The woods gave out onto the Learner place and I stopped to get my bearings in the differing degrees of darkness. A barnlike garage on the near side, with the stable doors drawn closed. Shrubs around it, and what looked like an orchard of shadow trees off behind, toward the house. The place was landscaped, designed, thought over; even in darkness you could feel the womanly care that had gone into it. Grace Learner, I thought. Who designs gardens.
I stayed there at the fringe of it all until my breathing separated itself from me, grew close to regular. I tried to think of it as just a house. But this was hard, with me dressed head to toe in black at three in the morning and the one light shining downstairs, poking out onto the lawn like a shout; someone was awake. Though from this angle and distance I couldn’t see inside the room. I let myself imagine it was her.
A split-rail fence ran along front, between the lawn and the road. Keeping outside of it, well beyond the spillage of light, I went across the face of the house and then over the fence at the point where it came out under the limbs of a huge oak. My old football knee was stiff from the cold. The leaves on the ground smelled damp. The house was twenty yards away.
For a long time nothing moved. The lit room was a stage set waiting for the actors to show up: the high back of a reading chair, a little table with a glass and a bottle of the hard stuff, a tall bookcase sagging with books, a desk with a computer and a lamp, more books. A thinking man’s lonely palace. There was a sofa against the left wall, complete with mussed-up blanket and pillows.
And I thought: Ethan Learner. Professor of English at Smithfield College.
It was an empty room. Then it was not empty. He reached for the glass, and I saw that he’d been there all along, reading, hidden by the chair’s high back. An arm went out for the glass and then disappeared with it—that was all I saw. Then it became a matter of waiting for the rest of him.
Not long afterwards, he stood up. His back was to me. He shuffled to the desk—not walked, but shuffled like an old man. His dark hair was wild. He wore a heavy bathrobe over his clothes and carried the glass in one hand and a book in the other. He set these things down on the desk next to the computer and moved to the door, where he stopped and raised his hand to the light switch on the wall. I thought he was going to leave, go upstairs to bed and his wife.
Just before switching off the light, he turned to look at the sofa with its blanket and pillows. It was a long look, as if he was seeing himself there, huddled and awake. As if he had stores of pity for the man he saw there, who was himself. Then, deliberately, as if by an act of will, he turned to the window. I saw his face clearly for the first time. Hollowed out. Empty, as the room had been empty even though he’d been in it. For a second I thought he was seeing me. But it must have been his reflection he saw, in the windowpanes, because just then he turned his head away and switched out the light.
Now the night was a tide, simple and black. You could be invisible in it, submerged, of no consequence, not even there. I took a deep breath and stepped from behind the tree and out into the middle of the lawn.
And looked up.
Somewhere behind the dark windows, Grace Learner lay sleeping.
Ethan
We were truly alone now; we’d been cut loose. You don’t realize what an anchor hope is until it is definitively gone and you stand gutted, as though disembowled, with no weight left inside to hold you down on earth. Hollow, you begin to float. The mind, without recourse to other people, without ballast, turns in on itself, rooting out the darkest reaches of the person you thought you were. Nothing looks the same. It is existence as one long hallucination; existence as daily riddle—to which, as in a masochist’s dreamscape, every object, sight, sound at first appears to be the answer, the missing piece, yet in the end turns out to be meaningless.
The police were gone, out of it. They had shut down, locked their doors, taken down the shingle. Leaving us on the outside.
Cowards.
Some things, of course, would go on as before. The not sleeping. The nights alone on the sofa. The detective-fiction daydreams ending in a cataclysm of vigilante justice. In the realm of fantasy I was a hard wronged man with a mission. This was a world of bright colors and clarity, quite the opposite of how things stood in real life. Never mind. This would be my story now. So nights I sat in my study and closed my eyes and killed the daylights out of a man I couldn’t have identified had I passed him in the street. A nameless, faceless man.
