Northwest Corner

by John Burnham Schwartz

  Of course, being small, buffeted somewhat by the onrushing water, his feet grasping for purchase, his short arm firing too quickly in his zeal to win the national fly-fishing title and bring home the forty-pound rainbow that doesn’t exist, Sam doesn’t entirely pull it off. The line gets caught in a stand of brush on the bank behind us. He tugs at it, getting frustrated, making things worse till I tell him to stop. I trudge out of the water and up onto the bank and spend close to twenty minutes extracting the line from the brush, detangling the leader. I think about changing the fly for better luck, but the truth’s that, with my meaty fingers, the delicate, almost surgical fly knots are a little out of my small-motor league. Nothing’s easy, is what I mean, so I decide to just stick with what we’ve got on. I carry his cleared line back into the river and tell him to reel in a few feet. He does this, in the process burying the tiny stone-honed barb of the fly into the tender skin between my thumb and palm.

  My shout of Fuck! echoes briefly through the Salmon River Canyon before disappearing.

  At this point in his life, Sam isn’t scared of my temper as some kids might be. He actually thinks I’m funny, and stands laughing in the flowing river while I extract the hook and suck the blood from my hand, laughing too.

  On the pier, in the astounding coastal light, I stand dazzled and bereft. My ex-wife beside me. Fishing, or so we call it. Observing now a large white sailboat as it enters the mouth of the harbor and approaches slowly under power, the halyard making a hollow clang-thwack against the aluminum mast. Dad at the helm, mom and two teenage sons readying the dock lines and fenders. “Tommy, make sure you run the bowline under the bowsprit and through the chock!” And curly-haired Tommy, as if he’s heard the same directive a hundred times before: “I’ve got it, Dad!” Dad slows the engine still more, cuts the wheel hard, and the long beautiful yacht—my God, half a million easy—swings gracefully into the empty berth and is docked.

  “Ruth, what happened with Norris?”

  “Oh, please let’s not.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  Ruth sighs. “I’ve begun to think recently that maybe right from the beginning what I loved most about Norris was how he wasn’t anything like you. He was so anti-you it was almost funny. On the wrong day, being with Norris could be like running a knife through left-out butter. You’ve got a lot of things wrong with you, but a lack of resistance isn’t one of them.”

  This is amusing to me, or almost. I chuckle for a while, the fishing rod twitching in my hands.

  “Laugh all you want,” Ruth says calmly.

  Stepping off his yacht onto the pier, Dad throws an arm around each of his sons, ruffling hair, and the family makes its way toward Captain Cook’s and the parking lot. Screaming gulls follow them, hovering, stiffly inhabiting the sky like birds on a mobile.

  “I miss you, Ruth.” My ambivalent chuckle has died in my throat.

  Ruth turns and studies me. I can’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses, but I can tell by the way she’s holding her head that her perspective is steady, neither sentimental nor aggrieved, just watchful and knowing. She takes the rod from my hands and slowly begins reeling in.

  “Dammit, it’s the truth.”

  “A truth, you mean. If it’s even true, which I sincerely doubt.”

  “Which leaves us where?”

  The plastic bobber reaches the tip ring and stops there. She takes hold of the purple rubber worm without distaste and hooks it to one of the lower guides.

  “You know, that’s the same thing I asked my oncologist when it all went south,” she says. “He’s older, not one of those cocky hotshots. This really sad face. Lost his own wife to cancer. I was sitting in his office right after he delivered the bad news, about to fall off my chair or throw up, and I said, I asked him, ‘So where’s that leave us?’ And know what he answered?” Ruth’s eyes are hidden from me, but I can hear the tears rising through her voice. “My doctor said, ‘My dear, that leaves us alive.’ ”

  She leans over and gives me a peck on the cheek. As she does, her arm with the rod comes forward and the rubber worm brushes my ear, causing me to shudder.

