Reservation Road (4 page)

Dwight

Black land rushed by. Finally the woods opened as if they’d been split by an ax, and this car with us in it ran out under the moonless night past stone-walled fields still and dark. We passed a farm, or its shadow, the silo rising like a prison guardtower.

Leaving that boy behind.

Eight more miles to Bow Mills. I kept my speed, cornering with white-knuckled hands. Now and then the tires squealed out, but lightly, nothing like before. I was sweating as if a fever had just broken.

“It hurts,” Sam whimpered. “It hurts.”

He was pressed against me, curled up, still crying, holding a hand over his right eye. I couldn’t stand it. “Is it your eye?”

“I hit it,” he whimpered. He seemed five years old again.

“Here, let me see it.” I took a hand off the wheel and tried to pull his hand from his eye, but his crying climbed an octave, so I quit. “Let me,” I said.

He took his hand away. It was too dark to see anything. I leaned over him. Before I knew it the car was drifting to the left again and my heart kicked. But it went no further than that; I cut the wheel and we were back on the right side of the line. “I can’t look at it right this second, Sam,” I said.

With my eyes on the road, I groped in the dark for the top of his head, put my hand on his soft hair. Then with my fingers I trailed down his smooth brow and lightly touched the eye where he was hurt. I felt the wet trace of his tears and the swollen flesh and bone all around his right eye. He cried out and tried to hit my arm. “Stop it,” I said, and he stopped. “I needed to know. You’re not bleeding but you’re going to have a bad shiner. We’ll get you some ice as soon as we get to your mother’s.”

There was a silence; he’d stopped crying. “What’s a shiner?”

“Black eye.”

“Black?” he said, quizzical.

I almost smiled.

Suddenly, Sam sat up. “Dad?” His voice was nasal from crying. It was strange. He seemed twice as old as the boy who had spoken just before.

The question was on the way. And it came down to this: What did he know? What had he seen? I had to get there first. “Sam,” I said. “Listen to me.”

In the dark of the car my son looked at me. Whatever he’d been about to ask, he let go.

“We hit something back there on the road,” I said.

“I know.”

“Do you know what we hit?”

He didn’t answer.

“Do you?”

“No.”

I breathed out. “We hit a dog.”

Sam was quiet.

“Was it big?” he said finally.

“Yes.”

“Did we kill it?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know if we didn’t stop?”

“I know.”

“It could still be alive.”

“No, Sam. I’m telling you. I saw it happen.”

“But—”

“No, Sam. Believe me. Okay?”

“I believe you, Dad.”

That was the end of it. I felt numb. Dead. My son’s imagination had my dirty footprints all over it. We crossed the Bow Mills town line and drove down quiet tree-lined roads filled with people I used to know. I turned onto Larch Road and there at the end was my old house.

The porch light clicked on the second my headlight showed in the driveway. The door opened and Ruth came rushing out to the edge of the porch. She had on a cardigan thrown loose over her bare shoulders and a long gingham dress and a pair of reading glasses dangling from a chain around her neck, banging against her breasts as she moved about.

Not long after marrying Norris, Ruth had started dressing strangely, sometimes like an old schoolmarm and sometimes like a suburban beauty queen who’d once had a guest spot on
Hee
Haw
. Norris was in insurance and seemed to appreciate it. Personally, though, when I thought about my ex-wife at night, which occasionally I still did, she was wearing Levi’s if she was wearing anything. That was how it had been when we’d met in college, and for the first few years of our marriage. Ruth had looked as good in an old faded pair of Levi’s as any woman I’d ever known.

I pulled to a stop, facing the porch, and immediately turned off the headlight. Darkness was what I wanted. But not Ruth: in her hand, I saw, was a foot-long Mag-Lite—heavy enough to double as a club should things get rough. She was down the porch steps in a flash and hurrying across the little lawn. I had run over one man’s boy and was holding on for dear life to my own, but as I watched her I couldn’t help thinking about how I’d laid the sod for that lawn and built that porch, how all of it had come from me and once been mine. It was petty and shaming.

“Norris!” Ruth called, over her shoulder. “Norris!”

Norris appeared at the door and hesitated. I had threatened to kill him once and maybe he was thinking about that now. Backlit from inside, in his Sunday-casual mode—a madras short-sleeved shirt and high-waisted slacks—he looked like one of those fun-park cardboard figures you throw baseballs at. He took a few more steps before stopping again.

