Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  The three boys had never expected to be able to serve together. They were sure they would each be sent to some different remote place, and that by the time they retuned to Norbitt—if they returned—they would barely be able to communicate, so diverse had been their experiences. But, no. Their assignments had kept them together, Vic, Harm, and Alvie. They had spent most of the war in England, at an air base; their only combat experience thus far was being on the Arky during D-Day, and really, that did not count because they were offshore. When they talked about the fact that they had yet to see close-up combat, they put disappointment in their voices, impatience and irritation, they way you were supposed to do, so that people would not think you were a coward.

  A man on the Arky who had seen combat—real combat—set them straight one day: “Everybody’s a coward. You got that, boys? Everybody. It’s what you do anyway—it’s what you do while still being a goddamned coward—that matters. You’re here, aren’t you? You’re here.”

  Their job for today was to stand on deck and search the water for bodies. They were looking for survivors, for men who had maybe fallen behind during the assault, been dumped out of a landing craft, and were bobbing along now, waiting for rescue. So far they had not found any living men. Just bodies. Those, too, they brought aboard. Those, too.

  The Arky was an old beauty. Commissioned in 1912, she was the oldest ship in the D-Day fleet. Patched-up, a little rusty, but okay. And the three boys? They were lean and fit and strong—fitter than they had ever been before in their lives and, they suspected, fitter than they would ever be afterward, either.

  They looked out across the chaos of ocean that slapped and rubbed and pounded against the shore of Omaha Beach. They scoured every inch of that water for any sign of life. It was tricky, though, because there was so much motion already—the wind plucking wildly at the gray waves, and the gray waves rising and splitting and diving against the gray sky. Trying to find movement within other movement was grueling, and tiring. But they did their jobs.

  It was shortly after Harm had told his Eisenhower story that it happened. Harm had turned away from the water—he was still savoring the afterglow of having brought the tale to them, its very unlikeliness giving it its glory, as the general in charge of everything, of all of their lives, plus the fate of nations, had stopped to chat with a damned coal miner, a guy who might have been any one of them—and so he did not see it.

  Alvie was the one who saw it. He saw khaki, and he saw motion. But he made the mistake of telling Vic first, and pointing at the undulating scrap on the waves, before shouting it out to the other men on deck, and so it was Vic who sounded the alarm, Vic who got the credit for being alert and observant.

  The soldier was faceup in the water about thirty yards off the starboard bow, his arms and legs spread out and twitching, as if he was doing jumping jacks with great enthusiasm. Following the alarm, the deck was swarmed; officers shoved aside enlisted men and other officers, too, shouting out orders, almost hysterical with expectation. Regular order was quickly restored but for a few crazy minutes—minutes that reassured Harm that even the officers were human beings, men with feelings, and subject to intense emotions such as relief and joy—there was no order whatsoever.

  And then it was over.

  When they hoisted him up it was instantly clear that the soldier in the water was not alive, after all. He was dead. Stone dead. The motion of his arms and his legs had been caused by the heavy waves, not by any volition of living limbs. His body was being rocked and jostled by the sea. That was all. It was just one more body, nothing special. The men returned to their stations. The three boys went back to scouting the water.

  That water continued to rise and fall all around them in a ragged dance of which the ocean never seemed to tire, an endless saga of waves climbing and collapsing, climbing and collapsing, like gray peaked mountains created and destroyed again in seconds, crumbling to their doom and then instantly reforming. Harm would have found it hypnotic and even somewhat soothing, if he was not so sick all the time.

  The three boys stood on the deck, scanning, searching. As Harm had watched his shipmates haul up that dead body—the skin was greenish-yellow and rubbery-looking—he was smote by a memory, an image he had tried very hard for the past six years to keep locked up and far away from him: the old woman and the kid, dead at the side of that road.

  The wind was even stronger now. It had a roar at the back of it, a sound like a tractor engine. Harm had to get right in his friends’ faces to talk to them, so close that some of his spittle landed on their cheeks. There was no other way to be heard. “When we get back,” he said, shouting each word, giving it a separate weight and thrust and authority, “maybe we should go visit the family of that little girl and the old lady. See how they’re doing. After all these years. It’s the least we can—”

  “You shut the hell up!” Alvie shouted. He wiped Harm’s spit off his face with a savage motion, as if even the delivery system of Harm’s idea might be contagious. “Just shut up.”

  “Nobody will know,” Harm yelled back, “why we’re asking. They won’t know.”

  The wind tore at the words, ripping them into smaller sounds, flinging them around the deck like confetti.

  Vic ducked his head closer to his friends, so that he could be heard. “Shut up,” he shouted at Harm, not angrily, but in a bossy way, and then he turned back to the water to do his job.

  That was the next-to-last time they would ever speak of what had happened that day on the dusty road outside Caneytown, West Virginia. The next time was seventy-one years later, and it would cost two of them their lives.

  Chapter Twelve

  The first thing Carla did when she arrived at Thornapple Terrace on Wednesday morning was to look around for Travis Womack. She did not want to be too obvious about it. Casualness was key.

