by Paul Doiron
I ran my hand along my face, feeling the tiny scabs and the whiskers that I had meant to shave the night before. I realized that I didn’t care if Sarah saw me looking grungy. What was past was past.
“When and where?” I asked.
“How about five o’clock at the Top of the East?”
It was a rooftop lounge at a luxury hotel where we had once spent a wild New Year’s Eve. We were just college seniors, but we had splurged on a room so we wouldn’t have to drive back to Waterville after a night of bar hopping. One of us (probably me) had gotten the idea to have sex on every piece of furniture in the room. I woke up the next morning with cold sunlight streaming through the window, hungover, and sore in every part of my body. I had never been happier in my life.
There were dozens of bars Sarah could have suggested. I was astonished she’d picked one that came with so many suggestive memories attached.
“I’ll see you there,” I said.
* * *
I arrived fifteen minutes early and found a parking spot in front of the Immanuel Baptist Church on High Street. It was a great granite building with stained-glass clerestory windows and a towering bell tower. I’d never thought of the Baptists going in for Gothic architecture.
I entered the hotel and crossed the gilt-tinted lobby. I rode the elevator to the twelfth floor and asked the hostess for a table with a view of Portland harbor. The bar wouldn’t fill up until after five, but there were a handful of tourists seated on the couches and random guys in business suits with loose neckties getting a head start on their boozing. A woman dressed smartly in a black shirt and black pants came over to take my drink order, and I asked for a double bourbon on the rocks.
The view from the Top of the East was the best in Portland. I wasn’t remotely an urban person, but looking down on the brick buildings and the cobblestone streets, and then the port of Portland itself, bustling with fishing boats and island ferries, with the forts and lighthouses of Casco Bay in the distance, I could understand why Sarah had decided to make her home here. David DiPietro was the game warden whose district included the city. I could never imagine what sorts of calls he received. Help, there’s a raccoon in my trash cans! An owl just flew off with my house cat! The whole appeal to me of joining the Warden Service had been of making a life for myself in the woods. But maybe if I’d been assigned to Portland after graduation, Sarah and I would still be together.
There was no point in dreaming up alternate realities when I was having a hard enough time coming to grips with my actual life.
Sarah arrived late, as usual. Late enough for me to be halfway through my second bourbon, and feeling the warmth of the first one entering my bloodstream.
I watched her negotiate the tables between us, smiling, waving, and I thought she looked even better than the last time I’d seen her. She’d grown out her blond hair to shoulder length, and she was wearing a pinstriped gray suit that I never would have described as sexy until I saw her in it. Sarah had always been athletic. She’d been a competitive diver at Choate.
When I stood up, she gave me a hug—not too tight—and then held me at arm’s length, her hands squeezing my shoulders, smiling as she studied my face. “Maddie was right. Look at you.”
“I need a haircut and a shave.”
“You look good with actual hair.”
She’d never been a fan of my biweekly crew cuts. “What about the beard, though?”
“I don’t usually like them. I’m not sure I would have recognized you if we’d passed on the street. It’s so great to see you again, Mike.”
She took a seat, and I did the same. She was wearing lipstick and eye shadow, heavier than before. She brought her elbows up on the tabletop, intertwined her fingers, and smiled at me. I didn’t notice a ring.
“You look beautiful, by the way,” I said.
“Even with long hair? I thought you liked it short.”
“I think we had plenty of misconceptions about each other.”
She let her gaze turn toward the window and the cityscape below. “I’m not sure what made me think of meeting you here.”
“We had a nice time in this hotel.”
She glanced back at me with one corner of her mouth turned up. “Nice isn’t the word I’d use. It was room two twenty-seven, I seem to remember.”
The server reappeared, and Sarah asked for a Dark and Stormy, a cocktail she never used to order. She was looking at me with wide blue eyes, as if I were a strange new creature she had never encountered before.
“Your beard makes you look like your father,” she said.
“People keep telling me,” I said.
“He was a good-looking guy for someone his age. What happened to your face, though?”
“I was shot the same night as Kathy.”
“Wait. You were there?”
“The guy blew out my windshield as I was driving up to her house.”
The skin tightened above her eyebrows. “I thought you weren’t a warden anymore.”
“I was just visiting.”
She leaned across the table, giving me a whiff of her perfume, which smelled expensive. “Are you allowed to tell me what happened?”
“I can do whatever I want now,” I said with a smile. “I’m a civilian.”
“I still can’t believe you quit the Warden Service. Never in a million years would I have imagined that happening.”
“People change,” I said.
“That’s no explanation.”
The waitress returned with Sarah’s drink and asked if I wanted another Jack Daniel’s. I was tempted—something about being with Sarah again in this place made me want to let myself go—but I passed. I had a long drive back to Appleton.
I thought I had gotten away with not answering Sarah’s question, but as soon as the server left the table, she returned to the topic. “What happened to you, Mike? On the one hand, you seem like the same guy I lived with in Sennebec. And yet you’re totally different, too.”
