The From-Aways

by CJ Hauser

  “No,” I say. “I’ve read it.”

  He nods and gets up. He opens the cabinets under the sink where we keep our recycling. He puts the paper on a stack of other old papers. I watch as he methodically binds the stack up with twine. Cutting it. Knotting it.

  “I’m going out,” he says.

  “Henry—” I say.

  But Henry lifts the stack by the strings and through the screen door I see him taking it out to the end of the drive where we leave our recycling.

  And this will be happening all over town. Our story will be used to wrap up fishes at Deep’s. It will line the floors of pets’ cages. It will get crumpled into balls and used for kindling. It will blow away down the docks, the four-squared pages opening and closing like moths’ wings. It does not matter so much as my newspaper brain thinks it does. It doesn’t matter like humans do.

  And then there is the other kind of news, the kind about Rosie. The kind that you give squatting next to your husband’s bed, reeking of gasoline. This news is different from the news in the paper. It is the kind that will make its way through town whether people read the Star or not. People will phone people. People will see people, in the supermarket, at the gas station. Parents standing around the carousel will talk in muffled voices as their children ride around. Have you heard? someone will say. And someone else will say, Heard what? And that is when it truly is the news. When you are the one who has to instill in your voice the exact right balance of kindness and seriousness with which to tell someone something that she doesn’t really want to hear.

  SOME COMPANY MEN are brought up to repair the substation. People talk about what happened in quiet voices. And they do not stop talking about it.

  In this town, people understand a death by drowning. It happens yearly. Men are yanked overboard by ropes tied wrong. There are undertows and riptides. Drunk children and drunker adults go swimming. There are squalls.

  But there are no fires. To lose a girl this way is something this town has not practiced for. There will be no funeral because Rosie’s parents will have the services in Florida. They have said they will not be returning to Menamon. It is mentioned, about town, that their faces haven’t been seen around here in quite some time anyway.

  And if the Salems do not come back, and if there is no funeral, perhaps it will be easier. It will be easier to think instead that Rosie has just gone down to Florida, a troublemaking kid collected at last by her parents. We imagine Rosie sulking over breakfast on her parents’ patio. We imagine her refusing all the fruits, and juices. We imagine her complaining about the noisy chattering bugs in the palms, the kinds that are bigger than the ones we have here. We imagine warm air stirring wax-green Florida leaves. We see her staying pale. Wearing SPF 80 and forgetting to rub in a spot between her shoulder blades. We think of the postcards she will send us, idyllic beach scenes with notes on the back saying things like, This is dreadful. Give my regards to the Uncle. Love, Rosalind.

  But then, we see her slowly unfurling. She starts cooking her parents Stationhouse specials for breakfast. She sits with her father on the beach. They both wear Red Sox caps, but sometimes, if the Sox aren’t playing, we imagine them rooting for the Rays. We hear it when Rosie starts to sing again. Murmuring little songs as she convinces her mother to dye her graying hair blond. We watch as Rosie starts a shell collection, favoring the ugly twisted ones with secret pink insides. We see her line the shells up on the shelf in her bedroom. We notice that she has started to think of it as her bedroom. And we see how she forgets all about us here in Menamon. And we are glad it is this way. We are glad when we see Rosie in an alligator-green bathing suit and a silly sun hat of her mother’s, standing knee-deep in warm Florida water. She is smiling and squinting, half blinded by the sun. She cannot see us. And we are glad.

  44

  Quinn

  Joe Deep decides there’s going to be a memorial. He runs an event listing in my goddamn paper, which is still coming out, without me. The memorial is down on the waterfront, today, at noon.

  I’m not going. Like hell I’m going.

  Carter says we’re going. I sit on a stool at the island in his kitchen, watching him crack eggs, using his thumbs too much to do it. I shake my head. “No,” I say. “I’m not going. I’m in a bad mood, Carter. My whole life is a fucking bad mood.” I take a sharp breath in. I shiver.

  Carter wipes egg off his hands. He leaves the room and comes back with a sweater for me. “Put that on,” he says.

