Finally, the time for him to leave town arrived. The night before he left he took a drive, setting out along the golf course and then down a bit past the Hollands’ and beyond them the Gammonds’ old place, continuing on through the village past the green and the Congregational Church and the shops with their painted signs, turning at the intersection onto Elm and heading out to the state route.
There, uninterrupted woods ran either side of the highway for the first three or four miles until he reached the liquor store that still stood on the far side of the traffic light across from the muffler shop. It had begun to rain and the red of the traffic signal slid down his windshield in rivulets quickly cleared by the wipers, only to blur again as the signal turned green and he crossed the line back into Alden.
He glided through one light after the next, by the glowing signs
for discount meals in the parking lots of the fast-food chains and passed the cinder-block furniture warehouses and the box-store plazas that they had knocked down the old malls to build, until eventually he reached Foley Avenue and turned off the strip. Half a mile down at the intersection with Main darkened storefronts stretched from one end of the block to the next: an insurance office, an empty showroom with a for rent sign in the door, a beauty salon whose faded posters advertised hair styles of the eighties. Across the street a convenience-store awning was illuminated by the bright yellow sign above the check-cashing office next door, its metal grate locked to the sidewalk.
Christmas decorations already littered the front yards of the ranch houses along Howard, the glowing Santas and plastic reindeer arranged like inflated toys on outsize playroom floors. As he reached Eames Street, the rain softened to a drizzle and then stopped. Up ahead he could see low traveling clouds, their yellow underbellies lit by the strip that lay just on the other side of the creek and the fences. Single-family homes petered out toward the end of the block where he noticed Phil’s Pizza had been replaced by a Brazilian restaurant still serving at this late hour.
The triple-deckers began on the other side of Miller, big clapboard rectangles with three front porches, stacked one atop the other, the angles on most of them no longer right, their posts sagging into the worn corners of the decking. Trash cans were lined up along the chain-link fences that fronted most lots beside the gated parking spaces. There were Christmas decorations here as well, string lights flashing slowly on and off in windows with the shades pulled and farther up Mrs. Cronin’s old wooden crèche, its figures two feet high and illuminated in front by a row of bulbs sheltered under a weathered strip of plywood.
He pulled to the curb and cut the engine. Up on the third floor of
number 38 the lights in his mother’s apartment were still on. He pictured her as he had a thousand times: she would be into her second bottle by now, watching the evening dramas while whatever she’d managed to make herself for dinner lay half eaten on the table in front of her.
To climb those stairs, he thought. To take a seat in the chair opposite and let her pour him a drink.
She had done that sometimes the year before he left, because she’d wanted to keep him in the room with her, he being the only audience for her silence, the only person who might ask her to break it. Which he never had, having learned the power of reticence from her.
Whenever he’d been tempted over the years to get in touch with her he would recall what it felt like on those summer nights in the apartment when he’d sit shirtless across from her, his chest moist with sweat, able to clock almost exactly how long it would take before she would let slip some half-muttered remark about how fit he’d become, his baby fat all gone. Her son, the only romance she’d ever had, all grown up. And then he would remind himself that she had a phone if she wanted to call.
And yet here he was, drawn back by something, by the residue, perhaps, of all his dreams of her.
He drank a few of the beers he’d brought with him in the car, gazing into the street where he used to play hockey at dusk with his cousin Michael and the Fischer boys and Dave Cutty from up the road until his mother came out onto the front porch to call him inside.
T
HE DOOR TO
the building had never been kept locked and wasn’t locked now. A new rug carpeted the stairs but the steps still creaked beneath his weight as he climbed them. On the third-floor
landing, the same worn cable rug lay in front of his mother’s door, the same black umbrella stand there beside it.
He’d expected to have to wait a few minutes after knocking, his mother needing the time to rouse herself. But the door came open almost right away and he was confronted with a bearded man in his early sixties with a thatch of dark hair and a nose veined at the tip. He looked out at Doug through large, owl eyes that were clearly long since done being impressed. An ex-hippie, Doug thought, or an old biker.
