“Oh, shit,” Zach says. “Mom! No. No. Get out of here!” By then she has turned away, holding her palm behind her. “I’m sorry! I’ll wait in the car! Go, get some clothes on.”
As embarrassed as she is, as soon as she is out of sight she crumples to the rutted road and offers a prayer of gratitude. Because even though her son is guilty of being caught naked with this woman, his sins don’t seem to be the sins of someone who raised his hand to his fellow man. His sins are the sins of Adam, not Cain.
“Mom! You can come back now.”
When she returns to the clearing, Zach is zipping his jeans. But he is still shirtless. Thin as he is, his arms seem extremely powerful. He must have spent the winter chopping wood. But that doesn’t explain why he is standing so much straighter. Why he seems so much prouder and happier to be alive. He pulls on a threadbare BOYCOTT GRAPES T-shirt he must have snagged from his father’s drawer and kept as a memento.
The woman—head bent, long wet hair hiding her face—pulls on an ankle-length flowered skirt that stretches to contain her belly. (A boy. That’s what Maxine’s mother would predict. If Angelina were carrying a girl, the bump would be lower.) She struggles to button her swollen breasts into a blue cardigan Maxine recognizes as a Hanukah gift she bought Zach his first winter at MIT. Buttons buttoned, the girl lifts her head. How could Maxine have thought Zach was dating her only to prove he is above the prejudice most men would have against dating someone handicapped? Or because he eroticized her disability? She is a beautiful woman. Gentle. Kind. Of course he loves her.
“She’s freezing, Zach.” Maxine wants to put her arms around the girl and rub her. “What were you thinking, letting her go in the lake!”
Zach frowns. “Letting her? We got so hot digging the garden, we dared each other to jump in.”
Angelina hobbles to the tree where she leaned her braces; like a fencer arming herself for a joust, she slips each forearm into a cuff. “It’s very nice to see you again,” she tells Maxine, holding out her hand, which, when Maxine takes it, turns out to be very cold, from the lake. Maxine wants to tell Angelina she is happy to see her, too. But she still is too confused to know if she is or isn’t.
At the cabin’s threshold, Maxine hesitates. But the one-room interior doesn’t smell as musty as she expected it would smell. For one thing, the cabin hasn’t been locked up all winter. The smoky scent of the stove permeates the braided wool rugs and ratty tweed sofa, with the added scent of what must be a woman’s shampoo or soap. Zach puts on the kettle for tea, then brings out a tin of brownies Angelina baked.
“I’m glad they didn’t burn,” she tells Maxine. “I needed a month to get used to cooking on a stove that has no settings.”
Maxine is so ravenous and the taste of the brownie so chocolatey and rich she wishes she could pretend the occasion is nothing more than a mother meeting her son’s girlfriend and complimenting her on her baking skills.
“It was Norm, wasn’t it,” Zach says.
“Norm? No. Norm said he didn’t know where you were. He said … Are you serious? Norm knew the whole time?”
“Mom,” Zach says, “guys don’t rat each other out. They just don’t.”
Even now, she wants to demand Zach divulge the name of whoever set fire to that pirate ship. “Your grandmother figured it out.”
“Grandmom?”
Maxine shrugs, unwilling to admit her mother knows her son better than she does. The water in the kettle boils. She is afraid Zach will serve her tea made from dried grass or weeds from the lake, but the tag on the bag says Lipton.
“It’s just …” Zach says. “When Angie told me she was pregnant, I knew you wouldn’t approve.”
Of course. The one truly insensitive remark Maxine ever made. She had apologized and apologized. But still, how could Zach forget? “You’ve been seeing each other this whole time? Since high school?” It occurs to her Zach must have told Angelina what she said.
“Not the whole time,” Zach says. “When I decided to move to the West Coast, we had a huge fight. Except I really missed Angie. I came home for a few days. We had, well, a nice reunion. Then I went home to California.”
