Northwest Corner (19 page)

Who will have you then? Who? The fire is no more. The fire that was love.

PART THREE

SAM

H
E HEARS VOICES DOWNSTAIRS
, a man’s and a woman’s, and comes stealthily out of his room, where for the past half hour he’s been tossing a Jason Varitek–signed baseball again and again into his Mizuno glove, the repeated sound of the soft webbing enveloping him, soothing him, rounding unwanted edges, virtually making him disappear.

He stands in the hallway at the head of the stairs, not quite believing his ears.

“You couldn’t at least have called?”

In response, an audible male sigh—ponderous, weary, possibly embarrassed.

Then his mother again: “I can’t believe this. Where were you planning to sleep?”

A mumble.

“What? Oh, in that case be my guest.
Jesus!
”

But her sarcasm is subtly animated, Sam would swear—as if this unanticipated man-invasion, however much a pain in the ass and an insult to her intelligence, is already producing a galvanizing reaction, bringing strange purpose to this little outpost of waiting and despair.

“How long are you planning to stay? At least tell me that.”

“Any chance a guy could get a beer?” The first clear words the man’s spoken.

An odd snort from his mother. Which sound it takes Sam a moment to realize was actually laughter.

• • •

And so something has begun.

He light-steps it back to his room, quietly closes the door, and sits at the schoolboy desk where, on his laptop, ESPN.com’s home page continues to offer the first ten lines of a story about Barry Bonds and steroids; a piece about a female decathlete with one leg; a sidebar on some lunatic Cape Cod fisherman who caught a hundred-and-forty-pound bluefin tuna from a plastic kayak:
“I thought the effing thing was gonna pull me all the way to effing Portugal!”

With his finger on the trackpad, he navigates backward to the Wikipedia page he was looking at before he started obsessively throwing the ball into his glove:

SEPSIS is a serious
medical
condition that is characterized by a whole-body
inflammatory
state (called a
systemic inflammatory response syndrome
, or SIRS) and the presence of a known or suspected
infection
.
^[1][2]
The body may develop this inflammatory response to microbes in the blood, urine, lungs, skin, or other tissues.… Approximately 20–35% of patients with severe sepsis and 40–60% of patients with septic shock die within 30 days.

He clicks the bloody dot in the upper left-hand corner and the webpage vanishes—just as he hears his father put his full weight on the bottom stair. The screen goes gray. His father is climbing, and with each step the whole house seems to shift under its foundation. And Sam’s gray nothing screen, which holds a kind of existential terror for him, is abruptly filled with his chosen saver: a downloaded thirty-year-old photo of Freddie Lynn in midswing, arms fully extended, the baseball a white stuttering trace of itself, a stop-motion ghost, flying so fast off his bat on its way over the Green Monster that no camera will ever be quick enough to catch its true, singular shape.

DWIGHT

I
STOP IN THE DOORWAY
of his room as at some invisible electrified fence. He’s sitting at his desk, half turned to the door, waiting and not waiting. The color photo on his laptop screen makes me look twice: Freddie Lynn hitting what appears to be a sure home run.

Freddie Lynn: Boston hero, superboy, grace of the gods—till he wasn’t. An historical figure to my son, who of course never got to see him play in person.

“Hey.”

Snapping his computer shut as if it’s porn he’s been looking at, he sits staring at the brushed-metal cover.

“Ever answer your cellphone?” I pause, studying him, not really expecting a response but willing him to look at me. “So … How’re you holding up?”

Finally he turns. “How long are you staying?”

The question stings a little, and I attempt to deflect it with a painted-on grin. “You must be related to your mother.”

“It’s her house.”

“And don’t I know it.” My tone is still jaunty, but my right hand has begun strangling the doorjamb; I make the fingers release. I think about going farther into his room, maybe sitting on the bed. Instead, I stay where I am and keep talking, the words coming out rambly and nervous.

“Tony sends his best. I told him, you know, that you had a situation come up all of a sudden back home. I didn’t get into specifics or anything, but I think he understood. He got it. I’m taking my week of summer break a little early.”

