Sparta (27 page)

The house was an old saltbox cottage, small and shabby, with peeling walls and mossy shingles. It stood on a rise overlooking a small pond. Behind the house was a field, and beyond that, pinewoods. At the edge of the woods stood an old water tower the children were forbidden to climb. Beyond the woods was an abandoned cranberry bog, big flat terraces bordered by narrow ditches.

The house faced a quiet road lined with wild beach plum bushes. Across the road were sandy fields of sparse grass flecked with dark juniper trees. The house stood at the top of a little rise. Below it was the barn, musty and cobwebby, full of the sour smell of bats. Narrow haylofts were on either side of the main space, and a single stall. The floorboards were soft and crumbling. A rope swing hung in the open doorway.

In Conrad's childhood summers, stepping out the kitchen door and letting the screen bang behind you was to enter a landscape of infinite possibility. The air was buoyant and salty, the grass wiry underfoot. Everything beckoned: the dense tangle of honeysuckle leading down to the pond, the hot, tarry road, the water tower among the trees. Nearby was the beach, salt water slapping against you as you waded into the cold, bracing churn. The hot sun, the limitless blue sky.

He texted back:
4 sure.

Years earlier, playing some game, he had chased Ollie down the stairs, trying to catch him. The stairs were steep, nearly vertical, and Conrad's fingers grazed Ollie's shoulder as Ollie tripped and fell. He thundered to the bottom, arms and legs in confusion. For a moment he lay still on the floor; then he sat up and looked at Conrad. His face was crimsoned, blood spreading over his mouth and chin. He said, “You killed me.” For a moment Conrad had thought he had.

It was only a bloody nose. Lydia made Ollie lie down on the kitchen floor while she pressed a cold washcloth to his face, and the bleeding stopped. But after that, during any game, Ollie would give Conrad a zombie look. “You killed me,” he would intone.

“Yes,” Conrad would answer, “I killed you, and if you don't watch out, I will kill you again.” Then they started struggling again, laughing and choking. Conrad was bigger, and he almost always won.

In the sandy meadows across the road the boys made a fort in a tree-ringed hollow. As they were digging a trench, they were attacked by streams of tiny stinging red ants crawling up their legs inside their jeans. They yelled, yanking off their pants. They slapped and scraped at themselves, jumping and shouting and laughing. “Oh, jeez! Oh, jeez!” they screamed, hopping about in their underpants. “Oh, jeezus! My nuts! My nuts!” They never went back to the fort after that.

The road was made of thick, sandy tar, and in the hot sun it melted, making shiny little black puddles. Conrad and Ollie made oily pellets from these and threw them at each other, dodging behind the beach plum bushes. They used the unripe beach plums as weapons, stripping them from the pungent leaves and pelting each other, laughing.

*   *   *

They all drove up from Katonah. Jenny and Ollie went with Marshall, Conrad with Lydia. Early start, Lydia had told them all firmly the night before.

By eight o'clock it was already hot. The early sun was reflecting off the white clapboards. The inlaid pebbles in the driveway gave off heat underfoot, and the willows hung straight and motionless. They loaded the cars, walking back and forth from the house, carrying suitcases, canvas bags, cardboard boxes of food. Conrad liked having a mission. He strode back and forth, carrying the largest things he could find. In the back seat of Lydia's car was the cat carrier holding Murphy, silent and resentful, her pupils huge with alarm.

When the cars were loaded, everyone stood outside waiting for Lydia. She was famously the last to leave. Resisting departure, she went through the rooms in a last-minute fury, turning off switches, locking windows, carrying things from place to place, writing notes, performing small tasks that could not be delegated or even explained.

“Any sign of your mother?” Marshall asked Jenny.

“I'll see if I can help,” Jenny said. She came back in a few minutes, shaking her head.

“She said if we were ready, we should go, not to wait.” She looked at Conrad. “Do you mind being abandoned? We'll open the house when we get there.”

“Nope,” said Conrad. “See you up there.”

“If we don't break down,” Marshall said. “Stop if you see us on the side of the road.”

