“Where do you think you’re going?” his friend Josh asked.
“I’m going to Salem,” Hawk said. “I’ll be back here in the morning.”
“How’re you gonna get there? Fly?” someone else asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m gonna sprout little wings.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” one of the other guys said. The group had been in awe of his climbing skills, and of the idea that anyone actually liked being up in the air so high.
HAWK DECIDED TO HITCH A ride to the Rockport train station. The first two cars passed him, but the third one, a car full of college girls, pulled over and opened the door.
They were headed to Newburyport to a party, and they wanted him to come along.
“I don’t think so,” Hawk said, shaking his head. “I know trouble when I see it.”
“Oh, come on,” one of them said with a smile. “It’ll be fun.”
He waited at the station for the Salem train. There was almost no one riding tonight. Hawk sat alone in the last car.
The train pushed through the fog in Beverly. He could see people lining the wharves waiting for the fireworks: families on blankets, tailgaters.
When he got off the train in Salem, the streets were dry. He walked down Washington Street through groups of partying tourists and then cut down Front Street to Derby. He didn’t stop at the wharf, didn’t even stop at his boat to change. People crowded the grass at the end of Turner Street and sat in the gardens at the Gables. There was no moon tonight, so it would be a good show. He took a quick look to make sure no one was watching him, glad that the streetlight near the old house was burned out. Then he climbed the vines to the room on the second floor and let himself in through Zee’s open window.
27
ZEE COULD HEAR JESSINA downstairs, the sound of silverware clanking as she cleaned up. Breakfast was over, and she was baking something.
Zee noticed the scratch marks she had left on Hawk’s back. She felt bad about it, hoped he wouldn’t take off his shirt at work today. But watching him half dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed, something stirred in her again, and she wanted to reach out to him.
“Do you have to go?” she said to him, and he laughed and turned to face her.
“I’ve got to get back to Rockport,” Hawk said.
She reached out and pulled him onto the bed, unzipped his pants and went down on him. He groaned.
“Shh,” she said, hearing Finch’s walker below, heading toward the kitchen.
“I’m not the one who needs shushing, am I?” He grinned as he moved slowly on top of her. And when he was close and when she started to moan, he clamped his hand over her mouth and pressed hard. She arched her back and rolled onto him and bit down hard on his hand, and he didn’t pull it away. And she didn’t care anymore if Jessina heard them or even if Finch did, because she was no longer here.
THEY’D BEEN SLEEPING TOGETHER FOR almost a month. Zee knew that Mattei would tell her it was obsessive, especially so soon after Michael. Mattei would tell her that Hawk was her drug of choice. But she didn’t want to think about Mattei or about Michael or Finch downstairs with Jessina still hand-feeding him his meals and Zee letting it slide. Zee knew she shouldn’t let her do it, because he needed to be able to feed himself, to hold on to that skill. She had been here for six weeks now, and things with Finch were clearly slipping. She couldn’t help but let them slip, because there were so many of those things, too many details to manage. Everyday tasks the rest of us take for granted, from buttoning a shirt to getting up from a chair, had to be watched and aided. So when Zee could escape for a while into another world with Hawk, she did so gratefully.
If Hawk was her drug of choice, then he was her only vice. She couldn’t get enough of him. She lived in two worlds, or so it seemed. Her days were filled with the business of caregiving and all the things that went along: ordering food from Peapod, diapers and lotion so Finch’s skin wouldn’t break down, a soft washcloth to bathe him, prunes for constipation, Oreos for treats. When Finch wandered, which he did whenever he got to the tail end of a dose, she followed him, making sure he didn’t fall with each unsteady step.
She couldn’t get him to use the railings that Hawk had installed. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t use them, more that he couldn’t seem to figure out how, or couldn’t make his hand grasp the rails that would steady him. Instead Zee kept placing his walker in front of him, reminding him softly each time he moved to “use the walker.”
Most of the time, she felt as if she were talking to a child, though she knew full well that he understood her words. This was her father, yet it wasn’t. It was a duality she had stopped trying to resolve. Finch was now both child and father. She realized that her need for a father was profound. But with so much unresolved between them, theirs had often been an uneasy relationship. Still, he had always been there when she needed him. And now he was the one who needed her.
The tender feelings she had for Finch, when they came to her, seemed to come from that vulnerable place she recognized in him, a place that may have always been there but that was now the more prevalent part of his otherwise thorny personality. Finch had always used his intellect to distance himself. When things became too much for him, he had often spoken in quotes or riddles, a quality that seemed to amuse Melville but one that Zee had found frustrating. And now, once the new drug had left his system, the one that caused the hallucinations, he had stopped speaking as Hawthorne, but he had pretty much stopped talking altogether, though she could tell that he still understood her. When he spoke, his speech was perfect, but he chose to do so less and less, and he uttered not much more than single syllables if possible when Jessina was in the house, though Zee could tell that Finch liked her.
“You don’t need to talk down to him,” Zee said. “He may not be talking much, but he can understand you well enough.”
“I’m not talking down to him,” Jessina insisted. “I would never do that.”
Jessina bathed Finch and dressed him in the mornings, then came back again to feed him dinner and put him to bed. In the long hours in between, Zee read books to him, something she knew that Melville had done, though Melville had had better success with it than Zee. Mostly, when his meds were at their peak, Finch dozed. She would get up, prop a pillow under whichever side his head flopped to, and sit back down again, reading more quietly now so as not to disturb his sleep but not altogether stopping in case her words might drift to someplace in his subconscious that might still be vibrant, a place she could not often reach when Finch was awake.
She did not presume to read Hawthorne to Finch. The book she picked from Finch’s shelf was Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, partly because she had never made her way past the first volume and partly because she thought the words might jar Finch’s involuntary or Proustian memory. She wondered whether she could get Jessina to make madeleines, if Zee could find a recipe.
When she found herself unable to read any longer, Zee would put on the soft music she knew that Finch favored: Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, or sometimes Puccini.
When his meds wore off, Finch grew agitated and felt compelled to walk, though it was the worst possible time to do so. He had fallen twice already. Luckily, neither fall had hurt him, but falling was a serious threat to the elderly in general and to Parkinson’s patients in particular. Though Finch was only in his late sixties, and far too young to be experiencing the extreme effects of aging, the Parkinson’s seemed to be moving much faster than Zee had expected.
And so Zee followed him as he walked through the house, accompanying him everywhere-to the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the bath-trying to afford him some privacy but being careful that he didn’t get up and wander, leaving the door partly open so she could hear him if he needed her. “Leave me,” he would often say.