Red Hook Road (14 page)

Ruthie flinched at the casual use of Becca’s name. She could not get used to hearing it spoken aloud.

Mary Lou, seeing Ruthie’s discomfort, patted her hand and said, “You’ll be all right, dear. You know that, don’t you? It just takes time.”

Ruthie felt tears gathering on her lashes. She blinked them back.

Mary Lou asked, “How is your mother holding up?” Before Ruthie could even begin to fabricate a plausible reply, Mary Lou added, “No, of course. I know. You just give her my regards, won’t you?”

Ruthie nodded. She had planned to choose a few books for herself, but suddenly the task seemed insurmountable.

She turned to leave and found herself face-to-face with Matt Tetherly.

“Oh!” she said.

“Hey, Ruthie,” he said.

He looked terrible, black smudges not just under his eyes but around them. His lips were so chapped they were peeling. He licked them now, nervously.

“Hey,” Ruthie said.

“I was just looking for Samantha.” He glanced beyond Ruthie to Mary Lou. “Has she been by to check out her books?”

“She dropped some off,” Mary Lou said. “I imagine she went off to choose some more. If I know that girl it’s going to take her some time. You’d best find a seat. Or, better yet, go on over to the New Releases table. The new Tracy Kidder just came back, and I know how much you loved
The Soul of a New Machine
.”

“I read that!” Ruthie said. “For a psych class on obsession and compulsion.”

“Really?” Matt said. “I mean, I guess I can see that. The guys it profiles are complete workaholics.”

“Have you read
House
?” Ruthie asked. “That’s the book of Kidder’s that I really love.”

“I didn’t read that one. I’m not really interested in architecture or construction.”

“I’m not either, but I thought it was really compelling.”

Mary Lou, tapping away on her computer, announced, “
House
is in. For some ludicrous reason it’s in home improvement. Which probably explains why no one has checked it out in four years. Ruthie, why don’t you take Matt upstairs and find it for him.”

Ruthie and Matt blushed and looked away from each other self-consciously.

“Go on,” Mary Lou said, brooking no disobedience.

As they made their way up the stairs Ruthie said, “You don’t have to check it out if you don’t want to.”

Matt shook his head. “Oh, you bet I do. And I’ve got to read it, too. She’ll be quizzing me on it next time I come in.”

Ruthie giggled, and then stopped in her tracks, aghast. She could not believe that she had laughed. Actually laughed. As if anything could be funny now.

Matt glanced back and saw her frozen two steps below. He came back down and stood next to her, not touching her. “It’s okay,” he said.

His voice was impossibly soft and gentle, and although such sympathy from anyone else would have immediately caused her to break down yet again, this time she felt something ease inside of her. “Let’s go get you that book,” she said.

She found it for him quickly. He followed her back downstairs and stopped at the circulation desk to check it out. She stood next to him for a moment and then murmured, “I’d better go.” Before he could answer she turned on her heel and, with a hasty good-bye to Mary Lou, left the library.

After a quick stop at the market to buy milk, eggs, and a tub of the Moose Tracks ice cream her father was so fond of, Ruthie headed for home. To get from the center of town to East Red Hook without traveling on Red Hook Road past Jacob’s Cove was an exercise in complicated navigation that involved nearly fifteen miles of driving, much of it on dirt roads in various states of ill repair. Still, despite the fact that it turned a twelve-minute drive into one that could last as long as forty-five minutes, depending on whether you had the bad luck to get stuck behind a tractor, this was the route that Ruthie had been taking since the accident.

Today, however, during the few minutes she’d spent in the library, a pickup pulling a six-horse trailer had managed to jam itself across the width of the road, its front end hovering over the ditch on one side of it, the rear of the trailer pressed firmly up against a wide tree stump on the other. The driver, a string bean of a man with the long, cadaverous face and the deep-set, dark-rimmed eyes of an Edward Gorey character, leaned against the side of the trailer smoking a cigarette.

Ruthie rolled down her window, “Excuse me,” she said. “Are you stuck?”

The driver raised an eyebrow and took a long drag on his cigarette, the ash drawing down nearly to his fingers.

“Are you waiting for a tow truck?” she said.

“Yeah,” he replied, drawing out the word in a Maine accent so thick it sounded put on.

“Do you know how long it’ll be?”

The man shrugged. “He’ll get here when he gets here, won’t he?”

Ruthie rolled her window back up and rested her forehead on the steering wheel, imagining the ice cream turning to soup in her reusable canvas shopping bag. After a few moments she put the car into reverse and headed back through town, turning sharply onto Red Hook Road.

She drove quickly at first, taking the turns too fast, allowing her car to drift perilously close to the opposing lane. But as she approached Jacob’s Cove, she slowed to the speed limit, checked her mirrors, and began to pay close attention to oncoming traffic. When she rounded the final curve she slowed down even further, fixing her eyes on the asphalt immediately in front of her car, willing herself not to look to her right. She made it nearly all the way past the beach when finally, unable to resist it any longer, she glanced into her rearview mirror.

The strip of beach was full of people lying on gaily striped towels, sitting in beach chairs, making their painstaking way down across the pebbles to the water. An inflatable boat bobbed in the shallow water near the shore, and as she watched, two small boys wearing bright orange life vests grabbed each other’s hands and tumbled together over the side and into the water. They bobbed immediately to the surface. Ruthie’s eyes filled, but the blare of a car horn snapped her to attention. Her car had begun to drift to the center of the road, too close to an oncoming car. She jerked the steering wheel, overcorrecting, and for a moment her tires bumped along the shoulder. By the time she reached the village and pulled into her driveway, she had stopped crying.

