It took me five minutes to get the courage to turn the ignition on. It took me six to swallow the bile that accompanied having to back out of the driveway at Pete’s office. I knew he was looking at me through the curtain, wondering if I had the guts to put my innocence to the test. By the third red light, I had stopped shaking.
On Google maps, it looks like a straight shot through central Connecticut to Cape Ann, an optimistic three-hour journey from hell to my new adventure. Interstate 84 to the Mass Pike, then swing onto I-95 to its 128 terminus, and Bob’s your uncle. Except that I’ve chosen to begin the journey to the next place in my life during rush hour. I’m slowed way down through Hartford, but once past East Hartford, it’s open road to the state line. I’m sailing along by that time, cheerfully confident I’m making good time, when I get to the unpredictable Mass Pike, where I-84 débouchés onto it and all these lanes of traffic compete with the speeding vehicles already on the Pike that want to move over to the Sturbridge service plaza. Worse, there’s been a car fire on the right shoulder a mile down, and that’s the real holdup.
Creep, stop. Creep a bit more, get excited. Stop. I’m supposed to meet the contractor at eleven. It’s ten-thirty now. Ignoring the lighted signage along the turnpike that reminds me that texting and driving is illegal, I text Tucker Bellingham, the project’s general manager, to let him know I’ll be late. Great way to make an impression as the new project manager. I’m no traffic virgin; I know this east-west route very well.
I crank up the radio in a vain attempt to muffle the persistent thoughts that have engaged the worst parts of my brain since the moment Warden Hinckley set me free. Why me? Why not me? It’s an interesting dichotomy. My case is hardly sexy: White woman runs over heinous but rich boyfriend, revenge or accident? If I knew who had recommended me to the Advocacy for Justice, maybe I could better understand why I was chosen to be advocated for. I think back to my erstwhile fellow inmates, and there isn’t one who might not have benefited from the attention of a nonprofit group bent on getting justice served where justice had been thwarted. Certainly LaShonda deserved a second chance. She, too, had been victimized by a boyfriend, and the system. I’d said as much to Meghan, and all she said was that it had been my turn—my turn for something good to happen.
LaShonda had said about the same. If there was resentment or jealousy in those green eyes, she kept it from me. “Hey,” she said, “life sometimes gives you a break. Take it and run.”
Surrounding the topography of my thoughts is the extreme pleasure of changing radio stations. I dabble in oldies, news, classical, and rap. I have a choice!
And then, as these things do, the road opens up, we pick up speed, and I am over the bridge spanning the Annisquam River and around the two rotaries into Gloucester by one o’clock. It takes a little more time to find the Homestead, mostly because I drive by it, convinced the my nav app is wrong. I leave the well-kept county road, turning onto a narrow lane. This can’t be the place. This looks like it’s ready to fall down. It’s dressed in clapboards so old that they appear soft, with tinges of green at the edges and no obvious paint. Despite my lofty title, I’m no expert on construction, but the roofline seems to sag; no, it does sag, like a inverted bow. There is a foursquare chimney in the center of it, and the roof shingles that should surround it are missing; tar paper flaps in the light breeze. Blind windows flank either side of the black front door, two on one side, one on the other, giving the house a lopsided face.
The yard, such as it is, is a wonderful example of the term benign neglect. Weeds flourish in the uncut grass, itself a stalky brush of more gold than green. I realize that I’ve stopped dead in the road, so I follow a two-track dent in the grass that leads to a barnlike structure appended to the house by a breezeway, or what must have been a woodshed back in the olden days. I shut the car off, grab my phone, and text Mr. Tucker Bellingham, principal of Dogtown Construction Company, to say that I have arrived. In a moment, I get a text back; we’ll meet here at two o’clock.
That’s fine. I’m starving.
The coffee shop is so busy that I have to sit at the endmost counter stool. I’m facing myself in a mirror. I try not to look at the face reflected back at me, because she looks like someone I used to know, but I can’t recall her name. I haven’t had a proper haircut in a very long time, all those expensive layers have grown out, along with my highlights, replaced by premature gray, and I have gotten into the habit of tying it back, a look that narrows my face, a face that is the very definition of prison pallor. It’s not that I hadn’t spent time outside. With the dogs, I’d had the one privilege of access to the prison yard whenever I needed it. But the yard is walled, and the sun is a reluctant visitor, and the very climate within the prison steals the color from your cheeks. There are no beautiful women in prison. Any beauty a woman walks in with is quickly taken from her. The stress of communal living, the poor-quality food, the constant tension, the loss of privacy, all suck the beauty from her face and her soul. I look at myself in the mirror across from me and see a pinched and faded remnant of who I was. My nose looks more prominent. My brows are shaggy and I should put on lipstick. I should find a CVS and buy some.
