The From-Aways (28 page)

“Oh, fuck you, Carter,” I say, but if I’m honest, all I want is for him to keep pinning me to him here in the water, snapping turtles lurking beneath us in this lake in a yard that feels like home for no goddamn reason at all. And so I just keep still.

Carter clasps the back of my head and presses me closer, my head against his chest so I can hear all his organs bumping around in there.

He says, “I got you. You know that? You might not need it now, but I do, I’ve got you by the gills. Whether you like it or not.”

33

Leah

W
e are in our backyard, under one of the large pines, a blanket of needles beneath our feet. Henry is eating a bowl of oatmeal and I am drinking coffee, keeping him company before he heads out to the
casa grande
.

Henry moves his spoon around, stares into his bowl. “How’s work?” he says. And I know it’s not Charley or the paper he’s asking about. It’s me. How I’m doing, feeling about all this. Because I told Quinn and Charley I couldn’t work on the piece, and since then have been sulking around the house. Sulking around the office. I did the right thing but I am not a good sport. Our peace is uneasy.

Quinn and Charley were pissed.
You realize how idiotic this is?
they said to me.
We’re running the story one way or the other. What difference does it make whether you help or not?
But to Henry, it makes a big difference whether it’s his wife’s name in that byline or not. Its presence, a condemnation. Its absence, a declaration of solidarity.

Henry was so happy when I told him I’d done it. He made dinner. He grilled, and through the screen door I could hear him singing a little as he flipped the blackening vegetables with a metal spatula. As he set the table that night, he laid the plates on the table with such enthusiasm that he shattered one, the white seam of china inside the blue enamel visible as a vein.

But his happiness is wearing thin. Not only because I have been sulking but because he is bracing himself for the article and what it will mean for the construction. He’s working long hours to get as many saplings and plantings in as he can. It’s as if he thinks he’ll be able to keep this job if only he can water in enough boxwoods.

So, how is work? While Quinn and Charley have been researching and fact-checking for the Dorian piece, I’ve been writing the majority of the paper:
LOBSTERMEN
PETITION
FOR
MINIMUM
CATCH
SIZE
DECREASE
!
LOCAL
4-
H
TO
SPONSOR
CAKE
WALK
!
ALBINO
DEER
SPOTTED
NEAR
SOUTH
FORK
,
AGAIN
! While I find myself cropping photos of lemon meringue pies and coming up with terrible puns to keep myself amused, Quinn and Charley are calling up state offices about land deeds. Calling up banks to confirm the accounts are what we think they are. Looking into the Dorians’ past real estate records, and requesting anything that’s on file.

“Work is fine,” I say. “ ‘Red Tide: Is It Worse Than Ever?’ ”

“Is it?” Henry says.

“Experts disagree,” I say. “It’s highly controversial. How is your work?”

Henry nods. “Good,” he says. “We put in three Japanese maples yesterday.”

I nod. We sit there quietly. We have never had trouble finding things to say to each other before. I sip my coffee.

A pinecone drops from the branches above us. Henry kicks it over to me. “When I was a kid we used to collect these,” he says. “My mother told us there was magic in them, and if we let them dry long enough, we could release it. At Christmas we chucked them in the fire and the flames changed from orange to yellow-green. Mom told us that was the magic being released and we could wish on it.” He stirs his oatmeal around with the spoon and it steams.

“So they
were
magic?” I say.

“Definitely,” Henry says. “All my wishes came true.”

I pick up the pinecone and finger its pieces. This is the kind of story that made me fall in love with Henry. All the haunted carousels and the fishermen’s weddings and magic pinecones. “What was it really?” I ask. “That made the fire change colors?”

“What, you don’t think it was magic?” Henry says. He thumps me on the leg. “C’mon,” he says.

I shrug.

“Borax,” he says. “Laundry detergent basically. You have to soak them in it, then let them dry out again. My mother used to soak them when we weren’t looking.”

Of course she did.

I worry that all the old saints like June are being driven out of this place. The kind mothers, the stoic fathers, the fishermen, and the local legends from Henry’s stories—I fear I have showed up just in time to catch their last days. Maybe I’m too romantic. Maybe that’s just what a story is. The sort of thing you have to understand on its own terms, a stretched truth and not a real thing at all. Maybe if you believe in the real-bodied truth of such things or places you are a fool.

Everyone needs to grow up sometime. Maybe even towns need to grow up. To stop imagining what they want to be, and just get down to the dirty business of what will keep them alive.

Henry gets up and offers to take my mug to the dishwasher. I give it to him.

“I’m headed out,” he says. “You want a ride?”

“Sure,” I say, and follow him inside. Even if I did help write the piece, it probably wouldn’t be enough for all those old blinking ghosts to stick around.

34

Quinn

R
osie clomps downstairs to meet me, a Polaroid postcard in her hand. “I haven’t sent them one in more than a week,” she says. “If I stop now they’ll think it was a phase.” Rosie’s hair is brushed out and hanging down. She’s wearing one pair of enormous silver hoops. I think she’s lost weight these past weeks.

I grab her hips. “You’re not eating enough,” I say. “Or sleeping enough.” She’s out late every night with those guys, plotting. Even Jethro has been off and on at the Uncle.

