The story of Nancy’s accident made its way back to our town in small portions. She lived in New York City after college, working as a consultant and carrying a leather Coach briefcase. Her muggers hit her over the back of the head. She was found barefoot — the muggers had stolen her shoes — and unconscious, and stayed in a coma for six days. When she woke up she was different. She spat the hospital Jell-O across the room. She sat for hours on the roof of her building smoking. Work was impossible — she often trailed off midsentence, her ears rang incessantly. She developed vertigo and during these spells would sit in the middle of the sidewalk, or on the shoulder of the street. Twice the police picked her up for public intoxication. Her friends told her she was more fun than she had been before. She slept during the day, and walked New York neighborhoods at night, wearing a man’s fedora, drinking from a flask. When people trailed too close behind her, she’d yell at them, in the voice of a tiny woman who was about to transform into a hulk, “Get away,” as though they were the ones that needed protection from her. She went to Coney Island and rode the log flume over and over, without her protective helmet. She came out as a lesbian, and wore a shark tooth necklace she’d bought on vacation in Costa Rica every day. Her mom stayed with her in New York for three months, setting up a prayer shrine at the kitchen table, before convincing Nancy to move back to California with her, where she spent her disability money on Ring Pops, nitrous oxide canisters, three-piece suits, and a guinea pig named Petal. Some days all she could do was lie in bed, letting the guinea pig root through her hair, trying to make a nest.
She was thirty-five. She could feed herself and dress herself and she wanted to live unsupervised and not be treated like a child. She took her guinea pig and the red Jeep — which at this point had a rusted-out undercarriage and a sunroof jammed open by one-eighth of an inch, enough to let in rain — and returned to the vacation house alone. Her parents owned a gazebo by the water with glass windows looking out in all watery directions and seagulls squawking and shitting on the roof, as they would on the roof of a lobster boat. This is where Nancy slept, on a futon on the floor, surrounded by the unearthed vestiges of her childhood — the oversized rabbit pillow with long white hair that shed all over her pajamas, the pilled Ninja Turtles comforter, the lava lamp, the porcelain kittens with blue jewels for eyes — objects she had long ago packed away into the basement for the day her children might want them.
Most of this I would learn later. On that day in October all I saw was the Jeep and the flash of her hair, which had been brown and was now bleach blonde, nearly white. I spent an hour in the bathroom with the oils and a new kind of powder makeup, applying samples, until I had tried on Beige Neutral and Sandy Fair and Sun-kissed Medium, writing notes about each on Post-its that I stuck to the bathroom mirror. Then I thought I might try to clean the toilet, but I had forgotten to buy a toilet brush. I dug through my office, which was simply a room where we hid our unpacked boxes, until I found a penny whistle that Bruce had given me as a stocking stuffer last Christmas. I wrapped the whistle in a plastic bag and used it to push a tissue around the toilet basin. As I did this I played the rehearsal track for the hundred-person choral group I had joined in an effort to make new friends. We met once a week in a church basement three towns over to sing songs in Old English that I memorized by ear. The rehearsal track was sung by the choral director, a spunky soprano with bracelets that clattered on her wrists, but she recorded the contralto part with her pitch artificially deepened and slowed. I belted out the one line I had memorized because the lyrics sounded like, “Lay out your Levi’s, lustily,” and pictured someone who looked good in Levi’s taking them off and folding them carefully on my bed. The voice on the recording sounded like a demon being melted by sunshine.
When I finally made it to the end of my driveway I opened the mailbox and there wasn’t even a flyer, just a birthday postcard from my dentist forwarded from my old address for the twenty-fifth birthday I’d celebrated two months before. I decided to keep walking along the shoulder of the road toward the harbor. When a car came by, which they did on this road at about sixty-five miles per hour, I stepped from the gravelly shoulder into the ditch and collected the garbage littered there, until the garbage was too much to hold. I was still miles away from the dock so I stacked the Burger King bags, Miller Lite cans, and Styrofoam shreds in a neat little pile and left it behind.
I had read Stephen King’s memoir about life in Maine to try and feel rooted in my own life, and it comforted me to know that he too had gone for long, dangerous walks along the road’s shoulder. Stephen had been hit by a van that veered into the wrong lane while the driver tried to control his Rottweiler. I imagined the same wild driver was still behind the wheel, careening down this very road with his slobbery Rottweiler as I slogged through the stream of ditch water.
I was ten minutes from my parents’ house, but I didn’t want them to see me. We had a deal that though we lived in the same town we would keep our lives separate unless I invited them over or they invited me over for dinner parties, which happened about twice a month, or sometimes we met in the adjacent town for a sandwich. When I met with them I wore a pair of bright, salmon-colored pants, tied my hair in a ponytail, and talked about the choir, trying to act as though everything was all right. I knew that they had been looking forward to a wedding and to grandchildren from the day they’d met Bruce. “I can die now,” my mother had told me that Christmas, “knowing you’re happy.” She ran her fingers lightly across my back, my head resting in her lap. There was someone else in the world who could take care of me.
I wondered what they were doing, and pictured them sitting under the arbor my dad had built, smoking pot out of the hookah, maybe, and listening to the static-laced Bob Dylan Hour on the radio as dark clouds gathered, our three yellow Labs rolling in the muddy grass. Every time Bruce and I came for dinner I would have given anything to send Bruce away and stay the night in my mom’s bed, eating Pop-Tarts and watching Special Victims Unit with her asleep in the bed beside me and her lumpy wool socks pressed against my leg, surrounded by velvet pillows and her incense smell, Dad’s snores rising up from downstairs where he slept beside the woodstove. But instead I helped Bruce wash the dinner dishes, resenting his tiring, relentless displays of politeness, and then I’d hug them goodbye and climb in the cold car and drive the six minutes to our house in the woods, panicked with homesickness, like I was attending the world’s longest sleepover. For years I’d lived across the country and hadn’t felt a glimmer of desire to move back in with my family, not once.
When I reached the dock parking lot I could smell the lobster pound that was next door to my parents’ house, and I swore I could hear the faint sounds of the Labs barking and my mom calling them inside, her wolf whistle carrying across the bay. The dock payphone had been disconnected, but I picked up the phone just in case and listened into it, then walked over to the hut where the sailing students took lessons. There were six pieces of rope that the students used to practice their knots, attached to a plank above a hitching post. Below each rope was the name of the knot the students were meant to tie — Bowline, Anchor Bend, Sheepshank, Halyard Hitch, Slip, and Reef. Sheepshank and Slip were still intact and I undid those and tried to redo them but the rope kept coming loose in my hands. I gave up and tied the pieces of rope together in pairs like children’s shoelaces.
I wanted to walk down to the dock but someone was sitting on the end of the pier, hunched and small beside the few remaining rowboats. When she turned her head, I saw that it was Nancy.