Chapter 10

Luke was sitting in the corner, smoking a cigarette. His hair was longer than the last time she’d seen it, unwashed, and he appeared tired, his eyes haggard, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well.

Are you all right, sweetie? she asked.
He took a drag of his cigarette and slowly blew the smoke out.
Are you and Dad going to get a divorce?
Why would you ask that?
Are you?
No. Of course, not.
Are you still seeing that man?
No.
Do you love Dad?
Yes.
Then why did you do that?

When she woke Luke was gone, though his aura, as always, seemed to linger. She thought she could smell cigarette smoke. While her son never smoked in his life, at least not to her knowledge, he was smoking in the dream. What did that mean? Was it connected somehow to the fact that the police report mentioned cigarette butts on the floor of his car. Had Luke taken up smoking? Or were the cigarettes someone else’s? As she lay there, she heard a delicate noise, a whisper, something running along the roof of her room. A squirrel perhaps? A blown leaf? She thought about the time Luke had sprung the idea of his cross-country trip. The three of them were eating a rare dinner together that last summer. Out of the blue Luke said he wanted to visit some college friends out in San Francisco.

“Why not fly then?” Elizabeth had asked.

“I’d like to see some of the country,” he replied.

“Well, who’s coming with you then?”

“Just by myself.”

“You’re going alone?” she had asked, looking across the table at Zack for his reaction. He just sat there, silent.

“I’m not a little kid any more, Mom. I can make my own decision about this.”

“I still don’t think that’s such a good idea, Luke,” she said. “Zack?”

Yet her husband surprised her by saying, “Why not? He should see some of the country before he settles down.”

“Settles down? He just turned twenty-one, for heaven’s sake,” Elizabeth said mockingly.

“Well, before he goes into his senior year. And he has to start worrying about grad school or jobs. Or whatever.”

“See, Mom,” Luke taunted. “Dad gets it.”

Dad gets it. Which meant that she didn’t get it.

“Luke and I’ve talked about it,” Zack said.

“Really?” she replied, glaring at her husband. She felt like the odd man out, as if they had teamed up against her behind her back. “And where was I during all this planning?”

“You’re never home,” Luke threw at her.

“What do you mean, ‘I’m never home’?” she countered. Yet her son’s gaze suggested that his comment implied something sinister. Were her absences that obvious? The times she said she had to work late? Go into the office on a Saturday. The subterfuge of infidelity.

Luke got up and left the table. And with that, his trip was a fait accompli. Later in bed that night, she couldn’t let it go though.

“I’d have appreciated it if you’d told me about this plan,” she said to Zack.

“It wasn’t really a plan. Luke mentioned something in passing about driving cross country.”

“And you think it’s a good idea?”

“Elizabeth, he’s twenty-one. We can’t really stop him even if we wanted to.”

“But we didn’t have to make it so easy for him.”

“I drove across country when I was in college. What’s the big deal?”

She wasn’t sure what the big deal was. Perhaps it was that she just felt left out of the decision. Or perhaps it was that her son was growing up and away from her right under her nose. Or that her mind was so occupied by her own secret life that she hadn’t been paying enough attention to her son. As she lay in bed now, she thought if only she’d put up more resistance. Maybe Luke wouldn’t have gone. Maybe he’d still be alive.

* * *

Elizabeth dressed quickly in the chilly room and then went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth, using only cold water and her finger. She would have to get some things. Outside, the cold Shenandoah Valley morning stretched out with scattered clumps of fog suspended here and there, like tattered clothing hanging out on a line to dry. Shivering, she thought she recalled some article of clothing in the trunk. She opened it and saw an old gray sweatshirt that said St. Anselm College across the front in blue lettering. At one time it had been Luke’s. She threw it on; the thing smelled of mildew and was two sizes too big for her. Then she headed up to the main office to check out. A gaunt, wizened-looking Indian man was behind the desk this morning. He had streaks of white in his black hair and white eyebrows. He was reading the paper and sipping a cup of tea.

“Checking out?” he asked perfunctorily.

“Yes,” she replied. As the man, rang up her charge card, Elizabeth asked, “Are you Ajit?”

“Yes,” he said, surprised that she knew.

“May I ask you a question?”

She showed him the photo of her son on her cell phone. She explained to him that he had stayed overnight here last year. She knew the chances of him recognizing Luke were remote. The man knitted his white brows, stared at the photo again, scratched the top of his head.

“Just one moment.”

He bent down behind the counter and came up with an old registry book.

