Reunion at Red Paint Bay (3 page)

“What’s up, buddy?”

“Nothing.”

Simon moved closer, trying to detect any bulge in a pocket or shirt that might hint at the hidden item. Then he saw the drawing on the front of Davey’s shirt, white on black, small skeletons floating in the air. He reached out and grabbed a bit of the cloth.

Davey jumped back. “What are you doing?”

Simon pulled the bottom taut, exposing the words—
DEAD BABIES
. “Where’d you get this?”

The boy looked down at his chest. “I don’t know. I’ve had it for like forever.”

“Mom didn’t buy it for you?”

Davey shook his head. “I buy my own stuff.”

“With our money.”

“What am I supposed to do, get a job to pay for clothes?”

The tone was combative, as so often lately, but Simon wouldn’t take the bait. “A paper route wouldn’t hurt,” he said. “You could earn your spending money.”

“Sorry, Dad, but the only paper in town pays kids three bucks an hour.”

“Plus tips.” Simon stared at the odd expression on the dead babies, as if they were in a blissful state of nonexistence. It wasn’t a gory depiction at all. Still, not appropriate. “I don’t want you wearing that to school.”

The boy kicked the toe of his sneaker into the ground, sending up a clump of grass. “The teachers don’t care. They can’t stop you anyway. It’s like my freedom to wear what I want.”

“Sorry, kiddo, but my responsibility as a parent trumps your freedom of expression. Dead babies aren’t a suitable thing to be wearing on a shirt anywhere, let alone at school. And don’t kick up the grass.”

Davey stopped his foot in midair and set it down again. Then he put his hands on his hips, a provocative little pose. “Can I go now?”

“Sure,” Simon said, and he really was happy at that moment for his son to get out of his sight.

When Amy came through
the front door, he was already pouring wine in the kitchen. “You’re late,” he called into her, “so I started without you.”

She stepped out of her shoes, leaving them in the hallway. “I had to go to an antiviolence workshop in Portland. It ran over.”

He poured the Merlot to the brim, red filling her glass. It was a challenge for him, how high he could go without spilling. “Change anybody’s mind from proviolence to antiviolence?”

She took the glass in two hands and sipped, as if from a chalice. “You should realize by now your sarcasm is useless on me. It just doesn’t stick.”

“That’s why I can be as sarcastic as I want. You don’t take it personally.”

Amy opened the refrigerator and pulled out a celery stalk. She swirled it in her wine, then bit off the end. “Davey upstairs?”

Simon nodded. “You know he’s wearing a T-shirt with dead babies on it?”

She did seem to know. “I think it’s an undead, vampire kind of thing the kids are into. I don’t like it either. Maybe I’ll make it disappear the next time he puts it in
the wash.” She turned onto the side porch and flopped on the wicker sofa. It was detox time.

“So,” Simon said, sitting on the window ledge across from her. That was all he ever needed to say.

“The climax of my day was the tarantula lady. She lives in one of those new monstrosities in Bay Estates. Three thousand square feet just for herself and a dozen tarantulas.”

“She keeps tarantulas?”

“She rescues ones that are injured or deformed. She’s actually quite famous in spider circles. She’s written books on baboon spiders, mouse spiders, bird-eating spiders.”

Simon dipped the tip of his finger in the wine and ran it around the rim of the glass. It was a strangely pleasant sensation. “So why’s she seeing you—a troublesome tarantula?”

“She’s obsessed with observing every little event in her life like it’s deeply meaningful. She’s all wrapped up in memory.”

“That doesn’t sound so serious.”

“It is for her. She never sees the big picture. She thinks her life is an accumulation of minutely analyzed experiences, and she feels compelled to relate every one of them to me.”

Simon yawned at the thought of it. “I don’t know how you can listen to that stuff all day. It’s basically
people saying, ‘Aren’t I a fascinating human being with all of these weird thoughts for you to interpret?’ ”

Amy bit off another piece of wine-soaked celery. “And you know this from what, your nonexistent first-hand experience with treatment yourself?”