“Norris!” yelled Ruth. She was coming fast. Neither Sam nor I had moved to get out of the car. We were frozen men.

“Looks like your mother’s a little upset,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“When she sees that eye she’s going to be a lot upset.”

“I know.”

“You and I will just have to weather the storm together.”

He nodded. His face was pale in the darkness except around his right eye, where the skin was already coloring up pretty badly. I reached out and took his jaw gingerly in my hand. He winced and almost pulled away.

“How’s the eye?”

“It hurts. Is it a shiner?”

I smiled. “Right. You’re a tough kid. Don’t forget about the ice.”

“Okay.”

“It was a good game, huh?”

Before he could answer, Ruth yanked the door open on his side. I pulled my hand off Sam’s face as if he’d bitten me. She gathered him in her arms, saying, “Come here, baby,” and at the same time managed to shine the Mag-Lite directly in my eyes.

“Ruth, get that light out of my eyes.”

“Go to hell, Dwight.”

“Ruth, goddamnit, turn that light off.”

“He’d better be okay,” she said. “If he’s not okay, you’re in deep shit. Do you hear me? You’re in deep shit anyway.”

“The light,” I said.

But she wasn’t listening. She’d pulled Sam out into the open to better embrace him and check for damage. I got out of the car—I didn’t want to be sitting when she caught sight of his eye.

“Hello, Norris,” I said.

“Hello, Dwight.”

“Sorry I’m late. The game ran sixteen innings.”

Norris was a serious Red Sox fan.

“Sixteen? No kidding. Who won?”

“Sox. Mo Vaughn hit a grand slam.”

“No kid—”

“Shut up, Norris,” Ruth snapped. She had the Mag-Lite trained on Sam’s face. He was squinting painfully, not liking it one bit but staying quiet. The light was bright and hid nothing. The eye was swollen almost closed and the skin around it looked as if it had been inflated and then injected with a black-and-purple dye. I looked away. “Norris,” Ruth said. “Go call the police.”

“What?” I said. “Don’t do that.”

“You take my son to a ballgame and bring him back looking like he’s been mugged. But he hasn’t been mugged, has he? No, he’s just been out with his good old dad. You’re sick, Dwight. You’ve got a problem and should be separated from the rest of us who don’t get a thrill beating the daylights out of our children. Go call the police, Norris.”

“Norris,” I said. “Don’t do that.”

“Ruth . . . ,” said Norris.

“Mom, it was a dog,” Sam said.

Everybody looked at him. And my son with his eggplant eye calmly reached up and pushed the Mag-Lite aside, so it was no longer blinding him. “We hit a dog, Mom. We killed it. It was terrible.”

Ruth just stared at him. The expression on her face was a mix of so many things I remembered in her from our marriage: relief bordering on happiness; petty disappointment at having her moment stolen; anger at me that went, finally, way beyond words; a mother’s unbearable love for her son. After a moment she noticed the Mag-Lite beam shining uselessly across the lawn and switched it off. We settled into calmer waters, lit now by just the faint edge of porch light.

“That doesn’t explain your eye.”

“I got hit,” Sam said.

“What?”

“He means he was sleeping against the door,” I said quickly, “and got thrown into it when we hit the dog.”

“Where was the dog?”

Ruth was asking Sam, but he shook his head. He was ten and didn’t know the names of the roads too well. So Ruth reluctantly turned to me. “Where was it?”

“Cantwell Road,” I said, naming a road about half an hour’s drive from Reservation Road. A road I was sure she knew: one afternoon years back, we’d pulled off Cantwell Road and made love in the car. That was fact. But if Ruth remembered the details of that day, she showed no sign of it.

“What were you doing on Cantwell?”

“Coming home from the game. Taking a new shortcut. Driving like hell, in fact, because, as I just told Norris here, it was extra innings.”

“I’ll bet it was.”

“It was, Mom,” Sam said.

“Lay off, Ruth,” I said.

“I’ll lay off when I’m good and ready. Your headlight’s busted.”

“It was the dog,” Sam said.

“That’s right,” I said. “I heard the light pop when we hit.”

The Mag-Lite came on suddenly, found first me, then the front of my car, the busted right headlight. Ruth studying it all as if it was just another symptom of the mess my life had become after she’d stopped loving me.

