Late in the Tuesday night before the Thanksgiving recess which would begin the next day at noon, Rachel, drifting to sleep in her single bed in the room just down the hall from the master bedroom, heard tires on the gravel driveway. She was so close to sleep she wanted to pretend she hadn’t heard the sound or was just dreaming it. Someone had lost his way and was turning around in the driveway.
In the middle of the night? Who? The police? Because something terrible had happened in the dorms? A bad trip? A rapist breaking in? Please, not a suicide! It had happened at a colleague boarding school last year. She jumped out of bed and looked out the window.
The black surface of Bob’s BMW glistened in the yellow porch light. He was already almost to the front door. Flooded with relief and surprise—he’d told her he would arrive tomorrow night—she ran down the hall in her bare feet, hearing the front door open, and got into their king size bed. Seconds later, she heard him coming up the stairs. She rolled over so her back would be to him as he entered the room.
“Rachel?” A whisper in the dark, behind her. She didn’t answer. His footsteps toward the bathroom. The toilet flushing, then water running in the basin. Then silence, while he undressed. Then an instant of light she perceived through her eyelids. Then the click of the bathroom light switch, then darkness again, his footsteps padding, and the slight chill on her back as he lifted the covers, and she turned over toward him, still pretending to sleep, nestling, as if by instinct her chin into his neck, while his arm came over her shoulders. “Surprise! Surprise,” he whispered. And indeed it was: he’d skipped a whole day of work to have an extra day with her and Sylvia! She pressed herself more tightly against him. All was well! All was well! And they both drifted to sleep.
In the morning, before he awoke, she lifted his arm from her shoulder, rolled over away and got up as quietly as she could out of bed, and went down the hall to the room where she slept when he wasn’t home and made up the bed. Just in case he went in there and wondered who’d been her guest. Even though he’d never gone in there. Not once in nineteen years. There was no reason he would.
She went back down the hall to their room and rejoined him in bed. “Thank you,” she said, not whispering now. “Four whole days together, not just three!” Expecting they would make love. But he slept on, exhausted, she was sure. She waited some more. He still slept on.
“Bob, wake up,” she said, not quite loudly enough. Because the head of school should be at breakfast to wish the girls a happy Thanksgiving. And remind them of how much they had to be thankful for. She got out of bed, hoping he would awake before she was finished dressing, but he slept on. Disappointed with herself, like an addict incapable of refraining, she left him for the dining hall.
IN THE EARLY afternoon, after parents’ cars and the buses to the airports and Amtrak had carried the students away for the long weekend, Rachel drove in her green Subaru station wagon to the Stop and Shop in Fieldington to shop for Thanksgiving dinner. Bob sat beside her in the passenger seat. “I wish I’d woken up on time,” he’d said. She’d forgiven him, of course.
Sylvia sat in the backseat between Elizabeth, who was staying with the Perrine-Bickhams because Thanksgiving break was too short to go all the way to Oklahoma, and Auda Hellmann, an exchange student with red hair from the Salem School in Germany who was also staying with Rachel’s family, Germany being even further away than Oklahoma.
On that same afternoon, Christopher Triplett stood at the edge of the parking lot of the Stop and Shop, waiting for the bus to Hartford. He would buy the ticket on the bus with the panhandling money he’d saved up because he didn’t need to buy food anymore. He hoped his aunt would be glad to have him. He would’ve called her to tell her he was coming, but he’d lost his cell phone. He’d have to take the chance. Maybe she would forgive him for the way he’d treated her last summer—showing up at her door, needing shelter, accepting her hospitality and her offered affection, and then suddenly disappearing.
It was a cold morning, but the sky was blue and cloudless and the air was fresh. He was almost happy, but nervous too, on edge. Like when you expect something good to happen—if something very bad doesn’t happen first.
Even though he was not panhandling at that moment, some people coming in and out of the store must have recognized him. Because they walked right past him as if he were not there, and others glanced at him and then quickly away. The tug of war between his hope his only living relative would forgive him and the fear she would slam the door in his face made him more and more agitated. He couldn’t stop himself from checking the rooftops and all the windows. His hands felt empty without a weapon in them, so he put them in his pockets.
