It had been hard enough living without him. Susan told herself to doubt. This was a trick. She now stood four feet from her son. She felt both snow-blind and some midget-child herself. She’d never felt so short till finding she might brag about her boy this size. He handed the rattling box down, out, over to her. “It’s candy. I don’t know if . . . but just thought . . .”
She’d need no swab, no wait for DNA results. Her womb, his source, contracted, simplest creature recognition. His rich voice had a slight burr in it. That thrum set off a code only her marrow knew. Her head recognized him last.
“Hello” seemed ludicrous but she’d just said it.
• • •
THE SKIRT WAS tan-poplin, carpooling-comfortable but never meant for guests. Her blouse white Egyptian cotton, washed safe-feeling. She wore no makeup, hair just hanging loose. Barefoot, she felt unprepared for any company, especially his. Susan floated just above the scene as when she first rose to address an audience. This let her notice her own heart’s pounding; she could look down and observe a collection of Chekhov stories resting open in her right hand. One red foil heart fourteen inches wide weighed her left. She managed to set both onto the foyer’s yellow bench. It struck her that she had just been searching in that book for something. And here Michael was.
Nineteen years she had imagined. But never once had she made ready. How could a person? He walked right up to her in this cool tiled front hall. His eyes were a blue too primary. He simply stared. So near, he reacted as you might to your first ghost. No, to the first non-ghost ever encountered after a life among just those.
She could see his shivering. It struck her as pitiful but made him look less dangerous. Outdoors he’d appeared some gigantic he-cat puma. His shoulders looked bulked-up too suddenly. But, nearer, his face had kept a surface simple as a boy’s. He, being ten inches taller and looking down, couldn’t help hovering. But his pink mouth still hung open like some child’s, fearing punishment.
So much emotion was finding then leaving them both, they each appeared half-paralyzed. At last, the young man simply smiled at her. When he did, saliva popped, white teeth showed with a single audible snap. His force registered against her front side with the crack of whiplash.
His voice steadied. He explained she was more beautiful even than he’d hoped. “I’m not beautiful,” she said. “I’m not stupid but I’m not beautiful.”
“Susan? This is just . . . like . . . I don’t even know what . . .”
He turned aside. She wanted to hush him; she could not risk his being an idiot, however fine he looked. He now admitted sideways to the air, “I made up a speech. It won’t probably be as good as in the car, but . . .” He shifted now, determined.
“I guess you were fourteen when we met. I mean when we were first together. I’m not but five years older now than you were then. I think some man forced you to. (Part of me thinks it was that doctor, the boat driver.) Some way I know he got you to, during all that confusion after your dad’s getting killed. No fair. And my guess’d be, just happened the once. Bad luck, but I stayed on there, to remind everyone. Bad luck . . . for you. Then your mom took even that away. They robbed us, Susan.
“At least I get to be with you this once. Without the Internet it couldn’t have happened. The people that adopted me? good folks but simple, real religious. It was a farm. They worked me pretty good. They did save up to buy me a Mac for my sixteenth. I’d been begging them, see. Said it was for school. Of course, first thing I did with it was try and leave them by hoping to find you! Not real nice of me, I know. But, since nine months before I even got myself born, seems I’ve spent my main time waiting to meet you.”
Came a pause.
• • •
SHE LONGED TO stop him. Susan pictured him rehearsing this talk while driving the jalopy down from God knows where. Still she must let him finish. Michael had come so far through time and space to have his say.
“My plans are . . . this. Funny, but m’plans? all seem to end right here. Finding you has not been super-easy, ma’am. Everything was like you said, triple-coded. Firewalls back of firewalls. A few months ago I finally broke through. Then I sat there and, funny, realized there’s no fire, not one real wall. Finally I’d patched together enough different jackleg skills to where I’d cracked their last subcode. Sure worth it. See, I’ve mostly come to try and make things up to you.”
“You, me?” she asked.
He nodded. Michael’s voice had so recently gone baritone, each sentence of it snapped into her hearing.
