Whirl Away (15 page)

I wrenched my knee badly in the third fall. By then I was too angry and tired to be careful.

The ground on the barrens is uneven; the walking jars your knees and ankles as you stagger from dip to moss mount, and I was already streaming with sweat. Around my face and above my head, the biting stouts had caught my scent, and the big deer flies were endlessly circling my head, waiting for the right chance to draw blood.

I put a foot wrong as I was going over a pile of loose rocks, then put the other foot down through a screen of juniper covering a deep hole. I teetered over and fell sideways, feeling my knee give out. As I fell and before the pain started, I felt a curious ripping in my knee, like the feeling of tearing heavy corrugated cardboard crosswise. When I stood up, there was a sharp pain the moment I put weight on my leg, and I sat down again, almost crying out. I sat for a while, ripping up bog plants with my fists, tearing apart any flower stalk I could reach.

It was her goddamned fault, I thought. This was her fucking game and her fucking fault. I was out sitting on my
butt on the barrens and they'd all think it was a big fucking joke. I remember thinking there'd have to be payback for this.

It's time they realized just how goddamn serious it really was.

As soon as I got moving again, I went straight through the bog covering a small pond. Falling forwards, my leg still stuck out straight, I knew I was going into the water the moment the bog gave way.

Suddenly swimming, I had a moment of sheer panic when it seemed like I wouldn't be able to get back out. I was flailing around, tearing apart the bog, trying to find solid ground. When I tried to stand, I sank into the gluey, peaty black silt at the bottom, and I couldn't seem to reach the edge. My injured leg was screaming as I tried to stay afloat, and I thought that this time they'd actually killed me with their stupid game.

Madeline should have known better. I had wasted the whole day looking for them, and that meant the weather observations hadn't been done—no temperatures, no wind speeds. Now I'd get a careful message from St. John's or Gander, questioning whether the system was down or whether their keeper was passed out drunk in his own kitchen again.

Eventually I got out of the bog, but I was soaking wet, my clothes shot through with peat, and I had dragged myself across the bog with my hands until I could finally stand. Even then, heading straight for the tower with my knee swollen and throbbing, it took me almost two hours to get back.

I didn't even care if they were watching me anymore, didn't care if they caught me or tried to startle me. They just better not come within reach. If I got back to the house and they were already comfortably back, I'd put the place up, I swore I would.

But the house was quiet.

By then, it was cooling a little outside, a light wind had come up, and I could see the front edge of fog rolling in. If I'd been caught out in that, I thought, I'd be on the barrens until the weather finally broke. And that could be days, if the wind was right.

They weren't upstairs, and I was pretty sure they weren't in the basement either, although I wasn't going to hazard the stairs to find out, not with a knee that had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. It took me ages to get my wet jeans down over the swelling, and I threw all of the filthy, soaking clothes down the stairs to the concrete basement.

Let her deal with it, I thought. It's her fault anyway.

I had a beer and then another, throwing the caps at the sink, sitting at the kitchen table and looking around, trying to decide when they'd be back, or if they'd been back already. It would be just like Madeline to take the boys into Trepassey for fish and chips and leave me on my own for a cold dinner of whatever I could scrape up from leftovers in the fridge.

After a while, I staggered around the house, trying to find any sign of where they might be. I ended up in our bedroom in front of the dresser.

I opened her top drawer, to see if the laundry had been done yet, to see if she had found the laundry basket down by the washer and had brought it back up, socks and underwear nestled down into their proper spaces.

The drawer was empty. Completely empty, as it had been since the day they'd gone to Mistaken Point and we'd met on the stairs. Just like every other drawer on her side of the dresser. Only the paper on the bottom, and the dry green smell of birch. I hit the dresser with my fist, over and over, because there was nothing else left to do.

I went to the boys' rooms, where the pillows never moved and the covers were never thrown back, the beds always made and never slept in. Where stuffed animals had decamped for other pastures.

And I remembered a month earlier watching from the tower and seeing the back of Madeline's head as she drove away—the boys too small for their heads to even show up in the back window of the car—the dust from the tires kicking up into the air in a grey-brown rooster tail and blowing away to the right of the road, disappearing in among the leaves of the blueberry bushes and rhodora.

Surprise.

J
OHN
thought of the sound as a soft, in-drawn breath, a breath that was always taken in that last single second before the other sounds came. He heard it right before the shriek of tires pulling sideways against their tread. John would hear the police use the word “yaw” for the striated mark left behind on the pavement, and he'd start building it into his own descriptions almost immediately. “When you see yaw, you know they were going too fast.” Just like that.

The tires made a shriek followed by the boxy thump of the car fetching up solid, side-on, in a crumpling great pile in the ditch.

Then, the horn—and often, screaming.

The mailbox at the end of the driveway had his last name, Eckers, in precisely placed stick-on block letters. It was John and Mary's second mailbox this year. Along the front of the property he could still see the places where he had planted a regimented row of seven maples. Only one of the original trees remained, its leaves in late autumn blaze, and it was the tree down at the very edge of the property. The rest had
been sheared off by a red Suzuki Sidekick, three teenagers and the unforgiving shallow turn in the road just at the end of the driveway.

“Three times?” other people would ask at parties, disbelief making their voices rise high at the ends of their sentences. “Cars have crashed three times right in front of your house?”

“Third time unlucky,” John would say wryly, as if the sentence had just occurred to him, as if it was a bitter turn of phrase that had sprung just then from quick personal reflection, and then he'd start talking about the sounds, the smells.

