Authors: Sarah Kernochan
The illusion has to last through September. After Labor Day, Hoyt can let the elements and the pests have their go once again at Maple Manor. Once more vines will crawl under the roof, leaves blow into the garage, mice strafe turds on the kitchen counters and make their homes under the bedclothes. Snow and ice will wall off the driveway.
Hoyt does have a plow attachment for his truck, and he does bill the Meltzers for snow removal, but winter is mainly his time for uninterrupted reading and drinking. Once or twice during the season he will snowshoe into the property from the road, leaving aimless loops of tracks around the house as he notes damage he will address, in an eleventh-hour dash, next July.
Rehearsing this calendar of chores in his head, Hoyt’s attention is elsewhere when he reaches the curve in the road.
A woman comes into view, walking in the middle of his lane, her back to his headlights. Hoyt’s reflexes are slow: dreamily he records the thin hair wafting with each of her strides, her clam-digger pants, the duffel bag in her hand. Then, sucking air, he wrenches the wheel left to avoid hitting her.
At the same moment, in the opposite lane, a pair of low-slung headlights swings around the curve. Car and truck collide with a thick crunch.
MARLY HAD ALSO BEEN
at the Shicker Shack earlier, though she left before Hoyt arrived. She hadn’t wanted to go. But Chuck Mosher kept shooting looks over his wife’s shoulder, his eyes jerking back and forth:
Marly…door… Marly…door.
Clearly he was nervous about having both ladies in the same room: the woman who bore his children and his name, and the one he fucked on bowling nights when he was expected home late.
Taking the hint, Marly had left. But it was a shame: there were at least six other guys at the Shack who were glad to see her. Gil Reynard, with his cute grin and maxedout credit cards (she always has to buy drinks). Oly Gustaffson, back from Iraq with his amazing finger prosthesis; Oly’s boss, who sells carpeting, and whom she mixes up with Harold Bourjois the mortician because they both smell of formaldehyde; Brink Banner, manager of a cold-storage warehouse near the freeway (a place nowhere near as cold as his wife, he once told Marly).
Actually, the entire town of Graynier is filled with men who exploit Marly’s good nature. A cheerful person, Marlene Walczak always tells herself that if times are tough, they could be tougher. Her daughter Pearl may be overweight and illegitimate, but she could be morbidly obese and an orphan. Men might ram away at Marly like a plunger in a toilet, but at least they’re not mean and disrespectful; they’re fond of her. She loves seeing that little lamp switch on in their eyes when she swings into the bar after work. You can’t fake that appreciation; it’s almost as genuine as love.
“There are worse things,” she always says, spinning her skimpy straw into gold. “Be thankful for what you have.”
After leaving the Shicker Shack, Marly went to The Hut, where she bumped into Van Farkle, who was all a-twitch for some pussy. Turning down his generous offer of the reclining seats in his Camry, she managed to wangle an invitation to his house.
In the past Van had enjoyed having her over; he would record their goings-on with the mini-cam he had mounted on the ceiling. By now, though, he had more than enough tapes of them scrambling around the waterbed; they were all pretty repetitive after a while. It took some effort to convince him that coitus in the home was way preferable to coitus in the Camry, something she’d learned empirically from slamming against the gear shift and cup-holders only the week before.
It was a good thing Van had woken her at 3:00 a.m. and told her to get the hell out. Otherwise her daughter Pearl would have discovered her mom’s empty bed in the morning, and they would have both been late to work. Giving Van’s meaty shoulder a kiss, Marly had gotten dressed quickly and jumped in her car.
Halfway home to the trailer park, she swung her Cavalier around a corner, and saw a young woman walking in the opposite lane.
For a split second Marly registered the girl’s slight silhouette, rimmed by a big bright halo of light.
Then the halo turned into the headlights of a truck, which swerved suddenly, plowing into Marly’s car.
HOYT GETS OUT
of his truck, his hand on the back of his neck. In the collision, his head snapped forward and back; now bolts of pain are flashing through his cervical spine.
The first thought he has is about liability. Though his pickup looks fine (except for a little paint damage), the other car, a cheap compact, has taken the brunt, its fender flattened, its hood buckled, one light gouged out. The driver will be angry—or worse, injured. Hoyt braces for accusations, police reports, blood alcohol tests, defendant’s hospital bills, insurance claims.
His second thought is defensive. It wasn’t his fault. There was someone—a girl—smack in the middle of road.
Where is she?
He peers around quickly. It hurts to turn his head. There’s no one on the road now; maybe she continued walking and passed beyond the streetlamp’s pool of light.
The other driver gets out of the car. Hoyt tenses.
Then he sees it’s only Marly.
Dazed, she’s holding her neck, too. “Hi, Hoyt.” She musters a meek smile. “Was—was that my fault?”
Hoyt relaxes. Why not let her embrace the blame, as long as she’s willing? “You took the curve too wide. I couldn’t avoid you.” It’s always fun to fuck with Marly Walczak’s head.
Marly is looking about in confusion. “There was a girl standing in the road. Did you see her?”
“I saw someone. Nobody there now.”
“Oh my God! You don’t think I hit her?”
“You would’ve heard it.”
While Marly checks along the roadsides for a huddled little body in clamdiggers, Hoyt searches under the vehicles. They both find nothing.
“Hoyt…” Moonlight plays on Marly’s anxiously creased forehead and the sooty mascara whorls around her eyes. “Please let’s not report this. My insurance was canceled last week ‘cause the payment was late. I was going to put a check in the mail Friday when I get paid.”
“Suits me. You got the worst of it, anyhow.”
Her engine starts right up. As she inches it onto the road alongside Hoyt, the fender drags noisily, its headlight looking like Quasimodo.
