Steve blinked. “Not tonight, no.”
Afternoon light traced the shape of a sugar maple onto the carpet; the tree’d been there for as long as Jeremy could remember. Once, as a child, he’d asked his dad how old it was. “Who knows?” Steve had replied cheerfully from his station at the Weber, flipping a burger and admiring the fresh black grill marks on it. “Older than anybody here, anyway!”
“It’s all right,” Jeremy said after a minute, with a tenderness beyond his years. His father was still standing in the doorway, visibly waiting for some kind of reply. “I know what you mean.”
*
The northbound lane is closed now. Fat orange barrels scroll past the passenger’s-side window, bobbing into view like buoys on a lake. It isn’t clear what kind of work the road needs over there on the other side of the cones; it looks fine, and there aren’t any workers around. At one point a parked steel drum compactor breaks the spell, but there’s nobody up top.
A low table with some back issues of Family Circle on it, and a modest sofa, and an old recliner, and the television resting on a cabinet originally meant for storing plateware. Lisa and Sarah Jane sitting together, visiting in the bluish light of the screen.
“Why are you letting me move in?” said Sarah Jane. “It’s kind of strange, if you think about it.”
“You look tired,” said Lisa.
“It’s a pretty—” She looked for a word that wouldn’t sound like she was complaining. “It’s a pretty generous thing to offer somebody just because they look tired,” she said.
“It’s not a big deal. You’re not the first person to come and stay here for a while.”
She had suspected this fish was down there in the depths somewhere, but it was a surprise to see it flop up onto the deck like that.
“Where’d the others go,” she said.
“They’re fine.”
“What do you mean, they’re fine.”
“They’re all just fine.”
“Where are they, though.”
Lisa waved her hand toward the big window.
“They’re out there somewhere,” she said.
“You knew them, though.”
“Of course I knew them, they were here.”
“Isn’t that them?” Here nodding toward the TV.
Here laughing: “No, no. Those are just people in transition.”
“But you know who they are.”
“Maybe. I think. Mainly in a general sense.”
“In a general sense.”
“Loosely. Generally who they are, were. At any rate they’ve moved on.”
“You mean they’re all dead.”
“Maybe. I guess. I don’t really know. They’re people who were here once. I’m their witness. I keep their memory alive.”
“I don’t get it,” said Sarah Jane.
“Sure you do,” said Lisa. “Everybody does.”
“Everybody what?”
Lisa rose to her feet, took a deep breath, and shook her hair. It was late and the moon was so bright you could see it through the drawn blinds.
“Everybody leaves a little something behind,” she said, heading up the stairs. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
*
She lay awake later, thinking: Keep their memory alive. People you once knew who’ve gone somewhere: those memories everyone can understand. They are hothouse flowers. You tend to them because the world will be diminished by their loss. But the memories to which Shed #4 and Farrowing Crate bore witness—whose were those? They were nothing, they went nowhere. No names, half-seen faces, no locatable beginnings or ends.
But there was the one scene, though, that did feel like an end, the last one on the tape labeled State Road. That woman running down the driveway, her hair seen free for the first time. Someone following. The sound of cold gravel underfoot, the cold readily established by clouds of steam emerging from a panting mouth at lens-height behind the camera, fogging the screen as we pursue our quarry out toward the road. Sarah Jane couldn’t fix the outline definitively, couldn’t say why this felt like the one scene after which no other could be envisioned. But in the hidden recesses of her heart, at the bottom of a diagram she’d never looked at under good light, that’s what it was: the concluding moment, the nearest thing to a climax these dozens of tapes had to offer. The opening out onto the blacktop. The last blurred burst of information before the transmissions stopped coming forever.
3
Sometime after dinner that evening, as the washing machine in the garage chugged cheerfully away, cleaning the blood out of Jeremy’s clothes, Steve dug his journal out from the back of the drawer where it had lain unattended for years. He turned to the point where he’d left off; that final entry before the long break ventured so far out into the depths: it had felt like a purging, and it was. He’d seldom thought of the journal at all after writing it. It had taken him over a year, back then, to get to the place where he could open himself up to say It feels dark a lot of the time. This new entry took the shortcut.