Red Hook Road

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Well, what would you do if you decided not to go back to England?” Matt said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t even have the beginning of a plan.” She laughed. “No plan at all. That would go over well with my mom. That’s like anathema to her, no plan. That’s like you have cancer of the life.” Iris was the queen of checklists, agendas, strategies, long-term forecasts, reservations made years in advance. Her thinking was always ten steps ahead of her current situation and twelve steps ahead of everybody else. Given her mother’s example, to Ruthie the idea of dropping out of school with no idea what she was going to do next held a kind of dangerous and seductive terror.

  “I don’t want to think about it anymore,” Ruthie said. She sat up and straddled Matt’s waist. “Let’s do this instead.”

  Twenty minutes later, Ruthie had drifted off to sleep, but Matt was too confused by his reaction to the possibility that she might not go back to England to follow suit. He wanted to be with her, that was clear to him. The idea of another long winter alone was too depressing to contemplate for long. One evening toward the end of the previous winter, Matt had driven down Red Hook Road to Jacob’s Cove. It was only a little after six, but the sun had set, and the last of the grayish light was fading from the sky. Early in the day, rain had washed away much of the snow, and what was left was crusty with ice and dirt. It gave way beneath his boots with a muffled crunch. Matt left his car running, the beams of the headlights long and yellow across the beach. Shoving his bare hands into his pockets and tucking his chin into the collar of his coat, already clammy with the moisture from his breath, he walked out along the rocky beach until he was a foot or so from where the waves lapped against the pebbles and mud. He stood there, gazing out at the bleak vista. Interspersed among the mass of evergreens was the occasional bare white of a dead tree, its naked branches iced with moonlight. The beach was devoid of life, the sandy earth clotted with dead brown grasses. The ocean was black. Cold even in his down jacket, his ears itchy beneath the wool of his ski hat, Matt stared at the grim, unwelcoming sea and thought how dead it seemed. On that freezing, rainy evening in March, all of Maine seemed dead.

  He could not go through another winter alone like that. He wanted to ask Ruthie to stay here and help him bear it. But was he ready to announce their relationship to the world? Even more frightening, was he ready to tell his mother?

  There was no point to lying there and worrying. He had a lot he wanted to accomplish this evening, and before too long there wouldn’t be enough light to keep working. He pulled on his shorts, a pair of thick socks, and John’s old work boots, a size and a half too big. He left Ruthie dozing on the bed.

  Because the finishes in the stateroom and the main cabin of the sailboat demanded such craftsmanship, Matt had waited until now to do the finishing work on the cabinetry, honing his skills over the past two years first on the deckhouse, crew quarters, and galley. The Alden’s large and elegant stateroom was in an unusual location—at the bow, in what would ordinarily be the fo’c’sle. In most boats of this size, the stateroom was amidships, or at the stern. Matt remembered that when John first bought her, his friends from the boatyard had expressed reservations about the location. “You’ll be hurling all night long,” had been the general consensus. But John had argued that the deep, heavy hull was sea-kindly; it would sail so easily, even in rough seas, that not even the most tentative or weak-stomached of passengers would be disturbed. In fact, he had always claimed that the spacious stateroom, its private head complete with a bathtub, was perfect for luxury-loving charter customers, and was one of the main reasons he had bought the Rebecca. The stateroom and, of course, her name.

  Matt was finishing the Rebecca precisely to John’s specifications, even though he could not imagine sailing her—or any boat, for that matter—to the Caribbean. He wasn’t sure what was involved in one’s becoming the captain of a charter vessel, but he was fairly confident that whatever it required was something he didn’t possess. Indeed, Matt had no idea what he was going to do with the boat once he finished restoring her. Beyond that, in Ruthie’s phrase, he had cancer of the life: no plan at all. He did not let himself think about it, ever. He just worked.

