The Returning

by Ann Tatlock

  “Good for you, son.” John nodded. “So you like working at the restaurant? You like bussing tables?”

  “Yeah, Dad. It’s fun. You’ll like it too. It’s going to be great, Dad, having you there.”

  John felt humiliation wiggle through him. He’d wanted to have a job waiting for him when he came home, and he’d asked Owen to help him find work. Owen told him he wasn’t likely to find much in a town the size of Conesus, but he could have a position at the restaurant if he wanted. John agreed, hoping for something like assistant manager, but Owen said the only spot he could slip him into right now was cleaning tables.

  “It’s only temporary, you know, Billy,” John said. “Maybe only a few weeks. Just until I can find something—” He almost said “better” but stopped himself. “Just until I can find something more in my line of work.”

  “And what would that be, Dad?” Rebekah asked, her eyes steely.

  She was trying to goad him, John knew, though her question was valid. What line of work was he in? He’d been in life insurance, mortgages, real estate. He’d sold municipal bonds, cruise packages, vacuum cleaners. In Virginia Beach he’d been working as an ad rep for the small local magazine his brother owned. Jared had convinced him the position might lead to something better, which was why he’d pulled up roots in the first place and moved the family from Rochester, New York, to Virginia Beach, Virginia. But then there’d been the accident and the arrest and . . .

  The piece of speared meat at the end of his fork stopped midway between the plate and his mouth. His stomach felt sour. His head spun to think of how his life had turned in all the wrong directions. What if he had never let Jared talk him into moving to Virginia? What if he had never driven that particular stretch of road on that particular night? And for that matter, to get right to the source of the mess, what if years ago he had been able to finish college instead of having to quit to get married?

  “You know, Dad,” Billy said, smiling brightly, “you might like the restaurant so much, you won’t want to leave. You can stay there with me.”

  John nodded slowly. “Sure, son,” he said. “Maybe.”

  He moved his gaze to the lake, saw the water shiver as the wind slid over its back. It was a beautiful sight, especially the way the sunlight danced in a chorus line on a watery stage. He certainly hadn’t seen anything like that in a while. He was home and he was free and he wasn’t going back—not to the prison of concrete and steel and not to the inner prison of soul-wrenching despair.

  He turned to his wife. “So Owen’s still making good with the restaurant business, huh?”

  She answered him, but he wasn’t really listening to what she said. And though they strove toward something like conversation until the meal was done, John was all the while tamping down memories of clanging bars and prison guards and the dull-eyed face of a lost young man peering into the window of his car.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  John thought often about the man he’d killed. He wondered who the guy was, wondered even what his name was. No one knew. He’d had no identification on him, and afterward, as he lay in the morgue with a “John Doe” tag on his right big toe, no one claimed him. He’d been buried in a common grave without a soul to grieve for him. Except for John.

  After all this time John had never quite stopped grieving. He was saddened mostly by the fact that the man was young. The medical examiner thought he was somewhere around twenty-five, maybe thirty. He was an unkempt, bearded guy with a stench great enough to reach even John’s rum-sodden brain and linger there so that John thought he could smell the unwashed flesh now. Even as he sat on the porch overlooking a star-pocked lake on his first night of freedom.

  “You coming to bed?” Andrea asked. “It’s nearly midnight, you know.” She stood inside the screen door, as though she needed something—some protective barrier—between them.

  John looked up at her from the glider where he sat. “I’m not tired. But you go on.” He thought she looked relieved.

  “All right.”

  “The kids asleep?” he asked.

  She nodded. “For the time being. Phoebe usually wakes up in the night and moves over to Billy’s room.”

  “How come?”

  “She’s scared.”

  John waited for more, but Andrea didn’t go on.

  “But he’s only got that rollaway that’s hardly big enough for him.”

  “She takes her pillow over and sleeps on the floor. So be careful to step around her if you go to the bathroom in the night.”

  Billy didn’t have a room. Not really. Between the front room and the bathroom was a hall wide enough to fit the rollaway bed on one side and a chest of drawers on the other. That was his space.

  “Phoebe wouldn’t rather sleep in the bed with Rebekah?”

  “No. She’s scared,” Andrea repeated. “Of her own sister?”

  “No, of the room.”

  John frowned. “She think it’s haunted or something?”

  “She’s a kid, John. Kids get funny ideas.”

  “I guess so.”

  They were quiet a moment. Andrea seemed to want to say something, so John waited.

  Finally she spoke. “Beka has been having nightmares lately. Sometimes she wakes up screaming, so don’t be alarmed if you hear her.”

  “Why is she having nightmares?”

  “I don’t know. Probably adolescent anxiety or something.”

  “Does she say what they’re about?”

  “She says she doesn’t remember them once she wakes up.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “She’ll outgrow them.”

  “Yeah, I hope so. Maybe that’s why Phoebe moves to Billy’s room. Hard to sleep with someone screaming in your ear.”

  Andrea smiled wanly. “I suppose. Well, good night.”

  “Good night.”

