“No, Em,” I said. “She’s not. She’s sad and unhappy. She misses Josh.”
There was silence. I was afraid to look at her.
“So do I,” Emma said. “I miss Josh.”
“I know you do, Em.”
We sat in the car staring ahead through the windshield, as though we were still moving, as though we were going somewhere.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll wait for you out here until you’re finished.”
“Okay.”
“Do you have everything?”
“I guess so.”
“All right, then. I’ll see you in around an hour.”
“Okay.”
There was a long breath of stillness. And then in her high voice Emma said, “Sallie, stay.” She opened the door and got out, carrying her music books. I watched her. She started toward the Wheldons’ front porch. Then she stopped, as if she’d forgotten something, and came back, walking all the way around the front of the car to my side.
I rolled down my window. “What is it? Did you forget something?”
“You forgot to bring a book,” she said gravely. “For waiting.”
We stayed in the car for a time, Sallie and I. She didn’t complain. Dogs, after all, sense better than humans the high-frequency emanations of personal misfortune; they will not leave you, but neither will they press you on the issues. Having made their sympathies known, they will circle you, waiting for you to look up.
When I finally looked up, what I saw was Norris Wheldon stepping out onto the porch. A man I hardly knew. A man who like his wife seemed to favor brightly hued clothing in all circumstances, all kinds of weather. At weddings no doubt, perhaps even at funerals. Today there were checks and plaids and greens and reds; conceivably, he was wearing golf shoes. He came to the edge of the porch and peered out at the driveway, shading his eyes with his hand against the bright autumn sunshine, stooping a bit. Spotting me inside the car, he began waving as though we were old friends, saying something that I couldn’t understand.
I opened the door and got out. Norris Wheldon had stopped saying whatever it was he’d been saying, and in the air now like a faint scent I heard the muted, buttery notes of a piano—scales, played by a little girl’s fingers.
“Hiya,” said Mr. Wheldon, waving.
I opened the back door and Sallie jumped out, trotting directly to the bushes in front of the porch, where she peed long and hard.
“Well,” said Mr. Wheldon, looking on. He had stopped waving at me for the time being; in fact, he appeared subdued by the raw act of nature he was witnessing. He stood with his hands on his hips, arms akimbo, staring down at his bushes. “She certainly needed to go,” he said mildly, when Sallie had finished.
“Good morning, Mr. Wheldon.”
“Norris.” He was smiling now, good spirits regained. “Call me Norris. You’re Ethan, am I right?”
I told him that he was right.
“You know, Ethan, Ruth felt terrible having to cancel out on your daughter’s lesson this week. Making you come over here for the makeup and all. But I’m the one who made her. She had the flu. It’s just started going around, you know.”
“Coming over here was no trouble,” I said.
“I mean, leave it to Ruth and she just keeps on giving her lessons, fever or no fever. That’s how much she loves her students.” He shook his head in admiration.
“Emma’s very fond of her,” I said.
“Well, it runs two ways, I can tell you. You’ve got a sweet little girl there, Ethan.”
“Thank you.”
I thought that would be the end of it. But Mr. Wheldon stood on the porch nodding his head as though on the verge of saying something more.
“Sallie!” I called out before he could speak. “Here!”
She came trotting over. I got the leash from the car and attached it to her collar and held her loosely at my side.
“You must be darn glad to have her,” Mr. Wheldon went on. “I mean, personally speaking, I’ve never been one of those people who thinks an only child’s the way to go. Doesn’t make sense, if you ask me. Life’s just too rough and tumble for that. I mean, you never know what’s coming one day to the next. There’s got to be a backup, is my feeling. A backup every single day. But then maybe that’s just my business head talking—I’m in insurance, you know.”
I told him that I knew.
