The Midcoast, page 17
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
The construction guys finished their sandwiches, so Steph moved down to their end of the bar and asked her father to step aside while she bussed their plates, and then Nate’s lunch came up in the window. She presented him with the plate and a red basket of onion rings. He was a man who ordered onion rings. Nothing about him was as intriguing as she had imagined when he walked into Bon Bon, and really, what she had imagined about him had only taken shape the moment she turned the other way, based on a fleeting and incomplete first appraisal. Nate should have let that be it. He was pretending to be nice and open, but he had a wife and kids somewhere else—and other secrets that weren’t even secrets in the place he came from—so in the end he was no different from any other man who tried to keep her from knowing what was rightfully hers to know.
Twenty minutes later, Nate had finished his lunch and crumpled up his napkin. He placed it in the red basket and pushed it across the bar. “So,” he said quietly, after finishing his ginger ale. “I’d love to see you when you’re not at work. I feel like we have more to talk about.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Steph said. “You seem like a nice person, but I’m married.”
“Me too.”
“Right.”
He ran a hand over his tan, stubbly head. “Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll leave my card. I hope you’ll call me. I just want to talk.” He put his business card on the bar and stood up. He left way too much cash, and then Steph thought he was about to go, but instead he seemed to remember something. “One of those videos,” he said, sliding his wallet into his back pocket, “I ended up watching the whole thing. You’re a good public speaker.”
“Thank you.”
“You were talking about the early days, when you were waiting tables and going to college, and Ed was working as a lobsterman, but then the price of lobster started going up, and you guys started making your way.”
“Yup,” Steph said. “That’s how it happened.”
“Well,” Nate said. “I found the story inspirational. And I don’t even think you give yourself enough credit.”
“I give myself plenty of credit.”
He laughed and said, “Okay, good. Sorry, I just thought it was funny, or interesting, I mean. The price of lobster. I looked it up. It’s actually gone down over the years.”
“Down?”
“At least compared to inflation. If you guys were making more money—I mean, you say you were hustling like crazy, and I believe it.”
When Nate was gone, Raymond asked Steph who he was.
“I don’t know,” she said, throwing his card in the trash. “Some banker from Delaware.”
* * *
—
It took her three full days to clean the house. She threw out old magazines, dusted the fan, dusted the beams above the living room, teetering on a ladder as she reached as far as she could, swept the chimney, checked for loose bricks, rearranged the walk-in closet, refolded all Ed’s clothes, threw out all the old shoe boxes. She’d be done as soon as she inspected every plank and nail in the house, she told herself, making sure everything was where it ought to be. Then she would stop. She was far too busy as mayor, restaurateur, and mother to be doing this, anyway. It was just that she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she had finished cleaning. And also, it was that she was looking for something. She could admit it. She was looking for something but didn’t know what it was.
Once she’d finished with the rest of the house, she went to the master bedroom and stripped the bed and looked under the mattress, but there was nothing there. Nothing anywhere. So, with nowhere left to look, she lay on her bare bed. Outside the bedroom windows, the sun was going gray. A storm was supposed to come up the coast. A great white hurricane was spinning off the Carolinas and it would never make it this far north, but there would be waves marching up the shore, and wind running through the pines, and rain bleeding down the windows. Steph rolled onto her side and thought back to the beginning. She had come home from New Hampshire ready to make the best of her one year at Lincoln. She didn’t know anyone, but nor did they know her. She could be whomever she wanted to be, do whatever she pleased. The plan was to kick ass in school and apply to out-of-state colleges like UNH and Northeastern while tearing it up on the weekends, no strings attached. What a joke. No strings. As soon as Ed had shown up at Jamie Kerry’s house after the first day of school and found her smoking a joint with Jamie on his bed, she had felt the ties begin to bind, and they had talked for a minute or two, and he had reminded her who he was, that morning on the fuel dock, but Jamie was anxious to get Ed out of there and kept laughing this weird laugh and saying, Well, make yourself right at home, Ed! and then Ed touched the brim of his hat and looked right at Steph and said, Nice bracelet, even though she wasn’t wearing a bracelet, and then he was gone, but it was like those lines were already tied tight and he was tugging her right out the door with him. Steph handed the joint to Jamie and said, I’ll be right back, but she already knew she’d never return. She caught up to Ed on the dock. He was in his boat, yanking angrily on the engine chain. The sun had gone down by then, so she could make out little more than his dark figure and the scent of salt water, fish, gasoline.
“Hey you,” she said.
He didn’t respond.
“Why’d you say ‘nice bracelet’?” she asked him, raising her voice over the sound of the engine, which had finally come alive. She hugged her arms to her chest to keep herself warm. All she was wearing was a swimsuit and a tank top that said Old Orchard Beach in pink cursive font.
“You know why,” he said. He was busying himself with the stern line, not looking at her.
“No, I don’t.” She pointed at her naked wrist. “See? No bracelet.”
“I ain’t blind,” he said.
“Then what are you?”
“Nothing.”
