The Midcoast, page 18
Steph didn’t like where Nate was headed—there seemed to be some implied bearing on her own life, and she wanted to keep Nate’s story on its own course; this was not the kind of answer she’d been looking for—so she told him that she’d had a change of heart, that she no longer wanted to hear what he had to say, but Nate said Steph needed to hear it, that it was for her own good, and then he said that he’d taken a few long weekends off from work to drive from Delaware to Maine. There was a rumor that the product was coming around the border on boats, but who knew if it was true, and the only mysterious boat anyone remembered seeing (Nate had questioned police chiefs and fishermen in Rockland, Camden, Vinalhaven, and North Haven) belonged to someone who had broken into a big summer home on North Haven about twenty years prior. Nate found this out from the sternman who had seen the boat. The captain he had gone out with that day was dead now. But the sternman remembered the boat as gray and traveling upwards of forty knots. That was pretty fast for a lobster boat, Nate said. Sure was, the sternman said. Nate didn’t believe the guy would remember the color of the hull—didn’t really believe any of the story and was ready to stop listening because he was more interested in recent crimes—but then the sternman said he knew he was remembering the boat correctly because he had seen it again. Or one just like it. Last year. He had seen the boat tearing past the islands just after dawn, out to sea a ways. The sternman (he wasn’t a sternman anymore—he had his own boat—but Nate kept referring to him as the sternman) was returning from a tuna-fishing trip, which was why he was out so far. He had taken note of the gray-hulled boat because it was cruising, just like the one he had seen years before, faster than any lobster boat should have been able to move. The sternman had barely enough time to focus his binoculars before it vanished. And in his binoculars he saw the transom. She was from Casco Bay. He couldn’t remember the boat’s name, but he remembered that the buoy atop the wheelhouse was black and white.
Still, this was not much for Nate to go on. He filed it away under dead-end leads. He went back to Delaware.
After another few weeks, he returned to Maine, just to check on his parents, and while he was home, Rockland hosted their annual lobster boat race. And it was at this race that Nate saw boats going faster, much faster, than he had ever seen a boat go before. This was interesting. He started thinking. He decided to look up which racing boats had gray hulls, and when he did, he noticed that over the years someone named Ed Thatch had always entered the races, always, according to those who knew, with gray-hulled boats. And when Nate followed Ed Thatch back to his true port of call, not Casco Bay but South Bristol, and then to his true home address, not South Bristol but Damariscotta, and looked at his new house and the businesses he owned, and Nate saw how beautiful his wife was, Nate couldn’t help but think that, for a lobsterman who hadn’t graduated high school, Ed Thatch had done pretty well for himself. And when he went down to the docks and looked at all Ed’s boats and realized they all had racing engines, he started to wonder why anyone would need so many boats to move so quickly—certainly not just to get from trap to trap or to compete with one another in the summer races. And so Nate started following Steph because at first he thought she must be in on the family business, but then it became clear that she wasn’t; otherwise she wouldn’t have held a meeting to tell everyone that her town was the safest on the Midcoast when it was only safe because it was in the eye of the storm, the domain of the man who controlled the weather.
Nate finished his story and the car fell silent. A sheet of rain blew away from the roof, then back onto it.
“Why are you telling me this?” Steph asked him finally. She couldn’t believe any of it. It made perfect sense, and she had prepared herself to trust him, and yet she couldn’t. This was not what Ed had withheld from her. He would never build their life upon anything so treacherous. Now she was scared. Scared of what Nate might be capable of and scared of losing her family. Because if what Nate had said was true—any of it—then it was a matter for her to deal with, not him. She wanted desperately to regain control but couldn’t think of a way to do so. Her bag was in her lap, and her phone was in her bag, but there was no one to call, no one who could help her, and she didn’t have any service anyway.
“I wasn’t expecting to like you,” Nate said, facing to his right, away from Steph, looking into the storm.
Steph glanced at Nate. She thought of the phone again, and then she reached into her bag, trying to be discreet—
“Wait, back up a second,” she said.
“Back up?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking down again, tapping the screen, “a second ago, you said you liked me.”
“I’m—I just had to say it,” he said.
“But when we first met,” she said. “It wasn’t a coincidence.”
“No.”
“And you were just doing your job, helping out your parents.”
“That’s right.”
Outside the waves kicked off the rocks, and the observers retreated from the cliff, moving back to the parking lot, their faces all obscured by the rain streaming down the BMW’s windows.
“It’s just—” Steph said, trying to sound sincere, trying to sound nervous in a way she wasn’t, “I thought there was something else that first time we met.”
“I thought so, too,” Nate said. “Of course I thought that.”
“So what—we just leave it like this?”
“Leave it like what?”
“Leave it without—you know—seeing where it goes,” she said.
Steph watched him weigh a response. He struggled with her proposal, if that was what it was, for a long time. Then he reached for her hand. His fingers felt somehow wet and cool and hot all at once. “No,” he said. “I mean, yeah—I want that to happen.”
“Okay,” Steph said. “Me, too.”
