Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  Yet, in a town like West Bradford, everyone’s life is fairly open to observation. For instance, no tragedies are anonymous. The survivors are identifiable right there among the citizenry: shopping at the grocery store, coaching a soccer game, teaching first grade, styling a customer’s hair, practicing surgery.

  Six years ago, September 20, on a lovely, crisp afternoon, Martin had picked Toby and David up early at soccer practice so the boys could shower and change before they all went out to their favorite Mexican restaurant. When Martin came to a stop on State Street, behind a car making a left turn, a young man named Owen Croft, a child of Judith and Larry Croft, a good student, a local basketball star—that boy, tired after a hard practice and preoccupied at seventeen—had cruised straight into the rear of the Howellses’ small blue car at thirty-five miles an hour. The front seat, with David and Martin carefully strapped into their seat belts, was untouched, but the back seat, and Toby with it, were entirely crushed. The town was doubly wounded—anguished for the Howellses above all, but also for the Crofts. And the numerous other calamities, disasters, and tragedies that had occurred since then were, each one of them, personal to some degree to everyone in West Bradford.

  His son’s death would be an event that crossed Martin Howells’s mind at least once every day of his life. On this mild June day, Martin walked along the crest of Bell’s Hill and looked down at the village that lay across the valley and spread up the first rise of the opposing mountains, and felt a curious sense of homesickness for West Bradford, even though he was within it. He often experienced this unquenched yearning, and he had learned to hold it at bay, not to investigate it too carefully. It was a familiar state of mind that, in its vague manifestation, was really no more than a longing still to be held innocently within the years before his son died.

  The day was delicate, with such a persistent but gentle breeze from the west that the full-blown summer leaves of the trees on Bell’s Hill only fluttered and rustled; even the slender saplings did not bow. In the morning the temperature was seventy degrees, the humidity was low, and the cloud cover was complete but so transparent that the entire blue sky breaching the gap of the valley of West Bradford from mountain to mountain was barely glazed with pale white.

  Duchess had strained at her leash all the way up the hill, but as soon as Martin released her at the height of the ridge where the trail flattened out, she had refused to move away from him at all. They continued on for a few minutes, moving along together closer than two abreast, with Duchess crossing nervously in front of him, ears flat in apprehension and hobbling him at the knees with every other step; but this was their accustomed routine, and Martin edged from side to side across the path in avoidance of her without even thinking.

  He stopped and threw sticks for her and leaned against a tree where he had a view of the whole town. He could see the roof of his own house among the tops of the trees surrounding it, as well as the cars and people moving on the carefully laid pattern of streets among the bright swards of groomed green grass. The scene was comforting and familiar, yet, in the tremulous clarity of the day, the world splayed out before him seemed fragile, as if it were contained in an overturned porcelain teacup.

  In the immediate aftermath of Toby’s death, Dinah had not allowed anyone to visit other than Judith and Larry Croft and their son Owen, and she had not agreed to see them until several days after the private service for Toby attended only by the immediate family. She had taken calls of concern and comfort from her mother and father and brother, but she had refused to have them come to West Bradford from Ohio, and she had begged Martin to delay visits from any of his family as well.

  “Dinah, people want to see us because they’re so… sad. They need to grieve, too,” he had said, and she had looked at him and nodded.

  “I know. I know what they need. But I can’t… I won’t just… give him away. I can’t deal with it right now. For once, Martin, for once, I’m not going to be polite! I don’t care how they feel! Not any of them! Not one single one! It’s not their business. I want them to leave us alone.”

  Initially Dinah had wept and paced the house, pressing her fists against the door of Toby’s room and sliding downward in a crumpled heap as she let herself understand the fact that whenever she opened that door Toby would not ever be there again. And she had turned to Martin and embraced him, as he had bent over her there, but she had never surrendered to him any bit of her particular sorrow, nor had she accepted any of his. She had enclosed herself in a monosyllabic grief, clearly mustering great energy even to respond to their youngest child, Sarah, or to David, who was so stunned by the enormity of the catastrophe that he scarcely felt any emotion at all.

