Here on Earth (25 page)

Belinda used to sit on his porch and cry sometimes; once, she spent the night, curled up on a blanket on his floor. She had hair the color of roses, and on the night when she stayed with him her lip was split open; it hurt too much for her to drink the water the Coward offered her. Although he knows that Belinda died years ago, she seems to have reappeared beneath his apple tree. The Coward pulls on his boots and hurries outside. He’s ready to greet Belinda with a hug, but when she turns around he sees it’s only the girl who was here before, the one who left him the old compass he was given on his twelfth birthday, when there was still hope for him.

“I’m not trespassing,” Gwen says quickly. Maybe she’s been crying about her father and maybe she hasn’t been. This bright sunlight could bring tears to anyone’s eyes. “It’s this horse. He loves apples.”

“All right,” the Coward says in a surprisingly mild voice. Now he sees, there are indeed tears on this girl’s cheeks. “Let him eat.”

The Coward sits on the rickety front steps of his porch. The ice makes everything in the distance shine like diamonds. The Coward blinks in the light. He has always believed that if vodka looked like anything, it would look like ice. Gin, on the other hand, was pure, clean snow.

“You don’t know me.” the girl says.

She has come to sit beside him on the steps, which cannot be a pleasant experience, the Coward is certain, since he can’t remember the last time he bathed. But in fact, his odor is no more offensive than marsh grass or old apples, slightly vinegary.

“I’m Gwen,” the girl says. “My father is Richard Cooper. My mother is March.”

The Coward appraises her. His niece, if what she’s saying is true. Well, she does have the Cooper nose, straight and narrow, and those pale blue eyes.

“I don’t take after my mother, if that’s what you’re thinking. But you’re my uncle all the same.”

“For all the good it will do you,” the Coward says.

Gwen laughs. “Screwed-up family.”

“You have no idea,” the Coward tells her.

Gwen rests her chin on her hand and watches Tarot munch apples. It’s actually beautiful out here, if you don’t mind the isolation. If loneliness isn’t a factor. Before she can say another word, the Coward has risen from the steps and is already heading for his house. He can’t take too much of people. Five minutes is just about tops.

“Where are you going?” Gwen asks.

He doesn’t want to think about his family. That’s sorrow, plain and simple, and besides, he’s got better things to do.

“I’m going inside,” he tells the girl.

“To drink?” The horse has come near, so Gwen stands and reaches for the reins. “That’s what you do, right? It’s like your occupation or something, isn’t it? Being a drunk?”

“Drunkard,” the Coward corrects.

He squints against the glare of the diamonds in the Marshes. If he wants to, he can go inside and pretend there’s no one beneath his apple tree.

“In case you’re interested, your son doesn’t drink at all. He won’t even have a beer. Even if everyone else is completely wasted, he won’t touch the stuff.”

The Coward has reached his front door, but he doesn’t go inside.

“You’d be proud of him,” Gwen says.

Although the Coward’s back is toward her, she knows he’s listening.

“If you ever took the trouble to know him.”

When the Coward turns to face this girl, she has her hands on her hips. Clearly, she’s not the sort to back down from things. If she loves you, she’ll fight for you, and that’s what she appears to be doing right now.

“What makes you think I have a choice on that topic?” The Coward’s voice sounds harsh.

“Because you do,” Gwen says. “You just do.”

The Coward watches as she leads the horse out of his yard, around the garden gate, then into the Marshes, where the ice has begun to melt in the thin afternoon sunlight. There’s something hot in the center of the Coward’s chest, so he sits back down on his porch. The floorboards are loose; beneath them is a den of raccoons. When the Coward walks across these marshes, to Route 22, and the liquor store beyond, that is his choice. In all these years, he has not stopped to think other choices were his to make as well.

He feels sick inside. If he’s having a stroke, then it’s a suitable penance for all the ruin he’s brought upon his tired body. If it’s a broken heart, he deserves that too. Tonight will be so chilly he’ll have to burn extra wood in his old stove, and the smoke will billow out into the Marshes like a flock of blackbirds. He’ll drink ice and snow, he’ll drink himself senseless, and he’ll be surprised to discover that when he wakes the next day, on his hard, cold floor, he’ll still hear that girl’s words ringing in his ears.

