It was late when Denise parked her Miata a few houses down from the address Paulette had given her when they were at the Acadian. Several days had passed, full days for Denise. Acadia was at the peak of its busy season. That wasn’t the reason she’d put off visiting, however. Twice Paulette Duffy had called her cell. Denise hadn’t picked up.
There was a lot to think about before she could distill even part of it into words. Paulette Duffy—Paulette—had had years to grow used to the idea. Until they’d met in the old lodge, Paulette had no proof, but she’d long had suspicions. Not Denise, not the trained law enforcement officer, taught to seek out disparities and make sense of them. Denise hadn’t had a clue.
She had always been at pains to give as little thought as possible to her so-called family. Home wasn’t “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” as Frost had written. Home was where, if you had to go there, you might as well put a gun in your mouth and blow your brains out. You’d be doing yourself a favor. The Denise who had suspicions was a deep-secret Denise, a Denise that Ranger Denise Castle had thought long dead.
Three days and two phone calls passed, and finally, at quarter past ten in the evening, Denise was parked on the outskirts of the small village of Otter Creek on a two-lane road that cut through a dollop of public land still extant in the midst of Acadia National Park.
When she’d first bought the Miata, the only concession to good sense she’d made was disabling the interior light, a practice customary in police vehicles. No sense in lighting oneself up for whatever miscreant might be waiting in the dark to take a potshot at the local constabulary.
Denise was grateful for that moment of sanity. Tonight she didn’t want to be seen entering or leaving Paulette’s place, wasn’t sure she wanted the two of them to be associated with one another. Not sure she wanted any of it to be real. Not that she loved the devil she knew, but she was used to him. Paulette would change everything.
Moving quietly and casually, she sauntered the hundred yards between her car and Paulette’s cottage. Should one of the scattered residents happen to look out a window, she would appear to be an innocent out on a stroll enjoying the sweet-smelling night.
Paulette’s home was what Denise’s high school art teacher used to call a two-bit picture in a thousand-dollar frame. Because of its location, the smallish plot of land had to be worth a fortune. The tiny but picturesque shack squatting on it was hardly worth the match it would take to burn it down. It had to be family land. Paulette’s husband’s, Denise guessed. Had it belonged to Paulette, surely she would have sold it and run away on the proceeds.
Paulette’s husband, Kurt Duffy, wasn’t home. Paulette had said that in the text that finally brought Denise to Otter Creek.
She stepped into the deeper shadow of the dilapidated porch. Through the four frosted panes in the front door shone the bluish wavering light from a television. Either the volume was off or the old house had better soundproofing than its gaping weathered siding suggested.
Denise rapped lightly on the frame of the screen door.
The door opened so suddenly it startled her. Paulette must have been waiting and watching for her. “Come in,” she whispered, as if she shared Denise’s desire for secrecy.
The house’s interior was as sorry as its exterior. A battered, stained sofa, cigarette burns on the arms and one of the cushions, slumped against the left-hand wall, facing off with a huge television. The TV was the old-fashioned kind with a rounded glass front and three feet of tubes forming an ugly black hump on its back.
A scarred coffee table filled the space between, cup rings overlapping on the ruined finish, the surface littered with orange crumbs from a single-serving bag of Doritos. Blinds with broken slats, dents in the plaster walls, dirty finger marks on the woodwork, and the cracking linoleum floor attested to the misery Denise had sensed in the battered blonde on the barstool.
Nausea tinged with panic rose quivering and cold in Denise’s midsection. Like Paulette’s bruised face, the room was an outward manifestation of the ruin Denise carried inside herself. Scrupulous attention to her outsides kept it hidden. She hoped. Her apartment was spotless, neither cluttered nor Spartan; the art was tasteful, the dishes carefully selected. The same could be said for Denise—sharply pressed clothes, well-cut hair, clean unbitten nails, painstakingly maintained so no one would suspect that her life was no better than if she were living it out in this sad room.
Anger at the tawdriness of Paulette’s house flared up, hot and bitter. This place was a slap in the face, insulting.
Paulette read her expression, or maybe her mind.
“It’s not me,” Paulette said hurriedly. “This room, it’s not mine. What I mean is…” Shoving the ruin of bleached hair back from an eye now haloed in the faint yellows and greens of a fading bruise, she let her eyes wander over the desolate interior landscape. A sigh of such exhaustion Denise’s anger was blown away on it emptied Paulette Duffy’s lungs. “I made it nice, not rich, but orderly and clean, and, believe it or not, it had charm. I’m good with my hands.”
Denise was good with her hands. For Peter’s house she’d sewn curtains and created flower beds, stenciled bathrooms, and carved tiny animals on each kitchen drawer pull. For Peter’s house. For Lily’s house. For the baby’s house.
“Kurt liked it once. Then, I guess, he knew how much it meant to me … I don’t know. Things changed. Things got broken,” Paulette finished with a resigned smile.
For Denise, too, things had changed. Things had gotten broken.
“Please, please, come,” Paulette begged, and to Denise’s surprise, Paulette took her hand and tugged her farther into the house. More to Denise’s surprise, she didn’t jerk her hand free. It was okay. It was good. It was right that her hand was in Paulette’s hand. Nothing had ever been so right before. It was like she and Paulette were alone, alone together.
