The From-Aways (38 page)

“Not really,” I say. “But I think I can tell them some good things. It would have been better if I could have brought that time capsule. I thought I’d be a real hero if I could do that.”

“Heroes are overrated,” Leah says.

Down the way, the fisherman says, “Goddammit.” He’s reeled in his line once more and at the end of it is the same ugly fish all over again. Its bug eyes are embarrassed. Its fins are flapping slowly.

“It’s the same damn fish!” I say. I look at Leah, whose mouth is open. Then she starts laughing, a slow build, until her eyes are squeezed shut and tears are running down her face and almost no sound is coming out. She lets herself fall onto her back, on the blanket, her laugh honking out again, hysterical. And I’m laughing too. “Of all the lousy-luck fish,” I say, and we’ve just about got ourselves back together when the fisherman hurls the sea robin back into the ocean, a little harder than he has to, shouting, “I never want to see your sorry face again!,” which sets us off all over again.

Leah pulls herself together first. “Oh,” she sighs. “I’m going to miss you. Hurry back and bring me a souvenir. Some key-lime pie. A seashell.”

“I will,” I say. “I’ll send you a postcard. And hold my job for me. I don’t want to come back and find out Charley’s eloped with the printer and let the paper fall to pieces.”

“You got it,” Leah says, staring up at the sky. “Hey, Woodward,” she says. “Don’t leave me alone on the beat too long, okay? There’s a lot of news in this town.”

“Okay,” I say.

We reach our arms across and shake on it.

49

Leah

I
am sitting on the front steps, picking dead leaves from the hydrangea while Henry packs up his truck. He opens all the compartments and moves around the things inside them. He’s wearing a thin gray thermal with the sleeves pushed up and tan Carhartt workpants. His beard is neat and already he is a little tan. I imagine him rolling up to the city and I feel a pang. I imagine him parking his truck, taking up two parallel spots, and when he climbs out into the street, I can see him frowning at the two parking meters. I imagine a girl there, a girl like I used to be. She will be busy with her purse and her phone and her boss, but she will spot this Henry, this Hank Jr., all the same. She will stop and watch him. She will admire his easy loping stride as he walks the length of his truck and feeds quarters into both parking meters. It would start there, all over again.

Henry’s got one duffel bag in the well of the passenger side. The seat he’s left empty, in case I change my mind. But I won’t, because I know this is something he has to do without me. That he has to go and then come back for it to really mean something. In the bed of the truck he has a bunch of work stuff. A pair of pruning shears he’s partial to. Some plans rolled up in a plastic tube. He pulls a blue tarp over everything and bungee-cords it tight.

Henry is leaving me the lobster pot to drive while he’s away. This morning we brought our coffees out to the garage and he showed me the tool kit in the trunk, walked me through which tools are used to cure which rumbles, what clankings. Staring at all that stuff under the hood, I watched his hands move over the tools, pointing at the engine and explaining things like he truly believed I would be able to fix them. Everything smelled like cool morning air and coffee and motor oil. The sun was shining in the garage door but inside it was dim and I thought about trying to pull Henry down in the backseat. Having sex with him right there. But I did not. That would not have been enough to make him stay.

Henry examines two different reels of gardener’s wire, trying to decide which to take and which to leave. He throws both in.

“I called my parents,” I say. “They said you should come over for dinner if you want to.”

“That’s nice,” Henry says. “I will.”

“You got everything?” I say.

“Just one more bag,” Henry says. He lays a hand on my shoulder as he angles past me, back into the house. He’s packed just two bags, but he’s bringing the good pruning shears. Henry could live for a year with nothing but snacks and those pruning shears.

I wonder if I will ever go back there, for good. I try to imagine putting on high heels and rushing to catch the express train. Watching it pull away without me because I wasn’t aggressive enough on the stairs, and saying “Shit!” loud enough for everyone on the platform to hear. I try to imagine sitting at my desk at the
Gazette,
covering the low public opinion polls after the mayor institutes a new cigarette tax, and working on a retrospective comparing this year’s Whitney Biennial to the past twenty. I imagine going out with the other writers after work and hashing through all the office gossip. Who didn’t even get considered for the section-editor job. Whose piece got killed for suspicious reasons. And I can imagine myself doing a very good job pretending to be interested in all this, but wondering why the bar we were in didn’t have a jukebox, and if it did, why I couldn’t find Patsy Cline, or Carter Marks, in it. Why there wasn’t a red-haired girl banging on the side of that jukebox, saying,
Hey, Leah, take a look inside this machine. Do you know this machine ate my quarter?
Just so I would give her another one. Just so she could play Guns N’ Roses. Just so she could dance with her girl.

Coming up here as a newlywed, I got confused, I think. Between my husband and this town, maybe I only had enough resources to fall in love with one. To make one fall in love with me. I was so worried about Niagara Falls, but somehow it didn’t occur to me to worry about the pull of an entire ocean.

It’s not too late for us, I don’t think. We’re just good at reinventing wheels. At taking the long way. A mulligan couple. We are not good at many things, but we try to be. We are very good at continuing to try.