A silver Prius came toward him across the parking lot, stopping so near him he had to step back, and a fat teenage boy, wearing a baseball cap backwards, got out and slammed the door. Christopher jumped at the sudden noise. The kid stared at him. Like he’d never seen anything like that before. “I’m waiting for the bus, shithead,” Christopher said. “You got a problem with that?”
“Why would I give a fuck what you’re waiting for?” the kid asked, and turned and sauntered away across the parking lot.
Christopher starts after him. He’s going to reach around the kid’s head and poke his forefingers into each eye and pry them out, hear the sucking sound the eyeballs make, feel the wetness on his fingers. And know the justice.
Then the darkness came. Did he close his eyes? And then it was bright again. The kid strolled into the store, utterly ignorant of what had been about to happen to him.
A few minutes later, while he was still imagining the shitstorm he would be in if he hadn’t stopped himself, an elderly lady in a brown coat paused in her walk across the parking lot, and searched his face with kind gray eyes. “I wish you a happy Thanksgiving,” she said. Her voice was firm, her manner formal.
“I thank you,” he said. It was a moment of grace.
She nodded her head and reached in her purse.
“I don’t need money,” he said, gently. “I’m not begging.”
She flushed, withdrawing her hand from the purse. “I’m sorry, the other day, near the ice cream store—”
He shook his head. “I don’t need to do that anymore, but don’t be embarrassed. Everything’s fine.”
“That’s good. And you have a place to stay?”
“Yes, ma’am, I have a place to stay.”
“I’m glad!”
“It’s by the river.”
“And they’re feeding you?”
“Yeah, they’re feeding me.” He was feeling shy. And yet he wanted to tell her everything. If there was a bench, he’d ask her to sit.
“What organization is it? I’d like to know. Maybe I could volunteer.”
“What do mean, organization?” he said, sad all of a sudden. And a minute ago he’d been almost happy! She was trapping him into telling her where his camp was. That was her job. Then they’d come and pull it apart.
“I mean where they’re feeding you. Where you sleep.”
He shook his head.
“All right, I’ll leave you alone,” she said, speaking softly, and he understood she was respecting his privacy. “But I am glad you have a place to stay.” She stepped past him. He felt a surge of regret, wanted to call her back, to say he was sorry for being so wrong about her intentions.
She stopped, stood very still for a second, like she’d suddenly thought of something. She turned around. “Then why are you standing here?”
“I’m waiting for the bus.”
“The bus?”
“The one to Hartford.”
“There’s no bus to Hartford.”
“What do you mean, there’s no bus to Hartford? What’s this?” He pointed to a bus schedule on a placard affixed to a light pole.
“Oh dear! That’s outdated. They should have taken it down. There’s no bus to Hartford anymore.”
“No bus! How can they do that? Just cancel a bus?” He was genuinely amazed. He really didn’t know anymore how anything worked.
“I’m so sorry. How will you—”
“You think I’m a nutcase, don’t you?”
She looked at him gravely. It seemed for a very long time. Then she shook her head. “It’s the world that’s crazy. Not you.”
He thought about that for a moment. “I didn’t say the world wasn’t crazy,” he said. “It was crazy of me though, to think I should go to Hartford when I have a place right here.” The words surprised him. He was just making them up. But now that he’d said them, they almost felt true.
“And they’ll give you a nice Thanksgiving dinner?”
He thought about the cans of food the two girls had provided him. “Nice enough,” he said.
“I’m so glad,” she said. “God bless you”—and she turned to cross the parking lot toward the Stop and Shop.
He stood very still, fighting off the urge to run after her and tell her everything. Instead, he realized it was getting warm, and took off his down jacket and stuffed it into his backpack resting by his feet. He didn’t see the car with a couple in the front and three girls in the back.
ELIZABETH AND SYLVIA saw their homeless man standing near a silver Prius. The down jacket he wore was like a flag. Would Rachel recognize it? Had Gloria proudly shown them to her when she’d bought them for the club? “What are you staring at?” Auda Hellmann asked.
