The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

Elizabeth Tallent
Never Come Back

This was his life now, his real life, the thing he thought about most: his boy was in and out of trouble and he didn’t know what to do.

Friday night when he got home late from the mill Daisy made him shower before supper, and he twisted the dial to its hottest setting and turned his back to the expensive showerhead whose spray never pulsed hard enough to perform the virtual massage its advertising promised-or maybe at forty-three he’d used his body too hard, its aches and pains as much a part of him now as his heart or any other organ, and he had wasted good money on an illusion. Ah well. He rubbed at mirror fog and told the dark-browed frowner (his own father!) to get ready: she’d had her Victor look. Whatever this development was, it fell somewhere between failing grade in calculus and car wreck, either of which, he knows from experience, would have been announced as soon as he walked through the door. This news, while it wasn’t life or death, was bad enough that she felt she needed to lay the groundwork and had already set their places at the table and poured his beer, a habit he disliked but had never objected to and never would. As a special treat Daisy’s father had let her tilt the bottle over his glass while the bubbles churned and the foam puffed like a mushroom cap sidling up from dank earth, and if she enjoyed some echo of the bliss of being in her daddy’s good graces while pouring his beer, Sean wasn’t about to deprive her of that.

Daisy told him:

Neither girl seemed very brave, yet neither seemed willing to back down. Not their own wounds but a sturdy sense of each other’s being wronged had driven them to this. They had a kind of punk bravado, there on the threshold, armored in motorcycle jackets whose sleeves fell past their chipped black fingernails. A flight of barrettes had attacked their heads and seized random tufts of dirty hair. Dressed for audacity, but their pointy-chinned faces-really the same face twice-wore the stiff little mime smiles of the easily intimidated, confronting her, the tigress mother, bracing their forlorn selves as best they could, which wasn’t very well at all. There was nothing to do but ask them in. As she told it to Sean, Daisy wasn’t about to let them guess that (a) she pitied them, and (b) she understood right away there was going to be some truth in what they said. Victor’s favorite sweater, needing some mending, lay across the arm of the sofa, and when one of the twins took it into her lap, talisman, claim, Daisy hardly needed to be told that girl was pregnant. As the twins took turns explaining not just one of them was in trouble, both were, an evil radiance pulsed in the corner of Daisy’s right eye, the onset of a migraine.

A joke, Sean said. Because, twins? Somebody told these girls to go to V’s house and freak out his parents.

Drinking around a bonfire and they wander deeper into the woods and they came across this mattress and it’s like a sign to them. Sign is what they said. Does that sound like a joke to you? They have a word for it. Threeway. They have a word for it. Ask yourself what these girls know, what they’ve ever taken care of in their lives. Who’s ever taken them seriously? We will. We will, now. Across the table Sean shook his head, his heavy disgust with his son failing, for once, to galvanize Daisy’s defense of the boy. In the appalled harmony of their anger they traded predictions. Victor would be made to marry a twin, maybe the one whose dark eyes acquired a sheen of tears when she petted his old sweater, because she seemed the more lost. Victor would be dragged under.

“When’s he get home?” Sean said.

“Away game. Not till two a.m.” It was Daisy who would be waiting in her SUV when the bus pulled up at the high school to disgorge the sleepy jostling long-legged boys.

“We hold off on doing anything till we hear his side of the story.”

We hold off? If she hadn’t loved him she would have laughed when he said that. It wasn’t going to be up to them to hold off or not hold off, but if Sean was slower to accept that reality than she was, it was because he hated decisions being out of his hands.

However disgusted he’d been the night before, in the morning Sean was somber, concerned, protective, everything Daisy could have wished when he sat Victor down at the kitchen table for what he called getting the facts straight. The reeling daylong party was true, and the bonfire, and the rain-sodden mattress in the woods where a drunken Victor had sex with both girls, though not at the same time, which was what threeway meant. They must have claimed that for dramatic impact, as if this thing needed more drama, or because they were so smashed events blurred together in their minds. The next several evenings were taken up with marathon phone calls-Sean asked most of the questions and wouldn’t hand the receiver to Daisy even when she could tell he’d been told something especially troubling and mouthed Give it to me! By the following weekend they knew for sure only one twin was pregnant, though it seemed both had believed they were telling the truth when they sat on Daisy’s striped couch and said the babies, plural, were due July fifth. The sweater-petting girl told Sean she had liked Victor for a long time-years-and had wanted to be with him, though not in the way it had finally happened, and when he heard this Sean coughed and his eyes got wet, but who were those tears for? Daisy wanted to know. Not for his own kid, for those girls? Questioned, Victor remembered only that they were twins. He knew it sounded bad but he wasn’t sure what they looked like. Nobody was quote in love with him: that was crazy. And no, they hadn’t tried to talk to him first, before coming to the house, and was that fair, that they’d assumed there was zero chance of his doing the right thing? And why was marriage the right thing if he didn’t want it and whoever the girl was she didn’t want it and it was only going to end in divorce? The twin who was pregnant had the ridiculous name of Esme, and what she asked for on the phone with Sean-patient, tolerant Sean-was not marriage but child support. If she had that she could get by, she insisted. She’d had a sonogram and she loved the alien-headed letter C curled up inside her. At their graduation dance she shed her high heels and flirted by bumping into the tuxes of various dance partners. Victor followed her into the parking lot. Below she was flat-footed and pumpkin-bellied, above she wore strapless satin, her collarbones stark as deer antlers when he backed her up against an anonymous SUV hard enough their first sober kiss began with shrieks and whistles.

