Suddenly I wanted to cover her; I reached down and tugged at the sheet. She didn’t move. I smelled the warm-laundry scent of her sleep and saw up close the areola not perfectly round, the tiny bumps on the raised pale pink luminous skin, as though she were chilled. And the pinpoint indentation in the center of the nipple, through which her milk had flowed. And I remembered how she’d carried Josh around the garden with her day after day, feeding him as she went. Talking to him. Telling him the names of things.
I finished covering her and turned away.
Knowing this: It was all still his. Belonged to him. Everything he’d touched, needed, every place he’d been.
The door to Emma’s room stood open; she wouldn’t sleep with it closed. Her room was on the west side of the house and the light within was gray. She’d kicked the covers off during the night: tanned, thin legs; navy T-shirt; blond head; thumb in mouth; long neck of Twigs, the stuffed giraffe, held fiercely in the crook of one arm, as if she were trying to love him to death. I sat down on the edge of the trundle bed and put my hand on her hip.
“Emma. Time to get up.”
“No.” A sleepy whine, she curled up double, folding Twigs’s neck in two.
“It’s Friday—camp today. Remember?” I shook her gently until, finally, her eyes opened and blinked at me. “Come on. Get some clothes on and I’ll make breakfast.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“We’re letting Mom sleep in today.”
“Why?”
“Come on now, hurry up.”
I went out of the room, found Sallie getting up from her dog bed at the end of the hallway. She yawned, showing every tooth, and then stretched, forepaws straight out, bending low as a praying Muslim.
“Mecca’s that way,” I said, pointing to the east.
Raising herself, Sallie looked at me.
“Look, I don’t care,” I said. “Do what you want.”
She followed me down the stairs.
Standing in the afterworld light of the refrigerator, staring into it, I saw half a package of English muffins, one egg, some skim milk, a jar of Dijon mustard. No cereal, no fruit. Nothing of any interest to a child. The freezer contained three sticks of butter, a bag of French-roast coffee beans, and a stack of empty blue ice trays.
Upstairs, the toilet flushed. Emma getting ready, doing what I’d asked. While I stood looking at the emptiness, trying to decide. Breakfast for my child. What would it be? Either choose or forget the whole thing. But I could not choose.
A noise freed me: Sallie scratching at the inside of the back door. I’d completely forgotten about her. I let her out and she raced over to her favorite tree, a big sugar maple, where she squatted and peed like the lady she was, looking at the heavens.
I stood in the doorway. Sunlight was visible, though no sun. The morning air held just the remnants of the night, the dew already leaving the ground, becoming sky again. Good, country air. Mourning doves stepped gingerly across the grass, their heads bobbing in the manner of wise men, their throaty, ruffling calls speaking of safety and peace, proclaiming this land we’d come to, the life we’d chosen—away from danger, from noise, the reaches of artifice, the probing hands of strangers. Our children had never known cities.
Sallie raced around the tree and over the grass. The doves scattered into the air.
There was my own growing up. The only child of older parents, intellectuals both, who lived in fear. My father who watched in a kind of disbelief as year by year our neighborhood near the University of Chicago, where he taught linguistics, turned into a dangerous, unfamiliar place. Yet he was a stubborn man and would hear no talk of moving. As if the city—and by extension the world—had a responsibility to do right by him and he would hold his ground until that responsibility was met.
And then one night, as he walked home from the campus, he was mugged and badly beaten. I was ten years old. And I saw how after the incident he grew too afraid to walk home from work; too afraid, eventually, to take the bus. I saw how, though he still refused to talk of moving, every evening without fail my mother drove to his office and brought him home. And then at dinner he would rage to us about the violence of the world. It was for him a form of personal betrayal, and his feelings of helplessness were such that he could only intellectualize them.
