I’m not ready for fall: the long, chilly evenings, the morning frost shining on the last of the peppers and tomatoes, the yellowing squash, the tattered pea vines still clutching their stakes. Despite its late planting, the garden has flourished; my cupboards look as full as my mother’s ever did, and I’m proud of the rows of canned vegetables, the neat labels: pole beans, pickles, salsa. Yesterday I dug up the lavender potatoes Adam ordered on a whim from a catalog. I figured they’d be bitter, but they were light and sweet, and we ate a small mountain of them, boiled, with butter and salt. This is why we left Baltimore, where we shared an apartment for over five years, eager to exchange the city for small pleasures like these. “A good fall taste,” Adam said, and I wondered how I could have dug onions and beets, caulked the north windows, walked beneath maples filled with leaves the color of fire, and all without realizing summer had tapered to a brief warmth somewhere in the afternoon, dried up, blown away. Too late, I’m wishing I’d savored it more, our last summer alone. Next fall, we’ll have a nine-month-old child. I remind myself of this every day, trying to make the idea seem real.
How will we find time to plant another garden? How will we keep up with the house, the yard, oil changes and dental appointments and regular exercise, the day-to-day maintenance that already demands so much room in our lives? It seems as if we are already as busy as we possibly can be, Adam with his carpentry work, me with my job at the Turkey Hill Nature Preserve, no parents close by to help out in a pinch. “There’s Pat,” Adam reminds me—another reason we moved to New York State. And already she’s volunteered baby-sitting, but her house is a disaster, her little girls wild, and I’m not reassured when she tells me, “When you’ve got three, what’s one more?” Of course, my mother would love to stay with us for a while after the baby is born, but she’d mine the house with green scapulars, prayer cards, and bottles of holy water, the way she did the time she came to visit just after Adam and I were married. It had been a long week for all of us. On Sunday, she went to Mass with a neighbor—I’d arranged that in advance. Afterward, over the brunch I’d made, my mother spoke of nothing but the graffitied state of my soul—one black mark for each missed Mass—while Adam ate in silence.
“What will you do when you have children?” she said. “Certainly you’ll want them to have a moral upbringing.”
“I am a moral person,” Adam said, “and I never went to any church when I was a kid.”
He picked up his plate and left the room, leaving my mother and me to glare at each other.
Now she wants to know if we’re making plans for a baptism. “I’ve never been a godmother before,” she hints. “Maybe Adam could get baptized at the same time. A two-for-one special.”
I match her tone. “It’s only a bargain if it’s something you need.”
I’m tired of my mother’s hints. Today at Turkey Hill, watching lines of geese scarring the horizon, I have the urge to jump in my car and drive…where? Anywhere. Away. But it’s autumn that’s making me feel this way, the restless wind, the skittering leaves, and I realize it’s the perfect time to open Uncle Olaf’s wine. He called it Autumn Tonic, and though he’s been dead for several years now, Auntie Thil still sends me a bottle each fall from what’s left of his well-stocked cellar: dandelion or mulberry or plum. The names themselves are sweet to the tongue. Usually, Adam is amused by that sweetness—he prefers beer to sugary wine—but when this year’s bottle arrived in the mail, he said, You shouldn’t be drinking; you should be taking care of yourself. All summer, he’s been busy with what he calls the preparations, finishing household projects, taking on extra carpentry work. He waxes the truck, vacuums out my car. He joined a shoppers club in Binghamton and comes home with boxes of bulk toilet paper, pasta, rice. When I tell him it feels like we’re anticipating war, he reminds me of what I already know, what everyone with children has been telling us almost gleefully: Four months from now, there will be little time for anything other than the baby’s needs.
For the next three days he’ll be traveling across the state, scavenging for antiques he’ll restore and sell at Pat’s shop in Cobblestone. It’s a lucrative sideline, something to do when construction work drops off for the winter. He left yesterday, one suitcase filled with clothes rolled into tidy logs, and when I come home from work, the dark windows remind me he’s gone. At least there’s the cat for company, but the moment I open the door, she weaves between my legs and runs to the edge of the lawn, where she rolls happily in the dead grasses. I think about getting back in the car, driving to Pat’s house for supper with the girls. Pat wouldn’t mind, especially if I picked up some ice cream for desert. Right now I’d choose even my nieces’ messy clamor over this silent house.
It’s then that I remember Uncle Olaf’s wine. I remember the low cedar barrels where he aged it, under the cellar stairs beside crates of yeasty pilsners, stouts, and ales, and his own potent invention, Raspberry Glog, which he stored in glass jelly jars. At Christmas, we kids got a taste on the tip of a teaspoon, perhaps the last sip that someone didn’t want. But every now and then throughout the year, we’d sneak down the steps—me and Sam, Monica and Harv—to steal another swallow or two. The glog looked as harmless as Auntie Thil’s canned fruits, plums and peaches and spiced brown pears, which occupied identical jars. I took a long, dizzying swallow, hiccupped the exquisite taste of raspberry, and experienced the light-headed chill of knowing I had done something I could not undo. The alcohol ferreted through my veins, tickled the hard-to-reach places in my mind. When I passed the jar along to Sam, it seemed as if it were taking an awfully long time for my hands to obey my wish: Let go, Let go, Let go.
The glog was eighty proof; I know that now, the way I know each sip of wine means death to a handful of brain cells. As I sit in the kitchen rocking chair with my glass, pushing the floor away with my toes, I imagine those cells—the baby’s and mine—like frogs’ eggs: clear, clumping jelly, thick with information. There is no way to know if it is information we might someday need. There is no way to know if it is information we might someday need. There is no way to know if it’s information we are better off without. But this I do know: one glass of wine can’t be any worse than these past few months of stifling caution—low-salt diets, doctor visits, vitamins that leave my mouth tasting strange, eight glasses of water every day, eight hours of sleep every night. Adam believes in these rules the way my mother believes in the Ten Commandments, as if they are a magic formula, an infallible recipe.
Beyond the French doors, I can see clouds of migrating birds rising and falling, dust devils blown by a hundred wings. Our house is the last on a dead-end street, perched on the edge of a ravine. We bought it when we got married, liking the back porch, which juts out like an impulse, and the side yard, with enough space for Adam’s sculptures. Deer pick their way up from the ravine to strip bark from the apple trees we planted along the lot line, standing on their hind legs to nibble beyond the wire protectors. In Horton, the deer drifted in herds of fifty and sixty, like cattle. They came at dusk and grazed until darkness, finally in visible except for their eyes, which trapped light from passing cars and glowed like floating spheres. First frost always made them bold. Even the yearlings were anticipating winter, the long, gray days of bitter bark and tough, dead grasses, and they ate steadily, fiercely, as Sam and I watched from my bedroom window, wrapped in a quilt, our feet dangling off the edge of my bed to catch the heat that rose from the vent on the floor. I told him the deer were really souls of the dead. If we went outside, we’d instantly die too. During the day, they transformed into other animals—bears and fish and even dogs and cats—so you never should approach a strange animal, in case it wasn’t what it appeared to be. My mother overheard our murmurings one evening and put an end to it by stomping outside, my father’s jacket thrown over her nightgown, and startling the herd into white-tailed flight with an exasperated flick of her hands.
