The Den Read online

  She was old, likely in her eighties, and she said her children had kicked her out of her own house. “They think I need to be in a home,” she said bitterly. “I thought of getting a man for the house, but you know what, I like the look of an independent woman.”

  Henrietta, she meant. Of course. Henrietta, an independent woman.

  “You don’t have to do much. My children want to sell it, but not over my dead body. Or over my dead body, I suppose. There’s a list of everything you’ll need. Plumber, snowplow man. You just have to keep the place warm, make sure the pipes don’t freeze, keep the mice out. Get a cat if you want.” Then the woman laughed and said, “Hell, get a lover.”

  Henrietta turned red. Was it that obvious, the kind of girl she was?

  The woman said, “You have a car, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, go on up there, why don’t you. See if you like the look of things. Slide open the barn door, there’s a key to the back door on the eastern wall. You just go up there and have a look and see if it suits you and then you call me again.”

  * * *

  —

  At the motel, Henrietta showed the woman at the desk the address of the house. “How long to walk?” she asked.

  The woman shook her head, scoffed. “That town’s nearly two hours away by car,” she said.

  “What’s it like there?” she asked.

  “Nothing is what,” she said. “You like nothing? Better pack your groceries, that’s what I say.”

  For an entire day, Henrietta lay on the bed in the motel room, wondering what she ought to do. Finally she called that old woman back up. She said, “My car broke down. Do you know where I can get another?”

  * * *

  —

  The man who owned the garage was named Jaime. He looked her over and said, “You don’t look fourteen.”

  “I’m not fourteen,” she said.

  “Ha,” he said loudly, and then he led her to a little rusty blue two-door car parked in the grass behind his shop. It was a stick shift, which, luckily, Kaus had taught her to drive. It was one of the things no one had known, ever. That at night, when she snuck out, he would take his father’s car and the two of them would drive right out of town, all the way up the river to the lake a half-hour away. They’d swim naked in the dark, and then they would just stand there in the soft night air and let their bodies drip off. Back then, Kaus had told her she would need to know how to drive, and he had been right. He had told her she would need to know lots of things, that she would need to know how to take care of herself. From the start he had been shocked by how little she knew about how to do that. “You,” he would say. “How do you know so little?”

  It was also back then, on one of those nights when she took the wheel and drove recklessly, laughing, filled up with a new kind of happiness, that he’d first told her she didn’t care about anything. That he liked that about her. She had never said anything to him about it, but she thought of it still.

  “You’re not quite done, you know,” the man said after she had handed the money over and signed the papers. “You’ve got to register it.” And then, “You do have a license?” He kicked at the plates. “These plates are ten years expired plus some.”

  “Can I just drive the car over to register it?”

  He shrugged. “Your choice,” he said. “Probably won’t get caught, but up to you.”

  She took the car and left. She stopped at a gas station and finally she bought herself a map, ashamed she hadn’t thought of doing so until just that moment. It was more than a two-hour drive, plus some extra time to find the road, but when she did she woke right up. It was a dead end, a tunnel of dwarfed pines and gray-green moss that shimmered with dew, and it was actually more like a dirt driveway—her own driveway, soon—than a road at all. It was the sort of forest she imagined Jane would have liked. Magical, otherworldly. When it opened up on the other side it was to a high field of tall, sharp grass and that house that stood singular at its crest. Below was ocean in three directions. Henrietta, seeing the house, thought she must have the wrong address, so she turned the car around quickly and drove back down to the road and checked the mailbox number, then drove farther down still, retracing her steps all the way to the sign that announced she’d entered the town. Of course the house looked okay to her. Of course. When she got back to it she raced to the barn and slid the door open and found the key and hurried inside, feeling like she had finally gotten to the finish line of the terrible game she had started more than a week ago now. She let the door hang wide open as she raced around and tried every chair in the place, every bed. There was a sign on the front of the house, 1776, and it had all been perfectly preserved—or restored, she never quite knew which. Thick, ancient windows, maple floors, a beehive oven in the brick of the fireplace. A woodstove in nearly every room, and quilts, and furniture upholstered in bucolic scenes: men with their hunting dogs, women and children out for an afternoon picnic. It was all too much. Straightaway she found the phone and called that woman up and said yes, yes. She said she felt she could stay on there forever.

  * * *

  —

  In that house, Henrietta officially decided that in order to be a mother she had better know how to roast all the typical meats and to make macaroni and cheese, that sort of thing. There was no TV at that house anyway, so she didn’t know what else she was going to do. There were lots of cookbooks, and there was a grocery store some twenty minutes away. There was also a little hardware store, and in addition to tools they sold some clothes and some things women would like: hand mirrors, makeup, glossy magazines. Henrietta bought herself light pink nail polish and a manicure/pedicure kit, and in another two days she went back to the store to buy a few more colors of polish. She also spent hours walking the property, and for this she’d bought some wool socks and rubber boots and some pants that were meant for a fisherman. There wasn’t much snow, just cold, bitter rain, and keeping the house warm and dry kept her busy enough. She’d pulled a mattress out of one of the bedrooms and put it on the floor in the living room, and that way she had to heat only that room plus the kitchen. She would lie there on the mattress and look out the window at the ocean below for hours, thinking of nothing at all.

