Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,67

his body gearing up for an emergency.

“I came to talk about Rowan.”

Webster takes a step backward, which she reads as an invitation.

He closes the door behind her. She glances around at the small foyer, the dining room to the left, the kitchen straight ahead.

“You haven’t changed too much.”

He can’t tell if that’s a compliment or not.

Sheila has on a short black jacket over a pair of slim gray jeans. She’s wearing leather sandals. She has an unusual necklace made of large beads. She’s worn her hair up in a kind of a smashed ponytail. He watches her take in the house.

He hasn’t shaved. The cotton shirt is well past its sell-by date. He probably smells. He hasn’t brushed his teeth.

Why the abrupt change of mind? he wonders.

“Come into the kitchen,” he says.

Webster goes ahead and sweeps up an armful of papers from the kitchen table and lets them fall onto the dining room table. “Bills,” he says when he returns.

Webster wishes there were acronyms for what’s about to happen.

“Would you like some coffee? I have a pot on.”

“Sure,” she said. “Thanks. I’ll leave before she gets home. There’s no need for her to know I was here.”

“Rowan and I don’t keep secrets.”

A lie. Especially lately. He wonders how long it’s been since he and Sheila had a conversation about their child’s welfare. Did they ever?

He notices that her hands are trembling. “I’ve thought about Rowan every day since I left her,” Sheila says.

She raises her chin and purses her mouth. Her mouth is still lovely, he’ll give her that. Her long neck is mostly unwrinkled. He refuses to look at her body.

“If you’ve thought of Rowan every day, why haven’t you called her? You say you’ve been sober for ten years.”

“It’s complicated,” she says.

“Try me.”

“I was afraid,” Sheila says. Webster sets a cup in front of her. “The sobriety still feels new. I was afraid that if I opened that door on… you, Rowan, Vermont… I’d start drinking again. It wasn’t something I positively knew. It was something I felt.”

“Past tense.”

“It’s why I’m here.”

Webster waits.

The grandfather clock in the hallway chimes the hour. Sheila smiles. “You kept that running,” she says. “It’s nice.”

“You hardly notice it when you live with it all the time.” He takes a sip of his own coffee. “Rowan’s a great kid. But she’s right at the edge. The edge of what, I don’t know. She’s testing, testing all the time. And, as I mentioned at your place, she seems to think she has a genetic disposition to alcohol. I told you that I found her here one night in a state of near blackout.”

Sheila winces. “Webster, I’ll do whatever I can to help, but I’ve missed a lot.”

It’s a bald statement, as true as anything she’s said. He tries to imagine himself in her shoes, but his mind won’t let him.

“Rowan’s spinning just beyond my reach,” Webster says. “She’s let her grades go. She was about to go to college at the University of Vermont, but because she’s currently failing English and calculus, she might not be able to enter in the fall.”

“College,” Sheila says with a wistful tone.

“She worked hard for it, too,” he says. “And now she’s almost blown it.”

Sheila glances around the room. “I’m really surprised you didn’t marry,” she says. “You always seemed like the marrying kind.”

“No time,” he says. “When I didn’t have work, I had Rowan. I had to be mother and father to her both.” He pauses and stares at his ex-wife, wondering how she is taking this. An unwanted thought enters his mind.

“It’s amazing,” he says, “given where you came from, that you were in Vermont that night at all. And then you married me.” Webster pauses. “It’s almost as though you decided, spur of the moment, to try on a life, like trying on a new dress. Then you realized that the waistband was too tight, that the sleeves weren’t long enough. And so you chucked it. Me and Rowan and Vermont. Tossed it onto a heap on the floor.”

“It was a dress I loved,” Sheila says. “It didn’t fit, but it was a dress I loved.”

“As in adored? Couldn’t live without?”

“I adored Rowan. You know I did.”

“Tell me one thing,” Webster says. “That night, on the land, the first time we made love, you weren’t on the pill, were you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Sure you do.”

“It wasn’t what you think,” she says. “I didn’t con you into marrying me. I felt that I could be careless with