Reservation Road (12 page)

Grace

She woke to an empty house. She woke in a fog, with no sense of herself. The dimensions of her life came back to her only gradually. She lay unmoving and felt the walls close around her, rough and cold to the touch.

The clock read 10:45. It was Monday—the day she’d promised herself she would start to do some of the things required of her. There were so many things. Ends to tie up, holes to fill. She shut her eyes and saw Josh’s casket disappearing into the ground.

Deep under the covers, she curled into a ball, into her center, seeking a primordial comfort.

Downstairs, in robe and bare feet, she sat at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee. She couldn’t eat. Just the sight of a package of English muffins in the refrigerator made her long to be sick. She could imagine starving herself to death without any trouble at all, gradually turning bodiless, then mindless, memoryless, into nothing. Except it would be too easy. She stared out the window at the garden she’d made. Sallie chasing a squirrel up the oak tree.

There were these periods, small pools of underwater time, when Josh was not there for her. When she couldn’t or wouldn’t think about him and so couldn’t locate him, even in memory.
Gone
.
Already
. While she treaded water, got lost in oblivion. While she was undone by such complicated maneuvers as getting up and sitting down. Undone by English muffins. Overheard saying, to absolutely no one, “Brushing my hair is beyond me.”

She got up from the table, carried the mug to the sink, and set it precariously on top of the tall pile of dirty dishes: it did not fall.

If it falls later, she thought, while I’m thinking about something else, I will not care.

There was a To Do list in her head, comprehensive and written in a nice, fine hand. The problem was remembering it. The lines got broken up, separated, like a sheet of paper ripped into pieces and thrown into a hat at a party, each piece with a different word on it. She could only draw one word at a time, which was useless.

She chose the bathroom first, hers and Ethan’s. She went to the laundry room for the cleaning supplies and yellow rubber gloves, and put them all in a plastic bucket and carried them up the stairs and down the hallway. She looked neither to the left nor to the right as she went. But she could not ignore it: the door to Josh’s room was closed, the door to Emma’s open. She walked fast, her stomach reeling, her mind crying out, and then she was standing in her room. Sunlight broke dappled through the curtains onto the hardwood floor, her clothes strewn there, the bed against the wall looking stripped and violated on her side, where she’d thrown the covers off. But not on Ethan’s side: he’d pulled the sheets up almost to the headboard, as if to cover any trace of his presence. She had no recollection of his getting out of bed; did not really remember him being there at all, except that he’d been the one who’d turned out the light last night. The tidiness of his side of the bed disgusted her. How contained it was, and selfish. You couldn’t tell from it anything about what he was thinking or feeling or suffering.

Now, standing in the middle of the spacious, sunlit room, she ducked her head as though she’d just gone shooting into a tunnel. The bucket fell from her grasp. It banged on its side and clattered terribly, and the cleaning supplies spilled out: Fantastik, Windex, Comet, a sorry old sponge, those yellow gloves shocking as a scream. And she started to cry, sinking to her knees on the hard floor.

Later, she sat on Josh’s bed with her feet on the floor, her palms flat on the spread. Everything cold to the touch. Everything neater than it was supposed to be in the room of a ten-year-old boy. She remembered, on that morning eight days ago, walking through this door and telling him he wouldn’t be going to the concert unless he cleaned his room from top to bottom, left to right, spic to span—“We’ll leave you behind.” A mother’s idle, love-crippled threat. And how much it hurt now to discover the degree to which he’d listened and obeyed. The room was neat, the bed was made. All his secrets lay tucked away in their secret places. Such a cruel irony that this should be the only room in the house with any order now. As though a bomb had fallen everywhere else. Well, she could exist here, in this room. It was the only place. She could curl up here and let the world outside remain as it was, beyond her, not understanding, not giving a damn—

Far below, the doorbell rang.

No. Go away.

She waited. But then the bell rang again, and like some automaton she stood up. When the bell rang a third time, she went to the stairs. Gravity urged her down them. Then she was at the front door. She was opening it: a police officer, walking back along the flagstone path to his police car parked at the side of the road. He was almost to it when he heard the door open and turned around. He wore mirrored sunglasses and she wasn’t sure if he was the same one she remembered from before.

“Yes?” she said.

He took a couple of steps toward her. “Mrs. Learner?”

“Yes.”

He pulled the gray hat off his head and held it at his hip. “Sergeant Burke, Mrs. Learner. State trooper, Canaan barracks. I’m the one in charge of your son’s case.”

Say “police officer,” Em.