  The evening they sat in the living room waiting for the Crofts, Martin looked over at Dinah and put her behavior down to anger. He envied her for it; he was filled only with a terrible lassitude and hopelessness.

  Dinah sat silently on the couch with an alarmingly open expression on her face, her eyes too wide, her mouth stretched taut at the corners. Watching her, Martin felt an absurd but keen expectation that she would reveal something heretofore kept secret at the very core of herself, something that would resolve and dissipate the dreadfulness of what had happened to them.

  When Judith Croft had come into the room, she had stopped short at the sight of Dinah and then stepped forward again with one hand stretching toward her. Martin had intercepted Judith with a slight hug. Martin and Dinah had known the Crofts for over fifteen years; they had served on school boards together, exchanged dinner invitations, and been dinner guests at the same houses. Martin automatically drew Judith toward him in an affirmation of their mutual sorrow and their long connection.

  “I don’t know…” Judith had begun, “I don’t know how this could happen. I don’t know why… and Owen… Owen doesn’t know why….” She was a small woman with an intense face. Her chin was slightly too square, and she had small, deep-set, but very brilliant blue eyes. Martin had always thought of her as a wiry, durable person—humorless and resilient. But that evening she had suddenly seemed gaunt and stringy and so abrupt in all her movements that it was as though she were about to fly apart. Her son loomed between his parents, taller than either of them and mute with misery. Martin found himself standing with his arm around Judith staring carefully at Owen, who waited with his father in the doorway, not meeting Martin’s glance.

  Owen was probably considered handsome, Martin thought, although he was awkwardly lanky, and his ears were large and stood too far away from his head. But he had beautiful, thickly lashed green eyes and blond hair, and he gave a strong impression of artlessness and even vulnerability. Martin was confused as he studied him. He had been thinking of Owen as the boy who had so carelessly, so recklessly, driven his car straight ahead into traffic that had stopped inconveniently, instantly killing Toby. And although he had seen Owen Croft around town over all the years since Owen was first able to ride his bike at about age six, Martin had imagined him as dark and sullen and sulky. Surly and spoiled, a doctor’s son with too much money, too little caution.

  “Could we sit down, Martin?” Larry finally said, still stranded at the door with Owen. And they had come into the room and settled on the chairs, but no one spoke until Owen turned to Dinah. His voice was strained and husky.

  “I know there’s nothing I can say that will change anything,” he said, and he looked to Dinah for a signal, but she had her attention fixed on him only marginally, which made Martin cringe for him in spite of himself. Owen bent forward in his chair with the urgency of what he needed to say. “I was just driving home….” It was an appeal. He was only going home; he was not rushing to any place particularly desirable. “I’d just gotten off from practice, and I was late…. The sun was in my eyes and I didn’t see.…” His face suddenly tensed in an effort to fight tears, his mouth crumpled inward at the corners, and still Dinah simply gazed back at him, abstracted. “I didn’t see….” He couldn’t go on with what he was saying un
til he looked down at his hands and took a long breath. “I don’t even remember thinking about it….” Finally he couldn’t go on at all, but just bent his head to his hands. The adults were frozen where they sat, with Owen’s words hanging over them.

  Judith had begun to cry then, and she reached out her open hands in an appeal to Dinah. “Oh, Dinah! What do we do now? What do you want us to do? What can we do?”

  For the first time since the accident, Dinah’s attention seemed to become engaged. She blinked at Judith and her mouth quivered. “What can we do?” She spoke as though she were repeating a phrase in a foreign language whose meaning wasn’t entirely clear to her. “Well… I don’t know.” She sat back in her chair, giving way to exhaustion all at once, her face becoming less taut, her eyelids drooping. “Well…”—and she gestured outward with one hand—“we just go on, I guess.” And Judith leaned her head against the back of her own chair and closed her eyes while tears ran down her face.

