Northwest Corner

by John Burnham Schwartz

She gets down on her knees then, yes she does, right there on the kitchen floor.

  EMMA

  SHE PAUSES IN THE DOORWAY of her mother’s studio, trying once again to account for the changes. From her childhood she’s preserved a mental picture of several antique lamps, an interwoven jungle of spidery hanging plants and lithe potted palms, and a large, overstuffed reading chair with a slipcover of green velvet worn in spots like a favorite pair of old jeans. Here, however, is spare, industrial efficiency, enforced geometry, and highly focused halogen lighting. The lack of soul is general. Only the original drafting table remains, as if to say This one last thing will I still honor. Everywhere else, hard new metal has replaced old soft wood. This room that for years was the last haven for her mother’s dreaming and private moments, for curling up with the contents of her head or the hand-drawn plates of some nineteenth-century monograph on shrubs, today more accurately resembles a diamond cutter’s workroom, a temple of purposeful precision.

  A second table, metal, is set up for an iMac with a twenty-four-inch monitor and a color laser printer. The only chair is a modernist Swiss thing that looks about as comfortable as a park bench. And what plants remain are sharp-edged and sculptural, cactus eye candy, lovely enough as long as you don’t try to touch them.

  Bent over a drawing, hard at work, Grace Learner is oblivious of her daughter’s cataloguing presence. A welder’s beam of halogen light spills off her blond head and into the shadowy corner of the room.

  Emma takes another step. A floorboard creaks, and her mother raises her head sharply.

  “Oh, it’s you!”

  “Sorry. Just coming in to say good night.”

  “You’re going out?”

  The gaze focuses rapidly, taking in the glove-tight jeans and sexy stretch top, then jumps to the digital clock on the computer table.

  “It’s getting pretty late.”

  “Now was the only time Paula could get free.” The lie pops out of Emma’s mouth so easily it leaves no trace on her tongue. “Oh. How is Paula? Still with that awful boyfriend?”

  “That was a couple of years ago.”

  “Where are you meeting her?”

  “Is that a new project you’re working on?”

  An obvious diversionary tactic; yet depressingly, as foreseen, her mother can’t help warming to this rare interest in her work.

  “It’s for Sue Foley. She says she’ll have me redesign their entire four acres if I can come up with something that will persuade her husband.” Her mother pauses to realign the tracing paper she’s been working on. “The job would mean a lot.” A tentative half smile squeezes out. “Well, it would be great.”

  “I hope you get it.” Emma means this—but at the same time, physically, she has begun drifting backward.

  “Em?”

  Halfway out of the room, she gets reeled back. And here is her mother at the canted table, face outwardly composed but blinking now in familial Morse code a haggard SOS: Don’t. Leave. Yet.

  “You’ll be careful? End-of-the-holiday weekend. You know how wild people get.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The empty, formal phrases trotted back and forth; no end, seemingly, to how many times they can be recycled, or how much erosion they can cause over time.

  Then, out of nowhere, her mother takes a deep, complicated breath. “I ran into Wanda Shoemaker at the supermarket this afternoon.”

  Emma doesn’t want to be rude exactly, but her foot has begun to tap against the floor. She’s already late. Sam might leave before she gets there. She might never see him at all.

  “Who’s Wanda Shoemaker?”

  “The woman living with Norris Wheldon. Probably going to marry him, I’ve heard.”

  “Sam Arno’s stepfather?” Suddenly, Emma is listening with both ears instead of just one.

  “Wanda told me news that just knocked the breath right out of me.”

  “What news?”

  “It seems that a few weeks ago, just before he was supposed to graduate, Sam Arno got into a fight with another UConn student at an off-campus bar.”

  “So?” Emma’s tone—by design or accident, she doesn’t know which—emerges almost cavalier. Like: Guys in bars get in fights all the time. But look closer and you’ll see that her foot has stopped tapping. She takes a step farther into the room and remains there, taut and waiting.

