In the Night Season (30 page)

I
T LOOKED
, S
HAW THOUGHT, LIKE
one of those squalls that sometimes broke over the hills from the north, a lightning shower of snow that could leave four inches of wet, heavy flakes in less then twenty minutes. Twice in his life he had actually seen lightning and heard thunder in such storms. Now he drove through it, heading up into the foothills of the Shenandoah, to Darkness Falls. The snow would be worse at altitude. He kept a slow, steady pace. His was the only car, the only light. He put the roof lights on, anyway. The road was quickly disappearing in the whiteness.

He had helped put Nora Michaelson into the ambulance and had got from her, in her murmured hysterical speech, something about her son and the lake. She said it over and over, in a kind of whispered scream, like the sound people make while tossing in a nightmare. Well, and this was all of that, wasn’t it?

The man on the floor of her house had suffered serious head trauma and had been taken away in another wagon. There were gunpowder burns on his hip and lower back, where the unregistered pistol he had been carrying in the belt of his jeans had gone off. Shaw decided that he would drive up to Darkness Falls and see
what he could find. The whole picture of these events still eluded him—but he was certain that Ed Bishop’s murder was at the heart of it.

He decided to stop in on Eloise, remembering that she had been worried about the old man. If he wasn’t home now, he could be in real trouble in such a storm.

Eloise had the floodlights on. Her shadow was in the window of the front door, and before he got out of the car she had come along the walk, bundled in her coat, arms clasped tightly about herself. “He isn’t back yet, Phil.”

He looked into the flying storm.

“I’m afraid he’s fallen into the lake.”

Shaw turned his spotlight toward where the ground slowly descended to the lake edge. He crossed that space, carrying his flashlight. The snow was already ankle deep. Eloise walked with him, calling her father by name. “Aaron? Aaron? Can you hear me?” There were tall trees around much of the circumference of the water. Here the grass grew tall and whiplike, standing up out of the collected snow. They moved along to the right, searching for footprints. The trees closed the light off from the street, and they had to depend on his flashlight. They found animal tracks. Eloise had taken hold of his arm for support and kept calling the old man’s name. The wind rushed at them in blustery gusts from the west, hurling the snow. It came flying at them out of the dark, sparkling in the beam of the flashlight, speeding toward them so thickly they couldn’t see more than a few feet.

“Daddy!” Eloise called.

They kept going, until the grass and weeds turned to briars, where no one could walk. Then they turned and retraced their path back to the wide area of illumination and blindness under the spotlight. The animal tracks were gone.

They crossed to the other curving away of the lake edge and into the trees there. The snow blasted at them. They were making their way around toward the cleared area of the beach. The ground dipped and rose, and the wind whipped at them. The flashlight went out. Shaw stopped and slapped it against his thigh.
Eloise called out, forging ahead of him in the fiercely onrushing whiteness. There was thunder. It cracked right overhead, an explosion. She cried out, “Jesus God.” Shaw kept following, the flashlight blinking. He hit it against the palm of his hand, and it came back on, showing a moving wall of glittering turbulence. He pushed through, trained the beam on the ground before him. Eloise’s tracks had nearly filled already. He had lost her. “Eloise,” he said.

Her voice came from a surprising distance. “Over here.”

He went toward it. The ground tripped him up, and he stumbled forward. One foot stepped down in water, and he realized he had come close to the lake’s edge. The cold of it felt like a burn through the skin of his foot. He worked his way back upward, the flashlight blinking again.

“Hurry,” Eloise said.

She was nearer. He pointed the light. The flakes were showering down too thickly; they gave the light back. He felt blind, helpless, pitching toward the sound of her voice. The light flickered out again, and he had almost fallen over her, where she knelt in the lee of a big fir tree. Before her was the old man, also kneeling, and between them, the shape of something else.

“What is it?” Shaw said, trying to get the light to work.

“Dad,” Eloise was saying to the old man. “Can you walk? What happened here?”

