Reservation Road (10 page)

“If she wants to play, I wouldn’t stop her,” she said.

“I’m glad,” Ruth Wheldon said. “So I’ll see you all there Wednesday evening?”

“I guess so.”

She said good-bye then, and went out of the room and up the stairs to the lobby. Emma was there, beneath the high wall of stone crosses.

Dwight

It was my policy, for the weekly pickups and drop-offs of my son, to arrive unannounced when possible. On the Sunday mornings when Ruth didn’t have Sam already waiting for me out on the porch—his hair combed and his teeth brushed and, for all I knew, flossed; looking every inch like somebody else’s child—I liked to sneak in the front door without knocking, a practice which drove Ruth up the wall because she knew perfectly well what I was up to, how my real goal was just the gathering of evidence. A sly glimpse, maybe, of the family troika sitting around the breakfast table; of Sam perusing the Sunday comics while ignoring every attempt on the part of his stepdad (whom he thought was just plain dull, if not stupid) to make conversation and “bond”; of Ruth ignoring Norris, too, for not dissimilar reasons (that she thought he was just plain dull, if not stupid); and even of Norris himself, dressed in madras and verbally flailing, on the verge of tossing up the white flag and beating yet another hasty retreat to the green peace of the country-club golf course.

What was also true, though, was that for all my guerrilla tactics to see
her
life, Ruth didn’t know or care a whole lot about mine in return. So long as my smallish child-support checks showed up on time (they were voluntary, not compulsory, on my part since she’d married Norris), and I didn’t fudge my hours with Sam, her curiosity about my daily existence was minimal. She’d never been to my house in Box Corner, although it was only ten miles away. She never asked me about my work or how my friends were. Which was okay, in some ways, because my house was not worth seeing and my job not worth talking about and my friends were few. Because much had been diminished since the old days, and, like many whose lives are fueled largely by regret, I’d come to feel that what was diminished was better left to the dark, in private.

Either way, now that our history together had been written and tossed out, Ruth didn’t seem to care two cents what I did outside of my dealings with our son. It was as if she could not forget my past and could not remember my present.

Maybe it was sad, the fact that I meant so little to her. I knew it was lonely. Still, I counted on it making the lying I had to do easier.

I went up the steps to the porch and into the house. Nobody saw me. From upstairs I heard Ruth’s voice in a nagging vein; it sounded as if she was after someone about something. I turned left from the foyer and went through the dining room (I remembered the Sheffield antique shop where we’d bought that wrought-iron chandelier for $138) and into the kitchen, where I found Norris sitting alone at the breakfast table in his green and yellow golf clothes, drinking coffee and reading the
Litchfield County
Times
. He nearly knocked over the mug when he saw me.

“Dwight!”

“Hello, Norris. Don’t get up.”

But Norris was already up, pumping my hand, and wouldn’t sit down. “When’d you get here, Dwight?”

“Just this second.”

“How’d you get inside?”

“Just walked in.”

Norris nodded vigorously but seemed at a loss what to say next. Color had suddenly appeared in his cheeks, and I had the feeling that if he’d had a crowbar in his hands and been a different sort of man, he’d have gone for me.

“Is Sam here, Norris? How about Ruth?”

“Upstairs,” Norris said.

“Maybe I’ll just go up and let them know I’m here.”

“You mean go upstairs?”

“Either that or yell.”

“I don’t think Ruth would go for that at all, Dwight, to be honest,” Norris said—a little nervously, I thought. “Why don’t you have a seat? How about some coffee? We’ve got a fresh pot right here.”

Norris poured me a cup of coffee and refilled his own, and we sat down across from each other. He seemed a little wired all of a sudden, blowing unnecessarily on his coffee and drumming his fingers on the table. And I thought, not for the first time, that my evidence-gathering tactics were a sham. I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know, and all the old news was bad news at that.

Norris cleared his throat. “So, Dwight, how’s tricks?”

A solid
thump
came from upstairs, something chunky and serious, like a bowling ball, hitting the floor right above our heads. Norris made no sign that he’d heard anything unusual. It was Sam’s room up there, and right afterwards I heard Ruth’s shrill warning cutting through the timbers: “Don’t play with that in here!” And I tried to imagine what it was she could be talking about, what piece of sports equipment or farm machinery Sam was chucking around up there. But it had been a long time since I’d seen the inside of his room, and I was no longer well acquainted with his inventory.

“Not much to tell, Norris,” I said. “You know, same old life.”

“I do know that, Dwight, I certainly do.” Norris did a little more finger drumming on the table, then abruptly stopped. “Say, how’s the car?”

“What?”

“I said, how about the car?”

I was careful to take a sip of coffee then and not to spill. “What about it?”

