Ernie's Ark by Monica Wood Page A

hasn’t.”
    “If I were on the run, I’d run alone, wouldn’t you? Don’t you think that makes sense?”
    Chewing daintily, Tracey flattened Marie with a luminous, eerily knowing look. “Are you on the run, Marie?”
    “What I’m saying is that he’ll get a lot farther a lot faster without another person to worry about.”
    Tracey swallowed hard. “Well, what I’m saying is you don’t know shit about him. Or me, for that matter. So you can just shut up.”
    “I could give you a ride home.”
    “Not without your keys, you couldn’t.” She opened the fridge and gulped some milk from the bottle. “If I wanted to go home, I would’ve gone home a long time ago.”
    It had gotten dark in the cabin. Marie flicked on the kitchen light. She and Ernie left the electricity on year-round because it was more trouble not to, and occasionally they came here in winter to snowshoe through the long, wooded alleys. It was on their son’s behalf that they had come to such pastimes, on their son’s behalf that the cabin had filled over the years with well-thumbed guidebooks to butterflies and insects and fish and birds. But James preferred his puzzles by the fire, his long, furtive vigils on the dock, leaving it to his parents to discover the world. They turned up pine cones, strips of birch bark for monogramming, once a speckled feather from a pheasant. James inspected these things indifferently, listened to parental homilies on the world’s breathtaking design, all the while maintaining the demeanor of a good-hearted homeowner suffering the encyclopedia salesman’s pitch.
    “Why don’t you want to go home?” Marie asked. “Really, I’d like to know.” She was remembering the parting scene at the airport, James uncharacteristically warm, allowing her to hug him as long as she wanted, thanking her for an all-purpose “everything”that she could fill in as she pleased for years to come. Ernie, his massive arms folded in front of him, stood aside, nodding madly. But as James disappeared behind the gate, Ernie clutched her hand, and she knew what he knew: that their only son, their first and only child, was not coming back. He would finish school, find a job in California, call them twice a year. James had been waiting since the age of eight to try life solo and was not one to turn back on a promise to himself.
    “My father’s a self-righteous blowhard, if you’re dying to know,” Tracey said. “And my mother’s a doormat.”
    “Maybe they did the best they could.”
    “Maybe they didn’t.”
    “Maybe they tried in ways you can’t know about.”
    Tracey looked Marie over. “My mother’s forty-two,” she said. “She would’ve crawled under a chair the second she saw the knife.”
    Marie covered the mustard jar and returned it to the fridge. “It’s possible, Tracey, that your parents never found the key to you.”
    Tracey seemed to like this interpretation of her terrible choices. Her shoulders softened some. “So where’s this son of yours, anyway?”
    “We just sent him off to Berkeley.”
    Tracey smirked a little. “Uh-oh.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Marie asked. “What do you mean?”
    “Berkeley’s a pretty swinging place. You don’t send sweet little boys there.”
    “I never said he was a sweet little boy,” Marie said, surprising herself. But it was true: her child had never been a sweet little boy.
    “You’ll be lucky if he comes back with his brain still working.”
    “I’ll be lucky if he comes back at all.”
    Tracey frowned. “You’re messing with my head, right? Poor, tortured mother? You probably don’t even have kids.” She folded her arms. “But if you do have a kid, and he’s at Berkeley, prepare yourself.”
    “Look, Tracey,” Marie said irritably, “why don’t you just take my car? If you’re so devoted to this boyfriend of yours, why not go after him?”
    “Because I’d have no idea where to look, and you’d run to the nearest police