  I pull it over my head and don’t bother to pull my hair out of the neck. I let him make me food. It’s been a few days, and this is what we do. I sleep. He wakes me up and says I have to eat something. I yell at him. He says, “Fine,” and then starts cooking anyway. Usually I smell it and come out.

  This is what Carter and I should have done when Marta died. Eaten food. Yelled at each other. Worn large sweaters as mourning garb.

  This morning he’s making omelets with cheese in them and spicy peppers—the way we like them. He puts a blue china plate in front of me. He gives me silverware and a cloth rag of a napkin. “Eat,” he says.

  I roll up the sweater sleeves and I eat. Carter watches me swallow, then forks some eggs into his own mouth. “It will be good to go,” he says.

  “No fucking way,” I say, my mouth full of eggs.

  Carter shakes his head. “No way?” he says.

  I nod.

  He goes to the phone. “Remember that you made me do this,” he says.

  When I hear the faint “How’s it going?” on the other end of the line, I know he’s bringing in the big guns.

  Charley pulls up in the drive twenty minutes later. Her face is too nice.

  She gives me this sad smile and says, “Get in the fucking car, Winters, or you’re fired.”

  I sit on my stool and stare at her. “You can’t be idiotic enough to think this will work,” I say. “You I expected better from.”

  Carter excuses himself to go get ready. He leaves us alone.

  Charley holds out her hand. “Please, Quinn,” she says. I bite my lip. These fucking women with their fucking pleases.

  “I don’t want to,” I say. “I don’t think I can. Who do I owe it to, to cry in fucking public? I’ll cry right here. I’ll grieve just as much. Okay? I promise.”

  “It’s not for them, you moron, it’s for you,” Charley says. “And for Rosie.” Charley looks at the ceiling. “You know she would have loved something like this. You know she would drag you to it if she could.”

  “Hah!” I laugh a snotty laugh in spite of myself. It’s true, this is exactly the sort of dumb thing Rosie would make me go to. Only it’s her own dumb thing. Her own dumb memorial. I imagine her poking at me, pulling back the covers, handing me my clothes, saying, We’re going.

  “I’ll bum you a million cigarettes, huh?” Charley says.

  I scan her pockets. I see the rectangle of a pack. “I’m not changing,” I say, flapping the big sleeves of Carter’s sweater.

  “No one gives a damn what you wear, Winters,” Charley says, rubbing at her eyes. “Okay? Just come.”

  “Fine,” I say. I hop off my stool.

  Carter emerges, dressed in black. I know he’s heard the whole thing. “Are we going?” he asks anyway.

  We follow Charley out to the car. Carter gets in shotgun and I climb in the back. I don’t put on a seat belt. Charley starts the car.

  “I’d like those cigarettes now, please,” I say.

  Charley tosses the pack into the backseat. “Take them,” she says. “I quit.”

  45

  Leah

  I have developed a fondness for the dinghy.

  It used to seem like just another part of the dock, but ever since Henry and I slept in it, I’ve started coming down here. I scrubbed the hull out with water and bleach. The rope tying it to the dock was old, so I bought a new one. I’m getting better at climbing in. Today, I manage it without even wobbling.

  I am sitting in the dinghy, in m
y black dress, knee length, sleeveless, my hair up in a bun, waiting for Henry to come get me so we can go to Rosie’s memorial. There’s something about the smell of the water that makes me feel like a real live human being. There’s bigness, here by the ocean. When you look at it, how those waves come rolling in, you think, There can’t really be another one coming, can there? And then there is.

  “Ahoy,” Henry says.

  “Ahoy,” I say.

  He climbs into the boat. He is wearing a gray suit. He has trimmed his new beard. We sit there for a moment, rocking. I sit up taller and imagine a large oil portrait of us, the kind so big you have to step back to see it like in the galleries at MoMA. New Yorker in Dinghy, with Husband.

  “You ready?” he says.

