Northwest Corner (27 page)

And, with the entire life system needing emergency repair, there seemed no point in taking my tools with me to continue my pursuit of small-time fixes elsewhere. What’s a little tear in a sleeve when the coat itself needs replacing? Why stop the faucet drip when you’re up to your knees in floodwater? Who gives a shit about a workroom when the house has burned to the ground? And then eventually, deep in a lockdown hole, say, you start to think—always a mistake—that all those beautiful American tools maybe never really existed in the first place, nor the famed blueprints toward which they were going to be put so nobly to service; that there never was going to be any table or toboggan or birch-bark canoe, that it was all just an excuse masquerading as a dream, an empty reason not to spend your weekend hours with your wife and son while you had the chance, a dead-end escape hatch down the stairs, a basement in your head.

At the sound of footsteps, I turn. Ruth is standing halfway down the basement stairs. Up behind her the door to the rest of the house is open, daylight from unseen windows reaching down over her shoulders and head, singling her out in the otherwise fluorescent glare. I have a block of sandpaper in my hand, and I set it on the bench.

“Sorry about the saw noise.”

“I didn’t hear it. I went for a long walk.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere special.” She’s clasping her hands, looking at me from a slight angle. “What’re you doing?”

Instead of answering, I step aside so that she can see the birdhouse I’ve almost finished making. The kind of basic home project taught in every shop class in every grade school in America. Seventeen-odd years ago, Sam and I made one—or, rather, I made one and Sam passed the hours handing me tools, watching and talking and growing
bored and drifting off and coming back and standing by my leg, right here, while I cut and nailed and sanded and stained. And when we were done we wrapped the birdhouse in brown butcher paper tied with rough twine, and gave it to Ruth for Mother’s Day. “Oh,” Ruth says. “Look at that.”

I found the spare wood in the boiler room, where I left it long ago. The sanding is almost complete.

If I’m still in this house by evening, I think, I will stain the birdhouse and nail it to a tree in the backyard, beside the older one ruined by weather.

SAM

I
T IS LATE AFTERNOON
by the time he pulls into the driveway beside his mother’s car. To his consternation his parents are sitting out front on the porch steps with drinks in their hands. They are not next to each other—a couple of feet of space separates them—but their drinks appear the same, made by the same hand—rum and tonics, he guesses from the golden-brown liquid in the glasses and the visible wedges of lime—and their postures are ominously at ease, languorous almost, which gives the contradictory impression of a certain jerry-rigged unity, some new amorphous history shifting beneath his feet, and for a long minute he remains in the car, as if protected, watching them through the windshield, unsure after all that’s happened that he can face the end of the day.

His father sets his drink on the porch. They are watching him, too, waiting for him to come out.

He closes the car door, and out on the lawn a cardinal flares like a struck match. There’s a rabbit frozen in green quicksand by the sight of him—can’t go forward, can’t go back. And he understands. Feels it all too much, can no longer defend the position; whatever armor he had in that department is gone. He is skinless. He takes a few more steps. The sun is going down.

His mother smiles anxiously. His father shakes his head as if to ward off disbelief.

Because he suddenly understands that it is meant for him, Sam sits down in the space between his parents.

A long moment passes: the three of them, sitting in a row, looking out at the yard.

Then he feels his father’s arm around his shoulders. No more than that. And he is undone.

DWIGHT

H
E IS SOBBING
. He falls forward as if trying to wrench himself free of his own body. His head comes onto my lap and I hold him there on the porch. I hold him a long time. He is my child, his pain pouring into me.

PART FOUR

RUTH

T
HE APPOINTMENT HAS BEEN ON HER CALENDAR
for weeks:
Friday, June 2nd, 11:30
A.M
., Dr. Orenstein
.

After this they’ll come regularly, every three months, for the next five years, for the rest of her life. But first you have to get there. This kind old doctor who lost his wife to the very thing he’s trying to help her beat back, he will have to lay his hands on her, feeling for dark stars in her body. She will have to peel back her robe and submit herself to the machine. X-rays will see inside her as no human eyes can.
Lie still, my heart, lie still
. The rest is fate. Or just dumb luck. You bare yourself and say,
Do your best, please; see what you can find
. And if they find nothing you will live to come again. And if the constellations return, dark as dark matter, soon enough they will stop looking. And that will be the end.

