A Town of Empty Rooms (38 page)

“Okay,” Serena said. “How many in class?”

“Twenty-two,” said Miss LaChawn. “Thank you.”

AFTER THE NIGHT DAN HAD vanished, the night they had fought and pushed past the roaring in their own heads, Serena found they were polite with each other, careful; both were aware that they were visitors in this marriage, and, perhaps, that marriage was in some ways a form of theater, that each one had made a decision to act as a husband or wife. She crawled into bed with him again, and there was the feeling of his skin against hers, that sensation of cherishing, a tide rising in her chest. He had admitted something to her, his sorrow for his dead brother, and she felt she had gained admission to some deeper part of his heart. She held herself awake, watching his dark eyelashes while he slept; the house was silent but for the creaks in the siding and the sound of his breath, then the sound of hers, beside him. She ached to press herself into his skin, wholly, to inhabit him, and she wondered if she loved him because he gave her a way to fall out of herself, if that was the reason anyone loved anyone, for that brief detour out of one's skin.

Dan was also watching her. Her face, as she slept, was unbearably sweet to him; it was a relief to be able to look at it, to have her beside him again. He was embarrassed that he had driven off the night that Forrest visited them, but he had not known how to stop himself. Forrest's words kept shouting through his head. He kept thinking of Zeb running with the other scouts and then as no longer part of the group, for no other reason but that Forrest didn't want him to be, and he kept seeing that night over in his mind, at odd moments, when he was talking to clients, when he was waiting at a stoplight, when he was tucking Zeb in — he thought of Forrest 's pleased face, and Dan's entire body started to burn. In his mind, he was telling Forrest the things he hadn't: Fuck off; Don't do this to my son; Think what you're doing; I didn't cheat, stop thinking that I did; I wanted to make things easy for my son; Don't do this to him.

Dan got into his car and went to work, and nothing made the searing disappear. It had the distinct quality of pain, and he wanted to be rid of it. That night, he stood in their bedroom, looking out the window at the dark yard, theirs and Forrest's, separated by the thin wire fence, and he could not bear it.

“I want to do something,” he said. She knew what he meant, just looking at him.

“We can't just sit here,” he said. “How are we supposed to sit here? After what he did.”

“What do you want to do?”

He swallowed. “Come with me.”

They walked in their thin clothes into the backyard. It was the first time they had been alone together, with some shared purpose, in months, and now, instead of going to get a meal or see a movie, they were going to take revenge on the Boy Scout troop leader. Serena could barely see Dan in the dark. The grass crunched, crisp, frosty, under their feet; the dry leaves sounded like the ocean. Dan felt invisible; it was a great, powerful feeling. They stood at the edge of the yard, by Forrest 's fence. The dogs were in the house, and the yard was silent.

She stood in the darkness, and she had to admit: There was something pure and thrilling about standing here, wanting to do something to make Forrest feel as they had.

Serena shivered. Dan was pacing back and forth. His hands were trembling; he was staring across the yard. There was something in his expression that she had never seen before — it was in his eyebrows, the curve of his lip. He could not control how he felt; it made him look helpless.

She followed his gaze, which was directed at Forrest's shed. It was completed now, a tidy two-story building, a pale tin roof gleaming in the moonlight.

He knelt and picked up a branch; he threw it over the fence. It soared and landed. He picked up another. Then he hopped the fence. He crept around to the back of the shed, tapping the branch against his hand. She hopped the fence, too. Dan walked around the shed, clutching the branch. He lifted the branch and whacked it against the shed. Once. There was a hollow thump. She picked one up and hit it, too. The shed. The shed that had required a prayer. An icy fear dissolved to giddiness.
Thunk.
The dogs. Nothing. No one was stopping them. The shed echoed like a tin pan when they hit it, but it did not dent; it was like a drum, echoing a sad, helpless song. Serena's arm muscles tensed, the sky above was velvet black and scattered with stars; her breath floated, dragonlike, silver, in the air. Fear and excitement gathered, light, under her ribs. Dan's arm reached back, and
whack —
there was a glistening crack, ringing — a window shattered.

