She supposed she hadn’t considered it at all. The long term was just that: a long way off. She had just let it slide from the everyday world that she shared with her little boy and his paints. It was one of those things that a woman just knows. Somewhere on an exhale in the middle of the night, or held in a glance across the crowd at a dinner party, kept inside something, there was subtle comprehension. She had been finally ready to confront Oliver about it the night before the weekend fishing trip at Charlemagne, the one that needed to go smooth sailing, Sadie-babe with Wittman and Merridew and their wives. It was not, she realized, knew full well even, the most opportune time to attack the subject. But it just happened. It was a time bomb with a hidden counter. And she just couldn’t keep it from going off.
They had driven apart, Oliver and Sadie-babe. Not even drifted, but actively wandered from each other. They had wanted to become separate. Neither had a hope of fixing anything. Neither had the desire.
Early that summer she had announced that her wish was to go back to teaching. Well, back to teaching was incorrect. She had gotten her degree and had done two internships at secondary schools when Zeb was still a toddler but she had never actually been a teacher. She didn’t necessarily want to have her own classroom, or even to teach classes to children at all. Now she wanted a position at the school board instead. Ethics in Secondary Education is where her desires lay. She wanted to reform the whole board, from trustees all the way down to the front lines of teachers, principals, and in-school guidance counselors. She wanted the system to realize the disparity between special needs kids, both those with gifts and those with certain disadvantages. Her dream was public school reform. Top to toe.
“Who’s going to look after Sebastion?” Oliver had griped.
Both during the first internships and this new desire to work, she responded, “We’ll get a nanny. Someone who can come in every day until three when I’ll be home again.”
Home again. Oliver wanted to scoff. What’s this about home again? Why not home still? He had hated the idea, hated it.
But he let her do those first internships. His quiet delight came when the internships, four months each, ended peaceably and without much ado. Both came to their inevitable conclusion and she never said anything more about them. He was happy for that. Home again. And that was the start of the end.
When Zeb was nine, though, her desires reared up again. That’s the way Oliver would have described it: a horse that got a bur under its saddle and needed to just run off a tantrum or work off some steam.
He expected this bur to work itself out quickly and that Sadie would eventually—though perhaps after a longer absence from her duties as a mother and wife than before—come ambling back to where she belonged: the kitchen-dining split of the Redfield house in Vaughan.
Mid-summer she already had a job with the school board and was required at meetings during the school year and before. Some lectures and teaching conventions she even lobbied to attend and she got most of them. There was a major convention as far away as metro Vancouver scheduled for autumn.
Sadie didn’t know why everything had to revolve around Oliver, particularly lately, since things had always seemed to revolve around him. That weekend, she wanted nothing to do with Merridew & Wittman. She wanted to read reports and prepare for her own Monday morning. In all likelihood, his pressure—smooth-sailing Sadie-babe—had brought out the anger in her, had brought out the topic of the other girls.
Like her son, she didn’t care much for her husband’s bosses. She knew John Merridew was a bastard and a cold-hearted conniving one at that, but still, the fact that he had let slip that Oliver and the girl, Daniela, had met each other at a party on a friend’s yacht had been a favor. It wasn’t good that it slipped. Definitely not good. But it was better than not knowing for certain.
The detail, she did not understand, and never would, was that Merridew let her find out simply to prove he was not above using the information. The real threat would come when the rest of the firm, particularly Wittman, knew the questionable details. Oliver’s promotion would be gone, and most likely so would his job altogether. And would another firm want to hire someone with that kind of scandal baggage?
Merridew had no proof of any wrong-doing, only the girl’s word against Oliver’s, but in a strange twist that everyone seems to understand, that’s all you need: doubt.
And Sadie was not dumb—Merridew knew that. Even as upset as she was, she would never ruin her husband’s chances for anything. Merridew played it—played her—and everything seemed to fall in line.
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Sadie’s own boss was Darren Knoll, supervisor and senior trustee of the public board. And she was spending, as far as Oliver was concerned, too much time with him. Meetings, a few late week nights, even some Saturday afternoons. And Sadie would be hard-pressed to deny that Darren Knoll had a certain something. But no one ever asked. Not co-workers, not friends, not the other parents and not Oliver.
Just the same Oliver thought the timing of her late nights with Darren Knoll were rather convenient. After the August weekend when she found out for certain who Oliver had been having a tryst with, she wanted to scream at him that he was no longer in a position to think anything at all about her.
And the screaming did start, intertwined with the already customary and lengthy silences.
When November came, his anger was at its peak, having promised, vowed, that he would never touch another woman ever again, but that, in return, she couldn’t go to the lecture series with her boss. He even went so far as to claim that Merridew had framed him, tricked him into what had happened with Daniela. But, packing for her convention trip to Vancouver, Sadie wanted to hear nothing of that.
“What?” Oliver had screamed, “You’re just going to go to Vancouver with Knoll? We’re not going to work this out? You don’t even want to talk?”
