Chapter 8

The lights of the oncoming vehicles along the highway nearly blinded her. Ill-tempered semis patrolled the night highway like vicious Dobermans, growling and snarling, blasting their horns, zooming right up on her rear end as if she were an unwanted interloper in their private domain. She stopped once at a convenience store just past New Haven, filled up the Saab with gas and bought one of those energy drinks to stay awake. Before she pulled back on the highway, she got out her notebook and looked at the map she’d made of Luke’s journey. She didn’t quite have a plan. Rather, she’d simply follow in her son’s footsteps, as much as she knew of them, and hope for something. Perhaps to meet someone Luke had spoken to during his trip. Someone who might offer her some glimmer of what he was feeling in those last days. It was a long shot, she knew. But what else did she have? After leaving home her son had first used his credit card in a small eastern Pennsylvania town, at a restaurant called The Sandlot, so she set her GPS for there.

For now she wanted to keep things simple—her mantra was, don’t think, just drive. She hoped to put as much distance between herself and Garth’s Point as she could by first light: sort of like an escaped convict trying to get as far away as possible before anyone noticed she was gone. She felt two contradictory emotions. On the one hand, being in motion was oddly liberating; she felt unencumbered, light, filled with some indefinable potential. For the first time in months she sensed herself directed by some inner purpose, liminal and unshaped though it might have been. Still, it was as if she were consciously and willfully moving toward something rather than avoiding things, as she had been during the past year. At the same time, she felt anxious, filled with a vague apprehension, as if she was headed for some unknown disaster. Partly it had to do with this sweeping sensation of isolation that had come over her since leaving her house, abandoning her normal life. Here she was on the road, in the middle of the night, heading off to God knows where, and no one, not a single soul in the world, knew where she was. Something could happen to her, one of those horrid semis could run her off the highway and down into some ravine, and she’d be like one of those people you read about dead in a car for days before someone found her decomposing body. She thought of Luke, after his car went off the road, alone in the desert night. All by himself. Not a soul had known he was there. The accident report had said he’d lain there for several hours, alive, bleeding, in shock, before help arrived. She hated to think of her son so vulnerable, so alone like that in the universe. She wished now she had the bottle in the glove compartment, something to bolster her courage.

Stop it, she told herself.

She tried to give herself over to the simple rhythm of the road slipping beneath her, the purely mechanical reactions of her body as she steered the car, sped up or slowed down. For background noise, she had the radio tuned to the Albany public station playing classical music to insomniacs. Yet despite her attempts to avoid thinking, to keep her mind at bay, she couldn’t not think. Thoughts flew at her like bats at twilight, swooping around her head. She pictured Zack sound asleep, that innocent but equally determined way he had of surrendering so completely to sleep, on his back, his mouth slightly agape, his hands locked over his chest like someone resting in a coffin. If it was true that a sound sleep was the sign of someone with a clean conscience, then Zack was innocent as a child. She had a powerful desire to curl up beside him and hold him while he slept, to protect and comfort him. When he woke to find her gone, it would confuse him. The engineer in him would want to do something. Fix it. He’d call her, and when she told him what she was planning, he’d try to talk some “sense” into her, which would mean getting her to turn around and come back home. When he couldn’t do that, would he get in his car and come after her? Would he call the police? She had no idea what he was capable of in this situation. No more, in fact, than she had of herself. She’d entered some alien and unpredictable region, where it was impossible to base anything on what had gone before. From now on, she’d be making up the rules as she went along, reinventing her life. Reinventing herself.

