The Hazards of Good Breeding (24 page)

“Do you know where your father is?” Rock asks in a strange inversion of her thoughts.

“I have no idea,” she says, pronouncing each word clearly. “I have no idea where my father is. I have no idea where my brother is. I have no idea about anything.”

Rock looks over at her with a strange look of concern and—is it nervousness? “I just—I actually came over here partly because, I know it sounds weird, but I saw him a few hours ago—”

“Eliot?”

“Your father.”

“Oh.” Disappointment wells up in her. “Where?”

“Well, that's the weird part.” Rock shifts his position to look more fully at her, and he does—he really does—seem nervous. Paler than usual and sort of twitchy. “There's this guy—remember Don Hammond? he worked at Emack's when we were in high school?”

“The drug dealer?” Caroline asks, narrowing her eyes. Rock looks high. He is probably about to launch into some elaborate delusional story. She tries to listen, but her mind has returned to Eliot, who is covertly xeroxing a “missing” poster of some young black boy, according to Stephan. Is he somehow mixed up in a child abuse case? Or has he been converted to some cultish religion?

“. . . and he was just sitting there in the car.” Caroline forces her attention back on Rock. “I don't know, maybe it's stupid, but I just felt like you should know because he seemed kind of strange—and because—”

Caroline stares at him. Her father sitting in his car outside a drug dealer's house? The image is so incredible it almost makes her want to laugh. Sex and drugs—next he'll be blasting Trent Reznor. It would be funny, except for the condom at Lilo's. This stops her; it seems, for some reason, to lend credence to the idea.

“Because?” she says.

“Because there was this thing Denise was saying—I didn't even know if I should mention it. I'm sure it's not true, but I guess—I guess I thought you'd want to know even if it's just some weird rumor. . . .” Rock's face is flushing uncharacteristically. “That your dad and—that Eliot's old babysitter is pregnant and—it's his baby . . .”

Caroline can feel the blood rush through her veins in an aggressive, possibly dangerous, charge at her head, and then drain away, leaving some cooler, less sustaining substance in its place.
Oh
, she wants to say, but she can only think it. His baby.
His
, meaning her father, and
baby
, meaning his. In the same sentence. She can see this, the phrase, the possessive pronoun and noun, suspended in her mind. So this is why Rosita left.

She is not sure how much time has elapsed since Rock has stopped speaking.

“Caroline?” There is the sound of footsteps and the dogs barking from the kitchen. Stephan—she has completely forgotten him.

From where he is sitting on the sofa, Rock's eyebrows rise in surprise.

“Hi,” Caroline says, straightening, pulling herself forward off the wall with what feels like heroic determination. “In here.”

“That's an amazing sight,” Stephan is saying, ignoring the dogs, whom Caroline has let out from behind the grate and are barking close on his heels. “Shhht. Cut it out,” Caroline reprimands them. They seem unusually wound up this evening.

“That bullet hole in the tree,” he is saying. “I got it on camera. The contrast isn't any good because it's so dark, but maybe I'll come back tomorrow. . . . Oh—hey, I didn't know you were here,” he says seeing Rock from the doorway. “I'm sorry, am I interrupting—?”

“No,” Caroline says. “No,” she narrows her eyes and stares at him. It must be through Denise that he knew Eliot had no babysitter anymore. “I just feel a little queasy.”

“Oh,” Stephan says, raising his eyebrows. “Should I come back for the grand tour?”

Outside, there is a faint scratching sound that could possibly be a car turning off the road onto the driveway. “Yes,” Caroline says. “I think so.” She stops herself. It
is
the sound of wheels crunching over the gravel—she is quite sure. Could it be Eliot? Getting dropped off by someone? She starts across the dining room and through the window she can see the sweep of the headlights, which blink once and then fall into darkness. The Explorer. Her father's Explorer. She breaks into a jog across the rest of the dining room, through the kitchen, out the door onto the steps. There were two people silhouetted in the front seat, she is sure of this. Eliot! Maybe there has been some plan all along for her father to pick him up somewhere at a designated time.

The next few seconds seem enormous—made up of a myriad of complex, independent movements and actions, and at the same time seem very simple and absolute, streamlined almost as if they have been rehearsed. The driver's door opens and then the passenger's, but instead of Eliot, the person who steps out is a young woman in a loose dress and glowingly white sneakers who is unmistakably pregnant. Caroline stops short in her approach, and from behind her she hears the screen door screech wide as Stephan pushes it open and pauses on the threshold between light and darkness, inside and outside. And almost before Caroline sees them, she feels them coming, lets out a little cry, but already the dogs have shot out through the door Stephan is holding open, and in a flash they are running, charging up the driveway with their tails straight out behind them like streamers.