“Yep. I’m an insurance man. And you’re a professor, Ruth tells me? English, that right?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t read a whole lot of made-up stuff myself, Ethan. Being in my line of work, I mostly try and stick to the facts, you understand. Of course on my good days I do like to think it takes a pretty creative mind to fit the right policy to the right person. ‘Norris,’ I tell myself, ‘these are people’s lives you’re dealing with. Their hopes and dreams. The big stuff. You can’t just go in there and expect to put two and two together and come out with four. It doesn’t work that way.’ You know what I mean?” He peered at me, waiting for me to say something.
But I had nothing to say. I felt like an immigrant who did not speak his language, whose heart and mind were still back in the old country, no matter this dumb body standing here. After a long, awkward moment, I shook my head. “Excuse me,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry.” I opened the car door.
“Hey, Ethan, hold on a sec!”
I looked at him.
“No offense meant.”
“I know,” I said.
“Then come up and sit on the porch. I won’t be bothering you. I promised Ruth I’d do a little lawn care before golf.”
He seemed to take my silence as an assent; descending the porch steps, he walked around the side of the house, out of sight. I stood where I was, unable to decide even the smallest thing. Mr. Wheldon returned a minute later, carrying a long-handled rake. He gave me a thumbs-up sign. “Ruth hates the sound of those leaf-blowers,” he said, as though an explanation were required. “And the fumes give her a headache. Why don’t you and your dog relax on the porch? When my stepson comes down I bet he’ll fix you a cup of hot cocoa.”
And with that Mr. Wheldon began to rake his lawn.
There was a cane-backed rocker on the porch, and I sat on it, rocking. I had never planned on being here. This might have been my nursing home: the dragging, rasping sound of the rake being drawn over the beleaguered grass and dead leaves; piano notes played and held suspended in the air like dust motes in sunlight; the hospital tones of Ruth Wheldon’s encouragement to my daughter. A crow cawing in someone else’s yard. Sallie settling at my feet, releasing a breath like a god’s sigh of contentment, rolling over to sleep.
I must have dozed off. Rocking. Tired all the time.
I must have dreamed this: Josh sitting on a chair in the music building at Smithfield, playing late Beethoven. Playing not to me, but away from me, to the organ that is like the face of a temple. All I see is his back, the dark curls of his hair, the bow slashing the air above his turned left shoulder, the fragile neck of the instrument. How thin my son is. How, as the music moves from mere melancholy to wretchedness and finally to blasphemous outrage, his body begins to shut down, to hunch and curl like a pill bug closing to protect itself. As though I were watching him change under a microscope into a man, and then beyond manhood into old age. He is shriveling up. As I look on, the bow disappears. And then the violin. The music has stopped for good. And in the silence I call out his name, but he doesn’t seem to hear; he’s grown deaf. It’s no longer possible for him to turn around, even if he wanted to. And I begin to cry. Josh is small as a baby now, curled into a ball, rocking and rocking on the chair. . . .
And rocking, I woke up.
A boy was standing on the porch, not five feet away, staring at me.
I felt my face with my fingers: tears.
“You were crying,” the boy said simply.
His voice was high but serious. He was small, sandy-haired, wearing denim overalls over a sweatshirt
. I recognized him, though he looked younger without a discolored eye. I couldn’t recall his name.
I dried my eyes with my fingers. “I guess I was having a bad dream,” I said.
He nodded, as if he understood.
Sounds were returning: piano, a steady raking, a dog barking in the distance. I looked down at my feet and there was Sallie looking back at me.
“That your dog?” the boy asked me.
I nodded.
“What’s its name?”
I told him.
“Is she nice?”
“Yes.”
“I had a dog when I was little and I liked her a lot too,” the boy said. “She was a mutt named Boggs, after Wade Boggs, my favorite player.”
“Did she die?”
“Yeah. She got run over by a car. When I was like four. My dad helped me bury her. I can show you the place if you want.”
The sound of the raking ceased; the boy and I turned our attention to the front lawn, where Norris Wheldon stood, leaning on the rake like a cane. His face shone with sweat. He waved when he saw us regarding him.
“Took a little snooze, didya, Ethan? Hey there, Mr. Boggs,” he said to the boy. “What say you fix our guest here a mug of your special cocoa?”
