“I’m sorry I’m so late,” she murmured. She’d gone and said it twice already, and now she’d said it again. She felt a need.
“Don’t be sorry,” Mrs. Wheldon said. “Emma and I had some extra scales to work on anyway.”
But Grace was sorry just the same. She thought, just before Mrs. Wheldon shut the door, that she could hear Emma’s footsteps on the tiled floor of the lobby; she hoped Emma would wait there, where she’d been told to, and not wander around. And then the door shut and the room was suddenly, absolutely quiet. The door was thick, for soundproofing, and there was carpeting on the floor. Mrs. Wheldon sat down on the corner of the piano bench and motioned Grace to sit down too, on the folding chair, and Grace sat down.
Mrs. Wheldon said, “I was hoping to get to talk to you today.”
Grace nodded but didn’t say anything. She thought: I am here. The folding chair was hard and uncomfortable, the metal seat unpadded and still faintly warm where Mrs. Wheldon had been sitting just minutes before, teaching Emma how to play the piano.
“Your husband left this morning before I had a chance to say anything to him,” Mrs. Wheldon said.
Grace nodded again, thinking that this woman was the first stranger she’d seen since the funeral—though not a stranger, exactly; Mrs. Wheldon had been giving Emma piano lessons for close to a year. And for a few months her son, Sam, had even been a classmate of Josh’s in the first grade—but then Josh was pushed ahead a year. Grace had seen Sam now and again since then, caught bodily in the throng of kids pouring out the doors of the school in the afternoon, after classes let out, and into the arms of anxious waiting parents like herself; a small, sad-looking boy with hair the color of fine yellow sand, like his mother’s. He played the trumpet once in a while at school assemblies, not very well, and his name was Sam Arno, she remembered now, not Sam Wheldon. She felt almost as if she’d been thinking about the boy without knowing it. But that was impossible.
“I wanted to tell you how sorry I am, Mrs. Learner,” Mrs. Wheldon said. “Everybody I know is so sorry. Josh was a wonderful boy. It was an unthinkable tragedy.”
It wasn’t the word “tragedy” that got through, or even her son’s name on the lips of this woman, but the word “unthinkable”: it pushed a button in her brain she didn’t know was there, and the next thing Grace knew she was saying, in something close to a normal tone of voice, “Thank you, Mrs. Wheldon.”
“Please. Call me Ruth.”
“All right.”
“I wanted to talk about Emma.”
“If you want.”
“Something like this is hard enough for grownups, but for kids . . . I’ve been worried about her.”
“Of course.”
“Can I ask if she’s getting any counseling?”
“She isn’t.”
“Do you and your husband have any plans?”
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
Mrs. Wheldon looked as though she were about to say something else, but then didn’t. Silence started edging into the room. It was like smoke and not the relief Grace had thought it would be. Without her being aware of it, Mrs. Wheldon’s left hand was reaching for the closed lid of the piano, a couple of her fingers nervously dancing, but then she noticed it and withdrew it onto her lap. Grace saw that Mrs. Wheldon was afraid. Afraid of what had happened to a ten-year-old boy on a dark road at night, afraid of accidents and death and another woman’s pain, another woman’s guilt. Watching other people fall apart was a lousy business, Grace thought—and she reached over and did what the other woman wanted to do herself but wouldn’t: she opened the lid of the piano, exposing the long, dulled row of keys, ivory and black. She was sick to hell of talking about her life.
“Mrs. Wheldon?”
“Ruth,” said the other woman.
“Ruth, how’s your son? How’s Sam? I haven’t seen him in a long time.”
Mrs. Wheldon let her fingers touch the piano. She played two of the keys, middle C and F-sharp, in quick succession, and the quick probing notes filled the room and then died. Then she was embarrassed, her face coloring up. “Sam’s fine. He’s okay,” she said. “Thanks for asking.” Her accent had changed slightly, it seemed to Grace; let go of something, turned linear and flat.
