Closer All the Time Read online

She takes another peek inside the house.

  The cat is rolling herself up into a tangle, kicking and biting at the yarn, and the girls are laughing with a hoarse, clenched ferocity that means they’ve probably had just about enough.

  Susan takes one last drag, walks down the plank steps—imaginary cameras still rolling—and drops the cigarette onto the grass. She puts it out with the toe of her shoe, and nudges it out of sight under the porch.

  Then she crosses her arms and looks around at the fields and trees.

  It’s pretty here, and she loves having a big garden; she loves the field that leads down to their little piece of the river. It’s always been nice to be able to shoo your children—or grandchildren—outside without worrying about traffic or strangers or any of that.

  Sometimes though, there’s a part of her that still wants to be a town girl. It’s thinking about her childhood that brings it on, she supposes. It always makes her think of her home—the home she loved so much.

  She holds her arms out wide, turns toward the house, dances up the steps to the porch. Inside, she gathers up the yarn and lets the cat out. Then, she takes the girls into the bathroom so they can brush their teeth and wash their faces and hands. She lets them do most of it themselves, before taking control of the washcloth for the finishing touches.

  She has their pajamas in the closet, and before long they’re in the guest room, tucked in, waiting for their mandatory story. And because Susan has been thinking about being a girl and about the house she grew up in and about Johnny Lunden, she sits on the edge of the bed and says, “Once upon a time, there was a little girl who looked just like Olivia Hurd . . .”

  “Like Eloise Hurd,” the younger girl mumbles sleepily but adamantly.

  “Like Olivia and Eloise Hurd,” Susan says. “And one day this little girl moved to Baxter from a little brick house a long way away . . .”

  Susan can clearly remember the ride down from Bangor. It was a warm spring day, much like today. She remembers sitting in the backseat and listening to her parents talk in the front. She remembers crossing the river and looking at the railroad trestle a little downstream, and entering the town, and how different—cozier and prettier—from Bangor it seemed.

  They’d parked in front of the hardware store and her father had pulled the directions out of his shirt pocket and checked them. Then he’d gotten out to look at the numbers on the buildings. He came back to say to her mother, “We can walk it from here,” with a boyish, expectant grin.

  And Susan remembers how they’d proceeded along the street past one beautiful old sea captain’s house after another, and how she’d wondered with burgeoning excitement which one it would finally be.

  When her father stopped and put his hands on his hips, Susan had held her breath and prayed that he wouldn’t shake his head, say, “Nope,” and start off again, as he’d done a couple of times along the way. Because this house looked like a fairy-tale castle: tall and white, gabled and filigreed, flanked by high-arching elms.

  “This is the one,” he’d said then, and they went reverently up to the porticoed front door. Her father knocked and the real estate agent let them in, shaking her father’s hand and then her mother’s and then Susan’s, very gently.

  “Welcome to Baxter!” he said. “I think you’re going to like it here!”

  They followed him through empty, echoy chambers with gleaming hardwood floors—it was much roomier than their house in Bangor—and Susan remembers the narrow passageways that led into mysterious turrets on both sides of the living room. But she wasn’t allowed to explore the turrets just yet.

  She had followed the grown-ups through another room and up a stairway, and when they got to the top, her father had pointed and said, “This could be your bedroom, honey,” and the realtor, hearing this, led them into the wonderful, sunny room with a bay window, an enormous closet, and an expansive, lofty ceiling.

  Susan had wanted to stay right there forever.

  But the realtor had more to show them.

  “See what you think of this!” he’d said, taking them to another stairway that led to the attic. He had then conducted them up a short set of steps and through a hatch to an open widow’s walk on the roof, where Susan leaned against a wooden railing—her mother’s arm around her—and looked all the way across the leafy town to the river.

  If they hadn’t bought the house after that, Susan would have died. But she’d known better than to plead, because her father had instructed them on the drive down not to appear too eager, even if the place seemed too good to be true.

  “They’ll jack up the price,” he’d said. “Believe me, I’ve seen it happen.”

  And they had believed him, of course, because he was a real estate attorney himself, which is how he’d gotten word on the house in the first place, before it even made it onto the market. He’d been looking to move out of Bangor, to find a little town with an abundance of nice old homes and a shortage of legal specialists, and one of his pals in the business had tipped him off about Baxter.

  From the widow’s walk the real estate agent had pointed out the homes of several of Baxter’s leading citizens. He’d given them a little rundown of the town’s shipbuilding history, the industry that had made all the big homes possible.

  Then he took them back downstairs, and Susan’s father had allowed her to run into one of the turrets—they were just round rooms, it turned out—and then to go outside and play, as long as she stayed in the yard, while he and Susan’s mother talked with the realtor in the kitchen.

  Susan remembers walking out the side door and moseying around the house, trailing a hand along its brick foundation, to the backyard, where she was stunned to see a dirty-faced, towheaded boy in patched overalls hunkered down in the shaggy grass, out of sight of the house behind a prim little shed, fiddling with bits of wood and a cigarette lighter.

