4

COCHRANE CROSSING

June 17

There was a sign that said COCHRANE CROSSING POP. 254. It hung from a pole that had been bent either by a storm or by a drunken driver unable to fathom the treacherous twists of the blacktop highway. The sign itself was rusted and almost illegible, as if the inhabitants of the place were anxious to maintain a certain anonymity. And the village gave that impression, the small frame houses huddled close together and the porches masked by shadows, the window of the general store empty of goods and unadorned by signs, the tavern little more than a dim cave with no beer signs hanging outside. The whole place might have been hacked out of the weather-beaten landscape by a race of people too weary to face any more of the world, a species that had retreated indoors forever, behind barricades and locks and empty windows and drab lacy curtains. Rosie had the thought that if Cochrane Crossing were a person it would be wearing dark glasses and traveling under an assumed name.

She put her foot lightly on the brake as a 30 MPH sign came up in front of her. “Who was Cochrane and what did he cross?” she asked.

Martha smiled. “He’s probably one of those characters lost in history,” she said. “The kind that disappears and just leaves his name behind like an afterthought.”

“I guess,” Rosie said, seeing glimpses of the ocean in the narrow spaces between the houses. “Anyplace else in the world, this would have been turned into a swinging resort years ago. A boardwalk. A couple of high-rise hotels. Some nightclubs. I bet there’s an entrepreneur somewhere just aching to find a joint like this and transform it.”

She yawned. She hadn’t slept well, waking a couple of times in the dead of night with a dull headache burning just behind her eyes. Once when she’d wakened she’d had the odd, dreamy impression that somebody was walking around the downstairs part of the house—she’d ignored it and turned over on her side and gone back to sleep again but she remembered it now, wondering if perhaps Martha or one of the kids had wandered downstairs for a drink of water. And then she was conscious of how quiet the two kids were in the back seat of the wagon and she glanced at them in the rearview mirror.

“Nothing makes me more suspicious than a couple of very silent teenagers,” she said. “I always get the impression that conspiracies are being hatched and devious plots thought up. Am I right?”

She saw Tommy smile in a thin way but Lindy didn’t react to her question at all, just continued to stare out of the window as if the village were a leper colony in which she had a morbid interest.

Rosie parked the wagon outside the grocery store and swung round to look at the kids. Lindy—there was something secretive about her own daughter, she thought. Something that was just a little furtive. It was as if she had constructed a portable transparent cage around herself into which she could retreat whenever she felt like it. Adolescence. That was the name of that cage. Adolescence, with its jigsaw emotions. That was where you first started to lose your own kid. It was like making a present of your own flesh and blood to that malignant figure, good old Father Time.

She reached back and stroked Lindy’s head. “What’s on your mind, babe?”

Lindy shrugged.

It’s one of those moody days. One of those days in which the kid just seemed to soak herself in isolation. Rosie often thought that the best way to deal with such times was to leave the child alone until she snapped out of it all by herself, which was precisely what she intended to do right now. She got out of the wagon and stepped up on the sidewalk, where Martha was already waiting in the entranceway to the store.

“They’re big on advertising round here,” Martha said.

Rosie looked at the sullen window of the store, through which she could see the dull interior of the place and a figure moving around in the gloom. She started to laugh. “I can see Doris Maitland charging in here with a hatful of her coupons only to find that this place won’t redeem them.”

They went inside. There was an old-time wonderland of smells all at once, of hams, spices, cheeses, pickles, the kind of perfumes that had long ago been expunged from supermarkets by air-conditioning units. There was sawdust on the floor and an antiquated meat-slicing machine and a thin-faced woman standing behind the counter, her eyes the precise color of the ocean that came and went around Cochrane Crossing. She raised her face from a newspaper she’d been reading and smiled at the two women, and there was something so warm and so unexpected in her expression that Rosie suddenly thought, Hey, Cochrane Crossing has a heart after all. So much for your basic first impressions.

The woman leaned forward, gnarled elbows on the counter. “You must be the folks renting the Callahan place.”

Rosie moved between stacks of canned goods, items in boxes, noticing the thin layer of dust that covered everything. “The Callahan place?”

“The beach house eight miles down a ways,” the woman said.

“Right,” Rosie said.

“You like it down there?”

“It’s fine, just fine.”

The woman picked at something in the corner of her eye. “Must be three, four years, since that place was rented for a summer.”

“That long?” Rosie asked, surprised. Three or four years—why would a summer beach house lie vacant that long? Maybe the owner hadn’t wanted to rent it. Maybe it was something that simple.

“Must be, I reckon.” The woman came around the counter now, wiping her hands against her apron, which was spotless and white. “My name’s Darlene. Darlene Richards.” And she was smiling again, as if hospitality were as natural to her as breathing the ocean air.

