could see that each pile consisted of a different publication; I saw headers with words like Journal, Sentinel, and Herald. Mixed with the cabin’s odor I could detect the ancient ink.
I reached down to remove the shoes from my aching feet, and my knuckles grazed glass. It was a bottle of whiskey. I picked it up. It was empty. I remembered my father’s red eyes and imagined his hunched figure emptying this bottle while I arrived at the train station, as I stumbled helplessly through town. Irresponsible was the word that settled in my mind. My mother had been far from perfect, but irresponsibility was something I had never had to deal with, much less live alongside.
All at once I was exhausted. I dragged myself to my socked feet and shuffled across the cluttered floor. Behind one door were a toilet and a tiny sink shoved against a curtainless shower. Through the remaining door was a bedroom barely big enough for the mattress wedged between its walls. The sheets were knotted. Filthy clothes wove a strange carpet across the floor. This room belonged to my father.
I dragged my bags to a far corner of the main room, near the sink, and with aching muscles slid a couple of waist-high stacks of newspapers out of the way. I removed my trumpet case from my pack so that the clothes inside could function as a pillow. I put a jacket over my legs, a hooded sweatshirt over my torso. I lay back and crooked an elbow over my eyes, the popping of the firewood the only sound. I began to pray, as my mom had taught me to when I was little, but the sentences scattered and I forgot to whom I was speaking—God, Jesus, or her.
Sleep came pulling, but one thought would not let me go. I killed her, he had said. It was a horrific statement. It was an invitation for me to loathe him. I couldn’t resist. I did. It was arrogance, his certainty that despite not having spoken to my mother in sixteen years, he still mattered enough to have figured some way in her passing. You fucking bastard, I thought. You don’t get to be a part of her death, no matter how bad you want it.
In semiconsciousness I saw the wedge-shaped nicks in my mother’s left ear and heard my father ask me about the direction she was walking versus the direction of the oncoming bus. She had never heard very well out of her left ear—why had it taken me this long to remember that? She had not mentioned it in years, that was true, but it had been evident every night in the cocking of her head when she watched TV, and in the way she had held the phone to her right ear, never her left. She had not heard the bus because it had come up on her left—her left ear, the one her ex-husband, my father, had somehow maimed. This direct line drawn between my parents, the first I’d ever witnessed, was startling. Their lives did connect, and violently; her death was along that line, too, and somewhere along the line was an intersection that was me.
6.
WHEN I AWOKE IT was morning. The taste of charred wood burned my throat. I stood with the aid of the closest block of newsprint. I needed to pee and hobbled across the floor, stubbing my toes on any number of objects and sending one tower of papers wobbling. I urinated into the shallow yellow basin of the toilet and blinked around the dank bathroom, wondering at what seemed missing. It took my splashing cold, sulfurous water over my face before I realized. There was no mirror.
I poked my head outside. The trees were bright green and lined with gold from the rising sun. The lush forest scent temporarily rinsed my body of the cloying odor of the cabin. My father’s truck was still missing.
The first day of school—it was today. The realization crashed upon me. I had counted on an evening full of discussions with my father about my classes, my textbooks, my teachers, my schedule, what time I needed to get to school and how I would be getting there. Nothing of the sort had happened and it was Monday morning in Bloughton, Iowa, and I had no books, no ride, no instructions, nothing.
I checked my watch. It was just after seven. In Chicago, classes had begun at eight. Based on yesterday’s trek,