Then Sam came back into the house and into the office and kissed him on the head. He reached beneath a scattered folio of blueprints, pulled out the thick paperback of The Brothers Karamazov and gave it to Luc, saying it was a new, definitive translation by a husband and wife. Disoriented, daunted at first, Luc took the book, turned it over to read the synopsis and said, “I’ve never read Dostoyevsky.”
“There happens to be a great Russian lit professor at Carleton.”
Luc looked up at him. “How do you know?”
“I studied with him.”
“Really?” Luc grinned. “And he’s still there?”
Sam cuffed him on the shoulder. “Smart ass. I’m sure there are other professors I studied with who are still there. Anyway, I was thinking if you like this, maybe you’ll take his course in the spring.”
“It’s my last year,” Luc reminded him. “I still have requirements for my major. And I don’t know if this one is even offered.”
“Oh, it’s offered. I checked.”
“Ah.” An awkward moment and then Luc said, “Funny how my parents never suggested I take even a single course.”
“Well, you’re into econ and government. They probably figured you don’t have the time for something like this.”
Luc laughs. “I almost took—I wanted to take—art history. But I didn’t . . . because, well, I’m not going in that direction anymore, so what’s the point.”
“You can always take that, too, in the spring.” Sam looked hopeful and Luc couldn’t help wishing his own father had shown this sort of concern.
“If I take art history and Russian lit, I’ll have to come back in the summer. To finish.”
“Wouldn’t be the end of the world. It’s your only college education, after all.”
Luc said, “But you understand why I’m studying what I’m studying, don’t you?”
“I think so.”
“Not always but too often whenever I try to go back to drawing, I start to feel the electricity thing. It’s like that part of my brain doesn’t want to be disturbed anymore, and bites me if I touch it. Does that make any sense?”
“Sure . . . it does.” But Sam’s tone is skeptical.
And so, wanting to please him, back at school, Luc sat down with Dostoyevsky one Sunday. He was resting a pulled thigh muscle as the result of a scrimmage. The warmth of late summer wafting through his window, he was lying on his bed and feeling unusually calm, even happy, knowing that he loved somebody completely and deeply, a man who lived only an hour away and whom he could visit whenever he wanted.
The book was different from anything he’d ever read. It moved slowly but had an urgency that he recognized and that seemed familiar. Then it came to him: Of course, this is the work of an epileptic mind, a mind like his, a mind that breaks down into blinding flashes and sounds, constantly flirting with a fit that might or might not give warning of its appearance. And what struck Luc was that every major character in the book seemed to come close to the edge of insanity, even crossed the border into it, but finally at the last minute stepped back to reason. What compelled him to keep reading was that he felt understood for once—and—ironically, by someone who’d lived in another century.
When Luc told Sam he was well into it, Sam suggested paying attention to Smerdyakov, the epileptic servant. But it was really Ivan whom Luc cleaved to, well before knowing that Ivan would be afflicted with a brain fever and told by a Moscow doctor that hallucinations would quite likely be in his condition. Ivan has already dreamed up The Grand Inquisitor, when Christ returns during the inquisition and, recognized, is sentenced to death. Then later on in delirium, Ivan meets with the Devil, who, dressed like a dandy, actually tells him that he wants to enter a church and offer a candle in simple-hearted faith. Reading about this hectic encounter makes Luc felt a bit more at home with the kinetic episodes of his off-kilter brain.
But there’s no electricity circulating now. He’s in the doldrums one moment and in terror the next. He hears the wind sluicing above his head, the brittle groans of winter, snow heaving and softly bellowing in the rising and falling temperatures. At a certain time of day, he can spy a glint of frozen field, the dapples of sun and the shadows of fence rails that elongate, then vanish as light ebbs away. And the murmur of the Millstone Creek grows louder at night. He knows the sound will increase in the melt, with the shore coming nearer and nearer. But it will be months before the river arrives and surely he’ll be somewhere else by then.
PART 2
Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive
the consequences of their recklessness.
—George Elliot, Middlemarch
February 18; Logan Airport, Boston, Massachusetts; 22 degrees, 20 miles visibility, light wind chop
Sam doesn’t know if it’s the increased dose of painkillers that the hospital has given him for traveling, or just his restive mind, but he finds himself narcotically daydreaming. He’s at an art opening in Lebanon, New Hampshire, noticing a plump woman with salt-and-pepper hair held in place with a girlish beret, a woman with a grave, florid face carrying a pitcher of red hibiscus tea with the nametag “Eleanor Flanders.” He can’t help staring at her, desperate to see Luc’s likeness in his mother’s face. Can she really be out in this harsh world so early in her grief? How can she get out of bed every day, knowing she’ll never see her son again? Sam has stared at her for too long, and she catches his gaze and migrates over to him.
With a slight air of annoyance she asks, “Do I know you?”
And he thinks: Grief has cracked open her soul, she’ll talk to anybody now because she’s so distraught, her life is ruined, it will never, ever be the same for her. As his own tears come, he tries to stanch them and manages to say, “I heard about your son. I’m so sorry for your loss. I was just thinking about . . . well, I lost . . . one, too.”
