Reality Check Page 7

  “None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for you.”

  “You’re blaming me?” Cody said.

  “Now, Win,” said Fran, touching his shoulder. At that moment a limo rolled into the driveway. “Come,” Fran said.

  “We’ve got to catch the flight back.”

  93

  Mr. Weston didn’t notice the limo, seemed to be aware of nothing but Cody. He shook off Fran’s hand. “Yes, you sneaky bastard,” he said, his voice rising and rising. “I do blame you. If you hadn’t come barging into her life, derailing everything I’ve worked so—” All at once, although Mr. Weston’s mouth was still moving, no sounds were coming out, no sounds except for little gasps. Mr. Weston’s hand went to his throat—the letter floating from his grasp—and he started pushing at his windpipe as though something had slipped out of alignment.

  “Win?”

  And then Mr. Weston spun around in a kind of limp sinking pirouette and fell on the marble floor of Cottonwood’s entrance hall.

  The limo driver knew CPR. Maybe because of him, Mr. Weston was still breathing and his heart was still beating when the ambulance came a few minutes later. A few minutes after that, Cody was standing all by himself in front of Cottonwood. He picked up the letter, pulled the door closed, checking carefully to make sure it was locked before he drove away, like that would make all the difference.

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  CHANCES OF SURVIVAL IN THE NIGHT WOODS: Cody couldn’t get that phrase out of his mind. Back at the apartment, he looked without success for news of Clea and then checked the weather in North Dover, Vermont. Rainy and windy, high 45, low 33. Thirty-three was cold, could easily turn that rain to snow. Cody was already pretty sure about his plans, but the weather report moved him closer to certainty. He took out his cell phone and tried her number again.

  “Hi, this is Clea. I’m not here right now, but please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

  That was it, end of story. “Clea,” he said. “I’m on my way.”

  Cody was aware how stupid that might have sounded, say to some all-knowing observer, but he didn’t feel stupid, not the least bit. He went to MapQuest, entered Little Bend in one box and North Dover, Vermont, in the other, and printed the results.

  Cody didn’t have any real luggage, just a big duffel he used for sports equipment. He started packing: jeans, extra sneakers, a few T-shirts, sweats, underwear, socks. What else? He couldn’t think of anything. With what he was already wearing—his other pair of jeans, flannel shirt, fleece—he had all he needed.

  He thought of calling his father but couldn’t imagine a way for the conversation to go right. Instead he wrote a note and stuck it on the fridge.

  Dad,

  I’ll be gone for a few days. Looking into this

  job out of town. I’ll call.

  Cody

  Looking into this job out of town: vague enough to be almost true. Cody had reached the point of knowing that lying was a necessary life skill, and even that some of those who went furthest in life lied the best, but he hadn’t reached the point of getting comfortable with it.

  Duffel in one hand, car keys in the other, he glanced around 96

  the apartment, suddenly saw it for the first time not as just simply home, but as the dingy dump it was. A scary idea hit him: He wouldn’t be back. But that was crazy. He started for the door, realized he’d forgotten his toilet kit—toothbrush, razor, all that. And what about taking along a sandwich or two, and water?

  Five minutes later, and now fully packed, he left the apartment and went down the stairs. At the bottom he realized he hadn’t thought of his bad leg, hadn’t favored it at all, not the whole way down; meaning the knee wasn’t so bad anymore and he was getting better. His heart lifted inside his chest; relief turned out to be a real physical feeling. He popped the trunk of his car, threw in the duffel, and thought: Low 33—winter jacket. Cody climbed back up the stairs, found the apartment door locked, reached into his pocket, and: no keys. Locked out. He’d left them inside. Step one on the journey: kind of funny.

  Cody drove out of the alley and turned onto the street, where he paused behind a car letting someone off at the Red Pony. He’d just had time to see that the someone was Mrs. Redding when the driver’s door opened and Tonya came running out. Cody rolled down his window.

  “Hey, Cody.”

  “Hey.”

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  “This is so weird. Clea and everything. Plus have you heard the latest?”

  “About Clea?”

