The Hare Page 8

  Below her. Lit only by the interior light of the BMW.

  Putting a suitcase in the trunk.

  “Bennett?” she said.

  He looked up, his expression difficult to discern in the dark, then he put his finger to his lips. “Sshhss. I was just coming to get you.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Hurry, you must hurry.”

  Thus, Rosie flew, she threw things into a garbage bag, what came to her hand, what was in her direct path, and she lifted Miranda, drowsy, sucking at the creamy teat of sleep, and ran down the stairs.

  Within seconds they were in the car, Bennett was reversing fast, and Rosie saw the boathouse — windows and doors open, Bennett’s clothes were strewn across the deck, a single Docksider left in the driveway, she hadn’t noticed.

  “My art,” she said, and began to open the door.

  But he jammed the car into first, the gravel spitting out from the rear wheels, and they were already halfway up the driveway, already hitting with speed the lip of tarmac as they spun onto Sasco Hill Road. Rosie had always thought the reason he drove slowly was the age of the BMW, but it was clearly capable of sprints.

  They could hear sirens, so Bennett swung right onto a side-street, then slowed to his usual speed limit. He carefully wove through the night-empty streets, Rosie’s ears pricked for the sirens, she scanned for police cars.

  “Light me a cigarette.” Bennett checked the rearview mirror.

  “Not in the car with the baby.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered, opening his window, snatching the pack from the dashboard and doing it himself as he segued onto 95 north. They drove on without speaking, through the toll at Stratford. The hot outer air hummed and whistled as it battered the windshield and bounced in through the open windows. Rosie’s hair snapped and twisted, Medusa-like. She didn’t even have a hair tie.

  “Bennett?” The furious sound of the wind and passing cars made conversation difficult — for most cars were passing them, Bennett holding to the speed limit with the accuracy of Apollo coming in for the moon landing. Except this was no conversation, merely Rosie yipping against the air currents. “Bennett? Is this something to do with Hobie?”

  The cigarette had begun to calm him, so he lit another one.

  “Why were there sirens?”

  Still he said nothing, he was ruminating, far, far away, in his Minotaur cave.

  “Why are we running away from the police?”

  He glanced at her, “Police?”

  “There were sirens.”

  A short laugh: “Maybe a Jew was trying to order a drink at the club.”

  They drove among the streaming tail lights, smearing red ribbons in the dark, and at last, he put his hand on her thigh and announced: “Great news! We’re going to Vermont!”

  “But the police —”

  “A brilliant new career opportunity has come my way!” Another inhale of another cigarette, another glance in the rear-view mirror, there was almost a rhythm now. “I am very tired of dealing with trinkets and baubles, my girl, the flotsam of divorce and death. Sad, angry people are so unreliable. We need something more stable and I’ve been offered a teaching job at a small liberal arts college located near the Canadian border. It’s where the wealthy send their less palatable children, those rejected by well-endowed alma maters, after all even Dartmouth must draw the line some —”

  “Bennett,” she said, then screamed, for he swerved into the adjacent lane. “BENNETT!”

  “Asshole!” he yelled at the neighboring car. Another cigarette, he was practically eating them. He turned on the radio, classic rock, shouting, “My blood runs cold.” And began drumming his hands on the dashboard. “My memory has just been sold!” Now he slammed his fists. “Ba da da da da My angel is the centerfold!” This delivered with seething mania, the vocal severity of a dog barking.

  Rosie brought her knees to her chin, wrapped her arms around her shins and held on.

  Then he was laughing, the raucous Bennett laugh, turning the radio off. “Did I ever tell you about the time Hunter S. Thompson and I tried to steal Fidel Castro’s underwear in Cuba?” His cigarette dangled from his lips. “Hunter’s doing a hush-hush piece for Rolling Stone, and I just happen to be there because I’m on a Hemingway lark, I’m obsessed with Hemingway, and on an island like Cuba, a few years after the Bay of Pigs, it doesn’t take long for the only two Americans to find each other. It was a wild ride, that’s for sure, I had just turned 18 and I’d only ever had a couple of tokes with Willie Kreitler behind the field house, and there’s Hunter with this tool box — I’m not kidding you, an actual tool box — of pills and drugs and paraphernalia. It’s all beautifully arranged, color coordinated, so all the red pills are together and the white pills are there with the individual packets of coke and green pills with the weed. Hunter’s a real old lady in the beginning, the drug taking is very ordered, very systematic.”

