By the age of fourteen, I had lived through three minor earthquakes and two major ones, the most recent of them just after Clinton became president. Our neighbor—an older guy we called Large Nathan because he shared my first name and weighed three times what I did—told me he’d predict the next quake by the thickness of the air. Earthquake weather, he called it. The skies turned brown from all the traffic on the freeway. You could feel the pressure building, and after days without a breeze, something had to give. I’d wake with the bed swaying under me, hear the hangers rattling in my closet, and very soon I’d be running down the back staircase because the last place you wanted to be during an earthquake was in an unreinforced concrete building in Southern California.

My mom often told me not to worry. We’d be far away from Los Angeles when the big one struck and any earthquake in the meantime, she said, would be no worse than the earthquakes we already knew. Even then, I didn’t quite believe her. I’d seen the damage from the Northridge quake, the broken asphalt and our parking garage leaning to one side. The newscaster on TV said the next one would be even bigger.

To cope, I read survival advice in the newspaper. I told myself that disasters don’t happen as long as you keep them firmly in mind, that surprises can be avoided the more you know about them, and the more I knew, the less frightened I’d be. This became my superstition. I borrowed books from the library and learned enough about subduction and blind faults for Mom to call me her budding geologist. I lay in bed with the World Book encyclopedia open across my knees and sketched a cross-section of the earth’s crust in my Big Chief tablet. Sketching kept the ground from shaking. It let me fall asleep.

Mom said we lived restlessly, and she was right. We couldn’t afford anything better than a small apartment in Reseda on the money she earned from her part-time teaching jobs. Her boyfriend at the time promised to help with the rent but didn’t. The apartment had three rooms—four if you included the kitchenette attached to the living room—with thin walls between them. I’d wake to hear them arguing about money. When she tired of that, she went to the living room to move a sofa or hang a picture. Her boyfriend followed her, and the argument would continue there. I put a pillow over my head and tried not to listen.

Mom’s voice rose in pitch, his became sarcastic, and after a while the words didn’t matter at all. I didn’t want to understand what made them argue, probably because I had no superstition for it.

*

Rick lived with us around the time of the Clinton quake. He was Mom’s fourth boyfriend after we moved to California (or fifth, depending on who did the counting). Before Rick, she dated men she’d known from local colleges, instructors and professors uncomfortable in their own skin. After a few months, they’d disappear, and Mom would leave their clothes and books in a cardboard box by the garage. Somehow, though, Rick stuck around longer than most.

She met him at an EST retreat, where they talked for hours without a break. It was a time in her life she sought clarity—a personal truth, the thing itself—and hoped to find it with the help of others. Rick sat next to her, asked her about love and Nietzsche and a meaningful life, and then invited her out for a drink. They had nothing in common. He taught guitar during the week and led hiking trips to the desert on the weekends; Mom hated The Allman Brothers Band and would rather sit on the sofa with a book and a mug of coffee than be outdoors. Rick owned a white 70s Chevrolet Chevelle with a burgundy racing stripe and mag wheels; she never enjoyed cars or driving. He was so much more practical than she was, knew how to rig up the kerosene stove when the earthquake took out the power, improvise a shelter from an army-surplus tarp. I can’t say whether Mom found him attractive for that very reason—or that I ever understood why she chose one guy over another. Her reasons were never very specific. A man had to make her feel alive, she said, had to be himself and had to understand her. Rick managed to satisfy the first two of those. So did my father for a few years. Whether either of them ever understood her, I can’t say.

It was clear, though, what men saw in her. Mom was beautiful. I realized this as a child walking through a restaurant, my hand in hers, noticing men look up from their newspapers, the cashier stopping to stare from behind the counter. When Rick arrived in our lives, he had noticed, too, telling me how she reminded him of Natalie Wood when she drowned.

“Don’t you mean she looks like Natalie Wood before she drowned?” I asked.

“Before, for sure,” Rick said. “And during. There’s always this battle going on inside her. I’ve never met anyone as intense as your mother. Or as vulnerable.”

