The From-Aways (23 page)

Leah

I
wake up with the a/c thrumming loud and a scratchy motel comforter pulled over my head. I can hear someone’s kids, happy and screeching in the parking lot outside. I get up and open the blinds. The kids are chasing each other around the motel sign. The pink neon is faintly flashing:

VACANT
.
VACANT
.
VACANT
.

Last night a girl named Bethany checked me in under the name Leah Loon. I’m supposed to check out at eleven.

Things look misty and a little green out the window. If I went home, returned to Henry on an almost-spring morning, we might be able to go back to what it was like before. He could pretend I’d never heard him say those things or seen him hit Billy and I could pretend to be a good wife who didn’t abandon her husband when he needed her or wrote articles that hurt his job.

I am good at many things, really, I am.

I get back in bed, pull the covers up, and turn on the television.

I try to focus on the nature show, flickering on the screen, but then I start thinking about Henry at home and how he is probably pretty upset. And I don’t want him to be upset, but I need a little time. Time to understand who Henry
actually
is
. Because who was that person at the tracks who said such terrible things and threw such beautiful punches? Could that possibly have been Henry?

I have a sneaking terrible feeling that all these surprises are actually just glimpses of Henry’s Henryness. That these are things I might have learned about him before we got married if we had not done things so quickly. And back at the house, he may be thinking the same thing about me. I can’t bear to go home and find Henry, looking at me, head cocked, disbelieving, thinking: Who are you?

I flip through channels, looking for anything that will hold my attention.

Because if this new Henry is the real one, then I’ll have to say good-bye to
my
Henry and all the old ways I thought about him. I’m not ready to do this. I love my Henry, after all. I married my Henry. This new, real person? He’s an interloper.

I turn off the television and open the drawer next to the bed. The Twilite Motel has room service. I’m about to order some eggs, bacon, juice, when I see they have a drink menu. I can order room-service beer. I can even order room-service cocktails! I order my small feast plus a Bloody Mary. The omelet full of cheddar and apples is good but the Bloody Mary full of horseradish and gin is even better. I phone up Bethany and I order another.

Two Henrys is too much, this room is thirty bucks a night, and Bethany has my credit-card number on file.

I have always wanted to go on a bender.

28

Quinn

I
t’s been three days and no one has seen Leah. Especially not Henry, who’s sitting at
her
desk right now ticking off all the places she’s not. Namely: here, the bar, and my place.
She could only be,
he keeps on saying.
She could only be
.

But what the fuck does that mean?
She could only be
. She’s almost six feet tall and capable of taking down dictation at fifty words a minute. She can hold a half bottle of whiskey and still drive a station wagon. You never know what she’s going to do until she does it, so why the hell does this guy, married to her for life, think she could only be in one of three places?

I almost feel bad for him. In the past days signs have been springing up in front of Henry’s house, Leah’s house, like mushrooms. Big poster boards on stakes that say things like
SAVE
NEVERSINK
PARK
! and
DON
’
T
KILL
THE
CAROUSEL
! and
DON
’
T
FENCE
ME
OUT
!

Office. Bar. Quinn’s. Henry keeps ticking these three places off like he’s the fucking Rain Man. He’s poking through Leah’s papers, looking for clues.

“When I was a kid,” Henry says, “my father would bring us here after taking us out on the boat. My grandfather was editor.” Charley comes out of her office, where she’s been on the phone calling around to see where Leah might be. She hands Henry a frame she’s taken off her office wall. It’s an article from the eighties with a picture of her (so small!) and Henry (even smaller!) holding this long fish in their two sets of hands. The lead says,
THE
BLUES
ARE
RUNNING
! The caption:
Pictured above, Charley and Hank Lynch Jr. with their first catch of the season.

I point to the picture of Charley. “Such a cute kid. Can you believe that’s you?”

“Of course I can, Winters, what sort of dumb-ass question is that?”

“Anything?” Henry says.

Charley says no, and lays a hand on his shoulder. “No one’s seen her, Hen.”

“Maybe she’s in New York,” I say. “I mean, doesn’t she have parents and all?”

“I doubt it,” Henry says, “but I’ll call them later.” He holds his head in his hands.

I get that. Who wants to say,
Hey, your daughter who I married seems to be missing and do you have any idea where I could find her
?

“Just try not to worry so much. I’m sure she’s fine,” Charley says. She clears her throat with a nicotine rattle. “Maybe she just needed some space.”

Needed some space? I give Charley the fisheye. I’ve never heard such tenderhearted bullshit out of her before. Something is up.

“What were you doing there anyway?” Henry says to me.

“The park protest?” I shrug. “Covering a story. Went on an anonymous tip-off.”

“A tip-off,” Henry repeats. “You mean Rosie. You should tell Carter he’ll never change anything if his front line is full of high school space cadets.”

“Hen,” Charley says.

“Are you talking about Rosie?” I say, and I’m on my feet. “You kiss those rich clowns’ asses for a paycheck while they build a mansion on Rosie’s childhood home and you make fun of her for doing something about it?”

Henry shakes his head. “What do you know about any of this?”