  Larry Croft looked from Dinah to Martin, but he didn’t speak for a moment. “Owen’s talked to the police, of course. We don’t know what charges…”

  But Dinah held her hand up to negate what he was saying, what she was hearing. She rose from her chair in oddly uncoordinated slow motion and turned away from all of them, making her way slowly off down the hall, her arms extended slightly, palms outward as though she were moving in the dark.

  Larry got up, and Martin rose with him, although Judith continued to sit with her eyes closed in silent weeping. Owen had straightened up, but he was teary and he didn’t look at anyone. They were all helpless in the silent room, and Martin realized that that was what Dinah had understood almost at once when she had heard about Toby’s death—the pointlessness of all their overwhelming sorrow.

  “Maybe this was the wrong time to come,” Larry said. “What we wanted you and Dinah to know is how sorry we are.” He paused again and ran his hand over his head where his hair had receded. “Oh, God… I don’t know any way for you to know how sorry we are.” He leaned toward Martin and grasped his upper arm in an attempt to draw forth Martin’s comprehension of what he was saying. His tone was confiding. “I mean, here we are with our own son standing right here. But we aren’t making any excuses, Martin. Owen’s not either. He never did. He never did to us or the police….”

  Martin found himself overtaken with an unspecified sensation of pity so powerful that he felt light—unfettered by his own body. A sweet, metallic taste rose in the back of his throat, and he shook his head to stop Larry from continuing. “We just go on, Larry. We just go on. Dinah’s right. We’ll just have to go ahead.” He looked over inclusively at Owen and Judith, who was drying her eyes and rising from her chair.

  And Martin, remembering all this, saw now that after that meeting they all had gone ahead—what alternative had there been?—but they had only progressed in fits and starts, and the amorphous sorrow and shock in the town concerning Toby’s death had been left unresolved, glimmering through the air over West Bradford and in the atmosphere of all those other places where Toby had been known: his aunts’ and uncle’s, his grandmothers’ and grandfather’s, and within his own house where it suffused all the rooms.

  Several weeks after Toby’s death, Martin had put Duchess on her lead, intending to follow this very same route up Bell’s Hill. He had started out in a mild October drizzle, but as the rain increased he had changed his course and made his way along the village streets, tramping stolidly through the puddles.

  He rounded the baseball field of the high school as the rain grew stronger, the drops full and hard and gusting over him in sheets when the wind picked up. He crossed the sidewalk to the gym and pushed open the wide door that led into the rear of the building. As soon as she realized that she was out of the rain, Duchess shook herself vigorously, spattering him with water, and he looped her leash around the metal stanchion supporting the bleachers.

  Martin would have liked to join the small group of parents in the center of the bleachers who had arrived early to watch the basketball practice before driving their children home in the heavy rain. They had discarded their dripping jackets in a pile and were talking among themselves in a comradely murmur. With Duchess in tow, however, he had no choice but to sit unobtrusively at the foot of the far end of the bleachers near two women who had climbed higher up in the stands and were chatting softly while glancing at the cheerleaders practicing farther down on the sidelines.

  The basketball team was almost languorous in their warm-up drills, waiting for the coaches to organize them. A dark-haired boy passed the ball off to his teammate and moved over to the bleachers where the cheerleaders sat. He approached a small girl, sitting about four seats up, who wouldn’t glance his way. Finally he fell forward slightly from the hip, resting his forearms widely on either side of her, and she made a great point of straightening up to peer over his shoulder, refusing to look at him.

  The boy bent farther over the girl, and she finally looked right back at him and smiled, raising her hand to brush his hair back from where it had fallen over his forehead. The two of them said something to each other before the boy stood back and moved away. Watching them, Martin was suddenly surprised by a memory of uncomplicated adolescent lust, and his attention was caught with an odd alertness, as though he remembered this very building, the high struts of the roof, the echoing thunk of the ball, the diminished, hollow murmuring of a few people in an empty gym.

