Robert Wilson - The Divide

And today—the last day of Susan’s visit—they had come here to this grave, where Susan had stood frowning for the last forty-five minutes, poised on the brink of a mystery.

She was distressed to discover that she could not summon up a concrete image of her father. She tried and failed. She could remember only the things she associated with him—his clothes, the mirror polish on his shoes, the brown sample cases he had carried to work. The rest was either hopelessly vague or, worse, deathbed images, his emaciated body and hollow eyes. She remembered the sound of his voice, the soothing rumble of it, but that was a childhood memory. His laryngeal cancer had ended all that, of course; but it seemed to Susan that he had fallen mute years before the operation, a functional silence in which anything meaningful must never be pronounced. His way of protecting her from the divorce, from his own fears, from adulthood. She was trying hard not to hate him for it.

How awful that sounded. But it was true: she had never forgiven him for his silence, for his cancer, for his callous descent into the grave. It was a monumentally selfish thought. A childish thought … but maybe that was the heart of the matter: she could never come to this place except as a child, suspended in time by his withdrawal and his death. She would never be his “grown-up daughter.” She couldn’t say any of the things she needed to say, because he couldn’t listen.

She was startled by the touch of her mother’s hand on her shoulder.

“Come on, Susan. We’ve been here long enough.”

Have we? Susan climbed into the car dutifully, a child, thinking: Maybe not Maybe if she stayed long enough, the right words would come to her. Talking to herself, she would talk to Daddy. And Daddy would answer. His buried words would rise up from the ground and hover in the cool, sunlit air.

But she couldn’t stay forever. And so the car carried her down the hillside in the long light of the afternoon, away from the stubbornly silent ground.

Her flight out of Los Angeles left an hour and forty minutes late, which meant she missed her connection at O’Hare. The next available seat to Toronto was on a red-eye flight; she had an afternoon and evening to kill in Chicago.

She phoned Toronto with this news and then—on an impulse—rented a car for the day. She did not want to stray too far from the airport; Susan distrusted official scheduling and usually preferred to lurk near the departure gates. But she knew her way around this city and she recalled that John’s old neighborhood, the neighborhood where he had grown up with the Woodwards, was only a short drive from the airport.

Winter hadn’t affected the city too severely. There was a glaze of snow along the highway embankments, but the air was clear, with faint trails of wintery cirrus clouds running down to a powder blue horizon. But it was cold, the kind of cold that made the tires crackle against the blacktop.

She had written down John’s old address in her notebook. The neighborhood was a Levittown, a postwar bungalow suburb, treeless and bleak in the winter light. She located the street—a cul-de-sac—and then the house, a pastel pink box indistinguishable from any of these others. THE WOODWARDS was printed on the mailbox. A sign posted on the front lawn said FOR SALE and a smaller one beside it announced a CONTENTS SALE—SATURDAY FEBRUARY 16.

Today.

Susan allowed the car to drift to a stop.

She didn’t think she would have the courage, but she did: she got out of the car and walked up the driveway and knocked on the door, shivering. She was about to turn away when the door opened a crack and a grey-haired, chunky man peered out.

“Mr. Woodward?”

“Yes?”

She took a breath. “I, uh—I saw the sign—”

“Sale ended at four o’clock,” he said, swinging the door wider, “but you might as well come in. Hardly anybody else showed up.”

Susan stepped inside.

The house had obviously been stripped down for moving. There were blank spaces where there should have been furniture, and curtain rods empty over the windows. It seemed to Susan that James Woodward had been similarly stripped down. He was not as big as she had pictured him; not nearly as imposing. He was a small, barrel-chested man with a fringe of grey hair and big, callused hands. He was friendly but distant, and Susan was careful to pretend an interest in this item or that as he conducted her in and out of these small rooms. What she really wanted was to find some ghost of John or even Benjamin lingering here; but there was nothing like that … only these mute, empty spaces. Coming down the stairs she said, “Is your wife home?” He shook his head. “She died. That’s why I’m moving. I tried looking after this place for a while, but it’s too big for one person.” He opened the basement door. “There’s a few things still stored down here—if you think it’s worth the look.”

“Please,” Susan said.

This was where his workshop had been, though most of the tools had been carried away. Not much left—a battered workbench with curls of pine and cedar still nesting under it; an ancient P.A. amplifier with its tubes pulled. In one shadowy corner, an acoustic guitar.

Susan went to it immediately.

“Oh, that,” Woodward said. “You don’t want that.”

“Maybe I do,” Susan said.

“You know, I sold some guitars earlier. I used to make ’em by hand. Like a hobby I guess you could say. But that one—see, the truss rod’s off true. You know guitars? Well, it means it’ll go off tune and be hard to fix. The action’s a little too high off the frets, too. It’s a bad instrument.”

“How much do you want for it?”

“Say, fifty bucks for the materials? If you’re serious. You play?”

“No,” Susan said. “But I have a friend who does.” She took the money out of her purse.

James Woodward accepted the payment; Susan picked up the guitar. It was heavier than she expected. The strings rang faintly under her fingers.

“I almost hate to sell the damn thing,” Woodward said. He looked past Susan, past these walls. “It’s funny,” he said. “It’s the broken things that stay on your mind. Broken, bent, half-made or bad-made. You take them to the grave with you.”

She climbed off the plane in Toronto weary and dazed, collected her suitcase and the guitar from the baggage carousel. Dr. Kyriakides was waiting in the crowded space beyond the customs checkpoint.

She understood by his hollow smile that something was wrong. She followed him up to the carpark and loaded her baggage into the trunk of the Honda, daunted by his silence.

“John is back,” he said finally.

“That’s good,” Susan responded.

Dr. Kyriakides opened the car door for her. Ever the European gentleman.

“But Amelie is missing,” he said.

It was a long drive back to the house. A snowstorm had settled in from the west and wasn’t leaving; the car radio warned people to stay off the roads. Susan was grateful that Dr. Kyriakides had been able to maneuver the Honda all the way to the airport; she was even more grateful that she was able to drive it back. Visibility had closed in and the road was blanked out north of the city; the headlights probed into a swirling wilderness. For the time, she was too preoccupied with driving to press for details about Amelie.

The weather grew steadily worse, but the tires were good and there wasn’t much traffic and they were back at the house before long. Kyriakides brushed the snow from the car while Susan headed for the kitchen and a hot cup of coffee.

John was there, waiting for her.