Northwest Corner Read online

  DWIGHT

  WHEN SAM’S DOOR REMAINS CLOSED, I take a second beer out to the patio and, zoo-like, pace back and forth. Some ominous little weeds have sprouted around the cement, I see, and I make a mental note to spray the hell out of them with Roundup over the weekend. Meanwhile, someone’s grilling chicken in his backyard a couple of houses over, the marinated smoke rising up plump and fragrant; and a neighbor’s dog begins to bark hungrily, then another. Then both animals’ voices abruptly fall dead, and the evening is still again.

  Minutes pass like this, the dusk settling in—the lazy, arrogant, slow-moving dusk of Southern California, where the world is your oyster and there’s time enough for any dream. And I remember that my son, who until an hour ago I stubbornly continued, against various odds of my own making, to think of as a sensitive boy forever young, is now twenty-two years old, a grown man who has violently struck another man with a baseball bat. A physical expression of some roiling darkness in him that I surely recognize, because it is mine.

  And, at some point, one has to ask: What are a kid’s odds going to be growing up, when his father does time for killing a boy, accident or not? What are his odds going to be, anyway? Not even my old man did that to his family.

  My bottle is empty. I sit down heavily on the one chair in my backyard.

  Tomorrow I’ll buy another chair, I finally almost decide; and more plates, and maybe a bigger freezer, too. I’ll think about what’s happened here today and make lists toward change and attend to those lists with a hopeful urgency that I cannot in fact recall in myself.

  I get up and go inside.

  The house is quiet. I walk down the short hallway and stand with an ear against the closed door to the guest bedroom, hearing nothing from inside. After a few moments, I knock lightly and open the door.

  My son is lying on his back on the bed, mouth agape, still in the towel he was wearing, his right arm dangling off the edge. There is no movement in him at all, and for a terrible moment I believe he is dead. I think he has killed himself somehow, that he crossed the country to do that in my house.

  I’m halfway to the bed, stepping panicked over my set of dumbbells strewn across the rubber-matted floor, when I see his chest rise.

  I stop to watch him breathing in and out, until I’m sure. And then, slow and careful as a heart-attack patient, I back out of the room and leave him to sleep a while in peace.

  EMMA

  LOOKING BACK ON IT, theirs is not a house of dramatic battles; it is a house of forced retreats across mountains and down through bitterly cold rivers. Ever retreating, ever glancing over your shoulder for the invisible enemy, who is a ghost. The war long ended; there is no front to fight on. The cause of the unholy conflict—the death of a child, a son, a brother—is unmentionable history.

  Ah, but: a living child remains. Not the chosen one, however. No, that was her brother.

  Unlike some other kids she knows, Emma never wanted to be an only child, with the only child’s lonely, obsessive burdens, the need to stand for everything and everyone. But that’s what, for its own reasons, life has turned her into.

  Her parents were close and loving once, she is almost certain. There are photos that stand as, if not proof, then emotional attestations to familial and marital happiness, what human lives produce instead of proof. Two parents, two children, a dog, a fine old house. Her mother a creator of exquisite gardens for other people. Her father a teacher of impressionable minds and the author of brilliant elucidations of important works of literature. Her mother beautiful and still young. Her handsome father …

  • • •

  She is seventeen and applying to college when he packs three suitcases and departs for Chicago—a “practical relocation,” her parents call it, as if she’s a head case and can’t tell the difference: separation, divorce, the long, cold withdrawal into an ever smaller and more isolated chamber of the heart. What else can you say about a man who’s given up teaching the novels of Henry James and the poems of Wallace Stevens to write a book on twelve—no, sorry, eleven—sentences of the Talmud?

  It is early morning. There is mist; this is not an illusion. A taxi pulls up outside and beeps its horn. She carries one of the suitcases. Her mother has not come out, and cannot be seen at any of the windows. A coldness has seeped in everywhere. The house’s eyes are closed; the front lawn overgrown with weeds.

  Her father kisses her, not tenderly on her cheek as he once did but on her forehead, penitentially. Some sort of Old Testament thing, she guesses.

  She tries hard not to cry, and is successful.

  The taxi gone, she returns to the house. Her mother’s bedroom door is closed. Through the partition, Emma listens carefully for tears and sobbing, but hears nothing.

  The silence, on both sides, feels like hate. Maybe it was always like this, and she just didn’t know it.

  She gathers her books and drives herself to school in the car that her father left behind.

  DWIGHT

  A LITTLE AFTER TWO IN THE MORNING, I creep into his room to get my weights. Wired awake. Wanting to hurt and sweat myself into some purer condition—or, barring that, simply to pass out for the last few hours before sunrise.

  The door to the room has a creak in it. I stand in the wake of that noise listening for his deep breathing. Sam still on his back on the bed, bare chest and cheekbones holding light that otherwise doesn’t exist. On the floor, the dumbbells are low dense shadows like rooting animals underfoot. I feel for them in the gloom, and grip them by the necks, and two at a time carry them out of his room into mine. I’m leaving with the last pair when his sleep-fogged voice catches me.

  “Mom?”

  How do you answer? Except to say, No. You’re mistaken. That’s the other one. The one who raised and loved you right. “It’s just me.”

  But he’s asleep again, and doesn’t hear me.

  SAM

  IN THE DARK, just before sunrise, he comes awake in his father’s strange coffin of a house. The bleached walls of the bare white room, and the morning dark somehow dishonest, permanently uncommitted, too much unearned daylight to follow.

  He tries to roll over onto his back, but the bruise on his chest is still so deep the pain reaches through him to the bruise on the other side. He groans and lies motionless, breathing heavily.

  Nonetheless: the hard-on he woke with stubbornly undimmed, an animate kickstand. The kind that weighs twelve pounds and hurts, has been attached to you for so long it’s become your enemy and your soul. It defeats you in principle—there’s nothing you can imagine wanting to do with it, other than to warehouse it somewhere, at low cost, by the month.

  Once again, he’s woken with Emma on his tongue after some long, essentially plotless, mostly forgotten dream that sticks to him now like the spotted afterimage of camera flash in the eyes. A dream that’s more than a dream because you know you’re going to see it again, one of its hundred and sixty-seven variations. For two years that’s been her presence in his life, no more and no less. And here he’s crossed the entire country, trashed and ditched his future, wrecked the whole show, only to discover that she’s followed him anyway. Followed him without really caring. He’s given up trying to understand how it works: a single, almost wordless act that’s held him prisoner ever since, free enough to pursue other girls and his life, but too emotionally shackled ever to really show up for the game.

  With his hand now, he tries without much hope to free himself of her for the day. Using her all the way, of course. And gets what he came for. As if he ruled her, not the other way around.

  Afterward, he curls up on his side. Sleep coming for him finally, lapping at his jagged edges.

  RUTH

  SHE 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 re
gard; 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

  SHE 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.