THE MAIL:
A sporting goods catalog for Jon, a phone bill, a credit card solicitation, and a white envelope with my name and address written on it in an unfamiliar hand.
Inside, a white sheet of paper, and, in black pen, Sherry. I wish now rd written you a love note sooner. Tm sorry I waited this long to tell you how beatiful you are. I can never let you go. Your mine forever. Call me please. Bram.
I had never seen his handwriting before—cramped and masculine, as if writing with a pen on a piece of paper were oppressive, feminine. My name in that writing looked foreign to me, a name belonging to someone else—to a woman who had brought her lover into her home, made love with him in her marriage bed. To a married woman who had kissed her lover on the back porch of her own house as her son slept in the bedroom over them. To a woman who might weakly pretend that she had ended her affair but who, in truth, had made nothing clear to the man who had written her name on that envelope.
What, I wondered, had made her think it would be so easy to undo sins of such magnitude?
Why, I wondered, had she expected that, with no real effort, she could simply return to her ordinary life after departing from it so blithely, so completely?
Looking at my name, captured in Bram's unfamiliar handwriting, I heard Jon's voice say, End this now, and I put the envelope, with Bram's return address written in the left-hand corner, in my purse, got my keys, and headed for the car.
BRAM'S neighborhood was an area of small houses only a mile or so off the freeway. It was easy enough to find his street, Linnet Drive, but more difficult to find his house, because there were no numbers visible from the street. It was as if, here, someone had come through the neighborhood and painted over the addresses, or stolen the numerals from the mailboxes, as an elaborate prank. Always the postman's daughter, I wondered how the mail got delivered, how often it wound up at the wrong houses, if the neighbors returned the misdelivered mail to one another, or simply threw it away.
Then, I saw it:
The red Thunderbird.
My hands began to sweat, seeing it. Cold and damp on the steering wheel, they slipped as I turned into the driveway behind that car. I hit the curb, but managed to park, to step out of the car, to walk toward the front door.
It was a light blue house. There was a white birch tree in the front yard. Bandages of white bark had peeled from the trunk, near the roots, and fallen onto the lawn, revealing raw, pink flesh underneath. There were crows in the top branches. They cawed when I stepped out of the car, but went silent, looking down at me from their high branches as I passed under them. Somewhere down the block, a cat yowled, but other than that, the neighborhood seemed deserted, dead quiet. I climbed the two steps to Bram's front door.
It was painted red. There was a peephole in the middle of it, like a single, brass-rimmed eye. The curtains in the front window were heavy and white, and pulled closed. I took a breath, knocked on the storm door, which raided in its frame. I stood still, then, and listened. I heard nothing from inside the house.
I knocked again.
Nothing.
I looked around until I found a doorbell behind the branches of a forsythia bush—its yellow flowers already having bloomed and faded—and rang it, and the bell was so electrical and loud, even from where I stood on the other side of the door, that I imagined it rattling the walls of the house, blowing the curtains open, knocking cups and plates from the cupboards—and still I heard no movement from inside. But when I turned and began to walk back to my car, I felt something behind me, and whirled around to look.
The front door was open, and a woman was standing at it.
She said, "Yes?" from the other side of the storm door.
I took a step toward her, and she disappeared in the glare on the glass. I squinted, but still couldn't see her. I said to that glare, "I'm looking for Bram." I said, "Are you—"
"Yes," she said. "I'm his mother."
I felt my heart stutter, then start. I opened my mouth to speak. I said, "Oh."
The woman opened the storm door a crack then, and I saw her even more clearly. Yes. This was Bram's face—female, older, but she had Bram's deep-set eyes, the eyebrows, the facial structure. She was wearing a white robe. Her eyes were dark, but not suspicious. Was I wrong, or did she look, somehow, amused? Did she know Bram had told me she was dead? (Why had he told me she was dead?) When I managed, finally, to say, "Do you know where he is?" she smiled and shook her head. She said, "No, hon. No, I sure don't."
"He's not here?" I asked.
"No," she said. "He's not here."
