In the darkened room at the Saltmarsh Motel, Lowell and Sam sit in silence.
Lowell smells western Massachusetts in the fall. He smells pine resin. He smells the thirteenth of September, 1987. He remembers what he did the day the plane blew up on the national news. He remembers that he left the school’s common room blindly and drunkenly. Other boys made way for him, he vaguely remembers that, though he told no one his mother had been on the flight. He stumbled down the hall to the only pay telephone in his dorm.
He dialed Washington.
“Your father’s still away, Lowell,” the secretary said. “He hasn’t called in since the hijacking. What message should I give him when he calls?”
“I don’t know,” Lowell said. He hung up.
He walked out through the school grounds and found himself on the highway heading east. It was dark. He passed a green billboard that announced in phosphorescent letters: BOSTON 90. He realized he must have walked for several hours. Cars passed him. Trucks passed. He decided to hitch a ride. It was only minutes before a pickup stopped.
“Where you headed, kid?” the driver asked. He wore a plaid shirt and a Red Sox baseball cap.
“I don’t know,” Lowell said.
“Are you from the school? You look like a prep school kid.”
Lowell felt he should know the answer to this question, but he could not think of it.
“You running away?” the driver asked.
“I don’t know,” Lowell said.
The driver frowned. “Are you on something? Like, are you …?”
“No,” Lowell said firmly.
“Rumor is that school’s a running river of drugs.”
“I’m not on anything,” Lowell said. This certainty felt like an anchor, like the one thing, for the time being, that he knew to be unquestionably true.
The driver scratched his head. “How about I buy you a hamburger?” he said. “There’s a pit stop about ten miles on. Hop in.”
Lowell climbed in. There was a tool kit on the passenger seat, the kind that carpenters wear like an apron. The driver pushed it onto the floor. “Put your feet on it,” he said cheerfully. “Nothing you can hurt.” A pine-scented air freshener in the shape of a Christmas tree dangled from the rearview mirror. The cabin smelled of dog. “Name’s Joel,” the driver said. “What’s yours?”
“Lowell.”
“You in trouble, Lowell?”
“I guess so,” Lowell said.
“Boy kind?” Joel asked. “Girlfriend left you? Got her knocked up?”
Lowell said nothing.
“Feels like the end of the world?” the driver asked sympathetically.
“Yes,” Lowell said.
“It ain’t,” the driver assured him cheerfully. “I know it feels like it, but it ain’t. Hell, I still remember the night I found out my high school sweetheart was cheating on me. I got blind stinking drunk and I borrowed my dad’s car and drove it about one hundred miles an hour. I actually thought about smashing myself into a tree. Make her sorry, you know? Talk about stupid. What I did was hit something on the shoulder, spun out of control, got the fright of my life. Boy, did I suddenly find out how much I wanted to stay alive!
“I was lucky. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but you just lost someone, right?”
“Yes,” Lowell said.
“You want to talk about it?”
“No,” Lowell said.
“Okay. That’s fine. You go with your gut, kid. You want to tell me her name?”
“My mother,” Lowell said.
“Your mother?”
“She just died.”
“Oh.” Joel had no contribution to make on this subject. “Shit. Well, shit. That’s heavy stuff.”
They drove in silence until the glow of a Shell station came over the highway like a sunrise. “Bathroom,” Joel said. “Meet you in the restaurant.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
But the pines of the state forest rose like a wall just fifty feet from the gas pumps and as soon as Joel disappeared into the men’s room, Lowell walked into the pines. He kept walking. It was cold and he wished he had a warmer jacket. He walked until he was too weary to walk any further, then he made a nest for himself in the spongy pine-straw and curled into it. He slept and dreamed that he was alone in a rowboat without any oars. There were rocks. There was a lighthouse somewhere. There was fog. He could see debris floating past his boat: lost luggage; his father’s books; the Dead Sea Scrolls; a birdcage with doves.
Shipwreck, he realized.
He realized other boats were drifting nearby in the dark.
He could hear his mother calling for help. “Lowell!” she called all night. “Lowell!”
But he had no oars and no light. He could not find her. There was nothing he could do.
He woke to find himself sobbing, his mouth full of spiky needles and earth.
When they found him, he was huddled at the base of a tree, numb with cold. He spent a week in the school infirmary with pneumonia.
All that night, he thinks now—thirteen years and four months later—all that night when she called and called, she was still alive in that black place, sending me doves.