Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  “They come all the way up here?”

  “No way. House calls only. A guy who can shell out three hundred for a girl isn’t going to risk the Porsche on Lake Trail. It’s a niche market but there’s plenty of business, believe me.”

  Gareth was quiet then for a moment and there was a calculating glitter to his eyes. When he spoke, though, he sounded genuine enough.

  “Maybe you can help me out. You’re not working, right?”

  “No.”

  “I need a delivery man sometimes, someone to take the girls to their gigs and bring them home again when they’re done.”

  “Like a pimp?”

  “Like a driver. I’m the pimp.”

  “I don’t think that’s something I want to get involved in.”

  Gareth looked at me like he was trying to figure out if I was retarded. Then his face brightened.

  “Marla.”

  “What?”

  “Marla. You think hanging out with hookers might not be the smart thing to do if you want to get back together with her.”

  “Who says I’m going to do that?”

  “But you are, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Dude, no skin off my ass. Get back with her, don’t get back with her. Way too late to make any difference to me. But think about the driving thing, okay? I don’t like leaving Dad here by himself at night. It’d really help me out and it’d be easy money for you.”

  While we were talking David rolled out of the house and into the barn and began working on something with a lathe. The screech of metal on metal killed the rest of whatever conversation Gareth and I might have had. Gareth stood and beckoned me into the barn. He said close to my ear, “Pretend you’re interested.”

  All the benches and the various pieces of power machinery in the barn had been set at a level low enough for David to reach from his wheelchair. When he realized we were watching him he stopped the lathe and held up a cylindrical piece of metal.

  “Lamp base. Got an order for two hundred. Take a look. Now that’s quality work.”

  He spent a minute or two pointing out its merits and Gareth explained that his father did custom piecework for a company of architects in San Francisco. The fittings he made were top-end limited runs and couldn’t be bought in stores. I made some appropriately impressed noises but I’d had enough of Gareth by then and I leveraged this interruption into an opportunity to leave, saying I had to pick Stan up.

  Gareth walked me back through the bungalow and at the front door made me give him my cell phone number.

  “We gotta stay in touch now, Johnny. Hey, take a photo of me. Today is a special day. We need a record.”

  I had no interest in recording anything to do with him, but I snapped a picture with my phone because it was quicker than arguing about it.

  After he’d gone back into the house I walked through the parking lot, past my pickup, and over the grass bank that separated the road from the beach. I took my shoes off and walked along the edge of the lake.

  Marla and Gareth had been together almost a year when she and I knew that we would end up with each other. I was often at their apartment and I’d seen the meals she made, the cleaning and washing she took care of, the standard endearments she sprinkled over him. But I’d seen too, as time passed, that she was not in love with him. So I started going to the coffee shop where she worked and in her breaks we’d sit and talk. She was his partner, I was his friend. Both of us knew what was happening but neither of us could stop it.

  And of course the time came when we were given our chance to do more than talk. A tailor-made day: unusually warm, Marla rostered off work, and Gareth away with his father in Sacramento buying car parts. Stan was eleven years old and on summer break and he wanted to go swimming. How natural then, how innocuous, that on such a hot day Marla should come with us to the lake. What else could you do in heat like that but swim?

  If we had been somewhere else, somewhere with good roads and plenty of ice cream, the lake’s beach would have been packed. As it was, by Oakridge standards it was still pretty busy. We found a spot at the southern end of the lake, twenty yards or so short of where the beach ended in a sprawl of rocks that merged, further on, with solid forest. We spread out our towels and hit the water

  I have an image of us that day. Flashes of moments in the water jolting before me like sun through the windows of a moving train. And sun there is. It is bright around everything. It catches the spray we send into the air, it coats the surface of the lake in long scallops and bows, it makes the wet skin of our bodies tight and alive and beautiful. I see the sheen of it on Stan’s dark wet hair, how it picks out the white of his teeth and makes diamonds in the drops of water on his lashes as he leaps up and down, waist deep, throwing scoops of water into the air, watching the liquid break apart into a fall of heavy drops that hold all the colors of the world as he laughs and shouts, “Hey, Johnny! Hey, Johnny! Look at me!”

  Of these remembered images I wish that that was all there was. I wish some part of me had been good enough to hold on to just these. But there is another image which overlays itself on this glittering cavalcade, which my gaze was drawn to over and over during that last careless playtime we had together-that of Marla’s back. Flat and smooth, pliant as it twists about the axis of her spine, the clasp of her bra, the elastic of her briefs squeezing a gentle line about her hips as she jumps from the water, splashing Stan. And me, watching behind her, thrilling with the knowledge which has just that instant become a certainty-that my hands will press against her body, that I will undo that clasp, that my thumbs will hook the elastic of her briefs away from her waist, dragging down over hips and thighs…

  The question the two of us pose closes at that instant and there is really nothing more to do but wait.

  Ah, that image… that knowing. It should have been a sun-spangled confection of memory, an Olympic torch of the heart burning down the long tunnel of the past. But to me now and for all the years after that day, the image of Marla from behind has become less a capturing of her beauty and my desire for it than a portrait of my own horrific selfishness.

