A Town of Empty Rooms Read online

  “Maybe it’s something at the school,” she said, carefully. “Maybe his classmates — ”

  “Maybe his teacher?” he asked. “What’s her name — ”

  “Miss Donna. The CEO of kindergarten.”

  He laughed. She stopped folding and listened; he had not laughed at anything she’d said in a while.

  “Is it her?” he said. “Is she too hard on her product line?” He was restless, folding up the small shirts and tossing them on the sofa. “What do you think? Who do you think is upsetting him?”

  They were both afraid. The heater thunked, alarmingly; they stood in this flimsy house that held the odor of dirt; the low-echoing sound reminded her where they were. It felt like nowhere. She wanted to go to him and touch his cheek, the hard, clear slope of it; she wanted him to reach forward and touch her arm, softly, the way he used to, to feel his hand slip gently beneath her shirt. He looked so frightened pacing the room, and she could hear some crumbling in his voice. There was something pure in the knowledge that here was the only other person in the world who bore the same fear that you did about your child. They had shared other things — the idea that the other person said things that seemed infinitely smart and important, the sensation of being asleep together, flesh against flesh, over years, the shudder of sex, the sounds they made into each other’s skin during orgasm, the odd understanding that all these pots and pans and utensils were theirs, the perception, over the last decade, of the shift and startling fading of youth, and then this, this emotion that began five years ago. The moment Zeb was born, they were united in love for him but also in this profound and utter fear.

  “I wish I knew,” she said.

  He sat on the couch; she sat next to him. She could sense his restlessness in the way he was tapping his foot, and she put a hand on his leg, gently.

  She remembered the day that they had brought Zeb home from the hospital. They had sat in their living room, this unbelievably small, pink person wrapped in a blanket, in her arms, and after the relatives and friends had brought their casseroles and left, when there was finally silence, they remained seated and looked at their son. They were alone, the three of them. Suddenly she was aware of the sound of the city roaring below them, the whine of a wet, gray April New York City morning, the sounds of people going to work, impassive through birth and death. Sitting in this small room with this tiny being, she felt, acutely, the sense that they had all been thrown there, carelessly, that the continents and the oceans clung to the earth by the most fragile gravity, that they could grip this child tightly and he could still fall through their arms. She understood, more fully, her father’s fear of what could happen to her. She stared at the boy and she wanted to surround him, and she saw the way Dan’s large hand set the blanket around the child’s face, the way his hand trembled. She loved him for his helplessness, for the way he, too, was now a prisoner.

  She felt him pause for a moment when she put her hand on his leg. They sat for a moment, like this, as though they were testing it. Maybe now they could move on from the standoff between them. Dan looked up at her for a moment, and, as though her face was too bright, like the sun, he jumped up and started walking around the room. They had eight hours before the shrieking began again. She knew that walk, its briskness; he wanted to fix this. Now.

  “It’s not the teacher. Not the students. Maybe it’s something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “What do you say to him?”

  They had not begun accusing each other when Zeb was first born; that happened over time, when the endless sleeplessness made their brains feel like cotton, when the children, inexplicably, flew into demonic rages in supermarkets, when she counted to three and no one had any desire to do what she asked, when it became clear they were, as parents, as helpless and sometimes ineffectual as castaways thrown into an ocean on a raft. Someone had to have gotten them into this mess. You. How could happiness feel this bad?

  It began then, the occasional moment of blame, the desire to squeeze out of the chaos and find this — an escape. But now she saw something new in his eyes: desperation.

  “I tell him, ‘Go inside.’”

  “What about saying, ‘Kindergarten will be fun! You’ll be the star!’”

  “Like that will make it happen?” she asked.

  They wanted their child to walk into school, happy, even carefree, the way other people’s children seemed to be — how did the other parents engineer it? He rubbed his hands together the way he did when he was about to make a presentation.

  “But why do other kids just walk in?” he asked.

  “Maybe they’ve lived here longer. He’s just been here a month.”

