The cats, he saw, were asleep by the woodstove.
He squatted briefly beside Alfred and patted the boy on his shoulder, and then collapsed on the couch beside Laura. He kissed her on her cheek, but she didn't offer him even a trace of a smile. He realized he was in for a pretty chilly night if only because he was so late, and he knew he deserved it. Still, the idea didn't bother him the way it would have once, and as he sat back against the pillows, he tried to understand why. Was it simply because he'd already had sex that day, so he didn't care whether he got lucky or not? No, of course not, he wasn't that driven by hormones and need. At least he hoped he wasn't. But if that wasn't it, then what was it? Was he really falling so completely out of love with this woman he'd married--this woman beside him right now--that he didn't give a damn that she was pissed at him? In some ways, that would actually be considerably worse.
The truth was, she'd been pretty cold to him for a couple of days now. He didn't believe Alfred had said anything to her about the conversation they had Monday morning--certainly he hadn't as of Monday night when he spent some time with the boy and made sure that every single canned peach and Twinkie was right back where it belonged--but he couldn't be sure.
He turned from the television to look at Laura, aware that he hadn't a clue what they were watching. He saw that Laura was already staring at him, and he tried to read exactly how angry she was by her face. Very, he decided, and he started to speak:
You should have seen the mess this nice family had waiting for them when they walked in their house tonight. Mom and two boys, coming straight home from hockey practice. The place was a disaster, it was like a tornado had gone through the living room, he said, hoping sympathy--for him, for the victims--might defuse the ticking bomb inside Laura. Real nice people, he went on. The Danyows. Got a dog from the shelter a couple years ago. You might even remember them if you saw their faces.
She nodded. Paul and Emily were here for dinner, she said, her voice so calm it was absolutely impenetrable. Louise, too. Of course.
Yeah, I'm real sorry I wasn't here. How come Paul and Emily were? he asked. He wasn't exactly sure why, but the idea that the Heberts had been in this house with Laura disturbed him. He wondered what Paul might have said to her about the run-in he and Alfred had had Monday morning, if anything, and whether the older man might have shared with Laura some inkling of what Terry now knew about the boy.
They just dropped by. So I invited them to stay.
He smiled. Good, good, he murmured, careful to keep his own voice steady. Then: So how was Louise?
She leaned forward on the couch and told Alfred that they didn't want to disturb him so they were going to go in the kitchen to talk--catch up on their days was how she put it--and the boy offered to pause the movie so she wouldn't miss anything.
No, you keep watching, she said to him. You can fill me in on what I miss.
She rose and Terry stood up to follow her, stepping carefully over the child on the floor. Suddenly he was exhausted, and he decided he wanted to be anywhere in the world that moment but where he was.
SHE SAT DOWN at her place at the kitchen table and folded her hands together on the dark wood. He started to sit down beside her, but he realized he would be better off if he remained on his feet--more alert, less vulnerable, in command--and so he opened the refrigerator and got out the container of milk and the makings for a sandwich. He wasn't hungry because he'd grabbed a hamburger and fries at the lone fast-food restaurant in Middlebury after leaving the Danyows, but Laura didn't need to know that. As far as she was concerned, he'd come straight home after leaving the burglary site.
It sounds like you and Alfred had a nice day today.
We had a fine day. Fine enough, anyway.
He stared at the mayonnaise he was spreading on the potato bread, his body facing her as a courtesy though his eyes were focused elsewhere.
Louise get to watch him ride?
Uh-huh.
Paul says he's good. That true?
I think so.
Were you and Paul there when Louise went to see him on the horse?
Paul was. I was here making dinner.
There was a slight edge to her response. It wasn't so much, he thought, that she felt put upon for making dinner, as she was annoyed that he hadn't gotten home on time.
I really am sorry that work intervened, he said as he started to layer the sliced turkey on the bread. What did you all talk about? What did Louise have to say about the lad?
Cut the lad crap. Please.
He looked up. Pardon me? he asked, stalling.
I said to stop calling him lad. It sounds condescending.
I don't mean it that way.
Then how do you mean it? You don't say it with even a teeny drop of affection.
He laid the knife down on the counter, careful not to drip mayonnaise on the Formica, and when he looked at her, he saw for just the briefest second the shape of Hillary's eyes--their absolute intensity--when his daughter would be holding a small bat in T-ball. Dribbling the soccer ball down the field. Fighting with Megan over...over anything. And while he understood their conversation was about Alfred, he didn't believe that the boy in the next room was in reality the issue. She was angry with him, and he recognized it was because for the last month, ever since Phoebe told him she was pregnant, things had been different between them. Tense. Everything between them had become a small annoyance.
No, that wasn't accurate. With the exception of November--those few weeks when he was trying to make things right after sleeping with Phoebe the first time--everything between them had been a small annoyance for two years. Two years and two months. Either she was a catatonic who couldn't get out of bed--and who could blame her!--or she was angry or...