  She stood by the receptionist’s desk. She had given the old woman her name, and the reason she was here. Now it was a matter of waiting for Bonita Layman—she was finishing up a phone call, the receptionist had informed her—to come out and escort her to the area where she’d be doing the interviews with the older employees.

  “So,” Carla said. “This is a pretty big place. You must have a good maintenance staff.” Smooth, Elkins, she thought. Real smooth.

  The receptionist’s wrinkled old prune-face twitched. “Yes.” She went back to her computer screen.

  Carla unhooked her backpack from her shoulder. She set it on the floor. She leaned over, pretending to be checking her gear. Truth was, she had already checked it multiple times out in the Kia, before she even came in. She had everything she needed.

  While rustling through the items, Carla said, “I mean, with all these rooms, there’s a lot to go wrong. Plumbing, electrical, heating and air-conditioning.”

  “Yes.”

  Instead of saying what she was really thinking—You’re a chatterbox, lady, aren’t you?—Carla said, “So what do you have? Five people, six? To keep it all running right?”

  The receptionist made one of those snickery sounds in her throat that indicated disbelief at such an outlandishly inaccurate guess. “We have two people on our maintenance staff. Mr. Ford and Mr. Womack. Mr. Ford is the supervisor.”

  “Oh.” Carla tried to act as if she really didn’t care what their names were. She zipped the top of her backpack shut, lifted it, and re-slung it over her shoulder. “Are either one of them around? Well, come to think of it, I don’t want to bother a supervisor—so maybe that other guy? I just had a few questions about the kind of brick they used on the outside. About its insulating properties.”

  She’d gone too far.

  “I’m confused,” the receptionist said crisply. “Are you here to do interviews for a library project—or are you an inspector with the county building department?”

  Bonita Layman’s door opened, rescuing Carla. The director motioned her into her office. Before she shut the door behind them, Bonita called across the lobby to the r
eceptionist: “Dorothy, the light switch.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll call Travis and send him in.”

  Score! Carla thought.

  * * *

  But she didn’t get to see him, after all. He never came into the director’s office, at least not while she was there. Which was not, admittedly, all that long. Bonita Layman gave her a quick summary of the Terrace’s history, and then handed her a sheet of paper. It was a list of staff members who were old enough to fulfill Carla’s criterion for interviews, and who had agreed to participate.

  Bonita took her to the lounge. It was crowded. Two old men sat in armchairs with their walkers angled directly in front of them, as if they needed to be ready at any moment to bolt in order to accomplish some essential errand. In truth, they had not moved in hours, and would likely not move at all for the rest of the day, unless someone came and fetched them. A woman who looked as fragile as glass stood by the window, staring at the snow, one hand on her chin, the elbow of that arm cupped by her other hand. Every thirty seconds or so she would turn and face the room at large and say, “What? What?” Then she turned back to the window.

  Carla’s attention was drawn to a gentle-looking old man who sat at a round table across from a younger woman. Judging by the similarities in the bone structure of their faces, and by something that rhymed in their eyes, Carla guessed that this was the man’s daughter. On the table in front of them was a checkerboard, its pert little squares filled in and waiting for someone to make the first move. The old man wore a plaid driving cap and a soft blue V-necked sweater and beige slacks. He kept his slender, gnarled hands folded in his lap. He had a serene expression on his face. The woman, however, did not; her face looked as if it had been eaten alive by a scowl.

  In the chair between them sat a bored-looking aide. She had spilled something on the sleeve of her pink smock, and the only time she came alive was when she frowned and dug at the crusty spot with a fingernail.

  Despite the aide’s lassitude, Carla felt a definite energy emanating from that table. It was not positive. It had, in fact, a raw and corrosive vibe. It only went in one direction. And it came from Scowler, not Driving Cap.

  Got to be a story there, Carla thought.

  Or maybe not. Maybe it was ordinary, and maybe they saw this kind of thing around here every day. Maybe the effort of visiting a loved one in the lounge, watching them sink beneath the gray waves of Alzheimer’s, would make anybody sour and angry, and maybe, after a while, you would start worrying hard about all the money and time and resources he was taking up, day after day, and so you would start to resent him, even though you knew it was not his fault.

  “Arlene, this is Carla Elkins,” Bonita said. She moved Carla along, directing her into a corner of the room. Two metal folding chairs had been set up there, facing each other. On one of the chairs a plump, frizzy-haired woman in a pink smock had settled herself, her white-clad thighs spread wide and partially rolling off either side of the seat. “Carla is the woman I told you about,” Bonita went on. “She’s doing a project for the library. Talking to people about why they stayed in the area.”

  The aide’s mumble was low but audible. “Must’ve been for jobs just like this—a high-paying, fulfilling job of emptying bedpans for minimum wage.”

  Bonita stiffened. “As I recall, you volunteered to talk to her today, Arlene. If you don’t care to participate, then you certainly don’t have to.”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” the aide said. “Just kidding around.” She offered Carla a polite, insincere smile that lifted her doughy face for an instant. “Sit down, honey. Tell me what you need to know.”