And then my heart nearly quit.

I was standing about a yard from the front of the car. A tiny fragment of dark cloth, about the size of a dime, was caught on one of the shark’s teeth of glass along the rim of the crushed headlight. In my shock I half expected to find signs of the boy’s blood, too, but there weren’t any. I stole a look at Ruth, who was standing with Sam about ten feet away. But her expression—hard, reserved—was impossible to read.

I waited.

A moment later she switched off the Mag-Lite. I breathed again, hearing her say, “Poor thing.” Her tone was soft for the first time all evening. She had a great fondness for animals, dogs especially. When, the year after Sam was born, our first dog—a retriever named Sanford—died, Ruth had cried for three days straight.

“It was black,” I said. “Good-sized. It ran right in front. There was nothing I could do, Ruth. I don’t really want to think about it.” I paused. “And my guess is Sam doesn’t want to think about it, either.”

Ruth nodded then. There was a brief, tired silence between us. I saw how some of her hair, sand-colored like Sam’s, had fallen out of the bun she’d put it in, and lay now across her cheek like a silk ribbon.

“I’m sorry, Ruth. What can I say? I tried. It was a good day when it started. I just got a step or two behind, that’s all.”

“Old Dwight,” Ruth said almost sadly, shaking her head.

I sensed some long-ago tenderness in her voice; if not for the darkness, I would have sworn she was looking me straight in the eyes. For a second I forgot what kind of day it had been.

Then she broke the spell. My ex-wife. She brought our son extra-close, held him by the shoulders with his back against her front, as if to keep him from running anywhere dangerous he might want to go. “Well, Dwight,” she said. “You’re a free man, I guess.”

“Free to go, you mean.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Till next Sunday.”

“That’s the rules.”

I looked at Sam. “What’ll we do on Sunday, sport?”

He shrugged; it had been a long day. “I dunno.”

“We’ll sleep on it. Okay?”

“Okay, Dad.”

“I love you,” I said.

I got in the car without waiting to see if he’d say it back. My strength was down and I could feel the panic rising not so far off, about to flood over the dam. I keyed the engine and switched on the headlight.

“You should get that light fixed, Dwight,” Norris said through the open window. “It’s against the law.”

“Thanks for the tip, Norris. I intend to.”

Ruth already had Sam on the porch steps. Norris hurried after them.

I tried to bring myself to drive away then, but couldn’t. I watched my son enter the bright sphere of porch light, his battered eye come to shocking life.

Norris caught up with them. Ruth opened the screen door. The three of them were just about to go inside when Sam turned suddenly and gave me a small stiff wave so fraught with the tragic circumstances of life that tears sprang to my eyes.

I stuck my head out the window. “Don’t forget to ice that eye!”

But the door was already closed; the porch light went out. It was just my one headlight now, climbing the house, rearranging space. Bad magic. I put the car in gear and turned around, leaving tire tracks on the lawn.

Grace

She sat curled up on the worn green-velvet chair in her studio, holding her knees in her arms as if they constituted a whole person, a love.

The room was full of shadows. The carefully nurtured plants standing in clay pots and hanging by long weblike wires from the ceiling—the plants she had watered and looked to for inspiration and sometimes even talked to like people—were gathered around her now as always. But in the lack of light the leaves and flowers that had always seemed to her like the natural forms of words, a kind of living poetry, were suddenly just dead shadows like everything else, everyone else, the dark absent space where something of value had once been. As if, she thought, someone had just told her how the magic trick worked and ruined everything.

It was a sham. It was loss, just loss.

Something came nudging now against her shin, warm and insistent: Sallie. Shepherd-collie mix, eight years old. Same age as Emma. She reached out and stroked the noble head, fingers working behind the fine, upstanding ears. The two-tone-brown dog eyes fixed on her, one ring of color softer than the other; a universe there, impossibly soft and liquid. And fur the color of tortoiseshell, like something pulled from a sultan’s treasure chest.

“Sallie,” she whispered.

Then, closing the door in herself that had come ajar, she pushed the dog away. Sallie took a few steps back and hesitated, eyes searching. But Grace was inward, unseeing. Soon just the paws padding on the rug and clicking on the wood floor, and then she was alone.

Thinking:
Where is Ethan?
He should have been home by now.

Thinking:
Drink. Go ahead.
She released one of her knees and found the glass sweating in the dark, took a gulp of Scotch made watery from too many melted ice cubes.

