Empty Mile

CHAPTER 3

Gareth was a tall, slim guy with red-blond hair and pale skin that looked as though it had a layer of rust underneath trying to get to the surface. He had a habit of putting his hands on his hips and when he walked he strutted like a peacock.

We met in a bar when I was eighteen and he was a year older. He’d recently moved to Oakridge from Sacramento, the last in a string of relocations that had started when he was twelve and his mother ran off with another man. Gareth’s father was a car mechanic and had bought a small garage in town that the two of them ran by themselves.

At first it was fun hanging out with him-we were into cars, we liked the same music, we got drunk on beer. As I got to know him better, though, I found that there were other aspects of his personality which were not quite so carefree.

His mother’s abandonment and his father’s failing lifelong struggle for financial security had left Gareth with a lasting sense of insignificance. It wasn’t that he thought he was inferior to other people, because he certainly did not. He had simply come to believe that the universe had no interest in his existence. Because of this, he tended to treat people as mirrors in which to reassure himself of his own identity-a view of others which made friendship with him repetitive and draining. It also, on one occasion at least, translated into some pretty spectacular violence.

There was a small bar in Back Town where we used to play pool. I’d been in there one night, shooting pockets by myself, waiting for Gareth to turn up so we could head over to Burton and see a band. Two guys on vacation from somewhere on the coast thought it bad form that I was using a table to practice on when they wanted a real game. Things got heated and eventually I figured it was safer to surrender the table and catch up with Gareth at his place instead. But that wasn’t good enough for them and when I left the bar they followed.

My car was parked a few hundred yards along the street in a kind of no-man’s-land between Back Town and the Oakridge commercial precinct. It was darker here and the road was lined with scrub-filled lots that had been pegged out to service Back Town’s creeping expansion. The two guys figured it was a perfect place to hammer an uppity local.

They were big men and they were liquored up and after they’d knocked me down a few times the action and the booze combined to kick their poolroom anger into overdrive. One of them held me and the other took out a clasp knife and was preparing to cut his initials into my chest when a major disadvantage of that location, for them at least, made its presence known. The street was one of the ways you could get to the bar from Gareth’s place.

They didn’t realize he was there at first because he didn’t yell out or tell them to stop. He just walked up with a wrench and hit the guy with the knife hard enough across the side of the head to knock him out. The guy who was holding me threw me to one side and stepped forward. He was about the same height as Gareth but fifty pounds heavier. The extra muscle, though, didn’t make any difference. Gareth smashed the side of his face in with the wrench then kicked him in the ribs until something in the guy’s chest snapped.

That was the night I learned my friend had the potential to be a very dangerous man, and even though he’d saved my life I never felt entirely comfortable with him again-something, I guess, which spared me a little angst a couple of years later.

Gareth first saw Marla when she took her car into his father’s auto shop. She was an orphan who’d wound up in Oakridge at seventeen when her third set of foster parents took a job as caretakers in one of the camp grounds. After a childhood and adolescence spent in the harsh concrete of L.A., largely unloved and unhappy, Oakridge for Marla was a cool green refuge of the spirit, a haven from her past that she had no intention of ever leaving. So when her foster parents decided two years later to return to the city she stayed on alone, working as a waitress in a series of Oakridge’s cafés and restaurants. She’d been supporting herself like this for three years when she and Gareth began their relationship.

For Marla, he was a sanctuary from the emotional root-lessness of her earlier life. For Gareth, any attractive woman who agreed to live with him would have been useful, would have satisfied his need to believe that he meant something to the world. But he found more in Marla than that. Bizarrely, for someone so obsessed with himself, he found a woman to fall in love with.

They lived together in a small apartment over his father’s garage. When he and I were alone together he spoke about her constantly. It was a pairing which might have led to marriage, growing old together, children… except that I was in love with Marla too. And eventually she fell in love with me.

