Preston Falls

by David Gates

  “Jean?” Carol breaks in, and the phone starts squealing. “Wait—here, let me turn this thing off.” Suddenly the connection is absolutely clear of noise. “Hi. Sorry. So you’re going to stay over?”

  “I don’t know. The thought of that drive, you know? Maybe if I went to sleep now and got up really early—but that would mean you having to get the kids off to school.”

  “Like I’ve never gotten a kid off to school before.”

  “Oh, I know, but I hate to dump everything on you. And especially a Monday. You know what a pain they can be.”

  “These kids?” she says. “No problem.”

  “Let me talk to Mel for a sec. Carol, you’re sure this is okay?”

  “Absolutely. Mel’s right here. Mel, your mom wants to talk to you.”

  “Hi,” Mel says. “Is Daddy there?”

  “No, I guess I missed him.” Think fast. “He said something about he might go over to see Nonnie before he came back home. So I expect that’s where he is.”

  “So why can’t you call him there?” says Mel.

  “I did try calling there,” Jean says. Digging herself in deeper. “They’re probably out to dinner or something. I thought I’d try again a little later.”

  “When did Daddy say that?” says Mel.

  “Say what, hon?”

  “Say he was going to Nonnie’s.”

  “I don’t know—the last time we spoke?” Hard to imagine a worse way of handling this, but it seems to be the way she’s handling it. Soon she’s got to sit Mel and Roger down and tell them she doesn’t know what to tell them.

  Mel says nothing. Obviously not buying it but stumped for what to ask next. Now Jean will have to coach Carol in case Mel tries to get something out of her. She’ll also have to try to reach Sylvia immediately, and somehow not scare the hell out of her in the process. Then again, maybe he is at his mother’s.

  “Listen, dear. I’m going to spend the night here and come down in the morning, and Aunt Carol’s going to take care of you. So will you do me a favor and help out as much as you possibly can, especially in the morning? You know how slow Roger can be.” Another of Jean’s cheap little masterstrokes of motherhood; Roger’s no worse than Mel.

  “I guess so,” Mel says.

  “So I’ll see you tomorrow, sweetie. I should be home in plenty of time for trick-or-treating.”

  “Mother, that doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters,” says Jean. “Listen, is Roger there?”

  “Yeah, he’s here.”

  “Would you put him on, please? I love you.”

  “Love you too. Roger, Mom wants you.”

  “I know who it is,” Jean hears him say. “I’m not stupid.” The phone clunks down. Then Roger says, “What?”

  “Hi, handsome,” says Jean. Her new strategy is not to let him dictate the tone. “I was just telling Mel and Aunt Carol, I decided to stay over and come down in the morning. So I want you and Mel to be really good. Like, I want you to go right to bed when it’s bedtime. And make sure you let Mel have enough time in the bathroom in the morning. Okay?”

  “How come she can’t use the downstairs?”

  “Because Aunt Carol uses the downstairs,” she says. “You know that.”

  “Yeah, but she gets it all to herself.”

  “Enough,” says Jean. If he says No fair, she’s going to scream. Roger says nothing. Jean decides to pretend this means he’s knuckled under. “So Aunt Carol said you guys might rent a video?” she says. “Yeah, we did, but it was stupid.”

  “What did you get?”

  “Home Alone Two. I already saw it ten times. It sucks.”

  She’s given up on sucks, though she still calls him on sucks the big one. “Well, maybe Aunt Carol would read more Lord of the Rings with you. In fact I know she would if you asked her nicely.” It’s the one thing he’ll allow to be read to him anymore; Jean figures it’s because of the sword-and-sorcery aspect. Which is in itself worrisome: next step is heavy metal—which he’s already into anyway—then on to satanism. But at least it’s a book. By an Englishman.

  “She doesn’t read it right,” Roger says.

  “That’s very rude, Roger. And I hope Aunt Carol didn’t hear you say that.

  It would hurt her feelings.”

  Silence.

  “Is she right there? Did she hear what you said?”

  “No,” he says. Probably a lie.

  “Still,” says Jean. “Next time, think before you speak. And listen, don’t forget—right to bed when Aunt Carol tells you. Sleep tight, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Hugs and kisses. Would you put Aunt Carol back on, please? Love you.”