She said, “I’m Grace Learner.” She felt dislocated, pulled from the socket.

The officer nodded. The sunglasses couldn’t hide the fact that he was looking at her strangely.
He is trying to be careful and correct,
she thought.

“We already met once before, ma’am.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I was going to call,” he said, “but I was coming out your way and thought I’d just drop by instead. I promised your husband I’d keep him posted on things.”

“My husband’s not here.”

He nodded again.
He’ll go away now.
But he stayed where he was, looking at her. Probably expecting her to be properly curious about his news:
He can go to hell.
Curiosity is just another kind of hope, and hope is sick, it is feeling after death. She wanted to knock the mirrored glasses from his face.

“Maybe I should come back another time. . . .”

“It’s all right,” she said, surprising herself.

She stepped back from the door, and he came slowly forward along the flagstones and into her house. For a moment she saw the beginnings of her face take shape in his glasses, before he took them off. His eyes were gray. Then, looking down, she saw the gun in his holster, its curved grip jutting out from his hip like a bone or a horn, and it reminded her of the gun her daddy had brought home from the war, the gun that he’d kept, along with his old uniform and his medals and the love letters he’d received at the front, in an army trunk in the attic. Where once he had found her snooping.

It was the letters she’d come to look at, but he didn’t know that. He’d assumed it was the gun. She remembered the dry heat of the attic and the smell of the trunk, naphtha and must. And how he had taken the gun out from its dented metal box and shown it to her, saying grimly, “This is a dangerous thing, Gracie. A terrible, dangerous thing. I keep it because it meant something to me in the war. But it’s got nothing to do with our lives here, honey, and you must promise never to touch it.”

She had promised. She had loved him so. And then, years later, after he had died and she had found herself grown and married, one day the trunk itself and all of its contents had arrived from Durham on a truck. Thinking of her infant son, she had stuck it in the barn, and made sure that it was locked, and never looked at it again.

“Would you like coffee?” she asked Sergeant Burke.

“That would be nice, ma’am, thank you.”

On the wall to the left of the stairs hung the Arts and Crafts mirror her grandparents had given them as a wedding present. It was a handsome piece, simple and true. She had always admired it. Now, leading the way to the kitchen, she saw herself in it. She’d forgotten all about the ugly robe she was wearing, forgotten the bed-pressed hair and red, swollen eyes. And suddenly she understood the embarrassed expression on the man’s face, why he stood with his shoulders slightly hunched, as though drawing away from the sight of her: the ugly, tedious fact of her misery had unmanned him. Not that she blamed him. She almost started to apologize for her appearance but couldn’t get the words out. All at once, a crushing weariness.

She poured him a mug of coffee and led him to the living room at the back of the house. An old room, the floor lower at the middle than at the corners, the walls faintly bowed. On one of the walls, a watercolor landscape she’d made in college.

Sergeant Burke sat on one of the comfortable chairs in front of the fireplace, sipping his coffee, looking at her where she sat on the sofa. Then looking past her, down the length of the room and all that was in it, through the far windows of old blown glass. The bubbles and imperfections in the panes transformed the sunlight in some way she couldn’t fathom. And she thought:
He is an
observer, this man, a professional—a detective, a hunter-gatherer of
facts. He will see all there is to see about us.

“The coffee’s good,” he said.

“What?”

“The coffee.” He held up the mug. “Tastes good.”

“Oh.” She nodded, tried to smile. “Would you like some more?”

“No, ma’am, thank you.”

She stared into the cold stone fireplace.
Cold since when?
A chilly night in early June. The fire crackling. Reading
The Lion,
the Witch, and the Wardrobe
to Emma while Ethan played chess with Josh. Josh had won—he had won, checkmate. She touched her hand to her cheek. “I don’t know where my husband is, Sergeant.”

He said nothing.

“Is it Monday?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ethan drops Emma off at music camp.”

“Probably on his way home right this minute,” Sergeant Burke said encouragingly.

She said, “It must be lunchtime by now.”

Sergeant Burke looked down at the floor. “It’s after three, ma’am.”

“So late?” Aware of her fingers slipping off the cliff edge one by one, endless space below. Attached by nothing.
I do not want
to fall
. She folded her arms over her chest and squeezed until breathing was a challenge she could think about for a few seconds at least.

“Ma’am,” the officer said. His voice was tentative, awkward. “I don’t know if your husband told you, but we’ve got a counselor we work with over at the barracks. Her name’s Charlotte Lewis. She’s got a master’s degree in social work. More than that, she’s a nice lady. And, uh, if you ever felt the need—”

“ ‘Need’?” She could taste the word on her tongue like metal.

