a mistake?” Henry says. “Moving up here and everything? We can go back to New York if you want. You might be happier at home.”
“I am at home,” I say. “I feel very much at home.”
“Well, I don’t know if I do,” Henry says. He strokes my hair. We lie there for a while. “It’s okay if you don’t like it here. I know it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
I think about this. Sometimes when Henry is talking about his hometown he is talking about himself too.
“Sometimes I’m not all I’m cracked up to be,” I tell him.
Henry gets up on his elbow so he can look at me properly. He squeezes my hand. “Me too,” he says.
I pick the book up off the floor and hand it to Henry, the pages opened to Johnny Appleseed.
“Read,” I say.
Spring
30
Quinn
When Leah walks into the Star office for the first time in weeks, it’s a warm May day. Up here, a warm day gets people batshit-crazy excited.
Posing in the entrance to her office, Charley grips the top of the doorframe, practically hangs from it. “A full staff to kick around!” she says, delighted.
“Hi, Charley,” Leah says.
“You had a good vacation?”
“You bet,” Leah says. “So, what’s the story?”
Charley smacks the doorframe. “Winters!” she says. “Fill Leah in.”
I catch her up. Since we ran the piece about the protest, we’ve been running a story in every issue about the ongoing debate over Neversink Park and the Dorian property. Interviewing people about what they think. Publishing minutes from town committee meetings about zoning. We haven’t officially taken sides, but our full-page historical retrospective on the long-standing local love and lore of the carousel? It brought a tear to many an eye.
“Tell me that wasn’t the headline,” Leah interrupts. I pull last week’s paper from the shelf and hand it to her. The headline: A LOOK AT THE LONG-STANDING LOCAL LOVE AND LORE OF THE NEVERSINK CAROUSEL. Leah moans, as if in real physical distress.
This week, we’re publishing a piece about the Sanford family and their generous creation and maintenance of the park.
We work for a few hours before Charley comes out of her office again and says, “Don’t you have some business at town hall?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“Take Lynch with you.” Charley closes the door behind her.
“She called you Lynch,” I say.
“She’s hoping it hasn’t worn off,” Leah says. “Where are we going?”
I explain about the benefit. Leah reaches into her bag. She’s got an envelope all stamped and addressed to town hall.
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t pay this?”
“Not until the benefit,” I say. “And about that. Carter doesn’t think he needs a permit, but if he doesn’t get one, the cops will have an excuse to barge in. And wouldn’t it be nice if there were just some music and there was no chance of trouble? If no one had to be worrying about anyone?”
“You mean Henry,” Leah says.
“I was thinking about me,” I say. I was thinking about Rosie.
TOWN HALL IS a dreary little building next to the post office. Leah stoops as she walks down the hall. The bureaucrat behind the desk in the clerk’s office is wearing a too-large pink T-shirt with paisleys on it and a pair of eyeglasses around her neck on a long fake-gold chain. The glasses sit on her enormous shelflike bosom, and when we ask her for the necessary forms for the permits we need, she wheels her office chair over to the appropriate filing cabinets to get them for us without standing up. She visits several different cabinets, collecting forms, and then she wheels back, licks a finger, and flips through. Permission to hold a public gathering on town property. Permission to hold a gathering on the town green in particular. Permission to play music and set up electronics. Permission to grill in the open.
“A party?” she says. “How nice.”
Leah and I take turns filling out every damn form there is in this town. We hand them back to the bureaucrat, who retrieves her giant glasses from their leash. “I’ll get her to sign them right now,” she says. “Save you a trip.”
I drum gleefully on the counter and Leah looks around the office, at all those filing cabinets. Then the bureaucrat trudges back from the back room, frowning at the papers. She hands them to us. “I’m afraid your request to use the town green has been denied,” she says.
