Last Night in Twisted River (52 page)

What
wouldn’t
Danny have thought of, if only to torture himself? Danny couldn’t bring Joe back to life; he couldn’t change what had happened to his son, the way a fiction writer could revise a novel.

When, after that year had passed, Danny Angel could finally bear to reread what he’d written in
Baby in the Road
, the accidental killing of that two-year-old in diapers, which once began the book, not to mention the subsequent tormenting of the dead toddler’s parents, seemed almost inconsequential. Wasn’t it worse to have a child escape death that first time, and grow up—only to die later, a young man in his prime? And to make the story
worse
in that way, in a novel—to make what happens more heartbreaking, in other words—well, wasn’t that actually a
better
story? Doubtless, Danny believed so. He’d rewritten
Baby in the Road
from start to finish. This had taken another five, almost six years.

Not surprisingly, the theme of the novel didn’t change. How could it? Danny had discovered that the devastation of losing a child stayed very much the same; it mattered little that the details were different.

BABY IN THE ROAD
was first published in 1995
, eleven years after the publication of
East of Bangor
and eight years after Joe had died. In the revised version, the former two-year-old grows up to be a risk-taking young man; he dies at Joe’s age, twenty-two, when he’s still a college student. The death is ruled an accident, though it might have been a suicide. Unlike Joe, the character in Danny’s seventh novel is drunk at the time of his death; he has also swallowed a shitload of barbiturates. He inhales a ham sandwich and chokes to death on his own vomit.

In truth, by the time he was a senior in college, Joe seemed to have outgrown his recklessness. His drinking—what little he did of it—was in control. He skied fast, but he’d had no injuries. He appeared to be a good driver; for four years, he drove a car in Colorado and didn’t get a single speeding ticket. He’d even slowed down with the girls a little—or so it had seemed to his grandfather and his dad. Of course the cook and his son had never stopped worrying about the boy; throughout his college years, however, Joe had honestly given them little cause to be concerned. Even his grades had been good—better than they’d been at Northfield Mount Hermon. (Like many kids who’d gone away from home to an independent boarding school, Joe always claimed that college was easier.)

As a novelist, Danny Angel had taken pains to make the arguably suicidal character in
Baby in the Road
as unlike Joe as possible. The young man in the book is a sensitive, artistic type. He’s in delicate health—from the beginning, he seems fated to die—and he’s no athlete. The novel is set in Vermont, not in Colorado. Revised, the boy’s wayward mother isn’t wayward enough to be a Katie character, although, like her doomed son, she has a drinking problem. In the rewrite, the Danny character, the boy’s grieving father, doesn’t give up drinking, but he’s not an alcoholic. (He is never compromised or incapacitated by what he drinks; he’s just depressed.)

In the first few years after Joe died, the cook would occasionally try to talk his son out of drinking again. “You’ll feel better if you don’t, Daniel. In the long run, you’ll wish you hadn’t gone back to it.”

“It’s for research, Pop,” Danny would tell his dad, but that answer no longer applied—not after he’d rewritten
Baby in the Road
, and the book had been finished for more than five years. In the new novel that Danny was writing, the main characters weren’t drinkers; Danny’s drinking wasn’t for “research”—not that it ever was.

But the cook could see that Danny didn’t drink to excess. He had a couple of beers before dinner—he’d always liked the taste of beer—and not more than a glass or two of red wine with his meal. (Without the wine, he didn’t sleep.) It was clear that Dominic’s beloved Daniel hadn’t gone back to being the kind of drinker he used to be.

Dominic could also see for himself that his son’s sadness had endured. After Joe’s death, Ketchum observed that Danny’s sadness had a look of permanence about it. Even interviewers, or anyone meeting the author for the first time, noticed it. Not surprisingly, in many of the interviews Danny had done for various publications of
Baby in the Road
, the questions about the novel’s main subject—the death of a child—had been personal. In every novel, there are parts that hit uncomfortably close to home for the novelist; obviously, these are areas of emotional history that the writer would prefer not to talk about.

