With three hours before the general store opened, he carried his easel and palette outside, wiped off the deck furniture, and brought out a cup of coffee. Never had the trees glistened so brightly, their branches a slick ebony. His eyes followed the spread of one sycamore’s limbs, from arteries, to capillaries, to each leafy cell nodding at the water’s edge. He watched the lowest leaves bob in the current, thinking how his body was equally fragile, little more than a floating stick.
All morning David painted his ideal river, green water sprinkled with white flecks of sunlight, tree shadows skimming the surface. When it was time to leave for the store, he felt disappointed. His painting wasn’t finished, and neither was his soul’s rejuvenation. But Sarah would be sick with worry and his patients would be waiting, so he stuffed his wallet into his front pocket, walked outside to the storage shed, and lifted his mountain bike from the stacks of flowerpots and lawn chairs.
It had been years since he and Sarah had ridden together on these mountain roads. Shortly after buying the cabin they had gotten matching bikes, hoping to explore the area without the accompaniment of a car engine. In the first few years they had spent long afternoons pedaling logging trails, startling chipmunks and deer. Once, an adolescent black bear had paused in their path, assessing them with slow curiosity. David could still remember his reaction—a mixture of awe and vulnerability. Far from the hard shell of his car, how would he protect his exposed arms, and his wife’s bare throat?
But on this morning there were no bears, no deer. His eyes were trained on the gouges in the muddy road, where the flash flood had swept gravel into the woods. Rocks and puddles jolted his kidneys, so that by the time he reached the first cluster of houses outside the village of Eileen, his calves were spattered like a Pollock canvas.
Inside the general store, he waved at the woman using the pay phone in the back, but she gave no sign of acknowledgment. He bought a donut, a bottle of orange juice, and a local paper, then walked outside to the picnic table and spread the news before him.
The lead story described the new dean of students at the college, a former Yale professor who had arrived in town with a clear mission to curb the excesses of the Greek system. Good luck, David thought, opening his bottle of juice. Scanning down the page, he stopped at the headline FLASH FLOOD CLAIMS THREE. Two small girls had been swept down their backyard creek. Sad, very sad. Then he read the name of the third victim:
David Robert McConnell
.
Goose bumps prickled along his arms as he stared at the words
missing and feared lost
. He recalled that odd sensation in the river, when the sun appeared like a divine revelation and he felt his spirit rising to the surface. Here, in the infallible medium of print, was the confirmation of his death.
Reading on, he learned how Sarah had called the police after waiting an hour in the rain, trying to reach him on his cell phone. Poor Sarah. He walked inside the store again and glared at the woman on the telephone. She turned away.
Back at the table David read the final paragraphs. The police had found his kayak and personal belongings along the banks near Buck Island. Today rescue teams would drag the deep water above the dam, using dogs in the boats to try to sniff out the corpse. They’ll never find me here, David thought, and as he imagined their futile searching an unexpected smile tugged at his lips. It occurred to him that he didn’t need to contact the office right away. No one was going to be expecting him at work that morning. Death had granted him a holiday, and he felt like a child, waking to an unforecasted snow.
Of course he would have to call Sarah. By now she would be stricken. But even as he rose once more to check the telephone, a strange sensation held him back. From some remote corner of his mind, one emotion surfaced—morbid curiosity. How
would
Sarah react to his death? Would she be overcome with grief? Miss him terribly? Would she care as much as she had cared for all those babies? Or would she, deep in her quiet soul, feel relieved? They had been struggling on the edge of separation for so long, perhaps this was an opportunity—perhaps, an act of God.
And then the impulse came, so concrete it almost hurt—an unmistakable desire to run away. Of course it was ridiculous. He had a wife, a job, a mortgage. He was a responsible person, known for doing the right thing. But what
was
the right thing for a man in his midforties, when his marriage and work had stagnated? Wasn’t there something else that he had envisioned for his life, some dream that might still be possible? All around him the trees were whispering invitations, encouraging him to fade into their shadows, and as he watched their branches nod, David sat back down.
