The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(51)

“Do you remember back in Maine when we were talking about the people who would be on your list . . . you know . . .” He was nodding, and she continued. “Do you remember you mentioned Madison Brown?”

“I don’t really remember,” Richard said. “But I’m not surprised I named her. Are you and her still best friends?”

“Oh, no,” Joan said, shaking her head a little. “Not since the summer. It turns out—no big surprise—that she is a terrible person.”

Richard shrugged and raised his eyebrows.

“Right,” Joan said. “Go ahead and say it: No duh.”

“You said it, not me.” Richard thought it was like no time had passed at all since they had last talked, in another library, in another state. “What did she do to you?”

“I thought she was my best friend, but now all she cares about is popularity. She’s been talking behind my back.” Richard must not have responded properly, because she added, “No, really. She is awful. I realize that now.”

Richard nodded, then said, “No duh.”

Joan smiled. “So what I was thinking,” she said. “Is that you and I could team up again and do something about it.”





Chapter 22





Kimball


The following day, back in Cambridge, I received Elizabeth Grieve’s two books of poetry. Her debut was called Variations on a Theme. She had won a first-book contest from a small university press, and there was a glowing blurb on the back by the judge of the contest, saying that the book “heralded a stunning new voice that will challenge readers’ notions of how a poem is even created.”

I did my best to erase that sentence from my mind as I read the poems, some of which I quite liked, and some of which read to me like products of poetry workshops—free verse, present tense, the speaker of the poem obviously the poet herself—and if that sounds like bitter criticism coming from an unpublished poet such as myself, I imagine it is. My favorite poem in the collection was the title poem, which was quite funny, a long list of lines all playing on the famous quote, “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” There was also a rather touching poem called “Wild Hospital Nights,” about her bout with cancer, and how a nurse had given her a book of poems by Emily Dickinson.

Sea Oat Soup was a chapbook printed by a letterpress printer, the image on the cover a line drawing of a dissected horseshoe crab. These poems were slightly different from the ones in her debut. They were more surreal, none of them were about cancer, and they seemed to coalesce around a theme, although all I could tell you of that theme was that it was the intersection between the ocean and a lot of sexual imagery. The penultimate poem was the one that interested me the most. I read it three straight times.

Tides

Kennewick, 1999

I came because I was told to, to wind-combed knolls and marshy views, to tidepools crammed with crabs as brittle as the dollparts

clicking in my mind.

You came here too . . .

LUCKY LUCKY ME . . .

a blue-lipped daughter of a blue-lipped man

who took my hand

and showed it to the briny stench and sea-salt of a slack tide.

I left some knucklebones

behind—they must be white as scallop shells by now. My parents left behind an ovulating daughter,

all rotten beachplums on the vine,

and my sister, just turned the tender age of murderers, went swimming past the breakers with a boy, and came back all alone,

while seabirds circled overhead for what’s been killed

and left between the ocean and its edge.



Kennewick was in southern Maine, a vacation spot split up into several sections. Kennewick Harbor. Kennewick Beach. Kennewick Center. I was familiar with it because, as a child, my family would go on vacations at the nearby town of Wells. I was also familiar with Kennewick because it was where Ted Severson and his wife, Miranda, had been building a summer house when Ted was killed in the South End of Boston.

But what really interested me about the poem was the stanza devoted to the speaker’s sister. And by speaker, I meant Elizabeth Grieve because this was clearly a confessional poem that had reimagined an actual event. It had even been dated. I assumed that calling her sister a murderer and mentioning a boy who drowned was all metaphorical, but I jumped onto my computer anyway, began to research drownings in Kennewick during the year 1999. I didn’t find anything, but I did find a drowning that had happened in the year 2000. A teenage boy named Duane Wozniak had gone swimming late at night from the Kennewick jetty and drowned. The article mentioned the girl he’d been swimming with had alerted the hotel staff at the Windward Resort, where he’d been staying. The name of the girl hadn’t been stated. It bothered me a little bit that the drowning had happened in the year 2000 when the poem had specified 1999, but I wrote poetry myself, and my guess was that Elizabeth Grieve changed the date because 1999 looked better on the page than 2000, which still sounded to me, and maybe to her as well, like a science-fiction date.

I found one follow-up article on the drowning and it said that Duane had been staying for a month at the resort with his parents, Pat and Evelyn Wozniak, of West Hartford, Connecticut, and his cousin, Richard Seddon, from Middleham, Massachusetts. I searched for a Richard Seddon from Middleham but didn’t find anything else besides that one mention. But the name was familiar to me, and on a whim I went to my closet and got out the cardboard box again where I’d stored that part of my life. There was a pristine copy of the Middleham-Dartford yearbook from 2003 that had been sent to me by Maureen, my department head. I flipped through the graduating seniors and there he was, Richard Seddon, in three-quarters profile. Thick black hair and a face like a blade. He was borderline handsome, but I knew he’d been a bit of an outcast, an odd kid, tall and skinny, who kept to himself.