The Journey Home

by Michael Baron

She felt the gentle rise of his chest as he chuckled. “You know me, darling. No matter what I’m thinking about when we start, I’m completely consumed by you within seconds.”

  She hadn’t expected this response. “You mean you weren’t thinking the entire time about our making a baby?”

  He lifted his head and turned it toward her. “You mean you were? A guy could get a complex about that sort of thing.”

  She kissed his shoulder and propped herself up on one arm. “I was swooning, of course. I’m sure you noticed that. You never, ever, have to worry about it. But a baby, Don. A baby!”

  Don smiled at her and ran his fingers through her hair. “You’re not going to give this child all of your attention now, are you?”

  “Only ninety-five percent.”

  He grinned at her slyly. “Do I at least get the other five?”

  She pecked his cheek. “You get the other ninety-five. That’s how this works.”

  “If I did the books in the office that way, I’d go to jail.”

  She settled back down on his chest. “This is not about offices, Don. And it’s definitely not about calculations. It’s about magic. Family magic. Don’t you think?”

  Don pulled her closer still. He was always doing this, as though the only way they could truly be near enough would be if they were in the same body. She loved it. “I do think so, darling. I think we’re going to have a magical family together.”

  “Does three still sound like a good number to you?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “Are we talking about the numbers the rest of the world uses or your magic numbers? I just want to make sure that I’m not agreeing to have eighteen children.”

  She pinched his side. “Just three, Mr. Smart-Aleck. Two girls and a boy.”

  “Unless it’s two boys and a girl.”

  “Or that.”

  “Or three boys.”

  She let the idea percolate for a moment. “If we have three boys you’re going to have to hire a nanny for me.”

  “As though you would let anyone else take care of your kids.”

  Antoinette giggled and then rose up and took Don’s head in both of her hands. “Isn’t this exciting?”

  She kissed him quickly and he pulled her back to him for a longer, deeper kiss. “I love you, Hannah.”

  She kissed him again. “I love you, Don.”

  He held their heads close together. “You know it might not have happened tonight, right?”

  “I know. And if we have to try several times before it happens, I’ll be fine.”

  She settled in his embrace again. “But it did happen tonight.”

  TWELVE

  Curio

  Warren had hoped that the cooking aromas would draw his mother out of her room, but she stayed there instead. Over the past few weeks since he’d started making these daily lunches, her strength seemed to be flagging. He was relatively sure that there was no direct connection between the two events – in fact, only the food seemed to jostle her at all – but it was still disappointing that his attempts to draw her back into the world had so little impact. It seemed that she was walking slower than ever, and she always appeared to be tired. Warren had discussed this with the doctors at the facility, but they seemed unmoved. Their unspoken message was “She’s old; what do you expect?” Warren assumed that they saw the kind of mental and physical decline she exhibited with numbing regularity; but this was a singular event in Warren’s life. Dad had gone in an instant – he had driven to a Senior Citizens function the day before a heart attack felled him. He wasn’t going to trivialize this, no matter how “circle of life” the Treetops staff got with him.

  The dish he was preparing today was Ralphie’s You-Must-Be-Kidding Pork. Mom had created it for a neighbor so obsessed with pig meat that he’d insisted his wife have their kitchen painted pink. At a casual dinner party with Ralph and his wife, Mom presented a pork loin wrapped in bacon and stuffed with kielbasa, ham, and sweet Italian sausage, served with a sauce flecked with prosciutto. The way she told the story, she’d intended it as somewhat of a joke, but everyone at the table enjoyed it so much – especially Ralph, who by some reports wept – that it made regular appearances at large gatherings.

  Making this meal was definitely pushing Warren to the edges of his nascent cooking skill. He’d convinced the butcher at the supermarket to butterfly the pork for him, which was a big help. Warren did-n’t want to think about how many pigs might have died in vain if he’d attempted the exercise himself. Still, the stuffing required significant preparation. The pork products needed to be chopped or removed from their cases and then mixed with minced onion, sage, rosemary, egg, and just a tiny bit of bread-crumbs. He then needed to roll and tie the pork, drape bacon over the entire thing, and roast it.

