Good Harbor (19 page)

KATHLEEN PUT ON
her seat belt and sat, distracted, her fingers on the unturned key. Buddy came over
to the driver’s side. “You all right?”

“I’m fine.” She started the car and pulled out of the driveway. Kathleen drove down
the block slowly and waited for the traffic to break. Why are there so many cars today?
Why are they all going so fast? Why won’t anyone let me in? She gripped the wheel.

Finally there was a gap in the traffic and she eased out into the road. A trucker
blasted his horn and set her heart racing. Riding the brake, Kathleen edged into the
rotary, merged right toward the bridge, and realized she was panting. Climbing over
the river, she noticed a long line of passing cars. She looked down at the speedometer.
I’m not really going twenty miles an hour, am I? As another car passed, she turned
to see the driver mouthing curses at her.

She fixed her eyes on the bumper of the car ahead of her and tried to keep up. Oh,
my God, she thought. Oh, my God.

Once she got off the bridge, Kathleen pulled over to the side of the road, crawled
over to the passenger’s seat, opened the door, and vomited onto the sandy shoulder.

What on earth had she eaten last night? Or was this some form of radiation sickness?

She counted to one hundred and felt her pulse slow down a bit. It wasn’t food poisoning
or radiation sickness, she thought. It was all in her head. And if she didn’t pull
herself together, they would drag her to a psychiatrist.

She found a breath mint, brushed her hair, and started the car again, forcing her
right foot down until the speedometer registered forty-five, which was as fast as
she could bear to go. “I can do this,” she said, glancing at her panicked eyes in
the rearview mirror. “I have to do this.”

Kathleen arrived at the office ten minutes late, but no one commented or seemed to
notice her agitation. I must be a better actress than I thought. Or maybe they just
weren’t interested.

Actually, the whole office was a bit out of kilter. Dr. Singh was at a conference
in Boston. His replacement, a heavyset woman with a Russian accent, came in to check
on the settings and barely looked at Kathleen. Rachel had called in sick and Terry
was on vacation. The substitutes called her “honey” and took too long getting her
positioned.

On her back, arm raised, breast bare, she tried not to think about driving home. She
closed her eyes against the red laser line, but it remained on the backs of her eyelids,
vibrating and fading, a crimson tightrope.

After her treatment, Kathleen drank a cup of tepid tea in the too bright hospital
cafeteria and then walked around the small gift shop for as long as she could. At
least there won’t be much traffic now, she thought. She could drive like a little
old lady and they could all pass her. I can do it, she told herself. I’ve done it
a million times.

She had done it with children screaming in the backseat. She had done it with brushfires
smoking in the woods on both sides of the road. She’d driven this stretch of road
after the unveiling of Danny’s headstone, Buddy sobbing beside her.

I can do it, she thought. But as she approached the bridge, she started to shake.
“What
is
this?” she wailed, and pulled off the road again.

“Okay, okay,” she said in the tone she used with the kindergartners. “You don’t have
to take the bridge. You can go around.”

But that would add so many more miles to the trip. Which was worse? She stared at
her knuckles and realized her hands ached from grasping the steering wheel so tightly.
All she wanted was to be home.

“Let’s go home,” she said to herself firmly in the rearview mirror. She turned off
the highway and took the longer route, forcing herself to breathe slowly: in two-three-four,
out two-three-four.

That evening, she asked Buddy if he would mind driving her tomorrow. “It would be
nice to have the company.”

“Only if you let me take you to breakfast after.”

With Buddy at the wheel the next morning Kathleen wasn’t quite as terrified, but the
trip over the bridge still made her pulse speed up and her hands clammy. She kept
her eyes on the guardrail and counted. Buddy didn’t notice.

No one seemed to notice. One of Marcy’s daughters had chicken pox, so she was out
of the office. When Joyce called, Kathleen said she was feeling a little unsteady
on her feet, but even Joyce didn’t seem concerned. She’d thought Joyce might guess
that something was wrong.

Kathleen sat under the awning on the deck and tried to read but couldn’t concentrate.
She ended up in the cool of the den, dozing in front of the television. She didn’t
answer the phone unless she heard Buddy on the answering machine. She listened to
a message from Rabbi Hertz, and one from that young woman, Brigid.

She stayed out of the car. Buddy ran the errands and did the grocery shopping. He
came home after work to find her asleep on the couch. He sat on the chair beside her,
leaned his head on his hand, and worried. Hal and Jack had called him at the store
to find out what was wrong with their mother: she sounded weird when they spoke to
her on the phone. Buddy told them that Kathleen was just tired. That’s what she kept
telling him.

She woke up and saw the look on Buddy’s face and said it again. “I’ll be okay. It’s
the radiation. They all say I’ll be fine.” Then she made up another story about walking
at Good Harbor with Joyce.

JOYCE FELT ELECTRIFIED
and breathless. She woke before six and walked to the end of Rocky Neck in the wispy
stillness. Back home, she turned on the computer, wrote a poem about the sunrise,
and deleted it. When Frank called, she was sitting on the kitchen floor, staring at
the purple swatch she’d painted.

“I’m trying that eggplant color,” she told him, coughing to clear her throat.

“Are you okay?”

“I think it’s just the fumes getting to me. But I think I’m almost ready to get serious
about the book now that the painting is nearly done.”

“Great.”

Joyce said nothing.

“Well, then, I won’t keep you.”