“No, you’re something.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re mad at me, but I don’t know why you would be.”
He was about to untie the bow line, but he stopped and stood straight, staring at her from beneath his hat brim. “All right, fine then—I am curious—what’d you do with it?”
“With what?”
“You being fresh with me?”
“I’m not, Ed! Swear to God. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He yanked at his hat, looked away, looked back. “You’re saying you never got the bracelet I sent?”
“What bracelet?”
“I sent it middle of the summer. Made of twine.”
“Twine? Where’d you find a bracelet made of twine?”
“I made it. Tied a monkey fist on one end.”
“A what?”
“A monkey fist. A big knot. Put a loop on the other end.”
“Like a clasp?”
“I guess.”
For a moment they stood silently, staring at one another. Ed had made her a bracelet. Waited for a response. Hadn’t heard a peep. It wasn’t her fault—but still.
“Ed,” she said, “I never got a bracelet. I promise.”
“We only met once, so I can see why you wouldn’t want it.”
“I did want it. Or I would have. I’m just—I’m sorry it never got to me.”
“Well,” he said, “they ain’t that hard to make. I could make you another one.”
“I’d like that.”
He went to the bow and untied the painter but didn’t push off—not yet.
“Where are you going?” she asked him.
“Don’t know. Home.”
They stayed silent for a moment. A bug, too small to see, landed on Ed’s neck. He slapped at it, then threw it away. “Why?” he said. “You wanna go somewhere?”
She looked up at the house, back to the boat, then got in and sat on the fore-bench, facing back toward Ed. Soon they were carving away from the dock and heading down the dark river. He kept driving until they reached a soundless cove. Houses shone between the trees on the shore, well away from the boat. Then Ed cut the engine and let the skiff drift.
She could have said no. Or she could have insisted that if they were going to do it, it would be the way she had done it before (quickly, only pausing to yank clothes off and condom on, guy above her, Steph nearly crushed beneath his weight); that would have been fine, too. But what she shouldn’t have done, once they had stripped down to their bare skin, at least below the waist, when Ed laid himself against her and started pushing forward, was go along with it. He wasn’t wearing anything. All she had to do was say, No, Ed, we wait until you get something. But she couldn’t find the words. She didn’t want to disappoint him. And she did want to feel him inside her—there was that, too. When he entered, it came as a full-body shock. It was like stepping into a frozen lake, waiting for the warmth. The breath went right out of her. They were lying on a bed of oil-stained life jackets in the hull of the Whaler, a sawed-off milk jug rolling around by her head. Sound would travel farther on water than it would on land, so Steph worried that the houses on the shore might be able to hear them, but it was a fleeting concern—soon she’d forgotten all about the people in their houses, forgotten about everyone other than Ed.
That wasn’t the only time, and within months she was pregnant and living in the trailer. She remembered being happy. Right? She hoped she had been happy. What she didn’t know was if she had been happy since. But nobody’s happy all the time. It’s no way to go through life. If you’re happy all the time, you don’t appreciate anything. You have to have contrast, to have low moments to bring out the high moments in relief. And if nothing else, Steph had built a life of high contrast.
* * *
—
A few weeks later, Steph met with the chamber of commerce and representatives from all the local real estate firms. If her husband and son weren’t going to let her in on whatever it was they knew and she didn’t, she had no choice but to move ahead as planned. If they wished to keep her in the dark, she would let them.
So, she told everyone, she had good news for the real estate business. The town was embarking on a new publicity campaign—ads in Down East magazine and The Boston Globe, and a new glossy brochure that would emphasize the authenticity of Damariscotta as well as its safety. She told them about the maps, about how Damariscotta was Maine’s “Safe Haven.”
Town planning meetings were open to the public, but this one had drawn only a handful of realtors and several senior citizens with nowhere else to go. Cammie was there to keep up her end of the deal, offering her support and her vote in return for the discounted lease on Ben’s old storefront. EJ was there, too, sitting at the far end of the table, though Steph had said hardly a word to him and refused to make eye contact as she laid out her plans for Damariscotta’s future. Steph reminded everyone of her ambitions for the town and the added revenue they would need to get there. She reminded them that in today’s volatile economy, they were in competition for every dollar spent on the Midcoast. And everything was going well, she was receiving in response to her pitch mostly nods of approval, when she saw someone who stopped her midsentence. It was Nate, now wearing a red rain jacket in anticipation of another storm working its way up the coast. He had let himself in through the front entrance of the library and taken a seat at the far end of the table. She hadn’t seen him since that afternoon in the Schooner. She hadn’t thought about him either, not for the past few weeks anyway—or if she did, she assumed he was already gone, back in Delaware.
Now he stared at Steph. Everyone was staring at Steph. But she felt his gaze more forcefully than all the rest. Faltering and reaching for the diamond buoy around her neck, she scanned the note cards spread before her but couldn’t find her place. She knew she was close to the end, approximately, so she said, “Maybe we should—I guess—let’s just open this up to questions.”