*

Mom’s intensity came through in her convictions. She had many of those. Sometimes they would build over time until she had to stop to write down her thoughts, scribbling in a spiral notebook at the kitchen table while the water for the pasta boiled over. Other times, they’d come to her suddenly while she drove to a teaching job on the outskirts of LA. She’d pull off at an exit, take out her notebook, and start writing. If the conviction was strong enough, she cut her day short, called the principal’s office at my high school to let them know she’d pick me up early. I waited for her outside, embarrassed by the sight of her car—a faded Buick, a gift from my grandparents patched with duct tape around its bumpers. When she drove up to the curb, I got inside and hoped no one saw me. Our dog was in the back seat along with an overnight bag Mom had quickly packed.

“Where are we going?”

“Somewhere important.”

She had promised to take me on an early tour of colleges after I told her I’d been reading about suspension bridges and electric dams. Someday I wanted to build large things that defied nature. She told me that Caltech had a good civil engineering program. I wasn’t even sure where Caltech was, but I liked the idea.

“Are we visiting schools?”

“No, Nathan. We’re looking for a new place to live.”

“Oh.” Of course. I’d forgotten this had been Mom’s plan all along, to flee LA, our apartment, the landlord who wouldn’t fix anything and the carpet that smelled of cat pee from a previous tenant. Rick had mentioned the A-frames in the high desert near Yucca Valley, houses that flexed when the earth shook, and were inexpensive, too. She was intrigued, she said, because deserts were healthier than cities.

As we drove out of the city, I rolled down the window to sample the air outside and wonder where Rick was. I hadn’t seen him for a week. He would sometimes disappear for days and then reemerge from Mom’s bathroom with a towel around his waist. I could never be sure if they’d broken up and reconnected—or whether they’d even recognized the difference. Rick kept a shaving kit in the bathroom and a guitar under the sofa. As long as those remained in the apartment, I figured he was still in the picture somewhere.

Mom said nothing as she turned east onto the freeway. We drove until the city spilled into the desert, past the large tracts of ranch homes, squat bodegas, and strip malls. I remembered what she once told me: nothing in California was meant to last.

“Rick couldn’t make it?”

“I don’t know.” She glanced dimly down at my pants. “Why are you wearing those?”

“Why am I wearing pants?”

“Why are you wearing that pair? You look like you’re in a gang.”

She hated my favorite pair of baggy jeans that hung low on my hips but didn't like the slim khakis my grandparents gave me for Christmas any better; they reminded her of a stockbroker’s.

“And Rick?”

“He had to work.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “I thought he’d help us look.”

She turned to me and glared. She wouldn’t yell at me, I knew, but I couldn’t help wondering if I was witnessing the pain my father felt. He probably had no idea she would leave Minnesota with only a few suitcases, me, and the dog. I was only six at the time. She wrote him a note on the refrigerator door and was gone before he got home from work. Mom had a conviction back then, too: the sunshine in California would do us good, the people would be more open-minded, and my father would never grow as a person no matter how long she stayed with him.

An adjunct professor’s pay didn’t go far in LA, and my father refused to pay child support without a court order. She never filed the paperwork, and so we lived on the edge of poverty, from one strongly felt conviction to the next.

In a few hours, Mom pulled off onto a long dirt road. We parked near a large patch of sage brush at the foot of a hill and a plywood sign nailed to a post that said 2.4 acres—buildable. She sat behind the wheel, looking out the window with no inclination of getting out.

“Is this it?”

She didn’t answer. There was only the scrub, the hills, the burnt orange of manzanita trees in the distance.

“Where’s the house?”

I should have kept my mouth shut and let the moment speak for itself. Mom had turned away from me, her shoulders hunched so I couldn’t see if she was crying. I thought about the time she pledged money to a charity and stayed up for two nights making clothing for the victims of a flood. In the thick of it, she talked about making the world a better place; days later, she looked back and said the strain and sleeplessness felt like she’d been hit by a bus.

