Northwest Corner (25 page)

Across the room, the door to his closet stands open. Up on the top shelf, jutting out starkly amid a riot of old clothes and sports equipment, is a trumpet case of hard black plastic.

“Ever play the horn anymore?”

He shakes his head. Slowly he raises himself to a sitting position and leans back against the tongue-in-groove wall: I can see the tic-tac-toe ridges in his abdominals smooth out as the angle of his torso widens. There is a tear at the left hip of his blue boxer shorts. His muscled chest is practically hairless, and the bruises he had when he arrived at my house in California have faded away to nothing.

“I wasn’t any good,” he says, after a while.

“You always sounded pretty good to me.”

“You probably weren’t the best judge.”

“No,” I agree.

We fall silent. Sam begins picking at the bedspread with his long fingers. And merely to do something and maybe, against tall odds, to lighten the general atmosphere, I get up and move to the window and raise the white shade. And, unexpectedly, the subway-car noise of the roller going up, its pins and ball bearings, brings back to me with a painful stuttering strangeness my mother in her last days. Sad decent woman, who every morning during the housebound months she was dying of stomach cancer used to raise her bedroom shade so that she could watch me leaving for school. She never failed to wave to me as I climbed on the yellow bus, even when my old man screamed at her to get back in her sickbed.

The day is brightening. The lawn needs mowing and the doves have gone away. I turn and look back at my son, who’s looking down at his hands.

“There’s nothing you can’t ask me, Sam.”

He sits staring at his hands, a small swab of muscle pulsing in his jaw.

“Do you dream about him?”

“Yes.”

“His family?”

“All of them,” I say.

“Then what? What do you do then?”

“What I can. I get up and go to work.”

He looks up at me. “Do you hate yourself?”

My mouth is dry. Carefully, I sit on the edge of his bed.

“Some days. Other days are better.”

He nods as if he understands, which makes me sadder than anything he could have said.

He is my son. He’s within reach now. Soon, I think, I will try to touch him, but not just yet.

RUTH

S
HE STANDS AT THE KITCHEN SINK
finishing last night’s dishes, her back to the windows that look out over the front yard. It was a point of contention with the house when they bought it all those years ago: how it seemed ungenerous, and maybe even cruel, to deprive the one person who was to spend a good portion of her life cooking meals and washing up for the family of a reasonably pretty view while she worked. After months of grudging, Dwight gave in and said that as soon as they had the money they’d redesign the kitchen, turn the sink around, make it however she wanted. The money eventually came, but, despite numerous promises, the new kitchen never materialized. She watched Dwight build himself a fancy workroom in the basement and buy loads of junior sports equipment for Sam, who wasn’t yet even three feet tall. She saw the Newmans next door do a gut renovation, complete with portable wine cellar and the latest German appliances. Which was okay; envy wasn’t her particular sin. It was just that some days, living in the “country,” as they called it, she missed nature the way she missed her mother. One eventually grew tired of brown backsplash tiles palimpsested with 1990s marinara sauce. She wanted to be able to look up one day—simply raise her head—and see that the world was larger and more inviting than her house kept telling her it was.

The last pot done, she sets it on the dish rack and turns off the water.

She hears it then, behind her and outside: what she has not heard here, at home, in a very long time. It takes her a few moments to understand.

Norris had no gift for it. He didn’t like having objects thrown at him. The only ball he ever related to was tiny and never moved unless he himself decided to strike it.

She turns and looks out the window at the lawn.

She sees the white baseball, hard-looking in the morning light, speeding through the clear air toward her son.

She sees her son, as calmly as if he’s considering an itch under his chin, tip his glove like a casual salute and envelop the ball, make it disappear. He doesn’t even glance at it; he knows it’s there. He reaches down—a magician now—and plucks his trusted rabbit back into the light; he grips it and unlimbers himself and hurls the object back whence it came.

She sees the ball speeding backward in time.

