Jane and Iris were coming from the direction of East Red Hook, however, and so the setting sun lay behind them, casting long shadows into the deepening blue shade of the evening. Iris had never ridden in Jane’s van before. It was cleaner than she would have expected, cleaner than her own car, which was full of crumpled chewing gum wrappers, half-finished bottles of water, and used tissues. Iris often thought of her car as a kind of automotive portrait of Dorian Gray, betraying in its disorder and dirt a side of her personality that in all other areas was ruthlessly and efficiently tamped down to nonexistence.
The ride, as brief as it was, seemed to Iris to last forever. Jane drove slowly, staring through the windshield, her eyes fixed to the road, her brights on, as though her excess of caution would erase other drivers’ prior failures. Iris had to grit her teeth to keep from shouting at Jane to step on it, although she knew that there was no point in hurrying.
About fifty yards before the cove a sheriff’s cruiser was parked athwart the road, blocking traffic. A deputy stood next to the cruiser, waving his arms at them to stop. Jane braked, and cranked her window down. At once the acrid smell of burning rubber filled the car. Iris coughed, her eyes watering, but Jane didn’t even wrinkle her nose.
“Let me through,” Jane said.
The deputy recognized her. He hesitated for only a moment before shrugging and going to move the cruiser.
Jane kept the window down and drove slowly. The urgency drained from Iris; she now wished for the ride to last as long as possible. To last forever. At first, before they rounded the final curve that gave onto the cove, they could see nothing of the accident. Looking out the window, Iris marveled at how normal, how beautiful, everything looked. At one end of the cove a patchwork of farmland led down to the rocky coast, brown where the fields lay fallow, pale green where the hay waited to be mowed, mossy green where the fruit in the blueberry bogs had yet to ripen. In a small pasture above the water a dappled gray pony stood, one of its rear legs tucked up to its belly, its tail flicking across its back. So perfect and perfectly normal, yet the air was thick with the sulfurous stench of burning metal and rubber, raw and harsh as it passed into Iris’s lungs, and where normally there would be only the whispering of the wind in the pines or the hollow cry of a loon, there was a strange and frightening grinding sound. A faint roar.
When the women rounded the corner, flurries of ash streamed into Jane’s open window, dusting her left arm, leaving flakes of gray across the red paisley. There was an SUV lying on its back in the middle of the road, flames flickering from the crushed and charred front, spewing a boil of smoke. A crew of volunteer fireman struggled to control the blaze.
Jane slammed on the brakes, and Iris jerked forward against the seat belt’s restraining shoulder strap. They stared at the crash. Two sheriff’s cruisers and the Red Hook volunteer fire department’s hook and ladder straddled the road on the far side of the wreck. Blue and white lights flashed from the racks on the roofs of the cruisers. Roping off the area directly around the accident scene were swags of yellow police tape mocking the swags of flower garlands that still decorated the church a few miles up the road. The limo lay with its back end in the brackish water of the cove, submerged halfway up the passenger doors. The front end clung to the asphalt, its hood buckled and ripped open on one side. The driver’s door had been forced open and now hung from a single hinge. Because the tide was still in, the fire crew—most of whom Iris recognized—wore waders, bright yellow, hip-high. They worked in water up to their knees, trying to tear through the crushed metal of the right rear passenger door with the Jaws of Life.
Iris stared through the windshield of the van, unable to move, but the slam of Jane’s door jarred her out of her paralysis. She followed Jane up the road. Just as they reached the police tape, two banks of lights mounted on tall tripods snapped on, flooding the scene with a harsh and truthful radiance. Now Jane and Iris could see well what had been invisible in the twilight: the angry black skid marks looping across the road; the blue tarps spread out and covered with bits of charred metal in orderly rows; the burned-out cab of the SUV; the three long, lumpy black bags laid out on the gravel shoulder at the side of the road.
