Six Hours

The sensor on the meadow gatepost woke as they went by it, and said so to no one.

Corinne saw it for half a second in the headlights, a little white plastic rectangle on a gray post, winking its tiny green eye at the passing truck. For deer, he had told her once, in April, in the sun. It winked, and let them pass, and went back to sleep. Somewhere in a kitchen two miles behind them, in a pocket of Pip’s coat, a phone lay dark and silent against eleven keys on a steel ring, and could not be told.

She had expected, she thought, to feel more.

The wind was still enormous. It hit the side of the truck like a thrown wall and the whole cab leaned and recovered, and the wipers fought the rain in long ragged arcs, and the gravel road unrolled in the beams, pale, wet, strewn with branches. The road she had run down barefoot on the nineteenth of September, and bled on. Pip drove it at twenty miles an hour with her face a hand’s breadth from the glass. She had not said a word since the kitchen. Her jaw was set and her eyes were very bright, and one hand, the left, had come off the wheel and gone round behind her to the small of her back and stayed there, pressing.

“Are you hurt?” Corinne said.

“No.”

“Your back.”

“It’s an old operating-room back. It’s nothing.” She took the hand away, as if it had been caught at something. “How are you? Don’t say fine.”

Corinne looked down at her own hands in her lap. They were shaking. She had not noticed. Her teeth had begun to chatter too, small and fast, a purely mechanical sound, like a typewriter in another room, and she could not make it stop. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think I’m — I keep waiting to be glad.”

“It comes later.”

“Does it?”

“For most people.” Pip drove for a while in silence. “Not always the way you think.”

The Pellertons’ barn came up on the right, a black shape against the storm. Pip swung the truck in behind it and killed the engine and the lights, and the noise of the wind rose up around them like water closing over a head. She sat with both hands on the wheel. She reached over, very slowly, and took Corinne’s wrists, both of them, in her long cold fingers, and held them still on her knees until the shaking slowed.

“We change cars,” she said. “I’ll leave this where he’ll find it. Keys in the ashtray. I want him to have to walk a mile and a half in the morning, in that wind, to get his truck, and think about it.”

“He keeps a spare of everything.”

“I know he does. I’m not trying to lock him out, Cor. I’m trying to buy a day.”

* * *

The Subaru started on the second try.

It was warm, in the way a car is warm after you’ve left a flask of tea in it: faintly, and with a smell of old coffee and dog biscuits and the particular green plastic of Pip’s glove box. Pip had left a blanket on the back seat. She’d left a bag of clementines, a paperback, a box of tissues. She had planned it down to the tissues. Corinne looked at the paperback, a mystery with a bloody hand on the cover, and a sound rose in her chest and came out, and was half a laugh.

“You brought something to read.”

“I thought I might have to wait.”

“For how long?”

“A week. I had a hotel in Camden I could have gone back to.” Pip turned the Subaru out of the Pellertons’ yard and onto the lane, and the wipers took up their beating. “I’d decided to give it till Tuesday. And then I was going to come up with a casserole and a crowbar and the sheriff, and see what happened. I’ve been awake since Wednesday.”

“Pip.”

“I know. I’m all right.” She drove with the heater on full. “I have to make a call. I want you to listen, because I’m going to say something that isn’t true, and I want you to know why.”

She stopped at the end of the lane, under a streetlight that wasn’t lit, and took out her own phone and held it a moment in her palm. Then she dialed a number she’d evidently had by heart, and put it to her ear, and sat with her eyes closed, and waited. It rang four times.