Henry comes outside and hefts his bag into the cab of the truck. “I’m happy to move the bags to the back,” he tells me. “If you wanna ride along.”

I say, “Send me a postcard. One with the Empire State Building on it.”

Henry nods, rubs his beard.

“Come here,” I say. I stand up on the steps and he comes. He puts his arms around me. He kisses my face. My cheeks, my forehead, my nose.

“Bye,” he says.

“Come back soon,” I say. He has his hands on my shoulders, my Henry. He kisses me once more, properly. He gets into his truck. He turns the engine over and I listen to the tires breaking up the clamshells. At the end of the driveway Henry honks and waves. I wave back at him.

A
ROUND FIVE O
’
CLOCK
, I am reading someone’s old paperback, sunk into the couch in the living room, nursing a whiskey. I hear the front door swinging open. So soon, and already Henry has come back to me, I think.

I leap up and go to the kitchen, not running quite, but not walking either.

Charley is putting her keys down on the counter. She is carrying a six-pack. “I’m inviting myself over,” she says. “Where would you like to entertain me?”

I gesture at the house. Anywhere. The whole thing.

“All right, then,” Charley says. She marches into the living room and puts the beers on the coffee table.

We open the windows. There’s a thrumming buzz of insects just born or waking up for the season, and the crash of the waves behind it. I sit cross-legged on the braided rug. Charley packs some new Marlboros against the flat of her palm, opens them, and peels back the foil. She opens some cupboard I’ve never noticed before, from which she pulls out a big turquoise ashtray shaped like a seashell. Then she sprawls, taking up the whole couch.

“I quit, really,” she says as she lights one. “I’m just making an exception for tonight.”

“Me too,” I say as I do the same.

Charley and I drink our beers and put out stub after stub and she tells me about her romance with the printer, and I tell her about Quinn going to Florida, and we both place bets on how long it will take Henry to come back. Charley bets too high, too boldly,
two days, max,
and I know she is trying to cheer me up. Sooner or later we start to plan things for the paper, hammering out what to do this week and then the next and how it will be when Quinn gets back. What we will all do then.

When Charley heads out, around eleven, she leans heavily against the doorframe and says, “I better see you Monday at nine, Lynch. Don’t think I’m going to start doing you any favors.”

50

Quinn

L
ooking at Maine’s rear end in the car mirror shouldn’t make you lonesome for it. Not if your genes are wired right. But on my way out I counted doughnut shops (six), men in sleeveless shirts (three), elbows out the driver’s side (a dozen), and about a million custom Red Sox license plates (
BOSXFN
,
SOXNTN
,
WKDSOX
), and it gave me a true pang.

I’m headed down south. My plan is to stay in Florida just long enough to piss off Rosie’s ghost. Seeing her parents should be plenty, but I figure I’ll do things right. Because if I hang around long enough, if I drink frozen virgin cocktails and wear long shorts to the beach, if I track down Hemingway’s five-toed cats and mail Leah postcards, if I bird-watch pelicans and flirt with girls at NASCAR races, Rosie will have no choice but to start haunting me.

That’s all I can hope for really. For Rosie to haunt me just a little bit. I imagine her tailing my car even now, complaining all the way. Saying,
What do you think you’re doing, exactly? Do you know how interminable a drive this is?
Have you even brought any provisions?

I imagine her at every rest stop. Telling me not to buy cigarettes, please, and do I really think I’m going to be able to eat that and drive at the same time?

I’m a big fan of hauntings, as it turns out. I would take Marta’s
please
to heart and let her tie her ghostly twine around Carter and me all over again, if I could.

That crafty wench. I miss her. She would have loved a Florida road trip.

My family portrait: There’s me in the center, seemingly a random girl, alone in the frame. But squint. There behind me, all silvery like spider floss? Marta. Next to her is Rosie, loving how she looks all shimmery. And in the corner, just barely edging into the frame, is a guitar player’s miraculously gnarled hand. Carter, sneaking his way in.

Driving down the coast like this, you see a lot of places. You look at them and you think: Maybe I could live here. Maybe I could have a pickup truck and a Rottweiler puppy, a studio apartment with a king-sized bed, a colonial home with chickens in the yard, a double-wide with satellite TV. You think maybe I could Live Right Here Forever.

I could pick any of these places if I wanted. No one’s going to stop me from settling in Massachusetts, or West Virginia, or Florida, and starting all over again. But whenever I think about going someplace new, I think about Carter. I think about that little room with the lilac blanket that looked like it had been waiting for years.

I’ve blown out of towns enough to know what normal missing feels like, and what it means to have a magnet strapped to your back. Waves know what that’s like. To be drawn out, and to be called back home again.

I would place a bet, a big one, that Menamon, Maine, will be seeing my sorry face again.

If you hop a tall fence, electric in your mind

You’ll see Saint Rosie of the high watts, Saint Rosalind.

If you find a tin box, buried, lost to time

Might be Our Lady of Penobscot’s, Saint Rosalind’s.

51