Dead Level (34 page)

So it was Hodell who’d come floating down the stream at us, during that first flood. Bob pulled a chair out, or someone did.

“Hooper took Hodell’s clothes for himself, left the tourist for dead. His name’s Harold Brautigan, by the way,” Bob added. “And he’s right down the hall here, getting over a skull fracture and some birdshot to his arm.”

“What I’m wondering,” said Ellie quietly, “is why the blast wasn’t bigger. I mean, a propane explosion—”

“Uh, yeah,” Sam put in, sounding embarrassed. “The thing is, there wasn’t much left in that tank. See, Wade asked me to call the propane guy?

“But I forgot,” Sam admitted. “I had, uh, something else on my mind, and … man, I’ve really been batting a thousand lately, haven’t I?”

“Maybe so,” said my dad, “but in this case, if you had done what you said you’d do, your mom would be mincemeat now.”

“Right,” said Bob. “So cut yourself a little slack.”

Then: “What about Wade?” My dad’s voice turned no-nonsense serious; at the sound of it, it hit me whose voice I
hadn’t
heard and a bolt of fright surged through me.

Bob again: “That’s what I came to tell you. Wade’s out of surgery, and from what they’re telling me—”

My eyes popped open. “Surgery? What surgery?”

They all looked at me, pleased that I was awake. But they couldn’t hide their worry. About Wade, I realized …

“Bob?” I asked, turning to him in appeal. A fat plastic IV bag full of dark red blood hung from the pole by my bed, dripping into my arm. Besides the transfusion I also had enough other tubes, monitors, and high-tech gadgets on and around me to equip a mad scientist’s laboratory.

“Wade’s fine,” Bob assured me soothingly.

I sat all the way up. The room didn’t spin, and I didn’t pass out. But: “Facts, Bob, I want—”

“Mom, Wade got shot,” Sam said. God, he was handsome, just like his father at that age. “In the leg, but they—”

“I want to see him.” I swung my own legs out of bed, paused at the wave of faintness that clobbered me. But: “Get me a nurse. A wheelchair, a nurse, and a hot, soapy washcloth.”

I got a horrifyingly clear glimpse of myself in the mirror over the washstand, opposite the bed. “And a comb, please.” I looked like Dracula’s leftovers.

“Mom,” Sam said cautioningly, rushing forward, and the nurse who hurried in after I’d hammered on the call button wasn’t too pleased with me, either.

But half an hour later—I’d had to threaten to sign myself out against medical advice and take a cab home, which I would have—I’d had my face washed, teeth brushed, hair combed, and a fresh bale of cotton put into my nose with, I guessed, the same device the State of Maine uses to drive highway mile markers into granite bedrock. After that, they helped me into the chair I’d demanded and rolled me down the hall to the recovery room.

Inside, Wade lay still unconscious and hooked to a long tube connected to a respirator; he hadn’t woken up yet from the surgical anesthesia.

A sheet covered him to his armpits; his face, half-obscured by tubes and tape, looked like something a house cat had used for a scratching post. “Hey,” I said softly.

I rolled myself nearer. “Hey.” I put my hand in his. There was an oxygen monitor clipped to his index finger. A transfusion bag like mine hung over his bed.

He looked awful, but he was fine; I could tell by the even rhythm of his EKG tracing, the unhurried whushing sound of his breathing machine, and the atmosphere in the bright, clean room:

Calm. Unworried. A nurse came over to me. “It’s going to be
awhile before the anesthesia wears off. We’ll take the breathing tube out when it does.”

She shot something into his IV. “It was a little dicey for a while, but the surgeons are happy with how he’s recovering.”

I couldn’t say anything. I just felt so … grateful, and it struck me then that when he wasn’t vying for the title of Worst Husband in the World, Victor had done exactly this for most of his life:

Fixed things, so sick or injured people could get well and other people like me could sit by their bedsides, trying not to weep with relief.

He’d gotten me out from under that burning cottage, too, I felt very sure, in the only way he could: he’d
scared
me out.

But I’d already decided I wasn’t going to tell anyone about that, or they’d think I had brain damage. The nurse adjusted the IV running into Wade’s arm. “It was a big surgery,” she said. “He’ll sleep for quite a while.”

