Where or When

by Anita Shreve

  That December, I touched my daughter often. Stephen worked on machinery and taught at the school, and when we chanced upon each other, in the kitchen or in a hallway, he held himself away from me, in self-preservation. I believe now that he knew before I did that I was leaving him, that he felt it in the silences, in the unreachable distance, even as he denied it to himself, refused to imagine it.

  We spoke sometimes and were careful with each other—unwilling yet to disturb the separate peace each of us had made.

  The week before Christmas, I went into the attic, where I had found your picture, and brought out garlands and tinsel, colored lights and a star. The ornaments were heavy, the garlands weighted, and it was an effort to raise my arms to the tree. Lily asked me often what it was I was looking at, and I answered her that I wasn’t looking, I was thinking.

  I was thinking about equations: Is one hour spent doing X equal to thirty-one years of doing Y?

  On Christmas morning, my husband left the bed early. I waited until I could smell the fried dough and the coffee, and I went down to join him. He was wearing an ocher flannel shirt, and I was thinking: Are you wearing a similar shirt, one that I have never seen, may never see at all? Are you with your wife, your children? Do you hold your wife in the bed when you sleep? Do your children join you in the bed on Christmas morning, making a sandwich of bodies, as Stephen and I sometimes did with Lily and had done with Brian when Brian was with us?

  It wasn’t possible, of course, ever to forget Brian, or that he should have been there with us. Christmas was the worst, though I don’t know how I can say that. Every day was the worst; the pain was not dulled by time, not filled up, not muted. He had died in a friend’s car on the way home from a soccer game at school, died when the car in which he was traveling was hit by a metallic-blue Corvette that had run the light. In the few seconds just before the intersection, the last few seconds of his life, Brian, for reasons that will never be known to us, had unfastened his seat belt. For days, for weeks, for months afterward, I replayed that scene in my head, willing time to stop, so that I could crawl into that car, into the back seat, and refasten the seat belt for my son.

  Stephen finished frying the doughnuts. In his flannel shirt, he made an effort to be festive. Lily came, with a bright anticipatory smile. With a flourish, Stephen let down the curtain, and Lily ran to the tree.

  We ate the doughnuts as Lily opened up her stocking and her presents. Stephen and I made a show for each other, each pretending to be happy. I opened the leather book: It was beautiful, and I said so. I had given Stephen an easel and a set of costly oil paints, and I saw at once the confusion behind his smile: How could he take up again this hobby while he was under siege?

  We were sitting in the living room, awash with colored paper, toys underfoot. Stephen made a fire, brought us more coffee. I was thinking that in each house on the street, in all the pastel houses, there were children and colored paper, and women and men who might or might not love each other, who might or might not have indelible connections of their own. And it was then that I remembered another present for Lily, one I had hidden away. It was a sweater, a rose-colored sweater that she could wear through the winter.

  I laughed. I’ve forgotten a present, I said.

  Stephen said, You do this every year.

  I said, I hide them so well I sometimes forget about them. I’ll just get it now.

  Stephen was standing. No, I’ll get it, he said. I’m already up.

  I looked at him against the window, the overbright light from the snow outside causing him to be in silhouette.

  Yes, OK, I said. It’s in the dresser in my closet, the third drawer down.

  I sat back, took a sip of coffee. Lily had on her lap a jewelry box with a secret compartment that intrigued her. The hot coals from the fireplace filled the room with warmth.

  I sat up quickly then; the coffee spilled onto my robe. I was paralyzed, unable to speak or move. Lily said, Mum, you spilled your coffee.

  I waited a minute, possibly an hour. I heard Stephen’s footsteps through the kitchen, looked over to where he stood in the doorway.

  I saw it all on his face—that peculiar mix of confusion and horror that accompanies a fear confirmed.

  In his hands he held your shirt.

