The Northern Reach

by W. S. Winslow

  The pain between Imelda’s shoulders flared and she pulled over.

  “Five kids in ten years Mumma had. Can you imagine? He might just as well’ve killed her himself,” Imelda said.

  “But he didn’t,” Pug replied, a deep sigh pushing the words across the bench seat and into Imelda’s ear.

  “The hell’s that supposed to mean?” Imelda asked. Bile rose in her throat, but she forced it back.

  “She had an anxiety condition, Imelda. Least that’s what they called it. After she had Jessie, she couldn’t bounce back, just sank deeper and deeper. You know that, you’ve always known. That’s why we were so worried after you had Deborah. You were nervous, too. Like your mother.”

  “Is that so, Auntie? That the diagnosis they gave you up to the state hospital? ‘Imelda’s quite nervous, so what we’ll do is just tie her up in this lovely white jacket and run enough electricity through her brain to light up the midway at the state fair. That ought to steady her out. Make her into a right perfect little wife and mother, and if it doesn’t, we can always try it again.’ Was it you that signed those papers, Pug, or my loving husband?”

  “You were so sick, Imelda. We were afraid you’d hurt yourself, or the baby. They said it was the only way to make the depression go away. You didn’t eat or sleep. You couldn’t be left alone, not even a minute. For a whole month after Deb was born, you wouldn’t feed her or pick her up. You remember.”

  Imelda’s head and neck were throbbing. She rummaged in her purse for the Vicodin but couldn’t extract a pill, so she dumped some in her lap. With a shaking hand she shoved three in her mouth, then took a gulp of tea, barely managing to choke it down.

  There was so much she’d lost after the shock treatments, huge chunks of her life that had been blown to scraps, experiences and feelings she knew she’d had but could never find again. Even so, she was drowning in the flood of memory, recalling the things she couldn’t forget even when she tried, and now the worst ones came gurgling up like stinking black dregs from a clogged sink pipe.

  She remembered Mumma crying more and more as her belly got bigger that last time, then later, when Imelda was almost ten—in the fall, just a few weeks after Jessie was born—finding her mother in the woods behind their ramshackle pile of a house, red rivers from the gashes on her wrists pooling on the yellow leaves that littered the ground on either side of her, one shoe on and the other next to her poor cold foot. It seemed so wrong, her lying there all uncovered, that Imelda stooped down to put her shoe back on even as she screamed. Now all she wanted was to pull the plug on that memory, wash it away once and for all, down the drain with her mother’s blood.

  Imelda clenched her jaw and rubbed her eyes, then put the car in gear. She jerked it back onto the road and had just reached cruising speed when she noticed party lights in her rearview mirror.

  “Good God almighty, what now?”

  Imelda replaced her scowl with a plastic used-car salesman grin and said, “Well, well, as I live and breathe, it’s Stumpy LaVallee. Seems like the deputy wants to chat.”

  Pug suggested pulling over, which Imelda did, so abruptly that Stumpy’s cruiser nearly rear-ended the Caddie. With the blue lights flashing, he stalked up to Imelda’s side of the car.

  “Well, hello there, Stumpy. Might want to get those brakes looked at. Damn near stove in my rear end,” she said, then winked to show she was willing to be a good sport about it.

  “Mrs. Levine, have you been drinking?”

  “Yup, smoking, too.”

  “I think you’ll need to get out of the car.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Step out, please.”

  “No need to get stroppy, dear. If I was speeding, you can just write me a ticket and I’ll be on my way.” Feeling parched, she took a delicate sip of her tea.

  “You will not. Mrs. Levine, I’ll need your license and registration right now, and you will step away from the vehicle. I can smell the liquor in that drink from here.” He pointed at the vodka on the front seat. “And that bottle has been opened.” Stumpy’s voice rose with each word, the last one came out just shy of a squeak. He grabbed at the cup in her hand, which Imelda thought was awfully rude.

  “If you’d like a drink, Deputy, all you’ve got to do is ask,” she said, firmly but not unpleasantly, holding the cup beyond his reach.

  “I do not. Now put down that alcoholic beverage and remove those keys and step out of that car. I’m not going to tell you again, Mrs. Levine. I don’t want to take you in, but I will.”

