Helen Whitehouse.
Joan Richardson was wrong. That had already happened.
15.
Raquel Rematti was always struck by how much Riverhead, the town seventy-three miles east of Manhattan where Long Island divided into the North Fork and the South Fork, resembled the decaying factory cities of Rhode Island, southeastern and northeastern Massachusetts, and southern New Hampshire. Instead of abandoned factories, Riverhead had abandoned gas stations, most of them on lots with grass and weeds growing through the fissures in the broken concrete. There was even a rusty Esso sign rising over the lot of a long-closed gas station. Esso signs were artifacts of another era, like the big cars with whitewall tires she could remember from her childhood in the late sixties. Most of the storefronts on Main Street in Riverhead were boarded over with plywood. Graffiti was sprayed on the plywood. The only active stores were essentially indoor flea markets. There wasn’t even a McDonald’s or a Burger King.
The residential streets around Riverhead had the look of small towns in Appalachia; there were hundred-year-old houses that must have looked poor when they were built, pick-up trucks in the driveways, and sofas and stuffed chairs on the porches. Raquel knew the poverty of most of America—the decrepit housing, the rundown public schools, the bleak shopping malls—the America that the cheery, pervasive television andprint advertising for cars and vacations and prescription drugs never depicted.
Several years ago, on a trip driven by a reluctant nostalgia, she had returned to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where her family had lived for three generations. Arriving from Sicily in the 1920s, her grandfather had worked for years in a shoe factory in Haverhill alongside the sulphurous Merrimack River, and her father worked there too until the cold day in 1976 when the immense red brick factory building was shut down without any notice to anyone. Raquel was still in high school then, but already tall, strikingly attractive, and first in her class. She knew she was destined for scholarships at any one of several legendary colleges and that she would leave Haverhill behind. The sight of those old factory buildings, some of them renovated but most abandoned and strewn with black graffiti, still painfully tugged at her when she drove through the familiar streets: as a girl she would meet her handsome, happy, and strong father on the iron pedestrian bridge that spanned the Merrimack, which he crossed every day for forty years on his way to and from the factory. She still longed for him: in 1990 he had died of cancer, the disease that had almost taken her own life over the last year. She could still sense his manly, all-enveloping presence.
The prison was on the outskirts of Riverhead. It was a sprawling single-story cinderblock building constructed in the 1970s and surrounded by fences with barbed wire. It was set in what was once a potato field. Raquel passed through the outside security point and parked her car near the main entrance. Many of the cars in the visitors lot were older Mazdas, Toyotas, and Fords. They were the cars and oversize pick-up trucks of family members visiting prisoners. There were also a few Mercedes and BMWs, the cars of visiting lawyers.
For more than a month, Raquel had regularly stopped on Friday afternoons at the prison to visit Juan, sometimes just fortwenty minutes or so, on her drives from the city to her weekend house on the Atlantic coast in Montauk. She had bought the house as a generous gift to herself after the terrifying nine months in which she learned she had breast cancer, underwent debilitating weeks of chemotherapy, and the loss and reconstruction of her left breast. Raquel had always loved life, and she was in utter dread at the thought of losing it during the grim months when the cancer took greater hold before it just halted and was reversed, a miracle she attributed to the cures her doctors delivered and also
Joan Richardson was wrong. That had already happened.
15.
Raquel Rematti was always struck by how much Riverhead, the town seventy-three miles east of Manhattan where Long Island divided into the North Fork and the South Fork, resembled the decaying factory cities of Rhode Island, southeastern and northeastern Massachusetts, and southern New Hampshire. Instead of abandoned factories, Riverhead had abandoned gas stations, most of them on lots with grass and weeds growing through the fissures in the broken concrete. There was even a rusty Esso sign rising over the lot of a long-closed gas station. Esso signs were artifacts of another era, like the big cars with whitewall tires she could remember from her childhood in the late sixties. Most of the storefronts on Main Street in Riverhead were boarded over with plywood. Graffiti was sprayed on the plywood. The only active stores were essentially indoor flea markets. There wasn’t even a McDonald’s or a Burger King.
The residential streets around Riverhead had the look of small towns in Appalachia; there were hundred-year-old houses that must have looked poor when they were built, pick-up trucks in the driveways, and sofas and stuffed chairs on the porches. Raquel knew the poverty of most of America—the decrepit housing, the rundown public schools, the bleak shopping malls—the America that the cheery, pervasive television andprint advertising for cars and vacations and prescription drugs never depicted.
Several years ago, on a trip driven by a reluctant nostalgia, she had returned to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where her family had lived for three generations. Arriving from Sicily in the 1920s, her grandfather had worked for years in a shoe factory in Haverhill alongside the sulphurous Merrimack River, and her father worked there too until the cold day in 1976 when the immense red brick factory building was shut down without any notice to anyone. Raquel was still in high school then, but already tall, strikingly attractive, and first in her class. She knew she was destined for scholarships at any one of several legendary colleges and that she would leave Haverhill behind. The sight of those old factory buildings, some of them renovated but most abandoned and strewn with black graffiti, still painfully tugged at her when she drove through the familiar streets: as a girl she would meet her handsome, happy, and strong father on the iron pedestrian bridge that spanned the Merrimack, which he crossed every day for forty years on his way to and from the factory. She still longed for him: in 1990 he had died of cancer, the disease that had almost taken her own life over the last year. She could still sense his manly, all-enveloping presence.
The prison was on the outskirts of Riverhead. It was a sprawling single-story cinderblock building constructed in the 1970s and surrounded by fences with barbed wire. It was set in what was once a potato field. Raquel passed through the outside security point and parked her car near the main entrance. Many of the cars in the visitors lot were older Mazdas, Toyotas, and Fords. They were the cars and oversize pick-up trucks of family members visiting prisoners. There were also a few Mercedes and BMWs, the cars of visiting lawyers.
For more than a month, Raquel had regularly stopped on Friday afternoons at the prison to visit Juan, sometimes just fortwenty minutes or so, on her drives from the city to her weekend house on the Atlantic coast in Montauk. She had bought the house as a generous gift to herself after the terrifying nine months in which she learned she had breast cancer, underwent debilitating weeks of chemotherapy, and the loss and reconstruction of her left breast. Raquel had always loved life, and she was in utter dread at the thought of losing it during the grim months when the cancer took greater hold before it just halted and was reversed, a miracle she attributed to the cures her doctors delivered and also
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