The path from lawn into orchard always along the left side, this sunrise wall, east facing. Here was where his mother had hammered the planks loose. Here was where he had stood in the shape of a cross. And here now was where he found the checkbook, pushed out in the gap between human and solid earth, armored by rock, where he had not been able to dig a furrow.

He picked it up and flipped through the pages, squinting. She had signed every check, and a dozen of them had amounts. The last one $430,000. All this money.

He looked away at the walnut trees, whited. Looked again at the checkbook, held it in both hands, turned it over and found a note. Please, son. I love you.

And yet she’d been willing to throw him away. She had called him an animal and wanted him to spend the rest of his days in a cage like an animal.

Please, son. I love you. He didn’t know what to think of this, because here was the problem: he believed her. He knew that he owed her everything, that every son owes his mother everything. And he knew that she loved him, and that he loved her. But he also knew that she had been willing to throw him away. And it was not possible to get these things to fit together.

Mom? he called.

He could not stand here long. The sun would not allow it. Mom, he repeated.

But there was no answer. He walked up close, put his ear at a gap between boards and tried to hear movement, a dry voice, anything.

The landings of grasshoppers, a yellow sound, without depth. The distant, unstoppable hum of the air conditioners. A car passing on the road, much muffled by the hedges. But nothing else. Only the sound of his own blood and breath.

He walked to the next wall, with the bay door and its old rusty lock. Mom? he tried again, but no answer. So he went to the third wall, the side with the toolshed, where he would bake through the afternoon, and he stood there squinting at old wood. I can’t make any sense of you, he said.

She had been excited, breathless and excited at the thought of him being dragged away to prison. She had said she was afraid of him, but why? He had done nothing. She had called him an abuser and a rapist, her own son who had done nothing. What he’d shared with Jennifer was not a crime.

You, he said. You have done this. You have forced me into this.

She was not responding. He wanted to talk with her. He wanted to find out why.

It’s not fair, he said, that I get one parent and she’s crazy. That’s not fair. And here I am talking to a wall, just as crazy as you. Thanks, Mom.

There would be no peace, ever. He could see that. His mind would always be chained to thinking about her. Guilt and anger and shame and everything else that made a life smaller. She had destroyed everything. He had wanted to focus on his meditation. That was all. He had wanted to be left alone.

He couldn’t just stand here. He went to the lock, held it in his hand, yanked at it to see whether it might open. He had no idea where the key might be. Rusty old lock, much bigger than needed, thick steel.

Galen looked in the toolshed for the key. Along the small shelves and ledges built into the walls, added to over the years. His grandfather a kind of pack rat. And the problem was not in finding a key. The problem was that there were too many keys, dozens of them, on chains and lying individually in the dust. So he collected them all and brought them back to the bay door, set them carefully in the bottom of a furrow.

Rusty, dirty keys and a rusty, dirty lock. Even if he found the right key, he might not know, because it wouldn’t go in easily. The lock so hot in this sun it was burning his hands, but he tried key after key, finally went for cotton gloves from the toolshed, then tried more keys.

I haven’t decided anything, he told her. Don’t get your hopes up. I’m just seeing if I have the key.

Then he thought of WD-40. That would help tremendously. He walked past all the crap scattered in the dirt, everything he had thrown out of the toolshed, and didn’t see a blue and yellow can. He stepped inside the toolshed and let his vision adjust, knelt and searched along the lower wall under a slanting roof and found half-used cans of paint, grease and engine oil, and finally the WD-40.

Galen sprayed the keyhole in the lock, leaned away from the smell, sprayed the pile of keys in the dirt. He needed a rag or something to clean them, but he had only the cotton gloves. So before he tried each key, he wiped it, both sides, on the glove of his left hand, on the palm, the fingers still curled in pain, that hand turning into a club.

A few of the keys were the right size and went partway in, but not one of them went all the way in.

How is this possible? he asked. A million keys and one lock. How could I not have the key here? Where’s the key, Mom?

Not one of them fit. He walked around to the lawn, to the pile of crinkled photos and crap from the drawers. He took the glove off his right hand and sifted for keys, found dozens more. It didn’t make any sense that there were so many keys, as if his family had owned all the world. What did they all unlock? What was left? All the illusions everywhere in this life, and we were left holding a pile of keys to nothing. This is perfect, Galen said. This is exactly how things are.

He carried them all back to the lock, and he knew none would fit but he tried them anyway, one at a time, in what felt like a ritual, nothing less than sacred. I honor this, he said. If a key fits, you’ll go free.

Light-headed from the WD-40 vaporizing. Light-headed from the sun, from living in this incinerator. A grasshopper landed on the lock and he let it stay there and watch. A husk of a body, something that could be threshed like wheat. Good bread of grasshopper, something Galen might try.

When the last key failed, he let the lock fall back against wood and the grasshopper launched. Galen on his knees in the dirt, burning. He didn’t know what to do next.

His mother was dying on the other side of this door. There was no point in hiding that. He hadn’t made any decision. He had never made a decision to let her die, but she was dying anyway. It was her own fault, something she had done to herself, but he was responsible too. She had made him responsible. Damn you, he said.

Our actions controlled beyond what we could know. Galen could never have seen any of this, and yet this is what he had been given.

He felt like he would die, too, if he remained kneeling here in the dirt and sun, so he rose, his legs stiff, and walked around to the fig tree and the spigot and opened the water wide, drank gulp after gulp. He could try to get some water to her, put the hose through a gap in the wall and let it run. He might have to do that. Or let her out. But he didn’t see how he could let her out. She had left him with no options. Thanks a lot, he said.

Galen walked into the wilderness on the other side of the lawn, into what was supposed to be his grandmother’s garden. Thistle and dry yellow grass to his shoulders, his feet falling out of sight, rattlesnake and lizard. He didn’t care what happened. Live oak, its leaves knit up in spiny points, scratching all along his bare skin, through his shield of dirt. A thicket of them, and he pushed his way through, liked the awareness that came with all the cuts. A forest for flaying. The leaves only half alive, half green, the trunks thin and numerous and hidden in shadow. His head still exposed to the sun as he pushed between them, short trees without real shade.

This wilderness extended, stretched on and on, thistle and grass and live oak. His thighs and stomach caught by the thistles, his feet pierced by thorn and branch and rock. He held his arms out when he could, to catch more thistle and oak. A shallow dry sea he was wading through, merciless sea, his eyes stinging, the taste of salt, and he the only man to wade here.