by Monica Wood
Tracey glanced upstairs. “He doesn’t seem to be coming back down.”
The front door opened, and another small knot of people scattered through: aunts and cousins, more neighbors, some of Marie’s coworkers from the library. Karen whispered to James: “See if you can get your father to come down here.”
James watched his almost-ex-wife take Tracey into the kitchen. Then he turned, alone, to face the flight of stairs.
At his father’s bedroom door his mother’s dog, a grief-stricken Yorkie, sat like a broken doorstop, half-standing, half-sitting, its pindrop black eyes darting. James pushed the door open and found his father standing at the window, gazing down at the ark. The bed looked freshly made. “People are here, Dad,” James said.
His father didn’t move. He was wearing the suit he’d bought for James’s graduation from Berkeley, over twenty years past; it fit him badly, and he looked like what he was: a pipefitter in a suit he’d been forced to put on. Because of the long, bitter mill strike, he hadn’t worked in months, his retirement package suspended in a limbo he never talked about. James wondered if he should offer his father money.
“Dad, there are people downstairs.” Without his mother here, he felt his sentences as ungainly blows, awkward as two-by-fours.
His father seemed blurred and ghostly in the cottony light blanketing through the window. Snow was coming. Your father, people had whispered to him all morning, Your father, your poor father, he’s been building that, that thing, whatever it is, and the mill’s still out, and now that your mother’s gone . . . In his youth, James had sometimes felt orphaned by his parents’ mutual devotion, but he felt nothing but pity now. Then, as his father turned to face him, another sensation altogether: a stab of envy, shockingly familiar. As he had once envied his father the breadth of his love, James now envied him the breadth of his grief. James himself would never suffer like this; he knew it; and the knowledge of what he’d been spared provided not a scrap of relief.
“Your mother had a lot of friends,” his father said.
“It’s you they’re here to see, Dad. People come to, I don’t know, to comfort the survivors.”
His father turned to the window again. “I’d just as soon stay up here,” he said. He took off the suit jacket. He sat down and removed his shoes, then lay across the made bed, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling. “I’d just as soon.”
The dog slunk in and whined at the bedside. James stooped to pick it up. It was coarse and wiry and not at all the comfort he might have been hoping for. “You want the dog?” he asked.
His father nodded, and James placed the dog on the bed next to him. His father didn’t move.
“Karen and I are getting a divorce, Dad.”
His father blinked once, slowly. “Your mother figured it was something like that. She used to hear from Karen so regular.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“It was good of her to come. Your mother would’ve wanted her here.”
“I’m going downstairs now. People are here.”
“All right.” He put his big hand on the little dog.
“That’s a nice-looking rig out there, Dad,” James said. “Like a sculpture, kind of.”
“I wanted to paint it. Your mother liked it better plain.”
James waited. “All right, then. I’m going now.”
Downstairs the rooms swelled with the murmurings of people who had known his mother far better than he. Most of the women brisked in and out of the kitchen; the men circulated uncomfortably, parting the drapes from time to time as if hoping for help. Brad Collins sat in Marie’s chair, looking forlornly down at her knitting.
“He won’t come down,” James said to him. He had trailed Brad Collins for an entire summer more than thirty years ago, falling in with Brad’s other kids and pretending he was Brad’s son.
“Leave him alone, then,” Brad said. He put his hand on James’s arm, and for the first time since he’d gotten the news, James teared up.
“The dog is with him. I left the dog up there.”
“Good. That’s good.” Brad nodded, his lower lip jutting out. “It was a great love story, James. Children don’t know these things about their parents. Ernie and Marie. It was a great love story.”
“I did know that,” James assured him, nodding. “I knew that.”
The afternoon unfolded, long and painful. Karen produced a coffee urn from someplace—where?—and it burbled efficiently. Finally the guests trickled out, even Brad and Alma, leaving James and Karen alone.
Then Tracey emerged from the kitchen. “Oh,” James said.
