Reservation Road (8 page)

“All right.”

“So we’re clear, then?”

“Yes, we’re clear.”

“Then I’ll be going.”

He stood up, and I came around the desk and we shook hands. His hand was thin and callused and dry and couldn’t have been mistaken for a young man’s hand. Our eyes met, until I looked away. Then he went out, closing the door behind him, and I sat at my desk again, swiveling my chair so I was looking out the window to the little parking lot. Behind the lot stood a field, soft and green in the summer with daisies growing there, and a jungle gym at the near side. In a few moments I saw Stu Carmody climb into his pickup and drive away.

I tried to think about him. But with each new thing I looked at through the window, each thought I had, I just seemed to get farther away. As water rises in a flood, so memory fills in the empty places, covers all that is dead.

There’d been a jungle gym, too, in the weedy yard in front of the house I grew up in in North Haven. I remembered my old man making a big deal out of it when he brought it home, pulling the new parts from the long cardboard Sears box and holding them up ceremoniously for my mother and me to see. As if there was some secret there. It took him so long to put it together that it got dark, even though it was summer, and he made me hold the flashlight while he worked. When my arm got tired and I couldn’t keep the light where he wanted it, he screamed at me. Later, after he died, I went back and pulled the whole thing apart and hauled the pieces to the dump. And later still, after I was married and Sam was born, I went myself to Sears and bought a jungle gym and put it together with my own hands. Sam used to play on it. Then, some time during the years when I wasn’t allowed to see him, he stopped. I never asked him why. Maybe, in the way of all growing boys, he simply lost interest, moved on to other things. In any case, I never saw him on it again.

Ethan

We buried him. We buried our son on a Tuesday, in a stone-walled cemetery, under a sky the color of ashes. He would have been ten years, three months, and nineteen days. It did not rain. There were two dozen people, a minister, and a rabbi. I have no recollection of what was said. What I remember is the smell of damp earth, and that Grace held one of Emma’s hands, and I held the other.

Afterwards, people came back to the house with us. Friends, good neighbors, bearing food; they brought their children who had known Josh, gone to school with him, played with him. They stayed as long as they could stand it, and then they left, taking with them their bewildered, frightened children, to whom they must now try to explain.

We stood in the front hall, in our funeral clothes, with no idea what to do. Grace’s mother, Leila, finally took charge, suggesting to Emma, with painfully forced enthusiam, that they go upstairs to her room to change, and then perhaps read a book together. Emma did not say no, but she refused to climb the stairs; she sat down on the ground and began to cry.

“Come on, sweetie,” Grace said desperately. She picked Emma up like a baby and carried her upstairs.

The sound of her crying faded; soon a door closed.

Leila put her hand on my arm and looked me in the eyes. “She will be all right, Ethan,” she said tenderly. “In time, you will all be all right.” She was her daughter, only older: a fine-boned beauty with wonderful white hair, which she kept short and always well arranged. Perhaps she was more innately genteel than Grace, being a southern woman of a certain age. She had lost her husband, many years ago.

I wanted to acknowledge her kindness, but no human gesture occurred to me. Seeing this, Leila leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll go make us some tea,” she murmured, and went off in the direction of the kitchen.

Outside, it had begun to rain.

I stood there, confused for too long, starting to pat my pockets as if I’d lost something I needed, pocketknife or pipe—a sad joke of an addled professor, I realized dimly, through a haze of even sadder truths. It was not just the moment that paralyzed, but the vast circumference of time ahead; I could imagine no way of filling this picture, or keeping away the silence that lay behind it. My fingers found a small hard oblong object in my pants pocket and began to worry it through the cloth.

Some of Josh’s things had been returned to us that morning. His shirt and Windbreaker were being held for forensic testing, but everything else he’d been wearing or holding on Sunday had come back in two brown paper bags labeled with his name. Trooper Tomlinson had delivered them to our house, just as we were preparing to leave for the funeral. Some enterprising soul at the coroner’s office or the morgue had come upon the arrowhead in Josh’s blue jeans pocket, had slipped it into a clear plastic evidence bag, only to discover, to his professional disappointment, that it was not evidence at all, or at least not of the kind that would mean anything to him.