“Hello,” the old man said. “My little friend here is hurt.”

“It’s a boy,” Eloise said. “My God, Philip.”

He fell to his knees, and the flashlight flickered.

“We just met up out here,” Aaron said.

“I don’t think he’s breathing,” said Eloise. “He’s not breathing, Phil.” She pulled at the shape there between her father and herself. Shaw put his hands on the solid form. He felt bone, a stillness. Eloise commenced working at the snow-frozen clothing.

“He’s asleep,” the old man said. Evidently, he did not understand what had happened.

Shaw worked on the boy. Put his two hands down on the chest.

Eloise had helped her father to stand, and they loomed over him. They were taking the air away.

“Get out of here,” Shaw heard himself say through his striving. “Get back, leave us alone.”

They went off into the screen of flakes.

The snow was coming horizontally now, in a hoarsely moaning wind. The boy was still, eyes open, mouth partially filled with the snow. Shaw cleared the mouth and began working to get the lungs to accept air. The flashlight lay at his side, still flickering, and he cursed low, pushing gently on the boy’s chest. The eyes, in that eerie light, seemed to move, but when he paused, there was nothing. He began working again, brushing the snow away from the neck.

“Come on, son,” he heard himself say. “Come on, boy.”

The eyes were clouding with snow.

“Oh, Christ,” Shaw said. He stopped, looked up into the flying tumult of the sky, and screamed, “God!”

His hands were down in the snow, on either side of the boy’s head. He lifted them out of the cold, lay them against the chest, and pushed once more, and again, and still again, then put his mouth on the boy’s cold mouth and blew. The light went out, was gone. He was being buried in the storm, wind sweeping at him as if it had been dragged all the way here across arctic canyons. He would stay, even if it covered him. He would freeze here in an attitude of furious refusal to give in. He kept working. Somewhere nearby, he heard Eloise and her father. They might as well have been static on a radio. Their voices went away, and he brought the boy up into his arms.

“Please,” he said. “Come on, son. Please.” He lay the body down and pushed on the chest again, breathed into the mouth, stopped.

And heard the smallest high-pitched sound of supplication.

The boy was only a dark outline, fading before him. But there had been the sound. He put his ear down to the mouth and felt the softest current of motion that was not the wind. It was not the wind, and another sound came—a cough. The boy coughed deeply and began to cry. Then he kicked, trying to scramble to his feet. In one hand, Shaw saw a knife. He had to pry it from the fingers.

“It’s okay, son,” he said.

The boy struggled, and Shaw held him, put his hands under the wiry body and lifted, standing in the blast of the storm. Eloise and her father were a few yards away. He could hear them. “It’s okay,” he called out. “He’s all right.”

He held the vital, breathing, moving body in his arms and made his way toward the brightness, toward those other voices from the world of his old heartbreak, and he held tight, feeling against the side of his face the bony cheek, the wet hair, of this other boy—this saved, solid boy in his arms—and he said softly, so as not to frighten him further, that everything was all right now. It was going to be fine. Fine.

The boy held on to his neck, breathing better now, crying and trying to speak.

At the house, Eloise took her father into the bathroom and got the bathwater running. Shaw carried the boy into her bedroom and wrapped him in blankets from her bed. There were cuts on his hand and on his ankle. He was bruised and dehydrated and still only half-conscious. Shaw said, “Son, is your name Michaelson?”

There wasn’t any response.

“You don’t have to talk,” Shaw told him. He touched the side of the face, put his hand gingerly down on the chest.

“Dad?”

Shaw said, gently, “It’s okay, son.”

Eloise was working with the old man in the bathroom, and their voices, echoing in the sound of rushing water, seemed to frighten the boy further. He was attempting to talk. Shaw made efforts to calm him, to give him time to realize that he was safe at last, but it was apparent that something kept forcing a pressure to speak. His eyes were wild. He said something about his mother.

“Yes,” Shaw said. “She’s safe.”

“Travis,” the boy got out.

