Reunion at Red Paint Bay

He leans against the back of the sausage truck, inhaling the smell of cooked meats as he watches the front gate. He doesn’t need to hide. Paul Chambers doesn’t really exist, and no one would recognize him as Paul Walker even if they had been in the same class or lived on the same street. His face has filled out like the rest of him, and his hair receded. He doesn’t wear glasses anymore. He does have a thin mustache and one slightly drooping eyelid, as if he has recovered only partially from an early-age stroke. Altogether unrecognizable, he’s sure. And unexpected. It wouldn’t occur to anyone to ask, What do you think Paul Walker is up to these days? No one would wonder if he were in Red Paint. No one would care.

An hour passes as it does when one is waiting, agonizingly slowly. That’s how it was waiting for Jean at this same spot the summer after junior year. He was sure that she wouldn’t come, sure that he had misinterpreted her mumbled assent to meet him at seven at the carnival. And then there she was, fifteen minutes late, in a sleeveless dress that billowed out from her legs at the slightest breeze. He wanted to stroll arm in arm with her down the midway, but she said she felt out of place with all the other girls in shorts. He steered her to the dimly lit outer path, the back side of the amusements, wondering if she just didn’t want to be seen with him. He had money and offered her ice cream or a lobster sandwich or soda. She said no thanks to everything. She did agree to a ride and chose the Ferris wheel. Their car stopped at the very top, and from there they gazed over the lights of Red Paint, trying to pick out their own houses. As she looked over the side he put his hand on her knee, just below the hem of her dress. He moved his fingers a little, then the wheel moved again.

He feels foolish waiting now. Perhaps they arrived early and were already wandering the grounds. They could be coming on one of the other two nights of the carnival. Just as he pushes himself away from the truck he spots Simon walking through the gate, his wife by his side. A minute or two later and he would have missed them. Is this how finely God plans things, everything happening just in time?

They’re holding hands, an intimate act. Palms pressed against each other. Fingers intertwined. We belong to each other. That’s what holding hands announces to the world. We have each other to go home with and hold and kiss. Who do you have?

“Come on, Davey,” Simon calls over his shoulder, and the boy runs the few yards to catch up, an obedient son. Davey.

Paul bends over as if to wipe something off his shoe as they pass him by. Then he follows them down the midway a few steps behind, plenty of people in between.



He has always loved the Hall of Mirrors, the feeling that one could dissolve into them, linger there and watch, then reappear at will. Or not reappear at all. He stares into the mirror now, hands on his hips, and it stares back, blank. Perhaps just a faint outline of where a body should be, the hint of presence, the impression of a form just passing through. He hears footsteps, stands still, waits. Then a voice making a kind of whacking sound. In a moment the boy turns the corner, his eyes closed, punching ahead of himself. His small fist lands in Paul’s belly, and his eyes flash open. “Sorry mister, I didn’t mean to hit you.”

“It’s okay,” Paul says, letting his hand fall reassuringly on the boy’s shoulder. “I used to do this with my eyes closed, too, when I was your age. I guess there are two of us who know the trick.”

“The trick?”

“With your eyes closed the mirrors can’t fool you.”

Davey squints up at him, the beginning of farsightedness. “Didn’t I see you before?”

“Maybe. I’ve been around the carnival all night.”

Davey takes a step, bumps into the glass hard, laughs, and then makes faces at himself. In the mirror a dozen boys are grinning madly.





A white ball of fur lay sprawled across the breakfast table, basking in the slanting light from the bay window. Amy sat on the bench, stroking Casper’s head with one hand and holding a book in the other. Simon dropped a yellow legal pad on the table and slipped in on the opposite side. He poked the cat in the rear a few times with his pen. No response. “I gather we’ve given up trying to keep Casper off our eating surfaces.”

“She does it all day when we’re not here, so why bother?” Amy turned back to a bookmarked page. “What do you think of this? ‘People only grow around sadness.’ ”

“Sounds right, I guess. Who said it?” Amy held up the book:—Semrad: The Heart of a Therapist. He figured that he was supposed to know who Semrad was. She had probably mentioned him dozens of times.