“When do you say he stay here?”

“It would have been August seventh or eighth, a year ago.”

The old man started thumbing through the pages. He slowed, then asked, “What is his name?”

“Luke Gerlacher.” She spelled it for him.

“Ah, yes. Here vee are,” he cried, touching a line on the page with a long thin finger. “He stayed one night. A silver Honda. Connecticut plates TXU-684.”

“Yes, that was his car.”

Elizabeth felt a small thrill at the notion that someone had actually met Luke, had written down his license plate, had taken his credit card. Had spoken to him.

Ajit spun the book around so that she could see Luke’s signature. She ran her fingers over her son’s name. She felt her throat ache.

“Is there something I can do for you, madam?” the old man asked.

She told him why she was interested, that her son had died just a few days after stopping here, that she was following the route he’d taken hoping to learn whatever she could about his last days.

“Oh, please to accept my deepest sympathies, madam.”

“Thank you.”

She started to leave, when the man said something in another language. She turned back toward him.

“We having saying in Hindi: as a man casts off worn-out garments and puts on new ones, so the soul casts off the worn-out body and enters a new one.”

She stared at the man, not sure how to respond.

“May you have a safe journey.” He smiled at her, showing one gold tooth in the front.

* * *

From the highway, she spotted a Wal-Mart and pulled off. She wandered up and down the aisles, tossing things into her cart she thought she would need for the trip—toothpaste and a toothbrush, deodorant, floss, lip balm, a razor, Tylenol, antacids, a hair brush. She didn’t buy any makeup, though she had lipstick in her pocketbook. What would she need makeup for? Disinterestedly, she picked out some clothes, a couple pairs of jeans, some socks, several blouses, a flannel shirt, even some underwear. She didn’t try anything on, just grabbed something near her size and threw it into the cart. Though Elizabeth was hardly a fashionista, she liked dressing well, even expensively, and would never have considered buying clothes from Wal-Mart, and certainly not without first trying them on. Tall, long legged, she found it hard to find things off the rack that fit her anyway. But now it didn’t matter. She wanted warm, functional clothes for the trip. Stuff she’d probably donate to the women’s shelter after this was over. She felt a strange, almost giddy sense of freedom in this fact. The absence of vanity in shopping for clothes was oddly liberating. As she held up a pair of jeans she thought of what the Indian man had said to her: as a man casts off worn-out garments and puts on new ones, so the soul casts off the worn-out body and enters a new one. She was putting on new garments herself.

She bought a simple canvas duffel bag to carry all her stuff in and then she picked up some snacks for the car, a package of trail mix, a half dozen Powerbars, several bottles of Vitamin Water. She also bought a pink scrunchie, the sort she used to wear when she went for her run around the lake. Just in case, she bought a flashlight, as well as a charger for her iPhone. In the housewares sections she grabbed a pillow and pillow case, always having disliked resting her face on a pillow someone else had slept on.

Getting back onto I-81, she continued south. She pulled her long dark hair off her face, into a ponytail and used the scrunchie to hold it in place. She turned on the radio and listened to country stations. C&W had always been one of her guilty pleasures. She liked the old sort of country music, though, Hank Williams and Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, Patsy Cline and Merle Haggard. Her father had liked that sort of music and she could remember him playing it on an old phonograph out in the garage as he worked on their car. She liked listening to it with him. The grit and pathos of lost love, of freight trains and pickup trucks and jail cells, and the boozy attempts at forgetfulness. She missed her father all of a sudden. Unlike her mother, he had always been affectionate, tender, and patient with her and her siblings. A gentle man. Unfortunately, Elizabeth had more of her mother than her father in her.

She got two phone calls about a minute apart, both, she saw, from the office, but she decided to ignore them. Probably Joan warning her that she was on thin ice, that her job was in jeopardy if she didn’t stop this nonsense and get back to work. Where was the loyalty? Here she’d worked for the firm for ten years, never called in sick once, had done excellent work, and she has one rough patch, and they were ready to give her the boot. Fuck ’em, she thought.

