In Paxton, winter relinquished its hard grip on the land slowly, the bony fingers of the season unfurling to reveal the mud beneath. What was uncovered belied the stark beauty of the other seasons—there was only tenacious, axle-deep mud on the narrow roads, and the nakedness of the trees awaiting the mysterious spring messages to begin the process of greening.
This tipping into spring was never linear or predictable, the warm days punctuated with cruelly frequent forays back into winter, the bony fingers extending their grip once again, sometimes for weeks at a time, weighing down upon the land and the people it held tight against the long-awaited spring….
In Paxton the roads were read like Braille, the feel and depth of the dirt transmitting its signal through the squirming tires, the steering wheel flaccid and loose as the car drifted sideways through the turns. One day there was only mud; the next, the tires crashed through puddles, sending shards of ice flying against the steel-gray sky.
This was a capricious season, as readily darting toward spring as retreating toward the immovable cold of a New Hampshire winter, and Chatham knew instinctively that it was not a time to commit to one path, where circumstance might obviate it as readily as six inches of snow on a March morning.
In contrast to this was the solidity of life on Morse Road—the turn-of-the-century house with the tall, ill-fitted windows that stubbornly defeated the white-hot output of the wood stove, the two forces locked in mortal battle through the biting New Hampshire winter.
The town had become as familiar to Chatham as the curvature of his wife’s hip—that place where his hand rested neatly, as if the skin and bone had conformed to each other with evolutionary precision after all these years. Nearly everyone in the small town knew him, and he derived enjoyment from this fact. He had bent and adapted himself to Paxton; it had also conformed to him, the two entities achieving a comfortable dependency. He took pleasure from a thousand measures of familiarity, stacking them like cordwood in his memory: his knowledge of the vast network of dirt roads, the fact that he knew the best place to buy hay for the horses, or get a tire changed on the tractor in an afternoon’s time, or that he could cross-country ski across a hundred acres of land belonging to a half-dozen neighbors, with impunity. They merely waved. The familiarity of these things was a brace against the bitter reversals of the Northern New England spring, and he took comfort from them, wrapped himself in them, like the tongues of warmth from a flame.
He played these things, and the other images of the town, through his mind like cinema: the steaming breath of the horses as he greeted them each morning; in summer, the great hordes of mosquitoes and black flies unleashed upon the land and its people, the proboscis so fierce with pent-up winter energy that it left a small blood trickle, as if the skin had been pierced by a tiny, spinning drill bit. In Autumn, the air that crackled with freshness, impelled by breezes from other hemispheres. The winter and its searing cold that drove all living things from sight.
And he thought now of the spring, fraught with possibility and doubt, poised like a scared animal at the roadside, direction unsure.
Before he was even in the side door—still pounding his mud-covered shoes against the boot scrape— Chatham heard his wife, Catavina, calling from inside.
“How many are there?” This was the running joke between them—in winter it was so raw in Paxton that you could name the degrees Fahrenheit like members of a small family. In January, for instance, he’d call back with: “Just seven of them!” Today, hunkered down in a recalcitrant and bitter March, there were just 26 of them. He imagined them huddled together against the unseasonable cold, played with the image in his mind. Then he called out the number to her.
“That’s not right,” said Cat in a dogged standoff against the meanness of the season that would not yield to spring. “It’s March, for chrissakes. I’m staying inside.”
Chatham smiled at the thought of his wife’s perennial fight against the seasons. She was crankiest in the fall, as the days tumbled like ice floes over a dam into the long New Hampshire winter. Chatham knew that his wife was enamored with Paxton, but that the weather was a prominent and convenient target for her, a way to expend energy, generate useful warmth.
Chatham, on the other hand, liked the cold, imagined that he could generate his own heat against it, like a dynamo. Sometimes he would split wood in winter in just a T-shirt, steeling himself and heightening the pleasure of re-entering the warm house, his skin pink and scalded by the cold.
“Do as you like,” said Chatham, feigning agreement.
“Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t come out until spring, and I’ll stage a ceremonial burial for that damn thermometer, and the ice scraper, and my winter boots, and all the other accoutrements of winter I’d just as soon never see again.”
She was building intensity now, the futile standoff compounding and growing upon itself.
“Sounds good,” said Chatham. “See you in a few months.”
“You think I’m kidding. One of these days I’m just going to boycott the cold. I’ll call you from Mexico. I’ll be drinking margaritas, and eating fish tacos, and you’ll be freezing your ass off in this hardscrabble town.”