  “Maybe you’re saying something that’s scaring him,” he said.

  Something hardened in her. “Me? Why does it have to be me?”

  “It has to be something,” he said, folding a child’s pair of jeans, as if that gesture would reveal some innocence.

  “Well, keep thinking,” she said. She walked to the other side of the room, annoyed.

  SHE REMEMBERED THAT, AT THE beginning, he had seemed devoid of fear. The first time she and Dan walked down the street, she felt like she wanted to capture him, like a butterfly. The longing became wide inside her, like a net. It buoyed her up so she felt like her feet were light on the sidewalk. He walked, but what she loved about him, what she wanted to absorb, was his eagerness, which he had manufactured, somehow, to reside in every part of himself — his large, slender hands, which reached up to gesture through the air when he made a point, which reached forward, gently, to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. She saw it in the way he rushed into a restaurant and moved them three times until he had found the right seat. She saw it in the way he pressed the waiter for the best year for the Cabernet. She saw it in the way he took her hand later, the way he leaned in and kissed her. Early on, he seemed to believe their life together was determined; it was a certainty that startled her.

  Dan had specialized in creating glossy press packets, strategies for the small cities and regions that had been overlooked, ignored: He dragged out the Museum of Handmade Potholders in Gelman, Virginia, Two hundred and thirty years ago, colonial women were faced with a question: How to pick up a steaming pot? This museum is the answer. Or the botanical garden that held the one coconut tree that produced a pink coconut. Come to Tall Palms, Florida, home of the rare pink coconut tree. Or simply the state park that no one visited: Come see the unmarked beauty of Gorges State Park in Georgia! “I can raise any town’s tourist traffic twenty percent,” he said, and he was right; they came from small, midsized cities along the Eastern seaboard to get his expertise, to be well-regarded, a destination where strangers wanted to go. During one of their first dinners, he said, “Burgo, South Carolina. What kind of name is Burgo? A bunch of chain stores, a mucky lake. But Burgo is home to a group of the most dedicated troll doll collectors in the country. They had to put together a museum! That led to a revival of the local handmade donut store. No one believes they have anything valuable to offer. They just want Walmart, Target, Old Navy. That’s not how they’ll bring people in. America. I’m sick of hearing about DisneyWorld; I’m sick of hearing about the Mall of America. They’re attention hogs. You have to find what is unique in a town. I can tell them what’s worthwhile about themselves. I can help spread the love.”

  He knew everything about the promotion of small towns, but he did not tell Serena that he felt he was improvising his family. Serena took it for granted that her family, with its flaws, would not vanish. He did not tell her that he felt a cool gratitude blow through him when he opened the door, lugging plastic bags of groceries, to see her sitting at the table, bent over her laptop, casually expecting his arrival; he could not believe it when he crawled into the bed they shared and she was there; he could not believe it when the children ran to him in a tide of sound, their small, fierce arms embracing him. It was gorgeous and disorienting, and in New York he had walked through midtown and
had felt like he was part of the world. As a boy, he had not imagined he could ever be part of it.

  He remembered when he was five, walking into the parking garage under their building with his brother Harold. He saw his father pressing up against a woman, her long arms wrapped around him, her fingernails sharp and red. Dan remembered the sudden rapid pace of his heart; how his father’s knees buckled, as though he’d been shot; how his father turned toward him, how he pushed the woman into the car, how he heard the trilling and awful sound of her laugh; how his father walked toward them, his footsteps ringing through the dank parking garage, and stared at them, his face icy and incomprehensible. Dan believed, at that moment, that anything could happen: Their father could drive off with that woman or, perhaps, kill them.

  “You saw nothing,” their father said. “Go.” Dan barely spoke the whole year he was five; his tongue felt like a wild fish in his mouth. He barely got through words the next year or the next, until his mother, distraught after their father left them, finally noticed and hired a speech therapist for him.

  “My first client was in Mississippi,” he told her, and laughed. “I remember how slowly I said the name. Perfectly. Mississippi.”

