It was a Sunday, early evening, spring. New leaves shining in the trees along both sides of MacLellan Street forming a vivid, protective canopy. A current of regulated security glittering in the air, in the ordered rows of parked cars, the sheen of cleaned windows. Clayton Beale, his mind alert, his hands trembling, stood in the newly paved street by the ruined body, ready for anything to happen, from the violent to the miraculous.
A cluster of middle-aged moms who’d heard the sound of brakes had formed, all of them yelling into their cells.
While he stood there, he couldn’t help but study the lawns around him. They were so neatly green and trimmed, as if they’d been cultivated in a lab and gently slotted within their property lines. He knew the types of noxious carcinogens these people blessed their lawns with to keep the weeds away. He could gauge to within a dozen gallons the staggering amounts of water they wasted with their timed sprinklers.
Two teen stoners, enormous rapper t-shirts billowing over their low-slung jeans, rolled up on BMX bikes, stopped next to the body, and stared. The bolder of the two dismounted. He crouched down and put a hand out, as if to touch one of the still-open eyes of the newly dead woman.
“Cody, get away from there,” one of the mothers said. “Now.”
A Latina woman in a restaurant uniform, the only person of color there, Clayton observed, came out from her home with a blanket. She covered the body. As she straightened and stepped back, he said to her:
“I was just driving along, you know, and boom.”
It really had been a fluke. Usually he biked everywhere but he’d decided he was finally going to get new compost tubs and would need the trunk space. So he was heading home in his perpetually unwashed Honda two-door, when a woman appeared, walking in profile, in the middle of the street. She was swinging her leg forward into her next step – her hands on her head as if she were already anticipating the impact – when he hit her, sending her arms flying up and her face smashing down into his windshield.
He could still see her in his mind, the white rind of her dentures knocked askew and exposed beneath her upper lip, which was curled back and mashed along the base of her nose, while her lower lip was torn and flattened in a colorless compression against the windshield. Her nose was bent sideways, so firmly fused into her cheek that, even in the midst of everything, he knew how much it must have hurt. Arcing out around the woman’s face was a spin-art nimbus of blood, as if she were some instant religious vision fallen from the sky.
A fleet image, imprinted in permanence in his brain.
And then she was gone, reduced to a thumping sound rolling across his roof, like something from a carwash.
He had no memory of stopping, only of jumping out and running back to the heap of her in the street. His muscles, his nerves, his pulverizing heart, all of him still believing that if he got to her in time, everything would be all right.
She had no ID with her and she wasn’t carrying a purse. But he recognized an Alzheimer’s bracelet on her wrist. Bending down as if he were afraid to disturb her, ignoring the blood in her matted hair, the obtuse bend in her left leg, he’d flipped the pendant over and seen a name and a phone number, a hotline to call to ensure a safe return.
“Is awful,” the woman said, not unsympathetically. Clayton wasn’t sure if she meant what happened or what he’d done specifically. She turned and hurried back to her house, but not before quickly making a sign of the cross and kissing her closed fist.
Finally, the swelling sound of an approaching siren could be heard.
Footage from a surveillance camera approximated his traveling speed at 28 mph. The limit for that area was 30. There were no actual witnesses to the incident itself, but people from the block who were interviewed said that Clayton seemed like a decent, responsible person, not reckless or indifferent. When the investigation was finished, he wasn’t charged with anything. The death was ruled an accident.
Mrs. Donna Powers, seventy-eight years old and widowed, now deceased. A former family therapist with a private practice, she’d retired about two years earlier when she’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She had lived with her daughter Monica, in a neighborhood a mile east of where he’d hit her. As Mrs. Powers’ illness developed, Monica said, so had her tendency to wander off.
He learned this from the local paper, which had also posted a picture, taken years earlier, of Mrs. Powers. A studio portrait in which she’d obviously been coached to look upward slightly and to her right. Her features were relaxed, her eyes alive, her face softened by a gentle smile. She looked happy in a way that suggested her happiness extended beyond the moment of her portrait. Seeing her again filled him with despair.
The evening of the accident, he left a message with Tara, the new department head of the Forestry program at Mitchell Creek College where he taught, explaining what happened. He was sitting in his office when he heard a quick knock and looked up to see Tara peeking at him shyly.