  Had he forgotten that he’d already told her this story? Should she interrupt him and then you and Hunter decided to steal Fidel Castro’s underpants. Should she finish the next sentence, we woke up and there were pills and shit everywhere, the tool box looked like it had been attacked by angry monkeys. Rosie already knew the shit was literal shit, greasy little turds smeared or set in neat mounds like Jello molds and then we realized monkeys, factual monkeys, I didn’t know Cuba even had goddamned monkeys but the monkeys had been at the drugs and the monkeys were outside and they were fucked up, they were looping through the trees, they were falling like fruit, they were screaming and festering and moaning.

  Rosie hugged her knees tighter, her head down, so her kneecaps pressed firmly into her eye sockets, but she could still hear him and we were electric, man, we were running through the hot soup night with the smell of frangipani punching our nostrils and a bottle of cheap rum in hand, we were super-human climbing over the wall, any saner and we would have been scared but we felt no fear, no pain, Hunter and I, the quantity and quality of drugs had seen to that, and fearless we were also invisible, and we fell into the dictator’s garden, we saw his boxers hanging on the washing line like bunting, fine white cotton, made in France, so much for communism.

  By dawn, they were arcing around Boston, passing Route 3 to Lowell, and Rosie imagined Gran waking up. Rosie had never seen Gran actually waking up, she had always been already awake, dressed, in the kitchen making breakfast for the lodgers. As a child Rosie had wondered if Gran slept at all, or merely folded herself up like a bat and shut her eyes for brief minutes. In the middle of the night, Rosie had sometimes heard the TV.

  She hadn’t phoned Gran in over a year and in that brief conversation had given Gran the impression that she was still at Parsons. Rather, she hadn’t admitted that she was shacked up with an older man and pregnant. There had been nothing to say, there never was, the weather, general health. It was strange how little Rosie felt for the person who’d housed her and fed her for more than a decade; she was, perhaps, just another lodger. Not even that, because Rosie had cost Gran money, not just the outgoings on food and clothing and shoes but the occupancy of a room that might otherwise be generating income. Gran had once said — one anniversary of the car crash — that Rosie was “an accidental pregnancy.” At the time, Rosie hadn’t understood, not just how sex could be an accident — from the little she knew, sex definitely involved awareness of certain body parts; but why Gran would tell her this. Chris put her straight: “You weren’t planned.” Then added, “That doesn’t mean you weren’t wanted.” As there had been no legal abortion at the time, Rosie had no real way of knowing if her parents had stayed together out of love or lack of option. She couldn’t remember them together, not in a single frame of her memory. Chris thought he was also an accident because his parents didn’t love each other at all, they fought and spewed all kinds of hatred and this spattered out on him, he sometimes came to Rosie wrapped in silence, and it seemed to Chris unlikely that his parents had come together for a moment of love. “But they s
till had to do it,” Rosie had noted. “Drunk,” he said. “They do stuff when they’re drunk, I hear them, and it’s disgusting. Sandra and me, we’re the hangovers that won’t go away.” Chris’s parents constantly reassured him of his trespass, they actively un-loved him with words and even bruises, while Rosie felt instead the cold, steady drizzle of Gran’s resentment.

  The week before Rosie left for Parsons, Gran told her to clean out her room, she already had another lodger lined up. It wasn’t much: a Ziggy Stardust poster Chris had given her, shells from the trip to Maine, her art supplies. When she walked away from the house — Chris had given her a ride to Boston’s South Station — Rosie hadn’t looked back, there’d been nothing to see, certainly not Gran having a last-minute change of heart. Certainly not The Giggle Man looming down. He’d long gone.