  The makeshift kitchen seemed to grow daily as Warren contemplated new meals. He’d brought the one good pot he had at his apartment, along with a cutting board, a knife, and a few other utensils. When he went to Crystal’s to sign their long-negotiated divorce agreement, he told her about his cooking exploits and she suggested that he take some of the pans they’d saved from Mom’s house. This morning, he was already in the Treetops parking lot before he realized that he didn’t have an oven in which to roast the pork. Another trip to Bed, Bath & Beyond – his fifth in three weeks – netted him a portable brick oven. It was an extravagance, especially since he was no closer to landing a new job than he had been four months ago, but it seemed in the right spirit of things.

  The roast was now in the oven while Warren sautéed spinach with garlic, and boiled potatoes for mashing. His mother had taught him years ago that every entree should include a green vegetable and a starch, and now that he was feeling a bit steadier about cooking, he stuck to that with these meals, even though it meant eating a far larger lunch than he normally ate, and even though his mother only grazed through bits of it.

  When he was done with the sides and while the pork rested, he contemplated the sauce. Beyond the prosciutto, he had no idea what went into it. He’d never seen his mother make this dish. Deconstructing the pork was easy, especially since the primary ingredients were the stuff of family legend, but the sauce was a complete mystery. She’d long lauded shallots, so he minced one and threw it into the pan where the prosciutto had been sizzling. Then he added some chicken broth, which certainly made the sauce liquid, but didn’t come close to the right consistency or flavor. He let the sauce reduce while he considered other additions. A tablespoon of butter made it thicker, but nothing else. He was getting ready to punt. Maybe he didn’t even need a sauce.

  “Apple jam.”

  The voice startled Warren. He’d been so focused on the pan that he hadn’t even realized his mother was awake.

  “You finish the sauce with butter and apple jam.”

  Now that Warren thought about it, he could remember a slight taste of apple in the sauce cutting through the mountain of pork. If he’d really concentrated, he probably could have figured that out. Of course, he never would have guessed about the jam part. He didn’t even realize you could make jam out of apples. Applesauce and apple butter, sure. Apple jam?

  “Um, I don’t have any of that.”

  Mom patted him on the arm with an understanding smile and moved him away from the pan. She looked in the apartment’s small refrigerator and found the remains of a bottle of orange marmalade that Warren had used a few days earlier.

  “It won’t be the same, but it’ll work,” she said as she added a few spoons of the marmalade to the pan and stirred it with a whisk.

  She turned to face him, satisfied. “Just let that simmer for a minute. Is everything else ready?”

  He laughed, thinking about how easily she’d solved a problem that had him befuddled and thinking about how great she looked with a whisk in her hand. “Yeah, just about.”

  They sat to eat a few minutes later. The sauce wasn’t what he’d remembered, of course, but the orange did a decent job of balancing the rich
ness of the pork, and the pork itself had a ridiculous amount of flavor.

  Though her “closer” act had been impressive, Mom ate her usual birdlike quantities. Warren had been taking the leftovers home and eating them for the next night’s dinners, but even the small pork roast he’d gotten left him with a considerable amount of meat. When his mother retired to her bed about a half hour after lunch, he made up a plate and headed to the office Jan shared with the other nurses.

  “I thought you might be hungry,” he said as he laid the plate on her desk.

  She looked up at him with an appreciative smile. “How did you know I didn’t get a chance to eat lunch today?”

  “I could hear your stomach rumbling all the way down the hall.”

  She looked down at the plate. “This looks great. What is it?”

  “It’s pork roast stuffed with three different kinds of pork with a prosciutto sauce on top.”

  “You must be kidding.”

  “How it got its name, actually.”

  She put the napkin he’d provided on her lap and then tasted the pork with the knife and fork he’d also brought for her. “You made this?”

