Her fingers begin to tap out the rhythm on his knee.
“Remember this?”
He remembers. Schubert was his age when he composed it, though it would not be published until after his death.
RUTH
COLLEGE IS OVER for the year. All month long, commencement ceremonies for the various schools, self-congratulatory speeches given and prizes bestowed, caps tossed into the air. She performed the rite herself once, here in Storrs, back somewhere in the sixteenth century. She can still vaguely recall the days after the big hurrah, end upon beginning, the stupor of it, a public hangover.
Youth’s calendar: the arrogant assumption that there will always be time to recover.
It was around that time, she can’t forget, that she first moved in with Dwight.
The admissions-building parking lot is two-thirds empty. She and Sam walk across the lined hardtop to the building’s entrance, the clouded sun casting a white haze so harsh that nothing seems to hold any defined shape for more than a second or two. The UConn campus—seemingly twice the size and ten times as modern as when she was a student—strikes her as eerily hushed, postmortem.
Dean Burris said that he could see them in his office at eleven-thirty. It is twenty past now, and they walk squinting in the light and through the glass doors that read GORDON W. TASKER ADMISSIONS BUILDING, up the stairs to the second floor. She gives their names to a middle-aged woman with a matronly perm and a dignified air, whose desk has been transformed into an altar of family photographs. The woman has many children and grandchildren, Ruth observes, and they form a family like any other, except that, framed and arranged in this manner, this grandmotherly presence watching over them day after day, they appear safer and more benevolent than most.
“He’ll be with you in a couple of minutes,” the woman says.
“Thank you.”
They sit on a sofa to wait. The grandmother behind the desk returns to her keyboard. Every so often Ruth hears a resonant ping as a new email arrives, or a whoosh as another message is fired out into the academic ether.
Sam lifts a copy of Campus magazine off the glass-topped table. She watches him peripherally, sensing his nerves raised like goose bumps on the surface of his skin; or maybe they’re hers. He spends a minute noisily turning pages, then drops the magazine on the table as if he’s just realized that he does not, in fact, know how to read.
His folded athlete’s legs reach almost to the edge of the glass coffee table. An animal designed to run, here held captive. Even walking across the parking lot, he seemed on the verge of sprinting, each long, fluid stride finished high on the ball of the foot, as if about to take off at full speed in any direction but the one in which she was leading him. As if the possibility of running away is never far from his thoughts.
Is this some recent behavioral change, forged in unhappiness, anger, guilt? she wonders. Or maybe it’s always been there and she’s just missed it, along with so much else.
Once again the inadequacy of her knowledge of him looms before her, a crash-test dummy of maternal defeat. Of course, there have been victories, too, along the way, but in the parenting game victories and defeats never do feel or mean the same thing. They are not equal in terms of consequence. This is something that Dwight has never owned up to: he’s a man who has mistaken defeat for victory too many times to count. Which only makes Sam’s decision to seek him out in California that much harder for her to accept. Why? Looking for what? Safety? Absolution? A big brother in disgrace? Did he find any or all of it?
She will be the last to know. The only certain thing is that, sure as she’s his mother, his not coming to her first is a judgment on her as a mother. She can feel the weight of his verdict without yet knowing the sentence imposed, the cost. Though that knowledge is inevitable, she has no doubt.
“Dean Burris will see you now.”
Ruth looks up. The woman, dignified grandmother that she is, standing there, smiling down at them, a much older version of those pretty little girls in the photographs on her desk. And anyone can see that the sentiment behind her smile is not false. That it is sincere. It must be genetic, then, a smile like this, a sense of family like this, some lovely tree whose curled roots reach deep down into time past, all the generations pulling for one another, and whose strong, healthy branches grow out into the time to come, the time not yet known, ready to bear fruit.
Or else it’s just a smile.
In any event, Ruth can see in the woman’s face—interesting, isn’t it, how this once and future smile manages to hold so many questions—that Sam is both a prize and a consternation to her: what can this nice-looking young man have done wrong?
