Reservation Road (19 page)

“No, thank you,” I said, loud enough to be sure he heard me.

“You’re the boss,” he called back cheerfully, and resumed his raking.

“
He’s
not my real dad,” the boy said to me in a confiding tone of voice.

“Your parents were divorced?”

He nodded.

I noticed the way he was looking at Sallie. “Sallie doesn’t mind being touched,” I said.

He approached her slowly, getting down on his knees on the porch. She wasn’t afraid of him, and he ran his hand from her brow down her long muzzle to her nose.

“My dad drove over this dog on the road,” he said, watching his hand as he stroked her. “It was an accident. During the summer. I was asleep when we hit it but Dad said it was black and we killed it. He felt really bad about it. Me too. I got a black eye when we hit it. All my mom said was that’s why we can’t have dogs any more. Because they’re always getting run over.”

He didn’t look up at me. He kept petting the dog. And I closed my eyes. I was seeing a car hitting a black dog, crushing it, passing on. The dog left by the side of the road like a piece of trash.

I opened my eyes. There was just his sandy hair washed in daylight. His living bones. His hand smoothing a dog’s head with tender affection. His unknowing love. There was his face so clear and young without the badge of bruised eye. He was on that stage with his trumpet.

Now he looked up, right into my eyes.

“Is it true you’re Josh’s dad?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was.”

“Are you still sad?”

“I’ll always be sad.”

“Till you die?”

“All my life.”

He looked down again, running his fingers through Sallie’s soft coat. She was his antidote to what he saw before him, in me: a pain that never ends. He could not imagine it.

Grace

With no work to do, it was hard to tell the days apart. It was November, she knew that much. Every day, it seemed, colder than the one before it. Leaves piling up on the ground. Her garden dying like a country gone to war.

It was an afternoon, today: and she walked slowly around the house, the garage, assessing the devastation. She did not want to miss anything. Apples were rotting on the ground beneath the trees. She went past the little garden shed where she kept her clippers, all her tools, to the beds of roses behind. They needed clipping back, but she would not do it.

It is the breaking of a pact,
she thought.
The love of God
turned upside down.

You thought and dreamed and planted, you tended, getting on your knees in the dirt. You watched and waited, tried through experience and luck and empathy to discover what each living thing required to grow and thrive, and then you found some way, any way, to provide it. Because the living thing would not be there but for you. Because it was you who chose.

She walked on. Beyond the roses were the hostas: she saw that they were finished, too. The full green leaves and aubergine-colored stalks of summer had collapsed under the weight of their own decomposition; there was the odor of rot. She turned her head away.

Sallie trotted ahead of her, up the garden path to the west of the house. Under a carpet of fallen leaves the slab pathstones were invisible. The leaves rustled and crumbled under the dog’s four paws and her own two feet. Everything alongside the path was dead and discolored. And though she had expected this, it still came as a shock. Tiny Rubies dead. Dead Crater Lake Blues. Silver Brocade. Rust and ocher leaves everywhere, like something strewn at a funeral.
I have not been here in so long
, she thought;
I
have not even looked
. It was a world made and then let go. Here at the top of the path where the land leveled out, where she had carried Josh and planted, she once believed, his spirit . . . well, the perennials were finished, too.

She stopped walking; she had seen enough.

How long she’d been outside she didn’t know, but she was chilled to the bone; it was afternoon, perhaps four o’clock, the light already starting its decline. She felt as if she had been far from this place, trudging over some former battlefield—Ypres, or Verdun— the boundaries invisible now, grown over with weeds, the past a horrible buried joke.

She went inside.

Climbed the stairs, past Emma’s room, found the door open, took a peek inside: empty. Emma not home from school yet. Time enough then to lie down in her own room for a few minutes, curl up, close her eyes; time enough, she thought without much hope, to try to shed the skin of memory that had deadened her these last months and kept her from feeling. She understood:
I cannot go on like this
. She started down the hallway. But then she saw the door to Josh’s room standing not quite closed, and she halted. It had been closed earlier, she remembered. It had been closed, as far as she knew, for a long time. The very sight now— just a few inches of boy’s blue carpet, bathed in steel-like tones from the windowed light—made her irrationally afraid, as if it signified the presence of an intruder in her house.
Stop it
, she told herself, trying to master her fear. Which worked, sort of; she pushed the door open the rest of the way. Then heard her own intake of breath, and stood as if frozen in the doorway.

“Oh, my baby,” she whispered.

It was Emma. Huddled on the floor, crying, among the shards of Josh’s smashed violin.

Emma began to cry harder, to wail, pieces of the instrument she had shattered clenched in her fists. And now Grace did not hesitate. Fragments of antique shellacked wood crunched under her feet. She swept Emma up off the ground and carried her to Josh’s bed.

Dwight

Another Sunday came, and I decided to take Sam to the Chat-ham Fair.