“All I know about therapy I learned from you.”

She wiped her lips with her hand. “At the end of the session I stood up, her cue to leave, and she says, ‘I feel like I’m just getting started. I want to go for another hour.’ I said, ‘Let’s keep to our regular schedule.’ She said she’d pay me double. She was desperate to keep talking about herself and I’m thinking, This is your problem, you consume yourself focusing on every stray bit of your life. I tried reasoning with her, I tried coaxing her, I tried being forceful with her, and then I decided that was wrong, I was playing into her, so I picked up the phone. She got the message. She left.”

“Good, you—”

“Wait, that’s not all. I went out to my car, checked my rearview mirror, and there she was, standing right behind me. If I hadn’t looked, I would have run her over.”

Simon thought about the bizarre situation taking shape and the jeopardy Amy had been in. Driving over someone could never be explained, even if the victim was asking for it. “What did you do?”

“I leaned out to talk to her, but she put her hands over her ears. So I hit the horn. She left.”

He hoisted his glass in the air. “Congratulations. You won.”

“Therapy isn’t a power struggle. I’m not supposed to induce anxiety in my patients. She surprised me, and I reacted badly.”

He leaned across the space between them and gave her a kiss on her forehead. “I’m sure you’ll be ready for her next time.”

The message on the postcard
said: “What good are funerals? They offer no solace. If God had all possibilities in His hands at Creation, was Death really the best He could come up with as The End? Faithfully …”

The signature was unreadable. The first letter looked like a ragged
F
or
P
. The rest of the name ran together, a row of inverted
v
’s, like a child’s drawing of waves. Simon turned the card over. G
REAT
S
ALT
L
AKE
was scrolled atop a borderless expanse of water. On the side hung a white bag, thumbnail size, marked G
ENUINE
GSL S
ALT
. He rolled the bag between his fingers as he walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. Amy was at the breakfast table hammering the keys of her laptop. It was her day to enter session notes.

He waited for her to look up. “Do we know anyone who died recently in Salt Lake?”

“I don’t think people drown there. You can almost sit on the water.”

“I meant in the city.” Simon held the card in front of her eyes.

“It does make you think,” she said.

“What?”

“Why God created the kind of death we have out of all the possibilities.”

“Such as?”

“He could have had everyone die at the same age, or everyone die painlessly, or have the dead reappear as spirits to reassure us they’re doing okay on the other side—that one would have been especially nice.”

“Maybe God created all those possibilities in other worlds. We just got the one with frequently painful death and unknown afterlife.”

Amy pointed at the card. “Did you notice, this is addressed to
Master
Simon Howe.”

He looked again. “I haven’t been called Master since my grandmother died and stopped sending me birthday cards.”

Amy reached up and squeezed the bag of salt. “Sending a tourist card from a funeral, that sounds like something one of your cousins would do.”

Simon took the postcard and slid it under the bright yellow fish magnet on the refrigerator, which is where they saved all the odd things they might need later.

He stood in the semicircle
of his reporters and wrote
Story Ideas
on the easel. The black marker squeaked across the paper, leaving a faint grade-school smell. Outside the window Erasmus Hall, Red Paint’s resident harbinger of the apocalypse, shook a fistful of tracts at anyone passing by. “Repent!” filtered through the glass, a scratchy, almost plaintive plea. Erasmus was losing his voice.

A purposeful cough drew Simon’s attention back into the newsroom. “Okay, Barbara,” he said, “anything interesting from the Selectmen this week?”

His editorial assistant stood up and smoothed her black skirt down her legs. “They just faxed over the agenda,” she said. “They’re supposed to debate the town meeting article on the Common improvements, but Jack Harris may show up again and make a fuss about them breaking the open meeting law a couple weeks ago. They had him thrown out last time.”

Simon wrote
Possible Chaos at Selectmen’s Meeting
. “Sign up Ron to go with you in case Harris shows,” he said. “We don’t want to miss a shot of the Selectmen tossing him out the door this time.” Simon turned
toward Joe Armin, a young man with an inch-long pin through his left ear, which he pulled at whenever anyone was looking his way. “How’s the reunion preview going?”