“Clayton, I am so sorry to hear about this,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he said, “a little shaken up but okay, I guess.”
She slipped in and sat on the edge of a chair across from his desk. “So what happened, exactly? If you’re okay talking about it.”
He described the incident in the simplest of terms and when he told Tara about the Alzheimer’s bracelet, her eyes widened and she sat back in the chair.
“Oooh, the poor thing. God, that’s just awful. How sad.”
“Yeah.”
Tara leaned forward. “Well, in a way, it’s really not your fault.”
“Well, actually, it is my fault,” he said. “I killed her.”
“Yes. Okay. Only, all I’m saying is that she might not have known what she was doing. She might not have even known where she was.”
“Maybe.”
“Are you going to be okay to finish out the semester?”
“I’ll be fine. It’s just a few more weeks.” He knew it was important to project stability, to appear sober-minded and sensitive to the grim facts but capable of incorporating those facts and moving on. It was his hope at that moment that his ramshackle, single man appearance – the moss of his salt and pepper beard, his permanently sad eyes looking out from his so-old-they’d-become-retro wire-frame glasses – would back him up.
“I’ve been thinking about getting some counseling,” he offered.
Tara relaxed and sat back in the chair. “Good. Good for you. That’s really important.”
She means well, he told himself that afternoon while he stood waiting for the bus to take him home.
And at least she actually said something. Because in the final weeks of the semester, the other folks in his department, co-workers going back years in some cases, shunned him. Most checked in once and quickly, prying out the grisly details before switching to nervously hustling by him in the hallways with a nod.
I’m still me, he wanted to yell at them. When the school year ended, he packed up his things and left, hurt and full of blame, mostly for himself.
He took his own advice and joined a grief-counseling group. He was never singled out, never pressured to speak. But silently absorbing the intensity of other people’s suffering made him feel like an impostor. Embittered parents who had lost children to drugs or disease, and were now coping with marriages falling apart under the strain; widowers left alone in life and unable to summon up the strength to continue; middle-aged children looking after dying parents. How could he tell these people I killed someone when they were already dealing with so much loss? When he felt like death itself. After a few weeks, he stopped going.
Despite having spent his life in Mitchell Creek, he had never developed a deep collection of friends. Growing up an only child, he’d become accustomed to being lonely but had learned to be industrious and self-sufficient. He eventually knew no other way. College had been a time of study and preparation, not partying, and he came out of it highly employable but still essentially alone. On the job, he developed incidental friendships with his co-workers, the common cause of land stewardship providing somewhat limited opportunities for conversation, but he rarely took up anyone’s offer to come by for dinner or grab a beer after work.
He and his wife Ellen had lived and worked in relative quiet, Clayton teaching and Ellen working at the medical center as a floor supervisor. He’d fallen hard for her when they’d first met and had been astonished when she seemed to actually fall for him, not only because he’d spent most of his adult life single but because Ellen was a catch – smart, invitingly attractive (a runner and cyclist who enjoyed a drink or two, she was regularly hit on by a varied spectrum of males), and singularly focused on the trajectory of her career. That they were both available and near their mid-thirties seemed to set them apart, as if they’d been keeping themselves in reserve for each other.
From the beginning of their relationship, they’d visited Ellen’s parents every year in Maine, and Clayton had felt if not embraced by them, then at least acknowledged as someone who was clearly devoted to their daughter. Aside from these breaks, however, he and Ellen lived for their work, occasionally planning elaborate trips to Europe but never actually getting there. Their focus on helping was primary. They never had children and had never wanted them. He was always saying there were already too many people on the planet, tearing through everything that had been reduced to a “resource.” When Ellen turned 40 and there was still no pregnancy, her parents gave up hoping.
But turning 45 seemed to change something. She really hadn’t wanted children, she’d told him, she felt sure of that. But when she actually aged out to what she considered the point of no return, it seemed to him that their decision had degenerated in her mind into a shameful failure of will, a betrayal of her true self. And she blamed him – for his timidity, his lack of ambition, his peevish concerns for the environment and the damage more humans would bring to it; his acquiescence to his ideals instead of her feelings. Ellen became more argumentative, then more withdrawn. The recreational, reward-system drinking of wine that they had developed but limited to weekends broke loose and spilled over into the week for her. He let her go for a while, even tried to join in, staying up late with her while she joylessly streamed reruns, thinking it was something she needed to help her get through a rough patch. But once she began to drink nightly, often staying up after he went to bed, practically shooing him away so she could be alone and then sleeping on the sofa, he realized he had no idea how to help her.