In the hushed joyous days after the baby was born Sean made a serious mistake that he blamed partly on sleep deprivation; the narrow old two-story house had hardly any soundproofing, and because Victor and Esme’s bedroom was below his and Daisy’s, the baby’s crying woke them all. He had stopped in the one jewelry store downtown and completely on impulse laid down his credit card for a delicate bracelet consisting of several strands of silver wound around and around each other. Though simple, the bracelet was a compelling object with a strong suggestion of narrative, as if the maker had been trying to fashion the twining, gleaming progress of several competing loves. He was the sort of husband who gets teased for not noticing new earrings even when his wife repeatedly tucks her hair behind her ears, and any kind of whimsical expenditure was unlike him, but he found he couldn’t leave the store without it. He stopped for a beer at the Golden West, and when he got home the only light was from the kitchen, where Esme sat at the table licking the filling from Oreos and washing it down with chocolate milk. Her smile hoped he would empathize with the joke of her appetite rather than scold the late-night sugar extravaganza as, he supposed, Daisy would have done, but it was the white-trash forlornness of her feast that got to Sean-the cheapness and furtiveness and excessive, teeth-aching sweetness of this stab at self-consolation. With her china-doll hair and whiter-than-white skin she was hardly the menace to their peace they had feared, only an ignorant girl who trusted neither her baby’s father nor her sneaky conviction that it was she and not the grandmother who ought to be making the big decisions about the baby’s care. Esme wet a forefinger and dabbed the crumbs from Daisy’s tablecloth as he set the shiny box down next to her dirty plate. She said, “What is this?” and, that fast, there were tears in her eyes. She didn’t believe it was for her, but she’d just understood what it would feel like if the little box had been hers, and this disbelief was his undoing: until those tears he had honestly had no notion of giving Esme the bracelet. He heard himself say, “Just something for the new mama.” As soon as she picked the ribbon apart, even before she tipped the bracelet from its mattress of cotton, he regretted his impulsiveness, but it was too late: she slid it onto her wrist and made it flash in the dim light, glancing to invite his admiration or maybe try to figure out, from his expression, what was going on. In the following days he was sorry to see that she never took it off. Luckily the household was agitated enough that nobody else noticed the bracelet, and he began to hope his mistake would have no ill consequences except for the change in Esme, whose corner-tilted eyes held his whenever he came into the room. Then, quick, she’d turn her head as if realizing this was the sort of thing that could give them away. Of course there was no them and not a fucking thing to give away. Sean began to blame her for his uneasiness: she had misconstrued an act of minor, impulsive charity, blown it up into something more, which had to be kept secret. The ridiculousness of her believing he was interested was not only troubling in its own right, it pointed to her readiness to immerse herself in fantasy, and this could be proof of some deeper instability. He didn’t like being looked at like that in his own house, or keeping secrets. He was not a natural secret keeper, but a big-boned straightforward husband. Since he’d been nineteen, a husband. Daisy came from a rough background too, her father a part-time carpenter and full-time drunk who had once burned his kids’ clothes in the backyard, the boys running back into the house for more armfuls of T-shirts and shorts, disenchanted only when their dad made them strip off their cowboy pajamas and throw those in too. The first volunteer fireman on the scene dressed the boys in slickers that reached to their ankles and bundled their naked teeth-chattering sister into an old sweater that stank of crankcase oil, and to this day when Sean changes the oil in his truck he has to scrub his hands outside or Daisy will run to the bathroom to throw up.

As Esme alternated between flirtation and sullenness he tried for kindness. This wasn’t all her fault: he was helplessly responsive to vulnerability, and-he could admit it-he did have a tendency to rush in and try to fix whatever was wrong. Therefore he imitated Daisy’s forbearance when Esme couldn’t get even simple things right, like using hypoallergenic detergent instead of the regular kind that caused the baby to break out in a rash. The tender verbal scat of any mother cradling her baby was a language Esme didn’t speak. Her hold was so tentative the baby went round-eyed and chafed his head this way and that wondering who would come to his aid. More than once Esme neglected to pick up dangerous buttons or coins from the floor. She had to be reminded to burp him after nursing and then, chastened, would sling him across her shoulder like a sack of rice. Could you even say she loved the baby? Breast-feeding might account for Esme’s sleepy-eyed bedragglement and air of waiting for real life to begin, but, Daisy said, there was absolutely no justifying the girl’s self-pity. Consider where she, Daisy, had come from: worse than anything this girl had gone through, but had Sean ever seen her spend whole days feeling sorry for herself, reading wedding magazines in dirty sheets, scarcely managing to crawl from bed when the baby cried? It wasn’t as if she had no support. Victor was right there. Who would have believed it? He was attentive to Esme, touchingly proud of his son, and even after a long day at the mill would stay up walking the length of the downstairs hallway with the colicky child so Esme could sleep. For the first time Victor was as good as his word, and could be counted on to deal uncomplainingly with errands and show up when he’d said he would. Victor’s changed ways should have mattered more to Esme, given the desolation of her childhood. Victor was good to her. Esme could not explain what was wrong or what she wanted, Daisy said after one conversation. She was always trying to talk to the girl, who was growing more and more restless. They could all see that, but not what was coming, because it was the kind of thing you didn’t want to believe would happen in your family: Esme disappeared. Dylan was almost four and for whatever reason she had concluded that four was old enough to get by without a mother. That much they learned from her note but the rest they had to find out. She had hitchhiked to the used-car dealership on the south end of town and picked out a white Subaru station wagon; Wynn Handley, the salesman, said she negotiated pleasantly and as if she knew what she was doing and (somewhat to Wynn’s surprise, you could tell) ended up with a good deal. Esme paid in cash-not that unusual in a county famed for its marijuana. She left alone-that is, there was no other man. Not as far as Wynn knew, and he was being completely forthcoming in light of the family’s distress. The cash was impossible to explain, since after checking online Victor reported their joint account hadn’t been touched, and they hadn’t saved nearly that much anyway. Esme had no credit card, of course, making it hard to trace her. Discussion of whether they were in any way to blame and where Esme could have gone and whether she was likely to call and want to talk to her son and whether, if she called, there was any chance of convincing her to come back was carried on in hushed voices because no matter what she’d done the boy should not have to hear bad things about his mother.

With Esme gone, Victor began to talk about quitting the mill. The ceaseless roar was giving him tinnitus; his back hurt; there were nights he fell asleep without showering and woke already exhausted, doomed to another day just like the last, and how was he supposed to have any energy left for a four-year-old? Had Esme thought of that before she left, he wondered-that he might not be able to keep it together? No doubt his steadiness had misled her into thinking it was safe to leave, and when he remembered how reliable and fond and funny and tolerant he had been, anger slanted murderously through his body; and it was like anger practiced on him, got better and better at leaving him with shaking hands and a dilated sense of hatred with no nearby object; and he began to be very, very careful not to be alone with his little boy.

