Bedtime Story

by Robert J. Wiersema

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” Bream asked, looking into the canyon.

  “When did you see it?” Dafyd asked.

  “Years ago,” he said. “The last time we were at war. Before you were born. This canyon has always been …” He seemed to struggle for the right word. “Special. We try to camp nearby when we can.

  “It’s sacred,” the magus offered.

  The captain turned away.

  “Stephen and Gafilair camped here during the first war,” the magus continued, “almost a thousand years ago. I suppose that’s why he decided to hide the Sunstone here.”

  Dafyd stared at the old man. The Sunstone was here?

  As the sun crept lower, and Bream spread his men along the length of the chasm, Dafyd grew anxious. So much was depending upon him, and he had no idea what he was doing, what he was supposed to be looking for. The rays of the sun shifted as it set, and the rainbow light gradually faded, replaced with the rich honey glow of evening. The air grew cold again, and Dafyd wrapped his arms around himself as he searched for something, anything, that might answer the questions raised by the magus’s book.

  At the moment the sun slips and the doorway to the secret world is revealed, Dafyd remembered.

  The waterfall roared on. The shadows shifted and crept on the canyon walls.

  “I don’t see anything,” the captain grumbled to the magus.

  “Patience,” the magus said, his voice less than sure.

  “If your book is to be believed …”

  Dafyd tried to ignore their voices. The sun was mostly sunk into the earth now, only the barest curve of light remaining over the river past the canyon’s mouth.

  There was nothing here. No secrets. No Sunstone. He thought of the handmaiden, the man who had died on the road; their sacrifices for him had been for nothing.

  The last edge of the sun slipped below the horizon. And with the final ray of light, Dafyd saw it.

  It happened so suddenly he thought he had imagined seeing anything. But the magus was pointing across the river, and a shout came from a guardsman up the line.

  The shadows on the rocks across the canyon had seemed to straighten and solidify, forming, for one passing moment, the perfect, symmetrical, unmistakable outline of a door in the canyon wall.

  As quickly as it had come, though, the image disappeared, and the canyon was dark.

  I left the dishes to soak while Jacqui took a bath. David was in bed, so while dishes and wife were immersed, I read a few pages of the novel I was reviewing for my next column, absorbing next to nothing, letting the words wash over me.

  Once we had all gotten past the initial weirdness, dinner had been quite pleasant: a reminder of better times. The three of us together, eating, drinking, talking: anyone looking through the window would have thought we were a normal family.

  After David was finished he put his plate and glass on the counter beside the sink and headed back up to his room, Jacqui and I sat for a while longer, working the wine down in our glasses. We hadn’t talked about anything important, and avoided any topics that might provoke a fight. We talked about the Emergency Room, about David’s fight with the French language, about the book I was reviewing. When I offered her more wine, she waved it away, mentioning how much she would like to take a bath. She offered to do the dishes—“Doing my fair share, with you making dinner”—but I shook my head and poured her more wine to take with her.

  The dishes were just about finished when I heard her coming down the stairs. Taking one last swipe across the rim of the last pot, I held off looking at her as long as I could, wanting to delay the pleasure.

  “I think I needed that,” she said as I hung the dishcloth on the faucet.

  “Glad to be of service.” I turned to face her.

  That first moment was worth the wait. She had on one of my old T-shirts, which clung to her, hanging just to her upper thighs. Her legs were bare, shiny. Her skin was flushed, glowing from her soak, her hair glistening. Her eyes were relaxed, soft.

  “I’m probably a little late with this,” she said, handing me the empty wineglass.

  “There’re always more dishes to be done.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “For all this.” She gestured around the room. “It’s been a rough few days at work.”

  I took a step toward her, shaking my head as if it were nothing. “No big deal,” I said.

  “No, it was. I really appreciate it.”

  I was close enough to feel the heat radiating off her, smell the sweetness of whatever she had put in her bathwater. I gently put my hands on her hips, barely touching her, the softness of the T-shirt over the warmth of her skin. I leaned forward.

  She took a step back, shaking her head as if to clear it. “Chris, what are you—?”

  “It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it?”

  Thankfully, she ignored the question. “Chris. It’s a bad idea.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t you remember our anniversary?”

  I’d been thinking about that night since Dale had mentioned it. Dinner and a few drinks, talking the way we used to, then falling together, our bodies fitting like two pieces of a whole.

  “I remember,” I said.

  “It made everything crazy for weeks. We were fighting all the time.”

  “We fight all the time anyway.”

  “Things are pretty good right now. I don’t want to mess that up by jumping into something that we’ll both regret.”

  “Sleeping with my wife isn’t something I’m going to regret.”

  “It’s not the sex, Chris.” She took a step forward and touched the back of my forearm, just below the elbow. “I do love you. I really do. And the idea of messing up the sheets with you”—she allowed herself a naughty, knowing smile—“definitely has a certain appeal. It’s what comes after … It’s your thinking that this would somehow make everything else better, too. That you could start moving your things back in.”

  I shook my head, but she wasn’t wrong.

  She squeezed my arm. “I don’t have the strength for it.”

