Four Cups of Tea

Four Cups of Tea

I pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. The engine hunted for a second and then quit, and in the quiet after it I could hear the wind working at the gap in the driver's-side window.

I sat in the car a long time. My hands stayed on the wheel until the knuckles went pale, and I looked out through a windshield gone soft with mist. The white two-story wood house in Milton stood at the end of the drive.

Thirty-one years without anyone's hands on it had taken the white paint off in sheets, down to gray rotted wood.

The red maple out front—the tree my mother used to say had bloomed for the first time the year I was born—was bare. Its branches went up dry and thin into the gray sky over the Hudson flats.

I pulled a breath in and pushed the door open and got out. Rotted wood, leaf mold, and the damp off the river a quarter mile away came up all at once, and the taste of it went sour at the back of my throat.

The drive up to the porch was about 40 feet of gravel gone over to weed. My father's name was still on the side of the mailbox in stick-on letters, W. MILLER, three of them peeled to half. The flag was up. I put it down and went on to the steps.

The key went into the lock and turned with a rusted screech. I put my shoulder into the door. It came open slowly, the hinges letting out a long dry sound, and the air that had been sitting in there for 31 years came out past me.

Everything inside was where it had been since the night of October 17 that year.

I walked into the living room. Dust lay thick over the faded striped sofa, over the old boxy television, over my father's oak desk. I went down the short hallway and heard my own soles knocking hollow on the floor.

I had gone past the Underwood on my father's desk without stopping. It was black under the gray, the ribbon spool half unwound. The dust on the keys was uneven, thick along the top row and thin toward the space bar. The cover was on the floor by the chair leg.

I stopped on the second stair. It still went creak under my weight, the same sound I used to step around, holding my breath, every time I came home late and didn't want my father to notice.

My father taught psychology at the local university. To an eight-year-old just brought into that house, he was discipline itself, and cold with it.

He never raised his voice and he never hit me, but the eyes behind those gold-rimmed glasses had a pressure in them that made a person look down first. He taught me to read what other people did with their hands, and to hold my heart rate level inside fear:

"James, an outburst is the worst enemy clear thinking has. A mind run by its own outbursts is a mind that has already lost. You have to learn to set yourself apart from the pain before you can run it."

My mother, a psychologist with a name around the area who kept her own practice in the annex off the house, taught me a different way.

She used to sit by the window in the fall light with a cup of jasmine tea and watch me work through the intro psychology books my father assigned me. She would smile, and her voice stayed soft, and it went straight through whoever she was talking to:

"Look into someone's eyes and you'll never see what they're saying, James. You'll only see what they're working to keep covered."

Her practice was the annex on the north side, two rooms with their own door onto the side yard, and her patients were always gone by five. One man came in the evenings instead. He parked at the foot of the drive and walked up, and he never used the front door, and he waited in the small back room with the radiator rather than the one with the chairs in it. He knew my name, though nobody had ever introduced us, and at nine I didn't think that was worth asking about.

They raised me on everything they knew, on standards and on the patience of people whose work is opening up other people's minds. But standing in that dead room today, in the smell of ash and dust, something old started coming up in me again.

It was a kind of emptiness. A gap I couldn't name, as if nothing I had lived through in this house had ever been only the three of us: me, my father, my mother.

I went farther into the room and stopped at the oak dining table. The dust on it was thick.

I drew a finger through it. At the edge of the table my finger caught in a deep scratch gone black with mildew, the one the corner of the game box had worn into the wood years before.

The smell of rotted wood and that one catch under my finger brought back a rainy afternoon 34 years earlier.

That year I was 12. Fall rain came down hard enough to raise bubbles on the blacktop out front. It was cold, and my father had a small fire going in the fireplace, and the three of us sat around the dining table playing Parcheesi. He took his coffee black and bitter and drank it in small sips from the armchair. My mother sat on the sofa and smiled while I fumbled the dice.

The wooden board was laid out in four colors, one to a corner: red, green, blue, yellow. My father took red. My mother took green. I took blue.

The board was laid on the table with the yellow corner facing the empty chair. At that corner the varnish had gone through to the bare wood in a patch about the size of a palm. My father shook the dice in his fist and never used the cup, and my mother kept her four green pieces in a line, one square apart, all the way around.

The game ran two hours. What I keep coming back to is this: the four wooden pieces at the corner across from me, the yellow ones, stayed lined up on their start squares.

We played all afternoon and nobody touched those four yellow pieces, and nobody cleared them off the board. My father went on taking his turns, and my mother went on smiling and setting her pieces into the scoring squares.

Now and then, in the gaps between rolls, both of them would let their eyes go over to the empty chair at that yellow corner, an easy look, the way you glance at somebody waiting his turn.

That evening, when my mother brought the tea tray and the cake out to the table, she set down four glasses.

I looked up and asked her, "Mom, there are three of us. Why did you pour four?"

Her hand stopped for a beat. The smile stayed where it was and went out behind her eyes:

"Force of habit. What counts as family in this house... runs wider than you think, James."

For years I told myself it was the kind of odd habit two psychologists collect. Standing alone in that room with my finger still down in the old groove, I couldn't make it hold.

What if somebody really had sat at that yellow corner?

A flesh-and-blood person who had lived with me and eaten at that table, and who had been taken out of my head completely after the night it happened?

I crossed the room and opened the sideboard under the window. The board games were still stacked in there, and the Parcheesi box sat third from the bottom, one corner of the lid worn down to bare gray cardboard.

I lifted the box an inch to square the stack. Something inside it shifted and ran to one end with a dry rattle and stopped. The lid had been taped once along the short side with masking tape that had gone brown and let go at both ends.

I set the stack back the way it had been and closed the doors without taking the lid off.

I stepped back from the table and shook my head once to get rid of it. Maybe too many years down inside detective novels had turned me into a man who builds a case out of nothing.

On my way past the staircase I counted the steps. Fourteen. Coming in that morning I had counted 13. I counted a third time with my hand on the rail, got 14, and took 14.