Peter remembers it all with perverse clarity: the hard knock on the back door, his mother rising from the couch, the happy violence on the TV. His mother said, “If that’s your little friend from down the street I’m going to kill him,” and she headed to the back of the house, to the source of the irritation. He trailed her and the dogs trailed him, filling up the narrow hallway. He could hear the knocking ahead, the hollow door rattling in its frame. Whoever it was had interrupted a good part of the show—the part where the guns come out—and he was annoyed as his mother must have been at the prospect of his friend’s smiling face bobbing in the doorway, all that unwanted sun shining into their lives. Except that it was raining—he hadn’t noticed all morning—and it was his father at the door. He was holding the new baby sort of sideways in the crook of his arm the way you might hold a package, but the child seemed happy enough. His mother had strong opinions about this baby, and his father, and their current situation. “He’s using it as an excuse,” had been her exact words, “but it’s no excuse at all and the law agrees with me.”
The baby’s face was wide and flat. Although its eyes were open it did not appear to be seeing anything in particular. His father shifted the weight of its body slightly and said, “Sorry for the unannounced visit but I didn’t know where else to go.” And he smiled like a salesman who had been clever enough to come to the back door, a salesman who went up and down the street trying to sell people babies. Let me in and I’ll show you what it can do. Of course, his father was not a salesman at all. He worked building houses, or picking up after the people who built houses, wandering the construction site sweeping up stray nails and scrap wood. His truck was still running in the driveway, the passenger’s-side door open and the headlights on in the rain. The baby’s hair was wet and dark as the fur of a Labrador retriever and Peter wanted to touch it and feel that softness.
The dogs tried to push their way out of the space between his mother’s leg and the door but she kicked them and they scrambled backward. She said, “Where the hell did you come from?”
“From White Horse,” he said. “Now are you going to make me a cup of coffee?”
“That’s not my responsibility anymore,” she said. “If it ever was. Doesn’t what’s-her-name make good coffee?”
“Yeah, well,” he said. “About that.”
But she interrupted him. “And where is your car seat? How did you get that poor kid here, bounce it on your lap the whole way?”
“I’m a safe driver,” he said. “You know that. Now let me in. I want to see my sons. And this is a good thing that’s happening. Let me tell you what’s going on.”
Peter’s brother was upstairs pretending to read. Finish his novel, he’d say, and then head up to masturbate dreamily with his sleeping bag over his head. His mother would bang on the door. She knew what was going on.
That’s what Peter remembers most about his mother. She was a woman who knew what was going on. She liked to say that about herself. In fact, he remembers her saying it as she held the door half-open. “I know what’s going on.” And even though he does not remember her as especially kind it would have been impossible for her to turn him away, a man who had just driven hours to his ex-wife’s door, holding a baby in the rain. She had to let him in. Her son was watching her. So she opened the door and he moved inside, sniffling, looking around at the place, the pictures on the walls, the arrangement of shoes just inside placed in a long row, sneakers, boots, slippers. He had managed to remove his own boots while still holding the baby, lifting a foot and pulling at the laces, shifting his weight. He seemed as comic as the stuff on the TV, just as heroic too, and just as impossible.
“There’s a difference between obligation and kindness,” his father said. “And all I’m asking for is some kindness. Now how about that coffee?”
Peter and his mother ride the monorail across the city. Below them trees and people. A cluster of families surrounding a man on a horse, the man holding balloons, leaning down to hand them to children. Why is he doing this and why does Peter care? Because for some reason he’s jealous of the man, of the children scrambling around him too, and even of the parents who look on as contented bystanders. It’s a nice scene and if he could he’d spit on it that would make him feel pretty okay again, but the monorail is enclosed, of course, and he’s never done anything like that before, even as a kid. The guy handing out balloons steadies the horse to perfect stillness, its head lowered to receive some strokes from little hands. What would it be like to fall into all that, to become the center of everybody’s panicked attention? His mother sits rigid with her pocketbook on her lap. She gives the impression of being immune to it all—muggers, disaster, Peter’s chiding corrections. She seems to have surrounded herself with an invisible bubble. If the impossible did happen she’d simply remain sitting there, staring straight ahead, everything dying below her.
The monorail reminds him of rocket ships and space travel, but it’s rickety as a state fair roller coaster. He can feel the vibration in his thighs. Any second it seems like it might collapse. He reaches out to hold her hand—this is a very important trip for her—but he knows he’s the one searching for comfort. Her hand is a cold, dry thing. He grips it tight anyway. Even now, on this trip to the memory clinic, her nails are polished and perfect, her hair freshly done.
