by Stash (v5)
“He must be looking for Jude’s other business associates,” Brian said.
“I think they’d be smart enough to stay away.”
“Especially with the ‘bad guy hunter’ on the case.”
Thanks to a front page article in the Morrissey Bee, Detective Keller had found local fame and earned a reputation as a detective who hunted “bad guys.” The reporter wrote about his dozen years of service in the police department, his relentless pursuit of justice, his spearheading of the town’s battle against drugs, and—most prominently in the article—his bold foray into the Adirondacks where he’d tracked a local drug dealer, Jude Gates, to his indoor pot farm, only to find him executed gangland style. Not to come away empty-handed, Detective Keller apprehended the dealer’s accomplice who was returning to the property unaware that police were on the premises. The suspect, Aaron Capuano, was being held in Franklin County.
There was no mention of Gwen in the article.
When asked by the reporter what he was doing outside of his jurisdiction, Keller responded, “Hunting bad guys.”
Despite the hero worship from the weekly paper and a quote praising Keller from the Morrissey chief of police, Gwen had heard from Roger that the detective was under investigation for operating outside his jurisdiction and not contacting the state police or the Franklin County sheriff until after he’d found Jude’s body and arrested Aaron Capuano.
As for her own case, the DA had dropped all charges, not just the vehicular manslaughter that Roger promised would never stick, but also the lesser possession and DUI charges. She was cleared, legally, although she continued to replay the accident in her mind, looking for a way to avoid it. She couldn’t find one.
With Jude, she understood some degree of accountability came back to her as well. She tried to piece together a cause and effect around the events that led to Jude’s death, and what role she played on the cause side. Jude was killed the same day she told him about the police. Did he panic and make a mistake, one that got him murdered in a drug deal? He didn’t seem the type that panicked easily. Or had he been shot by the police—Detective Keller was up there; he was the one who found the body. Keller had known about Jude for almost two weeks, maybe he got his chance and let it rip, then framed the young Aaron Capuano, a disabled veteran. She couldn’t rule it out.
“There’s no way of knowing,” Brian told her. “The best thing is to put this behind you.” He didn’t want to analyze her tipping off Jude about the police. Or calling Jude back on the phone to explain herself. Or getting lost in the wilderness. She had apologized to her husband and he accepted her apology. He didn’t ask more questions.
She didn’t tell Brian about Jude kissing her the day she picked up the bag, and his attempt at a second kiss the morning she ran into him at the market. The second time would help justify her blurting out the news about the police as a way to fend him off, but the cost of telling Brian outweighed any benefits. What benefits were there, anyway? Confessing the kiss to Brian wouldn’t make her feel better, and it wouldn’t help Brian, either. Gwen already felt better, confident she wouldn’t make a similar mistake again.
She stayed quiet and busy: helping the kids with homework, driving to soccer practice and dance classes, finding volunteers for Helping Hands for the PTA. She didn’t get high, because now she had nothing to smoke and nowhere to get it, and she didn’t feel like it anyway, although that could change.
Brian spent a week in California in meetings to launch the start of Zuprone’s clinical trials. When he returned, he told her there was a possibility they’d need to relocate to Santa Cruz. The company was taking a wait-and-see approach to determine if a transfer was necessary and would make the decision in a few months, by Christmas at the latest. Santa Cruz was situated right on the coast, on the northern curve of Monterey Bay, a beach and tourist town of perfect weather. At first, Gwen had reacted negatively: their entire lives were here. Their friends, the schools, their mountain house. Parents and extended families within driving distance. You can’t just abandon your home. But after her initial objection, Gwen realized that moving would not be traumatic. Families moved all the time to other cities and parts of the country. There was no reason they couldn’t find their place in another community, start again, make new connections. Whether they relocated or not, Brian was happier on the clinical side at Caladon than he’d been in business development.
Let’s just wait and see what happens, Brian said. We don’t have to make a decision yet, so let’s not tell anyone about this.
