Where or When (26 page)

I ran to where Stephen was sitting on an old wooden chair he had thought years ago to refinish and had brought to the barn, where it had remained all that time. There was a shotgun at his feet. The wound was to his shoulder; he was holding his arm limply in his lap. One sleeve was soaked with blood—a drenching, rusty spill.

He was barely conscious. His hand was already gray beneath a blotting of the rust.

I said, Stephen.

He looked at me, tilted his head. The pain was visible on his face.

I touched his hand.

I'm so sorry, I said to him.

I watched the paramedics wrap my husband in warm quilts, tie him to a stretcher, and carry him out into the overbright sunshine of the yard. Later, the surgeon who stitched him said that he would lose the use of his arm. I wondered how it had happened: Had his hand shaken so badly that he had missed?

I understood that this was not for the shirt, nor for the onion sets that had been washed away, but for a life, a way of life, that might have to go with the onion sets.

I understood that it was for having had the farm at all. To release him from the farm.

And I understood, too, that it was for the missed connection—for an emptiness I had failed to fill.

When the paramedics had gone and I had said that I would follow, I went back into the barn. I scrubbed the chair and the floorboards. I think it strange now that I did not cry. I washed the chair clean, but I could not remove the stain from the wooden floor, from the tiny cracks where the color had settled in.

 

 

 

 

H
E HAS WAITED
long enough. Yesterday, Christmas Day, with its excruciating pain and elaborate pretense, was, he thinks, the longest day of his life. After his drive to the beach, he found a motel room at the edge of town, slept until sunlight blurred the edges of the shades, then drove back to his house for the charade of Christmas morning. He found Harriet, ashen-faced, an automaton, a smile frozen on her lips, sitting in a straight-backed chair, as the children, having demolished their stockings, were opening their presents. Only Hadley of his three children, on the floor with an unopened present on her lap, seemed to sense catastrophe in the air. He took off his coat in the kitchen, sat on the couch, and was immediately inundated with the squeals and queries of Anna and Jack, who pushed presents onto his lap, demanding his attention and scrutiny and, more than once his aid in assembling toys. Normally that was a task he accepted grudgingly as a necessary fact of fatherhood, but yesterday he welcomed the work: It provided a focus, a distraction from the frozen smile.

When the presents had been opened, assembled, and marginally played with, he went into the kitchen and made pancakes—a ritual of Christmas morning that felt hollow this time. At the dining table, Harriet sat unmoving, a fork stabbed into a pancake, as if she were unable to cut it for herself. Even Jack and Anna began to feel the calamity, turning their gaze from mother to father to mother, then over to Hadley, who seemed, as the eldest, the repository of secrets. Catching Harriet's eye, Charles thought to take the ball from her, ease her task, by beginning the talk himself. (How, he had no idea; he had not prepared for this, could not even imagine the vocabulary with which one told a child this terrible thing.) But Harriet, seeing his intent, shook her head quickly. He didn't know if her gesture meant not now, or not today, or not at all, but it wasn't his place to question her, not his decision.

Awkwardly, after the meal, Charles stood in the middle of the family room, dispossessed, unsure of whether or not he had the right even to go upstairs to the bathroom to fetch his toilet kit, which, in his haste the night before, he had left. He had tended the fire, cleaned up the wrappings from the presents, finished the breakfast dishes, and was now unemployed. Normally they'd have gone visiting—to his parents, to her parents, for more food, to see the trees. He supposed that Harriet still planned to make these trips, was unclear if he should accompany her. Ought they to make a clean sweep, telling first the children, then each family—in the way they had once announced the impending birth of Anna?

But Harriet made the decision for him. She said simply, at his side, “Go now.”

He turned to her, thinking he would ask her if she didn't want him to stay, to help her tell the children, but her face was impenetrable. She answered for him the unspoken query.

“I'm going to tell them when you're gone,” she said.

He left then, said no goodbyes. The children occupied, he slipped out the kitchen door, feeling small and mean. It was the worst crime, he thought, stealing away from one's children.

He'd driven to the motel, locked himself in his room. He'd wanted desperately to call Siân, knew that he could not. They'd made an agreement: They wouldn't call each other on Christmas Day. But what agreements were binding now?

He'd tried to sleep, a futile and restless effort. He'd gotten up from the bed, driven to the Qwik Stop for a six-pack, gone back to the room, drunk the six beers, one after the other. Still he couldn't sleep. There was nowhere to go, no one to call. It was Christmas Day, the one day of the year when everyone was occupied, everyone nestled into a family. And whom would he call if he could? Was there anyone to whom he would tell this story, anyone who could understand what he had done? He did not feel sorry for himself, did not want the companionship or understanding of other men. He wanted only to talk to the one person, hear the one woman's voice. He thought that if he could talk to her, he would be able to sleep. Everything would be all right.

He'd driven to the beach then. Straight across the bridge to the dunes. He'd walked the spit in its entirety, the air clean and chill, the sea gradually becoming rougher than it had been during the hours before dawn. He liked the sun on his face, even though it gave off little warmth. On his way back along the beach, in his crumpled suit and overcoat and soiled shirt, he walked at the edge of the hard sand left by the tide and thought of Winston. And when he thought of Winston, he was immediately mired in the imponderables left in the wake of his pronouncement to his wife: Who would keep Winston now? Himself? His children? And with those questions, immediately there were others: Where would he live in the interim until Siân could get free? Would she want to get free? Where would his wife and children live when the house was foreclosed? How could he keep his business going if the business was located in a house he could no longer enter? Did he have a business left at all? And how was he going to pay for everything?