She snapped back. “You didn’t do a lot of talking this summer at the lake when that girl was eyeing you up and down over burgers and hot dogs.”
“You’re just going to go? You and that—that Knoll.”
The fight, like they always did as Zeb remembered, carried through the house. One of his parents would trail after the other hollering obscenities and hurling accusations, and the other—too calm, always too calm—would walk ahead from room to room, moving things, gathering things, or just enjoying having the other follow at the ass-end of things like a dog smelling a treat.
This time it was mother who had the nerves of steel. After gathering up what she needed she had finally filled her suitcase and snapped its latches closed and the loud words came to an end in the living room.
“Yeah,” she said, looking back at him while she held the case with two hands in front of her. Her voice got meek then, not the triumphant will of earlier when she could walk around with her back to him. “I’m just going to go.”
Feeling like a cat in a bag tossed out to sea, Sadie stepped out of the front foyer into darkened yard. A fast rush of cold air bit her lips and pinched her cheeks. The waiting cab was invisible behind the banging door, a sound she would hear in her sleep for the next two nights. And the crying started even before her hand was on the taxi’s door handle.
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Zeb backed the Ci into the heavy gate twice more before accepting that it was only budging slightly. He was trying to push an aircraft carrier up a mountain with a tugboat. And this tugboat was lodged furtively on the lane. The car simply couldn’t catch a grip on the slippery patch beneath its tires, couldn’t get up enough speed to even nudge the gate.
Looking ahead, at the Druid still coming towards him, he popped the vehicle out of reverse and then into first. He started moving forward. In one fluid movement, the Druid reached down to the spot where the car had earlier spun off the drive way and onto the front yard. She scooped up a long flat stone which made up the drive’s edge, stepped gingerly out of the way of the car’s path and lobbed the rock, about the size of two open hands, at th
e windshield.
The glass didn’t burst but, with a thunderclap, became a smoked panel of tiny lace-fine cracks, intricately entangled with each other to all edges of the glass. The stun was enough to have Zeb throw the car off course and he couldn’t see through the glass. The tires spun and the Ci found its way into the east bit of the yard, narrowly missing the tail end of the rental car in front.
The wheels ground to a stop in the deeper snow.
Stuck and going nowhere, Zeb tried to peer through the snake work windshield to find a means of escape. The Druid, he saw in his side view, had picked up that stone again and was heading for the vehicle.
The Ci’s tires spun in the snow, producing a scant wave of snow mixed with dirt. Zeb, frantic, blind, and having lost the Druid’s whereabouts in his mirrors, slammed the car into reverse and tried to rock it out of the burrow it had made for itself.
Another smash came; the rock fell against the windshield again and Zeb saw Malin’s upper torso sprawled across the sideview mirror and the driver’s window.
The rock came down twice more with sudden thrusts and the window was finally dislodged from its casing. It fell onto him like a giant, crinkling piece of taffy. Still together, but droopy, it was like a wet piece of thick cardboard, tinkling together with a sound that brought shivers to the back of Zeb’s already cold neck. Zeb shielded himself as it came into the car, and the Druid’s hands reached into the cab and grabbed hold of its molded rubber edges. She yanked it out and threw it to the ground like a lifeless body and then she reached back into the cab for Zeb.
Her fingers were scratching at him, trying to find purchase on his neck and his face. His hands reached out to try and beat her away. Out of the darkness of his closed eyes, Zeb’s right hand reached beside him for the stick shift. He found it and dropped the car out of reverse, then placed the stick in first gear again. He popped the clutch.
The car lurched.
Then it eased forward, on the verge of a stall. But Zeb slammed his foot down on the clutch pedal again and the car got a short burst, its engine regaining power. It eased forward, and the pitch threw the Druid off her balance. She pulled her hands away from the attack on Zeb and instead used them to steady herself by pressing against the dashboard and the support post beside the driver’s door.
Zeb put his hands on the wheel again and put his sock foot down on the gas, coercing the car forward on the snow once again. He turned the wheel, eyes held on the Druid who was still battling for balance on the hood. He aimed at the boat launch’s metal wheel tracks that sat against a backdrop of the snow covered ice-skin of Charlemagne Lake.
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Sadie left on a Tuesday night. But she never meant to leave for good. Sebastion William was the most important thing in the world to her and she never dreamed that she wouldn’t be returning to Vaughan, to the house where she had helped raise him. But there was a part of her that sought to even the terms. Is that what it was? If Oliver had his fling, then maybe she would have hers too?
No, that wasn’t it. Darren Knoll had his charms but she doubted that anything would come of that during the lecture series in Vancouver. It was more an assertion that she could go; proof to herself, and to her husband, that she would and could do things for herself. There was nothing worse than feeling helpless.
And getting into that taxi-cab, whether the tears came with her or not, proved it.
The trip was only four days. The time apart would not solve things, but didn’t a little distance make things easier to see? Maybe, she thought. Maybe we all have to go to the ends of the earth and come back to see the important things.