“When?”
“I don’t know—now?”
He was staring forward, through the windshield, or at it; there was nothing to see but the thick folds of rain. “Where?” he asked.
“Anywhere.”
Steph glanced out the window. A couple in green rain jackets was moving off the grass by the lighthouse and through the parking lot. Hopefully they weren’t headed to a car with out-of-state plates. Nate probably wouldn’t notice. He was just a bank investigator. The couple would have to do. “Shit,” Steph said, ducking.
“What is it?”
“Ed’s uncle.”
“His uncle?”
“Look away.”
Nate did as he was told but said, “You’re bullshitting me.”
“I’m not. It’s a small county. Everyone knows everyone.”
“Apparently.”
She could feel she was losing him. She didn’t want to lose him, and nor did she want to touch him, but this first desire overcame the second. She reached to his crotch, placed her hand on his fly.
“Just not here,” she said.
Nate didn’t respond. He didn’t look toward her. Instead he let himself get erect under Steph’s hand. “You drive back toward Rockland,” she said. “I’ll follow you. There’s a motel up Route 1.”
He made her wait for a response, and when she withdrew her hand, he leaned over to try to kiss her. She couldn’t do it. She stopped him. “Not here,” she said. “I don’t know where they went.” She gestured behind her, at the couple she had accused of being related to her by law.
Nate looked at her one last time, told her to stay close to him in her car, then opened the door as the rain swept in on a gust—
“Wait,” she said. “Give me your number. In case I lose you.”
He removed another business card from his wallet and handed it to her. “Cellphone’s on the bottom,” he said.
She waited until he was beyond the rain, and then she went to put her face in her hands to keep herself from screaming. But her hand had been on Nate, and the thought of touching him, then her face, made her gag. So she rolled down her window to gather as much rain in her open palm as she could and rubbed her hands together, as if that might wash off everything that had just taken place.
Even if she also needed to preserve it. She pulled the phone out of the bag, hit the stop button, and scrubbed back to the middle of the timeline. She hit play to test the audio quality:
I thought that, too. Of course I thought that….
A bright light bounced off the rearview. Nate. She hit pause on the phone, pulled out behind the Jeep, and followed him away from the lighthouse, back toward town. She would split off as soon as she could. When they passed from Bristol into Damariscotta, approaching her own road, she entered Nate’s number into her phone, called him, and said, “Bear right at the intersection—it’s faster,” and he did. “Stay on the line,” she told him. “I’ll give you directions.” His Jeep and her BMW went along School Street, by a row of small houses and a farm stand, and then his SUV was passing the police station, in front of which Steph was relieved to see her son’s large cruiser. She took a sharp left and pulled in next to it. She could see Nate’s taillights up ahead, moving to the shoulder.
Eventually he spoke. “What are you doing?” he asked slowly.
“Going to see my son.” She opened her door and got out of the car, walking quickly, hugging her cardigan to her chest with one hand as it soaked through with rain. “My son’s a cop,” she said into the phone. “As I believe you know. And if he hears the conversation I just recorded, he’s not going to be happy. I don’t think your wife would be very happy either.”
Her hand was on the door of the police station, but she didn’t go inside. She watched Nate’s Jeep, she listened to the silence on the phone, and then she heard him say, “Fuck you, Steph Thatch.” His brake lights went off and he drove back into the road and away from town. Her phone went dead.
Steph waited until well after his lights had disappeared, and then she took her hand off the door and went back to her car. She sat behind the wheel, a series of shallow breaths rattling her chest. When she saw an officer exit the front door—not EJ—she put the car in reverse and headed for home.
The night had arrived with the storm. Steph only thought to turn the headlights on when she realized she couldn’t see a thing. Leaning forward over the steering wheel, peering through the overworked windshield wipers, she traced her way to the house. When she arrived in the driveway at last, she turned the car off and looked as far as she could down the meadow. She was parked next to the Silverado, and the lights were on inside the house. She wondered if Ed might have built the first fire of the season in the fireplace, but she wouldn’t be able to see the smoke behind the rain. She didn’t know what she should do first. Which event she should react to. She took out her phone and thought of all the people she had to call. Everyone who had attended the meeting—she’d have to tell them to forget about Damariscotta’s safety record. Forget the vague attitudinal shift. She’d have to call the graphic designers and tell them to remove MAINE’S SAFE HAVEN! from the brochure. But this was not something she needed to address right away. Why had it occurred to her first? She had to deal with her family before she dealt with anything else.
She opened the door and felt the rain on her hair and shoulders. She made it to the kitchen and moved inside, where the hanging lights blazed away above the granite island. Through the speakers on the TV, she could hear the voices of men, but she wasn’t ready to approach Ed just yet, so she went to the bedroom and stared at their bed. She looked outside at the relentless weather. She sat in the chair in the corner. She replayed everything she had just heard and said, thought about it, then decided, in the end, that she was not going down like this. No way. She had worked too hard to get to where she was. She needed to find a way to protect herself. Her family. She thought of Ed, thought of turning him in. But calling the police didn’t make any sense. There was no reason she should have to throw away the beautiful life she’d made for her family. The life she and Ed had made together.
