We returned home to White Pine worse than ever. The following days we hid out at home and tried our best to return to our previous life, our previous selves. But it was impossible.
I never told Tess, but I was sure that any minute we’d be arrested. I dreamed of Sam Young sneering at us from behind two sturdy cops.
But they never came. The television says not to change behavior after committing a crime, but we never went back to work. We drew the blinds. We drank too much. We barely ate. Tess clung to me as if I might protect her. She had cruel nightmares and woke me with her trembling.
We stayed in bed and read the paper, but nothing was reported.
As if we’d never been in that kitchen.
I said, “You see? We’re going to be fine.”
Of course, that wasn’t the entire problem.
“It’s that I don’t ever want to do it again,” she said. “I thought he would be the first, Joe. I thought it was only the start.”
Tess went to see my mother. I don’t know what happened there. She wanted to go alone.
When she came back she said, “I told her what I did. I told her I couldn’t do it again, or anything like it. She was cold. She didn’t say anything. I’m sure she’d thought I was one kind of person and now she knows I’m another.”
I went to see my mother myself.
I told her we were leaving.
I said, “Why would you be cruel to Tess?”
She smiled. She seemed drugged and sad. The early prison charisma was gone. She took my hands off that awful table and raised them to her lips.
One of the guards turned his head.
“You’ll come back and see me, Joe?”
“Of course,” I said.
I wanted to shake her back into her first self. Or into whatever version had raised us. The self that sang to me in the mornings on the way to school, that drove too fast, said, “Sink or swim, fight or die.” The woman of all that light and fire, so severe, so tender, so funny, so sure of her place in the world.
I said, “What happened? How are we here?”
She took a long breath, fixed her gaze on my hands, and said, “I don’t know how. There was just that woman, those kids. Then that man, Joe, that goddamn man.”
Her cheeks were flushed. She pushed a strand of hair back from her forehead.
“Afterwards, for all this time, I thought, somehow I can make it mean something. The letters. The visitors. Tess.”
“Look at me,” I said.
She refused and kept on talking. “I thought all of us could make it matter.”
She shook her head, glanced up, and when I saw the blue of her eyes, I said, “Sometimes I’m on fire and the world is so perfectly clear and I am so bright and alive and I can’t stop moving. And other times, other times I’m just the opposite. I wake up and I’m so miserable I can barely see. I can’t move at all. I don’t know what it is or where it comes from.”
She squeezed my hands tight.
“Do you have that, Mom? Does any of that happen to you?”
She sighed and looked at something behind me while I studied her mouth. I waited for her, for some absolute conclusion, some explanation, a final answer, a last and crucial bond. I waited and waited. I waited until I thought I would take her shoulders in my hands and shake it out of her but when at last she returned, she only said, “Me, Joey Boy, I can always move.”