Reservation Road (5 page)

Dwight

The house I was renting in Box Corner was a pale-blue two-bedroom ranch-style with a free-standing two-car garage. There was nothing in it—not a windowpane or sheet of dry wall or bathroom S-pipe—that was more than five years old, that had any history or soul. Until I came around waving my rent check and the flag of my desperation, no one had ever lived in it. The developer who’d built it had had high hopes, I guessed, but what he’d thought was a big fat windfall turned out to be just a two-bit S&L. Bankruptcy followed, America’s gold rush in reverse: foreclosure, a failed auction, the need to find a tenant until the market picked up. Around that time my probation was lifted and I came back, looking to be near my son. This was the place I found. Perfect nothingness. The first thing I did was to make up the second bedroom for Sam, preparing for the day when, thanks to the courts, I’d no longer have to have him back at Ruth’s by seven p.m. or else.

It was nearing eleven when I put the car in the garage. The fragment of dark cloth was still caught on the broken headlight, but I did nothing about it. I left it there, pushing a button as I went out, hearing the pulsing hum of the electric door descending from above. Sealing up the evidence.

A man can convince himself of anything, for a little while. I tried this now. I let myself into the house, tossed wallet and keys on the pale-blue Formica counter that separated the kitchen (unused; the latest appliances) from the den (where I lived, mostly), and went straight to the fridge for a beer. I turned on the TV in the den and sat down on the gray leather sofa that had, like most everything else, come with the house. Waiting for the local eleven o’clock news to start, I drank the beer. Then I got another out of the fridge and polished that off, too. I lit a cigarette.

The world was suspended. I hung in it like one of those buzz-haired astronauts filmed in deep space, trying to drink a mug of Ovaltine, eat a freeze-dried dinner, before it, too, floated away. It was possible—between, say, ten-fifty and eleven o’clock—to feel as if nothing had happened. To feel nothing. To see no images besides the sweating green bottle, the burning cigarette, the TV commercial for Pizza Hut, the furniture that would always smell as if it was wrapped in plastic.

Was that peace? A cool blank ten minutes before the news came on. A blond-haired anchorwoman named Kyle. I knew her well from just such tidy domestic scenes as now, sitting here on the gray leather sofa with beer and cigarette in hand. I leaned forward. Unless war had broken out somewhere—and it had better concern at least one country that was damn Big and Important— the eleven o’clock news in this corner of the state usually began with a local tragedy of some sort. And the truth is, they were rarely without the kind of juicy material that made men like me— solitary, beer-drinking, failed dads who knew more than a little about the workings of the criminal-justice system—sit up and pay attention. Forget football. Every night somebody out there lost control of car, body, mind, and somebody else suffered for it. Blood was spilled. People went missing and were never found. Children died.

Tonight it was a three-car pile-up on Route 8 coming out of Waterbury. Two boys, both seventeen, were dead; another, eighteen, was listed critical. Names were being witheld. Drinking was strongly suspected. Behind the TV reporter—not Kyle any more, but some hardier, at-the-scene type—red lights whirled. A police squawker could be heard clearly through the open window of a parked cruiser, a single word: “Negative.” After that, gibberish.

Police, Fire, EMS: red lights whirling like a cheap light show. A few bystanders were standing at the edge of the cordoned-off stretch of hardtop, drawn to the scene first by mayhem, or even worry, then by the hallucinogenic lights of television. Where were the victims’ parents? Send your boy out on a Sunday evening for sandwiches and bumper pool, get him back in a bag. Hear all about it on the eleven o’clock news. . . .

The spell was broken. I found myself in the den, sitting on the gray leather sofa with the same old beer and cigarette (or maybe, by now, a different beer and cigarette), when gravity returned.

Coming out of the second turn, the car had been mine again. I had regained the touch, found the road. Tod’s three-letter sign came shining out of the trees like a fractured beacon, and I saw the tall, dark-haired man with glasses step out of the bright-lit office into a night he knew nothing about. I saw him look up, right at me, felt the connection of surprise and dread and pain draw tight like a noose around us both. Forever.

The boy’s name was Josh.

On the news at this moment, sudden and pointless, the week’s lottery pick; Ping-Pong balls with numbers written on them were being shot up out of a modified popcorn popper into a clear plastic tube. I got up from the sofa, went to the fridge for another beer. Half of it was gone by the time I reached the Formica counter on which my keys and wallet were sitting. There, too, was an empty cigar box (from headier days) in which I kept important odds and ends, such as the spare garage-door opener. I lifted the lid of the box and pressed the rectangular white button on the opener. Through the far window of the den, above the TV, I had a view of a section of lawn and driveway, and I watched as an expanding chunk of light appeared in front of the far side of the garage, the grass there suddenly turning yellow in the surrounding darkness, the pavement suddenly turning brown. And then I knew my car was visible from the road, lit up like the spectacle it was.

