Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz Page B

heard was like ice, like ice cracking in the heat, and I brought my hands to my chest. Between the dense, mounded pectoral muscles there was the breastbone, thin and brittle, and I put my thumb against it, on the spot where the right front of my car would have hit his boy, shattering the bone, and I pressed.

Ethan
    I left Grace sleeping. The early morning light came in through the half-curtained windows, and I left my dreams by the side of the dark road with my son, and climbed out of bed. Every night now was a graveyard visit.
    Grace didn’t even stir. I wondered if she’d taken something, some drug, so steady was her breathing. The light fell across her. Her closed eyelids looked swollen. Her jaw was clenched, a muscle working there, over and over. Still, she was beautiful. My beautiful wife. She lay on her back with the sheet fallen and her nightgown slipped off one shoulder, her breast exposed. I looked; I wasn’t dead. I remembered the first time I’d seen her skin like this, unprotected and unadorned, as she lay on a thin mattress on the floor of my university apartment. She’d been twenty. Her eyes had been open then.
    Suddenly I wanted to cover her; I reached down and tugged at the sheet. She didn’t move. I smelled the warm-laundry scent of her sleep and saw up close the areola not perfectly round, the tiny bumps on the raised pale pink luminous skin, as though she were chilled. And the pinpoint indentation in the center of the nipple, through which her milk had flowed. And I remembered how she’d carried Josh around the garden with her day after day, feeding him as she went. Talking to him. Telling him the names of things.
    I finished covering her and turned away.
    Knowing this: It was all still his. Belonged to him. Everything he’d touched, needed, every place he’d been.
    The door to Emma’s room stood open; she wouldn’t sleep with it closed. Her room was on the west side of the house and the light within was gray. She’d kicked the covers off during the night: tanned, thin legs; navy T-shirt; blond head; thumb in mouth; long neck of Twigs, the stuffed giraffe, held fiercely in the crook of one arm, as if she were trying to love him to death. I sat down on the edge of the trundle bed and put my hand on her hip.
    “Emma. Time to get up.”
    “No.” A sleepy whine, she curled up double, folding Twigs’s neck in two.
    “It’s Friday—camp today. Remember?” I shook her gently until, finally, her eyes opened and blinked at me. “Come on. Get some clothes on and I’ll make breakfast.”
    “Where’s Mom?”
    “We’re letting Mom sleep in today.”
    “Why?”
    “Come on now, hurry up.”
    I went out of the room, found Sallie getting up from her dog bed at the end of the hallway. She yawned, showing every tooth, and then stretched, forepaws straight out, bending low as a praying Muslim.
    “Mecca’s
that
way,” I said, pointing to the east.
    Raising herself, Sallie looked at me.
    “Look, I don’t care,” I said. “Do what you want.”
    She followed me down the stairs.
    Standing in the afterworld light of the refrigerator, staring into it, I saw half a package of English muffins, one egg, some skim milk, a jar of Dijon mustard. No cereal, no fruit. Nothing of any interest to a child. The freezer contained three sticks of butter, a bag of French-roast coffee beans, and a stack of empty blue ice trays.
    Upstairs, the toilet flushed. Emma getting ready, doing what I’d asked. While I stood looking at the emptiness, trying to decide. Breakfast for my child. What would it be? Either choose or forget the whole thing. But I could not choose.
    A noise freed me: Sallie scratching at the inside of the back door. I’d completely forgotten about her. I let her out and she raced over to her favorite tree, a big sugar maple, where she squatted and peed like the lady she was, looking at the heavens.
    I stood in the doorway. Sunlight was visible, though no sun. The morning air held just the remnants