Wish You Were Here (25 page)

So be sure that it's true
When you say I love you
It's a sin to tell a lie

Those were the heirlooms, the pieces he'd made down there. The stuff up here was junk mostly, ruined by humidity, the veneer peeled off. Still, she'd been so happy to find their old salt and pepper shakers the other day, as if she'd saved some small part of them and how things used to be.

She didn't care. At her age she was allowed to be sentimental. She would never become one of those women who loaded every horizontal surface with china knickknacks, but since Henry had died she found herself dusting the things on his dresser more often, and going through their photo albums, trying to find a nice shot of the two of them to set on top of the piano. That was natural, she thought. She needed to look back. And it hadn't been crippling. It hadn't stopped her from getting things done. She could count on her mother's Prussian industriousness to buoy her, keep her even-keeled. Even now, on vacation, she roamed the house, looking for something to put in order—gathering up the coasters, straightening a stack of magazines.

In the kitchen, putting on water for tea, she chanced to look out at the road, the rain jumping white off the blacktop, and saw that the garbage was still there. She was sure today was the day. Maybe they'd changed their schedule; it had been two years. Maybe they were late because of the rain.

At that moment, an ancient boat of a station wagon rolled up and stopped beside the mailbox, the car facing the wrong way, and the man
in the front seat leaned out and with a practiced motion flipped down the door and slipped the mail in with one hand. She waited until he passed the Lerners' before sticking an umbrella out the screen door.

“Sorry,” she told Rufus, who thought he might get a walk. He turned around and stumped out of the kitchen, grumping.

It was colder than she thought, fat drops thumping Arlene's car; twigs brought down by the rain speckled the hood. The grass seemed a brighter green, despite the fact that it was overcast. To her delight she found a toad sitting stone-still in the pebbly grit by the side of the road.

“Well, look at you,” she said, bending down. He was the color of wet sand, with dark markings and lidded eyes, and she could see his heart beating. “All right, I'll leave you alone.”

The road itself was decorated with drowned worms, their white bodies like watery chalk marks. The gardener in Emily pitied the waste.

She checked for cars, then turned her back to the road and opened the mailbox.

There was a letter—junk mail, it looked like—and a local free sheet. A small red ant was walking the edge of the letter. Another was running along the metal floor of the box. There were more crawling on the door and a dark concentration on the wall—hundreds of them swarming on one spot, some fleeing the sudden light, streaming for the safety of the far end.

Emily slapped the door shut and looked up and down the road as if it were a joke, as if someone might be spying on her. It was only on her way back to the kitchen that her mind thawed from the shock of it and turned determined. She'd dealt with her share of aphids and potato bugs and, one summer, a plague of Japanese beetles. Henry had laughed at her ruthlessness, the way she defended her garden like a mother protecting her young.

She'd forgotten the card for Louise. Completely forgotten it.

“Damn.”

She left the umbrella outside rather than navigate the doorway with it. She thought there was a bucket under the sink, but she ended up using the corn pot, blasting hot water into it while she searched for the Bon Ami. The sweet dish soap would just attract more of them.

She needed both hands for the pot, and had to pause at the corner of the counter and open the door before shouldering through. The water sloshed as she walked. The rain tapped at her, a subtle weight in
her hair. There was no one coming so she set the pot down in the road. She saw how she wanted to do this. She would need paper towels, but not until this part was done, and it came to her—too late—that Henry probably had a spray in the garage. God knew how old it would be, and she didn't trust sprays anyway. This was better.

She grasped the tab that opened the door, yanked it down and backed away. The ants were more disorganized, scattering, their antennas feeling the air. She bent down and lifted the pot, the cloudy water steaming like soup.

Her first throw half missed, the water splashing in the grass. What did hit trickled out around the door, which was filled with swimming ants. The mail itself remained inside, a soggy island; she reached in and pinched it out, let it fall to the road with a slap. It was raining harder, she could feel it on her face, dripping down her brow. Her second throw was better and brought a waterfall, and a possible cause—a popsicle stick. Ants caught in the backwash waved their legs as they went over the lip. On the ground, a struggling knot of them dissolved under her shoe. She threw the rest of the water and stomped back and forth, being thorough, scuffing her soles on their bodies.

