by Bill Clegg
Lydia lowers the phone to her chest. Her face is a mix of agony and disbelief, and when she returns the receiver to her ear, her voice is softer than before, less hurried.
I know you think I’m a stupid woman, Winton, but even you won’t believe the next part. The next part is possible only when you have a weak woman who is afraid to be alone. Whose son has a scholarship to a school on the other side of the country and is leaving without looking back. It’s only possible when you are an idiot like me who will listen to a guy like you hour after hour, for months, listening to lies like songs on the radio.
The next part is when I stopped being a mother. I agreed to give a deposition about where Rex had been the days before the arrest, which was actually nowhere I knew. The truth was that he’d taken off without explanation or phone calls for three days, which was normal for Rex. He turned up that Saturday afternoon, without his Corvette, dropped off by a friend he’d been helping set up a restaurant in the city, he said. This was when he asked to borrow our car the next morning. His lawyer said that this little deposition from me was the last thing Rex needed to make sure he didn’t take part of the fall for Luke. It was, Carol said, the least I could do given the circumstances. So despite the fact that I had on the same day found out that Rex had a police record that included fraud and multiple drug charges, I gave the deposition. And when the lawyers and the DA and Rex then told me that I needed to convince Luke to plead guilty and get a reduced sentence, I did that, too. They told me that even though Luke was eighteen and not a minor, he would only get a slap on the wrist because it was his first offense, that it wouldn’t affect his scholarship or his life in any way. Do you think I bothered to check with anyone—Stanford, his coach, another lawyer—to see if they knew what they were talking about? Of course I didn’t. I listened to Rex. And instead of hiring a decent lawyer and letting a jury decide, I convinced Luke to go along with the plea that they all wanted from him. He was terrified by this point, in jail for days, and the DA spooked him with threats of spending all of his twenties behind bars. The public defender told Luke it was his best shot at a normal life, and in the end he pled guilty. He pleaded guilty and spent eleven months in prison.
What happened next won’t surprise you. Rex got off scot-free and in three weeks was gone. No good-bye, no phone call, no note, no thank-you. Nothing. I never saw or heard from him again. I’ll bet you saw that part coming, Winton. That part in the story when the dumb woman does or gives the guy who can make her laugh the thing he wants and then he disappears. You’ve heard that part of the story before. You’ve heard it and seen it and done it a thousand times.
Did I tell you a woman came to my door tonight and hit me in the face? She did. You probably know her father. Another dumb sucker like me sending money to strangers. At least he’s lucky enough to have a daughter to step in. Which she did. She let me have it. And thank God. She knocked some sense into me. Finally, someone knocked some goddamned sense into me! You know what she said? She said I destroyed people’s lives and she was right. She told me I had to stop, Winton. She told me to stop, and right now, even though it’s too late to do anyone any good, I’m stopping.
Before Winton speaks, Lydia stands up from the kitchen table. She drops the receiver from her ear and hugs it to her chest for a few seconds before carefully returning it to its cradle. Upstairs, the television has been turned off, and for the first time all evening her apartment is silent.
Silas
It has been nine months since he ditched his bike here and snuck down the driveway and across the lawn to the house. Like on that night, there is now a bright moon, not quite full, but nearly so. It lights the road and, opposite the chained driveway entrance, acres of apple and pear orchards where Silas and his friends spent many hours as kids. In the bluish light he pictures Ethan and Charlie whipping apples from long sticks into the stone walls and watching them explode. How many afternoons had they spent there smashing fruit and laughing their heads off? He remembers the Mexican workers who would wave at them and let them be. No one ever seemed to miss those apples or care that they were trespassing. When was the last time they came here? Silas wonders. Two summers ago? Three? It seems like another lifetime. Something shines in the dark across the road, and at first he can’t tell what it is, but as he steps closer, he sees it’s June Reid’s old mailbox, dented and silver and still standing. It leans to the left, and the red metal flag points toward the ground. He turns back toward the top of the driveway and descends slowly.