He had spent two days planting the trees—staking out the straight line, digging the holes, preparing the wet clay with buckets of topsoil so the trees would have at least a chance to get started and eventually grow into a stately line. He imagined the trees as much more than saplings, imagined Mary looking out the big front windows on the front of their bungalow, watching for the bright yellow of the school bus through the tightly woven leaves, waiting for it to pull to a stop. Every time, he imagined she had a dishcloth in her hands, imagined she was working the damp fabric around something as she stared out through the glass. The house was well back from the road, a small three-bedroom ranch, just one of dozens like it along the narrow highway.

No kids yet, but they were hoping. It was a hope that he almost had trouble figuring out. It was, he thought, as if he and Mary needed some particular completion that they just couldn't find otherwise; that they felt there was something missing, something they kept looking for, and that they had loosely decided must rest in starting a family.

In an offhand way, he thought it was like the trees. Other people had trees, big, tall, dignified trees like footnotes to their complete and satisfied lives. It's what you get when you're diligent and careful and you plan ahead. Like children—and then grandchildren. Get kids, and then you get grandchildren too. He'd tried to explain that to Mary as if it was all a given, but she didn't seem to get it at all.

Sometimes, he imagined himself as an old man, raking up the fallen leaves around maple trunks as thick as a man's waist. He had planted the trees far enough apart to take that into consideration, and he had researched how much space a mature maple needs, reading up on different tree species before making his final choice. He imagined kids running around too, kids who could safely be packed up at the end of the day and sent home.

The Suzuki ended any chance of that. Late on a Friday night, the car spent its last few seconds in the air, completing a shallow but complex barrel roll to the right. John found out later it was three clean, tight and acrobatic rotations, while inside the metal box everything flew around along its own personal imperative, physics moving scores of things in hundreds of directions. A dozen beer on the back seat didn't manage to escape the cardboard confines of their box, but every single bottle broke its neck hitting the roof of the car, a roof that was now sharply lower after the touchdown on the first spin. A carton of paperback books in the back, taped and Magic Markered and designated for a church sale, burst their bounds and the books battered around inside the back of the car, fluttering wildly. All the floor mats leapt up an
inch or two and then settled topographically back into ridges and valleys, the dips catching the diamonds of safety glass from the broken side windows.

John would find the spare tire the next morning, almost up to the side of the house, long after the wrecker had dragged away all the other pieces.

One of the teens left the car too, winding up spreadeagled on the lawn, but it was the firefighters who found him. John didn't even realize the teen was there until they'd put the boy on a gurney and brought him down the driveway.

The crash was, John decided, the most gruesome thing he had ever seen. He and Mary had been in the living room, watching television, when the Suzuki first left the road. For just an instant, Mary had reached across and set her hand on his wrist, but John was up off the couch in a moment, looking out at the black silhouette in the yard, backlit by the street lights, the car's headlights still pooling on the grass.

When he was out the door and standing next to the wreck, his pulse hammered quickly in a not unpleasant way, and he could feel it tripping hard in his ears.

Mary stayed in the house.

John had approached the car gingerly, as if there were some need to treat the overturned vehicle gently. He could hear the exhaust system ticking as the metal cooled, the pace of the ticks slowing.

One of the teenagers left inside the car had been thrown upwards in virtually the same arc as the beer case. The stem of the rear-view mirror had taken out his left eye, but it didn't
matter. His neck was broken along the same angle as all the bottles.

The driver, meanwhile, met the steering wheel with his chest, the roof with his shoulder and the inside of the door with the ribs of his left side—except for his left arm, which flicked out through the broken window as if signalling a turn and then snapped as the car rolled smoothly over it. A Kleenex box and a dozen CDs had flown through the air, striking things and flying again. With the last thump, the glove compartment had burst open, vomiting paper and a windshield scraper and a spare house key that everyone in the owner's family had been trying to find for months.

The first thing John noticed as he came down the driveway was how cleanly the tumbling vehicle had sheared off six of his seven maples. The mailbox post was snapped off at ground level. The mailbox itself, crushed, turned up underneath the car once it was finally moved.

In the minutes before the emergency crews arrived—Mary had called 911, standing in the front window like a black cut-out of herself—John decided both of the teenagers in the car had to be dead. He was wrong. The driver survived, as did the passenger from the back seat, the passenger who had popped out through the back window after the glass burst away and who had flown, wingless, to crumple in the grass.

John stood rooted in one spot when the fire trucks arrived, stunned by the lights and the noise and the rapid, clipped motion of the firefighters. He was still standing in the same place when the police, finished with their brief
investigation, their measurements and photographs, stopped traffic in both directions so the wrecker, parked square across the road, could stand the vehicle back on its wheels, drag it back onto the road and haul the wreck away.

It seemed like it was over in minutes, but Mary told him he had been outdoors for more than an hour and a half. That was all she said. After that, she didn't want to talk about it anymore.

John couldn't understand why. He tried to talk to Mary about it, about the long gouge in the grass and the way the mailbox was carried along by the car and then pancaked flat, about the teenagers and the way they'd looked and the fact he hadn't even realized one of them was launched clear and had been lying on the grass of the front yard like he was having a nap.

Mary listened for a few minutes, but as soon as she heard that one of the teenagers had died, she abruptly told him that she had no interest in hearing any more about it.

He found that somehow discouraging.

Mary was a small woman, and the two of them made an incongruous pair. Some couples look like each other, but John and Mary didn't. He was tall and thin, with dark, straight hair, his face too sharp for his own liking. Once, upon inspection in the mirror, he had decided his eyes were too close together. Mary, on the other hand, was small and doll-like and perfectly balanced, with big eyes that always seemed to be perched on the verge of surprise. The difference between them actually made him uncomfortable. People, he thought, might look at them and find it hard to believe they belonged
together, especially when they heard Mary talk, heard the way her words came out tiny and precise and high, like a child's.