A few weeks before, Helen had finally called him. She sounded weak as she said, “Bobby, you’ve been awfully good to me my whole life, and I love you very much.” Immediately tears came to Bob’s eyes, he could not believe that she was dying, that they were having this conversation. And she said, “Don’t be mad at me that I didn’t want to see you. I didn’t want to see anyone except the kids, it’s not pretty to die.”
“That’s okay,” Bob said.
“Now promise me something,” Helen said, and Bob said, “Of course.”
“Larry does not like his father very much. And I want you to help him. And help Jim. Jim is going to be a mess, and so is Larry, and so if you could keep that in mind, and help Larry especially.” She paused and then said, “And also Jim.”
“Of course,” Bob said.
“I’m going to hang up now, Bob. I will see you in heaven. I love you very, very much. Oh, and I’ve planned the funeral—meticulously—so no one has to worry about that.”
Bob said, “I love you too, Helen.”
And she hung up.
—
For many days Bob walked around as though not really here in the physical world. When he went into the grocery store, he would stop and people would bump into him and he would say, “Oh sorry, sorry.”
—
On one such day as he stumbled around the grocery store, he heard his name called out, and it was William. “Bob!” called William, raising an arm above his head to wave to him—Bob saw a person turn to look, because William was so enthusiastic—and Bob walked over to him and said, “Hey, William, how are you?”
“Great,” said William. He was wearing thin reading glasses far down on his nose, and his white hair stood up as it usually did. “Just great. Man, this work I’m doing at the University of Maine—” And off he went on his parasites. In a certain way Bob could not believe it. And yet through his fog he understood this to be true, William liked his parasites and his work. His big white mustache moved as he spoke. Finally, William said, “So how are you?”
And Bob said, “My sister-in-law is dying,” and then William’s face changed. He looked hard at Bob and said, “Oh my God, Lucy told me that. I’m so sorry. You’re quite fond of her, right?”
And Bob said, “Yeah—she’s, well, she’s Helen.”
William asked how long she had been sick and then he spoke to Bob about the length of time it usually took a person to die of this disease, and in a way, Bob liked that. It made him sort of feel cared for. “So sorry,” William said, shaking his head. “So sorry about this, Bob.” He pushed his hand through his hair and said, “Where are the pickles in this place?”
After they parted, Bob thought again of how he had told both his wives his memory of saying to his mother that he had never really liked Christmas and how both of them had been kind but not—to Bob’s mind—really been able to care. And he thought now as he bought a jug of orange juice, That’s just how it is, that’s all. He thought: God, we are all so alone.
—
But—Lucy. She did not make him feel alone. He realized this as he walked to the register.
Book Two
...
1
In the fourth week of March, the body of Gloria Beach was discovered in a quarry pool outside of Saco, about two hours south of Shirley Falls. There had been warmer weather for a few weeks, and her body was discovered by a hiker walking past the quarry. The body had floated to the top of the water apparently from a car that was pulled out by the state police the next day; the body was badly decomposed, and they had used dental records to identify the body as that of Gloria Beach. The car was the missing rental car from Saco, the car that had allegedly been rented by the woman named Ashley Munroe. There was a photograph of Ashley in the paper. She had bright red hair and a squint. The car had been rented the day that Gloria Beach went missing, and back when the car had not been returned, Ashley Munroe had been accused of auto theft, but her defense—as you might recall—was that her driver’s license and her credit card had been stolen, and she had not been charged. And also she had those excellent alibis, having given birth to her baby during this time—right there in Shirley Falls. People had seen her there on the very day the car was supposed to have been rented in Saco.
The car rental place did not have Ashley Munroe on camera; their security cameras only stored things for sixty days, so there was no visual record of her in the place. Also, the customer service person who had apparently dealt with Ashley Munroe at the car rental place had since moved to Florida and had no recollection of the event.
This time only Matthew Beach’s photograph was in the paper next to Ashley Munroe’s. And he still looked unfortunate. The newspaper said that investigations were ongoing. No one had yet been named a suspect.
*
We might want to take a moment to wonder who this Gloria Beach woman was. But the full story of Gloria Beach remains shrouded in mystery. There are some “facts” as she recorded them in a journal—in two notebooks she kept at various points in her life, a journal that only her son Matthew had access to. The journal would eventually come to Bob Burgess, who shared parts of it with both Margaret and Lucy; later, Katherine Caskey, a social worker in town, would have contact with it as well.