  * * *

  —

  Every time she went to the grocery store, she got the paper from the city, and she’d sit in the car and flip frantically through it, searching for any mention of herself. There never was one.

  She wasn’t sure if that made her miss her family more or less. She should have left them a note, she thought. Maybe if she’d left a note, they wouldn’t be as angry, which meant that maybe then they would look for her. But then one night she woke up with the realization that she had actually left one—or at least she thought she had. That practice one, the one she’d considered leaving but then decided against—she was sure she’d left it in that box in the fireplace in The Den. After she remembered that, every single day she would repeat, “Please find my note, Jane, please find my note,” as though she believed in that sort of message or prayer.

  But then why did she even leave? Had it even been necessary? Would her mother really have forced her to go through that whole terrible thing again? She sat up wondering that sometimes, too.

  * * *

  —

  With her clothes on, it would still be imperceptible to others, but Henrietta could see the definite roundness of her belly now. Sometimes she felt that to admit there was a baby in there would be to make it disappear, and that was just one more thought that terrified her. Not that she wanted to have a baby any more now than she had at the start—she was only a child, after all. She knew that as well as anyone. But now that the thing was in her, growing.

  Sometimes Henrietta feels like all her life it has been her fate to leave. When she used to drive at night with Kaus she would always say, “Jus
t keep driving. Go far away.” He never would, though. Loved his grandmother too much, wanted to care for her. But Henrietta—even when she was younger, when she would walk in the woods or steal a ride on her father’s horses, she would always think of just going and going and never coming back.

  * * *

  —

  She had left her family in November, and by January she was certain she could feel a flutter. At first she knew it was just her baby spinning around in there, but then, all alone in that big, windy house, she convinced herself that it wasn’t movement at all, but a signal of some horrible trouble within. Finally she called the place that receptionist at the hospital had told her about. The Birth Room. When the woman answered, Henrietta said, “I’m pregnant.” In response, the woman practically jumped through the phone with congratulations. Henrietta told her quickly that it had been an accident, and then she made an appointment for the next day. She said she could feel something, and the woman said, simply, “Well, there you go. You’ve got a baby in there.”

  The place was all the way back in Ellsworth, which she hadn’t returned to since coming to the house. As she drove she repeatedly thought she must be headed the wrong way. It was that the drive was so much more beautiful than she’d remembered, the ocean so much grander. In one sense, she had become accustomed to such a view—in her new house, she could see the open ocean from nearly every window. But somehow, up in that house, she had come to see that ocean as separate, as water that encircled her spit of land and nothing else, as though even the earth’s immutable features now held her apart from the rest of the world. Now, as she headed toward the big town, with the ocean at her side nearly the entire way, she was forced to admit that she was not nearly so disconnected as she might have thought. It made her want to pull over, to postpone the journey, because as she drove she could not stop picturing the people of the town below just waiting for her arrival, ready to trap her and drag her back off to where she belonged.

  But then that wasn’t an entirely bad vision. Besides the fear, there was a little seed of hope tucked into it.

  But no matter—fear, excitement, she forgot it all. She went into that place and lay back on the purple couch and the midwife put some kind of speaker contraption to her belly and that little thing’s heartbeat just filled the room. There it was, a whole, entire heart inside her belly.

  * * *

  —

  The childbirth class at The Birth Room began in March, when Henrietta had been on her own for nearly half a year. By now she really could cook: She could make a pie and its crust, she could stuff and roast a turkey, she could bake a moderately good loaf of bread. It made her think of Jane. Really, so much of her life alone did. She’d even begun to read, and had already read every book the library owned on babies. She was excited to go to this class—felt an unexpected fascination in the growing baby. Before leaving she dressed carefully, as though it was her first day at a new school. She watched the tide coming in as she drove, and the sun gleaming off the water. It was a familiar trek by now—she’d been having appointments every other week since January—but the beauty of it continued to surprise her, and just now it filled her up, so that by the time she arrived she was wrapped in a new kind of feeling. Happiness, maybe. She was going to meet other pregnant people like her. The waiting room was lined with glossy photos of newborn babies and their deliriously happy parents, and for the first time as Henrietta walked in she could imagine herself up there among them.

  She was late, though. She realized it as soon as the door shut behind her, ringing its bells, and faces from down the hall peered out. So many women were already there. And, worse, they all had their partners—their husbands—with them. They all had jobs and houses and plans, and surely they all had freshly painted nurseries and brand-new cribs. They sat snugly on the couches and chairs that lined the perimeter of the room. She stood awkwardly in the doorway as they went around the circle introducing themselves—name, due date, profession, that sort of thing. There was an accountant, a hairdresser, a few fishermen, lots of future stay-at-home moms. And Henrietta: single runaway. They had all already turned to her. She pushed herself harder against the doorframe, and when they still wouldn’t look away she said, “My name’s Henrietta and I live way the hell up there.”