“No, thank you,” I said, loud enough to be sure he heard me.
“You’re the boss,” he called back cheerfully, and resumed his raking.
“He’s not my real dad,” the boy said to me in a confiding tone of voice.
“Your parents were divorced?”
He nodded.
I noticed the way he was looking at Sallie. “Sallie doesn’t mind being touched,” I said.
He approached her slowly, getting down on his knees on the porch. She wasn’t afraid of him, and he ran his hand from her brow down her long muzzle to her nose.
“My dad drove over this dog on the road,” he said, watching his hand as he stroked her. “It was an accident. During the summer. I was asleep when we hit it but Dad said it was black and we killed it. He felt really bad about it. Me too. I got a black eye when we hit it. All my mom said was that’s why we can’t have dogs any more. Because they’re always getting run over.”
He didn’t look up at me. He kept petting the dog. And I closed my eyes. I was seeing a car hitting a black dog, crushing it, passing on. The dog left by the side of the road like a piece of trash.
I opened my eyes. There was just his sandy hair washed in daylight. His living bones. His hand smoothing a dog’s head with tender affection. His unknowing love. There was his face so clear and young without the badge of bruised eye. He was on that stage with his trumpet.
Now he looked up, right into my eyes.
“Is it true you’re Josh’s dad?”
“Yes,” I said. “I was.”
“Are you still sad?”
“I’ll always be sad.”
“Till you die?”
“All my life.”
He looked down again, running his fingers through Sallie’s soft coat. She was his antidote to what he saw before him, in me: a pain that never ends. He could not imagine it.
Grace
With no work to do, it was hard to tell the days apart. It was November, she knew that much. Every day, it seemed, colder than the one before it. Leaves piling up on the ground. Her garden dying like a country gone to war.
It was an afternoon, today: and she walked slowly around the house, the garage, assessing the devastation. She did not want to miss anything. Apples were rotting on the ground beneath the trees. She went past the little garden shed where she kept her clippers, all her tools, to the beds of roses behind. They needed clipping back, but she would not do it.
It is the breaking of a pact, she thought. The love of God turned upside down.
You thought and dreamed and planted, you tended, getting on your knees in the dirt. You watched and waited, tried through experience and luck and empathy to discover what each living thing required to grow and thrive, and then you found some way, any way, to provide it. Because the living thing would not be there but for you. Because it was you who chose.
She walked on. Beyond the roses were the hostas: she saw that they were finished, too. The full green leaves and aubergine-colored stalks of summer had collapsed under the weight of their own decomposition; there was the odor of rot. She turned her head away.
Sallie trotted ahead of her, up the garden path to the west of the house. Under a carpet of fallen leaves the slab pathstones were invisible. The leaves rustled and crumbled under the dog’s four paws and her own two feet. Everything alongside the path was dead and discolored. And though she had expected this, it still came as a shock. Tiny Rubies dead. Dead Crater Lake Blues. Silver Brocade. Rust and ocher leaves everywhere, like something strewn at a funeral. I have not been here in so long, she thought; I have not even looked. It was a world made and then let go. Here at the top of the path where the land leveled out, where she had carried Josh and planted, she once believed, his spirit . . . well, the perennials were finished, too.
She stopped walking; she had seen enough.
How long she’d been outside she didn’t know, but she was chilled to the bone; it was afternoon, perhaps four o’clock, the light already starting its decline. She felt as if she had been far from this place, trudging over some former battlefield—Ypres, or Verdun— the boundaries invisible now, grown over with weeds, the past a horrible buried joke.
She went inside.
Climbed the stairs, past Emma’s room, found the door open, took a peek inside: empty. Emma not home from school yet. Time enough then to lie down in her own room for a few minutes, curl up, close her eyes; time enough, she thought without much hope, to try to shed the skin of memory that had deadened her these last months and kept her from feeling. She understood: I cannot go on like this. She started down the hallway. But then she saw the door to Josh’s room standing not quite closed, and she halted. It had been closed earlier, she remembered. It had been closed, as far as she knew, for a long time. The very sight now— just a few inches of boy’s blue carpet, bathed in steel-like tones from the windowed light—made her irrationally afraid, as if it signified the presence of an intruder in her house. Stop it, she told herself, trying to master her fear. Which worked, sort of; she pushed the door open the rest of the way. Then heard her own intake of breath, and stood as if frozen in the doorway.
