He had been with them since, been with her, except for when she was on the mainland. This had unintended consequences. You grow to love a woman, seeing her that way, the way she comes through the back door in her bare feet, or the way her cheek looks when she turns and there is a soft slope. If you live closely and there’s peacefulness between you, and she has something pretty in her features or movement, you’re naturally going to feel love for her, or want to protect her. He had understood this. But he hadn’t expected what it would feel like when she was away, that the feeling of everything else went away, too, or how he would try to practice, during the days she was there, her going away, so that it wouldn’t come as a shock, or hurt when it happened.
Sometimes when he went back to the house he thought he might find his son as he had been, not toward the end, but before the kids, a distant man puzzled by his surroundings. Island life didn’t prepare you for any other life, and there had been the breakdown in college. Gene had gone to Boston to visit Shaun. He remembered his son slumped on his dorm bed, his legs sprawled out, with no determinate shape to his tall, thin body. Gene had sat at the edge of the bed, unsure of what to say. Breakdowns were not in their vocabulary, and he had not thought of it that way, though the knowledge of it had come later, that it wasn’t going to come back again, how his son had been. It’s true, there’s something broken afterward, no matter what everyone says. On the island mostly it was alcoholism, which he wished Shaun had been able to muster instead, as he would have been able to survive in that way, he would have been able to hobble along with some degree of cheer, but this fragility left him no match for anything. Gene sat at the edge of the bed. Are you telling me you won’t go to your classes? he asked him. When Shaun didn’t answer, he said, Well, what do we do then? I guess we withdraw you from school, and then you and I go back? I’d rather stay here, his son said. Gene decided to go to the market to get things for the dorm fridge, which then involved cleaning out what had gone bad. He bought apple juice and poured Shaun a cup. I’m having trouble understanding this, he told his son, I’m trying, but I’m having trouble.
He woke to his son shaking and didn’t understand at first that his son was trying to cry without making a sound. Where does your roommate go? Gene asked him. To his girlfriend’s. It was a series of things that he didn’t think would affect the future. It hadn’t occurred to him that it would last inside his son. Shaun had come back and spent the summer landscaping on the mainland, and the work had been good for him, slowed him so he was able to finish school the next year, and he stayed in Boston, and met his wife, and they came back to the island and had children. When his son had disappeared after taking the children and returning them unharmed, Gene was able to tell Meghan about the time in college. He told her about holding Shaun’s hand. He rarely touched his son, but after three days he’d found himself so exhausted that he reached for him. He said that what she did with Matt would have been painful, but that it hadn’t been the reason Shaun had left, that it had come out of another time, from events that occurred before Shaun had met her. And you have your sons and this is your life now, he said. If Gene hadn’t understood him that week in Boston, years later at least he was able to understand that it was sad and that was all. I can’t get over it, Meghan had said. We stop trying to think that way, he said. We think about what we’re going to do instead.
Now his son wasn’t at home, and Meghan was on the mainland again. He had the kids wash up, then he read to them. After, he sat in the living room with a beer. Bea came over, and they sat on the front step. They had been romantic, but this had stopped months earlier. At a certain point he hadn’t wanted her to come over, so he had been going to her place, but that had stopped, too. She had come over that night because she knew Meghan was gone. Bea had pale, thin skin, and soft white hair. She grew herbs that she made tea with. During the times when he had gone over, she would drink tea while he drank beer. Now the field below was lit with fireflies, though not as many as the month before. Beyond that, you could feel the sea. She said, It seems that you’re not coming over anymore.
It’s been a while, he said.
Anywhere else, she said, that would be how it was, there’d be little sense in mentioning it. But here, she said, we get so few chances at anything, and so I wonder why. He thought of the isolation that she, because of him, would now experience, but didn’t feel it. Not in any part of him, not sympathy in any part of him for her.
And then I knew why, she said, and I wondered why it had ever seemed important to me to know why. Why had it?
When she left he watched her walking in the thick air, her white blouse lit by the moon, like she was a spectral thing moving away from him. But what good is there in keeping the things you don’t want, simply because they are something?
He turned off the front lights, put his glass in the sink. Went to the hall so he could see into the kids’ room, see that they were still there. He had held himself together and what good had it done? For whose benefit had he held himself together? Certainly not for anyone else’s, but not really for himself, either.
Gene remembered his exaltation when he finally left his son. How he’d fiddled with the radio in the truck to get a song, and rolled down the windows, and stopped for a nice dinner off the highway, then slept in his truck until the ferry came in the morning. It had been good to be home, to have slipped out from under something. He had called his son and felt stronger talking to him, more able to help. If we leave someone and feel better, we let ourselves think we have done the right thing. Of course it’s not true, he now knows, taking off his boots, lying on his bed, the blankets with their moist smell of the island.
In the morning he took the kids to Bea’s. She had put out stuff to make boxed muffins. She had done this with them before, and they had liked how inside the box there was a can with blueberries. It was a simple thing to have liked, but they had liked it. He stood there while they went down the hallway. Eventually they would leave, or he would leave. They couldn’t stay like this forever. The night before on the steps, Bea had talked about his son. We weren’t that close, our families, she had said. But still, when he was young, and I would be on my porch at night, it must have been after your dinner, I could always count on him coming out the back door, and the minute he got out, he always started to run, usually down the field, as if it was something just being outside. It was a terrible thing, what happened, she said. The way he disappeared. I didn’t know what to say after. I wanted to tell you that. That I wanted to say something but didn’t know what to say.
She had spoken quietly, in the dark, while they had both looked ahead at the field. He lay in bed afterward trying not to think of it. He thought of how they had found the house where his son had taken the kids, where they had stayed for two days. How it was small and brightly lit, and there were blankets there still, and a few of his son’s shirts.
CITIES I’VE NEVER LIVED IN
During the trip, the lover I had left behind in New York had stopped calling. I was glad to be traveling, for the movement it gave me, but I was uncertain how my life would be when I got home. I didn’t want another period of instability, and I felt the suspension you feel when you’re fine, but you’re worried it won’t last, and there’s nothing you can do to make it stay.
I had come up with the idea years before — when I first became interested in soup kitchens. I made the plan to travel the United States, going to small interior cities and going to kitchens there. I had volunteered in kitchens in the past and had found it comforting. I would work for a few hours and then would sign my name and get in line and eat, scrunched over, not poor enough to eat there if I hadn’t worked, but not a volunteer doing it out of goodness. Lost, probably, in ways that made me more comfortable in places like those — the church halls, the Styrofoam plates, the trays, the gentle feeling of caretaking and cafeteria lines — and lost perhaps in ways understandable to those around me.