Orient (16 page)

“So was I. Gavril swam out and got him.” Beth dropped the flower on the grass. “But that’s why I’m here.” Paul stared at her in confusion. “For Mills, I mean. You remember I said I’d take him on a drive, so if you want to give him a few hours off to—”

There was a scraping sound at the back door, and Beth watched as Mills strained to maintain his grip on an outdated microwave. He finally managed to toss it on the discards pile, went inside, and returned a minute later with his arms full of plant basins, cracked buckets, and a red gas canister.

“Mills,” Paul called. “Why don’t you take a break? You remember Beth from the picnic?” He left Beth on the lawn and jogged over to take the containers from Mills. The two men spoke for a moment by the house. The teenager eyed her as he took off his gloves. She smiled and then stopped smiling, reluctant to seem like an approved babysitter. She wondered if she looked more like someone from Paul’s generation than from his.

Paul and Mills headed toward her. The young man was dressed like a scarecrow, in an ill-fitting checkered shirt and denim pants that were too bulky and grease stained to belong to someone his age. She settled on his face to spare him embarrassment, and her eye lighted on his gray front tooth, the color of the clouds overhead.

Mills held out his hand. “We met before, sort of.”

“At the picnic,” she said, taking his grip. His fingernails were black with grit.

“No, the beach.” He had watched her cry on the side of the causeway.

She nodded. “Do you want to go for a drive? I can show you a few of the local attractions if you don’t mind stopping off with me at a house for an errand.”

Paul thanked Beth with his eyes, and promised a lunch of oysters on their return.

“Let me change first,” Mills said, tapping his shirt buttons. “Unless you also have plans to put me to work.” A boy’s irreverent smile broke through his lips. “But Paul might not be okay with that. He has me on retainer.”

“Don’t take him to the slave cemetery,” Paul joked.

Guilt made for
an exceptionally spirited tour. Beth was so mortified about bringing Mills to a dead man’s house that she stalled for an hour before taking the turn down Beach Lane, filling the time with side trips to places she’d half-forgotten about, historical landmarks of such minor interest to anyone but the historical board that their muddy knolls were untouched by human tracks. On Bird’s Eye Lane, right by Karen Norgen’s home, was the settlers’ graveyard of 1690, a small gully of crabgrass shaped like the base of a mouth. Black stone teeth grew unevenly from the ground, tilted at odd angles toward the sky. Beth pointed to the few semilegible stones: H
ERE
L
IES
A
GNES
V
AILS
, D. 172 and A
LFRED
B
ROWN PAS
1753. Moss invaded each stone in bright yellow spills, covering dates and crosses. Agnes Vails’s marker was crowned by a carving of Mary holding the infant Christ; the mother’s face had eroded into a concave puncture, but the baby had survived the centuries. The mother was holding the baby out, as if trying to give it away.

They climbed back in the car, and Beth navigated the lumbering
dirt road with its homemade sign,
PRIVATE—UNAUTHORIZED CARS KICK UP DUST
, to ward off unwanted traffic. A hundred yards from the onyx chess pieces and pink-marble bread loaves of Old Oysterponds Cemetery, down a winding gravel pass, sat the Orient slave cemetery, wreathed by tall brown grasses. The cemetery was heart shaped and buzzed with cicadas. Beth read aloud from the historical board’s bronze plaque: “Slavery persisted in Oysterponds until about 1830. Here were buried some twenty slaves. Here also lie the remains of Dr. Seth H. Tuthill, proprietor of ‘Hog Pond Farm,’ and those of his wife, Maria. It was their wish that they be buried with their former servants.” Eighteen baseball-size rocks lay buried in the dirt, absent of engravings, and at the front were upright marble slabs for Seth and Maria, decorated with fresh daisies by Tuthill descendants who still owned land in Orient. The smell of wet mud made the graves seem almost fresh.

“That was sad,” Mills said when they returned to the car. He zipped his hoodie up his chest and squirreled his hands in his sleeves. Beth turned on the heat but didn’t ask him to roll up his window.

“Yeah, those poor people couldn’t even escape their masters in death.” Beth made a U-turn and proceeded down the street, where desolate-looking new houses huddled against freshly planted hedges.

“Orient’s got a lot of cemeteries,” Mills said. “Is that all your historical board does, keep these old plots going?”

“Among other things,” she said.