Our dog fidgeted in the backseat. I could hear him whimpering. After a long drive, we both needed to pee in the brush. As I lifted the door handle, Mom put a hand on my knee.

“Nathan, I’m sorry. I thought—” She paused, looking bereft at the landscape around us. “They didn’t tell me it would only be this.”

*

They say a dog senses the ground shaking well before people can. Ours didn’t. Tron, the wiry gray and white mutt we rescued from the pound, growled only when the neighbors fought or my mom was on the verge of breaking up with a boyfriend. It was as though the only tectonic force Tron understood was unhappiness.

*

The night of the big earthquake, Rick brought over a bottle of rosé and a collection of Rilke poems. He was expecting, I guess, that my mom would be in the mood for wine and poetry. She wasn’t. She had just read in a magazine how close the world had come to an awful end, not from malice but neglect and plain stupidity. The article bothered her enough to bring it to the dinner table, wedge the magazine under her plate, and read to us about the Soviets who mistook clouds over the silos of North Dakota for a missile launch, the flock of geese that resembled a fleet of bombers, the faulty circuitry of a NORAD computer. How quickly we’d all be gone.

Rick sat quietly as she read aloud, nodded his head and wiped his chin with a napkin. “Well,” he said, “nothing happened.”

“What do you mean, nothing happened?” she asked.

“Because we’re here—no worse for it.”

She pushed her chair away from the table and began to clear the dishes. We hadn’t finished dinner yet. Rick’s plate disappeared while he was holding a fork in his hand.

“I think they call this a disagreement,” he said, apparently to me, because Mom had already fled to the kitchen, filling the sink with water and washing herself of the conversation.

He leaned toward me. “It’s better to live on the edge. A little adrenaline is good. Don’t you agree?”

“Leave Nathan out of this,” Mom yelled from the kitchen.

“Why? He’s old enough to think for himself.”

Rick liked to challenge me. He’d just returned from a hike in Joshua Tree and the sun left his face tanned everywhere but where his Ray-Bans had been. His eyes didn’t focus on the same plane; one held steady while the other wavered slightly. It made me uncomfortable having him look at me and right through me. I shifted in my seat, tried to think of anything that counted as living on the edge—the time I rode my skateboard down the off-ramp, my friend daring me to cross a busy street at rush hour—but none of it was worth mentioning.

“I’ll stay out of this,” I said.

Rick smiled. “A safe answer, grasshopper.”

*

The first time Rick called me grasshopper, I thought it was an insult. I was always the smallest kid in my class, the one adults complimented for being good at bike-riding and tying my shoes, without realizing I was older than I looked. Grasshopper sounded like the name of the smallest group of kids at summer camp, the ones who stayed behind while the Gazelles and Cheetahs went swimming in the lake. I hadn’t seen the same TV shows Rick had or understood the connotations or that being a grasshopper could be an honor.

*

Mom fumed, dropped a casserole dish on the kitchen floor, and said she’d had enough of Rick’s callousness. For the rest of the night, I hid in my room and read from my creased copy of the Dune trilogy. I waited. They’d talk until they worked it out or, if not, Rick would spend the night somewhere else. Tron sat on the edge of the bed while I stroked the fur under his chin until he settled and I fell asleep.

When I woke, the windows were drumming, and I had the sensation of being on a train as wide as a cattle car, Rick standing in the doorway, telling me it was time to go. I couldn’t sort it out.

“Go where?”

He grabbed my shoulder. “Out!”

We ran down the back stairs, Rick, Mom and the dog a couple steps ahead, me still in my pajamas wondering whether the concrete slabs of the staircase would remain in one piece.

By the time we reached the patio, the shaking stopped. Lights went on above us. There was chatter from the open apartment windows. I heard Large Nathan saying this was the big one, someone else asking if an airplane had hit us. Then came a silence I didn’t trust. Nothing I’d read about earthquakes told me what to do next. Neighbors crowded around in their underwear and bathrobes, all of us looking up at our apartment building, at the gaps in its plaster and the exposed metal beams, wondering if it would collapse.