The other reason I don’t want to keep looking in that unforgiving mirror is that I am aware of the proximity of men in this narrow place as reflected in that mirror. Workingmen, come to grab a cup of coffee between jobs; retired men, killing time before having to go home. Men in the fluorescent yellow vests of construction jobs; men in blue jeans and flannel shirts. Heavy leather work boots. Thick white or black rubber boots, suggesting a maritime profession. Big men, most of them. Bearded or not, balding; potbellied or slender. Put a gray guard’s uniform on any of them, switch out the hammers hanging from their utility belts for truncheons, and they could have been the same men I encountered every day in prison. In a world of women, it was the men who controlled the universe. Warden Hinckley, Officer Tierney, and the rest of the sundry poorly trained guards who either bullied or flirted, or worse. In my experience, men are not to be trusted.
“Can I have this wrapped, please?” I ask the woman behind the counter. She plops my half-eaten egg-salad sandwich into a Styrofoam container far too big for it. I order a coffee to go. I drag a few dollars out of my jeans pocket and hope that it’s enough. I remember to take in a deep breath, to let it out slowly. The passage between the counter and the booths is narrow, and I have to wait for a guy standing at the register to move enough that I can squeeze by and get out the door. He doesn’t notice me standing there, take-out container held at chest level, coffee seeping its heat into my hand. I need to make him move; I need to get out of here.
I am attempting a clumsy dance step to sidle out behind him when he suddenly turns and, sure enough, bumps the coffee in my hand. The lid pops off, but, miraculously, the spillage hits neither of us, only the floor. I feel the scarlet of anxiety hit my face.
You are so clumsy, what is wrong with you? Charles’s voice is always in my head at times like these.
“Oh, ma’am, I’m so sorry.” The guy quickly grabs a handful of inadequate paper napkins out of a dispenser and starts sweeping away the mess. “Marcy, can I get this lady a new coffee?” He rises to his full height and I am put in mind of a bear on its hind legs. He’s one of the flannel shirt guys I’ve been trying not to look at.
“It’s fine. No, please. I don’t need another. There’s plenty left.” I bolt out the door, dropping the remains of the coffee and the sandwich into a trash can. I lock the doors of the Forester. Officer Tierney liked nothing better than bumping into you, making sure he led with his crotch, knocking the food tray out of your hands. Standing there watching with his serpent’s eyes as you bent to pick up the mess. Especially after I had declined his offer of sex in exchange for feminine products.
Back at the Homestead, as my benefactors call it, I get out of the car. I pull the key that Pete Bannerman gave me out of my jeans pocket and realize that I don’t know if it’s the key to the back or the front door. I try the front door first. It sports a very tarnished door knocker in the shape of a fish. Just out of curiosity, I lift it by the tail and drop it to see if it still works. It does, although the hinge squeaks. I bet some 3-in-One oil would fix that. There are cracked panes in the flanking windows, and I wonder if the windows will have to be replaced. Modern energy-efficient windows would certainly help with what must be enormous heating costs for a leaky old house like this. Well done, me, a very pertinent observation with its companion suggestion. I try the key, but it doesn’t fit. So around to the back I go.
Approaching the back of the house, I think that it looks as bad as it did from the front. Maybe worse, because, at some point in the house’s life, a clumsy addition was tacked on, aluminum-sided, sporting those crank-out windows, completely at odds with the rest of the house. A vent pipe sticks up through the roof, and I figure this must be for the bathroom. There is a slouching screen door, sans screen, its cranky hinges protesting as I pull it away from the back door. I try the key, but it doesn’t fit this lock, either. Guess I’ll have to wait for Bellingham. Maybe he’s got the right key. Unless there’s a door I haven’t spotted.
In the meantime, I’ll explore the yard. The day is just lovely and having the freedom to stroll around and, literally, sniff the flowers is a delight. My circumnavigation around the house and property takes me to a stone wall. There are gaps in it, places where the drystone construction has given up, gravity has won, and the stones, many of them dressed granite, have fallen off, seeking a return to the earth. I notice one rock with something painted on it. I brush the lichen from its surface and read Boy. It gives me a little shiver. Is some poor nameless child buried here, all by himself? And then I think, No, this is a pet. A dog, maybe. I look around for other markers. Have I come across a pet cemetery and should I be prepared for a Stephen Kingesque haunting? But there don’t seem to be any others, at least none marked by hand-painted stones.
