Reservation Road (16 page)

Ethan

I began another academic year at Smithfield because I had to. Someone had told me this once, but I’d forgotten who. Or I’d read it—Marcus Aurelius, perhaps, one more lost footnote for me. Not that it mattered. You moved forward. That fall I was scheduled to teach two electives of my own devising: Bitter Pill: Irony and Temporality in James (Late Period), Ford, and Woolf; and Heroic Fiction/Fictive Heroics: Writers After Warfare. There was nothing to say about these courses except that I’d thought them up in an earlier time, as a different man in a different life, and thus the grim ironies they held for me now were wholly unintended, if no longer unimaginable.

The first few weeks of the semester passed. New and old students got themselves settled, class rosters filled in and solidified. One morning I looked up from my spot at the front of the classroom, between the tabletop podium and the blackboard, and saw the young faces gathered as I’d seen them gathered for a dozen years: earnest, quizzical, eager, bored, skeptical. Too early in the year for adoration or resentment. Though not too early, I noticed, for pity. Most everyone at the college knew what had happened to my son. They had read about it in the papers or heard about it in the dining hall. Like sightings of a ghost, they claimed among themselves to have seen Josh on campus in the past, his black violin case slung over his bony shoulders, or claimed never to have seen him. They believed that they knew me and what kind of man I was, what sort of father, or they believed, rightly, that they did not know me and never would.

Twice every day I drove by the Canaan police barracks. And, unable not to, each time I passed I would turn and regard the building—squat, drab, impenetrable, it resembled nothing so much as a bunker in some cheap and futile war—and try to imagine Sergeant Burke sitting alertly at his desk, staring perhaps at the framed photographs of his own family, still in pursuit, supposedly, of the identity of the man whose gray outlines I’d seen inside the car that killed my son. This was an exercise in rage and hope, in constructing a balloon and attempting to fill it with just that mixture of gases that will cause it to rise without also causing it to explode. Rage because after two months there had been no progress in the case. They had found no one; as far as I knew, they suspected no one. Because in their failure to find who had committed the crime Burke and his upstanding colleagues had come to feel like the enemy to me, or at least the only enemy I might ever know other than myself.

And hope? Because in spite of everything the case was still alive. Because blame might still be found, placed, allotted. Because there was at least one man outside of the cave we lived in who spent his days with Josh’s name on his lips; who, looking out a car window at the passing roadside on a day leaning toward dusk, perhaps saw my son’s face.

It was an evening in early October.

I stayed in my office until six-thirty, hiding with the door shut; hiding in books that no longer smelled right, felt right to the touch, and so no longer gave refuge—as in a house blackened by fire, when the only sensible thing to do is gather up what’s salvageable and move on, but you just can’t face it, so you stay put, you and your poor family, night after night, wandering the rooms with soot-blackened fingers and damp ash up your noses, saying to yourselves, “It just doesn’t feel the same.”

By six-thirty the building was empty; even Jean Olsen had left for the stale, canola-fried air of the dining hall. I gathered up my books and walked out to my car and drove across campus. The blue sky was faltering, the days already growing noticeably shorter. Leaves were turning on the trees by the road where it dipped and then climbed past the music building with the beautiful windows and over the brow of the second hill to the gate.

Through Great Barrington, through Sheffield, across the state line and the train tracks. The darkening sky, and everything under it distinct: two crows flying over the phone lines; a man loading bags of fertilizer onto the bed of a pickup; the first sign of pumpkins. The summer was over, it was autumn, and Josh—

He is sitting on our leaf-strewn lawn, smiling, a gutted, grinning pumpkin in his lap and an orange-handled child’s safety knife in his fist, the dull, serrated blade streaked with pulp, glistening seeds heaped on a sheet of newspaper beside him. He is seven. He’s just carved his first jack-o’-lantern and couldn’t be more pleased with himself. I am raking leaves and watching him out of the corner of my eye. He lays down the knife with an artist’s air of skeptical yet satisfied completion. Then he turns silly. Giggling, he waves me over, teasing: “He looks like you, Dad! He looks like you!” I pick him up and spin with him across the lawn, around and around, twirling our bodies together like a top, his head upside down, his mouth open—until, crying with laughter, he begs me to stop—

I slowed down. Ahead now, in the dusk, the police barracks appeared—squat and ugly, a spotlight shining from above the front entrance out over the parking lot, where only three cars were parked. Without another thought, I turned in.

