Red Hook Road (9 page)

“Mum.”

“Go!” she shouted.

Matt looked at Daniel, his eyebrows raised, his shoulders shrugged as if to say, What am I supposed to do now? When no reply was forthcoming, he said, “All right, Mum. I’ll be waiting for you at home. Don’t stay too long.” Then he called out to the sheriff, “You won’t let her stay too long, will you?”

“Don’t worry, son,” the sheriff said. “The truck will be here soon.”

Matt crammed his hands into his pockets and followed Maureen, who was trudging back to the car. Daniel, his arm around Iris’s shoulders, tried to lead her away.

“Wait,” Iris said. Her voice was calm despite her tears. “Officer?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Who was riding in the other car?” Iris said.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

“The other car. The SUV.” She pointed at the wreckage. It was just possible to see beneath the charring that the truck had once been white. “Who was driving it?”

“Man from Bucksport way. I’ve got a couple of deputies heading out to tell his family.”

“Was he drunk?”

“We won’t know until the autopsy. But if I had to guess, I’d say probably not.”

“And the limo driver? Was he drunk?”

Daniel said, “You know he wasn’t.”

“So what happened? Why did they crash?” Iris said.

Sheriff Paige said, “The limo driver probably had the sun in his eyes, maybe took the turn too wide. The way I read it, the Explorer swerved out of the way and got its wheels up on those rocks and that’s what flipped it. Unstable as hell, those trucks. Doesn’t take much for them to turn turtle.” He looked at Matt. “That about what you saw, son?”

“Yeah,” Matt said. “It just flipped and rolled right over the top of the limo.”

Daniel pulled Iris close. “Let’s go,” he said.

When they reached the car she paused and looked back. The fire in the SUV was finally out and only a small plume of black smoke still rose from the car’s broken carcass. There was no moon, and so the cove and the trees had faded into the darkness. The two banks of spotlights each sent out a sharply delineated bend of bright white light. One strip of light illuminated the SUV, the other the limousine, which was no longer in water but lodged in mud, the ebbing tide having begun to recede from the shore. The two zones of light overlapped in the middle of the road. In that small, brilliantly lit space, Jane stood facing the wrecks, her broad back to Iris. Her arms and hands hung limply by her sides. A gust of breeze sent the hem of her dress swirling around her legs.

Jane stood in that little island of light like a sentinel, a lighthouse on an uninhabited, forbidding coast. Iris gripped the car door with her hands
and stared at Jane. She had never seen anyone look so completely alone. How could they drive away and leave her there, enclosed in the husk of her grief? Iris started to call to her, but just then Jane bent down and picked something up off the ground. With a jerk of her strong arm she sent the rock arcing high toward the limousine. It landed with a crack on the shredded roof. Iris jumped at the sound.

“Iris,” Daniel said, gently pressing down on her shoulders, maneuvering her into the car. “Let’s go home.”

Jane bent down for another rock, and Iris quickly ducked into the car, so that she wouldn’t have to see or hear it land.

When the call came from Sheriff Paige early the next morning to tell them that Becca’s body was waiting for them at a Newmarket funeral home, Daniel assumed he and Iris would make the unhappy trip together. Iris, however, refused. She was sitting on the screen porch, curled up in her wicker armchair, its floral chintz cushion worn white at the seams. She had been sitting there since before dawn, when they both had given up the pretense of sleep. “I already saw what I needed to see,” she said.

“But don’t you want to make the arrangements?” Daniel asked. It was uncharacteristic of Iris to leave something this important to him, to trust that his decisions would reflect or even begin to approximate her wishes.

“No,” she said, simply, and laid her cheek on her bent knees, a fall of curls hiding her face from his view.