  “So—” repeats her mother with sudden irritation, as though it’s now incumbent on her to make an obvious and unforgivable point. “So the boy he beat up is still in the ICU in Hartford. And from what Wanda told me he may not pull through. He may die, Em. And Sam Arno may well end up going to prison like his fucking father.”

  The room goes quiet; the word fucking seems to linger like a crude aftertaste. Behind its invisible, altering presence it’s possible to hear the tree limbs shifting in the breeze in the front yard. Emma’s face feels cold, stamped on like a sheet of tin.

  Her mother is staring at her fiercely. “Did you hear a single thing I just told you?”

  Nodding, Emma turns and walks out of the room. She flees the house. She drives to Canaan as fast and recklessly as she can, in her safety-first Swedish car that doesn’t know the meaning of recklessness.

  RUTH

  INTO THE RUNNING BATH she pours a generous dose of dark-green sea kelp foam and watches it catch like a flame under the tumbling water. Greenish white bubbles flare to the surface as if breathed into by an invisible glassblower. They grow rapidly, with a barely audible, sibilant fizz, till the water’s surface is covered. The air in the tiled room already turning humid, the scent pleasantly marine.

  On the closed lid of the toilet beside the tub, she’s gathered her necessities: the latest issue of Vogue, a fresh mug of tea, a cuticle stick, and an oval pumice stone of the kind, thirty-five years ago, her mother taught her to use.

  She slips the robe from her shoulders and, naked, eases herself into the bath.

  Down below, distant and outside, there are footsteps on the front porch. A moment later, the door to the house opens and closes. Then Ruth hears more footsteps—too heavy for Sam’s—in the entry hall.

  Shutting the magazine she’s been reading with a transporting avidity, she sets it on the toilet lid, her wet fingers leaving snail’s tracks down the front of the glowing, mineral-hard model on the cover, ruining her ten-thousand-dollar dress.

  The bathwater has cooled. She isn’t ready to get out yet. She needs more time. She turns on the tap again. Warm fresh water trickles out, turning hot. She increases the volume, adding more bath foam. New bubbles form and spread, and soon she can no longer see any part of herself.

  “Sam …? Ruth …?”

  Downstairs, she hears him calling out tentatively to the house at large, somehow making their names sound like trick questions, when they’re just names. She lies back, the weight of her head eased by the smooth rounded rim of the tub, and listens to him gamely tackle the stairs. With each step the house tremors faintly; the liquor he’s drunk is in his overreaching feet. He gains the landing and there’s an abrupt, guilty stillness that she recognizes, too, and then he’s knocking on Sam’s closed door.

  “Sam …? You in there …?”

  Sam’s not in there, and in the still emptiness, his dejected need for company by now architecturally palpable throughout the house, she audibly follows him on the next stage of his long march against loneliness, down the hallway in her general direction. “Ruth?” he calls. “You asleep?” Well, not anymore. He’s like the mummy in those old Peter Lorre movies—heavy-footed, inadvertently comical (if you’ve never been married to him, that is), murderously unstoppable.

  “Ruth?” he calls again—this time from her bedroom, not fifteen feet and a half-closed door from where she lies in a state of unseemly aquatic exhibition.

  With both hands, in case he’s lost his mind, she quickly attempts to froth up the patchwork bubbles into a decent coverle
t. Shouting, “Don’t come in, I’m taking a bath!” The warning unnecessary: she hears the aging springs shudder and twang as he lowers himself onto the bed in the next room—all two hundred pounds of him, spread out horizontally by the sound of it, on the side that used to be Norris’s.

  Poor old Norris. Were he around to witness this little réunion de la nostalgie, he’d probably require an emergency angioplasty on the spot. More likely, though, ten o’clock on a holiday night, he’s out duckpin bowling, shopping for golf shoes online, comparing actuarial tables, or microwaving lite popcorn with his new family. Or all of the above. Well, people are different, aren’t they? A girl never can predict who might wander into her boudoir during a bubble bath.

  She turns on the tap again. The hot water trickles down and the heat warms her toes.

  “Where’s Sam?”

  A surprise: Dwight’s breathing once he hit the bed was loud enough that she assumed he’d passed out.