“Travis. Well, he’s got head trauma. He’s in the hospital. Your mom is fine.”

The boy shook his head, lay back on the pillow, and tears dropped from the corners of his eyes down the sides of his face.

Shaw said, “It’s over, son.”

“My mother,” the boy sobbed. “He’s still got her.”

“We took take care of him,” Shaw said. “No,
she
took care of him. She’s safe.”

The boy slipped into unconsciousness again. He had both hands over Shaw’s hand where it lay on his chest.

I
N EARLY SUMMER
, E
D
B
ISHOP’S
sister came to sell his house and everything in it—all that she herself did not want. She kept his books and a few personal things. She was an officious, rather imposing woman, Nora thought. There was something a bit standoffish about her. Even so, because the two women worked together dispensing with the contents of the house, a friendship began to form. Jason noticed it and remarked on it one evening as he and his grandfather sat side by side on the porch of the Michaelson house, which Nora had decided to keep, no matter what. They would spend a few weeks in Seattle, with her parents, but this house, which she had fought for, was going to be her house. She had settled this with her father while she was still in the hospital suffering from varieties of exhaustion and shock.

There had been emotional troubles, too.

One did not walk away from these things. Jason was on medicine to help him sleep. His mother had been in and out of the hospital and still didn’t have much of an appetite.

Her parents had come from Seattle. Nora’s mother had spent at least some time nursing all of them, though Henry Spencer was an old military man, and when the wound to his scalp healed, he wanted
no more talk about any of it. Whatever he was feeling he kept mostly to himself; he expected the others to follow suit. Jason had decided that he disliked him, a little, without really feeling much animosity or bitterness. It was an aversion, really, a wish to be away from him when they were together.

As they were together now.

It was getting near twilight, a violet haze in the sky. The old man had a newspaper folded on his lap and was smoking a cigar. Jason breathed in the strong smell of it. Out on the lawn, his mother and grandmother were weeding the garden they’d planted. Ed Bishop’s sister had pulled into the driveway in her Chrysler, having used the pretext of a question about the sale of the unused farm equipment to come over. Jason watched the women. Each day he lived by the little passing minutes, each minute, dreading nightfall and the silence of the sleeping house. Dark. The borders of the light that always burned now in his room.

“You okay?” the old man asked him.

This was the question they all asked of one another, many times, every day. “I’m fine,” Jason told him.

The women laughed at something. Their soft voices came to the boy on the humid evening air.

They could laugh. It occurred to the boy that something resilient in them made it possible to laugh, made it so that they were not cringing in the corner of a wall somewhere, waiting. He understood this without words, and in the next moment he tried, unsuccessfully, to find some way to express it to himself.

The worst thing was the knowledge of the attic, that space above him in the house. It had come to mean all the bad things he had been through—and when he could sleep he was often awakened by an image of Travis Buford Lawrence Baker standing out in the brown grass staring up at him. Sometimes he dreamed that he walked up there and, against every nerve in his mind—forced by the illogical pattern of the dream—peered out to see Travis standing below, one hand visored over his eyes, staring. It tore him out of sleep each time with a thudding of his heart. And there was no returning to sleep afterward.

Travis had survived his beating and was awaiting trial. He was confined to a wheelchair. Of his three partners, two were dead, and another was in custody in the state of Washington.

Jason lay in bed at night reciting all this to himself. It helped a little, but only a little.

Sometimes, the county investigator, Shaw, came by. There was something oddly tentative about him with Jason, a sadness the boy sensed and once more failed to find some way to express for himself.

Shaw had brought some paperwork for the boy’s mother to fill out, and there were matters of the court that he had handled. He made gentle, self-deprecating jokes about his first-rate police work, telling Henry Spencer that he had stumbled through the whole affair from beginning to end. Jason’s grandfather spoke of being grateful for the outcome. Jason sought excuses to make Shaw stay, fantasizing that the policeman and his mother might discover an affection for each other. Nothing had come of it, though. Shaw had visited once, bringing his daughter along—the daughter was visiting from Richmond—but he’d had his friend Eloise with him.

