Then we were in Connecticut. Sunday almost over. And past the twang of the music, I heard the ring of another failure in my head.
Back at the fair, I’d bought Sam a caramel apple on a stick. I didn’t know exactly why I’d bought it—he hadn’t really wanted it. I guess I’d wanted him to have something to take home, just one thing clean and normal and fresh-grown to show his mother. He hadn’t even taken a bite of it since we’d left, just held it loosely in the fingers of his right hand like a thing of no interest that he was honor bound to deliver.
Now our tires were bumping over the rail tracks north of Canaan, and in the silence just afterward I heard a little thud on the floor by Sam’s feet. It was all shadow down there, but I knew what had happened. He’d let the apple drop. I could picture it in my head, the gluey caramel stuck to the floor carpeting, never to be gotten out. The day gone like that.
I took a deep breath and told him not to worry, it didn’t matter.
He didn’t say anything.
And all the while I was driving. My hands, not my mind. Tracking the route to my former home, paying attention, seeing with fingers. Muscular memory. While I got lost in a mess on the floor, the police barracks must have gone by, my dentist’s office, Tommy’s Diner. And at the familiar sight of a narrow tree-lined road heading off to the left, my hands must have known what to do. Instinctively, all on their own. The rule of the body is to take all shortcuts. The rule of the mind too, even if the mind doesn’t know it.
I took the turn to the left.
Here, it was like night. The tar blackened and slicked with rain. The few wet leaves still on the trees giving off no color, as if they were turned in on themselves, on strike. A pathetic, faded yellow line. Everything worn down, shut off.
I switched on the headlights. I slowed down a little, careful of the water on the road. Recognition hadn’t hit me yet. It was just a road, a shortcut, and I was still mourning the day, licking my wounds. I’d have my son home soon, and safe from me.
There was a sharp turn ahead, curving to the left. It was like seeing a face remembered from childhood. You do not forget. The first turn curved left and, at this speed, flowed seamlessly into the second turn, which was sharper, turning to the right, a curve of beauty and horror. Where the second turn straightened, there was Tod Lovell’s gas station. It was open for business. The red neon sign hadn’t been turned on yet, or it was broken, but inside the building a light was on. And a man was sitting in there, doing nothing.
I took my foot off the gas. Like a voice calling, like the pull of the moon on the ocean. The car slowed as if it was dying right under me, and I steered it over by the two round-shouldered pumps and turned off the engine.
I saw the man inside the office get up off his stool.
Next to me, Sam shifted restlessly. He’d been quiet for so long that just his moving felt like a shout. He said, “Where are we?”
I didn’t answer him.
The pump jock was at my side. He had a goatee and pimples. I rolled down the window and told him to fill it up.
Sam said again, “Where are we?”
I didn’t answer.
The pump jock came back, a look on his face as if I’d cheated him. “That’ll be six and a quarter.”
I gave him seven and rolled my window back up. I started the car and drove off, picking up speed past the spot where Ethan Learner would have found his son among the weeds and scrub brush. We were almost out of the clearing when Sam shifted suddenly in his seat as if he’d just woken up.
He said, “This is where we killed the dog.”
I didn’t say anything. I held on to the wheel and drove, watching my mistake unfurling like a perfect, huge wave. Sam said impatiently, “Right, Dad? The black dog. This is where we killed it.”
“I killed it,” I said. “Not you. Don’t you ever forget that.”
“But it was here, right?”
“Right, Sam,” I said.
I drove on. Where the trees opened again there was fog lying low over acres of pasture and stone walls. Somewhere behind the fog would be a farm with a silo like a prison guard tower.
Sam said, “Dad?”
“What?”
“What road’re we on?”
I said, “It’s the shortcut, Sam.”
“No. I mean what’s it called?”
I stared straight ahead. The fog was growing thicker, turning in slow white circles over the road, blinding me. I slowed down.
I said, “It’s called Reservation Road.”
Ethan
I slept in our room that night. Not since September had we shared a bed like husband and wife. The first night on the sofa is like the first anything, I suppose: without experience or memory of such a thing, there is no notion of it being anything but a singular, enclosed moment. Certainly not a pattern, a habit. Then a week passes, a month, and before one knows it the sofa, with its humid sheets and creaky springs, has become the way things are. I was brushing my teeth in the downstairs bathroom when Grace entered and inquired, in a neutral voice, where I planned to spend the night. We regarded each other in the mirror above the sink. Her hair was down, washed and shining, and she was wearing a white cotton nightgown; I had the sense that she had made herself up for me. Perhaps I just wished this: standing there at the sink, five feet from my wife, my back to her, I felt her presence like a sudden caress. Heat rushed up through my body. I turned around to face her.
“With you,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”
“Yes,” she said, and went out.
The bedroom, when I reached it, was dark. I paused in the doorway to allow my eyes to adjust. The bed, with its white covers, appeared like a kind of ghost ship, faintly yet richly glowing. I made my way toward it, driven by a combination of nervousness and instinct. It was like being a teenager again, only infinitely more somber. I could smell her floral shampoo, the cotton scent of her nightgown. Her blond hair held on its crown some unbegotten light, her face luminous beneath it. I crawled into bed beside her. Our legs touched and retreated. We lay in silence, hearing our breathing like whispers in the darkness.
