Eyes Wide Open

Chapter Fifty-Three





An hour later, darkness setting in, Sherwood drove his car down Grand Avenue, past the empty fast food storefronts and closed-up auto supply stores, toward Grover Beach.

The clock read eight forty-five. Only a few cars were on the road. The small beach town shut up like a cell block after dark. One or two of the Latino bars still had some life, field hands and out-of-work construction workers drunkenly staggering out.

In another lifetime, he might’ve stopped and checked them out as they headed for their cars.

He made a left on Fourth, and then Division, heading farther down the hill along the tracks. They used to find bodies dumped in the woods around there. He could still have told you every clearing in the brush where you could score weed or crack. The only time he’d ever fired his gun was on a bust down there back when his hair was still dark and he was still in a uniform.

You’ve got to risk it all, the doc had said.

Funny, he thought as he drove. He thought he had risked all he had twenty years before.

He thought of Kyle.

He drove his Torino up to the run-down apartment complex. He had been there twice before in the days after Evan had been killed. He stopped the car and put it in park in a dark spot out of the glare of the streetlamp, maybe thirty yards from the entrance. From there, he had a good view of the courtyard and the first-floor apartment. He saw a light glowing behind the drapes. He sank deeper into the car seat and made himself comfortable. He hadn’t done this sort of thing in more than a decade. In a way it felt good.

Dorrie would laugh, he thought. He turned off the ignition. No, she wouldn’t.

She would smile.

Erlich was wrong. He knew everything about risking it. About losing it all too.

It had been a family camping trip. On the Clackamas River, up in Oregon. He, Dorrie, and Merry, their twelve-year-old daughter.

And Kyle.

They went rafting. It was the week of the initial spring release. The rapids were mostly level threes and fours. They’d taken pictures. The whole family smiling. Having the time of their lives.

Later, they coasted downstream. The river grew wide and the current smooth. The group pulled over to the shore for a basket lunch, part of the outing. The guide broke out the single-person kayaks that the rafting company had towed there. Everyone took a shot at it. It was fun. The current was easy. Kyle was a little scared to get in, but some other kid not much older tried it and had a blast.

Maybe if he hadn’t pushed him, Sherwood always thought when the dark moments came.

Maybe if he hadn’t pushed Dorrie: “C’mon, he’s a big kid. He can handle it.”

He was nine.

Kyle was paddling a few yards behind the main raft when the current, more like a series of small eddies, intensified.

Still not enough to make anyone alarmed, only enough to keep an eye out. Kyle suddenly seemed to be having a little trouble steering. No one paid much attention. There was no danger. Sherwood had been telling his war stories to one of the other couples, a stockbroker and his wife from Seattle. The guide even broke out the cold drinks.

Then Kyle called out.

“Donny,” Dorrie shouted, noticing the gulf between them had widened.

For the first time Sherwood saw that his son was afraid.

“Mom,” he called out, struggling. “Dad!”

“Right side, right side,” one of the guides yelled out to him, doing his best to slow the main raft.

“Keep it steady, son!” Sherwood called.

If the boy had just been twelve, even a little larger, it would have been nothing. The current was barely more than a trickle.

But a hundred yards downstream, the river divided. There was a sliver of an island in the middle separating the two sides. No more than a couple of hundred yards long. Everyone watched with elevating concern as Kyle got himself caught in a midstream current and was drawn, against his increasing attempts to right himself, to the other side.

Dorrie became alarmed. “Don!”

That was when Sherwood took off his sneaks and went to jump in. But the guide held him back. They were too far along.

“He’ll be okay,” the guide said, trying to reassure him. “There’s nothing dangerous over there.” He signaled to the other raft. “We’ll meet up with him on the other side.”

Sherwood yelled out. “You’ll be okay! Just paddle, son!”

But his heart told him something entirely different.

Back outside Charlie’s apartment, Sherwood gazed out at the darkened courtyard. He turned on the radio. Something easy and soothing. Country. Annoyed at himself.

Why did he have to go through this now?

It was called a strainer—a thatch of branches just below the surface.

And the sound of that word still brought him anguish and pain, though it had been almost twenty years.

They steered the main raft to the far end of the island and waited for Kyle to make his way out.

Everyone was shouting, “Kyle! Kyle!” Even the other rafters.

He never did.

Sherwood finally jumped in. Panicked. Running ahead of the guide. Thrashing against the current upstream. The river was no more than thigh high and seemingly smooth, but after running hard a hundred yards Sherwood’s thighs began to tire and feel like concrete, a steady stream of water pushing against them. “Kyle! Kyle!” His heart suddenly accelerating in a way he had never felt on the job.

“Kyle!”

The second hundred yards lasted a lifetime. All the power in his legs simply gave way. They turned to fire and then to rubber, and he had to stop, the guide running past him.

Where are you, Kyle?

Up ahead, he saw the guide kneel in the water, freeing his boy from the brambles that had caught on his life jacket, under the surface. He gazed back with a look Sherwood would never forget, crying out, “Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man . . .”

It’s time to risk it, Sherwood . . .

Really? He had already lost it all!

He snuggled in the car seat in a comfortable position and took out a burrito from a bag and settled in. He turned up the volume.

Thank you, the doc had said. And it made Sherwood smile.

Don’t thank me. Thank that damn pastor. Knightly.

Behind the shades in the apartment, the light had gone off.