Now, finally, a nod: “Okay, I guess.”
Grace hugged her. “I love you.”
They rode together in the front seat of the wagon—her car, with a hundred and twenty thousand miles on it. An old friend, a relic, an icon; the sort of car that showed she’d had a life, been around, done things, wasn’t uptight, had once been fearless. Well, it was a lie. Today she’d made sure to buckle Emma’s seat belt herself, and now she couldn’t stop looking at it, making sure it was still fastened. Keep your child safe. Starting to sweat every time the speedometer crept over thirty-five.
“Why’re we going so slow?” Emma demanded.
“We’re not going slow.”
“We are.”
“We’re going the speed limit.”
“It’s boring,” Emma said.
Grace looked over at her. “Where did you learn to talk like that? Not from me.”
“I’m bored.”
Emma brought her feet up on the seat and began unbuckling one of her red strap shoes. Grace watched out of the corner of her eye, listened to the open-mouthed breathing: a pantomime of childish concentration and moody restlessness. When Emma had the shoe off, she held it in her hands for a moment, vaguely satisfied. Then she fit it on her foot again. The rebuckling took a long time. Finished, she stuck her legs straight out and admired her shoes. For some reason, Grace felt like weeping.
“What’s the matter?” Emma said.
“Nothing.” She blinked, and the tears that had been sitting in her eyes receded.
“Mom?”
“What?”
“Did I tell you about the puppy Justine got for her birthday?”
“No. Tell me.”
“It’s really little and cute. It’s a beagle puppy.”
“That sounds nice.”
Emma frowned. “Can we get a beagle puppy?”
“We have Sallie.”
“But Sallie’s so big.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being big,” Grace said, a bit too vehemently. A hawk flew over the tops of the trees, over the road, and rose, circling along invisible currents of wind, toward the hazy, shimmering sun. She watched it until it was above the roof of the car and out of sight. She was angry but didn’t know why. “You’ll be big one day, too, and prettier than ever.”
“Like you?” Emma said.
Grace didn’t answer. She watched the road. She rolled down her window the rest of the way and felt the soft, warm air beat against her face and shoulder. And she thought: It is like North Carolina in springtime. And suddenly she imagined, for the first time in her adult life, going home to Durham again. Living with Mother again, in the white house with its sun-drenched attic. Climbing the worn, polished stairs to her old room. Curling up for good.
Is Emma with me? Or Ethan? Or am I alone?
“Mom?” Emma said.
The lovely, soothing image vanished: gone the fragrant green spring, the white house, the bed of childhood; now she was at the bottom of a well, looking up.
She said, “Yes, Em.”
“Justine heard her mother talking about Josh.”
“Josh?” Her voice broke a little—she heard his name, like a little fragment falling off a statue. “And what—”
They were passing the sign for Wheaton. The little green sign, as for all Connecticut towns, with the white topographical outline of the state and the name inside: Wheaton. She was gripping the steering wheel so hard her hands ached. She made herself go on. “And what did Justine’s mother have to say about Josh?”
“That if he hadn’t been playing in the road he’d still be alive,” Emma said.
A car passed suddenly on the left, despite the yellow line: a roar of engine, the poison tang of exhaust. Scared her to death. Without planning to, she took her foot off the gas; the car, as if etherized, coasted onto the shoulder and stopped. The engine idled.
Emma was looking at her in confusion.
“Why’d you stop? We’re not there.”
“No.” Grace could hardly hear her own voice.
“Then why?”
“Emma, do you know what Justine’s mother meant when she said that about Josh?”
“Meant?”
“What she was really saying.”
“No, I—”
“I’ll tell you what she meant.” Her own poisoned voice: it was like seeing herself from a great height, like watching herself in a nightmare, unable to stop herself. “She meant that Josh would still be alive if your father and I had been more careful. That’s what she meant. She meant his death was our fault.”
Emma shook her head fiercely. “That’s not what she said.” She looked certain.
