Envious Moon (15 page)

W
e made love until we could not make love anymore. Until our very bones ached from coming together. I found a small town nearby and fetched us sandwiches and we ate on the bed, lying on our stomachs. I stood on that tiny porch and looked at the huge pines and out to the rural highway and I smoked. It was the only time I allowed myself away from her. But then I was back inside and in the dark of that room I watched Hannah sleep. I lay on my back and traced the spider-web cracks on the ceiling. And when the sadness rolled over me, it took me by surprise. Didn't I have everything I wanted? Wasn't she all I wanted?

Of course, there was all that we knew that went unsaid. In Rhode Island and in the western corner of Connecticut, we both knew they were looking for us. Men and women we did not know, and some that we did, whose entire existence right now was built around finding the two of us and tearing us apart. Taking Hannah away from me. Sometimes lying there, I pictured them. Cops and detectives, in some windowless room, map on the wall, going over different scenarios. Did they go to New York to try to vanish into the big city? Or had they
driven out west? Were they still in Connecticut, maybe at another campground?

And I'll admit that part of me liked their attention, how it elevated the thing between me and Hannah, even though I was afraid of what they wanted to do to us.

There was something else important that went unsaid. For the first time in my life, I was away from the ocean. I know that sounds silly, but the more we moved inland, into these forested hills, the more I felt its absence. The ocean that was a different color every single day. The ocean that had given me work, had given my father work. The ocean that when I rode on its surface I was aware of its awesome strength and its power, at the same time knowing that I was one of the few who knew how to respect and love it. Not tame it because no man could do that. I had been born to the sea. It was in my blood. It was all I had ever known. And it saddened me to think that it might be gone forever.

That second morning at the cabin, we opened the door to cloudy skies and a cool, rawboned day. It looked like rain when I stopped at the log cabin and dropped the keys in a wooden box there for this purpose. Out on the rural highway, Hannah turned to me in the cab.

“Anthony,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I need clothes.”

I looked at her and I felt so stupid and selfish. She had come directly with me that night at her school, and had not packed a bag. She had on the same jeans and T-shirt and sweater she had that night. “I'm so sorry,” I said. “I completely spaced.”

“And you need to do laundry.”

“I do?”

She nodded. “Your clothes stink.”

I lifted the front of my shirt up to my nose and smelled it. Sweat and cigarettes. “You're right,” I said.

We continued to drive north through beautiful country. We were following a meandering brook that disappeared from the road before bending back alongside it. The heavy pine forest came right to the edge of the road and now and again when we came up a hill, we could see blue mountains in the distance.

Outside of Rutland the rain came, and it fell so hard the shoddy wipers on the truck could barely keep it off the glass. We got burgers at a drive-through and then we pulled into the parking lot of a giant strip mall. I pointed. “Wal-Mart,” I said. “We'll get you clothes there.”

Hannah looked at me. “Are you serious?”

I shrugged. “Got a better idea?”

We held hands and walked through the wide aisles of the store like some married couple. She was used to shopping in fancy stores in Boston, but she didn't even have a wallet, and the only money we had was the cash that I took from under the carpet that night. This was not a time to be picky. And Hannah, to her credit, managed to give in to it, and while I waited she modeled things for me, a pair of jeans that fit her like a glove, a white button-down shirt, and a sundress that I loved, blue and white checked, and short enough that when she moved its bottom hem swayed and showed off all of her lovely tanned legs. We bought her two sweaters and a coat, underwear and socks. We filled a cart with clothes. And when we pushed the cart out to the truck in the rain, her arm was looped in mine, and I knew that this may not be what she was accustomed to, but that on some level she was grateful.

Farther down the same strip, we found a Laundromat and I
brought my bag inside and got change out of the machine. The place was empty, other than the old woman who ran it, sitting on a folding chair watching a soap opera on a small black-and-white television. All my stuff fit into one of the big washers and Hannah and I sat down in the middle of a row of molded plastic seats to wait for it.

