Sixty Days and Counting

It was a familiar experience for Frank, and yet this time he was following the lithe and graceful figure of his lover or girlfriend or he didn’t know what, descending neatly before him, like a tree goddess. Some kind of happiness or joy or desire began to seep under his worry. Surely it had been a good idea to come here. He had had to do it; he couldn’t have not done it.

The trail led them into the top of a narrow couloir in the granite, a flaw from which all loose rock had been plucked. Cedar beams were set crosswise in the bottom of this ravine, forming big solid stairs, somewhat snowed over. The sidewalls were covered with lichen, moss, ice. When they came out of the bottom of the couloir, the stairboxes underfoot were replaced by a long staircase of immense rectangular granite blocks.

‘This is more like the usual trail on the east side,’ Caroline said, pointing at these monstrous field stones. ‘For a while, the thing they liked to do was make granite staircases, running up every fault line they could find. Sometimes there’ll be four or five hundred stairs in a row.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No. Every peak on the east side has three or four trails like that running up them, sometimes right next to each other. The redundancy didn’t bother them at all.’

‘So they really were works of art.’

‘Yes. But the National Park didn’t get it, and when they took over they closed a lot of the trails and took them off the maps. But since the trails have these big staircases in them, they last whether they’re maintained or not. Mary’s dad collected old maps, and was part of a group that went around finding the old trails. Now the park is restoring some of them.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘I don’t think there is anything like it. Even here they only did this for a few years. It was like a fad. But a fad in granite never goes away.’

Frank laughed. ‘It looks like something the Incas might have done.’

‘It does, doesn’t it?’ She stopped and looked back up the snowy stone steps, splotchy here with pale green lichen.

‘I can see why you would want to stay here,’ Frank said cautiously when they started again.

‘Yes. I love it.’

‘But …’

‘I think I’m okay,’ she said.

For a while they went back and forth on this, saying much the same things they had said at the house. Whether Ed would look at her subjects, whether he would be able to find Mary …

Finally Frank shrugged. ‘You don’t want to leave here.’

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I like it here. And I feel hidden.’

‘But now you know better. Someone looked for you and they found you. That’s got to be the main thing.’

‘I guess,’ she muttered.

They came to the road they had parked beside. They walked back to his van and she had him drive south, down the shore of Jordan Pond.

‘Some of my first memories are from here,’ she said, looking out the window at the lake. ‘We came almost every summer. I always loved it. That lasted for several years, I’d guess, but then her parents got divorced and I stopped seeing her, and so I stopped coming.’

‘Ah.’

‘So, we did start college together and roomed that first year, but to tell the truth, I hadn’t thought of her for years. But when I was thinking about how to really get away, if I ever wanted to, I remembered it. I never talked to Ed about Mary, and I just made the one call to her here from a pay phone.’

‘What did you say to her?’

‘I gave her the gist of the situation. She was willing to let me stay.’

‘That’s good. Unless, you know … I just don’t know. I mean, you tell me just how dangerous these guys are. Some shots were fired that night in the park, after you left. My friends were the ones who started it, but your ex and his friends definitely shot back. And so, given that …’

Now she looked appalled. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Yeah. I also … I threw a rock at your ex,’ he added lamely.

‘You what?’

‘I threw my hand axe at him. I saw a look on his face I didn’t like, and I just did it.’

She squeezed his hand. Her face had the grim inward expression it took on whenever she was thinking about her ex. ‘I know that look,’ she muttered. ‘I hate it too.’ And then: ‘I’m sorry I’ve gotten you into this.’

‘No. Anyway, I missed him. Luckily. But he saw the rock go by his head, or felt it. He took off running down the Metro stairs. So he definitely knows something is up.’ Frank didn’t mention going by their apartment afterward and ringing the doorbell; he was already embarrassed enough about the hand axe. ‘So, what I’m still worried about is if he starts looking, and, you know, happens to replicate what my friend’s friend did.’

‘I know.’ She sighed. ‘I guess I’m hoping that he’s not all that intent on me anymore. I have him chipped, and he’s always in D.C., at the office, moving from room to room. I’ve got him covered in a number of ways – a spot cam on our apartment entry, and things like that, and he seems to be following his ordinary routine.’

‘Even so – he could be doing that while sending some of his team here to check things out.’