“I never would have made him come back,” Angelina interrupts. “You have to understand. I am not the kind of woman who tries to trap a man. But when I didn’t get, you know, my monthly?”
“We were really surprised,” Zach says. “It’s not as if … We’re not idiots, Mom.”
“I needed to tell Zach,” Angelina says. “I felt it was his right to know.”
“I appreciate that,” Maxine says. “But couldn’t you have told me, too? I’m not …” She wants to say “judgmental.” But she did judge Angelina. Without ever really knowing her.
“If we decided not to keep the pregnancy, Angie’s parents would have had a fit. And if we did keep it, there was no way they weren’t going to expect us to get married. So I had the brainstorm of spending a month up here to see how well we got along and figure out what to do.”
“You quit your job?” Maxine says.
“I didn’t want him to,” Angelina says. “Professor Sayers, this was Zach’s decision. The part about quitting his job and coming here.”
“I hated it.” Zach’s face goes rigid, the way it used to when he was arguing with his father. “I hated the whole Silicon Valley start-up thing. Everybody acting so pleased with themselves. All they’re trying to do is make a killing and retire at thirty and spend the rest of their lives playing with their toys.” If people really wanted to head off global warming, Zach said, we could switch to solar and wind tomorrow. Did Maxine know how much energy those tech companies soaked up with their servers? His father was right. What you really wanted to do was use the cheapest, simplest technology to make people’s lives better. Basic stuff. Like clean water. Cooking fuel. Low-tech medical care. High-energy, super-efficient stoves that didn’t explode.
As if to practice what he has just preached, Zach gets up and strikes a match—all these years since he threatened to set fire to that bully and he still needs three tries—and uses it to light a lamp. The scruff on his cheeks makes him seem older and more masculine than the last time she saw him, in Ann Arbor. Where she saw him overlaid by the reflections of the child he used to be.
“I guess this means …” Maxine glances at Angelina’s belly.
Angelina smiles shyly. “When we tell my mother, we can lie and say she’s the first to know. Otherwise, she would be very hurt.”
“We haven’t set a date,” Zach says. “But, yeah, we’re going to get married.”
“Married!” She wants to tell them how happy she is. For both of them. And she is happy. All those years she worried Zach would end up like so many angry, politically extreme young men. Worried he would end up like Thaddy. But here he is engaged to a warm, intelligent, sensible, good-hearted woman. If only Sam were here to witness what she is witnessing. If only she could tell her father.
But she is sick at the prospect of ruining their joy with everything she has to tell them. It’s all she can do not to keep the news about Thaddy to herself. To share a meal with her son and future daughter-in-law, catch a few hours of sleep on the sofa, then head back to Ann Arbor without revealing what she knows.
“Are you going to stay up here all year?” she asks. “You can’t grow everything you need to eat. And you’ll need health insurance. You can’t have a baby and not have health insurance.”
In half an hour she has gone from puking with fear that her son will get shot by government agents to nagging him about health insurance. Two years earlier, when she helped Zach load his VW for California, she numbed him with reminders to drive carefully, to make sure to change the oil and rotate the tires, to find a dentist and get his teeth checked, to sign up for the retirement package at his job and start socking away the maximum the plan allowed. Wasn’t that what mothers were for? If you had a kid who went on a hunger strike, how could you help but hope he grew up to be a normally selfish adult who got a job and met a nice young woman and settled down to lead a normally selfish life? But when he did, how could you not be disappointed he was going to waste his life tending to the minutiae of middle-class existence?
Zach scowls his familiar scowl. “We only intended to stay up here until we figured out what to do. To save our money. Figure out the next step.” He looks at Angelina, as if seeking permission to reveal what that next step might be. From now on, Maxine realizes, this will be the woman whose approval her son will seek.
