Red Hook Road (29 page)

The ramshackle barn in the back meadow, into which no one but Matt had any reason or desire to enter, was the perfect place for them to find privacy. Ruthie never drove there, for fear of Jane recognizing the car. They would meet in town, and she would leave her car in the parking lot of the library. When Ruthie was with him in his car, Matt would drive quickly up the driveway and across the meadow, parking his truck on the far side of the barn. He kept the barn’s broken side door propped open with a jagged piece of cinder block, so that they could enter and exit without the risk of being seen by Jane or anyone else who happened to be in the house. They lay beneath the shadow of the
Rebecca
, the sailboat like a sentinel guarding their secret.

Now Matt lay propped on one elbow, looking at Ruthie. He wondered how he could have known her for so many years without noticing how lovely she was. Her skin was rosy and ripe, especially now, scraped pink from the scratchy blanket on which they’d been rolling. She shaved only the lower half of her legs, and her thighs were covered with translucent gold down. He reached out and held the palm of his hand hovering just above her thigh; he imagined he could feel the faint buzz of static electricity drawing the hair on her legs to the taut skin of his palm.

Although the two had very different coloring, Ruthie reminded him of Becca. They had the same long legs and narrow waist, the same slightly knobby knees and pneumatic ass. Once he’d even told Ruthie this, or rather a more innocuous version—that when her hair was hidden under a bandana, she looked like Becca. Ruthie had been pleased, he could tell.

From the time Matt had first begun to notice girls, Becca had been
there. In the house, on the beach, in John’s car all summer long. Matt had spent a not inconsiderable part of his adolescence fantasizing about the faint outline of Becca’s goose-pimpled aureole rising beneath the thin fabric of her bikini top, or about the strands of light brown pubic hair that occasionally pulled free of the confines of her bathing suit. Ruthie’s pubic hair was darker, and looking at it now he felt his cock stirring again.

Ruthie scooted closer to Matt, and he put his arm around her. She looked up at the
Rebecca
. “She’s a beautiful boat, Matt.”

The truth was, Ruthie didn’t care much for boats. In her own family she was the anomaly; even Daniel enjoyed sailing, although he was hardly as obsessed as Iris and Becca were. While her family had jovially accepted Ruthie’s aversion to the sport, John had never stopped believing that he could change her mind. The summer Ruthie was fourteen John had made a gift to her of an old dory that he had restored and painted a jolly turquoise blue. He had added a sail to the skiff and, claiming it was unsinkable, insisted that she enter the yacht club’s juniors’ race, a monthly spectacle Becca had won at least half a dozen times as a girl. He was so eager and so genuinely confident in Ruthie that she agreed; she even wore the “Team Copaken” T-shirt he’d made for her. She spent the race watching ten-year-olds whiz by her as she tried unsuccessfully to hoist the sail out of the water. Despite John’s insistence that during the three minutes before she had capsized he had seen in her a nascent marine gift about to catch fire, she never again took the boat out alone. Whenever she was obliged to go sailing, she tried to ensure that her responsibilities were limited to not getting bonked on the head by the boom.

“I hope she’ll be beautiful when she’s done,” Matt said.

“How much longer do you think you’ll be working on her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe another six months. Every time I run out of money it kind of sets me back.” John had had the money from Becca’s violin to pay for the restoration of the Alden, but that was all gone by the time he died. Worse, Matt had made dozens of costly errors since beginning the renovation of the boat. He could not bear to consider the number of hours and dollars he had spent on his first attempt at pouring the lead for the ballast keel. He couldn’t afford to pay a foundry to make the keel, and since John had planned on doing his own melting and pouring, Matt had decided to do the same. He’d gotten help with the pattern from one of
the yard’s designers, and built it from white pine timber. The melting and pouring of the lead had been easier than he had expected, and by the time he was fairing the lead with edge tools, going for the kind of sweet-looking line John would have expected, he was feeling pretty good about it. And then, while smoothing the lead with his power planer, he had found the beginning of a bubble. Sick to his stomach with dread, he had poked his finger into the bubble all the way through the lead. He had had two choices. One, he could drop the keel, undo the keel bolts, and let the whole fucking thing down so he could cut back the lead on top of the bubble and repour. Or he could pay the foundry to make the keel ballast, just like he should have done in the first place. It turned out to be a good thing he had decided to max out yet another credit card and pay for the job he failed at, because it was one of the foundry workers who had pointed out to him that the copper keel bolts he had worked so hard to fabricate and install would, within a year, stretch out so much the keel would probably just drop right off. Out they came, to be replaced with bolts of bronze.