Where you got your ideas, she still likes to say, Heaven only knows! But looking back, I don’t see them as any stranger than the things we were taught to believe. Once, when Sam and I were quarreling over some small thing, she told us that each time we raised our voices in anger, it was the same as holding a burning match against the flesh of Jesus, which made all the angels weep. I was filled with remorse, imagining the hot sizzle of Jesus’ skin, the agony in His eyes, the wailing of thousands of white-winged creatures. But Sam ignored the kitchen match my mother had lit to emphasize her point. Undaunted, he looked around the room.
“I don’t see any angels,” he said, crossing his arms on his chest. “Prove it.” My mother doesn’t remember this. Her Sam was a boy who volunteered to lead Grace before meals. Her Sam sat up straight at Mass, hands folded just so, like in a First Communion picture. With age, she’s becoming as religious as my grandmother ever was, and it’s hard for me to remember there was a time when she urged me to rely on myself—not God alone—for answers. She recently joined a women’s prayer group; they meet twice a month to pray. One woman has cancer of the liver, and when the group joins hands, they ask God to shrink the tumor. They pray for each other’s children, for people in the community; they pray for news about Sam. They believe that if a person has faith the size of a mustard seed, anything is possible. “Why do you always look for negative things?” she asks me. “Or is that just what happens when a person stops going to church?”
Even now, she’ll call with news, real or imagined, of Sam: a dream, an anonymous phone call, a hopeful letter from a missing persons organization, an insight from a psychic, saying, Sam is thinking about us or Sam is ill or Sam is coming home soon. Prove it, I want to say. There have been too many disappointments, too many trips across the country to discover yet another stranger, someone else’s lost son. But since my grandmother’s death, I’m eager to hear my mother’s voice, as lonely for her company as she is for mine. When she talks about Sam, I keep the silence she believes means we agree.
Growing up, my house rang with many of these silences; the things you did not say because to say them would be wrong; the things you did not feel because they were sins. The things you wanted to do but couldn’t because you were a girl, or a boy. The questions you could not ask because you might be acting too big for your britches or else talking nonsense, in which case my father would tell you to simmer down. If you can’t say something nice, my mother told me again and again, don’t say anything at all. And perhaps what I remember are things that should not be remembered, should not be spoken. Simmer down. Simmer down.
For my thirteenth birthday, my father gave me matches and a pack of Camels, wrapped up in pink tissue paper. I was in the backyard, where I’d been idly throwing rocks at a stump. It had been, until that moment, a normal kind of birthday. We’d had an early supper of meat loaf, my favorite, and a store-bought cake I’d picked out myself at the bakery downtown, a chocolate cake with green frosting and lavender sugar flowers and Happy Birthday Abby written in cursive across the top. My mother had given me a diary with a key and a glass horse tethered to two glass foals. Sam had saved his money to buy me a king-size box of Milk Duds and a key chain that was a flashlight too. Now my father was giving me a pack of cigarettes.
“Thank you,” I said.
My father looked pleased. He played with the zipper on his Fountain Ford windbreaker. “Have one,” he said politely, as if he were offering me a cookie, a stick of gum, some unexpected little treat.
I studied the Camels uneasily. My mother usually bought our gifts, and I figured my father just didn’t know any better than to give me cigarettes. He’d given things to Sam that I’d considered strange; a Baggie of smashed butterfly wings from the grille of his car; his broken watch; chewed-up pens with the names of car dealerships trailing down their sides; a large inflatable spark plug from a gas-station window display. The Camels were just one more mistake, only this time the mistake was aimed at me. Or was it some kind of trick? No makeup, he had warned me. No high heels, no nail polish. He’d never said specifically that I wasn’t allowed to smoke, but I knew it was something I wasn’t supposed to do.
“I don’t smoke,” I told him.
His expression did not change. He took the cigarettes, put them in his pocket, and said, “C’mon, let’s go for a walk.”
The red and gold of the turning leaves glowed eerily in the twilight. I watched the faint crescent moon move with us, slipping from tree to tree as we walked down the driveway to the highway, and I tried to keep up with my father. He was a fast walker, a businesslike walker, head down, shoulders forward, hands jammed into the pockets of his windbreaker. Sam and I had once imitated his walk for amusement, stretching our legs like wading birds, tucking our chins to our chests. But lately, Sam tried to throw an extra inch into his own stride, my father’s broken watch sliding up and down his arm the way the high school boys’ class rings slid on the slender fingers of their girlfriends.
At the highway, my father turned right toward Oneisha, and I wondered if he was leading me there, if I would be expected to walk the ten miles behind him in silence. But when we came to the end of our land, he stepped off the road and followed the gully to the stand of hickory trees that belonged to the Luchterhands. There I paused, catching my breath. The hickory trees had a reputation: Older kids biked out from town to hold secret meetings here, to drink Southern Comfort from Dr Pepper cans, and to beat up younger kids like me. “C’mon,” my father said when he realized I had stopped.
“Mom’s going to wonder where we are,” I said, but I picked my way toward him through the weeds. The wind moved in the branches of the hickories, and they clicked together, the sound my grandmother made with her tongue to mean Shame. My father took the cigarettes out of his pocket, and I knew then that he meant for me to smoke one. “Somebody’s going to see,” I begged, but the highway was a pale gray scar in the distance.
He opened the pack, selected a cigarette, put it between his lips. “I used to smoke,” he said. “Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
He lit the cigarette, drawing once, twice. His wispy hair lifted slightly in the wind. “Son of a bitches make me sick now,” he said. He coughed, shaking his head. “I want you to have your first smoke with me, not with some kid at your school.”
He held out the cigarette.
“Dad,” I said.
“One cigarette,” he said. “Then we can go home.”
His face wore the look that meant, no matter what, he was going to get his way. I took the cigarette from him gingerly, stuck it into my mouth, and sucked. It tasted like dirt. I spat out a stream of smoke, watching it curl upward and upward until it blended into the sharp white tooth of the moon. The glowing end of the cigarette was oddly beautiful, like a ruby but deeper, etched with gray patterns of ash.
“Your mother would kill me if she knew about this,” my father said.
