Northwest Corner (15 page)

She drives, imagining turning west and not stopping; imagining being like that. All spring for American Studies she’s been reading firsthand accounts of women—pioneers, freed slaves, Native Americans, line cooks, horse breakers, prostitutes, factory workers, Civil War nurses, even a midget in an early American circus—who for one reason or another set out westward into the American unknown. And in most cases it was only after this radical displacement that they found voices with which to speak of what had happened to them. And the difference, the enormous gulf in meaning and actuality,
between these voices and the historical silence that they otherwise inhabited is what moves her most keenly; how what made their lives bearable lay not so much in their surviving their literal experiences, however brutal or good, or in the stories they eventually came to tell (if they were lucky), as in their somehow learning to navigate the terrible isolation before and after the telling, the unspeakable, ingrown silence. It’s so easy to get swallowed up by the life you never expected to have. To just disappear. To live inside this great white whale of yourself and never have a vision of where you might be going, or where you’ve already been, or why.

She comes back to reality just as the car is entering Winsted. Not a long journey after all, not as she hoped it would be. A Chevy dealership and a Sunoco station and a diner with a
HELP WANTED
sign posted on the glass door. A mother with dark-red hair and pale unhealthy skin pushing her baby in a stroller with a loose front wheel: the stroller wobbles and swerves, wobbles and swerves, and the mother does not stop.

A streetlight, and Emma turns northwest, onto Route 44. Soon enough, on the left, a sign for Rugg Brook Reservoir. Then the sign is a disappearing eye chart in her mirror and she’s driving on, her body but not her mind—her mind stuck back in a morning walking around that reservoir with her father and brother. Josh in the lead playing Indian scout, having discovered a deer floating on its side at the water’s edge, its abdomen a swallowed brown globe. Hideous and gross, but he was thrilled, his narrow shoulders quivering with fascination. He was poking the bloated carcass with a long sharp stick, probing and investigating, trying to make it bleed, when their father, roaring up from behind, tore the stick out of his hands, shouting,
Don’t touch it! Leave the dead in peace!

A disturbingly uncontrolled reaction coming from an adult, a father, it strikes her now, something too desperate already there, adrift and fearful, excruciatingly prescient. Nothing she wants to remember, driving past the sign for Millbrook Road and pushing on, going inexorably home.

And the memory, and her failed attempt to escape it, leads to another recollection, as she continues along 44, seeing more and more signs of the familiar, the protective moat of distance between her and her mother good and breached now: walking into Josh’s room one afternoon and finding him cradling one of his most prized possessions, an antique bowl-shaped gold pan, the gift of an eccentric uncle. He used to keep it in a silk-lined box on the shelf above his bed. The bowl made not of metal, as one might have expected, but of some low-grade ceramic, with distinctive grooves and runnels to allow the gravel and silt to sluice off, leaving the gold nuggets and the dust behind. And Josh, thorough and secretive as ever, had done his homework. At the age of ten, he could tell you all about the gold rush and the lives of the prospectors and the harsh anarchic conditions in the mining towns of Northern California. He knew enough about that lost world to invent a future for himself in which one day, on a break while touring San Francisco with the New York Philharmonic, he would drive inland and visit one of the original mining ghost towns and, pulling his antique miner’s bowl out of his authentic turn-of-the-century miner’s rucksack, do a little panning himself. Because there was still gold to be found coming out of that earth, he was sure of it. You could not convince him otherwise.

And this, thinks Emma—entering now, slow as she can go, the town of Wyndham Falls and circling the green—is what happens when your life is taken before your eleventh birthday. No one can argue with you anymore, or prove you wrong, or celebrate your genius, or love your imagination more than you do, or make there be gold where there isn’t any, or discover that gold, or be with you as you look for it full of hope, on your knees, panning in that wide, rushing river that still runs out of the mountains.

SAM

I
N THE AIRPLANE CABIN
, the lights are off. His mother’s eyes are closed. He thinks she’s asleep until, in a soft, middle-of-the-night voice, her eyes flutteringly sealed, she begins to talk.

“I’ve been sitting here wondering what you could have been thinking when you hurt that other boy. The violence of it still shocks me. That you could do something like that. But I don’t believe you’re a person who would ever want to hurt someone else. I don’t believe that. I know you, Sam, and that’s not you. You’re not a person who would ever want to hurt another person. I’ve never believed that about you, and I’m never going to.”

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

I
T’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

J
UST 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.