The Midcoast: A Novel

Back when I lived out of state, people always used to get excited when they found out where I was from. They didn’t meet all that many Mainers—I was like a moose descended from a log cabin, wandering their backyard, eating their shrimp—and wondered if I was from anywhere near the town where they’d gone to summer camp or cruised in their custom sloop. Sometimes I was, sometimes I wasn’t, but Maine is a large state with more coastline than California, I liked to point out, plenty of old gray villages like the one I grew up in, plenty of places to get lost or hide, especially when socked in by a heavy fog. Maybe they’d heard of Damariscotta if they’d ever taken a vacation to the Midcoast, but they tended to pronounce the name wrong and then ask what it meant, and I would say either River of Little Fishes in Abenaki or something Scottish, we weren’t really sure. If they asked what the town was known for, I would have said brick-making, then ice-shipping, then oysters and this one little gallery that sells lobster buoys painted to look like political figures, but this was all before Maeve and I moved back home and bought our coastal charmer with a view!, a listing so pyritic that its author, our realtor, met us at the door mid-apology and with a referral to a rodent removal service.

Before my return I was still telling that old joke, whenever I needed to explain where I was from, about the local who has to give directions to a visiting urbanite. “You can’t get the-yah from he-yah,” says the Mainer, which tells you a little about the roads and highways on the Midcoast, a little more about the shotgun wariness that’ll greet you on so many overgrown front porches, and a lot about the granite breakwalls between those who’ve been here for generations and those who’ve landed more recently, within the past century or two. I am one of these newer arrivals, not a true Mainer—if your parents are from elsewhere, you don’t count, even if you moved to town at age three—but at least I’m not a tourist. We all scowl at the tourists. They ascend as one big traffic jam every summer and presume to know the place just because they’ve rented a cottage with bunk beds and weathered a gentle nor’easter. The other day I saw a couple in matching sunglasses lingering in front of the Sotheby’s, gazing at a flyer full of homes, one of which belonged to the Thatches, our town’s wealthiest family; when I overheard them indulging in the fantasy of moving here year-round, imagining Maine as the way life should be, I found myself wishing I had some other flyer with pictures of the peeling shack Ed Thatch lived in as a child, or the trailer he and his wife Steph moved into when they were only eighteen (or our own drafty ranch, for that matter), just to show these dreamers what they might find if they ever arrived in the off-season and ventured down the wrong dirt road.

To move on from any of these dirt roads was supposed to be impossible, but then the Thatches did just that, moved from there to here—well past here, actually. Steph loved to remind us of their early days, all the hard work and long hours that had put them on this different track, and it’s not that we didn’t believe her, just that we’d heard it all before, heard it plenty. But every small town has its own running dramas, its own local celebrities (there’s a set of twins that’s been calling our high school basketball games since the big playoff run in ’89, and there’s a mussel farmer who wears a bodybuilding getup in every parade—we think because mussel and muscle are homophones—and he’s been doing it since I was in college). So I guess I always assumed I’d return to the Midcoast, if I returned, to find things basically where I’d left them. And most things were. Just not the Thatches. Which was fine. They were off in the distance, nothing to do with us, their rise and fall like a rolling swell tumbling down the coast.

People do move here for the views. Ours is of the salt bay, partially, but also of our neighbor’s three-car garage and a pyramid of algae-covered lobster traps. “The real deal” is how our realtor described the neighborhood, meaning that what we’d see through our windows was mostly the slowly revving engine of Mainers going nowhere. Unless there’s a fog. Then there’s nothing to see, only what everyone else can see, only what’s right in front of us.

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But it was a sunny day in May the last time I saw Ed, one year ago now, when I, Maeve, Jack, and Jane went to the Thatches’ house to attend “A Reception in Honor of Amherst Women’s Lacrosse.” That Ed and Steph had somehow given life to and sent into the world a freshman midfielder on the Amherst women’s lacrosse team had never stopped seeming completely implausible, and yet we all knew Allie’s story—this was the daughter—because Ed would give you the lowdown any chance he got. You’d be walking out of the post office or into the natural foods co-op when there’d be a loud honk and you’d look up to see Ed hanging out the driver’s side of his Silverado, banging a flat hand against the door. “Hey, Andy! Two goals against Tufts! She’s on some kinda roll!” And before you even had time to congratulate her, or really him, he’d be thundering down the low brick canyon of Main Street, past the art gallery and the butcher shop, both of which leased from him.

