Reservation Road (7 page)

“What are the odds?”

“Of getting him?” Burke shook his head. “I don’t give odds, Mr. Learner. You understand. I’d have to be crazy to do that, and I’m not crazy.”

“I’m asking for your professional opinion.”

He considered this, his eyes scanning his desk while his mind worked the angles of the question. Where the calendar used to be, his gaze suddenly grew fixed. But to my surprise he made no mention of what was missing, and when he looked at me again his eyes were clear.

“Mr. Learner, I’ll be straight,” he said. “Hit and run is among the toughest of all cases to prosecute. Problem is, at the end of the day it’s not just evidence. You can have all the goddamn evidence in the world and still be smack in the woods. Let’s say we identify the perpetrator, all right? The man you believe you saw driving the car. Let’s say we find him and bring him in. It’s still our responsibility to prove in court that he was aware of hitting your son, that the son of a bitch left the scene with full knowledge of having fatally hit someone, not an animal or an object but a living, breathing human being, that he was fleeing and not just driving on. You see what I’m saying? That he knew what he’d done. How do we prove that? That’s hard. I’ll be straight with you, sometimes it’s damn near impossible. And without that proof there’s not a whole hell of a lot we can do to him. Even with it, we’re pretty much hamstrung when it comes to sentencing.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying even if we convict him, it’s unlikely he’d serve much time.”

I felt the hole already opened beneath my feet suddenly opening wider, deeper. And then I was falling into it and something like a wind was in my ears. “How long?”

Burke looked down at the pen in his fingers. “I’m probably more cynical about it than most.”

I slammed my fist down on the desk, knocking over the Styrofoam cup and spilling the black coffee onto the floor. The room fell quiet at once, but Burke did not flinch.

“Easy now.”

“You fucking tell me, Burke. How long would he get?”

“Maybe a year.”

“No.”

“Maybe six months. You’ve got to understand—”

“No,” I said. “Jesus Christ, no.”

Then I was on my feet, no idea how I’d gotten there, and Burke was rising too, his hand out to settle me down, put a hold on me.

“Mr. Learner—”

I heard light footsteps behind me and saw Burke make a single deft shake of his head to whoever was there, and then the footsteps and the wide blue shadow behind me faded away across the room.

“Sit down,” Burke said. “Please.”

I sat down. There was a strange heaving in my chest that had nothing to do with exertion, and I put my head between my knees and closed my eyes.

“Mr. Learner,” Burke said, “I think we should see about getting you and your family some counseling.” A new note of temperance had entered his voice, one man talking another down from a ledge. “We have a professional here, a nice lady.”

“I don’t want any counseling,” I said. “Talk to my wife.”

“You’re in a tough place,” Burke said. “A hard place. I know that.”

“No, you don’t. It was my fault. Do you understand what I’m saying? My son is dead because of me.”

“Your son’s dead because a man in a car ran him over, Mr. Learner. Vehicular homicide. And I promise you—”

I was on my feet. The room was not spinning, but it was not stable either, and I set my legs against the possibility of its tipping. Then I was halfway across the room.

Burke called to me. “You’ll hear soon as we know anything, I promise.”

I walked away under the cold white light past the troopers behind their desks, eyeing me warily, and the man like me seated in the corner, hunched over and whispering to his police confessor, then down the hall and through the heavy steel door marked Authorized Personnel Only. In the dispatch room, behind the Plexiglas shield, the woman with the auburn hair was doing a crossword puzzle in pen. She did not look up as I passed.

Dwight

I left the car in the garage, all closed in, and took a taxi to a Chevy dealership in Winsted, where I leased a white Corsica on a month-by-month. Then, dressed for work, blue summer suit and red tie, black wing-tip shoes, I drove the new car out Route 44 through Wyndham Falls and on into Canaan.