“Shit,” he said, looking surprised. Glass glittered onto the grass. Dan turned and hopped the fence, with Serena following him. They ducked and ran back into the house. A dog began to bark.

Dan slammed the back door and they stood, breathing hard. His face was flushed. She looked onto the kitchen floor; glass had cut his hand, and blood was streaming down it. Serena grabbed hold of his forearm.

“Are you okay?” she asked. Drops of blood were falling onto the linoleum.

“I think,” he said. She grabbed a dish towel and wrapped his hand in it.

“Is it bad?” she asked. “Does it hurt? Let me see.”

He held out his hand. It was not a large cut, but it was deep, and blood quickly soaked the towel. They stood, looking at each other. Her cheeks were cold.

The smell of fresh pine was sharp on her hands. She washed them. They had broken a window; she could hear the shattering in her mind, the strange sound now attached to them, their actions.

“I could have knocked the whole thing down,” he said, his tone glad and pained and wondering. “I
could
have done it, you know, I wanted to just hit it down. I could have just beat the whole damn thing into a pile. Not just that — his house. I could take a bat to the goddamn neighborhood — ”

“Okay, okay,” she said, alert to something in his tone. “Stop.” She was ashamed, all at once, that they had done this, that they had leapt the fence and broken Forrest's window. How easy it had felt, how light, in a way, to try to answer him for what he had done. But — what had — what was Forrest going to do? She took another dish towel and wrapped it around her husband's hand. The peach-colored fabric, decorated with lemons, reddened.

 

 

 

 

THE NEXT MORNING, SHE LOOKED outside to see if she could detect traces of their visit, but the yards appeared the same, the sparse grass like cold flat straw, the leaves scattered across the dirt. She could
see the window that Dan had broken. It was startling: The building had been injured. Dan was dressed and clutching his coffee by 7:30 AM; the children shrugged on their jackets and marched out into the chilled winter air.

When she returned from dropping the children off at school, she went into her yard to pick up Zeb's sweater, which he had left there. As she walked back, she saw Forrest slowly circling his shed. Her throat was empty, light. She watched him walk, the dogs beside him, tails bouncing.

Forrest stood, clutching one of his saws. His eyes flickered on her and stopped.

“Vandals,” he said. The word pierced the air. “Did you see
this
?” His face was red and flushed; he looked deeply old. “I come out this morning, and what do I see? This window? How did this happen?”

She swallowed.

“Maybe a tree,” she said, watching him.

He looked up; there were other trees stretching around the yard, but none had been as close as hers had been. His eyes fluttered. “Someone broke my window,” he said. “Help me clean it up. That 's the neighborly thing to do.”

She stared at him. It was as though he was not talking to her anymore, but to some ghostly representative of her — as though that was all he had spoken to ever, she now understood.

“Forrest,” she said, “maybe I would help you . . . but why would I want to . . . after what you said to us?”

His eyebrows lifted.

“Do you remember what you said?” she asked.

He stood, whistled a moment. The tune was not discernible.

“
Me
?” he asked.

“You,” she said.

A smile flashed across his face, a child's smile, then vanished as though the wind blew it off. He put his hands into his pockets and took them out, placed them on the wire fence.

“You kicked my son out of Scouts, Forrest,” she said. Her voice was strangely cool; she listened to it like remote music. “For no reason. Just because you wanted to.”

He looked at his hands, and she saw his shoulders shrug. “I had my reasons — ”

“You made them up! You just wanted us out. You did this to a
child,
” she said. The sky was gray and blank.

His eyelid twitched. “No, I didn't,” he said.

“Yes. You
did.
”

“Stop saying that,” he said. “I love children. Don't you see them watching me every week? They love
me.
” He stepped closer to the fence. “They love me because I'm the best scout leader in the county. The state. Maybe the nation.”