All this was ridiculous, no way to live. And it was ridiculous that sometimes, as I sat gnawing on an impossible future, the past would come back to me in the shape of my father. That brilliant man, that intellectual, who ran from his helplessness and his rage and chose to paint it as a victory. I would find him sitting across the room, in the wingback chair by the window—older, sadder, mumbling still the hypocritical pacifist slogans of his latter days. His moleskin trousers worn thin, his tweed jacket redolent of pipe smoke. Had he been real, I would have taken him by the collar and shaken him. I would have called him a liar. I would have thrown him out.
I want to be clear about this, now. Without hope, the need to punish is the one true religion. Blame must be fixed on some soul other than one’s own. Justice must be done. Or else there is only the desert of grief and one’s own footsteps upon it—restless, unceasing, as alone as the most distant planet in the universe.
Dwight
It wasn’t planned. It was an accident.
Sam had been caught stabbing a pencil into the hand of another boy in his class, sending him to the infirmary. By noon of the next day, I received a call requesting my immediate presence at the school, to meet with Ruth and Larry Briggs, the principal.
I was late getting there. First, I had to excuse myself from a meeting with Jack and Drew Peckham, a local land developer intent upon screwing his three children out of their future inheritance because they’d voted for Clinton in the last election. Peckham was a major client, and Jack was visibly unhappy about my leaving in the middle of things.
When I arrived, I found Ruth already sitting in Briggs’s office. He was leaning toward her over his desk and talking intently, but fell silent as soon as he saw me.
The truth was that Larry Briggs and I had never gotten along. He thought I was a thick-bodied lout, arrogant and maybe dangerous, and he’d been overheard saying as much back in the days after the accident, when Sam had to write his answers in class on a chalk tablet because his jaw was wired shut. A time I had not forgotten. And as for my return view of Briggs, I considered him a misplaced Anglophile in a hound’s-tooth sportcoat who thought the town of Wyndham Falls beneath him but had never mustered the imagination to leave. He saw himself as a culturally superior Robinson Crusoe on a barren isle, woebegone, when in fact he was just a plain old narcissist whose own voice sounded like a choir to him because he was incapable of hearing any other. His bitterness over his circumstances he took out on the hides and minds of little boys and girls whose imaginations were exponentially brighter than his own.
Today, Larry Briggs didn’t bother getting up when he saw me. I crossed the room and sat down on a chair next to Ruth. By way of a greeting, she said my name once—said it flat, the way you might say the word “tree” if you were out walking in the woods— while Briggs nodded curtly in my direction and said nothing. In the gap made by their silence I heard the sound of children playing in the playground outside. Then Briggs went on with what he’d been saying to Ruth before I’d arrived, went on talking to her as if I wasn’t there.
He had a skin-cream tan. And he talked about my sweet son as if he and Ruth were the only two people on the planet who might know anything about him. He inquired, clinically, about troubles at home, about Sam’s relationship with Norris. He said that Sam’s homeroom teacher, Ms. Throm, had observed of late an alarming level of aggression in Sam, a boy always known for his gentle, shy demeanor.
And Ruth was admirable, I’ll say that for her. She was a master thespian, an audience killer. S
he said no, no trouble at home. She said fine, Norris and Sam got on fine. Her head dipped down, her hair let loose, her pretty nose and hazel eyes looking on the verge of being crushed by worry for her son, who had already been through so much. She said she couldn’t speak for what went on between Sam and me, that wasn’t for her to say. Of course, Sam’s relationship with his father was a complicated business, she guessed everyone knew that.
Here Briggs nodded sympathetically and said oh yes, he did know that, certainly. He said, like a shrink, “Go on, Ruth.”
And here Ruth smoothed her skirt over her thighs—it was a little tweed skirt, in a sickly shade of green—and told Briggs about the summer Sunday that Sam went to my house and came home different. She’d never been able to find out what happened, but something had, because she’d noticed a change in Sam since then, and so had Norris: troubled, at first afraid, then increasingly sullen, now possibly aggressive. Something must have happened. Because how was it otherwise that a boy might go from gentle and shy one month to jabbing pencils into the hands of other boys the next? She was beside herself, my ex-wife said. She was at a loss.
