Chapter Seven
Seven
And now Bjorn, he thought, pulling onto River Road.
Olive rode shotgun. To hell with the booster seat she hated: he needed all the allies he could get.
Wind whipped through the treetops. The forecast was for a storm, and for a big one, something vast and laden, churning the humid exhalations of the oceans toward an arctic bulwark hunched across Vermont.
They were running late. Line workers from the electrical utility were backing a massive vehicle onto the college playing fields, and then they found themselves behind a plow, blade up and moving slowly, scattering violet salt from whirligigs beneath its bed.
The bell was ringing as they pulled into the parking lot.
Olive ran, her backpack heaving side to side.
Miles had made a good show of normality that morning, marveling with his daughter at the gathering vehicles, letting her cycle through the heating options on the dashboard.
Whatever happened now, whatever chaos Kate had just unleashed, whatever the fury now engulfing him, he knew he must protect his daughter and his son.
Olive joined the line of other stragglers funneling in between two teachers. Someone honked behind him, but he waited, hoping against hope that she’d look back.
She looked back. He waved, though it didn’t seem that she could see him through the windshield glass.
And now? he thought, as he began to drive.
The obvious answer was to go back home, confront his wife about the message.
But thinking of the text again, the images that now rose up unbidden, made him nauseated with humiliation.
Bjorn? An ocean-swimming Byron scholar, yes.
Even an unforgotten high-school love. But Bjorn Nordqvist?
It was a bad joke, he thought, the Vermont version of sleeping with the salsa teacher with the too-tight pants.
The kind of stupid, shallow thing a man would do, not Kate.
Or had she, like him, been seduced not by Bjorn, but by the skiing, the speed, the snow, the sense of flying, of being carried by the earth?
Or was it not Bjorn, but Miles himself? Was this his mistake, to fail to understand that the Slight Disappointment was no longer just a Slight Disappointment, but a dawning realization of the limits of the person that she’d married?
Because who wouldn’t have grown tired of a forty-five-year-old man still stuck in his coming-of-age story?
That was his mistake: to think that she’d accepted the invitation to this far-off kingdom for the lark, perhaps for him to finish up his dissertation, whereas, really, she had hoped to save their marriage.
And he, pursuing fantasies with half-deluded misfits, had misunderstood.
In the fairy tales he studied, a common plot involved a foolish peasant who has the impossible fortune to win the heart of a magnificently beautiful princess.
Simple men, farmers or woodsmen, who did nothing but free a dove from its entrapment, or kill, often by an act of stupid courage, an imprisoning ogre.
Again and again these stories appeared, and every time that Miles read one, he found part of him protesting that this was not the way they truly ended.
That these were the folktales told by peasants, whereas in the folktales told to each other by princesses, the fool was rewarded with a thanks, a peck on the cheek, a horse, or an ox, and the princess went off to marry someone else.
And he thought that, until that moment, despite the ups and downs of his life, despite the moments of Tragedy and lots of History, he had been blessed to live, as his professor once had told him, in a Comedy, and this was about to shift.
He should go back, he thought, but at the road to home, he turned north, deeper into Vermont, along the highway they had driven together the first morning of their arrival.
Had the memory of that morning not been so clear, he never would have recognized it, the lush green valley now a monotype of gray and white.
They seemed like different people then, embarrassingly innocent, astonished by the smallness of the towns and bigness of the forests, the magic of the streams, the bounty.
He could recall the moment, shortly after their arrival, sitting by the swimming hole, Kate’s shoulder pressed to his, the wet fabric of her swimsuit clinging to her belly.
Olive, Wesley, splashing through the water, so clear that he could see their wavering bodies as they dove for river stones, the future perfect with its possibilities.
And now it had come to this.
He drove aimlessly at first, wanting to be anywhere but home, thinking of other moments from the past few weeks, the rides that Kate had taken home from friends whose names she never thought to mention, dinners that dragged on long into the night.
And he had missed it. He, who had written half of a dissertation on Anna Karenina, as if it were a novel about the joys of rural life and not about adultery, which was what every other person in the world would say it was about.
He drove for nearly an hour. He was hungry then, and he realized that he had not eaten breakfast, and stopped at the gas station where his family had stopped for their first breakfast after their arrival.
Now the lot was packed with line crews. For the first time, the full seriousness of the storm broke through his ruminations.
It looked like an army preparing an invasion, the trucks in ranks, snow gathering on plows and pistons.
Diesel in the air. Inside, the little store was crowded, men milling around the coffee and the counter, where they talked with the attendant, or watched a news report on television.
There was something almost superhuman about them, the plowmen, the saltmen, the linemen, who—in a matter of hours, according to the forecast—would be in buckets forty feet up in the air, inches from high wires sluicing with current.
They seemed bigger, more solid versions of people.
The coats they wore were made of heavy canvas striped with reflective tape, their boots of heavy rubber, their gloves the size of gauntlets.
The room was thick with the heat of breath and bodies, the melted snow, the smell of wet canvas, the flavors of the coffee.
The windows streamed with condensation; the cowbell on the door rang constantly.
Elsewhere in the shop, a woman was talking with a friend about her car that wasn’t working, and when to get her kids from day care.
No one noticed Miles.
He lingered, finished his coffee in the aisle alive with iridescent chips and lurid candies.
Outside, the air was changed, balmy, tropical even. He got back into his car and drove until he heard the phone ring in his pocket, and stopped, certain it was Kate.
It wasn’t Kate. It was the school calling, and his heart clenched a little, as it always did, to see the number.
Had Olive hurt herself, or were the cruelties of yesterday ongoing?
But it was only an automated message regarding the storm.
The forecasts had changed, and there would be early pickup.
He now had to hurry, pulling out onto the highway as heavier flakes began to fall.
—
It was a half-hour to the school, and Olive and Harper were waiting with Miss Kayleigh when he got there.
He smiled, a bit pathetically, it felt, when he saw his fellow Wylkesian—as if Miss Kayleigh might console him.
But Miss Kayleigh was all business. Harper’s dad, who worked in Massachusetts, couldn’t come to get her, and Harper had chosen to go home with Olive.
Apparently, what had happened yesterday between the girls had been forgotten; they talked with excitement about a television program Olive had never seen, but whose details she knew intimately.
Wesley was already home when they arrived, quick to report they were out of milk, out of Cheerios, tortillas, bananas, and yogurt, so Miles got into the car and drove off to the Co-op.
To town for groceries, he started to write Kate, but stopped.
The thought occurred to him that she might be with Bjorn at that moment, and the image of his domestic text arriving at the Olympian’s bedside as he double-danced his wife into the pillows made him sick.
But no, he’d forgotten; it was two, and she was just finishing class.
It was as he parked that he saw Nausica?, leaving the store with a bag of groceries, weaving through the crowded lot.
She wore her Red Sox jacket, and above her boots, he could see the hint of stockings, touchingly ineffective against the weather.
Protruding from the top of the bag were flowers.
All winter, he had seen versions of them in the store, sad and clearly the worse for wear from the great distance they had traveled.
He had often wondered who bought them. Now snow gathered on them, and in Nausica?’s hair, and he saw her wipe her glasses with the back of her fingerless gloves.
How cold her fingers must be, he thought.