Beneath the Weight of Sadness

by Gerald L. Dodge

  Amy

  Four weeks after Truman’s death

  I didn’t realize he was gone until the day after he left. I’d gone down the stairs in the middle of the previous night, and I’d expected him to be somewhere on his sleepless wanderings through this quiet and mostly dark fortress we had once called our home. He wasn’t there and I felt relief, the way we both used to feel when weekend guests would trudge down the stairs with their suitcases, and we’d walk them to their cars and, as they went around the circle of the drive, wave to them, both of us letting out a deep sigh of relief that it was only the three of us now and we could resume. Resume. And after I’d poured a glass of chilled chardonnay I crept back upstairs and passed Truman’s room—there was no light showing beneath the door—and to the room where Ethan had taken up residence. I opened the door slowly so as not to awaken him, and there was what I thought was a slight form under the covers, and I quietly closed the door again and went back down and sat in the dark.

  It had become such a ritual, the two of us wandering alone in the house at night. I felt strange without Ethan making his way somewhere in the house with his glass of whiskey and his silent grief. He’d been my companion, in the same way we’d once shared companionship by talking and hiking and making love and waiting for Truman to arrive from his own dwelling inside me. The cord connecting Truman and me, like when I used to string two soup cans pulled tightly so I could talk to my friends when I was a child, that kind of connection.

  Every morning Ethan would put his head on my bare stomach and listen to our Truman, making a thrum of sound that even then was like Truman and no other person. But Ethan couldn’t hear what I heard, because I knew it was Truman even when he was the first jejune brain and lungs, and then coming out of me as if all that was needed was that squawking and thinking Truman. A beautiful boy with white-blond hair and black eyes and the cord was never ever cut.

  Now, though, it was just the nightly sojourn we each had, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, each of us in our own heads, sharing only fate rather than love or bonds or anything as it once was. And as soon as I peeked into the room with the form there on the bed under the covers, I assumed he was sleeping. I felt a tug of anger toward him. He could sleep! How could he finally sleep? And I returned downstairs, back to my wine, some place in one of the rooms where I could feel safe from drafts and leaking air and I could listen for even the slightest stirrings of my Truman. Because that was the conundrum as I saw it: I had to listen and wait for even a minor stirring, a slight tremor of Truman’s presence, but I couldn’t conflate that with the malevolent stirring of air working its way into our house for the sole purpose of carrying me away from my Truman.

  However, the next day I realized Ethan had not been here the night before and had not come home the entire day. I’d made food for us, mistakenly thinking he would arrive. I could make certain he’d not disappeared as I had thought would happen to me, floating like some inflated balloon with no possible way of navigating back to Truman. And so when Ethan didn’t show up for dinner, I looked out into the garage where Truman and Carly had once held all their secrets, beautiful and their own, and the car was gone.

  Again, my first reaction was relief, this time because he hadn’t been taken away, but then I remembered the times in the last several weeks he’d been driven home from TRUAM. He was too drunk to drive, as Susan confided in me, worrying over his health and whether he would be stopped by the police. As if I cared whether he was stopped or not. But now I had to consider the possibility that that was exactly what had happened. He had been carried away, because he’d been here the evening before and now he was gone.

  I dialed his cell phone and I got his voicemail and I hit end. What would I have said?

  “Are you floating somewhere, Ethan? Are you taken away just as I always thought would happen to me, so that you will never be here in case your son returns?”

  And I knew almost for certain that he would return, that my Truman would return, because the FBI had been brought into the case. That senator, John Collier, had called Ethan one morning and I had listened in on the conversation. He wanted the FBI in on it. Nelson Parachuk wasn’t doing enough, or not finding who did this to our Truman, but, of course, the obvious reason was that Truman wasn’t dead. They’d been mistaken. Because even with the state police and the local police and the FBI, no one was caught, not even that Rich Beck and his son Tommy who had stolen Carly’s heart, had taken her heart from Truman. They weren’t even responsible because NO ONE was.

  But now it was possible that Ethan would never know. Because it was after two days that he was not in the house, wasn’t here at night, wasn’t up with me in the middle of the night drinking his whiskey, and it was then I became concerned that he would never return. What would I tell Truman when he came back and looked in the study for his father? What would I say to him?

  “Your father did not have the sense to stay away from dangerous places. I saw him several times outside talking to people—I think once I saw him speaking to Frank Rodenbaugh—and the wind was whipping around and I watched from the window, Truman, and I confess I saw your father look back toward me with his imploring look as if I was to rescue him. But you must understand that the wind was blowing to the point that I’m not sure how your father was able to stay standing, that he didn’t blow away just then, but I was not about to go out there to help him. I wasn’t the one who’d gotten myself into that situation, and even though I could see desperation in your father’s eyes, I was not going out there.