Our family was late getting to the reception so had to park on the shoulder of the gravel driveway, way up by the main road, behind a chartered bus and a steep line of out-of-state SUVs, their rear windows papered in Amherst Lacrosse stickers, Nantucket beach permits, and faux-European circle decals designed to make MV and OBX look like legitimate nation-states. Back when Ed and I had worked as teenage dockhands at the Pound, Ed would have called this visiting herd Your kind of people, Andy, but he’s the only one who ever called me Andy, and I always resented the characterization—perhaps because it fit. I had gone away to Exeter, then Dartmouth, played lacrosse at both stops, roomed with Virginia aristocrats who now arrived at reunions with full-time nannies and made a show of matching any and all donations to the scholarship fund.

I thought I understood, then, what we were getting ourselves into. The women’s lacrosse team would get feted and fed the day before its big game against Bowdoin College. There would be chicken parm and Gatorade. Dads would get sloshed and lean a little too close and deliver pointed musings about the way the team ought to be run, who should be getting more of a burn, who should be riding more pine. They’d be wearing shiny polos with their country clubs’ emblems on the breast, pastel belts embroidered with whales and three-woods. The moms would be overdressed in whatever summer attire had just arrived in the boutiques of Wellesley or Annapolis, and they would ask the players about their girlfriends, or in this case boyfriends, or maybe it didn’t matter anymore.

But as we steered our kids between the Thatches’ garage (formerly a farmhouse) and the house (formerly a barn) and made our way onto the backyard (really a long shimmering meadow that humped down to the river over a series of small hills like an off-season ski slope) it became clear that Ed had taken the concept of “pre-game reception” in a whole new direction. What we were stumbling into was more like a spectacular Midcoast-themed carnival. There was a train of folding tables dressed in purple gingham tablecloths, a trailer-length grill blowing smoke into the sky, and a massive white tent strung with yards and yards of hanging lightbulbs. There was even an inflatable lobster the size of an elephant (where had Ed procured it? I had no idea. I assumed he must have stolen it from some boarded-up state fair). Someone had wedged a lacrosse stick in the lobster’s left claw, and visitors were taking pictures of each other standing next to it as if they had slain the poor thing. The rest of the meadow was overtaken by players, parents, and coaches, all of them wearing purple.

“Can we play in the bouncy castle?” Jane asked, our daughter, seven years old at the time.

“What bouncy castle?”

She pointed in the direction of an overinflated lobster trap—another carnival prop I never could have conceived of—bursting with children, all flopping around and jamming each other’s heads between the pontoons.

“Yes,” Maeve said. “But bring your brother. And don’t touch anyone if they look sick. Like if they have a runny nose, stay away.”

“Stranger danger!” Jack said, age six.

“That’s something else, Jack,” Jane said.

“You’re something else, Jane.”

“Go,” Maeve said. “Have fun.”

The kids ran at the trap, and Maeve and I headed for the tent. We passed a table at the edge of the lawn, where I picked up a brochure proclaiming Damariscotta to be Maine’s “Vacation Haven” (Steph Thatch’s new marketing slogan, part of a rebranding effort, more on this later), and then we waded through the small clusters of guests, saying hello to anyone we knew—our accountant, our kids’ pediatrician, our sheepish realtor—all of whom looked a little confused by the surrounding festivities but willing to go with the flow in exchange for an open bar—until a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt over a turtleneck, the school superintendent I soon learned, corralled our marital unit and asked my permission to talk shop.

“About what?” I said.

“No, no,” he said, “with Maeve.”

Maeve runs a not-for-profit called EduVerse that empowers students to write poems about their own lives (here’s a stanza I found on the kitchen table recently: So many seagulls around the parking lot / It’s like a party for seagulls / If you have a bike you can bike right through em / But they’ll just fly away / They’ll be back to eat your trash someday), and once the superintendent had thanked Maeve for all the fine work she’d done in the county’s middle schools, he asked her how she might feel about expanding the program. Maeve would be very interested in expanding the program, she said, squeezing my hand in silent apology. This felt like my cue to slip away for a beer, so I waited until the superintendent wasn’t looking and mouthed Good luck to Maeve who mouthed Get me something, too, so I mouthed Okay, what? and she mouthed White wine, actually, no, I could go for a beer and by now the superintendent was looking again, so I said, out loud, “I’m on it,” and went hunting for the bar.