Since that first time, the morning after it happened, I hadn’t been back. Perhaps because of the unfavorable, even alarming, impression made by my first appearance in the barracks, Sergeant Burke from the beginning had seemed eager to keep our conversations localized, contained. There was the one meeting at our house, followed, for a while, by weekly phone check-ins, always with the same news, delivered in tones of careful military neutrality: Nothing to report yet, we’re still on the case. By Labor Day, though, his calls had slacked off and his voice had begun to betray a new kind of frustration. I was phoning him three, four times a week and he was never available to take my calls, he was busy, he was ducking me, using the auburn-haired, small-eyed dispatch officer as a cover.

The place seemed abandoned now. If not for the spotlight shining over the entrance and the stray fluorescent cracks visible at the edges of the metal blinds drawn over the windows, this particular barracks would have looked out of business. The waiting room was empty; the dispatch room was empty, too. Did the police, like regular citizens, go home en masse on the dot of five or six o’clock, leaving the world’s troubles on their desks for the next brave morning? Did they too have trouble meeting their mortgage payments? The law in shutdown. As far as I could tell, the waiting room bulletin board was papered with the exact same xeroxed messages as on my last visit: somewhere a dog named Moby was still lost, perhaps dead; somewhere loitered the hooded-eyed fathers wanted by the state for failure to pay child support; somewhere roamed the fugitive rapists and killers.

There was no bell to ring, so I tried rapping on the Plexiglas window, producing merely a padded-cell sound of muted struggle. Then I turned to the steel door marked Authorized Personnel Only and began to pound on it with my fists.

The door opened and I found myself face-to-face with the dispatch officer with the auburn perm and the small eyes. She was out of uniform and disgruntled.

“What do you think you’re doing, banging like that?” she demanded. “This is a police station.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to see Burke.”

“You mean
Sergeant
Burke.”

“Yes.
Sergeant
Burke.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“No.”

“Then it’ll have to be another time—he’s got an important meeting this evening. Or if you want you can talk to the night-duty sergeant. His name’s Nichols. He just came on.”

“I don’t want to talk to Nichols—”

“
Sergeant
Nichols.”

“I want to talk to Burke.”

Her eyes narrowed to slits and she tugged the zipper on her purple fleece pullover high up under her chin, the metal pulltab getting lost in the soft, jowly flesh there. “Maybe I’m not making myself clear. What you’re gonna have to do is call Sergeant Burke in the a.m. Got it?”

“I’ve
been
calling him. That’s why I’m here.”

“Sorry.”

She started to turn away, pulling the door closed behind her. I grabbed the door.

“You’re not listening to me.”

The woman whirled around and spoke rapid-fire. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll take your hand off this door right now.”

I let go of the door. My hand hung in the space between us, restless with the need to do something. I saw her looking at it.

“Step slowly back from the door,” she said.

I stepped back.

She took a breath. “There are regulations,” she said.

“I don’t care.” I stepped back farther until the edge of a plastic chair was pressing against the backs of my legs, and then I sat down, as though pushed by a terrible exhaustion.

“Well, I do,” she said. “I have to, it’s my job.”

“What?” She was not in clear focus. I removed my glasses, rubbed my eyes, put my glasses back on. Everything taking a long time. “Have to what?” I said.

“Care.” She was looking at me strangely. “About the regulations.”

“My son is dead,” I said. “What do your regulations have to say about that?”

The exhaustion was too great. I closed my eyes. I had not had a decent night’s rest since my son had died. And here, now, in this windowless room, I felt as if I had not slept since being born, and was only now understanding that I would never sleep. I sat in my own darkness, waiting to hear the sound of the steel door closing.