After driving an hour, she spotted two descansos within a span of half a mile. She stopped at both. The first was a simple, crudely fashioned affair, made of two sticks tied together with a piece of faded blue cloth that turned out to be a scarf. She thought how very different these roadside memorials were from headstones in cemeteries. You’d never see something like this in a cemetery, she thought. In cemeteries death was expensive and formal and highly ritualized, as much a grand statement of one’s social standing as anything else. Not only that, cemeteries were meant to segregate the “remains,” as George Doucette had mockingly referred to them, to corral them into regulated ghettos of the dead hidden behind ornate fences and well-manicured shrubbery. But these descansos were sprinkled among the living, along busy roadways and thoroughfares, forcing themselves upon us in a way that cemeteries didn’t. They were a constant reminder, a memento mori of just how tenuous our hold on life was. One moment we were riding along, thinking of jobs and dinner and sex, thinking we had all the time in the world, and the next we were in some ditch breathing our last. They made us aware that in a heartbeat everything could change.

As plain and crude as the first memorial was, that’s exactly how elaborate the next one was. It stood at the base of a sheer cliff blasted from the side of a mountain when they’d cut the highway through. The shoulder was narrow and Elizabeth barely had room to pull her car safely off the highway. She had to pick her way down a rocky incline before she got to the cross. This one was carefully planned out, constructed of two sections of metal welded together and painted white, with a metal ring surrounding the intersection so that it resembled a Celtic cross. In black gothic lettering along the horizontal section was painted the following: To our beloved Jack. You are with the angels now, Love, Mom, Dad, and Katie. On the vertical part it said, 5/13/99–11/26/08. Nine, Elizabeth thought. My God! Just a little boy. On the ground surrounding the cross was the usual assortment of mementos: plastic flowers, a Teddy bear, a variety of toys and trinkets, a baseball glove slowly coming apart along the stitching. Also strewn about were random shards of glass and plastic, pieces of black rubber and splinters of chrome, obviously from the crash. Funny, Elizabeth thought, how the objects of life and death commingled there along the highway.

She happened to spot a small recess in the cliff wall just behind the cross. She saw things arranged in the natural grotto and walked over to check it out. Displayed were various religious icons—a small crucifix, rosary beads, some sort of medallion, as well as a dozen plain stones that people who’d stopped had evidently picked up from the base of the cliff and placed there. At the back, Elizabeth noticed something else: a small ceramic figurine. She reached in and picked it up. It was a pieta, the cheap sort of icon one could buy in a religious gift shop. The Virgin Mother cradling her dead son, his nearly naked body draped over her lap.

Looking at it, Elizabeth couldn’t help but recall the time in the back room of Weldon’s Funeral Parlor in Garth’s Point. They’d decided to have a closed casket; after all, the injuries had been extensive and with the autopsy and paperwork it had taken nearly two weeks to get the body transported back to Connecticut. Given the circumstances, Kenny Weldon, the owner, suggested a closed casket would definitely be, as he put it, “the way to go.” Elizabeth, however, insisted that she see her son one last time, that she be able to place around his neck the crucifix he had started wearing. So Kenny had arranged a private viewing for them. She could remember the man trying to warn her that it “Might be a little upsetting, Mrs. Gerlacher.” But, stubbornly, she went ahead with it anyway. Kenny led them into the back room, where, as in some TV crime series, a table rested, upon which was a black plastic bag holding the obvious shape of a body. Before unzipping the bag, he’d looked at Elizabeth one last time, as if to say, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She remembered having the breath suddenly sucked from her lungs and her knees going rubbery when she saw her son, her Lukey, lying there pale and lifeless as some manikin. Oh my God, she cried, as she turned and fled the room.

She squatted and picked up a stone from the ground and added it to the collection in the niche. “Rest in peace, Jack,” she said.

“Ma’am.”

Startled, she turned to see a police officer standing on the shoulder of the highway, his silver Dodge cruiser pulled up behind her car. She hadn’t even heard him stop.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” he asked in a slight southern drawl. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a clipped mustache, his shaved temples below his cap shining an unnatural pink in the morning sunlight.

“Yes,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

Elizabeth realized she must have looked a little out of it, her hair unwashed, no makeup, in the wrinkled clothes she’d slept in the night before.

“I saw the cross.”

“You can’t park here, ma’am. It’s dangerous.”

“I was just leaving,” she replied, heading up toward him. The cop stood planted there, hands on hips, watching her as if she’d done something criminal.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked again, looking her over critically.

“I’m fine, officer,” she replied. “You must see a lot of these crosses.”

“Too many. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t allow them.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “They can be a distraction. People watching them instead of where they’re going.”

“I guess people need a place to pay their respects,” Elizabeth said.

“That’s what they got cemeteries for.”