  She turned and climbed the stairs. John watched her disappear. He was afraid of the bedroom on the second floor, but not because of ghosts.

  He turned back to the lake and to the memories that had been clawing at his mind since dinner. The man had been a drifter; he may have been on the road for years, looking for something. He’d never find it now. John had put an end to all that.

  He had been at Jared’s house that night, the two of them drinking together after work, as they did almost every Friday night. Neither of them drank during the week, but those first drinks together on the crest of the weekend were the kickoff for two days of boozing. They told themselves and they told each other that they weren’t alcoholics. No, they didn’t have to have it. But they wanted it. The weekends were what they lived for. It didn’t matter that they both had wives, families, responsibilities. They spent five days a week being responsible. They deserved two days off.

  They had sat on the porch of Jared’s beach house, listening to the waves pound the shore till sometime after midnight. When John stood, unsteadily, and said he needed to get home, Jared had warned, “Listen, bro, be careful driving. The last thing you need is another DUI.”

  “I’m fine,” John had said, and then he eased his way through the house and out to his car in the drive.

  He might have made it home all right, but John was a happy drunk, and when he was tanked he was inclined to do random acts of kindness. On that long and little-traveled road, he caught a figure in the high beams of his headlights, moving along the side of the asphalt, weighed down by a backpack that looked heavier than the man himself.

  John passed the guy, then pulled over to the side of the road and rolled down the passenger-side window. When a moment later a scruffy face peered into the car, John said, “Hop in, buddy. Where you going?”

  Brown eyes peered out from beneath a swirling waterfall of dirty hair. The drifter leaned a little closer and said, “Anywhere.”

  “I can take you partway,” John told him cheerfully, and the next thing he knew, the guy was seated beside him in the front seat while the pack rested on the floor behind them.

  John
had wondered briefly at the fact that they trusted each other right off, but he didn’t have much time to think about it because just a few miles farther down the road a summer rain spat fury on the windshield, and the car was all of a sudden turning in ways it shouldn’t be turning, and after that John Sheldon’s life went veering off in the wrong direction. Again.

  Later, John didn’t remember much about the accident. He didn’t remember much about that night other than the tangled hair and the stench and the rain. He wondered whether he had asked the man his name, and if he did, whether the man had replied.

  The accident might have been blamed on the rain and the slippery road were it not for the fact that John’s blood alcohol level was .21 percent. A good thirteen points over the legal limit for driving in the state of Virginia.

  The judge decided John had killed the man. That, and his previous DUI, earned him five years. John didn’t miss the irony of it. While he was simply trying to do someone a favor, he actually ended up snuffing out a life.

  Since then John wondered if the young man might have found himself in the midst of his travels had he been able to keep traveling. Some young men who hit the road ended up finding their way home again. Maybe this guy would have too. Maybe he would have stopped looking and made peace with himself. Maybe he would have cut his hair and shaved his beard and settled down and had kids, if the journey hadn’t been prematurely ended.

  John hadn’t had a drop of liquor since that night. Not even a sip of the underground supply flowing freely through the prison. He’d promised himself he’d never drink again, and then he’d promised God. Keeping that promise was the first thing he was going to do to make sure his life stayed on track now that he was out.

  The moon hovered over the lake, a slim crescent hanging like an unclosed parenthesis in the sky. John couldn’t remember ever having seen the moon from prison. There was plenty he’d have to get reacquainted with, plenty he’d have to get used to all over again. He wanted things to be good this time around. He didn’t want to make the same mistakes he’d made too many times before.

  “God, help me,” he whispered. That was what Pastor Pete, the prison chaplain, had said to pray when you didn’t know what else to pray.

  Andrea was probably asleep by now. John hoped it was safe to go up. He stepped inside and climbed the stairs, careful not to let his shoes land too heavily on the uncarpeted steps. When he reached the garret room at the top, he discovered that Andrea had already been thinking ahead. No wonder the old queen bed was in Rebekah’s room now. Andrea had moved the twin beds up here.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Andrea listened as John moved hesitantly around the room, getting ready for bed. He hadn’t awakened her when he came upstairs; she had turned out her reading light only moments before. Sleep would be elusive tonight. She had known that when she’d climbed the stairs to the garret room, which she would now be sharing with somebody else. Her body was tired, but her mind was whirling, flashing conflicting messages of hope and grief.

  Beside her bed, on the floor, were two piles of books: one, a stack of paperback romance novels, the other, various volumes of poetry. She loved the romance novels because they always had a happy ending. She loved the poems about unfulfilled longing because they were true.

  Downstairs I laugh, I sport and jest with all;

  But in my solitary room above

  I turn my face in silence to the wall;

  My heart is breaking for a little love.

  The poem by Christina Rossetti somehow seemed appropriate reading for tonight. Andrea had underlined those words in shades of blue ink years ago. She didn’t even need to read them now, she knew the lines so well. Had memorized them without trying. Had lived them for years.