  THE WIND FROM THE NORTHEAST rips along High Street, stinging the side of his face with a cold rain that smells of the sea. Charles watches as a string of Christmas lights loops high over the traffic, dislodging a wreath, which bounces once onto the street, then scuds along the sidewalk like prairie sage. Last-minute shoppers, their faces pinched with cold, bend toward the storm. From his vantage point on the top step of the bank, Charles looks out over the row of storefronts toward the harbor. Even sheltered, the water is rough; a grizzled sky meets a muddy sea not two hundred feet from shore, obliterating the lighthouse at the end of the point. He hopes each of the draggermen has made it back in; there is nothing worse than a boat late or lost over Christmas. He remembers two or three scares from the past the news spreading with Christmas greetings until no one in town could pass a window without looking out to sea and mumbling a prayer—as though no celebration could begin until all boats were in and accounted for.

  The storm will hurt the shops, he thinks, the small businesses struggling through the worst Christmas season in memory. Already McNamara, with his lumberyard at the end of High Street, has declared bankruptcy; and Janet Costa, at the stationery store, has told Harriet she won’t make it through February. The decline is contagious, the failure of each enterprise a harbinger of other failures to come. Charles wonders if the street soon will resemble a ghost town, with rows of empty storefronts.

  He takes one step down, hikes his collar to cover his ears. He should go home, he knows, to help Harriet with the tree, but if he goes now, he is certain she will see it on his face—their own failure, his failure. He feels the anger, but oddly there is now as well a kind of relief. It can’t get much worse, and in that there is some comfort. The particular struggle to save his house is over.

  He looks across at the coffee shop; he could go in there, get himself a sandwich, wish a few clients a happy Christmas. But it isn’t what he wants—it won’t take the edge off the anger. He looks down the street in the direction of The Blue Schooner: a pint, a bowl of hot chowder, wish a different set of clients a happy Christmas. The wind howls up the steps, buffets his coat. Nothing keeps out the cold in a storm like this, he knows. He feels the raw air inside his sleeves and close to his chest.

  Hunched in his coat, he jogs down the steps of the bank. On the sidewalk, he turns to look up at the imposing edifice. The thick white columns support a wide stone portico. An oversize wreath, decorated with tiny jewels of light and golden bows, hangs over tall wooden doors, as if promising access inside to wealth and taste and power, when what the bank has really done is suck the town dry. Charles wants to give the bank the finger, suppresses this juvenile urge.

  He hates the bank, The Bank, the institution itself and not really the people who work inside it. He hates the institution that has siphoned millions of dollars out of the community with its stock offerings that have all gone to shit, the one that has lent out other millions and now lost all of it. He can’t even count the number of people in town who’ve had to forfeit, in the last several months, their retirements, their IRAs, everything they had. Now the bank has no money to lend to keep people like Medeiros afloat—literally.

  The meeting was brief, stunningly brief and clearly pointless. Whalen had called the meeting deliberately for the twenty-fourth, and Charles knew this was punishment for his having crossed the banker at the volleyball game. He felt sorry now for that encounter; he knew the financial fiasco wasn’t Whalen’s fault, and when Charles arrived at the bank—twenty minutes late for his eleven o’clock appointment (twenty deliberate minutes spent sitting in the Cadillac in the bank’s parking lot; they could all be children when they wanted to be)—he wanted to say that to the banker. Charles studied th
e sweating pink face, the remarkable shine on the bald pate, and said simply, “Whalen.”

  Whalen looked down at the papers on his desk, shuffled them. “You’re four months behind on your mortgage payments, Callahan,” he said. “What are you going to do about it?”

  Charles knew immediately he shouldn’t have come. What was the point of talking to Whalen anyway? If the bank was going to foreclose, then let it be. The process was inevitable. “You know I can’t bring it up to date,” he said.

  Whalen looked at Charles. The man’s reading glasses enlarged his pupils. Charles thought idly of hot frogs on a railroad track, felt truly sorry for the man. “The bank examiners are looking over our shoulders right now,” Whalen said, “and they’re forcing us to act on all our problem loans.”

  Charles felt his own face grow warm. He knew he should shrug his shoulders, walk out the door. It was what any sensible man would do. Or perhaps he should beg, plead the Christmas season; or lie, say the money would be there the first of the year. But why lie? There wouldn’t be any money in January, or in February, for that matter.

