Northwest Corner (28 page)

She reaches the exit and disappears through the automatic doors, gone into daylight.

Left behind, her daughter lowers her head. Long seconds tick by.

All the life gone from his father’s face.

Years from now, it is these breath-held moments he will remember most sharply: the interstice between what he knows of the world and what he will do; the getting ready.

He is tired to death of having no comfort to give to those who truly need it.

“Emma.”

She looks at him.

He walks up to her. He puts his hands on her shoulders and his cheek next to hers.

“Go after her,” he says.

And she does.

EMMA

T
HROUGH THE KITCHEN WINDOW
, in the gathering dusk, Emma can see her mother on her knees in the garden: the closed nautilus of her back, the furiously working arms, beside her a mound of pulled weeds.

She flips a switch by the sink, and outside a pool of light laps her mother’s bent, praying back and brings her closer.

Her mother does not pause in her work. She keeps pulling.

Knotweed is pernicious, everyone knows, it will keep coming: you have to remain vigilant, mustn’t let your guard down for even a day.

And so the garden is just a big metaphor, is that it? And yet not.

The dirt is real. The weeds. This woman with her hands in the dirt and her heart still in pain.

She is going to make her mother a cup of tea. She is going to pour her a glass of wine. She is going …

She goes outside: around the light thrown up by the house, the dusk is coming. It’s coming. The air is sweet with flowers. The birds are thinking of rest.

All this weeding might just finally do the trick. You never know.

“Mom.”

Her mother does not stop. The pulling of each weed has a sound: in this small death, one more life.

Emma gets down on her knees to help.

PENNY

A
T THE END OF THE DAY
, outstretched in the Eames chair, a glass of white wine beside her, her leather journal open on her lap, her fountain pen uncapped, Penny writes:

A hand searches for another hand, not knowing it is already full
.

She looks up. Ali is standing in the doorway, dressed in her flowered pajamas. Her eyes are soft and needy. Her face is vulnerable once more.

Penny puts aside her pen and notebook.

Ali enters the room. She sits on a chair a few feet from her mother, turned away from the built-in desk. She draws her knees up to her chest.

“What is it, sweetie?”

Penny leans forward, trying to get as close to her daughter as possible. Thinking that love has a memory, too. It knows how to come home.

DWIGHT

W
E COOK THE FOOD
, try to do it right. We sit down at the dining table. I pour wine for the three of us.

But the celebration is over before it ever really begins, and no one eats or says very much.

Ruth is gazing into the corner of the room as if she’s lost something there.

Finally, she looks at our son.

“I’m just curious. How long have you been in contact with her?”

“It’s not like that,” he says. “Are you seeing her?”

“No.”

He falls silent.

Then: “We understand each other.” Then: “I can’t explain it.”

Ruth drinks the last of her wine; she folds her napkin and lays it on the table. And I do the same. As if we’re normal people finishing a meal in a family restaurant. But we are not in a restaurant. We are just ourselves in this house that has held so much and so little, everything possible and never enough.

I see Grace Learner standing under the cold light of the supermarket: staring at me in shock and hatred, terrified and enraged that I’ve
come back to haunt her, that I will always be here, that I will never leave her in peace.

I see her boy, frozen in time. The family she lost because of me.

We think we are solid and durable, only to find that, placed under a cruel and unexpected light, we are the opposite: only our thin, permeable skin holds us intact.

Hemophiliacs walking through a forest of thorns.

I look at Ruth. It’s a long look, as if we are tied to each other by a cord, which we are. What I want her to know is more than I can ever say.

“I can’t stay here, Ruth. I can’t do that to them. I’m going to leave in the morning.”

She is silent, her face impassive. She pushes back her chair and gets slowly to her feet.

“I’m truly sorry.”

Sam has been staring at his hands. Now he looks at me.

“I’m going with you.”

RUTH

S
HE REMEMBERS HER MOTHER
saying to her once, years back:
Ruth Margaret, you must earn everything that comes to you, or it is not worth having
.

And it is sound advice—you cannot refute it. Though it’s not until now, inside her echoing head, that she finally needs to demand in return:

Yes, but haven’t I earned it yet?