Angelina nods, and the two of them launch into a description of a scheme in which they will find the money to buy a derelict building in Detroit. The soil has been so badly contaminated by the incinerator that has been belching soot across the city for decades they will need to gut and refit the structure with hydroponic tanks in which to grow spinach, arugula, wheatgrass, basil, and, yes, kale, to sell to local restaurants and farmers’ markets. They plan to install solar panels on the roof and a geothermal heating system in the basement. If they can do so economically, they will also raise shrimp and culture mushrooms. They are hiring Norm to help them rehab the building. After that, Norm will start his own business, designing and building urban playscapes from scavenged wood and other recycled materials. Eventually, they will rent their leftover space to bakers, brewers, and makers of artisan cheese.
“We’ll be like … urban pioneers,” Zach says, as if they will be breaking sod on a virgin prairie instead of moving into a city already inhabited by hundreds of thousands of long-time residents. Is Detroit’s future to be turned back to farmland? Will people who once earned their living manufacturing automobiles, airplanes, tanks, and tires settle for herding sheep and raising kale? If anyone else were relating such a plan, Maxine would dismiss it as well-intentioned foolishness. But how can she not respect her son for giving up a six-figure salary so he can move to a falling-down factory in Detroit and raise fresh produce in a city where there isn’t a single decent grocery store for miles? Why should she discourage him from a plan that will ensure that he and her future grandchild live less than an hour from Ann Arbor?
She expresses as much enthusiasm as she can muster. But she can’t help asking if Angelina has seen a doctor. Has she gotten her blood pressure checked? Has anyone done an ultrasound? Are they sure she is eating properly?
“Mom!” Zach says. “Do you really think I would let the mother of my baby starve?” Angelina has visited a clinic in Mackinaw City. She takes iron pills and vitamins. They eat plenty of nutritious food. Zach’s savings are running low—that’s why he asked Norm to send those savings bonds—but he and Angelina can last the summer, especially with eggs from the chickens they recently bought and vegetables they will be planting in their garden.
“But why the secrecy?” Maxine asks. “You’re a grown man. How could I stop you from doing what you want? I never could.”
“Can you really say you would have been thrilled if I quit my job and decided to have a baby? You and Dad wanted me … you wanted me to do so much.”
“Look, Zach,” she starts. “I didn’t come here just to track you down. I’m glad I know where you are now. But there’s been a lot going on. I need to talk to you. About something very serious. Do you remember Thaddy?”
The way he squirms and refuses to meet her gaze unsettles her so profoundly she wonders if Thaddy has, in fact, sexually abused her son. She can’t bear to find out. So she keeps barreling ahead, explaining how she read the manifesto and came to suspect Thaddy wrote it. Tells him about the package that showed up in her office with Zach’s name and return address on the wrapping. Mentions the time Thaddy and Zach sent a similar package to Zach’s father.
Zach puts his hand to his mouth. Leans forward. Breathes harder and more erratically, rocking on the bench.
“Zach,” she starts, but he cuts her off.
“Thaddy has been writing me letters. It’s one reason I didn’t want anyone to know where I was.”
“You still keep up with Thaddy?” That can’t be what he means. “You kept up contact with him, after he left Ann Arbor?”
“He’s a lonely guy, Mom. I wasn’t surprised he’d write me. He always used to say I was like a little brother to him.” Apparently, Thaddy hoped Zach would see it as futile to reform the system from the inside. He hoped Zach would remember his promise that the two of them would drop out and live off the grid. Thaddy wrote that he quit his job and used his savings to buy a cabin in Montana. He loved spending his days outdoors, loved using his hands to achieve something tangible. Zach would love living there, too. The two of them living there together would be so much better.
“He wanted you to come live with him?” Maxine asks, even as she is sure Thaddy’s request wasn’t sexual. Thaddy would have preferred to live with a female lover. But if no woman would have him, then living with a younger brother he could teach to hunt, chop wood, and build a fire, someone who would listen to his philosophizing about the evils of modern life, was second best.
