Absolution, p.23
Absolution, page 23
It was mid-January before we were back, and on our first weekend there the forecast suddenly turned from rain to snow. Douglas and I drank a bottle of wine by the fire in the hearth room, the snow coming down, a kind of muffled patter against the windows. We were feeling pleased, at last, with ourselves and our decision to buy this isolated old house. The loneliness of the place, something that had struck us both, somewhat naively, certainly belatedly, when we first moved in, we now called, after the frenzy of the holidays, its greatest gift.
Just the two of us and the night falling with the slowly accumulating snow.
Early morning and I was standing at our front window with my coffee when I saw Dom’s tractor turn into our driveway. Jamie was hunched beside him in the cab, intent, serious—bouncing from side to side with his mouth hanging open and his round black eyes staring straight ahead. In his cap, behind the glass, there was no mistaking him for a child. When they got to the top of the driveway, I waved. Father and son waved back.
I heard Douglas coming down the narrow stairs behind me. He’d been snoring something awful last night—the wine—and I’d finally gone into the second bedroom just before dawn.
“Who the fuck’s clearing the driveway?” he asked.
I turned around to say, “Dominic,” realizing as I did that he didn’t recognize the name. “The guy next door,” I added. “I told you he said he would. He offered.” And then, when he still didn’t comprehend, I said, “Dominic. Next door. With the Down syndrome boy.”
Douglas was in his boxers and a T-shirt, his thinning hair still tousled. It was unusual for him to come downstairs before showering.
“What Down syndrome boy?” he asked. Nearly angry. He kept his hand on the banister, and I found myself suddenly wishing he would let it go. He looked, with his morning beard and his bed head and those skinny legs, very old.
I rolled my eyes in the sibling way of the long-married. I tapped the glass. “Jamie,” I said. “The boy next door. Ellen and Dominic. Next door.”
He made his way across the pretty room. He was barefoot, too. He leaned to look out the window. The tractor with the plow was down at the far end of the driveway now. There was a long two-lane stripe of cleared asphalt next to a neat wall of what might have been half a foot of snow. I was tapping the window, one hand on my hip to convey Now do you see what I’ve been trying to tell you? The marital arrogance that I had long ago given up trying to withstand.
He peered out into the brightness for a few minutes, the sound of the plow growing louder, and then he raised his unshaven face to mine. He smelled of sleep. He looked at me, and then his eyes darted away, across the room, touching, it seemed, piece by piece, all of our newlywed trappings, fruits of my inheritance: new couch, new lamps, new paintings on the wall. Then he turned back, and all that was familiar about his face, the still- identifiable traces of that skinny, funny stoner kid I had known and loved for most of my life, was transformed. By time, of course, but by fear, too. Something I knew in an instant I’d never seen in his face before.
I was certain he didn’t know where he was.
He said, casually, “Oh yeah. I remember.” He ran his hand over his eyes. “I’m still half asleep,” he said.
And then, this wasn’t much like him, he leaned against me, put his arm around my waist. A mere remnant of last night’s fun—the brief lights-off lovemaking of the long-married. We watched the tractor move down the drive. Doug said, “At least we never had to deal with anything like that. A kid like that.”
I thought to ask him, but didn’t: What do you mean “at least”?
He turned back toward the stairs, and just as I was about to return to the window—I was going to wave to Dominic again, signal that he and Jamie should come inside for some coffee, some cocoa—Doug’s arm shot out. He knocked over the ceramic lamp on a small end table, swept off, in a fury, the glass and a book that had been left there. “You didn’t tell me,” he cried—suddenly bellowing—“you didn’t tell me anything about someone plowing our drive.” For the first time in my life, I thought he would hit me. “How much is he charging? Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”
I should have soothed him, cajoled him, even asked him gently why in the world he was yelling about this. But that wasn’t my way. My mother’s daughter. I met his anger with my own. Perhaps because I realized, vaguely, how much I’d been looking forward to seeing Dominic again, to hearing his voice. Perhaps because I thought Doug’s strange outburst was some reaction to the vague romantic notions I’d begun to attach to Dominic in the dull loneliness of this new life we were heading toward.
