Northwest Corner

by John Burnham Schwartz

  DWIGHT

  I STOP IN THE DOORWAY of his room as at some invisible electrified fence. He’s sitting at his desk, half turned to the door, waiting and not waiting. The color photo on his laptop screen makes me look twice: Freddie Lynn hitting what appears to be a sure home run.

  Freddie Lynn: Boston hero, superboy, grace of the gods—till he wasn’t. An historical figure to my son, who of course never got to see him play in person.

  “Hey.”

  Snapping his computer shut as if it’s porn he’s been looking at, he sits staring at the brushed-metal cover.

  “Ever answer your cellphone?” I pause, studying him, not really expecting a response but willing him to look at me. “So … How’re you holding up?”

  Finally he turns. “How long are you staying?”

  The question stings a little, and I attempt to deflect it with a painted-on grin. “You must be related to your mother.”

  “It’s her house.”

  “And don’t I know it.” My tone is still jaunty, but my right hand has begun strangling the doorjamb; I make the fingers release. I think about going farther into his room, maybe sitting on the bed. Instead, I stay where I am and keep talking, the words coming out rambly and nervous.

  “Tony sends his best. I told him, you know, that you had a situation come up all of a sudden back home. I didn’t get into specifics or anything, but I think he understood. He got it. I’m taking my week of summer break a little early.”

  Understandably, Sam doesn’t respond to any of this. So I just stand there, my monologue delivered and the air sucked out of me, everything quiet except for my own battering heart. His room is essentially unchanged from when he was ten; this is what I’m seeing. Which could be laziness in him, or fear, or maybe a curious form of bravery. His own little Cooperstown. The Sox forever and ever. On a shelf above his head his sports trophies are arrayed, at least half a dozen, their fool’s-gold skins dulled with dust.

  What does one do with it all after the fact? What’s any of it still good for? His vibrant boy’s spirit reduced to artifacts, to trinkets.

  The problem is that once I start thinking this way it’s hard to stop. To keep myself from perceiving every last thing through a darkening tunnel. To not see my son the way my faults and failures have taught me to see the world and myself, to tar him with that stinking brush. When all the kid’s done is leave his room the same, which is no crime.

  RUTH

  SHE STANDS IN A STATE of suspended belief, watching him climb the stairs. Each lumbering step a small explosion that, being somehow personal, threatens to bring down the entire structure. Which collapse she would deserve, absolutely, for letting him stroll in here unannounced like this—into her house—to stage his big mock-heroic riding-into-town moment, as if he truly has anything to add to the pot. She knows this man: he’s no General MacArthur, or even General Schwarzkopf. More like having that silly cartoon clown fish Nemo arrive to mooch off the wreck of the Titanic.

  Before her on the front-hall rug, his black carry-on sits upright on its rubber wheels like an overtrained poodle. Enough clothes for three days, she estimates by size—unless, of course, she offers to do his laundry for him during his uninvited stay.

  Over her dead body.

  She observes herself give the suitcase a good, solid kick, and it falls over onto its side.

  Next, she walks into the kitchen and bitterly hunts down a single bottle of beer in the fridge—the last survivor of the twelve-pack she bought for Sam’s visit over Easter weekend—eventually finding it nestled with the broccoli in the humid vegetable drawer. She twists the top off with such animus that she tears her pinkie nail. And the lightly hissed Fuck! she hears then can only have come from her own mouth. No, it isn’t her night. She puts the bottle to her lips and forces down a few ounces of sour brew, just to prove she can. That little belch was hers, too.

  Then, calmer for some reason, she carries what remains of the beer upstairs.

  The door to Sam’s room is open, Dwight loitering in the entrance. Apparently he’s made limited headway in his caped-crusader parenting mission, and now hopes to beat a hasty retreat to the nearest sports bar.

  She taps him on the back. “Here’s your beer.”

  He turns eagerly, his face alight with canine gratitude—more for the interruption, she suspects, than for the drink—though she notices him squinting quizzically at the amount of liquid missing in the bottle.

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s the last one in the house. So I’d take it slow.” She tilts her head around the roadblock of his body and peers at her son, slumped at his desk in front of his closed laptop. “Everything peaceful in here?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” Dwight grumbles.

  “I can’t imagine. Listen, I’ll make up the sofa in the den for you. But after tonight you make your own bed.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  At this she raises an eyebrow but keeps the tart fruit of her reply to herself. A matter of personal privacy. She walks down the hall to the linen closet.

  EMMA

  SHE HAS NO INTENTION of telling her mother about Sam Arno. An old habit; also simple common sense.

