The From-Aways

by CJ Hauser

  Charley sighs. “You’re hired,” she says.

  “What’s my beat?” I ask. No obituaries, no obituaries, I telegraph silently.

  “Beat?” Charley says. “Your beat is to find some news in this godforsaken excuse for New England idyll. And much luck to you.”

  I THOUGHT IT would be hard to find him but it says CARTER MARKS right on the damn mailbox. Driving from the Star to my new place, I’m taking a hairpin turn, braking into it and ready to zoom out with my wits about me, when I see it. I’m used to seeing his name in newspaper articles, on late-night radio shows, in used-record bins, but the mailbox is a first.

  I brake. I let the car idle. The mailbox has a stuffed fox wired to the post. Its glass eyes glint at my low beams. The drive is gravel, red lollipop reflectors all bent to hell along the sides. The trees are tall and thick here and the house is surrounded by a wall of juniper bushes. Through the branches I can see that the roof dips low at its center and clots of lichen spread outward like a saddle. It looks uninhabitable.

  I have an impulse to march in and do this right now, but sometimes I also feel like screaming loudly in silent movie theaters or leaping over railings at the mall. What I’m saying is that this is not a healthy impulse. Even if I got so far as knocking on his door, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I’ve been working my speech over in my mind, and it’s not quite done yet. Actually, it’s less of a speech and more of an ode, to my mother. More of a song, really, but fuck if I’m going to sing to that man. Fuck if he’ll ever hear the sound of my voice outside the tirade of life-smashing information I’m going to deliver to him like a smiting angel with a badass sword.

  Maybe I won’t even tell him my speech. Maybe when I do go down his creepy fox driveway, I’ll go like a soldier. I’ll unfold a piece of paper and eyeball it the way those sad-eyed boys do in the war movies. Carter Marks? I’ll say. And when he says yes I won’t even spare a glance to see if our noses are the same or if I got my green eyes from him. I’ll just inform him in my most official way that Marta is dead. And that she was beautiful. And that he is a total fool for using her so cheaply. Wringing a song out of her, knocking her up, and then leaving once there was no more juice to the squeeze. That he never really loved her at all, and I want nothing to do with him.

  Although I am curious about the fox. Whether or not taxidermy runs in the family is the sort of thing I’d like to know.

  ROSIE AND I live above the Stationhouse Café, where she waits tables. Our apartment shakes when the local passes through, but this is nowheresville, so that’s only four times daily. In the online listings, hers was the only apartment under MENAMON (West). The subject read, Area Girl of Little Means Seeks Same as Roommate.

  Rosie’s room has a single bed with pink sheeting that’s twisted into knots by morning because she thrashes like a demon in her sleep. She has postcards from her parents taped to the wall. Rosie grew up here but her parents moved to Florida a year back, right after she graduated from high school. She refused to go with them because she thinks Florida is where people go to die. She ticks off on her fingers: skin cancer, alligators, syphilis-carrying mosquitoes, retirement homes. “Besides,” she says, “there’s nothing less appealing than a man in Bermuda shorts offering you a drink made from bananas.”

  I think she means encephalitis-carrying mosquitoes, but I don’t have the heart to correct her. Rosie is nineteen. She started working at the Stationhouse right after high school. She comes home from work smelling like coffee and the butter the café fries their eggs in. “This job is ruining my complexion,” she says. Rosie says she’s going to be a famous singer when she grows up, so her complexion is of paramount importance. She sings in the shower and likes to wear a shower cap because if she takes a bow at the end of a song, the drumming of water on plastic sounds like applause.

  In spite of this, I hide the guitar from Rosie. The guitar was Carter’s, left behind when Marta and I were left behind. The original plan was to give it back to him: Here, the last of your shitty stuff, and I don’t want it.

  But then, right before I moved, I started playing it, and now I’ve been practicing chords and riffs when Rosie’s at work. I hide the guitar because it seems too much to explain. How bad I am. How old it is. Why I still have it at all. Because when I pick up the guitar I feel a strange sense of balance, like a missing limb has been returned to me. Because I don’t know how to feel about the fact that this is obviously Carter’s genetic juice, working away inside me.