We waited for almost an hour. After it became clear the building would stay standing, Rick put a hand on my head. “Well, grasshopper, we survived that.”

While the neighbors packed their cars and went looking for a motel or a relative’s sofa to sleep on, Rick and I retrieved the canvas tarp and rope from the garage and rigged it between a tree and the pool fence. I helped him. I was his grasshopper.

We tore apart an old pine dresser and built ourselves a camp fire. As the wood burned, it struck me how happy Rick was to be outside, playing the guitar he’d fetched from the apartment. Whatever resentment my mom felt had disappeared, too. She sat by the fire next to him, her arm around his waist, singing along to Me and My Bobby McGee and House of the Rising Sun.

I lay on the grass and looked up at the moon through the palm trees. The earthquake had passed us by. A weight had lifted. I listened to Mom’s voice, pure and thin and fragile at the upper range, and thought about how moods flowed right through her like a current in a highly conductive material. Like aluminum that got intensely hot one minute and cool the next. I can’t say I ever got used to those moods. They’d catch me by surprise, make me think I’d never witnessed her so upset, forgetting—somehow—the last time she raged about the stupidity in the world, the thoughtlessness of the people around her. It didn’t occur to me at the time she had a problem that needed treatment.

*

I have only a handful of memories of my father, his tan sports coat with the patches on the elbows, his antiperspirant that smelled of naphthalene, and the handful of times he’d visit from Minnesota to bring me to school or a baseball game. His only advice to me came unsolicited:

“Remember to be patient with your mother. She needs a lot.”

What I think he meant—what I wish he’d said—was: Nathan, you’re a good kid and don’t get alarmed when your mother reaches the edge of some precipice.

But those would be my words, not his. To me, he was less like a father and more like an uncle who visited occasionally, hand me a toy or some money, and after a hushed conversation with Mom, be gone in a few days. I always got the sense he’d absolved himself of responsibility—I was Mom’s problem to sort out and, eventually, Mom would be mine.

*

Within months, Mom was on the phone, restless, talking with friends about places she wanted to be and colleges I’d never heard of. On the weekends, she went for long jogs in the neighborhood, making a wide loop through the streets and coming home drenched in sweat. This was the first time I remember her throwing herself into exercise, though it wouldn’t be the last. Rick told me she wasn’t really jogging; she was running away.

I got home from school to find the airline ticket on the kitchen counter. She was hopeful about a teaching job at a small college in Boston and apologized for having made arrangements so quickly. In hindsight, I’m not sure she really had an interview or any firm commitment from the school. I remembered the last time she rushed to catch a flight for a job interview, lost her return ticket, and spent an extra week in Milwaukee, my aunt assuring me that Mom was just fine and would return soon. This time I knew she would return, but not necessarily when.

The night before her flight, she baked a week’s worth of spinach lasagna, carved up, wrapped in foil, and stacked neatly on top of the frozen peas. Because our aunt in Orange County couldn’t look after me, Mom asked Rick to stay at the apartment for the week. Rick got home from the Guitar Center in the late afternoon and sorted through the contents of the freezer. He shrugged, dropped a brick of lasagna on the kitchen counter to thaw, then slumped on the living room sofa. His arms draped on the top of the sofa; he looked at me, bored, the way someone does when there’s nothing good on television.

“Teach me something,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Teach me something I don’t know. Teach me about blind faults.”

“Is this what you do in EST?” I knew how they talked at their meetings and the conversations that went in circles.

“What’s EST got to do with it?”

“Well, if you know enough to ask about blind faults, you probably know what they are.”

This made him smile. “The grasshopper is too smart for the teacher.” He reached for his backpack and rummaged through it. “Let me guess. It’s a fault no one knew existed. You know, like an undiscovered galaxy.” He pulled out a small box and a plastic sandwich bag. “Is that right?”

“Sounds right.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?” He folded a thin sheath of paper in the shape of a U and poured the gray-green weed into it. “I don’t suppose your mom would mind.”

Mom hated cigarettes, though I knew she’d smoked pot in graduate school. It was the medicine, she said, that got her through those years.