I took another puff, inhaling this time. My stomach churned chocolate cake with green icing; I choked for a minute, tears streaming down my face. “Kids aren’t supposed to smoke,” I said.
“Tap the ash off the tip,” he said, and he demonstrated with his finger. Sparks spun into the arms of the hickory trees. I tried smoking with my left hand, then smoking no-handed. I tried blowing smoke through my nose.
“I could teach you how to do a smoke ring,” my father said after a while.
“That’s OK.”
“I guess you don’t have to finish all of it,” he said.
I handed it to him, relieved. He put it out under his heel and kicked loose ground over the butt. For a moment, I thought that if I stood on my toes the wind would lift me high into the trees, and their arms around me would be soft and warm, and the smell of them would be magic.
“You going to smoke when the kids at school give you a cigarette?” he asked.
I shook my head no. My mouth tasted awful.
“That’s my good girl,” he said. He turned away, and I followed him out of the field. We passed Mrs. Luchterhand, who was riding one of her black Morgans. Both her long braid and the horse’s tail were clipped with reflectors, which glowed like eyes. “Wonderful evening for a walk,” she said to my father, her voice high and airy, like my mother’s.
When we got home, he led me inside through the back door so my mother wouldn’t see. “Will Sam have to smoke a cigarette when he turns thirteen?” I said.
My father watched me kick off my sneakers by pushing my toes against the heels. “No,” he said. “Take your shoes off with your hands.”
“How come?”
“They’ll last a long time if you take care of them.”
“I mean how come about Sam?”
My father laughed and shook his head as though he were remembering something private. “Boys can take care of themselves. It’s you I’ve got to worry about.”
“Why?”
He smiled, reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a small box wrapped in green paper. “Happy birthday,” he said, and he watched me open it. It was a necklace with my birthstone. He’d picked it out himself. “For my teenage daughter,” he said.
The clock by the bed glows 2:00 A.M. when I first start hearing music, or, more precisely, a muffled, driving beat. I close my eyes, half dreaming the long Saturday nights in Horton, the slow cars moving up and down the dirt road that followed the lake-front all the way out to Herringbone Beach, trawling for girls sitting in small groups in the grass. Music was the simplest bait—Led Zeppelin, the Stones, AC/DC. My friends and I floated toward that music and the heat contained in the sound of it, so much like a heartbeat, but faster, harder, freed from the limits of the body. Hey, girls, wanna ride? Wanna ride? and we came up out of the long trampled grass, brushing off our jeans, rubbing stiff knees. In the morning, I’d get up and go to early Mass, tamed by knee socks and a fresh cotton slip, penitent in my good church dress.
I led two lives when I was in high school, and each had its own sound track. Classical music was for church and home: my private voice, a gift from God. This was the music that accompanied the girl my parents knew, the girl my grandmother admired and my teachers praised. Mornings, I got up early and practiced on Elise’s piano for an hour before school; after school, I used the grand piano in the school auditorium, taking the late bus home with the athletes and cheerleaders and pom-pom girls. They treated me kindly, if a bit uncomfortably; I was something of a bewilderment to them. But every now and then I’d show up at their parties, which made me acceptable, even marginally cool. Rock was for those forbidden nights—lurid, public, urgent—and this is the sound that unravels me from my sleep, peeling the layers away like onion skin, until finally I get up and step into my sweatpants. Pulling an old sweater of Adam’s over my T-shirt, I go into the kitchen, open the French doors to the cold night. The moon is almost full, and the houses and trees are outlined in silver. I can hear lyrics, laughter, and I realize the noise is coming from the belly of the ravine. Sometimes I walk there in the morning before work, carefully following the faint deer paths until I reach the trickle of water at the bottom called Poison Creek. In spring, it swells into a river, seven or eight feet wide; Adam and I saw a dead raccoon once, swollen and stiff, its curious hands stretched skyward.
My next-door neighbor, an older woman whose name I do not know, steps out into her yard. She has a man’s coat draped over her shoulders; she uses her hands to pin it chastely over the front of her robe. When she sees me, she walks over to our lot line and stops precisely at the edge, as if she’s toeing a mark for a race. “You’re new here,” she calls, “so I’ll tell you. They have parties down there every fall.”
“Who?” I ask. She is wearing slippers shaped like rabbits, and they hop in place as she shifts from side to side in the frosty grass.
“Kids,” she says, and she takes one hand from the front of her coat to shake her finger in the air. “High school kids. They wait till the weather gets cold and the police don’t want to get out of their nice warm cars and chase them off.”
“I’m Abby,” I say, but she doesn’t hear me.
“Goddamn kids. I called the police, but you know they won’t do a thing about it. If it were up to me, I’d just send Charlie on down there with his gun.”
She turns, rabbits marching, back toward her house, without saying good-bye. I’ve seen Charlie huffing around their lawn in summer, squirting weed killer on the dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace, and I don’t like to imagine him with a gun. Still, as I go back into the house, I understand some of my neighbor’s anger. When I was a girl, my grandmother told me how it surprised her whenever she looked—really looked—into a mirror. It’s not how I feel, she said, but I did not understand. Now I stand in front of the oval mirror hanging beside the French doors. My hair is brittle-looking; the skin beneath my eyes looks bruised. At five months, my pregnancy shows enough to make me look potbellied, though Adam says that isn’t true. Dirty-looking freckles have erupted across the backs of my hands, my chest, the bridge of my nose. One long worry wrinkle runs parallel with my eyebrows. This is not the way I feel.
I often wonder what Sam would look like today, whether or not I would recognize him. At twenty-nine, he’d probably be getting our family’s slumped shoulders and the beginnings of a receding hairline. Of course, if he was trying not to be recognized, he’d keep his blond hair dyed brown or black, though perhaps his hair would have changed naturally, turning reddish like my mother’s. A few years ago, my mother and Auntie Thil were spending a day at the Wisconsin Dells when they saw a man with a long red beard who looked so familiar that my mother followed him from souvenir stand to souvenir stand, fingering T-shirts and postcards and mugs, until she heard his voice. “That fellow had a deep voice,” she told Auntie Thil when she found her again. “Sam talked through his nose.”
“Didn’t Sam have a deep voice?” Auntie Thil said.
“No, he didn’t,” my mother said. And then she got very upset. “I’m his mother! Don’t you think I would remember a thing like that?”
Later, when Auntie Thil told me the story, I could hear my mother’s voice rising above the sound of the falls, see the other tourists moving gently away, parents clutching their children’s hands.
