The Taker (17 page)

The days passed in dreary sameness. My father kept me employed every minute, from when we woke in the semidarkness of a new day until I laid my head on my pillow at night. Sleep brought no respite, for I frequently dreamed of Sophia: rising from the frigid Allagash, standing like a plume of smoke in the graveyard, circling my house in the darkness as a restless ghost. Perhaps her ghost found some comfort in my suffering.

I knelt at my bedside before retiring in the evening and wondered if it would be blasphemous to ask God to extricate me from this predicament. If banishment was to be my punishment for my grievous sins, oughtn’t I accept my lot rather than petition God for clemency?

My sisters grew sad as winter waned and the day of my leaving grew closer. They spent as much time as they could with me, not speaking of my departure, but sitting with me, hugging me, pressing their foreheads against mine. They worked furiously with my mother to mend my wardrobe, not wanting to send me away looking so rustic, and even made me a new cloak of last year’s spring wool.

The inevitable would not be delayed forever, and one night, when the thaw had settled on the valley in earnest, my father told me that the arrangements had been made. I would leave the next Sunday on the provisioner’s wagon, escorted by the town tutor, Titus Abercrombie. From Presque Isle, we would ride in a coach to Camden, then travel by ship to Boston. The family’s one trunk was packed with my belongings and left by the door, a paper with the name of all my contacts—ship’s captain, mother superior of the convent—sewn into the lining of a petticoat along with all the coin my family could spare. My sisters spent that night huddled against me in our wide bed, unwilling to let go of me.

“I don’t understand why Father is sending you away.”

“He wouldn’t listen, no matter how we begged.”

“We shall miss you.”

“Will we see you again? Will you come to our weddings? Will you stand beside us at our babies’ baptisms?” Their questions brought tears to my eyes, too. I kissed them gently on their foreheads and held them tightly.

“Of course you’ll see me again. I’ll only be gone a short while. No more tears, eh? So much will happen while I’m away, you won’t notice my absence at all.” They cried out in denial, promising to think of me every day. I let them cry themselves to exhaustion before lying awake the rest of the night, trying to find peace in the last few hours before dawn.

When we arrived, the drivers were hitching the horses to the wagons, now empty, having delivered loads of dry goods—milled flour, bolts of fabric, fine needles, tea—to the Watfords’ store the day before. Three large wagons, and six brawny men made the last adjustments to the harnesses and doubletrees, and watched sheepishly as my family huddled around me. My sisters and mother were pressed tight, tears streaming down their faces. My father and Nevin stood to the side, gruff and emotionless.

One of the drivers coughed, reluctant to impose but anxious to depart on schedule.

“Time to be going,” Father said. “Into the carriage with you, girls.” He waited while my mother embraced me a last time, as Nevin helped the driver load my trunk into the empty wagon bed. My father turned to me.

“This is your opportunity to redeem yourself, Lanore. God has seen fit to give you another chance, so do not be frivolous with his beneficence. Your mother and I will pray that you safely deliver your child, but do not think about refusing the sisters’ assistance in placing the baby with another family. I am ordering you to not keep the child, and if you see fit not to heed my orders, you would do just as well
to not return to St. Andrew. If you do not transform yourself into a proper God-fearing Christian, I wish never to hear from you again.”

Stunned, I went to the wagon, where Titus waited for me. With a chivalrous dignity, he helped me climb onto the bench next to him. “My dear, it is my pleasure to chaperone you as far as Camden,” he said in the stiffly formal, though friendly, tone I’d heard Jonathan mock. I didn’t know Titus well as I’d never taken a class with him and only had stories from Jonathan by which to judge him. He was an older gentleman, on the delicate side, with the constitution of a scholar: bandy arms and legs, a little potbelly that had grown over the years. He’d lost most of his hair, and what was left had turned gray, leaving his bald pate with a wispy fringe in the style of Benjamin Franklin. He was one of the few men in town to wear spectacles, a spindly pair of wire frames that made his pale gray eyes seem smaller and even more watery. Titus spent the summer months in Camden tutoring his cousin’s children in Latin in exchange for his keep, since all of his students in St. Andrew worked on their family farms until school began in the fall.

As the wagon lurched to life, I cried copiously, returning my mother’s and sisters’ frantic waves through my tears.

As the town rolled by, the aching in my throat and heart intensified as I watched the only place I’d ever known shrink into the distance and said good-bye to everyone—and to the only one—I’d ever loved.

THIRTEEN

F
ORT
K
ENT
R
OAD, PRESENT DAY

T
he border crossing is not far away. Although Luke hasn’t driven there in years, not since taking the family on some half-assed vacation to the Appalachian Range trail, he’s pretty sure he can still find it without looking at a map. He takes back roads, which are slower and will take longer, but he figures they’ll be less likely to run into any state troopers or other police officers; there are too few of them to watch secondary roads or bother with small towns. The highway, that’s where the trouble is, speeders and overweight long-haul truckers, the money offenses that will bring in revenue for the state.

