The From-Aways (14 page)

“Is that the moon?” I say, which is a stupid question because it is clearly evident that this is the moon in front of us. By some trick of the angle of the street and the position of the skies, it seems to have dipped down. It is fat, eroded only by an eighth on one side, and the deep orange color of wild honey.

“It is.” Henry blinks and presses lightly on the pedal, creeping the car over the hill so that the moon springs up. Though shining furiously, it is now comfortably distant from us, and the vehicle, once more. I watch Henry’s face. “I thought we were gonna hit it,” Henry says. “I braked.”

I think that in this moment of improbability I might be able to get away with what needs to be said. I say, “Your mom wouldn’t have wanted you to sell the boat.”

“How would you know?” Henry says. “For Christ sake, Leah. Don’t say dumb shit about things you don’t know about, all right?” He is staring at the moon.

This feels like my insides have been carved out. Everything about tonight hurts. Here is this man in the car beside me, who I am married to, who did not tell me the first thing about his life here until he had to. Who tried to keep a whole wing of himself from me.

“Henry,” I say, “you need to tell me these things. About your family, and the town, and YOU and
Carter Marks
and, just, everything. So I can understand you. So I can be ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“For them!” I say.

For loving you properly, inclusively, cumulatively, I think.

“For Charley and everyone in this town who smiles at you for coming back and gives me looks like I’m the reason it didn’t happen sooner and the
Star
is rotting on the Deeps’ wharf.”

Henry’s face twists at my mention of the rotting boat. “I’m ready.” He sighs. “You don’t need to worry about them. I’m ready enough for both of us.”

This has obviously been working splendidly so far.

“But we need to be ready together, that’s the whole point!” I say. “It’s like those guys in the action movies, where they’re handcuffed together, or to the suitcase or whatever? And they have to jump out of the plane with the parachute and they say ‘one two three go’?”

I’ve lost the thread of what I was trying to say. How can I explain it? The way we need to be a team, to know each other completely, for this to work and for me not to feel alone—but I can’t find the right words. “You know,” I say, “and sometimes the first guy’s not ready and so they say ‘one two three go’ again. And then the second guy’s not ready and so they have to wait, until both of them are ready to jump.
You
have to wait. To jump.”

Henry gives me a look. “You’re pretty crazy, you know that?”

“Are you only realizing this now?” I say. “Vows were made! You promised to love my crazy ass until death! What did you think you were signing on for?”

“I don’t know,” Henry says. I am horrified to see on his face that he really did not consider this question until now. “Eating together. Sleeping together. Maybe kids? I don’t know. What did you?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Henry eases his foot off the brake and we climb the rest of the way over the hill. We drive on.

Henry says, “What is it you wanna know about Carter Marks, exactly?”

O
N
M
ONDAY
, H
ENRY
drops me off at work in his newly redecorated car. Charley comes out of the office. She stands in the doorway as I get out of the lobster pot. Henry waves from the driver’s seat. I hold my breath as Charley takes the spectacle in. I’m sure destroying her father’s car is just one more thing she can add to my rap sheet. She circles the woody. Her lips are pinched together and it looks like she’s trying not to throw up. When she reads
THE
MENAMON
STAR
, she guffaws in a wicked way. She is not mad, I realize. Charley thinks this is hilarious.

“How do you like taking this out, Hen?” she says. “The guys at the docks appreciate her?” Henry glares. Because they do. Over the weekend his dad’s old friends spotted the car and they think it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. New Englanders believe in comeuppance.

“I don’t wanna hear it,” says Henry. “Not from you.”

Charley turns to me. “It’s some nice work,” she says, and offers me the flat of her hand, raised high.

“What’s that?” I say, wary, not trusting the gesture.

“That, Leah, is an up-top,” says Charley.

I smack her hand and enjoy the look on Henry’s face.

16

Quinn

I
haven’t heard a word from that rat bastard. I left the bait of my name on the article about the cats and now it’s December, a month for the lonely to slit their wrists to the tune of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and he hasn’t said a word.

Yesterday, it snowed.

Our one-pipe heating system groans like a ghost in Rosie’s room, and the rest of the apartment is freezing. I’m rolled up in my blanket like a damn caterpillar cocoon, trying to accumulate body heat. I tried to walk in quietly tonight; Rosie says when I come home late it
disturbs her slumber
. But I’ve been lying here shivering for half an hour and it’s too quiet for her to be anything but wide-awake. Then I hear Rosie in the next room, praying. Her door is cracked just wide enough for me to hear.

“Dear Jesus,” Rosie says, like she’s writing Him a fucking letter. “Dear Jesus, please keep my father safe from alligators and watch over my mother, who seldom applies a strong enough SPF. May they not meet their end in a retirement home, and if they do may it not be in the accursed state of Florida, which I hope You don’t mind me saying, as it was Your Father’s doing, though of course some of God’s creation is meant to try us.”

I wriggle onto my back and stare at the ceiling. I exhale out my nose, trying to warm it. I’d tell her to pipe down, but it’s three
A
.
M
. and I just got in and I’m afraid that she’s awake now because I have
disturbed her slumber
.

“Dear Jesus, please forgive me for my sins such as not charging the full dollar amount on some customers’ fried eggs and giving them extra hollandaise for free even though it’s supposed to be fifty cents. These are trying economic times and a lot of that sauce gets thrown out anyway.”

Saint Rosalind, crazy as a loon.

“Also, please look out for Carter Marks, even though Quinn hates his guts. He might make a good man yet, as he’s already a good tipper and a good musician.”