“Get that headlight fixed?”

“Headlight? As a matter of fact—”

“You know, the cops’re rough on that one. They’ll ticket you for sure—hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty buckaroos—and then to top it off they’ll haul you in and treat you like a bona fide criminal.” For some reason, Norris found this funny and laughed, showing some silver in the molars. “It’s a double whammy.”

“As a matter of fact, Norris,” I said, “my car’s in the shop. It turned out the headlight was just the tip of the iceberg. The transmission’s totally shot. The guy over there said it’s so bad I ought to think about scrapping it.” I paused. “So I’m leasing.”

Norris whistled. “That was one expensive dog you hit, huh?”

I made myself smile. “It’s all right. I got a real good deal on a lease. Zero money down.”

“Well, that’s good, I guess,” Norris said. “But you know, Dwight, hitting a dog is just plain bad luck. Just about the worst luck there is. And a
black
dog?” Norris shook his head. “Whoo, boy. Glad it wasn’t me.”

“It was an accident.”

“Not according to the police,” Norris said, taking a sip of coffee. “You hit a dog and don’t report it, they’ll fine you for that too, you know. One way or another, they get you.”

I studied him for a moment, to see what he might be getting at. But he was just holding up his cup and looking into it, turning it this way and that, and didn’t seem to have meant anything.

“I reported it the next day,” I lied.

“Well, lawyers know best,” Norris said without conviction. He got to his feet, poured himself another mug of coffee. Then he sat down again.

“I’ve been worried about Sam, Norris. Since the accident. Has he seemed upset to you?”

“Upset?” This didn’t seem to have occurred to Norris; he shook his head again, pursing his lips. “Not especially, no. Not to me he didn’t. No screaming nightmares, if that’s what you mean, Dwight. Of course, there’s that eye. More coffee?”

Before I could answer, I heard light, quick feet on the stairs and then on the old floors in the dining room, and in a moment Sam appeared in the kitchen. The first thing I noticed was his eye. It was still blue and purple in places but starting to turn yellowish all around, which was less shocking maybe, but uglier. And the eye itself was blood red from the broken vessels. It was a jeweled ruby eye and he wore it like a young prince, as if he knew its true value all right but couldn’t have cared less. He smiled a little shyly when he saw me, and I felt my heart lift for the first time in a week.

“Hey, sport.”

Sam looked from me to Norris and back to me. “Hi, Dad.” Now his voice was quiet, quieter than his footsteps running through the house, and he was looking down at his sneakered boy’s feet, which he had stacked, one on top of the other, like a flamingo’s. He was wearing cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt.

“Is your mother coming down?”

“I guess so.” Staring at his feet.

I was experienced in this sort of shyness and tried not to let it bother me. If you don’t see your son for four years and then see him only on Sundays for eight hours at a pop, and there’s a new man in the house to boot, then there is a shift in the numbers, the natural math of loss and gain. Compare it to anything you want— the ocean carrying sand away to another part of the beach—but don’t expect what you left behind one week to still be there exactly as you left it the next. At the start of every Sunday my son was shy with me again. Yet each time I tried to have confidence. I told myself that we’d been through worse than this in the past, had closed more distance than this.

“I thought we’d head on over to my place for a little while,” I said. “See what you and I can kick up. Sound okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. All right.” I stood up and so did Norris—immediately, as if he was attached to me by a string. “Thanks for the coffee, Norris. We’ll be back at the usual time.”

“Um, actually, Dwight, I think Ruth wanted to have a word with you.”

“With me?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Well, that’s fine, Norris, as long as she shows up by the time Sam and I get out to the car. That sounds fair, doesn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know, Dwight. . . .”

I put my hand on Sam’s shoulder and led the way out of the kitchen. Norris followed. We were just stepping out onto the porch when I heard Ruth coming down the stairs behind us. A moment later she came out onto the porch. Today she wore a little denim vest and plaid short-legged cotton pants that looked as if they’d been in the deep freeze since the Eisenhower administration, and white bobby-type socks and a pair of Keds. The whole thing put me at a loss.

“Well, Dwight.”

“Hello, Ruth.”

“Did Norris tell you I wanted to talk?”

“I told him,” Norris said.

“He told me.”

“So can we talk?”

“All right,” I said. “Sam, why don’t you and your stepdad go check out the new set of wheels while your mom and I have a little talk. Okay?”

Sam nodded, and he and Norris went down the porch steps and across the little lawn to the Corsica. Ruth and I stood side by side watching as Norris opened the driver’s door and Sam climbed in behind the wheel, and then Norris went around and got in the passenger’s side. It looked like a driving lesson.

“You look good, Ruth,” I said. “Your figure is as fine as it ever was.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Ruth said coolly.