That was the end of Act One: the diva had sung. Ruth caught her breath and looked at me. A hard look, driven by scrutiny, not love, not generous enough for hate. A look that made me remember hitting her that one night, hitting her with my fist, the plate shattering on the floor and her going down with it. The memory was like a car coming at me in the dark, blinding me with its lights, and I flinched, there in the office, my head turning away from her. Now I was looking out the windows of the school. And I saw how the sky today was of a blue to make you afraid: a gemmed hardness without compassion. Every bad thing that had followed my hitting Ruth shone clear on its surface.
I decided to get out of the room while there was still time. I stood up.
Ruth said sharply, carelessly, “Sit down, Dwight. We’re not done here.”
I was standing above her, looking down. Maybe, staring at my knees like that, my ex-wife forgot, for a blissful moment, what kind of man I was. Maybe she simply thought she was home talking to Norris. It wasn’t Norris, after all, who carried his temper tucked inside his gut like a bomb. And it wasn’t Norris she saw now, as she raised her head and looked into my face. I watched the old fear come roaring back into her eyes. Her back stiffened and her mouth drew a line.
I took a step away from her: because she was right about me. Dead right. I could feel the adrenaline in my arms, the bunched muscles, the big hands itching for trouble. With no more effort than breathing, I could picture doing every one of the bad things her mind was accusing me of doing.
I started for the door.
And now Larry Briggs came jumping out of his chair. Larry Briggs: his cheeks pinked with outrage, barking at me that he knew all about my “history” and wasn’t surprised one iota—this was just the sort of behavior he’d expected from me. He wagged his finger at my back as I disappeared through the door. And never even guessed just how lucky he was to be alive.
Grace
She sat on the grass by the playground watching the second graders running wild. She counted fourteen of them, and they were screaming and scampering through the sections of giant plastic tubing and slipping down the slide and swinging on the swings; at least two had fallen and were in tears.
She checked her watch. On the top floor of the school, Emma was sitting in a room with the child psychologist, “working through the trauma of death.” And in the face of such incontrovertible wisdom—such method, technique—what could she have done but take her hat off and bow down? Then retreat. Put myself out to pasture where I belong . Here on the grass, staring after other people’s children, seeing how it was done: family life. She had known once, had done it herself.
In the playground the teacher, Mrs. Poor, was applying a Band-Aid to the knee of a Korean girl with pigtails who was crying. A tiny, bright spot of blood was visible on the girl’s pale skin. And Mrs. Poor was saying soothing, meaningless things like “Now, now” and “There, there.”
To the east, past the tennis courts and the playing field, woods began: the leaves there a mottled tapestry of ocher, crimson, rust, persimmon. In a week or two the hills and shallow valleys would be iridescent, as though on fire. The thought filled her with a fleeting rush of hope, a feeling she tried to hold, tie down, but it slipped from her grasp. A few weeks—what had two and a half months changed? Time was not the promised balm, wonder drug, heal-all: Josh would never be alive again. I am stone, Lord, not flesh as you once promised, and all the days to come will work their hard weather on me, until I am carved with the loss of him. . . .
She crossed her arms and hugged herself. Did it functionally, like someone reading from a manual—here is what you do for pain. And without surprise she saw it again: a blond girl walking across a lawn carrying a pitcher of iced tea. Smelling the wet grass and hearing the glass-and-china crash of human collapse, of death in the making; then turning and finding Daddy on his back by the pool, a strange man pounding on his chest and Mother screaming, pleading for God’s compassionate intervention, as if He might actually hear, as if He lived in the house at the end of the drive. . . .
And she wanted to scream: How does one get through it, survive? And now, almost calmly, like a faint echo, an answer: One does not. And now another: It is too much to bear.
Why couldn’t they see that?
