The Vanished Child

by Sarah Smith

  He knew exactly how the wheels would slip on the clay by the gates, how the auto would slew and roll and fall into the narrow cut of the Spruce. He had no sense of being able to stop it. The gate pillar was stone and about four feet across; the auto went into a long skid, down the grade, its headlights full of granite, and hit the gate. It slewed, spun a quarter turn around, and slipped toward the ditch, passenger side crumpling, rearing like a horse about to roll over and crush him underneath it. At the height of the roll there was a moment of intense, quiet balance, without weight or motion, as complete as being at work in the lab. He had time to think of everything. Louis in New York, Maurice O’Brien... An elephant trumpeting in sunlight. He had time to smile at that. He thought of Perdita last night; “I won’t tell. ” No, never, but she would know. He couldn’t let that happen to her; except that he had not much choice now. He threw his weight away from the direction of the roll.

  The car lost balance and crashed down the way it had come, landing upright.

  He closed his eyes as the windshield exploded. Stone sliced through the right side of the car, shearing metal, and the impact knocked the breath out of him. The car jounced and swung back and forth and screamed metallically, settling onto a broken spring.

  He leaned against the steering wheel, gasping. My G-d, my G-d.

  One of the headlamps was half smashed and guttering, throwing a haze of light into the air; the other still worked. He unclipped that one and looked at the auto. It was broken. All four wheels were smashed, the thick hubs splintered. Most of the passenger side was bits of metal on the ground. It would take wrecking equipment to move it. He was still overwhelmed by that calm like death or a prayer, and the absolute terror of knowing what he knew and being still alive.

  Outside the car the gravel rolled under his feet and the path blurred into the water-soaked grass, whipping in the wind. He turned and the rain beat into his eyes, stinging like tears. He had cut open the back of his hand, a deep cut runneling blood, and it stung. The rain hit his face like a fistful of needles. But in the middle of the storm there was the quiet, which he had no name for. The wind howled and pounded at him. By the wrecked car and the paint-scored gate was a tree, a pine; he turned away from the car and ducked under its branches for shelter, but when he touched the hard bole of the trunk, pine sap smelling in the dark, he began pounding his fist against it and could not stop.

  I will not remember, I will not even imagine, what happened to Richard Knight to bring him to murder. I will not let myself know what it would be to kill someone, even someone you hated; to be full of that terrible desolation, and to be eight years old—

  But that was what the quiet was, it was the same thing as the pain and the desolation; it was Richard.

  The wind and rain thrashed the branches against him, he was wet through, and he scooped up a handful of the pine needles and stones under the tree, hurling them into the wind. Nothing more ridiculous, nothing more futile; he should have laughed at himself but he threw grass and stones at the darkness, where the wind blew them back again in his face, but he picked them up again and threw them at the wind as if he were still Richard Knight and William Knight this storm.

  He remembered nothing, nothing at all; but he screamed and swore at the storm, and damned William Knight, and finally cried for Richard, until he was exhausted.

  He leaned against the pine bole. Can’t I stop now? He wanted to be out of the storm, out of everything he was feeling, wanted to be warm and dry and someone else. He wanted to make rational, considered judgments, to drink hot tea with rum, to be grown up, and to agree with someone that the poor child was not in the least to blame.

  The only thing the poor child had not known was how he would feel for the rest of his life.

  Through the screen of trees he saw the shape of the auto, the smashup six years ago. There is a body right there, he thought, on the ground beside the car. He saw it in the rainy darkness, knowing this was the last time he would really see it; from now on it would be memories. This time the body was recognizable as William, an old man with long white hair, flung facedown. I’ve killed him, Reisden thought confusedly. He was glad, so glad he was shaking and frightened, but horrified, and wrenched by loneliness, as if he were lost in an unimaginably far place with no landmarks and no way to get back, and he was afraid to kneel down and turn the body over for fear he would see someone he loved. He stood in the rain with the water streaming down his face, and it only slowly came to him that he was crying still, and that the person he was crying for was his grandfather; it was ludicrous, appalling, but he cried.

  Twenty feet back was the near gate of the bridge. He held up the lantern and looked through the bridge rail and the grating at the river he had not driven into, and he let the rest of the numbness go, feeling Richard in anger and terror, in vengefulness and pain and sorrow, and in the quiet too.

  Underneath him the water raged, grey and twisting, and the rain cried down in sheets through the open cage of the bridge. The storm soaked him, whipped him with the force of the wind. He held the lantern over the water, barely three feet below the bridge, and the river was terrible, full of grimaces and twists like mad faces. He set the lantern on the decking and with cold, stiff fingers took the gun out of one wet jacket pocket, took the bullets out of the other, and loaded the gun.

  The lantern at his feet fell over and went out, and he stared into the blind dark. Did God see you, Sir, when you did this? Did you think of God? Every victim has one hold on his tormentor; Richard’s had been that he could get sick. Richard could die.

  No, William. Now we make peace.

  He stretched out his hand with the loaded gun in it, held the gun over what he hoped was the river, and let it go. It fell down, away from him, into the dark and the water’s roar, and he threw the rest of the bullets after it.