  “Nothing new about her, not that I’ve heard. I’m talking about her father. He came back from the search for business or something and now he had a heart attack. They had to do one of those bypasses.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Friend of my mom’s is a nurse at Western Memorial—she thinks he’ll make it.” Tonya glanced into the car. He caught her smell; a very nice one. “Where you headed?” she said.

  “No place special.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Huh?”

  “No place special, Cody. Got room for me?”

  He almost said Huh? again. Instead, for once, he did a little better. “How’s Dickie?”

  “Dickie,” she said, “is a dick.”

  Cody laughed. All his impressions of Dickie—someone he’d been dealing with since the earliest days of Pop Warner—

  came snapping together into an accurate picture.

  “So what’s the answer?” Tonya said. “Got room for me?”

  Their eyes met. Maybe hers weren’t quite symmetrical, maybe her hair, cut in a lopsided way, with purple at the ends, 98

  was a little silly, but there was something about Tonya. “You’re going places, Tonya.” That just popped out; he was blurting all sorts of things in the past little while.

  Tonya’s mouth opened in surprise.

  “Later,” said Cody, and he drove away. He glanced back in the rearview mirror. She was giving him the finger, a smile on her face.

  Cody stopped at an ATM and took four hundred dollars from his account, the most it would give him in one day. Then he got on the interstate and headed east, away from the mountains. He’d been west, into the mountains—and even across and all the way to San Diego once, a long time ago, blue waves just at the edge of memory—but he hadn’t been more than twenty miles the other way, east of Little Bend. He thought of the scene in the Lord of the Rings movie where the hobbits stop at the edge of a cornfield marking the border of the Shire. His own border was an exit in the middle of a flat nowhere: INDIAN

  VALLEY, 6 MILES. Cody hadn’t been planning to do this, hadn’t had the slightest notion, but he took the Indian Valley exit. Cody had been to Indian Valley twice before. The first time, with his mother, to see the farmhouse where she’d grown up, he barely remembered. The second time, to her funeral, he didn’t remember much better, although by then he’d been almost 99

  eleven. He had clear memories from that year—returning the opening kickoff for a touchdown in his very first Pop Warner game—so why was his mother’s funeral reduced to just a few shadows? Cody drove into Indian Valley—a crossroads with endless fields all around, now bare until spring—and parked behind the little church.

  There was no one around. Cody made his way through the cemetery. He couldn’t remember the exact location of his mother’s grave, but the Indian Valley cemetery wasn’t very big, and soon he was standing before it: a small dark stone, rounded at the top and glinting with mica or some other mineral. It had her name, Gina Laredo, and her dates, much too close together for bracketing a human life.

  You were supposed to bring flowers: Cody knew that from the movies. He looked around for something pretty, but nothing qualified. He bent down, swept away a few scraps of paper and some dead leaves. His mom had kept the reality of things hidden from him. All that—what was the word? Trauma. All that trauma: the discovery, very late, of an aggressive form of breast cancer; mastectomy; chemo or radiation or maybe both—C
ody still wasn’t sure. What the hell difference does it make now? his father had said the one time he’d asked. But whatever the treatment, she’d lost her hair, and that couldn’t be hidden, although she’d tried. He’d lain beside her on her 100

  bed—this was before the apartment, in their house, a nice little house with a park across the street—and she’d told him she’d been sick but was all better now, and her hair would soon grow back. And her hair did grow back—but different, with gray in it—and she’d returned to her job in a lawyer’s office. Then one day, carrying groceries up the front steps, she’d tripped and fallen. Cody, beside her, heard a cracking sound, and his mother had cried out in pain. “Mom! Mom! Are you okay?” He’d helped her up and she’d limped into the house, partly supported by Cody’s shoulder. The cracking sound had come from her leg breaking, not one of the two smaller bones below the knee, but the big one from the knee to the hip, which doesn’t break often. His mother’s bones had turned out to be full of cancer. It hadn’t been long after that. That bone crack: Cody remembered it more clearly than her face.

