Red Hook Road (44 page)

The next week, when the young woman came back to the library, she found Ruthie straightening up the computer section (Dewey Decimal Nos. 004 to 006) and said, “That book was really good! It’s different from the others. But I liked it. It made me cry, and I loved the ending, but it’s really funny, too, isn’t it? I mean, at first I didn’t really notice—or I guess maybe I didn’t get it—but once you’re into it, it’s funny. Like Mrs. Bennet? She’s, like, a complete idiot.”

“You’re absolutely right. She is a complete idiot. Would you like to try another by the same author?” And thus did Ruthie create a reader in her own image, one of many girls she would direct, without ever allowing a hint of condescension in her voice, from Barbara Cartland to Jane Austen.

Although she never spoke of it to Matt, the more real the charter boat
plan became, the more her apprehension grew, and the more the library became her refuge, a place of asylum from the gathering stresses at home. She talked more and more about the library, both because her work there made her so happy and because she wanted him to know how happy she was. As if once he caught on he might say, “Hey, let’s forget the whole boat thing and stay on land, where we both clearly belong.”

Ruthie had ached to talk about her anxiety with her mother, to ask her for advice, but while Iris had greeted Matt’s plan with studied nonchalance, Ruthie knew how intensely she disapproved. Any apprehension Ruthie expressed would be greeted with relief. There would be no opportunity for the unbiased consideration of the options that she actually sought. So instead of turning to her mother, Ruthie had found herself confiding once again in Mary Lou Curran.

Mary Lou had gotten it into her head that the children’s room needed reorganizing, and the library director, all too aware of the fruitlessness of opposing one of Mary Lou’s ideas, had asked Ruthie to try to mitigate the damage, under the guise of offering assistance. Mary Lou sat perched on a miniature chair and directed Ruthie around the room.

“I think the beanbag chairs should be distributed throughout the room,” Mary Lou said, “rather than gathered in a circle.”

“That’s an idea. Except that the little ones like to sit in the beanbag chairs for story time.”

“They can sit on the carpet for story time,” Mary Lou said. “Instead of lolling about on beanbag chairs.”

Ruthie laughed. “Have you actually ever
seen
story time?”

“Of course I have. And it wouldn’t be such a free-for-all if the children sat in a quiet circle. Don’t put the blue beanbag chair under the fish tank. They’ll climb on it and end up sending the tank flying. Again.”

“Mary Lou,” Ruthie said, once she’d situated the beanbag chairs to the elderly woman’s satisfaction. “Can I ask your advice about what to do next year?”

“Advice? From me? You can certainly
ask
. Whether I have any to give is debatable.”

“I think you’re a veritable fountain of sensible information,” Ruthie said.

“And now you’re teasing me.”

“Well, yes.” Ruthie smiled. “But it’s true. You’ve always given me good advice. You’re the one who told me to come work here.”

Mary Lou nodded. “That certainly has worked out, hasn’t it?”

“It has,” Ruthie said fervently. “I love working in the library.”

“All right, then, I will give you some advice. And, like all of my very best advice, it’s not based on anything you actually asked me or told me at all. It’s offered in total ignorance. A shot in the dark.”

“Sounds perfect.”

“Go back to school, and get a master’s in library science and information studies. I believe Simmons College in Boston has a very good program. Or, if you like, you can even do it online. I met a lovely young woman at the conference who got her degree from Rutgers but did the whole thing on the computer.”

Library science! She had known that people got degrees in library science, naturally. She had worked with trained archivists and librarians, first at Harvard and now here in Red Hook. But the idea that this job she merely loved could be more than something she did while she waited to figure out what she was supposed to do had never occurred to her. That she could
be
a librarian, rather than simply work at a library. She was inclined to blame her mother for the fact that she had never considered the idea. She knew exactly how Iris would regard such a career path: true intellectuals, true lovers of literature and of books, did not become librarians, they became scholars. But Ruthie wondered if she really could lay the blame at Iris’s feet. Wasn’t the fault for her failure of imagination, in the end, only her own?

Now, as she drove up Red Hook Road on her way to visit her ailing grandfather in the hospital, she wished she could just tell Matt exactly how little she wanted to sail to the Caribbean.

“We’ve got to figure this insurance thing out,” Matt said. “We’re putting the boat in the water in two days.”

“I don’t know, Matt. Maybe it’s just an insoluble problem.”

He looked up from his papers. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s just too much money.”

Matt sighed heavily. He folded the papers in half and dropped them on the floor by his feet. “I’ll figure it out. Maybe we can get a loan or something.”

“We can’t borrow any more money, Matt.” They’d already taken money from Daniel, over her objection.

“I know,” he said. “The money’s my problem. I’ll figure it out.” He looked at her quizzically. “Or is it something else? Are you trying to tell me that you don’t want to go?”

He was giving her the perfect opportunity. All she had to do was agree, to tell him that she was afraid, that she hated sailing and didn’t want to be trapped on a boat, not with him, not with anyone. That she had finally, she thought, found something that
she
wanted to do, not what her mother wanted for her, or what he wanted. Not what Becca had been meant to do, but what she, Ruthie, was meant to do. She took her eyes off the road for a moment and looked at him. His eyes were wide. He looked frightened. “No, it’s not that,” she said. “It’s just … maybe we’re not ready.”

“You don’t think I can do this.”

“I do. Of course I do. It’s just … I don’t even know if you
want
to do this.”

“We’re not talking about what I want. We’re talking about what you want.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to …”

“Well, what is it, then? You don’t have faith in me. You think I’ll just fuck it up.”