  She’d known John Sheldon almost all her life, their families’ cottages being only half a dozen doors apart. When they were children, the three boys—Owen, John, and Jared—palled around together while she watched from a distance. Watched and waited. Later she poured her adolescent longings into her diary as she went on waiting. Eventually she was allowed to hang on to the fringes of their trio, joining them for a few hours while they swam or fished. They took her along to the amusement park, where she trailed behind them. They took her to the movies, where she sometimes sat a few rows ahead, sometimes a few rows behind. Only in hindsight did Andrea realize that Owen had probably been pressured by their parents to include her.

  But at last the day came when John noticed her, as though she had suddenly slipped into a coat of flesh and become visible. She was eighteen and fresh out of high school. He was nineteen and one year into his studies at a community college in Rochester. Though Andrea never considered herself beautiful, she decided she must have finally blossomed enough to attract the person she’d been watching all her life.

  That lovely summer of 1988 was one of shy infatuation. For the first time, Andrea realized that life could be kind and maybe even filled with promise. When John Sheldon showed up at the cottage, he didn’t always come looking for Owen. Sometimes—in fact, most often then—he came looking for her. He took her for walks along the lake or to movies at the theater in town. Sometimes at night they sat on the dock and talked for hours while the stars winked down at them from an open sky. When he told her he loved her, she believed him, and her future seemed certain and bright. Owen kidded her about her beau. Her parents approved.

  And then that fall John invited her to the Harvest Dance at the community college he attended. They went, not knowing that everything was about to go wrong. Before the dance was over they exchanged the party for the backseat of John’s car, and when Andrea arrived home late that night, she was carrying in her belly the seed that would grow into Billy.

  She still believed John loved her once. She held that belief in her heart like a piece of fine china, all wrapped up in layers of tissue paper. Sometimes she took it out and gazed at it longingly, then wrapped it up securely again and tucked it away.

  That was what she was doing when she heard John creeping up the stairs. She quickly put away the memory of his love, as though he might catch her gazing at it. Shutting her eyes, she pretended to be asleep.

  Even without seeing his face, she sensed his momentary confusion at the twin beds. She had done it for him, of course, to make it less awkward. He could come to her, or he could choose not to.

  She wasn’t surprised when he chose not to. That was how it’d been for a long time before the accident. Somewhere along the way she and John had stopped being lovers, had stopped being friends as well. They were just two people rolling along on parallel tracks through the same lonely territory.

  Though his territory had been a little less lonely. At least he’d had way stations of companionship, she thought bitterly. He’d been unfaithful. He thought she didn’t know, but how could she not? A wife could sense those things. What amazed her was that he had never left her, had never gotten off the train for good at one of those stations and left her to go on without him.

  But then, she hadn’t left him either, though she certainly had grounds. She’d entertained the thought at times and had been nudged in that direction by her brother and sister-in-law. Owen and Selene had spent the last few years trying to convince her to find someone else. She deserved someone better, they said. Why would she stay with a man like John?

  She could hear Selene’s voice even now. “Listen, honey, if you’re afraid you won’t find anyone else, don’t be.”

  They were at the beauty salon one day at closing time. Selene was at the front desk scribbling notes in her appointment book while Andrea swept up locks of hair with a wideheaded mop. “It isn’t that, Selene,” she had said.

  Her sister-in-law looked up from her book, one strand of frosted hair falling over her brow. She unwrapped the foil from another piece of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit and popped the gum into her mouth. “Then what is it exactly?” she asked.

  What was it exactly? Andrea’s mind echoed. She was too embarrassed to say, so she resorted to clich
és. “I’m staying with him for the kids.”

  Selene rolled her eyes, snapped her gum. “Yeah, right,” she said. “Like he gets the father of the year award or something.”

  “Well, he is their father, you know. I can’t change that.”

  “So maybe you can give them a stepfather who’s not in prison.”

  The words had stung, but Andrea let the comment slide. She couldn’t afford to argue with Selene or get on her bad side. She had to work with her sister-in-law at the beauty salon until John got home.

  Now John was home, and Andrea had to wonder whether Owen and Selene hadn’t been right after all. She might have at least looked around, allowed herself to test the waters—just to see if there could be someone else for her out there.

  What she couldn’t admit to Selene, though, was that she didn’t want someone else. She wanted John. In spite of all the ways he’d hurt her, she couldn’t seem to fully untangle him from her heart. She wished she could. She’d rejoice if she could. But he was like a tree whose branches had grown into and around a chain-link fence. She’d have to take an ax to the root to cut the stubborn thing out.

  If he left her, she would accept it. But she would not leave him.

  She wondered about this coming-to-Jesus thing that he claimed had changed him.

  “It’s hard to explain, Andrea,” he’d told her, “but I’m different now. I’m a different person.”

  She had told him that was a fine thing. She was glad he’d found religion. She hoped it would make him happy. And he’d looked disappointed, as if she’d said all the wrong things, though she didn’t know what else to say.

  “I know it’s hard to understand . . .” he’d said.

  And that was the end of the conversation there in the visiting room in the prison two years ago. As though there was no use going on because she would never understand.

  Well, if he really was different, he didn’t have to explain, as far as she was concerned. She’d be satisfied simply to see it.