And that was just her. He understood well his own desire to find any excuse imaginable to be anyplace but this house with its ghosts--exuberant banshees one moment, self-contained spirits the next, the shape of the eyes of this woman before him enough to bring them both back--of his dead daughters everywhere. Everywhere! She could take down the fucking photographs, they could box up the toys and books and cart them up to the attic, but you couldn't make them go away so you didn't miss them so much you just grew ornery and short with whoever was present.
Which, often enough, was going to be your wife. Even if some days she was delicate and easily hurt.
I asked you a question, she said. I'm waiting.
He tried to recapture what they were talking about, and he knew it had something to do with Alfred. The way he'd just called the boy lad.
He closed his eyes for a brief second because he needed a moment without seeing even a trace of Hillary or Megan before opening his mouth, and then answered softly--the kid was, after all, only two rooms away in the den--Look. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for how I've behaved, I'm sorry for the fact I've been in a foul mood. You know that, right? I'm sorry, really I am. But you know what? It isn't working. I wish to God it was, but it--
It? What do you mean by it?
He held up his hands because he honestly wasn't sure, his palms open and flat. Everything. The boy. Us. This house--
This house? Suddenly you want to move, too?
Too?
Too. You said this house isn't working, either. Like Alfred. And us.
He wondered if he could finish this, and he didn't believe that he could. Not after the deaths of their daughters. But didn't marriages often crumble when a child passed away? Hadn't Laura herself read that in some article she'd come across about grieving, or been told it by some self-proclaimed expert on the subject? What, really, was he protecting her from by not telling her about Alfred and their exchange Monday morning, or about Phoebe and the fact that they were now linked by far more than a drink in a bar? What was he trying to preserve? Their marriage? It was over--or, he told himself, it should be, because he feared he might want another woman more than the woman he'd married, and didn't that say it all? And as for keeping it together for the kids, ther
e were none! Not anymore! If he had a responsibility to any child, it was to the one Phoebe was carrying, not the boy watching TV in the den. That poor, troubled kid was already wrecked anyway, he was already well beyond anything a couple as beaten up as Terry and Laura Sheldon could offer.
She was waiting for him to resume speaking, and spoke herself only when it seemed clear to her that he couldn't decide what he was supposed to say next. You still think I'm a basket case, she said, and you don't want to live with one anymore. Well, I can't blame you. But you know what? I'm not going to lose that boy because of you. I don't know exactly what happened Monday morning, but--
What did Paul tell you?
I talked to Alfred, too, so--
See? That's what I mean. I asked the boy not to--
He told me because I confronted him. And the reason I confronted him was because of what you told Paul.
Well, then, here are the facts from the only grown-up witness who was present. Fact one: He had taken--
Food! He had taken some food! And if he'd been our biologic child or even our adopted child, you wouldn't have considered it stealing! Then you would have just seen it as a kid taking some food upstairs to his room. But because he's Alfred, it's something else! It's theft, it's--
He was planning to run away. Face it.
He was planning to do no such thing. I talked to Louise, and she--
She doesn't live here. How many times has she seen the kid in the last two or three months? Twice? Maybe three times counting tonight? She doesn't--
She does know him. And she knows the behavior. He was only doing what lots of kids in his situation do. He was getting ready in case he got moved again.
Here's the pattern, Laura: You steal something small. Then you steal something a little bigger. It's progressive. You just know he's taken dollar bills out of our wallets, you just know--
He has a job. He doesn't need to do that. If you had any involvement with him at all, you would have figured that out.
And there are--excuse me, were--there were guns in this house. It seems to me, I had--
I think you should leave.
What?
Go. Leave. I think you should leave, and we can talk in the morning.
Tomorrow's New Year's Eve, he said, unsure what he was driving at.
That's fine.
He was aware of a low rumble--a murmur, actually, just loud enough to muffle (though not quiet completely) the sounds all around him. He realized it was the sound of shock. He'd experienced it once before, when he was in the passenger seat of Henry Labarge's cruiser, when the man was driving him home from deer camp after dropping on him the bombshell that his daughters were dead. The engine, the radio, the occasional moments when Henry would open his mouth on the long drive back to Cornish and tell him something were all noises that had sounded to him like they were muted by a thin sheet of water. As if his ears were just below the surface in the bath.
It was like that now. Laura was saying something more to him, something about finding a place to stay for the night, a friend or a motel, it didn't matter to her, but he could only hear select words and syllables through the wet curtain that seemed to surround him.
He nodded that he would leave--yes, yes, for the night, he was saying, and he found that even his own voice was strangely muffled, we'll talk in the morning--and he saw that his sandwich was still incomplete. He'd never finished making it. He didn't need to, because he really wasn't hungry, but he knew he was going to miss it. He didn't know if it would be the very last thing he would do in this house, but it was the very last thing he would do before...before this.
This confrontation. This rupture. This...
She was still talking to him and he was still nodding, and he realized he should be paying attention. Wasn't this exactly the opening he wanted? Wasn't this what on some level, low and cruel as it was, he'd been hoping would happen? He could never leave her, he'd concluded, but if she initiated it, if she took that crucial first step...
