In the Night Season Read Online Free Page B

up. A female voice told him Edward Bishop was on the line. He spoke to the distraught Mr. Bishop, then got up and walked down the hall to the cafeteria, where he ordered a cup of coffee and sat drinking it, reflecting that if this was what he needed now, he would pay heavily for it later in the day, at the end of his day.
    In the nights, he spent the hours reading, or sitting on a hassock in front of the television, channel-surfing. The avalanche of crap on television didn’t even serve as an anodyne now; in fact, it sometimes kept him awake in recollection. Television was a depository of time past; you saw people doing and saying things they were doing and saying when you were elsewhere in your life. “Elsewhere” for Philip Shaw involved the loss of a son, through what he believed was his own neglect, a kind of neglect, anyway. And the memory of it had never come with any less force, or changed one element of the hard pure pressure under his breastbone, that the boy was gone—eleven years now, almost to the day. The anniversary coming around again, with its familiar force. Eleven years in which his marriage had deteriorated and gone to pieces, and his ability to do much of anything beyond the rote work of his daily grind had narrowed and narrowed. He had a daughter, the lost boy’s younger sister, and his wife was taking her away, too, now.
    The lost boy’s name was Willy. Eleven years ago, while vacationing in Fort Lauderdale, Shaw, in the glow of too much alcohol, had taken the boy, nine years old, into the surf with him. The wavesseemed moderate enough, deep swells, lifting and setting them both down, near shore. But the boy had disappeared at the base of one and not come up. It crashed and surged all the way to the beach line, and the foam of it washed back to reveal the shape of the boy on the sand, lying facedown, his head turned at a terrible angle.
    A freak accident, the doctors said. It was just the way the water hit him, or moved him against the ground under the weight of it coming down. This type of thing was rare, but not impossible in such conditions. There were other people in the water, other boys Willy’s age. No one was at fault, the doctors said. But Shaw thought of the beer he had had to drink—the careless, impervious sense of well-being with which he had plowed into the rough waves with his son.
    There had followed a long spiral, an incremental sinking that both he and his wife, Carol, had not quite understood for what it was; they had both spent an awful amount of time drunk. Carol had come to see it first. “We have a daughter who isn’t old enough to remember what got us started on this,” she told him. “I’m so ashamed of myself.”
    When she stopped the drinking, she buried her longing for oblivion under a busy parade of fierce involvement in community service—the PTA at school, volunteer teaching, volunteer work in the nursing homes, day-care centers, hospitals, hospices, and shelters. For a month she had housed a pair of battered women and a homeless adolescent girl with a heroin addiction. Shaw came home late in the nights to the sprawl of human shapes on the living room floor and in the room that had been his son’s. If he was not already drunk, he would get himself that way as quickly as possible. Mornings, he drove his daughter to school and ached for how little she was getting of what she had every practical right to expect. He would kiss her cheek and watch her walk into the low red-brick building that was her other life, the life with girls and boys who came from less confusing households, happy families.
    It was after he managed to stop drinking that the sore places in his marriage began to be insupportable. The truth of the matter was that there had been trouble neither of them quite acknowledgedbefore Willy’s death, and perhaps it was so that without the duress of unendurable loss, such troubles exist in the silences of any marriage, without ever bringing the edifice