Grist Mill Road

by Christopher J. Yates

  His father calls twice and leaves messages, becoming insistent about the guy in Goldman who owes him a favor. Patrick doesn’t return the calls, but less picky in his search for new work now, he sends out his résumé another eleven times and fails five interviews. Hannah might not like the word fail but what other word should he use? And he needs to find a job soon—the financial crisis is becoming more severe with each passing day, every news bulletin. What was it Trevino said? Tornadoes with a 50 percent chance of Apocalypse.

  He cooks more and more, making frequent trips to the greenmarket, returning with his wicker basket full of roots and apples before the spring produce arrives. And then with fava beans, asparagus, sorrel, baby artichokes. The frequency of his blogging increases and the numbers for Red Moose Barn show a steady improvement, more and more traffic to his website, a rise in the number of page views per visit. He was worried that increasing his posting would lead to saturation, boredom, but instead he seems to be feeding some sort of need. And then his brother is on his back about allowing their father to help him. Eventually they fight on the phone, Patrick hanging up angrily when his brother scoffs at the word principles.

  He embarks upon a personal mission to cook every recipe from the book La Cuisine Précise by Jean-Jacques Rougerie, a Christmas gift from Hannah, described by The New York Times as the most challenging recipe book ever written for the home cook. When he is not dreaming up meals for Red Moose Barn he is filling a paint gun with chocolate to spray melon-ball-size scoops of ice cream, or turning chicken fat into a powder that he scatters over microgreen salads like a dusting of crumbled feta, or poaching egg yolks in clarified butter, droplet by droplet, so that when he is finished the plate appears to be covered in hundreds of kernels of corn.

  Here and there he starts to slip Jean-Jacques Rougerie’s modern techniques into the homey cooking of Red Moose Barn. But everything must stay hidden, he tells himself, the magic behind the curtain.

  His technique is rapidly improving. Sometimes he looks at a plate of food he has produced and feels that something beyond him must have guided his hand.

  And yet still Patrick knows he has to find a job and he spends hours trying on interview clothes, as if a certain shoe–tie combination or a particular pair of socks with this shirt or that, his blue suit or his gray, might make all the difference.

  He fails three more interviews, the third of which he was sure he had nailed.

  Gray suit, pale blue shirt, brown silk tie.

  Meanwhile he continues to follow Don Trevino. There are no set days assigned to the task but he feels the frequency increase. One weekend he realizes that he followed Trevino on four of the previous five workdays, weekdays, and promises to limit himself to two days a week.

  En route to these clandestine missions, or when returning home, it becomes increasingly important to Patrick that he take a route that will entail his not having to stop and wait at a single crossing light. He feels desperate that he should achieve perfect efficiency of motion and wonders if some part of him supposes that efficiency of motion might make up for the increasingly wasted hours of his life.

  Often he imagines running at Trevino, charging like a bull, the liberating roar that would sound from his lungs. He pictures the moment of recognition on Trevino’s face when he realizes that the crazy bellowing and running down the street is an ex-employee and that he, Don Trevino, is the target. Sometimes Trevino has time to turn and flee but Patrick chases him down, pow! Or if he doesn’t catch him, Trevino runs into moving traffic. Oh, the distance a body might fly. Other times Don Trevino is frozen by uncertainty and Patrick leaps and tackles him, their bodies sailing horizontally offscreen.

  He reads an article about professional pasta extruders and later that day imagines feeding Trevino’s arm into one of the machines.

  Linguine.

  He recounts these daydreams to Dr. Rosenstock, who reassures him that such thoughts are perfectly natural. Patrick’s mind clearly has need of these fantasies. But he doesn’t tell Dr. Rosenstock about the actual stalking, not least because the word stalking strikes him as too extreme, and neither does he feel ready to share what he has written down about the events of 1982. Whenever he’s ready, Dr. Rosenstock reassures him, adding that he’s immensely pleased with their progress, he should be very proud of himself, Patrick feeling infantilized by the praise.