* * *

Over the next couple of hours she spotted a half dozen more descansos along the highway. The farther south she went, the more crosses she saw. They popped up everywhere. She wasn’t sure if it was that the people down here were just worse drivers, or if they were simply more religious. She spotted a pair of crosses near the base of a sprawling white oak just off the highway. Despite the warning from the state trooper, something about them piqued her interest so she pulled over to take a look. The tree had a deep but fading gash in its bark at about bumper level, which Elizabeth assumed was a healed-over wound from the collision that ended the lives of the two people. She squatted and inspected the crosses. The first was twice as tall as the second. Along the horizontal slat was written “Janet-Marie Holtz” while “Monica Holtz” adorned the smaller one. The two had died at this spot on September 5, 1998. Sisters, Elizabeth wondered. Mother and child? The one named Janet-Marie was only seventeen, Elizabeth calculated from the birth and death dates, but the other one had only a single date written below the name—the date of her death. Written in small letters along the vertical section of the larger cross were the words, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” Elizabeth stood there for a moment, pondering the scene before her, recalling that George Doucette had said that every descanso had a story to tell. Why did the smaller one have no birth date? Then it came to her in a surge of recognition. Of course. The seventeen-year-old was pregnant when she ran off the road and struck the tree. That’s why there was no birth date for Monica, because she had never really been born. She had only died here. The irony of Monica dying before being born somehow struck Elizabeth. She could picture the young mother driving home from work, her thoughts on those things any teenager would be thinking, except for the fact that she was carrying a child already. Or perhaps she was running away, trying to flee from her shame. Elizabeth wondered if she was married. Or if like that waitress back in Pennsylvania was all on her own. Maybe she wasn’t paying attention. Maybe she was thinking how screwed up her life was going to be, how everything was going to change for her. No more dating or going to parties. Life for Janet-Marie Holtz was suddenly going to be very serious from that point on. Then again, for all Elizabeth knew the girl was ecstatic to be pregnant, to be carrying life inside her. Maybe she’d just felt the baby move and she was so excited that for a moment she took her eyes off the road to look down at her belly. Maybe to utter the name she was going to give her baby.

Monica.

Elizabeth recalled the first time she’d felt Luke move inside her. She was about five months pregnant, which, after many fruitless years of trying, including a miscarriage, was a shock in itself. She had almost reconciled herself to the fact of her and Zack being childless. She felt she could have adapted to such a life. She had her career, her many interests. Besides, having kids wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Her own mother hadn’t seemed all that thrilled to be a parent. Yet Elizabeth was not only shocked to learn she was pregnant, she was, quite frankly, amazed by how much she enjoyed carrying new life within her—the sudden fullness of her breasts, how tender and solicitous Zack had become with her, how incredibly horny her hormones suddenly made her. She and Zack had sex almost every night. And her feelings about having a child changed too. Before, when she’d go to some friend’s baby shower and the other women would gush about being pregnant, Elizabeth couldn’t understand what the big fuss was. She thought herself odd, lacking some maternal gene other women possessed. Then she became pregnant and overnight it was as if a switch had been flipped inside her. She threw herself into the pregnancy. She fixed up the upstairs study in the old house they lived in in the center of town when they’d first moved to Garth’s Point. She reveled in buying maternity clothes, looking for things for the nursery, hunting for cute little items in secondhand gift shops. This one particular day she was pushing a shopping cart down the canned goods aisle of the Stop and Shop in town when suddenly she felt this incredibly strange sensation just behind her navel. It wasn’t the “kick” she’d heard others talk about. No, this was a subtle but firm movement, more a shift in things, similar to the minor earthquake she’d once felt while in California, the ground moving under your feet. “Oh,” she’d cried out, clutching her stomach with one hand and grasping the cart with the other for balance. “Oh, my!”

An elderly woman nearby turned toward her and said, “Pardon me?”

“I just . . . I felt my baby move,” Elizabeth said, with what must have been a dopey grin on her face.

“Good lord, do I remember that feeling,” the woman replied, retuning the smile. “Do you have names picked out?”

“No, not really. We’re thinking of Sarah if it’s a girl. After my husband’s mother. And if it’s a boy we don’t know yet.”

Only later would she decide on the name Luke. Yet it wasn’t so much a decision as it was a revelation. As best she could recall, one morning she woke and the name just appeared in her mind, almost as if someone had whispered it in her ear while she slept. “Luke. Luke Gerlacher,” she said, trying the name out for size, like a school girl doodling in the margins of her notebook the names for her boyfriend, her future husband, her first-born. Luke.