“Does he still play the trumpet?”
“Oh, yes.” A smile began to appear on Mrs. Wheldon’s face but was pulled back. “He plays all the time. He makes a racket.”
“I remember hearing him play at assembly.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Wheldon said quickly, “Sam’s isn’t the kind of talent Josh’s was with the violin. I was always sorry I didn’t have the skills to teach him.”
“Would you say hello to Sam from me when you see him? He won’t remember me, but I’d like you to anyway.”
“Okay.” Ruth Wheldon was looking at her strangely. But Grace didn’t care. She no longer expected to be known or understood. She had all kinds of memories, too, and they were all around her now in the little room, and it was impossible to speak about them with anyone who was alive.
She stood up. “I’d better be going. Thank you, Ruth.”
“Don’t go.” Ruth Wheldon hurried to her feet.
“Emma’s waiting for me.”
“Sure,” the woman said. “I’m sorry. Stupid of me.”
Grace shook her head and turned to go. She was almost to the door.
“Mrs. Learner?”
“Yes?”
“Wednesday is the last day of camp. We always end with a concert in the gym here, so all the kids who want to can play for their parents and friends. It’s less pressure than you’d think. Really, it’s about family and showing appreciation for how hard the kids’ve practiced. Emma’s worked really hard this month, Mrs. Learner. She’s a good girl and she’s improved a lot and we’re all proud of her, and I have to say I think it’s important for her now, given everything, to get up and play for everybody and for everybody to listen.”
“Does she want to?”
“I asked her today and she said yes.”
She tried to picture Emma playing the piano up on a stage, but she could not. Somehow, her vision of things got stuck in the audience, all the people she knew, who were full of pity and whispers.
“If she wants to play, I wouldn’t stop her,” she said.
“I’m glad,” Ruth Wheldon said. “So I’ll see you all there Wednesday evening?”
“I guess so.”
She said good-bye then, and went out of the room and up the stairs to the lobby. Emma was there, beneath the high wall of stone crosses.
Dwight
It was my policy, for the weekly pickups and drop-offs of my son, to arrive unannounced when possible. On the Sunday mornings when Ruth didn’t have Sam already waiting for me out on the porch—his hair combed and his teeth brushed and, for all I knew, flossed; looking every inch like somebody else’s child—I liked to sneak in the front door without knocking, a practice which drove Ruth up the wall because she knew perfectly well what I was up to, how my real goal was just the gathering of evidence. A sly glimpse, maybe, of the family troika sitting around the breakfast table; of Sam perusing the Sunday comics while ignoring every attempt on the part of his stepdad (whom he thought was just plain dull, if not stupid) to make conversation and “bond”; of Ruth ignoring Norris, too, for not dissimilar reasons (that she thought he was just plain dull, if not stupid); and even of Norris himself, dressed in madras and verbally flailing, on the verge of tossing up the white flag and beating yet another hasty retreat to the green peace of the country-club golf course.
What was also true, though, was that for all my guerrilla tactics to see her life, Ruth didn’t know or care a whole lot about mine in return. So long as my smallish child-support checks showed up on time (they were voluntary, not compulsory, on my part since she’d married Norris), and I didn’t fudge my hours with Sam, her curiosity about my daily existence was minimal. She’d never been to my house in Box Corner, although it was only
ten miles away. She never asked me about my work or how my friends were. Which was okay, in some ways, because my house was not worth seeing and my job not worth talking about and my friends were few. Because much had been diminished since the old days, and, like many whose lives are fueled largely by regret, I’d come to feel that what was diminished was better left to the dark, in private.
Either way, now that our history together had been written and tossed out, Ruth didn’t seem to care two cents what I did outside of my dealings with our son. It was as if she could not forget my past and could not remember my present.
Maybe it was sad, the fact that I meant so little to her. I knew it was lonely. Still, I counted on it making the lying I had to do easier.