  Imelda considered the possibility of being bound up again, this time in handcuffs, locked away in a tiny cell, just sitting in the dark, and rejected it. “Listen, Stumpy, enough is enough. I’m a sick woman and I don’t have time for this foolishness. You just go ahead and drop that ticket by the house,” Imelda said as she took her foot off the brake and stamped on the gas. Over the squeal of the tires, she called back, “Bucky’ll take care of it. Bucky takes care of everything.”

  The deputy scrambled back to his car. When he pulled out behind her, he added a siren to the lights.

  “Oh, stop your noise,” Imelda said, and accelerated to put some distance between them.

  “Poor Stumpy, always a bridesmaid,” Imelda said to Pug, who’d sat silently through the altercation. “Sheriff Largay’ll never retire, you know. Told me once he planned to die with his boots on. More likely he’ll be wearing orthopedic shoes and a truss.”

  Her aunt shrugged.

  Stumpy was closing, clearly intending to lock her up, so Imelda picked up the vodka bottle and tossed it over her shoulder. The deputy swerved to avoid it. The tails of Imelda’s head scarf were slapping her face, so she loosened it with her free hand, letting the oversize square of pink-and-green silk flutter away. It settled right on Stumpy’s windshield, which forced him to slow down. The Cheez Doodles created a garish orange snowstorm as she shook out the bag.

  Imelda watched in the rearview mirror as Stumpy tried to push the scarf aside with the wipers, but before he could clear his view, she’d pulled off her hairpiece and let that go, too. Then she slipped out of her cardigan and flung it back at Stumpy’s car. Only when she was down to her bra and skirt did she stop undressing and look behind her again. The wiglet and assorted garments were snarled in the cruiser’s wiper blades. Stumpy stopped, jumped out of the car, and pulled at the tangled mess.

  The whine of the siren receded into the distance. The sun was warm on Imelda’s skin, and her unpinned hair blew back from her face. Up ahead, just past the next rise, was the turnoff for Skunk Pond. She took it faster than advisable, but the big car hugged the road.

  “How’s that for problem solving, Pug?” she asked as they clattered down the dirt track.

  “A problem delayed is not a problem solved. You know as well as I do.”

  “Is that so, Dear Abby?” Imelda shot back.

  “Ayuh. And where do you think you’re going?”

  “You know as well as I do,” Imelda singsonged back.

  The prowler’s siren rose and fell as Stumpy blew by the turnoff to the dirt road. Imelda stopped the car. She remembered being twelve years old and bumping along this very stretch in Pug and Alonzo’s old truck, the same one that had rushed her to the emergency room when she was three. That second trip, Pug had driven out to Skunk Pond to collect her niece, the one with the sassy mouth who looked so much like her dead mother that neither her father nor his brand-new wife could stand her, or her back talk, one minute more.

  Ralph Martin had been drunk the day he threw his eldest daughter out of the house, like most every day since he’d lost his wife. Even so, he’d had room in his heart for the other kids. But not Imelda.

  “Why, Pug?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know, maybe he loved your mother too much to be reminded of her, or maybe he didn’t love her at all. I never could tell.”

  Imelda had cried to leave Jessie and her brothers, cried for the loss of her mother and for the
father who didn’t love her anymore, or maybe never had. But Pug had loved her, and in his way maybe Bucky had, too, even if she’d never been able to love him, or Deborah, or herself, quite right. She was crying still, but now she felt strangely light, as if the past were dissolving, like blood drops in puddles.

  Imelda sat for some time just past the second bend in the Skunk Pond road, a mile from the place where she was born, surrounded by the smell of pine sap mixed with the sweet rot of dead leaves and wet bark. The sun peeped through the branches overhead and kissed her upturned face. The September breeze blew her eyes dry and caught the wisps of her hair as it rippled over her head and shoulders, caressing the arms folded across her chest and the hands that gripped her shoulders.

  Pug was whispering in her ear. “It’s all right, Mellie. I took you home once and I always will. Remember?” She hadn’t been called Mellie in such a long time, not since she was a girl.

