Reservation Road (3 page)

Ethan

Explain this to me: One minute there is a boy, a life thrumming with possibilities, and the next there are marked cars and strangers in uniform and the fractured whirling lights. And that, suddenly, is all the world has to offer.

It is cold beyond believing. A hand holding a black metal flashlight. A hard mouth saying who, what, where. My son covered by a sheet.

They came. They came quickly, I’ll grant them that. They all seemed to know where Tod’s was. It had, after all, been there a long time. The ones in white swarmed like paparazzi over Josh’s broken body; flashbulbs popped in the night. They zipped my son into a white plastic bag, and then into a red plastic bag, and then wrapped him in a sheet. They took him away from us.

Grace followed in our car. She hadn’t seen anything and the police suggested she go home. I was worried about her driving. I’d held her as tightly as I could until her crying grew less uncontrolled, almost rhythmic, but the expression of shock and denial on her face now belied all that. She took Emma with her. Emma didn’t cry. She trembled and that was all.

Hit and run: it was enough to bring the state police from Canaan. Sergeant Burke was our man. Ken Burke. Perhaps forty, with close-cropped brown hair graying at the temples. Broad-shouldered, a square-jawed, square-nosed, determined face. A deep voice, basso profundo. I distrusted him on sight. And after a few terse exchanges—at no point would I have described it as a conversation—I got the impression that he felt the same way about me.

I was leaning against one of the gas pumps. Leaning against it or I would have fallen down. The smell of gas, which I hated, was the only thread tying me to the world I now found myself in: Sergeant Burke with his official notepad, his badge catching the weird, warping reddish light from Tod’s half-broken sign, and the cruiser lights still turning at the side of the road, though turning now without sound or purpose—the accident had already happened.

“Sir?”

What? It was Sergeant Burke getting the ball rolling, starting the process. It turned out there was indeed a system to uncovering the truth, a way. I looked through the window into the lighted room where, not twenty minutes earlier, I’d been musing on the state of my life, and saw Burke’s young partner questioning the flannel-shirted gas-station attendant. Who had seen nothing.

Out on the road a couple of police types were scouring the area for evidence. There was broken glass, yes. Blood, too. Jittering flashlight beams and voices calling to one another: “Anything?” “Negative.”

“Sir?” It was Sergeant Burke again. “I’m afraid I need to ask you some questions.”

I didn’t know what to say, how to do this.

“How you and your family came to be here, what you saw. So we can get after whoever did this to your son, not waste any time.”

“I’ll make things easier for you,” I said, pushing myself to an upright position. I could taste the bile rising in my throat. “My name is Ethan Learner. I’m a college professor. My wife is Grace Learner, she’s a garden designer. We live in Wyndham Falls. Our daughter is Emma. Our son is—was—Josh. He was ten years old. He was very good on the violin. And we loved him. Excuse me.” I walked briskly to the edge of the asphalt, where the scrub brush began, and vomited my guts out.

When I was upright again, Sergeant Burke raised his notepad to the ready position. “Sorry,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

He nodded. There was compassion there—or some stiff-lipped incarnation of it—but I did not want it.

“Let’s start by you telling me exactly what you saw,” he said.

I took a deep, acid-smelling breath. “We stopped so my daughter could go to the bathroom. We weren’t far from home, but she said she couldn’t hold it, so we stopped. My wife took her inside.” Sergeant Burke gave a quick nod. “I stayed out here, with my son—with Josh.”

I stopped speaking and Sergeant Burke waited. He had the patience of a hunter or a psychoanalyst. I looked across the road and tried to lose myself in the black trees, the dense nothingness. I didn’t want to vomit again. This was harder than I’d thought. I hadn’t thought. Had had nightmares, certainly, bad daydreams about the safety of my children. But not ever in my life had I really thought about this.

“He was—he was by the road. There. And it worried me. I told him not to stand so close to it. But that hurt him. Hurt his feelings. He has—had—a lot of pride. I shouldn’t have said that to him. So I kind of took it back. I went inside.”

“Inside the office?”

“Yes.”

“For what reason?”

