Ordinarily, she would have shooed Mister off the couch, but tonight she lets the dog stay beside Collie. She goes on, to the sun porch where her father slept when he was ill, after he came home with his tail between his legs. Ruth has made up a cot, but she didn’t have time to hang the curtains she’d sewn when the porch was last used as a bedroom. Moonlight falls into the room and spills across the wooden floorboards. Dan Solomon had left Ruth for another woman, but in the end, he found his way back; he asked to be taken in after an absence of more than ten years, and Ruth couldn’t deny him, even though her daughters thought she was crazy.
He was my husband, Ruth said, and there was no arguing that. She nursed him through his cancer as though he’d never hurt her, and if she’s ever regretted the choices she’s made, she’s never mentioned it aloud. Jorie, however, had been far more wary when her father returned. The first time she saw him again after so many years apart, she thought she’d want to strike him, that’s how angry she was at what he’d done to their family. But he was so very changed, by illness and regret, that she’d hugged him instead, although what she feels about him she still can’t quite make out.
Jorie sits cross-legged on the cot where her father slept during his illness. It seems as though a lifetime has passed since she’s last lived in this house. She thinks of Ethan, who would be lying on his cot at this very moment, staring at the ceiling of his cell. a bumpy plaster that was painted pale green. He always told her he couldn’t sleep right withour her, and on those few occasions when they’d been separated—a fishing trip for him, a three-day weekend in Puerto Rico for her when Charlotte’s marriage was in its final last-gasp stages—Ethan told her he’d slept in a chair. A bed without her was not worth getting into, that’s what he’d said, and sleep was a foreign country without her hand to hold.
Well, she can’t sleep either, and it isn’t because they’re apart. She’s kept awake by moonlight, and perhaps it’s the glint of that silver light that makes Jorie go to what had long ago been her father’s bookshelf. She takes down a leather-bound atlas and props up the book on her father’s old desk, where he had faithfully paid the bills each month when she and Anne were little, before he went away. Now there are pots of begonias and curly ferns on the desk, but still there is room enough to open to the map of Maryland and trace the route she plans to take. She wants to see for herself what sort of place can make a man turn and run so fast and so hard that he’d lose himself as he traveled, with pieces of his history falling like leaves, until he was empty enough to be brand-new, like a man dropped to earth from the farthest reaches of the moon, with silver light running through his veins, where there should have been blood.
Three
Dreamland
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, THE FIELDS IN this part of Maryland were yellow, burned and discolored by a season of unusual heat, but now, in the first week of August, they are sweet and green, rich with corn and soybeans and millet. Out here on the Eastern Shore, two hours from Baltimore and half an hour past the Bay Bridge, the old roads buckle in the summertime. Late in the afternoon, when the air becomes cooler, a person can smell the tide upon approaching the marshes past Blackwater. When Jorie stops for gas, she stands beside the rented car in the fading light and tries to get her bearings. The landscape is one she’s not accustomed to, with bits of extreme beauty peeking out from between asphalt and billboards. Beyond the gas station, for instance, lies a stretch of wild rice, golden and blooming riotously in the damp, brackish soil.
I could move to this place right now and nobody would know who I was and what I was leaving behind, Jorie thinks to herself as she pays the attendant and gets a Pepsi from the soda machine. She holds the ice-cold can to her forehead and blinks in the sharp light. I could tell people anything I wanted to, and whatever I told them, that would be the truth as far as they were concerned. Whoever I said I was, well then, that’s who I ’d be.
