“I know, but I can’t do it, Johnny. I can’t.”
“Okay, go home and wait for me. I’ll get a ride back.”
I gave her the keys to the pickup and kissed her quickly. She nodded but her face was ashen and I wasn’t sure she was registering anything other than the fear of being connected to Ray’s death. She walked to the pickup, doing her best to look like what was happening on the beach meant nothing to her, and drove away without looking back.
All the boats were beached now and the police and the dive team were standing in a loose circle around the body. Several of them were talking on their radios, reporting this unexpected find to their various superiors. As I approached them the Oakridge officer who had earlier suggested we wait by the rocks held up his hand and blocked my path.
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to stay back.”
But I had a clear view of the body now. I lifted my hand to my mouth and gasped, “That’s my father!”
And so a day which I’d known would be long became longer. Patterson had to be called out. I had to explain to him why I was certain it was my father-how I could tell by his watch and his clothes-that I had nothing new to add to the case, that him being found there was pure coincidence as far as I was concerned and, when the question was put to me, that I did not think the fact Stan had killed Gareth meant that either one of them had killed my father.
Patterson said they’d take my father’s body to the lab in Burton to determine the cause of death and to see if there was any forensic evidence. But he told me I shouldn’t be too optimistic they’d find anything that would further their original investigation, given the length of time he’d been underwater.
They gave me a few moments alone with the body. The months underwater had erased the features from its face and left it a pulpy ball on which it was hard to define any trace of personality at all. It was a shocking sight, but I was shocked more by my own ambivalence. The sight of my father’s dead body should have broken me with grief. But it did not. As I looked at the soggy mass I felt only a puzzled emptiness, as though this body was not that of my father, but of some unknown person I had once passed in the street long ago. I wondered how it was possible for a son to feel this way about his father. But I knew. I knew.
By four o’clock it was all over at the lake. The ambulance had taken the bodies away, the dive team had packed up and gone, and Patterson had headed back to town to deal with his paperwork. The two uniformed officers were the last to leave. They walked up and down the beach for several minutes picking up small pieces of trash the other men had left behind, then one of them came over and asked where they should drive me. All day long I had wanted to be gone, away from this place, but now I felt I could not leave without a last, solitary goodbye to a site that was both the start of the guilt I carried for my brother and the end of all the attempts I had made to fix it.
I told the cop I’d make my own way home. He looked dubious for a moment, then reached into the rear of the cruiser and handed me a folded survival blanket.
“Don’t stay too long, it’ll be cold tonight.”
He gave a small salute and the cruiser pulled away.
I looked across at the bungalow where Gareth had lived.
There was smoke coming from the chimney and I knew David would be inside, alone with the loss of his son. I thought about going to see him, but I had enough pain of my own. I sat on the grass bank and wrapped the foil blanket around me. There was less than an hour till the sun dropped below the mountains and the light on the lake was softening and small insects had come out to stand trembling on the surface of the water near the shore. It seemed to me suddenly that I had been cold forever, and I was cold still, even with the blanket. I drew it up so that it covered my head and I looked out from under it at the lake.
Eight years ago I had left Oakridge hoping to outrun the guilt I felt at Stan’s drowning, but far from distancing myself from it, I had compounded it, because by leaving I had added the guilt of abandonment, of sentencing Stan to the exclusive care of my emotionally arid father. Later, too, there had been more guilt as I realized better what my departure must also have meant to Marla.
I should have learned over those eight years that guilt can neither be worked off nor outdistanced. But I did not, and in the end my desperation to be rid of it had driven me back to my hometown. I worked hard there, with Stan and with Marla, trying to force the present to compensate the past. I did the best I could. But it didn’t make any difference.
Stan had believed that life would take care of him. And though his mind was less capable than mine he had been smarter than me. He had understood that you cannot hang on to guilt so desperately, so tenaciously, and hope to live a life that is either bearable or worthwhile.
Now, with my utter failure staring me in the face, I saw, finally, that he had been right. It was not the fixing of guilt that was important, but learning to find a way to come to terms with it, to understand that the past must be lived with, not forever battled against.
My guilt had become the structure of my world, but that day, as I watched the waters of the lake darken, the sheer weight of regret I carried finally pushed me beyond itself and somehow, by overload, cauterized that part of me which made such an ongoing agony of my mistakes. I’d simply had too much to take any more, but I also knew that if I kept feeding my guilt, kept it alive at such a level, I would certainly destroy what little there was left in the world that I still held dear. There would be no chance at all for Marla and me.
I was not absolved, I was not free of everything I had ever done. My past would always be with me and I would always regret so much of it, but there was now some curtain drawn across it, through which it could still be seen but which muted its sounds and colors and filtered it just enough that its incandescent horror could no longer scorch the present so deeply.
Perhaps it would not last. Perhaps my guilt would again catch me and begin anew the process of tearing the lives of those around me to pieces. But for now I was beyond it and I would use this respite from it as carefully as I could to build a life with Marla in which she and I would at last be able to find some measure of joy in each other. Sometime in the future. Sometime, if we were lucky.
I left the lake as the light was fading. There were clouds now in the sky and a breeze had started. Millicent’s Datsun had been towed from the trail and there was nothing where it had been but torn earth and the trunk of a tree from which the bark had been scraped. When I reached the Oakridge Loop I called Marla on my cell phone. Half an hour later she met me in the pickup and we drove home pressed against each other with the heater not working and whatever thoughts we were thinking kept silent inside ourselves.
Patterson called in the middle of the following week to tell me my father’s body had yielded nothing conclusive. The fact that he’d been found in the lake dressed in business clothes seemed to confirm a theory of foul play, but neither the wound they had discovered on the back of his head nor anything on his person gave any indication as to who might have been involved. Similarly, questioning David, the lake’s only permanent resident, had provided no useful information. Patterson told me he was sorry, but finding the body was probably as good as it was going to get.
Two days later, in the morning, we buried Stan and Rosie and my father.
The next day there was snow on the ground at Empty Mile.
And the day after that Marla and I locked up the cabin and got into the pickup and drove out of Oakridge toward the East.
Acknowledgment
Huge thanks to Catherine and Andrea for providing a bed, a place to write, and food to eat at a crucial moment-this book would not have been completed without that stay in paradise.