  Silence.

  “Hi,” said Carol. “We’re doing fine.”

  “He can be such a trial,” says Jean.

  “Honey, you’re forgetting Dexter.” Carol’s son was hyperactive until he was ten, when she finally gave up her nothing-inorganic trip and put him on Ritalin; he’s now at the University of Washington.

  “Well, anyway, thank you. One more time. You know, I just feel like we’ve prevented you from having a life while you’ve been here.”

  “Don’t be silly,” says Carol. “As long as I’ve got strong fingers and my Alan Jackson tape with him on the motorcycle, I’m a fulfilled woman.”

  “They didn’t hear that, right?”

  “Look, I better let you go, so you can get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, I guess I should—oh crap, I almost forgot. I told Mel that Willis might be at his mother’s.”

  “Right,” says Carol. “Um. Do we have any reason to think that’s the case?”

  “No. But I had to tell her something.”

  “I see,” says Carol. “Ah, any instructions?”

  “Not really. God, I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut. I mean, if Mel wants to call there you obviously can’t say no. But if you could just stall her for even like a minute after we hang up, I’m going to call Sylvia right now and forewarn her.”

  “That would be good.”

  “Except what do I say to her? Like, Don’t have a heart attack but your son’s missing?”

  “That would get your point across,” says Carol.

  “Crap,” Jean says. “Okay, I’ll call you later.”

  Sylvia’s phone rings five times before a machine picks up. Willis? Oh, right: he once said he was going to record a thing for his mother too. “Please leave us a message after you hear the beep.” So it’s not true that Willis never follows through. She notes, however, that his own family didn’t rate an us.

  After the beep she says, “Hello, Syl. And Willis, if you’re there. It’s Jean. Ah, Sunday night? Syl, I was just wondering if you’d heard from Doug, because I was under the impression that he might possibly be stopping by your place before he comes back down to Chesterton. Anyhow, if that’s the case, could you have him give me a call? I’m in, ah, Preston Falls right now, it’s Sunday night—I guess I said that—and I’m heading back down Monday morning. Anyway, I hope you’re well. Talk to you soon.”

  Was she casual enough? Upbeat enough? The woman is seventy-one years old, for God’s sake. Not that seventy-one is old anymore, but even so. After a while she notices that music’s still playing, and turns the boombox off. What relief, this silence. She takes another sip of the tea and Dewar’s, then gets the bottle and pours in just a hair more. Whatever she told herself she was accomplishing by coming here, what she’s really doing is taking a night off.

  She gets up to go to the bathroom, opens the door, turns on the light—and there’s a huge gaping hole in the floor. All the boards are gone between the sink and the bathtub, and cold dank air is coming up. One more project he started and didn’t finish. It feels creepy, sitting there peeing, as if there’s nothing under her.

  The bedroom’s cold and the sheets are filthy. She drags an oil-filled electric radiator out of the closet and plugs it in on Willis’s side of the bed, where the outlet is. Now, are there any clean sheets? Well, there
’s that garish flowered set of her mother’s. She strips the bed and puts the dirty sheets and pillowcases in the hamper. Along with his dirty clothes from the floor.

  While the bedroom’s warming up, she goes back into his study and plays girl detective. She opens a little plastic Tandy box and finds unlabeled diskettes, still with plastic over them, and one with a label marked BACKUP. She clicks the mouse to see what documents are on his C drive: SALEBILL, MEMO8, SHITBULL, MEMO7, SPORTY, 27734, MENSONG, LIED-JOUR, MEMO6, 2MARTY, BULLSHIT, TWADDLE, SPINDOC. She opens MENSONG, which turns out to have nothing to do with music; it’s a press release about some blind taste test of Sportif against Gatorade. She closes MENSONG, reaches up to bat away a spiderweb hanging from the ceiling, then changes her mind. This is hopeless. She shuts the computer down and goes back into the bedroom, where it already feels warmer. She starts opening drawers, but turns up only clothes. In the closet she finds his Air Jordans and his cowboy boots. Therefore: last seen wearing Timberlands.