She had allowed the moment to slip through her fingers, and now she saw no way out. “I do so have faith in you,” she said. “I love you.” She reached blindly for his hand and squeezed it. “I love you, Matt.”

He brought her fingers to his lips and kissed them. “I love you, too.” He sighed again, one of the heavy, burdened sighs she had heard him heave so many times. “Ruthie, I have spent three years of my life on the
Rebecca
. I can’t just throw her away.”

“Of course you can’t. Just ignore me. I’m upset about my grandfather. That’s all it is.”

After a few long, silent minutes, Matt leaned over, snapped on the radio, and turned up the volume so that there was neither the need nor the possibility of them conversing the rest of the way to the hospital in Newmarket.

The risk, Iris told Ruthie and Matt as they stood outside Mr. Kimmelbrod’s hospital room, was due not so much to the broken hip, nor even to the surgery that had attempted, with a certain amount of success, to repair it. What had the doctors worried was the possibility that Mr. Kimmelbrod might, as a result of the trauma both of the fall and of the surgery, develop a pulmonary infection or congestive heart failure.

Iris looked terrible. She had dark purple circles under her bloodshot eyes and her curls had gone flat. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail and tied it with a rubber band without benefit of a mirror; her ponytail was off center, sticking up from the back of her head like a broken handle. Her lips looked chapped and bitten.

“I brought you fresh clothes,” Ruthie said, holding up the tote bag she had brought along. “And some moisturizer. The air is so dry in here.”

“Thank you, honey,” Iris said. She took Ruthie’s hand. “You’ve been so helpful. Grandpa and I both appreciate it so much. You too, Matt. Thank you.”

Ruthie squeezed her mother’s hand. “Do you want to go home? Just for a couple of hours? You can take a shower, and maybe have a little nap? I can stay here with Grandpa.”

“I don’t think I should leave him,” Iris said.

“It’s okay, Mom. You’re so tired. If you really want to help him, you have to stay strong for him.”

Iris shook her head, but she was clearly exhausted. Dying to take a shower, to get some sleep.

They tiptoed into the room. It was a small box crammed full of instruments and monitors, with barely room for a single chair. Both the front
and back walls were made of glass. Pale green curtains partially obscured a view of the parking lot and a strip of spindly evergreens at one end of the room, and of the nurses’ station at the other. Iris went to the bed and tugged the blanket up higher on Mr. Kimmelbrod’s chest. His eyes were partly closed, only the whites visible above the pink rims of his lower lids.

“Is he awake?” Ruthie whispered.

The corners of her grandfather’s mouth turned up in a faint, brief approximation of a smile.

“He is,” he said, opening his eyes. His voice was at once creaky and soft, as if the effort of expelling sufficient air to speak were almost too much for him.

“How are you feeling, Grandpa?” Ruthie asked.

He raised one of his long, snowy-white eyebrows.

“Worse than I look,” he said. “Trust me.”

Iris said, “We’re waiting for the morphine drip to start up again.”

“Is something wrong with it?” Ruthie said. “Should I go tell the nurse?”

Iris shook her head. “They say that he’s supposed to be able to control it himself, and that’s true up to a point. But it only gives out so much in an hour.” She leaned across the bed and picked up the button and pressed it a few times. “See?” She pointed at the drip. “Nothing.”

“Are you in pain, Grandpa?” Ruthie said. She stood at the foot of the bed, resting her hands lightly on Mr. Kimmelbrod’s splayed toes.

“There appears to be some concern that I will become a drug addict,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said. “Elderly violinist junkies being such a scourge on society.”

Iris pursed her lips and gave a little puff of frustrated air.

“I’ve spent the better part of the morning trying to convince someone to up his dose, to no avail.”

Mr. Kimmelbrod once again closed his eyes.

“He’s been like that this morning,” Iris said. “In and out.”

“You should go home, Mom,” Ruthie said. “Really, I’ll stay with Grandpa. It’s fine.”

“Yes,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said, without opening his eyes. “You must go get some rest, Iris. You are worrying me.”

Iris sighed.

“Matt’s going to be at his mom’s all day, loading up the
Rebecca
and taking her down to the yard,” Ruthie said. “I can stay here while you’re gone, and then when he’s finished he can pick me up.” Matt had tried to get the yard to move back his launch date, but their calendar was full. It was either now or wait until the end of the summer, and as appealing as the idea of delay was, it didn’t make sense to wait any longer.

“It’s going to take me at least a few hours,” Matt said. “You’ll have plenty of time to get to East Red Hook and back. Have a nap. Take a shower.”

“You don’t mind?” Iris said. “There’s nowhere you need to be, Ruthie? Work?”

“They know I’m here,” Ruthie said. “And Matt told the yard he wouldn’t be in until after lunch.”

Iris allowed herself to be convinced.

Mr. Kimmelbrod’s blanket had pulled loose, and Ruthie did her best to remake the bed around him while he slept, managing to form serviceably tight hospital corners, as if there were a standard that she was expected to maintain and might possibly be graded on.

“Very good, my dear,” Mr. Kimmelbrod said, sleepily. “They’ll have you cleaning the bathrooms next.”

“Toilets are where I draw the line,” she said. “You’ll have to get up and clean your own.” She emptied out his plastic cup of water and rinsed both it and the matching pitcher in the shallow sink. When she turned back to Mr. Kimmelbrod, she saw that his eyes were open and he was fumbling for the morphine drip.