  Most of the girls sat scattered over a small section of the far bleachers while two of them demonstrated a series of leaps and turns again and again. Now and then one of the seated girls would rise and step down the bleachers to join them until she, too, mastered the sequence. They were not shouting their cheers; they were concentrating on the choreography and only talking quietly among themselves.

  When Owen Croft came out of the dressing room behind the two coaches, the atmosphere became subdued. Martin had not realized until that moment that he had been expecting to see Owen, but now he watched him carefully. Owen didn’t see him at all. In fact, Owen kept his head down, his eyes averted, and he didn’t turn to talk to anyone; he simply moved into a loosely organized rotation beneath the basket, turned, put the ball up, and moved off.

  Both the women sitting above Martin, and the larger group of people farther down the stands, were quiet while Owen pivoted, ran, shot, moved. A kind of sympathetic solemnity was heavy in the atmosphere as Owen continued to radiate his own isolation within that group of lanky boys. And Martin felt it, too—an aching suspense, a communal need for resolution, absolution.

  There was a dramatic hesitancy in the movements of the cheerleaders whenever they passed by Owen if he was sitting on the bleachers watching a play. They would offer a solemn tilt of their heads, or touch his arm, or briefly brush his shoulder without engaging his eye. In his presence that afternoon, they perceived themselves as fragile and tentative. When one or another of them spoke some word to him, he didn’t answer or turn his head; he remained overwhelmed and unreachable, and therefore he was suddenly the heroic center of all the sweet radiation of their grave concern.

  The pale light that fell from the high windows of the building illuminated the shifting bodies without variation or shadow. Every aspect of the scene had an equal vibrancy of color, like the landscape of a dream. Slowly the players moved into separate teams. Five boys loped into the near court, but the only one Martin knew was Winston Grimes, the starting center.

  The drills became smoother, the pace quicker and purposeful. In the far court Owen came in under the basket for a lay-up, and then the team moved into another pattern, an elaborate series of passes, while the defensive players flung themselves violently in the paths of their opponents, lunging and waving their arms while the offensive players pivoted and searched for an opening. The two practice teams were serious now, and the increased adrenaline was tangible under the lofty roof. The calling back and forth of the players echoed harshly, and the damp air was filled with a pervasive, tangy s
cent like wet hay.

  Martin sat perfectly still, but he was infected with that same surge of adrenaline. His whole body was tense, his senses heightened. A remembered knowledge of communal masculinity under the attention of pretty girls along the sidelines swept over him, and he knew again, just for a moment, that simultaneous male arrogance that had rendered him and his teammates haughty and indifferent—even contemptuous—of those very girls whose presence spurred them on.

  All at once Martin had become lost to his thirty-eight-year-old self and was affected with an absolute loss of self-consciousness or restraint. Without a pause, without any consideration, he was up and off the bleachers, trotting diagonally across the court. He too, just like those lovely young women and the leanly muscled boys, was drawn toward Owen Croft. Jogging slowly across the floor, his treaded boots thumping against the parquet, he didn’t notice the surprised faces of the players under the basket as he approached.

  Owen was under the basket holding the ball in midair, cocked over his head. Martin took two long strides and launched himself forward, landing his head solidly under Owen’s breastbone—a football tackle—and clasping him around the waist. Owen was slammed backward, his long legs bent under him, his head bouncing up after thudding against the floor. There, lying on the floor of the gymnasium, clasping Owen Croft tightly, and short of breath, Martin was finally trapped in a long moment of realization. He came back to himself the instant Owen’s head had hit the floor, and it was as if those following seconds became elastic, stretching out too far for him ever to escape them. Finally he pushed himself up and away from Owen, getting to his feet and brushing himself off without looking up at all the faces turned toward him.