The law offices of Cutter & Trope occupied the first floor of a handsome two-story Greek Revival situated to the east of the tiny center of Canaan proper. There were neatly clipped box hedges out front of the house and a paved lot behind. The lot was just big enough for five cars to get in, park, and get out without running into each other, if you were smart about it and looked where you were going. Today especially I tried to be smart. It was late morning already when I stepped out of the car, and the July sun was beating down. I walked around the side of the house and between the hedges and up the steps to the porch. Through the door I could hear Donna Kabrisky, the secretary I shared with Bob Trope, talking on the phone. Donna was a large-boned, pretty woman of thirty-four, divorced with no kids, and we’d been sleeping together, haphazardly but not unsuccessfully, for about six months.

“Mr. Trope’s on vacation this week and next,” she was saying. “Sorry, Mr. James, it’s a secret. . . . Right, two weeks. . . . Okay, I’ll tell him. . . . Thank you too, Mr. James. . . . Okay, bye.” I walked in just as she was hanging up, and her expression changed. “Well, if it isn’t Dwight,” she said.

In her mouth this morning my name didn’t sound like my name but like some disease, a blight that had come down on the heads of good farmers and folk all over the county. People were dying, livestock too, and it was my fault. (She couldn’t have known how right she was.) My mouth was dry and I ran my tongue over my lips.

“Morning, Donna.”

“It’s almost noon,” Donna said coldly. “Catching up on your sleep?”

“As a matter of fact, my transmission’s completely shot and I had to take my car to the shop. The guy over there says it’s so bad I may have to scrap it altogether. So right now I’m leasing.”

I’d planned this little speech on the drive over. It was about facts and alibis and the way life was going to be from here on out. I was sweating, and took off my jacket and loosened my tie, undoing the top button on my shirt.

“Poor old Dwight. You’re having a tough time today, aren’t you?”

Donna didn’t sound sympathetic. If not for the low-cut summer blouse and the large breasts and the long African earrings (none of which, including the breasts, Ruth would have been caught dead with), it might have been my ex-wife talking.

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

Donna shook her head, and I noticed wisps of gray in her curly brown hair that hadn’t been there when we’d first started together. She plucked an emery board from a Garfield pencil mug on her desk and began filing her pinky nail with brutal, expert strokes. “I don’t know, Dwight. Maybe it’s age. Closing in on forty, right? Maybe you have Alzheimer’s.”

“My problem is the opposite,” I said. “I remember too much. Are there any messages?”

Donna stopped filing and studied her pinky, then started in on her ring finger. “Actually, Dwight, I’m good. Doing well. Thanks for the concern.”

I sighed. “What did I do, Donna?”

“Nothing. You did nothing. Last night was fun for me. I didn’t miss you at all.” She stopped filing and looked right at me. “Am I wrong, or did you say you were going to call last night?”

I remembered then. “You’re not wrong.”

“Are you even sorry?”

“Yes. I am. I’m sorry.”

“Something better come up?”

“I took Sam to the ballpark,” I said. “I must have told you about that last week.”

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot. Men and boys and sports, rah rah. You still should’ve called.”

“Anyway,” I said, “it was a mistake. I thought I’d be back in time and I wasn’t. The game ran till six and I had to drive like hell to get him back to Ruth’s before she went crazy.” I paused to gather my wits. I was still sweating and my mouth was dry again. “And then coming home we hit a dog on Cantwell Road. The whole thing was just a huge mistake.”

I looked closely at Donna. She had closed her eyes and lifted her head in a pose of lamentation. “A dog? Oh God, Dwight, how awful. Was it dead? Did you kill it?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” Donna said. “Poor Sam.”

