“While you’re here,” she said, “can you help me move a table down from the attic?”
Grateful for something to do besides sit in the parlor, CJ said, “Sure, Mom.” He stood and headed for the hallway, to the pull-down stairs that would take him up to the attic.
“I didn’t mean you had to do it right now,” Dorothy called from the parlor.
“It’s okay, Mom.”
When he slid the latch aside and pulled the stairs down, a musty smell came with them. That couldn’t be good, CJ thought, knowing that the smell meant some moisture.
His work boots clumped on the wooden staircase as his hand instinctively went for the string that hung at the top of the stairs.
When he pulled on it, a single, swinging sixty-watt bulb went on, yet it didn’t do much to dispel the shadows from the corners of the room.
But what the light did show was enough to coax a single word from CJ.
“Wow,” he said.
Dorothy, who stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up at her son, said, “Wow, what?”
“I’d forgotten all of this stuff was up here.”
Except for a few items, the attic was a photograph of the way it had looked when he’d last been up here. The only differences involved the far right corner of the room, where several items— his father’s, by the looks of them—had been haphazardly tossed into a pile.
Seeing them made CJ aware that he’d gained access to a place his father had been trying to get to for years.
“The table’s the small one to your right. I’ll help you carry it down.”
She started coming up the stairs behind him, and he moved deeper into the attic, until his eye caught something familiar against the wall to his left. It was a chest, blue in color, like what a magician might use for an escape trick, although not quite that large. CJ crossed to it and knelt down, his hand feeling for and finding the latch.
Before he’d left for Vanderbilt, he’d cleaned his room out. His father had threatened to turn it into an office the second CJ walked out the door, and CJ decided he would rather move all his possessions himself rather than risk what his father would have done with them. The entire left corner of the attic, and halfway down the left wall, housed the contents of CJ’s room, and he hadn’t seen any of it since the day be walked out the door in 1993.
The first thing he saw was his baseball glove—the one he’d used in high school and that he hadn’t taken to college. He’d spent that summer working in a new glove, tossing it against the wall, stomping on it, rubber-banding a ball in its pocket—all the abuse a ball player had to inflict to make his glove ready for the game, to make it feel like an extension of his hand.
He set it aside and reached for something else in the chest, remembering that he’d packed some of his more important possessions there. It told him something about how the seasons of life shuffle, or reset, priorities that he’d forgotten about, all of these things within just a month of leaving New York. His hand came up with a faded envelope that bore a Vanderbilt letterhead: his scholarship offer. He put that aside too, and when he shifted his weight, when the single overhead bulb cast more of its light on the contents of the battered case, he saw his senior yearbook.
Dorothy had gained the top of the stairs and stood over him, but she didn’t say anything as he pulled the yearbook out and started to flip through its pages. It didn’t take him long to find his own picture. He laughed when he saw it, and then grimaced when he studied the shirt he was wearing. With a headshake he moved past it, glancing at the odd picture here, the random message there, people who’d scribbled memories and goodbyes on the pages. He didn’t know where any of them were now.
He was about to put the yearbook back in the chest when he reached the pages between which he’d stuck his team photo. The glossy print had attached itself to one of the book’s pages and it made a slight tearing sound as he pulled it free. He couldn’t believe how thin he was in the picture. Probably all of 150 pounds. He started to put the picture back, to end this trip down memory lane and help his mom with the table, when he spotted the neat handwriting beneath a girl’s picture that had been hidden behind the baseball photo.
For a long while he studied Julie’s picture—until a shifting of body weight behind him reminded him that his mother was there. Before he closed the book, though, he read what Julie had written all those years ago. Then he closed the book, placed it back in the chest, and shut the lid.
“Where’s that table?” he asked, perhaps a bit too gruffly.
“Right there,” Dorothy said, and there was a particular tone in her voice that made CJ look at her. And right then she didn’t look like the agitated creature he’d spoken with downstairs. She looked like his mother, with perhaps a dash of melancholy. With a small smile she took him by the arm and led him across the attic.
She was right, it was a small table. It was the end table that used to sit by the couch, by the arm near the piano. It was light enough that he could carry it down by himself. But before he did that, he had to remove what looked like a few old black-and-white photos from its surface. He scooped them up and flipped through them. There were only three, and two of them were shots of himself, Graham, and Maryann when CJ was maybe four, taken by a fence at the house on Lyndale—a fence that a storm had taken a few years later.
The third picture was of a man who appeared to be about the age George would have been around the time the other pictures were taken, but it wasn’t his father.
“Who’s this?” he asked, holding the picture up so his mom could see it.
“Just a friend of your father’s,” Dorothy answered. “I forget his name.”
After a last look, and a feeling that he remembered the man in the picture from somewhere, he shrugged and looked for a place to deposit them. He settled on his mother, whose outstretched hand took them and slipped them into her pants pocket.
As he’d been standing here, he’d noticed the musty smell was much stronger.
“Do you have a leak up here?” he asked Dorothy.
“Not that I know of.”
