Ethan
The night was over.
I stuck my head in Emma’s room and listened until I could hear her breathing. Then I went down the hall, undressed outside our bedroom, and stole inside. All was still, early-morning dark, Grace a long raised shadow on the bed, the white pillow luminous around her face like a halo. I slid into bed beside her. She stirred, turning toward me.
“Ethan?”
“Shh. Go back to sleep.”
“You’re freezing.”
“I’m all right.”
There was a pause. I lay staring up into the depthless air and saw imposed on it, floating as though on a night-black sea, the white diving float.
“Did you go to the lake?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“A little more,” Emma said.
She was seated at the kitchen table, spoon in hand. I stood beside her pouring milk into her cereal bowl.
“A little more, please,” I said.
“A little more, please.”
I heard footsteps and looked up. Grace entered the kitchen in flannel bathrobe and slippers.
“You’re spilling!” Emma said.
I had not stopped pouring; I looked down: a small puddle of milk on the table. Another night of sleeplessness had left my senses dulled and jittery. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I’ll clean it up.”
“I’ll do it,” Grace said. I felt her fingers graze my shoulder as she passed to the sink for a sponge. Emma and I watched her wipe up the mess I’d made.
“Thank you.”
Grace did not smile, but I could see she was trying. She’d brushed her hair. She seemed awake in some way she had not been in a long time. I could not remember, I suddenly thought, the last time the three of us had all been present for breakfast.
I asked her if she wanted coffee.
“I can do it,” she replied. She went to the counter and poured a mug for herself and brought it to the table and sat down next to Emma. I sat, too. The room was silent save for the ticking of the clock on the wall. Emma had put down her spoon and was staring at her mother, her face caught in an expression—a kind of wordless, intimate, brave questioning—that made her seem years older. And then Grace reached out and with her finger tucked a few loose strands of Emma’s hair behind her ear. “Eat your cereal, sweetie. It’s almost time for school.”
From outside, through the doors and windows battened down against the bitter early cold, Sallie’s barking reached us, faint yet vibrant, like a favorite voice remembered from childhood.
The sky was the color of old pewter. And the dog ran streaking over the grass and the unraked leaves.
“It’s winter,” I said.
After breakfast, I got Emma bundled up and took her out to wait for the school bus. Sallie joined us at the edge of the road, wagging her tail. Emma stroked the dog between the ears and talked to her.
“Sallie, you be careful when the bus comes.”
The bus appeared up the road, a yellow streak against a background of gray and brown. I looked up at the sky, imagining it snowing soon, the snow gathering over our road and trees and house and barn.
Emma said, “How much did Josh’s violin cost?”
I looked down at her. “It doesn’t matter,” I said as gently as I could.
“But how much?”
“Your mother and I don’t want you to worry about that,” I said. “All right?”
She was silent. The school bus, driven by Mr. Peoples, passed us slowly, on its way to turn around a bit farther down the road; Emma was the final pickup. I looked up and saw children’s faces, some still sleepy-eyed, behind the closed windows, and then the bus turned around, red taillights flashing, the warning beeper sounding as the wheels reversed. It came to a stop in front of us and the doors opened with a whoosh.
“Bye,” I said. I bent down and kissed her. “I love you.”
“Bye,” she said, already looking past me into the bus.
She climbed on. With a thrifty nod of his head, Mr. Peoples closed the doors. He waited as Emma walked down the aisle and found an empty seat in the middle of the bus, on the side nearer to me, next to a sandy-haired boy. I recognized the boy. And then the bus shifted into gear and slowly began to pull away.
Emma never did look back. But Sam Arno did. He turned full to the window and waved at me—unsmiling, painfully serious, a shy boy looking as though he wanted to talk.
