With a grin, the pilot started the engine. Have I
mentioned that he was approximately fourteen years
old? Anyway, it only coughed two or three times before
catching and running evenly, which meant only
about ten seconds when I was so terrified that I had no
discernible vital functions whatsoever, if you didn't
count all the ones I thought I might lose control of any
minute.
The plane was a three-seater: me and the pilot up
front, Ellie strapped in the rear. Her expression was
glowingly radiant, the look of a little kid with an all
day pass to the carnival.
Seeing her face, I realized suddenly that if the plane
did crash, there was little that I could do about it. Possibly
this thought was the result of all the neurochemicals
pouring into my system, like the ones that
supposedly make you feel cool as a cucumber while
you're about to be devoured by a tiger, although I
don't see how anyone could really know that.
Slowly my fists unclenched. The waves looked like
crumpled aluminum foil. A boat bobbed, the size of my
little fingernail. Far to the west, over Nova Scotia, the
remnants of last night's storm loomed darkly like an
evil kingdom towering into the sky.
"So," I said, "tell me again why we are going here.
What's she want to talk to us about?"
"I don't know," Ellie replied. "Harriet wouldn't
say. We'll find out when we get there."
Strapped in or not, I was about to pop her one, but
then we were landing, a process whose details--
especially the part about dropping to earth way more
rapidly than I thought could possibly be normal--
captured me utterly until it was over.
Ten minutes later we were climbing the steps to
Olde Bayview Nursing Home, a short walk from the
airfield.
"So this is Boxy's mother, who lives here, and she's
seventy years old," I said, trying to get straight in my
head what Ellie had been saying to me while the runway
pavement was coming up at us so damned fast.
"Seventy isn't old enough for a nursing home," I
added.
"It is for Harriet. She started failing when Boxy
died. Not long after that," Ellie went on, "she gave up
her house and came here to live. Since then she's been
going downhill. Her mental functions. Sleeps most of
the time, doesn't speak at all, that sort of thing."
She pressed the doorbell on the low, white-painted
concrete block structure. What the place lacked in
snazziness it more than made up for in regular maintenance:
clipped hedges, a lawn like a putting green, riotous
flower beds. A very old man with a very humped
back was scattering bonemeal lovingly around the feet
of some perfect rosebushes.
Someone inside buzzed us in. "I knew she lived
here," Ellie went on, "but she's been completely uncommunicative
for so long, I never even thought of
mentioning her to you. What I didn't know was that
she's not out of it anymore. She's woken up, George's
cousin says."
In the foyer, a golden retriever got up and greeted
us with wags and tongue lolling. From behind the reception
desk, a woman smiled and offered the visitors'
book. The place smelled of soap and fresh floor wax.
Ellie signed the book, and we were directed down a
hardwood-floored hallway so shiny that I could see the
soles of my shoes in it, yet somehow it wasn't slippery.
I made a mental note to ask someone there how
they managed the trick, since my floors could certainly
use an application of the miracle substance. I knew of
only two possible conditions for old wood floors: gritty
or whoops!
"It should be one of these rooms," Ellie murmured.
The cleanliness here was stunning: windows
glittering like diamonds, woodwork so unsmudged
that it seemed to have been painted--glossy enamel, in
a fresh, springlike shade of mint green--that very
morning. A faint hint of something medicinally camphorated
hung in the air, mingled with the smell of a
cake baking.
"George's cousin works here," Ellie added, "did I
mention that? The one," she added, "who called last
night. And Harriet's doctor says her mental trouble
started with a stroke."
At which I finally got it: so that was how the
cousin hooked into it. In Eastport, the maze of social,
work, and family connections was mind-boggling, and
it was mostly Greek to me.
Only not to Ellie. "But if you ask me," she went
on, "Harriet's breakdown was on account of a broken
heart." We came to the door of a large common room:
braided rugs, crocheted afghans, a large yellow cat ensconced
in a sunny window.
"Then the other day someone told her Reuben was
dead," Ellie finished. "She's been bright as a new
penny, since."
"I still don't see, though," I objected, "why she
wants to talk to us."
"I don't," said a shaky old voice at my elbow. "I
want you to talk to me."
