I first met Sarah Harris during our freshman year at Colby College, in central Maine. I’d fallen asleep in the back row of Chemistry 141, and she gently touched my shoulder after the lecture had ended and the classroom was emptying. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty” were the first words she ever spoke to me. From the start, I knew I was bewitched.
Sarah had grown up in suburban Connecticut, and she’d come from money. Her father had started a profitable Web site in the nineties, during the first round of the dot-com boom, only to lose millions when the bubble burst. The specter of poverty continued to haunt her. In college, she had a recurring nightmare of the bursar kicking her out of school because her tuition check had bounced.
We didn’t share many interests, beyond an insatiable sexual appetite for each other and a passion for the outdoors. Her hobbies were less bloody than mine-she was an avid hiker, swimmer, and bird-watcher-but she found it fascinating that I would get up before dawn to go deer hunting in the woods outside Waterville. Her city friends used to call me “Bambi killer” and mock my camouflage jacket and L.L. Bean boots. But Sarah ignored them. She recognized something feral underneath my clean-cut exterior, and like many good girls from proper families, she was aroused by the scent of danger.
After graduation, when I told Sarah I wanted to become a game warden, she initially took the news as a prank. When she realized I was serious, she came to the conclusion that the experience would merely be a rite of passage for me-like riding a motorcycle across Mongolia or working on an Alaskan crab boat for a season-but that eventually I would settle down and make money. Maybe move to Boston and get a law degree.
Sarah’s own obsession was with kids, early-childhood education specifically. Her life’s plan was to teach for a few years-“get my hands dirty,” she said-then enter a Ph. D. program. She saw the radical transformation of the nation’s school systems as being one of the historic imperatives of our times and talked about dedicating her life to educational reform.
Our first attempt at cohabiting fell apart when she’d realized that my interest in being a game warden seemed to be growing, rather than abating, with each night I spent crouched in the puckerbrush with a mechanical deer decoy. After many lonely evenings and at her older sister’s urging, she’d moved out of our run-down shack. She was gone for three months. But then in the autumn, after my father’s crime spree made the national news and I achieved notoriety for my part in the desperate search for him, we met for dinner. The next thing I knew, I was unloading from a rental truck the same furniture that I had so recently watched vacate our shared dwelling.
For my part, I tried not to psychoanalyze her motivations. It was enough that she was back in my life. Like most men, I subscribed to the hackneyed theory that women are essentially unknowable.
The house we were renting was a little ramshackle place overlooking a tidal creek that flowed into the Segocket River. Big pines shaded the roof, and sometimes at night, a great horned owl would roost in the tallest trees to eat his dinner. In the mornings, I would find fur-and-feather pellets on the hood of my patrol truck. Once, I found the flea collar from a neighbor’s missing cat.
When I got home, Sarah was already in her flannel pajamas, sitting in front of the computer. She’d replaced her contact lenses with glasses and fastened up her shoulder-length blond hair in a scrunchie. She took one look at me in my mud-crusted uniform and frowned.
“Don’t ask,” I said.
“You’re worse than a dog, the way you track mud in.”
“Well, I’m certainly dog-tired.”
“You and me both, baby.”
I had to dig out the mud impacted around the laces to get my boots off, shedding dirty flakes all over the doormat. Carefully, I stripped down to my boxers and undershirt. By the time I’d finished, I was already sweating from the heat.
The house was always too warm for me now that Sarah was back in residence-we might as well have belonged to different species, polar versus tropical-but the house was also cleaner by an order of magnitude. During the months we’d lived apart, my existence had been reduced to microwave burritos, wrinkled shirts, and unwashed dishes. Now instead of bare walls, there were colorful Audubon bird prints and windowsills lined with Christmas cactuses; the refrigerator contained fresh broccoli instead of leftover pizza. Sometimes I missed my unshaven days without a woman in residence, but mostly I was grateful. I once read that, on average, married men live five years longer than single ones, and I could easily believe it. The human male fights the domestication process tooth and claw, but it’s the best thing that can ever happen to him.
I walked over and rested my hand on her shoulder. “What are you looking at?”
She closed the browser window before I could see the screen. “Work stuff.”
“Just as long as it isn’t porn.”
“You’re the only man I’ve met who doesn’t download it.”
“I’m not going to participate in other people’s degradation.”