“I mean it.”

“That’s nice. Listen, Dwight. I took Sam to the doctor Tuesday. For that eye.”

“And?”

“Nothing’s broken.”

“I could’ve told you that. In fact, I did.”

“I wanted a professional opinion.”

“So you got one. What else?”

“Insurance won’t cover the visit.”

“Is that what this is about?” I sighed. “Just send me the bill, Ruth. Okay?”

“Thank you.” There was color in her cheeks. Embarrassment, I guessed. She was not beyond it after all.

“Well, if that’s it, then we’ll be going. The clock’s ticking. I’ll have him back on time. Promise.” I turned to go, but she stopped me with a hand on my arm.

“Dwight?”

“What?”

“I saw Grace Learner the other day.”

At the mention of the name I went still. A sudden meltdown in my bowels caused a rush of heat up to my face. “I don’t know who that is,” I said.

“Didn’t you see the papers?”

“No.”

“Her son was killed last Sunday night. A hit-and-run over by Tod’s Gas on Reservation Road. They have no idea who did it. Can you imagine that? There couldn’t be anything worse than that.”

“They don’t know who did it?”

“No idea.”

I breathed out privately, as relief spread itself through my body like a tonic. “How’d you happen to see her?”

“Her daughter’s at the camp and she came to pick her up. I tried to tell her how sorry I was, how sorry everybody is, but I’m afraid it didn’t come out right. She looked—I don’t know, she looked just kind of broken.”

There were tears in Ruth’s eyes, something I hadn’t seen for years.

“Dwight, their son was Sam’s age. He was only ten years old. I just can’t stop thinking, What if it’d been Sam instead? It could have happened to anybody, but it happened to them, not us. I don’t think I could live through something like that.”

Ruth was standing close to me, closer than she had for a long time; then in a moment she was leaning closer still, as if she wanted to be held. So I did just that. There on the porch in plain view of our son and her husband, I put my arms around her and felt the old feeling well up briefly between us, old and familiar and gone. For those few moments it didn’t matter what I’d done, I felt our shared fear for Sam and what the world might do to him; we were his protectors. Until in my ear Ruth whispered “Okay” and opened her arms. I stood back and we separated. Before I knew it, I was walking across the little lawn to the car.

Getting out from the passenger’s side, Norris gave me a Charles Bronson staredown that would have flattened a weaker man. He was justly aggrieved that I’d laid hands on his wife, and maybe he was even a little confused. But hard as I tried, his feelings had no effect on me. I looked at him as if I’d never seen him before. And then I drove my son away from that house and over to my own.

Ethan

Sunday: Josh had been dead a week.

Our house the site of a wordless, internalized diaspora over a landscape riven with fault lines: Emma in her room and Grace in her studio and me in my study. Silence.

Take away the ritual of meals from a family and what you have left is a way station; human contact is not guaranteed, even by love. It must be fought for, earned, desired, fed. Hope and courage are required. The last time we’d all eaten together had been at the concert, the four of us gathered on the blanket, sublime music in the air. Josh sat Indian-style and ate the only food he ever truly enjoyed eating, which was a bologna-and-cucumber sandwich on white bread with the crusts cut off, no mayonnaise, no mustard, and a pint of Hershey’s chocolate milk and cookies. A bubble of self-containment around him, of private serene concentration, like a child mystic, oblivious to his father’s probing gaze, the old man’s hungry, thwarted desire to know his son’s innermost thoughts, intent upon just this: the long thin fingers pulling the carton open into a wide square brown mouth, dunking the cookies one by one into the milk, until they were perfect.

I was in my study now.

Seeing his hands, which were beautiful.

Remembering his hands, seeing his hands holding a rope swing when he was nine.

Remembering the rope hanging from a tall elm by the Connecticut River, and his hands holding on to it, and the sunshine filtering through the leaves.

He is afraid. He does not want to. He stands on a low wooden platform that looks down the sloping field to the gray-green river. I stand with him. I tell him to place his feet on the knot at the bottom of the swing, to squeeze the rope between his knees. I take his hands and place them around the rope, which is rough-hewn and three inches thick; and I tell him to hold on tight, he will be fine, it will be fun; and I say “Ready, set, go”; and I give him a hard fatherly shove that sends him sailing out over the platform into free space, over the ground sloping away, and the rope with his hands locked around it rising into sky; and I watch his body rise and soar, and he is soundless. And then, at the apex of the rope’s flight, I watch him fall like a stone. He just seems to let go. It is about twelve feet to the ground. He lands in a brittle little heap. And I run to him.

He is unhurt. It is a miracle. He picks himself off the ground, dirt on his knees, and walks past me without a word. Because I have lied to him.