Sixty Days and Counting (8 page)

Surprised, she said, “That’s Ed’s boat. I was going up to get him off Roosevelt Island.”

“That was quite a time to be out on the river.”

“Yes, it was. But he was helping some folks at the marina get their boats off, and we had already taken a few down to below Alexandria, and on one of the trips he stayed behind to help free up a boat, while I ferried one of the groups downstream. So it was kind of back and forth.”

“Ah.” Frank put a hand onto the table, reaching toward her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what to think. You know—we never have had much time. Whenever we’ve gotten together, there’s been more to say than time to say it.”

She smiled. “Too busy with other stuff.” And she put her hand on his.

He turned his palm up, and they intertwined fingers, squeezed hands. This was a whole different category of questions and answers. Do you still love me? Yes, I still love you. Do you still want me? Yes, I still want you. Yes. All that he had felt briefly before, during that hard hug on the garden path, was confirmed.

Frank took a deep breath. A flow of calmness spread from his held hand up his arm and then through the rest of him. Most of him.

“It’s true,” he said. “We’ve never had enough time. But now we do, so—tell me more. Tell me everything.”

“Okay. But you too.”

“Sure.”

But then they sat there, and it seemed too artificial just to begin their life histories or whatever. They let their hands do the talking for a while instead. They drank tea. She began to talk a little about coming to this place when she was a girl. Then about being a jock, as she put it—how Frank loved that—and how that had gotten her into various kinds of trouble, somehow. “Maybe it was a matter of liking the wrong kind of guys. Guys who are jocks are not always nice. There’s a certain percentage of assholes, and I could never tell in time.” Reading detective stories when she was a girl. Nancy Drew and Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, all of them leading her down the garden path toward intelligence, first at the CIA (“I wish I had never left”), then to a promotion, or what had seemed like a promotion, over to Homeland Security. That was where she had met Ed. The way at first he had seemed so calm, so capable, and in just the areas she was then getting interested in. The intriguing parts of spook work. The way it had let her be outdoors, or at least out and about—at first. Like a kind of sport. “Ah yeah,” Frank put in, thinking of the fun of tracking animals. “I did jobs like that too, sometimes. I wanted that too.”

Then the ways things had changed, and gone wrong, in both work and marriage. How bad it had gotten. Here she grew vague and seemed to suppress some agitation or grimness. She kept looking out the window, as did Frank. A car passed and they both were too distracted by it to go on.

“Anyway, then you and I got stuck in the elevator,” she resumed. She stopped, thinking about that perhaps; shook her head, looked out the kitchen window at the driveway again. “Let’s get out of here,” she said abruptly. “I don’t like…Why don’t we go for a drive in your van? I can show you some of the island, and I can get some time to think things through. I can’t think here right now. It’s giving me the creeps that you’re here, I mean in the sense of…And we can put your van someplace else, if I decide to come back here. You know. Just in case. I actually have my car parked down at the other end of the lake. I’ve been sailing down to it when I want to drive somewhere.”

“Sailing?”

“Iceboating.”

“Ah. Okay,” Frank said. They got up. “But—do you think we even ought to come back here?”

She frowned. He could see she was getting irritated or upset. His arrival had messed up what she had thought was a good thing. Her refuge. “I’m not sure,” she said uneasily. “I don’t think Ed will ever be able to find that one call I made to Mary. I made it from a pay phone I’ve never used before or since.”

“But—if he’s searching for something? For an old connection?”

“Yes, I know.” She gave him an odd look. “I don’t know. Let’s get going. I can think about it better when I get away from here.”

He saw that it was as he had feared; to her, his arrival was simply bad news. He wondered for a second if she had planned ever to contact him again.

They walked up the driveway to Frank’s van, and he drove them back toward Somesville, following her instructions. She looked into all the cars going past them the other way. They drove around the head of the sound, then east through more forests, past more lakes.