As Caesar approaches the woman—Rosita, Caroline recognizes her now, and she
is
pregnant—she takes a nervous step backward and raises one hand to her head, in a gesture of shock or despair that is almost predictive, an effect preceding its cause, and Caesar slows, lowers his head almost submissively for a moment, but then at once he jumps up and at her, his big paws rising to land on her shoulders. And then for a moment he seems to have subsumed her—his black head obscuring hers and dropping, dropping, until with a breath-stopping thud her head hits the car's rear tire. There is a great deal of shouting—Caroline is not sure if it is coming from her own mouth or her father's or even Rock's; she is dimly aware he, too, has emerged from the house. But the noise attaches itself to nothing, hangs simply overhead, and dissipates into absolute silence. There is no sound from the woman, no bark or growl from the dogs, and no more shouting. In the distance, there is the sound of the rhododendron leaves scraping, like anxious hands, one against the other.

Caroline moves off the flagstone path onto the driveway, as if through some substance thicker than air—thicker, even, than water. Caesar stands off to the side with his head lowered, almost crouching. On the driveway, the woman's body is slung across the pale stones like something roughly used and then abandoned. Her father is kneeling beside it, and Rock, too (how has he gotten there so fast?). Her father is saying something that sounds strange but reassuring, foreign almost, like a comforting word in another language. The dogs stand back a few yards, licking their paws, looking uneasy. One of them is emitting a soft, low-pitched whine.

As Caroline approaches, Rock stands and starts toward the house, but something stops him—his face rearranges itself into an expression of incredulity. Caroline thinks, for a moment, it is she who has somehow surprised him, but then turns and finds herself looking straight into the slick black eye of a camera. It is Stephan, standing not two feet behind her, filming the disaster he has, in a way, created. A tiny green light blinks on as if registering her attention. Something fierce rears up inside her, cutting through the oppressive weight of inaction; she thrusts her hand out over the cold glass lens and yanks it downward, in an age-old gesture of protection.

17

E
LIOT HAS IMAGINED
this moment often enough that now that it has arrived it feels insubstantial, only possibly more real than it has been the hundreds of times he has thought through it before. He has changed into his Paul Revere knickers, strapped on his backpack (outfitted with water, a sandwich, two apples for Blacksmith, and his leaflets) backward so he can reach into it while he rides. He has saddled Blacksmith and led him out to the muddy ground in front of the stable without a hitch. Above him the night sky seems unusually bright and hollow, scattered with stars. Eliot knocks his hand against the rough-grained wood of the stable door to be sure this time he has his body with him. It grates satisfyingly against his skin, sends the sting of a splinter into the fat of his palm. He is here now, and ready.

Blacksmith sighs and looks patiently into the layered, swaying darkness of the wood as Eliot puts one foot in the stirrup and swings himself up onto his back. It feels somehow higher up than usual; the ground looks faraway and unreliable, but Eliot is not afraid. His body feels firm and indestructible, as if it is made of some solid, uniform substance as durable as Styrofoam. He nudges the horse's warm flanks and Blacksmith starts forward with a swish of his tail over his hindquarters. All around, against Eliot's face and neck and the thin blue nylon of his Paul Revere knickers, he can feel the refreshing cool of evening. There is nothing but the hiss of Blacksmith's footsteps, the chink of the buckles on his stirrups, and the rush of an occasional car on the other side of the trees.

The path that winds into the wood behind the stables will bring them to the first leg of the Revolution Way Bike Trail. Eliot has selected this route carefully. It will take him through Lexington and then Arlington and into Cambridge, where he can then make his way along the river and across to Boston on the Weeks Footbridge. Once he is there, there will be no more bike route. Thinking about this part of the trip makes Eliot nervous. He does not have Rosita's exact address, but when she lived with them she would go to her brother-in-law's on Saturdays, to a place called Roxbury, which he has found on the map—a broad area between a pearlike shape called Olmstead Park and on the other side, the bay. And she must still be there. Eliot has not believed his father for a moment that she moved. She would have told him if she was moving somewhere.

