Free River Road by Carol Goodman Page B

As I passed Ross’s house, I stared at it, shocked at how much had happened since I’d left the party yesterday, when I’d thought my biggest problem was not getting tenure. The old brick colonial looked peaceful with icicles hanging from its black trimmed eaves, the red barn garage positively pastoral against the unplowed snow. Ross hadn’t had time to digout his driveway either, I noticed, although the barn door was partly ajar, wedged open by a drift of snow. The vintage Peugeot Citroën he kept in the barn wasn’t meant for driving in the snow anyway; he must have taken his Volvo, which he kept in a covered spot on campus, to the train station to pick up the Dawsons. The Volvo was his professorial car, he’d once said to me, the Peugeot the car of his salad days . The summer after Emmy died, and after Evan had moved out, it was the Peugeot we took west into the mountains, racing down dark, winding country roads as if we were plunging into a bottomless pool. I had been the one to end it at the end of the summer, because, I told him, I didn’t want to risk losing my job. He’d expressed disappointment, but now I thought that he’d have done it if I hadn’t. Our affair was part of those salad days he liked to relive with students around the fireside, like his days as an undergraduate at Harvard, or working at The New Yorker , or driving cross-country with On the Road in his back pocket. Our affair would have been partitioned off, just as he’d now sectioned me off into the “undesirable” category.
    I turned onto the river road, tears streaming down my face. Although there was still light filtering through the trees the road was dark, a tunnel between the snow-covered stone walls beneath a canopy of bare branches. The sun lit up the topmost branches, turning them into skeletal fingers. Dead fingers on a ghost road. I could no longer tell myself that it would be all right when they found the person who killed Leia. Not after I’d seen the looks on all those faces, all those eyes branding me a murderer. The thing was, I didn’t feel they were wrong. Wasn’t I a murderer? If not of Leia, then of Emmy, whom I’d let run down the hill and out onto the road while I was too busy— writing! —to watch her? The looks of sympathy all these years had always felt false. The damning looks I’d just gotten in the Peace Garden felt true .
    I walked on the side of the road, not caring if someone came and drove into me. Only when I reached Leia’s memorial did I stop. It had grown over the day, filling with candles and flowers and stuffed animals all but covering the daffodils that had turned brown in the cold.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said, reaching past a candle to touch the dead flowers, not sure if I was talking to Leia or Emmy.
    As my hand brushed the cold glass I saw it wasn’t a candle but a bottle. A fifth of bourbon.
    I picked it up, shocked at the wrongness of it. The late-afternoon light caught the two inches at the bottom and the red roses painted on the glass. Four Roses bourbon. Hannah Mulder’s brand. I slipped it in my coat pocket, where it fit as if that’s where it had always belonged, and walked home.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    W alking into my house did nothing to alleviate my sense of wrongness. In fact, the emptiness I felt inside seemed to swell at the sight of the stacks of papers and dirty glasses. I picked up a couple of glasses and brought them to the sink. Then I opened the cabinet to the right of the sink and took out the bottle of bourbon. As I took it down I remembered my resolution in the woods and the look on Anat’s face when she asked me how much I’d had to drink at the party. But I’d made that resolution before I knew that I had more to worry about than not getting tenure, and Anat hadn’t just had to face the entire town looking at her as if she were a murderer. I was pretty sure that if she had