Thinking:
Pills, too.

But there was nothing to do. She saw that with a godlike clarity.
Goddess
, she suddenly thought: what Mattie Gilmore had called her in high school. Mattie Gilmore, who’d been envious of her; who was still envious last year when Grace brought Ethan and the kids back to Durham for a family visit, and Mattie dropped by the house. Grace hadn’t spoken a word to her since the senior prom. She was Mattie Tucker now, mother of three and a good forty pounds heavier, casting that burning eye over them all, reaching way back for a southern pleasantry that was more like a Halloween apple with a razor blade in it: “Well, don’t y’all make just the
perfect
family of four?”

It hadn’t hurt then. It had been funny. She and Mother and Ethan had had a good laugh about vindictive old Mattie that night, sipping drinks by the backyard pool, in the very spot where Daddy had dropped dead of a heart attack. But it hurt now. It hurt, and it would go on hurting. Perfect family of four. As if Mattie Gilmore were some kind of witch and had put a curse on them. Why? What had she ever done? What had any of them ever done? To give a child only to take him away. To make and then unmake, as if a family weren’t built of lives but of things that could be broken, returned, thrown out—

She was holding her knees again. Weeping. Grief as a way of living, she saw now, like breathing. The price of being a parent.

There was a sound at the door.

“Mom.”

Emma’s pale legs and white underpants and luminous face and blond hair shone out of the darkened doorway; her sleeping T-shirt was navy blue and made her torso nearly invisible, as if some creature had taken a bite out of her in her dreams. And suddenly, against her will, Grace thought:
What if it had been Emma
instead of Josh?
Emma who was gone, and Josh who was here now, whom she must hold and love and console? Josh standing in the doorway, calling her? For a moment it felt so real she thought she saw him. He was wearing his red-and-white-striped pajamas and the curls of his dark hair fell down over his ears, and as he came toward her she saw with a kind of humorous pride how his feet were slightly pigeon-toed, and when he opened his mouth to call her again it was in his familiar night voice, his nasal stuffed-up sleepy-boy’s voice that made her smile, and she reached for him—

“Mom?”

She blinked hard: it was Emma standing in the doorway, it was Emma. Josh was gone, and here was Emma. “Oh,” she whispered, as if she were filled with air and had just punctured herself by mistake, as if she were leaking. She felt sick with confusion and guilt.

Emma was standing in the doorway, needing her. Letting go of her knees, she quickly wiped the tears from her face as best she could. “Sweetie, you can’t sleep?”

“I was having bad dreams.”

“Come here and tell me about it.” She patted her lap, and without a word Emma came over and climbed up on her; a little girl again. She placed her hands around Emma’s narrow waist and shifted her along her thighs, Emma facing her, so that the thin, newly muscular legs she had seen earlier in the gas station bathroom were locked now around her waist, joining them together.

“I’m glad to see you,” she said. “I really am.”

Emma was looking into her eyes. “Were you crying?”

“Yes,” Grace admitted. She tried to smile but realized immediately that she would lose control again if she did. So she cut it out, felt her face lock, frozen and contorted. She took a hand off Emma and wiped her own swollen eyes. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s the only thing I seem to be any good at right now.”

“I couldn’t,” Emma said.

“Couldn’t what?”

“Cry.”

“Oh, Em.” She hugged Emma to her, feeling threads of silken hair against her cheek.

“I couldn’t. I tried but I couldn’t.”

“Your heart’s just telling you it hurts too much to take it all in right now. That’s all. It will happen. And when it does, Em, when it does it will be very sad, but the world won’t end. You’ll be all right. I promise you.”

But she was weeping again, her breathing ragged and hideous to her ears. She was foundering. And it was Emma trying to save her, not the other way around. Emma touching her hair, saying, “Don’t cry, Mom, don’t cry.” Over and over again. Until minutes had passed and this mother could breathe again like a human being. Until she could think. Until she could know, indisputably, irrevocably, that she was no kind of mother.
Not like this.
One child still left but not the strength any more to do what is necessary. That strength is gone.

“Ow,” said Emma, pulling back a bit. “Not so hard.”

“What?” Squeezing too hard, hugging too tight; she eased up. She was trying to grasp the sequence of events, trying to figure out how it could have happened.

“That’s better,” Emma said, as though she were the one in charge here.