I went up the steps to the porch and into the house. Nobody saw me. From upstairs I heard Ruth’s voice in a nagging vein; it sounded as if she was after someone about something. I turned left from the foyer and went through the dining room (I remembered the Sheffield antique shop where we’d bought that wrought-iron chandelier for $138) and into the kitchen, where I found Norris sitting alone at the breakfast table in his green and yellow golf clothes, drinking coffee and reading the Litchfield County Times . He nearly knocked over the mug when he saw me.
“Dwight!”
“Hello, Norris. Don’t get up.”
But Norris was already up, pumping my hand, and wouldn’t sit down. “When’d you get here, Dwight?”
“Just this second.”
“How’d you get inside?”
“Just walked in.”
Norris nodded vigorously but seemed at a loss what to say next. Color had suddenly appeared in his cheeks, and I had the feeling that if he’d had a crowbar in his hands and been a different sort of man, he’d have gone for me.
“Is Sam here, Norris? How about Ruth?”
“Upstairs,” Norris said.
“Maybe I’ll just go up and let them know I’m here.”
“You mean go upstairs?”
“Either that or yell.”
“I don’t think Ruth would go for that at all, Dwight, to be honest,” Norris said—a little nervously, I thought. “Why don’t you have a seat? How about some coffee? We’ve got a fresh pot right here.”
Norris poured me a cup of coffee and refilled his own, and we sat down across from each other. He seemed a little wired all of a sudden, blowing unnecessarily on his coffee and drumming his fingers on the table. And I thought, not for the first time, that my evidence-gathering tactics were a sham. I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know, and all the old news was bad news at that.
Norris cleared his throat. “So, Dwight, how’s tricks?”
A solid thump came from upstairs, something chunky and serious, like a bowling ball, hitting the floor right above our heads. Norris made no sign that he’d heard anything unusual. It was Sam’s room up there, and right afterwards I heard Ruth’s shrill warning cutting through the timbers: “Don’t play with that in here!” And I tried to imagine what it was she could be talking about, what piece of sports equipment or farm machinery Sam was chucking around up there. But it had been a long time since I’d seen the inside of his room, and I was no longer well acquainted with his inventory.
“Not much to tell, Norris,” I said. “You know, same old life.”
“I do know that, Dwight, I certainly do.” Norris did a little more finger drumming on the table, then abruptly stopped. “Say, how’s the car?”
“What?”
“I said, how about the car?”
I was careful to take a sip of coffee then and not to spill. “What about it?”
“Get that headlight fixed?”
“Headlight? As a matter of fact—”
“You know, the cops’re rough on that one. They’ll ticket you for sure—hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty buckaroos—and then to top it off they’ll haul you in and treat you like a bona fide criminal.” For some reason, Norris found this funny and laughed, showing some silver in the molars. “It’s a double whammy.”
“As a matter of fact, Norris,” I said, “my car’s in the shop. It turned out the headlight was just the tip of the iceberg. The transmission’s totally shot. The guy over there said it’s so bad I ought to think about scrapping it.” I paused. “So I’m leasing.”
Norris whistled. “That was one expensive dog you hit, huh?”
I made myself smile. “It’s all right. I got a real good deal on a lease. Zero money down.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess,” Norris said. “But you know, Dwight, hitting a dog is just plain bad luck. Just about the worst luck there is. And a black dog?” Norris shook his head. “Whoo, boy. Glad it wasn’t me.”
“It was an accident.”
“Not according to the police,” Norris said, taking a sip of coffee. “You hit a dog and don’t report it, they’ll fine you for that too, you know. One way or another, they get you.”
I studied him for a moment, to see what he might be getting at. But he was just holding up his cup and looking into it, turning it this way and that, and didn’t seem to have meant anything.
“I reported it the next day,” I lied.
“Well, lawyers know best,” Norris said without conviction. He got to his feet, poured himself another mug of coffee. Then he sat down again.
“I’ve been worried about Sam, Norris. Since the accident. Has he seemed upset to you?”
