If the Internet were planet Earth, the amount of space devoted to pregnancies, motherhood, infants, and toddlers would surely fill a continent. Of course, the Internet had an enormous investment in the subject: those future babies would be its next generation of users. Beth’s computer froze twice during these searches, as clicked-on Web sites disappeared into an unclicked-on landslide of pop-up windows offering coupons, discounts, mommy membership sign-up forms, vitamin supplements, and directories of local pediatricians. The third time it froze, she closed both the laptop and her eyes, trying to feel the limits of her own body, its mass and shape, its devotion to being Elizabeth Shepherd, here and now, in the first days of October on the fingerlike peninsula of the North Fork.
The next day, she didn’t go to Jeff Trader’s house either. She watched from the kitchen window as a green Subaru pulled into Magdalena’s driveway, and Cole Drake, holding his briefcase to his chest, rushed up to the cottage porch. Beth wondered if the old woman had grown impatient of waiting and enlisted the local lawyer to scout for Jeff Trader’s journal. That seemed unlikely. Beth had gone to high school with Cole Drake, and even then he’d had the makings of the cold, limp-eyed contract drafter he eventually became. He had the same haircut as he did in school, short on the sides, longer on top, the style of a man two months out of the military. Beth couldn’t grasp what his pretty wife, Holly, had seen in him. She imagined Cole naked, his pasty, hairless body, the bony nodes of his sternum an extension of his pronounced Adam’s apple, and quickly dressed him again. Gail honked twice from the road, attention-getting full-second drones, and Beth hurried out the back door with her purse. Gavril waved through the glare of the garage window, smiling, it seemed to her, at the promise of an afternoon safe from interruptions.
Her mother had arranged a shopping excursion in Riverhead, had phoned her twice that morning to say how much she was looking forward to it, what fun they were going to have, gilding the day so thoroughly that it could only end in disappointment. Beth spent much of the day sitting with husbands outside dressing rooms as Gail appeared in different silk dresses, leaning against the doorframes in sultry poses, one leg overlapping the other, as if she were navigating the walkway of a phantom yacht. Beth spent their lunch break giving her mother a tutorial on her brand-new iPhone. That’s what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever from the universal cloud. Gail asked Beth to take her picture with the phone. After Beth clicked five shots of her mother in the watery light of the diner, Gail insisted that she add the prettiest one to a number of dating apps. “Upload me,” she begged from across the table. It sounded more like “Unload me.”
On the third day, Beth found herself out of viable excuses for avoiding Jeff Trader’s house, although she still had plenty of rational ones. Magdalena had lost her mind in suspecting Jeff Trader was murdered in one of the safest, crime-proof zip codes on the eastern seaboard. Beth had no business tracking through the house of a recently deceased stranger on the hunt for some apocryphal book. Moreover, assuming there was any truth to what Magdalena said, she didn’t feel safe entering the house of a murder victim alone. The idea frightened her, the way crypts in graveyards frightened her, or freshly emptied and Lysoled rooms in retirement homes. She considered lying to Magdalena, telling her she’d gone over and found nothing, but she worried that the old woman would ask questions about Jeff Trader’s house that she had no way of answering convincingly. So, on the third day, Beth steeled her courage and headed to her car. Almost as an afterthought, she remembered a promise she’d made to a neighbor, and realized it was the perfect solution: she could pick up Paul’s foster kid, bring him with her to Jeff’s house, and be done with two obligations in a matter of hours.
The Benchley mansion bordered the Sound just as her own house did, six streets west on Main Road, a five-minute drive if the Connecticut ferry didn’t clog the streets with its procession of commuters. She parked behind the blue Mercedes in the driveway and climbed the porch. Lights burned in the front windows. She rang the chrome bell and heard the hum reverberate through the hallway. After a minute, she rang again, and when no one answered, she walked around the house, following a curve of box hedges that had probably been pruned last by Jeff Trader.