“Ned,” said Pip, in a voice Corinne had never heard: tired, warm, a little hoarse, the voice of a woman who has been up all night with a sick child. “It’s Pip Wolcott. I’m so sorry for the hour. Is everything all right at the harbor? Good. Thank God. Emory told me, he told me about the boat, I could hear in his voice what it meant to him. You’d every right to ask him, Ned. Don’t ever think otherwise. I’d have asked him myself.” A pause. “Listen. I need a favor, and I hate to ask. Corinne’s bleeding. She started about an hour ago, quite heavily, and he was off with you and she called me, and I’ve come and fetched her. I’m taking her to Portland, to the Maine Med. Yes. It’s early. It may be nothing. It may not.” Another pause, in which the rain beat on the roof. “No, he doesn’t know. I couldn’t have told him on the radio. He came in so wet and so tired, Ned, I gave him something to sleep. He’s on the kitchen floor in front of the stove. He’ll sleep till midmorning, and when he wakes he’ll be — he’ll want someone there. I wondered if you and Mary would go up at nine and sit with him. Bring one of Mary’s casseroles. I know. I know. Just be kind to him. He’s going to need it.”

She hung up. She sat with the phone in her lap and the engine thrumming.

“I’ve just told the best man in Port Ellis that you’re losing the baby,” she said.

“I know.”

“It’s the only story that explains an empty house. It’s the only one he’ll tell, and everyone will repeat. Whatever he says when he wakes, whatever he thinks he remembers, the whole town will have heard from Dr. Wolcott that Corinne was bleeding on Halloween and was taken to Portland by her friend.” She did not look at Corinne. “I’m sorry. I’m using his own trick against him. The thing he did with Mrs. Dunphy and the casseroles. I’m using the town.”

“Pip. It’s all right.”

“It isn’t. But thank you for saying it.”

They went out onto the road.

* * *

The storm followed them all the way south.

It was past two when they came onto Route 1, and past three when they reached Waldoboro and found it closed by a spruce across both lanes and a fire engine standing in the road with its lights turning blue and white over the wet. A man in a yellow slicker waved them back. Pip said something short under her breath, and swung the Subaru round, and found a way north and west on roads that grew narrower and darker and more flooded the farther they went, past a church and a gas station and a house with every window blazing, powered by a generator, a single square of yellow in a continent of black. Wires hung down across the road. Twice they crept under them with their hearts in their throats, and Pip said, quite calmly, they’re dead, Cor, they’re dead, don’t look at them. Once a tree came down in the road behind them, softly, almost politely, with a long sigh and a slow settling crash, and neither of them said anything.

She had not eaten since noon. Pip produced the thermos, and it was soup, her own chowder with the bacon, warm still; and Corinne drank it out of the lid with both hands, shaking, with the steam going up into her face. It tasted of salt and butter and Sunday afternoons. She ate a clementine. She ate another. She was dimly aware that she was crying, and had been for a while, without a sound, simply letting it run down her face and fall into the lid. Pip drove and did not look at her. After a time she reached across and laid her hand on the crown of Corinne’s head, like a woman steadying a child on a ferry, and kept it there.

They stopped at a twenty-four-hour Irving in Gardiner at ten to four, in a parking lot blown clean of everything but a single flapping tarp. The fluorescent lights buzzed. Pip went in with cash and came out with a plastic bag: ginger ale, saltines, a pair of thick gray socks, two cheap toothbrushes. A phone in its blister pack. Corinne watched her through the glass, in a man’s wool coat, with her wet hair standing in spikes and her shoulders hunched, counting out bills at the counter to a boy with a ring through his lip. She looked like a woman who had come to rob the place and thought better of it.

When Pip got back in she did not start the car.

She sat with the key in her hand. The rain beat on the roof. Under the lights of the pumps the puddles shivered, and the whole lot swam in a dim yellow glare, and for what seemed a long time neither of them spoke.

“Pip,” said Corinne.

“Give me a moment.”

“You don’t have to —”

“Cor. Give me a minute.”

She put both hands over her face. For a moment nothing happened. Then her shoulders began to shake. It started low in the chest, and she tried to hold it, and failed. She made a noise, a harsh, ugly, strangled sound that Corinne had heard only once before in her life, in a hospital corridor, from a stranger who had just been told something; and she folded forward over the wheel and brought her fist down on the dash, once, twice, three times, hard enough to crack the plastic.

“I let him,” she said. “I let him. I let him.”

