River Road

by Carol Goodman

  The one place on campus that retained the feel of the old estate was in the gardens. Most of the statuary was gone except for a few chipped goddesses and satyrs, which students dressed up in graduation robes at commencement and sometimes moved around as pranks. The rose beds and perennial borders had grown wild and unkempt for years. “It was a popular make-out spot where everyone went to get high in the sixties,” Dottie had told me. “In the eighties a group formed to save the garden.” Although it hadn’t been restored to its Italianate splendor at least you didn’t find cigarette butts and condoms in it anymore. (The Blackwells’ old boathouse on the river had replaced it as a favorite make-out and pot den since then.) And under a coat of snow, with the sun setting over the mountains across the river and candles glowing, it looked like it belonged at a fancy private school, not a state school.

  There must have been a hundred people gathered already. As the Dawsons came into the garden Dottie gave them each a candle protected by a white paper shell. She was wearing a heavy purple cape that made her look like a Druid priestess, the candlelight turning her face pink. As if by prearranged signal, the group parted in half for the Dawsons and then formed a loose circle around them. A lectern had been set up at the center of a colonnaded apse that stood at the end of the garden overlooking the river. Abigail Martin, the college president, came forward to shake the Dawsons’ hands and give them each a chilly embrace. Abigail was an able administrator, but not the warmest woman. I’d noticed over the last year that she often called on Ross for support at public events. Ross was so much better at making people feel important. I could understand why she’d sent him to collect the Dawsons but I hoped that they didn’t see it as a slight. She said a few words now—bland words of condolence—and then turned the lectern over to those who knew Leia better.

  Ross took the lectern first and spoke movingly of his impressions of Leia. He told a story about how Leia had taken over reading aloud a memoir piece for a girl who was crying too hard to read it herself. “Leia was always willing to speak up for others, to give voice to the silenced. I cannot believe that Leia’s voice has been silenced with death. I must believe her voice will live on in all of those she would have spoken for.”

  One by one, Leia’s classmates and teachers came forward and read poems and told stories about Leia. Joan Denning told a long rambling story about how Leia said she believed in ghosts because she’d seen one when she was twelve and so Joan knew Leia’s spirit would always haunt Acheron. John Abbot read Leia’s favorite passage from Wuthering Heights. Cressida talked about how Leia had been so dedicated to her students at the prison that she’d gone to some of their parole hearings. Listening to the moving tributes, it was easy to forget that the police had questioned me, but when Ross motioned me to the dais, I hesitated. How could I stand up there and talk about Leia while a forensics team labored in a police lab scraping Leia’s blood off my tire? But everyone was looking at me, waiting. It would look worse, I realized, if I refused to speak.

  I got up and faced the circle of candlelit faces. I saw my colleagues, students, friends—and at the back of the crowd, his police hat in his hands, Sergeant McAffrey, staring at me.

  “Every once in a while a student comes along who reminds you why you teach,” I said, returning McAffrey’s gaze. “Leia did more than that. She reminded me why I live.”

  A murmur rose up as I left the lectern and I knew that people were telling each other that I was that teacher whose daughter had died. Dottie hugged me. Cressida squeezed my arm. Joan Denning patted me on the shoulder. I looked around for Sergeant McAffrey, but instead I ran into Sue Bennet, a tiny wire-haired woman who ran the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. “Well, here we are again,” she said by way of greeting. Sue’s eighteen-year-old daughter had been killed driving home from her high school prom by a man with a previous DUI driving in the wrong lane on Route 9.

  “Yes, it brings up terrible memories,” I said, guiltily remembering that I’d dodged Sue’s last few calls. “You must be thinking about Allison.”

  “I’m thinking about the monster who did this,” Sue replied in a loud voice.

  “I’m sure they’ll catch him. The police talked to me—” I broke off, not wanting to tell Sue about hitting the deer. Or about the two glasses of wine I’d drunk at the faculty party. If it were up to Sue all alcohol would be made illegal. Possibly cars as well.

