Ernie's Ark (6 page)

Then she heard it: the sound of a person struggling up the steep, rocky path from the lake. Swishing grass. A scatter of pebbles. The subtle pulse of forward motion.

It was a girl. She came out of the trees into the sunlight, naked except for a towel bundled under one arm. Seeing the car, she stopped, then looked toward the cabin, where Marie uncoiled herself slowly, saying, “Who the hell are you?”

The girl stood there, apparently immune to shame. A delicate ladder of ribs showed through her paper-white skin. Her damp hair was fair and thin, her pubic hair equally thin and light. “Shit,” she said. “Busted.” Then she cocked her head, her face filled with a defiance Marie had seen so often in her own son that it barely registered.

“Cover yourself, for God’s sake,” Marie said.

The girl did, in her own good time, arranging the towel over her shoulders and covering her small breasts. Her walk was infuriatingly casual as she moved through the dooryard, picked up the knapsack, and sauntered up the steps, past Marie, and into the cabin.

Marie followed her in. She smelled like the lake.

“Get out before I call the police,” Marie said.

“Your phone doesn’t work,” the girl said peevishly. “And I can’t say much for your toilet, either.”

Of course nothing worked. They’d turned everything off, buttoned the place up after their last visit, James and Ernie at each other’s throats as they hauled the dock up the slope, Ernie too slow on his end, James too fast on his, both of them arguing about whether or not Richard Nixon was a crook and should have resigned in disgrace.

“I said get out. This is my house.”

The girl pawed through the knapsack. She hauled out a pair of panties and slipped them on. Then a pair of frayed jeans, and a mildewy shirt that Marie could smell across the room. As she toweled her hair it became lighter, nearly white. She leveled Marie with a look as blank and stolid as a pillar.

“I said get out,” Marie snapped, jangling her car keys.

“I heard you.”

“Then do it.”

The girl dropped the towel on the floor, reached into the knapsack once more, extracted a comb, combed her flimsy, apparitional hair, and returned the comb. Then she pulled out a switchblade. It opened with a crisp, perfunctory snap.

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “I get to be in charge, and you get to shut up.”

Marie shot out of the cabin and sprinted into the door-yard, where a bolt of pain brought her up short and windless. The girl was too quick in any case, catching Marie by the wrist before she could reclaim her breath. “Don’t try anything,” the girl said, her voice low and cold. “I’m unpredictable.” She glanced around. “You expecting anybody?”

“No,” Marie said, shocked into telling the truth.

“Then it’s just us girls,” she said, smiling a weird, thin smile that impelled Marie to reach behind her, holding the car for support. The girl presented her water-wrinkled palm and Marie forked over the car keys.

“Did you bring food?”

“In the trunk.”

The girl held up the knife. “Stay right there.”

Marie watched, terrified, as the girl opened the trunk and tore into a box of groceries, shoving a tomato into her mouth as she reached for some bread. A bloody trail of tomato juice sluiced down her neck.

Studying the girl—her quick, panicky movements—Marie felt her fear begin to settle into a morbid curiosity. This skinny girl seemed an unlikely killer; her tiny wrists looked breakable, and her stunning whiteness gave her the look of a child ghost. In a matter of seconds, a thin, reluctant vine of maternal compassion twined through Marie and burst into violent bloom.

“When did you eat last?” Marie asked her.

“None of your business,” the girl said, cramming her mouth full of bread.

“How old are you?”

The girl finished chewing, then answered: “Nineteen. What’s it to you?”

“I have a son about your age.”

“Thrilled to know it,” the girl said, handing a grocery sack to Marie. She herself hefted the box and followed Marie into the cabin, her bare feet making little animal sounds on the gravel. Once inside, she ripped into a box of Cheerios.

“Do you want milk with that?” Marie asked her.

The girl nodded. All at once her eyes welled up, and she wiped them with the heel of one hand, turning her head hard right, hard left, exposing her small, translucent ears. “This isn’t me,” she sniffled. She lifted the knife but did not give it over. “It’s not even mine.”

“Whose is it?” Marie said steadily, pouring milk into a bowl.

“My boyfriend’s.” The girl said nothing more for a few minutes, until the cereal was gone, another bowl poured, and that, too, devoured. She wandered over to the couch, a convertible covered with anchors that Ernie had bought to please James, who naturally never said a word about it.