Two weeks ago, when he called her in Fairbanks, she told him that she’d been getting lost in grocery stores. “I go up one aisle to get the milk and the milk’s not there,” she said. “Then I turn around and head to produce and I wind up in the bakery.”
Of course, it was much worse than that. “She’s been shitting herself,” his father said, when he called from Montana. “You need to talk to her.”
Yes, she’d been shitting herself and yet here she is with her precise makeup, her reassuring glance in his direction when they touch.
He’s sure it’s all going to just come apart around them. It feels like they are hurtling forward surrounded by an eggshell. Everybody else reads newspapers, trapped in their headphones.
If his father had not called him, he might not have known at all.
At first the call had displayed the usual symptoms: it arrived after midnight, his father’s voice a little slurred, although maybe Peter imagined that. First, they talked about his brother, his own children, his wife. And then the call passed into an even stranger world when his father said, “When did you last speak with your mother?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
The kids were coming out of their rooms. Carol too. All of them squinting through the hallway light. The phone had woken them up, but this was not that abnormal. It happened every couple of months and then Peter would move quietly all through the next day, work on his projects in the garage or go for a long drive. He motioned for them all to go back to bed and they inched into their rooms to their tropical fish nightlights and princess bedspreads. “Yeah, well,” his father said. “She’s in trouble and she’s not exactly the kind of person to ask for help, right? Unless you know something about her that I don’t.”
He wasn’t aware that his parents even spoke anymore, not for years and years.
His father said, “Peter, are you listening to me? This is important,” and he felt like a kid who’s been caught dozing off in class. But he reminded himself that he was the responsible one, the man who loved his wife and children. He’s not a boy anymore, for Christ’s sake, so why did he feel like one? He already knew what he’d do when he returned to bed: grab Carol, pull his head between her breasts. Then she’d stroke his hair until he was able to sleep.
He’d known his mother has been in trouble for weeks. The writing on the postcards had grown bizarre, the one last week a complaint about the price of gasoline, the one before that blank except for a few words, a list of household chores. Clean the floor. Wash clothes. Fold. But he had taken the postcards and put them on the fridge with the others, writing side down. Pictures of bears and ice. The same things she’d been sending him since he left the state fifteen years ago.
His father said, “If you love her, then you’ll go see her.”
He had a way of being honest and deceitful at the same time. It was as if honesty was a trick he could pull on you, get your head spinning around and around until you didn’t know what was real anymore. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Fine.”
So at the memory clinic they sit in a white room waiting for the doctor. “I’m in perfect health,” his mother says. The doctor is charming, young, handsome, with three pens standing at attention in the pocket of his jacket. First, he speaks to them about their trip here. Was it a good one? What about Alaska. Is it true what they say about the Aurora? “It depends what you’ve heard,” his mother says from her small plastic chair. She is as unsmiling as a shark. But the doctor grins and says, “I’ve heard it’s beautiful.”
“It is that,” she says.
Then they talk about the names of presidents, the days of the week, and the birthdays of her children. “There’s Peter,” she says, with a nod in his direction, and she names his birthday, his job, the names of her grandkids. “And then there’s that other one.” She waves her hand at the air.
The doctor treats all of this as a charming eccentricity.
“I can smell urine,” she says. “Urine and the stuff they use to clean urine.”
The doctor asks her to recite the alphabet backward beginning with the letter Z and ending with A.
“Let me see you do it,” she says, when she stops at R.
His laughter is generous and patient.
Peter tries it in his own head. Z. Y. X. W.
“Once more?” he asks her.
“Complete foolishness,” she says. “Are you going to lock me up here?”
“Mom,” Peter says. “It’s not that kind of place.”
“You’re not going to put me in a home. You’ll need my signature for that.”
“This is actually not that uncommon,” the doctor says to Peter. “Let’s take a recess. I’ll be back in a bit and we can start at the beginning.” He turns and his voice softens. “Is that okay, ma’am? I’m sorry that this is upsetting for you.”
“He reminds me of your father,” she says when the doctor is gone and she is flipping through a book she’s brought for the occasion. “That smile of his. It’s like he wants to fuck me.”
