The Cure (11 page)

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

T
HE EASTERN SKY BLUSHED
with dawn’s first glow as Hope emerged from the side door of her house wearing a fur hat, flannel robe, and tall black rubber galoshes. Drawing the robe tighter against the cold, she hurried along the gravel driveway toward the street where her copy of the
Bangor Daily News
lay perilously close to an ice-fringed puddle. She bent to pick it up. She straightened with the paper in her hand and saw a man step from the darkness of the tree line just across the road. Her heartbeat doubled in the time it took to back up two paces toward her house. Clutching the newspaper to her chest, Hope’s mind raced to thoughts of Steve’s report yesterday: Willa gone missing and the awful riot at poor Henry’s store and nearly thirty people in the jail. She remembered Steve’s belief that some of these people from away were bound to be hardened criminals, his concern that Willa had been murdered, his prediction that someone else would get hurt sooner or later. She asked for God’s protection. Then she remembered her daughter still asleep inside the house and she revised her prayer, thinking,
better me than her.

The silhouetted man across the street came slowly closer through the darkness.

She backed farther up her driveway, afraid to turn and run.

“Hello, Hope.”

She stopped. She processed the voice, and knew it, and felt release from one kind of dread even as another kind rushed in.

“Hello, Riley.”

They stood that way a moment—him in the middle of the street, her in the middle of the driveway, both at a loss for words. Then she turned abruptly, striding toward the house with gravel crunching under her galoshes. Behind her, Riley did not move. After Hope had taken several steps she called, “Come on,” but she did not pause to see if he would follow.

She went inside. She dropped the newspaper on the scarred pine kitchen table. She took a mug down from a cupboard. She was already pouring him a cup of coffee and trying not to spill it when he finally stepped in, hesitantly, through the mudroom off the driveway. She said, “Still take a lot of sugar?”

“Ayuh.”

She stirred it into the coffee and turned to look at him, rage and pity vying for control. But the rage died without a whimper at her first clear view of him, a stranger standing in her kitchen’s incandescent light, much older than her memories, emaciated, filthy, shivering from the cold. He peered out cautiously from behind his bushy hair and beard, just an upper sliver of his face revealed, as if he wore a mask. If she had not heard his voice, she would not have known him. But she had heard him speak her name, and now there seemed to be two people standing there: this shaggy old drunk come in trembling off the street, and the beautiful young man whom she had married nearly twenty years ago.

Hope crossed the kitchen and put the steaming mug into his shaking hands. “Take a seat, Riley. I’ll go get a blanket.”

Still shivering, moving with a strange hint of reluctance, he did as he was told.

Hope walked to the linen closet in the hall as if dreaming, removed a fleece blanket, and bunched her fists within it. She shut her eyes and stood motionless.

Through the darkness just behind her eyelids Hope saw the birth pains of that dead man in her kitchen, a clearing filled with bloated, stinking corpses where abundant life had been, and Riley fallen to his knees in supplication to his grief, a young and naïve Riley giving birth to doubt and cynicism then and there, shaking both his fists at heaven in the midst of awful labor, his lamentation’s long assault upon her ears as clear as yesterday.

Hope opened her eyes again and wiped them with a corner of the blanket and took it to the kitchen and draped the thing around his shoulders. Riley continued to shiver as she topped off her own cup of coffee and sat down opposite him. They both took a sip. She swallowed. “You look awful.”

“I walked all night to get here.”

“How come?” She asked without any real interest in the answer. She knew he was lying anyway, knew he had no need to walk all night, knew he had been in town at least a week, knew he was only there for money. She remembered how it had been toward the end, when money was the only mutually acknowledged connection left between them. She remembered, and knew she had to steel herself to tell him no. She would not pay for Riley’s booze.

But of course he was too smart to ask so soon. “Where’s Bree?”

“Asleep.”

He nodded, his red-rimmed eyes wandering around the room from behind his shaggy mask, taking in everything but Hope. “I saw her a few days ago.”

“Where?”