“Why are you yelling at me?” I asked. “Our neighbor is plowing our driveway for us. For God’s sake. What’s wrong with that?”
He ran his hand over his face once again. Said something about never telling him what he needed to know.
“You must be hung over,” I said and turned back to the window—Dom’s tractor was now making its last pass—until I heard Doug go back up the stairs. I was too angry, then, to invite the two of them in. I should have been frightened, I suppose, by Doug’s outburst. It wasn’t much like him, but, then again, it wasn’t so unlike him that I was moved to suspect something other than a bad mood, too much wine.
We spent the rest of the weekend barely speaking and drove home on Sunday without seeing Dom and Jamie again—although I did drop a thank-you note in their mailbox before we left. And then the long winter, getting the house ready to be put on the market come spring.
IT WAS MARCH WHEN I RETURNED. I went alone. Our arguments, our impatience with each other, had become burdensome. Again, I saw this only as a consequence of the changes we were bringing on ourselves: selling the house, “downsizing,” feeling old age encroaching. We’d begun the stupid habit of tagging everything in our past with an equal and opposite glance at our future: ten years ago we did that bike tour in Napa. In ten more years, we’ll be …
Observations that always left us both in a bad mood.
I arrived at the house in the late afternoon. Made a quick trip to the little store at the crossroads and settled in. I’d imagined fixing a simple dinner for myself, eating it alone by the fire, with a book and a bottle of good wine. I imagined myself luxuriating in my rebellion—there had been a bit of a scene when I told Doug I did not want his company for the weekend—basking in my daring solitude. I was not the sort of woman who did many things alone.
But I ended up watching television, the same shows I would have watched with Doug, and then feeling when I turned off the set and began to turn off the downstairs lights both foolish and vaguely afraid. I climbed the stairs to our bedroom feeling I’d been called out on my independent-woman charade. I climbed the stairs dreading the night ahead.
Sleepless, I spent most of it in the guest room, in a pretty little chair I had selected with our decorator, one I had never actually sat in before. It was very dark—a moonless night. I would have welcomed that terrifying bat-wing lunar light show of those nights in Saigon.
I would have welcomed as well my mother’s certainty that there was something contained in the darkness. Something I was supposed to know.
The one window in the little room slowly reappeared: an intimation of gray, then pinkish dawn. I dressed as soon as there was light enough to see by.
Outside, our property displayed only the shyest indications of spring: that furred shade of red about the barely budded branches, and the sharp early morning scent of March, some whiff of fading snow in it, some hint of sun. The sky was brightening behind a distant copse of trees, turning from fiery pink to watercolor blue. Across our back field, there was mud and new growth, green among the dry stalks. I heard the spring-again sound of rushing water, a sound that made me remember the stream at the back of our property.
I set out for it, dressed in duck boots and barn jacket, playing the part.
We’d had a talkative real-estate agent when we first toured the house. A back-to-nature type, Doug had called him. As we walked this field, he suggested that while we were out this way, we take the time to visit a spot some miles to our west. An ecological reserve, he said. Rare and fascinating. A few hundred acres of swamp formed ten thousand years ago by the runoff of the continental ice sheet, and full of certain plant species—tamarack trees, he said, cotton grass, cranberry—as old as the Pleistocene itself.
“You can walk right through it,” he told us. “There are paths and raised platforms.”
He said it would be a good way to remember how brief life is, how little time we have on this roiling planet. “It’ll give you the long view,” he said.
Douglas was walking ahead of us, his head down, but he slowed his pace at this and then, as we caught up, he glanced my way. I knew that grin. My husband’s own sarcastic, too-cool-for-school, smart-ass grin. The one that said he would not be taken in.