“Where is he, your boyfriend?” Marie asked finally.

“Out getting supplies.” The girl looked up quickly, a snap of the eyes revealing something Marie thought she understood.

“How long’s he been gone?”

The girl waited. “Day and a half.”

Marie nodded. “Maybe his car broke down.”

“That’s what I wondered.” The girl flung a spindly arm in the general direction of the kitchen. “I’m sorry about the mess. My boyfriend’s hardly even paper-trained.”

“Then maybe you should think about getting another boyfriend.”

“I told him, no sleeping on the beds. We didn’t sleep on your beds.”

“Thank you,” Marie said.

“It wasn’t my idea to break in here.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“He’s kind of hiding out, and I’m kind of with him.”

“I see,” Marie said, scanning the room for weapons: fireplace poker, dictionary, curtain rod. She couldn’t imagine using any of these things on the girl, whose body appeared held together with thread.

“He knocked over a gas station. Two, actually, in Portland.”

“That sounds serious.”

She smiled a little. “He’s a serious guy.”

“You could do better, don’t you think?” Marie asked. “Pretty girl like you.”

The girl’s big eyes narrowed. “How old are
you
?”

“Forty.”

“You look younger.”

“Well, I’m not,” Marie said. “My name is Marie, by the way.”

“I’m Tracey.”

“Tell me, Tracey,” Marie said. “Am I your prisoner?”

“Only until he gets back. We’ll clear out after that.”

“Where are you going?”

“Canada. Which is where he should’ve gone about six years ago.”

“A vet?”

Tracey nodded. “War sucks.”

“Well, now, that’s extremely profound.”

“Don’t push your luck, Marie,” Tracey said. “It’s been a really long week.”

They spent the next hours sitting on the porch, Marie thinking furiously in a chair, Tracey on the steps, the knife glinting in her fist. At one point Tracey stepped down into the gravel, dropped her jeans, and squatted over the spent irises, keeping Marie in her sight the whole time. Marie, who had grown up in a
different era entirely, found this fiercely embarrassing. A wind came up on the lake; a pair of late loons called across the water. The only comfort Marie could manage was that the boyfriend, whom she did not wish to meet, not at all, clearly had run out for good. Tracey seemed to know this, too, chewing on her lower lip, facing the dooryard as if the hot desire of her stare could make him materialize.

“What’s his name?” Marie asked.

“None of your business. We met in a chemistry class.” She smirked at Marie’s surprise. “Pre-med.”

“Are you going back to school?”

Tracey threw back her head and cackled, showing two straight rows of excellent teeth. “Yeah, right. He’s out there right now paying our preregistration.”

Marie composed herself, took some silent breaths. “It’s just that I find it hard to believe—”

“People like you always do,” Tracey said. She slid Marie a look. “You’re never willing to believe the worst of someone.”

Marie closed her eyes, wanting Ernie. She imagined him leaving work about now, coming through the mill gates with his lunch bucket and cap, shoulders bowed at the prospect of the empty house. She longed to be waiting there, to sit on the porch with him over a pitcher of lemonade, comparing days, which hadn’t changed much over the years, really, but always held some ordinary pleasures. Today they would have wondered about James, thought about calling him, decided against it.

“You married?” Tracey asked, as if reading her mind.

“Twenty years. We met in seventh grade.”

“Then what are you doing up here alone?”

“I don’t know,” Marie said. But suddenly she did, she knew exactly, looking at this girl who had parents somewhere waiting.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the girl said.

“You couldn’t possibly.”

“You’re wondering how a nice girl like me ended up like this.” When Marie didn’t answer, she added, “Why do you keep doing that?”

“What?”

“That.” The girl pointed to Marie’s hand, which was making absent semicircles over her stomach. “You pregnant?”

“No,” Marie said, withdrawing her hand. But she had been, shockingly, for most of the summer; during James’s final weeks at home, she had been pregnant. Back then her hand had gone automatically to the womb, that strange, unpredictable vessel, as she and Ernie nuzzled in bed, dazzled by their change in fortune. For nights on end they made their murmured plans, lost in a form of drunkenness, waiting for James to skulk through the back door long past curfew, when they would rise from their nestled sheets to face him—their first child now, not their only—his splendid blue eyes glassy with what she hoped were the normal complications of adolescence, equal parts need and contempt.

