Reservation Road (6 page)

Dwight

Something woke me. Maybe it was the birds. I was sitting on the gray leather sofa with my legs propped on the glass-topped coffee table. Predawn light. Green empties standing all around—I counted five—and the ashtray overflowing with butts and gray matter. I tried to sit up but my knees felt as if someone had taken hammer and chisel to them. The TV screen was fuzzy gray with a violet stripe down the middle. It almost looked pretty.

The light came through the den windows and struck me in the face, dragging with it a new day. I wanted to run somewhere, and keep running. I got myself on my feet and went to the window. My car was sitting in the driveway. The dew had formed a kind of caul over it, and the sunless light was starting to shimmer over the dark wet skin. It seemed alive. Around it on the lawn a couple of mourning doves were poking for worms, their cooing the only sound at this hour. Everything else was still.

Why hadn’t they come for me? Box Corner was not so far from the rest of the world that it couldn’t be found. The police could easily have passed through here in their cruisers and spotted the car sitting in the driveway, facing the road. They would have seen the piece of the dead boy’s jacket stuck in the broken headlight, the last thing anybody took from him while he was alive.

I’d gone back inside the house, last night, to sit on the couch, to drink more beer and smoke more cigarettes, to wait for them to realize who I was and what I’d done. I’d made it in time for the end of the eleven o’clock news. In time for sports, baseball and Fenway Park and hot dogs. I’d watched a replay of Mo Vaughn slugging a grand slam in the bottom of the sixteenth to win it for the Sox. The camera took in the crowd surging to its feet at the crack of the bat, a sea of heads rising as if synchronized to follow the ball’s flight across the green field and over the monster leftfield wall. Then the cheer exploding upward through bright rings of raucousness—a war cry, a fertility rite, a dance for rain.

And there the videotape had ended, the news ended. Good night. In just a few minutes we’d witnessed the deaths of teenagers, a lottery winner, a life-altering home run. And I had remembered my son’s hands bunched into fists during the game; then released, happy, loose, and trusting. Mine for a minute.

I went down the hall now. Pale-blue synthetic carpeting thick and feisty under my feet, like walking on foam rubber. The realtor had referred to my bedroom as the Master Suite. All the furniture here had come with the lease. The bed was round. The bureau and bedside tables were made of a white wood-laminate that spoke of cheap hair salons and big-chested women in pussycat pajamas. Most of the things I valued I kept in this room, tucked away in furniture I couldn’t stand the sight of. My treasure chest of memories, my Ode to Life. Sam’s letters I kept in the top drawer of the left bedside table, where I could reach for them while lying awake at night, while remembering, while trying to explain to myself, like a shock victim, the how and why of things. I found them now, took out the bundle and peeled off the rubber band. I pulled one out at random and sat down on the bed to read:

DaD

i aM LeRNiNG To pLay TRuMpiT at sCooL. MoM WaNTs Me To pLay peaNo LiKe HeR BuT i DoNT WaNT To. i LiKe TRuMpiT BeTeR. oK?

My sTepDaD says To CaLL HiM THaT BuT i DoNT WaNT To, He TRys To pLay BaLL BuT Hes NoT GooD LiKe you. i ToLD HiM aND MoM GoT MaD. sHe sTaRTeD To yeLL aND say sTuFF aBouT you. soRRy.

BoGGs GoT FoR HiTs. i Mis you. SaM.

MoM DiDNT ReeD THis.

There was no date, but I didn’t need one. He’d been eight years old when he’d written that. Ruth was married to Norris by then. Norris, in fact, was living in my house. (For some reason, Ruth had been anxious about our coverage, and had gone to the offices of Wheldon and Peterson Insurance to get more information about the vast array of protections available to the American family unit. What was most available, it turned out, was Norris.)

I read the letter over again. The spelling was worrisome. Sam had since been diagnosed with dyslexia. He was getting some extra tutoring at school, and spelling a little better these days. Still, he was behind the normal rate of development for boys his age.

In other respects, though, the letter stood out as a happy bulletin. I even smiled once: Norris would not be much of a ballplayer, no. Mr. Stepdad. Sam knew what was what, all right. He would never call a nickel a dime. He would not settle. Ruth had wanted him to play the piano. That was natural enough— teaching it to children was what she did for a living. But being part of a phalanx of piano-tinkling upstarts was not Sam’s dream. He was an individual, and individuals played the trumpet.

