“You’ve got to trust me, Ben. You really do this time.” He picked up his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. “I’ve had a good visit with Mom. Real good. When I leave, I want you to explain it however you feel is right. I can’t say goodbye to her.”
He was crying, still, and Bennie was, too. Littlefield walked past him to the back door. “I appreciate what you’re doing, Bennie. Trust me, though. I’ve got to leave.”
The door shut. Bennie stayed inside and watched his brother walk out to the Chevette. Littlefield started the engine, turned on the lights, and drove away.
Bennie walked through the house to find his mother.
“Did William leave?” she asked.
Bennie told her he had—he said Littlefield had been in love with a girl but it hadn’t worked out, and that he was probably going to spend some time away from the island. He told her Littlefield might try to get a fresh start somewhere else, and he needed to do it on his own.
She shook her head. “I don’t understand. You should have seen him, Benjamin,” she said. “He was being very nice to me. Very loving. If he was leaving, he would have told me.” When she looked at Bennie, though, he could see that she knew he had left and wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.
22
Even after spending a long string of winters in Maine, it’s difficult to stop thinking spring might come early. They didn’t get a lot of sun that year, but the temperatures started rising, the streams and rivers flooded, everything was brown and sandy and dead, and then all at once—they thought it was a false start—the world was green.
Bennie was working the weekend shift for Handelmann, who’d left early on Friday. In the warm months Handelmann motored regularly in the aluminum boat to Quohog Island, the two-acre crag he owned, to camp for the weekend. Because of this, Bennie worked extra hours at the shelter, which was at its best in early summer, when everyone adopts. The dogs were spending more time in the outside pen and less time bothering the cats. The indoor cages weren’t getting used, so they didn’t need to be washed.
The last Friday in June, Handelmann put Bennie in charge of the four o’clock appointments. He sped through them, giving a few shots, doling out heartworm meds, and only one dog, a miniature schnauzer, needed to have his anal glands expressed. Bennie was hoping to have the doors locked at five sharp. He’d told Helen to meet him then, so that they’d have time to pick up food and bring it to Singer’s Cove for an early-evening picnic. They still tried to walk out to the water there every afternoon. His leg was feeling stronger than ever, so he only noticed the break when the weather was changing. The walks, and the time he spent with Helen, were helping him heal.
By early May, Gwen and Jamie Swensen had started dating, and by June it seemed Gwen was falling for him. Bennie had been worried at first—he liked Swensen okay, but with Gwen? She said he had a good heart, and he wasn’t nearly as much of a drunk as he’d seemed on St. Patrick’s Day. They liked to fish together. He had his own boat, a little wooden skiff his grandfather had built. She found a subletter, postponed her plans to return to Brooklyn for another few months, and was waiting to hear back from auditions at Portland Stage Company.
Martha went back to her shifts at Rosie’s. She’d found her own apartment in Westbrook. She still spent plenty of time with them on the island, though, and she came up whenever she had a night off. A week after Littlefield left, she’d gotten a letter from him. She showed it to Bennie and Gwen. All he said was that he was going to be missing his regular Tuesday-night visits to Rosie’s. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he wrote. He said he had more he wanted to tell her, and that he’d write again soon. As of early May, she hadn’t gotten another letter.
In Handelmann’s office, Bennie sent out the latest round of bills. He did a final check on the overnight animals, though he knew he’d be on duty again early in the morning, so there wasn’t much to worry about. The Australian shepherd mutt who’d been brought in at noon after being hit by a sand truck was hooked up to an IV, with fluids and a narcotic skin patch, and even though she’d lost a front leg in the accident, she was sleeping peacefully. With Handelmann gone for the weekend, Bennie wanted to catch up with the pile in the crematorium shack so he wouldn’t have to go in there on Saturday or Sunday, when he was the only one on duty.
