Richard Ford - Wildlife

I walked back into my dark room and sat on the bed. I could still feel my heart beating. I was cold with just my underwear on, my feet cold on the floor, my hands cold from nervousness. Out the window it was still bright moonlight, and I knew the next day would be colder and that maybe winter would come on before it ever became true fall. And what I felt like was a spy — hollow and not forceful, not able to cause anything. And I wished for a moment that I was dead, too, that all three of us were. I thought about how small my mother seemed out in the hall with her body showing in the light, how she had not been strong or forceful, and that she must’ve felt that way herself, and that we felt the same way at that moment, saw the same future alone in our rooms, in our beds. I tried to imagine that this was a help but could not quite do it. Then a car went down our street, and as it came in front of our house it blew its horn — two honks and then a very long one. I jumped up to the window and looked out. I thought it would be Warren Miller — I didn’t think it would be anyone else. He wanted to come back, or he wanted her to come where he was, or he just wanted her to know he was out there, in his car, in the dark, riding around Great Falls thinking about her in a kind of panic. The horn changed sound as it got farther down the street, and I never saw the car — if it was Warren Miller’s Oldsmobile or someone else who did not know us. I saw its taillights and that was all, heard the horn stop. Then I got in bed and tried to be calm. I listened to the night in our house. I thought I heard my mother’s bare feet on the floor, moving, thought I heard her door shut down the hall. But I could not be sure of it. And then I went to sleep.

The next morning was cold, as I thought it would be. I turned on my radio and listened to the forecast, which said there would be wind out of the southwest before the day was over, and that it would stay clear, though along the Rocky Mountain front snow was expected to offer relief for the crews fighting the Allen Creek fire.

I could hear my mother in the kitchen. She was wearing shoes that scraped the linoleum floor, and I knew she was going out soon. The air base, I thought, or to the grain elevator, or to Warren Miller’s house. Anything still seemed possible. For some reason I thought I’d be leaving. I didn’t have a place to go, or any place I wanted to go, but I realized I had waked up thinking, ‘What am I going to do now?’ And that seemed like a thought you had before you left someplace, even if it was a place you had always lived or the people you had always lived with.

My mother was sitting at the kitchen table when I got dressed and came out into the house. She was eating a piece of toast and a scrambled egg on a plate and drinking coffee. She looked worn out, though she was dressed in a nice way — a white blouse with a white bow up to her neck and a brown skirt and high heels. She looked at me, then looked at the clock on the stove which said it was ten fifteen, then went on eating her breakfast.

‘Drink some coffee, Joe,’ she said. ‘Get a cup. You’ll feel like a white person in a minute.’

I took a cup down and poured coffee out of the pot. My cheekbone hurt where she had hit me, but there wasn’t a bruise I could see. I sat down across from her. I didn’t think she would talk about last night, and I was not going to bring it up. It was all clear enough to me.

‘What’re you about to do now?’ she said. She seemed very calm, as if something had stopped bothering her that had bothered her very much.

‘I’m not going to school today,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you’d go. I understand.’

‘What are you going to do?’ I drank some black coffee. I had not drunk much coffee before that, and it seemed too hot and not to have any taste to it.

‘I’m going over to those Helen Apartments and rent a place,’ she said. ‘It’ll have two bedrooms. You’re welcome to live there.’

‘All right,’ I said. I didn’t think she wanted me to, though it was not because she didn’t love me. It just wasn’t the first thing in her thinking that morning.

I sat at the table and tried to imagine what I could say to her, something that we could talk about together, anything ordinary about the future or even that day, but there didn’t seem to be anything. She looked out the window toward the backyard, where the sky was visible — blue and with no clouds in it — then she drank some more coffee, picked up her fork and put it on her plate.

‘Can I tell you something?’ she said, and sat up straighter.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You’re going to have all these other mornings in your life when you wake up and nobody’ll tell you how to feel,’ she said very slowly. ‘You’ll just have to know. So would you let me tell you how to feel this time? I won’t tell you any more. I promise.’

‘Okay,’ I said. And I was willing to do that. It was the thing I didn’t know how to do at that moment, and I was glad she thought she did know.

My mother put the tips of her fingers on the edge of her plate where there were only some crumbs left and her dull silver fork. She looked at me and narrowed her lips. ‘I haven’t lost my mind yet,’ she said. She looked away from me then as if she was hearing those words and thinking about the ones she was going to say next. ‘You don’t want to think when people do things you don’t like that they’re crazy. Because mostly they aren’t. It’s just that you’re not part of it. That’s all. And maybe you want to be.’ She smiled at me and nodded as if she wanted me to agree with her.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I understand that,’ and I did.

‘I know you don’t want to have this conversation with me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t blame you. But I’m still alive. I haven’t died. You have to get used to that. You have to account for everything. We all do.’

‘Are you going to see Warren Miller today,’ I asked.

And this was a question I wish I hadn’t asked, because I didn’t really care what the answer would be, and she had something she thought was better on her mind because she said, ‘Christ almighty.’ She got up and took her plate to the sink and ran water on it. ‘The sky’s falling,’ she said. She leaned to the side and looked out the window at the morning sky. ‘That’s what you think, isn’t it?’ Her back was to me.

‘No,’ I said.

‘I couldn’t stand it to be young again,’ she said. ‘I’d run from the fountain of youth, I swear to God. Yes, I’m going to see Warren. Or I guess I will. I don’t know. Is that okay? I guess it’s not.’

‘Do you love him?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ my mother said. ‘And if you wonder how all that happens so fast, it simply does. So. Maybe it’ll be over in a hurry.’

I wanted to ask if she loved my father and if it was possible to love two people at once. Though I knew what she thought the answer was; it was yes in both cases. And I thought she was probably right and wished there was something else she could say or I could to make just this moment better or more like a moment from the life I knew before.

‘It isn’t that you can’t say no to somebody else, or somebody’s just too good-looking,’ my mother said. She was still looking out the window. ‘You can’t say no to yourself. It’s a lack in you. Not somebody else. That’s very clear to me.’

She looked at me over her shoulder just to see what my face looked like, or if I was about to say something or wanted her to say something else. But I must’ve seemed not to be thinking about that because she smiled at me and looked back out the window, just as if we were both waiting for something to happen. And I suppose in retrospect we were. We were waiting for my father to be there, and the fire to be controlled and for all our lives to become whatever they’d be from then on — different and maybe better or maybe worse.