Dylan understood this. After nightmares he did not try his dad’s room, right next to his, but padded his way through the dark house up the narrow flight of stairs to the bedroom, where he slid in between Sean and Daisy. More than once his cold bare feet made accidental contact with Sean’s genitals, and Sean had to capture the feet and guide them away. This left him irritably awake, needing to make the long trip to the bathroom downstairs, and when he returned the boy was still restless and Sean watched him wind a hand into Daisy’s long hair and rub it against his cheek until he could sleep. Worse than jealousy was the affront to Sean’s self-regard in feeling so contemptible an emotion. This was a scared little boy, this was his tight hold on safety, this was his grandfather standing by the side of the bed looking meanly down. Protectiveness toward his own flesh and blood had always been Sean’s ruling principle, and if that went wrong he didn’t know who he was anymore. He rose to dress for work one chilly 6:00 a.m. and noticed the amateur tattoos running cruelly down the boy’s arm. Had an older kid got hold of him somehow, was this some kind of weird abuse, why hadn’t he come running to his grandfather? Sean bent close to decipher the trail of descending letters. I LOVE YOU. Not another kid, then. Not abuse. But wasn’t that bad for him, wouldn’t the ink’s toxins be absorbed through his skin, didn’t she think that was going a little too far, inscribing her love on the boy while he did what-held his arm out bravely? Time, past time, for Sean to try to talk to Daisy, to suggest that day care would be a good idea, or a playgroup where the boy could meet other kids. When Daisy was tired or wanted time to herself she left the boy alone with the remote, and once Sean walked in on the boy sitting cross-legged while on the screen a serial killer wrapped body parts in plastic, and how could you talk to a child after that, what could you tell him that could explain that away? All right, they could do better. He supposed most people could do better by their kids. Maybe her judgment in taking a pen to the boy’s arm wasn’t perfect, but was it such a bad thing to have love inscribed on your skin, whoever you were? Half the world was dying for want of that. If Daisy adored this boy Sean could live with that. More than live with it: he admired it. He admired her for being willing to begin again when she knew how it could end.

Maybe Victor’s mood would have benefited from confrontation-a kitchen-table sit-down where, with cups of reheated coffee to warm their hands, father and son could try to get at the root of the problem-but envisioning his own well-meaning heavy-heartedness and guessing that Victor would take offense, Sean was inclined to ignore his son’s depression. In most cases, within a family, there was wisdom in holding one’s tongue. Except for one thing: Victor could, if he concluded his chances were better elsewhere, take the boy with him when he left. This gave a precarious tilt to their household, an instability whose source was, really, Victor’s fondness for appearing wronged. He came home with elaborate tales of affronts he had suffered, but Sean knew the foreman and doubted any unfairness had been shown Victor. When Victor needed to vent, Sean steered clear and Daisy, rather than voicing her true opinion-that it was time he got over Esme-calmly heard him out. Victor could ruin his mother’s peace of mind by ranting at the unbelievable fucking hopelessness of this fucking dead-end town, voice so peeved and fanatical in its recounting of injustice that Sean, frowning across the dinner table, thought he must know how ridiculous he sounded, how almost crazy, but Victor kept on: he was only waiting for the day when the mill closed down for good and he could pack up his kid and his shit and get out. What were they, blind? Couldn’t they see he had no life? Did they think he could take this another fucking day? From his chair near his dad Dylan said, “Are we going away?”

“No, baby boy, you’re not going anywhere,” said Sean, at which Victor did the unthinkable, pulling out the gun tucked into the back of his jeans and setting it with a chime on his dinner plate and saying, “Then maybe this is what I should eat.” Daisy said, “Sean,” wanting him to do something, but before he could Victor pushed the plate across the table to him and said, “No, no, no, all right, I’m sorry, that was in front of the kid, that’s taking it too far, I know I know I know, don’t ask me if I meant it because you know I don’t but I swear to god, Dad, some days it crosses my mind. But I won’t. I never will.” Gently he cupped his boy’s head. “I’m sorry to have scared you, Dyl. Daddy got carried away.”

“I want that gun out of the house,” Daisy said. Sean had gone out into the starry night and folded the passenger seat of his truck forward and tucked the gun into the old parka he kept there. In bed that night Daisy turned to him, maybe needing to feel that something was still right in their life, and while he understood the impulse and even shared it, he found he was picturing Esme’s pointed chin, her head thrown back, her urchin hair fanned out across a filthy mattress in the woods, an image so wrong and good he couldn’t stop breathing life into it, the visitation no longer blissfully involuntary but nursed along, fed with details; the childish lift of her upper lip as she picked at the gift-box ribbon came to him, the imagined grace of her pale body against the filthy mattress, her arms stretched overhead, her profile clean against the ropy twists of dirty hair, no she wouldn’t look, she wouldn’t look and he came without warning, Daisy far enough gone that momentum rocked her farther, Sean relieved when she managed the trick that mostly eluded her while also, in some far-back, disownable part of his mind, judging her climax too naked, too needful, and at the same time impersonal, since she had no idea where he was in his head, and this, her greedy solitary capacity, bothered him. In the slowed-down aftermath when their habit was to roll apart and stretch frankly and begin to talk about whatever came to mind, a brief spell, an island whose sanctity they understood, where they were truly, idly, themselves, their true selves, the secret selves only they recognized in each other, she didn’t move or speak and he continued to lie on her worrying that he was growing heavier and heavier, her panting exaggerated as if to communicate the extremity of her pleasure, and for a sorry couple of minutes he hated her. There was something offensive in her unawareness of his faithlessness. If he was faithless even in his mind he wanted it to matter and it couldn’t matter unless she could intuit it and hold him accountable and by exerting herself against him, as she had a right to, make him want to come all the way back to her. That was up to her. If she couldn’t do it then he might continue to be bewilderingly alone and even slightly, weirdly in love with the lost girl Esme, indefensible as that was, and astounding. Daisy squirmed companionably out from under, turned on her side, a hand below her cheek, the crook of her other arm bracing her breasts, the light of her eyes, the creases at the corners of her smile confiding, genuine, her goodness obvious, the goodness at the heart of his world, the expression on his face god knows what, but by her considering stillness she was working up to a revelation. With Daisy sex sometimes turned the keys of the secretest locks and he could never guess what was coming, since years and decades of wrongs and sorrows awaited confession, and even now, having loved her for twenty years, he could be surprised by some small flatly told story of some terrible thing that had happened when she was a kid. Damage did that, went in so deep it took long years to surface. Tonight he had no inclination to be trusted, but could hardly stop her. “This thing’s sort of been happening. Maybe four or five times? This thing of the phone ringing and no one being there. ‘Hello.’ ” The hello was hers. “And no answer. And ‘Hello.’ And no answer. Somebody there, though. Somebody there.”