  She was upset at first to find a strange boy, not only making himself at home on their new property, but playing with fire to boot. But since he seemed to be totally unaffected by her arrival, she didn’t yell for her parents, and when she walked closer and he finally did look up from his little campfire, it was with such a welcoming, mischievous grin that all she could think to do was crouch down next to him.

  “This is my secret hideout,” he’d told her. “But you can stay.”

  “Okay,” Susan said.

  “Want to help?”

  At his direction she peeled wispy bits of birch bark from the orderly row of trees bordering their back lawn, and added twigs and broken pieces of pine shingles from a small assortment beside the cellar door.

  They slowly fed the fire, careful it didn’t get out of control, too engrossed to talk much more beyond exchanging names and ages. (He was seven, too.) But by the time Susan’s father had come outside and called her name, they were well on their way to becoming fast friends.

  Her father called her name again, loudly.

  Susan yelled, “Coming!,” and they’d stomped the flames out and run around to the portico, where the realtor was shaking everyone’s hand again and climbing contentedly into his convertible.

  “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you!” he called over.

  Everybody waved as he drove off, and then Mr. O’Leary turned around, put an arm around Susan’s mother, and said, “Well, how about that!”

  Then he seemed to notice the boy standing beside his daughter for the first time, and he scooched down low to shake the boy’s slender hand, asking his name and where he lived.

  “Johnny,” the boy had said, pointing diagonally across the street to a house that, while not grandly built like the ones on their side of the street, had no doubt once been a perfectly acceptable Cape Cod.

  Now, though, it was so obviously neglected—peeling paint, broken porch railings, a cracked window, missing roof shingles—that when the boy asked if it would be all right for Susan to come over and play, her father, having already taken note of his personal dinginess, suggested that
for now, he’d prefer they stay right here where he could keep an eye on them. But he winked and said it playfully, so as not to embarrass the boy. Her father was always thoughtful that way.

  “And as time went on,” Susan says, “the girl and the boy became best friends, and they stayed friends all the way through school.” She’s still sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the dark window, speaking in a low voice.

  When she stops talking she can hear Eloise breathing deeply, and she would have thought Olivia was asleep, too, but when she leans over to kiss them good night, Olivia’s eyes open a fraction.

  “I like that boy—that Johnny,” Olivia says.

  “I like him, too,” Susan says. “He was a nice boy.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Oh, he grew up,” Susan says, “just like we all do.”

  “Not me,” Olivia whispers, and then, just like that, she’s out.

  Susan laughs soundlessly, kisses Olivia’s cheek, then walks around to the other side of the bed and kisses Eloise’s. She pulls the covers up under their little chins.

  Susan is back on the porch, smoking another cigarette, when Roger finally makes it home. He shuts his headlights off, and for a moment she can’t see anything. Then it’s a clear night again and there are thousands of stars overhead, some bright as anything, others barely visible against the blackness.

  Roger limps over from the car. “Is that you, Susan?”

  “I suppose it is,” Susan says.

  “You know how I feel about smoking.”

  “Why, hello, darling,” Susan says. “I missed you too.”

  Roger stops halfway up the steps and looks at her. The porch light isn’t on, and it’s dark with just the starlight and a fingernail of a moon over the trees, and she’s barely visible. She looks different—something about her posture. He watches the ember at the end of her cigarette rise and brighten, then lower again.

  “Is everything all right?” Roger says.

  “Oh, of course it is.”

  Roger watches the ember rise again, then drift off to the side and hold steady. In the vague light, he thinks that Susan has tipped her head to one side. She might be looking at him. He’s not sure. Then he hears her long, slow exhalation, and for a moment the smoke lingers between them in the dark country air.

  Eric

  Eric Lunden is sitting on the baggage belt with James Blake, waiting for the next flight to arrive.

  The belt is a relic that Roger Lambert picked up for a song when he transformed Baxter Municipal into Knox County Regional a while back. It’s a sort of conveyor with swiveling plates that hooks through the baggage room and disappears under a SAIL THE MIDCOAST poster. Eric and James are sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups, keeping an eye out that some wise guy doesn’t sneak in and hit the on button that sends the belt lurching into motion. Those twisty plates can do some damage.

  They’re discussing the new girl Lambert’s got working the Avis desk when an elderly dude comes ambling up with his two-wheeler, which means the Maine Air flight is going to land shortly—their cue to get outside.

  They ease to their feet and head for the doors, two rangy young guys almost exactly the same size.

  Eric says, “Hey, Tate,” to the skycap, and the old-timer says, “Eric” right back, with a friendly-enough nod. Then he turns to James and says, “Brother,” and they bump knuckles.

  Eric and James shove through the double doors, cross to the taxi stand, and drape themselves against James’s front fender. It will take a few minutes for the plane to actually land and for the passengers to claim their bags off the old conveyer and come outside.

  Eric doesn’t mind dawdling there. He and James have become amigos all over again, twenty years later, and it’s nice, standing there in shirtsleeves in the sunlight that comes at a slant across the river and settles itself over the airport like a softly shaken blanket. The edge of that blanket flips little dust devils up that kick past them and twirl away along the terminal lane.

  After a while Eric looks at James and says, “About all that brother stuff.”

  “What took you so long?” James says.