  “Who they should be talking to are the DUIs in our town. Hannah Mulder and Peter Ray Osterberg . . .” Her eyes were roving over the crowd as if she expected to find our children’s killers here. Instead her gaze fixed on Sergeant McAffrey, who was standing next to the Dawsons.

  “You, Officer!” Sue demanded, heading toward the group. “Why aren’t you out looking for the monster who did this? Why aren’t you hauling in Hannah Mulder and Peter Ray Osterberg? Do you know that one third of all drivers arrested for DUIs are repeat offenders?”

  McAffrey turned toward Sue. “Those individuals no longer have driver’s licenses, ma’am,” McAffrey said.

  “So? Fifty to seventy-five percent of drunk drivers continue to drive on suspended licenses. They should be registered like sex offenders.”

  I saw Marie Dawson flinch at the words sex offender. A small crowd had been drawn by Sue’s rising voice. Ross leaned over and whispered something into Dottie’s ear and then Dottie approached Sue, put a hand on her arm, and whispered in her ear. Sue seemed to deflate, sinking into herself. Without anger pinking her cheeks, her skin was sallow and I could see dark rings under her eyes.

  I felt a surge of pity for Sue Bennet. She might seem like a crank right now, yelling at strangers, making a scene, but that was only because she’d thrown all her grief into this cause. Maybe I’d have been better off if I had done the same—if I’d channeled my grief, as Cressida had suggested, into writing a memoir or teaching at the prison. Only, I hadn’t wanted to make Emmy into a cause or memoir. I didn’t want Emmy’s face on the MADD website or the cover of a book. I just wanted her home. I started walking toward Sue but before I reached her I saw Kelsey Manning leaning in, whispering something in Sue’s ear. Sue listened, the color returning to her cheeks and the fire to her eyes. When she looked up she was staring right at me, all that grief and anger channeled at me.

  “Is this true, Nancy? Did you run over Leia Dawson and leave her for dead?”

  I heard Dottie gasp and saw Chad Dawson put a protective arm around his wife as if she was the one Sue was attacking.

  “No!” I cried. I looked around the crowd—past Cressida’s astonished look—until I found Ross and spoke directly to him. “I hit a deer last night. The police brought me in because of the damage to my car. That’s what I was trying to tell you before.”

  Ross held my gaze for a moment and I saw the same look of sadness and disappointment in his eyes that I’d seen last night when I accused him of denying me tenure because of a broken affair. But now as I looked at him I saw something else—the performer playing the role of able administrator. He turned from me and addressed Marie and Chad Dawson. “I’m very sorry,” he said, “if I had known I would have suggested that Professor Lewis refrain from attending the vigil to spare you this scene.”

  I felt the words like an icy blow to my stomach. I looked at the crowd, warm in the glow of the candlelight. Only I was standing outside in the cold. The only one who would meet my gaze was Dottie and she only mouthed the words: “Oh, Nan!”

  I turned away and walked out of the garden, the candlelit path a blur of runny lights like broken eggs. It was all I could do to keep from breaking into a run. I had the absurd notion that if I did the crowd would run after me like a pack of wild dogs smelling fear.

  I walked to the edge of campus, toward the river road and home. As I passed Ross’s house, I stared at it, shocked at how much had happened since I’d left the party yesterday, when I’d thought my biggest problem was not getting tenure. The old brick colonial looked peaceful with icicles hanging from its black trimm
ed eaves, the red barn garage positively pastoral against the unplowed snow. Ross hadn’t had time to dig out his driveway either, I noticed, although the barn door was partly ajar, wedged open by a drift of snow. The vintage Peugeot Citroën he kept in the barn wasn’t meant for driving in the snow anyway; he must have taken his Volvo, which he kept in a covered spot on campus, to the train station to pick up the Dawsons. The Volvo was his professorial car, he’d once said to me, the Peugeot the car of his salad days. The summer after Emmy died, and after Evan had moved out, it was the Peugeot we took west into the mountains, racing down dark, winding country roads as if we were plunging into a bottomless pool. I had been the one to end it at the end of the summer, because, I told him, I didn’t want to risk losing my job. He’d expressed disappointment, but now I thought that he’d have done it if I hadn’t. Our affair was part of those salad days he liked to relive with students around the fireside, like his days as an undergraduate at Harvard, or working at The New Yorker, or driving cross-country with On the Road in his back pocket. Our affair would have been partitioned off, just as he’d now sectioned me off into the “undesirable” category.