Gwen could leave the issue open, along with the unknowns about the accident and Jude. She didn’t need to chase closure, as Brian had suggested when she went to James Anderson’s funeral, although sometimes closure found her. She heard from Sheila Anderson, through the mail on a personal letter handwritten on the Alzheimer’s Association stationery. Sheila apologized for lashing out at Gwen at the funeral and followed her apology with a request for a donation. She wrote that she volunteered for the Alzheimer’s Association now and was raising money for families that needed to care for a loved one suffering from the disease. Gwen wrote a check for five hundred dollars, and that closed a door behind her, at least most of the way.
She’d Be More Careful
Hay bales piled two deep and six high shaped a maze of turnbacks and dead ends. Dried stalks of straw shuffled underfoot. The air smelled like a barn. A hand-painted sign on cardboard between two columns of hay said: ENTER HERE.
Gwen followed the kids into the labyrinth.
“Catch us, Mommy, catch us,” Nora yelled. They disappeared at the first left turn.
Gwen turned once at the end of a passage, turned again, came to a dead end, backtracked to a T and was lost. Panic jumped her like a mugger in a black alley. Alone in the wilderness again, the shakes about to set in. Please don’t let her be doomed to freak out at every wrong turn from here on in.
She called for Brian to retrieve her and let Nora and Nate fend for themselves.
The maze filled the entire greenhouse except for three picnic tables near the front where parents waited while their kids navigated one end to the other and then came running back a long aisle between the glass walls and the hay bales.
Gwen retreated to one of the tables and sat next to Marlene. Roger and Brian went in the maze to chase the kids.
“What’s wrong?” Marlene asked.
“I don’t like the idea of getting lost in there,” Gwen said. “It creeps me out. My heart started racing. I even started to sweat. I mean, it’s just a kids’ maze.”
“I can understand it, given what you’ve been through. You just need more time. After Roger had his bicycle accident last year, he didn’t ride for months, even after his shoulder healed.”
She took Gwen’s hand. “Come on, let’s get some cider.”
They left the greenhouse and walked across the yard to where folding tables served as a snack bar. Cider, coffee, and sugar doughnuts lined the tables. Carts of pumpkins and gourds were parked to one side. Price tags hung on Indian corn bundles. Marlene bought two cups of hot cider and gave one to Gwen. They found a spot on a wooden bench. Today was the autumn open house at Helderberg Community Farm, a sixty-acre organic operation that sold seasonal produce shares. Gwen split a share with Marlene each week. All summer they had eaten fresh lettuce, green beans, snow peas, eggplants, peppers, beets, tomatoes, corn, and more. There had been too much parsley, no one liked the lemongrass, but otherwise the farm share had been great and Gwen had even gotten her kids eating more vegetables. That alone made the cost worthwhile.
The owners, Karen and Eric Granger, graduates of the Cornell College of Agriculture, held open houses in spring, summer, and fall. Brian and Gwen had come with the kids for the summer solstice celebration, and Gwen had taken the kids swimming in the pond once over the summer.
When the kids emerged from the maze, they all rode the hay wagon out to the pumpkin patch. They sat on bales on the wagon, pulled by the tractor, bumping along the rutted track.
Eric, tanned from a season of farming, drove the tractor. Gwen sat with Brian, across from Marlene and Roger. The kids had paired off by gender. Nora sat with Abby, discussing the merits of fat pumpkins versus tall ones. Nate sat with Josh, who was explaining the difference between batting average and on-base percentage.
The distance from the barnyard to the pumpkin patch covered a few hundred yards, past dried cornstalks, fading raspberry bushes, and harvested vegetable rows on one side and a stretch of hardwoods and a toolshed on the other. The track dipped and pitched, and the tractor labored and fumed. It looked like an old one, painted a few times, the uncovered engine exposed like a beating heart. The hay seats cushioned the bumps but Gwen was sore and felt each one.