“I remember you.”

I opened my eyes.

“You’re Learner. Your boy was the hit-and-run.”

I nodded—like a dull boy outside the principal’s office, or perhaps just a boy beaten senseless. Nobody’s father. As the seconds passed, her fingers began to play with the zipper at her throat.

“All right,” she said, as if conceding defeat in our battle of wills. “Wait here.”

Burke came out into the waiting room still slipping his coat on. Underneath were a blazer and tie, a button-down, and khakis. His short graying hair was combed, and it all looked like dinner at the in-laws.

“Mr. Learner,” he said. “I was planning on calling you.”

I stood up. There was something abject, almost humiliated, underneath his voice tonight that gave me pause. His gray eyes, usually machine-steady, were restless and wary.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.” At this lie Burke glanced at the bulletin board and its paper sorrows.

“Why, do you have news?”

“Information.”

“What information? Is it news or isn’t it?”

“Why don’t we sit down.” Burke’s hand gestured like an usher’s, and I felt a net of invisible threads of sweat break out on my forehead.

“Just tell me, Burke.”

Burke nodded, as if to say that he’d known all along it would go this way and there was nothing to do now but proceed. He cleared his throat. “All right. Mr. Learner, as of yesterday your son’s case has been listed inactive.”

“What?”

“Standard police practice. After a certain period of time, all unsolved cases get reprioritized.”

“Re
prioritized
? Is this some kind of sick joke?”

“Obviously, we’ll still be on the lookout for the perpetrator,” Burke went on. “That hunt will be ongoing but indirect, as will any evidence gathering. But I have to tell you that officially the case has been moved to the back burner. And I’ve been reassigned.”

“You can’t do that,” I said.

“Mr. Learner—”

“No. I’m sorry, you can’t do that.”

“It’s hard, I know that.” Burke reached out and touched my shoulder.

“Take your hand off me.”

Burke’s mouth tightened and he took back his hand. His voice turned a few degrees more officious. “We’ve got a small force here, Mr. Learner, barely enough men to keep up with all our responsibilities week to week. If we didn’t separate the old cases from the new ones we’d be swamped.”

“
Swamped?
” I turned to the wall and struck my open hand against the bulletin board, sending thumbtacks skittering across the room and papers raining onto the floor. Burke did not move.

“Take it easy now. There was no need—”

“Shame on you,” I said.

“I’m a police officer, Mr. Learner, and I’m doing my job the best—”

“You’re a son of a bitch and a coward. You’ve got no guts, you’ve got no heart—”

“Now you hold on right there!”

“I hope it happens to you, Burke,” I said.

Now his eyes fixed on me like two gray stones. “What did you say?”

“You heard me. Your own son. How would it feel? Your own son mowed over on the side of the road and you the one standing here begging for a scrap of information, a little bit of goddamn human decency, and all you get is nothing, looks the other way, calls ducked, standard practice. Shame on you. I never thought in my life I’d say it but it ought to happen to all of you so you know. So you know what it feels like. Because if you don’t know you just don’t give a damn, do you? Just doing your lousy job, right? Shame on you. My son was worth ten of you.”

Burke’s face had gone pale. His hands were balled into fists at his side, and there was a look in his eyes that said he had better remove himself from this situation. And in that momentary expression I saw that he and the police were now finished with me. They’d had enough. My rage, which felt to me still barely even tapped, had wrecked whatever goodwill there’d been, and with it any chance of finding the man who killed my son.

“Sergeant,” I stumbled, “I . . .”

He turned his back on me. Facing the Plexiglas window, in the center of which floated his dulled and watery reflection, he began to button his coat.

“We’re done here, Mr. Learner,” he said in a frigid voice to the empty dispatch room. “In a few days’ time there’ll be a name in your mailbox. Any problems you have from now on, any questions, any complaints, you take them to the trooper with that name. But not to me. Good night, sir.”

He turned and went out through the front entrance into the night, and was gone.

Dwight

And promises get broken, one by one.

At three a.m. one night in early October, I drove over to Pine Creek Road.