"His car?" I said, nodding toward the Thunderbird.
"Yeah," she said. "Well, his car's here, and all his things are here, which is certainly a mystery. But he's not here. I haven't heard a word from him since yesterday. I must have been at the store when he came home with the car. Amelia is going crazy. He was supposed to have the kids last night. She had to get a sitter."
I took a step backward, told her I was sorry to have bothered her, that I worked with Bram at the college, that—
"Well," she said. "If you hear from him, tell him we don't know what he's up to, but it's time to check in with his mother. Boys," she said, shaking her head. "They never grow up, do they?"
She smiled again. I tried to smile back.
CHAD smelled like sunlight and grass when he got in the car. He sighed, sitting down in the passenger seat. He pulled off his T-shirt and wiped it across his face. When he leaned forward to do it, I saw a long scratch on his back. Had a branch, or a rake, or some other hazard of the landscape torn the flesh there during the day? I said, "How are you, Chad? How's your hangover?"
"Better," he said. "I sweated it out."
On the drive home he told me about his day. A hedgerow they planted at a country club. A lawn they mowed and edged just outside of town. He told me that Fred had gotten even stranger since the summer before, when Chad would regularly find him talking to himself, sometimes crying, in the back of the truck they used to haul the landscaping equipment around. "Today he asked me if I believed in alien abductions," Chad said.
"What did you tell him?" I asked.
"I told him, no, I definitely did not, and I didn't ask him why he was asking me."
"Good thinking," I said.
"He's got nothing for me tomorrow," Chad said. "They haven't worked me into the schedule quite yet. We can go see Grandpa if you want."
"Oh, yes," I said. "Yes, let's do that, Chad. Let's go tomorrow."
"Sure," he said. "Good."
The car, with Chad in it, felt lighter.
Full of spring, green.
We pulled into the driveway, and I saw that the lilacs were still wildly in bloom, that they had not even edged to the other side of their full perfection. They shimmered with it—purple, swollen, fragrant.
It couldn't last, I thought, more than another day or two, but for now, they were at the height of their beauty.
In the scrubbrush, Kujo was still wrestling with something, pawing around in the weeds. Either he'd been there since morning, or he'd left and come back. When Chad got out of the car, he called Kujo's name, but the dog ignored him.
DURING the drive to Silver Springs, Chad and I talked about books. We talked about movies. We talked about California, and the weather, Grandpa's depression, the traffic, and then I asked about Ophelia. "What's she like?" I asked.
"You've met her," Chad said.
"I know," I said. "But I've never really talked to her."
"She's great," he said. "She likes to read. She plays tennis."
The legs, I remembered. The sturdy, athletic legs.
"What do her parents do?"
"Her dad killed himself when she was four. Her mom's a dental hygienist. Her stepfather's a cop."
"Her father killed himself?"
I looked at the side of Chad's face.
The beautiful, strong jaw. The gentle curve of it—neither Jon's nor mine. He turned to look back at me, and then I saw
it in his eyes. He's in love with her, I thought—this plain, tragic girl, who reads, who plays tennis, who has the lovely teeth (although I couldn't remember them) of the daughter of a dental hygienist.
He turned away from me again, and said, "Yeah. He shot himself. Ka-bam." He held his index finger to his temple, and I gripped the steering wheel tighter. Rob, the gun, the hotel in Houston. Had anyone ever told Chad how my brother had died?
I hadn't.
Had Jon?
Would Chad have made such a joke if he'd known?
I said, trying to control the tone of my voice, "Has she been able to get over that? Has she—?"
"No," he said. He said it like a challenge, as if I'd asked an insulting question. "No," he repeated. "She most certainly has not."
"Is she happy, though?" I asked. "Is she a happy girl?"
"No, Mom," Chad said, and laughed out loud this time. "She isn't happy" Again, the sarcasm. I'd asked him a ridiculous question, which he refused to take seriously. He was refusing to give me the answer he knew I wanted, which was that his girlfriend was a sane and stable person. He said, instead, "But I wouldn't exactly call myself a 'happy person,' Mom. Are you?" He turned to look at me again, and I felt it burn straight through me, like a laser, like an X ray, and thought it again, he knows.
