Wendy had been staring at her plate, watching the eggs sink into a lukewarm and clotted state, stirring up the arrangement of toast and jam and eggs. It was safe to look up again.
—Elena, do you have anything to add?
Elena shook her head drastically.
—No, no. Wendy and I will take this up on the way back to the house.
So that was the end of it. Whatever stray impulse had led Wendy’s mother into the Williamses’ house—and it had been passed along to Wendy in full, just as the volatility of the O’Malleys had been passed along to her—whatever the impulse was that had led her mother from the party onto the water bed, where she had swam in Jim Williams’s arms, whatever revolution had taken place in her mother, it had been succeeded by a harsh return to her old constitution. That was the way of things with adults—they trailed after ecstasy and then denied it, rationalized it, dressed it all up in talk. Her mother regretted being there, in that kitchen, regretted having cooked the breakfast, regretted even having hurt Benjamin, however justified this hurt might have been. Her mother regretted everything now. Wendy could see this regret playing across her face.
—Hey, bub, Jim Williams said, your shortwave radio have any batteries in it? Think we can get news radio or something on there?
Sandy nodded halfheartedly.
And the two of them rose together and in synchronous, almost choreographed movements, they wiped their mouths with the cloth napkins Elena had set on the table, set these napkins across their plates, and left the plates behind.
And then Wendy thought about the complications of the whole night. What if there was a sort of swap with the neighbors and it exceeded everybody’s expectation? Just to start with, Wendy was going to be sealed into a town where everyone knew her mother slept with the man up the street. This knowledge would circulate like her own dalliance with Debby Armitage. Then, take it a little further, go a little further down that road, she might be stepsister with the boy she loved, and stepsister, also, with his rival, whom she had also once loved. She would commit incest with a stepsibling. She would permit each of her stepbrothers to touch her. She would dry hump them together, maybe. Then her stepbrothers would fight to the death for the right to seed in her a two-headed baby who spoke Greek at birth and knew the date of Jesus’ next appearance. Her father and stepfather would not speak to one another. Her mother and stepmother would not speak to one another. She would be enjoined, when in the company of her father and Mrs. Williams, against speaking about her mother and Mr. Williams. Or: she would never see Mikey and Sandy, because they would have opposite weekends of visitation. Or: they would split up visitation, one week with Sandy, one week with Mikey, and she would swap them, as her parents had swapped one another. Or: she would return home with the Hoods and this whole weekend would remain a horrible episode no one ever talked about, which left in its wake the moral carnage of a whole town full of kids.
—We should get going, her mother said. Let’s finish this up and you can get your things. I’ll borrow some boots.…
—We have to walk?
—The Williamses’ car is back up on Ferris Hill and your father has the Firebird.
The silence between Wendy and Elena was long and durable. Almost unbreachable.
—You don’t love Dad anymore, Wendy said.
Elena gave this statement a respectful space. Then she said:
—That’s right.
Wendy would think about this moment a lot, later, and she would conclude that Elton John’s drummer, Nigel Olson, meant more to her than her parents’ marriage, and that her own heart had shrunk down, like the heart of the Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Because she didn’t feel that much right then. She had learned well the parsimony her family had taught her.
—But you’re not gonna divorce him, are you?
—I don’t know the answer to that yet.
—Aw, Mom, you …
Lurching through this conversation, they rinsed dirty plates under cold water. This was the last of what they could share. Then Wendy left her mother to find her stuff—her poncho, her boots—up on Sandy’s bed. At the top of the stairs, she could hear Sandy and Mr. Williams. In the bathroom.
They were sitting on the bath mat, with an array of tools spread out before them, as though this were an operating amphitheater. Before them, through the tiles in the bathroom, a steady leak had developed. It wasn’t much more than a drip really, a drip that was collecting in the bathtub, but it spooked the Williams men nonetheless. It wasn’t coming from the showerhead, or from the tap. It was coming from the wall.
Sandy handed the tools to his father one by one. Wrench. Pliers. They were turning off the water at valves, behind the toilet. This had no effect on the leak. Beside them the radio chirped away about the storm and its swath of destruction. Then the announcers moved on to the subject of that 18½-minute silence.
—We’re going to go, Wendy said.
The men of the Williams family didn’t look up.
—Come again, Jim Williams said. Always happy to see you, dear.
Wendy slipped out of the bathroom and gathered up her things, bundled herself up. Sandy’s bed was as carefully made up as if it had been the guest room, as if he weren’t a permanent resident in his own room. G. I. Joe hung listlessly above the closet.
And then, downstairs, just as she and her mother were buttoning their last buttons in the kitchen, there was a knock at the front door.
—Let me in, Janey Williams called. I don’t have my keys.
Another louder pounding. The sound was muffled.
Then Jim Williams on the staircase: worried, preoccupied, caught between a number of different reactions. Sandy stood right behind him, stalled on the eighth or ninth step, gripping the banister, his chin pressed down upon the tops of his hands. On the doorstep, Janey Williams was unraveled, disarranged, unhinged even. Wendy could tell. And this was before Mrs. Williams saw Wendy’s mom.