Such a relief not to have to travel again through the charred landscape of her childhood that he almost yawned. “Kids. Messing around.”

“No,” she said. “Her.” His frown must have been puzzled because she said, “Esme.”

“Esme.”

“Don’t believe me then but I’m right, it was her and the last time she called I said, ‘Listen to me. Are you listening?’ and there was no answer and I said, ‘Never come back.’ I didn’t know that was about to come out of my mouth, I was probably more surprised than she was. ‘Never come back.’ ”

“And then what?”

“And then she hung up.” She scratched one foot with the toes of the other. “And that’s not like me. And I didn’t have any right, did I?” Rueful smile. “If I’d said, ‘Honey, where are you? Are you in trouble?’ that would have been like me, right? And maybe she would have told me, maybe something is wrong and that girl has nowhere else to turn. She’s the kind of girl there’s not just one filthy mattress in the woods in her life, not just one fantastic fuckup, but last time she was lucky and found us, and we let her come live in our house, and we loved her, I think-did we love her?-and I think if things got bad enough for her she’d think of us and remember we were good to her, weren’t we good to her?”

“Yes.”

“Yes and now it’s like I’m waiting for her to call again. Or turn up. I think that’s next. She’ll turn up. And I don’t want her to. I never want to see that girl’s face again.”

He couldn’t summon the energy for I’m sure it wasn’t her, even if that was probably true. He could also have accepted Daisy’s irrational conviction and addressed it with his usual calm. Of course you’re angry. Irresponsible, not just to her little boy, but to us who took her in, who cared about her-she left without a word. It’s natural to be angry.

He lay there withholding the consolation that was his part in this back-and-forth until she turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

I made a serious mistake with Esme once. Gave her a bracelet. If he could have said that. If he could have found a way to begin.

Dent Figueredo wasn’t someone Sean thought of as a friend, but this sweet May evening they were alone in the Tip-Top, door open to the street alive with sparrow song and redolent of asphalt cooling in newly patched potholes, Dent behind the bar, Sean on his barstool thinking about taxes, paying no attention until he heard “I want your take on this.”

“My take.”

“You’re smart about women.”

Women? But Sean nodded, and when that didn’t seem to be enough, he said, “Hit me.”

“See first of all despite her quote flawless English she utters barely a word in the airport, just looks at me like I saved her life, which you’d think I would be a sucker for but no, I’m praying get me out of this, ready to turn the truck around and put her on the next flight home, and like she knows what I’m on the verge of she unbuckles and slides over and you know Highway Twenty twists and turns like a snake on glass, I never felt that trapped before in my life, just because this itty-bitty girl has hold of my dick through my trousers and you know she’s never done that before and I should’ve known that at this late date I’m not good husband material, should have lived with that but no, I had to get melty when I seen her doe-eyed picture on the Internet. Shit.”

“Husband material.”

“What you got to promise if you want a nice Filipina girl,” Dent said. “She’s some kind of born-again. Dressed like a little nun, baggy skirt and these flat black worn-out shoes. No makeup. Won’t hold your eye.” When he catches Sean’s eye he looks down and away, smiling, this imitation of girly freshness at odds with Dent’s bald sunspotted pate and the patch of silvery whiskers he missed on his Adam’s apple, and Sean can’t help laughing.

“What happens to her now?”

“Stories she tells, shit, curl your hair.” Dent used his glass to print circles of wet on the bar. “America still looks good to a lot of the world, I tell you.” He crouched to the refrigerator with his crippled leg stuck out behind. “She’s staying in my house till I can figure out what comes next, and you should see the place, neat as a picture in a magazine. Hard little worker, I give her that. If any of my boys was unmarried I’d drag him to the altar by the scruff of his neck.” He levered open his beer, raising it politely. Sean shook his head. “Course before long,” Dent continued, “one of them boys will shake loose.”

“Meanwhile where does she sleep, this paragon?”

“Nah, Filipina.”

“And you two, have you been-?”

“Ming. Cute, huh?” Dent drank from the bottle before pouring into his glass.

“Took the upstairs room for her own, cleared out years of boy shit. Jesus won’t let nobody near her till there’s a ring on her finger. Twenty-two and looks fifteen. That’s the undernourishment.”

When, sitting down to dinner that night, Sean told Daisy about the girl, she said, “You’re kidding,” and made him tell the entire story again, then said, amused, “Poor thing. You know he lied to her. And do you think he ever sent his picture? He’s, what, a poorly preserved sixty, a drinker, a smoker, hobbling around on that leg and he talks this child into leaving her home and her family and now he won’t do the right thing?”

“He’d never seen her till she got off the plane. I think his lack of any feeling for her came as a shock. And in his defense he is leaving her alone.”

“Of course he’s terrified of any constraint on his drinking. Dylan Raymond, we are waiting for your father.”

Dylan put down the green bean he was trailing through his gravy and said, “Why?”

“Yeah, I think that’s maybe more to the point. Because she’s a born-again, and might start in on him.”

“Is she pretty?”

“He says she has drawbacks.” He bared his teeth. “Primitive dental care.”

“Oh and he’s George Clooney.”

“But she’s sweet, he says,” Sean said, prolonging his bared-teeth smile. “Good-natured.”

Victor came to the table then in his signature ragged black T-shirt and jeans, his pale workingman’s feet-which never saw the sun-bare, dark hair still dripping wet, and he stood behind Dylan, kneading the boy’s shoulders. “Who’re we talking about?” he wanted to know.