Ruth gets to her feet. She makes sure that her purse strap is on her shoulder, and then she gives her son the look that says It’s time to stand up. And he stands up. No, she hasn’t completely lost control. He unfolds his legs and becomes taller than her again, more powerful, despite his frightened, flicking eyes.
We’re all scared, she wants to tell him. Every single one of us, all the time. That’s what makes us family.
SAM
LATER, HIS IMPRESSIONS of the dean and their seventeen-minute meeting will be obscured, made hazy, by what follows. The dean in his well-appointed office with the leather chairs, the Native American art, and the high-end relaxer toy with the row of five silver balls hanging by fishing line from an ebony wood frame.
Later, after the visit to the hospital, what he will retain most concretely from his meeting with Chas Burris, Dean of Students, is a piece of fine stationery, cream-colored with a visible weave and the navy-blue UConn letterhead above the dean’s name in fourteen-point lettering, on which the dean himself has written in blue-black fountain-pen ink the names Nic Bellic, Mirko & Sonja Bellic, the family’s address and phone number in Colchester, Connecticut, as well as the words Hartford Hospital ICU; and beneath that, demarcated by a significantly drawn line, the names Jack Cutter and Cutter & Associates of Canaan, Connecticut, and another phone number.
And only later, after the hospital, sequestered once again in the privacy of his childhood room, in his mother’s house in Bow Mills, will Sam come to fully appreciate, if that’s the word, the artful summing up of his late adolescence and early adulthood that the dean’s information sheet has so efficiently achieved.
Leaving the dean’s office with his mother, he is careful to hold the paper at the edges. It is his diploma, after all, the only one he’s ever likely to receive, and it feels crucially important to him not to stain it with his sweaty fingerprints.
DWIGHT
THE REST OF THE WEEK PASSES. I can give no decent accounting of the experience except to say that my son isn’t in it. He is gone from my house and from my place of work, from the passenger seat of my car, from the manicured softball diamond on which we as mutants frolic and fail, from the little spit of backyard sod where I grill my steaks. As if he was a dream—nothing Hallmark, no Iron John epiphanies of male bonding, no movie fireworks, tears, or hugs, just a rogue sort of dream that overtook me for a couple of weeks and then evaporated on waking. The status quo resumed. He is gone, and it’s as if each day holds less of him, Wednesday a thimble, Thursday a drop, till by Friday there is no trace left.
And, as I walk my aisles and chart my numbers and stack my Italianmade bocce sets and polish my name tag and consider my prostate and the love life that I no longer seem to have, the questions keep returning, the great unknowns above all others, a multipronged koan designed, I’m coming to suspect, less to enlighten than to torture: How could I have let him leave without telling him anything that mattered? Without looking out for him more and caring for him better? Without paying more scrupulous attention to what now threatens him? Without insisting on going with him and holding on?
Have I learned nothing?
Of course, there was a time in my life when merely not perpetrating direct harm against another individual—let alone my son, or another’s—might have seemed a kind of victory for me. But
if I ever truly believed such a thing, I do not believe it anymore. You cannot reach fifty years of age and still think that nothing is better than something, unless you are a fool as well as an asshole. Despite what the mathematicians assure us, zero is not a meaningful number in real life.
SAM
HE LEAVES HIS MOTHER in the main lobby downstairs. He insists; she has followed him enough. There is a brief argument and then, literally midsentence, she surrenders. Simply stops talking and stares down at the floor, her hands fluttering open of their own volition, as if she’s just released her final hold on the hope she once had for him.