I spot a tangle of undergrowth and skinny trees on the other side of the tumbled rock wall. If I was a country girl, I might be able to name the trees and bushes that fill in the space beyond the wall. I know oak; at least I think I do. Maybe beech? That white-and-black tree must be white birch. Isn’t that what the Native Americans used for canoes? I’ll have to ask someone. I don’t know who. I don’t know anybody. Oh wait! I have a smartphone, so I guess I can look it up for myself.
Here’s something I can identify, blueberries! Or are they huckleberries? I can’t tell the difference, but they are sweet, and I pluck a handful to make up for the lost half of that pretty good egg-salad sandwich. When I was a kid, we used to go blueberry picking at those U-Pick-Em places up Route 1. I have a flash of memory, of Teddy, on his feet, dropping berries into my pint basket. I grab another handful of berries. After so many years of fruit privation, the sweet tang of ripe berries is beyond luscious. I feel a ripple of excitement in my gut, I can go to the supermarket and freakin’ buy fresh food! My circumstances have changed so rapidly I haven’t had time to process the magnitude of it. Little realizations keep popping up, and I add them to the string of happiness beads that each moment away from Mid-State accretes. I pop another handful of berries into my mouth. Blueberry juice stains my fingers and I lick them.
A massive silver pickup truck pulls up beside my red Forester. DOGTOWN CONSTRUCTION COMPANY is professionally lettered on its side in gold and blue. Tucker Bellingham has arrived.
As I approach, the driver climbs out of the truck. It is my dance partner from the diner.
“Tucker Bellingham?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, are you with the clerk?” He does that man thing, looking around for the man who should be standing here instead of this woman.
“I am the clerk. Mary Rose Collins.”
There is this little flush of embarrassment that hits his cheeks above the gray-shot black goatee he sports, “Oh. Okay. Of course. M. R. Collins. I thought it was Mr. Autocorrect.”
“Not what you were expecting?” I’m not going to think about why Pete managed to keep my gender out of the conversation. I’m just hopeful he kept the really important things about me out of the conversation, too. “Mary Rose—M.R. Mostly known as Rosie.”
Bellingham shrugs off his faux pas. “We’ve kind of met, haven’t we?”
“We have. The incident at the coffee shop.”
“Righto. Sorry about that.”
“Ah, I can’t seem to make this key work.” Better a non sequitur than an explanation.
Tucker takes the key and leads me into the woodshed and then to a side door, unlocks it, and gives it a shove with his shoulder. “After you.”
Now is my moment of reckoning. I go in.
The woodshed door leads directly into the kitchen. The only thing that suggests the twentieth century, much less the twenty-first, is the combination gas stove, which is white, with a fringe of hardened grease. The sink is black soapstone, with a brass faucet and a sloping enamel drain board. A china cup is on the drainboard, a remnant of the last occupant, maybe her last cup of tea. No saucer. A woodstove protrudes from the mouth of a fireplace, and there is a rag rug centered in front of it on the warped brown-painted floorboards. Whatever colors the braided rug might have once been, it is now a uniform gray color, and even as I step on it, a plume of dust rises from it. I feel like I’m treading into a crypt, a burial place.
“Stove works. And I had a gas delivery made. Oh, and the water is on.”
“Is there hot water?”
“Looks like the water heater died a long time ago. We’ll get a new one in soon.”
Tucker is clearly familiar with this place, and he leads me around, enumerating the ideas he has for its restoration. They all sound expensive, and I figure that my first responsibility to the Homestead Trust will be to make sure he’s working off its page. Except that I have no specifics. No budget. No idea.
How am I ever going to stay here? We haven’t even gone upstairs yet and I’m ready to bolt. “I’m not sure how I’m even going to stay in this house; there’s no heat, no hot water. It’s pretty…”
“Primitive?”
“Yeah.” I don’t add that this place makes prison look positively luxurious.
“You won’t need heat just yet, and I’ll show you how to use the woodstove. You can boil water on the gas stove. If you think the beds aren’t usable, I’d suggest that you head down to Cabella’s and pick up a good cot and sleeping bag. It’s roughing it, yeah, but, hey, the Trust obviously thinks you’re up for it.”