When it happened, when I took her away from him, it killed our friendship. He broke all contact with me, refused even to look in my direction when we passed one another on the street. This anger, this heartbroken enmity, had not lessened one degree by the time I left Oakridge a year later, so to find him now, waiting for me in the parking lot of the garden center, made me immediately wary.

He pushed himself off the Jeep and stuck his hand out.

“Johnboy. Been a long time, dude.”

“Gareth.”

We shook hands and pretended to be old friends glad to see each other again. Gareth must have sensed my uncertainty, though, because when the reunion was done he cleared his throat and stuck his hands in his pockets.

“This is an amazing coincidence, Johnny. When I heard you were coming back to town I hoped like hell we’d meet up, and now we have. I’ve been waiting for this a long time, man.”

“Really?”

“What happened was fucked up. Losing Marla was a blow, I can’t say it wasn’t, but after you left and she and I didn’t get magically back together I realized it was just one of those things. I felt like such a prick, you know? We were buddies. What happened with her shouldn’t have changed that.”

“Well, it was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, but I promised myself if I ever got the chance I was going to make it right.”

Gareth took his hands out of his pockets and raised his shoulders.

“I’d sure like to be friends again.”

I had enough to deal with in Oakridge without subjecting myself to Gareth’s particular brand of friendship, but with him there in front of me, holding out an olive branch, I didn’t feel I had much of an option. And, of course, there was the fact that he’d saved my life hovering in the background.

“Okay.”

“Awesome, man. Awesome! This is like such a huge fucking weight off my mind.”

We made nice for a bit longer, then I got my keys out and turned toward my pickup. Gareth was suddenly aghast.

“Dude, what are you doing?”

“Going home.”

“I thought… Look, you don’t know anything about my life now. Why don’t you come out to my place? We don’t have the garage anymore. You’ll get a kick out of it, I promise.”

“I don’t know…”

“Johnboy, come on! Follow me in your truck. An hour out of your day. Jesus, man, this is an event!”

We left the garden center and turned right on the Loop, following the wide curve of the Oakridge basin northeast. The country along our route was mostly light forest, but occasionally there were driveways leading into the gardens of large homestead-style houses. I had the windows down and warm air that smelled of pine needles and hot tarmac blew across me. For a little way we ran parallel to a stretch of the Swallow River and the trees that lined the road broke its metal glint into a pattern of backlit leaves and smashed silver water.

It was only when the scattered houses disappeared and the forest became denser that I began to suspect where we were going. I could have turned back, of course, I could have U-turned and raced for the safety of town. But I knew that sooner or later my time in Oakridge had to involve a return to this place, that it would be impossible for me to reconcile my past without doing so.

And so I followed Gareth when he turned into an unpaved, deeply rutted series of cutbacks that had originally been gouged into the hillside by Conservation Corps workers back in the Depression. It took us five minutes of scrabbling up the steep grade before the track leveled out and gave on to a place every Oakridge local knew well enough, but which for me was burned like a brand across the soft tissue of memory. A place I had not been since I was eighteen.

Tunney Lake was oval in shape, about four hundred yards by a hundred and fifty. It was fronted on its long side by a beach of coarse sand that was bordered to the right of where the trail came out by solid forest, and on the left by cleared land. There was no shoreline on the far side of the lake. Instead, a cliff of pockmarked rock rose fifty feet, straight from the water. Above this the trees continued, giving the lake the appearance of a giant soap dish chiseled into the side of the hill.

On the beach a scatter of people sunbathed on towels or played in the dark water. For the most part, though, the place was deserted. Late morning on a weekday the locals were at work and the tourists, not having the incentive of knowing how beautiful the place was, were almost always turned back by the difficulty of the road.

The track we were on ran almost the whole length of the beach and ended in a dirt parking lot which had a small set of public toilets in one corner. Beyond this there was a bungalow with a barn out back, and a collection of rundown weatherboard huts in a row along the last of the land by the beach. A wooden jetty cut into the water here. At the end of it a small rowboat lay upturned, the white paint of its hull flaking in the sun.