  He starts to delight in the use of cheaper cuts of meat—beef shanks, pork shoulder, neck of lamb—and learns to debone a whole chicken, taking great pleasure in the task of butchering bird after bird, popping joints, snapping bones from their sockets, severing cartilage. Every time he finishes, he cleans and hones the knife, stroking the blade afterward, checking the deathly sharpness of its edge until he can almost hear a high-pitched ringing in his ears.

  He continues to write about his food adventures for his blog on which he has now placed ads and created links to buy products he uses. In March he makes $147.40. In April he makes $202.68. He wonders about investing in a better camera.

  When his next interview proves fruitless, Patrick realizes that his number of failures has risen to nine. He worries that it might mean something definitive should the total reach ten. He takes his résumé from the printer, crumples it into a ball and makes a perfect throw into the wastebasket.

  He gives up having his hair cut expensively by Takahashi in a NoHo loft every four weeks and buys clippers instead, cutting his own hair while standing naked in the bathtub, the vacuum cleaner close at hand. While the clippers buzz he thinks about how undignified this scene would look to anyone witnessing the process.

  The home haircuts are just one element in his effort to cost-neutralize his existence. Now that he cooks most weeknights, instead of two or three, they must be saving more than a thousand dollars a month on restaurant meals. His blog is making only pocket money for now but two hundred dollars is at least something to throw into the equation. Plus, they have no mortgage to pay—thanks to Hannah’s inheritance, finances have never been a genuine concern. If he can cost-neutralize himself perhaps Patrick can justify not having to find himself another job so soon.

  Thoughts of the continuing job search make him sick, the process having quickly made him feel undignified. As undignified as he might feel were someone to observe him standing naked in the bathtub, the vacuum cleaner close at hand, his pale body covered in short lengths of dark clipped hair.

  Every day the picture in his head of Red Moose Barn gains a little more detail. The interior of the restaurant has been clear to him for some time, so his imagination begins to wander farther and farther outside. He sees a meadow rising behind the barn, climbing eventually to an apple orchard. The restaurant’s nearest neighbors are retired professors who live in a converted schoolhouse and take the same table early every Thursday evening.

  Back in the real world of their condo, Patrick begins to perform domestic chores beyond the kitchen, which means they have to let go of their housekeeper—there remains nothing for her to clean. He fears an angry scene but it is worse, their housekeeper cries and tells him they have a beautiful apartment and she is grateful to have worked there. Hannah says that letting go of Marta was a mistake, Patrick will soon find a job and they will struggle to find a housekeeper as good.

  But not using Marta will save them almost five thousand dollars a year. So he scrubs and he dusts and he polishes. He washes their clothes and folds them neatly away. One day in their apartment building’s laundry room, a woman tries to help him add time to the dryer. But he knows how to add five minutes to the dryer. He’s a man, not an idiot. This is not genetic fucking knowledge.

  Patrick smiles and thanks her.

  Returning to the apartment, he discovers that a picture of sorrel soup with blackened shrimp that he sent to a food photo submission website has been accepted. Nearly seven hundred people are funneled to his own website that day. One visitor, TribecaM, writes such a kind and gushing comment about Patrick’s recipe-writing style that he asks Hannah whether
she has invented the character TribecaM so that she can compose uplifting comments on his blog to bolster his mood.

  She says that she has done no such thing, then looks uncomfortable, as if wondering whether she might be guilty of some negligent omission.

  One night, before the weather is quite warm enough for it to be comfortable outside, they make love on their building’s roof terrace, almost getting caught by neighbors who come out to show the view to friends. Patrick and Hannah are behind a long wooden planter and they hear the neighbors whispering about people in the building they dislike. Hannah and Patrick are not on the list but some of their dislikes surprise Patrick and he feels hurt on other people’s behalf.

  Another night, after watching The Seagull on Broadway, they eat at a Mexican restaurant and Hannah slips her hand under the table and up against his groin. They fuck urgently but almost silently in the men’s bathroom before returning to plates of léchon and carne asada.