  The bells on the front door rang again just then, and finally everyone peered past her to see who else had walked in.

  And so, Alicia. Happy, perky, poor Alicia. She had a small frame, even smaller than Henrietta’s, and a huge belly, and she wore a man’s T-shirt and bright green track pants that snapped up the sides. Over the coming weeks the T-shirt would change but the pants would remain the same. She pushed herself right into that room and squeezed onto the couch, and when prompted she announced proudly that she worked as the clerk at a gas station. Her hair was a bright, shocking blond, which Henrietta assumed to be the result of bleach but later learned was pure nature. She too lived way the hell up there—she actually phrased it just as Henrietta had—and because she and Henrietta were the only ones without partners, they were paired together for the remainder of the monthlong class.

  “What do you do?” Alicia asked Henrietta as she practiced squatting on a birth stool. In another few months, Henrietta would be holding Alicia’s hands as Alicia moaned naked atop this very stool.

  “The pelvis may be bone, but it shifts during labor,” the instructor said. “The pelvis can do amazing things.”

  “I need a job,” Henrietta said, because working did seem like the most normal thing to do.

  Henrietta said she was twenty years old, but Alicia was honest about her age—or at least Henrietta thought she was. Alicia was eighteen. That evening, they moaned lowly together, and they practiced that quick, horselike sputtering, and together they were shocked to learn that after they pushed their babies out they would still have to push out an entire placenta. “No fucking shit,” Alicia said in front of the whole class, when the instructor told them how much blood they would lose. “My sister,” she said, “she went all the way back to the hospital. She thought she’d lost an organ or something.”

  Alicia’s whole family still lived in the northernmost reaches of the state, and none of them knew she was pregnant. In Henrietta’s mind, this put them in roughly the same boat, minus the briefcase of money, of course. So it was that they became friends. In the parking lot, after seeing the sad state of each other’s car, they decided that since they both lived in roughly the same area, they might as well carpool.

  * * *

  —

  Throughout the following week, Henrietta found herself looking forward to the next class, to some company. She even picked up Alicia’s phone number a few times, considered calling just to talk or even to invite her over, but she decided to wait. When Wednesday finally arrived she drove early to the gas station and found Alicia waiting in front of the pumps. She had a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips to share and a bottle of iced tea for each of them. Before they pulled out, Alicia pointed out back to the trailer she rented, told Henrietta it was a shitbox but it was her own.

  And then, “I almost forgot, I found you a job! You know Josephine’s?”

  Henrietta did not.

  “Fancy restaurant,” Alicia said. “Least the cook thinks it’s fancy, but he’s full of shit.” She said she’d known the man forever, and that he’d just told her they were looking for a waitress. “I told him you’d go in. What do you think?”

  * * *

  —

  On Friday she went into the restaurant. She didn’t need to, not at this point, and what with the baby coming it probably didn’t make any sense, but other than wanting to appear normal, she also wanted to feel that way. Anyway, her father had worked in a kitchen her entire life; to say she had experience wasn’t totally inaccurate. The cook called the owner, he came in and shook her hand, and within five minutes she had a job. No questions about the growing belly. She didn
’t see the owner again the entire time she worked there.

  The restaurant was the sort for tourists, opened only Thursday through Sunday, and it wouldn’t get much business until high summer. Just now—March, April—Henrietta rarely saw more than five tables a shift. She was the only waitress. The cook’s name was Timothy Vallilee.

  “Say it with me,” he said when they met. “Val-li-lee. Like Galilee.”

  He had a brown wavy mullet and he wore fluorescent, jungle-patterned chef pants. He was fifty-some-odd years old, and he’d spent his entire career cooking at low-quality, overpriced tourist restaurants that would keep him living where the fishing was good. This particular spot was his favorite; over the years he’d returned to it at least a dozen times. Most recently he had returned to it from a “mistake” in Alaska.

  Timothy pronounced marinara sauce mart-nara without knowing that was incorrect. He slapped Henrietta’s ass with his towel each time she walked by. Still, she liked him. She was on a barren spread of earth, beautiful but arctic, and aside from the loneliness, she always felt just one step away from being swallowed whole by the ocean. Knowing Timothy—just knowing one more person—seemed to help.

  One time, Henrietta went to Timothy’s cabin after close. She brought Alicia with her. It had been built as a vacation spot—a little summer shack in the woods not two minutes from the restaurant. This was still early spring, the air so wet and penetrating that Henrietta felt even her skin would never dry off. He’d hung woolen blankets over the windows to keep the heat in, so that while they sat there together in the living room it felt more or less like they were in a cave. Timothy smoked pot and played his electric guitar, and Alicia seemed to be having a good enough time, but after about an hour or so Henrietta was so disgusted by the combination of their pregnant bellies and the noise and Timothy and his smoke and beer that she told Alicia it was time to go and then she walked right out. Alicia took her time getting to the car. Once there, she suggested that rather than being driven all the way home, she could just stay over at Henrietta’s. It seemed a good enough idea, and that’s how it all began, at least in Henrietta’s memory.