Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz Read Free Book Online Page B

about what’s happened here today and make lists toward change and attend tothose lists with a hopeful urgency that I cannot in fact recall in myself.
    I get up and go inside.
    The house is quiet. I walk down the short hallway and stand with an ear against the closed door to the guest bedroom, hearing nothing from inside. After a few moments, I knock lightly and open the door.
    My son is lying on his back on the bed, mouth agape, still in the towel he was wearing, his right arm dangling off the edge. There is no movement in him at all, and for a terrible moment I believe he is dead. I think he has killed himself somehow, that he crossed the country to do that in my house.
    I’m halfway to the bed, stepping panicked over my set of dumbbells strewn across the rubber-matted floor, when I see his chest rise.
    I stop to watch him breathing in and out, until I’m sure. And then, slow and careful as a heart-attack patient, I back out of the room and leave him to sleep a while in peace.

EMMA
    L OOKING BACK ON IT , theirs is not a house of dramatic battles; it is a house of forced retreats across mountains and down through bitterly cold rivers. Ever retreating, ever glancing over your shoulder for the invisible enemy, who is a ghost. The war long ended; there is no front to fight on. The cause of the unholy conflict—the death of a child, a son, a brother—is unmentionable history.
    Ah, but: a living child remains. Not the chosen one, however. No, that was her brother.
    Unlike some other kids she knows, Emma never wanted to be an only child, with the only child’s lonely, obsessive burdens, the need to stand for everything and everyone. But that’s what, for its own reasons, life has turned her into.
    Her parents were close and loving once, she is almost certain. There are photos that stand as, if not proof, then emotional attestations to familial and marital happiness, what human lives produce instead of proof. Two parents, two children, a dog, a fine old house. Her mother a creator of exquisite gardens for other people. Her father a teacher of impressionable minds and the author of brilliant elucidations of important works of literature. Her mother beautiful and still young. Her handsome father …
• • •
    She is seventeen and applying to college when he packs three suitcases and departs for Chicago—a “practical relocation,” her parents call it, as if she’s a head case and can’t tell the difference: separation, divorce, the long, cold withdrawal into an ever smaller and more isolated chamber of the heart. What else can you say about a man who’s given up teaching the novels of Henry James and the poems of Wallace Stevens to write a book on twelve—no, sorry, eleven—sentences of the Talmud?
    It is early morning. There is mist; this is not an illusion. A taxi pulls up outside and beeps its horn. She carries one of the suitcases. Her mother has not come out, and cannot be seen at any of the windows. A coldness has seeped in everywhere. The house’s eyes are closed; the front lawn overgrown with weeds.
    Her father kisses her, not tenderly on her cheek as he once did but on her forehead, penitentially. Some sort of Old Testament thing, she guesses.
    She tries hard not to cry, and is successful.
    The taxi gone, she returns to the house. Her mother’s bedroom door is closed. Through the partition, Emma listens carefully for tears and sobbing, but hears nothing.
    The silence, on both sides, feels like hate. Maybe it was always like this, and she just didn’t know it.
    She gathers her books and drives herself to school in the car that her father left behind.

DWIGHT
    A LITTLE AFTER TWO IN THE MORNING , I creep into his room to get my weights. Wired awake. Wanting to hurt and sweat myself into some purer condition—or, barring that, simply to pass out for the last few hours before sunrise.
    The door to the room has a creak in it. I stand in the wake of that noise listening for his deep breathing. Sam still on