And so as he aged, my father became a living paradox. He joined the movement of nonviolence and took to quoting, with Old Testament fury blazing in his eyes, Gandhi and King. He declared his hatred of guns and the people who used them. When I turned twelve, he told me that he would punish me if he ever heard that I’d been fighting at school, whatever the cause. Violence was weakness, he said, and neither he nor his son would ever be weak.
I left as soon as I was able. Found a life far from home. Married a woman with fears of her own but with strength too. And here we raised our children and taught them not to be afraid.
Sallie was sprinting across the front lawn. Happy dog after a pee. She was by the red garage, circling Grace’s station wagon parked in the driveway. She disappeared behind it.
“Here, Sallie!” I called. I didn’t want her wandering out to the road.
She reappeared a moment later, carrying a newspaper in her mouth.
“Sallie,” I said. “Come here.”
She let me take the paper from her. The Lakeville Journal that was thrown, freshly printed, onto our driveway every Thursday evening. This time we hadn’t seen it. Grace had been in her study all evening and I’d been in mine, and Emma had been watching a video of Beauty and the Beast. I’d read for twelve hours yesterday, because that was what I could do. Never thinking that the paper had come.
It was damp now, from the dew. I didn’t look at it. I took it inside, leaving Sallie to run around as she pleased. Emma was not in the kitchen, which was a relief. I dropped the paper on the table, took the coffee from the freezer and ground it and put it in a filter in the coffeemaker and turned on the machine. My heart was hammering inside my chest. When the coffee was done, I poured myself a cup and sat down at the table.
I found him first on page A2, under “Obituaries”:
JOSHUA B. LEARNER
WYNDHAM FALLS—Joshua B. Learner, 10, died July 24, 1994, from injuries sustained when he was struck by a passing automobile on Reservation Road in North Canaan. He was the son of Ethan and Grace Learner.
Joshua Learner was born April 7, 1984, in Wyndham Falls, CT.
He was to enter the sixth grade in September at Sherman R. Lewis Public School on Route 44 in Wyndham Falls.
In addition to his parents, he leaves a sister, Emma, in Wyndham Falls; and a maternal grandmother, Leila Spring of North Carolina.
Funeral Services were held July 26 at a private location.
There were fourteen other obituaries on the page. My son was the youngest. The oldest was a woman ninety-six years old, who died in a nursing home of natural causes.
I took a sip of coffee, scalding my tongue. My hand shook, coffee spilling over the rim onto page A2 of the Lakeville Journal, soaking through to the end. The paper already damp anyway. I set the mug down on the table.
So clean, the obituary. A time-honored literary form.
Move on, then. Get it over with.
On the next few pages the familiar section headings, so strange today as to seem like a series of surreal jokes: “Senior Menu”; “Salisbury Calendar”; “Canaan Chronicle”; “Kent Briefs”; “Northwest Corner.” Then, on A6, under “Regional,” I found him again:
BOY’S DEATH MOURNED IN WYNDHAM FALLS
WYNDHAM FALLS—Family and friends said their final goodbyes to Joshua Learner during private services at the Learner home last Tuesday.
The 10-year-old Pine Creek Road resident died at the scene of a hit-and-run accident July 24, as he was standing by the side of Reservation Road in North Canaan.
According to state police, the fifth grader was standing in front of Tod’s Gas and Auto Body shop at about 8:45 p.m., presumably waiting for his parents, who
were inside the gas station.
The identity of the driver remains under investigation.
Joshua Learner recently completed the fifth grade at Sherman R. Lewis Public School in Wyndham Falls, where he was in the school orchestra.
“Josh Learner was a prize student, and the most talented musician to come through this school since I’ve been here,” said Lawrence Briggs, principal of the school since 1988.
Plans are under way by the school orchestra to plant a tree in his memory.
The boy’s father, Ethan Learner, is a professor of English at Smithfield College in Great Barrington, MA. The boy’s mother, Grace Learner, is a local garden designer.
Emma Learner, 8, sister of the deceased, is to enter the fourth grade at Sherman R. Lewis Public School in September.
There was nothing more.