  THE DAYS TICK by for Rosie and me. It’s seven o’clock in the morning and I’m drinking coffee with two hands, sitting cross-legged on my pullout couch. I’m mustering the strength to go to the Star and let Charley run me into the ground again. I’ve been cranking out articles for weeks but I haven’t found that Woodward and Bernstein intrigue like I’d hoped to. Maybe because Charley has me covering things like the county’s largest wasp’s nest. My headline was COUNTY ABUZZ OVER COUNTY’S LARGEST WASP’S NEST!, which I thought was pretty great, but Charley reamed me out. Apparently you’re not supposed to use the same word twice in one headline. But whatever, the intrigue will come. I’m on the beat now. Excitement is obviously right around the corner.

  I drink the dregs of my coffee and get up to pour myself more.

  “You?” I say to Rosie, holding up the pot. She shakes her head.

  Rosie is getting ready to go to work downstairs. We have our rituals already, she and I. Weak light through the open window makes a screen shadow on the floor. Late-summer bugs rattle in the grass outside. Rosie ties her apron strings. She’s the perfect waitress, she says, waiting for something better to come along.

  “What do you think is going to come find you here in Menamon?” I say.

  “Love,” she says, looking up with a squint, like maybe she can see right through me. “People are always falling in love with waitresses.”

  3

  Leah

  There is, in Menamon, Maine, no news.

  Here is what there is: One of the oldest carousels in the United States. It spins on the south side of the harbor, on a little scrap of land staked with a sign that says NEVERSINK PARK. I park the woody nearby, its hood ticking like a bomb after I cut the engine. The carousel’s horses have sneering painted mouths: gums exposed and teeth too large. A brass ring, the victor’s spoils, flits around the perimeter. This was one of Henry’s stories: fishermen said the wooden horses came alive at night and galloped over the waves, capsizing boats and biting through mooring ropes.

  A red-bearded man with dark complicated tattoos around his calves operates the carousel machinery from a folding chair in the center. He catches me staring. “You’re too tall to ride,” he says, and pulls a lever that makes the ghostly organ song go faster. “But give me a kiss and I might let you.” It’s the kind of challenge I might have accepted once, before I was married. I lock up the car and head down the boardwalk to the market.

  The boardwalk runs along the shore to the docks. The beach is just a few yards of slick rock. There are a dozen piers, most for lobster boats and small fishing craft. Gulls hover; this is where the men sit and smoke and pull the guts from fish, the meat from clams, the lobsters from pots. There is a convenience store that sells ten-dollar galoshes and tiny waterproof virgins. There is a fish market that sold me Lavender and Leopold and today sells me cod. There is the hardware store where Henry loves to pilfer Red Hots from a fishbowl they keep on the counter. No one minds. The men who work the waterfront, they don’t begrudge him anything. No one does. He is the prodigal son come home, saved from the city just in time. Saved from being what I am. What they call me. A From-Away.

  I did that! I want to say when people smile and say they’re glad he’s home. I want to point a thumb at my chest and let them know Henry had no intention of coming back to Maine for another few years at least. I was the one who heard his stories about life in Menamon and knew we had to move. Of course he agreed, got excited once plans were afoot, but Henry could easily have dal
lied forever eating New York pizza and condescending to ladies who thought you could grow peach trees on roof decks. He was happy enough landscaping roof gardens for city matrons, until he met me. Here is your prodigal son! I want to say to the people of Menamon. I have brought him home for you.

  On the drive back, the car’s heat gauge rides high. I worry, because this car is Henry’s baby: a wood-paneled red Buick Roadmaster with two decades of beach-pass stickers plastered on the rear windows. It belonged to Henry’s father, Hank. Henry spent our first week here fluently cursing under the hood, and whatever he did worked, though we keep a tool kit in the trunk. The car is hot, but the day is hot. I can make it home.

