The Clearing

by Dan Newman

  The book was called Thanks, Dad and each page had a simple stick-figure drawing of a father and son doing different things together, each captioned with a tribute, like Thank you for always carrying me when I get tired, Dad, and Thank you for taking me on big adventures. It was mushy, sappy stuff, but Nate remembered it hitting him like a freight train.

  The officer followed Nate’s stare and looked at the image, turning it round for a better view. He snorted once and cast the wallet dismissively onto the bed. Then, in a strangely choreographed manner, two officers exchanged serious glances and turned in unison toward Nate. The one on the chair stood and Nate watched in disbelief as he unclipped the leather handcuff holster.

  Nate stood abruptly. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  • • •

  By morning, the incident at the party was all but forgotten. It was Sunday, and Nate woke late to find his parents sitting on the balcony eating halves of freshly sliced grapefruit. The place had already been cleaned up; the chairs were all returned to their usual spots, the ashtrays emptied, the glasses cleaned and the beer cans swept away.

  “Morning, sunshine,” said his father.

  Nate smiled at him in secret camaraderie. The chat had come late the night before, when the party was nearing its end, and his father had left him with a kiss to the crown of his head and the whispered magical words, everything’s fine.

  His mother smiled, oblivious to the silent exchange. “Want some breakfast?” She proceeded to put a bowl of the tart pink fruit in front of Nate’s spot at the table. He never liked grapefruit, but it wasn’t worth the argument so he ate it anyway.

  Nate’s dad flipped through the paper he was reading and folded the broadsheet into a manageable rectangle. “I had an interesting call this morning,” he said, peering over the top of the paper at Nate. It was clear he wasn’t going to go on unless Nate played along. It was corny, but Nate secretly liked it.

  “And?”

  His father looked over to his mother with feigned concern. “I don’t know, dear, should I tell him? I don’t want to get him too worked up.”

  “Oh, stop teasing the boy,” she said.

  “Dad! Come on!”

  “All right, all right. Seems you’ve been invited to a sleepover—a two-nighter.”

  Nate sat up straight. A sleepover! Now that was some news. In two weeks, he would be thirteen, and for almost a year now it hadn’t been cool to be too openly excited about anything, but this…this was a sleepover. “With who?” he asked.

  His parents were glad to see the child in him return; unabashed enthusiasm was an increasingly rare commodity in Nate. “Tristan’s dad called and invited you up to the plantation,” said his dad. “Sounds like a boys’ weekend: You, Pip, Richard and Tristan. That is, if you want to go.”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” cried Nate, hopping up from the table. “It’s soooo cool up there!”

  The plantation. It was the stuff of legend in their little group. Tristan had been there a million times; he’d grown up on the island and Ti Fenwe Estate was a second home for him. But Nate had never been. He’d heard the stories. Ti Fenwe had taken on a mystical quality among the boys thanks to three important facts: One—it was in a very remote part of the island, deep in the bush like a secret hideout—probably discovered by pirates. Two—Tristan had two mini-bikes out there, little dirt bikes with fat wheels and chrome frames that the kids were allowed to zoom around the expansive estate on. And three—the place was steeped in spooky stories.

  To hear the older De Villiers kids tell it, there was plenty out there to get you delightfully creeped out: there were relics of the island’s grim past, including a wall with rusted and rattling chains still waiting patiently for the next cargo of slaves. There were the unexplained deaths of almost every former owner of the property—every one of them a male heir of the De Villiers clan. And there were the obscure forest spirits that were rumored to roam that particular part of the remote St. Lucian rainforest. For expat kids marooned by their parents on a tropical island paradise, it was nothing short of Disneyland.

  Nate tucked into a second piece of grapefruit. The sleepover would be next weekend—Friday and Saturday night—and that would make for a mighty long week in between. He thought for a moment about the timing of the invitation. He’d never been asked before, so why now? And then it came to him. This would be Tristan’s doing. As mean as that boy could be, you had to admire his audacity. The invitation was a pre-emptive strike designed to throw Nate’s mom off-balance. She’d never complain to Tristan’s dad about the incident the night before—not while he was calling with such a gracious invitation for her son. The move was daring, genius stuff.

  Nate wanted to bolt over to Pip’s, to scream and shout, and to run through the bush at full speed with airplane arms.

  He was finally going to Ti Fenwe.

  10

  When he woke it was dark outside.

  Nate swung his legs off the bed and rubbed his face with both hands. The stubble was thick and scratchy. It had been that way for days, weeks even, but he didn’t care. There was no reason to shave. No reason to clean the place up. Around him the apartment was in disarray, and he supposed it had been that way for a long time, too. But now, after the hours he spent with Sergeant Cole, the lady from Victims Services and his cold, dead father, he realized his own surroundings echoed his father’s in a horribly similar fashion. He could almost hear the apple thud to the ground, resolutely sitting there mere inches from the trunk.