But she didn’t give anyone time to ask anything. She motioned to vote right away. She was moving too quickly for the seniors to keep up. EJ stood to go, but now Steph hoped he would stay. With her eyes she tried to plead with him to remain seated, but he was on his way to the door, and when she stole a glance at Nate, the meeting’s only nonresident didn’t avert his gaze.
“Officer Thatch!” Steph said, but EJ was already gone.
She turned back to the expectant, slightly puzzled faces. “Let’s vote,” she told them again, but really there was nothing much to vote on—what Steph had proposed amounted to a small change in attitude and a subtle shift in the way the town sold itself. The motion passed unanimously and quickly.
She began to pack her things, but when Nate stood from his chair and looked ready to come to her end of the table, wanting a word, clearly, she took whatever she had, leaving the note cards behind, and hustled for the door.
Outside, walking across Main Street, keys in hand, she heard Nate call her name. She kept walking, but then he yelled to her again, louder this time. Finally she turned and saw him jogging down the steps of the library in his red jacket. There was no point trying to run, no point in making a scene. Nate looked both ways as he crossed the street and came to her side—attempting to smile but failing at it. Above his head the clouds were darkening and moving like ships, and the telephone wires were swinging in the wind.
“Thank you,” he said. “Sorry. Just wanted to say hello.”
“Hello,” she said.
“Can we go somewhere?”
“That sounds like more than hello.”
“We need to talk.”
“How is that possible? What could we have to talk about?”
“That’s what I need to explain.”
Everything about the exchange felt off-kilter. Steph was no longer attracted to this stranger and couldn’t recall why she ever had been. She tried to tell herself that she had remembered their first moment in Wiscasset differently than she had lived it. He had lost his tan since then. He seemed balder somehow. And yet he was promising to tell her something, and she was so desperate to have someone fill her in—on anything—that she asked him where he wanted to go. Anywhere away from anyone she might know, he said. So she told him to follow her.
She opened the door of her BMW and started driving. On her way around the First National Bank, she passed a white Jeep Cherokee with Delaware license plates, which put its blinker on and trailed her up the hill toward the church. Steph turned onto Bristol Road, going faster than the speed limit. The sky overhead was still gray, but as she looked forward, she saw a darker, lower line of clouds forming over the southern horizon. She was close to home now, close to her long driveway, but she didn’t stop. This was the safest place in Maine, she told herself, and she needed to know whatever it was that Nate wanted to tell her. She needed to get to the bottom of something, even if it wasn’t the right thing.
She kept driving, splitting her attention between the storm filling the windshield and Nate’s white SUV in the rearview. She drove until she reached the peninsula’s southern tip and the lighthouse. When she looked at her phone again, it had lost service.
She parked the BMW. The lighthouse beam flashed over the parked cars, then the lawn, the rocks, the sea. Steph had lost sight of the Jeep when she came into the lot, and the sky was dark. There were people on the lawn, storm watchers. They wore foul-weather gear and kept a safe distance from the surf. The wind held them upright as they stood atop a long bladed ridge. The coast here looked ripped apart—its tectonic match gone to the other side of the ocean but the scars still raw and deep. Heavy swells rode in from the horizon and shattered on the rocks, around and over the storm watchers. They all took a step back.
As heavy raindrops pounded the roof of her SUV and washed over the windshield, Steph heard a rapping on the passenger’s-side window, and the door opened. Nate settled into the car, rain streaming down the seams of his jacket. He closed the door, and the BMW went quiet again save for the percussion of the rain. Nate removed his hood. Steph could feel wet heat coming off his body, and the windshield fogged over.
“I’d say this is remote enough,” he said.
He wiped his hand over his face and pulled rain from his nose and chin. Again, he tried to smile at her and failed. His teeth were beige. “So I guess I’ll just start talking,” he said. But then he went silent. The rain beat along the roof. Finally he began his story. It was an account of his travels over the last month—for longer than that, actually. Since before they had met. He reminded Steph that his brother had died and that he was home to help his parents. Steph remembered all this. But this time he told her in greater detail about how the brother had passed away. Steph had been picturing the brother as older, but he was younger. The brother had always struggled with the law, authority, drugs. He went to rehab once but dropped out. When he died, he was messed up on pills and dope. And he had been drinking. Steph wasn’t sure why any of this was relevant to her. If this was what Nate wanted to tell her, it wasn’t worth the trip down the peninsula—he had chosen the wrong person to open up to. Several times she interrupted to ask where this was going—but Nate was intent on finishing and ignored her each time. His parents wanted to blame someone, he said, and he told them to blame his brother. Or his demons, if that made the parents more comfortable. But they said no, no, no—whoever it was that brought these drugs to our town is an evildoer who needs to be brought to justice. Nate told his parents that he knew they were grieving but that they had to try to be reasonable. He asked them what they really wanted. And they—his dad, really—said they wanted the drugs to stop coming to Rockland. So Nate said he would look into it. He said this mostly just to make his father happy. He didn’t think he would find anything.
