asleep. She was the only one awake; hers the only light she could see. She felt like the last woman on earth, survivor of a nu-clear holocaust. What was producing all these images in her mind night after night? she wondered.
Girl, you have to get some sleep! she told herself, switching off the lights. This is your home now.
Believe it.
Danny Miller, age twelve and a half, was dream-ing that he was in a canoe on the Moose River in Maine. He was with his camp on a wilderness ex-pedition. Everything was perfect. The sky was bright blue; it was warm. There were no mosquitoes. He lifted his paddle out of the water and watched the drops fall from it like diamonds sparkling in the sun. He glanced back over his shoulder to share his happy thoughts—and he gasped! His English teacher was in the stern. He was twice his normal size and laughing his head off. “You didn’t finish your homework, Miller,” he yelled, and waved a list of vocabulary words at Danny. It was miles long, fluttering in the breeze, trailing onto the bottom of the craft. “Oh no!” Danny mumbled, tossing his covers to the floor. “Not more!”
His mother, Pix, had been known to sleep through thunderstorms, but children talking in their sleep, never. She was by Danny’s side in an instant, picking the sheet and blanket off the floor and tucking them securely around him. She stroked his hair back from his forehead. He had always been a sweaty little boy. “It’s okay, sweetheart, you just had a bad dream.”
With his eyes still closed, Danny mumbled, “It was so weird, Mom. Mr. Hatch was at camp, making me do more vocabulary words.” Pix went back to bed and crawled under the covers. Her husband, Sam, asked, “Everything all right?”
“Danny was having a nightmare—and Aleford’s seventh graders are definitely getting too much homework,” she answered, going back to sleep.
It was a quiet night, too, at the Aleford police station, which shared space with the town clerk’s office in the town hall. Sometime in the sixties, a new one-story addition—lots of plate glass and solid vertical siding—had been added to the ven-erable brick building, which itself was most aptly described by Selectman Sam Miller as “H. H.
Richardson tripping with Maxfield Parrish.” The quasi-Bauhaus addition had been intended to house the police, but Chief MacIsaac, although new to the post then, had mustered the nerve, and support, to reject it outright. The town clerk had refused to budge also—hence, the file boxes in the lone jail cell. Over the years, the addition had come to serve for such things as small committee meetings—Aleford had a superabundance of committees, everything from the Historic Dis-trict Commission to a committee appointed to select street names— and also as the headquarters for the Community Education Program—Yoga, Mastering Your Mac, Cooking with Heart, Decoupage, and the like.
The chief was getting ready to go home. He’d taken the swing shift, as he occasionally did, to spread things out fairly among Aleford’s few officers of the law. There wasn’t a whole lot of crime in the town, at least not crimes you could arrest people for. Charley MacIsaac had his own opinion of what constituted a misdemeanor, and what got said at Town Meeting, the board of Selectmen’s, and the school committee often qualified.
He looked at his watch. It was morning now. The next day. He yawned. Dale Warren was late and if he didn’t get his ass into the station soon, Charley would have to call and wake him up—again.
The door opened. “Sorry I’m late. I have to get a louder alarm!” It was the same thing Dale said every time. “Anything up?” Dale always asked this, too, and always in the same hopeful tone of voice. He was young and didn’t know any better.
“No, thank God,” Charley said. It was what he always replied. Their customary exchange completed—a kind of handing over of the watch—
Charley left and walked out to his car. Now,
It was cold. After a few false starts, the engine coughed feebly and turned over. Charley drove three blocks to his house. It was dark. He’d forgotten to leave a light burning. Funny—his wife, Maddie, had been gone now for longer than they’d been married, but he still hated walking into the empty house knowing she wouldn’t be there.
Once inside, he turned on the lights and slung his sports jacket, an ancient tweed, on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. He was too tired to go to bed yet, and he reached for the tin of oat cakes that his sister in Nova Scotia made sure was never empty. There was a beer and some juice in the fridge. Not too much else. He ate most of his meals at the Minuteman Cafe. He drank some juice from the carton and sat down with the tin of cookies. Maddie had wanted to come to the States. Her brother was a cop in Boston, and so at the tender age of nineteen, Charley had found himself changing countries and eventually pursuing a career in law enforcement himself. After the first miscarriage, Maddie had insisted on leaving the city. She’d been sure the air would be better, and besides, didn’t they want their children to grow up as they had—running through the countryside, like on Cape Breton? Aleford had had an opening, and by the time Maddie died, still childless, Charley was Chief MacIsaac.
He’d been tempted to move back home—he’d never called Aleford that, because it wasn’t—but he knew he wouldn’t fit in anymore in Canada, either. Too many years away. He had been able to sense it on the visits they made each summer, the visits he’d kept on making. In Nova Scotia, they all thought he had a Massachusetts accent. In Aleford, people meeting him for the first time always asked him where he was from.
He put the lid on the tin, making sure it was tight. Oat cakes lasted forever. You could put some in one of those time capsules, dig it up a century later, and they would taste just as good as the day they were made. Maddie’s had been the best, but his sister’s were close. She’d wanted him to remarry, writing about this widow or that divorcee for years. She’d given up now. He’d only ever wanted one woman, and his sister should have known that. One woman who was the picture of health, then gone in four agonizing months.
He looked at his watch. The birds will be singing their sweet songs soon, he reflected, and if I don’t get some sleep, I’ll be dead tomorrow.
