It was mesmerizing to watch the whites turning in the foamy current. Occasionally, a napkin would slide across the glass window like a pale carp. Sometimes, a towel or a sheet leapt like the ghost of some elegant animal, a deer or a fox—or there’d be a face, a human face, with eyes and lips and a nose, flashing for no more than a second in the soapy tumult. Like the face of the clever little baby she knew she’d have one day. A white dress, a wedding cake. Sometimes a sheet that had become knotted opened like a huge flower inside the spinning tunnel, and Florence would feel something like she often did in church: that she’d been touched by the hand of God.
* * *
At times, late in her shift, she grows tired. Like now. The phantasms in the tunnel are no longer lovely. In the machine, she sees there are still stains, black lines like tire tracks on a white road. Smudges, imperfections—it will have to be done again. She’s exhausted as she stares into the enormous snow globe of the washing machine.
It all looks so strange. Winter. Great mounds of snow and ice, shifting and falling. Trees smothered by a blizzard. The machine squeaks like a dog whining, or a child crying.
She wants to go home and climb into bed, to wrap herself in her own white sheets that smell like milk. She wants to soothe her red hands; to sleep. But her work isn’t finished. What’s been entrusted to her is not yet clean. The black streak that moves across the glass window feels like danger, defilement. The black streak turns red.
Panic.
She puts her hand against the machine and closes her eyes. It makes no sense to feel this much heat in December, in the middle of a blizzard.
December
40
A Hunting Accident
The snow fell like a kind of confusion, piling up outside the cabin, obscuring logic. Conrad tried to understand what was going on. There was a child in his house, a creature so tiny and pale it was sometimes terrifying. The boy’s delicacy had started to make Conrad’s entire world seem like something made of glass. Nearly three months had passed—and nothing had gone as planned. Of course, the passage of time did have its advantages, one of which was the way it allowed Conrad’s memory to take some license with the situation.
How had the boy gotten here, exactly? It seemed impossible to Conrad that he would have brought Edgar to the cabin—plucked him away from his home, his family; lied to him. More likely, the boy had followed him here. He wanted to be here. This being the case, Conrad found it confusing when the boy cried and said he wanted to leave. He did this less than he’d done at first—but, still, the situation was not as it should be. When the boy was upset, he appeared even more translucent. Even on good days, life proceeded at an odd tilt.
Someone, either he or Edgar, was thinking about things in the wrong way.
If he calmed his mind, though, he remembered that he had a plan. But the plan seemed ludicrous now. Grief had fucked up his head—its effects oddly similar to those of certain hallucinogens he’d experimented with when he was younger. Everything was fluid, provisional, chimeric. Nothing was real. This had been true ever since Kevin had died—but the feeling, which everyone said would diminish, had only grown stronger over time. Maybe it was a bad idea to prolong his involvement with this other boy. Conrad was torn.
While he still wished to be destroyed, he’d also become greedy. He’d become a father again, experiencing a disturbing facsimile of love. He knew it was a lie—but sometimes the motions of domesticity were sufficient to create a world. Feeding the dog together, the fish; watching television; drying someone’s tears; sharing breakfast every day—these were the things that made up a life, that made people a family. Conrad and the boy were no longer strangers. They were blood. What ran through their veins and made them inseparable was the same hallucinogen. Grief.
For all their struggles and fraught negotiations, hadn’t they also had some wonderful days? Conrad found himself caught between two impulses—the first being to antagonize the child, so that the child might rightly despise him. But, at the same time, Edgar had come to depend on him, and Conrad felt compelled to provide assistance.
The most miraculous thing, though, was that Edgar had found the strength to offer kindness, as well. At first, Conrad was suspicious, not being able to see beyond the context of his own manipulations. But then he came to understand that the boy’s compassion was authentic. He seemed to be equipped with an empathy bordering on the pathological—a febrile intelligence uncannily attuned to the pain of others. Conrad felt known, sensed how his every thought and feeling drifted like spores of pollen onto the boy’s invisible antennae. Edgar’s whiteness seemed the outward sign of an unencumbered, and possibly self-damaging, receptivity.