“I didn’t know anybody,” she explained. “I guess I was hiding.” Her coat was still on, the top button nearly twisted off.
James stood up: her cue to leave. He wanted to sit in his mother’s chair and imagine what it might be like to love a woman the way his father had loved her.
“I hurt your mother,” Tracey said, picking up her purse. “It’s been a weight on my conscience. I mean, for years, like a big green fist, a monster’s fist bearing down on my terrible conscience.” She extracted a starched stack of bills. “I realize that money is a poor. . . I mean, some people might even consider this kind of crass, but an apology is not something you can hold in your hand, the only thing you can really hold in your hand is money, so this is heartfelt, I do assure you, and I’d appreciate your forebearance very, very much. I’ve been saving up. It’s four hundred dollars.”
“Please, keep your money,” James said, shocked. “Whatever it is, I’m sure my mother’s forgotten it.” He didn’t want to hear some story about hurt feelings, a women’s squabble. Maybe she’d stolen some books from the library under his mother’s watch. James looked past her, toward the stairs, where his father was descending in his new, vague way. He was still wearing most of the suit, the shirt damp and rumpled, the tie, too short, pasted askew on his broad chest. How long had he been like this, moving like a hurt deer? Is this what grief looked like?
Ernie faltered toward Marie’s chair and stood there, kneading the chair-back hard with his meaty fingers. He fixed on Tracey. “What did you say your name was?”
“Tracey Martin,” she said, blinking fast. “Used to be Brighton.” She sucked up her breath as if expecting a blow.
After a long silence, in which something wrong and new racketed into the room, some knowledge James was not privy to but sensed in the shifting planes of his father’s face, Ernie said: “There was a Tracey Brighton, a long time ago, broke into our cabin.”
“That was me,” Tracey said, her eyes brimming. “I was nineteen, Mr. Whitten, I’m a different person now.”
James looked to Karen, who shook her head: No, I have no idea.
“I was a horrible person then, Mr. Whitten,” Tracey was saying, “truly I was, I know that, but I swear to you I’m different now. I’m in a program, and a church, and I’m going to marry a wonderful man soon, a minister, but first there are certain steps, a certain clearing of conscience, and it was my idea completely, I assure you, nobody’s making me do this, it’s my own free will, I’ve become a person of free will”—she held out the money on her narrow palm—“and I sincerely wish to offer amends.”
“You’re talking about Bear Lake?” his father said, the planes in his face breaking up now, but subtly, like an earthquake too small to register. “You and that boyfriend of yours? Our place on Bear Lake?”
James looked around, bewildered. His father and this stranger were discussing the family camp, sold the year after James left for Berkeley.
His father’s face continued to transform itself, an expression James remembered from the few times, as a mouthy teenager, he’d suffered Ernie’s rage. Always it was about defending Marie, defending his wife against the rudeness of his son. “They gave you a wrist-slap,” his father was saying, his voice shimmering with fury. “You came into the courtroom with your lawyer father and your pretty dress and got a wrist-slap.”
“What’s going on?” James
asked, his blood beginning to pulse woozily. “Dad, what are you talking about?”
Tracey began to weep, her palm still open, money stacked like a deck of cards. Karen shot James a look: Do something.
“When I got there she was bleeding,” his father said. “Her little hands were tied, and her ankles.” He looked at James, a scary, loosened look. “Your mother was a husky woman, a strong woman. But she had such little hands.” Before James could stop him, he lunged at Tracey. “You get out of my wife’s house!” he raged, his face finally crumpling like burnt steel. Both fists bunched and shook. “Get out, get out of her house!”
Tracey flinched violently, then bolted for the front door, flinging the words I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry like coins over her shoulder. When the door shuddered closed, the house fell silent.
“For God’s sake,” James said, trembling now. “Dad?” He approached his father as he would an accident victim, with all due fear and attention. Ernie was still standing, his fists at his ears, tears dripping helplessly down his windburned cheeks.
“Your mother loved that place,” he said heavily. “We sold it because of that tramp and her burglar boyfriend.”