  Following John’s specifications, Matt had replaced the twin berths in the stateroom with a queen-sized bed, comfortable for couples. He’d refinished the clothes cabinet and the drawers, polished the knobs and handles and replaced those that were missing. The one piece of cabinetry that had proved a challenge was the side table. It was an odd design; the edged tabletop was fairly straightforward, but at two corners it had posts capped with elaborately ornamented finials, similar to half of a four-poster bed. One of the finials was in good shape, but a decapitated post with a splintered top was all that remained of the other. Matt had scoured catalogs and Web sites searching for a matching finial, had even posted pleading messages on the Alden Internet discussion groups, but no one had ever seen anything quite like the little table. For a while Matt debated just shearing off the posts at the base. They were so exceptional that no one would notice their absence; the table would seem like any other. But finally Matt couldn’t bring himself to lop them off. John, he knew, would have carved a new finial, and he owed it to his brother at least to try.

  There were men at the yard who specialized in this kind of fine, finished cabinetry, but Matt was not one of them. His area of expertise, if you could call it that, was sanding, the job they still had him working down at King’s, long after other guys who had started with him had moved on. It was a mindless job, requiring only a minimum of arm strength and a reasonably steady hand. You could have trained a smart monkey to do it. Whenever he got discouraged about his inadequate skills and correspondingly low status at the yard, he reminded himself that sanding beat scraping and painting the bottoms of hulls. But despite his inadequacy and lack of experience, after many months and dozens of false starts, he had managed at last to carve something that, if you didn’t look too close, strongly resembled the original finial.

  Flush with this success, today he had set himself the infinitely easier task of replacing a six-inch strip of ornate molding on the side of the table. Matt plugged his router into the extension cord and, holding the heavy tool in one hand and the bit case in the other, climbed up onto the deck. Before he stepped down into the cabin he glanced down at Ruthie. It was so odd how much she reminded him of Becca, and yet how utterly different they were. Was it only her shape that was like her sister? That, and some undercurrent of sweetness. For all her sass, Becca had been sweet. Kind. Like John. And like Ruthie.

  The contoured grip handles on the router’s plunge base had begun to wear through, and as he climbed down Matt reminded himself that he should drive into Newmarket and see if the Ace Hardware sold replacements. Yanking the extension cord behind him as he went, he walked through the unfinished main cabin and down the hallway between the galley and the stateroom’s private head. There was a single step from the hallway down into the stateroom and he stumbled, catching himself right before he hit the ground. He’d taken that step a thousand times, maybe more, and still it tripped him up nearly every time, especially when he wore John’s boots.

  “Shit,” Matt said, dropping the bit case and getting a firmer grip on the router. “Spaz.”

  “Spaz” had been one of John’s favorite nicknames for Matt. As big as he was, John had been as agile as a gymnast, sure-footed even when shinnying up a sixty-foot spar in the middle of a storm. Matt possessed none of his brother’s fluid grace.

  Setting the router down on the finished side table, Matt knelt down and dug around in his bit case until he found a three-inch pattern-making bit. He fitted the bit into the router, turned the machine on, and locked the trigger. The grinding, metallic whine of the router’s small motor reverberated off the mahogany walls and ceiling. Gripping the router handles, Matt began carefully to carve the bit of molding. He stepped back to get a better look at what he was doing, and caught the toe of his oversized boot on the extensi
on cord. When he tried to kick loose the cord, it wrapped itself around his ankles, like a lasso thrown to hobble an escaping bull. Matt stumbled, caught himself for an instant, and then started to go down. He flung out one hand to break his fall and tried to keep hold of the router with the other, but the foam padding on the handle chose that moment to tear. The machine bolted out of his grip, ricocheted off the top of the side table, and swirled through the air like a furious wasp, crashing into the deck beam and gouging out a splintered chunk of the polished wood. Matt lunged for the router, but it bounced off the face of the cabinet, managing to crack both doors. He hurled his entire body at it, knocked his chin against the side of the table, and missed. The router, like a thing possessed, smashed through a sole board and plunged down into the bilge.

  “Fuck!”

