Empty Mile (4 page)

I knew all of this without being told, of course. Without the blinding caul of my lust, that this would happen was just so fucking obvious. Don’t leave a child alone by water—a primal understanding. I should have been looking after him. I should have been with him. But being with Marla had been more important.

As I massaged Stan’s heart the utter clarity of my guilt, the knowledge that I alone was responsible for the stillness of his body, took from me part of myself, stole away that quality most humans assume to be the bedrock of who they are—the quality of believing oneself to be a good person.

After that day I would never think that about myself again.

When Stan choked and spluttered back to life, when his eyelids fluttered open and he gazed past me into the blue sky, I thought I would faint with relief. As he sucked in great sobbing lungfuls of air I held him close, shouting to the crowd, “He’s alive! He’s alive!” And as they clapped and cheered I promised myself that I had learned my lesson, that I would never again be careless with another human being. I had no idea, in those moments of jubilation, that my lessons were only just starting.

The paramedics arrived while I still had Stan in my arms. They had lumbered their vehicle up Lake Trail in response to a cell phone call from one of the crowd. There were two of them and they pried Stan away from me, strapped him to a backboard, and carried him across the sand to their truck. I trotted beside them, repeating to Stan that he was going to be all right. He’d been looking around him as though enraptured by what he saw. When his eyes came to rest on me, though, he stared blankly for a moment and I felt the tendrils of a new fear tighten around me.

“It’s Johnny. Are you okay, Stan? It’s Johnny.”

He smiled and closed his eyes. “Johnny …”

Then his head lolled sideways and we were climbing into the ambulance.

Before they closed the doors I saw Marla. She must have been following us but I had not noticed her, had not even thought of her. She was standing still, watching me, and as our eyes met we both knew that what we had started in the forest that day was going to stay buried there for a long, long time.

The paramedics took Stan fifty miles to the hospital in Burton on radioed instructions from Oakridge’s own emergency clinic. I remember the time as a strip-lit nightmare of recriminations from my father and my own worry for Stan. My father tried, I think, to keep his anger in check, but there were times when it was just too much for him.

Through the battering storm of doctors and tests and waiting rooms and not knowing, a word began to surface, a wicked piece of flotsam that weighted our lives forever after and tore from me any hope that Stan’s near-drowning might ever become forgivable.

Hypoxia. A brain starved of oxygen longer than three minutes begins to die. Like
never leave a child alone near water
, it is something we all know. But which parts will die, what trajectory of sacrifice the brain will plot and its effect on the individual, are never known until after the fact. Likewise the extent of recovery varies unpredictably.

A doctor, trying to give us something to hope for, said, “There is no certainty of interpretation in brain trauma. In the way the brain interprets it, I mean.”

He only wanted to help, but it was wasted on us. We could see for ourselves that Stan’s brain had interpreted its trauma pretty fucking severely.

There was a transition phase in the weeks and months that followed. There was rehab and therapy, rapid improvement in motor skills—a sloping graph against the axes of time and damage. After three months Stan had pretty much gotten as good as he was going to get.

The doctors said it could have been much worse. They neglected to mention that it could just as easily have been much better.

Stan was more than functional. He did not come out of it a slavering vegetable, he was not paralyzed down one side or deprived of the use of language. He suffered neither ataxia nor aphasia. But he was changed, there was no doubt about that. Gone was the diamond-bright focus he had directed at the world, gone was the goal-oriented overachiever, gone was the IQ that set him apart. He was Stan number two and he was never going to revert to what he’d been before, never going to heal beyond this particular threshold of resurrection.

And it was all my fault.

Now, twelve years later, standing on that beach again, I felt my guilt no less keenly. I’d left a kid who couldn’t swim alone near water and all the time that had passed since then, all my years of isolation in London, all my blind-eye-turning, had not made the slightest difference to what I thought of myself.

I walked across the sand to the parking lot and got into my pickup. It was not until I had begun the treacherous descent down Lake Trail that I realized Gareth must have known what my reaction to being at the lake again would be.

CHAPTER 4

W
hen I got to the garden center Stan was waiting outside for me. He bounced into the pickup.

“Hey, Johnny, I thought of something today. I thought of an idea to have a business.”

“Lay it on me.”

“A man came in and bought a whole load of indoor plants—weeping figs and dracaenas and yuccas. He wanted them for his office. But he didn’t know how to look after them. He didn’t know anything about plants. And that’s when I got my idea. What about a business that rents out plants to offices and stores and places like that and then goes out and looks after them?”

“That’s a great idea, but people already do that. We used to have it where I worked in England.”

“Yeah, but nobody does it here in Oakridge. I asked Bill.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. And he’d know, he’s like king of this place.”

“Well, keep it in mind, then.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll keep it in mind ’cause, Johnny, I think it’d be good to be a businessman. It’d make me part of everyone again.”

I started the pickup and we headed into town. For a while I was able to stay quiet, but eventually my visit to the lake got the better of me.

“Do you go up to the lake much, Stan?”

“I can’t swim. I like the woods near our place better.”

“Are you scared to go up there?”

“You shouldn’t think about the lake, Johnny.”

