Wish You Were Here (65 page)

“Thank you,” his mother said when he was done, and stopped him with a hand on his shoulder like she might give him a hug, except she didn't bend down, just held him there so he had to look up.

Her face was serious and he realized what she was going to ask him.

He'd kill Ella, the tattletale.

“You haven't seen it, have you?”

“What?” he said, making his face blank.

It wasn't fair; they had to catch him.

“What. Your cousin's watch.” She made it sound obvious, sick of him playing dumb. She seemed sure, as if the only thing he could do was confess. He could say anything and she wouldn't believe him—and without any proof. Later he'd be sad about this, but now he was angry that she was blaming him just from what Ella said. It made it easier to say no.

They went out by the drive, for the children, though the boys had reported it. As they cruised by the neat white houses and professionally tended lawns, the lake glinting between them, Ken felt an odd sense of loss, an opportunity missed, as if they were leaving for good and he was abandoning her. Lise had told him to go, shoot, but he knew it was just another test, and those had become more important to her, and not only because they were here. She was unsure of herself and therefore of him, and he couldn't figure out what he'd done or not done to trigger this latest fit of insecurity. Nothing had changed between them.

They had to go past it. There was only one road. From the highway he could see the cars far across the ponds, and for an instant processed the shot, already composed for him, the low line of trees and giant sky, the insignificance of Man (with the shadow of his father in there somewhere). Morgan would groan and flip the print over as if it hurt his eyes. Don't try to make statements, just feel what's there. Like most of Morgan's advice, it was too sixties, too groovy for Ken, but he'd never say that, not until he did something worthwhile.

Beside him, driving, Meg let the scene slide by without a word, as did Lise behind him. In the way back, the boys craned for a look, the girls ignoring them, bored, and he wondered if his fascination was only a poorly rationalized version of theirs, juvenile and mindless, at base sensational.

He could feel something around Tracy Ann Caler, he couldn't say what—a buzz, a current—but it was there, good or bad. What was almost more exciting was that no one else seemed to have caught on to it. He wanted to believe his attraction was real and noble, if mysterious, and took the lack of any actual connection between them and the strength of his feelings as proof of rather than evidence against that. She was as much his as she was her abductors', and he could see the slipperiness of his position. He wondered if that would change if they found her. It would
have to, he thought. Otherwise it was just rubbernecking,
Life
-magazine crap.

“Everyone ready for Gravity Hill?” Meg asked the car at large.

From the back came mocking, halfhearted cheers.

“Ah, let's skip it this year,” Ken deadpanned. “They're probably too old.”

“I want to do it,” Justin spoke up.

“What about the rest of you? Let's take a vote.”

All he got was muttering, though a real vote would have been close. Lise was only here because she didn't want to be stuck in the house with his mother, and Meg only came for the kids. Sam and Justin were on his side, but that was it—boys against girls.

“How many say yes?”

“Not funny, Dad,” Ella said.

“Okay,” he said, “we'll go.”

He used the ensuing silence to look out the window, his eyes sifting, gleaning. He'd brought the Nikon, but the light was too strong, shadows sharp on the trees, every leaf precise. The road was so familiar he could see beyond the fronts of the Snug Harbor Lounge and the rotting billboards and the cabin of the pro shop at Willow Run to the pastel asbestos houses and their sorry garages, the high weeds in the ditches gone brown. September was coming. He could feel the day getting away from him and he wanted to stop the car and walk along the berm, saving it all. He could follow the road around the lake that way, make a circle; all it would take was patience. He could shoot the seasons, show skaters standing where the ferry ran, the Rod and Gun Club's built-in grills capped with snow. Thousands of dull, unassuming photos. He would head out every morning with his lunch and a water bottle in a backpack. He wouldn't think, he'd just bang away, then sort them out later on the contact sheets. When he died they'd find hundreds of undeveloped rolls, every inch of Chautauqua documented, a kind of map.

“Our turn must be coming up,” Meg asked, testing him.

“Up on the right,” he said, but she was already signaling.

She knew. They used to come every year.