There is no house now, just a dark rectangle of dirt and rock. He sees no sign of anything burned or charred, no sign of what had been here. Its size surprises Silas. It does not look large enough to have once held rooms and furniture and all the complicated systems that keep a house operating. He approaches where the kitchen window would have been and stares into the air above the strange patch of earth. It looks like a garden, he thinks, waiting to be planted, or an enormous grave, freshly dug and filled. He hears a twig snap, and when he jumps to look behind him he sees what is left of the small stone shed, half-lit in moonlight like a ragged ghost. The small cedar shingle roof is mostly burned off but the walls and door remain. Impossibly, two of the boxes of Ball jars are still stacked there. He steps inside, sits down on the dirt floor, and leans back on the cold stone.
Nine months ago, he’d come back here because he had no choice. He tries to remember how late exactly it was, but that part is fuzzy. He knows he got home from work by eight o’clock, because he ate dinner with his parents and sisters. He remembers them needling him about the wedding preparations and the rehearsal dinner at the house. What he’d seen, what he’d heard, who was there. He couldn’t understand why all the interest, especially from his mother, who kept asking if he’d seen Luke’s mom, Lydia. She’d always had a problem with her. Did she wear one of her little, low-cut dresses like she used to turn up in at the Tap? His sister Gwen yelled, Mom! That’s not nice! His father laughed and it went on from there.
After eating the vanilla ice-cream bar his mother gives him for dessert, he gets up from the table to go to his room, impatient to pack a hit and crash to sleep. Halfway up the stairs, something seems off. He stops midstair, thinks. The knapsack. Where is it? His chest tightens. Did he just leave it at the kitchen table? He bolts down the stairs into the kitchen and tries to act casual as he sails past the table to the kitchen sink. Glass of water, he preemptively mumbles as he scans beneath the table and sees nothing anywhere near where he was sitting. Before getting trapped in conversation, he disappears upstairs and into his room, where he thinks through each beat of the afternoon. He had his knapsack when he and Ethan and Charlie were fucking around and getting high on the Moon. He remembers rushing back and stashing it in the stone shed behind boxes of Ball jars so it was out of sight and off his back while they hurried through the remaining work.
It hits him. IT’S STILL THERE. Behind the box, in the shed, next to the house. The fucking knapsack is still there, and in it his bong, his pot, his learner’s permit, his school ID, and his cash. An army of people will be showing up first thing in the morning to empty that shed and set up the wedding reception. Rick Howland, the caterer, for one, is definitely going to be there before eight, and Luke is up at six most mornings, so even if he thought about beating Rick to the house, Luke would no doubt be walking the property, picking up sticks, and cursing his half-assed workers for doing such a lame job.
Silas sits on his bed and tries to regulate his breathing. He’s crashing from being on his feet and high all afternoon, and he feels like he’s hyperventilating. He balls his fists into the top of his thighs, takes a deep breath, and wishes he could go to sleep. But there is no way around the grim truth: he has to go back. He has to ride back up Wildey Road and down along Indian Pond after everyone in his house—and hopefully by then in June Reid’s house, too—is asleep.
Which is exactly what he does. Three long hours later, after he’s heard the last toilet flush down the hall in his parents’ b
athroom. After he’s jerked off twice and slammed a warm Red Bull that he’d forgotten to drink a few days ago. He’s not sure if it’s the caffeine or the adrenaline, but as sleepy as he was before, he’s now awake. He’s ready to get this over with. He steps as softly as he can down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door to where his bike is leaning against the house. He flies down Wildey and Indian Pond and almost overshoots June Reid’s driveway. He skids to a stop, gets off his bike, and throws it in the weeds.
