Red Light Run

by Baird Harper

  He took a deeper breath and a knot clenched in his throat. He wanted to explain about Glennis, but the lump in his neck swelled and hardened. In the distance, the headlights of a maintenance truck bumped along the far edge of the cemetery grounds. He knelt to the turf, trying to draw a full breath, but the air was too thick with memory, with history. Alarm bells clanged inside his head. Sirens rang out in the night. Then it was quiet again.

  //

  The next morning, as the Prairie Stater carried him toward the city, Emmit made his way to the lounge car, where there were bigger windows and booths to stretch out in. The corn rushed by as if on a conveyor belt. Despite the assumptions of people like Hartley, Emmit knew nothing about farming. For years he’d traveled the world selling tires, but more recently he spent his days at a sales desk for a company that made foundation sealant. Gold Seal was a metallic yellow liquid that turned gray as it dried. His office had a window that looked out onto a parking lot. Beyond that was a state highway, a Home Depot, and then a green sea of corn to the horizon.

  In Chicago, he boarded a commuter service that whisked him north of the city. Forty minutes later he stepped off the platform into Tower Hill at a posh suburban intersection with banks on three of its corners. A light rain fell. Hartley had given walking directions to their house, but before Emmit could get the paper out of his pocket a silver Audi rolled up to the curb with his son-in-law’s face in the window.

  “She’s at the salon right now,” Hartley reported as Emmit got into the car. The seat belt had turned up the collar of his raincoat, making him look like someone playing a private eye.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Hartley.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s good to see you too.” Hartley pulled through town, listing Glennis’s transgressions—She fell asleep in this park . . . She made quite a scene at that restaurant . . . These people, in the blue house, are no longer our friends—down a street full of shops selling luggage and imported furniture, until he stopped in front of a frosted window with scissors painted on the glass. “She’s in there right now.” Hartley glanced at the dashboard clock. “She’ll be done any minute. Just watch. She’ll stumble out and get in her car. She drives drunk everywhere. We can follow her and you’ll see how bad it is.”

  “I can imagine,” Emmit told him. They sat watching the storefront for a time, suburban ladies occasionally emerging, opening umbrellas over their too-new hair. “Is there a place to get a sandwich?” Emmit finally asked. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

  Hartley stared at the salon window for another moment, then drove a few blocks down to a café with French art on the walls and butcher paper tablecloths. When he didn’t order anything for himself, Emmit asked for two BLTs.

  “Glen’s told me about her mom,” said Hartley. “She says it was much worse with your wife.”

  Emmit drank his water, watching his son-in-law’s face distort through the bottom of the glass. “I’d bet it’s about the same.”

  Hartley went on about the intervention, describing what he figured it might achieve. Eventually the sandwiches showed up and Hartley stopped talking.

  “How are the markets treating you?” Emmit asked.

  Hartley pushed his fries around his plate. “It would help if you could tell me exactly how the September corn looks down your way.”

  “It’s still August corn right now, isn’t it?”

  A smile flickered at the corners of Hartley’s mouth.

  “My office looks over a cornfield,” Emmit said. “I’ll give you a report on Monday.”

  Hartley eyed the window. “Don’t you think this’ll take longer than that?”

  “A lot longer, I’m sure.”

  As they drove back across town, Hartley explained that Glennis would be out all afternoon shopping and beautifying for what she expected would be a dinner at the house with a retired anthropology professor she’d had in college, but would really be the intervention, with their minister and Glennis’s doctor and a woman from New Horizons Sobriety Clinic. “And us too, of course,” Hartley added. “The others will be more like mediators, while you and I state grievances.”

  As they waited for the garage door to open, Emmit stared at the house. The rain had paused and their new copper gutters blazed absurdly in the afternoon sun. Hartley began a new tour inside the house, again narrating Glennis’s troubles—She spent a whole night on this hardwood . . . She fell down these steps—until they’d come to the guest room.

  “Tonight it ends,” the younger man said, chopping the edge of one hand against his open palm. “Before she becomes some kind of tragedy.”