Eventually she had him park at a feature called Bubble Rock, which turned out to be a big glacial erratic, perched improbably on the side of a polished granite dome. Frank looked at the rocky slopes rising to both sides of the road, amazed; he had never seen granite on the East Coast before. It was as if a little patch of the Sierra Nevada had been detached by a god and cast over to the Atlantic. The granite was slightly pinker than in the Sierra, but otherwise much the same.

“Let’s go up the Goat Trail,” she said. “You’ll like it, and I need to do something.”

She led him along the road until it reached a frozen lake just under the South Bubble, then crossed the road and stood facing the steep granite slope flanking this long lake.

“That’s Jordan Pond, and this is Pemetic Mountain,” gesturing at the slope above them. “And somewhere here is the start of the Goat Trail.” She walked back and forth, scanning the broken jumble of steep rock looming over them. A very unlikely spot to begin a trail. The pink-gray granite was blackened with lichen, had the same faulted structure as any granite wall shaved by a glacier. In this case the ice resting on it had been a mile thick.

“My friend’s father was really into the trails on the island, and he took us out and told us all about them,” Caroline said. “Ah ha.” She pointed at a rusted iron rod protruding from a big slab of rock, about head high. She started up past it, using her hands for balance and the occasional extra pull up. “This was the first one, he said. It’s more of a marked route than a real trail. It’s not on the maps anymore. See, there’s the next trail duck.” Pointing above.

“Ah yeah.” Frank followed, watching her. This was his Caroline. She climbed with a sure touch. They had never done anything normal together before. She had talked about being a bicyclist, going for runs. This slope was easy but steep, and in places icy. A jock. Suddenly he felt the Caroline surge that had been there waiting in him all along.

Then the dark rock reared up into a wall of broken battlements thirty or forty feet high, one atop the next. Caroline led the way up through breaks in these walls, following a route marked by small stacks of flat rocks. In one of these gullies the bottom of the crack was filled with big flat stones set on top of each other in a rough but obvious staircase; this was as much of a trail as Frank had yet seen. “Mary’s father wouldn’t even step on those stones,” Caroline said, and laughed. “He said it would be like stepping on a painting or something. A work of art. We used to laugh so much at him.”

“I should think the guy who made the trail would like it to be used.”

“Yes, that’s what we said.”

As they ascended they saw three or four more of these little staircases, always making a hard section easier. After an hour or so the slope laid back in a graceful curve, and they were on the rounded top of the hill. Pemetic Mountain, said a wooden sign on a post stuck into a giant pile of stones. 1,247 feet.

The top was an extensive flat ridge, running south toward the ocean. Its knobby bare rock was interspersed with low bushes and sandy patches. Lichen of several different colors spotted the bedrock and the big erratics left on the ridge by the ice—some granite, others schist. Exposed rock showed glacial scouring and some remaining glacial polish. It resembled any such knob in the Sierra, although the vegetation was a bit more lush. But the air had a distinct salt tang, and off to the south was the vast plate of the ocean, blue as could be, starting just a couple miles away at the foot of the ridge. Amazing. Forested islands dotted the water offshore; wisps of fog lay farther out to sea. To the immediate right and left rose other mountaintops, all rounded to the same whaleback shape. The peaks to both east and west were higher than this one, and the biggest one, to the east, had a road running up its side, and a number of radio towers poking up through its summit forest. The ice cap had carved deep slots between the peaks, working down into fault lines in the granite between each dome. Behind them, to the north, lay the forested low hills of Maine, trees green over snowy ground.

“Beautiful,” Frank said. “It’s mountains and ocean both. I can’t believe it.”

Caroline gave him a hug. “I was hoping you would like it.”

“Oh yes. I didn’t know the East Coast had such a place as this.”

“There’s nowhere else quite like it,” she said.

They hugged for so long it threatened to become something else; then they separated and wandered the peak plateau for a while. It was cold in the wind, and Caroline shivered and suggested they return. “There’s a real trail down the northeast side, the Ravine Trail. It goes down a little cut in the granite.”

“Okay.”

