After the car accident our lives went on, altered momentarily but at first not appreciably changed. For a time Mark and I held each other in forgotten ways. We did not see those parents again, though I looked through the papers for a memorial service, thinking to send flowers, a card. I could not even say where they lived, though I studied each house — looking for what exactly I didn’t know — when I had occasion to drive past. In my mind I singled out one house and marked it as theirs — a weathered farmhouse, devoid of charm, from whose roof protruded the metal pipe of a wood-burning stove; it pumped gray smoke continually all that winter.
For days we smelled oil. When they finally towed the car late that night the odor grew stronger — all of it had spilled out by then and made a thin, slick trail along the street, away from the tulip tree, toward the nearest town. The largest pool spread in the street in front of our house and the smell seeped into the air and became for us synonymous with the event — the imagined taste of it, its dark, syrupy smell. I thought I’d never get it from my nostrils; I imagined I smelled it in the folds of my sweaters and on the fingertips of my gloves.
In the days following the accident a small makeshift memorial grew up around the tulip tree — a wooden cross, nailed of spare wood by some stranger’s hands, cheap bouquets of flowers wrapped in plastic, notes thumb-tacked to the tree bark, a gaudy religious figurine. I left it for almost a week. At the time, it was Leann I believed I was thinking of. I wanted to erase this for her; to have the memory scabbed over by others — by a flurry of ice-skating and movies, special treats and excursions. I wanted none of us reminded of it — daily, hourly, every time a car slowed at the opening of our driveway. I went out one night when she was sleeping, without telling Mark, taking with me a large cardboard box and a hammer. I pried the notes from the tree, gathered up the flowers, the cross, the garish Virgin, and packed them all away.
Mark looked up when I came in with the box. He didn’t say a word but took it away and disappeared out the back door, toward the garage. When something else appeared at the base of the tree, I went further. I penned a note: This tree is private property. Please do not deface it. On the following day I discovered our housekeeper, Daniela’s mother, bringing another religious statue and carrying it out to the road. I fired her on the spot. The note I pinned to the tree remained there through several seasons, growing stiff and battered, the ink blurred and running.
At night, sitting at the edge of Leann’s high bed, my feet on the stepstool she used to climb into it, I told us both outrageous lies. That the boy had recovered, that she was mistaken in what she thought she’d seen; that she, Leann, would never die. Her face — even then it could be stern and remonstrative — surrounded by pillows with blue sprays of wildflowers, was mostly expressionless. She said little. Occasionally her forehead would crease, her eyes skeptical — that scar between her eyes the only real betrayal of her thoughts. Mark accused me of trying to alter what could not be changed, of whitewashing, compensating. Our fights grew acrimonious, the tension in our home thickened.
We separated briefly, although the accident was no longer the primary cause — it was as if we had opened a cellar door and found that what was inside was rank, moldy and spoiled. I was distant, I learned, and moody as a cat, selfish and sexually aloof. I told Mark he was childish, that his sulking left me cold, the touch of his fingers on my skin — cool, thick as sausages — made it crawl.
Mark stayed, for a time, above the office he had been renting in town. For Leann, we resorted comfortably to lies, telling her that he was on an extended business trip, or working so hard at his new business that it was easier to sleep at the office. In my memories of this time, there is no indication of whether she believed us or not. I had the dogs, with whom I walked to exhaustion, and I often did Leann’s homework for her in the evenings, my patience was so thin, my need for distraction so great. The smell of oil dissipated, lingering only in my memory, becoming something my nose twitched and tested for, finding only the cleanness of new snow, the smell of fir trees. But the ice remained on the lakes, the running water still halted in its rippling tracks, often my prints — the waffled marks of my hiking boots — and the pawprints of the Labradors were the only marks not made by deer or coyotes, squirrels, the forest’s other unseen inhabitants.
I began walking on the ice while Leann was in school. I had seen the steps of deer crossing the expanse of lake, once even the thin blade marks of some skater, so I knew it must be solid, many inches thick. Near the water’s edge my boots sank in slush, alarming me, but then I stepped onto a soft snow cover that made the water feel safe as a field, solid as my own alabaster lawn. From the middle of the lake, the view was new, foreign, though I knew the place as well as my own house. The dogs tucked their tails and whined, following me reluctantly, their wiser instincts telling them that water was water, and not to be fully trusted, whatever its appearance. But in the center of the frozen lake we were ringed by trees — by land that circled and seemed to hold us in a great white palm.
I walked on the lake until even the dogs would not follow anymore but stayed on shore, pacing and crying. There were fissures by then and the ice shifted under my feet and grew soft. One day, when the sky was a bolt of blue cotton, I began to hear something new. Birds were at work in the trees and above me a small hawk was gliding, his white undersides spread, attuned to the lifts and vagaries of air. What I was hearing was water running and stirring under my feet, just below the ice. I saw a peak just beyond where I stood, a place where the ice was rupturing. A frozen wave, lifted by the movement of the water: the inevitable return to motion, the desertion of that lovely, temporary stasis. I didn’t go out on the ice again and the dogs were grateful; within days the ice split and the lake swelled. We jumped newly made waterfalls and sank to ankles and hocks in the mud that came to characterize that particular spring.
Mark came home when the ice broke, an irony apparent to no one at the time. He came in one night with his briefcase and resumed his nightly routine. He checked Leann’s homework and set the table for dinner. He kissed the side of my nose and nuzzled the dogs, who had missed him terribly. We fell back into our old ways — we were never people for lengthy postmortems of arguments. The rift between us closed like water rising over ice, obscuring the shards of truth we had flung at each other, smoothing our lies and disappointments, returning us to the people we were most comfortable being — calm and unruffled, fluid but contained.
