Northwest Corner (7 page)

RUTH

S
HE STANDS AT THE STOVE
the morning after Dwight’s call, frying four pieces of bacon, mentally excavating the past twelve years, during which, for better or worse, she’s been the presiding parent to her son, the one holding the keys and laying down the law. (She cannot in all good faith include Norris in this regard; he’s simply too much of a jellyfish.) With a fork, invisible droplets of hot grease spattering her fingers, she turns the fatty, half-browned strips one at a time and sees Sam graduating from high school. She drives him again, the car loaded to the roof, to his first day of college. She remembers him—this sequence mysteriously looming above the rest—two years ago, in the spring of his sophomore year, coming home for a weekend.

He arrived that Friday night just in time for dinner. By then she no longer bothered complaining about the infrequency of his visits, despite the nearness (a mere ninety-minute drive) of his college campus. Still, she had her arms around him practically before he stepped out of the car, the porch lights casting their briefly united shadow almost to the edge of the driveway. The clean-dirt baseball smell of his clothes penetrating her defenses as she noticed the touch of black greasepaint on his cheek that he’d missed in the shower after practice—this she wiped away with her finger, as if he was still ten years old; a maternally willful misconception that lasted, oh, about forty-two minutes, until the moment when, finishing the meal of pot roast, potatoes, and blackberry cobbler she’d prepared, he stood up from the table mumbling that he was going to “hang” with some friends from high school and not to wait up. She didn’t set eyes on him again till he emerged from his room at eleven the next morning,
at which point she fed him and did a load of his laundry and later, carrying the folded clothes back through the living room, found him sprawled on the couch watching the Red Sox.

Question: Was he already troubled then? Lying there all that day like a gorgeous lounge lizard, calling out at the TV, as a bunt was laid down by an opposing player, for the “wheel” play, whatever that is? Already troubled that second evening when, wolfing down his last bite of dessert, he once again jumped up from the table to go out, this time to a party in Falls Village? Bye, Mom—peck on cheek, brief hug, Don’t wait up, out the door.

By ten, Norris was snoring. By midnight she, too, was unconscious. Was Sam, for Christ’s sake, troubled then?

Which brings her to Sunday, waking that misty spring morning, Norris already out playing his usual eighteen at the country club. Rising, she went straight to the bedroom window to confirm that Norris’s old car—a Honda Civic he’d agreed to let Sam use at college because of its Japanese reliability, admirable fuel efficiency, and impressively retained Blue Book value—was in the driveway. Wherever Sam had been the night before, he’d returned in one piece. And now they would have the day together before he went back to school.

She washed and dressed, taking her time, adding a touch of lavender water, appreciating the exceptional peace of the morning: her son, whether or not he chose to “hang” with her on a weekend night, asleep in his old room down the hall.

An hour later, she was frying bacon—frying it as she is today, with fork and grease-spattered fingers—sipping coffee, and scanning the newsless headlines in the Winsted
Register Citizen
, when she heard his footsteps on the linoleum behind her. The smile she turned on him then unfortunately misplaced; for he was wearing, she immediately saw, his jean jacket, the one with the beige corduroy collar, and carrying the UConn sports duffel he’d brought with him, the bag fully loaded, the zipper zipped. He was going back early, she understood, right that minute, taking with him the shirts and boxers she’d washed and folded, leaving her with half a pound of cooked bacon
and too many eggs. He hadn’t bothered to change his clothes from the night before. He hadn’t even been home.

“You’re going?” She was careful to drain the question of any note of accusation or feeling.

“I’ve got practice.”

“But it’s Sunday.”

“Coach,” he explained with a helpless shrug, as if he was a farmer and
coach
a euphemism for
hail
or
locusts
—which in its way, she could see, it was.

She studied him, certain he was lying, because he wouldn’t look at her—at the floor, yes, the microwave, the sheets of paper towel on the counter already striped with pieces of crisp bacon, each in its own penumbra of grease.

She switched off the burner. “I’ll walk you to the car.”