“He mentored a generation of therapists in how to connect to their patients with their heart, not just their heads. But I think he got it backward. People don’t grow when they’re sad, they’re too busy being sad. The same if people are angry or depressed or in pain—they get trapped in these emotions.”

“You’re disagreeing with the eminent Semrad?”

“Daring, aren’t I?”

Simon wrote on his pad, and Amy let her book close over her finger. “Doing your column?”

“I’m taking to heart your suggestion that the postcard sender is a threat and making a list of all the people who might want to fold, spindle, or mutilate me.” He scribbled a name, and Amy leaned across the table to see.

“Who’s Ray Jefferson?”

“My first roommate after college. I told him he had to move out after his year was up.”

“Why did you do that?”

Simon tried to project back to his former self. “He seemed fake to me. He’d say things like, ‘I love the smell of winter, don’t you?’ and ‘Making music is like making love’—that’s another one. He was pretending to be sensitive.”

“Maybe he thought you’d like that about him.”

“Why would I care how sensitive he was?”

Amy shrugged. “Sensitivity is one of those positive qualities a person can have.”

“Not to a twenty-two-year-old male it isn’t.”

“Wait—he wasn’t gay, was he?”

“No, I didn’t kick him out because he was gay or I thought he was gay, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“So how did he react?”

Simon remembered the expression on Ray’s face, a strange mixture of embarrassment and disbelief with a dose of hatred. “He said he’d fall apart if I kicked him out, and I guess he did for a while, with cocaine, went to jail for eighteen months. I can imagine him blaming me.”

Amy reached her hand to stroke Casper, and the cat stretched out, exposing her belly. “You think twenty years later he’d still be blaming you?”

“I don’t know,” Simon said. “He was the kind to carry a grudge.”



When Simon called Davey for dinner, the boy came rushing down the steps as always, one misstep away from plunging headlong into the front door. At the bottom he grabbed the post to turn into the hallway, and Simon saw a thin metal handle jutting from his back pocket. “Hold on, what’s that?”

Davey twisted around to see. “What?”

“Is that a knife?”

He pulled it out. “No, it’s a letter opener.”

“A letter opener is a knife.”

The boy rubbed his finger along the blade. “Not when it’s this crappy. It couldn’t cut soup.”

Simon put out his palm, and Davey handed it over, blade first. “Why did you take this off my bureau?”

“Why would I take your stupid old letter opener?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

“I found it on the stairs, okay? It was sticking out from the rug.” He pointed to the spot. “You shouldn’t leave your knife lying around like that, Dad, ’cause I could have stepped on it with my bare feet and got lockjaw.”

“I didn’t leave it on the steps, Davey.”

“Does your jaw really lock when you get lockjaw?”

“It can, if you don’t get a tetanus shot.”

“Then I better eat dinner fast.” He started for the kitchen.

“Wait, you didn’t take this out anywhere, did you?”

Davey hesitated. “Not really.”

“What does that mean?”

“I put the knife in my pocket and kind of forgot it was there when I went to Kenny’s.”

“Don’t tell me you took it out at Kenny’s.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

“Davey, did you take it out?”

“Not really.”

“Will you stop saying that? You either did or didn’t take it out.”

“It sort of fell out when we were fooling around.”

“Did you put it somewhere safe when it fell out?”

“Sure, Dad. You think I want to get sliced open by accident?”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking anymore.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of a mystery,” Davey said. “Can I go eat now?”

“Go,” Simon said as he stared at a place on the steps where the rug was pushed up a little, exactly where Davey had pointed.



In bed that night, the yellow pad propped against his knees, he added to his possible threats. There seemed to be no end to the people who might want to do him in.

Amy let Semrad drop on her chest. “Your list is growing.”

“Eleven so far.”

“You can think of eleven people who might want to harm you?”

“Like you said, I’m the editor of a newspaper and apparently I have a knack for pissing people off.” He wrote down a twelfth name—Dana Maines.

Amy tilted the gooseneck lamp to shine on his pad. “What did you do to Dana?”

“We were going to take off to L.A. together after we graduated from Bowdoin. She wanted to be an actress, and I was going to write screenplays she could star in.”