They pulled into the pumpkin patch and Eric U-turned in a broad arc and waved and smiled to them as the wagon circled along behind. A baseball cap shadowed his eyes. An educated farmer, he stood out among his customers who also were educated but had chosen to become lawyers, professors, bankers, and business executives. He and his wife had four kids, two girls around the ages of Nate and Nora, twin boys on the cusp of adolescence. A fifth was on the way, with Karen displaying a belly that could be hiding a pumpkin.
Eric shut the engine, climbed down, and released the ladder at the back of the wagon. He swung it to the ground and reached a hand to help his passengers down, his stone dry fingers and callused palm like gritty sandpaper in Gwen’s hand.
He spoke to each person as he offered help on the stairs. Thanks for coming out today, he said. It’s good to see you. Hi, I’m glad you could make it. Welcome.
The kids were already roaming the field, turning over pumpkins, looking for perfect shapes. Roger and Marlene walked off along the edge of the field, heads bowed in intense, whispered discussion. Gwen hoped they were not arguing, at least wished it wouldn’t escalate to yelling at each other. She’d witnessed that between them in the past and it was an ugly and embarrassing sight.
She held hands with Brian as they walked the first row.
“We have to go farther back, all the good ones will be picked over here,” Brian said.
“That hay wagon is too bumpy, I think I’ll be walking back to the car,” Gwen said. “I’m a little sore.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
They’d made love last night, which accounted for the achy ride on the hay wagon, but Gwen was happy. They’d both been asleep and she woke from the dream, the one about being lost, twice she’d had it now. But it was Brian who was lost, not her. Or missing. He could be missing or have left her, but the setting was forested wilderness and she was looking for him yet there was nothing except trees and tangles of brush and ferns on the ground, and darkness and isolation ahead. She woke and her heart was beating hard and she felt Brian next to her and she scaled him, finding a hold and pulling herself on top, kissing him awake and getting him aroused and inside her before he was fully aware. As soon as they finished Brian fell back asleep, but he had a smile for her this morning and the intimacy had radiated between them all day.
Somehow what had transpired with Jude provided her relationship with Brian a boost of fresh energy that reminded her of their early days together. They’d touched each other a lot this past week. Made love three times already. Rushed the kids to bed so they could spend the evenings together. Brian called her from work several times a day. She didn’t know how long the passion could last, but she woke thankful each morning the spell still held.
“What about this one?” Brian said. He held up a pumpkin in two hands, round as a basketball with symmetrical grooves and smooth orange ridges running from a curved green stem.
“It looks perfect.”
Nate approached them, lumbering over clods of dirt and withered vines, holding his pumpkin in two hands. If the one Brian had picked was the archetype of a pumpkin, this one was a mutated disaster: oblong in shape with a flattened side where it had lain on the ground, and marred by ghastly bumps like a bad case of acne all over it. Its color ranged from green to orange and on to brown.
“Look at my pumpkin, look at my pumpkin!” Nate called.
“It’s unique,” Gwen said. “I’ve never seen one like it.”
“It’s a monster,” said Nate. “See, here are the eyes and this is the mouth and these are the bullets.”
“Bullets?”
“Yeah, it shoots bullets.”
Nora called to Brian from the far end of the patch. “Dad! Help!” She had her arms around a giant pumpkin, but couldn’t lift it off the ground. Brian went back and picked it up and started walking toward the wagon. Twice he stopped to rest and set the pumpkin down. By the time he reached Gwen, sweat sheened his forehead.
“Mom, I found the biggest one,” Nora said. “It weighs a hundred pounds, right, Dad?”
“Feels like it.”
“Yuck, that’s so ugly,” Nora said, looking at the pumpkin Nate held.
“I found the scariest one,” said Nate.
“We all found good pumpkins,” said Gwen.
Brian pulled out his camera and started snapping photos of the kids next to their pumpkins. Then came the requisite goofy faces: Nora’s tongue sticking out, Nate staring cross-eyed. Gwen stepped in and posed them with their arms around each other—a regular smile, please—and snapped a half-dozen more pictures, one of which she hoped would turn out well enough for a holiday card.