Ruthie said, “What about the money from the accident? Can you use that to finish the boat?”

“I used my share up on it already, and no way my mother will let me have hers. She thinks this is a waste of my time. She hates sailing.”

“That’s weird. She’s a Mainer. She lives on the water. And John was such a big sailor.”

Ruthie felt almost relieved to hear that Jane shared her antipathy for the water.

“My grandfather died in a hurricane when my mom was a kid. He was out on a big groundfish rig, down near Rhode Island. They tried to ride the storm out. Nobody knows what happened. Probably just got swamped by the waves. There were a lot of boats lost in that storm.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Ruthie said. “That’s awful.”

“Mum always says she doesn’t really remember my grandfather, but she was twelve years old when he died. It’s not like she was a baby. It made her hate the water. It used to make her crazy back when John and I were kids every time my aunt Mary would send us out with my uncle Don in his lobster boat when he was too drunk to be trusted not to get his foot caught in the warp and drown.”

“What’s the warp?”

“The line connecting the buoy to the trap. You get that wrapped around your foot when the traps are thrown over the side and you’re fish food. My mum hated the idea of us out on the water, but she couldn’t say anything. If we didn’t pull the traps, then Aunt Mary and Uncle Don wouldn’t be able to pay the loan on their boat and the bank would take it. But Uncle Don was a regular dub and it was never all that safe for us to be out with him. When it’s a thick fog and you can’t see more than a few feet ahead of you, it’s easy to lose your way, especially if you’re a drunk idiot like my uncle. Or sometimes you think it’s going be a fine day, and a storm will roll in all of a sudden. Anything can happen out on the water.”

“Did your mom mind that John was planning on becoming a charter captain?”

“Sure she did, but John’d just kind of rib her about it. Say he was going to get a life insurance policy and make her his beneficiary, that way she’d stop pitching him shit. Mum loves money a hell of a lot more than she’s afraid of water.”

It took a moment for the irony of the comment to sink in, but when it did they both grew suddenly still. After a moment, Ruthie, searching for something to fill the silence, said, “It’s so nice here. I wish I didn’t have to go back to England.”

“You’ve only got one more year.”

“That feels like a really long time.” Ruthie had been so unhappy at Oxford, isolated despite the ubiquity of American students, maladroit and dull when compared to her British colleagues. She’d made few friends and developed no real personal relationships with her tutors, spending most of her time alone in the dank and anonymous dorm room that she’d been assigned, nothing like the stone grotto she’d imagined when she first found out she’d be attending Oxford. Her unhappiness had not surprised her. It was just a continuation of the misery of her last year of college. The only true pleasure she had was in Matt’s e-mails and text messages.

“Well, what would happen if you didn’t go back?”

“Oh, God, I don’t know.” Naturally the thought of bailing on her Fulbright and leaving all that gray misery and loneliness behind had occurred to Ruthie almost every day over the course of the long year in England. But how could she ever turn her back on all those years of hard work, on
the incredible good fortune that a Fulbright represented? How could she step off the long-foreseen path of her life without having the faintest idea of what lay on either side of it? She had been telling people, had been telling herself, since she was fourteen years old that she would follow in her mother’s footsteps and become an academic, a scholar of literature. And she loved books and stories, loved studying the strange interplay between the life and work of an author, loved pondering the mysteries of Mr. Darcy’s erotic life before he met Elizabeth Bennett or the effect of Joyce’s transition to dictation on his later work.

