The Wrong Road by Cris Aboobaker

The train rattled through the trench of the tracks, rocking Bill and Lon like children on a carnival ride. With each stop, the Christmas crowd leaked away, clusters of homes seen out the windows dwindled to an isolated few until they were flying past banks of leafless trees and brown fields fissured by frozen marshes, their view widening to the glow of the evening skyline.

They had met in Penn Station with a quick hug, brothers in matching gray hoodies and baseball caps, taking the long train ride to the end of Long Island for Christmas dinner with their mom. Bill was broad and burly, Lon as tall but slim with an aquiline face. Little was said but when they hugged, Lon smelled beer in Bill’s beard and caught a furtive look. A month ago, when they last spoke, Bill talked about staying sober, going to meetings. He had stumbled again while Lon had been busy with his life.

“It’ll be strange this year without Dad. Just you, me, and Mom,” said Bill, over the clatter of the train.

Lon nodded. There would be an empty space where Dad had been. Another person, rarely talked about, padded into his mind like a shadow on the edge of thought.

“Do you miss him, Lon?”

Lon grunted. “He was a sonofabitch but he was our dad.”

Bill laughed and rolled his big head toward the window.

The whistle blew and they were finally there, shaking their long legs and heading into the frozen air. There were few cars in the parking lot, no cabs waiting, no bars on their phones.

“Ah, what the hell, let’s walk, it’s only a mile or so,” said Lon.

“It’s awful cold,” said Bill, pulling his arms around himself.

“Ah come on, we’ll be there before you know it.”

They walked down curving roads that intersected with other roads going different ways. They all looked the same. Above them was a cover of deep dark and tangled tree branches. A few stars shone through to match the glints of ice beneath their feet. It seemed a longer walk than they anticipated, until they came to a clearing blocked by a frozen pond with tall weeds growing all around it.

“Funny, we took the wrong road,” said Bill.

Lon said nothing, cursing himself, wondering how his feet managed to take this way.

“This is where she went down,” said Bill, as if a hand was gripping his throat.

It had been another Christmas long ago. There were three of them then, Bill, Lon and little Sylvie, who was playing on the ice.

Lon patted his brother on the shoulder. “Let’s go Bill. No point standing here, it’s cold.”

But Bill kept looking at the frozen pond.

Sylvie was five, Lon seven, Bill ten, the day she fell through the ice. Lon went running, yelling and crying back to the house with Bill trying to pull her out as the ice kept breaking. But the long arm of the sea that fed the wild marshes was strong that day, it pulled her under and she was gone.

“She would have been twenty-five,” said Bill. “How beautiful she would have been.”

By the time rescue workers swarmed the scene, in yellow suits with grappling tools, it was too late. Lon heard echoes of their whistles in the fading light, as he, Bill, Mom and Dad huddled together in silence.

A few days later he dragged his feet in a long march up the church steps in a little suit, his family leading a procession of relatives, friends and neighbors, filtering into the front pew while dozens of adults, some he barely knew, offered condolences. They stood in the cold while the priest said final prayers and an empty child-sized coffin was lowered into the grave.

Later the house was full of men in dark suits rattling ice in whiskey filled glasses, women hurrying up the steps and into the kitchen with casserole trays. Dad sat with his big tattooed forearms on the table, head in his hands, with his mates from the precinct and cops from neighboring towns standing around him like a protective posse. Mom sat on a kitchen stool, sobbing helplessly, while neighbor ladies bustled around, putting food on plates. They took turns standing beside and putting their arms around her.

Bill and Lon wandered back and forth, collecting stray pats on the head from above, a raining patter of adult hands, massive mitts of men and slender perfumed appendages of women. Lon endured it, hoping they would leave, and after, it would be like a dream that never happened.

But after, when everyone had gone, Dad took Bill alone to his basement den and closed the door. Lon followed Mom around the house while she dusted furniture and hummed to herself, Foggy Dew, he remembered, the tremulous song gaining volume as if to shield her from the geysers of rage that squirted from under the basement door. Shield her but not her son.

“You were the eldest. You were in charge. How could you let her go out on the ice? Have you no sense at all?”

Lon separated from Mom to put his ear to the door. To hear Bill’s soft and sobbing reply. “I couldn’t stop her. She was dancing. You know how she loves to dance.”

“Idiot!”

Bill emerged, pale but wiping the moisture from his cheeks. There would be no more crying after that, even from Mom. There were two of them now, not three; aside from pictures on the mantle and a few puffed-up words on holidays, it was as if that’s how it had always been.

Once, when he was in college, Lon accidentally ran into his brother. On a Saturday evening, a group of his friends wanted to score some weed and someone piped up, “I know a guy.” They got in a car and drove to the community college down the road.

Sitting in the center of a dorm room decorated with Grateful Dead posters, marijuana smoke billowing from a water pipe, sat a big man, laughing like a brown-haired, curly-bearded Santa Claus. He greeted the guys as they came in, half standing and passing the pipe around, megawatt smile shining below red, rheumy eyes. Lon had never seen a man so sad trying to look happy. It took a moment to realize it was his brother.

“Don’t tell Dad what I’m up to here,” Bill said, as he hugged and held Lon close.

“Of course not.”

But from then on, Lon tried to keep in closer touch. As if he was now the sibling trying to pull another from falling through the ice.

Lon visited home more often. Bill usually found excuses to not show. Dad’s big-jawed face, though more lined and jowled, became more like a clenched fist through the years. Anger was expressed at everything, long-haired hippies from the local college who Lon suspected he roughed-up when the opportunity arose, immigrants, colored people and liberals who made excuses for their laziness. Mom shrank more into her own world and Lon tried to jolly the old man along. It was worse when Bill came; Dad shook his hand perfunctorily and carried on with his tirades, looking at Bill sidelong, as if they were indirectly aimed at him.

Even in the hospital, in those final days, when Bill came, as cleaned up as Bill could be, and reached for his hand, Dad took it but turned his face away. Lon turned from the sight of this last rejection, cold and sick inside, looking out the hospital window at traffic on the parkway and gray clouds streaking across the sky.

So, this is manliness. To bury grief and guilt so deep inside that it becomes a poison.

Where were you Dad, that evening, drinking Christmas cocktails when your little girl was on the ice? What kind of man uses the tragic loss of one child as an excuse to destroy another?

A stiff breeze blew, clattering small pebbles across the ice. Lon put his arm around Bill’s shoulders, felt him shiver, as they looked out across the frozen pond.

“It wasn’t your fault, Bill. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Dad always thought it was. I was the eldest.”

“Goddamn Dad! He’s dead now. Dead with all the cruel and ugly things he said.”

“Dead along with Sylvie,” said Bill.

“Well maybe it’s time to talk about that. Maybe it’s time to cry about it.”

He took his brother’s hand, as if they were children, and led him back down the road toward home.

Cris Aboobaker

Image: A grey and white image of a frozen lak e from pixabay.com