Black River (10 page)

She has never heard him play slowly, Claire realizes. He always plays at speed, and she has wondered if he ever had to play slowly, even as a child, or if all his music was always inside him, waiting to be called. But now he begins to play so slowly she has to listen for several long seconds before she recognizes the familiar melody of “Over the Waterfall.” (She is both sorry and grateful he doesn't begin with “Black River.”) He hits the first wrong note just a few bars into the A part, a sharp that shouldn't be there. Another a couple notes later, this one flat. He's out of practice, Claire tells herself. Rusty is all.

Still. “Over the Waterfall” is a simple tune. One of the first he taught Dennis. It has always surprised her that he likes it so much, because it cannot possibly challenge him. It reminds her that what Wesley likes most is the music. He has so much talent, so much skill, that she sometimes falls into the trap of thinking it's all about the virtuosity. But he, too, can like a melody simply because the notes sound good together.

Another wrong note. He's stiff, then. Nine broken fingers, after all, two surgeries. He's gone to his physical therapy appointments religiously, but the fiddle is different. It will take time. Then he gets to the B part, the faster half of the tune. When he plays this in public, this is where people quit chatting with each other and set back and really listen, where they start whooping and stamping their feet. One missed note. Two, three. His bow slips and squeals against a string.

When Claire goes to the doorway, she finds Dennis in the hall. He is half hidden in the shadows, pressed against the wall, his teenage face young with bewilderment. And Wesley, in his chair beside the hearth, jaw set against the chinrest, eyes resolutely
not
on hers,
not
on his fiddle and the fingers that can't play it. The worst of it is that the familiar melody is still recognizable, just close enough to right that Claire still finds herself listening for it, each wrong note jarring the ear all over again.

And he won't quit. Tries to force it, plays faster, leaves “Over the Waterfall” behind and aims for something else, anything else. Claire almost recognizes a few measures of any of a half-dozen tunes, but the notes tumble over one another in a grating cacophony.

Dennis moves to go into the living room, and Claire stops him with an arm across his chest. She looks at him, and suddenly she misses the bewilderment, because it has been replaced with a resignation he isn't old enough for, an expression that says this is no less than he expected, that this fits right in with what he knows of the world. Claire wants to lie to him, tell him everything will be all right, but she goes to Wesley instead, kneels beside him and puts a hand on his thigh. Wesley, she says.

He ignores her. His eyes are on his strings now, his bow, his fingers that won't obey.

Wesley.

The bow sawing desperately, the motion hardly intentional anymore, nearly a seizure. A sound to set your teeth on edge.

Wesley, please.

He makes an awful sort of pained sound deep in his throat, and Claire reaches forward and curls her hand over the scroll of his fiddle and pulls it down, away, and finally he relinquishes its weight to her and quits. Half drops and half throws his bow to the floor. It clatters dully on the hardwood, a blunt coda to his ruined song.

 

We thank You for our sorrows and trials, for they make our joys shine ever brighter.

 

What happens first? Does Dennis start to act like his father, or does Wesley begin to fear he will?

 

The third time Dennis runs away he is fifteen, and he stays gone two days. He has always come back by dark before. Wesley spends every moment of those two days scouring the hills, trawling the streets of Black River and Elk Fork in his pickup, walking the banks of the river and reluctantly searching its currents. (He denies the last when she asks, but Claire has seen him from the porch, hands in his pockets, head bowed to the water.)

He's okay, Wesley tells her again and again.

She nods. Again and again.

He's a smart kid. Knows how to look after himself.

Dennis turns up Wednesday evening, dirty and smelly and looking a little frightened but a lot pleased. Wesley is home for a brief supper, his truck keys waiting beside his dinner plate, coat unzipped but still on. Claire meets her son at the door and folds him into the tightest embrace she can muster, is relieved to feel him squeeze her back. Wesley stands with her, waits until she lets Dennis go.

You all right, boy?

Yeah.

You ain't hurt?

No.

Then you apologize to your momma, and you apologize to me.

She sees her son's mouth twitch—she can't tell if he's angry or amused, and oh, it's an unpleasant sight—but he pulls himself straighter yet, dutifully meets her eyes and says, I'm sorry if I scared you, Mom.

She's almost glad he doesn't sound like he means it. Shane always sounded like he meant it when he told her he was sorry.

I'm just glad you're safe, she says.

Wesley waits long enough to be sure Dennis isn't going to say anything else.

Apologize to me, he says again.

Dennis looks at him.

Wesley's been looking for you, Denny.

Didn't ask him to.

He had to trade two shifts.

Didn't ask him to do that, either.

Wesley steps carefully around her and pushes Dennis against the wall. It's a controlled movement—the heel of one hand against Dennis's breastbone, just enough pressure to put him against the wall and keep him there—but Dennis grunts and the back of his head connects solidly with plaster. Claire can't decide if this is something she should object to, if this is violence she is seeing. Later, when she plays the moment back in her head, she still won't be able to decide.

You're going to stand here, Wesley says, until you apologize. Dennis tries to force his way off the wall, but Wesley leans into him—he only moves an inch or two—and Dennis stays where he is. He puts his hands around Wesley's wrist, and Claire sees fingernails digging into flesh, but Wesley doesn't flinch and doesn't move.

So Dennis stands against the wall. Wesley sits back down, inches of space between his spine and the back of the chair. Thank you for dinner, Claire, he says, without looking away from Dennis. I'm finished.