“Sounds like you had it all planned out.”

“Yeah, well, everything seemed possible, if you got out of Maine first. But then I heard she was telling people we were eloping, and getting married was the last thing I wanted to do, since I was waiting for the perfect girl to come along.” He tapped Amy on her arm. “So I screwed up my courage and went to the coffee shop where we were meeting and told her I wasn’t going.”

“How did she take it?”

Simon pushed up the sleeve to his shirt and pointed at several small indentations just below his left shoulder. “She stabbed me with a fork.”

“I thought that was from a vaccination.”

“It’s from Dana. She got really loud saying how I was backing out on her and ruining her dreams. I reached over to quiet her down, and she stabbed me.”

“Bit of an overreaction.”

“I thought so. Anyway, I saw a note in the Bowdoin Alumni News a couple of weeks ago that she’s moved back to Portland. I was going to drive over there this week for Jack Monroe’s retirement party from the Herald, so I thought I’d look her up and see if she could be the one sending me weird postcards. She was definitely the type.”

“We decided the sender is male.”

“If your theory of penmanship is right, yes.”

“You sure you’re not just looking for an excuse to meet up with an old flame?”

“You’re the only old flame in my life.” He turned toward her to kiss, and as they did he shoved the yellow pad to the floor so that nothing would come between them.





Paul Chambers Walker leans into the stiff breeze. It invigorates him, the feel of it against his face. To the east he can see a patch of blue between the distant trees, and he’s sure it’s the ocean. So many things are like that, he thinks, recognizable if you already know what you are looking at.

He turns to the small, square office building and scans the list of tenants. There she is—Amelia Howe, second floor. He pushes in the glass doors and takes the broad steps by twos. The first office at the top of the stairs has a gold-plated sign, LEVIN AND HOWE. He enters the waiting room, empty as he expected it would be at the end of the day. It’s a messy area, with the cheap blue vinyl chairs out of line and magazines scattered across the coffee table. The large plant in the corner is yellowing and dropping leaves. The inner office door opens and Amy Howe appears, her shoes in her hand. Her hair is pulled back, all business. Close up she seems younger than he thought from the quick glimpses at the carnival, and prettier, perhaps.

She balances on one leg and then the other to slip on her shoes. “I didn’t know anyone was out here.”

“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” he says.

“You must be the one who called about a five o’clock appointment.”

He nods over his shoulder. “You’re overwatering the plant. You’ll kill it that way.”

“Thanks. I’ll watch that.”

She looks him up and down without moving her head, just the slightest shifting of her eyes, a talent she must have honed over years of assessing clients for whatever small mark or twitch that might hint at what is troubling them. They are alone here, a man and a woman. Does she feel their isolation as he does?

She holds out her right hand. “I’m Amy Howe.”

He takes it and shakes repeatedly, squeezing a little harder each time. “Paul Chambers, Dr. Howe.”

“Actually, I’m an LIC SW—a licensed social worker.”

“Sorry.”

She slides her hand gently from his. “I don’t normally see clients at this hour, Mr. Chambers. My last appointment is three to four.”

He smiles a bit sheepishly. “Your service said they would have to check with you about it, and since I didn’t hear back, I figured I’d come over.”

“They tried to reach you. The number you left seems to be wrong.”

“Really?” he says with the appropriate amount of surprise to his voice. “I’m staying over at the Bays-water Inn. Maybe I got the number mixed up. I do that sometimes, I have to confess, a bit of dyslexia with figures. If this is inconvenient for you, I’ll make an appointment for another time, of course.”

She looks indulgently at him, ready to make an exception for a poor soul who can’t even get a simple phone number right. What threat can there be from a man who so willingly offers to leave?

“Since you’re here,” she says, “please come in.”

Paul moves past her into the office and sits in the leather chair. He runs his hands over the smooth brown hide of the arm, back and forth, skin against skin. She goes behind her desk and pulls out a pad. He scans the wall and sees her professional certificate, University of Maine, Orono. A state school.

“May I call you Paul?”

“I prefer Mr. Chambers.”