“Upset?” This didn’t seem to have occurred to Norris; he shook his head again, pursing his lips. “Not especially, no. Not to me he didn’t. No screaming nightmares, if that’s what you mean, Dwight. Of course, there’s that eye. More coffee?”
Before I could answer, I heard light, quick feet on the stairs and then on the old floors in the dining room, and in a moment Sam appeared in the kitchen. The first thing I noticed was his eye. It was still blue and purple in places but starting to turn yellowish all around, which was less shocking maybe, but uglier. And the eye itself was blood red from the broken vessels. It was a jeweled ruby eye and he wore it like a young prince, as if he knew its true value all right but couldn’t have cared less. He smiled a little shyly when he saw me, and I felt my heart lift for the first time in a week.
“Hey, sport.”
Sam looked from me to Norris and back to me. “Hi, Dad.” Now his voice was quiet, quieter than his footsteps running through the house, and he was looking down at his sneakered boy’s feet, which he had stacked, one on top of the other, like a flamingo’s. He was wearing cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Is your mother coming down?”
“I guess so.” Staring at his feet.
I was experienced in this sort of shyness and tried not to let it bother me. If you don’t see your son for four years and then see him only on Sundays for eight hours at a pop, and there’s a new man in the house to boot, then there is a shift in the numbers, the natural math of loss and gain. Compare it to anything you want— the ocean carrying sand away to another part of the beach—but don’t expect what you left behind one week to still be there exactly as you left it the next. At the start of every Sunday my son was shy with me again. Yet each time I tried to have confidence. I told myself that we’d been through worse than this in the past, had closed more distance than this.
“I thought we’d head on over to my place for a little while,” I said. “See what you and I can kick up. Sound okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. All right.” I stood up and so did Norris—immediately, as if he was attached to me by a string. “Thanks for the coffee, Norris. We’ll be back at the usual time.”
“Um, actually, Dwight, I think Ruth wanted to have a word with you.”
“With me?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Well, that’s fine, Norris, as long as she shows up by the time Sam and I get out to the car. That sounds fair, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I don’t know, Dwight. . . .”
I put my hand on Sam’s shoulder and led the
way out of the kitchen. Norris followed. We were just stepping out onto the porch when I heard Ruth coming down the stairs behind us. A moment later she came out onto the porch. Today she wore a little denim vest and plaid short-legged cotton pants that looked as if they’d been in the deep freeze since the Eisenhower administration, and white bobby-type socks and a pair of Keds. The whole thing put me at a loss.
“Well, Dwight.”
“Hello, Ruth.”
“Did Norris tell you I wanted to talk?”
“I told him,” Norris said.
“He told me.”
“So can we talk?”
“All right,” I said. “Sam, why don’t you and your stepdad go check out the new set of wheels while your mom and I have a little talk. Okay?”
Sam nodded, and he and Norris went down the porch steps and across the little lawn to the Corsica. Ruth and I stood side by side watching as Norris opened the driver’s door and Sam climbed in behind the wheel, and then Norris went around and got in the passenger’s side. It looked like a driving lesson.
“You look good, Ruth,” I said. “Your figure is as fine as it ever was.”
“I’m glad you like it,” Ruth said coolly.
“I mean it.”
“That’s nice. Listen, Dwight. I took Sam to the doctor Tuesday. For that eye.”
“And?”
“Nothing’s broken.”
“I could’ve told you that. In fact, I did.”
“I wanted a professional opinion.”
“So you got one. What else?”
“Insurance won’t cover the visit.”
“Is that what this is about?” I sighed. “Just send me the bill, Ruth. Okay?”
“Thank you.” There was color in her cheeks. Embarrassment, I guessed. She was not beyond it after all.
“Well, if that’s it, then we’ll be going. The clock’s ticking. I’ll have him back on time. Promise.” I turned to go, but she stopped me with a hand on my arm.
Reservation Road Page 10