“Pip —”

“I knew. I knew when he was fourteen. I stood in my own front hall with a trowel in my hand and I knew, and I put the trowel down and I made a cup of tea. For eight years I kept a file. A file, Cor. As though a file were a thing you could do. As though it were an act.” Her voice cracked right across. “I thought, he’s grieving, he’s clever, he’s lonely, he’ll grow out of it. Every doctor in the world has heard that one. I’ve said it myself to the mother of a seven-year-old who set a cat on fire. And that girl, Tessa. That girl. I wrote a check. I wrote a check. And I drove across town with a folder on my knee and sat at that family’s kitchen table with a man in a good suit, and I came home and I sat him down and I said, Em. Look at me. I’m going to fix this. And do you know what he said? He said, Okay.”

She lifted her wet, wrecked face.

“He said okay. And I believed him.”

Corinne reached out in the dim yellow light and took the long cold hand off the dash and held it. It was a surgeon’s hand. A hand that had held so many other people’s hearts, and it lay in hers, thin, trembling, with the knuckles skinned raw.

“You couldn’t have known what he’d do,” she said. “He did it to me too. Pip, listen. I lived with him for six months. I loved him. I slept in his bed, and I didn’t know. I translated him. He sat across a table from me for four months and I read him like a book in a language I thought I knew, and I never saw what was on the page. If you couldn’t, I couldn’t.”

“That’s the part that gets me,” said Pip hoarsely. “That’s the worst part. That you loved him.”

The rain drummed on the roof.

“I should be furious with you,” she said. “I’ve been trying all night. I thought, it will come when I see her. I thought, it will come when I’m on the stairs. A woman who’s my oldest friend, who babysat my son, who I trusted with the key to my house, and she’s — and he’s twenty-three. And what comes instead is the lamp. The lamp, and the lock, and the file. I keep arriving at those, and there isn’t any room for the rest. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I’m not angrier. It’s the one thing in the world you’ve got a right to expect of me, and I can’t find it.”

“I don’t want you to be.”

“I know you don’t. That isn’t what I —” She stopped. She drew a long breath, and held it, and let it out. “Tell me one thing. And tell me the truth. Was it you?”

“Was what me?”

“Who started it.”

It was not a hard question. She had asked it of herself in the dark a hundred times, in the dead hours of the night, with the cedar slats across her window, and she had never once given the answer she believed, because it was neither of the answers a person wished for. She thought about it. She told the truth.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think he did, a long time before I knew. I think he started it when he was fifteen, at a funeral, and I was just the last person to find out. But I let it. I stood at the sink in April and I knew exactly what I was doing, and I did it. I wasn’t tricked. Not that part. I was thirty-eight and I’d been taken apart by a man who took me apart so politely I thanked him for the tools, and Emory looked at me as if there was something in me worth the trouble of looking at. Do you know what that’s like? And it was real, Pip. For me it was real. I need you to know that. And it doesn’t make the rest of it any less —”

“I know.”

“It doesn’t make it any better either.”

“I know,” said Pip. “That’s what frightens me.”

They sat in the yellow light with their hands joined across the gearshift. After a time Pip said, in a small and ordinary voice, as one raising a point of order, “I’ve dropped something on the floor, I think. Is it the thermos lid?” And Corinne laughed, and then began to cry in earnest, and Pip put her arms round her over the gearshift, awkwardly, in two wet wool coats, and the pair of them held on, and rocked, and made noises, in the front seats of a Subaru in the lot of an Irving in the dead middle of a hurricane.

“Is he going to be all right?” Corinne said into her shoulder.

She felt Pip go still.

“I’m sorry. I know what I’m asking. I know. But I’m — he’s on the floor. Under a blanket. He was crying in the boat, Pip, he said so, and he said — and nobody — he’s got nobody. He sat there and he knew what you were doing, and he didn’t pull away.”

“I know he didn’t.”

“Is he going to be all right?”

For a long time Pip said nothing. When she did, it was in the voice of a woman reading out a chart whose figures she could not alter.

