Reservation Road

by John Burnham Schwartz

  The books open on the table were conclusive: her career, if not already dead, was grievously wounded. Of the four jobs she’d been hired to do for August and September, all had been aborted; there had been awkwardness, unpleasantness—return of payments demanded and given, orders canceled. Her reputation among clients and suppliers was damaged. Not even communal pity could mask the fact that she was seen as someone who could no longer be trusted, who might not recover.

  She wanted to care, but could not. Knew she should care for Emma’s sake, but could not. Knew that it probably should have meant something to her when Ethan came home, as he had last week, and announced in a drained, nearly robotic voice that he’d decided not to take his year-long, half-pay sabbatical the next year, because they would not be able to afford it.

  With a sigh, she closed the books. She felt dirty and stale, wanted to wash her hands and face. A wastebasket sat beneath the worktable—an old present from Ethan. It was woven of reeds from the river Liffey, and he’d been unabashedly proud of it on the day he’d given it to her, full of stories of its provenance. Why, Joyce himself had . . . She could not remember. There was Molly Bloom at the end of it all, saying yes. Yes. And Grace thought, I cannot remember what that feels like. Why say yes? She took the books now, accounts and appointments, and dumped them in the wastebasket. Then she went around the studio throwing open the windows, hoping the brisk air would cleanse her somehow; it did not, though it carried to her the scent of apples from the two trees out back, as clear as if she were holding a bushel of them in her arms. This, anyway, was something. She breathed in deeply.

  She heard the phone ringing and she went to it; Mother had said she might call. Mother who was very concerned, these days, about Emma and “the shrink.” Afraid for Emma. Constantly making not-so-subtle comparisons between Emma and Grace, the original bereaved child, the little blond girl who’d lost her father. “Well, just look how you turned out,” she’d said hopefully last week. “You turned out just dandy, didn’t you? In spite of everything.”

  Grace didn’t feel dandy. She felt as if someone had cut out her heart with a spoon.

  The phone sat on a table in the corner of the studio. She reached it on the third ring. “Hello?” But there was nothing, just dead silence. And then a click. She put the receiver back down, thinking, All right, Mother.

  She knew what her mother really thought, what she wanted: that Emma should come down to Durham and live with her for a while, until things got “cleared up” at home. But this was wrong-headed, Grace wanted to argue, based on the misguided assumption that things would ever get “cleared up” at home. Cleared up by whom? The police? She had never believed in them. They had gotten nowhere and then they had quit. They weren’t even good liars.

  The phone rang again, startling her. Her hand was still resting on the receiver; she felt the vibrations within like a tiny SOS. She picked up.

  “Hi, Mother.”

  But it wasn’t Mother—she sensed that immediately. The silence on the other end of the line was heavy and male and, somehow, distinctly not southern. A chill passed over her skin.

  “Hello?” she demanded. “Who is this? Hello!”

  The line went dead.

  Dwight

  In my office late on an afternoon without meetings or purpose; paid by the hour with no hours to fill. Where small-town meets small-time.

  Time to think.

  I kept my door closed. Sat behind my desk as if there was a client present, requiring my full attention. But there was no one. The yellow pencils and the pencil sharpener. The two photos of Sam. The phone. The quiet.

  Half an hour passed like this. An hour? Maybe, possible. I’d called her twice, heard her voice, hung up. Now, in my mind, I was still on the line with her, still trying to get the words out. Tell the truth. But I couldn’t do it. I saw my mouth moving, shaping the words, but no words came out. The call was over.

  She wouldn’t have understood anyway, I told myself. And so I promised myself, once and for all, to just let her go.

  Then the day got worse: the door opened and Donna walked in.

  I straightened myself on my chair but she wasn’t fooled—she knew my schedule these days, its time gaps deep as swimming holes. And she was not enamored of my sense of industry, among other things. She stood just inside the doorway, hands on her shapely hips and a look, somehow, of both resentment and relief on her face, like a rich investor who’s decided to pass on that phony tax shelter once and for all. We hadn’t slept together since mid-July. After Josh Learner died, I stopped calling Donna. And when she called me, I made excuses that became less believable by the week. There was never a big scene. Eventually, she just stopped calling, and the ice that formed between us at work grew so thick we could barely see each other through it.

  I fingered my tie. “What is it, Donna?”

  “I want to talk to you. That’s what it is.”

  Before I could respond, she closed the door. I got up, extending my hand out over my desk to the straight-backed chairs. “Have a seat.”

  Donna said, “Don’t use that voice with me, Dwight. I’m not one of your clients.”

  I nodded: she was right. I stepped out from behind my desk and went to her and tried to give her a kiss, but she put her palms on my chest and pushed.

  “You’re a son of a bitch,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “And you look like shit.”

  “I know that, too,” I said.

  “Goddamn you, Dwight.”

  “Yes.”

  We sat down on the two chairs. I hadn’t managed to kiss her, and I had the sense of yet another package of long-diverted trouble finally arriving on my doorstep. I almost never sat on these chairs. They were more uncomfortable than seemed likely. For a fleeting moment I thought of poor Stu Carmody sitting here, talking to me about the outer limits of his pain and his life, looking for a flicker of compassion. I said, “I think I know why you’re upset, and I’m sorry.”

