WHEN SAM’S DOOR REMAINS CLOSED, I take a second beer out to the patio and, zoo-like, pace back and forth. Some ominous little weeds have sprouted around the cement, I see, and I make a mental note to spray the hell out of them with Roundup over the weekend. Meanwhile, someone’s grilling chicken in his backyard a couple of houses over, the marinated smoke rising up plump and fragrant; and a neighbor’s dog begins to bark hungrily, then another. Then both animals’ voices abruptly fall dead, and the evening is still again.
Minutes pass like this, the dusk settling in—the lazy, arrogant, slow-moving dusk of Southern California, where the world is your oyster and there’s time enough for any dream. And I remember that my son, who until an hour ago I stubbornly continued, against various odds of my own making, to think of as a sensitive boy forever young, is now twenty-two years old, a grown man who has violently struck another man with a baseball bat. A physical expression of some roiling darkness in him that I surely recognize, because it is mine.
And, at some point, one has to ask: What are a kid’s odds going to be growing up, when his father does time for killing a boy, accident or not? What are his odds going to be, anyway? Not even my old man did that to his family.
My bottle is empty. I sit down heavily on the one chair in my backyard.
Tomorrow I’ll buy another chair, I finally almost decide; and more plates, and maybe a bigger freezer, too. I’ll think about what’s happened here today and make lists toward change and attend to those lists with a hopeful urgency that I cannot in fact recall in myself.
I get up and go inside.
The house is quiet. I walk down the short hallway and stand with an ear against the closed door to the guest bedroom, hearing nothing from inside. After a few moments, I knock lightly and open the door.
My son is lying on his back on the bed, mouth agape, still in the towel he was wearing, his right arm dangling off the edge. There is no movement in him at all, and for a terrible moment I believe he is dead. I think he has killed himself somehow, that he crossed the country to do that in my house.
I’m halfway to the bed, stepping panicked over my set of dumbbells strewn across the rubber-matted floor, when I see his chest rise.
I stop to watch him breathing in and out, until I’m sure. And then, slow and careful as a heart-attack patient, I back out of the room and leave him to sleep a while in peace.