I had written him back, of course. To tell him I was proud of his decision to learn the trumpet. To say that though I could see his point about his stepfather’s limited skills with bat and ball and glove, sometimes the truth could hurt more than he realized, so he should be careful how he said things to people about themselves, since people—adults especially—were often blind to their own faults. I’d gone on to say that Boggs possessed the best pure swing in baseball. But everyone knew that, I admitted, so maybe I was no wiser than most. What, if anything, separated me from the pack was my love for my son. Your mother will say bad things about me sometimes, I’d written. She’s mad as hell at me for a lot of things, and right about most of them, too. I’ve made some terrible mistakes, and you know I’m sorry. But nothing anybody says about me is as true as this: I love you, Sam. I’ll write again next week. We’ll see each other sometime soon. I’ll hear you play that trumpet. Dad.

I folded the letter in half along its well-worn crease and stuffed it back in the envelope (on the flap: “saM aRNo”). Like a player returning a lucky card to the deck, I slipped the envelope back into the pile with an obsessive’s attempt at recall; it had told me something, and I already counted on seeing it again. Then I twisted the rubber band around the letters, closed the bundle up in the drawer, and went outside.

The sun had risen above the stand of trees across the road. The light was weak but still strong enough to have burned the dew off my car. The ’89 midnight-blue Ford Taurus sat dry as toast, all its secrets exposed.

I climbed in, started it up, turned it around. I put my car back in the garage and listened to the machine hum of the door going down.

There are heroes, and there are the rest of us. There comes a time when you just let go the ghost of the better person you might have been.

PART TWO

Ethan

A fuel truck was parked in front of the Canaan State Police barracks when I arrived the next morning, its pump droning and its hose half buried in the ground. A black man in gray coveralls stood in the sunlight with his hand resting on the pulsing hose, testing the pressure, a transparent, heat-stoked cloud of fumes shimmering just above his head as if he were being baked.

The front door of the barracks opened directly into a small waiting room with three plastic chairs, a drinking fountain, and a low table supporting a cardboard rack of Alcoholics Anonymous brochures, “A.A. at a Glance” and “Is A.A. for Me?” To my right, through a Plexiglas window, I could see into a larger room in which three policewomen dressed in pale blue uniforms with dark blue trim were sitting at their desks and talking. One of them—thickset, with small eyes and an auburn perm—nodded soberly when I gave her my name. She informed me that it was only eight-fifteen in the morning and Sergeant Burke wasn’t in yet, though he would be shortly, if I cared to wait.

I sat down on a plastic chair. The waiting room had no windows. After a while, I got up to take a drink of water. Next to the drinking fountain was a steel door marked Authorized Personnel Only. Finally I sat down again and stared at the facing wall, which was covered with bulletin boards papered with xeroxed messages like “Lost Dog ‘Moby’—Last Seen in Sheffield,” and “Wanted by CT for Failure to Pay Child Support,” and “Fugitive Alert,” complete with grainy mug shots of rapists and killers. It was a wall of crime and shame and suffering, and I stared at it a long time, until the many names and pictures and deeds began to blur, becoming indistinguishable.

Sitting there beneath it all, the point was not so hard to grasp. They made it easy for you. It was a message anyone could understand, if you’d been hurt badly enough. It said that you who were suffering, you who’d been the victim of an unthinkable crime, the loser of a life, the man who couldn’t find his wife, the parent robbed of a child—that you were not, as you assumed, unique in the world. Far from it. There were many just like you, many worse off, even. Consequently, special treatment was out of the question. An impartial system existed. The scales were already set. It was a question of protocol, etc. You got in line, took a number. Your turn would come, not before, not after. Everyone was equal.

And now, as I sat in the windowless room reading these bulletins, images of my own guilt began to reel behind my eyes like a Zapruder nightmare: images of the car bearing down on Josh and his absolute, knowing stillness, his silent terror—but everything seen now through a darkened prism, the muddied geometry of my negligence: seen over my turned shoulder, through shadows and night, from an angle, at a remove too great to be measured or bridged or helped, as if I had not just turned my back on him but fled, and now could not get back—

My heart was pounding. I was sweating. The A.A. brochures lay on the floor at my feet and I was staring at them; I’d kicked the underside of the table, upsetting the cardboard rack. I got down on my knees and began gathering them into piles.

Distant beyond the Plexiglas shield, the policewoman who’d spoken to me earlier was looking in my direction. I could see just the top third of her, as though she were a bust. She kept me pinned with her small eyes until I’d gotten the brochures back in the rack and safely on top of the table, the titles hopelessly mixed up, and I was seated again on the plastic chair, and then she turned back to another policewoman, a broad-shouldered brunette, who was saying, apropos of I didn’t know what, “That is so cute.” And then they all turned when a trooper—some sergeant, not Burke—walked in and began telling a story, something amusing about last night that I didn’t catch because just then the steel door opened and I stood up, thinking it would be Burke.