“No, she won’t care.”

“And will you be joining me?”

I had only smoked once on a dare from a friend, finding the butt of a cigarette tossed from a passing car. “I don’t smoke much.”

Rick laughed. “Here—I’ll show you.” He lit the twisted end of the slender joint and brought it to his lips, took a deep breath, and held it there. “Swallow and count to three.” Turning his head, he let a plume of smoke escape his lips.

“Now you.” He handed it to me.

I took it, grasping it too closely to the burning end.

“Shit!” I dropped it on the coffee table.

“No worries, grasshopper. Try again.”

I picked it up gingerly, pretending the bitter smoke didn’t burn the back of my throat. My eyes watered. I tried not to cough.

Rick leaned forward. “Good. Good. Hold it. Swallow and—” He looked up at the ceiling. “Exhale and release the burden.”

I did and felt like throwing up.

*

It surprised me how quickly I adjusted. As the smoke filled the living room, Rick played a riff on the guitar while I watched with my mouth open. The phone rang. I saw the lights on the answering machine change from green to red, heard the sound of Mom’s voice through the speaker damaged by a milkshake I’d spilled a year earlier.

“Honey, are you there? Nathan?”

“You want to answer that?” Rick asked.

“No.”

Rick shrugged, strummed the guitar quietly while Mom continued.

“Just wanted to see how you’re doing. I think you’d like it here. A lot. The buildings are so magnificently old and the people around here are so smart. So much more culture than California.” She paused. “Honey? Nathan? Will you pick up please?” She exhaled loudly enough to be heard on the answering machine. “Anyway, I have an appointment with the dean in the morning. Don’t do anything rash while I’m gone.”

Rick stopped playing. The machine went silent and its message light began to blink. I had a feeling I’d never known before, like watching myself watching the answering machine, being in the room but at a distance, not sure if what I felt belonged to me or someone else, or whether I felt anything at all.

“You know what your mom’s doing, don’t you?” Rick asked.

“She’s looking for a job.”

“She’s dumping me.”

“Maybe she’ll change her mind.”

“I doubt it.” Rick started strumming again. “She has a bad case of ‘Everything is wrong with my life and it needs to change right now.’ It’s like a disease.”

I figured she’d be alright if she cut back on the coffee and exercise. “No, she’s just like that.”

Rick didn’t seem to hear me. He’d found a riff with the cadence of a Chuck Berry song and sang along with Mom’s words:

“Honey, are you there? Honey, are you there? Don’t be rash. Don’t be—” he took in a breath— “raaaassshhh.”

The pitch was so far beyond his range that it ended in a hiss—raassshhhhhhhhh. It reminded me of the air rushing from a balloon, a power ballad sung badly, the cry of the neighborhood kid who broke his ankle playing football in the street. It reminded me of every argument Mom had with the men in her life, every time she said she was done with them, the sigh of frustration on the answering machine, which meant she was too bothered to explain just how bothered she was.

Rick seemed delighted at his own discovery and how the riff changed shape again.

I began to laugh. I caught my breath and sang along to the song’s makeshift bridge, then laughed some more. Something told me to.

*

Before that night, I had this notion that doctors someday would learn to remove feelings as cleanly as a surgeon removes a tumor. It would be quick and painless and, like the pot I was smoking, make you forget that people ever got upset or agitated.

*

After the third joint, we were hungry. Instead of heating up the lasagna, Rick decided we’d go out for fast food. “No offense, grasshopper,” he said, “but cooking isn’t your mother’s forte.”

He drove us across town to the Del Taco which he said had the best burritos and was open all night. We took the boulevard past the drug stores and the old movie theater, Rick slowing down at a traffic light and then gunning the engine to get to the next light before it turned red. You could beat all the lights, he told me, if you were quick enough. The Chevelle counted among his few possessions: a car, a bag of climbing equipment in the trunk, and two guitars. It had been abused by previous owners, stripped of its back seat, carpets and radio, leaving only the front seats, a steering wheel, some loose wires under the dashboard, and the smell of cheap air freshener. It roared as he accelerated, its suspension stiff and registering every rut in the road. I wondered whether this was how the first astronauts felt reentering the earth’s atmosphere, hurtling through space at the mercy of the elements.