Wasn’t it enough that Danny had made every effort to detach himself from the personal? He’d enhanced, he’d exaggerated, he’d stretched the story to the limits of believability—he’d made the most awful things happen to characters he had imagined as completely as possible. (“So-called real people are never as complete as wholly imagined characters,” the novelist had repeatedly said.) Yet Danny Angel’s interviewers had asked him almost nothing about the story and the characters in
Baby in the Road;
instead they’d asked Danny how he was “dealing with” the death of his son. Had the writer’s “real-life tragedy” made him reconsider the importance of fiction—meaning the weight, the gravity, the relative value of the “merely” make-believe?

That kind of question drove Danny Angel crazy, but he expected too much from journalists; most of them lacked the imagination to believe that anything credible in a novel had been “wholly imagined.” And those former journalists who later turned to writing fiction subscribed to that tiresome Hemingway dictum of writing about what you know. What bullshit was this? Novels should be about the people you know? How many boring but deadeningly realistic novels can be attributed to this lame and utterly uninspired advice?

But couldn’t it be argued that Danny should have anticipated the personal nature of his interviewers’ questions concerning
Baby in the Road?
Even nonreaders had heard about the accident that killed the famous writer’s son. (To Ketchum’s relief, the cowboy seemed to have missed it.) There’d also been the predictable pieces about the calamitous lives of celebrities’ children—unfair in Joe’s case, because the accident didn’t appear to have been Joe’s fault, and he hadn’t been drinking. Yet Danny should have anticipated this, too: Before there was verification that alcohol wasn’t a factor, there would be those in the media who too quickly assumed it had been.

At first, after the accident—and again, when
Baby in the Road
was published—Dominic had done his best to shield his son from his fan mail. Danny had let his dad be a first reader, understanding that the cook would decide which letters he should or shouldn’t see. That was how the letter from Lady Sky was lost.

“You have some weird readers,” the cook had complained one day. “And so many of your fans address you by your first name, as if they were your
friends!
It would unnerve me—how you have all these people you don’t know presuming that they know you.”

“Give me an example, Pop,” Danny said.

“Well, I don’t know,” Dominic said. “I throw out more mail than I show you, you know. There was one letter last week—she might have been a
stripper
, for all I know. She had a stripper’s
name.”

“Like what?” Danny had asked his dad.

“‘Lady Sky,’” the cook had said. “Sounds like a stripper to me.”

“I think her real name is Amy,” Danny said; he tried to remain calm.

“You
know
her?”

“I know only one Lady Sky.”

“I’m sorry, Daniel—I just assumed she was a
wacko.”

“What did she say, Pop—do you remember?”

Naturally, the cook couldn’t remember all the details—just that the woman seemed presumptuous and deranged. She’d written some gibberish about protecting Joe from pigs; she’d said she was no longer flying, as if she’d once been able to fly.

“Did she want me to write her back?” Danny asked his dad. “Do you remember where her letter was from?”

“Well, I’m sure there was a return address—they
all
want you to write them back!” the cook cried.

“It’s okay, Pop—I’m not blaming you,” Danny said. “Maybe she’ll write again.” (He didn’t really think so, and his heart was aching.)

“I had no idea you
wanted
to hear from someone named Lady Sky, Daniel,” the cook said.

Something must have happened to Amy; Danny wondered what it could have been. You don’t jump naked out of airplanes for no reason, the writer thought.

“I was sure she was a crazy person, Daniel.” With that, the cook paused. “She said she had lost a child, too,” Dominic told his son. “I thought I would spare you those letters. There were quite a lot of them.”

“Maybe you should show me those letters, Dad,” Danny said.

After the discovery that Lady Sky had written to him, Danny received a few more letters from his fans who’d lost children, but he’d been unable to answer a single one of those letters. There were no words to say to those people. Danny knew, since he was one of them. He would wonder how Amy had managed it; in his new life, without Joe, Danny didn’t think it would be all that hard to jump naked out of an airplane.

IN DANNY ANGEL’S WRITING ROOM
, on the third floor of the house on Cluny Drive, there was a skylight in addition to the window with the view of the clock tower on the Summerhill liquor store. This had once been Joe’s bedroom, and it occupied the entire third floor and had its own bathroom, with a shower but not a tub. The shower was adequate for a college kid like Joe, but the cook had questioned the extravagant size of the bedroom—not to mention the premier view. Wasn’t this wasted on a young man attending school in the States? (Joe would never get to spend much time in Toronto.)

