Northwest Corner (6 page)

Like a sinking, poisonous balloon it lands: the answer to the question I’ve been too scared to ask. Why, after all the years of locking me out, he’s finally come to my doorstep.

This feeling of dirt. Unable to wash it off because now it’s inside him and untouchable.

In the bathroom, behind the closed door, the shower begins to run.

I can hear the moment he steps under the stream, my ears still attuned that way. Imagining my son’s long, carelessly muscled torso and the water beating down on him. The outside dirt running off, different from my dirt and particular to himself.

At the same time, listening to him try to scrape himself clean, thinking about his being here at all, I find that I’m having trouble shrugging off the nagging fear that it’s some dark, sticky notion of me and my life that led him to run away from what he’s done, as I ran years ago.

But what can you do with a thought like that, except turn away from it as fast as you can? I go to my room, drop the terry robe (suddenly preposterous under the circumstances), and pull on whatever clothes are at hand. I sit on the bed and hold myself still while I count off thirty seconds.

Old trick from the downtime.

Two years since I’ve used it, but Sam’s mother’s number comes back now without fail. (It was my house, too, once.) First digit, then the fingers walking the rest. Which only proves, maybe, that there’s no such thing as an ex-wife. The long, slow ringing is almost soothing till it stops.

“Ruth, it’s Dwight.”

Her silence is so long I lose track of it. I begin to think I hear a TV somewhere, and some slithery movement followed by a papery flutter—probably her closing a magazine she’s been reading in bed.

“Ruth?”

“I’m here.”

“Sam’s in my house.”

“What?”

Before she can say any more, I jump in and tell her the gist of it, along with what scattershot details I know of the matter.

Her shock, understandably, is many-sided. She bombards me with questions that I can’t answer. Still, I do my best.

When I’m finished, Ruth observes—not meaning it as praise—“You sound like a lawyer.”

I’m about to halfheartedly defend myself when I look up and see Sam standing in the hallway, a towel knotted at his waist and his torso glistening with water. A bruise like a beanpole eggplant across his muscled chest. His beauty, even so, simple and astonishing to me, a shock to the paternal system: as if the boy he used to be, beautiful, too, but miles different, fits inside this bruised man without meaning or wanting to; as if this creature is both man and boy.

“Where is he? I need to talk to him. Please, Dwight, for God’s sake, put him on.”

I reach out the phone. “It’s your mother.”

Sam shakes his head.

“Talk to her.”

The shake of his head grows fierce, almost violent. He turns—I catch a glimpse of a second nasty bruise on his upper back, this one fist-size—and disappears into the guest room, shutting the door.

“He doesn’t seem to be up for talking just yet, Ruth.”

“I still don’t understand what he’s doing there. He should be
here
, dammit.” A castered, fumbling noise on her end, and I picture her hunting for something—Ambien or chewing gum—in the drawer
of her bedside table. “I always knew something like this would happen.”

“Ruth, listen. I don’t understand the situation any more than you. Just give me a little time with him and let me see if I can’t sort him out, come up with some sort of plan.”

Her laugh is so grimly sardonic it causes the skin on my back to prickle.

“Who’s going to sort
you
out, Dwight? That’s the question.”

And then, before I can attempt an answer, she hangs up.