“He kept reminding me I promised to come out and live with him. And I did promise. But I was, like, fourteen. Plus, that whole business about how everyone would be better off if we went back to subsistence farming … Maybe not everything Dad did in Africa or India was for the best. But to romanticize poverty the way Thaddy does. All that backbreaking work. Not wanting people in developing countries to have any of the comforts we have here. I got tired of arguing and stopped writing back. I didn’t hear from Thaddy for a few years.
“Then he showed up in Oakland.” He turns to Angelina. “This was last summer? Just before you told me you were pregnant?” He turns back to Maxine. “He said the revolution was about to happen. The government was keeping surveillance on everything we did, and when people found out, they would finally rise up. Things would get ugly, he said, and he wanted me to be on the right side. The safe side. With him. Plus, he wanted me to tell him how the surveillance stuff worked. How someone could spy on you through your phone. Which they totally can, Mom. So, a lot of what he was saying made sense. But he didn’t seem to be the same Thaddy. He was really thin. And he had this faraway look. You know, like that Manson guy?
“When I said I wouldn’t leave with him, he got mad. He said I would be sorry if I didn’t come. That wasn’t the only reason I left town. I left to go get Angie and bring her here, to the cabin. But one reason I kept my location secret was I didn’t want Thaddy to keep showing up and bugging me. I didn’t mean to worry you so much. I just needed time alone with Angie. Time for us to figure things out. I couldn’t have imagined Thaddy would send you that package. Jesus, I’m glad you’re okay. You must have been scared to death. Maybe that’s all he wanted to do, to scare you.”
Maxine isn’t sure how to put what she wants to say. “To be honest, Zach, I didn’t know what to think.”
“But you couldn’t have … You didn’t think I was the one who sent it? When Thaddy and I did that to Dad, I was a kid. I felt awful! That’s when I stopped wanting to hang around with Thaddy. I realized he hated Dad. I thought it was about the Africa stuff. And to be honest, Mom, I kind of agreed with him. I was pretty young, and I thought maybe Dad did get off on playing the big white dude from America who showed up with all this neat technology so the natives worshipped him. But then I realized something else was going on. Thaddy hated Dad because Dad was married to you. Did they ever even meet?”
“Once,” she says. She remembers crossing the Diag with Sam and running into Thaddy. Introducing the two men. Watching Sam reach out to shake Thaddy’s hand and Thaddy keep his hands in his pockets, refusing to fall prey to the older man’s attempt to charm him. “Thaddy was jealous of your father. Jealous that your father had a wife. Had me.”
“Yeah,” Zach says. “That makes sense. Thaddy started asking me all these questions about your personal life. Like, if you really loved each other? If you had sex?”
“Oh, God,” Maxine says. “I never should have suggested the two of you hang out. But you were so shy. Both of you. I thought you would be good for each other.”
“Of course,” Angelina breaks in. She smiles and pats Maxine on the sleeve, as if she, too, knows how reticent Zach can be and, in Maxine’s place, would have promoted such a friendship.
“He never …” Maxine doesn’t want to complete her question. “Thaddy didn’t touch you, did he?”
“Are you kidding? Thaddy? Mom, you know how obsessed he was with finding a girlfriend. He didn’t do anything to hurt me. And he would have dismantled anyone who tried. Don’t forget how much good he did. It’s because of him I didn’t spend my entire adolescence hooked up to a bunch of video games.” He waves to indicate the trees and lake. “He got me to appreciate the outdoors. He got me to think for myself. To be this independent. Don’t you get it, Mom? Angie and I lived here all winter. We did everything for ourselves.” Maxine can see Angelina nodding, looking at her son with pride. “That’s why, I’m sorry, I just can’t get my head around the fact that he’s actually killed people. If that’s the truth.”
“It is the truth,” Maxine insists.
“If it is, that’s a side of him I never saw. I saw his anger. I saw his frustration. But I never saw anything that would indicate he could actually kill someone.”
“I know this is all hitting you at once.” Maxine hesitates. “But there’s one more thing I have to tell you.”