The depth of her irony pleased him. Truth was, the two of them had folded the small community around them like a blanket. Chatham worried that this had made them more vulnerable, not less, for they had surrendered their own defenses to what surrounded them. There were things that would have protected them in a thousand other circumstances, by force of will, but they were gone now. They had each other, and they had Paxton, but the accumulated power of these things was still a fragile defense. In northern New England it was standard practice to carry a blanket, shovel, and snow gear in your trunk, but you could still be found dead at the roadside, wrapped in the things you thought would save you.
Chatham imagined how one thought could generate heat, the steaming breath of it defying all that surrounded them. He figured it was the surest thing they had.
Chatham sold real estate, which he thought of as a mercenary profession. He found the work completely uninteresting, but it enabled him to live in a beautiful place and capitalize on the widespread desires of others wishing to do the same.
Catavina had picked his name out of the phone book one day as she was driving through Paxton. She was a New York City marketing executive, fleeing the confines of Manhattan in a rental car for the weekend. Like many city dwellers, she was suddenly intoxicated with the urge to buy a house in the country, compelled by the faint notion that she could somehow lead contradictory, dual lives—the busy professional climbing the greasy pole of the corporate hierarchy, and the peaceable country dweller. The twin urges churned within her like acid.
She was soothed by the depth of the greenery that whizzed past as she drove up Highway 91, the music playing loudly through the CD player. She imagined the ragged ends of her life spreading out behind her, fading and dissipating like contrails in a broad blue sky.
Chatham answered her phone call with a languid tone that Cat found disarmingly and instantly different from the staccato rhythms of New York. Chatham, for his part, was nonplussed by the call, and he cleared the afternoon as he had done so often for people like her. He knew it would only take one, among the dozens, to make his time worthwhile with a fat commission. At times like these he was taken back with his own opportunism, surprised by the magnitude of the urge to fatten his wallet and secure his place in the New Hampshire hills.
She met him at his office and they set off in his four-wheel-drive truck. As they traipsed through the drafty houses, he couldn’t help but notice her lithe body, the subtle snatches of skin revealed by her loose-fitting blouse. She, similarly, liked his rough manner, the ease with which he navigated the potholed roads, and the obvious calm he derived from a place that he had made his own.
Both feigned interest in the houses, but as they preceded each other down the echoing hallways, they spent more time eyeing the other’s rearward views, and the fit of each other’s jeans.
Catavina, due back in the city that night, surprised herself by booking a local B&B, the two agreeing to continue the house tours the next day. This time it included lunch, followed by dinner, and drinks. The day was infused with forceful but barely perceptible momentum, like the calm of a canoe on a broad river, the speed of which is only revealed when compared to the stillness of the willowy banks.
She had recently been through a string of bad relationships, the worst of which included some small amount of violence, the bruises subtle, but obvious to those who knew her. After that she dug herself in, erected a bulwark against future passions and what she had come to view as an attraction to unkind men.
So this day, in Paxton, it surprised her how easily she was caving, a helpless, long slide toward vulnerability and exposure.
After two Irish coffees, the two tumbled easily into the tall bed, casting aside the stacked pillows, relishing how their unlikely circumstances had brought them together, and the seeming anonymity of the sudden tryst. They felt smug at breakfast the next morning, sharing the table with other guests who supposed they had arrived together, when in fact they had known each other for only a day.
“Where are you two from?” said a paunchy woman between bites of scone and eggs, her husband vapid and smiling beside her.
“Well..” started Chatham in earnest.
“Madison, Wisconsin!” Catavina cut in.
“Really? You’re a long way from home,” said the woman.
Catavina at that moment had a sensation of being only loosely moored, in a place she had never visited before, and having slept with a complete stranger. So she set sail freely, the story gaining its own fictional momentum, blown by breezes of passion and recklessness.
“Yes, we’re doctoral candidates at the University there. In philosophy. We’re between semesters.” She could only hope that the woman had never been to Madison. She had not been there herself.
“Yes, we’re writing a book on American journeys, and we’re here gathering material. Who knows? We might put you in the book!”
Chatham looked at her wildly, hoping for rescue, any small tether that would bring them back to truth and propriety. At the same time, he realized he was enjoying the fiction, and saw the two of them clearly acting out the ruse. It was at that moment that he felt the slightest sensation of something giving way in him, single strands breaking, leading to other fissures, until the entire fabric had been rent. He wondered: Could a person trust in the power of a single, steadfast thought to stay safe from turbulence? His house, the town of Paxton, the cruel reliability of the seasons, all had been a comfort to him—a host of carefully erected defenses. What surprised him now was the ease with which it all let go.
