by Sue Miller
And with all that, she wanted to work on a new play she had going.
She turned over in bed to look out the bedroom windows. There was a pine at the back of the yard that she often thought of as consoling. Just its deep, dark green, she supposed.
She had her life again. She was glad. The sense of its slipping out of her control, the feeling she’d briefly had with Sam, that was over. And this hollowed-out feeling she had now of being accountable for every minute of the day, for all the hours to come, and to come after that?
This was temporary, she told herself. It was the postpartum feeling, something she knew very well how to deal with. “Get over it,” she whispered out loud.
She sat up and threw the covers back. Reuben’s head rose from the bed to see what this meant. She spoke sharply to him: “Let’s go, Rube. Let’s take a walk.”
She did stay busy over the next days. She worked out twice at the gym, several hours each time, something she had let fall away during November. She went shopping for presents for her grown nephews, still living at home. She had her nails done and read through several New Yorkers that had arrived and been put in a pile on the coffee table. She read a collection of poetry written by a Chicago friend. She read it again. She cleaned up.
As she was going through the piled-up bills and notices on her desk, she decided it was time—why not?—to throw away all of her old accumulated bank statements, going four or five years back. All the old income tax filings going back longer than that. It would be nice to have those drawers free for other uses.
She went into the kitchen and got a big black garbage bag from the box under the kitchen sink. Crouched there, she was slowed for a moment by the memory of the feelings that had confused and overwhelmed her the day Sam took her for their walk. That was done, she told herself. Life goes on. She stood up. She went into the living room, to her desk. She pulled out the first drawer and began to lift things out.
She was on the second garbage bag, halfway through the next drawer down, when she found it, a large manila envelope, not, this time, full of receipts for tax deductions. Flat, empty feeling. Not labeled, though she knew right away what it was.
She opened it, slid the photograph out, and there they were, Gus and Leslie—young, happy, beautiful. She examined it closely, all the familiar details. The blur of light and shadow that signaled the flower garden, Gus’s bony bare feet in the grass, the tips of his fingers appearing at Leslie’s waist from behind, his eyes, slightly shadowed by his fair hair. Leslie’s strong profile looking at him, her long straight hair and pale skin.
She hadn’t looked at it in several years, anyway. Would she, ever again? They seemed like strangers, these two people—whoever they were, gone now. Gone, of course, because of death—Gus’s terrible end. But gone, too, because of life, because of the alterations of time, the reshaping of the self over the long years. Leslie’s self, remade.
Billy’s self, too, changed, worn to a new shape.
As Gus’s would have been, if he’d lived. He couldn’t have stayed the sunny boy forever. If he had, how awful for him.
The line from the psalm at Gus’s service came to her: And the place thereof shall know them no more.
No more Gus. No more Billy either. Not as they were then. Taken away—by death, by life, inexorable life. Billy felt tears at the back of her throat, but she didn’t yield to them.
She put the picture back in the envelope and set it in the open black trash bag, on top of her tax return from 2002 and the spilling old canceled checks.
The snow started in the night and was already five or six inches deep when Billy went out in the morning with Reuben and set the trash bags on the curb. The sky was a pearly gray. There were so few cars moving in the street that she let Reuben off the leash, and he bounded free and then back to her again and again in his pleasure, like the puppy he’d once been.
She didn’t try to work. While she ate her breakfast she had the radio on, listening to the school closings, the names of all the nearby towns’ school districts, the private schools, arranged alphabetically. Later she read, she listened to the quartet she had heard the week before, and then Annie Fischer, Maurizio Pollini. She sat by the window and watched the world transform itself while the music sang to her.
The trashmen seemed to be delayed. The bags had disappeared entirely. Had become little hillocks of white, the blanketing snow like a metaphor for forgetting, she thought.
But I didn’t forget, Gus. I did the only thing I knew how to do with it. I wrote it, I built it. I tried to make it come out the right way, for you. I used it. For you, this time.
Around five, the truck swung by, its clashing noises muffled by the deep powder, by the thickened air. She watched the men pull the bags out of the snowbank and toss them into the wide maw of the yellow truck. When they’d gone, when she couldn’t hear the truck anymore, she felt a kind of letting down, a release of some sort. She cried for a little while.
When she was done, she went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She splashed her face with water. Then she dried it off.
She found her boots in the bedroom closet. She put on her bat coat, her hat, her mittens, and went out alone into the twilit, reborn world, Reuben by her side.
SAM HAS SET THE EARRING in a dish on the hall stand where he also keeps his keys. Every time he goes in or out, he sees it there, winking at him, seeming to ask him something. Twice it’s gotten caught in the keys as he picks them up and he’s had to thread it out of them before he leaves.
What he thinks he’s going to do, what he knows he should do, is to mail it back to Billy, but he doesn’t have an address for her. He can’t remember the street number of the house on Union Park where he picked her up the day they went for their walk. He’s not sure he ever knew it. She might have said the eighth house in from the corner, or whatever it was. The fifth house in.
He could call Leslie to get the number, but for various unexamined reasons, he doesn’t want to. He actually did call the theater, but whoever answered there said, quite rightly, that they couldn’t release that kind of information.