“But that’s what she meant.”
“No.”
“Yes, Emma.”
“But it’s not true!” Emma cried suddenly. “It’s not!”
Emma’s face was falling, the certainty of childhood dissolving now like a tablet in water. Grace felt sick to her stomach with regret, but still she could not stop herself. “Yes, Emma. Yes, it is.”
She reached out to touch her daughter.
“No!” Emma shouted, slapping her hand away. “Get off me!”
Grace shrank back at once. “I’m sorry—”
“I hate you! I hate you!”
“No . . . please—” In a panic Grace turned the key in the ignition. But the engine was already on; a metallic screech rent the air, and she cried out as if she’d been stabbed. She fell back against the door, sobbing.
Dwight
It was dusk and the school parking lot was full of cars. Inside the building the concert had just started. Halting notes rose to the open windows of the gym like birds trying to escape, sometimes successful, sometimes not, sometimes hitting the panes, sometimes finding air. Children’s music. I sat in the Corsica with the windows down, listening, looking out over the playground in the dusk, slowly working my way through a pint of Jim Beam.
Ruth had told me that Sam came tenth on the program, near the end. That meant there was much bad music to get through before then, and much confidence to pull out of the bottle before I could face my son and the other parents and their children. Before I could set eyes on Ethan and Grace Learner and their daughter. They’d been names in the paper, small blocks of print. They’d been ideas and now they’d start to breathe. They’d breathe me in. Soon I’d see their faces, maybe the color of their eyes. It was dusk. I was halfway through the bottle and still not sure it would be enough. A few small kids and a couple of au pairs were gathered around the slide in the playground. The kids took turns sliding down. I heard shouts and laughter. The slide’s surface shone in the dusk.
Somebody was playing “Greensleeves” on a recorder. It might have been two instruments; it sounded like a duet. Ruth must have lost her mind to put on a program like this. I wondered what she was wearing. Something wrong for the occasion, probably, something way off, standing in front of the community, all those upstanding citizens with kazoos in their pockets. Embarrassing. Yet beneath the clothes there was that same body I knew. I had tried to stop thinking about it but it had never worked. Too often at night her naked image was projected against the blank wall of my memory, alone or with me, someone like me, joined at the hips, thrashing around like two teenagers in heat.
I put the bottle to my mouth and swallowed, and a little bit of fire rushed down my throat. Everywhere else the light kept draining away. In the playground a boy went zooming down the slide on his rear. Something about him made him go faster than the others; at the bottom he flew off as if he’d been kicked, and landed in a heap on the ground. I heard him crying.
“Greensleeves” came to a weepy close. A fifteen-hanky performance. The applause was hearty, and then Ruth was introducing the next number. I couldn’t make out the words, but I recognized the sound of her. It was her public-speaking voice, hauled creaking out of the basement and oiled up for this summer rite. Only Sam’s appearance at the end of the set, gleaming trumpet in hand, would crack her composure, turn her
back into herself. No one else would know the difference or care.
I had to get going. It was now or never. I put the bottle to my mouth again and tasted how things might be. There was no direction to think in that was totally without consequences, which is just another way of saying that I was alive against my better judgment. I saw how Stu Carmody had understood the human condition as well as any man. Though he too had made a mess of it in the end. He’d wanted to go out of the world neat and orderly, everything tidied up, but it hadn’t worked out that way. He’d tried to hang himself in his barn, but the rope was old and it broke from his weight (the police found it on the premises). So he was forced to rig up his shotgun. The irony of which was not lost on him before he blew his brains out. In a suicide note addressed to me he stated that, though he could not remember it, he knew for certain his coming into the world had been a bloody mess, as all births are, and he’d been nothing but a damn fool ever since for thinking he might leave the world any way but how he’d found it.
Grace
Everyone seemed to arrive at once. Cars pulled into the parking lot behind the school, one after another. The doors opened into the soft light and children ran screaming for the playground, where the metal slide shone like a silver waterfall. Parents tried in vain to call them back. In the end they simply watched them go and smiled knowingly at one another.