The Dunn & Burpee Funeral Home, on Main Street in Newmarket, was a large brick house of approximately the same vintage as his and Iris’s home in East Red Hook. It was plainer in design, bereft of gingerbread and scrollwork, with a turret but no widow’s walk, yet was somehow more imposing for its simplicity. The last of a block of stately homes constructed in the nineteenth century by the owners of the copper and granite mines that had once brought wealth to this now slightly seedy small city, the funeral home was flanked on one side by an auto parts store and on the other by a boxing gym called the Maine Event. The gym had always caught Daniel’s attention when he came to Newmarket, but as he had hung up his gloves thirty years before, he never had cause to walk through the door.

Today, before mounting the broad stairs that led up to the front door of the funeral home, he stood for a moment on the sidewalk and stared at
the blank steel door of the gym. The door banged open and a beefy young man stepped out, his head too small for his overdeveloped body. In one hand he carried a plastic milk crate full of iron dumbbells. He dropped the crate on the ground to prop the door open.

“Hey,” the young man said, when he noticed Daniel watching him. “What’s up?”

“Nothing much,” Daniel said.

Inside the funeral home Daniel was greeted by the undertaker, a man of about his own age, in a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and shiny black tie. Daniel looked down at his own faded jeans and frayed polo shirt, embarrassed. The undertaker, not obviously perturbed by Daniel’s attire, steered him into a small wood-paneled room and sat him down on a maroon brocade couch.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” he said. “Some coffee or a glass of water?”

“A glass of water would be nice,” Daniel said, surprised at how normal he sounded. As if he were shopping for a new pair of jeans rather than a coffin for his daughter.

The undertaker returned with his water and handed him a binder full of pictures of caskets. Daniel leafed through the binder, the sweat from his fingertips leaving smudged whorls on the Mylar-covered pages. With every turn of the page came the thought that every single one of these caskets, the Batesville Imperial Mahogany, the Steel Provincial Gold, the Stainless Tapestry Rose, would one day contain the body of someone’s child.

The undertaker, adept at steering the inconsolable through impossible tasks, gently returned to a page at the front of the binder. “Fairfield Poplar is a nice choice for a young woman.”

Daniel was suddenly conscious of feeling impatient, bored, even. Not with choosing the casket, or not
only
with that, but as if he were waiting for everything—the accident and his daughter’s death—to be over. As if it were a film that was dragging on for too long. The credits would have to roll at some point. If he just held on long enough, the last reel would end and Becca would no longer be dead.

The undertaker quietly cleared his throat and Daniel managed with a great deal of effort to bring his attention back to the specifics of his
task. “No, these aren’t right,” he said. “They’re too … too much. We’re Jewish.”

“Ah,” said the undertaker, barely concealing his disappointment. “You’ll be wanting this, then.” He pulled a page from his desk drawer.

Daniel looked at the plain pine box, unfinished, with three velvet looped handles on each side. Was this the casket his daughter would have chosen for herself? Or would she have gone for scrollwork and flounced cerulean satin, regardless of the dictates of the religion that she barely practiced? He shook his head clear of the bizarre image of Becca flipping through this book of coffins as if she were turning the pages of the L.L. Bean spring catalog. He willed himself to recall something, anything, that mattered: the way her hand had trembled in the crook of his elbow as he led her down the aisle.

“Or if you’d prefer something of more lasting quality …” the undertaker said, handing Daniel another sheet of paper. This page had a glossy color photograph of a varnished pine casket with long wooden handles on the sides and a wooden Star of David on the gently rounded top.

What would Iris choose? This task felt like a test she had assigned him, an exam for which he hadn’t studied, but on which, by some obscure logic, his future depended. Would Iris have tossed the page aside and asked what, exactly, the point was of “lasting quality” in an item whose very purpose was to decompose? Was there some sacred or aesthetic principle he was neglecting? Worried he would dampen the page with his sweating hands, Daniel put it down on the gleaming coffee table.

The undertaker said, “The interior of the Eliazar is crepe, but we can arrange for velvet if you prefer.”

Daniel looked from one page to the other. There was no reason to select anything but the most simple box, he told himself, told Iris. The coffin meant nothing. It symbolized nothing. It was only a convenient way of carrying the body of his daughter to the hole in the ground where corruption and biology could take their proper course. But what hole, and where?