  //

  With Janice, Emmit had intervened occasionally, and occasionally his wife had curbed her drinking, but never for long. It went like that for years until one day he came home from a sales trip to find her blacked out on a couch in the basement. Glennis, then just an infant, he found in the empty bathtub. While the paramedics took Janice to the hospital, Emmit put his daughter in his car. The highway made a straight line to the sky and the fields of corn and soy spread out limitless on both sides. They’d start over on their own, he’d thought, someplace else. They’d go to the city, where he had friends. Or to the mountains, where he knew no one at all.

  “That’s not who I married,” he’d said, turning to the child in the backseat. “That is someone else entirely.”

  But the baby wasn’t listening. The baby was asleep. And somehow, hours later, they ended up back home again. He still had years more to put up with, waiting for disaster, inching toward divorce. It wasn’t until Janice turned up in that motel room that Emmit finally left Wicklow, hiding his daughter from the stares and whispers for the duration of her school years. But all along Emmit held on to the old house, until one day, after Glennis left for college, he packed up the car and drove back home for good.

  //

  Downstairs, he found the reverend picking deviled eggs off a cold-food platter. They discussed addiction as the minister led the way into the library, where Glennis’s doctor and the liaison from the sobriety clinic sat on wingback chairs sipping coffee. In turn, they each made note of their knowing about Janice.

  “What exactly do you know?” Emmit asked.

  “That she also struggled with alcohol,” the doctor said.

  “Oh,” said Emmit. “Yes, that’s true.”

  “A double burden,” said the liaison in her soft, clinical voice.

  “Every family has one,” Emmit told them, trying to sound jolly. “I got two.”

  Hartley rushed into the room. “Someone’s pulling into the driveway.” He made a quick count of chairs. “Everybody be quiet, and I’ll call her in.” A minute passed, then another. No doors opened, though a knocking could eventually be heard. Hartley chugged out of the room, returning minutes later with a silver-haired man in a blue blazer, tan slacks breaking over penny loafers. A slender paper bag hung at his side, a bottle of brown liquor peeking out.

  “Everyone,” Hartley said, his forehead pinching, “this is Professor Vincent Ash.”

  The professor’s attention lingered on the minister before finally returning to Hartley. “I guess I didn’t understand what you were asking me to do. Was I only supposed to pretend to come over for dinner?”

  “That’s okay,” Hartley said. “The more we have, the stronger we are. Should we go over our roles again?”

  “Maybe you should sit down,” said the doctor.

  Hartley palmed the back of a chair, appearing to agree with the idea before shaking it off. “No, I’ve got to stay on my feet for this. Can I get anything for anyone? More coffee?” His eyes cased the room, finding each of his guests in turn. “It’s funny,” he added, putting on a wounded smile. “I could actually use a drink right now.”

  The professor set the bottle of scotch loudly on a glass side table. “An intervention, huh.” He glanced around the room. “How’s it going so far?”

  Then a door opened and shut at the other end of th
e house. Footsteps across the kitchen floor.

  Hartley’s back straightened. His eyes widened on Emmit. He cleared his throat. “Honey . . . ?” he called out into the silence. “Glen, is that you? I’m in the library.”

  He stopped to listen. Everyone waited. The moment filled and filled with anticipation, as if they were a surprise party hiding in the dark.

  “Sweetheart . . . ?” he called again. “Can you . . . can you come in here?”

  The footsteps started up again, padding closer, until Rick LaForge appeared in the doorway.

  “Oh, Christ,” Hartley muttered, pressing out the door without a greeting.

  Rick surveyed the room, locating Emmit. He said, “I decided to come after all.”

  Hartley came back a moment later with a chair for the professor, then he left again to go sit on a padded bench in the foyer with a view of the driveway.

  In the library, the sun dropped into the stained-glass window and the waiting became even more awkward with everyone’s face cut up into so many colors. Eventually, Hartley came in to get a cup of coffee and stand by himself in the corner, glaring at Rick, who carried on loudly to the clinical experts about his own continuing venture into sobriety. Then the room dimmed as night came on and the conversation meandered into more accessible topics—hapless Chicago baseball and the terrible heat, the way windows stick in such humidity.