It wasn’t Burke—just a tiny gray-haired woman wearing a green smock who smiled at me, before ushering in a red-haired man with a mop and bucket. The man had the large head, small eyes, pallid skin, and slightly unhinged smile of a Down’s child; he looked like an adolescent, though he was probably close to thirty. Seeing me in the room, he stopped, and an expression of intense anxiety spread over his face. I sat down again. The woman put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Go on,” she said softly. “It’s all right.”

He entered the waiting room and began mopping the floor with broad, slow strokes, and after a moment the woman went out through the door marked Authorized Personnel Only, and I lifted my feet so the mop could pass underneath my chair.

In the dispatch room, the sergeant was finishing his story: “. . . And just when the son of a bitch opened the door, I was pulling the biscuits out of the oven!” The three policewomen laughed. The floor was opening up under my feet and no one seemed to realize it but me. The red-haired man was drinking thirstily from the water fountain, water running down his chin onto the freshly mopped floor. There were pools of water all over the floor anyway. He looked up when the old woman returned.

“Finished?” she asked.

He nodded, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

“It’ll dry in no time,” she said, looking satisfied. She went to the entrance and pushed the door open. I tried to prepare myself for the fuel truck parked there, and the sickening smell of gas and the droning of the pump. I saw how bad memories were buried everywhere and would be forever.

To my surprise, though, the truck was gone and the air coming through the open door smelled clean and fresh. Morning sunlight spilled in with it. For a moment I thought I was going to cry.

Sergeant Burke must have entered the barracks through a rear entrance; when he finally came to get me it was through the Authorized Personnel Only door, and he was carrying a half-full mug of black coffee.

He asked me if I’d been waiting long, but I didn’t know; I’d forgotten my watch that morning, something I never did. Not that it mattered, any of it. I followed him down a water-streaked hallway (the red-haired man had been here, too) and into a large, windowless, fluorescent-lit room with half a dozen metal desks in it. A clock on the wall read 9:10. Three of the desks were occupied by short-haired uniformed men talking on the phone, their gun belts causing them to sit unnaturally tall. Burke’s desk stood in the far corner, its surface cluttered with phone books and stacks of papers and framed photographs of two little girls and an attractive woman who must have been his wife. The frame of this last picture had a chipped corner and a long diagonal crack in the glass and I wondered what had happened to it.

Burke pulled a chair over from one of the unoccupied desks and motioned for me to sit down. I did, and he settled himself behind his desk, placed a stenographer’s notebook on the blotter, unclipped the ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, took a sip of coffee, and looked at me.

When I didn’t begin immediately, he said, “You want some coffee or something?”

“Okay. Please.”

“Milk? Sugar?”

I shook my head, and he went off to get the coffee. The wall above his desk was composed of bare white-painted cement blocks. A Disney World poster was taped to it like a Magritte window, and directly beneath the poster there was a plastic plant on the floor. The artificial leaves of the plant were reaching up toward the sun in the picture—a posture of false desire, it seemed to me, a cold perpetual sunniness. My eyes trailed back to the photos on the desk, Burke’s smiling children and wife, the chipped and cracked frame, and beside them this time I saw what I hadn’t before: a small tear-away desk calendar with “Tod’s Gas and Auto Body” printed in red ink across the bottom of the page. The name didn’t register at first. I sat calmly observing the red ink and bold typeface, the grid of days and dates, until I felt a chill so deep I shivered. Then I lifted the calendar off the desk and crumpled it between my hands and, with a quick check around the room, stuffed it deep into the wastebasket under Burke’s desk.

When I looked up he was at the far end of the room, coming slowly toward me with a Styrofoam cup in his hand, staring at it, trying not to spill. He had seen nothing. He looked perfectly human then, an awkward, decent man in uniform, and I badly wanted to feel some connection to him. But I felt little—empty, far away even from grief, aware of everything and nothing.

Burke set the cup of coffee down on the desk in front of me and settled himself again on his chair. His face was tanned in the way of someone who spends considerable time outdoors, with faint white squint marks at the corners of his eyes which looked like tiny scars.
He is not the enemy,
I told myself. I pictured him standing in his backyard, holding one of his daughters up toward the sun.

“So,” he said. Now he looked me in the eyes. “You and your wife probably didn’t sleep much last night.”

I shook my head, thinking about the calendar in the wastebasket beneath his desk.

“Did you remember something you wanted to talk to me about? Something from the accident, maybe. Something you saw.”