“Rosie Andersen. This is my friend Martha Schuyler.”

Martha looked up from a stack of Campbell’s soups she’d been examining and smiled at the woman.

“Those your kids out there?” the woman asked.

“One’s mine. The other I can’t take any responsibility for,” Rosie said.

Darlene Richards strolled to the window and looked out at the station wagon, studying the kids a moment. “Bright-looking youngsters,” she said. Without turning, without taking her eyes from the children, she asked, “How long you folks staying?”

“Six weeks,” Rosie said.

“A lonely place way out there.”

“We like it. It’s a change from the city.”

“I’ll say.” Still rubbing her hands, Darlene Richards moved back toward the counter. She had thin sticklike legs covered with rather old-fashioned black stockings and she moved in a strange rocking manner, as if there were something wrong with her hip. “Now which city would that be?”

“Syracuse. Upstate New York.”

“That’s a ways.”

Rosie found herself liking this woman and her quaint store, found herself enjoying the smells of the place, what you might call—in the manner of a magazine article—the ambience.

She glanced at Martha and wondered at her friend’s silence and her shyness. It was usually like this whenever they found themselves confronted by a third party. Rosie did all the talking, went through all the social maneuvers, and Martha clung to the background like a wallflower.

“Don’t know what you’ll find to do out here after Syracuse.” Darlene Richards pronounced the name Sire-Accuse, almost chopping off the last syllable in her mouth. “Some folks go to the bar at night, I guess, and some go to church on Sundays, but mainly there ain’t much of anything around Cochrane Crossing. No movie house. No library.” The woman shrugged in the manner of somebody who had become accustomed to the backwaters of the world. Rosie watched her and wondered why people chose to live here or if it was the kind of place you were born into and died in, stripped of choice through lethargy or a lack of stimulation or a failure of ambition. She couldn’t see herself here all year round—but this was a relative thing: New Yorkers couldn’t imagine Syracuse twelve months out of every twelve either.

The little bell above the door rang and she looked round to see Tommy come into the store. She thought how much he resembled his father if you saw him in a certain light. A little double, a replica. She realized she didn’t want to think about Charlie right now—she’d never liked the man on those few occasions when she’d met him, finding him somewhat intense and self-centered, wrapped up in his little academic world as if it were the only real one. And she wondered what it was that Martha was still clinging to in the marriage. Did she think clocks could be turned back and deeds erased and the sun would rise again in an unsullied sky? Romantic Martha. She looked back at Darlene Richards.

“You mentioned somebody called Callahan.”

“Yeah, right. I did. The Callahans always owned that house out there.”

“Do they still live around here?” Rosie asked.

“Only one of them left and that’s old Andrew, but he keeps pretty much to himself these days.” Darlene Richards propped her elbows up on the counter again. “I got some ham here that would tempt a saint. You interested in ham?” She dragged a huge slab of meat from under the counter and slung it out in front of her.

Rosie looked at the pink meat for a moment, seeing tiny drops of sweatlike moisture glisten on the fatty flesh.

And just for a moment, a terrible moment, she saw something move in the grain of the flesh. Something white, burrowing. A maggot.

There, just beneath the surface of the ham, a tiny worm.

Her stomach turned over and she felt sticky liquid rise inside her throat.

But then the worm was gone and she wasn’t sure if she’d seen anything at all, if it was just something she’d imagined in the poor light of the store. She recovered her composure slowly.

“We’ve got quite a list of things to pick up here. Maybe we’ll get around to that ham later.” She turned to Martha. “Well, kid, time to stock up,” and then she began to move up and down the very narrow aisles, stuffing things into a wire basket.

Martha followed behind her, and Tommy slid off to look at a rack of old comic books he’d discovered tucked away in a corner.

“Is something wrong with Lindy?” Martha asked.

“She’s just off on one of her little mental trips. Sometimes she reads something in a newspaper—like maybe how some Buddhist monk has set himself on fire or how kids are starving in Chad—and for a few days she’ll haul the burdens of the world round on her shoulders.” Rosie picked up a package of Anacin. “These or Bufferin?”

Martha pulled a face. “I’m into Tylenol myself.”

“I don’t see any here,” and Rosie dropped the Anacin into the basket and moved farther down the aisle. She stopped by the toilet tissue. “One-ply or two?”

“I go for the two-ply personally. I like the density.”

“Two-ply it is.”

They paused together in the far corner of the store in front of a stack of canned meats. Rosie studied the labels for a time, looking at the Spam and the luncheon meats and the whole boned chickens. “Decisions, decisions. Isn’t this fun?”