“A burglary?” James asked, unable to focus, turning from Karen, whose eyes looked pinned open, to his father, who kept shaking his head, looking down upon Marie’s chair. “Why didn’t I know about this?” James pleaded, his head vibrating like a stuck saw.
“The boyfriend got some jail time,” Ernie said, taking long, wet breaths. “They broke in, and took some things, and the car. First they cut your mother with a knife,” he said. “The girl’s the one who did it. A little cut”—he touched his own face, just above the temple, his hand quivering—“right here. Just to scare her. Just to make her think there was no such a thing as being safe in the world.” He bent his head, all the light in the room seeming to pool in on him.
“Good God,” Karen breathed, dropping into a chair.
James squinted hard, trying vainly to clear his view. “When, Dad? When did this happen?”
“You’d just gone off to Berkeley. Your mother wanted to be alone, so she went up to the camp.”
“Alone?” James asked. His mother never went to camp alone. His mother never went anywhere alone.
Ernie shook his head, then made his way into Marie’s chair. He picked up a skein of yarn and held it. “She was under the boyfriend’s spell,” he muttered. “That’s what she said in court. Your mother believed her. Her in her pretty dress. All that blond hair.” He clutched the yarn. “Of all days,” he said. “Your mother would think it had some kind of, some kind of significance. That it meant I was supposed to forgive her.”
He looked at James, as if James would not know this about his mother. Ernie waved his hands, washing them of the whole tottering world. “Of all days. Why today, of all days?” He dropped his head into his hands, rocking himself a little.
“What was Mom doing there by herself?” James asked. He was trying to backtrack, get one fact at a time. He would build himself back to steady ground this way.
“We had some trouble,” his father said at last. “Your mother and I, we hit a bump in the road.”
All right, James thought. Fact number one. “So she, what, moved up there?” He couldn’t imagine it. “She moved up to camp?”
His father looked up. “It was a big bump.”
Now James sat, his skin throbbing, the house groaning with his mother’s absence. It was his own self unbuckling now, everything he thought he knew sluicing away. The endlessly told story of his parents’ smooth slide into love, that beautiful, seamless ride against which he had measured his own failures of affection—that story suddenly read more like anybody else’s, maybe even his own if you didn’t count the ending.
“Are you all right, Ernie?” Karen asked.
James watched, stranded by confusion, as Karen shepherded Ernie into the kitchen. He heard the tap opening, a chair scraping back, a low, encouraging murmur.
He stepped outside, taking in painful gulps of air, imagining the hundred other ways his marriage might have gone. It had started to snow, a lacy feathering that landed wet and silent. He was about to retreat when he spotted Tracey, parked across the street, waiting. He marched over to her as she rolled down her window. “Get out,” he told her.
“You take this money,” she snapped, thrusting the bills into his hands. “I won’t leave till you take it. I mean it.”
He saw just then a snippet of the hardness she’d been trying to overcome. It pleased him unaccountably, the aftermath of a bad life still present in her voice. He reached into the car and slapped the bills down on the dashboard. “You cut my mother’s face.”
She nodded gravely. Her upturned face looked puffy and stained. “He told me to do worse than that. I saved your mother’s neck, is what really happened.”
“And you want, what, a medal for that?”
“I never wanted to hurt her. You have to believe me, I had nightmares for years.”
“You—” It hurt to talk, as if his throat had been badly bruised and only halfway healed. He managed to say, “What are you looking for? Forgiveness?”
She shook her head, her mouth melting downward. “No,” she said. “But I was hoping.”
Snow filtered down the back of his shirt. He stepped back, eyeing her corded neck, her old eyes, her shabby car. “Just go. Keep your guilt money.”
“Wait,” she said. “Please. I have to tell you something. Your mother wasn’t scared of me. I was a desperate little loser with a knife, but she wasn’t scared.” She blinked at the snow falling into her open window. “I think it was because she could see I was redeemable.”