The crying was the worst thing he’d ever heard and he was prepared to do anything to make it stop: bounce it, say sweet words to it, put it under a pillow or drop it out the window, pray to God or maybe even the devil. He wondered vaguely what his parents would do if he just let it fall to the grassy edge just outside the kitchen window. They were on the back porch talking. Yelling really, although he couldn’t hear a word. Possibly he only remembers it as yelling. Maybe they were whispering in that way they used to whisper, through tight teeth, their faces close together with his mother’s hand on his father’s shoulder.
But the baby definitely cried and he bounced it and begged it. He gave it his thumb to bite. Its face squeezed and collapsed and turned red and still they did not come. He could see its pulsing flesh at the back of its throat when it screamed and he wondered if this was the foundation for something, if everything after would be built on this awful moment.
Eventually his brother appeared and said, “What the fuck?” He looked around the room and made a grab at his mother’s cigarettes, slid three out and put them in his jeans pocket. “Dad’s out there, huh? Did what’s-her-name kick him out?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re having a serious talk.”
“I think it probably wet itself,” he said. “The little dude.”
“It’s raining harder,” Peter said.
“It’s sleet,” his brother said. “Coming off the mountain. You can hear it on the roof.”
They stood listening to it clatter on the tin through the wailing of the baby. He said, “It’s traveled all the way from the mountains.”
“Jesus,” his brother said. “I’m the one who should sound stoned. What’s the matter with you?”
Finally, his parents appeared, both of them soaking wet, his father running his hand through his hair. The baby passed around along with some towels. They all sat down again. “This is the situation,” his mother said. “Your father and this little one are going to sleep over here tonight. The baby will sleep with me and your father will sleep on the couch. Then in the morning I’m going to go to work, you boys are going to go to school, and your father is going back to where he came from and have a good talk with his girlfriend. Isn’t that right, Tom?” she asked, and she looked at Peter’s father.
“I accept these terms,” he said, and he laughed, but it was just a nervous titter, and he looked down at his hands. And Peter thought that if he could just keep them all together like this, under the clattering tin roof, then everything would be okay. First tonight and then they’d figure out something tomorrow, some new reason to keep them all here and out of the rain. The sleet, he corrected himself.
This is what he’s thinking about as he moves through the letters in his head. JIHGFE. The test is over, but he’s still answering one of the questions, and as he does this he’s also able to consider, somewhere out on the edge of his mind, that odd family around the table. The baby has found his way back to him. His father is drinking a beer. His mother is holding a spatula. That’s the picture he can’t shake as they wind their way through the memory clinic. His mother is trying to find her way out past the numbered doors. “Mom,” he says. “Hold on.”
“I’m tired of waiting,” she says. “These doctors think your life is nothing. They want you to die here.”
They pass another doctor who gives them the once-over, then a place they might have been before. They are lost, lost in a memory clinic, and Peter wants to throw up his hands and laugh and laugh. He hasn’t even found his way to A yet either. He keeps stopping and starting. Finally, he’s there. The original doctor. They’ve journeyed back to him. “You wouldn’t believe how often this happens,” he says. “This place is a maze. Were you looking for the restroom? Down there and to the left.”
“Right,” Peter says.
In the bathroom his voice is shaking. “Nobody is going to hurt you. The sooner we finish this the sooner we can go.”
“You need my signature to put me in the home,” she says, “and you’re not going to get it.”
“I’m not going to put you in the home,” he says, “and you know what? If I was going to lock you up I wouldn’t need your signature. You don’t know anything about it.”
“I won’t let you,” she says. “Your father won’t let you. Where is he? I want to talk to him.”
“I’m doing this for you,” he says. “Get back out there and behave yourself and answer those damned questions.”
“Oh, please,” she says. “I know what you’re really mad about.”
The next morning, he rose for breakfast to find his father at the stove and his mother at the table with the baby. She was feeding it bits of mushed carrots with her fingers and its face was smeared with orange. Both of them, his mother and father, were smiling and laughing and the room was full of heat and music. Outside more rain. It had been raining all night and the truck was covered with a thin sheen of ice. He had never seen anything like this before, not in August, and he was a little afraid, but his parents didn’t seem to care at all. The table was already set, plates and forks and even knives and napkins. He wasn’t used to seeing knives and napkins.
“The first one is for you,” his dad said. “Well, the second one. I burned the first one. That one was for the trash can.”
His mother laughed at this as if this was something she really found funny and tweezered a glob of carrot into the baby’s greedy mouth.
“No church today,” his mother said, although they had not gone to church since the divorce two years before.
“I might not believe in much,” his father said. “I certainly don’t believe in the rule of law. But I do believe in God. And not the God in the Bible and not the God on the TV.”