Jorie gets directions and heads out. It’s been a long while since she’s been anywhere on her own, and she has a nervous, prickly sensation up and down her spine. What would happen if she never returned? Anne is the only one who knows where she is, a necessity in case of an emergency. But Anne is disorganized and may already have lost the sheet of paper with the vitals written down- - time of departure, time of arrival, the name of the town that is Jorie’s destination. With no husband and no child to accompany her, Jorie feels oddly light, as if she could float away through the open car windows; the breeze catches her pale hair so that it flies everywhere and is quickly tangled into knots. She thinks warmly of the vacations she and Charlotte used to take when they were young, always staying at third-rate motels, whether on the shore in Rhode Island or up in Maine, weeks when they ate fast food, and stayed up all night, and had a ridiculously wonderful time. It astonishes Jorie to think of how young they were, how hopeful and free. Amazing where your life can deposit you before you know it. One, two, three, and you’re on a completely different road than the one you’d always expected to be on at this point in your life. There is no compass when such things happen, no rules and no maps to guide you, and no one who cares if the sun is glaring or if the asphalt is melting beneath your tires.
As Jorie drives on, loblolly pines edge the road and cast shadows across the thickening air. She turns on the radio for company, but the southern twang of the voices and the chords of a sorrowful country song only serve to sharpen her loneliness. At the turnoff to Holden there’s a stretch of cordgrass that is nearly eight feet tall, and Jorie can hear the call of birds from within the reeds. As she gets closer to town, she can’t help but wonder if Ethan had driven down this very same road fifteen years ago, and if, as he’d passed by the marshes, he’d noticed the wild cherry and sweet gum trees.
Although she’s exhausted from traveling, Jorie finds the Black Horse Hotel easily enough: it’s the only hotel in town, far less busy than the Econo Lodge she passed before she stopped for gas. The building is framed by tall white pillars and there is a set of gray stone steps, swept clean every morning. Inside, the lobby is cool without benefit of air-conditioning. There’s a restaurant that looks decent, and a bar called the Horseshoe. The woman behind the desk is pretty and lively, the sort of woman Ethan might have dated if he’d stayed in this town instead of traveling north to New England, instead of running as fast as he could.
“You look like you need a good night’s rest,” the desk clerk says cheerfully as Jorie signs in.
Jorie feels a little guilty about using Anne’s credit card, but with Ethan no longer working and so many bills to pay, she is frighteningly low on funds. With unexpected generosity, Anne had shoved the MasterCard into Jorie’s hands. Go on and enjoy it, Anne had told her as she left for the airport. Trent will be the one paying the bill, so honey, live large. They’d laughed as they’d imagined Trent’s distress upon seeing the charges, but as Jorie signs her sister’s name on the register, she wonders if she isn’t committing some punishable offense. Perhaps this simple act would be considered forgery or grand larceny; still, it’s the only way she can pay the bill, so from now on she is Anne Lyle. In truth, she’s more comfortable under the cloak of her sister’s identity. It’s as though she has discarded herself somewhere between Baltimore and the Bay Bridge, and has become the sort of woman who uses falsified ID and spends nights alone in a hotel, the sort of woman whose husband is sitting in a jail cell hundreds of miles away with no idea of where she is and when she’ll be home.
Her room is nice and clean, with a down quilt on the bed and a hand-hooked rug ringed with flowers, which covers most of the wide, pine floorboards. Sheer curtains frame a view of town hall across the street, a brick building fronted by glossy magnolias. There’s air-conditioning up here, but Jorie doesn’t bother with it. She opens the window and breathes deeply: she wants to know what it feels like to be in Holden in the summertime. The damp scent of evening falling, the heavy August air, the song of the red-winged blackbirds, alighting in the fields around town by the thousands, to feed
on wild rice and fight for their territory.
After she’s settled in, Jorie orders room service, choosing a house salad with vinaigrette dressing along with a steak sandwich and fries. Once the food arrives, she finds she’s ravenous. And she’s equally tired; soon after she’s caten, she falls asleep on the bed in her clothes, shoes still on, desperate for rest, even though the sky is still light in the farthest corners and the hour isn’t much later than nine. On this night, Jorie dreams that Ethan is with her, beside her in the hotel bed, his face close to hers. He is so handsome that she is blinded, and for an instant she’s unable to make out her own husband’s features. He leans closer, and although she cannot really see him, she can feel his warm breath, as well as the catch in her stomach as her desire for him rises, the way it always does when he’s near.
Who did you think I was? he whispers to Jorie in her dream.