Another observer might have failed to notice the fine strands of blond hair caught in the zipper teeth of the centermost bag. An observer who had not spent the past twenty-six years watching that hair grow from a patch of soft fuzz over a baby’s ears to a thick cascade of honey curls. Someone who had not washed it, combed out its tangles, braided it, tied it with ribbons on school picture days, who had not affected unconcern when, one Thanksgiving, the yellow hair was suddenly purple, shaved to the skin on one side. Someone who did not know that hair better than her own would not have noticed it wafting in the light breeze blowing in over Jacob’s Cove. For the rest of her life Iris would be haunted by occasional dreams of Becca’s long blond hairs snared in the zipper of the black body bag.
Iris clamped down on the scream that rose inside her, swallowing as hard as she was able to. She turned from the body bag and watched as one of the firemen climbed up onto the top of the limousine, reaching out a hand to steady himself on the roof like a surfer on his board. With three precise blows of his ax he hacked at the sunroof, and it gave way, the sheet of glass collapsing in on itself.
Sheriff William Paige, who had been standing on the shore watching the crew do their grim work, looked over his shoulder and saw the two women coming toward the crash, five feet of sunset between them. They were dressed for a party, and even if he hadn’t been warned by a radio call from his deputy, he would have known who they were: two mothers, come looking for their children.
He jogged up to the barrier, his holster bouncing against his hip. With one leather-gloved hand, he held the police tape down so that they could step over it. The slender, wan-looking one allowed him to take her hand and help her over, but the other, the one with the fierce, plain Down East face, refused with a single shake of her head any help he was fool enough to think he could provide. Sheriff Paige had learned over his many years in the department that the best—the only—way to express condolences in such situations was briefly, almost blandly.
“I am so sorry for your loss,” he began. Then he explained to the women what, as far as he could tell, had happened.
Until this evening, the Newmarket-based limousine driver would never have had any cause to drive this stretch of Red Hook Road. He would not have been familiar with it, and thus would not have anticipated the problem of the sun. If he took the turn too fast and too wide, and then was blinded as he came around the bend, he would have hit the car coming the other way.
The women stared at the sheriff intently as he talked, watching closely as he drew a picture in the air with his pointed finger.
When he finished his explanation he paused for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t think any of them knew what hit them. They didn’t suffer.” For a moment he felt embarrassed at what was not, he knew, an entirely honest attempt at solace. He had no idea whether or not they had suffered. How could he?
Normally the sheriff would not have bothered to come down from Newmarket for a traffic accident. Accidents happened all the time on these winding country roads, people died, especially in the winter, with ice and bad wipers and nothing to do to pass the long dark nights but stay warm over a bottle. Yet there was something about this particular accident; the bride and groom dead at the scene. It was like an old English folk song, he thought, or a tragic poem. He had found himself unable to stay at his desk when the 10–50 came in, and had driven all the way down here, lights flashing and siren wailing, to see it for himself. It was as bad as he had expected, as bad as any accident he had ever seen. The fire in the SUV had burned hot, transforming the body of the driver into a scoriated husk that barely resembled a man. But the two bodies they’d already pulled out of the limousine were worse. Crushed skulls, skin punctured by jags of broken bone, blood everywhere.
“Is that John?” Jane said gruffly.<
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“Ma’am?” the sheriff said.
“Is that John or Becca they’re trying to get out of the car?”
“That’s John, ma’am. The boys are working on extracting him. You can see that side’s crushed pretty bad. But they’ll get him out.”
“If they haven’t extracted him yet,” Jane said, “then how do you know he’s dead?”
Sheriff Paige frowned and then, uncharacteristically, turned away from her gaze. For a moment he looked down at his shiny black boots. Then he forced himself to wipe his expression clean and meet her eyes.
“He might be alive in there,” Jane said, her voice harsh and loud.
“No, ma’am.”
“How do you know? You haven’t gotten to him yet. You don’t know.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. He’s gone.”
“You don’t know that,” Jane said, her voice rising. “They haven’t even gotten to him yet.”
“When they moved the … bride, the men made sure.”
By now Jane’s face was bright red, and beads of sweat gathered at her hairline. She wiped the back of her hand roughly across her forehead. “He might be alive in there. He might be breathing.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. He’s not. We’re certain of that.”