Hannah leaned into me and she rested her head on my shoulder. She was bored. “We'll be out of here soon,” I said.

“Then what?”

“I don't know,” I said, and I didn't. Next to me on the seat was a stack of magazines and I picked up the one on the top.
Vermont Life,
it was called. I flipped it over and on the back was a picture of these new homes on top of a mountain. In the picture they were surrounded by snow and they looked quite beautiful. A-frames with big windows. Tall pine trees around them and you could see where the land dropped off and there was a hint of broad valley behind them. They were winter houses for rich people, the kind of people Hannah had known her whole life. The kind of person Hannah was when she wasn't with me. I pointed at the picture. “How about here?” I said.

Hannah looked down at it. “Stratton Mountain,” she said, reading from the caption.

“What do you think?” I said. “We'll go there and get ourselves one of these houses. Live on top of a mountain. Learn how to ski or something. Wake up every morning and look across the valley.”

“You're crazy,” she said.

I stood up. “Excuse me,” I said to the old lady watching her soap. She turned in her seat and looked at me. I held up the magazine to her and she was too far to see it real good but
she peered at it anyway. “Do you know where this is? Stratton Mountain?”

She turned back to her show. “About half hour south,” she said.

“We must have passed it.”

She didn't look back at me. “Depends what way you came.”

I didn't answer the old woman. I sat back down and I smiled at Hannah. I nudged her with my elbow. “We'll get one of these houses,” I said. She rolled her eyes at me and I loved her for it.

O
n the road heading south, we crested a hill and something happened that I had only seen in the middle of the North Atlantic. The sun cracked through the clouds and it shone brightly on the front of the truck while the bed behind was pounded with heavy rain. Two worlds in a matter of inches.

At a gas station I filled up and then I left Hannah in the truck and I went into the phone booth. After I dialed, the machine came on and told me I owed a dollar seventy-five and I pumped the quarters into it. A click and then it was ringing. Berta answered on the third ring.

“Hello, Mama,” I said.

She spoke to me in Portuguese. Either someone was there or she knew they had tapped the lines. She told me to come home, to turn myself in. It was the only way out of this mess, she said.

“I can't do that,” I said. “This is my life. I'm living it.”

“You're sick,” she said to me, practically spitting the words at me over the phone.

“I have to go,” I told her, aware that I had already been on too long. I had seen the movies. No doubt there were men in
a van in front of my house running a trace on this very call, trying to narrow in on this roadside spot in Vermont. “I love you, Mama,” I said, and then I hung up.

For a while as we drove, her voice echoed in my head and it made me sad to hear it. Berta didn't deserve any of this, I knew that. She only wanted good things for me, she only wanted me to be a good man, like her husband, my father, had been. She didn't understand the things that drove me, and she may have loved like this once, but it had been a long time. It was too much to expect her to understand.

Soon the road began to climb and we were into the mountains, coming around turns to see valleys and rolling hills opening up before us. The pine forest had given way to oaks, birch, and maples, and in the now steady afternoon sunlight, some of them showed the first red of fall. It was beautiful. My spirits lifted to see it and I put my hand on Hannah's thigh and I squeezed.

We came onto Stratton Mountain just as the light was failing. There wasn't much to it. More of a big hill, with a ski lift you could see cutting up either side of it. Some restaurants and a few hotels. Lots of condos. We drove past all of it and when we were coming down the other side, I saw a green sign that said, Mountainside homes. Underneath it said, starting at $500,000. I smiled at Hannah. “This is us,” I said.

She shook her head. “What are you going to do?”

“I'll show you.”

We drove up an unpaved tree-lined road and when we reached the top, the land leveled and there were no trees. The sun had fallen behind the distant hills but in the last of the light we could see for miles. Foothills and ridges leading to where
we were. There were all these houses up here and all of them were dark. The A-frames from the pictures, chalets with big porches that looked down over the mountain. Not one of them had a car in front of it. They were new enough that there was no yard to speak of around them. Just dirt piled here and there. I stopped in front of one and got out and climbed up the porch and looked through the sliding glass doors into the house. It was hard to see in the light, but I saw that it was empty.