From the road, the house is dark. It is an old, two-story stone house, but the far right section, the oldest, is made of wood, and the only windows in front are on the first floor. People could be awake upstairs and from the road he wouldn’t know. He’d have to sneak down alongside the kitchen before he’d be able to tell. He considers coming from around the back of the house, but thinks about the noise he’d make trudging through the woods to get there. Better to go quietly down the driveway and slip up the side between the kitchen and the stone shed.
The gravel drive crunches beneath his feet even though he is stepping as gently and slowly as possible. It takes what feels like hours to get to the lawn, where his footfalls are nearly silent. By the time he reaches the near corner of the house, he can see a yellow panel of light hitting the stone shed. The kitchen light is on, and by the way it flickers and wobbles, there must be someone in there. FUCK FUCK FUCK, he whispers to himself. He leans against the side of the house and holds the rough wood siding for balance. He cannot go back now. He will inch along the outside and secure a place next to the kitchen window until whoever is in there goes to sleep. He begins to move. What must be a bat flaps the air just above his head, and he collapses to the ground and covers his face. It takes every bit of control he can muster not to scream. He stays down, adjusts his crouch to a seated position, and crab-crawls gradually to a spot out of the light’s path, just to the left of the window. He rests his head against the side of the house and waits. At first no sounds come from inside. The cicadas are everywhere, their sound enormous, but after a while it becomes ambient noise, as elemental and invisible as the dark he is huddled in. Then he hears voices coming from the back of the house. The fucking screened-in porch, he thinks, having forgotten until now that it’s right there, just behind the kitchen at the back of the house. He’s only half the width of the house away. If he sneezes, whoever is in there will hear it. He begins to panic. He’s too exposed, too close. If he attempts to leave now, they will hear him. He tries to control his breathing, but focusing on it makes it sound louder, more erratic. He holds his legs in his arms and squeezes. He is only twenty or so yards from the stone shed where his knapsack is, but it might as well be on the other side of town. He is trapped. There is nothing to do but wait for everyone in the house to go to sleep.
Crouching in the dark, he tries to make out what the voices on the porch are saying. It does not sound like people celebrating the night before a wedding. At the wedding of his oldest sister, Holly, they had a keg on the back porch and everyone stayed up until at least four in the morning. He remembers her fiancé, Andrew, a rich kid from New York whose family has a summerhouse in town, and how he had an eight ball of coke. His buddies from college broke into the pool at Harkness to go skinny-dipping. This was last summer, and Silas’s sisters wouldn’t let him join in. He had to stay at the house watching his parents and uncles get shitfaced and listen to Andrew’s parents fight about who was sober enough to drive home. This scene at June Reid’s is, by comparison, a funeral. He’d seen Lolly around over the years, and she was hot in a rich hippie-chick kind of way, and the guy she was marrying seemed fine, just a bit of a douche bag and a know-it-all. He heard them talking in the lawn earlier that day. Something about flight times and packing bags. It occurs to Silas that Lolly Reid has probably been on over a hundred airplanes and probably to places he’s never heard of. Silas had been on one plane: to Orlando, Florida, with his sisters when he was eleven. Their grandmother met them at the airport, and they spent two days in long lines at Disney World. Silas didn’t think Lolly Reid, even as a kid, was the type to go to Disney World.
The porch door creaks open and he hears footsteps. They are coming around the house. Then he sees a man. It’s Luke. He’s wearing a white Izod shirt and dark pants and walking to the back of the lawn toward the trees. He must be taking a leak, Silas thinks as he watches the white of his shirt hover in the far dark like a ghost. He stays there for what feels like a long time, longer than he’d need to piss. Eventually, he makes his way back toward the house, walking directly toward Silas at first and then veering toward the porch door. The voices kick up but then they seem to move into the kitchen. Faintly, he hears footsteps on the stairs, the water in the second-floor bathroom turn on, and a toilet flush. A door shuts and then the house is quiet.
