From Away

by David Carkeet

  To reduce the chance of a career-ending error, Denny conducted research. Every closet, cabinet, and drawer was an archive labeled “Who Is Homer?” The bookcases in the spare bedroom showed not just what Homer had read but where he had gone to college, for some still contained store receipts from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Homer seemed fond of history, American especially, with an emphasis on slavery. One book on the shelf, a transportation history, was familiar to Denny. He took it down, went to the railroad chapter, quickly tracked down the page he wanted, and entered a correction of an erroneous date.

  On the top closet shelf were board games to enliven the farmhouse on winter evenings—Monopoly, Sorry, Clue, Scrabble, Boggle. A Yahtzee box filled with used scorecards showed names Denny didn’t recognize, along with Homer’s. The closet also housed boxed sets of ancient television series. Denny watched segments of The Mitch Miller Show, Your Hit Parade, and Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. He danced to Lawrence Welk’s music—his mother had been known as “The Dancing Clown,” especially after her injury, when she took her act in a new direction, and she had taught him all her moves. He enjoyed The Glenn Miller Story and The Benny Goodman Story, but he stared in disbelief at love stories like David and Lisa, Dr. Zhivago, Roman Holiday, A Man and a Woman, and Love Story itself. The overriding emotion he felt was embarrassment that Homer was such a sap.

  On the closet doorjamb of the spare bedroom he learned Homer’s probable adult height—the last pencilled line of a series plotting his growth, birthday by birthday. The record ended at age seventeen, when Homer was 5’11”, an inch shorter than Denny’s present height. In the medicine cabinet of the bathroom off Homer’s current bedroom, he discovered something that gave him a jolt: a half-full box of Accu-Chek lancets and a warranty sheet for a blood glucose monitor. Homer was a diabetic! Denny wished he had known this earlier. What diabetic would eat sweets the way he did? But even this blunder had not betrayed him. The chin that Sarah had thrust at him in reaction didn’t mean, “You’re not Homer.” It meant, “Go ahead and kill yourself—see if I care.”

  Homer’s workshop was all tools and gun racks and business files. The files helped in an initiative Denny undertook after a former customer left a phone message about a possible repair. Denny culled email addresses from Homer’s records and created a group list, adding to it addresses from customers who had sent Homer business-related emails early in his three-year absence, thinking he was still home. To this group of nearly 150 recipients, using Homer’s email account, Denny sent warm thanks for their business in the past and an announcement that owing to “personal problems” he had no immediate plans to re-open his repair shop. He included Sarah in the mailing, having gotten her address from some terse messages she had sent Homer in those first days after he disappeared. Consistent with her policy to date, after the email went out, she expressed no curiosity whatsoever about his “personal problems.” Somewhat to his surprise, neither did anyone else.

  There was Betsy to deal with too, who had been a model of patience. Denny finally called her at the hotel to give her the first of his promised updates on her nephew’s status. He said that Homer was doing well, he was getting his house organized, and he had taken up model railroading. Denny was surprised to hear himself add this last spontaneous fabrication to his otherwise bland, prepared summary. “Hmph,” she said. “He’s playing with little trains instead of visiting me?” Denny protested that the avocation had a strong historical base, but she interrupted him and asked if he, Denny, had been in touch with the police yet.

  “No,” he said guardedly. “I’m still on the road.”

  “Then I have some sad news that you might not have heard.” She told him about the discovery of Marge’s body and the likelihood that she had fallen from the balcony after all. Denny made appropriate noises. Betsy said, “It’s very sad. I shall always think of you as Marge’s last fling, Mr. Braintree. She didn’t have much happiness in her life. I hope she had some with you.”

  “I think she enjoyed the Jacuzzi.”

  Betsy chuckled, though Denny had intended no humor. After a pause, she said, “Mr. Braintree, about my Homer—did he ever tell you what has weighed on him all these years?”

  Denny went on alert. “No, he didn’t.” Did she know, or was she hoping to learn it from him?

  After another pause, she said, “Tell him I’ll give him a few more days, and if he doesn’t come down here, I’m going up there, Sarah or no Sarah. Tell him that.”