  We said good night. I stopped on the back stoop in the light from the window, my chest tight, my eyes burning, not even really sure of what had just happened.

  Closing the door lightly behind myself, I lit a cigarette, and tried not to hear Dale’s voice in my head, tried not to reach into my pocket to touch the key to his apartment.

  David had woken to the sound of voices in the kitchen, right underneath his bedroom. His mother and father. Again. Not fighting this time. “Having a discussion,” they would call this.

  He waited for a few moments, the covers pulled tight to his chin, his head pressed into the pillow, hoping that it would stop, that the voices would fade again, that the bad feeling would disappear.

  When it didn’t, he reached out for the lamp on his bedside table and turned it on. He climbed out of bed and walked across to the door, not really taking care to be quiet.

  As he closed the door, he took To the Four Directions off the shelf.

  Lying back down on his stomach, he opened the book and tucked the leather bookmark inside the back cover.

  As he started to read, his parents’ voices disappeared.

  The sun was still low in the sky when Dafyd opened his eyes the next morning.

  He had fallen asleep at the river’s edge outside the canyon, listening to the magus and the captain discussing how long it would take to ride back to Donder where they could ford the river, and he awoke to find them already awake and sitting a short distance away.

  “We thought it best to let you sleep,” Bream said. “It could be a long day.”

  Dafyd nodded.

  “If any daylight remains when you return with the Stone,” the captain said, “we will take to the road. The sooner we return to the Queen, the better.”

  “But you should eat,” the magus said, standing up and gesturing for Dafyd to sit, passing him a metal plate with a hank of bread and some
dried meat. “He does have time to eat, doesn’t he?” the magus asked the captain pointedly.

  “Of course.” The captain’s voice made it clear that he was not in agreement. “Not too much, though,” he warned. “You’ll want to stay light.”

  Dafyd wanted to ask what the captain meant, but he contented himself with a mouthful of bread.

  When they entered the canyon a short while later, the captain’s meaning became clear.

  Dafyd was speechless: the guardsmen had been busy. Overnight, they had constructed a primitive rope bridge over the raging river.

  “How?” he muttered. The bridge was little more than two thick ropes strung across the canyon, one above the other, woven together with a third rope that looped between them like a loose spiderweb.

  “The men did a good job,” Captain Bream said proudly.

  Dafyd looked at the shadowy wall at the other end of the bridge, where he knew, though there was no sign of it, the mysterious doorway waited. The bridge swayed in the wind, stretched uneasily across the river, no more substantial than the web it resembled.

  “Very well, then,” he said, fighting a tremor in his voice and taking a deep breath, reminded of something his mother always said. “Sooner begun is sooner done.”

  I poured myself a glass of vodka from the bottle in the freezer and took my first swallow standing in the kitchen with the freezer door still open. The vodka was a short, sharp shock, exactly what I needed.

  Maybe Dale was right. Maybe it was too far gone, too late to change anything between Jacqui and me. Maybe it was a salvage operation now, not a rescue.

  I sagged into my desk chair. As I shifted, the keys in my pants pocket pushed into my leg. I emptied the contents of my pockets onto the desk. Keys. Lighter. Two twenty-dollar bills. A handful of change. A receipt from Munro’s Books. The yellow envelope with the key to Dale’s apartment.

  And a beige, frayed-edged piece of paper with a name and a telephone number written on it in green ink.

  I stared at the paper on the desk as I poured myself a glass of vodka.

  Tara Scott.

  I picked up the note, looked at it carefully. Took a swallow of vodka. Looked at the clock: a little after ten.

  I lifted the phone, and looked back down at the paper.

  Salvage or rescue?

  I set the phone down and dropped the paper on the desk.

  V

  NOTHING BREAKS THE WRITING SPELL like the telephone ringing. Only a few people have my number: it could have been my agent, one of my publishers …

  I answered anyway.

  “Mr. Knox?” It was a woman’s voice, brusque and impersonal. There was a slight hollowness to the line, a buzz of noise and voices in the background.

  “Yes?” I said guardedly. I reached for my coffee cup but it was empty.

  “I’m Barbara Kensey. I’m calling from George Jay Elementary.”

  I straightened in my chair. “Is there something wrong with David?” I imagined him lying in a narrow bed in the nurse’s office, his face flushed and sweaty, or sitting with a bucket between his knees.

  “Your son is fine, Mr. Knox. He’s with me right now. I’m calling because there was an incident this morning.”

  “An incident?” Suddenly craving a cigarette. Not a good sign.

  “Yes, Mr. Knox.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m afraid that I’m unable to discuss that over the telephone, Mr. Knox. Mr. Davis, the vice-principal, has requested that you or Mrs. Knox come into the office to discuss it in person.”

  Oh shit.

  “Sure,” I said calmly, mentally scrambling. “I don’t have my wife’s schedule right here, but I can call her—”

  “Actually, Mr. Knox, this is a matter of some urgency. Mr. Davis has cleared a spot in his schedule at 11:30.”

  I looked at the clock: 10:58.

  “Right now?”