“He’s twenty-three years old. I gave him a dose that’s been given to ten thousand adults of his size. He’ll sleep, and wake with a headache and a hole in his night, and he’ll be sick and frightened and utterly sure that something terrible has happened and unable to say what. And then he’ll be himself.” She drew back, wiping her face with her wrist. “You’re asking me whether the man who locked you in a room for eight weeks is going to be all right.”

“Yes.”

“God help you.” She laughed, shakily. “God help us both. So am I.”

* * *

They crossed into New Hampshire at ten to six, in a gray light that had no source.

The rain had stopped somewhere on the Spaulding Turnpike without anyone noticing. It simply wasn’t there any more, and the wind had dropped away behind them with a long exhausted sigh, and the whole sky, from the black road to the first bar of dawn, was open, and clear, and unbelievably wide. Great scoured clouds broke over the hills, tinted at the edges like the inside of a shell. The birches shone. Every leaf in the world seemed to have been torn off and plastered on the road, wet and yellow, like a Persian carpet laid out for a king.

Corinne had been asleep, or nearly. She woke with her cheek against the cold glass and Desmond’s hat over one eye, and sat up, and for a moment did not know what she was looking at.

“What day is it?”

“Saturday. It’s the first of November.”

“It’s stopped.”

“Yes.” Pip’s voice was a thread. “Say something about the weather.”

“It’s —” She looked. She did it properly, as one would for a client. “It’s cleared. It’s going to be cold, I think. There’s a hard light on the water. It’s very clean. It’s going to be one of those perfect, iced, blue days that only come after a thing like this, where you can see every needle on every pine. I think it’s —” Her voice failed her, and came back. “I think it’s a beautiful morning, Pip.”

“Yes,” said Pip. “I think it is.”

The lake lay below them, round a bend, in a bowl of pines: a long sheet of pewter without a ripple. A white birch grew on the shore. A dock ran out into the mist, and on the dock a rowboat had been drawn up and turned over for the winter, and beyond it, among the trees, with a stone chimney and a green tin roof, stood a camp that had been Desmond’s cousin’s and was now, by some process neither woman had ever fully understood, Pip’s. The key was under a flowerpot. It always had been.

Pip turned off the engine and the world was suddenly, thunderingly silent.

“Cor,” she said. “Before we go in. There’s something I have to tell you. It’s going to be hard, and I’m not going to do it in the car, because you’ve had enough of cars. You’ll sleep, and eat, and I’ll make a fire. Then I’m going to tell you what this costs.” She gripped the wheel. “I’d give anything not to have to. I want you to know that I looked for another way. I looked all week.”

“What does it cost?”

“Everything, I think.” She looked at her. Her face in the gray dawn was fifty years old, and thin as paper, and her eyes were the eyes of someone who has kept a long watch. “But not what you think. I’ll tell you by the fire.”

Corinne nodded. She put her hand flat on her stomach, on the green sweater, under the dead man’s coat, the way she had a hundred times in a dark room: out of habit, out of nothing, to let the child know that she was there.

Something moved.

It was very small. It was a flutter, no more, a moth against a windowpane, a bubble rising through water. It came, and went, and came again, a little to the left and lower down, quick, deliberate, delicate as a thought. She held her breath. She did not move a muscle. It came a third time.

“Pip,” she said.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She heard her own voice, thin and unlike her own. “Nothing’s wrong. Pip. She moved.”

For the length of a breath the world held perfectly still, the cold lake, the white birch, the pale and perfect dawn. Then Pip put her head down on the steering wheel and wept, quite quietly, for a long time, with her hand over her mouth, and Corinne put her other hand over it, and the two of them sat there, side by side, with the baby between them turning over and over in the dark like a swimmer coming up for air.

Neither of them spoke of the man on the kitchen floor.

But he was in the car with them, all the way up, in the long silent minutes: patient, clean, and kind. And as the first sun came over the hills and laid a bar of gold across the lake, Corinne thought of the last thing he had said, in the language that was not his, in the voice that was so soft; and she knew, as one knows a word in a foreign tongue before one has ever looked it up, that it had not been a promise at all.

It was a forecast.