Mills picked his teeth with his fingernail. “Dead people are easy to love.” He looked out at an unremarkable stretch of grass, identified by a plaque as the former site of an Indian village. “What about that cemetery we went by before? The one with all the marble.”

“Oh, Oysterponds,” Beth said. “That’s not interesting. It’s normal.” She hesitated before adding, “It’s where my father’s buried.”

He glanced at her, but she kept her eyes straight ahead.

“Do you want to visit him?” Beth hadn’t visited the grave once in all the months she had been back in Orient. She pictured its smooth red marble, with two thin crosses etched on either side of his name. When
she looked over, Mills was staring at her. The gold cross of his earring glinted in the sunlight.

“I like your earring,” she said. “Were you raised religious?”

“No,” he replied, touching it with his finger. “It’s just a reminder of someone I lost. Like the crosses families stick on the side of the road where a loved one died in an accident.” Beth had never visited the section of the New Jersey Turnpike where her father died. It had never occurred to her to place a cross at the scene of his accident; she was never really certain whether people left them as memorials or as warnings of sharp turns, anyway.

“A reminder,” Beth repeated, strangely flattered that he had confided in her. Mills was like a refractory water pump: it took immense effort to get a flow going, but when a few drops dribbled from the spout, they felt precious, like something to drink. “Was it a friend?”

“More like a stranger,” he said quietly. He stretched his arms and rubbed his scalp on the headrest. “Why don’t you show me a place
without
a plaque,” he said, laughing. “You’re from around here, right? There’s got to be something that’s just yours.”

Beth steered the Nissan down Village Lane. The street followed the shoreline of the bay, past the long dock of the Orient Yacht Club with its moored sailboats blanketed in blue tarps. Newer houses competed for bay views, purposely built to emulate New England fishing cottages. She wanted him to witness the beauty of the water, its waves beating toward the tip in the pull of the current to open sea. It was beautiful, this stretch of Orient, wild with tawny sword grass that hushed in the wind and with seagulls rotating in the air. Like any resident forced to play tour guide, Beth turned tourist herself, taken aback by the beauty of the village, its monastic quiet interrupted by birds and frozen light. Why had it come alive for her only when Mills sat beside her? Why couldn’t she appreciate the view on her own?

Two deer sprinted through the fields, flowing like a stream. She let the car idle on the road. From this vantage point, Bug Light
projected from a mound of rocks one hundred yards out in the water, two floors of pristine lighthouse white over a brown cement base, like a fat woman lifting her skirt to pee. Behind it, the faint haze of Gardiners Island hung like a band of locusts.

“Is this the bay or the Sound?” Mills asked. “I’m usually good with directions, but out here I keep getting turned around.”

“It’s the bay.” She grabbed Mills’s hand and drew a flame shape on his palm. “You and I are in houses on the Sound,” she explained, pressing her fingers to his skin. “That’s north. In fact, if you walked the shoreline from Paul’s house, you’d be in my backyard in twenty minutes. And in another half hour you’d make it to the tip.”

“Paul said his mom used to own a hotel out that way.”

“That’s right,” she nodded. Paul’s mother had sold the farmhouse decades ago, and three or four Orient families had lived there before Luz Wilson and Nathan Crimp, Gavril’s artist friends, bought it at auction for an egregious price last May. The farmhouse wasn’t far from Jeff Trader’s mobile home. She seized the opportunity. “Do you want to see it?”

“Maybe later,” he said. “I like it here.”

They sat in silence, watching sailboats nod in the distance, and the silence remained with them as Beth finally shifted into drive and stepped on the gas. She didn’t ask Mills a single question about his background, not ancient or recent. She knew he was an orphan, and Paul mentioned that he had met some trouble in the city; drugs, she guessed. With so many topics off-limits, Beth fell back on the weather. “In winter, this all turns to ice,” she told him, pointing at the coves of water gnarled with marsh branches. “Sometimes, when a hard storm comes, it even cuts the causeway off from the mainland. Then you’re really stuck out here. You can go crazy waiting for the sun.”

“All we had in Modesto was sun,” Mills said. “It was constant there. And all the plants and dirt and skin were so brown that it seemed like the sun was still burning even when it was overcast.”

“That’s like Orient but with fish,” she said, laughing. “Have you
noticed how everyone’s skin around here is as gray as striped bass?” Mills reached his hand out the window to catch the wet salt air as it wove through his fingers.

“Not you,” he said.

