Half an hour after the Angelus rang I went inside. I had almost an hour until my class began—time that I would have previously happily spent in my classroom. Even though I had been at the academy for three years, I still didn’t know its hallways intimately. I rarely walked down corridors where I didn’t belong. As a result, there were entire floors of the school that I had barely seen and had taken almost no notice of. I wasn’t interested in attaching myself to them now, but I did want at the very least to be able to say that I had really seen all of the academy and not just the selected portions of it that I felt comfortable in, that because I was there it had made a full, proper impression on me. I had already spent enough years without noticing anything; I had walked for a long time with my eyes half closed. I wasn’t suddenly passionate about the hallways of the academy that morning, and made no effort to search for any distinguishing detail other than noting, as I had always done, that the walls were painted a terrible shade of yellow. Such efforts weren’t really necessary and couldn’t be sustained, regardless; if one was really looking, which was what I felt I was finally doing—looking, with neither judgment nor fear at what was around me—then that was enough to say you had truly been there.
Thirty more minutes passed like that—time enough to cover the missing three floors. Once I was finished, groups of students started entering the building in steady droves. The hallways were soon flooded with their bodies; without knowing it, they took up more space than rightfully belonged to them. They constantly reached out to touch one another, affectionately or violently or both at the same time. Their limbs and voices were everywhere.
It was with the full appreciation of this spectacle that I finally entered my classroom, a few minutes before the first bell was to ring. I was still waiting for it when the dean’s secretary came and knocked at the door. Most messages that came from the fourth floor were passed down through students and other teachers. It was rare to see Mrs. Adams anywhere other than in her office. My students knew as well as I did that something important was happening, even if they didn’t know what it was yet. To save me the embarrassment of being publicly summoned, Mrs. Adams was careful to whisper into my ear that the dean and the school’s president would be waiting for me upstairs once my class was finished. I thanked her in the kindest voice I could for the message. “Tell them I’ll be there,” I said, but a part of me doubted already if that was true. The whole exchange lasted only a matter of seconds—thirty to forty at most, and yet undoubtedly it changed the mood, enough so that when I turned and faced my students, it felt as if they had been replaced by a whole new class, one slightly more nervous and on edge than the previous.
XXV
Just what my mother hoped to find after she left the car was never clear. She claimed to have seen lights in the distance as soon as she stepped out, but it was never certain that she expected to reach them, much less find anyone there.
“They weren’t very bright,” she said when I asked her to describe them, “but there was nothing else out there, so they were easy to see.”
She spoke with a rehearsed conviction, her hands nearly but not quite gently folded on her lap, as if she was attempting to model to her long-lost son a form of good behavior and proper decorum that she had never quite practiced but was willing to pretend to do now. Her voice was perceptibly sterner and less nostalgic than it had otherwise been until then, and yet, despite her best efforts, I had a hard time believing her, both then and even more so now. Having walked along the side of the road for over an hour, I have seen lights only from the few passing cars that have gone by, helmed by overly cautious drivers who have turned their headlights on early even though dusk is still at least an hour away, because it’s true, you never know what you might find along these quieter back roads. There are no nearby towns, and all the houses are set far back from the road and are blocked by trees or bends that keep them hidden. It’s possible that thirty years ago there was more here. Plenty of homes since then I’m sure have been destroyed—sold off to make more room for farming or just simply abandoned as corn prices fell and small fortunes were lost, and so perhaps this is what my mother saw—a few twinkling porch lights on the horizon that may very well have been there, even if it was only because she wanted them to be.
According to her, after she left the car she walked in the general direction of the scattered lights for close to an hour in search of help.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she told me, and at least in this regard, I was fully convinced. She would have never claimed to be at a loss for anything unless she really was. It wasn’t in her nature to do so.
“I was afraid of sitting in the car by myself, and I saw the lights. I didn’t know how far away they were. I thought I would reach them after just a few minutes, but it didn’t turn out that way.”
To hear her tell it necessitated a belief that she began her search with the best of intentions, and that it was only because of an error in perception that things had gone wrong. The lights were too far. Distances were deceptive, especially in the dark, and given how empty this road generally is, particularly after dark, what else was she to do.
She stopped at least once to put on a sweater.
“It was much colder than I thought,” she said. “I was freezing once I left the car.”
And again later to briefly catch her breath.
“I didn’t have much energy, you know. I was pregnant with you and always tired.”
She thought several times about turning around, or simply stopping where she was and giving up.
“I almost went back,” she said. “I kept looking behind me expecting to see your father waving at me. He could do something like that. He used to do that all the time. He’d leave and then come right back a few minutes later or he’d get up in the middle of the night, but I’d always find him next to me in the morning. I thought if I walked a little bit farther he’d find a way to get the car back on the road and would come and find me. When I couldn’t see the car anymore, I wanted to stop and give up, but then I remembered that I had you to think about as well.”
The first half hour was the hardest.
“It was so dark out there you wouldn’t believe it. I kept thinking there was something hiding in the fields. I didn’t know about these things back then. No one had ever told me what happened in those places. The only thing we had ever really learned in school about America was that it was very rich and they treated the black people terribly. Maybe it sounds stupid to you, but my father had told me to be careful of strangers in America. He said they would kill you if they saw you. He knew about these things and I believed him.”
Finally she saw a car approaching, perhaps a mile or so away. Its headlights were far brighter than those of the houses that she claimed to have seen. While for most the sight of an approaching car would be more than welcome, my mother, after a fleeting burst of relief, was confronted by a host of doubts and worries.