The bewildered look that crosses her son’s face takes her back to a time when it was so much easier to protect him. When he relied on her for his survival. When the dangers seemed so much easier to fend off or control. “Zach,” she says. “Your professor at MIT. Professor Hertz?”
Zach snaps his head as if he has been struck in the face. “What about him?”
“He’s Thaddy’s latest victim.”
This revelation takes a few moments to register. “Wait. Is he alive? But why Hertz? Are you making this up?’
“I wish I were.”
“Shit! Thaddy doesn’t even know the guy! The only reason he would have done that would be to win me back. Maybe he thinks he’s getting even with the jerk? For my sake? How could he, Mom? Hertz is okay? Tell me! Is he okay?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I heard on the radio he was injured. They didn’t say how badly.”
Maxine moves toward her son, but Angelina is the one Zach turns to. “Oh, love, love,” Angelina says, “I’m so sorry.” She tries to embrace Zach, but he pulls away and paces. He regains his composure enough to ask if his mother has gone to the police.
“No,” she says. “I wanted to find you first.”
“I don’t get it,” Zach says. “Why didn’t you tell them as soon as you got the package?”
She wishes she could lie. But lying would compound the betrayal.
“Wait,” Zach says. “You thought Thaddy and I …” He puts his hands on the back of the rattan chair beside the fireplace. “Seriously? It’s bad enough you didn’t trust me when I said not to come looking for me. When I said I needed some time off. Some privacy to sort out my life. But you thought, what, I mailed you a bomb? I tried to kill you? That’s something I would do? You and Dad … You suspected me of all sorts of things. Like burning down that playground? Like starving myself to death? You wanted me to care. You wanted me to change the world. You wanted me to be a revolutionary. But not too much of a revolutionary. I should care, but I shouldn’t care too much. Well, that’s not so easy. To care. To worry about all the shit you and Dad trained me to worry about. But only to worry and care a reasonable amount. You wanted me to make a revolution. But a nice revolution. A gentle revolution.”
He grips the chair harder. Lifts it from the ground. For an instant, Maxine thinks he might pick it up and hurl it. But he slams it back down, hard, and walks over to Angelina.
“No,” Maxine says. “I didn’t think you would hurt anyone. Not willingly. But I thought Thaddy might have … maybe you and Thaddy …” She stops trying to explain. She hadn’t really thought her son capable of mailing a bomb to anyone. Had she? She has driven all this way to make sure Thaddy didn’t kidnap Zach. To make sure Zach was here of his own free will. Although, to be honest, she also has been trying to prove she isn’t one of those mothers who, when the police reveal her son has been stockpiling weapons, insists he couldn’t be a terrorist. And in doing so, she has violated the very definition of a mother. Because even if your son does turn out to be a murderer, aren’t you supposed to be the one person on earth who believes him innocent? She has betrayed her son in such a way he might never forgive her. Although, knowing Zach, he will pretend he does.
“This is all too much for me right now,” Zach says. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast. You must be hungry, too, Mom. And Angie needs to eat.”
Zach goes to the icebox and takes out a pot of lentil stew he cooked to make sure his girlfriend receives the nutrition she needs to give birth to a healthy child. While he stands stirring it at the stove, Maxine feigns normalcy by asking Angelina if she has any siblings. Yes, Angelina says, she has an older sister, a nurse in the Marine Corps. Her mother works as an accountant for her father’s nursery. Her father is disappointed Angelina didn’t go to college, which was the reason he and Angelina’s mother came to the United States, but he is pleased she wants to follow him into the business of growing and tending plants. Angelina’s morning sickness lasted six weeks. So far, she hasn’t suffered the heartburn that made Maxine so miserable when she was pregnant with Zach. They have been told the baby’s gender, but if it’s all right with Maxine, they will keep that a secret, for now. Angelina’s words are sometimes garbled. Maxine is tempted to close her eyes so she can focus and listen harder. But she reminds herself nothing that afflicts her daughter-in-law could be passed on to her grandchild. What upsets her is that she is about to become a grandmother. At fifty-five! If she is a grandmother, there is no longer any ceiling between her and the older generation. No immortality for her. She will never live to greet the Singularity.