  “Will do, Betsy.” She had spoken with a force that made argument pointless.

  Shortly after noon that same day, a mild Sunday, Denny was perusing Homer’s old tax returns when he heard Sarah shout an order for him to meet her at John and Rodrigo’s at 3 o’clock. This was followed by a slam of the front door. He waited for the familiar punishing roar of her car engine, but instead he heard a shriek and a curse. By the time he reached the front window, she was emerging from the workshop with a skimming net attached to a long aluminum pole. She stomped down to the pond, which was now completely clear of ice, and began to scoop out chunks of something and heave them backwards over her shoulder. She catapulted whatever it was—unwanted vegetation?—into the field, but then, apparently having a better idea, she aimed for the road below the pond and managed to reach it with most of her throws. When she was done, she tossed the pole aside, walked to her car, spit once on the ground, and drove off.

  Denny put on a sweater and walked down to the pond. Well before he reached it, as he picked his way through the muddy field, he saw what she had done. She had killed the fuckers. They were frogs—mating frogs, some still connected even in death. The ones that had been following their urges at the center of the pond, out of her reach, had been spared, and several of these had since drifted shoreward, and not just in pairs. Groups of three and four were linked in thrashing watery orgies. They were all doing what they were meant to do, and they were happy. Denny knew this as certainly as if he had grown up a member of their colony. He also guessed it from their upbeat chirping noises. He spent the next half-hour combing the field, still soft from snow melt, scooping up stunned survivors with his hands, and returning them to the pond. The ones who had hit the hard road surface were goners. When he had saved all that he could, he picked up the net—Sarah had left it by the pond, doubtless for a follow-up massacre—and he carried it down the hill into the woods, where he tossed it out of view. She would think it had been stolen. It could happen, even in Vermont.

  Back inside, Denny went right to Sarah’s office. He stood in the doorway and surveyed it. A fake-wood corner station housed Sarah’s desktop computer, printer, and fax machine. Long, folding tables covered with forms, brochures, and CDs stood against adjoining walls. A metal filing cabinet was next to the closet door. The walls were bare. He had come to the room with the intention of getting to the bottom of Sarah, of solving her once and for all, but he realized he was already there. He understood her as well as he would ever want to.

  Something about the room was strange. It was joyless in every respect but its color—a pastel blue on the walls and an even softer blue on the ceiling. It was the room of a girl. Denny had an idea and went to the closet door. There on the jamb were the same kinds of markings that plotted Homer’s growth on the closet door of his childhood bedroom, horizontal lines identified by date and age. These pairings trailed well behind Homer’s, and the last age entered was an “8.” Denny had another thought and went to the closet in the spare bedroom, the one containing the old board games. The Yahtzee scorecards showed several names, but only two with consistency. “Homer”—in a child’s print—regularly defeated “Amelia.” The girl did win a few games, and those scorecards were decorated with light blue stars. Across one card giving Homer the victory was scrawled, “Homer cheated!!!”

  Denny pulled down the other boxes but found no other scorecards. One, a faded game box labeled “Hurry Home,” contained not a game but handwritten letters, all signed, “Hanno.” A few postmar
ked envelopes were in the box as well, addressed to Erlangen, Germany. Denny ran his eye down a few of the letters, observed the diary-like nature of the record, and saw what they were—letters home, written by an exchange student who lived at Little Dumpling Farm for the 1987-88 school year. A quick calculation told Denny that that would have been Homer’s senior year of high school. The letters were in English, perhaps so that Hanno could show off to his German family.

  Denny set the box on the bed and began to sort the letters. When he had them in chronological order, he read them from beginning to end. They told of school sports—Hanno was not modest about his role in the school’s soccer victories—Homer’s musical skill, and little Amelia’s antics on the backyard trampoline (“So komisch!” he wrote, opting for German at unpredictable intervals). The letters compared Vermont and Bavarian farm economies and animal husbandry in more detail than Denny would have wished. They marched through the seasons in the rural northeast, describing the leaves of fall, small-town trick-or-treating, Thanksgiving (“turkey and pumpkin pie—das schmeckt!”), Christmas caroling, skiing, maple sugaring, mud season, the Washington County Fair held on the farm grounds, and the approach of a sad summer farewell. His last letter home concluded, “I shall never forget these genuine, sympathetic people of the land!” Hanno was an exclaimer!