The oak trees between the Benchley and Muldoon lawns shook, as if something invisible were alive in the branches, causing leaves to shudder to the ground. The day was silent and growing colder as the sun rose toward noon. The box hedges ended, and black trash bags filled their place. Tied and twisted garbage piled against Paul’s basement windows. One side of the back door was reserved for a heap of metal—two bicycles, five broken folding chairs, fan blades, fishing poles, a blender. Beth was about to knock on the door, but her eye caught a splotch of red through the wild grasses and cat briars that separated the Benchley lawn from the shoreline. She descended the trail of beaten weeds and found Paul sitting on a lawn chair in a red cable-knit sweater. An easel stood between him and the water, and he dabbed his brush into a palette of paint.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Beth said as she approached. She examined the painting, a scenic landscape of the Sound and, in its far corner, a frail, faint suggestion of Bug Lighthouse, not yet fleshed out in the creams and crimsons on Paul’s board. For Beth, watching someone else paint was like being a fallen nun watching someone else pray: she felt a combination of jealousy and judgment, along with an awareness of how misplaced those emotions were. Paul wasn’t a bad painter, only conventional, re-creating a postcard, marvelously untroubled by critiques of the neo-Marxist, cyber-capitalist, post-human Manhattan variety. Gavril knew all those critiques so well that he might even turn them back on themselves and pronounce Paul’s landscapes ingenious. Outsider art was big that year. So was insider art. Her own paintings had fallen, unwelcome, somewhere in between.
Paul spun around, the tip of his mustache flecked with white paint. He smiled and placed his palette and brush in the grass by his shoe.
“Please don’t look,” he said, cringing. “You and your husband are real artists. I’d hate to hear all the things I’m doing wrong.”
Beth shook her head. “No. You’re doing a wonderful job. You’re capturing the light perfectly.” She put her hand on Paul’s shoulder and leaned in to breathe the paint’s stringent polyurethane. “I miss that smell,” she said. “I haven’t picked up a brush in so long. I’m afraid I’ve lost the nerve. And if you’re worried about Gavril, here’s a little secret. He can’t draw to save his life. He tried to sketch me once on a bar napkin. He might as well have used a pool stick.”
“I can’t keep up with contemporary art,” Paul replied, swatting off the compliment as he rose from his chair. “Painting is just a meditative practice for me. A way to take in the beauty of the scenery while it’s still here. I put a few finished works in the local craft show. Maybe I end up decorating some bathrooms if I’m lucky. But with all the real artists moving out here lately, I might even lose that distinction. How much is Gavril’s work going for these days?” It had become increasingly acceptable to merge the topic of art with sales prices in everyday conversation, as if the general public finally understood art’s value: as a form of currency that could be cashed in like poker chips.
“I’ve been sworn to secrecy.” She clasped her hips and stared out at the Sound, where a white duplex ferry lumbered in the water, taking its hourly crossing from New London, Connecticut, to the landing on the tip next to the restricted Plum terminal. Something about the landscape captured in Paul’s painting was disturbing her orientation, her innate sense of geography, and only when she looked for the lighthouse that Paul had sketched on the canvas did she realize the obvious discrepancy. The lighthouse was too far east, on the bay side instead of the Sound, hidden by miles of rocky outlooks and thick, lashing reeds.
“You’re cheating,” she said. “There’s no lighthouse from here. Not even Coffeepot. And certainly not Bug.”
Paul took in the view, untroubled by the observation.
“You know, I helped consult on the rebuilding of Bug Light back in 1990,” he said. Beth did know that. The original Bug Lighthouse was burned down by arsonists in 1963, and she remembered the long summer of Orient celebrations when the historical board raised the money to build an exact replica, sailing in the new lighthouse on a tugboat and installing it on the same crown of rock. “I did it gratis, of course,” Paul went on. “I had just graduated from architecture school and was still fresh to the field. I swear, I still worry that it’ll collapse into the sea, given how green I was. But the board didn’t like their landscape robbed of that fixture. It’s funny—back then, they thought it would help bring in tourism. Now new people are the last thing the historical board wants to encourage.” He turned to her. “So what do you think? Did the board do the right thing? Or is the lighthouse just a big Disney lie, a ruse to make us feel connected to some maritime past?”