“Don’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

“I think about it a lot.”

“You know something I think about? When I was on the sand and I woke up, I remember how bright the sun was and how good it felt to look up into the sky and it was like I could feel everything all around me. And then I felt your hands on my chest and I could see you and I could see the sun and the sky and I felt good, Johnny. That’s what I remember, I felt good. I didn’t always feel good later, but when I felt bad, when I couldn’t understand something or when the kids were teasing me, I remembered that—the sun and feeling everything all around me.”

Stan’s dance lesson was in a clapboard community hall that stood alongside a church in a residential street north of Back Town. The hall had a concrete area out front for parking that was about two-thirds full of small cars. Several old people were tottering across it toward a set of open double doors.

Stan wanted me to come in and watch him but my visit to the lake had jarred loose too many memories and there was something else I wanted to do. He sulked a little until I promised I’d come back before he finished.

The Channon was southeast back over the Swallow River and was about as far away from Old Town as you could get and still say you lived in Oakridge. It was an area of light forest that held a scatter of small, widely spaced houses. A place where the rents were low and people kept to themselves.

Marla’s house was a two-bedroom wooden bungalow a few minutes drive into the area. It was screened from the road by a hedge and separated from its closest neighbor by twenty yards of trees. I drove slowly past it. A driveway ran down the left side of the house and from what I could see through the gap it made in the hedge, it didn’t look like anyone was home. There was no car out front and the glass of the windows was flat and dark.

I parked the pickup a hundred yards further on and walked back along the road, my hand tight around a set of keys I carried in my pocket. These keys had been with me through all my time in London—two for my father’s house, one for the wooden bungalow I was now approaching.

The front of the house had not changed. When Marla and I had found the place the window frames and the front door with its pebbled glass window had been white, but on our second day there we’d painted them red to mark the exuberance we felt at finally making our home together. I was twenty-one and Marla had just left Gareth for me—scratch one friend, gain one lover.

I wasn’t sure if she still lived there. I’d written to her after I left Oakridge and she’d replied for a while, but her letters had been full of accusations and sadness and after a year she’d stopped writing back. Since then the only news I’d had of her had come in the rare letters or e-mails my father and I exchanged. Even the letter I’d sent telling her I was coming back to Oakridge had gone unanswered. But somehow it didn’t seem possible that I would not have known if she’d moved. It was reassuring that the window frames and the door were still red.

I walked quietly down the side of the house, looked through what had been our bedroom window, and saw immediately that I’d been right—this was still Marla’s house. The room was still a bedroom, it even held the same bed and dresser. And on the dresser, a framed snapshot of Marla and me posing at some picnic spot on the Swallow River.

I went back to the front of the house. I knocked on the door and waited a long time and knocked again but no one answered. I looked around me. None of the other houses in the street could see into Marla’s front yard. So I took her key out of my pocket and pushed it into the lock and turned it and opened the door. I stood on the threshold for a full minute, listening, then I stepped through and closed the door quietly behind me.

Memory drove into me like a truck—the polished wooden floor of the hallway, the two bedrooms on the left, the living room on the right, kitchen and bathroom at the back. Even the smell of the place carried signatures of my time there—hot wood, air heated through glass. This house and the relationship that went with it had been one of the landmark abandonings of my exit from Oakridge.

The past reached out to me from every room—from shelves I had assembled and screwed to a wall, from hooks I had put in the backs of doors, from a hinge I had clumsily fixed with a nail … The house was not a morgue for our time together, though. My ghost was there, but it was buried under eight years of her own living and showed through only in small patches, as though in painting on the layers of the present, time had missed a bit here and there.

I tried to guess what her life had been like since I’d been gone. It was obvious she had not become wealthy or even comfortable—there was not the accumulation of new possessions that would indicate eight years of stable finances. Had she found another man? I looked for signs and to my relief found none. There was, however, one change to the house I could not decipher.

We had always used the second bedroom as a storage room, had rarely ever gone into it. Now it was empty of household junk and held instead a double bed made up with dark blue sheets and a quilt. At first, I thought Marla must have taken a boarder, but there was too little in the room to point to regular occupancy. Apart from the bed there was only a small dresser and a wall mirror. But still, there was a fragrance of use here, a sensory mark that made me think the bed was sometimes used, that the mirror was occasionally looked into.

I pulled back the covers of the bed. They had not been recently washed and the smell of sex rose from them. Dusty smears of dried semen stood out against the dark material. I opened the drawers of the dresser. The top one held a set of lacy black woman’s underwear and a bottle of personal lubricant. The other two were empty.

I was closing the drawers when I heard a car pull into the yard out front. If it was Marla I didn’t want our first meeting to be like this. If it was anyone else I doubly didn’t want to be found in the house. I bolted from the room, down the short hall to the kitchen. There was a back door there that opened onto a small garden. I unlatched it and stood waiting, ready to run. The size of the house meant that to have any chance of escaping undetected I’d have to wait until whoever had just arrived opened the front door and stepped inside. The moment they did this I’d race down the side of the house and out onto the road. And hope that whoever it was didn’t look out of any windows while I was doing it.

