Because you can, that’s all.
Because I’m in this thing?
Because you’re sixteen, Sean.
They were silent. Wind pushed at the glass doors, rattling them like a man locked out.
What is it? his father said.
Nothing.
What, Sean?
Is she going to be all right?
His father stared at him, his eyes glassing over, and Sean said, I mean Mom, and his father looked out at the car.
She’s going to need time. And help. She’s going to need your help.
And yours too.
Yes.
But you’re going back. To keep looking.
Yes.
I’m going with you.
You need to get back to school, Sean. And you need to heal that leg.
They were not on the highway long before his knee took up an intense
pulsing—rhythmic flashes of pain he thought he ought to be able to see like light in the eyelets of flesh where the spiderlegs sunk in. A quasar of bone and nerves throbbing under the zippered skin. He stared at his knee and he remembered the ground up there. The brown bed of needles, the weeds and the dust. Lying there looking up into the trees with the feeling of piss in his crotch. Hot piss in his crotch and a leg all wrong and his heart pounding and still seeing the man’s face behind the wheel, no surprise no fear no nothing, just the yellow lenses, and
he’d closed his eyes when the man came up—Don’t touch him, she said—and he’d kept them closed like he was sleeping as they put the man’s blanket that smelled of wool and gasoline over him and he kept them closed as she knelt and talked to him one last time, and he kept them closed and he kept them closed with the piss going cold in his crotch.
How’s the leg? his father said. As if the pain were visible after all, burning like headlights in his mirror.
Fine, he answered.
6
Angela walked.
She walked and her mouth was dry and there was the supermarket sign across the street like a bloodstain in the gray, side-blown rain. The trees were lashing themselves. The umbrella filled with wind and lifted, brute and purposeful. When the little walking figure lit up she stepped into the crosswalk and a man said Shit and she stopped just short of the collision—bike and bicyclist skidding by quarter-wise to the road, tires locked, rainwater fanning, a wet grimace of face under the helmet and then the wheels unlocking and the bike righting and the man glancing over his shoulder not to see if she was all right but to tender his disbelief, his fury, before facing forward again and pedaling on through the rain.
She crossed the road, crossed the parking lot, and the glass door swung open and she stepped into the supermarket’s vast fluorescence, thinking of the winter day she’d first seen him on that bike, that three-speed from another century, himself an unlikely figure in army surplus trench coat and canvas haversack, like some courier of the tundra. Grant Courtland, someone told her. Pulling up next to her another day at a crosswalk and turning to her and waiting for her to look. Waiting. And when she looked at last she saw first the redness of his face, the bright blooms of cold on his cheeks, blooms of some essential enthusiasm, and next the eyes, stung-wet and very blue, and lastly the lips as he smiled and said, You look nice today. And rode on.
In her apartment over the Polish bakery he would read to her, fragments of which she could still recite: Homeless near a thousand homes I stood, and O! speak again, bright angel-a, and I’ll example you with thievery. Years later he couldn’t believe she remembered the lines when he himself did not.
Such days, such nights. Such heat in the dead of winter! How could it ever end?
The sun’s a thief. . . . The sea’s a thief.
Can you recite too what the father said that day? said Faith.
Yes: God does not ask His children to bear that which they cannot.
Right.
But neither does He permit them to not bear it. Therefore He asks His children to bear the unbearable.
He knows you have strength you don’t know you have.
“Excuse me.” A woman was reaching past her for a bottle of water. Angela said, “I’m sorry,” and moved aside.
Angela stared at the bottles. So many choices. She selected one and studied its list of ingredients: water. A little boy of perhaps five was standing beside her. She looked down at him and he looked up. Brimming blue eyes and teartracks on his cheeks.
“Where’s your mother?”
He shook his head.
Angela looked around.
“All right. Don’t worry. Come on.” She turned and walked and the boy followed. After a moment he took hold of her skirt. As they passed the long produce bin the indoor thunder sounded and a fine mist fell from unseen jets, dewing up the bright tomatoes, the perfect heads of lettuce. The thunder is to warn you, Sean said, ten years old, so you don’t get sprayed. Caitlin said, Oh, really? and stepped forward with her summer arms.
“Bradley!” came the cry. A quick breathy commotion bearing down from behind. “Where are you going?” Wild, puffy eyes and all the goods her arms could carry as she groped for the boy’s hand. “Where are you going with
my son?”
“Nowhere,” Angela said. “We were going up front to—”
“You just walk off with someone’s child in a grocery store?”
Angela looked at the woman. Then she looked at the boy, his face buried now in the woman’s thighs.
“He looked like a very nice boy,” Angela said, and the woman’s mouth convulsed mutely. She dropped a bag of cornchips and let it lie there so that she might palm the boy’s head and lead him away.
Angela paid for her water and walked outside. Still raining, though the wind had moved on. The little trees of the parking lot seemed to be collecting themselves, checking for damage. Under a concrete shelter sat a number of iron tables with a number of people using them: supermarket employees on smoke break, businesswomen stabbing at salads. Was it lunchtime already? One old man writing in his notebook. She stood across from the old man and asked if she could sit down and he looked up over thick plastic frames, one eye pinched nearly shut and the other a clouded blue marble. He said, “By all means,” and she sat down and opened her bottle and drank from it, watching the rain.
She looked at the old man again. Bent over his notebook with what looked like no pencil at all in the twisted and swollen fingers. Heavy brown overcoat and a tweed cap finger-darkened at the brim by a lifetime of donnings and doffings. A wooden cane was hooked on the table edge, thinner at its topmost curve as if by heavy sanding. She looked at his hands again and saw the tiny pen.
“What kind of pen is that?”
He held it up. It resembled an elongated black suppository.
“That’s a space pen,” he told her.
“A space pen.”
“It’s the pen they use in outer space.”