  She goes downstairs to find something to read. In the front hall she picks up book after book; what are these things? Willis is forever snapping them up at tag sales and junk shops and then reading nothing but the same obsessive stuff he’s already read a hundred times. Look at all this. Fear Strikes Out, by Jimmy Piersall with Al Hirshberg—some baseball player, apparently. Five Acres and Independence, by M. G. Kains, which figures. A worn-out edition of Pilgrim’s Progress with this crude picture on the cover of a man in helmet and armor and another with long hair and a red tunic, hands clasped in prayer as waves rise around them. Not your world’s greatest illo, but the lettering’s nifty: tall, sort of shaky-looking, all caps—they did upper case simply by making the same letters taller—obviously hand done by somebody just making it up as they went. Still, it’s nicely consistent from letter to letter, and it might be fun to have on hand. You’d have to extrapolate the rest of the alphabet, but it looks doable. You’ve got all the vowels—thank God for that U in Bunyan—and the R would give you the D, the E, the F … definitely doable. Right, and she’s the only hack graphic designer in New York who ever fantasized about doing a children’s book someday.

  So he was having some kind of religious crisis? Is that what she’s to gather? Pilgrim’s Progress, for God’s sake. Reverting to some ancestral Puritan caca? The Willises themselves hadn’t come over on the Mayflower, but somebody had, back on his father’s mother’s side or something. Willis always talked about it—talks about it—with such contempt, at the same time making good and sure you know. Well, probably he was just showing off by reading something old and unreadable, though God knows who he was showing off to. Even when he’s absolutely by himself he’s still doing his Mr. Everything number: out with his chainsaw, or “sweating joints” or putting up sheetrock, which he now seems to call “drywall,” and at night reading Pilgrim’s Progress. Or whenever he does his reading now; maybe he gets up and squeezes in a canto or two before breakfast.

  Then, halfway down a stack of paperbacks, she finds Emma, with its orange spine and the portrait on the cover of some woman who looks nothing like how you picture Emma and in fact is some actual person. But which Jean likes because it’s so wrong that the image doesn’t get in your way. Marcia Fox, by Sir William Beechey. Whoever they were. Jean brings Emma into the kitchen, sits down in front of the heater and takes a sip from the mug—completely cold and poisonous-tasting. She wants especially to read the part where Mr. Knightley says, “You have been no friend to Harriet Smith, Emma.” But she also wants to take her time getting there, so she starts in where Emma’s doing the watercolor of Harriet and Mr. Knightley says, “You have made her too tall, Emma,” and Emma knows he’s right but won’t admit it. Jean wouldn’t mind being cared for and condescended to by Mr. Knightley. When they start making the collection of riddles, Jean remembers that she’d better call Carol; as soon as she finishes this chapter. But as Emma begins walking stupid Harriet through the riddle about the word courtship—Jean always feels stupid too when she reads this part, because she didn’t get it the first time either—the phone rings.

  “Hi,” says Carol. “I hope I didn’t wake you up, but since I hadn’t heard …”

  “No no, not at all. I was just reading.”

  “So did you get hold of his mother?”

  “Left a message. I didn’t hear back.” Jean takes another awful-tasting sip. “Did Mel try to call her?”

  “No, she just went up to her room. When I put Roger to bed, I looked in and she was asleep in her clothes.”

  “She must be exhausted,” says Jean. Less what she thinks than what she wants to think. “Did you help her into her pj’s?”

  “I thought I should just let her be.”

  “But you covered her up, right?”

  “Yes, Mother,” says Carol. “So now what?”

  “I thought I’d set the alarm for five and just drive straight into the city.”

  “But wouldn’t it be easier to deal with this up there?”

  “Carol, I have a job. I have to be at work.”

  “That’s totally crackers,” Carol says. “You have to get some good sleep, really rest yourself. Then call your office in the morning, say you’ve got a family emergency, get hold of the police and just start dealing.”

  “But what if that takes all day? I can’t not be there for Halloween.”

  “I think they’ll survive,” says Carol. “Let me worry about this end, okay? If you get tied up, I’ll tell the kids you had like a plumbing emergency or something. Aren’t you always having trouble with the plumbing up there? Look, I guarantee they won’t ask for a lot of details. Like I thought it was very interesting with Mel tonight, where she started asking you stuff and then didn’t follow up? I think the spirit tells the mind how much can be processed at a given time.”

  “Right,” says Jean. “Listen, I should probably go.”

