Chapter 6

Elizabeth didn’t take any time off from work, but she decided she’d better heed Joan’s warning and cut out the booze, get to the office on time, focus more on her responsibilities. At the same time, she found herself—at work, driving somewhere in the car, standing in line at the grocery store—replaying the chance meeting she’d had with the old man. The things he’d said seemed to strike a chord in her, a low vibration at the base of her skull that seemed to grow in volume each day. How he’d told her he felt a connection with his dead wife at the roadside memorial. How the spirits of the dead often stayed near where they had perished. She remembered, too, how he’d laid his hand on her arm and said, We all got regrets. He seemed to have some intimate knowledge regarding the intricacies of grief and guilt.

In the evenings after she and Zack ate a quiet dinner, she would excuse herself, saying she had work to catch up on, and head down into her study. There she would take out her notebook on Luke, go over once more his credit card bills and phone records, scanning the dots on her map, trying to connect them, trying to see if some picture might emerge, a portrait of her son’s final journey on earth. One evening she decided to call a place in central Texas called Ned’s Landing, where Luke had charged $93.67. Was it a gas station? It seemed an awful lot just for gas. It was the day before the accident. Three hundred-odd miles before he arrived in Marrizozo, New Mexico.

An old man answered, a voice so dusty and parched she had to listen carefully in order to understand. She explained that her son had stopped there to buy something.

“He spent over ninety dollars. That seems a lot for gas.”

“Gas?” the man said. “We don’t sell gas.”

“You don’t?”

“No, ma’am. We run a museum.”

“A museum?”

“Aircraft. We have vintage World War II planes. A little gift shop out front.”

Then it hit her: That’s where Luke had bought the plane.

“Do you sell a P-51 Mustang model?” Elizabeth asked.

“Ah huh. Mustangs, Hellcats, Black Widows, Thunderbolts. You name it, we got it.”

“My son bought a Mustang from you. I wonder if you remember him.”

“We sell a good many P-51s. They’re the most popular.”

“He was tall. Thin. Twenty-one years old. Dirty blond hair,” Elizabeth recited as if she were describing a suspect in a crime.

“Don’t ring a bell, ma’am,” the man said. “When you say he was here?”

“A year ago August.”

“That’s a long while back,” the man said with a laugh. “My memory ain’t what it used to be. What was he doing here in Haslitt?”

“I think he was just passing through. He was driving out to the West Coast.”

“Maybe if I saw his picture.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said and hung up.

* * *

During lunch one day, she left her office and stopped at Tully’s Florist Shop just off the green to buy some flowers. The place smelled pungently of mortality, like a funeral home.

“What are they for?” asked Jocelyn, the owner, a red-haired woman in her mid-forties.

“For a friend.”

The woman picked out a bunch of lilies and chrysanthemums.

“Do you want a card?” she asked Elizabeth.

“No. That won’t be necessary.”

She drove over to the cemetery, parked, and got out. The fall had grown suddenly colder, a sharp wind slicing in off the sound like a serrated blade. The cemetery sat on a small rise overlooking an apple orchard, and beyond that was a bluish-gray sliver of ocean. She hadn’t been here in a while. Perhaps May or June. The last time she came was in the evening, and she’d been a little drunk and had trouble finding Luke’s stone. When she finally found it, she curled up on his grave only to wake in the middle of the night, cold and damp and disoriented. Whenever she visited she always left more frustrated and confused than before she’d come. And of course she never felt in the least any connection to her son, never felt his spirit or whatever it was she was supposed to feel here. George Doucette was right about that. Cemeteries were merely filing cabinets for the dead.

This day she knelt and put the lilies and chrysanthemums at the base of the headstone. She did some minor housekeeping, mostly nervous energy—ripping up weeds and brushing away a few stray leaves that had been blown here from the woods at the back of the cemetery.

She recalled the day of the funeral. Her son’s casket lay suspended over the astroturf-covered hole in the ground. Father Jerome had come down from New Hampshire to give the eulogy. A tall, slender, athletic-looking man with a neatly trimmed goatee that reminded Elizabeth of some TV soap opera actor, he spoke about how Luke’s remarkable promise had been on the verge of being fulfilled, about faith, about a loving God, none of which Elizabeth could understand in the least. A loving God could take her son? After the ceremony, the priest had come up to her and Zack, his eyes misted over, and taking Elizabeth’s hand, he said how he felt a certain measure of responsibility for having supported Luke’s decision to go on this trip.

Elizabeth didn’t know what he was talking about.

“It wasn’t your fault, Father,” Zack replied, glancing sheepishly at Elizabeth. “I thought it was a good idea, too.”

It appeared for a moment he would say more, but instead, he offered his apologies for not being able to stay for the reception and turned and left.

