Northwest Corner (20 page)

She pats her pinned-on hair reflexively, while her other hand falls to checking and rechecking the knot on her robe in case she’s been flashing him by accident. All in all, she’s starting to feel like Norman Bates’s mom in
Psycho
:

My mother’s not herself today
.

“Why are you staring at me like that?”

“No reason. Just looking at you.”

“Please don’t.”

He looks away, but not by much. She takes air into her lungs and slowly releases it. The wish to knock him out of his comfort zone sits high in her chest, a kind of reduced life goal. At the same time, there is logistical business to attend to, things that need to get conveyed
now that he’s here, or risk further complications later. The lawyer she’s going to see this afternoon is his old partner, the best man at their wedding, and decidedly a former friend. Which will not go down well. There’s a history there. Though it’s Dwight’s history, not hers, she’s going to remind him, and if he has a problem with that he’ll just have to deal with it like a grown-up.

“Sam and I have a meeting with Jack Cutter over in Canaan this afternoon,” she announces, apropos of nothing, in her willfully brisk voice.

As expected, she watches the warmth drain from his brown eyes, till they’re like those hard glossy chestnuts you find in Central Park in December, if your parents were loving enough to take you to New York City for a
Nutcracker
weekend, as hers were.

“Why him?” Dwight practically barks.

“Because the dean recommended him.”

“And why the hell would the dean recommend Jack Cutter of all people, out of all the lawyers in the state?”

“I don’t know, Dwight. Probably because he knows I know Jack and he happens to think he’s good at what he does. His reputation.”

“His reputation,” Dwight repeats, adding a guttural sound at the back of his throat. “Cutter’s never been anything but a small-town huckster, and you know it.”

“A huckster who hired you when you were untouchable around here, in case you’ve forgotten,” she shoots back before she can think better of it. “Which makes you what, exactly?”

Too far: she sees his eyes go from cold, which she can defend against, to something faintly wild, which she cannot; his expression a laser beam of raw, uncalculated anger. And she knows without the slightest doubt that if she wasn’t already sitting across the room from him safe and sound she would retreat a step or two backward to protect herself—from her memory, if from nothing else. And that, humiliatingly, is all it takes for her to relive the occasional—maybe three times in all—moments of being physically afraid of him during
their marriage. The recall a jagged piece of amber suddenly jammed into her chest, the old skin-prickling fear inside it, perfectly preserved.

Which makes her want to bloody him somehow in return, yes it does.

“You asked if you should come, remember? ‘To help.’ And I said no. But you came anyway—to suit yourself.”

“I came for Sam,” he protests. “Of course you did.”

“He’s my son, Ruth. He’s got my name.”

The idiot patriarchal smugness of this last remark alone—what has Sam’s name ever brought him but grief?—is enough to make her crazy.

“Not even you could be that much of a narcissist.”

“He came to stay with me.”

“Because he’d just done a stupid, terrible thing and was scared out of his wits! And you were the farthest possible place he could think to get to. But intermission’s over now. Time to face the music.”

She is trembling, the air in the kitchen rippling with unstable energy. And the worst part is that her tone of certainty is such an obvious sham.

He turns away from her and, with an air of rigid disgust, splashes what’s left of his coffee into the sink.

A moment later, she hears his mug clatter recklessly against the blue-veined porcelain, hard enough to chip her dead mother’s stoneware beyond repair. It’s too much—in a flash she’s on her feet, lashing out at him as she somehow knows he wants her to:

“This is
my
house, dammit! Either show some respect or get out!”

He says nothing. The room gone still and quiet, his anger seemingly replaced in the space of a few seconds by hers. Roughly he runs the flat of his hand over his face as if to scrape off the invisible muck, then turns and goes to the windows and stands brooding over the yard.