Laverne scratches on the door, and when I open it to let her in, I hear cars revving at the end of the street, bellowing male laughter, and a long, shrill wail that could be a teenage girl’s giddy joy or else a cry for help. Which? The music swells again, and I can’t hear anything else. Laverne hops up on the counter, butts her head against my hand. She knows that I don’t have the heart to chase her off the way Adam would. But Adam isn’t here, and I decide to walk down into the ravine, just to make sure I know the difference between the sounds of pleasure and pain. As I pull on my coat, all the warnings about walking alone at night play in my mind like a symphony, brief and discordant. What if there’s someone hiding in the weeds? What if I were to take a wrong step, tumble into the open mouth of the ravine? But then, what if I am swallowing too many vitamins? What if, at this very moment, my cells are tingling with the radioactive kiss of a bomb detonated years ago? This is what Adam does not understand. No matter what we do, no matter how we plan, anything might happen at any given moment, and that moment will always be the one you least suspect—in the dark span of an eye blink, in the crick of a turned-away head, in the moment after you first awaken and realize that none of this is a dream.
The moon is so bright that I cast a shadow until I move beneath the sheltering arms of the trees that line the ravine. The music rumbles in my chest, in my throat, in the bones of my feet; bonfires flicker between the trees. When I stop to look back toward the house, all I can see are the windows. As children, Sam and I sneaked out into the cornfields at night, following parallel rows, zapping each other between cornstalks with the beams from our flashlights. Now and then we’d look back to see the porch light, a beacon reminding us where we belonged, calling us home. Once, I turned off my flashlight and waited, invisible and silent, as Sam’s beam licked at the stalks around me, disappeared up into the sky. Where are you? he called. Are you OK? I heard him thrashing farther and farther away from me, his voice growing higher, shrill.
I’m not KIDDING! WHERE ARE YOU?
Still I did not move, did not breathe, until his light winked out and left only the stars to watch over us. Why are you so mean? he sobbed, again and again. I crouched, hugging my knees, trying not to laugh and trying not to cry, every nerve in my body tingling, tingling. I mattered, I was needed. I was important to my brother.
At the foot of the ravine, the fires are giving off a cloud of thick, sweet smoke. Thirty or forty high school kids are standing around in groups, dancing close in the fallen leaves, their bodies weaving single silhouettes. A boom box is balanced in the low crook of a tree. Above it, girls sway in the branches, slapping at each other and laughing, and I realize I’ve discovered the source of the scream. If I called up to them and told them I had come out of concern, they would not understand. Don’t worry about us, they might say, annoyance clouding their clear voices. Nothing’s going to happen to us.
I walk around the outskirts of the bonfires, negotiating this odd sense of invisibility and remembering similar high school parties in Horton, on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. As soon as it was dark, cars began to line the winding dirt road, trunks packed with coolers of beer. Everyone drank and talked and wandered around the bonfires, the wood smoke clinging to our clothes and hair; I could smell it even after I got home and showered and slipped, still reeling, into bed. There was music in this too, a dizzying melody, and I wanted to get up and go downstairs to the piano and sound everything out: the craziness of the dancing, the brush of a boy’s cold cheeks, his impossibly warm mouth. Now I watch the faces of the girls, their lips and cheeks done up in red and pink, the forced colors of cheer. I watch their darting eyes and the way they use their hands when they speak, painting the air around themselves, weaving invisible cocoons. I watch the boys, the way they walk with their hips tugging them in the direction they want to go, their heads and shoulders bobbing smoothly behind as if innocent, simply along for the ride, and I remember waking up in my bedroom after coming home from one of those parties, cotton-headed, confused. It was the ninth of August, four days after Sam’s official disappearance on August fifth, four days before I’d be interviewed by detectives investigating incidents at Dr. Neidermier’s and the drive-in and Becker’s Foodmart, investigating an assault on Geena Baumbach of Oneisha. Boys were moving from the door to the window, led by the sleek pull of their hips. One of them—Sam—went through my jewelry box. One of them opened my purse, which was slung over the back of my rocking chair. One of them bent over me and began to stroke my hair. “What a nice ring you’re wearing,” he said, exaggerating his politeness. “Can I have it?” From a faraway place in my mind, I watched myself twist Elise’s ring off my finger. There is no room for this in my mother’s careful memories. There is no place for this in her longing for Sam’s return. I never told; how could I? How could I be the one to finally break my mother’s heart?
The music stops, and the yodel of a police siren billows unevenly through the air, bouncing off the sides off the ravine so it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from. Bodies scatter wildly into the brush, and I’m caught up in their panic and running too, clumsily climbing over fallen logs, branches whipping my face. The cops! we’d call to each other, and suddenly everyone would be scrambling down the side of the bluff, fighting for a foothold, the evening’s dizzy drunkenness evaporating like mist. Then would come the long, aching silence, the crunch of footsteps on gravel overhead as we clung to the slender trees growing out from the side of the bluff, praying to Blessed Jesus that they wouldn’t give way. Below, the lake sparkled diamonds in the distance, but all we could think of was the rocks directly below us and the murmur of gulls disturbed from their sleep and the cops’ yellow beams stroking the leaves only inches from our faces.
I cannot imagine that the cops here tonight are much different from the cops I remember from Wisconsin. They all have their badges and billy clubs, their crisp uniforms and questions, a heavy walk that means Do what I say. Sam had disappeared before, sometimes for several days; and each time, they found him, or else didn’t find him; but either way, he always ended up back home. Once, my mother found things missing—money, a tiny silver picture frame, her watch—but when Sam came in to breakfast his first morning back, it was as if she had forgotten these things had ever existed.
“Good morning,” she sang as he sat down at the table. His eyes were like poison, and he kept them fixed on his cereal bowl. My father no longer addressed him directly; instead, he talked to the sugar dish, or the newspaper he was reading, or our ancient cat, Rose, who still loved Sam and struggled arthritically into his lap. “So he’s finally come back from God knows where,” he muttered to the ceiling, but Sam just blinked his poison eyes—he didn’t speak to my father at all, directly or indirectly. Rose purred and purred, pushing the top of her head into his hand. I watched that hand, waiting for it to respond, and I knew something had been lost in Sam when it did not.
But how easily things might have been different! When the police asked their halting questions, my mother simply gave them the answers that should have been true. Sam had had his moments, like any teenage boy, she said, but he had no special difficulties, there were no fights at home. The friends and relatives who said otherwise were betraying Sam at the very time he needed them most; the truth was what you made it, and it was only by stating these things to strangers that they became terrible, unalterable fact. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. So I kept silent about the night that Sam came into my bedroom with his friends, looking for money, jewelry, anything they could sell. “So, Sam-boy, this is your sister,” said the one who was stroking my hair. He looked older than Sam, and he had the knife Mrs. Baumbach would later describe: a leather grip, an odd tip curved like a question mark. “She isn’t going to breathe a word of this, is she? Your sister can keep a secret,” and he moved his hand over my shoulders and gown, lightly, as if he were soothing a child. Sam had my confirmation locket, the birthstone necklace my father had given me. “You got anything else?” was the last thing he said, but I was too scared to answer. Abruptly the one standing over me straightened, and then they were gone, filing out into the hallway, leaving only the smell of their cigarette smoke, and a bitter cologne I’ve never encountered since. For years, I worried I’d come home to find Sam waiting beside my door, or rummaging through my jewelry box, or pointing a gun to my head. I worried that someone would discover the part of me that hoped my brother would never be found.
