Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  That night, as she lay in bed waiting for the pill to take effect, Jane’s thoughts began to drift, first, and perhaps inevitably, to her son. She tried to remember his face, his shape, but whether it was due to the effects of the medication or of time, she found herself struggling to recall the simplest thing. Had his single dimple been on the right or the left cheek? Was it he or Matt who had the slightly protruding belly button? Disturbed by her failure to remember, she turned her thoughts to Matt. The expression on his face every morning when he left for work, dumb resignation, as though someone had forced him into this job and he wasn’t permitted to quit. As though he hadn’t brought it on himself. But these thoughts, too, were distressing, and so, almost against her will, she found herself thinking about the sheriff. He was a decent man. Steady, polite, even courtly; not like her ex-husband. And nice-looking, too. Then, with a gentle suddenness, as if a great black balloon had been inflated inside her head, she was taken by a deep and dreamless sleep. When she awoke seven and a half hours later she did not even remember that her final conscious thought before going under had been of the way Bill Paige’s strong jaw contrasted with the almost feminine cupid’s bow of his upper lip.

  III

  The house where Matt lived with his mother was on the far side of Red Hook Hill, off the Newmarket road, an area that shared nothing with the pretty little town of Red Hook but a zip code. The house stood far inland, with a view not of blue water but of austere hills from which the timber had been logged, and of blueberry bogs that were prettiest in early summer, when the mat-like shrubs bloomed pink and white. The road to the house was paved as far as the two abandoned chicken farms—massive, windowless structures from which periodic blasts of ammonia stench still emanated nearly a decade after the chickens and their manure were gone—but after that it turned to dirt, mud in the spring, and plowed only intermittently in the winter. Like the impeccably restored houses in town, their house was white clapboard (or the front and sides were; the back, unpainted for as long as Matt or anyone else could remember, was driftwood gray), but the clapboard was vinyl, an improvement his mother was still hoping to extend to the rest of the house.

  Matt’s late great-uncle, a determined if not particularly talented carpenter from whom Jane had bought the house, had added a two-story extension to one side to accommodate his large family, but had failed to take adequate care in pouring the foundation, and the annex had sunk a foot lower than the rest of the house. The line of windows across the upper story deviated from the horizontal at the seam between house and annex, giving the whole establishment a cockeyed look.

  Once Matt had left for college, he’d figured he’d never again take up permanent residence in his mother’s house, but after he dropped out he moved back in. Lately, though, he had come to spend most of his time in the barn. When he wasn’t at work down at the boatyard, he was working on the Rebecca. When the weather got warm enough he had pulled an ancient mattress down from the attic and laid it on the floor in the corner farthest from the door, fashioning himself a little bedroom area with a nightstand made from a plastic milk crate on which he placed a battery-operated lamp. In the crate he kept an ever-rotating stack of library books. The mattress smelled of mildew, and the Hudson Bay blanket he used as a bedcover was worn through in places. When he didn’t feel like going all the way back to the house he just pissed out the door. The barn had no power, so he relied on the long series of extension cords John had long ago run from Jane’s kitchen window across the long expanse of the yard to the barn. Every so often, whenever Jane decided she couldn’t stand the mosquitoes and moths flying into her kitchen, Matt would be plunged into sudden darkness.

  Other than laying claim to the small area immediately surrounding his mattress, Matt had done nothing to change the barn from the way it had looked before the accident. John’s tools were still laid out on the shelves he had built above his rough-hewn workbench. John’s work clothes still hung on the nails he had hammered into the bare studs of the walls. John’s gloves were still in their place on the hook next to his circular saw, their fingers still curled into the shape of his hands.

  This evening it was only a few days away from the summer solstice, and although it was dinnertime, the fat sun still hung high in the sky, filling the barn with light. The sun picked up the dust motes in the air and they glowed yellowish gold, like tiny bits of floating confetti. The wood floors were warm, especially near the windows and the open barn door. A shaft of light from one of the skylights that John had cut into the ceiling fell across Ruthie’s bare legs. She lay on Matt’s bed, naked but for the stretched and faded Rolling Stones T-shirt that Matt had been wearing a few minutes before.