And she? Does she enjoy even a momentary spark of victory at
this reversal? Sorry, none. Too tired to move, more like it. As if an entire day, not just thirty minutes, has passed in freakish mortal combat, and she’s here bleeding from the spleen even as she stands staring over his shoulder at the yard they first planted together when they had no money to speak of and a child on the way. Oh spring, that hypocritical bitch, is being good to them today: the flowers bright from sun and rain, the hedges lush. The Newmans’ dog has wandered back inside for his breakfast, and a gray squirrel is scampering up one of the tall oaks. All this is in front of them, she sees, incontrovertible, subject to no one’s mistakes or lies or rage.

She takes a deep breath to anchor herself to the floor, and speaks to him with as much truth as she can imagine.

“Please, just listen to me. I don’t have the energy to fight with you. My heart’s not big or tough enough. Probably it never was. Sam’s known Jack Cutter since he was born. And if things get worse, my God, Dwight, if that boy dies, he’s going to need a lawyer who believes in him. Do you hear me? People who believe in him. That’s it, and it’s my decision.”

Behind her the coffeemaker exhales like a dying old woman.

Dwight makes some reply, but it’s so soft and mumbled, with his body turned away from her, that she doesn’t catch it.

“What?” She stands staring at his broad back. “What did you say?”

He repeats himself sorrowfully without turning or revealing his face to her, the words coming out like a pitiful confession.

“I believe in my son.”

She doesn’t understand her need to console him then, to lay her hand on his back and maybe even be consoled by him in return; or how, in the end, she’s somehow strong enough to fight off this urgency and stand there and not touch him at all.

SAM

E
NTERING THE KITCHEN
, he finds them standing close to each other by the window. Their faces twitch round on him in unison, before his mother retreats a few steps to the table.

“You’re up early.” The smile she tries on for his sake so clearly needs an oilcan that it shames them both. Still, because he loves her more than he knows, he walks up to her and kisses her cheek.

“What’s that for?”

He doesn’t answer
I was upstairs and heard you yelling your ass off at him and I’m proud of you, Mom
, but that’s the essence of it.

“Morning, Sam,” mumbles his father from his outpost by the window, so close yet so far.

“Morning.”

In the general silence that follows he goes to the counter, takes two slices of bread out of the package, and drops them in the toaster. He has no appetite, but he understands viscerally that this is what one does: you start the day, or you never get up.

Within seconds, the insides of the appliance begin to glow and tick.

And so the family—what’s left of them, anyway—stand captivated in their separate places: waiting for the expert who might disarm the bomb that holds them there.

DWIGHT

E
STATE AND TAX LAW
was my legal specialty, if not precisely my area of expertise. A subfield I’d chosen during my final year of law school, much as an anxious med-school student from the wrong side of the tracks might decide to go into proctology—not because he finds the study of the anus riveting per se but because he figures there will always be plenty of anuses to go around and so, on the demand side at least, his particular line of practice should be well covered in times of general depression.

It was Jack Cutter, two years ahead of me, who urged me toward estates (the anus analogy is his, I readily admit). Following some early hotshot years at a big firm in Hartford, during a subsequent low period in my life—which turned out, in retrospect, to be merely a stage of descent—I went to work at Jack’s tiny but successful firm, Cutter & Trope, housed in a handsome Greek Revival building on the outskirts of Canaan. According to the circumstances of the time this was a huge break for me, what I suppose you’d call a saving grace. Logically, I know this. But, looking back, I can’t seem to take it that way.

Clients came to me early in life, just married, on the verge of having kids. They came to me late in life, too—especially late, and especially when they believed they were dying. They came with their eyes wide open and their skins thinned by fear of oblivion; they came exposed and vulnerable and, in their clumsy agedness and terrified wonder, a lot like children. They came to me with cataracts and arthritic joints, some with cancer. They came in pain and rage, and they came in something like hope. They came with grievances
petty and epic. They came with enemies in mind, and long-lost loves. They came jingling stuffed coin purses from bygone eras or hefting folders thick with stock certificates of the great companies of American capitalism. They came with debts to hide, tales of bankruptcy and shame, and nothing much to talk about but my exorbitant fee. They came with private vaults stuffed with bullion and hidden bloody knives and shelves of dusty tomes on how to turn horseshit into gold. They came with twins and triplets and grandkids in the double digits. They came with but one living relative who ever gave a damn, the hard-core gay nephew who, all dressed in leather, represented the definitive end of the line.