I cross our lawn and sit on the steps that lead up to our deck, trying to catch my breath. Clouds have dimmed the moon to a quiet star, and the wind rises, shivering in the branches of the apple trees. I wonder why I was running in the first place—I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I heard the music, I practice saying. I was concerned. I came out to investigate. Still, I am afraid as I listen to the cops thrashing through the trees below me, and when I see the glow of a flashlight moving in my direction, I stand up quickly and prepare my face, because this is what you do when the police ask you questions. You smile, a big, wide, friendly smile. You ask if you can be of any help. You assure them that, regardless of appearances, everything is really all right.
Halloween is Adam’s favorite holiday, and this year he’s offered to take Pat’s girls around our neighborhood during official trick-or-treating hours at dusk. Pat lives above her antique store on a busy street in downtown Cobblestone; her neighbors are a hardware store, a liquor store, a gas station. But our streets are quiet, the houses set close together, the neighborhood windows plastered with cutouts of black cats and witches riding on brooms. Even our next-door neighbor Charlie hung a homemade ghost from the corner of the house, his wife calling shrill instructions as she held on to the stepladder. This morning, when I look out our bedroom window, I can see the white sheet flapping in the wind, its Magic Marker mouth stuck in a wide, pitiful howl. I want to walk over and pull it down, put the poor thing out of its misery. I don’t like Halloween. There’s something unnerving about skeletons in the grocery store, bats suspended from the ceiling at work, hay-stuffed corpses sprawled on people’s lawns. I’m hoping we’ll get by with a simple smiling jack-o’-lantern, but no such luck. Adam goes out to get one and, when he returns, the truck bed is filled with a dozen of the ugliest pumpkins I’ve ever seen. He carries them into the kitchen one by one, proudly, as if they’re trophies.
“I’m going to carve them for tonight, surprise the girls,” he says. “You want to help?”
Laverne eyes the pumpkins suspiciously. My expression is probably the same.
“How much did all this cost?”
“Next to nothing, can you believe it?” Adam says. “They’re irregulars. Carl Jaeger let me have the lot for twenty bucks.”
“Carl Jaeger should have paid you twenty bucks to take them,” I say, staring at the odd shapes, the warty cheeks and splintered stumps.
“Wait and see,” Adam says. “I have an idea. The girls are going to love it.”
So I cover the linoleum with old newspapers, and we sit cross-legged on the floor, the history of the past months spread between us. Adam pulls the first of the pumpkins into his lap; he holds it steady against his knees, wiping its face with a warm wet cloth. He is gentle about this task, turning the pumpkin’s face from side to side the way one might turn a child’s face, alert for dirty ears, smudges, sleeping sand. My lap is already filled with my stomach, which is about the size of the next-to-smallest pumpkin—big enough to have made my descent to the kitchen floor unwieldy. Big enough so that strangers are starting to notice. Some make predictions: Most say it’s a girl. Adam and I have told my doctor we don’t want to know in advance.
My mother is predicting a healthy boy with my almond-shaped eyes and her own mother’s smile. A boy just like my brother. She believes it’s no coincidence that my revised due date—January fifth—is the day before Sam’s birthday. “The doctor says that’s just an estimate,” I say. “It could be born in December, or as late as the middle of January.”
“Or January sixth,” my mother says. “Stranger things have happened.”
She looks for signs in everything. She claims burning bushes are everywhere and that most of us just haven’t learned how to see them. Last Saturday night, when she and Auntie Thil joined hands with the other members of their women’s prayer group, they saw a little boy, dressed in an infant’s snow-white baptismal gown, walking up the long gravel driveway toward our house in Horton. This, she called to tell me, was the child I will have. Sam coming home like the prodigal son.
She says, “Have you thought about naming the baby after Sam?”
Adam outlines a pair of squinting eyes, a mouth that badly needs a dentist. There’s nothing he likes better than transforming an idea into something concrete. Every day as I drive to work, I pass things he has made, places where he’s left his mark: this new porch, that refurbished farmhouse, a delicate gazebo tucked between the trees. He’s planning another sculpture for our side yard. Inside the house, he rearranges our furniture. He paints and papers and plans. As my belly swells, he touches me—the small of my back, the indentations behind my knees—as if he is evaluating my structural integrity, longing to make improvements: a pillow, supportive hose, sturdier shoes. He reminds me to take my calcium supplements. He fusses over how much or how little I sleep. Is there anything I can do? he asks. Is there anything you need?
He holds his pumpkin in front of his face. “What do you think?” he says from behind it.
“Scary,” I say.
He lowers it, looks at it closely. “You think so?” he says. “Scared, maybe.”
“Aren’t you going to make any happy ones?”
He chooses another knife. “You can make the happy ones,” he says.
But my first jack-o’-lantern will turn out sad; I can already tell by its flat, scarred cheeks, complete with tear-shaped blight marks. I cut open its forehead, and there’s that pumpkin smell—rich, mildewy, dank, the odor of sealed, dark boxes, the odor of secret things. I separate the seeds into the wooden bowl for baking; the orange goo goes into the compost bucket. My mother doesn’t put her faith in things like supportive hose and vitamin tablets, what she calls quick fixes. The power of prayer will smooth the ache out of my tired back, reduce the swelling of my ankles better than elevation. The day she called me to say her group had prayed for my ankles, I got the giggles.
She sighed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just a funny thing to imagine.”
“Abby, when is it we remember to pray?” she said in her practiced businesswoman’s voice. “When things are going OK? No, it’s when we have problems that we remember God and turn to Him. That’s why He sends us these little hardships.”
“God’s talking to me through my ankles?”
“Don’t laugh,” my mother said, but she laughed a little herself.
My jack-o’-lantern is an unhappy disaster. The mouth is lopsided, the left corner slicing too far down into its chin. One eye is smaller than the other. I turn it around for Adam to see.
“It’s much scarier than mine,” he says.
I’m surprised. “But it isn’t scary.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it isn’t.”