“You don’t know. He might be all right in there. He might be alive.” She inched closer to the wreck.
The sheriff said, “Please, Mrs. Tetherly, if you’ll just calm down, the firefighters will do their jobs and we’ll have his body out in a minute or two.”
“Calm down?” Jane shouted. “Calm down? You’ve got some nerve, you son of a bitch.”
He placed a restraining hand on her shoulder. “Let’s just move back behind the police tape. Give the men room to work.”
“Get your hands off me.” Jane jerked her shoulder, flinging his hand away. Then, suddenly, she lunged for the sheriff, grabbing the front of his shirt with both her hands. She was a big woman, strong from years spent clomping up and down stairs, hauling heavy vacuum cleaners and baskets of laundry, and she had a good grip on his shirt. She shook him, yelling, “Get him out!” One of his buttons popped off and stung her on the chest. The round red mark that the button made on her thin, freckled skin would, over the next week, slowly fade to a yellow bruise and then disappear, but for the rest of her life, whenever she thought of her dead son, she would rub the spot, sure she could feel a small, dimpled button of sorrow.
Sheriff Paige gently but firmly removed Jane’s hands from his shirt and held her wrists for a long moment. When he let her go, she collapsed. He caught her in his arms and eased her to the ground.
Iris knelt down by Jane’s side. The sheriff backed away, motioning to his deputies and to the fire chief to give the women some space, a little air, as if inches and oxygen would make it easier for them to assimilate the horror of their children’s deaths.
Jane sat in the dirt, thick legs splayed, head hanging, elbows resting on her thighs, hands limp between her knees. Iris hovered next to her, watching as tears rolled from Jane’s closed eyes, down the length of her nose, hung there for a moment, and then dropped onto the pebbly soil. Iris put her hand up to her own face. Her eyes felt dry, gritty, like she’d opened them into a sandstorm.
The tide was going out and the firemen rolled down the tops of their tall, rubber waders. With a screech of metal against metal, they finally managed to pry the car door off its hinges. Someone turned off the motor of the Jaws of Life and its grinding roar gave way to a sudden silence. Iris could hear the creaking of the trees, the hiss of the wind in the leaves, a single, mournful loon calling across the water, the sound of tires on the sandy grass at the edge of the road. Then doors opening and slamming, one by one. She didn’t turn around to see who it was.
Two of the volunteer firemen stood in front of the car, a shield, Iris thought, to block her and Jane’s view as they pulled John’s body out of the car. Only once it was hidden from sight in the black body bag did they step aside. Iris watched them carry the bag, two men on either side, to the pointless ambulance. The four of them then picked up the second bag, and methodically loaded it into the ambulance, too. Then the third. Then the fourth. Then, quietly, without slamming them, one of the firefighters closed the rear doors of the ambulance. The engine started and the ambulance rolled slowly away, skirting the cruisers that partially blocked the road.
Iris stood up. She hesitated for a moment and then offered her hand to Jane. The other woman shook her head and hoisted herself to her feet. They stood side by side, staring at the twisted wreckage, then, wordlessly, they turned and walked to their families, who stood beyond the police tape. Maureen and Daniel stood together, Daniel squinting against the smoke from Maureen’s cigarette. Matt hung back, close to Daniel’s car, which he had pulled up next to Jane’s.
Daniel opened his arms and Iris came over and leaned into them, closing her eyes. She felt his heart beating beneath the firm muscles of his broad chest, and for some reason the steady thump allowed her to resume her tears.
“Let’s go home,” Daniel said. “Matt, Maureen, do you two want to go with your mother?”
“I’m staying,” Jane said flatly. “I’m staying until they tow it away.”
The sheriff, who stood at a small remove from them, said, “We’ve got a flatbed coming in from Newmarket to haul the cars up to the Department of Transportation yard.”
“Why do you want to do that, Mum?” Maureen said. “It’s just a damn car.”
“Still.”