The way, only a few weeks ago, he’d said it would be okay if Conrad wanted to call him Kevin. “Not all the time,” the boy had clarified—adding, cryptically, “Just when you have to.” At that point, though, it was Conrad who couldn’t allow it—recognizing, with a cold shock, how effectively he’d dismantled Edgar’s former existence. It had been a slow process, accomplished by a steady casting of long shadows backwards onto the boy’s mother and the man who was conveniently called the butcher.
Conrad’s best option might be to portray the better man. Taking the higher ground would not necessarily stand in the way of his own destruction. If Edgar were to erase Conrad, couldn’t the boy’s act be one of love, instead of hatred?
Conrad wished he could sleep, but his mind stayed lit with a kind of Christmas Eve electricity: outrageous desires rubbing up against the fear that he might get exactly what he deserved. The steady down-drifting of snow only added to this sense of laden expectation. Something was waiting outside the cabin, where visibility was compromised. It was often necessary to stay indoors. Much of the hunting season had passed. Conrad had gone out only once, alone, bagging a twelve-point buck, which he’d dressed discreetly in the woodshed while the boy was sleeping. The meat would last them a few months.
On clear days, during the brief hours of sun, Conrad would give Edgar his lessons in the yard. He was progressing nicely—though he still refused to shoot anything but crabapples or tin cans.
At night, in bed, Conrad tried to reconstruct the chain of events that had brought him here; tried to arrive at what he wanted. Sometimes it was helpful to jot things down in his notebook. Words weren’t a solace, but they focused one’s emotions into something more tangible; they were splinters that could actually be pulled from the heart and placed on a table, regarded.
Kevin is dead.
It was amazing that such a thing could be written down. It took Conrad’s breath away.
A year ago he’d died. A year and twenty-six days. Since then, there were long stretches of time Conrad couldn’t recall. Certain things, though, came back to him easily, mercilessly preserved, like clips from a film made without his consent.
The first few weeks after Kevin had died—Conrad recalled clearly. He and his wife had barely risen from their bed. They slept, or didn’t sleep. There was no talking. They didn’t touch. Eventually, Sara drifted to one of the guest bedrooms and stayed there. Conrad didn’t blame her. If it had been possible for him to leave his own body and sleep in another room, he would have done it. At that point, his vague desire to abandon himself had not yet condensed into the more practical thought of suicide.
It was clear from the beginning (the beginning being Kevin’s end) that Sara would never forgive him. From now on, it would be a new life—one in which every open door, every song, every glass of water, would be clogged with unconquerable regret.
Not being particularly brave or inherently brutal, Conrad was unable to act when the idea of taking his own life presented itself, like an envelope slipped under a door. He picked it up, turned it over—but found himself unable to open it.
It was not as if there were no encouragement.
Three weeks after Kevin’s death, Conrad’s shotgun was returned to him—the investigation complete; closed; the father deemed of stable mind, with no intention
to inflict harm.
Innocent. An accident.
* * *
Sara had stood by Conrad’s side at first—holding his hand during the questioning, kissing his cheek at night after he’d fallen asleep. She tried to be kind, understanding that his pain might be greater than hers.
Still, her son was dead—and her husband, the boy’s father, was responsible. At first, the fury she felt toward Conrad was a distant planet, barely visible at the outer limits of her grief. But, by the time the gun was returned, the planet had moved closer. Her hands would shake whenever Conrad approached. She knew he hadn’t shot Kevin on purpose, but reason played no part in this. In her mind, she parsed her fury into endless questions.
