Northwest Corner

by John Burnham Schwartz

  Scraping the eggs onto two plates, adding a piece of baguette for each of them, she splashes olive oil and lemon juice over the arugula.

  “Sit,” she says to Ali, who sighs and rolls her eyes but in the end, being twelve and having no other option, joins her for dinner.

  SAM

  AT LAST HE TURNS, the arm carrying the duffel by now numb and roughly five feet long, onto a short street called Hacienda. His GPS a torn-off remnant of a much creased and fingerprinted envelope marked by return address in his father’s chunky scrawl: the original having contained a Hallmark Christmas card of a hockey-playing snowman with the same seven words as every year added at the bottom—Think of you often. Love, your dad—along with a check for a hundred dollars.

  The card he threw out like the ones before it. The check, like the other checks, he cashed at the deli on his way to practice. The gift money he squandered on a denim shirt with fake mother-of-pearl buttons.

  Not part of his traveling kit now, the shirt. Left behind with so much else. Just the envelope with this street name: Hacienda. Single-story stucco boxes in various shades of pale, no garages, patios probably in the back. Out front tidy, bright-eyed flowers, clean little middle-class Southern California street.

  Not the dad he remembers from twelve years ago, not possible: these cupcake houses that have never known the cold, dull weight of snow or remorse.

  The house is beige, same color as the one across from it. He stands between them, middle of the quiet street, looking from one to the other. A less-than-new Chrysler Sebring convertible parked in front of No. 28.

  He passes through the low gate, onto a cement-block path. In the center of the door floats a knocker in the shape of an amputated hand holding a smaller-than-regulation baseball. Funny, almost. Sam recognizes the grip on the pitch as a two-seam fastball. He puts his hand over it for confirmation, a private reenactment. Can’t help himself. The white-painted metal still warm from the afternoon sun.

  The last pitch he’ll probably ever see was a two-seamer.

  Now, on the far side of the country, it comes for him again, living thing, rising and tailing away the closer it gets to home.

  The bat still on his shoulder.

  The bat sinking into another man’s flesh.

  He takes his hand off the knocker without making a sound. There’s a doorbell, too, but he doesn’t try it. He stands frozen. It’s dawning on him in painful stages how his running all the way here is a pathetic tracing of his father’s running from his crime twelve years ago. There is no such place in this world as “away.” Nothing for him to do now that he’s here but stand outside his father’s gingerbread house like some paratrooper mistakenly dropped from the sky. What he needs is X-ray vision. To glean through this firewall door some early warning of the radioactive force within, the human trouble waiting there.

  Exhaustion is suddenly upon him like a caul: so many hard, pointless miles traveled, and Hacienda Street just a snow-globe desert like any other.

  He should’ve made some kind of plan. This is not a plan.

  He puts his hand on the door, turns the knob and, to his surprise, feels the latch give; and, before he can regret himself a moment longer, he’s through, into his father’s house.

  EMMA

  FOUR YEARS AGO: her father, Ethan Learner, once admired literature professor and critic, stands in front of the sagging bookshelves in his study, an open poetry book in his hands. Emma is sixteen; her dad forty-six, plenty of salt in his dark hair, a ragged beard, too, grown by neglect, and, above the round bookish glasses, black Russian eyebrows in need of a trim.

  She has stopped in the doorway of that room whose quality of doomed penance makes even seasoned visitors, even family, pause and reconsider.

  A long silence: digesting a poem, he raises a finger in her direction, but not his head.

  “Dad, I’m spending the night at Paula’s. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

  He doesn’t seem to hear. Then, slowly, the head comes up, blinking her in; it is always a long way back for him. In the past eight years, his son’s killer has gone to prison, been released, and disappeared somewhere, maybe to his own little hell. But here at home none of it has made any difference that Emma can see, except for the beard.

  “Let me read you something,” her father says, with more intensity than the occasion requires.

  In the window behind him, past the huge dusk-shadowed limbs of the old oak that has stood in the yard since God knows when, Emma observes the glowing brake lights of her best friend’s car.

  “Dad—”

  “Just the first couple of lines. Her name was Katherine Philips.”

  “Dad, I’m going, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Imperceptibly his head falls back, as if by interrupting his train of morbid thought and robbing him of his feeling (though she wants to point out that the feeling isn’t really his but rather belongs to just another dead writer) she has cruelly cut him off from his one source of comfort. Stung, his liquid dark eyes quickly drop back to his book, and a guilty heat begins to creep up her face. He’s Sisyphus, for Christ’s sake, can’t she see? And once again, selfish girl, she’s chosen not to help him climb his mountain.

  She leaves him there and goes outside.

  This time of year, late fall, the dusk is as dark as night. From Paula’s car, she glances back and sees her mother watching from the open front door. Just watching. Backlit, wearing a stylish cardigan, her blond hair expensively cut: outwardly, at forty-three, the talented and successful garden designer that some of the people of Wyndham Falls still remember from the days before the tragedy.

  And yet, upon closer inspection, there’s something a bit off about her. She isn’t waving and calling out “Have a good time, girls!” like the other mothers. Instead she murmurs, so softly it’s like a wounded bird spiraling toward you in the dusk, “Be careful!” Followed by the totally unnecessary “Drive safely!” Which makes her daughter want to hug her, and also to throttle her. Because it’s been like this for so long—half Emma’s entire life—that the memory of that earlier, supposedly happy time is like an old sheet that’s been washed too many times: thin, stained, torn, in places translucent—you can see right through it.

