River Road (15 page)

I winced. “That seems so petty now.”

“No, Nan, I shouldn't have let
that
happen either. I told you I'd recommend a review and I meant it. Once this is all behind us—if I'm still chair, that is.”

“Why wouldn't you be?”

He tilted his chin toward my computer. I glanced back at the screen and saw that the tally of comments had gone up. “While we're sitting here the cyber-scavengers are pecking over your reputation. That's what they'll be doing to me if it gets out that my car was involved . . .
unless the police focus on another suspect first. Then all this will go away.” He leaned forward and shut my computer. His arm brushed against my leg but I no longer felt any desire for him. Instead I felt a wariness creeping up from the cold floorboards. Had Ross just suggested that if I incriminated Troy he'd see to it that I'd get tenure?

“I can't say that I saw Troy in the car if I didn't.”

“Of course not,” Ross said, getting to his feet and standing over me. “I'd never ask you to. But you may remember more as you think about that night. You were upset, you'd had a few drinks, then you had the police grilling you. Details might come back to you now that you're not so afraid.” He stroked the side of my face with the back of his hand. “That's the main reason I came here tonight. So you wouldn't feel afraid anymore. So you would feel safe.” He looked down at me, his eyes full of regret. For what? I wondered. Because I'd rejected his advance? But I already had the feeling that his attempted seduction had been as much an act as the one he put on in the classroom. That he was more interested in my getting him off the hook than in my getting into bed with him. And that if I didn't—

“Be careful driving home,” I said, trying not to show him how afraid I suddenly felt.

He leaned down and brushed his lips against my cheek. “I will,” he said, his breath warm on my face. “You be careful too.”

A
fter Ross left I noticed that he'd left the bottle of Glenlivet behind. It glowed in the light of my laptop like those Catskill sunsets Ross and I had driven toward that summer. The smoky taste of the scotch was on my lips from Ross's kiss. It was the taste of forgetting, of oblivion.

I don't think I can afford that kind of oblivion anymore
, I'd just told Ross. But sitting here alone in my cold, empty house I wondered if I had the courage to do without it. What if the truth was that while I lay asleep—
passed out
—in the woods someone had killed Leia?
Come back!
I'd heard in my dream. Only, what if it hadn't been a dream? What if someone had been shouting for Leia to come back and when she didn't he—or she—ran her down and killed her? If I hadn't been asleep—
passed out drunk
—I could have helped her. Would I be able to live with that?

Without realizing it I noticed that I'd moved closer to the bottle and was hovering over it as if it were a flame I was huddling over for warmth. Or as if instead of oblivion it promised memory—like Proust's madeleine—one taste and the whole episode in the woods would come clear.
You were drunk then so maybe being drunk now—

I opened the bottle and poured an inch into Ross's glass before another voice, sounding suspiciously like Sergeant McAffrey's, added:
I thought you said you weren't drunk that night. I thought you said you'd only had two glasses—

Shut up
, I told the McAffrey voice, taking a sip of the scotch. It burned my tongue as if the bottle really did contain liquid flame.
I'm trying to remember.

I took the glass upstairs. I tried lying down in my room but just as I was falling asleep I heard the train whistle coming from the tracks near the river. It was a lonesome sound that seemed romantic when we first moved here but over the years had come to sound like the keening of a child. I got up and moved to Emmy's room, on the side of the house farthest from the tracks, where the whistle didn't carry, and lay down in her bed. I looked up at the painted stars on the ceiling, trying to remember looking up at the night sky through the tangle of branches. I remembered there'd been a glimpse of moon despite the snow, so bright I'd closed my eyes against it—

Come back!

I heard it now, as clear as if someone had spoken it out loud. I opened my eyes to the stars on Emmy's ceiling, only they weren't Emmy's stars, they were snowflakes, each one lit up like one of the candles at Leia's vigil. They were drifting down from the sky and gathering on the blond hair and blue dress of a little girl.

