The Slippage: A Novel (26 page)

“I’m not saying anything,” William said. “So that should be best.”

“Hey,” Emma said. “Look.” Higher up on the tree’s trunk, William could see the edge of a honeycomb protruding from a hollow. “They usually use bigger spaces than that,” Emma said. “They smooth the bark near the entrance. Can you see?” She angled her head up. The wind freshened and gusted behind them. A spot appeared at the corner of the hive and bombed down at Emma. “Ouch!” she said. She hit at her own hip. “Damn it.” What looked like a bee’s corpse tumbled to the ground.

“It’s exactly like your dream,” William said.

“Yeah,” she said. She frowned. “That’s what I think about my life every day. Just like a dream.”

William wasn’t up for more conversation. He tugged on Blondie’s leash and headed for home, counting twenty steps before he turned and looked back. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, not exactly, but what he saw was a woman he had known for a few weeks, at most, staring up at a tree as sunlight dappled the grass beside her flatly.

He was deep into the invitation stage now. Fitch had said yes. Wallace had said yes. Tom had said no and laughed and asked if William minded if he set the phone down while he thought things through and then, without setting the phone down, said he couldn’t be sure because Jesse had reconsidered his offer, and then laughed again, with a hope that was also a fear that the hope was misplaced, and said that he couldn’t control the pace of that reconsideration and didn’t want to, because he wanted to fully deserve whatever came to him. “I’ll put you down as a maybe,” William said.

The phone rang back right after he hung up with Tom. “Hello?”

“Is this William?”

“It is,” he said, suddenly unsure.

“This is Bonnie Travis.” He couldn’t place the name at first, and then he remembered: the short, moon-faced woman who was married to Jim, Louisa’s ex-boyfriend. They lived in Seattle with a boy and a girl. She did something in sales. Bonnie.

“Hi,” he said. “How’s Jim?”

“That’s why I’m calling,” she said. “He’s dead.” Her voice, high and fluted, misshaped the word.

William caught his own reflection on the inside of the glass door that led out to the deck. It looked like a mirage. “What?” he said. It didn’t seem like enough. “How did . . .,” he said, and then stopped. Now it seemed like too much.

When Bonnie spoke again, her voice was frayed. “He’s been having a hard time. It started as money trouble and it spread. We haven’t been getting on.”

“We heard from him about a month ago, when you two were in town visiting. We were going to have a drink.”

“No,” she said. William let the line fill with silence. “He never even made that trip. He just wasn’t able.”

“But he said he was here. He said that you weren’t feeling well and that’s why he couldn’t come out to meet us.”

“He said lots of things, for lots of reasons.” She coughed a sob. “The funeral was small, just family.” It hadn’t occurred to William to think about the funeral until then. “I just thought you should know,” she said.

William was overcome by fatigue at first, but then he was overcome by the opposite. He walked down the hall to the bedroom, came back to the garage, ended up in the kitchen, uncertain what he was looking for. In the bathroom William looked at himself in the mirror. He saw a man who preferred illustration to photography, winter to summer, South America to Europe, basketball to baseball, who thought often of death, preferring to divert it into metaphor, and dreaded the days when he could not, who frequently experienced a violent hatred of the ways that people asserted their own importance, who wondered if he knew anything, especially the things that he once thought he knew completely. He flicked off the light and watched his reflection in the dark.

When Louisa came home, he greeted her at the door and said he had coffee in the kitchen for her and that she needed to come and sit. “There’s news,” he said.

“Are you expecting?” she said.

He laughed because he thought anything else, even a grave face, would be a kind of ambush. He let her get halfway through her cup of coffee. When he told her about Jim, her hand flew up to her mouth like a bird, and she began to breathe shallowly through her nose. Then she pulled her arms tight around her, each palm matched to its opposite shoulder; the muscles stood out in her forearms but they were not very strong muscles and the effect was one of failure. “When did we see him last?” she said. “He looked good, I thought.” She dragged an index finger through the wet corner of her eye. She looked like she would be wiping her eyes like that all night.