Understandably, Sam doesn’t respond to any of this. So I just stand there, my monologue delivered and the air sucked out of me, everything quiet except for my own battering heart. His room is essentially unchanged from when he was ten; this is what I’m seeing. Which could be laziness in him, or fear, or maybe a curious form of bravery. His own little Cooperstown. The Sox forever and ever. On a shelf above his head his sports trophies are arrayed, at least half a dozen, their fool’s-gold skins dulled with dust.

What does one do with it all after the fact? What’s any of it still good for? His vibrant boy’s spirit reduced to artifacts, to trinkets.

The problem is that once I start thinking this way it’s hard to stop. To keep myself from perceiving every last thing through a darkening tunnel. To not see my son the way my faults and failures have taught me to see the world and myself, to tar him with that stinking brush. When all the kid’s done is leave his room the same, which is no crime.

RUTH

S
HE STANDS IN A STATE
of suspended belief, watching him climb the stairs. Each lumbering step a small explosion that, being somehow personal, threatens to bring down the entire structure. Which collapse she would deserve, absolutely, for letting him stroll in here unannounced like this—into her house—to stage his big mock-heroic riding-into-town moment, as if he truly has anything to add to the pot. She knows this man: he’s no General MacArthur, or even General Schwarzkopf. More like having that silly cartoon clown fish Nemo arrive to mooch off the wreck of the
Titanic
.

Before her on the front-hall rug, his black carry-on sits upright on its rubber wheels like an overtrained poodle. Enough clothes for three days, she estimates by size—unless, of course, she offers to do his laundry for him during his uninvited stay.

Over her dead body.

She observes herself give the suitcase a good, solid kick, and it falls over onto its side.

Next, she walks into the kitchen and bitterly hunts down a single bottle of beer in the fridge—the last survivor of the twelve-pack she bought for Sam’s visit over Easter weekend—eventually finding it nestled with the broccoli in the humid vegetable drawer. She twists the top off with such animus that she tears her pinkie nail. And the lightly hissed
Fuck!
she hears then can only have come from her own mouth. No, it isn’t her night. She puts the bottle to her lips and forces down a few ounces of sour brew, just to prove she can. That little belch was hers, too.

Then, calmer for some reason, she carries what remains of the beer upstairs.

The door to Sam’s room is open, Dwight loitering in the entrance. Apparently he’s made limited headway in his caped-crusader parenting mission, and now hopes to beat a hasty retreat to the nearest sports bar.

She taps him on the back. “Here’s your beer.”

He turns eagerly, his face alight with canine gratitude—more for the interruption, she suspects, than for the drink—though she notices him squinting quizzically at the amount of liquid missing in the bottle.

“Thanks.”

“It’s the last one in the house. So I’d take it slow.” She tilts her head around the roadblock of his body and peers at her son, slumped at his desk in front of his closed laptop. “Everything peaceful in here?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Dwight grumbles.

“I can’t imagine. Listen, I’ll make up the sofa in the den for you. But after tonight you make your own bed.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

At this she raises an eyebrow but keeps the tart fruit of her reply to herself. A matter of personal privacy. She walks down the hall to the linen closet.

EMMA

S
HE HAS NO INTENTION
of telling her mother about Sam Arno. An old habit; also simple common sense.

Sunday she works all day, returning home at six with her back so stiff from eight hours of weeding and brush-clearing in Lakeville that she doesn’t think she’ll be able to rise in the morning. Her mother’s suggestion of two Motrin and a hot shower sounds reasonable enough, but crawling up to her room she decides she needs something stronger.

An inspired summer-vacation gift from her college roommate Sarah, the single Vicodin pill has been kept these past couple of weeks, wrapped in a pink Kleenex, in the zippered pocket of her makeup bag.

She washes it down with Diet Coke and waits.