  “I know it’s not your fault,” Charles said. “I know you’re only doing your job. To tell you the truth, Ed, I feel sorrier for you than I do for myself.”

  Whalen looked sick, even in the glow of incandescent light and warm wood. Charles knew that when the feds got through with Whalen, he, too, would be out on the street, and possibly on his way to jail.

  Charles leaves the bank, passes the coffee shop, then makes his way toward The Blue Schooner. A Salvation Army Santa is out in front of Woolworth’s. Charles gives the can some change. A pickup truck passes, a wreath on its grille. Charles ponders what degree of holiday spirit would possess a man to put a Christmas wreath on his car, decides it must have something to do with kids. Halfway to The Blue Schooner, he comes upon a pair of phone booths on the sidewalk. He cannot pass a phone booth now without studying it, considering the possibilities. Generally he does not ever call her from a place as public as the center of town, but today everyone is so huddled, warding off the storm, that he is certain no one would notice him. Yet even so, he thinks again, it is too risky. They have agreed, tentatively, not to call each other all day Christmas Eve or on Christmas itself, with the understanding that neither is likely to be alone. He stops at the booth, looks at the black phone. He wants to tell her about Whalen, about losing his house. He wants to tell her that he thinks about her every minute even when he is dealing with the bank; she is always there hovering in his thoughts He tries to imagine her in her kitchen making pirogis with her mother-in-law. He picks up the receiver, puts it back. He leans on the shelf. How bad could it be? Even if the mother-in-law is there, or Lily is there, she could talk to him for just a minute, just long enough so that he could hear her voice, so that he could tell her that he thinks her feet are beautiful. He wants to hear her laugh. He picks up the phone again, dials the familiar number. The phone rings twice, three times, four times. He wonders idly where she is. At the store? Out in the car with her daughter? Is it raining there too, or snowing?

  The phone stops ringing. He hears a man say hello. The man sounds breathless, as if he had run in from outside. The man says hello again, and Charles is paralyzed, unable to speak, unable to put the phone down. Once again the man at the other end says hello, this time with exasperation. The voice is deep; the “hello” has resonance. And yet the man does not sound cheerful or friendly, or is Charles extrapolating again, reading too much into a simple greeting? Charles hangs up the phone and backs away from the booth as if he had been barked at, nipped at, by a dog. He has imagined her husband, has known on one level that the man must exist, and yet the image has been disembodied, willed away when he wants it to be gone. But this he cannot will away—the resonance of that voice across the wire. The man does exist, is standing in her kitchen. Where is she?

  Subdued and frustrated, he enters The Blue Schooner. The bar is thick with men, off early from work, in now from the water, or simply escaping the ennui of a day at home with no structure. Charles makes his way through the wet heat of the crush, finds Medeiros on a stool at the end of the bar. Charles hesitates, says hello.

  “Callahan.”

  “Joe.”

  “Buy you a beer?”

  “Thanks.”

  Medeiros is sweating under his wool cap. His eyes are rheumy in the dim light. Medeiros will be going home to a Portuguese meal with his clan—squid and octopus; each family has its rituals. Charles leans on the bar, unbuttons his coat, shakes it out. He loosens his tie. The beer is sharp and cold, deeply satisfying. He returns the favor, orders Medeiros a bourbon.

  “What’s the matter, Callahan? You look like shit. You been losin’ weight, or what?”

  “Something like that.”

  “The kids OK?”

  “The kids are fine.”

  “The wife?”

  Charles starts to smile. “The wife is fine,” he says.

  “So what’s the story, then? You broke?”

  “Yeah, I’m broke.”

  Medeiros takes a long swallow of bourbon, looks at Charles. “Yeah, so what else is new? We’re all broke. There’s something else. You in trouble?”

  Charles looks up at the ceiling, down at the condensation on his glass. He drains his beer, signals the bartender for another.

  “You could say that, Joe. You could say I’m in trouble.”

  “I knew it. I knew you were in trouble. I told Antone you was in trouble. I could see it on your face. With the government? With the IRS? With that deal that went sour? What?”

  Charles leans on his elbow, looks at Medeiros. “I’m in love.”