When Eliot is near enough to Concord Center to see the faint forms of the white clapboard buildings of Concord Academy, he slows Blacksmith down to a walk and unzips the backpack, which feels snug and heavy, like a baby against his stomach. He will have to move quickly; it is not quite late enough to be sure there will be no one on the sidewalks even on this sleepy end of Main Street. At the public notice board on the corner he stops and dismounts, loops Blacksmith's reins around his elbow, takes two thumbtacks from the front pocket of his backpack and a flyer from the stack inside. With a quick look over his shoulder, he posts it above an advertisement for typing classes, beside a poster of a band called Thunderhead.

M
ISSING,
it says,
ROBERTO RODRIGUEZ. CALL 617 223 4987 IF YOU CAN HELP
.
It sends a thrill through Eliot—Roberto's dark eyes shining out from the white paper and his own phone number at the bottom of the page. Of course, Rosita will never see this sign here, but it feels important to put it up anyway. Every flyer he puts up will bring Roberto that much more out of the forgotten jungle and into this world of peaceful green lawns and clapboard houses. Once he has reached Roxbury, Eliot will make his way through the tarred wilderness of streets with names like Mansur and Bragoon, which he has picked out because they were the smallest, narrowest gray lines on the map he printed off the Internet in his school library. And he will tack his flyers everywhere—one on every lamppost. He knows when Rosita sees them she will call.

In the beginning, Eliot considered taking the commuter train to find her—the same one she would take to go to her brother-in-law's on Saturday mornings. But the train does not run after ten
P.M
., and anyway it is better to go on horseback. This way he can make stops in Lexington, Belmont, and Cambridge—he can connect the two worlds with this paper trail of flyers. And until he crosses the river, he can follow in the footsteps of Paul Revere.

Eliot drives the last thumbtack into the post and Blacksmith shifts his weight and snorts, picks up his right foreleg and replaces it on the ground as if in indecision. Two figures have come into view on the other end of Main Street—a man and a woman holding hands under a streetlamp. Eliot swings himself back up onto Blacksmith, crosses the empty street, and makes his way out from under the glare of the streetlights. In front of First Parish Church he posts another flyer, and another again on the mailbox at the corner of Thoreau Street. He had not planned on putting so many up here, but his conviction ripens with each car that passes without stopping to ask what he is doing—a young boy out on a horse in the middle of the night.

At the corner of the Concord Turnpike Eliot finds the second leg of the bike path, which is dirt almost all the way to Lexington—it runs along the road here, obscured from it by a stand of thick pine trees.
A shape in the moonlight a bulk in the dark
—he recites the words to himself as encouragement, because it is dark here, beyond the reach of streetlights. He can see only the outlines of his arms and legs, the bulge of the backpack in front of him.
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead/ In their night-encampment on the hill/ Wrapped in silence so deep and still/ That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread/ The watchful night-wind, as it went/ Creeping along from tent to tent.
He recites bits of the poem to himself and feels the rush of wind through the trees, against his skin, against his eyes, his hair, the insides of his elbows.
A moment only he feels the spell/
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread,/ Of lonely belfry and the dead.

I
t is nearly midnight
when Eliot reaches the place where the trail merges with 2A. Blacksmith is hot and sweaty and turns skittish at the feel of the pavement under his feet. “It's okay,” Eliot says, patting his neck, and his voice sounds strange to him—inconsequential compared to the suddenly loud clanging of Blacksmith's hooves on the tar. It has taken him longer to get here than he imagined—a full hour, which means the whole trip will be longer than he thought. It is only a quarter of a mile until the trail picks up again on the other side of the road, but there is no sidewalk and not much of a shoulder. He keeps Blacksmith close to the wall of trees along the right. It is just a short way, he reminds himself, no more than a quarter of an inch on the map.

A van rounds the curve ahead of them, and its headlights frighten Blacksmith, who yanks his neck to the side, nearly tearing the reins from Eliot's grasp. The van itself hurtles forward, seeing them only at the last minute and swerving with a dramatic screech of tires to the other side of the road. For a moment its headlights cut a swath of light through the forest Eliot and Blacksmith have emerged from. It looks like a terrifying mess of twisted branches and dead leaves, a confusing and impossible wilderness to have come through.
A shape in the moonlight a bulk in the dark,
Eliot thinks, but the words have lost their inspirational quality. He feels like a vibrant, frightened collection of edges and nerves and bones now, not something strong and solid and bulky, belonging to night. Beneath him Blacksmith feels altogether separate; Eliot's hands seem to be losing their effect on the reins. Another car flies past them and also swerves at the last minute, screeching its tires and leaving a trail of loud music behind. Blacksmith snorts and looks back toward Eliot with a wild eye.

