So much for Gwen’s perfect night. It’s been ruined; it’s been murdered. There is no way she’s going home now.
“Go ahead, if that’s what you want,” she tells Hank. “I’m not afraid to check out the Marshes.”
Gwen turns and takes off, not thinking of how rash her decision is; not certain, in fact, of where it is she’s going.
“Hey, wait a second,” Hank shouts. “Wait up. You can’t go there.”
But it’s too late; she’s in motion. Gwen is running in the direction she believes leads to the Marshes. She can hear Hank calling her, but she’s too upset and angry to stop. The sound of her breathing is filling up her head and she can hear things flying from tree to tree; she hopes that they’re birds and not bats. She heads east, or what she thinks of as east; she’s surprisingly fast when she puts her mind to getting where she wants to go.
Gwen hears Hank calling, but she doesn’t stop, not until the trees begin to thin out. The grass is taller here, and there’s the smell of salt. In the moonlight, everything is silver. An owl glides over an inlet, without warning, without a sound. The silver grass moves in the wind; where Gwen walks, it’s waist-high and she has to be careful to avoid the places where the mud seems deepest. People can sink so deeply into this bog they disappear forever, or at least that’s what Lori has told her.
It’s extremely quiet here. Sound dissolves. Why, Gwen can hear her own heartbeat. Behind her and in front of her is a sea of grass. The few trees which grow here are huge oaks, and some stringy pines. You can smell the pine if you breathe deeply. If you listen carefully, you can hear past the silence to the echo of something moving. All around are fiddler crabs, traversing the mud in the moonlight. Luckily, it’s low tide, or Gwen would be sloshing through knee-deep water. Instead, she has to make her way over the crabs, tentatively, trying to avoid crushing them.
Hank comes up behind her, and grabs her with such force that Gwen almost loses her balance.
“Are you crazy?” His breathing is ragged from running. His jaw is pulsating. “You don’t just wander around in the Marshes. This isn’t a joke.”
Gwen throws her arms around him. What will she do if she ever loses him? How would she ever survive?
“I’m sorry about your father,” she whispers.
“There’s the place they want to bomb,” Hank says now. “His house.”
Gwen steps away to look in the direction Hank nods toward. Two big, old apple trees are all she sees; that, and the moonlit grass.
“Behind the trees,” Hank says.
When Gwen squints she can make out the tumbledown house. That’s a porch. An old gate. A railing.
“I want to see it,” she says. “Let’s go closer.”
“No,” Hank says. “He’ll hear us if we go closer.”
“I don’t care if he does.”
Gwen looks at Hank. If he tells her not to, if he tries to boss her around, something between them will be over. She didn’t realize this, but now she knows it to be true. Thankfully, he doesn’t. He stays there and waits while Gwen navigates through the marsh grass and the scratchy sea lavender.
The water has begun to rise, enough so that Gwen can feel how cold it is through the soles of her boots. Funny thing, there’s a garden gate in front of the house, but no fence. All you have to do is scoot around the gate, and make your way past the apple trees, then past some old blackberry bushes and over a cluster of raspberry canes. Maybe the fruit here was planted by Aaron Jenkins, the Founder, or maybe blackbirds dropped seeds down from the sky which managed to sprout in spite of the sandy soil. Either way, the bushes are now an overgrown warren, occupied by sparrows and rabbits and evil-tempered raccoons.
Gwen has to do this, go past the bushes and continue on. She refuses to be the kind of girl who gets scared off easily, whose opinion echoes her boyfriend’s, who can’t stand up for herself. She’ll be damned if she ends up like her mother, ready to do anything, even lie, for a man. All the same, Gwen is shivering as she walks up to the house. She doesn’t have to look back to know that Hank is watching her. She concentrates, trying to stop her heart from beating so fast.
As she gets closer she notices scattered glass, the remnants of windows broken by boys from town. The porch steps sag, but Gwen goes up them anyway. She looks through the window nearest the door, but it’s difficult to see inside. She can make out a table and chairs, some blankets on the floor, and a little potbellied coal stove. It looks like a place where nobody lives, but he’s in there. Gwen can feel his presence. He’s scared, like those sparrows in the bushes who sense Gwen’s proximity. He’s got his eyes shut tight, and he’s praying that whoever’s out there will go away, which is exactly what Gwen does. But before she leaves, she reaches into her pocket. She wants him to have something, and the old compass she meant to give Hank is all she has. She places it on the threshold, then pushes the door open, only a little, but enough to smell the mildew and dust from inside.
Heading back to Hank is tougher going. The tide is coming in fast now; before long, Gwen’s boots will be soaked. The leather will be ruined and she may have to throw them away, and yet she takes the time to look behind her. Unless she is mistaken, the compass is no longer on the front porch, and so she feels free to run the rest of the way; she can run until she reaches Hank at last.
14
Everyone saw March and Hollis together on Halloween night. They’re common knowledge now, discussed in the deli aisle of the Red Apple market and in the reading room at the library. They were sitting beside each other all through their dinner at Dimitri’s, not across from one another like normal, civilized people. The waitress over there, Regina Gordon, doesn’t like to tell tales, but honestly, they couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. They were practically doing it right there at the table, and several customers noticed when he reached his hand under her sweater. Why they had bothered to go out to dinner at all was a mystery to Regina, since it was clear all they wanted was each other.
Ed Milton is the one who finally informs Susanna Justice of her friend’s affair. He tells Susie right after they make love, at her place, a cottage so small he can talk to her from bed while she fixes them hot fudge sundaes. Susie’s dogs, Chester, the golden Lab, and Duffy, the black one, watch her every move, drooling onto her bare feet.
“Bullshit,” Susie says when he tells her about Hollis and March. “I’d be the first to know.”
“Well, you’re probably the three hundredth to know,” Ed informs her. He’s a big, good-looking man who moved up here from New York City, and his only complaint about small-town life is that there isn’t a decent bagel or a good cup of cappuccino to be found. He misses his daughter, an ill-tempered twelve-year-old, who comes up from New York for one weekend a month, legal holidays, and all of July. Ed has great blue eyes, and he cries at sad movies-God, even Susie’s dogs are wild about him. If she let herself, Susie could get involved with him. And this is the reason she’s ready to argue whenever she has a chance-to ward off anything deeper than what they already have.
“You know what I’m going to do?” Susie says, half in jest. “I’ll call them both and get the real story.”
Ed gets out of bed and stands between Susie and the phone. He’s one of the few men Susie has known who look better without clothes than with them.
“Stay out of it,” Ed says. “That guy is trouble.”
The hot fudge is ready, but Susie doesn’t bother with it, even though the ice cream she’s scooped has started to melt. “You sound like you know something.”
“I’ve heard rumors, that’s all.” Already, he’s starting to back off. This often happens when Susie is reporting on local issues, whenever a source realizes he’s said too much. “It’s your friend’s business, not yours,” Ed adds. “Besides”-he really did have a great smile-“love is strange.”
Susie has always wondered where Hollis was during those years he was away, but nobody else has ever seemed interested. Out making money, people usually joked. Or, I don’t know, but when you find out tell me-I’d like to be as rich as that bastard.
Susie finds herself thinking about Hollis all that day, and into the next. She’s got him so much on the brain, in spite of how she dislikes him, that she ignores her daily chores to focus on him instead. He’s like some terrible puzzle, made up of equal parts flattery and contempt, and she’s still trying to figure what bothers her most about