But that had all been predicated upon the notion that she took the first step because she found out about Phoebe Danvers. She was kicking him out now, however, and she hadn't said one single thing about that other woman. Not one word. Still didn't know Phoebe even existed as anything more than a girl he'd once had a drink with in a bar.
And yet she was kicking him out anyway, sending him alone into the night because of...the boy. Alfred.
She was actually picking some boy she barely knew over him.
*
PART THREE
New Year
"George seemed to be around often that summer. He liked me, I could tell. And I was grateful for what he had done for my children. Then he just disappeared, and he was gone for most of the autumn. His company was on the march. I told myself he was chasing Apaches--maybe the Lipan--because I didn't want to believe he might be fighting my people. But I didn't know for sure, and of course no one would tell me. I missed him."
VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),
WPA INTERVIEW,
MARCH 1938
*
Terry
He drove the cruiser up into Cornish, his first time there in almost a week, and the first time in the new year. He didn't guess anybody would be home: Alfred would be at school, and Laura would be at the shelter. Instead of veering off the main road and returning to the house via the notch, he decided to stay on the River Road. He hadn't planned to visit the river--hell, he hadn't even planned on going to Cornish--but here he was, following the paved road for a change as it curled side by side with the water.
It had been cold and snowy for almost the full week. Winter had finally arrived, and though it had come late, it had come with the storms and icy gales they took for granted. He could only remember two days when he'd seen blue skies and sun in the last seven, and on both occasions it had been so cold that the smoke from the woodstove chimneys he'd glimpse as he drove rose straight into the sky like flagpoles.
When he reached the spot where the girls' bodies had been recovered, he came to a stop and parked the cruiser as close to the drift as he could. He felt particularly alone--more so than usual--because he was in one of those dead spots in the county where the radio wouldn't work. He climbed from his car and guessed the temperature would hit twenty today, perhaps even a few degrees above that. But it was gray and damp and raw, and there was just enough wind to cause him first to blow on his hands, and then reach back into the vehicle for a pair of gloves. Then he started over the snow, telling himself with each step into the knee-deep powder that this was an asinine idea and he should turn around, shake the snow off his pants, and get on with his day.
But he couldn't stop, and he knew that. He'd come this far, he may as well go all the way. So what if his pants got wet? Troopers could always find something to bitch about when it came to their cars, but he had no complaints with the heater. A fucking oven, if he wanted. He'd blast the heater on his legs, and they'd probably be dry by the time he got back to the barracks.
He pushed aside the leafless branches of a pair of sugar maples, stepped over what he guessed was a cluster of raspberry bushes--in the snow he could see only the very tops of the twigs--and stared for a brief moment at the tracks from a snowshoe hare. He wondered if he'd see a river otter or a beaver when he arrived at the water, and guessed there was a chance. At least he'd see signs.
There was a thick wall of ice on the surface of the river, and flat kaleidoscopic filigrees of frost along the smooth surfaces. Frozen white daggers were suspended mid-drip like stalactites from the edges of a great many stones, including parts of the pair of boulders--each nearly half the size of a mobile home--that he knew had caught some of the debris from the village that had been swept downriver in the flood.
He'd been reassured that by the time his daughters had gotten here--this twist in the river with its gloriously big rocks and its nearby pool where his neighbors (though, thank God, not him) had once come to reel in rainbow and brown trout--they'd d
rowned. Yet what he would never know, and sometimes when he was alone in his cruiser he would see their small bodies pinwheeling through the water, was how much they had felt. How long they had lived. Yes, they had drowned, but there was so much more to it than that. Head traumas. Massive internal hemorrhaging. Broken bones. You don't die instantly when you drown, that's for sure, and that was a part of the problem.
Back at the road he heard a truck rumble by, and he wondered what the trucker thought of the cruiser parked by the drifts here in the middle of nowhere.
He turned around and stomped back through the snow, and through the small tangles of dormant bushes and shrubs. When he was back inside his cruiser, he sat for a moment with the engine idling and felt the warmth from the heater on his ankles--even through his boots and his pants and his socks--and though a part of him still planned to drive by the house (perhaps even wander around a bit inside), already his mind was asking, What for? Really, he thought to himself, what for? The empty house would just depress him, and there wasn't anything there he needed--at least anything tangible he could actually take back with him to Henry Labarge's parents' cabin on Lake Champlain. And so he swung the vehicle around in the thin strip of pavement between the drifts and decided instead he would simply run the roads a bit on his way back to Middlebury.
HE TALKED TO his mother that night on the phone. He spoke with his brother and his sister and, yes, Phoebe as well, but most of the time he had talked to his mother. He actually hadn't planned on speaking to anyone but Phoebe, but first his sister called because she'd heard from their mother that he and Laura were living apart, and she wanted to know what was going on--how serious the rift was. Then, at Leah's urging, he had phoned their mother to reassure her that he was fine and Laura was fine, and she needn't fret: Soon enough, the two of them would solve their problems and reconcile.
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