Earlier, after they’d arrived home from the meeting with Melinda, Ernest had darted from room to room, agitated, ferreting under beds and blankets in search of something, or maybe to be sure that whatever he didn’t want to find, he would not. He didn’t speak much to begin with, but now he denied them a single word, and he ran until they stopped pursuing, until his frustration peaked in the middle of the living room, where he plopped cross-legged to the floor. When they approached he elbowed the air, his cries evolving into screams, the worst they’d ever heard, and the house felt as if it were rising off its foundation in a state of panic.
Jameson walked out of the living room, then walked right back, questioning, as he had so many times, if he was cut out for this. His skin felt thin, no protection against the hot bundles of nerves firing underneath.
Sarah Anne sat on her heels several feet from Ernest, not asking anything of him, not trying to do anything. Jameson didn’t feel it was enough, though clearly it was more than he could think to do. His entire body tingled with nervous sweat. This child’s anguish was doing him in.
He tried to settle on the sofa, but immediately got up. He looked to Sarah Anne, but she frowned as if to say that he was the one who needed to cool off. There appeared no end to what felt like an inferno reaching the ten-foot ceilings, with Jameson disintegrating into ash and embers. “Sarah Anne,” he finally said, hearing the crackle of dread in his own voice. “I can’t keep . . . this is not . . . I’ve got work to do.”
It was well past noon, and a whole checklist of things had to be loaded onto his truck—table saw, gloves, cords, toolboxes; other supplies he still needed to pick up from the lumberyard. He was to leave early the next morning to restore an old farmhouse in eastern Washington, and if his looming departure had been the only thing on their minds today, it would have been strain enough.
When he walked past Sarah Anne his mouth went dry and he started blinking. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. Her upward glare did the talking. A crying child is not the worst thing in the world. A crying child is a child alive, and you of all people should know that.
Her eyes were not saying those things. This was what he told himself as he crossed the yard, kicking up grass already parched and splintered in June. She was not thinking those things about him, was she? He sat on the stool in his workshop, the door closed and the windows open. Jameson was thirty-five years old, but how could that be? It did not seem possible to have lived through all that he had lived in only three and a half decades.
He breathed in the smell of sagebrush and dirt, and he breathed in the potter’s wheel stored lopsidedly in the corner. Its clay-encrusted scent somehow cut through a workspace full of sawdust and metal and turpentine. The wheel evoked his entire past with Sarah Anne, and he resisted the urge to drag it outside and fling it to the ground like a drunk thrown from a bar after everyone had simply had enough. Sarah Anne had not gone near it in the three years since they moved there, in the three years since the children had died. She said that in time she’d get back to it—she planned to get back to it. But now there was Ernest, and she was a different woman. Just as Jameson, even when surrounded by the tools of his trade, was a different man.
He leaned his elbows on the bench and listened to the clear and steady voices of public radio on the old transistor, as his father did in another era, and he thought of how heavy the start of each workday had become as his red knuckles disappeared inside cold leather gloves. And here, too, fatigued in the warm afternoon, bombarded by news of drought and forest fires and technology messing with the minds of the young.
His mother had lived and died by the belief that luck came in threes, though the bad got most of her attention. “Black marks on the day,” she called them, superstitious to the core, the way her own mother had been. All she needed was one ruinous thing to start and she would set about preparing for the inevitability of a second and third. A bruised toe or a neighbor’s dead cat could count, as could a cousin’s lost job or the headline of a murder close to home. By day’s end she would tell Jameson and his father to laugh if they liked, but there it was. Her proof of three black marks laid bare.
And so it was his mother who came to mind when Jameson’s cell phone rang with an out-of-state number. He turned down the radio and thought, Here comes the second black mark. The man on the other end owned the farmhouse where Jameson was headed in the morning, and he apologized for not getting in touch sooner, said he’d had other things on his mind, mainly a diagnosis he’d been given for the pain in his upper left side. He was placing a courtesy call, politely implying that his approaching death was inconvenient. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “But I’ve got to cancel the job.”
A dull daze took hold of Jameson, seeped and set into his bones, a stupefied loss of feeling that would return throughout the evening, throughout the silent dinner with Sarah Anne. But before that, right here, a man was dying, and Jameson wanted only to get off the phone.
Voices hummed in the background and glassware chinked as if the man were calling from a restaurant. As soon as his wife got on the phone, Jameson knew what was coming. He told her before she had to ask that he would refund the deposit, of course he would, even as he was wondering how.
As soon as Jameson hung up, Ernest ran into the yard and fell down in the patch of strawberries. Jameson went after him, but Jameson was not the person whom the boy turned to for comfort, and the boy cried harder and scrambled away as Jameson approached. Ernest dug his heels into the dirt, his legs and feet and cheeks smeared with bright red juice while this grown man stood helpless, breathless as the child before him. Sarah Anne appeared as if from nowhere, and Jameson stepped to the side while she lifted Ernest to her chest, her hand on the back of his head. Ernest gave in to her quickly, tucking his face against the side of her neck, his arms up and over her shoulders.
Hours later, with the two black marks behind them, Jameson was washing dishes in the kitchen with Sarah Anne, the sun dipping orange behind the jagged white Cascades, the only sounds the running faucet and, from the yard, a set of collared doves cawing their final bids on the day. Don Marshall up the road once mentioned that it was legal to shoot the birds year-round, an invasive species, he said, worse than pigeons. Jameson had made a point to say that they cooed just like mourning doves, mostly they cooed all along like that without the cawing, and Marshall said he didn’t give a rat’s ass if they knew how to whistle the Lord’s Prayer, they didn’t belong here, and he tilted his head and asked did Jameson not understand the way a system of life worked? “A system of life?” Sarah Anne had asked when Jameson told her about it later. “That’s what he called it,” Jameson said, and they acted like they didn’t know what the neighbor meant, like he was just a funny old-timer, but they knew, and they knew they knew, and each was thinking of the system of life they’d set in place, where they did not speak about the past, and they did not express petty complaints, though every complaint was now petty because nothing was worse than the death of one’s children. This system of life got them out of bed, propped their bodies into upright positions, set their feet moving in the direction of the coffeemaker, still alive, the children still gone, not still, again, gone again with every sunrise.
Sarah Anne placed the covered leftovers in the fridge, and Jameson stopped himself from telling her not to bother. It wasn’t likely they’d go near any of it, but Sarah Anne would not throw food in the trash unless it had gone bad, and there was no harm in letting her have this gesture of goodwill, a ritual that made one thing a little bit easier.
Everyone was tender and quiet now, Ernest resting on the sofa, everything put away, wiped clean and in place. Jameson dried the skillet, hung it on the hook near the stove, and looked around at the tidy solace of the kitchen, the orchestrated order that would greet them come morning when they would try again.