There were still some in the box, and now they were escaping, racing along the outside, under the hinged flag and over the red reflector. She had them on the run. She needed more water, and a flashlight to see inside, and paper towels. She felt a strange sense of triumph, as if she'd met a great challenge. But how absurd it seemed to her, how ridiculous she must appear to someone else, battling a bunch of ants. Racing back to the kitchen with the pot, she thought that anyone watching her would think she was a crazy woman. The very idea made her laugh.

Ken fell asleep in the movie, as he knew he would, so the cold air and the rain—trailing like snow through the high lights—seemed refreshing and necessary. The sky was a blue filter, the world a cheap horror flick, all mist and black trees.

He saw a boy standing by the ticket booth and wanted to tell him to wait for his parents inside. How easy it would be, one person driving, another to drag him in. They could pretend the choke hold was just roughhousing.

It was the girls' turn to be in the backseat together, and he had to ask Sam to sit up front. The first time, Sam pretended not to hear him, and when he repeated it, an edge crept into his voice that he hadn't really meant. For a while after they got out of the lot, the car was quiet.

Behind him, Justin turned on his Game Boy. The girls replayed their favorite scenes, chopping the air and making kung-fu sounds.

Sam stared out his window, ignoring Ken when he looked over.

“You've got to listen to me, buddy,” Ken said softly, but Sam just sulked, clammed up the way Ken himself did when Lise wanted to fight. He'd come by it honestly, he thought, and pictured his father's serene face at the dinner table. He was the last one done even though he said almost nothing. He seemed to eat in slow motion, to set his fork down between every bite. Once Ken had tried to outlast him only to have his mother scold him. He knew his father was just being polite, that he'd grown up in a household where it was considered greedy to reach for the food, rude to rush through supper. In his mildness, his father seemed to embody the very idea of manners. Ken had never heard him seriously complain about anything, not Vietnam or Nixon or the IRS or even his health at the end, as if a Zenlike acceptance was proof of his wisdom. But to a child his self-possession could seem an illusion, the usual adult insistence on infallibility. For years he seemed backwards to Ken, out of touch, but
later his calm seemed ideal, his silence not empty but dignified. Ken still could not figure him out.

“Can I please play my Game Boy?” Sam asked.

He'd gone far past his hour, but Ken didn't want another battle.

“Till we get home, but that's it for today.”

“Okay.”

It came on with an electronic tweet, and reflexively Ken said, “Sound.” He drove, Sam beside him, bent over the little screen, unreachable.

In the movie, the father was the same way, so lost in his job at the amusement park that he completely missed Paris and the kids' adventures. The film was typical, Ken thought, telling children that their parents were selfish and that they deserved better—a Disneyfied guilt he didn't remember from the movies he grew up on.

His father would have never taken them to the movies by himself. Maybe to the drive-in on a Saturday night, the whole family going, his mother making popcorn at home to take in a cookie tin. He could envision his father at the wheel, a seed of light trapped in his glasses, an indistinct picture flashing on the screen. Ken had passed the place ten years ago, and even then it was overgrown with weeds, the fence around it falling down. Now it was supposed to be part of a mall, the field of speaker poles harvested and paved over. It was like the Putt-Putt, another lost monument to his imaginary happy childhood. That time had solidified, become history, and yet he could bring back conversations at the dinner table, Meg jumping from her seat and running upstairs, slamming her door while her napkin uncurled on top of her mashed potatoes.

“Do
you
know what her problem is?” his father asked, as if he had no clue—as if there were an answer—and then his mother (after hesitating, waiting to see if he'd do it) would get up and remove the napkin from Meg's plate and rigidly cross the living room to the stairs and go up them slowly. Meg never came back down, and so this turned into a wordless ritual, quicker each time, less upsetting. The solution was to send Meg away to boarding school. After that, their dinners were uneventful.

