Reservation Road (20 page)

Grace

Her eyes opened in the dark: she blinked, blinked, trying to make sense—not of a dream but of a dreamlike movement around her. Something told her to lie still. She saw Ethan’s back, shadowed, leaving the room. There was the urge to call out—“Where are you going?”—but she suppressed it. She had an instinct about it anyway. She thought she knew.

They had been happy that summer, the four of them, in the tiny rented cabin by the lake.

Happy
. She saw Ethan laughing, young. She saw herself. She remembered the day they had met, fifteen years ago, looking up from her desk in the dorm room and finding this handsome graduate student standing in the doorway—tall, thin, highcheekboned, dark, intense. He wasn’t looking for her but for her roommate, who was out; he had found her by mistake, but once he found her he would not stop talking. He was all hands when he talked, nervous energy, his long fingers gesticulating, playing some harmony only he could hear. He was like a beautiful idea being worked out right in front of her, and she remembered feeling as if, from the very moment he began to speak to her, he were asking her to participate in the process of creation, inviting her inside himself, telling her, with his expressive wandlike hands, that what she thought and believed and was, mattered.

Now, in the silence, she heard his car start up. The tires on the drive, his leaving.

Dwight

That night, for whatever reason, I couldn’t sleep. I watched the Thursday late movie on TV—about a man who terrorizes his ex-wife and daughter, till the ex-wife finally kills him with a carving knife. I read a few pages of a book about the Yankees-Dodgers Series of ’49. I stuck some dirty clothes in the washer and set it spinning. I considered calling Donna in the futile hope that she might change her mind about me for one more night.

In the end, though, I gave up the pretense of doing anything worthwhile. I got the bottle of Jim Beam down from the cupboard and poured myself a drink. Then I poured myself another. I was afraid. My skin felt hot, my lungs shallow. I kept telling myself that this was just another night in a long black parade of nights stretching out into the unknown; life was going to go on, I kept telling myself, maybe for a very long time. But this was not comforting. I had never known a night that seemed so long, without purpose or end.

Ethan

The roads at that hour were empty, not a living soul. I drove through Canaan, turned west for fifteen minutes to Salisbury, and followed my headlights up the short winding road to the top of Mount Riga.

It was a summer colony of plain unheated cabins dotting a strip of land between two lakes. The warden’s cabin stood nearest the road. I remembered him from that summer four years ago—a tall man with a high forehead and a glass eye. I remembered his cabin as I did all the colony: a place of vivid simplicity, the weathered wood set off against the green of the surrounding grass and trees, and, in the background, the lake’s dark but sun-dappled blue. Now my headlights shone over it as they might over an abandoned car: shuttered, it had no windows, no face. The wooden gate in front was drawn down, blocking the way. I stopped the car, pulled a flashlight from the glove compartment, and got out. The night was cold, the air laden with unborn snow, the moon obscured by clouds—not a breeze stirring, not a sound save for the brief ticking of the engine as it cooled. I zipped up my coat, pulled on gloves. Switching on the flashlight I set out on foot along a dirt path, around the wooden gate and past the warden’s empty cabin.

Cabin number four was on the water. I approached it from the footpath, shone my light on it at first from a distance, and it was hazy, blurred, and dark. As I drew closer its form grew more distinct, like a memory emerging from the murky remnants of a dream. I came to the front door and it was locked. The windows were shuttered. I ran the light over the door, and there was the name I remembered: “Hyacinth,” carved into the wood—as inexplicable as “Rosebud.” We had not owned this place; we had spent a single summer here and then never found our way back. We had been visitors. I tried the door again but it would not open, and then I walked around to the lake side and up the two steps to the uncovered porch. The rear door was locked, too, the window closed up. But someone had left a folded beach chair leaning against the railing. It was covered with rust. I unfolded it and sat down facing the still, black water.

Time passed. And I stayed awake and remembered.

