Northwest Corner (24 page)

SAM

“W
HERE ARE WE?” SHE ASKS
.

“Someplace I used to come when I was a kid.”

He speaks softly, the words weightless; but still his voice seems to ring in the night as if he’s calling her out of some shelter to meet him in the dark. The dark a kind of wilderness, the two of them inside it. He reaches for her hand, feels her lace her fingers through his. No thought to this—thought comes the moment after, his mind running in his heart’s rutted wake.

In his other hand he holds a small flashlight he found in the glove box of his mother’s car. The weak trembling beam lighting in body-length patches the unmarked dirt tracks they’ve driven down to get here, ending now in meadow. Incipient dew gives the thick grass an optimistic shine. Mole tracks cross the field at random. He spots a burrow of some sort, maybe a woodchuck’s. Ahead loom the tall shadows of trees, interspersed with low humps of shrub. He’s lost track of where they are, but guesses it must be somewhere near Dutcher’s Bridge. The Housatonic must be on the other side of the trees. The river of his childhood.

They are the same in this, he wants to believe: born into a place not of their choosing, they carry its fixed but living pattern inked on their skins as they grow and break away, wild for some other home to make. The river remains where it’s always been, moving constantly but never changing, waiting for the inevitable day when they
will come crawling back to its banks in supplication. Because it knows more than they do, and always has.

He can’t remember the last time he was close enough to hear the rippling whisper of its steady flowing—as he can now, holding his breath in the dark, walking beside her.

EMMA

T
HEY REACH THE RIVERBANK
. He lets go of her hand and switches off the flashlight, and for ten seconds that stretch like a hundred the night blacks her vision. She feels on the cusp of panic until the edges of a knowable picture begin to emerge, half-familiar sensations, beauty of detail and scent. Thick ankle-high grass and damp loamy soil underfoot. The tarry water flowing by with its mica flecks and earth whisperings. The long shadows of elderberry shrubs on which clusters of tiny blue-black berries impose islands of bewitching lacquered darkness.

An owl hoots warily in the distance. And she recalls her mother telling her how some indigenous cultures believe that the elder tree offers protection against evil and witches.

Sure
.

Sam’s been staring at the river, but now he turns to look at her. A facet of light appears on one cheek; she has no idea where it’s coming from, but for some reason it moves her deeply.

It’s then that she hears herself asking him the first of the questions she’s brought.

He tells her. Tells the whole thing, and when he’s done she speaks about extenuating circumstances, questions of self-defense. But he is reluctant to talk about excuses or ways out. What he needs to do is draw from his acid pool of self-recrimination a portrait of his own flawed conscience, a drawing intended to posit that, according to
some moral proof of his own reckoning, inside the heart of his violent mistake must live the real person.

Which, if true—the X-ray correct and the guilt earned—then inside the heart of the real person can live only the violent mistake.

She leans closer and kisses the mark of light on his cheek, the unconscious brand of his goodness.

SAM

H
IS HANDS UNDER HER TIGHT-FITTING TOP
, flush against her skin, his fingers piano-scaling her rib cage to the under-stone coolness of her breasts. Kissing her, his tongue deep in her mouth, her taste some herb he can’t name, her tongue silken and firm. Her hair freshly washed, soft as hair can be. Her beauty more resonant than his memory imagined—a mysterious collage of slender but forceful definitions that, under his fingers now, in his mouth, are, at long last, open to him again.

Until she pulls her head back, stands looking at him from inches away: “What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head, tries to kiss her again.

But his heart isn’t in it.

So he is discovered. Betrayed by himself, after two years of dreaming. His physical desire a shameful no-show, the bat again left on his shoulder. He stands before her buried alive by these thoughts—trapped not in reverie but in a lost city whose forced excavation, performed alone under her honest questioning gaze, is hard and painful work that leaves him on the verge of grief.

He’s about to turn away when she reaches out and presses a hand to his cheek.

“Breathe.”

For a moment, he has no idea what she’s talking about.

“Smell that? It’s elderberry.”