She liked him, even without the compliment. She liked his frank way of talking and his even franker way of saying nothing for ten-minute stretches. She had cultivated the Manhattan tendency to admire those who felt no need to fill the silence.

Two impulses Beth had long thought extinct competed for her attention as she drove from the bay. One was to mother him, to buy him lunch or simply press her palms to his forehead. The other was to paint him. Beth found herself examining Mills’s pale skin as it roped into shadow in the crooks of his neck and the wiry hairs of his sideburns creeping up into the liquid ink of black, loose curls. She thought of colors—ochers, emeralds, and blues—from paint tubes she hadn’t considered for nearly a year. It had been so long since she’d felt this way—
inspired
. She sped east on Main Road, racing toward the tip, afraid at any minute that she’d lose the sensation, this happiness for the company of a stranger who reminded her why she’d once enjoyed painting strangers in the first place. To love them, to—that terrible technological term now ruined for all time—
connect
.

What Beth did not want to do was drive to Jeff Trader’s property. Strangled by a sense of duty, she finally forced the car to take the turnoff through the barren fields near the Point. On a corner lawn, an orange sign bowed in the wind. P
LUM
I
SLAND
H
ORRORS: DEMAND
A
NSWERS FROM
O
UR
B
OARD AT THE
M
ONDAY
M
EETING
.

“I have a favor to ask,” she said, staring ahead at the road. “The guy you saw dead on the beach? We have to go to his house”—she purposely did not use the words
break in
—“to retrieve a book for my neighbor. She’s an old lady, probably crazy, but she was a close friend of his. I promised.”

Mills tapped his feet on the floor and wiped his hands along his thighs.

“So you have me stealing for you.”

“
With
me, not for me,” she corrected. “I was scared to go alone.”

“You were scared?” he asked, straightening up. “Okay. But in case we’re caught, it was your idea.”

As the waters of the Atlantic gathered in the horizon, signs of personal ownership grew rare. Fields stretched in fallow creams and purples, blistered after a long summer by the sudden cold, and roads ended for no apparent reason, as if the developers had run out of ideas miles before the land reached the sea. After a series of labyrinthine turns, Beth pulled onto Beach Lane, a squalid, ramshackle foothold of civilization at the tip. She counted the houses that led toward the three acres of land on the Sound that belonged to Jeff Trader. A handful of disheveled single-story units appeared, built from wood and aluminum and oxidized gray from years of conflict with ocean squalls. Of no consequence to local history, they’d been allowed to steep in the salt air, littered with rusted lawn mowers and splintered plastic baby pools and broken, netted porches. Here and there some recent, richer settlers had made a bit of headway, erecting bland suburban two-stories so fresh that trees had not yet been planted in their designated mulch beds. Slowing down to look for Jeff’s driveway, she noticed a young woman leaping off the front steps of a red, aluminum-sided bungalow.

The woman looked familiar to her, vaguely, but Beth couldn’t pinpoint where or how. Her brown hair was twisted back in a French braid. She wore a pair of unseasonably tight turquoise shorts over tan, slender legs. A sweatshirt covered her chest, its Coca-Cola-lettered logo asking,
WHY DON’T WE SAIL FIRST
? As Beth slowed in front of the house, the young woman gazed nervously at the car, as if suddenly conscious of traffic. She pulled the sweatshirt hood over her head, turned around, and darted back into the darkness of the porch.

“Who’s that?” Mills asked as he rotated to catch sight of her.

“No idea,” Beth replied. “It’s the off-season—probably a girl from Greenport hiding from her parents.”

“Finally, some trouble,” Mills said approvingly.

“Oh, so a dead body and a break-in aren’t enough for you?”

She pulled into Jeff Trader’s driveway. The lid of his mailbox hung open on the post, its mouth jammed with withered memorial carnations. Just as Magdalena had said, Jeff’s white truck was parked at the end of the driveway, though Beth was surprised not to see yellow police tape on the front door. The mobile home had sunk so deeply in the earth that wheat grew around its cement blocks. A jerry-rigged front deck hung with tools and empty plant basins. The windows were shut and curtained, a few starred with masking tape to prevent shattering in hurricane winds. Beth took a breath, reminded Mills what they were looking for—a leather notebook of some kind, probably hidden behind cereal boxes in a kitchen cabinet—and got out of the car. “Let’s be quick. Then we’re done, and neither of us gets arrested.”