The River at Night(9)
Sandra stared at the red dots as she gnawed on the black licorice she’d bought at the gift shop. “This can’t be real.”
“Afraid it is,” said one of the women in green. “My best friend’s sister and her new husband died on their wedding day in 1973, right after the ceremony on their way to the reception. Boom, like that. Gone. But it was fall, you know, rutting season. Moose are crazy then.” She let go a creepy laugh. “One whiff of something good, and they just tear across the road, don’t look both ways!”
“Jesus Christ,” Rachel said under her breath as she walked around a nine-foot monster plastic moose in the middle of the room, its antlers grazing the twelve-foot ceiling.
“You’ll be fine,” the woman said. “It’s summer. Just keep your eyes out.”
I trailed behind as Sandra, Pia, and Rachel burst out of the building, howling and wisecracking about rutting season and two-ton mammals hurtling across highways for hot moose action. As we settled back into the car, it occurred to me that we were already dressed for this new world. Rachel in her red fleece vest, multipocketed hiking shorts, and ankle-high boots; Sandra in her purple Patagonia jacket; Pia outfitted head to toe in REI’s finest. Already I sensed a profound separation from the normal, even from the people we had been that very morning in my cozy apartment in Boston.
A thought came to me that I couldn’t force away: What we are wearing is how we’ll be identified out in the wilderness. This middle-aged woman in this blue jacket, these nylon pants, these Timberland boots. I noticed for the first time a small zipper on my new hiking shirt and counted three cunningly hidden pockets, one on either side of my waist and one on my sleeve, where I could put things like keys, or maybe a note telling someone what had happened to us. I imagined what I might say, if I’d be able to conjure anything profound. All I knew was that no one expected us home for five days, and no one I knew expected to hear from me at all.
5
After Portland, where the rocks in the bay at low tide looked like slumped-over bodies, the miles seemed to fall away more quickly behind us. Green became the rule, man-made structures the exception. Trees shot up taller somehow, sprouted thickly even in the median strip, creating a forest there just as lush as the one rushing by on our right. Trucks roared past us groaning with the incomprehensible weight of hundreds of massive logs. I thought longingly of the outlets in Kittery we’d blown by, all the charming B&Bs in the Yorks and Ogunquit. Rachel googled “northernmost Starbucks in Maine,” mumbling something about stopping there for “one last latte.” Sandra did her best to hold on to NPR, but we lost even that around Lewiston.
Pia drove with her steady intensity, refusing all offers to pitch in behind the wheel. We drove through tiny, eerie towns, each with its own weather-beaten church. Bradley, Old Town, -Olamon, LaGrange. Hand-scrawled signs said things like CONNECT TO GOD ANYTIME, NO BROADBAND NEEDED. Five-or six-headstone cemeteries, sometimes oblong or even triangle-shaped, perched on the crests of hills or overlooked rushing streams, providing for the dead some of the best real estate around. We passed trailer parks with no name: just half a dozen metal lumps clustered together as if for warmth or safety. Snowplows, firewood, and boats lay scattered on front lawns, apparently for sale. Real estate signs announced 30,000 ACRES AVAILABLE NOW—with no phone number—while immense barns imploded slowly on abandoned lots. One house we approached looked kempt and tidy, as though some happy person lived there and enjoyed the upkeep, but as we passed and looked back, we saw a nightmare of rotted frame and plastic sheeting, hastily duct-taped and flapping in the breeze. A woman in a housecoat and backless slippers stood on a weed-sprung driveway and stared at us, arms crossed hard.
For miles we found ourselves stuck, cursing, behind a guy driving a rust-bucket flatbed stacked high with unnamable farm machinery, tools that threshed and cut and hoed, and what looked like an exploded washing machine dangling over one side. Each time we tried to pass, he’d swerve to the left and cut us off, disgorging a clanging engine part or length of pipe that Pia masterfully navigated around. Finally he hooked a crazy fast right onto an unpaved road, fishtailing in a cloud of red dirt. The last we saw of him was his fist waving out the window before he disappeared into deep woods.
The wind picked up as the day cooled from T-shirt to long-sleeve weather. It seemed intent on muscling our car into the other lane, whipping big clouds full of personality across a bright blue sky. A wooden cross and withered roses marked a death at the side of the road. I wondered who had died there, and if anyone still thought of them.
Surrounded by the comforting presence of my friends, I let myself think about Richard; how he still haunted the apartment. Half-awake each morning I would reach for him across the bed, only to find a terrible emptiness. As I gazed out the window at all the green rushing past, I tried to picture what he might be doing at that moment. Perhaps locking up after office hours at school; he’d done his time and gotten tenure, had been able to stomach academia where I could not. Or maybe he was busy trying to get the new grad-school girlfriend pregnant. After three miscarriages, I’d given up on trying to save our marriage with kids. It seemed as if anything made of Richard and me could not take hold in my barren body. When does hope turn into masochism? We ended up getting dogs, big ones that died in a decade, less, then turned to cats, which broke our hearts only slightly less often.