In the steerage elevator, pressed aside by a scrub-clad resident with an unoccupied gurney, he begins to lose solidity. His body, all he’s ever had going for him really, feels hollowed out from the inside; his legs are tubes. The urge to turn back is suddenly acute, but he can only keep rising. His floor dings, and for a long moment he stands disoriented before the multiple directional signs, the wide fluorescent corridors. A crossroads. Then to his right the double doors with the small viewing windows open automatically outward, and two residents in blue paper gowns and hair and shoe covers walk out briskly, one of them saying to the other, “What the hell’s keeping those labs?” in a tone of exhausted complaint, the other replying, “Are you scrubbing for the three o’clock?” They turn down the central corridor, their footsteps strangely inaudible. In their wake the doors to the ICU linger open, a mouth waiting to devour him.
Slipping in, Sam sees a bustling nurses’ station at the center of a large open unit, an orderly chaos of half-curtained beds and portable machines. And he can hear, above the sourceless pings and whispers and a violently discordant note of laughter, the bellows-like breathing of a ventilator.
• • •
Of the four paper-gowned medical professionals behind the nurses’ station—who are supposed to interrogate him, he knows, and if he is not related to the patient demand that he leave the premises—two are perusing medical records on computer terminals, another is organizing a rolling cart of urine jugs, and the last is on the phone asking for one order of red-dal curry and two of tikka masala.
Ignored by them, he floats past. A phantom. He finds Nic Bellic’s chart posted two-thirds of the way down the right-side corridor. There is no one in the vicinity. The curtain making an island of the sickbed is partially pulled back, as if someone has recently passed through.
A body lies on the bed. He barely recognizes the face that he only ever saw once. The intimacy is too stark: a thick clear tube runs out of the young man’s gaping mouth. The lips are essentially blue. A thin, wormlike feeding tube runs through one of the dilated nostrils. An IV is threaded into an engorged vein on the back of his right hand, half an inch of blood backing up the dripping saline. Nic Bellic is unconscious or asleep, so heavily sedated that the silent waves of heartbeat on the monitor appear to be breaking in slow motion over an invisible beach in a country that does not exist. Some kind of primitive, sick video game is what it looks like. Maybe he is good-looking, or maybe he is more than that, actually good; with his eyes closed it is impossible to tell.
“You family?”
The large black woman in the white nurse’s uniform, voice from the Islands, brushes past him and twists a plastic ring on the IV. Only when he hesitates in answering does she turn and look him full in the face.
Like being picked out of a lineup. Him. That one there. It was him.
“No.”
“Can’t stay, then. Not with no gown on you, neither.”
“Can you tell me, is he going to be okay?”
She reaches bluntly past him and pulls the curtain wider: an invitation for him to leave now while things are still peaceful.
“Okay? Hmm. Sepsis not okay—no, mister. But the doctors, they be doing what they can.”
EMMA
SHE IS STILL BAGGING the leavings of the day’s work—the beggar’s harvest of snapped twigs, hacked branches, soil-clumped weeds that she’s pruned, raked, plucked since morning—when she sees the car pull into the driveway and her mother get out. Mrs. Jamison appears at once, grabbing Grace Learner’s elbow and leading her to the bluestone path that Hector and his crew laid earlier in the day.
“The edges are too high,” the woman complains. “There, you see what I’m talking about? Someone could trip and break an ankle.”
Someone like her, she means.
“Don’t worry. We’ll build up around them tomorrow.”
“I am worried, Grace. I’m not happy.”
“It will be dealt with, Polly. All right? Hector will be back first thing in the morning, and we will deal with it.”
A voice that Emma can’t remember hearing from her mother in years, if at all: a bulwark voice, not unfriendly but hard as bluestone, that declares, politely, Don’t fuck with me if you know what’s good for you.
In any event, effective. With an indignant sniff, Mrs. Jamison retreats to her unblemished house and is not seen again that afternoon.
Lawn sack filled, Emma hauls it and a second one across the grass and heaves them into the leaf-strewn back of the Volvo. They’ll take it all back to Pine Creek Road and add it to her mother’s compost pile, which by summer’s end will be a mountain of rot. (Mrs. Jamison has made it perfectly clear that she does not believe in compost.)