—Top of the morning, Janey said, as Wendy pulled back the door. Is the lady of the house at home? She placed a hand absently on Wendy’s head.
—We have a problem. Jim waved her in.
—What happened to the car, dammit? she said. And then she saw: Oh, so happy to see you, Elena, and so well put together. What’s going on? Why so many long faces?
—How did you get back? Jim Williams said, as he came down a couple of steps. His tone was detached. It was the tone that preceded a long, difficult conversation.
—Maria drove me up and around and down Ferris Hill. I passed the car. My car. What the hell did you do to it?
Jim Williams gripped his wrench as though he were making a point with it. Sandy looked down at the fuzz on the carpet and Wendy looked at her mother, who seemed to be staring vacantly at some empty region out in the yard. Upstairs there was the sound of a drip in the bathroom.
—Your car seems to be stuck on the road, too, your Firebird, Janey said to Elena. I hope Benjamin didn’t, you know, encounter … the legal authorities on his way down the hill.
—We wrecked the car, Elena whispered stupidly. Wendy watched her mother fumbling to deal with the situation. And she could guess now the way the map of the evening went, even if she couldn’t see all of it right in front of her. Some of it got put together by her, some by others. But the feeling of those stories was on her now. Those stories circulated around her. Maria Conrad returning home to find her son, Neil, getting his first blow job from Janey Williams, Janey actually crying while she was doing it, her salty bitterness falling on his pale pink erection—Neil too stupid in contentment to know the effect he had, or didn’t have, on her; Maria returning from Stephan Earle’s house, where Stephan had ejaculated prematurely and promptly fallen asleep after having called Maria by the wrong name—not her own, not even his wife’s name; Stephan Earle’s wife, Marie, stuck at breakfast with Dan Fuller when Chuck Spofford appeared, with his son in tow, to accuse Fuller of stealing his mistress; the logistics, the geometry of accommodation at the G
orman residence, the Sawyer residence, the Boyles’. All these cars trying to get around town behind all these other cars. Each with its freight of betrayal and lost opportunity. On top of everything else the storm. Wendy didn’t want to think about it. She wasn’t old enough to think about it.
—Did you two have fun? Janey said.
—Oh, be quiet, Elena said. If you want to discuss this at least let’s do it in private. We don’t have to drag all this out in front of the kids. They already know enough as it is anyway.
—We’ve told them, sweetheart, Jim Williams said.
—You what? Janey said.
—Look, this isn’t all that important now. We have a couple of real problems, Jim Williams said. There’s a leak in the bathroom somewhere. I’m a little concerned about the … that the pipes may have burst. That’s big trouble. And—
—You’ll figure it out, Janey said.
Like Wendy, Sandy was paralyzed. Halted by the snowballing of points of view, by the partition and division of points of view. As Janey Williams swept by him and his dad on the stairs, in her wrinkled silk pajamas (draping her wool coat on the banister), she leaned to kiss Sandy on the forehead. She began to sob, choking, heaving sobs. Some women in New Canaan were beautiful when they cried: all sorrow was bound inside them like the bound feet of Asian women. Their tears cut delicate tracks in their pristine cheeks. Not so with Janey Williams. She coughed and gasped and hawked up more of what she was keeping down. Her nose was red and raw—Wendy could see—like her dad’s gin-blossomed nose. Janey tried to shout some invective as she cried but the flash flood was too heavy now, and the best she could do was struggle away from her family, struggle away from all that promise and kindness. On the way to her bedroom she paused—at Mike’s door.
She reached for the knob.
The trick buzzer sounded.
Janey swore. And then she turned the knob and found the bed empty.
—Where’s Mike? she called.
—That’s what I … Down with Ben, Jim said. We think.
—Why would he be down there? she called, hysteria creeping into the mix of her temper. Ben hates Mike. Don’t be stupid. Don’t tell me you didn’t even—
—Calm down, why don’t you.
Jim was turning the wrench over in his palm. But he didn’t move.
Janey was at the top of the stairs, frozen in latitudes of regret. They were all isolated in that foyer, all of them.
Then the ambulance pulled up in front of the house.
An ambulance of quaint, nostalgic design. An old American station wagon, in bright red, with a revolving yellow light on top. The light, rotating slowly, coming to a stop. Sunlight picking up the reflectors in the lamp and elsewhere on the ambulance. The sun reflecting on the limitless array of reflecting surfaces. The sun, the reflections of the sun, the fallen limbs of trees. A vast sweetshop of sugar-coated treats, some kid’s fantasy of a Christmas world of candies. Sweetmeats.