There were clouds blowing in from the west but they didn’t look serious. Otherwise it was a fine November day, strangely mild. Sam wore overalls and a Red Sox sweatshirt I’d bought for him, and a pair of Converse sneakers no different, really, from the pair I’d had as a kid. He rode up front with me in the Corsica, fiddling with the radio to try and find the Patriots game, even though I’d told him it was still too early in the day. No matter. I drove with one arm resting along the top of the seat back, just above his head. It felt to me as if my arm was floating above him like a guardian weapon, ready to be called to use.

We crossed into Massachusetts and a little north of Stock-bridge caught the pike heading west, and soon we were in Columbia County. We’d crossed two state lines in the course of an hour’s drive, an experience common to any jaded Northwest Cornerite but a fact still astonishing to my son, who twice said to me, over the fuzz of radio static he’d managed to fix on the radio, “You
sure
this is New York, Dad?”

What could I say? I was sure. Ruth and I had been to Europe on our honeymoon, the only time for both of us. Three weeks in a tin-box Fiat, crossing whole countries as though they were towns for the taking. We made love outside a ruined castle in the middle of France, with yellow flowers poking up between our legs, and Ruth repeating the words “Knights Templars” to herself and laughing like a happy, beautiful drunk. The Knights were the ones, supposedly, who’d built the place and disappeared, leaving it to us.

A country fair.

Prize vegetables and prize pies, a million-plus apples, a pumpkin the size of New Jersey (though still smaller than the blue-ribbon bull), a sheep with a permanent, a politician in a booth. Always, a politician in a booth, talking. Carnival rides. A demolition derby.

After the Ferris wheel and the bumper cars, a pellet-gun sharpshooting contest and an almost-won stuffed warthog, we ate foot-long dogs and cotton candy, followed by a hunk each of fried dough. I drank a couple of beers and tried too hard to make Sam smile.

We were doing all the right things. But something was missing, or broken. Sam had always liked fairs, but today he seemed to stare at his feet a lot and not to care about winning or losing the games he played. He didn’t seem to notice when, late in the afternoon, the politician got caught by a photographer with his tongue down the throat of a pretty young girl behind the livestock pen. And he didn’t seem to mind that all afternoon the clouds kept blowing in from the west, gathering over our heads.

By four-thirty it was raining. We were already halfway toward dark. With a foolish, desperate grin on my face, I turned to Sam and asked him one more time what ride he wanted to go on next, what gun he wanted to shoot at what target, what food he wanted to eat.

He said he wanted to go home.

There are some scenes that never end, they just keep getting replayed. The walk to the parking lot, the leaving, the long drive home.

On the way back, Sam tried again to find the Patriots on the radio, but we’d bookended the game with our coming and going, and it was over. All he found was more static—for a trumpet player he had a high tolerance for noise pollution—and I got irritated and pushed his hand from the radio dial and fixed the station myself. Sam said nothing, just retreated into the shadows of his seat. And for the next half hour, like a student who’s studied too hard and too long for the test, I sang diligently along with Merle Haggard and Conway Twitty, as we recrossed the state lines that held, this time, no traces of astonishment for my son.

Then we were in Connecticut. Sunday almost over. And past the twang of the music, I heard the ring of another failure in my head.

Back at the fair, I’d bought Sam a caramel apple on a stick. I didn’t know exactly why I’d bought it—he hadn’t really wanted it. I guess I’d wanted him to have something to take home, just one thing clean and normal and fresh-grown to show his mother. He hadn’t even taken a bite of it since we’d left, just held it loosely in the fingers of his right hand like a thing of no interest that he was honor bound to deliver.

Now our tires were bumping over the rail tracks north of Canaan, and in the silence just afterward I heard a little thud on the floor by Sam’s feet. It was all shadow down there, but I knew what had happened. He’d let the apple drop. I could picture it in my head, the gluey caramel stuck to the floor carpeting, never to be gotten out. The day gone like that.

I took a deep breath and told him not to worry, it didn’t matter.

He didn’t say anything.

And all the while I was driving. My hands, not my mind. Tracking the route to my former home, paying attention, seeing with fingers. Muscular memory. While I got lost in a mess on the floor, the police barracks must have gone by, my dentist’s office, Tommy’s Diner. And at the familiar sight of a narrow tree-lined road heading off to the left, my hands must have known what to do. Instinctively, all on their own. The rule of the body is to take all shortcuts. The rule of the mind too, even if the mind doesn’t know it.

I took the turn to the left.

Here, it was like night. The tar blackened and slicked with rain. The few wet leaves still on the trees giving off no color, as if they were turned in on themselves, on strike. A pathetic, faded yellow line. Everything worn down, shut off.

I switched on the headlights. I slowed down a little, careful of the water on the road. Recognition hadn’t hit me yet. It was just a road, a shortcut, and I was still mourning the day, licking my wounds. I’d have my son home soon, and safe from me.