Up close, he looked as if he hadn’t slept. A raw streak like an unopened gash ran from his left ear to his jaw, but she wouldn’t indulge herself or him by asking about it. He wanted to be such a grown-up, let him be a grown-up. She followed him out through the screen door. His work boots untied, though this she guessed was just a style, a way of moving through the world as if he didn’t give a damn, dragging his feet—not unlike, it struck her, how he’d spent the weekend moving through the house. Just passing through, ma’am.

On the lawn a rabbit posed frozen, blurred in the sun-infused mist, its ears pinned to its back. Leaping into panicked flight when Sam popped the trunk.

“Well …” She was standing right next to him.

“Sorry, Mom.” He still wasn’t looking at her. The scale of her failure, which she couldn’t yet grasp, threatened to blot out the day if she didn’t cut this short.

“Call me next week, okay?”

She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. He smelled like someone else. Not her sandlot son, player of games, but a man, older and less wise than she knew what to do with. She stepped away before he could wrap her in his arms and make her disappear.

EMMA

S
HE DOES NOT IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZE
Sam Arno leaning against the back wall in the living room of her classmate’s house in Falls Village in the spring of 2004. She has not seen him in a couple of years, for one thing; for another, they haven’t exchanged more than a casual hello since, with the hunched bolting of an escapee, he abandoned Wyndham Falls for Torrington High six years ago, willing to make the long commute just to get the hell away. Why he’s crashing a senior high-school party when he’s already a college baseball star (word has it) at UConn, she can’t imagine. Though none of this, she viscerally understands, has anything to do with her level of shock at seeing him again.

He has changed. Grown and filled out; disposed of that small, weary boy with the traveling trumpet case. Become, as if reluctantly, physically beautiful. His body long and muscular and lean, his hands large and thrillingly veined. His face marked by sharp memorable planes and just the right amount of natural punctuation. This Emma observes for herself when, after urgent navigation across the crowded, flailing room, she manages, through force of need, to take up the empty place on the wall beside him, turn and really look at him, and ask him what he’s doing there. To which he stares back at her with green eyes flecked with splashes of gold, and gives some answer she instantly forgets. Because she has already reached the vanishing point, finding it hard to look at him head-on without looking past him, into the next moment and then the next, where in the context of private possibility all she can really imagine is him putting
those strong hands on her, first roughly, then sweetly, then roughly, stripping her down layer by layer, till there’s nothing left.

They leave after about twenty minutes. They are standing near each other; then she looks up and finds him staring at her with a ravenous intensity, as if he’s just realized he is starving.

She follows him through the crowd. People make way for them. It never enters her mind not to go.

It is cold and poorly lit on the porch. The front door closes behind them and they are alone, the music and the shouting muted. She already knows they won’t be returning to the party.

“I want to show you something,” he says.

Half a mile up the dark country road is a house no one lives in. A working farm once, Sam tells her as they walk in the wash of moonlight at the edge of the road, twigs snapping under their feet, and then a kind of gentleman’s farm, and then the widowed owner, learning that he was going to die of cancer and wanting to spare his family the trouble, got his papers in order and killed himself with a shotgun in his barn, and before they’d even buried him his kids started fighting over the property, greedy to carve it up and sell it off despite his stated wishes, and the lawyers were called in and the courts slapped a freeze on everything, and for years the farm has stood empty and half ruined. The widower’s name was Carmody; Sam’s father was his lawyer and, briefly, the executor of his estate.

Sam turns brooding after telling her all this, maybe regretting having mentioned the family connection. Emma doesn’t confess that her parents are present too, in a way, a kind of pre-guilt already factored in, in spite or because of the warm liquid thrum between her legs every time her hip or arm touches his, her nipples erect in the night that is too cold for crickets, and the fact that she, who has never been especially keen on offering herself to the local boys, wants now, in just a few minutes, to fuck this sad beautiful boy and be
fucked by him, hard and permanently, with a raw need unlike anything she’s known before, except maybe her unquenchable longing, during the total eclipse following his death, for the restoration of her brother to the world.