  When Denny reached the last letter he realized it was of a different order. Dated April of the year following Hanno’s stay with the family, it showed an Erlangen, Germany, address as its point of origin, whereas all of the other letters originated from Little Dumpling Farm. This one was an expression of condolence to Homer’s family. Hanno thanked Homer’s father for taking the time to telephone him with “the tragic news.” The letter did not identify the news, but Denny knew what it was—knew it as certainly as if he had received the phone call. Hanno went on to say that he was sending them all of the letters he had written home as an exchange student. “These letters are a treasure to me,” he wrote, “for they tell of a golden age of contentment as I dwelt in a family of perfect love.” Hanno seemed to need to sacrifice something of his own that was precious to him to show that he shared in the family’s grief.

  Denny got up and again examined the dates next to the lines charting Homer’s growth. Then he went back to Amelia’s marks and dates. Homer would have been eighteen years old at the time of her death, in his first year of college. Denny imagined him, away from home, receiving the phone call too.

  He wandered the house. It felt different now that he knew the family had lost a young child. He felt different as well—illprepared, unqualified to fake this side of Homer. Luckily, it hadn’t come up so far. Nor did it seem likely that it would, not just because it had happened some twenty years ago, but because the house contained no trace of Amelia. Just some marks on a doorjamb in a pastel blue room.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE STREET CLIMBED STEEPLY FROM THE HEART OF TOWN, AND Denny had the feeling that the Rambler might flip over on its back. One switchback was so severe that if he had been driving a very flexible train, the passengers could have high-fived out their coach windows. The road finally leveled, and, working from the invitation he had filched from Sarah’s desk that morning, he followed the street numbers to John and Rodrigo’s—a yellow clapboard house perched on the hillside.

  Sarah stood near the front door and stared at him without expression. He drove by, looking for a place to pull over, and suddenly found a two-car gap in the long line of parked cars. As he eased into it, he heard a “No” loud enough to reach him through his closed window. The speaker, a woman standing on her front porch, shook her head at him with a frown. A sign above her garage read “Take Back Vermont,” and she evidently meant to take back this parcel in front of her house. He drove on to the end of the line. As he walked past the woman’s house, he found her delivering the same loud message to two women who had pulled their Subaru into the forbidden spot. One of the two—the passenger—was rolling down her window to engage the homeowner, but the driver restrained her, presumably acting in the spirit of her bumper sticker, “Vermont: Keep It Civil.”

  When Denny reached John and Rodrigo’s, Sarah turned and went in ahead of him. She walked briskly between two tall men in the living room, interrupting their conversation and making them stagger back and look at each other with surprise. One said to the other, “Ai-duh,” and they laughed. But when they spotted Denny, they sobered up.

  Denny spoke first. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s going well, Homer,” one of them said guardedly. Denny kept moving. Where had Sarah gone? As he navigated through handshakes, claps on the back, and punches on the arm, he used his quest for her as an excuse to avoid conversation. More than one old friend expressed a desire to “catch up,” but without sufficient urgency to slow him. Denny worked his way to the kitchen at the back of the house, opened a sliding screen door, and stepped out onto a large wooden deck that boomed with conversation. Seventy or eighty people seemed to be talking all at once. Denny’s eyes went from group to group. It was a vast social complex, staggering to contemplate. If he could get through this party, he could get through anything. He could be Homer forever.

  A man to the right was talking about color balancing. A woman to the left was excited about her new kiln. Someone said “open studio weekend.” The words “artisanal cheese” floated his way. In the middle of the deck, looking bored in a group of four people, stood Nick. He brightened and gave Denny a wave, which made Millie turn and half-smile in greeting. Denny took a step toward them, but a golden-skinned man with a round, shaved head bore down on him, his arms stretched wide for a special Homer hug. At the last instant, however, the man opted for a handshake. “Good old Homer,” he said. “If I had known you were going to disappear for so long, I would have been nicer to you last time.” The man’s skin was a lovely tone that Denny had never seen on flesh before. His rounded head looked like a honey-flavored Tootsie Roll Pop. “I was a poor host. I barely talked to you at all, and then—shazam! You disappeared. I’ll make it up to you today, promise. Actually, when we heard you were back, we decided to give this year’s party two themes—‘Goodbye, Winter,’ and ‘Hello, Homer.’ John even got a banner.”