Ice everywhere, and icicles, brittle, crunchy snow and ice, through which Benjamin Hood trudged now, falling into ice, rescuing himself, jogging from the ambulance to the exterior of the Williamses’ house. Hood’s face was swollen and pink-orange with embarrassment and anxiety. His progress up what would once have been a flagstone path—he was actually veering across a flower bed now—couldn’t really be called progress. He hustled, he urged his flaccid thighs and calves on, and yet he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was stalled on that walkway, on that flower bed, stretching out his fat, puffy palm toward the front door. No closer.
The sound of radio static coming from the ambulance. Wind rollicking in sugar-coated trees. Reflections. The sound of icicles giving up their form, returning to rivers. The restless movement of water. Wood smoke drifted on the wind and scorched a sad spot in Hood’s heart. Even on this mission, he couldn’t ignore it. The past was so past it hurt—afternoons in duck blinds with his father, northern New England and its bittersweet citizenry. He missed the past and he could have been kinder. He was only ten steps from the front door now; his movements frozen to a crawl.
The front of the house: white, orderly, colonial. A flagpole (unflagged), an array of carefully tended shrubs garlanded in ice. Two-car garage. Imitation gaslight beside the front step. Columns. Behind, the hill. Below, the Silvermine River.
At last, when it seemed a whole day would come and go before Hood reached the Williamses’ door, when it seemed inside to Elena Hood and to the Williamses and to Wendy Hood that the ambulance had pulled into the driveway for a coffee break, or for a morning bird-watching excursion, when it seemed to Janey Williams that she had opened and closed the door a dozen times and each time had found a different day, a different tragedy—a day in which the ambulance drivers were simply asking directions, on their way to some coronary event; a day in which it was just a red station wagon with a flat tire, not an ambulance; a day in which the loss belonged instead to the Hoods and Ben was simply looking for Elena and Wendy—after all these alternatives, the knock came at the door. The door opening, and then the knock. It was all backward.
—Janey. Uh. You and Jim had better come out here for a moment. I’m afraid there’s something.… You’d better come on out here. I … you need to talk to these men. Listen, I—
Then the splash page. The procession was like pipers, like some medieval crew schooled in gymnastic—Janey and Jim Williams launched themselves desperately out into the snow, dressed only in what clothes they wore in the house; followed by little Sandy Williams, who carefully jumped into each of the foot holes his parents depressed in the walkway in front of him, balancing, nearly falling over; followed by Elena, arms folded, shoulders hunched, lips pursed, not knowing why she followed exactly; and then Wendy, snow-blinded by the reflection of light and the sound of water running everywhere; followed by Benjamin Hood himself, now relieved of his responsibility but anguished, knowing. Hood in his galoshes.
The ambulance driver waited for them, slouched against the car. At the same moment, a police car slowed and parked on Valley Road. Two officers emerged and listlessly ambled toward the column of observers.
—Your neighbor here found the body of a young boy over by the hospital, the ambulance driver was saying, mostly to Jim Williams. Says he has reason to believe that the boy is your son. I’m afraid … well, we have attempted to revive the boy and we have failed to do so. To revive him. But we really ought—
Janey Williams’s face—featureless, bland, and then twisted. Tragedy mask, comedy mask, tragedy mask. She smiled, she trembled. She knew, she didn’t know. The year had sprung a leak. Loss surged and waned according to its own itinerary. Janey’s hands were red and importunate, as if she was conducing the scene somehow, waving through its downbeats. She danced and wept and conducted and spoke in tongues.
The ambulance driver let the news sink in, looked down at tracks in the snow—he was an accomplished messenger of ill—and then he went over to seek consel from the police.
—You think it’s okay to let them identify the body?
This was all done in asides.
—I’ll take care of it, if you want, the officer said. He moved toward the circle around the ambulance.
—These guys got to move along to the hospital. To make it official. And we’re going to have to get a full report, but first I’ll need to know your names. You know, the usual stuff. And you say your boy has been missing how long?
Distractedly, Jim Williams parted with the information. His answers were blunt, contradictory, imprecise. Ben Hood stepped into the circle and told his story again. The policeman—unconcerned with the usual logistics of Hood’s account—pointed to the ambulance, to the treasure housed there.
—Somebody probably ought to identify, he said. We could do it and get it out of the way. To Jim Williams: You want to come here and have a look?
No, absolutely not. Williams didn’t want to look, to taste that scene. He found himself looking around, ready to suggest almost anybody else. They all watched him swiveling,
each of them ready to volunteer. Maybe Sandy ought to have done it, or Janey, though she was far away, back in the past, jousting with all the hurts that were now called up alongside this one. Jim didn’t want to look at his dead son. Fathers shouldn’t have to. It should not have been a configuration of any paternal fate. It was instead the sad responsibility of sons—identifying the dead—a responsibility Jim had already fulfilled in his life. Sons should bid farewell to fathers.
Then Jim Williams, trembling, resigned himself to the duty. He climbed into the back of the ambulance. His cry emerged, long and hoarse and elastic and then muted, choked off. And they could also hear the ambulance driver venturing the probable cause. And they could hear the other two men inside—there was routine conversation. Football scores. Jim climbed unsteadily from the ambulance, a husk.