“Watch this.” Rick put his foot on the gas, pinning me into my seat as we sped by the light turning red. “Ha!”

We made it to the Del Taco, going through four more traffic lights without stopping once. While we waited to order, Rick looked around the restaurant, then nodded toward a group of kids at a table in the corner.

“Someday,” he whispered to me, “you’ll have one of those.”

I recognized some of them from high school. They were a year or two ahead of me, the type who hung out in the smoking area, the girls with their halter tops and eyeliner, guys with long hair.

“One of what?”

“A girlfriend.”

The possibility hadn’t occurred to me yet. Having a girlfriend seemed as far away as college. As we walked with our bag of burritos and tacos back to the car, I glanced over at Rick. He was old enough to be my father but still young and athletic enough to pass for my older brother. I felt proud to be with him. I felt older, better. I hoped this time, for once, Mom would hang onto a boyfriend.

I tugged at the latch on the Chevelle’s door. Rick was standing on my side of the car, holding out his keys.

“Your turn,” he said.

“My turn for what?”

“Drive us home.”

I walked around to the driver’s side, let myself in. I felt out of place behind the wheel, just tall enough to clear the dashboard, looking through the gap between it and the curve of the steering wheel. My feet barely reached the pedals. “Are you sure?”

 “Yes.” Rick pointed to the floor. “The long pedal on the right makes her go, the one in the middle makes her stop. ’F’ goes forward, ‘R’ backwards. I say we start by going backwards.”

I eased my foot off the brake, felt the weight of the car under me as we backed slowly out. I shifted into forward as Rick coached me. The Chevelle rumbled along the nearly empty boulevard. Rick hummed to himself, then asked how I was doing.

As long as the road didn’t curve and nothing sudden happened ahead of us, driving was easier than I expected. In fact, it felt natural. We drove past the empty offices and shops, the tangle of electric lines over our heads, the traffic signals cooperating, green at the first intersection, green at the next, turning yellow just before we got to the third. I probably ran through the red light, from the way Rick looked back suddenly. “Pick it up,” he said. “You’re barely going the limit.”

I coaxed the gas pedal with the toe of my sneaker and felt the Chevelle surge forward. The light ahead of us turned yellow. We weren’t going fast enough to clear it or slowly enough to stop gracefully. I knew not to hit the brake too hard, that our momentum would spin us in a dizzy circle, just as Mom did when taking an off-ramp too quickly. My foot hovered between the brake and the gas. I pressed the gas hard, held my foot there.

“You got it, grasshopper!”

“I can’t.”

Rick put his hands on the dashboard, leaned forward.

“Go!”

I saw the car pull in front of us, its headlights cross our path before its heavy frame connected with ours. I didn’t hear the thud; I felt it. Then the Chevelle lifted off the ground, going sideways and forward at the same time, Rick’s shoulders crashing into mine. I remember the spray of tempered glass from the windshield and little else beyond that.

Thinking back on it, I hear Rick’s voice and the cry of an ambulance. But I’m pretty sure those details came later, layered on top of what I actually remembered, because what I actually remembered wasn’t much.

*

I woke to the smell of pancakes, fried eggs, and the coffee Mom left for too long on the burner. The few occasions she made a big breakfast were usually momentous ones: Clinton’s first election, publication of her work in a sociology journal, and the morning after she’d broken up with a boyfriend and didn’t want me asking too many questions. I turned my head, thinking I’d fallen asleep on the sofa and expecting to see her at the kitchen table dabbing a piece of toast in the runny yolk. Mom wasn’t in the kitchen. She was leaning against an oversized chair, asking how I was doing.

It was an impossible question. I groped around, tugged at the blankets on my knees as if my thoughts were buried under there.

“Where am I?”

“In the hospital.”