And if so, tough girl, then what? When they’re going to leave you anyway. Leave you for the other parent who’s earned not half of what you have over the long haul, nor sacrificed half as much. Leave you with a glance and a single throwaway line. Leave you by yourself, when you’re just getting addicted to the company. Leave you as you’ve always predicted you’d be left. Leave you when you can no longer really blame them for leaving you. Leave you with your bill of good health, still uncelebrated and a matter of some optimistic conjecture. Leave you so abruptly and so completely that you can’t imagine what to do with their leaving but hold it up and study it in its natural light and shadow, in daytime as well as dusk, observe it like a philosophy, take it to heart, alone now they’re telling you, honestly struck by how the light passes through it to the side on which you remain, here, in bittersweet and solitary wonder.

“Mom.”

She cannot speak, or look at him.

“I’ll come back. I promise.”

She wipes a hand across her unseeing eyes.

Dwight says, “I’ll send you a ticket to come out, Ruth.”

A ticket. She will need a ticket to see her son. She begins stacking plates.

“There’s his diploma,” he goes on, warming to his cause. “I have a friend who might be able to work out a way for Sam to finish up his credits at UCSB. You’ll come out for graduation.”

Will she? Go out to California for Sam’s graduation? Probably, though it’s hard to believe.

She has been to California, and it is not the promised land.

But then neither is this place—Bow Mills, or any other town in Connecticut, any place anywhere. They are simply places you live. You’re born there, or one day, pushed or drawn or dreaming, you move there. You live there, and get married there, and raise children there. And there, if you stay long enough, things happen to you and the people you love that no one can imagine. And either you survive them or you don’t.

She carries the plates with their uneaten food into the kitchen and lets the door swing shut behind her, leaving the men to themselves, to sort it through or not. She stands there alone, suddenly wishing she had a dog, a puppy, who might eat these leftovers with a pure and jubilant hunger, so none of it would go to waste.…

Waste is something she has grown to hate as she’s gotten older, waste and indifference.…

She will wake up tomorrow and her son and his father will be gone. The house and her life will be hers again, not a waste. And she cannot be indifferent to any of it, this she knows.…

She and the pup she’s going to have will go outside and the yard will be green as a Swiss field in summer, and she will watch the puppy run and frolic.…

A cardinal will flutter onto a branch of the old oak, and for the first time in months the color that pops into her head will not be
blood
. It will be
rose
.…

And then she will go back inside and sit down and write her son a letter, to try to tell him how much she has loved her life while she’s lived it.

• • •

She returns to the dining room. Where her men are still at the table.

Dwight with his chair pushed back, that graveling voice, in tandem with those powerful arms, caught in the middle of a story about a legendary home run smashed over the wall in Fenway Park, some game-winning hit that will never be forgotten.…

While, beside him, Sam sits listening, his eyes on his father and his mouth cocked in what might just be a smile …

Ruth goes up to her boy, who is a man, and kisses the top of his head.

“I’ll help you pack.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One writes alone, but never in a vacuum. My particular gratitude goes to my editor David Ebershoff, who so gracefully combines his impressive gifts as a novelist with those of an ideal reader. As always, the wise and bracing counsel of my longtime agent, Binky Urban, helped see me through, from beginning to end. Jen Smith, at Random House, once again offered a clear-eyed reading of my manuscript at a crucial juncture in its development. And working with the wonderful Jynne Martin in publicity has turned the sometimes confounding experience of promoting a book of serious fiction into a pleasure.

My warm thanks as well to Gerry Krovatin and Dr. Cara Natterson, dear friends and experts in their respective fields of practice, who helped round out my legal and medical knowledge in the writing of this novel.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Aleksandra, and our son, Garrick, for all that they do, and all that they are.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
OHN
B
URNHAM
S
CHWARTZ
is the author of four previous novels:
The Commoner, Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days
, and
Reservation Road
, which was made into a motion picture based on his screenplay. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and his writing has appeared in many publications, including
The New Yorker
and
The New York Times
. A past winner of the Lyndhurst Foundation Award for mastery in the art of fiction, Schwartz has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is currently literary director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Aleksandra Crapanzano, and their son, Garrick.