“We’re circumnavigating the country,” he said suddenly. “It’s kind of like Steinbeck and ‘Travels with Charlie.’ “ The woman and her husband looked at them blankly. “Only we don’t have a dog.”
“Oh we do!” said the woman, oblivious to the intricacy of the unfolding story. “A Labrador!”
“What a waste of a good lie,” said Catavina later in the hallway. “That woman was an imbecile.”
“Maybe that was a good thing,” said Chatham. “Anyone with more intelligence would have seen through it. I hope you don’t mind if I say so, but we’re lousy liars.”
“Probably right,” said Catavina. “But thanks for stepping into the ring, nonetheless. We had it going for a minute there, didn’t we?”
She was a lousy liar, but Chatham could see there were no lies being told now, in her words, or in her eyes. The two of them felt mildly inebriated with their deception as they jounced down the hall of the B&B. It was 9 am, checkout wasn’t until 11. Their blood racing, they laughingly threw off their clothes and piled back in the big bed, the “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging jauntily off the doorknob. They could hear the breakfast dishes being put away, the guests rolling their suitcases down the uneven wood floors toward their cars and lives far from that place.
The two of them had shared a lie, which made it no lie at all, so that in that room there was only the truth of a commonly held deception, and of love, which they took to be the same. It was in this way that they greeted the New Hampshire day with their lovemaking, the sun streaming in through the blinds, painting the big bed in broad stripes of illumination.
There followed a long-distance commute. For months, Catavina made the five-hour trip to New Hampshire, sometimes in treacherous conditions, the blowing snow and lurid slides of the rental car heightening the passion of their eventual union. Chatham sometimes made the trip to New York. But the compass of the relationship seemed to point north, to the New Hampshire woods.
After six months of this, Cat resigned from her job, moved from the city and into the house on Morse Road. She slipped easily into the culture of the small town, the trappings of Manhattan falling away like bark from the deadfall that littered the property. She moved more easily, dressed more casually, freed from the constraints of the city.
Chatham was pleased with the change, felt he had nudged her toward some truer version of herself. But she nudged him, too, redesigning things, throwing out his old furniture, bringing a wind of change to the drafty house and to his life.
The relationship grew with slow-moving grace, unhurried, but deeply rooted, traveling inexorably toward marriage, even from the start.
The ceremony took place on a fall day, the curious amalgamation of Catavina’s city friends and the people of Paxton tangled together like a mix of fall leaves.
“How did I end up here?” she asked him one day. “Where did my other life go, the one I thought I was going to lead? You know—in the thick of things. Professional woman. City life.”
“I dunno. Your choice I guess—to be here, in the slow lane. Why, you regret it?”
“No. Just wondering. I can’t figure how these things happen. We end up in places we never imagined for ourselves. Not long ago I was living in the busiest city in the world, staying out until 1 am, riding subways. Now I live on a road where I pick up my head to identify every passing car—and half the time, I get it right. Or they wave, like I’m a relative or something. In New York, I didn’t even know the people in my building. Or didn’t want to know ‘em.”
“You sound like you have pangs.”
“I don’t. Really. I just can’t figure how I covered so much ground, so quickly. Manhattan is five hours from here, but it’s a million goddamn miles in my mind. Another time zone.”
“I’ll take that as an endorsement,” said Chatham. “Maybe you’ll stay a while.”
She smiled, folded herself into him, the strong arms wrapping around her, protecting her against all those things that were a million miles away, the distance at once unbridgeable, and covered in one lazy step.
In those days Chatham viewed the relationship as whole, complete, and therefore resisted the idea of children—thought of it as an intrusion into the sanctuary of their relationship and the small town that held them tight against the changing New England seasons. Cat’s view of the world was the inversion of this; she loved Chatham, but needed a child to solidify and consummate the relationship, and to expose herself to something she could only dimly comprehend but felt compelled to do.
And of course, she was right. The boy, Stephen, brought a completeness into their lives that could never have been anticipated. Chatham’s feelings for Stephen were composed of that strange alchemy of fear and attraction, responsibility and pure love. It could not be explained, but it propelled him with evolutionary force into a role that he had only faintly imagined for himself. It took him willingly, to a place of fear and surrender, even helplessness.
He never felt this more acutely than one day when he took Stephen to a playground, watching over him dutifully, enjoying the boy’s growing self-confidence and physical coordination. Chatham was reading the paper, absorbed in the local police blotter, when he heard the dull crack, like a small, dry branch snapping under the weight of heavy snow. He glanced over to the place where Stephen had been playing on the high bar. The boy, on the ground now, looked at his father quizzically, as if groping to understand the thing that had just happened to him. He held up the broken arm in a strange, disembodied movement. In that one moment Chatham met the boy’s eyes, which seemed strangely accusatory, as if the father’s inattention was somehow responsible for the compound fracture, the bone sticking out grotesquely from his forearm. There was a moment in which the immensity of the pain was held at bay, the briefest respite, and in that moment the father and son exchanged a knowing glance. It was only the thinnest veneer of communication, broken into shards by the cascading pain. Then the boy began to cry.