She sees his father, standing on the other side of the lawn, catch it without struggle or regret.

PENNY

S
TIRRING A POT
of miso soup Wednesday evening, she notices, to the right of the stove, the corner of a yellow scrap of paper poking out from underneath the blender. She pulls at it with her fingernail, and a Post-it emerges. Written there, in Ali’s cramped print, are the words “Dwight called.”

The message is stained with some sort of cooking oil and decorated with juvenile doodles in purple ink; it is not even close to fresh.

There is nothing left on the answering machine but this morning’s automated message from GEICO, informing Penny that her quarterly car-insurance premium is coming due, and suggesting online payment as the most convenient and secure method. Whatever Dwight had to say to her has been erased by her daughter.

She slams her hand into the machine, so hard that the thing flips over twice, and the small plastic hatch to the battery compartment pops off. She stares at this minor wreckage as at another’s handiwork. She thinks of marching to her daughter’s room and forcibly extracting her face from the screen of her desires and demanding to know exactly,
exactly
, the message that was left by a man who may, or may not, be asking for some kind of comfort.

Reaching for her purse on the counter, she shouts to Ali that she’s going out.

There is no response.

• • •

A light shines from above Dwight’s front door, reaching to the small patch of grass; a precautionary measure in his absence, it would seem, meant to deter criminals. An example of grim psychological conditioning, Penny speculates to herself, or maybe just good practical sense.

And sitting in her car parked on Hacienda Street, reading his house as though it’s a poem in disguise, Penny attempts now, in desperate earnest, to take a hard look at her own psychological conditioning, such as it has been. The glittering false premise of her many years of adult training: the insistent sifting for patterns and symbols that can be broken down into constituent theories, to be coolly sorted and weighed for meaning in the clinical laboratories of the mind.

To somehow find a way,
his
way, to throw away all that. To call it what it is. To be able to say, tonight, simply because she needs it to be so, that maybe this light shining in the darkness is just that—a light in the darkness—and enough to live by.

SAM

H
E EXCUSES HIMSELF
precipitously from dinner. His parents are sitting on either side of him, one at each end of the table, and when he stands and picks up his plate of half-eaten food both sets of eyes, for their own reasons, grow unnerved and meaningful:
You’re going to leave us here
, together?
You must be kidding
.…

Outside, in fast-lowering dusk, he walks the front yard. It is two days since he’s been off the property.

You reach a stage where you don’t want to be seen anymore, by anyone
.…

Above the trees, in its rightful place, the evening star is an all-seeing eye hammered into the world’s bruise.

And under his feet now, in the corner of the yard, a good-sized rectangle of lawn—about ten feet by five feet—shows a persistent degradation of growth: a worn green carpet striated with streaks of brown dirt.

On this area over countless years his stepfather spread thousands of dollars’ worth of fertilizer and specialized lawn products. For it turned out to be beyond Norris’s imagination to accept that there are some places whose troubled history cannot be cured by tonics and potions and other people’s seed. His grass-growing failure he took personally—it was almost funny—never understanding how the problem was never his to begin with.

A jungle gym had been here once, put together by Sam’s true father. Sam retains blurred, fragmented memories of playing on its tilted swing and rickety slide, under sunshine that may or may not have existed.

And then, at some still unformed age, he has no idea why, he simply refused to go near it anymore. And that part of his childhood was over.

The contraption remained, a monument to inept mechanical love and other, more complicated secrets, until the day his father angrily took it apart. Piece by unhappy piece, the jungle gym was transported to the junkyard.

Which was when his father, showing an optimism singular in his history, began an interminable wait for the lawn to repair itself, to grow full and thick again, in this place as in others.

A wait that has outlasted them all.

On this very spot, half night-shaded dirt and half meager grass underfoot, Sam is standing when his phone rings in his pocket. Out of an otherwise quiet evening, the repeated, vibrating cacophony seems to originate deep in his own chest: his heart rattles in its scaffolding, and his knees tremble.