Some jobs you can’t shower off at the end of the day. Over burgers and fries at Tommy’s Diner, Jack and I would joke about having blood on our hands after some irascible widow had blown through the office, waving her hatchet of vitriol and wanting to leave the world to her cat. We facilitated her wishes, of course, and the blood that we laughed over belonged to all those relatives who were going to try to kill one another (after drowning the cat) the minute the old crank was in the ground, to get her pile of loot (a pile not insubstantially diminished by the money owed for our services). Which seemed funny for a while, until it wasn’t.

Things just change. You can booze it up for years, pour the turpentine down your gullet every morning, afternoon, and night for decades—and then one day out of the blue a single sip of beer will send you screaming to the ER, and the beginning of the end has begun. You will never know why. You can think you’re best pals with someone, sit across from him at lunch week in and week out yucking it up over the same tired jokes, then the next thing you know one afternoon the mere sight of him chewing with his mouth open makes you sick. Or maybe it’s him who grows sick of you first, and you’re just too far gone to realize it.

Out in the real world nothing but a vetted legal contract is writ in stone, and even then someone—your wife, say—is surely waiting in the wings to sue your lights out. Like the med student who comes
down with every disease he studies, the lawyer without a rock-bed conscience (in terms of numbers, take the American Bar Association and multiply by two) is inevitably susceptible to the view of morality that he has helped bring into practice—i.e., whereby the best man at your wedding ends up being the same fuck who never once visits you in prison.

SAM

F
ROM SOMEWHERE HIS MOTHER IS CALLING HIM
. He comes out of his room and down the stairs, and there by the front door stands his father.

“Where’s Mom—my mother?”

“Out in the car.”

“You’re coming, too?”

“You okay with that?”

Sam walks past him. In the driveway, the car’s already running: his mom hates to be late. A morning talk show, disembodied above engine noise, floats out the window and across the yard. Faintly self-impressed, politely interrogative, the radio anchor’s voice reminds him of the shrink he was sent to after his dad, all of a sudden and four months too late, turned himself in to the state troopers for accidentally running over Josh Learner and leaving him dead by the side of Reservation Road.

The shrink with the pale freckled skin and thinning Creamsicle-colored hair, always the same brown corduroy jacket and uncool Wallabees. The room where they met two times a week a former school bathroom—windowless, pipes sticking out of the walls where the urinals used to be, it was easy to imagine the piss smell if you let yourself.

Worse, as he walks to the waiting car, actual words come back, not an exchange of views or feelings but a psychiatric one-way street—something he hasn’t thought about in a long time and doesn’t want now, drowning out the radio chatter in his head like some advertising
jingle that you swear you’ll never be loser enough to remember, yet end up singing to yourself anyway:

And how did it feel when you learned what your father had done?

Sam?

Was it that he didn’t tell you himself? Prepare you somehow? That he lied to you about something so huge? Was that what hurt most, that you had to hear about it from other people? How did that make you feel?

Sam, if you won’t talk to me, I can’t help you
.

He never did talk, not to the shrink or anyone else. Him in a nutshell: plenty to think about and nothing to say. Which maybe was the thing about sports, the on-the-spot sense of acceptance it gave him at fourteen, fifteen, after—here, finally, was pure doing, not saying. Learn to do something, do it right or wash out; train your body till it knows nothing else; do that thing again and again till the mind separates itself, grasps its own pathetic worthlessness and quits the body. Out on the field, any field, if you stop to think, you lose.

Though every theory has its limits. Of which he is his own solid proof: he never even took a swing when it counted most.

“Why’s
he
coming?” he asks his mother in a low voice.