Matthew Stokoe: Empty Mile

I had no interest in recording anything to do with him, but I snapped a picture with my phone because it was quicker than arguing about it.

After he’d gone back into the house I walked through the parking lot, past my pickup, and over the grass bank that separated the road from the beach. I took my shoes off and walked along the edge of the lake.

Marla and Gareth had been together almost a year when she and I knew that we would end up with each other. I was often at their apartment and I’d seen the meals she made, the cleaning and washing she took care of, the standard endearments she sprinkled over him. But I’d seen too, as time passed, that she was not in love with him. So I started going to the coffee shop where she worked and in her breaks we’d sit and talk. She was his partner, I was his friend. Both of us knew what was happening but neither of us could stop it.

And of course the time came when we were given our chance to do more than talk. A tailor-made day: unusually warm, Marla rostered off work, and Gareth away with his father in Sacramento buying car parts. Stan was eleven years old and on summer break and he wanted to go swimming. How natural then, how innocuous, that on such a hot day Marla should come with us to the lake. What else could you do in heat like that but swim?

If we had been somewhere else, somewhere with good roads and plenty of ice cream, the lake’s beach would have been packed. As it was, by Oakridge standards it was still pretty busy. We found a spot at the southern end of the lake, twenty yards or so short of where the beach ended in a sprawl of rocks that merged, further on, with solid forest. We spread out our towels and hit the water

I have an image of us that day. Flashes of moments in the water jolting before me like sun through the windows of a moving train. And sun there is. It is bright around everything. It catches the spray we send into the air, it coats the surface of the lake in long scallops and bows, it makes the wet skin of our bodies tight and alive and beautiful. I see the sheen of it on Stan’s dark wet hair, how it picks out the white of his teeth and makes diamonds in the drops of water on his lashes as he leaps up and down, waist deep, throwing scoops of water into the air, watching the liquid break apart into a fall of heavy drops that hold all the colors of the world as he laughs and shouts, “Hey, Johnny! Hey, Johnny! Look at me!”

Of these remembered images I wish that that was all there was. I wish some part of me had been good enough to hold on to just these. But there is another image which overlays itself on this glittering cavalcade, which my gaze was drawn to over and over during that last careless playtime we had together-that of Marla’s back. Flat and smooth, pliant as it twists about the axis of her spine, the clasp of her bra, the elastic of her briefs squeezing a gentle line about her hips as she jumps from the water, splashing Stan. And me, watching behind her, thrilling with the knowledge which has just that instant become a certainty-that my hands will press against her body, that I will undo that clasp, that my thumbs will hook the elastic of her briefs away from her waist, dragging down over hips and thighs…

The question the two of us pose closes at that instant and there is really nothing more to do but wait.

Ah, that image… that knowing. It should have been a sun-spangled confection of memory, an Olympic torch of the heart burning down the long tunnel of the past. But to me now and for all the years after that day, the image of Marla from behind has become less a capturing of her beauty and my desire for it than a portrait of my own horrific selfishness.

Afterwards we lay in the sun, stretched straight in a row, soaking up heat like cells in some giant organic battery. The outside of my thigh rested against Marla’s and our blood pressed at the barrier of our skins until we could no longer ignore what we had gone there to do.

I told Stan that Marla and I were going for a walk in the forest. He wanted to come, of course, and when I said he had to stay and guard our things he gave a resigned snort. But he seemed happy enough and rolled onto his stomach and pulled a book out of his bag. Before I left I looked down at his skinny back. Stan was a smart kid, smart enough to be a grade ahead of his age at school, and his superior IQ allowed him to excel at most things his world presented, but he was a poor swimmer and though he loved the water he could do no more than an uncertain dog paddle.

“You need some sunscreen.”

“Okay, in a minute.”

“And remember, don’t go in the water, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah, Johnny, I got it. Don’t go in the water.”

Marla and I walked casually across the sand, but as soon as the forest closed behind us she put her hand in mine and we started to run. We didn’t have any idea where we were going but we knew what we needed. Between the trees the ground was soft with long grass and there were patches of light where the sun fell through holes in the canopy of leaves; outside these glowing islands the forest was cool and shadowed and the grass was cold against our legs.

A couple of hundred yards back from the lake we found a swale of grass in a cone of sunlight. We stopped at its center and the noise of our dash died suddenly around us. We stood panting, face to face, smiling. Light and dark. A heartbeat of stillness. Out there, out in the splashing, picnicking world, there were reasons to hesitate, to question what we were doing, but in this wooded sanctuary there was only us and what we wanted from each other. I felt the sun sizzling in my cells and my eyes, even in the strands of my hair.

The grass we lay on slid against our bodies as though it had been polished. It bruised and tore beneath us as we moved, leaving a pale wash of green on knees and elbows and shoulders. The moment was not lingered over, it was stolen time and could not be wasted on the languors that arpeggiate love. It was everything at once, as much as we could cram into a handful of minutes. Afterwards, as we lay beside each other, the scent of the grass we had broken rose about us.

Who knows what plans we might have made then? What resolutions to join our lives, what fretting there might have been about the hurt we would inflict on Gareth? But these turmoils were not to be, not that day. Sounds from the lake carried to where we were. They were baffled by the trees but if you listened you could guess at their meaning-the willowy scale of laughter, the short barking of a complaining child, the calling of a mother, two or three notes, over and over, like an instrument being tuned…

We had not heard these sounds, of course, as we strained at each other. But now, as our bodies quieted, they began to fall upon us. And as they fell they changed, from a collection of commonplaces to a harsh blatting that lanced the warm cocoon Marla and I had drawn about ourselves. For a moment I lay listening, trying to decode their meaning. And then I was pulling on my shorts and running, running, running…

Because the sounds I could hear were panic and danger and alarm. And I knew what was causing them.

Out of the forest. Into the sun. Our towels and bags were still at the edge of the lake. Stan’s book too. But as much as I willed the image, as much as I screamed for it to be so, he was not there reading it. A few yards further on a group of people were crowding over something.

I ran through them, shouldering bodies out of the way, and stopped abruptly. A man was kneeling, driving his locked arms rapidly up and down. The jeans and shirt he wore were soaking wet and beneath his pumping hands the body of my brother was dreadfully pale and dreadfully still. His chest flexed and one of his feet rocked back and forth through a short arc but it was plain to me that he was not alive. I dropped to my knees opposite the man. I felt a sudden desperate need to explain that I was the one here to whom this terrible event was most terrible, to confess to the ring of faces peering down at me my part in this tragedy.