  I turned onto the river road, tears streaming down my face. Although there was still light filtering through the trees the road was dark, a tunnel between the snow-covered stone walls beneath a canopy of bare branches. The sun lit up the topmost branches, turning them into skeletal fingers. Dead fingers on a ghost road. I could no longer tell myself that it would be all right when they found the person who killed Leia. Not after I’d seen the looks on all those faces, all those eyes branding me a murderer. The thing was, I didn’t feel they were wrong. Wasn’t I a murderer? If not of Leia, then of Emmy, whom I’d let run down the hill and out onto the road while I was too busy—writing!—to watch her? The looks of sympathy all these years had always felt false. The damning looks I’d just gotten in the Peace Garden felt true.

  I walked on the side of the road, not caring if someone came and drove into me. Only when I reached Leia’s memorial did I stop. It had grown over the day, filling with candles and flowers and stuffed animals all but covering the daffodils that had turned brown in the cold.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, reaching past a candle to touch the dead flowers, not sure if I was talking to Leia or Emmy.

  As my hand brushed the cold glass I saw it wasn’t a candle but a bottle. A fifth of bourbon.

  I picked it up, shocked at the wrongness of it. The late-afternoon light caught the two inches at the bottom and the red roses painted on the glass. Four Roses bourbon. Hannah Mulder’s brand. I slipped it in my coat pocket, where it fit as if that’s where it had always belonged, and walked home.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Walking into my house did nothing to alleviate my sense of wrongness. In fact, the emptiness I felt inside seemed to swell at the sight of the stacks of papers and dirty glasses. I picked up a couple of glasses and brought them to the sink. Then I opened the cabinet to the right of the sink and took out the bottle of bourbon. As I took it down I remembered my resolution in the woods and the look on Anat’s face when she asked me how much I’d had to drink at the party. But I’d made that resolution before I knew that I had more to worry about than not getting tenure, and Anat hadn’t just had to face the entire town looking at her as if she were a murderer. I was pretty sure that if she had she would need a drink too.

  I rinsed one of the glasses, poured an inch of bourbon into it, and drank it in two gulps standing at the sink. There. That wasn’t so bad. I had no desire to drink more. I’d feed Oolong and then clean up—only, Oolong hadn’t come down to greet me. That was weird. Had even my old cat abandoned me? I called her name and went looking for her in the linen closet where she sometimes hid and then Emmy’s room on the off chance she’d gotten in there the last time I’d opened the door.

  She was curled up on Emmy’s bed, which was still made up with the Disney Princess sheets and comforter Emmy had demanded for her fourth birthday. I stood for a moment looking up at the Day-Glo stars Evan had painted on Emmy’s ceiling. They glowed in the dim light of the night-light, but more faintly than they had seven years ago, making me think of something Evan had liked to say when we met in college—how a star you saw in the night sky might have exploded a million years ago and you wouldn’t know it yet because of how long it took for light to travel from distant galaxies. Even then it had given me a chill. It was like knowing that the worst thing could have happened already but you didn’t know it yet. Like me sitting at my desk and hearing the screech of tires on the river road and not knowing that my life had just been blown to bits. It was that moment I always returned to in my dreams—that second of oblivion that had made me mistrust every moment of my life since.

