No Book but the World: A Novel (7 page)

Laughter exploded among us kids. Freddy, at my elbow, positively brayed. I did not understand the joke any more than he must have, any more than the others must have—even the older ones, I think, couldn’t have known precisely what was funny—but it seemed necessary to laugh, and a giddy carillon of sound rippled up and down the line. We recognized the feel of comedy, the rhythm of a punch line, the well-oiled choreography of a pratfall, which is what Neel effectively turned it into, never mind that he remained planted where he stood, upright, heedless of the freezing rain.

June laughed, too, softly, or maybe she only smiled, an inward, chastened smile. I was standing near enough to hear the drops pattering off the waterproof poncho; alone among us she was dressed to repel the weather.

An ache welled in my throat. I understood its origins no better than I’d understood why I’d been laughing moments before, but I reached suddenly for one of June’s bare hands, and squeezed it in my own now gloved one.

•   •   •

O
N THE ROAD TO
C
RITERION,
I descend around a curve and a white wing of water rushes at me, beats violently against the windshield and driver’s-side window. I must have gathered more speed than I meant to, coming downhill, hurtling toward my appointment with Bayard Charles, toward the promise of getting one step closer to Fred, and sliced too fast straight through this deep puddle that has responded by rising up as a mad swan. I lose control; the back wheels pull to the right and the rest of the car follows, skidding sideways onto the shoulder and then off the shoulder, scraping up for screeching yards against a wall of banked earth. All the rhythm instruments, still in their duffel bag in the backseat, join in the fracas with great clattering and rattling before I manage to bring the car to a stop.

In the seconds that took, my shirt has become soaked. My top lip is damp with sweat, my hair sticking to my neck. The air bag didn’t inflate, so the impact couldn’t have been that severe, but my heart feels woozy as a candy heart dissolving in liquid. The wipers are still going, all out of tempo with time, which is suspended in a bubble of stillness. I assess. I feel unnaturally high in my seat, thrust toward a brightening overhead; the rain is lessening. Is that true? Yes, the downpour is thinner now, and pale breaks striate the clouds. My sense of elevation is real, too, I realize, a function of the rear right side of the car’s canting low, either because the wheel has sunk into the wet ground there or because the tire has gone flat. As my heart reincorporates into something more solid, I mentally scan my body. I locate only two, anomalous complaints: my throat hurts, for no reason I can fathom except my esophageal muscles must have clenched in fear, and my left knee throbs for reasons I can’t make sense of at all; it’s as if it got banged against the door, but the impact was all on the right side of the car.

Dennis
, I think, wanting him here. And then:
Fred.
With a crumpling realization.
What am I even doing here, Freddy? How can I possibly help?

Now, just now, like an echo of the water that smashed against the windshield, the hopelessness of my expedition breaks over me—a wave of futility, humility. In the turmoil of the past several days, my only thought has been to rush to Fred’s side. But what is it I think I’ll accomplish by being there? I see Dennis’s kind, watchful face, his blue eyes carefully devoid of skepticism, the way he looked at me Monday afternoon as I sat at the table, mapping my route by hand while he stood with his mug of tea, ready to offer his opinion if asked, ready otherwise to keep it to himself, with that innate sense of chivalry that is so large a part of why I fell in love with him.

I see Kitty, too, being careful. Not quite as careful as Dennis; she was bolder, with her gift of the composition book and her chiding impatience—“Oh,
Bird
”—but nevertheless refrained from saying what she, what both of them, must have been thinking: this is a fool’s errand, and I, the fool.

We learned of it Friday. Dennis heard first, while out on a job. Back in Queens he’d worked for a green energy consulting company. Since moving to Freyburg, he’s started his own business, Lo-Impact Solutions, installing environmentally friendly home insulation. About half the time he’s out on the road, doing consults or installing hemp flax or recycled blue jeans in people’s walls and ceilings and floors. On Friday he was doing a renovation project, and at midday the owner happened to be eating his lunch and watching TV in the next room. There Dennis was, unrolling batts of post-consumer denim and cutting it to fit between the wall studs in what would be a new playroom, not really paying attention to the noon news being broadcast only a few yards away, when his ears pricked up at the sound of Fred’s name.