“I’ve been living here for almost a year now and my—”

“Exactly,” Henry says. “You’re a fucking flatlander, and if you knew a thing about this town, you’d know houses like these are the only way to get people around here decent jobs. It might,” he says to Charley, “even make it so you don’t have to freeze your ass off on a boat every day of your life just to take care of your family.”

Charley shakes her head. “When you tear down one thing so you can build another, you change a place. You make it new, so it’s not ours anymore. Sure, it’s only a little change, but if Elm Park does it, and the Dorians do it, and you help them . . . I’m saying, all the little pieces of home you’re giving away, they start to add up. And then someday, we’ll look around and think, Whose town is this? None of it will be ours anymore.” Charley pauses. “Hen, you’ve got to stop. I know it’s a good job, but you’ve got to stop.”

Henry sits there looking at his hands for a while. Then he stands up. “I’m going to find Leah,” he says. “I don’t know how you can just sit around like this.” He gets up and slams out the office door.

Charley watches the hinges settle and then thumps the desk with her hand. “He always fucking leaves in the middle!” she says. “Even when we were kids he did that. Left in the middle of the fight before he ran out of things to say.” She picks up a cigarette from her pack and lights it. Mouth full of Marlboro, she says, “I never run out of things to say, and he knows it.”

“Give me one of those,” I say.

“You quit,” Charley says. “I hate mooching quitters.”

“Just one,” I say. “Just one for a lonesome flatlander?”

She snorts, and hands me one. I knock on the glass of the framed article. “You fished?” I say. “I can’t imagine you fishing.”

“Bring me a bluefish and I’ll clean it for you faster than any Deep,” Charley says.

“Is that a rivalry dating back to the days of the ‘lobster wars’?” I say.

“You
sound
like a flatlander when you talk like that,” Charley says. She stubs out her cigarette, looks at the pack, tosses it to me.

“Take these with you,” she says. “It might help.”

“Help with what?” I say.

“Leah’s at the Twilite Motel,” Charley says. “The woman at the desk said a tall lady named Loon checked in two days ago.”

W
HAT A DUMP
. The Twilite Motel’s neon sign is on in the daylight and it hurts to look at it. Rosie has left her yellow plastic sunglasses in the cup holder. I put them on and everything looks a little less April-bright and ugly.

I head for the squat hovel labeled
OFFICE
. There’s a stocky blond girl in a motel-logo shirt leaning on the counter at the desk. The collar of her shirt is half flipped up and there’s a stain on her sleeve. She is drinking a Diet Coke and reading an enormous book. She looks up. She has dark circles under her eyes.

“What are you reading?” I ask.

She flips the pages so they run through her fingers, like it could be anything. “
Anna Karenina
,” she says. “It’s pretty good.”

There are just too many girls to love in this world. “Do you know where I might find a guest of yours, a tall lady with dark hair?” I say.

“Miss Loon? You’ll find her poolside,” she says.

Outside I round the parking lot, pass the motel rooms, and then I see a concrete square surrounded by a chain-link fence. Here is the in-ground pool, absolutely green and surrounded by an optimistic number of chaise longues.

In one of them is Leah. She is dressed in the same muddy jeans I saw her in last as well as an enormous brick-red sweatshirt that says
DOWN
EAST
on it. She has the hood up and is wearing a pair of large black sunglasses, the price tag still dangling from one of the arms. In her hands she’s holding a copy of the
Boothbay Register,
which she seems to be reading, or at least flipping through. In her lap is a box of taffy and on the ground is a quarter-empty bottle of White Horse whiskey.

Apparently the Twilite Motel has a gift shop.

“Hey, Loon!” I shout. Leah looks up at me. She doesn’t seem pleased. She goes back to reading the paper. I open the fence gate and take a chaise next to her. I push up my sunglasses. I’m wearing my mother’s old Irish sweater and I pull my hands into the arms and hold the openings shut. I wiggle down into the chaise and still it’s not comfortable at all. “Are you having a breakdown?” I say. “Or just a bender?”

“Do you know that this establishment does not offer the
Menamon Star
? I gave them a piece of my mind, let me tell you.” She flips the page again. Either she’s not really reading or booze counts as a performance-enhancing drug for journalists. “So I got the
Register
instead, and now I’m thinking I’ll have to go apologize. Because this paper is vastly better than ours. Look at this, they have a world news section. Boothbay is reporting on the economy in China, for Christ sake.”

“But you don’t want to write about stuff like that anyway, do you?” I say.

“I don’t want to write about anything at all,” Leah says. “I quit. My notebook I bequeath to you.”

“Please don’t start bequeathing anything just yet,” I say. “It’s premature and fucking creepy.”

Leah finishes what’s in her glass of whiskey. “You’re right,” she says. “Let’s just say I’m on vacation.”

A car drives by the motel and the chain-link fence around the pool rattles. The concrete is bumpy and stained in spots and the chaises are yellowing and brittle. The bare branches of the trees all around us wave back and forth as a wind blows hard; leaves from the parking lot blow through the fence. They land on the surface of the pool, which, despite its color, still smells of chlorine.

“This is some pleasure spot,” I say. “When are you coming back?”

“Oh, I don’t think I will,” Leah says.

“I think you’re out of vacation days.”