I couldn't answer.
I looked straight ahead, out the windshield, and said nothing. After a few miles, I changed the subject. I said, "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"
In my peripheral vision I thought I saw Chad shake his head, but when I looked over at him, he was nodding yes.
IT WAS too late by the time we got to Silver Springs to go to the nursing home, so Chad and I checked in to the Holiday Inn and then went to dinner across the street at a place called the Carousel, which had a motif of painted horses and an all-you-can-eat spaghetti buffet.
But there were flies hovering over the buffet, flying in and out of the steam that rose from the noodles and tomato sauce under the bright overhead lights, so we made our dinner choices from the menu. I ordered a salad with grilled shrimp, the Hoola Bowl, which was placed before me with a small paper umbrella at the center. Chad had a steak, rare, which bled profusely all over his plate. His baked potato turned pink with it, but he dug into it quickly. I tried not to watch.
Our waitress was a beautiful redhead, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, and she was clearly smitten with Chad. She could barely look at him. She giggled far too loudly when, after asking him if his steak was too rare, he looked up at her with a dripping slice of it held over his plate and said, "No, I like to hear the heartbeat. It's comforting."
"She's so pretty," I said as she walked away. "Don't you think?"
Chad looked in her direction, as if he hadn't noticed her before, and said, shrugging, "She's okay. Not my type."
"What is your type?"
"Well, I don't like girls who giggle," Chad said.
"Doesn't Ophelia giggle?" I asked.
"Ophelia most definitely does not 'giggle,'" Chad said, returning to his steak. It was almost entirely eaten, just a long bone with some scraps left on it. Chad sawed at those scraps.
"It's sweet," I said, trying to keep my voice steady, noncommittal and magnanimous at the same time, "that you've known Ophelia as a friend all this time, and now you see her as a girlfriend."
"Mom," Chad said. He put his fork down on his plate, his knife balanced on the bone. He cleared his throat and looked up at me, a half smile on his face, and said, "Ophelia and I have been dating for two years."
I said nothing.
I looked down at his plate.
I looked back up at him.
He was no longer smiling.
I said, almost in a whisper, "Why didn't you ever tell me this, or your dad?"
"Dad knows," Chad said. "Dad always knew."
I put my own fork down. I swallowed. I said, "Why didn't I know?"
"You know why," Chad said.
I inhaled.
I put my hands on the edge of the table, and held it. I said, "I do?"
"Yeah," Chad said. "You do. You know."
"What do I know?" I asked. I was trying to picture it—the two years. It was all there, seven hundred and thirty days crammed into a space the size of a postcard, misaddressed, still traveling from post office to post office, accumulating postmarks, and messages, and meaning, about to arrive in my mailbox. Just now arriving in my mailbox. "What?" I repeated. "What do I know?"
"You know you would have hated it," Chad said. "You didn't like Ophelia. But not just Ophelia, Mom. No girl would have been good enough. Even Dad always said it would be better just to keep the information about Ophelia to myself." He laughed then, and reached across the table, took my hand. "But I love you most, Mom. I always will. Don't worry. If I get a tattoo, it'll say MOM."
I looked up at him. He was joking, he was laughing, but he wasn't smiling.
I let go of the table, pulled my hand out of Chad's, and put my hands in my lap. I said, "So, why are you telling me now?"
"Because it's time for you to know," Chad said. "You should know about me, Mom. I know about you."
"How do you know?" I asked under my breath.
"I saw the fucking car in the driveway," he said, and the harshness of it made me sit up straighter. "I saw it, Mom, you know, and what was going on down there, and I finally got Garrett to spill the beans at Stiver's, and, anyway, it was obvious. I knew it even when I was in California. Let's face it, Mom, you're not the world's greatest bluffer."