  As Bennett turned north on I-93, and then, entering New Hampshire, Rosie felt a wild rush of gratitude. Exits drifted by, turnings to towns exactly like Lowell, filled with Grans and dull, yearning girls like Rosie. Only she was here, fastened into the car seat, escaping a second time. They passed Concord, passed the signs for the Maine seacoast, and the first mention of Canada to the north. For an hour, the highway cut through a flatland of forest, the trees straight and solemn, the lack of horizon felt claustrophobic; then the landscape suddenly opened out in the morning sun, so Rosie had a sense of the wild, high mountains she was entering, and she was amazed that this rising tumult of rock and sky existed only hours from Lowell, and Bennett was saying, “We had a Picasso on the dining room wall. From his later period. Even genius runs out. It was a doodle, probably while he was on the phone or taking a shit, but my father had decided we must have modern art in the house. He never had good taste. It was true what my mother said, the Irish sense of style is limited to potatoes and popes and she once served him a potato in a little pope hat to make her point. The Irish are impressed with fancy dressing. James Joyce is just Hemingway in a frilly shirt for 500 pages. Have you ever read Ulysses? People say they have. People say they wash their hands after going to the bathroom.”

  Rosie turned to regard him, his handsome profile, and as she watched his face and hands mobilizing the anecdote, she realized the telling soothed him, and maybe the stories and the asides, the Picasso on the dining room wall, the drugged-up monkeys, were the way he re-invented himself when he was lost. This big, strong man buried his fear in bravado.

  The highway narrowed now, funneling between a high peak of dark pine and a sharp granite plinth. Beyond, Rosie could see more mountains, endless green forests over recalcitrant hills, on and on. It was another country, and she felt the liberty of the traveler.

  Bennett pulled off in Franconia, they had breakfast in a diner. He had to make a phone call, he told her, and staked out the phone booth near the men’s room. It was many phone calls, and waiting for return calls, and the manager of the diner frowned as Miranda’s squalling disturbed the other customers. So Rosie went outside and found a stream just beyond the parking lot, and she and Miranda dabbled in the clear, chilly water rippling beneath the dappling leaves. No Chip leered out to drive them off. There were rustlings instead, among leaves and underbrush — chipmunks, small brown birds, and a bright blue bird she thought might be a jay watched her intently from a high branch.

  At dusk they drove on, another two hours, and where the signs promised Canada 20 miles northward, Bennett turned off the highway. Just across from the exit ramp, a motel squatted, low and toad-like, under a single blinking street light.

  Rosie’s body still shuddered from the car as she sat on the bed, and her ears hummed with the wind of the open car windows. Bennett went back outside, shutting the room door quietly behind him. For a moment, she panicked, thinking: he has the car keys, he’s going to leave us here and disappear. But she could see him out the window, leaning against the pillar of the motel’s overhang. His shoulders were hunched, and she felt a wild, lurching sympathy.

  In the bathroom, the soap, cup, towels were arrayed on the sink, an altar for the traveler. Rosie soaked a flannel in warm water and cleaned Miranda as she slept. Vomit had congealed in the fat wrinkles of her neck — it had been a mistake to give her ice cream. Rosie gently wiped her child, tracing the small, perfect body with the cloth. A rash was beginning to sprout between her legs from the long hours of damp confinement, though she had not complained. Rosie wiped on cream, sliding her fingers between Miranda’s soft labial folds. Once her own mother had done this. Her own mother, not even a ghost, not even a disturbance of the dust, she’d left no impression, not even a photograph. Yet Rosie felt her now, leaning in against her, guiding her hands over Miranda’s warm skin. Once Rosie had been thus lulled and loved and wanted, Rosie was sure, and that love had entered into her, a particular osmosis, stubbornly lodged deep in her cells, never to be bartered.

  “Rosie.”

  He mumbled in the dark.

  His hand moved along her shoulder, around her waist, he pulled her to him, onto him, just like that. She arched her back to take him deeper. After, when he’d fallen asleep, she went to the bathroom to wipe away his wetness, and then, for a while, she stood at the window.

