The From-Aways (25 page)

“I like this room,” I say. “We should sleep here more often.”

“Okay,” Henry says. “We can do that. Listen—”

I cut him off. “Hen, I don’t want to . . .” Because maybe everything can be this easy. We can start over and sleep in this child’s room and not have to hash through the mess we’ve made. Maybe Henry won’t have to realize just quite how strange I am.

“We’ve got to talk some,” he says. “This is what grown-ups do, Leah. They talk.”

“Talk about what?” I say, like an idiot.

“Do you think we made a mistake?” Henry says. “Moving up here and everything? We can go back to New York if you want. You might be happier at home.”

“I am at home,” I say. “I feel very much at home.”

“Well, I don’t know if I do,” Henry says. He strokes my hair. We lie there for a while. “It’s okay if you don’t like it here. I know it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

I think about this. Sometimes when Henry is talking about his hometown he is talking about himself too.

“Sometimes
I’m
not all I’m cracked up to be,” I tell him.

Henry gets up on his elbow so he can look at me properly. He squeezes my hand. “Me too,” he says.

I pick the book up off the floor and hand it to Henry, the pages opened to Johnny Appleseed.

“Read,” I say.

30

Quinn

W
hen Leah walks into the
Star
office for the first time in weeks, it’s a warm May day. Up here, a warm day gets people batshit-crazy excited.

Posing in the entrance to her office, Charley grips the top of the doorframe, practically hangs from it. “A full staff to kick around!” she says, delighted.

“Hi, Charley,” Leah says.

“You had a good vacation?”

“You bet,” Leah says. “So, what’s the story?”

Charley smacks the doorframe. “Winters!” she says. “Fill Leah in.”

I catch her up. Since we ran the piece about the protest, we’ve been running a story in every issue about the ongoing debate over Neversink Park and the Dorian property. Interviewing people about what they think. Publishing minutes from town committee meetings about zoning. We haven’t officially taken sides, but our full-page historical retrospective on the long-standing local love and lore of the carousel? It brought a tear to many an eye.

“Tell me that wasn’t the headline,” Leah interrupts. I pull last week’s paper from the shelf and hand it to her. The headline:
A
LOOK
AT
THE
LONG
-
STANDING
LOCAL
LOVE
AND
LORE
OF
THE
NEVERSINK
CAROUSEL
. Leah moans, as if in real physical distress.

This week, we’re publishing a piece about the Sanford family and their generous creation and maintenance of the park.

We work for a few hours before Charley comes out of her office again and says, “Don’t you have some business at town hall?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

“Take Lynch with you.” Charley closes the door behind her.

“She called you Lynch,” I say.

“She’s hoping it hasn’t worn off,” Leah says. “Where are we going?”

I explain about the benefit. Leah reaches into her bag. She’s got an envelope all stamped and addressed to town hall.

“So you’re saying I shouldn’t pay this?”

“Not until the benefit,” I say. “And about that. Carter doesn’t think he needs a permit, but if he doesn’t get one, the cops will have an excuse to barge in. And wouldn’t it be nice if there were just some music and there was no chance of trouble? If no one had to be worrying about anyone?”

“You mean Henry,” Leah says.

“I was thinking about me,” I say. I was thinking about Rosie.

T
OWN HALL IS
a dreary little building next to the post office. Leah stoops as she walks down the hall. The bureaucrat behind the desk in the clerk’s office is wearing a too-large pink T-shirt with paisleys on it and a pair of eyeglasses around her neck on a long fake-gold chain. The glasses sit on her enormous shelflike bosom, and when we ask her for the necessary forms for the permits we need, she wheels her office chair over to the appropriate filing cabinets to get them for us without standing up. She visits several different cabinets, collecting forms, and then she wheels back, licks a finger, and flips through. Permission to hold a public gathering on town property. Permission to hold a gathering on the town green in particular. Permission to play music and set up electronics. Permission to grill in the open.

“A party?” she says. “How nice.”

Leah and I take turns filling out every damn form there is in this town. We hand them back to the bureaucrat, who retrieves her giant glasses from their leash. “I’ll get her to sign them right now,” she says. “Save you a trip.”

I drum gleefully on the counter and Leah looks around the office, at all those filing cabinets. Then the bureaucrat trudges back from the back room, frowning at the papers. She hands them to us. “I’m afraid your request to use the town green has been denied,” she says.

“On what grounds?” Leah says.

“Ms. Gunthrop says you’ve failed to give proper notice. The green is already all booked for the spring.”

“Gunthrop?” I say. “She’s in charge of stuff like this?”

“I’m in charge of everything,” Gunthrop says as she emerges from the back room. She is wearing a lavender skirt suit. “The town will be spraying pesticides all week.”

“What kind of pesticides?” Leah asks, calling Gunthrop on her obvious lie. “Could you refer me to the company that will be spraying? I’ve been looking for someone to care for my own yard and—”

“This is bullshit!” I say. “Tell the bugmen to come another day!”

“I’m afraid it would be very expensive to reschedule,” Gunthrop says.

Leah asks, “If we file for a permit today, what’s the earliest we can use the green?”

“I’d have to check the town calendar,” Gunthrop says. “It could be months. We’re actually just closing for lunch right now, and I have meetings all afternoon, so I’m afraid if you’d like me to check the calendar, I’ll have to ask you to come back tomorrow.” She strides out of the office, waving to us as she goes, a little kid’s wiggling-fingers good-bye over her shoulder.

The paisley bureaucrat is still holding our forms. She ducks under her desk and we hear an awful whir.

“Are you shredding our forms?” I say.