To live, then, means continually opening her most hidden self up to clinical scrutiny. No other way to do it:

Put your hands on me. Turn me inside out. Make your accounting. And then, either way, let me go free
.

She remembers the day she made the appointment, studying her date book at the reception desk of the Breast Center on the first floor of Smilow Cancer Hospital. She picked a Friday because she thought it more likely that Sam, whose post-graduation plans were still unclear, might be around to accompany her. She chose late morning because she imagined, hopefully, that if he was home he’d want to sleep late as usual.

Calling up from the front hall now, she asks if he’s ready.

He appears at once at the top of the stairs. If she wasn’t already
anxious about what lies ahead, his alacrity—and the fact that he’s shaved for her sake—would be enough to tip her over the edge. It’s as though a skull and crossbones floats above her.

Instead, she smiles at him, which immediately improves her spirits.

At that moment, Dwight emerges from the den. He’s shaved, too. He hovers there nervously, not quite looking at her.

Finally, just to calm everybody down, she says flatly, “For God’s sake, it’s only a checkup.”

DWIGHT

I
F YOU LIVE ALONE
, you probably spend less time in waiting rooms than most people. This could be, of course, because you have fewer people, maybe no one, to wait for. You are your own stoic messenger, delivering only to your home address: whatever the news, you will bear it yourself.

And then, one day, you will enter an exam room where a highly trained medical specialist will tell you a story based on a chart or a picture. One story, with a couple of possible endings, none of them necessarily what you’d choose to write on your own. But that’s how it is. You will thank the man and get dressed. You will reenter the waiting room, this time from the opposite side. And the room will be populated by strangers, every one of them waiting for someone who isn’t you.

Compare this, for a moment, with today: this spider’s web of transitive love that holds you fast.

Someone much dearer to you than yourself has taken her place inside the exam room and been strapped into a machine. The results are pending; they always will be. And it’s you stuck outside, waiting among last month’s magazines, neurologically soothing artworks, and the odd plastic plant, for her to come out and tell you the story.

“Clean,” Ruth says. “He said I was clean.”

She is smiling, facing us in the waiting room. Slowly, she puffs out her cheeks and expels the air.

• • •

Approaching her car in the cancer hospital’s parking facility, she holds the keys out to me.

I get in behind the wheel, Ruth takes the passenger seat, and Sam gets in back.

I start the car and ease us to the gate.

My foot is gentle on the gas at first. We make our way out of New Haven, a city I’ve always hated till today, northward to Route 8.

It is just the three of us, riding home: as if it’s a real place, after all.

Our beleaguered state of Connecticut running past—uncommon today, and beautiful.

EMMA

F
RIDAY AFTERNOON
, she drops her mother at Sue Foley’s and continues on to the tree nursery. A good hour spent picking out shrubs on her mom’s shopping list—India hawthorn, Chinese witch hazel, black chokeberry, summer sweet, Burkwood viburnum—then buying and loading six thirty-pound bags of mulch into the car, then stopping at the garden-supply store to replace a lost trowel. By the time she starts back to the Foleys’ it’s a little past four. She drives with the windows open, the wind in her hair, the radio on loud.

The song ends just as she arrives. She gets out of the car and stands leaning against the warm ticking hood, looking over the property.

The L-shaped, cedar-shingled house sheltered from the road by old-growth privet. The driveway framed by evergreens, some sick and some healthy, the air smelling of pine sap and turned soil and the roses climbing the front of the house, a riot of all the wrong colors. On one side a small overgrown pond, its surface simmering with dragonflies. On the other, a sloping irregular field where piles of metal pillars and a haystack of white tarp lie ready to be assembled into a wedding tent.

“Hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

Her mother, standing on the front steps, a pair of gardening gloves folded in one hand, her face shaded by a straw hat.

“Just a couple of minutes.”

“How’d the errands go?”

“Okay, but they didn’t have the same kind of trowel; I had to get a different one.”

