Sam watches his mother’s eyes peel open in the dimly glowing darkness. From two feet away, he can see the whites of her eyes shining like lights across a river at night.
“So you can talk to me or not talk to me. It’s been a long time, and I guess I doubt you’re going to start now. You can let me in or you can keep sitting there in silence, hour after hour. But one way or another, Sam, you’re going to need me. Because I’m here. I’ve always been here. It’s the one thing I’m probably any good at, just being here for you and loving you a whole lot. I’m good at it. I’ll be here for you, and I’ll love you, Sam, whether you decide to talk to me or not.”
RUTH
IT’S MIDDAY when they drive up to the house. The sun floats high and bright over the trees. Door to door, between car and plane, the overnight journey from California has taken fourteen hours.
She gets out of the car, and then Sam does. Wordlessly he lifts his duffel and her carry-on from the trunk and walks to the front porch. She follows, her head gauzed with exhaustion yet still somehow perceiving the lawn’s emerald-green depth, from recent rain or heavy dewfall, and the scattering of rabbit pellets by the three wooden stairs, and the deer trace of rubbed-off bark on the taller of the two oaks separating her property from the Newmans’ next door. A clinging scent in the air of sunbaked compost. The newspaper in its clear Baggie sleeve lying in the gravel driveway. The kind of noticing you do if it isn’t really your house. As maybe it isn’t anymore. Now that her son has proved in every way that matters that he’s no longer a child—legally, she remembers Dean Burris saying; and legally?, she remembers herself asking—maybe the house is trying to tell her something. Like Get out.
Or maybe she just needs some sleep.
Inside, the pile of mail has climbed past the door sweep. Health care, mostly, and junky catalogs. Living alone, one becomes an expert on the uninvited documents that assault the home, the fusillade of news, tidings, offerings, demands—the grim, the costly, the cheap, the salutary, the redundant, the offensive, the cold-blooded, the hysterical, the superficial. The superficial are best, in her opinion, because you can read them in the checkout line at the supermarket or on the toilet and feel just fine about yourself.
Sam has stepped over the mail and started up the stairs, a bag in each hand. A man in her house again, she recognizes; or an almost-man. She thinks of Norris and internally shakes her head. Bending down over the unlit bonfire at her feet, she begins gathering up the envelopes, magazines, flyers. Thinking, So many trees. Seeing, in a flash of autumnal self-consciousness, this unvarnished, refracted image of herself: middle-aged, twice-divorced, sick and alone, picking crap off the floor. Exposed before her son. A truth that causes her to rise too quickly, surfacing like a flailing diver sure to get the bends, one knee audibly cracking, until the fraught contents of her head feel sucked down into a woozy vacuum and she has to reach a hand out to the nearest wall to steady herself.
“Mom?”
She wills herself back into focus: Sam, halfway up the stairs, staring at her.
“You okay?”
“Just a little tired.”
About as many words as they’ve exchanged in the past six hours. Still, for a moment that beautiful worried face of his, unwittingly expressing love, appears childlike again.
He turns and continues up the stairs. She stands listening to the creaking of his footsteps along the hall and into her room, the light thump as he sets down her bag. Then his gangplank passage to his own room, and the closing of the door.
And that’s the last she sees of him through the afternoon and well into the next day. He doesn’t emerge in the morning to eat breakfast. Doesn’t, as far as she can tell, make a trip to the bathroom. She supposes he’s still on West Coast time, but then she’s forced to remind herself that these are the same hours he’s always kept at home.
She has no idea what he does in his room hour after hour. An active young man, a gifted athlete, firmly enclosed now in a twelve-by-fourteen box, with a student’s desk and chair, a twin bed, an outdated stereo, a shelf full of baseball trophies, and Red Sox posters and memorabilia from the dark eternal days before the miracle championship. A sweet little cell, if not quite innocent. What alarms her above anything else is the quickness of this move toward self-imprisonment. As if he knows something she does not, sees a future for himself that she is too cowardly or deluded to face.
These thoughts come to her mostly in the car as she rides to the supermarket, while roaming the wide air-conditioned aisles with the other country moms, in her kitchen as she goes from cupboard to refrigerator to pantry disgorging and shelving the contents of her brown paper bags. Everything for two now. Too bad, isn’t it, how the things that one has so long prayed for never do happen the way one wants them to, and never without a price.
EMMA
JUST THREE DAYS INTO IT, and a routine has already been established. The woodpecker rapping of her mother’s knuckles on her door wake her at seven sharp. She experiences again the cloudy out-of-bodyness of being reborn in her old room, a cautionary figure pulled together not out of cells but of memory fragments beyond her ken.
She gets up slowly. Her mother has gone downstairs to the kitchen. The jeans she pulls on show dirt stains from yesterday’s work.
They fix their own bowls of cereal and mugs of coffee. As if—some new reality show—they have no recollection of each other’s habits, no proof, are simply in residence like tourists at a hostel.
The first morning her mother made French toast. But when the food went untouched the treaty was tacitly rewritten on the spot: Okay, so it will be like this. Easier for everybody. A commonwealth of two—independent but related.