Within a year they were divorced.
He moved out, giving Ellen the small house they’d once been so happy in, and found a ground-floor apartment across town on a street of two-story clapboard row houses; a definitive step down from what they’d had, but appropriate for the mood that had taken over his life: grimly respectable, defensive, but basically defeated.
He still loved her but had come to understand that that was now his problem.
With the divorce finalized, he and Ellen lost contact. He only saw her randomly, waiting at a red light in her newly washed car, say, or crossing the Price Chopper parking lot in clothing he didn’t recognize, a pair of sunglasses on her head. He wasn’t proud of it, but there were times when the silence became too much in his place, and he’d rolled past their old house on evening bike rides, just to look. (He couldn’t get over the fact that she’d installed air conditioners, one in the bedroom, if it was still the bedroom, and one in the living room, despite the discussions he’d had with her in the past about how awful they were for the environment.)
About a month before the accident, he saw her one evening as he pedaled home from work, leaving Walgreens with a couple of white prescription bags in her hand. His stomach sank with worry. Was she all right? Would she tell him if she wasn’t? He was reminded that he was no longer allowed to ask.
Not long after the end of the school year, insomnia and the relentless weight of the accident drove him to break down and call Ellen. What he wanted from her he wasn’t exactly sure, but he hoped that if she picked up, she wouldn’t be drunk.
She was. But only a little.
“Maybe this isn’t a good time to talk,” he said.
“No, no. It’s fine,” she said. “I’m just moving some furniture around, trying to open the space up a bit. I’m happy to take a break.” He heard ice tumbling in her glass as she took a loud sip.
At the mention of furniture, an image of the home he no longer shared with her materialized in his mind. The idea of changing things up there, of creating new patterns, made him feel as if pieces of his brain were being shuffled.
“Well, I just wanted to say hello, see how you were doing,” he said.
Ellen laughed. “I’m good. I… well, I guess I wasn’t expecting to hear from you.” She inhaled another sip. “Is everything all right? I know you didn’t call just to say hello.” He heard her walking across the floor.
He hesitated and then gave over. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry.” He took a breath and said, “This is going to sound crazy but I kind of ran someone over a couple of weeks ago. And… I killed them.”
“You what?” He heard Ellen stop moving.
“Yeah, this poor old woman, Mrs. Powers. She had Alzheimer’s and it looks like she was probably sundowning, which, you know, I remembered you telling me about. That thing that people with Alzheimer’s experience sometimes at the end of the day when they feel a little confused and agitated… she just wandered out of her house and walked in front of my car.” Sweat leaked from his ear where the phone made contact and rolled beneath the neck of his shirt.
“Holy smoke. Wow.” He heard Ellen on the move again, slower now, and in their kitchen, opening the freezer and rattling the ice bucket, no doubt to refresh her drink. At the sound of it, at the sound of her voice in her kitchen, their kitchen, he felt desperately thirsty. “So… are you all right?” Ellen said.
“Yes and no. Restless, mostly. I’m having trouble sleeping. Probably from the heat.”
“Well, that and you killed somebody.”
There was silence on both ends.
“Sorry,” Ellen said. “But you know what I’m getting at, right? Look it, one more air conditioner isn’t going to destroy the planet. It’s already kind of fucked anyway. Just buy one. Let yourself be comfortable for once.”
How many times had he heard that from her? And now she had two units in her front windows and who knows how many more in the back. “You know my feelings about that.”
“Yeah. ‘What we do as individuals may not seem to matter, but collectively, it does.’ See? I can still quote you I heard it so many damned times.”
“I also keep seeing her face,” he said.
He heard Ellen slam the refrigerator door and take a noisy sip. She was moving again, the sound of her feet on the floor traveling up through her body and into the phone, probably back to the living room where the air conditioner was no doubt blasting away. “So have you thought about counseling?” she said, a newly aggrieved tone in her voice. “Or maybe some melatonin?” He heard the rustle of her sitting and settling back on the couch. He bored her. He annoyed her. He walked to his bookshelf and stared at the creased and flaking spines of his books.
