Here on Earth (21 page)

“We’re going out to dinner at Dimitri’s. It’s not exactly a crime.” And yet March must feel it is, since she’s so busy defending herself.

“Fine,” Gwen says. “It’s none of my business.”

She knows her mother lies about where she goes.
Whatever
, Gwen thinks to herself when her mother says she has an errand to run or that she’s going out with Susie. Sure, at
this time of night, my mother’s going food shopping.
That’s what she’d tell Minnie if the two of them still spoke on the phone.
Like I believe it. Like I believe anything she says.

Hank knows about them too. God, how could he not? Once, he was waiting for her at the end of the driveway when she came to visit Tarot. He insisted they walk to school early, right then, and he had a funny look on his face, as if he felt sorry for her. Gwen glanced at the house then and realized the Toyota was parked there. March had spent the night, and Gwen hadn’t even known. She’d just assumed her mother was still sleeping when she’d left the house at five-fifteen.

Another time, she saw them when she took Sister for a walk. They were in the driveway, parked in his truck. Gwen had looked away as quickly as she could, but she’d seen her mother kissing him. She’d seen March’s head tilted back and her mouth open. After that, Gwen had run all the way back to the porch, but it was too late; she’d already witnessed too much.

“You’re making a big deal out of nothing,” March says as they drive toward town.

“Look, you don’t have to explain anything to me. It’s your life.”

Gwen slinks down farther in her seat and looks out her window. The trick-or-treaters are out in full force, wandering up and down the High Road and Main Street dressed as ghosts and ballerinas and Ninjas. It’s as if the children have taken over; they’re everywhere, crossing streets and lawns, running through the darkness with flashlights and bags filled with candy.

“Thanks for the ride,” Gwen says when they pull up to Chris’s house, and she gets out before her mother can say anything more. What a relief to be walking up the path to the party. There’s already a crowd inside, and a pile of coats in the front hall. The music is turned up so high that the bass vibrates through the walls and into Gwen’s skin.

“Finally,” both Chris and Lori shout when Gwen comes into the kitchen, where Chris’s mom is mixing up a punch recipe which includes orange soda and grapefruit juice. The girls are all in black—everyone is supposed to be dressed accordingly for this event—and Chris sports a black witch’s wig over her blond hair.

“You look fabulous,” Lori tells Gwen.

“You think so?” Gwen says uncertainly. She has to learn to take a compliment. She has to stop being so uptight.

Chris’s mom finishes the refreshments, then retires to the den, since she’s promised to give them “space” for this party. As soon as she’s gone, the guy Lori’s started dating, Alex Mahoney, takes out a fifth of vodka and doctors the punch. Everyone’s laughing about how plastered they plan to get, except for Gwen, who’s too busy watching Hank come in through the back door. His face is flushed from the raw weather and there are leaves in his pale hair. He’s wearing a threadbare black overcoat—one of Hollis’s castoffs, no doubt—jeans, and a clean white shirt. Gwen knows him—he ironed the shirt himself; he was careful and thorough and that’s why he’s late. Standing here, in this crowded kitchen, she could not love him more.

“Here you go, old boy,” Alex greets Hank. handing over a glass of the punch. “This should do the trick.”

Hank grins, but he puts the glass on the table, and heads straight for Gwen. He bends down so he can whisper.

“You look beautiful.”

“Thanks,” Gwen says. She actually does it. She accepts a compliment. If she can do that, anything can happen. Tonight feels like the night of her dreams. She wraps her arms around Hank and knows that he’s the one. She cannot remember being happier than when she is dancing with him, or when she perches on the arm of a couch to watch him play darts. By midnight, Gwen is ready to leave, so they can go up to Olive Tree Lake and be alone. Anyway, the group who’ve gotten plastered from the spiked punch are getting somewhat obnoxious. It’s definitely time to leave.

“You know what we should do next?” Lori’s new boyfriend, Alex, is saying. “Go down to the Marshes.”

“Oooooh.”

Someone is making spooky noises. A girl laughs, but it’s a short, trumpeting sound.

“Seriously,” Alex says. “We’ll bring a few cherry bombs.”

“Smoke out the Coward?” another boy guesses.