  And that’s what life is now.

  Her mother, Grace Learner, turns, closes the door. Shut up again, the house is briefly no more than it would seem to be—a “dignified” old Colonial, according to the Realtor, who in a few years will unsuccessfully put it on the market.

  Smell of exhaust: Paula waiting. But Emma can’t bring herself to leave anymore. Continues to stand hypnotized by the scene, a frozen lake studded with frozen lives, her gaze pulled back through the black limbs to the glaring window, where her father still stands by the bookshelf reading poems that exist only thanks to the deaths of children.

  And in a few moments, as she already knows will happen, her mother appears in the doorway of her father’s room and stands there waiting, as earlier her last living child waited, for the man of the house to look up from his tears and recognize her.

  DWIGHT

  AFTER WORK, I go home and take a long shower. I hold myself as still as possible and let the hard, calcified water come down. Then I put on a terry-cloth robe and head for the kitchen to get myself the evening’s first beer.

  The house is empty when I enter the bathroom, but it isn’t empty when I come out. The sense I have of another man in my house is kinetic and alarming: I feel him before I see him. My muscles tighten, and I take small, charged steps to the edge of the living room.

  But, to my confusion, instead of a stranger wielding a kitchen knife or carrying off my TV, what I find is a handsome, leanly muscular, not very clean young man sitting on my sofa, his long legs splayed before him.

  I stand in shock. With his mop of greasy sand-colored hair, prominent cheekbones, and wide-apart eyes, the young man looks like his mother, except for the dimple in his chin that’s mine.

  “You left the door
unlocked.”

  We haven’t seen or spoken to each other in twelve years. His voice now not high and sweet as when he was a boy but a sandpaper dirge, deep and a little flat. (Missed that, I think with a sodden feeling in my chest—and his first shave, his high-school graduation, and every other thing he’s gone and lived through without me.) His tone, for starters, as if I’ve just accused him of something, though I haven’t.

  I take a few moments to compose myself as best I can.

  “How are you, Sam?”

  The question may be too existential for his taste: he sits looking at his hands.

  “You thirsty?” I hear myself persisting. “Want something to drink?”

  He is ten years old again, lying in bed in our house in Box Corner. Outside it’s snowing and the sun is just coming up, but you can’t feel any warmth behind the snow. I help him under the covers, his smell so innocent I can’t believe I ever had a hand in the making of him. I tell him to go back to sleep. Everything will be fine, I say, though it isn’t and hasn’t been for a long time and, indeed, never will be again. And Sam believes me. He asks if I’ll take him sledding later, and I promise I will. And then he closes his eyes and I kiss him goodbye and step out into the hallway, where the face of what I’ve done and whom I’ve hurt is waiting for me.

  And that is the end, and the beginning.

  “D’you have any beer?” he asks now.

  In the kitchen, out of his sight, I lean against the wall.

  The refrigerator with its undrunk bottles and cool bright-lit air: sometimes this is all you find yourself trying to get to.

  I get there, and bring back two bottles of beer.

  He’s pulled in his legs, is sitting up now like a guest. Staring at his hands, which are as dirty as a boy’s. Nothing looking right to him in my rented California house, but then why should it?

  I hand him a beer and sit across from him, not too close to scare anybody. An anxious penny taste on my tongue. My hands aching with the need to touch him.

  “So. How’s school?” A stab at general conversation, to give myself a fighting chance. A safe enough place to start, it would seem.

  “I left.” He says this to his hands, quietly.

  I sit looking at him, dumb as a stick.

  “There was a fight.”

  He takes a deep, needy swallow of beer. Angrily he wipes the sweating bottle on his T-shirt, leaving a wet spot.

  “In a bar.”

  He swallows more beer and stares at his hands again.

  “This guy hit me from behind, and I …” He shakes his head. “I just kind of lost it.”

  “Lost it how?”

  Now, solemnly, he nods—a gesture so out of sync with himself and the story he’s telling that my heartbeat lurches with a panicked clamor into my head.

  “I hit him with a baseball bat,” he says.

  “What?”

  “He came at me first.”

  “A bat? Jesus, Sam, are you out of your mind? How bad was he hurt? Was he conscious? Bleeding?”

  “He got up and walked out on his own.” His voice has turned suddenly stiff, and he’s blushing—from shame, I imagine, at having to admit to me, of all people, how badly he lost control of himself.

  I breathe out, feeling my pulse slow a notch. “Did anybody press charges?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God. Christ, you’re lucky.”

  His eyes snap up and fix on me, bright and hard with disgust.

  The room is silent. I watch my neighbor, Ramón Hernandez, drive past my window and park in front of his house.

  Sam gets up. I almost say something to stop him, but then I see that he’s not actually going anywhere: his shoulders are hunched in defeat, and he’s left his duffel behind. Halfway to the front door he stops and turns, aimless—not old or brave or mean enough, I’d swear, to have attacked another man with a baseball bat in a bar.

  “I wanted to hurt him.”

  His voice is so quiet I can’t be certain I’ve heard him correctly.

  “What?”

  He looks away and doesn’t repeat the remark.

  “Does your mother know?”

  “She’s got enough on her plate.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Nothing. I just want to take a shower, okay? I’ve been on a bus for three days, and I just want to take a shower, if that’s okay with you.”

  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

  FROM 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.