She stood over me and put her hand on my forehead. I recognized the jacket and pants she’d taken with her to the interview, saw the suitcase on the floor she’d brought straight from the airport. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Like someone hit me in the head.” I had this sensation of the hospital bed sinking from under me. I reached out, took hold of the steel railing at my side. “Why’s the bed moving?”

She looked down at the floor. “It’s not, Nathan. They gave you Percocet. That’s probably what you feel.”

“And this?” There was a bowl of jello on the tray next to me.

“You asked for it an hour ago. You said you were hungry.”

“I did?”

I couldn’t recall anything happening earlier, had only a hazy recollection of getting Mexican food with Rick, of me behind the wheel of his car.

“Where’s Rick?”

“Gone,” she said.

“Gone? Like gone gone?”

“No. He’s not gone gone. You don’t need to worry about him.” She waved her hand. “I’m only worried about you.”

A nurse came in, fussed with my pillow, and adjusted the IV. She told me about the concussion and the X-rays the doctors wanted to take. I’d broken some bones, but they didn’t know how many. The pain medicine kept me from feeling the worst of it. I turned to Mom.

“You know, it wasn’t all Rick’s fault. I went along with him.”

“What was he thinking, letting you drive?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters.” She clutched my hand. “He was the adult in charge. Or should have been.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. The painkillers had the effect of separating my thoughts from my body, leaving them to spin freely while the rest of me stayed still.

“Why does everything feel so upside-down?” For a moment I wondered if I was really saying these words or just thinking them. My throat felt dry. “I’m tired of it.”

Mom glanced at the empty hospital bed next to mine, then down at her feet. I saw her eyes begin to well. She stood still for a moment and then returned to the big chair, sat down in it and rested her chin in her open palm.

“I know,” she said.

“You know what?”

“That I’m not easy to be with. I was thinking about this on the flight back. Me—the way I am—has been hard on you.” Her hair had fallen in a tangle across her face. “This whole thing, this accident, makes me realize how much I love you. You love your own. You have to.”

She seemed so small and frail, hunched over in the chair with her legs tucked under her. In a few years, I would be visiting her in the hospital, sitting next to her while she recovered, exhausted after one of her long fits of travel and sleeplessness. But at the moment I had nothing else to say, nothing to make sense of the situation. Apparently she didn’t, either. We sat quietly and listened to the hum of medical equipment in the room and the muffled voices of the nurses in the hallway. I imagined myself back in the apartment, sliding Rick’s guitar out from under the sofa, its neck snapped in half as if it had been in the accident with us.

Mom got up and put her hand on my forehead again.

“How are you feeling now?”

“Better.” I was still sorting it out. I wanted to ask if she’d ever had a feeling hit her out of the blue, a feeling that made no sense, like the tug of a planet that you know is there but can’t see. But I didn’t ask, afraid she might tell me the meds had made me loopy, or, worse, that she knew exactly what I meant.

“I’ll recover, right?”

“Of course, Nathan.”

I closed my eyes, tried to picture the damage inside my head and tried to remember what I’d read. Objects in motion keep moving; objects at rest stay there. Remarkable, I thought, how much I felt caught between the two.

Paul Farwell remembers growing up in Southern California, waking to the sound of the clothes hangers rattling in his closet, and wondering why a freight train would be rumbling toward his parents’ small ranch house. The memory stuck with him. His short fiction has appeared in The Antioch Review. He has a PhD in Philosophy from SUNY Stony Brook and currently works in the Boston area. For more about his current writing projects, you can find him on Twitter @paul_w_farwell.

Meagan Berlin (image) is a queer, self-taught illustrator and tattoo artist fixated on the repetition of small marks. Currently working on traditional and unceded Coast Salish territories, specifically of the Lkwungen and WSÁNEĆ peoples / 'victoria BC’. Their artwork has been published in the collection zines FIST (curated by Cristine) and SCRATCH (curated by Nina Chwelos) and in the literary publications Poetry is Dead and GUTS. You can find them at their website: berlinillustration.com.

This essay and illustration were originally published in Salt Hill 43.