• 11 •
Ten minutes later he was pedaling to the cabin, the telephone growing distant behind him. He assured himself that this retreat was only temporary. He would finish his painting, rest a little, and return to his life the next day. The painting could be a gift for Sarah, an atonement for his selfish absence. She was his Penelope, waiting for her shipwrecked husband.
But that night, as the sunset spread across the treetops, he assumed Penelope’s role himself. Leaning over his easel with a moist rag, he daubed out the geese he had painted that afternoon. His work was not complete; he would need another day.
The next morning he woke early, painted for an hour, then rescued his fly rod and tackle from the cobwebs in the storage shed. Dead beetles fell from his hip boots when he shook them out. He reached a gloved hand down into the toes to feel for mouse nests, before donning the boots like plaster casts and lumbering off through the woods. A few times the tip of his rod caught in honeysuckle vines, but eventually he emerged at his favorite fishing hole, where the river descended in wide, stairstep ledges. There he tied his lucky fly, waded in above his knees, and began whipping the water’s surface, his line whistling a tuneless song. Initially he thought of Sarah, and all the excuses for his disappearance, but after the first bite, nothing else mattered for the rest of the morning.
Walking back two hours later with a pair of trout in his bucket, David glimpsed the green patch of his backyard and froze. A policeman was standing on the dock, pistol holstered at his side.
Of course, David thought as he crouched behind a tree. He should have expected this. Someone would have to be dispatched to search the cabin. They had probably combed the woods from Buck Island to this spot, maybe with dogs—dogs that had caught his trail on the bank near the canal locks, and had led them all the way to the cabin’s back door. Maybe the dogs would catch his scent now and howl him out, sheepish and apologetic, the ludicrous truant.
The policeman on the dock removed his hat, and David relaxed. He knew this guy. It was Carver, Carver Petty, a black man in his late thirties, the favorite local cop among the college crowd. Carver was the kind of man who never arrested students for public drunkenness, unlike his overly zealous colleagues. When he found college kids vomiting in park bushes, he drove them to the campus hospital, where they could sleep it off under a nurse’s observation.
“You’re a good man,” David had often said, taking some staggering freshman off Carver’s hands. To show his thanks, David had offered free medical care for Carver’s nine-year-old daughter, saving them the copayment at her pediatrician’s office. She had been raised by Carver ever since his wife walked out eight years earlier. Luckily the child was blooming with health, her problems limited to mild bronchitis in the winter, poison ivy in the summer. David sent them home with free samples of hydrocortizone.
So now Carver had come to investigate the cabin, the last place where Dr. McConnell was known to be alive. David tried to remember whether he had left any signs of current habitation. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, so there was no food on the table, no radio playing, no door propped open. There was only his painting, still wet on the easel. He wondered if Carver had noticed; perhaps he was waiting for the doctor to show himself.
As David wondered what to do, he watched Carver place his hat over his heart, look out across the river, then wipe his eyes with his left hand. And with that small gesture of grief David knew that he was safe.
An hour later he was alone and back at his painting, scraping away a layer of feathers with his palette knife. Tomorrow he would return home, so he told himself. It would be the third day, the proper time for the dead to rise. He could appear to Sarah first, and perhaps she would forgive him. Or perhaps not. The time for forgiveness might be long gone.
The next morning, threading through the woods on a slow walk, David tried to concoct a plausible story. Amnesia was comical, a broken limb too easily disproved. Hypothermia, however, gave him pause. Now there was a logical diagnosis. He could claim that after his near drowning, the rainy hike had left him bedridden with severe chills, compounded by a twisted ankle. He had attempted a trek to the general store on the second day (which would explain why he had missed Carver’s visit), but the swelling had been so bad he’d had to turn back after a mile.