I have to ask, “Who are they, the Trust people?”
“Damned if I know. I just talk to that Pete Bannerman guy.”
Thus goes any fleeting hope that I’ll find out who my benefactor is.
“And why do you think they hired me?” Clearly, he doesn’t know the actual arrangement; that this is some kind of bizarre test of my spirit by an unknown benefactor.
“I don’t know. Probably the same reason why they hired me. I’m the best. You’re probably good at what you do, too.”
I wonder what it is he thinks I’m good at. I haven’t been good at anything in a very long time.
I follow Tucker back out into the warmth of the summer day. He’s given me a rough idea of the work he’s already got lined up. As early as tomorrow, I can expect workmen. I wonder if I can find someplace to hang out while they’re here. The idea of being in the presence of men is still uncomfortable, and I wonder if I’ll ever get over that.
Tucker yanks his truck door open, climbs in. “So, tomorrow, then. Welcome to Dogtown.”
“I thought this was Gloucester.”
“It is.” He pulls away, leaving me standing in the unkempt yard.
I watch him drive away, and fight the urge to call Meghan right this minute. I need the voice of someone who will tell me that everything will be all right.
I’ve made camp in my new digs, racking up a few bucks on the “business” credit card that Pete handed me. A decent folding cot, which I’ve set up in the kitchen with a Coleman sleeping bag; a composting toilet because, despite what Tucker said, there is no dependable plumbing in this house—one flush and the ancient commode blew a gasket. He told me that the last tenant—Henrietta Baxter, he said her name was—didn’t seem to mind the lack of hot water or other modern amenities, such as a shower. I can’t complain. Which is to say, I shouldn’t complain. I don’t have to share that fly-specked mirror over the nonfunctioning sink with anyone else. I have a giant economy-size box of tampons, and being able to reach in and get one whenever I need it is priceless. I don’t have a supply of ramen noodles hidden away, I have actual cans of Campbell’s soup, six varieties, sitting openly on the shelf in the pantry. My first trip to the grocery store took two hours, my eyes dazzled by choice.
I have silence.
I am not used to silence. I lived in an unquiet house, then a noisy dorm. Not to speak of life in prison with the bells and sirens and loudspeaker announcements day and night; the perpetual sound of someone yelling or crying or cursing God. Even living with Charles wasn’t quiet, not living as we did in the city. Here I don’t even have the soft hiss of car tires on the macadam in front of this house, situated ever so close to the road. After seven o’clock, there is scarcely a car going by. I wonder who would call should this place go up in smoke? Who would notice? The most reliable noise is that of crickets, knelling the end of the day. At dawn, the birds twitter and cheep and caw and rasp, and the fact that I can hear them so distinctly only reminds me that I am alone. I have never really been alone. I longed for the concept while incarcerated; a moment’s privacy seemed attainable only through breaking rules and being sent down. But now, now that I have hours alone either before the various crews join me for the day or after they go home, I realize that I have never been prepared for solitude. I come from a full house. I don’t think that there were more than a handful of times when I had more than an hour by myself there, and those times only when my mother had Teddy out for his therapy or for a checkup.
I find myself lying awake tonight, plucking at the slippery surface of the sleeping bag in an attempt to get it smoothed out over and under me. Other than my own grumbling about the uncooperativeness of the sleeping bag, there is complete silence inside, not even a ticking clock to keep me company. The single brass faucet doesn’t even drip, no relentless hypnotic rhythm to fix upon. I think I hear an owl outside. Certainly crickets. Needless to say, I quickly give in to a little wholesome wild imagining. A creaking sound from upstairs—is that the house settling, or someone there? Old house noises, not quite inside, not quite out. Something hits the roof. Acorn or intruder? This place is ancient; surely one or two of its former inhabitants must be lingering. A scratching in the walls, and I draw the sleeping bag over my ears.
Earlier, I’d called Meghan and she’d patiently listened to the odyssey of my travels and the oddness of my accommodations. Her only advice: “Hang in there. It’ll get better.”
A while later, in a doze, not truly asleep, I startled. Is there movement outside? A rustle in the long grass? Is someone moving out there? Someone who might think this abandoned-looking house is a good place to seek shelter? I sit up, yanking the bottom of the sleeping bag, which had slumped to the floor, back onto the cot. The slick material hisses as it moves against the mattress. Of course, it was just the sound of the bag slipping, not some creature—or worse, human—slinking around the back door. Still, I get up and turn on the one working lamp in the house. It was never dark in prison, so having a lamp on in the bedroom-cum-kitchen is no problem for me.