Gareth and I parked in the lot and got out of our cars. He walked a few yards toward the bungalow then turned back to me with his arms spread.

“Here it is, Johnny, the brave new venture.”

Like the trail, the bungalow and its row of huts had been built by the Conservation Corps in the 1930s. They’d used them as their barracks while they cut hiking trails through much of the hill country around the Oakridge basin. When they were banged together their projected lifespan had probably been two or three years, but their frames and foundations had been well made and they’d ended up standing for more than seventy. Much of their cladding, though, was now not original and the roofs were patchworks of replaced tin.

As long as I could remember the place had been run as a low-rent motel serving the few tourists who hung tough on the road or the occasional party of locals who got too drunk at their barbecues to make it back down the hill. It had had a string of different owners, but when I was last at the lake it had been one of Bill Prentice’s satellite concerns, a poor relation to his successful garden center.

The front of the bungalow had a red and white neon Reception sign in the window and had been made over into an office that faced the lake. I couldn’t see clearly through the grimy net curtains but it didn’t look like anyone was in there waiting for business to show up.

Gareth led me through the front door. In the office there was an unmanned white Formica desk littered with scraps of paper and empty coffee cups. Behind the desk a doorway gave access to the rest of the house. We went through it and along a corridor. The rooms we passed were shadowed and dim and there was a smell of old cooked grease and stale urine in the air.

The hallway ended in a large combination kitchen/living room. Set into the rear wall of this was a wide door and a window which showed a short view of the barn and the forest beyond it. In the living area of the room the floor was covered with dusty, worn-through carpet on which a ragged lounge set had been untidily arranged. There was a brick fireplace that had old ashes in the grate and, beside it, a scarred card table with bits of some mechanism strewn across it.

“As you can see, we’ve moved up in the world.”

“You run the cabins?”

As we were speaking a man in a wheelchair pushed open the back door and rolled into the room. He caught what we were saying and grunted, “When anyone can get up that fucking road.”

I knew who he was but he was very much changed from the last time I’d seen him. Then, David, Gareth’s father, had been a physically tough man of medium height who, if you asked him, would tell you he worked damn hard three hundred and sixty days of the year. Now his legs were withered, his face was dried out and leathery, and he had some kind of scar running around the front of his neck. And he was in a wheelchair.

He rolled over to me and looked hard into my face.

“Which is hardly fucking ever. I remember you.” He stuck his hand out and we shook, then he rolled away, over to the card table, and called over his shoulder. “You know what this is? It’s supposed to be a fucking toaster. Only, the fucking Japs make ’em with parts that are so fucking weak, twelve months after you buy it it stops being a toaster and turns into a nice compact piece of scrap metal instead.”

Gareth looked sadly across at him. “You need anything, Dad?”

“Pair of legs and a lucky streak.”

Gareth tried to smile but it didn’t work. He moved to the kitchen, took two beers out of the fridge and motioned me through the back door to a patch of grass behind the house. We sat in the sun on plastic garden chairs.

“What happened to your father?”

“This place. Five years ago he sold the garage and bought it figuring he’d finally found something that was going to bring in the bucks.”

“Really?”

“It sounds stupid now, but it wasn’t then. The only thing that stops this place being a goldmine is the road-too difficult for the tourists. But the way the deal was put to the old man, it sounded like the road was going to get fixed. Know who he bought it from?”

“It belonged to Bill Prentice when I was here.”

“Right. About a year before Dad got involved Prentice was made Resource and Development Manager for the council-gets to say what bridges need to be built, do we need another set of traffic lights, etcetera. And, of course, what roads need to be built. The council has to vote on it but he pulls a lot of weight, so if he’s behind something it’s got a good chance of going through. Anyhow, time passes and old Bill strikes a cash flow problem, decides to sell the cabins. His wife’s worth ten times what he is and could easily have fixed him up, but apparently she keeps her money very separate from his little enterprises. So Bill needs a buyer, but the place is a fucking dump and no one bites. Until Dad. And what made him stupider than everyone else? Bill let slip accidentally on purpose that the council was planning to build a proper road up here. Bingo. Tons of tourists, tons of money. Dad was hooked.”

