I was a child raised by wolves, she tells Sally one nothing October day. They are on a beach in Delaware, the ocean wrought and glinting. In grays and browns the day presents as grades of rupture, bands of oblivion unfolding outward — the sky, the water, the sand, the sedge. The thought settles over Jesse in the absence of other thoughts: there is nowhere else she needs to be.
Later she will think how foolish our dreams of arrival are. How many times must we say to ourselves, Maybe this is it, maybe the struggle is over, when we are only on the vast crescent of an expansive boredom, some beach in Delaware with our back to the sea?
Peter runs after a flight of sandpipers that rise into the air like spangled filaments after light.
Everyone thinks they were raised by wolves, Sally says.
(III)
You are twenty-nine. You are going home. This is happening. Kick and scream if you will. Carp all the way to the airport. Complain to your friends, to Anita. Such a drag. A duty, really, and joyless. No, you love your mother, she’s just impossible, deluded. The way parents are. Such lame-o’s, irredentists lost to an irrecoverable past. You look a bit bedraggled, you must admit. A bit showily causal in your knockabout jeans and Keds. No sense getting dressed up for your mother, but it’s like you’re trying to prove you’ve left. Prove you don’t belong. And yes, you’ve been away too long, it’s true. A year, can it be? And yes, everyone else in what was once your family now has a different family of his own. Meanwhile your mother’s life has shrunk to the space of three stories she tells herself not exactly riveted to the truth: that she and your father continue to enjoy a spiritual bond since the split; that she is happy, all things considered; that you and she are a pair, alike in loneliness, although you often have girlfriends whom she continues to conceive of as very close women friends.
It rains your first days home. You sit with your mother in the back room and she says she’s been feeling close to God lately. We talk, she tells you and says He put her on her own to know Him better. Water runs down the frosted glass. You should have more conversations with real people, you say. You know the sort: flesh-and-blood, visible, prone to unfortunate differences of opinion. I never knew what profound companionship I could find in God, she says. And what you want to say is that a person can’t find companionship in an echo, that she is listening to her echo and the thing about an echo is it will never surprise you. But you say nothing. You can rip the bandages off everyone else’s private wounds, not hers.
Your father and me, Jesse, we just wanted different things.
Anita told me to tell you to date more.
It’s nice you have such nice friends, she says.
The rain taps out your silence. On your third day home you escape Ma.
The weather has broken and hot sun floods the shadeless downtown. The heat culls moisture from the hollows. You pause at the old department store. Through the windows you can see the dais and pulpit where Amy’s father used to preach. People you don’t know are gathered at a card table with coffees and notepads — congregants, strangers, new stewards of what was once yours — and you have the brief urge to go in and tell them to stop, that you and Amy have explored this blind alley and can tell them the dimensions if they like. It is a kind of vertigo you feel, a queasy lurch at the precipice of collapsed time, seeing those things continue on from which your own life has diverged. And it reminds you of watching the high school girls play soccer on a visit home years ago, the sudden truth in your stomach, as they ran in their red pinnies through the quickening dusk, that new bodies would keep coming to fill those jerseys year after year, shouting in a joy that was itself the very act of forgetting — forgetting those who had come before, forgetting how they would disappear themselves.
At the new coffee shop a barista pulls the lever on the espresso machine like she isn’t sure what will happen. A finger taps your shoulder. Oh, goodness, you say, and you and Amy’s mom are hugging. She’s grown bigger over the years, cut her hair short, let it gray. How is she? Just lovely, she says. She’s remarried. Yes, you heard. A younger man, a naval engineer, the stuff of light gossip. Larry, she says. You look so great! Well, thank you, she says — but she does. And how beautiful are women of a certain age, when they stop obsessing over weight and clothes and come to inhabit the world without pretense.
I’m doing yoga, she tells you.
My girlfriend likes that, you say. She smiles, says nothing. And what do you hear from Amy? you ask.
A shadow passes over her face. Do you know, Jesse, I haven’t heard from her in months? I hardly recognized her the last time she was here. She got involved in, what do you call it, helping the janitors at her school get a decent wage? And she was in those protests up in New York. Helping folks after the storms hit. I said, Amy, we got storms down here, honey. People in need down here. That’s what the church teaches, after all. And you know what she said to me, she says, What about the church, Ma? Do you have any idea what goes on in this country while we talk about Jesus this, Jesus that? Well, I said, you can’t save everyone, sweetheart, try as you might. And she says, Talk to me when you’ve tried. But I think she felt bad because she said, We could all be trying a little harder. My own daughter! But you know, I was proud of her too, Jesse, because I could hear God’s love in what she said.
If God loves one person, it’s Amy, you tell her.
What a sweet thing to say, she says. But you know, she kept saying how revolution was the only hope. I mean, revolution—in this day and age?
Amy’s very pure hearted, you say. When she thinks something, she’s got to believe it all the way down, as deep as it goes.
But Amy’s mom is staring out the window. She kept saying how all the problems were structural. Everything was structural. I don’t pretend to know what that means.
You say you guess it means we’re all caught up doing one another little harms we don’t even notice. You touch her shoulder. You and Amy are still young, you remind her.
But you don’t feel particularly young. In fact you feel older than just about everyone on earth. And how did mothers get so innocent as they aged? How, instead of revealing itself to them, did the world grow ever stranger and more worrying, as though you formed a system with them and moving in one direction caused them to move in the other, unseen cables in the dialogue of souls?