Days and then weeks pass and there is no word of Joshua. After work each day Mother is too drained to eat and merely wants to collapse upon the sofa bed in the living room but Duncan heats some lasagne that Magdalene left at their door earlier in the day, tinned vegetables or chicken soup and perhaps makes pasta or rice—dishes he’d learned from Joshua on those nights when mother worked the second shift at St. Luke’s or was singing at the Windsor. The gas has been cut off for the last month and he cooks on a small Primus stove, oil from the butane cylinders flickering small and blue in the dark of the room. When the food is ready, he sits with her at the table in the kitchen, watching her eat—masticating a small mouthful of food until it is mush—and urging her to eat more.
Swallow, Mom, he says, and take another bite.
She puts her knife and fork down on the table. I can’t, she says. I’m full. Look how much I’ve eaten.
You’ve barely touched it. C’mon, another four bites. You can do it.
He scans the channels on Brother Canice’s radio for music, but nothing comes except a low hum and brief static. He listens for the beep and squeak frequency of passing satellites, for the voices of the astronauts, for Michael Collins, but although he knows they are up there somewhere a hundred thousand miles distant, tumbling and cold and lost in their numb revolving halfsleep, the San Francisco night sky is empty, and when he peers from the greasy front window, even the stars seem to have collapsed into the void.
When he can no longer urge her to eat more, Maggie pushes back her plate and climbs onto the fold-out bed, the thin mattress sinking and the frame groaning beneath her, and Duncan turns on the black-and-white to Dallas, the sound of it somehow comforting, reverberating off the faux-wood paneled walls, and Maggie leans toward the picture, watching until her eyes grow heavy. On the table by the bed, like a bottle of medication, sits her whiskey, its umber liquid half finished.
After a moment, he looks to the fold-out. Mother lies there, staring at the ceiling, hands crossed over the hard stone of her swollen belly. Every so often the Primus stove gives off small belches of liquid fuel, startling him.
He turns down the volume on the television set and watches her. She’s as still as a corpse. What does she see on the ceiling, on the tin? Angels perhaps. Bearing her up to that place where Joshua has already gone. Perhaps Joshua, now with the wings of an angel, is carrying her. The black-and-white images flash silently on the screen. He listens for the sound of her breathing.
Mom? he says, and she turns briefly in his direction, her eyes glassy and unseeing.
Are you okay?
Her face contorts in silent, anguished pain. Wind trembles the room, like some small boat pitching upon a sea; a soft rain patters upon the windows.
No, she groans. I don’t feel so well.
Mom, you need a doctor.
Finally: I’m okay. But then, as pain grips her gut, she grimaces, turns onto her side.
Mom, I think you need a doctor.
No, she shakes her head. No, Duncan. I’ll be fine in the morning. I just need to sleep.
And then more softly: I’ll be fine.
Mom?
Mom?
But she is asleep again, and after a moment, Duncan looks back to the television, stares vacantly at is flickering black-and-white images, turns the volume loud so that he doesn’t have to hear the empty silence and his own fear churning in his head and belly. He climbs onto the mattress next to his mother, places his arms about her and his ear against her heart, listens to it thumping meekly in her chest.