Reservation Road

by John Burnham Schwartz

  “I remember,” he said.

  “And about how you were asleep in the car with your father, and when you woke up he told you he’d hit a dog on the road and killed it. Remember that?”

  Sam nodded. “A black dog.”

  “That’s right. And I was just wondering if you remembered when that happened.”

  The boy said nothing, turned now and glanced back at the school bus, saw it still filling with children. The shouts and games of others. His feet shifted under him, a restless tic. Finally, he turned back to me.

  “During the summer,” he said.

  “I know. I mean what day.”

  “July. After the all-star break.”

  “Can you tell me what day it was?”

  “Sunday.”

  There was no particular inflection to his voice. It was just a day. He had no idea what it meant. I felt a tingling in my arms and fingers as if from a mild electric shock.

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “We were coming back from the game,” he said. “My dad got box seats. The Sox beat the Yanks. Mo Vaughn hit a slam in the sixteenth. He’s my favorite player after they traded Boggs to the Yanks.”

  “Can you tell me what time it was?”

  He shook his head. I ran the sleeve of my coat across my brow; it came away wet.

  “Was it dark?”

  “When I woke up it was.”

  “Right after the accident?”

  He nodded. “I got a black eye against the door. A shiner.”

  “You were sleeping low down in the seat?”

  “Yeah.”

  I took a step back from him. I was seeing it again. The car coming from the left in the darkness. The one dark shadow behind the wheel, the orange pinpoint of the cigarette. Nothing else. But a boy there this time, asleep and invisible.

  “Sam?” I said.

  He was looking at the bus again. It was nearly full. At the sound of my voice he glanced at the trumpet case by his feet. His feet shifting again, as though he had to pee.

  “Um, I gotta go, Mr. Learner. Mr. Peoples gets really pissed off if we make him wait.”

  “Sam,” I said.

  I knew what I was doing: just his name once and he went still. His name that I’d heard shouted twice on a dark road as the father drove on. Just his name now in a stern man’s voice, a father’s voice, the one that demands an answer. He looked up at me like a guilty son.

  I said, “I want you to tell me the name of the road where your father hit the dog.”

  Minutes seemed to pass, while I looked on hardly breathing.

  And then, finally, he nodded.

  “It’s the shortcut,” he said, as if reciting a fact he was proud to have committed to memory. “It’s called Reservation Road. My dad told me.”

  Suddenly, the bus motor roared to life. Mr. Peoples pressed the horn. Sam reached down and grasped the handle of the trumpet case, hoisted it up, and hugged it once again to his chest.

  “I gotta go now, Mr. Learner,” he said, already moving toward the bus. “Bye.”

  “Good-bye, Sam.”

  I watched him climb on, move down the aisle, find a last empty seat. Soon he had become a face like all the rest, seen at a distance through glass; he might have been anyone’s. The bus shifted into gear.

  I saw Emma then. Sitting at the back of the bus, her blond hair like a sun spot in a thundercloud, her face flush to the window in confusion and distress at the sight of me. Somehow, we had missed each other, and now it was too late. I called out her name but the bus didn’t stop. It pulled out of the parking lot, turned west, and disappeared down the road.

  Dwight

  Around six that same Friday evening I drove over to Ruth’s. By that hour it was dark. The porch light was on, and two cars I’d never seen before were parked in the drive next to Ruth’s green wagon and Norris’s pale blue Mercury sedan. It looked like a dinner party. I sat in my parked car for a minute or more, forehead touching the wheel, my hand groping blindly for the glove box and the pint bottle inside. I got hold of it, lifted my chin, and drank. As I did, I found myself staring directly into the lighted window of Sam’s room upstairs, but I didn’t see him.

  Walking across the grass, I heard their voices, raucous and probably juiced with a martini or two, and caught a glimpse of them through the living-room windows. They were sitting around the fireplace. Some guy was laughing like a horse. It all looked pretty cozy.

  In and out, I was telling myself, in and out. You know why you’re here. Just get in, get your son, and get out. I was on the porch, caught by that light I’d hooked up so long ago. I was knocking on the door, thinking how the source of things always seemed to get lost in the shuffle of events and the passage of time, that was just how things were.

  It was Norris who opened the door. My bad luck. He was wearing a green blazer and a yellow button-down and his face was glowing like something dipped in oil.

  “Dwight!” he greeted me. This was not enthusiasm. More like shock, what you might say if you found a man standing naked in your bedroom closet.

  Intending to defuse matters right away, I leaned in close and spoke softly. “Norris, listen. I need you to do me a favor.”

  “It’s Friday night, Dwight,” Norris said, recovering his usual bouncy tone. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I need to talk to Ruth.”

  “Why’re you whispering?”

  “Just go and get Ruth for me, Norris. Would you do that? I need to talk to her.”

  Norris looked at me. He seemed to be considering, in his insurance-man’s way, the validity and cost of my claim. Finally, he shook his head. “Sorry, Dwight, I don’t think Ruth would appreciate the interruption just now.”