Here it was. I pulled it out, looked at it: putty-colored, smooth, wondrous, ancient, thumb-shined, collected, secret.

Can I have it back now?

I could not remember hugging him that day.

What other things? In his room alone I could name these by memory: peacock feather, sparrow’s nest, sheet of mica, chunk of pink quartz, hockey puck from a Hartford Whalers game, comb with missing teeth, rail spike, harmonica, the inside of a baseball wound like the earth. And his violin in its case under his bed, the sheets of music.

This is what my son loved: tidal pools, abandoned train tracks, the sound of woodpeckers, the movement of turtles. And hated: brushing his hair, the taste of eggs, the feel of wool socks, lies.

A clap of thunder outside, low, close by: the wind had picked up and was blowing rain against the windows. I went to the front door and out. The rain was a torrent.

Dwight

The paperboy drove by in his pickup just after six Friday morning. I lay awake in bed with the windows open and the breeze riding in sweet and not yet hot, and heard the light
whump
of the rolled-and-rubber-banded weekly
Winsted Register-Citizen
hitting the driveway. Then the truck went past and I heard what had been there just before, the birds again, the doves cooing on my lawn. Just another sunny summer morning.

I lay in bed and tried to ignore the paper, the sound of it landing on the driveway, the fact of its existence. But this was impossible. There’s a feeling you get if you live in the country but find yourself in the city one day, any city, walking around and minding your own business and believing yourself not just alone but one hundred percent anonymous, when suddenly from out of the blue, and almost always from behind your back, somebody calls out your name. The heart starts to go crazy. Whether you’re innocent or guilty doesn’t matter. It’s the sound of your name in a place where you expected no one to know it that’s enough to tip you over the edge, and for a moment you know exactly what it’s like to be the wrong person in the wrong place, spotlighted, picked out of the lineup. And even if it turns out to be just a big fat mistake, everything afterward feels personal. So I tried to forget about the newspaper sitting in my driveway, but I couldn’t.

The article would be under “Crime Watch” or under “Accidents” or maybe even on the front page. There’d be facts, names and places. Last Sunday night the so-and-sos from such-and-such lost their son Josh. Car did not stop. The funeral was held on . . . Suspect still at large. Reward offered.

The father was tall and dark, thin, with glasses. I could see him clearly. I would always see him clearly. Without question he’d have a wife, probably other children. Now or in an hour they’d go outside for the newspaper—this paper or a different one, it didn’t matter, there were crime watches and accidents and unsolved tragic incidents in every local weekly—and then over coffee, if they could stomach it, they’d see their own names in print and where they lived, and the name of their son who was dead and how he’d died. And it would all seem like a sick joke to them; as if they didn’t already know their own names and where they lived and the name and age of their son and how he’d died.

A breeze eased in through the open windows. Outside, it was starting to heat up, it was going to be a hot day. The doves had stopped calling to each other and to me. A car drove by and in the silence afterwards there was a loneliness that wouldn’t go away. I pulled the sheet off my naked body and lay there on the bed, imagining the tall, dark man sitting at a wooden table in some kitchen somewhere, reading the newspaper. His glasses were round and reflected light. I imagined him getting to the word “suspect” and not knowing what to do. Not knowing anything about me. Where my name should be he’d find just that word; and where my photograph should be he’d find nothing.

I imagined knowing him and him knowing me. I imagined telling him the truth about myself, filling in the blank places.

This suspect was thirty-eight years old. His body was of the burly, chunk-a-lunk variety—six feet tall, two hundred pounds. Big enough to hurt somebody. He’d played football in college (second-string tight end) until injuries knocked him out; there were operation scars on his right shoulder and left knee, and those joints ached in the cold weather. He’d broken his nose, too, or his old man had, long ago, and it had set wrong and there was a permanent bump there. It gave his face “character,” people always said. His eyes were green if they were anything, and he had a cleft in his chin as if a little piece of him had fallen out during birth. His hair was brown and straight, with the first signs of gray, and he wore it short, lawyerly, though by now it was generally known in the area that his best days as a lawyer were behind him.

