Chapter 12
We agreed we had to tell Phil what was happening. It was evil to keep him waiting any longer, living this lie. With Sarah becoming healthy again, and winter coming on, we had to go forward with the awful scene.
We decided the conversation would happen between Sarah and Phil alone.
At some point, maybe, I’d have my own talk with Phil.
And maybe someday we could all talk together, but that day was a long way off.
I could imagine a time when we were old and mellow and forgiving of our younger selves for all our trespasses, but for now, the married couple were the main protagonists here.
This was their tragedy. It was Sarah’s confession to make.
I would wait in the shadows and hear about the conversation after the fact.
“Do you think he has any idea what’s about to happen?” I said. We were on our respective phones again, sitting at our desks, eating our lunches. Outside, the last, ragged maple leaves were clinging to the branches. The sky was the shade of wet concrete.
“I don’t think he has any idea what’s about to happen,” she said. “Poor guy.”
“I feel really bad for him,” I said.
“Yeah, me, too,” she said. And we sat through a long, anguished silence memorializing our regard for Phil. What was there to say?
She made a plan to drive with Phil to Summer Lake, an empty playa in the desert beyond the Cascades.
Their final destination would be some hot springs with supposedly healing waters, and the long drive would give them an opportunity to talk in private.
The prehistoric geology of the desert would offer a backdrop of proper dignity for the conversation, she thought.
Time was like a physical presence out there, striated into the faces of the canyons and mesas, dwarfing all human suffering.
The morning they left was cool and damp. I woke up and took my place at my desk as usual, but found it impossible to work. Thoughts of Sarah and Phil rattled in my mind. I thought about them in the car, surrounded by all that space. What were they saying?
I took a walk earlier than normal, heading into the hills, up through the aspens and into the sword fern under the Douglas fir.
The trail was becoming a slurry of decomposing leaf litter.
I could hear the calls of crows, song sparrows, juncos, and spotted towhees, all the usual suspects.
By now, Sarah and Phil were probably climbing the pass.
They were possibly even east of the mountains.
Soon, they’d be coming out into the high plains sage of Christmas Valley, with its big sky and tabletop mesas.
I wondered where their conversation had gotten to now. If only I could listen in.
I arrived at a bluff overlooking the valley and checked the time: 10:00 a.m. I knew Sarah would be as kind as humanly possible in their conversation.
She’d couch all the ugly news in many layers of love and sympathy, and yet there was no way around the pain it would cause.
In my mind, I could almost see the curdled look on Phil’s face as the truth landed.
I could feel the waves of disbelief, anger, and sorrow rolling off him.
I could imagine all the questions and clarifications that would follow.
They’d have to renarrate their entire lives together.
The silences would be hellacious. They’d have to confront the fact that the love between them was over.
It was all terrible, but in the end, I knew, Phil wouldn’t fight.
He’d take the news into himself and surrender to Sarah like the decent person he was.
He wouldn’t try to convince her of anything or lead her to doubt herself.
He’d wish her only happiness in her new life, and blessings in her new love.
And in that surrender he’d display the true strength of his character once again.
He was a generous, profoundly mature person.
And then they’d come home, and we’d be free.
We’d been talking about moving to California, maybe Sonoma or Glen Ellen, someplace with rolling, golden hills and wildflowers.
We were hoping to find a house close to Sarah’s parents, but not too close.
Wherever we ended up, I already saw our new life in a series of snapshots misted with nostalgia.
I saw a baby lying on a clean quilt in the morning sun.
A baby’s hand touching a silky California poppy.
I saw Sarah standing on the limestone steps of a public library, holding a swaddled baby.
Around the edges, I could smell dry grass and sun-warmed blackberries.
I could feel the heaving shadows of a heritage oak on my eyes.
Who would our child be? A boy or a girl, it didn’t matter. What would the child bring out in me? There would be new streams of experience, new forms of inspiration. A baby and writing, all worlds together, nothing sacrificed, only gain.
I headed back home to wait for the future to begin.
I waited all afternoon for an update from Sarah, but Sarah didn’t call that day, which only made sense.
They were way out in the desert, probably beyond cell range.
I made myself pasta for dinner and watched a documentary about black holes on TV.
I was doing my best to get my mind off the distant scene, but I couldn’t help picking at it, worrying it, wondering what was going on.
I imagined their conversation progressing in all its many stages and detours.
I wondered if Phil was fighting harder than I’d expected, or if Sarah was waffling.
Maybe they’d gotten drunk and were having a final go-round of tragic breakup sex.
None of it seemed impossible, and none of it bothered me. I forgave them everything in advance.
Before bed, in case Sarah found a hot spot, I left her a message telling her not to worry, to just be there with Phil, however long it took.
In the morning, I got up and did a little work.
Around noon, I ate a sandwich. And not long after that, as an afternoon nap started to loom, a call finally came in.
I rushed around the house looking for my phone, which had slipped into the cushions of the couch, worried and excited to hear Sarah’s summary of the last twenty-four hours, but when I pulled it out, the name on the face wasn’t Sarah’s.
It was Candy’s. I tapped the button and said hi, and she asked if I’d heard the news.
“What news is that?” I said.
“The news about Sarah and Phil,” she said.
How incredible, I thought, that the word had already traveled.
Phil had barely received the news himself, and already Candy had it.
Phil must have called her in the night, I thought.
He’d needed to process his grief and he’d found a signal.
And now, already, Candy was turning around and calling me to process her secondhand grief.
It seemed like Phil hadn’t given Candy the full story, however, because she didn’t seem to understand I was part of the news she was passing along, too.
“I haven’t heard,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Oh. No,” she said. “I hate to be the one to tell you this then, but… oh boy…”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Go ahead. I might have some idea.”
“Well, there was an accident yesterday,” she said.
“Wait, what?”
Candy kept talking but already I was having trouble following her meaning.
The news she was telling me wasn’t the news I’d been expecting, the news of Sarah and Phil’s breakup, but rather the news of some kind of crash.
Phil and Sarah had been driving in the woods yesterday afternoon, Candy said, when out of nowhere, a buck had jumped the guardrail and plowed into their car.
The impact had caused the car to veer into the oncoming lane just as another car had been rounding a bend, and the rear bumpers had clipped, sending Sarah and Phil’s car off the road.
They’d spun over a ledge and tumbled into the Klamath River, rolling at least twice.
While Phil had made it out with a broken leg and major contusions on his face and chest, and was now resting safely in the hospital in Medford, Sarah hadn’t been so lucky.
She’d probably been unconscious when the car hit the water, and she’d drowned.
“I don’t think this is right,” I said. “I just talked to Sarah yesterday.”
“It happened yesterday afternoon,” Candy said. “Late in the day.”
“I texted her in the afternoon,” I said. “I left her a message last night.”
“Well, yeah,” Candy said. “I don’t think she got that.”
We went around for another ten minutes, with Candy explaining the events to me, and me disbelieving, even as more proof piled up.
She told me it was rutting season right now, and the bucks were jumping across the highway all the time, driven crazy by their mating instinct.
The only thing in their minds was the scent of the females.
I kept asking Candy questions, trying to find a way in which she’d gotten her facts wrong, or garbled them in the retelling somehow, but as many ways as I asked her to recount the story, it was always the same.
By the time we hung up, the world had disappeared.
Everything had drained completely out to sea, leaving me alone on an empty beach.
I didn’t know what to do, so I went over to the window, half expecting to see bloody writing in the sky, but there was only an airplane traveling silently through the atmosphere, drifting south.