  “It’s quite a serious matter, Mr. Knox. Your son was involved in an altercation this morning—”

  An altercation? “He was in a fight?”

  “—with Monsieur Vert, his French teacher,” she went on, as if she hadn’t heard me. “David isn’t welcome to return to class until Mr. Davis has had a chance to discuss this matter with one of his parents. Will you or your wife—?”

  “I’ll be there,” I said slowly, sagging in the chair.

  I didn’t say anything to David for almost two blocks. I had hoped that maybe the walk would be the best thing for both of us. Give us a chance to cool off. Keep us from saying anything we might regret later.

  It didn’t seem to work.

  “Jesus, David. What the hell were you thinking?”

  He was walking a couple of steps behind me, looking down at the concrete. I stopped and turned to see his answer: a soundless shrug.

  He hadn’t said much of anything since I had arrived at the school.

  The secretary had shown me into the vice-principal’s office, and I had spent the next fifteen minutes listening to a painfully one-sided chronology of events, from which I could only glean a few unassailable facts: David hadn’t been paying attention in French class, and when Monsieur Vert noticed this, he also noticed that David was preoccupied with something under the edge of his desk. Expecting it to be the video game that he had confiscated before, he had approached David quietly from behind and caught him reading.

  I had had to contain a smile.

  What Monsieur Vert said happened next, though, purged any amusement. He had taken the book, and David—

  “You threatened a teacher.”

  “I didn’t threaten him,” he said, sounding surly.

  “You said you were going to kill him.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  I stopped, feeling a twinge of optimism. “That’s what Monsieur Vert said.”

  “Monsieur Vert.” He snorted. “He’s not even French. His name’s Mr. Green. He was the social studies teacher until Mademoiselle Rochelle got pregnant.”

  “David …” He had a good sense for the ridiculous. “He told the vice-principal that you threatened to kill him. If you didn’t say that—”

  “I said I should strike him down.”

  I almost laughed; it sounded like something from the book.

  “And I didn’t say it to him. I just … said it. To myself. I didn’t think he would hear me.”

  “Well, apparently he did. And now you’re suspended for the rest of the week.”

  We started walking again, David falling into step beside me this time.

  “It’s only a day and a half.”

  “You’re lucky you weren’t expelled.”

  He shrugged.

  “And it goes on your permanent record.” Jesus, I had actually used the words permanent record. “And you have to apologize to Monsieur … to Mr. Green before you can go back to French class.”

  “Like I want to go back.”

  “You don’t really have a choice,” I said.

  “It wasn’t my fault, you know.”

  “Come on, David. You were reading in his class. He caught you red-handed.”

  “He said it was stupid.”

  We turned onto our street.

  “What?”

  “He said the book was stupid. He said that if I wasted my time reading things like that, I’d end up being stupid too.”

  I had to breathe through the anger I felt rising in me. What sort of thing was that to say? Especially with all the problems that David had had with his reading, his insecurity about how smart he was. What sort of teacher …

  Breathe.

  We were almost to the house when he asked, “So what’s going to happen now?”

  “Well, your mother and I will have to talk about it when she gets home from work,” I said. “I think you’ll probably be grounded.”

  His face fell.

  “That’s the way it is, David. You just got suspended. For threatening a teacher. You can’t actually think that there won’t be consequences.”


  A moment of consideration, then he shook his head. We started up the front stairs.

  “In the meantime,” I said. “You can spend the afternoon working on your irregular French verbs.”

  He had to look at me to see if I was kidding.

  “Hey, Dad,” he said as I opened the front door. “Is that—?” Pointing at the package under my arm.

  I had forgotten that I was carrying it. “Is this the book, you mean? The cause of all this trouble?”

  He waited a beat. “Can I have it back?” Looking at me guilelessly.

  “Are you serious?”

  He nodded. Of course he was.

  I ran through all of the arguments, I tried to weigh all of the conflicting stories, tried to remember how angry I had been when Mr. Green told me of what happened in the classroom.

  But then I would picture the weedy little man telling my son that he was stupid, that his book was stupid. Power-tripping.

  I held out the package. “French verbs first, right?”

  “Slow and steady,” said the captain, as Dafyd shuffled along the lower rope, his hands gripping the upper line.

  The only good thing about being scared for his life, Dafyd thought, glancing down at the rushing water far below, was that he didn’t have time to worry about what to do once he reached the other side.

  He took a deep breath, and another step.

  The bottom rope lurched under his weight, pulling away from the top one as far as the cross-woven line would allow, pulling at his arms and throwing off his balance. He swung in the air, and for a moment it felt like the ropes might spin him all the way over, and drop him into the river.

  “Spread your arms and legs,” the captain called out. “Spread your weight on the lines.”

  Dafyd shifted his right hand and foot a bit farther out on the ropes. The swaying of the lines immediately slowed.

  “You’ve got it now,” the captain said.

  Dafyd didn’t feel like he had anything; he felt spread out like a hapless insect. Even through the gloves the ropes dug into his hands, while the weight of his body pushed the bottom line painfully into his feet.