Still, it wasn’t enough. I took the car keys and went outside. Light spilled through the open front door onto the lawn that I kept mowed short and crisp (I was a good citizen and neighbor). Anybody driving by then would have been struck by the odd light-show of my existence, this formerly uninhabited house and garage exhibiting such atypical life, doors open and lamps beaming into the night, lottery balls coming up all the right numbers. There was dew on the grass. It might have been any other night. I entered the bright coffin of the garage. On the empty side (it had been designed for a two-car family) sat the usual detritus: a file cabinet; a charcoal grill; a hand-push Honda mower; a floor lamp that had short-circuited months ago; a ten-year-old set of golf clubs; wax-encrusted, rock-scarred skis; a makeshift worktable (a plank on two sawhorses) with vise and lamp, tools spread on and beneath it; snow tires; a deflated football; two Louisville Sluggers, one big and one small, and three grass-stained baseballs; my old outfielder’s glove from law school, and a newer, stiffer, smaller glove for Sam.

I didn’t look at the headlight, the fragment of cloth. I didn’t have to. I got in the car, behind the wheel. It smelled different, hard to describe, some scent sharp and metallic, ozone after lightning. I started up the engine. The sound filled that boxy, nearly enclosed space with its reverberations, product of the five-year-old Ford exhaust system, the eighteen-month-old Midas muffler. Time to change? Trade in? Too late. Live with it. The half-drunk beer was still in my hand. I’d brought it, so I drained it. Thinking, for the first time, about my case. I was a lawyer, after all. There was the illegal broken headlight, and my failure to stop at the scene. There was my record and my life. There was the dead boy on the side of the road. In the eyes of the law, there was no such thing as an accident.

The engine was running. If I pushed the white button clipped to the visor above my head, the garage door would slide down. The opener was also a closer. All that CO would enter me like a long, last dream at night and send me to permanent sleep. So I wouldn’t have to see anything more, how it would all play out. The dumb pain of living. It could end like that, if I willed it to.

There are so many kinds of failure in a man’s life; an Olympiad of humiliation. Maybe this was just another variation: I put the car in reverse and backed out of the garage. I turned it around and switched the engine off and got out. I left my car sitting in the driveway, its busted nose pointing at the road, bright as a neon sign, saying Punish Me.

Ethan

I was driven home by Sergeant Burke and his partner, whose name was Tomlinson. It must have been around eleven o’clock. The roads were empty and quiet. I sat in the back of the police car, listening to the intermittent silence and crackle of the CB radio; for twenty minutes no actual human being spoke a word. It was dark in the backseat, not even the glow from the dashboard. I sat with my knees aligned, my hands tightly clasped—as if, with this hand and that hand, I might somehow hold myself together. I heard Tomlinson, behind the wheel, sniff the air twice—there was dried vomit still on my shirt, and its stink had infected the car. He rolled down his window. Burke glanced over at him, murmured something that I didn’t catch, and then Tomlinson rolled up his window a couple of inches and left it like that.

We turned onto Pine Creek Road. In a little while lights appeared up ahead, on the left, a yellowish wash like a faint stain reaching out through several windows of a handsome old Colonial house, white with painted shutters, onto a broad rectangle of yard, a split-rail fence: the house I lived in. As we pulled to a stop by the mailbox, the precise delineation of the fenestrated light came clear: the upstairs landing illumined; the kitchen downstairs; and from Grace’s studio, at the lower back corner of the house, there emerged just the faintest suggestion of a glow, like a candle flame in a church. From here the house appeared empty, a nest of vacancies.

And to this quiet, anesthetized scene add now the headlights and brakelights of one police cruiser, and the war-zone cacophony of radio static and belch. Tomlinson shifted gear into park. And suddenly I was home.

Burke, in the passenger’s seat, slid an arm along the seat back, turned, and regarded me with what I took to be intended kindness.

“You’ll be okay?”

How to answer? The question not a question but a generic encouragement, a euphemistic hand on the shoulder; not at all, really, about revelation. And so, hunched like a felon in the dim backseat of the cruiser, I nodded. And then I opened the door and got out.

“Mr. Learner?” Burke was getting out, too; with a little sigh, he rested his hand on the top of the open door and looked at me earnestly. Then he pulled a business card from his shirt pocket and offered it across the roof of the cruiser. I took the card but did not look at it. “We’re on the case here, sir, I want you to rest assured of that,” he said. “And if at any time you feel like getting in touch with me, you can give a call over to the station. I’ll get the message and get right back to you. That’s a promise. We’ll be in touch.”

He stood waiting for some response, but when I remained mute, he seemed to come to some decision about me. With a nod of his head, he murmured, “Good night, sir,” and ducked back into the cruiser.