And suddenly he smells it in the humid air, emanating from the
shrubs behind: as if her naming the scent is the key that unlocks his knowing it. And with this simple recognition comes an equally simple, and rather vague, memory of his mother baking an elderberry pie. He can’t remember the year, or the pie getting finished, or eating it, or the taste, or whether life was good then or more like it is now; just his mother in the kitchen with her sleeves rolled up, flour dusting her forearms to her elbows, while he sits doing his homework at the kitchen table, a radio playing low.

And over the river a sudden breeze pinches the water’s black skin into intricate flashing scales, like tiny silver minnows leaping in the holographic night—until, as quickly as it’s risen, the breeze dies and the scales are swallowed back into the smooth oil-black liquid, where all is moving as well as still.

He places his hand over Emma’s hand, against his face.

There is still the possibility that she knows him better than he knows himself, can read him without words. Who else, if not her? They who were there by chance when the world went wrong. He doesn’t need to own or claim her, only to hold on to the fact of her. To stand with her on the scented bank of the river, naming the things that can still be named, touching her hand, till the night finally runs out of darkness.

RUTH

F
OR MORE THAN TEN MINUTES
as she finishes her bath, Dwight’s deep regular breathing is the only sound coming from the next room. Not even the drain’s centrifugal rant manages to interrupt his descent into the depths of a calmer place where, for minutes or hours, he might hope to inhabit someone who is not himself. Almost like old times.

She stands in the bathroom rubbing moisturizer on her body—everywhere but on her breasts, which, just these past few days, she’s turned superstitious about touching. She puts on her robe and turbans her hair with a towel. On the robe are forget-me-nots, season-less and charming, giving the impression, in a certain light, if one rules out a host of other factors, that she is every age she’s ever been.

Escaping the mirror, she walks into the next room.

He’s rolled onto his side, toward the middle of the bed. On the pillow by his chin there’s a liver-colored patch of dried blood and a larger absorbed blot of darkened cotton where he’s drooled in his sleep. His bottom lip looks swollen and painful.

She stands watching him. To see him sleeping on this bed again is to see a part of herself that’s never quite woken up. A wave of feeling for that young woman moves her. A part of her is animal, too; neither of them is static. Under his eyelids and rough stubbled cheeks now, the pale, surprisingly hairless skin at his wrists, the powerful twitching shoulders, Pyrrhic battles are still being fought: even in repose, his muscles quiver and rage at invisible enemies, who will never be beaten.

The difference, she is starting to believe despite her instincts, is
that he’s finally learning to live with his hands gripping only his own throat. The only person he dreams of hurting now is himself.

With delicate, almost loving concentration, she unlaces his shoes and pulls them off. She covers him from the waist down with the quilt sewn in the Crown of Thorns pattern that’s come down from her mother’s mother. Like a baby blanket obsessively clutched for too many years, it has turned ragged at the edges and is slowly disintegrating. She covers him with it anyway. And then she turns off the lights and leaves him to sleep in the once familiar darkness.

DWIGHT

I
WAKE IN MY MARRIAGE BED
. It’s deep night or early morning and I find a lamp on the bedside table and switch it on. A quilt is draped across my legs. My shoes have been removed. My mouth aches, and the lower half of my jaw. I turn my head and see an ugly rust-colored smudge where my cut lip’s been pressing against the white pillow while I’ve been sleeping.

Ruth, though not physically present, is all over this room: her needlepoint throw draped over a chair; her TV on a mahogany chest of drawers come down to her from her Aunt Marlene; her ivory bra hanging on the closet doorknob; her shoes with the heels worn down along the inside edge; her silver tray holding two small bottles of lavender water.

Eau-de-vie, I remember calling it once, till Ruth shook her head and with a sly grin said, “I think that’s the liqueur you’re talking about.”

We conceived Sam here. His bassinet stood in the corner by the window so he could watch the stars twinkling up in the blue-black sky if he felt the urge to see other worlds, which he often did. He slept and dreamed under an airplane mobile I put together from a kit.