  Afterwards we lay in the sun, stretched straight in a row, soaking up heat like cells in some giant organic battery. The outside of my thigh rested against Marla’s and our blood pressed at the barrier of our skins until we could no longer ignore what we had gone there to do.

  I told Stan that Marla and I were going for a walk in the forest. He wanted to come, of course, and when I said he had to stay and guard our things he gave a resigned snort. But he seemed happy enough and rolled onto his stomach and pulled a book out of his bag. Before I left I looked down at his skinny back. Stan was a smart kid, smart enough to be a grade ahead of his age at school, and his superior IQ allowed him to excel at most things his world presented, but he was a poor swimmer and though he loved the water he could do no more than an uncertain dog paddle.

  “You need some sunscreen.”

  “Okay, in a minute.”

  “And remember, don’t go in the water, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah, Johnny, I got it. Don’t go in the water.”

  Marla and I walked casually across the sand, but as soon as the forest closed behind us she put her hand in mine and we started to run. We didn’t have any idea where we were going but we knew what we needed. Between the trees the ground was soft with long grass and there were patches of light where the sun fell through holes in the canopy of leaves; outside these glowing islands the forest was cool and shadowed and the grass was cold against our legs.

  A couple of hundred yards back from the lake we found a swale of grass in a cone of sunlight. We stopped at its center and the noise of our dash died suddenly around us. We stood panting, face to face, smiling. Light and dark. A heartbeat of stillness. Out there, out in the splashing, picnicking world, there were reasons to hesitate, to question what we were doing, but in this woo
ded sanctuary there was only us and what we wanted from each other. I felt the sun sizzling in my cells and my eyes, even in the strands of my hair.

  The grass we lay on slid against our bodies as though it had been polished. It bruised and tore beneath us as we moved, leaving a pale wash of green on knees and elbows and shoulders. The moment was not lingered over, it was stolen time and could not be wasted on the languors that arpeggiate love. It was everything at once, as much as we could cram into a handful of minutes. Afterwards, as we lay beside each other, the scent of the grass we had broken rose about us.

  Who knows what plans we might have made then? What resolutions to join our lives, what fretting there might have been about the hurt we would inflict on Gareth? But these turmoils were not to be, not that day. Sounds from the lake carried to where we were. They were baffled by the trees but if you listened you could guess at their meaning-the willowy scale of laughter, the short barking of a complaining child, the calling of a mother, two or three notes, over and over, like an instrument being tuned…

  We had not heard these sounds, of course, as we strained at each other. But now, as our bodies quieted, they began to fall upon us. And as they fell they changed, from a collection of commonplaces to a harsh blatting that lanced the warm cocoon Marla and I had drawn about ourselves. For a moment I lay listening, trying to decode their meaning. And then I was pulling on my shorts and running, running, running…

  Because the sounds I could hear were panic and danger and alarm. And I knew what was causing them.

  Out of the forest. Into the sun. Our towels and bags were still at the edge of the lake. Stan’s book too. But as much as I willed the image, as much as I screamed for it to be so, he was not there reading it. A few yards further on a group of people were crowding over something.

  I ran through them, shouldering bodies out of the way, and stopped abruptly. A man was kneeling, driving his locked arms rapidly up and down. The jeans and shirt he wore were soaking wet and beneath his pumping hands the body of my brother was dreadfully pale and dreadfully still. His chest flexed and one of his feet rocked back and forth through a short arc but it was plain to me that he was not alive. I dropped to my knees opposite the man. I felt a sudden desperate need to explain that I was the one here to whom this terrible event was most terrible, to confess to the ring of faces peering down at me my part in this tragedy.

  “He’s my brother,” was the only thing I could force past my lips.

  The man grabbed my hands, putting them where his had been, locking my elbows, showing me how to do it.

  “When I stop blowing, pump.”

  For several seconds the back of his head hid Stan’s face. I felt the narrow chest rise and fall but there was no elasticity to it, no willful drawing in or pushing out of air. His flesh, too, was dense beneath my palms, as though muscle and tissue had become somehow compacted.

  I was moaning. I could hear the sound, but I couldn’t stop it.

  “Pump! Pump!”

  I hammered down on Stan’s chest.

  People in the crowd started to bead together what they had seen into small strings of explanation.

  “He was out by himself. I saw him go in-he looked okay.”

  “We thought he was playing. We couldn’t tell he was in trouble.”

  “Jared saw him go under.”

  “Yeah, he was way out, but I knew something was wrong.”

  The man kneeling opposite me touched my shoulder and I stopped pumping while he blew another series of breaths into Stan. When I started again he spoke in rapid sentences around his own gasps for air.

  “He was under a long time. My kids saw it happen, but I couldn’t find him.”

  I knew all of this without being told, of course. Without the blinding caul of my lust, that this would happen was just so fucking obvious. Don’t leave a child alone by water-a primal understanding. I should have been looking after him. I should have been with him. But being with Marla had been more important.

  As I massaged Stan’s heart the utter clarity of my guilt, the knowledge that I alone was responsible for the stillness of his body, took from me part of myself, stole away that quality most humans assume to be the bedrock of who they are-the quality of believing oneself to be a good person.