I watched the bus until it disappeared. And though the boy was gone, I was still seeing him like an after-image burned into my mind: my son’s age but not my son. Fair where Josh had been dark, but small like him, serious like him, asking questions of the world in the same unmade voice. Hearing him now, seeing him as he stood on a stage in a school gym holding his trumpet, looking as though he wanted to crawl inside it, his bruised and bloodshot eye caught under the bright lights for all to see. And his mother with him, embarrassed, helpless: “You’re probably all wondering about Sam’s eye,” she was saying. “Well, he was out with his father, Dwight, last week and they got in a little accident. . . .”
A cold wind gusted, sending dead leaves scrabbling along the road edge around my feet. I ducked my head against the chill. Sallie trotted off, came back, and poked my thigh with her muzzle; she wanted to go inside now. I checked my watch and with a feeling of vague consternation discovered that it was later than I’d thought. Fridays I had a full schedule—a ten o’clock and a twelve o’clock followed by office hours after lunch and a faculty meeting at five. I went into the house to gather my books.
Grace was upstairs in the shower; a distant thrumming came from the hot-water heater in the pantry. In my study I filled my briefcase and then stood at my desk bent over a blank sheet of notepaper. I wrote “Grace”—and then I paused, the pen hovering just above the paper, as I tried to decide what else to say. I saw the three of us sitting at the breakfast table . . . but at this instant it all felt too momentous and pressured and I could not seem to find the right words. It was the Arno boy again, trespassing on my thoughts, as if with that long look through the bus window he had in some impossible way attached himself to me. Finally, in frustration, I scrawled the rest of the note—“Back for dinner. Love, E.”—and grabbed my bag and hurried out to the car. I glanced up at our bedroom windows to see if she might be watching, but I saw no one. And then I drove away.
I made it through Wyndham Falls, on the road to Canaan. But in my eyes now as I drove was neither the day ahead nor the hard tarnished sky but Sam Arno’s face, looking back at me through glass. A boy in an accident. In a car. A boy bounced around in a car like a pinball—“He was out with his father, Dwight, last week . . .”—at the whim and mercy of his father.
I was entering Canaan now, a town I knew. I turned right at the blinking yellow stoplight, north onto Route 7, and in a minute or two I saw the little green road sign ahead on the right. It was Reservation Road, heading off to the east. I slowed down. I was still seeing him: Sam Arno on the porch, awash in light, petting a dog, telling me a story. But transfigured now, a dream figure whose eye had healed as if by magic. A boy too serious, too quiet, too old and too young for who he was. A boy my son’s age. I wanted to take him in my arms, hold him like my own.
He was speaking to me.
“My dad drove over this dog on the road. It was an accident. During the summer.”
The road ran off to the east, a shortcut to nowhere, a gash in a dark wood. I took it now. Onto black tar, between trees naked of leaves, past a swamp buried in bramble: leave this day behind. Ahead just a memory waiting like a lost love and the young unmade voice calling out: “I was asleep when we hit it but Dad said it was black and we killed it. . . . I got a black eye. . . .”
The turn appeared ahead. The first of two. It curved to the left, and I took it speeding faster than I’d thought and as the car swung around into the second, sharper, rightward turn I heard the tires bite the road and felt the sudden centripetal acceleration and straightening as Tod’s Gas and Auto Body eme
rged from the clearing like a nightmare vision. I braked suddenly. The car went skidding and screeching past the two gas pumps to where the weeds and scrub brush began and came to a halt.
I left the engine running. It had happened here. I got out of the car. My breath thin, drops of sweat streaking my glasses, the air cold and bitter. It had happened here. I turned from the roadside where Josh had lain with his chest crushed and blood pooling in his mouth, and looked past the two pumps, back along the narrow two-lane road. The car had come from there. And it was still summer.
Dwight
Two o’clock rolled around, and I was still at home. Sitting in the den like a resident catatonic. Hearing the phone ring three separate times and the answering machine pick up, and Donna’s voice saying my name, first as a question, and finally as an insult. I let it all flow by. I just couldn’t do it.