“This old horse,” his mother said, but she was still smiling, feeding the baby.
And Peter did remember talks like this. Rants, his mother called them. Sometimes about the church and sometimes about the government. Back at the old house his father had kept marijuana plants in the chicken coop with the dirty-feathered chickens. He kept a gun in a wooden box under his bed and talked about how the CIA had shot Kennedy. “You don’t remember it,” he’d say. “You were just a baby. But they slaughtered him right in his car just because he was making this country better for the working class and for Catholics. Right in the brain.”
But at that moment, as he made the second pancake, all of it seemed charming, a fairy tale he had told them once, read to them from a big picture book. “How’s it coming along?” his mother asked.
“Almost there,” his father said. “Maybe a little too far actually.”
He held up the black thing and Peter thought, you did that on purpose. You think it’s funny. But it was kind of funny. He found himself smiling too. The baby was funny and so was the pitiful black pancake. Even the weather was funny. You could see the ice pelting the porch.
“It’s not a day for driving,” his father said.
“Got that right,” his mother said.
His brother was hiding out upstairs doing his thing. The place was small enough that if everybody stopped talking, stopped moving, maybe they would have been able to hear him. Except, he realized, the tin roof was clattering with ice and rain and it didn’t seem like it was going to stop. It was getting worse. “Third time’s the charm,” his father said.
The monorail had been his mother’s impractical idea, involving parking in an expensive all-day lot followed by walking through a series of busy streets. He had said no four, five times, but eventually given in when she began to tear up. It was nice up there, he has to admit, although it gave the entire day a mood that felt celebratory when it should have been somber.
When they take the monorail back across the city the horse is gone, although occasionally he spots a kid holding a balloon. It’s getting late and people seem to be walking home. They will travel this way as long as they can, to the end of the line, and then find their way to his car and he’ll at least have the radio to fill the space, because his mother is silent for the first time all day. She’s reading her novel and his legs are spread, hands on his knees, in a pose of concentration. Finally, she speaks without looking up. “You wanted me to be dignified,” she says. But he doesn’t answer. He’s sick of speaking to her. One of his sons has a severe learning disability. His daughter has night terrors. She doesn’t know a thing about them, doesn’t even think to ask. “I just want to go back,” she says. “It’s my home. I know where my toothbrush is. I can find it in the dark.”
He keeps his mouth and arms stiff. He’s trying to pretend she’s not there. The results will come by phone call, a more detailed report by mail. “Do you remember that we’d have to cut the lawn?” she says. “I always thought that was the most foolish thing I could imagine. That a person would move all the way to Alaska and still have to cut their lawn. I don’t do it anymore. I just let it grow. Who cares? It’s wonderful. Let it all grow. That’s what I say.”
He does remember. His father pushing the gas mower back and forth and then later, when he was gone, his brother. When his brother left at seventeen then it fell to Peter. His mother would watch him from the back window. Was she proud or just making sure he was doing a good job? He says, “It’s not like we were living in a timberland. We had a lawn so we cut it.”
“Timberland,” she says. “That’s funny,” and he realizes that she’s won. There’s no way to return to his invulnerable silence. “Let me ask you something,” he says. “How about this for a test? Do you remember when Dad came that time, and he had the baby, and he stayed for almost a week? What was that all about?”
“Your father and I have a very complicated relationship,” she says.
“Yes,” he says, “but you didn’t answer me.”
“You’re remembering it wrong,” she says. “It was more than a month. What do you think of that, smarty pants? I’m not denying anything. In fact, it’s worse than you remember. He stayed for more than a month and we were man and wife again. And what’s-her-name in White Horse, that idiot with the fetal alcohol syndrome, the slow girl is what I used to call her, she rang us up every night, and every night I told her that he’d be leaving the next morning. And she believed it. It’s like she had never been lied to before in her damned life. So trusting. Like a little kid really, but built like a linebacker.”
“I remember holding her baby,” he says.
“You grew up too fast,” she says. “That’s on me. But what could I do? I grew up too fast too. Jesus, I was, what, eighteen when I had your brother.” She smiles thinly. “Your father was something else.”
But he remembers another thing, something he refuses to tell her. He’s returned to his silence and found something more there: a strange kind of peace. The memory has returned to him as if it’s a thing he’s misplaced in plain sight, some eyeglasses or a wallet. Her voice has summoned it back through the corridors of his history and now here it is and it’s as sharp as the thumping noise of the train. Soon he’s going to check her bags, place her carefully on her plane, send her back to Fairbanks, but this thing stays with him.
