Lutie pulled away first, didn’t look behind her at the car, rubbed her nose with a gloved hand, wished that she hadn’t a ghost in tow, because she didn’t want to hurt Sol. I don’t want to disappoint him. But Sol, now smiling quietly, not so widely that his teeth showed, wasn’t going to find out, she reminded herself. She was going to ditch this ghost, she just had to figure out how.
He was still leaning against the open door as she pulled out of the motel’s parking lot, framed by darkness, and he lifted his hand as they went, waving when he must have thought she wouldn’t see.
The radio remained off for the entire trip back, sun in his eyes the whole damn way, visor down, sunglasses on, flatlands mounding into hills eventually, every mile taken on the interstate, making good time. He exited the main highway at the airport, heading into Aurora just in time for rush hour.
Sol had avoided stopping along the way, mostly because he wanted to get back in time to have a decent sleep before his morning shift, but also because it was Tuesday, by his reckoning, and Robbie has just had a long weekend without him, no explanation. He’d found his phone under the motel room’s desk, but the battery was drained and damned if he’d brought any kind of recharger with him. He could have stopped somewhere, grabbed a coffee and used a pay phone, but he could barely walk and didn’t want to tempt fate. I could have phoned her. He’d be home soon enough, so what was the point?
The point? I’m chickenshit and I don’t want to be chewed out once over the phone, then when I get home. That’s the point.
The evening commute was complicated by a pile-up on the I-70, and as Sol inched past the clean-up crew, ambulances long gone, troopers directing traffic, he checked for ghosts, force of habit. Most days, he wasn’t above pulling over, asking the crew if they needed any further help, just so he could send some new ghosts on their way before they got too stuck. This time, though, there was nothing. Either no one had died or they’d died and gone. Nothing for him to do and he was glad for it, because no way would he have been able to make a deadroad, not today.
Jesus, I should just mind my own business.
He knew that Baz would probably sing all the way to Toronto and that Lutie would be regretting her decision to bring him right about the time they hit Chicago, but he figured that they’d work that out between them. It didn’t wear at him, the decision to do nothing. See, he told himself, I’m learning. Since traffic was bumper to bumper, wasn’t even inching forward at this point, Sol glanced at the photo Lutie had given him.
Aurie looked so young. They both did. They were. They had been. Younger than me now, there, Sol thought. I wonder if you knew what you were getting yourself into, old man? But he couldn’t ask questions like that and not drive himself crazy. Maman was so serious, grave. He remembered that about her, that it had been like pulling teeth to get her to laugh. Baz could do it. Baz had always been able to do it. At least one of us could. He put the photograph back on the passenger seat, tapped the steering wheel, imagining the feel of the doorknob in his hand, the shape of it.
Imagined coming home.
Once past the accident, traffic moved a little better, and he was going against the main stream of it anyway. He turned south again, sun now coming obliquely from the side window, orange over the Front Range, and he wound through the bungalow-lined streets, some garbage cans already at the curb for morning collection. He’d have to remember to bring out the trash, a physical chore that he’d be hard pressed to manage in his condition. Let it slide, Sarrazin. Some things you can let go. How he was going to function at work tomorrow was beyond him, and he had no idea what his shifts were past the next one, but he had the feeling that he’d agreed to a whole bunch in a row, maybe even a double shift to make up for the time off this last weekend. A desk for the next few days sounded pretty damn good, but not as good as his own bed.
The streetlights came on as he found parking and killed the engine. He sat for a moment, road vibration buzzing through his system like a drug. Move, he coached himself. Move and don’t seem all beat up, ‘cause Robbie’ll have a fit. He looked at his house: post-war bungalow, nothing special, buff clapboard, front door with three small rectangular windows descending like they were coming down a staircase. Patchy snow on the ground and the place had never seemed so precious and welcoming. The curtains were all drawn and the chainlink gate was ajar.
He opened his door and levered himself out, went to the back of the truck and retrieved the cardboard box of his father’s things, placed the photo on top. He shut and locked the Wagoneer, willed himself to walk—slowly, stiffly—up the path. Steps one by one and she would hear him now if she hadn’t before.
He held the storm door open with his body, key in hand, trying to figure out how to balance the box and turn the key at the same time. He wondered if he should ring the bell, get Robbie to open up, but that would be admitting his state, and he wasn’t quite ready to do that, to himself or to her. Necessity was the mother of invention: he pinned the box against the storm door with his hip, and got the key in the lock.
The knob was as he’d imagined it, felt good and right in his hand.
Just at the same time as he turned the knob and hefted the box back into his grasp, a small internal voice, distant and vaguely childlike, asked, Where’s the dog, Sol?
Where’s the dog, and the door swung open into darkness.
