Hide and Seek

By then I knew I was leaving town, going to Boston. I had a job there

that my dad had arranged for me, and I was hoping a small Beacon Hill

school was going to accept me for the fall term. As it turned out I

did get in. Just barely. She was returning to Chestnut Hill. There

was no staying in Dead River after what happened. Not for either of

us.

Kim never saw the town again.

I went home now and then to visit my folks. But it was never good for

me. It was strictly duty.

Anyway, we sat there a long time while hamburgers slid in and out of

the microwave and sodas were poured and people came and went, and I got

to thinking about Casey and that last time we'd had together when she'd

said she loved me, and how changed she was by then. I knew it was

finally clear to her as it was to me that the end of all the useless

risk was not thrills but waste and death, a death from within- and that

our being in love had finally repudiated all that, and we were

strangely happy. In the midst of all the terror, we were happy. The

caves had shown us the worst the world could do to you, and for just a

moment, something of the best.

I was going to Boston because I wasn't dying anymore. Inside, I felt

cleaner than I'd ever been.

I tried to explain that to Kim.

"You've got a second chance, "she said. "Me too. So do I." Then she

shook her head. "Steve and Casey they were both so good at the end."

A year ago last December I drove by the Crouch place and there was

smoke coming out of the chimney. Someone was living there. I wondered

if they knew. I asked Rafferty.

"Sure, they know. Everybody does. But the guy living there is just a

caretaker. He'll be there two or three months, tops, while the

surveyors and execs do their work. You know who owns the property now?

Central Maine Power. The town bought it from the bank just like

everybody wanted them to do for Ben and Mary. Then CMP bought it from

the town. Scuttlebutt is that what we're going to have there is a

waste dump from the nuclear plant in Wiscassett. Ain't that a killer?

Nobody knows for sure, of course. But god knows it