“That’s some sales pitch, buddy,” Douglas told him.
But the man was unfazed. He went on to say that the area was what the scientists called a relict. “Like relic, but with a t.” A word that connotes, he told us, something that has survived the death of another.
Douglas smiled again.
“Name me something that hasn’t,” he said.
* * *
I SKIRTED THE WETTEST PARTS OF THE FIELD by walking along our property line and saw a small wooden swing set at the far side of Dom’s land, and then the ramshackle remains of a tree house, weather-worn boards gone askew and a knotted climbing rope. There was another small outbuilding, doorless with a shadowed interior, far enough away that I couldn’t be sure if it housed both the tractor and the plow or the plow alone. And near it, a part of the field shorn of undergrowth, which indicated, I knew now (country living), the heavy cover of the septic tank.
Both properties sloped down toward the trees, and I veered right and then found a path through them.
I can’t say I was feeling any better out and about, in the morning sunlight. In fact, I grew more wary, walking through the woods, imagining what might happen should I trip on a bit of fallen branch or twisted vine, should I suddenly be seized with a heart attack, or stroke, or even just, simply, lose my way. I was beginning to realize that what frightened me about being alone, last night in the empty house and now as I made my way down a barely discernible path toward the rushing creek, was that no one was within the sound of my call.
I could as well be here as nowhere at all.
Their voices reached me as I came into the clearing that marked the stream. Dom and Jamie, talking together.
I came upon them easily enough. Dom was seated on a fallen tree trunk, his back to me. Jamie was about ten yards away, in knee-high galoshes, a switch in his hand. He was following something in the water, and Dom was offering advice and bits of caution.
I called out a hello, hoping not to startle them. But neither, of course, was plagued by my own desperate encounters with solitude. They greeted me with no more surprise than they had when I’d seen them at our little grocery store. They were perfectly at ease in the world.
Jamie waved and called, “Hi.” Dom looked at me over his shoulder, called “Good morning,” and then stood, politely—some remnant of that impulse your husband’s generation was so steeped in. An instinctive response to a woman’s, any woman’s, appearance, anywhere. All rise.
“You’re up early,” he said. He had seen my car in our driveway. “I was wondering if you guys would be back with the spring.”
We sat down together on the fallen tree. He told me that one of his sons and a daughter-in-law and their two small children were visiting. They’d arrived from Atlanta just last night. Sleeping in, he said, as normal people are happy to do. He and Jamie had started out on their hike first thing this morning to allay their impatience. Both of them—father and son—were counting the minutes until these little ones were awake and running around the house.
He said it was a habit of theirs to walk out here on those mornings when neither of them could sleep—usually because they were impatient to get a good day started: those visiting grandkids awake and ready to play, for instance, or a trip to the ocean, a promised meteor shower, tickets to an Orioles game.
“You name it,” he said, “Jamie and I are the first up and looking out the window. We’re both antsy in the same crazy, insomniac way.”
Jamie was some distance from us, walking along the edge of the stream in his boots, but not so far that we couldn’t see him looking back now and then—despite the intensity of his focus as he searched the shoreline of what was just a creek, a meandering bit of silver in this light. Now and then as he looked back, he waved.
Dom never failed to wave back, even as the two of us talked about my mother.
She was, Dom said, “something else.” He knew her, of course, from the hospital work, and remembered clearly the morning she had brought him the Barbie doll in the ao dai for his newborn daughter.
He’d been a little afraid of my mother, he confessed. At first, anyway. She was so beautiful and confident. “Kind of bossy,” he added, and I said, “Tell me about it.” He had his eyes on Jamie as he spoke, who was crouched now, inspecting and sorting the rocks and pebbles at the stream’s tiny shoreline.
He remembered her market baskets filled with toys, and the other women who trailed her. You among them, I suppose. He said she had come along on occasion when a contingent of American corpsmen visited rural orphanages, even a leper colony outside the city. He recalled that she had once brought silk clothes for all the patients.