“Know what I think, Susan? I think we are more brother-sister than anything else, twins almost. You didn’t choose to have a kid early. We’re the only ones really in this, aren’t we? Nobody will ever know what-all they cost us, will they, Susan? Splitting us up and everything. —This here’s about the happiest minute of my whole entire life—till NOW anyways!”
• • •
THERE MUST BE something she could say. There must be a middle-class book club Jane Austen “To Do” list for such major moments. But what volume of etiquette might ever index a reunion this weird, a gift so total?
She opened her mouth to speak, Silence seemed her only language. Not even Dr. Chekhov—possessing all compassion’s force and elegance—would dare risk human speech just now. His plays are wisely built around long pauses, life’s load-bearing silences.
So Susan pressed her right index finger perpendicular across her own lips. Please, no more teenage speeches, however dear. She simply moved closer, barefoot, child-high on him. She moved nearer a boy who’d somehow tracked her to this house so big it always sounded empty. Couldn’t he be some confidence trickster? a decoy, some electrified angel sent to end her at first touch? If so, he’d be right to execute her. And, if justice required that, she stood ready.
Punishment made more sense than how her boy-child had been growing larger on some godforsaken acreage. This was why she’d always felt afraid. She’d been guarding him by inventing for herself certain silly local tests. The pointless early Web searches. The MA in Russian lit, another gambit meant to second-guess fate and map him. Homages, little blood payments: What if this had never happened? What if the firewall had kept him out?
Strangers with a farm had got to name him “Michael.”
• • •
THAT WORTHY COUPLE, the husband a college suite-mate of Doc Dennis, had sat on the bench marked WAITING, holding two baby blankets, option blue: boy, option pink: girl. The second she gave life to this child he had been stolen.
Any words she risked now would emerge as smeary zoo sounds. Touch alone might and must suffice. Only human contact could prove simple and profound enough. Susan felt stupid, if most gratefully reduced. Madame Chairlady, fallen mute at last! It seemed her greatest achievement, a silence this hard-earned.
One Buckhead book group had lately tried hiring her away. They’d begged her to defect from the local club. They swore they would all read whatever novels Susan chose (or even poetry!).
—But, no! What had facile conversation ever got her? Hadn’t authorities once talked her out of him?
• • •
ODD, BUT MICHAEL, across those years, and shut up in some farmhouse attic, seemed to have received her beamed wishes. At least he didn’t appear to hate her. Her live-in daughters acted far more critical, miffed about her graduate work, peeved at her boring clothes. Michael didn’t know enough to disrespect her yet. Nor did he act afraid of her.
But how could someone so luckless avoid hating others? Why did he not blame her for his lifetime’s desertion? Hadn’t he arrived here solely to hurt her? Susan fought back waves of elation that swerved toward nausea recalling her first morning sickness on a school bus trip. Even as she worried for her safety, for her life. Hard to trust that this was not some cruel hidden-camera show. But it was too late for asking him to please leave. To spare her just an hour to collect herself. By now that would ruin him, she knew. Then one phrase, shot full of consolation, came to resc
ue her. It flooded her with sanity. She spoke it aloud only for herself. Wherever had she picked this up?
“Fear NOT!” Susan whispered.
Her mantra-code-name joke. She’d intended it only to console and steel herself. She forgot that he, another person, was even actually here.
“Thanks,” the actual son acknowledged her at once. “Wicked-good advice. —But I’m okay.” Naturally Michael had taken his mother’s two words as tenderly parental. Rightly his.
“I don’t feel so scared now,” he explained. “Not with you really here, right in your own house. Can’t thank you enough for even seeing me. —You know? some of the parents that kids contact, won’t even open the door.”
• • •
THIS CLOSE, SHE lifted arms, sent them wider till each got clear around him. Given so broad a circle, she could only lace stray fingers behind the big back. Her each gesture toward him slowed itself, expecting to be batted down. She met no such rebuff. Soon it felt like these two persons hung suspended here in some clear oil. It offered slight resistance that gave license, some honeyed unaccountable slow motion.