“If it was that certain, why didn’t Prentice hang on to it himself?”

“Oh, he had an answer for that. Know what it was? The council couldn’t build the road while one of their councilors stood to benefit from it. Not bad, huh?”

“But the road never happened.”

“The council changed their minds, decided it wasn’t the right time for that kind of expenditure or some other bullshit. Bill swore blind he thought the road was a done deal. Said he was really sorry. But of course he didn’t want to buy the place back and we were stuck with a property that couldn’t pay for itself.”

“And the wheelchair?”

“After a couple of years trying to keep it going Dad started to suffer from depression. They put him on some pills but they didn’t do any good. What he needed was a shitload of cash. Anyhow, along with the depression he couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know it at the time, but in some people who have bad depression taking sleeping pills can lead to a preoccupation with suicide. So the doctors wouldn’t give him anything. What he does, then, is call up some biker whose Harley he used to work on when he had the shop. Next thing you know he’s got a pile of benzos. Sure enough, a month or so later he jumped off the barn with a rope around his neck. He would have died for sure except the strut he tied it to was rotten and snapped when the rope maxed out. Dad hit the ground feet first and broke his back.”

“Hence Bill Prentice’s tire today?”

“Petty, I know, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.”

The cabins were set a little further back from the lake than the bungalow and from where we sat we could see along the front of the row. They looked largely unoccupied, but as Gareth finished speaking two girls in their early twenties, wearing tight swimsuits and oversized sunglasses, walked down the path from the parking lot, unlocked the end cabin, and went inside. I raised my eyebrows at Gareth.

“You do get some customers, then?”

“They’re what you’d call an external source of income.”

“Huh?”

“They’re hookers, Johnboy. We have a mutually beneficial relationship. I set up their tricks and give them a place to stay, they give me thirty percent.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Oakridge has changed while you’ve been gone. All those rich people up on the Slopes? They’re used to being able to buy whatever they want, and what some of them want to buy is sex. So far it’s meant the difference between this place going under and just scraping by.”

“They come all the way up here?”

“No way. House calls only. A guy who can shell out three hundred for a girl isn’t going to risk the Porsche on Lake Trail. It’s a niche market but there’s plenty of business, believe me.”

Gareth was quiet then for a moment and there was a calculating glitter to his eyes. When he spoke, though, he sounded genuine enough.

“Maybe you can help me out. You’re not working, right?”

“No.”

“I need a delivery man sometimes, someone to take the girls to their gigs and bring them home again when they’re done.”

“Like a pimp?”

“Like a driver. I’m the pimp.”

“I don’t think that’s something I want to get involved in.”

Gareth looked at me like he was trying to figure out if I was retarded. Then his face brightened.

“Marla.”

“What?”

“Marla. You think hanging out with hookers might not be the smart thing to do if you want to get back together with her.”

“Who says I’m going to do that?”

“But you are, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Dude, no skin off my ass. Get back with her, don’t get back with her. Way too late to make any difference to me. But think about the driving thing, okay? I don’t like leaving Dad here by himself at night. It’d really help me out and it’d be easy money for you.”

While we were talking David rolled out of the house and into the barn and began working on something with a lathe. The screech of metal on metal killed the rest of whatever conversation Gareth and I might have had. Gareth stood and beckoned me into the barn. He said close to my ear, “Pretend you’re interested.”

All the benches and the various pieces of power machinery in the barn had been set at a level low enough for David to reach from his wheelchair. When he realized we were watching him he stopped the lathe and held up a cylindrical piece of metal.

“Lamp base. Got an order for two hundred. Take a look. Now that’s quality work.”

He spent a minute or two pointing out its merits and Gareth explained that his father did custom piecework for a company of architects in San Francisco. The fittings he made were top-end limited runs and couldn’t be bought in stores. I made some appropriately impressed noises but I’d had enough of Gareth by then and I leveraged this interruption into an opportunity to leave, saying I had to pick Stan up.