“To talk. Talk about things.”

“With whom, Sergeant? This woman? Did she ever meet my son? Did she ever know him? Could she possibly have any idea who he was?”

Who was this talking? she wondered suddenly. Whose voice coming out of her mouth?
I do not recognize her.

Sergeant Burke’s eyes had left her for the room behind her head. “I know you’re upset, Mrs. Learner . . .”

“Upset?” Grace shook her head. Already the anger was leaving her like water through a drain; she wanted to hold on to it. She was a husk; she’d never been so empty. Her voice was frighteningly calm. “You’re wrong, Sergeant. I’m not upset. I’m hardly even here.”

His look of confusion then would once have been a kind of victory for her, something to laugh about and describe to friends. Not today. They sat in an awkward, distinctly unprofessional silence as the clock ticked.

I am finished.

Somewhere outside, a car door slammed.

Sergeant Burke stood up. “That’ll be your husband.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “My husband.”

Ethan

Monday morning I got Emma into the car on time, and drove her over to music camp.

We said very little on the way. Perhaps she was still waking up. Perhaps conversation of any kind was simply beyond me. Outside it was hot already and I had the air conditioning on and the windows rolled up, like a city driver or a man on the interstate. Emma sat in the front seat with her sun-browned legs sticking straight out. She’d dressed herself, as always, according to her own sense of fashion: a red V-neck T-shirt and denim shorts, and sneakers with purple stripes and Velcro straps instead of laces. I drove with the radio off. Ten minutes to the center of town, such as it was—general store, mediocre pub, gourmet sandwich shop, pharmacy—and around the little oblong green, past the white houses and the tall white church behind which the birds would have been singing under a single, broad-limbed oak, and eventually to the Sherman R. Lewis Elementary School, where I parked beside a green station wagon.

“Here we are,” I said, turning off the engine.

Emma said, “That’s Mrs. Wheldon’s car.”

I didn’t know what to say. I reached into the backseat for her music books.

“Sam Arno’s got a black eye,” Emma said.

“Does he?”

“Uh-huh. It’s totally gross.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, and received from Emma a look of disappointment, even pity, at my banality. I handed her the music books. Bach was on top, a selection of pieces for the intermediate piano student. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

“No. . . .” She was staring out the window at the playground, the metal slide shining white-hot under the sun. Something was happening inside her, but I had no idea what it was. I felt my heart sinking.

“Emma?”

“It’s okay,” she said in a small voice. She pushed the red button by her hip and the seat belt came free, went sliding across her. But she made no move to get out.

I leaned over and kissed her head. “I hope it goes well today.” “Is Mom going to pick me up?”

“Yes.”

“Tell her not to be late, okay?”

“She won’t be.”

“Good.”

She sat there for perhaps ten seconds more, saying nothing, staring at her feet, mustering courage. Then she opened the door and got out.

I watched her in the rearview mirror: a bright shot of red dropping out of my blind spot and into the white heat of the morning. Refracted, she seemed already distant. And then, thirty feet away, I saw her stop.

I waited. She stood dead center in the mirror, her red-shirted back to me, halfway to the entrance to the school. I hoped she’d start walking again, but she didn’t. Finally, I opened the car door and got out.

The air was hot and dry, the sun so bright off the pavement it was like being struck in the face. I walked toward her. Even when I was close, she didn’t turn around, and I went up and crouched down behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. I felt the tremor in her then, like a live wire run taut, and for a long fixed moment it was as if I were holding her again by the side of Reservation Road, trying to absorb her trembling and knowing that I could not. Gently, now, I turned her around. Her face was red and streaked with tears. Her nose was running. I picked her up in my arms and the music books fell to the ground. Her crying was ancient, fierce, and nearly silent.

She was just eight years old. I knew everything about her, and nothing. After her tears were done, I asked her if she wanted to go home. But she said she was okay. She insisted on going to camp. She was stubborn. Nothing more was said, nothing explained. We picked the music books off the ground and entered the school.

Out of the bright light and heat into coolness and near dark; my eyes were slow to adjust. I held my daughter’s hand for guidance. And for a moment there was just blind memory: holding my own father’s hand, breathing in the aching stone coolness of the synagogue he used to take me to on Chicago’s South Side. A grief temple. A kind of vertigo. Then I was back again in the square high lobby with the gray stone crosses embedded in the walls, impossibly deep. Emma was holding my hand. And the woman standing before us, her hands clasped at her waist, was Ruth Wheldon.