“But — ” she said.

“I've been through some hardships in my life, but I got over it. You wouldn't know. I survived things that would destroy you. I never complained! People love me. I love God, my country, my neighborhood. But then things got — well. You move in, and my trusted pecan tree, which had produced pecans reliably for twenty-two years, suddenly stops. Coincidence? Maybe not. You move in, and my grandson Dawson loses the Pinewood Derby after we tested that car for five hours last weekend. Coincidence? Maybe not.” His hands gripped the fence. “You move in, and they change Christmas break to winter break. You move in, and — ” his words tumbled over each other, “my wife has a heart attack, my wife who was fine until you moved in, and then I'm sitting beside her in the hospital, wondering if she'll wake up the next day and — ”

“Forrest!” she said. “Look. I don't know why any of that happened. But it wasn't us, for god's sake — ”

“Then what?” he yelled. “
What
?”

They looked at each other, the sky hard and gray, a flat roof stretching over them; the ground was thin, a mere shell, under her feet.

“I don't know!” she said. “How does anyone know? But I know that you kicked him out — I know that much.”

He flinched. “
Stop,
” he yelled, his voice raw. His face held confusion so vast it erased everything else. The wire fence stood, flimsy, between them.

His expression crumpled as if he did not know what to say next. Forrest stumbled back suddenly, jerked by an invisible hand; his face
was bright red, and she could see a dark shadow of sweat under his shirt. A sound like a laugh and a cry fell out of him. It was the first time she had ever seen him speechless. Forrest scanned the yard, looking at the shed, the clouds, the trees, his hands open, trembling. He was looking at what was leaning against his shed. There was a saw, a pair of pruning shears, and a gun.

It was a hunting rifle, which she had seen in his shed, and which he had brought out today; there was a rag beside it. He grabbed the gun.

She stepped back, first slowly, then more quickly.

A vein rose slightly in his forehead. His hands gripped the gun firmly but also with a kind of tenderness, as though he was yearning for it to tell him what he needed to know. She backed up, one step, two. His blue eyes searched the yard. He opened his mouth and closed it — he did not seem aware that Serena was even there — the gun was pointed toward the sky, pressed against his shoulder, as though this was what he craved finally, this particular posture of authority; he pressed the gun to his body as though it were a baby.

“I did not,” he said. She watched him holding the gun, watched for any movement. He backed up. He wanted something, she could see that in his face, wanted to say the one thing that would clarify all of this, that would help him comprehend the disorder in the world. His gaze was both hazy and focused. He backed up more, and then he turned and tripped, his gait tilted as though he were running down a hill. He veered toward his house. “Stop,” he said to the air, a chant, husky, almost a sob. He headed toward his house, one leg limp; he grabbed the railing of the two steps that led into the back of his house, dragged himself one, two steps, into his house, and she understood then that Forrest, in all his rage and bewilderment, could not bear to be viewed as anything but good.

 

 

 

THERE WAS A SLAMMED DOOR, the brisk flapping of a hundred wings, Evelyn's hoarse scream, the long, sorrowful drone of ambulance sirens, the dogs trotting, their barks piercing the air, the metallic rattle of the stretcher, the flat, bored descriptions of the paramedics into
their walkie-talkies, the wind-rush of traffic two blocks away, the faint buzz of a plane against the sky, the low rustle of the wind, the voice of Celine Dion erupting from a passing car radio, a stray cat crying across the street, the wheeze of Dan's car scraping up against the curb, the shuffle of the mailman putting mail in their box, the bump of kids' bikes on the sidewalk, the doors opening and closing as the neighbors gathered, the screech of an owl gliding over the yard, the branches bending from the weight of the birds, the dogs barking, still barking, padding around the yard after the ambulance left, the innocence of the birds chirping after, their sounds filling the air.