  “I heard something,” Hartley interrupted. “A car door. Did anyone else hear that?” But judging by the glances moving around the room Emmit could tell no one had heard anything.

  The reverend was the first to give up, announcing that he had Sunday services in the morning. Then the doctor left, and the woman from New Horizons. Emmit watched them under the driveway floodlight, shaking their heads. Then it began to rain again and they rushed into their cars and sped off.

  “I can’t say I’m entirely shocked we lost this little showdown,” the professor said, strolling toward the door in the manner of someone accustomed to taking leave with ceremony. “Your wife wasn’t much of an anthropology student. The study of human progress requires a bit less cynicism, I think, and better attendance too. But somehow she got an A anyway.” He smiled and clapped Hartley on the shoulder. “Glennis has remarkable resolve.”

  When the old man finally let himself leave, Emmit brought the cold platter to the kitchen table, where he pulled out a chair for Hartley. They ate spinach dip and cheese and crackers.

  “She has remarkable resolve,” Hartley said in a mocking voice.

  The powder room door opened and Rick came into the kitchen still buckling his pants. Hartley’s face curdled.

  “Resolve, sure,” Rick agreed, scraping a chair backward and joining them at the table. “It’s the rest of us who are weak with sobriety.”

  “Is that what AA teaches you?” Emmit asked.

  “More or less.”

  “I wouldn’t say I feel ‘weak,’ ” Hartley said.

  Rick scooped up a handful of crackers. “I’m just saying I’ve been where Glennis is now. I’ve been the one lying in the gutter while all my friends were waiting to help.”

  “She’s not exactly in ‘the gutter,’ ” Hartley said. “She’s probably at a wine bar right now. The place serves sushi.”

  “Every gutter’s different.” Rick reclined, tossing a cracker into his mouth. “But it’s still a gutter.”

  “Anyway,” said Emmit, “I think the point is that this process may take some time.”

  Rick yawned, looking around. “How many bedrooms does this place have?”

  Hartley only stared back at the question, then rose and retrieved the bottle of scotch the professor had brought. He poured two drinks, then said, his voice taking a sharp formality, “I assume, Rick, that you won’t be partaking.”

  Rick only grinned at the amber glasses, and said, “Think it’s time I hit the sack.”

  When they were alone again, Hartley loosened. He sighed and said, “Glennis was always a bit wild, but I liked that about her. You know, like in college. But now, I don’t know, I want to have kids. I don’t know if we can have kids, but even if we could, how would that work?” He put a piece of cheese between crackers, looking to Emmit, as he held the tiny sandwich between finger and thumb, like a sad giant.

  “The booze I felt I could handle,” Hartley continued. “Lots of booze, sure. But then there were painkillers. I swear everyone around here has a prescription for something. And then, last month, her girlfriend came into town, her old roommate, Denise, you remember her. She came in for the weekend, Denise did, and they ended up snorting heroin together.” Hartley put the little sandwich in his mouth and crunched it up. “Look at where I live,” he said, flicking a crystal bowl at the center of the table, glancing up into the skylights. “Do you think anyone around here does heroin?”

  For dessert they cut the big chocolate-dipped strawberry in half, and this seemed to signify their giving up as well. So they refilled their glasses of scotch and sat down in front of the baseball game. And later, when they got tired of getting up for more ice, they just poured lukewarm scotch straight from the bottle.

  “Neat,” said Emmit, lifting a sarcastic toast.

  Hartley tipped his glass back, downing half of it in a single gulp, making a face. It reminded Emmit of the way teenagers drink, suffering the flavor in order to impress friends, to impress girls, to just get high. But his son-in-law didn’t care for the high any more than he did for the flavor of the oak barrel. When Hartley was finally able to shed the sour face, he topped himself off again, saying, “I don’t get it, what’s so neat about it?”