He started to answer, then seemed to think better of it. Instead he said, “She looks beautiful.”

“So you’ve been here a few days?” It had always been so easy to catch him in his lies.

“Yes.”

“I thought you said you walked all night to get here.”

“I . . . uh.” He took a sip from the mug. “It’s complicated.”

Hope watched him. He had yet to look at her directly. She said, “I’m sorry about Brice.”

He did not seem surprised she knew. He nodded, looking down.

“Did you go to his funeral?” Setting yet another a trap for him, knowing the answer, knowing because she herself had been there, all alone at the potter’s field except for the sparrows and the impatient gravedigger.

“I, uh, I was too drunk.”

Surprised, she set her coffee down and stared. It was not like the man she remembered to confess to such a thing. Before he left, they had not even been able to agree he was an alcoholic.

He said, “But I’m not drinking anymore.”

He spoke these last words in a rush and for the first time looked into her eyes. There was a challenge in his gaze, a strange intensity. With a wisdom born of hard experience, Hope saw he was indeed sober at that moment, and saw he was nonetheless still broken and would therefore drink again as soon as possible. She failed to keep sarcasm from her voice. “Congratulations.”

He looked away.

“I don’t have any spare cash, Riley. My new job doesn’t pay much.”

“I heard you’re the mayor now.”

“Yes.”

He said, “That’s really something.”

“Thank you. But I still can’t spare you anything.”

He seemed to shrink beneath her words. “That’s okay. I have some money.”

“You do?”

“I just . . .” He paused, the blanket still around his shoulders, looking gaunt and weak. “I just wanted to see you. And Bree.” He rose unsteadily and shrugged off the blanket, draped it over the back of the kitchen chair and stood there swaying slightly. “Maybe . . . around town.”

“Sure,” she said, still sitting.

He turned, took one step toward the mudroom and stopped, his back to her. He wavered, and then fainted dead away.

Hope was kneeling at his side when Bree entered the room a minute later, her shiny black hair skewed from her pillow. Rubbing sleep from almond eyes, the girl opened the refrigerator, unaware of Riley and Hope on the floor beyond the table until Hope said, “Honey, I need your help over here.”

Bree turned and took one look and dropped the orange juice carton to the floor. “Who is that?”

“Help me get him to the sofa.”

“Who
is
that?”

“Come over here and help me, honey.”

Together they were barely able to lift the unconscious man and drag him out into the living room and lay him on the sofa. Hope went back to the kitchen to get the blanket. When she returned to the sofa she saw her daughter standing there, short and broad and brown and sturdy, gazing down at Riley’s form. Bree said, “Is that Daddy?”

Hope leaned across the back of the sofa and spread the blanket over him.

Bree said, “Is he drunk?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why is he here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want him here.”

Hope thought of all the Christian things she ought to say, words of kindness and forgiveness—
whatever you do to one of the least of these you also do to me
—yet she would not lie to Bree. She said, “Me either.”

They stared down on him together. In the quiet of the little house that she and Riley had once bought together, Hope heard her grandmother’s clock tick loudly and the refrigerator’s whir. Then Riley Keep began to snore, a sound she remembered well, and in it she heard echoes of a different Riley—or this same one in the infancy of his addiction—curled in on himself on the dirt beneath his hammock, snoring just like this and reeking with the awful stench of vomit and that homemade alcohol The People concocted. Riley, who had never touched a drop before, a minister of God, a missionary, drunk for fourteen days. The first time.

Distant voices brought her to the present. Hope crossed the living room in her pajamas and her robe and black rubber galoshes. She parted the curtains beside the Christmas tree at the front window. She peered out toward the street.

The sun had nearly risen back behind the tree line. She saw a gang of strangers clearly as they passed by her front yard, ten or twelve of them at least, walking down the middle of the road with big sticks in their hands. One of the men turned to meet her eyes. She pulled her robe close around herself and backed away from the window, letting the curtain fall back into place.

Should she call the police? What would she tell them? Men were walking past her home? She did not know them but they were too dirty? Too many? Too poor? She turned back toward the wasted man who had surrendered to their cause so long ago.