Conrad nodded, and Marshall, Jenny, and Ollie climbed into the laden car. It rolled slowly down the driveway, and Jenny waved and called, “See you up there!”

Conrad waved back, watching them descend the short slope and turn cautiously onto the dirt road, Jenny's arm still waving.

When the car vanished, the place was restored to silence and everything seemed to expand: the willows, with their cascade of leaves, the deep green lawns, cool and sumptuous despite the heat. Conrad thought of Ali. He'd have liked to show him this place.
That's a white ash.
Ali had looked so closely at the photograph.

Conrad climbed into the driver's seat. He left the door open, one leg stretched outside. It was getting hotter, but this was not real heat. Here it was humid and enervating, the heat like a burden, but it wasn't real heat. Conrad turned the key in the ignition and skimmed the radio stations, then turned it off and sat with his head tilted back, eyes shut. He felt pretty good. He'd cleared two-thirds of the meadow, working all of July, tugging out the roots, dragging the branches into big piles of wilting leaves. He was looking forward to kicking back.

Lydia appeared in the mudroom, calling out, “Okay! Sorry!” She turned to lock the door, then pushed out through the white gate. She wore a wide, floppy hat and carried a canvas bag. “Sorry to take so long,” she said. “There was a load in the dryer and I couldn't leave it in there. And I had to write notes to Katia.” Her face changed as she saw that he was in the driver's seat. “Are you driving?”

“I offered,” he said.

“So you did,” Lydia said, and got in. “Okay, then, we are off, off, off.” She fastened her seat belt and turned to the back. “Hi, there, Murph, you beautiful pussycat. Are you all right?”

Murphy gave her a smoldering look.

“Con?” She smiled at him. “All set?”

“Locked and loaded,” Conrad said. “Full battle rattle, ready to roll.”

She gave him an uncertain smile. They started down the driveway, the tips of the willow branches trailing faintly against the roof. Lydia leaned back.

“I love this,” she said. “I love this moment when we really leave. I love this house, but I love the feeling of leaving it, leaving everything behind and heading off into the summer.” She turned and smiled at Conrad. “Con, I'm so glad you're here.”

“Yeah, me, too.” He smiled, his eyes on the road.

“I mean, back from Iraq, of course,” she said, “but also right here, right now, in the car with me.”

Conrad nodded slowly in agreement, feeling vaguely guilty. He felt as though he should be offering something, doing more than he was. “Me, too,” he said again.

Their narrow dirt road sloped gradually through the woods, down a long hill. At the bottom it reached a fast paved road that led to a big six-lane highway. Conrad turned down the ramp, and the car slid into the stream of traffic heading north through upper Westchester County.

In places the highway had been drilled out of standing stone, and high man-made bluffs slanted steeply away from the road. The open cuts revealed the bare interior: Skeins of strata drifted in pale galactic swirls through the dark stone. Igneous, sedimentary—and what was the third kind? Dropped from outer space? He couldn't remember. He liked these bluffs, they were like a giant geology lab, demonstrating exactly the way the earth had been formed.

As they drove north, the highway cut through hilly woodland and overgrown pastures. Up here, too far for daily commuters, the land was mostly open and undeveloped.

In the nineteenth century it had all been farmland, but when the railways opened up the Midwest, the big agriculture of the era moved out to the great fertile plains. The local farms turned to orchards and dairy herds. Dairy farms survived until the forties and fifties, when refrigeration made local milk unnecessary. Now the dairy farms had failed and the land was either abandoned or being developed, the old apple trees suffocated by bittersweet and the fields gone to weeds and saplings.

Lydia had told them all this a hundred times, her voice reproving, as though her family were somehow guilty, responsible for the twin juggernauts of commerce and technology. As a teenager, Conrad had resented this burden. Lydia felt responsible for everything—every one of her patients and everyone in their families, the environment, and every plant and creature on the planet. How could anyone live like that? And why did she want to share the burden with her children? It made him resentful and impatient.

From the highway the old farmhouses were visible, solid white clapboard colonials, the handsome barns nearby. No animals, though, no tilled fields.

