Safer (16 page)

Meanwhile, I’d worked up a sweat. My coffee was gone, and I was getting tired of carrying the empty mug. Though all the neighborhood patrolling had improved my fitness over the past few weeks, the hilly terrain inside the refuge had me breathing through the mouth.

“You okay back there, Doc?”

“Shipshape,” I said. “How far does this go, anyway?”

“Not much farther. There’s a good spot to turn around up ahead.”

In a few minutes, we climbed a rise and emerged into a small clearing ringed with gnarly oaks and tall, slender birch trees, their white bark peeling like old paper.

“End of the line,” he said.

“You might have to carry me back.”

“We’ll catch a breather here.”

Ten or twelve feet away from where we stood, there grew a head- high stand of stalky, fernlike foliage, dotted with purple spots, scattered with clumps of small white flowers. Roger saw me looking and said, “Hemlock.”

“What?”

“Same stuff they used on Socrates, if you believe the story.”

“No kidding.”

“Didn’t used to grow here,” Roger said. “Showed up one spring a few years ago. Gets thicker every year now.”

He stood there with his coffee mug in one hand, the other in his jacket pocket, the same as he’d looked standing on our front stoop an hour earlier. Except for a little sweat- darkened area along the edges of his hairline, you’d never know we’d just trudged a mile and a half through heavy timber.

“Look there. Don’t touch.”

I saw where he pointed: woody vines growing close to the ground, winding in and out of the hemlock stand. Waxy green leaves, some tinged red at the tips.

“Know what that is?”

I smiled. “Afraid I wouldn’t have made much of a Boy Scout.”

“Poison ivy.” He made a circular gesture around his head. “You can walk a mile in any direction without running into that stuff again. Just seems to grow right here for some reason. Funny.”

His gaze seemed distant. I felt a tingle in my bowels. By then I thought I knew where we were standing. Standing here felt uncomfortable.

“Roger,” I said.

“They found my boy there.” He raised his mug to his lips, nodding toward the hemlock grove. “Ten years in April. He was a bookworm too. Not like Brit, but he did always like to read. The other day I thought, you know, he might have been in one of Doc’s classes over there on campus now.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“The search came right through here,” he said. “They figured, whoever took Brandon… they figured he must have still had him then. Had him somewhere. Figured he brought him here later. After.”

“Roger,” I said. “I don’t—”

“One theory went that he might have made himself part of the search,” Roger said. “He could have dropped Brandon’s backpack in here on purpose. Gotten things started in a direction. Joined the volunteers so he’d know which areas had been cleared off the grid already. He could have doubled back later, used the search tracks to hide his own.” He shrugged. “That was one theory. There were others. None of those ever checked out either.”

Normally, I don’t go in for capital- letter ideas like Good and Evil. As my students approach their critical essays on classroom reading assignments, I tell them that reliance on absolutes is—generally speaking—the wrong tool for the job.

This makes it difficult to describe what I felt standing next to Roger, gazing at the plot of overgrown soil that had once held the body of his murdered son. All I can say is that it was clear and sunny that day, but my memory of that clearing is black and overcast.

“They say if you leave it alone, it’ll eventually take over the whole area.” Roger took a sip of his coffee and nodded at the hemlock grove. “Gets thicker every year.”

We didn’t say much on the long walk back. After we’d finally left Roger’s well- worn footpath to Brandon Mallory’s original grave site—after we’d waded back through the boundary of sumac and wildgrass, and crossed the ground back to Sycamore Drive—Roger finally said, “I guess it probably seems like I stick my nose in where it doesn’t belong sometimes,” he said. “Maybe it’s true.”

“Listen, Roger—”

“The fact is, when it comes to our little circle, I don’t much think in terms of ‘neighbors.’ ” He opened his mug and tossed the last of his coffee onto the ground. “Pete and Melody, Barry and Trish, all the kids. Michael. Now you and Sara. This might come out sounding dramatic, Doc, but I think of you folks more as family.”

I closed my mouth and said nothing.

“My son was taken in broad daylight.” He hooked a pinky finger through the handle of his mug and walked along with his hands in his trouser pockets. The sun seemed to be turning the clock backward now, from autumn back to summer. “Middle of a school week, plenty of folks around. But nobody remembered seeing a thing.