“I know I should have been relieved,” she said. “But I wasn’t. I think maybe for a few seconds there I was. That didn’t last long, though.”
When the car was less than a half-mile away, she was certain that she had to get out of its line of sight.
“There was a tree not too far away on the other side of the road. I remember that. I thought of hiding there. But then I was afraid they would see me running across the street.”
And so she made a quick, impetuous decision to duck back into the ditch that ran along the side of the road. She scurried all the way to the bottom for safety, lying flat against the embankment to make sure no one could see her.
“It doesn’t make sense to you now why I would do that. I know that. It was different at the time, though. I didn’t know who was in that car. I kept thinking that maybe they were going to try to hit me with it. How did I know that they wouldn’t? What if I had stood in the road and they crashed right into me. We would both be dead then. There were so many things I didn’t know back then. I was only twenty-eight. I never used to be afraid of anything, but it was completely different once we came here. I was always afraid. I used to hate to leave the house by myself. What if someone yelled at me or hit me? I never knew what was going to happen. A little boy with red hair once swore at me. I think he called me dirty. Or something like that. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was very afraid of him, even though he was just a boy. What could he have done to me? I don’t know. You don’t know what that feels like. To be afraid of everything, even children. My English wasn’t very good then. Most people were very nice and they would say, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ but not everyone was like that. Some people would get very angry, and it wasn’t just at me. It was at your father as well. The people in that car could have done anything they wanted to me and no one would have known. I was afraid of getting lost and disappearing all the time.”
She hid in the ditch by the side of the road until the headlights came and then passed. For good measure, she waited at least five more minutes to make sure they were completely out of sight before she even attempted to stand up again. Once she did she found that she was tired and nauseous and more comfortable lying on the ground.
She staked out a space next to a newly erected wooden fence, on the other side of which were hundreds of acres of more farmland. Today, this is all part of the same estate, everything that stretches from where my mother sat down to rest to the place where the accident occurred belonging to one company known for its cereal. The estate continues on for another two miles before breaking open to allow for a now half-dead small town.
The barbed wire along the fence is surely new. My mother made no mention of it and would have been less likely to stay had it been here then. She always thought Americans were too territorial. “All those fences and flags,” she had once said, seeing very little difference between the two. Take the barbed wire away and it’s easy to see the appeal in resting here. The road remains relatively untrafficked even today and were it not for the private property markers along the border I’d be inclined to do the same as her. She, for her part, did the best she could to make herself comfortable, pulling out another sweater from her valise to use as a blanket around her shoulders and a second to rest her head against. She leaned back against the fence and drew her knees into her chest for warmth. She said she had never felt so tired.
“It was like I had walked a hundred miles,” she said. “I was so exhausted. Every part of me was tired.”
She drifted off to sleep. For the first time she had a dream of a house that resembled the one she had grown up in, except larger and in this version dressed in the same type of furniture she had picked out for herself from the catalogues—all of it sleek and dark with smooth, clean lines that nearly hugged the floor. When she woke up a few minutes later, she was convinced that her husband had finally gone ahead and died without her.
“I was sure of it,” she said. “I don’t remember why anymore. Maybe it was because of the dream. He wasn’t in it. Maybe there was no reason. Maybe it was just because I thought it would be better for the both of us if he had.”
I was struck by that sudden hint of concern for my father. Never once before had she made any mention of how he suffered or how deeply miserable they were when together.
“Was he that unhappy?” I asked her.
She looked at me briefly stunned, as if I had spoken to her in a language similar to the ones she knew in form and tone and yet still completely incomprehensible.
“I don’t mean him,” she said. “I mean you and me. Better for us.”
She leaned in at that moment and almost touched her hands to mine, but pulled back before she could complete the gesture; she didn’t know if I was fully on her side, and was afraid of finding out that I wasn’t.
It was with that thought of her husband already dead that she picked herself up and continued her walk along the road, this time no longer worried about who she would or would not find to rescue her. Suddenly it seemed to her as if there was nothing out there that she had to fear, neither cars nor man, and that if called upon to do so, she could walks for miles, straight through the night and into the morning.
“A great weight,” she said, “had been lifted off my shoulders.”
Night in the rural Midwest, miles away from any large towns, can be a remarkable thing precisely because there is often so little to behold. There are plenty of stars, but a greater number could always be found in other remote corners of the country. I’ve seen more of them for example on a single clear night outside of Boston than I’ve ever seen here, and I’ve stared up in obligatory wonder. Still, that doesn’t mean that I loved this place any less. The insects, whether they’re cicadas or crickets, are going at it right now, and their pulsing, whirring hum more than makes up for what the sky may lack. They haven’t quite yet reached their full force, and won’t until hours after the sun has completely set, their sound more of a persistent hum than the full-fledged chorus that it will soon be. My mother was kept in their company for the last thirty minutes of her walk, and I’d like to think that she also reveled in their sound, even if she made no direct mention of them. There isn’t much time left for her to enjoy these things. When the next set of lights finally approached, they obviously came with her and my father in mind. Someone, most likely the car that had passed, had spotted the tail end of the red Monte Carlo sticking out of the ditch and had done the right thing and called for help, and now help was finally coming, bringing with it a cavalcade of lights and sirens. Very soon they are going to be the only things that she can hear. The rest will fade into the background, and for the next eighteen-odd years she’ll spend much of her solitary time remembering how it felt to have briefly wandered even one small piece of earth with absolutely nothing and no one at all to fear.