Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz

Trooper Tomlinson had delivered them to our house, just as we were preparing to leave for the funeral. Some enterprising soul at the coroner’s office or the morgue had come upon the arrowhead in Josh’s blue jeans pocket, had slipped it into a clear plastic evidence bag, only to discover, to his professional disappointment, that it was not evidence at all, or at least not of the kind that would mean anything to him.
    Here it was. I pulled it out, looked at it: putty-colored, smooth, wondrous, ancient, thumb-shined, collected, secret.
    Can I have it back now?
    I could not remember hugging him that day.
    What other things? In his room alone I could name these by memory: peacock feather, sparrow’s nest, sheet of mica, chunk of pink quartz, hockey puck from a Hartford Whalers game, comb with missing teeth, rail spike, harmonica, the inside of a baseball wound like the earth. And his violin in its case under his bed, the sheets of music.
    This is what my son loved: tidal pools, abandoned train tracks, the sound of woodpeckers, the movement of turtles. And hated: brushing his hair, the taste of eggs, the feel of wool socks, lies.
    A clap of thunder outside, low, close by: the wind had picked up and was blowing rain against the windows. I went to the front door and out. The rain was a torrent.

Dwight
    The paperboy drove by in his pickup just after six Friday morning. I lay awake in bed with the windows open and the breeze riding in sweet and not yet hot, and heard the light
whump
of the rolled-and-rubber-banded weekly
Winsted Register-Citizen
hitting the driveway. Then the truck went past and I heard what had been there just before, the birds again, the doves cooing on my lawn. Just another sunny summer morning.
    I lay in bed and tried to ignore the paper, the sound of it landing on the driveway, the fact of its existence. But this was impossible. There’s a feeling you get if you live in the country but find yourself in the city one day, any city, walking around and minding your own business and believing yourself not just alone but one hundred percent anonymous, when suddenly from out of the blue, and almost always from behind your back, somebody calls out your name. The heart starts to go crazy. Whether you’re innocent or guilty doesn’t matter. It’s the sound of your name in a place where you expected no one to know it that’s enough to tip you over the edge, and for a moment you know exactly what it’s like to be the wrong person in the wrong place, spotlighted, picked out of the lineup. And even if it turns out to be just a big fat mistake, everything afterward feels personal. So I tried to forget about the newspaper sitting in my driveway, but I couldn’t.
    The article would be under “Crime Watch” or under “Accidents” or maybe even on the front page. There’d be facts, names and places. Last Sunday night the so-and-sos from such-and-such lost their son Josh. Car did not stop. The funeral was held on . . . Suspect still at large. Reward offered.
    The father was tall and dark, thin, with glasses. I could see him clearly. I would always see him clearly. Without question he’d have a wife, probably other children. Now or in an hour they’d go outside for the newspaper—this paper or a different one, it didn’t matter, there were crime watches and accidents and unsolved tragic incidents in every local weekly—and then over coffee, if they could stomach it, they’d see their own names in print and where they lived, and the name of their son who was dead and how he’d died. And it would all seem like a sick joke to them; as if they didn’t already know their own names and where they lived and the name and age of their son and how he’d died.
    A breeze eased in through the open windows. Outside, it was starting to heat up, it was going to be a hot day. The doves had stopped calling to each other and to me. A car drove by and in the silence afterwards there was a loneliness that wouldn’t go away. I