After a while, I shuffle into the bathroom. Where, hours after the fact, the air still smells of Ruth’s bubble bath—like her, bracing rather than flowery. The scent of a morning walk along a Cape beach in summer, the tide out and the seaweed left to dry on the yellow sand, the sand yellow like my wife’s and son’s hair, on a Fourth of
July weekend of the last perfect year, the three of us shot from behind in an endless, vanishing wide shot.

I sit on the edge of the bathtub, breathing it all in. Then, like the animal I am, I get up and stand for a minute pissing into the toilet. And go to the sink and stare into the bright clear mirror at my fifty-year-old face. The lower lip fat now with blood, a small blue star blooming in its corner.

EMMA

B
ACK HOME
, alone in bed, the warmth of Sam’s hand remains on hers. This is actual, she believes. And awake as she’s ever been, with an hour or two left of the night, she begins to study the warmth under the microscope of her feeling. Gradually she twists the dial, increases the magnification. Looking at the kind of warmth it might be, its source, its conceivable longevity. What it might signify, what it might not. If there might be answers in it as well as questions. Whether it’s even sexual, after all, despite her longings and his. Or whether the sexual part might in fact be more remembered than real, a kind of shared aura trailing them from the past, a reflection less of where they’re headed than of where they’ve been.

It’s morning and time for work before the truth comes down on her in all its sadness and possibility: that she loves Sam Arno not, as she has long assumed, with the full heat of her passion but instead like a brother. And it’s for this that she knows she will forgive him anything.

SAM

I
T’S THE WALL OF HIS ROOM
he sees when he opens his eyes in the morning, but it’s not the wall he feels.

He doesn’t move. He lies there, staring at the wall, an odd, probing warmth on his back.

In the dream, what there was of it, his mother’s house was a different color, dark green. No reason. There was a rocking chair on the porch. He cannot in fact recall such a chair. But he can recall the thin dark-haired boy who sits on it, rocking slowly, just the tips of his black sneakers touching the floorboards (and only on the downward rock), his elegant, precociously musical hands resting secretively, maybe haughtily, atop the black violin case in his lap.

He walks past this boy. They do not acknowledge each other. He enters his house, climbs the stairs, and goes to his room.

The Red Sox memorabilia is gone. No, it’s not the Yankees—this isn’t a horror movie—it’s merely nothing. Bare white walls. Another pointless incongruity. It’s still not registered on him yet, the identity of the thin dark-haired boy downstairs, all four feet of him. The boy who sits rocking on the chair that was never there. The boy who—he can hear it now, rising from the porch and entering his open window—is humming to himself, yes humming, in a soft high voice, as if to unburden himself of his life, and at the same time to tell the world a story: the voice burnished as in church, practiced and choral, with something like a soul in it.

It’s the music Sam can’t get rid of. That keeps coming back to him like a curse, here and here and here and here, whenever it feels like it. As if he was the one who’d gone and killed everything.

DWIGHT

I
T WAS A CLEAR NIGHT
, but it’s a gray morning. What I can see of it, anyway, pressing dully around the drawn shades in Sam’s bedroom.

I’ve turned his desk chair around so I can sit observing the twin bed, cornered against two walls, where he lies facing away from me on his side, one knee raised almost to his chest as if he’s hurdling some obstacle in his sleep. On the floor, his clothes are dropped in no special order. I notice some caked dirt on his boots and the knees of his jeans—he was out in a field somewhere, I guess, or down by the river.

I sit watching him, the throaty, priestlike calls of mourning doves coming in through the partially open window.

At some point, he rolls over and blinks at me. He doesn’t seem surprised by my presence, and I have the vague feeling that he’s been awake for a while already, just lying there, hiding in plain sight. We stare at each other, until I turn my visible attention to the computer sitting on his desk, as if it has something important to tell me. Next to it is a speckled school-composition notebook, and near that, on the floor, Sam’s baseball glove, an expensive Mizuno, with a fresh white ball still caught in the webbing, an illegible autograph scrawled on the ball’s exposed face, between the sewn red seams.