Reservation Road (9 page)

Grace

She was still sitting in her studio Friday afternoon when Ethan came in. She’d been there all day, listening to the phone ring, hearing the answering machine pick up, as if her only remaining power lay in this stillness that was like death. She did not move, did not speak. The machine took care of all that, marshaling the disembodied voices of friends and relatives into their respective corners of the room, where they stayed quiet and tame. Still, she listened, because any words were less poisonous than her own. As when Judy Aronson called for the second time: “Grace? Grace, are you there? Call me, honey. Please. I know how hard this must be for you.” And Pam Foster too, to say that she and Dick had just heard from Judy, and how sorry . . .

Then the machine was full. Which was a relief. And she could sit curled on the green-velvet chair as the afternoon shadows lengthened from the world outside to the floor at her feet, and count the messages, each call a tiny red blink of light:
So
sorry . . . So sorry . . .

Until here, now, was Ethan. Standing before her, his face dark with stubble, wearing the same khaki pants and blue work shirt he’d worn since the funeral. The shirt had a hole in one elbow and the pants a black ink stain on the right front pocket. Though she could not judge him for this, she thought; she looked just as bad. Unkempt. Her jeans too long unwashed, a white T-shirt with a rust stain down the front, her feet bare.

He stood a few feet in front of her, crossed his arms over his chest. And something in the gesture made her feel unkind, as if he were a visitor and she were being rude to him. It was true: she had designed the room to be like this. It was hers and not for other people. It wasn’t a sitting room. There was nowhere to sit but at the worktable or on the green chair.

“Where’s Emma?” he asked.

“What?”

“Emma.”

“Emma?” For a moment her heart stopped beating.
Emma
. She’d completely forgotten. Emma was at music camp. Three days a week, working on her piano technique with Mrs. Wheldon. Had stayed home this past Monday and Wednesday, but then after the funeral the parents had decided that it was important, probably it was important, for Emma to keep up with her life, to keep busy in spite of everything. So this morning Ethan had resumed the old schedule and driven Emma to school, where the camp was. It was her job to pick Emma up at the end of the day. It had always been her job, but today she’d forgotten about Emma and now, realizing it, she felt frightened and ashamed. She felt angry. She wanted to hit something.

“She’s at camp where she’s supposed to be.”

“And you’re planning to pick her up?”

“Of course I am.”

“What time?”

She didn’t like his tone. It was a test of some kind and she knew already she would fail. “When do you think, Ethan? When it’s over. Four-thirty.”

“Grace, it’s five-fifteen.”

Now she was not curled up on the chair any longer but standing on her feet. Still, though, she was determined to sound firm, not to show him what a lost cause she was. “Is it? Well, then I guess I really blew it, didn’t I? I guess I’m awful.”

“That’s not my point.”

“No? So what is it, then? Your point.”

Ethan sighed angrily and rubbed both his hands hard over his face. “Grace, just listen to me. It’s all right. But one of us needs to go now and pick her up. That’s all. Right now.”

“I’ll go. I’m going right now.”

She was not going to cry. She picked up her shoes from the floor and walked right by him. They did not touch.

“Grace.”

She turned around.

“What have you been doing all day?”

“Sitting here. Listening to the machine. It’s full. It won’t take any more messages. And you know what? I’ve decided I’m not going to listen to it any more.”

Then she turned and walked out and left him standing in the room alone.

On Route 44 at the east end of Wyndham Falls stood the modern red-brick building with gray stone trim and raised gray stone crosses on its facade that was the Sherman R. Lewis Elementary School. The lobby was empty, cool; classes were long out for the summer. At first Grace could hear nothing but her own footsteps echoing on the tiled floor. The sound was haunting to her, full of Josh, and she was relieved, after she stopped walking and stood quietly in the square, empty space, to hear rising up from the basement the first blurred edges of a woman’s voice, and then the high-octave tinkling of a piano.

She walked to the back of the lobby. The stairs leading down to the music rooms were there and the sounds were stronger. She heard piano notes. Then the notes ceased and Emma said, “Like that?” and Mrs. Wheldon answered, “Still too strong, Emma. Remember,
pianissimo
,” and right afterwards the same notes could be heard again, climbing the stairs, only softer than before, and Grace leaned her back against the wall and stared across the lobby to the front entrance.