The day was like a mirror of itself, or maybe of me: it kept passing, and yet it stretched ahead too. Endless. In it I was nobody and nothing, just a pinpoint ship on a gray horizon, a faceless mirage. I wasn’t coming any closer, wasn’t coming into focus. Something had changed, skipped away when I’d thought I had it marked and fixed. I felt weak and small. And I remembered, for some reason, a day, I must have been eighteen, when I left my college dorm and drove over to North Haven to see my old man. I didn’t call ahead. We hadn’t spoken in months, but from an aunt in Meriden I’d heard he’d had some heart trouble and was hoping to see me.
The day was sunny and warm, full spring, and I drove through the familiar streets, the cramped, aluminum-sided houses and weedy yards and chain-link fences and cracked pavement. At the end of my block kids I knew were playing whiffle ball. There was Mrs. Grimaldi standing on her lawn in a cheap housedress, holding a rust-stained parasol. She waved and I waved back. I had a stitch in my side, sweat starting down my face. I kept going slowly. Ahead, parked on the street, I saw my old man’s brown Le Mans, and then his house, the house I grew up in, the front door light dangling off its wire, an upstairs window taped over with cardboard, everything gone wrong since my mother died. In the yard the grass stood a foot high, spotted with dandelions. He was sitting in the middle of it all, on a bent deck chair, like a sick king on a broken throne, a shriveled old man, stooped and small, not yet fifty. We watched each other closely as I drove by. It was the last I ever saw of him.
I got up from the sofa, went into the kitchen. In a juice glass I poured myself a bourbon and drank it off. I poured myself another and left it standing on the counter where I could look at it. Then I reached for the phone and dialed the office. Donna picked up as I knew she would.
“Cutter and Trope,” she said.
“Donna.”
There was a pause signaling recognition, then a little suck of breath. “Jack wants to know where you are,” she demanded.
“Home,” I said.
“I’ve been calling. Where the hell have you been?”
“Home.”
“Liar. Listen to me, Dwight. You’ve really managed to piss him off this time.”
“I’m calling in sick. Tell Jack he can go fuck himself.”
“You’re not sick.”
“You have no idea.”
“Dwight, listen to me”—abruptly her voice had turned to a whisper—“I can’t keep covering for you.”
“Then don’t. I never asked you to.”
“That’s right, you didn’t,” she said coldly.
“In fact,” I said, “I recommend we all start telling the truth around here. The whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
“What are you talking about?”
I brought the glass to my lips and finished what was in it.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Dwight?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Are you okay?” All of a sudden a note of concern in her voice, a sign of care. I wished that I was with her.
“No,” I said. “I’m not okay. I’m sick.”
She let out a sigh of frustration. “Dwight, listen to me! Just pull yourself together and get in here. I swear Jack’ll fire you this time. He’s just looking for a reason.”
“Well, if he does, he can go fuck himself.”
There was a silence. I set the glass down on the counter again; empty, it made a hollow ring.
“Donna?”
“I can’t do this any more,” she said. She sounded suddenly on the brink of giving up.
“Donna, I’m sorry.”
“No, Dwight,” she said sadly. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”
And she hung up.
I stood with the receiver against my ear, as if she was still on the other end of the line, talking. Then I put it down. Something had been set in motion, but its image was fuzzy, blurred. Only courage makes things clear, and I couldn’t seem to find any. I walked through the house to my bedroom. I pulled shirts off hangers, grabbed underwear and socks and pants out of the laundry hamper, filled two duffel bags with clothes and set them aside. From the table drawer I took out the thick packet of Sam’s letters. And then, as if it was an island surrounded by sharks, I crawled to the center of the big round bed and curled up, hugging the letters to my chest.
Ethan
Inside the school the bell was ringing, closed in, far-off: two-thirty. I got out of the car. I’d been waiting since noon and my legs were stiff. In the meantime the parking lot had filled. Clusters of parents stood by, waiting for their children. I nodded to the ones I knew, smiled, looked away. Between us the yellow school bus, nose pointing toward the road, Mr. Peoples sitting at the helm with a newspaper spread over the wheel. A scene typical, yet strange today, ominous, it seemed to me: the world holding its breath for a little boy. Stillness and waiting and the gray, wintering light. And now from within the building, bell silenced, the first distant yells and thundering of footsteps.
