The From-Aways (19 page)

I say, “Sure they will,” because I’m reading the
Gazette,
which features a small but front-page story by a woman I was interns with. It’s about a UN delegates meeting taking place in the city. It seems pretty thin to me. For front page? Come on.

“Why! Why will they want nasturtiums?” Henry says. He throws up his hands and stares at me, boggle-eyed. I imagine a
Menamon Star
front pager:
LOCAL
MAN
DRIVEN
TO
MADNESS
BY
NASTURTIUMS
.

I
AM HAVING
a dream in which Henry shows his landscaping plans to the Dorians, who in the dream are played by my parents. The sound of ironing wakes me, the hiss of its pass. I open my eyes. The light is dim and blue, and Henry, showered already, is wearing nice pants and gold-toe socks and a sleeveless undershirt, his face too close to a white button-down shirt as he passes the iron over it. He has shaved, and I can smell the almond cream that will make his cheeks smooth for all of an hour. His jaw is squarely set with a determination that is sweet: he uses the iron like it’s a spade. Like he can dig the wrinkles from his shirt. I wish he wouldn’t have to put the button-down over his undershirt. He looks so nice as he is.

I close my eyes. The dream blips, trying and failing to come back. No, the Dorians will not be my parents masquerading under another name.
Surprise! Here we are; we’ve bought a summer house to be near you!
No. They would not do that. It is six o’clock on a Sunday in New York right now. My mother is sleeping, shiny under the eyes with cream, her décolletage smelling of lilacs. She’s a nighttime moisturizer. She has a miniature radio near her bed and listens to it through one earpiece as she sleeps. Never music, usually late-night talk radio. In the darkness, all these late-night callers are phoning in and whispering in my mother’s ear. She says it helps her sleep. I asked her once,
Doesn’t that give you strange dreams?
She said,
What dreams
?

My father is likely awake and looking through the paper right now. He’ll be wearing a bright African-print robe purchased at one safari resort or another, the waist cinched around his stomach, no longer as flat as it was in his tennis-playing days. He’ll be quietly exclaiming over the idiocy of the paper, both the events that have transpired and the people who have chronicled them.
Are you kidding me
? he’ll be saying, looking around to see if there’s anyone to elaborate for. Then, returning to his paper,
You’ve got to be kidding me
.

I open my eyes again. “Morning,” Henry says. “The Dorians come today.” As if I didn’t know.

“I had a dream about nasturtiums,” I lie. “The Dorians said they wanted you to rip them all up.”

A
T THE SITE
I try hard to remember that I must not call the house the
casa grande
while the Dorians are here. The property map lies on Henry’s truck hood and he traces the route he will take the Dorians along to view the landscaping plans. It is hard to imagine what the Dorians will see when they arrive. What I see is a hulking monstrosity of wood beams on a dirty concrete foundation. The builder is inspecting his building. The electricians are taping wires that seemed conspicuously exposed to the spring damp. Everyone is doing his job. I pace about. Today my job is to wait and then to smile and be kind so the Dorians see that a city person can live in Menamon too.

“Hey, Leah,” Batman calls. He is sitting on some lumber, his hair lying neat over his blue anorak, his hands perfectly still. Batman knows how to wait. “Leah,” he says, “if you keep pacing we won’t have to till that land.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Leah, it’s okay.” He smiles, and it is such a good smile. I wonder who the person is that Batman loves the best.

There is murmuring from the men, and when I turn an enormous black car is wending its way toward us. Henry’s body goes rigid, tall, like a soldier’s, and again I anticipate my parents climbing out of the car. Of course this is ridiculous, but I feel a slow-creeping panic all the same. What would they think, seeing me like this? Here I am with my pant cuffs dragging in the mud, on a small-town beat where taxidermy constitutes big news, my hair going wild, the little pieces around my forehead astray.

The SUV parks and the car door opens. A man steps down, gives a quick wave and walks around to the other side of the car. He opens the door for his wife. No, these are not my parents. The Dorians are not like my parents at all. In fact, they are young. They are my and Henry’s age.