  “He was safe that time, though, Truman, because he was loaded down with bourbon. But since the spring weather had set in he was going outside more frequently, and so I couldn’t account for when he went out. I never saw it happen, but you know as well as me, Truman, that your father loved the grounds and he loved to go out there even late at night. You did too, but that was before things became so ethereal, when a person could just walk into a kitchen and say to his parents, ‘I’ll see you later,’ and then just walk out after planting a kiss on the top of my head and not return, as if that wouldn’t make everything tenuous from then on.”

  I began to think what I would do if both Truman and Ethan were gone from me. They’d been my whole life. Yes, I’d gotten my master’s, begun to teach at a local community college, done something other than just read books. And I enjoyed teaching the classes with a circle of people speaking about meta this and meta that. Whoever uses metacognition or meta-reasoning at a dinner or even at a party where people stand around with cocktails? Yes, it became clear to me, through metacognition, that I didn’t know what I thought I knew until I knew what I knew, or, I know what I know because it was always there through meta-memory, and what Ethan always said about that was true, that it was bullshit or mental masturbation.

  “Because you can’t say that in a diner or anywhere else because it doesn’t mean anything. It only gives people some self-satisfying feeling, and the only way it really is important is when you know in a ‘meta-knowledgeable’ way that if you use words like that, you’ll scare the shit out of people and they won’t want to stand next to you or bring you your eggs and bacon and rye toast after all.”

  And Ethan made me laugh the first time he said that because it was so true, but I taught the classes and enjoyed them anyway because I loved it.

  I have all these books for a class I was taking in African-American studies, slave narratives, Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Shirley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose. The teacher was a beautiful, lithe black woman who walked into class with the self-assurance born of a PhD from Princeton, along with a few published books on African-American literature. She was gentle and patient with the mostly white class. I didn’t tell her I was also teaching college. I didn’t see the point in it. Even then, when I began the class in January and read the first texts, even then I felt the greatest pull of guilt and despair thinking about the women and men who’d had their c
hildren sold from them. I tried to discuss it with Ethan and he’d listened patiently, but I could tell he was thinking, That was then and this is now.

  And he finally said, “We can’t do anything about what happened then.”

  And I said, “But that isn’t the point. I’m talking about how those poor people must’ve felt when their own children were taken and sold so that there was a chance they would never see them again, never know the fate of their own children. Just imagine if Truman were taken from us and we had no idea if we’d ever see him again, ever.”

  And three nights ago I’d almost said that to him. I’d almost said, “Now we know how it feels, Ethan, to have our boy taken from us, to have our boy disappear and not have any idea where he’s gone to or if he’ll return.”

  I didn’t, though. I knew it was pointless. I knew he had his own ideas about Truman and his fate.

  And so I wander the house alone. I often wonder where Ethan has gone, but I don’t dwell on it. He knew the consequences of taking Truman’s disappearance lightly. Not that he wasn’t and isn’t devastated by what has happened to our son. He is. I can tell just by the fact that he can’t sleep at night.

  There was a time when Ethan could sleep through anything. He loved to sleep and then he loved to awake to another day. In that way he was like a boy who never really grew to complete adulthood. But I saw a difference in Ethan ever since he’d returned that Sunday morning and said that our Truman was dead. I don’t think he fully grasped what it meant to say such a thing. I don’t think he took the time to really analyze what that word “dead” signified. I could only imagine all those enslaved blacks who must’ve wondered what happened to their children, if they were alive or gone for good, and would there be a chance they would become free so they could track them down and bring them back from some awful place, restore them to their natural place with their parents.

  I wanted to tell Ethan that. I wanted to remind him that we needed to wait patiently and be careful so that we would both be there for him when he returned. When the lights went on in his room and I could once again open the door and see him stretched out on his bed with his hands behind his head, looking out the window or up at the ceiling, thinking Truman thoughts.

  And in this case two negatives don’t make a positive, or at least I don’t think they do. But maybe because Ethan is gone it means Truman will return. Because how could God decide to take both of them so that I wander around in this huge house alone without anyone to see or talk to? But like I said before, He wants us all to accept Him as the sole provider of benediction.

  It’s like that slave, Margaret Garner, who could not trust God and killed her own child rather than have that child enslaved as she had been. She knew, if she returned to Kentucky, the wind or even the slightest draft could kick up and carry away her children, take them away from her so that she’d never see them again. Better they were dead by her own hand than to live with that kind of dread. Better they were dead than have uncertainty. But her children would live in depraved conditions no matter where they were, even with their mother. It was different with Truman.

  He could come back and lay in his bed and cross his legs and that would be that. Not another word would be said about where he’d been or why he’d made his father and mother feel such anguish. I know I speak for Ethan, too, when I say that Truman could come back tomorrow and we’d never even ask him where he’d gone. It didn’t really matter where he’d gone, did it? It wouldn’t matter even if you just left and didn’t want to tell us why you’d gone. We’d accept it and then we’d go on with our lives as if none of this had ever happened, as if all of it was a bad dream. And it was then that I wanted to tell Ethan I thought that’s exactly what it was: a very bad dream. I went out into the garage again and only my car was there. His was still gone. I’d wait to see him tonight, though. I’d wait until all the other people on this side of the world were sleeping and then we’d stumble into each other, Ethan with his whiskey in his hand and me with my wine in mine, and I’d tell him then.

