You Lost Me There (33 page)

“Joel, it takes time.”

“Well, great.” He tipped a beer my way. “Thanks for the expertise.”

“Hey, screw you.”

I got up and walked down to the water.

“You think I don’t have regrets?” he shouted. “I fucking wake up, I’ve got a dozen things I wish I’d said, then the next morning, they’re still there, plus I’ve come up with two more my old scoutmaster confessed to me in a dream while he’s driving around in a clown car. How do you get rid of fucking
that
?”

“Quit drinking. You should get back to work.”

“Yeah, well screw you, too, Dr. Disappear-O. Work cures all, my ass.”

“I’m serious.”

“She collected bums to feel better about herself. Me, my dad the drunk, now you.” Joel laughed. “Hey, no disrespect, but who’s more fucked-up than He Who Pisses Naked While Trespassing?”

I went inside and searched, found it, then returned with a notebook I’d discovered in Betsy’s desk while I was cleaning house: a collection of all the reviews Joel had ever received, clipped and glued in chronological order.

He paged through slowly. Half he hadn’t seen before, he said. He cried like a baby.

We must have fallen asleep outside because I woke up at five in the morning, still in the same chair. Joel was gone. Someone had spread a blanket over my legs.

 

 

 

I read Regina’s poetry book several times: in bed at night, outside at lunch, first thing in the morning before work. I understood her poems better each time, and that perhaps they didn’t need to be understood through logic so much as felt, like music.

And I worked. I wrote about Sara’s life, a skeletal outline. It went badly.

 

 

 

Betsy’s lawyer flew up from Boston about a week after Joel’s nighttime visit. We met one afternoon in the dining room at Blue Sea: the lawyer in his suit, me in my gardening clothes, Joel in his baseball cap and chef’s uniform. At least his eyes looked clear. The room was busy with cooks draping long sheets of pasta over the dining tables. I noticed Cornelia was absent. She hadn’t been at the funeral, either, though I’d invited her. Dan the boyfriend was polishing wineglasses. He avoided looking at me and stayed behind the bar. I considered shouting out that I’d thrown away his necklace.

The lawyer explained the terms. A third of the savings would be split between Miriam and the few relatives I’d met at the funeral, another third would go to an Acadia preservation group. The remainder and all of Betsy’s assets and possessions—the bonds and life insurance, the house, the car, the cottage on Cranberry—were Joel’s. I was left a painting I’d always liked.

“You’re welcome to come back,” I said to Joel when the lawyer was gone.

“Well, it’s my house now, isn’t it?” he said. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry. I’m stressed, I quit smoking again. Tell you what, I’d appreciate it if you continued living out there for a bit.”

Then he noticed something, spun around, and screamed at a young woman preparing ravioli. Apparently she wasn’t cutting consistent shapes.

There was a message on the answering machine from Cornelia when I got back to the cottage, her voice hemming and hawing.

“So, hey, Uncle Victor, hey, so I actually decided not to take the job with Joel. But please don’t be mad, I’m irresponsible, I know. And you did so much to help me, I totally realize that. So I’m calling from Logan, I bought a ticket last night online. I just don’t know if I want to cook for a living, you know? Except I totally fell in love with wine at Blue Sea, there’s so much you can learn, so I think I’m going to try working for my dad. See if I like it, you know, the business from the other side. Anyway. But please don’t worry, I’ll mail you the keys tomorrow, I took a taxi to the airport and the car’s in the driveway. And with everything that happened, I still totally loved this summer. I just don’t think I’m an island person. Oh, and I broke up with Dan, in case you see him. He was a pothead anyway, plus he was like sleeping with this waitress, can you believe that? Anyway, rambling, I know. Okay. Bye.”

A week later, Joel called. He told me his plan was to move into Cape Near sometime in September, and that he wouldn’t be doing anything on Cranberry for at least a year. He said, would you consider closing up the camp, or just staying there through October?

“It would be a privilege,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“Are you back in AA yet?”

“What, for dates? Honestly, half the reason people go to meetings is to meet somebody as screwed up as they are.”

He laughed and hung up.

 

 

 

I did an inventory of Betsy’s possessions. I went to church when no one was around, and I found no company there, but I utilized the quiet. I caught up on my reading. I was dying to get back to work. Forestalling the obligation to write a short history of Sara’s life, I asked Miriam about hers over the phone. Pleasant childhood, pleasant college experience, unpleasant early divorce, a second marriage that lasted two decades and bore two lovely children, then the husband died from cancer, later she met Gary. “I really think I’ve done all right,” she said, laughing cheerfully. “You know, it matters that you say it when it’s true, Victor. You’ve done all right.”