Iris would probably want her in the Red Hook graveyard where her own grandmother was buried, despite the fact that it had no Jewish section, something that had bothered Mr. Kimmelbrod enough that he had chosen to bury his wife far from her family, in a nondescript cemetery in
Queens. Daniel was sure, however, that no matter where her own mother lay, Iris would never consider burying Becca anywhere but in Maine.

Daniel felt disconnected from his own past, and thus had difficulty understanding the ferocious pride his wife and daughters took in the Maine part of their heritage. He always felt vaguely embarrassed when one or the other of them told a guest that Ruthie and Becca were the sixth generation to have lived in this house, or when they described a fellow summer resident as a “from-away,” or when they painstakingly layered the yearly dump sticker in the corner of the Volvo’s windshield in such a manner that you could see all the ones from the years before.

Daniel’s family had come to America at the turn of the twentieth century and resided in a series of houses and apartments, first in New York and then in Pittsburgh, the locations of which had long since been forgotten. He felt no great loss at this lack of patrimony, and while Daniel had always enjoyed the summers in Maine—he liked the landscape, the cool air, the way their lives slowed down, all their New York and professional worries forgotten for a few months—he didn’t love the place the way his wife did. Daniel could have just as easily summered in the Hudson Valley, Block Island, Oregon—anywhere, as long as they were away from the city. Indeed, he sometimes thought he would have preferred a place where the water wasn’t so damn cold and where he didn’t spend a good portion of July bundled up in layers of fleece.

“The Eliazar,” Daniel said. “Crepe is fine.”

As he was signing the myriad documents the undertaker presented to him, Daniel heard a gentle bonging, a muffled doorbell.

“Excuse me,” the undertaker said, and left the room.

Daniel completed the paperwork and stepped out into the funeral home’s large entryway. There, standing beneath the crystal chandelier, he saw Jane conferring with the undertaker. She had known enough to try to dress for the occasion. She wore a plain blue skirt and a white top that gaped a bit between the buttons, revealing the ribbon at the center of her polyester lace brassiere.

“Hello, Jane,” Daniel said, as he handed the undertaker the stack of documents.

“Hello.”

They stood awkwardly, Daniel wondering if he should reach out and hug her. If it were anyone else he might have. Or he would have if it were someone not protected by a carapace of New England reserve.

After a few more moments of uncomfortable silence, Daniel said, “How are you?”

“Fine,” Jane said. “You?”

“Fine. Well, not fine, really. But, you know. Fine.”

Jane pursed her lips in disapproval. Daniel felt an urgent need to leave the room, to leave her and the undertaker behind.

As he was gearing himself up for his good-bye, Jane said, “I just confirmed with Mr. Burpee that we’re going to hold John’s viewing starting on Tuesday, and then the funeral on Thursday. Unless that conflicts with what you’re planning.”

“No,” Daniel said. “I mean, I’m not sure what we’re planning.”

“You’ll let me know,” Jane said. “We’ll come, of course.”

“Of course.”

“You’ll let me know,” Jane repeated. She gave him the details of John’s funeral and then turned her attention back to the undertaker, bidding Daniel good-bye with a curt nod.

Daniel stood in front of the funeral home, blinking in the sunlight. For a moment he could not remember at which end of the block he’d parked his car. He peered up and down the road. He saw the old blue Volvo in front of the auto parts store, but instead of heading in that direction he turned the other way, to the boxing gym.

The Maine Event looked exactly like every other gym in which Daniel had boxed, exactly like he expected it to. A cracked poured-concrete floor on which were spread mats of various colors. A row of heavy bags, another of hooks for speed bags, a wall of mirrors, a corner full of beat-up weights and an ancient Nautilus machine, and, in the center of the room, a ring, roped in red, the padding scuffed and torn in places. The room gave off the familiar stink of sweat and old socks, complicated by the metallic edge of disinfectant.