Reservation Road

by John Burnham Schwartz

  Sergeant Burke’s eyes had left her for the room behind her head. “I know you’re upset, Mrs. Learner . . .”

  “Upset?” Grace shook her head. Already the anger was leaving her like water through a drain; she wanted to hold on to it. She was a husk; she’d never been so empty. Her voice was frighteningly calm. “You’re wrong, Sergeant. I’m not upset. I’m hardly even here.”

  His look of confusion then would once have been a kind of victory for her, something to laugh about and describe to friends. Not today. They sat in an awkward, distinctly unprofessional silence as the clock ticked.

  I am finished.

  Somewhere outside, a car door slammed.

  Sergeant Burke stood up. “That’ll be your husband.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “My husband.”

  Ethan

  Monday morning I got Emma into the car on time, and drove her over to music camp.

  We said very little on the way. Perhaps she was still waking up. Perhaps conversation of any kind was simply beyond me. Outside it was hot already and I had the air conditioning on and the windows rolled up, like a city driver or a man on the interstate. Emma sat in the front seat with her sun-browned legs sticking straight out. She’d dressed herself, as always, according to her own sense of fashion: a red V-neck T-shirt and denim shorts, and sneakers with purple stripes and Velcro straps instead of laces. I drove with the radio off. Ten minutes to the center of town, such as it was—general store, mediocre pub, gourmet sandwich shop, pharmacy—and around the little oblong green, past the white houses and the tall white church behind which the birds would have been singing under a single, broad-limbed oak, and eventually to the Sherman R. Lewis Elementary School, where I parked beside a green station wagon.

  “Here we are,” I said, turning off the engine.

  Emma said, “That’s Mrs. Wheldon’s car.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I reached into the backseat for her music books.

  “Sam Arno’s got a black eye,” Emma said.

  “Does he?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s totally gross.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, and received from Emma a look of disappointment, even pity, at my banality. I handed her the music books. Bach was on top, a selection of pieces for the intermediate piano student. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

  “No. . . .” She was staring out the window at the playground, the metal slide shining white-hot under the sun. Something was happening inside her, but I had no idea what it was. I felt my heart sinking.

  “Emma?”

  “It’s okay,” she said in a small voice. She pushed the red button by her hip and the seat belt came free, went sliding across her. But she made no move to get out.

  I leaned over and kissed her head. “I hope it goes well today.” “Is Mom going to pick me up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell her not to be late, okay?”

  “She won’t be.”

  “Good.”

  She sat there for perhaps ten seconds more, saying nothing, staring at her feet, mustering courage. Then she opened the door and got out.

  I watched her in the rearview mirror: a bright shot of red dropping out of my blind spot and into the white heat of the morning. Refracted, she seemed already distant. And then, thirty feet away, I saw her stop.

  I waited. She stood dead center in the mirror, her red-shirted back to me, halfway to the entrance to the school. I hoped she’d start walking again, but she didn’t. Finally, I opened the car door and got out.

  The air was hot and dry, the sun so bright off the pavement it was like being struck in the face. I walked toward her. Even when I was close, she didn’t turn around, and I went up and crouched down behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. I felt the tremor in her then, like a live wire run taut, and for a long fixed moment it was as if I were holding her again by the side of Reservation Road, trying to absorb her trembling and knowing that I could not. Gently, now, I turned her around. Her face was red and streaked with tears. Her nose was running. I picked her up in my arms and the music books fell to the ground. Her crying was ancient, fierce, and nearly silent.

  She was just eight years old. I knew everything about her, and nothing. After her tears were done, I asked her if she wanted to go home. But she said she was okay. She insisted on going to camp. She was stubborn. Nothing more was said, nothing explained. We picked the music books off the ground and entered the school.

  Out of the bright light and heat into coolness and near dark; my eyes were slow to adjust. I held my daughter’s hand for guidance. And for a moment there was just blind memory: holding my own father’s hand, breathing in the aching stone coolness of the synagogue he used to take me to on Chicago’s South Side. A grief temple. A kind of vertigo. Then I was back again in the square high lobby with the gray stone crosses embedded in the walls, impossibly deep. Emma was holding my hand. And the woman standing before us, her hands clasped at her waist, was Ruth Wheldon.