  Beyond the motel’s fluorescent glow, she could see nothing in that charcoal dark. There was the murky smell of water and mud, the sound of unknown creatures pipping — night birds? Insects? Every few minutes a car or truck sped by on the interstate, heading to or from Canada, she assumed. A town of some kind lay not far away, but its lights were off, its dogs asleep. She had no other sense of the topography — hills or lakes or rivers. She was hovering above the earth, as if in a spaceship, untethered from both gravity and time; the world had paused for her on this warm August night. In a few hours it would roll forward, and she and Miranda and Bennett would tilt and fall with it.

  THE WOODSTOVE

  1985–1986

  The leaves were already turning this far north, russet, red, flame-thrown across the high-humped hills they drove along the ribboning road. How did Bennett know the way, the roads had no signs, they branched off indifferently, tunneling into the riotous trees — some had already thrown down their gauntlet of bright primary yellow. Madness, she thought, that nature can produce color this intense and pure. The sky moved above, a sailor-blue backdrop for the white clouds, fleet despite their plumpness. White houses, red barns, yellow houses, grey barns, cows in green fields, a white steepled church, the steady hem of hills always emboldening the horizon. The trees rustled like crinoline above her.

  They had long ago left the tarmac for the dirt, a wide dirt road for a narrow one, passing yet another dairy farm, and then no farms only rough woods and wild meadows. Bennett said, “Here.” At the dead end: a small white house with a green door and high gables, the garden overgrown with brambles and golden rod, two apple trees drooping with fruit, gold and red.

  Bennett no longer opened her car door, for he tended Miranda, holding her in his strong arms. Rosie stepped out into the grass. The smell of leaves, the hum of bees. Squirrels were feasting on the wind-fallen apples. The steps needed repair, the door was not locked, Rosie noted, as they entered the house.

  In the rooms, furniture loomed under white cloths. There was faded floral wallpaper, and underfoot wide floorboards painted dark green. “Whose house is it?”

  “Family friend,” he said.

  “Buffy and Wally?” she suggested. “Or Binky and Monty?”

  He laughed, a deep, appreciative laugh, inviting her in so that she laughed with him, a comrade. At last they looked at each other. She half-expected an apology, but he was incapable, she knew. He had passed the exit for Lowell, and that was sufficient.

  “Let’s get these covers off.” He pulled at the first one, revealing an armchair in chintz. Miranda had fallen asleep in his arms, so he placed her on the chair with exquisite tenderness. They went around the rooms, the sofa, the dining table, the sideboard, the kitchen. Bennett took her and turned her onto the kitchen table, his fingers found their place, opening her. “Yo
u’re always so wet, Rosie, you’re always ready for me.”

  Upstairs, the beds were made up, tightly cornered with crisp cotton sheets and wool blankets. Who had made them, and how long ago? A bed, she thought, stays made for years. When they climbed into the double bed that night, between the cool pressed sheets, they found — however — that a congregation of mice were living in the bottom half. They’d buried into the mattress, scattered seed shells and droppings. The house was infested.

  “Yull be needin firewood?”

  The man had knocked at the door. He did not introduce himself in his odd, high voice. He was short and broad and dirty, an insect odor hummed about him that Rosie recognized as unwashed flesh. He had a massive tumor in his left cheek and no teeth, no teeth at all.

  “I don’t know,” Rosie replied, trying not to fixate on the tumor or the smell. Bennett had left for the college wearing his Harris Tweed jacket, so nervous he’d packed an extra deodorant in his briefcase.

  “Ya leavin before tha winta, then?”

  “I think we’re planning to be here.”

  “That roight?” The man chewed, looking thoughtful.

  “Will it be very cold?” Rosie asked.

  “Reckin will know come April.”

  It was perhaps a joke, but the man didn’t smile, so Rosie pressed her lips together.

  “Ya goin through tha winta withou heat, then?” He chewed some more, then deftly moved the tumor to the other cheek. Rosie realized it was tobacco.

  “I’m sure there’s heat.”

  “Must be some special kinda heat they got down theah in tha flatlands.” This insect man, dark-hair as a beetle, tipped his hat and walked back toward his pick-up.

  “Wait!” she stepped out after him. “Do you have a number? I’ll have to find out.”

  “No phone. Yain’t gotta phone neitha.”