“Good,” I replied, holding Wade’s hand. There were tiny gold hairs on the backs of his fingers, a familiar scar at the base of his right thumb where a rope burned it once.

“That’s good,” I managed to repeat.

And then I did weep.

Harold had Facebook, and LiveJournal, and Twitter. But when the day finally came for him to leave Eastport, he realized he’d never use them again. Over his two weeks here, the real world had captured him, and now nothing else would do.

Eastport captured him: salt and creosote, woodsmoke and the tang of rose hips ripening in red clusters, their perfumes mixing with the good smells of bacon and coffee drifting from the diner. Harold stood on the fish pier by the tubby, bright blue tugboat
Ahoskie
, listening to the rhythmic creak of her side sliding with the wave action along the pier’s rubber bumper.

Gulls cried, rising and diving into the foamy white wake of a
wooden boat puttering on the bay. In the harbor, diesel engines grumbled wetly, adding their rich stink to the mix as men in boots clomped down ramps, then jumped aboard the idling vessels.

Oh
, Harold thought clearly, turning in the scouringly brisk breeze off the water to the row of red-brick commercial buildings opposite the pier.
Oh, I want to stay
.

But he couldn’t. Not now; later, maybe. Across the street, Eastport police chief Bob Arnold came out of the hardware store and saw Harold, nodded a greeting.

The chief had been awfully helpful, especially about the gun, which strictly speaking Harold should not have been carrying with him that day in the woods. But now it was all right, and so was Harold’s head, only a small scar remaining.

The chief tossed a bag onto the seat of his squad car and drove off in the direction of his new office. Harold happened to know there was a surprise party planned to celebrate the chief’s move; he wished he could attend.

Maybe next time there’s a party, I can be there
, he thought, absently rubbing his shoulder, which was still a bit sore from the birdshot the surgeons at the hospital had dug out of it.
Maybe when I come back
.

Bob would still be the police chief, Harold was sure; the chief’s little girl had returned from her doctor’s visit with new medications that were working pretty well already. So to his vast relief, the chief wouldn’t have to be moving to Arizona soon but only a few blocks down the street.

In the diner, Harold slid into his accustomed booth. When she saw him, the waitress—Heather, her name was; she had two kids, and a husband who was a fisherman, and her mother worked at town hall, where she did the payroll and issued vehicle registrations—poured his coffee and put in his breakfast order of pancakes and a slice of bacon without having to ask.

Eastport’s newspaper, the
Quoddy Tides
, lay on the booth’s red leatherette seat; on its puzzle page the word jumble had already been filled in but the Sudoku was blank, so he started on it. Behind the
counter, the radio played classic hits and public service spots, church supper announcements and local tag sale ads mingling with Rod Stewart and the Beatles.

By the time he finished his meal, he’d discovered that even the easiest Sudoku was still beyond him, and that two of the diner’s massive blueberry pancakes were still all he could eat.

“Thanks, Heather.”
For everything
.

He left a ten for a tip and went out before she could argue that it was too much, stopped at the flower shop to pick up the big bouquet he’d ordered earlier, then crossed to Dana Street and walked on up the hill between the library lawn’s gazebo and the Rose Garden café, its windows full of geraniums and its graveled side yard furnished with a bowl of water for thirsty dogs.

Like me
, Harold thought at the sight of the bowl, old white china with a dark blue stripe around the top.
I was thirsty
.

And they gave me water here
. From behind him, the big, deep
whonk!
of a departing freighter’s horn seemed to vibrate even the granite beneath his feet. He let the sound go through him:

Remember. Oh, I want to remember all this
. He watched as the huge vessel made its ponderous way up the bay toward the Cherry Island light, even in daytime a bright blip on the clear blue sky.

Time to go
. He turned left past the old Masonic Hall. Ahead, Jake Tiptree’s big old house loomed like a massive lighthouse itself.

As it had been, for him. Even now he felt it drawing him in. Stopping before it, he let his eye run up its massive side along its antique white clapboards to the topmost window.

In the window, which was glitteringly clean, a white lace curtain hung motionless. Then … it was over before he could be certain of what he had seen … the curtain
twitched
.