“Maybe you should just get drunk,” she said. “Puke it out of your system.”
“Right. Drink it away. Like you? Just sink back into air-conditioned oblivion, pump out another ton or two of CFCs and act like nothing’s wrong? Is that your sage advice?”
“No, actually, my advice is for you to go fuck yourself.”
He heard Ellen’s front door open and close.
“Hey, babe,” Ellen said. “I’ll be there in a sec.”
Babe? He hated that term. And he thought Ellen had, too.
“I’m gonna go,” Ellen said.
“So, who’s the blue ox?”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. Forget it.” He paused and then he said, “I’m sorry I called.”
She sighed. “Clayton, I’m sorry too, but look, just get over it and buy an AC. And take care of yourself, all right?”
Because no one else will do it for you, he heard in the dead air of their finished conversation.
By the end of June, Clayton’s insomnia hadn’t dissipated in the slightest. Endless bike rides, taken to exhaust himself, left him parched and depleted and itchy from some kind of heat rash that swirled across his chest in alarming welts. Each night when he tried to sleep, his eyes sprang open and stayed that way. He took to drinking wine, figuring if Ellen was embracing alcohol, he might as well try it too. Meditation, something he’d dabbled in in college, only served to create a private theater in his mind where the image of Mrs. Powers’ shattered face stared at him.
The summer, something as a teacher he had once cherished, became his enemy. Time clung to him and pulled him down into a paralyzed torpor. And as he stewed, parked on his accordioned futon in front of his whispery rotating fan, he began to pick at his profession. What hope did this planet have against people? He despaired of seeing another crop of kids, naively hopeful about a future that they still imagined themselves being a part of. He despaired of pretending to be hopeful with them. All he was doing was finding ways to convince them to invest in the future of a planet that was going to eventually exterminate them and their offspring in order to fix itself. But there was no other option. Could he ever confess his belief that the planet was worth saving, but that people weren’t? And if that was what he believed, then what business did he have teaching?
August arrived, bringing with it the inevitable preparation for the return to school. Tara called and left messages about what a great summer she hoped he was having and how she wanted to have a quick meeting with him, just to check in and catch up. He didn’t return any of these calls.
As the season faded, the weather finally broke. His insomnia mercifully cleared off. He still dreamed of Mrs. Powers, still saw her face searching for him in unguarded moments, but the shock of that vision was ebbing, the nerve ending exposed by his trauma subdued to numbness. After too many wretched hangovers, he declared a moratorium on the booze, too.
Driving had been out of the question since the day he’d hit Mrs. Powers. The evening of the accident, he’d parked his car in the shed in his backyard and walked away from it. He knew at some point he’d have to get behind the wheel again, but the one time he’d sat in his car, just a few weeks after the incident, had stirred up such vivid images of Mrs. Powers that he’d jumped out panting. The time had come to try again.
When he did take the car out, the experience, to his dismay, was painless. He was accustomed to his indelible feelings of guilt and complicity about driving his little pollution mobile. But something had changed. Some concerned part of his being had been removed and replaced with indifference. He drove out of his neighborhood and saw the same houses and strip malls, the same car dealerships and landscaping businesses, the same fenced-in factories and stretches of thruway littered with eviscerated road-kill and ragged tarps blown off the backs of trucks and soiled diapers tossed from windows and shattered strips of tires fallen to pieces and left behind on the shoulder and countless to-go cups and lids caught in the weeds and grass – and none of it reached him or saddened him, and he didn’t care. He couldn’t remember why he’d ever cared.
He was a numbed-out mess by the time he made it home.
He needed to get away, fast.
He needed to go to the woods.
Traffic on the way up to Cedar Mountain was tolerable that morning, despite the fact of his involuntary wincing when cars zipped past him. He noticed, however, that the further he got from Mitchell Creek, the more distance he put between himself and Ellen and her invisible blue ox, the more relieved he began to feel. The more certain he was that he’d made the right choice. By the time he arrived, it was early afternoon, the sky was busy with scudding clouds, and the parking lot was nearly empty. He slathered himself in Badger Balm, shouldered his daypack, and headed up the narrowing trail.
