Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,52
fun last night?” he asks.
“Pretty much.” There’s a trim of tiny pimples at her widow’s peak, a rose growing near a nostril. Rowan’s morning smell—the sweet scent of her hair, the particular fragrance of her skin—is so familiar to Webster that he thinks he’d know the girl anywhere: in the woods, in a crowded department store. He remembers a trip to Boston he and Rowan made during spring vacation when she was nine. After touring the Freedom Trail, he took her to the Aquarium and promptly lost her when he became engrossed in an exhibit on penguins and she wandered away. Panicked, he snagged a security guard, which alerted other security guards. Rowan was startled to find herself the center of attention at an exhibit of dolphins. “I knew where he was,” she said, bewildered.
“Rowan, eat. You need your strength.”
Rowan rolls her eyes. Webster wonders how many times he’s said that to her. Sometimes he gets into a groove, and he can’t get out. “It’s just that Friday, at breakfast, you went from zero to sixty in nothing flat. Everything OK?”
“Everything’s fine, Dad.”
“Well, good,” he says, though he knows now that it isn’t.
Rowan scratches her left arm, a sign that she’s anxious.
“You OK?” Rowan mimics as she points to her father’s untouched breakfast.
Webster stabs a cold egg. “You don’t have to take that tone with me.”
Rowan sops up her eggs with a slice of toast.
Webster puts his fork down and glances at the dirty windows. He can’t eat the eggs. Wrong breakfast. He’d have done better with something sweet. “Rowan, I’m getting tired of your moodiness.”
“Dad, just fuck off, OK?”
The word, like a scratch of fingernails against a blackboard, creates a physical reaction along his spine. Webster can see that Rowan is waiting for him to reprimand her, punish her. When he doesn’t, she pushes her chair back. “Where’s the hose?” she asks.
From the garage, Webster watches as Rowan washes the outside windows. She stands on a stepladder and starts with the back attic window of her bedroom. She points the hose with the attached Windex and sets the switch to “soap,” letting the foamy water shimmy down the panes. Rowan waits a few seconds, turns the sprayer to “water,” and washes the soap away, leaving a clean window with droplets that will shortly dry. Just the way he’s taught her. He’s had to assure her that the fluid won’t damage the bushes and the grass, and though he wonders how that can possibly be true, neither the bushes nor the grass has been hurt. He wishes Windex would invent a product to wash the insides of the windows as easily as the exterior ones. Old houses are great, but a bitch to keep clean.
She climbs down the ladder and washes the next level of windows, two at a time. Soap two, then rinse two. She’s wearing her rubber boots, her pajama pants, and a slicker that once was yellow. Her boots are already wet from the sprayer and the dew in the shaded grass. He likes the flowers of late May, early June. The crab apple, the lilacs, the trillium. One day the color isn’t there; the next day it is.
He thinks his not mentioning the fuck rattled Rowan more than if he’d laid into her.
Rowan reaches the front of the house and tackles the other attic window. She untangles the hose and takes it with her up the stepladder. She aims it, soaping up the mullions. She slips past the frame of the window and points the nozzle at the vinyl siding.
What the hell? Is she trying to give the house a wash, too?
Rowan makes wild loops and crazy brushstrokes. An angry sound escapes her. She turns her weapon on the bushes with their new leaves, at the lilacs with their potent scent, at a pine tree that she covers with what looks like wet toilet paper.
Rowan shoots as far down the driveway as she can. Then she raises the hose and lets it rain straight over her.
Webster takes off at a run. Rowan lets the hose fall and begins to climb down the ladder. When she stumbles, Webster catches her, keeping her upright. He pulls her head, soapy hair and all, into his shirt.
Webster and Koenig are backup, second rig on the scene. A six-vehicle pileup on the road coming off the mountain. The fog moved in fast, visibility nil. The fog halos the whites and blues on the cruisers. Webster spots five of them and another