This was not knowledge but an inkling, demanding confirmation. I would have it. That morning, from the gas station on Reservation Road I had gone to Smithfield; somehow, I had made it through my ten o’clock, lecturing innocent young souls on the false heroics of humankind as represented in our finest literature. What I said I have no idea. When it was over, I left a note on my office door claiming sudden illness and drove over to the elementary school to wait.
It was not feeling yet; that was still on the outskirts. These two and a half hours in the car were not about feeling. I sat in a kind of trance, as if awaiting a judgment preordained, from on high, words that would simply confirm what I had always known to be true. What would happen afterwards was as far from my capacity of thought as the moon.
Mr. Peoples, like a rabbit sensing a fox, lifted his head and sniffed. He folded his newspaper and squared himself on his seat: they were coming. A wild throng of children burst, walking and running, from the doors of the school, a sea of moving color and deafening noise, heading for the parking lot. A hundred of them or fifty. Taking a few steps forward, I spotted him near the front of the pack, dressed all in denim, carrying a plastic instrument case like a burned-out salesman. My heart had begun to pound. I called out to him.
“Sam!”
Hearing his name, he halted in midstride, forcing the moving line of children to part around his body. He turned and I raised my hand in greeting and though he didn’t smile I saw recognition lift his face. Stiffly, awkwardly I waved him over. In no time at all he was standing before me, his open face silently questioning, the instrument case—a trumpet—hugged to his chest between the blue nylon straps of his backpack.
I was sweating. My throat was tight; my voice when it came sounded like something squeezed from a tube. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he said.
“What are you doing?”
He shrugged. “Goin’ home.”
I nodded, crossed my arms over my chest, cleared my throat; leaned back against the trunk of my car, hoping to appear like a man who might do such a thing naturally, without motive or guile. “Do you want a ride?” I said. “I’ll drive you.”
He paused, looking from me to my car, studying us both as though for some sign of the warnings his mother doubtless had given him about strange men and cars and offers of rides. His clothes were baggy and too thin for the weather; inside them he floated, a small, pale body. Finally, almost sorrowfully, he shook his head. “I’m not supposed to.”
“I understand,” I said.
One by one, I saw children climbing onto the school bus beyond him. He will go now, I thought. Deep in my chest, like the first blind step into quicksand, the stirrings of desperation.
But then, suddenly, Sam set the trumpet case down on the ground. “So . . . um,” he mumbled, “are you here ’cause of . . . ?” Suddenly out of words, he looked down.
“You mean Emma? My daughter.”
He nodded.
“She should be out any minute,” I said.
“You gonna drive her home?”
“Maybe.”
“Is she sad, too?”
“What?”
“Because of Josh.”
“Yes,” I said. “She’s sad, too.”
“I think she’s nice,” he said.
“Thank you, Sam.”
I glanced above his head again. The bus already half full of children. I could see them through the rectangular, metal-framed windows, backpack-humped bodies moving along the aisle to empty seats, sitting down, until just heads were visible and it was all a puppet show.
I looked back at him. His gaze had wandered. I cleared my throat and said his name.
He looked up at me. Immediately I focused on a spot on his forehead, any place but his eyes.
I said, “I took Sallie for a walk this morning.”
Silence.
“Remember Sallie?”
“Your dog?” he said.
“Right.” I tried a smile now but it froze on my lips. Hopeless-ness, frustration, somewhere behind it shame. I could feel the sweat beginning to slide down the side of my face. I made myself go on. “And while I was walking her I started thinking about the conversation you and I had the other weekend. Remember, Sam? Because we talked a lot about dogs.”
Reservation Road Page 22