“What do you see?” Hannah called up to me.

“It's empty,” I said. “Let's try another.”

We tried two more and they were also bare inside. But the third one I looked into, slightly back from the road, had what appeared to be furniture. I looked around the doors and the windows for signs of some alarm. But I didn't see anything, and I told Hannah to wait out front and I walked around the back. There was wood stacked underneath another porch and next to it was a door. I tried it and it was locked. I picked up a big square piece of the firewood and I stepped back. I threw it at the window on the door and it went right through, almost cleanly, it seemed, the glass falling to the floor inside. I reached through and unlocked the door.

I was in a basement. In the dark I made out a wooden staircase and I went to this and climbed the stairs. I opened the door and I was in a great room, and in front of me were the sliding glass doors that led to the high porch in the front. I felt around the wall for a light switch and I found one, and when I clicked it the room flooded with light. The ceiling had to have been forty feet high. There was a stone fireplace against one wall, and a stone chimney that went all the way to the ceiling. Leather furniture and bookcases filled with books and board
games. A big kitchen and a staircase that led to a second-floor balcony that looked over the room.

I went to the sliding doors and unlocked them and stepped out.

“Come on,” I said to Hannah, who stood outside the truck now.

“It's someone's house,” Hannah said.

“No one's here,” I said.

She looked reluctant but she came up the stairs. The first thing I did was look in the fridge. It was empty save for a couple of bottles of champagne and fifteen or so bottles of beer. The freezer was full of frozen meat. Steaks and whole chickens and all kinds of things I didn't recognize. This was better than I thought.

Hannah said, “What if they come back?”

“They won't,” I said. “Not for a while.”

“How do you know?”

“There's no snow,” I said. “That's what they come here for, right? Snow?”

I parked the truck around back, in the dirt yard, where it couldn't be seen from the road. While I was at it, I brought a handful of the cordwood upstairs and I built us a fire in that huge fireplace. I closed the heavy drapes in front of the sliding glass doors and we only used one light in the kitchen and a standing one in the living room. No reason to take any chances. I took two big steaks out of the freezer and put them in a pan of water to thaw.

“Have a beer,” I said to Hannah where she sat on one of the overstuffed leather chairs in front of the fire.

“I don't want a beer.”

I smiled. “Champagne it is then.”

I held one of the bottles over the sink and took off the wrapping and then twisted the cork until it popped. A little of the champagne cascaded out. There were wineglasses in one of the cupboards and I filled two of the glasses and brought one over to Hannah. I sat down in the chair next to her. The fire was going good and it kicked orange-and-red shadows around the room. I reached my glass to Hannah's and we clinked the two of them together.

“Make a toast,” I said.

“To what?”

“I don't know. To us. Something.”

“To us,” Hannah said, and I raised my glass and she did, too, and we drank.

I said, “I bet they have a bathtub.”

“So?”

“You could take a bath.”

“You want me to take a bath.”

“No,” I said, “I just thought you'd like it, that's all. When these steaks thaw, I'll cook them up. You must be hungry.”

“Okay,” she said, and she stood and left me, climbed the stairs. She walked with the lifelessness of the exhausted. I didn't blame her, it had been a hard couple of days.

A few minutes later, I heard water running through the pipes. I lighted a cigarette and looked at the fire. It was a real good fire. Yellow-and-red flames rising above the burning wood. That great fire smell spilling out into the room. I stared up to the balcony where Hannah was. I looked around this great room. The high ceilings and the leather furniture. The rectangular windows up high that the moonlight slanted through.
I ashed my cigarette into a large painted vase next to my chair. My arms, running along the supple leather of the chair, were suddenly heavy. Not that it mattered. I had everything I had ever longed for. I remember thinking that there was nothing else I needed.