Reservation Road Read online

  Stu Carmody appeared in the doorway. He was a tall, gaunt man of sixty-nine, with short white hair and cutting blue eyes and an Adam’s apple the size of a fig. He owned a good-sized farm out toward Falls Village and never wore anything but the same checked gingham shirt, pressed blue jeans pulled up high with a western belt, and spit-polished leather workboots. I stood up and came around the desk to shake his hand.

  “Stu.”

  “Dwight. I was callin’ all morning.”

  “Car trouble,” I said. “Have a seat.”

  Stu sat down on one of the two straight-backed chairs I kept for clients, and I went back around the desk and took my usual seat. I saw him glance to his left, at the leather-bound law books that lined the wall of shelves. There were not enough books to cover the shelves, so that gaps were conspicuous and it looked as if the place had recently been robbed.

  “What’s on your mind, Stu?”

  “Dyin’,” Stu said.

  “You’re not even seventy.”

  “I had a checkup Thursday, Dwight,” Stu said. His eyes were so blue that it hurt to look at them. “Routine, the doctor said. Well, don’t you believe it, mister. By Friday a.m. I was down in New Haven with my veins chock-full of needles. They crammed me into one of those MRI contraptions and turned the switches on. Juiced me up pretty good. Cost a good goddamn fortune too, even with insurance. And all for what? Cancer.”

  The word didn’t mean as much to me as I knew it should. I tried to think about Stu but instead found myself thinking about the will I’d drawn up for him. His wife was dead and both his kids had moved out west. He was leaving them his farm anyway, knowing they’d probably sell it the very day he was gone. The fact was, he didn’t have any other options. Though he wasn’t the type to get sentimental over it, and the will had not been difficult to draw up.

  “I’m very sorry, Stu.”

  “I hate doctors,” Stu said matter-of-factly.

  “Where is it?”

  “Here.” He touched his neck just below the Adam’s apple, where the lymph nodes would be, swollen and malignant, beneath the dull wrinkled skin. “And here and here.” He touched both armpits.

  “Lymphoma?”

  “You’re smarter than that doctor,” Stu said.

  “There’s treatment.”

  He shook his head. “Treatment maybe, but no cure.”

  “Treatment’ll buy you time. Maybe a lot of time.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because I’m lookin’ ahead, Dwight, and I don’t have to be a medical genius to see what it’ll be like. Pain and pissin’ and drugs and the rest. And I don’t want it. I flat out reject it. And it’s my life, goddamnit. That’s what all this legal stuff’s about, isn’t that right? So that I got these papers say it’s my poor life and this is what I want done with it. I want us to be clear on that, Dwight.” He was breathing hard, his rib cage rising and falling.

  “We’re clear, Stu,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “What is it you want me to do? We already drew up the will.”

  “I want to know something,” Stu said.

  “What?”

  “Is the will still good if I don’t die natural?”

  I looked him in the eyes. “You mean if you kill yourself?”

  “That’s what I’m gettin’ at.”

  “It’s still good,” I said carefully. “It’s your life and your will, Stu. That’s what the law says on this.”

  “Good. All right, then.”

  “All right, what?”

  “Nothing,” Stu said. “Just all right.”

  We sat there a minute more. I tried to think about Stu and what he was facing, but the feelings weren’t sharp or clear or about him or anything real. It was as if there’d been an amputation, my heart flying off with that boy on the road, my body left behind. And the body is nothing. This man was going to take his life and I was going to say nothing to him about it because that’s what was in me. Because he was going to die anyway and there was no such thing as help. There were only the yellow pencils standing in the pencil cup and the broken pieces with them. There was my son, too, there was Sam, two photographs on a desk.

  Stu cleared his throat and I glanced up and found him looking at me. I could see on his face that he knew my mind had drifted. My failure to help him was all over the room.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It could have been for a hundred things.

  “You’re my lawyer, Dwight.”

  “Yes.”

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a white envelope, crisply folded, and placed it on the desk. “This is a letter for afterward. I want to know things’re in order, Dwight. I don’t want my kids and people talkin’ about what a mess I left. I was never like that.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Stu. If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right.”

  “So we’re clear, then?”

  “Yes, we’re clear.”

  “Then I’ll be going.”

  He stood up, and I came around the desk and we shook hands. His hand was thin and callused and dry and couldn’t have been mistaken for a young man’s hand. Our eyes met, until I looked away. Then he went out, closing the door behind him, and I sat at my desk again, swiveling my chair so I was looking out the window to the little parking lot. Behind the lot stood a field, soft and green in the summer with daisies growing there, and a jungle gym at the near side. In a few moments I saw Stu Carmody climb into his pickup and drive away.

  I tried to think about him. But with each new thing I looked at through the window, each thought I had, I just seemed to get farther away. As water rises in a flood, so memory fills in the empty places, covers all that is dead.