  He grabbed the cord, trying to drag the router back through the splintered hole. He could hear it crashing around in the bilge, ricocheting off the sides, grinding through thousands of dollars’ worth of wood. “Fuck! Fuck!” He hauled on the cord, but it raced through his hands like the warp of a lobster trap, burning his palms. The router dropped back down into the bilge. He could hear the wailing shriek of the steel bit tearing through wood.

  Grabbing hold of the electrical cord, he started pulling it, hand over hand, in the other direction, hoping he could jerk the plug loose from the socket, but there was too much slack. He tore out of the stateroom and tripped again over the step, landing on his face and leaping up without even noticing the blood streaming from his swelling nose. As he ran he could hear the router rolling and crashing around the bilge like a lotto ball in a rotating drum.

  And then silence.

  He scrambled up the ladder to the deck. Jane stood below him in the shadow of the boat, holding the unplugged end of the extension cord. She stared at him with narrowed eyes and a set, grim mouth. Ruthie stood beside her, hair tousled around her head, face still soft with sleep. The old T-shirt reached barely to Ruthie’s naked thighs and she stood barefoot, her toes leaving little circular prints on the dusty floor. Behind her the blankets were pushed halfway off the mattress.

  Jane’s chest heaved with the exertion of her run across the yard. She dropped the end of the cord to the ground. Matt rubbed his nose and looked down at the blood smeared across his hand.

  Jane turned to Ruthie. She looked the girl up and down, Ruthie blushing beneath her gaze.

  “That’s John’s shirt,” Jane said.

  IV

  Ruthie and Matt sat in the cab of his truck in the parking lot of the Bait Bag, Ruthie eating her fried clams and Matt his lobster roll, a stained paper bag of onion rings on the armrest between them. They’d thrown on their clothes and raced from the scene of their humiliation, and then, once they were in town, had ended up here. Matt had suggested getting something to eat.

  “Do you think we should?” Ruthie had said.

  “There’s no point in hiding now,” Matt said.

  “Your mom won’t tell anyone, will she?”

  Matt laughed grimly. “Hardly. But she knows, so what’s the point of skulking around?”

  “Well, my parents don’t know.”

  “Are you embarrassed? Do you think they’ll be pissed off at you if they find out you’re seeing me?”

  “No,” Ruthie said. She didn’t really know if she was lying. She wasn’t embarrassed. Not of Matt. She liked Matt. More than liked him. But Iris would be upset. Or, if not upset, then certainly disappointed. Especially once she knew that Ruthie didn’t want to go back to Oxford.

  “You’re right,” Ruthie said. “I’m sick of sneaking around. Let’s just get something to eat, like normal people.” She reached across and grabbed his hand, pulled it to her lips, and kissed his knuckles, bloody from his mortal combat with the router. “You’re my boyfriend, right? There’s no reason people shouldn’t know.”

  Were Matt not so distracted by his internal calculations of what his calamitous accident with the router was likely to cost him both in cash and in labor, he might have allowed himself to react to the word. He had never, after all, been anybody’s boyfriend before. He’d hooked up with plenty of girls. Well, four. And he’d gone out with more. But he’d never thought of himself as anyone’s boyfriend.

  Despite their calculated flagrancy, when they arrived at the Bag they saw no one they knew other than Doreen Darling, who worked the pickup window and was famously taciturn. She was not likely to gossip. The only other diners were a group of Finnish backpackers who had, Ruthie supposed, taken a wrong turn on their way to Otter Cliff in Acadia National Park or to the vertical expanses of granite that so attracted climbers to Clifton. Certainly the 940-foot Red Hook Hill could not have been the destination of these ruddy-cheeked men and women, with their heavy-treaded leather-and-mesh hiking boots and tall backpacks festooned with carabiners, lengths of webbing and rope, and patches of their blue-crossed flag. Wherever they were headed, there was no danger of them noting the relationship of two total strangers sharing a greasy meal in a Ford pickup.

  Ruthie dipped a clam in tartar sauce but hesitated before putting it in her mouth. “I’m sorry about the boat,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Matt rubbed his forehead. The headache that had started as soon as he saw Jane standing next to Ruthie’s nearly naked body was getting worse.

