Atticus by Ron Hansen

Author:Ron Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins

FIVE

You’re wondering what woke you. A hand near his face; a hand that sought him but held back as if it feared being scalded. And then a faint whirring noise from the kitchen, on and then off. But there was nothing to see in the five o’clock gloom of the upstairs bedroom, and no hushed breathing, no hallway sounds, no feather of a human presence floating in the wake of a hasty withdrawal. And yet Atticus got up and hung there at the top of the stairs, wondering if he was imagining the faint smack of a foot on the dining room’s pink cantera marble. After a while he walked into the room Renata slept in, flicking on the ceiling light and finding Shakespeare’s Plays still there by the unmade bed and three empty Corona bottles on the floor.

Either Saturday morning or later Renata had retrieved her clothing and shoes from the walk-in closet but left behind the hard-sided green suitcase with its Mexicana Airlines luggage tag, the suitcase as there as a Spanish word suddenly remembered. Escopeta. Shotgun. Atticus pulled off the red shock cord and flipped open its hasps, finding inside just an old plastic bag from a shoe store in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. While he couldn’t recall that his son was ever up there, Atticus was past being either sure or surprised. Seemed you didn’t fully know Scott, ever; it was like trying to hold water in your hands.

His thoughts were too assailed for sleep, so Atticus got into his funeral shirt and his straight-leg blue jeans and boots. And he was finishing a bowl of cornflakes and milk in the kitchen when he saw the Radiola tape player up on the refrigerator and punched the rewind button. He put his bowl and spoon in the kitchen sink and filled the bowl with water, then he punched stop and frowned at the tape and forced down the play button. Atticus could see the right reel take up slack and heard Linda Ronstadt’s strong and gorgeous voice singing a fiesta song, “La Charreada,” holding a high note for what seemed an impossibly long time while the horns and strings of maríachis played behind her. Atticus went out to the seashore with the player cradled against his left forearm, his spirits lifting with the happiness of the music as he walked on the hard wet sand, heightening the volume as huge waves cracked and boomed like falling timber and the high winds flustered the palms on the roofs.

But as Linda Ronstadt was singing the first verses of a “Corrido de Cananea” she was abruptly cut off, and Atticus held the player to his ear to hear just a hushed ambient noise, of paintbrushes rattling and swishing in turpentine jars, of footsteps on a plank floor, as if one night in his studio Scott had mistakenly pressed record instead of play. Atticus hiked up a hillside of sand to get farther from the grumble of the sea and heard a spigot being turned and water gushing into a glass beaker of some kind.

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