  We live south of the downtown. Beachfront, but tiny beach-front. Red-tide-twice-a-summer beachfront. Watch-out-for-the-invisible-jellyfish beachfront. Oh-those-are-just-the-sand-fleas beachfront. Closer to town, where the shore gets wide and the sand gets fine, there’s a gated community called Elm Park. Those houses are all the same: Palladian windows, two-story entryways, a piano no one knows how to play in a foyer they actually call the foyer. This year the sticker pass to sit on that wide sandy beach costs eighty dollars, up from fifty. The paper said the beach-sticker hike had old-time Menamonians “in a hot-blooded fury.” Who is writing this copy? I thought.

  Are you angry? I asked Henry. He shrugged. He said, Things change. People should get used to it. It disappointed me that my Menamonian wasn’t in a hot-blooded fury of his own.

  When I get home I tell Henry the woody is running hot and that in addition to its being haunted, I think the carousel might be the secret engine of Menamon; that if something happened to the red-bearded operator, the town would grind to a halt.

  “Maybe,” he says, but does not sound convinced. “How hot?” I stand behind him and slip my hands into his pockets. I stick my chin on his shoulder, a tall-lady prerogative, and kiss his neck. Henry unpacks my groceries. He has white scars on the backs of his hands and arms from wrestling trees and thorny perennials. In the winter they’re invisible, but with his late-summer tan they’ve developed like a Polaroid. Higher up, on his right arm, Henry has a tattoo. It’s a circle. A single blue line, thin as the needle that inked it. I tease that he meant to get it filled in with something but couldn’t handle the pain. But he says no, it was always only ever going to be a circle. Because a circle is perfect. An artist’s ideal. It’s a truly boring tattoo, if you ask me, but I never thought I’d wind up married to a body with any ink at all.

  I hear a car engine in the drive. “My sister’s coming by,” Henry says.

  “What?” I say. Because she can’t be. I have been excited for this moment, meeting my new sister, but in my head it happens differently. Not like this.

  “She’s dropping off some extra house keys,” Henry says. I see what must be Charley’s Jeep. It has stalactites of red mud hanging from its undercarriage and a bumper sticker that says SAVE THE LOONS!

  I say, “You know I hate unexpected guests.”

  Henry palms my neck and rubs his thumb beneath my ear. He once trained as an EMT and sometimes I think he is secretly taking my pulse when he does this, seeing how worked up I actually am.

  “Family don’t count as guests,” Henry says, and as he does, Charley comes around back, through the kitchen door, with a box of beers.

  She and Henry smile at each other with their mouths closed, then hug each other. Charley claps Henry on the back. The older sister.

  “Charley, this is Leah,” Henry says.

  “Hi,” I say. “Let me help you with that box.” Charley checks out my arms like she doesn’t trust me not to drop it. She has an expressive forehead and the thick blond hair of a well-cared-for horse. I’ve been told she and Henry resemble their mother.

  “Hi,” she says, and hands over the box. Seadog Ale. “Welcome home,” she says to Henry, and hands him two sets of keys.

  “Stay for a beer?” says Henry.

  “Just one,” Charley says.

  Charley and I sit with beers in the yard while Henry puts the rest in the refrigerator. The plastic chairs we found in the basement had been chewed along the legs by a long-dead dog or something more feral. The yard is encircled by tall trees and the last light comes through splotchily. I can hear the ocean. I can hear Charley’s teeth clink against the glass mouth of her bottle.

  Charley is a journalist too. Runs the local paper. This is the other reason I have been imagining this meeting: I want to work at the Star. I’ve got to start reporting again. If I don’t find a way to write, to sweat under deadlines, to patchwork information into stories, I might go crazy.

  “You grew up in this house?” I say. Charley looks at me, like she knows I’m wasting her time with questions I already know the answers to.

  “Sure did,” Charley says. She takes out a pack of Marlboros and lights one, staring up at the house. I regret my question. I imagine this is a sad thing for her to do, to look at this house that was her parents’, and is now her little brother’s. If you ask, Henry will tell you his pops was mauled by a black bear in a squabble over blueberries. He will tell you this because, if you don’t already know it, the truth is none of your business. The truth is that Hank Lynch got drunk and sailed a too-small craft into a storm a few years after Henry’s mother, June, died.