  Joe Medeiros seems stunned, stupefied by Charles’s words—as if he hadn’t heard a man say those words in a very long time, cannot quite compute them. The draggerman looks embarrassed, takes a thoughtful sip of bourbon. He shakes his head, out of his depth.

  “I didn’t figure you for that, Charlie. I never figured you for chasin’ skirts.”

  “This isn’t chasing skirts.”

  “Who is she?”

  “No one you know.”

  “Where is she?”

  “With her husband and daughter in Pennsylvania.”

  “Wow. Shit.”

  “Yeah. Shit.”

  “Does the wife know?”

  “Harriet? No.”

  “You gonna tell her?”

  “I don’t know, Joe. I’m not sure what I’m going to do.”

  Medeiros looks away over the noisy crowd, as if pondering Charles’s options. Defeated by the lack of easy solutions, he turns back to Charles.

  “Well,” Medeiros says, settling on a bromide, “you gotta do what your heart tells you.”

  Medeiros lets out a long sigh, acknowledging that even that was complicated. What if the heart wanted the lover but wanted the wife and kids not to be hurt?

  “I guess,” he adds lamely.

  “Yeah, I guess,” says Charles.

  Medeiros looks at Charles, slides off his stool, not wanting to be in the proximity of such a thorny problem—not on Christmas anyway. “I gotta talk to Tony over there, find out his boats made it in,” Medeiros says. He puts a hand on Charles’s shoulder. “Hang in there,” he says.

  “Thanks, Joe. Have a happy Christmas.”

  Charles takes Joe’s stool, orders a bowl of chowder. The chowder tastes good; nothing better than Rhode Island chowder, with its thin broth. He orders another pint of beer, listens to the cacophony in the room. The bar is close, overheated, redolent of damp wool from the fishermen’s caps and jackets. A dozen clients are at tables or standing at the bar. Last Christmas—and at Christmases before that—Charles used the occasion to spread goodwill, rekindle contact with lapsing clients. But today he knows he cannot manage that. He feels disoriented, shut off from the men, shut out from a world in which the usual standards and words apply. The voices in the room seem overly loud, out of sync with the mouths forming the words, as if a sound track were
a split second off. Charles shakes his head to clear it. He doesn’t belong in here. He has to get out, but he can’t go home either. Not yet.

  Charles crosses the street, walks back toward the car. He is wet inside from sweating in the overheated bar; soaked outside from the nasty weather. He bends into the wind, watches as a car’s spray washes along the street. Already the traffic is thinning out, everyone off work early, closing shops, going home. He was supposed to pick up something for Harriet—what? He tries to concentrate. Milk? Eggs? Bacon? Paper towels?

  He reaches the bank parking lot, puts his key in the lock. As he does so, he glances over the top of the Cadillac, sees the back of St. Mary’s, the town’s Catholic church. He removes the key from the lock, crosses the lot, then makes his way through a wet mossy cemetery. He enters the church by a side door.

  He hasn’t been inside the church in over a year, not since the Fahey funeral. The interior is dimly lit, with electric lanterns high overhead. Votive candles flicker in bubbly red glasses. He walks in twenty feet, looks at the altar, nearly smothered today in poinsettias. He has always hated poinsettias; their color alone seems poisonous to him. He studies the cross suspended above the altar, a particularly grotesque crucifixion, the skin of Christ abnormally white, with magenta blood from the wounds dripping along the feet and hands. Why do this to children? he wonders, not for the first time. He walks to the front pew, sits down, his hands folded limply in his lap. He examines the cross on the altar itself, a simpler gold cross, without a body. He focuses on the cross, tries to formulate a prayer. But the old words still do not work, and he cannot create the necessary sentences. He wants to ask for help and to kneel, as if in those simple acts he might be forgiven—not so much for what he has done as for what he is about to do. His longing for forgiveness feels enormous, a large indefinable longing, but he knows the request is futile. He will never give up Siân; therefore, according to the rules of the game, asking for forgiveness is out of the question. And in any event, it has been too long since he has had any clear idea of what or whom he was asking for forgiveness.