But Danny had argued that he wanted Joe to have the best bedroom, because maybe then his son would be more inclined to come to Canada. The room’s isolation on the third floor also made it the most private bedroom in the house, and—for safety’s sake—no third-floor bedroom should be without a fire escape, so Danny had built one. The room, therefore, had a private entrance. When Joe died, and Danny converted the boy’s bedroom into a
writing
room, the novelist left his son’s things as they were; only the bed had been removed.

Joe’s clothes stayed in the closet and in the chest of drawers—even his shoes remained. All the laces were untied, too. Joe had not once taken off a pair of shoes by untying the laces first. He’d kicked off his shoes with the laces tied, and they were always tightly tied, with a double knot, as if Joe were still a little boy whose shoes often came untied. Danny had long been in the habit of finding his son’s double-knotted shoes and untying the laces for him. It was a few months, or more, after Joe died before Danny had untied the last of Joe’s shoelaces.

What with Joe’s wrestling and skiing photographs on the walls, the so-called writing room was a virtual
shrine
to the dead boy. In the cook’s mind, it was masochistic of his son to choose to write there, but a limp like Dominic’s would keep him from investigating that third-floor writing room with any regularity; Dominic rarely ventured there, even when Daniel was away. With the bed gone, no one else would sleep there—apparently, that was what Danny wanted.

When Joe had been with them in Toronto, both the cook and his son could hear the boy’s kicked-off shoes drop (like two rocks) above them—or the more subtle creaking of the floorboards whenever Joe was walking around (even barefoot, or in his socks). You could also hear that third-floor shower from the three bedrooms on the second floor. Each of the second-floor bedrooms had its own bath, with the cook’s bedroom being at the opposite end of the long hall from his beloved Daniel’s bedroom—hence father and son had some measure of privacy, because the guest room was between them.

That guest room and its bathroom had recently been spruced up—in readiness for Ketchum’s expected arrival, the woodsman’s now-annual Christmas visit—and because the bedroom door was open, both Danny and his dad couldn’t help but notice that the cleaning woman had prominently placed a vase of fresh flowers atop the guest room’s dresser. The bouquet was reflected in the dresser’s mirror, making it appear, from the second-floor hall, as
two
vases of flowers. (Not that Ketchum would have noticed or acknowledged a
dozen
vases of flowers in his room, the writer thought.)

Danny guessed that the cleaning woman probably had a crush on Ketchum, though the cook claimed that Lupita must have pitied the logger for how old he was. The flowers were in anticipation of how near death Ketchum was, Dominic absurdly said—“the way people put flowers on a grave.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Danny told his dad.

But the flowers and Lupita were a mystery. The Mexican cleaning woman never put a vase of flowers in the guest room for any other visitor to the Rosedale residence, and that guest room in the house on Cluny Drive was more than occasionally occupied—not only at Christmas. Salman Rushdie, the author with a death threat against him, sometimes stayed there when he was in Toronto; Danny Angel’s other writer friends, both from Europe and the United States, often came to visit. Armando and Mary DeSimone were visitors to the city at least twice a year, and they always stayed with Danny and his dad.

Many of Danny’s foreign publishers had slept in that guest room, which reflected the author’s international reputation; the majority of the books in the room were translations of Danny Angel’s novels. Hanging in that guest bedroom, too, was a framed poster of the French edition of
Baby in the Road—Bébé dans la rue
. (In the connecting bathroom, there was an oversize poster of the German translation of that same novel
—Baby auf der Strasse.)
Yet, in the mind of the Mexican cleaning woman, only Ketchum merited flowers.

Lupita was a wounded soul, and she certainly recognized the damage done to others. She could not clean Danny’s third-floor writing room without weeping, though Lupita had never met Joe; in those years when he’d come to Canada from Colorado, Joe never stayed for long, and Danny and his dad had not yet met what the cook called “the Mexican marvel.” They’d had a host of unsatisfactory cleaning women in those years.