  There is, in finding your beloved, the belief that this person answers a question that resides in you, a question that you did not know has always lived inside you. Dan answered Serena’s question — how can you move through the world while sometimes closing your eyes to what surrounds you? She loved in Dan what seemed to be an endless hopefulness. She liked the way he believed in clichés; he seemed to believe in the goodness of the world even after growing up in a family that wanted to disregard him. It seemed so generous, this eagerness, so fearless in a way. She answered the question for Dan — how can you move through the world while allowing yourself to see everything in other people? He had loved the fact that she could not hide anything about herself and could spend large amounts of time talking about her fears, that she regarded the world with a clarity that he did not; he admired that. He had spent his life trying to find people who would not surprise him at all.

  After their wedding, they drove, with the cavalier machismo of the newly married, all night to a flimsy, plastic motel by the highway just off the Delaware Memorial Bridge, a place they had chosen just because they were too tired to move. There was such a glorious naiveté in that drive, that rush in their rental car down I-95, by the rattling trucks, by the people hunched over the steering wheels, for the cool pure hope that, by finding each other, they had fled some basic sadness. They spent their marital night at a truck stop, the long, white beams from the headlights sweeping through the plain room, the trod-on blue carpet, the sharp odor of Lysol, the guttural grinding of the engines outside. She gazed at him, sitting naked against the pine headboard, one knee bent, looking out at the semis lined up in the parking lot, and the headlights fell upon his face so that he looked as though he expected to be swallowed into them, into pure light. She moved toward him, wanting, too, to be brought into his longing. He wanted to fall into her breasts, her thighs, the way she cupped her chin in her hand and peered into the darkness outside as if waiting to see something else come out of it. She loved his hope, and he loved her fear. They fell into each other, grateful for each other’s arms and legs and lips and for what they could grab from each other, and they woke to the sour, damp sheets, the pink light of the sun in the shabby room; she looked at him asleep beside her, and she felt that particular brief melting pleasure — she did not want to be anywhere else.

  The flaws were already sown, as they are with any union.

  HE HAD THOUGHT SHE WAS joking when she called to tell him that she had been escorted by security out of her office at Pepsi. He laughed, but when she was silent, he could not speak for two days; he did not trust how he would form the words. He put on a good face for the lawyers; he watched their small savings vanish; then, a few weeks later, when he walked with her out of the lawyers’ office, after they had settled with Pepsi and the company had agreed not to press charges, he leaned toward her and asked why she did it.

  “I missed my father,” she said.

  He stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I wanted money so we could get out of town.”

  She said this in a normal voice. He picked up a fork and began to twirl it slowly, a simple, ordinary action; he hoped it would keep his hands from trembling. “Out of town? Where?”

  “He always told me, ‘Be prepared to leave.’ We talked about it. It was a kind of bond.”

  He nodded, quickly, as though to prove he understood. Her hands felt warm, but he was aware of their physicality, the bones in her knuckles, the rubbery tendons under her skin, how delighted he had been when they held hands before and he could not distinguish between her hands and his own. Now he squeezed them for a moment, but then he let go.

  “Just then — I missed him so much I could barely breathe.”

  He closed his eyes; she would think he was saddened, but he was thinking of something else.

  The truth was that at his brother Harold’s funeral, a few weeks before, he had been unable to feel. He was surrounded by the members of his family, weeping, his father standing back, gray, the first time he’d seen him in years, and Dan felt a hollow sensation in his chest. Harold had been the only other person who had seen their father in the garage, and Dan remembered the rise and fall of his eight-year-old brother’s breath, Harold’s hand gripping his shoulder, and how they felt like one body walking out of that shadowed garage into the golden light emanating from the lobby’s chandelier. The chandelier looked like a cluster of icicles, and they stood beneath its dim burnished light, stunned. He waited for Harold to do something, and his brother lunged toward the light switch and switched off the chandelier. The lobby darkened; people turned toward them; Harold laughed and switched it on again. They took turns, switching the chandelier on and off, and he loved Harold then, intensely, for this, the way they controlled the lobby, the two of them, until they were sent upstairs.