Harriet Thorogood was a small, fragile woman
with thin white hair, tiny bones, and the dark, sharp
eyes of a bird. Wearing a flowered dress with a white
lace collar, rolled stockings, and orthopedic shoes, she
sat alertly in an upholstered armchair that seemed big
enough to swallow her up.
"Someone said you found him after someone cut
him, hung him to bleed. I want," she demanded avidly,
"to know how he looked."
Ellie and I glanced at each other. Neither of us
wanted to relive finding Reuben or to report the gory
details. But she was Boxy's mother.
So we sat down together and told her.
Rather, Ellie did. While she talked, I kept seeing
Harriet Thorogood as she'd been twenty years earlier:
not fragile, still vigorous, with a ten-year-old son.
I saw her come to the door with a cigarette in her
hand. A drink, maybe, poured on the kitchen counter
while she finished the dishes. There was a radio playing
show tunes behind her, and when they told her what
had happened I felt her eyes going wildly from one to
another of their faces.
Searching for the one that would tell her it was not
true.
But none of them had.
When Ellie had finished, Harriet sighed and looked
away, satisfied.
"Mrs. Thorogood," I said, "didn't Boxy ever ask
anyone for help about Reuben? You, or any adult? He
was in the church group, for example. Didn't he ask
for help from Reverend Sondergard?"
Slowly she dragged her gaze back. Some of the
brightness had already gone from her expression, as if
now with this last thing finished, she had little reason
for remaining alert.
"No," she quavered regretfully. "He never. I
wished he had of, I'd o' skinned that Tate bastard"--
bahstid-- "alive. And he mustn't have asked the reverend
for any help, or the reverend would've helped him.
Wouldn't he?" she demanded.
Her cloudy eyes were full of a last appeal: surely
her son hadn't asked for help against Reuben Tate,
only to be refused.
"Of course he would have," I told her, with more
confidence than I felt. "I'm sure he'd have done anything
he could, if he had known."
"Well, then," she muttered. "There's an end to it. I
thank both you girls very kindly." With this her head
drooped, her tiny fingers plucking unaware at the cotton
fabric of her dress.
So: no new, revelatory information, nothing illuminating
to add to another sad old story. Just an old
woman who wanted some punctuation for the end of
her tragedy.
And one other thing.
Back at the airfield, I climbed into the aircraft with
no assistance, settling in the front cockpit seat and
strapping the safety harness over my chest. Swinging
around, we hurtled down the narrow runway and, it
felt like, straight off a cliff.
Air punched up under the plane, lifting it, and we
climbed suddenly, bouncing a little in the crossways air
currents around the island. I didn't care.
"You're gung-ho all of a sudden," Ellie said,
watching me carefully. "I'm sorry nothing useful came
of this."
But it had. "I understand," I said. My voice flew
away on the engine noise. "The part of it that I hadn't
been getting."
We banked hard right, arrowing toward Moose Island,
on it the town of Eastport, the causeway ribboning
east across more blue water, and finally the forested
coastal plain, a vast swath of autumn reds, yellows,
and evergreens rising to the mountains.
"What I didn't get was the physical act," I said.
"Putting the blade to his throat and cutting it. Because
... well, how? I mean, how could anyone do
it? How could any human being actually do a thing
like that?"
History, of course, suggested that lots of them
could. Were, probably, right this very minute. And
yet ...
The nightmare memory of Reuben hanging in the
graveyard still came to me at odd, awful moments. But
this time, what I had imagined of Boxy's mother came,
also:
How she had felt. My mind tried to put Sam in
Boxy's place, but I wouldn't let it. That far I couldn't--
wouldn't--go.
And didn't need to. Sunlight glinted suddenly on
the plane's front window, turning it into a mirror.
There was another crucial task to accomplish
that morning, and by the time I got
home it was the hour when normal people
might actually be in their offices. So, although
it was not what I wanted to be doing--
--Ellie was sitting at the table reading Terence's
diaries, and the faces she was making as she did so
made me want to start hashing them over with her
immediately--
--I began making phone calls.
When I was finished, it was several hours later, and
I'd kept Victor's trauma center from becoming a dead
issue for one more day. Bankers, builders, real estate
salespeople, medical regulators, prospective investors:
I promised them all that Victor's arrest had been a
terrible error, the kind of thing that happened in your