A diving float sits in the water like a square white cake. Josh is six; everything he attempts is an event. He spends entire days on the float—diving, climbing out, diving—and I spend my days watching him. His naked shoulders and hopeful resolve. His certainty that the rest of life exists simply to get the dive right. He bursts from the water with his back arched, face turned up to the sun. . . .

But then, one day, the diving abruptly stops. He is standing on the porch when I wake up. It is barely past seven and I emerge from our room and say good morning to him, and like a child prophet he points down the lake and says: “Swans.” That is all. I join him on the porch. And there, by the water’s far edge, floats a pair of those majestic birds. Josh tugs on my arm. “Dad, can we go look?”

We climb into the canoe, Josh in the bow. I insist that he wear a life preserver. At first he tries to paddle, but the paddle is too long and heavy for him, and in the end he has to put it away; only my paddle eddies beneath the polished blue surface of the water as we glide along. The sun is ahead of us, low but already hot, turning that end of the lake into a mirror of sky. The swans float upon it. I watch my son on his knees from behind, finding something poignant and indelible in his hands gripping the gunwales, the slope of his shoulders, the tilt of his head to the water. We pass in front of another cabin, on whose porch a man is doing deep knee bends. And then, as though caught in the moving silence of a dream, we find ourselves nearing the swans, who at this moment are feeding, their necks extended and their heads hidden beneath the water.

“It’s running away,” Josh whispers.

Sensing our approach, one of the swans has raised its head and is swimming briskly for the far bank. Its partner remains behind, feeding complacently.

“It doesn’t see us,” Josh whispers.

We have drawn within ten feet of the feeding swan. I am in awe and can only imagine how my son must feel: the bird is a pure, godly white. The curve of its neck where it disappears into the water is thrilling. I open my paddle to slow our pace as the canoe drifts closer. The feeding swan does not move, does not even raise its head.

“Dad,” Josh says.

Something in his tone sends a warning: he sounds suddenly close to panic.

“What is it, Josh?”

He does not have time to answer. Drifting, the canoe bumps the great white bird from behind, toppling it: and the bloody, headless neck rises from the water—

A frog splashed the water’s edge and I started. The night was cold and black. The onyx surface of lake rippled, broke to shadows and random glimmers of light. Pale breaths steamed from my nostrils. I put a hand over my mouth and smelled old leather, my father’s glove.

PART FOUR

Dwight

It finally began to turn light outside. It always does. I stood at the window, watching it happen.

A Friday morning in November, and I was thinking about my son. Remembering when he was a little boy just learning to talk, the feel of his arms hugging my neck as I carried him around the house, his grip tightening on me whenever he grew scared or happy. Not so long ago in years, and yet a thing so decidedly past it seemed to live in its own time, back beyond my reach.

Outside, now, it looked like snow coming, and winter behind it; it looked cold. And I stood trying to make a plan of some kind, trying to make some sense. But I was too tired to do much. The long night awake had left me spent.

There’s no point in stating the obvious, but I will anyway, for my own reasons: not getting caught isn’t the same thing as being free.

While I was away from Sam those years, kept from seeing him, reduced to a pen pal, all I could think about was getting back to him. By hook or crook. You come back on your knees if you have to, find whatever house is empty, take the job that will take you. The pieces of your life are a jigsaw puzzle—no more, no less—and you set about fitting them together again, always keeping in your mind the image on the puzzle box that got incinerated while you were living elsewhere: the image of your life as a bruised yet still decent enterprise. Without which, it must be said, you are finished.

Now I found the clicker, opened the garage door, stepped outside the house into the new morning: gray sky tinged with winter, a sludgelike cold in the bones. Not a good day for courage or making plans. I walked across the lawn to the garage. The car was there, midnight blue body dulled by a coating of dust, the broken headlight, the history. And in the opposite corner, by the worktable, a file cabinet. I went to it, opened the bottom drawer, and pulled out a folder. Inside the folder was a copy of my last will and testament—a document I’d prepared myself when Ruth and I got married, had updated when Sam was born, had revised after the divorce, and had updated again just last year. It’s a lawyer’s job to always be careful, never to be caught short. Now, standing in the garage, I read it over again.