When she came into the living room, she found Ed with his boots on the ottoman. The television showed rain falling endlessly on a tarp at Fenway Park. He hadn’t built a fire. He was drinking a beer. Steph picked up the remote and turned the power off.
“Christ,” Ed said, glancing at her for the first time. “What happened to you?’
She sat on the ottoman, on its farthest edge. “I got wet,” she said.
“Didn’t you have a jacket?”
“I know what you’ve been doing, Ed.”
“And what—”
“Shut up. Shut the fuck up.”
He shut up.
“You have to quit,” she said. “You have to quit everything you’ve been doing.”
He took his time answering. “It’s a little more complicated than that,” he said.
“I don’t care.”
He took his boots off the ottoman now, sitting up. He laid his hat on the table. He was thinking. “This about what EJ said to you?” he asked.
“It’s about that and everything else. Doesn’t matter what it’s about. You have to put an end to it. That’s all you need to know.”
Ed scratched his beard, then scratched it again. “Can’t just snap my fingers, Steph.”
“You have to.”
“Or else?”
“Or else you’ll get caught.”
He stared at her. His demise was a prospect, she now understood, that he had already come to terms with.
“And if you get caught,” she added, “you’ll bring the whole family down.”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
“Yes, it will. I’m telling you, Ed. You haven’t considered the fallout.”
“Yuh—I have.”
“I will divorce you,” she said. “Got that? You keep doing what you’re doing, we’re done.”
She waited just long enough for her words to sink in, then rose, placing her hand on Ed’s knee and pushing herself up. She went to the master bathroom and flicked on the lights. She started drawing a bath, cranking the faucet to hot. Her fingers, still wet from the cold rain, had taken on an almost translucent quality around the nails and looked ready to molt or peel away. She shed her clothes and stepped into the bath, sinking down low, the water pooling between her legs, rising around her ribs.
9
Toward the end of our final conversation, I asked Steph if she ever regretted issuing the ultimatum.
“It wasn’t an ultimatum,” she said.
“It wasn’t?”
“I just told him what the right thing to do was. And what would happen if he didn’t do it.”
“Sure,” I said, “but I guess what I’m asking is: Do you ever wish you hadn’t told him anything?”
“You mean, do I ever wish I had turned in my husband?”
“Well, no,” I said, hesitating, “unless you do wish that.” I gave her just enough time to make it perfectly clear that she did not wish that, not at all. “I just meant—” I had to be careful here, because if Steph thought I was assigning any blame in her direction, she would, I knew from previous experience, end the interview with a quick glance at her otherwise silent wingman, the square-rimmed attorney in the corner. “I just meant that you told Ed that he had to stop immediately,” I said. “And that caused, you know, some problems.”
“I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?” She was sitting on the couch, elbow on the arm, high windows and the view of the lawn and the river behind her.
“No, I guess not,” I said. “But for Ed, it was hard—it seems—for him to extricate himself from the business right away. Just because he was in so deep.”
“He did the best he could. We both did.”
“You helped him?”
“I gave him advice. Kept him on track. He told me everything.”
And as far as I know, this was true; Ed really had divulged all his secrets to Steph. The majority of what she gave me in fact came from moments that she hadn’t been present for, moments that Ed had kept hidden for a long time.
We were both getting tired, so I returned to a few facts in need of checking, and then we were done for the day and I was on my way off the Thatches’ property and heading home.
But here’s what I was trying to get at:
Steph had acted too hastily, I think. She never should have told Ed so explicitly what he had to do in order to win her back, to stay married and keep his family intact. It was the one thing, in all the years they had been married, that she had never done before. In the past, he had made assumptions and she had never corrected these assumptions, which gradually led Ed to believe, after so many intra-relational transactions had produced the very same results, that all Steph really wanted (which was all he really wanted) was a nice place to live, material comfort, status—all things that he could buy, more or less. But then, in issuing the ultimatum (or whatever it was, however Steph preferred to think of it), she changed the rules. As Ed had tried to tell her, to cease his dealings so abruptly would take a great deal of effort and finesse. Ending the break-ins along the coast was a matter of relative simplicity; Ed would tell his people to stop, and they would stop, unless they didn’t, in which case he would make them stop. Ending the relationships with their associates in Lewiston and Canada, however, presented a dicier proposition. Such an extreme revision to the established workflow ought to have been introduced with diplomacy, over a matter of months or years. Ed was not a kingpin. He did not grow or manufacture his product, and he did not sell it on the street. He brought it around the border from Nova Scotia, connecting wholesaler to distributor. How the parties on both sides of the border might react once they lost their middleman shouldn’t have been hard to predict; when suddenly a giant lacuna opened up in the supply chain, everyone would lose their shit (as indeed everyone did). Ed knew there would be problems. Many problems. And yet he had always prioritized Steph’s desires far ahead of his own, so he tried in earnest to fulfill her demands, even if there might have been a better way to go straight.