“You’re good to go,” Hoyt says heartlessly.
“You know, my neck doesn’t feel too good.” She catches herself complaining. “Still, it could have been a lot worse!”
On the drive home, Hoyt keeps an eye out for the girl they both saw. But she seems to have vanished.
C
HAPTER
T
WO
A
round 3 a.m. Brett finishes the Little Rompers Nursery School website design, inserting his secret signature: a tiny pumpkin in place of the ‘c’ in the copyright notice circle. If anyone accidentally clicks on it, guitars explode and the Smashing Pumpkins holler,
“Despite all my rage/ I’m still a rat in a cage…”
So far his employer hasn’t caught him at it.
He emails the link to his boss, rubs the sweat off his glasses with the hem of his T-shirt, and scratches a mosquito bite, pink on the pallor of his arm. It was probably a mistake to set up his workspace in the top-floor garret. The summer heat rises and clots under the rafters; when he gets up from the rickety ladder-back chair, unbending his long frame so his head grazes the eaves, he is momentarily dizzy. But he’d wanted to be within earshot of his son’s bedroom, in case the boy has a nightmare or something and calls for him.
Not that Collin would.
Their first summer together, begun only a week ago, is already a disaster. Maybe Veronda wanted it that way. When he went to pick Collin up in Norwalk, she stood in the driveway with her fierce acrylic nails crossed over the boy’s chest like a mother bear’s. Gold eyes like a bear, too. Parting her claws, she handed Collin over to Brett. Her parents were on hand, for good measure, their baleful stares reminding him that he’d cut short their daughter’s college career by impregnating her, thus forcing her return home to Connecticut.
Brett took his son’s hand. It hung limply in his grasp as he led the boy to the rented van. “Bye, sugar bunny,” called Veronda’s mother. Brett knew there would be cold carnage if he returned their grandson dinged, dented, or white-ified at summer’s end. The sinister whine of weed whackers on a Saturday reminded him of the hell he would descend unto at the hour of judgment for having boned a good black girl. This despite the fact that Veronda had been the one to straddle
him
, to cover his meager mouth with her lush pillowy lips, and later to shock him with her nasty laughter when he said he loved her.
He’d paid monthly support, sent Christmas presents, telephoned on Collin’s birthday, but the message from Norwalk was always the same:
pay and pay but stay away.
We’ll let him come to the phone and that’s it.
The boy’s conversation was all grunt. Brett gave up calling.
This past year, though, the recriminations changed: Brett learned that he was selfish, he had no interest in knowing his own son, he never asked to visit, he had a good job and unfettered freedom as if he’d done nothing wrong, as if Collin didn’t exist! Brett took the blows and awaited fresh instruction. It came in June: he would take the kid for eight weeks of father-son bonding while Veronda went to Ghana to understand her roots.
Now, his hands sliding over crumbled wallpaper, Brett gropes his way down the staircase to the second floor. The dingy floorboards yelp under his bare feet as he pads cautiously down the corridor to look in on Collin, as a father would.
As it happens, Brett can’t look in on his child because he can’t see him. The boy’s bed is swathed in mosquito netting hung from four posters. The kid is veiled from view— and that’s the problem.
From the moment he got into Brett’s van, Collin had vanished into silence, turning his face away as if telephone poles, freeway shoulders, blurred woods were of intense interest. Brett kept glancing at his son, admiring his amber skin and fluffy brown curls, the pretty eyes that were always averted. The only motion came from the boy’s hands, continually pulling on his fingers, as if trying (in vain) to make his knuckles crack.
The poor kid is nervous, Brett thought. Maybe separation anxiety.
He waited to feel waves of fatherly, if not love, then solicitude. He imagined the waves would start gently, and grow to a pounding surf by the end of the camping trip.
Except father and son never went camping. For six hours Brett drove north in the rented RV—stocked with backpacks, tent, headlamps, freeze-dried chili—finally pulling up in a southern New Hampshire trailer park near a recommended trailhead.
He turned the engine off.
With feigned confidence Brett said, “Let’s hook this sucker up,” something he’d gone to a chat room to find out how to do. There had better be a Wi-Fi hotspot somewhere, as promised by the park’s website. He had to keep up with the office for six weeks somehow.
Then the kid piped up: “I don’t want to go camping.”
“Oh. Why didn’t you say anything?”
Collin’s response was not to say anything.
“I was scared my first time too. But after you get through it, you feel really good about yourself.”
“I’m not scared. I just don’t like it.”
“How do you know if you’ve never done it?”
“I can tell I don’t like it.” The boy spoke in the measured tones of an adult pretending patience.
Brett glanced anxiously at his cell phone. No bars. Maybe camping wasn’t a good plan. “What do you like to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, at least you know what you don’t like. How about kayaking?”
“No.”
“We could find a river and ride down the whole way in rubber tubes. That’s awesome.”
“No.”
Brett was running dry on ideas. “We could rent some mountain bikes.”
“No.”
“What do you do in the summers? Do you swim?”
“No.”
“Do you know how to swim?”
“No.”
“What if I teach you?”
“No.”
“Are you afraid of the water maybe?”
Collin hesitated. Had Brett hit a nerve?
“I don’t like swimming,” the boy said, his tone final.
“Do you like sitting here? Because we’re not going anywhere until you can think of something you’d rather do than hike into the wilderness with your dad.” He said it lightly, but maybe ten-year-olds didn’t compute irony. Were those tears glimmering under the long lashes, or the reflection of the setting sun?
Brett drove to a motel called the Hay Rick. There was one vacancy. The rest of the rooms were engorged with girls in muck boots, gathered for a big horse show.
Brett brought in a bucket of chicken to share and did his email while Collin watched four hours of TV.