  “You know, I have an idea about this. That you might think is kind of off the wall, but there’s this—”

  “Carol, could you tell me this later? I’m pretty tired.”

  “I know, and I’m keeping you up. We’ll talk when you get back. God, and I’ve still got dishes. Sleep, okay?”

  Jean drinks off that last little bit, puts the mug in the sink and goes upstairs. She’s never actually stayed here by herself, in all this time. The bedroom’s almost comfortable now. She takes off her shoes, gets in bed with her clothes on and pulls the covers up around her—a waste of clean sheets, really. The alarm clock’s second hand is twitching away, so the battery must be good. Ten of eleven; that seems about right. She sets the alarm for seven-thirty instead of five, picks up Emma, then remembers about the time change. So it’s really what? Spring ahead, fall back: ten of ten. Which now seems pretty early to be going to bed. But she’s whipped. She resets the clock, picks up Emma again and fixes the covers so only her face, hands and shoulders are out in the air. Her nose is cold. Kitty, a fair but frozen maid. She’s at the part where Emma thinks Mr. Elton’s in love with Harriet, but he’s actually hitting on her. At some point she realizes her eyes have been closed for a while: she’s still sort of thinking about Mr. Elton and that whole problem, but she’s also weighing the risk of disrupting this delicate state of not-quite-sleep by reaching over and turning out the light.

  3

  The alarm goes off—deetdeetdeetdeetdeet—and she shoots out her hand. Too hot and bright in here: her mouth is dry, and apparently she went to sleep with all her clothes on. Out the window, the sky’s a cold cerulean blue. And it’s so quiet. Then she remembers what she’s doing here.

  She gets out of bed, turns off the radiator and unplugs it. Puts her shoes on, gets Willis’s old reindeer sweater out of the bottom drawer and makes her way down through the cold house into the toasty kitchen. Through the window over the sink, she sees the grass is white with frost. She wants to call home and make sure everything’s okay, but an interruption is probably the last thing Carol needs; the important thing is just to drive safely and
get home to them. She starts water for coffee, then goes in and pees, trying to be extra careful near that hole in the floor, since she’s still half asleep. Washes, brushes teeth, brushes hair. One thing she’d better do is turn the water off in the house, so the pipes don’t freeze. Just in case he—in case nobody gets back here. If she can figure out how he used to do it. She reaches up under the sweater, sweatshirt and t-shirt and smears his Mennen (what else?) under her arms.

  There’s a can of Medaglia d’Oro in the fridge, but she can’t find the filters; finally she just spoons Taster’s Choice into the JOE mug and dusts cinnamon over it; she hates black coffee—especially black instant coffee—but it beats getting a headache. She puts what’s left of the Dewar’s in the cupboard, thinking what a bad girl she’d be to tip it back at this hour of the morning. The phone book’s in the drawer: a pitiful little thing about the thickness of Vogue, say, and it covers all these little towns, yellow pages included. In the front they’ve got all sorts of police to choose from: state police, police in whatever town, county sheriff. Apparently you’re supposed to know which to call for what. Her water’s bubbling; she turns off the burner, fills the mug, stirs.

  She sits at the table and rubs her cold fingers above the steaming coffee. It’s actually a little early to be calling the police; wouldn’t it seem weird not even waiting until eight o’clock after you’d let it go all this time? They’d think you were the crazy one, like no wonder he had to get away. Another aspect of this is that up here your police are all going to be men.

  Coffee’s way too hot, so she goes into the pantry and on into the closet with the tank and the water heater to see if she can figure out how to shut stuff off. At first it’s hopeless—just all these pipes—but then she begins to see. Only two pipes go into the wall toward the bathroom and kitchen, which must mean these are the water lines into the house. So if you turned those two valves off, at least water couldn’t go anyplace but this closet, right? And then if you just heated this little area … The space heater, she’s afraid, might burn the whole place down, but there’s that electric radiator upstairs. Willis used to have some way of draining the tank and the water heater, but then wouldn’t you have to shut the pump off too? Or else everything’s just going to fill back up again. One of the breakers probably shuts the pump off, but of course nothing’s marked. Well, it’s her own fault for never making Willis teach her. Though in fairness she was always busy getting the kids organized and the house straightened up. So now she’s in the position of being a dithering woman.