“Good morning, Mr. Learner,” she said. She sounded slightly breathless, as if she’d just run up the stairs.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Hi, Emma.”

“Hi, Mrs. Wheldon.”

Ruth Wheldon smiled at Emma. It was a pretty smile, turning nervous at the end; apparently, she’d exhausted her prepared remarks.

“I was just dropping Emma off,” I said. “I hope we’re not too late.”

“Oh, no,” Ruth Wheldon said.

I bent down and kissed Emma on the cheek. “Good-bye, Em.”

Ruth Wheldon took a hesitant step closer. She was wearing a kind of summer pants suit, all in green, and high heels. “Mr. Learner?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think I could talk to you for a minute?”

I glanced down at Emma, who was staring at her feet. “All right.”

“Emma, why don’t you go downstairs and join the other kids?” Ruth Wheldon said. “Tell Mrs. Peabody I’ll be down in a minute. Okay?”

Emma nodded. She seemed, like me, broken now by weariness, too tired to resist anything. “I’ll be done at four-thirty,” my daughter said to me—reproachfully, like an adult—and then, music books in hand, she walked to the back of the lobby, turned to the right, and disappeared down the stairs.

Ruth Wheldon cleared her throat. “I want you to know how sorry I am. How very sorry.”

The words were ashes in my mouth: “Thank you.”

Ruth Wheldon seemed on the verge of saying something more, but didn’t trust herself. Her eyes were gleaming even without direct light; perhaps it was tears. She stood looking at the floor, then at me, then high above my head. I knew nothing about her except for the odd clothes she habitually wore and the fact that despite them she was attractive. That her sorrow seemed genuine yet touched me no more than if it had been false. “You probably want to talk about Emma,” I said, to make it easier for her.

She nodded gratefully. “I talked to your wife last week.”

“I know.”

“About the concert Wednesday evening.” She paused. “Is it still okay?”

“It’s up to Emma.”

“Sure.”

Her attempt at a smile died on her lips. There was no easy way to do this, and the crosses in the walls weren’t helping. Death is death. And I thought of my father in temple, his shoulders slumped, grieving for centuries of pain and loss, only a fraction of it his own.

“I also asked your wife about counseling for Emma, Mr. Learner,” Ruth Wheldon said. “If you had any plans in that direction. I don’t want to pry. It’s none of my business, and the last thing in the world I want to do is to make things harder for you and your family after the tragedy you’ve all been through. But I’m concerned about Emma. There are times when it’s like nothing’s happened, and other times when you can just feel her start to crack. I think she’s got strong feelings of guilt. She feels almost responsible in some way for what happened, like it was her fault.”

“Her fault? That’s ridiculous.”

My voice, angry and assaulting, echoed faintly against the walls, and made the silence that followed feel all the more regrettable. Taken aback, Ruth Wheldon merely stared at me.

I thought:
I am harming Emma, too.

“I’m sorry,” I stumbled. “I didn’t mean—”

“You don’t have to explain,” she said.

“No. It’s just—she’s—you’ve got to try to understand. Emma’s the only one who’s innocent.”

“I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“Never mind. Excuse me.”

“No, please—”

“You think Emma should see a psychiatrist?”

Ruth Wheldon looked miserable now, on the verge of tears. “Yes, I do. Somebody who knows more about these things than I do. A professional.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me.”

I reached out and touched her hand. I didn’t know why. Then I left.

Around the little oblong green, this time in reverse. White church, white houses. The white heat of morning. All of it a strange reminder now of the blank white light in the empty refrigerator at home: nothing for Emma’s breakfast again this morning. I saw the hand-lettered sign for Krause’s General Store and pulled in.

Paul Krause stood behind the burnished wood counter, talking to gossipy, bilious old Mrs. Briggs, the school principal’s mother, and ringing up her goods. He paused mid-sentence when he noticed me come in, his mostly bald head swinging in my direction and then quickly retreating. Mrs. Briggs followed his initial look, her ossified neck forcing her body to turn a full hundred and eighty degrees to get me in view. She was not by nature as diplomatic as Paul Krause, nor as genial, and my sudden appearance caused her to emit a breathy “Oh!” of surprise.

“Morning, Ethan,” Paul said, with an unmistakable gentleness.

I nodded. “Morning, Paul.” I hurried to the back of the store to avoid any contact with Mrs. Briggs.