She’d grown up believing what was said around her—said on Sundays and holidays, said with bourbon glass in hand and naked, grasping hope in the heart; said, bending down, to blond little girls who have seen love collapse and die by the pool: that there is virtue to be mined in pain, oh yes, that all human tragedy is part and parcel of God’s plan, a way for the soul to reach through darkness toward the light of salvation. Then why was Mother screaming so? Then why was Daddy on the ground? A good man, a doctor, a veteran of a war neither he nor anyone else had understood; a survivor of so many things. The world ever after his death cold, a monstrous experiment. This is what children know, for they are the prophets of loss. And now it had happened twice. Now Emma too might grow up afraid, crippled by the belief that it was love that was aberrant; that the seed from which life grew was not Josh’s birth, not his curious spirit and passionate probing intensity, but his death, his murder. And who could blame or sincerely contradict her? No one. No one who would not lie.
Grace lay back on the grass, curving an arm across her eyes so that she would not have to look at the sky, which, immense and blue, frightened her now. She heard a sound escape her lips—not quite a moan, but something new, untranslatable.
And then, abruptly, she sensed she was being watched—a feeling like being touched by a shadow on the end of a stick. She sat up and looked around.
A big, powerful-looking man, broad in the shoulders and chest, stood at the edge of the parking lot about twenty feet behind her. He was dressed in a blue suit and a white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. A tie hung loose from the collar. She got to her feet. Her heart was pounding, which shamed her; she wanted to be neither angry nor afraid, yet for some reason she was both.
“Yes?” Her own voice sounded brutal to her. “What do you want?”
The man looked at her before speaking. He seemed to be studying her. She took a step back, then regretted it.
“Are you Grace Learner?” he asked, finally. But it sounded like a false question, as though he already knew the answer.
“What do you want?” she repeated.
He said nothing.
“And you were watching me. Why? I don’t know you.”
“Don’t be afraid.” His voice was gravelly, quiet, and sad.
“I’m not afraid. I’m angry. I want to be left alone.”
“Don’t be angry.”
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Dwight
She asked me who I was.
She kept looking at me. A woman in grass-stained jeans and scuffed hiking boots, a red-and-black plaid shirt, a down vest unzippe
d. Blond hair barely kept together with a rubber band. A dry yellow leaf hanging off one shirt sleeve. Her face was pale, her eyes wide and blue and stunned. A woman who had disowned her beauty, spat on it, and here it was still trailing her around like a too-faithful dog. Her face said: Get off, don’t want you, don’t give a fuck. She didn’t look like somebody’s mother. More like a patient recently out of shock, lost now. Like someone whose only real desire in life was to crawl back to the trauma ward—a far-flung country, quiet, the one place on earth where she’d felt safe. She wanted to get back there, but the map had been burned. Leaving her outside the school, forced to listen to the cries and laughter of children.
I opened my mouth to speak.
But what came out was just my name. It meant nothing to her, might have been the start of a song; I might have been somebody else. She stood there looking at me, sniffing the air as if she could smell the copper taste in my mouth. And in her face I saw this, too: she thought she was the only one living outside the town walls. She didn’t know that I’d spent my life there.
I looked away, and then I walked away.
Grace
Late October. The sky was the blue of heaven; the leaves died on the trees and fell to earth.
She stood at her worktable, account and appointment books spread open before her, her hands flat on the tabletop, which was canted thirty degrees to ease the strain on her arms and back during the long hours of drafting; whose surface she had long ago smoothed with a sheet of milky green contact paper, now marked with a decade’s worth of stray pencil and ink marks, like the hieroglyphs of a civilization forever lost. She hadn’t drawn a thing in months. Hard even to remember what it felt like to put pencil to paper, to figure and design, the goodness it had imparted to her life. And so within a short time, a kind of free-fall from the sky, her art and mind had become shadowed like everything else; a penumbra of feeling and desire, a distant reminder of a once great light.
Reservation Road Page 18