Gareth walked me back through the bungalow and at the front door made me give him my cell phone number.

“We gotta stay in touch now, Johnny. Hey, take a photo of me. Today is a special day. We need a record.”

I had no interest in recording anything to do with him, but I snapped a picture with my phone because it was quicker than arguing about it.

After he’d gone back into the house I walked through the parking lot, past my pickup, and over the grass bank that separated the road from the beach. I took my shoes off and walked along the edge of the lake.

Marla and Gareth had been together almost a year when she and I knew that we would end up with each other. I was often at their apartment and I’d seen the meals she made, the cleaning and washing she took care of, the standard endearments she sprinkled over him. But I’d seen too, as time passed, that she was not in love with him. So I started going to the coffee shop where she worked and in her breaks we’d sit and talk. She was his partner, I was his friend. Both of us knew what was happening but neither of us could stop it.

And of course the time came when we were given our chance to do more than talk. A tailor-made day: unusually warm, Marla rostered off work, and Gareth away with his father in Sacramento buying car parts. Stan was eleven years old and on summer break and he wanted to go swimming. How natural then, how innocuous, that on such a hot day Marla should come with us to the lake. What else could you do in heat like that but swim?

If we had been somewhere else, somewhere with good roads and plenty of ice cream, the lake’s beach would have been packed. As it was, by Oakridge standards it was still pretty busy. We found a spot at the southern end of the lake, twenty yards or so short of where the beach ended in a sprawl of rocks that merged, further on, with solid forest. We spread out our towels and hit the water

I have an image of us that day. Flashes of moments in the water jolting before me like sun through the windows of a moving train. And sun there is. It is bright around everything. It catches the spray we send into the air, it coats the surface of the lake in long scallops and bows, it makes the wet skin of our bodies tight and alive and beautiful. I see the sheen of it on Stan’s dark wet hair, how it picks out the white of his teeth and makes diamonds in the drops of water on his lashes as he leaps up and down, waist deep, throwing scoops of water into the air, watching the liquid break apart into a fall of heavy drops that hold all the colors of the world as he laughs and shouts, “Hey, Johnny! Hey, Johnny! Look at me!”

Of these remembered images I wish that that was all there was. I wish some part of me had been good enough to hold on to just these. But there is another image which overlays itself on this glittering cavalcade, which my gaze was drawn to over and over during that last careless playtime we had together-that of Marla’s back. Flat and smooth, pliant as it twists about the axis of her spine, the clasp of her bra, the elastic of her briefs squeezing a gentle line about her hips as she jumps from the water, splashing Stan. And me, watching behind her, thrilling with the knowledge which has just that instant become a certainty-that my hands will press against her body, that I will undo that clasp, that my thumbs will hook the elastic of her briefs away from her waist, dragging down over hips and thighs…

The question the two of us pose closes at that instant and there is really nothing more to do but wait.

Ah, that image… that knowing. It should have been a sun-spangled confection of memory, an Olympic torch of the heart burning down the long tunnel of the past. But to me now and for all the years after that day, the image of Marla from behind has become less a capturing of her beauty and my desire for it than a portrait of my own horrific selfishness.

Afterwards we lay in the sun, stretched straight in a row, soaking up heat like cells in some giant organic battery. The outside of my thigh rested against Marla’s and our blood pressed at the barrier of our skins until we could no longer ignore what we had gone there to do.

I told Stan that Marla and I were going for a walk in the forest. He wanted to come, of course, and when I said he had to stay and guard our things he gave a resigned snort. But he seemed happy enough and rolled onto his stomach and pulled a book out of his bag. Before I left I looked down at his skinny back. Stan was a smart kid, smart enough to be a grade ahead of his age at school, and his superior IQ allowed him to excel at most things his world presented, but he was a poor swimmer and though he loved the water he could do no more than an uncertain dog paddle.