But he wasn't so different from his mother, actually. He'd been sort of trying to save the world, joining the Corps. Now he couldn't remember exactly why. At the time it had seemed unarguable. Now his own ideas seemed as confused and childish as his parents' idealism, all that naive sixties bullshit. How could they have thought anything was so simple? How could he?

Driving onto the highway, Conrad had moved at once into the fast lane. There was a lot of traffic. He didn't like being constrained or having other cars around him. He especially didn't like cars coming too close. When a car moved alongside him in the middle lane, he sped up, keeping a constant eye on the rearview mirror. He actually didn't like having any other cars at all on the highway. He preferred driving in convoy, on a road that had been cleared of other vehicles.

“The first time we rented the house at the Cape,” Lydia said, “I think you were three or four. We went up there in the first place because Marshall's family had always gone there, so he loved it. They had a big house on the water in South Yarmouth. You remember it.”

His grandparents' house had been sold years before, but he had memories of it: the big sunny rooms, the croquet lawn. They'd driven past it many times, though it was hidden now by pines and a high stockade fence. They could see the upper part, white clapboards, glossy black shutters. Beyond it was a lawn and a path down to the water. The driveway was made of clamshells.

“We used to come up and stay with your grandparents. You were probably too young to remember that. Then one day when it was raining, we called a real estate broker, just out of boredom, and drove around to look at rentals.”

He had never heard this.

Lydia looked ahead. “Your father always said he didn't want to inherit his parents' house. He didn't want the responsibility of looking after a second place. And he couldn't spend the whole summer there, the way his father had.”

Behind Conrad, in the left-hand lane, was a small white sedan. Nearly every car in Iraq was a small white sedan. Everyone drove them: taxi drivers, businessmen, and insurgents. Suicide bombers. The sight of the car made Conrad's pulse quicken, though he wasn't in Iraq and he knew this wasn't a suicide bomber. The car was moving fast, coming up on him from behind. Streams of cars were sliding along all three lanes; directly ahead of him in the fast lane was a big black SUV.

“So your father was already looking around. Even if we'd kept the family house and just used it ourselves for a couple of weeks and rented it out for the rest of the season, he'd have had the responsibility. He said he never wanted to drive up in the middle of winter to get the boiler fixed or the chimney patched. He always said, ‘Never own if you can rent.' Of course, he meant a summerhouse, not our house.”

Beside Conrad, in the middle lane, was an opening. The next car back, a bullet-shaped silver sedan, was driving badly, wallowing back and forth. Some idiot, texting.

“I remember we saw several houses that day. Most of them were awful. Brand-new little bungalows, cheek by jowl beside other horrible little houses in developments or else right on top of the road.”

Lydia had folded her arms on her chest. She sounded dreamy and abstracted.

“It's sort of terrible, going around and looking at other people's houses. You see their lives, everything they've chosen, the lamps, the bedspreads, the chairs. I mean, not that they're so awful, only that the people are so exposed, so naked, for you to walk through passing judgment. Which is just what you do. If you don't like the houses, the owners feel they've failed. You voted against their taste, their choices, everything. I felt so bad for the owners. They were always there, lurking around in the kitchen or the hall, moving out of each room as you walked in. I walked around saying loudly how beautiful each house was, admiring the curtains.”

“Only you, Mom,” Conrad said.

The white car was closing the gap. In the front seat were two military-age males wearing dark glasses.

“No, really,” Lydia said. “They knew we were judging them. It's a horrible feeling. I read once that when people's houses have been robbed, the first stage is being frightened and angry, but then people get indignant because the thieves didn't take other things that the owners thought were valuable. They're upset that the thieves didn't take more.”

The white car was hanging back now, just out of rifle range.

“I remember one house. There must have been a mix-up about the appointment. We got there, and the broker went to the front door and then came back to the car and said we'd have to wait for a bit. We sat and waited. The broker kept going up and knocking, and then she'd come back and get into the car again.”

Conrad kept his eye on the rearview mirror. It looked as though one of the males was using an electronic device. It was how you detonated an IED—you could use a cell phone, a remote-control device for a TV or a toy airplane. All it took was one click.