It was only now, imprisoned on her own property by a skinny girl who belonged back in chemistry class, that Marie understood that she had come here alone to find a way to forgive him. What did he mean, not worth it? Worth what? Was he speaking of John?
Marie looked down over the trees into the lake. She and Ernie had been twenty years old when John was born. You think you’re in love now, her sister warned, but wait till you meet your baby — implying that married love would look bleached and pale by contrast. But John was a sober, suspicious baby, vaguely intimidating; and their fascination for him became one more thing they had in common. As their child became more and more himself, a cryptogram they couldn’t decipher, Ernie and Marie’s bungled affections and wayward exertions revealed less of him and more of themselves.
Ernie and Marie, smitten since seventh grade: it was a story they thought their baby son would grow up to tell their grandchildren. At twenty they had thought this. She wanted John to remember his childhood the way she liked to: a soft-focus, greeting card recollection in which Ernie and Marie strolled hand in hand in a park somewhere with the fruit of their desire frolicking a few feet ahead. But now she doubted her own memory. John must have frolicked on occasion. Certainly he must have frolicked. But at the present moment she could conjure only a lumbering resignation, as if he had already tired of their story before he broke free of the womb. They would have been more ready for him now, she realized. She was in a position now to love Ernie less, if that’s what a child required.
The shadow of the spruces arched long across the dooryard. Dusk fell.
Tracey got up. “I’m hungry again. You want anything?”
“No, thanks.”
Tracey waited. “You have to come in with me.”
Marie stepped through the door first, then watched as Tracey made herself a sandwich. “I don’t suppose it’s crossed your mind that your boyfriend might not come back,” Marie said.
Tracey took a big bite. “No, it 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 John 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. John inspected these things indifferently, listened to parental homilies on the world’s breathtaking design, all the while maintaining the demeanor of a goodhearted 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, John 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, welled up, nodding madly. But as John 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.
“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 station.” Tracey finished the sandwich and rinsed the plate, leading Marie to suspect that someone had at least taught her to clean up after herself. The worst parent in the world can at least do that. John had lovely manners, and she suddenly got a comforting vision of him placing his scraped plate in a cafeteria sink.
“The nearest police station is twenty miles from here,” Marie said.
“Well, that’s good news, Marie, because look who’s back.”
Creeping into the driveway, one headlight out, was a low-slung, mud-colored Valiant with a cracked windshield. The driver skulked behind the wheel, blurry as an inkblot. When Tracey raced out to greet him, the driver opened the door and emerged as a jittery shadow. The shadow flung itself toward the cabin as Marie fled for the back door and banged on the lock with her fists.
In moments he was upon her, a wiry man with a powerful odor and viselike hands. He half-carried her back to the kitchen as she fell limp with panic. Then, like a ham actor in a silent movie, he lashed her to a kitchen chair with cords of filthy rawhide.