“That’s a terrible story,” Emma said.
“You’re right.”
Again, now, a pause, or more like a hesitation; we sat looking at each other until, oddly frightened of myself, I glanced away.
“Well,” I murmured. “Time for bed.”
“Dad,” she said, “your hands are shaking.”
I looked down. “Are they? I must be tired.”
“Time for bed.”
I tried to smile. “You’re right.”
“Good night,” she breathed.
“Good night, Em. I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
She closed her eyes. I kissed her, once on each eyelid, and got up. At the door I switched off the light and stood staring into the new darkness until I thought I could see her blond head. And then I went out.
At the end of the hallway, just outside our bedroom door, Grace was standing, already in her nightgown.
“Are you coming to bed?” she asked quietly.
I finished closing Emma’s door. “In a little while. There’s some reading I want to do first. You probably shouldn’t bother waiting up.”
I thought she would turn away, but she stood where she was, looking at me.
“Are you sure?”
Her eyes were fixed on mine with a poignant intensity; she was looking at me, I thought, as if she knew everything. A sudden physical weakness ran through my body, a debilitating need for her comfort and touch, and in my mind I saw a fantastic sequence of images in which she reached out to me and told me not to go.
“Good night,” she said.
I went to her and kissed her. “Good night, Grace.”
Then I let that go. The warmth of family, the fantasy of retreating and forgetting. I went downstairs alone.
I waited two hours in my study. This was the hardest time. The night drew later, darker, the house silent save for its cold-weather noises, creakings and hummings and knocks. I sat there and felt the anger come back. Sat rigid on that chair like something frozen until the house itself was forgotten, a discarded shell. I saw that there was no choice any more. The frustration was like a physical wound which, quickly fading, leaves a red scar of despair. It had hurt a long time already. But now that I knew who he was, it had become unbearable.
I got up, moved about. Ran my hand reflexively over the spines of my books. Sat down again and put my head in my hands. I felt exhausted and terribly frightened but also resolute and not alone; my son, and the man who’d killed him, were in every thought I had.
Then it was later. I went outside. The sky was black with a lining like smoke which was the clouds full of snow; the moon was gone. I walked carefully across the hard, frost-covered ground. Up close, the barn was a shadow mountain, ominous and unfamiliar, and with outstretched hands I felt my way around the side to the narrow door. Hinges cried out. Stepping inside, I smelled the traces of dung and hay, ghosts from another era, and over it gasoline, an automobile in the cold. I switched on the light. A single bare bulb floating high up among the rafters, my breath already rising toward it, dissipating.
On the far side of the barn, beyond Grace’s car and the empty space for my own, along a wall of junk, lay the army officer’s trunk that had been Grace’s father’s. Her private shrine to his memory. Looking at it now, its coating of dust and negligence, finding it locked, I remembered the day it had arrived by truck from North Carolina. Our first summer here. Josh was an infant. We had the mover put the trunk in the barn. “What’s in it?” I had asked her. “A few of his things,” was all she would say. She had seemed moved almost beyond words, alone with herself and the still undiminished pain of her father’s early death. I left her to go through the contents alone, and then, later, I went through it myself, in secret: a West Point blanket, moth-eaten, faded gray and black; a mess kit; a leather valet of tarnished military medals, cuff links, studs, a gold watch; a shoebox of letters with old stamps, the glue dried to nothing, the stamps like dead flies in an attic. And in a dented metal box, a revolver, army issue, property of Captain Avery Spring. And bullets.
Dwight
I fixed up the spare bedroom for him, the one that had never been slept in. The one that had been waiting for him to come home to. And while Sam stood there looking around at the bare ugly walls and such, the criminal lack of posters and Red Sox memorabilia, I tore open the package with the brand-new nightlight that I’d been saving for months just for this occasion, and plugged the thing into the wall. It made a world of difference, if you ask me. Bingo, a motel becomes a house.
