The From-Aways (37 page)

But even though it is not the town I made up in my head, the truth is that I love this place. This dump of a town. These crazy, tenacious people who are wrong and angry more often than they are right and kind.

Because here is the news: I am one of them.

And if Henry is not?

I understand there is a chance that if Henry goes to the city he will find he does not want to come back. I cannot make him promise that won’t happen. Can’t go with him like a chaperone to make sure he returns. He doesn’t know yet, so neither do I. So I will tell him good-bye and I will kiss him and I will trust in his return. Because you cannot always know with love. If we knew how things would turn out for certain, knew a person completely, that would be far too easy.

My stomach feels heavy and my throat feels tight. I ask Henry for a ride. I ask him to drop me off at the
casa grande.

T
HE BURNED HOUSE
looks worse than I had imagined. Do you know what a burned house looks like? It looks like an X-ray that shows you all the places where things are broken. It looks like a black skeleton that is not strong enough to stand up. It is messy.

When you walk in a burned house, you have to look at where you are putting your feet because sometimes what looks like a floor will not hold you up. Anything can give at any time.

When you walk in a burned house, you pull your dress over your nose because it doesn’t just smell like burning, it smells like insulation, and wire, and plastic. It smells like all the terrible chemicals once safely fused together to make you a house have now been rent apart.

All around the broken house you will play a game called What Did That Used to Be?

A green lump with a piece of scorched wire looped through it was a bucket.

A white plastic puddle on the ground used to be a rope.

An odd-shaped object that shines when you rub the black off it was going to be someone’s very expensive bathroom fixture.

When you walk in a burned house, you should not look up. But if you do, the sky will be graphed into zones by blackened rafters and this will be the most hopeless thing you’ve ever seen.

Or at least you’ll think so, if you don’t look down again. You should not look down. But if you do, you will see a girl squatting in what was supposed to be the basement but is now just the deepest part of a burned house. The girl will have red hair tucked into a too-big green sweater, and you will see her through a large hole in the floor. You will be able to see her because the light in this house travels all the way through the roof to the basement. The girl will have black ashes all over her and her hands will be bleeding because she is pulling up pieces of concrete.

The concrete foundation of the house will have split with a fissure, and there will be a long dark crack in the floor. It is this crack that the girl will be grappling with. She will be smashing a piece of pipe into the sides of the fissure, breaking off pieces of concrete. She will be tearing them away with her hands, making the crack wider. There will be nothing hasty or emotional about the way she does this, and she will not move, even after she hears you, and turns her head to look at you. She will not care that you are there. She will go back to making the fissure wider, and wider, clawing at the foundation with her red fingers.

“W
HAT ARE YOU
doing?” I say.

Quinn doesn’t turn or stop. My shoulders tremble watching her scrape her hands up, trying to dig her way through four solid feet of cement.

I’m standing on the foundation wall of the basement. I look for the basement stairs but they’re gone. It’s about eight feet down, and I don’t know how Quinn thinks she’s getting out of there. I take off my heels and balance them on the top of the concrete wall and leap down. I land a few feet from Quinn.

“What do you think is down there?” I say, panting a little.

Quinn still doesn’t look at me, just keeps on banging, a high metal ring each time the pipe hits the concrete. Little pieces fly off in her face and she doesn’t seem to care. She clears the rubble, and starts again.

“Okay. I don’t need to know what you’re doing,” I say. “But I’m going to help you do it.” There’s another length of pipe and I pick it up. I look at the crevice line and then bring the pipe down hard with both hands. It bangs into the concrete and the juddering force of the blow travels through the shaking pipe, through my arms. My entire body feels it.

Quinn turns around, her lips pulled back from her mouth like she’s going to snarl, or bite me, but she freezes. She looks at me. I resettle my grip on the pipe as I wait for the blow to stop traveling through my body, vibrating in my teeth.

When I feel myself again I lift up the pipe, prepared to bring it down, but before I can Quinn grabs me in a hug that is also a body lock. “Stop,” she says. “I can’t look at your fucking face like that.”

I drop the pipe, which hits the floor with one end and then the other. An awful noise. I hug on to Quinn. “We should have gone for her,” I say into Quinn’s hair. “I shouldn’t have said to let her be.”

Quinn shakes her head. “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” she says, and I feel a rushing relief run through my whole body.

“What are we doing here?” I say.

“I don’t know. It’s probably not down there anyway.” She looks at the empty crater. Chucks a little piece of concrete back into the void.

“What?”

“Rosie’s time capsule,” Quinn says. “A bunch of junk. Some photos and hair. A magic seashell.”

“Magic?” I say.

“Yeah, probably,” Quinn says. “What kind of rat bastard pours concrete over a magic seashell anyway?”

“A real rat bastard,” I say, and the way Quinn’s body moves up and down against me, I know she is crying. I hold on to her until she stops. I say, “Let’s go to Carter’s.”

“As long as there’s not a priest there,” she says.

“No priests,” I say. “Charley maybe, but no official religious personnel.”

At the wall, I give her a boost up and she climbs out of the basement. I jump up and grab the top of the wall and then pull myself up and out too.

We walk all the way to Carter’s. It’s nice out, and it feels right to be on the road: walking on the pebbly sides, snatching at the weeds that grow there. Quinn stares at her hands like she can’t believe they’re hers. “We need that priest after all,” she says. “Someone should sanctify this flesh. These are some holy fucking hands.” She holds them up and they glow red in the sun.

Carter opens the door before we even knock. He has seen us coming down the drive. “Jesus,” he says when he sees us.