  Last summer, when Matt and Ruthie had begun seeing each other, they had taken refuge in the barn to keep away from the prying eyes of the town. People in Red Hook talked. They knew which lobsterman had drunk away his profits and stood to lose his boat, which father of three had been accused of fondling his children’s young friends, which postmistress was meeting her sister’s husband at the motel on Route 3 every Tuesday at lunchtime. The locals knew and talked about the summer folk because they took care of their boats and houses, waited on them in the restaurants, filled their gas tanks, and bagged their groceries. The summer people mostly knew one another, and spent most of their time pondering the personal lives of their fellow yacht club members. The middle strata—the boatbuilders and back-to-earthers, the retirees and professionals, those who liked to think of themselves as locals but whom the locals referred to as “year-round summer visitors”—talked about everyone. As the Copakens and Tetherlys traversed all these groups, Ruthie and Matt did their best to maintain a very low profile. They kept themselves to themselves, as his mother would say. They had not reached an agreement to conceal what was going on between them; rather they understood without discussing it that their relationship would be the stuff of gossip, something they both wanted to avoid. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, every time either of them had walked into the library or the liquor store, Neptune’s or the food co-op, there would settle over the crowd a little hush. It was the same for the other members of their families. It made going out in public that much harder. By now, though, the tragedy had faded in others’ minds. They could pretend to be no different from anyone else. But if people came to know of their relationship, once again they would find themselves back in the spotlight, something neither Ruthie nor Matt could tolerate. And so from the very beginning they’d kept things quiet.

  Ruthie traced their relationship from the August night, the summer of the accident, when together they had set off the last of the wedding fireworks. Although they had not even kissed, that was when she considered it to have begun. Matt dated things from the next Fourth of July, after that second evening of fireworks, when they had made out in the dark on the steps of the Grange Hall. Ruthie had led Matt there after the last bottle rocket had been set off because she needed at that moment to touch him, to feel his hands on her body. Watching those bursts of light exploding in the sky had made them both feel untethered, disembodied, as if they, too, were at risk of disappearing like fading sparks in a dark summer sky. They made love for the first time a week or so later, huddled under a blanket on the deck of the Rebecca.

  Because of the secrecy they had imposed on the relationship, they could not go to the beach, or to the movies. They could not share a pitcher of beer at the Neptune or even an ice cream cone at the Bait Bag. Sex had given them something to do while each enjoyed the comfort of the other’s company. Sex was their primary occupation, and yet, even so, once they were separated by thousands of miles they managed to maintain their connection. This despite the fact that Matt did not have a computer and the lines to use the ones in the library were so long that it had taken tenacity and a real sense of purpose to answer Ruthie’s e-mails from England.

  The ramshackle barn in the back meadow, into which no one but Matt had any reason or desire to enter, was the perfect place for them to find p
rivacy. Ruthie never drove there, for fear of Jane recognizing the car. They would meet in town, and she would leave her car in the parking lot of the library. When Ruthie was with him in his car, Matt would drive quickly up the driveway and across the meadow, parking his truck on the far side of the barn. He kept the barn’s broken side door propped open with a jagged piece of cinder block, so that they could enter and exit without the risk of being seen by Jane or anyone else who happened to be in the house. They lay beneath the shadow of the Rebecca, the sailboat like a sentinel guarding their secret.

  Now Matt lay propped on one elbow, looking at Ruthie. He wondered how he could have known her for so many years without noticing how lovely she was. Her skin was rosy and ripe, especially now, scraped pink from the scratchy blanket on which they’d been rolling. She shaved only the lower half of her legs, and her thighs were covered with translucent gold down. He reached out and held the palm of his hand hovering just above her thigh; he imagined he could feel the faint buzz of static electricity drawing the hair on her legs to the taut skin of his palm.