Then again, how would Zack know she’d taken off, that she hadn’t just gone in to work early? She pictured how her “disappearance” would unfold. When she didn’t show up for work (she had a closing that morning), someone from the office would call her cell, several times probably, more and more anxious with each passing hour she failed to show up. Prior to the past year she had always been so reliable, so conscientious. In fact, she hadn’t taken a sick day in years. But recently she’d grown slack in her duties, arriving to the office late, calling in sick, missing court appearances and meetings and deadlines. When she didn’t answer her phone, Joan would probably call Zack. She could picture her friend saying something like, She can’t keep doing this, Zack. But then he’d tell her that she wasn’t home “sick” and their annoyance with her would quickly turn to worry, that something had happened to her. Something serious. That she’d been arrested for drunk driving, or that she’d been in an accident. Perhaps she ought to text him, she thought. Leave a note telling him she was fine. But what did “fine” mean? He’d want to know where she was and she couldn’t very well type with one hand the necessarily complex plan she was enacting, while driving a busy interstate at night with the other. And she didn’t want to stop and lose her momentum. Besides, what could she say in such crude shorthand, how would she describe what she couldn’t even describe to herself? Going out to see where our son died. Or, Trying to find out what he wanted to tell me. That would make no sense at all to Zack, and in fact would probably only serve to heighten his alarm. She could stop and call him later, before he left for work. Yet she was reluctant to engage him in direct conversation, fearing that he would try to talk her out of this. Her commitment to this course of action, she sensed, was fragile, in its embryonic form and therefore easily shattered. No, she wanted to get far enough away before the various “authorities”—Zack, Joan, the police, the rational part of her own brain—were alerted.

She thought of the house closing she was supposed to be at the next morning, now, in fact, just a few hours away. Of all her duties as a lawyer in the firm, this simple, mundane aspect perhaps gave her the most satisfaction. She liked helping people get their house, their home, especially young, first-time buyers. After leading them through all the perplexing hurdles and the arcane legalese, she savored watching as the happy couple left her office feeling they were about to head off into their “New Life,” one which she had played a small role in fashioning. She considered calling Joan and leaving a message that she wouldn’t be in, make up some excuse—say that she was feeling sick to her stomach, or that she needed to take some time off. But if Joan answered the phone, Elizabeth knew she’d wiggle the truth out of her one way or another. And if Warren got wind of it, who knows what he’d do? She what? he’d cry. Elizabeth feared, too, that if she tried to explain what she was doing out loud to someone else, attempted to give it a shape and meaning, it might appear for what she sensed it was—preposterous. Insane. The work of a mind that had completely unraveled. Perhaps only in the forgiving darkness of the night, with the motion of the car lulling her into a state of resigned acquiescence, did any of this make sense.

So she didn’t call—not Zack, not anyone. Not yet. She just drove on, speeding westward into the night.

As she crested a hill, a sign along the highway caught her attention. Brightly lit, it showed a father tucking his small daughter into bed. The caption below the two said, “If something were to happen to you, who would take care of her?” Some insurance company shamelessly playing upon a parent’s desire to protect his child. The sign, however, evoked a vivid memory in Elizabeth. In it, Luke was four or five, and she’d just finished reading him his favorite story, Hamilton, about an obese, voracious pig who foils a wolf from taking over the barnyard. The book was dog-eared, and she must have read it to him a hundred times. Her son couldn’t hear it enough. She could still remember a line from it: “For a pig is just downright supposed to be big.” This one night she had just tucked Luke in and was about to turn off the light when he told her he was afraid. She assumed it was the usual, run-of-the-mill fear of “monsters” or after reading about Hamilton, the occasional “wolf.” Elizabeth would make an exaggerated, comical show of looking under his bed, in the closet, checking to see that the window was locked. “See,” she’d say. “Nothing.”

But this time, he surprised her. “No, not monsters.”

“Then what, sweetie?”

“Will I die?”

“Don’t be silly,” she scoffed, trying to make light of it. Then seeing how his light-blue eyes had darkened with an apprehension she hadn’t seen before, she added, “You’re not going to die, sweetie.”

“What about grandma?”

Shortly before this, Elizabeth’s mother had passed away from a stroke. Elizabeth, who had always had a troubled relationship with her mother, felt mostly guilt that she didn’t feel more at the woman’s passing. Luke, too, hadn’t seemed particularly affected by his grandmother’s death. And yet, obviously it had taken more of a toll than she’d imagined.

“Grammy was old,” she comforted, cradling his head against her shoulder.

He seemed to chew on that thought for a moment. Then he said, “But everybody has to die someday, right?”

“Someday. But not for a long, long time.”

Her son seemed to chew on that answer for a moment. “But I’ll die someday. And you and dad, too. Everybody.”