  Light faded. Her name and dates grew invisible. Cody had an idea. He went back to the car, opened the trunk, took out an old practice football he kept in there just in case an opportunity for throwing it around came up. In the glove box he found a Sharpie. He wrote on the ball: RIP MOM. LOVE CODY, 11. Football players always followed their name with their uniform number. He went back to the gravestone and laid the ball in front of it. Cody drove out of Indian Valley, got back on the interstate. The way his father was now: How much came from his mother 101

  dying, both the fact of it and the how of it? Some, for sure, but hadn’t there always been too much drinking? Cody thought so. And what about the meanness? Cody wasn’t so sure about that. Who’d first taught him football, shown him how to throw and catch? His father, of course. He owed him for that. Maybe his father had knocked him around some in those sessions, but hadn’t that been to toughen him up? You had to be tough, and not just in football.

  The stars came out, so many and so beautiful in the black sky, but not much company. Cody tried to find something on the radio. He drove through the night. The road went on and on, lit-up sights flashing by but mostly just the darkness. For the first time in his life he felt American. He’d been American the whole time, of course, just had never translated it into a feeling. Did all Americans share the feeling, have it the same? Cody didn’t know. At some point during the night, he realized he’d forgotten his boots.

  And maybe he was going to need them. Snow was falling the next day when he reached Chicago. He hadn’t slept and his eyes were getting heavy, but Chicago didn’t look like a good place for sleeping. He kept a lookout for Soldier Field but didn’t spot it.

  Halfway across Indiana, or maybe a little more than that, 102

  traffic, so heavy since Chicago, finally thinned out. A sign rising high over the flat land read: MOTEL . Cody took the next exit. He’d stayed at motels before—with his parents on the San Diego trip, and several times on the road for Pop Warner tournaments—but he’d never handled the signing in before. It turned out to be easy, especially when you paid with cash in advance. Ten minutes after getting the key, Cody was fast asleep in room twenty-three of the Hoosier Grand Motel. It was dark when Cody woke up, and for a few moments he didn’t know where he was. He got up, felt his way around the room, parted curtains, looked out at the unfamiliar. On the other side of the wall, a woman was saying, “I’ve had it up to here with the bastard.” Cody thought of turning around, going home, a thought he overcame after a minute or so. He took a shower, changed clothes, went to a diner across the street, where he was the youngest person in the place by far. Cody ate two cheeseburgers with sides of fries and cole slaw, drank a Coke, felt better. He paid the check, calculating the tip by doubling the sales tax, the way experienced restaurant-goers did it, according to Frank Pruitt. Taking his change, Cody realized he was still hungry and bought himself a KitKat, the biggest size they had.

  By dawn—a gray, colorless dawn and the New York State 103

  Thruway cutting endlessly through brown scenery—he was hungry again. Just past Syracuse, he took a pit stop. He gassed up, bought coffee and muffins, found an ATM and withdrew another $400, leaving a balance of $946—not bad. A school bus parked beside his car just as he was getting back in. Some kids who looked about his own age gazed down. A window slid open and a girl called out, “Hey, Colorado!” And behind her another girl said, “Take me with you.” Balancing the tray with coffee and muffins, Cody glanced up at them, couldn’t think of anything to say. “Are they all as cute as you in Colorado?” the first girl said.

  “I’m the cutest,” Cody said. “They threw me out.” Hey, all of a sudden thinking of something to say.

  The girl looked surprised, then started laughing. “What did he say?” said the other girl.

  Cody got in his car, rolled back onto the Thruway. The kids on the bus seemed a lot like the kids at County High. He felt good to be out on his own, crossing all these states. Just another driver on a long, long road: If he didn’t screw up, no one would care about his age or anything else. It was a free country.

  Cody left the Thruway in Albany, continued east on a smaller road that slowly rose into greenish-brown hills. Just as he crossed into Vermont, the sun came out, and the hills 104

  grew prettier, if not quite so nice as the mountains back home. But as he turned north, the hills got taller and nicer, took on all sorts of interesting, rounded shapes; and he realized he’d never seen anything like this; every size was just right, if that made sense. Cody went through a beautiful little town with a village green and a white church, and then a few more, even more beautiful. At 1:07—Cody noted the exact time—he drove into North Dover, the most beautiful of all.

