That turned dark quickly. Instead of looking at me, staring as if I was an extraterrestrial or an alien, his eyes flitted from her face to mine and he seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. You have been in that house too. They know. She has seen me. In a second I was standing in the middle of a wide open space. He was in the garden, facing away from me, my mother was lying on a chaise longue beneath the sun, looking somber and sad, and I saw a child standing next to her with his mother's golden hair. He seemed to be talking to me, laughing with me, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. A man called to me from the house, "Bobby." "Over here." There was a man beside me who looked like my father. He had long hair, thin and unkempt and white. "It's me," he said, and the sight of him sent me into a rage. "I knew it," I said. "What are you doing here?" "I don't know." "Where is she?" "She's over there," and I pointed to the chaise longue. "Well, Bobby, it doesn't matter. You've done enough." "But what if I hadn't done anything? What if I hadn't . . ." "Listen," he said. And he took my hand and he said something and I looked at him and he nodded and then he dropped my hand and turned away and walked away from me. "Bobby?" "It doesn't matter," he said. And then, "Bobby?" The words had come out of my mouth like a ghost, the ghost of my father, not my father at all. I stood in front of my mother, who looked at me but didn't know who I was. I stood for a long time. Her silence seemed as hard and as blank as that last breath of air you expect to find in the bottom of a well, because you can't help feeling it's there. It's the place you have to look, the place you have to go to. You can't think about anything else. You can't think about going back, because there's nothing there to go back to, nothing but silence. The sun moved in and out of my mother's eyes, her face was becoming a mask, and I thought about that, about what it meant, how we move from one room to the next, how we're moving from the living room into the hallway, how we will move into the bedroom, to lie with her, but we will not be moving into the bedroom but into her theater, into her stage, and I thought about that and thought about the place you go to when you die, to which you are taken, when it's your time to go. You get into that place, even though you're not dying, and that place is like a tunnel and it's dark and it's cold, and no one else is there, and no one can ever know how quiet it is, how lonely it is, no one can ever know that, because it is their place. They never have to leave it, and so they never know what it is, because they have never been in that place before. The sun shone and shone, and my mother's body shuddered and shook on the chaise longue, and I thought, there will come a time in the night when she will leave that theater and go back to her room, and in the morning she will open the blinds and look outside, and there will be an empty stairway and a closed front door and outside the glass will be her garden, and her house and her yard and her neighbors, and her dogs and the sky, the sun, the wind, the lawn and the trees. She will not see them, because she is a bad actress, and the actress does not see the audience. She never sees what she is watching. She is never there, for her. It's always someone else watching her, someone else in her place. I stood and looked at her, and I said the word I'd never said before. "Mom," I said, and I said it softly. I said the word because it worried me, because it had become a thing that belonged to her, the word her own, and she could say it whenever she wanted, because she could pretend I was one of the family she had gathered. And I said it because I was afraid that she would go back to her room, and I would never see her again, and she would never know what it was I'd called her. "Mom." I called her the way she called me. The way we are taught to call children in the world. The way we say it to the dogs. Her name came up as I thought of the dogs, her dogs, her black spaniel and her boxer, her two dogs on the leash. And I called them the same way I said her name to myself, and that was a name I used to call my mother's dogs, the dogs that pulled my brothers and me around the yard. And I called her the way the dogs called her in the mornings and the afternoons, in the heat of the sun and the drizzle of rain, and I cared for her dogs the way she had cared for me. I watched her, I looked at her, and she was looking at me, too. She was as white as I was, and her eyes were empty, just empty. She was her name, the way she was me. I know I saw it in her eyes, because I knew how she looked. I didn't need to look at myself to know how I would look. I had no questions. I knew what I had seen, and I knew what I was, the way you know what you know when you hear a sound, the sound is familiar. "Mom," I said, "we need to talk." # PART FOUR # WHAT IS HOME? ## 16 ## What Is Home? When I was a child, I imagined the world was a place that was flat and was full of clouds, and it was always dark, and it was never sunny. The sun never shone, not a ray, not a single ray ever, not even on the days I wanted to believe it was a sunny day. I imagined, too, that the world was dark and cold, and I could see why people wanted to be somewhere else. My father is like that, too. He went away to college. He went to Canada. He went to Russia. He went to Cuba. He went to London and New York. He went to many places. He was never home. He went to the North Pole. He went to the South Pole. He went to all the places he was expected to go. He went to places where he could live like a king, without anyone knowing. I asked my mother why he had gone away when he was still my father. She never answered my question. My father was never home when he lived at home. He was never home when he went away, and when he went to jail, he wasn't home when he came home, either. He came home and didn't see us. "He's not home." He said that when he went away, it was like he was going home. But that's not the same as being home. I know the time he came back from Cuba, he said, he was like a soldier. "Like a soldier," I said, and I tried to picture a soldier, and I saw a man walking, a young man with a gun in his hand, marching, with a flag in the wind. "No," my father said, "I wasn't a soldier." He said he was a spy. I said, "So why did you go to Cuba?" He said he went to Cuba to see the war and the revolution. "What did you see?" "I saw a man." "A man?" "I saw the man who wanted to make a change, and I saw what I thought would change, and then I saw what was already changed." "What was already changed?" "I saw there was no revolution." "What does that mean?" "It means, my son, that I'm not a revolutionary. I never was. I was a spy, a man who was sent to spy on other people who were trying to be revolutions. The one in Cuba was not a revolution, but it was a revolutionary experiment. It's a revolution that has been, and it's never been remembered." My father said, "You've changed, son, you've changed." And I remember asking him why I had changed, and he said I was too small to change, and I was too young to think like I did. I asked him what I thought like, and he said I was like the father who has been in jail and wants to change, but can't forget what he was before he went to jail. He was the father who was out in the world. I asked him who I was. He said I was like the father who has lived in the world. I was living in the world, and he was in the world. I asked him why he never told me this, and he said because I was too young