I found it in one corner of the tent, next to a raised platform where Maine’s most famous all-white reggae band was just starting to plug in its amps. The bartender handed me two Shipyards, both wrapped in purple cocktail napkins with the Amherst crest on one side, crossed lacrosse sticks on the other, and I thanked him and apologized because I didn’t have any cash for a tip, before following a trail of tiki torches down toward the river, where the fog was just beginning to snake along the shoreline, drafting north from the ocean. All of this land I had gazed upon many times, but always from the river, always from someone else’s boat. The house was high on a hill. Pines lined the northern flank of the meadow. Birches lined the southern flank. The grass was freshly mown. There was a new dock. I was hoping to take a look at Ed’s old lobster boat, recently converted into a pleasure cruiser with roaring twin engines, rumored to hit speeds northward of fifty knots, this overhaul, in total, rumored to cost northward of two-fifty—

But I never made it that far. Instead I ran into Steph Thatch. Ed’s wife. Our mayor. Town manager was her official title, but she called herself the mayor, and we all followed suit, feeling like the difference was trivial and she’d pretty much earned the right anyway. She was marching up from the dock, rising through the grass in black rain boots and tight blue jeans. She wore a gray flannel shirt and a down vest, the better part of a dead coyote serving as a hood. The garments were trimly cut, unzipped or unbuttoned to her freckled breastbone, her brown hair bedazzled with blond highlights. She said hello and asked if I had seen her husband, which I hadn’t.

“Well, either we launch this thing or we don’t,” Steph said.

“Which thing?”

She pointed to the steaming, barrel-shaped smoker where the Dodwells, a brother-sister catering duo, also operators of the town’s only taxi, were prodding at a mound of wet seaweed.

“You see any lobster?” Steph asked me.

“I can’t tell from here.”

“That’s because they’re still in the river,” she said. “Ed insisted on supplying them himself.”

“As he would,” I said.

Steph looked dubious.

“Since he’s a lobsterman,” I added.

“Of course he’s a lobsterman. Was a lobsterman. He wears a lot of hats, you know. He’s been busy. This reception means the world to him. It’s nice you’re here. Great turnout, actually. I just worry he takes too much crap.”

“Takes it, or takes it on?”

“Takes it on.”

I had no idea if this was true. Ed struck me as the kind of rural titan who’s come far enough in life to turn himself into a man of leisure, but perhaps that was only in my own dealings with him, which mostly concerned Allie’s lacrosse career.

“He and Chuck already filled three traps and put them in the river,” Steph said. We were standing in the steepest part of the meadow, so she had to brace a hand on her uphill knee to hoist herself to my level. “We’re supposed to go out on the boat, and the girls are supposed to help them haul the lobster. I should have stopped him. It’s just too much.”

I looked at a few of the young women, talking and laughing with their parents. “I bet they’ll enjoy going out on the water,” I said.

“Oh, they’ll love it,” Steph said. “But only if we go now. Otherwise, we’ve got issues.” She looked behind her at the sky, which was continuing its sweep toward gray, and then she waved at a woman in a periwinkle cashmere sweater, who waved back. “Who the hell are you,” Steph muttered through a smile, just loud enough for me to hear, before taking off in the woman’s direction, calling as she went, “We didn’t know if you’d make it!”

I sipped my beer. The challenge would be to drink just one. I wasn’t worried so much about getting drunk, although I probably would, more about putting on weight, which I already had. Right around then—as I turned my gaze upon the other men in the field—I realized there was a service I could provide, a way to contribute to the gathering. I would search the premises for Ed, let him know that his presence had been requested.

At first I couldn’t find him anywhere. He wasn’t in the meadow, wasn’t in the tent, wasn’t amongst any of the boosters. Perhaps he was in the house—the hulking former barn with deck appended to the river side, shingles new enough to hold only the slightest shade of ash, trim painted forest green. Steph had hired contractors from up the coast, blasted out all the old stable walls, pumped the roof full of skylights. I liked the look quite a lot.