  “Good morning, Mr. Learner,” she said. She sounded slightly breathless, as if she’d just run up the stairs.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Hi, Emma.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Wheldon.”

  Ruth Wheldon smiled at Emma. It was a pretty smile, turning nervous at the end; apparently, she’d exhausted her prepared remarks.

  “I was just dropping Emma off,” I said. “I hope we’re not too late.”

  “Oh, no,” Ruth Wheldon said.

  I bent down and kissed Emma on the cheek. “Good-bye, Em.”

  Ruth Wheldon took a hesitant step closer. She was wearing a kind of summer pants suit, all in green, and high heels. “Mr. Learner?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think I could talk to you for a minute?”

  I glanced down at Emma, who was staring at her feet. “All right.”

  “Emma, why don’t you go downstairs and join the other kids?” Ruth Wheldon said. “Tell Mrs. Peabody I’ll be down in a minute. Okay?”

  Emma nodded. She seemed, like me, broken now by weariness, too tired to resist anything. “I’ll be done at four-thirty,” my daughter said to me—reproachfully, like an adult—and then, music books in hand, she walked to the back of the lobby, turned to the right, and disappeared down the stairs.

  Ruth Wheldon cleared her throat. “I want you to know how sorry I am. How very sorry.”

  The words were ashes in my mouth: “Thank you.”

  Ruth Wheldon seemed on the verge of saying something more, but didn’t trust herself. Her eyes were gleaming even without direct light; perhaps it was tears. She stood looking at the floor, then at me, then high above my head. I knew nothing about her except for the odd clothes she habitually wore and the fact that despite them she was attractive. That her sorrow seemed genuine yet touched me no more than if it had been false. “You probably want to talk about Emma,” I said, to make it easier for her.

  She nodded gratefully. “I talked to your wife last week.”

  “I know.”

  “About the concert Wednesday evening.” She paused. “Is it still okay?”

  “It’s up to Emma.”

  “Sure.”

  Her attempt at a smile died on her lips. There was no easy way to do this, and the crosses in the walls weren’t helping. Death is death. And I thought of my father in temple, his shoulders slumped, grieving for centuries of pain and loss, only a fraction of it his own.

  “I also asked your wife about counseling for Emma, Mr. Learner,” Ruth Wheldon said. “If you had any plans in that direction. I don’t want to pry. It’s none of my business, and the last thing in the world I want to do is to make things harder for you and your family after the tragedy you’ve all been through. But I’m concerned about Emma. There are times when it’s like nothing’s happened, and other times when you can just feel her start to crack. I think she’s got strong feelings of guilt. She feels almost responsible in some way for what happened, like it was her fault.”
>
  “Her fault? That’s ridiculous.”

  My voice, angry and assaulting, echoed faintly against the walls, and made the silence that followed feel all the more regrettable. Taken aback, Ruth Wheldon merely stared at me.

  I thought: I am harming Emma, too.

  “I’m sorry,” I stumbled. “I didn’t mean—”

  “You don’t have to explain,” she said.

  “No. It’s just—she’s—you’ve got to try to understand. Emma’s the only one who’s innocent.”

  “I don’t think I know what you mean.”

  “Never mind. Excuse me.”

  “No, please—”

  “You think Emma should see a psychiatrist?”

  Ruth Wheldon looked miserable now, on the verge of tears. “Yes, I do. Somebody who knows more about these things than I do. A professional.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Don’t thank me.”

  I reached out and touched her hand. I didn’t know why. Then I left.

  Around the little oblong green, this time in reverse. White church, white houses. The white heat of morning. All of it a strange reminder now of the blank white light in the empty refrigerator at home: nothing for Emma’s breakfast again this morning. I saw the hand-lettered sign for Krause’s General Store and pulled in.

