Travelers Rest (29 page)

“I just want to see you for a second,” he said.

Dewey relaxed. He was used to his father's eccentricities. He inspected the ceiling of the shaft, and Tonio knew, because it was the kind of thing he always knew about his son, that Dewey was wondering how the ceiling had been cut so square with the wall. Normally, he would have attempted to say something about nineteenth-century hard-rock mining techniques.

“I love you, Dewey,” he said instead.

“I love you, too, Dad,” Dewey answered him. And when they began to walk again, his son reached out and took his hand.

Tonio shined the light on the tunnel walls. There was nothing to see and nothing to hear, except that somewhere deep beneath the sound of water dripping there was at this level of the mine a steady movement of air, a wafting in and out, a suspiration. Dewey stared back and forth at the path ahead and the path behind, as if listening to the sound.

The air had been getting steadily warmer, but Dewey's shoulders shook, as if he had a chill. “I see her sometimes. I found her fingerprints.”

And he too could see Julia then, standing in the driveway of their house in Mount Pleasant, a pair of hedge clippers in her gloved hand, assessing the status of her azaleas. How had they never understood each other better? Why had they wasted so much time?

“I see her in the hotel, but she's not there,” Dewey said. He sucked in a couple of hard breaths. “I see you sometimes, too, but you're not the same.”

“I'm here,” he said. “Look at us. Both of us. We're here.”

“Sometimes I don't even know if I'm alive,” Dewey said. Tonio shined the flashlight on Dewey's face, which was streaked with tears or sweat. “
Don't,
Dad,” Dewey said, and he shined the light away. “How do you even know you're alive in this weird place?”

“I know I'm alive because I'm with you,” he said.

They walked on in silence, keeping to the right when the path forked once more, and soon it became more level though it still didn't seem that they were getting nearer an entrance.

“What about Mom?” Dewey said after a while. “How do we know she's okay?”

He didn't know how to answer this question himself, but he thought hard about it while they walked. He tried his best to corner his own feeling and make it speak, make it give his son, make it give both of them, something to hope for when logic failed. “Did you see the sign at the mine entrance?” he said.

“Hugh showed it to me. It's a stupid sign.”

“Maybe not if you think of it the right way.”

“How do you know what's the right way?” Dewey asked.

He wanted to say,
Because it's my sign, I made it with my own hands,
but it sounded too strange, and he wasn't sure he could explain to Dewey what he meant. “I'm just saying what I think,” he said. “What I think it means is that if you dream something, or you wish for something, that thing is already real.”

Dewey didn't say anything in response and they walked along with the sound of their footsteps echoing. From somewhere below the passageway, farther down in the mine, there came a noise that sounded like an engine laboring.

“Let me tell you a story,” Tonio said. “When I was about your age, maybe a little bit younger, my mother and father planned a surprise for me on Halloween.”

“Halloween is fun,” Dewey said. “This is starting off to be a good story.”

“You have to understand, though, that your grandparents weren't very good with surprises. They didn't understand children.” He thought about Robbie, and how Robbie had to grow up there with them, too, when they were much older and probably understood children even less. “My father was a judge, you know.”

“I know,” Dewey said.

“Very proper, very stern.”

“I know,” Dewey said. “He's pretty stern
now.
”

“But he loves you,” Tonio said. “He loved me, too, but he wouldn't show it. I didn't know he loved me when I was a child.”

“I always knew you loved me,” Dewey said.

Tonio stopped walking for a moment, and he put his hand on his son's head, felt the matted hair, and then he started walking again. “Good,” he said, and he took a deep breath, the musty air making him cough a little. “So it was Halloween, and it was before school, and I was at the table eating breakfast.”

“What did you eat?” Dewey said.

“I don't remember.”

“But
generally
what did you eat? I mean, what
in general
did you like to eat for breakfast as a kid?”

“That's a good question, Doozer,” he said. “I don't really remember. I don't think it matters now.”