  “Norris,” I said, “it’s important. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Just go and get her for me.”

  “Actually, Dwight, we’re having a little dinner party here. Kind of a major shindig, if you want to know—”

  Norris stopped talking and looked down. I’d taken a fistful of his left lapel.

  “Listen carefully to me, Norris. I want to talk to Ruth now. Okay?”

  “Okay, Dwight. I get your point.” Norris’s face had turned a deep pink. “But I want you to know I don’t appreciate this. I’m going to hold it against you, in fact. Here in my own home, I mean. A man shouldn’t be touched by another man in his own home.”

  “In principle I agree with you,” I said.

  “Norris,” Ruth called out from the living room, “who’s that you’re talking to?”

  “Nobody, honey!” Norris called back over his shoulder, a little too cheerily.

  In a minute we heard the sound of her heels against the wood floor coming toward us.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Norris said to me under his breath.

  “Norris . . . ,” Ruth was saying as she reached the door. Then she saw me and her face fell about a foot. “I should’ve known.”

  “Ruth, I need to talk to you.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Ruth, listen—”

  “No, you listen. This isn’t your house. You can’t just show up here any time you feel like it and demand to talk to me. I’ve got a life. We’ve got people over. So good night. If you want to talk to me you can talk to me Sunday. Move, Norris.”

  Norris stepped aside briskly and Ruth started to close the door on me.

  I grabbed the knob and stopped the door halfway. “Listen, Ruth . . .”

  She kept pushing but the door wouldn’t budge. “Are you drunk?” she demanded.

  I shook my head.

  “Goddamnit, Dwight, let go of the door.”

  “I need to see Sam, Ruth. I need to see him.”

  “You want me to call the police, Ruth?” Norris said hopefully.

  Ruth waved him away. Still pushing on the door, she said to me through clamped teeth, “You can see him Sunday.”

  “No.”

  “Goddamnit, Dwight!”

  “Ruth,” I said, “I can�
��t wait till Sunday.”

  Maybe it was something in my voice: all of a sudden she stopped pushing on the door and so did I, and she eyed me through the opening with angry but considering eyes. Then the door gave another couple of inches and I saw the long red dress she was wearing, the same dress she’d worn at the concert back in August.

  “Norris,” she said, “you’d better go back to our guests. God knows what they must be thinking by now.”

  “But Ruth—”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “If you say so,” he said reluctantly, and went back into the living room.

  To me Ruth said, “You’ve got one minute.” She stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind her. The night was cold and she rubbed her arms to warm herself.

  “You want my coat?” I offered.

  “The only thing I want from you is an explanation. And it better be good.”

  “I’m going away, Ruth.”

  She stopped rubbing her arms and looked at me.

  “I’m leaving the state,” I said.

  I’d expected the news to shock her, maybe even sadden her, but there was none of that. She merely nodded, looking me in the eyes with an unsettling directness, as if she knew right then all that I was about and all that I’d done.

  I looked away.

  “It’s time for a change,” I said lamely. “Things around here have gone kind of stale for me.” I paused. “Things aren’t really working too well.”

  “You mean your life,” Ruth said.

  “Yeah.”

  She was rubbing her arms again. They were slender, light-catching arms, just as I remembered, and I took off my coat and slipped it over her shoulders.

  “Thanks.”

  I tried on a smile. “Any time.”

  “When time’s gone by, Dwight,” she said, and the loaded seriousness of her tone dragged the sad little smile right off my face, “and you’ve found yourself another life and haven’t been around here for a while, I want you to remember how tonight I never asked you what kind of trouble you’re in. I want you to remember that, okay?”

  “Okay, Ruth.”

  “What you have to live with is your own business. That’s between you and your conscience. But Sam’s my business. He’s our son. And that’s how it is. And you remember that.”

  I said that I would remember that always, and it was the truth. And Ruth leaned back against the porch railing, her hair shining in that light, and let out a breath like a sigh, like a hand letting go of what it had long been holding. What fell away was me.

  “You came here for Sam,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “You want to go up and see him?”

  “I want him to come and spend tonight in my house,” I said. “That’s the only thing I want. I want just for once to wake up in my own house and find my son there with me. That’ll be enough.”

  Ruth shook her head. “No.”

  Her voice was firm, and I felt some last small hope start to crumble. “Please, Ruth.”

  “Why should I? I mean, would you, if you were me? I doubt that. It’s Friday night and you’ve had a drink or two. I know you, Dwight. I know all about you.”

  “It’s my last chance,” I said.

  “That’s your own doing, and you know it.”

  She stood looking at me for a long moment. I saw a nugget of hard black pity in her eyes that hurt as much as anything she’d ever said to me. Then she turned her back on me and stared out into the cold night, her breath painting the darkness beyond the reach of the porch light.

  “I remember waking up every morning believing you were going to change,” she said.

  The wistfulness in her voice caught me by surprise, struck a wound somewhere in my memory: I remembered too. More than anything I wanted to put my arms around her now. But I did nothing.

