his back on the bed, bare chest and cheekbones holding light that otherwise doesn’t exist. On the floor, the dumbbells are low dense shadows like rooting animals underfoot. I feel for them in the gloom, and grip them by the necks, and two at a time carry them out of his room into mine. I’m leaving with the last pair when his sleep-fogged voice catches me.
“Mom?”
How do you answer? Except to say, No. You’re mistaken. That’s the other one. The one who raised and loved you right. “It’s just me.”
But he’s asleep again, and doesn’t hear me.
SAM
I N THE DARK , just before sunrise, he comes awake in his father’s strange coffin of a house. The bleached walls of the bare white room, and the morning dark somehow dishonest, permanently uncommitted, too much unearned daylight to follow.
He tries to roll over onto his back, but the bruise on his chest is still so deep the pain reaches through him to the bruise on the other side. He groans and lies motionless, breathing heavily.
Nonetheless: the hard-on he woke with stubbornly undimmed, an animate kickstand. The kind that weighs twelve pounds and hurts, has been attached to you for so long it’s become your enemy and your soul. It defeats you in principle—there’s nothing you can imagine wanting to do with it, other than to warehouse it somewhere, at low cost, by the month.
Once again, he’s woken with Emma on his tongue after some long, essentially plotless, mostly forgotten dream that sticks to him now like the spotted afterimage of camera flash in the eyes. A dream that’s more than a dream because you know you’re going to see it again, one of its hundred and sixty-seven variations. For two years that’s been her presence in his life, no more and no less. And here he’s crossed the entire country, trashed and ditched his future, wrecked the whole show, only to discover that she’s followed him anyway. Followed him without really caring. He’s given up trying to understand how it works: a single, almost wordless act that’s held him prisoner ever since, free enough to pursue other girls and his life, but too emotionally shackled ever to really show up for the game.
With his hand now, he tries without much hope to free himself of her for the day. Using her all the way, of course. And gets what he came for. As if he ruled her, not the other way around.
Afterward, he curls up on his side. Sleep coming for him finally, lapping at his jagged edges.
RUTH
S HE STANDS AT THE STOVE the morning after Dwight’s call, frying four pieces of bacon, mentally excavating the past twelve years, during which, for better or worse, she’s been the presiding parent to her son, the one holding the keys and laying down the law. (She cannot in all good faith include Norris in this regard; he’s simply too much of a jellyfish.) With a fork, invisible droplets of hot grease spattering her fingers, she turns the fatty, half-browned strips one at a time and sees Sam graduating from high school. She drives him again, the car loaded to the roof, to his first day of college. She remembers him—this sequence mysteriously looming above the rest—two years ago, in the spring of his sophomore year, coming home for a weekend.
He arrived that Friday night just in time for dinner. By then she no longer bothered complaining about the infrequency of his visits, despite the nearness (a mere ninety-minute drive) of his college campus. Still, she had her arms around him practically before he stepped out of the car, the porch lights casting their briefly united shadow almost to the edge of the driveway. The clean-dirt baseball smell of his clothes penetrating her defenses as she noticed the touch of black greasepaint on his cheek that he’d missed in the shower after practice—this she wiped away with her finger, as if he was still ten years old; a maternally willful misconception that lasted, oh, about forty-two minutes, until the moment when, finishing the meal of pot roast,
“Mom?”
How do you answer? Except to say, No. You’re mistaken. That’s the other one. The one who raised and loved you right. “It’s just me.”
But he’s asleep again, and doesn’t hear me.
SAM
I N THE DARK , just before sunrise, he comes awake in his father’s strange coffin of a house. The bleached walls of the bare white room, and the morning dark somehow dishonest, permanently uncommitted, too much unearned daylight to follow.
He tries to roll over onto his back, but the bruise on his chest is still so deep the pain reaches through him to the bruise on the other side. He groans and lies motionless, breathing heavily.
Nonetheless: the hard-on he woke with stubbornly undimmed, an animate kickstand. The kind that weighs twelve pounds and hurts, has been attached to you for so long it’s become your enemy and your soul. It defeats you in principle—there’s nothing you can imagine wanting to do with it, other than to warehouse it somewhere, at low cost, by the month.
Once again, he’s woken with Emma on his tongue after some long, essentially plotless, mostly forgotten dream that sticks to him now like the spotted afterimage of camera flash in the eyes. A dream that’s more than a dream because you know you’re going to see it again, one of its hundred and sixty-seven variations. For two years that’s been her presence in his life, no more and no less. And here he’s crossed the entire country, trashed and ditched his future, wrecked the whole show, only to discover that she’s followed him anyway. Followed him without really caring. He’s given up trying to understand how it works: a single, almost wordless act that’s held him prisoner ever since, free enough to pursue other girls and his life, but too emotionally shackled ever to really show up for the game.
With his hand now, he tries without much hope to free himself of her for the day. Using her all the way, of course. And gets what he came for. As if he ruled her, not the other way around.
Afterward, he curls up on his side. Sleep coming for him finally, lapping at his jagged edges.
RUTH
S HE STANDS AT THE STOVE the morning after Dwight’s call, frying four pieces of bacon, mentally excavating the past twelve years, during which, for better or worse, she’s been the presiding parent to her son, the one holding the keys and laying down the law. (She cannot in all good faith include Norris in this regard; he’s simply too much of a jellyfish.) With a fork, invisible droplets of hot grease spattering her fingers, she turns the fatty, half-browned strips one at a time and sees Sam graduating from high school. She drives him again, the car loaded to the roof, to his first day of college. She remembers him—this sequence mysteriously looming above the rest—two years ago, in the spring of his sophomore year, coming home for a weekend.
He arrived that Friday night just in time for dinner. By then she no longer bothered complaining about the infrequency of his visits, despite the nearness (a mere ninety-minute drive) of his college campus. Still, she had her arms around him practically before he stepped out of the car, the porch lights casting their briefly united shadow almost to the edge of the driveway. The clean-dirt baseball smell of his clothes penetrating her defenses as she noticed the touch of black greasepaint on his cheek that he’d missed in the shower after practice—this she wiped away with her finger, as if he was still ten years old; a maternally willful misconception that lasted, oh, about forty-two minutes, until the moment when, finishing the meal of pot roast,
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