Then Nora took several pictures of Gwen and Brian. Gwen would never have called herself photogenic, but when she looked at the photos in the camera’s tiny viewer the word radiant came to mind. Even Brian noticed.
“You look great,” he said.
“I feel great, and I love you.” She kissed him.
They went back to the hay wagon and climbed up with the pumpkins, Brian heaving Nora’s orange boulder onto the wagon floor, then pushing it to a spot in the corner. Roger was on the wagon with Josh and Abby, each holding pumpkins. Other passengers returned with their pumpkins. Marlene still wandered through the field.
“I’m going to walk back,” Gwen said.
“You can bring Marlene with you, unless she’s staying out there until the Great Pumpkin comes,” Roger said.
Gwen heard the edge in his voice. They’d been fighting.
“We’ll save you a cider doughnut,” Brian told her. “Right, kids?”
“Do we have to?”
“Of course we have to.”
“How many can we have?”
This time one of Eric’s teenage sons climbed up and started the tractor. The engine coughed, spewed a blast of exhaust, and settled to idle. Eric’s son got down again and secured the ladder step to the wagon and got back on the tractor and clutched into gear. Gwen waved to her family. Nora gave a thumbs-up; Nate was looking the other way. Brian blew her a kiss and she laughed—had he ever blown her a kiss before? She couldn’t remember.
She waited for Marlene, who walked toward her as soon as the tractor and wagon left. Together they started along the rutted path. There were raspberry bushes to one side, the sagging canes dotted with late, stunted fruit.
“Are you okay?” Gwen asked. “It looked like you and Roger were talking about something pretty serious.”
“We pick the worst times to have the baby discussion. All I had to do was mention that Karen looks really good with her pregnancy and that set it off.”
“He’s still against the idea?”
“Still and always. And you know what the main reason is? He doesn’t want to be tied down. He says we’re just getting a little freedom—as if raising a family were some kind of jail sentence.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t mean it that way.”
“We’ve got our two, I should be satisfied, he says. He’s probably right.” Marlene tripped on a broken stalk of corn at the edge of the track. Gwen reached a hand to help her stay up.
“You and Brian seem so happy, how do you get along so well all the time?”
“We don’t want another baby.”
&n
bsp; “You know what I mean.”
“Not all the time, but right now—we feel lucky, like we dodged a bullet. But Brian says we didn’t dodge, it just happened to miss us.”
“It’s even scarier when you put it that way.”
They walked a few more steps in silence. “You know what?” Gwen said. “I really need to pee.” She’d felt it during the hayride out and while looking for pumpkins. Between the soreness and her bladder she couldn’t wait any longer.
They passed a shed that backed against a line of trees separating two fields. There were two bays with sliding wooden doors. “I’m going behind here,” she told Marlene.
She stood at the side of the shed and looked back to the pumpkin patch. Marlene watched the tractor in the distance. Gwen undid the snap on her jeans, dropped her panties and squatted. She peed and felt a sting. She looked in her purse for a tissue or napkin to wipe herself. There was nothing. She unzipped an inner pocket and felt around and her hand came up with a crumpled scrap of tissue. When she unfolded it something fell to the ground.
She reached down to pick it up. It was part of a joint, the remaining half from the day she’d gotten high in Thacher Park after buying the bag from Jude. That day. She remembered she had wrapped the half-smoked joint in the tissue and stowed it in here and had worn the string clutch like a long necklace, which never left her until Brian held it for her when they left the hospital, she in the police cruiser. No one had looked in it. Gwen had forgotten anything was there.
“What is it?” Marlene asked.
Gwen pulled her pants and stood up. “Part of a joint.”
“Oh my God, do you have any matches?”
Without thinking, Gwen rummaged the inside pocket and found the pack of matches she’d picked up on her way out of Gull. She paused. Wait. How could she, after what happened? But she didn’t have to say no, not always, not forever. It was a beautiful day after a rough stretch. Brian was driving—so she wouldn’t get in that situation again. And she’d tell him, which is what he asked her to do. She’d be more careful.