In this sunporch, where the family had always gathered, Mrs. Emerson’s long-ago voice rang and echoed. “Children? I mean it now. Children! Where is your father? When will you be back? I have a right to know your whereabouts, every mother does. Have you finished what I told you? Do you see what you’ve done?” On Timothy’s old oscilloscope, she would have made peaks and valleys while her children were mere ripples, always trying to match up to her, never succeeding. Melissa was a stretch of rick-rack; Andrew’s giggles were tiny sparks that flew across the screen. Margaret only turned the pages of her book and tore the corners off them. She was a low curved line, but Matthew was even lower — the EKG of a dying patient. He pulled the afghan up closer around him. His mother slept on, her moonlit profile sharp and strained, her mouth pulled downward with the effort of accepting when she had always been the one to pour things out.
He slept, and she woke him three times — once for water, once for the sound of his voice, once for a bedpan. For the bedpan she insisted that he call one of the girls. He climbed the stairs in the dark, hesitated at Mary’s door, and then woke Margaret. While she helped her mother he stayed in the living room and kept himself awake by watching a pattern of leaves moving over the Persian rug. Then Margaret came back out and tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you want me to take over?” she asked. “You look dead on your feet.”
“No, I’m all right.”
“I called Emmeline. She won’t come,” Margaret said.
“We’ll find someone.”
“Matthew, you know that I could change Elizabeth’s mind. Mary didn’t put it to her right.”
“No,” Matthew said.
“I could have her here in an hour, if she took a plane.”
“There are agencies all over Baltimore that can help us out with Mother,” Matthew said.
He went back to the easy chair. Its rough fabric had started prickling through his pajamas, and he kept shifting and turning and rearranging the afghan while his mother lay tense and wakeful at the other end of the room. “I want—” she said. But in her pause, while he was waiting for her to finish, Matthew fell asleep.
He awoke at dawn. Every muscle in his body ached. “Oh, Matthew,” someone said, and for a moment he thought it was his mother, finally getting around to saying his name; but it was Margaret. She stood over him, fully dressed, holding Susan. Susan wore a romper suit and straddled her mother’s hip with small round legs still curved like parentheses. She looked down at him solemnly. “Hi there,” he told her. “Matthew, you look terrible,” Margaret said.
“I’m okay.”
He looked over at his mother. She was watching them out of eyes the same as Susan’s — round and pale blue and worried. “How you doing?” Matthew asked her.
“I fool—”
“You feel?”
“I fool I’m—”
She flattened the back of her hand across her mouth. Tears rolled down her stony face, while she stared straight ahead of her. “Mother?” Matthew said. He struggled up out of his chair, but then there was nowhere to go, nothing to say. He and Margaret stood there in silence, already defeated by the day that lay ahead of them.
Everyone agreed that Matthew should go to bed now — even Matthew himself. But first Mary brought him a breakfast tray in the sunporch, and while he was buttering a roll his head grew so heavy that he laid his knife down and leaned back and closed his eyes. He felt the tray being lifted from his knees — a falling sensation, that made him jerk and clutch at air. “You should go upstairs, Matthew,” Mary said. But he only slid lower in his seat and lost track of her voice.
He dreamed that he was in a forest which was very hot and smelled of pine sap. He was walking soundlessly on a floor of brown needles. He came upon someone chopping wood, and he stood watching the arc of the axe and the flying white chips, but he didn’t say anything. Then he felt himself rising out of sleep. He knew where he was: on his mother’s sunporch, swimming in the bright, dusty heat of mid-afternoon. But he still smelled the pine forest. And when he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Elizabeth in a straight-backed chair beside his mother’s bed, whittling on a block of wood and scattering chips like fragments of sunlight across her jeans and onto the floor.
12
The first thing Elizabeth did with Mrs. Emerson was teach her how to play chess. It wasn’t Mrs. Emerson’s game at all — too slow, too inward-turned — but it would give her an excuse to sit silent for long periods of time without feeling self-conscious about it. “This is the knight, he moves in an L-shape,” Elizabeth said, and she flicked the knight into all possible squares although she knew that Mrs. Emerson watched in a trance, her mind on something else, the kind of woman who would forever call a knight a horse and try to move it diagonally.
She set up game after game and won them all, even giving Mrs. Emerson every advantage, but at least they passed the time. Mrs. Emerson cultivated the chess expert’s frown, with her chin in her hands. “Hmmm,” she said — perhaps copying some memory of Timothy — but she said it while watching her hands or the clock, just tossing Elizabeth a bone in order to give herself more empty minutes. Elizabeth never hurried her. Mary, passing through the room once, said, “Hit a tough spot?” And then, after a glance at the game, “Why, the board’s wide open! All that’s out is one little pawn.” “She doesn’t like standard first moves,” Elizabeth explained. Although eventually, when Mrs. Emerson had collected herself, all she did was set her own king pawn out.
Every time Elizabeth looked up, Mary was somewhere in the background watching her. Margaret was standing in the doorway hitching her baby higher on her hip. Well, Margaret she had always liked, but still, she kept having the feeling that she was being checked out. Were they afraid she would make some new mistake? Under their gaze she felt inept and self-conscious. She plumped Mrs. Emerson’s pillow too heartily, spoke to her too loudly and cheerfully. All of Thursday passed, long and slow and tedious. No one mentioned going home.
For them — for Margaret, who had sounded desperate and offered double pay and a six-week limit and a promise of no strings attached — she had taken a leave of absence from her job with only ten minutes’ notice and flown to Baltimore when she had never planned on seeing it again. She had minded leaving her job. She was a crafts teacher in a girls’ reform school, which was work that she loved and did well. The only mistake she had made there was this one: that she had left so suddenly, and lied about the reason. Told them her mother was sick. Oh, even the briefest contact with the Emersons, even a long distance phone call, was enough to make things start going wrong. She should have kept on saying no. She should be back in Virginia, doing what felt right to her. Instead here she was pretending to play chess, and all because she liked to picture herself coming to people’s rescue.
She moved out pawns, lazily, making designs with them, sustaining over several turns the image of some fanciful pattern that she wanted them to form. No need to watch out for attacks. Mrs. Emerson would never attack; all she did was buckle, at the end, when she found her king accidentally surrounded by half a dozen men for whom Elizabeth had forgotten to say, “Check.”
“Could I bring you two some tea?” Mary asked, hovering. “Does anyone want the television on?” Margaret said, “If you’d like a breath of air, Elizabeth, I can stay with Mother. Feel free to go to the library, or draw up lesson plans.” They thought she was a teacher in a regular school. Elizabeth hadn’t set them straight. She kept meaning to, but something felt wrong about it — as if maybe the Emersons would imagine her students’ crimes clinging to her like lint, once they knew. She wondered if the school smell — damp concrete and Pine-Sol disinfectant — was still permeating her clothes. While Mrs. Emerson struggled for a word Elizabeth’s mind was on the paper towel roll on the nightstand: two more towels and the roll would be empty, and she could hoard it in her suitcase for an art project she had planned for her students. “I want—” Mrs. Emerson said, and Elizabeth’s thoughts returned to her, but only partially. Piecemeal. Neither here nor there. She felt suddenly four years younger, confused and disorganized and uncertain about what she could expect of herself.