“You need to get him outta here,” said their daughter.

“Let’s wait to see what’s wrong, honey.”

“What’s wrong? He’s a
drunk
.”

“Yeah, but he’s not drunk right now.”

“How do you know that?”

Hope sighed. “I know.”

“But—”

“Go get ready for school.”

“You’re just gonna
leave
him there?”

“Let’s just get dressed, honey. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”

Riley’s snoring did not pause, even when Hope felt his forehead to satisfy herself that he had no fever. He rumbled in the background as she dressed and prepared breakfast for her daughter. Bree ate sullenly and said little, but that was not unusual. Left to her own thoughts, Hope tried to imagine what it must be like to be so tired you fell asleep while standing and did not awaken when you fell. If she had not seen it happen she would not have believed it possible.

The time came for them to leave for work and school. Hope tried to wake him, shaking his shoulder, calling his name, but he kept snoring. She decided to let him be. She left by the side door through the mudroom with Bree. Halfway to her car Hope turned back. She reentered the kitchen and slipped the cooking sherry into her briefcase before walking out the door again.

All morning Hope kept thinking she had made a serious mistake. She endured three meetings in her town-hall office while wondering if he was emptying her house of valuables to pawn. She broke the speed limit driving home over lunch, only to find he had not moved a muscle. Even the rhythm of his snoring on the sofa had not changed.

Hope felt a little better in the afternoon, but still it bothered her to think he was in the house unsupervised. She cut her workday short and left for home at four-thirty, driving up Main below a series of banners dangling from the street-lights—snowflakes, gift-wrapped boxes, Santa, and a manger scene purchased from a company in Chicago after much debate with Jim Rylander, a town councilman and a Unitarian who objected to the manger scene on the grounds it was divisive and unconstitutional. She sighed at the memory and turned from Main onto the street that climbed up to her house.

Minutes later, entering the living room Hope saw the blanket neatly folded on the sofa. She called Bree’s name, and then Riley’s name, and got no answer. She hurried up the stairs to Bree’s room and knocked on the door. Still no answer. Nervously she grasped the doorknob. To open it was a major breach of protocol that could infuriate her daughter, but Hope had to know. She inched the door open just enough to see Bree’s broad little back across the room, swaying to the rhythm in her headphones as she typed on her computer. Relieved, Hope closed the door again. She stood in the stair hall listening. Was that the sound of water running? She entered her own bedroom. On the far side of it the bathroom door was closed. She called, “Riley, are you in there?”

“Ayuh. Out in just a minute.”

“Okay.”

She stepped into her little walk-in closet to change out of her work clothes. Kicking off her shoes she pulled the door closed for privacy and found herself in total darkness. She had forgotten that the light went off automatically. She opened the door enough to turn the light back on, but that made her feel exposed when she got down to bra and panties, so she quickly put on the first things she saw: a pair of blue jeans, an old sweater, and her favorite worn-out moccasin slippers. Riley was still in the bathroom when she came out again. She went downstairs to linger nervously in the kitchen. She wiped the counters with a sponge. She checked the pantry and refrigerator for supper ingredients, though she knew exactly what was there. She had begun to sweep the floor when she finally heard the familiar squeaking of him walking down the stairs. She would have known that sound anywhere, even after all the time gone by.

Riley entered tentatively. Hope had to smile in spite of herself. He had shaved and done his best to cut his hair. His naked face was gaunt, and the dense shadow of his whiskers contrasted darkly with the unnatural paleness of his chin and cheeks, but he did look almost like himself again, like one of those men who didn’t bother with their hair or clothes and did not even know that they were handsome.

He said, “There was a package of razors in the cabinet. . . .”

“Okay.”

“I cleaned up everything. You won’t even be able to tell, except for the razor.”

“It’s okay, Riley.”

His eyes searched the kitchen for a place to rest, looking everywhere except at her, just as he had that morning. The awkwardness was contagious. She found herself wiping down the counters again.