“Take a ride with me?” A bead of perspiration clings to his temple.
“Right now?”
He nods.
“Let me get my bag and lock up the back door.”
She goes upstairs and changes into faded denim skinnies and a camisole with a light jacket. When she adds a touch of makeup, she catches a glimpse out the window of Jason in the front yard with Madison. He smokes a cigarette and is talking with the dog standing at perfect German Shepherd attention near his feet.
Maris grabs her purse knowing the twists and turns of this day are about to bring her into his world. At the top of the stairs, she turns and runs back to her bedroom to take off the diamond ring, then grabs her leather sandals. Downstairs, she sits on the porch to slip them on, noticing that Jason had finished off her glass of wine.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I want to explain myself to you.” Jason’s attention stays focused on the highway, though he seems very much aware of her, adjusting the air conditioning and glancing at her every move. “When I saw you at the mass this morning,” he continues, “I knew I had to explain things before you left here.” He passes a slower car in front of them, then opens his window a little. “But I’m not really sure how to do this.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m sorry about this morning, at the church. I wasn’t walking out on you, or on Paige. Jesus, Paige stood by me all the way to hell and back. I just needed to compose myself.” He pauses while checking the rearview mirror, then glances at her again. “I want you to stay, Maris. In Connecticut. In my life. But you have to know my story first, and the best way to tell it is to bring you there.”
“And where would that be?”
“The scene of the accident. There’s more to it than you’re aware of. More than anyone’s aware of, except my sister. You have to understand my leg, and my face, and what I see when I look at the scars. There are others, too. Road burns did a good job of ripping up my back.”
As they drive inland, the highway hugs the Connecticut River on the east. Pleasure boats drift about and the river’s ripples sparkle silver beneath the afternoon sun. The road curves along with the river while to the west, the towns grow more congested.
“Paige has arranged an anniversary mass for Neil every year since he died.” Jason drives at a steady pace, using his signal and passing cars infrequently. As he nears his destination, though, she notices the vehicle slows up. “And every year, it takes more and more out of me.”
The town of Addison lies on the outskirts of Hartford. Developers have filled the old farmland with tracts of colonials, sprawling ranches and contemporaries in the south end of town. The central and north end hold the older real estate, the large homes set back off the streets under the umbrella of stately oaks and maples.
Maris grew up, after her mother’s death, in Olde Addison in the historic district near the cove. The presence of water always soothed her, even here. The cove forms a little inlet, a thick comma off the Connecticut River that local residents use as a boat ramp and as a permanent summer docking for larger pleasure boats. It is a pretty little area, surrounded by woods on two sides with a large old barn and colonial homes gracing its entranceway. Patches of green grass spread out around weathered picnic tables. It’s a nice place to have a sandwich and watch the boats docked on the silver expanse of water.
Under different circumstances, Maris would have mentioned all of this to Jason. She would have suggested that they sit at a table and look at the boats for a while.
Now he drives west out of Olde Addison on streets nearly deserted and quiet in the summer heat, except for the occasional drone of a lawn mower. They pass older Federals and English Tudors with deep lawns, then a newer, close development, until they turn onto the Turnpike. There are no trees there, no summer lawns to soothe the eye with cool colors, only warehouse stores and fast-food restaurants and simmering parking lots. Less than a mile before Hartford, the vehicle slows as Jason pulls into the breakdown lane, then carefully off onto the shoulder of the road. A traffic light hangs ahead of them, with the city line a few blocks further. He opens both windows and kills the engine before sitting back with an uneasy sigh. To their left, a large cemetery covers a sloping hill, and to their right, on the other side of a swath of roadside brush, beyond an immense parking lot, a strip mall houses a grocery store, discount store and other small shops.
Jason sets his sunglasses on the dash. “This is where my brother died.”
“Here?” Maris had lived away since high school and had no idea the accident occurred just outside her hometown. “Right here?”
“Past the light there.” Jason looks at the road beyond the traffic signal. “Not in a hospital bed, or even on an ambulance stretcher where someone could have helped him, or comforted him at the end. No one wiped his face or told him it would be okay. He died alone on the street.” He unknots his loosened tie and pulls it slowly from his collar. Even on this scrubby patch of turnpike, birdsong comes in the windows. Maris takes the tie from him and neatly folds it while he looks outside. She turns and sets it on the back seat.
“We were on his bike that day. A Harley Neil bought a couple years earlier. He didn’t even ride it much, just a little bit in the warm weather. It was more a conversation piece than anything else.”
A few cars approach, and he waits till they drive past and the quiet returns before continuing. “Neil needed a part from the bike shop further back on the Turnpike. It was one of those hot days when nothing’s doing, so I went along for the ride. We drove up on the back roads from the beach.” He checks his mirrors and glances out at the pavement. “The back roads were cooler than the highway. Lots of shade. Less traffic.”
Jason leans forward then, resting his arms over the top of the steering wheel. Maris thinks that his small details are his way of painting the picture of the whole day instead of just a picture of death. It seems the only way to get through that day, today, right now, or he might never get out of it.