The inside, too. This I saw as I cupped my hands to the glass doors on the deck. I was impressed by the openness and vastness of it all. From background to foreground: an industrial-strength kitchen, a high and wide stone fireplace, a living room carefully decorated in rustic antiques—black metal, raw wood, antler chandelier, vintage telescope, vintage map of the Midcoast. On the coffee table was a live—no, a stuffed—fox in an action pose, facing me and snarling. The voices of the party were beyond earshot now, so behind me I heard only a gull, the wind, and what sounded like a murmuring brook. I couldn’t detect any movement inside, but then I noticed a presence, an almost completely still presence, something—or someone—who didn’t quite fit. Ed. Wherever he went, the ocean went with him, and I could sense it, even through the glass: the salt in his beard, the mud beneath his nails. He was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, in his socks, rubber boots upright next to his feet, leaning back, his hands on the squared-off leather arms. His head was cast downward, possibly at the table next to his chair, but with his hat blocking my view, I couldn’t tell for sure. I was about to knock on the glass when he shifted his gaze toward mine. For a moment we eyed each other through the door, and I felt caught.

“Hey, Ed,” I said, sliding the door open.

“How we doing, Andy.”

“Doing well. Thanks for having us.”

I was expecting him to say something more, but he didn’t, so I stood silently and he sat silently as the band launched into a cover of something familiar. They were down the hill and out of sight. “Enter Sandman” set to a reggae beat—that was it.

“Quite the party,” I said. “Allie’s team looks good. No wonder they’re kicking ass this year.”

“Yuh,” he said. He spoke with a heavy Maine accent, a guttural dialect that inflected even the shortest of phrases.

A moment passed.

“Steph’s looking for you,” I said.

This got Ed moving, but only slowly. He reached across the armrest and flipped what looked like a manila folder from open to shut. He pulled on one boot, then the other, and pressed against the arms of the chair to lift himself to a standing position, stiffly at first, then loosening up, like a bear hitching itself onto its hind legs. I’m not short, but Ed had me by a couple inches. He was always looking down from beneath the visor of a cap, an oily thumbprint on the bottom of each brim. Since I’d known him, he’d regularly worn what you might expect from someone who grew up on the southern tip of the peninsula with a UFO-sized satellite dish in the front yard and a deconstructed snowmobile in the back—diesel-stained jeans, hooded sweatshirt, dirty baseball cap—but on this day, the hat and hoodie matched, both purple, both with AMHERST LACROSSE printed in bold white letters across the chest or crest. The sweatshirt had been knifed at the collar to make room for a thick black beard. I had thought he’d be jovial today, excited about the reception—it was as close as the Thatches would ever come to a debutante ball: his daughter, their family, officially accepted by the suburban elites who’d been paying private school tuitions and club team fees since their daughters were all in kindergarten together—but that wasn’t the vibe.

He came to the door and removed the second beer, the one intended for Maeve, from my grip. He raised one eyebrow as a way of showing gratitude, then slugged the whole thing. When he was done, he burped and said, “You sure Steph was looking for me? Not EJ?” EJ was Ed and Steph’s son, Allie’s older brother.

I thought back. Steph had definitely been looking for Ed. “She said Ed,” I said.

“That’s good.”

For another long moment Ed didn’t say anything, and I thought we might have reached the end of the conversation, but then he said, “Now, Andy.” He turned toward me. “What the hell kind of name is Trip?”

I was at a loss and told him so.

He repeated himself, but Trip meant nothing to me. “Trip?” I asked. “With one p?”

“Don’t know,” Ed said. “You’re the English teacher.”

This was true enough, but it was in my capacity as lacrosse coach that I had come back into contact with Ed when I returned to town, and I couldn’t remember any other instance when he’d acknowledged the other half of my job title.

“Hang on,” he said, frowning, thinking back. “Yuh. It was one P.”

“Okay, so most likely, that’s a diminutive form of ‘Triple.’ ”

“Triple?”

“Yeah, like, ‘the Third,’ ” I said. “For example, your son is Edward, Junior, and therefore—”

“No, he ain’t. He’s Everett Joseph. People just think he’s a junior.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, if he were a junior, you could call him Chip, like ‘Chip off the old block.’ And if he were a third, you could call him Trip. And if he were a fourth—” I hesitated. “Actually, I don’t even know what you would call him then.”

Ed scratched at his beard but no longer looked interested in discussing thirds, fourths, fifths—none of the above. For whatever reason, my etymology lesson had set him at ease.

“So who is he?” I asked.

“Who’s who?”

“Trip. The person you just asked me about.”