“If it still prevents boats from crashing at night,” she said. “And looks good in your paintings.”
“A very functional lie,” Paul agreed. “Functional and pretty. So there you have it. I guess I feel the liberty to rearrange the landscape a little bit. We natives have that license.”
“I’ve never been out to Bug Light,” she said. “Is it falling down?”
“The county’s always threatening to sell it. Who’d want to buy it, though? And I hear Arthur Cleaver donates a nice chunk of money every year to keep it running.” Arthur Cleaver was one of the resident boat fanatics, a millionaire from Manhattan who served as counsel for the historical board.
“That’s nice of him,” she said. “I’d hate to see it gone.”
They took the trail up to the lawn. Beth spotted her future car companion carrying a radiator out of the house. He tossed it on the metal heap and returned inside, dusting gloved hands.
“I hope this purge doesn’t mean you’re planning on selling,” she said.
Paul rubbed his chin. A gust of wind picked through his hair to upset its careful part. “No, I’m not selling. Not yet, anyway. I’d like to keep the house for as long as I can afford it. The older I get the more I appreciate Orient when I’m in the city.”
“That’s odd, because the longer I’m out here the more I miss the city,” she said, pausing at an elder bush to pick one of its white, weedy flowers. She twisted its stem and plucked its wet petals as she walked. It occurred to her that she and Paul had similar histories: both were Orient children who had fled to New York for careers and had recently returned to take possession of their family houses. Their migration patterns were consistent; the success of that migration probably wasn’t. “I thought you worked in Manhattan,” she said. “How do you manage to get the time off like this during the week?”
Paul bunched the sleeves of his sweater. His glasses were white with the reflection of the mansion shining off of them.
“I took a leave of absence. My firm had me on a project that fell through and I decided I’d finally fix this place up instead of jump in to help with another corporate-park development. So I’m doing a little work from here on my computer, trying to unlearn how to be an obsessive round-the-clock architect. It’s been years since I’ve spent the fall at home, and Mills is turning out to be good company. That said, he’s probably regretting his decision to come right about now. I might have overestimated a teenager’s need for a little peace and tranquility.”
“Oh, he’ll get used to it,” Beth replied, thinking the opposite.
“He’s been so quick to jump in. It would have taken me weeks to clear out what he’s managed in just a few days. You don’t realize how old you’ve become until someone young comes around to remind you. Maybe the only way to stay young is by staying away from the young.”
“Tell that to my mother,” she muttered, thinking of Gail’s surgery addiction. She regretted the comment as soon as it left her lips; it was unfair to attack Gail in a village that had already turned against her.
“How is your mother?” Paul asked. “I hope Magdalena isn’t giving you a hard time about her. Lena’s a real sweetheart when you—”
“I just saw Magdalena, actually.” She turned to Paul. “She’s pretty shaken up about Jeff Trader.”
“That’s a blow,” he said, taking off his glasses and wiping the lenses with his sweater. “I talked to him a few days before he died. I keep trying to remember if he sounded any different. I told him I needed the second bedroom aired out and he asked why. I said I had a guest coming in from the city, a kid who was going to help around the house. You know what he said to me? ‘Seems like there are a few people in Orient who shouldn’t be.’ I let it pass—honestly, it seemed like he was drunk, and I thought he was upset that I was giving away his job. I had to reassure him the situation was only temporary. But I keep thinking about it, and for the life of me I can’t figure out what he meant. Losing Jeff was bad enough, but I feel terrible that Mills saw the body. He was on the beach when they pulled him in.”