“Everything matters now,” Dewey said.

He looked down at his son, who seemed to have grown taller in the last week. “Let's say cereal, then. I think I liked to eat cereal as a kid.”

“Okay,” Dewey said. He reached out his hand and ran it along the tunnel wall. “Ew,” he said, and wiped his hand on his sweater.

“I wouldn't touch that,” Tonio said. “Dripstone formation. Bacteria. It's what happens where water gets in. It also might mean we're getting closer.”

They walked along hearing their footsteps and that sound like the hollow whistle of a distant machine beneath them. “I know what that is,” Dewey said.

“Dripstone,” he asked, “or that sound in the air?”

“Both,” Dewey said. He was looking at his feet.

Tonio knew the sound, too. He'd heard it before somewhere. It wasn't a good sound and it didn't foretell good things. “So,” he said, “Halloween. I'd had a dream…Don't you have a coat to wear?”

“It's wet,” Dewey said, and wiped his nose on his sweater sleeve. “It's hard to keep things dry here.” He kept walking without looking up.

“I'd had a dream the night before, probably because I watched a scary movie.”

“Because it was the night before Halloween,” Dewey said.

“Right,” Tonio said. “It was the first time I'd had the dream, but I've had it many times since. I was walking in the dark, and there was something burning somewhere, and no matter which way I went the fire kept getting closer. Soon I had walked into the middle of the fire, but before it burned me, everything went black and the fire suddenly went out and there in its place was the biggest diamond I'd ever seen.”

“So it turned out to be a good dream.”

“Sort of. The next morning I was eating breakfast, and my mother and father rushed into the kitchen. They were both smiling for some reason, which was unusual. Normally only one of them would smile at a time. My mother said, ‘Come quick, Anthony, we found treasure in the hall closet!' So I ran to the hall closet and I opened the door and there it was, glowing in the dark, the biggest diamond I'd ever seen.”

“Really?”

Tonio pointed the light back the way they had come but there was nothing to see. It seemed as though the noise kept getting closer. “No, not really. It was a glass candle my mother had lit to try to set the mood. The treasure turned out to be two tickets to an Egyptian exhibition at the museum.”

“That's it?” Dewey said. He pulled his hand away from Tonio's and wiped it on his pants and then held Tonio's hand again.

“But when I opened the closet door, I
saw
the diamond. It was like an illusion that disappeared when I stared at it too long.”

Dewey stopped walking. Tonio pulled up beside him and shined the light ahead in the tunnel. The shaft felt hollow like a mouth and you could hear steady dripping from the ceiling now and behind it there was that humming or rasping noise from down below. Dewey stared straight ahead but his face was blank.

“What?” Tonio said. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing. I'm just listening.”

“To what?” he asked. “My story or that noise?”

“Both,” Dewey said. “Go on telling it.”

Something in his son's voice made him pause for a moment. “You sure?”

“Yes,” Dewey said mechanically. “Finish telling me about the diamond.”

“Well,” he said, a little uncertainly, searching his son's face, which was pale and glistening in the oblique beam of the flashlight. “There's not that much more to tell. At the same time, my mother and father shouted ‘Happy Halloween!,' and then my mother picked up an envelope from behind the candle and gave it to me. The envelope had the tickets in it. I was just mad about the diamond.”

They had started walking again and Dewey seemed to have gotten back into the rhythm of the story. “Your parents were really weird,” he said.

“Right,” Tonio said, “but my point has nothing to do with that.”

They had reached another fork and to the left was a rubble-strewn path and an old lift going down to even lower subterranean levels. The rasping noise had grown louder, and Tonio had to stop talking while they veered away and into a tunnel that rose slightly upward.

“The point is this,” he said, and he stopped, and he knelt down so that he was looking directly into Dewey's eyes, at his dirty face and greasy hair. “Have you not been able to take a shower?”

“Like I said, Hugh and Lorraine make me wash up in the kitchen.”