“That’s very self-righteous of you.” She hit the power switch, and the machine stopped humming. “Speaking of which, the Warden chaplain called for you again. She said she wants to go for a ride-along one of these days.”
The Reverend Deborah Davies had been on my case for months. She wanted to talk with me again about my father’s strange criminal behavior. As required by the Warden Service, I had already put in my hours with both a psychologist and the reverend herself, but I’d found counseling a waste of time.
“I don’t need that woman tagging along on patrol.”
“You should talk with her. It wouldn’t hurt for you to open up to people about what happened.” She peered at me over her glasses. “Avoidance isn’t a successful life strategy.”
“What am I avoiding?”
After the events at Rum Pond, all I wanted to do was move forward with my life. Meeting the retired warden pilot Charley Stevens and his wife, Ora, and seeing their love for each other, it seemed like I’d finally found an example of what a happy relationship could look like. And then when Sarah agreed to come home, I felt like I had reason to believe my luck had changed.
“If you don’t know what you’re avoiding, then I can’t tell you,” she said. “I’m going to read in bed. I made some biscuits you can have with your soup.”
I watched her shuffle in her slippers into the bedroom, thinking how beautiful she looked even dressed in flannel pajamas, with her hair tied up in a frumpy knot.
In the kitchen, I poured myself a whiskey and reheated my dinner. Sarah usually corrected her kids’ homework at the kitchen table. Tonight, I found some government forms scattered among the spelling quizzes. One of them was something called a Mandated Reporter Worksheet from the Child and Family Services department; the other listed signs of possible abuse or neglect: “Unexplained bruises and welts on the face, torso, and back; cigarette and other burns; mysterious fractures and dislocations; bald patches on the scalp.”
I wondered now if these forms explained her somber mood.
The lights were off when I finally went to bed, but even in the pitch-blackness, I could sense that she was still awake beneath the covers. I brushed my teeth, then crawled in beside her.
“Honey?” I said.
“Not tonight, Mike, OK?”
Sex, for once, was actually far from my thoughts. “I wanted to apologize again for missing that movie.”
“I’m not feeling well anyway. My stomach’s been giving me trouble.”
“Do you think it’s the flu?”
“Every kid in my class is sick with some virus or other, so who knows?”
I turned on my side and rested my hand on her shoulder. “I saw those forms from Child and Family Services on the table. Do you think one of your students is being abused?”
In the dark, she made a sound that was almost like a laugh, but I knew it wasn’t a laugh. “One of them? All my kids have cuts and bruises. I could report my entire class if I was paranoid. But no, the principal just wanted to remind us what we should be looking for, so she handed out those forms again.”
When I’d first met Sarah, she was one of the least sarcastic people I’d ever met. “It doesn’t sound like you had the best day,” I said.
She yawned. “You never told me what happened with that car accident.”
“The driver wasn’t there when I arrived. I guess she caught a ride. In the meantime, somebody came by and swiped the deer.”
“Weird,” she said sleepily.
“The trooper who showed up was this asshhole, Hutchins, who transferred over from the turnpike. He said a rumor was going around that I’d quit the Warden Service.”
“You shouldn’t care what jerks say.”
“It just pisses me off.”
“Everything pisses you off. Sometimes I think that moral indignation is your natural condition.” She yawned again. “You might sleep better, you know, if you didn’t have a drink before bed.”
For a while, I’d dealt with my anger by throwing myself into my work, but everywhere I went my reputation preceded me. Seven months after my father’s manhunt, I was still receiving crank calls (some of them, no doubt, from my fellow cops), with suggestions about where I should insert the barrel of my SIG SAUER P226 before squeezing the trigger.
Of course, you can’t erase the past. You can only avoid making the same mistakes over again.
In my dissolving thoughts I saw the image of a young woman lying unconscious in the dirty snow. I realized that Hutchins never had any intention of searching the woods. But Ashley Kim had told the tow company she was uninjured and catching a ride. Besides, the thought of driving back to Parker Point-to do what exactly?-was insane. While I was fretting about this woman’s safety, she was probably at her friend’s house, recounting her brush with death over another glass of wine.
Don’t think about it, I told myself. Go to sleep.
Eventually, I did. But my sleep was a fitful one, and when I awoke in the morning, it was with the same gnawing uncertainty that had troubled my dreams.