“So was I. Gavril swam out and got him.” Beth dropped the flower on the grass. “But that’s why I’m here.” Paul stared at her in confusion. “For Mills, I mean. You remember I said I’d take him on a drive, so if you want to give him a few hours off to—”
There was a scraping sound at the back door, and Beth watched as Mills strained to maintain his grip on an outdated microwave. He finally managed to toss it on the discards pile, went inside, and returned a minute later with his arms full of plant basins, cracked buckets, and a red gas canister.
“Mills,” Paul called. “Why don’t you take a break? You remember Beth from the picnic?” He left Beth on the lawn and jogged over to take the containers from Mills. The two men spoke for a moment by the house. The teenager eyed her as he took off his gloves. She smiled and then stopped smiling, reluctant to seem like an approved babysitter. She wondered if she looked more like someone from Paul’s generation than from his.
Paul and Mills headed toward her. The young man was dressed like a scarecrow, in an ill-fitting checkered shirt and denim pants that were too bulky and grease stained to belong to someone his age. She settled on his face to spare him embarrassment, and her eye lighted on his gray front tooth, the color of the clouds overhead.
Mills held out his hand. “We met before, sort of.”
“At the picnic,” she said, taking his grip. His fingernails were black with grit.
“No, the beach.” He had watched her cry on the side of the causeway.
She nodded. “Do you want to go for a drive? I can show you a few of the local attractions if you don’t mind stopping off with me at a house for an errand.”
Paul thanked Beth with his eyes, and promised a lunch of oysters on their return.
“Let me change first,” Mills said, tapping his shirt buttons. “Unless you also have plans to put me to work.” A boy’s irreverent smile broke through his lips. “But Paul might not be okay with that. He has me on retainer.”
“Don’t take him to the slave cemetery,” Paul joked.
Guilt made for an exceptionally spirited tour. Beth was so mortified about bringing Mills to a dead man’s house that she stalled for an hour before taking the turn down Beach Lane, filling the time with side trips to places she’d half-forgotten about, historical landmarks of such minor interest to anyone but the historical board that their muddy knolls were untouched by human tracks. On Bird’s Eye Lane, right by Karen Norgen’s home, was the settlers’ graveyard of 1690, a small gully of crabgrass shaped like the base of a mouth. Black stone teeth grew unevenly from the ground, tilted at odd angles toward the sky. Beth pointed to the few semilegible stones: HERE LIES AGNES VAILS, D. 172 and ALFRED BROWN PAS 1753. Moss invaded each stone in bright yellow spills, covering dates and crosses. Agnes Vails’s marker was crowned by a carving of Mary holding the infant Christ; the mother’s face had eroded into a concave puncture, but the baby had survived the centuries. The mother was holding the baby o
ut, as if trying to give it away.
They climbed back in the car, and Beth navigated the lumbering dirt road with its homemade sign, PRIVATE—UNAUTHORIZED CARS KICK UP DUST, to ward off unwanted traffic. A hundred yards from the onyx chess pieces and pink-marble bread loaves of Old Oysterponds Cemetery, down a winding gravel pass, sat the Orient slave cemetery, wreathed by tall brown grasses. The cemetery was heart shaped and buzzed with cicadas. Beth read aloud from the historical board’s bronze plaque: “Slavery persisted in Oysterponds until about 1830. Here were buried some twenty slaves. Here also lie the remains of Dr. Seth H. Tuthill, proprietor of ‘Hog Pond Farm,’ and those of his wife, Maria. It was their wish that they be buried with their former servants.” Eighteen baseball-size rocks lay buried in the dirt, absent of engravings, and at the front were upright marble slabs for Seth and Maria, decorated with fresh daisies by Tuthill descendants who still owned land in Orient. The smell of wet mud made the graves seem almost fresh.
“That was sad,” Mills said when they returned to the car. He zipped his hoodie up his chest and squirreled his hands in his sleeves. Beth turned on the heat but didn’t ask him to roll up his window.
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