“My mom is pretty,” Dylan announced, then waited with an air of uncertainty and daring-the kid who’s said something provocative in the hope the adults will get into the forbidden subject. Victor could conceivably say, “What mom?” He could conceivably say, “You wouldn’t know your mom if you passed her in the street.” He could conceivably say, “That bitch.” Sean knew Victor to be capable of any or all of these remarks, and was relieved when Victor calmly continued to rub the boy’s shoulders. Not answering was fine, given the alternatives. When Dylan began drawing in his gravy with the green bean again, his head down, he inscribed circles like those his dad was rubbing into his shoulders, in the same rhythm. How does he understand his mother’s absence? Sean wondered. Surely it’s hard for him that his father never mentions his mother, worrisome that nobody can say where she’s gone. Daisy has not made up any tale justifying Esme’s desertion. Sean understood the attraction of lying consolation; he felt it himself. The boy’s relief would have been worth almost any falsehood, but Daisy had insisted that they stick with what they knew, which was virtually nothing. Daisy said, “Yes, your mother is pretty,” with a sidelong glance at Victor to make sure this didn’t prompt meanness from him.

Victor changed the subject: “Who were you saying was sweet?”

Ming had no demure, closed-mouth smile, as he’d expected from an Asian girl, but a wide, flashing laugh whose shamelessness disturbed Victor, for her small teeth were separated by touching gaps, the teeth themselves incongruously short, like pegs driven hastily into the ground. The decided sweetness of her manner almost countered the daredevilish, imbecile impression made by those teeth. Seated on a slab of rock at the beach, he peeled off his socks. Flatteringly, Ming had dressed for their date-not only a dress, stockings, and high heels-while he had worn jeans and his favorite frayed black T-shirt, but he figured this was all right, she would know from movies that American men complained about ties and jackets. Ming’s poise as she stood one-legged, peeling the stocking from her sandy foot, was very pretty, and the wind wrapped her dress-navy blue printed with flying white petals-tightly around her thighs and little round butt. Her panty hose were rolled up and tucked into a shoe, her shoes wedged into a crevice of the rock. In the restaurant earlier Victor had observed her table manners and found them wanting. It wasn’t so much that she made overt mistakes as that she wasn’t allowing for the grace-note pauses and frequent diversions-a smile, a little conversation-with which food is properly addressed in public, but chewed steadily with her little fox teeth. Her style overall began to seem quick and unfastidious and he was curious about what that would translate to in bed. He had been trying not to think about that because he knew from what Dent had said-first to his dad and then, when Victor called, to Victor himself-that she was a virgin, and it seemed wrong to try to guess what she would be like, sexually, when the only right way of perceiving her was as a semi-sacred blank slate. Respect, protectiveness: he liked having these feelings as he slouched against the rock, the wind bothering his hair, the bare-legged woman turning to find him smiling, smiling in return. There: the unlucky teeth. Guess what, she’s human. He jumped from the rock and took her hand and they walked down the beach.

For nearly a year Victor was happier than his parents had ever known him to be, even after he was laid off from the mill for the winter. Not the time you’d want to get pregnant, but Ming did, and when she miscarried at five months, they both took it hard. “She won’t get out of bed, Dad,” Victor confided in a late-night call. “Won’t eat, either.” After work the next day Sean decided to swing by their place, a one-story clapboard cottage that suited the newlyweds fine except that it didn’t have much of a yard and lacked a second bedroom for Dylan; all agreed the boy should continue living at his grandparents’. Two birds with one stone, in Sean’s view. Not only was the continuity good for Dylan, but once she saw she wasn’t going to have to negotiate for control of the boy, Daisy was free to be a kind, unintrusive mother-in-law. Privately, Sean has all along believed he is better than the other two at relating to Ming. To Daisy, Ming was the odd small immigrant solution to the riddle of Victor, the girl who had supper waiting when he got home, who considered his paycheck a prince’s ransom, who tugged off his boots for him when he was tired. The miscarriage was a blow but such things happened. Ming was sturdy and would get over it. Basically Daisy was only so interested in anyone other than Dylan, and Victor-well, could you count on Victor to bring a person flowers to cheer her up? Or ice cream? Even if Ming won’t eat anything else she might try a little of the mint chocolate-chip she loves. Safeway is near their cottage, so Sean swings into the parking lot and strides in, wandering around in the slightly theatrical male confusion that says My wife usually does all this before finding what he wants, remembering Daisy had said they were out of greens, deciding on a six-pack of beer, too, craving a box of cigarettes when it was time to pay, that habit kicked decades ago, its urgency a symptom of his sadness about the lost baby, and bizarrely, ridiculously, he was standing in the checkout line with tears in his eyes, recognizing only then that the girl thrusting Ming’s roses into the bag was Esme.

She seemed to have been trying not to catch his attention, and he wondered if she had been hoping against hope he would conclude his business and walk out without ever having noticed her. She could reasonably hope for that, he supposed: a job like hers could teach you that the vast majority of people walked through their lives unseeing. The checker was hastening the next lot of groceries down the conveyor belt, loaves of bread and boxes of cereal borne toward Esme as Sean hoisted his bags and said, “So you’re back.”

“Not for long.”

“Not staying long, or you haven’t been back long?”

Over his shoulder, to the next person: “Paper or plastic.”

“You’re staying with your sister?”

None of his business, her look said.

The woman behind squeezed past Sean to claim her bag, frowning at him for the inconvenience-no, he realized, she was frowning because she thought he was bothering Esme, who scratched at her wrist, then twisted a silver bracelet around, the bracelet, part of her repertoire of nervous gestures, because this was Esme, fidgeting, resentful, scared-smiling to cover it up but construing the mildest gestures or words as slights, taking offense with breathtaking swiftness and leaving you no way to remedy the situation. In the face of such fantastical touchiness, gracefulness became an implausible virtue-quaint, like chastity. Nonetheless he tried: “Come to see Dylan.”

“Paper or plastic.”

“He wonders about you, you know.”

“Plastic.”

To Sean, who had edged out of the aisle and stood holding his bags, she said wretchedly, “Does he?”