H
ow much snow will fall this winter? That’s what people want to know. How much wood should be stored beside the front porch? How much cash allotted to the Snow Shovelers’ Fund, which pays local boys to excavate driveways and sidewalks for the town’s senior citizens? Judgment is, there’s a long, hard season in store, at least among those who frequent the Lyon Cafe, and this theory has been seconded by the patrons of the reading room at the library as well. Just see how high the hornets have built their nests, always a sign of deep snow to come. Sheep and horses have especially thick coats for November. Squirrels are still storing chestnuts. Warblers have already migrated south, moving through town much earlier than usual, forsaking their nests in the ivy.

Ken Helm has a mountain of firewood outside his small house. He’s been chopping wood all summer and throughout the fall. His wife and two sons don’t even notice the sound anymore, but they hear it in their dreams; a rhythmic hewing that echoes whenever they close their eyes. Susanna Justice drives out to order wood for the season, for her parents and for herself, as she does every year. It doesn’t take much to heat Susie’s little cottage, but she’s heard this winter’s going to be a killer.

“The Judge always gets his delivery first,” Ken tells Susie after she’s ordered two cords and is making out the check. “My favorite customer.”

Susie smiles, but her mind is elsewhere. She’s a bulldog all right; she can’t let go, especially when she’s got the sense that she’s onto something. Yesterday she went into Boston to speak with the oncologist at Children’s Hospital who was in charge of Belinda and Hollis’s son, Cooper. Cooper was diagnosed with leukemia when he was four, and although the doctor refused to let Susie see the boy’s records, he insisted nothing was out of the ordinary. Nothing out of the ordinary to get a death sentence for your four-year-old. Nothing out of the ordinary to be married to a man as distant and mean as Hollis, to hold your little boy in your arms all the way home from Boston after the doctor informs you of a diagnosis as cruel as that.

“Is Hollis still letting you cull through his woods?” she asks when she hands Ken Helm his check.

“I pay him good money for it,” Ken says, defensively, as if she’d accused him of dealing with the devil. “I wouldn’t take anything from him for free. I pay for the use of his land, but that doesn’t mean I like him.”

As soon as Susie hears that twist in Ken’s voice, she knows he wants to tell her something. When she began working at
The Bugle,
it took a while before she understood that just because people don’t answer directly doesn’t mean they won’t eventually tell all. Ken will talk, all right, if Susie asks the right questions.

“Were you using his woods back when Belinda was alive?”

Ken Helm has been accompanying Susie to her parked truck. Now, he stops.

“I didn’t say anything about Belinda.”

“That’s true. You didn’t.” He knows something, all right.

“Is there something you wanted to ask me about her?” Ken holds his hand above his eyes to block the sun, but the result is, Susie can’t gauge his reaction.

“It’s probably nothing,” Susie admits. “I heard some talk about Belinda and Hollis. Just gossip.”

“What’d you hear? That he killed her?”

Jesus, Susie thinks.
Everyone does know.

Ken stares straight ahead at the mountainous pile of wood beside his house. The line of his jaw seems unusually tight.

“That’s right,” Susie says, in an easy tone, not wanting to scare him off. “I heard he might have.”

“That’s not gossip,” Ken Helm says. “That’s a fact of life.”

Susie’s heart is racing. To calm herself, she shifts her gaze to stare at the woodpile along with Ken. It’s taller than the roof of his house. Taller than many of the trees.

“Is there some proof?” Susie says.

Ken whistles through his teeth for his dog, a golden retriever who’s strayed too close to the road which runs past.

“Anything at all?” Susie asks.

“The proof is that I know and everyone in this town who had anything to do with Belinda knows the way he treated her. She forgave him not seven but seventy-seven times. You’d see her face, and you knew. Whether or not he killed her with his bare hands doesn’t matter. He’s responsible for her death.” Ken’s dog trots over and Ken pats the retriever’s head. “Just as I’m responsible.”

Susie looks at Ken Helm, surprised at this assessment from a man she’s always known, but has never thought to talk to before. “Why would you say that?” Susie asks. “What did you have to do with her death?”