“Hell, I know what it’s like,” he said. “You get tied up in your own life. Got your own job, your own bills, your own lawn to mow. You get a promotion. Build that nice house in Spoonbill Circle.” He tipped his head back, gesturing down the hill. “Get the kids into the school district.”

We walked.

“More people show up with the same idea. All of them living their lives. Neighborhood gets bigger, starts to spread out. Pretty soon you’re nodding to the folks next door when you get the paper in the morning and you don’t even know who lives across the street. Next thing you know, you’re living in a great big maze. Turn left instead of right one day, you could end up lost in your own subdivision.”

Don’t,
I thought. I saw where he was going. I didn’t want him to go there. Not like this.

But Roger had something to say, and he’d been waiting all this time to say it. So I stayed quiet and let him.

“Maybe if we all mind each other’s business a little, what happened to Brandon won’t happen to Brit Seward,” he said. “Or little Sofie, God forbid. Or Jordan or Jake. Maybe what happened to you and Sara at your place won’t happen to anyone down the hill.”

Was I being unfair?

“Maybe some of these other things you hear about happening other places… maybe they won’t happen quite as often around here.”

Wasn’t there at least a small part of me that understood? Even agreed, to a point?

“Or maybe we can’t change a thing,” Roger said. “But it seems like we can sure as hell try.”

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is ablaze.
The ancient poet Horace was said to have written that line. I know because it’s printed on the inside cover of the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Directory, which we kept in a drawer in the kitchen. It’s also printed on the business card Roger had given us in case we ever needed to contact him at his Safer Places office. It was the organization’s motto. The Safer Places version of
Always Be Prepared.

I’d only been half- joking when I’d told Roger I wouldn’t have made a very good Boy Scout.

“Well,” he said as we reached the sidewalk in front of my house. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“For the company. Hell of a walk back up there.”

A hell of a walk. Yes.

“I guess I just wanted to explain where I was coming from last night,” Roger said. “Felt like we got onto some bad footing, and I’m sorry for that.”

Over in the common, Trish Firth pushed the twins on the kiddie swings. She saw us and waved. We waved back. We’d been gone nearly two hours. I wondered if Sara was home yet.

“Roger,” I said. “I’m so sorry about what happened to your family.”

He nodded. “I know we haven’t talked about it much. But you and Sara shouldn’t feel like it’s off- limits.”

“I didn’t know Brandon,” I said. “And I didn’t know Clair. But I can imagine how much you loved them.” I meant every word of this. “I
can’t
imagine what a thing like that does to a person.”

“Well, I’d be a liar if I said you get over it. But everybody loses someone eventually.” He shrugged and smiled a little, watching the Firth twins. “I guess we all learn how to move on.”

“The place you showed me just now. What you shared with me up there?” I nodded as sincerely as I could. “I want you to know that I don’t take it lightly.”

“Meant a lot to have you there, Doc.”

I said something cruel then. Part of me regretted saying it even as the words left my mouth. Part of me would say it again. “I also want you to know that I’ve never, in my entire life, felt as manipulated as I feel right now.”

Roger’s face seemed to jump. He looked at me as though I’d slapped him.

“Shame on you,” I said.

Over in the common, the Firth twins giggled and kicked their legs, swinging back and forth in their bright blue safety harnesses. Trish smiled and tickled their feet as they came near, pushing them away again. If she could sense anything wrong between Roger and me, she didn’t show it.

For a moment, Roger’s expression seemed flat. Then his eyes went dark.

I realized that I’d never seen anger on Roger Mallory’s face before that moment. If I had, maybe things would have happened differently. Or maybe not.

Either way, I left him standing there and went inside.

THERE S WEAR AND TEAR IN A MARRIAGE,
my dad once told me. He was a lawn chair philosopher, Joe Callaway, with tavern- tested analogies for almost any occasion. For some reason, he seemed especially drawn to the topic of family relations, and by his retirement years, my father had accumulated more homespun marriage advice than Dr. Phil.
You drop it sometimes. Bang it around a little. It picks up tiny little cracks you can’t even see.