I finished the coffee, staring out the window at the dog running there and the morning rising with relentless disregard for all souls alike. It was not any longer a question of theory or interpretation; of course, it never had been. I had left Josh standing by the side of the road because I lacked the courage to tell him not to. I turned my back on him to save myself the trouble. That was the truth. And it was beyond forgiveness. And the papers with their fastidious regard for fact had missed the truth.
And they had missed the other guilty party. The unknown man under investigation. The killer in his car. Who did not stop.
I got up, went into the pantry. The room was tiled and cool, always cool, smelling of flour and soup cans and dry dog food. A familial smell, the smell of our house. The safe smell of stores in waiting, nourishment in reserve. Pancakes today, French toast tomorrow.
It required not thinking. From here on out. It required a state of suspended disbelief. Otherwise you might go insane. You might want to take the fucking house apart beam by beam, until it was spread all over the lawn, as if exploded, no more and no less than the pieces it came from.
You might want to kill yourself.
Grace
She was still sitting in her studio Friday afternoon when Ethan came in. She’d been there all day, listening to the phone ring, hearing the answering machine pick up, as if her only remaining power lay in this stillness that was like death. She did not move, did not speak. The machine took care of all that, marshaling the disembodied voices of friends and relatives into their respective corners of the room, where they stayed quiet and tame. Still, she listened, because any words were less poisonous than her own. As when Judy Aronson called for the second time: “Grace? Grace, are you there? Call me, honey. Please. I know how hard this must be for you.” And Pam Foster too, to say that she and Dick had just heard from Judy, and how sorry . . .
Then the machine was full. Which was a relief. And she could sit curled on the green-velvet chair as the afternoon shadows lengthened from the world outside to the floor at her feet, and count the messages, each call a tiny red blink of light: So sorry . . . So sorry . . .
Until here, now, was Ethan. Standing before her, his face dark with stubble, wearing the same khaki pants and blue work shirt he’d worn since the funeral. The shirt had a hole in one elbow and the pants a black ink stain on the right front pocket. Though she could not judge him for this, she thought; she looked just as bad. Unkempt. Her jeans too long unwashed, a white T-shirt with a rust stain down the front, her feet bare.
He stood a few feet in front of her, crossed his arms over his chest. And something in the gesture made her feel unkind, as if he were a visitor and she were being rude to him. It was true: she had designed the room to be like this. It was hers and not for other people. It wasn’t a sitting room. There was nowhere to sit but at the worktable or on the green chair.
“Where’s Emma?” he asked.
“What?”
“Emma.”
“Emma?” For a moment her heart stopped beating. Emma. She’d completely forgotten. Emma was at music camp. Three days a week, working on her piano technique with Mrs. Wheldon. Had stayed home this past Monday and Wednesday, but then after the funeral the parents had decided that it was important, probably it was important, for Emma to keep up with her life, to keep busy in spite of everything. So this morning Ethan had resumed the old schedule and driven Emma to school, where the camp was. It was her job to pick Emma up at the end of the day. It had always been her job, but today she’d forgotten about Emma and now, realizing it, she felt frightened and ashamed. She felt angry. She wanted to hit something.
“She’s at camp where she’s supposed to be.”
“And you’re planning to pick her up?”
“Of course I am.”
“What time?”
She didn’t like his tone. It was a test of some kind and she knew already she would fail. “When do you think, Ethan? When it’s over. Four-thirty.”
“Grace, it’s five-fifteen.”
Now she was not curled up on the chair any longer but standing on her feet. Still, though, she was determined to sound firm, not to show him what a lost cause she was. “Is it? Well, then I guess I really blew it, didn’t I? I guess I’m awful.”
“That’s not my point.”
“No? So what is it, then? Your point.”
Ethan sighed angrily and rubbed both his hands hard over his face. “Grace, just listen to me. It’s all right. But one of us needs to go now and pick her up. That’s all. Right now.”
“I’ll go. I’m going right now.”