He gets out of bed and walks to the window. He moves the filmy curtains aside, then turns back to smile at her. She wants him so completely she’s tied up in knots, yet when she tries to speak, she finds she cannot say one word, nor can she leave her bed and go to him. She can only watch as he steps beyond the curtains and casts himself out the window, like a bird who has longed to be free, disappearing from view so quickly that when Jorie finally struggles from the tangled bedsheets to look for him, there is nothing to see in the hot, pallid air. Anything a man might leave behind, footprints and fingerprints alike, have vanished, and the clothes he wore have unraveled into a pile of white cotton thread.
Jorie awakens the following morning with a terrible headache. Her feet hurt from sleeping in her shoes, her mouth is parched, and she rises from bed with her dream still around her, a foggy halo that nags at her. She showers and dresses, then phones her mother’s house, as she’d told Anne she would, to check in on Collie. Collie’s fine. or so Anne says, and Jorie will just have to take her sister’s word for it, since Collie himself won’t come to the phone. He’s too tired, he’s still half asleep, he has nothing to say. No matter how Anne tries, he cannot be convinced or cajoled into speaking to his mother, and this isn’t like Collie.
“He’s so angry,” Jorie says.
“So is every twelve-year-old boy.” Anne tells her. “At least yours has a right to be angry. Stop worrying about Collie. Gigi’s going to take him and that strange little girlfriend of his down to the lake. They can cool off and eat the picnic lunch I’m sending along with them- -peanut butter, pickles, and pink lemonade. Remember? We used to think it was a sure cure for just about everything.”
Jorie does indeed recall that she and Anne used to fix that exact picnic nearly every day after their father left them. It was the only summer when they spent any amount of time together, and now it comes back to her, how they used to walk to Lantern Lake, the long way around, past the old orchards that grew spicy russets and buttery Keepsake apples, along with Mclntoshes and Macouns. It was the only time they had ever felt close to each other, gorging on that wretched menu no one else would have cared to eat, wanting only what was salty and sour to ease their pain.
Jorie knows Anne is taking good care of Collie, yet for what is perhaps the thousandth time, she wonders if she’s done the wrong thing in leaving her boy. She cannot imagine he will understand that this trip was hardly a matter of choice for her. How could she ever be sure this place existed if she hadn’t flown to Baltimore, and rented a midsize car, and followed her map of the Eastern Shore? She needed to do these things, just as she needed to sleep in this hotel bed and dream her terrible dream, and wake on this sunny morning in Holden, Maryland.
Most people look inside to know what they feel, but Jorie has nothing left inside anymore. The truths by which she has lived her life have evaporated, leaving her empty of everything except the faint blue static of her own skepticism. She has never been a person to question herself; now she questions everything. Yes, she is looking out the window at town hall as she sips the coffee room service has brought her, but mightn’t that vista—the knobby gray stone building, the lustrous trees and wrought-iron benches—just as casily be a moonscape? Magnolias don’t grow on the moon and red-winged blackbirds don’t fly there, or so she has always been told. Yet how does she know that for sure? Where are the documents, the photographs, the hard and fast proof? In a matter of weeks, Jorie has become a disbeliever in just about everything, including herself She, who took people at their word and always trusted her own instincts, is now a woman who wants only facts, black ink on paper, eyewitness accounts.
As soon as the clock on the night table is at nine on the dot, Jorie leaves the hotel to go across the street. It’s another hot day, and she’s already overheated by the time she finds her way to the department of records. The woman behind the desk, busy with some mail and muttering to herself, ignores Jorie, until Jorie asks to see a death certificate. The clerk, a local woman named Nancy Kerr, who’s never lived anyplace but Holden and has never wanted to, is suddenly interested. Nancy is a few years younger than Jorie. with dark curly hair and a no-nonsense demeanor. She’s the person folks in Holden come to when they want to complain about something, and after a few years at the job, most of the soft edges she once had have been eradicated.