“It’s just the beard. It makes me appear older and wiser than I really am.”
“That’s why I mean,” she said, tapping my chest with her painted fingernail. “Where did that guy come from?”
“Which guy?”
“The funny one.”
“I was always funny.”
“Trust me,” she said. “You weren’t. Look, it’s OK if you don’t want to talk about it.”
I threw back my head and laughed.
“What?” she asked, genuinely perplexed.
“You’re not going to stop asking me questions until your curiosity is satisfied. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed about you, Sarah.”
“I always thought we were mutually curious,” she said with a sly grin. “It was something we had in common.”
“One of the only things we had in common.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Let’s talk about you for a while and then we can return to the subject of my radical transformation. Tell me about this school you’re working for.”
She took a long sip of her fizzy rum drink. “I’m afraid I’ll just bore you.”
“I need a diversion from the past few days.”
She set the glass on the table. “Well, it’s called the Coracle School, and it’s for kids ages two to six. Do you know what a coracle is?”
“Like the Welsh boat?” I didn’t understand the connection but didn’t want to interrupt her by saying so.
“It’s circular in shape,” she said. “The philosophy behind Coracle is just so progressive and revolutionary. When I talk about it, people say, ‘Oh, it sounds like the Montessori approach,’ but it’s totally leading edge. Maria Montessori died seventy years ago, and we’ve learned so much about neuroscience since then. The Coracle curriculum comes out of proven discoveries in how a child’s brain develops. I mean, we now know that three-year-olds become more interested in structured activities.” She had been speaking faster and
faster. Suddenly, she caught herself. “I just realized I was giving you my fund-raising pitch. It’s the curse of being a development director.”
“Tell me about the man you work for, then,” I said.
She flared her nostrils. “Maddie told you about Jon.”
“She said you were involved.”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “Jon is a genius. He’s literally the smartest human being I’ve ever met. He’s so charismatic and kind and wise. When you talk to him, it’s like there’s no one else in the room. He just has this magnetism about him.”
I drained my glass. “How old is he?”
A shadow fell across her face. “That’s a rude question. I thought you were genuinely interested in my work. I haven’t asked who you’re seeing now.”
“I apologize,” I said. “I guess it proves I’m not as grown-up as my beard.”
The waitress must have been watching us closely. When she noticed me finish my drink, she came back to see if I wanted another now. I said no, but Sarah did something that surprised me: She downed the remainder of her Dark and Stormy in one big gulp and ordered a second cocktail.
“Wow,” I said.
“It’s been a long week.” She began absently fiddling with the top button of her blouse, buttoning and unbuttoning it. “So, who are you seeing?”
“At the moment, I am single,” I said.
“There’s got to be someone.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw Stacey’s face, but it was the laughing, blueberry-lipped version I had seen in my dream, not the real person; just a figment of my imagination. “The dating options in Washington County are not what you’d call optimal.”
“Maddie said there was a woman at the lodge that you were staring at all night.”
“That’s just someone I know from the department. She’s a wildlife biologist.”
The waitress returned with the Dark and Stormy. She set a bowl of miniature pretzels between us and then departed. Once again, Sarah took a serious pull from the cocktail glass.
“You might want to slow down,” I said.
“Listen to you,” she said. “The voice of moderation. You really have changed. I live in the West End, so you don’t need to worry about me driving. Maddie said that you and this woman got into a pretty passionate argument at one point.”
I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. “Maddie thought Stacey and I were involved because we were arguing?”
“You and I used to argue.”
“I’m not dating Stacey Stevens,” I said, trying to sound insistent.
She gripped the glass by the bottom and had it halfway to her mouth. Her hand hovered in midair. “This woman is Charley and Ora’s daughter?”
Sarah and I had been living together when I first met the Stevenses, and she knew what a mentor Charley had been to me as a rookie warden.
“Yes.”
She took a drink and then set the glass down again on the circle of condensation it had left on the mat.
“Huh,” she said.
* * *
We talked as the shadows lengthened. The setting sun turned the western sides of the buildings below us to gold. Across the mouth of the harbor, the lighthouses began to wink on, one after the other: Bug Light, then Spring Point Ledge Light, and finally Portland Head Light, commissioned by George Washington himself, at the far entrance to Casco Bay.
Sarah’s mood was erratic. She pulled information out of me about Jimmy Gammon’s death and then the night Kathy was shot. She listened with tears in her eyes. After a while, I returned to the subject of the Coracle School in an attempt to show her that I was genuinely interested in her new life. I also wanted to dodge the many questions she still had about about my decision to leave the Warden Service. Her spirits rebounded—assisted by a third cocktail I didn’t stop her from ordering but probably should have—and she began to speak with animation about the exciting work she was doing: how she could see positive changes in the kids from week to week, and that her belief in the school’s mission and practices made her even more passionate about raising money to support it.