At that moment Chatham felt the weight of all that he could not control, a crushing avalanche in which he must nonetheless stand erect, the immensity of it all around him. He felt the relationship slipping through his fingers, felt sure it was a thing only he could have permitted to happen, regretted his own actions, and the actions that brought a child into the world that he could not protect from gravity or other inexplicable and overpowering forces that were yet to come, were sure to come. In that moment he sensed the magnitude of all he could not see or guard against: a chance meeting; a physical compulsion, consummated in a rough fashion in one night, bed clothes strewn about the room; the seeming security of a small town; a child’s bone snapping due to the overwhelming weight of circumstance.
He imagined that all of this was impelled by an invisible force, subtle breezes, the moon in its course across the sky. Who could know? All of these things, even the smallest forces in nature, multiplied and compounded the myriad events of a day, leading to different places, different lives.
When Chatham and Cat were in their mid-40s, the relationship took a turn, but not toward dissolution and recrimination, as is common of that span of togetherness, but to a place of greater depth and commitment that was inexplicable and would occasionally hit Chatham like a broadside. Theirs was a constellation of love, fixed and immutable in the night sky, unmoved by atmospheric disturbances of work, child rearing, and finance.
Chatham thought back to a trip they had taken to Italy. They were walking on a remote road, through the dull green of olive orchards, when he sensed a presence. There, just off the path and down a steep slope, he could see two depressions in the tall greenery, exactly forming the shape of reclined bodies. He looked closer, and saw they were two young nuns of the local church, their long, black-and-white habits stark against the spring green where it surrounded them in their secret tryst. He noticed that their upper arms were just touching as they slept, a current of affection passing between them, electrical in its force.
He remembered being shocked by the potential of the scene, the air of innocence and deception that lay over the women like low fog, heavy and impenetrable. Were they there to bask in the sun, an innocent urge—or was it something more? Had they been joined in some way, just moments before—illicit love, perhaps? Had they met at an appointed hour, perhaps this day and every day, to consummate the thing they could not speak of?
Chatham thought of his own love like this: restful, a place of sanctuary, but also indulgent, pleasurable in some way that enveloped him and put the rest of the world at bay. He had enfolded himself with Catavina, and put the world in a state of retreat, and what passed between them could not be measured, only guessed at, each night great arcs of energy connecting them in the darkness as they lay next to one another.
Yet, despite the depth and solidity of the relationship, Chatham knew that in their 17 years he had moved back one place in the queue of Cat’s life. Stephen was number one.
Catavina’s love for the boy was singular, one flickering star in the night sky, at once inexhaustible and fragile. She invested everything in him, left nothing guarded or in reserve for what she knew was sure to come, what must come.
The boy had recently completed the wide arc of adolescence in which parents, and anything of convention, is pushed violently away, rejected, then allowed to come near and is even embraced with a sort of comfortable resignation.
Since Stephen was the only, Chatham and Cat took the same hyperbolic path that his life had, rode it like passengers on a coaster, nauseous and ill at ease at every turn he made toward that region outside law and propriety.
Then there was the girl—Sandra—pretty in a dangerous way, enlarging Stephen’s badness, widening the broad sweep away from parents, home, and school.
Cat hated her, blamed her, wished ugliness upon her. It split the mother and son as if by a maul. Unheard of meanness passed between them, the deadly alchemy of love and hate that is unique to parents and children—a simultaneous revulsion and elemental love. Cat resented the girl’s presence in the house, hated the site of the Toyota retreating down the gravel drive with the two of them in it. Hated the theft of the only child by love and an impulse she remembered too well.
The magnetic hatred between the two women reached a climax when Stephen was 17. Chatham and Cat had been to a friend’s for dinner, and were comfortably drunk by the time they got back to the house on Morse Road.
A fire was burning in the living room, Stephen and Sandra reposed—but still clothed—on the couch.
Cat flew inexplicably into a rage at how they had commandeered the house for their tryst. She kicked the fire with a heavy boot, the melted snow hissing against the flames.
“What are you doing? Who said you could be here, alone?”
“Mom,” said Stephen. “We were just hanging out.”
“Hang out somewhere else,” she said, before realizing that their expulsion was the worst thing she could do, driving them toward further estrangement. She regretted it as soon as she had said it.