But the “facts” seem to be these: She was born Gloria Labbe in a very small town called Selby, far north in Maine, an only child. A photograph—the only known childhood photograph of her, on the back was written Gloria 14 yrs—shows her to be a short, strikingly attractive girl: She gazes at the camera with her face tilted down and her eyes looking up. By the age of sixteen she had given birth to a baby boy. Who was the father? We do not know. But in her earliest journal entries she makes references to an uncle, her father’s brother, who would come to visit on occasion. She writes, “I dread the visits…the smell afterward.” When she became pregnant her parents reacted poorly, and this is when we learn that her mother was a drinker, because Gloria writes, “I hate the smell of my mother’s drinking more than anything except” (The sentence is not finished.) Her father told her that she was a deep embarrassment, and she writes: “The words sliced through me, I will never forget them.” By the age of seventeen Gloria Labbe was living in a motel on the road that went from Selby to Milo; she was given a room at this motel in exchange for working the front desk. She was extremely stressed at this point in her young life: She had a baby to look after, and she would put him in a playpen by the desk during the day. There are also a few references to her having to “please” the owner of the motel so that he would not kick her and the baby out, and she records these incidents with a matter-of-fact yet sorrowful distance. “I know how to do this but it makes me sick each time,” she writes.
When Walter Beach walked into the motel one day—he was from Shirley Falls and he had come for a few days to Selby to see an accountant he wanted to have join his firm—he was taken with Gloria’s beauty and her child, and with the whole pitiful and touching situation. He married her four weeks later and she moved with him to Shirley Falls along with Thomas, her small son. The very moment she was married she began to gain weight. She refers in her journal to “the sex act,” which she hated, and she ate more and more and became quietly hysterical, and then not so quietly. She later gave birth to Diana and Matthew, and very little is said about that. But as her children grew older, she went to work in the school cafeteria. She was aware that she was known as Beach Ball or Bitch Ball by the kids there. She writes, “The more frightened I become the more awful I behave. No one [and this is underlined three times] can hate themselves more than I do.” In a later entry—there appear to be none for a few years—she refers to Diana’s beauty, adding, “But she’s tall.” She also records being “pathetically” dependent on her husband. When Matthew was ten years old he became ill with leukemia, and she writes of this with great love, of giving up her job at the school and devoting herself to her “Small Angel,” as she called him. At this time she lost all the weight she had gained, because her anxiety—which was different from the anxiety she had suffered previously for so many years—was such that she could not eat. Almost nothing is said about Thomas and Diana.
Her husband left her without warning. According to her journals she was both relieved and devastated, and also confused. But he had a large life insurance policy with her named as the beneficiary, and he wrote to her that even though they were divorced she would still receive the money when he died. “I cried for two hours when I heard that.”
That is really all we know of Gloria Beach at this moment. But the point is that she had her story, as we all have our stories. And we will return to it in time.
*
Susan Olson, as she sat at her kitchen table on that next morning after Gloria Beach’s body had been discovered, looking at the newspaper that had landed on her doorstep in the plastic wrap that was still slightly wet from the rain in the early morning hours, said quietly, “Oh my word.” She stopped eating her toast and read the article two times. “Oh my God,” she said. There was no one with her, she was used to talking out loud to herself.
But this was a Thursday, and she was to meet Gerry O’Hare—her friend, the former police chief—for coffee later that morning on his porch. She could not wait to discuss this with him.
“Holy, holy crap,” Susan said softly to herself as she peered at the paper on the table.
*
Forty-five minutes away on the same morning that Susan was reading about Gloria Beach in the Shirley Falls newspaper, here, in the smaller town of Crosby, Bob was having a cigarette. It was a windy day with muted sunlight that was trying to press through the cloud covering, and Bob was standing beside his car in the back parking lot of that same old inn that had gone bankrupt and had vines growing over its windows. Last night his wife had sniffed his shoulder and said, “Bob? Don’t tell me you’re doing that again. Please don’t tell me you are smoking again.”
And he had lied!
He had lied.
Now Bob thought, Keep moving, so that the smoke wouldn’t stick to him, although the wind seemed to twirl itself around and not go in one direction. As he took a step forward, his phone in his coat pocket started to ring and he stepped right into the smoke he had just exhaled, and he thought, You idiot. Meaning himself.