  “I remember,” Imelda said. She took a deep breath, uncrossed her arms, and raised them to the sky, unfettered and free.

  When Stumpy LaVallee finally retraced his route and headed toward Skunk Pond, he found Imelda Levine, all alone, just as she had been when he pulled her over, seated behind the wheel of her yellow Cadillac, barely cold and still as winter night, smiling softly to herself.

  SMOKE SIGNALS IN THE AFTERTIME

  Alice Culligan died feeling she’d been goaded into it. She was long past hope and ready for the end, but once the visiting nurse slid the needle into her arm and the morphine began to flow, she’d have been content to drift forever in velvet limbo. Her children, however, had other ideas. They’d convened at her house with a funeral to stage and grieving to do, and her continued existence kept them from getting on with either.

  Day and night they hovered, disrupting her peace with their squawking and their relentless, pecking care. At first their voices were low, their conversations hard to follow and full of odd pauses, which Alice assumed were filled by gestures that conveyed what they didn’t want her to hear. Later though, as the days wore on, the chatter became louder and looser.

  Every few hours, when the morphine’s hold began to slip and Alice became twitchy and agitated, they’d quiet down for a while. Sometimes she whimpered in pain, other times in frustration. She discovered that the more she moaned and thrashed, the sooner the drug was dispatched down the tube to plump her flaccid vein.

  One day her daughters argued about how much to give her. Theresa, the eldest child, fretted their mother was getting too much.

  “Jesus Christ, T,” her younger daughter, Molly, spat. “An overdose’d be a gift from God. That is not living.”

  Oh, but it was. For the first time in her adult life, Alice was completely relaxed, her mind free to wander wherever and for as long as she liked. Confined to her bed, with nothing left to hide and no one else to worry about, she felt finally, truly free.

  As she lay there, cast-off memories came drifting back, flotsam and jetsam on the opium tide. She recalled the Christmas tree lights twinkling in the darkened living room of her parents’ house, the aching cold of Penobscot Bay in summer, and her first real party dress, a lemon chiffon confection with a midnight-blue silk sash that she and her mother had bought in a fancy dress shop down in Portland, Ducharme’s Couture it was called. They served Mother champagne in a long-stemmed lily pad while Alice modeled dress after dress. The day ended with a steak dinner at the Fessenden Club, served by ancient men in white mess jackets and Bing cherry bow ties. In the smoky, candlelit dining room, with her father ordering for the three of them, Alice sipped a Shirley Temple from her own delicate stem; it was one of the few times she could remember her mother laughing.

  As her thoughts unspooled, Alice lost all sense of time. Still she was tormented by hands, familiar ones that held hers and stroked her forehead and strange ones that tore at her parchment-skin, cruelly shifted her from one side to the other, and casually groped the most private parts of her body like greasy mechanics manhandling rusty car parts.

  Voices besieged her, too. They demanded her attention, asking, “Mum, can you hear me?”

  “We’re all with you, Mumma,” they informed her. “We’re right here.”

  Well of course you are, you goddamned fools, she thought. I’m dying, for Christ’s sake. Where the hell else would you be?

  Eventually Alice was worn thin, too tired even for her memories. More than anything, she wished to be left in peace, floating serenely to oblivion on the great rolling river of dope.

  The last straw was a visit from Father Barbizon. The thought that he’d be anointing her with his white woman-hands and speaking the sacred last rites with his rosy, too-moist mouth was more than she could stand, even with the drugs.

  That ridiculous old fool, she thought. I don’t know whose ass he had to kiss to get Bloody Paul’s, but if he thinks he’s going to be the one to give me absolution, he is very much mistaken.

  And so, before the priest could open his Bible or uncork the holy water, Alice Byrne Culligan rolled the dice on eternal salvation and let go of her life. To hell with it, she thought, I’ve had enough. Let this be the end.

  It wasn’t.

  * * *

  The dying was easy, simple release, no pain, no fear, but no heavenly host either, and this surprised Alice. For a moment she worried she might be headed for hell, which was not a possibility she had ever entertained. But no, she wasn’t suffering, nor could she detect anything like the sulfurous flames of eternal damnation the Sisters of Mercy had so often threatened her with in school; this was a relief. Though she was clearly no longer in her body, neither did she appear to be going much of anywhere, and at least for the nonce, she remained in her rambling shingled cottage way out on the tip end of Bridge Point, where the reach met the bay.