There was a sharp turn ahead, curving to the left. It was like seeing a face remembered from childhood. You do not forget. The first turn curved left and, at this speed, flowed seamlessly into the second turn, which was sharper, turning to the right, a curve of beauty and horror. Where the second turn straightened, there was Tod Lovell’s gas station. It was open for business. The red neon sign hadn’t been turned on yet, or it was broken, but inside the building a light was on. And a man was sitting in there, doing nothing.

I took my foot off the gas. Like a voice calling, like the pull of the moon on the ocean. The car slowed as if it was dying right under me, and I steered it over by the two round-shouldered pumps and turned off the engine.

I saw the man inside the office get up off his stool.

Next to me, Sam shifted restlessly. He’d been quiet for so long that just his moving felt like a shout. He said, “Where are we?”

I didn’t answer him.

The pump jock was at my side. He had a goatee and pimples. I rolled down the window and told him to fill it up.

Sam said again, “Where are we?”

I didn’t answer.

The pump jock came back, a look on his face as if I’d cheated him. “That’ll be six and a quarter.”

I gave him seven and rolled my window back up. I started the car and drove off, picking up speed past the spot where Ethan Learner would have found his son among the weeds and scrub brush. We were almost out of the clearing when Sam shifted suddenly in his seat as if he’d just woken up.

He said, “This is where we killed the dog.”

I didn’t say anything. I held on to the wheel and drove, watching my mistake unfurling like a perfect, huge wave. Sam said impatiently, “Right, Dad? The black dog. This is where we killed it.”

“I killed it,” I said. “Not you. Don’t you ever forget that.”

“But it was here, right?”

“Right, Sam,” I said.

I drove on. Where the trees opened again there was fog lying low over acres of pasture and stone walls. Somewhere behind the fog would be a farm with a silo like a prison guard tower.

Sam said, “Dad?”

“What?”

“What road’re we on?”

I said, “It’s the shortcut, Sam.”

“No. I mean what’s it called?”

I stared straight ahead. The fog was growing thicker, turning in slow white circles over the road, blinding me. I slowed down.

I said, “It’s called Reservation Road.”

Ethan

I slept in our room that night. Not since September had we shared a bed like husband and wife. The first night on the sofa is like the first anything, I suppose: without experience or memory of such a thing, there is no notion of it being anything but a singular, enclosed moment. Certainly not a pattern, a habit. Then a week passes, a month, and before one knows it the sofa, with its humid sheets and creaky springs, has become the way things are. I was brushing my teeth in the downstairs bathroom when Grace entered and inquired, in a neutral voice, where I planned to spend the night. We regarded each other in the mirror above the sink. Her hair was down, washed and shining, and she was wearing a white cotton nightgown; I had the sense that she had made herself up for me. Perhaps I just wished this: standing there at the sink, five feet from my wife, my back to her, I felt her presence like a sudden caress. Heat rushed up through my body. I turned around to face her.

“With you,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”

“Yes,” she said, and went out.

The bedroom, when I reached it, was dark. I paused in the doorway to allow my eyes to adjust. The bed, with its white covers, appeared like a kind of ghost ship, faintly yet richly glowing. I made my way toward it, driven by a combination of nervousness and instinct. It was like being a teenager again, only infinitely more somber. I could smell her floral shampoo, the cotton scent of her nightgown. Her blond hair held on its crown some unbegotten light, her face luminous beneath it. I crawled into bed beside her. Our legs touched and retreated. We lay in silence, hearing our breathing like whispers in the darkness.

“I’ve been thinking about him,” she said. “All the time now. Remembering. All these things, Ethan. All these things and no one to tell them to.”

“Tell me something you remember,” I said.

She was silent. We lay staring up at the black ceiling, our thoughts, like our bodies, parallel and separate. I wanted to ask if she could ever forgive me, but I was afraid. Then, her voice enveloping us both, she began to speak.

“It was the summer we rented the cabin up by the lake,” she said. “You’d promised Emma you’d take her out on the canoe, so Josh and I went for a walk up the dirt road. I told him to go on ahead if he wanted. For about fifty feet he ran as fast as he could. Then he just stopped and stood staring down at the ground. It was a turtle, sitting there in the middle of the road. I don’t know what it was doing there. It was almost midday, hot and dusty. And he bent down and picked this turtle up and put it down in the bushes by the side of the road, so it wouldn’t get run over.”

Grace paused; she reached out and found my hand beneath the bedcovers.

“He was our son,” she said. “And he didn’t know—he didn’t know—how I was back there watching him. Back there in the road with my hand over my heart, loving him so much just for picking up a measly old turtle. He put it down where it would be safe. And then he stood there until I caught up with him. He took my hand, Ethan. And he didn’t know. It was just another day to him. But it’s what I remember.”

Time moves slowly in the darkness. Long into the night, Grace went on holding my hand. I rested my head on her breast and, for the first time in many days, managed to sleep.

When, some time later, I awoke, we were no longer touching; Grace lay on her side of the bed and I lay on mine. If I had been dreaming, I had no recollection of it. My thoughts were the same as they had been while I was awake.

I got out of bed. And quietly, while Grace slept, I dressed in the dark and went downstairs.