Empty Mile (35 page)

Stan and Rosie’s bedroom occupied one whole end of their trailer and when I entered it I felt, at first, cheated. The brown Formica walls, the concertina door, the aluminum window frames … none of this was Stan to me. This was not where he had grown up, this was not where he had lived with me. This was Stan’s new life, a life which had existed independently of me.

But as I stood longer in the room Stan’s imprint on the place began to show. Like a photograph developing, his things rose one by one out of a background of unfamiliar furniture and a thin scattering of Rosie’s possessions—a comic book on the floor beside the bed that he must have been reading the night before, pairs of sneakers slung haphazardly against a wall, sketches of superheroes, an open can of Coke and a packet of potato chips … These glimpses of the everyday moments in his life, these small, mundane, intimate times when he was most himself, cut me so deeply I had to steady myself against the doorframe.

There was a closet beside the door. I opened it and ran my hands across Stan’s clothes. The leather jacket I’d given him when I left Oakridge was at the head of the row, and beside it the pale blue bowling shirt he’d been wearing on my first day back. I took the shirt from its hanger and sat at the foot of the bed and buried my face in it, breathing in the scent of my brother—perspiration and the perfume of Brylcreem—trying to breathe into existence a world around myself which still contained him. But of course I could not, and in the end the shirt served only to drive home how utterly and permanently gone he was. I sat and cried into it until I felt empty of anything worthwhile, empty of anything I might have held up as evidence that I was, if only in the smallest of ways, a good man.

When, finally, I put the shirt back in its place, I saw Stan’s two remaining superhero costumes and remembered his words to me about how I should wear them sometimes. I took them out of the closet and draped them over my arm. I spent another minute in the bedroom trying to absorb as much of him as I could, to parcel up and carry away with me forever these last, fading traces of his life, but I had come to my limit and did not have the strength to stay longer. The only other thing I took from the room was the leather jacket.

Outside, it was very cold. I walked quietly back to the cabin and sat on the steps out front. I put the leather jacket on and zipped it up and sat breathing steam into the air with my hands in its pockets, thinking about how I had destroyed Stan’s faith in life.

He had seen the world as a place of hope, as something that looked after the people who lived within it. There had been a magic to it for him. It was a place where you could hold a tree and be energized, where moths could somehow draw power to you. But six months in my presence had taken every last piece of this magic away from him.

My guilt was a condition of the soul that lay about me like a gray tubercular cloud, and Stan had breathed it in every day that he was with me. He had recognized it for what it was. He had told me to stop feeling bad, to leave the horrors of the past in the past. But it had made no difference. My self-loathing had sustained me for so long that I could not give it up. And Stan, who had never had the chance to build resistance to this most adult of afflictions, was unable to withstand its unremitting onslaught, unable to prevent his own trusting view of life becoming terminally infected with it.

He had worshipped me, he had looked to me for a model of how to live, and I had shown him only regret and hopelessness and a barren future where happiness was impossible. And it had been this, more than any attack by Jeremy Tripp or Gareth, that had changed him into a person capable of picking up a handgun, pointing it at another human being, and pulling the trigger.

Later, as it was starting to get light, Marla came out with coffee and sat next to me. I put my head on her shoulder and she stroked my hair and I wanted to stay like that forever, sitting there with the feel of her fingers taking away thought, never having to address anything or deal with anything or think about myself ever again.

Around 6:30 a.m. we got into the pickup and drove out to Tunney Lake to watch the police dive team from Sacramento search for Stan and Rosie’s bodies. On the way past Millicent’s house we stopped and knocked on her door. It took her a long time to answer, when she did she was wrapped in a quilt from her bed and her face looked gray and immobile. We asked her if she wanted to come with us, but she shuddered and said she couldn’t bear it and went back into her house.

The officer stationed at the entrance to Lake Trail recognized us and rolled his car back so we could pass. At the lake there was an ambulance and an Oakridge police cruiser in the parking lot. On the beach three large black SUVs with crests on their sides and long metal trailers behind them were backed up to the water’s edge. Three gray semi-inflatable boats had just launched. Two of them each held a driver and a pair of wet-suited divers, the third appeared to be some sort of coordinating vessel and carried a pod of electronic equipment and three guys in dark fatigues and peaked caps.

Two Oakridge police officers were on the beach talking to a guy with a mustache who looked like he was the head of the dive team. One of the officers saw us and came over and told us it might take most of the day for the divers to find anything. He pointed to the rocks at the far end of the beach and said that the most private place to watch from would probably be there. The man with the mustache nodded at us and tugged the bill of his cap.

Marla and I sat huddled in our coats on the sand where the rocks started. The divers were in the water now and the boats idled behind them, following their bubble trails. The cold air was still and sound traveled easily and around us the morning filled with the noise of outboard motors, the calls of the men in the boats, and the burble of two-way radios. The dive team had begun working near the shore and was only slowly making its way out toward the deeper water by the cliff face.

As I watched them, blankly waiting for the inevitable, I realized that Oakridge and all it had ever held for me was finished, that I would sell Empty Mile as soon as I could find a buyer. Gareth’s share would go to his father and I would give Stan’s to Millicent. Marla and I would take the rest and travel east across the country until there was no more land to travel across. We would find a place to live there and hope that the three thousand miles of land between us and Oakridge would be enough to keep us safe from the people we had been.

By midday the divers had moved across the lake and were within fifteen yards of the cliff face. They found Stan first. We heard one of the men in the boats shout, then all three boats quickly converged on a pair of divers who had surfaced and were supporting something between them. I couldn’t see much at first from where we were, but when the body was lifted into one of the boats I saw that it was dressed in gray and black.

The boat came into shore and the police and the dive team members on the beach jumped to meet it. They lifted Stan’s body out and lay it face up on the sand.