So there it sits. Three or four times he’s picked it up and held it, as if doing this will make it clear to him what the next step is. A magic stone, he had thought the last time he did this, and he put it back, smiling sadly at himself. Idiot.
And now he’s standing over it, leafing through the mail, mostly junk. With the advent of e-mail, no one writes letters anymore. He has gotten a few Christmas cards this year, including one from Leslie and Pierce, but even that seems to be fading as a custom.
But here is a thick, square envelope, announcing the possibility of something personal. There’s no return address on the front, but when he flips it over, he sees Charley’s San Francisco address in the triangle of the folded-over flap. He opens it.
It’s a card—a spare, simple tree, like a child’s cutout, with brightly colored ornaments strung in loops across it. Charley and Emma have both signed it, in their very different handwritings—Charley’s a scrawl, Emma’s something worthy of the Palmer method. Folded inside the card is a typed letter. It will be the yearly summing up of their activities, written by Emma. Sam is unfolding it as he walks into the living room and sits down. There’s a pure, chaste light in here, a result of the snowstorm outside, the whited air. He holds the letter and reads about Charley’s small business installing solar panels and rooftop wind turbines on private homes. Emma is working part-time, running the “office” for him. The children—Sam’s grandchildren, photo enclosed—are both doing well, and their activities are described.
It makes Sam almost unbearably sad. Charley is the son who’s most lost to him, though he was never the cause of worry and desperation the way Jack was. But Charley turned away from Sam early on, clearly seeing him as unreliable, not adequate alone as a parent, and not doing a good-enough job of pretending to be Susan as well as himself. And then he and Emma had married when they were both so young, they’d moved
so far away. Charley’s never in touch. If it weren’t for Emma’s occasional letters and Sam’s brief yearly visits to them, he would know nothing about his son or his family.
He remembers the day Charley told him he was going to get married. He’d come up on the train from college in Pennsylvania to make the announcement in person. They were sitting in this room. Sam was worried about it. He was pointing out Charley’s youth, and Emma’s. As he spoke he could watch Charley’s face somehow shut down, his mouth form itself into a small, grim smile. “Well, you don’t have to come, then,” he said.
Sam backtracked quickly and said no, no, of course he wanted to be there, of course he would come, he wouldn’t dream of staying away.
Too late.
The day after this—after Charley’s announcement, after Sam’s misstep—Sam took him to the Back Bay train station. He sat in the car and watched him walk away. He didn’t turn back, he didn’t wave, and Sam had the sense, as Charley disappeared in his puffy nylon parka, that he’d screwed things up with his oldest son, screwed them up beyond salvation.
It was that day he had sat in the Starbucks on the corner near the station and suddenly felt he had to do something about his life, something he translated as the need for Leslie. Surely it was the depth of his despair at having failed Charley again, of having failed in everything else, as he felt it then—as a husband, as a father—that made him reach for the solution, the answer, in such an impossible place, he thinks now.
He remembers the astonishing rain as he drove up to Vermont, several times so heavy on the windshield that he could see only ten feet in front of him. One downpour was so blinding, an opaque silver cascade down the glass in spite of the frantic wipers, that he pulled off the road entirely to wait it out, setting his emergency lights to blink. As he got farther north, it grew lighter, but it was mixed with snow. Falling slush, really. It was sticking on the grass divider like a lacy cloth.
He had the radio on. He had wanted something—music, some afternoon interview on NPR, something to fill his mind uselessly so he wouldn’t have to think. He turned it off when the stations fizzed and buzzed and went staticky, but once he was past Hanover on 91, he tried it again—he thought he remembered the number of the public radio station for this area.
He was fiddling with the knob, looking down at the digital read of the numbers, so he missed the beginning of the accident—the deer leaping into the road, the car two cars ahead that slammed on its brakes and started to skid. What he saw, looking up, was the car directly in front of him turning sharply right to avoid the skidding car, and a fleeting glimpse of the deer, now on the other side of the highway, the white flag of its tail rising and falling as it ran, as it disappeared into the black woods. He braked just as the car in front of his lost control. It shot off the road, over the grass verge, and into the trees, turning slowly all the while, so it ended up facing backward, its headlights shining eerily into the woods.
Sam pulled off the road and stopped. The first car, the one that had started everything—though actually, of course, it was the deer that had started everything—that car was gone, its taillights fading to glowing dots in the dark distance.
He got out of his car and ran down the slight incline. It was an old car, big—a boat, really. The passenger side was undamaged, but the hood had buckled in. The engine was shrieking steadily, a sick noise. There was one person inside, a woman, hunched over the wheel.
Sam opened the door on the passenger side and bent in. She lifted her head slowly and turned to him, her face stupid in terror. She was young, maybe in her twenties. A girl. There was a purplish lump already rising on her forehead, blood seeping from it.
“You’re all right,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said after a moment. Her breath was coming unevenly. “I don’t know.”
Sam could barely hear her over the engine’s wail. He reached in and turned off the key in the ignition. Everything was silent, suddenly. And dark.
