The Tell (42 page)

When he drew back from the hole and the rush of yeasty air, he saw Anya next door. If you knew the father, did you know the child? There were the same oceanic, pale bare feet propped up on the porch railing, the graceful body balancing on the back legs of the chair, the unfocused attempts at reading. Always thinking, never really at rest. Anya pushed the hair off her forehead. If you'd known the father well—or maybe not at all—could you ever know this child? Did he want to know her? His grief for Wilton was borderless, his grief for her confined. She would be okay.

Six days earlier, Wilton's body had been laid out in a morgue in Hartford. According to the police, the car he'd been in, driven by a woman they assumed he'd met at the casino, forty-two, recently divorced, and with two teenage children, had left the dark Connecticut country road and slipped soundlessly into a deep, muddy marsh. Sunken, hidden by fog and cattails and the indemnity of private property and abandoned appliances, their tracks covered by new snow, the car had remained undiscovered until someone had come one early morning to dump a van full of old computers. Wilton must have thought, as the car slid off the road, what a fucking lousy way to go, what terrible luck when everything might just begin again, when they'd all survived what they'd done to themselves and to one another. He would have kept his eyes open as the dark water rose up the windshield and the mud locked them in.

Owen imagined that if you'd been on the tenth floor of the hotel above Eagle Run, unable to sleep that night after Mira had left Wilton, you might have seen this lanky, coatless man walk out with the beautiful woman, and you might have thought they looked ready for anything, arm in arm. You might have seen them laughing it up into the heavy fog as they waited for her car to be brought around by the pimply valet. You might have watched them get in, and seen the car take the long route past the parking lots until it disappeared from view. Maybe, if you'd seen them earlier, you might have thought it looked like love between them. But who would ever know what it was, or where they were going, or what route they were taking? Or why Wilton was in the car at all? You wouldn't have known they were entirely underwater and drowned when you finally managed to sleep.

It was three days ago that Owen and Mira had driven Anya to Maine, forty minutes outside of Portland, where Wilton's sister lived. On the highway headed north, empty on a weekday morning, Owen felt like they were chasing Wilton's body and that this was some sort of gruesome race, but for what prize? But the body had been delivered that morning and was waiting at Pineview Cemetery—how many Pineviews were there, Mira wanted to know, indignant with heartache at the dumb name—as were Wilton's sister, Susan, and her husband. The five of them, plus the casket, made an awkward group at the graveside, and later in Susan's sunporch with the green indoor-outdoor carpet, where the louvered windows were open and the noise of the street repaving ground on. There was a kind of stunned feeling in the room as they ate sandwiches to the sounds of a jackhammer. It was the same house, Susan told them, that Wilton had grown up in.

Owen searched Susan's face for any resemblance to her brother. There wasn't much she could tell them about Wilton, who'd been out of the house when she was still a baby. But the dead had the power to superimpose themselves, and here, after the morning spent standing by a deep hole and not knowing what to say to one another as the piney winds blew around them, Owen saw Wilton everywhere and in everyone. Susan looked like him around the eyes.

Wilton might have claimed to like how direct Susan was, how her bright, pedestrian geraniums reached for the sun, how there was a lack of pretension in any of this. Hers was the kind of life Wilton said he envied, but who knew if he meant it. Soon, Owen and Mira and Anya would get back in the car and drive the hours back to Providence, and they might all feel that this day had stumbled along and their stupor and sorrow had prevented them from asking the right questions. And that this was their only chance.

Owen had asked to use the bathroom, and Susan's husband was sent to show him where it was. Owen tried to picture Wilton in this low-ceilinged, compact house, sitting at the round table in the kitchen with the sunflower salt and pepper shakers and plastic tablecloth, his feet on the worn linoleum, his body relaxed in the tight living room. The view from the bathroom upstairs was of woods without end. It was an invitation of deep green amnesty. Owen would never know what Wilton saw in these trees growing up, or what he saw in the trees the woman's car crashed through, or where it was he wanted to go.

Owen left the half-stripped bedroom and the house and crossed the driveway to stand at the fence. Anya glanced up from her book.

“You look like a coke fiend,” she said. “Or a vision of your future. Your hair is completely white. I can see every wrinkle in your face, even from here. You should see yourself.”

“No, thanks. I don't want to witness old age just yet,” he said, dusting himself off and explaining what he'd been doing.

“I think it would be interesting to see ahead like that. Get a preview of the next fifty years.”

“That because you'll always be beautiful.” He hadn't meant to embarrass her, but he had. Her strain of modesty was not Wilton's. “I know I'll look like my father. I'll have hair sprouting from the tops of my ears and out of my nose.”

Anya gave him a soft smile. He sensed that they had only a certain number of words left to say to each other. Packages still being delivered to Wilton were piled up on the porch, and he offered to carry them inside for her.

“I was hoping someone might steal them. They just keep coming.” Anya eyed the boxes warily. “Even the guys who cut the grass still show up, and I can't bear to tell them to stop. It's like they've come to the party, but no one's told them the host is dead.”

Owen pushed through the gate. He made two trips inside with the boxes. The place had a picked-over feel to it—how much more had Anya given away, and why so urgently? What remained were the indents of chair legs in the rug, small squares of evidence that someone had once lived there. He thought of the outline of the former owner's bed upstairs. Anya was undoing piece by piece what Wilton had put together for himself and for her. His comforter was on the floor in front of the couch. Anya had been sleeping downstairs. She brought Owen a knife to open the boxes.

“No, you do it,” he said. “Or you could just leave them unopened.”

“I don't want any of it. I didn't ask for it, but everything's mine, anyway.”

She kneeled to open the first box. She hesitated; her father's aspirations were packed inside. Here was a bread maker, boxes of chocolates, drinking glasses, three different kinds of vinegar, and another cashmere sweater for her birthday in two weeks. She sat surrounded by it.