  Carla wondered a bit at this sudden change of heart, but then she realized that the aide could put off her duties as long as she was being interviewed. Talking to some nosy stranger was more desirable than emptying bedpans. Only by a slight margin, probably.

  Bonita wished them well and left. Carla turned on the digital recorder.

  Arlene Lewis had been born and raised on a farm just down the road from what was now Thornapple Terrace. “Was just a big old hunk of woods back then,” she said. “My daddy always hoped to buy it, add it to our property, but hell—he could barely afford the monthly payments on the land he had already, much less go out and add more.”

  She was sixty-nine years old. She’d been married and divorced three times. Carla must have reacted to that news without meaning to—perhaps she had flinched, or raised an eyebrow just the smallest bit—because Arlene laughed at her and said, “Honey, you just wait. Wait ’til you’re my age. You’ll see. Things get stale, okay? For the both of you. Only thing you can do then is move on. I loved ’em all. Still do, matter of fact. And once I’ve refreshed myself with somebody new—well, there’s no law that says I can’t sneak back around from time to time and sample the earlier merchandise. If you know what I mean.”

  Carla was very much afraid that she did know, and so she hurriedly changed the subject. She asked Arlene when she had decided to make her life here, and not somewhere else.

  “That’s not something you decide, honey. It’s something that just happens. You always think it’s temporary—everything, I mean. Because you can change anything at any time. When you’re young, you think you’ve got all these choices. Well, you don’t. My daddy used to say that you don’t have to worry about falling into a rut—because the rut’s out there looking for you already and it’ll get here real soon. No escape. You’re stuck before you know it.” Arlene said these things with a certain gallant cheerfulness, and not the lugubrious self-pity that such sentiments might inspire.

  Before Carla could ask the next question, there was a commotion at the checkerboard table. The daughter was jabbing a finger at the old man. She was not shouting, but her voice had the menacing, escalating edge that was well on its way to a shout: “You fucker. I know you fucking remember. I know it.”

  The aide tapped the woman’s shoulder. Time to settle down. But the woman shook her off and continued to heckle the old guy: “What about me? What about Nelson, wherever he is? What are we supposed to do, huh? With the rest of our lives? After what you did to us?”

  The woman abruptly broke off her rant, lowered her head, and thrust it in her hands. She was not crying; her grief struck Carla as something that had ranged beyond the ability to be expressed in mere sobs a long time ago. It was part of her being now, fossilized inside the larger universe of everything she did and said and was. In the meantime, the old man gazed serenely across the table. He smiled a tiny little smile.

  Arlene turned back around to Carla. She had been watching the drama with a relish that made Carla want to offer to go fetch popcorn. “We get that all the time,” Arlene muttered. With a naughty grin, she added, “Usually, though, it’s the patients who act up—not the visitors.” She squared herself in her chair, ready to get back to it. “Fire away.”

  “What’s your favorite childhood memory?” Carla asked.

  Arlene pondered the question for a very long time. “I don’t remember very much about my childhood. I used to—but I don’t anymore.”

  Carla looked concerned. Her face made Arlene snicker and sweep a pudgy hand around the lounge, where three more patients had wandered in, shuffling along like lost zombies. They stood in a row by the wall, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

  “Oh, honey—not like those poor folks,” Arlene exclaimed. “Not that kind of ‘I can’t remember.’ What I mean is that I don’t want to remember it, so I just don’t. I keep it off to the side of my brain. See, we were pretty poor, and my parents went hungry a lot of times themselves so that us kids could eat. I don’t really like remembering how my mother would stand by the table, thin as a corpse although not quite as talkative, and spoon another helping of oatmeal into my brother Leroy’s bowl. Leroy would eat it right up. He was too young to realize that my mother was giving him her helping.” Arlene shook her head. Carla started to point out that she had just recounted a scene from a childhood she claimed
she did not remember, but held back. Arlene was an intelligent woman. If there was irony in the vicinity, she would know it. She didn’t need Carla to circle it with a Sharpie.

  “Memory’s a tricky thing,” Arlene said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, take that lady who was sitting at the table over there with Bill Ferris.”

  Carla looked. The table was now vacant. Both Scowler and Driving Cap were gone. Only the aide remained, still picking at the spot on her smock, digging in.

  “That lady,” Arlene continued, “comes here all the time. Lives pretty far away, but makes the drive, no problem. And it’s like she’s trying to get old Bill to remember something. But he won’t. Like you saw, she gets real mad at him. Got so mad once she went a little crazy. It was way worse than today. We had to pull her off of him. Me and Lester, another aide who works the same shift as I do.

  “It’s gotten so bad with Bill’s daughter now, you know, that Ms. Layman said she can’t be left alone with him. Has to have an escort. That’s why Peggy’s over there. Today was her turn to make sure that crazy lady didn’t take a swing at her own flesh and blood.”

  “If she hates him that much, then why does she have him in a place like this? Gotta be pretty expensive.”

  “Guess so,” Arlene said, bobbing her head. Her frizzy hair bounced up and down like dandelion fluff in a mild breeze. “But it’s sure as hell better than having him live with her, I bet.”