  “I had to think about it.”

  James snorts. They often snort at each other.

  “No, really,” Eric says. “Am I not a cabbie?”

  “You are,” James drawls.

  “Was I not a skycap, too?”

  “Rumor has it,” James says. He looks into his coffee cup, takes a quick sip.

  “If you prick me, do I not bleed?” Eric says.

  James rolls his eyes because he knows Eric is showing off. He’s way more educated than Eric—has a master’s in comparative lit from Columbia, and taught for a while at Quinnipiac. But he also turned out to be someone who couldn’t hack academia for whatever reason, which is why he’s back in town, temporarily driving taxi for Norm Lavin.

  “And where do I abide?” Eric says.

  James doesn’t bother to answer.

  The fact is, Eric has been staying with James at the rooming house. How Eric ended up there was, he came back to Maine to see his mother and brother, and when that went better than expected, he decided to go crazy and look up the old man, too. But Johnny Lunden was at the Togus VA facility, drying out, which meant Eric had to hole up somewhere if he was going to wait, which he decided to do because it had taken him almost a decade to come back this time, and who knew when he’d work up the ambition to try it again.

  He ran out of money after a couple of weeks, and Early helped get him in at the airport. He lugged baggage, then jumped to a cabbie job. When James reappeared it was a surprise, but they reconnected easily enough over a few games of horse, and then James began driving too, and they were together a lot, just like the old days.

  “That’s all well and good,” James says now.

  “But . . . ?” Eric says archly.

  “There’s context involved.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well,” James says, “one’s heritage.”

  “As to that,” Eric says, “who can ever really say?”

  And he puts an arm next to James’s. He’s a bit olive-y anyway, and likes his sun, and James isn’t a hell of a lot darker, truth be told. Eric shakes his arm to emphasize the scant difference.

  “Are you making some kind of a point?” James says.

  “A family of Nordics,” Eric says, “and I show up.”

  “So there was an Italian in the woodpile.”

  Eric laughs.

  The terminal doors bump open then, but it’s only Lambert’s kid hustling off on some errand.

  Eric looks back at James. “So listen, one day in Portland I closed the bar at this hotel, okay? And while I was walking across the parking lot, these two assholes came out of one of those street-level rooms, yelling the N-word.”

  James raises his eyebrows. “At you?”

  “I shit you not.”

  “Huh,” James says. “Continue.”

  “When they got close one of them said, ‘Hey, you ain’t a—!’” Eric makes a nasty face to indicate the unspoken word. “Then they turned around,” he says, “and went back from whence they came.”

  “Crestfallen, no doubt,” James says.

  “Crushed,” Eric says.

  “Poor lads,” James says. “Racists have feelings too, you know.”

  “Anyway, the point is—”

  “The point is, it was dark out and they were probably drunk.”

  They work on their coffee. Pretty soon the Maine Air twin lands and rolls out and taxis toward the terminal. It’s the only scheduled carrier that comes into Baxter, a little commuter that flies Cessnas back and forth to Boston.

  “Another time,” Eric says, and James groans.

  “No, listen. I’m walking back from the store with a six-pack, and this girl I happen to know is going the other way, and it seems like she’s purposefully not looking at me, so when we’re about to pass I reach out and grab her arm. She jumps a foot. ‘Oh, my God!�
� she says. ‘I thought you were some black dude.’”

  “Well!” James says. “No wonder she jumped.”

  “She didn’t mean it like that. Anyway, the point is—”

  “Yeah, I know.” James finishes his coffee and takes the empty cup across to the trash can next to the terminal doors. There’s a paperback sticking out of his back pocket. He and Eric are both notorious for reading in the cabs—it drives Lavin crazy—but James’s books are apt to have the word treatise on their covers, while Eric’s tend more toward busty blondes and revolvers.

  James comes back and the old baggage belt starts up—you can hear it lurching and clanking into gear—and Eric warns, “I got more,” as he drifts down to his own cab to wait.

  “I’m sure you do,” James says.

  After ten minutes the clatter shuts down and people start coming outside. First are a couple of old ladies, arms linked, dragging suitcases on wheels. Seeing James in the number-one spot, they veer toward Eric, smiling like harpies.

  “Sorry, ladies,” Eric says. “That other gentleman is first.”

  James snorts under his breath. One of the old ladies rolls her eyes over toward him and then back to Eric, staring fixedly, trying to will him into some kind of tribal understanding.

  “No problem, ladies,” James calls over. “It’s perfectly all right.”

  “Absolutely not!” Eric protests. “I wouldn’t think of it!”

  It’s all bullshit, of course. James is pretending to be unflappable, and Eric is feigning righteousness, but actually neither wants anything to do with the old ladies because whoever transports them will inevitably have to hump their bags up three flights of stairs into a place that smells like stale crumpets and old cat litter in exchange for a minuscule tip, if any. Eric has the leverage, though, because James is first up, so when he marches them over and more or less stuffs them into James’s cab, James can’t do anything about it.

  “There you go, brother,” Eric says.

  James smirks. He walks around the front of the car and gets in behind the wheel. He looks over his shoulder and says, “To the Ritz, ladies?”