Emmy
. She was standing in front of me, dressed in the Blue Fairy costume she'd worn for Halloween the year she was four—her last Halloween—and the pink leggings and long-sleeved shirt I'd made her wear under the costume because it had been cold that night and she had refused to wear a coat—because fairies didn't wear coats. On her feet were the light-up Skechers that Evan had bought her so she'd stand out trick-or-treating in the village. So she wouldn't be run over. She had a smudge of chocolate on her mouth from the Reese's Pieces she'd sneaked from her goody bag. Each detail was so vivid that even though I knew she was dead I believed she was standing there in front of me.

I held my arms open wide, but she shook her head, blond braids swinging. “No, Mama, you come on. We have to go!” She turned on her heel and ran into the woods.

“Emmy!” I cried. “Come back!”

But she only laughed and kept running. I ran after her, following the flashing lights of her sneakers. She was running up the hill, through the old orchard, dancing behind the gnarled old trees, playing hide-and-seek. My heart stuttered every time she vanished behind a tree.

“Come back!” I cried.

“I'll catch up with you at the party!” she screamed and then ducked behind a thick trunk. When she came out she wasn't Emmy anymore; she was Leia.

“No!” I cried.

Leia looked back at me over her shoulder. She was wearing her red jacket, the old cracked leather peeling like bark, and her red cowboy boots, but they still lit up like Emmy's sneakers when she turned and ran. “Come on, Prof, you said you would catch up, so
catch up
!”

She ran through the snow, flakes of her jacket peeling off in the wind like red leaves, and leapt over the crest of the hill—

When she hit the ground she had become a deer. I followed her, sure that the deer was still somehow Emmy and Leia and that it would lead me to what they had wanted to show me. Even when the deer leapt into the river I leapt after her, into the icy water—

I woke up, gasping for breath, slick with sweat that had chilled in the draft from the open window. My head felt as heavy and clouded as the sky outside, as if I had fallen into the river and gotten sealed under the ice. For a moment I wished I had. If that was where Emmy had been leading me that's where I ought to be. Maybe the dream meant that I was supposed to throw myself in the river and drown myself. Then I'd be with Emmy again—and Leia and Shawna Williams. I felt the weight of the dead tipping me toward them, as if I were standing on one end of an ice floe and they were standing on the other, weighting the balance so I would slide down into the icy water—

Or I'd had the dream because Ross had asked me to remember what happened in the woods the night Leia died.

I walked downstairs. My laptop was still open on my desk, the
bottle of Glenlivet standing next to it, a sad tableau that reminded me of a happier one of a plate of half-eaten reindeer cookies, a half-finished glass of milk, and a thank-you note in Evan's spiky handwriting from Santa to Emmy. As I stood on the stairs I imagined the tree we had cut down at the Christmas tree farm on the old Stanfordville Road, trimmed with the ornaments of farm animals and deer and tiny gray mice tucked inside walnut shells that Evan had made. I remembered Emmy running downstairs in her fleecy red pajamas to see if Santa Claus had eaten the cookies we'd left for him. I could feel the weight of her warm, eager body tilting the balance of that ice floe—

I'd go out. Not to town or the college or anywhere I'd meet anyone. I'd go back to the woods where it all started and then I'd follow the path Emmy had shown me last night in my dream. I'd see where it led me. After all, it was Christmas morning, when the past came back to haunt us. Besides, what else did I have to do with the day?

*  *  *

I made myself tea and instant oatmeal, which I had to eat plain because the milk had gone bad, and dressed myself warmly in long underwear and fleece and down. I felt like I was feeding and dressing a child, coaxing myself to complete these burdensome tasks in anticipation of some future treat—

Just one more bite of your peas and then you can have dessert!

You can play in the snow if you put on your mittens!

When I was dressed I washed my mug and bowl and left them to dry in the drain rack by the sink. I put the Glenlivet away in the cupboard next to the vitamins and Tylenol. I straightened out the pillows on the couch, cleared all recent searches on the computer, and closed it. I stuck the
Acheron Gazette
in the recycle bin. I put the
Beauty and the Beast
tickets in an envelope, stamped and addressed it to Amanda, and put the envelope in the mailbox.

