T. Boyle - World's End

The next day Lola sat beside her through the never-ending morning, the unendurable afternoon and the starless night that fell on her like a curse. Don’t worry, Lola said, her voice dabbing at the wounds, he’ll turn up. He’s safe, I know it. For all they knew he could have gotten away to the City with a carload of concertgoers or doubled back to Piet’s place in Peterskill. He’ll call, she said, any minute now. Any minute.

She was wrong. Soothing, but wrong. He didn’t call. Hesh beat the bushes and Hesh found nothing. Lola wanted to know if she could get her a sleeping pill. It was 11:00 P.M. No one had seen or heard from Truman in twenty-seven hours. Scotch? Vodka? Gin?

Then it was Monday, early — seven, eight, she didn’t know. Lola was standing behind the counter at the van der Meulen bakery and Hesh, his arms rough with scab and his face ripened like a fruit, was on his way to Sollovay’s Auto Glass and Mirror on Houston Street. That was when he walked in. She hadn’t slept in fifty hours and she was seeing faces, Walter was wound up like a dervish in his private three-year-old’s dance of denial and trauma, the trash was overflowing, the larder empty, her mother rushing back from a vacation in Vermont to be with her in that bankrupt hour, and he walked in the door.

He was limping. He was drunk. There was a dark punished bruise beneath his left eye, his ear was bandaged and he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn to the concert, dirty now, torn, steeped in blood. What was there to say? We were worried sick, where were you, did they hurt you, I’m so glad, we’re so glad, Walter, look, look who’s come home. She was up off the davenport and rushing to him, Walter at her side, leaping to the familial embrace, tears of gratitude, Odysseus home from the wars, unfurl the banners, sound the horns, lights, camera…but he was numb to their touch. In the next moment he shoved past them, shielding his face like a gangster outside the courthouse, and then he was in the bedroom, the suitcase gaping open on the bed like a set of jaws.

“What are you doing?” She was on him now, tugging at his arm. “Truman, what is it? Talk to me! Truman!” Beneath her, clinging to his father’s legs, Walter kept up a steady dirge, “Daddy, daddy, daddy.”

Nothing could touch him. He shrugged her off as he’d shrugged off tacklers in the years of his glory, single-minded and heedless, plunging for the goal line. Books, clothes, his notes, the manuscript: the house was on fire, the woods were burning. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his lip quivering with that sick betrayer’s grin — she didn’t exist, Walter was invisible — and then he was on his way out the door.

Outside, the car. The Buick. They said later it was Van Wart’s car, but how would she know? It was black, long, funereal. She’d never seen it before. “Truman!” She was at the door, she was on the stoop. “Talk to me!” He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even look at her. He flung the suitcase in back and sprang into the driver’s seat like a hunted man, and then the car jerked into gear and lurched back down the driveway. She stood there, stricken immobile, and in that moment, through the sad slow dance of light on the windshield, she caught her final glimpse of him. Jaw set, eyes dead, he never even turned his head.

But Truman didn’t leave her without a valediction of sorts. As the car swerved to the left on Kitchawank Road, presenting her with the long gleaming plane of the passenger side, Piet suddenly appeared at the open window, sprung up like a toadstool from the sunless depths of the interior. He turned to her, slow as clockwork, and lifted his pale cupped child’s hand in the least and smallest wave.

Bye-bye.

When Anna Alving swung into the driveway it was just past two in the afternoon and her hands were trembling on the wheel. She’d left the rented cottage on Lake St. Catherine at seven that morning, her husband following in the second car. They stopped for lunch somewhere outside Hudson (Magnus so preoccupied with his vanishing son-in-law he barely touched his tuna on rye, and she so wrought up she had six cups of coffee with her danish) and then set off again in tandem. The Chevrolet was a racehorse compared to Magnus’ creeping Nash, and though she tried to hang back and keep him in sight, by the time they reached Claverack the rear-view mirror showed nothing but blacktop. She thought about pulling over to wait for him, but the grip of emergency tightened on her, and her foot went to the floor. Mama, her daughter’s voice came to her as it had on the phone the night before, Mama, he’s gone, and she took the curves in a headlong rush that savaged her tires and nearly jerked the steering wheel from her hands. Now, as she pulled up to the silent bungalow, the bungalow that sat newly painted in a lattice of leaf-thrown shadow, looking placid, normal, staid, she loosened her grip on the wheel and cut the ignition. She sat there a moment, listening to the ticks and groans of the dying engine, gathering up her purse and composing her face. Then she started up the front steps.

She found Christina sunk into the davenport, shoulders bunched, legs clutched to her chest. Beside her, stretched out prone atop an avalanche of children’s books, was Walter. He was asleep — mouth agape, eyelids half-closed — and she was reading to him. Oblivious. Her voice sunk to a weary monotone. “Jack Sprat could eat no fat,” she read, “his wife could eat no lean.”

“Christina?”

Christina looked up. In the past six hours she’d been through every fairy tale and nursery rhyme in the house. Cinderella, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, they all lived happily ever after. Babar, Alice, Toad of Toad Hall, life a bowl of cherries. Then there was Jack — Jack of the beanstalk, Jack of Jill, Jack the housebuilder and Jack the candlestick jumper — and Humpty Dumpty, Wee Willie Winkie and poor Cock Robin. “Have they found him yet?” her mother asked.

Slowly, reverently, as if it were part of some ritual, Christina closed the book in her lap. Her mother was standing there before her, tanned from her month on the stony shingle of Lake St. Catherine, her hair newly done and a look of permanent anguish on her face. Found him? What she wanted to know was who killed Cock Robin.

Her mother’s voice came back at her: “Is he all right?’

She looked up into her mother’s face, the face that had been her sun and moon, her comfort and refuge since she lay helpless in the cradle, the face that vanquished all those horrific others that infested the shadows and leered through her dreams, but all she could think of was poor Cock Robin and the birds of the air that fell a-sighing and a-sobbing when they heard the news. “They found him,” she said finally.

Her mother was unconsciously clenching and unclenching her fists, there was the rumble of a second car in the driveway, Walter murmured something in his sleep. “They found him,” she repeated. A car door slammed. She could hear her father’s footsteps on the pavement, the stoop, she could see his anxious face through the mesh of the screen.

“Yes?” her mother said.

“Yes,” she said. “He’s dead.”

He wasn’t dead, but far better that he were. By nightfall the Alvings had heard the rumors — had heard Hesh’s version, Lola’s, Lorelee Shapiro’s and Rose Pollack’s — and Christina, stretched the length of her childhood bed like a corpse laid out for embalming, finally admitted the truth. Truman had left her. Left her unprotected at the concert, left her to agonize through two sleepless days and nights, then packed up his things and left her for good. “I can’t believe it,” her mother said. Her father rose from his chair. “I’ll kill him,” he said.

There was the second concert at the end of that week, big with triumph and pared down with defeat, and then August gave way to September, with its lingering warmth and deluded butterflies, with the fullness that yields to decay. By the time the trees turned, Christina had lost twenty-two pounds. For the first time since she was fifteen she weighed less than a hundred pounds, and her mother was concerned. “Eat,” she said, “you’re wasting away to nothing. Forget him. Forget him and eat. You’ve got to keep your strength up. Think of Walter.”