  “Will you be able to fix it?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I don’t have a choice.”

  “Is there any way I can help?”

  “You’re sweet, but unless you’ve been keeping some serious carpentry skills a secret all this time, there’s not a whole lot you can do.”

  Ruthie couldn’t muster up a smile. Instead, she ate the fried clam she was holding and licked the grease and tartar sauce from her fingers.

  Once they were done Matt said, “Let’s go get a beer at the Neptune.”

  There was no chance of the Neptune being populated solely by reticent acquaintances and disoriented Finns, and while Ruthie might have been able to handle a few familiar faces at the Bait Bag, she was not ready for the stir their entry into the bar would cause. The guys from the boatyard would surely be there, as would the younger summer people, those who would rather drink a two-dollar beer sitting next to a fisherman than a five-dollar G&T in the company of their parents’ yacht club friends. There would likely be no one in the Neptune that Ruthie and Matt didn’t know, and while she understood that their relationship was now going public, she wasn’t yet prepared for such a blatant coming-out party.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  She was sure, but the disappointment in his voice made her wonder if she was being selfish. “Do you need a drink after what happened with your mom?”

  “Screw my mom. I need a drink after what happened to Rebecca.”

  To Ruthie, the calamity had been their discovery. To Matt, that was just icing on the shit cake of John’s boat’s destruction.

  Matt turned the key in the ignition and the Ford coughed once before coming to life. “So, we’ll get a beer?”

  “I’m sorry, Matt. I really don’t feel like it. But you should go.”

  “That’s all right. So what should we do? Just go for a drive? Or do you want me to take you home?”

  “No. I don’t want to deal with my parents, either.”

  “So what do you want to do, Ruthie?” His voice betrayed a hint of impatience.

  Ruthie looked up the road toward the center of town. Although it was nearly eight o’clock, long after closing, the lights in the library were all on. She felt a sudden longing, random but keen, for the tidiness of the library, its smell of binding glue and furniture wax, for the bright, orderly world it contained and embodied.

  “You know what?” Ruthie said. “I think there might be a concert or a lecture at the library tonight.”

  “A concert,” Matt said.

  “Or a lecture.”

  “A lecture,” he said. He began backing out of the parking lot.

&n
bsp; “You should just drop me off,” Ruthie said. “Go to the Neptune. I’m sure I’ll be able to get a ride home afterward.”

  “I don’t mind going with you,” he said, unconvincingly.

  “Seriously, Matt. It’s fine. It’s actually better if you don’t come. It’ll probably be full of my parents’ friends, and the last thing I want is for my mom to hear about us from one of the library ladies. I want to tell her myself.”

  By now they’d reached the library. Matt drove past, and then turned into the parking lot of the neighboring Key Bank. He parked on the far side of the lot, where the stream of people entering the library would not be able to see them.

  “I can’t just leave you in town in the middle of the night,” he said.

  “It’s not the middle of the night. And, seriously, I told you, I won’t have any problem getting home. Who knows. My parents might even be here. They come to the library events all the time.”

  That seemed to convince him. “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.” She opened the car door and leaped lightly to the ground. “Go on. It’s fine. Call me tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  Halfway across the parking lot, Ruthie turned and ran back to the car. She tapped on the window and Matt rolled it down. She leaned inside and gave him a soft kiss, gently tugging on his lower lip with her teeth. “Love you,” she said lightly, as if the omission of the noun in the sentence made it somehow less startling. Then she turned and walked briskly toward the lit-up library, her hands shoved into the pockets of her jeans.

  A novelist held the floor in the event room of the library this evening, a man who had moved to Red Hook to rough it on the proceeds of his trust fund and to complete the novel, entitled Medicine Hat, from which he was now reading in an authoritative but not particularly lively way. The event room was crowded, gray metal folding chairs filling every available open space. Many of the audience members were indeed friends or committee colleagues of Iris’s, but Ruthie was relieved to see that her parents were not present after all. She took a seat at the back of the room, and for the next hour allowed her mind to wander.