By six-thirty, she can just about stand upright and pain-free. By seven, sitting down with her mother to a dinner of store-bought
pasta e fagioli
and sourdough bread, she’s smiling intermittently and can’t get herself to shut up. Words pour from her lips—
Carpinus
, for instance, rolls off her newly versed tongue as though she’s Olmsted himself; as does a strange disquisition on poisonous tree frogs and a long monologue on the various ways that pioneer women dealt with their periods while out on the wagon trail, and half a dozen other informational obscurities that don’t bear mentioning, the live product of one of the best (as the brochure trumpets) liberal-arts educations in the world. As much to say to her mother,
See what your money’s buying?
Or, alternatively,
How cool is it that a conversation doesn’t actually require the participation of both of us!
Which under the circumstances
would have to pass as a full-fledged epiphany—and amazingly, in her own mind at least, does.

But in truth she’s not in command of her thought flow to the extent of making any kind of grand point. She doesn’t care. All she can really do, the only real control she possesses, is to continue hoarding her semiprecious secret that she saw Sam Arno with his mother pulling in for gas at the Christie’s Food Mart outside town. That he’s come back to the deathly nest, for whatever reason, just as she has, and now must be close by.

Her mother, meanwhile, unaware of any sighting—unaware of so much—nursing a single glass of white wine to Emma’s half bottle, stares in amazement at this unprecedented display of conviviality by her daughter, such a rare show of, well, humanness.

The drug wears off around ten. The magic talking babe she’s become is unceremoniously deposed by a pain-racked mute, whose head is a hollowed-out gourd. It’s more than sad. Her mother—in her bedroom by now with the door closed, probably reading
The Year of Magical Thinking
for the third time—observes none of this. Which strikes Emma as the essence of mutual loneliness; unless somehow, like that famous unheard tree falling in the forest, it’s a perverse kind of enlightenment.

She limps through the creaking house, turning out lights.

RUTH

F
ROM BEHIND THE CLOSED BATHROOM DOOR
at the end of the hall, she can hear a gurgling faucet and some haphazard splashing. And the fact that her son’s awake at six-thirty in the morning is so atypical it affects her like a tremor, some physical disruption of the house’s natural geology.

Nonetheless, knotting the belt of her ratty bathrobe, she proceeds downstairs as though secure in the illusion that it’s just another day.

Which pantomime is soon dispensed with. Because, approaching her kitchen, she begins to smell her own coffee being brewed (Green Mountain Breakfast Blend); and then, entering, catches sight of the burly visitor at her table, hunched over a plate of burned toast heaped with the French strawberry preserves that her pupil Adam Markowitz’s mother gave her after winter recital at school—that she’s been saving, unopened, for some more auspicious occasion not yet arrived.

“Morning,” says Dwight, chewing a mouthful.

She says it back, absorbing the scene. His hair is damp and he needs a shave. He looks—she doesn’t want to be ungenerous here—vaguely as if he’s spent the night in his car; but then so, probably, does she. And although she’s trying her best to acclimate, his presence is too distorting, to the point where she can’t even muster any real annoyance over the violated jar of preserves.

Wild strawberries, no less
. Whatever.

She pours herself a mug of coffee, no sugar, and, blank as a mental patient on double meds, sits down across from him.

“Can I get you some toast? Eggs?” he asks politely.

She stares at him in a kind of wonderment. Is this Tommy’s Diner and she’s simply misread the signs?

“No, thank you.”

“You should eat something.”

She turns and looks out the window. Sees the Newmans’ black Lab nosing along the bushes between the two houses. After mild urinary suspense, old Toby lifts his leg and does his business.

“How’d you sleep?” Dwight persists.

She observes that his eyes are clear, focused: he is a man she was once married to, and he seems to really want to know.

“Mixed.”

Ten minutes later, he’s at the counter pouring himself a third cup of coffee—a veritable caffeine sponge, she’s had time to note, despite his supposed healthful California existence. Holding the full mug, he slouches back against the counter and fixes her with a gaze whose meaning only he can fathom, the slightly left-of-center vertical crease between his eyes deepening to a brain patient’s crevasse; as though he’s struggling to remember a single cogent thing about her, comparing her with some other her in his uncertain playbook.