Authors: Sarah Kernochan
Brett sighs. He’s arguing with an amnesiac, a mental patient, someone having a breakdown, or a stoner. Whichever she is, short of carrying her bodily to the door and dumping her back into the night, there seems no way to get rid of her.
Curling up on her side, she settles her head on her pink duffel, her eyelids drooping.
He tries another tack. “Can I get you some water?”
“Yes, thank you,” she murmurs.
Brett retreats to the kitchen, crossing to the wall-mounted phone. His hand pauses on the receiver. If he calls the police, they will hold her in custody, contact her family or whatever home she walked away from. Maybe he would be returning her to some dire situation, abuse: some peril that prompted her to flee.
He needs to know more before he decides her fate. Filling a glass with water, he returns to the parlor.
She has fallen asleep, knees drawn up, her shallow breath muffled in the folds of the duffel.
If he can remove the bag without waking her, there might be an ID inside. Setting down the glass, he kneels beside her.
“Jane,” he says in a normal voice, testing. She’s too deep in slumber to respond.
Up close, he can see the lavender halo of fatigue around her eyes, the delicate lashes shivering imperceptibly as she dreams, her lips slightly puckered, like an infant’s seeking milk. Gently he takes hold of the duffel’s strap, his other hand reaching to lift her head and slide the bag out.
Without warning her fingers uncurl, blindly seeking, and wrap around his wrist, dragging his hand to her cheek. Her eyes open, glimpsing him briefly through the clouded film of sleep.
Brett remains paralyzed, even after her lids droop closed again. His hand stays pressed to the softness of her white cheek. Suddenly, unaccountably, he is drenched in tenderness.
Every cell’s invaded: he loves her as if he already has loved her, as if he started loving her long before he opened the door.
MANY DAYS FORWARD
, he will wonder about this moment, when he questions once again why he let her stay on in the house. He will tell himself: it’s like that moment when you’re walking along and a little stray dog crosses your path. It was abandoned long ago, and years of dumb suffering have taught it that there is no rest anywhere, and yet it casts one sidelong look your way, a feeble spasm of hope.
The second your eyes lock, you know that from now on this animal belongs to you. Its need puts the flame to your love. And you stick your hand out, offering an end to its wretched wanderings.
Come.
You are already thinking of what name to call it.
My Jane.
C
HAPTER
F
OUR
E
ven at a distance Hoyt can see the skunk, the black and white punctuation at the end of the green lawn, as he pulls up his truck in the Meltzers’ driveway. He can tell by the animal’s flattened shape that it spent the night in the cage trying to dig out or arching up to test the metal bars overhead with its webbed toes. Now it is lying down, weary and dull-eyed, head squeezed against the corner, with no appetite for the barbecue-sauce-smeared slice of bread that enticed it into the cage. The knowledge of its doom has spread like noxious gas through its body, leaving the animal with only enough energy for its last stand.
He shuts Pete inside the cab, where the mutt writhes with excitement. He takes the lid off the rubber trashcan in the truck bed, releasing the miasma of skunks gone by. Next he grabs a plastic tarpaulin, holding it in front of his face and body as he walks across the lawn to the cage. The skunk scrambles to its feet.
Mephitis mephitis,
Hoyt thinks.
He has a head full of Latin, from prep school, law school, and earlier, when he was a kid and wanted to be a vet, studying the phyla of fauna obsessively, species and subspecies, markings and habitats. All that academic knowledge has devolved over time into a low-lying mental sludge that randomly belches up a stray fact once in a while, like the Latin name for skunk:
mephitis mephitis.
Hoyt still knows everything he knows. But there are ineffable pleasures in playing stupid. If he had his way he would pass without pause into genuine and sincere stupidity, commensurate with his position in life. Unfortunately his intelligence, the fruit of his early industry, refuses to die, like the stink that is about to explode from
mephitis mephitis.
Hoisting its tail, the skunk unleashes its spray on the tarpaulin. Hoyt uses the plastic to cover the cage, picking it up and returning to the truck. Fumbling through the tarp to open the cage door, he upends the cage, and the skunk plummets into the garbage pail. Hoyt fastens the lid over it.