  Her thoughts became unusually clear, the morphine’s blur replaced by bright, sharp consciousness unencumbered by flesh. At first she was aware only of relief at being released from that dreadful, decaying prison. All her life Alice had been proud of her appearance, vain even, but the ravages of the last year had stripped away her cool, blond beauty and, with it, what remained of her dignity and patience.

  She gazed down at her discarded corpse but felt no attachment; it no longer interested her in the least. The nurse with the brutal touch removed her sausage fingers from Alice’s wrist and looked away from her watch. When she spoke, there was a palpable wave of shock in the room. After murmuring some canned words of condolence, she slipped away. It was the only graceful thing Alice could recall her doing.

  The family was ringed around the hospital bed that had replaced her four-poster when she could no longer get up on her own. At her right shoulder stood a startled-looking Norman Barbizon, Bible in hand, gob half-open, and she was pleased to have shoved his absolution back down his throat. Alice regarded her children with regret, the priest with something very like pleasure.

  Having overcome his initial shock, Father Barbizon flipped from last rites to prayers for the dead, his flustered fingers rattling the pages of the holy book until he found the appropriate selection and was able to get to work.

  “To You, O Lord, we commend the soul of Your servant Alice Byrne Culligan,” intoned the priest. “Being dead to this world, may she live unto You. In Your most merciful goodness forgive whatever sins she has committed in this life through human weakness: through Christ our Lord.”

  Theresa sagged in the armchair next to the priest with her face in her hands. Her closed-mouth keening sliced through the drone of the sacrament like a siren in a traffic jam. No one seemed to notice.

  Alice’s attention shifted to her elder son; she was anxious to witness his devastation. Tall, fair, and patrician in a beautifully cut gray flannel suit, Paul stood stock-still, staring at his mother’s vacant body; he blinked twice. Only the thin, rigid line of his mouth betrayed any hint of unexpressed emotion. His right arm was wrapped around his younger sister, Molly, as she sobbed into his shoulder. Alice was surprised that her da
ughter, a journalist whose unblinking accounts of atrocities from hellholes around the world had built her reputation for toughness, would be so shaken. She and Molly hadn’t really ever been close.

  The priest droned on.

  Alice’s fourth child, Jack, was stationed at the end of the bed, white-knuckling the footboard, silent tears rolling down his cheeks and dripping from his chin to splatter the leaping black stag on his tatty old high-school sweatshirt, making it look as if the animal had been tommy-gunned in midstride. Alice wondered where he’d found that old rag. Must have been rummaging around in the attic again, she thought. Jack made no sound as he wept and looked off into the middle distance rather than at the desiccated shell that had, until recently, been his mother. He didn’t seem to notice his nose had started to run.

  Next to him, Ina Coltrane, who’d been with the family for more than forty years, stood with one hand on Jack’s shoulder. With the other, she tapped his arm and handed him a tissue from her apron pocket. Her gray eyes never moved from Alice’s face. She appeared to be waiting for a surreptitious breath or telltale flutter of the eyelids, but they did not come.

  “Let us pray together. Please respond with Lord, have mercy on her.”

  Like Pavlov’s puppies, Alice’s four children bowed their heads and responded to the priest’s words as they’d been trained to do since they first learned to talk. Mrs. Coltrane lowered her eyes, but her lips did not move.

  As the repetitious call-and-response rolled on, Alice watched her family. Normally, emotional displays embarrassed her, but she was gratified at being properly mourned, and by the fact that the loathsome priest was witness to her family’s grief.

  She could see that Jack and the girls were stricken, but Paul puzzled her. Still handsome at forty-five, he was the only one of her children to inherit her looks and had, she could now admit, always been her favorite. She had expected him to feel her loss much more deeply than the others and was perplexed to see him standing dry-eyed next to her corpse, an island of buttoned-up composure in a roiling sea of emotion. His stoicism could have passed for strength, and that was probably how the others would see it, but Alice wasn’t so sure.