David was reviewing his symptoms with professional detail, nearing the western side of the cabin, when suddenly he stopped. Margaret’s blue Accord was parked in the drive, which could mean only one thing. Sarah had come looking for him. She would see his dishes in the sink, the painting on his easel, and the game would be over. Sarah would recognize the signs of life.
He wondered if he should walk into the cabin and confess everything, trusting that the women’s wrath would fade over time. And perhaps that would have been the right thing to do, but instead he found himself sneaking up to the kitchen window, peering through the glass from behind a rhododendron. He saw Margaret throwing away his food—the ham, the mayonnaise, the apples and tomatoes. She must hate me, he thought as he watched his supplies disappear into her plastic trash bag. But then he considered Sarah, standing beside his easel, examining the brushes soaking in turpentine. And oddly enough, her eyes were not angry, her mouth was not prepared to scold. She appeared sad and contemplative, an expression he had witnessed in hospitals and at gravesites. David realized that he was looking at two widows, come to clean the mess left by a dead man, and for the first time since his absence, the shame swept over him.
He crouched with his back to the cedar boards and pressed his fingers against his temples. What an idiot he was. What a son of a bitch. He, the doctor, was causing pain.
Had Sarah been alone he would have revealed himself at that moment, but he dreaded Margaret’s disdain. In the face of her pragmatic nature his retreat into the woods seemed pathetic. He would have to wait for some future occasion when he could speak to Sarah alone.
Glancing into the window, he saw her approach his bedroom, and he circled quietly to the northern side of the cabin. Through unwashed glass blurred with a spiderweb, he watched her smooth the mattress, pull the sheet tight, and fold it down six inches, perfectly horizontal. She tucked the edges under the mattress, fluffed two pillows and placed them over the fold. Then she sat on the bed and stared at the closet.
If she cries, I will go to her.
He never could bear to see Sarah cry. Whenever she was troubled he had always hurried to correct the problem with a joke, a bouquet, or a prescription. That was why he had felt so helpless during the miscarriages, why he had stayed in the basement at night while she cried in bed. Because all he could do was offer cups of chamomile tea, kiss her forehead, rub her shoulders, clean the bathroom and the bloody sheets.
It all came back as he searched Sarah’s face for hints of anguish. There were no tears, no sobbing. Her expression was stoic, which made him stare all the more. Did this woman really miss him? Sarah was so difficult to read. Not like his young female patients, who seemed to welcome college as the age of display, saying “Look at
this
, doctor. Look at
me
.” His wife never invited observation, which was one of the things that appealed to him. Sarah had layers of reserve that shielded a heart which was genuinely, intensely warm—whenever he could reach it. In these past few years it had gotten harder for him to touch that heated core, she guarded it so closely. Still, he felt an odd thrill in looking at her, trying to interpret her subtlest gestures. Of course he recognized this spying as a shallow temptation. Doctors knew the horror and the fascination of other people’s tragedies; the spectacle of human suffering was a sadistic pleasure.
David pulled himself away and walked back into the woods. Fifty yards past the cabin he sat at the base of a small hill and waited for the sound of a door closing, the start of a car’s ignition. When he heard the clatter of Margaret’s tires spinning on gravel, he looked back and watched a flash of blue metal, carrying Sarah far away.
• 12 •
That night in the cabin David felt, for the first time, unmistakably dead. For the past few days he had reveled in the possibilities of a new life, but now he mourned the old one. He tried to reassure himself that there was still time. Time to confess, to return to his previous routine. But how could his former life be anything other than diminished?
Tomorrow he would have to go to the general store, to replace the food that Margaret had thrown out, and there he would face the telephone, waiting like the wife he was neglecting. That would be the moment of reckoning, the point of no return.
All night he slept fitfully, thinking of Sarah sitting at the foot of this bed, surveying the room with those sad, dark eyes. It was cruel to let a woman mourn for a living man, cruel to leave her alone in their empty house. But their marriage had already been a form of grief, and any momentary joy she felt in his reappearance would not last long. He told himself that their best hope for happiness was to change their lives, and this was a change beyond imagining.