There was an uncomfortable and clingy grip between feeling like the last nine years of her marriage were a huge waste of her twenties and that having Sebastion, her beautiful baby-boy with his Gift from God, was something she couldn’t imagine her life without.
But she thought it best to just push it all out of her head for the duration of the trip. Either that or she would find herself crying at the drop of a hat. And no one wanted to see the trustee’s assistant bawling like a child.
Things got questionable, though. She shouldn’t have been surprised. When Darren cancelled their attendance at the last evening’s closing presentations, she grew wary. But not wary enough to think anything wrong.
Instead he took Sadie out for a late dinner. At a red table cloth with two place settings in a restaurant of dark mahogany and flickering candles they became a little too comfortable with each other, especially after two bottles of wine. The check came and Sadie found herself in Darren’s hotel room shortly thereafter.
He smelled good, and there was no shadow on his face like there usually was on Oliver’s. The What Am I Thinking routine, through clouded thought, held muggy by the clutch of red wine and the mental desire to push thoughts of Oliver as far out of her mind as possible, came up after a few moments on the bed. On the hotel bedspread, flowers and vines, she felt more and more entangled. The feel of Darren’s lips, she would remember in a few hours, was not a good thing. His smell was good, his smooth face too. But his lips. They felt foreign. They felt...not right.
Overcome, she left him there, rushed out with no explanation, and took her rental car to the airport through sleet that was falling heavier and heavier. She was intent on buying a late night seat on the eleven-twenty flight to Pearson International, home. Her guilt was a gilded edge and she felt like she was laying naked on it.
But impending weather downed all east-bound departures until at least morning. The guilt though, it was sharp. Her judgment was clouded, indistinct, and she felt like she could not face any of her colleagues or Darren Knoll in the morning. She certainly could not sit next to them on that early morning flight.
With Sebastion’s little face in her mind, and her reflexes still dulled by the wine, she hit the highway east, heading through the storm. She was feeling tired and worn, but was convincing herself that the alcohol’s effects were easing out of her system. Things would turn around.
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The Druid didn’t know what she was thinking. At first the desire to just finish things up, not atonement per se, but something in the same family as atonement, drove her to grab the matches and light the paintings on fire. She wanted to see those glimpses of faces, those voices she knew too well, and the knowledge of everything that had come and gone, vanish. She wanted to see it burn up.
And she wanted herself and Zeb to go with it.
Even through the grief, the downright sickening grief, she couldn’t let go of that hatred for Zeb.
It was palpable. Even after so much time, after such a long journey of twists and turns, she couldn’t get rid of it. And she followed Zeb out into the yard with it still in her mouth. Its taste made her swing the rocks against his windshield. He wouldn’t escape. Even through the clouds of pressure, the crush of the past on her windpipe, she just couldn’t let him away.
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When the gold and chrome Thunderbird bumper had finally slipped beneath the churning waters of the frigid and unforgiving river, David Langtree groped and sputtered in the water, trying in the darkness to find an edge to the stream. His panic, his overwhelming grief, both, gnawed at him. He felt like there was pure electricity flowing into his body from his extremes. His missing forearm was agony and his mind was lost in pictures of his little girls somewhere under the water, still belted in, trying to scream but only having their lungs fill with cold water, freezing them from the inside out.
His sloppy dogpaddle brought him to the edge of the water where the other driver, that damned fool who owned the road, was clinging to a dark tree root and calling out to him.
David’s sight, without his glasses, was a blurry gray with washed out blues. Only the snow, white, glowing white, was distinct. In his ears, the buzzing of his tinnitus was stark and loud, nearly drowning out the shouts from that only other living soul.
He made it to that driver and saw that same half-moon face as before. The water roiled
and crashed. There were dark shards of mountain and the trees seemed to shiver. The sweet unmistakable scent came from that other driver’s breath and he heard his father’s voice against the buzz in his ears: I have been grieving for you longer than you will be for me.
—grieving for you—
—longer than you will be for me—
With anger, shock and disillusion coursing through what was left of his body, he reached out for a long slender neck as he finally went under.
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The evening was mild and the stars were beginning to come out at the dull eastern panel of sky. In the west, the sheet above them was still a lighter blue, even pale at the edge of Eden’s twinkling presence.
Initially, Zeb’s fleeting image of his neighbor’s boat launch had seemed promising. If he couldn’t get through his own black-barred gates, a detour onto the surface of the lake using the tracks of the boat launch and then back onto the gravel lane using another launch somewhere down the road seemed like his only chance. The ice was surely strong enough to easily sustain the weight of the car at its shallow edge. But in the chilly dimming light, with the Druid’s wiry grip on him, he had taken the car well past the lake’s shallow rim, had, in fact, revved the engine uncontrollably in first gear and brought the Ci way out from the safety of the edge. Unable to grip the wheel while he battled her, the car had ambled from his original course. They were not yet approaching the middle, for Charlemagne had a deep and wide body, but were much farther than feasible if he wanted to start looking for a way back on to the pebbly shore.
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