When Marla and I got there the men fell silent and made way for us. I stood close to Stan, staring down at him. He’d lost his mask and his glasses and the wet Batman costume stuck tightly to his rounded body. His eyes were closed and the dark lashes against the white skin made him look very young, as though death had stripped away the attempts he had made to disguise himself as an adult, leaving behind instead the soft brave boy he had always really been.

It was an impossible thing to accept that those eyes would never open again. The lids were not damaged, his face, though swollen a little, was unmarked. There seemed no reason why, if I shook him hard enough or breathed into him long enough, those eyes should not flutter open, that he should not smile and say to me, “Hiya, Johnny. Don’t worry, I’m fine.” It had happened once before.

But it wouldn’t happen this time.

I bent and put my hand against the side of his face. I was not prepared for how cold he felt, how hard the bone of his skull seemed beneath his skin, but I kept my hand where it was. He was my beautiful brother, the man I had come back to Oakridge to fix. My last, lost hope for absolution.

This was the last time I would see him outside a coffin, this was the last shred of connection between us before formal process took over. I wanted to stop this headlong race, this rocketing of him away from me. I wanted to hold on to him, to not let him go, and believe that by doing so I could keep some essential part of him alive. But he was already gone and there was nothing, not a thing in the entire universe, I could do to bring him back.

When I stepped away from the body two of the dive team picked him up carefully and placed him in a black vinyl body bag. As they were zipping it up one of them asked me if I wanted them to leave his face showing. I shook my head and they closed the bag and then all of the men on the beach gathered about it and lifted it in silence and carried it gently and slowly over to the ambulance in the parking lot.

Fifteen minutes later the same pair of divers who had found Stan found Rosie. When she was laid out on the sand we went over and stood beside her. She had been a quiet, closed presence and only Stan had really passed beyond the locked façade she held against the world, but she had been a part of our lives for six months and I was as responsible for her death as I was for Stan’s. Before they closed the body bag Marla stepped forward and smoothed Rosie’s hair away from her face and arranged the collar of her dress more closely about her throat.

After that there was nothing more for us at the lake. The police would pack up, the bodies would be transported to the coroner in Burton, there would be an autopsy, and sometime later Stan and Rosie would be released for burial. I wanted to get home as fast as I could, to close the door behind me and shut out the world, but as Marla and I were walking across the grass bank to the pickup there was a shout from the two divers who were still in the water. We turned to see them waving to their command boat. They were a long way out across the lake, almost at the cliff face, and it was impossible to see what they were holding just below the surface of the water. But I had a sickening feeling I knew exactly what it was they had found.

Marla clutched my arm and we stood there on that low grassy bank, unable to move, unable to look away as a third body was pulled from the water and ferried to shore. The police, having no reason to associate us with this one, paid no attention to us and unloaded the body and laid it out with less ceremony than they had previously.

This new body was in far worse condition than Stan or Rosie. If it hadn’t been for the remains of the business suit that clung to it, it would have been difficult to identify it as human at all from where we stood. It was a white, bloated thing that curved from head to toe like the back of a whale. Where the flesh was exposed the skin was tattered and peeling. The head was bigger than it should have been and most of its hair was gone.

But Marla and I both knew who it was.

I took a step forward but Marla pulled me back. Her eyes were wide and frightened. She whispered, “I can’t do it. I’ll give myself away.”

“If they knew anything about you and him they would have come to you when it happened.”

“I know, but I can’t do it, Johnny. I can’t.”

“Okay, go home and wait for me. I’ll get a ride back.”

I gave her the keys to the pickup and kissed her quickly. She nodded but her face was ashen and I wasn’t sure she was registering anything other than the fear of being connected to Ray’s death. She walked to the pickup, doing her best to look like what was happening on the beach meant nothing to her, and drove away without looking back.

All the boats were beached now and the police and the dive team were standing in a loose circle around the body. Several of them were talking on their radios, reporting this unexpected find to their various superiors. As I approached them the Oakridge officer who had earlier suggested we wait by the rocks held up his hand and blocked my path.

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to stay back.”

But I had a clear view of the body now. I lifted my hand to my mouth and gasped, “That’s my father!”

And so a day which I’d known would be long became longer. Patterson had to be called out. I had to explain to him why I was certain it was my father—how I could tell by his watch and his clothes—that I had nothing new to add to the case, that him being found there was pure coincidence as far as I was concerned and, when the question was put to me, that I did not think the fact Stan had killed Gareth meant that either one of them had killed my father.

Patterson said they’d take my father’s body to the lab in Burton to determine the cause of death and to see if there was any forensic evidence. But he told me I shouldn’t be too optimistic they’d find anything that would further their original investigation, given the length of time he’d been underwater.

They gave me a few moments alone with the body. The months underwater had erased the features from its face and left it a pulpy ball on which it was hard to define any trace of personality at all. It was a shocking sight, but I was shocked more by my own ambivalence. The sight of my father’s dead body should have broken me with grief. But it did not. As I looked at the soggy mass I felt only a puzzled emptiness, as though this body was not that of my father, but of some unknown person I had once passed in the street long ago. I wondered how it was possible for a son to feel this way about his father. But I knew. I knew.

By four o’clock it was all over at the lake. The ambulance had taken the bodies away, the dive team had packed up and gone, and Patterson had headed back to town to deal with his paperwork. The two uniformed officers were the last to leave. They walked up and down the beach for several minutes picking up small pieces of trash the other men had left behind, then one of them came over and asked where they should drive me. All day long I had wanted to be gone, away from this place, but now I felt I could not leave without a last, solitary goodbye to a site that was both the start of the guilt I carried for my brother and the end of all the attempts I had made to fix it.