“I had a dream last night,” I said.

“A dream?” he said.

“That’s right.”

A light seemed to go out of Burke’s gray eyes. “A dream,” he repeated.

Suddenly I felt a terrifying rush of adrenaline through my arms to my fingers; I took hold of the tops of my thighs and squeezed as hard as I could. “You don’t believe in dreams, Sergeant Burke?”

“No, sir, not in police work.”

“It’s Learner,” I said. “Not ‘sir.’ Ethan Learner. That’s my name.”

“I’m aware of that, Mr. Learner.”

“I’m a person just like you, in case it hadn’t occurred to you,” I said. “And I’d appreciate it, I’d really fucking appreciate it, if you would listen to what I have to say.”

But I’d lost him. His gaze had slipped off me and fallen on someone or something over my shoulder, another trooper probably. His face was a kind of code, unreadable by me, and I became aware then of a weird silence in the room (except for a single ringing phone no one would answer), and the feeling of people watching me.

The light falling from the ceiling was cold and white. I felt close to sick, and bent over and looked at the floor between my knees.

Sighing, Burke stood up. “Mr. Learner, I’m going for more coffee. By the time I get back, either we’ll have ourselves a talk or we won’t. Either way, I’ve got a lot of work to do on your son’s investigation. I hope you understand that.”

I looked up at him. “I apologize, Sergeant.”

Burke reached down and straightened the photographs on his desk, though they did not need straightening. He did not seem to notice the missing calendar. His thumb was working the top of his pen furiously, clicking the point in and out.

“I’d like to start over,” I said.

“I’m doing my job, Mr. Learner. This is my job.”

I nodded without looking at him, and then he sat down, sighing again. “All right,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“Thank you.”

“All right.”

“Last night I told you I heard him shout something,” I said.

“The perpetrator.”

“The perpetrator. I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d been dreaming about it. A nightmare. It was ‘Sam’ he shouted, not any of the other words. It was ‘Sam,’ somebody’s name. I’m positive now. He shouted it twice.”

“Sam?” said Burke, studying me skeptically.

“Yes.”

“That’s a definite?” He did not sound convinced.

“Yes. Definite. I heard him.”

“Sam,” he repeated.

“That’s right. Sam.”

“Hmm,” he said.

I waited. Then, slowly, deliberately, Burke folded back the cover of his notebook and clicked down the point of his pen and printed the name Sam.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Questions,” he said. “One: You’re sure there wasn’t anybody else in the car? The suspect was definitely alone?”

“I told you last night. I didn’t see anyone else, but it was dark.”

“So you’re not sure.”

“No. I guess not.”

“Two: Did your son have any nicknames?”

“No.”

“I’m not talking about just at home. Is it possible he might’ve had a nickname at school you wouldn’t’ve known anything about?”

“It’s possible, but I doubt it.”

“Nickname like Sam, maybe.”

“No.”

“Three: The name Sam mean anything to you? Do you recognize it? Know any Sams? Anything?”

“No. I thought about it all night, but no, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Burke paused to take a sip of coffee, wincing at the cold and bitter taste. Afterwards, he sat thinking, as though alone, and a few moments later he refolded his notebook and played again with his pen. Somewhere a phone was ringing—whether the same caller as before or someone new, I couldn’t have said. And then I saw another man, a man like me, sitting hunched and broken over a desk on the far side of the room, talking to a sergeant.

I said, “It’s not enough to go on, is it? It’s not enough.”

Burke cleared his throat and drew himself up on his chair. “Mr. Learner, I’ll be straight with you about what kind of case this is shaping up to be. At the moment we don’t have a lot to go on, but that doesn’t necessarily mean too much. Things can turn up. We’ve already sent out teletypes with the current information to every police barracks in the state, and any time now we should have checks established on the main roads. If the perp’s trying to flee or just out there driving around like an idiot, odds are we’ll know about it. In the meantime we’ll be trying to home in on the vehicle any way we can. In cases like this the vehicle’s usually the perpetrator’s weakest link, as good as fingerprints if we can tie man and machine together. Along those lines we’ve got glass samples already in the lab, and cloth from your son’s jacket—could be some paint on there, smaller than the eye can see. Any vehicle characteristics we can identify that way will help get us a lead on the make and model. And get make and model, we’ll be that much closer to the man. Then there’s the autopsy. Should be done by this afternoon. Things can turn up there—paint, glass, plastic chips. You never know. A fast-moving vehicle almost always leaves some kind of trace behind on the victim. I’m sorry to say it like that, but that’s my job.”