Why did Conrad have to hunt? Why did a rich man need to kill animals for food? Because his father had done it? She’d never liked Conrad’s father. The idea to hate all men seemed reasonable. She didn’t include Kevin here; Kevin was a boy. Why did Conrad feel compelled to turn him into a little soldier? Take him to that horrible cabin every year? Teach him things! Teach him to be a man! Why couldn’t men leave children alone? Leave them to their mothers?
Even Conrad’s grief began to infuriate her. It smacked of drama. She supposed it was genuine, no different from her own, but sometimes Conrad displayed it too fervently, as if he wanted her to approve of it or give him some kind of comfort she was incapable of giving. Maybe what he really wanted was for her to openly condemn him—take time away from her own grief and punish him. As if the tragedy were all about him.
Infuriating, to see him at the kitchen table, writing in his journal—his pen scratching violently, nearly ripping the pages. She used to love the fact that he was “creative”—it seemed to soften some of the shit Conrad had picked up from his father. But now he seemed a fool, a weakling. All these years trying to write a book! And what was he doing now, when he scribbled—working on his never-ending novel or writing about Kevin? Was it all one thing to him—all part of his fucking “process”? What writers did with their minds seemed offensive to her, the way they messed things up, mixed the real with the imaginary. As if one could escape from the facts, or change them. Writers were selfish. Conrad wrote at the kitchen table, in tears, and it repulsed her.
She no longer loved him. Nothing was left. Whenever she was at home with Conrad she found it difficult to breathe. Luckily she’d kept her job as a nurse after getting married. She wasn’t the type to sit around all day like Conrad and do nothing. Writing was not a job. Who was he trying to kid? A man with a four-million-dollar portfolio, and he dressed like a gas station attendant. Drove that shitty green truck. What a phony.
She inwardly condemned her husband to mask a deeper sadness: that she’d never really understood him. Grief should have brought them together, exposed them to each other; instead, it turned her chest into a plate of armor, outside of which Conrad skulked nervously, unpredictably, a stranger more than ever—possibly an enemy.
He’d given her a child, though, a beautiful boy. But that was over, too. She’d loved them both so much, Conrad and Kevin, that she now felt it within her rights to hate with equal intensity.
She would leave. Stay with Anita, a friend from the hospital; eventually get her own place. Start over.
She’d already decided to let Conrad keep the dog. Kevin’s dog. The poor beast was always wandering around the house, looking for the boy. She’d never be able to bear it.
* * *
For Conrad, the return of the shotgun was significant. It meant that he was to be trusted. Trusted to do the right thing. He would sit in his bedroom for hours—lifting the gun to his mouth and then lowering it. Everyone, the living and the dead, waited for the sound. He left the door cracked in case Sara cared to see what he was up to.
She never came to the bedroom, though.
If he just had a little encouragement. If someone would just say, Do it.
There was an edge, black and breathless. It was right there, right in front of him. Crossing it would require no more than a click—a beetle closing its wings.
But he was afraid.
How did other people do it? Conrad wondered. Those who’d managed it certainly could not have had more sadness than he did. More regret, more self-loathing. What secret power did they possess—these suicides—what charm against fear? They must be like gods, he thought. Unable to finish himself, Conrad felt the sting of his mortality as never before. Did he secretly want to live? It was disgusting.
He saw shadows. Sometimes the dog came into the bedroom and stared at him or pushed her head against his leg. He refused to touch her.
One afternoon, he took the shotgun into the living room—where Sara was sitting on the couch, picking lint off the sleeve of her sweater. He placed the gun on her lap and knelt before her—a little to her left so that the barrel of the gun was facing him.
He didn’t expect her to do it, of course. He only wanted her to look at him. To see him.
Air streamed audibly from his wife’s nostrils, a slow deflation; her body slumped. When she looked at Conrad, it was with an expression that began as sadness, but quickly bloomed into contempt.
“You think you can just…?”
She looked down at the gun. The corners of her lips stretched so far into her cheeks it almost seemed she was smiling. From her mouth came a stream of garbled sound Conrad couldn’t decipher.