  It would be a wonderful thing to watch his reaction, to watch him throw his head back like the old Ethan and say out loud, That’s just like our Truman to pull something like that. If he isn’t the God-damnedest kid the two of us made. God damn if he isn’t. Then everything would be fine. Just like that.

  Detective Parachuk

  Twelve days after Truman’s death

  Not a thing. Nothing. The mayor calls me nightly as if his pestering can somehow make a difference. The state police are here, the FBI, and yet nothing. I am puzzled by the fact that no one heard a sound the night of the murder. One man, Brent Lawson, said he heard a scream, a girl’s scream, at about the time Truman was killed, but he also said he had woken every night for the past five years to the same scream. His daughter had been killed in an auto accident. Did he look out the window? No. The screams subsided and then he was able to sleep.

  Wendy wants me to resign. I truly do think about it. I hardly know these people anymore. But as soon as I consider it, I think of the Engroffs. I think of the sadness I see in both of them. Their marriage is more than likely ruined. Their lives are more than likely ruined, and if I could find who killed their son, maybe that would give them some solace.

  I felt the charge of learning about this Roger Claus after the Marsh boy told me about him, but his father has powerful people in Washington and, even though we’ve alerted the embassy in Saudi Arabia, we’ve gotten no response, only a promise to look into the matter. They claim they don’t have access to all the Americans who have financial dealings with Saudi businesses. We contacted Columbia University and they said Claus left early because of a family matter, and they’d agreed to send his final exams through the embassy, but the exams haven’t been developed to this point, and so we have to wait on that. We are trying to get a court order to get access to the address that was given to Columbia, but as with Truman Engroff’s cell phone, the process is long and most courts are reluctant to get involved with a foreign government, even when it is only indirectly.

  Plus we’ve discovered Claus has dual citizenship, which makes it even more complicated.

  It seems like, at every turn, the investigation is deflected by wealth and influence or both. I wish Persia were like it was when I was a kid. Things were simpler. We had rules and no one thought they could ignore them just because they had money. Even the folks who came out from the city knew how to behave. It’s like they would come out here in the way people come to a house as guests. When you’re a guest you conduct yourself in such a way that you’re not imposing on your host. In the past, when scions of the Vanderbilts and others like them came here, they knew they were guests, I guess.

  But that has all changed now. Sometimes some of us old-timers feel like we’re the guests now, even in our own town. It’s like everything else nowadays: There’s privilege and then there’s the rest of us.

  Ethan

  Twenty-nine days after Truman’s death

  I knew as soon as Frank Rodenbaugh said, That’s just the thing, Ethan. I know for a fact she never would talk to him again after your Truman…after Truman died. I knew then that Carly knew.

  I’d promised Frank Rodenbaugh I’d call her. He wanted me to call her but instead I drove to the school and I waited in a corner of the parking lot under some very old white pines, the shade, I hoped, camouflaging my black Lexus. I got there just before the last bell would ring and I waited with the air conditioner on because it was a very hot late April day. I began to cry when the students poured out of the building onto the waiting school buses and the upperclassmen started streamed toward their cars, their voices full of hope and a haphazard happiness, not knowing there was the possibility they’d never see another day, it was that easy for bad things to happen even to kids only beginning to start their lives. I watched them with their backpacks full of books and they ran or lumped along out to their cars, laughing and calling to each other like a chorus of boisterous birds flitting around, and I
thought all the time, My Truman will never be with them again. He’s not been here for a long time and he’ll never be with these children walking to his car and coming back home to us.

  I felt a resentment because there were students going out to the cars and driving into freedom who didn’t want Truman to have freedom, wanted him locked in that casket so that he would no longer make them uncomfortable, no longer remind them that not all people were the same. And some were happy to point that out or brave enough to point that out, and I couldn’t have pointed out any of those kids by name but I knew they were among that throng and it made me want to do something violent so they would know they weren’t always right and they weren’t always safe and there were people out there who might very well want to hurt them just as they’d contemplated hurting my Truman.

  Then I saw Carly. She was with three other girls and they were walking to the far end of the parking lot, and I realized I should’ve considered that, because Carly was always late, a thing Truman was constantly griping about. Her car was parked at the far reaches of the parking lot and the farthest away from the school, because she’d be one of the last kids to make it to school. She had on a plaid skirt like girls wear in Catholic schools and a white, short-sleeved blouse and a brown pair of Uggs, seemingly incongruous to the rest of what she was wearing. The two other girls were dressed more casually with shorts and blouses. All three had backpacks and all three were pretty.