“It's okay,” Eliot says aloud and reaches forward to put a hand on the horse's twitching shoulder. “Just a little farther.”

But he feels suddenly less convinced that he
can
actually reach Roxbury from Concord, that Rosita's world rests on the same solid ground, in the same state, on the same continent and
planet,
as his. Of course, he knows it does; he understands logically how each street connects to the next. He has even re-created the whole web in papier-mâché. But now that they are out of the woods and on the paved road, there seems to be something wrong with the equation—some lack of correlation to the physical world.

Eliot is aware, only faintly, of the hum of an engine behind him, when there is a tremendous blast, like a gunshot, that issues from its belly. Blacksmith half rears and then shoots off with a stuttering heft of muscles become suddenly fluid, a body determined by grace. And they are sailing over the pavement, past the squat gray houses that have begun to spring up along the road and shiny dark humps of cars parked in driveways, past the modest yards and gas grills and darkened windows with their blissful, quiet safety. Past rows of carefully planted flowers and street signs and spindly, staked saplings like little deer. As he rides, Eliot has the strange, euphoric feeling that he has become Roberto. Become a boy who is missing—a boy who belongs to a world between this one and that of the dead. A boy who has been, for all intents and purposes, forgotten, but still exists, still struggles to mean something in the world. All around him Eliot can feel time opening up and shrugging back the cloak of darkness, softening its shoulders to make room. He can feel it like a wind passing through him, collecting pieces of his anger and sorrow and disappointment and scattering them through the darkness like so many dandelion seeds.

And then suddenly there is the glare of metal—the fender of a pickup truck headed around the curve in front of him—and the heave of Blacksmith's body against the reins—a sort of thump beneath him, and then absolutely nothing, his body coming down into the soft embrace of air rather than Blacksmith's firm haunches. At the same time there is an incredible confluence of sounds: the shriek of brakes and the penetrating blare of a horn, the clatter of Blacksmith's hooves racing away, and the soft crumpling smack of metal against wood. Followed by what sounds at first like an eerie rise of wind swooping toward Eliot—a tornado of sorts, descending on him where he lies now, on his side among the dead leaves in the ditch. A tree falling, slowly at first—a slender aspen felled by the impact of stainless-steel radiator grid against its pliable trunk—and then faster with a whoosh through the snapping branches of other trees and undergrowth, hitting the earth with a dull thud.

Then there is stillness—the dying of the truck's engine like the moment of ending, the TV screen shrinking to a pinpoint and then off.

But not over. Somehow, there is still the slamming of the door, a figure emerging, and the repeated, almost awed whisper,
Oh God Oh my God Oh God
—a large, short-haired woman, rocking herself slightly, hands clasped around her substantial waist, approaching him. Eliot can see her sneakers—dirty, marshmallowy-looking shoes and the rolled cuffs of her pants, the stunned fluttering of the aspen leaves against the dirt and underbrush beside him, as if they don't yet know they have been upended—that already the trunk that sustains them is dead.

There is water trickling gently through the ditch and down one side of Eliot's neck. It is uncomfortable. This makes him sit up.
Are you all right? Oh Jesus—are you—
the woman is saying now. She has a wide terrified face. From this upright position, the world slips into a more ordinary focus. There is steam escaping from the hood of the pickup and the headlights are still on, shining into the sad skittery mess of blowing leaves, unnaturally green and bright in the glare. Eliot lifts himself to his knees and tentatively, pressing his hand to the ground, he pushes himself up to stand, mud running down his neck, his shoulder, his right leg. There is a cut on his knee and a pain in his right ankle, but otherwise his body feels whole. In front of him the woman's broad face slackens and, almost as if she has been pushed from behind, she drops, right there in the road, to her knees.
Oh dear Jesus
, he can hear her saying.
Oh sweet Jesus
.

Strapped to the front of him, he still has his backpack, now slick with mud. Staring at it, he feels a pang of some terrible unease rising through him—of what? He looks at the woman, who is asking him a question, at the pickup, at the slender trunk projecting uncannily from the radiator, and then at the dark road, the darkened yards and houses on the other side of the street. There is no Blacksmith. A dark, desperate feeling wells up in Eliot—he can feel it gathering in his stomach and seeping out into his bones. Blacksmith has disappeared. He is alone here on this road with this hysterical woman and his flyers, undistributed, miles from Roxbury, no closer to Rosita.