She swallowed and tried again, setting down each word as if it were a heavy stone pulled from her chest. “How can a person look like an animal?”
Conrad closed his eyes.
“Tell me—how can a twelve-year-old boy look like a fucking deer?”
The question contained no sarcasm; it was not rhetorical. She wanted to know.
But what could he say that he hadn’t already said—to her, to the police, to himself—a thousand times?
A boy can look like a deer if he has dark hair and is wearing a brown jacket.
A boy can look like a deer if he’s running.
A boy can look like a deer if it’s late afternoon and the light is fading.
Conrad was an excellent hunter. He always put safety first. Kevin was supposed to have been behind him. You stay behind me—he’d drilled that into the boy since he was eight, when he’d given him his first rimfire. What the fuck had gotten into the kid’s head? Why had he wandered off and circled around to the pond? Why had he taken off his orange vest? Sometimes Conrad found himself so angry with Kevin he would punch the wall—a consuming rage that confused his grief and made him wonder if he was capable of murder.
But, no. It was an accident—a hunting accident. Those were the words on the report.
Conrad rehearsed the phrase. It seemed odd, code for something else, as if it should be in quotes. He scrawled the words at the top of a blank page, where they floated hopelessly, like the title of a story that would never be written.
A Hunting Accident.
Over the next several weeks, Conrad, delirious with exhaustion, would sometimes spot the entry in his notebook. Eyes fluttering, he would stare at the words—troubled by the sense that they bore some relation to something that had happened in his own life.
* * *
When Sara left, she kissed him—but when he tried to embrace her, she pulled away. She’d packed only a small bag. She was crying. She wished him good luck, as if he were a stranger. But then she said two things that made Conrad feel that she still loved him—even though she refused to look him in the eye.
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
And then she said, “I hope you finish your book.”
A few weeks later, when the paperwork came, making their separation a legal matter, Conrad signed his name and returned the papers without delay. Soon after that, a woman named Anita, another nurse at the hospital, came by the house to pick up a few of Sara’s things. She brought along her son, a tall healthy boy—thirteen, fourteen—named Jarell. Conrad could barely stand to look at the strapping kid in torn jeans.
The things
Anita and Jarell collected from the house seemed strange to Conrad. Sara had made a list. Electric toothbrush, neck pillow, passport, running shoes, inversion table. It was the teenage boy who carried out the large contraption that allowed Sara to hang upside down to stretch or do sit-ups. It made no sense to Conrad why she would want that now. He pictured his wife hanging upside down in the black woman’s living room. How was that going to help? Did she think her body was an hourglass; that she could reverse the flow of time? He was surprised that Sara wanted nothing of Kevin’s.
The boy’s bedroom, all its sunken treasure, was left to Conrad. Sometimes he would lay out Kevin’s clothes and stand before them. It took no effort at all to play it differently—Conrad forgetting his orange vest, and Kevin blindly shooting.
* * *
For a while, in the quiet house he’d shared with his wife and son, he lost all sense of his body. Minutes, hours, days—they varied little in length or quality. When he returned, several months later, to the here and now, it seemed that he might be slightly better. He was able to eat, bathe, take Jack for a walk instead of just letting her relieve herself in the yard. One morning, Conrad found himself tucking in his shirt and sensed that he might actually survive; might want to survive.
But then he started watching the children. He would drive around until he found an active spot near a school or a park or a convenience store. What struck him as he watched them was the disconcerting fact that they were all beautiful. It was like an assault—each face flying into his body like an arrow. Whereas before it had always been obvious that certain young faces lacked charm or grace—now it was impossible to find an ugly child. The homely, the ill-fated, the plain, joined hands with the gifted and the comely. They all seemed to possess a secret trove of light that they carried, threateningly, just under their skin. They were beautiful, but dangerous. They brought back Conrad’s desire to be loved, destroyed.
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