  She turns off the water and tells him matter-of-factly where their son has gone, as far as she knows. There is no immediate reaction. She can’t see him, but they are close enough that soft voices will do; there’s no need to shout. While she waits for him to challenge her, start something, he merely shifts around on the mattress, sending the springs crying as if he is no more than the weight he carries, no more than that. His lack of fight is so opposite his typical bully brand of strength that in spite of herself she begins to feel sorry for him.

  She lies in the tub and listens to his silence, her fingers making tiny ripples in the bathwater. In the next room, as far as she can tell, he has stopped moving entirely. She begins to think he must have drifted off again.

  “I hated my old man,” he says suddenly—as if, shivering awake, he’s just spit out whatever bad dream was on the tip of his tongue. “Christ, I hated him. But I never took a swing at him.”

  She lies there, picturing again the angry raw knuckles on Sam’s right hand that she observed in the car—and realizes what must have happened between them on the roadside. A depleted feeling of imminent sadness drains her, like an hourglass about to run out of sand.

  She says, “You would have, if he’d lived long enough.”

  Dwight grunts. “Maybe.”

  “Sam doesn’t hate you. He tried, but he couldn’t do it.”

  “He’d have his reasons.”

  “Yes. He would.”

  His silence then is his confirmation. She still knows him. Maybe if she lives longer, maybe in thirty years, she’ll start to forget who he is. There are people everywhere who marry again and move on, growing older and older, farther and farther from where they started, and begin, at first gradually and then with annihilating finality, to forget, forget all of it. But in her case that seems unlikely. It is not about love. It is about physics. She and Dwight are like two speeding cars that collided head-on before ever knowing the world. What’s left of each, the wrecks of their hearts, all that’s not scattered by the roadside and in the fields, has been fused by the force of impact, made into one thing, which no longer at its core resembles the old things. What’s between them isn’t useful or beautiful or good. It simply is. It exists. She has never separated herself from him as she imagined.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  Still thinking, she makes no reply.

  “How I handled today, all of it. I deserve what I got. Worse. Sometimes …”

  He doesn’t finish. Maybe there’s no end to it. “It’s all right,” she says, not unkindly.

  “I’m trying.”

  “I know you are.” She takes the pumice stone off the toilet seat and balances it on her raised knee. Just as she used to do when she was twelve and her mother was still there to teach her how to live.

  “I’m just no good, Ruth. No fucking good.”

  She could tell him it isn’t so. But they’ve always known each other better than that.

  They are quiet then, the two of them, in separate but connected rooms, hardly moving, listening intimately to each other for the first time in many years.

  SAM

  OUTSIDE FANELLI’S, the night is moonless but clear; a warm breeze has swept the clouds from the sky. The parking lot is clotted with weeds, and shards of broken bottles glitter underfoot. Above the sound of his boots scraping the dirt, Sam hears the chirping of crickets rising out of the marshy derelict field, and the vaporous bass thump of music escaping the bar.

  He comes to his mom’s Subaru, keys dangling from his fingers.

  He sees her then—a few yards away, leaning against an old Volvo wagon with her arms folded across her chest, her blond hair smudged yellow by the safety light from a phone box at the rear corner of the lot.

  “I waited an hour,” he says, his voice caught awkwardly between anger and relief. “How long have you been out here?”

  She doesn’t answer. Hugging herself, though the night is anything but cold.

  EMMA

  SHE FOLLOWS HIS TAILLIGHTS toward the center of Canaan. It’s after ten and the town is dead. A small-town law office, shuttered for the night, could stand for a funeral home; Tommy’s Diner, with not a light on, looks as good as bankrupt. At the junction with 7, traffic signals swing in the breeze from their stretched wires like arms waving to the dark. The audience gone. It’s just the two of them now, in their separate cars, and the birdcall of rusted hinges coming out of the black sky.

  Then his left blinker speaks to her. She replies with hers, and soon they’re heading south on 44 toward Salisbury.

