Illustration by Matthew Bollinger

For the third time in three years, they talked about what would be a suitable birthday present for her deranged son. There was so little they were actually allowed to bring: almost everything could be transformed into a weapon, and so most items had to be left at the front desk and then, if requested, brought in later by a big blond aide, who would look the objects over beforehand for their wounding possibilities. Pete had brought a basket of jams, but they were in glass jars and so not permitted. “I forgot about that,” he said. The jars were arranged by color, from the brightest marmalade to cloudberry to fig, as if they contained the urine tests of an increasingly ill person. Just as well they’ll be confiscated, she thought. They would find something else to bring.

By the time her son was twelve, and had begun his dazed and quiet muttering, had given up brushing his teeth, Pete had been in their lives for six years, and now four more years had passed. The love they had for Pete was long and winding, with hidden turns but no real halts. Her son thought of him as a kind of stepfather. She and Pete had got old together, though it showed more on her, with her black shirtdresses worn for slimming and her now graying hair undyed and often pinned up with strands hanging down like Spanish moss. Once her son had been stripped and gowned and placed in the facility, she, too, had removed her necklaces, earrings, scarves—all her prosthetic devices, she said to Pete, trying to amuse—and put them in a latched accordion file under her bed. She was not allowed to wear them when visiting, so she would no longer wear them at all, a kind of solidarity with her child, a new widowhood on top of the widowhood she already possessed. Unlike other women her age (who tended to try too hard, with lurid lingerie and flashing jewelry), she now felt that that sort of effort was ludicrous, and she went out into the world like an Amish woman, or perhaps, even worse, when the unforgiving light of spring hit her face, an Amish man. If she was going to be old, let her be a full-fledged citizen of the old country! “To me, you always look so beautiful,” Pete no longer said.

Pete had lost his job in the recent economic downturn. At one point, he had been poised to live with her, but her child’s deepening troubles had caused him to pull back. He said that he loved her but could not find the space he needed for himself in her life or in her house. (He did not blame her son—or did he?) He eyed with somewhat visible covetousness and sour remarks the front room, which her son, when home, lived in with large blankets and empty ice-cream pints, an Xbox, and DVDs.

She no longer knew where Pete went, sometimes for weeks at a time. She thought it an act of vigilance and attachment that she did not ask, tried not to care. She once grew so hungry for touch that she went to the Stressed Tress salon around the corner just to have her hair washed. The few times she had flown to Buffalo to see her brother and his family, at airport security she had chosen the pat-downs and the wandings rather than the scanning machine.

“Where is Pete?” her son cried out during visits she made alone, his face scarlet with acne, swollen and wide with the effects of medications that had been changed, then changed again, and she said that Pete was busy today, but soon, soon, maybe next week, he would come. A maternal vertigo beset her, the room circled, and the thin scars on her son’s arms sometimes seemed to spell out Pete’s name, the loss of fathers etched primitively in an algebra of skin. In the carrousel spin of the room, those white webbed lines resembled coarse, campground graffiti, as when young people used to stiffly carve the words “PEACE” and “FUCK” into picnic tables and trees, the “C” three-quarters of a square. Mutilation was a language. And vice versa. The cutting endeared her boy to the girls, many of whom were cutters themselves and seldom saw a boy who was one, and so in the group sessions he became popular, which he neither minded nor perhaps really noticed. When no one was looking, he sometimes cut the bottoms of his feet—with crisp paper from crafts hour. In group, he pretended to read the girls’ soles like palms, announcing the arrival of strangers and the progress toward romance—“toemances,” he called them—and sometimes seeing his own fate in what they had cut there.

Now she and Pete went to see her son without the jams but with a soft deckle-edged book about Daniel Boone, pulled from her own bookcase, which was allowed, even though her son would believe that it contained messages for him, believe that, although it was a story about a long-ago person, it was also the story of his own sorrow and heroism in the face of every manner of wilderness, defeat, and abduction, that his own life could be draped over the book, which was simply a noble armature for the revelation of tales of him. There would be clues in the words on pages with numbers that added up to his age: 97, 88, 466. There would be other veiled references to his existence. There always were.

They sat at the visitors’ table together, and her son set the book aside and did try to smile at both of them. There was still sweetness in his eyes, the sweetness he’d been born with, even if fury could dart in a scattershot fashion across them. Someone had cut his tawny hair—or, at least, had tried. Perhaps the staff person hadn’t wanted the scissors to stay near him for a prolonged period and had snipped quickly, then leaped away, approached again, grabbed and snipped, then jumped back. That’s what it looked like. Her son had wavy hair that had to be cut carefully. Now it no longer cascaded down but was close to his head, springing out at angles that would likely matter to no one but a mother.

“So where have you been?” her son asked Pete.

“Good question,” Pete said, as if praising the thing would make it go away. How could people be mentally well in such a world?

“Do you miss us?” the boy asked.

Pete did not answer.

“Do you think of me when you look at the black capillaries of the trees at night?”

“I suppose I do.” Pete stared back at him, so as not to shift in his seat. “I am always hoping that you are O.K. and that they treat you well here.”

“Do you think of my mom when you stare up at the clouds and all they hold?”

Pete fell silent again.

“That’s enough,” she said to her son, who turned to her with a change of expression.

“There’s supposed to be cake this afternoon for someone’s birthday,” he said.