He told me that everyday moisture finds its way into those cracks over the years. Sweat, tears, plain old rain. If you don’t stay on top of things, when the weather turns cold, the moisture expands. The cracks get wider.

That’s how it happens,
he said.
People think they’re solid, then boom—one day the floor falls in.

By late October, the weather in our house had cooled. It
wasn’t any one thing. That summer and fall had been an exercise in displacement and exhaustion; first had come the discom-bobulating news of the pregnancy, followed by the move from Boston to Clark Falls, followed by the attack, and finally the miscarriage. This string of events had been like one cold shower after another, and Sara and I hadn’t been physically intimate in months. Now, with school in session, we saw each other less. Argued more.

We’d been jarred out of alignment before, but for some reason, this time, the harder we tried to recalibrate, the more we seemed to tweak things out of shape. After a while, the constant need to wrestle the steering wheel became a frustration all its own.

As the semester wore on—as Sara’s new job increased its demands on her time, and as my own step backward into what amounted to academic grunt work gradually wore my spirit down—it seemed almost as if we’d run out of gas.

I’d been looking forward to the last weekend in November. Sara had a conference in Albany, not far from Boston—a lovely afternoon’s train ride through the Berkshire Mountains on the Lake Shore extension. I saw a chance for us to get back to the basics. A trip together back to our old stomping grounds. Find a B&B in Brookline or Cambridge. Spend the weekend. Come home remembering each other again.

Sara said, “You want to hang around an econ conference.”

“Under no circumstances,” I told her. “But the conference ends Thursday.”

“What about your classes?”

“I can fly out Friday morning,” I said. “Meet you at the train station. I’ll be Cary Grant and you can be Eva Marie Saint.”

She smiled. “It sounds nice.”

“Doesn’t it?”

Her smile faded slowly. After a minute, she sighed.

“To be honest,” she said, “I’d been thinking I could use the time away.”

“Exactly. It’ll be perfect.”

“For myself.”

She looked at me like she wished she could think of a better way to say it. Her eyes said,
Don’t be mad.
Her mouth said, “To recharge my batteries, I guess. I don’t know. Empty out my head.”

Class, do you see what I’m doing here?

Observe these techniques:

I begin with a brief anecdote about my father. As far as anyone knows, the anecedote might not even be true. But I’ve salted it with believable, blue- collar detail, and there’s probably no way to judge its authenticity for sure.

It doesn’t really matter what my father actually said or didn’t say. My intent is to establish tone and perspective. My own reliability as narrator. The tone is meant to be down- to-earth; the perspective is meant to be that of a regular Joe. The kind of Joe who thinks of his father’s advice. Did you notice that I named my father Joe?

Joe happens to be my father’s name, but I could have named him anything. I have a PhD in English literature; I could just as easily have started with a passage from Shakespeare, or Faulkner, or even Gertrude Stein.

But then maybe I’d seem elevated when I want to seem re-latable. Notice the way I describe my marriage as though it were a car. Most everybody has driven a car.

Sara’s job is “demanding.” We infer that perhaps she’s been spending more time at work than at home. My job is described— no offense to you, Class—as a “step backward.” An understandable disappointment for a once- tenured professor. Maybe even vaguely unfair.

No doubt my wife and I had any number of conversations between August and October. Maybe, at some point in time, one of these conversations hurt Sara’s feelings. Maybe there was a time when I’d made her feel rejected? Like I cared more about my own feelings than I cared about hers?

We can’t be sure. At my choosing, I’ve related only one
conversation. A conversation that left
me
feeling rejected. In this conversation, I’m the one who appears to be trying. Do you see what I’m doing?

Time to get it over with.

The night I slept with Melody Seward:

She came over to talk to Sara, who was still in Albany. I was working my way through a bottle of overpriced Shiraz and feeling sorry for myself.

Melody was obviously upset, perhaps bordering on distraught. It was past nine o’clock on Friday night, and I asked her to come inside. She hesitated; we’d never gotten to know each other especially well, and we’d never been alone together. But she clearly needed to be somewhere other than home. Sofia was at Melody’s mother’s house; Brit was sleeping over at her girlfriend Rachel’s.