  “You think you know why I’m upset?” Donna said, her voice rising. We were sitting just a foot apart. She reached out and took my jaw in her strong fingers and forced me to look her in the eyes.

  I didn’t last long before I looked away.

  She shook her head in a slow, disgusted way, as if she might spit. “You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t really know anything, do you, Dwight? You may think you do, but that doesn’t count.”

  “You’re right,” I said, not looking at her.

  “So what’s that?” she accused me. “You throw in the towel, don’t even try? ‘Oh, I’m real sorry, everybody, but, you know, everything in my life’s just shit. So I guess I’ll just leave it that way, ’cause it’s easier.’ Well, that doesn’t work for me, Dwight. It’s not even fresh. You’ve pulled it on me too many times. I’ve got feelings for you, sure. I’ve never been coy about that. But that doesn’t mean I plan to spend my life waiting for you to grow up.”

  Donna stood up, pressing some moisture from her eyes with the heel of her palm. I stayed sitting and lifeless. She looked down at me with something like pity in her face.

  “Don’t expect me to be here for you when you hit bottom.”

  She turned to go. She was reaching for the doorknob when the door opened and Jack Cutter walked in.

  I got up then. “Goddamnit,” I said. “This is my office. Doesn’t anybody fucking knock anymore?”

  “Not me,” Jack said calmly. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said to Donna.

  Donna hurried past him without a word.

  Jack looked at me with mock concern. “Don’t tell me: trouble in paradise?”

  “Shut up, Jack,” I said.

  Down the hall the washroom door slammed shut.

  “Well, well,” Jack said.

  It seemed like a friendly visit for about the first ninety seconds. Then that was over, like a pretty little detour that leads into a swamp, and Jack got to the point. As he talked to me, he went and sat on my chair, so that I had
to look at him from the wrong side of my desk. He was wearing a candy-striped shirt that fit tight as a drum across his medicine-ball gut, and bright red suspenders for trim.

  His message was almost clear. He said he wasn’t too happy about my performance of late. There were a couple of things. First, there was the Carmody case.

  “I’ve been keeping this to myself for a while, Dwight,” Jack said. “But now with this other stuff, I think it’s just as well—”

  “What other stuff?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “In a minute,” he said sharply. “Now listen to me. I happened to get a peek at that pretty little suicide poem Carmody wrote, and I’m telling you, you were clearly implicated.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You knew all along the old geezer was going to off himself, and you didn’t tell me?”

  “What if I did, Jack? What does it matter? The man was sick. He had a right to some privacy.”

  “Not on this one he didn’t. Not from me. I don’t give a shit about his privacy. I’m the guy responsible here, and the rule is I know everything that goes on. That’s how this place works.”

  But Carmody was just the tip of the iceberg. There were other things that wouldn’t do. There was my general condition at work lately, which was singularly unimpressive, even for me. There was Drew Peckham, who was so incensed that I’d left my meeting with him early, he’d told Jack he never wanted to set eyes on me again.

  “Drew Peckham’s our biggest client, Dwight.”

  “And Sam’s my son. You know why I had to be at school that day.”

  “That kind of trouble’s bad for business, Dwight,” Jack said.

  “You think that’s trouble?” I said. “Because Drew Peckham’s got his ego bruised? Believe me, that’s not trouble.”

  Jack said nothing. He shook his head and hooked his thumbs under his suspenders: a backroom pol playing at farming.

  Abruptly a shiver of panic started swimming up my insides. “What’s going on here, Jack?”

  Jack said, “That’s exactly what I’m trying to get at.”

  “Are you firing me, Jack? Is that what you’re doing?”

  “I’m just trying to clarify the situation.”

  I stood up. I put my hands on the desk and leaned in on him, inadvertently knocking over the pictures of Sam. They fell flat on the blotter, face down. “Are you firing me, Jack?”

  Now Jack was standing too. His hands out front of his stomach, ready for one thing or another. A big man, suddenly unsure. He was red-faced and already breathing hard. “Have you forgotten?” he said slowly. “I hired you when nobody else would touch you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m concerned, Dwight. That’s all I’m saying.”

  I let a few seconds pass. I took my hands off the desk and straightened up. Our faces close across the desk, our eyes locked. I could smell his sour breath.

  I reached down and replaced the pictures of Sam, back where they had been on my desk.

  That afternoon, alone in my office, I sat looking out past the jungle gym to the field. The summer daisies were all gone, and the grass had thinned, though it was still green. I hadn’t seen a single kid on the jungle gym since Labor Day. The field felt empty— even now, with a couple of truant boys tossing a football back and forth.

  Now, for a little while, I tried hard to recall this same scene from a year earlier: my sitting in this square room, staring out at the jungle gym and field, the daisies gone with summer and the grass thinned, a couple of boys still hanging around, tossing a ball. A bucolic scene, almost. Just a year ago, Dwight Arno had been a human being. He’d made mistakes, sure, but he hadn’t killed anyone. Certainly not a child.