Elizabeth looked down again at the two crosses, the young mother and her unborn baby. She wondered when the mother had come up with a name for her child and to whom she’d told it. She had to have told somebody, otherwise how had they known to have written Monica on the cross? It struck Elizabeth as terribly sad that the mother had never looked upon the face of her child, never called her by name. Never caressed her or nurse her. Never held her in her arms when she was frightened or heard her laughter. At least she, Elizabeth, had experienced all that. She’d had Luke for twenty-one years. That was something to be grateful for, wasn’t it?

Elizabeth touched the smaller of the two crosses. “Monica, sweetheart,” she said in a whisper that was barely audible, “can you hear me?”

Cars whooshed by. Elizabeth waited.

“Do you know my son?” she asked. “Luke Gerlacher.”

She waited some more. Then she turned and got back in the car and continued on her way.

* * *

By late afternoon she had reached eastern Tennessee. She picked up I-40 and turned west, where a dark, impenetrable wall of clouds loomed above the horizon like a tsunami about to strike land. All day long, Elizabeth had been trying to recall the summer before the accident, sifting through her memories like an old Rolodex, hoping to come up with something she might have overlooked, something Luke may have said or done that would shed the faintest light on what he’d wanted to talk to her about. However, she recalled little of importance. In fact, it seemed they’d hardly exchanged more than a few words that summer. Mostly it was a blur of the mundane, pedestrian conversations with her son regarding college bills and dentist appointments, laundry and the need to have the shock absorbers replaced on his Honda. In the few lengthier conversations she could remember, Luke was reticent, seldom offering anything personal. She tried to believe, as Zack did, that their son was only acting the way any college kid did, going through the normal, sometimes unpleasant phase of a son morphing into a young man. But sometimes she suspected it was deeper than that, more profound, something that was troubling her Lukey.

How different things had been just a short time before, when he was with TJ. How happy he’d seemed then. Elizabeth felt she could almost trace the change in her son to the moment when the girl broke up with him. The poor kid seemed devastated. She remembered talking to him by phone one evening at school, right before Christmas break his junior year. When she asked about TJ coming for Christmas dinner, as she often had, he’d told her, with this odd, casual heartlessness it seemed, that TJ and he were done.

“Done?” Elizabeth had cried. “What on earth happened?”

“She wants to date other people.”

“She said that?”

“Not in so many words.”

“What did she say?” Elizabeth pressed.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Mom.”

“But—”

“Mom, just stay the hell out of my business, would you?”

It was after that when he seemed to grow more distant—guarded was the word that came to Elizabeth, his emotional life something he preferred not to share, or at least not with her. Always a late bloomer, Luke hadn’t had much experience with girls nor seemingly much interest. As he hit his teens, on more than one occasion, Elizabeth had expressed her concerns to Zack. “He’s so good looking, why doesn’t he have any dates?” she’d said. Zack though felt their son was just slow to develop, that he would date in his own good time. Yet in the back of Elizabeth’s mind lurked the question all parents ask of a child that was slow to develop an interest in the opposite sex: Was he gay? Then TJ came into the picture his sophomore year in high school and overnight Luke changed. He was head over heels about her, his first real girlfriend. She used to come over to the house and hang out with Luke, do homework together, watch a movie, listen to music—their relationship as easy and natural as if she were just another one of his buddies. Elizabeth felt it was wonderful to see her son blossom like this. Sometimes, TJ would sit at the kitchen counter and talk with Elizabeth, while waiting for Luke to get home from some place or other. She was such a sweet kid, smart and funny and pretty, popular but not snooty like a lot of the girls in town. Elizabeth had never had a daughter but TJ obligingly filled that role. She was like a part of their family. They used to invite her for Christmas dinner and to come out to the Cape with them when they went on vacation.

After he’d first started seeing TJ, Luke would come home after a date and want to talk all about it with Elizabeth. When he was a senior, he’d even confided in his mother about the first time they’d had sex. Though shocked by the fact that her little Lukey was being intimate with a girl, she listened carefully, tried not to let on she was secretly aghast. Actually, Elizabeth thought it was cute how he inquired about the “mechanics” of the act, shared with her the fact that he didn’t think he’d “been very good,” and wanted to know what he could do “better” the next time. And she savored the fact that her son came to her and not his father for such advice.

But after their break-up, he didn’t speak to Elizabeth about his love life at all. In fact, about his life at all. When she’d inquire if he were dating anyone, he’d snap at her, “Just stay out of my damn business.” Elizabeth thought he was still stuck on TJ. Zack, on the other hand, believed it was good that Luke wasn’t tying himself to just one girl, that he was “playing the field,” as he put it. Though she agreed with Zack in theory, she nonetheless preferred the old Luke to this new version who was so aloof, so distant, so sullen.