Practice saying it, while you can: “Welcome home, son. Here’s your room, son.” And then remember that rehearsals don’t count.
He changed into his pajamas, went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. And my heart was beating hard just from knowing that he wasn’t going anywhere but was settling down for the night, right here. Then he came out of the bathroom and told me that the sink was too tall for him to reach. I offered to lift him up myself but he didn’t want help. He was ten years old and wanted something to stand on.
Well, I would have gotten him anything he wanted that night. I looked around the house for a couple of minutes but there was nothing for him to stand on. Which wasn’t much of a surprise. Because it was an empty, useless house but for him. Because the only footstool I had was sitting out in the garage, coated with dust.
I told him to hang on, I’d be right back. I went to the kitchen for the door clicker in the cigar box.
Outside, the air was cold, the sky heavy; it felt as if any second it would start to snow. I walked across the lawn. Yellow light painted the drive in front of the garage. I went inside. The car was there as it had been, but this time I kept clear of it. I stayed to the left side, where all the stuff was—the junk and sports equipment and tools, the bearable memories. I found the footstool underneath the stray lid of a plastic trash can. It was made of plywood stained a fake cherry color and didn’t look strong enough to hold my weight. It looked poorly homemade. I couldn’t remember how I’d come to have it, or if I’d ever tried to use it. But I thought it would do fine for Sam, and I picked it up and walked out of the garage with it, making a conscious effort not even to glance at the car. As if, on my boy’s first and only night in my house, I might be able to keep these histories separate, his and mine.
Back inside the house, I found him in his pajamas sitting on the gray leather sofa in the den, watching the eleven o’clock news on TV.
“I’m waiting for sports,” he said.
What could I say? I didn’t give two cents for the state of his dental hygiene or his bedtime. He was my son. I sat down beside him and fit my arm around his shoulders.
Grace
She woke dreaming of suicide.
Snow on the ground; glorious sunshine; the light a series of explosions that leaves her dazed. In her nightgown, doorway of the house, she stands staring at Ethan, who stands in the middle of the yard, his hands, slit at the wrists as though gilled, outstretched toward her as if for an embrace, his blood pouring onto the snow in two steaming, red rivulets. He says nothing.
Now, beyond Ethan, something moves: she sees Josh running across the white ground for the road. She wants to call out but is unable to make even the smallest sound, merely raises her hand in an ambiguous gesture that goes unnoticed. Josh comes to the fence and goes over it. He reaches the road, white also, and runs into it just as a yellow school bus drives by. The bus blinds her like a sun and she looks away. When she looks back he is not there. The bus has passed, never stopping, and there is no sign of him. Mutely she falls to her knees in the doorway of the house. She sees Ethan, on his knees too, arms still outstretched, face drained of color. His blood has melted the snow around him; there the earth is bare and damp, red-rimmed like a wound. But in front of her the snow is white and thick and she reaches out and buries her hand in it. The hand disappears. The cold comes like a burning. And then a sound—
She woke shaking. The covers off her. The room dark but
strange, luminous, dream light, and in her mind, held like a note that goes on singing itself long after the song is over, the sound.
She hugged herself, lay thinking, What is it? Like a door closing. A door—
And then, from outside, through windows, an answer.
She was on her feet before her body could catch up. Stumbling across the room to the window—one to the left, northeastfacing, view of the driveway. First thing she saw was the snow everywhere, in the air thick and sinking, still and downy on the ground. A world transfigured. Her dream but at night. And then his headlights came on, reaching out from the driveway to the road, catching in those beams the continuous, fragmented falling of the heavens. As if during the night the sky itself had broken. A wave of fear rippled through her, the need to stop him from leaving, her hands, panicked like the newly blind, scrabbling up along the panes to the window lock, grasping with cold dumb fingers, straining. With a wrench it gave. And she threw open the window with all her might.