They are still there when she has washed and dried the dishes. Wesley stares at Dennis; Dennis stares at the empty space over Wesley's head. Dennis's hands are in fists against the wall, and there's a worrisome smudge of something on his wrist, mud or blood. Wesley's hands are resting on the tabletop, loose and open, the kind of casual that can only be dangerous. The skin over his knuckles is flushed, and Claire can imagine the heat of the pain he never mentions but is always etched on the periphery of his expressions, evident behind the careful modulation of his voice. She rests a hand at the place where his neck joins his shoulder, leans close to his ear. Maybe it would be best to deal with this tomorrow, she says. When you've both had—

Good night, Claire. I'll be in as soon as I can.

She goes to bed. She does not sleep. She listens to the silence in the living room, to her husband not moving, to her son not speaking.

Dennis never does apologize. Sometime after three, Wesley will tell her, Dennis's eyes roll to the whites. It's not the standing. It's not; he'd skipped meals in the two days he'd been gone. Claire scrambles out of bed when she hears him begin to fall, but when she gets to the living room Wesley has already caught Dennis in his arms.

 

And we thank You, Lord, for the certitude that You are with us as we walk through this life . . .

 

Wesley is a good man.

Dennis is a good boy.

Why is this not enough?

 

. . . and for the knowledge that You will never abandon nor forsake us.

 

Her son is sixteen. He has been suspended from school four times this year—for fighting each time—but still has straight A's. He never plays his fiddle anymore (Wesley sold it last year, for two hundred dollars, and gave the cash to Dennis), but he spends weekends working at Arthur's. He's good with the horses, Arthur says. Has a natural affinity.

Her husband is forty-two, and for the first time in his life he is beginning to look old. He's working day watch again, and when he comes home now it is an hour before Claire dares talk to him. Not because she is afraid of him—he has never given her cause to fear—but because the sound of her voice, too soon, seems to pain him. He tries so hard to show her that he is fine. He hasn't sold his own fiddle, but he doesn't touch it, either.

That night—the last night—Wesley says grace, and Claire and Dennis watch each other while they listen. When Wesley is finished, Claire immediately starts talking. (During the day she plans what she will say, careful to choose topics neither of the boys in her life will care about: gardening, what Hallie Christiansen told her at Jameson's that morning, a story from the radio program she has taken to listening to while she cooks.) Dinner has become performance art, a one-woman show in which she must provide all the conversation while also consuming a meal and guarding against dangerous silences that might tempt Dennis or Wesley to fill them. It's going well until Wesley interrupts her.

What happened to your face?

There is a bruise at Dennis's hairline, faint enough that Claire had hoped Wesley wouldn't notice. (What doesn't he notice?)

Nothing.

You been fighting again?

Wesley, let's—

No.

No? Wesley catches Dennis's wrist, turns it so the light falls on the blackening scabs over his knuckles. If I call up the school tomorrow and talk to your principal, he gonna tell me “no,” too?

Do whatever the fuck you want. See if I care.

Claire puts her hands to her face.

What did you just say, boy?

Fuck, Wes. I said fuck. F-u-c-k, fuck. Want me to say it again?

And Wesley is standing, and he is not Wesley her husband, he is Wesley the officer (abruptly, Claire realizes she has always thought of them as separate people; just as abruptly, she understands they are one and the same), and his voice is suddenly hard and sharp and much deeper than usual. Get up, he barks. Up!

(
He is not his father,
she has told Wesley.)

Dennis doesn't answer, and he doesn't move, but Claire can see the bravado bleeding away. His hands are in his lap, his shoulders hunched. He is trembling, just slightly.

(
He is not your father,
she has told Dennis.)

Get up, Wesley commands again, and he grabs the back of Dennis's shirt collar. And then—it is as though time jumps forward a few seconds, as though Claire doesn't see it happen at all—Dennis is on his feet and Wesley still has hold of his collar and there is a gun in her son's hand and a gun aimed at her husband's face.

Claire just has time to see that Dennis's eyes are black with fury, that he has both hands on the grip of the revolver and that it's shaking anyway. Just has time to see Wesley's features go blank, the anger that was there a moment ago gone, gone, gone, replaced with nothing at all. Then Wesley moves, so fast, and he grabs Dennis's wrist and hits him hard in the face, twice, and her son is on the floor and there is blood on his face and his clothes and the rug, and the revolver is in Wesley's hand now and his hand isn't shaking and she doesn't know if his finger has the strength to pull the trigger or not, but the gun is leveled and steady and ready to put a bullet in her child.

She stands up and screams, Stop! Or means to scream, but it comes out a whisper, and she says it again and again, trying to make the word louder, but it is still a whisper:
stop stop stop stop stop.
She sees Wesley hear her, sees the subtle change in the way he holds himself. But he keeps the gun aimed at Dennis a half second longer before he drops his arm and turns around and goes outside. She expects the door to slam but it doesn't.

Later, after she has brought Dennis back from the emergency clinic, his nose packed and splinted, but before Wesley has returned from wherever he has gone, she will clean up the dishes. One fork is on the floor, a smear of sauce there on the rug beside the blood, but otherwise everything is so ordinary. She will know, scraping the food into the trash and scrubbing the plates and drying the glasses, that she will not do these things here again. That there will be no more meals together. No more family. No more grace.

She will remember the way her son's rage made her see his father in him for the first time. She will remember the way Wesley hesitated before lowering the revolver, the way she knew, in that moment, that what he kept from his face was fear, and that fear was more dangerous than anger.

And the next day, when Wesley says to her, A person shouldn't have to share his home with someone who wants him dead, she will not disagree.

 

Amen.