  “Well, my mother needed to come in at the last minute to save the sauce from complete failure, but I cooked the rest of it.”

  “Wow. I’m skipping lunch daily from now on.”

  “There’s plenty of room at the table.”

  Jan tried everything and then nodded admiringly. “Did you just say that Antoinette gave you a hand with this?”

  “It was another one of those moments where the decades just disappeared. She came in, fixed the sauce, and then went back to being a frail little old lady.”

  “That’s exciting.”

  Warren tipped his head to one side. “It was temporary. But we’ve had a few of these moments. I’m thinking of putting them in a curio cabinet.”

  Jan reached for his hand and squeezed it, a gesture that caught him off guard completely. It took him a split second to squeeze back.

  “Can you sit for a while, or do you need to get back to your mother?”

  Warren pulled over a chair from another nurse’s desk. They were alone in the office, the first time he’d ever seen it this quiet. “She’s asleep already.”

  “That’s good. Not the part about your mother being asleep, but the part about you having a few minutes. I hate eating by myself.”

  “Then come join us. Really. We have a seating at 12:45 every day. Except for the days when I make a huge mess of things.”

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll take you up on that.”

  Jan ate appreciatively and Warren recounted the apple jam/orange marmalade in detail, presenting it the way someone on SportsCenter might. Minutes later, a crisis involving Mrs. Blake pulled Jan away and Warren headed back to the apartment to clean up.

  Mom was deep asleep at this point. She didn’t even budge when he kissed her good-bye. They’d had a moment, though.

  THIRTEEN

  Behind the Display

  “Let’s get off at this next exit,” Joseph said as they approached a sign for a town named Vista.

  Will looked over from the driver’s seat, eyes wide. “You recognize something?”

  “No, sorry. We’ve just been driving for most of the last two days. I need to get out of the car for a while. Maybe walk around a town a little. We haven’t tried that yet. It could help.”

  The expectation on Will’s face dimmed. “Sure, what the hell.”

  The kid took the next off-ramp and then drove left at Joseph’s direction. Joseph didn’t have any particular reason to make this suggestion, just as he had no particular reason why he wanted to stop in Vista, but he figured any action was better than no action at this point. Any decision, regardless of how randomly chosen, could lead to a breakthrough of some sort.

  For a mile or so, this didn’t seem to be a particularly fruitful choice. There had been a couple of fast-food restaurants near the exit, but the road turned residential quickly, lined with ranch-style houses on modest plots of land. Six houses in a row were painted various shades of light blue.

  “We could be driving right past my home,” Joseph said as they stopped at a traffic light. “My wife could be sitting right there in that kitchen right now telling someone how worried she is about me.”

  “You’d know.”

  “Would I? Why would I know? How would I know? The fact is, my house could have been down the block from where we started and we’ve just been driving farther and farther away all this time. Either that, or it could have been two exits back. What was the name of that town? Oh, yes, Greendale. Maybe I live in Greendale and my memory is just too shot to help me out in any way.”

  “You’d know.”

  The strain in Will’s voice when he said this surprised Joseph. Joseph had liked the kid instantly. He was easy to like, with his floppy hair and crooked smile. His commitment to the cause was definitely his most endearing quality, though. Joseph had gotten nowhere near enough of Will’s story out of him, but as their time together grew, it seemed that Will’s devotion to getting Joseph home increased exponentially. He was taking this personally and would no doubt consider it a huge failure if they didn’t achieve their goal.

  For the first time, Joseph wondered what would happen to Will if they ever did find Joseph’s wife. Would Will stay for dinner and then get in his car to return to his place with Steve and Karen and his four foster siblings? Did he have other expectations or other plans? Was Will scouting out someplace for himself as they made this journey? When Joseph reached his destination, what could he do to help Will reach his?

  The road began to change about a quarter mile later. A small downtown shopping district emerged, brick buildings with elongated awnings and flowering bushes on hip-high wrought iron planters.