It began to spin then—the table, the restaurant, Chad across from me. I closed my mouth. I opened it again, and Chad said, casually, picking his fork and knife back up and beginning to cut again at the ragged bits of bloody flesh on the bone, "Don't bother to say anything, Mom. I'm not going to tell Dad or anything. Your secret's safe with me. And it's over now anyway."
"It is," I said. "Chad. It's—"
"Yeah," he said. "Let's not ever mention this again. Okay? Mom? I mean it. I never want to talk about it again. It never happened."
The waitress brought our check. I took it. Chad never looked up at her, but he looked at me. He said, "I don't blame you entirely, Mom. It was his fault, too. I know it. He was an asshole. But you're too old for this shit, Mom. And that's the last thing I ever want to say about it."
***
AFTER dinner, we went back to the Holiday Inn, and Chad fell asleep on the double bed closest to the television while we were watching a made-for-TV movie about a man whose secret identity had begun interfering with his love life. When I saw that Chad's eyes were closed, his mouth open, I tiptoed across the room and turned the television off. He was fully dressed, and not under the covers, so I took the bedspread off my bed and put it over him. When I did, he snorted a little, then rolled onto his side.
He'd always slept on his side. I could still see him—a newborn propped between pillows on our bed, deeply asleep on his side, his tiny pink hands pressed together near his cheek, as if in prayer. I had a photograph of him like that, his little rosebud lips puckered. It was in an album.
But if I hadn't snapped that photograph, put it in an album, would I have remembered?
And what pictures of the past had I not taken—forgotten, lost?
What details had slipped away from me over the years, into the limbo of memory, forever?
In the end, at least, I wondered, would they come back to me? Would that be the consolation prize for having to die—a brilliant replay of all of it, every moment fresh, in perfect light, relived, with all five senses, again? Could I have it all back, ever, someday, in the last moments of my life? And, if I could only have one thing—one detail, one sense—what would it be?
Oh, I knew.
I knew.
It would be the smell of him as a baby.
Milk and crushed violets and new leaves.
I closed my eyes and pressed my face into that smell. That baby neck. The soft flesh between his ear and his collarbone, and hummed to him. Hmm, h
mm, hmm. He cooed. And then I knew I was asleep, because I had a baby again, and then a toddler—I was poised above his golden ringlets with a pair of scissors, a scrap of Handel drifting through the windows of a passing car, and then he was a little boy again, running across a green field, scaling a tree. He started climbing higher, and higher. "Chad," I called up to him. "Get down here."
But he kept climbing.
I started, myself, to climb the tree after him.
"Chad?"
He didn't answer.
"Chad!"
He kept climbing until all I could only see was the sole of his tennis shoe. My heart was pounding. Still, I thought, if I could just stretch far enough, if I could reach high enough, I could get ahold of his ankle, and then I—
Then I felt something close around my own ankle, a hand, and I looked down and saw Bram smiling up at me.
"Sherry," he said. "Did you think you could get away from me?"
And then he was pulling me down, and Chad had disappeared entirely, and I was falling, and I saw the truth of it all as I was falling, as if it were a photograph, as if it had been in an album all along but I'd never really looked at it, never truly seen it:
None of it had mattered.
None of it.
I'd worked at it, motherhood.
The cupcakes. The lessons. All those nights reading to him. I'd read Shakespeare to him. I'd read Whitman. Emily Dickinson. Yeats. I'd volunteered in his classrooms. I'd julienned his vegetables. I'd insisted that he get some fresh air, and then I insisted that he sit down to study. I breast-fed him. I sang to him. I'd gotten to know his teachers. I'd befriended his friends—and then in the driveway with Bram Smith in five minutes on a May afternoon (the lilacs, obscenely perfumed, just on the edge between blossom and self-destruction), I'd ruined it all, I'd run a stake straight through the heart of the life I'd thought I'd been living—the life I thought I'd created, perfected, and I woke up breathless in the motel room in the dark, my hands at my throat as if I were trying to stop myself from screaming—while, outside the door, in the hallway, a child was laughing, and a man said, "Shhh. It's late. People are asleep."