The house is locked and boarded up. Neither of them wants to go into the barn where the old guy blew his brains out, so they remain outside in the cold, pressed and heaving against a rusted feed trough. A few inches of rainwater pooled in the bottom—and in that water, she can’t help noticing, the three-quarter moon hanging like a glass Christmas ornament; till their bodies set the trough to rocking, and the water ripples, breaking the moon apart.

Wet already as a licked kitten, she reaches down into his loose jeans. His gasp a small explosion in her ear. His grip suddenly fierce at her hips, hands pawing down her jeans: in the next moment she feels herself heaved up in his strong arms and fitted onto him like a missing part, a hovering sack of need. She cries out, imagining reaching into his chest and touching his beating heart. Her fingers accidentally rake the side of his face, though he seems oblivious of any pain, just repeats her name over and over under his breath, his half-closed eyes glazed with moonlight, right up to the second he bursts.

Afterward, he sets her down gingerly—as if, now that it’s finished, she, like the moon, might break into pieces. In silence, they pull up and refasten their clothes. The left side of his jaw scarlet where she scratched him. She isn’t sorry. She’s swimming with him, leaking him into her underwear, smelling him with every breath, shaking so badly that Sam has to cover her with his body like a blanket. Not cold anymore, finally not anything. He lifts the hair that’s fallen over her face and kisses her there between her eyes—such a tender, mature, manlike thing to do that she has to wonder who, by fucking each other, they’ve just become.

DWIGHT

S
AM IS STILL CONKED OUT
at eight the next morning as I stand in my kitchen, facing the open refrigerator. Food reserves totally inadequate for long-term occupancy, it must be said, or even guest residency by more than a single individual. Though I’m not thinking very straight about the matter, having been up since half past five, rattling around in my sun-filled cage like a lab hamster, waiting for my son to emerge from his room.

So that I might offer him what, exactly? A fatherly speech? A morning hug? A plan for living? Almost a relief that he continues to sleep—as tired, it seems, as if he walked all the way from Connecticut. And yet still the note I leave for him on the kitchen table rambles on too long about murky topics that have nothing to do, let’s face it, with breakfast. Topics like family and the future. I give my cell number in case he has questions or simply wants to check in while I’m out (unlikely). Tell him that I’ll be back in an hour and look forward to having breakfast together. That he should think of
mi casa
as
su casa
for as long as he feels like staying. Maybe we’ll talk more over dinner about his plans, such as they are, though absolutely no pressure to cannonball into the familial deep end all at once if he’s not in the mood. By now I’m on the back side of the page ripped from the SoCal memo pad, and it’s time—even I can see—to bring this baby home. Keep the tone light and parent-friendly, but not too. After lengthy deliberations with myself, I sign the note “Dad,” which is simple fact, but cautiously leave out “love”: I don’t want to antagonize my son or, in truth, to dredge up recollections (unwanted, I feel certain, by both of us) that might lead him to the
judgment that I’ve yet again failed to earn something out. There’ll be opportunity enough for that. My handwriting, jacked up on a second cup of black, is jittery, as if possessed.

Then, before leaving the house, I call my boss at home. An early riser, Tony will already have worked out in his home gym and be seated now in the family breakfast nook with the L.A.
Times
, a mug of coffee, and a bowl of Go Lean cereal with nonfat milk. (It’s a depressing verity that every man of a certain age knows with self-absorbed precision the dreary, hope-to-live-forever routines of other men in middle life—hard-won knowledge, I might add, that gets us precisely nowhere.) On the wall above Tony’s head are framed color photos (most professionally snapped) of the Lopez family at work and play, arranged in an artful mosaic. All in all, it’s as pleasant a morning stage set as one could hope for.

One of the girls picks up and chirps “Hi” through a mouthful of something or other.

“Hey there. That Ruby?”

“It’s Jade.” Voice snippy: mixing up the twins is not the path to their hearts.

“Oh, right. Sorry. Hey, Jade, it’s Dwight Arno.”

“Dad! Dwight Arno!”

“
Mister
Arno, honey,” I hear Tony murmur as the phone transfer gets made. “The store?” This to me, and all business. “Morning, Tony.”