“Any boyfriends?” I asked. I told him briefly about Aunt Arlene’s mysterious man.
Dom shrugged. He might have blushed. “I could probably think of three or four guys who were in love with her,” he said.
He said one time, there was a kid in really bad shape, malnourished when he was brought in, full of worms and then, as happened too often, a cascade of troubles: the moment when they might have saved him suddenly, somehow, irretrievable. Gone too close to the edge. Slipped over the cliff. He said Charlene was holding the kid when he died. A simple, barely noticeable passing. Shallow breaths that merely paused and did not start up again.
He said one of the American doctors who was with them put a stethoscope to the kid’s heart, and told my mother he was gone. And then Charlene looked up, like he’d just insulted her.
“I’ll never forget it. She was pissed as hell. She said, as if we could do anything about it, ‘This is unacceptable.’”
Dom shook his head, his eyes still on Jamie. “I’d been going around with this basket she’d brought, helping to give out her little treats, and I was standing there with them both, Charlene and the doc, feeling like a fool—this big empty basket on my arm. This poor kid in hers. And her so frigging angry. Outraged. I heard myself say, I swear, I meant to be nice, you know, comforting, ‘What are you gonna do? These things happen.’ Or some such-is-life kind of thing.”
He paused, shook his head. “And then the doctor turns on me. Sort of matching her fury. Jesus.” He laughed, remembering. Jamie was now carrying something to us in his cupped and dripping palms.
“‘Do this,’ he tells me.”
Dom leaned over his knees, hunched his shoulders, dropped his voice, and turned his face to mine.
“This guy points to your mother, with that poor wreck of a kid on her lap. He says, ‘See if you have the balls to do this.’”
In that early morning light, Dom’s blue eyes had something of the silver flash and sparkle of the running stream beside us.
“I was in love with her myself at that moment,” he told me. “I loved how angry she was. Like that kid was the most valuable thing ever made.”
And then Jamie stood before us, his galoshes sparkling with spring water, his flannel shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows and his hands wet and spotted with mud. “What you got?” Dom asked him.
Shyly, the boy held out a shining stone. It was a chipped black rock veined with silver, fused to two smaller stones with what seemed a wreath of pink pearls.
“Look at this,” Jamie said simply, full of simple wonder.
Dom placed his own hand under his son’s. “That’s a beauty,” he said. He waved a gentle pinky over the stone. “Onyx, I’m guessing,” he whispered. “Maybe mica. Sandstone, pink quartz.”
He told Jamie to bring the stone up to the house, show it to his brother. “He’s smarter than either of us about rocks.”
But Jamie closed his hand again. He looked at me from under his fair brows. “It’s for you,” he whispered, and offered me the fused stone. I took it, thanked him.
And then he turned back to his careful inspection of the pebbled shoreline.
* * *
THE THREE OF US walked together back through the field. As we approached Dom’s shed, a truck pulled slowly into the long drive. The men, Dom’s workers, I assumed, waved to Jamie, and he ran to greet them.
Dom and I lingered. The sound of the truck, the bustle of the men as they left the cab, broke open somehow the day’s fresh beginning. We might both have been reluctant to let the quiet go.
I asked how Jamie’s health was, his heart.
“Great,” Dom said, and, as his son had done, made with his thumb a little cross over his chest. “Turns out, his first heart surgery, which he had before he was ours, was pretty amazing. Every doctor since has said so. Guy who did it was some kind of magician.” He laughed, but I think he was aware that he was telling me something I might not have understood.
It was like a piece of the new sunlight, golden pink as it was, had fallen on that casual phrase “before he was ours.”
He spoke in a rush. “A pediatric cardiac surgeon working gratis on an abandoned premie with Down syndrome at a third-rate hospital—so good that twenty years later other surgeons are saying, Wow.” He shook his head. “How’s that for believing in a benevolent universe?”