  I tried hard to get the memory right, but a year is a long time. Images get distorted.

  Now the boys were leaving the field, going home for cookies and milk, or down the road to Fanelli’s for double shots with chasers. There was no way of knowing. There was just the present, unfolding, and the dark truth of the just-happened, not yet recorded by history.

  The field was empty.

  Ethan

  “Please,” Emma said.

  I sighed. “All right. Sallie can come, too.”

  Emma sat in the backseat with her arms around the dog, as though they were lovers and I their chauffeur. She had stopped complaining about Sallie—too big, not cute enough, too much hair, same old dog. Now she never liked to be without her. She was far ahead of her parents, I thought, her world boiled down to just this: one arm for Sallie and the other for Twigs, the stuffed giraffe, holding tight to their soft, comforting, uncomplicated bodies as all around her the floodwaters rose and people went under. It made better than good sense. One arm, one half of her heart, for a living mortal soul, and the other for a creature who would never die.

  We left Wyndham Falls behind, and Emma began to hum to herself and the dog: I looked in the mirror and saw her sitting practically on top of Sallie, her chin resting on the furry oblong dome of the dog’s head. Humming a made-up song. The long muzzle poking out. The dog not minding.

  Then she caught my eyes in the mirror and stopped humming.

  “Don’t stop,” I said. “I like it.”

  But she remained silent, holding on to Sallie. And I thought, with a sinking sensation, that I had no idea where she was, or what she was thinking.

  “Emma?”

  “Are we lost?” she said abruptly.

  “Lost? Why would we be? We’re just going to Mrs. Wheldon’s.”

  Emma shrugged. “I just thought . . .” She turned back to Sallie. A moment later, I heard her whispering to the dog: “I was just checking. I was just checking.”

  “We’ll be there soon,” I said, mostly to myself.

  She made no reply. She began to hum again, faint as a breeze. I did not understand. It was as if, somehow, between front and back seats there had sprung up an invisible partition that muffled our voices and made us unreal to each other. Loneliness had crept over us like a cloud.

  I drove on. And then, just as arbitrarily as she had begun, Emma stopped humming. I heard the sound of her seat belt coming unbuckled. She leaned forward, grabbing my seat back with her hand so that I felt her fingers in my hair. “Yesterday . . . um . . . Mom was taking me over to Justine’s and she got lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “I mean really lost. And she’s been there like a hundred times.”

  “Well,” I said—inanely, professorially—“that happens. Sometimes even familiar things can start to look strange.”

  Emma just shrugged.

  “Like words,” I went on, feeling too great a need to explain myself. “If you stare at a word long enough it almost always starts to look misspelled.”

  “Even when it isn’t?”

  “Right.”

  “Then how do you know when it is and when it isn’t?”

  I paused, groping for an answer. “By knowing, I suppose. And trusting what you know. Sometimes that’s the hardest part.”

  We were entering Bow Mills. A village more than a town. A prosperous-looking place, overtaken in recent years by weekenders from the cities. A place where successful men “dressed down” and “relaxed” by mowing and tinkering and watering. As now, on a Saturday morning, passing a rotund man pushing a leaf-blower across his expansive front lawn. And another, dressed in a multi-striped track suit and a down parka, hosing down the four-wheel-drive in front of his three-car garage.

  I slowed down, peering through the windshield at the little green road signs. “Look for Larch Road,” I said. “That’s where Mrs. Wheldon lives.”

  “Dad!” Emma shouted.

  Just ahead, two boys were tearing out of a blind driveway on their bikes. I slammed on the brakes. The tires squealed and my right arm swung out and clamped over Emma, trapping her against my seat back. The car came to a halt and there was a scrabbling sound as Sallie was thrown forwa
rd onto the floor.

  “Emma!”

  “Sallie!” Emma cried, pushing off the weight of my arm so that she could attend to her dog.

  The boys made expert, skidding turns onto the road shoulder and rode on.

  “Sallie,” Emma breathed with relief, as the dog climbed back onto the seat.

  My heart was pounding. The two boys rode off without even a glance back at us. They were racing each other and laughing, standing high off the saddles as they pedaled, as though they were running through the air.

  Then I heard my daughter, stroking the dog and whispering: “Poor Sallie. Poor, frightened Sallie.”

  I got us moving again. I found Larch Road and made the turn. A yellow sign announced that it was a dead end. Ruth Wheldon had said to go to the end of the road and the house would be on the right.

  “We’re almost there,” I said.

  Emma was looking at me in the mirror. “Is Mom sick?”

  I looked away. Trying to recall what it was I had told her just fifteen minutes ago. About trusting what you know.

  “What do you mean, sweetie?”

  “Is Mom sick?” she repeated patiently.

  Ahead I could see where the road ended. We were not far.

  “No, she’s not sick, Em.”

  “But she’s not okay, either?”

  The Wheldons’ mailbox was green, with a duck painted on it. I turned into their driveway and parked.