  “This what you had in mind?” Will said as he slowed the car to accommodate the heavier traffic.

  “Yeah, this is just what I was looking for. Let’s walk around a bit.”

  Will found a parking space adjacent to a shop with an orange awning. They walked toward the shop, saw that it sold dresses, and kept walking down the block.

  “Do you and your wife do stuff like this?” Will said as they looked into the window of a bicycle store.

  As he had with each of Will’s prompts, Joseph considered this. “I don’t know. Maybe. This doesn’t feel strange, so I guess there’s a chance.”

  The next store sold athletic shoes. Its window displayed dozens of sneakers, some looking aggressively high tech and others looking expensively casual.

  “Oh man, they have the new Mega-Trainers,” Will said, pointing. Joseph followed his finger and his eyes landed on a pair of white shoes with a thick black sole that seemed better suited to a car. There were tendrils of silver rubber reaching up toward the laces.

  “You like those?”

  “This is the first time I’m seeing them in person. I’ve been reading about them online for months. This is the shoe of the moment.”

  Joseph looked down at the boy’s shoes, assuming that Will had once coveted them as much as he did the Mega-Trainers. The sneakers had some of the same markings as the new shoes, but the leather had become nearly worn through at the right pinkie toe.

  “Do you want to try on a pair?”

  “I don’t know; they’ll probably just crush my soul.”

  “No, come on. I need to see these up close. They’ll look different on your feet than they do in a store window.”

  They walked into the shop and Will gave the clerk his shoe size. The clerk seemed impressed that Will wanted to try the Mega-Trainers, which probably meant that the sneakers were ludicrously overpriced. When Will tried them on, he sighed, as though he’d just stepped into a warm bath.

  “Molten armor,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s how they describe these shoes. ‘Molten’ because they fit your feet like they were made just for them and ‘armor’ because you could dance on a bed of nails w
hen you had these on without feeling a thing.”

  Will stood and took a series of long strides across the store, pivoting sharply and making a darting move as though he were on the field of play before walking back to his seat.

  “I’d better get these off before my heart breaks,” he said, reaching for the left lace.

  “Leave them on,” Joseph said.

  Will looked at him, confused.

  “Leave them on. I said I’d pay for gas. This is like gas for your feet.”

  “Hey, good line,” the clerk said.

  “Pass it along to the shoe company. Maybe they’ll give us a discount.”

  Will stood. “You’re gonna buy these for me?”

  “You need ‘em and they look good on you.”

  “Geez, really?”

  Joseph put a hand on Will’s shoulder, something that suddenly seemed much easier to do than it had seemed the other night. “You’re driving me all over the place waiting for me to have some kind of breakthrough. I really think I can do this little thing.”

  “Wow, thanks.”

  The shoes didn’t make as much of a dent in Joseph’s wad of cash as he expected. The clerk threw in a sticker that meant nothing to Joseph, but seemed to please Will, which made the entire purchase seem like more of a bargain.

  They continued their trek down the block, with Will making several sudden lunges forward or fast side-steps. “Yep, these shoes are incredible.”

  Will seemed more boyish since he put on the sneakers. It was as though the shoes that had literally given him more bounce in his step had done so figuratively as well. It was entertaining to see. Joseph wondered if something in one of the shops on this street could do the same for him.

  They browsed an electronics store and bought some almond bark at a chocolate shop. At a music store, Will saw a new release from a band he liked, approached it quickly, and then turned back to Joseph, pointing and saying, “Not asking for it. Not asking.”

  The store after that featured a wide variety of goods made from recycled materials. They found hats made of burlap coffee sacks, drinking glasses made from wine bottles, serving bowls made from old vinyl records, and sculptures created from found objects, among dozens of other things. They’d been alone in the store when they entered, but as Joseph examined a tote bag made from old magazine covers, he heard a burst of laughter behind him. He turned to find four women joking with one another as they looked at the merchandise. He could only see the face of one of them, a brunette with wavy ringlets who appeared to be in her late twenties.