“I’m sure it’s fine.” Her mother slides onto the passenger seat. Around her mouth some buoyant twitchiness, Emma notices, like a baby bird about to leap from a branch for a first risky flight.

She starts the car and pulls out onto the road. The radio off, but the Fray’s “How to Save a Life” still haunting her head:

And I would have stayed up with you all night

Had I known how to save a life

“I got the job,” her mother says.

She glances over. The smile out in the open now, cut loose, the little bird bravely, improbably aloft.

“They’re willing to go all in. We’ll start as soon as the wedding’s over.”

“Mom, that’s great. How’s the money?”

“Decent. Good enough, anyway.” She pauses. “I might just be ready to do some serious work again.”

Emma drives on. End of the week: long hours of labor behind them, dirt under their nails. Her mother no longer actively smiling but looking ahead with level chin and a gaze softer by the minute.

And this to see: atop a perfect red barn a sailboat weather vane pointing true north; a chestnut mare and her foal staring over a split-rail fence; a man with a wheelbarrow planting forsythia.

She breathes in deep, the country in her lungs. She drives by Pine Creek Road and keeps going.

“Em, you just missed the road.”

“We’re not going home yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Supermarket,” she explains.

“But we’ve got plenty of food.”

“Not this kind of food, Mom. This is special. Tonight we’re going to celebrate.”

DWIGHT

W
E WALK THE AISLES
of the Stop & Shop together. Friday late afternoon, in the Northwest Corner. All the neighbors out, known and unknown, heading home from work, stocking up for the weekend.

Sam wheels our cart loaded with three New York strip steaks, a sack of mashing potatoes, bunches of herbs to rub over the meat, a bag of prewashed lettuce, a ready-to-heat apple pie, and a tub of vanilla ice cream. A dinner to celebrate Ruth’s good health. Ruth to Sam’s left, intently scanning the shelves for other treats to add to the evening’s haul. I watch her drop back and pick out a bottle of aged balsamic vinegar, then walk ahead and toss it into the cart.

Her step appears light and dancing to me. She looks hungry again, you’d say, as if the meal to come might just turn out to be the pleasure she doesn’t know she’s waiting for. And the sight of her like this makes you want to eat that meal with her, whatever it’s going to be. To sit down at the table with her and pay serious attention, not to miss it.

Muzak’s playing cloyingly over invisible speakers, some little appetizer medley of Americana. The tune at present is “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”—neither of whose creators, I recall reading once in an in-flight magazine, ever went to an actual ballgame before writing the song. Theirs was the mythic, not the particular, game; certainly not the game at which, in the bottom of the third inning one Sunday afternoon at Fenway in the spring of his fifth year, my son magically caught his first foul ball.

Still, hearing the tune wherever you happen to be, even in a supermarket,
you know that summer has to be close. That it isn’t far away. That spring is just the bridge you walk over in your sleep to reach this place where the song’s playing. Soon, any day now, the barbecues will all be going, and you’ll be able to talk baseball with anyone you meet.

I am trying to be in the moment, not to make plans. There’s no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that’s that.

I have never been any good at this.

Clean. He said I was clean
.

The heart can hardly hold it all.

Sam and the cart reach the end of the aisle. Ruth’s right beside him. I see them start the hairpin turn to the right, to pass along to the next aisle—frozen foods, I guess it is—and then, as if they’ve run smack into a wall, they simply stop where they are.

SAM

H
E WATCHES HER FACE CRUMPLE
. Josh Learner’s mother. Then she turns and runs. Back of the supermarket and the aisle long as a bowling lane and down its bright catwalk spine other women, moms lost in ruminations on fish-stick brands and ice-cream prices, their shopping carts thoughtlessly parked on the diagonal, horizontal, some of the rides with small kids dangling off the rear fenders, a carnage of traffic and road obstacles blocking passage, making escape that much more difficult or impossible. She runs it anyway. He’s never seen the like, elegant woman in a kind of jerking sprint, her shoulders shaking as she goes, her left arm raised to her face as if she’s just been shot in the forehead. And people, every last one of them, stop and stare. Fucking town. Not the house on fire but the mother inside, burning alive.