It was cocktail hour, voices smoothed by drink. They were all there: old neighbors, old friends and enemies. Nothing had ever been forgotten. She got out of the car and stood watching. She saw the first boy begin his descent down the slide.
He flew, laughing the whole way. He seemed to shine, too; like a little god, like a messenger. And she felt the gleaming metal in her heart like shrapnel, and then its swift, painful expansion, how its coldness could become all that she was. She turned away before the boy reached the bottom.
She found Ethan standing on the other side of the car, looking at her, the hood between them like a table.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“I thought you said something.”
“No.”
He turned to Emma. “Do you have the music?”
Emma disappeared into the backseat and came out holding a paper folder. “I got it.”
“I have it,” Ethan corrected.
“I know,” Emma said. “Mom?”
“What?” Grace couldn’t look at her. Because she was afraid of her. This little girl in the white dress and red strap shoes, a red ribbon tied in her blond hair. Ethereal and perfect. A daughter who did not seem to remember telling her mother that she hated her.
“Look,” Emma said, pointing. “Tommy Gilmore’s going down the slide.”
She looked: a pudgy boy rocketing down to the ground.
“Tommy Gilmore’s not wearing a white dress,” Ethan said to Emma.
“I wish I wasn’t either.”
“You look pretty. Grace? Are you with us?”
“I feel sorry for Tommy Gilmore,” Grace said.
“Why, Mom?”
But she couldn’t explain it.
“Let’s go inside,” Ethan said.
She saw again the gray stone crosses in the thick brick walls, both church and state. They went up the front steps and into the high wide lobby and she saw the crosses there, too, resolute above the small crowd, and she thought that perhaps this was what she needed, more of this rock-bottom shelter under God. A thick-walled place. Someplace to go. But it was just a school; it was not for her. They were in the midst of it now, other families entering the lobby and milling around, and she felt Emma shrink back instinctively behind the protection of her legs. Grace let her hand fall to her side, a casual offering. Without even a glance, Emma reached up and took it.
“It will be okay,” Ethan said softly, out of the blue.
It was a small thing; he might have been saying it to himself. Still, she was grateful.
She felt they were being watched, whispered about. She looked around. And what she saw made her stomach turn over: in the corner Judy Aronson stood in a huddle with Pam and Dick Foster and Mary Ann Lucas and her husband, Tom. They were talking among themselves and shaking their heads communally over the tragedy of it all and darting somber glances at the Learner family in the center of the room. Grace looked away. She wanted to leave now. She and Judy Aronson were friends. Not the Fosters as much, and the Lucases not at all, but Judy Aronson yes, they’d been friends, had had lunch together regularly over the years and had talked a great deal, about real things. And Grace felt the betrayal bitterly, as a sign of what was to come.
It was almost time for the concert. The gym was on the second floor and people were climbing the stairs. Mothers held tight to the hands of their youngest children as they took each step. A lifeline. She felt her spirit go with them, her body left behind, just bones and flesh. She couldn’t make it.
“Grace.”
She turned. It was Judy, standing with a hang-dog look on her wide face and her arms out. Grace felt tears suddenly pushing behind her eyes, and a searing anger.
Judy stepped up and hugged her. “Oh, honey. Did you get my messages? I called three times.”
“The machine’s broken,” Ethan said quickly. “Hi, Judy.”
“Hello, dear.” Judy took one hand off Grace’s back and gave Ethan’s arm a squeeze. Then, with the same hand, she managed to touch Emma’s hair. “And you, Emma.”
Emma recoiled. And Grace stepped out of Judy’s arms and took her daughter’s hand instead. “Yes, the machine’s broken.”
“I don’t know how to say how sorry I am.”
“It’s all right,” Grace said. “It can be fixed.”