  After that day I would never think that about myself again.

  When Stan choked and spluttered back to life, when his eyelids fluttered open and he gazed past me into the blue sky, I thought I would faint with relief. As he sucked in great sobbing lungfuls of air I held him close, shouting to the crowd, “He’s alive! He’s alive!” And as they clapped and cheered I promised myself that I had learned my lesson, that I would never again be careless with another human being. I had no idea, in those moments of jubilation, that my lessons were only just starting.

  The paramedics arrived while I still had Stan in my arms. They had lumbered their vehicle up Lake Trail in response to a cell phone call from one of the crowd. There were two of them and they pried Stan away from me, strapped him to a backboard, and carried him across the sand to their truck. I trotted beside them, repeating to Stan that he was going to be all right. He’d been looking around him as though enraptured by what he saw. When his eyes came to rest on me, though, he stared blankly for a moment and I felt the tendrils of a new fear tighten around me.

  “It’s Johnny. Are you okay, Stan? It’s Johnny.”

  He smiled and closed his eyes. “Johnny…”

  Then his head lolled sideways and we were climbing into the ambulance.

  Before they closed the doors I saw Marla. She must have been following us but I had not noticed her, had not even thought of her. She was standing still, watching me, and as our eyes met we both knew that what we had started in the forest that day was going to stay buried there for a long, long time.

  The paramedics took Stan fifty miles to the hospital in Burton on radioed instructions from Oakridge’s own emergency clinic. I remember the time as a strip-lit nightmare of recriminations from my father and my own worry for Stan. My father tried, I think, to keep his anger in check, but there were times when it was just too much for him.

  Through the battering storm of doctors and tests and waiting rooms and not knowing, a word began to surface, a wicked piece of flotsam that weighted our lives forever after and tore from me any hope that Stan’s near-drowning might ever become forgivable.

  Hypoxia. A brain starved of oxygen longer than three minutes begins to die. Like never leave a child alone near water, it is something we all know. But which parts will die, what trajectory of sacrifice the brain will plot and its effect on the individual, are never known until after the fact. Likewise the extent of recovery varies unpredictably.

  A doctor, trying to give us something to hope for, said, “There is no certainty of interpretation in brain trauma. In the way the brain interprets it, I mean.”

  He only wanted to help, but it was wasted on us. We could see for ourselves that Stan’s brain had interpreted its trauma pretty fucking severely.

  There was a transition phase in the weeks and months that followed. There was rehab and therapy, rapid improvement in motor skills-a sloping graph against the axes of time and damage. After three months Stan had pretty much gotten as good as he was going to get.

  The doctors said it could have been much worse. They neglected to mention that it could just as easily have been much better.

  Stan was more than functional. He did not come out of it a slavering vegetable, he was not paralyzed down one side or deprived of the use of language. He suffered neither ataxia nor aphasia. But he was changed, there was no doubt about that. Gone was the diamond-bright focus he had directed at the world, gone was the goal-oriented overachiever, gone was the IQ that set him apart. He was Stan number two and he was never going to revert to what he’d been before, never going to heal beyond this particular threshold of resurrection.

  And it was all my fault.

  Now, twelve years later, standing on that beach again, I fe
lt my guilt no less keenly. I’d left a kid who couldn’t swim alone near water and all the time that had passed since then, all my years of isolation in London, all my blind-eye-turning, had not made the slightest difference to what I thought of myself.

  I walked across the sand to the parking lot and got into my pickup. It was not until I had begun the treacherous descent down Lake Trail that I realized Gareth must have known what my reaction to being at the lake again would be.

  CHAPTER 4

  When I got to the garden center Stan was waiting outside for me. He bounced into the pickup.

  “Hey, Johnny, I thought of something today. I thought of an idea to have a business.”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “A man came in and bought a whole load of indoor plants-weeping figs and dracaenas and yuccas. He wanted them for his office. But he didn’t know how to look after them. He didn’t know anything about plants. And that’s when I got my idea. What about a business that rents out plants to offices and stores and places like that and then goes out and looks after them?”

  “That’s a great idea, but people already do that. We used to have it where I worked in England.”

  “Yeah, but nobody does it here in Oakridge. I asked Bill.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. And he’d know, he’s like king of this place.”

  “Well, keep it in mind, then.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll keep it in mind ’cause, Johnny, I think it’d be good to be a businessman. It’d make me part of everyone again.”

  I started the pickup and we headed into town. For a while I was able to stay quiet, but eventually my visit to the lake got the better of me.

  “Do you go up to the lake much, Stan?”

  “I can’t swim. I like the woods near our place better.”

  “Are you scared to go up there?”

  “You shouldn’t think about the lake, Johnny.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I think about it a lot.”

  “You know something I think about? When I was on the sand and I woke up, I remember how bright the sun was and how good it felt to look up into the sky and it was like I could feel everything all around me. And then I felt your hands on my chest and I could see you and I could see the sun and the sky and I felt good, Johnny. That’s what I remember, I felt good. I didn’t always feel good later, but when I felt bad, when I couldn’t understand something or when the kids were teasing me, I remembered that-the sun and feeling everything all around me.”