The land back here was rolling, dairy farms cut from the woods, rusted wire fences. The barns tempted him, but it was pointless from the
car. They had to go under the interstate, and then halfway across a yellow field the road abruptly turned to oiled gravel, stones plinking beneath them.

“I don't remember it being this bad,” Meg said, sounding just like his mother.

It stopped, and the asphalt was all patches, jostling them. The woods closed in on both sides. Ahead, a kid Sam's age was driving an ATV on the wrong side of the road without a helmet. Before they caught up to him he turned onto a dirt trail and was lost in his own dust. The road rose to cross some train tracks, and as Meg slowed to save her suspension, Ken could see far down the green tunnel of leaves. They could have buried her anywhere out here, just left her back in the woods somewhere. The marina seemed too public.

It shouldn't matter to him. The day was taken up. Tomorrow they were leaving, Monday he'd be at work again. If he had another week—but it was typical of him to come up with an impossible project and then not follow through. This was no different. All summer he'd gotten nothing done.

“Gravity Hill,” Meg read, and slowed for the turn.

It was in the middle of nowhere, marked by a blue sign like a rest area with a boxy picture of a camera on top. There was an official pull-out. A couple of chained picnic tables sat in the grass by the roadside but there were no garbage cans, and a sign at the back of the lot advertised the fine for dumping. In the past they'd all gotten out to watch, the children running alongside the car, but now Meg just stopped at the fat white decal that served as a starting line.

“Everybody ready?” she asked.

Nothing.

“I said, is everybody ready?”

“Yes!” the boys said, and she shifted into neutral and took her hands off the wheel.

They waited. He'd actually taken pictures of this, yards of video over the years, all the different cars they'd owned. As a child, he'd watched home movies of his parents' two-tone Chevy creeping uphill, his father waving sheepishly from the window in his Ray-Bans. His mother had her turn in a mid-sixties Cutlass, her hair an embarrassment. Even he and Meg had squared off as teenagers in their beaters, a drag race in slow motion.

The effect had something to do with how the roadbed had been laid out and graded. The road appeared to dip between the two hills—or it only appeared that the second hill was a hill. You looked up and couldn't see over the hump so you were tricked into thinking you were going uphill. His father could explain it. Sam and Ella knew better than to ask.

“Are we moving at all?” Lise asked.

“It takes longer if it's windy,” Meg said.

“Is it windy?”

He zipped his window down and peered over the sill like the gunwale of a ship. The road was inching beneath the running board. “We're going.”

“You can barely tell,” Lise said.

“Just wait.”

There was a pop can on one of the picnic tables, and he imagined Tracy Ann Caler here with her family as a girl, the pictures they would have taken, pictures her parents would look at now and remember her by. He'd never known her, so how was his project supposed to be a memorial, if that's what it was?

He didn't know what it was, and he was right to worry. The feeling—whatever it was—wasn't simple. If it made him queasy, what did it do to Lise? But wasn't that even more reason to follow it? The police would still be there when they got back.

“I can feel it!” Justin said.

“Now we're going,” Meg said, though the needle she pointed to pointed to zero.

He could feel it too, and shouted, “Here we go!”

It seemed impossible, looking at the hill rising in front of them, but slowly the van began to freewheel, leaving the picnic tables behind, the trees creeping by on both sides.

“Weird,” Ella said.

Every sense said down but they were going up, or maybe it was the other way around. It was a trick, impossible except for the feeling in his stomach that they were falling—faster and faster, as if they couldn't stop. Meg held her hands in the air to prove she wasn't doing anything. They all clapped as they gathered speed, even the girls, all of them headed for the crest, drawn on by invisible forces.

The parking lot for Panama Rocks was starred with weeds. Theirs was the only car there. As a child Meg had been afraid of the place, setting nightmares here, faceless killers chasing her through the cold, mossy boulders and shadowy trees, trapping her in dead ends where she clawed her fingernails to shreds trying to climb the sheer walls. She dreaded their yearly real-life visit, the jokes that focused on Fat Man's Misery—or worse, went unspoken, all of them sorry for her. Now she was surprised at how small and harmless it was, even quaint (for a torture chamber), a half-assed roadside attraction slowly going to seed.

