My last night in Pennsylvania, I stayed in a motel on the main highway out of town, a cheap, anonymous place with rattling baseboard heaters and a bulk dispenser of harsh pine-scented soap. It had taken longer than expected—two weeks in fact—but I’d managed to place Aunt Becky in a fine residence offering memory care. Now fatigue overwhelmed me, the kind of terminal exhaustion that sets in when the conclusion of one project forces the confrontation of other more daunting tasks.
Only a narrow sidewalk buffered my room from the parking lot. A car idled outside. Its brights shone through the thin curtain, the harsh glare landing on the lone chair, making it inhospitable. I stacked pillows against the bed’s headboard, stretched out my achy legs and pulled a photo from my jacket pocket.
I’d found the picture—my father with Daniel at seven—in one of Aunt Becky’s desk drawers. As a young child, Daniel spent every July on the farm, and this was taken in front of my mother’s old garden, the flowers from my childhood replaced with tomatoes and climbing beans and red-stalked rhubarb. My father stands in a kind of crouch, arms thrown wide. Daniel is in mid-run, hair flying back, arms outstretched, desperate to collapse the time and space between them. The hug has not yet happened, but it cannot be avoided, and my father’s face glows with an unfiltered joy.
It astonished me, the pain this photo caused, the way it proved me wrong on so many fronts. These past weeks, I had been compiling charges of withholding against the people in my life—my father, my son, Katherine, and Peter. But in this moment, each presented their own evidence of withholding against me. My father after I rejected his touch: “Well, I think that’s enough for today.” Peter’s disbelief my first day back: “Were you running away from me?”
Katherine loomed huge in the room. “I’m here, right here!” she snapped, drumming her chest fiercely, as if my silence denied her very solidity, as if I wielded it as a weapon. And she’d been right, hadn’t she? I knew full well that certain silences could be sharpened into long, fine needles and slid with little effort into a beloved’s tender places. Such silences carried the advantage of their own alibi. They could be defended not only as innocent but as a sacred communion with the Divine itself. And so she had shouted. And the more she shouted, the quieter I became. Until, one day, my silence overtook her and she too turned mute.
Through all this, Daniel skulked at the edges of the room, waiting until the others had their say. When they were done, when they had faded away, my son stood and walked to the center, grave and substantial, patient in his own silence until I allowed the lights to come up on him.
A WEEK INTO HIS SENIOR YEAR, Daniel arrived in the kitchen without time to sit down to a proper breakfast, irritable as he always was at seven in the morning. He ignored the fruit and cereal I’d put out, shoved a piece of toast into his mouth, and scooped up his chemistry text on the counter. A paper fluttered down. He snatched it up, but not before I saw the D slashed in red at the top.
The afternoon before, he had defied my instructions to come home after football practice and had gone to the gym instead. I was disappointed he’d done so after receiving a near-failing grade. No. Let me restate that. Not disappointed. Angry. I will admit it. I was angry that last morning.
My son took after Katherine’s side of the family, not only in his dark good looks but in his attitude. The Morettis were a boisterous group who shouted their political views in outraged certainty, believed it rude to expect a break in conversation before adding one’s voice—“Goddamn it, Isaac, do you need a red carpet rolled out before you condescend to speak?”—and preferred nothing more than a muddy game of tackle Frisbee. Yet Daniel had collected college applications and dreamed of playing football for a mid-tier school. How little it would have taken to see that his heart was full of longings and aspirations, not only for his day and week and year but for his life, for the man he wanted to become.
That morning, though, I saw none of this, only the one grade on a minor test.
Daniel noticed my gaze. “No big deal. Just a quiz.”
I might have shaken my head. Perhaps my eyes revealed disapproval. Sometimes your body betrays you.
“What?” he said, his anger rising to meet mine.
“Colleges will scrutinize your grades,” I said in a perfectly reasonable and thus hateful tone. “That’s a little more important than your athletic endeavors, don’t you think?”
He slammed his book down, a coldness in his eyes that felt new. “And why do you think I’d rather go to the gym than come home?”
“Because your physique is more important to you than your mind?” I was no longer attempting reason.
“Because it’s like a fucking morgue in here. Why do you think Mom left?”
“That’s a private matter between—”
“She’s my mother! I saw what was going on. You hardly talked to her. You tried to pawn it off as some religious crap, but you’re the same way with me. If anything, it’s gotten worse since she left. You’re always in your office, always claiming you need to commune with the Divine or some shit like that. When you do talk, you lecture.”
I wondered who this boy was, when he’d decided he could talk to his father this way. I tried to trace back to someone I knew, tried to find the point I’d lost him. But I was lost myself, lost in a fury at his denigration of me, of my faith, at his blame for his mother leaving. I didn’t speak, because if I did, I would have shouted, So it’s my fault your mother fucked another man behind my back for a year? He knew nothing of Katherine’s affair. I had taken the brunt of his judgment without defense, believing he would find it less painful to think ill of his father.