“Is there some kind of problem?” the man asked, when Doug offered no greeting.
“It’s just someone I knew—she used to live here.”
“You talking about Cathy?”
“Catherine. Catherine Fanning.”
“Yeah. She lives here. What do you need with her?”
“I want to see her.”
“She’s out. You some kind of salesman? We’re not interested if you are.”
“No,” he said. “I’m her son.”
The man cocked his head back, eyeing Doug skeptically. “You don’t say? You’re with that bank, aren’t you? We saw something about that on the news.”
Doug nodded. Somewhat reluctantly, the man stepped aside to let him enter.
As if in a waking dream, Doug followed him down the hall, entering a living room he hardly recognized. The old corduroy couch and chair were gone, replaced by a dark-green upholstered living-room set and a glass-top coffee table. The carpeting had been torn up and the wood floors refinished. Walls whose paper had once been stained by the steam leaked from the heating pipes were now painted a clean off-white.
There were no stacks of old newspapers. No piles of magazines. In fact, there was barely any clutter at all.
“You live here?”
“I do,” the man said, leaning against the kitchen doorjamb, his arms crossed over his chest. “I’ve lived here ten years.”
“Ten years?” But how could this be? Ten years?
“Where is she?” Doug asked.
“At a meeting,” the man said, the slight, righteous emphasis on the last word leaving little doubt as to the kind of gathering he meant. “You want coffee?”
“No.”
Turning to look behind him, Doug saw that the wall to his old bedroom had been torn out. A dining table now filled the space where his bed and bureau used to sit.
“She must be getting on better with the landlord than she used to,” he said. “He hated us.”
“She bought the place. Awhile back. Before I got here.”
Doug couldn’t help laughing. “Bought it? With what?”
“She keeps books for a construction firm. She’s done all right.”
“So what are you?” Doug said. “The dry-drunk freeloader?”
The visible portion of the man’s heavily bearded face squinched, as if he were swallowing something tart.
“I figured you were probably an asshole,” he said. “Personally, I don’t give a shit what kind of mess you’re in. But you should know something: your mother’s got fourteen years sober. She’s doing just fine. You coming here like this—that’s the kind of thing that can screw a person up. So if you’re here to cause some kind of trouble, you might want to think about leaving.”
He was about to make himself clear to the man, when he heard
the front door open and then his mother’s footsteps coming down the hall. Standing where he was, all the way into the living room, she didn’t notice him at first. And so for just a few seconds he was able to watch her as she put down her suede handbag and removed her gloves, the indelible oval of her face aged and yet no different, a face too familiar to ever actually see anymore than you could see your own.
And then her eyes followed the man’s to Doug. She stood motionless.
“Douglas.”
“Hi there, Mom.”
“Cath—” the man began, but she interrupted him.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Why don’t you go out.”
“I can stay right—”
“It’s all right,” she said. “Go.”
He lifted his leather jacket off the back of one of the dining-room chairs and before disappearing up the hall, paused to place a hand on her shoulder, leaning in to kiss her above the ear.
After the sound of the door latch closing, his mother slowly unbuttoned her coat and turned to hang it on a mirrored rack that stood where Doug’s bedroom bookcase once had. She straightened the front of her blouse and tucked her hair behind her ears. At last, she looked straight at him. Under the blaze of her unvanquished eyes, he heard a ringing in his ears and felt his whole body go suddenly weightless, as if he’d lost sensation in everything but his head.
“You look well,” she said.
“So do you.”
“Will you sit down?”
“I’m okay,” he said.
How was it, he wanted to know, that after nearly twenty years she could seem younger than the day he left? Her black hair was silver and
black now, the skin about her eyes had grown looser, the backs of her hands mottled. But to look into her face, to meet the green eyes that she had given him, sharper than he’d ever seen them, to see the color in her cheeks, was to witness an uncanny thing, as if in his absence she’d shed not gained the weight of time, a younger spirit living now in the older body.
