Free Leaving the World by Douglas Kennedy Page A

it – was spot-on correct.
    ‘Three miles of unbroken sand, unspoiled, often empty, with the best ocean vista in New England. Any time I’m up in Maine and out of sorts with the world, I take a walk on Popham and stare out at the sheer vastness of the Atlantic . . . and somehow, it always makes me feel that possibilities still exist beyond the confines of my little life, that there’s always a way out.’
    I stood on the beach and gazed out at the Atlantic and heard David’s voice telling me all that. And I couldn’t help but wonder if, two days ago, he was finding things so unbearable, so beyond consolation, that the sight of Popham tipped him over the edge. Not only was it just too beautiful to bear, but say it didn’t do its restorative magic? Say its raw epic grandeur didn’t console, but rather heightened his sense of having been trounced. Say he was at such a low point – so defeated by everything – that the beauty of the water was simply too hard to bear. Say he shut his eyes to its metronomic surf, its shimmering surface, and began to think: If I can’t bear this  . . .
    Personally I couldn’t bear looking at the water and simultaneously thinking about what David might have been going through in the final hour of his life. So I returned to the car and drove out of the parking lot and turned right, following the road towards the direction of a signposted summer colony of houses. Halfway there, the road narrowed, owing to traffic cones with police tape stretched between them. I stopped the car and got out. The police cones and tape were shaped into an elongated rectangle – like a long coffin, perhaps fifteen feet by four. I swallowed hard and stared down at the blacktopped road. There were noticeable skid marks across it, the wide imprint of the tire tread indicating that it was a substantial vehicle which hit him. I walked over to the police tape and peered down. The side of the road here was marked by dirt and scruffy grass. I peered closer at its surface and could see the dried remnants of blood at that frontier between the blacktop and the earth. There was one significant stain – a large blotch that seemed to have oozed out in a long thin trickle.
    I shut my eyes, unable to look at it any longer. But you came here to look at it in the first place . I straightened myself up and stood in the middle of the road and noted the narrowness of the blacktop at this point. I checked its surface, walking forwards beyond the police cones, looking downwards, hoping to find . . .
    Yes! There, beneath my feet, was a pothole. Not a particularly big pothole – maybe a foot or so in diameter – but located in a telling spot, perhaps twelve feet or so before the skid marks and the police cones. A narrative assembled in my mind. David left the beach and was coming along the road at speed. He saw the truck moving towards him. He prudently steered himself to the edge of the blacktop. But then his front wheel hit the pothole, he lost control of his bicycle and was thrown into the path of . . .
    That was it. That’s how it happened. An accident. So random, so arbitrary – an unlinked set of circumstances coming together to create disaster.
    I could now tell myself that it wasn’t suicide; that, truly, David had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    I walked back to the car, feeling no relief, no lightening of my sadness, no sense that this personal confirmation of his accident had made his loss easier to bear. All I could think was: Why are you here? OK, you’ve confirmed what you wanted to confirm. Now what ?
    Now . . . nothing. Except the drive back to Boston. And then . . . ?
    But before I headed back I decided I should see his house. I’d passed it on my way out to Popham – knowing it immediately because he had talked so often about its exact location in the village of Winnegance.
    Now, upon reaching it, I first stopped at the end of his driveway and got out, looking up its