Now while Emma reads The Huffington Post on her laptop, standing at the counter, her mother skims one of the local papers at the table. Now like rival figure skaters they perform an elaborate pas de deux in front of the refrigerator and make diplomatic way for each other at the compost bin. Now they both listen in their own free space to the sound of birdsong infiltrating the kitchen from the yard outside, and this, at least, is not a point of contention.
Through the window Emma can see chickadees and a cardinal arranged on the truncated perches of the clear plastic feeder, happily pecking away. The seed compartment full. And she remembers a couple of years when her mother let the feeders go empty and all the birds left. And she remembers those same years when her mother stopped weeding the garden or pruning the hedges or having the lawn mowed, and the neighbors shook their heads and said How sad and looked the other way. People habitually remark that they understand how such things happen, but the fact is that no one does. And then Emma went off to college—not so far away, according to Google, just sixty-one miles and still in the state of Connecticut—and stopped coming home, and sometime in there her father left, too, and her mother woke up from a ten-year coma with her eviscerated heart rebuilt out of stone.
The neighbors have come back; that’s what her mother claims, anyway.
The house is in decent order now. Of course, it’s slowly falling apart like everything else, but in an orderly way.
Her mother is strong now—stronger than all those people who were never destroyed.
That emotionally paralyzed woman who used to add, with humiliating frequency, Be careful! and Drive safely! to every second utterance, what of her? Sorry, friend, no more. A superhero has moved into the house and replaced her. Wears an exoskeleton, where before all was vulnerable flesh. Lives aboveground instead of under. Moves only and ever forward.
Witness, for example, the following email, received in March:
Emma,
After much thought, I am writing to tell you that I will need you to come home this summer and help me with my business. As you know, it’s the most important season of the year, and I’m already shorthanded and can’t afford to give up any jobs or hire more labor, even on a part-time basis. I need someone I can trust to help me.
Making this demand on you is a last resort. I�
��m aware that you had other plans, and that you would prefer not to spend a weekend with me, let alone a summer. But I have no choice. Over the last few years your father has made a series of catastrophic decisions that have cost him a significant and respected academic career and any kind of responsible stability in life. There are reasons, and we’ve been over this and I know that your sympathy for both of us is mostly used up. But you must understand how his actions have impoverished us all. The fact is that for us to continue sending you to Yale, even with your scholarship and work study, it falls to me to make the hard decisions that are more than just emotional reactions to what life has done to us as a family.
You will fight me on this, I can already hear you. But it’s time to stop pointing fingers, Emma. The situation is what it is and I need your help, and, whatever you say, I believe it will do you good to give it. We can’t sit around waiting for your father to recover, because that may not happen.
As soon as you can, please email me the date of your last exam in May, so I’ll know when to expect you. I’ll get your room ready and promise to give you as much space as possible. Try to see that I love you as much now as ever.
Mom
So this is the battleground, now that she has indeed come home to help. Emma feels like a fool for not having seen it taking shape. That her mother’s unsentimental exit from griefhood should leave behind such tender bitterness in herself. That a stone heart can seem so hatefully selfish, just by being stone. That the old, crippling family wound has been so long in existence that it’s warped her, too, become a kind of addiction, a scavenged oil drum at which, whenever she needs an enemy, she might warm her frozen hands over the flame of her mother’s anguish.
• • •
By a quarter to eight they’re in the car—her mother’s Volvo, a newer version of the wagon she drove home from college—heading to the first job. Emma cracks the window, letting the morning’s spring coolness into the car, testing its firmness and clarity, despite the unsparing light that’s like looking through a pane of frosted glass. A hard breath taken into the lungs: washing out the unsaid things that seem to clot any room, even this moving one, in which they find themselves together.
“Polly Jamison can be difficult,” her mother remarks.
Emma studies her, there behind the wheel. An attractive woman—this she can appreciate on the surface. Hair still blond, bones still elegant. A gardener’s roughened hands, with a narrow circumference of paler, faintly indented flesh on the left ring finger, where for twenty-one years her wedding band used to be. Wearing today a slate-colored fleece top, fitted dark twill pants, and green rubber gardener’s clogs. She could be forty or even less, except for those hands and the burls of pain lines at the corners of her eyes.
“Unfortunately, I’m going to have to leave you there and get over to the Foleys’,” her mother says. “Their son’s getting married behind their house in two weeks and they’re beside themselves.”
Emma looks out her window: they are entering Bow Mills.
“I’m not qualified to work on my own. Nobody hired me.”
“You’ll do fine. The work isn’t complicated. Hector and his crew will be laying the bluestone. Just keep an eye on them, mulch around the trees, do the regular upkeep on the flower beds. Nothing fancy. The snowdrops and the Glenn Dale azaleas need special attention. If Mrs. Jamison starts complaining about the Carpinus, just tell her to give me a call on my cell.”
“Carpinus?”
“The hornbeams. She wants to have them severely cut back so they look what she calls French. But it’s not French, it’s just ugly, and I won’t do it.”