They seemed happy.

Now the boy’s grandfather put out the cigar, removed the ash, and stored the cigar in his shirt pocket. “What’re you thinking about?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Jason told him.

“You know what I’m thinking?”

The boy waited.

“I’m thinking about moving back here for good.”

“Where would you stay?” Jason asked him, hoping to hear that he was thinking of moving into the house.

The old man took this the wrong way. “Don’t worry,” he said with a smile. “We’ll find a place of our own.”

“No,” Jason said.

There was another laugh from the lawn, and now all three women crossed the expanse of grass to the porch.

“Eugenia has asked us to dinner,” Nora said.

“Why, that’d be just lovely,” said the old man.

“Jason?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Sure you are, honey. You just don’t know it yet.”

“I better get back and start,” Eugenia said. “I’m still not used to that kitchen.”

“Would you like some help?” Jason’s grandmother asked.

“I’ll be fine.” Edward Bishop’s sister walked off and got in her car. They watched her pull out and head down to the other house.

“She’s sweet,” Gwendolyn Spencer said. “But she’s so held-in. I’m surprised she invited us.”

Nora said, “Her brother was my friend. A splendid friend. And he paid for that generosity with his life.” Her eyes welled up.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Jason’s grandmother said. “I didn’t mean anything.”

The old man brought the cigar out of his pocket and lighted it. “Guess I will finish this,” he said.

“Henry,” said his wife. She reached out and touched the small place, a discoloration, where the tear in his skin had been, the bullet that might have killed him. Jason looked out at the trees, where a pair of starlings were sailing and diving at a crow. The world was all violence; even the flat, spun shapes in the sky were taking on the shades of blood. One day in the spring his mother had gone with Shaw and an officer of the court to Bryce Mountain Storage and requested access to pallet 9. In it were several boxes of canceled checks (years’ worth of them, the whole history of the failed business, all tightly bound in rubber bands), some deeds and contracts, a few tools, and four cartons containing more than two million dollars’ worth of stolen computer chips. These were turned over to the police, and it was in all the newspapers. Jason’s mother told him that everyone could plainly see now that the Michaelsons were without anything anyone could possibly want.

Now she stepped forward and put her hand on his cheek.

“I’m thinking of Dad,” he said.

“You all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “I wish we’d all stop asking that question.”

“That’s gonna take a while,” she said.

For a time, they all watched the colors fade in the sky.

“I told Jason I was thinking of moving back to Virginia,” Grandfather Spencer said.

The others simply took this in.

“He seemed a little worried that we’d move in here.”

“No I wasn’t,” Jason said and felt abruptly as though he might have to fight back tears. He stood and went into the house. His mother followed him into the kitchen, where some of the vegetables she had harvested from the garden lay untrimmed—carrots mostly, and a few tomatoes.

“He didn’t mean anything by it,” she told him.

“It’s not that,” Jason said. “I’d
like
them to move in here.”

She hesitated a moment, then put her hands on his shoulders.

It seemed impossible to imagine that people might go for years without any bad trouble, that he himself might go the rest of his life, as Shaw had told him, without ever seeing another criminal face-to-face. He thought of Travis and of the others and immediately felt weak, terrifyingly susceptible.

“We’ll make friends with it,” she told him. “Won’t we, honey? We’ll have to. Other people have managed to get on with things. We can do this, Jason. You and me.” Her voice shook. “You’ll see.”

He put his head against her chest. He was thinking that soon, tonight if he could manage it, he would go up into the attic and straight to that window and stare full in the frame of it, looking out at what he could see of the world. He would stand there until the shaking in his bones stopped. He would make himself perform this ritual of exorcism, which he had no words for, but nevertheless understood. He would find some way to outlive this particular fear. For a second he believed this, but then it all dissolved in doubt—a hard, clutching feeling at the pit of his stomach.