He could never think of sending Ella or Sam away from him—as if that made him a better father. He was too aware of his own shortcomings to criticize or even compare himself to anyone. He resented the movie, that its clumsy moralizing could make him rethink his own complicated
life, yet provided no real help. He didn't need Tracy Ann Caler to remind him of how precious his children were.

They came over the rise that looked down on the bridge, and wind buffeted the 4Runner, turned the wheel in his hands. Up the lake, the clouds held a greenish tinge. It began raining harder—loud—and he had to click the wipers to high and lean forward so he could see. A splash of taillights flared. Rather than brake and risk hydroplaning, he took his foot off the gas. Hard drops battered the windshield, knocked the roof like marbles.

“Whoa,” Sam said.

Ken downshifted, keeping his eye on the lights. He was afraid they were going too fast, that the car was too large to stop if the guy ahead of him locked them up. He could pull off, but then his lights might be a target. The rain had to weaken eventually. He put the defrost on but all it did was dry out his eyes. He noticed that the girls had stopped talking, the silence a kind of alarm.

Though he couldn't pick out any landmarks, he knew they were coming downhill into the dip before going over 17 and past Hogan's Hut. If he could see the turn for Hogan's Hut, he'd take it and they could wait out the storm there. He imagined what it was like out on the lake. There were sure to be a few fishermen stuck in remote coves, bundled up in ponchos with only beer to keep them warm.

He realized he needed to blink, and did.

The car in front of him braked, and he braked. They were crawling along, doing less than twenty. He could see a second car ahead matching them. Another materialized, brighter. The double yellow line reappeared, and a black strip of sky. The rain softened, slackened, and the wipers were beating crazily. He turned them down. In the distance, a wave of thunder broke and rolled over the hills. Beside him, Sam thumbed on his Game Boy. The girls went back to reciting the best lines.

He sat back and relaxed, the tension draining from his arms, bleeding through his fingers into the wheel. The cars ahead sped up, shedding mist. The road turned in a long curve, bottomed and climbed the far side of the dip. They were right where he'd thought they were, nearly to 17. It was still raining, but he could see now. They crossed the overpass and Hogan's Hut floated by on their right, its pumps lit against the gloom, a red Pegasus flying in a white circle. He thought of Tracy Ann Caler standing
behind the counter, sipping her coffee and listening to the radio. She must have had no idea what was happening.

He thought he could have done something, but short of going back in time to warn her, he couldn't imagine what that might have been. He could not have done that any more than he could revisit his father in the hospital and tell him he'd done a good job. The wish was pointless; it was just how he felt now. He wondered if his feelings for his father would change in the coming years, though his father himself would be absent from the process.

As they passed the Book Barn he looked for Meg's minivan but didn't see it. Willow Run was deserted, a light on in the dumpy clubhouse. In overgrown yards sat scabby cottages losing their asbestos brick in patches, and then, heralded by a giant billboard, a lone model home, its yard neat as a green. The wrecks were more interesting. While they must have been here through his childhood, and in better shape, he didn't remember them. The country seemed old to him, long gone to seed, like the Pittsburgh his father knew, a city of natty bankers and brawny steelworkers. It was a trick of memory, giving the past a solidity the present could only imitate.

Part of it was vacation. The days were shapeless and bland, like today, taking the kids to the movies. It was just the rain, and having nothing to do. In Boston he'd be in his darkroom, satisfied to work in the quiet red light. Part of it was his father, he couldn't deny it. For all its changes, Chautauqua seemed to belong to the past, brought those lost summers and everything in them closer.

He and Lise still had to do their list. The thought of it annoyed him, wiped his mind clean. The idea of choosing a literal memento stumped him. He wanted all of it, none of it. It seemed more of a gesture than anything.

The Snug Harbor Lounge had snagged a good-sized crowd, pickup trucks and an El Camino with a tarp parked on the grass.