James stood in the spongy street, gazing at this luckless, hapless, used-up person who had come up from Connecticut with a stack of new bills. What on earth would his mother have done?
“I’ve got two kids now,” she said. “Two ex-husbands.” She made a laugh-cry sound and wiped her eyes again. “You want to talk baggage, I’ve got a trainload, and yet as soon as I’m finished paying my moral debts, this wonderful guy is going to marry me. He pulled me out of the muck and still he’s going to marry me.”
James glanced up the street, and down. His mother would have stood here, listening. This was a son’s knowledge and he was glad to have it. He leaned on the car door. “How many,” he asked, “how many debts do you have to repay?”
“More than I can do,” she said. “They’re hard to track down. I found your parents from the court record.”
“Are they all like this?”
She shrugged. “One guy slapped me, but at least he took the money. Listen, do you want to get in? You’re all wet.”
He studied her for a few moments, then rounded the car and got in beside her. Vinyl seats, no floor mats, a wicker cross dangling from the rearview. He felt a pang of pity that he hoped his mother would approve of. “Everybody has debts,” he said.
“Well, my conscience is in worse shape than most people’s.”
It occurred to James then, sitting in this car that smelled faintly of transmission fluid, that Tracey’s conscience was probably in better shape than most people’s. Better than his, certainly. The car’s bare interior seemed muffled and safe. He envied her the luxury of confession. To whom could he confess?
I never loved my wife. I carried on with women half my age. I was a terrible father. I was a terrible son.
“There’s no such thing as a clean conscience,” he told her. “You won’t feel as cleansed as you think you will.”
Tracey regarded him without pity, without judgment; it was the way he imagined alcoholics met one another at AA meetings. “It’s never too late to start fresh,” she offered.
“Oh, it is,” he said. “It is absolutely too late.” He looked out through the scrim of snow at his parents’ house. “Some things aren’t amendable.”
“That’s true,” she agreed. “But some things are.” She held his gaze. “I was hoping this would be one of the
m.”
The world seemed so full of transgressions at the moment, so full there was hardly room to take a breath. To erase just one, to have that power, did not seem like something he could turn down. He felt useful. He felt called. “Listen,” he told her. “I’m her son. I can forgive you on her behalf.”
“Really?” she said, her lips parting. “Oh. Wow. My God. Thank you, really. You have no idea.”
She slipped the money from the dashboard and he took it. She shuddered with relief. If his father refused the money, he would send it to his daughter in Alaska, or wherever she was by the time they got back. Karen would know; Karen would know precisely.
He shut the door and headed across the street, hunching his shoulders against the snow. Behind him he could hear Tracey’s car rattle into gear. Ahead of him lay his father’s house, and the ark, steadfast and hulking, seemed to move as the snow gathered upon it. He stood staring at it despite the cold, this object of mystery that belonged to one man and one woman upon whom some trouble had been visited, failing to put them asunder.
He entered the house, which had gone silent. Karen was sitting in his mother’s chair. “He’s upstairs,” she said. She shook her head slowly. “God, Jamie.”
“I know. God.”
“People have all kinds of secrets,” she said. She gazed up at him. “Did you think I’d come back? After you were finished with Miss Teenage America?”
He tilted his head to really see her; she was not angry. “I think so,” he admitted. “Probably.”
“There was a time when I might have,” she said. “But not now. You know that, right?”
He nodded. “I’m so sorry,” he told her, enunciating the words.
She smiled wearily. “Thanks.”
“Can I sit with you awhile?” he asked.
She slid over. His mother’s chair wasn’t big enough for the two of them, but he wedged himself next to her, sliding his arm along her shoulders. The coming evening edged in, certain and safe, as reassuring as the long-ago feel of his mother’s hand. He listened for sounds of his father. After a few minutes his hip fell asleep, his knee began to throb. But he didn’t move. Something about the waning of this sorrowful day felt wondrous and unearned, like a snow day or a magic spell or forgiveness, and James did not want to be the one to end it.
