Northwest Corner (16 page)

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By a quarter to eight they’re in the car—her mother’s Volvo, a newer version of the wagon she drove home from college—heading to the first job.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

H
IS 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.

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

C
OLLEGE 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.