“Oh, my baby,” she whispered.
It was Emma. Huddled on the floor, crying, among the shards of Josh’s smashed violin.
Emma began to cry harder, to wail, pieces of the instrument she had shattered clenched in her fists. And now Grace did not hesitate. Fragments of antique shellacked wood crunched under her feet. She swept Emma up off the ground and carried her to Josh’s bed.
Dwight
Another Sunday came, and I decided to take Sam to the Chat-ham Fair.
There were clouds blowing in from the west but they didn’t look serious. Otherwise it was a fine November day, strangely mild. Sam wore overalls and a Red Sox sweatshirt I’d bought for him, and a pair of Converse sneakers no different, really, from the pair I’d had as a kid. He rode up front with me in the Corsica, fiddling with the radio to try and find the Patriots game, even though I’d told him it was still too early in the day. No matter. I drove with one arm resting along the top of the seat back, just above his head. It felt to me as if my arm was floating above him like a guardian weapon, ready to be called to use.
We crossed into Massachusetts and a little north of Stock-bridge caught the pike heading west, and soon we were in Columbia County. We’d crossed two state lines in the course of an hour’s drive, an experience common to any jaded Northwest Cornerite but a fact still astonishing to my son, who twice said to me, over the fuzz of radio static he’d managed to fix on the radio, “You sure this is New York, Dad?”
What could I say? I was sure. Ruth and I had been to Europe on our honeymoon, the only time for both of us. Three weeks in a tin-box Fiat, crossing whole co
untries as though they were towns for the taking. We made love outside a ruined castle in the middle of France, with yellow flowers poking up between our legs, and Ruth repeating the words “Knights Templars” to herself and laughing like a happy, beautiful drunk. The Knights were the ones, supposedly, who’d built the place and disappeared, leaving it to us.
A country fair.
Prize vegetables and prize pies, a million-plus apples, a pumpkin the size of New Jersey (though still smaller than the blue-ribbon bull), a sheep with a permanent, a politician in a booth. Always, a politician in a booth, talking. Carnival rides. A demolition derby.
After the Ferris wheel and the bumper cars, a pellet-gun sharpshooting contest and an almost-won stuffed warthog, we ate foot-long dogs and cotton candy, followed by a hunk each of fried dough. I drank a couple of beers and tried too hard to make Sam smile.
We were doing all the right things. But something was missing, or broken. Sam had always liked fairs, but today he seemed to stare at his feet a lot and not to care about winning or losing the games he played. He didn’t seem to notice when, late in the afternoon, the politician got caught by a photographer with his tongue down the throat of a pretty young girl behind the livestock pen. And he didn’t seem to mind that all afternoon the clouds kept blowing in from the west, gathering over our heads.
By four-thirty it was raining. We were already halfway toward dark. With a foolish, desperate grin on my face, I turned to Sam and asked him one more time what ride he wanted to go on next, what gun he wanted to shoot at what target, what food he wanted to eat.
He said he wanted to go home.
There are some scenes that never end, they just keep getting replayed. The walk to the parking lot, the leaving, the long drive home.
On the way back, Sam tried again to find the Patriots on the radio, but we’d bookended the game with our coming and going, and it was over. All he found was more static—for a trumpet player he had a high tolerance for noise pollution—and I got irritated and pushed his hand from the radio dial and fixed the station myself. Sam said nothing, just retreated into the shadows of his seat. And for the next half hour, like a student who’s studied too hard and too long for the test, I sang diligently along with Merle Haggard and Conway Twitty, as we recrossed the state lines that held, this time, no traces of astonishment for my son.
Reservation Road Page 20