She’d had no answer for that. Elizabeth would come to realize that her son, slow when it came to things like learning to throw a baseball or dating a girl, was precocious regarding more adult subjects like mortality, the suffering of others, simple kindness. For example, once they were walking the streets of New York when seven-year-old Luke ran over to a homeless person and put a dollar of his allowance money into the man’s can. Or another time when the mother of a fourth-grade classmate of his had died, Luke had asked Elizabeth to make a second lunch so that he could bring it in to school and give it to the boy. “He won’t have anybody to make his lunch now, Mom.”

Zack used to say that Luke had an old soul.

* * *

She drove into Pennsylvania, sunlight just beginning to spill over the humpbacked mounds of coal culm bordering the highway. An hour south of Scranton, she spotted the first one—the first descanso of her trip. She was heading down a steep incline hacked into the side of a mountain when she saw the cross, small and starkly white against the black background. It stood not far from the entrance of one of those runaway truck ramps. She slowed and pulled over to the side of the highway. She got out and stretched, her legs and back stiff from having driven hunched over for nearly four hours. The morning was chilly, and with just the t-shirt she’d worn to bed she shivered in the brisk autumn air of the Pennsylvania mountains.

She walked over to the memorial, squatted, and read the faded lettering written on the horizontal section of the cross: Ray Zimmerman, 1949–1991. Forty-two, Elizabeth calculated. She wondered if he’d been driving a truck when his brakes gave out on him and he tried to slow down on the runaway ramp. Below his name and attached to the cross was a small metal plaque covered with patina, which made the inscription on it hard to read. She had to lick her index finger and wipe it across the engraved lettering to be able to read it. My Dearest, I miss you so much. Until we meet again. Love, Ginny. She found intriguing the image of Ray Zimmerman’s wife coming out here by herself and digging a hole and putting up the cross. Arrayed on the ground about the cross was what she had come to know as the usual collection of junk, though in this case it had a particular theme: fishing rod and reel, waders, a fishing hat with all those little lures attached to it. Nearby rested a small St. Christopher’s medal. They were supposed to keep travelers safe. Evidently it hadn’t worked very well in this case. Everything looked weathered from the elements and undisturbed for ages, as if no one had come here for a very long time. As she squatted there, her bare arms rippled with goosebumps, she thought of the things George Doucette had told her. How the spirit of the dead person hovered near where he died. How sometimes one could feel a connection to that spirit. How each resting place had its own story to tell. She somehow didn’t feel sadness or anger or regret here. Instead, Elizabeth pictured a man on a quiet, early morning stream, mist hovering above the water, casting toward a deep pool, waiting for an unseen trout to strike. Would that be his version of heaven? The place where he came to rest?

Raymond, she thought to herself. Raymond, can you hear me?

Behind her, semis roared by, their exhaust pipes clattering away as they geared down for the steep grade. After a while she became adjusted to the noise and mostly what she heard was her own pulse sounding in her temples, beating in her neck. It was in that moment that she became aware of it. At first barely audible, then from somewhere up in the woods, she heard a faint, fluttery cry, haunting and melodious. Oo-wah-hooo, hoo-hoo. She recognized it as a mourning dove. She used to hear them down at the lake early in the morning. She loved lying in bed listening to the bird’s cry. The sound so beautiful, so poignant. So other-worldly.

Oo-wah-hooo, hoo-hoo.

* * *

Around mid-morning, a half hour past Harrisburg, she arrived at the place called The Sandlot. It turned out to be a small diner in a Quonset hut that sat adjacent to a large stone and gravel operation. Several dump trucks zoomed past the diner, trailing a cloud of reddish dust in their wake. As she entered the restaurant, half a dozen burly, baseball-capped men seated on stools at the counter stopped in mid-sentence, turned, and stared at her. She felt as if she’d entered someone’s private kitchen. A young, thin, hard-looking girl who wore a lot of metal in her face and black lipstick seated her in a booth over near a window. Her hair was hacked off on one side, while the other had gaudy streaks of pink and green in it. The girl wore a white polyester uniform that had her name tag pinned to her breast pocket: Nadine.

“You want coffee?” she asked almost impatiently, as if Elizabeth were interrupting her from something much more important. Her voice was scratchy and frail, like someone with laryngitis.

“Please.”

