The From-Aways (3 page)

In spite of this, I hide the guitar from Rosie. The guitar was Carter’s, left behind when Marta and I were left behind. The original plan was to give it back to him:
Here, the last of your shitty stuff, and I don’t want it.

But then, right before I moved, I started playing it, and now I’ve been practicing chords and riffs when Rosie’s at work. I hide the guitar because it seems too much to explain. How bad I am. How old it is. Why I still have it at all. Because when I pick up the guitar I feel a strange sense of balance, like a missing limb has been returned to me. Because I don’t know how to feel about the fact that this is obviously Carter’s genetic juice, working away inside me.

T
HE DAYS TICK
by for Rosie and me. It’s seven o’clock in the morning and I’m drinking coffee with two hands, sitting cross-legged on my pullout couch. I’m mustering the strength to go to the
Star
and let Charley run me into the ground again. I’ve been cranking out articles for weeks but I haven’t found that Woodward and Bernstein intrigue like I’d hoped to. Maybe because Charley has me covering things like the county’s largest wasp’s nest. My headline was
COUNTY
ABUZZ
OVER
COUNTY
’
S
LARGEST
WASP
’
S
NEST
!, which I thought was pretty great, but Charley reamed me out. Apparently you’re not supposed to use the same word twice in one headline. But whatever, the intrigue will come. I’m on the beat now. Excitement is obviously right around the corner.

I drink the dregs of my coffee and get up to pour myself more.

“You?” I say to Rosie, holding up the pot. She shakes her head.

Rosie is getting ready to go to work downstairs. We have our rituals already, she and I. Weak light through the open window makes a screen shadow on the floor. Late-summer bugs rattle in the grass outside. Rosie ties her apron strings. She’s the perfect waitress, she says, waiting for something better to come along.

“What do you think is going to come find you here in Menamon?” I say.

“Love,” she says, looking up with a squint, like maybe she can see right through me. “People are always falling in love with waitresses.”

3

Leah

T
here is, in Menamon, Maine, no news.

Here is what there is: One of the oldest carousels in the United States. It spins on the south side of the harbor, on a little scrap of land staked with a sign that says
NEVERSINK
PARK
. I park the woody nearby, its hood ticking like a bomb after I cut the engine. The carousel’s horses have sneering painted mouths: gums exposed and teeth too large. A brass ring, the victor’s spoils, flits around the perimeter. This was one of Henry’s stories: fishermen said the wooden horses came alive at night and galloped over the waves, capsizing boats and biting through mooring ropes.

A red-bearded man with dark complicated tattoos around his calves operates the carousel machinery from a folding chair in the center. He catches me staring. “You’re too tall to ride,” he says, and pulls a lever that makes the ghostly organ song go faster. “But give me a kiss and I might let you.” It’s the kind of challenge I might have accepted once, before I was married. I lock up the car and head down the boardwalk to the market.

The boardwalk runs along the shore to the docks. The beach is just a few yards of slick rock. There are a dozen piers, most for lobster boats and small fishing craft. Gulls hover; this is where the men sit and smoke and pull the guts from fish, the meat from clams, the lobsters from pots. There is a convenience store that sells ten-dollar galoshes and tiny waterproof virgins. There is a fish market that sold me Lavender and Leopold and today sells me cod. There is the hardware store where Henry loves to pilfer Red Hots from a fishbowl they keep on the counter. No one minds. The men who work the waterfront, they don’t begrudge him anything. No one does. He is the prodigal son come home, saved from the city just in time. Saved from being what I am. What they call me. A From-Away.

I did that!
I want to say when people smile and say they’re glad he’s home. I want to point a thumb at my chest and let them know Henry had no intention of coming back to Maine for another few years at least. I was the one who heard his stories about life in Menamon and knew we had to move. Of course he agreed, got excited once plans were afoot, but Henry could easily have dallied forever eating New York pizza and condescending to ladies who thought you could grow peach trees on roof decks. He was happy enough landscaping roof gardens for city matrons, until he met me.
Here is your prodigal son!
I want to say to the people of Menamon.
I have brought him home for you.

On the drive back, the car’s heat gauge rides high. I worry, because this car is Henry’s baby: a wood-paneled red Buick Roadmaster with two decades of beach-pass stickers plastered on the rear windows. It belonged to Henry’s father, Hank. Henry spent our first week here fluently cursing under the hood, and whatever he did worked, though we keep a tool kit in the trunk. The car is hot, but the day is hot. I can make it home.

We live south of the downtown. Beachfront, but tiny beach-front. Red-tide-twice-a-summer beachfront. Watch-out-for-the-invisible-jellyfish beachfront. Oh-those-are-just-the-sand-fleas beachfront. Closer to town, where the shore gets wide and the sand gets fine, there’s a gated community called Elm Park. Those houses are all the same: Palladian windows, two-story entryways, a piano no one knows how to play in a foyer they actually call the foyer. This year the sticker pass to sit on that wide sandy beach costs eighty dollars, up from fifty. The paper said the beach-sticker hike had old-time Menamonians “in a hot-blooded fury.” Who is writing this copy? I thought.

Are
you
angry?
I asked Henry. He shrugged. He said,
Things change
.
People should get used to it
. It disappointed me that my Menamonian wasn’t in a hot-blooded fury of his own.

When I get home I tell Henry the woody is running hot and that in addition to its being haunted, I think the carousel might be the secret engine of Menamon; that if something happened to the red-bearded operator, the town would grind to a halt.