“I’ve been thinking about him,” she said. “All the time now. Remembering. All these things, Ethan. All these things and no one to tell them to.”
“Tell me something you remember,” I said.
She was silent. We lay staring up at the black ceiling, our thoughts, like our bodies, parallel and separate. I wanted to ask if she could ever forgive me, but I was afraid. Then, her voice enveloping us both, she began to speak.
“It was the summer we rented the cabin up by the lake,” she said. “You’d promised Emma you’d take her out on the canoe, so Josh and I went for a walk up the dirt road. I told him to go on ahead if he wanted. For about fifty feet he ran as fast as he could. Then he just stopped and stood staring down at the ground. It was a turtle, sitting there in the middle of the road. I don’t know what it was doing there. It was almost midday, hot and dusty. And he bent down and picked this turtle up and put it down in the bushes by the side of the road, so it wouldn’t get run over.”
Grace paused; she reached out and found my hand beneath the bedcovers.
“He was our son,” she said. “And he didn’t know—he didn’t know—how I was back there watching him. Back there in the road with my hand over my heart, loving him so much just for picking up a measly old turtle. He put it down where it would be safe. And then he stood there until I caught up with him. He took my hand, Ethan. And he didn’t know. It was just another day to him. But it’s what I remember.”
Time moves slowly in the darkness. Long into the night, Grace went on holding my hand. I rested my head on her breast and, for the first time in many days, managed to sleep.
When, some time later, I awoke, we were no longer touching; Grace lay on her side of the bed and I lay on mine. If I had been dreaming, I had no recollection of it. My thoughts were the same as they had been while I was awake.
I got out of bed. And quie
tly, while Grace slept, I dressed in the dark and went downstairs.
Grace
Her eyes opened in the dark: she blinked, blinked, trying to make sense—not of a dream but of a dreamlike movement around her. Something told her to lie still. She saw Ethan’s back, shadowed, leaving the room. There was the urge to call out—“Where are you going?”—but she suppressed it. She had an instinct about it anyway. She thought she knew.
They had been happy that summer, the four of them, in the tiny rented cabin by the lake.
Happy. She saw Ethan laughing, young. She saw herself. She remembered the day they had met, fifteen years ago, looking up from her desk in the dorm room and finding this handsome graduate student standing in the doorway—tall, thin, highcheekboned, dark, intense. He wasn’t looking for her but for her roommate, who was out; he had found her by mistake, but once he found her he would not stop talking. He was all hands when he talked, nervous energy, his long fingers gesticulating, playing some harmony only he could hear. He was like a beautiful idea being worked out right in front of her, and she remembered feeling as if, from the very moment he began to speak to her, he were asking her to participate in the process of creation, inviting her inside himself, telling her, with his expressive wandlike hands, that what she thought and believed and was, mattered.
Now, in the silence, she heard his car start up. The tires on the drive, his leaving.
Dwight
That night, for whatever reason, I couldn’t sleep. I watched the Thursday late movie on TV—about a man who terrorizes his ex-wife and daughter, till the ex-wife finally kills him with a carving knife. I read a few pages of a book about the Yankees-Dodgers Series of ’49. I stuck some dirty clothes in the washer and set it spinning. I considered calling Donna in the futile hope that she might change her mind about me for one more night.
In the end, though, I gave up the pretense of doing anything worthwhile. I got the bottle of Jim Beam down from the cupboard and poured myself a drink. Then I poured myself another. I was afraid. My skin felt hot, my lungs shallow. I kept telling myself that this was just another night in a long black parade of nights stretching out into the unknown; life was going to go on, I kept telling myself, maybe for a very long time. But this was not comforting. I had never known a night that seemed so long, without purpose or end.
Ethan
The roads at that hour were empty, not a living soul. I drove through Canaan, turned west for fifteen minutes to Salisbury, and followed my headlights up the short winding road to the top of Mount Riga.
It was a summer colony of plain unheated cabins dotting a strip of land between two lakes. The warden’s cabin stood nearest the road. I remembered him from that summer four years ago—a tall man with a high forehead and a glass eye. I remembered his cabin as I did all the colony: a place of vivid simplicity, the weathered wood set off against the green of the surrounding grass and trees, and, in the background, the lake’s dark but sun-dappled blue. Now my headlights shone over it as they might over an abandoned car: shuttered, it had no windows, no face. The wooden gate in front was drawn down, blocking the way. I stopped the car, pulled a flashlight from the glove compartment, and got out. The night was cold, the air laden with unborn snow, the moon obscured by clouds—not a breeze stirring, not a sound save for the brief ticking of the engine as it cooled. I zipped up my coat, pulled on gloves. Switching on the flashlight I set out on foot along a dirt path, around the wooden gate and past the warden’s empty cabin.