  There’d been a jungle gym, too, in the weedy yard in front of the house I grew up in in North Haven. I remembered my old man making a big deal out of it when he brought it home, pulling the new parts from the long cardboard Sears box and holding them up ceremoniously for my mother and me to see. As if there was some secret there. It took him so long to put it together that it got dark, even though it was summer, and he made me hold the flashlight while he worked. When my arm got tired and I couldn’t keep the light where he wanted it, he screamed at me. Later, after he died, I went back and pulled the whole thing apart and hauled the pieces to the dump. And later still, after I was married and Sam was born, I went myself to Sears and bought a jungle gym and put it together with my own hands. Sam used to play on it. Then, some time during the years when I wasn’t allowed to see him, he stopped. I never asked him why. Maybe, in the way of all growing boys, he simply lost interest, moved on to other things. In any case, I never saw him on it again.

  Ethan

  We buried him. We buried our son on a Tuesday, in a stone-walled cemetery, under a sky the color of ashes. He would have been ten years, three months, and nineteen days. It did not rain. There were two dozen people, a minister, and a rabbi. I have no recollection of what was said. What I remember is the smell of damp earth, and that Grace held one of Emma’s hands, and I held the other.

  Afterwards, people came back to the house with us. Friends, good neighbors, bearing food; they brought their children who had known Josh, gone to school with him, played with him. They stayed as long as they could stand it, and then they left, taking with them their bewildered, frightened children, to whom they must now try to explain.

  We stood in the front hall, in our funeral clothes, with no idea what to do. Grace’s mother, Leila, finally took charge, suggesting to Emma, with painfully forced enthusiam, that they go upstairs to her room to change, and then perhaps read a book together. Emma did not say no, but she refused to climb the stairs; she sat down on the ground and began to cry.

  “Come on, sweetie,” Grace said desperately. She picked Emma up like a baby and carried her upstairs.

  The sound of her crying faded; soon a door closed.

 
; Leila put her hand on my arm and looked me in the eyes. “She will be all right, Ethan,” she said tenderly. “In time, you will all be all right.” She was her daughter, only older: a fine-boned beauty with wonderful white hair, which she kept short and always well arranged. Perhaps she was more innately genteel than Grace, being a southern woman of a certain age. She had lost her husband, many years ago.

  I wanted to acknowledge her kindness, but no human gesture occurred to me. Seeing this, Leila leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll go make us some tea,” she murmured, and went off in the direction of the kitchen.

  Outside, it had begun to rain.

  I stood there, confused for too long, starting to pat my pockets as if I’d lost something I needed, pocketknife or pipe—a sad joke of an addled professor, I realized dimly, through a haze of even sadder truths. It was not just the moment that paralyzed, but the vast circumference of time ahead; I could imagine no way of filling this picture, or keeping away the silence that lay behind it. My fingers found a small hard oblong object in my pants pocket and began to worry it through the cloth.

  Some of Josh’s things had been returned to us that morning. His shirt and Windbreaker were being held for forensic testing, but everything else he’d been wearing or holding on Sunday had come back in two brown paper bags labeled with his name. Trooper Tomlinson had delivered them to our house, just as we were preparing to leave for the funeral. Some enterprising soul at the coroner’s office or the morgue had come upon the arrowhead in Josh’s blue jeans pocket, had slipped it into a clear plastic evidence bag, only to discover, to his professional disappointment, that it was not evidence at all, or at least not of the kind that would mean anything to him.

  Here it was. I pulled it out, looked at it: putty-colored, smooth, wondrous, ancient, thumb-shined, collected, secret.

  Can I have it back now?

  I could not remember hugging him that day.

  What other things? In his room alone I could name these by memory: peacock feather, sparrow’s nest, sheet of mica, chunk of pink quartz, hockey puck from a Hartford Whalers game, comb with missing teeth, rail spike, harmonica, the inside of a baseball wound like the earth. And his violin in its case under his bed, the sheets of music.

  This is what my son loved: tidal pools, abandoned train tracks, the sound of woodpeckers, the movement of turtles. And hated: brushing his hair, the taste of eggs, the feel of wool socks, lies.

  A clap of thunder outside, low, close by: the wind had picked up and was blowing rain against the windows. I went to the front door and out. The rain was a torrent.

  Dwight

  The paperboy drove by in his pickup just after six Friday morning. I lay awake in bed with the windows open and the breeze riding in sweet and not yet hot, and heard the light whump of the rolled-and-rubber-banded weekly Winsted Register-Citizen hitting the driveway. Then the truck went past and I heard what had been there just before, the birds again, the doves cooing on my lawn. Just another sunny summer morning.

  I lay in bed and tried to ignore the paper, the sound of it landing on the driveway, the fact of its existence. But this was impossible. There’s a feeling you get if you live in the country but find yourself in the city one day, any city, walking around and minding your own business and believing yourself not just alone but one hundred percent anonymous, when suddenly from out of the blue, and almost always from behind your back, somebody calls out your name. The heart starts to go crazy. Whether you’re innocent or guilty doesn’t matter. It’s the sound of your name in a place where you expected no one to know it that’s enough to tip you over the edge, and for a moment you know exactly what it’s like to be the wrong person in the wrong place, spotlighted, picked out of the lineup. And even if it turns out to be just a big fat mistake, everything afterward feels personal. So I tried to forget about the newspaper sitting in my driveway, but I couldn’t.