  They no longer talk about his efforts to find a job. He doesn’t tell Hannah that his blog has started making money. It seems as if she has closed her eye to him and is silently praying for things to get better. But until they do, she doesn’t want to watch, she can’t take on his pain. Perhaps they love each other too much to talk about what is happening to him, that the sun is slipping from Patrick’s world.

  It had always seemed to him that Hannah’s nighttime screaming occurred approximately once a week. At the end of January he creates a document on his laptop to keep a record of these episodes and discovers that the true figure, over a three-month period from February to May, was 1.23 times a week. But there are no particularly severe episodes. No knives, no slashed upholstery.

  He expands the document to include figures that will allow him to analyze his tailing of Don Trevino—having decided that stalking is definitely too harsh a word—and then adds a section for recording the average frequency of his and Hannah’s lovemaking.

  One afternoon late in May, he snips all the collars from his work shirts, using a pair of kitchen shears he bought years ago to cut the backbones from chickens. The next day he tosses his ties in the trash chute, all of them except for the tie he wore on their wedding day.

  TribecaM has become an increasing presence on the pages of Red Moose Barn. She or he is always complimentary and Patrick wonders, with an embarrassed blush, whether he has a fan. A female fan, he hopes, his blush deepening.

  Perhaps the Times will include him in a list of top food blogs one day. He performs frequent web searches for Red Moose Barn to see if there are any new mentions. Soon this hopeful web searching becomes a biweekly habit. And then daily. But maybe his audience will simply reach a tipping point on its own. He looks out for any surge by keeping a close eye on his website analytics—the graph of daily hits, the audience pie chart with its red new visitors wedge. He becomes aware that he is staring at his phone and computer too often every day now, praying for new messages, statistical bumps, hoping that something transformative will simply arrive, that one day his life will forever be changed by a new arrangement of pixels on a screen.

  What else is there to do?

  June arrives. The sky is mostly blue. And Patrick’s number of failed interviews remains stranded on nine.

  PATCH

  I was unconscious until Wednesday ticked over to Thursday, so I don’t know exactly how everything played out, but I suppose that initially, as far as the police were concerned, all they had to go on was this—

  One 13yo girl, Hannah Jensen, brought to the hospital with a BB gun pellet lodged in her left eye, recovering from emergency surgery. One 12yo boy, Patrick McConnell, suffering from blood loss and head trauma. One witness after the event, Alice Welcher, 62, who stated that said boy, unknown to her, had cycled into her driveway with said girl, also unknown to her, on the back of his bike. Situation—the injured parties were seemingly the only two people who could explain what had happened and yet both said boy and said girl were, for the time being, unconscious.

  Meanwhile my father, Joe McConnell, Ulster County’s chief assistant district attorney, rising Democrat and would-be New York State assemblyman (the election was little more than two months away), did not hesitate for a moment before telling the police as much as he could. Yes, his son owned a BB gun, a Red Ryder. No, the gun could not be found at home. Following this my brother, Sean, having been swiftly hooked out of soccer camp, told the police that I was best buddies with Matthew Weaver and that we often cycled up into the Swangums with the BB gun concealed in a fishing rod bag.

  So now, at least, I was not the only suspect.

  Next, I presume, someone was dispatched to find Matthew, only to discover that he wasn’t home. In fact, Matthew had ridden over to Mannaha State Park, concealed his bicycle in a large patch of ferns and begun living survivalist-style somewhere near Jakobskill Falls, hoping to stay alive on a diet of wild blueberries. Possibly, were it not for his close encounter with a large black bear four days later, an encounter that sent him running almost directly into the arms of a park ranger, he might still be there now, the Mowgli of Mannaha.

  Meanwhile, back to the hospital, approximately an hour after I awoke, an hour after my mom had soothed me and informed me of my fractured skull but explained that I was going to be fine, my father and two police detectives entered the room.