Then the homeless man took off the down jacket and stuffed it in a backpack that was by his feet, and Rachel steered her car into the slot between a silver Prius and a ragged man standing in a thin tattered shirt with a backpack at his feet. She moved her glance from him to the rearview mirror to look into Elizabeth’s and Sylvia’s eyes. “Is that your homeless man?”
Elizabeth said, “No. That’s not him.” Sylvia looked away, releasing her breath.
Then the homeless man picked up his backpack and put it on and walked away. Everyone in the car watched him go. “Why are there so many homeless people in America?” Auda asked. “I saw them everywhere when I was in New York.”
In the front seat, Bob said, “That’s a good question. We better damn well figure it out.”
“Or what, Dad? If we don’t, what?” Sylvia said.
He hesitated. “We just won’t like ourselves very much, I guess. Some of us already don’t.”
“I’m glad you said that, Dad,” Sylvia said.
“I’m glad too,” Rachel said, turning now to Bob beside her in the front. He was looking out across the parking lot. He’d made his remark to the whole wide world.
IN THE STORE, Sylvia’s parents took half of the shopping list and went off toward the produce. Elizabeth, who’d accepted the second half, tore it into three parts, glancing meaningfully at Sylvia, and then the three girls separated, until Sylvia came as if by chance to where Elizabeth was pretending to ponder which kind of bread crumbs to choose for the stuffing.
“You think your mother recognized the…”
“Jacket?” Sylvia finished. It was the first time she’d ever seen Elizabeth look so worried. “No. She never even saw it. I was watching both. She was looking straight ahead.”
“And then he took it off?”
“Yeah, then he took it off.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“She probably wouldn’t have recognized it even if she did see it.”
“Maybe not. But then why did you keep quiet when your mother asked if he was the one?”
“I didn’t want to lie to my mother.”
“Really? What do you think you were doing at Morning Meeting?”
Auda came at that exact moment. “What do parsnips look like?” she asked. “We don’t eat them in Germany.”
THAT NIGHT, RACHEL dreamed she was in some kind of boat. Ahead of her was a harbor, empty of ships, save one far away against a dim horizon. The boat made no sound, propelled over the water through a mist by neither engine nor sail.
Behind her, out of sight, she felt the solid brown land slipping further away, and then the mist and the water of the harbor joined and everything was liquid, without form, except the ship toward which she was flowing. It got bigger and bigger until it was a massive cliff looming over her with a ladder coming down. She put her right foot on its bottom rung, and the boat, with her left foot still on its thin gunwale, began to part from the ship. Her two feet moved further and further apart. She saw each separate little wave jar against the side of the ship and turn to froth, she saw the stipples in the red rust above the waterline. At last, just as she was about to make a clown’s pratfall into the water between the ship and the boat, she moved her left foot off the boat’s gunwale onto the bottom rung of the ladder and climbed upward and was finally on the deck. A tiny person whose gender and age she could not determine, dressed in a piercingly bright white sailor suit, reminded her she was still the captain.
“We are days and days and days late in getting started, and no one but you knows how to start the engines.”
“I don’t,” Rachel said, “but please weigh anchor anyway.”
The little sailor disappeared and soon she felt the ship moving. It was gigantic, she couldn’t see the end of it in either direction and the funnel above her was a tower, but the ship glided as soundlessly as the little boat out through the narrows, and now she could see the land slipping by in sharp focus. Like a magnified photograph. Buildings, trees, cars of every color, people walking on streets. The ship glided faster and faster stern first, silently, toward the open ocean. She watched a green buoy leaning with the current, and then she woke up.
In the morning, lying beside Bob, she told the dream to him and asked him what he thought it meant. He waited for an irritatingly long time, staring up at the ceiling, pretending to be thinking hard. He turned his head to her and said, in his most gentle voice, “I think it would be best if you figured that out for yourself.” He kissed her forehead. “I know you will.” He got up and took a shower and left her in the bed.
“If I wanted to figure it out myself, I wouldn’t have asked you,” she murmured toward the closed bathroom door. But still, he’d said he was sure she’d figure it out, and anyway maybe Freud, or whoever it was, was wrong and dreams didn’t mean anything—just random vivid craziness we cook up in our heads—and there were a million real things that needed to get done for the Thanksgiving dinner.
Like when should she wake the girls up so they could help?