Sean said, though it was far from the case, “No one holds anything against you. He needs you. He’s five years old.”

“I know how old he is,” she said. “I do.”

“Or I could bring him by if that’s easier.”

Abruptly she stopped bagging groceries and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyelids. It was as if she’d temporarily broken with the world and was retreating to the deepest sanctuary possible in such a place. It was as if she despaired. He was sorry to have been a contributing factor, sorry to be among those she couldn’t make disappear; at the same time he felt formidably in the right, and as if he was about to prevail-to cut through her fears and evasiveness and self-loathing heedlessness to the brilliant revelation, from Esme to herself, of mother love, a recognition she would never be able to go back on, which would steady her and bring her to her senses and leave her grateful for the change that had begun right here and now in the checkout line at Safeway. Because lives had to change unglamorously and for the better. Because he had found her.

“Would you really do that?” Esme said.

“Yeah, I’d do that.”

She tore a scrap from the edge of the bag she was filling, reached past the glaring cashier for a pen from the cup by the register, scribbled, and handed Sean the leaf of brown paper, which he had to hunt for, the next day, when it came time to call her, worrying that he’d lost it, finding it, finally, tucked far down into the pocket of the work pants he’d been wearing, but Esme wasn’t there and instead he got her sister, who told him Esme would be home from work at five. Sarah was this one’s name, he remembered. “You know, she said you were really nice. Kind. So I want to thank you. She might not tell you this herself but I know she can’t wait to see the little guy. Me, too.” Fine, they would come by around six. Sean hadn’t yet broken the news of Esme’s return to Daisy, much less Victor, partly for his own sake, because he wanted to conserve the energy needed to deal with Daisy’s inevitable fretting and Victor’s righteous anger, partly for Dylan, because he wanted the boy to meet his mother again in a relatively quiet, relatively sane atmosphere, without a lot of fireworks going off, without anyone’s suggesting maybe it wasn’t the best thing for the boy to spend time with a mother so irresponsible. Was there, in this secrecy, the flicker of another motive? Something like wanting to keep her to himself. Sean, driving, shook his head at this insight, and beside him Dylan asked, “Am I going to live with her now?”

“Honey, no, this is just for a little while, for you guys to see each other. You know what a visit is, right? And how it’s different from live with? You live with us. You are going to visit your mom for a couple of hours. Meaning you go home after. With me. I come get you.”

“What color is her hair?”

“Don’t you remember? Her hair is black. Like-.” He felt foolish when all he could come up with was “-well, not like any of ours.”

“Not like mine.”

“No, yours is brown.” Sean tried to think what else Dylan wouldn’t remember. “Your mom has a sister, a twin, meaning they look just alike and that’ll be a little strange for you maybe, but you’ll get used to it, and this sister, see, is your aunt Sarah, and this’s your aunt’s house I’m taking you to. Because your mom is staying there. With her sister.”

Too much news for sure, and for the rest of the brief drive Dylan sucked his thumb as he hadn’t for years, but Sean didn’t reprimand him, just parked the truck so the two of them could study the one-story white clapboard house with the scruffy yard where a bicycle had lain on its side long enough that spears of iris had grown up through its spokes. If this had been an ordinary outing, Sean would have explained, “They built all these little houses on the west side for workers in the mill, and they don’t look like much maybe but they’re nice inside and the men were allowed to take home seconds from the mill and they made some beautiful cabinets in their kitchens,” because he likes telling the boy bits of the history of his hometown, but he kept that lore to himself and when the boy seemed ready they climbed the front porch steps together and stood before the door. “You want to knock or should I?”

“You.”

Sean used his knuckles, three light raps, and then Esme was saying through the screen to Dylan, “Hey you,” smiling her pained childish smile, and Dylan couldn’t help himself, he was hers, Sean saw, instantly, gloriously hers because she’d smiled and said two words. She held the door ajar and Dylan went past her into the house and he never did things like that-he was shy.

“Coming in?”

“I’ll leave you two alone. To get-” Reacquainted would strike her as a reproach, maybe. “So you can have some time to yourselves. Just tell me when to come for him and I’ll be back.” He paused. “His bedtime’s eight o’clock and it would be good if I got him home before that.” In case he needs some settling down. Sean doesn’t say that, or think about how he’s going to keep the boy from telling his grandmother where he’s been, but he’ll find a way, some small bribe that will soothe the boy’s need to tell all.

“Not even two hours,” she said.

“It’s not a great idea to feed him a lot of sugar or anything, ’cause then he gets kind of wired.”

“I wasn’t going to,” she said. “I know how he is.”

“It would only be natural if you wanted to give him a treat or something.”

“To worm my way back into his affections.”

“Not what I meant.”

In her agitation she gave her wrist a punishing twist-no, she was fooling with the silver bracelet, and he suffered an emotion bruising but minor, too fleeting or odd, maybe, ever to have been named, nostalgia for a miserably wrongheaded sexual attraction. Not regret. He had repented for giving her the bracelet by bringing her kid to her. Had that really been his reason? He repeated, “Not what I meant.”

“So maybe you won’t believe this, I can see why you wouldn’t, but I wanted to see him so bad. Only I thought you-all would for sure say no. Blame me. Not, you know, trust me. And instead you’ve made it easy for me and I never expected that and I don’t know how to thank you, Sean, I don’t, but this means everything to me, it’s kind of saving my life. It’s really basically saving my life.” Running the sentences together, so unaccustomed was she to honesty, afraid, maybe, of the feeling of honesty, scary if you weren’t used to it, and Sean reached out to lay a finger on her lips, ancient honorable gesture for hush now, no further explanation was necessary, he got it that to see your child again was like having your life saved, he would have felt the same way in her shoes but also chastened and rebellious confronting someone like him who was doing the real work, constantly and reliably there for the boy, and he wanted to convey the fact that none of this mattered if she was here and could give the boy a little of what he needed, a sense of his mother: but now it was Sean who was inarticulate, moved by the girl softness of her mouth, Sean whose finger rested against her lips until she jerked her head back and he was blistered by shame, the burden of impossible apology and regret shifting from her shoulders to his. He waited for her to say something direct and blaming, scathing, memorable, and when she did not he was relieved. But he wasn’t fooled, either. She knew exactly what had happened and where it left them. This girl believed she now had the upper hand, but must use her leverage tactfully, however unlike her that was, if he was not to instantly deny what had taken place. What he understood was that he was in trouble here, but that she was going to collude with him because, basically, he could give her more of what she wanted. The child. His agreement was necessary for her to continue secretly seeing the child. And Sean did not know how to set any of this right, only that he needed to keep his voice down and not do any further harm-not scowl in dismay or do anything else she could construe as a sign of problems to come. He told her, “Seven-thirty then, okay? See you at seven-thirty,” and she said in a voice in no way remarkable, “We’ll be here.”