  He went down a road lined with tall old trees and big old houses, came to a main street, parked by a café called the Rev, a cool place, you could just tell. Cody got out of the car, intending to ask directions to Dover Academy. He paused; he’d been out of touch: Was it possible Clea had turned up, that everything was all right? He reached for his cell phone, about to try her number, but as he did, heard a drone from the sky. Cody looked up and there, over high wooded hills to the north, saw a helicopter flying low. That answered both his questions. He got back in the car.

  105

  CODY FOLLOWED THE MAIN STREET—Spring Street, according to the signs—for two blocks, then turned up Mountain Road. The helicopter’s drone grew louder, and once or twice he spotted it, dipping low over the wooded hills to the north. After a few hundred yards, he reached two tall stone gateposts: Dover Academy, 1886. There were no actual gates. Neither was there a wall: The school was separated from the rest of the town not by an obvious barrier but by something invisible, like a force field. Cody could feel it.

  He drove through the gateposts, followed a long drive, began to see grand buildings he recognized from the TV

  report. Kids of about his own age walked across those big grassy quadrangles; the boys all wore khakis, the girls wore khakis or skirts. That was one difference from home, where just about everyone wore jeans. Another difference was that while most of the kids wore fleeces, as at home, these fleeces were better quality; somehow, even at a distance, he could tell. A few of the Dover kids, boys and girls, also wore scarves; you might see a girl or two at County in a scarf, but a boy? No way.

  Cody passed a tall bronze statue of a man in a long coat holding a book and began seeing signs: Admissions; Baxter Hall; Goodrich Field; Griffin Dance and Performance Theater; Carnegie Gymnasium; Kravis Observatory; Mellon Memorial Museum of Art; Dover Equestrian Center. He took that road, a road that curved around a covered hockey rink with walls that seemed to be made mostly of glass, went by a series of tennis courts—an arrow pointed to Golf—and up a tree-lined hill, nice houses spaced far apart on either side. He saw a few little kids out playing. Were these houses for the teachers? Cody thought so, but mainly he was thinking: This is a
high school? A huge red barn—also familiar from the TV report—appeared on his right, at the end of a white-gravel lane. He let out his breath, as though he’d just accomplished something. But—

  apart from the journey, making it all this way to something glimpsed on TV—exactly what? Where was he at? Maybe 107

  square two. Cody turned onto the lane, followed it to a parking lot beside the barn, and found a space between a horse trailer and a North Dover Police cruiser.

  Cody got out of the car, his knee stiff, and felt the wind, a cold wind and rawer than the kind of cold wind he knew, maybe because there was more moisture in the air. He zipped his fleece to the top, shoved his hands into his pockets, and walked toward the barn, limping for a few steps and then not. There was no more time for any of that. In the distance the helicopter hovered over the hilltops.

  A notice tacked on the shingles by the open barn door read: SEARCH HQ . Cody went in. Stalls lined both sides of the barn, horses in most of them; in the broad hallway between the stalls, people stood around a desk. But what Cody noticed first—before the stalls, horses, or people—was the photograph displayed on the desktop: Clea. Cody recognized that photograph, even knew when it had been taken: at the sophomore class picnic up at Custer’s Point; and by whom: a Guardian photographer; the Guardian had included it on the monthly What’s Up at County High page. The picture showed Clea sitting on a park bench, a smile on her face and a soda in her hand. In the original, Cody had been sitting beside her, also with a soda and a smile. In this print, here at the Dover Equestrian Center, Cody had been cropped out.

  108

  Cody approached the desk. A white-haired woman behind it was passing out flyers. People took them, turned, walked past Cody on their way out: a middle-aged couple, a few men a little older than that, and a bunch of Dover Academy kids. They had a look that Cody could spot already. In a few moments Cody and the white-haired woman were alone.

  “Hi,” she said, glancing up at him. She had a soft, friendly face, like someone’s friendly grandmother. Not Cody’s: His mother’s mother had died young, also of breast cancer; his father’s mother, who lived up in Casper, did not have a friendly face.