Cabin number four was on the water. I approached it from the footpath, shone my light on it at first from a distance, and it was hazy, blurred, and dark. As I drew closer its form grew more distinct, like a memory emerging from the murky remnants of a dream. I came to the front door and it was locked. The windows were shuttered. I ran the light over the door, and there was the name I remembered: “Hyacinth,” carved into the wood—as inexplicable as “Rosebud.” We had not owned this place; we had spent a single summer here and then never found our way back. We had been visitors. I tried the door again but it would not open, and then I walked around to the lake side and up the two steps to the uncovered porch. The rear door was locked, too, the window closed up. But someone had left a folded beach chair leaning against the railing. It was covered with rust. I unfolded it and sat down facing the still, black water.
Time passed. And I stayed awake and remembered.
A diving float sits in the water like a square white cake. Josh is six; everything he attempts is an event. He spends entire days on the float—diving, climbing out, diving—and I spend my days watching him. His naked shoulders and hopeful resolve. His certainty that the rest of life exists simply to get the dive right. He bursts from the water with his back arched, face turned up to the sun. . . .
But then, one day, the diving abruptly stops. He is standing on the porch when I wake up. It is barely past seven and I emerge from our room and say good morning to him, and like a child prophet he points down the lake and says: “Swans.” That is all. I join him on the porch. And there, by the water’s far edge, floats a pair of those majestic birds. Josh tugs on my arm. “Dad, can we go look?”
We climb into the canoe, Josh in the bow. I insist that he wear a life preserver. At first he tries to paddle, but the paddle is too long and heavy for him, and in the end he has to put it away; only my paddle eddies beneath the polished blue surface of the water as we glide along. The sun is ahead of us, low but already hot, turning that end of the lake into a mirror of sky. The swans float upon it. I watch my son on his knees from behind, finding something poignant and indelible in his hands gripping the gunwales, the slope of his shoulders, the tilt of his head to the water. We pass in front of another cabin, on whose porch a man is doing deep knee bends. And then, as though caught in the moving silence of a dream, we find ourselves nearing the swans, who at this moment are feeding, their necks extended and their heads hidden beneath the water.
“It’s running away,” Josh whispers.
Sensing our approach, one of the swans has raised its head and is swimming briskly for the far bank. Its partner remains behind, feeding complacently.
“It doesn’t see us,” Josh whispers.
We have drawn within ten feet of the feeding swan. I am in awe and can only imagine how my son must feel: the bird is a pure, godly white. The curve of its neck where it disappears into the water is thrilling. I open my paddle to slow our pace as the canoe drifts closer. The feeding swan does not move, does not even raise its head.
“Dad,” Josh says.
Something in his tone sends a warning: he sounds suddenly close to panic.
“What is it, Josh?”
He does not have time to answer. Drifting, the canoe bumps the great white bird from behind, toppling it: and the bloody, headless neck rises from the water—
A frog splashed the water’s edge and I started. The night was cold and black. The onyx surface of lake rippled, broke to shadows and random glimmers of light. Pale breaths steamed from my nostrils. I put a hand over my mouth and smelled old leather, my father’s glove.
PART FOUR
Dwight
It finally began to turn light outside. It always does. I stood at the window, watching it happen.
A Friday morning in November, and I was thinking about my son. Remembering when he was a little boy just learning to talk, the feel of his arms hugging my neck as I carried him around the house, his grip tightening on me whenever he grew scared or happy. Not so long ago in years, and yet a thing so decidedly past it seemed to live in its own time, back beyond my reach.
Outside, now, it looked like snow coming, and winter behind it; it looked cold. And I stood trying to make a plan of some kind, trying to make some sense. But I was too tired to do much. The long night awake had left me spent.
There’s no point in stating the obvious, but I will anyway, for my own reasons: not getting caught isn’t the same thing as being free.
While I was away from Sam those years, kept from seeing h
im, reduced to a pen pal, all I could think about was getting back to him. By hook or crook. You come back on your knees if you have to, find whatever house is empty, take the job that will take you. The pieces of your life are a jigsaw puzzle—no more, no less—and you set about fitting them together again, always keeping in your mind the image on the puzzle box that got incinerated while you were living elsewhere: the image of your life as a bruised yet still decent enterprise. Without which, it must be said, you are finished.
Now I found the clicker, opened the garage door, stepped outside the house into the new morning: gray sky tinged with winter, a sludgelike cold in the bones. Not a good day for courage or making plans. I walked across the lawn to the garage. The car was there, midnight blue body dulled by a coating of dust, the broken headlight, the history. And in the opposite corner, by the worktable, a file cabinet. I went to it, opened the bottom drawer, and pulled out a folder. Inside the folder was a copy of my last will and testament—a document I’d prepared myself when Ruth and I got married, had updated when Sam was born, had revised after the divorce, and had updated again just last year. It’s a lawyer’s job to always be careful, never to be caught short. Now, standing in the garage, I read it over again.
In the event of my death, all that I owned, minus debts payable, was to be left to my son. Whether he be good or bad, sweet or angry, happy or frightened, whole or shattered; whether he love his father and mourn him or be thankful that he is gone.
Reservation Road Page 21
