Out There: a novel by Sarah Stark Page B

away from him as she wiped the crumbs off the counter, and now she seemed intent on silence. He didn’t feel as if he’d been withholding important information, though. She was probably just fine. Grandmother rarely got upset, and when she did, it usually had something to do with the bread order for the store or a dog pooping in her yard, practical things like that. She wasn’t the fragile kind of woman who cried or got her feelings hurt. She’d had too much in her life go haywire to afford to cry every time some little thing upset her—or, for that matter, to get in a bad mood. Moodiness and anger were for rich people, Jefferson had always thought.
    “I love you, Esco,” he said, just after she brushed against his arm with the sponge. “So glad to be home, you know?”
    She paused in her cleaning and took a breath as she looked at him. And then it was as if a meteor had hit the earth somewhere far away and shaken Santa Fe in the process. She lunged against his chest, burying her face in his T-shirt and letting out a long string of wails that to him sounded both nocturnal and oceanic. He held on to her head, breathing into her hair and telling her it was okay, it was okay, everything was going to be okay now. When she had sobbed several long minutes without cease, she began to speak into his chest, as if she could only get out the words she needed to say if she did not look at him straight on, a barrage of thoughts and emotions that went on and on, Oh my grandson, oh my god, you are home you are home, you really did make it home alive, oh my god, oh my god, oh my beloved, my child, my sweet one, you are alive, oh I love you so much, so much you will never know, never know, never know, you are here, here you are, your sweet skin, oh my god, your sweet skin, your sweet hands, oh your eyes, oh your tiny little fingers, when you were a baby, oh my god, I was so worried, I was so worried, I thought you wouldn’t survive and I did my best, oh my god, my sweet baby, I did my best.
    Jefferson had always imagined but never witnessed Esco saying things like this. Of course he knew she loved him. Of course he knew she was the reason he’d survived childhood without a mother. Of course he knew she worried. But this outpouring, this desperate clinging to his chest, this sobbing  . . . She wasn’t supposed to be crying, and now that she had flung herself against his chest, now that she clung to him as if to prove to herself it was really him, Jefferson knew more than ever that he had to find a way to heal himself. If that doctor down in Albuquerque was not the one to help him, then Jefferson had to find someone else.  Esco needed him to be well.
     
    Finally the darkness seemed to have lifted within Esco. She raised her head, and looked past Jefferson at the pile of blankets on the couch.
    “What is that all about?” she asked.
    When he told her in an excited voice that he’d opened up the van and that it was a perfect hideaway in which to heal, no visible rats or snakes, and that he planned to start spending time out there, beginning that very night, and that tomorrow he was going to prune all the dead stuff out of the elm and beautify every chamisa and lilac and rosemary bush in the yard, and oh, by the way, did she know where his clippers were? she thought someone had yanked the braided rug, the rug that had covered the floor under the kitchen table for fifteen years, away from under her feet.
    “You can’t sleep out in that van,” she said.
    But he was already gone, halfway through the expanse of dirt and weeds, humming a tune she couldn’t place but that she’d heard several times as he’d showered lately.

11
    A week later, while his grandmother thought he was on his way by train back down to Albuquerque to meet Dr. Wesleyan for the second time, Jefferson watched Nigel read the weekly alternative paper—he liked the classifieds on the back page and the kinky sex column written by the gay guy—as one of the