I was on the verge of telling some of this to Henderson, as we ate and waited for Evan to arrive, when the phone rang again.
Like children in a game of Statue, we froze, as we had every time it emitted an electronic bleat. Like adults in crisis and in love, we felt our pulses quicken. Narratives coursed through our veins.
My fingers tingled as I reached for the phone. But it was not Vicki. It was a computer voice selling subscriptions to The Soap Opera Digest.
I mention it-I remember it-because it was a moment of comic relief for us, because it inspired the light-hearted turn our conversation took, and we ended up joking about what favor Evan could possibly want from me. "Probably not money," Henderson said, "or the baby-blue polyester curtains in your room at the Lighthouse Motel or your prewar Volkswagen with original upholstery." At that exact moment, like a period at the end of the sentence, the doorbell rang.
Turned out it was the car Evan needed, and me to drive it, a sort of getaway job. "I'm about to pick up my brother and his family on the nine-thirty ferry. The young woman I told you about, Jenn-"
"Twenty-five?"
He nodded. "She's also going to be on that boat. I need you to take her to the chicken coop, the place I offered you. She had to leave Boston unexpectedly."
"Can't she get a cab?" Henderson asked. "Sophy ought to be here in case Vicki calls again. I'd offer to drive, but I never learned how."
Evan turned to me, and when he saw that his weighted silence could not persuade me, he said, "I know this is a difficult time for you, and under ordinary circumstances you know I wouldn't-"
"Is she in trouble?" I asked.
After a moment, he said, "We're all in a bit of a jam."
Then there was another silence, with Henderson and me waiting for an explanation, and Evan mulling over whether he should give us one.
"This is the young woman you used to be…" I said driftily, thinking it might loosen his tongue.
"I want her to be seen by as few people as possible. You know what it's like here. I wouldn't impose on you if there were anyone else I could trust with this-" He went silent again and looked at me hard, as if I were a juror he had to bring around, someone stony-faced, unreadable, mute. I was divided, not in two, but in three: I wanted to sit by the phone for Vicki; to help Evan out because he had gone out of his way to help me; and to help him out, not to repay his favors but because I was, after all this time, and in spite of everything, flattered that he needed me, even to be his chauffeur.
Henderson must have seen the way Evan was looking at me, a little needy and off-kilter, the usual suaveness squashed, and he-Henderson-must have done some calculations of his own. "If Vicki calls," he said, "I suppose I can do what's necessary"
It wasn't until Evan and I were outside, standing between our two cars, that he explained. "I didn't want to say much in front of Henderson. I just got word there'll be a nasty story in the Boston Herald tomorrow morning. There's a guy with a vendetta against Mavis for her work on the sexual harassment committee at Harvard. When he was investigated for two or three complaints and his contract wasn't renewed, he did enough snooping to learn something about Mavis that's going to force her to resign from the committee. That pile of dirty linen led to another-Jenn and me. A scandal-mongering reporter who's been out to get me for years because he doesn't approve of my clients was handed a sex scandal with my name on it. The whole mess'll be on page one. In the midst of all this, Mavis and I are having a cocktail party tomorrow night for tout le monde to honor my law school pal Judge Tucker, who was just nominated to the Second Circuit."
"But what about Jenn? Why is she coming here now?"
"Jesus," Evan said, looking at his watch, "the boats about to dock. I'll point her out to you and vice versa. She knows a friend of mine will take her to the chicken coop, where she'll hide out for a few days. That's all you need to know. And this." He reached into his back pocket and handed me an index card, filled front and back with his blocky print. "Directions to the house."
"Is she delusional, thinking she can hide here?"
"She's a kid. She panicked. I'll go the back way to the ferry. Follow me." A moment later, Evan's headlights flared, and he was out of the driveway and most of the way down Longfellow by the time I got the Rent-A-Wreck into first gear. He meant "follow me" in a general way-more like "catch me if you can." I caught him at the end of the next block. For a few minutes, the soupy rattle of the old VW engine and the logistics of our route-a series of right turns onto narrow one-way streets, then left into the alley beyond the old Swansea Bank & Trust-obscured the news Evan had handed me. Then the news obscured everything else.
From the parking lot, I could see that the ferry was not in its slip yet. I killed my headlights and looked out to the harbor, in the direction of Chillum's Point. A familiar brushstroke of bright light moved across the darkness. Funny, the things you learn to interpret; from the position of this particular speck, I knew it would be six or seven minutes before the boat would make landfall. I spotted Evan in a growing cluster of people assembled on the landing where passengers without cars would disembark, coming off a ramp that rose to meet a door on the second level of the ferry. Something about trying to keep track of him as he drifted through the crowd gave me the idea that Vicki might turn up on the boat, too; I might find her if I looked hard enough. She's a kid, she panicked. Hadn't we all, beginning with me and my mad dash from New York, racing here as if Will were on his death bed, Vicki following me, as if I were on mine?
Do you wonder whether I was besieged with thoughts of what might have happened to her, the horrors, the headlines? I was and I wasn't. When the thoughts came to me, they arrived like stones pitched through a window-unexpected, scaring me out of my wits. Without them, I felt a steady thrum of anxiety, my pulse racing, heart working much too hard.
Next time I looked toward the water, I saw the ferry a few hundred feet off shore, its giant garage-like door halfway up, weirdly ajar and about to disgorge fifty cars. My spirits lifted suddenly, incrementally: Hello, Pavlov. My years of living here made the sight of the ferry a tonic. Someone was coming to visit. The possibility of comfort, of company. Or was some part of me energized by Evan and Mavis's undoing, the spectacle of the mighty falling? Of Mavis, the shrill moralist, being unmasked? Was it schadenfreude or was it relief at the distraction from my own troubles? All, I'm afraid, of the above. I read the directions to the chicken coop before I got out to join Evan on the receiving line.
From ferry:
West on Ocean Dr. 8.2 mi. R. on Gulley's Creek .6 mi. to stone pillars. L. onto dirt road. Go 1.3 mi. to 3-way fork; take middle fork.7 mi. to tree on R with 4 signs nailed to it ("Green House" "Randolphs" "Baxters" "Coop"). Take R and go.8 mi to tree on left with sign that says "Coop." Turn left immediately after the tree, even though path looks too narrow for cars. Go 1.7 mi. Yr headlights should be shining directly on coop.
Crawford Cove on your right, 200 paces.
I had been given directions as eccentric as these to plenty of places on Swansea. I loved the poetry in them and dreaded the prose: one wrong turn at one unmarked tree, and you're as lost as Hansel and Gretel. That had happened to me one night coming back alone from a friend's house at Indian Pass, in the heart of the old forest. Round and round I'd gone, a rat in a maze, while my gas gage slipped toward empty. I kept looking for the middle path by the tree that had her name on it, then for someplace wide enough to turn around in, then for any house with lights on, then for any house at all. Just when I'd started to panic, the dirt road gave way to pavement.