He calls Charley, who is out patrolling in her car, looking for Quinn. He heats up a kettle of water and fills two basins with it. He mixes in some peroxide. He lets us sit on his couch, even though we are filthy. Quinn soaks her hands in one basin, on the side table. I have another one for my big feet, which barely fit inside. Carter sits cross-legged on the floor, watching us.

“You girls have got to start taking it a little easy,” he says. “Just for a while.”

48

Quinn

H
ello?” I say. The kitchen is empty. So is the living room.

“Leah?” I call as I go up the stairs. “Bernstein? Where are you?”

A head appears at the top of the stairwell. Henry’s. “Hi,” he says.

“Hey,” I say, and I climb the rest of the way up.

Henry is standing in the hallway, two huge duffel bags at his feet. He’s wearing an ancient white Springsteen T-shirt with a couple of holes in it.

“Where you going?” I say.

“New York,” he says.

“For how long?”

Henry looks into one of the suitcases like the answer might be there along with his jeans, some socks, a book called
A Boy’s Guide to Edible Plants
. “A week maybe,” he says. “Leah’s down at the beach.”

“Okay,” I say. I start to head down the stairs, but then I say, “The Boss,” and point at his shirt. “That’s some good stuff.”

Henry looks down at himself. “The old stuff, yeah.” He hesitates a second and then says, “I’m sorry about Rosie.” He braces his hands against the walls, like he’s trying to push the hallway wider. “She was a cool girl. I remember when she started junior high. All the high school guys tried to ask her out and she wouldn’t go with a single one.”

I make a sound that is the closest thing to a laugh I’ve made in days. “That doesn’t surprise me,” I say.

“But it was the way she did it,” Henry says. “She’d always tell them she would consider it. Consider dating them. And then she would send these long handwritten letters, like, in the mail, explaining all about her goals, and ideal of compatibility, and things. Telling them how sorry she was but she just didn’t think it would be possible for them to take her out.”

I imagine Rosie writing letters like these. I see her sitting on her bed and using a pencil and loose-leaf. I can see her signature, loopy at the bottom.

“The crazy ones are always worth it,” I say.

Henry laughs. “You’re probably right,” he says.

“I am,” I say. “I know it. I hope you know it too.”

Henry stares into his suitcase. “I do,” he says.

“So, you ever get a letter like that?” I say. “From Rosie? You sound like sort of an expert.”

Henry laughs. “Of course I did,” he says. “Two pages long.” He shakes his head. “Sorry is a stupid thing to say but I am. I am sorry.”

I stick out my hand and say, “Nice to know you, Henry Lynch. I hope I see you around again soon.”

Henry shakes my hand, a good grip. It smarts a little. “You too,” he says.

I head downstairs. “There are some beers in the fridge,” he calls after me.

L
EAH IS SITTING
on a quilt spread in the sand. She’s leaning over her knees, hugging them. Her hair is pulled back into a little broom of a ponytail. She’s got an old white sweatshirt on inside out, the neckhole cut wide and showing her shoulders. She’s got her jeans rolled halfway up her shins, like she’s been wading. This time of year the water could freeze you blue.

“Forgot yah beeyaz?” I call, in an old-timey Mainer voice. She turns around and I lift the six-pack high.

I sit down next to her and get to work taking off my sneakers. I bury my feet in the beach.

“How are your hands?” Leah says.

I hold them out. “They’re healing.” Cracks and splotches of scab make them all kinds of purple and red. “I’ll be able to pick up the guitar in another week.”

Leah nods. “Henry’s leaving,” she says. She’s been waiting to say this.

“He told me,” I say. “Going to do some city-slicking.”

“Just for a while,” Leah says.

“Of course,” I say. “Back in a flash. What about you? Are you going city-slicking too, you lousy flatlander?” I push on her a little, so she rocks away from me and back again. If I lose Leah I don’t know what I’ll do.

“No,” Leah says. “I’m not. Maybe not ever again.”

“That,” I say, throwing my arm around her, “is fucking fantastic news.”

A few yards off a sport fisherman is standing near the tide line, looking into a white plastic bucket. His pole is upright in the sand, staked. His line is cast in. It starts to jerk and he goes to the pole. He leans back and reels it in. Flapping from side to side at the end is the ugliest fucking fish I’ve ever seen. It’s brown and mottled. There are these weblike things contracting at its sides and it has a limp spiky-looking top fin. A mouth as wide and sad as a frog’s flips open and closed slimily.

The man starts cursing at the fish. He fingers the hook and works it out of its lip.

“What is that?” Leah calls out to him.

“A fucking sea robin,” the man shouts back.

I whisper to Leah, “The Lesser Fucking Sea Robin is an indigenous species of the Maine coast, and is considered largely inedible by the natives.”

The man flings the sea robin back, the thing flipping tail over mug until it disappears into the waves. We watch him rebait his hook and cast, the line arcing wide out over the water.

Down the way a dozen little boats are bobbing up and down in the water, each one tied up to its house’s dock. One house down an old man is sitting in a beach chair. He’s wearing green shorts and a denim shirt open to brown belly. He’s got a three-inch-thick paperback in his hands, something black with raised gold letters. The page ends are dyed blue-green. It can’t be more than seventy degrees down here, what with the wind.

“So you’re coming back to work, then?” Leah says.

“Eventually,” I say. “First, I’m taking a trip too.”

“Don’t tell me! You called your old job! You’re going to do a little work for them. But you’ll be back soon!” Leah flails her hands around as she says this. Then she looks at me, embarrassed over this outburst that obviously has more to do with Henry than with me.

“No,” I say. “I’m going to Florida. To see Rosie’s parents.”

“Florida?” Leah reaches behind me to pull two beers from the pack. She opens them and hands one to me. We clink. She takes a long sip, then says, “Do they know you’re coming?”