Later, at home, he’ll dispatch the critter with a .22 CB, single shot to the head, then hand over the pelt to Googie Bains, an aide at the nursing home and amateur taxidermist.
The Mistress of the Manor (Hoyt calls her MOM) has no idea he shoots the skunks and raccoons he traps on her property. She has asked him please to release the creatures in some other vicinity, a “humane” act that only makes them somebody’s else’s problem. Typical: MOM sees nothing contradictory in driving twenty miles in a gas-guzzling atmosphere-choking SUV to buy organic vegetables.
Hoyt just ignores her. Her husband, not Audrey, hired him to be caretaker, and Jack Meltzer understands that pests must die. And there is no more humane method than a bullet to the
medulla oblongata
. It’s what Hoyt would choose for himself, if he had half a mind. (In fact, if he did have half a mind, it would be a mercy and a pleasure to blast out the remainder.)
Opening the cab door, Hoyt releases Pete. He’d bought the mutt from a shelter and now he charges the Meltzers fifty dollars a month for Pete to chase away Canada geese. Tearing across the lawn, Pete scatters the birds from the putting green, pursuing them to the artificial lake, where it bounds ecstatically into the water, content to churn and bark all day long until they get the picture.
Hoyt’s neck still hurts from last night’s collision with Marly Walczak. Maybe he should buy one of those foam cervical collars. Meanwhile, he has to make his rounds.
Of the estate’s thirty acres, twenty are wooded and ten cleared for the 10,000 square-foot country-French-style manor, the tennis court, lap pool, fishing lake, horse barn (never occupied), formal garden, remote-controlled waterfall, great lawn, and topiary maze.
The latter, MOM’s creation, never fails to crack Hoyt up: that anyone would want to construct a claustrophobic labyrinth in the middle of such open splendor. Bathed in sun and sky, the property is perched on a high hill above Graynier, opposite its smaller sister Rowell Hill, boasting views of two counties beyond. So what does the Mistress of the Manor do but put up a maze of eight-foot hedges to hide in? “It’s a beautiful place to meditate,” she claims, though the only evidence of transcendental activity Hoyt has ever seen is a bong and a book of soggy matches hidden behind a stone bench—probably belonging to the Meltzers’ 13year-old daughter (currently at theater camp), who won’t be coming up this summer.
For three weeks the region has seen no rain; patches of the lawn have turned brown. He turns on the underground sprinklers, which he really should have done every day of the drought. He will have to leave the sprinklers on all night to coax the grass back.
Hoyt is helplessly devoted to the art of negligence. Audrey Meltzer has pointed this out a hundred times to her husband, but Jack Meltzer always gives his caretaker the benefit of the doubt. Jack just flat out likes the guy. He’s impressed and amused that his property manager can quote Chaucer and draft a will. Sometimes he invites Hoyt in for a drink, opens up a prize bottle of Meursault or Medoc from his wine cellar, and they shoot the shit, which leaves Jack with the agreeable feeling of fraternizing with a salt-of-theearth local without having to lower himself. Hoyt is his intellectual superior, he doesn’t mind admitting. Also a hell of a raconteur, a decent fellow, and honest.
Leaving “decent” and “honest” aside, Meltzer is mistaken that Hoyt Eddy is a local. He is the son of Hamilton Eddy of the Boston Eddys, a well-heeled, Catholic, hard-working, entrepreneurial family. Hoyt’s father ran a mutual fund, and begat six boys, of whom Hoyt was the youngest and—conceived during his parents’ divorce—the least welcome.
Absorbed into the father’s new household, Hoyt’s older brothers were overseen by his second wife, a brisk, rosy woman with four sons of her own. (These later turned out also to have been sired by Hamilton Eddy.) Hoyt was left with his mother Maeve.