Joe tugged at his ear. “Don’t take this wrong, chief, but your class was wicked dull. All anybody remembers is stealing the school bell and running somebody’s bra up the flagpole. Maybe because it’s been so long nobody can remember anything interesting.”

“It was only twenty-five years ago.”

Joe whistled at the thought of it. “Man, I haven’t even lived that long.”

It was true—no one on the staff except Barbara was within a decade in age of their editor. The paper couldn’t afford to pay for maturity or experience, and why would anyone with either choose to work in Red Paint, Maine? Simon glanced at the railroad station clock jutting from the back wall as he did reflexively a half-dozen times a day, even though time was stuck there at 7:45. A.m. or p.m.? When exactly did time stop at the
Register
?

His gaze returned to the front of the room. “Check with Holly Green over at the bank, Joe. She was president of our class. She’ll come up with some stories. Okay, Ellen, what do you have on the features side?”

A woman in jeans and a sleeveless yellow top straightened in her chair. “I got a call from a woman at 33 Larkspur Drive,” she said, flipping through her
black reporter’s notebook. “Elizabeth Nichols. She says the Virgin Mary appeared in her backyard.”

Ellen laughed a little, as did Simon, but no one else. “I guess none of you was here when she showed up in the freezer frost at Bay Market,” he said. They looked blankly at him, confirming his assumption. “So Ellen, how has Mary chosen to incarnate herself this time?”

The reporter’s face contorted, as if she were imagining herself in the Virgin’s predicament. “She’s sitting in a mound of dirt. The family was putting in a therapeutic spa for their son …” Ellen checked her notes again. “… John. He’s the boy who was paralyzed from the waist down playing football last year. His mother said that yesterday morning she felt something calling to her to look out her bedroom window, and there was the Virgin. She made the workers stop digging right away.”

Donna, the most timid woman who had ever worked for him, raised her hand, which he had made clear was never necessary in his newsroom. He nodded her way. “How does Mrs. Nichols know it’s really the Virgin?” she said in a voice so low everyone had to lean toward her to hear.

“Because,” Ellen said, “she’s been praying to her for help every day since her son’s accident.”

“Q.E.D.,” Simon said, and Ellen laughed a little, his audience of one. “Seems we’re the only skeptics in this bunch.”

Donna raised her hand again and began talking even before he acknowledged her, a big step forward, he thought. “I wrote the story when Johnny got hurt,” she said. “The way his spine was crushed, the doctors didn’t give him a chance. It
was
a miracle he survived.”

“A medical miracle,” Simon said. “But the question is how we treat this supposed appearance of the Virgin Mary now on Larkspur. Do we run a straight story, or do we hint that the whole thing’s a ploy to arouse sympathy and donations?” The young reporters exchanged glances.

“Maybe it’s neither,” Ellen said. “Maybe Mrs. Nichols is just seeing what she wants to see.”

“Can I ask something?” They all turned toward David Rigero, standing against the back wall, his foot on a chair. “I know I’m not a writer or anything, but I was wondering something.”

“Shoot,” Simon said.

Rigero fixed Ellen with his eyes in a way that made her look away. “Is anyone showing up there, like from the local parish?”

“Dozens of people,” she said. “Whole families.”

“So why are people around here looking for miracles in dirt?”

Simon wrote
Red Paint Looking for Miracles
on the easel. “That’s a good angle. Talk to the people making
the pilgrimage to the house, Ellen, find out why they’re going there. And take David with you.”

He decided to see
for himself. Miracles, even imagined ones, didn’t happen very often in Red Paint. He headed for the western side of town by the Bay Loop, the longer route that dipped and curved so much that even drivers familiar with the road kept two hands on the wheel. Off the right-hand side was Red Paint Bay, sparkling blue-green in the late afternoon sun. As a boy it seemed to him like the ocean itself, as big as it was, six miles around.