Preston Falls : a novel (27 page)

She holds out against putting on the radio until she gets off the Taconic, then holds out some more until the shortcut around Queechee Lake, and then all the way to Center Berlin, where she finally feels like it's either get something on the radio or go into an absolute panic. There's static where WQXR had been, and she hits Seek: a country-music station; a rock station, obviously for teenage boys; some man talking about the teachings of Paul, two seconds of "Dock of the Bay." She can't imagine why she would ever again need to hear "Dock of the Bay," or "Hey, Jude," or "California Girls." What it is, she's come to hate most music. She lands at last on a classical station out of Albany, where a solemn-voiced man is summarizing the plot of an opera. "The wedding party and Elvira reappear while Walton sounds the alarm and organizes the pursuit. Shock and grief at Arturo's disappearance strike Elvira senseless, and in a dreamlike delirium she imagines herself being married to him." She's driving past sagging barns and sagging trucks and cows standing in mud and a sign saying PUMKINS FOR SALE. She sees a dead raccoon up ahead, lovely round-ringed tail, body bloated huge, as if inflated. This is all too crazy. She turns the radio off and listens to the

PRESTON FALLS

wind and the tires and the engine: a three-part noise that if you really listen has little parts within each of the parts. She turns the radio back on. She passes landmark after landmark. The grocery store with the magnetic-letter sign at the curb: WE HAD A 2 MILLION WINNER. The boulder somebody painted to make it look even more like an Indian in profile. The used-book store that has the post boy out front; now it's wearing a Dracula mask.

The sun is just trembling above the horizon when she comes up the last hill—the real last hill, not the hill that looks just like it—and turns onto Ragged Hill Road. Past the tumbledown barn that Willis used to call Nude Descending a Staircase Acres. Past the silver trailer almost hidden by sumacs and the blue trailer with chickens running loose and a circle of dooryard gnawed bare by a tethered goat. Past the house with pastel-green siding where you usually see the fat little boy with the Mohawk out riding his bike and every year they have a perfectly weeded garden with absolutely straight rows. Then on through the stand of half-brown pine trees, going uphill all the time, and past the trailer with the GUN SHOP sign, the junk cars, the Hog Roster and the mountains of heaped-up firewood. What's-his-name's.

She comes around the last corner and sees that at least the house is still standing. But what's all that blue plastic? He must be putting a new roof on, God knows why—and God knows where he's getting the money. His truck's not here, and if ever a house looked deserted. The maple trees are bare and the lawn is higher than your ankles, except where it's covered in dead leaves.

She pulls up onto the lank grass, superstitious about taking the place where he parks his truck, and climbs out. The late-afternoon sun is higher above the horizon up here, and it feels hot through the thinning air. Not warm. Hot. Sharp and stinging. One of the reasons she hates and fears Preston Falls: in this clean air you can really feel the damage they've done to the ozone, far worse than they're telling us. Instant sunburn. Up here she keeps slathering Mel and Roger with sunblock and making them wear hats outside. Willis disapproves.

But she's forgotten how quiet it is, A breeze sets leaves rattling in a narrow file, as if a swift ghost had rushed through on the way from one arbitrary point on the lawn to another and vanished. She walks through the grass and leaves to the kitchen door, looking for signs that any-

I 8 9

one has walked this way lately. But she doubts even a man could see anything—even if he'd been a Boy Scout and read all of Shedock Holmes. The door's unlocked. There's a musty smell inside, together with a rotten whiff of stove gas. She calls Hello, then feels stupid: a house doesn't smell this way if people have been in it. But it's weird. Willis always locks up, though of course you can get in through any window. Which is in fact how he gets in, instead of going into the woodshed for the key. You'd have to know Willis to know how perfect that is.

He's left the boombox right out on the counter, and a stack of CDs. Which is weird, too: he usually hides stuff because the house was once broken into. But what she really doesn't like is this one little gray spider strand connecting the handle of the JOE mug with the countertop. She lays her fingertips on the rim, absurdly hoping to feel whether Willis is near or far. But no feeling of anything floods in on her. Of course. Because the whole idea is stupid.

She looks around. On the floor, Rathbone's food dish and water bowl, both empty. In the sink, a bowl with a spoon and a single Cheerio stuck to the inside. On the table, a Want Ad Digest folded open, with an ad circled in pen:

TRACTOR Ford 8N w land plow, disc harrow, snowplow, sickle bar, VGC, $2250 W/D.

