AFTER WORK, I go home and take a long shower. I hold myself as still as possible and let the hard, calcified water come down. Then I put on a terry-cloth robe and head for the kitchen to get myself the evening’s first beer.
The house is empty when I enter the bathroom, but it isn’t empty when I come out. The sense I have of another man in my house is kinetic and alarming: I feel him before I see him. My muscles tighten, and I take small, charged steps to the edge of the living room.
But, to my confusion, instead of a stranger wielding a kitchen knife or carrying off my TV, what I find is a handsome, leanly muscular, not very clean young man sitting on my sofa, his long legs splayed before him.
I stand in shock. With his mop of greasy sand-colored hair, prominent cheekbones, and wide-apart eyes, the young man looks like his mother, except for the dimple in his chin that’s mine.
“You left the door unlocked.”
We haven’t seen or spoken to each other in twelve years. His voice now not high and sweet as when he was a boy but a sandpaper dirge, deep and a little flat. (Missed that, I think with a sodden feeling in my chest—and his first shave, his high-school graduation, and every other thing he’s gone and lived through without me.) His tone, for starters, as if I’ve just accused him of something, though I haven’t.
I take a few moments to compose myself as best I can.
“How are you, Sam?”
The question may be too existential for his taste: he sits looking at his hands.
“You thirsty?” I hear myself persisting. “Want something to drink?”
He is ten years old again, lying in bed in our house in Box Corner. Outside it’s snowing and the sun is just coming up, but you can’t feel any warmth behind the snow. I help him under the covers, his smell so innocent I can’t believe I ever had a hand in the making of him. I tell him to go back to sleep. Everything will be fine, I say, though it isn’t and hasn’t been for a long time and, indeed, never will be again. And Sam believes me. He asks if I’ll take him sledding later, and I promise I will. And then he closes his eyes and I kiss him goodbye and step out into the hallway, where the face of what I’ve done and whom I’ve hurt is waiting for me.
And that is the end, and the beginning.
“D’you have any beer?” he asks now.
In the kitchen, out of his sight, I lean against the wall.
The refrigerator with its undrunk bottles and cool bright-lit air: sometimes this is all you find yourself trying to get to.
I get there, and bring back two bottles of beer.
He’s pulled in his legs, is sitting up now like a guest. Staring at his hands, which are as dirty as a boy’s. Nothing looking right to him in my rented California house, but then why should it?
I hand him a beer and sit across from him, not too close to scare anybody. An anxious penny taste on my tongue. My hands aching with the need to touch him.
“So. How’s school?” A stab at general conversation, to give myself a fighting chance. A safe enough place to start, it would seem.
“I left.” He says this to his hands, quietly.
I sit looking at him, dumb as a stick.
“There was a fight.”
He takes a deep, needy swallow of beer. Angrily he wipes the sweating bottle on his T-shirt, leaving a wet spot.
“In a bar.”
He swallows more beer and stares at his hands again.
“This guy hit me from behind, and I …” He shakes his head. “I just kind of lost it.”
“Lost it how?”
Now, solemnly, he nods—a gesture so out of sync with himself and the story he’s telling that my heartbeat lurches with a panicked clamor into my head.
“I hit him with a baseball bat,” he says.
“What?”
“He came at me first.”
“A bat? Jesus, Sam, are you out of your mind? How bad was he hurt? Was he conscious? Bleeding?”
“He got up and walked out on his own.” His voice has turned suddenly stiff, and he’s blushing—from shame, I imagine, at having to admit to me, of all people, how badly he lost control of himself.
I breathe out, feeling my pulse slow a notch. “Did anybody press charges?”
“No.”
“Thank God. Christ, you’re lucky.”
His eyes snap up and fix on me, bright and hard with disgust.
The room is silent. I watch my neighbor, Ramón Hernandez, drive past my window and park in front of his house.
Sam gets up. I almost say something to stop him, but then I see that he’s not actually going anywhere: his shoulders are hunched in defeat, and he’s left his duffel behind. Halfway to the front door he stops and turns, aimless—not old or brave or mean enough, I’d swear, to have attacked another man with a baseball bat in a bar.
“I wanted to hurt him.”
His voice is so quiet I can’t be certain I’ve heard him correctly.
“What?”
He looks away and doesn’t repeat the remark.
“She’s got enough on her plate.”
“Meaning?”
“Nothing. I just want to take a shower, okay? I’ve been on a bus for three days, and I just want to take a shower, if that’s okay with you.”
Like a sinking, poisonous balloon it lands: the answer to the question I’ve been too scared to ask. Why, after all the years of locking me out, he’s finally come to my doorstep.
This feeling of dirt. Unable to wash it off because now it’s inside him and untouchable.
In the bathroom, behind the closed door, the shower begins to run.
I can hear the moment he steps under the stream, my ears still attuned that way. Imagining my son’s long, carelessly muscled torso and the water beating down on him. The outside dirt running off, different from my dirt and particular to himself.
At the same time, listening to him try to scrape himself clean, thinking about his being here at all, I find that I’m having trouble shrugging off the nagging fear that it’s some dark, sticky notion of me and my life that led him to run away from what he’s done, as I ran years ago.
But what can you do with a thought like that, except turn away from it as fast as you can? I go to my room, drop the terry robe (suddenly preposterous under the circumstances), and pull on whatever clothes are at hand. I sit on the bed and hold myself still while I count off thirty seconds.
Old trick from the downtime.
Two years since I’ve used it, but Sam’s mother’s number comes back now without fail. (It was my house, too, once.) First digit, then the fingers walking the rest. Which only proves, maybe, that there’s no such thing as an ex-wife. The long, slow ringing is almost soothing till it stops.
Her silence is so long I lose track of it. I begin to think I hear a TV somewhere, and some slithery movement followed by a papery flutter—probably her closing a magazine she’s been reading in bed.
“Ruth?”
“I’m here.”
“Sam’s in my house.”
“What?”
Before she can say any more, I jump in and tell her the gist of it, along with what scattershot details I know of the matter.
Her shock, understandably, is many-sided. She bombards me with questions that I can’t answer. Still, I do my best.
When I’m finished, Ruth observes—not meaning it as praise—“You sound like a lawyer.”
I’m about to halfheartedly defend myself when I look up and see Sam standing in the hallway, a towel knotted at his waist and his torso glistening with water. A bruise like a beanpole eggplant across his muscled chest. His beauty, even so, simple and astonishing to me, a shock to the paternal system: as if the boy he used to be, beautiful, too, but miles different, fits inside this bruised man without meaning or wanting to; as if this creature is both man and boy.
“Where is he? I need to talk to him. Please, Dwight, for God’s sake, put him on.”
I reach out the phone. “It’s your mother.”
Sam shakes his head.
“Talk to her.”
The shake of his head grows fierce, almost violent. He turns—I catch a glimpse of a second nasty bruise on his upper back, this one fist-size—and disappears into the guest room, shutting the door.
“He doesn’t seem to be up for talking just yet, Ruth.”
“I still don’t understand what he’s doing there. He should be here, dammit.” A castered, fumbling noise on her end, and I picture her hunting for something—Ambien or chewing gum—in the drawer of her bedside table. “I always knew something like this would happen.”
“Ruth, listen. I don’t understand the situation any more than you. Just give me a little time with him and let me see if I can’t sort him out, come up with some sort of plan.”
Her laugh is so grimly sardonic it causes the skin on my back to prickle.
“Who’s going to sort you out, Dwight? That’s the question.”
And then, before I can attempt an answer, she hangs up.