It was his taillights she saw, receding up the road like a pair of bloodshot eyes, blurred by the falling snow. Too late. She wanted to scream to him but didn’t. Control yourself, she demanded silently, to no one, and sank to her knees. Her heart was a small animal fighting for its life. Snow blew in through the open window and landed on her bare shoulders.
In the end, she got to her feet and went down the hall to Emma’s room.
She was surprised by the amount of light; the snow outside the windows made everything visible. She stood in the doorway taking it all in: the dog in the corner; the thin chill coming from the frosted panes; the smell of washed flannel sheets; the girl asleep at the far edge of the bed, the covers in disarray. Emma. On the ceiling roamed a teardrop pattern of shadow. She took a few more steps, and then she was standing by the bed. She could hear her child’s breathing, see the life there, real and within reach. Not a dream. And she felt better, less afraid, rooted, somehow, in time and place. Her mind suddenly alight with the words she used to know and believe: “Now I lay me down to sleep . . .”
“Mommy,” Emma breathed.
The blond head moved, turned toward her: awake.
“I’m here,” Grace said.
And she lay down with Emma to wait.
Dwight
My eyes opened. I was lying on my back on the leather sofa in the den, still in my clothes, hands tucked between my legs for warmth. A baby curled up. I couldn’t remember falling asleep, or why, or dreaming. For a few seconds I couldn’t remember anything. The gray light more like darkness than light, a kind of glow in it. I sat up and saw through the windows the snow falling quiet and steady, the world all covered over with white, and then I remembered that Sam was asleep, in my house, actually here, in his own room down the hall. And I believe I smiled to myself, thinking maybe, after breakfast, I’d take him sledding.
Then the refrigerator started up, came to life humming, and I looked toward the kitchen.
Ethan Learner was half in shadow but I could see him. I didn’t make a sound. He had a gun in his right hand and as I looked on he cocked back the hammer.
“Are you Dwight Arno?”
I must have nodded. Fear had turned me hardly conscious, able to think only about Sam. Sam here, asleep, here because I’d wanted it, begged for it, down on my knees to Ruth. Whatever else happened, I had to get this man and his gun out of the house before Sam woke up.
“Mr. Learner—”
“Be quiet.” It was all he said. His voice soft with a kind of lunatic calm, out on the fringe somewhere, as if not knowing itself how scared or angry it was. He came closer, passing in front of a window. His round glasses turned to silver dollars and then went gray again. He stopped about five feet away, the gun pointed down at the middle of my chest. “Move slowly,” he said.
I got up, my bad knee cracking as it unbent. My body a roadside breakdown, veritable junk. But then it happened, I felt it: a slight pause in him as I drew myself up, a shift in his makeup, inside hesitation, as if he’d lost the tune he was supposed to sing. Doubt sticking its head into the room: I must have outweighed him by thirty pounds.
I could see the gun better now. Big, serious, maybe antique. It looked like the army gun my old man had kept in his bedside drawer, memento of his days with a purpose and a team, days surely gone; a weapon kept, during his long slide to nowhere after my mother died, under no lock and no key, as if just waiting for me to get my hands on it. I’d taken that gun out just once, sneaked it off one night while he was passed out drunk, carried it burning hot in my pocket down blocks and through alleyways and across abandoned factory lots and out past the edge of town, where, fear-struck more than tough, I’d blasted a can of Schlitz into the afterworld. I knew the sound, the kick, the kind of hole a gun like this one made in tin or paper. The rest was just a good guess. The bullet enters the body, expands in the blink of an eye, blows a hole out my back the size, say, of a walnut, which happens also to be the size of my shrunken heart.
“Where’s your coat?” Learner said.
“Over there by the door.”
“Let’s go get it.”
