You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [76]
At the top of the rise, Elizabeth sees the factory where they make cranberry juice and she remembers walking in the fields behind the house with Will, past the old bogs, thinking to herself how they would one day walk those paths with their child, how once he was born, life would be about the future. The oval Ocean Spray insignia is painted in red and blue on the side of the building, perched there on the shore against the icy, churning sea.
Farther from the center of town, traffic lights hang over deserted intersections. She walks on and on past fields and houses, another group of stores, a liquor market, a fast food restaurant. She crosses the town line out of Plymouth and keeps going, the snow coming faster. At the highway overpass there is no more Howard Johnson’s, some other motel now.
“He’s out this evening,” Ted’s father said when she called from her room. Then she remembered him telling her he and Lauren were spending New Year’s together. At the end of Winthrop Street, he’d said her place was, the day they visited Lord & Taylor.
Brickman’s Funeral Home is still there, and the Catholic church, and the convenience store at the top of the hill. Crossing the river, she walks by the old shoe factory, shops and apartments now, built on the ground of the ancient sawmill. She can barely feel her cheeks in the cold as she turns down her family’s street.
The old house sits back from the road, steep front roof with the long sloping back covered in a layer of white; weathered shingles detached in places; the shutters the same dark red they’ve always been. Her brother has never been able to bring himself to sell it, so it’s rented to people who usually don’t stay long. The crab apple tree still stands in the front yard, buffeted by the winds of another snow, and she thinks the house looks much as it must have the night she lay upstairs in the front room.
Once the doctor told Will and her parents that a third of babies were born with the cord wrapped once around the neck—twice less often but not never—whatever unspoken suspicion they had ended. But the trouble was Hester didn’t leave that night. She stayed. And occasionally Elizabeth couldn’t help yelling at her for not uncoiling her son as a midwife would. After a week, Will left to see his family. Her parents took her to the psychiatrist.
In the fields she used to play in as a child—sold now—there are other homes, outsized in every way, their wide circular drives paved, lights sprayed down over the yards as if from the walls of prisons. Huge, gaudy places that dwarf the crumbling saltbox.
At the end of the street, she sees Ted’s car parked in front of the blue imitation of a château. She walks up the drive, past an empty fountain.
“WHAT ABOUT YOUR room?” he asks, passing it in the hall.
She shakes her head. “We’ll use my parents’.”
They enter a room with dark satin walls, a canopy bed, undistressed, the carpet thick and plush. Lauren goes straight over and pulls the comforter off, throwing it onto the floor, leaving just the white sheets and lots of pillows. He wishes they were at least a bit drunk. This premeditation is unnerving.
Standing beside the bed, they start to kiss. It’s harder than they’ve kissed before, their teeth knock, their tongues squirrel deep into each other’s mouths. The remove Ted felt on the highway is with him here again, his mind somewhere behind them, committing the scene to memory. She takes his hand, puts it on her breast. He starts unbuttoning her shirt, wondering if he’s moving too fast, but her hands are rubbing the small of his back in encouragement and he guesses this is how it is done. The material is silky to the touch and the buttons come apart easily. When he has her shirt off, Lauren reaches over her shoulders and removes her bra. Her breasts are small, her nipples darker than he expected. He’s not sure what to do. Neither of them is moving. He has