Paulette led her to the pathetic couch, where they sat side by side, knees almost touching. Paulette began to talk of the little girl she’d been. The joy she’d found in the tide pools, each a tiny universe of beings so incredible it was hard to believe they were real and alive.
Denise had felt the same.
Paulette spoke of a puppy she’d had in fourth grade. Rex, she’d called him. Rex was a mixed breed with dark mottled fur and a depth of intelligence in his canny brown eyes.
Denise, who hadn’t been allowed pets—or much else in the way of comfort—had found solace in a stuffed dog, his fur mottled beige and brown. She’d named him Rex.
Paulette remembered winning the fifty- and hundred-yard dash in track meets all through grade school.
Speed was one of Denise’s strengths. Every morning until the snow got too deep, she ran five miles before breakfast. In a strange intoxicating way, Paulette was telling the story of Denise’s life, not factually, of course, but perhaps the life another Denise Castle had lived in a parallel universe. Which, in a way, was the case.
At some point they moved to the kitchen, and Paulette made tea—not coffee, tea; not fancy, Lipton. Both women drank it unsweetened with a dash of lemon juice.
Seamlessly the conversation shifted to Denise, and she found herself telling not of the wretchedness of her bouncing around the foster system but of a pair of sunglasses, the lenses shaped like hearts, the plastic frames canary yellow, that she’d had in the second grade, her prize possession, then basking in the warmth of Paulette’s throaty laugh of understanding.
Paulette’s had been shaped like the eyes of a cat, the frames fire-engine red.
Paulette had grown up on Isle au Haut, the only child of a lobsterman and his wife. Her mother “did” for the summer people who kept houses there. Much of Isle au Haut was part of Acadia National Park, the southernmost patch in the patchwork quilt of federal lands.
In her work as a ranger, Denise had been by the tiny one-room school where the island kids went dozens of times. She’d been by Paulette’s house. There had to have been times she had missed Paulette by hours, or even minutes.
At sixteen Paulette married Kurt Duffy, the son of a lobsterman who ran lines out of Frenchman Bay, and moved to the mainland, then to a tiny house on Otter Creek Road—a thin slice of public land cutting through the main bulk of the park on Mount Desert.
At sixteen Denise had planned to elope with a boy named Chuck Miles. He had been killed when a logging truck hit his Honda as he was coming to pick her up.
Paulette worked at Mount Desert Hospital.
Emergency medical work was Denise’s favorite thing about being a ranger.
Paulette worked mostly nights. She loved the night.
Denise loved the night; she volunteered for the latest shifts.
Twice Paulette had gotten pregnant, and twice Kurt Duffy had beaten her so bad she lost the baby. After the second time she could never get pregnant again; there were complications.
Denise had gotten pregnant with Peter’s child. He’d slaughtered it. Slaughtered all her children.
Kurt told Paulette that if she ever left him he would track her down and kill her.
Peter had made a family that Denise was not part of. A family with a baby.
Sometime after midnight they found themselves in the cramped bedroom Paulette shared with her husband when he chose to come home. Shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, they sat on the edge of the queen-sized bed and stared at their reflections in the wide mirror over what had once been a fine dressing table. Denise’s dark hair was pulled back from her face into a low-maintenance ponytail at the nape of her neck.
Paulette pulled her desiccated blond mop back and secured it with a scrunchie. Then they stared. Smoking had roughened the skin around Paulette’s mouth, and the blow to her face had discolored the flesh around her left eye. Other than this, they were the same. The ears were identical; their noses were the same, a little long with a squared tip and thin nostrils. Their eyes were the same shade of blue. Each had a brown fleck in the iris of her left eye, dead center below the pupil. Paulette’s eyebrows had been plucked, but the arch and the long winged taper matched Denise’s.
“I always felt you out there,” Paulette said, her voice soft with wonder. “When I was little, you were my playmate. Mom said you were my imaginary playmate. I knew better.”
Denise said nothing. She was afraid if she spoke she would cry or, worse, the woman beside her would vanish.
“Did you sense that I was here?” Paulette asked timidly.
Denise shook her head, fascinated at watching her sister’s—her identical twin sister’s—lips move on precisely the same mouth as her own. “I felt you as not here.” Denise tapped her chest over her heart. “Like I wasn’t all here. I felt part of me had gone missing. I thought maybe the doctors had accidentally cut off some part of me when I was born. It confused me because I couldn’t see any part the other kids had that I didn’t. No extra toes or arms or anything. When I got a little older, maybe eight or nine, I lived with a fairly decent family that attended a Presbyterian church. For the eight months I was with them, I went to Sunday school every week along with their kids. The teacher taught us that people had souls. After that, I assumed that I had accidentally been born without a soul. That that was the part that was missing.
“After that I put it out of my mind.”
For another few minutes they sat in silence marveling at the faces in the mirror. Denise realized she must have known from the beginning that the battered blonde on the barstool was the part of her that had gone missing.
She had recovered her lost soul.