She referred to the school founder, Jon Hogarth, repeatedly, but always in terms of admiration and awe rather than affection. If I hadn’t known from Maddie that they were a couple, I might have mistaken their relationship as platonic—a father figure mentoring an enthusiastic young believer. I’d met charismatic older men who used their “wisdom” to charm impressionable women into bed. Even though I wanted to wish Sarah the best, I found myself instinctively distrusting this man Hogarth.
“I’m glad you found such meaningful work,” I said, trying to conceal my misgivings. “It was always so important for you to have a sense of purpose.”
“You, too,” she said. “Are you missing it? The job, I mean.”
“It’s not the worst thing to wander in the wilderness for a while.”
She reached across the table and touched the injured side of my face. “You seem so lost, Mike.”
“It’s a bad time is all.”
“I wish there was something I could do for you.”
The suggestion wasn’t so subtle that I missed it. And I couldn’t deny that I still desired her. She was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever been with. But I could hear the alcohol in her voice. I removed her hand and gave it a squeeze. “You and I had our time together. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
She lowered her chin and looked up at me through her lashes. “You’ve always been so damned chivalrous. I’d forgotten how sexy it is.”
“You’re mistaking cluelessness for chivalry. There’s a reason I’m not seeing anyone.”
She stared steadily into my eyes for a long time. “Can you excuse me for a few minutes?”
“Sure.”
I watched her beautiful backside as she crossed the room, feeling less like a noble knight than a self-flagellating monk. What had I just passed up? And for what reason?
I let my gaze wander back to the window. A flock of herring gulls was gathered on one of the rooftops below, lined up along the edge, looking down expectantly at the street. Among them was a great black-backed gull. It was the largest species of gull in the world and a natural bully. When one of the smaller birds found a baguette someone must have tossed into a Dumpster, the big gull attacked until the other gull was forced to drop its prize.
The natural world had always been so much easier for me to comprehend than my fellow human beings. Amid all the bricks and concrete, the crowds and the cars, I found comfort in watching gulls, knowing I could understand their motivations. The great black-backed gull acted with aggression because it was hungry and because it was large enough to take what it wanted. There were no hidden reasons for its behavior. If only people were so easy to decipher.
Sarah was gone for ten minutes. I was beginning to wonder if she’d walked out on me for some unknowable reason, when my phone rang.
“Hello?”
“I’m in room two twenty-seven,” she said, and hung up.
30
I knocked on the door. My stomach had been doing flip-flops in the elevator. A voice had told me to hit the button for the ground floor and make a dash through the lobby. And yet here I was, staring at the peephole of room 227.
Sarah opened the door. She was wearing one of the hotel’s plush robes and she was barefoot. Her lips were parted in a smile.
I remained in the hall, as if paralyzed from the waist down. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“It’s not obvious?”
I stepped through the door. It closed behind me on account of its own weight.
She reached under my sweater and pressed her palm over my heart. “I decided I like the beard.”
“What about Jon?” I asked.
“He doesn’t have one.”
“You know what I mean.”
She tightened her fingers in my chest hair. I grabbed the back of her neck and pulled her head up until our eyes were locked together. Then I brought my mouth down to
hers and we began to kiss, not lovingly, but with lips parted, using our tongues. I reached inside her robe, found her breast, and I squeezed the hardened nipple. I let her neck go and wrapped my other arm around the small of her back. Her robe was open and her flat stomach was pressed against my groin. I wanted her to feel how much I wanted her.
She began pulling at the hem of my sweater, trying to work it and my T-shirt up over my head at the same time, but my arms got tangled in the sleeves.
“Wait a second,” I said. “Let me.”
I managed to get my shirt and sweater off with a minimal amount of fumbling. She dropped to her knees and reached for my belt. I found myself looking down at the uneven part in her blond hair. This was happening fast, and I was trying hard not to think about it, preferring just to let my body do what it wanted to do. She took the tip of my cock in her mouth but wouldn’t take any more of it at first. I wanted her to slide the rest down her throat as far as it could go, but she remembered how much I enjoyed being teased. When she finally did, it was almost more than I could stand.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”
I was worried about coming too fast.
“Lie down on the bed,” I said.
She glanced up and gave me a wicked smile that would have scandalized the parents of the students at Coracle. Then she let the terry-cloth robe slide from her shoulders and stood up, naked, in front of me. She took a step backward and flopped back on the bed with her arms and legs open. The sight of her bare body wasn’t helping me regain control of myself. She had recently had a wax.
She was lying there, waiting for me to work my feet out of my pants, when a phone rang. It wasn’t mine.
Sarah glanced at the nightstand. Her phone wiggled across the tabletop as it rang. The ringtone was a snippet of a pop song I didn’t recognize, something a teenaged girl might listen to.
After thirty seconds or so, the phone stopped ringing. The call had gone to voice mail.