  Serena was looking at him, waiting; he needed to speak quickly. This was why he did not want to feel; it was clearly dangerous.

  “Yes,” he said.

  DAN NOTICED FORREST SANDERS, THE aging Boy Scout, puttering around his garden in the evening. Forrest lifted a hand in greeting but did not have time to talk. Dan wanted to talk to him privately in the Boy Scout office; his desire to belong to something, to be welcomed into this seemingly happy group, felt too precious to reveal across the wire fence. He noticed when Forrest gunned his pickup truck and drove off wearing his Scout uniform: It appeared to be Mondays. The next Monday, Dan waited a few minutes, got into his car, and followed him.

  He reached the office at 8:00 AM, when it opened. He stood for a moment, gazing at the building. The sign outside the building said: TODAY’S WORDS: SCOUTS LIVE UP TO THEM! BRAVE CHEERFUL CLEAN REVERENT OBEDIENT

  Forrest was restocking Scout navy caps on a shelf. He looked up.

  “Howdy, neighbor,” he said. “Up early.”

  “Early to bed, early to rise,” said Dan, which was the sort of thing he imagined Forrest might like to hear. He looked around the room; the Scout items, in their outdoorsy innocence, seemed to be mocking him.

  “How’s your boy?”

  “Wanted to see if I could enroll him. And to see if I could apply to be a troop assistant leader. If you need one.” He heard himself make this offer and was suddenly afraid that Forrest would turn him down. Forrest grinned as though a lever had been pressed in his head.

  “Why not? Come in the back. We’ll get you the forms.”

  Dan followed Forrest to the back of the store. Forrest went to a metal desk surrounded by posters. There was a poster of a Scout leader pinning a badge to a beaming boy. There was a poster with a picture of a desk and large brown shoes. It said: Father’s Office: Where you can fix scraped knees and hurt feelings.

  “Your son will never forget it,” he said, gravely. “Those moments when you stand with him,
as he receives his badge, as you see the firelight on his face, as you kneel beside your boy, sharpening a stick . . . the moment he looks at you and sees you there, his father. Beside him.” He looked at him. “What’s your best Scout memory, Mister Dan?”

  Dan rubbed his hands on his slacks. “Best memory,” he said. He leaned forward. “Hard to choose, Mister, ah, Forrest. Maybe when . . .” He glanced at the posters on the walls. “When my father taught me to make fire. Rubbing the sticks together. In our backyard. That spark.”

  “I made fire, too,” said Forrest. “I remember when a spark flew off the stick and landed on a pile of leaves. It took but a second and everything was ablaze. My poppa fell onto it and rolled. He rolled out that fire with his shoulder. One second and it was out. Let me tell you. True story.”

  “Sounds like a great man,” said Dan; he sensed that Forrest wanted to be admired.

  “A giant. I’m telling you.” His voice was suddenly fierce. “Don’t even try to measure up. Don’t even think about it.”

  “I won’t,” said Dan, leaning back.

  “Good,” said Forrest. His eyes were sharp and blue, taking him in. “So. Your boy’s going to be thanking you the rest of his life for this, Mr. Dan Shine. He’s going to be a good Southern gentleman after we’re done with him.”

  “Let’s hope he can make a fire,” said Dan. “And put it out with his shoulder.”

  “Amen,” said Forrest.

  Chapter Five

  THREE WEEKS INTO THE SCHOOL session, Zeb made a friend. Serena stood on the patchy wet grass outside his bungalow with her son, who held her hand with a violent, bone-crunching grip until Ryan showed up. Ryan was six years old and almost five feet tall. He was the son of a former football star and already ran with sportsmanlike grace. When Zeb saw this boy, he lit up, beautifully, pink rising from his cheeks to his hairline. It was as though he was trying to recognize himself.