The questions made him dizzy. Or perhaps it was his hunger. He hadn't eaten anything since the eclectic dinner of Christmas Eve. (Was that really only the night before? he wondered in amazement; it seemed as though days had intervened.) And like Harriet, he had not touched the pancakes at breakfast. It was—he looked around him for the sun—what time now? He minded that he hadn't thought to collect his watch when he was in the house earlier. He thought it must be midafternoon, three o'clock, perhaps later. He'd driven then to a bar outside town where he knew he would not be recognized, had a sandwich there and a couple of beers in the company of the saddest men he thought he had ever seen, and when he'd emerged it was dark. Dark enough so that he could return to the motel and imagine that the day was over, dark enough to wish the day behind him.

He'd slept briefly, woken with a start. He called the motel owner to find out the time, was disheartened to learn that it was only seven-thirty in the evening. He'd driven back then to the Qwik Stop, bought another six-pack along with a toothbrush and a razor and, for good measure, a package of over-the-counter sleeping pills. If he didn't sleep tonight, he thought, he would go mad.

He
had
slept, fitfully, twenty minutes at a time, once waking up in the midst of a nightmare in which his house was floating in the bay and he could see Winston in a lower window, drowning. He'd had another dream, a sort of erotic nightmare, in which he and Siân were making love in his marital bed when Hadley entered the room. He'd woken from this dream with his shirt soaked. He'd sat up quickly, stripped the shirt from his skin, had a shower. In the shower, he determined that it was perhaps better after all not to sleep, spent the rest of the night until dawn sitting in the dark in the only chair in the room, finishing the rest of the beers.

 

It is ten minutes to ten now; he knows from the clock in the Cadillac, the clock still keeping accurate time after 140,000 miles. He is parked beside the best-situated phone booth in town, a booth at the back of a small fish market at the end of a pier in the harbor. It is a phone people seldom use, chiefly fishermen calling home to their wives. In the half-dozen times he has called her from here, the only sounds he has had to compete with are the slapping of the waves along the dock, the frenzied cries of gulls looking for chum.

His heart racing, his fingers shaking more from nerves than from lack of sleep, he punches in the digits of her phone number, then his credit card. The phone rings once, twice, three times. He prays fervently and rapidly that her husband is out of the house. He brushes the hair from his forehead, looks around him from habit. The dock is deserted, this day after Christmas.

She answers tentatively, as she almost always does.

“Siân,” he says with enormous relief. He is afraid for a moment that he might actually begin to weep with relief.

“Charles.”

“I thought I'd go out of my mind if you didn't answer,” he says in a rush.

“Oh . . .” Her voice sounds guarded, careful.

“What is it?” he asks. “Is your husband there in the room?”

“No,” she says, in a voice she might use to give information to a woman friend, an acquaintance. “My husband's brother is here with his family.” She pauses. “Visiting . . .,” she says carefully.

“Siân, listen to me. You don't have to say anything. I'll do the talking. But there's something very important I have to tell you.”

“What?”

“I've told my wife.”

“What?”

“I've told my wife.”

There is a long pause at her end.

“I don't understand.”

“I've told my wife that I'm in love with you. That I'm leaving her.”

The pause this time is so long he thinks she may have hung up the phone. Finally he hears her say, quietly, under her breath, as if she had turned her head away from the people in the room, “Oh, no.” She repeats this—two low, sonorous syllables. “Oh, no.”

“It's done.”

“No,” she says, again quietly. “No.”

“Siân, it's done. It's over.”

“What happened? Why?” she asks, her voice rising.

“It was awful. Just awful.”

“You can't . . .,” she says.

He waits. “What?”

“Listen,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “You have to get it back. You have to talk to her, get her to take you back. You can't have done this. We can't have done this.”

“Siân, it's done. I couldn't live that way. I couldn't keep lying, whatever happened. I'm not telling you you have to leave your husband. I'm just telling you what I had to do.”

“I know. I know.”

“Well, then.”

“I can't talk now. Something's happened,” she whispers. She says, in a louder voice, “So how was your Christmas?”

“When can I talk to you? When can I call?”

“You can't. Not today. I'll write.”

“Write! I'll go out of my mind waiting for a letter. Let me call you later.”

“No, you can't. You don't understand.” And again, in a louder voice, “Lily is fine.”

“OK, OK. But promise me this. You'll write today.”

“Yes.”

“And send it Express. I'll get it tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“And listen, take down this number. It's the motel where I'm staying. Just in case. Call me anytime you can. From a phone booth. Any hour.”

“OK.”

“Siân, I love you.”

“I know.”

“I don't want to hang up.”

“I know.”

“I don't want to let you go.”

 

He hangs up the phone, unable to say goodbye. He picks it up immediately, hears the buzz of the dial tone. He stands with the phone in his hand, unable to move, reluctant to replace the receiver.

He looks out toward the end of the dock, takes a great gulp of air. What could possibly have happened that she needs to tell him about?

He replaces the receiver, walks to his car. He hits the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. There is nothing he can do but wait, a task at which he is remarkably poor. He has all but promised her he will not call her again. He could hear the fear in her voice. Something is very wrong, and she can't tell him what it is.

He puts the car in gear, heads down High Street, thinks of driving west to Pennsylvania. Instead he passes the street on which he used to live, makes the turn. He sees his house; Harriet's station wagon is not there. He takes a chance, pulls the Cadillac into the driveway. He hears no sounds, sees no faces in the windows. When he opens the kitchen door, the silence is complete: Not even Winston is here, bounding out to greet him as he normally would. Charles looks at the disarray in the family room—children's toys strewn about, abandoned. On the counter in the kitchen is a note in Harriet's hand: “We're at my sister's. I don't know when we'll be back.”