The calendar says September: summery picture of a lake with these cliffs hanging over it and a red-and-white sailboat out in the middle, no sail up and nobody inside.

The furniture's still piled up in the dining room, and the living room's still empty. Her footsteps echo. Plastic still over the window, still the same hole in the ceiling. He hasn't gotten much accomplished in his two months. Though in fairness he is doing major stuff to the roof. She goes into the front hall, around the sofa and upstairs. She peeks into the kids' rooms at unwanted toys: a red-and-blue plastic three-wheeler and a broken space robot in Roger's room; in Mel's, jigsaw puzzles (Mount Fuji, a covered bridge) and games (Candyland, Don't Wake Daddy). And there sits the black-haired doll, Rosita or whatever her name was, that Mel used to tote around everywhere: legs spread, arms spread, back against the wall, eyes open, waiting for somebody to give a thought to her. Waiting for years. Jean actually feels herself getting teary. Oh please.

She goes into what Willis used to call, with that little sneering hesi-

PRESTON FALLS

tation, "the, ah, master bedroom." Bed's unmade—of course—and the floor littered with underwear, socks and t-shirts. Well, damned if she'll clean up his mess. Not that anyone's asking her to. The light's too spooky for her to linger, anyway: that slanting, end-of-day sunlight that makes things seem to glow from within. She opens the door to Willis's little study—God, there's a window broken in here and glass all over the floor. The lovely locals. And his computer's on, with his customized Screensaver crawling: I CAN'T GO ON I'LL GO ON. She looks around for the rock somebody must have thrown—nothing—then kneels and touches her wrist to the seat of his chair. Out of sheer stupidity. Could it be that locals broke that window downstairs, too, and this was some kind of hate campaign like what happens to black families? She wouldn't put it past these people. And she can actually sort of see it their way: city folks are driving up the price of homes so locals can't afford to live here anymore. In Wakefield, the next town over, teenagers used somebody's summer place for a drug party house all winter and did fifty thousand dollars' worth of damage; toward the end they were blamming the walls with shotguns.

But what actually happened here? Okay, he's working on his computer, somebody throws a rock, he runs down to investigate, gets in his truck—and then what? He just never comes back?

Meanwhile the red light on the answering machine's going crazy.

She presses Play. "Hi, how are you, how's the. house coming . . ." Beeeep. "Hey. It's Marty. Listen. Couple things to go over, for when you come back. Nothing major Give me a call the next day or two? Four four two six? In case you've forgotten." Beeeep. "Hi, just thought I might catch you in. . . ." Beeeep. "Aahsk nawt why yaw brotha has nawt called you, aahsk why you have nawt called yaw brotha." Beeeep. "It's Marty. Listen, we do need to talk. Please get back to me? Four four two six?" Beeeep. "Hi, uh, listen, I'm a little concerned . . ." Beeeep. "Willis, it's Marty. It's very urgent that you get back to me as soon as you can. We're assuming that you're coming back to work, since we haven't heard to the contrary, but we badly need to talk. So if you get this . . . four four two six. Okay?" Beeeep. The red light stops flashing.

So he got none of these messages? Her first one was at least two weeks ago.

She looks through the stuff on his worktable. Receipt from the Quicklube in Chesterton, August 30. Old phone bills, electric bills, bill from Drew's Propane Service. No letters. Catalog from Renovator's Sup-

ply, folded open to a page of hinges. What's strange, though, his pictures aren't up anymore. Just nail holes. They're on the floor, stacked against the table leg. Here's the farmhouse he grew up in. His horrible father, whom she used to try to think of as his pathetic father. His grandparents, though she can never remember which grandparents. Mel and Roger on Block Island, when she was six and he was three: Mel scooping sand with a plastic bucket, Roger holding up her Little Mermaid inner tube around his waist, neither one looking at the other or at you. And Jean herself, just after they were married, sitting on a lawn chair in Sarasota, umbrella'd drink in her hand, with sunglasses and that floppy old straw hat. She looks like any carefree young woman.

She picks up the phone. "Hi," she says when Carol answers. "Well, I'm here. But there's no sign of him. No messages, I take it."

"No, not at all. Everything's fine." Which must mean the kids are right there.

"It's very weird up here," says Jean. "It just looks really deserted. And there's this window broken up in his study, and his computer's still on?"