“Oh, yeah. Like you’d have the guts,” Chris teases.

Several people laugh now.

“Let sleeping cowards lie,” one of them suggests.

Gwen is listening to all this, disgusted, but when she turns to Hank to discuss how sophomoric these guys are, he’s gone. She looks in the kitchen and in the hall. Nothing.

“Have you seen Hank?” she asks Lori, and anyone else she recognizes, but the answer is always no. Gwen has a panicked feeling. It’s as if, while she wasn’t looking, everything’s gone wrong. She grabs her coat and heads outside. What would it mean if he left her at the party and took off? How could it be that he’s already halfway down the block, black coat flapping out behind him?

Gwen runs after Hank, and when she catches up to him she hits him in the back, right between the shoulder blades.

“How could you do that to me?” she cries when he spins to face her. Gwen should be embarrassed, there are tears in her eyes, but she’s not. “Is that how you treat someone you care about? You go and leave them?”

Hank’s face is pale, and it’s not easy to read his expression on this dark street, but all at once, Gwen realizes she’s not the only one who’s crying.

“What is it?” Gwen says. “What’s wrong?”

“The Coward,” Hank says. “The guy in the Marshes they wanted to smoke out? That’s my father.”

They walk through town in silence. There are a few stray trick-or-treaters ringing doorbells, but most have gone home to bed. A quarter-moon has risen, but the night is unusually dark. Hank keeps his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, and he walks fast, so that Gwen has to trot to keep up with him. Forsaking their original plans, they do not go to Olive Tree Lake—where many of the couples from the party have already trekked, looking for privacy and romance. Instead, they start for the hill.

“It’s not your fault that Alan is your father,” Gwen says.

Hank smiles, but he doesn’t look happy. “Yeah? Then why do I feel like it is?”

“Maybe he’s not as bad as everybody says.”

Hank clearly doesn’t want to discuss this. He speeds up his pace and they walk on in silence, an unusual and lonely condition for the two of them to find themselves in. When the house on Fox Hill is in sight, Hank backs off.

“I’m tired,” he says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

So much for Gwen’s perfect night. It’s been ruined; it’s been murdered. There is no way she’s going home now.

“Go ahead, if that’s what you want,” she tells Hank. “I’m not afraid to check out the Marshes.”

Gwen turns and takes off, not thinking of how rash her decision is; not certain, in fact, of where it is she’s going.

“Hey, wait a second,” Hank shouts. “Wait up. You can’t go there.”

But it’s too late; she’s in motion. Gwen is running in the direction she believes leads to the Marshes. She can hear Hank calling her, but she’s too upset and angry to stop. The sound of her breathing is filling up her head and she can hear things flying from tree to tree; she hopes that they’re birds and not bats. She heads east, or what she thinks of as east; she’s surprisingly fast when she puts her mind to getting where she wants to go.

Gwen hears Hank calling, but she doesn’t stop, not until the trees begin to thin out. The grass is taller here, and there’s the smell of salt. In the moonlight, everything is silver. An owl glides over an inlet, without warning, without a sound. The silver grass moves in the wind; where Gwen walks, it’s waist-high and she has to be careful to avoid the places where the mud seems deepest. People can sink so deeply into this bog they disappear forever, or at least that’s what Lori has told her.

It’s extremely quiet here. Sound dissolves. Why, Gwen can hear her own heartbeat. Behind her and in front of her is a sea of grass. The few trees which grow here are huge oaks, and some stringy pines. You can smell the pine if you breathe deeply. If you listen carefully, you can hear past the silence to the echo of something moving. All around are fiddler crabs, traversing the mud in the moonlight. Luckily, it’s low tide, or Gwen would be sloshing through knee-deep water. Instead, she has to make her way over the crabs, tentatively, trying to avoid crushing them.

Hank comes up behind her, and grabs her with such force that Gwen almost loses her balance.

“Are you crazy?” His breathing is ragged from running. His jaw is pulsating. “You don’t just wander around in the Marshes. This isn’t a joke.”

Gwen throws her arms around him. What will she do if she ever loses him? How would she ever survive?

“I’m sorry about your father,” she whispers.

“There’s the place they want to bomb,” Hank says now. “His house.”