She was not going to cry. She picked up her shoes from the floor and walked right by him. They did not touch.
“Grace.”
She turned around.
“What have you been doing all day?”
“Sitting here. Listening to the machine. It’s full. It won’t take any more messages. And you know what? I’ve decided I’m not going to listen to it any more.”
Then she turned and walked out and left him standing in the room alone.
On Route 44 at the east end of Wyndham Falls stood the modern red-brick building with gray stone trim and raised gray stone crosses on its facade that was the Sherman R. Lewis Elementary School. The lobby was empty, cool; classes were long out for the summer. At first Grace could hear nothing but her own footsteps echoing on the tiled floor. The sound was haunting to her, full of Josh, and she was relieved, after she stopped walking and stood quietly in the square, empty space, to hear rising up from the basement the first blurred edges of a woman’s voice, and then the high-octave tinkling of a piano.
She walked to the back of the lobby. The stairs leading down to the music rooms were there and the sounds were stronger. She heard piano notes. Then the notes ceased and Emma said, “Like that?” and Mrs. Wheldon answered, “Still too strong, Emma. Remember, pianissimo ,” and right afterwards the same notes could be heard again, climbing the stairs, only softer than before, and Grace leaned her back against the wall and stared across the lobby to the front entrance.
The gray stone crosses on the facade were visible from inside the building too, she saw now. She counted six of them. They were set into the red brick, they must have been three feet deep. All but the central overhead light was off in the lobby, and the walls were in shadow, with the crosses shining through as in a church, and as she stared up at the walls she felt something stir inside her chest and then fall away. She thought how these crosses had always bothered Ethan. He had even gone so far once as to say that he was glad his Jewish father hadn’t lived to see his grandchildren going to a school with crosses built into its walls. He’d made no mention of his WASP mother’s feelings on the matter, or about the fact that she was dead, too. Not that it mattered in the end. God had never meant very much to Ethan except as the protagonist of a long, imperfect, beautifully written work of literature called the Bible. It was not God’s laws or proverbial wisdom that attracted him so much as the novelistic questions of individual character and motivation. Faith for Ethan could be distilled down to words, and words he could revere all right, but only through the ruthless lens of criticism.
She stood remembering how at the beginning of their relationship they had debated endlessly over the nature of faith. He kept trying to pin her down, make her say definitively what she believed in, where God lived for her, as if it were a house with a street number and mailbox. He couldn’t accept her answer that she didn’t know, that certainly she believed in Him and there had been moments in her life when she’d thought she’d known precisely where she lived in relation to Him (eight years old and finding in the attic the box of Mother’s love letters to Daddy during the war in Korea), but that those moments had passed, and what remained was a constant wondering why and where and when it would finally be revealed to her, and that this, probably, was the imperfect faith she had come to live on.
They had talked and debated and argued, but they hadn’t necessarily accepted or understood. And then, around the end of their first year together, as quickly and completely as it had risen the subject had dropped from their shared lives; they had moved on to other things.
Downstairs, there were still voices, but the music had stopped. Now the voices were growing louder. She pushed herself off the wall she’d been leaning against, and gathered herself, and started down the stairs.
“There’s a room here where we can talk,” Mrs. Wheldon said.
Grace followed her into one of the empty white music rooms. It was simple and small. There was a black upright piano and a lacquered black piano bench and beside it a folding metal chair. As in all basements, she thought, the light felt deathly.
“It’s private here,” Mrs. Wheldon said.
She was probably forty but looked younger. She wore a knee-length summer skirt and a white blouse that was oddly prim for someone so pretty and young-looking. Half-glasses hung by a chain from around her neck. The blouse was closed at the neck by a black ribbon tie, tied in a bow, and her sand-colored hair was pinned to her head in a kind of bun. It was an odd effect, Grace thought—noticing, at the same time, that where Ruth Wheldon’s calves came out of the skirt they were shapely and young-looking and so were her ankles.
Reservation Road Page 9