She thought about it. Sighed a big sigh. ‘I hate to leave here when there might not be a reason to.’

Frank said nothing; his presence was itself proof of a reason. Thus his appearance had indeed been a bad thing. The transitive law definitely applied to emotions.

She had directed him through some turns, and now they were driving around the head of Somes Sound again, back toward her place. As he slowed through Somesville, he said, ‘Where should we put my van?’

She ran her hands through her short curls, thinking it over. ‘Let’s put it down where my car is. I’m parked at the south end of Long Pond, at the pump house there. First drop me off at the house, then drive down there, and I’ll sail down on the iceboat and pick you up.’

So he turned at the firehouse, drove to her camp and dropped her off at the house, feeling nervous as he did so. Then he followed her instructions, back toward Southwest Harbor, then west through the forest again, on a winding small road. He only had a rough sense of where he was, but then he was driving down an incline, and the smooth white surface of Long Pond appeared through the trees. The southern end of its long arm was walled on both sides by steep granite slopes, six or seven hundred feet high: a pure glacial U, floored by a lake.

He parked in the little parking lot by the pump house and got out. The wind from the north slammed him in the face. Far up the lake he saw a tiny sail appear as if out of the rock wall to the left. It looked like a big windsurfing sail. Faster than he would have thought possible it grew larger, and the iceboat swept up to the shore, Caroline at the tiller, turning it in a neat curlicue at the end, to lose speed and drift backwards to shore.

‘Amazing,’ Frank said.

‘Here, wait – park your van up in those trees, just past the stop sign up there.’

Frank did so and then returned to the craft, stepped in and stowed his daypack before the mast. The iceboat was a wooden triangular thing, obviously handmade, more like a big soap box derby car than a boat. Three heavy struts extended from the cockpit box, one ahead and two sideways and back from the cockpit. It was an odd-looking thing, but the mast and sails seemed to have been scavenged from an ordinary sloop, and Caroline was obviously familiar with it. Her face was flushed with the wind, and she looked pleased in a way Frank had never seen before. She pulled the sail taut and twisted the tiller, which set the angles of the big metal skates out at the ends of the rear struts, and with a clatter they gained speed and were off in a chorus of scraping.

The iceboat did not heel in the wind, but when gusts struck it merely squeaked and slid along even faster, the skates making a loud clattery hiss. When a really strong gust hit, the craft rocketed forward with a palpable jolt. Frank’s eyes watered heavily under the assault of the wind. He ducked when Caroline told him to, their heads together as the boom swung over them as part of a big curving tack. To get up the narrow lake against the wind they would have to tack a lot; the craft did not appear able to hold too close to the wind.

As they worked their way north, Caroline explained that Mary’s grandfather had built the iceboat out of wood left over from when he had built the garage. ‘He built everything there, even some of the furniture. He dug out the cellar, built the chimney, the terraces, the dock and rowboats …’ Mary’s father had told them about this; Caroline had met the grandfather only once, when she was very young.

‘This last month I’ve been feeling like he’s still around the place, like a ghost, but in the best kind of way. The first night I got here the electricity wasn’t on and there was no sound at all. I never realized how used to noise we’ve gotten. That there’s always some kind of sound, even if it’s only the refrigerator.’

‘Usually it’s a lot more than that,’ Frank said, thinking of how D.C. sounded from his treehouse.

‘Yes. But this time it was completely quiet. I began to hear myself breathing. I could even hear my heart beat. And then there was a loon on the lake. It was so beautiful. And I thought of Mary’s grandfather building everything, and it seemed like he was there. Not a voice, just part of the house somehow. It was comforting.’

‘Good for him,’ Frank said. He liked the sound of such a moment, also the fact that she had noticed it. It occurred to him again how little he knew her. She was watching the ice ahead of the boat, holding the boom line and the tiller in place, making small adjustments, splayed in the cockpit as if holding a kind of dance position with the wind. And there they were barreling across the frozen surface of the lake, the ice blazing in a low tarnished sun that was smeared out in long bars of translucid cloud – the wind frigid, and flying through him as if the gusts were stabs of feeling for her – for the way she was capable, the way she liked it out here. He had thought she would be like this, but they had spent so little time together he could not be sure. But now he was seeing it. His Caroline, real in the sunlight and the wind. A gust of wind was a surge of feeling.