At five minutes before the hour, he walked out back and was surprised how high the sun was in the sky. It was warm and bright and the grass between the main building and the crematorium shack needed mowing. He’d started the fire an hour earlier, and when he stepped inside he knew right away it was hot enough. All he had left was a Great Dane. He tried putting him in lengthwise, knowing that a dog of his size would normally fit, but he felt one of his legs catch on the metal seam near the back door, so he pulled him partway out—the dog had already started to burn, of course, so he shoved him back in. Bennie scampered to the rear of the kiln to fix the snag. He opened the smaller door in back to find that the dog was caught up in the usual place, the metal seam, so he used a poker to free its legs. Just as he was pulling the poker out of the fire, he spotted two small cylindrical lengths of metal beside the seam, hidden from view when looking into the oven from the front. He scraped them out of the kiln and onto the floor, and saw that they were charred metal screws. When he looked at them on the ground, it was no less shocking to see them, and his first thought was that they seemed like they could have been part of a story Coach might have told: the screws that had once helped repair the leg of a hockey star from Tavis Falls were now blackened by fire in a pet crematorium on Meadow Island.
The kiln was closed, but he stayed near the back side of it, looking down at the screws as they cooled there on the ground. They were a horrifying and very real piece of his brother’s life, his actual experience. He picked the screws up off the ground. They were warm, without burning his palm, and they were black with soot and the grooves were caked with resin. When he closed his hand around them, they were hotter than he thought, and sharp.
Helen was punctual, as always. Within a few minutes he heard her calling his name outside the door.
“Just a minute. I’m almost done,” he said.
He waited to catch his breath. Littlefield had been all alone, through everything: going back to the woods beside the road, bringing the body out, getting it to the kiln. He had made this decision on his own. He had assumed he was guilty, and that he needed to take care of what he’d done—all of this he had done on his own. And now he was gone, living someplace new, among strangers.
Bennie walked back around the kiln to the door. When he saw Helen, he opened his hand and showed her what he’d found.
23
When Bennie knocked on Vin’s door in June, in the early evening, there was still plenty of light outside, and Elizabeth, Vin’s wife, came to greet him. She was a tired and sour-looking woman; Coach had said on a few different occasions that she’d been pretty in high school, like a Scandinavian model, with round cheeks and long blond hair, but whenever Bennie saw her she looked like she hadn’t been sleeping. She called for Vin, who was watching TV with their granddaughter Sadie, and he called back to her, inviting Bennie in. When he walked into their living room, Vin was stretched out on the couch; Sadie was lying on her stomach on the tan carpet, propped up by her elbows. Elizabeth yawned, switched off the TV, and offered Bennie a beer. He asked for a cup of water and sat with them for fifteen minutes, long enough to finish his glass; they listened to Sadie tell them about the robot she and her classmates were making at school. It was made of cardboard but could tell fortunes. Vin didn’t say a word to Bennie; they just listened to Sadie’s story, and when she was finished Elizabeth offered Bennie more water, but he wasn’t thirsty, and they sat there for a moment after Sadie skipped into the other room to get some of the drawings she was working on. Vin wasn’t being his normal, boisterous self—he was unruffled and quiet. Before Sadie got back he stood up and gestured for Bennie to come outside with him. Bennie knew he was a smoker, but when
they stepped into his yard, past the empty doghouse, Vin didn’t take out his cigarettes.
It was one of those warm, perfect, fresh-smelling early summer evenings, and they stepped down to the lawn, in the blue shadows. “Fucking Benjamin,” he said. “Benjamin Littlefield.”
“I’ll tell you why I’m here,” said Bennie. He felt himself shaking. “I want you to apologize for going after my brother.”
Vin shook his head. He hit Bennie in the stomach, which bent him over. Then Vin kicked him—a quick punt to the groin.
He fell down into the grass.
“Stand up,” Vin said.
Bennie knew it was going to take him a while to satisfy this request. With his cheek in the grass, he wheezed, “What’s your problem?”
“I never got you back for that stunt in the bar,” said Vin. “Okay. Now we’re even. Now I can apologize to you. It’s true. I was wrong about your brother.”
After catching his breath, Bennie tried to climb to his feet, and as he stumbled Vin grabbed his arm, pulled him up, and led him to the edge of his back porch. They sat for a few minutes—Vin took out his cigarettes, lit one for himself, then handed Bennie the pack and his lighter. While they smoked, Vin told Bennie that he knew Littlefield was prone to trouble but he’d always thought he was a decent person, regardless. “Why’d he leave?” Vin asked.