William wasn’t expecting a second call from Bonnie. “I feel like I owe you some more details,” she said. Her voice was thick and thin at once. “I found him.” She paused, though not long enough for William to say anything, which was a relief, and then she tipped forward into the rest of her explanation. “He was sleeping on the couch in the guest room. He was doing that more and more, at first because the kids snuck into our bed at night and woke him up, but then for no reason at all. On the night I’m talking about, they weren’t even there: they were at my parents’ house. But he never came to the bedroom, and I figured he was on the couch, like always. He was sensitive to noise and to light, so it was always like a cave in there, door shut tight, lights off. I came to get him in the morning and the door was open a crack and all the lights were on. There was a bottle of pills on the table next to him. I went to shake him, and the second my hand touched his arm I knew. It wasn’t just that I guessed. I felt it. The absence of it. I didn’t even try to revive him. I just called the police.”

A question stirred dimly within William, and he brought it into the light. “Did he leave a note?”

Bonnie made a harsh noise that sounded almost like a laugh. “Not just one,” she said. “Evidently this had been on his mind for a year or so. We were in debt and he wasn’t telling me. He was addicted to pills. He couldn’t sleep because he felt like everything was vanishing. He was worried that he had cancer. It’s hard to even tell what parts of what he said were true.” She drew a deep breath and this time when she spoke her voice was steely and tearless. “I have two kids,” she said. “A man with children shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”

“Terrible,” William said, meaning all of it. He kept most of the information from Louisa, except the fact that Jim had thought that he was sick, because that seemed like a plausible explanation for an impossible act.

The next morning, Louisa made coffee that she didn’t drink and started in on how Jim had looked the last time he had visited them. “He’d lost some weight,” she said. “Not too much, though. He said he’d been working out regularly, that he was cutting out red meat. Why would someone let vanity rule them, even a little, if they’re thinking of ending it all?”

“He probably wasn’t thinking about it yet,” William said. “Or he was putting on appearances. Or he was fighting to stay afloat.”

“He had an uncle who killed himself,” she said. “Jim always said he couldn’t imagine ever doing anything like that.”

“That was twenty years ago,” William said. “Why would what he said then matter now? The person he became might not even be connected to the person he was.”

“If people are going to change so much,” Louisa said, “then we shouldn’t be able to remember them as they were. It’s too awful.” She got her things and went to the front door. It all seemed like labor and William suddenly felt that he, too, was moving with difficulty.

William called Wallace. He needed to arrange a time to pick up some paperwork from him out at the site. “Haven’t seen you in a little while,” Wallace had said on the phone, sounding a little forlorn. He told William he had to go survey a new site at some point, but that he’d leave the papers for him in the command center if he wasn’t around when William got there.

It was time to walk the dog, who wasn’t in the yard or in the kitchen or in the bedroom. William tried the garage, but no luck there either. Out of the narrow window facing the street he saw a shape flash by, and then another. Each darkened the window for only a fraction of a second, and the series of them signaled like a code. He opened the door and saw that it was a pack of boys on bicycles, racing and shouting each other’s names. “Your mother,” one of them said, laughing. Across the street, Emma and Stevie were getting into their car. William waved and Stevie nodded in return. His face was set, not exactly grimly, and he had a zippered duffel slung over his shoulder. He pointed at Emma and said something to her, though the words didn’t carry to William. They backed their car out and drove up the street. Was it the baby already?

William went back inside. “Blondie,” he said, louder this time. No claws scratched on door. No tags jingled on collar. He called Louisa but she still didn’t pick up. “Do you have the dog with you?” he said. “Call me.” That’s when he thought to go out in front and check on the gate, which he found slightly ajar, wide enough to fit his entire forearm.

William started off down the street, whistling sharply for the dog. He knocked on neighbors’ doors, but two houses in a row were empty, and at the third Cassandra Kenner answered, wearing an extra-large men’s T-shirt and possibly nothing else. William asked after Blondie, received an invitation inside to call the neighbors, declined politely, and got out of there quick. He hopped into his car and looped through the neighborhood, up Albert and down Briar, up Pence and down Garth.

On Elster Street a dog idled against the flat wall of a hedge, but when he got closer he saw that it was a dark brown shepherd at least a third heavier than Blondie. Hinton: nothing. Cedar: no dogs, but a pair of cats and a little girl presiding over them in what looked like an extremely important meeting. Then, on Fallows, he saw Blondie crouched beneath a tree, nosing in a patch of high grass. He pulled to the side of the road. “Hey,” he said. “Come here.” She barked but stayed where she was. William got out of the car. Blondie had clawed into the under-soil; ants fled over her paws. “They might think you’re their god,” William said. He tugged the god by the collar, pushed her into the back seat, and sped up Fallows to Kenmore, and then Kenmore to Harrow.