When I was with Charles in New York, I thought that I was lonely. What I was, it seems to me now, was simply being bored. Now I am actually alone, and I suffer a different kind of loneliness, not one of being left to my own devices all day, but as one who has been alienated from those I love, those who used to love me. At first, this estrangement from my family felt temporary, forgivable. I had this childish belief that families had to take you back, that they had to love you. My transgression was in making the choice I had, and it was only after Charles’s death, and the upending of my life, that I realized that that choice had cut so deep that I would never be welcomed home.
I am more persistent now that the wheel of fortune has turned for me once again. I call my mother every day. I leave voice messages for her and, as an unreformed pesky little sister, I group text my brothers. I see the lengthening one-sided thread, as if I’m casting my line into an empty sea.
It rained last night, and the tall grass of the backyard is glittering with droplets in the early sun. I’ve become an early riser. As soon as the sun breaks cover, I wake up, surprised every morning that I am awakened by the sun and not fluorescent lights. I make my coffee in an old-fashioned percolator on the stove. It’s taken a few tries, but now I have the timing down perfectly. Cup in hand, I go out through the path that I’ve trampled in the unkempt yard—Tucker has promised a mow crew will show up by the end of the week. It rained hard enough that the path is muddy, and I regret wearing my new Nikes outside. There’s a stone bench, or maybe it’s just a big rock no one could move, so it’s become a bench, but it’s situated perfectly to sit and enjoy coffee and nature and make a plan for the day. The bench is nearby Boy’s stone, and I feel like I’m communing with his (presumably) canine spirit as I sip my wickedly strong java. It makes me feel less alone, which makes me wish that I was comfortable around the workmen. But I think that may take some time. It has been a while since I was in the company of a nice guy. A trustworthy guy. Someone who didn’t want something from me. Or who made me into a target. These guys are too much like the men I spent the last few years staying away from. Not that they aren’t polite, quiet, and honed in on their tasks, not on me. But some habits of fear are hard to put aside when circumstances change.
I hear Tucker’s truck horn. I’m sure he’s afraid of catching me in dishabille. He has no idea that I’ve grown quite used to strange men seeing me in my nightclothes. Or even wrapped in a raggedy towel on those occasions when a sudden lockdown resulted in my being forced to the floor as I was coming out of the shower. He certainly can’t imagine the squat-and-cough routine. He doesn’t know that I have no modesty.
As I push myself off the rock, I glance down and see a paw print. It’s huge, too big for a dog, I think, and then I wonder if there are wolves in this area. Maybe coyote feet are bigger than I thought. I’ll ask Tucker if I should be nervous. I’m a city girl, after all. Now that I’ve noticed them, I follow the paw prints as they appear here and there in the exposed muddy patches in the tamped-down grass. Here’s one, there’s another, and then I’m standing in the barn. Not exactly in the barn proper, but in that connector that Tucker calls the dogtrot, the covered space between the house and the barn. Ancient splits of firewood are stacked in it, and I imagine the former residents were happy to have a dry cover for their heating source, and a way to fetch it without having to go outside. The paw prints—and by now I’m convinced these are a wolf’s—lead into and out of the dogtrot and away, as if the beast took himself across the road.
“Good morning.” Tucker has found me standing in the dogtrot. I point out the paw prints. I assume that anyone built like he is, outdoorsy, would know what these prints signify. “Look at this. Can you tell me if this is a wolf print?”
Evidently, Tucker was raised right, and he doesn’t make fun of me. At least not immediately. “Uh, no. I don’t think we have wolves out here, at least not anymore. I’ll check with the fish and game people if you’d like.”
“How about a coyote?”
“That’s more likely.” Like a good Boy Scout, Tucker examines the set of prints, and he admits that they are unusually large. “Be careful about leaving trash around.”
“I’m composting.”
“Keep it in a container. You don’t want to attract skunks and raccoons; they’re coyote food.”
Maybe I should get a dog. A random thought that sends a little thrill through me. I could do that. I have the freedom. No one’s permission to ask, no application to fill out, no waiting period. Nothing so small it could be killed by a man’s hands. Something big, with a big bark. I picture it exactly. Almost like I’ve seen it before. Something assertive, but not aggressive—unless I require it. Loyal to me. Mine alone, never to be handed over to anyone else.