Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

I held the baby. I said, “Nothing. Never mind. I’m just a good old crazy thing.”

I carried Rebecca out the door, and Bobby followed me to the car. As I strapped Rebecca into her car seat she began fussing and whimpering. Eventually the motion of the car would lull her but for a while she’d be inconsolable. I braced myself for her wails.

“Bye, boys,” I said.

“No,” Rebecca said from her car seat. “No, no, no, no, no.”

They both kissed me, told me to drive carefully. They kissed Rebecca. Their attentions were all it took to push her over the edge. She opened her mouth, nearly gagging on a howl she’d been building up to since breakfast.

“Bye, Miss Rebecca,” Jonathan said through the window. “Oh, we love you even if you are sporadically monstrous. Have fun with your horrible grandmother.”

“Take care of yourselves,” I said. I backed the car out of the drive. I waved, and the boys waved back. They stood close together, in front of the dilapidated house. As I pulled away, Jonathan suddenly came running toward the car. I thought for a moment he had something to tell me, but then I realized he was only going to run alongside for a few yards, foolish and faithful as a dog. I drove on. He caught up and briefly kept pace, blowing kisses. I waved again, one last time. Before I reached the turn I looked in the rearview mirror and saw both of them. Jonathan and Bobby, standing in the middle of the road. They looked like a pair of beatniks, sloppily dressed in a remote, unimportant place. In their sunglasses and T-shirts and unruly hair they looked like they were standing at the brink of the old cycle: the 1960s about to explode around them, a long storm of love and rage and thwarted expectations. Bobby put his arm over Jonathan’s shoulder. They both waved.

The road was silver in the morning sun. It was a perfect day for traveling. Rebecca kept up her wails in the back seat. Miles ticked away under the wheels. I knew our lives wouldn’t be easy. I pictured us together in San Francisco or Seattle, moving into an apartment where strangers argued on the other side of the wall. I’d push her stroller down unfamiliar streets, looking for the grocery store. She wouldn’t think of our lives as odd—not until she got older, and began to realize that other girls lived differently. Then she’d start hating me for being alone, for being old and eccentric, for having failed to raise her with a back yard and a rec room and a father. For a moment, I thought of turning back. The impulse passed through me, and if I’d been able to make a U-turn I might have done it. But we were on a straight stretch of highway. I followed the double yellow line until the impulse was absorbed by gathering distance. I kept my hands on the wheel, and didn’t think of anything but the next mile and the next. I glanced back at Rebecca. She was finally calming with the motion of the car. Before she went under, she looked at me balefully, her nose running and her cotton hat askew, and said one word. She said, “Mommy.” She pronounced it with a distinct edge of despair.

“Someday you’ll thank me, sweetie,” I said. “Or maybe you won’t.”

Now I’m alone with this. This love. The love that cuts like an X-ray, that has no true element of kindness or mercy.

Forgive me, boys. I seem to have gotten what I wanted, after all. A baby of my own, a direction to drive in. The house and restaurant may not be much to offer in trade but that’s what I’ve got to give you.

I turned off the highway and headed west.

THE MOON is following us, a white crescent in a powdery blue sky. We are driving home from the grocery store: Erich, Jonathan, and me. Erich these days is a slippery presence. He comes and goes. If I wasn’t driving I might hold him to keep him from floating out of the car. Instead, I say to Jonathan, “How’s he doing back there?”

Jonathan looks into the back seat. “You okay, Erich?” he asks.

Erich doesn’t answer. He is suffering a fit of absence. Who knows what he hears? “I think he’s okay,” Jonathan tells me. I nod and drive on. Farms pass on either side of the road. Cows go about their ordinary business, steady as history itself.

At the house we help Erich out of the car, guide him up the porch stairs. He smiles with the confused beatitude of the ancient. He could be pleased that we’re home again. He could be remembering a toy given him when he was four. We put the groceries away in the kitchen.

“How about a bath?” I say.

“Do you think he needs one?” Jonathan asks.

“I think he’d like one,” I answer.

We guide him upstairs, start the bathwater. Steam puts a sparkle on the chipped white tile. While we wait for the tub to fill we help Erich off with his clothes. He neither resists nor participates. His face takes on its boggled look, something different from expressionless. When he loses track of himself he drifts into this look of mute incomprehension, as if he can’t quite believe the emptiness he sees. It is astonishment divorced from dread and wonder. It is nothing like a newborn’s face.

When he’s naked we sit him down on the toilet lid. The tub fills slowly. Erich sits with quiet obedience, hands hung limp between the stalks of his thighs. Jonathan reaches over and touches his hair.

“I’m going to put some music on,” I say.

“Okay.” Jonathan stays beside Erich, supporting his shoulder bones with one hand. With the other he keeps administering ginger, comforting little swipes at Erich’s hair.

I turn on the radio in the bedroom. It is tuned to an oldies station, the music of our childhood. Right now, Van Morrison sings “Madame George.” I turn the volume up so it will carry into the bathroom.

When I get back Jonathan says, “This is a great song. This has always been one of my favorites.”

“Care to dance?” I ask him.

He looks at me uncertainly, wondering if I’m making a joke.

“Come on,” I say, and I hold my arms out. “Erich won’t fall. Will you, Erich?”

Erich stares in the direction of his own bare feet. Cautiously, Jonathan pulls his hands away. Erich does not tip over. After a moment Jonathan walks into my arms and we do a waltz. Our shoes clop on the bare tiles. I can feel the agitation of Jonathan’s continuing life. It quivers along his skin like a network of plucked wires. I run my hand up and down the buttons of his spine. Van sings, “Say goodbye to Madame George. Dry your eyes for Madame George.”

“Bobby?” Jonathan says.

“Uh-huh?”

“Oh, never mind. I was going to say something stupid like ‘I’m scared,’ but of course I am. We all are.”

“Well, yes. I mean, I guess we are.”

We dance to the end of the song. I would like to say that Erich smiles, or nods his head in rhythm. It would be good to think he joins us in that small way. But he is lost in his own mystery, staring into a hole that keeps opening and opening. When we’re through dancing we help him up, and lower him into the bath. Together, we scrub his head and his skinny neck. We wash the hollow of his chest, and the deep sockets under his arms. Briefly, he smiles. At the sensation of bathing, or at something more private than that.

After his bath, we put him to bed. It’s late afternoon. Jonathan says, “I’ll buzz down to the restaurant and do the reordering, all right?” I tell him I’ll replace the missing shingles.

We go about our errands. It’s a normal afternoon, steaming along toward evening. Jonathan drives to town, I prop the ladder against the house and climb up with an armload of new cedar shingles. They will look raw and yellow against the old coffee-colored ones. The old shingles, strewn with pine needles, are crisp and splintery under my hands and feet.