  “I am,” I say. But I am not. I keep hearing myself, that night, when Quinn suggested we look for Rosie at Billy’s place. Let her do her thing, I said. So easy. We went to the bar instead. Let her do her thing.

  The boat knocks against the planks. Henry pushes us off a little bit. I look down through the green water. Watch how the rope undulates in the murk.

  “I’m going later this week,” Henry says. “I called my old guys. They have a couple of projects they could use me on. I won’t stay long. A week or two.”

  “You’ll be working?” I say.

  He nods. “It’ll be good to be working. I just need a break from all this. From Menamon.”

  “And you’ll come back?” I say.

  “Of course I’ll come back,” Henry says, and takes my hand. He seems so tired. So joyless. It’s not just me who has done this to him, but I did not help. I did not help at all.

  “Wanna come?” Henry asks. “You can nose around the Gazette offices. We can see some friends.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  Henry shrugs.

  New York in springtime. Trees in concrete wells will be in bloom. New Yorkers will be sneezing. Allergies, they will say, allergies. The restaurants will be unfurling blue awnings; they will be bringing out their outdoor tables. Out-of-work actors will line up for interviews to wait tables in the extra sections. They will bring their head shots to the interviews. On the subway, fair-weather fans will resume wearing their Yankees championship gear. The men who have been wearing their 1986 satin Mets jackets since 1986 will dismiss them. Both of these kinds of people will start buying the Post more regularly to get game updates. At the Gazette, they will have exactly one meeting about how they could make their sports coverage compete with the Post’s without the use of puns. Nothing will come of this meeting. In the parks, runners will appear. Those first few weeks there will dozens of pale chubby-legged girls, flushing red in the face, getting ready for summer. My parents will start dreaming about their summer plans. Out loud they will say, We are thinking of going to Paris. To themselves they will be thinking, What if we just told everyone we were going to Paris and then stayed home and did nothing? There will be ads in the classifieds for rentals in the Hamptons, Fire Island, Nantucket. This is New York in spring.

  And I do not want it.

  I stand up too fast in the boat. It rocks but I have my sea legs now. I do not fall. I smooth my black skirt. “Let’s just go to the thing,” I tell Henry. “Let’s talk about this later.” We climb out of the boat and onto the dock. I pick up my patent-leather heels, hop off the planks, and walk in the sand, shoes clopping together as I grip them by the straps.

  I think about June. How she was so perfectly a creature of this place, born of it and lost to it, but loved. I may have gotten a late start but it is not too late for me to belong to this place, I don’t think. I am not really a New Yorker in a dinghy anymore.

  46

  Quinn

  We walk down the boardwalk to the dock. There are a lot of people there. Enough that I feel like running away immediately. I freeze but Charley grabs my wrist hard and keeps on marching me forward.

  There’s a wet hair-mussing breeze coming off the ocean and people take turns holding down their skirts and running hands over their heads. They’re wearing nice dark clothes. Everyone in a town like this has a good mourning outfit ready and waiting to go.

  Joseph stands in the center of the circle, his back to the sea, waiting. He’s wearing a blue, collared shirt and jeans. Billy’s not far off, wearing a collared shirt too. He looks smaller and paler than usual. He raises a hand when he sees me and holds it there. It’s not quite a wave. I nod at him.

  Charley drags me down to where Leah and Henry are standing. Leah makes awkward shapes with her mouth but doesn’t say anything. Carter stands on my other side. Close, like he thinks I’m going to bolt.

  Joseph looks at his watch, and then he clears his throat. “I want to thank all of you for coming today,” he says. “Father Martineau will be leading us in a requiem mass. Father Martineau, would you begin?”

  An old Canuck emerges from the circle, all in black, with a collar on. His eyes are rheumy and he has a boom box and a cup of holy water, which he sprinkles about. Holy water, I think. With a whole fucking ocean behind him.

  The father crosses himself, then stoops down. The boom box starts humming some ghostly Latin something. “The ‘Dies Irae,’ ” he says. “They are singing, ‘Day of wrath! O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophets’ warning. Heaven and earth in ashes burning!’ ” He speaks too loud because he’s old, and because he’s competing with the wind. A few women make simpering noises. But what the fuck is this, anyway? Rosie hadn’t been to church since she was a kid at Easter, and even then she was only in it for the chocolate eggs.

