IN ′73 BLAINE AND I had swapped our lives in the Village for another life altogether, and we went to live in a cabin in upstate New York. We had been almost a year off the drugs, even a few months off the booze, until the night before the accident. Just a one-night blowout. We’d slept in that morning, in the Chelsea Hotel, and we were returning to the old Grandma notion of sitting on the porch swing and watching the poison disappear from our bodies.
On the way home, silence was all we had. We ducked off the FDR, drove north, over the Willis Avenue Bridge, into the Bronx, off the highway, along the two-lane road, by the lake, down the dirt track toward home. The cabin was an hour and a half from New York City. It was set back in a grove of trees on the edge of a second, smaller lake. A pond, really. Lily pads and river plants. The cabin had been built fifty years before, in the 1920s, out of red cedar. No electricity. Water from a spring well. A woodstove, a rickety outhouse, a gravity-fed shower, a hut we used for a garage. Raspberry bushes grew up and around the back windows. You could lift the sashes to birdsong. The wind made the reeds gossip.
It was the type of place where you could easily learn to forget that we had just seen a girl killed in a highway smash, perhaps a man too — we didn’t know.
Evening was falling when we pulled up. The sun touched the top of the trees. We saw a belted kingfisher bashing a fish upon the dock. It ate its prey and then we sat watching its wheeling flight away — something so beautiful about it. I stepped out and along the dock. Blaine took out the paintings from the backseat, propped them against the side of the hut, pulled open the huge wooden doors where we kept the Pontiac. He parked the car and locked the hut with a padlock and then swept the car tracks with a broom. Halfway through the sweeping, he looked up and gave me a wave that was also a half-shrug, and he set to sweeping again. After a while, there was no sign that we had even left the cabin.
The night was cool. A chill had silenced the insects.
Blaine sat beside me on the dock, kicked off his shoes, dangled his feet out over the water, fished in the pockets of his pleated trousers. The burned-out shadows of his eyes. He still had a three-quarter-full bag of cocaine from the night before. Forty or fifty dollars’ worth. He opened it and shoved the long thin padlock key into the coke, scooped up some powder. He cupped his hands around the key and held it to my nostril. I shook my head no.
— Just a hit, he said. Take the edge off.
It was the first snort since the night before — what we used to call the cure, the healer, the turpentine, the thing that cleaned our brushes. It kicked hard and burned straight through to the back of my throat. Like wading into snow-shocked water. He dipped into the bag and took three long snorts for himself, reared his head back, shook himself side to side, let out a long sigh, put his arm around my shoulder. I could almost smell the crash on my clothes, like I’d just crumpled my fender, sent myself spinning, about to smash into the guardrail.
— Wasn’t our fault, babe, he said.
— She was so young.
— Not our fault, sweetie, you hear me?
— Did you see her on the ground?
— I’m telling you, said Blaine, the idiot hit his brakes. Did you see him? I mean, his brake lights weren’t even working. Nothing I could do. I mean, shit, what was I supposed to do? He was driving like an idiot.
— Her feet were so white. The bottoms of them.
— Bad luck’s a trip I don’t go on, babe.
— Jesus, Blaine, there was blood everywhere.
— You’ve gotta forget it.
— She was just lying there.
— You didn’t see a goddamn thing. You listening to me? We saw nothing.
— We’re driving a ′27 Pontiac. You think nobody saw us?
— Wasn’t our fault, he said again. Just forget it. What could we do? He hit his goddamn brakes. I’m telling you, he was driving that thing like it was a goddamn boat.
— D’you think he’s dead too? The driver? You think he’s dead?
— Take a hit, honey.
— What?
— You gotta forget it happened, nothing happened, not a goddamn thing.
He stuffed the small plastic bag into the inside of his jacket pocket and stuck his fingers under the shoulder of his vest. We had both been wearing old-fashioned clothes for the better part of a year. It was part of our back-to-the-twenties kick. It seemed so ridiculous now. Bit players in a bad theater. There’d been two other New York artists, Brett and Delaney, who had gone back to the forties, living the lifestyle and the clothes, and they had made a killing from it, became famous, had even hit the New York Times style pages.
We had gone further than Brett and Delaney, had moved out of the city, kept our prize car — our only concession — and had lived without electricity, read books from another era, finished our paintings in the style of the time, hid ourselves away, saw ourselves as reclusive, cutting-edge, academic. At our core, even we knew we weren’t being original. In Max’s the night before — pumped up on ourselves — we had been stopped by the bouncers, who didn’t recognize who we were. They wouldn’t let us into the back room. A waitress pulled a curtain tight. She took pleasure in her refusal. None of our old friends were around. We spun backward, went up to the bar, the canvases in our arms. Blaine bought a bag of coke from the bartender, the only one to compliment our work. He leaned across the counter and gazed at the canvases, ten seconds, at most. Wow, he said. Wow. That’ll be sixty bucks, man. Wow. If you want some Panama Red, man, I got that too. Some Cheeba Cheeba. Wow. Just say the word. Wow.
— Get rid of the coke, I said to Blaine. Just throw it in the water.
— Later, babe.
— Throw it away, please.
— Later, sweetie, okay? I’m chomping now. I mean, that guy, come on! He couldn’t drive. I mean what type of fucking idiot hits the brakes in the middle of the FDR? And you see her? She wasn’t even wearing any clothes. I mean, maybe she was blowing him or something. I bet that’s it. She was sucking him off.
— She was in a pool of blood, Blaine.
— Not my fault.
— She was all smashed up. And that guy. He was just lying there against the steering wheel.
— You were the one told me to leave the scene. You’re the one said, Let’s go. Don’t forget it, you’re the one, you made the decision!
I slapped him once across the face, surprised at how hard it stung my hand. I rose from the dock. The wooden boards creaked. The dock was old and useless, jutting out into the pond like a taunt. I walked over the hard mud, toward the cabin. Up on the porch, I pushed open the door, stood in the middle of the room. It smelled so musty inside. Like months of bad cooking.
This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
We had been happy, Blaine and me, in the cabin over the past year. We had chased the drugs from our bodies. Rose each morning clear-headed. Worked and painted. Carved out a life in the quiet. That was gone now. It was just an accident, I told myself. We had done the right thing. Sure, we’d left the scene, but maybe they would have searched us, discovered the coke, the weed, maybe they would have set Blaine up, or found out my family name, put it all over the newspapers.
I looked out the window. A thin stream of moonlight skidded on the water. The stars above were little pinpoints of light. The longer I looked the more they seemed like claw marks. Blaine was still on the dock, but stretched out lengthwise, almost a seal shape, cold and black, as if ready to slip away off the dock.