Sonant

Why should the devil have all the good tunes?

- Rowland Hill 

Years ago in Concord.

Prologue: The Pump House

To all outward appearances, Aaron Levine lived a life of grudging compliance with the judge’s Order for Protection. When he drove through Concord, he kept to the highway. He did all his shopping and banking in neighboring towns. And the room he rented at the Acton Motor Lodge was well beyond the two mile radius specified in the restraining order.

In truth, he violated the order with abandon, prowling the forests and swamps behind his old house. Absurd, the lengths he would go to get there undetected, but what else could a heartsick father do to see his own daughters?

He could understand why the judge would award custody to Sheila. Sure, he had anger issues, aggravated but not excused by Sheila’s constant belittling of his musical ambitions. Until he got his emotions under control, Nina and Marta were better off staying with their mom. But to deny all visitation rights was too much to bear. He hoped the appeal would set things right, but until then, he had no choice but to resort to extremes.

Friday night at home with the girls was always pizza and popcorn and a Disney DVD. An unquellable pang compelled him to come see if the family tradition continued without him.

For the third time that week he slipped through the woods on foot, face obscured by a hooded sweatshirt. When he reached the commuter rail tracks, he turned towards Boston, following the rail bed deep into the barrens lining the banks of the Assabet River. A dead elm marked with an axed ‘x’ showed him where to veer through a swampy patch of pines to a hip-deep ford in the river. He slogged his way across, current tugging at his thighs.

Two hundred yards through red maple and aspen, the land rose through a patch of knotweed, leveling off at the lawn he had mowed a thousand times. He crawled on his elbows and lay there in the weeds, gazing at the little white house he had scraped and painted through several cycles of weathering; the swing set and play house he had constructed for Nina from scrap lumber and recycled hardware; and the vegetable garden with all the broccoli and lettuce gone to seed. Ten years he had lived here, only to be tossed out like an old couch.

He knew that people would find this behavior creepy if he was found out. And he knew that it would probably land him in jail. But knowing how wrong it was to stalk his own family compelled him no less.

The restraining order had less to do with any real threat of violence than with Sheila’s emotional fragility. Yes, he had been loud. He had always been loud. Who wouldn’t be if his wife of twelve years threatened to leave, without giving a chance to make things right? Even now, he refused to accept her divorce filing as permanent, seeing it simply a phase. Sheila would eventually want him back.

But he had never intended any harm. Being outward with emotions was embedded not only in his personality but in his upbringing. Shouting was simply how his branch of the Levines communicated. He couldn’t help that Sheila perceived every outburst as a physical threat. But he had never touched her in anger. Never.

As he lay among the knotweed, letting mosquitoes feast unslapped on his sweaty brow and scratched arms, his intent was not to spy on Sheila’s suitors. Yes, she was seeing other men, but that didn’t matter. That wasn’t why he had come. He wanted to be close to his family, in a place where he might imagine he was simply trimming brush and any moment now the back door would open and Nina would call him into dinner. Just like old times.

As the sun sank into the pines, the house stayed dark. They weren’t even home. There would be no communing. This revelation opened a void in his chest that could have swallowed the known universe. He retreated back to the river in the dark.

For five days he resisted the urge to return. It was three miles there and back. A rational man would have simply stopped and let his lawyer appeal and renegotiate a sensible calendar of visitation. Weekends with Nina and Marta at the site of Sheila’s choosing? Why not? He would even concede to a chaperone.

Instead, he found a place to sleep in the forest. It was a pump house built in the late seventies as part of an EPA Superfund cleanup. An old W.R. Grace waste pond had polluted the groundwater with vinyl chloride and a soup of less pronounceable toxins. The pump had long ceased to operate; in fact, most of it had been removed from the house. But it sat half a mile from his backyard and a quarter mile from the Stop and Shop where he could park his car.