“See!” he said, the veins in his neck throbbing. “Even now, even with me yelling at you, you’re just staring. Not a goddamned fucking word!”
I picked up the breakfast I’d set out for him. “Go live with your mother, then,” I said. “She practically begged you to.”
“I would if I could. Believe me. But my friends are here. My team.”
“Ah, yes, your beloved football.”
He slung his backpack over his shoulder and said with revulsion, “I am not you. Do you get that, Father?” A mocking tone on that last word. He blinked as if the kitchen light bothered him. “I will never be you.”
He wanted to hurt me. I think he had wanted to hurt me for a long time. I waited for him to slam out of the house. Perhaps I hoped he would. If he had, I’d have the small consolation of knowing he was the one to end things there. But he didn’t. He stared at me, his face full of vicious expectation.
In the end, I made the choice. I turned away from my son. He gave me a lengthy moment to correct course. I could feel the heat of his glare. I almost did. In that moment, I imagined—as I often did in those last months—turning, wrapping my arms around him, telling him that I loved him, that I always had. But I didn’t. I waited until I heard him sigh. Then a moment longer. I waited until he opened the kitchen door. Lingered there.
I waited, my back to him sternly, until the door closed reasonably behind him.
This is what I’m left with.
I STUDIED THE PICTURE OF MY FATHER AND DANIEL, wondering what would have happened that last morning if I had turned to my son and opened my arms.
I glanced at my watch. Eleven thirty. Eight thirty in Port Furlong. I picked up my cell and called Peter. His wife, Elaine, answered. She inquired after my aunt with her usual warm concern, and I asked about the girls.
“I know Peter wants to talk with you,” she said, “but he’s out right now.”
“Without his cell?”
“He was distracted when he left. You know, all that political stuff with the superintendent. I don’t really follow it, but he’s pretty riled up. Had another one of those meetings tonight. Thought he’d be home by now. Do you want him to call when he gets in? I know it’s late back there.”
I told her I’d be up another half hour, and we said our good-byes. My bags still needed packing, and I gathered my belongings, thinking how Peter and Newland were probably fighting over the budget again. I had turned out the light and was nearly asleep when the phone rang.
“Sorry for calling so late,” Peter said. “In my defense, Elaine told me to, and I always do what she says.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said, sitting up, trying to sound awake. “What’s going on with Newland?”
“That really what you want to talk about this time of night?”
“No. Not really.”
He let me collect my thoughts, the line giving off a low buzz. “I’ve been struggling with Daniel’s last day,” I said. “Would you mind a few questions?”
I heard a soft sigh, then, “No. Of course not.”
“You talked to him that last afternoon, right?”
“Only in passing. I ran into him after classes. He was on his way to practice, and I asked how the team was shaping up. Nothing much to it.”
“Was he agitated? Anything like that?” We’d been over this before, likely many times, but Peter stayed patient with me.
“He was distracted. Kind of blew me off, said he was running late, which wasn’t really like him. Nothing that made me worried for him, though, just a sense he had something on his mind.”
I let the line go silent.
“I’m sorry that I don’t have more for you.”
“What about Evangeline?”
“Evangeline? What about her?”
“You thought you saw her with the boys. You were certain. Then you changed your mind. What do you think now?”
“Isaac, I told you, it wasn’t Evangeline. The person I saw was too tall. It had to be Derek.”
Again I wanted to tell Peter about the bracelet, the pregnancy, all Evangeline had admitted. And all she had not. Once more, something held me back. “So you don’t think Evangeline had anything to do with the boys?”
“I really don’t.”
An edge of frustration had crept into his voice. He was likely exhausted from a rough meeting with the superintendent. Then it occurred to me. “This thing with Newland, is it about Evangeline?”
A moment of dead air. “Why would it be?”
“The forms. The ones that don’t always get inputted. Did he find out somehow?”
“No. Nothing to do with Evangeline.” He took a breath, then the start of a word, then silence. He coughed, and it sounded thick, like he might be ill. “I’ve heard she’s catching up in her classes. Everything appears to be working out.”
“It is,” I said.
“I know you probably have to get up early . . . so unless there’s something else . . .”
“No, nothing else.”
“Okay,” he said. “Get some rest and don’t worry about your classes. Fuentes is doing fine. We’ll see you when you get back.”
I HAD TROUBLE SLEEPING THAT NIGHT. Every day there seemed to be a new mystery. Not only about my son and the girl but about generations of Balch men. About the mystery of one person reaching toward another.
The mystery of whether a life can turn on a single touch given or withheld.