  RUTH

  DWIGHT INSISTS on driving her back to her motel to rest. Surprisingly the time with him, however weird, wasn’t awful. Yet watching his car pull away, taking him back to work, she feels the old sense of relief. Her very bones are tired. Like spending the day on one of those moving airport walkways and only now, stepping onto solid ground, do you realize how hard it is to walk unaided on your own two feet; hard, but still easier than being with someone else.

  The endless sunlight pours through the flat square windows of the motel room. Tiny flotsam of industrial carpet in the air. She draws the blinds and the room darkens, the air disappears. She sits down on the edge of the bed, her hands in her lap. A minute passes like this: for once, she isn’t aware of thinking. She lies back and rests her head on the thin pillow. To hell with the wig, she thinks. She closes her eyes.

  When she wakes, the sun is pressing around the blinds at a dying angle. It’s past five o’clock. She feels as though she’s been sleeping for days, as though a solid chunk of her life has fallen off and disintegrated while she slept. One moment you’re standing on a pier like some jaded high-school heartbreaker; the next you’re as good as ninety. One morning your child is in your womb; by evening he is forever outside you. And still the sun rises and falls.

  On the cheap bedside table, her cellphone lies blank; no one has called while she slept. And it is the same day, Tuesday. She will have to find Sam soon, tonight or tomorrow, and take him back home, or the whole rickety scaffolding is going to collapse for good. Even so, she can’t imagine how she might protect him. Her son. He is unprotectable, and still she will have to figure a way. This is her job in life, or there is no job at all. A small hope breathes inside her that Dwight might be of some help, but it’s nothing she can count on.

  Carefully, she gets to her feet. She goes into the bathroom and splashes water on her face and brushes her teeth. Looks at herself long and hard. Tries to arrange the borrowed hair where it sticks out awkwardly from her head, but soon gives up.

  SAM

  HE STANDS BY THE WINDOW in his father’s living room watching his mother step out of the rental car. Both of them far from home, on the backside of lost. He angles himself to one side to make sure she won’t spot him, and to give himself a moment to adjust to what he’s seeing. The wig he can deal with—he knew it was coming, figures it’s better than nothing at all—and the starkness of her cheekbones in the blue falling light; but her physical tentativeness sounds an internal alarm, the way her feet walk the cement blocks to his dad’s front door as if following some invisible Seeing Eye dog.

  He understands too well, which is what frightens him.

  He lets her ring the bell. Even then, doesn’t rush to greet her. Knowing that once he lets her in and she reaches out to hug him and tries to peer into his eyes to read him, as if that was possible, they’ll already be into the next frame, whatever it is, and the story will go on. And he’s reached that point in the story where he doesn’t want to know the rest. He’s sick and tired of his own story and would just prefer not to.

  “Where have you been, Sam?”

  Her face an involuntary flip book of the human register: shock, anger, love, terror.

  “L.A. Like my note said.”

  “What were you doing there? Why haven’t you answered any of my calls?”

  Tender as a sunburn victim, he turns back into the room before she can try to touch him.

  “Do you have any idea what’s happened since you ran away?” she demands to his back. “Do you know what you’ve done, and what you’re accused of?”

  His throat, physically, will not allow him to acknowledge the truth.

  “Get your stuff. I’m taking you home to Connecticut tonight.”

  In the end, his mother puts her arms around him.

  For a full minute, she cradles him. Their reunion
lingers indefinitely, carving its own warped dimensions, till his feet begin to shuffle in her longing, inconsolable embrace.

  And still he’s painfully aware, deep down at the level of the soul, how he presses back, towering over her, his head tucked low so that he might fit once again into the crook of her neck: that uncataloged place on her body where, in another life that he can’t quite remember or get back to, he knows he once felt safe.

  DWIGHT

  IT’S EARLY EVENING when I return from work and find Ruth’s rental parked outside my house.