Gwen steps away to look in the direction Hank nods toward. Two big, old apple trees are all she sees; that, and the moonlit grass.

“Behind the trees,” Hank says.

When Gwen squints she can make out the tumbledown house. That’s a porch. An old gate. A railing.

“I want to see it,” she says. “Let’s go closer.”

“No,” Hank says. “He’ll hear us if we go closer.”

“I don’t care if he does.”

Gwen looks at Hank. If he tells her not to, if he tries to boss her around, something between them will be over. She didn’t realize this, but now she knows it to be true. Thankfully, he doesn’t. He stays there and waits while Gwen navigates through the marsh grass and the scratchy sea lavender.

The water has begun to rise, enough so that Gwen can feel how cold it is through the soles of her boots. Funny thing, there’s a garden gate in front of the house, but no fence. All you have to do is scoot around the gate, and make your way past the apple trees, then past some old blackberry bushes and over a cluster of raspberry canes. Maybe the fruit here was planted by Aaron Jenkins, the Founder, or maybe blackbirds dropped seeds down from the sky which managed to sprout in spite of the sandy soil. Either way, the bushes are now an overgrown warren, occupied by sparrows and rabbits and evil-tempered raccoons.

Gwen has to do this, go past the bushes and continue on. She refuses to be the kind of girl who gets scared off easily, whose opinion echoes her boyfriend’s, who can’t stand up for herself. She’ll be damned if she ends up like her mother, ready to do anything, even lie, for a man. All the same, Gwen is shivering as she walks up to the house. She doesn’t have to look back to know that Hank is watching her. She concentrates, trying to stop her heart from beating so fast.

As she gets closer she notices scattered glass, the remnants of windows broken by boys from town. The porch steps sag, but Gwen goes up them anyway. She looks through the window nearest the door, but it’s difficult to see inside. She can make out a table and chairs, some blankets on the floor, and a little potbellied coal stove. It looks like a place where nobody lives, but he’s in there. Gwen can feel his presence. He’s scared, like those sparrows in the bushes who sense Gwen’s proximity. He’s got his eyes shut tight, and he’s praying that whoever’s out there will go away, which is exactly what Gwen does. But before she leaves, she reaches into her pocket. She wants him to have something, and the old compass she meant to give Hank is all she has. She places it on the threshold, then pushes the door open, only a little, but enough to smell the mildew and dust from inside.

Heading back to Hank is tougher going. The tide is coming in fast now; before long, Gwen’s boots will be soaked. The leather will be ruined and she may have to throw them away, and yet she takes the time to look behind her. Unless she is mistaken, the compass is no longer on the front porch, and so she feels free to run the rest of the way; she can run until she reaches Hank at last.

Everyone saw March and Hollis together on Halloween night. They’re common knowledge now, discussed in the deli aisle of the Red Apple market and in the reading room at the library. They were sitting beside each other all through their dinner at Dimitri’s, not across from one another like normal, civilized people. The waitress over there, Regina Gordon, doesn’t like to tell tales, but honestly, they couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. They were practically doing it right there at the table, and several customers noticed when he reached his hand under her sweater. Why they had bothered to go out to dinner at all was a mystery to Regina, since it was clear all they wanted was each other.

Ed Milton is the one who finally informs Susanna Justice of her friend’s affair. He tells Susie right after they make love, at her place, a cottage so small he can talk to her from bed while she fixes them hot fudge sundaes. Susie’s dogs, Chester, the golden Lab, and Duffy, the black one, watch her every move, drooling onto her bare feet.

“Bullshit,” Susie says when he tells her about Hollis and March. “I’d be the first to know.”

“Well, you’re probably the three hundredth to know,” Ed informs her. He’s a big, good-looking man who moved up here from New York City, and his only complaint about small-town life is that there isn’t a decent bagel or a good cup of cappuccino to be found. He misses his daughter, an ill-tempered twelve-year-old, who comes up from New York for one weekend a month, legal holidays, and all of July. Ed has great blue eyes, and he cries at sad movies—God, even Susie’s dogs are wild about him. If she let herself, Susie could get involved with him. And this is the reason she’s ready to argue whenever she has a chance—to ward off anything deeper than what they already have.