The story concerned a search that had been under way since late Tuesday, upstate in the Meurtriere Mountain area of Criterion County, along the Canadian border. Emergency personnel along with civilian volunteers were looking for a twelve-year-old boy who’d been reported missing Monday evening after failing to return home from school. Several witnesses reported seeing the boy in a white Toyota pickup just blocks from his middle school, and by Tuesday afternoon police had located what they believed to be the vehicle in question, which by then had been reported stolen by the boy’s grandfather, near one of the trailheads at Meurtriere State Forest. After nearly three days of searching, authorities announced they’d located the driver of the stolen truck, believed to have abducted the boy on his way home from school. A white male in his early thirties, he had, they said, been transported under police guard to an area hospital where he was receiving treatment for unspecified injuries. Meanwhile, the newsreader concluded, the search for the missing boy went on.

All of this Dennis held inside his mind as he finished the job without haste. I marvel to think of it, how he worked another four hours at the client’s house, always, being Dennis, measuring twice to cut once, stopping maybe, once the batts were all in, to sit in the van and eat the cheese sandwich he’d brought from home, then heading back into the house to staple-gun the vapor barrier into place, carefully overlapping the plastic sheets at the seams and as carefully cutting them around the switch boxes and outlets. He’d have loaded up the van when he was done, then returned to the worksite with his broom to sweep any errant staples and scraps of plastic, then his vacuum to suck up all the stray fibers and cotton dust, before coming home to me with his burden of news.

He found me, Friday night, standing at the stove sautéing eggplant and celery and onion, and he turned the burner down before placing his hands on my shoulders, his thumbs on my collarbones. The deliberateness of his touch, the purposeful, steadying weight of his hands describing a kind of circle there, as if to brace or contain me, was so unlike him that I knew before he spoke it was something very bad.

“I heard a story,” he began, “about your brother.”

“A story?” I repeated, confused.

“On the news.”

“About my brother?”

“I think so.” And he relayed in his quiet, unflinching voice what he’d heard about a man named Frederick Robbins: about the mountain and the boy and the white Toyota pickup, about the search party and the hospital and the middle school and the witnesses and the police guard and the wooded trails and the below-freezing temperatures and the continuing hunt for the missing child, and all the while I had the strange sensation that I was Fred, that I was standing in Fred’s body, had taken his place that I might hear these words as the guilty party in his stead, and so I willed myself to let them in, I steeled myself to hear the worst, and when Dennis did not end by saying what I was sure must be coming—that Fred or the boy was dead—I felt a kind of reprieve that was like exhaustion, and the wooden spoon I’d forgotten I was holding clattered to the floor.

It seemed to me then that I had been bracing for news like this all my life.

What I said: “That’s not Fred. How could it be? He’s on the Cape with Dave.”

I hardly know Dave Alsop, the grown son of former Batter Hollow students and a former student himself—although he came right at the end, for just the last few years of the school’s existence, before I was born. I met him at Neel’s memorial service and remember him only as lean and taciturn, reeking of tobacco but pleasant enough, with a lazy ginger stubble and a housepainting business on Cape Cod. For a month or so after Neel died, Dave hung around Batter Hollow and made himself useful, repairing things, splitting firewood, cleaning out gutters. June, who’d known him as a little boy with bright red hair who’d shown up often at her folk dance and pottery classes, spoke gratefully of his presence during that time. And four years later, when she knew she was dying, she had reached out to Dave, made arrangements for Fred to go live and work with him. I didn’t know all the particulars, only that Dave had agreed to provide room and board in exchange for work; that June had left instructions for a sum of money to be transferred into Dave’s bank account each month, and that I had been relieved Dennis and I weren’t being asked to take care of Fred.

Dennis knelt and picked up the spoon. “I called Dave.” Sometimes Dennis uses a voice that makes me think he’s working not to spook me. “He says he hasn’t seen Fred in months.”

The first present Dennis ever gave me—I was seventeen and beside myself with the heady implausibility of Kitty’s twenty-four-year-old brother noticing, let alone wanting to impress me—was a necklace he’d made out of a tiny spirit level and a thin leather cord. Besides my wedding ring and a pair of earrings, it’s the only piece of jewelry I have from him. I reach for it now, not around my neck but around the rearview mirror where it always hangs, and where, in the aftermath of the skidding stop, it continues to swing back and forth with frantic energy, like a pendulum divining something of great magnitude. I still it between my fingers, then lift it over the mirror and hold it parallel to the earth so that the bubble centers between the rings. A car pulls up behind me. Puts its hazards on.