Finding herself suddenly famished, Elizabeth ordered the breakfast special—two eggs over easy, bacon, homefries, toast, and a glass of milk. Outside the window, a steady procession of dump trucks rumbled past, shaking the table, swirling up a cloud of dust. Even in the diner, Elizabeth could taste it, a sweet, burnt odor like incense. As she sat there, she decided it was time to make some calls, now that she was far enough away from the gravitational pull of her obligations. She called Zack first. In some ways she was relieved that he didn’t answer. She’d eventually have to talk to him, but the delay was appreciated. “It’s me,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m all right. I . . .” She paused then, not quite knowing what to say. “I’ll call you later. Okay.”

Next she called the office. She got Amy Roorsbach, the paralegal.

“They’re all here for the closing, Elizabeth,” Amy said anxiously to her. “What should I tell them?”

“Let me talk to Joan.”

In a moment Joan came on.

“Elizabeth,” her friend cried, “where the hell are you?”

“I’m not feeling well. The file’s on my desk. Everything should be in order. Could you handle it for me?”

“No, I can’t. I have to be in court.” Then in a whisper, Joan said, “Are you drinking again?”

“No, I . . . I told you, I’m not feeling well.”

“Well, why didn’t you call earlier?”

“I’m sorry. Really,” she said.

“Warren’s going to hit the roof on this. I don’t—” But before Joan could continue hectoring her, Elizabeth hung up. The phone rang again but she didn’t answer it. In fact, she silenced it, though she did hear it buzzing on the table, like some sort of angry wasp.

When her food came, she put the phone into her pocketbook. She decided not to think about her job, the trouble she was making for herself. Instead, she dug in, eating ravenously, for the first time in memory. The eggs done just the way she liked them, the bacon nice and crispy. She happened to spot the young waitress seated diagonally across from her in a booth. She was facing Elizabeth, head down, appearing to count her tip money; it was spread out over the table, and, like a child after having broken her piggy bank, she was putting like coins together in small piles. As Elizabeth watched the young waitress, she happened to notice something she hadn’t before. The subtle swelling just above her lap. Pregnant. Just a few months but definitely pregnant. Elizabeth didn’t see a wedding ring though. This girl wasn’t much older than Fabiana.

The waitress noticed her staring. Getting up, she went over behind the counter, got the coffee pot, and returned.

“You need a refill?” she asked almost curtly.

“No, I think I’m all set.” Elizabeth hesitated, then asked, “How far along are you?”

The girl screwed up her mouth, gave Elizabeth a look that was part surprise, part annoyance, as if to say, It’s none of your damn business, lady. Elizabeth couldn’t get over all the metal sticking out of the girl’s nose and eyebrows, her lower lip and ears. Her face looked mutilated, tortured, as if held together by nuts and bolts. And that hair. If she were her kid, Elizabeth wouldn’t let her leave the house looking like that. But up close Elizabeth could see that beneath it all she was kind of pretty, with dark, almond-shaped eyes, and a soft, full mouth that made her appear vulnerable when she pursed her lips. Though she looked nothing at all like TJ, Elizabeth was reminded of Luke’s former girlfriend for some reason. Something about her mouth.

“Four months,” she finally confessed. “It’s a girl. I didn’t want to be surprised. I had enough surprises already.”

“You must be so excited.”

“Thrilled,” she said, lifting the metal in one eyebrow so that Elizabeth couldn’t tell whether she was being sarcastic or not.

“Have you picked out names?”

This question seemed to open up something in the girl. “I’m leaning toward Amber Moon. Howard’s not so hot on it though.”

“Is that your husband?”

“He’s the father. But I figure he doesn’t get to have a say.”

“Oh. Why’s that?”

“He keeps saying we’ll get married just as soon as his divorce is finalized. But I’ve heard that line before. He’s still living with his wife.”

“Must be hard. Being a single mom, I mean.”

“I’m doing fine. It’s my parents that are freakin’ out. To hear them, you’d think I killed somebody or something.”

“You hang in there,” Elizabeth said, hoping to put a period to the conversation. Instead, the girl stood there, coffee pot in hand.

“This isn’t how I planned for things to go.”

“Life never goes how you plan, believe me. Just don’t give up.”

“Hell, no. I got plans, Howard or not. I’m saving up to go back to school.”