They headed off the northeast shoulder of the hill, and were quickly down into scrubby trees. Here the ice had hit the rock head-on, and the enormous pressures had formed the characteristic upstream side of a drumlin: smooth, rounded, polished, any flaw stripped open. And exposed to air for no more than ten thousand years; thus there was hardly any soil on this slope, which meant all the trees on it were miniaturized. They hiked down a good trail through this krummholz like giants.

It was a familiar experience for Frank, and yet this time he was following the lithe and graceful figure of his lover or girlfriend or he didn’t know what, descending neatly before him, like a tree goddess. Some kind of happiness or joy or desire began to seep under his worry. Surely it had been a good idea to come here. He had had to do it; he couldn’t have not done it.

The trail led them into the top of a narrow couloir in the granite, a flaw from which all loose rock had been plucked. Cedar beams were set crosswise in the bottom of this ravine, forming big solid stairs, somewhat snowed over. The sidewalls were covered with lichen, moss, ice. When they came out of the bottom of the couloir, the stairboxes underfoot were replaced by a long staircase of immense rectangular granite blocks.

“This is more like the usual trail on the east side,” Caroline said, pointing at these monstrous field stones. “For a while, the thing they liked to do was make granite staircases, running up every fault line they could find. Sometimes there’ll be four or five hundred stairs in a row.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Every peak on the east side has three or four trails like that running up them, sometimes right next to each other. The redundancy didn’t bother them at all.”

“So they really were works of art.”

“Yes. But the National Park didn’t get it, and when they took over they closed a lot of the trails and took them off the maps. But since the trails have these big staircases in them, they last whether they’re maintained or not. Mary’s dad collected old maps, and was part of a group that went around finding the old trails. Now the park is restoring some of them.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I don’t think there is anything like it. Even here they only did this for a few years. It was like a fad. But a fad in granite never goes away.”

Frank laughed. “It looks like something the Incas might have done.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” She stopped and looked back up the snowy stone steps, splotchy here with pale green lichen.

“I can see why you would want to stay here,” Frank said cautiously when they started again.

“Yes. I love it.”

“But…”

“I think I’m okay,” she said.

For a while they went back and forth on this, saying much the same things they had said at the house. Whether Ed would look at her subjects, whether he would be able to find Mary…

Finally Frank shrugged. “You don’t want to leave here.”

“It’s true,” she said. “I like it here. And I
feel
hidden.”

“But now you know better. Someone looked for you and they found you. That’s got to be the main thing.”

“I guess,” she muttered.

They came to the road they had parked beside. They walked back to his van and she had him drive south, down the shore of Jordan Pond.

“Some of my first memories are from here,” she said, looking out the window at the lake. “We came almost every summer. I always loved it. That lasted for several years, I’d guess, but then her parents got divorced and I stopped seeing her, and so I stopped coming.”

“Ah.”

“So, we did start college together and roomed that first year, but to tell the truth, I hadn’t thought of her for years. But when I was thinking about how to really get away, if I ever wanted to, I remembered it. I never talked to Ed about Mary, and I just made the one call to her here from a pay phone.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I gave her the gist of the situation. She was willing to let me stay.”

“That’s good. Unless, you know…I just don’t know. I mean, you tell me just how dangerous these guys are. Some shots were fired that night in the park, after you left. My friends were the ones who started it, but your ex and his friends definitely shot back. And so, given that…”

Now she looked appalled. “I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. I also…I threw a rock at your ex,” he added lamely.

“You what?”

“I threw my hand axe at him. I saw a look on his face I didn’t like, and I just did it.” And in fact the stone was below in the glove compartment of his van.

She squeezed his hand. Her face had the grim inward expression it took on whenever she was thinking about her ex. “I know that look,” she muttered. “I hate it too.” And then: “I’m sorry I’ve gotten you into this.”

“No. Anyway, I missed him. Luckily. But he saw the rock go by his head, or felt it. He took off running down the Metro stairs. So he definitely knows something is up.” Frank didn’t mention going by their apartment afterward and ringing the doorbell; he was already embarrassed enough about the hand axe. “So, what I’m still worried about is if he starts looking, and, you know, happens to replicate what my friend’s friend did.”