Reservation Road (24 page)
Dwight
It was a cabin no different from any other. For too long he kept me out front of it, staring through me as if I wasn’t there, while the snow came down on us like confetti. A single word carved above the door—“Hyacinth”—and behind the cabin nothing but the lake.
Then suddenly he had the gun aimed at my face and was saying, “Walk around the side of the cabin.”
His voice was quiet, the gun steady. I could feel it happening now. I tried to think of something to say to him, but there was nothing. No big speech. No fear any more, just tiredness. I lowered my head and began walking around back of the cabin.
You dream what you’re able under such circumstances; you dream your limit. I found mine where I’d left my son, in his room, in bed. I hoped he was asleep. I had the blankets in my hand and felt the warm trapped air rising up from his body.
Halfway around the cabin, Learner’s foot caught on something—tree root, shrub, rock, I didn’t know—and he stumbled forward. He gave a grunt. He had lost all control over his feet, and his gun arm came down and his shoulder collided with my back, and what happened next was no more than pure instinct: my elbow jumped back and I smashed him in the face.
He was on his knees, moaning softly, his hands covering his nose, which was bleeding and probably broken; his eyes lost in a blind squint of pain and disorientation—I saw his glasses on the ground in front of him. The gun sitting in the snow three feet away. He might have tried for it, but he didn’t.
I didn’t think twice. I picked up the gun and put it in my coat pocket and stepped around him, heading back to the path. This, too, was instinct. But then I took my time. I made a point of not looking back.
The future lay before me, I might have thought. All of a sudden, and again. Sundays on the ball field with Sam, meat on the grill. A bright movie sequel with all the old characters and my son as the star.
Except I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see him.
Ahead, through the scrim of falling snow, there was just this: two other cabins by the lakeside, white covering their rooftops. And they were no different, it seemed to me, from the one Learner had tried so hard to reach, like a piece of the past he’d wanted to hold in his fist as he struck me down. For his own reasons. Somewhere beyond it was his car, and the road back down to Salisbury. That was all.
I walked a little way, and then, thinking I heard him behind me, I stopped and turned around.
He was still there. I saw him through the snow, by the little two-bit cabin on the lake. And he was weeping. On his knees in a cold white world, on all fours like an animal, his face buried in his hands which were buried in snow. Around him the splatter of blood. A man humped on the ground as if in the aftermath of a prayer so full of loss that in the end it had left him broken.
I stood looking at him, unable to turn away. The sky falling down white. Maybe it was a kind of dead reckoning, my own position fixed at this point in time according to the one true and immovable thing, which was a man on his knees. I had taken from him everything there was to take, and had wanted none of it, had hoped and tried to avoid it, had regretted it deeply. But I had taken his boy just the same. And so now I went back to him.
Ethan
There is a kind of failure that defies understanding. No map can be drawn of it. The best one can do is to shout into the darkness behind in the hope that some distant echo will return to illuminate even partially the road chosen, the wrong turns made, the hubris and misguided love and circumstance that brought one to this place where there is no light at all, no road ahead and no turns to contemplate, nothing to think about that is not already buried and past. Somewhere back I had misplaced my son, had lost sight of his memory, which was the one truth that remained after his death, and had instead followed something false, which was not worthy of him.
I heard him walk away, his footsteps heavy and plodding through the snow. He was disappearing. From my hole in the ground I witnessed none of it, but kept my eyes shut tight, my bleeding, numb face in my hands. I could not seem to stop weeping, could not even imagine it. My only dream then was to never get up.
The footsteps were already close when I heard them again. I was too beaten to feel any surprise at his return, nor was I afraid any more; it was with a great force of effort that I raised myself off my arms at all. Then I was kneeling upright and he was standing there. My head swam with dizziness, and my eyes, useless without my glasses, struggled in vain to focus, but he remained just a massive, blurred figure, like some vague totem looming over me. His arm, hazy and thick as a fencepost, outstretched toward me, his brown-gloved hand not three feet from my face.
“Take these,” he was saying.
His hand came closer. The snow fell upon it and now the thing in his fingers shot off tiny facets of light like a coin held and turned under a lamp. It was my glasses. They were small and insignificant-looking on the leathered palm of his hand, and he held them as though afraid of crushing them, with his fingers spread far to the sides. I reached out and took the glasses and they were as cold as if they’d been frozen. I put them on, fitting the curved wire earpieces around my ears. Where the nosepieces touched my face, the swollen bridge of my nose felt as if it had been sawed in two, and I breathed in sharply through my mouth, my head afloat again in a sea of dizziness. Then the pain retreated to mere numbness and I could see his face.