“I’m having a whale of a time, Rosie.”

“Me too,” and Rosie dropped some Spam into her basket. Martha followed her round the corner of the aisle. Boxes of candies, rows of Baby Ruths and Mounds and Almond Joys, jellybeans glistening like a rainbow of slugs, pink things wrapped in cellophane. A whole sugar nightmare.

“I think we give this section a miss,” Rosie said.

“Speak for yourself.” Martha tossed three Hershey bars into the basket. “I haven’t learned how to handle the munchies like some people I know. I still suffer.”

“Which reminds me, we need rolling papers.”

Twenty minutes later they were through and back in the street again. They stashed the bags in the back of the wagon, where Lindy was still sitting and watching the street motionlessly. Jesus, Rosie thought, her mood better improve—they were going to be here for six weeks and the last thing she needed was a sullen teenager on her hands for that length of time. But she knew from experience that it was best to let Lindy drift out of it herself. She’d tried the social director approach, the jolly slap-your-knees-and-let’s-sing-campfire-songs bit, but nothing like that worked with Lindy. She was like a human submarine waiting for the right kind of weather before emerging.

“You want to look around a bit before we head back?” Martha asked.

“Sure, let’s check the scenery,” Rosie answered, and as she got inside the car she reached back and ran her hand over Lindy’s face. Despite herself, she asked, “You sure there’s nothing wrong, babe?”

“I’m fine,” Lindy said, and her voice was flat.

“You could’ve fooled me.” Rosie started the car and drove away from the sidewalk. Sometimes, when Lindy assumed a pouting expression, Rosie had flashes of when the kid had been a baby. Back then, the pout had been cute and adorable, and she and Herb had even done things to encourage the look—like playfully removing a favored toy or teasing the baby with some bonbon held just out of reach. That was then, but now was different and the look didn’t exactly enthrall Rosie these days.

There were only two streets in Cochrane Crossing, a main street and another that intersected it just beyond the grocery store. Rosie went right, in the direction of the beach, seeing on either side of the car more of the same frame houses, the same porches, the same windows that gave you the feeling there were people watching from behind drawn drapes. The street simply petered out close to the beach, where the pavement was covered with windblown sand and patches of sea grass. She backed the car up and returned the way she had come, crossing the main street and driving away from the shore this time. There was a dilapidated railroad track overgrown with weeds and an abandoned warehouse of some kind just beyond it. A few more houses, and then nothing.

She returned to the main street once more, passing a small church with a bleached-out signboard out front. Pieces of paper were tacked there and they fluttered back and forth in the breeze. Bulletins of some kind. Announcements of forthcoming events. Marriages. Christenings.

Rosie couldn’t imagine marriages and births in this place. She couldn’t imagine forthcoming events. She couldn’t see Pot Luck Suppers and fundraisers or any of the gatherings you might normally associate with a church. There was a certain bleakness to the small white stone building that suggested inactivity, abandonment. But since the big front doors were open a little way and a small kid was peering out, his large eyes impassively watching the station wagon go past, there had to be some kind of activity going on inside.

And then they were going past the bar and the grocery store, and Cochrane Crossing was suddenly behind them, disappearing from the rearview mirror as if it had been the figment of somebody’s imagination. Presumably Cochrane’s, Rosie thought. Which didn’t say a whole lot for the creativity of the guy if that dreary village was all he could dream up.

“The local tour,” Martha said. “I guess that’s it, folks.”

“I guess,” Rosie said.

They drove in silence a little way, then Rosie remembered what Darlene Richards had told her about the beach house. “Did you hear her when she said the place hadn’t been rented for three or four years?”

“Yeah,” Martha answered.

“How do you figure that one?”

Martha shrugged, as if the question didn’t interest her. “Maybe it was on the market and they were trying to sell it. Who knows? Maybe they just didn’t want renters.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

Martha took out a cigarette and lit it; she didn’t answer the question. She rolled her window down and let the smoke blow out. In the back seat the breeze flipped the pages of Tommy’s comic book, and Lindy sat with her face pressed to the window, her nose flattened against the glass.

Rosie sighed. She had always disliked silences, and the one inside the car right then grated on her a little. What the hell. Some days don’t work. Some days people are preoccupied with their own things. Some days they don’t really want to communicate. So they have their comic books or their cigarettes or their moods of withdrawal and you couldn’t change that.

She gazed at the sea for a time. After lunch, she’d drink some Jack Daniel’s and she’d take her camera and go down the beach someplace and lose herself in her own little universe of prisms and lenses and apertures, textures and shadows and compositions. This was only the first day, after all—and the tour of Cochrane Crossing hadn’t exactly been uplifting.