“Are you sitting down, son?”

“No, Mr. Cutter.”

“Well, I am, son. I’m sitting down, and I’m an old pro in the game of life. So my advice to you right now is to go find yourself a good, sturdy chair to sit down on, and to listen damn carefully to what it is I have to tell you.”

EMMA

T
HURSDAY MORNING
, she says goodbye to her mother—who believes her to be going to meet an illustrious professor about a possible research position for the fall—gets into her car, and drives up Pine Creek Road. But instead of taking the shortcut for New Haven she continues to the outskirts of Wyndham Falls, where she parks in an unreserved spot behind the post office. From there she walks east a hundred yards along the edge of Route 44, stopping by the 35-mph speed-limit sign on which someone has scrawled the trenchant words
WHY NOT ME
? with an indelible marker.

A not unreasonable question, it seems to her as she waits beneath it for her ride—if, say, like the hooker standing outside heaven’s gate in the tired old joke, you’re only granted one question to get what you always thought you wanted. It dresses up nice, existentially, and is suitable for just about any occasion.

Several minutes later, a white rental car pulls over in front of her. Sam is behind the wheel, and she climbs in beside him.

“They moved Nic Bellic out of intensive care last night.”

She turns and studies him. Handsome from the side, as he is from the front. The flickering car-window light on him today like the inside of a grotto. So here it is: she’s been waiting for the explanation, why he called her near midnight, waking her up, to inquire in an offhand voice, which she immediately X-rayed, whether she might be
able to change whatever plans she had and go to Hartford with him in the morning. And, seeing through that voice, she said she would. For which agreement, first thing this morning, she made the requisite arrangements; nothing being simple in this land. Preparations required, fractional white lies.

“Does that mean he’s going to be okay?”

“It will take him a while to recover. But ‘no lasting effects anticipated.’ According to my lawyer.”

“Sam, that’s amazing.”

He doesn’t look amazed, however, or even relieved, his jaw set and his gaze unswerving, as they motor grimly on toward Hartford and around them, all along this two-lane country highway, the pastoral landscape gradually sheds every last atom of its pastoral nature.

They drive by a wholesale furniture outlet with a
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS
sign; and a Dairy Queen; and an Italian sub shop. Two gas stations. The pet store where her father took her one day to buy fish. She remembers how the pimpled young man ran his tiny feminine net through the tank, coming up with her first guppies. He blew air into the clear plastic bag before knotting it. And all the way home she worried about the fish, trapped inside with that strange unwanted breath, which was not like or of them.

Sam slows down; there’s traffic bunching ahead.

“My lawyer told me not to go to the hospital again.”

“Why?”

“Because—his words—at this point it’s incumbent on me as someone who’s still a potential defendant in a potential criminal proceeding to maintain total separation from the potential plaintiff. That even so much as a semblance of a record or pattern of personal involvement with said potential plaintiff must be avoided at all costs, because it could leave some kind of motivational trace that a jury could later interpret with a negative bias.”

“That’s one of the most hateful things I’ve ever heard.”

He shakes his head to himself.

“Well,” she says, “we’re here anyway.”

• • •

They drive on. Her left hand on the armrest, inches from him. He drives as though on an extraordinarily long trip, with continents still ahead of him. He drives as if he has no company in the world, including himself. If she were to touch him now, she thinks, it would simply be to bestow faith, or what she knows of it, to show him something good about himself, something like the news he’s just gotten.

“It means a lot to me you came,” he says, after a long silence. “So what did you tell him? Your asshole lawyer.”

“I thanked him for calling. And then I told him he can go fuck himself.”

She laughs out loud—a sudden joyousness, like dancing.

He smiles at her then. Like a gold coin buried under the sand that you gave up looking for so long ago you can no longer remember where or when.

The smile she hasn’t seen since they were children.

SAM