“Okay, Mr. Chambers, what brings you here?”

Her directness appeals to him, no preliminary questions of who he is and where he comes from. Just What brings you here? “I’m having dangerous thoughts.”

His answer doesn’t throw her. No reaction at all, except for letting the pen slide between her fingers and tapping it against her desk, then turning it over and tapping again. Nervousness or stalling? Perhaps a former smoker needing continual stimulation of her fingertips. “What kind of dangerous thoughts?”

“What kind?”

“Your thoughts could be about some thing or person or yourself.”

“Some person.”

“How frequently are you having these thoughts?”

“Every day.” She writes this down on her pad. “Many times a day,” he adds. She writes this, too. “Virtually every moment.” He has her attention now, so why not go all the way? “I even dream dangerous thoughts,” he says. Surely that makes him a very dangerous person, doesn’t it? He leans back in his chair into the drift of cool air coming from the vent in the ceiling. It tickles his nose and makes him sneeze as he always does, three quick times.

“God bless you,” Amy says.

He pulls out his handkerchief to rub his nose. “Catholic.”

“Excuse me?”

“Catholics say God bless you. During the plague the pope ordered people to say that when somebody sneezed because a sneeze was supposed to expel the soul from the body.”

“I’m not Catholic, Mr. Chambers.”

“Not now, no, but how were you raised?”

She opens her mouth as if to answer, then looks down at her pad. He takes this opportunity to size up the small rectangular office, noting its spareness, its utility. There’s nothing diverting on her desk—no Buckyballs or Rubik’s Cube or magnetic puzzles to occupy one’s hands. On the walls, nothing to distract a patient. A thick curtain covers the window. It is the space of a no-nonsense person.

She says, “The dangerous thoughts that you’re concerned about, are you acting on them in any way?”

If he answers yes she’ll undoubtedly inquire as to what actions he has taken. If he answers no she’ll presume he’s just talk. He knows the drill. “Maybe.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t understand maybe.”

Of course she doesn’t. Ambivalence isn’t allowed here. He’s either acting on his dangerous thoughts or he isn’t. He’s either crazy or he isn’t. He’s either justified in his actions or he isn’t.

“It’s a long story,” he says. “How shall I begin?”





Simon wasn’t surprised to see the story slugged Randy Caine Arrested Again appear in his news inbox. It was only a matter of time before Red Paint’s resident troublemaker reverted to form. He had a reputation to keep up, and he certainly wasn’t going to let himself be defined by some errant impulse to do good for once in his life. Simon clicked on the story and read:

Police Nab Suspect in

B&E at Flaubert’s

Randall Caine, hailed last month as a hero for pulling a local girl from a burning car on Dakin Road, was arrested Saturday at 10:52 p.m. for breaking and entering in the nighttime.

Police say Caine, 27, was caught in the alley next to Flaubert’s Spa carrying a crowbar, with a glass cutter concealed on his person. The door to Red Paint’s popular market was found forced open. It is not known yet what items, if any, were missing.

According to police, Caine said that at the time of his arrest he found the crowbar in the alley and was looking for a phone to use to report the open door.

Off the top of his head, Simon could recall at least five other such stories since he’d become editor—Caine nabbed for possessing marijuana, Caine stopped for driving without a license, Caine inciting the Tiger Tavern melee, Caine breaking a restraining order, Caine threatening a lawyer (his own). The youngest member of Red Paint’s first family of crime was determined to make his own mark in town. Simon deleted the headline and wrote: Hero of Car Accident Arrested on Burglary Charge. In the notes field of the file he typed, “Box on Page 1.” Randy always appreciated the prominent placement.



He did phone Dana Maines, and after a few minutes of catching up suggested lunch in Portland. She agreed so enthusiastically that he felt compelled to mention Amy for the first time in their conversation.

“You’re married?” she said.

“Sixteen years.”

“And you’re calling me up?”

“I thought we could have lunch.”

“Why?”

The question stymied him. He could hardly say he wanted to make sure she wasn’t stalking him, and he certainly didn’t want to give the impression he was interested in hooking up. “You’re right,” he said, “there really is no reason for us to have lunch.”