RUTH

F
ROM THE BED
, still holding the phone, she makes her way quickly to the bathroom, unsure whether to pee or throw up. In the end doing neither, choosing by default, because she’s already there, simply to stand at the sink looking at the haggard scarecrow the mirror gives back to her. A purple cardigan over her checked flannel nightgown, little patches of scalp gaping whitely through the sparse new growth of hair on her head. Were she to witness such a picture of another woman in a bathroom at night, she feels certain—the cardigan and nightgown, the henpecked coiffure, the tag-sale regalia—she’d have to draw a host of ungenerous conclusions about her and her life situation, starting with her ability to be a good and responsible mother. For if you can’t take better care of yourself than this—if, certainly no longer young, you let yourself go to the extent of wearing pilled sweaters to bed and having hair that resembles a mostly empty bowl of popcorn; if, peering into the bathroom mirror at an hour when most women should be snuggling up with their husbands in front of
An Affair to Remember
instead of
The Daily Show
alone, what you see staring back at you from the looking glass is, in effect, not yourself as you once recalled her but an answer to one of the more absurd questions in the Sunday
New York Times
crossword—well, you do the math. And she has; she’s done the math. Which is why, probably, standing now in the bathroom, she finds herself suddenly chilled despite the cardigan and the thick rag-wool socks, feeling the April cold in her poisoned bones to a degree that goes way beyond the seasonal meteorological average (not for nothing is Bow Mills called “the icebox of Connecticut”) or the fact that, responsibly
for a woman who some months ago decided that she would rather live alone and sick than with a silly man who too often made her want to laugh at rather than with him, she’s turned the thermostat down to sixty-two degrees for the night.

The hand still holding the phone is trembling—again, nothing to do with the cold. She sets the black plastic instrument on the sloping clamshell rim of the sink and lets go, only to watch it slide down into the bowl and come to rest on top of the dulled chrome drain. She stands looking at this, the earpiece out of which her ex-husband’s voice with his terrible unhappy news has sprung at her, her urge to turn on the tap and electrocute the thing ferociously strong.

DWIGHT

W
HEN
S
AM’S DOOR REMAINS CLOSED
, I take a second beer out to the patio and, zoo-like, pace back and forth. Some ominous little weeds have sprouted around the cement, I see, and I make a mental note to spray the hell out of them with Roundup over the weekend. Meanwhile, someone’s grilling chicken in his backyard a couple of houses over, the marinated smoke rising up plump and fragrant; and a neighbor’s dog begins to bark hungrily, then another. Then both animals’ voices abruptly fall dead, and the evening is still again.

Minutes pass like this, the dusk settling in—the lazy, arrogant, slow-moving dusk of Southern California, where the world is your oyster and there’s time enough for any dream. And I remember that my son, who until an hour ago I stubbornly continued, against various odds of my own making, to think of as a sensitive boy forever young, is now twenty-two years old, a grown man who has violently struck another man with a baseball bat. A physical expression of some roiling darkness in him that I surely recognize, because it is mine.

And, at some point, one has to ask: What are a kid’s odds going to be growing up, when his father does time for killing a boy, accident or not? What are his odds going to be, anyway? Not even my old man did that to his family.

My bottle is empty. I sit down heavily on the one chair in my backyard.

Tomorrow I’ll buy another chair, I finally almost decide; and more plates, and maybe a bigger freezer, too. I’ll think about what’s happened here today and make lists toward change and attend to
those lists with a hopeful urgency that I cannot in fact recall in myself.

I get up and go inside.

The house is quiet. I walk down the short hallway and stand with an ear against the closed door to the guest bedroom, hearing nothing from inside. After a few moments, I knock lightly and open the door.

My son is lying on his back on the bed, mouth agape, still in the towel he was wearing, his right arm dangling off the edge. There is no movement in him at all, and for a terrible moment I believe he is dead. I think he has killed himself somehow, that he crossed the country to do that in my house.

I’m halfway to the bed, stepping panicked over my set of dumbbells strewn across the rubber-matted floor, when I see his chest rise.

I stop to watch him breathing in and out, until I’m sure. And then, slow and careful as a heart-attack patient, I back out of the room and leave him to sleep a while in peace.

EMMA

L
OOKING BACK ON IT
, theirs is not a house of dramatic battles; it is a house of forced retreats across mountains and down through bitterly cold rivers. Ever retreating, ever glancing over your shoulder for the invisible enemy, who is a ghost. The war long ended; there is no front to fight on. The cause of the unholy conflict—the death of a child, a son, a brother—is unmentionable history.

Ah, but: a living child remains. Not the chosen one, however. No, that was her brother.

Unlike some other kids she knows, Emma never wanted to be an only child, with the only child’s lonely, obsessive burdens, the need to stand for everything and everyone. But that’s what, for its own reasons, life has turned her into.

