“So where have you been?” her son asked Pete, giving him a hard stare.
“Good question,” said Pete, as if praising the thing would make it go away. How could people be mentally well in such a world?
“Do you miss us?” the boy asked.
Pete did not answer.
“Do you think of me when you look at the black capillaries of the trees at night?”
“I suppose I do.” Pete stared back at him, so as not to shift in his seat. “I am always hoping you are OK and that they treat you well here.”
“Do you think of my mom when staring up at the clouds and all they hold?”
Pete fell quiet again.
Her son continued, studying Pete. “Have you ever watched how sparrows can kill the offspring of others? Baby wrens, for instance? I’ve been watching out the windows. Did you know that sparrows can swoop into the wrens’ house and pluck out the fledglings from their nests and hurl them to the ground with a force you would not think possible for a sparrow? Even a homicidal sparrow?”
“Nature can be cruel,” said Pete.
“Nature can be one big horror movie! But murder is not something one would expect — from a sparrow. All things can be found in the world — but usually you have to look for them. You have to look! For instance, you have to look for us! We are sort of hidden but sort of not. We can be found. If you look in the obvious places, we can be found. We haven’t disappeared, even if you want us to, we are there to—”
“That’s enough,” she said to her son, who turned to her with a change of expression.
“There’s supposed to be cake this afternoon for someone’s birthday,” he said.
“That will be nice!” she said, smiling back.
“No candles, of course. Or forks. We will just have to grab the frosting and mash it into our eyes for blinding. Do you ever think about how at that moment of the candles time stands still, even as the moments carry away the smoke? It’s like the fire of burning love. Do you ever wonder why so many people have things they don’t deserve but how absurd all those things are to begin with? Do you really think a wish can come true if you never ever ever ever ever ever tell it to anyone?”
On the ride home she and Pete did not exchange a word, and every time she looked at his aging hands, clasped arthritically around the steering wheel, the familiar thumbs slung low in their slightly simian way, she would understand anew the desperate place they both were in, though the desperations were separate, not joined, and her eyes would then feel the stabbing pressure of tears. The last time her son had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, morbidly ingenious. He might have succeeded but a fellow patient, a girl from group, had stopped him at the last minute. There had been blood to be mopped. Once her son had only wanted a distracting pain, but then soon he had wanted to tear a hole in himself and flee through it. Life was full of spies and preoccupying espionage. Yet the spies sometimes would flee as well and someone might have to go after them in order, paradoxically, to escape them altogether, over the rolling fields of living dream, into the early morning mountains of dawning signification.
There was a storm in front and lightning did its quick, purposeful zigzag between and in the clouds. She did not need such stark illustration that horizons could be shattered, filled with messages, broken codes, yet there it was. A spring snow began to fall with the lightning still cracking, and Pete put the windshield wipers on so that they both could peer through the cleared semicircles at the darkening road before them. She knew that the world was not created to speak just to her, and yet, as with her son, sometimes things did. The fruit trees had bloomed early, for instance, and the orchards they passed were pink, but the early warmth precluded bees, and so there would be little fruit. Most of the dangling blossoms would fall in this very storm.
When they arrived at her house and went in, Pete glanced at himself in the hallway mirror. Perhaps he needed assurance that he was alive and not the ghost he seemed.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked, hoping he would stay. “I have some good vodka. I could make you a nice White Russian!”
“Just vodka,” he said reluctantly. “Straight.”
She opened the freezer to find the vodka, and when she closed it again, she stood waiting there for a moment, looking at the photos she’d attached with magnets to the refrigerator. As a baby her son had looked happier than most babies. As a six-year-old he was still smiling and hamming it up, his arms and legs shooting out like starbursts, his perfectly gapped teeth flashing, his hair curling in honeyed coils. At ten his expression was already vaguely brooding and fearful, though there was light in his eyes, his lovely cousins beside him. There he was a plumpish teenager, his arm around Pete. And there in the corner he was an infant again, held by his dignified, handsome father, whom her son did not recall because he had died so long ago. All this had to be accepted. Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same regardless. Tenderness did not enter except in a damaged way and by luck.
“You don’t want ice?”
“No,” said Pete. “No thank you.”
She placed two glasses of vodka on the kitchen table and there they sat.
“Perhaps this will help you sleep,” she said.
“Don’t know if anything can do that,” he said, with a swig. Insomnia plagued him.
“I am going to bring him home tomorrow,” she said. “He needs his home back, his house, his room. He is no danger to anyone.”
Pete drank some more, sipping noisily. She could see he wanted no part of this, but she felt she had no choice but to proceed. “Perhaps you could help. He looks up to you.”
“Help how?” asked Pete with a flash of anger. There was the clink of his glass on the table.
“We could each spend part of the night near him,” she said.
The telephone rang. The Radio Shack wall phone brought almost nothing but bad news, and so its ringing sound, especially in the evening, always startled her. She repressed a shudder but still her shoulders hunched and curved. She stood.
“Hello?” she said, answering it on the third ring, her heart pounding. But the person on the other end hung up. She sat back down. “I guess it was a wrong number,” she said, adding, “Perhaps you would like more vodka.”
“Only a little. Then I should go.”
She poured him more. She had said what she’d wanted to say and did not want to have to persuade him. She would wait for him to step forward with the right words. Unlike some of her meaner friends, who kept warning her, she believed there was a deep good side of him and she was always patient for it. What else could she be?
The phone rang again.
“Probably telemarketers,” he said.
“I hate them,” she said. “Hello?” she said more loudly into the receiver.
This time when the caller hung up she glanced at the number on the phone, in the lit panel where the caller ID was supposed to reveal it.