Downstairs, a single light was glowing, spilling out through a window onto the rectangle of lawn. From the glimpse I had, the lit room looked empty.

This time I didn’t turn around. I parked down the road a way, out of anybody’s sight, and started walking back to the house. Wishing I’d had more than two drinks before leaving my house: a couple of stiff ones couldn’t touch this roadside darkness. The moon was no moon at all. My heavy footsteps on the road, twigs snapping in the woods to my right, an owl in there lifting off and flying.

I remembered going hunting once with a school friend and his father. It was my first overnight trip, and at the end of a long bloody day we’d made a campfire ringed with rocks and sat around it saying almost nothing, eating our dinner and listening to the fire, drinking Irish coffee out of a thermos. I was fourteen and my mother had been dead six years. When the time came to turn in, my friend’s father placed his hand on my head, ruffling my hair. “Did good today, Dwight,” he said. “You’re on your way.” We got into our sleeping bags. Soon, my friend and his father were sound asleep, their steady breathing like the warm nuzzling of animals in the dark. But I couldn’t sleep. Too much had happened. I’d done good, I was on my way. I lay awake thinking about the deer I’d killed that day, a poor, flinching shot, and the blood it had trailed as it ran frightened through the woods and fell, ran and fell, and how I’d wanted it to die for my own reasons.

The woods gave out onto the Learner place and I stopped to get my bearings in the differing degrees of darkness. A barnlike garage on the near side, with the stable doors drawn closed. Shrubs around it, and what looked like an orchard of shadow trees off behind, toward the house. The place was landscaped, designed, thought over; even in darkness you could feel the womanly care that had gone into it. Grace Learner, I thought. Who designs gardens.

I stayed there at the fringe of it all until my breathing separated itself from me, grew close to regular. I tried to think of it as just a house. But this was hard, with me dressed head to toe in black at three in the morning and the one light shining downstairs, poking out onto the lawn like a shout; someone was awake. Though from this angle and distance I couldn’t see inside the room. I let myself imagine it was her.

A split-rail fence ran along front, between the lawn and the road. Keeping outside of it, well beyond the spillage of light, I went across the face of the house and then over the fence at the point where it came out under the limbs of a huge oak. My old football knee was stiff from the cold. The leaves on the ground smelled damp. The house was twenty yards away.

For a long time nothing moved. The lit room was a stage set waiting for the actors to show up: the high back of a reading chair, a little table with a glass and a bottle of the hard stuff, a tall bookcase sagging with books, a desk with a computer and a lamp, more books. A thinking man’s lonely palace. There was a sofa against the left wall, complete with mussed-up blanket and pillows.

And I thought: Ethan Learner. Professor of English at Smithfield College.

It was an empty room. Then it was not empty. He reached for the glass, and I saw that he’d been there all along, reading, hidden by the chair’s high back. An arm went out for the glass and then disappeared with it—that was all I saw. Then it became a matter of waiting for the rest of him.

Not long afterwards, he stood up. His back was to me. He shuffled to the desk—not walked, but shuffled like an old man. His dark hair was wild. He wore a heavy bathrobe over his clothes and carried the glass in one hand and a book in the other. He set these things down on the desk next to the computer and moved to the door, where he stopped and raised his hand to the light switch on the wall. I thought he was going to leave, go upstairs to bed and his wife.

Just before switching off the light, he turned to look at the sofa with its blanket and pillows. It was a long look, as if he was seeing himself there, huddled and awake. As if he had stores of pity for the man he saw there, who was himself. Then, deliberately, as if by an act of will, he turned to the window. I saw his face clearly for the first time. Hollowed out. Empty, as the room had been empty even though he’d been in it. For a second I thought he was seeing me. But it must have been his reflection he saw, in the windowpanes, because just then he turned his head away and switched out the light.

Now the night was a tide, simple and black. You could be invisible in it, submerged, of no consequence, not even there. I took a deep breath and stepped from behind the tree and out into the middle of the lawn.

And looked up.

Somewhere behind the dark windows, Grace Learner lay sleeping.