“What? To find—we were out of wiper fluid.” Sergeant Burke squinted slightly. “Look, back on the road we drove through this swarm of—I thought they were mayflies, but Josh didn’t believe me. Now I don’t know. They were all over the windshield. I tried to clean them off, but there wasn’t any fluid.”

I noticed that Sergeant Burke wasn’t jotting any of this down.

“So you went inside the office to purchase a container of wiper fluid. And where was the—where was your son at this time?”

“I told you. He was by the road.”

“Can you tell me what time this would have been?”

“Time? I don’t . . . it must have been close to nine. I checked my watch when we pulled in. I was impatient. I wanted to get home. It must have been about a quarter to.”

Sergeant Burke made a note on his pad. “How long did you spend inside the office?”

“I don’t know. He had to go get the stuff. Three, maybe five minutes.”

“Did you see your son during that time?”

“I . . . no. No, I did not.”

The breath went out of me. Time went from whirling to stillness, and suddenly where the question had floated between us, hanging in the air, there was an impenetrable black silence, which was my guilt; nothing else was real. I saw Josh standing by the dark road, his back to me. Slowly, I saw myself turning away from him, discarding him, until he was behind me, and gone.

“It’s my fault,” I whispered. Without knowing it, I had fallen into a crouch, a kind of squat, my hands touching the hard ground.

Sergeant Burke gave no sign that he had heard. He looked away, into the brightly lit office, where, in a terrible pantomime, his partner was busily writing down something the gas-station attendant was telling him. Sergeant Burke shifted his feet. I remained where I was, almost on the ground, not quite.

“I saw him just before I went inside,” I said. “I checked, and he was just standing by the road looking at nothing. Thinking. I thought maybe about music. And I’d already hurt him by worrying. So I left him alone.”

“When did you see him next?”

“When I came out.”

“What occurred then?”

“What do you think?” I snapped.

The skin on Sergeant Burke’s face tightened and he looked away. I made myself get to my feet. “Excuse me,” I said. “That was rude.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is hard.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was looking at the ground when I came out. I was—I was tired and I was thinking about myself—about nothing—when I heard the sound of the tires. . . .”

“From which direction?”

“There. To the left.”

“And then?”

“I looked for Josh. I looked where he’d been, but he wasn’t there. He was in the road. Just standing there. I called out. . . .”

The car was coming again, striking him in the chest, his body flying into the bushes. A line of blood leading from his mouth, a dent the size of a fence-post hole in his chest. Crushed. When I lifted him up, his head dropped back and his mouth gaped open. His teeth were painted with blood that looked black in the darkness.

“Can you tell me anything about the vehicle?”

I closed my eyes. Inside the dark, racing car there was a glowing orange pinpoint: a cigarette. A man driving. “There was a man,” I said.

Sergeant Burke grew very still. “Driving?”

I nodded.

“Anyone else there with him?”

“No.” I had raised my head, and for a moment, as the car raced by, it had felt almost as though he’d turned his face in my direction. “He looked at me.”

“Could you describe him?”

“He was smoking. There was a lit cigarette in his mouth.”

Sergeant Burke waited. I tried to see something, anything, more about the man who had killed my son, but I could not. “No,” I said bitterly. “Nothing.”

Sergeant Burke stood quietly, staring at the notepad in his hands. Then he said, “Let’s move on. Can you tell me anything about the vehicle itself?”

Now I felt an edge of panic. Trying to picture the car in my mind, I saw just the glowing tip of the cigarette, the man hidden in shadow. “I don’t know.”

A barely audible sigh escaped Sergeant Burke’s lips. He turned his head five degrees to the right and looked at me from there. “Anything.”

“Let me think.” I made myself go back to before. Tires crying out. An apparition out of the trees. “One of the headlights was broken.”

Sergeant Burke touched the pen tip to the paper. “Right headlight or left?”

“What?”

“Right or left headlight?”

“Left—no. Right.”

“Which is it? Right or left?”

“Right.”

“Is that a definite?”

“Yes.”

He jotted it down in his notebook.

“Okay,” he said. “Type of vehicle.”

“A . . . I guess you’d call it a sedan.”

“Make?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know much about cars.”

“Four-door or two-door?”

I tried to think. He looked up sharply from his notepad. “It was dark,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Four doors. It was a four-door.”