In the meadow behind Jane’s house stood a ramshackle barn, long ago painted red but now faded to a murky, peeling brown. John had laid claim to the barn the moment they had moved into the house soon after Jane and Frank’s divorce, and it had always been his exclusive domain. Matt was never excluded, but to enter he had always to request permission, a ritual he continued to observe, under his breath, whenever he crossed the threshold, despite the fact that John was no longer there to grant or deny it. It was years now since Matt and John had hauled eleven truckloads of trash out of the barn: generations’ worth of broken furniture, empty crates, rotted sails, car batteries spiderwebbed with acid dust, reeking buoys. It had taken them more than a week to empty the barn enough to make room for John’s derelict schooner,
Rebecca
. They set up the barn as a makeshift dry dock, and John proceeded over the next few years to renovate the boat, with Matt as his eager assistant and dogsbody.

Coming home from Jacob’s Cove on the night of the accident, Matt had crawled up into the half-finished old Alden and stretched out along the inside of the hull, resting his cheek on the smooth planks. He had lain there all night and into the morning, until Maureen had barged into the barn and hollered at him to stop crying like a baby and get his ass inside with the rest of the family where he belonged.

For weeks afterward, Matt had lain around the house playing video games, watching TV, and reading. He’d never returned to work at the yacht club after John’s funeral, and after a couple of weeks his mother had given up bothering him about it. His only excursions had been to the library, where he would spend an hour or two surfing the Internet before checking out a pile of books to bring home.

But today, after seeing Ruthie in the library, he found his usual distractions unsatisfying. He tried reading the book she’d recommended, which he had to admit was compelling enough, despite its subject matter, but he couldn’t concentrate. There was nothing on TV, and playing video games had come to make him miss John too much. John had given him a PlayStation 2 for Christmas last year, a gift as much for himself as for Matt. It wasn’t the same playing Dragon Ball Z or Final Fantasy X on his own.

Finally, he wandered over to the barn and stood in the shadow of the Alden’s bereft carcass, staring up at it. He had loved working on the boat with his brother, listening to music, shooting the shit. Just like when they were kids and their aunt used to send them out on their uncle’s lobster boat to pull his traps when he was too drunk to do it himself. Their father, as big a drunk as their uncle, hadn’t been around much, and even when he was there he would never have dreamed of patiently teaching Matt the right way to handle a router or a caulking gun, or even how to hammer a nail.

John had planned to finish the boat by the next summer, then sail it down to the Caribbean, where he and Becca would get into the luxury charter business. The Alden, though measuring only a bit over forty-eight feet, was roomier than she looked. She’d been designed with full, deep ends, a high freeboard, and a generous beam that allowed for two staterooms—one large and elegant, the other small but fitted neatly—a good-sized galley, and an enclosed head with a comfortable shower. The amidships saloon was well proportioned, with a transom, two berths, and a large drop-leaf table. The idea was that Becca would cook gourmet meals for the rich people, and John would show them a good time: pick pretty coves to drop anchor in, take them out snorkeling. John would always include Matt in this grand scheme, saying that his brother could come down and crew for them after he graduated from Amherst, and Matt would always reply that he had plans of his own: graduate school in oceanography, hopefully at Scripps out in San Diego, where he could study the effects of climate change on the oceans, a field that had obsessed him from the first time he read about what rising sea levels would do to coastal regions like Down East Maine. John would remind Matt that he would still have vacations, and Matt would agree to help him finish the boat, then join him and Becca in the Caribbean for a week every Easter, because their mom would expect him home at Christmastime.

Matt looked around at the tools John had left neatly in their places, at the stacks of hardwood, the cans of varnish. On a makeshift drawing table—just a wooden door propped on two sawhorses—there was a small stack of drawings and blueprints, held down by a well-thumbed copy of Skene’s
Elements of Yacht Design
. John’s years’ worth of
WoodenBoat
magazines filled a small, rough-hewn bookshelf. There was a layer of dust over everything, and when Matt moved the Skene to look at the drawings beneath it, it left behind a clean, square ghost. The topmost drawing was a photocopy of a detailed blueprint of the Alden that John had found in a volume of Alden plans and drawings. Beneath it were drawings he’d made himself, labeled in the precise, confident architect’s handwriting that Matt had always envied and admired. Matt’s own scribble was illegible even to himself.

Matt gazed from the drawings to the boat and back again, wondering how much work there really was left to do. He flipped through Skene, tried to understand the full-page complicated renderings and schematics. None of it meant anything to him, but he was a quick study, and had been working all this time by his brother’s side. Surely there were simpler books than this one, ones that laid out the process of restoration in a way even he could understand. And there were the guys at the boatyard. John’s friends. They’d help him.

Inspired, he decided to head on over to the Neptune and see if he could find someone who might be willing to talk to him about the project. But for some reason, when he got to town, he turned right onto Red Hook Road and drove to Jacob’s Cove. He slowed down as he drove up to the cove. He pulled off the road onto the broad shoulder. The tide was low, and he could pull the car out onto the rocky strip of beach, facing the water. He turned off the engine, stared out over the water, and let himself remember. WKIT had been playing “Little Wing” by Jimi Hendrix. One minute he was rocking out to the music, and then the next, framed in the windshield of his car was a Ford Explorer sailing through the air in awful slow motion toward the limousine ahead of him. As Hendrix’s weary, spacey, soulful voice sang in his head, Matt watched the Explorer drift down on top of the limousine, crumpling it like tinfoil. The noise of the accident still echoed in his brain: an impossibly loud boom, followed by the grinding screech of metal on metal. The limo spun around and
careened across the beach, its back end plowing into the bay, sending up arcs of water that shimmered in the orange-red light.