Today, glancing at the words cut into the polished marble, she whispered softly, “Luke,” the way she’d first uttered his name when the nurse in the hospital had placed him in her arms, as if testing the name out for size. She could still remember the sweet smell of his jaundiced skin, the bruises along his temples from the forceps delivery. Her Lukey had not come into the world willingly, had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, perhaps a metaphor for the man he was to become—stubborn, prickly, often difficult. Perhaps like his mother. She smiled though at the memory of his pale pink eyelids, those incredibly delicate, frog-like fingers as they groped tentatively at this strange new world he’d entered. She got out her cell phone and scrolled through the pictures she had of Luke. Sometimes she did that, as if to rekindle her memory of him. There was one in particular she was fond of. It was one of the last photos she’d taken of him. It was down at the lake, on a bright summer’s day that last summer. He was sitting on a lounge chair on the dock, in his bathing suit, reading. His hair was sun-bleached, his face tanned, handsome, serious. She could still recall the book he had with him most of that summer: Siddhartha.

Somewhere along the line Luke had changed. Especially in the last year of his life, he’d grown distant and withdrawn, become this stranger who could have called her on the night of his death to say he needed to talk and she hadn’t the slightest idea what it might be. She could remember one particularly dreadful incident that happened when Luke was a junior. He’d come home from college one weekend, and the three of them had gone out to celebrate Zack’s fiftieth birthday in New York. She’d wanted the evening to be special. She’d planned a lovely dinner at a posh restaurant and splurged and bought Zack a Rolex, perhaps because she felt guilty about the affair she’d only recently become involved in. Their waiter, a young, overtly gay man, had given them, Elizabeth thought, poor service. Their food was cold, he’d mixed up one of their orders, didn’t refill their water glasses, mostly ignored them. When he brought their bill, Elizabeth had reprimanded him, embarrassing him publicly. Luke as usual—whether it was simple contrariness on his part or his natural affinity for the underdog—had come to the waiter’s defense. “Why are you making such a big deal out of it, Mom?” he’d said.

“If I’m paying good money, I expect good service.”

“Maybe the poor guy was busy. Or just having a bad day. Can’t you cut him a little slack?”

“His bad day isn’t my concern. If I’m having a bad day, my clients shouldn’t have to pay for it.”

“Why do you always have to be so hard on people?”

On the way home, she and Luke continued their argument, with Zack performing his usual role as referee, which only infuriated Elizabeth all the more.

“Just stay out of it,” she’d snapped at her husband. Then to her son in the backseat, she’d said, “You can be forgiving when it doesn’t come out of your pocket.”

“You just didn’t like him because he was gay,” Luke accused.

The comment took her by surprise. “What! Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s true. You pretend to be this big liberal, doing all your women’s shelter work, but you’re just an elitist snob.”

The accusation was like a slap in her progressive face. Was she an elitist snob? Had she been hard on the waiter because he was gay? Was she always so hard on people, as Luke had alleged?

She knelt on the damp earth, feeling the moisture leaching through her nylons. She remained silent, waiting, though for what, she hadn’t the faintest idea. She remembered how George Doucette had scoffed at the word remains. He’d been right, of course: it was a vile term for somebody’s loved one. What lay there in the ground below her wasn’t her son, her Lukey. So where was he then? At one time, when she was little, like her father she’d believed in the whole nine yards, in a heaven, in forgiveness, in the grace of a loving God. But what sort of loving God could have stolen a mother’s child like this, for no reason, a pointless accident in the desert? Even after all these many months, Elizabeth couldn’t reconcile herself to the fact of his absence. How could he be gone when she could feel him still, in her heart, in her fingers, recall the touch of his skin, the lemony tang of his hair? Or the sound of his voice that, from time to time, sounded so real, so close. Though the actuality of Luke may have dimmed, she felt him still. As she knelt there, she closed her eyes and said something she had given voice to several times before, usually when she lay half drunk in the dark on Luke’s bed: What did you want to tell me, sweetheart? She waited for several seconds, but save for the wind rubbing against the headstones, a silken sound, there was only the pulse beating in her throat. That and silence. Instead, she thought of a line she’d once glimpsed in Luke’s diary: He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. She knew what she had lost. What she wasn’t sure about was what she had gained.

* * *

After the meeting with George Doucette, she’d begun to see those crosses, those descansos, everywhere. In the past week she must have spotted a dozen. As she drove around town or up to Hartford for a court case, there they were suddenly. They seemed to appear out of nowhere. Along the sides of roads, at intersections, in the center median of highways. One overlooked a bridge that crossed the Connecticut River. Another was nailed to a sycamore tree. Still another she spotted before a pasture filled with cows that stared at her with curiosity when she stopped the car to look at the cross. All the places where people had died suddenly, unexpectedly, and where other people, their loved ones, had put up crosses to their memory.

