Outside the house inside the night beyond the father, the mother stood in porch light, in a gown. The mother knocked and rang the neighbors’ bells. She banged and clapped and tried the windows. People, she thought. People who can sleep. The mother moved from one house to another. None of the houses looked like hers, nor the house she had grown up in, nor the house grown up in by the son. From house to house to house to house to house the mother knocked and crossed off numbers on her arm. She’d woken up and found the numbers there delivered, formed in the patterns of the clogged pores where her hair would no longer grow.
The mother had some idea of what she’d say when asked, if ever. Some homes had bells that shook her sternum, or would play a song she knew she knew. Some homes seemed to quiver right along, as would their home, leaning. The mother imagined herself inside each home’s walls as she touched them—inside not sleeping, hearing herself at the door. At certain doors she tried the keys she’d crammed fat in her pockets, but in the locks they’d spin and spin.
She guessed men’s names into the crack, a string of fathers’ names hidden inside her, names of those who too had lost. She tried Antoine, Paul, Stanley, James; she tried Tom, Kim, Ken, John, Jim, Ray, Edward, Robert; she tried a name she could not quite name. The names stuck to her mouth. These names came from somewhere in her, she could hear them, coming on and on, and trailing off . . .
The mother tried her name, then her mother’s, then the father’s, then the son’s. No one would come. The homes went on hearing. The homes would stand there. Overhead the sky cracked up with old light—light that sometimes seemed to form a map. The neighborhood went on regardless, even when the mother hid her eyes.