He’d taken this hike countless times but he wasn’t after exploration. He needed comfort. A familiar, consoling piece of terrain. As he moved further into the woods, as he settled into a rhythm and regulated his breathing, he began to pick up on the pleasing familiarity of birdcalls – the black-capped chickadee, the blue-jay, the towhee. His lungs, opening with exertion, fed on the sweet scent of balsam. Beneath the darkening cover of leaves, he began to disappear, casting no shadow, becoming another creature in the woods.
About a quarter of the way in, he stopped to take a sip of water. Tipping his head back, he noticed a plastic bag snagged in the low branches of a tree.
“Fucking people,” he muttered
He shoved his water bottle in his pack. The bag was definitely within reach if he just climbed a short way. He looked around to see if anyone was coming, then hauled himself up.
The bag was actually a bit further up and out than he thought but, fully committed, he continued. When he came even with it, he shimmied out on a sturdy-looking branch. With one hand gripping a branch above him, he snagged and unwound the bag from the branch and mashed it into his back pocket. Shimmying back, he lost his footing. He lunged at the trunk and slid down its rough surface, his heart smashing in panic against his ribs. He caught himself and managed to make it down the rest of the way but his knees were shaking when he touched land. He sat on a small boulder by the trail’s edge and gulped at his water. While he stabilized, scrapes inside his upper arms and inner thighs as well as an abrasion on his left cheek began to throb and sting. After a careful inspection, during which he discovered a gash in his shirt that exposed his ribcage, he pushed on, knowing the thing to do was walk it all off.
The higher and deeper he went on the trail, the cooler the air became. The more he moved and worked his body, the more the scrapes on his thighs and arms burned, particularly where they came in contact with the edge of his hiking shorts. Stopping to roll up the cuffs, he noticed an empty plastic bottle wedged into a bush just off the trail. He plucked it out and put it in the plastic bag he’d taken out of the tree.
How could someone do that, he thought? I’m done. I’ll just shove this right here.
He was so tired of it.
He moved ahead, picking up whatever trash he found and putting it in his bag. When he passed the occasional hiker going in the opposite direction, he managed a weary smile for them but it seemed that once they took in his ripped clothing, bloody arms and legs, and growing bag of trash, they decided he was a crazy person and picked up their pace.
Which was fine. He wasn’t feeling very talkative anyway.
The sky had grown overcast by the time he made it to the lake. He walked until he reached his special place, a natural clearing with a quartz and sandstone outcropping and a view across the lake to the pine tree-topped cliffs on the other side. As he laid his bag of trash down by his backpack and sat on the rock beside them, it struck him that he was the only one there. He watched a gust of wind trouble the water’s surface and push its way across until he felt it blowing against him, cooling his cuts. He stretched his legs out and leaned back on his hands, opening himself up to it.
This was what he’d been missing all this time.
He closed his eyes and listened to the wind.
When he opened them again, he saw that a baby black duck had paddled into view, working its way toward the shoreline where he was sitting. When it reached the shallows, it waddled forward and stopped, turning in profile to his hushed stare.
“Hey, Duck,” he whispered.
The duck stood, blinking.
He noticed that further out in the water, an adult female duck followed by a string of ducklings was swimming toward an unseen part of the shore. The duckling standing in front of him, shivering and running its beak through its wing feathers, looked like it came from that group and had somehow become separated.
He felt his heart surge.
“Hey, Duck,” he said. “Your mom is looking for you.” He lifted his arm and made a vague, flappy gesture toward the duck family swimming away in the background. “You shouldn’t be over here.”
The duck moved further inland, eventually stepping onto the outcropping where he sat.
Of course, he thought. He’s looking for food, conditioned to come here by all the people who sit where I am right now. Who feed these ducks and have their picture taken with them and post it on Instagram.
“Duck,” he said, “I don’t have anything.”
He looked out and saw that the raft of ducks was no longer in view. Fearing the moment was lost, he stood and made a moving wall of himself with his feet, guiding the baby duck off the rock and back into the water. But it set off swimming away from its family.
“No,” he said. “You’re going the wrong way.” When he realized that the duck was not going to listen to him, he sat back down and watched him disappear.
He’ll be fine, he told himself. He’ll do better out here on his own than I ever could.