A minute passed and I didn’t hear steps on the porch or the scrape of a key in the lock. It occurred to me then that the driver of the car may well have just been using Marla’s driveway to make a turn.

I pulled the back door shut, cursing myself for this insane act of unlawful entry. I left the kitchen and crept along the hall to the living room. There, mercifully, the curtains were half drawn and by staying close to the wall I was able to work my way around the room and look through the window at an angle that showed most of the area in front of the house without exposing myself.

The noise I had heard had not been that of a turning car. Sitting smoking a cigarette in her olive Mercedes was the woman I had met at the nursery that morning—Patricia Prentice, the jittery, unhappy-looking wife of Stan’s boss. As I stood watching her, a second car pulled into the yard and parked.

My mother died in a car wreck when I was sixteen and from then until I left Oakridge I’d never known my father to be with another woman. He had loved my mother in his distant, battened-down way and I always figured his sense of what was right had prevented him from looking for anyone else. But it seemed that eight more years of being without a woman had eroded this sense of rightness just a little, because the second car was his and he was standing now, holding Patricia, cupping her breast and running his other hand down her back to her buttocks.

It was shocking to watch him touch another person so intimately. It was so far beyond my frame of reference for him that by witnessing it I felt I was stealing something from him, some charged emotional possession that should have been his alone to know about.

I didn’t have long enough to really start feeling bad about it, though, because the kiss and the touching ended and Patricia and my father headed toward the porch. I crept along the hall to the kitchen and stood by the back door until I heard a key turn and footsteps cross the threshold. And then I ran, crouching low, out into the back garden, around the corner, and along the side of the house. I stopped for a moment at the edge of the front yard, scanning the place where the cars were parked, but it was clear, my father and Patricia were in the house and the door was closed behind them. I walked quickly out to the road and back along it to my truck.

As I drove away I suffered the unsettling realization that the semen I had seen on the dark sheets of the bed in the spare room must have been my father’s.

The hall where Stan was dancing was a pretty basic affair—a stretch of bare floorboards, a curtainless stage at one end, a piano and several stacks of orange plastic chairs pushed into a corner. Almost all the people there appeared to be in their sixties or seventies and I couldn’t help wondering if this gathering was less a lesson than some sort of community program organized to allow pensioners to socialize.

I stood in the doorway and watched the last dance of the afternoon. A portable stereo on top of the piano played an upbeat rhythm with a Latin feel and I guessed the class was practicing the cha-cha. For most of them, practicing was the operative word. They moved uncertainly through the steps and often stopped to confer with each other about what move came next. But Stan and his partner were in a different league entirely.

He was dancing with a girl about his age wearing a faded pink shift and a pair of old running shoes. She had dark straight shoulder-length hair that looked dull and unwashed and a lot of the time she kept her eyes on the floor. They were the youngest there by far but they moved with confidence through the whole of the dance.

This was something of Stan I had not seen before—my bouncing, stampeding brother was suddenly graceful. It seemed that in this controlled world of set moves he was able to feel sure of himself again, certain of his abilities. That he was able to claw back some of what he had lost at the lake.

When the lesson was over Stan and I walked out to the parking lot. The girl he’d been dancing with had beaten us outside and was standing by an old orange Datsun. She had her keys in her hand but she hadn’t opened the car. Stan waved to her. The girl didn’t meet his eyes but she lifted her hand and smiled.

As we pulled out onto the road Stan turned his head to keep her in sight. Then he straightened and let out a breath.

“What do you think, Johnny?”

“You were great. You’re far too good for the rest of them. I had no idea you could dance like that.”

“What about Rosie?”

“The girl you were with? She was good too.”

“I like dancing with her.”

“You dog!”

Stan laughed, embarrassed but pleased at this man talk.

“Have you asked her out yet?”

“Nah …”

“Are you going to?”

“She might not want to.”

“What are you talking about?”

Stan shrugged and looked out his window.

“I don’t know …”

“Looks like she likes you.”

Stan turned back from the window and smiled quietly to himself. “Yeah.”

We were silent for a while, then, as we drove through Old Town, Stan spoke again.

“Johnny, did you think about my idea?”

“The plant thing?”

“Yeah. I thought of a name for it. Plantasaurus. What do you think?”

“Like a dinosaur?”

“Yeah.”

“Like it’s some kind of plant-eating dinosaur?”

“You don’t get it, do you? Planta-saur-us. Planters are us. Planters are us! We could be the Godzilla of the plant industry.” He pointed out the window. “Look at all the stores. There are so many places that’d like plants, I bet. Don’t you think it’d work?”

“Plenty of stores have plants already.”

“But not proper ones. Not displayed all nice and looked after. People don’t know how to, Johnny. They don’t have time. We could deliver them, set them up in planters, and every week come around and water them and clean them and replace them when they needed it. Rich people might even want them in their houses.”

“So, all we have do is buy a van, buy the planters, find a supplier to get the plants from, do some advertising so people will know about us, and find an office to work out of.”

I’d run through this list as a joke to try to make him see things in a more practical light, but by the time I’d finished I felt bad for stamping on his idea so hard. To my surprise, though, he didn’t seem fazed.