A Home at the End of the World

“How about a game of Scrabble instead?”

“Fine,” he said. “Great. You’re on.”

The following day we drove to the airport with Ned’s ashes tucked inside Jonathan’s black shoulder bag, swaddled among the socks and underwear. This time I’d claimed the driver’s position, and Jonathan didn’t protest. It was a rare overcast day, the sky filled with clouds that had bumped their way down from the Rockies, still heavy but depleted of their rain. The air was silvered, imbued with a steady, shadowless, and all but sourceless light that could as easily have emanated from the desert floor as from the atmosphere.

Jonathan was telling me of his growing interest in carpentry when I turned off the highway onto a side road I knew about.

“Hey,” he said. “Is this a shortcut?”

“No. It’s not.”

“Where are we going?”

“Just hang on.”

“I’ll miss my plane,” he said.

“No you won’t. If you do, you can get another one.”

The road, a thin ribbon of newly laid asphalt, led into the mountains where a scattering of wealthy men and women had built their homes. One of my customers lived out there, in a house so intricately married to the surrounding rocks it was barely distinguishable as a house at all. Before the road reached those elaborate dwellings, though, it dipped through a shallow ravine that held one of the desert’s small surprises: a surface manifestation of underground water, not so blatant as to form a pool but moist enough to grow lush grasses and a modest stand of aspen trees, the leaves of which shimmered as if in perpetual surprise.

I stopped the car in that ravine. It looked especially beautiful in the cloudy light. The white trunks and pale green leaves of the aspens were luminous, and a spoke of sunlight, breaking through, set fire to a single facet of the rough red mountainside beyond.

“Jonathan,” I said. “Let’s scatter the ashes here. Let’s be done with it.”

“Here?” he asked. “Why here?”

“Why not? It’s lovely, don’t you think?”

“Well, sure. But—”

He glanced at the back seat, in the direction of his bag.

“Get out the box,” I said. “Come on, now. Trust me.”

Slowly, with great deliberation, he reached into the back and unzipped his bag. He returned with the box cradled in both hands.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“I’m sure. Come along.”

We got out of the car, and walked several paces into the thick dry grass. Jonathan held the box. Flies buzzed lazily around us, and a dust-colored lizard froze atop a waist-high pink rock, staring at us with the whole of its darting, speeded-up life.

“This is pretty,” Jonathan said.

“I pass by sometimes,” I said. “I have customers out here. Whenever you come to visit from now on, we can come out here if you like.”

“Should I open the box?” he asked.

“Yes. It isn’t hard. Can you see how it works?”

“I think so.” He touched the catch. Then he took his hand away, without lifting the lid.

“No,” he said. “I can’t. It isn’t the right place.”

“Honey, they’re only ashes. Let’s scatter them and get on with our lives.”

“I promised. This isn’t the right place. It isn’t what he’d have wanted.”

“Forget about what he wanted,” I said.

“You could do that. I can’t.”

He held tightly to the box, his knuckles whitening as if he feared I’d take it away from him. I said, “That isn’t fair.”

“I don’t know if it’s fair. It’s true. Mom, why did you want to marry Dad?”

“I’ve told you that story.”

“You’ve told me about wearing white shoes after Labor Day and him having nice thick hair and how you couldn’t think of any reason not to, so you did,” he said. “But why did you marry him, why did you stay married to him, if you weren’t any more interested than that? Did our whole family start just because getting married and having a baby was what you thought you were supposed to do?”

“Now watch yourself, young man. I loved your father. You didn’t sit it out in that condominium for years. You didn’t wake up with him in the night when he couldn’t breathe and fell into a panic.”

“No. But did you love him? That’s all I really want to know. I know you sacrificed for him, and supported him, and all that. But were you in love with him?”

“What a question to ask your mother.”

He cradled the box in his arms. “I think maybe I was in love with him,” he said softly. “I adored him.”

“He was just an ordinary man.”

“I know. Don’t you think I know that?”

We stood for a while at the edge of the aspen grove. Nothing happened; nothing moved. Jonathan held the box, his face set stubbornly, his eyes squeezed shut. After several minutes I said, “Jonathan, find someone of your own to love.”

“I’ve got someone,” he said.

It gave me a kind of vertigo, to hear us both talk like this—a tingling, lightheaded sensation of great height and insufficient protection. We had always been so circumspect with one another. Now, rather late in the game, when I had things to discuss with him, we possessed no easy language.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

He looked petulantly away, as if something on the horizon and to my right had captured his attention. There, right there before me, angrily avoiding my eyes, was the four-year-old boy I’d known more intimately than I knew myself. Now he was back in the guise of a man aging in a British, professorial way; taking on a weedy, slightly ravaged, indoor quality.

“You don’t know anything about it,” he said at length. “Our lives are more different than you can imagine.”

“I know well enough about women,” I said. “And I can tell you this. That woman is not going to let you have equal rights to her baby.”

Now he could look at me. His eyes were hard and brilliant.

“Rebecca isn’t her baby. Rebecca is our baby,” he said.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“No. Literally. Bobby and Clare and I don’t know which of us is the father. That’s how we decided to do it.”

I didn’t believe him. I knew—somehow I knew—that he and that woman had not been lovers. He was telling me a story, as he’d liked to do as a child. Still, I went along with it.

“And that’s what Clare wanted, too?”

“Yes. It’s what she wanted.”

“It may be what she said she wanted,” I said. “It may be what she thought she wanted.”

“You don’t know Clare. You’re thinking of a different kind of person.”

“No, my darling. You are. I know what it is to believe the people you know are different, that your life is going to be different. And I’m standing here telling you there are universal laws. A woman won’t share her baby.”

“Mom,” he said in an elaborately calm voice. “Mom, you’re talking about yourself. It’s you who wouldn’t give your baby up.”

“Listen to me now. Go out and find yourself someone to love. Have a baby of your own, if that’s what you want.”