I felt the gun graze my back as I went by him. There were things I thought to say but they were all about my son asleep down the hall, nothing he’d want to hear. So, moving for the door, I said nothing. Get my coat, I was thinking, get out of this house. In an hour or two Sam wakes up alone, sees the snow out his window and thinks maybe about sledding, wanders down the hall into his old man’s room and finds the round bed unslept in and the bureau drawers emptied and the duffel bags stuffed with clothes, feels the first twinges of confusion. Then a check of the rest of the house and the discovery that Dad has skipped out. Again. This would be the worst part, and my heart ached for him. But he would get over it. One day. He had already survived worse from me. And he would be safe, not in danger because of me. He knew how to use the phone, knew his own number; eventually he’d call his mother—
“Put it on,” Learner said.
My coat was on a hook by the front door and I put it on.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”
I put my hand on the doorknob. It was my own boy I was thinking about, not his. Last night. My own boy asleep on the couch, the TV droning on, my arm around his shoulders: I pick him up and carry him to his room, his head lolling, his feet sticking out, and tuck him in. First time in my house, last time in my house; he never wakes. And now I was leaving him again. The snowy cold blowing through the crack underneath the front door. I thought what a cheap-shit house this was and how sorry I was to ever have lived in it. I was turning the doorknob when I heard Sam, faint but clear, calling me from the other end of the house.
“Dad!”
Learner froze. “Who’s that?” His voice when he finally got it out was a panicked, whispery mess.
I couldn’t answer.
He jammed the gun into my back. “Answer me.”
“My son,” I whispered.
“What?”
“My son.”
“Where?”
“In his room.”
“Oh, Christ,” he said. Sweat had suddenly appeared in tiny glistening beads all over his forehead.
“He’s just a kid,” I said. “He doesn’t know anything.”
“Shut up.”
“Dad!”
“Let me go in and talk to him.”
“No. Shut up.”
“Dad!”
“If I don’t go to him he’ll come out.”
“All right,” Learner said weakly. “Go.”
He steered me with the gun—the muzzle hard and nervous in my spine, leaving a mark—pushed me ahead of him, back across the den to the hall, down it. We stopped outside Sam’s door, which was partway open. From the hall I saw just the edge of one window, the strange gray-white morning coming in around the shade, beneath it the tiny glowing bulb of the nightlight. I stepped inside the room. Sam lay on the bed with the covers kicked off, wearing nothing but his underpants and a long-sleeve T-shir
t. He was still sleepy, his hair mussed, his eyelids thick. I put a smile on my face and said, “Hey, sport.”
“Where were you? I woke up.”
“I can see that,” I said, not answering his question.
“What time’s it?”
“Too early for you to be asking.”
“You got your coat on,” he pointed out.
I’d forgotten I was wearing it. “Yeah, well, it’s snowing outside and real cold in here.” I sat down on the edge of the bed before he could say anything else. “As a matter of fact,” I went on, “what do you think you’re doing on top of the blankets? You catch a cold over here and your mother’s gonna let me have it. She’ll never let you come back.” I took a handful of the blankets and lifted them up so he could slip under. A waft of his smell came rising up with the warm, trapped air. “Listen to me, Sam, okay? I just want to check something. You know the phone number at your mother’s house?”
He didn’t answer right away. Then he nodded.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell it to me.”
He told it to me.
“So if you needed to, you could call her and get her to come pick you up here?”
He looked me in the eyes as if he sensed something. Finally, he nodded again.
“That’s my boy,” I said.
I heard Learner then, a noise so soft and invisible it wouldn’t mean anything unless you knew what it was: weight shifting from one foot to the other on the carpet. It made me hate his guts. I leaned over and put my arms around my son, half lifted him out of bed. He weighed next to nothing. I kissed his head and told him that I had to go into the office to work on a crisis—a legal problem involving someone very important—and that if I wasn’t back by the time the cartoons started on TV he should call his mother and have her come over and get him.
I let him go. His head dropped back on the pillow. He didn’t say anything, asked none of the obvious questions. Just kept looking at me. Till I stood up, tugging at the covers so they fit under his chin.
Reservation Road Page 24