But they were not. “She has rights,” Sarah told Sean, who was in her kitchen, in a rickety chair she had pulled away from the table, saying, “She has rights,” saying now, “It’s wrong for him to be kept from his mother the way you-all have done.”

For some reason, when she’d pulled the chair out for him, he’d taken it and turned it around and straddled it. Maybe he had needed to act, to take control of something, if only the chair. This is her sister-or closer than sister, twin-and he keeps his voice down. “Ask yourself why I brought him by. I’m her best friend in this mess, but what she’s done is damage her own cause. This isn’t gonna look good.”

“To who?”

“Do you know where she’s going?”

“To who won’t it look good?”

Trailer trash, Daisy called the sisters once. “The thing is to make this right without having anybody else get involved.”

“You’re threatening me.”

“I’m the opposite of threatening you. I’m saying let’s work this out ourselves. You tell me where she’s gone and I find her and we work it out like reasonable people and there’s no need for anybody else to know she abducted a five-year-old child.”

“A five-year-old. You-all opened your door and what’s in this basket? A cute little baby! She wasn’t in labor eighteen hours. She never chipped a tooth from clenching or left claw marks on my hand. Tell me you ever even really knew she was in the house. Tell me you ever once really talked to her. Victor hit her upside the head so hard the ringing in her ear lasted a week. Do you know he said he’d kill her if she tried to leave? It was my four thousand dollars. So she ran, you know, she took the money and she ran and there was never any phone call and it kept me up a lot of nights. It wasn’t the money, it was not knowing she was all right-they say twins know that but I didn’t, not till I saw her again. And I never saw her look at anyone like she looks at that little boy when he says I want to stay with you and it’s not like she planned this but after that how was she going to let him go? I’m not saying she makes great choices but you were unrealistic thinking she could give him back.”

The chair wobbled as he crossed his arms on its backrest. “Maybe so. She and I need to talk about that. Work out what’s best for all concerned.”

“It sounds so reasonable when you say it.”

“I am reasonable.” He smiles. “Families need to work these things out.”

“Now you’re family.”

“Like it or not.” Still smiling.

Sarah gave in. Esme was driving north toward Arcata to go to college there. “None of you thought she was good enough for college.”

An outright lie but he let it go. “How long ago did they take off?”

“Not long. She had to get her stuff. She was just throwing things into the car. Dylan helped. Laughing like they were both little kids.” He continued to look at her. “Mmm. Twenty minutes ago maybe.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know kinds of cars.” He won’t look away. “Smallish. A Toyota maybe. Green maybe.” Not smiling now: he needs her to get this right. “Yeah. Green. A bumper sticker. Stop fucking something up. That really narrows it down, hunh. Trees. ‘Stop Killing Ancient Trees.’ Trees are her thing.”

“You’re sure about Arcata.”

“See, she’s wanted that for years, an apartment and classes and her little boy with her. Botany. Redwoods, really. Did you know that about her? She loves redwoods and there’s this guy there who’s famous, like the guy if you want to study redwoods, and she met him, and she might be going to be his research assistant this summer. She said-” But she’d told him what he needed to know and he was out the door. Lucky that it was north, the two-lane highway looping through the woods without a single exit for sixty miles and few places to pull over, lucky that after dark nobody drives this road but locals and not many of those. As long as he checks every pull-off carefully and doesn’t overshoot her then it comes down to how fast he can drive, each curve with its silver-gray monoliths stepping forward while their sudden shadows revolve through the woods behind, the ellipse of shadow-swerve the mirror image of his curve, evergreen air through the window, no oncoming lights, which is just as well given his recklessness, the rage he can admit now he’s alone, the desire just to get his hands on her, the searing passage of his brights through the woods like the light of his mind gathered and concentrated into swift hunting intelligence that touches and assesses and passes on because its exclusive object is her. At this speed it’s inevitable he will overtake her-nobody drives this road like this-but now he’s bolted past a likely spot, a scruffy rutted crescent rimmed with trees tall enough to shade it from moonlight: there. He brakes and runs the truck backward onto the shoulder, passing an abandoned car whose color, in the darkness, can’t be discerned, and pulling in behind he reads STOP KILLING ANCIENT TREES. Such fury, such concentration, and he almost missed it. An empty car. Here is his fear: that she has arranged to meet someone. That Sarah was lied to, and Arcata was a fable, and there’s a guy in this somewhere, and she told him she would go away with him if she could get her kid. Nobody to be seen but when he gets out in the moonlight it was as if the air around Sean was sparkling, as if electricity flashed from his skin and glittered at the forest, as if he could convey menace even to a stone. When he checked in the backseat there was the boy curled up, sleeping in his little T-shirt and underpants with nothing over him, no blanket, not even an old sweater or jacket, and cracking the door open-its rusty hinges alarming the woods-Sean ducks into a cave of deepest oldest life-tenderness and takes the child in his arms and leans out loving the weight of him and the shampoo smell of his mussed hair. He sets him down barefoot and blinking, his underpants a triangular patch of whiteness in the moonlight, the boy as shy as if it was he who’d run away, keeping a fearful arm’s length from Sean, and when Sean says, “Where’s your mom?” blinking again, seeming not to trust Sean, confused and on the brink of tears and there’s no time for that. That was for later. “Get in the truck,” he tells the boy, “and I don’t want you coming out no matter what. Your job is to stay in the truck and I don’t want you getting out of that truck for any damn reason whatsoever, do you understand me?”

“I have to pee.”

“Come on then.”

Watching from behind Sean feels the usual solicitude at the boy’s wide-legged stance. Dry weeds crackle.

