A Home at the End of the World

“What kind of message would you want?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just…Aw, man. I don’t know.”

I looked at Clare, who was looking at Bobby with a mingled expression of wonder and uncertainty. I think until then she had not realized he was fully, independently human, with a history of loss and great expectations. He had presented himself to her as a collection of quirks and untapped potential—she’d all but invented him. Just as the hypnotist must see his subject as a field for planting suggestions in, Clare would have seen Bobby as a project whose success or failure reflected only on her. She was the one woman he’d slept with. She selected his clothes and cut his hair. Arranged marriages might have been like this, the bride arriving so young and unformed that she appears to absorb the union into her skin, her husband’s proclivities taken on and made indistinguishable from her own. Clare, the husband, must have seen for the first time that Bobby had had a life outside her sphere. I couldn’t tell whether she was pleased or dismayed.

After a while, we left the cemetery again. It seemed there should have been more to say or do, but the dead are difficult subjects. What’s most remarkable about them is their constancy. They will be dead in just this way a thousand years from now. I was still getting used to it with my own father. The whole time he lived I had thought in terms of how we might still change in one another’s eyes. Now we could not revise ourselves. He’d taken the possibility with him into the crematorium’s fire.

We got back into the car. I touched the two silver hoops I wore in my ear, looked down at my own clothes. I was a man in cowboy boots and black jeans. I wore ten black rubber bracelets on one wrist. I could still travel, change jobs, read Turgenev. Any kind of love was possible.

“Next stop, New York City,” Bobby said from behind the wheel. If he was not quite somber, he had grown more blank—it was his old response to sorrow. His voice lost its rhythm and lilt, his face slackened. I have never seen this in anyone else. Bobby could withdraw from the surface of his skin, and when he did so you suspected that if you stuck him with a needle the point would penetrate a fraction of an inch before he cried out. In these vacant states he said and did nothing different. His speech and actions continued unimpaired. But something in him departed, the living snap went out, and he took on a slumbering quality that might have been mistaken for stupidity by someone who knew him less.

I asked if he wanted to go by the bakery to see his old boss and he said no. He said it was past time to get back on the road, as if we needed to reach New York by a particular hour. I stroked his shoulder as we pulled onto the highway. I think we both felt defeated by Cleveland, its ordinary aims and modestly rising prospects. Perhaps others have a more agreeably definitive experience when they revisit their hometowns: those who’ve escaped from industrial slums or declined from pinnacles of great wealth or happiness. Maybe they’re better able to say, “Once I was there and now I’m somewhere else.”

We were all quiet for the next hour. Clare was so withdrawn I asked her if she was feeling sick again, and she told me no in an irritated tone. Pennsylvania arrived with its long steady roll of white barns and gentle hills. We drove along in a small hothouse of sourceless gloom.

Without preamble, as we approached a sign for Jay-Dee’s Cheese Popcorn, Bobby said, “I’ve been thinking. Would you both ever want to, like, get a place out of the city? Like a house we could all live in?”

“You mean all three of us?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

Clare said, “Communes are out of style.”

“We wouldn’t be a commune, exactly. I mean, we’re more like a family, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“We are nothing like a family,” Clare said.

“Like it or not,” Bobby told her. “Too late to back out now.”

In a low voice, Clare said, “Stop the car.”

“What? What is it?”

“Are you sick?”

“Stop. Just stop the car.”

Bobby pulled over to the side, assuming she was going to be sick. We were literally nowhere, in a stretch of farmland gone fallow, the fields weedy and strewn with trash. A Texaco sign shimmered at the curve of the road ahead.

“Honey,” I said. “Are you all right?”

She had opened the door almost before Bobby came to a full stop. But instead of leaning out to vomit she jumped from the car and began walking, with fierce determination, along the brushy shoulder. Bobby and I hesitated, searching for the proper response.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“I don’t know.”

“We’d better go after her.”

We got out of the car and ran to catch up with her. An eighteen-wheel truck ground past, swirling grit and a windstorm of garbage around our feet.

“Hey,” Bobby said. He touched her elbow. “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Leave me alone,” she said. “Please just go back to the car and leave me alone.”

She may have meant, in a disorganized way, to leave us in Pennsylvania. She may have meant to hitchhike back, or to begin a life of drifting around the country, getting waitress jobs and renting rooms in small-town hotels. I had entertained similar impulses myself.

“Clare,” I said. “Clare.” I thought the sound of my voice would calm her. I was her closest friend, her confidant. She turned. Her face was dark with rage.

“Leave me alone,” she said. “Just go. The two of you.”

“What is it?” Bobby asked. “Are you, like, really sick?”

“Yes,” she said. To escape us she left the roadside and veered across the flat expanse of chalky, untended ground. Shredded tires lay around, and the matted pelt of a raccoon that had been mummified by the passing seasons. We kept up, flanking her.

“Clare,” I said, “what is it? Just what in the hell exactly is it?”

Her voice hissed. “I’m pregnant. All right?”

“Pregnant?”

“We’re having a kid?” Bobby said. “You and me?”

“Shut up,” she said. “Please just shut the fuck up. I don’t want to have any goddamn baby.”

“Yes you do.”

“No. Oh, hell. I’ve let it go over three months now. I’ve never had morning sickness before. The other time I was pregnant, I had it taken care of before anything like this happened.”

“You want to have the baby,” Bobby said.

“No. I’ve just been, I don’t know. Lazy and stupid.”

“Yes. We can have it. We can all three have it.”

“You’re crazy. Do you know how crazy you are?”

“A kid,” Bobby said to me. “Hey. We’re having a kid.”

“ We are not having anything,” she said. “ I may be having a baby. Or I may not.”

“Honey, are you sure?” I said.

“Oh, I’m very sure. I’m quite perfectly sure.”

We were halfway across the field, headed nowhere. Nothing lay ahead but a line of bare, cement-colored trees bordering a second field. Still, Clare marched forward as if the answers to all her questions waited just past the horizon. Sun shone anemically through a thin gruel of cloud.

“Clare,” Bobby said. “Stop.”

She stopped. She looked around, and appeared to realize for the first time that she was in the middle of open country, with no reasonable destination at hand.

“I can’t do it this way,” she said. “I should either be in love with one person, or I should have a baby on my own.”

“You’re just scared,” Bobby said.

“I wish I was. I’d rather be scared than furious. And embarrassed. I feel like such a fool. What would we do,