CJ left the table where it was and started walking along the wall, skirting his mother’s sewing machine and a cardboard box filled with old clothes. The farther he went this way—in the direction of the living room—the fainter the smell was. So he headed back the other way, toward the part of the attic that shared an outer wall with his old bedroom. The smell was stronger in this direction, in the corner where Dorothy had piled George’s things.
He admired the temerity of his mom to hold on to the old man’s things like this, but it wasn’t lost on him that what he’d just experienced, the time he’d spent going through his own things, was all his father wanted.
Looking up at the roof, he began searching for signs of water damage. He was almost to the corner when he found it—a water stain spreading out above a beam. The sun was out today, but CJ knew that when it rained, water would drip onto the beam and pool until it began to spill over the sides. By the size of the water stain, and the damage the moisture had done to the beam, it had been leaking for a long time.
The smell was almost overpowering where he stood. He lowered his gaze, seeing that the leak was directly over the hostage possessions of his father. Because it was so dark, he couldn’t see past George’s golf clubs and a trio of boxes filled with only Dorothy knew what. He bent down and picked up the golf clubs, standing them up against a stationary bike. Then he inserted himself between the exercise equipment and the stack of boxes.
He was effectively blind, so he reached into his coat pocket for his keys, for the penlight attached to the key ring. He directed the narrow beam over the real estate at his feet, and what he saw produced what might have been the first curse he’d ever uttered in front of his mother.
“What’s the matter?” Dorothy asked him.
When CJ turned toward her, he saw that she hadn’t moved away from the steps.
“Well, a whole box of George’s clothes are destr
oyed,” CJ said. “And you may want to get a mold expert in here, because I sure can’t tell you if this stuff is toxic or not.”
From across the room, Dorothy nodded, a gesture that conveyed she knew there was more coming—that what her son had told her didn’t match the profanity.
CJ shook his head and released a deep sigh.
“The Winchester’s ruined,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head again. “Man, is he going to be mad.”
Chapter 22
The Tragically Hip made their music as CJ sat at the card table that served as the apartment’s eating area. The green fabric of the table was ripped, and the chair CJ sat in wobbled whenever he shifted his weight, but for tonight it was the perfect setup.
He was one of those writers who subscribed to the school of thought that there were two atmospheres that facilitated writing. The first was that environment which the writer created for himself—the familiar chair, the right kind of pen, a cup of Sumatran coffee, black. By arranging these things the right way, the writer could coax the words out, get the story on paper with a minimum of fuss. The other atmosphere was the one in which it didn’t matter if all the writer had in his possession were a roll of paper towels and a red crayon; it didn’t matter if the chair was wobbly, or if the room was too cold, or if the Hip CD stuttered at the same spot on Track 9 for thirty-seven seconds. Still, the words came pouring out onto the page, unstoppable and yet often messy.
That was where CJ was tonight, although he did have the luxury of a good pen. He’d popped the CD in, grabbed a cup of Maxwell House, and sat down with a notebook and started to write. And when he wrote the first letter, it was like throwing a switch. The words started to come with reckless abandon, for as he wrote a sentence he could scarcely remember the one that came before, didn’t know the one that would follow. The sentences disappeared behind him as if he were viewing an incredibly long, straight fence that sank into a dot in the distance, and when he turned the other way, the way he was heading, he saw pieces of a fence that hadn’t yet been built.
All he knew was that he was a cistern filled with words and that he had to get them out, and the faster he wrote the quicker he emptied. And he had to reach empty.
When he was like this, he barely had room for thoughts of anything beyond feverishly transcribing the story. But tonight, in the midst of it, it hit him that he hadn’t felt this way even once when writing The Buffalo Hunter. And while the article was progressing nicely, no amount of nonfiction could work the magic either.
Under the table, Thor snored in time with the music, and it was all just noise to CJ. Even so, a page later he found he’d written a dog into the story. It was like transcribing jazz. Writing prose like jazz, he wondered if he ought to write a book about that.
He was writing about Eddie, although he didn’t call him that. And his father was in there too. Beyond these, a darker character lurked. Formless for now, but not void. Graham would work his way into the story in his time.
In the living room, the song changed.
Julie turned out the light. Ben had preceded her to bed by a good hour but she hadn’t been tired. Even now, she wasn’t sure she would fall asleep, but she had to try or else she’d be a zombie trying to see Ben off to work and Jack and Sophie to school.
She exited the living room and started down the hallway, but when she reached Jack’s door she opened it a crack and peered inside. He was a lump under the blankets and from somewhere inside came the sound of light snoring. Knowing how he slept, confident she wouldn’t wake him, she gave in to the impulse to open the door and go in. For a teenage boy, Jack kept his room pretty neat, although she knew some of that came from the discipline Coach Carter instilled in the kids. Before football, she’d have tripped over a half dozen items before making it a few feet into his room.
But perfection was a fleeting animal; she bent down and picked up his shirt.