  In truth, his furniture was only marginally better than his father’s, but it was pieced together with the same utilitarian eye—something he’d put down to necessity after the divorce. His apartment screamed bachelor—one who didn’t care. His living room consisted of a worn, tan-colored couch and a well broken-in leather chair that had once been black but was now something much grayer. There was a particle board coffee table that had seen service in his college days, and two lamps that looked like refugees from an old-age home. Everything else had gone with the house. Christ, he’d never noticed how transient it all looked—it seemed temporary, like a student’s dorm. Here for a semester then gone.

  The similarities between his own apartment and his father’s house were suddenly too sharp and uncomfortable; he needed a distraction. In the fridge he found a bottle of cold water, and when he sat down at the tiny kitchen table to drink it, he saw a pair of business cards sitting there, one from Kathy Tailor at Victim Services, and the other from Sergeant Cole.

  Nate picked up Sergeant Cole’s card and stared at it. There was a matching one around here somewhere, he remembered. And it was enough to start it all again. His head sank slightly and the hollowness began to creep back in. He thought of his father’s house again, about the questions Cole had asked him there. What about the box of papers and things? All that stuff he had around him. Did you touch any of that?

  No, he had said.

  He slipped his hand into the pocket of his pants and found it all still sitting there, bunched up and folded. Why had he lied to Cole? He wasn’t sure, but it felt like it was none of the policeman’s business.

  When he found his father, he knew right away the old man was beyond help. There was no mistaking the damage the gun had done to his head. The complete finality of it all—punctuated in crimson along the far wall—had stopped Nate from running for the nearest phone and crying for help. Instead he had sunk slowly beside the old man, and then covered his shattered head with a towel from a nearby laundry pile.

  He had just sat there for a time—it seemed like hours but it was probably only minutes—with his brain in a flat stall. He could see what his father had done, but it didn’t register.

  Around him were the upturned contents of two shoe boxes: papers, documents, and letters that he had apparently poured into his lap just before putting the pistol in his mouth. Nate picked up a random handful—a dismissal letter from the Foreign Service, his parents’ marriage certificate, letters from Nate’s mother—long
since estranged. There were copies of his father’s military record, his honorable discharge, a raft of legal papers associated with the dissolution of his marriage and, among everything, a stack of airmail envelopes with a rubber band around them.

  In his kitchen, Nate had to stand to pull the folded wad of paper from his pocket, and when he placed it all on the table he did so carefully. Somehow the letters were now more valuable than he had appreciated when he first stuffed them into his pocket. He smoothed each one out, and laid them in two columns—one set that was addressed to his father, and another set addressed to Nate. There were six envelopes bearing his father’s name, and two with Nate’s. All were the same kind of airmail envelopes with blue and red chevron borders. Nate carefully arranged them in order of their postmark date. Of the letters sent to his father, the earliest one arrived in 1978, with the other five arriving in intervals of about five or six years. The last one, the most current one, had arrived only a week ago.

  In the other group, the letters addressed to Nate, the postmarks showed one sent in 1980, and another in 1982. Nate ran the numbers through his head. He would have been seventeen when the first arrived, and nineteen by the time the second showed up. Both were sent to his father’s address, and both remained unopened. Nate had never seen them before, didn’t even know they existed, but he knew right away what they were about.

  He knew he would read all eight of the letters, but not today. No, that would be too much for now, in the immediate wake of his father’s death. He already knew the broad strokes of what was in each of them, so it was really just a question of details. When did he last talk to his father? He couldn’t bring it to mind, couldn’t bring the specifics into view no matter how he tried. That, too, felt like a failure, but there were so many.

  First there was the career. He had over a decade of journalism under his belt, a degree that said he had the requisite training, but what he’d been covering was drab, spiritless stuff. He had worked for a string of local dailies across the country covering winter fairs, local elections and Santa Claus parades. But it wasn’t news. Not really. It wasn’t the important, center-of-it-all lifestyle that he had dreamed of.

  He’d applied to all of the big national papers of course, but never got so far as an interview. A couple of requests for tear sheets, but then nothing. Silence. And so discouragement would inevitably set in and he’d go back to covering the drama of some hardware store’s one-hundredth anniversary. And as real success eluded him, he began to see it in his wife’s eyes. It was a shared disappointment at first, but over time it converted, changed into something more defeated, as if she was finally seeing the limitations in the man she had married. She hid it well, but he could see it.

  But Nate kept trying. At one point he’d even tried freelancing. He recklessly quit his job at the Oxford Herald and two months later went skulking back, head low, penitent and penniless. A sympathetic editor took him back and suggested there might be a column in the experience. It worked, and then there was another, and another. Something stuck and after a few months he was given a regular four column-inches every week in the “perspectives” section. It was what would pass for the highpoint.

  And then there were the novels. There were three of them, each carefully woven together night after night consuming thousands of hours, but none had found the mark. He’d sent them to hundreds of agents and publishers, and one by one the responses came back with polite rejections, and then, after a while, they stopped coming back altogether. At first his wife was sympathetic—keep trying, it’ll break—but after a while, after the relentless march of his mediocrity in both the job hunt and his great literary career, she eventually stopped caring. Her husband was already the man he would become, and nothing more. Eventually all three of his novels ended up on the same shelf in his spare room closet. Her voice chattered at him from across the years: Maybe teaching? Maybe you could become a teacher? Of course, the subtext was clear: Maybe you should focus on getting a real job.