Rosie hikes up her pants. “I’ll sleep tonight, after the benefit concert,” she says. Her pants slide right back down to where they were. If Rosie’s ass starts shrinking I swear I’ll cry.

As we walk to the car I say, “Listen, I’m going to park the car over behind the post office so that if a bunch of people try to leave the green at once, we won’t be stuck.”

“Why would that happen?” Rosie says. She opens the passenger door. Stands there, her chin tucked to her neck, putting up her hair, one wrist flying around, looping the rubber band.

“If the police come,” I say. “So if they come, don’t do anything stupid. Just book it over there, okay?”

“Quinn,” Rosie says. “If the police come I’m letting them take me.” Like this is obvious.

I don’t think they make arrests for performing folk music without a permit, but it’s not the police I’m worried about. It’s what the rest of those men might do if the police try to shut the show down. “Rosie,” I say, “if the police come, please let the other guys deal with it, okay?”

She looks at me like I’m a moron. “But then what would be the point, Quinn?” We’re talking over the hood of the car, each of us on a side. “I’ve worked just as hard as they have and I’m not going to let them or you keep me cheerleading and painting banners. When this is through I want everyone to know I was a part of this. A big part. So I’m not going to let you whisk me out of there like some kid.”

But she is a kid. And I know she’s worked hard but sometimes I wish she’d be thinking about me instead of about Carter and his Rebel Seven. Thinking about the two of us instead of a busted old carousel and this shitty town. “Just get out of there if things go wrong,” I say. “Okay?”

“Arrrrrr!” She makes a frustrated noise. “Why can’t you understand anything ever!” She slams the car door. Why can’t I understand anything ever? This is a damn good question. I swear I once yelled that exact same thing at my mother. I think I was nineteen. Yes, I think it was when I was Rosie’s age.

So I pull a Marta. “Fine,” I say. “Fine. Let’s just go.”

“No,” Rosie says, shaking her finger at me now, like I’m going to be learned a lesson. “No, we’re going to walk there. Let’s take Kenamon Road.” She waves the stamped Polaroid she was going to mail to her parents out in the air between us. “You’ll get it,” she says. “I’m going to show you and then you’re going to get it.”

We start off down Main Street like normal. Wobbly shrubs full of yellow blooms have appeared in people’s yards. There is green climbing everywhere, vines sneaking up around telephone posts. The power lines are strung low, sweeping from post to post. It makes me nervous when the breeze picks up and they sway.

Rosie leads me onto Kenamon Road. “Kenamon?” I say. “Is that like a street planner’s typo?”

“It’s a different version of the same word,” Rosie says. “
Menamon
is Penobscot for somebody’s son.
Kenamon
means your son.”

The whole street is a leafy tunnel of green. The air feels cool, and all the little houses here with their weird slanting porches have the strangest things out on the lawns. Junk, Henry would say.

“It looks just like my street did,” Rosie said. I’m looking around and it is clear, yes, this is the sort of place where you can grow a Rosie. Rosie takes my hand. The porches all have columns and the paint peels off them in strips, because sea air, even at a distance, will strip away your best intentions. There are chairs on these porches. Lots of them. Like whole families are prepared to sit together for long stretches of time here.

These houses, they are so sweet. It’s not like where I grew up with Marta. Not at all. The road is not paved and Rosie keeps getting pebbles in her sandals. She stops, leans against me, and flicks her ankle around. On one porch there’s a well-worn easy chair full of pillows pointing directly at another easy chair across the street, ready for a cross-road conversation. The people who live here are not rich enough to secrete their yards and lives from one another, like they do up in Elm Park, where privacy is part of the pitch. It feels like
Swiss Family Robinson.
I see a row of dead horseshoe crabs lined up on a set of steps. A rusted old oven spills blooms on a lawn. There’s one yard so covered in child-sized sports equipment it seems the house’s children must have a league, a dozen players at least. A brown rabbit scurries under a bush. I smell a barbecue grill. I hear guitar music from somewhere. Maybe it’s Carter, warming up with an amp, broadcasting a pied piper’s call to join him on the green.

I wonder what I would have been like if I’d grown up here. Different for sure. After all, Carter did, Rosie did, and they seem to get some things that I just don’t. They trust in things I can’t imagine.

“How could anyone bulldoze these?” Rosie says. “Do you see?”

She’s right, and I think they’re bastards. But you’ve got to think about the truth sometimes too, so I say, as quietly and nicely as I can, “And that sucks. But they paid for them, Rosie. You know? It doesn’t make it right, but they paid for those houses.”

“Yeah”—Rosie shrugs—“but we thought they were going to live in them.” She leans on me again, slipping pebbles from her sandal.

Rosie says, “So this is what it was like. Down on Penobscot, where I grew up. And now they’ve built that thing and poured concrete all over my magic seashell and my letter to my future self and my lock of hair. And my parents are gone and I wouldn’t mind so much if that house was at least still there, even if I couldn’t live in it. Then I could at least still walk by and remember how nice things used to be. But it’s just gone, and the whole town will be gone soon too. It’ll all become something different and the something different will be exactly like everywhere else. And if that happens, I want no part in this.”

“I thought you wanted out of here,” I say. “To be in a band and tour the world.”

“I used to think so,” Rosie says. “But it hasn’t seemed so bad lately. What with Carter, and you, and all this stuff happening? It’s not like before. I want things to stay the way they are right now.”