“Can you get out?” he asked her. “Can you open your door?”
She sat up slowly. She tried the door. She couldn’t move it. He saw that it was wedged against a tree trunk.
Sam got into the car, out of the snowy rain, and sat next to her. Blood was running now from her swollen forehead, and he found a handkerchief in his pocket to blot it. Gradually she seemed to come to herself, to be less terrified. He asked her what hurt. Her head, she said, and her leg. He leaned over and saw that the side door had been pushed in, that her leg was stuck, somehow wedged against it.
“I feel a little dizzy,” she said.
He thought that he shouldn’t even try to get her to move, that she should stay where she was until someone could look at her. He told her so. He went back up to his car and called the Hanover police on his car phone. He described approximately where he was and gave them the license number of his car, which they would be able to spot by its blinking lights. He said he thought they were going to need an ambulance. He went back down the hill and sat in the car again.
She had relaxed; she was almost lighthearted now. She had dry-looking, curly hair and a round face, nearly all in the same plane—flat. When she smiled, though, she was almost pretty. She was talking about the strangeness of the accident, the feeling that it had happened in slow motion. “I was almost more interested than scared,” she said. “As soon as I felt it was out of my control, I was just … curious, I guess you’d say, about what would happen next. Do you know what I mean?”
Yes, he said. He did.
He kept wiping at the blood. The swelling itself appeared to be slowing it.
“I wonder, could you die thinking that?” she said. “‘Oh, what will I hit now, and now?’ I mean, just being interested?” She giggled suddenly.
He saw that she was younger than he’d thought. Maybe in her late teens. He thought he should keep her talking. “Where were you headed?” he asked. “When you were so rudely interrupted?”
“Oh, I was visiting my aunt. My great-aunt, actually. She’s in a nursing home.”
He dabbed again, trying not to hurt her, and said, almost absent-mindedly, “Well, no good deed goes unpunished.”
Apparently she hadn’t heard this before. She smiled in childish delight. After a minute, she said, “My aunt is pretty crazy, actually. She has Alzheimer’s disease.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s not so bad. She thinks she’s doing a lot of neat stuff. She said she was glad I arrived when I did because she’d just gotten back from her trip down the Nile.” She laughed, and he did, too, in response to her amusement, but also to the prettiness of her laugh.
“I’ve always wanted to go to the Nile,” Sam said after a moment. “Maybe that’s the way I’ll finally get there.”
“Oh, you’re not old,” she said.
“Not yet,” he agreed. It was getting colder. He might want to get his coat out of his car pretty soon.
Her face had become earnest. “Do you believe in signs?” she asked him.
“Portents, you mean?”
She looked as if she didn’t understand the word.
“What kind of signs?”
“No, what month you’re born. Those signs.”
“Oh. No. No, I don’t.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed.
“You do?” he asked after a moment.
“Yeah. Sorta.” She leaned back. She seemed suddenly exhausted. She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them fiercely wide and licked her lips, as though willing herself to alertness. “I mean, my horoscope today said I should stay close to home.”
“There you have it,” Sam said. “All the proof you need.”
She looked at him. After a few seconds, she said, “I know you’re kidding me. You don’t think … that’s real.” She seemed embarrassed and a little sad, and Sam felt bad. She was shuddering a bit from time to time, too. He got out of the car again and went up the hill for his coat. When he came back to the car, he put it aroun
d her shoulders. He buttoned it under her chin. She was protesting, but she let him do it.
“There,” he said when he was done arranging it. “Better?”
“Yes,” she said. After a minute: “You’re really nice. To do that, and to stay here with me.”
“Anyone would,” he said.
“No, that’s not true,” she said. After a moment, she said, “Where were you going? Are you going to be late for something?”
“Oh.” Sam smiled ruefully. “I was going to meet my own true love.”
“Honestly?” She sounded impressed.
“In a manner of speaking. She might not agree.” And then, because they needed to pass the time, because the temperature in the car was dropping steadily, the engine ticking as it did, he told her about Leslie, a shortened, edited version of the story—he left Charley out, he left out his own feelings of emptiness and failure. When he was done, he said, “So, do you think she’ll come away with me?” He smiled at her. “Would you?”
“Well, it’s very romantic,” she said hesitantly.
“Thank you.” When she didn’t look at him, he said, “I think, thank you.”
“Well, she is married. To someone else.”
“To the wrong man, obviously.” Sam was joking—half joking—but he was aware, suddenly, of how he might sound to her. Like someone dangerous. Like a stalker.
They sat silently for a moment. The wet snow hissed gently outside as it landed on the trees. She said, “But I don’t think you …” She was looking at him, worry in her plain face. “Maybe she really, really loves him, did you ever think of that?”
“I have thought of it. Often. But I think I still have to do this.”
“Well, I hope it … I hope it’s all okay.”
There was something so genuinely concerned in this, so sweetly generous, that he said, “Oh, it will be okay. No matter what. Just as you will be okay, right?” He dabbed again at the blood still pumping, but slowly now, from her head.
“Yeah, I’m gonna be fine,” she said.