The moon shone brightly around his shades; she could see everything in her son’s room clearly. He’d been writing earlier, and while she knew she shouldn’t, she crossed silently to his desk and bent down to inspect the handwritten pages. Jack was turning into a talented writer, and she loved that at the same time as she hated it. It reminded her of CJ, even as it teased her with the knowledge that, aside from the Baxter blood, her son had nothing in common with the boy she’d loved so long ago. Of late, many of the things happening in her life had that particular duality.
Ben, of course, encouraged Jack’s interest in writing. And unlike Julie, he didn’t seem at all bothered by how this interest reminded his wife of someone else. When he’d married her, Ben had made a promise that the past would stay the past. Not once had he broken that promise.
He wasn’t dumb. He knew how hard the last few weeks had been for her—how confusing it was to have CJ here. All he’d done was give her the space she needed so that she could figure out how to handle things. The problem was that she didn’t know how to do that. How did a person deal with emotions that had at one time been successfully dealt with when the one dealing with them anew was a different person? Not necessarily a better person, but certainly different.
She stayed in her son’s room for a long while but she never did read any of the words he’d written. When she left the room she knew she wouldn’t sleep. Back in the living room, she searched for some Mark Knopfler amid the CDs, popped in Shangri-la, and turned the volume down so it wouldn’t wake Ben or the kids.
The music started in time with her tears. She sank into Ben’s recliner and let them wash over her. And she didn’t even know what she was crying for beyond a general sense of loss, and a feeling of guilt that had dogged her steps since the moment CJ Baxter returned to town. At some point the tears turned into prayers, and a while after that the prayers turned into a peace that was like détente.
When the CD ended after sixty-six minutes, she didn’t notice.
The clouds kept the moon from dispensing all but the most meager light, and most of what might have fallen regardless was caught up in the tree branches, which seemed to soak up the illumination, even though their leaves had draped the cold ground below them.
Graham, though, didn’t need the moon’s help to find this spot.
He was cold, even in the heavy coat he wore, which was one of the ways that age left its mark. Even ten years ago he wouldn’t have felt the weather. Now the wetness of the woods got up into him, made his back ache.
It seemed appropriate, because this was the spot where Eddie had died.
The night was quiet except for a light wind that whistled through the hollow trunk of a tree behind him, and a lone owl that called from what could have been any direction.
Graham’s feet had found the spot, as they always did, until he was like a tree rooted to the earth. Or like a migrant bird that always returned to the same branch when the season changed.
He wasn’t overly sentimental, nor was he prone to harbor guilt for something that was long past—a quarter century past. But he was susceptible to introspection, to weighing how the contents of a single instant could so drastically alter the courses of several lives. And Graham was well aware of how the ripples from that day had reached shores more distant than he could have anticipated.
“I’m sorry you’re dead, Eddie,” Graham said.
The woods took the words and swallowed them up, and if either they or Eddie was inclined to grant any kind of forgiveness, they kept it to themselves.
Chapter 23
Of all the things that should have occupied CJ’s attention, there was only one that wouldn’t leave him alone while he finished his toast. Perhaps it was because, of all the other things he could have pondered, the one he chose to obsess over was also the one that had the least to do with him. The problem, though, was that the man responsible for the puzzle, and who sat next to him chewing on a piece of bacon, remained inscrutable on the subject.
“Oh, honey,” Maggie tsked at him. “I think you’re just going to have to accept
the fact that he’s not all there.” She was walking by with a plate of food as she said it and she patted Dennis’s hand affectionately.
Dennis, who didn’t seem at all put out by the comment, took a sip of coffee and said, “She’s p-probably right.”
CJ was starting to suspect that was the only answer that made sense. After all, why would a multimillionaire still live with his parents, drive a beat-up Chevy truck, and bounce between low-paying, labor-intensive jobs? It wasn’t any of CJ’s business, but for some reason the question wouldn’t leave him alone.
He decided that he needed to find a new tactic, something to get Dennis to spill his guts. But before he had a chance to formulate one, the bell on the front door gave an emphatic jingle.
It wasn’t until he heard a few of the regulars snicker that CJ turned and saw Artie. During his short time in Adelia, CJ had pieced together enough to know that Maggie did, indeed, carry some kind of torch for CJ’s boss, and that it had something to do with the senior prom, although the details on the exact nature of the relationship were a bit hazy. What that told CJ was that Artie wasn’t entirely clueless regarding her affections, and that whatever it was that normally kept him out of the eatery had nothing to do with the food.
Artie stood in the doorway, scanning the crowd until he found his employee at the counter. Artie didn’t make it more than a few steps before CJ understood that something was wrong.
“What’s the matter, boss?” CJ asked.
Up close, it was obvious that Artie was agitated. He glanced around the restaurant, his eyes lingering for just a moment on Maggie, who was approaching them wearing a look of concern.
“It’s your mother,” Artie said, trying to keep his voice down, which might have worked had everyone in the place not been straining to hear.
Immediately several horrible possibilities flashed through CJ’s brain. He slid off the stool and took Artie by the arm. “What’s wrong?”
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