Always a mistake, looking for guilt, Grace thought, always a one-way street, heading over a cliff:
Then just don’t do it
. She had told Ethan to stop at the gas station; perhaps she had made him. Four doors flying open . . .
Why?
Emma in the bathroom, the yellow light, the stink. Ethan with Josh by the car, the dark road—

“There,” Emma said, almost satisfied. “You’ve stopped crying.”

Somehow, it was true: suddenly she was a field without rain, drought-ridden, cracked. It was rage. Rage had dried her up, redirected her blood. She saw Ethan wiping the windshield with a rag, blind, never once turning around—

Emma stirred in her lap; Grace looked down and there she was.

“I think we should get you back to bed,” she said.

“Promise you’ll stay until I go to sleep.” Emma’s blue eyes, suddenly fear-struck, roamed her face, seeking reassurance.

“I promise.”

But, promise made, she didn’t move. Thinking,
Every promise
now must necessarily be a lie
. Seeing now how nothing, not the slightest act or gesture or word, would ever again be simple or easy, or even possible.

“Another minute,” she murmured. “I’ll give you another minute.”

A minute: perhaps it was less, perhaps more. The point was holding each other with an imperturbable stillness; the point was survival.

Then Emma shifted, stirred.

“Is Dad in trouble?”

“What kind of trouble?” Grace said.

“I saw him talking to that man. The cop.”

“Say ‘police officer,’ Em.” The correction came out automatically—
If I was Emma,
she thought,
I’d laugh in my face
. It was all meaningless now. Still, it felt good to say the words without thinking, to be a mother again for even a second, obsessed with the normal, small-minded punctuation of daily life. “Daddy was just answering some questions. Trying to help.”

“Did he see what happened?”

“Yes, Em, I think he did.”

“Was Josh in pain, Mom?”

“I . . .”

Ethan had told her not to look. Carrying the weight in his arms, coming toward her along the road: it was her son. And the world did not stop. Ethan kept coming, staggering almost. Then she was running at him. She was screaming Josh’s name. She was right on top of Ethan when he turned his back, trying to protect her. All she could see of her son was two splayed feet. She was pounding on Ethan’s back with her fists and he was begging, begging her not to look. . . .

“No, Em. He wasn’t in pain.”

“Is he dead?”

What had she told Emma? About death. What had Ethan told her? Grace couldn’t remember. She would have to explain it all over again, or for the first time.

But not now. So all she said was, “Yes.”

Emma hugged her more tightly. Her perfect young body pressed against Grace’s breasts like a hand over a bleeding wound, temporarily stanching the flow out. Grace closed her eyes and imagined living.

“I’m scared,” Emma said.

“I know you are, darling.”

“Josh was in my dream.”

“What?” She almost pulled back; it took all the self-control she possessed to keep from jumping to her feet and dumping Emma on the ground.

“It woke me up and I was scared.”

“Just now?”

Against her shoulder Emma’s head moved up and down.

“Your brother loved you very much,” Grace said.

She no longer knew how she was getting the words out; it was like surgery, a bloody excision; perhaps it would help, perhaps it would be fatal. Thinking:
What am I, then?
And knowing now the answer:
A victim, not a mother
. In her arms Emma had begun to sob, slim body shaking as if from terrible cold. Grace felt the child’s grief enter her own body like a current.

“Oh, my baby,” she said.

Suddenly Emma’s grip tightened frantically around her neck and from her throat came sobs like convulsed words; she was trying to say something: “W-we . . .”

The sounds were terrible.
She is dying
, Grace thought;
she is
dying, too.
“Emma, sweetheart, tell me. . . .”

“W-we stopped because of
me
,” Emma sobbed.

Grace felt a chill run through her. “No, sweetheart, no—”

“Y-yes. So I c-could go. Because of
me
.”

“No,” Grace protested. “No. It was an accident, a terrible accident, terrible, but dear God, no. . . .”

But her voice was too weak and the words that might have given comfort died within her. Destitute and hateful without them, she rose, bolting, awkward as a foal, to her feet—and felt how, even so, Emma tightened her grip and held on: a child’s indomitable love and weight. Grace nearly staggered beneath it; until, somehow righting herself, she found, if not balance, then a way to move forward nonetheless. Holding her daughter tightly against herself, she carried her out of the room that way, and up the stairs to bed.