that only her dirty face is visible. Her hair is all worms: fat, glistening earthworms that flex and squirm. The bottom of the hole is lit with a flashing blue light.
A screen door slaps shut with a bang loud as a gunshot, and Jack comes awake sitting on the top of the stairs. He has been nightwalking again. There’ve been times his mother has found him out in the yard at two in the morning, eating handfuls of dirt. Once he went down the road bare naked, carrying a trowel, slashing it at imaginary enemies. It has been worse in the three weeks since she left.
He can still see that flashing blue light, and at first he doesn’t know why. Beth appears at the bottom of the stairs and looks up at him with eyes bloodshot from crying. She mounts the steps three at a time, pulls on his arm to bring him to his feet.
“Come on, buddy,” she says, her voice grainy with emotion. “Back to bed.”
He climbs under the covers, and she sits on the edge of the bed beside him. She smooths his hair down with one palm, thoughtlessly stroking him as if he were a cat. He can smell her hands, a spicy sweetness, like geraniums.
Red and blue lights strobe across the smooth white plaster ceiling, throbbing around the blinds. Jack hears low male voices outside and the staticky squabble of people talking on the police scanner.
It isn’t the first time law has come around to the house. The ATF raided them two years before. The feds tossed the house but didn’t find the guns, which were buried in a sack, six feet deep, out in the barn, directly beneath the parked John Deere.
The bedroom door eases open. Hank looks in on him.
“Jack? It’s your mother.”
“Oh. Did she come to get me?” He hopes not. He’s perfectly cozy under his blankets, with Beth’s hand gently stroking his hair, and he doesn’t want to get up.
“No.”
Hank McCourt crosses the room and sits down beside Beth. Beth takes his hand and gazes miserably up at him. The round lenses of Hank’s spectacles flash crimson and sapphire.
“Your mother is coming home,” Hank says.
Beth shuts her eyes, the muscles of her face straining against some powerful emotion.
“She is? You’re not mad at her anymore?” Jack asks.
“I’m not mad at her anymore.”
“Did the police bring her home?”
“No. Not yet. Jack, do you know why your mother wanted to leave?”
“Because you wouldn’t let her drink.”
He has been taught this like a mantra over the last three weeks, has heard it from all of them: his father, Beth, Connor. His mother has been sober for two years, but her self-restraint finally split and tore, like a wet paper sack. The only Jack that concerned her now came in a bottle.
“That’s right,” Hank says. “She wanted to go someplace she could drink and take her crazy pills. She chose those things over you. It’s awful to think she needed those things more than she needed us. She was staying in the efficiency apartments near High Street Liquor. So she didn’t have to go far to do her shopping, I suppose. She bought a bottle of gin this afternoon and took it into the bath with her. When she stood to get out, she slipped and cracked her head.”
“Oh.”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh.”
“She was ill, you know. She was ill when I met her. I thought I could make her better, but I couldn’t. It runs too deep in her family. Your mother had peculiar ideas, and she tried to drown them with drink. In the end she only drowned herself.” He waits for Jack to reply to this, but Jack doesn’t have anything to say. Finally his father adds, “If you need to cry, no one will think less of you.”
Jack searches his emotions but can’t find anything yet approximating grief. Later, maybe. When he has time to get his head around it.
“No, sir,” he says.
His father studies him for a time, from behind the bright blinking lenses of his spectacles. Then he nods, perhaps with approval, and squeezes Jack’s knee again and rises. They do not hug, and Jack isn’t surprised. Jack is not a little boy anymore. He’s thirteen. Thirteen-year-olds fought in the Civil War against Yankee oppression. Thirteen-year-old soldiers carry machine guns in Syria to this very day. Plenty of thirteen-year-olds are ready to die or kill, whichever might be required.
Hank lets himself out of the bedroom. Beth stays behind. Jack doesn’t cry, but