She spotted three in Garth’s Point alone. One was just south of the green, on the way to the shore. She’d been by this section of road countless times, and had never really noticed it before. This time, she slowed the car as she went by it but didn’t get out. The cross was a small, simple thing, with a plastic wreath of faded flowers draped around it. She spotted another heading west past Bartlett’s Orchards. This one had been the scene of a notorious crime in town. A dozen years earlier a man walking his dog at night had been struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver, whom they’d never caught. And just before the high school, in a swampy area on the west side of Great Hill Road, she came upon a large cross nailed directly to a fence post. The kid who died at that spot, Joey Parsons, was from one the oldest families in town. Elizabeth knew the mother and had gone to the funeral, which brought out half of Garth’s Point. It occurred to her that these memorials had been there, in some cases for decades, and she’d never noticed them before, at least not on a conscious level. Since meeting the old man, however, the crosses seemed to leap out at her, crying Look at me! And each time she saw one, she couldn’t help but imagine a barren section of desert, Luke’s battered Accord tipped over, steam rising from the radiator, broken glass and twisted metal, her son lying on the ground looking up at the sky.

One day during her lunch hour she drove out to the women’s shelter. She hadn’t had a drink in nearly a week. She was trying really hard to get a handle on things, trying to take it one day at a time. Searching online she’d also picked out a couple of names of therapists. She hadn’t called any of them yet to make an appointment but she felt a little better for having simply looked. It was, she felt, just a matter of willpower. Of willing yourself to get better. Just like Zack had said. You needed to choose to move on, to get on with your life, rather than wallowing in grief and self-pity. Who knows, she might even go along with Zack to his grief support group? What could it hurt? Besides, it would please him.

“I guess I owe you that bottle after all,” Father Paul said to her when she stopped by his office.

For a moment she’d forgotten their wager, thought it was merely some perverse attempt at humor by Father Paul directed at her effort to stay on the wagon.

“Fabiana. She ended up in the emergency room.”

“Oh, no!” cried Elizabeth. “What happened?”

“She’s got a broken arm. Some bruises.”

“That son of a bitch. Where is she now?”

“With her son in the play room.”

Fabiana was on the floor playing with Esteban. Elizabeth took a quick breath when she saw the cast on her left arm. When the woman spotted Elizabeth she got up and came over to her.

“Hola, señora,” she said. She held up her arm, gave Elizabeth a you-were-right nod.

“Oh, Fabiana, I’m so sorry.”

“Debería haber escuchado a usted. I so estúpida.”

“It’s all right. How are you?”

“Better.”

“Will you sign the restraining order now?”

“Sí, sí. I sign,” she said, pantomiming signing with the hand that was in a cast.

After she’d finished at the shelter, Elizabeth was driving back to work along the interstate, her thoughts on Fabiana, when she saw it up ahead. Two actually. A matching set, like salt and pepper shakers. A pair of crosses just off the highway, between the shoulder and a service road that ran parallel to the interstate, halfway up a little rise. They stood side by side facing west. How many times had she driven this stretch of road without ever noticing them before? On something more conscious than a whim, she pulled off at the next exit, crossed over the highway, and drove back along the service road until she figured she’d reached the spot. She stopped and got out of her car. She walked over to the edge of the road, where a six-foot-high chain-link fence separated the road from the highway. The crosses were just on the other side of that hill, she thought. She cautioned herself: Just what the hell do you think you’re doing? But she disregarded the warning and went ahead and awkwardly clambered up the fence in her high heels and skirt. If anyone saw her, they’d think she was nuts. And maybe she was. As she lifted her back leg awkwardly over the fence, her nylons snagged on a sharp edge; she heard a tearing sound and felt a sudden sharp burning sensation along her calf.

“Fuck!” she cried.

She continued over and clambered down the other side. She saw that her nylons were shredded and that she had a cut running crosswise along her Achilles. A trickle of blood had already formed against her pale skin. About halfway down the steep, grassy embankment were the crosses. She used her high heels like crampons to dig into the side of the hill, and she had to keep one hand near to the ground so as not to slip. The crosses were about twenty feet above the pavement. Below, cars and trucks roared by with a brutal ferocity, their occupants’ eyes, Elizabeth felt, locked on this strange scene unfolding before them. It occurred to her that someone might actually call the police and then how would she explain what she was doing? Warren would think she’d completely lost it and fire her. Yet once more she ignored her own warnings and continued down.