“Who are Hugh and Lorraine again? Never mind for now.” He put his hand on Dewey's shoulder. “The point is this. What I remember after all these years is that, when I opened the closet door, I saw a sparkling diamond, the biggest one in the world. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Dewey said. “I think so.”

“I can still see the diamond as if it were actually there, and I've dreamed about it ever since. It doesn't matter that it didn't actually happen. What matters now is that I stored it that way in my memory. It's in my memory the same way as…I don't know, the time when we surprised you with the hamster.”

“So what are you saying?” Dewey said. A note of panic had crept into his voice. “That I should just be happy
remembering
Mom?”

He pulled Dewey in closer, as if he were afraid he might fly away. “No, what I'm saying is that I
believe
Mom is okay someplace and that she's trying to find us.” Unexpectedly, a vision of Julia in the hotel alone, seated on the edge of the bed, surrounded by suitcases, troubled him. He adjusted his glasses on his nose and continued. “And we have to keep trying to find her. We have to keep on believing that we'll find her for however long it takes. I know that's not logical, and I'm not saying that all the things I tried to teach you before were wrong—I'm just saying that maybe I haven't paid enough attention to my subjective experience of the world.” He thought about that, everything he'd stored up inside him, all this time, all these years. He had been afraid of it, how strongly he felt about the life he'd made, how every little event, every time Julia had ever kissed him lightly on the lips to say goodbye, every time she'd touched his hand in passing, added something to a foundation, an edifice of accrued memories. He had wanted it not to be dangerous. He had thought you could hide yourself away. “What's true is what I make true. That's what the sign means. That's how I know Mom is okay somewhere. Does that make sense?”

“Maybe to someone else,” Dewey said, “but not to me. I'm only
ten years old.
”

His son stood there sniffling. Tonio pulled his shirtsleeve down over his hand and wiped Dewey's nose with it. “You
know
Mom. You can picture her right now.” Dewey looked down at the ground and nodded. “
Keep
that picture. Keep it in your head and Mom will come back to you.”

Dewey leaned in and rested his forehead against Tonio's cheek. For the few moments that they stayed there that way, Tonio formed his own picture of his wife, a picture of her lying in their bed in Mount Pleasant in the morning with the sun coming through the windows, the cat, Cleopatra, sitting on her stomach and kneading her paws on the blanket while Julia talked to her in the way she had a habit of doing—
How is Cleo this morning?

He pulled Dewey in closer. “I kept picturing you, and you kept picturing me. That's why we found each other in this place.”

“I know about Sparky,” Dewey said. “I saw. I was watching from the window.” Tonio could feel his son's breath catch, and he ran his hand through Dewey's sweaty hair, and kissed him lightly on his forehead. He had killed Sparky with a hammer and buried him out behind the trees, and then he had stood there by the small grave trying to compose himself before he went back to the house. He wasn't upset because of Sparky—Sparky was better off—but because he remembered the day they had brought Sparky home, how his son had looked at him with such joy, and how he had known it couldn't last.

“Sparky was suffering.”

“I know, Dad. I'm not blaming you.” Dewey turned his head so that his face was buried in Tonio's chest. “I'm saying I understand.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” Dewey said. “I understand everything.”

In a minute they went on. The passage was cut squarely out of the rock and it rose more and more and he knew they were close to the surface now. Dewey walked along beside him and they switched off holding the flashlight and the pellet gun. Tonio sensed that there was a door up ahead in the passageway before he actually saw it. It was a plain steel door at the top of a flight of wooden stairs, a door that looked less like the opening to a mine than to his faculty office building back home in Charleston.

As they moved toward the door the wind picked up, whistling from down in the mine shaft. Tonio pulled Dewey close and walked faster, the door looming in the near distance, flickering in the yellow light like a flame. The wind stopped, everything went still, and the heat rushed in and there was no air to breathe. Tonio gasped but drew in nothing, and Dewey bent over next to him, and Tonio had to straighten him up and keep him moving toward the door.