  Denny looked around, overhead, into the trees. “Where is it?”

  The host—Rodrigo, certainly—pressed his lips together. “It got kiboshed. Sarah said you wouldn’t want a fuss to be made over you. I told her she was just jealous. She didn’t like that, I could tell.” Rodrigo gave Denny a wild-eyed look, which seemed to make his dome shine more brightly. A group of people emerged from the kitchen, and he called out, “If you’re looking for John, he’s over on the Manchurian Candidate couch.” Denny’s eyes followed the direction he had indicated. One of the men on the swinging couch, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a black ponytail, looked familiar. So did the couch. “I’ve got to pull something from the oven. We’ll catch up later, Homer. I insist on it.”

  Denny watched him go, then looked around. He had been here before—not in the flesh, but as a viewer, when he had watched the videotapes at Homer’s. This was the same cedar deck that Homer, on all fours, had been forced to admire by the other homeowner, John, who was now seated on the ugly floral couch. Honey-domed Rodrigo had been behind the camera at the time—he remembered Sarah, on that very same couch, using Rodrigo’s name when he had filmed her. He also remembered that there had been dancing in a meadow at the end of the party. Where did that happen? He walked across the deck. What he saw over the railing was more like the opposite of a meadow. A sheer cliff dropped almost vertically to the town below.

  From this perspective, two or three hundred feet above the rooftops, Montpelier looked more than ever like a toy town. Denny gazed down one street, then another, assessing its realism. He admired the accuracy of positioning, the triumph of forced perspective, the surprising elements like the empty lot with an old concrete foundation in it—what a good idea! He liked it that the people on the sidewalks were moving.

 
; “Tempted to jump?”

  Denny turned to his lipophobic nemesis. Lance’s body-hugging black turtleneck flowed so seamlessly into his ski pants that it might have been a one-piece outfit. He joined Denny at the railing.

  Lance said, “I guess falling bodies are on my mind.” He pointed along the face of the cliff. “You can see your aunt’s hotel from here.” Denny leaned over the railing and saw the Ethan Allen, about three blocks distant and partly obscured by foliage. “You have a special room there, I understand.”

  “My cubby.”

  Lance flickered a sneer, as fleeting as an eye blink. “Betsy showed me. It seems strange that you would ever want to sleep there. You’ve got that big farm. All that land.”

  Denny said nothing.

  “Do you think you don’t deserve what you have, Homer? Do you have a low opinion of yourself? I would understand if you do.”

  As Denny pretended to ponder the question, he spotted Sarah working her way toward them without looking at them. She touched and greeted several people as she passed them. One of them tried to return her greeting, but she had breezed on by.

  “I ask,” Lance went on, “because I can’t see any other reason why you would want to sleep in that little room.”

  Where was he going with this? What did it have to do with Marge?

  “Hey, Homer,” a man in a cap and overalls yelled from a group farther down the railing. His hands were oversized. He seemed out of place in this crowd. An artist’s spouse, Denny guessed. “Edgar and Rose still runnin’ those Scottish Highlanders?”

  “Kilts and all!” Denny answered. The man guffawed and returned his attention to his group.

  “The old Homer humor,” Lance said wearily. “Actually, I think it’s pretty lame.”

  “So do I.”

  Lance’s surprise was cut short by the arrival of Nick and Millie. “Damn, Lance,” Nick said, “Millie says I never go to a party unless I know a cop is going to be there. Tell her I didn’t know your sorry ass was invited.” Instead of waiting for a response, Nick reached an arm behind Denny. “Homer, I don’t like the way you’re standing so close to that railing—just take a step or two this way, will you?”