Even lateral muscles holding up Susan’s head did brief involuntary spasms: her shock at finding Michael tactile, alive. The sound she made started as pure sigh but pressed too far. And yet this pinched mousy noise didn’t seem to frighten him. Instead he chuckled close against her ear, “Right! right?”
She rose onto bare toes. She must reach even higher to encircle whatever human-unit her infant had managed, fed by honest peasant strangers, to become. She felt again a piercing pain coring her right breast. A reminder, some task untended.
HOW TO EXPLAIN her tardiness in finding him, feeding him? How might she warn him that this house had other residents? Built too recently, the place echoed, sounding warehouse-huge. Today it felt like some stage-set B&B intended only for Republican donors. Today it looked both over-lavish and utterly impersonal. Another tasteful Atlanta furniture store. What sort of people hid within walled compounds? What sort of fearless boy could glide through such prisonlike security?
Susan considered running upstairs to fetch two silver-framed photos. Her parents at their handsomest. Here are your grandfolks, she’d tell this strange big kid. Here’s your nose, on him. The dented chin. See? she gave you all this great skin you got. But surely showing him his inherited jawline would just confuse things now. That could wait.
A MAN AND a woman in the foyer of the house painted “Heritage Barn-Red” finally got to actively say nothing. Any UPS man arriving would find not a thing at all odd happening here. She’d once shared smooth silences with the boy she married but those had curdled since. Some weekdays Susan’s husband came home midafternoon to view his “films,” this week’s X-rays. It made a quiet change of scene for him. Discovering this stranger, he might mistake the kid for some door-to-door Bible salesman, an eco-crusader arrived with the usual petition in his too-green suit.
But, for this pair, what was rolling on here felt unmatched in this whole gated development or the Universe. They could now be simple. That was it. If he spoke, she was allowed finally to hear him. It seemed a miracle that every citizen gets a body apiece and that we can then direct our own toward certain others’. Talking, he’d just been a recent high school grad; silent, she could glimpse what-all waited latent. Such goodness seemed inborn.
At least he had shut up, poor kid. Stillness? unimprovable. The amount to be communicated aloud must wait. Hushed, they agreed to just go forward down the slope toward further silence. Susan thought: If only we could live the rest of our lives locked safe into this dense a quiet! There would be no blustering, no arguments. Not one syllable’s apology. If only our next nineteen years might pass speechless, we’d finally be qualified to talk.
The two appeared so glad to merely hug, it became, as practiced here, almost an Olympic-level feat. Two similar strangers—if of widely differing heights—at last embraced, trying out varying international styles, metes.
She stopped making further sniffling rodenty-sounds. He simply stood, guardlike, stoic, the drum major continuing their embrace. He had to bow some from his waist in order to receive whatever upsurge affection this small slightly-older woman seemed intent on offering. Less mother, son. More a Michael finally meeting one particular Susan.
In this shaded foyer, near a front door left ajar—their embracing ran continuous. It would be smart to seek some seating place; but that might mean the briefest loss of contact. Two verticals kept savoring the safety of arms so protective and massed, arms linked within another’s adult arms equally strong, also intending purely to uphold, protect.
THE PHONE RANG once deeper in the house; machine answered: “None of us is in right now, but do leave a . . .” After that, as the pair stood joined, out on porch steps, through the open door, six English sparrows, squabbling, broke into flight. A young female swerved into the dark house just above the pair’s heads. Wings blurred off into the kitchen where something banged into a window. Minor glassware would be chipped or broken for the next hour, scarcely noticed.
Susan finally led him to a couch. She grabbed his right hand; its palm felt scratchy, leather. She flinched at finding his short life’s calluses; inner hand felt thick as a big cat’s paw-pads. She felt jealous even of the misery he’d known without her. Imagine Michael, shipped off so young to work some taskmasters’ cornfields. How had Doc Dennis chosen such slavers to raise their son?
These two were entering a time when forfeited years at last filter into particulates, yielding actual minutes, usable. She knew they’d each remember every first thing presently occurring. A specific birdsong shaped like a question mark, that boy’s skateboard passing repassing, these tallied as events precious, being mutual.