“I knew what she was going through, and I didn’t do anything.”

Susie can’t imagine that Belinda, who was extremely private and, although well liked by everyone, had no real friends, would ever confide in Ken.

“I was driving home one night, and I saw her in the road. I stopped, and she got into my truck. She said she’d hurt her arm, and I took her over to St. Bridget’s. Now, of course, they’ve got a whole section of the place named after him, but back then when I said I’d call Hollis for her, Belinda got all panicky. I mean panicky. So I waited for her, and when the doctor was through, I drove her home.” Ken’s dog has gone over to the woodpile, probably searching for mice, and Ken whistles again, more sharply this time. “Her arm was broken.”

“Did she tell you how it happened?”

“No, but after that, she came here sometimes. When she needed a ride to the hospital. I always did it, and I never said a word to anyone. Not even to my wife.”

“You’re not the only one responsible if everyone knew what was happening.”

Ken shakes his head. “One time I was asleep, and I woke up for no reason, and when I looked out the window I thought there was a ghost out there. She was wearing something white, I guess that was it. She had the kid with her that time—he was only a baby and I figure she didn’t want to leave him with Hollis. I can’t say that I blame her. Nobody wanted to confront him, but we should have. We should have gone to him.”

It is getting colder, even now, but Susie and Ken stand there, unmoving.

“ ‘If your hand or foot should cause you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter into life crippled or lame than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into the eternal fire.’ Matthew 18:8.” Ken Helm pauses to clear his throat. “It would have been a blessing if someone had stopped him.”

They finally head toward Susie’s parked truck. When they get there, Susie shakes Ken’s hand before she opens the door. She has never before noticed that his eyes are green.

“It’s the sun,” he says, to explain why his eyes are watering, and of course Susie nods, even though the sky is filled with clouds and the light is hazy at best.

“Don’t worry about the Judge’s delivery,” Ken says as Susie gets into her truck. “I’ll make him a nice, neat woodpile.”

On the way home, Susie stops at the Red Apple to pick up a few things—some yogurt, a box of fancy bakery-style cookies—but instead of turning left on Route 22 and going home to have lunch with her dogs, as she usually does, she turns right and drives to St. Bridget’s Hospital. Leave it be, Ed keeps telling her, but how is she supposed to do that, especially now that she has that vision of Belinda dressed in white standing beside the woodpile in Ken Helm’s yard?

Susie parks in the nurses’ lot, and props her
Bugle
parking sticker up against the windshield. The bad thing about living in a small town is that everyone knows your business, but it’s a good thing too, since it makes for connections which crisscross each other more often than the strands of a spider’s web. Susie has known Maude Hurley in the billing department at the hospital for ages. In fact, she dated Maude’s son, Dave, for quite a while, and remembers mostly that he was a terrific ice-skater and too perfunctory in bed. Maude, however, was a pistol, and Susie always enjoyed going to her house for Sunday dinners. Now, when she goes to the billing office, Susie brings the fancy chocolate chip cookies as an offering, but she doesn’t need to bribe Maude for information.

“Honey, everybody knew about Belinda,” Maude says.

But unfortunately, all of Belinda’s hospitalizations date to the time before admissions were computerized. Try as she might, Maude can’t call up anything on her terminal.

“That’s that,” Susie says, disappointed and starting in on the chocolate chip cookies herself.

“Not likely,” Maude says, and she leads Susie down to the basement of St. Bridget’s, to a room filled with ancient, mildewed files, suggesting that if anyone discovers her, Susie should say she’s gathering information for the hospital’s fiftieth anniversary.

Maude, Susie believes, would have made a great mother-in-law, and she gives the older woman a hug before getting down to work. It takes an hour and a half, but Susie finally finds what’s left of Belinda’s file. The file, however, covers only the last two years of Belinda’s life. The upside, if one can call it that, is that even in that relatively short period of time there were four admissions. More than average, Susie would guess, but proof of nothing. Two of the entries are illegible, but the other two—“broken mandible,” “fifteen stitches”—send chills along Susie’s spine. What, exactly, she can do with this information, she’s not sure, at least not until she notices Dr. Henderson’s name at the top of the page in the listing for the patient’s physician.