  Although the two had very different coloring, Ruthie reminded him of Becca. They had the same long legs and narrow waist, the same slightly knobby knees and pneumatic ass. Once he’d even told Ruthie this, or rather a more innocuous version—that when her hair was hidden under a bandana, she looked like Becca. Ruthie had been pleased, he could tell.

  From the time Matt had first begun to notice girls, Becca had been there. In the house, on the beach, in John’s car all summer long. Matt had spent a not inconsiderable part of his adolescence fantasizing about the faint outline of Becca’s goose-pimpled aureole rising beneath the thin fabric of her bikini top, or about the strands of light brown pubic hair that occasionally pulled free of the confines of her bathing suit. Ruthie’s pubic hair was darker, and looking at it now he felt his cock stirring again.

  Ruthie scooted closer to Matt, and he put his arm around her. She looked up at the Rebecca. “She’s a beautiful boat, Matt.”

  The truth was, Ruthie didn’t care much for boats. In her own family she was the anomaly; even Daniel enjoyed sailing, although he was hardly as obsessed as Iris and Becca were. While her family had jovially accepted Ruthie’s aversion to the sport, John had never stopped believing that he could change her mind. The summer Ruthie was fourteen John had made a gift to her of an old dory that he had restored and painted a jolly turquoise blue. He had added a sail to the skiff and, claiming it was unsinkable, insisted that she enter the yacht club’s juniors’ race, a monthly spectacle Becca had won at least half a dozen times as a girl. He was so eager and so genuinely confident in Ruthie that she agreed; she even wore the “Team Copaken” T-shirt he’d made for her. She spent the race watching ten-year-olds whiz by her as she tried unsuccessfully to hoist the sail out of the water. Despite John’s insistence that during the three minutes before she had capsized he had seen in her a nascent marine gift about to catch fire, she never again took the boat out alone. Whenever she was obliged to go sailing, she tried to ensure that her responsibilities were limited to not getting bonked on the head by the boom.

  “I hope she’ll be beautiful when she’s done,” Matt said.

  “How much longer do you think you’ll be working on her?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe another six months. Every time I run out of money it kind of sets me back.” John had had the money from Becca’s violin to pay for the restoration of the Alden, but that was all gone by the time he died. Worse, Matt had made dozens of costly errors since beginning the renovation of the boat. He could not bear to consider the number of hours and dollars he had spent on his first attempt at pouring the lead for the ballast keel. He couldn’t afford to pay a foundry to make the keel, and since John had planned on doing his own melting and pouring, Matt had decided to do the same. He’d gotten help with the pattern from one of the yard’s designers, and built it from white pine timber. The melting and pouring of the lead had been easier than he had expected, and by the time he was fairing the lead with edge tools, going for the kind of sweet-looking line John would have expected, he was feeling pretty good about it. And then, while smoothing the lead with his power planer, he had found the beginning of a bubble. Sick to his stomach with dread, he had poked his finger into the bubble all the way through the lead. He had had two choices. One, he could drop the keel, undo the keel bolts, and let the whole fucking thing down so he could cut back the lead on top of the bubble and repour. Or he could pay the foundry to make the keel ballast, just like he should have done in the first place. It turned out to be a good thing he had decided to max out yet another credit card and pay for the job he failed at, because it was one of the foundry workers who had pointed out to him that the copper keel bolts he had worked so hard to fabricate and install would, within a year, stretch out so much the keel would probably just drop right off. Out they came, to be replaced with bolts of bronze.

  Ruthie said, “What about the money from the accident? Can you use that to finish the boat?”

  “I used my share up on it already, and no way my mother will let me have hers. She thinks this is a waste of my time. She hates sailing.”

  “That’s weird. She’s a Mainer. She lives on the water. And John was such a big sailor.”

  Ruthie felt almost relieved to hear that Jane shared her antipathy for the water.