“We were at the bike shop for about an hour and decided to go to The Elm Café for a grinder, maybe a beer. You know, hang out awhile, shoot the shit. It’s in the south end.” He turns to Maris. “Have you ever been there, The Elm Café?”
“A few times.”
He nods, as though satisfied that she is following his journey to the accident. “We figured we’d drive down the Turnpike,” he continues, his voice low, “and turn off up ahead there.” He points to a further intersection where the Turnpike comes to an end at the Hartford line.
“The thing is, when we left the bike shop, Neil tossed me the keys. Just turned around and said You drive. I never forget that, the way I grabbed them right from the air. I see them, I hear them jangling like it happened yesterday. It’s funny how you remember random things like that.”
The occasional car that passes them now seems out of place. Jason is taking her somewhere inaccessible to anyone else, where their lives pause while the rest of the world goes on normally around them. For him, that has been a long reality. He’d paused right here on this strip of road for seven years now.
“So I drove his Harley down this road and we stopped at that light there.” He nods toward the traffic light in front of them, his hands still resting on the top of the steering wheel. “The light was red and we were waiting for it to turn green. There were no cars in front of us, no one behind us. It was quiet, with just the bike idling.” He pauses. “We sat there for a single minute like that. But that minute, Jesus. It was the last minute of his life.”
His eyes squint then and Maris sees how easily it happens. How that day lives inside him, just waiting for any cue to begin again and again and again. Watching him tell it is the same as standing on the side of that dry, scrubby pavement seven years ago, the heat beating down on the blacktop, the sun mercilessly blinding, the air warm and heavy. Everything about the day, relentless still.
He wore a black tee, dusty Levi’s, construction boots on his legs straddling the bike
, keeping balance, dark sunglasses in the bright sunlight as he waited for the light to change, glancing down at the bike gauges. Neil sat hitched behind him wearing sunglasses, his hair a mess.
Jay. Neil’s arm reached forward, pointing to the mirror. Hey Jay.
He saw it then, coming up behind them. He’d never seen a car move that fast, so fast that it took a second to register that the growing shape was, in fact, a car.
A whirlpool of roaring grew louder and rose up, overtaking and spinning around them, deafening their ears to anything else. And he knew, he just knew, that engine headed straight at them was fully opened. Every bit of breathing, of pulse, of strength, went into heaving five hundred pounds of bike a few feet over. Every molecule and atom re-formed to drench every bit of his skin while burning every muscle. Time grew greedy, taking all of it and giving it to the terror behind them, leaving them not even one second to ditch the bike and run for cover.
The sunlight turned white then, pure glaring white as Jason took the force of his brother’s weight fully on his back, the impact bending him over enough that Neil’s body flowed like a wave over his head and shoulders, and without him there to bear his brother’s weight, without his resistance, the body was airborne. But that pressure on his back, it stayed, as though Neil were holding on. It was still there as the world went suddenly silent, all sound muted, unable to keep up with the motion that would not stop, that spun the bike incessantly, Jason feeling his jeans hooked onto something twisting up his leg, keeping him attached to the machine. Afterward, he would always know that sight and sound ceased working in the heat of violence. Because a soundless ripping burned through his leg, a flame of pain with no direction to take so it took it all, before that bike released his leg and flung him across the pavement off to meet the brush growing wild on the side of the road. Then, nothing.
“And I wake up,” Jason is saying as Maris listens to the story. “Now. In the middle of the night sometimes, because I hear that same absolute quiet in my sleep and I’m on this road again.”
She shakes her head no.
“See, my only escape is sleep,” he continues, “but then I can’t sleep because I think over all the choices I made that day.” His voice grows nearly inaudible. “And I wonder if there wasn’t a moment when I could have changed it, so I wouldn’t have killed my brother.”
Maris closes her eyes. “No, no, no,” she whispers. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“No? Neil let me drive and I didn’t even see the car coming. What the hell was I doing? He saw it before I did.” His open hand hits the steering wheel hard. “When I think that he died because we were short a few seconds, it makes me sick. If I’d been watching my mirrors, my brother could still be here. Everything changed in twenty seconds.”
“No, it was a freak accident.” She looks from the road to him. “Why are you punishing yourself? You did the best you could under a horrifying circumstance.” She pauses, not knowing if she should say what else she thinks, not knowing how he will take it. How angry he will get. But he has to know it means something, means everything, to her. She reaches for him, turning his head to face her. “And you survived,” she insists.
“That’s right. I did.” He fights the grief then, she hears it. “And my brother died right there on the blacktop. He didn’t deserve that, nobody does. He looked up to me and I didn’t come through for him. And you ask why I’m punishing myself? I don’t know. Why was I driving? Why did Neil give me the keys? What made it him instead of me that day?” He sits back and drags his hand over his eyes. “He needed me. Oh Christ, it’s just too much, Maris.”
“Listen. Listen, you’ve got to stop blaming yourself. You’ve got to let that go.”
“But if I let go, he’s gone.”
There it is. His fear is of losing Neil completely. This is how he keeps him alive. “Jason, Neil will always be a part of you. In your memories, in your heart. Come on, he’s in all your designs. And as sad as it all is, everything happens for a reason. So something came out of that accident that you’re not seeing and can put it all to rest for you.”