Sergeant Burke studied me. “That’s a definite?”

“Yes.”

He jotted it down. “Okay. Color of the vehicle?”

“Dark.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“It could have been black. Or dark blue, dark green. It was going fast, and you see what kind of light—”

“Let’s talk about what kind of dark. Was it matte or shiny?”

“I think there was some light on it.”

“You mean reflecting?”

“Yes.”

“What I’m trying to get at here,” Sergeant Burke said, “is whether it might have been old or new, flat or metallic paint.”

“I told you. There was some light on it.”

He didn’t write this down.

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” I said.

He shook his head imperceptibly. “Let’s move on. Did you catch the license plate?”

“No.”

“None of it?” Sergeant Burke sounded disappointed. “How about state of origin? Was there a picture or design on it? Or any other distinguishing marks on the vehicle you might have noticed—bumper stickers, decals?”

“No. I don’t know.”

Bells trilling: the glass door to the office opened and the two young men walked out, their questioning session completed. Sergeant Burke’s young sidekick paused to put his gray felt state trooper’s hat back on—with two hands, just so. The gas-station attendant had tucked in his flannel shirt.

“Anything else you can tell me, sir?”

I was remembering something, if he would just be quiet: sprinting down the road after the car, hearing nothing but the blood in my heart and the gathering thrust of the engine, seeing nothing but the small dim shadow of the back of his head above the headrest. Then . . . what? He took his foot off the gas, there was no mistaking it—the engine seemed to die, suddenly the car slowed, and then I was gaining on him. I heard him shout something. His window must have been open, because I heard the sheer force of his voice, but it didn’t make sense, a single word or sound. “Sham!” it sounded like. “Sham!” And through the rear windshield I saw the shadow that was the back of his head and shoulders lean across the front seat toward the passenger side. The car swerved slightly and he shouted it again: “Sham!” or “Sam!” or “Slam!” None of it making sense. And I was still gaining, there was still the possibility of catching him. And then he stopped shouting, and the car pulled away.

“Sir?”

“What?”

“Anything else you can tell me?”

I made myself focus on Sergeant Burke. “Yes. He shouted something. The man in the car. I was running after him. I heard him. Some sound—‘Sham,’ maybe, or ‘Slam,’ or ‘Sam.’ I don’t know. Some word. I don’t know what it means. He might have been shouting it to himself or to me. I don’t know. All I know is he said it. He said it twice. I heard him. Then he got away.”

“ ‘Sham’?” said Sergeant Burke.

“Or something like it. Something that rhymes with it. I heard him.”

Behind me, a car started up and drove away. It must have been the gas-station attendant. Going where? To a bar for a drink. Home to his girlfriend or his mother. Then the police radio crackled and I saw Sergeant Burke’s eyes dart sideways to the cruiser where his partner sat waiting. Sergeant Burke wanted to leave now.

He folded his notepad and stuffed it in his back pocket and clipped his pen to his shirt pocket. He took his time about it. And then he was ready to go.

“Sir.”

“I just told you something important.”

Sergeant Burke’s expression was impassive; he might have been a statue. “Important, sir?” He gave his head an apologetic shake. “No, sir. Sorry.”

“I just told you something important and I want you to write it down.”

“No, sir. Sorry.”

“Yes, goddamnit. Yes!”

I was breathing hard, starting to shout, pointing my finger at him.

“Easy now,” Sergeant Burke said.

“We’re not done here. We’re not even close to done.”

“My partner and I are going to take you home now,” he said. “We can talk some more in the a.m.”

“You listen to me. There was a man driving that car. There was a man smoking a fucking cigarette and he looked right at me before he ran my son into the ground. I
saw
him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And why don’t you guys cut the ‘sir’ crap? Why don’t you talk like human beings?”

Sergeant Burke took a small step back from me, as if he didn’t trust what he might do. “I’m going to let that pass. You’re upset.”

“You’re fucking right I’m upset.”

I found I was trembling uncontrollably. And I fell again into that crouch, that ungainly squat from which I could place my palms flat on the ground to steady myself. Anything to touch the world as it had been before. But it would not go back. I kept trembling. Thinking now about my Emma, the waves of grief and fear rolling through her, and no end in sight.