Emma watches the small green road signs go by. The names entering her without meaning, though they are not unfamiliar: Larch Road. The Wheldons live there, she remembers, or used to, she doesn’t know anymore.… And now the memory comes back, sitting in the backseat of the old car with her dog Sallie as her father drives her to Mrs. Wheldon’s house for a piano lesson. A fall morning, because of the colors. In the months after Josh. She is small again, and young, and the notes she misplays that day at Mrs. Wheldon’s come back, too. And Mrs. Wheldon herself, touching her shoulder with perhaps extra care. And Sam … Now Emma is older, they all are; it happens so quickly and so slowly. Sallie, too, is dead. It’s that night in Falls Village with Sam again, and she is with him again, he’s inside her and they never have to say a word, not to each other.… And now she sees plainly how easy it is to despise oneself, how the mind moves without regret or conscience, its own animal, from death and loss to the color of leaves to the sound of broken music to the feel of a boy’s skin, as if all of it were equal.
She opens her window more, and the air rushes across her face.
Her father was brave that day. Brave for taking her to a piano lesson when there was no reason anymore to do anything.
His bravery, and the waste of it, makes her feel like crying.
“Here we are,” says her mother.
They turn into a driveway leading to a newly built Colonial. The tar dark and fresh. Parked in front of the house are a Lexus and a pickup truck loaded with roughly cut pavers of bluestone.
The house is white like their house in Wyndham Falls, with the same split-rail fencing. But this house has nothing wrong with it. It just sits there, immaculate and scarless. The compact front yard populated with knee-high figurines of deer, raccoons, and woodchucks made out of wrought iron.
“Mom, I don’t feel well. I need to go back.”
“It’s a job, Em,” says her mother quietly. “Just a job.”
Silence. And she gets out of the car. She closes the door and her mother drives away.
SAM
HIS THIRD DAY BACK.
By agreement, they leave after breakfast. He doesn’t own a car so they take hers, which will leave him sitting in the passenger seat for an hour and a quarter tugging at his shirt collar, nothing to do but listen to NPR (her choice), first the news and then the classical music.
She’s the chief today, in case there was any doubt. He shaved because she asked him to. Wore the shirt she wanted. Would’ve eaten the eggs she cooked if he could have done so without throwing up. His sincerity lies most of all in wishing not to make things worse than they already are.
They drive out of Bow Mills to Route 44. The morning overcast, the sky the color of fresh-dried cement. Light so sharp there’s no comfortable place to look but at solid things, all of which are moving.
Routes 44, 8, and 7 are the roads over which his life has flowed. Pastoral views occasionally, but just as often not. Most of the farms rough and mechanical when looked at up close, mud-caked, gone to rust, built on the wrong side of the economy. Houses with vinyl siding instead of real wood.
Pointing down a lane running toward a marsh where long ago he caught frogs with a boy named Eddie Tibbet, his mother says, “Your stepfather is seeing a woman named Wanda Shoemaker. I think he’s going to marry her. Her house is about half a mile up that way.”
They’ve passed the lane, continued east. Ahead, a mail truck is pulled to the side of the road, no one anywhere near it, as if the postman just decided to hell with it and left.
“Norris would like to see you,” his mother says. “He wanted me specifically to tell you that.”
Sam opens the glove box, closes it.
“He has his foibles like anybody else. But he really cares about you, you know.”
Foibles. Could be funny, attached to somebody else’s life. He looks out his window. The side of 44 shunting past, a pulled string of already paid visits ticking by. He is still young, he knows this empirically, but it feels as if there isn’t enough room inside him to hold all these lost things.
It comes rising in him then, nothing he can do to silence it: “I’m sorry you’re alone, Mom.”
He means this more than he can express, would stake his life on it. But she just turns her head and stares at him as if he’s being sarcastic or cruel. Which, in turn, feels cruel to him.
> The car begins to drift onto the shoulder. Her gaze snaps back toward the road. On track again but still agitated, she reaches an arm into the backseat, fumbles in her purse, slips a pair of big designer sunglasses over her eyes that have begun to turn watery. “Let’s worry about you,” she says briskly.
She thumbs the volume on the radio higher, ending the exchange. He might as well have stabbed her.
And 44 is not 44 anymore; it has opened up, turned semi-industrial. The farms gone, the big estates and little shotgun houses. All that looking and he wasn’t paying attention. He misses what he didn’t know he loved. There are signs for Hartford now, where they will cross the river and merge onto 84. There are signs for UConn.
“Mom, I’m sorry.”
He means for all of it this time. Himself. The whole fucking package. She won’t look at him again, but her hand comes out and pats his knee.
They ride like that, his love and worry pushing against the back of his throat, a swallowed shout, across the wide blue-metal river and closer, listening to the music.
The notes are familiar: piano, violin, viola, cello. Like the polished green stone egg he used to keep in a lockbox under his bed: he can’t see an egg now, or for that matter a bird, without thinking about it, though it was never anything but stone.
The name of the piece—“The Trout”—comes to him in a flash, a memory more of muscle than mind. Until he grew old enough to campaign successfully for something more fun, she used to play it on the stereo in his room every single night as he was fading off to sleep.
Northwest Corner Page 12