I planned trips to visit Ken and Dorothy in New Hampshire come fall. I puttered around the island, trying to fix the exact date in mind when I’d stage my Soborg comeback. The Little Cranberry people had ceased taking notice of me, and they accepted me at their town socials. People paid me compliments about Betsy, even Sara: anecdotes about my wife, reminiscences, questions about
The Hook-Up
. One afternoon, I was cleaning out the attic and I noticed a yellow Post-it note stuck to my shoe.

“Rumsfeld knew Saddam???” it said in Betsy’s handwriting.

One night, Mark called, Sara’s former agent.

“How are you. Look, let’s talk.
The Perfect Husband
.”

I sat down at Betsy’s desk. “What did you think?”

“Victor, first, Sara meant the world to me, you know that. I miss her. I miss her all the time.”

“I know,” I said.

“And nobody wants the long-lost script to appear more than me. But okay, this is business. What are we looking at, really?”

“I think it’s a rough draft.”

“Well, it’s a first draft. And truthfully, that’s the problem. I mean, it’s barely readable. The main character’s a walking cliché.”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling hot, “I thought it was true to life.”

“Yeah, okay, there are some decent lines. But true to life doesn’t put people in theaters. I read a hundred scripts a week. Why do people go to the movies? Because they’re not real. They’re so not real, they’re super-real, they’re Frankensteins without the stitches. But the stitches here are obvious. I’m not saying there’s no gold in the premise. Look, I like the local color, I buy the whole serial-killer-as-disease-specialist thing. And if anyone could mine her own material, it was Sara. End of the day, though, what we lack fundamentally is Sara’s vision. If she were alive, she’d write forty more drafts before she was satisfied. You and me, this isn’t what we do. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“Yeah,” I said, “me neither.”

Mark sighed. “Look, never say never. Maybe there’s some way to get this touched up. I’ll think on it, yeah? I’ll let you go. Call me next time you’re in L.A., okay? All right?”

 

 

 

One night after a bottle of wine, I almost phoned Regina. Instead, I called her the next morning, when I was sober and aware of my motivation. I wanted to call and wish her good luck in her graduate program, and to wish her well, that was it.

“She doesn’t work here anymore,” the receptionist said.

“She left?”

“I’m sorry, who’s calling, please?”

I almost hung up. “This is Dr. Aaron,” I said. “I’m off campus.”

“Dr. Aaron, I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize your voice. No, Regina finished last week, last Monday. I can give you her e-mail address if you want. Did she work for you at some point?”

And then that afternoon, as if responding to my signal:

The tourist season ended after Labor Day. Numbers on the ferry dwindled and the temperature dropped. We saw fewer visitors to scout the pie stands, and there weren’t as many drowsy summer people to nod to when I walked the lane into town.

I’d started collecting rocks off Betsy’s beach. They were like the ones at Hunter’s, coral with black spots, or gray and ringed with pink stripes. There would be some specific cause, I thought, for why those markings developed, and though I’d never been curious about geology before, it became a preoccupation. Most days, I found myself spending an hour or two with my pant cuffs rolled up, wading through the tide and storing my most interesting specimens in a bucket. I made a mental note to seek out someone in the geology department when I returned to the university. As sediment, were these rocks unique to Mount Desert Island? Why pink and gray, these tiger stones, and from what material causes? Had they turned up at Cape Hatteras, on Miami beaches, or was it only in Maine that they’d settled? What had brought them there?

By day I was finishing Sara’s entry in the Gardner book, as much of her life as I could remember. The end was in sight, but what had begun as a paragraph was approaching twenty pages. At dusk I’d check in with the lab, and some nights I joined Ken and Dorothy for dinner to watch police procedurals on TV until I was tired. Some nights I was. Others I stayed up until three a.m. and still couldn’t sleep without a couple of drinks.

I called the lab on Wednesday. I knew Lucy had recently returned from the Virgin Islands.

“Nice vacation?”

“You know, not bad. First day, I’m unpacking, I pull out a drawer to put away my tops, and this iguana jumps out, we’re talking twelve inches nose to tail, and lands on my chest. Gripping my jog bra with its claws. Other than that, I think this may have been the first time I actually relaxed. On the second-to-last day, but still.”

“So you went with some girlfriends.”

A short pause. “I said yes, Victor.”

I laughed and had to hold the phone away for a moment. “Of course you did,” I said. “How wonderful. Congratulations. I’m very happy for you.”

Now Lucy laughed, too. “Thank you. I don’t think my mother’s accepted it yet.”

“Are you happy?”

“I am. I’m trusting.”

“So what does the engagement ring look like?”

“Oh, it’s a Specialized.”

“A what?”

“A Rockhopper. Deke thought it was time I tried mountain biking, something we can do together. Isn’t that cute?”

“Probably a lot of biking near San Francisco,” I said. “Lot of labs out there, too.”

She exhaled lightly. “I’ve heard that,” she said.

 

 

 

It was nine o’clock, a Thursday evening, when Joel showed up, banging on the door. “I’ve been drinking,” he shouted from the yard.