  If I told them I didn’t remember anything, touching my shamed and bandaged skull as I did so, it was not intended as any kind of deliberate tactic. And yet, as it turned out, my temporary amnesia was a masterstroke, because it quickly became clear that Hannah had regained consciousness a few hours before me and the police detectives had already spoken to her. Shaking their heads, they took out their notebooks and that’s when I learned, from the mouths of others, the story of everyone’s role, my own included, in the tragic loss of a thirteen-year-old girl’s left eye. And it went like this—

  Matthew Weaver, Hannah Jensen and I had ridden up to the Swangums together on our bikes the previous morning, setting out from the parking lot of O’Sullivan’s Dive Inn at or around 11:00 A.M.

  Matthew had led the three of us to a spot in the woods where he and I often hung out.

  Arriving at the spot, Matthew sent me away.

  I departed.

  Matthew tied Hannah to a tree.

  Matthew proceeded to shoot at Hannah for several minutes with my BB gun.

  Hannah passed out from shock when one of the BBs struck her left eye.

  It was unclear how long she was unconscious but a few minutes after Hannah awoke, I returned to the scene.

  At this point I was stumbling and faint, bleeding from a hole in the back of my head.

  Nevertheless, I cut Hannah down from the tree and helped her back to civilization.

  At which point, I passed out.

  Yes?

  Oh, just spectacular.

  You see, sometimes you do nothing at all and everything turns out just peachy.

  Next the detectives asked me what put the big hole in my head and I paused, as if waiting for a fog to clear, and told them I was strolling around killing time after Matthew sent me away but had gotten spooked by a snake. Fearing it was a rattler, I turned around and ran but, panicking, tripped and fell. No, I had no clue where Matthew might be now. Yes, I certainly could describe to them the spot where the shooting had taken place and tell them what it was we did up there. I was happy to help as much as I could.

  Dad grasped me warmly by the shoulder. Good work, Patch, good work, he said. And now that I think about it, I’m fairly sure that was the last time in my life that my father ever looked proud of me.

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH HANNAH WAS JUST ALONG the corridor from me, I didn’t get to see her at all in the hospital.

  In fact, it would turn out that our family’s time in Roseborn would soon come to an abrupt end and I wouldn’t set eyes on Hannah Jensen again for another two decades, until our accidental meeting on the concourse of Grand Central Station. So I never did get to ask he
r why she didn’t mention anything to the police about the fact that I was there and did nothing—not that I would ever have asked such a question at that age. Instead I became haunted by the thought that one day the police would find out about my cowardice and I would be sent to jail where, with good reason, my fellow prisoners would abuse and torture me for my role in such a despicable crime. If I had thought about Hannah’s silence as to my presence, I probably would have guessed it was some kind of tit for tat situation. OK, so I had done nothing to stop Matthew from shooting out her eye. However, I did go back for her. I did cut her down and help her get out of that place. Perhaps Hannah thought we were even.

  Only it would turn out that the explanation for why Hannah Jensen had said nothing to the police was something completely different. But I wouldn’t learn this new side to the story for many years to come, several weeks after seeing her at Grand Central, a revelation that I overheard accidentally as she spoke on the phone. And now this revelation has become the monstrous secret that paces the perimeter of our marriage, like something that prowls in the shadows, a dangerous creature awaiting its moment, the right time to strike.

  When it comes to our relationship, we have only ever stated one rule out loud, a rule made at Hannah’s request. We don’t talk about that day. Ever. And if Hannah doesn’t want to talk about it, then certainly neither do I.

  So if I haven’t shown this account to you, Dr. Rosenstock, perhaps this is the reason why. Because to have kept the truth to myself for so long feels like a crime in itself, a terrible secret I couldn’t bear for anyone to learn.

  Hannah least of all.

  * * *

  I TURNED THIRTEEN ON THE following Tuesday, one day after my return from the hospital and two days after Matthew’s arrest and immediate confession, which I found out about because, being Ulster County’s senior prosecutor, my father had privileged access to all the information on the Weaver case, despite the potential conflict of interest, his son being, to use his increasingly desperate phrase, only very loosely associated with the matter.