What else? He could remember an afternoon sitting in a graveyard with his back against the curved gray stone wall. The wall stones were large and round and they pressed against the bruises his old man had made earlier, and with the pain there was the smell of fresh-cut grass and turned soil. Then skip a few years and he could remember being big and strong for the first time, lifting weights in the gym at school and learning to hit the heavy bag and the speed bag. There was the smell of sweat and leather and the sound of his taped fists smacking against the bags, a different music from each, and the magic, rock-hard, lactic burning in his arms. He could remember people being afraid of him, and how his old man started looking like just another little man to him. He could not remember crying, ever.

What else? We were getting close now, the tall, dark man and I, making our way through the history. This was important. I wanted to tell him that the newspapers didn’t give a shit about him. They wouldn’t listen. Listening was a lost art and they weren’t about to dust it off just for his sake. No, they’d tell him how it really was, who had been there on the dark road, what he and his family’d been through, the name of what they’d lost. The article would be maybe two inches long. It would be in a section like “Crime Watch” or “Accidents” or “Deaths,” or maybe it would even be on the front page. It would contain all the necessary names but one.

He should throw the newspaper out. I wanted to tell him. He should take his wife’s hand. He should talk and be listened to. He should know the whole story.

What else? Tell the truth now, don’t lie. There were the elements of a life, yes indeed, basic things, rock-paper-scissors things, and then there was what you did with them. In the end it was only what you did with them that mattered. This was important. (Somehow, though, the suspect had not learned this.) Was the tall, dark man listening? There was love and marriage and then one day the suspect had hit his wife. There was a child, his only son, and the suspect had hit his son, too. And there was the rest of life, there was trying to be a father and a decent man, and the suspect had driven his car into another man’s son and killed him and had not stopped.

Outside, another car went by. Maybe it was seven by now, neighbors going to work. Maybe it was already hot out there. Somewhere the tall, dark man was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. I could hear birds again, not doves but chickadees and blue jays. And something else, too. What I heard was like ice, like ice cracking in the heat, and I brought my hands to my chest. Between the dense, mounded pectoral muscles there was the breastbone, thin and brittle, and I put my thumb against it, on the spot where the right front of my car would have hit his boy, shattering the bone, and I pressed.

Ethan

I left Grace sleeping. The early morning light came in through the half-curtained windows, and I left my dreams by the side of the dark road with my son, and climbed out of bed. Every night now was a graveyard visit.

Grace didn’t even stir. I wondered if she’d taken something, some drug, so steady was her breathing. The light fell across her. Her closed eyelids looked swollen. Her jaw was clenched, a muscle working there, over and over. Still, she was beautiful. My beautiful wife. She lay on her back with the sheet fallen and her nightgown slipped off one shoulder, her breast exposed. I looked; I wasn’t dead. I remembered the first time I’d seen her skin like this, unprotected and unadorned, as she lay on a thin mattress on the floor of my university apartment. She’d been twenty. Her eyes had been open then.

Suddenly I wanted to cover her; I reached down and tugged at the sheet. She didn’t move. I smelled the warm-laundry scent of her sleep and saw up close the areola not perfectly round, the tiny bumps on the raised pale pink luminous skin, as though she were chilled. And the pinpoint indentation in the center of the nipple, through which her milk had flowed. And I remembered how she’d carried Josh around the garden with her day after day, feeding him as she went. Talking to him. Telling him the names of things.

I finished covering her and turned away.

Knowing this: It was all still his. Belonged to him. Everything he’d touched, needed, every place he’d been.

The door to Emma’s room stood open; she wouldn’t sleep with it closed. Her room was on the west side of the house and the light within was gray. She’d kicked the covers off during the night: tanned, thin legs; navy T-shirt; blond head; thumb in mouth; long neck of Twigs, the stuffed giraffe, held fiercely in the crook of one arm, as if she were trying to love him to death. I sat down on the edge of the trundle bed and put my hand on her hip.