We are looking at the same thing—how can we see it so differently? Adam squints one eye, widens the other, mimicking my pumpkin’s expression. I nail him with a glob of pulp, and he whips back a handful of cold, wet seeds. When I yelp, the baby shivers sympathetically. Adam says it’s bigger than the length of an outstretched hand. He reads all the brochures I bring home from the doctor; he even gets books at the library. There is nothing Adam loves better than a technical word, crisp in the mouth like a fresh stick of gum. Conduit, carburetor, compressor. Parturition, gestation, lactation. The baby, Adam reminds me, is developing according to the genetic blueprint we carry within our own cells. It is immune to my mother’s prayers and premonitions. Visions of little boys dressed all in white.
“He’s a goddamn encyclopedia,” Pat complains, her big laugh like an engine that fires but won’t catch. Pat suspects terminology of all kinds: She’s at home with gizmos and doohickeys, whatchamacallits and thingamajiggers, sniggering references to ovens and buns and biscuits. She tells her own half-grown biscuits—three bone-slender white-haired girls—that the baby is in my stomach.
Uterus, Adam corrects her, and Pat snorts; I blush, the girls roll their pale blue eyes. Three plain little girls with elaborate frilly names: Alinda, Lorentina, Tamela. “My leeches,” Pat calls them, running her hands through their strange white hair. They make me nervous—all children do—and I’m already dreading this evening, when they’ll fill our small house with their shrieky voices, their pounding footsteps. Those spindly pumping arms and legs. Those gap-toothed mouths. “You won’t feel that way about your own,” Adam says, but I worry that I might drop it like a cup, overfeed it like a goldfish, leave it behind in the grocery store the way I’m always doing with my purse. I worry that I won’t love it. I worry that I’ll love it too much. I worry that I’ll look into its eyes and see the figure of a boy, dressed all in white, walking up the driveway toward the house where my brother and I grew up.
Highway KL links the townships along Lake Michigan like so many rosary beads—Horton, Oneisha, Farbenplatz, Fall Creek, Holly’s Field. Each summer, Sam and I played survival games in the fields along this road, stockpiling food in makeshift forts, estimating how long we could live off the land. We gathered the crisp young shoots of wild asparagus, sweet beans yellowing in the fields, sour gooseberries, tart wild raspberries. We invented a secret language. We carried clumsy stick weapons. At home, we explored my mother’s pantry, dug our hands into the bins of cornmeal and oatmeal and rice, ran our fingers over the jars of pickles and tomatoes and beets in the root cellar; in the attic, we opened her cedar chest to inhale the bitter scent protecting our sweaters and scarves. It seemed that winter was always coming, a new virus constantly making its rounds, another bad influence seeping into the community—rock music, hip-hugger jeans, marijuana cigarettes. My mother looked in our ears and under our tongues, measured our height and weight against the chart in the bathroom closet. Once a week, we were forced to swallow a teaspoon of cod liver oil, just in case.
What were we preparing for even then? My mother still saves everything: string, rubber bands, slivers of leftover soap, bottles, rags, Christmas cards, our clumsy school projects, worn-out shoes. She collects discount dresses with crooked seams, bargain blouses, coupons. Her purse is heavy as an anvil, bulging with things she might need. Saint Christopher dangles upside down from the rearview mirror of her car; each New Year’s Day she blesses the house with holy water. And when these charms fail, there are always her intuitions, premonitions, dreams, which are true just often enough so that I can’t dismiss them. Even now, she always knows when I’m thinking about her. If I say to Adam, “Maybe I’ll call Mom today,” she’ll call me first. In Baltimore, at the beginning of my first and only semester of college at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, I tried to tell my roommate about my mother’s gift.
“My mom’s the same way,” Phoebe said. She was from Connecticut, wealthy and agnostic, and despite our differences we’d immediately become friends. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Her teeth were perfectly straight from years of braces; she saw a dermatologist and, she told me privately, a psychotherapist. It was the end of our first week of classes, and we were stripping our beds, getting ready to do our laundry.
“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “It’s like she has ESP or something,” and I told her how she’d sketched my father’s face the day before she met him. I was showing off a bit. I’d never been to New York City or gone sailing off the coast of the Florida Keys like Phoebe, but I had a mother with a special gift. I’d impressed friends in Horton with this story, and no one had ever questioned it. But Phoebe said, “What does your dad look like?”
“He’s tall, with brown hair, and he parts it on the side. He sometimes has a mustache.”
“That could be half the men in the world,” Phoebe said. “Did you ever see the sketch?”
The drawing hadn’t been saved. The only ones who ever saw it were Auntie Thil and my mother.
“I don’t think my mother would lie,” I said, hurt.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just saying people believe what they want to, that’s all.”
“This is different,” I said. “I’ll prove it. I’ll think about her right now and she’ll call me.”
“You want to put a dollar on that?” Phoebe said.
I hesitated; betting was a venial sin.
“No?”
“Sure, but you’ll lose.”
“Let’s see if anybody else wants to bet,” Phoebe said, and she headed for the door. But someone was already knocking. “Telephone, Abby,” she said. “It’s your mom.”
Phoebe and I stared at each other. If someone had yelled “Boo!” we would have screamed.
“No way!” Phoebe finally said. “You arranged that in advance.” She never would believe that I hadn’t. But that morning, I’d caught a glimpse of my own beliefs through the eyes of someone else. People believe what they want. That night, as I struggled to undress for bed without exposing anything unnecessary, Phoebe said, “Can I ask you something? Why do you always have a penny pinned to your underwear?” A penny? Could she mean my Saint Benedict medal, which my cousin Monica and I had vowed, along with the rest of Girls’ Catechism, to wear for life? I tried to ex plain: Saint Benedict medals prevented possession by the devil. “Do you think other people are possessed because we don’t wear them?” Phoebe said.
“No,” I said earnestly.
“So then it’s just Catholics the devil wants? How come?”
It seemed as if everything I’d ever believed in was being exposed as wishful thinking, foolish superstition, or, at best, a matter of opinion.
“Can I ask you another question?” Phoebe asked, after we’d turned out the lights. “If your mother has this gift, why can’t she find out what happened to your brother?”
The phone rings just as I’m finishing my third jack-o’-lantern, one with a growly expression and a frayed gray stump like a woman’s hat. I pick up the receiver in the hallway, coating it with pumpkin slime; I already know who it has to be. “Happy Halloween,” my mother says. “Are you having a nice weekend?”
“We’re carving jack-o’-lanterns,” I say, picking a pumpkin seed out of my hair. “Twelve of them.”
“Twelve!” my mother says, and the pause that follows is her secret, silent laugh, the laugh that is now mine. I’ve always envied women like Pat, with their booming, sexy laughter.
“I won’t keep you long,” my mother says. “I was just thinking about that jack-o’-lantern you and Sam had, the one so big you both fit inside it. Remember that, Abby?”
“Not really,” I lie. “I was pretty young.”