  It still burned.

  He wondered when that happened—when his wife went from I do to I wish I hadn’t—and whether it was a singular event or a series of stacked disappointments. Probably the latter, he thought. When they were first married life seemed so simple, so easy to navigate: see friends, go to work, catch a movie, make love. Repeat.

  When had she begun to see him as something other than her equal? He thought of her on their honeymoon, in the hotel pool with her arms locked about his neck, staring into his eyes like there was nothing else in the world worth looking at.

  He thought of the divorce, the custody hearings, where everything fell apart so quickly. Crossed arms, pursed lips, dismissive glances and quiet whispers to that bastard of a lawyer. He remembered the awful awareness of knowing he was losing Cody as it was happening. And this thing with his father—the man was already gone, already lying on a slab in some tile-cold morgue, he understood that—but the losing felt somehow the same, like a final glance backwards on moving day: it’s just a hollowed-out house now, but it used to be a home. He tried again to remember the last conversation he had had with the old man, but there was nothing there.

  Will I be okay, Daddy? Cody’s voice echoed plainly in his ears, and the pain was as fresh as the first time. The memories were tag-teaming him now, leaping from tragedy to tragedy in some grim orgy of self-pity. Fathers were supposed to protect their sons, to provide for them and shield them from life’s hard, jagged edges. He thought about his father back in the days on the island, when his dad used to tell him so convincingly—whenever he needed to hear it—that everything was going to be okay. And for a brief moment Nate could almost feel his father’s hand at his back, ushering him to safety. He remembered the surety of his father’s momentum, moving him calmly but firmly through the crowd of suits and uniforms in the police station and out to the waiting car—all the while whispering don’t worry, Nate, everything’s going to be okay. And up to a point, it always had been. Up to a point.

  Nate couldn’t do that for Cody now, and the truth of that cruel fact was an ache that would never go away. Was this something his own father could have ever understood? Perhaps the one he remembered so fondly from those carefree days on the island could. But not the more modern version, and certainly not the version he found lying on the floor with the top of his head blown off.

  Enough, thought Nate. He moved to the couch, and scooped up the remote. Perhaps the TV could stop this cavalcade of misery. As he sat down he caught a perfect reflection of himself in the black mirror of the TV screen. He hadn’t shaved in days. His hair was unruly and the shirt he was wearing, the same one he had worn all week, looked stained and stretched out of shape. He looked at the black screen and wondered who it was looking back at him.

  The question went unanswered as the screen surged into high-color life, mercifully bleaching out thoughts of Cody, his father and the woman he must have once loved.

  • • •

  The larger of the two policemen motioned for Nate to stand. The man’s demeanor was aloof, bored almost, and he held the cuffs loosely by his side as if they were nothing of any real significance. For Nate they had become the center of his world.

  “Sir, please turn around,” said the one by the door. His Caribbean drawl was rich, and in any other setting would have been a charming affectation. “Dis will be much easier if you jus’ cooperate.”

  Nate was wide-eyed. He could feel his heart racing, and his breaths were coming fast. “Wait, please, can we talk about this?”

  “Turn around. Now.”

  “Please.”

  The officer stepped in aggressively and spun Nate around. Immediately his partner was somehow there and pressing Nate into the wall face first. His arm was twisted backwards and up, more enthusiastically than needed, and Nate yelped as his arm’s range of motion was met and passed. With the pain came an overwhelming sense of dread, and a remarkably rapid urge to cease resisting and do whatever the burly policemen wanted. He had visions of rat-
infested cells, consular visits from pale men in wrinkled suits, and uncomfortable realities about the law in the Caribbean and the limited influence of his government far, far away. The handcuffs cinched up and bit into his wrists, and Nate yelped again—in fear as much as pain.

  He was jerked from his spot against the wall and turned to the doorway. Now he would face the perp walk, shamefully paraded through the hotel in full view of all the other guests and staff, made to exit in shame and humiliation.

  But before that indignity, there would apparently be another—the pat down. Nate was shoved firmly into the wall beside the closed door and rough hands clawed at every part of him. His head was twisted away from the doorway, and from there he could see the second officer stuff the bills into his pocket. He sneered at Nate and snorted once. “Evidence.”

  Another hand seized the back of his collar and jerked him backwards, popping the top button off his shirt as the garment rode up and into his throat. Strong hands pushed him round to face the door, and Nate could feel the last vestiges of courage slip away. Why was this all happening? His eyes flicked wildly around the room, looking for something, anything that might bring an end to this bizarre and frightening turn.

  “Move,” said the big policeman, and without waiting for Nate to comply he put a heavy hand between Nate’s shoulder blades and shoved him forward. Nate’s feet were too slow, and he pitched forward and down, his chest and face hitting the floor at the same time. He heard the whoosh of air being forced from his lungs, and the icy burn of the skin below his eye splitting down to the bone.