  I went downstairs and started cleaning, tossing out folders, old handouts, blue books from last semester, then pizza boxes and Chinese take-out containers. I stacked the sink with glasses and teacups and the recycle bins with plastic water bottles and newspapers. I put away the bourbon bottle after pouring myself another modest inch and sipped it slower than the first drink. A drunk would have just knocked it back. I was pretty sure that Hannah Mulder wasn’t sipping her Four Roses.

  As I worked I kept repeating three words—daffodil, barrette, bottle—as if they made up a haiku I was memorizing for class. Who had left them there and why? The idea that the barrette was a sign from Emmy had pretty much been ruined by the Four Roses bottle.

  I left the desk under the window for last. I shelved the books and threw out old mail. I dusted the oak surface until it shined. Evan had bought this desk at a local antiques store when we moved into the house. “For your second novel,” he’d said, “and your third and your fourth.”

  We’d had such big plans for the future when we moved here. Evan and I had bought the house on the strength of my appointment at Acheron and because we both thought it was the perfect place to raise Emmy. A pretty farmhouse in the country surrounded by apple trees, it was like something out of a storybook. We would get a dog when Emmy was big enough and maybe even goats when Evan could move up full-time. The only drawback had been that Evan had to commute to the city for his job as a graphic designer at a PR firm, but we hoped that he could go freelance eventually and then he’d have time to illustrate the children’s books he wanted to write.

  The picture of the three of us living that life was so vivid in my mind—Evan at his slanted artist’s desk in the studio we’d build in the old barn, Emmy feeding the goats, me writing my novels at the desk with the view of the orchard—that I sometimes had to remind myself that our first winter had been nothing like that. It had been a struggle to keep up with my heavy teaching load, the new preps, and the sometimes less than cooperative students. Evan was always tired from commuting. The house itself was more work than either of us—both suburban kids—had anticipated. The roof leaked, there were mice in the basement and bats in the attic, the propane heater worked only sporadically, and the woodstove smoked. It didn’t help that it was one of the snowiest winters in decades. Evan pulled his back shoveling the driveway and Emmy slipped on the ice and broke her arm, which made her cranky and difficult. I certainly hadn’t had any time to write.

  It was only when the snow melted and the apple blossom trees bloomed and the end of the semester was in sight that I’d begun to feel that we would make it through. I’d been outside digging in the garden with Emmy when I’d gotten an idea. I’d gone inside just to jot down a note but then I’d sat down at my desk. Emmy was playing right outside the window. I could hear her singing a little made-up song while she dug in the dirt. . . .

  Evan believed the house had killed Emmy. I didn’t agree with that but I knew it had killed our marriage when Evan couldn’t stay in the house and I couldn’t leave it.

  I took out the stack of papers I’d picked up today and put them on the desk. Then I poured myself another inch of bourbon and sat down. The sky outside was a deep violet, the snow-covered lawn a sea of lavender and mauve with tidal pools o
f indigo. Down below I could make out the road, winding like a dark river between stone banks, a twin to the Hudson that flowed behind me on the west side of the house.

  “A perfect view for a writer,” the realtor had said when she showed us the house.

  I wouldn’t be writing tonight, though. I’d spend the night grading the last of my papers. Tomorrow I’d hand in my resignation. And then? Who knew? My future loomed as mysterious as the ghost river unspooling down there in the dark. Maybe that was why I had to sit here at the window tonight. I had the feeling I had to keep watch. Last night may have been the night that ghosts walked, but tonight felt like something—or someone—else was out there waiting.

  The chill from the window made me cold but rather than close the curtains I put on my coat. I started reading with a red pen in my hand to mark spelling and grammar errors but after a while I put it down and just read. I always told my students to dig deep. There was a quote from Margaret Atwood that I liked to read to them: “All writing is motivated deep down by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring someone or something back from the dead.” Many of them had made their journeys to their own personal hells in their stories. It felt callous to point out that a student had misspelled OxyContin in a story about how her father’s addiction had wrecked her family and left her homeless at fifteen. Even the structural comments that came to mind—did we need to read about every night the author’s father had come home drunk? Could he pick out one night to stand for them all?—felt beside the point.