"What about?"
"My husband's death. William O'Rourke, in Cummington."
There was a pause of two or three seconds while he squinted at me, very unpolice-like, and I could tell he was connecting the dots: the dead man, the wife off-island, the Englishman who grabs the phone when she collapses, and now she's in a parking lot in the dark playing with a laptop? "So you're the wife in New York?"
"I am," I said, more solemnly than I had ever said anything, including "I do." I wasn't faking the solemnity, but I was aware of the effect I hoped it would have.
"I'll be right back."
He returned a long moment later and handed me my license and something that looked like a ticket, which I could see was called FORMAL NOTICE OF WARNING, as if they had to add a few extra words to "warning" to flesh it out, make it less naked, less flimsy as a punishment on the page.
"Thanks," I said. "Thanks very much."
"I'd get your friend's registration into the car"-the ka- "as soon as possible."
"I will."
It did not take me long to decide that the FORMAL NOTICE OF WARNING was a message I would be wise to read as broadly as possible. On my way back to the Winstons' end of the island, I did what I should have done earlier in the day. I drove to the Congregational church in the village of Twin Oaks, where I knew there were meetings three or four nights a week. It is a quaint little village, as perfect as something you'd see in miniature, in Lord & Taylor's Christmas window. An austere white clapboard church and a one-room schoolhouse, weathered shingles with lovely baby-blue shutters that often match the sky, both buildings set back from the sidewalk, their lawns framed with freshly painted white picket fences. Across the street, a one-pump filling station with a white clapboard cashier's booth. After dark, there is rarely anyone about, and driving through it, the place always seems-though this cannot be the case-bathed in moonlight, frozen in a time long before now.
There were no signs of life in the church or the parish hall; just this perfect tableau and my imperfect self.
My exact state of mind as I drove west, not sure of my destination? The word that comes up repeatedly is "beyond." I was beyond anger, fear, disappointment, humiliation, somewhere close to feeling beyond feeling, which resembles numbness but also craves it. By which I mean that I felt enough to know that I wanted to feel even less.
That's the closest I can come to a reason for doing what I did next, though a countervailing theory says that neither psychology nor free will has anything to do with it: if this is your affliction, once you begin, your body chemistry does not permit you to stop. You are in the thrall of something akin, say, to the force of gravity. You are, say, a brick sitting on the table. If the table disappears from under you, or you're pushed off the edge, you-the brick-have no choice but to fall.
So I went back to the Winstons' party and had a few more. I'd had only the two beers and a few swills of the Jack Daniels, but because I was out of practice, I stumbled in the dark going from the Winstons' dirt road to the Winstons' beach for what remained of the clambake.
The catering company had left; there were a dozen people milling around, some sitting on blankets, and a help-yourself cooler stocked with beer and a few open magnums of wine. I helped myself. I drank fast. It was easy to do in the dark. I guess I had two or three like that, glug glug by the cooler, and by the time I went looking for the people I'd come with, I was a lot worse off than when I had parked Evan's car. There was no way I could drive.
I wobbled over the sand, stopping deliberately at each clump of people, looking from one face to the other, staring as if I were painfully near-sighted and had lost my glasses. I could have asked whether anyone had seen Evan or Mavis, but I was feeling rude and combative, and I wanted these people to know how much I didn't like them, so I drifted from one group of strangers to another, as if the beach were a giant aquarium and I a spectator on the other side of the glass. Conversations floated past me, or I floated past them, and the wind picked up. I bent down to take off my sandals, and when I stood up, I was face to face with a shark. "If it isn't Betsy Schmidt," I said, and I must have said it too loudly, because she lurched backward, and another familiar face swam toward me. "And Hunter'S. Thompson. Swansea's Gonzo journalist. How are things in Hanoi these days, or do you call it Ho Chi Minh City?"
"I think you've got your geography a little screwed up tonight, my dear," Hunter Abbott said. "And your cast of characters. I heard about your husband only an hour ago. I'm sincerely sorry. Good man, Will was, despite that business with the CIA."
"You mean his career?"
"Approximately."
"So you don't think it's good news that he's dead? Because that was Betsy's first question, wasn't it, Bets? From now on we'll call you Good News or Bad News Betsy. Maybe you should rename the bookstore, Good News or Bad News Books. What would be the good news books? Maybe all the ones about massacres and cancer and suicide. And the bad news books would be, um, gardening. Cookbooks. Natural childbirth in your own home. What to name your pet. Hunter, do you know anything about what Will did with our dog? We had the sorriest little mutt. Will gave him to me as a consolation prize because I couldn't have a baby, and after he died-"
I stopped talking because a large arm clamped around my back and its fingers gripped my upper arm so hard it hurt. "For Christ's sake, Sophy," Evan said softly, but not kindly, in my ear.
"Let go, will you?"
Again in my ear, and not kindly: "I'm taking you home." The arm tighter around my shoulder, pushing me across the sand. "Come on."
"Don't push. Where were you? I was looking everywhere. Don't hold my arm like that, it hurts. What happened to Ginny?"
"Mavis and I were watching you make a spectacle of yourself. Our kids had fallen asleep on our quilt, and we were packing up, when your voice rang out across the beach. Sue Winston heard every word. It was quite a display."
He maneuvered me to the dunes, and we sank into sand with every step. "It was quite a clambake. I can't remember. Did you tell me where Ginny is?"
"She ran into a family she used to babysit for, and they invited her to their house. Any idea where you parked the car? Or if you parked the car?"
We were on solid ground by then, the dirt cul-de-sac at the Winstons' house. "Right behind that SUV. And though it may be hard to believe, I was not driving around the island in your car sloshed like this. This is of very recent vintage. I know I seem extremely potted, but I'm not."
"Good thing, because I'd have been worried."
"See? Just as I said. Here we are."
We got in and I handed Evan his key, though I can't recall now how much I was aware of hiding from him; how much I remembered at that moment about the rest of the evening. What I was acutely aware of as we turned around in the cul-de-sac and bumped along the rocky road was Evan's anger, which he expressed as silence punctuated with an occasional deep sigh. He glanced over at me. "Put your seatbelt on," he said gruffly, and I fumbled for a bunch of seconds until I got it on. I didn't know what to say to make him less angry, so I didn't say anything for as long as I could stand it. Then I said, "It's hard, being with all of you and your perfect lives. Your perfect houses and your perfect children and your perfect marriages and your perfect dogs."
A minute later we were on blacktop, on the two-lane road that led back to Evan's house and to the lighthouse at the end of the island, and I was not so drunk that I couldn't hear the self-pity in my voice. But Evan's answer pulled me in another direction, and the shock may have been what sobered me up enough to take part in the conversation that followed. "I have two perfect children and a perfect dog and two beautiful houses, but the rest, I'm afraid, leaves something to be desired."