There were five short aisles of canned goods, boxes of cereal, plastic bottles of shampoo. Along the back, beside the refrigerator and freezer, twenty- and fifty-pound bags of flour and sugar were piled three feet high. A pair of buck’s antlers decorated the wall—taken, Paul had once told me, by a much younger version of himself. He had a pot belly now. He swept the place daily, kept it clean. He talked patiently with the Mrs. Briggses of the world. I’d never understood how he made any money, though it was not my business. Chain supermarkets had long ago come to Winsted and other towns.

The door opened. Mrs. Briggs shot a last carnivorous look in my direction and departed. I carried a dozen eggs, a loaf of oatmeal bread, a box of Bisquick, and a glass bottle of Vermont maple syrup up to the counter, where Paul rang them up on the old-fashioned register with the round indented keys and the white-backed number cards that popped, ringing, into the window like so many jack-in-the-boxes. He paused before punching up the total. “Anything else, Ethan?”

We made eye contact. For some reason, I thought about how I’d touched Ruth Wheldon’s hands. I turned and looked back over the small store, dark with wood and smelling of flour. “Nothing I remember,” I said.

He nodded. He didn’t tell me he knew what I meant. He punched in the total and I paid and thanked him and went out.

I was reaching for the car door when my peripheral vision filled with a shape and color that made the breath die in my throat and my head snap up in the direction of the road: it was there, passing right by me. Four doors, dark blue, a reflecting midnight blue. A man driving. I dropped the bag of groceries. It landed on the pavement at my feet with a sickening crash, eggs and syrup blown to smithereens. I saw the neat chrome uppercase letters across the back of the trunk, FORD on the left, TAURUS on the right, and below it the flat blue of a Connecticut license plate. Diminishing fast. Thirty feet, forty feet, a hundred feet and turning left, following 44 west toward Canaan. Gone. I never saw the headlights.

There was no deliberation. I couldn’t get the keys out fast enough, couldn’t hold them without dropping them on the ground and again inside the car, pounding my open hand against the steering wheel and screaming at myself,
Stupid fucking
clumsy fool!
Then the key was turning in the ignition and the car shot backward into the road, which happened to be empty. I turned the wheel hard and the tail slid left, tires shrieking, the nose veering to the right, and I shifted again and the car jolted forward as if rammed from behind. Just before making the turn for Canaan, I glanced at the rearview mirror and recognized Paul Krause standing over my bag of shattered groceries with a broom in his hands.

I was not a good driver. My car swung wide on the turn westward. The guardrail separating the ten-foot bridge from the stream below came rushing up from the side. The back right bumper hit and released, and then the car straightened, accelerating onto a long straightaway. The dark blue sedan appeared at the end of it, distant but there. I locked on it. On him, faint dark blur through windshields. Probably thinking of himself as just an ordinary man, a citizen. He had no idea what was happening. It didn’t matter. I would appear in his mirror like a ghost. The red needle on the speedometer was climbing past fifty. Trees whipped by. I felt the ground rushing under me, under rubber and metal, huge chunks of it left in my wake. The distance between us was closing; he couldn’t have been going very fast. He was meandering toward Canaan. A day spent antiquing, perhaps, driving his car as if he had the fucking right. I could see the blue of the license plate, the make-and-model chrome. I could feel the steering wheel gripped in my white-knuckled hands and the sweat beaded on my upper lip. And I did not flinch when the rounded blue tail of his car grew larger than life, letters and numbers emerging as if out of a mist. I kept my speed. A thousand feet ahead on our side of the road I could see a gray stone wall.

I was fifteen feet behind him when he finally noticed me. His head jerked toward the rearview mirror, and instantaneously his car zigged to the right, almost onto the shoulder, offering me room to pass. I took it. I stepped down on the pedal and my car surged forward, entering his blind spot on the left, our vehicles no more than a yard apart. Five hundred feet ahead, the shoulder ran out, replaced by the gray stone wall. He was whipping his head to the side, trying to find me. I saw short dark hair and a flash of surprisingly white skin. I was pulling even with him, turning my wheel half an inch to the right, closing the narrow gap between us. The speedometer at sixty, the noise of the two engines all-consuming, pounding through the closed windows, pushing up through the seats. Every stone of that wall coming clear as day. And I turned to look at him. I wanted him to know. I saw the porcelain wedge of his profile and it was strange, so pale and smooth and frightened. Too strange. It gave me pause. Then it crushed me. I felt something crack in my heart, and a sickness start to leak out.

It was a woman. A woman about my age. A woman looking at me in terror, her lips moving soundlessly behind the layers of glass and noise and speed that separated us, calling out for her life.