spent the day after the storm with Sarah shielding me from phone calls while I slept in the darkened bedroom, knocked out on Vicodin.
Except for alcohol and some extra-strength Tylenol prescribed for previous broken bones and stitched wounds, I had never taken drugs before. Somehow I had negotiated my adolescence without ever smoking a joint. Having a crazed drunk for a father is a pretty good advertisement for sobriety in that respect.
So the spell that the Vicodin cast over me was profound. I drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to tell wakefulness from the hallucinations of my sleeping mind, feeling as if I were submerged at the bottom of a lake, watching lights and shadows dart across the ceiling like quick-moving fish. It was not an unpleasant experience. The pills made the pain in my hand vanish, and I would stare at my splint as if it belonged to some unfortunate person sitting on the bed beside me. Poor fellow, I thought.
Sometime during that first long, drugged afternoon, Sarah appeared with a bowl of minestrone and a plate of crackers. The brightness of the overhead light stabbed into my brain.
“How are you doing, honey?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Maybe you should get up for a while and walk around.”
“No thanks.” I was impatient to return to my languorous existence at the bottom of the lake.
“You should at least eat something.”
She plumped up the pillow behind my shoulders so that I could eat off the tray. I obliged her while she told me of the events that had taken place in the world outside my bedroom.
“The phone’s been ringing nonstop,” she said.
“Haven’t heard it.”
“You got calls from Lieutenant Malcomb and Kathy Frost, both wanting to know how you’re doing. Charley, too. That chaplain, Deb Davies, also called. I guess word travels fast through the Warden Service. You got this weird call from some guy named Oswald Bell earlier. He had this thick Long Island accent. He wanted to know if you’d read the files he gave you. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. There were a bunch of hang- ups, too.”
“The Barters.”
“God, do you think? Are they going to come over here? What should I do?”
“They won’t come over. They know I’d shoot their whole fucking family.”
She removed the tray from my lap and set it on the bedside table. Her eyes seemed a different color from what I remembered-I felt like I’d never truly seen them before.
“How many of those pills did you take?”
“Just what the bottle said.”
“Your voice is slurred. I don’t think you should take any more.”
“OK.”
She put a hand on my forehead and then ran her fingers through my crew cut. “I’m worried about you, honey.”
Her concern struck me as misplaced but very sweet. I felt a sudden desire to share some of the insights I’d recently experienced. “Do you remember your First Communion? There was all this big buildup to it in the Catholic Church. We had these CCD classes-I don’t know what CCD stands for-it was like Sunday school, except it wasn’t on Sundays. The idea of eating the body of Christ-what’s a kid supposed to make of that?”
“Mike…”
“The wafer was just this dusty round piece of paper. I don’t know what I thought would happen-maybe that I’d see a vision of God with beams of sunlight and angels. But instead, there was nothing. So which church should we raise our kids in? Catholic or Episcopal? I guess you’d be the one to take them, so you should decide.”
She got up from the bed and lifted the tray. She seemed to be swaying dreamily herself, uncertain on her feet. “Get some rest.”
After she’d left the room, I stared at the shimmering light beneath the bedroom door. It seemed to ripple like waves of heat rising off hot desert sands. Sarah hadn’t understood what I was getting at. These revelations were peculiar to me. No one else could understand them.
24
On Monday morning, after Sarah had left for school, I awoke to a sensation in my right hand. It might best be compared to an elephant sitting on all five of my fingers. I stumbled into the bathroom and began rummaging through the medicine cabinet. The little orange vial of Vicodin had disappeared without a trace.
I telephoned Sarah’s school and left a message. I told the receptionist it was an emergency. Then I waited in my pajama bottoms on the edge of the unmade bed, cradling my bad hand in my good one.
After an eternity, the phone rang. “Mike, what is it? Did you hear something about Travis?”
“I can’t find my pills.”
In my mind’s eye, I saw Sarah easing the receiver away from her ear until she could decide how to respond. “Did you look in the medicine cabinet?”
“Of course I looked in the medicine cabinet.”
“Maybe you got up in the night and misplaced the bottle. You might have dropped it on the floor. Did you check behind the toilet?”
“No.”
A paranoid idea popped into my head: I wondered if she had hidden my pills during the night. Her voice had risen to a higher pitch over the course of our brief conversation. At the police academy, I had learned that was one of the telltale clues to dishonesty.
“I’m sure they’ll show up eventually.” Sarah sounded like the patient schoolteacher she was. “Why don’t you take a shower and get dressed? You need something to occupy your attention. You could read that book Kathy gave you.” She seemed to be making a conscious effort to humor me. “The principal told me she’s transferring the Barter twins from my class as a precaution. Everyone here knows about you and their father.”
“ He attacked me.”
“It’s unfair, but people blame you for what happened to Travis. You’re the district game warden.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s just what I need.”
“Mike, you didn’t do anything wrong. You were just doing your job. If you find your Vicodin, please just take half a dose, OK?”
“OK.”
After we signed off, I set to work rooting through her underwear drawers and closet shelves in search of my painkillers. I had the thought she might have stashed the vial in a coat pocket or the toe of a boot. But no matter where I looked, I found nothing.
I was still rummaging around the bedroom when there was a knock at the door. It was the mailman with an express package from my mother in Naples, Florida. Inside was a get-well card, signed “With Love,” telling me she hoped the enclosed present would help occupy me while I healed. She’d sent me a video game, Cabela’s Big Game Hunter for PlayStation 2. I didn’t own a PlayStation machine. I didn’t even own a television.
I dropped the video game in the trash. Ora was right that my mother and I would eventually need to have a serious talk about my dad. But I had a gut feeling that discussion would be a long time coming.
Why had I been such a jerk to Sarah? A broken hand was no excuse. She’d never made a habit of lying to me. And yet she had been behaving so strangely lately. I had been so quick to believe Ora’s suspicion that Sarah might be pregnant. I needed to get past my self-pity and paranoia.
I downed a handful of ibuprofen with a glass of tap water. Then I pulled a bread bag from a kitchen drawer and, after stripping naked, wrapped the plastic around my splint and awkwardly fastened it into place with a rubber band. Even with the bag secured this way, moisture from the shower found a way of seeping in and dampening the brace.
I put on a flannel shirt and some oil-flecked Carhartt pants and then made myself the simplest breakfast imaginable-dry toast and orange juice. I ate it at the kitchen table. Looking out at the tidal marsh, I saw a red-