When William pulled up to the house, he noticed that the deck was done. The finish had dried. It was beautiful, the color of dark beer. Wallace’s truck was gone, so he walked to the small office; the lien waiver was folded up inside an envelope and centered on the desk. He turned back around just in time to see Blondie leap from the car and sprint toward the edge of the lot, where the land was soft from recent rains. “Hey,” William said. “Come back here.” He sprinted after the dog. It felt good to run, and particularly good to be running after something. He caught Blondie, or she let herself be caught, and he led her back along the dry high grass that led up toward the hillock. When his phone rang, he reached for it with his free hand, which meant going across his body. His next step was wrong. He did not fall, but he stumbled, and Blondie tore free and went down into the thick bluish mud up to her hocks. “Goddamn it,” he said into the phone.

“What?” Louisa said.

“Wait,” he said. “Hold on.” He got the dog by the scruff and dragged her toward him.

“I can’t really hear you.”

“Where are you?” he said. “I’m out looking for you.”

“For me? What about Blondie?”

“I have her.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, you should come looking for me. Soon.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“William,” she said. He hoped this was not her answer. Then the connection went to pieces and he could hear only a few stray words, “me” and “why” and “get.”

“Where are you?” he said again.

“I’m at the coffee shop, on a bench outside. I’ll wait for you here.” Her voice slightly trembled.

The dog was matted with mud and William had no time to wash her and he wasn’t about to let her back into his car like that. He led Blondie out to the doghouse behind the office, clipped the leash to the metal cleat, and wrapped it until it was short enough to keep her close to the crate. He found a dish in Wallace’s office, filled it with water from a bottle in the fridge, and set it beside her. “Good girl,” he said, hoping the dog would believe him. “Back as soon as I can.”

He went around the back way to the car; from behind the deck, the frame slanted down from left to right. Blondie barked hoarsely, a glimpse of her head protruding above the edge of the desk.

Louisa wasn’t at the coffee shop, though Gloria Fitch was. “No,” Gloria said. “I haven’t seen her. If I had, I would have asked her to stop me from beating that kid who made me the wrong drink.” She sipped it happily. “Hey,” she said. “Did you hear? Emma Wheeler went into labor.” William nodded and said he’d seen her and Stevie driving off to the hospital. “Can you imagine?” Gloria said. “When will people learn? A kid seems fun when you’re making it, but then . . .” She threw a hand up.

William called Louisa. No answer. He drove slowly home through the hardening dark. She wasn’t there either. Inside he stood in front of the television, watching baseball. He made himself a sandwich and ate just half indifferently. He switched channels and caught a few muted minutes of the movie about the aging cowboy trying to connect with his daughter. He dozed off and woke and saw that two more hours had passed without any sign of Louisa, and then he really started to worry. When the home phone rang at eleven, he picked it up and said, “Where are you?” But it wasn’t Louisa. “Someone from the crew just called me from the lot,” Wallace said. “You’d better get over there now.” His tone had no give in it.

Ennis, Gerrold, Oliva, Finster, Deacon: William was crossing roads so fast they began to blur together, and then he was racing down a long straightaway, and then he was swinging onto Harrow. What he saw in the distance put a fist around his heart. The house was burning.

Men walked around the edge of the lot, keeping an almost respectful distance from the cauldron of orange and white that beat like a heart in the rib cage of the house. They were heavy in slick yellow, with enormous black stripes stretching across the middle of their uniforms. There were eight men on the perimeter, and two had hoses, and there were four more who stood back slightly from the burning frame, and there were two more even farther back pressing buttons on their walkie-talkies and speaking numbers. William looked around, at the ghost of the frame of the house, at the lumber charred and at points eaten fully through, and he was not willing to believe anything he saw until he saw Louisa sitting on the hood of a car across the lot. She was wrapped in a blanket but still shivering, and a fireman was on one side of her and a policeman was on the other, and there was a siren just behind her that gave off red light and then blue light, echoing the two men.