They did not tell him about the pregnancy, and by the first of September it was over prematurely, Marie balled into a heap on their bed for three days, barely able to open her swollen eyes. “Maybe it’s for the best,” Ernie whispered to her, petting her curled back. They could hear James ramming around in the kitchen downstairs, stocking the cupboards with miso and bean curd and other things they’d never heard of, counting off his
last days in the house by changing everything in it. As Ernie kissed her sweaty head, Marie rested her hand on the freshly scoured womb that had held their second chance. “It might not have been worth it,” Ernie whispered, words that staggered her so thoroughly that she bolted up, mouth agape, asking, “What did you say, Ernie? Did you just say something?” Their raising of James had, after all, been filled with fine wishes for the boy; it was not their habit to acknowledge disappointment, or regret, or sorrow. As the door downstairs clicked shut on them and James faded into another night with his mysterious friends, Marie turned to her husband, whom she loved, God help her, more than she loved her son.
Take it back,
she wanted to tell him, but he mistook her pleading look entirely. “She might’ve broken our hearts,” he murmured. “I can think of a hundred ways.” He was holding her at the time, speaking softly, almost to himself, and his hands on her felt like the meaty intrusion of some stranger who’d just broken into her bedroom. “Ernie, stop there,” she told him, and he did.

It was only now, imprisoned on her own property by a skinny girl who belonged back in chemistry class, that Marie understood that she had come here alone to find a way to forgive him. What did he mean, not worth it? Worth what? Was he speaking of James?

Marie looked down over the trees into the lake. She and Ernie had been twenty-two years old when James was born. You think you’re in love now, her sister warned, but wait till you meet your baby—implying that married love would look bleached and pale by contrast. But James was a sober, suspicious baby, vaguely intimidating, and their fascination for him became one more thing
they had in common. As their child became more and more himself, a cryptogram they couldn’t decipher, Ernie and Marie’s bungled affections and wayward exertions revealed less of him and more of themselves.

Ernie and Marie, smitten since seventh grade: It was a story they thought their baby son would grow up to tell their grandchildren. At twenty-two they had thought this. She wanted James to remember his childhood the way she liked to: a soft-focus, greeting-card recollection in which Ernie and Marie strolled hand in hand in a park somewhere with the fruit of their desire frolicking a few feet ahead. But now she doubted her own memory. James must have frolicked on occasion. Certainly he must have frolicked. But at the present moment she could conjure only a lumbering resignation, as if he had already tired of their story before he broke free of the womb. They would have been more ready for him now, she realized. She was in a position now to love Ernie less, if that’s what a child required.

The shadow of the spruces arched long across the door-yard. Dusk fell.

Tracey got up. “I’m hungry again. You want anything?”

“No, thanks.”

Tracey waited. “You have to come in with me.”

Marie stepped through the door first, then watched as Tracey made herself a sandwich. “I don’t suppose it’s crossed your mind that your boyfriend might not come back,” Marie said.

Tracey took a bite. “No, it hasn’t.”

“If I were on the run, I’d run alone, wouldn’t you? Don’t you think that makes sense?”

Chewing daintily, Tracey flattened Marie with a luminous, eerily knowing look. “Are you on the run, Marie?”

“What I’m saying is that he’ll get a lot farther a lot faster without another person to worry about.”

Tracey swallowed hard. “Well, what I’m saying is you don’t know shit about him. Or me, for that matter. So you can just shut up.”

“I could give you a ride home.”

“Not without your keys, you couldn’t.” She opened the fridge and gulped some milk from the bottle. “If I wanted to go home, I would’ve gone home a long time ago.”

It had gotten dark in the cabin. Marie flicked on the kitchen light. She and Ernie left the electricity on year-round because it was more trouble not to, and occasionally they came here in winter to snowshoe through the long, wooded alleys. It was on their son’s behalf that they had come to such pastimes, on their son’s behalf that the cabin had filled over the years with well-thumbed guidebooks to butterflies and insects and fish and birds. But James preferred his puzzles by the fire, his long, furtive vigils on the dock, leaving it to his parents to discover the world. They turned up pine cones, strips of birch bark for monogramming, once a speckled feather from a pheasant. James inspected these things indifferently, listened to parental homilies on the world’s breathtaking design, all the while maintaining the demeanor of a good-hearted homeowner suffering the encyclopedia salesman’s pitch.