The two teenagers fled the scene like ghosts, Sandra’s car quickly retreating down the drive in a crush of gravel and snow.
Cat stood stunned in the darkened living room, staring unbelieving at the dying embers of the fire, the seeming violation of her home and hearth.
“Was that necessary?” said Chatham. “They were only being teenagers.”
“Two teenagers in a vacant house, in front of a warm fire, do things they later regret,” she said. “I’m trying to save them from themselves.”
That was the nadir of the mother’s relationship with the son, coldness passing between them for weeks afterward, Sandra’s name virtually banned from conversation.
Chatham hated the recriminations between the mother and son, and the caustic silence produced an urge to flee the big house. Years before, he had renovated a drafty barn behind the property, installing insulation and a wood stove that fought valiantly against the biting cold. He installed 15 feet of workbench space, and hung his tools like artwork on the pegboard surface of the walls. A large, red, 10-drawer tool chest abutted the workbench. He had an electrician install outlets throughout the barn for his power tools. Old car posters and memorabilia decorated the otherwise austere space.
This was sanctuary.
Chatham needed to wrap himself around something, a single point of focus, unwieldy, nearly unconquerable, that would show new facets of his well worn—and up until now—well-defined self.
He bought a 40-year old British car, an MG, in ruinous but nearly original condition. The decrepit vehicle would be such a thing, a vessel into which he could pour his thought and energy, and which in turn would reveal the depths of his shortcomings and inabilities and draw them in sharp contrast. Could he rewire the ignition system, or replace the decrepit wiring loom? Could he refinish the wood dash, true the wire-spoke wheels, rebuild the motor, and have the whole thing run when he was done? He had no idea, but he was about to find out.
Proceeding with only a workshop manual and dimly remembered techniques from a high school service station job, he would tackle the car methodically, from front to back, and before he was done, every nut and bolt would pass through his hands. As he did this, he realized that there was no other aspect of his life that could be so thoroughly manipulated and controlled—nothing that had this tactile quality, or where the results were so immediate and tangible. You grasp the weathered bolt with the channel-lock pliers, and lay it against the spinning wire wheel. Gradually, the 40-year patina of rust falls away to reveal the elemental part underneath, laid bare and shining, a beating mechanical heart. That bolt done, you lay it aside and pick up another. And so it goes, night after night, the empty beer bottles collecting in the recycling bin, a testimonial to the work done, the pile of freshly re-conditioned parts growing, eclipsing the pile of those yet to be done. Visible progress.
Each evening, after dinner, he would retreat to the workshop, beer in hand, flick on the inadequate overhead lights, turn on the busted-up shop radio, and commence work. He loved to turn the well-worn tools over in his hand, selecting the right extension and pivoting ratchet for the spark plugs, or nestling the splines of the correctly chosen Phillips screwdriver into the cross hatches of a bolt attaching a window crank. A 40-year-old car, by its nature, was only an approximation of the drawings that had created it. The skill of the mechanic was to compensate for this inexactitude through carefully chosen tools, a nexus of art and science.
The project, like the Paxton spring, was not without its sudden reversals. Bolts unceremoniously snapped, requiring hours of disassembly; wrenches slipped, glancing across fresh paintwork; knuckles were laid bare and bloody by their collision with the nearest sharp object.
But despite the vagaries of the old car, the project seemed more reliable and linear than his life outside the shop and the events in the big house. And so he kept at it—a half hour each evening, night after night. He had the feeling something was being uncovered, in the car and in himself. An unlayering. If only it could be uncovered, burnished, then somehow made whole again.
Cat humored him in his obsession with the car, saw its value in him, hints of change and transformation taking place.
“Where’s Dad?” Stephen would ask in the evening when the project was in full flight.
“Guess,” said Cat. “Where is he every night?”
“Yeah,” said Stephen. “I should know. He’s elbow-deep in the MG again. If you ask me, it’s a disease. He needs counseling.”
“That is counseling. Better than counseling. And cheaper. Have you ever seen him so relaxed?”
“Whatever. My Dad’s a grease monkey. Maybe he should work in a service station. I’m so proud of him. Not.”
“Don’t suggest it. He’s already threatened—he says there’s more of him in cars than in office work.”
Chatham had reached that point in his career when his job no longer defined him. There were other measures, none of them quantitative, that bettered captured the summation of a life and he had decided to pursue them. In this light, the project took on new intensity, becoming much more than a hobby. These things compelled him to apply newfound energy to the project, rushing toward a conclusion that would reveal a car, but more than a car. A man, maybe. Or a life.