But the formal study of literature, she had discovered, was not about love; it was about theory, and the theory of theory, and how smart you could make yourself sound while saying something very small about somebody else’s theory of what sounded smart. And she found England unbearable, not just because it was gray and lonely and her work proceeded at a tedious crawl but because Becca had never existed there. It was as if only in mourning and memory could she understand the world; and in England there were no cues, no traces of her loss. As soon as she got on the plane to come home for the summer, she had felt a slight easing of the anxiety that had tugged at taut strings in her chest all winter. In England, Ruthie had to impose her memories on landscapes that held no record of her sister, but Red Hook was safe. It was permeated with Becca’s presence. Every cove and every pebble, every teacup and throw pillow in the house, every library book and ear of summer corn steamed in the husk over charcoal, held at its core some memory of Becca and John.

“Well, what would you do if you decided not to go back to England?” Matt said.

“I don’t know. I don’t even have the beginning of a plan.” She laughed. “No plan at all. That would go over well with my mom. That’s like anathema to her, no plan. That’s like you have cancer of the life.” Iris was the queen of checklists, agendas, strategies, long-term forecasts, reservations made years in advance. Her thinking was always ten steps ahead of her current situation and twelve steps ahead of everybody else. Given her mother’s example, to Ruthie the idea of dropping out of school with no idea what she was going to do next held a kind of dangerous and seductive terror.

“I don’t want to think about it anymore,” Ruthie said. She sat up and straddled Matt’s waist. “Let’s do this instead.”

Twenty minutes later, Ruthie had drifted off to sleep, but Matt was too confused by his reaction to the possibility that she might not go back to England to follow suit. He wanted to be with her, that was clear to him. The idea of another long winter alone was too depressing to contemplate for long. One evening toward the end of the previous winter, Matt had driven down Red Hook Road to Jacob’s Cove. It was only a little after six, but the sun had set, and the last of the grayish light was fading from the sky. Early in the day, rain had washed away much of the snow, and what was left was crusty with ice and dirt. It gave way beneath his boots with a muffled crunch. Matt left his car running, the beams of the headlights long and yellow across the beach. Shoving his bare hands into his pockets and tucking his chin into the collar of his coat, already clammy with the moisture from his breath, he walked out along the rocky beach until he was a foot or so from where the waves lapped against the pebbles and mud. He stood there, gazing out at the bleak vista. Interspersed among the mass of evergreens was the occasional bare white of a dead tree, its naked branches iced with moonlight. The beach was devoid of life, the sandy earth clotted with dead brown grasses. The ocean was black. Cold even in his down jacket, his ears itchy beneath the wool of his ski hat, Matt stared at the grim, unwelcoming sea and thought how dead it seemed. On that freezing, rainy evening in March, all of Maine seemed dead.

He could not go through another winter alone like that. He wanted to ask Ruthie to stay here and help him bear it. But was he ready to announce their relationship to the world? Even more frightening, was he ready to tell his mother?

There was no point to lying there and worrying. He had a lot he wanted to accomplish this evening, and before too long there wouldn’t be enough light to keep working. He pulled on his shorts, a pair of thick socks, and John’s old work boots, a size and a half too big. He left Ruthie dozing on the bed.

Because the finishes in the stateroom and the main cabin of the sailboat demanded such craftsmanship, Matt had waited until now to do the finishing work on the cabinetry, honing his skills over the past two years
first on the deckhouse, crew quarters, and galley. The Alden’s large and elegant stateroom was in an unusual location—at the bow, in what would ordinarily be the fo’c’sle. In most boats of this size, the stateroom was amidships, or at the stern. Matt remembered that when John first bought her, his friends from the boatyard had expressed reservations about the location. “You’ll be hurling all night long,” had been the general consensus. But John had argued that the deep, heavy hull was sea-kindly; it would sail so easily, even in rough seas, that not even the most tentative or weak-stomached of passengers would be disturbed. In fact, he had always claimed that the spacious stateroom, its private head complete with a bathtub, was perfect for luxury-loving charter customers, and was one of the main reasons he had bought the
Rebecca
. The stateroom and, of course, her name.

Matt was finishing the
Rebecca
precisely to John’s specifications, even though he could not imagine sailing her—or any boat, for that matter—to the Caribbean. He wasn’t sure what was involved in one’s becoming the captain of a charter vessel, but he was fairly confident that whatever it required was something he didn’t possess. Indeed, Matt had no idea what he was going to do with the boat once he finished restoring her. Beyond that, in Ruthie’s phrase, he had cancer of the life: no plan at all. He did not let himself think about it, ever. He just worked.