  The article would be under “Crime Watch” or under “Accidents” or maybe even on the front page. There’d be facts, names and places. Last Sunday night the so-and-sos from such-and-such lost their son Josh. Car did not stop. The funeral was held on . . . Suspect still at large. Reward offered.

  The father was tall and dark, thin, with glasses. I could see him clearly. I would always see him clearly. Without question he’d have a wife, probably other children. Now or in an hour they’d go outside for the newspaper—this paper or a different one, it didn’t matter, there were crime watches and accidents and unsolved tragic incidents in every local weekly—and then over coffee, if they could stomach it, they’d see their own names in print and where they lived, and the name of their son who was dead and how he’d died. And it would all seem like a sick joke to them; as if they didn’t already know their own names and where they lived and the name and age of their son and how he’d died.

  A breeze eased in through the open windows. Outside, it was starting to heat up, it was going to be a hot day. The doves had stopped calling to each other and to me. A car drove by and in the silence afterwards there was a loneliness that wouldn’t go away. I pulled the sheet off my naked body and lay there on the bed, imagining the tall, dark man sitting at a wooden table in some kitchen somewhere, reading the newspaper. His glasses were round and reflected light. I imagined him getting to the word “suspect” and not knowing what to do. Not knowing anything about me. Where my name should be he’d find just that word; and where my photograph should be he’d find nothing.

  I imagined knowing him and him knowing me. I imagined telling him the truth about myself, filling in the blank places.

  This suspect was thirty-eight years old. His body was of the burly, chunk-a-lunk variety—six feet tall, two hundred pounds. Big enough to hurt somebody. He’d played football in college (second-string tight end) until injuries knocked him out; there were operation scars on his right shoulder and left knee, and those joints ached in the cold weather. He’d broken his nose, too, or his old man had, long ago, and it had set wrong and there was a permanent bump there. It gave his face “character,” people always said. His eyes were green if they were anything, and he had a cleft in his chin as if a little piece of him had fallen out during birth. His hair was brown and straight, with the first signs of gray, and he wore it short, lawyerly, though by now it was generally known in the area that his best days as a lawyer were behind him.

  What else? He could remember an afternoon sitting in a graveyard with his back against the curved gray stone wall. The wall stones were large and round and they pressed against the bruises his old man had made earlier, and with the pain there was the smell of fresh-cut grass and turned soil. Then skip a few years and he could remember being big and strong for the first time, lifting weights in the gym at school and learning to hit the heavy bag and the speed bag. There was the smell of sweat and leather and the sound of his taped fists smacking against the bags, a different music from each, and the magic, rock-hard, lactic burning in his arms. He could remember people being afraid of him, and how his old man started looking like just another little man to him. He could not remember crying, ever.

  What else? We were getting close now, the tall, dark man and I, making our way through the history. This was important. I wanted to tell him that the newspapers didn’t give a shit about him. They wouldn’t listen. Listening was a lost art and they weren’t about to dust it off just for his sake. No, they’d tell him how it really was, who had been there on the dark road, what he and his family’d been through, the name of what they’d lost. The article would be maybe two inches long. It would be in a section like “Crime Watch” or “Accidents” or “Deaths,” or maybe it would even be on the front page. It would contain all the necessary names but one.

  He should throw the newspaper out. I wanted to tell him. He should take his wife’s hand. He should talk and be listened to. He should know the whole story.

  What else? Tell the truth now, don’t lie. There were the elements of a life, yes indeed, basic things, rock-paper-scissors things, and th
en there was what you did with them. In the end it was only what you did with them that mattered. This was important. (Somehow, though, the suspect had not learned this.) Was the tall, dark man listening? There was love and marriage and then one day the suspect had hit his wife. There was a child, his only son, and the suspect had hit his son, too. And there was the rest of life, there was trying to be a father and a decent man, and the suspect had driven his car into another man’s son and killed him and had not stopped.

  Outside, another car went by. Maybe it was seven by now, neighbors going to work. Maybe it was already hot out there. Somewhere the tall, dark man was drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. I could hear birds again, not doves but chickadees and blue jays. And something else, too. What I heard was like ice, like ice cracking in the heat, and I brought my hands to my chest. Between the dense, mounded pectoral muscles there was the breastbone, thin and brittle, and I put my thumb against it, on the spot where the right front of my car would have hit his boy, shattering the bone, and I pressed.

  Ethan

  I left Grace sleeping. The early morning light came in through the half-curtained windows, and I left my dreams by the side of the dark road with my son, and climbed out of bed. Every night now was a graveyard visit.

  Grace didn’t even stir. I wondered if she’d taken something, some drug, so steady was her breathing. The light fell across her. Her closed eyelids looked swollen. Her jaw was clenched, a muscle working there, over and over. Still, she was beautiful. My beautiful wife. She lay on her back with the sheet fallen and her nightgown slipped off one shoulder, her breast exposed. I looked; I wasn’t dead. I remembered the first time I’d seen her skin like this, unprotected and unadorned, as she lay on a thin mattress on the floor of my university apartment. She’d been twenty. Her eyes had been open then.