“Whose death in particular?” When Nancy hears the name Rachel Morris, she shakes her head. “Poor thing.” For an instant, Nancy almost seems like the girl she once was, vulnerable and casily wounded, long before she got divorced and took on this job in order to raise her daughter. But that reverie doesn’t last. Nancy gives Jorie the once-over, and as she does, her face takes on a clouded cast. “You’re not a reporter, are you?”
“I’m just interested in the case. I’m trying to figure out what happened.”
“I can tell you exactly what happened. Somebody killed Rachel fifteen years ago, and now they caught the fellow, up in Massachusetts. You can read all about it in the papers.”
“Well, I thought I’d start by taking a look at whatever files you had.”
“And the reason I should do this for you would be?”
“It’s a personal matter.”
“Really.”
They look at each other and Jorie realizes Nancy Kerr had probably gone to school with Rachel Morris. Shed probably grown up right alongside her.
“You sound like you’re from Massachusetts, so I’m guessing it’s pretty damned personal.” Nancy is smart and she’s not afraid to speak her mind, but she’s had a rough week, with her daughter in bed with a stomach irus. All the same, she finds herself being won over by the fact that Jorie’s eyes are glassy, the sure sign of a woman who’s a stranger to a good night’s sleep, much as Nancy is herself. Perhaps this is the reason Nancy Kerr goes to a file cabinet and comes back with a folder. “Well, now I know I’m crazy. I just hope I’m not going to regret this as much as I do everything else in my life,” she says as she hands over the information.
When Jorie opens the file and sees the death certificate, she feels dazed, almost as though she’s been blinded somehow. She has to sit down, quickly folding herself into one of the hard plastic chairs, each of which has a desktop conveniently attached. Here are the papers, right in front of her. Here is a photograph that doesn’t even seem like a human form. Well, this is what she wanted, isn’t it? She had to know the official cause of death, had to see it in black and white, and now she has the coroner’s report in her hands. She forces herself to go over how the internal bleeding was caused by trauma, how the skull was cracked, leaving fragments of bone lodged in the brain. What she finds hardest to read are the simplest of facts: the color of the deceased’s eyes, green, and of her hair, red as roses, and the grievous information offered by a crude sketch of the birthmark at the base of the girl’s spine, a plum-colored blemish in the shape of a butterfly
When Nancy Kerr sees how pale Jorie is, her skin turning to ice on this summer day, she comes over and pulls up a chair. Nancy hadn’t planned to be helpful, but the mention of Rachel Morris’s name has opened her heart. Up close, she not
ices that Jorie has written down the address of the Morris farm.
“He won’t talk to you, if that’s what you’re planning,” Nancy tells Jorie.
“He?” Luckily, Jorie has her trusty map in the car, for the address is a rural route east of town, out past a series of inlets and ponds. She thinks of butterflies and birthmarks, and of a sorrow so deep a person would have to dig with a shovel and a spade all night long just to reach its outermost edges.
“Rachel’s brother, James. You can forget about it. He won’t see you if you go out to the house. There were a lot of reporters hanging around when it happened, and some awful people with their own agendas, psychics who didn’t have a clue and such. Everybody was looking to get their names in the papers. It wasn’t more than a few years before Joe and Irene, Rachel’s parents, both died, one after the other, the way people do when they don’t want to live anymore. After that, James stopped talking to people. Especially reporters and lawyers. Now they’re back, like flies. And even if that’s not what you are, there’s no way he’s going to see you. Unless you give me one good reason to try and talk him into it.”
“I know the person who’s been accused.” Jorie’s face tilts upward, as if she half-expects to be slapped. “So I’m involved, whether I like it or not.”
“And you don’t like it.”
“No.” Jorie closes the file on the Morris girl. She has already memorized most of the words within. “I hate it.”
Some people say Nancy Kerr is too soft-hearted for her own good once you get past her tough exterior. Certainly, it’s not easy for her to turn down someone in trouble. Nancy takes a hard look at Jorie, then heads over to the phone and dials; she speaks in a hushed tone for a few moments, then signals to Jorie.