“You need some sunscreen.”

“Okay, in a minute.”

“And remember, don’t go in the water, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah, Johnny, I got it. Don’t go in the water.”

Marla and I walked casually across the sand, but as soon as the forest closed behind us she put her hand in mine and we started to run. We didn’t have any idea where we were going but we knew what we needed. Between the trees the ground was soft with long grass and there were patches of light where the sun fell through holes in the canopy of leaves; outside these glowing islands the forest was cool and shadowed and the grass was cold against our legs.

A couple of hundred yards back from the lake we found a swale of grass in a cone of sunlight. We stopped at its center and the noise of our dash died suddenly around us. We stood panting, face to face, smiling. Light and dark. A heartbeat of stillness. Out there, out in the splashing, picnicking world, there were reasons to hesitate, to question what we were doing, but in this wooded sanctuary there was only us and what we wanted from each other. I felt the sun sizzling in my cells and my eyes, even in the strands of my hair.

The grass we lay on slid against our bodies as though it had been polished. It bruised and tore beneath us as we moved, leaving a pale wash of green on knees and elbows and shoulders. The moment was not lingered over, it was stolen time and could not be wasted on the languors that arpeggiate love. It was everything at once, as much as we could cram into a handful of minutes. Afterwards, as we lay beside each other, the scent of the grass we had broken rose about us.

Who knows what plans we might have made then? What resolutions to join our lives, what fretting there might have been about the hurt we would inflict on Gareth? But these turmoils were not to be, not that day. Sounds from the lake carried to where we were. They were baffled by the trees but if you listened you could guess at their meaning-the willowy scale of laughter, the short barking of a complaining child, the calling of a mother, two or three notes, over and over, like an instrument being tuned…

We had not heard these sounds, of course, as we strained at each other. But now, as our bodies quieted, they began to fall upon us. And as they fell they changed, from a collection of commonplaces to a harsh blatting that lanced the warm cocoon Marla and I had drawn about ourselves. For a moment I lay listening, trying to decode their meaning. And then I was pulling on my shorts and running, running, running…

Because the sounds I could hear were panic and danger and alarm. And I knew what was causing them.

Out of the forest. Into the sun. Our towels and bags were still at the edge of the lake. Stan’s book too. But as much as I willed the image, as much as I screamed for it to be so, he was not there reading it. A few yards further on a group of people were crowding over something.

I ran through them, shouldering bodies out of the way, and stopped abruptly. A man was kneeling, driving his locked arms rapidly up and down. The jeans and shirt he wore were soaking wet and beneath his pumping hands the body of my brother was dreadfully pale and dreadfully still. His chest flexed and one of his feet rocked back and forth through a short arc but it was plain to me that he was not alive. I dropped to my knees opposite the man. I felt a sudden desperate need to explain that I was the one here to whom this terrible event was most terrible, to confess to the ring of faces peering down at me my part in this tragedy.

“He’s my brother,” was the only thing I could force past my lips.

The man grabbed my hands, putting them where his had been, locking my elbows, showing me how to do it.

“When I stop blowing, pump.”

For several seconds the back of his head hid Stan’s face. I felt the narrow chest rise and fall but there was no elasticity to it, no willful drawing in or pushing out of air. His flesh, too, was dense beneath my palms, as though muscle and tissue had become somehow compacted.

I was moaning. I could hear the sound, but I couldn’t stop it.

“Pump! Pump!”

I hammered down on Stan’s chest.

People in the crowd started to bead together what they had seen into small strings of explanation.

“He was out by himself. I saw him go in-he looked okay.”

“We thought he was playing. We couldn’t tell he was in trouble.”

“Jared saw him go under.”

“Yeah, he was way out, but I knew something was wrong.”

The man kneeling opposite me touched my shoulder and I stopped pumping while he blew another series of breaths into Stan. When I started again he spoke in rapid sentences around his own gasps for air.

“He was under a long time. My kids saw it happen, but I couldn’t find him.”