  Sunday she works all day, returning home at six with her back so stiff from eight hours of weeding and brush-clearing in Lakeville that she doesn’t think she’ll be able to rise in the morning. Her mother’s suggestion of two Motrin and a hot shower sounds reasonable enough, but crawling up to her room she decides she needs something stronger.

  An inspired summer-vacation gift from her college roommate Sarah, the single Vicodin pill has been kept these past couple of weeks, wrapped in a pink Kleenex, in the zippered pocket of her makeup bag.

  She washes it down with Diet Coke and waits.

  By six-thirty, she can just about stand upright and pain-free. By seven, sitting down with her mother to a dinner of store-bought pasta e fagioli and sourdough bread, she’s smiling intermittently and can’t get herself to shut up. Words pour from her lips—Carpinus, for instance, rolls off her newly versed tongue as though she’s Olmsted himself; as does a strange disquisition on poisonous tree frogs and a long monologue on the various ways that pioneer women dealt with their periods while out on the wagon trail, and half a dozen other informational obscurities that don’t bear mentioning, the live product of one of the best (as the brochure trumpets) liberal-arts educations in the world. As much to say to her mother, See what your money’s buying? Or, alternatively, How cool is it that a conversation doesn’t actually require the participation of both of us! Which under the circumstances would have to pass as a full-fledged epiphany—and amazingly, in her own mind at least, does.

  But in truth she’s not in command of her thought flow to the extent of making any kind of grand point. She doesn’t care. All she can really do, the only real control she possesses, is to continue hoarding her semiprecious secret that she saw Sam Arno with his mother pulling in for gas at the Christie’s Food Mart outside town. That he’s come back to the deathly nest, for whatever reason, just as she has, and now must be close by.

  Her mother, meanwhile, unaware of any sighting—unaware of so much—nursing a single glass of white wine to Emma’s half bottle, stares in amazement at this unprecedented display of conviviality by her daughter, such a rare show of, well, humanness.

  The drug wears off around ten. The magic talking babe she’s become is unceremoniously deposed by a pain-racked mute, whose head is a hollowed-out gourd. It’s more than sad. Her mother—in her bedroom by now with the door closed, probably reading The Year of Magical Thinking for the third time—observes none of this. Which strikes Emma as the essence of mutual loneliness; unless somehow, like that famous unheard tree falling in the forest, it’s a perverse kind of enlightenment.

  She limps through the creaking house, turning out lights.

  RUTH

  FROM BEHIND THE CLOSED BATHROOM DOOR at the end of the hall, she can hear a gurgling faucet and some haphazard
splashing. And the fact that her son’s awake at six-thirty in the morning is so atypical it affects her like a tremor, some physical disruption of the house’s natural geology.

  Nonetheless, knotting the belt of her ratty bathrobe, she proceeds downstairs as though secure in the illusion that it’s just another day.

  Which pantomime is soon dispensed with. Because, approaching her kitchen, she begins to smell her own coffee being brewed (Green Mountain Breakfast Blend); and then, entering, catches sight of the burly visitor at her table, hunched over a plate of burned toast heaped with the French strawberry preserves that her pupil Adam Markowitz’s mother gave her after winter recital at school—that she’s been saving, unopened, for some more auspicious occasion not yet arrived.

  “Morning,” says Dwight, chewing a mouthful.

  She says it back, absorbing the scene. His hair is damp and he needs a shave. He looks—she doesn’t want to be ungenerous here—vaguely as if he’s spent the night in his car; but then so, probably, does she. And although she’s trying her best to acclimate, his presence is too distorting, to the point where she can’t even muster any real annoyance over the violated jar of preserves.

  Wild strawberries, no less. Whatever.

  She pours herself a mug of coffee, no sugar, and, blank as a mental patient on double meds, sits down across from him.

  “Can I get you some toast? Eggs?” he asks politely.

  She stares at him in a kind of wonderment. Is this Tommy’s Diner and she’s simply misread the signs?

  “No, thank you.”

  “You should eat something.”

  She turns and looks out the window. Sees the Newmans’ black Lab nosing along the bushes between the two houses. After mild urinary suspense, old Toby lifts his leg and does his business.

  “How’d you sleep?” Dwight persists.

  She observes that his eyes are clear, focused: he is a man she was once married to, and he seems to really want to know.

  “Mixed.”

  Ten minutes later, he’s at the counter pouring himself a third cup of coffee—a veritable caffeine sponge, she’s had time to note, despite his supposed healthful California existence. Holding the full mug, he slouches back against the counter and fixes her with a gaze whose meaning only he can fathom, the slightly left-of-center vertical crease between his eyes deepening to a brain patient’s crevasse; as though he’s struggling to remember a single cogent thing about her, comparing her with some other her in his uncertain playbook.

  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

  ENTERING 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.