“You were five,” she says. “I’ve got the picture here in front of me. The two of you with just your heads sticking out. Like chicks in an egg. I’ll send it on.”
“Oh, that’s OK,” I say, but I know it will arrive by certified mail, just like all the other things she’s sent over the past few weeks: Sam’s baby clothes, preserved in cedar chips, his baby blanket, and, most recently, his handmade christening cap and gown wrapped up in acid-free paper. She has saved it all, every last bit, scented with sandalwood, preserved beneath plastic, and I don’t need holy dreams to tell me she means to pass it along to my child in the same way that my grandmother passed Elise’s belongings to me. It was hard for me to remember I’d never known Elise; my grandmother’s memories became, at times, more real than any of my own. Even now, I remember the day of the cannery fire as if I’d actually been there. I remember the day of the funerals. I remember my grandmother’s grief. I don’t want my child to grow up that way, remembering things that belong to other people. It’s too great a responsibility, living up to the perfection—or the imperfection—of the dead.
Now my mother is describing the day we brought Sam home from his christening. It’s one of her favorite stories. My father lifts Sam out of his white blanket, plucks the lacy cap from his head. There you go, sport! he says in his booming voice, rocketing the baby around the room as my mother and grandmother cry in unison, Support his neck! But when they lay Sam across my lap, I support his neck without being told. I hold out my wrist when she checks the temperature of his milk. I soothe him when he cries in the crib beside my bed, singing little songs. And as I listen to my mother talk, I realize it’s happening again—I remember this, and yet, of course, that’s not possible; I wasn’t even two years old. “You were always a natural mother,” my mother says. “You took such good care of your brother.”
“Adam’s better with kids than I am,” I say, but my mother doesn’t want to change the subject.
“I mailed you Sam’s christening gown. Did you get it?”
“We did.”
“Your grandmother made that, you know. Now I’m glad I didn’t give it to Monica.”
“But you should have,” I say. “It’s so beautiful. Someone should use it.”
“I keep hoping you’ll use it,” my mother says. “I keep hoping you’ll change your mind.”
“Mom,” I say. “Why do we have to keep fighting about this? If the baby grows up and wants to get baptized, that’s fine, but I’m not going to do it. You know I don’t go to church, and even if I still believed in original sin, which I don’t, I’d have to think long and hard about baptizing my child into a church that doesn’t give women the same rights as men.”
“I just hope you don’t regret your decision,” my mother says. “It’s a comfort to me now, knowing Sam was baptized. Knowing that even if I won’t get to see him again in this world, we can be reunited in the next.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her mention the possibility that Sam won’t be found. “I’m glad it’s a comfort to you,” I say, as gently as I can. “But it’s not a comfort to me. I’m not even sure if I believe in an afterlife.”
“Oh, Abby,” my mother says, her voice full of anguish. “Then what’s the point of anything? How can you live from day to day if you think we just end at death?”
“Look,” I say, “I’ve got to go now. I’ll call you later, OK?” I hang up, drained, miserable. In the kitchen, Adam is at work on a new jack-o’-lantern, one with a double stem like devil’s horns. I remember sitting in the big pumpkin with Sam, back-to-back. The hard wriggling knobs of his spine. The cool walls of the pumpkin. That damp, secret smell.
“How’s Mom?” Adam says. I can tell he is pleased with his jack-o’-lanterns; it’s put him in a teasing sort of mood. “Any more holy visions of the baby?”
“No.”
“Hallelujah.” He uses a long-handled tweezers to pluck out a perfect oval eye. “Is she mailing us more stuff?” he says, but I’ve got my head in the fridge, so I can pretend I don’t hear. Cheese. Eggs. Milk. I don’t want to talk about anything. “It’s lunchtime,” I tell Adam. “You hungry?”
He shakes his head no. He is covered with pumpkin guts. He is consumed by his pumpkins, the idea of what his pumpkins will be. Absurdly, I think of Genesis, God bending over his new creation, dividing space, naming names. And he saw that it was good.
“I’m going to make an omelet,” I say. If I were living in Wisconsin, If I were the person I used to be, I’d be having a baby shower, planned by my mother and Monica. I’d unwrap rubber nipples, disposable diapers, a breast pump, IOU notes for baby-sitting and housework. Monica would loan me clothes her babies had outgrown; she and my mother and Auntie Thil would make me special teas, accompany me to doctor’s appointments, take me on trips to department stores to finger stuffed animals and jangly mobiles. We would make lists of ridiculous names—Garbanzig Rototiller, Chainsaw Elizabeth—before studying the worn Christian Names for Babies book that has been passed family to family for as long as I can remember. Of course, I would be planning the baptism—choosing godparents (my mother and Harv), making a reservation with the priest, preparing an announcement for the Baby News page of the weekly paper. Suddenly I am missing my mother terribly. I want to call her back and tell her I’m sorry, I’ll baptize the baby, I’ll start going to Mass, I’ll do anything she says, just to feel like I’m part of that life again, blessed with that kind of certainty.
“What else is on the way?” Adam says.
“Just a photograph. You don’t have to look at it.”
My voice is as sharp as the sound of the egg cracked against the bowl. Adam gets up and comes over to the stove. “What’s the matter?” he says. I open the shell, and there’s the sudden surprise of a double yolk.
“Nothing.” I puncture them each with a fork, add milk, beat them a bit too briskly. “My mother. You know.”
“I don’t know,” Adam says. “What did you talk about?”
“She wants us to baptize the baby.”
“So what else is new?” Then he sees my face. “I don’t understand why she keeps after you about it,” he says reasonably. “She knows we don’t go to church.”
I pour the egg into the hot pan. “That’s not the point,” I say.
“What is the point?”
“Salvation.” How can I explain this to Adam, with his blueprints, his careful reasoning, his twice-measured plans? Adam, who rearranges a room again and again, spinning each piece of furniture around himself as if it is a planet and he is the sun, the center, the confident source of gravity. I dump the omelet onto a plate. It falls apart, half cooked, ugly, nothing I want to put in my mouth. “Look,” I say, “what would you think about having a baptism anyway? Just to keep everyone happy? I mean—”
Adam stares at me as if I’ve developed stigmata. “I would hate it,” he says firmly. “You want to talk religion—fine. What kind of sin is hypocrisy?”
I scrape my omelet into the sink, turn off the burner, and go down the hallway to our room. The air smells of pumpkin, Adam’s sleep, mine. The intimate odor of our lives. Beside the bed is the cradle he has made entirely by hand, the headboard carved with pineapples, those old pagan symbols of fertility, life. My grandmother’s bed had four tall posts with a pineapple crowning each one. I remember being put down to nap on that bed beside my brother, the sour breath of the dog scorching our faces as we dreamed. Sundays after Mass, we’d burrow deep into the pile of guest coats, inhaling the dizzying clash of perfumes, scratching our cheeks on rhinestone brooches. Above the bed hung a large wooden crucifix. Once, my grandmother lifted it down to show us how the back could pop open to reveal blessed candles (half burned!), holy water, and oil, all that was necessary for an emergency baptism or last rites, the final cleansing of the soul.