I knew all of this without being told, of course. Without the blinding caul of my lust, that this would happen was just so fucking obvious. Don’t leave a child alone by water-a primal understanding. I should have been looking after him. I should have been with him. But being with Marla had been more important.

As I massaged Stan’s heart the utter clarity of my guilt, the knowledge that I alone was responsible for the stillness of his body, took from me part of myself, stole away that quality most humans assume to be the bedrock of who they are-the quality of believing oneself to be a good person.

After that day I would never think that about myself again.

When Stan choked and spluttered back to life, when his eyelids fluttered open and he gazed past me into the blue sky, I thought I would faint with relief. As he sucked in great sobbing lungfuls of air I held him close, shouting to the crowd, “He’s alive! He’s alive!” And as they clapped and cheered I promised myself that I had learned my lesson, that I would never again be careless with another human being. I had no idea, in those moments of jubilation, that my lessons were only just starting.

The paramedics arrived while I still had Stan in my arms. They had lumbered their vehicle up Lake Trail in response to a cell phone call from one of the crowd. There were two of them and they pried Stan away from me, strapped him to a backboard, and carried him across the sand to their truck. I trotted beside them, repeating to Stan that he was going to be all right. He’d been looking around him as though enraptured by what he saw. When his eyes came to rest on me, though, he stared blankly for a moment and I felt the tendrils of a new fear tighten around me.

“It’s Johnny. Are you okay, Stan? It’s Johnny.”

He smiled and closed his eyes. “Johnny…”

Then his head lolled sideways and we were climbing into the ambulance.

Before they closed the doors I saw Marla. She must have been following us but I had not noticed her, had not even thought of her. She was standing still, watching me, and as our eyes met we both knew that what we had started in the forest that day was going to stay buried there for a long, long time.

The paramedics took Stan fifty miles to the hospital in Burton on radioed instructions from Oakridge’s own emergency clinic. I remember the time as a strip-lit nightmare of recriminations from my father and my own worry for Stan. My father tried, I think, to keep his anger in check, but there were times when it was just too much for him.

Through the battering storm of doctors and tests and waiting rooms and not knowing, a word began to surface, a wicked piece of flotsam that weighted our lives forever after and tore from me any hope that Stan’s near-drowning might ever become forgivable.

Hypoxia. A brain starved of oxygen longer than three minutes begins to die. Like never leave a child alone near water, it is something we all know. But which parts will die, what trajectory of sacrifice the brain will plot and its effect on the individual, are never known until after the fact. Likewise the extent of recovery varies unpredictably.

A doctor, trying to give us something to hope for, said, “There is no certainty of interpretation in brain trauma. In the way the brain interprets it, I mean.”

He only wanted to help, but it was wasted on us. We could see for ourselves that Stan’s brain had interpreted its trauma pretty fucking severely.

There was a transition phase in the weeks and months that followed. There was rehab and therapy, rapid improvement in motor skills-a sloping graph against the axes of time and damage. After three months Stan had pretty much gotten as good as he was going to get.

The doctors said it could have been much worse. They neglected to mention that it could just as easily have been much better.

Stan was more than functional. He did not come out of it a slavering vegetable, he was not paralyzed down one side or deprived of the use of language. He suffered neither ataxia nor aphasia. But he was changed, there was no doubt about that. Gone was the diamond-bright focus he had directed at the world, gone was the goal-oriented overachiever, gone was the IQ that set him apart. He was Stan number two and he was never going to revert to what he’d been before, never going to heal beyond this particular threshold of resurrection.

And it was all my fault.

Now, twelve years later, standing on that beach again, I felt my guilt no less keenly. I’d left a kid who couldn’t swim alone near water and all the time that had passed since then, all my years of isolation in London, all my blind-eye-turning, had not made the slightest difference to what I thought of myself.

I walked across the sand to the parking lot and got into my pickup. It was not until I had begun the treacherous descent down Lake Trail that I realized Gareth must have known what my reaction to being at the lake again would be.