As if rehearsed, Alex Dorian goes to speak with Henry and the builder and Elena Dorian walks over and kisses me on both cheeks. She smells womanly, her perfume better suited for someone two generations older than her. Than us. “Hello,” Elena Dorian says. “You must be Leah.”

“Yes,” I say. “So nice to finally meet you.”

Mr. Dorian is clapping Henry on the back. He is a peer I never could have dreamed for Henry. When I first met Henry I knew he was not like the boys in New York with their vodka tonics and smartphones and cologne, but the way he is with Alex Dorian troubles me. Before, he was Henry, by a bonfire at my parents’ country house, laughing, baring his snaggletooth, falling off a log over something someone had said. Henry, eating a breakfast sandwich so intently you’d think it’d save his life. Henry in soft pajamas, grumbling in his sleep and radiating heat like a furnace. I sensed it when I first met him, and knew it later, when he grabbed my ass and pulled me to him, what kind of man he was. That his were hands that really knew how to do things. They were decisive and hard and for once I knew it would stick, my love. It had been a too slippery a thing for so long, with other men. But Henry was the sort of man who had nooks and spaces all through him where I could squirrel my love away. And I didn’t bother remembering any of the hiding spots. I just stashed it there, in him, again and again.

Alex Dorian laughs at something Henry has said, smacks his thigh, and Henry winks at him. I wonder about the reserves I’d tucked away. I suddenly feel that I would like to open up a few. Just to get us through this dark season, with the days still short and Henry getting more or less like himself, I am not sure which. Henry laughs a laugh deeper than normal and points a finger at Mr. Dorian, saying something about his car. Mr. Dorian puts his hands up in the air and chuckles.
Mea culpa! Mea culpa!

As Henry is chuckling next to Alex Dorian I know he is imagining them going out for drinks together, talking about additions and upkeep, being friends. Henry does not want to drink beers with the guys from the docks, the boys he grew up with. Henry’s mind is full of this new Menamon with nice houses and stable jobs for everyone. He wants people to see how much better things could be. Better than snooping neighbors and crumbling barns and drunk cousins and dangerous jobs that barely pay the bills.

But this thing that Henry is trying for? It’s impossible. I say this not as his wife, but as a newspaperwoman. If people let it, this town will change, and not in the ways Henry wants it to. When I wrote for the city section, I saw it happen again and again. The Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy. Places don’t get better for the people already in them; they change so new people want to live there and then the old people have to scatter. It’s just the truth. And, because I am my parents’ daughter, I also have this gruesome understanding: no matter how many attaboys pass between the Dorians and Henry, he will always be their employee and not their friend.

Of course, there’s no way to tell Henry any of this without sounding like a condescending, know-nothing From-Away. So I don’t. So here is Henry, changing before my eyes.

Where is that love I tucked behind your ear last winter? Where is the store I left between your ribs?

Elena Dorian comes over to chat with me. “Look at it! It will be so wonderful,” she says as she gestures at the skeleton of the house. I know she is seeing something there but it is beyond my imagination what it might be. I think of my own house, worn smooth from care and rubbing. It is nothing like the
casa grande.
I wonder, if Henry had the option of swapping this house for our own, would he do it?

“It will be stunning,” I say.
Stunning
. A word I have not used since I left New York.

Henry says, “Mind if I drive your car, Alex? I’d like to take you on a tour of the grounds.”

We bump along the road and it is dim inside this large dark car. The leather seats are so smooth I fear I will slide along the bench to Elena. She is petite and compact. She has long dark hair slicked neatly back and fastened with a tortoiseshell barrette. She has on a black sweater over dark and tailored jeans, large gold earrings, and a string of red beads. My legs do not neatly cross behind the passenger seat. Instead I am folded up at all angles, trapped in this close space, the smell of Elena’s perfume heady and intimate.

“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

C
arter’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!