“Okay then,” she said and hung up.

It happened so quickly he didn’t even have time to ask if she had made it to California.





When Paul settles into the leather armchair again, he feels the warmth of the body just gone. He wonders what poor person recently sat there pouring out his miseries as if they were the trials of Job. Misery always seems that way to the afflicted—unbearable, unimaginable, unlike anything anyone else has ever experienced. But who would trade the misery he knows for the misery of others? No one passed him in the waiting room going out. So how did the distressed person leave, through a secret exit for those who can’t stand to be seen? He feels the weight of this invisible stranger all about, a thick layer of him on the desktop, like fine dust, piles of him on the carpet, and the pungent odor of him soaking the air. In one hour here he would have sloughed off a couple of million cells, shedding his outermost self flake by flake. Paul inhales long and deep, breathing the stranger inside him.

“Mr. Chambers,” Amy Howe says, going by him and around her desk, “sorry to keep you waiting.”

Then why has she? Why show him into her office and then go out into the waiting room—to do what, see if her colleague Dr. Levin will stay around in case there’s trouble with the mysterious new client? It doesn’t make sense, people apologizing for what they could easily do differently.

He says, “Do you know why misery loves company?”

She takes her seat without response, not willing to say whether she does or doesn’t know.

“Because it needs an audience.”

She nods at his observation. “I’ll have to give that more thought.” But apparently not right now. “In our first session Monday,” she says, “we talked about the thoughts that were bothering you, and we’ll continue that in a moment. But I want to start by getting some basic information.”

“No,” Paul says.

“No?”

He has her attention, all of it, in the slight tilt of her head, the wide-open eyes, the tongue hesitating just inside her lips. He takes out his handkerchief and rubs across his nose, prolonging the moment. “My thoughts don’t bother me, like you said. I’m just constantly aware of them. Actually, I find them very interesting.”

“Okay, we’ll get into that. Have you sought help or counseling before?”

He notices that her right eye stretches out wider than the left, as if it has been pinched back by a finger molding clay, a slip of the hand by a lesser creator. Cosmetic surgery could probably correct the problem, if she considered it a problem at all. He regrets this tendency in himself, always seeing the small imperfections in people and wondering about their effect over a lifetime. What was her question?

“With a therapist or psychiatrist,” she says, “or maybe a clergyman?”

“Yes.”

“With …?”

“A dog.”

“Your dog?”

Paul coughs a little, letting his answer sink in, the peculiar psychological ramifications of it. There would be many. He sees a brown spot, slightly raised, on the right side of her face, only visible in a certain direct light. Cancerous, possibly. One in ten chance. Is it his place to mention the possibly lethal blemish? Would she be offended? “It was Jean’s dog, actually, a border collie with a reddish brown coat and glacier blue eyes. Her name was Sadie.”

“Are you putting me on here, Mr. Chambers?”

“I know it sounds ridiculous.” There he is again, owning up to his eccentricity. Dangerously odd people don’t do that because they’re not aware of how dangerous they seem to others. Now to offer a perfectly reasonable explanation. “When Jean moved away she didn’t want to take the dog from her familiar surroundings, so she left her with me. Sadie would curl up next to me on the sofa, sleep at the bottom of my bed, and I started talking to her. People do that, don’t they, talk to their pets when there’s no one else in the home?”

“It’s probably not uncommon.”

“You mean it’s probably common?”

“If you prefer it that way.”

“So I told Sadie about my thoughts, whatever came to mind. She didn’t talk back, if that’s what you’re wondering. But she was a good listener, and it helped, I think.”

“How did this dog—”

“Sadie.”

“How did Sadie help you?”

He hasn’t harmed anyone yet, for one thing. To all appearances he is a reasonably functioning human being, and aren’t appearances the currency of the realm in the twenty-first century? He says, “It always helps to open up to someone, don’t you think?” Of course she does, it’s her job to be that someone.

“Your wife—”

“Jean.”

“You intimated last time that Jean had died recently.”

“Three weeks ago. Too many Seconals.” Looking at it another way, she took exactly the right number of pills. Jean would have researched the required overdose very carefully.