“Maybe,” he says, but does not sound convinced. “How hot?” I stand behind him and slip my hands into his pockets. I stick my chin on his shoulder, a tall-lady prerogative, and kiss his neck. Henry unpacks my groceries. He has white scars on the backs of his hands and arms from wrestling trees and thorny perennials. In the winter they’re invisible, but with his late-summer tan they’ve developed like a Polaroid. Higher up, on his right arm, Henry has a tattoo. It’s a circle. A single blue line, thin as the needle that inked it. I tease that he meant to get it filled in with something but couldn’t handle the pain. But he says no, it was always only ever going to be a circle. Because a circle is perfect. An artist’s ideal. It’s a truly boring tattoo, if you ask me, but I never thought I’d wind up married to a body with any ink at all.

I hear a car engine in the drive. “My sister’s coming by,” Henry says.

“What?” I say. Because she can’t be. I have been excited for this moment, meeting my new sister, but in my head it happens differently. Not like this.

“She’s dropping off some extra house keys,” Henry says. I see what must be Charley’s Jeep. It has stalactites of red mud hanging from its undercarriage and a bumper sticker that says
SAVE
THE
LOONS
!

I say, “You know I hate unexpected guests.”

Henry palms my neck and rubs his thumb beneath my ear. He once trained as an EMT and sometimes I think he is secretly taking my pulse when he does this, seeing how worked up I actually am.

“Family don’t count as guests,” Henry says, and as he does, Charley comes around back, through the kitchen door, with a box of beers.

She and Henry smile at each other with their mouths closed, then hug each other. Charley claps Henry on the back. The older sister.

“Charley, this is Leah,” Henry says.

“Hi,” I say. “Let me help you with that box.” Charley checks out my arms like she doesn’t trust me not to drop it. She has an expressive forehead and the thick blond hair of a well-cared-for horse. I’ve been told she and Henry resemble their mother.

“Hi,” she says, and hands over the box. Seadog Ale. “Welcome home,” she says to Henry, and hands him two sets of keys.

“Stay for a beer?” says Henry.

“Just one,” Charley says.

Charley and I sit with beers in the yard while Henry puts the rest in the refrigerator. The plastic chairs we found in the basement had been chewed along the legs by a long-dead dog or something more feral. The yard is encircled by tall trees and the last light comes through splotchily. I can hear the ocean. I can hear Charley’s teeth clink against the glass mouth of her bottle.

Charley is a journalist too. Runs the local paper. This is the other reason I have been imagining this meeting: I want to work at the
Star
. I’ve got to start reporting again. If I don’t find a way to write, to sweat under deadlines, to patchwork information into stories, I might go crazy.

“You grew up in this house?” I say. Charley looks at me, like she knows I’m wasting her time with questions I already know the answers to.

“Sure did,” Charley says. She takes out a pack of Marlboros and lights one, staring up at the house. I regret my question. I imagine this is a sad thing for her to do, to look at this house that was her parents’, and is now her little brother’s. If you ask, Henry will tell you his pops was mauled by a black bear in a squabble over blueberries. He will tell you this because, if you don’t already know it, the truth is none of your business. The truth is that Hank Lynch got drunk and sailed a too-small craft into a storm a few years after Henry’s mother, June, died.

It seems like a good moment to ask about the newspaper.

“Charley, I’m interested in the
Star,
” I say. I could swear I saw her inhale a lungful of smoke but now she is staring at me and nothing is emerging.

“What part interests you, exactly?”

“Any parts that might be hiring, actually.” I had imagined we might become close in this way. Sisters, running a small paper together.

“I hired someone a few months ago,” Charley says, and rakes her strawlike bangs behind her ears. “Come see me at the office.” She tips her beer backward and finishes it. “Nice to meet you, Leah,” she says, and braces her palms against her knees to stand.

I
HAVE TROUBLE
falling asleep. Insomnia is a New Yorker’s affliction.

Henry and Charley are practically their own species. They have their own grunting language and their own shared grief, parceled out generously between the two of them. They are the last Lynches of Menamon, unless you count me, which obviously no one does. I doubt I will ever truly be one of them,
family
family. It is Henry’s tribe of two, and different now that he does not have Hank or June.

I loved books about orphans when I was small. Sara Crewe in
A Little Princess,
Mary Lennox in
The Secret Garden,
Pippi Longstocking with her absent pirate father, and my favorite, Harriet the Spy, with her tomato sandwiches and secrets. I pretended to be an orphan just like these girls: a sad child abandoned at a stranger’s grand estate, my parents lost to a car accident or a tiger in Africa. I would mourn them at night, drifting through the hallways of the penthouse, running my hands along the sideboards, telling myself stories about what my life would be like had I not lost them.

What are you doing up?
my father would say when he caught me drifting around, my hair all tangled from bed, humming little things to myself as I played out these fantasies.
Do you need something?

Nothing,
I would say.
No. I do not need anything.

Sara, Mary, Pippi, Harriet. My orphan heroes. I now realize I didn’t have any idea what I was playing at. How stupid a thing it was to wish for.

I flip my pillow. Pull the blankets higher. There is a problem with my childhood list, I realize. I think of
Harriet the Spy
along with these other orphan girl books, even though she did have parents. Because when I think of Harriet I see a girl on a busy sidewalk, big glasses, her backpack hitched high. She has her notebook in her hands because she always has her notebook in her hands. She is there to write down secrets. I see her as very much alone.

W
E MOVED HERE
knowing Henry would get a job at Arden Nursery. I would look for work, but with the house all paid for, his salary would be enough to float us. I drive him to pick up his new work truck. We walk along the busy rear lot where the land is writhing with green-scaled hoses that twine around the Ecuadorian yard workers’ ankles like snakes. A man with a Roman nose and long black hair spilling over his shoulders comes out of a greenhouse, dragging a length of hose behind him.