* * *

In the late afternoon, as the skies continued to threaten, Elizabeth got off the highway and followed the GPS to a place called “Cowan’s Cherokee Village,” a hotel in the eastern mountains of Tennessee where, according to her notebook, Luke had spent the night. She drove along a narrow road that curved between steep, hardwood-covered mountains. After a couple of miles she came upon the place, half a dozen cottages with fake tepee facades squatting in a semicircle around a pool whose water was mold-green. The man who showed Elizabeth to her room must have been ninety, with long white hair pulled back into a single braid (was he trying to pretend he was Cherokee?) and the wild look in his rheumy eyes of a failed prophet. The room turned out to be the size of a death-row prisoner’s cell, with a bathroom stuffed into a closet-like space in the corner.

“Hot water might take a spell,” the man said. “I got to turn the heater on this time a year.”

Elizabeth decided it was pointless to ask the old man if he recalled her son. Instead she inquired about a restaurant called Bart’s, where her son had eaten.

“Down thattaway,” the man said, pointing a bony finger toward the west. “I think they stay open till eight.”

Elizabeth drove down the road about a mile before she reached the restaurant, which was in a small plaza with a couple of other stores. A heavy-set waitress with a cotton-candy swirl of permed-red hair seated her. She had matching red lipstick and nails about an inch long. She called Elizabeth “darlin’” several times. “What y’all gonna have, darlin’?” the woman asked. Elizabeth ordered the baked chicken special with a salad, about the only thing on the menu that wasn’t “country fried.” Outside the window, she saw that the sky had darkened even more, with clouds boiling into each other, and tinged with those strange yellow and purple tones of a looming storm. A strong wind had kicked up, too, making the tops of the trees quake.

The woman returned after a while with Elizabeth’s order. “Looks like we’re gonna get us some rain,” the woman said to her, standing there and gazing out the window.

“Looks like.”

“Where y’all from, darlin’?”

“Connecticut.”

“I been to Massachusetts. Ever’body drives a big fancy car up there.”

The woman obviously liked to talk.

“What’chall doing way down here?”

“I’m heading out to New Mexico.”

“Boy, that’s a ways to drive.”

While Elizabeth ate her meal she retrieved an earlier voice mail from Joan. “Elizabeth? Are you there? If you are, pick up the damn phone. This is important. Warren’s mad as hell. I don’t know if I can put him off any longer. Call me, okay. Please.”

After a while, the waitress came over.

“You need anything, darlin’?”

“I’m good. May I ask you a favor?” Elizabeth said to the woman. She took out her phone and showed the waitress the picture of Luke. She explained how her son had been in Bart’s a year ago for a meal, wondered if anyone remembered him. The woman took the phone and stared at Luke’s photo for a while.

“That’s one good lookin’ young feller. I think he favors you. Cain’t say I recall him though. Is it something important?”

“To me, it is,” Elizabeth replied. She went on to explain that she was following the trail of her son, that he’d used his charge card here to pay for a meal.

The woman stared at her, waiting. “How come I get the feeling you’re gonna tell me something bad?”

“He was killed in a car accident,” Elizabeth explained.

“Oh, Lord,” the woman exclaimed, her fleshy face grimacing. “I just knew it. That’s just terrible.”

“It happened a few days after he stopped here. Out in New Mexico.”

The woman reached out and put her hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder.

“You poor thing. How old was your boy?”

“Twenty-one.”

“I swear, sometimes life just ain’t fair. Take my son-in-law, Travis. You couldn’t ask for a sweeter boy. Like my own flesh and blood. Sang in the church choir. Captain of the football team. Had a full scholarship to play for Appalachian State. Had a smile that was just pure honey. Then Nine-eleven happens and he signs up to go off and fight. Wants to do his patriotic duty,” she said sarcastically. “Does two tours over in Afghanistan. When he got home, he was changed. He was all messed up,” the woman said, tapping a long red nail against her temple. “Drinking, doing drugs. Couldn’t hardly sleep at night. Would get in these black moods my daughter didn’t even want to be around him. He scared her. It got so bad she took the two kids and moved back in with us.”

“What happened to him?” Elizabeth asked hesitantly.

“One night he went out in the truck and put a rifle in his mouth and blew his head off.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“My daughter said he was never the same. The man who came back was somebody else.”

“When my son went away to college, he seemed to change too.”