“I should say … about Peter. He’s a good person. He’s been good to me.”
“Glad to hear it. Seems like you’ve done okay.”
“What I have,” she said, her voice careful and measured, “it’s enough.”
How often had he imagined her here, drunk and alone? How long had that vision turned at the back of his mind, a wheel never grasping the other gears, a ghost seeking its way back into the machine?
“I’ve been in Massachusetts awhile,” he said.
“I know.”
“This last year … this last year, I’ve been over in Finden.”
She nodded calmly, even gracefully, qualities he’d never even imagined in her before.
“Why don’t you come into the kitchen?”
He followed her there, keeping his distance, observing as if from afar her motions as she took a filter from the box and placed it in the top of the coffeemaker and poured the grounds into the holder. From the cabinet she took down a packet of cigarettes and offered him one. He declined and she lit hers with a match from the stove.
“I quit,” she said. “It’s just now and then …”
If only she had been here on her own. If only she had been on the old couch, by herself, he thought.
“I want you to know, the reason—”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t.”
She straightened, and then stubbed out into the sink the cigarette she’d just lit. One hand gripped the counter while the other floated up across her chest to grasp at her arm.
“I never wanted to trouble you. You going—I understood that. I wasn’t well.” She clutched her arm more tightly. “Won’t you at least sit down?” she said, pleading with him now.
He shook his head.
“Please.”
“I can’t stay.”
His brain had begun to numb, the light and sounds of the apartment hitting on a dullened surface.
Through the door to the other room he could see a sideboard standing where his desk had once been. A lace doily rested on its polished surface beneath a large bowl of fruit.
He had built the house in Finden for her. He saw this now. He had built it so that he could come here and rescue her. Drive her back across the town line, this time for good. What other purpose had the house ever really had? But the woman he’d come to save—she had left before he arrived. Replaced by someone different.
He watched her pour him a cup of coffee and edge it down the counter toward him, her shoulders slightly hunched, her breasts hanging a bit lower on her chest, her hips a bit wider than before, but the color in her face, the new life—it was unmistakable. She was happy.
“I came to say goodbye,” he said. “I never said goodbye before.”
“In the fridge … there’s meat loaf … I can make up a salad.”
“I have to go.”
“Or a pasta …” The tears leaked from the corners of her eyes as she spoke.
Doug walked from the kitchen into the hall, hearing her footsteps behind him.
I carried you, he wanted to say. Down this passageway, from our couch to your bed when you couldn’t walk, I carried you.
At the door, he felt her hand on his shoulder and he turned out from under it.
“Don’t,” he said.
“But where will you go?”
“It doesn’t matter.” In the doorway, he paused. “My place in Finden. It’s over by the golf course. A mansion along the river. You can’t miss it. You should go see it sometime.”
And with that he stepped back onto the landing and quickly descended the stairs.
Chapter 20
The bright fluorescence in the foyer of Emily’s dorm hit Nate like the glare of dawn and he squinted to avoid it. He heard Emily and her friends spill through the doors behind him, laughing. It was two in the morning and they’d been drinking since before dinner, roving through parties on campus and off.
“You can’t sleep
there,”
someone shouted, calling Nate off the bench where he’d taken a seat. He rose, trailing behind the others. Emily was toward the front of the group whispering something to her friend Alex. He was a slender boy, a bit shorter than Nate, his hair slicked up in the front with gel. Though he wore vintage T-shirts and hipster jeans and had that well-groomed dishevelment about him that suggested a perfect nonchalance, he’d seemed anxious to Nate ever since they’d met a few months ago, when Nate had come for his first visit, sometime before Christmas. Anxious in a way Nate recognized. Emily’s other friends had welcomed Nate as a part-time member of the scene, but Alex had mostly avoided talking to him.
Now he knew why. This evening Emily had told him that Alex had asked her what Nate’s status was—gay or straight, available or taken. “You’re fair game,” she’d said as they left the dining hall. “You might as well live here.”