A small, respectable life – Jonathan Hollis felt he had the small part down, but he was falling further and further from respectability. He tried, he pretended, but in the end he always saw himself as far, far short of that. He felt polluted, forever guilty and small. He had never moved out and away, had never shed the clutches of that small, quiet place that hung like low clouds over his life.
Harwinton was a place of rolling hills and one traffic light. Too small to have its own high school, patrolled by state police because the population of 5,000 didn’t require more than one officer at any given time. Jonathan had lived here his whole life. Gene, the Braddick brothers and himself had all attended the tiny elementary school together. They rode their bikes through these small neighborhoods where everything seemed perpetually uphill and made bike riding an arduous task with occasional downhill thrills. Gene had skipped college and gone right to work for the town. Conner and Michael attended the state university, their parents always a bit more well-off than everyone else, and Jonathan attended community college for journalism.
Now, he wrote for the Gazette, which was lying on death’s door and barely able to pay the bills. Jonathan didn’t make a lot of money, and he would probably end up jobless in the next year, forced to join the unwashed hordes of professional internet writers. Mary worked weekends as a nurse at the local hospital. She made more money in a weekend than he did in a week. Perhaps he should just give up the writing completely and get something more respectable, where one works with his hands all day and all week and in the end has something to show for it – a new deck, a house, a building, something more than a five-hundred-word article that disappears into the annals of forgotten history.
Seeing his house, something he and Mary had worked and saved for, brought all of it back. He should have been proud of this place, despite the desperation they both shared in trying to pay for it. But it was built after that night in the Adirondacks; it was built during this fever dream of remorse, and, because of all that, it seemed to sag in under the weight of the past, sinking slowly into the wet soil. Every time he set foot inside, he felt it sink deeper.
He pulled into the driveway, and something in the trees behind the house drew his attention. He looked but saw nothing in particular, as if his animal brain had registered something important but his civilized, human mind could not put the pieces together. He stared into the trees that led to that marshland farther back. The leaves hadn’t changed yet. It was a warm autumn, everything hanging on, living out their last days to the fullest and brightest. No. He didn’t see anything. It was nerves, imagination, ghosts of the past. Jonathan wandered into those trees occasionally with Jacob, helping the boy explore the woods the way Jonathan had done when he was young. It was always muddy, even when there were weeks without rain. Jacob liked it, but he wasn’t the only one. About an acre back, at the edge of the marsh, they found a clearing in the trees with a small circle of rocks for a fire and benches made of carved-out deadwood. Liquor bottles and old beer cans littered the forest floor here. Jonathan hoped it was teenagers and not some wayward vagrants. He didn’t like the thought of strange men loitering in the woods so near the home where his boy played and his wife stayed home alone much of the day. Teenagers being stupid was one thing, but bums using the clearing as some sort of camp downright disturbed him. Since making that discovery, Jacob couldn’t go into the woods alone. He always had to be within sight of the back porch and either Jonathan or Mary would be there watching him. It wasn’t enough having to worry about the bears and coyotes that frequented the area during the summer; now he had to be concerned about whatever weirdos could be hanging around in the woods near his home.
He stepped inside, shut the front door, and felt the house sink a bit more. It seemed strangely quiet. Images flashed into Jonathan’s brain from old, forgotten television programs and commercials that showed a father arriving home and his family running to greet him happily at the door. But that was not the case. He found Mary at the kitchen table, poring over her computer, her thick brown hair resting on her shoulders, glasses perched on a small nose.
She looked up and smiled with quiet, wet eyes and said, “Are you okay?” He wasn’t sure if she asked because of Gene’s wake or if it was a more generalized question. Either way the answer was no. How many times had she begged him to come clean? To fess up to whatever was lingering inside him, but he couldn’t – he wouldn’t. It would destroy everything in one fell swoop. Although, maybe this slow destruction was worse. He couldn’t tell and he hadn’t the courage to test it.
“Where’s Jacob?” he said.
“In his room, playing. How was the wake?”
“About as you’d expect it to be. Lot of people, though. So that’s good, I suppose. I’m meeting Conner and Michael tonight. Talk about things.”
“That’s good,” she said. “You all should get together and talk this through. It’s been too long, and I’m sure this is hard on each of you.”
“Right,” he said and nodded appreciatively. He tried to look her in the eyes, but she turned away and that hurt most of all. She hadn’t touched him in a couple of weeks now. They hadn’t made love for two months. They were less husband and wife now than