That’s it. I’m sick of Rosie talking about Carter like some kind of local hero. She’s supposed to be on my side here, God knows no one else is, so I’m going to bust in there and tell her exactly what a jerk he is. But before I can get free from the blanket, she goes on.

“Also, Jesus, please take care of Quinn Winters. Let her see the light and understand that we must form a band. She is blinded to the way because she suffers much and says nothing, in the cold, the cold from which, if it is too much to bear, I hope she will seek refuge in my bed.”

I hear her get up off her knees and slide under the covers.

For a moment I lie very still, because if I make the slightest noise I won’t be able to hear and I’m suddenly awfully interested in prayer. But Rosie’s done now.

I wait, but I’ve never been very good at waiting, so then I crawl out of my blanket cocoon. I am shaking all over, and before I can think about it any more I run into Rosie’s room and jump under the covers.

Rosie is lying with her back to me. Her eyes are closed. She says, “Can we start a band?”

“Rosie—”

“Band!”

“To Whom It May Concern,” I say, “I will help Rosie start a band.”

“Amen,” she says. “Now get closer. We need to conserve body heat.”

“Amen,” I say, and make myself the big spoon, wrapping my arm around her waist.

We lie there. At first, I barely move. I’m terrified Rosie’s actually going to fall asleep with me in her damn bed. Could this really be about the heat? My arm starts to ache, the way it’s draped over her, dead still, so I give in. I run my hand over her stomach, which is soft. I slide over her hips. Then I skim down to her waist again, as if down a half-pipe, and my hand gains momentum and runs up the other side to her rib cage, over her T-shirt, so my fingers rest against the soft bulge of her breast. I press my nose into Rosie hair and I smell the back of her head and her neck and I kiss her there, my one arm squeezing around her shoulders, the other moving down to cup her belly. As I noisily breathe in her smell, she arches back, pressing her ass up against me, getting closer.

I feel like my heart is running too fast, like it might burn out at any moment, but I just keep smelling her hair, and hoping I won’t spook her, like some rabbit in the brush, who will let me keep being this near if I just stay still enough. I keep rubbing my hands all over her belly and up to her breasts, not so slowly anymore, not so gently, until I can’t take it anymore and I tug at the waistband of her underwear, feeling it ping against her as I let it go. I’m still wearing shorts but Rosie reaches a hand behind her back so it’s flat between my legs. She doesn’t move it, just wedges it there, and as I press my body against her I’m bumping up against her palm and fingers and I rock my hips a little to do it more on purpose. And still Rosie’s there. She’s not going anywhere, I realize.

She shifts her hips forward a little, and I slide my fingers down past the elastic and around the curve of her. Rosie is wet and it feels like she’s about a million degrees inside. I don’t move at first, because I just want to feel that heat. And then, even then, as I slide up to rub her, I try to move slowly, like I’m not even doing anything on purpose. Like who knows how my hand got down there rubbing her up and down. Rosie makes little noises, sounds deeper than her normal voice but quiet too, and she twists her head to push her face into the pillow to muffle them. But I hear her. And I keep rubbing her like that until she shudders and she grabs my wrist to hold it there. Her grip is serious, telling me not to move anymore, and I don’t. I stay entirely still until Rosie is no longer shuddering, and her body goes from arched to loose, and only then do I slowly slide my hand out of her underwear and trail it, fingers damp, up and down her back.

We lie like that for a while, still not facing each other. Rosie frees her hand and squeezes my leg. I could lie like this with her a long time, but there is one thing I am desperately curious about. I lift the covers up over us like a tent and peek underneath, and as I do so cold air rushes in and Rosie starts and yelps, “Hey!”

But I’m already laughing and once I’m started I can’t stop.

Rosie sits up and turns to face me, sitting cross-legged on the bed. She is flushed in the cheeks still, and as she watches me laughing and laughing she frowns. “What’s so funny? What?” She claps a hand over my mouth to stop me laughing. “This is serious, don’t spoil it!” she says, but I lick her palm and she lets go. And that’s when I kiss her, and it’s a real, true kiss with a lot of emotional wattage going behind it, but if I’m honest, it’s probably lousy in the way of kissing because even as I do it I’m still laughing.

Because Saint Rosalind wears plain white underwear, pure as the driven snow, and it’s just too good, too good, too good.

I
T
’
S THE THIRD
week of December that Carter Marks sends a letter to the fucking editor. It’s addressed to Charley, not me, so she’s in her office reading it because she’s keen on torturing people.

I open the door a crack just wide enough for me to fit my lips in. “I got you that interview with him, didn’t I?”

Charley doesn’t even look up. “Out, Winters. I’m reading.”

I slam the door and go sit on Leah’s desk. “How long can it take to read a fucking letter?” I say. She pats my knee but keeps editing.

Charley comes out of her office. “He’s giving us tips,” she says. “Which is presumptuous and obviously runs along bloodlines.”

She hands me the letter. It’s handwritten and the gist of it is that Carter thinks that I, that
Quinn Winters,
as he writes, should do a piece about the injustice of a recent town sanction and corresponding fine received by Cliff Frame of Derby Run Road for his inflatable Christmas display. Carter writes that certain thematic similarities between this story and my previous piece lead him to believe a continuity of reporting style, his fucking words, is in order.

This week the town ordered Frame to take down his display or pay a hefty fine. The town said it had to do with not properly housing the electrical apparatus for a semipermanent structure, but Carter suspects, and he’s probably right, that it had more to do with his proximity to Elm Park and the quote unquote taste level of the display.
At my urging,
writes Carter,
Frame is refusing to take down the display and will thusly incur a fine, which I will pay.

“He’s got this big heart, you know?” I say to Charley, shaking the letter in the air. “Big fucking heart.”