IT’S MIDDAY when they drive up to the house. The sun floats high and bright over the trees. Door to door, between car and plane, the overnight journey from California has taken fourteen hours.
She gets out of the car, and then Sam does. Wordlessly he lifts his duffel and her carry-on from the trunk and walks to the front porch. She follows, her head gauzed with exhaustion yet still somehow perceiving the lawn’s emerald-green depth, from recent rain or heavy dewfall, and the scattering of rabbit pellets by the three wooden stairs, and the deer trace of rubbed-off bark on the taller of the two oaks separating her property from the Newmans’ next door. A clinging scent in the air of sunbaked compost. The newspaper in its clear Baggie sleeve lying in the gravel driveway. The kind of noticing you do if it isn’t really your house. As maybe it isn’t anymore. Now that her son has proved in every way that matters that he’s no longer a child—legally, she remembers Dean Burris saying; and legally?, she remembers herself asking—maybe the house is trying to tell her something. Like Get out.
Or maybe she just needs some sleep.
Inside, the pile of mail has climbed past the door sweep. Health care, mostly, and junky catalogs. Living alone, one becomes an expert on the uninvited documents that assault the home, the fusillade of news, tidings, offerings, demands—the grim, the costly, the cheap, the salutary, the redundant, the offensive, the cold-blooded, the hysterical, the superficial. The superficial are best, in her opinion, because you can read them in the checkout line at the supermarket or on the toilet and feel just fine about yourself.
Sam has stepped over the mail and started up the stairs, a bag in each hand. A man in her house again, she recognizes; or an almost-man. She thinks of Norris and internally shakes her head. Bending down over the unlit bonfire at her feet, she begins gathering up the envelopes, magazines, flyers. Thinking, So many trees. Seeing, in a flash of autumnal self-consciousness, this unvarnished, refracted image of herself: middle-aged, twice-divorced, sick and alone, picking crap off the floor. Exposed before her son. A truth that causes her to rise too quickly, surfacing like a flailing diver sure to get the bends, one knee audibly cracking, until the fraught contents of her head feel sucked down into a woozy vacuum and she has to reach a hand out to the nearest wall to steady herself.
“Mom?”
She wills herself back into focus: Sam, halfway up the stairs, staring at her.
“You okay?”
“Just a little tired.”
About as many words as they’ve exchanged in the past six hours. Still, for a moment that beautiful worried face of his, unwittingly expressing love, appears childlike again.
He turns and continues up the stairs. She stands listening to the creaking of his footsteps along the hall and into her room, the light thump as he sets down her bag. Then his gangplank passage to his own room, and the closing of the door.
And that’s the last she sees of him through the afternoon and well into the next day. He doesn’t emerge in the morning to eat breakfast. Doesn’t, as far as she can tell, make a trip to the bathroom. She supposes he’s still on West Coast time, but then she’s forced to remind herself that these are the same hours he’s always kept at home.
She has no idea what he does in his room hour after hour. An active young man, a gifted athlete, firmly enclosed now in a twelve-by-fourteen box, with a student’s desk and chair, a twin bed, an outdated stereo, a shelf full of baseball trophies, and Red Sox posters and memorabilia from the dark eternal days before the miracle championship. A sweet little cell, if not quite innocent. What alarms her above anything else is the quickness of this move toward self-imprisonment. As if he knows something she does not, sees a future for himself that she is too cowardly or deluded to face.
These thoughts come to her mostly in the car as she rides to the supermarket, while roaming the wide air-conditioned aisles with the other country moms, in her kitchen as she goes from cupboard to refrigerator to pantry disgorging and shelving the contents of her brown paper bags. Everything for two now. Too bad, isn’t it, how the things that one has so long prayed for never do happen the way one wants them to, and never without a price.