Tom Carl sipped his beer.
“Is there more of you up there in Colorado, with your father?”
The boy looked at him.
“More of your people. Your family.”
The boy shifted his weight to his bad leg and Tom Carl said, “It’s none of my business. I’m just curious if your dad’s alone up there or not.”
“There’s an old man on the ranch where he’s living.”
Tom Carl raised his drinking arm and slapped at it with his free hand, killing a mosquito.
“How come you left? If you don’t mind me asking.”
The boy was silent a long time. A hard, bitter morning, he remembered, Perseus, the slayer of Cetus, setting in the west, and the old green truck wouldn’t start, so he took the good truck, the blue Chevy. He’d been living with his father in the ranch house for five months and he hadn’t thought, until he was miles away, how it would be when his father woke to find another child gone.
“It just seemed like it was time to go,” he said at last, and took a drink.
Tom Carl put a hand to his back and grimaced. “I thought maybe you had some kind of trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“Trouble.”
The boy met the older man’s eyes. Then he looked into the dusk and said, “No, sir. No trouble. I’m just trying to make gas money.”
Tom Carl showed him the casita and the daybed there and the showerhead over the stone floor. On his way out he stopped and asked the boy if he had a cell phone.
He did but the battery was shot.
His host stood gazing about the little room. “If you need to call someone,” he said, “come on over to the house. I got a cordless you can take outside and that’s about as good as it’s gonna get, privacy-wise.”
He thanked him and Tom Carl tipped his bottle good night and closed the door.
The boy removed his boots and socks and lay back on the narrow bed, his knee pulsing with the old damage and his shoulder answering where the muscle and bone went on chopping, and he lay in this dialogue of pain thinking about his father up in Colorado, his mother in Wisconsin, in the hospital, and Caitlin wherever she was—and he didn’t think he would sleep but he did, and in his sleep he climbed a path in the woods, in the dark, making his way by the progress of the animal he followed, a dog or wolf of such whiteness it raised shadows from the things it passed, the trees and stones. He kept pace with the white dog until the path grew steep and he began to fall behind, and soon he was in total darkness. Clawed at by the limbs of trees, falling to all fours, he scrabbled on until he came to her suddenly on the path. Pale and naked and curled upon herself, and though she was very young he knew it was her. He said her name but she only lay there holding her knees, and when he looked up again he saw the white dog watching him. He moved to pick her up and the dog advanced, and he let go and backed away. The dog came on and he backed away until he could no longer see her, until she’d slipped wholly back into the dark. Then the dog walked to her and by its light he saw her again, saw that she was sitting up, and that she was grown. Covering her breasts with one arm and gesturing to him with the other, beckoning him back, Come back . . .
20
There was one morning she could never forget, Angela said. Bright, battering morning when she’d awoken in her own bed after so long away, her own room—the first morning back from Colorado and it had not been a dream, she hadn’t thought so even for an instant—and the moment she was awake she knew Grant was gone. Knew he’d not even come up to bed but had slept a few hours on the living room floor and left in the dark or at first light, so as to spare her this departure, this separation—let her wake to it in her own time and on her own terms. It was like before, when he’d left them, her, for some other woman, some other bed, she said. Only now she was not sorry; every moment he was here with her was a moment he was not in Colorado, searching, and those were hard, hateful moments.
Grant picked up his coffee and sipped. He sat across from her at the kitchen table in the middle of the afternoon, the middle of September. Sean was in school; Grace’s kids were in school, Grace and Ted at their jobs. The house was like a house where everyone has been murdered: breakfast dishes in the sink, a boy’s plastic truck on the counter, the terrible wall clock ticking and ticking. Grant had come back at Grace’s request, to see Angela, to see his son, whose leg was now healed, or as healed as it would ever be. She wouldn’t say it outright but Grant knew that what his sister-in-law wanted was for him to see how things had become in her small and crowded house.
Caitlin had been gone for a year and two months.
That morning, that first morning back, Angela had come down the stairs in her robe. Sean was on the sofa under the bedding, books and homework and other things from his room spread out over the coffee table. The wheelchair within reach. He looked asleep, and Angela passed quietly into the kitchen and found Grant’s note by the coffeepot—I didn’t want to wake you, etcetera. She was standing at the kitchen window staring out when Sean rolled in. She looked at him and smiled. How are you feeling?
Did Dad leave?
He didn’t want to wake you. He said he’d call from the road.
Sean looked around the kitchen as if it he’d never seen it before. He was getting used to seeing everything from a lower vantage. As if he’d grown small again. Angela turned and looked out the window at the stark cold day. No cars, no one on the sidewalks, everyone shut up inside recovering from their Thanksgivings. They themselves had gone to a restaurant where they’d picked in silence at hot turkey sandwiches. The restaurant so quiet they clearly heard the young waiter in the kitchen ask, Christ, who died?
Mom? said Sean.
Hmm? She turned back to him. Yes?
He elevated his leg just a little and lowered it again. Nothing, he said. I think I’ll have some cereal.
Oh, I’m sorry, I should have asked. Do you want some eggs?
No.
Do you want an English muffin?
No, just some cereal.
Okay. Stepping to the cupboards, pulling down the boxes. We’re going to have to put stuff down where you can reach it, aren’t we. She set a place for him and moved the chairs away and she arranged all the cereal boxes and the milk and she watched him get himself parked before the bowl.
Aren’t you going to eat? he said.
Not right now. I’m going to go up and shower. Will you be all right?
I think I can take it from here.
She touched his shoulder and walked back through the living room and she understood, she told Grant, how everything had shifted in the house, like pieces in a puzzle: the boy’s room empty and the living room now a bedroom, her own bed half empty, another bedroom empty beyond all comprehension or belief. She climbed the stairs. Then, at the top, she heard Sean say something, but she didn’t stop, and she didn’t look back.
Grant waited. Angela lifted her mug and sipped and returned it soundlessly to the table.
That’s it? he said.
That’s it. Yes.
Grant looked toward the stairs.
Christ, that clock, he said. He turned to look out the window. Finally he turned back. Angie, you were in shock.
She thought about that. Do people remember being in shock? I remember the moment vividly. He called out to me and I pretended not to hear him.
Grant stared into his coffee. He shook his head. You can’t blame yourself, Angie. I know that’s your instinct as a parent, as a mother, but you can’t.
He heard the hollowness of these words in the ticking stillness of the borrowed kitchen.
She waited for him to look up. It’s worse than that, she said.
What is it? God? You blame God?
I wish I did.
He moved as if to reach for her hands and her hands withdrew to the edge of the table.
He watched her, studying her, and she saw the instant when he understood, and she knew that he had thought it himself, that it wasn’t just her.
But, Angie, my God, he said quietly. He was just a boy. And he was hurt. What could he have done?
I don’t know, I don’t know. Her eyes were dry. Dark. Grant didn’t know them. But he just lay there, she said. He just lay there while she got into that man’s car and I can’t help it, Grant, when I look at him all I can think is, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you stop her?