"Really?" says Carol, in the sort of bright tone she'd use if Jean had said a deer was standing at the kitchen door. "Well, Roger's right here. We've got the goody bags almost finished, and of course Rathbone's lying here supervising, Oh-oh, somebody heard his name."

"I guess you can't really talk."

"You got it," says Carol.

"I have no idea what I should do," Jean says.

"Oh, I know just what you mean. So I imagine Roger wants to talk to you."

Jean hears Roger say, "No I don't."

"Correction," says Carol. "He does not want to talk to you. He is, in fact, heading upstairs. Just a sec. Rog?" she calls, muting the phone somehow. "Would you just knock on Mel's door and tell her it's time to get up or she'll never get to sleep tonight?" Jean doesn't hear Roger answer. "Sorry about that," Carol says.

"What's wrong with Mel?" says Jean.

"Just taking a nap."

"Really? She never does that."

"Well, we had a pretty good hike. And I think she's a little bummed, to tell you the truth. Nap will probably fix her up. So what's your plan?"

"No idea. Turn around and come back, I guess. I don't know."

PRESTON FALLS

"But don't you think you better get the police going on this?"

"Oh God."

"WeUj^tf^..."

"I mean yes, I've thought about it. But it's like, what are the limits? He's perfectly within his rights to just, you know, go somewhere."

"When he has to be back at work tomorrow'^ Come on. He could be in some kind of really serious—"

"Look, can I call you later?"

"Jean, I'm only—"

"I'll call you later."

Jean goes to the broken eyebrow window, gets down on one knee and looks out. A squirrel moves along the stone wall, flowing from one frozen pose to the next. Carol is right: what's she waiting for?

For this not to be happening.

She goes back downstairs to the front hall and sits on the sofa. She folds her hands in her lap, closes her eyes and begins to say One, one, one in her mind. It was Carol who got her into meditation, back when Jean was eighteen and going through stuff and Carol was living with her hippie princeling in Central Square. (This was before Gid the mountain man, or whatever he thought he was.) Carol doesn't know she still does this; she doesn't want to encourage Carol in anything mystical. And she would certainly not want it known around The Paley Group. She did tell Willis, back when they told each other things. Since they were in confession mode, he said, he might as well admit that he sometimes prayed. She asked what his prayers were like; he said they always began "Dear God," like a little boy's. And in fact, when they were first married they tried saying this sort of nondenominational grace for a while. In a way, she's glad she never took Mel and Roger to church, or even taught them the Lord's Prayer or talked about God, probably because deep down she takes it all too seriously and didn't want to offer it to them unless she could absolutely get behind it herself. Though you could also look at it as the absolute worst form of child abuse, to starve the spirit. One more reason she's an unfit parent: she doesn't know what to think about anything.

All this self-talk is totally screwing up her meditation, of course, though you're not supposed to worry about that but simply go back to the one, one, one. When she opens her eyes again, the hall is darker and she feels slowed down. She cranes her neck and looks over her shoulder

I 9 3

out the little windowpanes at the sides of the front door: darkness is muting the green of the haylike grass, as if their neglect of this place were being forgiven.

So many days he'd spent here alone. Seeing these changes in the light.

She really needs to go outdoors and catch the very last of the day. She hears a crow caw: warning of someone's approach? She freezes and listens harder into the silence. No, nothing. Please, she thinks, stop scaring yourself. Walking through the dining room, though, she hears a car pass by on the road—rumble of motor, rush of tires and stab of electric guitar. Then it's gone.

She takes the path that leads up the hill behind the house. The sky's a deep ultramarine, clouds still backlit by the last orange glow. It gets warmer as she climbs. From the hilltop you can look out at other hills across the valley as it fills up with mist. Gentle, rounded hills: wooded except for one clean-shaven patch: somebody's farm. What a wonderful place this could have been.

But it's really not warm up here. She pulls the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and ties the drawstring in a bow, then puts her hands in the kangaroo pouch in front. She takes a last look: fuzzy horizontal stripes of cloud near the horizon, fat piles of whipped-cream cumulus bulging above them. Ultramarines, golds, oranges, magentas—she wishes Mel and Roger were seeing this with her, though Roger would be bored and Mel ostentatiously silent. She starts back down, watching her footing. God, look at this: somebody left a bottle up here. So the locals are cUmbing their hill. Though she's not even sure it's actually on their property. A plastic Polar Seltzer bottle, but with brownish gunk clinging to the inside. God knows. She tucks it under her arm and starts down.