There was so much to ask him, there could be no starter-question good enough. Silent, she practice-phrased introductions: Michael, meet Dwight, my husband. Husband Dwight, meet my Michael, my lost son, he found me here today.
But stillness held—merciful, immense, complex with perfect mirroring. Some encyclopedic understatement already linked mother-son. Quiet itself seemed a rural dialect of theirs. Yes, they were one parent and her child. But interim-growth-chart steps had gone unseen. So he arrived today, like Venus, born adult.
His half-smile looked sleepy; but she understood from the inside out this lifelong symptom of her own: it just meant his contentment. Such signs, recognized in another, cannot be taught or learned, only known.
She had just been pacing this same great room. Jittery, preparing her talk, Susan always took sharp right angles at both couches’ either ends. Somehow it calmed her, faking an almost military precision as she stalked about, overplanning. When he phoned, she’d been in just such striding form, her route’s mad geometry somehow soothing. She’d just been hitting her own forehead with the paperback itself while talking usual turns.
He now pulled free of their couch and, as nervous as elated, laughing while he shook his head with sideways-marveling, Michael himself started pacing. He had never met her, never seen her house; but she watched him now patrol her very accustomed twelve-foot stretch. She watched him turn her own exact favored angles. Susan watched her boy do right-faces at the same four points she liked.
That he had long ago forgiven her seemed a wish impossible as eternal life. Now, settled on the sofa nearest, legs drawn under her, she sat studying only him. He soon joined her there. Leaning nearer, she inhaled so deeply she wheezed. Michael trailed a scent. Eyes closed, she identified: lightly-salted butter, motel shampoo, the fine lanolin of an animal still growing. She longed to cry. But could not waste that kind of time.
Something must happen next. Just the chance excited her. Susan accepted this boy’s ingenuity at finding her, his plain good faith in leaping walls of fire. She already felt his gratitude rush out to meet and then quadruple hers. They even grinned alike—each’s deepest dimple swagged up to the right. But such giddiness contained the terror of its ending. Having finally worked their way into one a
nother’s field of vision, how to leave this safe-zone without perishing?
This interlude already seemed some long-deferred repayment. Legs tucked beneath her, supporting his side with hers, Susan found pleasure even in hearing her own Sub-Zero ice-maker’s egg-laying due diligence. Coins dropped into a sack of alms. Her father’s death had stained lake water twenty feet around. But, from those dark currents, this clear child ascended. She felt time, long-divided, returning to itself in strange renewing eddies.
HE MUSTN’T LEAVE. That ugly car of his had a gear marked REVERSE. True, he kept one arm still shepherd-crooked around her shoulder here now. And yet Susan felt—even while held by this much-visiting grace—more scared than ever. Something about his height, his crafted force and Roman looks. Some quality of his half-spooked her. Hard to identify what—in such a bonus—should so unsettle her. Some Protestant filter, usually stringent in protecting from temptation, felt torn away by the simple sight of him and lost for good. Was it his arriving as a full-grown man? Was it wrong of a mother at first sight to find her own son beautiful? Shouldn’t that be natural? Still, a list kept trying to form. She needed “To Do” something.
His hand moved to stroke her hair. She sensed how her hair’s texture must feel—to him—much like his own. (She made a note to urge his leaving all such sticky preparations out of hair so fine as theirs. She’d also instruct him to say “anyway,” not “anyways,” and in the right use of “you and I” versus “you and me.” So many silly small improving things she’d teach him first, it would be great!)
• • •
HE KEPT STARING at her face, then looking all around, then back into the eyes. Michael was thinking of leaving. She saw he feared he’d overstayed. Everything must now be taken back. He now sat—saving up this day and her. It would be a long haul back to tomorrow morning’s Apple Store.
He scanned side-to-side, someone soon-departing, poor boy, checking out her home. Not with much admiration. More as he would some crime-scene he’d be quizzed about a year from now. The floor plan he would need to know to save himself in court.