Carefully putting the cardboard box on the floor, Sol couldn’t disguise the moan of pain that caused him, but he knew he didn’t need to worry about being stoic for Robbie, because she wasn’t home. He clicked on the living room light. She’s taking him for a walk, he told himself in response. Not bothering with his boots, he took off his parka, made to throw it on the chair. He stopped himself mid-motion, because the chair wasn’t there. Robbie’s mid-century Danish armchair that she’d bought at a yard sale last year was gone.
He didn’t panic.
Instead, he dropped the parka on top of the box, shut the door behind him and collected himself, but his heart was going fast, too fast for this to be reasonable, for this to be normal. He could see the whole house from where he was, light from the living room illuminating the things missing, like he was looking at one of those kid’s puzzles in a magazine: Can you spot five differences between the two pictures?
There were more than five changes between what Sol had left and what he’d come back to. Gone: the Danish chair, Renard’s bowls, the vintage toaster that didn’t work but that looked fantastic, photos of her nieces and nephews on the mantelpiece. Slowly, he surveyed the rest of the house, looking for that which was not there. From the closet in their bedroom: all her clothes, all her shoes. The kitchen: a bag of dog food, the fancy muesli she liked for breakfast, a half-empty box of chocolates a friend had given her for Christmas and that he’d been forbidden from touching. The bathroom: her perfume, the box of cotton balls, her toothbrush, a package of tampons, the contents of two drawers where she kept her hairclips, hairspray, brushes, makeup. All of it.
After a half hour, Sol came back to the living room. He’d found evidence of her—a sweater that she’d missed, huddled in with his, a stocking in the dirty laundry basket. He didn’t bother disguising his limp now, but before he sank into the chair at the kitchen table—he’d bought that on his own, he remembered, twenty bucks from a firefighter moving out of state—he grabbed the bottle of rum from the top shelf, took down a chipped mug from the cupboard. Three mugs, neatly divided because there had been six and Sol couldn’t remember when they’d come into the house and maybe Robbie hadn’t been able to remember either.
He poured himself half a mug, took an enormous mouthful. On the table was a folded piece of paper, her hand naming him on the outside fold, loop and loop of the ‘S’ curved like a river going nowhere. He didn’t touch her note, left it exactly where it was. The only reason the letter wasn’t a ring was because he hadn’t given her a ring. The only ring he had made was around her, circling without landing.
He had come home, in the end,
and it was nothing like he’d imagined.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Fittingly enough, this all started in a bar. I first heard Barde’s version of the traditional folksong Les trois hommes noirs at the University of Victoria’s pub; the tune haunted me and haunts this story.
It’s impossible to write about heading west and catching out without tipping my hat to Kerouac’s On the Road, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Richard Grant’s American Nomads, all of which shine a light about what it means to belong and the need to get lost.
Huge bisous to Marilou Gosselin for minding my wayward Franglais and to Suzanne Hicks in Lafayette for sharing with me the finer points of modern Cajun. Gillian Cross guided me through stab wounds, cardiac arrests and EMT party tricks. Christina Pilz became my eyes on the ground in Denver and Nebraska. Sandi and Dennis Jones made me feel like I was a writer. Joy Temple gave me beer and an ear when I needed it. Celine Kiernan set the bar higher. But mostly, my Eeyore and my Tigger, Janice Morrison and Elizabeth Sisson, who cheer, weep and berate. All that is right is theirs; all mistakes are mine.
My agent Sandy Lu kept spirits from flagging and believed in Deadroads even when I thought it was officially a lost cause. Ross E. Lockhart and Cory Allyn guided the manuscript down the messy corridors of publication with humor and aplomb.
I keep a foot in two worlds, and without my wonderful families on both sides of the adoption divide, I couldn’t have written of familial fractures and delicate rapprochements with any sense of veracity. I thank them for their openess.
Finally and always, Genevieve, Charlie, and beloved Aaron never doubted I could.
Photo credit: Lizz Sisson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Ottawa and raised on Canada’s west coast, Robin Riopelle’s life has been marked by adoption, separation, and reunion. Like many of her characters, she has a muddy past, and a foot in (at least) two different worlds. She’s always had interesting work in museums and social service agencies. Some things she has done while collecting a paycheck:
•told unsuspecting people the whereabouts of a long-lost family member,
•go-go danced in front of 700 people,
•traipsed across a wind-whipped hospital rooftop with a nun,
•lost a frozen beaver head under a parked car.
Robin Riopelle is the author’s birthname. She currently lives on the border between French and English Canada with her criminologist husband, two seemingly delightful children, and an obstreperous spaniel.
In addition to writing fiction for adults, Riopelle also illustrates children’s books. Deadroads is her first novel.
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