  It seems like a good moment to ask about the newspaper.

  “Charley, I’m interested in the Star,” I say. I could swear I saw her inhale a lungful of smoke but now she is staring at me and nothing is emerging.

  “What part interests you, exactly?”

  “Any parts that might be hiring, actually.” I had imagined we might become close in this way. Sisters, running a small paper together.

  “I hired someone a few months ago,” Charley says, and rakes her strawlike bangs behind her ears. “Come see me at the office.” She tips her beer backward and finishes it. “Nice to meet you, Leah,” she says, and braces her palms against her knees to stand.

  I HAVE TROUBLE falling asleep. Insomnia is a New Yorker’s affliction.

  Henry and Charley are practically their own species. They have their own grunting language and their own shared grief, parceled out generously between the two of them. They are the last Lynches of Menamon, unless you count me, which obviously no one does. I doubt I will ever truly be one of them, family family. It is Henry’s tribe of two, and different now that he does not have Hank or June.

  I loved books about orphans when I was small. Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, Pippi Longstocking with her absent pirate father, and my favorite, Harriet the Spy, with her tomato sandwiches and secrets. I pretended to be an orphan just like these girls: a sad child abandoned at a stranger’s grand estate, my parents lost to a car accident or a tiger in Africa. I would mourn them at night, drifting through the hallways of the penthouse, running my hands along the sideboards, telling myself stories about what my life would be like had I not lost them.

  What are you doing up? my father would say when he caught me drifting around, my hair all tangled from bed, humming little things to myself as I played out these fantasies. Do you need something?

  Nothing, I would say. No. I do not need anything.

  Sara, Mary, Pippi, Harriet. My orphan heroes. I now realize I didn’t have any idea what I was playing at. How stupid a thing it was to wish for.

  I flip my pillow. Pull the blankets higher. There is a problem with my childhood list, I realize. I think of Harriet the Spy along with these other orphan girl books, even though she did have parents. Because when I think of Harriet I see a girl on a busy sidewalk, big glasses, her backpack hitched high. She has her notebook in her hands because she always has her notebook in her hands. She is there to write down secrets. I see her as very much alone.

  WE MOVED HERE knowing Henry would get a job at Arden Nursery. I would look for work, but with the house all paid for, his salary would be enough to float us. I drive him to pick up his new work truck. We walk along the busy rear lot where th
e land is writhing with green-scaled hoses that twine around the Ecuadorian yard workers’ ankles like snakes. A man with a Roman nose and long black hair spilling over his shoulders comes out of a greenhouse, dragging a length of hose behind him.

  “Hey, Batman, ven conmigo?” Henry says.

  “Sure, la casa grande?” he asks. Batman is the yard manager at Arden. His real name is Bertilio, but because the customers have trouble saying it, the younger men have changed it to Batman, which best I understand has something to do with the way he tosses his hair over his shoulder like a cape.

  “Yup,” he says. “Vámanos.” Henry speaks a little of what he calls landscaper Spanish. The men at Arden tease him for his gender confusion and accidental innuendos about hoses and cross-pollination.

  “The casa grande?” I say.

  “The house they’re building out by the carousel,” Henry says. “They bought two cherry trees and asked for an estimate on the back property. Forty acres of landscaping. I wanna get a look at it.”

  Batman whistles. “The New York people who bought the Penobscot lots,” he says to me. “That house.”

  I can tell that this seems like a glamorous project to Henry. So far Arden has sent him sawing off cancerous tree arms and spraying slaughterhouse leftovers to deer-proof rose gardens. But I wonder about this job. I have been reading in the paper that people are not happy about plans for this home, larger than any other in Menamon, even the Elm Park McMansions. A home that will sit on not one but five recently purchased beachfront lots. They don’t like how these people threw their money around to dissipate a handful of Menamon families, who, according to the local paper, “sped away from town, their trunks stuffed with out-of-state money, tails between their legs.” Again, I thought, Who is writing this copy? It couldn’t possibly be Charley.

  “You wouldn’t mind working for them?” I say. “These new people?”