I arrange my body in the center of the bed. The baby settles deeper into me, and I feel the click click of each fine bone in my spine separating. My hips pop too, first the right, then the left, my body coming loose in preparation for birth. “It’ll be even worse than you imagine,” my mother says, “so you might as well not think about it.”
Just after I dropped out of the conservatory, she dreamed that I appeared in a cherry-colored nightgown and stood beside her bed, not quite close enough to touch. At the time of the dream, I was living in a room in an apartment filled with people I did not know. Downstairs there was a grocery store, where I worked part time, mostly nights and weekends; during the day I looked for a better job, a full-time job. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been hungry. I stole what I could from the grocery; I swallowed glass after glass of cold water to curb my appetite. My brother was still missing, I was a disappointment to my mother and grandmother, and worst of all, I’d confirmed my father’s predictions: I couldn’t make it in the world. One night, I decided that I’d cash my next paycheck and hitchhike to Mexico or Montreal or Alaska, somewhere far enough from where I was so that even God wouldn’t be able to find me.
“What’s wrong?” my mother asked my dream self, and I opened my chest and stomach to show her that emptiness there. The next night, I came home from work to find a delivery of fruit and chocolate. Attached was a note from my mother, saying a check for five hundred dollars was in the mail. “Abby, you can never disappear,” she had written. “I will always know where you are, because you will come to tell me.”
I awaken to the sense of someone moving through the room. It’s late afternoon, already starting to get dark. My heart hammers in my chest even as I tell myself it’s only Adam, it’s all right. How much longer will I wake up at the slightest sound, thinking my brother and his friends have returned to stand beside my bed? It’s guilt, I suppose, that brings them back. Maybe it would help if I told someone what I saw, what I didn’t say, but whom? And after so many years, how could it make a difference? Mrs. Baumbach is dead; Dr. Neidermier has retired to Florida. The drive-in closed, and my mother has told me that even Becker’s is in trouble, threatened by the new Piggly-Wiggly in Holly’s Field. Adam’s weary weight presses the bed beside my legs.
“You said your mom was sending a photograph,” he says.
“Yes.”
“What’s in it?”
“Nothing. Just Sam and me as kids.”
Laverne hops up on the bed, teetering between us. The sound of her purr is ridiculously loud.
“It’s weird,” Adam says, and his voice is soft, musing. “Your mother tells me all about your brother every time she calls. You won’t talk about him even when I ask.”
“I don’t know what to talk about,” I say, remembering the queasy feeling of having to answer questions, questions. Police with radios; reporters with cameras; detectives with notepads and busy scribbling pens. My mother hovering nearby, afraid I might say the wrong thing, afraid that our family would look as if there were something terribly wrong with us. Afraid of what happens when people begin their talk in a small town like Horton, people who would say it was all my mother’s fault for being a career woman, a women’s libber, a woman who’d lost sight of her duty to her husband. I would have said anything to protect her. I would have said anything to re-create my brother in the image she held up to us all.
“Then don’t talk about anything,” Adam says. “Just talk. Just tell me something.”
And so I describe the pumpkin my father bought from the Luchterhands, so big Sam and I could both sit inside it. “After my mother took the picture,” I say, “my father told me to get out of the pumpkin so she could take one of Sam alone. He asked if Sam could fit inside all the way, and when Sam scrunched down, my father fit the top back on and sat on it so Sam couldn’t get out. We hadn’t carved the face yet. At first, Sam was laughing, and my mother and I were laughing too, but my father put his finger to his lips. Then we heard Sam say something, and then he screamed, and the whole pumpkin began to shake. He was three or so, and my mother was pulling at my father and saying, Gordon, please, you’re scaring him, and my father was laughing and saying she should lighten up. After a while, Sam stopped making noise and it got very still, so my father said, All right, and he lifted up the top. Sam had wet himself, and so my father spanked him.”
The baby shifts inside me, a twinkling sense of motion. I try to imagine all the things to come: first steps, first words, wet kisses, lengthening limbs and complicated rages, slamming bedroom doors, car doors, front doors leading to the sidewalk, to the street, to the town and the whole wide world. I know my mother believes that by bringing Sam back, she can finally put things right. I want to believe that too. But here are the shapes of my brother and his friends moving through my room on careless tiptoe. Here is my brother’s face, close to mine. Here I am looking into his cool stare and finding nothing that I recognize. How will I feel if, someday, I look into my own child’s face and see that same flat stare? Adam puts his arm around me; I touch his sandpapery elbow.
“I finished the jack-o’-lanterns,” he says. “You want to see?”
I get up and follow him out of the bedroom. The long hallway leading toward the living room seems like the tunnel we are told to expect when approaching death, the walls pulsing with a peculiar glow, the light at the end drawing us closer, close. The living room is alive with jack-o’-lanterns: flickering on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, leering from the log grate below, hunkered down in a row along the coffee table, balanced on the wide windowsill. Now I see that Adam had these places in mind when he chose the pumpkins this afternoon; no longer awkward or oddly shaped, each one seems perfect, tucked neatly into the book-shelf, snuggled in the cat’s round wicker bed. I turn to let the shadows lap their way around my body. The pumpkin smell thickens the candle’s scents: pine, vanilla, lavender, rich enough to eat. I’m dizzy with their odor, their color, Adam’s arms spinning around me like a welcoming web, snug and warm.
“Sometimes I still believe in God,” I say.
Adam shakes his head, his rough cheek scratching mine. He holds me tighter. “I can’t even imagine what it’s like to believe in something like that.”
The jack-o’-lanterns keep their silence, eyes brimming with light, and I’m a small child sitting beside my mother as she drives along the web of rural highways leading home. Which way is north? I ask, and my mother points straight ahead of us.
How do you know?
I just do.
But how?
In the distance, in the wide spaces between smudged clumps of trees, shapes appear and fade like ghosts: here the peaked roof of a farmhouse, there a fat silo, the horizon seamless as the silent fields, sealed for the season beneath a bitter crust of ice. I notice places where deer have pawed away the snow, tearing at the dead winter grasses, the last of the maples and fruit trees stripped bare by hungry mouths. But I can’t see north, and my mother never can explain to me how she feels it, how—like Adam—she was born with a perfect sense of direction. You can blindfold her and spin her around, and she’ll still be able to tell you north, southeast. West. West again.