There was a window to my right, not big, but it was open and a faint breeze was coming through it, blowing in over the porch, carrying the green scent of the hedges. I turned and looked out at the road. A Ben and Jerry’s truck passed by, heading east toward Bow Mills and my old life; for a moment I pictured Sam eating ice cream and smiling. Then the truck was gone. A family wagon came next, country-club mother driving and three blond daughters in back, the tops of their tennis dresses showing white above the car window like flags of surrender—then they were gone, too, and then a police cruiser drove by and I stopped breathing. (Which, even at the time, I understood to be pure instinct, a natural act of self-preservation by a body that is on the verge of drowning; like a man thrown into a swimming pool while asleep.) As the car went by, I could see the trooper in the passenger seat. He was no one I knew. He had his hat off and his trooper’s shades on and his blue shirtsleeves rolled up fair and square, bare forearm hanging out the window like any old teenager in summer, and he did not appear to be looking for anyone like me. Then he too was gone, and I rose again to the surface of my life and breathed.

I found Donna studying me, her expression neither hard nor soft, just curious, watchful. We were not close friends, but we were intimate in a way. In six months of sleeping together once a week or so we’d necessarily caught the kind of intense, momentary, self-regarding glimpses of each other that only sex provides. Along the way we’d gone to sleep touching and woken apart and had managed to mutually confess a few important things. She knew what I’d done to my son, not to mention my ex-wife, and I knew what her ex-husband had once done to her, how she still occasionally dreamed about it and woke in the night crying.

“Dwight?”

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry about last night.”

“Me, too,” Donna said.

For a second I had an overwhelming desire to tell her the truth. But just then the phone rang and she picked up and said, “Cutter and Trope, Attorneys at Law, hold, please,” and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Dwight, Stu Carmody’s been trying to reach you all morning. Says he wants to change his will again. And Jack wants an update on the Peckham estate.”

And then she took her hand off the mouthpiece and began talking again, and I walked into my office and shut the door.

I sat down behind my desk. It was made of cherrywood and expensive and I’d brought it with me from my old days on the rise in Hartford. The old days of doing estates and trusts and wills for the wealthy. People who’d paid my firm an abundance of green for my services. The old days of tidying up the packages and stroking the legacies. What I remembered most was that people died anyway. They died rich and then they weren’t rich any more because they were dead. They paid me to cut the corners, make the square peg fit into the round hole so that everyone could sleep better at night, and then they died and I died with them because the client is always right. In the end it was all about money. And the fact that the thing I had chosen to do with my life was the one thing I couldn’t abide. I’d had a corner office and a spot for my car in a garage. I’d billed entire lifetimes and driven home late, listening to the first few innings from Fenway on the radio, and found my only son asleep, incommunicado, and my wife in love with another man. I had always been late, behind, playing catch-up. The boy was standing in the road and I was driving too fast to see. I heard his cracking bones, his life gone to pieces, and saw him flying off the road.

There was a knock on the door and Donna stuck her head in.

“Mr. Carmody’s here.”

“Carmody?” I looked down and saw the three fresh pink message slips on the blotter, the name Carmody on each one. “Is he scheduled?”

“No.”

“What’s his problem?”

“Like I said. He wants to change his will.”

“Again? I just settled it for him last week.”

“He says it’s urgent.”

I sighed. “All right. Send him in.”

I waited for him behind my desk. I had stopped thinking about the boy flying off the road. There was a faded leather blotter on the desk and a stack of blank yellow legal pads and a pencil cup full of yellow Ticonderoga #2’s. And there were two framed photos of Sam, one from before the accident and one from after. In both he was a serious-looking, sandy-haired, small-for-his-age boy with green-and-gold eyes. You had to know where the scar was to notice it, I thought, to see the difference—aside from height and weight and a curious, sad questioning behind the eyes—between the later photograph and the earlier one. You made for the left earlobe and dropped down an inch, followed the jawline with care and maybe even a magnifying glass, and there it was, pale as a thread of sun. Anybody could see it if they knew where to look.

I took a blunt-tipped pencil from the cup and inserted it into the bright blue electric pencil sharpener I’d kept from my law-school days. The engine chugged like a toy locomotive and the hidden blades whirred. When the pencil was sharp, I snapped it in two. Then I put the pieces back in the cup with the other pencils.