Maureen sighed, dropped her cigarette to the dirt, and ground it out with the pointed toe of her shoe. “I got to get my girls home,” she said. “So I’m going to go with them”—she stuck a thumb in Iris and Daniel’s direction—“if that’s all right with you.”
“No matter,” Jane said.
“You want me to take Samantha home with me, or are you going to pick her up on your way?”
“You take her. Matt, you go, too.”
“That’s all right, Mum. I’ll stay with you.” It was obvious from everything about him—his tone of voice, the expression on his face, his slumped shoulders and back—that staying at the scene of the accident was the last thing he wanted to do.
“I don’t want you here. Go.”
“Mum.”
“Go!” she shouted.
Matt looked at Daniel, his eyebrows raised, his shoulders shrugged as if to say, What am I supposed to do now? When no reply was forthcoming, he said, “All right, Mum. I’ll be waiting for you at home. Don’t stay too long.” Then he called out to the sheriff, “You won’t let her stay too long, will you?”
“Don’t worry, son,” the sheriff said. “The truck will be here soon.”
Matt crammed his hands into his pockets and followed Maureen, who was trudging back to the car. Daniel, his arm around Iris’s shoulders, tried to lead her away.
“Wait,” Iris said. Her voice was calm despite her tears. “Officer?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Who was riding in the other car?” Iris said.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
“The other car. The SUV.” She pointed at the wreckage. It was just possible to see beneath the charring that the truck had once been white. “Who was driving it?”
“Man from Bucksport way. I’ve got a couple of deputies heading out to tell his family.”
“Was he drunk?”
“We won’t know until the autopsy. But if I had to guess, I’d say probably not.”
“And the limo driver? Was he drunk?”
Daniel said, “You know he wasn’t.”
“So what happened? Why did they crash?” Iris said.
Sheriff Paige said, “The limo driver probably had the sun in his eyes, maybe took the turn too wide. The way I read it, the Explorer swerved out of the way and got its wheels up on those rocks and that’s what flipped it. Unstable as hell, those trucks. Doesn’t take much for them to turn turtle.” He looked at Matt. “That about what you saw, son?”
>
“Yeah,” Matt said. “It just flipped and rolled right over the top of the limo.”
Daniel pulled Iris close. “Let’s go,” he said.
When they reached the car she paused and looked back. The fire in the SUV was finally out and only a small plume of black smoke still rose from the car’s broken carcass. There was no moon, and so the cove and the trees had faded into the darkness. The two banks of spotlights each sent out a sharply delineated bend of bright white light. One strip of light illuminated the SUV, the other the limousine, which was no longer in water but lodged in mud, the ebbing tide having begun to recede from the shore. The two zones of light overlapped in the middle of the road. In that small, brilliantly lit space, Jane stood facing the wrecks, her broad back to Iris. Her arms and hands hung limply by her sides. A gust of breeze sent the hem of her dress swirling around her legs.
Jane stood in that little island of light like a sentinel, a lighthouse on an uninhabited, forbidding coast. Iris gripped the car door with her hands and stared at Jane. She had never seen anyone look so completely alone. How could they drive away and leave her there, enclosed in the husk of her grief? Iris started to call to her, but just then Jane bent down and picked something up off the ground. With a jerk of her strong arm she sent the rock arcing high toward the limousine. It landed with a crack on the shredded roof. Iris jumped at the sound.
“Iris,” Daniel said, gently pressing down on her shoulders, maneuvering her into the car. “Let’s go home.”
Jane bent down for another rock, and Iris quickly ducked into the car, so that she wouldn’t have to see or hear it land.
IV
When the call came from Sheriff Paige early the next morning to tell them that Becca’s body was waiting for them at a Newmarket funeral home, Daniel assumed he and Iris would make the unhappy trip together. Iris, however, refused. She was sitting on the screen porch, curled up in her wicker armchair, its floral chintz cushion worn white at the seams. She had been sitting there since before dawn, when they both had given up the pretense of sleep. “I already saw what I needed to see,” she said.
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