“Maybe I'll miss it when the packages stop showing up,” she said. “That day in Maine, I didn't understand what was going on, not really. Everything meant something else. Even the house didn't feel real to me. Who were those people I'm related to?” Her eyelids were violet and faintly quivering. “I feel like my father came from nowhere and disappeared into nowhere.”

After Owen helped pack up Anya's car with stuff to drop off at Goodwill, he walked to Spruance. He stood across the street from the school with his back against chain link. In the weekend afternoon sun, the building was the color of yellowed paper smudged with erased words. There were still weeks left of the school year, but already the place looked shut down, unplugged and locked up. In every window, the faintest shadow of chicken wire embedded in the glass fell on the parchment shades. Weeds peeked out along the foundation and at the base of the wide, chipped steps. At the end of June, when the building would finally be closed for good, what was forgotten in lockers and desks and children's heads would stay there. Like the captive air behind his bedroom walls, the school's breath would have been witness to all sorts of history, but the kids wouldn't discover it; maybe no one would.

He hadn't known until then that he would stop teaching—maybe for a while, maybe forever. He'd lost faith in what he could do. If he watched closely now, would Spruance lean toward him even the smallest bit and ask him to change his mind? The clouds behind it held it steady. He had always been too interested in the lives of his students anyway, and how their families were arranged—one parent, two parents, grandparents, people called aunts and uncles coming in and out, neat, chaotic, full of the smell and sound of babies and spices, or softer with other syllables, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, the foreign taste of something bready, peppery, sweet. He had heard terrible stories. He'd heard great stories, too, but he didn't always remember those as easily.

Earlier, he'd wanted to say something to Anya about her father, but she must have sensed something troubling and she'd dodged him. She'd had enough of him, of all of it. She wouldn't face him or give him the chance to speak. The wind had flattened her hair against her cheek. He reached out to brush it away, but she pulled back.

He hadn't intended to go to Brindle, but he walked in that direction. Mira had been going to work every day since Wilton had been found, determined to resurrect the place. He didn't always ask what she'd done there but waited until she told him; she was cleaning, she was starting off slowly, she was planning. Would he help? He didn't ask her about money, though now what was missing from the house was clearer to him. He remembered the etched-glass vase that was gone as though it had always been the first thing he looked at in the morning and the last thing at night. The house felt lighter for it, as though it might rise with him in it, instead of sink.

He walked with the peculiar feeling that he wasn't being seen. In Fox Point, the air gave over to the bay. The window in Rosalie and George's son's apartment was spotless and closed. The Bright was crowded with heads bent over to ignore the passing day. Wickenden Street was still sleepy in the afternoon; night would wake it up. The underpass was a drumroll of pigeons' beating wings. A truck rattled over the Point Street Bridge, the bridge rattled under the weight, and the handrail shivered beneath Owen's touch. Brindle's front door was unlocked, and he called for his wife. She wasn't in her office, or the white gallery that smelled of new paint, or the studio. Her car was not in the back lot. The blue Dumpster had been replaced by two modest army-green barrels. Maybe you made only as much garbage as you had room for.

He sat at Mira's desk, and though he wanted to, he wouldn't read what was on top, not the letters or the notes she'd written to herself. He didn't pick up the phone to find out where she was. He had to believe she was coming back soon, that everything was fine. Her black jacket with the red zipper, the one she said that morning she wasn't sure she was going to need, was balled on the seat of the wicker chair. The desk was too small for him and his knees banged the underside. If the rest of Brindle was clean and cleared to start over, the office was still crowded with piles, old pottery, dried hydrangeas gone violet with dust. The skull of a rabbit Edward had given her. In this, Mira hadn't changed. Owen didn't think he'd ever spent time in the building alone. The sounds of the city settling were what Mira had heard for years. He was intrigued that in this room she'd turned her back on the river and looked into the core of the building instead. She'd always waited to see who was coming in.

He was enormously tired. The storm that had been inside his chest was leaving. In this unresolved hour, he went up to the roof and leaned against the still-warm brick of the bulkhead wall. In a few hours, people would crowd the bars that lined the other side of the river. Bubbles of music and heat would rise from cars. He moved to the edge and gazed down at the sidewalk in front of Brindle. At the other end of the roof, he looked down to the empty lot, and behind it, the few square yards of undeveloped land—weedy, sparkling with empties, hemmed on four sides by chain-link fencing. He could plant city tomatoes there and give them away. He'd seen pictures of buildings in other downtowns that had hung on against development, buttressed by skyscrapers, office buildings, warehouses, stores. Clapboard houses that were blown on by the exhaust fans of twenty-four-hour diners or sandwiched between a fish market and a dry cleaner. In bed at night, would the inhabitants feel they lived in the very middle of progress? Brindle wasn't surrounded yet, but the city was already encroaching on it, widening and rising a little more every year. You could hear the city's growing pains at night, a splitting of the seams, the lengthening of bones under the grandest houses. In decades, Mira would stand on this roof and not have a wide open view of the river anymore. She might be looking into condos and offices, onto highway improvements. She'd have to look straight up to catch any piece of emptiness.

He was still peering over the edge when she drove into the spill of light in front of the building. He called for her, but she couldn't hear him. He groped on the roof's surface for a small pebble that might have been dropped by a bird. What he felt was a thin trail of pea gravel from the driveway at home. The tiny stones ended up in every room of the house, occasionally in the bed or the shower. It was up here, too, evidence of Mira's presence. He picked up a few pieces and let them rain down on the car roof. Mira looked up. She shielded her eyes from an imaginary sun, not yet the moon.

“What are you doing up there?” she yelled.

He liked the way her voice rose to him. “Waiting for you. Come up.”