“You’ll have to get going,” the bureaucrat says. She shoos us out of the office and hangs a sign on the doorknob that says
WE
’
LL
BE
BACK
IN
. . . , with a little clock. She moves the clock’s hands to two
P
.
M
. An hour from now. “See you tomorrow,” she says, and wobbles down the hall.

Leah and I stand in the hallway, the overhead lights flickering orangely. I feel like I might seize.

I say, “This is what you get for trying to do things legally. So I guess we won’t have any permits and I guess it will just have to be another fucking mess with more cops and then of course I guess more fines. And then we’ll have to have another concert to pay off those fines and then I hope Carter has a really good plan. I mean, I hope John Lennon is going to rise up from the grave for a very special duet because otherwise—”

“They left the door unlocked,” Leah says.

“Sure,” I say. “Half of Menamon is unlocked.”

“So why can’t we just get them, then?”

“Them?” Law-abiding Leah Lynch . . . dare I hope?

“The permits. Come on.” She pushes the door open. Inside, she blows through the knee-high O.K. Corral door that separates the waiting clientele from the office workers. “Over here,” she says, like it’s nothing.

I throw my arms around Leah and hug her. This is what I’ve been waiting for: sneaking around an office and stealing documents! It’s Butch and Sundance, Woodward and Bernstein; it has been all along.

Leah shrugs me off and starts opening drawers, looking for the forms. “Here’s the one for grilling,” she says. “We’ll need the others too, plus some sort of stamp or seal. Or a picture of her signature.”

I sit on the bureaucrat’s desk. The top flexes in with an aluminum bang. “You know, Mrs. Lynch, this is hardly professional behavior,” I say. “Would you care to comment on the effect a whiskey bender has had on your career?”

Leah makes a face. “Are you going to help me or are you just going to make suspicious noises?” she says. Bossy Leah is back. I hop up and the desk bangs out.

As we’re rifling, we’re careful to leave everything as we found it, though it’s hard to remember what things looked like because this is actually the most boring office of all time. The drawers are full of voting records, receipts for ordering office supplies, copies of people’s liquor-license applications, paperwork paperwork paperwork.

Leah starts going through a filing cabinet in the back room, in search of old permits that might have Gunthrop’s signature on them. “So we can make a viable facsimile,” she says.

I find the form that allows us to have amps, to plug in and jam hard, but after half an hour of searching we still haven’t found those that actually allow us to hold a gathering on the green.

I pull open a cabinet in the rear of the room and flip through the manila folders. More boring shit. Land deeds. Construction permits. I see a file that says
29 Penobscot Road
. This is Rosie’s street. I think maybe I’ll find a picture of her house in the file.

I open the file and there it is. A small house with gray shingles and blue trim. There’s a second-story deck and all sorts of crazy shells and buoys hanging off it. There are three chairs on the deck and a tidy garden below. There’s a dogwood tree. It’s just a house, but it’s a nice house, and I imagine if it were mine I wouldn’t want it razed.

The photo is clipped to a bunch of papers and I slip it off the stack and into my pocket. I look at the stack of papers in my hand, mostly inspection documents. Papers evaluating the condition of the roof and the age and viability of the heating system. The deed for the sale between the Salems and the Dorians. It’s a good deal. Way more than a house like that could be worth and definitely enough for them to live comfortably for a very long time. I slip the folder back into the filing cabinet.

And then I notice that the next folder is a Penobscot Road deal too. And the next. All the deeds of sale for the Penobscot properties to the Dorians are grouped together in this cabinet. Behind them there’s another folder, a thicker one. I look at Leah across the room but I don’t say anything because I don’t want her to know I’ve filched the photo of Rosie’s house. I look at the clock. Another ten minutes have passed. Bureaucrat will be back in twenty.

I pull the thick folder out. Inside is all the paperwork that was necessary for the Dorians to demolish the Penobscot houses. The paperwork needed for them to fuse the properties together so they might be treated as a single-value entity for tax purposes. The building inspector’s report and their building permits.

The next folder has a series of amendments and waivers to the standard building permits issued in the last folder, orders from Maude Gunthrop and even George Barker, the first selectman. Their signatures are all over the papers.

“Yes!” I say. “Leah, I’ve got a copy of her signature. A copy of the first selectman’s too.”

“Great,” she says. “Now we just need that last permit. It’s not a copy of the permit you’ve got there, is it?”

“No,” I say, “it’s—” And I look at it and the bureaucratic legalese makes my brain bleed.

It’s a document that says the town’s Scenic Easement Policy restricting building rights on Penobscot Lot Six has been waived. It’s signed by Barker and Gunthrop. The next has to do with a designated nesting habitat for loons on Penobscot Lot Two. It’s also a waiver. There’s a manila envelope in the back of the file. I open it up and it isn’t a waiver or a document of any kind. It’s a stack of photocopies. Of checks. Made out to the town from the Dorians. Each check is attached to a payment advice showing where the money was allocated. They say things like
Menamon Tourism Initiative
and
Business District Development Fund.

“Leah,” I say. “Come look at this.”

“Did you find the permits?” she asks, standing up and stretching.

“No,” I say. They couldn’t actually have been dumb enough to just file these here, could they? I must be wrong. But I look at the file again, and then I think of the paisley bureaucrat and every other local official I’ve met in this town. Yes, yes, they could be. Yes, they are. “No,” I say to Leah. “I found something better.”

Leah comes over and takes the files from me. “They’re letting them break all sorts of rules,” she says. “Building laws. Environmental laws.”

“Yeah,” I say. “And in return they’re funneling money into pet projects.”

“Business District Development Fund,” Leah says. She walks over to a cabinet she was looking through a few minutes ago. She pulls files for each of the programs listed in the payment advices.