“Is Tom there?” the voice asked, soft and little girlish, furtive. He knew immediately who it was. He held her child in his hands.
His mother was upstairs. So was his father. His brother, who knows where? He remembers the rain clattering, coming down harder and harder, but that must be wrong. It couldn’t have rained that long. But it stretches through everything like the rail guiding the train car through the sky.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m not sure where he is.”
“Well,” she says. “Has he left?”
He stroked the baby’s head. He was getting good at it. He could make it sleep with a feathering touch, bring it back awake with a shifting of its weight to his other shoulder, watch it smile when he smiled, stare when he stared. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“Please,” she said. “You have to tell him I’m sorry. I’m not sure he’s getting my messages. There’s that woman.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“She calls me stupid, but I’m not,” she said. “I’m smart. I can raise the boy. It’s not hers. I don’t even know if it’s his. Who are you? Are you his son, the one with the drugs?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s me.”
“Your life would be easier if you let God carry your load,” she said. “All you have to do is let His glory do its work.”
“I’m going to tell him,” he said. “I promise. You give me a message and I’m going to pass it along.”
“Then tell him I love him,” she said. “I do. I don’t say that to everybody. I love him and I love my little boy and he needs to come back here and be with us. And tell him he doesn’t have to compromise. He’ll know what I mean.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell him.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I can tell you have a good soul. Remember what I said about your burdens, okay?”
He took the baby into the other room and put it on the floor and watched TV. It made contented cooing sounds and its hand shook, making small grabs at the air, and his favorite show came on, the one his mother didn’t like him to watch because the characters were always knocking each other around. But he’d watch it anyway, and then the one after and the one after that, until his eyes grew tired. The black-and-white figures poked and slapped but never actually hurt each other. No wounds or tears, no running away either, saying enough is enough and simply exiting the room. He remembers turning up the sound because of the noise of the weather, the ice and metal, the rain and tin. In his mind it is there when he wakes up and when he goes to sleep, there when he steps outside and checks the sky. His brother has gone, but there is this other one, this small thing in his hands, and there is a small voice on the phone telling him please.
He imagines his mother moving through her house the way a blind person might. There is the couch, it’s been there for twenty-five years, there is the fridge, her hand finds the handle. There is the nightstand and the alarm clock, the panel that slides back to reveal the circuit breakers, the closet where she keeps extra lightbulbs. It’s the first time he’s dialed his father’s number in years, but he answers with a casual, “Hey, Peter.”
All he can do is make a noise of hello. He sounds like an animal, and not a big one, something you’d find scuttling around in your kitchen. “You shouldn’t have let her get back on that plane,” his father says. “She’s not going to last through the winter up there.”
“Maybe,” Peter says. “Maybe that’s true.” His wife is out with friends. The kids are doing homework at the kitchen table. He’s up on the second floor trying to keep his voice down.
“Maybe,” his father says. “You’re always saying that. Maybe this. Maybe that. You should have told her, ‘You’re not getting on that plane.’”
“But I didn’t,” he says. “I didn’t say anything.” He’s surprised to hear the swelling pride in his voice. He guesses his father can hear it too. “I told her she was going to be fine,” he adds, “and then I watched her go. She turned and looked at me like a kid on her way to the school bus. Then she headed out.” It’s part confession, part boast. His children are already moving past him. Their math problems are getting just out of reach. He really has to concentrate on each solution. In a minute he’ll go downstairs and get a glass of water and then stand a polite distance from them, waiting for them to ask for help. Or not. He’s content to just watch. He’ll drink the water and start at Z again. He’s been doing that for the last couple of days and it’s been a challenge to get to M without hesitating. He says, “That woman you lived with for a while in White Horse. What was her name?”
“Oh, her,” he says. “Yes. Shit.” Peter waits. He can hear the kids talking about a movie downstairs. There are potato chips in a bowl on the table. He knows because he put them there before walking up here to have this conversation. “You know what?” his father says. “This is going to sound crazy, but it’s a blank. Leslie or something? Laura? Jesus, now I’m the one who’s the jerk, huh? Is that your point? Is that what you’re trying to prove here?”
He expected that answer. How long has it been? His brother is gone too. And the baby? The thing is, he doesn’t remember its name either, although its warmth is still a living thing to him, a solace in that endless rain. “Let’s not change the subject,” his father says. “I’m still angry.”