In the kitchen above him he hears the water in the sink run briefly. Cupboard doors shutting. And a slow ticking. Tick. Tick. Tick. Luke and June are talking and between the words the ticking. She is saying something about beating a dead horse and he is saying her name. She speaks and he simply repeats her name. It’s as if he is trying to talk someone down from the edge of a building or bridge. June, he says, and the ticking stops. She speaks, but Silas cannot hear the words. She is too far from the window. It’s stressful, whatever they are talking about, and Silas can tell by the tones and their volume that it’s getting worse. Shadows block the light from the window above him. They are right there, inches from his head. And now he hears every word.
June, he says, I’m not going to apologize for answering her truthfully. And it’s true: I’ve asked you twice now.
It’s not so simple. You know that. June’s voice is strict, like his mother’s.
But I don’t! Why the fuck is it not simple? I’m missing something here and you need to explain it to me. Silas has never heard Luke sound so upset. At work he can get serious, tense, but not like this.
June’s voice fades and Silas can only hear bits but he catches her last words because she shouts them. Because it can’t!
Luke, still by the window, says, Can’t is a lie and you know it. I love you and you say you love me, and not that I have a lot of good examples, but in my book that means you get married. His voice has risen to near shouting. Silas can hear June; she says something but she’s crossed the kitchen toward the stove and her words are just sound. Sound that ends the conversation, launches Luke across the kitchen and out the back porch. The screen door slaps shut and suddenly Luke is outside, walking swiftly and in a straight line to the back of the lawn, to the field, toward the far tree line, which leads to a maze of trails on the Moon. Silas watches his white shirt glide purposefully into the woods and disappear. He hears movement in the kitchen and then the screen door opens and shuts again. This time it is June, running, not walking, across the lawn, toward the woods. Her blond hair is what Silas sees flash along the same path Luke had taken just a minute before. Against the silver-blue field at night, her hair appears lit by a single beam of moonlight, as if it was following her across a great stage, like a spotlight following a rock star at a concert. When she reaches the dark border where the field meets the woods, she disappears, too.
They are gone, but in their place the ticking, which had stopped minutes ago, resumes. At first he thinks someone else must be in the kitchen. He waits a few seconds and the ticking goes on and there is no movement, no break in the light from the window. Did she leave the stove on? Is that even possible? Slowly, Silas stands. His legs and back are stiff from crouching. He steps to the other side of the window where a garden hose is coiled against the side of the house. He holds the window ledge, steps up to the top of the coiled hose, and hoists himself to see inside the kitchen. No one is there. The stove is on the opposite end to the window Silas is looking through—one of those old ones that rich New Yorkers spend thousands of dollars fixing up because they like the way they look. But this one doesn’t look fixed up. There is rust along the bottom and some of the knobs look like t
hey’ve been replaced with makeshift knobs from other stoves. Silas loses his grip on the ledge and jumps down. His foot lands on the hose nozzle and his ankle twists and he collapses awkwardly on the lawn. He stays down. Again, he hears the ticking. Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick. What the fuck am I supposed to do? he thinks as he looks out to the field for any trace of Luke’s shirt or June’s hair. He sees nothing but the dark outline of the reception tent looming in the moonlit grass. No one is around, no one can hear. It’s time. He holds his breath and lurches across the short distance between the house and the shed. His hands scramble along the door until he feels and frees the iron latch. The door squeaks like a dying cat as it opens, and for a second he pauses to hear if there is movement or sound from inside the house. Nothing. Just the ticking, which has with the new distance from the house almost disappeared into the hum of the cicadas. It is hidden in the noise of the world and heard only if you stop to listen for it. Silas stops listening for it. Still on his knees, he feels behind the stack of Ball-jar boxes for his knapsack, and YES-HOLY-FUCK-YES it is there. He slides it around the boxes and holds it like a long-lost and beloved puppy. Time to go, he leans down and whispers into the bag, imagining the first hit he will take from his bong once he’s cleared the property. He closes the squeaking shed door, folds the latch shut, looks toward the driveway, and pictures his bike hidden in the weeds.