When I opened the door Oolong tried to run out and I had to push her back in with my foot. I had the feeling she was trying to flee a
sinking ship. Or that she was trying to
get
to something. I looked around the yard, then toward the orchard, searching the trees for something stirring, but there was only the sift of ice spray over the snowdrifts. Still, I couldn't get rid of the feeling that I was being watched as I waded through the untouched snow to the barn.

I slid open the heavy wooden door with trepidation because, I told myself, animals might be hiding—foxes, possums, mice, bats. I hadn't been inside the barn since summer, when I'd stored my bicycle there. Something might fly out at me or something might be dead on the floor. But there was only the flutter of wings, the coo of nesting mourning doves, and slanted beams of light inside. The barn was empty even of the plans Evan had made for it. In a couple of years it would collapse into itself like the old barns on the Blackwell estate and begin the slow decay back into the earth.

For now, though, it held my bicycle, a few boxes of old books, and the cross-country skis Evan had given me for Christmas our first year here. We'd used them Christmas Day, skiing onto the estate, pulling Emmy on a sled. A magical day right out of a children's book. We'd gone out a few more times during the break but then once the semester had started I hadn't had time. I'd never used the skis again. Now they were peeling and warped, the boots that went with them full of spiders. I cleaned them out with an old rag, slid my feet into them, and carried the skis and poles to the edge of the woods. I snapped the boots into the skis and pushed off down the hill, heading toward the road.

The pines here were spaced far apart, making it easy to ski between them. The powdery snow gave way smoothly under me. I was out of practice, out of shape, and my head was still foggy from the Glenlivet I'd drunk last night, but it was easy going down the gentle slope. My leg muscles quickly warmed up and the day, which had started gray and overcast, brightened. The sun felt good on my face; the air smelled like pine and woodsmoke. There was a clarity and stillness in the day that felt like Christmas. Maybe it was being so close to the solstice. It
felt as if the earth had paused in its spinning at that moment when it tilted farthest from the sun and had taken a breath before turning back. The day felt poised. Balanced in between. A hawk sailing overhead, its high-pitched keen riding the cold air, seemed to move in slow motion, suspended in ether. I wouldn't have minded staying in this in-between place, coasting over the surface of things, forever.

Then I reached the wall with Leia's shrine. Someone had come early and laid pine boughs and holly amid the candles and stuffed animals.
Merry Christmas, Leia, love you forever!
someone had written on a Christmas card. Again I looked for anything unusual left among the offerings, but nothing stood out. Of course not, I told myself, Hannah had been the one to leave them and Hannah was lying unconscious in the hospital. Then I looked out toward the road. I pictured myself coming around the curve, seeing the deer, and swerving to avoid it, my car coming to rest inches from the wall. I looked down into the ditch between the wall and the road, forcing myself to think about Leia lying there. Could she have been there when I got out of the car?

But no, I'd searched the road, looking for the deer. I'd have seen her.

I turned from the wall and skied into the woods, following the path I'd taken that night to the clearing. I recognized the log I'd sat on, the tree I'd leaned against. I took off my skis and sat there now. I leaned back and closed my eyes, the sun on my face feeling better than it should have. I was here to remember, not sunbathe. I focused on what I'd heard that night—

A squeal of tires. A scream.
Come back!

A man's voice calling
Come back!

I heard it now. Startled, I opened my eyes and saw a figure in jeans and hooded jacket striding through the snow. He was only a few yards away from me but he was moving so fast he hadn't seen me. I tucked myself in closer to the tree, not wanting to be seen. There was something in the man's angry stride that instantly made me wary.

“Goddamnit, man, come back! Where the fuck do you think you're going? I can't keep up in this fucking snow.”

The voice came from behind me, back toward the road. The hooded man came to a halt and turned around. I was sure he'd see me but he was looking to my right and I was in the shadow of the tree. He shouted at the man behind him.