Five Days in Summer

and rang. He hung up and looked at his watch: it was a little after two o’clock. The promised phone call wasn’t expected for an hour and a half.
    He couldn’t wait anymore. He needed to go outside and breathe in some air, move around. He didn’t know what he needed.
    He needed Emily.
    Sarah was lying awake on her bed when he peeked his head into her room. “Maxi’s asleep and the boys are downstairs. I’d like to step outside for a few minutes if you don’t mind.”
    “Of course, dear.”
    “Are you okay?”
    Her eyes looked milky. She nodded but he knew she wasn’t okay. “Go ahead.”
    He left the house through the mudroom and walked into the garage. The door was scrolled open to the hot afternoon but inside it was coolly shadowed and damp with so much oxygen you could hardly breathe.
    He thought he’d walk a little but before he made it into the sunlight he saw the bikes. They’d been parked in that very spot all summer, between Sarah’s car and a path to the door. All three were old and rusted, but of the three, Jonah’s chain moved quickest and his tires were the most firm. Will pinched open the helmetfrom where Jonah had hung it on the handlebars, shook it out, put it on his head, and fastened it under his chin. It was a good fit. He wheeled the silver bicycle out of the garage, swung himself onto the seat and started to pedal: up the circular drive, around the front garden, then back to the house. Again. And again. He was moving and it was better but it wasn’t enough.
    This time he headed up the road to the first driveway, then back down. There was a deep silence on the old road, except for the clicking of his gears and the buzz of insects. He circled back and returned to the house, then went back up the road, and again, and again. Finally he needed more, and went farther, this time all the way to the entrance of Gooseberry Way.
    He turned back toward the house and rode steadily and hard.
    Before kids, he and Emily used to bike together when they were visiting Sarah and Jonah on the Cape, and now for the first time in years he thought of one of their favorite routes. Carefree, with nothing but time, they would cross into Falmouth and segue out of town at the first detour, following Shore Street all the way to the ocean; past neat New England homes fronted by green lawns on one side, fence and beach and sun-parched one-room stilt houses pegged in sand on the other. On a summer day the heat would lift on the strong winds off the ocean. Together they would ride fast along the narrow margin between road and sand, until they came to the first entry point to the Shining Sea Bikeway. They always turned in the direction of Woods Hole, following the asphalt thread past churning sea and strips of rocky beach and blooming fields of wildflowers, pine forests and all variety of hope for a life they were just starting to piece together. He recalled his flush of happiness as he followed Emily into a canopy of shade with its flashingglimpses of houses and the seams of flowering rosa rugosa that lined the path as it nearly collided with the ocean.
    The memory evaporated when Will reached the house. He turned up the drive again without slowing down. Faster. Uphill. His legs pumped and his mind raced and he rode as hard as he could but still he couldn’t go fast enough.
    There were many things Will didn’t know, most things. But what he did know he possessed; these understandings were as dense as his own flesh. The quick oxidization of apple slices. The gradual evaporation of water. The healing power of a Band-Aid on a small child’s imaginary hurt. The leaching of green from autumn leaves.
    His fatherhood.
    His hunger.
    The particular tenor of each of his children’s voices.
    What he knew, he knew, and the rest were questions he asked only in the presence of potential answers. Emily once called it avoidance, but only at the beginning; later, she knew better. Will had grown up around the stalk of his parents’ violent absence, comforted by layers of silence laid lovingly over him through the years by well-meaning relatives. After the funeral, his parents’ deaths were not discussed, except once, with Caroline, when their grandparents had given up on her and she had been sent to join Will with their Aunt Judy and Uncle Steve and their three boys; four, including Will.
    Caroline entered this branch of the Parker family with the dignity of a dethroned princess, or so Will had thought at the time; he was