I started to get dizzy. My hands were numb. I picked up my glass of wine, which I meant to drink, but I was clumsy, trying too hard to hold it. Suddenly, the glass exploded, sending shards flying. My hand was bleeding. I dropped the glass on the table. The wine had splattered all over the table. Boris was stunned, or maybe just embarrassed. The waiter came running. He stood ready to dab any stain from any fine garment, ready to apologize for the accident—however it had happened—once it was explained, but Boris and I were silent.
“Settle the bill,” I said, and headed for the door.
That night we had a huge fight. Boris should have let me leave, as I’d intended. My things were easy to pack. I’d only acquired a silk shirt since I’d moved in, which crumpled into a tiny ball. He grabbed my elbow by the elevator. He got down on his knees, which was more terrifying than affecting. He begged me to stay. He told me that everything he owned was mine.
“Everything?” I shook him off.
“Yes.”
I had been right about the will.
Boris collapsed onto the floor, sitting on his big backside. He was out of breath. “How can you leave me? You are all that I have. You are my family, my arms, my legs.”
I was not me. I was Boris’s limbs. I let my bag drop to the floor. I looked longingly at the elevator, but I realized that I was past the point of valuing freedom. I’d gotten more mature, somehow, in the past couple of months and it had made me mercenary. Boris had his hands on my calves. The top of his head was shiny and, with the light shining right above us, I could see my distorted reflection on it. “I need my own money,” I said. “I don’t want to ask you for ten dollars every time I want cigarettes.”
“Of course.”
“I need to see friends, to do things on my own.”
“But you have no friends but me.” Boris looked at me pleadingly.
“I’ll make them.”
Boris nodded down at the carpet, its pattern of a trellis strangled by wild rose.
I reached out my hand and helped him stand. “We should go inside and get a drink, toast to our new beginning.”
“Maybe a celebration is in order,” he said. But from the tone in his voice, I knew that Boris had nothing to celebrate and that he was deeply regretting having told me about the will. He was also consoling himself by thinking that he could change it whenever he wanted. He must have been; something kept him civil. Boris decided that we should take a vacation to blow out the bad air. We picked up his battered VW Rabbit, which he kept parked by Ann’s apartment in Brooklyn, and drove north. Boris liked New England so we decided to head to Maine to see the last of the leaves.
6
Boris fell asleep right around Providence and I kept heading up I-95. The weather was glorious—cold and bright. I hadn’t driven in a while so it was novel and fun. My mind wandered back to school and for a brief half hour or so I committed to the idea of going back, of making peace with my father, of springing my mother, of graduating and becoming a productive member of society. I saw the buildings and the glass windows and brass knockers of a million residences and saw myself peering out, opening the door—heard my feet thudding along the old floorboards. And maybe I’d get married. And maybe I’d have children—a gorgeous dark-haired girl who would love me, ask me what to wear when she was teenager. Or maybe I’d have a loyal dog to warm my feet. I’d take up hiking. And all this if I could just get organized, reach an epiphany, and go back to school.
I’d left the highway without thinking. I’d taken the exit to Hingham and on automatic pilot, with Boris next to me in the front seat, was driving home. I didn’t even realize what I was doing until I was in the driveway of my house. I cut the engine and looked at sweep of lawns, the stacked-boulder fences, the piles of leaves that rustled in the light breeze and dusted a few leaves back across the grass. I saw that my father had finally taken the swing down from the oak tree, which I suppose was better. I’d never used the swing as much as my mother and she only really liked it during one of her episodes. I remembered once, I think I was seven, seeing her flying backward in her bathrobe, and then forward out of her bathrobe, and then in her bathrobe as she sawed through the early morning air.
A cardinal was yelling for its mate and squirrels were racing around, squabbling, but other than that the house was silent. My father would be in Boston so I wasn’t worried that he’d see me. And then I saw the figure in the bushes—a white shirt, jeans, the head in a scarf. I froze. Was it my mother?
And then he stood up.
Mr. Jones, his scarf a bandana left over from the seventies. His hands wrist-deep in muck. “Can I help you?” he called out.
I started the engine and began reversing out the drive. I saw Mr. Jones studying my face and then, recognition.
“Katherine!” he yelled. But I was already driving away.
Boris woke up. “Where are we?” he said sleepily.
“I’ve gotten us lost,” I said.
Boris peered out at the road squinting. He saw the town sign, welcoming us. “We are in Hingham,” he said. He pronounced “Hingham” as “hingHAM.”
“There’s a gas station,” I said. “I can use the restroom there.” But all I really wanted to do was have Boris take over the driving.
Boris wasn’t much of a vacationer. He didn’t want to get away from it all. He decided we’d stay in Portland. A small city he could handle. More nature than that terrified him; uninterrupted views—skies rather than skylines—gave him panic attacks. Portland was covered in fog. It was thick and ubiquitous, as though a cloud had fallen from the sky and would blanket the city until someone could return it to the heavens. The fog put me at ease in much the same way I suspect rabbits are at ease when the visibility is poor. I liked the knotty streets and uneven cobblestones. I liked the way the brick buildings slowly came into focus out of the haze, leaning on each other as tired and crooked as old men. Spires poked out of the cloud cover. Streets turned you around until you were lost in a web of oxbows and dead ends. Bells from unknown steeples pealed in the heavy air; horns sounded balefully from the bay; the scent of fish hung in dense, salty pockets on the quays.
Boris and I arrived in the early afternoon and spent the last part of the day wandering around the Old Port. There was some excitement in town about a killer who had escaped from a lunatic asylum a few miles away in a town called Gray. Every overheard conversation buzzed with talk of the madman at large—a William Selwyn—who had already been dubbed “Bad Billy.” All of this, or so I was informed by a portly woman who saw my newspaper as an invitation to conversation, was a tragedy as they had only apprehended Bad Billy three years previously, after his sixth murder. His last victim, a woman of twenty-two, had been caught unaware at the bathroom mirror. When they found her body, her left eyebrow was significantly thinner than the right, her hands fisted around a pair of tweezers.
This was all very interesting, of course, but the woman proved difficult to get rid of. I folded my newspaper into my lap. Wasn’t it unfortunate, she said, that her own safety should be so compromised? No single woman would be safe, because single women were, after all, what William Selwyn was after. She raised her trim eyebrows expressively.
“It excites you, doesn’t it?” I said. And she left.
Boris finally returned from the bathroom and announced that he was hungry. There would be, he assured me, on one of those dark and salty jetties, a fish shack where we could “sup” with the locals. Boris was now sporting a floppy Gilligan hat that he thought made him look like a fisherman. He found his seaman’s dive with the help of some neon arrows and a sign that depicted a lobster in a beard and yellow raincoat.