  Paul Krause stood behind the burnished wood counter, talking to gossipy, bilious old Mrs. Briggs, the school principal’s mother, and ringing up her goods. He paused mid-sentence when he noticed me come in, his mostly bald head swinging in my direction and then quickly retreating. Mrs. Briggs followed his initial look, her ossified neck forcing her body to turn a full hundred and eighty degrees to get me in view. She was not by nature as diplomatic as Paul Krause, nor as genial, and my sudden appearance caused her to emit a breathy “Oh!” of surprise.

  “Morning, Ethan,” Paul said, with an unmistakable gentleness.

  I nodded. “Morning, Paul.” I hurried to the back of the store to avoid any contact with Mrs. Briggs.

  There were five short aisles of canned goods, boxes of cereal, plastic bottles of shampoo. Along the back, beside the refrigerator and freezer, twenty- and fifty-pound bags of flour and sugar were piled three feet high. A pair of buck’s antlers decorated the wall—taken, Paul had once told me, by a much younger version of himself. He had a pot belly now. He swept the place daily, kept it clean. He talked patiently with the Mrs. Briggses of the world. I’d never understood how he made any money, though it was not my business. Chain supermarkets had long ago come to Winsted and other towns.

  The door opened. Mrs. Briggs shot a last carnivorous look in my direction and departed. I carried a dozen eggs, a loaf of oatmeal bread, a box of Bisquick, and a glass bottle of Vermont maple syrup up to the counter, where Paul rang them up on the old-fashioned register with the round indented keys and the white-backed number cards that popped, ringing, into the window like so many jack-in-the-boxes. He paused before punching up the total. “Anything else, Ethan?”

  We made eye contact. For some reason, I thought about how I’d touched Ruth Wheldon’s hands. I turned and looked back over the small store, dark with wood and smelling of flour. “Nothing I remember,” I said.

  He nodded. He didn’t tell me he knew what I meant. He punched in the total and I paid and thanked him and went out.

  I was reaching for the car door when my peripheral vision filled with a shape and color that made the breath die in my throat and my head snap up in the direction of the road: it was there, passing right by me. Four doors, dark blue, a reflecting midnight blue. A man driving. I dropped the bag of groceries. It landed on the pavement at my feet with a sickening crash, eggs and syrup blown to smithereens. I saw the neat chrome uppercase letters across the back of the trunk, FORD on the left, TAURUS on the right, and below it the flat blue of a Connecticut license plate. Diminishing fast. Thirty feet, forty feet, a hundred feet and turning left, following 44 west toward Canaan. Gone. I never saw the headlights.

  There was no deliberation. I couldn’t get the keys out fast enough, couldn’t hold them without dropping them on the ground and again inside the car, pounding my open hand against the steering wheel and screaming at myself, Stupid fucking clumsy fool! Then the key was turning in the ignition and the car shot backward into the road, which happened to be empty. I turned the wheel hard and the tail slid left, tires shrieking, the nose veering to the right, and I shifted again and the car jolted forward as if rammed from behind. Just before making the turn for Canaan, I glanced at the rearview mirror and recognized Paul Krause standing over my bag of shattered groceries with a broom in his hands.

  I was not a good driver. My car swung wide on the turn westward. The guardrail separating the ten-foot bridge from the stream below came rushing up from the side. The back right bumper hit and released, and then the car straightened, accelerating onto a long straightaway. The dark blue sedan appeared at the end of it, distant but there. I locked on it. On him, faint dark blur through windshields. Probably thinking of himself as just an ordinary man, a citizen. He had no idea what was happening. It didn’t matter. I would appear in his mirror like a ghost. The red needle on the speedometer was climbing past fifty. Trees whipped by. I felt the ground rushing under me, under rubber and metal, huge chunks of it left in my wake. The distance between us was closing; he couldn’t have been going very fast. He was meandering toward Canaan. A day spent antiquing, perhaps, driving his car as if he had the fucking right. I could see the blue of the license plate, the make-and-model chrome. I could feel the steering wheel gripped in my white-knuckled hands and the sweat beaded on my upper lip. And I did not flinch when the rounded blue tail of his car grew larger than life, letters and numbers emerging as if out of a mist. I kept my speed. A thousand feet ahead on our side of the road I could see a gray stone wall.

