Read Online Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz - Free Book Online Page B

that though I could see his point about his stepfather’s limited skills with bat and ball and glove, sometimes the truth could hurt more than he realized, so he should be careful how he said things to people about themselves, since people—adults especially—were often blind to their own faults. I’d gone on to say that Boggs possessed the best pure swing in baseball. But everyone knew that, I admitted, so maybe I was no wiser than most. What, if anything, separated me from the pack was my love for my son. Your mother will say bad things about me sometimes, I’d written. She’s mad as hell at me for a lot of things, and right about most of them, too. I’ve made some terrible mistakes, and you know I’m sorry. But nothing anybody says about me is as true as this: I love you, Sam. I’ll write again next week. We’ll see each other sometime soon. I’ll hear you play that trumpet. Dad.
    I folded the letter in half along its well-worn crease and stuffed it back in the envelope (on the flap: “saM aRNo”). Like a player returning a lucky card to the deck, I slipped the envelope back into the pile with an obsessive’s attempt at recall; it had told me something, and I already counted on seeing it again. Then I twisted the rubber band around the letters, closed the bundle up in the drawer, and went outside.
    The sun had risen above the stand of trees across the road. The light was weak but still strong enough to have burned the dew off my car. The ’89 midnight-blue Ford Taurus sat dry as toast, all its secrets exposed.
    I climbed in, started it up, turned it around. I put my car back in the garage and listened to the machine hum of the door going down.
    There are heroes, and there are the rest of us. There comes a time when you just let go the ghost of the better person you might have been.

PART TWO

Ethan
    A fuel truck was parked in front of the Canaan State Police barracks when I arrived the next morning, its pump droning and its hose half buried in the ground. A black man in gray coveralls stood in the sunlight with his hand resting on the pulsing hose, testing the pressure, a transparent, heat-stoked cloud of fumes shimmering just above his head as if he were being baked.
    The front door of the barracks opened directly into a small waiting room with three plastic chairs, a drinking fountain, and a low table supporting a cardboard rack of Alcoholics Anonymous brochures, “A.A. at a Glance” and “Is A.A. for Me?” To my right, through a Plexiglas window, I could see into a larger room in which three policewomen dressed in pale blue uniforms with dark blue trim were sitting at their desks and talking. One of them—thickset, with small eyes and an auburn perm—nodded soberly when I gave her my name. She informed me that it was only eight-fifteen in the morning and Sergeant Burke wasn’t in yet, though he would be shortly, if I cared to wait.
    I sat down on a plastic chair. The waiting room had no windows. After a while, I got up to take a drink of water. Next to the drinking fountain was a steel door marked Authorized Personnel Only. Finally I sat down again and stared at the facing wall, which was covered with bulletin boards papered with xeroxed messages like “Lost Dog ‘Moby’—Last Seen in Sheffield,” and “Wanted by CT for Failure to Pay Child Support,” and “Fugitive Alert,” complete with grainy mug shots of rapists and killers. It was a wall of crime and shame and suffering, and I stared at it a long time, until the many names and pictures and deeds began to blur, becoming indistinguishable.
    Sitting there beneath it all, the point was not so hard to grasp. They made it easy for you. It was a message anyone could understand, if you’d been hurt badly enough. It said that you who were suffering, you who’d been the victim of an unthinkable crime, the loser of a life, the man who couldn’t find his wife, the parent robbed of a child—that you were not, as you assumed, unique in the