  “My grandfather died in a hurricane when my mom was a kid. He was out on a big groundfish rig, down near Rhode Island. They tried to ride the storm out. Nobody knows what happened. Probably just got swamped by the waves. There were a lot of boats lost in that storm.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Ruthie said. “That’s awful.”

  “Mum always says she doesn’t really remember my grandfather, but she was twelve years old when he died. It’s not like she was a baby. It made her hate the water. It used to make her crazy back when John and I were kids every time my aunt Mary would send us out with my uncle Don in his lobster boat when he was too drunk to be trusted not to get his foot caught in the warp and drown.”

  “What’s the warp?”

  “The line connecting the buoy to the trap. You get that wrapped around your foot when the traps are thrown over the side and you’re fish food. My mum hated the idea of us out on the water, but she couldn’t say anything. If we didn’t pull the traps, then Aunt Mary and Uncle Don wouldn’t be able to pay the loan on their boat and the bank would take it. But Uncle Don was a regular dub and it was never all that safe for us to be out with him. When it’s a thick fog and you can’t see more than a few feet ahead of you, it’s easy to lose your way, especially if you’re a drunk idiot like my uncle. Or sometimes you think it’s going be a fine day, and a storm will roll in all of a sudden. Anything can happen out on the water.”

  “Did your mom mind that John was planning on becoming a charter captain?”

  “Sure she did, but John’d just kind of rib her about it. Say he was going to get a life insurance policy and make her his beneficiary, that way she’d stop pitching him shit. Mum loves money a hell of a lot more than she’s afraid of water.”

  It took a moment for the irony of the comment to sink in, but when it did they both grew suddenly still. After a moment, Ruthie, searching for something to fill the silence, said, “It’s so nice here. I wish I didn’t have to go back to England.”

  “You’ve only got one more year.”

  “That feels like a really long time.” Ruthie had been so unhappy at Oxford, isolated despite the ubiquity of American students, maladroit and dull when compared to her British colleagues. She’d made few friends and developed no real personal relationships with her tutors, spending most of her time alone in the dank and anonymous dorm room that she’d been assigned, nothing like the stone grotto she’d imagined when she first found out she’d be attending Oxford. Her unhappiness had not surprised her. It was just a continuation of the misery of her last year of college. The only true pleasure she had was in Matt’s e-mails and text messages.

  “Wel
l, what would happen if you didn’t go back?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t know.” Naturally the thought of bailing on her Fulbright and leaving all that gray misery and loneliness behind had occurred to Ruthie almost every day over the course of the long year in England. But how could she ever turn her back on all those years of hard work, on the incredible good fortune that a Fulbright represented? How could she step off the long-foreseen path of her life without having the faintest idea of what lay on either side of it? She had been telling people, had been telling herself, since she was fourteen years old that she would follow in her mother’s footsteps and become an academic, a scholar of literature. And she loved books and stories, loved studying the strange interplay between the life and work of an author, loved pondering the mysteries of Mr. Darcy’s erotic life before he met Elizabeth Bennett or the effect of Joyce’s transition to dictation on his later work.

  But the formal study of literature, she had discovered, was not about love; it was about theory, and the theory of theory, and how smart you could make yourself sound while saying something very small about somebody else’s theory of what sounded smart. And she found England unbearable, not just because it was gray and lonely and her work proceeded at a tedious crawl but because Becca had never existed there. It was as if only in mourning and memory could she understand the world; and in England there were no cues, no traces of her loss. As soon as she got on the plane to come home for the summer, she had felt a slight easing of the anxiety that had tugged at taut strings in her chest all winter. In England, Ruthie had to impose her memories on landscapes that held no record of her sister, but Red Hook was safe. It was permeated with Becca’s presence. Every cove and every pebble, every teacup and throw pillow in the house, every library book and ear of summer corn steamed in the husk over charcoal, held at its core some memory of Becca and John.