Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz Read Free Book Online

looks away and doesn’t repeat the remark.
    “Does your mother know?”
    “She’s got enough on her plate.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Nothing. I just want to take a shower, okay? I’ve been on a bus for three days, and I just want to take a shower, if that’s okay with you.”
    Like a sinking, poisonous balloon it lands: the answer to the question I’ve been too scared to ask. Why, after all the years of locking me out, he’s finally come to my doorstep.
    This feeling of dirt. Unable to wash it off because now it’s inside him and untouchable.
    In the bathroom, behind the closed door, the shower begins to run.
    I can hear the moment he steps under the stream, my ears still attuned that way. Imagining my son’s long, carelessly muscled torso and the water beating down on him. The outside dirt running off, different from my dirt and particular to himself.
    At the same time, listening to him try to scrape himself clean, thinking about his being here at all, I find that I’m having trouble shrugging off the nagging fear that it’s some dark, sticky notion of me and my life that led him to run away from what he’s done, as I ran years ago.
    But what can you do with a thought like that, except turn away from it as fast as you can? I go to my room, drop the terry robe (suddenly preposterous under the circumstances), and pull on whatever clothes are at hand. I sit on the bed and hold myself still while I count off thirty seconds.
    Old trick from the downtime.
    Two years since I’ve used it, but Sam’s mother’s number comes back now without fail. (It was my house, too, once.) First digit, then the fingers walking the rest. Which only proves, maybe, that there’s no such thing as an ex-wife. The long, slow ringing is almost soothing till it stops.
    “Ruth, it’s Dwight.”
    Her silence is so long I lose track of it. I begin to think I hear a TV somewhere, and some slithery movement followed by a papery flutter—probably her closing a magazine she’s been reading in bed.
    “Ruth?”
    “I’m here.”
    “Sam’s in my house.”
    “What?”
    Before she can say any more, I jump in and tell her the gist of it, along with what scattershot details I know of the matter.
    Her shock, understandably, is many-sided. She bombards me with questions that I can’t answer. Still, I do my best.
    When I’m finished, Ruth observes—not meaning it as praise—“You sound like a lawyer.”
    I’m about to halfheartedly defend myself when I look up and see Sam standing in the hallway, a towel knotted at his waist and his torso glistening with water. A bruise like a beanpole eggplant across his muscled chest. His beauty, even so, simple and astonishing to me, a shock to the paternal system: as if the boy he used to be, beautiful, too, but miles different, fits inside this bruised man without meaning or wanting to; as if this creature is both man and boy.
    “Where is he? I need to talk to him. Please, Dwight, for God’s sake, put him on.”
    I reach out the phone. “It’s your mother.”
    Sam shakes his head.
    “Talk to her.”
    The shake of his head grows fierce, almost violent. He turns—I catch a glimpse of a second nasty bruise on his upper back, this one fist-size—and disappears into the guest room, shutting the door.
    “He doesn’t seem to be up for talking just yet, Ruth.”
    “I still don’t understand what he’s doing there. He should be here , dammit.” A castered, fumbling noise on her end, and I picture her hunting for something—Ambien or chewing gum—in the drawerof her bedside table. “I always knew something like this would happen.”
    “Ruth, listen. I don’t understand the situation any more than you. Just give me a little time with him and let me see if I can’t sort him out, come up with some sort of plan.”
    Her laugh is so grimly sardonic it causes the skin on my back to prickle.
    “Who’s going to sort you out, Dwight? That’s the question.”
    And then, before I can attempt an answer, she