In the event of my death, all that I owned, minus debts payable, was to be left to my son. Whether he be good or bad, sweet or angry, happy or frightened, whole or shattered; whether he love his father and mourn him or be thankful that he is gone.

Ethan

The night was over.

I stuck my head in Emma’s room and listened until I could hear her breathing. Then I went down the hall, undressed outside our bedroom, and stole inside. All was still, early-morning dark, Grace a long raised shadow on the bed, the white pillow luminous around her face like a halo. I slid into bed beside her. She stirred, turning toward me.

“Ethan?”

“Shh. Go back to sleep.”

“You’re freezing.”

“I’m all right.”

There was a pause. I lay staring up into the depthless air and saw imposed on it, floating as though on a night-black sea, the white diving float.

“Did you go to the lake?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“A little more,” Emma said.

She was seated at the kitchen table, spoon in hand. I stood beside her pouring milk into her cereal bowl.

“A little more,
please
,” I said.

“A little more,
please
.”

I heard footsteps and looked up. Grace entered the kitchen in flannel bathrobe and slippers.

“You’re spilling!” Emma said.

I had not stopped pouring; I looked down: a small puddle of milk on the table. Another night of sleeplessness had left my senses dulled and jittery. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I’ll clean it up.”

“I’ll do it,” Grace said. I felt her fingers graze my shoulder as she passed to the sink for a sponge. Emma and I watched her wipe up the mess I’d made.

“Thank you.”

Grace did not smile, but I could see she was trying. She’d brushed her hair. She seemed awake in some way she had not been in a long time. I could not remember, I suddenly thought, the last time the three of us had all been present for breakfast.

I asked her if she wanted coffee.

“I can do it,” she replied. She went to the counter and poured a mug for herself and brought it to the table and sat down next to Emma. I sat, too. The room was silent save for the ticking of the clock on the wall. Emma had put down her spoon and was staring at her mother, her face caught in an expression—a kind of wordless, intimate, brave questioning—that made her seem years older. And then Grace reached out and with her finger tucked a few loose strands of Emma’s hair behind her ear. “Eat your cereal, sweetie. It’s almost time for school.”

From outside, through the doors and windows battened down against the bitter early cold, Sallie’s barking reached us, faint yet vibrant, like a favorite voice remembered from childhood.

The sky was the color of old pewter. And the dog ran streaking over the grass and the unraked leaves.

“It’s winter,” I said.

After breakfast, I got Emma bundled up and took her out to wait for the school bus. Sallie joined us at the edge of the road, wagging her tail. Emma stroked the dog between the ears and talked to her.

“Sallie, you be careful when the bus comes.”

The bus appeared up the road, a yellow streak against a background of gray and brown. I looked up at the sky, imagining it snowing soon, the snow gathering over our road and trees and house and barn.

Emma said, “How much did Josh’s violin cost?”

I looked down at her. “It doesn’t matter,” I said as gently as I could.

“But how much?”

“Your mother and I don’t want you to worry about that,” I said. “All right?”

She was silent. The school bus, driven by Mr. Peoples, passed us slowly, on its way to turn around a bit farther down the road; Emma was the final pickup. I looked up and saw children’s faces, some still sleepy-eyed, behind the closed windows, and then the bus turned around, red taillights flashing, the warning beeper sounding as the wheels reversed. It came to a stop in front of us and the doors opened with a whoosh.

“Bye,” I said. I bent down and kissed her. “I love you.”

“Bye,” she said, already looking past me into the bus.

She climbed on. With a thrifty nod of his head, Mr. Peoples closed the doors. He waited as Emma walked down the aisle and found an empty seat in the middle of the bus, on the side nearer to me, next to a sandy-haired boy. I recognized the boy. And then the bus shifted into gear and slowly began to pull away.