“Your son?” she asks, incredulous at such a coincidence.
He nods his head and says, “Yes,” and immediately feels the shame of his lie.
Her response is a fluted sigh, like a soul that keens every time it breathes. “Ah. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“I just hope people have been as kind to you as they’ve been to me,” she says, and then adds, “I wish you’d known him, I wish you’d known Luc.”
“I wish I did, too,” he says.
But then a day later she calls him at home, railing at him. Somebody has told her Sam never had a son and why would he tell her such a blatant, awful lie? He can say nothing to explain himself.
“And you did know Lucas,” she accuses, her voice stinging Sam with the sound of Luc’s proper name. “He was in your life in a way . . . I guess I have to try to understand that now, too, don’t I?”
“I guess you do,” Sam confesses.
“Because I think . . .” She falters and then proclaims, “Because I think he loved you.”
“No,” Sam says, “because I loved him.”
Sam wakes up with a shudder just as the plane begins descending. Looking out the window, he could swear that, just ahead of its wings, he spies a strand of lights illuminating a coastline, and then an ultramarine membrane stretching out before him in the early evening shadows. But then the ocean reshapes itself as land, as lights and matchbox houses, like the mirage of an inland sea. Maybe the painkillers are wearing off.
Mike is dozing peacefully in the seat next to him. After cashing in some mileage points to upgrade Sam to first class, Mike flew out to meet him in Salt Lake City. With ample room for his leg and the cast, Sam has been able to get up during the five-hour flight and move around to prevent the possibility of a blood clot, which is always a danger when one travels with a leg broken in several different places. Gina, Mike’s girlfriend, a tough-minded nurse practitioner from predominantly Irish Southie, will be meeting them at Logan’s curbside with
a rented van, and the three of them will drive up to Vermont. They will get Sam reestablished and figure out what outside help he will need until he is able to get around on his own without crutches.
Snow falling steadily over Boston softens the edges of the grittier neighborhoods, bringing yet another frozen stratum to a city brutally besieged by winter. During the final approach over icy Winthrop Bay, Sam remembers that a plane went down there in 1960 after its engines inhaled a flock of starlings; he imagines colliding with the bracing waves, almost like a transitory death wish. During landing he can see the dirty floes left by plows that have run out of places to push what looks like an urban glacier. During the eastward flight Mike described people in tantrums feuding over parking spaces, slashing tires, threatening bodily harm. Sam wishes for the luxury of worrying about where to park his car, anything to stem the relentless anxiety plaguing him over the disappearance of Luc Flanders.
In their last conversation in the hospital before Jenkins returned to Carleton, Sam was warned that, despite the evidence that supports Luc’s walking away from Skylight Pond, he would likely be damned in the court of public opinion. Jenkins explained that local people, unhinged by an unsolved disappearance of a university student, might feel the need to indict somebody. Even in a place supposedly as liberal as Vermont.
Arriving back in South Woodstock close to midnight, with Gina and Mike, Sam sees a familiar Volvo station wagon parked in front of his house, clouds of exhaust blooming in the sub-zero air. “That looks like Pete’s car,” Mike says.
“I think it is Pete’s car,” Sam agrees.
Gina says, “What the hell! Why is this guy out here in the middle of the night?”
“He’s somebody we went to school with,” Sam explains.
“Somebody you went to school with,” Mike gently reminds him that their age difference is four years.
Sam tells Gina that Pete is a local reporter for the Valley News. “I guess he wants to talk to me.”
“It’s pretty late. Isn’t this a little aggressive?”
“I . . . don’t think it has to be,” Sam says as they pull up to the Volvo, and Mike, on the passenger side, rolls down the window. “What’s going on, Pete?” Mike says in a flat tone, deliberately forbidding.
Bundled up in a tan Carhartt coat, Pete Skalski is a short, compact exceptionally fit man with widely set light gray eyes and buzzed blond hair.
“Hello Mike. I’m here to talk to Sam.”
“Because?” Gina asks from the driver’s side.
“Don’t worry,” Pete says. “I’m here unofficially.”
“Pull up a little bit, please,” Sam says to Gina. When she does, he manages to open the van’s sliding door to meet his friend’s uneasy gaze, “Hey there, Pete.”
Pete’s attention immediately trains on Sam’s cast. “Holy cow! How long will that be on?”
“They say I’ll be free by the end of April.”
“You’re lucky it’s your left leg and not your right. At least you’ll be able to drive.”
“That’s some consolation,” Sam says.
“Can we get you inside?” Gina’s protective, nursing instinct has kicked in.
“Just hang on thirty seconds, okay?” Mike asks her quietly.
Sam waits until he and Pete are looking squarely at each other. “What’s going on?”
“There were other reporters hanging out here earlier. I told them you weren’t coming back until tomorrow.”
“How did you know I was coming back tonight?”
“Heather Finlayson,” he says. “You forget that she takes care of my dog, too. I figured Panda had to be there.”
“Just tell him to come inside,” Gina insists. “We need to get you inside, Sam!”
