Chapter Three
Thomas has come down from the mountain. Red, an older man he met on the way, is driving him to his old house.
It was the same house. That was the first thing — the sheer fact of its sameness. He had half-expected it to be gone, or transformed beyond recognition, or replaced with something that would let him off the hook of memory. Instead it stood exactly where he had left it, white clapboard with green shutters, the oak tree in the front yard that had been a sapling when they'd moved in now thick-trunked and certain of itself, casting shade across the porch.
The shutters were blue now. That was different. Erin had always wanted blue shutters and he had kept putting it off, the way he'd kept putting things off, and at some point after he was gone she had simply done it herself. Of course she had.
Red pulled to the curb and cut the engine.
Thomas did not move.
The memories came without invitation, without order, the way they always did when he let his guard down — not in sequence but all at once, layered, overlapping, the way the mountain played its sounds on a still night.
Lizzy at three years old, sitting on those porch steps in her yellow raincoat, very seriously explaining to a beetle that it needed to go home now. Her voice so grave, so certain that the beetle would understand if she used the right tone.
Emily, not yet two, standing at the front window with both hands #at on the glass, watching the oak tree move in the wind with an expression of absolute astonishment, as though the wind were something that had been invented just for her.
Erin on the porch on a Sunday evening, hair loose, a book face-down in her lap, not reading it, just sitting in the last of the light with the particular stillness of someone who has found, however briefly, exactly the right place to be.
He had stood at the kitchen window watching her that evening and felt something so large and quiet and certain that he hadn't had words for it then and didn't have them now. He had been so sure, in those moments, that he was enough. That whatever was broken in him was outweighed by the largeness of what he had.
He had been wrong about that. Or he had been right, and then wrong later. He was no longer certain which.
A car sat in the driveway — not Erin's old Civic, which he would have recognized, but a small red sedan, practical and adult. Beside it, a bicycle leaning against the garage wall. Teenage-sized, he thought, though he was no longer an expert on what teenagers needed.
The blue shutters. The grown oak. The bicycle.
His daughters were in that house. Or they weren't — they were at school, or with friends, or doing the thousand small ordinary things that made up lives he had not been present for. They were teenagers. He tried to hold that word and found he couldn't quite — it kept resolving back into yellow raincoats and small hands on glass.
He became aware that his hands were pressed flat on his thighs, exactly the way Emily had pressed her hands on the window. He hadn't noticed doing it.
He did not get out of the truck.
A minute passed. Then another. Red sat beside him with the patient silence of a man who had learned the difference between someone who needed to talk and someone who needed to be given time to find out which one they were.
Finally Thomas said, "I don't know what I'm going to say to her."
"No," Red agreed.
"Ten years. I don't — there's no version of this where I ring that doorbell and what happens next is fine."
"Probably not."
"She built a life. Without me. She did it well, from what I can — " He stopped. Looked at the blue shutters. "She always wanted blue shutters."
Red looked at the house. "She got them."
"She got them." Thomas breathed out slowly. "I keep thinking about what I'm walking into and I can't — I can't see past the door. What's on the other side of it, I have no idea. Who she is now. Who they are. Whether they — " He stopped again.
"Whether they'll want you there," Red said quietly.
"Yes."
Red was quiet for a moment. He turned the wooden rosary bead between two fingers, once, the way a man touches a thing he's touched so many times it's become part of thinking. Then he said:
"I sat in a parking lot for forty minutes before I walked into the funeral home to make Margaret's arrangements. Just sat there. Couldn't make myself go in." He paused. "Worst thing I ever had to do. And I'd have sat there all day if a woman I'd never met hadn't walked past my window and knocked on the glass and said, 'You ready?' Like she knew. Just a stranger in a parking lot."
Thomas looked at him.
"Sometimes," Red said, "the door is just a door. What's on the other side of it is still your life. It doesn't stop being your life because you've been gone from it." He looked back at the house. "Those are your girls in there. That's your wife. Whatever's happened, whatever's been said or not said or done or not done — that part doesn't change."
Thomas was quiet for a long moment.
"She may not want to see me," he said.
"She may not," Red agreed. "But she deserves the chance to decide that for herself. Don't you think?"
Something in Thomas's chest shifted. Not released — nothing as clean as that. Just shifted, the way weight shifts when you've been carrying it so long you've forgotten it could be carried differently.
He picked up his pack. He opened the door.
The spring air came in — cool, smelling of cut grass and the particular sweetness of the oak tree, a smell so specific and so known that it hit him somewhere below thought, somewhere the ten years hadn't reached.
He got out. He stood on the sidewalk and looked at the house and then he turned back to Red.
"I don't know how to thank you," he said.
Red waved a hand. "Send me a postcard when you figure out how it goes."
"I don't have your address."
"I'll be on the bench," Red said. "I'm always on the bench."
Thomas almost smiled. It felt unfamiliar on his face, like a door opened in a room long closed. He turned toward the house.
He walked up the path. The same stone pavers, the same slight unevenness on the third one that he'd always meant to fix. His feet found it without looking. Some things, apparently, the body simply refused to forget.
He stood at the door.
He raised his hand.
He knocked.