A few minutes later as Clayton stared out across the water worrying about the baby duck, he noticed a shape in the sky coming toward him.
It was the mother duck.
She reared back, throwing her wings out and her feet down and landed in the water a few yards out. She looked in his direction for a moment, then set off spinning and paddling, obviously searching the shoreline for her baby.
He made the flapping gesture again.
“He’s down there,” he told her. “Hurry up.”
The mother paddled off in the opposite direction.
He clambered to his feet. “No, no, it’s this way.” He began walking along the shoreline, hoping it would suggest to the mother that she should follow.
The mother continued paddling in the wrong direction.
He walked toward a reedy patch, waving his arm forward. “Come on, you fucking idiot. He’s this way.” Panic was flooding him. He knew he could help if he could find some way to communicate. He balled up his right hand, raised his curled index finger to his mouth and blew a dry duck call into his fist.
The mother duck paddled out of sight.
He blew harder. And harder. And harder. And that was when the vision of himself, standing alone and making noises in the hope of interceding in the lives of a couple of ducks, hit him like a sucker punch.
Hey kids, the planet is dying and it’s our fault. Pffrrrt.
Hey Ellen, I still love you, for whatever that’s worth, which apparently is nothing. Pffrrt pffrrrt pfrrt.
Hey everybody. I killed someone and it doesn’t seem to really matter. Pfrrt.
He let his fist fall.
“What are you doing?”
Clayton spun around at the sound of the voice.
A little boy wearing elastic-top jeans with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt tucked into them stood a few yards away up an incline. Like him, he had his fist up to his mouth, suggesting that he’d seen everything.
“Oh, I was, there was a mother duck who came here looking for her baby. Well, the baby duck was here first but it swam over there somewhere. And the mother went that way.” He pointed at the reeds.
“Can I see?” The boy ran down and stood next to Clayton at the edge of the reeds, leaning against his thigh and peering out, with the toes of his sneakers at the water’s edge. “Where is he?”
He reached down and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Hey, watch out there. You don’t want to get your sneakers all wet.”
“HENRY,” a voice boomed. “Get over here.”
Clayton turned to see a man in khaki hiking shorts and a look of tight-lipped rage pounding down the incline. Henry turned and ran to his father, who crouched down and pulled him in.
“Did he touch you?”
Henry was terrified and said nothing.
“I didn’t touch your son,” Clayton said.
Without looking up, the father said, “I didn’t ask you. Henry – I asked you if that man touched you.”
“You’re scaring the life out of him,” Clayton said. “I swear to you, nothing happened. I was trying to show him a duck.” And as he said those words, he realized how wrong they sounded.
In a click, the father was in his face, seething at him through a whisper. “Show him a duck, huh? Look, you homeless piece of shit. I saw your hand on him so don’t tell me nothing happened. If I find out that you did anything to him, anything at all, I will track you and I will gut you. You got that?”
He turned and started back to Henry.
“Go fuck yourself,” Clayton said.
“Big man,” the father said, continuing to move away. “You’re a big man.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Clayton said. “What are you gonna do – gut me? Was that what you said? Might as well try it right now, you’re so excited about it.”
The father turned and stared.
“Daddy, you’re hurting my hand,” Henry whined.
“You gonna kill me?” Clayton asked, moving forward. “Go ahead. Guess what? I killed someone. I did. Me. And you know what? It was easy. So let’s see if you can do it, Big Man.” He could feel himself about to cry and stopped.
The man looked at Clayton with contempt but kept his distance. “Let’s go, Henry,” he said.
Clayton watched them leave. And when they disappeared, he collapsed.
It was dark by the time he made it back to the parking lot. He had never been comfortable driving at night, but what choice did he have? He got in his car, threw his pack and the bag of trash in the back, and started the engine. He put the headlights on and looked out at the illuminated woods. The glare made a scrim of the brush and trees, a depthless, impenetrable wall.
He drove in a broad circle and pulled up to the exit. He clicked the directional on. Then he clicked it off and sat, the engine idling, the occasional car racing past him on the dark road ahead.
Sensing someone in the passenger seat, he turned to find Mrs. Powers looking at him. She was smiling as much as she could through her blasted mouth, smiling as if to say, it’s okay, it’s not your fault.
He smiled back.