They start for home.
A few minutes into the journey, her mother says, “I’d fire her tomorrow if we didn’t need the money. Did she harass you?”
“Not actively.”
It’s sort of funny, and her mother sort of smiles.
They return to staring out their respective windows. The white, depthless sky has darkened and softened since morning; now it looks like rain.
They pass a deer crossing sign. Then a hump of bloody flattened roadkill—a raccoon. They pass a woman and two girls with a Border collie on a leash walking by the side of the road.
She is suddenly, terribly thirsty. She pulls a metal water bottle from her backpack and drinks close to half a liter. Her jeans are filthy, bits of mulch litter her hair. Her fingers ache. New calluses swell her palms.
“Did you get any lunch?” her mother asks.
“Hector had an extra sandwich. Some kind of weird vegetable paste with sprouts.”
“I forgot to tell you he’s a vegan. Kind of surprising for a man who can lift a hundred and fifty pounds of stone with his bare hands, don’t you think?”
Hector Martinez is short but weighs two hundred plus, a sweet bulldog of a man. His boots are made of rubber and something like hemp. Where he gets his protein is a mystery. His crew consists of his two nephews, Luis and Adrian, seventeen and nineteen, string-bean carnivores who struggled throughout the day to lift the smallest slabs of rock. When not bent over their labors, the two boys stared at her ass as if it was a French rose blooming in a desert cave. This went on for hours, lending the day a certain amusing shape.
“I want you to know that I appreciate how hard you’re working,” her mother adds after a while.
“You’re welcome.”
She means it, but her mother just sighs. Formality is a cold distance for them both, Emma sees, as well as a necessary protection.
• • •
She opens her eyes: a gas station, the Volvo parked alongside two pumps.
She must have drifted off. Her mother is pulling her wallet from her purse, getting out of the car.
Emma is so tired she feels drugged. Time seems viscous, the world ticking aloud—a clock knocked off its rhythm.
In the large window of the low-slung building to her right, she can see a poster with brightly dancing dollar signs advertising the state lottery; another for Klondike ice-cream bars; a third for Boost energy drink. And so is she able to recognize the Christie’s Food Mart that years ago replaced Krause’s General Store at the outskirts of Wyndham Falls.
She watches her mother slide her debit card into the pump, pull it out again. Close to three dollars a gallon for regular. She w
atches her mother begin to pump the gas and turn to stare off at the trees and bramble across the road, thinking God knows what.
Emma remembers the old-style pumps from when she was little, the ones you can never find anymore, like mechanical men with unfortunate shoulders, and that delicate echoing bell ringing off the golden, eye-watering gallons as they flowed into her parents’ car.
At the very moment that Josh was being run over and killed by the side of Reservation Road, she was propped on the stinking toilet inside Tod’s Gas & Auto Body, panties round her knees, her mother helping her to pee.
For years afterward, her mother would plead with her father every time they had to fill up the car: You do it. I can’t. I’m sorry, I just can’t.
She watches this same woman, her mother, pumping gas and staring across the road. Till there comes, vibrating along the length of the car, the violent upward snap of the nozzle trigger shutting off the fuel supply. Full, finally. A faint electronic prompt inquires whether a receipt is desired. It is. And her mother gets back into the car.
What can you say? And to what possible end? When something so long wounded in a human being becomes, through time and the gradual unremembering of love, healed.
Except that it isn’t.
The getting out of bed, the getting dressed, the brushing of hair, the washing of dishes, the feeding of birds, the pumping of gas.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
Her mother starts the car. “Long day.”
As they’re pulling out of the station, another car is just pulling in: a dark-green Subaru wagon. The two vehicles move slowly past each other in opposite directions.
Unawares, Emma catches a glimpse inside: dreamlike, the unfolding pictorial vision as clear as a series of magnified stills.
It’s Mrs. Wheldon driving, she would swear.
And Sam Arno riding beside her.
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