Reaching the spot, Elizabeth squatted in front of the two white crosses. From the looks of them, they’d been put there ages ago. They were wooden, painted white, with dark lettering. Only part of one name was legible—Anthony Something. However, it was obvious that whoever put them here had taken meticulous care in their arrangement. Someone had used a level and had taken his time. Perfectly aligned, same height and angle, they could have been crosses at Arlington National Cemetery. The horizontal sections had been attached with screws and the bases had been secured into the ground with cement. When she touched them, they didn’t budge at all, felt as solid, as immovable, as marble headstones. The area immediately around the crosses was set apart from the surrounding hillside by stones laid out in a crude circle. Inside the circle was an odd array of junk: several melted candles, cigarette butts, an empty tequila bottle, a browned Christmas wreath, a ribbon with an attached bronze medal that was for second place for some unspecified competition, a plastic doll with straw-like hair and lusterless black eyes staring unblinking at the sky, ashes where a small fire had been built. Despite the crosses, the disparate items conjured up a scene that was slightly pagan.

Elizabeth guessed it had been a couple of high school kids who had died here, a boy and a girl. Maybe sweethearts. She pictured their friends coming here, lighting candles one night, singing, laughing, crying, drinking booze, carrying on as if at an Irish wake. Did other people, strangers, stop here as she did, and leave something behind, some sort of memento? She recalled how George had said people sometimes did that. Left things. As if to make a connection with the unknown dead. She also remembered how he had said that each place, each descanso, had a certain story to tell. Though she couldn’t quite say that she felt anything, this place, she reasoned, had to have been a sad story. Two kids dying here.

As she was staring down at the debris, something glittering in the long grass caught her attention. She reached down and picked it up. It was a small heart-shaped locket on a chain, the gold-plating tarnished by the weather. When she pried it opened with a nail, she saw a picture on one side. The rain had all but obliterated the features, but from the outline of the hair Elizabeth could tell it was a young girl. On the facing side was an inscription: Erin, forever in our hearts.

Elizabeth glanced at the locket in her hand, then at the two crosses. She wondered if the families or loved ones who visited here could feel the spirits of the two kids. But how exactly did one go about feeling the spirit of someone who’d passed on? Was there a particular technique, a conscious application of will, like with meditation or hypnosis? Did they offer up prayers, light a candle, as the old man said he sometimes did? Or as in a séance, was there a specified set of incantations or a particular chant to summon up the unwilling dead? Or did all of it presuppose a certain level of faith, that you had to believe in things unseen before you could ever hope to feel their presence? Elizabeth had never even remotely had that sort of feeling at a grave. Not at the grave of her father, whom she’d loved very much, nor at that of her son.

She sat down, then lay back, resting her head fully on the ground, the sun-warmed, sweet smell of grass in her nose. She closed her eyes. Behind her lids she could see red insect-like things rising and falling. She tried concentrating, tried forcing herself to block out the deafening roar of the highway below. As when she used to meditate, she tried both to empty herself of thoughts and sensations, and yet at the same time to be more open, more receptive to whatever might play across her mind. A heightened awareness. She could hear the pulse in her temples—dfff, dfff . . . dfff, dfff. After a while the car noises did seem to recede to some middle ground. Luke, she said to herself, the way she did sometimes at night while lying in the dark of his room.

She said his name again. Luke, sweetie.

Mom.

Startled, Elizabeth opened her eyes and sat bolt upright. Of course, she knew it was just her own inner voice replying. Or a memory of his voice. Either way, it wasn’t really him. Just her mind playing tricks on her. Still, it made her heart ratchet up a couple of notches. It almost felt as if Luke were nearby. Glancing down at the highway, she could imagine it all unfolding. The accident, that is. The two kids driving along, maybe drunk, perhaps just merely careless as teens can be. Talking and laughing, holding hands, flirting, not paying the slightest attention to the relentless laws of physics, the cruel mechanics of the world. Then in an instant everything changed, the car suddenly careening off the highway, airborne for a chaotic moment. There might have been time for a single, Oh, my God! before the car slammed into the side of the hill. Then there was the breaking of steel and glass and bone. And after that silence. Just silence.

And then she imagined, weeks, months after the funeral, the father of one of the two kids, down in his basement one evening, methodically cutting the boards, screwing them together, carefully painting them white, then stenciling in the children’s names and dates of birth and death, maybe an inscription of love: To my darling daughter. To my beloved son. Erin, forever in our hearts. What would have gone through his head, she wondered, as he made them? Did the ritual of constructing the crosses give him any sort of solace? Did it lighten his burden? Did he drive out and put them up all by himself? Or did his family accompany him? Or perhaps, both families, as in some odd posthumous wedding ritual. And what did they feel when they drove out here again, months or years later to this site where death had stolen their children? Did they, like the old man she had met, feel their loved ones’ spirits floating here like bright mobiles over an infant’s crib? In one sense she could imagine all this. It seemed now a perfectly acceptable means of dealing with loss. Of making a connection with their departed loved ones. Of fathoming the unfathomable. But in another way, it was still a complete and utter mystery to her, something beyond her grasp. These crosses, finally, were just pieces of wood and paint stuck there in the side of the hill.