“Was this intentional or accidental?”

“Jean was always very intentional,” he says.

“Do you know why your wife committed suicide?”

He nods. How could a husband not know?

“Would you like to talk about the reason?”

“She hated herself.”

“Why did she hate herself?”

“She wished to be a different person.”

“What kind of person?”

“A person who could forget. That was Jean’s burden, really, she remembered everything in great detail. Some people are like that. The secret to happiness is having a bad memory, don’t you agree?”

She treats his question as rhetorical, which it wasn’t. So many interesting threads of conversation like this get lost in the day.

“What did Jean remember?” she asks, back to her job of asking.

Paul stares at the brown spot, about an inch from her right eye. He wonders what a slice of that flesh would look like under the microscope. She flicks her hand over the area. A suggestible sort. “She remembered what was done to her.”

“What was done to her?”

He nods at the spot. “You should really have that looked at.”

“Excuse me?”

“On your face there, the discoloration. I wouldn’t take any chances. I’d have that looked at.”

“It’s just a birthmark, Mr. Chambers. Now I’d like you to focus—”

“She was assaulted.”

Her head leans toward him with interest, her eyes dilating. “I see,” she says, even though she couldn’t possibly, at least not yet. It’s just something to say. “When did this assault take place?”

“Twenty-five years ago.”

“Twenty-five years,” she repeats.

“Too long?”

“That’s not for me to judge. Some people get over traumatic events quickly, others bury the memories in their subconscious for many years. In a few people the pain turns into impacted grief that they live with for a lifetime. They actually can get very comfortable with it. It’s the only self they know—the grieving self—especially if the incident happened at an early age before they’ve established their full identity.”

Paul finds himself nodding, agreeing to everything she says. So eminently sensible. “What grief have you felt?”

Her head rises from her papers. “We’re here to talk about you, Mr. Chambers, and your wife.”

“Have you felt any grief at all?”

“Everyone has reason to grieve at times. Given the grief your wife couldn’t escape, could she have felt death would be a release for her?”

“You mean that she’d be better off dead?” he asks, to be perfectly clear.

“Some people are comforted by the idea of moving on to a place where they don’t suffer.”

“Heaven,” he says.

“That’s one possibility.”

“I’ve always wondered what a body would do forever in heaven. Hell is quite vivid in the Bible—chained head and foot in the lake of flames, the weeping and wailing. But heaven, nobody ever says what it would be like to exist there for a single day let alone forever. Tertullian tried, but I don’t find his answer very satisfactory.”

“Tertullian?”

“He was an early Christian philosopher. He said that one of the most intense pleasures in heaven would be to look down at the miseries people were suffering in hell. Personally, if that’s all he can come up with, I’ll take hell. At least there you’re experiencing the real thing, not watching it.”

She seems lost in the conversation, where to go from here. Perhaps he is getting carried away. He has that tendency. She says, “Was there a funeral?”

“Yes.”

“And did you go?”

“Yes. It was very unsatisfying. Preachers don’t know anything more about death than the rest of us. I walked out before the service was finished. Do you think that was disrespectful?”

“I’m sure the minister understood.”

“I meant to Jean.”

She rubs her eyes, taking a moment to think. “I’d say what’s important is whether you feel you disrespected her.”

“They left her bed unmade.”

“Excuse me?”

“When I left the service,” he says, “I went to her apartment to dispose of her things. The people from the funeral home, they didn’t straighten up when they took Jean away.” He can see the bed now in his mind, the white cotton blanket bunched up at the bottom, the sheets hanging off the side, her pillow on the floor. The mattress sagging in the middle, the imprint of a solitary sleeper. He remembers running his hands over the sheet as if tracing the shape of her—the curve of her legs, the bulk of her hips, her bony spine. His wife reduced to an impression in the bed, the memory of a mattress.

“That particularly troubled you?” Amy says.

He nods that indeed, the unmade bed troubled him.

She leans back, signifying a sudden change in topic. “Perhaps you could tell me about the assault that your wife—”

“Jean.”

“—that your wife, Jean, suffered.”

He shakes his head. “Another day.”