The MG was completed on a cold fall day, the motor sputtering to life, great billows of blue smoke emanating from the exhaust before it settled into a low rumble at idle.
Chatham took the car out on the valley roads near the house, accelerating briskly out of the corners, feeling the visceral pleasure of a thing he had wholly made, every part passing through his fingers during the long journey to completion.
The feeling was one of defiance, the mechanical demons at rest, at least for the moment. But there was another feeling, one of a slow turning—away from conventional measures of a life, toward things that were more subtle and somehow more powerful. Could he make an old car run? Could he fix the plumbing in the old house? Could he operate the plow during a blowing storm, or get the generator up and running when the lines went down? Could he nestle himself into the small community of Paxton, the two entities achieving a comfortable dependency?
Through these seemingly mundane things he found an opening, a frame within which he could consider the other questions of his life. Could he make a home and live peaceably in it? Could he keep his marriage through the decades? Could he survive the frenetic years of his son’s adolescence, and emerge peaceably on the other side, all relations intact, like an apple fallen from the orchard into a river, which bobs along the roiling rapids and lands gently on a muddy bank a mile downstream, intact?
These questions could not be answered directly. But, just now, he was beginning to understand where he could find snatches, subtle glimpses, of the answers. They were in the decrepit wiring of the old car, and in the tree that fell on his carport, requiring an entire spring to rebuild. They were in the pleasure of a full woodpile, and in the steaming breath of the horses as they huddled together against the implacable cold. They were in the silver flashes of trout in the stream behind his house, and in the deer he had hit and killed last fall on his way home from his son’s basketball game.
The answers were in the detritus of his daily life, carefully considered and allowed to filter gently through his fingers—the immense power of the things that deserved no attention at all, and all the attention in the world.
Stephen was in his senior year now, and had been admitted to college in Arizona. The very anticipation of leaving seemed to have brought him back peaceably into the family, as if for a long goodbye.
After two years of battles, sporadic drunkenness, a midnight summons to the police station, and a precipitous drop in grades, the boy was now completing his circumnavigation and had come to be a resident of the house again. He was at that point now, the demons temporarily exorcised, the parents and familiar surroundings issued a reprieve and allowed back into his life.
The summer had gone more smoothly, Catavina resigning herself to Sandra, the two of them even sharing some garden chores one afternoon while waiting for Stephen to return from his summer job in the Paxton grocery.
“So, where will you be next year?” asked Catavina, hoping for significant geography.
“Los Angeles,” she said. Two states: not epic, but it would serve.
“You two discussed things?”
“Somewhat,” said the girl. “No promises.”
“Good,” said Catavina, hoping to push the maul in farther, drive the two from each other through distance and the even more arduous terrain of emotion. “Those things don’t often last, you know—across those distances.”
“So I’ve been told,” said Sandra. “More than once. How about you? How will you and Chatham take it, with your only gone?”
It was a turn Catavina didn’t expect—she had been thinking only of the girl’s longing, not her own, which was surely the greater of the two. Catavina thought about all of them: Sandra, Chatham, herself—a house of longing.
Sandra knew immediately the question had landed on soft ground, judging from the silence that followed.
“We’ll do OK,” said Catavina. “Chatham and I have a long list of things we want to do together, places to go.” Truth was, she faced a wilderness. She looked into the future without her son, and there wasn’t a single bearing that she recognized or could head toward with any surety. Sandra knew this was so, even before she asked it. But the girl surprised Catavina by fielding the minor deception with grace, electing not to make the mother suffer with the acknowledgement of it.
“That’s good,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.
“It’s an exciting time, isn’t it?”
Early the next day Stephen went off in the rusted and nearly porous Toyota pickup truck, its only redeeming quality being its four-wheel drive, a feature used nearly nine months of the year in mud and snow.
Chatham had learned not to worry about the boy, but Catavina habitually could not sleep while he was still out. So they waited, until deep into the night in the eerie blue of the television.
The sound of the tires on the gravel drive was welcome. Despite the hour, Chatham knew there would be words between mother and son, but he nonetheless looked forward to the familiar sound of Stephen’s voice.
In the air, in the moment before the door knob turned, was the faintest indication of something gone awry, like a single, crisp breeze that marked an irrevocable movement toward winter and the ensuing change of season, leading eventually to complete and silent submission to snow. The shoes on the path were ponderous, the cadence slow and thoughtful. The knocks that followed confirmed the fist shudder of change, the transition toward a new season. Just when Chatham and Cat expected to hear the familiar sound of the dead bolt retreating, they heard instead a knock.