“What do you want to be?”

“I’m going into medical billing. So I can take care of Amber Moon by myself, if I have to.”

“Good for you. Mind if I ask you a question?”

“Sure, I guess so,” the girl replied, sliding into the booth and sitting down.

Elizabeth took her phone out and scrolled through her pictures until she came to one of Luke. It was of him sitting at the dock reading.

“Do you recognize him?”

The girl stared at Elizabeth suspiciously, hardly glancing at the photo.

“Should I?”

“He came in here. About a year ago.”

“A lot of people come in here.”

“Could you take a closer look?”

The girl leaned forward, staring at the photo.

“Boy, he’s cute. Is he single?” she asked with a girlish smile.

“Was.”

“Now why couldn’t I find some guy like that. Who is he?”

“My son. Do you recognize him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“His name was Luke.”

The girl looked from Elizabeth to the picture and back again. “You keep saying ‘was.’”

“He died. A few days after he stopped here, he was in a car accident.”

“Geez! That really sucks,” the girl said, wrinkling her nose as if she caught a whiff of a bad smell. “Why do you want to know if he was in here?”

“I’m trying to find out what his last few days were like. Where he stopped. Who he might have talked to.”

“Can I see his photo again?” the girl asked. Elizabeth slid her phone across the table. “If I’d talked to him, I would’ve remembered. He’s not one of our regulars,” she offered, with a sardonic flick of her head toward the men sitting at the counter. “I’m real sorry.”

“Thank you, Nadine,” Elizabeth said, reaching across and patting the girl’s hand. “You take care of Amber Moon, okay?”

“I will.”

“By the way, here’s my card,” Elizabeth said.

The girl took it, frowned as she looked at it.

“I’m a lawyer. I work with single moms. If you ever just need to talk, call me.”

“Sure.”

“No, I mean it.”

The girl nodded, slipped out of the booth and walked back over to her table. She quickly swept the small piles of money into her hand and dropped the coins into a pocket on the front of her apron, just in front of where her baby lay.

When Elizabeth finished eating, she placed three twenty-dollar bills on the table. It was all the cash she had on her. Before she left, she wrote a note on a napkin: Hold onto your dreams.

* * *

She drove for a few more hours before growing drowsy. Seeing a rest area up ahead, she decided to pull over and catch a short nap. She locked the doors. She’d read about women getting assaulted on the side of the highway like this. She’d warned Luke about doing this very thing during his cross-country road trip, yet here she was breaking her own rules. Leaning her head back, she closed her eyes and within moments was gripped by a leaden sleep. She had a dream, something about being in a small boat that was taking on water. She tried to bail the water but all she had were her two hands. The boat sunk lower and lower, until finally she had to abandon it and start swimming. The water was cold and viscous, and her arms could barely move through it, as if it wasn’t water at all but some other more dense substance.

She woke disoriented, a little anxious, the sun streaming harshly into the car. She could feel traffic whooshing past, shaking her. Where the hell was she, she wondered. It took her a moment to get her bearings. She reached over into the passenger’s seat and picked up her notebook. The next dot on her map was just outside of Staunton, Virginia. Luke had spent the night at a small hotel there. Before pulling back onto the highway, for some unknown reason, she recalled a visit to the house by Luke’s closest friend, a kid named Griff McCoy.

It had been an uncomfortably humid morning near the end of August, not a week after the funeral. Elizabeth was home alone and still in that dazed, post-trauma mode, where the depths of her pain were just being sounded. She moved about the house like an old person with arthritis, each step filled with a new and surprising ache. Everywhere she looked, there were memories that jolted, that seemed to prick her like a hypodermic needle or slam her like a hammer to the chest. When she answered the door, she was surprised to see Griff standing there on the porch. Most of Luke’s old friends from town had come to the funeral, as well as several of his St. Anselm classmates and Father Jerome. Even Luke’s former girlfriend TJ came. They’d all shown up at the funeral, hugged her and Zack, offered their condolences, and then left. Not a single one had stopped by to visit afterwards, neither for the gathering right after the funeral nor in the days or weeks or months that followed. Elizabeth felt as if they’d abandoned Luke.