  I stand for a while on the quiet empty street, in the imperceptibly darkening air, thinking about my ex-wife sitting in my house at this moment, and my son maybe with her—maybe Sam has returned of his own free will, I think, maybe he’s done that. It’s possible. The two of them together, in my house. And that is all. I don’t travel so far as to mentally investigate their conversation, difficult as it no doubt will be, or their states of mind, or the fragility of their individual futures. It’s just their combined presence that absorbs me, their being in my house, the miraculous nature of this, the sheer cosmic improbability when you consider the torn and poorly drawn road map that’s led me to this place over time, to this street and this house and this half-lived life. A simple thing in the big picture, maybe. And yet this evening I can’t seem to get over it. It almost brings me to my knees in gratitude, here in the street, this unexpected suggestion that my family was once more than just ruin.

  In my living room, they stand literally wrapped in each other—an image so old and storybook it feels iconic to me, bigger than all of us, a tattered flag flying over our tiny burned-out village long after the war has ended. I stand watching them in silent awe. And then they break apart, and without looking at me Sam goes down the hall to his room, and Ruth turns to me and says, quietly and firmly, “We’ve got to get going.”

  I drop my keys on the table by the door. They make a clatter, which seems to move reality along a little.

  “Maybe I should go with you.” The thought occurs to me only as I speak it aloud.

  Nor, apparently, did it occur to Ruth; the surprise on her face is its own rebuke. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “I used to be a lawyer, Ruth.”

  “I have the names of some people to call,” she replies warily. “But thanks, anyway.”

  Nothing more to say after that. We fall silent till Sam comes back into the room.

  He sets down his UConn duffel and, looking at the floor between us, formally thanks me for letting him stay.

  “Don’t thank me. You’re my son.”

  And that’s it, our big conversation.

  You can do all the planning you want, or you can do none: once their bags are packed, people leave.

  I walk them outside. The street still deserted, on the verge of another perfect dusk.

  “You know the way?”

  “I’ll follow the signs,” Ruth says.

  “I could make you some coffee for the road.”

  She stops and puts a hand on my arm and looks me in the eye, some kind of tenderness there.

  “We can’t wait.”

  I hold the car door for her, seal her in. And then there’s just Sam, standing by the hood.

  “Bye,” he mumbles.

  “I’m glad you came. You take care of yourself.”

  He nods. Mumbles something else—I think it’s “Sorry”—and ducks into the passenger seat.

  Ruth starts the engine. I can’t bring myself to step away.

  Words leave me then. You spend them carelessly, flagrantly, and the next thing you know they’re gone.

  EMMA

  FROM NEW HAVEN to Wyndham Falls is sixty-one miles, a distance that for two years has represented a protective and largely metaphorical moat separating her Gothic Ivy League fortress from her mother’s creepy cottage in the dark northern forest. So very Hansel and Gretel: her mother the old crone who boils kids for supper, and she the silly frightened girl who, following her brother, will never more than half believe in the power of breadcrumbs to lead her back to safety. That there’s no brother anymore just makes the journey that much more pathetic.

  She takes Route 8, her mother’s old Volvo wagon with 134,000 miles carrying her and the sum of her college belongings north through Waterbury, past the Mattatuck State Forest, through Torrington to Winsted. Not for the most part the glossy verdant Connecticut of second homes and country clubs and famous writers and movie stars but the working-class state that’s produced, all by itself, some of the most unappealing cities in the country, among them Hartford and New Haven.

  She drives, imagining turning west and not stopping; imagining being like that. All spring for American Studies she’s been reading firsthand accounts of women—pioneers, freed slaves, Native Americans, line cooks, horse breakers, prostitutes, factory workers, Civil War nurses, even a midget in an early American circus—who for one reason or another set out westward into the American unknown. And in most cases it was only after this radical displacement that they found voices with which to speak of what had happened to them. And the difference, the enormous gulf in meaning and actuality, between these voices and the historical silence that they otherwise inhabited is what moves her most keenly; how what made their lives bearable lay not so much in their surviving their literal experiences, however brutal or good, or in the stories they eventually came to tell (if they were lucky), as in their somehow learning to navigate the terrible isolation before and after the telling, the unspeakable, ingrown silence. It’s so easy to get swallowed up by the life you never expected to have. To just disappear. To live inside this great white whale of yourself and never have a vision of where you might be going, or where you’ve already been, or why.