“I was going to leave you,” he said.
He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out the gun. I felt no clenching of muscles, no fear; all that was gone now. In his hand the gun was the color of smoke and looked darker and strange and more like a machine. I simply stared at it.
“But I ran once, and I didn’t get anywhere that I can see,” he said. He looked at the ground. “Where would I go?”
He let the gun drop from his hand. It fell onto the snow between us and we both looked down at the spot where it lay. The barrel was pointing at him.
“I’ve got a son,” he said. “Ten years old like your boy was. That doesn’t seem fair to you, and it’s not.” He paused, his breath turning white in the cold, the snow falling silently onto his shoulders and head. He stared past me at the lake. “And it’s not fair that I’ve been a poor father to Sam, failed him a million different ways and kept failing him, while you were a good father to your son. I don’t know you, but I know that you were a good father to him. And I know it’s not fair. It is not right.”
His eyes returned to the ground between us, the gun there. He remained absolutely still. He seemed for the moment almost complacent. Yet beneath the dark stubble on his cheeks the muscles in his jaw stood rigid with effort.
I said, “You took his life like it was nothing and then you went on with your own as if you had a right.”
“I was afraid.”
“That’s not good enough,” I said.
I picked up the gun. Slowly I got to my feet. My gloves were stiff with blood, and through them I could feel the metallic cold. My knees too were wet and numb from the snow and no longer felt as if they belonged to me. With my thumb I pulled back the hammer. Then I was standing, holding the gun aimed at his chest, my finger braced against the trigger.
He stood motionless, his breath pluming the air.
Then he nodded once.
“Yes,” he said.
Now he seemed to be waiting for me to pull the trigger and be done with it. Not tranquil, but resigned, expectant. It could not have been mistaken for an act. I tried to avoid looking him in the face, but I could no longer help it; though neither of us moved an inch, the silence and the passing seconds seemed somehow to be pushing us together. His eyes, set wide in a broad, weather-beaten face, were brown and surprisingly soft, and I saw the pronounced dark circles beneath them.
I let the gun drop to my side and turned away from him.
And then for a long time nothing happened.
I saw the cabin, and the lake, and it was a place in winter.
I saw his son sleeping in his bed.
“I want . . .” I said, and saw only the snow.
He stood there looking at me.
“The police . . .” I said then, but it sounded like nowhere at all. I put the gun in my pocket and left it there. “Will you tell them what you did?”
After a while he said, “Yes.”
Then he was silent. The snow fell down on him and stayed. His feet shifted, and he raised his gloved hands in the air as though he were giving himself up to me.
“No,” I said. I saw him with the police, and it meant nothing, changed nothing. “No.” I was shaking my head, seeing his son awake now and standing in the cold, empty house.
I began to walk.
He called after me. “Where are you going?”
I stopped and turned. “Go back to your son,” I told him.
Dwight Arno said nothing. His hands dropped to his sides and for the first time I knew he was afraid. I walked out to the path. I did not stop. I left him there on the mountain, in the snow, alone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For shelter, support, nourishment, care, wit, wisdom, friendship, forbearance, and always sound literary judgment, my love, gratitude, and particular thanks to William and Paula Merwin, Alan and Louise Schwartz, Jane Kramer and Vincent Crapanzano, Margaret McElderry, Matthew Schwartz and Karen Levesque, Ileene Smith, David and Jean Halberstam, Ann Arensberg and Dick Grossman, Timothy Dugan, Amanda Urban, Robin Desser, Heather Schroder, Pico, and, above all, Aleksandra.
John Burnham Schwartz
Reservation Road
John Burnham Schwartz is the author of
Bicycle
Days
. He lives in New York City with his wife, filmmaker Aleksandra Crapanzano.
ALSO BY JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ
Bicycle Days
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 1999
Copyright © 1998 by John Burnham Schwartz
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Schwartz, John Burnham
Reservation Road: a novel / by John Burnham Schwartz. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
Ps3569.C5658R47 1998
813’.54—dc21 98-14580
CIP
Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger
In Memory of F. Ned Rosen
1965–1997
eISBN: 978-0-307-42746-5
v3.0