  Emmit couldn’t say. And he couldn’t tell if Hartley was punning or not. He felt drunk. The baseball game played on two TVs that merged whenever he blinked. He topped off his own drink, gulping toward his own deepening high, each sip a communion with Glennis’s addiction.

  Later, when the bottle got low, a voice said, It’s about time they got him out of there, and Emmit looked up to see the starting pitcher getting pulled. At this, Hartley levered himself off the couch, setting his empty glass loudly onto the coffee table, excusing himself to the bathroom.

  Later still, Emmit snapped awake again to a heavy metallic groaning. He looked around for Hartley, who’d never returned from the bathroom. The glassware rattled in the kitchen cabinets. An earthquake, he thought. Then the groaning abruptly ceased. Just the garage door grinding open, he realized. He sat up, then stood, drunk fingers fumbling to rebutton the top of his shirt. He tried to shake off the panic that was twisting upward from his chest, hardening like a tumor in his throat, as if he were a teenager again with parents coming home early to catch him drinking. He waited, swaying in place, blinking, his vision doubling and undoubling, but the angry parent didn’t appear. Glennis didn’t appear. It was Glennis he was waiting for. I’m the parent, he thought. I’m the one in control.

  When she still didn’t appear, Emmit walked out through the mudroom into the empty two-car garage, breathing for a moment the fumes left behind by Hartley’s car. The big door was still open behind where the silver Audi had been parked, and he walked out into the drizzling evening, into a silence that wasn’t so different from the one that washed nightly over Wicklow. A sound of air conditioners dutifully toiling, of single cars shushing down sleepy roads. Maybe Hartley was leaving her, he thought. For good, he hoped. But then a siren came whining through the quiet suburban night and its tensing pitch brought the panic back into Emmit’s throat. Another siren from a different direction. Then another. The deep braying of a fire truck.

  //

  Hours later, rowing through dreams, Emmit woke on the couch to Glennis softening her hand against the stubble of his cheek. As she leaned over, her long straight hair fell toward him, making a dim tunnel around her face, her big dark pupils pink around the edges, the eyelids slumping low, her blouse hanging inelegantly from her frame. And for a moment, Emmit felt relieved. This is not my daughter, he thought. This is someone else.

  �
�We’ve been waiting for you,” he told her, trying to sit up. He looked around for Hartley, as if it were time now to begin stating grievances. But the evidence in every direction—the raided cold platter, the half-empty bottle of scotch—scuttled the idea that they’d ever been trying to help anyone.

  His daughter laid a hand on Emmit’s chest, pressing him down, dragging a quilt off the arm of the couch and covering him with it. Then she was gone again, and he could only hear the tick-ticking of her fingers killing the house’s lamps.

  //

  At dawn, he walked upstairs and shook Rick awake in the guest bed. They packed their things quietly, got in Rick’s truck, and headed home. Emmit moved back into his house, unplugging all the phones and opening all the windows, stripping the beds, throwing the sheets into a pile on the laundry room floor. He got the Lumina towed to a service station, paid his bills, ate dinner in front of the ballgame.

  The night after passed slowly, a montage of strange and dispiriting dreams of stained-glass faces and howling sirens, of a long-dead woman looking down on him from above.

  At work on Monday, he stared at his computer, at his phone, out the window. The sky turned yellow. There were birds everywhere and then no birds. Rain and then hail. A piece of ductwork lifted off the Home Depot and rose up into the clouds. Everyone in the office rushed down to the basement, but Emmit stayed behind and listened to the sound a window makes when it curves.

  When the storm passed, he was the first person in the whole county to walk out into the ensuing calm. Everything wet shone in the sun like a kind of gold that wouldn’t last. He crossed the parking lot and the state highway, found himself a quarter mile into that field of corn—September’s crop in August. He put his hands in the dirt, on the stalks, pulled down one particular ear, shucked it, and let the breeze carry away the silk. He tried to discern how the crop was faring, tried to imagine whether prices might rise or fall. He put his ear to it, listening. The naked corn felt like that hand on his cheek, waking him again into the truth that people with so little control of their own lives have so much power over ours.