  A car passes going the other way. For a second, the back of his head is a silhouette in her vision—something to aim for—then a blinding slash of yellow, then just more darkness paled by the wash of her own headlights, and the two ruby eyes by which he’s leading her.

  SAM

  “WHERE ARE WE?” SHE ASKS.

  “Someplace I used to come when I was a kid.”

  He speaks softly, the words weightless; but still his voice seems to ring in the night as if he’s calling her out of some shelter to meet him in the dark. The dark a kind of wilderness, the two of them inside it. He reaches for her hand, feels her lace her fingers through his. No thought to this—thought comes the moment after, his mind running in his heart’s rutted wake.

  In his other hand he holds a small flashlight he found in the glove box of his mother’s car. The weak trembling beam lighting in body-length patches the unmarked dirt tracks they’ve driven down to get here, ending now in meadow. Incipient dew gives the thick grass an optimistic shine. Mole tracks cross the field at random. He spots a burrow of some sort, maybe a woodchuck’s. Ahead loom the tall shadows of trees, interspersed with low humps of shrub. He’s lost track of where they are, but guesses it must be somewhere near Dutcher’s Bridge. The Housatonic must be on the other side of the trees. The river of his childhood.

  They are the same in this, he wants to believe: born into a place not of their choosing, they carry its fixed but living pattern inked on their skins as they grow and break away, wild for some other home to make. The river remains where it’s always been, moving constantly but never changing, waiting for the inevitable day when they will come crawling back to its banks in supplication. Because it knows more than they do, and always has.

  He can’t remember the last time he was close enough to hear the rippling whisper of its steady flowing—as he can now, holding his breath in the dark, walking beside her.

  EMMA

  THEY REACH THE RIVERBANK. He lets go of her hand and switches off the flashlight, and for ten seconds that stretch like a hundred the night blacks her vision. She feels on the cusp of panic until the edges of a knowable picture begin to emerge, half-familiar sensations, beauty of detail and scent. Thick ankle-high grass and damp loamy soil underfoot. The tarry water flowing by with its mica flecks and earth whisperings. The long shadows of elderberry shrubs on which clusters of tiny blue-black berries impose islands of bewitching lacquered darkness.

  An owl hoots warily in the distance. And she
recalls her mother telling her how some indigenous cultures believe that the elder tree offers protection against evil and witches.

  Sure.

  Sam’s been staring at the river, but now he turns to look at her. A facet of light appears on one cheek; she has no idea where it’s coming from, but for some reason it moves her deeply.

  It’s then that she hears herself asking him the first of the questions she’s brought.

  He tells her. Tells the whole thing, and when he’s done she speaks about extenuating circumstances, questions of self-defense. But he is reluctant to talk about excuses or ways out. What he needs to do is draw from his acid pool of self-recrimination a portrait of his own flawed conscience, a drawing intended to posit that, according to some moral proof of his own reckoning, inside the heart of his violent mistake must live the real person.

  Which, if true—the X-ray correct and the guilt earned—then inside the heart of the real person can live only the violent mistake.

  She leans closer and kisses the mark of light on his cheek, the unconscious brand of his goodness.

  SAM

  HIS HANDS UNDER HER TIGHT-FITTING TOP, flush against her skin, his fingers piano-scaling her rib cage to the under-stone coolness of her breasts. Kissing her, his tongue deep in her mouth, her taste some herb he can’t name, her tongue silken and firm. Her hair freshly washed, soft as hair can be. Her beauty more resonant than his memory imagined—a mysterious collage of slender but forceful definitions that, under his fingers now, in his mouth, are, at long last, open to him again.

  Until she pulls her head back, stands looking at him from inches away: “What’s wrong?”

  He shakes his head, tries to kiss her again.

  But his heart isn’t in it.

  So he is discovered. Betrayed by himself, after two years of dreaming. His physical desire a shameful no-show, the bat again left on his shoulder. He stands before her buried alive by these thoughts—trapped not in reverie but in a lost city whose forced excavation, performed alone under her honest questioning gaze, is hard and painful work that leaves him on the verge of grief.