THE WINTER RAINS CAME and buried everything. They swelled the streams, scoured the ravines, drove deep to refresh the roots of the big sentinel trees that stood watch over the forest and climbed steadily up into the greening hills. Botanists put on their slickers and went out to take core samples and hoist themselves three hundred feet up into the canopy to measure the new season’s growth and biologists set up bait stations to collect hair samples of fox and marten for DNA analysis. Fishermen fished. Drinkers drank. It wasn’t the tourist season, but a few people ventured up the coast from the Bay Area, mainly on weekends and mainly to stroll arm-in-arm up and down the six streets of Mendocino village, and the Skunk Train started hauling tourists up the Noyo Valley again, though on the usual limited winter schedule.
After the funeral back in the fall, Carolee went to stay with her sister in Newbury Park for a few days, and when she returned, looking haggard, looking unrested and every bit as tragic as when she’d left, she kept harping on the theme of traveling, of getting out and seeing the world. Just a trip. Anywhere. If only to get out of town for a while because she couldn’t take the way people looked at her wherever she went, whether it was the library or the post office or just picking up the dry cleaning, and Sten felt as burdened as she did and gave in without much of a fight. They wound up driving down to Death Valley for the wildflower bloom at the end of February and then continued on to Las Vegas to throw money away and watch some overpriced idiotic revue he could have done without, once and forever. What he said to her was, “This is just like the cruise ship, except it’s floating on dirt instead of water.”
And she said, “Without the world-class indulgence,” smiling when she said it, because she was beginning to climb up out of the pit Adam had dug, the steps and handholds shaky at first but firming up as the days passed. They came home to an empty house, but then the house had been empty of Adam for years now, and if Carolee had ever harbored any dreams of grandchildren, whether produced by Sara Hovarty Jennings or some other woman unstable enough to hook up with their son, those dreams were buried now too. It was for the better, it really was, and he told her that, though he meant it to be comforting and not just purely cold-blooded. The truth was, he couldn’t imagine going through this all over again and couldn’t even begin to guess at what a child of that union, of Sara and Adam, would have had to cope with. Or no, he could. And that was why, all things considered, Adam’s death had been a kind of blessing, the true blessing, and not his odds-defying birth or the sweetness of his early childhood or the sense of completeness this kicking perfect blue-eyed baby lying there in his cradle had given them. He was their son, evidence in the flesh of the interlocking of the genes they’d separately inherited, genes their parents and parents’ parents had held on to through all the generations there ever were. More biology. Reproductio ad absurdum. Adam, the product of an older mother. An old mother.
He could adapt. Carolee could adapt too. But the thing that lingered longer than the sorrow, the thing he just couldn’t shake, was the shame. It was like a dream you can’t wake from, the vision of himself up there on the stage in the high school auditorium, urging everyone to remain calm and not rush off on some sort of witch hunt. Or chasing down those Mexicans with Carey, dead Carey, posturing beside him. Sitting there at the picnic table and trying to deny the evidence Rob Rankin presented in his little plastic bags. Living with the guilt. He wasn’t used to hanging his head or ducking away from anybody, all his life one of the big men in town, from his years on the football field in high school to his return as a decorated veteran and then a college grad working his way up from history teacher to assistant principal and finally principal and master of all he surveyed. He tried to be bigger than the shame, tried to get on with his life, but he found he couldn’t really face people anymore, couldn’t look anybody in the eye, even strangers, without wondering if they knew and how much they knew—it got to the point where he began to think there was no other solution but to pack up and move. Sun City, in Arizona, wasn’t that where old people went? Or Florida. What was wrong with Florida?
He came in from a walk one afternoon, his mind churning over the possibilities, and sat Carolee down and told her there was no other way, they were just going to have to move.
“Move?” she’d said. “Where? I mean, we practically just moved in here, didn’t we?”
“What about Florida?”
“Florida? Are you crazy? The tropics? You really want to go to the tropics?”
He shrugged, let her see his open palms. He was just thinking out loud, that was all, exploring the possibilities. “I don’t know. Up the coast, maybe. Eureka. What’s wrong with Eureka?”
“Another broken-down mill town? We don’t know anybody there, not a soul.”
“Right,” he said. “That’s what I mean.”