The boy had outfitted the dashboard with a low-end Hifonics digital receiver with push-button volume controls that Winkler could not figure out how to turn down. Electric guitar screamed out of speakers in the door panels. He stabbed buttons randomly as he drove but managed only to stop the tuner halfway between stations. Static deluged the car, punctuated by bursts of distant-sounding jazz. He rolled down the windows.
The roadsides had changed—a strip mall at an intersection; new developments labeled Meadowlark Ridge or Woodchuck Hollow—but the roads themselves were the same: the same iron bridge over Silver Creek, the same low and comfortable hill on Fortier Avenue, even the same weeds along the shoulder: Queen Anne’s lace and thistle bucking in the wake of a passing car.
At a convenience store he bought three wilted roses wrapped in cellophane and drove with them in his lap. Despite the howl of static, his heart was oddly steady; the Datsun griped through its gears.
East Washington, Bell Road, Music Street. The middle school—still a middle school!—marquee read: CONGRATULATIONS BOMBERETTE DANCE TEAM! In front of the entrance a giant poplar he didn’t remember stood sentinel. The parking lot was empty, save a trio of school buses parked at the back. He turned in and switched off the car and the speakers mercifully stopped their hissing.
He had spent one August in Ohio, a month of thunder: distant clouds in the far corner of the sky muttering most mornings; by afternoon whole colonies of storms illuminated in the radar’s sweeping radius, like spots of blood saturating a disc of gauze. By evenings, he remembered, the air would get so heavy with moisture he imagined he could feel each bloated molecule as it toppled into his lungs.
Memories heaved up: a ball of hail melting in his palm; sheets of rain overwhelming the windshield; a calendar darkening and turning in the whirlpool of the basement stairwell. The goose-shaped knocker. A smell of acetylene rising through kitchen floorboards. This place was the Ohio he had left, but it wasn’t, too: the hurtling traffic, a buzzing electrical tower where he was certain a tract of forest had been twenty-five years before.
He got out of the Datsun and exhaled. This was just a day. Just a late-summer morning, a few stratus clouds skimming over fields. To a passing car he would be nothing more than a man out for a walk. Who knew—maybe he had a family here; maybe—in some fundamental way—he belonged. He took the roses, locked the Datsun, and started up Shadow Hill Lane. A warm wind eased past.
Here was the subdivision, all the houses still standing: the Stevensons’, the Harts’, the Corddrys’. On the Corddrys’ mailbox stood a new, hand-lettered sign: THE TWEEDYS. In the driveway that had been the Sachses’, a bald man in painter’s coveralls took a bucket from the back of a van and carried it inside. There was no sign of the fallen sugar maple, just a young crabapple besieged by tent caterpillars.
He peeked inside the Harts’ mailbox, where a yellow strip of tape read Mr. Bill Calhoun. The same was true of the Stevensons: moved away, replaced by another name, updated lives.
New houses had been built at the end of the cul-de-sac—smarter-looking houses, with skylights and outdoor central-air units and art deco numerals. An image of the road awash in floodwater flashed in front of his eyes, flotsam and detritus, swirling brown water, his legs locked around a mailbox post.
Still, he could not suppress tendrils of hope: Sandy coming to the door, photos of Grace hanging in the hall, an eventual reconciliation. Had he wanted so much from life? An interesting job, a view of sky. A car to wash in the driveway. Sandy plucking weeds from a flower bed; his daughter pedaling a bike cautiously to the curb. A straightforward, anonymous existence. The odds were astronomical, he knew, but his brain floated the idea forth—they could be here—and he was reluctant to dispel it.
He scanned the houses but could not discern a trace of flood damage. Warps in the frames? Stains on the foundations? He saw nothing. It was as if the entire place had been rebuilt, the old houses hauled away, memories erased. Grass, trees, birds—even the smell of barbecue somewhere—every sound and sight bore a quiet, summertime complacency: no mysteries here, no secrets.
But everywhere corpses were rising from graves, shambling toward him: the odor of wet, mown grass, of weeds, of the river—each was a key to a memory: the card table in the kitchen, leaves in the backyard, a slap across the face.
Four houses, three houses, two. The cellophane around the roses crackled in his fist. “She won’t be here,” he said. “Neither of them will be here.” Still, spiders of sweat crawled his ribs.
Nine-five-one-five Shadow Hill Lane. The saplings flanking the front walk were now rangy, gangling adults. The walk and driveway were the same, the hedges unruly and full. The same eaves. The same front steps. A new garage huddled at the end of the driveway, clumsily built. In one of the downstairs windows a chain of paper dolls, taped to the glass, held hands.
He could see Sandy taking Grace inside, lowering her into the bath. Clumps of snow dashed against the kitchen window. In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.
The brass knocker had been replaced by a doorbell. An orange bulb behind the button flickered. It was strange to think that something added to this house after he had last been there had already become old in the interim.
A piece of slate suspended above the bell was engraved THE LEES. He wiped his palms on his pants and rang the bell. The door was maroon now, and the paint was flaking off. I’ll repaint it for them, he thought. I could do that today. Think of the things he could do: edge the beds, weed the lawn, pry moss from the sidewalk cracks—he’d cook them dinner; he’d defrost their freezer. Whomever Mr. Lee was, a guardian, Sandy’s husband, he wouldn’t mind; he’d shake Winkler’s hand, invite him into the backyard—by the end of the night they’d embrace like brothers.
There was a shuffling inside and a Korean woman came to the door holding a puppy. She squinted through the screen. “Yes?”
“Oh,” Winkler said. Over her shoulder, in the hall, the closet door had the same plastic knobs on it. “You live here? This is your home?”
“Of course.” She raised her eyebrows. “Are you all right, sir?”
“And no one named Sandy lives here?”
“No. Is this—?”
He thrust the flowers at her. “These are for you.”
She pushed the screen open a foot and took them and let the door close again. The dog sniffed the cellophane. She turned the bouquet to see if there might be a card.
“It’s a nice house,” Winkler said.
She looked up expectantly. “Are these from you?”
He shrugged, tried a half wave as he backed off the stoop. The heel of his shoe caught, and he staggered backward onto the walk.
“Sir?” she called.
“I’m okay,” he said. She closed the door, and he heard it latch. Blinds in the front windows louvered shut, one after another.
He gathered himself, trembling lightly, and continued to the end of the street, past the end of the cul-de-sac, through a backyard, to the edge of the river. The water was sluggish and low. The caps of a few stones showed above the surface, pale with dried mud. On the far bank, the trees had been thinned and he could see the decks and backyard swing sets of another neighborhood. He listened: a low murmur, a thousand tiny splashes. Somewhere above that, the sound of traffic. That was it. A meek, brown river purling along.