The gray stone crosses on the facade were visible from inside the building too, she saw now. She counted six of them. They were set into the red brick, they must have been three feet deep. All but the central overhead light was off in the lobby, and the walls were in shadow, with the crosses shining through as in a church, and as she stared up at the walls she felt something stir inside her chest and then fall away. She thought how these crosses had always bothered Ethan. He had even gone so far once as to say that he was glad his Jewish father hadn’t lived to see his grandchildren going to a school with crosses built into its walls. He’d made no mention of his WASP mother’s feelings on the matter, or about the fact that she was dead, too. Not that it mattered in the end. God had never meant very much to Ethan except as the protagonist of a long, imperfect, beautifully written work of literature called the Bible. It was not God’s laws or proverbial wisdom that attracted him so much as the novelistic questions of individual character and motivation. Faith for Ethan could be distilled down to words, and words he could revere all right, but only through the ruthless lens of criticism.

She stood remembering how at the beginning of their relationship they had debated endlessly over the nature of faith. He kept trying to pin her down, make her say definitively what she believed in, where God lived for her, as if it were a house with a street number and mailbox. He couldn’t accept her answer that she didn’t know, that certainly she believed in Him and there had been moments in her life when she’d thought she’d known precisely where she lived in relation to Him (eight years old and finding in the attic the box of Mother’s love letters to Daddy during the war in Korea), but that those moments had passed, and what remained was a constant wondering why and where and when it would finally be revealed to her, and that this, probably, was the imperfect faith she had come to live on.

They had talked and debated and argued, but they hadn’t necessarily accepted or understood. And then, around the end of their first year together, as quickly and completely as it had risen the subject had dropped from their shared lives; they had moved on to other things.

Downstairs, there were still voices, but the music had stopped. Now the voices were growing louder. She pushed herself off the wall she’d been leaning against, and gathered herself, and started down the stairs.

“There’s a room here where we can talk,” Mrs. Wheldon said.

Grace followed her into one of the empty white music rooms. It was simple and small. There was a black upright piano and a lacquered black piano bench and beside it a folding metal chair. As in all basements, she thought, the light felt deathly.

“It’s private here,” Mrs. Wheldon said.

She was probably forty but looked younger. She wore a knee-length summer skirt and a white blouse that was oddly prim for someone so pretty and young-looking. Half-glasses hung by a chain from around her neck. The blouse was closed at the neck by a black ribbon tie, tied in a bow, and her sand-colored hair was pinned to her head in a kind of bun. It was an odd effect, Grace thought—noticing, at the same time, that where Ruth Wheldon’s calves came out of the skirt they were shapely and young-looking and so were her ankles.

“I’m sorry I’m so late,” she murmured. She’d gone and said it twice already, and now she’d said it again. She felt a need.

“Don’t be sorry,” Mrs. Wheldon said. “Emma and I had some extra scales to work on anyway.”

But Grace was sorry just the same. She thought, just before Mrs. Wheldon shut the door, that she could hear Emma’s footsteps on the tiled floor of the lobby; she hoped Emma would wait there, where she’d been told to, and not wander around. And then the door shut and the room was suddenly, absolutely quiet. The door was thick, for soundproofing, and there was carpeting on the floor. Mrs. Wheldon sat down on the corner of the piano bench and motioned Grace to sit down too, on the folding chair, and Grace sat down.

Mrs. Wheldon said, “I was hoping to get to talk to you today.”

Grace nodded but didn’t say anything. She thought:
I am here.
The folding chair was hard and uncomfortable, the metal seat unpadded and still faintly warm where Mrs. Wheldon had been sitting just minutes before, teaching Emma how to play the piano.

“Your husband left this morning before I had a chance to say anything to him,” Mrs. Wheldon said.