It was the tipping that Chatham had felt, but there was no capriciousness here, no sense of turning back.
The officer delivered the speech in the measured way one does these things, the words soft and tendered with care, but still leaden and hurtful. It seems there was an ice patch, a curve that Stephen had done hundreds of times, the two events conspiring to make the car commence a steady, irrevocable slide off the road, where the tires caught, sending the pickup into a roll.
The old truck might have withstood the first roll, but the second seemed to have crushed it completely, and the boy within. A passing farmer had seen the bumper sticking out from the drainage ditch, and called the police. Stephen was gone by the time they got there.
Chatham fleetingly imagined that the bedrock of their relationship would carry them through the cataclysm that was now their lives. He coddled Cat, hoped he could play her in on the thin monofilament line of their bond, and somehow make things whole again.
But she moved with magnetic repulsion away from him and everything that was once familiar.
“Cat,” he said, imploring her. “We can do this. We can make it through. It won’t be easy, but we can do it—together. Will you at least try?”
Cat, never prone to tirades before, (except the one, with Sandra) went at her husband with venom. “You act as if I have a choice in this matter,” she said. “As if I could respond in a different way, or control these feelings. I cannot.”
“Cat,” he said. “I’m hurting as much as you. He was my son, too.”
“I’m the mother, and you cannot know what a mother feels.”
Chatham felt he did know, the pain of Stephen’s death searing and raw. But it was obviously no use to gauge one ache against the other—no winner in that contest.
“Cat,” he said. “I’m not saying we can ‘fix’ this thing that’s happened to us. I’m just trying to find a safe place—a way to survive.”
“Maybe I don’t want to survive,” she said, the leaden words pressing down on him, oppressive and inescapable.
“Don’t be that way, Cat. People live through these things. You don’t have to give up. Plus, we have each other.”
She glanced away, leaving him raw and exposed. Outside it was raining, borderline snow the seasons still moving two directions at once, the entire town and its people exposed and vulnerable.
Chatham had read that most relationships do not survive the loss of a child, filed the information but did not acknowledge it. It seemed possible that they would be different.
He tried to console her, bring her back to some semblance of herself. It shocked him to see the physical manifestation of the emotional storm, as she grew gaunt and hollow, like a holocaust victim.
Cat, unable to face anything that was once familiar, including her husband, eventually moved from the house on Morse Road to live with her friend Deborah.
Chatham retreated into what was familiar, finding superfluous work to do on the old car, adjusting the valves even though he had done it only six months before and knew the clearances were perfect. Not surprisingly, they were perfect now.
He made overtures to Cat, tried to coax her back from the wilderness of her grief and dissolution—he entreated her to get counseling, but she refused.
“Cat, can you come back to me, just a little? I’m still here for you, when you’re ready.”
“This has nothing to do with me,” she told him. “I am not the problem. The problem is that our child is dead, and I am only a direct reflection of that. He came from me, and I carry him with me now.” She always talked like this now, circuitous paths all leading to the same territory of grief.
“Let’s go away,” countered Chatham. “A trip would do you good.”
In response, the phone only clicked, an implacable cold transmitted through the line. Chatham shuddered to hear it.
Chatham lifted the soft cloth cover off the car, sunk into the cracked leather seat that conformed neatly to his buttocks, and pulled the choke. He turned the key and the car coughed to life in its reliable but gruff manner, as if initially resistant to the idea. Then it gave in and idled with rough resignation, as if summoned back, grumbling, from the decade in which it was supposed to have done its work.
He set out on the usual 30-mile loop through the vineyards and orchards near home, the route that gave him familiar relief from the events of a day. He worked the four-speed transmission on the old car with nuance and force simultaneously, the gears meshing roughly but decisively into place. The exhaust note was visceral, pleasurable in a tactile way—not something you could endure for long but fun while it lasted. And it turned heads in the neighborhoods, an annoyance that made him feel alive in the world and which he rather liked.
The car presented a sort of mechanical symphony to Chatham. He calculated the right entry speed for each corner, and the gear required, so that subtle clutch work would have him accelerating neatly out of each apex, the force pressing him back into the seat. There was an artistry to all this that he enjoyed—looking at the tachometer, matching rpms to the road speed, anticipating the gear and braking points. The road unfolded with pleasing familiarity.
The weather had been cold, but the roads had been dry for at least a week. He was careful enough with the old car to gauge this, and to know the traction point for the conditions. He always enjoyed feeling the back end of the car slide just a bit under acceleration with calculated application of the throttle.
