Matthew Stokoe: Empty Mile

I should have learned over those eight years that guilt can neither be worked off nor outdistanced. But I did not, and in the end my desperation to be rid of it had driven me back to my hometown. I worked hard there, with Stan and with Marla, trying to force the present to compensate the past. I did the best I could. But it didn’t make any difference.

Stan had believed that life would take care of him. And though his mind was less capable than mine he had been smarter than me. He had understood that you cannot hang on to guilt so desperately, so tenaciously, and hope to live a life that is either bearable or worthwhile.

Now, with my utter failure staring me in the face, I saw, finally, that he had been right. It was not the fixing of guilt that was important, but learning to find a way to come to terms with it, to understand that the past must be lived with, not forever battled against.

My guilt had become the structure of my world, but that day, as I watched the waters of the lake darken, the sheer weight of regret I carried finally pushed me beyond itself and somehow, by overload, cauterized that part of me which made such an ongoing agony of my mistakes. I’d simply had too much to take any more, but I also knew that if I kept feeding my guilt, kept it alive at such a level, I would certainly destroy what little there was left in the world that I still held dear. There would be no chance at all for Marla and me.

I was not absolved, I was not free of everything I had ever done. My past would always be with me and I would always regret so much of it, but there was now some curtain drawn across it, through which it could still be seen but which muted its sounds and colors and filtered it just enough that its incandescent horror could no longer scorch the present so deeply.

Perhaps it would not last. Perhaps my guilt would again catch me and begin anew the process of tearing the lives of those around me to pieces. But for now I was beyond it and I would use this respite from it as carefully as I could to build a life with Marla in which she and I would at last be able to find some measure of joy in each other. Sometime in the future. Sometime, if we were lucky.

I left the lake as the light was fading. There were clouds now in the sky and a breeze had started. Millicent’s Datsun had been towed from the trail and there was nothing where it had been but torn earth and the trunk of a tree from which the bark had been scraped. When I reached the Oakridge Loop I called Marla on my cell phone. Half an hour later she met me in the pickup and we drove home pressed against each other with the heater not working and whatever thoughts we were thinking kept silent inside ourselves.

Patterson called in the middle of the following week to tell me my father’s body had yielded nothing conclusive. The fact that he’d been found in the lake dressed in business clothes seemed to confirm a theory of foul play, but neither the wound they had discovered on the back of his head nor anything on his person gave any indication as to who might have been involved. Similarly, questioning David, the lake’s only permanent resident, had provided no useful information. Patterson told me he was sorry, but finding the body was probably as good as it was going to get.

Two days later, in the morning, we buried Stan and Rosie and my father.

The next day there was snow on the ground at Empty Mile.

And the day after that Marla and I locked up the cabin and got into the pickup and drove out of Oakridge toward the East.

Huge thanks to Catherine and Andrea for providing a bed, a place to write, and food to eat at a crucial moment-this book would not have been completed without that stay in paradise.