  She comes back to reality just as the car is entering Winsted. Not a long journey after all, not as she hoped it would be. A Chevy dealership and a Sunoco station and a diner with a HELP WANTED sign posted on the glass door. A mother with dark-red hair and pale unhealthy skin pushing her baby in a stroller with a loose front wheel: the stroller wobbles and swerves, wobbles and swerves, and the mother does not stop.

  A streetlight, and Emma turns northwest, onto Route 44. Soon enough, on the left, a sign for Rugg Brook Reservoir. Then the sign is a disappearing eye chart in her mirror and she’s driving on, her body but not her mind—her mind stuck back in a morning walking around that reservoir with her father and brother. Josh in the lead playing Indian scout, having discovered a deer floating on its side at the water’s edge, its abdomen a swallowed brown globe. Hideous and gross, but he was thrilled, his narrow shoulders quivering with fascination. He was poking the bloated carcass with a long sharp stick, probing and investigating, trying to make it bleed, when their father, roaring up from behind, tore the stick out of his hands, shouting, Don’t touch it! Leave the dead in peace!

  A disturbingly uncontrolled reaction coming from an adult, a father, it strikes her now, something too desperate already there, adrift and fearful, excruciatingly prescient. Nothing she wants to remember, driving past the sign for Millbrook Road and pushing on, going inexorably home.

  And the memory, and her failed attempt to escape it, leads to another recollection, as she continues along 44, seeing more and more signs of the familiar, the protective moat of distance between her and her mother good and breached now: walking into Josh’s room one afternoon and finding him cradling one of his most prized possessions, an antique bowl-shaped gold pan, the gift of an eccentric uncle. He used to keep it in a silk-lined box on the shelf above his bed. The bowl made not of metal, as one might have expected, but of some low-grade ceramic, with distinctive grooves and runnels to allow the gravel and silt to sluice off, leaving the gold nuggets and the dust behind. And Josh, thorough and secretive as ever, had done his homework. At the age of ten, he could tell you all about the gold rush and the lives of the prospectors and the harsh anarchic conditions in the mining towns of Northern California. He knew enough about that lost wor
ld to invent a future for himself in which one day, on a break while touring San Francisco with the New York Philharmonic, he would drive inland and visit one of the original mining ghost towns and, pulling his antique miner’s bowl out of his authentic turn-of-the-century miner’s rucksack, do a little panning himself. Because there was still gold to be found coming out of that earth, he was sure of it. You could not convince him otherwise.

  And this, thinks Emma—entering now, slow as she can go, the town of Wyndham Falls and circling the green—is what happens when your life is taken before your eleventh birthday. No one can argue with you anymore, or prove you wrong, or celebrate your genius, or love your imagination more than you do, or make there be gold where there isn’t any, or discover that gold, or be with you as you look for it full of hope, on your knees, panning in that wide, rushing river that still runs out of the mountains.

  SAM

  IN THE AIRPLANE CABIN, the lights are off. His mother’s eyes are closed. He thinks she’s asleep until, in a soft, middle-of-the-night voice, her eyes flutteringly sealed, she begins to talk.

  “I’ve been sitting here wondering what you could have been thinking when you hurt that other boy. The violence of it still shocks me. That you could do something like that. But I don’t believe you’re a person who would ever want to hurt someone else. I don’t believe that. I know you, Sam, and that’s not you. You’re not a person who would ever want to hurt another person. I’ve never believed that about you, and I’m never going to.”