Emma never did look back. But Sam Arno did. He turned full to the window and waved at me—unsmiling, painfully serious, a shy boy looking as though he wanted to talk.

I watched the bus until it disappeared. And though the boy was gone, I was still seeing him like an after-image burned into my mind: my son’s age but not my son. Fair where Josh had been dark, but small like him, serious like him, asking questions of the world in the same unmade voice. Hearing him now, seeing him as he stood on a stage in a school gym holding his trumpet, looking as though he wanted to crawl inside it, his bruised and bloodshot eye caught under the bright lights for all to see. And his mother with him, embarrassed, helpless: “You’re probably all wondering about Sam’s eye,” she was saying. “Well, he was out with his father, Dwight, last week and they got in a little accident. . . .”

A cold wind gusted, sending dead leaves scrabbling along the road edge around my feet. I ducked my head against the chill. Sallie trotted off, came back, and poked my thigh with her muzzle; she wanted to go inside now. I checked my watch and with a feeling of vague consternation discovered that it was later than I’d thought. Fridays I had a full schedule—a ten o’clock and a twelve o’clock followed by office hours after lunch and a faculty meeting at five. I went into the house to gather my books.

Grace was upstairs in the shower; a distant thrumming came from the hot-water heater in the pantry. In my study I filled my briefcase and then stood at my desk bent over a blank sheet of notepaper. I wrote “Grace”—and then I paused, the pen hovering just above the paper, as I tried to decide what else to say. I saw the three of us sitting at the breakfast table . . . but at this instant it all felt too momentous and pressured and I could not seem to find the right words. It was the Arno boy again, trespassing on my thoughts, as if with that long look through the bus window he had in some impossible way attached himself to me. Finally, in frustration, I scrawled the rest of the note—“Back for dinner. Love, E.”—and grabbed my bag and hurried out to the car. I glanced up at our bedroom windows to see if she might be watching, but I saw no one. And then I drove away.

I made it through Wyndham Falls, on the road to Canaan. But in my eyes now as I drove was neither the day ahead nor the hard tarnished sky but Sam Arno’s face, looking back at me through glass. A boy in an accident. In a car. A boy bounced around in a car like a pinball—“He was out with his father, Dwight, last week . . .”—at the whim and mercy of his father.

I was entering Canaan now, a town I knew. I turned right at the blinking yellow stoplight, north onto Route 7, and in a minute or two I saw the little green road sign ahead on the right. It was Reservation Road, heading off to the east. I slowed down. I was still seeing him: Sam Arno on the porch, awash in light, petting a dog, telling me a story. But transfigured now, a dream figure whose eye had healed as if by magic. A boy too serious, too quiet, too old and too young for who he was. A boy my son’s age. I wanted to take him in my arms, hold him like my own.

He was speaking to me.

“My dad drove over this dog on the road. It was an accident. During the summer.”

The road ran off to the east, a shortcut to nowhere, a gash in a dark wood. I took it now. Onto black tar, between trees naked of leaves, past a swamp buried in bramble: leave this day behind. Ahead just a memory waiting like a lost love and the young unmade voice calling out: “I was asleep when we hit it but Dad said it was black and we killed it. . . . I got a black eye. . . .”

The turn appeared ahead. The first of two. It curved to the left, and I took it speeding faster than I’d thought and as the car swung around into the second, sharper, rightward turn I heard the tires bite the road and felt the sudden centripetal acceleration and straightening as Tod’s Gas and Auto Body emerged from the clearing like a nightmare vision. I braked suddenly. The car went skidding and screeching past the two gas pumps to where the weeds and scrub brush began and came to a halt.

I left the engine running. It had happened here. I got out of the car. My breath thin, drops of sweat streaking my glasses, the air cold and bitter. It had happened here. I turned from the roadside where Josh had lain with his chest crushed and blood pooling in his mouth, and looked past the two pumps, back along the narrow two-lane road. The car had come from there. And it was still summer.