“What will your parents think of all this?” she asks.
“I am not sure,” Angelina admits. “My parents met Zach a long time ago, when he took me to the prom. But they don’t know we are still seeing each other. I am not the sort of person who enjoys lying. But they would hate him if they knew I got pregnant and he wanted me not to have the child. Or not to marry me. So I had to invent a story. I said I was going to work in the Upper Peninsula studying the trees, and it would be very hard for me to call because my cell phone wouldn’t work. I have been writing letters every day so they won’t be concerned. I dread when they find out the truth. But they will be happy we are getting married. My mother will jump up and down to find out she finally will be an abuela.”
That her son’s in-laws will be happy about the pregnancy highlights that Maxine isn’t as thrilled as she wishes she could be. Zach has quit his job and, aside from this scheme about buying a rundown factory and converting it to a vertical farm, he and his fiancée have no way to support themselves. Maxine was two years younger than Zach when she married his father. But she and Sam waited to have Zach until they were in their thirties and had good jobs. And Sam wasn’t suspected of being in league with a serial terrorist.
Angelina puts on her crutches and helps serve the dinner Zach prepared. The stew, for all Maxine had been hoping for something more substantial than lentils, turns out to be so comforting she asks for a second helping. Thank God the cabin has no working television; otherwise, she might feel obliged to put on the news and learn whether Zach’s professor has died of his injuries or Thaddy has mailed another bomb. As Zach scrapes the remains of the meal into the compost bin, she reminds him he will need to drive to Detroit the next morning to talk to the FBI. When Zach hesitates, she says this isn’t the same as tattling on some kid who burned down a play structure.
“I’m not trying to protect him!” Zach says. “I just can’t believe any of this is really happening.” The lid on the compost bin won’t close; Zach slams it with his fist. “I’m going to need time to close up this place. To make sure the chickens go to a good home.”
She tries not to entertain the suspicion he will use these chores as an excuse to run off. But he is still keeping something from her. What he has told her is true, but only as far as it goes. She should insist he drive back with her, leaving Angelina to lock up the cabin. But Angelina can’t drive. And Maxine already has betrayed her son by suspecting he might be implicated in Thaddy’s crimes. The best she can do is get up early, drive straight to Detroit, and tell the FBI everything Zach just told her. She will assure them Zach will be coming in himself, the following morning, with whatever lawyer Rosa and Mick have found.
If only she could do what a mother is supposed to do and tell Angelina more stories about Zach as a little boy. But she can no longer keep her eyes open. She settles back on the sofa. At some point, a male presence spreads a blanket to her chin. She takes the man’s hand. In her addled state, she almost presses it to her breast. Because this is Sam. Isn’t it? Sam is still alive, and Zach is all grown up, working for a company in California, and Sam has come in from spreading pepper around the tires to ward off the porcupines.
She lets the hand drop, then wills herself deeper into the dream in which Sam is still alive. Hours later, she needs to pee. If she is going to force herself from the warmth of the sofa and go outdoors to use the outhouse, she might as well get up and start the long trek back to Detroit. The fire in the stove has died down, and she is looking forward to getting in the Buick and turning up the heat.
For a few moments, though, she stands at the foot of the bed and watches Zach and Angelina breathe. The quilt doesn’t quite cover all of them. She bends and touches her son’s filthy, callused soles. His girlfriend’s much more delicate, twisted feet. How miraculous, that her son and his pregnant fiancée should be sleeping in the same bed in which his parents created him. If human beings lived forever, would the progression of generations be so compelling?
She is thrilled that her son is loved. Proud he has achieved what Thaddy couldn’t. As his mother, she must have done something right. He is a compassionate human being. A man who accepts responsibility for his actions. A man of conscience. And yet, her son has been lying to her all his life. He is lying to her even now. Their troubles aren’t over. Why does she suspect they are just beginning?