It looked closed except the front gate was tied back with a chain. There was an octagonal picnic pavilion in dark wood, and a long open barn, both overgrown and deserted, the eaves stitched with spiderwebs. The snack counter by the entrance was blocked off with plywood. The only person there was at the ticket window, a thin man in his sixties in a Bills cap, smoking and reading a fat Stephen King paperback. He gave them a map of the rocks, had the adults sign waivers for the children and pointed them toward the entrance.

Inside the fence a sign warned them to stay on the designated path and not climb on the rocks. There were no pets allowed, and no disposable items of any kind.
RUNNING IS DANGEROUS. THERE HAVE BEEN SERIOUS ACCIDENTS
.

“Oh great,” Lise said. “Just what a mother wants to see.”

“The liability must kill them,” Ken said. “I don't see how they stay in business.”

“They're not spending it on upkeep,” Meg said, “that's for sure,” because the warped two-by-four railing along the trail had peeled down to the bare wood, curling flakes of white paint caught in the grass. She was sure it had been there when she was a girl, but stopped herself before her memory could restore it. It seemed wrong, being nostalgic about a
place she despised. There was something insidious in the way the mind worked, welcoming anything familiar, like her sex dreams of Jeff.

It shouldn't matter to her what he did now. They'd been separated in every way before except legally, and yet she saw his plan to remarry as an attack on her.

The boys ran ahead of them like dogs, and they called them back and asked them to please be careful, just as her parents had. The girls weren't interested, sauntering along behind them, Sarah picking at her split ends. When they got home the whole Mark thing would explode. Meg was grateful she would be sober for it, but knew she would receive the brunt of her unhappiness. She deserved it, maybe even desired it, as payback. She had to be strong enough to accept that, not let things get personal, a battle of wills. She needed them to have a good year, and she thought they could now that the house thing was settled. Jeff could go fuck himself. It was just the three of them now.

The railing ended and the trail curved downhill, rocky shortcuts connecting the switchbacks. Ken warned the boys not to wander. The signs identifying the different species of trees were barely legible. She read them and forgot them instantly. She saw a Butterfinger wrapper, picked it up and tucked it in her back pocket. Where the shortcuts crossed, the path was uneven, stony ruts cut by runoff. It was much cooler under the canopy, you almost needed a sweater. Years ago, this was when her stomach would fill with hot fluid, her bowels drop, knowing there was no turning back. “Oh come on,” her mother would encourage her, as if this was fun.

Today she felt nothing, only a vague impatience to be home, getting ready for the beginning of school. They had to go out and buy supplies, new jeans for Justin, a good winter coat for Sarah. She could do it now without sweating every penny, all because of her mother. While she relied on that fact, she still hadn't fully digested it. She thought this must be how it felt to win the lottery—lucky and unreal, as if everything could be taken away just as suddenly.

She had to tell Ken the truth. Eventually, she thought. Over the phone.

They came to the base of the trail, a wooden square with the number 1 nailed to a stake in the ground. In the birches the rocks loomed like giant heads sunk in the hillside, their lichened faces layered and
stepped, dripping groundwater. Tree roots grew like vines over the greening ledges. She waved at a tangle of gnats.

“Okay,” Ken said, unfurling the map, “let's see what we have here. Castle Rock.”

“Where's the castle?” Lise asked.

They tipped their heads and squinted, but none of them could see the resemblance.

“Moving on,” Ken said. “Number two: the Mayflower.”

“That one?” Meg pointed.

“I guess.”

The boys scooted between the huge stones, Justin trying to keep up with Sam.

“Careful,” she called. “It's slippery.”

She could have sworn Fat Man's Misery was near the end, a kind of final test, but it was early, number 4. It couldn't have been simpler—two sheer walls that almost touched, the crevice between them Justin's size at the bottom, outlined by sunlight from the other side. There was nothing menacing about it. If she were shorter she could squeeze through easily.