Hoyt’s earliest memory is of lying in his crib and seeing the shape of his mother’s head beating rhythmically against the bars as she kneeled on the floor, sobbed and prayed. In place of any lullaby was the unchained melody of Maeve’s prayers; her hiccupping cigarette-roughened voice pleading with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, to take away her sins, cleanse her of hatred, and murder Hamilton Eddy and his bitch in their bed.
As Hoyt grew up, his mother’s church-fueled hysteria landed them both on the streets. She’d given away the divorce settlement money to the parish and then entered a cloister, briefly putting Hoyt in a foster home. But when the nuns found out how crazy she was, they showed her the door. Collecting Hoyt, she moved them into a homeless shelter for a few weeks, and from there to Seattle, where she got a job at a florist’s. She seemed to be waking up from her nightmare.
Then, when Hoyt was thirteen, she disappeared.
He continued going to school, living on what food she had left behind in the apartment, not telling anyone what had happened. Evenings, after football practice, he used his bus pass to travel all over the city, searching for her in every Catholic church and shelter he could find.
He loved Maeve. He was her little husband, her soul mate, her soldier; “my sword,” she said. Forgiving her, picking up after her, soothing her rages, forcing her to eat, letting her sleep in his bed when she couldn’t settle—he had no idea who he was without her.
A year after her disappearance, a post card arrived from Asia, forwarded by the Seattle post office to Boston, where Hoyt was by now living with his dad. Maeve wrote that she was working in a Catholic mission in Cambodia; she was at peace with herself, and asked Hoyt’s forgiveness.
Hoyt was in no mood to forgive. Uprooted from a life of drama and chaos, he was in shock: marooned in a highly regulated, even-keeled household of over-achievers. Everyone was his own man here. Everyone slept in separate beds. No one had ever held his mother’s head under the shower, washing clumps of shit out of her hair where she’d smeared it in penance for her sins. His brothers and half-brothers had Hamilton Eddy, his firm hand, sober love, and high expectations.
Ham Eddy’s other sons kept their eyes trained forward, rarely talking to Hoyt, marching to collect their prizes and degrees with regimental precision. Ham had his own reasons for averting his eyes from his youngest son. Hoyt knew too much. He too had been sucked into Maeve’s crazy, throbbing allure, had waded into the same muddy bog. And young Hoyt knew that Ham had the same weakness, that bent toward her madness. Not only had his father coupled with it, he still secretly pined for its tyrannical rhythms.
Submitting to the Hamilton Eddy program of hard, character-building work, Hoyt tried his best to make his dad proud. He was a quick study, nimble with words, brighter even than his brothers. But his heart was flayed, a salt tide of hormones surging into the wound. His grades rose and fell spasmodically; he became hostile to authority.
At sixteen, he was diagnosed as hyperactive and prescribed medication, which he sold to other students, since he was already embroiled in a passionate romance with paint thinner.
His exasperated father sent him to work on a country road crew in southeastern Massachusetts for the summer.
Hoyt seemed to thrive on outdoor labor and the community of laughing, cursing, shirtless brutes. He loved the hot hazy air, the exorbitant July foliage, the smell of wet tar, the filth that covered him until the evening shower and headlong collapse into bed.
The advent of August found the crew repaving a minor route near Graynier. One night at a bar, scarfing buffalo wings and brew with his fellows, Hoyt caught the eye of a waitress ten years his senior. She brought over the check, and the other guys grinned in Hoyt’s direction. “The trust fund baby’s buying tonight,” someone said.
The waitress was late on her rent and must have thought the rich boy might leave some gratitude on her dresser if she did him up good, a hope fanned by the fifty dollar bill he threw down on the check.
“Do you have anything smaller?” she asked.
“No.” He didn’t even look her way.
“Well, do you have anything bigger?”
The men guffawed. “Reach in his pocket and find out!”
Hoyt’s face burned redder than his sunburn. Up until then, he had successfully avoided women, still poking the embers of resentment toward his mother. But something, maybe the waitress’ boggy odor, drew him back into the treacherous delta of womanity. Egged on by his cohorts, Hoyt spent the night in her little room above the bar.