“Emma. Time to get up.”

“No.” A sleepy whine, she curled up double, folding Twigs’s neck in two.

“It’s Friday—camp today. Remember?” I shook her gently until, finally, her eyes opened and blinked at me. “Come on. Get some clothes on and I’ll make breakfast.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“We’re letting Mom sleep in today.”

“Why?”

“Come on now, hurry up.”

I went out of the room, found Sallie getting up from her dog bed at the end of the hallway. She yawned, showing every tooth, and then stretched, forepaws straight out, bending low as a praying Muslim.

“Mecca’s
that
way,” I said, pointing to the east.

Raising herself, Sallie looked at me.

“Look, I don’t care,” I said. “Do what you want.”

She followed me down the stairs.

Standing in the afterworld light of the refrigerator, staring into it, I saw half a package of English muffins, one egg, some skim milk, a jar of Dijon mustard. No cereal, no fruit. Nothing of any interest to a child. The freezer contained three sticks of butter, a bag of French-roast coffee beans, and a stack of empty blue ice trays.

Upstairs, the toilet flushed. Emma getting ready, doing what I’d asked. While I stood looking at the emptiness, trying to decide. Breakfast for my child. What would it be? Either choose or forget the whole thing. But I could not choose.

A noise freed me: Sallie scratching at the inside of the back door. I’d completely forgotten about her. I let her out and she raced over to her favorite tree, a big sugar maple, where she squatted and peed like the lady she was, looking at the heavens.

I stood in the doorway. Sunlight was visible, though no sun. The morning air held just the remnants of the night, the dew already leaving the ground, becoming sky again. Good, country air. Mourning doves stepped gingerly across the grass, their heads bobbing in the manner of wise men, their throaty, ruffling calls speaking of safety and peace, proclaiming this land we’d come to, the life we’d chosen—away from danger, from noise, the reaches of artifice, the probing hands of strangers. Our children had never known cities.

Sallie raced around the tree and over the grass. The doves scattered into the air.

There was my own growing up. The only child of older parents, intellectuals both, who lived in fear. My father who watched in a kind of disbelief as year by year our neighborhood near the University of Chicago, where he taught linguistics, turned into a dangerous, unfamiliar place. Yet he was a stubborn man and would hear no talk of moving. As if the city—and by extension the world—had a responsibility to do right by him and he would hold his ground until that responsibility was met.

And then one night, as he walked home from the campus, he was mugged and badly beaten. I was ten years old. And I saw how after the incident he grew too afraid to walk home from work; too afraid, eventually, to take the bus. I saw how, though he still refused to talk of moving, every evening without fail my mother drove to his office and brought him home. And then at dinner he would rage to us about the violence of the world. It was for him a form of personal betrayal, and his feelings of helplessness were such that he could only intellectualize them.

And so as he aged, my father became a living paradox. He joined the movement of nonviolence and took to quoting, with Old Testament fury blazing in his eyes, Gandhi and King. He declared his hatred of guns and the people who used them. When I turned twelve, he told me that he would punish me if he ever heard that I’d been fighting at school, whatever the cause. Violence was weakness, he said, and neither he nor his son would ever be weak.

I left as soon as I was able. Found a life far from home. Married a woman with fears of her own but with strength too. And here we raised our children and taught them not to be afraid.

Sallie was sprinting across the front lawn. Happy dog after a pee. She was by the red garage, circling Grace’s station wagon parked in the driveway. She disappeared behind it.

“Here, Sallie!” I called. I didn’t want her wandering out to the road.

She reappeared a moment later, carrying a newspaper in her mouth.

“Sallie,” I said. “Come here.”

She let me take the paper from her. The
Lakeville Journal
that was thrown, freshly printed, onto our driveway every Thursday evening. This time we hadn’t seen it. Grace had been in her study all evening and I’d been in mine, and Emma had been watching a video of
Beauty and the Beast.
I’d read for twelve hours yesterday, because that was what I could do. Never thinking that the paper had come.