Pete smiles sheepishly and tilts his head. He has quickly figured out that Gina is in charge. “I’ll help him,” he offers after Gina has pulled into the freshly plowed driveway. Turning to Sam, he says, “You can use my shoulder instead of a crutch from here to there, right?”
“Yeah, no problem.” Sam puts his arm around his friend. Once they are close and hobbling their way toward the side door, Sam says quietly, “So what’s going on, Pete? Why were you waiting?”
“Hoping to talk to you. My editor wants me to interview you.”
Sam draws back a little. “But how can you interview me? You’re biased. You’re my friend.”
“Simple. I’d disclose the fact that we know each other.”
Mike is now unlocking the door to Sam’s mudroom.
After a moment of consideration, Sam says, “Look, as you can see, I just got home. How about I’ll think about it?”
“That’s fine,” Pete says as he hands him off to Mike, who is standing just inside the door.
Once they are all inside, Sam says, “How’s Kristin, by the way?”
“She’s well,” Pete says. “She sends her love.”
* * *
“You almost lost it there,” Mike tells him the following morning. “Again. I wish you wouldn’t try and do everything yourself. Just let us—let people—help you.” He’s referring to Sam’s maneuvering around the kitchen, nearly collapsing with his crutches while trying to pour from a thermos of freshly made coffee.
Gina crosses her ample arms and admonishes, “If you fall and do any more damage to that leg, you may never walk right again, much less be able to ski.”
“I know. I know,” he says with exasperation. “I just hate not being able to take care of myself.”
She shakes her head and informs him, “You are going to have to rely on other people for a while. If you’d only stop resisting, you’ll make it easier on everybody else.”
“Okay, but it’s still going to be difficult finding anybody willing to come here and help me,” Sam says, referring to Jenkins’s “court of public opinion.”
“We just won’t look in the redneck pool,” Gina suggests.
“No, it’s not about rednecks,” Sam insists, going on to quote Jenkins that liberal as the region might seem, many New Englanders still sit in silent condemnation of love between men, and especially love between an older man and a much younger one.
“Even in this day and age?” Gina asks, dubious.
“Yes, believe it or not, ” Sam says.
“Besides, you can always get a visiting nurse.”
“I can’t afford a visiting nurse. My insurance won’t pay for it.”
“Well, we need to get you somebody’s help!” Mike insists as Sam hands him the metal crutches and sits down heavily on the sofa. Pain shoots up his leg so that he can’t help whimpering. “The only alternative is coming down to my house in Boston and living there. And I know you don’t want to do that.”
“I can’t do that!” Sam says, his temper flaring up in frustration. “How will I get my work done? I need to be at my desk, I need to see clients and have all my files, my plans, and my special printers. I’m already way behind. Besides, who’d take care of my Panda?” His black dog, an Australian shepherd mix, has drifted into the room. She looks at his cast and then at him with great worry in her intelligent, calculating eyes.
“She’s always welcome. You know that,” Mike says.
Although she had seemed jubilant earlier that morning when Mike went and fetched her home, Panda had greeted Sam more tentatively than usual. As though aware that he was injured, she even refrained from jumping all over him as she usually did whenever Sam returned from being away. Now she rubs her long fur coat against him, and he hugs her tightly, listening to her groan and whimper in pleasure. God, does he love this wise dog. And yet he thinks how desolate it’s going to be when Mike and Gina leave, just him and this big creaking house, a place where he once happily spent days and nights alone, until he met Luc, who filled the rooms with chatter and mirth and then left him to a profound, aching emptiness that made him fee
l even lonelier than when he had no romantic attachment in his life.
Gina resumes, “We just need to find you somebody around here to come in every day.”
As it turns out, the dog-sitter, Heather Finlayson, has a friend whose daughter, just out of high school, is looking for part-time work. Around noon, a sturdily built girl, fair-haired and slightly wall-eyed, arrives, and Sam can tell that she’s a bit of a misfit and, rather taciturn, not prone to making idle conversation. This, he decides, is probably a good thing. Gina speaks to her at length and, when satisfied that the girl can perform the needed tasks, spends the rest of an hour showing her how to help Sam up and giving tips on dealing with somebody relying on a pair of crutches.
It’s agreed that this young lady will come four hours a day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, and that Sam will pay her in cash. Once Gina formalizes the arrangement, she and Mike start organizing their return to Boston. Sam, in the meantime, has managed to propel himself upstairs to his room and sits on his bed with his leg propped up. Mike follows behind, drops down next to him and grabs hold of his shoulder. “You going to be okay without us, buddy?”
“Got to be okay. No other choice.”
Mike looks nervous and Sam imagines he’s reliving the nightmare of the accident in the Fall when they both thought Sam was going to die. “You were given a second chance. At your life. So don’t blow it. Go easy on yourself.”
“I’ll try. Not so simple when I keep thinking about Luc being gone and maybe being dead.”
“I know. I understand. But no matter what, in spite of everything, you still got to get yourself better. You got to focus on that. On doing your rehab exercises and taking one step at a time.”
Nodding, Sam goes quiet for a moment. “I’ll admit there is part of me that doesn’t want to do anything, part of me that just wants to give up. Part of me that just wants to let go.”
Black Diamond Fall Page 9