“Ain’t that the way. Sometimes I think it’s better if people stick close to home. With their family.”

Elizabeth nodded.

After eating only a little of her meal, Elizabeth had lost her appetite. She paid the bill and headed out.

“Take care of yourself, darlin’,” the waitress called to her.

It was pouring out now. The rain had just commenced, but it came down all at once, without the slightest prelude, like a water balloon punctured by a needle. It quickly turned the parking lot into a churning river, with the occasional clap of lightning followed by the boom of thunder rolling down through the valley. She made a frantic dash to her car but was soaked by the time she got in.

Back in her room, Elizabeth peeled the wet clothes off and climbed into the narrow metal shower. Afterwards, she dressed in some of the new clothes she’d bought. The shirt fit her fine but the jeans were snug through the waist and hips. She left the top button undone. She lay on the bed with the lights out, listening to the rain. Occasionally, the night outside would brighten almost into day from the lightning and moments later the cabin would shudder as thunder rolled past. The bed was saggy and uncomfortable but the new pillow she’d bought felt good beneath her head, clean and fresh and firm. Once again she was struck by a strong craving for a drink and was glad she hadn’t bought anything. It would be too tempting now.

As she lay there, something dark rubbed just at the edge of her consciousness, like a feather drawn lightly across skin making her shiver. She pushed it away but it returned. She kept pushing it away, but each time it would return, and each time it would be stronger. She thought of the story the waitress had told her about her son-in-law. How he had been all mixed up, and took his life. It was something that had crossed her mind before but which she had always managed to push away: suicide. What if it had not been an accident? What if he had meant to drive off that road? After all, he hadn’t been drinking, and the officer had said that he went off a straight section of highway. According to the police report, the evening had been clear, the road conditions good. And Luke had always been a cautious driver, always wore his seat belt, didn’t speed or take chances while behind the wheel. There was nothing to explain why the car just seemed to veer off and carry Luke out of this life, away from her. She recalled, too, Luke’s voice on her cell phone earlier that night, how it had sounded “off” to her, as if something was wrong. What if the “something” that had been troubling him was darker than she’d imagined, something so terrible and so private he couldn’t tell anyone—or at least hadn’t yet been able to tell anyone until he called her. She thought of that line she’d come across in his diary. Duc in altum. To put out into the deep end. Perhaps that, too, had darker implications than she’d imagined.

She was lying there in the dark, smoking and listening to the rain assault the roof when her phone rang.

“Elizabeth?”

The connection wasn’t very good, but she could tell it was Zack.

“Hi,” she said.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Tennessee.”

“Tennessee?” he repeated, his voice rising somewhat incredulously, as if she’d said Siberia. “What’s that noise?”

“It’s raining.”

“Sounds like it’s coming down pretty hard.”

He said something that she didn’t catch.

“What? You’re not coming in very clearly,” she replied.

“I said, ‘you sound better.’” She didn’t know what he meant by “better,” but she didn’t comment on that. “I was kind of hoping you might have reconsidered.”

“Reconsidered?” Elizabeth asked.

“This whole thing.”

“Zack, I told you I have to do this,” she said.

“You don’t have to do anything, Elizabeth. This is a choice.”

“All right. I’m choosing to do it.”

“Then—maybe I could come with you.”

“What?”

“I said, maybe I could come with you. I don’t like the idea of you driving all the way out there by yourself. I could fly out and meet you somewhere. Nashville,” he tossed out. “Have you reached Nashville yet?”

“No.”

“We could go together. Make it into a little vacation.”

“It’s not a little vacation,” she snapped, annoyed that he would even consider what she was doing a form of recreation. “I’m going to see where our son died. I’m not going to Disney World, for heaven’s sake.”

“Take it easy. I didn’t mean it like that,” he explained.

She listened to the rain on the roof for moment. It came in waves, driving, pounding rhythmically, like the ocean breaking onto the shore. Whhhsssh . . . whhhsssh.

“Are you okay? I’m worried about you.”

“Yes. I’m fine. I want to ask you something, Zack,” she began. “And I want you to hear me out.”

“All right.”

“The summer Luke died, did you notice anything wrong with him?”

“How do you mean ‘wrong’?”

“Was something bothering him?”

“Does this have anything to do with that call he made to you?”

“It might. When I think about him that last summer, he just seemed so . . . distant.”

“He was a college kid. They’re off in their own little world.”

“This was different. I can’t put my finger on it, but I think something was going on with him. Maybe he was depressed. Did you get that sense?”