Cat would enjoy this, but only because he did. The rattling car held no inherent attraction for her, but for their many years together she liked being with him and endured it, the two of them happily yelling above the wind and engine noise, “terrorizing the neighborhood,” as he used to say. These rides would usually end up at the coffee shop, the two of them looking ruddy, windblown and happy.
He imagined her displeasure as he broke traction and snapped the back end of the car sideways a few inches on a wet spot. Though she tolerated the car, she did not enjoy his little indulgences with speed. The thought of her displeasure pressed down on him, and in her absence it caused him to impulsively press the accelerator further, the car tilting and complaining until the wheels broke free entirely, initiating a lurid, four-wheel slide.
As a practiced driver, he always imagined he would have a response for such a turn of events—some artful countersteering or judicious application of the clutch that would right the car and set it again on the correct path. But in that moment, thoughtful calculation left him, or was rendered meaningless by the cataclysm of events that had become his life.
He had a vague sense of the car spinning once, maybe twice, before leaving the road. He’d never noticed the eucalyptus tree before, but he noticed it now, looking progressively larger as the car hurtled off the road, the familiar peeled bark looming large and frightening in his view.
He was both disappointed and somehow relieved at how the old British car seemed to surrender so readily, wrapping itself around the base of the tree with buttery ease, the body folding in a supple way against the massive trunk. There was only a lap belt on the old car, and Chatham felt himself snapped violently forward against it.
And then there was only the one, crystalline thought of Cat. She is relaxed, dressed in summer clothes, standing in front of the old house on Morse Road. With one finger, she beckons him forward. Although she is basking in the heat of a New Hampshire summer, there is an inexplicable chasm of cold and snow between them. Chatham sees that they are living in different seasons, unbridgeable by time or space. He moves toward her with determination. She seems briefly resigned to their union, but her steps are tentative, unsure of the time and season and the choices that must be made.
And then, there is only darkness.
The doctor is holding up the x-ray, and despite the oxygen mask and the host of tubes constraining him, Chatham thought that it bore some strange resemblance to a mechanical diagram for the old car. He could see that his tibia was mended with what looked like a high school shop project—some strange amalgamation of titanium plates and a long row of industrial-looking bolts. His fibula, cleanly broken through, had enough hardware to fill one of the small drawers at the hardware store that, in a different time, had given Chatham so much pleasure to rifle through. He had always carried the confidence he could find the right one, the pitch and thread count exact, to specifications. He wasn’t so sure now, of this, or much else in his life.
He breathed heavily inside the mask, or felt the need to, but the most miniscule movement of his chest brought paroxysms of pain, the result of three cleanly broken ribs. And the list went on: broken clavicle, punctured lung, concussion—a litany of pain.
Chatham was not surprised by his circumstance, the result of a long-held but barely acknowledged thought that his pursuit of speed would eventually land him here, or worse. He had frequently imagined himself, limp amidst the wreckage, the life gone out of him in a paroxysm of speed, diminishing roadway, and minor miscalculations. The thought of it had given him strange comfort, and it did so now. He had frequently thought that it would not be a bad way to go: a quick and violent flash, and then darkness. He had cherished the thought of it, even as he was repulsed by it.
Yet here he was, stolidly planted on this side of death, with no chance of retreat to the relative comfort of that dark place. There was just the one way forward, headlong through the pain, into the vertiginous terrain of his life. For he knew now that he would live, and he surrendered to it with the same ease he had always thought he would surrender to death. It was not a choice he had made; it had been made for him, with the faltering but inevitable surety of the seasons.
He had no idea how long he had been there, the days strung together in a dream-like sequence of pain and withdrawal. But one morning he woke up with a start, and the surprising realization that he was alive was made more surprising by the appearance of Cat at the foot of the bed, leaning toward him. The months-long look of disdain had drained at least partially from her drawn and weary face. In its place was an expression of shared tribulation.
She looked at the train wreck that was her husband, and saw in him the physical manifestation of their lives, the seeming injustice of the present circumstance, and all the things that had pressed down upon them with the inevitable cruelty of the seasons.
It seemed there was nothing to be said, but she summoned one, succinct statement, accompanied by a vestige of some lost emotion.
“How many are there?”
Chatham struggled to raise his hand, a simultaneous expression of pain and relief making its way across his face. He gave the sign he knew she was looking for, raising his fingers in profile, the effort making him grimace with pain.
He thought of the events that had brought them here, compelled only by thin air, subtle breezes that nudged living things toward unintended footfalls, compounded by a thousand movements in the course of a day, leading to different places, different lives.
He imagined that it if taken back far enough, every life must be somehow traceable to the minutest impulse in nature, a single breath of air, cataclysmic in its power to shape lives, and our very bones.
There were two.