Just once, slyly and amusingly, like a joke between friends. Or … 
had
it? Harold couldn’t be sure, not of that or of the other strange things he’d seen and heard in the house over the past two weeks, either.

But even if they’d really happened, that was all right. He guessed
he was probably a little strange sometimes himself. And in Eastport, that was all right, too.

Right as rain. Whistling, Harold strode up the front walk of the big old white house on Key Street, crossed the front porch, and went in.

“So was he nuts, or what?”

At about the same time as Harold Brautigan was finishing his breakfast at the diner and then buying his bouquet of flowers, Sam Tiptree stood on a rickety stepladder in the front hallway of his mother’s house on Key Street, looking up at the tin ceiling through safety glasses that made his face sweat.

Two weeks had passed since the events at the lake. Now, inches from Sam’s face, the grapevine-and-maple-leaf pattern pressed into the antique metal flaked gritty white paint bits down onto his dust mask.

“Dewey Hooper, I mean,” he added, scraping off more paint.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” said his mother. “If you mean did he have some diagnosable, treatable illness, something that would explain …”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Ellie thinks he must’ve, to be able to do what he did. She feels sorry for him, but I’m having a hard time with that. Maybe it’s just too soon.”

“Yeah.” Paint bits dusted down. Next he would vacuum it all, to get the last, tiny loose stuff. His mother stood with one hand on the ladder, supposedly to keep it from wobbling.

But he knew the real reason. He’d been quiet—too quiet, he guessed she thought—since it all happened. So sooner or later of course she would ask him about it; he tried forestalling her question with one of his own.

“What’s Ellie up to, anyway?”

His mother laughed fondly. “She’s rewriting my
Quoddy Tides
column. I gave it to her to read and she told me it was all bass-ackwards and did I want her to—”

She stopped, making a wry face. “Very funny,” she said at the way he’d nearly diverted her. Then: “So do you want to talk about it? Whatever it is that’s on your mind?”

He glanced down at her. “It’s okay, Mom. I’ve got things to do, that’s all. But I’ve got it under control.”

He did, too, with an AA meeting tonight, one tomorrow night, and one the night after. Nothing terrible had happened on account of his problem; the opposite, maybe. Everybody needed a wake-up call now and then, and he’d had his.

But he’d nearly taken a drink. That fact, stark and scary as hell, stood front and center. So he would do something about it.

Simple as that.
Keep it simple
, he thought calmly, taking a deep breath. So far, today was going just fine.

“That’s a no, then, huh?” He heard the smile in her voice as she accepted this. When he looked down again, he noticed suddenly that she was pretty, sort of.

A flurry of paint flakes drifted onto her. “Ma, put a dust mask on if you’re going to stand there.”

She did, pulling the elastic back over her ears. “This other thing, though,” she said through it. “About your dad and so on,” she added, startling Sam.

Because at that very moment, it was who he’d been thinking about: his father, and how he could see now in his mother’s face what must’ve attracted him: bright, intelligent eyes, good skin, a mouth that looked as if it smiled very frequently—

And most of all, that
interested
expression she always wore. “Yeah?” he said warily, reaching with the whisk broom to brush into a corner where the ceiling met the wall.

“Yeah. Because the thing is …” She was laughing now, which he thought was strange. Good, though: it hit him again just how glad he was that she’d survived. Wade too; now he was at the lake planning the new cottage. Everyone was fine.

Bella. His grandfather Jacob.
And me
, he added to himself.

Me too
.

“The
irony
is,” she went on, “when he was alive, he didn’t believe in—”

What?
Sam wondered.
What didn’t my dad believe in?
Besides honesty, fidelity, a basic sense of decency, the idea that he had ever owed anyone anything at all—

And yet
, Sam thought.
And yet, and yet
.

“Ghosts!” She burst out laughing. “He positively
scorned
the notion! Said people who did believe in them were pathetic.”

Or as his father would’ve put it himself, Sam recalled as he listened, such people were “not top-drawer thinkers.” Back then Sam hadn’t understood, believing that the phrase meant something about not keeping your thoughts with your socks and underwear.