Jason looks out the window at the road. “I don’t think so.”
“Stop it,” she says, her voice rising. “Just stop it and don’t you give up. Listen, you’re here where Neil died, looking for answers still.”
He turns and watches her and she sees his defiance, the look that says she can’t change this. “So let’s say Neil drove the bike that day. Neil was in control.”
Jason nods almost imperceptibly.
“Okay. Okay, so see? He would drive down the Turnpike the same way you did, but there would be little differences. Maybe he’d arrive here a few seconds later than you did. And the bike would be positioned differently than when you drove it. And with that car coming out of nowhere,” she pauses for a moment, “maybe you’d both be dead today.”
“Would it really make a difference?”
Her eyes sting with quick tears and she turns and reaches for the door handle, struggling with it for a second before pushing the door open and nearly spilling out. Just as quickly, Jason lunges toward her and grabs her arm.
“Maris, please.”
“No, no you please. You please!” Tears streak her face and she turns to get out of the SUV. She’ll walk home if she has to, she is so angry. Why doesn’t he see it? She struggles, but he holds tighter, his other arm reaching around her and turning her back to him. “God Jason,” she cries. “Would it make a difference? Those beautiful beach cottages would never be restored. Your sister’s children would’ve lost both uncles. Your beach house would be sold, your father’s barn torn down. Your parents … ” She smiles sadly. “I would never have ridden the carousel.”
“Okay,” he says, then reaches past her and closes her door. “Okay.”
“And you wouldn’t be in my life this summer.” She waits then as a few cars pass them, the radio blaring in one. “Don’t you see how your life moves with others? We’re all connected, you know? Didn’t Neil ever explain that to you?”
“Explain what?”
“The driftline. On the beach?”
He looks at her and shakes his head.
“Sometimes you have to be on the outside looking in to see things clearly,” Maris goes on, quieter now. “I am on the outside, and the answer you’re looking for is right in front of you.” She turns in her seat, facing him, reaching her hand to the side of his face for just a moment. “Your brother loved you so much. And if he saw how you’ve come down on yourself, loading your head up with guilt and conscience and whatever, wasting your life, he’d be really pissed off. And he’d let you know it, too.” She leans close, grabbing his arm with a small shake. “He’s gone, but he wants you to live. Don’t you see it?”
“No, I don’t.”
She studies his still face, his eyes. “The keys, Jason. The keys. You know how sometimes you get a sense of something that is about to happen, just for a flash of a second? Maybe that the phone will ring, or the car break down. Well when he tossed you the keys, which was not random, he must have known in some way. He handed you your life.” Tears streak her face again. “He knew. You’re alive because of Neil,” she insists. “Alive. So let your brother go, and live, Jason. That’s what he would want. You know he would.”
Maris is surprised at how her chest fills, how her lungs drag in breaths. The bike might as well lay twisted on the road in front of her. Sirens might as well be screaming, blood might as well be staining the pavement. She is with Jason completely, comforting him at the crash. “Just live,” she pleads.
Jason looks long at Maris before slipping out of his suit jacket with agitation, pushing open the door and stepping outside, standing motionless, not sure what to do, where to go. The air shimmers with heat; dry grass snaps beneath his shoes in the slow steps to the edge of the road. Standing at the hot, black pavement, he crouches down, his arms resting on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him. He becomes unusually aware of his prosthesis in this positi
on and though he wears a special sock where it attaches to his leg, the skin there is soaked with perspiration.
Warm minutes tick by on the roadside and every emotion pumps through his heart. Anger. Loneliness. Grief. He came to his brother’s deathbed looking for answers, for some way to let go, and it is happening because there is something else now. Someone else.
Still crouching, Jason bows his head and closes his eyes with this goodbye. In time, how much he doesn’t know, her hand rests on his shoulder. He reaches his own hand up and presses it over hers. She gives him a small smile when he rises to his feet, his shirt wet with perspiration, his face wet with emotion.
“Come here.” When he reaches for Maris, she steps close and he holds her face with his hands and presses his lips to her forehead. She is the here and now and he will not let go, not of today, not of tomorrow.
She pulls back and looks at him, her fingers touching his face, lighting on his scar. “You okay?” she asks.
Jason nods and slips his arm around her, walking her through the dry grass back to the SUV. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am. I’m tired, and have to sit down somewhere quiet.”
He closes the door for her as she settles back into her seat, then walks around to the driver’s side, wiping his face and giving a salute to the road before opening his door. Maris reaches for his hand as he pulls into traffic and drives away.
Chapter Twenty-Five
In Hartford’s Little Italy, they walk a few blocks past brick-front bakeries, pizzerias and clothing boutiques with racks of boho clothes set up outdoors. Tables spill from cafés under the shade of sloping canopies. Local markets sell fresh produce, peppers and spinach pies. Three-story tenements, their small lawns manicured, shrubs trimmed just so, line the side streets. Finally they turn into Bella’s, into its dim interior, its aroma of lasagna and fresh baked bread, its quiet.
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