“She had to go pee in the woods,” he said. Solemnly: “My mom did, in the woods.”

That was a new one to the boy.

Sean said, “What happened to your clothes?”

“I threw up and she made me take ’em off and throw ’em out the window cause the smell was making her sick too.”

“All right, now you get in my truck and you stay in the truck. What did I just say?”

“Stay in the truck.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Stay in the truck.”

He has to boost the shivering boy up to the high seat. Sean takes the flashlight from the glove box and checks to make sure the keys are in his pocket. He gestures for Dylan to push the lock down, first on the passenger side, then, leaning across, on the driver’s. Sean nods through the window but the boy only wraps his arms around himself and twists his bare legs together, and Sean remembers the old parka stuffed down behind his seat and gestures for the boy to unlock again and leans in and says, “Look behind the seat and there’s a jacket you can put on,” and his flash frames twigs and brambles in sliding ovals of ghost light, stroking the dark edge of the woods, finding the deer trail she must have followed. By now she had to be aware that he was coming in after her, and he took the shimmer of his own agitation to mean she was scared, and somehow this was intolerable, that she would be scared of him, that she would not simply walk out of the woods and face him. That he is in her mind not a good man, a kind man, but instead the punisher she has always believed would come after her, and whether he wanted to cause fear or didn’t want to scarcely mattered since that role was carved out ahead of him, narrow as this trail: coming into the woods after her he can’t be a good man. He can’t remember the last time he felt this kindled and all-over passionate, supple and brilliant, murderously good, and when his flash discovered her she was already running, but it took only two long strides to catch her. She broke her fall with her hands but before she could twist over onto her back he had her pinned. If she could have turned and they could have seen each other it might have calmed them both down but this way, with her back under his chest, his mouth by her ear, he was talking right to her fear-lit brain and what he said would be permanent and he felt the exhilaration of being about to drive the truth home to her, and he said What is the matter with you and then You took my kid and she said He’s not your kid and he said My flesh and blood and they both waited for what she would say next to find out whether she had come to the end of defiance but she hadn’t. If you take him away I’ll just come back. Even now she could have eased them back from this brink if she had shown a little remorse and he was sorry she hadn’t and said What do I need to do to get through to you. She thrashed as he rolled her over and her fist caught the flashlight, sending light hopping away across the ground. In the refreshed darkness he reached for her neck and she was screaming his name as his hands tightened to shut off her voice. Where his flashlight had rolled to a halt a cluster of hooded mushrooms stood up in awed distinctness like tiny watchers. When she clawed at his face he seized her wrists and heard twigs breaking under her as she twisted. The twining silver bracelet imprinted itself on his palm: he could feel that, and it was enough to bring him to himself, but she did not let up, raking at his throat when he reared back, and now her despairing Fuck you fuck you fuck you assailed him, its echo bandied about through the woods until feeling her wrath slacken from exhaustion he rolled from her so she would know it was over and they fell quiet except for their ragged breathing, which made them what neither wanted to be, a pair, and as he sat up something nicked the back of his skull in its flight, frisking through his hair, an electrifying noncontact that sang through his skull to the roots of his teeth and the retort cracked through the woods and there was the boy, five feet away, holding the gun with his legs braced wide apart. Behind him rose a fountain of sword ferns taller than he was. “Don’t shoot,” she said. “Listen to me, Dyl, don’t shoot the gun again, okay? You need to put it down now.”

He turned to Sean then to see how bad it was, what he had done, and in staring back at him Sean could feel by the contracted tensions of his face that it was a wrecked mask of disbelief and no reassurance whatsoever to the boy.

“It was a accident,” the boy said. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”

“Just you kneel down and put it on the ground,” she said. “In the leaves-yes, just like that. That was good.”

“It was a accident.”

“Sweetie, I know it was.” She sat up. With her face averted she said to Sean, “It could have been either of us. Did it nick you? Are you bleeding?”

He felt through his hair and held his hand out and they both looked: a perfect unbloodied hand stared back at them.

“A fraction of an inch,” he said in a voice soft as hers had been: conspirators. “I left the damn gun in the car. Fuck, I never even checked the safety, I was so sure it wasn’t loaded. It would’ve been my fault and he’d’ve had to live with it forever.”

“He doesn’t have to live with it now,” she said. “Or with you.”

She was on her feet, collecting the flashlight, and playing through the sapling audience the light paused and she said, “Jesus,” and he turned to look behind him at a young tan oak whose dove-gray bark was gashed in sharp white.

She turned from him. She told the boy, “It’s okay. Look at my eyes, Dylan. Nobody’s hurt. You see that, don’t you? Nobody got hurt.”

“You did,” he said.

“Baby, I’m not hurt. Pawpaw didn’t hurt me, and you know what? We’re getting out of here. You’re coming with me.”

Dylan looked down at the gun and she said, “No, leave it.” Then changed her mind. “I’m taking it,” she told Sean, “because that’s wisest, isn’t it.”

“You can’t think that,” Sean said.

“Tell me you’re okay to be left,” she said.

“A little stunned is all.”

“That’s three of us then.”

Dylan was staring at him and Sean collected his wits to say clearly, “You know what a near-miss is, don’t you, Dyl? Close but not quite? That bullet came pretty close but I’m what you call unscathed. Which means fine. Are you hearing me say it didn’t hurt me? Nod your head so I’m sure you understand.” The boy nodded. “We’re good then, right? You can see I’m good.” The boy nodded.

Esme said, “We need to go, Dylan. Look at you. You’re shivering.”

“Where are we going?”

“Far away from here, and don’t worry, it’s all right if we go. Tell him now that we can go.”

This was meant for Sean, and they watched as he took the full measure of what he had done and how little chance there was of her heeding what he said now: “Don’t disappear with him, Esme. Don’t take him away forever because of tonight. From now on my life will be one long trying to make this right to you. For him, too. Don’t keep him away. My life spent making up for this. I need you to believe me. I can make this right.”

“I want to believe you,” she said. “I almost want to believe you.”

Before he could think how to begin to answer that the mother and child were gone.

He knew enough not to go after them. He knew enough not to go after them yet.