FOUR YEARS AGO: her father, Ethan Learner, once admired literature professor and critic, stands in front of the sagging bookshelves in his study, an open poetry book in his hands. Emma is sixteen; her dad forty-six, plenty of salt in his dark hair, a ragged beard, too, grown by neglect, and, above the round bookish glasses, black Russian eyebrows in need of a trim.
She has stopped in the doorway of that room whose quality of doomed penance makes even seasoned visitors, even family, pause and reconsider.
A long silence: digesting a poem, he raises a finger in her direction, but not his head.
“Dad, I’m spending the night at Paula’s. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
He doesn’t seem to hear. Then, slowly, the head comes up, blinking her in; it is always a long way back for him. In the past eight years, his son’s killer has gone to prison, been released, and disappeared somewhere, maybe to his own little hell. But here at home none of it has made any difference that Emma can see, except for the beard.
“Let me read you something,” her father says, with more intensity than the occasion requires.
In the window behind him, past the huge dusk-shadowed limbs of the old oak that has stood in the yard since God knows when, Emma observes the glowing brake lights of her best friend’s car.
“Just the first couple of lines. Her name was Katherine Philips.”
“Dad, I’m going, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Imperceptibly his head falls back, as if by interrupting his train of morbid thought and robbing him of his feeling (though she wants to point out that the feeling isn’t really his but rather belongs to just another dead writer) she has cruelly cut him off from his one source of comfort. Stung, his liquid dark eyes quickly drop back to his book, and a guilty heat begins to creep up her face. He’s Sisyphus, for Christ’s sake, can’t she see? And once again, selfish girl, she’s chosen not to help him climb his mountain.
She leaves him there and goes outside.
This time of year, late fall, the dusk is as dark as night. From Paula’s car, she glances back and sees her mother watching from the open front door. Just watching. Backlit, wearing a stylish cardigan, her blond hair expensively cut: outwardly, at forty-three, the talented and successful garden designer that some of the people of Wyndham Falls still remember from the days before the tragedy.
And yet, upon closer inspection, there’s something a bit off about her. She isn’t waving and calling out “Have a good time, girls!” like the other mothers. Instead she murmurs, so softly it’s like a wounded bird spiraling toward you in the dusk, “Be careful!” Followed by the totally unnecessary “Drive safely!” Which makes her daughter want to hug her, and also to throttle her. Because it’s been like this for so long—half Emma’s entire life—that the memory of that earlier, supposedly happy time is like an old sheet that’s been washed too many times: thin, stained, torn, in places translucent—you can see right through it.
And that’s what life is now.
Her mother, Grace Learner, turns, closes the door. Shut up again, the house is briefly no more than it would seem to be—a “dignified” old Colonial, according to the Realtor, who in a few years will unsuccessfully put it on the market.
Smell of exhaust: Paula waiting. But Emma can’t bring herself to leave anymore. Continues to stand hypnotized by the scene, a frozen lake studded with frozen lives, her gaze pulled back through the black limbs to the glaring window, where her father still stands by the bookshelf reading poems that exist only thanks to the deaths of children.
And in a few moments, as she already knows will happen, her mother appears in the doorway of her father’s room and stands there waiting, as earlier her last living child waited, for the man of the house to look up from his tears and recognize her.