“No, I meant—”
“Grace.” Ethan put his hand on her back. It was a warning and not warm. “Sorry, Judy,” he said. “This is hard.”
“Don’t apologize for me!” Grace said, louder than she intended. She felt heads turn and the blood rushing to her face. Ethan looked away. Judy looked away. But not Emma. Grace held on to her daughter’s hand for dear life.
Judy had recovered and was making her farewell speech: “Now Grace, I want to have lunch. Whenever you’re ready, you come over and I’ll make something delicious and we’ll sit and talk. It doesn’t have to be about anything. We’ll open some wine. I just want to see you, make sure you’re all right.”
“I’m not all right, Judy.”
“Well, we can talk about that, too.”
Another hug was not attempted. Grace watched Judy climb the stairs, her graying brown hair cut short and square like her body, a sturdy, no-nonsense frame. The kind of friend you counted on to give it to you straight, not to gossip about you, no bullshit or pity or self-pity, a good dark sense of humor. All washed away now. Her son Aaron was in Josh’s class. Judy Aronson was a single mother. No, more than that—she was a widow. Her husband had dropped dead of a heart attack while shoveling snow from the driveway. It was the first thing Grace ever knew about her.
There was Emma’s hand again, the faintest shift in pressure. Grace squatted down and looked her in the eyes.
“How are you, sweetie?”
Emma looked at the floor. “Okay.”
“Are you nervous?”
Emma nodded.
“I played in a concert once, when I was about your age. Did I ever tell you that?”
Emma shook her head.
“Well, I did. My daddy made me. Just about everyone we knew in Durham was there, and I had to get up on a stage in front of them all and sit at the piano and play. I’d never been so terrified in all my life. But it went well. And I wasn’t half as good as you.”
She was on her knees in the center of the bustling lobby, holding her daughter. The rest were other people. She kissed Emma on the lips.
Ethan gave a long, despairing sigh: “We’d better go up.”
It was just a school gym with fluorescent lighting harsh as a microwave, and rows of folding metal chairs with an aisle cut down the middle
. The sight filled her with dread. At the end of the aisle was a low wooden stage, and on the stage a grand piano, a piano stool, a music stand. Ruth Wheldon stood over the music stand, adjusting its height. Over red pumps and a floor-length red dress she wore a powder-blue silk shawl that kept slipping off her shoulders to reveal flashes of smooth, tanned skin. Grace had never seen anything quite like it except at her prom long ago, or perhaps in the horror movie Carrie . She felt kind of sorry for Ruth Wheldon. And yet, at the same time, she couldn’t help noticing the slender, athletic shapeliness of the woman’s shoulders and arms, the curve of her bust, and how her sand-colored hair shone soft even in the cutting light. Men would be attracted to Ruth Wheldon, in spite of her clothes. Grace could see her sitting in an open convertible on a quiet dark road, a man’s arm around her, his breath on her neck. It was an image from another time and place, another woman and another man, and she didn’t know why it came to her now, and didn’t want it anyway. She reached down and smoothed Emma’s hair back behind her ears.
“Don’t,” Emma said.
“It was sticking out.”
“Let’s sit here,” Ethan said.
They sat in the third row, with Emma between them. The chairs were cold and hard. Other families were settling around them, parents talking to their children, boys’ voices rising above all other sounds. She would not look. Her thoughts threatened to seize her, take her back in time. She refused to give in to them. She kept her eyes straight ahead—the stage, the piano, the music stand. She had to hold on. She could hear people she knew whispering, gossiping with the impunity of the well-intentioned.
Ruth Wheldon had spotted her and was trying to make eye contact. Then she was walking over, the red dress rustling like taffeta. She was standing in the aisle, row three, her hands held together in front of her in that way favored alike by the very religious and the very nervous.
“I’m so glad to see you all here. Hi, Emma.”
“Hi.”
“Hello, Mrs. Wheldon,” Ethan said.
“Ruth.”
“Ruth,” Ethan said.
Reservation Road Page 15