Grace nodded again, thinking that this woman was the first stranger she’d seen since the funeral—though not a stranger, exactly; Mrs. Wheldon had been giving Emma piano lessons for close to a year. And for a few months her son, Sam, had even been a classmate of Josh’s in the first grade—but then Josh was pushed ahead a year. Grace had seen Sam now and again since then, caught bodily in the throng of kids pouring out the doors of the school in the afternoon, after classes let out, and into the arms of anxious waiting parents like herself; a small, sad-looking boy with hair the color of fine yellow sand, like his mother’s. He played the trumpet once in a while at school assemblies, not very well, and his name was Sam Arno, she remembered now, not Sam Wheldon. She felt almost as if she’d been thinking about the boy without knowing it. But that was impossible.

“I wanted to tell you how sorry I am, Mrs. Learner,” Mrs. Wheldon said. “Everybody I know is so sorry. Josh was a wonderful boy. It was an unthinkable tragedy.”

It wasn’t the word “tragedy” that got through, or even her son’s name on the lips of this woman, but the word “unthinkable”: it pushed a button in her brain she didn’t know was there, and the next thing Grace knew she was saying, in something close to a normal tone of voice, “Thank you, Mrs. Wheldon.”

“Please. Call me Ruth.”

“All right.”

“I wanted to talk about Emma.”

“If you want.”

“Something like this is hard enough for grownups, but for kids . . . I’ve been worried about her.”

“Of course.”

“Can I ask if she’s getting any counseling?”

“She isn’t.”

“Do you and your husband have any plans?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

Mrs. Wheldon looked as though she were about to say something else, but then didn’t. Silence started edging into the room. It was like smoke and not the relief Grace had thought it would be. Without her being aware of it, Mrs. Wheldon’s left hand was reaching for the closed lid of the piano, a couple of her fingers nervously dancing, but then she noticed it and withdrew it onto her lap. Grace saw that Mrs. Wheldon was afraid. Afraid of what had happened to a ten-year-old boy on a dark road at night, afraid of accidents and death and another woman’s pain, another woman’s guilt. Watching other people fall apart was a lousy business, Grace thought—and she reached over and did what the other woman wanted to do herself but wouldn’t: she opened the lid of the piano, exposing the long, dulled row of keys, ivory and black. She was sick to hell of talking about her life.

“Mrs. Wheldon?”

“Ruth,” said the other woman.

“Ruth, how’s your son? How’s Sam? I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

Mrs. Wheldon let her fingers touch the piano. She played two of the keys, middle C and F-sharp, in quick succession, and the quick probing notes filled the room and then died. Then she was embarrassed, her face coloring up. “Sam’s fine. He’s okay,” she said. “Thanks for asking.” Her accent had changed slightly, it seemed to Grace; let go of something, turned linear and flat.

“Does he still play the trumpet?”

“Oh, yes.” A smile began to appear on Mrs. Wheldon’s face but was pulled back. “He plays all the time. He makes a racket.”

“I remember hearing him play at assembly.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Wheldon said quickly, “Sam’s isn’t the kind of talent Josh’s was with the violin. I was always sorry I didn’t have the skills to teach him.”

“Would you say hello to Sam from me when you see him? He won’t remember me, but I’d like you to anyway.”

“Okay.” Ruth Wheldon was looking at her strangely. But Grace didn’t care. She no longer expected to be known or understood. She had all kinds of memories, too, and they were all around her now in the little room, and it was impossible to speak about them with anyone who was alive.

She stood up. “I’d better be going. Thank you, Ruth.”

“Don’t go.” Ruth Wheldon hurried to her feet.

“Emma’s waiting for me.”

“Sure,” the woman said. “I’m sorry. Stupid of me.”

Grace shook her head and turned to go. She was almost to the door.

“Mrs. Learner?”

“Yes?”

“Wednesday is the last day of camp. We always end with a concert in the gym here, so all the kids who want to can play for their parents and friends. It’s less pressure than you’d think. Really, it’s about family and showing appreciation for how hard the kids’ve practiced. Emma’s worked really hard this month, Mrs. Learner. She’s a good girl and she’s improved a lot and we’re all proud of her, and I have to say I think it’s important for her now, given everything, to get up and play for everybody and for everybody to listen.”

“Does she want to?”

“I asked her today and she said yes.”

She tried to picture Emma playing the piano up on a stage, but she could not. Somehow, her vision of things got stuck in the audience, all the people she knew, who were full of pity and whispers.