  I was fifteen feet behind him when he finally noticed me. His head jerked toward the rearview mirror, and instantaneously his car zigged to the right, almost onto the shoulder, offering me room to pass. I took it. I stepped down on the pedal and my car surged forward, entering his blind spot on the left, our vehicles no more than a yard apart. Five hundred feet ahead, the shoulder ran out, replaced by the gray stone wall. He was whipping his head to the side, trying to find me. I saw short dark hair and a flash of surprisingly white skin. I was pulling even with him, turning my wheel half an inch to the right, closing the narrow gap between us. The speedometer at sixty, the noise of the two engines all-consuming, pounding through the closed windows, pushing up through the seats. Every stone of that wall coming clear as day. And I turned to look at him. I wanted him to know. I saw the porcelain wedge of his profile and it was strange, so pale and smooth and frightened. Too strange. It gave me pause. Then it crushed me. I felt something crack in my heart, and a sickness start to leak out.

  It was a woman. A woman about my age. A woman looking at me in terror, her lips moving soundlessly behind the layers of glass and noise and speed that separated us, calling out for her life.

  My foot came off the gas. The car slowed as if it had been shot. She passed ahead of me and kept going, and it was over.

  Grace

  The front door opened—then silence. He must have seen the car out front, must know she was here with the police, but he did not call out to her.

  Standing in the living room, Sergeant Burke cleared his throat.

  “Ethan!” she called. Her own voice sounded damped to her, cloudy, like a cataract eye. “In here. We have a visitor.”

  Footsteps—he appeared under the wide archway with a flushed face, as if he’d just stepped in from the cold. But it was high summer. Drinking. A peculiar sense of dread, climbing her like a vine. She didn’t get up.

  “Afternoon, Mr. Learner,” Sergeant Burke said, with a sober nod. He sounded positively relieved to have another man in the room.

  Ethan nodded back. “Hello, Sergeant.” Then his eyes fell on her and his face darkened. She
watched him absorb her robe, her hair, her face. Even across the room she could feel his anger, the black thunder in him—because she was disheveled, because she’d failed to keep up appearances when appearances were important. (Are they? Are they really? I don’t fucking care.) He was far too private a man to yell at her in front of a stranger; he’d merely disown her with a stare. He turned away from her.

  She made herself speak. “Ethan, Sergeant Burke came by.”

  “Did you find him?” He was looking at the trooper.

  “No,” the sergeant said.

  “Do you have anything?”

  “Not much so far. But it’s early yet.”

  Ethan looked about to say something but changed his mind. She could hear the sharpness of his breathing—an exhale like a horse, a boxer throwing a punch. He came and sat down on the other chair, leaving her by herself on the sofa. He did not so much as glance at her. Sergeant Burke lowered himself onto his chair, careful of his gun belt, his eyes scouting them both in carefully controlled movements: A detective, a professional.

  “We’ve got the lab work done. That’s really what I came by to tell you folks about.” Sergeant Burke hooked a finger under the gun belt at his waist and hoisted it an inch. This seemed to relieve him of some pressure. He cleared his throat again. “Mr. and Mrs. Learner, the car that hit your son was dark blue, more like a midnight blue. It’s a Ford, we’re ninety-nine percent sure it’s a Taurus, which as you may know is a model the company started back in 1986. Our lab guys tell us it’s one of the earlyish years, but just which year is where things start to get a little fuzzy. Ford used the same paint mix and the same glass and plastic on the Taurus right through ’92. So, we could be talking an ’88 here, or we could be talking a ’92. That leaves a lot of cars in between.”

  “You’re making excuses,” Ethan said. His voice was quiet and frightening.

  “I’m telling you the facts, Mr. Learner.”

  “You want facts? A man murdered my son.”