  Carter has his head down, staring at the ground, and Charley’s contorting her face so she doesn’t cry again. They’re upset, and respectful, and thinking their own thoughts.

  So I just start walking.

  “Quinn?” I hear Charley say. I stop at the top of the dock, on the hill, in the reeds. They’re all staring at me with their mourning faces on. Even the priest. Especially Leah.

  “This has nothing to do with her,” I say. “If you knew the first thing about her, this isn’t what you’d do at all.”

  I want to go back home, but if I see Rosie’s unwashed dishes in the sink, or her bobby pins scattered on the counter, I won’t make it another day. I start walking, and when I get to the intersection, I know where to go.

  47

  Leah

  I don’t blame Quinn for leaving. She shouldn’t have to listen to this Gregorian jukebox and think about Rosie’s soul.

  The priest leans over laboriously and stops the cassette, then looks to Joseph. “Shall I continue?” he says.

  Joseph makes a deep sighing noise. “I suppose so,” he says.

  “Can I say something?” Henry says. Everyone turns to face us.

  Henry’s forehead is creased and he is squinting, because the sun is bright, but also because he is thinking. As the faces turn to him, he musses his hair, his beard.

  I think, No, whatever it is he is thinking about doing he cannot do it. It is too soon, and no one has as yet forgiven him his role in this mess. I can see it on the faces of the fishermen and fishwives, of the schoolteachers and the boys from the diner, of the Rebel Seven people miserably wringing their hands: the last thing they want to do today is listen to Henry.

  “ ‘Fiddler’s Green,’ ” Henry says.

  “Hank?” Joseph says.

  Henry says again, “ ‘Fiddler’s Green.’ ”

  Joseph’s face goes soft, but the rest of the people stare desperately at the priest. They are hoping he’ll start up his boom box again, shepherd them through some acceptable public grief for another thirty minutes, and then let them go home. But the old French Canadian priest seems relieved that something is happening. He is watching Henry too.

  “If no one minds,” Henry says. He makes a coughing noise, clearing his throat. The mourners are silent, wondering whether Henry’s really going to do this. Henry doesn’t notice. He starts singing.

  The song he begins is sad, but with a kind of lighth
earted resignation to it. Henry’s voice rises and then falls dramatically; it twists itself around multiple syllables with an Irish quickness. There is a kind of maritime gallows humor in the tone he takes. He sings:

  As I walked by the dockside one evening so fair

  To view the salt water and take the sea air

  I heard an old fisherman singing a song

  Won’t you take me away boys me time is not long.

  Wrap me up in me oilskin and jumper

  No more on the docks I’ll be seen

  Just tell me old shipmates, I’m taking a trip, mates

  And I’ll see you someday in Fiddler’s Green.

  Now Fiddler’s Green is a place I heard tell

  Where the fishermen go if they don’t go to hell

  Where skies are all clear and the dolphins do play

  And the cold coast of Greenland is far, far away.

  Wrap me up in me oilskin and jumper

  No more on the docks I’ll be seen

  Just tell me old shipmates, I’m taking a trip, mates

  And I’ll see you someday in Fiddler’s Green.

  When you get on the docks and the long trip is through

  Ther’s pubs and ther’s clubs and ther’s lassies there too

  When the girls are all pretty and the beer it is free

  And ther’s bottles of rum growing from every tree.

  Wrap me up in me oilskin and jumper

  No more on the docks I’ll be seen

  Just tell me old shipmates, I’m taking a trip, mates

  And I’ll see you someday in Fiddler’s Green.

  Now, I don’t want a harp nor a halo, not me

  Just give me a breeze and a good rolling sea

  I’ll play me old squeeze-box as we sail along

  With the wind in the rigging to sing me a song.

  Wrap me up in me oilskin and jumper

  No more on the docks I’ll be seen