Ed smiled and put his hand on my trapezius muscle, squeezing hard enough to make me wince. “Must be about them lobsters,” he said. It took me a second to gather that he was referencing the original premise of our conversation—why his wife might have been looking for him—but before I could respond, he removed his hand from my neck and walked right by me, past the inlaid hot tub (this had been the source of the brook-like noises, I now realized, also the source of the previously undocumented chlorine odor) and down the stairs to the meadow, disappearing into the crowd and the fog.

The weather had overtaken the grass by then, muting the forms of the parents and the young women who in their purple sweaters and pullovers had spread across the field and under the tent as naturally as a dash of wild lupines. It was the type of ghostly dusk that comes to the Midcoast every spring, a swirl of smoke and light, the river air at once warm and chilling, weather that can fill the sky with a sense of change—what kind of change, I can never tell.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, the paternal clock ticked—I should check in on the kids and find Maeve another beer—but instead I found myself glancing inside the house, then out at the fog, then back into the house.

I’m not sure what gave me the courage to go inside—perhaps I felt invisible, shrouded by the weather—but the next thing I knew, I was sliding the door closed behind me, and then I was alone in the Thatches’ home, standing next to a waist-high vase of pussy willows.

I began to work my way around the great room, passing the windows overlooking the meadow, the fireplace, then a table topped with framed family photos (EJ as a thirteen-year-old with an overgrown crew cut and a blank stare, oblivious to the laser show going on behind him; Allie in a purple headband with a lacrosse stick resting on her shoulder; the whole family on Ed’s boat, rails gleaming in the sun, everyone dressed in suits and summer dresses). I peeked into the kitchen, as spotless and dimly lit as an after-hours showroom, and eventually made my way toward the center of the space, beneath the high oak beams, around the taxidermied fox on the coffee table, angling between the couches arranged in a U before the fireplace. Above the fireplace was a flat-screen TV and above the flat-screen was a massive moose head with towering antlers and glassy black eyes.

Next to Ed’s chair was a table with a copper top. On the table was a manila folder, which I had seen Ed flip shut. Thick block letters on the folder read LINCOLN COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS, and underneath was the department’s circular seal.

EJ Thatch, Ed and Steph’s son, was an officer with the Damariscotta Police Department, not with the county, although the distinction wouldn’t have occurred to me at the time. I just assumed the folder came from EJ. Family business. Definitely not my business. But I couldn’t help myself. Whatever was inside the folder had been occupying Ed’s mind, and I wanted to know what it was. I don’t know how many of my neighbors would have done what I did, but I’m sure they all would have felt the urge. It wasn’t just the open bar that had brought us to the reception, after all. We weren’t friends with the Thatches. The Thatches didn’t have friends.

Using only one finger, slowly lifting the edge of the folder—as if the fewer digits I employed, the less guilty I might be—I splayed the file open on the table. Inside were several photos. Eight by ten. I turned over the first and saw what used to be a sedan. It was parked in a lot, an abandoned mill in the background, half the building’s windows missing, graffiti at the base of every smokestack. The pavement beneath the sedan was blacker than all the other pavement. The car’s frame was charred and collapsed upon itself, shrunken like a dead insect. It was a police photograph, so evinced a perceptible, almost blatant, disregard for composition. The car was nearly centered in the photograph, but not quite. The horizon line was off by a few degrees. The light was too bright.

I flipped to the next picture, and the next. The first showed the trunk of the car. The second showed the backseat. In each case, I had the impression that what I was looking at was nothing more than the burned-out husk of a vehicle. Everything was black and shapeless. But then I noticed a little pink in each photograph. Flesh. The skin of a burn victim, peeling off a skull or a clavicle. Now I could see: The car contained two bodies, both incinerated. I couldn’t tell whether either soul had been dead before the flames had hit the skin, but it wouldn’t have changed how I felt about the pictures; the sight was horrific, and I could sense almost viscerally the moment when the fire had sucked whatever last breath remained from the lungs.

I couldn’t look a moment longer—I regretted ever setting foot in the house—so I shut the folder and took a step back; I did it quickly, barely thinking, as though the photographs themselves were generating unbearable heat.

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An hour later I was in the meadow, helping my children learn to throw and catch a lacrosse ball, half my mind still stunned by the images, when I heard sirens up the hill. I looked to the driveway—we all did—just as a line of state police cruisers burst from the woods, lighting the fog blue, then red, then blue.