Her parents were close and loving once, she is almost certain. There are photos that stand as, if not proof, then emotional attestations to familial and marital happiness, what human lives produce instead of proof. Two parents, two children, a dog, a fine old house. Her mother a creator of exquisite gardens for other people. Her father a teacher of impressionable minds and the author of brilliant elucidations of important works of literature. Her mother beautiful and still young. Her handsome father …

• • •

She is seventeen and applying to college when he packs three suitcases and departs for Chicago—a “practical relocation,” her parents call it, as if she’s a head case and can’t tell the difference: separation, divorce, the long, cold withdrawal into an ever smaller and more isolated chamber of the heart. What else can you say about a man who’s given up teaching the novels of Henry James and the poems of Wallace Stevens to write a book on twelve—no, sorry, eleven—sentences of the Talmud?

It is early morning. There is mist; this is not an illusion. A taxi pulls up outside and beeps its horn. She carries one of the suitcases. Her mother has not come out, and cannot be seen at any of the windows. A coldness has seeped in everywhere. The house’s eyes are closed; the front lawn overgrown with weeds.

Her father kisses her, not tenderly on her cheek as he once did but on her forehead, penitentially. Some sort of Old Testament thing, she guesses.

She tries hard not to cry, and is successful.

The taxi gone, she returns to the house. Her mother’s bedroom door is closed. Through the partition, Emma listens carefully for tears and sobbing, but hears nothing.

The silence, on both sides, feels like hate. Maybe it was always like this, and she just didn’t know it.

She gathers her books and drives herself to school in the car that her father left behind.

DWIGHT

A
LITTLE AFTER TWO IN THE MORNING
, I creep into his room to get my weights. Wired awake. Wanting to hurt and sweat myself into some purer condition—or, barring that, simply to pass out for the last few hours before sunrise.

The door to the room has a creak in it. I stand in the wake of that noise listening for his deep breathing. Sam still on his back on the bed, bare chest and cheekbones holding light that otherwise doesn’t exist. On the floor, the dumbbells are low dense shadows like rooting animals underfoot. I feel for them in the gloom, and grip them by the necks, and two at a time carry them out of his room into mine. I’m leaving with the last pair when his sleep-fogged voice catches me.

“Mom?”

How do you answer? Except to say, No. You’re mistaken. That’s the other one. The one who raised and loved you right. “It’s just me.”

But he’s asleep again, and doesn’t hear me.

SAM

I
N THE DARK
, just before sunrise, he comes awake in his father’s strange coffin of a house. The bleached walls of the bare white room, and the morning dark somehow dishonest, permanently uncommitted, too much unearned daylight to follow.

He tries to roll over onto his back, but the bruise on his chest is still so deep the pain reaches through him to the bruise on the other side. He groans and lies motionless, breathing heavily.

Nonetheless: the hard-on he woke with stubbornly undimmed, an animate kickstand. The kind that weighs twelve pounds and hurts, has been attached to you for so long it’s become your enemy and your soul. It defeats you in principle—there’s nothing you can imagine wanting to do with it, other than to warehouse it somewhere, at low cost, by the month.

Once again, he’s woken with Emma on his tongue after some long, essentially plotless, mostly forgotten dream that sticks to him now like the spotted afterimage of camera flash in the eyes. A dream that’s more than a dream because you know you’re going to see it again, one of its hundred and sixty-seven variations. For two years that’s been her presence in his life, no more and no less. And here he’s crossed the entire country, trashed and ditched his future, wrecked the whole show, only to discover that she’s followed him anyway. Followed him without really caring. He’s given up trying to understand how it works: a single, almost wordless act that’s held him prisoner ever since, free enough to pursue other girls and his life, but too emotionally shackled ever to really show up for the game.

With his hand now, he tries without much hope to free himself of her for the day. Using her all the way, of course. And gets what he came for. As if he ruled her, not the other way around.

Afterward, he curls up on his side. Sleep coming for him finally, lapping at his jagged edges.