“I can’t believe you just kicked me in the balls.”
“He must have needed a change in scenery,” said Vin. “You and I could probably use that, too.”
“What, are we buddies now?” asked Bennie.
“Let me give you some advice, Bennie. Marry that girl. Helen. She seems like a good one for you. Marry her and start having kids. That’s the best thing I ever did.”
They tossed the butts toward Vin’s hibachi. When they stood up, Bennie’s balls were still aching. Vin led him through the house to the front door. As he started the Skylark, he looked back at the house, and through the window in the door he saw Vin’s granddaughter Sadie raise her hand in a wave. He waved back.
He drove slowly, noticing the cool touch of the steering wheel and the grip of the tires on the road, not thinking about the pain in his balls too much, trying to mind the yellow lines but also looking up at the new light green leaves in uncountable bunches in the boughs that hung above the road, the dust in the young blackberry thicket, and, as he came down into the hollow by Esker Cove, the tails of fog moving between islands outside his passenger-side window.
It was mostly a clear night, and warm, and the only fog he could see was in thin wisps at the outer edge of the harbor. He pulled over, parked on the shoulder, and stepped out into the warm evening, leaning against the Skylark, taking in the full ocean view from the mouth of the cove. Out by Watson Point, within minutes thicker fog rolled in, making trees and rocks and water disappear. He’d seen this many times, of course, but mostly he’d been out in the harbor in a boat when it happened: the fog appearing silently, almost instantly, so that one minute you’d spy the sharp-angled rocks on the far shore and the next minute mist had swept across your bow like kettle steam. All you can manage to see, then, are your own hands sorting through the anchor box in search of a chart.
He would see his brother again. Two years later. He’d get a phone call on a Sunday afternoon, and Littlefield would be in Vancouver. He’d tell Bennie how his life still had its challenges—Bennie would hear traffic in the background and know Littlefield was calling from a pay phone—but he would also say he was glad to be experiencing a different part of the world for a while. He would tell Bennie he’d met a girl he wanted to introduce to Mom. He would tell Bennie he was coming back, to check in with the family, to meet Gwen’s new husband, and Bennie and Helen’s daughter. It would take him another year to actually make good on these plans, but he would.
As Bennie watched the fog, he wondered if someone he knew might drive down into the hollow and be curious about what he was looking at. But no cars passed. Everyone was home, eating dinner, and he was glad to have the view to himself. It felt good to survey the fog from a distance—to see it erase island after island from a place where he had his bearings. He was eager to get home to see Helen, but he waited long enough to watch the fog roll all the way through—revealing trees and rocks and sky as quickly as it had hidden them.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to the generosity of the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and Deerfield Academy’s Wallace Wilson Fellows Program. Thank you also, B Love, Jeff Harrison, Leslie Falk, Alison Kerr Miller, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Monica Wood, Dan Abbott, Kai Bicknell, Jaed Coffin, and Mark Scandling. Thank you, Herb Taylor, for letting me use your living room in Spar Cove as an office, and for not kicking me out after I let the pipes freeze. Thank you, Theo Emery, Alix Ohlin, Kate Sullivan, Aaron McCollough, Curtis Sittenfeld, Eric Jones, Howard Rosenfield, Matthew Vollmer, and Amy Hassinger, for reading early drafts. Thank you to my brothers, Sam, Seth, Jake, and Jeff, and my sisters, Jesse, Kim, and Heather. Thank you to my intrepid and talented agent, David McCormick, and my editor, the patient, savvy, and kind Laura Ford. Thank you, Suegra, David Riley, and Linda Robinson. Thank you for your inspiration, Tom Robinson, for checking up on me. Thank you to my parents, Sam Robinson and Mimo Riley, for the love and guidance you provided. And thank you, CC and Maisie, always.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LEWIS ROBINSON is the author of Officer Friendly and Other Stories, winner of the PEN/Oakland—Josephine Miles Award. A graduate of Middlebury College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has also received a Whiting Writers’ Award. He now teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine and coaches middle-school basketball in Portland, Maine, where he lives with his wife and daughter. Visit his website at lewisrobinson.com.
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