  “I’m sorry, Ruth. You know I am.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said abruptly, turning around to face me again. “What’s past is past.” It was as if she’d just woken from a bad dream. She lifted my coat off her shoulders and handed it to me. “Thanks, Dwight, but no thanks.”

  I put my coat back on. She turned and walked to the door, stopped there, and looked back.

  “I’ll fix up an overnight bag for him,” she said. “He can spend tonight at your place. But it’ll be the last time.”

  She went inside.

  Ethan

  I drove home that afternoon with the man’s name in my mouth. Spitting out the vowels and consonants to myself, over and over, like a diver, alone in green watery light, murmuring to himself at the end of the high board.

  The car grew stifling. My muscles ached from their own pent-up tension. I rolled down the window and let in the cold gray air, wood smoke and metal. More than ever it looked like snow.

  What do you do with a truth like this? Where do you put it? Ideas don’t help. Ideas are nothing. Facts are what matter. Facts were what they’d made of my son in the newspapers, facts were the only language of the police—telling me his history based on his vital statistics as noted in their ledgers. Telling me what they didn’t know and what they wouldn’t do.

  I saw them sitting at their desks with their guns at their waists like substitute souls, and their eyes were heavy-lidded with indifference. And they did nothing.

  It was, finally, a message any fool could have figured out.

  You gather your own facts. You take a memory, a shadow in a car at night, your son’s broken body by the roadside. You take a man’s name. You put the facts together. And when you have the facts together, you place the man’s name on your tongue and you hold it there against indifference and forgetting, against murder and denial. You do not let it go. You take responsibility for what will happen. You do it yourself, because no one else is going to.

  Grace had put her car in the barn, which in bad weather we used as a garage; she must have felt snow coming, too. I left my own car in the driveway.

  They were sitting, mother and daughter, at the kitchen table. I appeared in the doorway like a stranger, a visitor happening by chance upon a scene of settled domesticity. Grace had made hot chocolate, arranged some cookies on a plate. Anyone could see that she was trying hard. The kitchen was warm, its lights burning brightly. But Emma looked as if she’d been crying, and there were lines on my wife’s face that I had never seen before.

  “Ethan. What are you doing home?”

  “I, uh . . .”

  “You were at school,” Emma put in accusingly.

  “You went by Emma’s school?” Grace said.

  I nodded dumbly. The room was warm and bright.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I have a terrible headache,” I mumbled. “I think I’ll lie down.”

  I retreated to my study, closed the door, sat on the wingback chair. I wanted to be alone, to think, but exhaustion wouldn’t allow it. I had not slept in so long that now, when I most needed an agile, focused mind, the feeling was of being trapped under an all-encompassing weight, like being buried up to my neck in sand. Time seemed to be running away from me, never to be caught.

  There was a knock. Perhaps I said something, because Grace entered, bringing Tylenol and water. I thanked her. She was about to leave. Then at the door she paused.

  “Did something happen today?”

  “It’s the headache,” I answered.

  She looked at me with a steady gaze. She seemed about to ask another question, but in the end she said nothing and left the room.

  Outside, it grew dark, afternoon passing into evening. A bitter wind rose up, rattling the windows, as I sat trying to convince myself of things already decided and things not yet decided.

  And then another knock, this time Emma, carrying a dinner tray. The tray was heavy for her and she gripped it fiercely, as though it were an animal trying to leap away and she would not let it. Knife and fork slid, clattering; the glass of water rocked but did no
t tip over. I took the tray from her.

  “Thanks, Em.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said soberly.

  “What time is it?” I glanced at my watch. “Eight-thirty. Almost bedtime.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m sorry about this afternoon. I was confused.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’ll be up to kiss you good night.”

  “Promise?” she said.

  Before I could reply she was gone.

  In a little while I went upstairs. She was in her pajamas, in her bed, under the covers. Twigs was with her, tucked under an arm. Sallie lay on the floor in the corner. I sat down on the edge of the bed. Her eyes were bluer than I had ever truly noticed and they were gazing up at me, fixed and knowing.

  “Are you sleepy?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Well, try. Close your eyes.”

  Her eyes remained open, staring at me. “Will you tell me a story?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Please.”

  “Okay.” I waited, not knowing if anything would come to me. Then slowly I began. “Once upon a time there was a man,” I said, “and he was silly. A silly man. But he had a beautiful daughter and—”

  “And a son?” Emma broke in.

  I paused. Like falling into a bottomless pool of sadness. “What?”

  “And a son.”

  “Yes.” Her hands—her pale hands with the already chewed nails and the ragged cuticles—were beautiful, resting atop the bedcovers; I placed my own hands over them, feeling at the wrist the faint beat of her pulse. “And a son.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “The man was cursed,” I said. “One day he’d run into a goat on a bridge and the goat had put a curse on him. He could never go to sleep before his daughter did. He had to stay up until he was absolutely positive she was asleep. That was the curse.”

  “Is that what made him silly?”

  “Yes. Silly and cursed.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing. That’s the end.”