“You’re not,” said Joyce, instantly annoyed at him for ending the conversation so
abruptly. “Things okay at work?”

“Yeah, crazy.” She could imagine him shrugging.

“Well, I have to get going. I should call Kathleen.”

“You’re a good friend,” said Frank. “Talk to you later.”

As soon as she hung up, Joyce got into the shower. Washing away my lies, she thought.
Not that I’ve lied to anyone. Yet.

In the car, she switched the radio from NPR to a heavy metal rock station and turned
up the volume. It was noise but it drowned out her misgivings and it seemed to sharpen
her senses.

Patrick kissed her absently when she sat down at the counter for lunch. He wasn’t
nearly as talkative as he’d been the day before. He hadn’t shaved either. “I had a
long night,” he explained. “Double shift. I didn’t get off till just now.” He smoked
one cigarette after another and only smiled as Joyce tried to make conversation, which
wasn’t easy. She couldn’t very well talk about her family, so she told him the story
of the statue in her yard, from Ricky’s near-fatal accident to Theresa’s recent devotions.

After the waitress delivered their sandwiches, they chewed in silence, and Joyce began
to think that this would be their last meeting. But Patrick asked her if she had time
for a quick walk at Plum Cove before he went home and crashed. They walked silently
past chatting mothers and playing children on the small, rocky beach.

Patrick leaned against Joyce on the way back to the cars, brushing his hand against
hers. “I’ve been so lonesome here,” he said. “You’re a good egg to put up with me,
Joycey.”

She squeezed his hand and lifted her mouth to be kissed. He obliged. He got into her
car and took her face between his hands, kissing her. For ten minutes, he kissed her,
then moved his lips to her ear and said, “Tomorrow, Joycey, would you come visit me
in my poor little room?”

“Yes.”

“Noon again?”

“Yes.”

He wrote down the address.

Joyce turned up the volume on her radio even louder and kept it there, turning it
down only for her daily phone call to Kathleen, who said no again. When Frank called,
she let the machine pick up. “Looks like a great beach day,” he said. “I hope you’re
having a good one.”

It was a long one, which she filled with ceilings, her least favorite job.

In the morning, she took a bath instead of a shower. She filed her nails and finally
left the house early, arriving in Rockport an hour before she was supposed to be there,
which turned out to be a good thing since she couldn’t find Patrick’s apartment. She
located the sub shop he mentioned, but there was no door at the address he’d given
her. Finally, she walked around to the parking lot behind the storefront, where he
was waiting, on the wooden stoop, smoking.

Joyce followed him up a flight of stairs that opened into a dim kitchen with empty
spaces where there should have been a refrigerator and a stove. They walked past a
line of hollow-core doors, each of them padlocked from the outside. “Who lives here?”
she asked.

“Workingmen,” Patrick said, leading the way. “Mostly Irish. Working two jobs, a lot
of them. Sending money back home.”

Patrick’s room was at the end of the hall. The two windows, hung with old floral bedsheets,
overlooked the street. Five oversize wrestling posters were taped to the walls. “Not
mine,” he said, pointing to the lurid masks and rippling muscles. “The kid before
me had ’em up, and they cover the cracks.” He lit another cigarette.

Jeans and work shirts were folded neatly and stored in blue milk crates that also
held a half dozen books, a carton of Marlboros, an ashtray, and a gooseneck lamp.
The king-size mattress took up most of the floor space, a worn, green acrylic blanket
tucked into hospital corners. It looked, oddly, like a monk’s cell. Or an odd monk’s
cell.

He took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. She could barely breathe.

When he closed the door, Joyce panicked. Was she out of her mind? No one knew where
she was.

“Are you all right?” he asked, stepping back and holding an open palm out to her,
as though she were a wary dog. He let her make the first move.

She paused, then put her mouth to his. They kissed, standing. He was in no rush. They
held each other, and he ran his arms up and down her back. He held her head and tangled
his hands in her hair. His attentions — deliberate, almost chaste — made Joyce feel
light-headed.

She had to sit, to lie down. But he held her standing, kissing, running his hands
down to the small of her back, her midriff, her ears, her ass, everywhere but her
breasts and her crotch.

She moaned. Patrick pulled back a little and smiled at her, as though he had won some
kind of victory. “You can go now if you like.”

Joyce pulled away, feeling as if she’d been slapped. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s hardly a palace where I live, is it now?”

“What difference would that make?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Americans are, can be . . .”

Joyce imagined a string of women coming here, turning up their noses at the squalor.
Though it wasn’t really squalid. It was shabby, but clean enough.

She put her hands on his hips and pushed herself up against him.

He laughed. “All right then.”

He drew her to the mattress and they necked like a couple of high school kids until
Joyce thought she would pass out. Patrick got up and excused himself to go to the
bathroom.

He’s getting a condom, thought Joyce, who took off her shoes.

The lock clicked shut behind him when he returned. Patrick lay down and started kissing
her. He unbuttoned her jeans and slipped his hand under her T-shirt, kissing her.
He stripped her slowly. With his tongue and with his fingers, he caressed her slowly,
head to foot.

He held her head between his hands and whispered in Celtic — sibilant, purring nonsense
warming the inside of her willing ear. He ran the silky insides of his forearms on
her thighs in a way that nearly brought her to orgasm, then paused for long, aching
moments, before taking her the rest of the way with his hand.