“No. I don’t think so anyway.”

Elizabeth paused, wondering if she should just drop it. Wondering if she really wanted to open up this can of worms. And that’s what it was, a can of worms. What good would it do either of them now to consider that the accident may not have been an accident? That the randomness of his death perhaps wasn’t so random? But she found herself at a place where she felt she didn’t have anything to lose. Once she’d decided to get in the car and drive out here, there was no turning back. Whatever happened, whatever she found out, she—they—would just have to deal with it.

“Have you ever thought maybe . . .”

“Maybe what?” Zack asked.

“That it wasn’t an accident?”

“What?” he cried. “I can barely hear you.”

“Have you ever thought maybe it wasn’t an accident?” she repeated, so loudly that the words echoed in the tiny room.

“What do you mean, it wasn’t an accident?”

“I mean, Luke was usually a pretty cautious driver. He always wore his seat belt and he didn’t this time. And the police report said alcohol wasn’t involved. He just went off the road. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Elizabeth, come on. Think about what you’re saying.”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m just wondering out loud. Maybe there was something bothering him. Something we had no idea of.”

“Honey, it was an accident. That’s all it was.”

“How do you know? How do we know anything?”

“The police didn’t suggest it was anything other than that. They said he probably just fell asleep at the wheel.”

“They don’t know that. That’s just cops trying to close the books. That’s what they do, to make their lives easier.”

“And what you’re saying, is that any better? Why even think such a thing, Elizabeth? It only makes everything worse.”

“I’m just trying to get to the truth.”

“Truth? How is what you’re implying any more true than what the cops said? They’re the professionals.”

“Zack, it just doesn’t make sense.”

“What you’re saying doesn’t make sense.”

A flash of light erupted outside, and a few seconds later another boom of thunder rattled the cabin. She felt her spine trembling, as if a train had passed nearby. She could still feel the aftershock vibrating the bed.

“I’m only looking for answers,” she explained.

“For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth. There are no answers. It was just something that happened. And we have to deal with it.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do. Deal with it.”

“And you think by going out there you’re going to find answers?”

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“The one answer I can give you is that our son didn’t do this on purpose.”

“How do you know that?”

“That wasn’t Luke. He didn’t want to die. He had everything to live for.”

“So what do you think he wanted to talk about that night?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

“And you don’t particularly care to know either.”

“Whatever it was, we’ll never find out. And even if we could, what good would it do us now?”

“I think it would help if we knew what he was thinking then. Where his head was at.”

“You maybe. Not me.”

“All right. Me then.”

“It could have been anything, Elizabeth. Maybe he wanted to drop out of school. Maybe he wanted to get a tattoo. Who the hell knows?”

“No, it was something important. I could hear it in his voice.”

“Maybe he was having girlfriend problems. Something with TJ.”

“TJ?” she said, surprised at the mention of her name. “What are you talking about?”

There was a pause, as if Zack was thinking of how he could undo what he’d just said, take it back. “He went out with her a few times that summer.”

“What? How do you know that?”

“He told me.”

“He told you?”

“Yes.”

She wondered why Luke hadn’t told her about something as important as that. He’d told his father but not her. Could that be what he had wanted to talk to her about, what had seemed so imperative?

“Were they dating again?” Elizabeth asked.

“I don’t know. You know kids these days. They don’t date any more. He said they got together a few times. Maybe it was nothing.”

“Then again, maybe that’s what he wanted to talk about.”

“You’re grasping at straws now.”

Perhaps she was. But what else did she have? She wondered why she and Zack had waited all this time to talk about any of this. Instead, they’d both retreated into their own grief, into a marriage of silence and secrets. She more than Zack, but he had done it too, in his own way. Taking his grief not to her but to his damn support group. Wanting to jump so quickly back into a life that no longer existed. To put Luke’s death behind them.

“Zack, I have something I need to talk to you about,” she began. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she realized how eerily close they sounded to what Luke had said to her: Mom, there’s something I really needed to talk to you about.

“Whatever it is, can’t it wait till you get back?”

“No, it’s important. That night . . .”

“What?” he cried, his voice fading, becoming scratchy, small and insect-like.

“Are you there, Zack? Can you hear me?”

“Barely. I think I’m starting to lose you.”

“The night Luke died. I was—”

But the call ended abruptly, their connection broken off by the storm. Or had he hung up on her, not wanting to hear what she might have to tell him? She thought of calling back but she didn’t. Instead she crawled under the covers and waited for sleep.