Stu Carmody appeared in the doorway. He was a tall, gaunt man of sixty-nine, with short white hair and cutting blue eyes and an Adam’s apple the size of a fig. He owned a good-sized farm out toward Falls Village and never wore anything but the same checked gingham shirt, pressed blue jeans pulled up high with a western belt, and spit-polished leather workboots. I stood up and came around the desk to shake his hand.

“Stu.”

“Dwight. I was callin’ all morning.”

“Car trouble,” I said. “Have a seat.”

Stu sat down on one of the two straight-backed chairs I kept for clients, and I went back around the desk and took my usual seat. I saw him glance to his left, at the leather-bound law books that lined the wall of shelves. There were not enough books to cover the shelves, so that gaps were conspicuous and it looked as if the place had recently been robbed.

“What’s on your mind, Stu?”

“Dyin’,” Stu said.

“You’re not even seventy.”

“I had a checkup Thursday, Dwight,” Stu said. His eyes were so blue that it hurt to look at them. “Routine, the doctor said. Well, don’t you believe it, mister. By Friday a.m. I was down in New Haven with my veins chock-full of needles. They crammed me into one of those MRI contraptions and turned the switches on. Juiced me up pretty good. Cost a good goddamn fortune too, even with insurance. And all for what? Cancer.”

The word didn’t mean as much to me as I knew it should. I tried to think about Stu but instead found myself thinking about the will I’d drawn up for him. His wife was dead and both his kids had moved out west. He was leaving them his farm anyway, knowing they’d probably sell it the very day he was gone. The fact was, he didn’t have any other options. Though he wasn’t the type to get sentimental over it, and the will had not been difficult to draw up.

“I’m very sorry, Stu.”

“I hate doctors,” Stu said matter-of-factly.

“Where is it?”

“Here.” He touched his neck just below the Adam’s apple, where the lymph nodes would be, swollen and malignant, beneath the dull wrinkled skin. “And here and here.” He touched both armpits.

“Lymphoma?”

“You’re smarter than that doctor,” Stu said.

“There’s treatment.”

He shook his head. “Treatment maybe, but no cure.”

“Treatment’ll buy you time. Maybe a lot of time.”

“No, thank you.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I’m lookin’ ahead, Dwight, and I don’t have to be a medical genius to see what it’ll be like. Pain and pissin’ and drugs and the rest. And I don’t want it. I flat out reject it. And it’s my life, goddamnit. That’s what all this legal stuff’s about, isn’t that right? So that I got these papers say it’s my poor life and this is what I want done with it. I want us to be clear on that, Dwight.” He was breathing hard, his rib cage rising and falling.

“We’re clear, Stu,” I said.

“Good.”

“What is it you want me to do? We already drew up the will.”

“I want to know something,” Stu said.

“What?”

“Is the will still good if I don’t die natural?”

I looked him in the eyes. “You mean if you kill yourself?”

“That’s what I’m gettin’ at.”

“It’s still good,” I said carefully. “It’s your life and your will, Stu. That’s what the law says on this.”

“Good. All right, then.”

“All right, what?”

“Nothing,” Stu said. “Just all right.”

We sat there a minute more. I tried to think about Stu and what he was facing, but the feelings weren’t sharp or clear or about him or anything real. It was as if there’d been an amputation, my heart flying off with that boy on the road, my body left behind. And the body is nothing. This man was going to take his life and I was going to say nothing to him about it because that’s what was in me. Because he was going to die anyway and there was no such thing as help. There were only the yellow pencils standing in the pencil cup and the broken pieces with them. There was my son, too, there was Sam, two photographs on a desk.

Stu cleared his throat and I glanced up and found him looking at me. I could see on his face that he knew my mind had drifted. My failure to help him was all over the room.

“I’m sorry,” I said. It could have been for a hundred things.

“You’re my lawyer, Dwight.”

“Yes.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a white envelope, crisply folded, and placed it on the desk. “This is a letter for afterward. I want to know things’re in order, Dwight. I don’t want my kids and people talkin’ about what a mess I left. I was never like that.”

“I’ll take care of it, Stu. If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

“I’m sure.”