It was damp now, from the dew. I didn’t look at it. I took it inside, leaving Sallie to run around as she pleased. Emma was not in the kitchen, which was a relief. I dropped the paper on the table, took the coffee from the freezer and ground it and put it in a filter in the coffeemaker and turned on the machine. My heart was hammering inside my chest. When the coffee was done, I poured myself a cup and sat down at the table.

I found him first on page A2, under “Obituaries”:

JOSHUA B. LEARNER

WYNDHAM FALLS—Joshua B. Learner, 10, died July 24, 1994, from injuries sustained when he was struck by a passing automobile on Reservation Road in North Canaan. He was the son of Ethan and Grace Learner.

Joshua Learner was born April 7, 1984, in Wyndham Falls, CT.

He was to enter the sixth grade in September at Sherman R. Lewis Public School on Route 44 in Wyndham Falls.

In addition to his parents, he leaves a sister, Emma, in Wyndham Falls; and a maternal grandmother, Leila Spring of North Carolina.

Funeral Services were held July 26 at a private location.

There were fourteen other obituaries on the page. My son was the youngest. The oldest was a woman ninety-six years old, who died in a nursing home of natural causes.

I took a sip of coffee, scalding my tongue. My hand shook, coffee spilling over the rim onto page A2 of the
Lakeville Journal
, soaking through to the end. The paper already damp anyway. I set the mug down on the table.

So clean, the obituary. A time-honored literary form.

Move on, then. Get it over with.

On the next few pages the familiar section headings, so strange today as to seem like a series of surreal jokes: “Senior Menu”; “Salisbury Calendar”; “Canaan Chronicle”; “Kent Briefs”; “Northwest Corner.” Then, on A6, under “Regional,” I found him again:

BOY’S DEATH MOURNED IN WYNDHAM FALLS

WYNDHAM FALLS—Family and friends said their final goodbyes to Joshua Learner during private services at the Learner home last Tuesday.

The 10-year-old Pine Creek Road resident died at the scene of a hit-and-run accident July 24, as he was standing by the side of Reservation Road in North Canaan.

According to state police, the fifth grader was standing in front of Tod’s Gas and Auto Body shop at about 8:45 p.m., presumably waiting for his parents, who were inside the gas station.

The identity of the driver remains under investigation.

Joshua Learner recently completed the fifth grade at Sherman R. Lewis Public School in Wyndham Falls, where he was in the school orchestra.

“Josh Learner was a prize student, and the most talented musician to come through this school since I’ve been here,” said Lawrence Briggs, principal of the school since 1988.

Plans are under way by the school orchestra to plant a tree in his memory.

The boy’s father, Ethan Learner, is a professor of English at Smithfield College in Great Barrington, MA. The boy’s mother, Grace Learner, is a local garden designer.

Emma Learner, 8, sister of the deceased, is to enter the fourth grade at Sherman R. Lewis Public School in September.

There was nothing more.

I finished the coffee, staring out the window at the dog running there and the morning rising with relentless disregard for all souls alike. It was not any longer a question of theory or interpretation; of course, it never had been. I had left Josh standing by the side of the road because I lacked the courage to tell him not to. I turned my back on him to save myself the trouble. That was the truth. And it was beyond forgiveness. And the papers with their fastidious regard for fact had missed the truth.

And they had missed the other guilty party. The unknown man under investigation. The killer in his car. Who did not stop.

I got up, went into the pantry. The room was tiled and cool, always cool, smelling of flour and soup cans and dry dog food. A familial smell, the smell of our house. The safe smell of stores in waiting, nourishment in reserve. Pancakes today, French toast tomorrow.

It required not thinking. From here on out. It required a state of suspended disbelief. Otherwise you might go insane. You might want to take the fucking house apart beam by beam, until it was spread all over the lawn, as if exploded, no more and no less than the pieces it came from.

You might want to kill yourself.