He grips the steering wheel in the dead center and steers with one hand. His passenger stares doggedly at the road in front of them, biting her lower lip. She looks even more like a teenager, burying concern under a veil of impatience.

“So,” he says, trying to warm the air between them. “Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Be my guest.”

“Well, can you tell me what it feels like to be—what you are?”

“It doesn’t feel like anything special.”

“Really?”

She leans back and puts her elbow on the armrest. “I don’t feel any different, not that I can remember anyway. I don’t notice change on a day-to-day basis and not in the ways that matter. It’s not like I have superpowers or anything. I’m not a character in a comic book.” She smiles to let him know that she doesn’t think it’s a stupid question.

“That thing you did in the ER, cutting yourself? Did that hurt?”

“Not really. The pain is very minor, just feels sort of dull, maybe like how surgery would feel if you got a low dose of anesthesia. Only the person who made you like this can hurt you, can really make you feel pain. It’s been so long I’ve forgotten what pain feels like—almost.”

“A
person
did this to you?” Luke asks, incredulous. “How did it happen?”

“I’m getting to that,” she answers, still smiling. “Be patient.”

The revelation that this miracle is man-made almost makes Luke dizzy, like suddenly looking at a landscape from a different perspective. It seems all the more impossible—more the chance that this is a deception by a pretty and manipulative young woman.

“Anyway,” she continues, “I’m pretty much the same as I was before except I don’t really get tired. I don’t get exhausted physically. But I get emotionally tired.”

“Depressed?”

“Yeah, that’s probably what it is. There are a lot of reasons, I suppose. Mostly, it just gets to me every once in a while, the futility of my life, having no choice but to live through every day, day after day. What is the point of enduring all this time alone, I wonder, except to make me suffer, to be reminded of the bad things I’ve done or the way I might have treated people? It’s not like I can do anything about it. I can’t go back in time and undo the mistakes I’ve made.”

This is not the answer he expected. He repositions his hand on the wheel while it vibrates hard in his palm as they travel over a rough patch of macadam. “Do you want me to prescribe something for you?”

She laughs. “Antidepressants, you mean? I don’t think it would do much good.”

“Medications have no effect on you?”

“Let’s just say I’ve built up a pretty high tolerance.” She shifts away from him now, facing the window. “Obliteration is the only way out of your head, sometimes.”

“Obliteration—you mean alcohol? Drugs?”

“Can we stop talking about this?” Her voice wavers at the end.

“Sure. Are you hungry? It’s probably been a while since you’ve eaten … Want to stop for a bite? There’s a place that makes good doughnuts over near Fort Kent …”

She shakes her head noncommittally. “I’m never hungry anymore. I can go for weeks before I think about eating. Or drinking, for that matter.”

“And what about sleeping? Do you want to take a nap?”

“Don’t sleep much, either. I just forget about it. After all, the best part of sleeping is having someone next to you, isn’t it? A warm body, a heavy weight leaning against you. It’s very comforting, don’t you think? How your breathing falls into a rhythm together, gets synchronized. It’s heavenly.” Did that mean there hadn’t been a man in her bed in a while? Luke wondered. Then what of the dead man in the morgue, the mussed sheets at the cabin—what did it all mean? Or maybe she was playing him, covering up what she is really like.

“Do you miss having your wife with you in bed?” she asks, after a beat, prodding him.

Of course he did, even though his ex-wife had been a light, restless sleeper and frequently jolted him awake when she tried to get comfortable or acted out in a dream. By the same token, he loved seeing her asleep in their bed when he came home from a late evening at the hospital, her long, elegant body draped by the covers, all gently rising
and falling curves. The crush of golden hair looped about her head, her mouth slightly open; there was something about seeing her, unaware, that made her beautiful to him, the memory of those intimate scenes forcing a knot to rise in his throat. That is too much to confide to a stranger, his loneliness and regret, so he says nothing.

“How long has she been gone? Your wife?” Lanny asks.

He shrugs. “Nearly a year now. She’s going to marry her childhood sweetheart. She moved back to Michigan. Took our two daughters.”

“That’s—terrible. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t waste your sympathy on me. It sounds as though you’re dealing with something much, much worse.” He has that feeling again, the same one he had outside the morgue, disorientation at the clash of her story with the world as he knows it. How could she possibly be telling the truth?

Just then, he thinks he sees the flash of a black-and-white patrol car in the rearview mirror as he makes a right turn. Had it been following them the whole time, Luke wonders, and he hadn’t noticed? Could the police be after them? The thought carries a special kind of discomfort for a man who has never been in trouble with the law.

“What is it?” Lanny asks suddenly, straightening up. “Something’s happened, I can tell by the look on your face.”

Luke keeps his eye on the rearview mirror. “Take it easy. I don’t want you to be alarmed, but I think we’re being followed.”

PART II

FOURTEEN