Someone comes toward me through the rain, man or woman I cannot tell until he’s at my side. Slightly built guy in an army-green raincoat, hood up, blinking through a pair of metal-rimmed glasses. Two knuckles tap the window. I lower it and the rain leaps in like sparks.

“You all right?” He’s standing with both hands at his sides. His face, back in the recess of his hood, looks clean-boned, disciplined. He might be forty-five, a young-looking fifty.

“Yes . . . yes.” The rain feels fine on my face.

“Nobody hurt?” He glances into the backseat, where I have only my Singalong Lady equipment: my guitar and the duffel bag full of percussion toys. “Car all right?”

“I think so.”

“See if you can get it up out of the ditch there.” He gestures with his clean-shaven, square chin and I turn to see what he means, but all I can see is the reddish earth wall, veined by roots and shrubby growth. I realize the reason I’m angled up so high must be the right rear tire’s having sunk into the mud between the paved shoulder and the embankment, rather than the result of a flat, a piece of news for which I have wits enough about me to be glad. “See if you can get out,” the man says again, backing up a step. I put the car in gear, foot still on the brake. “Try it,” he prompts.

I hesitate. “I’m scared I might hit you.”

He takes another step back. It’s very Dennisy, the way he does this: pure gallantry. I can see he finds the precaution unnecessary, yet he takes the step courteously and without comment, as if out of deference to what must be my own glaring cluelessness.

I take my foot off the brake, gingerly apply the gas pedal, do not budge. “Try giving it more gas,” he says. I do. No good. I can feel the wheel spinning. He moves around to the back of the car, then returns to me. “You’ve got about sixteen inches,” he says, holding up his hands to show me. “Try reverse, then real quick gun it forward.”

I try it. This time the car rocks back and lurches briefly forward before becoming stuck again in the exact same place.

“Again.”

I repeat the sequence, still to no avail.

“Let’s see if I give it a push.” Before I can protest he’s gone around behind. I turn to see him sidling into the narrow space between the rear bumper and the banked, rocky soil. Laying his hands against the slippery trunk. “Okay!” he shouts. I step on the gas and feel the wheel spinning, feel the car rocking from his pushing; he’s pushing not evenly but rhythmically, in waves. I depress the pedal lower and the wheel spins faster, shriller. I let up. He yells something. I look around. Through the streaming rear window he’s all wavy green. “Try again, don’t stop,” he shouts.

I comply, depressing the pedal longer and harder, and the rocking keeps up, the heaving to and fro, until, absurdly, appallingly, I find I cannot suppress an embarrassed grin. The motion transports me back to the coin-op kiddie rides they used to have outside our local Grand Union. There were two: a pink hippo and a blue race car. We’d come out of the store and pester June to let us ride them, only to wind up, on those rare occasions when she did produce quarters, having to endure the experience, as uncomfortable as it inevitably turned out to be. The painted seats were burny hot in summertime, and the grinding motion of the machines tossed us herky-jerk, but more than that, it was weirdly degrading—for there was something about it we both craved. This realization was my private shame. I’d look over at Freddy being buffeted roughly on his hippo, and he’d look over at me—his gaze vacant and wild, and it was clear that we were alike in this abnormal way, in our desire for vigorous motion that was purely impersonal, that came from motor and metal rather than muscle and skin. For although I, unlike Freddy, did not overtly shun the touch of others and never went into paroxysms of agony when subjected to it, the truth is I did not like it. The truth is, I understood Freddy’s aversion more than I’d ever admit.

Now, caught on the side of this rainy county road, I am flooded with the fact of my own ridiculousness. I feel redly silly, clown-nosed, bucking back and forth in the driver’s seat while my Good Samaritan heaves away at the rear bumper. It’s as though, having realized at last the full measure of my foolishness—the heedless way I’ve flocked to Perdu, flung myself headlong toward rescuing the brother I barely know anymore and who I am very afraid might have done something irremediable—I’m now stuck here in exaggerated, slapstick fashion: a risible one-woman cavalry with her tire wedged fast in a ditch. Everything seems suddenly mawkish, over-the-top, even the rain, even the lessening of the rain and the brightening of the greenish sunlight trying to force itself through the clouds.