I watched them drive off.

I didn’t go in right away. I stood at the edge of the lawn, by the split-rail fence and the mailbox, looking at our house. The night was warm, moonless dark, and still; the crickets had stopped singing. In the air was the damp, lush, private scent of the garden without the sun: lilac, lavender, mint, thyme. I saw the lighted windows of our house—this which was to have been our place of permanence, our home and hearth inviolable: Build and it will last, was the idea; reap and ye shall sow. This place to which we’d moved ten years ago, with Josh still in his bassinet; this sagging old house we had lovingly shored up and restored; where, bit by bit, Grace had made this garden. She had planted trees— dogwoods, junipers, Japanese maples, peach, apple, cherry. Carrying Josh with her wherever she went, pointing out plants and flowers to him, talking to him, sometimes voicing ideas aloud as they came to her. On the western side of the house, where the land climbed to a rise, she had stood one day imagining a garden of perennials. At the end of every summer they would bloom, she had promised him, and the butterflies would flock to them, wave after wave of monarchs. She said she could see it all as if in a dream: it would be Josh’s garden.

Upstairs, a window was opened: Grace stood on the landing, in the artificial light, cupping her hands against the upper panes and squinting, like someone looking into the sun. For perhaps a minute we simply stared at each other. Then she went down.

Grace

She had the impression, when he first came through the door and put his arms around her, that he was embracing her simply because she was standing there, because she would do; that he did not recognize her. But the feeling passed. His grip on her tightened with a sudden and awful need; he seemed to come apart in her arms, and then she felt herself holding him together in some way she’d never imagined would be necessary. She could feel his heart beating violently against her breast. He smelled of vomit. There was nothing to say.

Wordlessly, like a woman with her tongue cut out, she made him a drink and another for herself. Standing in the living room by the sideboard, she heard a rushing sound in her ears and pressed the cold sweating glass against her forehead. Then she gathered herself and the glasses and joined him in the kitchen, where he had wandered listlessly, like a ghost. The kitchen: butcher-block table, two chairs, two stools.
Stools for the children,
she thought, watching him sit down heavily, selfishly, on Josh’s stool, and felt a bright star of outrage burst in her chest:
How dare he
. But then she retreated, telling herself,
That world is
gone.
There were no boundaries any more. Everything was broken. Things were simply done to you.

She sat on one of the chairs.

Across from her, Ethan had his glasses off and was rubbing deep into his eyes. “Stop it,” she wanted to scream at him. He was practically blind. Without his glasses, he looked too young, all the scholarly wisdom and self-assurance gone; she wanted to shake him, and looked away.

“How’s Emma?” he said.

His voice had no strength; it was the voice of a victim. She looked at him. His glasses were back on. Behind clear round lenses his eyes were shot through with red. A stunned, beaten expression on his face, his lips parted as though he were having trouble breathing. And now, with pathetic heroic effort, he reached across the table for her hand—yet she did not feel touched, or better.

“How’s Emma?” he asked again.

Emma
. “Asleep. She woke up and . . .” She could not finish.

Ethan nodded dully, as if she’d actually said something. He swallowed half his drink and said nothing more.

She made herself ask the question. “Do they know anything?”

She had meant to say “the police,” but found suddenly that she didn’t want to use the word; language was a minefield now.

Ethan took back his hand. He opened his mouth but no words came out. He shook his head.

“Ethan?” she said.

He wouldn’t look at her.

“I need to know what happened. What you saw. Because I just . . . I don’t understand. He was there alive. And then . . . I just don’t understand.”

She stared at him; she waited. But he had no answer, or would not give her the one that he had. Nor did he have the courage even to look at her. He got to his feet and left the room.

He was gone only a minute. She watched the clock on the wall because it was not life. And then it was over, and he was back, walking slowly, unsteadily, carrying the bottle of Scotch. He put this on the table in front of her but did not sit down.

“I can’t really talk about this now. He was . . . he was standing by the road. It was dark. I left him there.” He stopped talking. He turned his face away from her. She could see his throat contracting, over and over, as though he were trying to swallow something that would not go down. Then he turned back to her and his voice came again and it was a small, lifeless thing, pushed as far from the pain of his heart as he could manage. “I turned my back on him. When I saw him again, it was too late. I saw the car. I saw him get hit. But I don’t seem to know anything. And because of me the police don’t know anything, either.”

There were tears in his eyes, trying to get out. The fact that he wouldn’t let them out made her feel as if she were suffocating. She closed her eyes and saw Josh standing in the dark road— alone, afraid, without protection or care. A groan of pain escaped her, like an animal in a trap.

Then she felt Ethan’s head touch her lap, and heard him sobbing: “It’s my fault. Oh my God, it’s my fault.”