“Hi, there, Mrs. G,” Griff had said, as she opened the door.

Griff, short for Griffin, was a large, bulky kid, soft around the middle, with a perpetual, ironic-looking smile pasted on his doughy face, which made him look as if he thought everything a big joke. Luke and Griff, along with a couple of other friends, had played in a band together for a while early in high school. Luke was the best musician, the lead guitarist, though truth was he wasn’t particularly good either. Of all of Luke’s friends, Griff was the one Elizabeth had liked the least. The word that came to mind was sly, though Elizabeth had nothing really to go on besides that smile. In all the years she’d known him, she’d never really warmed to him. Luke had sensed it, too, and on at least one occasion had asked her what she had against him. “Does he always have to smile like an idiot?” Luke came to his defense by saying, “Why do you always have to be so hard on people?” But here he was, the only one of Luke's friends who had the decency to stop by and say hello.

“Please, come in, Griff,” she said. They sat in the den. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, I’m good, Mrs. G,” he replied. It even annoyed her the way he called her Mrs. G, as if they were in some dopey sit-com from the seventies.

“You must be getting ready for school.”

“I leave day after tomorrow. Figured I’d stop by before then.”

Elizabeth and Griff chatted for a while, awkwardly, mostly about college, an internship he was doing at a law firm in New York, his plan to study for the LSATs that fall.

“You’re thinking of law?” she asked, a little surprised that he had the drive or smarts to become a lawyer.

“Maybe. It’s a possibility.”

Elizabeth used to press Luke about what he was going to do after he graduated with a theology major. He didn’t seem to have a clue, nor did he seem particularly worried about it. She was more concerned than he was. Several times she suggested he consider going into law.

“Let me know if you need a letter of recommendation,” she said to Griff. “Plus I might I have a few contacts.”

“Really? That’d be great, Mrs. G.”

Griff then stared across at Elizabeth and, without the slightest adornment or preface, said, “Luke was my best friend.”

The comment made her throat suddenly ache, it was so simple and pure and genuine. “He always liked you, too,” she offered.

“I miss him.”

“Me too.”

Griff glanced around the room, seemingly confused for a moment, as if trying to remember the purpose for his visit. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, I should get going.”

They stood and she gave him a big hug. Perhaps, she thought, her son had been right; she’d been too hard on him. Too hard on most people. “It was so nice of you to stop by, Griff.”

She walked him to the door. She knew they would probably never see each other again, or if they did, that the next time they bumped into the other, say, in town, at the Big Y or some restaurant, she’d be an old lady whose son had died years ago, and he’d be a fat father of three kids and coaching soccer.

“Take care, Mrs. G.”

“You, too, Griff. Say hello to your mother for me.”

As he started down the steps, she tentatively called out, “Griff?”

He stopped halfway, turned. “Yeah, Mrs. G?”

“Luke called me the night of the accident.”

She tossed this information out like a fly fisherman casting a lure, hoping Griff might rise to take the bait. Instead he replied only with, “Really?”

“Yes. He left a message saying he needed to talk to me. But we never got round to it. I think something was bothering him.”

Griff nodded noncommittally.

“You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

“You don’t think it could’ve had anything to do with TJ?”

“TJ?”

“Sometimes I think he still liked her.”

“He never said anything about her to me.”

“And you have no idea if there was something bothering him?”

Griff sucked in a breath and looked away, out toward the lake. His gaze then returned and held Elizabeth’s for the briefest of moments. But in that moment, she thought she saw something, a glimmer just below the surface.

“To be honest, Luke and me sort of drifted apart. We weren’t as tight as we used to be.”

“Why do you think that was?”

“He changed.”

“Really. In what way?”

Of course, Elizabeth had felt it too, but hearing someone else say it made it appear more troubling. She braced herself, both fearing and welcoming whatever Griff might offer. Revelations of drugs, depression, some dark, unsavory side of her son.

Griff shrugged. “He just didn’t seem to have fun doing the things he used to. It was like he was in his own little world.”

“Really,” Elizabeth said, waiting for more.

“I should get running along, Mrs. G.”

“Goodbye, Griff.”

As she watched him walk to his car, she wondered if he’d known more than he had let on. Or if it was just her suspicious mind working overtime.